This question came up in a discussion group I belong to on IM Faceplate.

There will be variations on how to apply these steps depending on the theme you use and whether or not there are widgets built into it. The two latest default themes for WordPress (Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven) both have that capability.

For this example I will use the new Twenty Eleven theme. Your theme may be slightly different but adding the links will be similar.

First you will need to create the pages on your blog for both of those items and get the URL of each page.

Go to your dashboard and click appearance then editor.

Then to the right select Footer (footer.php).

This will open up the file footer.php so that you can edit it.

Before you do anything copy and paste the whole file to a notepad or equivalent so that if you make a mistake you can replace the bad file with the original file.

You want to look at what text is where on your footer so that you can see where you want to add your links. In the case of the Twenty Eleven theme it would be right below where it reads “Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Twenty Eleven.”

The place you want to add these links may vary depending on the theme but once you know approximately where you can use that to find the proper starting point.

That code looks like this

<a href="http://wordpress.org/" rel="generator">Proudly powered by WordPress</a><span class="sep"> | </span><?php printf( __( 'Theme: %1$s.', 'twentyeleven' ), 'Twenty Eleven' ); ?>

After the closing php tag ?> hit return and add a line with the links you wish to use in appropriate a href format such as

<p><a href="affiliateurl">Affiliate TOS</a> - <a href="privacyurl">Privacy Policy </a></p>

With affiliate url and privacy url being the location of those two pages.

Your questions and comments are always 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.

Technorati Tags: add links to theme, edit footer, edit theme

There are certain universal rules that apply in the physical world and often beyond. Newton’s First Law Of Motion is definitely one of them.

Often stated as “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.”

It certainly applies to me and writing. For a couple of years I consistently blogged here about WordPress a minimum of 3 times a week and quite often daily.

Took off two weeks to work on a project that was more technical and less writing and come back to having a very hard time getting back to writing.

It will take a significant outside force (self discipline) to get back to normal and because I stopped it has taken a lot of effort to get back to writing regularly.

The topics that were constantly popping into this old brain have stopped and it is time to prime the pump and get back into it.

You can help with asking any questions you have about blogging in the comments below.

As they say in the Friday the Thirteenth series “He’s back…..”

Help me get there by asking your questions 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.

Technorati Tags: first law of motion, questions, self discipline, writing

Been beavering away in the background working on some new things. Before it goes too far though I prefer to get your input.

One of the things with WordPress and blogging in general is the speed at which things change. This creates a problem when it comes to creating products for it.

For example – When I first created WordPress Made Easy we were on version 2.0 of WordPress. As WordPress has changed the product has been updated.

Dealing with anything that has to do with plugins has been even tougher. Just went through this week end and went back to the original plugins I used to recommend. Except for Askimet there is not one plugin that I originally recommend. Not one.

When I started blogging and teaching it there was no My Space, Facebook, LinkedIn, Friend Feed or Twitter. All things that with the exception of My Space that I now use regularly.

As a product creator I wonder whether an ongoing membership that consistently updated would be better than creating individual products for this topic.

Now I would love your opinion and would like your input.

The other question is that if you did vote for the membership option would you prefer a higher single payment or an ongoing monthly/quarterly/annual payment?

As I am sure you can tell I am favoring a membership type way of delivering content but that ultimately is up to you the reader.

Appreciate your input.

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.

Technorati Tags: blogging, creating products, individual products, membership option, membership type, single payment, wordpress

Before I get started I am not taking sides on any political issues here. Just observing things that are happening. Not that I don’t have strong opinions this is not the format for it.

Not sure if you have noticed that WordPress.com has been fighting off a DDOS attack for the last couple days. Interesting that it seems to be coming from the Libyan government from some of the news stories I have been reading.

Seems those against the government have been using WordPress.com to communicate and coordinate their efforts. That is why the Libyan government is trying to shut them down.

Look at the social campaign run by Obama in 2008 to use a variety of blogs and social media to win the presidency and there is little doubt that if you can use blogs and social media you can have a huge advantage.

Egypt just had a change in government fueled by the usage of Facebook and Twitter.

There is no doubt that blogging and social media can be world changers. The question is are you using them to bring change about in your marketplace?

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.

Technorati Tags: blogging, DDOS, Facebook, social-media, twitter, WordPress.com

My post on Monday seems to have created more questions than it answers. My apologies for that. The purpose was to make you aware of the new items not muddy the waters.

Post formats are nothing more than a way to create custom displays for specific post types. A new look like the car above can be a powerful thing to use in your blog.

So lets address some things that were causing the waters to be muddied.

The first question that came up.

Yes these are changes to the codes that the theme designer puts in the theme that allows you to use special formats for certain types of posts.

By standardizing the names of the custom pages and defining what they are this will allow users to change themes that have the same definitions.

This way if you have used a theme that has these defined and want to switch to another theme you must check that it uses the predefined post formats that you have already added to your blog.

If not, then this will cause problems in some of your older post formats when you make a switch.

Previously the designer could make these custom pages but as there was no standard definition you were literally hostage to that theme. If you changed themes you would have display problems on changing the theme.

They should not affect plugins as these will primarily change the look of specific posts. It is more of a design thing allowing different types of posts to display differently.

Yes there is a good chance it could create display problems cross platform on browsers but that is a problem across the board.

The key thing will be how many theme developers decide to add these custom page options in their themes.

The big thing as a user will be to be aware of whether those neat features are using standards so that you have options in the future or whether you will have potential problems if you decide to change in the future.

That way you don’t get blind sided in the future when you want to change.

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.

Technorati Tags: custom displays, post format, site optimization, template designs

Have a couple ideas that like a caterpillar will be going into a cocoon and coming out as something else. Unlike the caterpillar it is not yet decided what these ideas will become. The caterpillar is imprinted with what it will become but these ideas are not.

To decide what they will become your input is needed.

One of the big things I have learned the hard way is that what I think you need is not necessarily what you want. After having this beaten into me over time by experience I know it is better to ask first.

Rather than generate what I think, I would much prefer to provide what you are actually looking for and want.

What I want is to get back to more teaching. It is what I do best.

Over the next week or so I will be doing some surveys to find what I can do with what I like that will help you get what you want. A win win situation for both of us.

It only works with your input. Would you help us both by taking the short 4 question multiple choice survey below?

Click here to take survey

And if I could impose one more time I just started a Fan Page for this blog at Facebook. Can you please like me by hitting the button to the right. Will be adding some special stuff up there shortly.

Thanks in advance for your help.

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.

Technorati Tags: help you, multiple choice, questions, survey

Regular readers know that I love getting questions and answering them. It is one of the ways that I can provide content that I know people (or at least one person) wanted addressed.

Now sometimes it is easy to get an answer and other times it is more opinion than fact. I do try to make it clear which is which. So today’s question will be answered as opinion to make it quite clear.

One of the reasons for opinion is that Google leads the way and is not exactly open about how they rank things to say the least. They give hints but you need to try different things and see what actually happens.

Now on this blog and probably on most of my blogs the sidebar is on the right. Not necessarily for SEO purposes although a while back before css became prevalent and most were using standard HTML there was supposed to be an advantage to being on the right.

The thinking was that spiders read top to bottom and seeing all of the items in the sidebar first made your content less important.

With css it is easy to avoid that through includes so that your content shows higher in what the spider reads. Is it true? I really don’t know and truthfully don’t care until I see something credible telling me I should.

The reason I use sidebars on the left on some niche sites is because that tends to be the first place people look and after testing find that it gets the most subscribers. As on those blogs the primary thing I am using them for is to get them on a list. That is my most wanted action form the page so I put the opt in box in the best hot spot.

For blogs like this and most of my blogs getting my content read is the most important thing so I use a right sidebar. That way the content is the first thing to grab some ones attention.

So sorry I really have not answered the question and not sure there is a definitive answer that I have found. But at least I gave you my why on where I put sidebars on different sites.

Got a question or an opinion on this or anything else about blogging? Let me know in the comments 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.

Technorati Tags: blogs, google, hot spot, new question, sidebar, spiders, standard html, subscribers, top to bottom

Really like interacting with people and that is one of the reasons I always ask for your questions and get them through comments and even occasionally through Twitter. Here is one that came in last week on Twitter.

It is the rewrite mod and how it works that can cause a problem. When you change from the default settings to a different style of url it creates rewrite rules in your .htaccess file.

There is a good explanation in detail on how this works and why it is harmful.

Now that may get a bit technical so the short version is that using things like %postname%, %category%, %tag%, or %author% first in your permalink will make your rewrite rules become bloated slowing down how quickly your blog can return the proper page. You can use something in front of those tags first like %year% or %post_id% and still use them without it being a problem.

With Google putting a premium on how fast your page loads this can not only frustrate your potential reader but can hurt where your post ranks in the serps. Neither item is something you want to do.

Your questions are always welcomed and encouraged here. Just leave a 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.

Technorati Tags: default settings, google, htaccess file, page loads, permalink, rewrite, serps, wordpress

Got a good question yesterday when I talked about Paper.li again. So lets go for a third post. Hopefully the third time is the charm.

The amount of time it takes is minimal if you have an active Twitter following and use lists. It is a one time setup and then it generates a new paper on the topic you picked each day.

In my case I use a Twitter list of marketers that I follow. It took less than 5 minutes to set up if you have a list in your Twitter account already like I did.

The paper I created gets retweeted just about every day by someone that is on that list when they are listed as part of the contributors.

Can’t really put a value on that but as I have chosen quality people that have similar audiences or audiences that I would like to reach it probably (have no way to track exact stats) has added new followers to my Twitter account and at the least gotten my name in front of a lot more people.

It is more valuable when others add you to your paper.

In summary the time is minimal to set it up and it runs on autopilot. The results are hard to measure specifically but more exposure for one time effort seems to be a good trade for me.

What do you think?

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.

Technorati Tags: audiences, exact stats, followers, marketers, paper li, time investment, time setup, twitter

Wrote about Paper.li a bit ago. It is a good way to aggregate some of your Twitter items those of your followers that creates a daily paper.

You can see the original post about Paper.li here. This question came in on the comments.

Now before I start a couple clarifications. Not sure if you are asking to import the whole page into your WordPress.com blog as a page or a post.

The difference is important. Pages are different than posts. Pages are stand alone and do not go in as part of your front page unless you set them up.

Either way there is not an easy way to import the whole page in to replace what you have.

There is an embed you can get from the Paper.li page and add the latest page into your sidebar as a widget. This can be added to any WordPress blog whether self hosted or at WordPress.com.

It is easy to do and here are the steps.

Go to your Paper.li page and in the upper right hand corner is an embed link.

When you click that you will get some code that you can copy and paste into a text widget that you add to your sidebar.

You may need to edit the width depending on your sidebar setup.

This will rotate through the various top stories on your sidebar.

So you can’t duplicate your Paper.li page but you definitely can use the widget to promote your Paper.li page.

Your questions and comments are always welcomed. Just use the comment box 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.

Technorati Tags: clarifications, paper li, sidebar, text widget, wordpress blog