Sometimes you just want to, and really, for branding purposes need to create a supporting blog for a product or membership site. I just had to do just that. A few weeks back my partners and I released a new membership site called Get Referrals Fast.
One of the things we have just added is a training blog to keep our member’s updated and supply content to help them get the most out of our program. It will also serve as a recruiting tool. Providing quality content will help to build credibility.
The key though was to get the blog to look like the membership site. Adapting it could be a real problem using any of the themes I normally use that I know are solid.
Then I remembered a program I had bought and use on various niche sites called Artisteer. I was not sure if it would be easy to use to take a great html template and adapt it to a blog theme.
It turns out it worked like a charm.
There are lots of reasons to create custom themes but paying a designer can end up being quite expensive. So if you are a niche blogger or a website flipper you may find this to be a great savings over paying designers.
The first beta release has been out and reading the development blog it looks like the WordPress 3.0 beta 2 is almost ready. I will start playing with it as soon as I see the release. I have been very pleased with the first beta. All of my plugins so far have been compliant and that is something that has not happened in quite a while.
It will be a bit different and the new default theme has some nice customization features. You will be able to change the backgrounds and much more. It is definitely a much more professional theme.
A far cry and much easier to customize than the venerable blue Kubrick default theme.
Add in custom menus and a lot more features and this will be a big change from the WordPress you are used to. If you are using WordPress for a CMS for your site you will really like these changes.
Add in the new multi user functions and this will be a big jump forward in usability and much easier to adapt for new uses.
So it should be quite a change coming and barring any problems should be quite soon. As we all know that is always subject to change .
WordPress has become the software of choice for the vast majority of self hosted blogs. The reason is simple. It is free and has a huge community that supports it with a large variety of themes and plugins.
It is easy to set up as most hosts have a one click Fantastico install (although I prefer to do it manually but that is a topic for another day) so people can get up and running with very little technical knowledge. You can do it quickly.
All of that being said there are a number of cretins out there that just love to exploit things because they can. Taking a few minutes to protect your blog can save you grief and at the worst allow you to recover if one of those cretins decides to visit.
Here are 5 ways to get started protecting your blog.
Change admin user
Use good passwords
Backup data base
Use a scanning plugin
Keep your blog up to date
The default user is admin when you install a blog direct. This will be changing in version 3.0 where you will be able to use your own user name and password as you currently use in Fantastico. Create another user with administrator privileges and delete the default admin user.
The second step is to use a solid password. When you install a blog direct WordPress creates a solid password using a variety of letters, numbers and symbols. If you use Fantastico you create your own word and may not use one that is secure.
When WordPress creates the solid password they then give you a prompt inside to change it. Only change it to something equally secure. I know it is a pain in the you know what to use a password like Wc7BS7f9 but it will make it hard for someone to guess it.
It is easy to automate backing up your data base. Use the WP Data Base Backup plugin and create a special Gmail account and have the backup emailed to you each day. I keep 30 days of backups so that if a cretin does get me I can get back to a copy of my blog from before the attack. You do need to regualrly check the email account to be sure you are receiving the email. I check mine every Monday.
This along with a copy of the files I have edited downloaded to my computer will allow me to replace the blog easily. This is good even if it is a server problem that causes your blog to disappear or be compromised.
The fourth way to protect your blog is to use a scanning plugin. I use two different ones. The Anti Virus plugin and the WP Exploit Scanner. The anti virus plugin can be configured to send you an email when it finds a potential problem. The anti virus plugin checks your files on the server.
You will get some false positives but it does allow you to find out quickly if your blog has a problem. Each day it scans your blog and emails you if there are problems. It is most likely to happen when you change or upgrade your theme.
The final way to protect your blog is to keep your version of WordPress upgraded. I know that sometimes it seems that there is a new version every other week. It can be a royal pain to do (although the new versions automate a lot of it).
The same applies to your plugins. One of the good things about WordPress is that when they find an exploit they close it quickly. So despite the pain in seeing the frequent updates they are necessary.
All of the plugins mentioned here can be found through the automated install in WordPress.
Take these steps and your chances of being compromised are lessened and you will have what you need if it does happen.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
The question came up about changing text size when I did the first part of the review on the upcoming WordPress 3.0. Here is what was in the comment.
I hope the new upgrade will allow for changing the body text size from a menu. Thanks for the update, looking forward to the upgrade.
You are going to be disappointed as text size is theme dependent. There are themes that have options like the Flexibility theme I use here where in the options panel I can change the size, font and color quite easily.
If your theme created adds the functionality it is quite easy. Fill in the items and click update.
That being said it really is not hard to change these items in any theme. The fonts and sizes are defined in the stylesheet usually called something like style.css.
It is easy to edit from the dashboard if you have set your theme files to be writable. Go to appearance – editor to see all of your theme files. Open style.css.
Note – Before editing any theme files always make a backup of the original files. If you break something you can overwrite your new code with the original.
You will need to look through the stylesheet to find the section but you will find where the size is. This is from the new default theme and is well documented.
In this case the font size is 12 pixels high and you could make it bigger or smaller. One note though, if you edit the font-size you will probably need to edit the line-height also.
As long as you have the original backup the worst that can happen is you need to upload the original to fix anything you break,
There are lots of easy thing like this that you can do to customize the look of your blog and Advanced WordPress is a good video tutorial to help you adjust the look of your blog.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Yesterday one of the ways to get more traffic was blog commenting. One of the commenters asked…
Any advise on how you go about finding the blogs to comment on? I find using Technorati and Google Blog search finds me the really big ones and the absolutely value-less ones, neither of which commenting on would leverage my time.
My personal preference is to find current blogs talking on related topics. Now I am a big advocate of Google Reader but any feed reader will do. I go do a search on my topic at Google News and add the RSS feed from the result to my reader.
This way every day I see the latest information Google has found on my topic. I check the reader and quickly scan through the results and see topics of interest. This allows me to find very new posts on these topics.
As I go through if I find a blog that has consistent articles on my topic it then becomes a blog I want to interact with. I add their RSS feed into the same reader so now I can quickly scan and see all their latest posts and become a regular participant.
It does not take a lot of my time and by keeping track of what is going on in my topic I can become more of an expert and build relationships with other bloggers that talk about that topic.
Now I do use a different Gmail account and reader for each topic I want to follow. If you are in multiple niches this makes it easy to take a few minutes every day to keep current and find blogs to comment on.
Unlike some of the software programs out there that go looking for blogs this way I am interacting with the latest new content on my topic.
For me I go a step further and use a similar method as I teach in Twitter Time Saver that allows me to share the best of the information with my Twittter followers while I am keeping current myself.
You can learn a lot on a new topic following this method while finding quality articles to comment on. This can be a great way to find blog owners that you can ask to guest blog with too. As you are already adding value to their blogs through quality comments they are much more likely to accept guest blog posts from you.
This method allows you to..
Find blogs to comment on that are current
Learn what is going on in your niche
Find potential places to guest blog
And if you grab Twitter Time Saver automate updating your Twitter followers with quality information
In just a few minutes a day. I love when I can set up quick and easy to use systems and accomplish multiple tasks at the same time.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Traffic is the lifeblood of any blog. No traffic and you end up writing to yourself.
Unlike the movie, Field of Dreams, blogging does not follow “If you build it they will come”. You will need to do a bit of promotion to get people to find your Field of Dreams.
Here are 3 ways to get started in letting others know that you have actually built it.
Guest blogging
One of the easiest ways to start building an audience is to find an existing audience and get in front of them. Contact different blog owners in your niche and offer to provide them with quality content. It is a win win because the blog owner gets extra content but you get exposure to your writing.
Those that appreciate the post you added will be very likely to visit your blog for more of your content.
Blog Commenting
Commenting on blogs can be a great way to attract visitors. Adding quality comments and taking part in the conversation can get your name known. You get to add your site when commenting on other blogs and if you are adding value other readers are likely to click through and see what else you have to say.
If the blog you comment on uses Comment Luv then you get a link back to your latest post with each comment. A good title on your post that is listed can increase the number of people clicking through to your site.
Article Submission
One of the great ways to generate extra traffic is to submit articles to the various article directories. As a blogger you are creating quality content regularly.
It is easy to reuse the content and create articles from your existing blog posts. A bit of editing and in a few minutes you can have an article ready for submission. This is a very effective way to leverage what you already do.
Add a signature file that links back to your blog and this can become a significant source of traffic to your blog.
So start using these 3 ways to generate traffic to your blog and take advantage of the efforts you are already putting in to your blog.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
WordPress released the first beta version of the next upgrade to the software. There are a lot of changes coming and I am starting to review some of the changes I have been liking in using the beta version.
You can find out more here. I would not use a beta version on any of your regular blogs but you can set up a test blog like I have done if you like to play and test out the newest versions.
First they have changed the default theme from the long used Kubrick. There are a lot of changes inside to the themes to take advantage of some of the new features. You can see this on my beta blog.
Today I will talk about some of the appearance changes. One of the new changes is that there are new menu options. You can now have drop down menus. I added one on the blog so that if you go to the about link a drop down menu will display below it. This will not work with all themes as it has to be coded properly. Theme authors will need to update their themes to take advantage of this new feature.
I will write more about how to do it when it is actually launched.
They have added the ability to update your themes like you can with your plugins now. When you go to the upgrade page under tools you will now see three categories.
Now the upgrade page will list all of your themes that have an update just like version 2.9.2 has for plugins.
The next item is killer for me. If you ever do custom coding to your theme and have lost it when upgrading there is support for child themes. This allows you to make changes that will not be overwritten when you upgrade the theme. You can find out more about using child themes here.
These are just a couple of the upcoming changes coming in WordPress 3.0 and I will be writing more about the other changes as the release gets nearer. Tentative release is for next month some time but as always will depend upon the testing results.
On another note this has been a rarity as I have yet to have a plugin compatibility issue for the plugins I use and recommend. A good sign as it has been a while since WordPress did a major version change that it has not effected my plugins.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Decided to start a new feature here for Sunday’s. Not sure if it will be an every week thing or not. It may just show up here on occasion.
The point is to ramble on about some of the things that have caught my eye each week and to rant on others. Let me know what you think in the comments.
First the danger with free resources. I opened my reader this morning and their were half a dozen items to a petition about Ning. Evidently Ning has decided that they will no longer be offering a free option. You will need to upgrade and all of their free communities will be disappearing shortly if they do not upgrade.
The point is that I an not ranting about Ning as they have a business model and what they choose to do is up to them. The problem is the danger you face when basing your model on free resources. If you are not paying you can get caught in something like this easily.
Now I feel bad for those that have invested a lot of time in their Ning sites but they never owned it and Ning can change things whenever they want. I love free sites like Ning, Squidoo, Hub Pages and numerous others but you do need to understand that you don’t own it and the rules can change at any time.
Not to say don’t use them but understand the risks if the rules change and that you have no leverage on what the new rules will be. Nuff said.
Now for a rant. I use Google Reader to keep track of numerous topics and it allows me to find lots of new blogs and other types of sites that I might share with people that follow me. This is really powerful for providing quality content to your Twitter followers and you can automate this through some tools as I covered in Twitter Time Saver. You just need to be the editor and sort the wheat from the chaff.
The problem is as I go through and start to sort and get to a blog that might be worth mentioning but it is unreadable. It happened this morning again as it does most days.
I click through and in this case the font size must be about 6 pixels. Now I am old, bald and not with the best eye site especially for reading teeny tiny letters on a screen. Hit the back key immediately.
That could have been the best thing I might read all day but…
If I have to work that hard to read it Fuhgetaboutit. Same thing for those that use those real dark backgrounds with light lettering. Sorry you may think that looks really cool but if I have to strain to read I am gone.
Which brings me to the next item in today’s rambling. I read Seth Godin’s blog regularly and there was a post this week you should read -When a stranger reads your blog.
You really should read that post if you blog but the key point is that you need quality through out because you can’t point people just to your good content and people will make a decision instantly as to the quality of your site.
That’s enough for this week let me know what you think about this new format for an occasional post. WordPress 3.0 is scheduled for next month and I am enjoying some of the new items and will start a series on some of the changes this week.
Have a great day.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
I am a firm believer in using blogs and you will hear a lot of people tell you that you need a blog but is a blog for you? It probably is something you should have (really no probably you should) but not all will benefit. Not because you should no have a blog but because of you. Here are 3 questions to ask before deciding if you should create a blog.
1. Are you looking for immediate results or are you patient enough to grow gradually?
Blogging takes a bit to gather traction. If you think the idea is to set up a blog and add some content and generate leads and sales I have a surprise for you. It takes time and consistent effort to create a worthwhile blog. So if immediate results are your goal and you have no patience blogging is not for you.
2. Can you maintain consistency?
The more often you post the better but consistency is more important. Yes posting every day or even more than once a day will be better. Posting 3 times a day for a week though and then once every three to six months will not.
You need to post regularly whether it is daily or weekly but you need to be consistent. If you can not do this then maybe a blog is not for you.
3. Will you spend the time to track your results and tweak what you are doing?
Successful blogs require you to track what is working. Everything you do will not work every time. If you do not or are not willing to keep track of what works the odds will be against your success.
Now if you can answer yes to these 3 questions you are well on your way to being a successful blogger. Now just go do it. You will be happy you did.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Okay I am pissed and will be stepping up on a soap box for a bit today. Usually I don’t tend to preach but what I have seen over the last few days has me pissed and it is not the spam bloggers that have done it. Well they have and always do piss me off but there is another party that looks innocent but makes a major contribution to it.
It may be YOU.
Before I really start raving let me step back and take a quick breath.
Now there are a variety of spam plugins for WordPress and generally they do a good job. Recently though I am seeing a huge increase in what I will call sneaky blog comment spam.
These are the ones that don’t look like spam initially. Here are some samples from this week end.
The article you have provided here is really cool…and i have gone through all the articles and posts you have posted in your site is pretty good…..great job
I really like this site. I use the same blog platform in 5 blogs of my network.
Thanks for the above post you have been provided here…its really good post….and the site is really great there is lots of stuff in this.
Thank you for your help!
Hello, found this through yahoo. just wanted to let you know that part. but um, thanks for the article. It’s good to know.
No those are not your normal spam and they do appeal to your ego. After all I know what it is like to blog and not get comments or get only the occasional comment.
If you have been blogging for a bit and not getting comments and this lands on your blog aren’t you excited? Sure you are someone is actually reading what I wrote. WRONG when it is this type of comment.
There is nothing specific in these comments about what you wrote. They are not made to take part in the conversation. They are made to generate a backlink.
Quite often someone took the time to actually post this. It may be a 50 cent an hour outsourcer because the spam plugins have become pretty good at catching the automated systems. This has led to people outsourcing generic commenting to generate back links.
Every time you don’t spam a comment like this that is made to your blog you add to the problem. That’s right! I know you want activity but if everyone spams these comments they don’t get links and soon they stop spending money to do this. Now this goes away but it only happens if enough people are not accepting these comments.
So the question is are you going to be part of the problem or part of the solution? Leave your comment below.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
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