Upgrading Wordpress has been one of my greatest fears since my first upgrade back in October of 2007 - after all, I nearly lost my blog in, what I’ve dubbed, my near Wordpress disaster. For that upgrade, the wonderful Automatic Upgrade Plugin wasn’t working for some reason, so I had to do it manually - nearly resulting in disaster.

However, this time around, the Automatic Upgrade Plugin worked and upgrading was a breeze.

Thoughts on Wordpress 2.5

Though I have only been using Wordpress 2.5 for a few minutes, I must say it’s beautiful. The interface is wonderful - user friendly and very versatile.

The Dashboard’s Re-Design

While the blue is a little too ‘baby blue’ for me…
They layout is extremely well designed and easier to navigate.
There are also many new subtle (and very nice) features - but if you’re curious to what they are… fire up the Automatic Upgrade Plugin and give it a whirl.

My One Problem

I do have one problem with Wordpress 2.5 - though the blame isn’t entirely at the geniuses over at Automattic…

The Popularity Contest plugin does not work. I’m hoping that Alex King (the author of the plugin) fixes it soon - because I would have no clue where to begin.

In the mean time, I look forward to exploring the many new features of Wordpress 2.5 and can’t wait to launch my new look - because this one is really starting to bother me…

As we learned before, getting links is the only way to increase your Google PageRank. So the question that would follow is, how do you get links? But there’s a little more to it than just getting links. Some links have more influence than others… the better the content the greater chance of links… so there’s more to it.
Now, I know this horse has been beaten to dead, so I won’t make this complicated.
Without further ado, let’s dive into increasing PageRank.

First of all, good content gets you links.
Plain and simple.
If you don’t have good content, no one will link to you - no matter how many strategies you use.
Beyond that, it’s mostly chance and timing.

But what can be done, I’ll share.
Different strategies work better for some people, and others work better for others.
So I’ll share what has worked for me.

In my experience, commenting on other blogs is the best thing you can do.
In the past, commenting on other blogs has been my greatest source of visitors.
By posting high quality and in-depth (that’s key) comments on similar blogs, you get the attention of that blogger and it’s regular readers and commentators. Then that blogger (or those readers) will get an interest in your blog and check you out. Those visitors will then (most likely) subscribe to your RSS. When they’re subscribed to your RSS, they’ll stay up to date with your articles, and give you links.
Further more, if the blog you’re commenting on has DoFollow enabled (Learn more about DoFollow), then you’ll get some PageRank credit from that as well.

After commenting on other blogs, participating in forum with a link in your signature would probably be best. The same principals apply - so I shan’t repeat myself.

Another great link and traffic source is Wikipedia
Wikipedia is ranked 8 by Alexa (11.28.07) and it’s traffic is still climbing. That’s a lot of visitors. Granted, they’re browsing a lot of pages, but why not get a link to a page on your web site on this traffic monster?
Note: Your link MUST pertain to the article. If the link isn’t relevant, and you’re persistent - your entire web site shall be banned from Wikipedia. (Read the Wikipedia policy on External Links for more info.)
I have done this for one of my previous sites (that is now offline) - and I got a lot of traffic. I don’t remember the specific statistics, but I got most of my traffic from links from about three Wikipedia pages.

Ok…
so those tips weren’t out of the ordinary…
but sometimes we all need to be reminded of them.

Do you have any other strategies that work for you?

Whooh boy - what an interesting episode BlogRush has been. In mid-september, BlogRush entered the blogging world promising many new visitors to your blog. BlogRush then had some spam issues and spam-blogs putting the widget on their site. The results were disastrous. BlogRush lost credibility for it’s links and for obtaining visitors. But even so, it had potential and I urged bloggers not to throw BlogRush out just quite yet. It had potential, but needed some refining. Then at the end of October, BlogRush launched version 2.0 with many new updates and more promises.

Being a blogger, I was interested again. The only true way to discover the truth was to try it out again - so I did.
I wanted to know for myself if BlogRush would really live up to it’s promises. It didn’t.

Since October 31st, my links were placed on BlogRush widgets across the web over 7,500 times - out of all those links I was clicked on a grand total of 5 times.
Sorry, but a click-through rate of 0.06% isn’t good enough for me.

Conclusion: BlogRush isn’t what it made it self out to be.

I am now removing the widget from my site.
Sorry BlogRush.