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How to Install WordPress Plugins Easily

By on November 24, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Install WordPress Plugins Easily

Most plugins can be found and installed easily. You do not have to leave your WordPress website because you can install most plugins quickly from your dashboard. The search for plugins is just as simple.

Where do I find Plugins?

Simply login to your WordPress dashboard. Scroll down to “”Plugins”” then select add new. In the new window that opens to the right there is a search box. You can also see a tag cloud of popular searches. Type in your term or select one of the words.

How do I select a Plugin?

Now there should be a list of plugins for you to choose from. If you know exactly which plugin you want check the name and the plugin author to make certain you have the right one. Otherwise you want to decide which plugin will be the best one.

What can I learn from this list?

Without clicking install there is a lot to learn from this list of plugins. You can see what the name of the plugin is. The average rating, however you do not know how many people rated that plugin. Then the description of the plugin. See if the description meets your particular needs. The plugin may be related to what you need not do what you need. If you still like the plugin at this point click install.

Does it pass the Installation Screen?

A Install pop-up screen will appear. This will tell you even more about the plugin. Here you can read more about the description. To the right you can see when it was last updated. This is in days. Next you can see if it is compatible with your version of WordPress. If the version is fairly current then even if it does not list your version it will probably work. You can also see how many people download it and how many people rated it. This is good because one person giving it a 5 means less than 100 people rating it a 4.5.

Still not certain about this WordPress Plugin?

Look towards the top of the pop up. You will see description, which is what you are looking at. Click Installation, Screenshots, and other tabs. These tabs change depending on if it has information or not. Visit the Plugin Site which is on the description tab. Then visit the WordPress plugin page. Hopefully this will get you enough information.

What about installation?

If you are satisfied enough, try the plugin. Just click install, then activate. Remember you can try a plugin and if you do not like it uninstall it. Simply click installed under the plugin tab. Scroll down the list of plugins to the one you want. Then click the word deactivate. If you do not plan on using it further, click delete next. But most plugins are free, and easy to deactivate. So when you need a new one, try it, you might like it

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How to Install a New WordPress Theme With FileZilla and Cpanel

By on November 16, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Install a New WordPress Theme With FileZilla and Cpanel

How to Install a New WordPress Theme with FileZilla and Cpanel.

It’s Great that you’ve installed your new WordPress software in your domain. But you need to change the generic wordpress themes with customized theme to make your blog beautiful and full of different functional capabilities.

You can install your new wordpress theme with Filezilla which is recommended or the Cpanel which is the more tedious part. Now lets begin;

Option 1:How to install your New WordPress theme with FileZilla

* Download your WordPress Theme and Unzip. Save in a location on your computer.

* First, download the FTP which will be FileZilla and run. To access your web files, log in the FTP with your webhost address, your username, and password. The default Port connection is 21 but you can leave it empty. Then connect.

* After successfully connecting, you will be able to see the files on y our computer in the left window and your webhost root document files in the Remote site which is on the right.

* Locate your saved unzipped WordPress Theme.

* Go over to the remote server on the right of the FTP and open the public_html folder, which contains your root document files. If you have installed your new wordpress theme on your domain, then you would see the wordpress files and folders and also the “”theme”” folder where the new wordpress theme should go.

* Drag the new unzipped wordpress folder to the theme folder. The file transfer then starts.

* After completing the file transfer, head over to your wordpress dashboard by logging in to your wordpress admin site with your username and password you provided when installing your wordpress software. Go over to Design, then over to Theme and search for your New installed theme and activate. It should then be visible on your blog. If you are using older versions of wordpress you can activate your new installed theme by going to Presentation and then Theme.

* You finished a successful WordPress Installation.

Option 2:How to Install your New WordPress Theme with Cpanel.

This is one tedious task and much more stressful when you have a wordpress theme with a lot of folders and files. I would recommend you stick with the FTP option which will transfer your files faster, save you a great deal of time and does much of the job for you. If you want to learn how to use Cpanel, heres how you do it.

* Log in to your Cpanel through Cpanel webhost domain with your webhost username and password. On your Cpanel Frontpage click on File Manager or Legacy File Manager.

* Open the public_html folder by clicking the folder icon by the side and not on the public_html text itself. Doing this will show all the files and folders in the public_html and clicking the public_html text will only show you the folder properties.

* Locate the wp_content folder and open through the icon folder. Then open the Theme Folder. This is where you upload all the new wordpress theme and folders.You will be installing the wordpress theme they way the files and folders are arranged in your computer.

* Create a New Folder by clicking on the “”create a new folder”” link at the top of the folders’ display. Then create the overall theme folder with the theme name. Then open the theme folder by clicking on the folder icon. Repeat the same process with all the folders in the WordPress Theme on your computer.

* You will have to install the files in the respective folders the way it is on your computer. All you have to do is clicking “”upload files”” when you are in the Folder that contains the files originally the way it is on your computer. On the upload page, click on browse and search for the files, then upload. Remember, clicking on the file name after upload will show you the edit properties for the file and you can change the File permissions CHMOD. Repeat this sequence for all Folders that contains files the way it is on your computer.

You’ll see that what you’ve been doing is transferring the files from the computer in the hierarchical manner into your web host the way they originally are. You see that it’s more tedious unlike Filezilla that transfers the Full WordPress themes and arranges the folders and files it contains automatically.

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For more advanced WordPress users

By on November 5, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, article directory, article plugin, article themes, Blog Business, Blog Platform, Blog Posting, blogging, Blogs, Conversion, Domains, Free Reports, Google Adsense, Membership sites, Mobil Blogging, New Blogging, SEO, Themes, Traffic, Web Design, Websites, widgets, wordpress, World Internet Summit, Wp Headers, Wp Themes, Youtube Video

For more advanced WordPress users who are looking for plugins to upgrade to, here are some nifty suggestions. Imagine a blog reader finding a useful link on your blog. Then imagine the reader clicking on the link only to find out that the link is broken. To avoid such frustrations, have this broken link checker installed on your blog. It helps you keep on top of things by checking your posts in the background while your WordPress administration page is open. It will then send you a notification on the Dashboard should a problem be found. It also checks outgoing and incoming links and you can time the intervals these checks are carried out.
If you have been blogging for a long time, nothing matters more than knowing that your posts are secure and accessible in the event of a fault. Backup your database on WordPress by using this plugin. It is compatible especially for Windows users.

Hard to deal with your codes on the blog? There are plugins that easily colorizes your codes making it standout and easy to read. The plugins are usually free of server dependency and supports multiple languages such as ; C & C++, C#, Delphi, CSS, JAVA, JS (Java Script) and more. For example, the Hex Hub HTML Color Codes and the Code Markup.
You have a RSS feed on your blog, now add to it! The Feedfooter is a handy plugin that puts an extra footer part on your RSS feed. You could place a greeting, an advertisement link or a personalized note to readers. It supports HTML enabling the embedding of banners right on the RSS feed. With 10 spots, you could place 10 different footers which rotate throughout your blog.
This cool plugin is a must have for your blog. The clicks made on your blog by readers are color coded with the most clicked on part turning red. It helps you easily track the most strategic locations for banners and ads and to know which links and advertisements are working and which are not. Having cool looking aesthetics does not hurt as well.
If you are a regular poster, the TinyMCE plugin is a nice WordPress plugin that allows you to change between a multitude of design choices to your blog post. This plugin is a timesaver with many shortcuts as well as a drag and drop option. In addition, linking, imagine and embedding videos are fast and easy.

This plugin brings your blog to new levels. It shows relevant posts and blogs when reader click on it. With high profile websites such as the CNN using this plugin, your blog could be linked to this international site should their news article be related to your blog post.

Just when you think you have seen it all, there are more plugins out there which can make your blog faster, cleaner and just more user friendly – increasing your traffic – which is the whole point of your blog in the beginning.

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WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers1

By on October 5, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers

WordPress is an open source web publishing platform used by millions of people around the world. It’s known to be relatively easy for a beginner to learn and start creating content for their blogs or websites.

However, there are few features that if not setup correctly, can do your site more harm than good. All the steps below assume that you are logged into your WordPress Dashboard (administration area).

The WordPress Tagline

The default WordPress tagline is “”Just another WordPress blog””. This acts as a subtitle for your blog or website and is meant to be descriptive of your content. Leaving this default text in the tagline text box means that your visitors and search engines will see this. It sure isn’t descriptive of what your site is really about is it?

You can easily replace this tagline with your own by going to:

Settings–>General–>Tagline

(make sure to save your changes)

Membership and User Role Rules

You have the ability to add additional users to your blog or website for the purpose of adding content or submitting articles for review. There two settings here:

Settings–>General–>Membership

Settings–>General–>New User Default Role

Be careful if you decide to let anyone register for your site. Spammers love it when this option is ticked without having hardened security measures in place first.

You will also want to choose the default role for new users wisely. WordPress allows five user roles:

Administrator
Editor
Contributor
Author
Subscriber

Each user role is allowed to access different administration areas of your WordPress installation. This can be a powerful way to organize your users but can also be potentially disasterous if one of those users accidentally deactivates a plugin or theme that your site depends on.

You can always add additional users manually without the need to open registration to the public by going to:

Users–>Add New

Set the Correct Timezone

99% of WordPress websites I’m brought in to help with do not have the timezone correctly set to match the location of the owner. The time is detected automatically, and you would think this would be OK, but it can cause a usability issue with your users.

Why? Imagine I live in California and my site offers news and updates about the Stock Market or Wall Street. Further imagine that I schedule an article to post at a specific time in order to target either my night owl readers or the early risers about a specific stock tip.

Well, if I’m in California and I schedule my article to post at 5:00am what happens if I didn’t set my timezone to match my location? You guessed it, that article would be published based on whatever timezone is set by default. This would not position my site as having “”breaking news”” for my target market.

What timezone is set by default? The timezone that gets chosen is directly based upon the timezone that is set on the server computer at your hosting company. I host some of my websites with West Coast based hosting companies but I live on the East Coast…therefore I need to make sure to set my timezone to Eastern Standard Time instead Pacific Standard Time.

(scheduling your article post times is a built-in feature of WordPress by the way)

Set Update Services

When you publish a new content WordPress provides a way for you to let other people now you’ve updated your site. Go here:

Writing–>Update Services

You’ll see that there is an text input box with one web address inside it. That address connects your website with the Ping-O-Matic search engine update service. Every time you add something new, your site tells Ping-O-Matic and Ping-O-Matic tells various search services.

You can add more update services to this list so you can be assured that any new content you create is automatically being distributed and indexed by a variety of update services. You can view a long list here.

Creating Human Readable URLs

When you create a page or blog post in WordPress, it is given a unique ID for use in the programming code and database. Because of this, when you view a page or post url in your browser address bar, you see something similar to this on the end of your web address:?p=123

The code at the end of that url address above is referencing the page/post ID of 123. That’s not very readable or descriptive to a person is it? Additionally that address contains absolutely no keywords that could be utilized by search engines to help them return relevant results to your content. Luckily, you can change how these look and make them much better.

Go to: Settings–>Permalinks

You will see that you have four choices of different url structures to choose from:

Default
Day and name
Month and name
Numeric
Custom Structure

I use different Custom Structures based on the needs of particular websites and I would recommend doing the same. You can learn more about Custom Permalink Structures here.

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How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

By on September 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

It’s a nightmare scenario. You go to your website only to find a nasty message from a hacker bragging about hacking your site. And nothing else. As far as you can tell your content is gone and you can’t even find a way to log into your WordPress dashboard.

Would your business survive your website being shut down, even temporarily?

It Happens

That’s exactly the situation that my friend of mine found herself in recently.

Fortunately we were able to help her out, rescue (most of) her files and get her back up and running relatively quickly. But that isn’t always the case.

Turns out she could have done some things to better protect herself. Fortunately she learned her lesson well and she’s in much better shape today than she was before the attack.

Have You Really Been Hacked?

A lot of times people come to me saying, “”My site’s been hacked,”” when it really hasn’t. With WordPress sometimes plugin conflicts can cause issues that seem to the user like a hacker has messed with something. This is most common when upgrading to a new version of WordPress if a plugin hasn’t been made compatible with the new version yet.

While that can cause your site to crash, it’s not caused by hackers.

Not only that, but most of the sites I’ve seen that have been hacked weren’t just taken down by them. Most of the malicious hacks I’ve seen involved injecting some code into the site, usually with the end goal to redirect site traffic to some other website.

The Symptoms

Without going into the gory details, my friend’s case was a little different. Her site actually showed an all white screen with an error message along the lines that a plugin conflict might produce and the hacker just wanted to crash her site. Turns out he was into stealing something else.

When I did some troubleshooting I was able to get her site back up and running in fairly short order. In her words:

I must add here, that it only took Chris 45 minutes to decipher and fix what was a rather sophisticated hack!

While I’d never promise to be able to recover a hacked site that quickly, I do have a good track record recovering hacked WordPress sites.

Protecting Yourself

Here are some things you can do to minimize the chances you’ll end up getting hacked and maximize the chances to fully recover quickly should your site crash (for whatever reason).

1. Use Strong Passwords.

I honestly think this was my friend’s biggest mistake. Again in her words,

This is what got me – I just used numbers and letters and the password was – well – kinda obvious.

Make your passwords not only hard to guess, but make them more difficult for sophisticated hackers to break as well. Randomly mix in special characters (found on the number keys with the shift button) as well as numbers and upper and lower case letters. Strong passwords make a huge difference.

Both WordPress and cPanel will tell you how strong your password is. Stronger passwords offer better protection.

The trouble is, having strong passwords also makes them harder to type in. That’s why I use 1Password to manage my passwords on my Macs. I can use really strong passwords and I don’t have to remember them or type them in. 1Password will auto fill web forms for me. It’s the best of both worlds: good security & user friendly.

2. Keep Your WordPress Updated.

One of the most common ways WordPress websites get hacked is because their owners don’t keep their software up to date. What happens is that older versions of WordPress can have known security weaknesses. These weaknesses are fixed by newer releases of the software.

But if you don’t update your software, you leave yourself exposed.

This also holds true with plugins and themes. Besides, the newer versions of WordPress make keeping everything up to date remarkably easy. There’s not much of an excuse to keep you from updating things.

3. Backup Regularly and Often.

A good backup can cover for a ton of other issues by making it possible to revert back to how things were before your site crashed. When it comes to WordPress you need to back up your

Database
Theme Files
Plugins
Media Uploads

There are several different plugins and services to handle backups of your WordPress site.

But the point is backup early and backup often!

Bottom Line

I don’t believe any site is completely “”hack proof.”” A determined hacker with enough resources can break into most anything. Just watch an episode of NCIS!

But if you do these three things you will greatly reduce your risk of being hacked and make it much easier to recover if you do run into a problem.

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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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How to Install a WordPress Theme

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

How to Install a WordPress Theme

One of the cool features of using a self-hosted WordPress website is the ability to very quickly and easily change the layout of your site. There are tens of thousands of free WordPress themes available to choose from. Many can be found on the WordPress website in the Theme Directory and many more can be found on various WordPress related sites as well. A quick Google for “”free WordPress themes”” will present you with all the themes you could possible want to choose from. In addition there are thousands of Premium (aka you pay for them) as well that offer even more advanced functionality and layouts for specific website types.

Installing a new theme is amazingly easy. From within your WordPress Administrative Dashboard, on the left hand side, click on “”Appearance”” and then on “”Themes.”” On this page you’ll see the current theme you have installed. If you are looking at a brand new WordPress install you’ll probably just see the standard default theme. At the top of this page you’ll see two tabs; one for “”Manage Themes”” and another for “”Install Themes.”” You guessed it – click on the “”Install Themes”” tab.

What you’ll see is a search page that lets you quickly search through all the free WordPress themes currently on the WordPress website. Choose a few parameters, such as color, width, number of columns or click on one of the quick tags like Featured or Newest. You’ll see the themes that match your search displayed for you with links for “”Install”” and “”Preview”” at the bottom of each thumbnail.

The Preview feature is pretty neat as it allows you to see how the new theme will look on your website. Keep in mind, however, that once in a while things will look a bit messed up. The new theme your are previewing many have different settings and parameters than you current theme so some things may look a bit out of place at first and require a bit of massaging.

Once you’ve found a theme you like simply click on the “”Install”” link and the theme will be installed into your site. You can then activate the theme to make it live online. Easy, right?

In the case you find a theme on a 3rd party website, not on the WordPress Theme Directory, you will simply need to download the file. Typically you’ll download the file in.zip format and need to extract it (right click, extract all). Once it’s extracted use a FTP program like Filezilla to upload the new theme files to your website. You’ll need to place the folder containing the new files into the wp-content/theme folder. Then visit your admin panel and activate the theme. Easy enough!

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