BLOG DESIGN JOURNAL

No matter whether you are going to build a blog dedicated to affiliate marketing, drop shipping, or your own product, it is very important to choose  a platform that will enable you to add content easily.

Today, WordPress and Blogspot are the industry leaders when it comes to the blogging arena. When you answer the following questions, it will help ensure that you are using the best platform for your new blog. Read the rest of this entry →

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Image via CrunchBase

I use several plugins to promote WordPress blogs via Twitter. They mainly fall into three categories:

Getting users to tweet individual posts.

Getting users to follow you on Twitter  (so they are reminded to come back).

Automatically tweeting about every single post.

Getting Users to Tweet Your Posts

There are others, but the plugin I use to get readers to tweet my posts is Tweet This. It offers a nice selection of buttons. I get to select which button it will insert at the end of each post.

Getting Users to Follow You on Twitter

The Twitter badge that remains in the upper right (or the left, if you choose) corner of the blog window is one of my favorite Twitter-related blog add-ons. It is attractive and can be eye-catching without being intrusive. Basically it takes up no space.

You get the badge for free at http://www.go2web.com. You select the color, the wording, even the exact position (left/right, and distance from the top). The site generates the code to create the badge on your blog.

The Twitter badge is not technically a plugin, because you have to use the Appearance > Editor and insert it in the PHP code (usually on the footer page), but that is actually quite easy. And the thing just works.

You can edit the color on your own site (instead of regenerating it at Go2Web.com) if you want to. Simply change the hex code in the tiny script you pasted on the footer page.

Tweeting Posts Automatically

Automatically tweeting a link to each post seems to be the most effective of all the Twitter tie-ins I have tried. There are several (at least) plugins that do that, and all of them that I have tried work just fine. Here are the ones I use:

Twitter Autopost

Tweet This

Twitter Tools

Twitter Autopost

Twitter Autopost is the simplest automatic tweet plugin I’ve ever seen. It is not free. I bought it with another automation plugin for less than $5.

Tweet This

Tweet this is free. You can find and install it, using the Add New feature in your WordPress dashboard. Besides adding a Tweet This button as described above, it can be easily set up automatically post to a Twitter account. Just enter a Twitter username and password.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is a whole complex of tools. It allows you to not only tweet automatically when you make a blog post but also to automatically post tweets to your WordPress blog. You have to be careful in setting up this plugin, or your tweet-post-cycle can become circular.

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For those people new to Internet Marketing there is some software that is so simple to use it make you laugh. Gone are the days of learning HTML code and in are the days of WordPress.

WordPress was originally created for blogging and bloggers but an increasing number of people have begun to use it for static websites. A simple way of explaining it is to imagine that you have purchased a domain name and have directed it to a hosting company that supports WordPress.

The way it works is you install WordPress directly from your host and create a user name and password. Then when you want to add text, photographs, video or audio onto your site you can do so by clicking on the appropriate button and once you Save you’re done.

One special feature about WordPress is the list of developers who have written software to do additional things. These plugins, as they are called, are programs designed to add additional features; for example the other day I wanted to create a membership site so that my members could log onto secure areas where I was making available some advanced tutorials.

The intention was to make the information available only to Gold Members. Fortunately these were two plugins that seemed to do exactly what I wanted. Read the rest of this entry →

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.
Read the rest of this entry →

A blog, believe it or not, when properly prepared creates content, and quite often is put very fast in the top ten of Google. Why it is so, try reading the following contribution to enlighten yourself:

A blog of domestic implements from a few features, allow search engines to crawl the content very quickly. The result was the fastest I have ever witnessed, added a new post within 20 seconds (including the top 10 ranking) for relevant phrases. How can this come about?

BlogPing

BlogPing is a protocol that implements any popular blog system. It serves primarily two things:

1. Blogs to notify each other (They were linked)

2. Notify search engines (Google Hello, I have published a new page)

Especially with the integration of Google Sitemaps that go on WordPress with a click of the hand, you need a search engine’s new content page to look once more. Sitemap opens directly to crawl a new page. Read the rest of this entry →

Image via Wikipedia

by Kathleen Gresham

When you say WordPress, people automatically think of blogging. WordPress is the blog engine supreme. It is free, easy to install and easy to customize.

Thinking of WordPress as just a blog engine, though, seriously limits your options. That would be a shame, because WordPress offers so many options.

WordPress is a full-featured content management system (CMS). It can keep track of multiple authors and their privileges, provide a place to store documents and allow users to download them, keep track of document revisions and allow you to compare them and reinstate earlier versions—and so much more.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with WordPress. And most options are freely downloadable somewhere on line at no charge.

1. Web Sites

WordPress allows you to build a static web site much faster than any website builder software. Especially if you are not a wizard with that particular sitebuilder. That is, unless you are a super whiz with, say, DreamWeaver, you probably cannot match the speed—and certainly not the ease—with which you can set up a web site with WordPress.

Nowadays there are some great themes with dropdown menus that look like high-quality web site templates and can be easily customized.

Not only that, the search engine optimization benefits of a WordPress site versus a conventional HTML web site are tremendous. There are so many blog networks and SEO plugins and other tools that you can use to promote a WordPress site that are simply not available for HTML web sites.

2. Forums

There are several free plugins that allow you to easily set up a discussion forum, using WordPress. You can use that forum to make money from advertising, offer support for the products or services sold by your company (on line or off line), meet like-minded people, and so much more.

3. Membership Sites

Membership sites are a great way to make residual income. You can charge a fee for joining, for example for a niche membership site, and/or charge a monthly membership fee. Internet marketers often use a membership site to post their products for purchasers to download, to offer affiliate marketing tools and status reports to their affiliates, and to offer support for their products.

Others simply charge a membership fee for members to get access to a host of free downloadable ebooks, software, or other original content in a particular niche.

4. Article Directories and Link Directories

Article marketing is a staple of online marketing, and articles sites have many purposes. If your article site becomes popular, you can make good advertising revenue. If not, you still have a good place to post original or PLR articles with links to your main blog or web site.

You can download free themes and plugins to build an article directory with WordPress. Or  you can build yourself a link directory with other free WordPress themes and/or plugins. You could, for example, add a links page from your main blog to all your other sites.

5. Blogs

Yes, of course, WordPress is still the easiest and most flexible blog engine for self-hosted blogs. The very popularity of WordPress means there are thousands of theme designers and plugin makers constantly providing excellent new free or paid products to add value to WordPress blogs.

6. Combination Sites

Lately I have been making combination website-blogs for offline and online businesses. That is easy to do with WordPress.

For example, see the site designed for Temples Gate, a charming metaphysical gift shop in Houston, Texas. The old site was unfindable on Google for any related keyword or phrase.

The new WordPress-based site rose to Google PR2 in just a few months. It gets traffic via Google searches from all over world.

The site continues to grow as we add more pages, posts, and photos. Google loves sites that steadily grow. And site visitors like to see new and different photos and text whenever they visit the site.

The embedded blog fits seamlessly into the web site, and the site is linked to a Google Calendar so that the store owner can easily add and update the classes, workshops, and other events held at the store.

We will soon add a shopping cart to encourage online purchases. WordPress makes it easy to do that, and several of shopping cart plugins are free. We are still comparing features and usability on a separate test site.

Flexibility and Free Tutorials

Some of the same features can be found on Joomla and Drupal, but nothing beats WordPress for design flexibility and the huge array of plugins, widgets and other accessories available to easily customize it. Also, there is so much free training available for WordPress. WordPress video courses abound, and many of them are free.

So think outside the box when deciding how to build your next site, whether for personal use, to enhance your offline business or for ecommerce. Consider using WordPress even if you are not building a blog. Your imagination is just about the only limit to what you can do with it.

Adding Extra Value to Your Blog

And consider all the options that the WordPress community offers for adding value to your blog. Even if a blog is your main goal, WordPress allows you to add a forum for your reader community or a paid membership area.

If you want to do business on line, WordPress is a great tool for that, too. The sky is just about the limit when it comes to WordPress.

Select Your Hosting Service Carefully

If you intend to build a business in online retail sales, however, make sure you have a good ecommerce web hosting service. Make sure  you use a service that fully supports whatever it is that you are trying to do.

My first hosting was horrible. We could not even get a simple WordPress blog to work properly on their service, and it was a nightmare. So look for quality, not just price, in selecting a hosting service, even if you are not currently planning to get into ecommerce.

What cool things do you do with WordPress? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Kathleen Gresham designs, writes, and promotes blogs and websites and consults on search engine optimization (SEO) and directory listings for online and off line businesses in Houston, TX. For more information, see Houston Blog Web and Web Fresh Leads.

Do you have AdSense ads on your blogs? If so, you urgently need to read this!

Google now requires that every site that displays AdSense ads must have a privacy policy page with details Google‘s newest privacy policy for AdSense ads. If that sounds complicated, it is.

You must comply by April 8, or risk losing our AdSense ad income. So what is a blog designer to do? I have about a dozen blogs, most of which are powered by WordPress, and I have been dreading having to deal with this.

Cavalry to the rescue! SEO whiz Eric Giguere has created a WordPress plugin to automatically generate a Google-compliant privacy policy on any page you choose, or to generate a complete new privacy page for your blog. And the plugin is free!

Download Eric’s new plugin from his personal blog, Synclastic, here.

There are instructions on the download page, but basically it is simple. Drop it in the plugin folder and make a few settings. 

Now, be sure to subscribe to Eric’s blogs, both Synclastic and his AdSense/SEO blog, The Unofficial AdSense Blog. I promise you will be very glad you did. Eric is a whiz, and he explains things in terms we can all understand

Excuse me. Gotta run. I have a bunch of plugins and privacy pages to install.