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Not an April Fools Day joke. Almost every month I do a Q and A and figured I would start it early this month.
So tomorrow night at 9pm edt I’ll answer your questions.
Full details at
You can stop there now and leave your questions then come back tomorrow and either call in or listen on the web.
Hope to see you there.
Mike Paetzold
Today’s question:
I enjoyed your squidoo podcast with Bob. How to do this?
That podcast was a teleseminar that Bob and I did. The service I was using then is free and they record it for you . You can get an account at The Basemenet Ventures.
I then downloaded the mp3 from them of the recording and uploaded it to my blog. I use the Pod Press plugin to create the buttons and to be able to allow it to play on the site or be downloaded. Created the page and added the media file and now it is available.
If you are going to do a podcast like I do most days here you don’t need to use a conference line. If you have a microphone and an audio editor you can record your own mp3. I use a free program from SourceForge called Audacity.
To make the podcast today here is what I do. Open Audacity and import my intro music. Push the record button and start talking. If I make a mistake I can just edit it with Audactity and once I am happy with the recording I just export it as an mp3. Then I will ftp the file up to the upload folder of this blog. Write my post and then click the add media file button and add the info for this podcast and then publish the post.
So easy even this Old Bald Guy can do it.
Also, a quick note – the next free WordPress Q and A Call will be April 1st. You can click on the link and leave your questions now then stop back on Tuesday for the answers.
As always your comments and quesstions are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Todays question:
I have a Minneapolis real estate website a. I also have about 50 interior pages written for 50 different communities surrounding Minneapolis. . “minneapolis real estate” is ranking very well in Google. How do I get these other cities to rank??
This is a bit different than most questions. You have a website and a blog. The reason you rank for the term Minnesota Real Estate is that all of your content has those terms. Even your interior pages have those terms and link back to your main page.
Here are 2 ways that you can help get ranked for the town pages.
You are adding constant content to the blog and it would be easy to link back to the page for the town for each post.
Use a plugin like All in One SEO to use custom title tags for each post. Example – There is a post titled “Happiness is a South Minneapolis Home” and it could have a different title tag of just the town. Done over time this would start to push your pages up for each town with very little extra work.
As always comments and questions welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Today’s question:
Plugins, RSS feeds, autoresponders, how do I get this stuff through C panel on a Mac.
Now all of this will be second hand. I have never used a Mac but I am considering one for my next computer because you can now run there os and xp on the new ones.
I did some checking with some friends that do use Macs though. The big problem is that Macs sometimes add some files when using FTP. The best recommendation I have gotten was to use Filezilla for Mac as your FTP client.
This seems to solve most of the problems with the excess code.
To add your plugins the FTP will be the same – place them in wp-content/plugins/ and then turn them on through the dashboard. I would not use Cpanel to upload these whether or not I was using a Mac or a PC.
Then you can use the dashboard to adjust your blog to your liking.
This is one question though where I am going to solicit the support of my readers if you use a Mac and have any other tips your input would be greatly appreciated.
As always questions and comments are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Today’s question is:
Under options, permalinks, I set the field to “custom” and added the /%category%/%postname%/ to make it SEO friendly.
I got this message below. I don’t have a clue what to do with this instruction or what it means.
If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all. (I can see the code I need to click). But now what?
The .htaccess file sets the rules that will allow you to use custom permalinks. If you have copied the code you just need to access the .htaccess file and add that information.
Log in to your cpanel – click file manager – and locate your .htaccess file (probably in public_html) if your blog is in the root of the site. Click to edit and add that code into the file and save it.
Now if your .htaccess file shows when you ftp in to the server (it doesn’t always depends on server settings) the easiest thing is to just cham=nge the permissions (chmod) to 666 and redo the permalink change in your dashboard.
The fact that it is not writable was what kept the blog from doing it originally.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed. Leave a comment or use our survey form to ask your question.
Mike Paetzold
Just saw this You Tube video that I thought shows the change in consumer mentality that the web has brought about.
Having conversations is important and a blog allows you to do just that.
Enjoy.
Now let me know your opinion and we can have a conversation here.
Mike Paetzold
Todays Question is:
Do I need to do keyword research to have a profitable blog?
Keyword research is probably the most overlooked aspect most new people trying to create a profitable blog skip.
Knowing which terms are searched for and what type of competition can be the key to get targeted traffic. This is really key if you are using your blog to presell products.
A properly set up blog can easily rank in the top 10 or 20 on the major search engines for long tail keywords and targeting them can help you get traffic that is in buying mode.
Someone searching for “chair” is probably just starting there research online. Besides for that term you are competing against 160,000,000 pages and your odds of making the first page or two are slim.
Someone that has narrowed their search to looking for “black leather executive chairs” is probably much closer to being a buyer and…
Your only competing against 180,000 pages. You stand a real good chance to rank well for this term.
Generating a list of keywords like this on your topic will do a few things.
Now there is more to it in that you need to check and see what the search volume is, profitability etc. but doing the research first and targeting words that are buying type words will make your blog much more profitable.
Your comments and questions are welcomed. Leave your comments or fill out our survey form to ask your question.
Mike Paetzold
Sorry no podcast on this one my voice is too hoarse.
Here is today’s question from the Q and A call.
My question is can you have more than one blog on one domain? Like www.yourdomain.com/blog/ and then have another blog at www.yourdomain.com/wdbog/ ? Is this possible or should someone get different domains for each blog?
This is a good question which is why I wanted to answer it here.
The answer is yes you can have more than one blog on a domain. Now for the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. One other thing I would recommend that you use sub domains instead of a folder if you are going to use multiple blogs. This means your url would be http://blog.mydomain.com even though the files would go in a folder on the server the same way. The search engines treat the sub domains as a different site and tend to index the separately.
Now let’s look at why you would want multiple blogs on the same domain and when it probably isn’t a good idea.
If your main domain is on a broad topic like dogs and you wanted separate blogs on
That would work because you would be getting keyword rich domains like http://greyhounds.mydogsite.com that are related.
Now if you had a golf domain and wanted other blogs on topics like
This wouldn’t work.
As always you can let me know what you think good or bad and ask your questions by commenting or using the survey form.
Mike Paetzold
Tags: blog questions, blogging, Mike Paetzold, multiple blogs, subdomains, wordpress questions
The replay is available of last night’s call.
There were some great questions asked and hopefully the answers are good too.
Hope you enjoy.
Mike Paetzold
Just a quick note that I will be doing a Q and A call this evening at 9pm edt.
You can listen online or call in your choice.
Details are below:
EVENT: Blog questions and answers
DATE & TIME: Wednesday, March 12th at 9:00pm Eastern
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it’s your choice)
TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, CLICK THIS LINK NOW…
http://instantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=2210259
You can find the time in your area at
Hope to see you there.
Mike Paetzold
Tags: blog, blog questions, blogging, Mike Paetzold, wordpress, wordpress questions
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