As this blog continues to grow and evolve (and as I get more familiar with what WordPress is capable of, particularly all those free plug-ins that are floating around the internet), I will work to provide you, my valued readers, with the best experience possible, while at the same time, I’ll be working to monetize and actually make an extra few bucks from Beyond the Rhetoric.

I’m probably quite a ways off before I’ll make $7k a month like John Chow, but the goal is there and I strive to reach it. He always did say, though, that you should write for your readers first and not for SEO or monetization. Write good content and the money will follow.

I’m working to make this blog better, so here are a small handful of features I have implemented over the last little while:

Bookmarks: One of the best things you do for your blog traffic is to get a particularly interesting post hit the Digg front page. You want to encourage your readers to Digg you, Delicious you, and so on. You’ll notice that at the end of each post, I now have a series of clickable buttons that will let you submit any given article to those popular social networking sites. This WordPress plug-in was probably one of the easiest to install. Feel free to try it out.

Top Commentators: Not entirely new anymore — I plunked it in before the end of February — but I’ve noticed a slight increase in the number of comments I get on this blog after implementing it. People like seeing their name in print and more people love getting the free linkback. To further encourage commenting, I might toss in a contest or two in the future. Suggestions?

Related Posts: I have been doing this manually for some time for a good number of my posts, but automation is the way to go (if it works). You won’t see the list of related posts when you visit the main page of this blog, but they’ll show up when you go into each individual entry. The problem is that you will see some duplication because, as I mentioned, I did this manually before. Extra bonus for you: more related posts. Special thanks to Ajith of Simple Informations for suggesting I add this plug-in.

Akismet: I don’t know why I didn’t activate this plug-in right away. Within 24 hours of moving over to WordPress, Beyond the Rhetoric got bombarded with comment spam. It was mostly ugly trackbacks from, ahem, adult web sites. Akismet is a pretty good comment spam blocker and has done an excellent job since I activated it a couple days ago.