Speaking of Twitter, there is also a Twitter account for ScribeFire. Feel free to follow if you want to be updated with the latest in ScribeFire happenings, including bits of news that might not merit their own blog post.

New Features

• Added ability to customize "Blog This" template (How does this work?)
• Added "Word Count" feature (in editor context menu)
• Added "Reload Posts" button in Entries tab
• Added buttons to copy post title/URL to Entries tab
• Added ability to change link and image properties (alt text, title, etc.) via context menu
• Added auto-upload of local images when a post is published
• Added "Insert table" feature

Bug Fixes

• Fix for double-encoding of & and other entities (issue #231); still working on a fix for this on Blogger
• Fix for RTL support (issue #93)
• Fixed blog editing in tab mode

Interface

• Code updates for easier themeing

You can report bugs with this version or request features for the next version by creating an entry at the Google Code project for ScribeFire. Once again, you can install this latest update by going to Mozilla Add-ons and clicking "Add to Firefox."

Update: Version 2.2.1 has been released as well to fix a problem with the Argentinian Spanish translation.

We are happy to give away a book that will help you improve your blogging, thanks for your support of ScribeFire! Don't forget to become eligible you just need to sign up for our free newsletter here.

One metric that I keep a close eye on is 'Page Views'. Another related one is 'Pages Viewed per Visitor'.

While all of the metrics mentioned above are important I am interested in how many pages each visitor to my blog views for a variety of reasons - two of the important ones being:

1. It's a measure of reader engagement - if a reader comes to my blog but only views one page it is an indicator to me that I need to work harder on engaging my readers and drawing them into participating in my blog. While they might have left satisfied (having quickly the found the information that they needed) I failed to draw them into commenting, viewing other related information, participating in a poll or some other activity that takes them a step closer to becoming a long term and loyal reader.

2. It impacts CPM ad earnings - when I run a CPM (cost per impression) advertisement on my blog it is in my best interests to create as many page views as I can. I get paid every time an ad is viewed - and one of the best ways to increase these earnings is to increase the 'pages viewed per visitor' metric.

How to Increase Page Views on Your Blog

1. Quality Content - before I get into some specific tips for increasing page views let me state the obvious and link it to the quality of your content. If you write engaging, useful and informative content you'll give your readers every reason to want to read more of the same. On the other hand if your content is boring and of a low content - it's no wonder that they only hang around to view just a single page.

2. Comments - the simplest way to get a reader to view more than one page is to get them to leave a comment on your blog. In doing so they hit the submit button in the comments section and the page reloads. Congratulations - you've just doubled your page view numbers! Of course this isn't always easy to do but you might want to consider some of these techniques for getting more comments.

3. Interlink Your Posts - another very natural way to grow your page views is to give readers links within your posts to other posts that you've written on your blog. This isn't always easy in the early days of your blog as you might not have many posts in your archives to promote in this way but after a while you'll find that it becomes easier and easier as your posts will overlap with one another. These types of links within posts should only be done when they add value to the post - irrelevant links just left to increase page views will just frustrate your readers.

4. Highlight Related Posts At the End of Posts - a great place to highlight other posts that you've written on the topic is at the end of your posts. Readers come to the end of a post and 'pause' before they decide what to do next. To stop them hitting the back button on their browser if you're able to position something relevant to read in these places that they pause you might just draw them deeper into your blog.

5. Compilation Pages - Jennifer wrote about creating a Best of Blog page for your blog a few days ago. In a sense what she's suggesting is that you create a compilation page (I also call them Sneeze Pages) where you link to many other posts that you've written. Highlighting these pages in prominent places on your blog is a great way of driving people in many directions and deep into your blog. The bonus is that you're sending them to your highest quality pages which increases the chances of them being converted to loyal readers.

6. Write a Series of Posts - putting together a series of blog posts that all relate to one another can bring a lot of life to a blog. For regular readers it can build momentum on your blog but over time it can be great for driving up page views because all of your posts are interlinked and draw readers who find the series to view each one, one after the other. A ten part series means someone reading the full thing sees 10 pages on your blog!

7. Interactive Elements - one challenge that many bloggers face is how to get readers who subscribe to their blog via RSS to actually visit their blog. If a reader reads your content in an RSS reader it means they have 0 page views. While I personally don't get too stressed by this (I figure at least they are engaging with me) it's not great for CPM advertising. One way to draw readers to visit your blog is to come over to comment - but there are other interactive tools that you can use also such as quizzes, projects or polls. Run these and post about them on your blog and you draw them to view a page or two.

8. Highlight Your Search Tool - most blogs have a search field somewhere on them that enables readers to look for more information. However I see quite a few blogs that have this search field hidden low on their page. This decreases the chances of it being seen and used. The more people searching for content on your blog the more likely they are to find something else to read.

9. Highlight Categories and Tags - similarly, if you highlight the category that a post belongs to or Tag it you again give readers something else to click on and read on a related topic to the post they've just read. In fact in doing so you link to pages where there are multiple more posts to read so you could be generating quite a few more page views.

10. Read More Links - on the front page of many blogs you'll see just excerpts of posts show with a link under them that says 'read more' or 'continue reading'. There are a few reasons to use this 'excerpt' or 'extended entry' feature of blogs. For me the reason I use it is because I want to highlight more than one latest post above the fold on the front page of my blog. I want to show readers at a first glance that there is a lot of content on my blog. However another added bonus is that you draw people to view a second page on your blog when they click the 'read more' link.

What would you add? How do you work to increase the numbers of page views on your blog?

*Darren Rowse is a guest blogger for Scribefire. He blogs professionally at ProBlogger, part of the b5media blog network.

Don’t require registration
Whether it is just the registration option included in Wordpress or a third-party option like TypePad, requiring registration will drop your comments down significantly. Simply entering a name, email address and URL is quick and easy and will encourage spontaneous comments. But if people even bother to register - and most of them won’t - having to wait for confirmation emails will significantly reduce the chance that those remaining potential commenters will follow through and post a comment.

Avoid capchas
Don’t require people to type in a capcha to submit their blog comment… and at the very most require them to answer a simple question that doesn’t involve squinting to read sideways letters with random colored lines running through them. Instead, think something like “What is 2+2″ or “What color is the sky?” If you use spam protection such as Akismet, you shouldn’t have many problems with spam at all.

Don’t moderate comments
You don’t need to automatically approve every comment, but consider automatically approve comments from those who have a previously approved comment, especially if you aren’t sitting there to babysit your blog. This will help keep comments flowing, especially if it might take a day or two to approve all the comments, leaving others to wonder why no one is commenting and why you aren’t approving their comments.

Reply to comments
When you reply to other’s comments on your own blog, this can also result in those initial commenters to respond back to your own comment. This not only ups your comment count on each post, but it also helps to encourage others to jump in as well, especially when they see you in there too. Install the comment plugin which will allow you to easily respond to each comment right in your control panel, rather than having to view each post individually to make your response.

Encourage comments at the end of each post
Ask a question about the post, whether it is for additional tips (”What other things to you do to…?”) or what others would do in the same situation (”How would you have handled it?”) to encourage people to comment.

Offer RSS comments
Make it easy for readers to follow comments made on your blog. This makes it easy to follow replies that others have made on comments they might have left on your blog, or just get further insight on your blog post by reading other’s comments.

Highlight top commenters
Use a plugin that shows off those with the most comments. You will need to watch for people making multiple “me too” comments to boost their comment count. And you will want to have it set to reset all the blog counts every week or two, otherwise new visitors might not think they have a chance to make the list if you have had your list running for the past six months and the top ten people on your list have 300+ comments each. Do make sure you keep this plugin updated, as there have been a few bugs in some of these plugins.

Especially if your blog is new or tends to get few, if any, comments, this can really help you get your comment count up and encourage new people to comment as well as to show new visitors that your blog is active.

See Jon's site for the text accompanying the video review.

What’s the best?
First, determine what your top blog content is. If you have kept analytics since the beginning of your blog’s existence, look and see which blog entries have had the most number of cumulative page views. Those should be included. Then consider other blog entries you feel are the best, but for some reason just didn’t make the most-eyeballs list, or perhaps they were really well received by a smaller niche than your blog generally serves. Aim to have at least 20-25 blog entries.

Categorize them
Perhaps the simple blog categories you use for regular blogging just isn’t the best way to break down your content. Or maybe you tagged many of your posts with 3 or 4 categories each, and you need to figure what one would be best suited to the blog. Just don’t do it by date… people can use the date archives if they want to know what you wrote back in June of 2006. Now that you have categorized them, divide each blog entry into a single category. And if you have a couple categories with only a single entry, go back and find a couple more to put in each. You want to make sure you have at least two entries in each category.

Write snippets
You don’t necessarily want to have just a page of links, especially if you have a lot of best posts to show off. So write new and unique snippets for each blog… really avoid the temptation to just copy the first sentence from each post. And make the snippets enticing as well, so that the combination of title and snippet make each one irresistible to readers.

Create a new page
Now that you have everything you need, create new page on your blog (a page rather than a blog post per se which would send it off into the archives. Call the page “Most Popular Blog Posts” or something similar, so that if people see it in the blog sidebar, they know exactly what it is if they clicked it.

Regularly update
Once you have created the page, do make sure you go back and update it. It doesn’t do much good for your readers if the page hasn’t been updated with any new popular blog hosts for the past six months. So make a habit of updating every month or so, or adding an entry after you notice it has a traffic spike.

If your blog is new
If your blog is fairly new, and you only have a handful of those most popular posts, there is no reason why you can’t have a best blog post page. Just leave out the categories and perhaps slightly lengthen the length of your snippets so it doesn’t look too bare. Then as you add new blog posts, you can add categories later and shorten the snippets to organize it better.

Promote it
Make note of it in your forum signatures. Comment and link to it from your own blog so that the longtime readers know it’s there. Include it in your resume or “about me” page on other sites. Share it when you are at industry conferences and add it to your speaker bio.

Automate it
There are a few plugins that add article pages with plugins. While not completely automated, it makes life easier for the lazy blogger.

When you create a best blog post page, it helps new readers who have just discovered your blog to find the best you have to offer. This also makes it more enticing for those readers to subscribe to your blog, since they can easily see just how much great content you have to offer. And since new blogs can easily implement this kind of blog strategy, it makes sense to add this to your blog.

How does it look?
How do your entries look in Bloglines, Google Reader, etc? When you subscribe to your own blog you can see how it looks, and you can notice things such as the fact you are only offering partial feeds when you thought you offered full. You can also check to see if there are weird formatting issues going on or anything else that makes your content look less-than-perfect when viewed in an RSS Reader.

Tech issues
Did you Wordpress bork your RSS feeds? What if you have been blogging daily for the last three weeks, but none of your subscribers knew it because their feed for your blog wasn’t updating? Programs aren’t fail safe and it is much better to notice on your own that your feed is not updating than to rely on your subscribers who might have thought you just must have gone on an extended vacation.

Hackers
Depending on your RSS settings, your RSS feed will update when something is changed on your blog. This means if your site falls victim to an injection attack where 10k worth of spammy hidden links are added to each entry, you should see each of those blog posts updated in your feed reader (however, it won’t show up if they are added in your blog footer, unfortunately). If you wake up in the morning and see that all your recent blog entries have been mysteriously updated overnight, that is a definite flag that something nefarious probably went on during the night. And if you spot a brand new blog entry by a hacker coming through, you will be on top of it too, rather than not noticing until the next time you logged into your blog.

Check snippets
If you are not including full blog entries, you can start optimizing snippets by seeing how they are appearing in your reader, and so you can continue to tweak as necessary. You can also check and see how excerpts are displaying.

RSS ads
If you are using RSS advertising, you can check your entries to make sure the ads are not only relevant, but that any advertisements you do not want displaying your ads are not showing up. And it gives you the opportunity to blog any ads from showing before most of your subscribers see them.

Quickly spot problems before everyone sees them
If you make a habit to refresh your RSS reader right after you post to your blog, you can also spot problems and fix them immediately, before they show up on everyone else’s reader. While you might not catch them all before they update, you could fix that embarrassing typo you made in the RSS excerpt before most of your subscribers download the feed.

Me, Myself & I
Do you have a lot of blogs? It makes sense to set them all up in the same folder, whether you call it “mine”, “me” or “vanity” in your RSS feed reader, then you can quickly scan them regularly. (Yes, mine is called Me, Myself & I… I suppose I was feeling creative that day!) But just don’t forget to regularly check the feed… subscribing to your own feed doesn’t do any good if you are not checking it

There are a ton of reasons to subscribe to your own feeds, especially when you are following other blogs in a blog RSS reader as well. So go and add every feed - including the comment feeds - to your RSS reader so you can be the first to spot potential problems, so they can be fixed before others spot them too!

Backing up your database
Bloggers are pretty lax at backing up their blog database. But what if a catastrophe occurs? Hackers, corrupt databases and a blog host that ceases to exist are all things than unexpectedly happens to bloggers, and they can take your entire blog with it. Having a backup of your blog’s database means that if something goes wrong, you will still have a copy of not only all your blog posts but also all the comments and trackbacks made as well. Not sure how to backup? Check for instructions with the blogger platform you use, or if you use Wordpress, you can also install a backup plugin that will do all the dirty work for you.

Backup your template files
You should also regularly back up your files too, especially your template files. This means that if a hacker exploits your template and adds thousands of spammy footer links or something happens with the host, you have a nice clean backup of your files, including any changes you might have made to the original template.

Upgrading Wordpress or your blog software of choice
After you have backed up your database and files, the next thing you should be doing is check for updates to your blog software. And most likely, it also means upgrading Wordpress, MovableType or whichever blog software you are using for your blog. Don’t just assume that upgrading to the next version is simply to give bloggers more features… chances are extremely good that the new version was made to close holes that could allow your blog to get exploited or hacked. Nearly all cases of blogs being hacked is because the blogger was lax in upgrading. And it is far easier to upgrade than it is to de-hack your blog it once it has been exploited.

Upgrading plugins
While not as critical as upgrading the blog software itself, upgrading plugins can be pretty important if there is a security loophole created with the version you are using. And as a bonus, the new version of WP 2.5 notes in the plugins page which plugins have new versions available. So you just need to remember to check the page… and upgrading plugins is usually just as painless as it was installing them in the first place.

I can’t stress enough how important it is to do these things for your blog. You don’t want to lose 2 years worth of blogging simply because you didn’t get around to backing up and upgrading. And a single exploit that has been done by hackers on your blog will take much, much longer than the amount of time it takes to simply upgrade and backup everything over the entire life of your blog. And as an added bonus, it will keep your sanity too Dealing with the consequences of not doing the above is not very much fun at all!

Become known by the blog you comment on
It can be a great way to introduce your blog to another blog in the industry you want to connect with, especially if your blog is brand new. I tend to visit all URLs from new commenters on my blog, and yes, I have subscribed to some of those feeds. And in this world with what seems like 20 gazillion active blogs, chances are I might not have found those blogs if they hadn’t commented on my blog first.

Recognition
You know the old saying that ads need to be seen 7 times before they generate a response from the consumer? The same thing applies to blogs. If someone sees you commenting regularly on blogs - especially multiple blogs in the same market -eventually people will get curious and click on your link to see what it is you do or write. So while that comment you left on a blog might not actually result in a clickthrough to your own blog, there is a good chance at least a few people read it and your name (or your blog name) will be in the back of their head for the next time they run into one of your comments.

Traffic
Yes, you can actually get a significant amount of traffic to your blog simply by including your URL when you make a comment. And the faster you comment after the blog post goes up, the more likely people will click your link. Just make sure you are including your URL in the URL field… don’t add it as a signature which can seem pretty spammy and could end up resulting in your comment being disapproved.

New Subscribers
Yes, you can get new subscribers simply by leaving comments on other’s blogs. First, you have to make sure your comment is good, insightful and top quality. Anytime I come across a really good comment someone has made on a blog, it makes me interested to know what else that person has to say in their own venue. And if I find their blog quality backs up the quality of the comment, I will subscribe to their feed.

Backlinks
Yes, not all blogs automatically nofollow links made by those who comment. Some have requirements to make it followed, such as X number of comments or approval by the blog author, so make a note of those blogs and comment more frequently on those, especially if they are considered authority blogs in your space.

Pay Off
Some people complain it takes too much time to comment on another blog. But if you have read the article anyway, it doesn’t take much time or effort to post a quick comment or response on what you read. Don’t think you have to write something lengthy, even a “Yes, I had the same response when I did XYZ on my blog a few months ago” is fine. The return on the time investment is one of the best things you can do for your blog.

It is important to comment on other’s blogs regardless of the popularity of your blog. But when you are starting out, commenting can be a crucial component that can actually make or break your blog. What do you think is harder? Encouraging a blogger to link to your brand spanking new blog, or getting traffic from that blog by people who read your comment there? Commenting by far! Then the traffic and links will naturally follow.