If you are using Tweet My Blog make sure to download the new version. It solves the problem with editing your blog and having multiple tweets.
They also improved the appearance when Twitter goes down so you get a better dsiplay in your side bar.
If you are using Twitter and WordPress you need to check out Tweet My Blog.
Your comments and questions are always welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Before I start my rant let me say that I appreciate the effort put in by numerous developers creating plugins. They add a functionality that greatly enhances the usability and power of WordPress as a blogging platform. I will apologize in advance to those that continue to improve and support their work this is not aimed at those.
There is a problem though with the current structure of how people look at plugins especially in the non marketing world.
Often developers create a great plugin, get a lot of people using it and then just get plain bored with continuing the development of it.
Not sure why that happens but it does happen way too often. My guess is because it is done gratis and they don’t have a way to monetize it.
Yes, they may put up a donation button but that does not necessarily generate sufficient incentive to continue the development as WordPress evolves.
At the same time those that do create a plugin and add a monetization model are skewered for asking for an email or having an offer in their marketing process to give away a free plugin. Yes, they continue to market to those people but if they are ethical (and most are) you can unsubscribe easily. (Of course you then miss the updates.)
These developers despite being seen as the lowest in the world of plugin creators have a vested interest in keeping their plugin fully supported because it helps to fill their marketing funnel.
These plugins are changed and supported well unlike some of the ones that just depend on donations and get bored.
Truthfully I would rather deal with the marketer that has a vested interest in supporting and improving their plugin than with the person that creates a great plugin and has no reason other than kindness or ego to support it.
After seeing a new plugin with a marketing funnel be skewered for their marketing (not for the quality of the plugin) like Tweet My Blog has been at this post where it only focuses on the fact that it only works on WordPress (note it is WordPress plugin – duh), has a way to make money and does not look at the differences between what is on the market and what is not.
Plugins rarely do something that is unique but make doing it easier. If you can code and want to tweak your theme and the code you can (if you know how) or you can upload a plugin and click activate and add options if necessary. Something non tech heads can handle.
Yes I can add my Twitter feed to my sidebar with the proper code, I can use other services to post my RSS feed to Twitter (at a delayed time frame as they only check once an hour) and avoid the marketing.
Now my question to you is the fact that a developer adds a marketing funnel to their delivery of a free plugin enough to skewer them?
Or would you rather deal with someone that does it out of the goodness of their heart, ego or some other factor and then has no reason to support it in the future?
I know what my answer is but would love to hear yours.
Mike Paetzold
Last nights call is available for replay.
You can listen to it at -
Hope you enjoy it and please leave your comments.
Mike Paetzold
With everything that has been going on it has been a while since I have done an open call so…
EVENT: WordPress Q and A
DATE & TIME: Tuesday, July 22nd at 8:00pm Eastern
FORMAT: Simulcast! (Attend via Phone or Webcast — it’s your choice)
TO ATTEND THIS EVENT, CLICK THIS LINK NOW…
http://instantTeleseminar.com/?eventid=3664803
So you can enter your questions now by clicking the link and then come back tomorrow night and I will be answering all of them.
Hope to see you there.
Oh! Have you grabbed your TweetMyBlog plugin and added the power of Twitter to your blog?
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Did a video to show a few of the new features that I like in the latest version of WordPress and give you some ideas on how powerful the Press It return can be for your blogging.
Let me know what you think of the latest version by leaving a comment below.
Mike Paetzold
You always here the buzz about Web 2.0 and for a reason – it works. Two of the things that work well together are Twitter and WordPress blogs.
I have been usnig the two together for a while. It can be time consuming as Twitter is like a mini blog but it is ever so effectiove at getting more readership to your blogs that it is worth the effort.
Today that effort just got cut appreciably. Tweet My Blog is a free WordPress plugin from Soren Jordansen and John Merrick. It will leverage your blog feed and Twitter automatically.
Now I have been using this for a few days and it ROCKS!
My Twitter followers are increasing at 3 times the rate they normally do.
I was using a different service to post from my feeds and because this is on the blog itself it posts my content much quicker than the other did.
Set it and forget it. Yep anything that can make me more active on Twitter without doing anything extra is huge. This is a must for any serious blogger and allows you to leverage your blog and Twitter to the advantage of both.
By the way the plugin is totally free but you should take a close look at
the special offer they have in store for you when join. I instantly grabbed my own copy, and I know it will skyrocket my marketing power when using Twitter and Wordpress.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Today’s question is a consistent one each time WordPress upgrades to a new version.
I am always a bit hesitant to Upgrade. What does one really have to do to Upgrade?
Is it easy or a Monster?
First you do need to understand a few things.
If you are comfortable with that it is a piece of cake. If you are not it can be a monster.
WordPress has a nice 3 step process that will easily walk you through it or I have a video below. It is from earlier versions but the upgrade process has not changed.
Tomorrow I hope to have some more info on the new version and some of the new features not previously covered.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
Mike Paetzold
Well while I was away yesterday WordPress released the new version 2.6.
As soon as I added it I saw something that I love.
It will now let you know if your plugins have updates. A great new feature.
Now to the important thing. All the plugins I recommend work and the upgrade was painless. I will be adding it to each of my blogs as soon as possible.
There were 4 other big changes and a lot of little ones.
The two that really caught my eye though in just a quick glance are the plugin upgrade notice and the theme preview. I will have to play with the others before I can comment on them. The rest of the changes are listed below and are quoted from the WordPress blog.
Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
Bulk management of plugins.
A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
Plugin update notification bubble.
Customizable default avatars.
You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.
Will be having fun testing some of the new features and will be reporting back in the future.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
You need to take advantage of the many free services to help get your blog started.
Caveat: The center of your hub should always a WordPress blog or a squeeze page on a domain that you control and own in my opinion.
Now that we have gotten rid of the caveat, lets look at some of the free tools that are available.
For the purposes of illustration we will pick a topic and use a bad word in my vocabulary ass/u/me that you have done the research and found to have profit potential about Turtles. (Turtles are my marketing topic of the day today bare with me here.)
You buy a domain, create your blog and start putting content there to draw traffic. You are posting at least daily to get started and more often if Turtles is a very competitive keyword. (Yes, I know I just picked that and have no idea if it is a competitive word. Boo hiss on me.)
Now go to Squidoo and create a lens on your topic. Add your RSS feed to your blog as one of the modules and make sure that use at least 20 tags. (You did keyword research before you entered this market didn’t you?) Add a short text article or two. Grab a You Tube module, a Flcikr module on your topic and add a guest book..
Go to Hub Pages, create a new Hub on your topic and add your RSS feed again. Make sure that you add tags here too. (For both of these you can do a quick re-write of your content to meet the content requirements . Do not use the same content on both sites or what you posted on the blog.)
Create a Blogger blog using your main keyword in the title you sign up with and create a short post about the great article you just found that links to a specific post on your blog with the keyword that post was focused on as your anchor text.
At WordPress.com and MSN Live you will be doing the same basic tasks except you will link to a different post on your blog with the corresponding anchor text for that keyword phrase.
Once a week you will want to add something to each of these sites. When you visit Squidoo you can add a module or just add a few more keywords and re-publish the lens plus the rss feed from your blog will be constantly updated.
Hub Pages will follow the same pattern as Squidoo. I usually add a new content module every other week.
Each week you will link to a new post from each of the free blog services with the anchor text for that post.
This allows you to take 5 minutes extra a day 5 days a week and keep a constant stream of links coming into your interior pages on a regular basis.
Want to take it up another level? Add a commenting and bookmarking strategy along with this you can easily increase the traffic and ranking to your blog quite quickly with very little extra effort. Add in article marketing and you may have to pay more for your server 
There are many more of these types of sites that you can use to get even more links. If you have a favorite share with us and leave a comment below.
Mike Paetzold
Andrew Hansen, the author of Niche Marketing On Crack has just launched a new service for niche bloggers. It is the most inclusive system I have seen for creating and manging niche blogs. Below is a quick video I did about it.
You can get it at Firepow.
Launches at noon today
Mike Paetzold
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Disclaimer: Some of the links mentioned within this post or posts it may lead to are my affiliate links and in such case I will get compensated for recommending those products. However, I will never recommend something that I don’t personally believe in and I welcome your questions and feedback.
