Well as April ends we are fast approaching the release of WordPress 2.8 next month. So far will not be the big culture shock that was there for 2.7.

Dashboard has had no major changes so far. A few things have changed. Plugins area has gone back to the old look. All the plugins show in the same area instead of the 3 separate areas of active, recently removed and inactive.

Fortunately so far all my plugins have worked fine so my guess is that there are not any major changes to the way they interact.

The biggest changes have been in the appearance area for themes. You can now activate or preview or delete direct from the themes area. For those that are listed you can also see if there have been upgrades and in some cases upgrade directly from there.

You can now install themes directly from the dashboard like you can plugins too.

You will be able to do a sorted search, upload from a zip file on your computer, check the featured themes, newest and recently updated.

This should definitely be helpful for new bloggers to be able to change things without having to ftp. You can preview the themes before adding them and delete easily any that you are no longer using.

The search feature looks interesting and I may write more about it as I play around a bit more. You can sort with quite a few criteria.

Just a reminder all of these pictures are from the beta version and some of these features may change before the final release comes out. I am sure there are probably more things that have changed but these are what I have noticed so far in playing around (the truth but I really should call it testing extensively )

All in all though looks like this will be an easy upgrade and the features will make things easier especially for changing themes.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: wordpress, WordPress 2.8, WordPress beta, wordpress themes

Todays question:

Any suggestions on the number of posts that one should show? Default is 10, but I have seen many blogs that only show 1 post.

This is actually an unanswerable question because it will be different depending on how you use your blog.

First understand that the visitors coming from the search engines are only going to see the post that it indexed. Google and the others will be linking to the exact post not your home page.

So the next questions are how are you advertising your home page and what do you want to have happen?

Here is an example – Each week on another blog I do a recap of the week and send people to the home page of the blog via an email blast to my lists.

I want people to keep reading if they are interested right down the blog because they may find something of interest in the second or third post. I’ll also do an email blast if I add an article hoping they will keep reading and take advantage of the offer that is in the second or third post down.

There may be others but the only time I can see where a single post on the home page might be worthwhile is where you are using a blog as a CMS (Content Management System) instead of a static web site to take advantage of the RSS feed and interlinking that is built into a blog and the ability to interact with your reader through comments.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blog home page, number of posts, WordPress home page

Pages, posts and home page often create confusion with WordPress users. Hopefully this will clarify the differences and the options.

What each does

Pages are usually used for things like an about page, contact form or other specific static type content. On quite a few themes (like this one) each page creates a menu item and often have buttons in the header.

On this blog I use them for an about page, two audios from teleseminars and a survey form for people to always have access to these easily.

You can also list the pages in the sidebar if your theme does not have buttons or a menu for pages built into the theme.

Posts will show on your main page in date order with newest posts first with the default settings.

You can edit the home page and the number of posts that show. The default setting is 10 posts. You can also set a specific post or page to show as the home page. You need to go to settings – reading.

If you want a custom page for your home page then click the radio button for a static page and use the drop down for either the page or post that you want to show permanently.

You can change the number of posts right below there. In both cases you need to update once you have made your selections.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: WordPress home page options, WordPress pages, WordPress posts

Exercise your writing muscles [ 3:11 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Just came back from my first trip to the golf course. Went ot the driving range and hit a large bucket of balls. I now hurt – badly.

See it has been a long snowy winter here in Pennsylvania and the weather has finally changed. Usually enjoy the exercise I get from going out to golf but the first couple of times each season I find pains in places I didn’t know I have.

Another week or two and it will feel good to get the exercise as my muscles that have not been used over the course of the winter get back in shape. The muscle memory will start to come back and I will hit the ball better. (Notice the use of words better not good).

This is something that I knew would happen and I know that I need to go through it to be able to enjoy my time out on the golf course.

Writing causes the same thing. When I first started wring a blog 5 years ago it was often painful to try and come up with a topic. Create a post and get it formatted the way I wanted and finally hit the publish button.

Not quite the same pain as I am feeling in my muscles but a pain none the less. Part of that was the striving for perfection we discussed yesterday.

If you find writing painful and we all do at times you need to just do it. If you are in the perfection mode go create a blogger blog and make it private. Go post every day for 20 minutes about anything there for 2 weeks.

No one will see it and you can delete it when you are done but if you actually exercise your writing muscles they will get stronger. Will it be painful? Probably will but it won’t take long for you to get in “writing shape”.

Take the time to exercise your writing muscles and you will be surprised how much easier it will become to write your blog regularly.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blog post, blogger, writing, writing blog post

Perfection Not Necessary - Just Do It [ 3:07 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Last night I got a call from my buddy Erik Stafford. Erik was catching up with me as we haven’t caught up in a while with me missing JV Alert in Orlando. After talking for a bit he asked if I would like to discuss blogging with his coaching clients.

Now I know the thought of me talking about blogging is not something I do very often, NOT!!!! Only every chance I get so I went and we had a good discussion. Erik had sent me a few links to some of the student’s blogs and I went through nit picking what I could see that could be improved.

Other than a few things that are mentioned here regularly like tagging the biggest problem was monetization or rather the lack there of any monetization and a lack of a strong list building effort. Now these are marketing blogs and were created to generate an income.

The discussion on this was interesting because the big opinion was that they weren’t ready for it because their blog wasn’t perfect. In a few cases they were not sure exactly what the best monetization was going to be.

See your blog does not have to be perfect and it will change over time but the only way to improve it is to do it. Start asking for emails as soon as you are producing content and getting your first visitors. Add your monetization early so you can improve it.

Just like WordPress itself all things on line are fluid. You try things and some work and some don’t. Those that do you try to leverage, those that don’t you try something else.

Waiting for perfection is one of the biggest killers I see in people trying to create a profitable blog. Things will change and it will never be perfect. This blog has had more different plugins and theme changes as I try different things. Some work, some don’t, I keep going.

At the end of the day the key is to follow Nike and Just Do It.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Technorati Tags: blogs, Erik Stafford, monetization. list building, wordpress

Tags and Simple Tag Information [ 2:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday’s post caused a few questions about tagging and Simple Tags.

The first had to do with setting the no follow. One of the items in the general settings is to make tag links use the no follow attribute. It is easy to do you just check the box and click update under the general setting

The other setting I like to change from the default is in the related posts section. I set it to show 5 related posts under each post on both the blog and feed. Because most visitors arrive at your site on a specific post this gives them related topics you have covered on other posts. It also adds related interior linking of your posts.

The other question was about the tag clouds. Having a tag cloud displayed allows the spiders to find and index your various tag pages which I have found gets the blog indexed deeper and often creates a double listing for certain keywords in Google. Both the appropriate post and the tag page get listed.

Any extra listings I can get in my buddy Google are a good thing as I see it and why I always use a tag cloud. Can’t prove it but do know that before I started using the tag cloud I was not seeing the double listings and within a week of adding the tag cloud it became very common.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: search ranking, simple tags, tag cloud, tags

Title Tags and All In One SEO plugin [ 2:02 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Todays question:

You mention “I always want to add tags to my posts, I may want a custom title tag and description ” I just recently read a post saing that SEO All In One Plugin is not as usefull as it once was. Is that your opinion as well?

When you mention Title tag and description do you mean in the WordPress Custom field? Do you use the Excerp field and is it usefull.

I still like and use the All In One SEO plugin. I have seen people recommending Headspace2 as an alternative but it won’t work with this theme so I have not used it. It does look promising and may test it on a blog without the flexibility theme but at this point haven’t used it so impossible to say.

The custom title tag is added in the tile area under All In One SEO Pack when you are editing the post.

It is helpful but not necessary to add a custom description and keywords to this section also but the title is the really important item for how your post will rank.

The tags and having a tag cloud that will get indexed are also important but do use a plugin like Simple Tags and make them no follow through the settings.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: All-in-one-seo, description, keywords, simple tags, tags, title tags

Here is a question from the Blog Talk Radio show that needs a bit more clarification.

How would one create a WP blogsite that is real estate oriented with articles, links, listings (descriptions of property for sale with 6 pictures)? Is there a WP theme that is particularly well adapted to do a real estate blog? Creating articles and links I understand but creating listings with pictures has me stumped at the moment.

With all the thousands of themes available I would not have a recommendation that way. Like any other theme find one that is clean, neat and easy to read. Personally I would stay with white background and black text of a decent size for any business related blog.

If the blog is not easy to read for all then people won’t bother. This eliminates all those neat and cool themes like the black backgrounds and neon blue lettering. Personally I can’t read those.

To create the listings I would use a free tool called Blog Desk. I use it for all my posts including this one. It will allow you to add a picture to your post, resize and set the position without any html.

I took a quick screen capture of the image editor section and input into the side of this post so that the text would wrap around it.

I never opened photo shop or anything else to re-size it and could change the size of the picture from the original by just clicking the radio button for the size I want.

Blog Desk will allow me to upload the photos and the posts directly from my desktop.

Now even though Blog Desk will allow you to publish your post directly from your desk top I never use that feature personally.

I always want to add tags to my posts, I may want a custom title tag and description or add a podcast or video through Seesmic before I submit my post.

Other than not letting it publish direct it is a great tool and allows me to create and edit my posts on my desktop and have them ready to upload when I am ready.

You can find a tutorial on using Blog Desk and tweaking various portions of your blog to make it more yours in the Advanced WordPress Tutorials.

Hope this helps answer the question more fully and always love to get questions from my readers. Leave yours in the comments.

Technorati Tags: BlogDesk, create posts with picture, find themes, wordpress

Last week I discussed the Optin Pop plugin that had just launched that I had been beta testing and went through some of the ways I am using the rotator within the paid version. In the comments the following came up.

Looks like a pretty powerful program Mike – have you used it long enough to share your results with it?

It has been running for a bit over a month on one of my blogs. Now a quick review of how it is being used and that blog.

The blog averages a bit more than a hundred visitors a day on average.

I set up the rotator that it includes 10 different offers that run concurrently to visitors. The first time as they exit they get the same offer that is on the sidebar and displayed by the What Would Seth Godin plugin for the update list and a copy of a free report.

Over the last 2 weeks 27% of the signups for that update came off the exit pop, 22% off of the sidebar and the balance off of the squeeze added at the top of the post for new visitors with the WWSGD plugin.

So the first pop added about 33% more subscribers than I was getting without it.

The next 9 times someone comes through they see one of two squeeze pages for two different e-courses and the one has received 8 subscribers this week and the other 4 subscribers (the former shows first so more have seen it.)

The other 7 pages are thank you page ads for various free to join sites that have an OTO (Butterfly type sites). Those are averaging about 5 signups combined per day over the past week.

Some have done better than others but that is probably because of the order they are shown in. I can’t tell if or how many of those people that clicked through joined and bought anything as I can only track through to click because the sites are not mine.

Overall the process is adding additional people in each of the programs regularly direct from those pages and I know from experience that most of those programs will average $1 or better per referral. Sometimes quite a bit more but realistically could place the value at $35 extra a week on those.

So overall my best guestimate would be that I am getting about $5 per 100 visitors in commissions and 4 subscribers to one list or another.

As all of this is extra, the addition of the Optin Pop with the various programs has been a worthwhile use of catching people that were leaving anyhow.

Check out Optin Pop plugin and check out the upgraded version.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: list building, optin pop plugin, squeeze page, wordpress plugins

Here is the replay from last nights Q and A show.

Special thanks to Steve Roye of Real First Steps for his help co-hosting.

Hope you enjoy and leave any additional questions you may have in the comments.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blogging, wordpress, WordPress Q and A