Should you give up a plugin for lent? [ 2:37 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday was Ash Wednesday for the Christian community and marked the start of lent. Mardi Gras is over and it is time to switch from excess to sacrifice. Lent usually includes giving up something. It may be your favorite beverage, chocolate or any thing else that would be a sacrifice.

Maybe it is time to think about using this time frame to give up a plugin from your blog too.

It is not unusual to find that the 5 or 6 plugins you started with are now 25-30. Maybe more for you or maybe less. I know I am guilty of this quite often.

You know how it works. You see something new and neat and just have to add it and see how it works. We all love new shiny objects. Then the bad part happens.

You forget about it. Next thing you know the number of plugins keeps climbing. You think you have 10 or 15 plugins and when you check and actually look, it is double that number.

So as we start lent, now may be a good time to check how many plugins you are using. If your number has climbed, just take a minute or two and see what you have actually added.

Are they helping you or hurting you? A slow load speed can hurt you with Big G, so do you really need all of them.

If you find you have a few that you don’t even remember why you added them then maybe you should give them up for lent. Check and see if it helps or hurts your results. (You are tracking your blog aren’t you?)

If it helps or is neutral then maybe you did not need it to start with. Obviously if it hurts your results then start it back up.

Take advantage of this time of sacrifice to do this and find out if your blog is bloated. Like changing the batteries in your smoke alarms when the time changes it can be a good maintenance item.

Just going through and checking how many plugins you have installed may be an eye opener for you.

That is what I think. 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: big g, blog, load speed, plugin, wordpress plugin

WordPress and plugins go together like peas and carrots. (Yeah I know a Forrest Gump thing, love that movie.) Plugins make things easy and can be very helpful but are they getting over saturated?

Over the last few months I have seen more and more plugins released. Some are free and some are paid plugins. Now I don’t have a problem with paid plugins. Have recommended some that can do things to help or automate things.

Really it is surprising that so many authors offer so many for free.

The problem is some are for CMS purposes and some are for blogs. Some are just because of laziness. That last category is the one that can hurt you.

Quite a few of those new paid plugins are specifically for making WordPress into a CMS and that part is fine. More and more I am using WordPress as the base for all of my sites. Except for older sites almost every new site I create uses WordPress to run it. Even minisites.

The problem I am seeing is that each plugin you add has the potential to slow down the loading of your blog. As Google is using load speed as part of their algorithm, page load speed matters.

The point is that although a plugin can make something easier, what is the trade off?

Often a bit of coding, like using a widget, can add the same thing a plugin does with some html. If you add a plugin versus adding some of your own code often you slow your load speed.

Think about it next time you think about adding a new plugin. Ask if there is an easy way to do something the same or similar without adding the plugin.

That little bit of thought may help your load speed.

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 plugin, cms content, content management system, plugin, wordpress, wordpress plugin

Amazing what you can find when you pay attention. Started seeing some tweets like “Best of.. post name url ” on Twitter. When I looked closer I saw at the bottom from Tweet Old Post.

So I went and checked in the plugin directory and saw a plugin by that name. Read about it and decided to try it.

Regular readers know that I love anything that recycles or repurposes content. This fit the bill perfectly. It automatically will randomly pick an old post and tweet it at a schedule I determine. Works like a charm.

Now to be clear there are two things you need to have to use this plugin and have it be of value.

1. Lots of quality evergreen content
2. An active Twitter following

It won’t work for you if a lot of your posts are time sensitive or if you are not active on Twitter.

If you are though this can be a great way to point traffic to some of your older posts automagically. And I love automagical things.

It is easy to set up and you can set the minimum and maximum date ranges and how often to tweet posts. It does it randomly for you.

As Twitter gets indexed this should not only be sending instant visitors that follow you from Twitter but doing some deep linking to your older posts too.

Definitely a tool to consider if you meet the qualifications above.

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.

Technorati Tags: backlinks, traffic, tweets, twitter, wordpress plugin

Article submissions is an easy way to generate back links and traffic to your blog. Ezine Articles is arguably the best of the directories and has some neat tools for you to use.

First if you become a platinum author they have a new service I have found quite helpful. You can become a platinum author easily if you submit enough articles that are approved. It won’t cost you a dime.

This service allows you to generate title ideas for any keyword. Have writer’s block? Log in to your account and open the tool and put in your keywords. You will get a selection of potential titles for that keyword. Choose one and you have that title for seven days to use to submit an article.

Once I have a specific idea (the title) it becomes easy to start writing. That is usually all it takes to get the creative juices flowing. Getting that initial idea is usually all of the inspiration it takes to get me writing.

The really neat thing though is that they have a WordPress plugin that will allow you to submit your blog post directly through your dashboard as an article. No more having to write your article, copy and paste it into your Ezine Articles account and submit it. Then go and add it to your blog.

You can write your blog post and submit it directly to Ezine Articles right from your dashboard. Then you can schedule your post all from one place.

Anything that saves me time is a good thing.

You can download the plugin direct from WordPress by searching for Ezine Articles and installing it through your dashboard. You will need to get an API key inside Ezine Articles to make it work but once that is done you are all set. Love where a little one time work can save me time day after day.

If you are not maximizing your use of Ezine Articles you are missing out on a great opportunity.

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: article-submission, Author, blog post, Ezine Articles, Platinum, wordpress plugin

I would love to tell you that security is not important and there are not cretins that would love to mess with your blog/s. Unfortunately, that is not the case so you will need to take precautions.

Fortunately there are a few plugins that can help you and save you time and trouble trying to protect yourself manually. Here are 3 plugins I use to help protect my blogs.

AntiVirus – This plugin will check your theme regularly for any bad files that may have been added. You can set it up to email you when it finds any problems so you know right away when you have been attacked.

WordPress Exploit Scanner – This will search your theme and your data base for potential exploits. It will not change any as there are a lot of false positives generated by some plugins like the caching plugins.

WordPress Database Backup – This plugin won’t protect your blog but will allow you to have a current backup data base for those cases where the cretins do get in and try to destroy your blog.

Like I said it would be nice if these were not needed but the reality is that you do need to protect yourself and these 3 will definitely help you to do just that.

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: blog security, security plugin, wordpress plugin

Welcome to a new decade. I will be going through the questions that were asked in my pre-Christmas post and answering them here. You can add your question to any of these posts by leaving a comment.

Here is today’s question

My question is how do do get your disclaimer to locate to the end of your post? Is there a plug-in? I tried to add to my posts individually, but they will not go where I want them. I know I’m out of date but I’ve been busy with college. But I still need to be legal.

I have not seen a plugin specifically for this yet but there may be one or it is a perfect idea for a coder to create. I prefer to add it directly into the theme code. If you are not comfortable editing the theme you could add it as part of your post using the FT Signature plugin.

Now to edit your theme is not hard but it may take you a try or two to find exactly where to add your HTML.

First make sure that you have a backup of your theme before you start. This way if you screw something up you can put back the original theme and no damage is done.

You should also have your theme files permissions (chmod) set to 666. This way you can do your edits from the dashboard.

The reason I can’t give you a specific way to do this is that each theme is set up differently and you will have to look for the place to add your disclaimer to get it to show the way you want it.

The main page you will need to edit will usually be single.php on most themes. This is the page that shows your single post. I do not think I have ever seen a theme that did not use this but you will have to check your theme files to be sure.

So log in to your dashboard – select appearance – editor to get to the files to edit. Then select single.php

On most of the themes I have tried it seems to work best when added right before the call to pull comments.

Add your disclaimer above that and save the change. Look at your blog on a specific post and see if it is showing where you want it to be. If it is your are good if not see where it is and adapt accordingly. Worst case add back your original file.

Now if you only want this to show on single page posts you are done but if you show the full post on your index page you will also need to edit that page also. That is always index.php in your theme files.

Finally if you are promoting items on your pages in addition to your posts you may need to edit the page template also which is normally page.php.

So depending on exactly how your blog is set up and how you use it you may have 1, 2 or 3 edits to make. Once you have it completed and working make sure to back up your new edited pages so that you have them if you ever need to replace the blog.

For video walk through of how to edit your theme and other items to tweak your WordPress blog check out Advanced WordPress Videos.

Remember to leave your questions or 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: adapt WordPress, add disclaimer, Advanced WordPress Videos, disclaimer, edit theme, wordpress plugin

In keeping with the back to basics theme that I have been following today lets go through how to add plugins to your blog. This has become extremely easy with the new version of WordPress. No longer do you need to know how to ftp (one of those words that can send chills down new people’s spine).

By the way ftp stands for file transfer protocol and in simple terms allows you to move files from your computer to your web host and vice versa and is one of the skills you need.

To add a plugin log in to your dashboard and when your menu is expanded you will see the following options.

Just click the add new button and you will get some more options.

You can search through the WordPress plugin data base to find a plug in. If you have already downloaded a plugin you can click the upload option then browse to find the zip file and install it that way.

The other categories just show you featured, popular or newest. The installation will be the same as for one you search for. When you search for a plug in you get a page with choices that come closest to matching your request.

You will get choices and you can see the ratings from others for these plugins. You can click the title on the left to see more details on each and when you decide click the install link on the right.

Click the red install now button and then fill in the connection information for your server. Once it is installed you can click the activate link and that is the end for most plugins although some will require some settings changes.

That is all you need to do to add a plugin 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.

Technorati Tags: add plugin, install plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugin

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.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blog spam, spam comment, wordpress, wordpress plugin, wp-spam free

Just a quick FYI if you use All In One SEO plugin. Seems the upgrade to the latest version turns it off. You will get a notice that you need to enable it. You will get this message.

Click the link to go to the admin page.

Update both of the data base links. (Make sure you have a data base backup – something you should do anyhow.)

Then make sure you have clicked the radio button to enable and then click the update button.

The good thing is that until you complete the tasks you will see the first warning message in your dashboard.

Keep them updated but make sure you complete the process or you will lose the functionality of the All In One SEO plugin.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: All-in-one-seo, plugin, upgrade plugin, wordpress plugin

Got a tweet yesterday which I promptly retweeted from CaptnAffiliate (someone you should follow if you are a marketer.)

@CaptnAffiliate: If you haven’t backed up your blogs recently, this is as good a time as any to do it!

It served as a good reminder and that is the reason for the post. My programmer does ours each week. This means we lose at most a week of blog posts if something goes wrong on the server.

There are two different ways to back up WordPress and which one YOU should use depends on how many plugins you have and how much tweaking you have done.

The easy way is to use the built in exporter in WordPress. This is quite easy to do just login and go to Tools – Export

Click the Download Export File and save it to your computer. (I have a separate folder just for blog backups so I can find them easily.)

This is the easy way but…

Yes there is always a but it only keeps your post content. If you are using a bunch of plugins or a complex theme like Flexibility that has various settings you have not saved all of those items.

The first way will give you your content but all of your settings are gone if you ever have to redo your blog. That is why I pull the actual data base for the blog. This will have all of the information on your settings and if you need to reinstall it you keep all of the settings changes you have made that are data base driven.

To save your data base I have started using a plugin called WordPress Data Base Backup (it will be added to the Power WordPress Users set on Monday) as it is easier to use for most than just exporting the data base through PHPMyAdmin. Once the plugin is installed just click Tools – Backup.

Then pick the additional tables you want to download (I grab them all but you can and should skip any stats data base as they can be huge and are not necessary for getting your blog back in case of catastrophe) by checking the boxes while holding the shift key.Then click

Check the download to your computer then click Backup now!

Save that file to your computer where you can find it and you are done.

Now this plugin will allow you to schedule the data base to be emailed to you but I always do it manually and save it to my computer so I know..

1. That I have a good copy
2. That is was actually done

Automation is great but it is too easy in my humble opinion to depend on that and God forbid you need it and something went wrong with the automation and you do not have a current backup. We back up once a week as part of our regular schedule of tasks. I have discussed your content and data bases here but you should also keep copies of any files you have edited such as your theme files. Just because you edited your header or footer of your theme in your dashboard you should always save a copy to your computer.

You can grab the basic theme files again easily but if you are like me and have editied your themes having a copy will save you having to do it again in case of catastrophe.

Which ever way you use, it is the end of the month and it is a good time to do your backup RIGHT NOW!

Hopefully this will be a total waste of your time and you will never ever need this backup but believe me, the one time that you do need this backup the time you spent doing it will be time well spent.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: back up WordPress, wordpress, wordpress plugin, WP Database Backup