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Totally Wicked With Widgets

By on June 22, 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

Totally Wicked With Widgets!

Feeling bored with your old theme? Want more customization in your blog? You can do that now with the WordPress Widgets! WordPress developer, Andy Skelton has announced the next generation of funky new WordPress plugin, WordPress Widgets, which drove the blogging community to both ends of the enthusiasm spectrum. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s here to stay.

To the people around the world, gadgets or gizmos are typically used to refer to helpful little high technology devices or tools. But to the tech savvy people of the computer or technology world, a widget is used generically for a plugin that can be placed in your blog’s sidebar. The best thing about widget is that even if you do not have any knowledge of html or how to edit a web page, you can still easily drag and drop for convenient customization or to increase your blog’s functionality. Through the use of widget, a self-contained piece of code that allows you to move into, out of or anywhere inside the sidebar area of your blog without touching a line of code, you can easily personalize your blog and deliver information just the way you wanted it with just a few clicks of your mouse.

Apart from the standard widgets in WordPress, there is also a vast variety of external widgets to choose from. Webpage such as http://www.widgetbox.com provides thousands of widgets for your blog, profile, or webpage with numerous categories ranging from humor, news, movies, music, sports and a lot more. Besides having widgets, it also contains several guides on how to make your own widget to give your blog a ‘truly yours’ experience or if you’re a developer, writing a WordPress Widget is as easy as a plugin and they’ve even documented all the APIs (application programming interface) for you, as well as including guides for theme authors and current plugin authors. In addition to the 130,000+ blogs on WordPress.com, the talented developers also have the ability to keep tab on to the thousands of people who are still downloading the WordPress program every day and the many hundreds thousands of the already existing WordPress blogs out in the World Wide Web.

By using Javascripts and Ajax, widgets are very much similar to boxes representing content elements within your theme’s sidebar. The only disadvantage is that you can’t change how they look or work. The standard elements include;

Archives – displays archive links for each month that has posts.

Blog stats – displays statcounter and traffic count to your blog.

Calendar – displays a calendar of the current month with dates appearing as links if there are posts for that day.

Categories – displays a list of post categories as links to those posts.

Links – displays list of links (blogroll) separated by category.

Pages – displays a link to each Page.

Most Recent Posts/Comments – displays list of the blog’s most recent posts or approved comments.
Meta/admin – displays links to meta functions such as Site Admin, Login/Out, Entries RSS, Comments RSS, and WordPress.org.

Search – displays a Search box to enter text to search your blog. A submit button is also provided.

Text – used to enter HTML, Javascript, or just plain text. Using this opens a number of possible uses for text widgets.

Also a very cool thing you can do is to add RSS feeds from other websites with these new widgets in your sidebar. And as such, widgets can be used for an infinite variety of purposes limited only by your imagination. The only downfall is that too many widgets can slow down your blog. Hence, try to control yourself from over-widgetizing your blog and avoid badly designed widgets. After all, too much of anything is too much.

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Make Money like the Top Bloggers

By on June 18, 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

Make Money like the Top Bloggers

Very few people expected that blogging could give them profits which
could encourage them to dump their regular jobs for it. However, it is
also a fact that most of the top bloggers had a humble beginning as
they did not start the blogs with the profits in mind. Nevertheless, the
blogs created by them were able to attract huge traffics which in turn
resulted in great profits for these bloggers. So what did these bloggers
do differently to make these mounds of money?

This article aims at discussing some strategies which were used by
some of the top bloggers for making money:

Create a blog on a niche of interest

All the top bloggers were able to make money through their blogs
because they were passionate about it. It is very crucial to determine
on a niche which is of great interest to you and many others. This will
ensure that you have a thorough understanding of the niche of the
blog, which in result will encourage you to add quality content to your
blog which will inevitably attract people with similar interests.

Create blogs with WordPress or Blogger accounts

Most of the successful blogs can be found with WordPress or Blogger
accounts. One of the reasons for the huge popularity of these blogs is
that they are more SEO friendly and hence receive more hits and
traffic.

Always add Content and value to your visitors

Even if your intention is to commercialize the blog, make sure that the
blog has content and ads which are of value to the visitors of your
blog. A blog which is able to draw the interest of a loyal audience will
result in increased traffic, which can play a vital role in heightening
your profits.

Pay regular visits to popular blogs on the same niche

Be interested in blogs on the same niche. This will result in increased
knowledge on the niche. Leaving comments on those blogs with back
links to your blog will result in increased audience for your blog. One
must understand that almost always, higher traffic leads to more and
higher paying ads which implies more profits for you.

Try selling advice

If you have considerable experience as a successful marketer, then
you can try selling advices in the form of full consulting packages. On
the contrary, you can also sell brief advices for a relatively lower fee.
This will almost inevitably result in increased cash flow, more content
and boosted traffic.

Spread your wings by creating blogs on different niches

If you are already the proud owner of a relatively established blog,
then it is high time that you start another blog on a different niche.
Placing the ads of these blogs on the established blog can result in
traffic for those blogs as well, which in turn will earn profits for you in
the long run.

It is very important to mention here that if you are interested in
making money like the top bloggers, then it is quintessential to
cultivate an attitude like them. Almost every blogger who has made it
big in this industry has dedicated a lot of time and effort to make their
blogs a hit. Like in any other job or industry, hard work is a must for
making it big in the world of blogging.

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Initial Steps to SEO

By on June 10, 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

Initial Steps to SEO’ing Your Blog

When you first start out blogging you’ll most likely have no clue what you should do in order to make your blog more search engine optimized, and if you don’t then you need to learn quickly. Without properly making sure that your blog is ready for the search engines in the early stages, you could easily miss something important and then not notice it for awhile. This is why I find it so important to make sure that you follow certain steps each time you start a fresh blog. If you follow the simple steps I’m about to outline for you then you should be able to have search engine traffic coming into your blog within a week from starting it. There is more you can do then just the things listed here to make your blog even more SEO optimized, but if you follow these steps it’s a good start for now if you don’t know what else to do.

The first thing that you should do is make sure that you change the permalink structure in the wordpress admin section, and also make sure that you allow search engines to crawl the site. There is an option near the permalink structure option that will show you whether or not you’re allowing or blocking search engines, so make sure that this is switched to allowing the search engines. I once made the mistake of not checking this for a couple months and wondered why my blog had no indexed pages, and sure enough it’s because I was blocking them from crawling my site, so make sure you choose the right option.

After you do those two simple things you can then install the all-in-one SEO plug-in for wordpress which will allow you too choose the title, keyword and description for each page of your blog. These titles, keywords and descriptions are what the search engines will be reading when displaying their results so make sure that you optimize this section as best you can. The more searched phrases that you can get rankings for on the search engines the more traffic you’ll end up getting, so make sure that you take the time to set the proper titles, keywords and descriptions for each page and post.

There are now two more plug-ins that you should download to finish off this quick process and that’s the Google Sitemap Generator and KB Robot Txt plug-in. This will help your blog get more search engine traffic and will help your blog get its pages indexed faster in the search engines. It takes only a mere five minutes to set-up the two plug-ins so that there functional.

Now you just about have a nicely SEO’d wordpress blog that you can begin filling up with blog posts for the search engines. From here you spend a bit of time each day submitting to some blog directories, social bookmarking sites and comments on other blogs. All of these techniques will help keep your SEO on good track and after a month or two of doing this you should begin seeing that you have some nice rankings in the search engines. Of course the more searched the phrases you rank for the more traffic you’ll get so try your best to rank for the most searched keywords in your niche. Sometimes these keywords can take months to get rankings for, so don’t become discouraged if it doesn’t happen overnight. Some keywords will lots of competition will be really hard to get, but if you ever do get it then you could strike rich with the amount of traffic you’d get. You’d be surprised at how many different keywords you could rank for with a blog, and it doesn’t take long to start getting those rankings if you put in a bit of work.

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The Indispensable Shopping Cart

By on June 6, 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

The Indispensable Shopping Cart

Shopping carts are a necessity for those Website owners who wish to sell physical or digital goods and also those who sell services. Customers have come to expect that a serious ecommerce site will have a shopping cart and will exit a site it if doesn’t. A shopping cart has become an indispensable part of doing business online.

A customer can place items into a virtual shopping cart and continue browsing the site to locate other items of interest. The customer can usually look at the top of the screen and see a running total of how many items they have placed in the cart and can usually also tell a running total of dollars spent so far. While navigating the online shopping cart a customer is able to add to the cart, delete items from the cart, change quantities of the items that are in the cart and make option choices such as color and size from the cart. Shopping carts will even do the math for the customer regarding totaling the retail amount of the order, adding any necessary tax and also adding the shipping fee to the order. Most shopping carts will even email the customer after they have made a purchase and thank them for shopping at the particular Website and will confirm the order that they just placed. The fact that a shopping carts software can be programmed to do this means that the customer will feel secure in the purchase.

Because most ecommerce sites have shopping carts, if your site lacks one you will look unprofessional to a customer visiting your site. The last thing you want to do is drive away potential customers because you did not think to provide a shopping cart.

A shopping cart can provide many benefits to the online store owner including providing data collection and market research based on customer usage, such as how many carts have been abandoned before the purchase was completed, and how much traffic went through the shopping cart. A secure, easy to use shopping cart can even foster repeat business when customers enjoy their shopping cart experience.

The benefits of a secure and multiple featured shopping cart can give your customers a shopping experience that will put them at ease dealing with you. When a customer feels comfortable dealing with you they will purchase more items, and also come back to purchase again from you. They will also spread the word about the good shopping experience they encountered with you and you will pick up more customers by word-of-mouth advertising.

A shopping cart is an indispensable tool to the Website owner who sells goods or services because of the professional look of the site, the shopping experience a customer will enjoy using the shopping cart and because of the invaluable data a shopping cart can provide the Website owner about the shopping habits of the customers who visit the site.

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Communicate with Twitter

By on May 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

Communicate with Twitter

Twitter is a unique kind of place, it’s another social networking location but still it’s a really excellent place to be. You can find all kinds of people on Twitter; pick a topic that you want to meet people who know that topic, like “basketball” or some other term. You can see the matches and click to see their Twitter page, click on the follow button under their picture, and you will than receive updates when they change their status.

It’s not full of tons of different types of themes or backgrounds you can use. However, you have some really cool looking themes that you can change the colors to your desire. Making you page perhaps very unique, or normal like others. Depending on what you want to do.

When you go on to find others, there is also a button that says “suggested matches”, check these out, you’ll be surprised who you may find there. Anywhere from Shaquille O’Neal, to Kevin Pollock, both the Kutchers, you know Ashton and Demi. And too many more to really name.

Looking through Twitter today, there was one post that had said the staff of Twitter had gotten to see the Phoenix Suns when they were in town, thanks to Shaq. How cool is that, really you know it happens once in a while, but it’s just neat to hear about what they are doing.

If you’re trying to get some interests going on products you have for sale. Put up your link and see if you get some more sales. Twitter is a place where you can meet people from all walks of life, and in all areas of the country. What a way to broaden your horizons.

For college students this can be a great way to get that extra information on a country they may have to do a report on. Go and look for people at that location. Get to know them and see if you can find out some information about their location, stuff that no one can find in a book. Not only will you have a unique report, you’ll impress your professor, and get a good grade.

Some people think they want to move out of a state to another state or country. Get on Twitter and find people from the area and ask about the weather, to what kind of places are in that place to have fun at. Or maybe you want to plan a special vacation, one that you can stay away from the tourist’s traps, and see things that most people don’t know about.

With a Twitter account that costs nothing to set up, you will open up new forms of communication with people who you might never meet, but could become best friends with online. Be sure that you check out the cool widgets, there is a listing of widgets that are available on the different types of operating systems. Check them out and add a widget or two.

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Shutter Reloaded

By on May 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

Extensions, or plugins, are used to give your site or blog more functions and extend its usefulness. They also make it more interesting and more convenient for you, the blogger, and may even draw more readers to your blog! This article will list a few basic WordPress plugins that will definitely improve your blogging experience.
Starting off the list is Shutter Reloaded, a plugin that makes your photo-viewing experience a better one. It uses the Lightbox effect, which is a script that enables images to overlay the existing page you’re on. It is very cool and definitely enhances your image-viewing experience. And because it doesn’t use an external JavaScript framework, it’s very light. That’s always a plus!
Another item on the list is the Google Custom Search plugin. The default search capability that comes with the WordPress page is limited to searches within your posts only. This powerful search capabilities can expand your search to the whole of your website and will be able to return more relevant results to your users.
Third on the list is a very interesting plugin called Akismet. What it does is that it blocks automated spam, which is the type that is sent by automated bots. Akismet eliminates spam by scrutinising the method of delivery, instead of the message itself. Installing this plugin will mean virtually no comment spam, as it is commonly delivered by bots. Automated bots, beware!
Another plugin that would up the convenience level of your WordPress is the Query Posts. It compiles a list of pages similar to the one you’re currently viewing, by way of a calculation of a page’s similarity in terms of title, content and tags. There are a lot of options that you can choose from for you to find related posts.
I’m sure your readers would like leave comments on your page, right? Well then you should install Subscribe to Comments. It enables your commenters to choose if they’d like to be notified of recent comments on your page. When this plugin is installed, a checkbox will appear for your commenters to tick whether or not they’d like to be informed via email of new comments.
Last but definitely not least is the WordPress Automatic Online Backup, an automated backup program that’ll save you the hassle of manually backing up all your databases. As you should already know, it’s crucial to have backups, especially for important data. WordPress Automatic Online Backup sends database backups to your free account at its website, but also does it on-demand. It will delete any old backup as soon as it receives a new one. You can also determine which backup version that you do not want to be deleted.
In conclusion, all the plugins listed are basically plug-and-play, so no hassle of long-winded installations; they are also compatible with WordPress 2.7; not to mention LEGAL and licensed under GNU GPL. They’ll make your WordPress experience a million times better!

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Promoting your Website through Social Media

By on May 17, 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

Promoting your Website through Social Media

In this day in age you need to utilize social media as a website owner if you want to reach out to the most amounts of people. Social media websites make up the highest visited websites on the internet so if you can reach out to these massive crowds then the potential for making money is endless. There are two forms of social media that every website owner should utilize at one point or another, and the sooner you implement these tactics the quicker you can build your traffic and earnings.

The first form of social media advertising is through social bookmarking websites. These websites are abundant nowadays and there are literally hundreds of them all over the internet. You don’t need to submit to all of these obviously, but you should find a list of the most visited ones and make sure you submit to them often. You’ll always get a rush traffic from them and the more viral your content is the more response you’ll find on the social media websites. The goal is to gain votes and get listed on the high traffic pages of these social media websites, which is a lot easier said then done. With many bots out there that cheat the systems it can be difficult to land a front page listing, but if you ever do then you can expect large amounts of traffic to come from them. You should generally post to social bookmarking websites every time you add a new page to your website. It takes minutes to submit a webpage to a social bookmarking website so the time investment is definitely worth the traffic you’ll receive.

The second form of social media advertising you use is a lot less crowded right now and there is also more potential for finding clients using this method. The method is video advertising and as you know websites like Youtube receive tons of traffic on a daily basis. There are hundreds of video sharing websites out there that you can submit your videos too, and although time consuming it’s worth it. Once your video is live on the video sharing website then it’s generally fine to sit there and receive traffic for months to come without having to worry about doing anything else. The more viral your video is the more traffic you’ll get leaking to your website obviously, but any video is better then no video. A lot of webmasters don’t know how to make videos so if you can do this then you already have an advantage over most webmasters. Most of us need to outsource this type of work and even though it’s costly I still find it worth the money.

Social media marketing and advertising is only becoming popular now, and if you think it’s already popular then wait to see how it is in three years. You need to implement these tactics into your website now before it becomes too late and too many people use them. There will always be room for these mediums of marketing, but once there crowded with webmasters then the potential for profit becomes lower. It’s always better being a leader then follower, so don’t want for everyone to jump on the social media bandwagon and start using the methods now before everyone else.

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Common Mistakes Webmasters Make When Building Links

By on May 13, 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

Common Mistakes Webmasters Make When Building Links

Every website owner needs to build links on a regular basis in order to compete with the competition, but many webmasters make severe mistakes when building links. If you make any mistakes when building links then it could cause you a massive headache and also ruin your website. You can’t just go out and get links anywhere you want too, instead you need to focus on building relevant natural links. Let’s take a look at some of the common mistakes webmasters make when building links.

Not Using Proper Anchor Text

The whole point of building links is too increase your search engine rankings in the many search engines, and you want to rank for the keywords people are searching for. Your anchor text when building links should be the keywords that you have been targeting on your website. Use different anchor texts when building links as well, but always make sure that the text is relevant to your keyword strategy.

Building No-Follow Links

No-Follow links are no use too anyone and they are only good if they can bring you lots of traffic from direct clicks. If you want to increase your search engine rankings though then you need to build do-follow links as there the only links that count for anything in the search engines. Don’t waste time building no-follow links and when you do build links spend the time to make sure your links are do-follow.

Building Non-Relevant Links

If you have a website that is about training dogs then you don’t need to get links from piano websites as there not even remotely relevant to your website. The search engines look for relevant links and if you build half the amount of links you do now, but make sure there all relevant then you’ll do a lot better in the rankings of the search engines. If you’re trying to increase your page rank then you’ll want to also build a few high page rank relevant links and that should do the trick.

There are plenty other common mistakes that webmasters make when building links on their website, and you should make sure you don’t fall into any of these. If you do then you need to correct the mistakes immediately as it could be the difference between ruining and saving your website. If you build links in link farms or spammy areas then you’ll need to deal with the risk of having your website de-indexed from the search engines.

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