Tag Archives | People

A Detailed Look at Some of the Most Popular WordPress Plugins

A Detailed Look at Some of the Most Popular WordPress Plugins

One of the most popular WordPress plugins being downloaded on a daily basis is WordPress.com Stats, in fact at the time of writing it has been downloaded more than 37,000 times. To be able to use this WordPress plugin you will need to be running WordPress version 2.1 or higher. It is also compatible up to 2.7 beta.

WordPress.com Stats offers you a really simple way of retrieving data. I sometimes find that the more complex stat systems such as Google analytics or mint provide far too much information which can be confusing especially if you are new to blogging.

Installation is extremely easy, and is done in 4 steps

1. First you will need to upload stats.php to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.2. Then activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.3. It will then ask you to enter your WordPress.com API key, you will need to do this to enable it to work.4. After a few minutes your stats will show.

Once installed you can view the stats in less than 20 minutes. It also has the added function of not including the hits of logged on users, which is especially handy if you are constantly updating and adding new posts.

This WordPress plugin will provide you with valuable information such as letting you know which pages and posts are the most popular, what people are clicking on and where your traffic is coming from. The way the information is viewed is very simple and easy to understand.

You can use the plugin on either a hosted or unhosted accounts and because all the data collection and processing is not done on your server it does not effect the load on your hosting account making it one of the fastest stats systems you can use.

Another of the most popular WordPress plugins is Google XML sitemaps. Over 1000 people per day are adding this plugin to their websites and blogs and the main advantage is because as you update or create a post the sitemap is automatically updated and the new information is passed to all major search engines such as Google, YAHOO, MSN and ASK.

You will need to be running WordPress 2.1 or higher to be able to install it and also have access to an ftp programme in order to create the files needed to install the software.

Adding WordPress plugins to your blog will not only give you access to a lot more information, these plugins are designed to make your website more pleasing to the eye and far more user friendly taking it to the next level.

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What-are-article-directories

What are article directories?

Article directories are sites that will allow you to publish articles online. But why should we write articles and publish in article directories rather than publishing it in our own sites? It’s because the article directories would already be getting lots of traffic and hence if we publish our article in these sites, then our article will be seen by many with much less efforts. But what will we be getting when others see our article? There are many advantages like the ones described below.

For each article that we publish in article sites like ezinearitlcles, we’ll be allowed to put about 3 links in them. And through these links we can make others to visit our site. Not just that, these links will be helping us to get some quality link juice as well. Yup, this is one of the ways to increase backlinks and at the same time search engine ranking of our sites. After you write an article, simply put a link or two to your sites at the end of the article. Yup, its that simple.

This is regarded as one of the easiest way to build backlinks to your sites. Not just that, you’ll be getting free traffic as well. Famous article directories like ezinearticles are viewed daily by millions of people. Most of them are webmasters looking to publish articles in their site. Yup, it’s allowed to copy the articles published in article directories to our sites. But we when do it, we should copy the links as well – that are put at the end of the articles by the publisher of the article. This way, people who publish articles are guaranteed that, if someone is using their articles in their sites, they’ll be getting backlinks from their sites as well. But people won’t be copying crap articles to their site. So, write quality articles and publish them in article directories. This way, you’ll getting a lot of one way, quality backlinks and traffic, free to your sites.

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Monetizing your Blog

Monetizing your Blog

After you have set-up your wordpress blog and begun getting some traffic to your blog from your link building and from the search engines you can begin monetizing your blog. You shouldn’t start monetizing your blog too early because it will turn some people off from your blog. Also make sure that you don’t make each post a big advertisement for some product or advertisement because your readers won’t enjoy that too much. You need to figure out the perfect combination of ads to make money off of your blog while keeping your readers happy.

Pay-Per-Click Ads

Google Adsense is the biggest ad network for bloggers and you’ll be best off using them for your pay per click ads. You simply make some pay per click ads to the size you need them in the Adsense admin section and implement them into your blog. The size of the ads will make a big difference so make sure you don’t try adding too big of ads into your blog. You should try to implement the ads into your blog so that they fit right into the content as it will draw in more clicks.

Affiliate Leads

Many of the affiliate networks offer leads that you can add to your blog and what this means is simply that you send your readers to a lead page where they sign-up for something free. Leads don’t pay that much when there free, but some of the leads which cost money will pay a lot of money. You’ll also find that you have better luck trying to get people to join leads then buy products.

Affiliate Products

All affiliate networks have products that you can promote and you can either add links or banners to your blog to promote these products. It’s best to generally write a review as a blog post to promote the product this way it won’t interfere with your blog. You will be paid on a commission basis for the products you sell ranging anywhere from 5-75%.

Link & Banner Sales

There are lots of webmasters and businesses that will buy links and banners from blogs with traffic and you can make lots of money with ads. You can choose to find the people privately on webmaster forums or you could advertise your blog in some of the networks out there that allow you to advertise your blog in hopes of selling links and banners. Many of the networks work great and will find you advertisers quickly, it’s best if your blog is niched based though when looking for private ad sales.

There are lots of ways you can monetize your blog as you can see, and I haven’t touched all of the methods either. I’ve gone through the most popular methods, but there are some other things that can make you money depending on your website niche. I’d recommend starting out with these monetization methods first so that you can make some money before moving onto other areas. Also remember that you should stay with the same networks until you reach minimum payouts so that you don’t have money sitting in a bunch of networks that you can’t withdraw. It’s a rookie mistake that many webmasters make and I don’t want to see you waiting months for your first check.

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StudioPress WordPress Themes Review And StudioPress Discount Code

StudioPress WordPress Themes Review And StudioPress Discount Code

More and more people use WordPress these days, because WordPress is free and there are a lot free and premium themes and plugins. Some of us love free WordPress themes, but most of time we can not find quality themes. So I suggest you use premium WordPress themes and you can get full support from the designers.

StudioPress is a leading WordPress theme provider; the designer Brain is famous in this area. If you are looking for high quality professional premium tempaltes, you can find your favorite WordPress themes on StudioPress. With Brian Gardner as the founder, StudioPress is being managed by a group of six professional designers, graphic artists, and WordPress experts.

There are more than 25 professional premium WordPress skins out there, including news themes, magazine themes, gallery skins, company templates, real estate themes and more. You can find your favorite theme here.

The price of these quality WordPress themes is affordable. Similarly important is the pricing of the themes offered by StudioPress; generally they are affordable at $59.95 per theme. On top of that, they also offer a Pro-Plus All-Theme package for $249.95 which you can gain access to all themes offered by StudioPress including the newly launched skins. With the Pro Plus All-Theme package, you are entitled to receive support and updates for all current and future StudioPress themes! You can use StudioPress coupon code to save.

StudioPress offers theme aid by means of their assist forum where you may ask any questions and they shall be answered by helpful members and supportive staff. On the negative side, no email assist is available and your issues will have to be posted within the forum in which others can address it. Hence, there may be no privacy on your component when it comes to asking for help. Nonetheless, this is not a massive issue due to the fact the critical thing is that you will get the assistance that you will need either from other members or the staff. When it comes to the use of the selected layouts for your web page, there is assistance and detailed concept tutorial provided for the members so that you can make integration of the concept towards the web site smooth and less difficult.

StudioPress WordPress themes are easy to use. Their layouts are fully Search engine optimized by 1 of the top SEO experts, Joost de Valk. StudioPress Themes can assist your blog rank much much better inside the Google by following StudioPress Tutorials and recommendations you’re able to obtain even higher search engine placement outcomes.

Good for SEO. StudioPress WordPress Themes are fully Search engine optimized by 1 of the top SEO professionals, Joost de Valk. StudioPress Themes can assist your blog rank much better inside the Google by following StudioPress Tutorials and recommendations you are able to achieve even higher search engine placement results.

To conclude the StudioPress review, the overall assessment of this premium WordPress subject provider is superb and highly recommended, having wide range of expertly developed SEO themes to offer to its prospects and consumers.

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Follow people on Twitter

Follow people on Twitter

Twitter one of the newer social networking websites out there; it’s a fun place to spend some time just looking around. A quick and free sign up will have you hopping around looking at other people on Twitter. You can also add your friends by using the email invite button, or the email match to see if some of your contacts are already on Twitter.

One of the coolest things about Twitter is the fact that you can look for others by name, or you can look at the tab that says “suggested matches”. These are the people Twitter thinks you should find interesting. Plus there seems to be several celebrities that are on this site too. A fun thing to do is to look up a celebrity and see who they are following, and who’s following them. It’s a quick way to add up people you want to follow at times. Someone you may not have thought of that is famous, and they are following all you do is go to the next pages and follow that other person too.

People will add you to who they are following too. It’s really neat to see that people you don’t even know would like to follow what’s going on with you. Maybe you write a blog that they find interesting, or some other reason. But really who cares as long as they don’t turn out to be a stalker, to get a message saying someone is following you is just a good feeling.

You can also pull up different topics, say you love “botany”, pull up the word and see if there might be others who are into botany. Follow them and perhaps you will learn more about the topic. Or you can find a friend who you can talk to about a subject that interests you both.

As with anything on the internet there may be some things that are inappropriate for younger kids. So you may want to just check if you son or daughter are on Twitter what they are following. Make sure that you tell them not too discuss any personal information with others either, but that’s on all kinds of websites you just need to be careful.

Following people on Twitter is so easy to do, once you find a person who you’d like to keep track of, just click on the follow button placed right below their picture or icon. Find some lifelong friends that you may never have met had it not been for Twitter. Or perhaps you’re a person who is shy in social settings. This is a way that you won’t need to go out of your house to meet someone. No more feeling awkward as your not sure what to say. Online it’s a lot easier to talk, your not face to face with someone, your not wondering if there is food in your teeth, or how you look. Try out Twitter to see if you can meet some great friends.

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Tips When Writing Your Blog Posts

Tips When Writing Your Blog Posts

When you blog you need good content to make it profitable and in order to make good content you should make sure that you know a lot on the topic of your blog. Don’t choose a blog topic that you won’t be able to write articles about daily as then you might run into problems. You need a topic where you can blog about it for months on end without needing to recover topics. Once you’ve decided on a good topic that you will be able to write on then you should follow these tips to ensure you’re writing good content.

You should always use heading in your posts and make them bold so they stand out. Headings catch the attention of your readers and work well when you need to break up a big post so that it’s readable. You should also try writing your posts in point form as much as you can because then you will ensure that more people are reading your posts. It’s very intimidating seeing a big block of content and often people won’t read it so instead break your articles into point form lists.

The last thing you should do is make sure you use pictures in all of your posts. You should try using at least one picture in your post so that it livens up the page a little bit and breaks the content up. Try inserting the picture so it’s in the content. People enjoy pictures in posts so to retain your blog readership you should make sure that you’re writing your blog posts with pictures. Some posts won’t require pictures though, and you can decide on that. Basically if you can’t find a picture that relates to the content then you don’t need to add a picture, this rare but it happens so some posts on your blog won’t have pictures.

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How to Protect Your WordPress Website From Hackers

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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