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WordPress plugins and some of the popular plugins

By on December 1, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

WordPress plugins and some of the popular plugins
There are a large number of plugins available for all WordPress users with the intention to enhance and improve their blogging experience. The number of plugins is increasing from day to day, but not all of the plugins are good for you as some may damage your WordPress installation or even harm your site. Some of the plugins that are worth trying out are:
1. Sideblog- this is a way to post short notes on the sidebar with options such as the number of entries to display, defining the sideblog categories and exclusion from RSS feeds. It is useful to post updates and sharing of links. Some of the options include cool themes, made the sidebars invisible from the search robots or adding feeds to the sideblog.
2. Secure and Accessible Contact Form- this is a plugin with a number of features such as extensive security with 16 individual abuse countermeasures, form an overview page to confirm the general configuration of the plugin, maximum accessibility and usability, option to use your own style sheet or extensive on board documentation library if you ever need any help.
3. Sociable- this plugin attaches a list of social bookmarking sites, which allows your visitors to bookmark and it is found at the end of your posts. It automatically add links to your favourite social bookmarking sites on your posts, RSS feeds and pages and you can choose from 99 different sites.
4. Gravatar 2 Plugin- this plugin allows the display Gravatar which is a globally recognized avatar of your commenters. This allows you to distinguish yourself from other users in an online community such as websites, forum or chat rooms. In WordPress, Gravatars are hosted on a single server by encrypting the user’s email address. You can have one avatar for each forum you visit.
5. Search Everything- this plugin allows you to search everything in the database as the default WordPress search engine does not search some pages such as static Pages or metadatas. There are options for you to choose, so you can choose what to search. Some of the options are to search every page, tag, category, comment, attachment, excerpt or non-password protected pages.
6. Admin Drop Down Menu- this is a very useful plugin as it saves you more time. Usually, you have to click a number of times to get from one page to another. With this plugin, just hovers the arrow of your mouse to the category that the page is located to save more time. Instead of going from one page to another before reaching the final destination, you can choose from the menu itself, which can inactivate a second menu from the first.
Do not be scared by the number of plugins available out there. The best thing to do is to do your research. Read blog posts, reviews or comments on the plugins which are widely available in the Internet. Choose those that will enhance your WordPress sites wisely.

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What is Involved in Shopping Cart Software

By on November 29, 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

What is Involved in Shopping Cart Software

There are many things that go on within a shopping cart. There are many different features and management systems, so many that it can be mind-boggling. When deciding on which shopping cart program to purchase you should know what the basic parts of a shopping cart system entails so that you can make a smart buying decision.

All shopping carts have some kind of ordering system whether it is a simple online ordering system that includes buttons that have HTML attached to them such as is done with the Paypal shopping cart or a store-front ordering system where everything is done on site.

All shopping carts also have the ability for customers to add items to the cart, delete items from the cart, and input quantity desired. All shopping carts collect data such as the customer’s name, address and phone number. All shopping carts have to include shipping modules unless the products are all digital in nature in that case there would be a download manager.

Advanced shopping carts would allow customers to have several options per item such as color, size, weight, shape, height or width. Some carts even have choices between bulk or single item orders.

Shopping carts normally have shipping options with common ones being USPS, UPS and FedEx, DHL, CanadaPost, and also AustraliaPost. Not only do you have the different carriers but you also have other shipping options such as delivery time: next day, second day, ground, and air.

Tax calculation are also a part of what shopping carts need to offer when the customer has a physical address that is in the same state or city as the merchant. Tax calculations are done by zip code. Merchants who have stores in multiple rates would have a hair-pulling experience if not for advanced software plug-ins such as TaxWare’s Sales/Use Tax System or CertiTax which can calculate for the customer in real time the exact taxes.

Buyers insist on secure transactions before they hand over their credit cards so it is important for the shopping cart to integrate a payment gateway that is secure, protection for credit card numbers that are stored on the Website, an SSL secure connection certificate between the customer and the Website to discourage hackers from stealing sensitive financial information from the customers. It is also important to have a secure Sockets Layer (SSL) between the customer and the Website. If your Website server is not secure customer won’t buy. It is also important to have secure order retrieval.

Not all payment gateways are compatible with all shopping carts so you need to verify that the payment gateway is compatible before making your purchase. The most common U.S. based shopping cart compatible payment gateways are Authorize.net, LinkPoint, veriSign PayFlow Pro, and WorldPay. PayPal is another alternative payment system for most shopping carts but PayPal’s proprietary Instant Payment Notification (IPN) is not always available so you have to check before deciding to use PayPal.

Most shopping carts nowadays provide email confirmation of order placement and a few provide email confirmation of shipment.

Cookies, temporary IP number assignment and randomly generated cart numbers are all ways that shopping carts have to help keep customer orders straight. Because some shoppers turn off cookies it is important that shopping carts be set up with other methods alongside cookies just in case.

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Obtaining your Blogs Initial Traffic

By on November 25, 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

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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Why use Sideblog in WordPress

By on November 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Why use Sideblog in WordPress?
For the blogging community of WordPress, it is well-known that there are lots of plugins available for your blogging experience. It would be impossible for one to utilize all of them and not all are suitable for your taste and style. Thus it takes time to learn the advantages and disadvantages of each of the plugins and whether they are serving the purposes they were built for. Some of the plugins are known to make your sites wonderful, while there are some that are just disasters.
One of the popular plugins is Sideblog. It is a small blog that sits in your sidebar. Here, you can post short entries on anything such as personal updates, recommendations of websites, links or updates of your blog.
Why should you use a Sideblog? There are several benefits for using Sideblog. You will be able to obtain more frequent updates. There are active bloggers who update several times a day, however for those who do not there will be a period of inactivity of their blogs. The only update they are getting is from the comments of the readers and visitors. A Sideblog will be useful here as it allows you to break up the inactive period.
For those who do not have sufficient time to post up a full blog post, Sideblog is useful as it allows the bloggers to post up short and quick updates. This is helpful to those who have a thought or update to share, but the amount of time is limited.
There are some readers who only read from RSS, and thus they may never have visited your blog although they may be loyal readers to your blogs. A Sideblog is separated from your main blog post feed, and thus readers will check in often to read the posts on your Sideblog. This will not only increase the number of visitors to your site, but also giving them a chance to leave comments or ad clicks.
With Sideblog, you will be able to add links to other sites that your friends are blogging, even if they are non-related to the contents of your blog. It comes with options such as preventing the search robots to search the Sideblog, and thus Sideblog allows you to add non-related links to your site. With this, you will be able to gain more friends by linking your sites to theirs and to link to friends that you have made, but cannot be linked from your main content.
Sideblog also allows the bloggers to show some of their true sides. In the blogging community, professionalism is important and bloggers work hard to retain this in their posts. This leads to good quality of articles they produced. With this plugin, a blogger will be able to show a little more of their true self. Sideblog is more personal compared to the main contents of a blog site.
The reasons to why should you use Sidebar plugin in your blogs are listed as above. There are positive feedbacks from the blogging community on this plugin.

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Why should you use plugins for WordPress

By on November 22, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Why should you use plugins for WordPress?
The default WordPress comes with only basic features. Thus to make your blogs more colourful and attractive, there is a large variety of plugins available to suit what you want and your taste. These plugins will not only enhance your experience as the owner and the blogger, but also to make it more pleasant for the readers to read your blogs, leave comments or to link to your blog site.
Some of the useful plugins for WordPress users are listed as below. One of the useful plugin is WP Cache. This plugin works by caching WordPress pages and storing them in a static file for future use. It is very useful especially if you have a site with low performance server or high traffic. Instead of loading and compiling the whole PHP code before building a page from the database, WP Cache will use the files stored in the static file when needed to save more time.
For those who are selling things on their blog sites, WP eCommerce is an useful plugin. It is easy to use and you can setup the shop within a few minutes through the Admin panels. It is a shopping cart plugin for WordPress users who are selling products or services on their blog sites. There is a wide range of setting for your product or service such as downloadable products, promotions, coupon codes or product variations.
Intouch Ajax contact form is another plugin for WordPress blogs. This contact form has been known to be useful and it filters all spams. Apart from filtering all spam messages, it has the option where you can customize the email subject, addition of form fields and thank you messages. It allows you to insert a custom-made contact form and the information will be sent via email.
Ajax Post Rating plugin adds a 5-star Ajax rating system to your pages and posts. It allows readers to rate your pages and posts either daily, weekly or monthly. Another similar plugin is Ajax Polls. This plugin is very flexible with lots of features. Other option available for this plugin is it allows you to archive the polls and the layout is customizable via Admin panels.
Another useful plugin is Ajax Comment plugin. It is a simple but effective comment plugin as it checks whether all fields are filled correctly, makes sure that there is no duplication of comments and it has flood protection capability too.
Digg This is another WordPress plugin which detects incoming links from Digg.com website to your WordPress posts. It will then automatically display a link to the post from Digg.com so that people will be able to digg your story. An email will be sent to the admin of the site once a dig is recognized.
The above are only a few of thousands of plugins for WordPress bloggers. It is worth the time to research around to search for plugins that will enhance your blogging experience. Plugins are a necessity not only for the blogger, but also for the readers.

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Forum & Message Board Marketing

By on November 21, 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

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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Why WordPress is So SEO Friendly

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

 To start with this article, defining WordPress would be relevant. WordPress is a publishing platform available in the Internet for free, particularly serving people who wants to create Blogs. It is one marvel of modern technology that lifted journalism to greater standard.

What is a Blog? What is Blogging? This is the modern way of writing multiple topics such as description of proceedings, individual diaries and commentaries. Why modern? The answer is simple. It is available and created on the Internet. Other materials such as graphics and videos may also be posted.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is an operation and plans of obtaining higher status (position) in Search Engine Result Pages (SERP). There are people who do these jobs and they are called Search Engine Optimizers.

The point of what they do is to make sure that your blog will be listed on the first page of the SERP, or if not, the succeeding first few pages. In this sense, millions of people looking and searching for your blog would find it on the spot or by just clicking these first couple of pages of SERP. If your blog is very far from the first couple of pages of the SERP, then less people will be able to read it. Most people are satisfied with what they may find on the first pages of SERP.

What are the reasons why WordPress is so Search Engine Optimizers friendly? One aspect that people need to look into before building a website or even a blog, is the Search Engines. For bloggers out there, WordPress uses dissimilar roles which allow it to be search engine friendly. For example distributing pings to extra sites, creating categories, classifying your posts, use of h1/h2 tags and others. Because of t he availability of these different functions by WordPress, Search Engine Optimizers can easily structure strategies and help users increase the level of their blog ranking on the Search Engine Result Page.

WordPress is SEO friendly because every post may have Meta and Meta tags images routinely created if the correct plugins are set up, the blog writing routinely generates a RSS feed, every post has an exclusive heading, and it has commonly restructured content that is typically interactive and creative, sites are frequently in print with quite fresh system,

Moreover, blog is set up by a static face page or an energetic pages like the customary blog, both post may be frequently tendered to RSS Feed aggregators whenever you have the correct plugin, everyone post could be presented repeatedly to the blog index, every post in the WordPress have a search engine responsive URL whenever you post in your blog, and every post can demonstrate the most recent X figure of posts inside that groups by only including up a plugin headed for WordPress.

Barriers in Technology and all industries will always be present and perhaps, would never go away. Surely, WordPress is still finding for enhancements and improvements, to amplify the good service for its users, one of them is to make the WordPress even more SEO friendly to the web users.

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Why Internet Marketing Software is Worth the Investment

By on November 13, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Why Internet Marketing Software is Worth the Investment

As a webmaster there are always new opportunities to purchase software that makes our lives a lot easier, and we need to determine if it’s worth the investment. There are many tools that either aren’t worth it or do the same as other tools and these ones you shouldn’t buy, but you should have a tool for all marketing aspects. There are usually three to five products in each category so you’ll need to determine which one to buy, but I do recommend having a tool for each marketing strategy.

Some of the tools you should purchase immediately are a social bookmarking tool and article submission tool. You’ll be able to use these two tools to automate link building and traffic generation. There are also some other tools that you can use to help marketing your website and you should use them to assist you. These tools will cost anywhere from $50-$200 and although it seems like a lot you’ll notice soon why you should invest in these tools.

Typically you’ll save about two to three hours per run on a automation marketing tool which means if you used each of the two tools above once a day you would save anywhere from four to six hours. Now in this four to six hour span everyday that you’ve just saved by using the tools above you can use it to increase your revenue. It’s very simple to make a couple hundred bucks within a week by spending six hours a day doing something.

So basically what I’m saying is that you’ll be able to make your money back that you invest on the tools within only a couple weeks. Now you can use the money you made back to purchase more automation and marketing tools that help increase your revenue. If you don’t already spend time on these marketing strategies then it may take a bit longer to make the money back, but nonetheless you will make your money back.

Once you choose to work smarter instead of working harder you’ll notice your daily life become a lot less stressful and busy. You won’t need to spend hours marketing your site each day anymore, and you’ll have more time to increase your revenues and spend time with your family. The number one reason people choose to work online is to spend more time with there family, now if you’re marketing your websites all day the time you have leftover to spend with your family is limited. If you automate your marketing with software tools then you’ll have hours each day to do as you wish.

The initial investment is always worth internet marketing tools nowadays due to the low pricing. The goal of the owners of the programs is to sell to the masses which is why they keep the prices reasonable. You should go out and get your marketing tools today and begin making your life easier and less hectic.

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