Archive | affiliate marketing

Obtaining your Blogs Initial Traffic

Obtaining your Blogs Initial Traffic

When you first start adding content onto your blog you probably won’t have much if any traffic and I’m sure you’re dying to get some visitors. In this part of the guide we’re going to look at how you can get some initial traffic to your blog. Search engine traffic is by far the most valuable traffic to obtain, but it takes time and work to get this traffic so you need alternative ways to obtain traffic in the beginning.

Once you have your first twenty posts on your blog you should spend a day or two working on building links to your blog homepage and article pages. You should first work on submitting the pages to the many social bookmarking sites out there, you should choose at a minimum five websites to submit your pages to and make sure they get good traffic before submitting.

After you’re done submitting your pages to some social bookmarking websites spend some time writing a few articles on the topic of your blog. You could also just rewrite some of the posts you’ve made on your blog, it’s totally up to you. The reason you need some unique articles is so that you can submit them into article directories. EzineArticles is by far the most popular article directory and I would recommend sticking with this directory for the first couple months. Article directories will allow you to place 2-3 links in each article in the author resource box. You can gain a lot of valuable links from writing and submitting articles into directories so don’t ever stop working on adding more to your profile.

While you’re waiting for some of your articles to be approved in the article directories you can work on submitting your blog into directories. All you need to do is submit your homepage into these directories for the most part, some will allow deeplinks and I would recommend submitting deep links when you have the option.

You should also spend at least an hour or so a day reading other blogs in your niche. Although there your competition you can gain valuable links from their blogs by commenting on them. The search engines love relevant links and you can get a lot of them from blog commenting. You can also get traffic from people clicking your links on other blogs which happens fairly often.

As you can see there are plenty of ways you can obtain traffic while you wait for search engine rankings to kick in. All of these methods also help your search engine rankings and will assist you with getting ranked. Articles submissions are very important and make sure you never stop submitting articles for the life of your blog. They will help you rank in the search engines for tons of keywords and once you have enough search engine traffic coming in then you won’t need to work as hard on promotion and marketing.

In the beginning of your blog you’ll need to do everything you can to gain traffic though. Spend as much time as you can the first few months building content and links to your blog as this will directly reflect your traffic. If you write valuable content and have an appealing blog then some of the traffic you build will turn into return visitors which are the goal. Not everyone will become a return visitor to your blog, but the more that do the better. Always make sure that you continue writing content for your blog and never stop because for the most part once the content stops the traffic comes to a halt.

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How to Install WordPress Plugins Easily

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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Ways to Choose Best WordPress Theme For Creating Your Blog

Ways to Choose Best WordPress Theme For Creating Your Blog

A great thing about WordPress is that it is a storehouse of tens and thousands of free and highly customizable themes that you can download from the internet. Now the question that may come to your mind is that why would the designers offer the themes for free, particularly those known for their stunning and professional looks! Well, by doing so, they are in a way increasing their credibility amongst the common mass!

Now with so many themes available online you may find it a bit complicated when it comes to choose best WordPress theme for your blog…I guess I’m right! Well, this is where the contents of this article come into play. Here you will find innumerable considerations such as personal taste, monetization, niche and much that helps you to choose best WordPress theme without much hassle.

Choose your niche: Yes that’s the most important…I mean you need to decide what you blog is about…whether you’ll be creating a photography blog, a marketing blog and so one. None of us aren’t that insensible to choose pretty flowers or puppies as themes to create business blogs…isn’t it so! However, the same themes can work well when it comes to creating your personal blog. What I intend to say is that you choose your niche; you can choose the relevant themes accordingly!

After choosing your niche, your next job lies in flipping through the designs available in that category. Design does play a viable role when it comes to creating a blog. Make sure you choose best WordPress theme to give an attractive look to your blog. If you succeed in doing so then you are sure to attract more and more visitors to your blog.

If you are interested to make money from your blog then choosing the right design is of utmost importance. Layouts without any sidebars may be your personal taste but are you sure they will work wonders for your ads? Instead why not go for multiple and “”widgetized”” sidebars together with three column layout!

And there comes your personal taste…you are free to choose any WordPress themes for your personal blogs…all you need to do is use large fonts so that the text is readable.

A good thing that you can do when it need to choose best WordPress theme is downloading anything and everything that you find appealing. You can then sort the ones that look promising. Practicing this sorting procedure for a number of times will help you get your dream WordPress theme!

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Forum & Message Board Marketing

Forum & Message Board Marketing

Webmasters need to use every marketing method that they can take advantage of and without using all the methods out there you’ll fall behind your competition quickly. There are plenty of marketing techniques out there that you need to use, and in this article we’re going to talk about the power of forum and message board marketing. You’ve might of already used these techniques in your marketing arsenal and if you have then that’s great, but if you haven’t or you rarely use this technique then you should consider using it more.

There is always at least one forum on every topic and many topics have hundreds of different forums available to them. You should gather a list of the forums in your niche and then join them all. You will need to make some posts on them all and get active in the community. On the forums you’ll be able to add a signature line which will appear at the end of all of your posts. You can use this line to add your website link so that you can get direct clicks and also backlinks. Forum backlinks can build quickly and add a lot of value to your current links. Some forums will require that you make a certain amount of posts before your signature line appears, don’t worry about this though and just patiently wait until you reach the amount of posts. Don’t go spam the boards as you’ll likely be banned for doing so.

For message board marketing you may have to add your link at the end of each of your posts, so make sure that you do so if it is required. There is no point helping out others on message boards unless you’re getting the backlink so be sure that you do in fact get a link for each post. Some popular message boards are the Yahoo message boards which covers basically every niche that you could imagine. You simply help people answer their questions and then you post your link under your answer. This will help you get traffic as these message boards are always busy and get great search engine rankings.

A lot of forums and message boards don’t allow do-follow backlinks which means your links won’t count in the search engines. You should try finding some that are do-follow so that you do in fact gain some backlinks from your hard work, but for popular boards with lots of traffic it isn’t so important. For instance the Yahoo message boards will allow you to post a link but it isn’t do-follow. I still recommend using this board though because it’s one of the busiest and on the internet and can bring in great targeted traffic for the lifetime of your website.

Don’t spam the boards or forums though as you’ll get banned and it will also look unnatural to the search engines if you get a couple hundred links one day and none the next. You should aim for the same amount of posts everyday and split them between the forums and boards you use. This way you’ll be able to not look suspicious to the search engines and they won’t penalize you for unnatural link building which trust me happens and isn’t pretty for that website owner.

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How to Install and Activate a Premium WordPress Theme1

How to Install and Activate a Premium WordPress Theme

The greatest thing about WordPress, the open-source Content Management System and blogging platform, is the sheer number of options it affords users when it comes to designing a website or blog. The user of a WordPress blog can upload any number of custom widgets that could display the user’s latest tweets or even a simple contact form, they can get granular control over various technical aspects of their site design including modifying permalinks and URL structures and, most importantly, they can easily alter the appearance of their website by installing a few WordPress themes. The power of WordPress exists in its ability to make significant changes to the appearance of a website in just a few simple clicks – users can add and delete entire designs in the click of a button.

The easiest way to add a new theme to your WordPress site is just to upload it using the in-built WordPress theme uploader. Before doing this however, you will need to actually download a theme and this can be done quickly and easily by typing “”WordPress Themes”” into Google and selecting from the many paid or free options available. You do not need to extract the contents of the zip folder once it has been downloaded, merely leave it as it is and then go to the appearance menu in WordPress and select add new theme. Click the upload button and then browse to the zip file and click upload, once this is done just click the activate button and you theme will now be live on your website.

Another popular way to install a theme is to upload it directly to the WordPress themes folder situated on your web server. The easiest way to do this is to install an FTP client such as FileZilla, and configure so that you have FTP access to your website. Once this is done, go to the “”wp-content”” folder, then click on the themes “”folder””. To upload a theme you will need to unzip it first – once you have done this just drag and drop the theme folder that is on your hard drive into the WordPress themes folder on your server. The theme will now be available to activate under the WordPress themes menu in your WordPress control panel.

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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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How to Install a New WordPress Theme With FileZilla and Cpanel

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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Top Seven WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

Top Seven WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

Many bloggers are using WordPress and with good reason. It is the most popular blogging software in use today and one of the biggest reasons is the ability to add functionality through the use of plugins. Plugins can turn your run-of-the-mill blog into a high powered online tool capable of bringing traffic and profit to your site. Consider using the top WordPress plugins on your current WordPress blog or on a future blog. You won’t be disappointed. Happy Blogging.

7. Page Mash

This is a simple WordPress page management plugin. The Ajax interface allows you to drag-and-drop the pages into the order you like, modify the page structure by dragging a page to become a child or parent and toggle the page to be hidden from output. You can also see the id of the page which is often helpful for theme developers. If you have a WordPress site with more than just a handful of pages, PageMash is extremely helpful.

6. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engine by allowing you to fine tune things like your page title and meta tags. This plugin is extremely easy to use as it works great straight out of the box. If you are an advanced user, you can customize virtually everything. And if you are a developer, this plugin has an API so your themes can access and extend the functionality of the plugin.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Perhaps the most downloaded WordPress plugin, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin not only automatically creates a site map linking to all your pages and posts, it also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com when you make changes to you site. If you want to include pages that are part of your site but not part of you WordPress managed content, you can do that to.

4. WP Super Cache

If you have a popular WordPress website you should seriously consider running WordPress Super Cache to improve the performance of your website. If you are not caching your pages, then every time a visitor comes to your site, WordPress has to pull together various pieces of information out of a database to put your page together. If you have a high traffic site, this is can really become a problem. WP Super Cache will store a copy of each of the pages on your website so that after the page has been assembled from the database once, WordPress can rest and just keep serving the static html copy of the page. This might be a bit techie, but the idea is you can dramatically speed up your site and reduce the load on your server by using WP Super Cache. If for no other reason, use this plugin so you don’t have to panic when your friend says, “”I just Dugg your site.””

3. NextGEN Image Gallery

If you want to display a photo gallery, show a series of product images, or just publish a slide show from your most recent vacation, the NextGEN image gallery is the plugin for you. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Among the many features, NextGEN Gallery includes a thumbnail generator, sortable albums, and a water mark function.

2. cformsII Form Plugin

If your looking for a free form management plugin, cformsII is an extremely powerful plugin for setting up contact forms on your WordPress site. You don’t need to know any PHP or write any code. You can visually build forms in the WordPress admin panel. Then, navigate to the page or post where you want to use the form and there is a button in the WYSIWYG editor that you click and up pops a list of forms that you have made. Simply click on the one you want and your form is inserted into your page. Update your page and you the form is live. You can specify required fields, default values, and there are plenty of styles to make your form blend in perfectly with your site.

1. Gravity Forms

If you want the best forms plugin WordPress has to offer, you need Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is an amazing plugin for managing online forms. Some of the incredibly useful features include conditional form fields which means you can show or hide a field or entire sections of the form based on a value selected in another field. You can pre-populate form fields using querystring, shortcode, function or hooks.You can even schedule when forms are available by assigning a start date and end date for when your form is live on your site. Supposed you want to run a contest where the first 50 people that fill out the form win a prize. Gravity Forms lets you set a limit on the number of entries a form can receive. Pretty much anything you ever wanted a form to do, Gravity Forms can do it.

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