Sitting here a bit surprised today but it is not the first time.
Yesterday I wrote about what I thought would be a hot topic and it fizzed out. Laid out a plan to help you eliminate some of the flaws created when you use Fantastico. Then I offered to create a free pdf to walk people through the steps.
The key was they had to ask for it by leaving comments and retweeting the post. So this morning I look and there are a few retweets, about normal for this blog but not one comment.
Now with the number of people who read this blog I would estimate (a wag – wild ass guess) that well over half of them have installed their blog with Fantastico.
Anyone that has would need the report to improve their security but obviously they don’t want it enough to leave a comment. Because they don’t want it they would not use it even if you give it to them.
Now when I wrote the post Sunday as my rant about people recommending Fantastico despite the security risks I received two emails from people asking if I had a service to do the fix for them and if so how much?
So obviously people are willing to pay to have their blog secured but not interested in doing it themselves.
Either that or people see no value in a step by step report.
The good thing is that I tested the waters before taking an hour or two and putting together the report. I am now able to use that time for other purposes that will be more valuable to my readers.
After my rant on Sunday there have been some questions on how to overcome the problem with Fantastico. You need to do two things to eliminate this flaw.
Change the tag on the database
Change your config file to use the new tag
Now this can seem a bit complicated but here is a step by step way to accomplish this.
Log in to your cpanel
Open up phpMy Admin
Export your current data base to your computer
Edit the data base to change the extension wp_ to a new one of your choice
Import the data base with the new tags
Edit the config.php to change the wp_ tag to the new one you created and upload it to overwrite your current config.php file
Make sure your blog is still working properly
Remove all of the tables from your data base that have the wp_ tag.
Now if there is enough interest I will put together a pdf with screen captures and a more detailed plan. It will depend on the number of comments and tweets that will decide.
Let me know if this is of interest to you by leaving a comment.
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 love Twitter and it has been and continues to be a great way to interact with others and build relationships. Lately though someone must be teaching a technique that really pisses me off.
It used to be that the problem would be in your direct messages. You know the type of message “Hey thanks for the follow now go check out xyz to big red easy button copy here.”.
That was relatively easy to ignore and just interfered with me. Of late though I am seeing more and more people trying to use the mentions to get their message out.
You know the posts you see “@twitteruser Check out xyz to big red easy button copy here.”
Now if you want to recommend your item to your followers that is fine but you do not have the right to try and hijack my followers. I have worked hard to build a relationship with my followers by giving them quality resources and the occasional recommendation.
This type of thing was happening once every two weeks a few months ago but of late has become an almost daily occasion. Now it may be because I have a decent size following.
So the time has come to be proactive with these cretins. I have started blocking those that are doing this and will continue to do that.
Now I hate the idea of blocking people and hate even more recommending to others that they do the same. Unfortunately that is the only way to deal with these people so from this point on all of those adding these spam posts will be off of my time line and I hope you do the same.
That is my feeling. What do you think? 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.
Just about every product I see that uses WordPress as a blogging platform starts with just go to Cpanel and use Fantastico to install your blog. That pisses me off and for a good reason.
Now before I get into that it would not be a problem if their were not cretins out there who just love to hack into blogs. Instead of using their skills to create positive things they just love to hurt what you are doing.
That is the reason that I get pissed off when I see people recommending Fantastico all the time. Because it is a script and follows the same items all the time it is much easier for these cretins to get in and do their mischief.
Now I realize that everyone is looking for the easy button and that is why people always start there. It makes a great bullet point on the sales letter to talk about the very quick, easy, no knowledge needed install.
After all the easier you make it the more likely people are to want it.
The thing is that it is really not hard to install WordPress without Fantastico and only takes a few minutes more to have a secure installation.
Now you can do it your self or if you would still like to not have to deal with data bases and that stuff upgrade at Expert WordPress and be able to still do it automatically and even upload their recommended plugins.
As long as you are using one of their recommended hosts (and my favorite, Host Gator, is one of them) it is very easy.
You can do it your self too and although it will mean you need to deal with MySQL data base and FTP the type of alphabet items that often cause new bloggers to stop like a deer in the headlights I have a free report below that will walk you through step by step how to do that.
It really is not hard and making your blog much more secure and taking a few extra minutes can save you a lot of trouble down the road if the cretins do get to you. Just download it below.
I do understand that most don’t like the idea of any additional work (a nasty 4 letter word) but it is a lot less work than fixing a blog that gets hacked.
Just my opinion but I think using Fantastico although quick and easy is a huge mistake for any one installing a new blog.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
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.
Every 4 weeks I do a seminar on Blogging and Social Media for Get Referrals Fast members. A question after the presentation crystallized something that I do and have been but had not really put down into a system when I am helping others..
There are a lot of items that you need to do as a blogger. The question was where do you get the time to do them all?
As I was answering the question I realized that I have unconsciously meshed a lot of things together as part of my routine that has saved me a ton of time.
Now for a successful blog here are some of the things that you need to do on a regular basis.
Get blog post ideas and create content
Comment on other blogs
Create back links from sites like…
Squidoo
Ezine Articles
Hub Pages
Video sites
Podcast directories
Social sites
and others
Keep up with forums and comment
Those are just some of the things you will be doing to grow your blog. Seems to be overwhelming when you look at it.
What I do came together piece by piece almost by accident.
It started when I created Twitter Time Saver which combined Google Reader and Friend Feed to allow me to share the best content on my topic with my Twitter followers in an automated way to build credibility.
In Sunday Night Cash Plan I showed people how I used one piece of content to create an article, blog post, podcast and video out of one piece of content.
The final piece of the puzzle came together with Backlink Flood which shows you how to create link networks using the Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo and Hub Pages.
Here is how I combine all 3 of these to save a huge amount of time by combining things
My day starts with checking my reader and sharing what I find of quality through Friend Feed. While there checking out the latest new items I comment on related blogs. At the same time as I go through and see what the current topics are I write down any potential blog post ideas I get.
Depending on how many items are in the reader and how many blogs I find to comment on this can take me from 10 -30 minutes.
Next is to create my content from my blog post ideas I have written down. At least once a week I use this content for an article, video and podcast to improve my back links.This can be done in an hour once you get comfortable with the process.
Finally I will take my previous content and use that to add to the various Web 2.0 sites to create even more back links to my blog or to a specific product depending on the topic.
This way by combining these tasks I can get a lot of things done allowing me to do multiple items on my to do list at the same time and saving me quite a bit of time.
Now there are specific steps needed to do each of these steps to get them set up and they are covered in the products listed above.
Because you have read all the way through this if you grab Sunday Night Cash Plan through Sunday night September 26, 2010 drop me a support ticket at http://askmikepaetzold.com with your receipt and I’ll send you access to both Twitter Time Saver and Backlink Flood for free.
Combine these techniques and get a routine and you will be surprised at how much more you can do in less time.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed.
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.
There is a lot to do when you run a blog. You need to be coming up with ideas and you need to be working on building up your traffic and back links. The 3 techniques below will help you do both at the same time.
This is a rare case where you can kill two birds with one stone. Normally I am about focusing on one thing at a time but this is one of the exceptions where you can effectively do two things at once.
Use A Reader To Stay Current
The first is one I have blogged about regularly and that is using a reader to keep current on what is going on in your niche. You can get instructions here on using a feed reader.
Keeping track of what is hot in your niche by following what is new in Google News and various high quality blogs and sites will allow you to keep up. This will give you blogs to read and comment on regularly.
A great way to get ideas from what others are talking about.
Be Active In Forums
The second way is visiting the forums in your niche. Being active in forums on your topic is a good way to keep track of what is hot. If you are active you can build your authority and while doing that drive traffic to your blog through your signature if it is allowed.
Yahoo Answers
Going through the questions asked in Yahoo Answers regularly and answering them can be a good way to come up with ideas for your posts. Leaving an occasional link will help your back linking. You don’t want to leave a link until you have answered a few questions and should not be done every time.
Using these three techniques will help you generate ideas for your blog posts. Have a way to write them down so you remember them when the time comes to actually sit down at the keyboard and you will find it easier to blog regularly.
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.
Sunday I ranted about bloggers not building their list from their blogs. One of the comments was worried about losing visitors from using a pop up. Here is the comment.
That’s great, but you use popup to gather e-mail information. Have you considered how many visitors you have lost vs how many you got… how about all those who left at the sight of popup?
Now I am sure that I do lose some people that leave because of the light box pop. Does not seem to be very many because the average time on site and the bounce rate did not change when I added it.
Now every time you make changes it is important to check your stats and see what happens. Yes a pop up can hurt your retention.
Now to go into more detail the pop up I use is a light box and it is delayed. It does not show every time people come to the site.
The key is to have quality content. If people want to read what you are writing people will stick. If your content is something they don’t care about the pop up will hurt you.
By setting a delay before the pop up happens it allows people to get interested in the content before the interruption. That is one of the reasons that I use Aweber for those because I can set the delay (in my case 20 seconds) and how often it shows up.
As it will only show once every 5 days my regular readers only see it very occasionally. Now I have gone to blogs where they have something similar and it shows each time you go to a new page.
Those blogs quickly lose me and I can understand your question if someone is doing that.
Set up right the light box pop can be an excellent way to increase your list and get more visitors back again and again.
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.
Getting the proper plugins structure can make a big difference in how well your blog works. The list below are the ones I recommend.
Now some of that is personal choice as WordPress has a huge number of plugins available and there are other plugins that will do the same or similar things. If you look to change your title tags, create a sitemap or control your pinging there are multiple choices available.
This list has worked well for me and do not conflict with the other plugins and themes I use regularly. All of these plugins are in the WordPress codex and can be installed directly into your blog.
All In One SEO – Having the ability to create custom title tags is a must have for your SEO efforts. Being able to do this can make a huge difference in how your post ranks in the various search engines.
Simple Tags – Taking advantage of proper tagging can make a huge difference in your rankings and internal linking. This plugin allows you to add related posts to improve the amount of time people spend on your site. If you use a different tagging plugin you would then need a related post plugin.
WP To Technorati – Technorati is a huge blog search engine and taking advantage of the potential traffic there is a smart move.
Google XML Sitemap – Having a properly formatted sitemap makes it easier for the search engines to spider your site. Regardless of the plugin you use for creating a sitemap make sure that you are submitting it and verifying it in Google Webmaster Tools.
Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger – WordPress has a flaw in that it will ping each tie you edit and if you are like me and sometimes make a mistake and despite editing the post first still find other mistakes later this is a must have. Limiting the pinging will keep you from being looked at as a spammer from the directories.
These are the 5 SEO plugins I see as a must have. The key is to have your blog set up to do what these do. Now if you are using different ones but are covering the topics there is no need to change.
There are lots of choices available with the number of plugins and fining the ones that will do this and not conflict is the key.
These are my choices. What are yours?
Your questions and comments are always welcomed. Just leave them 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.
Today’s rant is a pet peeve of mine. RSS subscribers are great and I use a feed reader to follow a lot of blogs. That said I often wonder why so many do not also ask for email subscribers.
It would be a good bet that just about every reader of your blog has an email account. So ask for permission to let them know when you have added new content. I do that here with a delayed pop up.
If you are using a quality autoresponder like Aweber you can add these by adding a single line of code to your theme. Aweber will also automate the delivery of email as it will read your RSS feed and send out on the schedule you set to let your subscribers know about new content.
So all I do is add quality content here and spread the exposure automatically.
As over 25% of my visitors are coming from email notifications it can make a big difference in your traffic stats.
You could use Feedburner to allow this and not get a separate autoresponder (and that is better than not collecting email subscribers) but you won’t have the option of contacting people without posting to your blog.
My guess is that quite a few of your current readers do not understand feed readers or adding an RSS subscription to their feed reader but they do have an email address and are used to checking it. That is why letting people get notified through email of your new content is important.
As always your questions and comments are welcomed. Just leave them 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.
