Very interesting post I must say! Though I don’t like John Chow that much, I believe you have exposed some very nice tips for new bloggers (like me) here.

I think my site complies with most of what have been said here. However, I don’t have a “Contact me” page/form… I don’t feel ready for that

Keep going! You’ve got a nice blog!

Ikki’s last blog post..Hypens in domain names?

Also, when you leave a comment, include your URL so that others can discover you. For example, had you left your URL in the comment form, I would have gone to your site and possibly subscribed if the posts looked interesting to me.

So if you want to increase readership, do the following:

1. Write a new post every day or so and make sure the content is good.

2. Pick a specific focus for your blog that will attract readers looking for information in that niche.

3. Add a lot of comments on other blogs, always including your blog URL.

4. Don’t be impatient for comments. They will come, in time.

5. Offer to write guest blog posts on popular blogs. For example, if you want to write a guest post for my blog, I might accept it (it depends on the topic and quality of the post).

Good luck.

Tom

I do not know how long you have been blogging, but it seems that you have a very popular blog. I recently started a blog and I really do not know what to expect. I want people to make comments on my blog and begin communicating, but I don’t know how to get them to go to my blog. Any suggestions aside from all your helpful tips? How did you attract people to your blog? To find you, I googled about tips to make your blog popular.

Looking forward to your advise…

It led me to this page (after clicking a link):

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_excerpt

The page itself isn’t all that clear, but here’s what it’s saying.

When you click a category link in your blog, you’re shown an archives page that shows only excerpts (brief paragraphs) of that topic. The default excerpt is the first 55 words of your post. But what if you start your topics with a cute lead-in, or some other way? What if you just want a more straightforward summary of the post to appear in the archive or category view? The Optional Excerpt tag allows you to do that.

In your admin dashboard, go to Presentation > Theme Editor. Click the Archive link of your current theme. Look for where the phrase “php the_content” appears. This will be within the loop. In my theme, it appears like this:

< ?php the_content("Continue Reading »"); ?>

Replace this tag with the following:

< ?php the_excerpt(); ?>

Now test it. Go to one of your posts. In the Optional Excerpt field, type a summary or description of the post. Then visit that page via the category archives. You’ll see that instead of the first 55 words showing, you see the optional excerpt you typed.

Here’s an example. With the Ze Frank post, I typed an optional excerpt that is more of a summary of the post. But if you click the post title, you’ll see the full post, and the first 55 words of my post show, rather than the optional excerpt.

As a side note here, in the theme’s files (the Presentation > Theme Editor section), different PHP files load different aspects of your site. The Archives page is what applies when you’re viewing posts by category or by archive date. The Main Index page is what shows when you view posts from the home page. The Single page is what shows when you click a post’s title. All of them call “the loop.”

(If you don’t know what the loop is, be sure to look that one up on the codex. It is what calls posts from your database, and it’s one of the most important aspects of your blog.)

I think this Optional Excerpt field may be useful. I haven’t really used it much, but I might. Do you think that it would provide a better reading experience for someone who is perusing archives?

By the way, speaking of archives, a lot of bloggers provide archives by date. I can think of almost no one who browses a site’s archives by date. That is a legacy carryover from the “blogs are personal journals” concept. The best archives are by category, in my opinion. Of course one can provide both an archive by date and category archive, but I think the archive by date is pretty useless. It basically tells readers how long you’ve been blogging.

What do you think of this Optional Excerpt field?

I use Google Reader where I first read your posts. The Read More link is visible as a hyperlink, but I get the subsequent text, too, so I don’t have to visit your site to read the entire text.
There is also a section on the Write Post page called Optional Excerpt, which I first thought was a way to provide only a few lines to a feed subscriber. Filling that in had no effect on my feeds, so I am not sure where that is used. Another matter to track down.

I’m ahead of you on the PHP matter. I have a great little guide called “PHP og MySQL for absolutte begyndere” (PHP and MySQL for absolute beginners.) I read it all in one sitting – the entire topic is really easy if you have the slightest knowledge about a database. My advantage is – I know the author of the book from my webgrrls network! Sitepoint.com has loads of information about PHP as well.

I added a screenshot to #8 identifying the read more button. I also have a content show/hide plugin that makes this function javascript so that page doesn’t have to reload. I think I got the plugin here: but I can’t remember. But even without the plugin, the Read More feature is useful if you write long posts. Not so much if you write short posts.

Unfortunately, the Read More plugin transfers to feeds, so people will basically have to visit your site to read the full content. I haven’t figured out a way around that, but I would like to.