WordPress Made Easy

Your blog’s success or failure goes back to the very first thing you do and that is not…

• Buying a domain
• Installing a blog
• Picking a blog theme
• Choosing the best plugins
• Creating back links
• Having a great opt in offer

Or any of a myriad of other technical things even though the items listed can all help improve your success.

It is not creating great content (although you will need that too.)

The very first thing you need is to find a profitable topic.

Get this one thing right and you can mess up some of the technical items, not have a super look and you can still see some success. Get it wrong and you can do everything else perfectly and still end up frustrated.

So your first step is to find a topic that people are not only interested in but spending money on. After all, whether you are monetizing your blog by recommending products, creating your own or selling advertising the profit will only be there if people are spending money.

Next time I will look into finding a topic like this but if you are looking for a short cut to finding profitable topics you might want to check out Susanne Myers Affiliate Niche Packs.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog, profitable topics, selling advertising, spending money

Yes, I have been MIA for the last couple of months but that ends today.

Been a lot going on here and spent way too much time in doctor’s offices and the hospital with my better half. Add in other outside problems and my blogging here stopped.

To get started it is time to go back to basics. Time to refresh things here and overcome the digital dust and get things repaired. to do just that I will be starting a series on getting your blog started.

The basics are important and often overlooked as all the hype you here and see in your email is about special themes, the latest greatest plugins and the basics get over looked.

So I am back and will be applying some of the items from Nicole Dean’s Blog CPR which is a great way to revive your blog.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed. If their are specific topics you would like addressed please leave them in the comments.

Be back tomorrow. Really I will be .

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: babk, basics, blogging, digital dust, Nicole Dean, special themes

WordPress has released version 3.2. There are big changes in this release so it pays to do a bit of checking before doing the upgrade.

Because of the changes your server must have different requirements than previously needed. You must be running at least PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0 to run the new version.

You can check with your server host to make sure of what your site is running or there is a WordPress plugin you can add to see if your current server configuration is okay.

Go to Plugins ? Add New and search for “health check” (it should be the first result). Install it, activate it, and it will tell you if you need to update anything.

If you do then contact your host to get them to make the appropriate changes.

Now the upgrade is not supposed to be able to be done if your server is not properly set up but as mine are I have not been able to test it.

Finally, there may be some plugins that will cause trouble with the new version. Make sure to deactivate your plugins before upgrading. (Yeah I know it is in the instructions but we all tend to get lazy on this type of thing.)

If you use Digi List Builder or Digi Viral Traffic plugins, Andy has already released upgrades and you should have received an email with the new download. (One of the reasons I like Andy’s plugins. He always stays on top of them.)

You can see what is new in my review of the beta release of 3.2.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: server configuration, server host, upgrade wordpress, wordpress, WordPress 3.2

WordPress just released a security update for version 3.1.

This update covers per the WordPress blog

With as easy as the upgrade process has become would recommend that you upgrade. The upgrade video is below.

If you are uncomfortable with upgrading then you can get me to do it for you.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: upgrade wordpress, wordpress, wordpress 3.1.3, WordPress security

Yesterday I spent time going through and removing the MyBlogLog widget from my blogs. As I had 11 different blogs with the widget it could have been a huge undertaking but it wasn’t.

The reason is that I use the widgets function for my sidebars.

Now I have friends that prefer to hard code in their sidebars. I can understand why too. I have on occasion (rare occasion) had trouble with the display of the content in widgets.

It is rare but that needs to be compared to the time savings and ease of using widgets.

In this example, all it took for me to remove the MyBlogLog code was to log in to the various blogs, click appearance then widgets.

Open up the widget titled MyBlogLog and then delete it.

Compare that to going into the editor for the sidebar and finding the code, removing it and making sure I did not remove anything extra that would mess up my sidebar.

Much easier to just delete the widget.

Add in the fact that I can rearrange the sidebar as I am testing things by just dragging and dropping things and there are a lot of advantages to using the widgets.

One final advantage of using widgets is if your theme has an upgrade you do not have to worry about redoing the sidebar file or ignoring the update (not recommended). Now you could avoid that problem if you used a child theme for your main theme with the sidebar code in it but that is a topic for another day.

• So are you taking advantage of the power of widgets?
• Do you prefer to hardcode everything?

Let me know in the comments below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: editing sidebar, theme editing, wordpress, WordPress widgets

MyBlogLog is closing on the 24th which is Tuesday. Despite being sad to see MyBlogLog go it is important to save aggravation and start removing their widget from your sidebar. It was nice social proof of who was visiting your blog but as they are closing the doors on Tuesday it is a good reminder to take the time and remove it now.

Not sure how it will display but there is a good chance that it will create an error of some type so take the time to remove them today while you are thinking about it.

I am.

No sense having trouble if it can be avoided.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: aggravation, blog, mybloglog, reminder, sidebar, social proof, widget

This question came up in a discussion group I belong to on IM Faceplate.

There will be variations on how to apply these steps depending on the theme you use and whether or not there are widgets built into it. The two latest default themes for WordPress (Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven) both have that capability.

For this example I will use the new Twenty Eleven theme. Your theme may be slightly different but adding the links will be similar.

First you will need to create the pages on your blog for both of those items and get the URL of each page.

Go to your dashboard and click appearance then editor.

Then to the right select Footer (footer.php).

This will open up the file footer.php so that you can edit it.

Before you do anything copy and paste the whole file to a notepad or equivalent so that if you make a mistake you can replace the bad file with the original file.

You want to look at what text is where on your footer so that you can see where you want to add your links. In the case of the Twenty Eleven theme it would be right below where it reads “Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Twenty Eleven.”

The place you want to add these links may vary depending on the theme but once you know approximately where you can use that to find the proper starting point.

That code looks like this

<a href="http://wordpress.org/" rel="generator">Proudly powered by WordPress</a><span class="sep"> | </span><?php printf( __( 'Theme: %1$s.', 'twentyeleven' ), 'Twenty Eleven' ); ?>

After the closing php tag ?> hit return and add a line with the links you wish to use in appropriate a href format such as

<p><a href="affiliateurl">Affiliate TOS</a> - <a href="privacyurl">Privacy Policy </a></p>

With affiliate url and privacy url being the location of those two pages.

Your questions and comments are always welcomed.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: add links to theme, edit footer, edit theme

WordPress announced the first beta version of version 3.2. It is expected to be final and released around the end of June but that is far from being etched into stone as regular WordPress users are well aware.

Three things to be aware of about the newest version.

• WordPress has new minimum system requirements: PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL 5.0.
• Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported.
• The favorites menu has been removed. If you’ve written any plugins that use this menu, it’s time to switch over to an admin bar placement.

A lot of what is new is under the hood and done to speed things up. The big visual differences are…

A new default theme – Twenty Eleven. Not a huge change in looks from Twenty Ten but with better menus. Just as easy to customize too.

A reminder in the dashboard if you are using an older browser. (Personally I am not quite ready to switch to Firefox 4 so I got the reminder below.)

Some minor changes in the admin dashboard but more a tweaking than anything else.

And you can now use the HTML mode in the full page writing mode. (For me this is a non issue as I never use the dashboard for writing my posts and prefer a desktop editor.)

Will see how it holds up as I play with test it out. Have not had any conflicts with my normal plugins. If you are testing it I would love to have your opinions too. Just leave a comment.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: beta version, dashboard, default theme, html mode, internet explorer, wordpress 3.2 beta

The Sunday Goodies are back as I was in a chocolate induced coma over Easter and did not post one. Not really. Was having fun with two young ladies that may have had a bit too much chocolate. They don’t like it as much as Christmas but it is close.

So lets get started on our trip through the blogosphere this week.

Our first stop will be to visit Melanie Kiseel’s blog for a post I really enjoyed titled “Two Ears and One Mouth – Do the Math”. The title says it all .

Our next stop will be to visit with Peggy Baron at her Adventures In Internet Marketing blog for a post titled “Duh! After All… I AM An Internet Marketer“.

The last stop this week but certainly not the least is to visit with Michelle MacPhearson to her blog of the same title. A post you need to read but may not be exactly happy with. (Often what we need is not always what we like;) titled “Sheena Was A Man“.

That is all for this week so let me know which one’s you like and any that you have found that I should not miss by leaving a comment below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogosphere, internet marketer

The latest update from WordPress addresses a security flaw and a few minor bugs that missed the last update.The security flaw fix is primarily for multi author blogs. Here is the notice.

Contributor level users could publish directly.

With as easy as the upgrade process has become would recommend that you upgrade. The upgrade video is below.

If you are uncomfortable with upgrading then you can get me to do it for you.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.

Technorati Tags: upgrade wordpress, wordpress 3.1.2