Okay I like to play with new things. Guess that is why I got hooked on WordPress because there are always new things to play with
Networking can be very beneficial. One of the people that I saw earlier this month in Philadelphia at JV Alert got in touch with me through Facebook. Jason Dee Elvis just created a plugin that I have started playing with called WP Comment Remix.
This does some neat things with the comments on your blog. Now I have not started playing with the tag functions in this yet
But I love what it does for the comments. You can reply directly to specific comments and link them. You can also automatically quote the comment with just the click of a link.
Now Old Bald Guy’s just love things that make life easier and this will help not only me but YOU.
Everyone can reply directly to a commenter and it will be much easier to follow any conversation in the comments for everyone.
It will even show me how many comments I have not replied directly to (and it was a lot) inside your dashboard.
Now to go play with the tagging feature and see how that works.
Great job Jason.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Mike, now that I have written and posted 39 blog articles to my Typepad account I’ve decided that I should have used WordPress to begin with. Do any of your ebooks address the problem of shifting a Typepad blog into a WordPress blog? Or is it better to just start anew with WordPress?
No I have never imported a Type Pad blog.
However, there is a facility in the latest WordPress to import the items from WordPress.
Now I can tell you how to do that but…
You need to create a mt-export.txt from Type Pad and have that on your computer. It is probably listed under the export options but not being a Type Pad user I can’t give you specific steps to do this.
If you get that done then it is relatively easy to import it. If the file is less than 2mb you can upload it directly if it is larger you will need to ftp it.
Importing first – Log in to your dashboard – click manage – click import -click on the Movable Type and Type Pad option. You will now be at a screen that looks like below.
Just click the browse button and find the file on your computer then click the upload and import.
Now if it is a bigger file then you will need to ftp it up to your site. Just upload it to your /wp-content/ folder. Then click the lower button to import it.
Hope this helps.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Hey Mike–I have a two part question about list-building. First, I know you like AWeber as an autoresponder, but are there any free or cheaper services that would suffice for someone who is frugal? And if someone did use an alternate autoresponder, is it possible/reasonable to transfer your list to a different autoresponder down the road after building a decent list?
Yes there is no doubt that Aweber is my favorite.
Feedburner has a service that will allow you to collect emails and have your updates emailed for you like AWeberr does. To the best of my knowledge you can’t send any other emails through it though.
For example when you sign up here I send out a series of blog traffic tips along with the updates from the blog. I also have the capability to send a broadcast when ever I want to. I don’t but I could.
The problem of moving a list from any autoresponder service to another is a different issue.
Any good service will require an imported list to re-confirm. This will cause you to lose the majority of the list usually. Now that is not necessarily a bad thing.
It will allow you to sort out those that are really interested.
Now the final point is about being penny wise pound foolish. My personal feeling is that if you can’t make the cost of AWeber work for you in very short order you need to really look at what you are doing. I have been doing a whole series at Mike Paetzold Recommends on business building and setting up business systems.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
what plugins, specially SEO does one really need and how to configure them
First one of the things to understand is that WordPress is a fluid environment. New plugins come – plugins disappear. WordPress itself goes through a major change every 3 – 6 months as they constantly improve things. So the list today could each change tomorrow because of changes in either WordPress itself or support from a plugins author.
That is one of the reasons that I have updated the 7 Tips To Make Your Blog Search Engine Friendly three times in the last year. And it will probably happen at least once more this year. It will depend on the changes in the platform.
All of those get installed by uploading them to the wp-content/plugins folder then logging in to your dashboard and activating them.
In order I don’t usually add any special settings to the All In One SEO or All in One Bookmarking.
The Google XML Sitemaps you should take the time to build the first one and may have to temporarily change permissions to get the first build done. If you do make sure that you turn the permissions back once you have successfully built the initial site map.
Simple Tags I don’t make changes unless you want to use the in post linking feature.
Smart Update Pinger does not take any changes unless you have never updated your ping list. You can add to your ping list directly through the settings there.
WP tags to Technorati – I do add the check box in the Open links in a new window. (I hate to have people leave and depend on them using the back button .The rest are the defaults.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
You may have seen that I had a guest posting here earlier this week.
This can be a great way to JV with other people in your niche. Alex Syseof writes on the same topics (WordPress) that I do here. We met in Philadelphia a couple weeks back and found that this would be a great way to help each other out.
Never under estimate the power of getting out and meeting people that do what you do. It can start all types of relationships that can be mutually beneficial.
Well today is payback and I have contributed a great article on using free resources to generate traffic . Check it out at
and take the time to see some of the other good information Alex has there. I know I enjoyed his article that I posted here and he does have some good content there.
As always your question and comments are welcomed.
Now this can be answered a few different ways as it is not clear what you are asking.
WordPress automatically creates a feed for your blog. It is found by appending /feed to the URL for your blog. So if you are looking for your own feed that is the easy way with WordPress.
Now you might want to add your feed to feedburner especially if you want to use the feed blitz email service. Go to feedburner and get an account and add your feed there then promote your feedburner feed.
This can be important if you want to sell text links or advertising because most sites base fees off of PR, visitor traffic and RSS subscribers listed at feedburner.
Now the other question that could be being asked is how to import RSS feeds for content. Now if all you are looking for is a news feed or similar content to enhance your sidebar there are plugins that will allow that.
If you are looking to scrape content and use someone’s content to populate your blog my answer is don’t.
Tags in WordPress play a huge role in great many aspects and directly influence your blog performance in such important areas as: Search Engine Optimization, Social Networks relevance and Reader Engagement.
And yet, many fail to realize full potential of WordPress tags and their proper implementation. In this article I would like to address that to some extent…
Tags for Search Engine Optimization
Perhaps the most important thing to understand about tags is – What Are They?Tags are keywords that describe your content, simple as that and yet in that description hides the importance of their proper usage. As keywords they become PART of your url and provide huge boost to Search Engine Relevance.
Using a tag cloud on the sidebar with Do Follow attributes sends search engines to links that include content that includes that tag (keyword) and gives them much needed content. Not only do you get better usage of the archived posts but also boost you rankings.
Interlinking of your posts for SEO using tags is extremely simple. As we all know internal links to relevant content counts by Search Engines not as highly as external links but still counts. Why not take advantage of it? After all – it is FREE SEO Boost!
I personally use “Simple Tags” plugin that uses tags to calculate relevance of the posts to each other and gives you options to display relevant posts under each article. Dynamically calculated SEO relevance that is completely HANDS OFF and on autopilot – Are You Using It?
Social Network Relevance
In this case I’m talking about the Technorati. I know… I know… you might say Technorati looses its power and influence but my personal results indicate that if you do it right – you get some traffic! Key here is getting it right!
First and most important step to this process is obviously to register and claim your blog on Technorati, which I will not cover. But second and yet JUST AS Important is to locate tags within Technorati networks that are most appropriate for YOUR blog. Create a list of those tags and make sure to use at least one of them in EACH post on your blog.
But in order for the Technorati to associate your blog post with one of the tags used – you have to tag that content in a specific format that they recognize. Quite time consuming if you ask me and since I love automating these types of tasks – I installed “Technorati Tags” plugin for WordPress. Just add one line of code to your theme and Voila! Your post is tagged for Technorati re-using your blogs internal tags!
Simple? I would say so and if used consistently it will bring you traffic from Technorati, I guarantee it as long as you picked the right tags and used them!
Reader Engagement
Dynamic and dated format of the blog content is its greatest benefit and at the same time its biggest failure! The older your content becomes – less relevant it becomes in the eyes of the Search Engines but what perhaps is even worse – is in the eyes of The Reader!
You are writing for the people. And while we would like to think that people come and see our blog from it’s front page – my stats shows that over 65% of new visitors land on one of the internal pages! Posts that you might have written in a hurry all of a sudden became the face of your blog and reader finds it irrelevant to his needs – he is looking for a way to click away and never come back!
You have only few options to engage them and hope to retain them by providing MORE relevant and recent content!
Option One: using the “Simple Tags” you present them with a list of tags relevant to the current post articles on your blog. In many cases this will draw them deeper into content.
Option Two: Using Most Recent (latest) articles on your blog’s sidebar. This might help you to present your latest content and engage the reader – provide a clickable link they are looking for and yet, retain them!
Option Three: Tag Cloud. Yep, this one is good not only for Search Engine Optimization but also for reader Engagement. People are getting used to the tags on blogs and realize that Tags are keywords! Clicking on keyword relevant to their search will provide them with access to more content they need! Mission Accomplished.
I hope this quick post helps you see some of the usage of the tools built into your blog and available elsewhere. 2 simple plugins you can install can help you greatly enhance your blog!
Alex Sysoef, is a blogger who shares his knowledge and experience on the pages of his WordPress Web 2.0 Guide blog, wrote this guest post. Visit for even more tips and strategies.
A thank you to Alex for supplying some great tips especially the two plugins that are now part of this blog for testing.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed both here and at Aiex’s blog.
I am hoping you could share high level overview of what is required to “go to the code and remove the comments.” Is it something someone with limited technical experience can do?
Okay I may be old and bald but…
Comments are one of the most powerful features of a blog. It allows for interaction and for others to add fresh content to your site.
Now if you don’t want comments you don’t need to go into the “code”. You can actually turn them off in the dashboard. Go to settings – discussion and you can turn off comments.
Not something I would recommend as I work hard to get interactivity going on my blogs.
I can see times when you would not want comments on a specific post and here again you can turn off comments on any specific post while writing it. Towards the bottom of the page there is a section called comments and pings where you can shut it off for that specific post.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
I’d like to give my Word Press blog a nice look, a home page with photos, each one of my article should be in an independant page; how can I upload videos to my home page.
A few questions in one short comment.
You can change the look of your blog by adding a different theme. Just upload it to the folder wp-content/themes then log in to your dashboard, click design and then click on the theme you want to use.
Not sure why you would want to use a page instaed of a post for your articles. You can set the blog to only display one page at a time inside your dashboard. Click settings, Reading and select to show one post.
Finally, to add video I use a plugin called Viper Video but there are other good ones available. It is more a matter of what you get used to using.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Hey Mike, I installed the Bunny’s Technorati tags plugin, but it doesn’t seem to be working. I have no tag cloud below my posts. When I write a post, I add tags into the “add new tags” field, but I none ever show up on my posts!
Now I have not used Bunny’s Technorati Tags plugin for well over a year and have not even looked at the latest version.
When WordPress went to version 2.5 they put the tagging directly into the script so I don’t personally use a tagging plugin any more.
They also added the ability to create a tag cloud on your sidebar with widgets by just clicking the add link. Whether they show on your actual post will depend on your theme and whether it has a call to display them. Mine don’t.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
