As WordPress 3.0 inches closer and the first release candidate has been made available there has been a number of plugin updates over the last week or two. Although it may seem to be a royal pain, it is actually good that plugin authors are updating their plugins to take advantage of the new features coming in 3.0.
It is important to make sure that you are keeping your plugins updated.
With the current version of WordPress this is extremely easy and you will save your self from problems by doing this when you see the updates come through.
Here is a video that will allow you to do all of your plugin upgrades at once from your dashboard.
Have a good weekend.
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.
Have been a bit quiet this week as I have been busy in the background preparing my latest product – Profitable Blog Steps.
Now this was put together because of the trouble that people have making money online. There are numerous steps and skipping one can be fatal.
I am sure you have hear the old saying, “how do you eat an elephant?”
The answer of course is, “a bite at a time.”
Trying to set up an affiliate blog can seem just like eating an elephant. There is way too much to do and then there is the awful feeling of not being sure where to start.
That’s number one reason why so many marketers don’t have a blog even though they know they are leaving lost profits on the table because they don’t have a blog.
That, my friend, is a crying shame because blogs are the ultimate search engine magnets.
However, it should come as no surprise at all when you consider that there are lots of steps to take when setting up and fine tuning your blog.
But if you go a “bite” at a time it is quite easy if you know exactly where to start AND you know what steps to take.
That’s why I created Profitable Blog Steps. It’s an audio/video course that walks you through all the steps.
This paint by numbers system of setting up money getting blogs consists of 10 easy to follow – easy to understand – modules that start at square one.
It covers…
- Introduction to Affiliate Blogging Secrets
- Blog Building: Research and Choosing Topic
Then it continues with more intermediate and advanced tactics you use to ramp up your success.
- The Free Bait Method
- Create A Viral ‘Infection’ With Resale Rights Reports
And you get detailed instruction on how do everything in between too.
It doesn’t matter if you are brand new or are an experienced blogger; Profitable Blog Steps can help you get the what you want from your online business.
So stop struggling and get the step by step tutorials that will lead you to success.
For the next week I am giving a discount for action takers. Check out Profitable Blog Steps today and save $20 but only until the 9th of June.
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.
Here in PA we are approaching the first long week end of summer. The temperature is going to be very summer like and not making me happy as 90 degrees F and 90% + humidity can make me irritable.
Time to get the air conditioner out of the back and into the window again. Knew this was coming and if I had been smart it would already be in place and ready but it isn’t so guess I have work to do today.
Logged in today to the back of the blog and see that WordPress has their seventh birthday today.
Now those little factoids don’t by themselves have a lot to do with blogging per se but then maybe they do.
Things change over time and weather is always a big one for most of us. WordPress continues to change and 3.0 should be here shortly. WordPress has changed drastically over the years and continues to evolve today.
Much as we would love to have things stay the same it is the changes that offer you opportunity.
Are you getting in front of the changes in your niche or are you reacting to the change like the majority of people?
If you are looking for more readers and followers they will find you when you are in front. Hard to be followed when you are lagging behind.
On another note I am still looking for a title for my new blog tour to take place in August this year along with blogs to visit. There will be a prize for the winning name and if I visit your blog for the week you will get 5 days of posts from me and any references to any of my products will be your affiliate links. I will be promoting the tour on Squidoo and my own blog network so your blog will get extra promotion from me.
I will write on any of the following topics…
Blogging
Blog SEO
List building
Affiliate marketing
Traffic generation
Private label rights
Product creation
So if you have a blog on any of those topics contact me at the support desk with details. If you have a name for the blog tour leave it in the comments.
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.
Well I have been a bit quiet this week because I have been quite busy putting the finishing touches to WordPress Made Easy. This is actually the third time that I have done this. Each time the product gets a bit better amd this time it will help you shatter the learning curve.
Originally I created WordPress Made Easy to help people get a blog online and customize it so they had a look and feel to it that they could be proud of. It still does that quite well even for someone who only uses a computer for email.
After all the checklists and step by step videos allow anyone to get the technical side done but there is a lot more to having a successful blog.
It actually starts with keyword research because picking the topic and getting that right is even more important than getting the technical details right. So I covered it.
Setting up and configuring plugins makes a huge difference too. Avoiding conflicts is even more important. Knowing which items will work with which keeps you from having trouble that can be a royal pain to trouble shoot. I know I get contacted quite frequently from clients “I broke my blog can you fix it?”
These things are easier to avoid than to fix. So I covered it.
There are a lot more things that have been added but check out exactly what you get at WordPress Made Easy,
Because after all what I say means nothing it is what you can do that matters. That is why I made it risk free to try WordPress Made Easy with my no questions asked 90 day guarantee.
After all it really is all about you and your success.
Is that a question you often ask your self when you sit down to add content to your blog? I used to have quite frequently but here is a way to overcome that problem.
For me it starts with setting up Google Reader for each of the topics I blog on. Go to Google News and search for the primary keywords on your topic. Grab the RSS feed for that search and add it to your reader.
[hidepost]You can find the rss feed after you made your search in Google News scroll to the bottom of the page and click the RSS icon.
Copy and paste the url from the browser into your Google Reader. To do that open Google Reader and click the add subscription button in the upper left hand corner.
This will open a box where you can add that feed in then click the add button.
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Now you have a place where you can get the latest news on your topics in one place. As you find quality blogs in your niche add their feed in there too.
Now I get up in the morning open up Free Mind (a free mind map software) and then my reader. Go through and see what has been added new and in 20 minutes or less I can catch up on what is going on in my topic. This is a great way to become more expert on any topic too.
This always generates ideas for topics so I add them into the mind map as I get them. Now you could use a note book or whatever other item you prefer but I like the mind map because I can easily rearrange things and tie things together,
It also happens to be the way I outline things so it is just comfortable for me.
Now as I teach in Twitter Time Saver you can link your reader to Friend Feed and Twitter to share things while I go through catching up which allows me to add more quality content while I am coming up with ideas.
Using content in multiple ways like this allows me to leverage the time I spend on research in many ways.
Try doing this regularly and you will soon find that there are more ideas on what to write on then there is time to write them all.
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.
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.
Every so often I take some time to go through the topics that I write about through some of the Google tools. Just finished a series on using Webmaster Tools.
Today I figured to go do some research in Google Trends on the topics I wrote about here regularly. I started with the three major ones – WordPress, WordPress themes, WordPress plugins.
Found a very interesting fact that has caused me to add a new plugin here. Not sure how it will work but this is a good example of how you can find things using trends you might overlook.
First lets look at what I found.
For WordPress
For WordPress themes
Finally for WordPress plugins
The part that made me feel good was that all of the trends for these topics are going up. As those are some of my primary topics that I write about regularly it will pay me to continue.
The part that caught my attention is that English and the North American region are not the biggest draw any more. These topics have tilted to a much more south east Asia and Indonesian is by far the most popular language choice.
So it is time to look at the translation plugins and get my information available in other languages if I want to get as much traffic as possible.
The other big thing that I know from playing with some of the various language translators is that I need to be aware of using slang that won’t translate well.
The latter is probably a good thing to be aware of even if you are not using translation software as some terms mean totally different things in the US, Great Britain and Australia even though all are “English”.
Testing the Global Translator plugin but if anyone has a good resource for translating pages would love to hear from you.
Take advantage of trends for all of your blog topics as it is a great tool for bloggers and you may be surprised at what you find out.
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.
Last time I discussed signing up for Webmaster Tools now it is time to look at how you can use what you are learning to do better with your blogging efforts.
You should be checking the results regularly. For me that is usually once or twice a week. Now let’s look at the first item in the dashboard, the top search queries. You can see the list from this morning for this site below.
Not surprisingly the first item is google webmaster as that was the topic of the last 2 posts I did. That is a new entry in the top queries and a new topic I have started addressing here.
Because I am doing a series on that topic this will probably stay in the list for the next week or so. Google likes fresh content and your newest items will usually rank higher but drop as time goes by.
3 of the top 10 are on this topic in a few different variations. Without checking the competition on these keywords I would expect that as I continue to do this series that it will move from the top of page 2 onto page 1.
The other new topic I addressed in the last week was Tweet Traffic Rush (a great way to generate additional; traffic through adding the widget to your pages).
These 2 topics were over half of my top 10. The other 2 topics listed there have been there for quite some time. The #2 item wordpress user levels is from a post that is over a year old and has been generating traffic since then.
Flex squeeze which is the other item listed in the top 10 is another post that is almost a year old but still doing well.
This top 10 gives you an idea of what is working right now but the real gold comes when you click the more button at the bottom of the top search queries. That will show you much more usable information.
Next time I will discuss that information in more detail so make sure you have signed up for the update list or added the rss feed here to your favorite 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.
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