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WordPress Plugins – Making the Most Out of Your Blog

Wordpress Plugins – Making the Most Out of Your Blog

WordPress is a very successful piece of software that not only provides a platform to begin blogging it also has many addition features such as wordpress plugins. These wordpress plugins allow users and administrators to add additional functions to their blogs and will provide the tools to customise a blog or website to suit the theme and genre.

Anyone who is new to blogging may not be aware that they have free access to a variety of plug-in so it is worth having a look to see just what is on offer to you, you may just install that vital wordpress plugin that sends your blog to the top.

WordPress plugins are located in the admin area of your blog, you will need to log into your wordpress blog to be able to access them and once you have done so you will see a tab labelled ‘plugins’ when you click on the tab you will be taken to a list of wordpress plugins that are waiting to be activated. You will also be given a description of that the plugin does and what version of wordpress you will need to be running for it to work. Once you have decided which plugin you want to activate simply click activate and your done!

You can also visit the wordpress website and download a heap of new and updated plugins directly from there. You will also be able to see which plugins are downloaded most often as well as read more information on each individual wordpress plugin.

Some of the most popular wordpress plugins available to download right now are Akismet, All in one SEO pack, cformsII, WP Super Cache, Google XML sitemaps and WordPress Stats.

Google XML sitemaps is recommended as it creates compliant XML sitemaps of your wordpress blog. The plugin supports all of the wordpress generated pages so every time you create or edit a post the sitemap is updated and google and all other major search engines such as ASK and MSN are informed of any changes.

The plugin is simple to install, you simply upload the full directory to your wp-content/plugins directory using ftp. You will need to make sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz writable via CHMOD 666. You then activate the plugin from inside your blog (located under options) and begin to build a sitemap. You will not have to continuously rebuild the sitemap every time a change or update is made because this is all automatic.

WordPress plugins make search engine optimisation a lot easier, It seems that search engines are quite fond of blogs as they are constantly being updated. You can make the search engines take more notice of your blogs by installing the relevant plugins.

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Tips for Running an Outsource Company

Tips for Running an Outsource Company

On the internet there are always people from all across the world who come together to form teams and businesses to help each other make money. In many international countries where wages are low there are freelance workers who will complete tedious tasks for half the price that anyone else will do it for. If you can find enough of these workers then you can start your own outsource company. I’ve seen many people on the Digital Point Forums who have outsource teams who complete work for them.

The hardest part of running an outsource company is finding reliable outsourced workers who work for as cheap as possible. Clearly the point of an outsource company is for you to find work and then outsource it for cheaper and keep the profit. When you can hire international people at half the wages you’re being paid then you can see that this is a lucrative business. You’ll need to possess some managerial skills that you can use to keep on top of your outsourced team, but apart from that you won’t need to do much else except find the work. Basically your job is to find the work, collect payments and make sure everything gets done on time and correctly from your outsource team.

In the beginning I found it difficult to get my outsource company running either due to the people I hired we’re not reliable or they charged too much. My goal was to always make at least 50% for finding the work and outsourcing it which although is a high commission, it was attainable. Nobody wants to throw money down the drain so the more money you can make the better off you’ll be. You never know when you might have a slow month in the freelance business anyways so it’s good to have some reserves from the months that do treat you good.

There is always work available online, but when you need to find work on a daily basis then it can sometimes run a little short. Everyone is looking for the cheap prices, and you definitely won’t have those. You’ll be relying simply on the work that you offer, and it needs to be good enough to retain clients. Webmasters don’t mind paying top dollar when things are done correctly, but the minute you start making mistakes you better have some answers.

When you have an outsource team from an international country the worst thing about it is that you aren’t able to meet them in person. You only get to interview them over a chat service on the internet and this can make it difficult to gauge people. In the beginning you might have some issues finding a team that gets the work done on time. As time progresses you’ll build a nice list of people who do complete work on time though and before you know it, you won’t even need to worry about your employees not finishing the work. You can never have to many people available to complete work for you, so don’t be shy about growing your list. Even if you don’t use half of them it’s good to have them on a list in case you ever become swamped with work, and trust me it will eventually happen.

When you have jobs to complete never leave them until the last minute because as you’ll find out outsourced workers don’t always comply with deadlines. It’s your fault if the work isn’t delivered to your clients on time due to your team not finishing it on team. This means you need to stay on your workers and make sure that everything is done correctly. If you finish to many projects with delays then word will quickly spread that your service has been slacking and it could result in less business.

Running an outsource company is hard work, but it’s very lucrative and it’s a lot less work then actually doing the work. When you manage a team of ten outsourced workers you can get more work done then if you we’re doing it all. You need to think like this if you want to make money online as it’s a battle that you need to win.

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How to Set Up a WordPress Blog For Profit

How to Set Up a WordPress Blog For Profit

Blogging can be an amazing way help you to make money on the net. It enables you to get messages out to potential customers, get messages out to existing customers, and does great things for the SEO (search engine optimisation) of your site. I’m not feeding you hype when I tell you that you should be blogging. Search engines love blogs so you’ll save loads on your advertising costs, too.

The articles bring people in and your articles, as well as banners in your sidebar, can sell to people that arrive on your site.

Setting up a WP Blog

Setting up a blog isn’t difficult. WordPress is really easy, really customisable, and works amazingly well for bringing you traffic. It has got to be the favourite blogging platform for the most successful online marketers. You can set it up on its own as the root of a domain or you can create a yourdomain.com/blog as well and add it to an existing site. If you’re with a webhost that offers cPanel hosting (most large webhosts do), you’ve already got the ability to add a free WordPress blog onto your existing website.

I would recommend that you host your blog with someone other than WordPress. For a small fee this way you have more control of your blog and cannot be shutdown anytime Worpress feels like it.

I used to use Go-Daddy but now use My Express Site. Very simple to use with great tutorials and excellent customer service.

Here are some non-technical overviews of how to set up WordPress blogs on their own as well as on your existing website. If you run into trouble, you’ll find loads of free online tutorials and your webhost probably has free support and can guide you through as well but it’s really quite easy.

In cPanel, there’s an icon called Fantastico or Fantastico DeLuxe. It’s a little happy face. By clicking on it, you can add all sorts of programs. Install WordPress from here. When you do, it’ll ask you where to do a new install and here’s where you can choose a URL such as yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com/blog. (If you don’t already have a domain and webhosting, you’ll want to set those up first.)

You’ll go through self-guided boxes that ask you for information such as your username and password and then with the click of your mouse, your blog is created. After it’s installed, you can login at: yournewblog.com/wp-admin.

Here, you’ll use the credentials you’ve set up and then you can go ahead and start blogging. You’ll find many free templates and tools to customise your blog and once you start blogging, you’ll find you get more traffic than ever to your website. Blog with search engine optimisation in mind and that’ll bring you plenty of organic traffic.

It’s a good idea to learn all you can about optimising a blog as well as monetising it. There are some great tutorials and tips that can help you unleash the potential of blogging with your target audience. Subscribe to my newsletter (in the sidebar) to learn more.

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Blogging With WordPress

Blogging With WordPress

WordPress is a popular open source blog publishing application. First available to the blogging public in 2003, the current release of WordPress is 2.7.1 as of February 2009. Open source means that it is available free of charge for the people to use. It is therefore very common for people to do blogging with WordPress.

WordPress has evolved around the years with introduction of themes, plugins and widgets into the blogosphere. Those additions really made WordPress very popular with bloggers due to the flexibility and ease to modify and customize the blogs. They could produce very professional-looking blogs in a short time frame with WordPress compared to when they had to do it using the HTML codes.

Theme is a way to “”skin”” a blog. It provides control of the look and presentation of the blogs. Without changing the core software, bloggers have the flexibility to change the display of posts and the blogs. By simply modifying some template files included in a particular theme, we can customize the blog’s look on-the-fly without having to worry about compatibility with the application and other components used by WordPress.

Since it is an open-source application, there are many people willingly working on and sharing the WordPress theme with everyone. Most of the blog themes are available free of charge. You can just use search engines to find WordPress theme with whatever additional attributes you want to have. You will be presented with hundreds if not thousands of websites that have more information on themes. You can also visit WordPress Theme Directory for a complete listing of officially recognized blogging themes.

Plugins are used extensively to extend the capability of WordPress blogs. There are just too many things to list down what you can do with WordPress plugins. I guess you can find just about anything you want to do available. If you can’t find it, it is relatively quite easy to make one if you have some basic programming skills. Just like the themes, there are many plugins available. Most of them are also available freely on the web. Beside using search engines, WordPress plugins are also available at WordPress Plugins Directory.

Another benefit of using readily available themes is that many people have designed adsense-ready themes. Adsense is a way to monetize your blog. Adsense is simply an opportunity for bloggers to display google ads on their blogs. They will earn money when people click on the displayed adsense. With adsense-ready theme, it means bloggers can configure adsense easily just by entering their adsense pub-id into some parts of the theme files.

A good resource to learn about blogging with WordPress is available on the web. Using normal search engines to search for WordPress tutorial, there are many resources available. You can choose to do the blogging directly on http://www.WordPress.com Otherwise, you can choose to host the WordPress on your own web hosting.

Installing WordPress can pose a challenge. However, nowadays WordPress is included in Fantastico that you can use to install with just one press. If you don’t have Fantastico in your web hosting, you should be able to do an install following the instructions provided when you download WordPress.

Although WordPress is very easy to use, for first time users who are not technically savvy, it is advisable to start with some basic tutorials to understand the structure of how blogging can be done with WordPress. Once you get the basic, using WordPress will be just like using a normal word processor.

Happy Blogging!

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Tips for Building Links for your Blog

Tips for Building Links for your Blog

Once you start blogging and want to become more serious about making money off of your blog you’re going to need to know how to build links for your blog. Links and content are the two most important things you’ll need to do for your blog and they’ll both take lots of time. In this article we’re going to look at some tips you can use when building links to your blog. Try implementing as many of these tips as you possibly can because they will all help you out.

Tip #1

• Make sure that you build links to your blog on a consistent basis. This means you should build links to your blog on a weekly basis and nothing longer then that. Don’t build a bunch of links one day and then stop for a couple weeks because the search engines will think your links are unnatural. As your blog ages you can build more links just make sure there all natural links.

Tip #2

• Always spread your anchor texts around and use a lot of different ones when building links. You want to use your main ones more often then others, but don’t just use a couple anchor texts. The search engines will think you’re trying to rank for the keyword unnaturally and punish your blog. If you use different anchor texts when building links you shouldn’t face this problem.

Tip #3

• Use as many different types of websites you can for your link building campaign. There are thousands of different websites where you can build links to your blog and you should spread your links around so they seem like there just coming naturally. The more variety you use when building your links the stronger rankings you’ll start experiencing.

Tip #4

• Don’t build links on link farms or anything that looks like a link farm. The search engines are very capable of finding these link farms and will ban your site from their listings. Most blog networks selling posts with duplicate content are considered link farms so be weary when buying these links for your blog.

Tip #5

• You can use automated software for building links to directories and social bookmarking websites, but there is a possibility of being banned in the search engine listings so be aware of this. There are plenty of people using these software programs without issues though so you can try them at your own risk.

There are plenty of other tips I could list for building links but you can implement these into your daily life and you’ll be well on your way. Always make sure you’re careful about building links because if you build links in a bad area you could get punished months down the road and all your work would be down the drain. I typically stick with directory submissions, social bookmarking and links from other blogs. I also use forum signatures for building quick links to my blogs and getting them indexed in the search engines. Make sure it’s a respected forum before using it for signature links because if you don’t then it could hurt your site instead of help your website.

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How to Set Up a Purchased WordPress Website on Your Hosting Server – Part 1 of 2

How to Set Up a Purchased WordPress Website on Your Hosting Server – Part 1 of 2

This is a two part article describing how to move and set up a purchased WordPress website on your hosting server. The first part explains why you may want to purchased a WordPress site, how to transfer the domain and setting up the domain on your hosting server. Part two will take a closer look on how to install the websites database and configure some important WordPress settings.

Have you ever tried moving and setting up a purchased WordPress Website on Your Hosting Server. In case you purchased an existing WordPress website and domain and has no clue on how to move and set up WordPress website on my Hostgator hosting account, read on…

The reason you may not want to setup your own WordPress website from scratch may be because you want to speed up implementation time and take advantage of the fact that the domain has already some age and AdSense monetization working. So you would only have to use your SEO experience to improve Search Engine ranking for the niche keywords.

Lets take a real example but change the names. Bob is the guy who purchased the domain and blog and the lady, lets name her Maria, that had sold Bob the domain and corresponding WordPress website told him she would send him all the information needed, but what Bob received were two zipped backup files, one with the database sql import file and the other was the WordPress domain directory. The only indications regarding setting up the WordPress website Bob got were that he had to upload the files to his server. Was this all he needed to do? What do you think?

Even though WordPress is very easy to install and manage, moving an existing WordPress Website to your hosting server should be a little more complex than that. So Bob thought that there must be more to it, especially as the MySQL database file had another database prefix, which is usually your hosting account ID. The format is something like MYHOSTID_MYDBNAME; so let’s name Maria’s database file maria89_wpbd123.sql. Bob’s Database prefix is bob58.

I know that when you restore a MySQL database in cpanel that it takes the sql file name to import the tables it into the same-named database, or creates a new one. Bob tried it out and as a result a MySQL database named bob58_maria89wpbd123 was created. The database restore had stripped out the underscore and added Bob’s database prefix. Not very nice:-(

Bob then wrote Maria back asking for more details, and whether there were any specifics that he needed to take into account for moving, setting up or configuring her specific the WordPress website. She apologized and replied that she did not know how to handle this and suggested having a live chat with my hosting support provider. Maria probably thought that moving a WordPress website from one hosting server to another would be as easy as she initially said, so Bob could not count on her and did not insist futher. Bob’s hosting provider has an outstanding support, so this was not a too bad idea, but then he decided that he would first have a go on his own.

So here comes how Bob proceeded for moving, setting up and configuring her WordPress website on his hosting server…There may be a quicker way, but it worked great for him and, in the end, if you know some simple but important details, the set up is pretty straight forward. Let’s first outline the basic steps required to transfer the domain to and set up the WordPress website on your hosting server.

Transfer the domain to your domain service provider
Set up the domain on your hosting server
Upload the WordPress database files
Configure your WordPress website

What do you need before you start?

WordPress Database MySQL restore file, DBprefix_DBname.sql
The complete WordPress website directory
The current WordPress admin userid and password

So let’s go a little more into detail on each step of the set up process…

1. Transferring the domain to my domain service provider

If you have also purchased the corresponding domain, the very first step is to get the domain transferred to your domain service provider. This will be done by the owner. If you have the same domain service provider, this is usually very simple; it’s called “”pushing””.

Unfortunately Maria had another domain service provider than Bob is using. So to make things easy he created a free account with her domain service provider and would take care of transferring the domain to his provider later on. Maria then “”pushed the domain into his account, Bob accepted it, and then pointed the domain to his DNS server. That was the easy part.

2. Setting up the domain on your hosting server

Bob has a hosting plan, which includes unlimited add-on domains. He logged into his cpanel and created the new add-on domain. This is pretty simple, so I won’t go into more details here. Bob did NOT need to create a WordPress Blog Website installation. This is done by restoring the WordPress database and uploading the WordPress website directory files he got to the domain’s root directory.

Bob then entered my new domain name in the internet browser’s address bar and saw that all was working so far, because he could see the empty cgi-bin directory that is created by default.

Now Bob could upload the WordPress website directory content to the domain directory, located below the root directory; in his case KingKoilMattresse.net. You can either do this via FTP or use the cpanel > Files > Backups wizard.

Bob reentered the domain name in the internet browser address bar and got the expected database connection error. First of all he did not have the DB installed yet and the connection information would be incorrect anyway. We will see how this part of our WordPress website setup can be achieved.

In the final part of the article we will have a closer look on how to Upload the WordPress Database files and Configuring your WordPress Website.

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WordPress Goldmine – Review For Bloggers

WordPress Goldmine – Review For Bloggers

Are you tired of hearing everyone else telling you about their success stories while you are still struggling to get started? Have you bought some manuals that promised a lot without delivering on their promises?

If it’s the case, let me reassure you that you are not alone. I personally hate those guru books that have all the answers, but don’t deliver. I hate them so much that the first time I heard about WordPress Goldmine, I dismissed it instantly.

The second time I heard about this book, however, it was from someone I knew and trusted. They told me that the book was an excellent, never written before step by step tutorial for WordPress bloggers. I had been trying to set up a blog myself, and didn’t understand anything about plugins, blogroll, themes and so forth. I knew that I could use a blog tutorial. WordPress Goldmine, was just that.

You probably already know that WordPress is a free blogging platform that anyone can use. There you can build an entire website on any given niche that you can own and dominate entirely. This is the beauty of this blog platform. The only problem is that the average new affiliate doesn’t know how to set up an efficient site, because even though it is not really complicated once you know it, it would take a lot of your time to do the learning process on your own.

The good news is, you don’t have too. Someone else did it for you and when he realized that no one had done it yet, he did it himself. He wrote a very well explanatory step by step on how to set up, promote and monetize a WordPress blog. It is so easy to follow that any average Joe, can do it and make money online.

Are you still doubting that you can do it? Well, let me tell you that if you can read and follow instructions, it’s all you need in order to be able to pull this through. Yes, this is as simple as that.

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