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Internet Marketing Course – 4 Recommended Plugins for WordPress Blogs

By on June 19, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Internet Marketing Course – 4 Recommended Plugins for WordPress Blogs

WordPress is probably the best interface for anyone who wants to setup a blog style website but has little or no HTML coding knowledge. I had to write HTML codes for websites generation when I was in college. When WordPress was born, it is heaven to many. I personally believe that WordPress was one of the key reasons to an explosion of websites launches over the past decade.

The following are essential WordPress Plugins for anyone who wants to monetize a website, especially one with a blog style.

1. Akismet

Most Blog style websites have a comment box at the bottom of every post that allows the readers to leave their feedback or comments. These comments are great for SEO traffic. However, the comment box is also a magnet for spam.

Akismet is a Plugin that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam and allows you to review the comments before approving it. To activate Akismet you will need a WordPress.com API key which is free for personal websites use.

Although Akismet is a good tool, you will want to check your comments folder regularly because some good comments may actually get filtered out. This plugin works like a computer anti-spam software that automatically put junk mails into your junk box. If you know how it works, it is not perfect. But this is not to say that you don’t need an anti-spam software.

2. Social BookMarking Links Plugin

This plugin automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites! Furthermore, you can also send a link to your post via email, AIM, Facebook, Twitter and more. WordPress version 2.6 or above is required though.

When you integrate social bookmarking with your posts, visitors can bookmark your web page with their social bookmarking accounts and that creates great backlinks for you that are well-liked by Search Engines.

3. Google Sitemaps Plugin

Google sitemaps creates a compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom created ones. What’s cool about this plugin is that every time you create or edit a post, your sitemap gets updated automatically and all the major search engines that support the sitemap protocol such as ASK.com, Google, Bing and Yahoo are notified about the update.

This simply means your blog pages will be more SEO friendly.

4. Google Adsense

This plugin provides a very easy way to generate revenue from your blog using Google AdSense. It is a very simple and yet almost maintenance free way of generating passive income from your blog. After you install and activate the plugin, go to the widgets under appearance and then add the AdSense tool to the sidebar or any where you like on your blog.

Before you install this plugin, please ensure that you have an approved AdSense account from Google, which may be a painful process for some because Google mercilessly rejects your application if it thinks you are generating junk sites.

For more WordPress tutorial and SEO tools, check out Adam Short’s Niche Profit Programs which offers countless video tutorials for the serious Internet Marketers in mind.

Get Educated. Market Smart!

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My Top 7 WordPress Plugins

By on January 17, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

My Top 7 WordPress Plugins

WordPress is just so popular not because it’s free (sure, that’s one reason) but because it is so robust and has so much functionality. WordPress plugins allow you to do just about anything with your blog! Below is a list of my 7 top WordPress plugins, what they do, and why you need them. While there are some plugins you need to pay for, all of these plugins are totally free.

1. Advertising Manager Advertising Manager allows you to easily monetize your blog by placing contextual ads from different advertising networks. Some of these networks include Google AdSense, Yahoo!PN, adBrite and Commission Junction.

2. Akismet Spam comments are a BIG problem. The reason for this is because there are clever people that misuse their programming skills to come up with ways to spider the Internet for blogs and leave comments on them automatically. One of my blogs gets over 50 spam comments every single day! Having to wade through these spam comments in search for the good ones would be a huge waste of time. Fortunately, Akismet will automatically trash the spam comments for you.

3. All in One SEO Pack If you could only have one plugin, this would be it. All in One SEO Pack helps you to make your blog SEO-friendly. Why would you want to do that? The more the search engines (e.g. Google) like your blog, the better you’ll rank and the more free, targeted traffic you’ll get.

4. DoFollow There are two types of links; dofollow and nofollow. Google will not credit nofollow backlinks when ranking a website. WordPress comments links are, by default, set up as nofollow links. The DoFollow plugin changes the comments links attribute to dofollow thus encouraging more visitors to leave comments on your blog.

5. Facebook Like The more you can integrate your blog with Facebook, the better. This plugin puts a Facebook ‘like’ button on every post and when visitors ‘like’ your posts, their Facebook friends will see it and you’ll get more, free traffic! Facebook traffic can be very viral. This is a powerful plugin that you definitely want to have on your blog.

6. Google XML Sitemaps This plugin auto-generates a sitemap for your blog and keeps it up to date. Google loves sitemaps.

7. Pretty Link Lite If you need to shorten a long link (to make it look prettier) or if you have an affiliate link you want to hide, this is the plugin for you.

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5 Must Have WordPress Plugins – Are You Missing One

By on January 11, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

5 Must Have WordPress Plugins – Are You Missing One? WordPress is arguably the most used CMS (Content Management System) online. It is partly due to its flexibility as a blog platform, and partly due to the large number of plugins and themes made by its large community of users. However, this huge choice of plugins can easily confuse a new user. Therefore, for those of you who are unsure which plugins to use, here’s a list of the top 5 must use WordPress plugins: 1. Akismet – Akismet is pre-bundled when you install WordPress. It is made by the same company that makes WordPress. Akismet is a spam blocking plugin that works very efficiently to block out spam comments. If you run a large blog, you really need this plugin. The amount of spam doing the rounds online is tremendous. If you were to moderate these comments one by one, you would have to spend hours maintaining your blog. Akismet makes the whole process automatic and saves you countless hours of effort. 2. All in One SEO – What good is a blog if no one reads it? With All in One SEO plugin, all your in-site SEO needs will be taken care of automatically. It will create meta tags, meta descriptions, etc. on its own. If you want your blog to be found by Google or other search engines, this is a must-have plugin. 3. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin automatically creates a sitemap of your blog to aid Google’s spiders in indexing it. Sitemaps are just what you think they mean: a map of your site. They can make it much easier for Google to find and index your site, so this plugin is a must have, regardless of the size of your blog. 4. One Click Plugin Updater – If you’re like me, you probably hate to update your plugins one-by-one. Most plugins have several updates a month, and updating them can be a real pain. One Click Plugin Updater simplifies the whole process by giving you the option to update all your plugins with a single click. A huge timesaver if you find yourself using too many plugins. 5. WordPress Database Backup – You never know when some unfortunate accident may befall your blog. Once, one very large blog of mine got hacked and consequently, I lost my entire database. I didn’t have a backup database, so I had to create everything from scratch (something that took me over 100 hours). With WordPress Database Backup, you can get it to make automatic backups and mail it to you on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. So there you have it: 5 plugins that are essential to any WordPress installation!

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9 Great WordPress Plugins For Your WordPress Blog

By on September 15, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

9 Great WordPress Plugins For Your WordPress Blog

WordPress itself is a great platform to run your own blogs but WordPress plugins make it a lot easier to control spam comments, SEO, check for broken links, place revenue generating ads and to back up your WordPress database to name a few. Without these plugins you would require technical expertise way beyond the average blogger, not to mention the time plugins save in doing things like creating a “”Contact Us”” page and sorting out all those spam blog comments.

Here are the 9 plugins that I now use on all my blogs.

Akismet is a popular plugin that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “”Comments.”” Without such a plugin your blog could easily become full of undesirable comments that you certainly do not want your readers to read.

All in One SEO Pack is Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. You can use this plugin to tweak the default options for title, description, keywords and duplicate content.

Broken Link Checker checks your posts for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found. There is nothing worse getting traffic to your blog and then sending them to a web page that no longer exists. Without this plugin it would takes quite some time to regularly check all the links on all your blog posts and pages.

Google AdSense, Chitika and Kontera plugins allow you to monetize your blog and make an income from an information blog.

Contact Form 7 allows you to create a “”Contact Us”” page with a form people can fill in for further information or questions about your products.

Google XML Site maps plugin will generate a special XML site map which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog. Another time saving plugin.

Pretty Link will shrink, track and share any URL on the Internet from your WordPress website. No more ugly affiliate links that you have to hide under hyper-linked text.

StatPress gives real time stats for your WordPress blog. This is my preference for displaying my blog stats.

WP-DBManager manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of the database. This is probably one of the most overlooked plugins for WordPress as a backup is only needed when your blog has been hacked or has failed due to technical issues. Relying on your hosting account for backups may not be a good as you think because blogs need to be backed up regularly as they are constantly changing with new posts being added regularly.

These are only a few of the many plugins available to use on your blogs. You need to consider the nature of your blog,the niche you are blogging in and other things like are you using you WordPress blog as a blog, a sales page or just a website?

You must also be aware that some plugins for WordPress can conflict with one another and cause problems with your blog. From my experience I have had I am yet to have a problem using the above combination of plugins but one must remember that plugins are always being updated and conflicts may arise with future updates.

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101 WordPress plugins for FREE

By on September 2, 2011 in Randy Roedl

www.facebook.com This video focuses on Akismet and All in One Webmaster plugins. Both excellant to help you with your spam issues and also getting out to the directories. For more help on Internet Marketing you can go to www.InternetBusiness4Newbies.com

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Top WordPress Plugins Overview Part 1

By on August 9, 2011 in Randy Roedl

gregguide.com Let’s talk about some of the top WordPress plugins. Addthis social bookmarking widget is a great social networking tool that allows your users to share your WebPages on sites like facebook and twitter. For you blogs advertising I would recommend that you go with Ad Injection, this advertising manager will allow you to post any type of ads on your site. It could be Google ads, click bank ads, commission junction ads or you own email forms from acajoom, phplist, aweber, icontact, or get response. Ad Injector also allows you to place these ads anywhere on your site. pcfix411.com

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5 Essential WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have

By on July 17, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

5 Essential WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have

WordPress is easily the best blogging platform on the internet. Its easy to use, yet powerful enough to run huge websites. Some of the top websites in the world run on WordPress, including sites like TechCrunch, WSJ Blogs, etc.

Its very easy to customize WordPress. There are a ton of themes from free to premium ones that can make your blog look like anything you desire. But more importantly, there are a host of free and paid plugins that you can use to customize your blog and make it easier to read.

Here are five WordPress plugins your blog shouldn’t exist without:

1. All in One SEO PluginThis is an essential plugin for all WordPress blogs. It automatically takes care of generating meta tags and keywords for your blog posts. Without this plugin, you would have a hard time ranking high in search engines.

2. Advertising ManagerIf you plan on monetizing your blog, then this plugin is a must have. You can insert your ads almost anywhere in your site’s template. Moreover, this plugin supports the Open X ad marketplace, which means that you can configure it to show only the highest CPM ads.

3. Add to AnySocial bookmarking is a great way to gain additonal eyeballs. With this plugin, your visitors can quickly add your blog post to the most popular social bookmarking directories in the world, or email it to friends.

4. AkismetThis is a plugin made by WordPress itself and is included in most installations automatically. It acts as a spam blocker for your blog. Akismet is highly effective at blocking and automatically deleting spam comments. An absolute essential, especially if you run a popular blog that might get a lot of spam comments.

5. Google XML SitemapsSitemaps make it easier for the Googlebot to go through your website. This plugin makes high quality sitemaps automatically that can be indexed by Google. A must have if you want to rank high in Google.

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How To Get A WordPress API Key For The Akismet WordPress Plugin

By on July 13, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How To Get A WordPress API Key For The Akismet WordPress Plugin

With the growing popularity of blogs and the ease to obtain links through comments on blogs, it didn’t take long for programmers to come up with automated tools to blast link packed spam comments to unsuspecting blogs.

Some just turn comments off for their blog but to me that eliminates one of the great features of making your blog interactive for your visitors. Comments can open discussion between the reader and the blogger. Your blog’s visitors can even subscribe to a post’s comments, getting notified of any new comments, keeping your readers coming back.

The WordPress plugin, Akismet checks comments posted on your blog posts against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.

To activate Akismet from your WordPress blog dashboard, click Plugins, scroll down and click Activate next to the WordPress Akismet plugin. After you do that you will see a box near the top of the dashboard that reads:

Akismet is not active. You must enter your WordPress.com API key for it to work.

Click the link in the message, and then the Akismet Configuration panel will open. You should then see this in the middle of the screen:

Please enter an API key. (Get your key.)

On the top of that page click the Sign Up tab, fill in your information and if you have a self-hosted blog choose the Just a username, please option.

Be sure to use a good email address in here to get your login information and WordPress API key, click the box to agree to legal junk and click next.

Check your email and click the confirmation link from WordPress to activate your account. You should then see a page that reads, “”Your account is now active!”” Click the login link within the text of that page and login.

You should now be at the WordPress.com site, if so click the dropdown box on the very top right of the page and choose “”Edit Profile””, now you are in the Global Dashboard.

Within the WordPress Global Dashboard you can now see your WordPress API key on the right side of the page. Oh, and by now you should have also got the API key in an email from WordPress also! But you should still edit your profile while you are in the Global Dashboard.

Now its time to place the API key in the Akismet WordPress plugin; go back into your WordPress blog dashboard, click the link on the Akismet WordPress plugin warning box near the top of the dashboard. Paste the WordPress API key in the box and click update options.

If the warning box is not visible check to see if Akismet is activated, click Plugins and look for the status of the plugin on the right. You will notice that all activated plugins are highlighted green. When Akismet is activated you can configure it by clicking Plugins, and look for the Akismet subpanel (white text in the dark blue bar) directly below and to the right of then main panel menu.

Keeping comment spam out while allowing your blog visitors to comment, will not only keep your blog clean but more interactive and help generate more traffic.

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