WordPress training isn’t like getting Microsoft or Oracle certified, because there isn’t an official certification program. Learning something new is always tough; learning a powerful software suite like WordPress can be frightening. It need not be. WordPress is actually approachable and easy to start with. Badly written course material can cast a pall over what should be a kick in the pants, because WordPress lets you do great things very quickly.

Here’s what to look for as you evaluate WordPress training courses.

•Clear indication of the version being taught
•Good freebies
•Step by step all the way
•Brief explanations of theory along with the how-to
•WordPress is far more than just a blogging application-do the course developers know?

WordPress changes fast-what version do they cover?

WordPress has transformed dramatically in the last few versions from highly capable blogging application to enterprise-ready content management system. New versions with major feature changes appear at least twice a year-much more quickly than most enterprise apps. Make sure the training materials you’re evaluating cover the latest version.

Vendor should give away great content

You should have absolutely no questions about the quality of the material you’re about to shell out good money for. That means the vendor should have the guts to give you a free sample that’s so good it leaves you no doubt that you’re getting serious value for the money. Take advantage of this very competitive market.

Step-by-step instructions so good you can learn just by looking

When you evaluate the free sample, it should tell you clearly what you’re about to learn, then show you with specific, fully illustrated step-by-step illustrations that you learn something new even if typing each command computer. You should be able to drop into the learning materials at any point and know precisely how to go about any specific step.

Here’s an example. If it says something like “Install the WP-DBManager plugin,” you’ve found a loser. Why? They’re leaving way too much up to chance. How do you get the WP-DBManager plugin, anyway? Can you get it through the WordPress dashboard or do you have to go straight to the developer’s site? (The former.) Is there anything you should know about that particular plugin after you install it? (Yes. You need to ensure immediately that it mails backups to your free email account every day, so you’re ready when disaster strikes.)

Instead, you should see clear instructions on how to install the plugin, and how to configure it, in such a way that even an unsophisticated user can do the job.

Sell the Theory

On the other hand, very often training materials show you how to do things without explaining exactly why you’re doing them. Everything you learn should start with an introduction explaining not only what you’re learning, but they should sell you on learning it. And I mean sell it. If you start a new section and can’t tell after the introductory paragraph how that section will make your publishing task easier or better or both, then that section has failed you. It’s not that you’re slow. It’s that the publisher hasn’t done its job.

WordPress is Big. Your Training Shouldn’t Be Small

WordPress is so accessible it’s easy to forget that it has gone far beyond blogging. It is so extensible through plugins and themes that you should have a solid reason for not using WordPress to to launch any small to medium site. If the training material doesn’t address larger issues, such as how to create a site that doesn’t look like a blog at all, you know the publisher is simply not with the program. Move on. There’s plenty of choice in the world of WordPress training.

Confused by all the great options you have to learn WordPress? Get our free training course written by WordPress expert Tom Campbell. For links and more information, click here –> WordPress Training Course

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/wordpress-training-course-learning-to-use-wordpress-should-be-a-kick-in-the-pants-1768076.html

In my blog post I’ve written on Enhance your blogging skills with WordPress Plug-ins. Today I’m going to explain about advance hacks & wordpress plug-in for powering your blogging.

We all know that WordPress is best CMS for blogging, if you have bit technical skills to tweaked with coding & R& D for trying new plug-ins, then blog post is must read for you. Let’s start with WordPress Plug-in & Hacks:

Wordbook – WordBook is provides you to facility of posting your blog posts in to your Face Book Wall. These blog posts will be showing on Boxes tab of your recent blog post.

Broken Link Checker – This plug-in let you know broking links of your blog. You can monitor links in your blog post, pages and other custom fields. It also notifies redirected links.

Link to This Page – Link to This Page allows you to handy way to obtain a link to your page or blog post from their web site.

WP Wall – This plug-in appears in your blog’s side bar. Readers can add quick comment about your blog and it will appear in side bar immediately, with out reloading the page.

PixoPoint Menu Plugin – Pix Point Menu Plug-in enhance your navigation control with regular or dropdown menu. It’s easy to modifying design & animated drop down menus and you can use it Up to two menus.

Highlight Search Terms – This plug-in Highlights search terms using jQuery within WordPress generated search results. This is compatible up to wordpress 2.7.1

Platinum SEO Pack – Platinum SEO Pack is pretty much similar as All in One SEO. It has also some additional functionality like you can add other Meta tags such as robots, index, follow or no follow. It also helps you to avoid duplicate content issues.

SEO Slugs – SEO Slugs WordPress plug-in eliminates stop words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

Extended Options – This plug-in can manage some certain Meta data like Relationship Meta links, Favicon Meta links, OpenID Meta links MicroID Meta links and Protocol discovery Meta links.

After the Deadline – This plug-in helps you to write better and spend less time on editing. You can use this plug-in for checking spelling, style, and grammar.

Automatically insert content after each post – This blog post helps you to minimize your efforts on content which you’re mentioning after each post. This hack will help you to insert automatically content after blog post.

Automatically insert author bio on each post – With the help of this WordPress hack you can add author bio of your blog on each blog post.

Compress WordPress output and speed your blog’s load speed – This blog post helps you to compress your WordPress blog and speed up your blog load post. Now a day faster loading website is having more chances to rank well as per Google’s latest algorithm update.

Hope this WordPress Plug-in & Hacks will helps you to take your wordpress blog at advance level as you want. If you have some other plug-in & Hacks of WordPress then you can share here.

Simron Bird is working with leading offshore Web Design Company based at India. She is passionate to share useful tips on search engine marketing, web analytics and Iphone application development.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/13-wordpress-plugin-hacks-for-powering-your-blogging-experience-1680289.html

You have read many article related to must have plug-ins or 10 essential plug-ins for wordpress. As wordpress expert and having long experience of blogging I would like to write the essential plug-ins for wordpress. This artilce is totally different from others due to reason that we didn’t discussed our liking or dislikings rather we have shared our experience while keeping in view the various aspects.

Each plug-in is best of its domain and would serve you the best. Som what a blogger might be expecting in his blog. We will discuss all the aspects which blogger may have and suggest the best plug-in for your wordpress installation.

Security:-

1. Most of bloggers ignore the security aspect of their blogs which might result in great loss. Very first plug-in that a blogger should have is login-lockdown. This plug-in monitors unsuccessful login attempts and defined number of unsuccessful attempts, this plug-in disables the login function of wordpress. Hence it secures you from brute force attempt and any illegitimate login attempt. Plug-in function has not ended here, this plug-in also records the IP address and time interval between each unsuccessful attempt.
2. What if your blog have been messed up by some of your grieved author/editor or contributor. Take regular back-ups of your blog. We have solution from Il filosoft which is fully automated and fully customizable. Select number of backups a day, and select the tables to be back-uped.
3. Spam is a serious problem for a blogger. Approving long list of comments is itself a hectic job and if spam comments are also posted, what to do then.SI Captcha Anti-spam and Akismet (included in stock version of wordpress) are blessing in this situation. Combination of both will give you maximum protection against spam.

For complete article visit us on Smartseo.shinningpak.com

Imran Yousaf is Computer Science graduate and have vast experience of computer software and hardware. He has special expertise in Internet Marketing, SEO, Blogging, WordPress and Thesis customisation.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/12-essential-plugins-for-wordpress-1630280.html

WordPress is an open source personal publishing system that helps you to create complex blogs, reviews on your website. It is loaded with sophisticated design features and such administrative tools that ease the process of developing and integrating a professional or personal blog on a site. Moreover, being free to download and use, WordPress has flexible templates that help to design the blog or review, create archives, set up the publishing infrastructure and even help to import another review or blog created with some other publishing system.

There are several free plugins that are present and can be put to use. But the commercial review plugins provided and supported by WordPress offer better functionality and support. As there are many such review plugins supported by WordPress, it is quite difficult to point out a single one. But here we discuss one of the best plugins:

WP Review Engine v4.0 : It’s one of the best wordpress review plugin supported by WordPress. It allows the creation of an affiliate powered review website. Being a commercial plugin it provides features such as integrated thumbnail images, ratings, affiliate links and custom fields which are an essential part of any review post. The users can control the look and feel of the review site down to the pixel control. This helps in the customization of the look as per specific needs.

The WP Review Engine wordpress review plugin is easy to use and includes many stunning features such as:

• Comparison tables
• Simple installation
• Generation of comments automatically
• Integration of Google maps
• Change order of reviews: the control over the order of posts helps the user to change the order of those posts that have the highest or lowest user comments or posts which have the lowest or highest ratings.
• Can help in importing data: it can import data from any CSV files. So any database content created elsewhere can be imported to WordPress.
• Is compatible with any theme: with this feature any theme can be incorporated into the review in just a few moments.
• Has tracking stats

Besides the above mentioned features the WP Review Engine allows the users

• To add a thumbnail image
• To add custom fields
• To add star ratings
• To post affiliate links

These features of the WP Review Engine are controlled and manipulated by the administration area, thus even new users can use it easily because of the starting guide and detailed documentation provided with the plugin. Being SEO friendly and tracking friendly, WP Review Engine can integrate Google maps too. Thus with all the above mentioned features, the WP Review Engine is the best WordPress review plugin.

Rahul Jain is a freelance writer and loves to write on a broad range of topics.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/wp-reviews-engine-40-the-best-wordpress-review-plugin-1614950.html

Making money from adsense is the easiest way, but it need strategy. You will have to place your ads in right place to get high CTR. The only way to get more clicks for your adsense ads is to place it above post title or below post title.

Placement Is one of the most important thing to get good CTR for your adsense ads and to earn good money. In this post we are going to place adsense inside, below and above blogger post title.

Ad the ads in any of the below position and get more clicks and money. Because the basic thing in adsense is CTR. High CTR = High Rate Per Click = High Earnings, and CTR is depend on your Traffic. If you have allot of traffic to your blog, then you can earn allot of money from adsese.

Traffic = Page Preview = CTR = Click = Earning

How to Place Adsense Above, below and inside Post Title in Blogger

Following are placements of adsense ads in a Post.

1:- Adsense Above Post Title

Login to your blogger Dash Board, Click on Layout, click on HTML and give a tick to “Expand widget Template” and find the below code.

Now Paste this code just before the previous one.

center;padding:5px;’>

— PLACE YOUR ENCODED ADSENSE CODE HERE —

2:- Adsense Below Blogger Post Title

If you want to insert adsese ads just after blogger post title then add the code just after this code.

Find this code  and paste the below code just after the previous one.

center;padding:5px;’>

— PLACE YOUR ENCODED ADSENSE CODE HERE —

Now you placed your adsense code inside your blogger post title and now you get good CTR to earn from adsense.

You can read the original article for Insert adsense inside blogger Post and you can find more at Blogging Tips

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/insert-adsense-inside-blogger-and-wordpress-post-1602810.html

There has been trend in search industry using WordPress as cms for either business blogging or personal blogging. WordPress is an open source blog publishing application and can be used for basic content management.

WordPress Plug-ins is the extensions that add bonus function to the basic WordPress software. These are what turn the basic blog program into a full content management system. Using WordPress plug-ins is the best way to customize wordpress blog as per needs.

I’m going to explain about most useful plug-in of wordpress through it you can do blogging easier.

All in One SEO Pack – All in one seo pack is most common used plug in. It is automatically optimizes your titles for search engines and generates Meta tags automatically. All in One SEO Pack is helpful to avoid the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs.

Google Analytics for WordPress – Google Analytics for WordPress plug-in is simple to use and easy to implement your Google analytics code into wordpress blog.

This plug-in also tracks outbound links, blogroll links, downloads and Ad sense    Clicks. It is also works with Urchin that mean you, can also integrate your urchin code with this plug-in in wordpress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps - This Plug-in will build Sitemap.xml for better indexing of your blog. You can also customize Sitemap.xml as pet your needs i.e. include or exclusion of categories or tags.

It will automatically generate Sitemap.xml and update into Google webmaster tool, yahoo webmaster tool and Bing webmaster tool every tine ones you updated your blog with new blog post.

Secure WordPress - This plug-in little helps for securing blog by removing error information on login page. It also helps to stop hacking attempts on your blog by eliminating wp-version tag.

KB Robots.txt – This plug-in allows you to manage robots.txt within wordpress blog. This is ideally useful for WP-MU installations. This plug-in also has some limitations that it will not helpful for blogs that are hosted on sub directory like example.com/blog.

WordPress Thread Comment – This enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.

Thank Me Later – It is useful for saying thanks to your readers on their comment by sending email of Thanks.It will also helpful to you engage your visitor into your blog.

WP Greet Box – WP Greet Box shows different greeting messages to new visitors of your blog and it depends on referring url from which visitor came on your blog.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – This plug-in allows option to your blog for retweeting through visitors. It also provides numeric count of retweet for your story shared through twitter.

WPtouch iPhone Theme – WPtouch iPhone Theme makes your blog into an Iphone application styled theme with single click. With this plug-in wordpress blog become mobile compatible and any one can visit mobile version of your blog through Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device and Iphone.

WP-PageNavi – This plug-in adds more advanced top & bottom navigation to your WordPress blog.

WP CSS – This plug-in helps you to enhance look of specific blog post and pages. You can add customized CSS to specific posts and pages.

WP Follow Me – WP Follow Me is simple wordpress plug-in that allows to put your twitter follow me badge on your blog.

Permalink Redirect – This plug-in ensure all page and posts always accessed via the permalink.

Contact Form 7 – This plug-in can control numerous contact forms and you can also customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple html. This plug-in also supports Capatcha, Akimet spam filtering.

All in One Ad sense and YPN – All in One Ad sense and YPN is able to add Google Ad sense ads or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads on your blog.  With this plug-in you can customize display and appearance of your ad powerfully. Advanced users can add html and css code before and after the ad to have total control of the ad display.

These all plug-ins are widely used for powerful blogging experience. Hope this will help you to enhance your experience with powerful blogging.

Simron Bird is associate with leading offshore seo outsourcing company in India offers services of Custom web application development, social networking application development and Iphone application development.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/enhance-your-blogging-skills-with-wordpress-plugins-1564963.html

Blogging can be an amazing way help you to make money on the net. It enables you to get messages out to potential customers, get messages out to existing customers, and does great things for the SEO (search engine optimisation) of your site. I’m not feeding you hype when I tell you that you should be blogging. Search engines love blogs so you’ll save loads on your advertising costs, too.

The articles bring people in and your articles, as well as banners in your sidebar, can sell to people that arrive on your site.

Setting up a WP Blog

Setting up a blog isn’t difficult. WordPress is really easy, really customisable, and works amazingly well for bringing you traffic. It has got to be the favourite blogging platform for the most successful online marketers. You can set it up on its own as the root of a domain or you can create a yourdomain.com/blog as well and add it to an existing site. If you’re with a webhost that offers cPanel hosting (most large webhosts do), you’ve already got the ability to add a free WordPress blog onto your existing website.

I would recommend that you host your blog with someone other than WordPress. For a small fee this way you have more control of your blog and cannot be shutdown anytime Worpress feels like it.

I used to use Go-Daddy but now use My Express Site. Very simple to use with great tutorials and excellent customer service. Check out the great features of My Express Site for 14 days for just $5 here.

Here are some non-technical overviews of how to set up WordPress blogs on their own as well as on your existing website. If you run into trouble, you’ll find loads of free online tutorials and your webhost probably has free support and can guide you through as well but it’s really quite easy.

In cPanel, there’s an icon called Fantastico or Fantastico DeLuxe. It’s a little happy face. By clicking on it, you can add all sorts of programs. Install WordPress from here. When you do, it’ll ask you where to do a new install and here’s where you can choose a URL such as yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog. (If you don’t already have a domain and webhosting, you’ll want to set those up first.)

You’ll go through self-guided boxes that ask you for information such as your username and password and then with the click of your mouse, your blog is created. After it’s installed, you can login at: yournewblog.com/wp-admin.

Here, you’ll use the credentials you’ve set up and then you can go ahead and start blogging. You’ll find many free templates and tools to customise your blog and once you start blogging, you’ll find you get more traffic than ever to your website. Blog with search engine optimisation in mind and that’ll bring you plenty of organic traffic.

It’s a good idea to learn all you can about optimising a blog as well as monetising it. There are some great tutorials and tips that can help you unleash the potential of blogging with your target audience. Subscribe to my newsletter (in the sidebar) to learn more.

My aim is to give you honest help and advice on growing a profitable online business without the hype!

For more free business tips and to discover more about me please visit my blog, http://whoisdeonbryan.com/

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/how-to-set-up-a-wordpress-blog-for-profit-1565154.html

If you are a blogger and have not used WordPress already, you should definitely give it a try now because you are missing much. In this article I will talk about top five reasons that makes WordPress the number one blogging platform in the world.

1. WordPress is free.

WordPress is an open source blogging platform that is shared for free. You can use as many copies of WordPress on your sites as you like. In addition you can customize the source code to meet your needs if you have some experience in coding.

2. WordPress is highly customizable.

Have you ever encountered two WordPress sites that look identical? I guess not. This is because WordPress is so flexible that you can change almost anything regarding the design and layout easily even if you do not know what HTML is. This is one of the most appealing features of WordPress that makes it so popular among millions of bloggers.

3. There are thousands of themes to use.

If you do a fast search on Google, I am sure you will find tens, if not hundreds, of websites that offer WordPress themes either free or paid. I know some websites offering more than a thousand free themes. That is a really good thing to have, which makes it easy to find a theme that is related to the topic of your blog. If you plan to spend some money, you can buy really nice looking themes and have a new one created if you can not find the exact theme you are looking for.

4. WordPress has great plugins.

Plugins are what makes life easier with WordPress. As WordPress is open source, each day new plugins are going public. Some of them are free and some of them are paid. From contact forms to social bookmarking tools and SEO tools, WordPress now has a great archive of plugins each designed to serve a specific need. This is one of the most powerful aspects of WordPress.

5. WordPress is search engine friendly.

Google loves WordPress and sites created by WordPress are indexed fast and rank well. Being already SEO friendly, in addition, there are lots of plugins that are used to make it better.

Find more about blogging and WordPress on Daily Affiliate Tips

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/5-reasons-why-you-should-choose-wordpress-to-blog-1544943.html

Many clients come to me and ask whether they should host a blog on their own server or setup a free blog via WordPress, Blogspot or other platforms. Since this question has been asked time and time again, I have decided to write a blog post on the topic. I literally receive 5-10 inquiries per week about such, and this will hopefully put the issue to rest once and for all.

Please find the benefits of each scenario below:

Hosting on WordPress.com
1) Hosting a blog on WordPress.com offers a free and easy way to setup a blog/website and instantly get things rolling.
2) There is no cost associated with free blog platforms, which makes them appealing to the masses.
3) Plugins and themes can be swapped very easily, no FTP connections required. This is also the case with most self-hosted blogs, but not always.

Self-Hosting a Blog
1) Site access is taken to an entirely different level and all aspects of the blog can be modified.
2) A wide variety of more custom plugins can be utilized.
3) In regards to SEO, hosting a blog on your own server is the absolute most important thing to do. The goal is to build strength/traffic to your own server/domain not blogspot.com or WordPress.com. This will ensure future sustainability and profitability.
4) In being able to fully customize a blog, advertisers (banner ads) are easier to acquire, thus making the blog more profitable in the end.

I hope this compare and contrast has been helpful. Be sure to check out my articles on Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing to get a better understanding of online advertising in general. 

Until next time, 

Sincerely,
Aaron Schoenberger
The Brainchild Group

The Brainchild Group is a Los Angeles SEO Company specializing in Corporate SEO, Restaurant SEO, Automotive SEO, E-Commerce Website SEO, Law Firm SEO and SEO for a host of other businesses.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/selfhost-blog-or-setup-blog-on-wordpresscom-1524391.html

If you were to develop a site seven or eight years ago, you would likely need at least a basic understanding of programming codes like HTML or Javascript. Such coding was a significant barrier to entry for many non-digitally savvy users. The game changed when WordPress was developed in 2003. Since its release, WordPress has grown to an incredible 62.8 million websites in the US and 202 million websites worldwide.

WordPress is an open-source blog publishing application that eliminates web programming for the end user. As it is open-source, there are many different features that have been created by developers to enhance your blogging experience and website design. Many of these features allow bloggers to increase their SEO performance. We will discuss many of these features and how to use them in WordPress.

Use Static Key Words

The more key words you have on your webpage, the more attractive you are to web crawlers. (In simple terms, keyword density is one of many variables web crawlers look at. For example, Google Search looks for the quantity and quality of other sites linking to you).

WordPress has many tools to create sections to feature your own blog posts. In WordPress, click on the “Appearance” button in the left sidebar. A drop down menu will appear. Click on “widgets.” Then drag and drop widgets, such as “recent posts,” “tag clouds” and “links” in the sidebar 1 column on the right. These widgets will increase the number of key words that appear on every page.

Use WordPress Plugins

You might also consider a plugin that features relevant post. This will increase your SEO and pageviews by creating an additional source of keywords and generate relevant content for your reader. Simply click…

To read more about optimizing blog post headlines, go to Sparxoo, a digital marketing, branding and business development blog.

Sparxoo is a business blog that inspires breakthrough by tomorrow’s leaders. We are a strategy consulting firm with a pulse on marketing, branding, and development.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/blogging-articles/optimizing-blog-post-headlines-in-wordpress-1526406.html