Doubt there are many people that this will apply to many but WordPress quite a while back made a commitment to keep the 2.0 as a legacy version and were going to support it until 2010.
They are going to be dropping this support for a few reasons but the biggest is the very few people that have continued to use the legacy series. You can read the whole story on the WordPress blog.
Yes the next BTR WordPress Q and A Call will be next Wednesday at 7pm.
As I hinted last month we will be doing something a bit different this coming month. Because of the surveys that biggest topic was creating content.
Steve and I will be addressing that for a half hour on that call and then getting into the usual Q and A.
More details and a download will be available before the show but you can start adding any questions here for the Q and A portion in the comments below.
In the mean time mark your calendar for Wednesday, August 5th at 7 pm.
The top major topic in the survey was content. I have long been a proponent of re-purposing content and do it quite frequently. You can do it by creating podcast and videos of your content.
Here is a great tool I found that can help you to easily take past content and change it up easily. This will also work for personalizing private label rights articles you have too.
Check it out at Real Content Secrets. You can use this tool to swap out words, combine multiple articles into a new article.
There are a variety of tools linked from there including links to the Google External Keyword Tool, various article directories. If you have a lot of private label rights articles on your topic this can be a great tool.
Try it out and play with this and I am sure that Real Content Secrets is something you will bookmark and return to regularly.
After you have played with this stop back and let me know what you think.
First a thank you to those that have voted in the various surveys. Not surprisingly content creation was the #1 item that people were looking for more information on.
Here are the results from the initial survey.
Setting up my blog 25.00%
Creating content 37.16%
Tweaking my blog 29.73%
Other 8.11%
Definitely will be talking more about content creation in the future. That being said you can see that it was not a total runaway. There was a sizable number of votes for both tweaking and setting up your blog.
Thanks again for your input and if you have not voted in the second set of surveys I would appreciate it if you would scroll down and let me know.
First a great big thank you to all that have voted or commented on the previous poll. That has been interesting to see the results. Now I am splitting each of the three topics into sub topics and would appreciate you picking the item in each section that would most help you.
Just as an FYI Content Creation is the current leader but tweaking your blog is a close second.
Here is the first subset on content creation. Pick the one topic that would most help you.
Tweaking your blog is next pick the one that will help you most.
Finally the set up of your blog.
Thanks again for your participation and comments are welcomed.
One of the things I like to do is to ask for your input. Please take a minute to let me know which item is your most pressing. Feel free to leave a comment to clarify your question.
Woke up this morning and one of the first things I found was a notice of an update from WordPress to version 2.8.2. This one is to fix a vulnerability. From the WordPress blog
WordPress 2.8.2 fixes an XSS vulnerability. Comment author URLs were not fully sanitized when displayed in the admin. This could be exploited to redirect you away from the admin to another site.
Take the time to update your blogs asap. As always when they update I have put the video on doing it below.
Make sure to back up your data base and any theme updates before you hit the upgrade button.
I recently did a post on my PLR blog about Double Your PLR Sales Easily. It was talking about capturing subscribers to be able to continue the conversation. I got this comment there.
The trouble is getting an opt-in box to look great on wordpress. Most, myself included, just stop trying to figure it out. If it isn’t done right, it isn’t worth doing.
Two things that bother me about that statement.
First even a poorly done opt in box will get some people to opt in.
Two it is not hard to add a good looking opt in to any blog. You even have multiple ways of doing it.
The most important part of your subscription box is the offer. If your ethical bribe is something of value people will want it even if it is not the prettiest item on the blog. Getting the offer right is the most important part of the puzzle. That could take a whole series of posts to cover all the options there and is more of a marketing topic than a WordPress topic.
Adding your actual form is relatively easy to do on any blog. If you are using Aweber (my recommended autoresponder service) you can create a variety of opt in forms with any number of options. It can be a slide in, an exit pop or even a light box form. I won’t go into the details as Aweber has great tutorials to show you how to create it.
To add it to your blog you just need to add the one line of java script that they give you to your theme template. It has to go between the body tags.
The easiest way is to add it to the header file for your blog right after the body tag. You can get there in your dashboard by clicking appearance – editor – header.
Just add the java script snippet right after the body tag. Save the change and you now have whatever form you created active on your blog.
Note – Your theme needs to be writable to be able to edit this from your dashboard. If it is not you will need to chmod the theme files to 666.
Adding it to your sidebar can be a bit harder depending on the width of your sidebar. Often you need to edit the actual html code if your sidebar is narrow. The java script snippet can cause spacing problems if the form you created is larger than the sidebar.
In the html there are two items that need to be edited if you have a thin side bar. You can edit the td tags between name and text box and email and the text box. Replace the <td></td> with a <br> tag. This will put the name over the text box instead of along side of it as it is in the form to the right.
You may also need to change the size of the text box if it is too large. The default is 20 and making it a smaller number (see the size=”20″ in the form above).
Once you have edited that just copy and paste it into a text widget in your side bar. To do that click appearance – widget and drag a text box to where you want your form. Paste in your edited code and save it. Check your blog and make an edit if you need to make it smaller.
Add in the numerous plugins that are available to add an opt in form to your blog in a variety of ways and it is relatively easy to add the form in numerous ways.
So there you have it now make sure you are getting subscribers from your WordPress blog. I do.
Yesterday I went off on a rant. It was set off because of spam blog comments. The funny thing is this happens only on various test blogs that I have up for a wide variety of testing purposes, video creation, etc.
Fortunately I rarely get this problem on my main blogs because of the plugins I use. For me I use WP-Spam Free and that gets rid of the automated spam quite well. Combining that with Askimet (comes with the WordPress install) keeps my main blogs clean.
The numbers of spam comments that they catch on this blog is quite numerous. Here is a picture from my dashboard.
Now this blog gets a lot of comments and the amount of comment spam would make me scream if not for this plugin combination. The point of yesterday’s post was to make people aware of the futility of using these spam techniques.
Take part in the conversation and you can create back links and generate visitors that resonate with you. (The kind that are already pre-disposed to your content.) Use the crap and you just piss people off.
Blog commenting can be a great way to build back links and generate traffic to your site. I comment on other blogs every day. Unfortunately too many people try to automate this and don’t participate.
They are SPAMMERS. Have to love idiots like this.
Now I have numerous test blogs for a wide variety of purposes. Just got this comment on one of them today and it set off this rant.
I read your article with great pleasure. Thank you.
Now I would spam that comment if it was on any blog but the kicker is the post it was left on.
Sure glad this idiot enjoyed my article. The worst part is that I normally ignore these notices and just let them sit unapproved in the queue. This particular blog was put up just for the purpose of doing some video instructions for a project a while ago. That is the only post on the blog.
The idiots have left others. Here is a selection of the non porn/Viagra/ring tone comments left there. Can you see a pattern?
Hi, nice posts there thank’s for the intriguing information
Hi, Congratulations to the site owner for this marvelous work you’ve done. It has lots of useful and interesting data.
Thanks for the useful info. It’s so interesting
In my opinion you are not right. I suggest it to discuss. Write to me in PM, we will communicate.
Listen there are ways to use automation to find blogs to comment on and I use them but you need to actually be involved in the process and add to the conversation.
The bad part is that the people that actually read this will be those that don’t need to. Maybe one of you is thinking of using some of this crap and this will make you think twice.
If not, at least I feel a lot better ranting it out.
thank’s for the intriguing information
