Thomas Silkjær has created a WordPress plugin that will createLanding Pages for your Blog. I never really understood landing pages before I read his article, but if you follow his example you should immediately understand them, and at the same time, see the value in using them. I am already begining to think about how I will use this in my client websites!

Seth Godin offers his list of 56 ways to get traffic for your blog. Some good advice is burried in this list, like using del.icio.us and digg.com to draw attention to your posts. Other valuable tips include posting often, encouraging people to subscribe to your RSS and writing about Google!

If you’ve been thinking about a personal blog, or starting a blog for your company or clients, you should check out the free and open-source WordPress blogging tool. WordPress is a complete content management system that is very powerful and easy to use. In fact, many hosting providers offer WordPress as a standard feature. If you’re looking for a good place to start with WordPress, WebMonkey has a very nice article that will help you Get Your Feet Wet with WordPress. It will introduce you to the basics of using this great blogging tool.

WordPress Multiuser is a specialized version of the popular PHP-based blogging software that could be used for creating community-based blogs.

Using WordPress Multi-user edition you will be able to have people be able to sign up for a new blog and have them securely manage their templates and settings without affecting any other users. Only one blog per user is allowed, but you can have unlimited users, and you can have multiple users on a single blog.

Pete Cashmore has an article titled - Here Come the Edge Aggregators - that describes four new services that are aggregating RSS feeds in new ways.  Services like Edgio and iNod scan RSS feeds looking for posts that are tagged with certian tags.  In the case of Edgio the tag being aggregated is “listing” with the result of the aggregation being classified ads!

Dion Hinchcliffe has an excellent Web 2.0 blog that I have added to my daily reading list. His coverage of new web 2.0 services, trends and techniques are a worthy read for any web developer.

So you figured you’d wait a while to upgrade your Wordpress Blog from version 1.x to 2.0.  A month has now passed since the v2.0 release and a new list of 10 Things You Should Know about WordPress 2.0 has just been released.  A good read if you’re planning to do an upgrade.

If you made a New Year’s resolution to redesign your blog, you may want to start with  Rachel Cunliffe’s list of current Blog Design Trends.

The fine people who created the software that runs this blog have just announced that WordPress 2 has officially been released. Tonnes of great new features including a completely redesigned backend that includes a bunch of AJAX goodness, the awesome Askimet comment spam busting plugin, resizable editing box and faster posting!

It’s been quite a month here at Digital Media Minute. I’ve doubled the traffic to this site and at the same time doubled the revenue from the advertisements you may see from time to time. I didn’t start the month with this goal in mind so I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the increased activity. I should also point out that my goal for maintaining this blog has nothing to do with visitors or revenue. I keep it going as I find it to be a nice way for me to keep up on the technologies that I use and research on a daily basis. The posts I create become somewhat of an archive of my research, and I find myself searching this blog, more than I do Google sometimes. And if other people like to read it and it generates a bit of revenue, then that’s just a nice bonus.

So I thought I would share with you a couple of the activities that I think have increased traffic to this site…

Content is King!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been spending more time writing original content as opposed to just linking to other sites. My post on the Top 12 Rails Tutorials was the most popular item at del.icio.us and was on the Digg front page for a couple of days. This drew huge traffic (28,000+ uniques on Saturday and Sunday). My post on Microsoft - Three Big Announcements was picked up on Tech Memeorandum (if you haven’t tried Memeorandum, you should - NOW). And finally a post with an odd title - Changes to Firefox Tabs Coming - was Digg front page item for couple of days (I’m not too sure why - but it was). Finally my Character Entity Refernce continues to be a great draw recieving in bound links from the likes of Eric Meyer, Todd Dominey and Molly E. Holzschlag. So you want traffic? Create content!

Giving away free content

At work, I’m currently attempting to increase the search engine placement of some of our clients sites. I’m mostly looking at the basic stuff like semantic markup, creating crawler friendly urls, encouraging clients to increase backlinks into the site (legitamate ones of course). But I’ve also been looking at additional techniques, like placing content on Free Content sites. While I was testing this, I created a new domain and a small site to go with it (I can’t give you the URL as it may skew my research). One of the things I did to increase traffic into this ‘virgin’ domain, was to write a couple of articles and submitted them to Article City. Article City is a large collection of articles that are available for free to any publisher, as long as they keep the Author bio and links back to the author intact. Within a month of publishing the virgin domain and submitting the articles to Article City, the virgin domain was garnering just over 1,200 inbound visits from Google per day! Needless to say, I updated my bio to include a link back to this site, and I have seen a positive increase in search traffic.