yoursite.com/category/blogging/blogging-wordpress/

instead of

yoursite.com/category/blogging/wordpress/

The reason for this is because the initial slug was already in the WordPress database and converting any category to a sub-category will be as same as creating a new category. The database will not overwrite the existing slug but will create a new one. Similar problem will occur if you try to rename a category to a name you had deleted previously. Browsing in the WordPress Support Forum, I still can’t find any solution for this therefore I’ve decided to try on my own. Thank God I manage to find a solution but still required quite a messy job if you are not familiar with the database system of your hosting server.

Here’s what I did to fix all the category slugs:

1. Login to your hosting server account.
2. Open the MyPhpAdmin (or phpMyAdmin or anything with similar function).
3. When the list of tables had been listed, look out for the wp_terms table. (note that I’m using the standard wp_ table prefix).
4. Delete the terms and slugs that are not in use. Make sure you check the ID for every Posts Categories and Link Categories because everything are in the same table. To ease the job, I just clear or delete the table database. Just be careful not to delete all other table database. Just clear the wp_terms table database. Note that If you delete everything in the table, you have to know which ID represent your Posts Categories and which are for Link Categories because you’ll have to rebuild them again.
5. Also edit the wp_terms_taxonomy which contains the hierarchical data of your categories. If you don’t edit this table, some new categories might be automatically become sub-categories based on previous data. My version allow me to delete all post categories and tags data in this table because they will be generated again when creating new category in the WordPress admin page. Just don’t delete the link_category term or clear everything in this table because this will bring hell to you. I did this mistake earlier and I won’t help if you did the same mistake.
6. After clearing the database, all the categories in you blog will be removed. Just go to the Categories section and create a new category. Just start all over again. This time make sure you plan every categories nicely to avoid any mistake. If you did make a mistake. Just repeat the steps mentioned above.

The method worked fine for me and I know there are many people are having the same problem. Please give me your feedback for this.

This is the reason why niche is important. If you asked any successful bloggers, the first advice you’ll get is to write about what you’re best of or what interest you most. Niche marketing or blogging is about having a targeted readers. Targeted readers are from any topics such as how to solve a rubix cube, games for iPhones, your graffiti artworks, anything. Internet marketing is also a niche but another thing is to know your competitors and try to write about something you already know instead of what you need to learn. What’s important is you stick to that niche so that your readers will also stick with you. I’m not an expert but here’s my experience with niche blogging. I have 2 niche blogs where one is about a Computer Aided Design (CAD) software and another for my artworks. Visitors to these blogs are in the same interest as me and as long as I keep giving what they searched for, they’ll keep coming and become subscribers. When the blog is getting more popular and interest to that niche is increased, more people come to the blogs and become subscribers. I write about a CAD software instead of CAD because CAD is still too general and covers so many aspects. By focusing on a software, I can easily write anything that I know without so much effort.

Another important reason why writing about internet marketing is not a good way to make money online is because people who read about internet marketing are mostly web-savvy. They know a lot about internet and advertising and will not generate so many clicks on your advertisement. To make most revenue from internet advertising, the target should be the non-web savvy users and search engines visitors. These are people who use internet to seek information and will go anywhere to find answers to their curiosity. Integrate all knowledge and resources of internet marketing that you know in these niche blogs or websites. If you have an internet marketing blog and another of different niche with similar amount of visitors, you’ll notice that more revenue is generated from the non-internet marketing blog. Different approach is required to make more income from internet marketing readers because they don’t just read your blog but also look at how you manage it. A referral link to an affiliate program will have more click than Adsense. Different approach is required to make more income from internet marketing readers because they don’t just read your blog but also look at how the blog is managed.

So why am I writing about internet marketing? I’m not an expert therefore everything in this blog are what I knew and experienced. I just write about everything I know and it feels good to share these information with others. Many people are trying to blog for money including me and this is actually not a good practice. The key is whether you like to write or not and what you can write about. If you don’t like to write, probably after a month you’ll give up and stop blogging. Same thing happen if you try to write about something you’re not good at. I know this because it happened. My suggestion is to make a research of yourself and find out what interest you most and you can write about the same topics over and over again. Don’t mix niches together in 1 blog because some niche readers don’t like a mixed category blogs unless you know how to organize them properly.

1. Submit URL to search engines

To make sure people find your blog from search engines, you’ll need to submit your blog url to them. By doing this, you’ll let them know that your blog exist and their web crawlers will “crawl” or scan your blog. Without these url submission, your blog might still be searchable by search engines but only after some period of time and will not be worthy for an updated blog contents.

• Google
• Yahoo
• MSN Live Search

2. Enlist in Directories

Some search engines share common open directory listing such as the Dmoz. Some search engines offer their own directories where will definitely get your blogs indexed in their search engines. These tools or directories will also scan your blogs and show statistics about your blogs, pages that link the blogs, or search engine optimization analysis for your blogs. Submitting to these directories are better than just submitting your url because these directories let the search engines know every pages of your blogs.

• Dmoz
• Yahoo Directories
• Google Webmasters Tool
• Live Search Webmaster Center

3. Join Communities

These communities will help your to optimize your blogs, write better contents, manage better layouts, and most important is help bring traffic to your blogs. Millions of people join these communities and all of them rely on each other to make their blog more successful. There are many groups in each communities that you can join that might be related to your blogs.

• Technorati
• MyBlogLog
• BlogCatalog

4. Submit to Blog Listings

This method is quite similar to submitting your blog to search engines. The difference is blog listings are focused to blogs only and blogs are categorised for easier search or browsing. Some blog listings really bring visitors to your blogs.

• BloggersBox
• Blogtoplists
• Blogarama
• Globe of Blog

5. Manage RSS Feed

Create or manage your rss feed and let readers to subscribe. Feed management is very important because not everybody can open your blog pages everyday to read your post. By using rss feed, you can notify readers about your new post through email or any feed readers.

• FeedBurner
• FeedBlitz

6. Get Statistics of Your Blogs

View stats of your blogs so that you’ll know how visitors find your blogs and where they came from. These tools will help you to optimize your blogs by showing you a lot of data including search keywords and clicks on your blogs.

• Google Analytics
• MyBlogLog
• W3Counter

7. Tell Friends

Utilize the social networks that you’ve joined to let people know about your blogs. Most of loyal readers are friends so just don’t blow this advantages.

• Facebook
• Friendster
• MySpace
• Hi-5

8. Join Related Forums

Join forums related to your blog contents where you can discuss a lot of information about the future of your blogs.

• Webmasters Talk
• Warrior Forum

9. Submit Your Blog Articles To Social Bookmarking

Millions of users are using social bookmarking because it can relate similar articles or categories and also suggest you article you might be interested to read. These also a secure place to keep your bookmark and you can access them anywhere from different computers.

• Digg
• StumbleUpon
• Del.ico.us
• Ma.gnolia

10. Find related blogs and link with them.

Use all the sources you can find to search for similar blogs and make friends with the authors.

These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is usually a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need an easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at http://blogcarnival.com/.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time. To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/go.php?offer=eworque&pid=1