WordPress Made Easy

Well it is finally here WordPress has just released the latest version 3.1. Now as this is a feature update and not a security update you may want to wait a bit if you are a technophobe.

Have upgraded a couple of mine and they are working fine with the plugins I use as I have been testing all along with the release candidates.

If the new features are must have take the chance and upgrade to take advantage of them. (More about those further down.) If not, it is rare that despite beta testing and numerous release candidates there is not something found once it goes into wide spread release.

Even think that Matt Mullenweg may even be reading this blog. Here is the email I just received and remember I was looking for a Valentine’s Day release.

Missed you on Valentine’s day. We were busy, busy, busy coding away on this WordPress thing. It’s blogging software but people have started using it for pretty much everything, powering their entire website.

The new 3.1 release is pretty cool, it has a new admin bar so you’re never more than one-click from your admin and adding links in the WYSIWYG is now like 42x faster and includes a lookup to make it easy to link to your own posts and pages.

What’s New With 3.1

• Redesigned linking workflow
• Admin bar
• Streamlined writing interface
• Refreshed blue admin scheme
• Post Formats support
• New CMS capabilities
• New Network Admin
• Advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries

Some of these features are good. I am loving the admin bar. If I am logged in and go to the blog I can get back to where I want (add a post, check comments, see stats just by clicking the bar at the top of the blog.

Post formats is something I will be using and writing about soon.

So if you use WordPress more for a CMS than a blog you will love this version. There is a lot to take advantage of there.

As I always do when we get a new release I put the easy upgrade video below but remember that upgrading or not depends on how important the new features are to you. If they are not wait for the first update.

The process has not changed since 2.7 so the video is still valid.

Look for more on WordPress 3.1 over the next week or so as it gets a wider distribution.

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: upgrade wordpress, whats new wordpress 3.1, WordPress 3.1

Over the last couple days I have seen numerous blog articles show up in my reader that read like those below.

• Nobody Blogs Anymore — They’re All Microblogging
• Blogging Is Dead Just Like the Web Is Dead
• Is Blogging on the Wane?

So is it true? Is Blogging really dead?

Well lets start with the point that each of these titles come from (gasp) a blog. Makes you wonder now.

The Huffington Post (a blog) just sold this month to AOL for $300 million dollars.

Wondering if AOL is that dumb to spend that amount of money for something that is dead?

No I think the death of blogging is vastly over reported.

The better questions would be is blogging changing? The answer to that would be a definite yes. Are they going away? Not in the foreseeable future.

More people are using micro blogging and various social media. I do. But I still blog too.

They supplement each other.

Will blogs move more to different types of content?

Absolutely. You are seeing it with more video content, podcasts, etc.

So from my point despite the massive reporting blogs are not dead. What is yours? 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.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogging dead, podcast, video content

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

Another Sunday morning here in the coal region. We had our teasing of warm weather and did get rid of most of the ice but we are back to winter again. Oh well it is February and two days above 50 F were a very welcome relief.

Though it may be cold outside that has not chilled off any of the great content I have found in my blogosphere travels this week. Once again had a hard time whittling the list to just 3.

Our first stop this week is a familiar one for regular readers but with a different author this time. We will start with a trip to Traffic Generation Cafe (a regular stop for me) and this article from James The Just titled “How To Write Titles With Teeth”. Enjoy this one. I did.

Our next stop in this week’s tour of the blogosphere is to Daily Blog Tips and a guest post by Diggy titled “The 10 Commandments to Successful Blogging“. Some really great tips and the last one is the most important for you to understand.

Our last stop today will help you generate ideas. A topic near and dear to my heart. This one comes from Experiments In Passive Income and is written by Moon Hussain titled “9 Sure-Fire Ways to Ignite & Generate Great Keyword & Niche Ideas“. Get your mind churning by applying some of these.

Hope you enjoy your travels. I did finding them for you. If you found posts that really resonated with you this week feel free to add them 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: blogging, blogosphere, keyword ideas, passive income, titles, traffic generation

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

One thing that starting the Sunday Goodies has done is to make me extend my reach. more. Sharing with others can be a great way to do that.

The majority of new blogs I find that end up being featured come from someone’s recommendation. Usually on Twitter but it does take some effort. (I know a big surprise.) But I work hard to keep it to a minimum.

So how do I keep expanding my reach?

When I find a good blog post on a new blog to me, I add the author to my Twitter account. Not just an add but they get moved to a category in Tweet deck for the people that I want to highlight so I am less likely to miss anything they tweet.

Monitor that person and see if they recommend other quality content. After a week or so you have a real good idea if they are active in retweeting others or not. If all they do is self promote they get removed.

The reason is that people that write content I like tend to interact with other quality writers on the same or similar topics. Some I know already, but often their recommendations lead me to another quality resource that I can follow too.

This again leads me to add that new person the same way and keep expanding my circle again and again.

I add their blogs into my feed reader the same way. Usually someone that has a post that gets my attention the same way continues to add quality content.

Occasionally though you find out that the post that attracted me was an aberration. About 10% of the time it fits the “even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while” scenario and then it is easy to remove the feed from my reader.

After all the biggest thing I strive for is to save time yet find quality resources. Expanding the people I truly pay attention to on Twitter and add quality blogs to my reader makes it easier to extend my reach and build a quality list of people to interact with.

Spending a bit of time each day can really multiply over time and you will never lack for quality content to help your Twitter followers or to find blogs to take part in the conversation.

Beats the tools that just find blogs to comment on because you build a constantly expanding list of others that are on topic. I find it leads to more traffic from those blogs when you do comment because instead of searching for keywords you have found blogs that resonate with you.

Odds are your content will resonate with those readers too. This leads to more traffic and an ever expanding reach for your content to people that are already interested in it.

That’s my thoughts. What are yours? Leave your 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: acorn, blind squirrel, blogs, followers, quality content, quality resource, twitter

When I first started doing this each week I thought this would be an easy way to create a blog post and provide quality content to you, my reader. It has but it really isn’t easy.

Now it could be if I went with more than three but do you really have time to check out more than that?

It has become hard because most of the previous entries are from people that consistently put out great content and I could just promote the same 3 blogs 3 weeks out of 4.

It amazes me how much quality content is put out each week that I find. Whittling it down to 3 is what makes it tough and not constantly repeating the same authors makes it even tougher.

So here is what I found this week.

The first stop is to visit a blog I go to regularly from Alex Syseof, WordPress How To Spotter. This is a guest post from John Lombaerde titled “How Can A Keywords Ranking Analysis Help Engine Search Visibility?” It explains some things about keyword research in a simple to understand way.

The next item is from someone I have not followed before but liked the content and will be in the future. It is from Geoff Livingston and his blog is named the same titled “4 Ways to Improve Content “.

The final stop is to go to Read Write Biz for an article from John Paul Titlow titled “Is Your Website Ready For the Coming Tablet Explosion?”. It is a topic that you really need to be aware of as a blogger. More and more people are reading your content on smart phones and tablets and you need to adapt.

All places to get good quality content and worthy additions to your feed reader.

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: improve content, keyword analysis, search visibility, search-engine, smart phones, tablets

Things often get stuck in my head. Does not always make sense as to why, but it happens. May be a function of age and baldness or maybe I am just getting senile. Hard to say.

One of the things that stuck was what WordPress wrote when announcing WordPress 3.1 Release candidate 2

“Beta 1 came on Thanksgiving, RC1 on Christmas, and RC2 on New Year’s Day. We won’t be waiting for another holiday for the final release”

Well because that stuck in my mind and we now have an RC4, will it be a Valentine’s Day release?

See I told you strange thoughts sometimes travel through my gray matter and quite truthfully it will come when it comes. I much prefer it be right than be released to meet a deadline.

WordPress does a great job with improving the software and this is not a knock on them but after that statement wouldn’t it be true justice to see 3.1 on Monday?

That is my rambling today what do you think? Leave your 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: upgrade wordpress, Valentines Day, WordPress 3.1

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