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Ways to Promote Your Blog

By on October 26, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Ways to Promote Your Blog

Bloggers have hundreds of different ways that they can use to promote their blogs and the more techniques utilized by the blogger the bigger chance that blogger has at having a successful blog. Since there are so many different options when promoting your blog I won’t be able to list them all here but I will aim to list some of them so that you can see some of the ways available to you when promoting.

One of the first methods you should use to promote your blog is by social bookmarking each and every one of your posts, this will help gain backlinks and also traffic to your blog so it’s a huge win-win for the blogger and I highly recommend it. It can be time consuming to submit to all of the social bookmarking sites but if you choose the top ten from an online list then you should be well on your way.

Another method you can use is article submissions which can be done quickly by yourself as you only need to submit to a few of the directories. A couple of the more popular options would be EzineArticles and GoArticles. Both of those places get a ton of traffic each day and they will help not only with backlinks but with bringing traffic to your blog.

You can also get active on other peoples blogs, preferably ones in your niche. You should comment as often as you can so that you gain a presence with the other bloggers in your niche. This can be important for in the future as your blog progresses you may find people wanting to exchange links.

Video marketing is another method that most successful marketers are using to gain the attention of millions of people. Youtube alone gets millions of people daily going to there site to watch videos so you can be sure a lot of people are watching videos and a lot of traffic can come from a well made video.

There are many hundreds of other promotion techniques that bloggers utilize to make their blogs successful and you’ll need to do more then the above to have a great blog, but by doing the above you’ll ensure a lot of steady traffic over time and a fairly decent blog. The above techniques are a great beginning and utilized with some other promotional and marketing tactics you’ll be well on your way to blogging for the big bucks. Don’t be shy about leaving your URL places but make sure it isn’t spammy looking or else most people will disregard your links and not click them. The less spammy the links look the more clicks you’ll end up receiving so fooling around with the placement of your links is a great idea.

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10 WordPress Plugins For Your Tech Blog

By on October 25, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

10 WordPress Plugins For Your Tech Blog

As a general rule of thumb most errors you’ll encounter with your WordPress blog are the result of excessive or incompatible plugins. While many find the selection of essential plugins a conundrum I believe in testing each plugin one-by-one with the latest version of WordPress so I can isolate the problem to determine the cause of the slow load times, call function errors or php memory limit warnings. The most valuable tool I can tell you when it comes to plugins is that when possible look for existing code that can accomplish the same result.

Of course there are certain plugins that even I use in my WordPress Blogs. I’ve compiled a list below of the top 10 plugins that I use on a daily basis that I believe will help any tech blog:

* AdSense Now – There are many ad insertion plugins for WordPress, but if your tech blog is using AdSense – this is the plugin I recommend. It allows you to insert your ad blocks aligned left, center or middle in 3 sections of a post. It also gives you the option to suppress ads on pages, category pages, tag pages, archives and more.

* Audio Player – Being able to insert mp3 clips or podcasts into your blog can be a problem. Audio Player is a plugin that makes this process simple – simply create a music folder on your site via FTP and then upload mp3 tracks to the directory. You can insert the built-in audio player into any of your posts or pages with a simple line of code – painless, simple and easy.

* Facebook Sharecount – It’s no secret that social networking sites like Facebook are effective ways to create a fanbase, but being able to harness that power relies on an easy way to share your great content. Facebook Sharecount will make it easy for visitors share your posts and monitor your content.

* Foliopress Descriptions – Once your tech blog has hundreds or even thousands of posts you will need a way to mass edit your descriptions. While the importance of meta descriptions is debated, I still believe that a hand written summary should be written for each post. Foliopress Descriptions supports post excerpt, These and All In One Seo meta description fields.

* Google XML Sitemaps – If you’ve read my previous post on how to get indexed by Google and Yahoo you know that having a sitemap is essential. This plugin auto generates your sitemap in a nice and neat XML file and let’s search engines understand the content on your tech blog. After installing and activating the plugin Google XML Sitemaps will take care of the rest.

* NextGEN Gallery – Managing your images and photo galleries can be a pain, but NextGen Gallery makes this simple. With features like auto resizing, watermarks, thumbnail creation as well as gallery effects – NextGEN Gallery is a must have plugin.

* Star Rating for Reviews – When you run a tech blog sooner or later you will start receiving products for review. Creating a solid review is as much about content as it is about presentation. Star Rating for Reviews allows you to create ratings for the products you review or even rate different aspects of the product and averages the ratings to determine a final score. The possibilities are limitless with the plugin – a must have for anyone looking to review tech.

* TweetMeme Retween Button – If you look at the posts on TechBlogStartup you’ll notice a yellow Retweet button aligned to the right. The power of Twitter is growing by the day so making it easy for your reader to ReTweet great content can prove very valuable. If you’ve installed Google Analytics like I explained in my previous post here, then you will be able to monitor just how many visitors enter your post through Twitter. If you are wondering why I haven’t included ShareThis it’s because I manually insert the code instead of using a WordPress Plugin.

* WP Super Cache – If you’ve heard of Digg then odds are you’ve heard of the Digg Effect where an article on a website becomes so popular so quickly that the flood of traffic to the website causes the server to crash. Since WordPress blogs are built on SQL Databases they are highly susceptible to this condition, but installing WP Super Cache can almost eliminate this threat. The plugin builds a cache of your posts and creates a static html page so that the server load is reduced and your site can handle more visitors. If your tech blog is brand spanking new I would install the plugin but not activate it until I started to see spikes in traffic or one of my articles was picked up by a major tech blog like Engadget or Gizmodo.

* All in One SEO – Search Engine Optimization is a key ingredient to driving organic traffic to your tech blog. Writting great content is key, but after you have created that content you need to make sure that it targets keywords and includes some basic optimization to ensure it is search engine friendly. All in One SEO does this job very well. If you are using the WordPress theme I use (Thesis) then you will not need this plugin, but for pretty much every other WordPressTheme I recommend installing it right away so that you can start writing your custom meta descriptions

All of the plugins I’ve mentioned above can be downloaded manually and then uploaded via FTP to your blog or you can add them from within your WordPress Dashboard – personally I prefer the latter. If you are wondering why certain plugins are not listed on my top 10 list – I just don’t find them essential to a tech blog. You will notice that I do somethings with TechBlogStartup that many people use Plugins or Widgets to do – eg. the top 6 articles aligned horizontally at the top of the site or the Recent Posts section in the side bar. For tech blogs that receive a large volume of traffic, limiting the plugins helps reduce the SQL memory load and if you’ve ever had a website crash you know just how important this is. Do you have some WordPress plugins on your tech blog that you think we should know about? Go ahead and drop your own list or links to the plugins in the comments section below so we can check them out.

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How to Add WordPress Plugins

By on October 23, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How to Add WordPress Plugins

When it comes to utilizing the power of WordPress, the one thing that sets is apart from other platforms is the plugin system. Plugins allow you to easily add advanced functionality to WordPress and can help you perform a wide variety of tasks. However, you need to learn how to add WordPress Plugin before you can start using them on your own blog or website.

There are two different ways to add plugins to WordPress. The first one is to go out and find the plugin you are looking for on the internet. You can then download the file that they give you. From there, all you have to do is log in to your WordPress blog and select the add new plugin link. WordPress will then have you point to the file you downloaded and it will automatically upload it into the correct directory.

The second way to learn how to add WordPress plugin is to use the built in search feature. You can type in a certain keyword or phrase and WordPress will automatically show you the plugins that it finds based on your search. Best of all, you can also see ratings for each plugin and see which one is the best option for you.

Once you find a plugin you like, just click the install button and WordPress will take care of uploading the plugin for you. If you do this method, you do not even have to upload the files yourself. It is really that easy!

As you can see, there are a few different ways to learn how to add plugins to the WordPress platform. Regardless of the way you choose, you can quickly start adding a lot more functionality to your blog or website.

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Ways to Monetize Your Blog

By on October 23, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Ways to Monetize Your Blog

In the early stages you shouldn’t really be thinking about monetizing your blog and instead you should be more focused on providing good content so that you can build a readership. Once the foundation is laid and you have a steady stream of traffic then you can begin to play with the many different monetization options. I feel some bloggers will put ads on their blogs way to early and most readers get turned off from this. If you’re planning on having a long-term successful blog then you shouldn’t even consider using ads on your blog until you’re well into being established in your niche. Once you have a certain trust factor secured with your readers then adding monetization methods can pay off greatly.

The first type of ad many people start with is cost per click ads and the most popular network for this is of course Google Adsense which I highly recommend joining. If you haven’t already registered with Google Adsense then this should be the first thing that you do before anything else. Adsense is very slow in the beginning but if you have traffic then eventually your earnings will go up. You’ll need to play with ad placement on your blog to ensure that you’re optimizing your ad space to the best of your abilities, but you shouldn’t be posed with much hassle doing this. Adsense pays millions of people every month and have a very good reputation which is why so many people use them to make money from their blogs.

Another method commonly used to monetize your blog is through affiliate offers and sales. You can either get leads and receive a set fee or a commission for products you sell. Selling products is far more profitable then getting leads but in the beginning we all need to start somewhere and often time’s leads are easier then selling products. There are countless numbers of affiliates for you to choose from and you should try sticking with only one or two until you reach minimum payment.

Finally you could choose to sell your own advertisements on the blog, usually you’d post on a webmaster forum in a Link Sales section and try selling links or banners. This can be really profitable if you can manage to keep a high page rank and decent alexa rating. Many people buy links on blogs so you can ensure residual income through link sales by maintaining a blog.

There are still other ways for bloggers to monetize their efforts but that’s the main three ways you should use to monetize, although selling links you need to be careful and make sure they don’t appear as paid links. Google frowns upon paid links and for this reason you should be really careful when thinking about selling links on your blogs. Selling links in the content is a lot risky and safer for you to do then offering sitewide blogroll links so you need to make the decision on how you’ll sell links if in fact you even choose to. Monetizing your blog gives you the chance to earn a nice income off of your hard work and you should make sure to capitalize on the chances. Once the readership is high then you should implement ads and affiliate offers that pertain to the topic of your blog.

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Quality WordPress Themes1

By on October 21, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Quality WordPress Themes

A innovative software makes it possible for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, DotNetNuke, and Blogger individuals to easily build templates within a short period of time. Instead, I use a WordPress theme that I installed in less than a half hour. After that I just added loads of great content such as images, articles, videos. As soon as they notice that another site have a similar theme they will immediately look for to find another one to ensure that their website boast a unique look.

The ePanel is the mechanism in their themes where you customize and set your website layout. You can dictate the navigation, home page, color scheme (if more than one color scheme is offered by a particular theme), search engine optimization, blog settings, and more. Photo WordPress theme is extremely important in the world wide web as to catch client and users to check out and use their web site wherever you’ll be able to include up your blogs and of course generating your own articles or blog posts and posting it to a certain web page.

Once you find a theme you like, you will need to download it to your own PC. It will likely be in either RAR or ZIP format, so you will need a unzipping tool. WinRar is free to download if the file has a.rar extension. Once unpackaged, you will need to FTP/Upload the files to your own webhost. WordPress application can also be used as a Content Management System (CMS). CMS is a document centric application which is used to manage documents.

By the time you get the Gallery WordPress Themes, the first thing that you should know is on how to install it. You should always remember that this is a child theme and because it is a child theme then the first and the most important thing that you should do first is to upload both the parent theme and the child theme, to do this you have to download Thematic theme and extract the folder and then after upload it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory. There has been a huge increase in the number of developers releasing free premium WordPress themes over the years. This has boosted the competition in the field, which has in fact benefited the end user.

Language of local or international origin can be used to create the weblog using WordPress theme development process. You can make test site and check the functionality of your WordPress template. StudioPress is a leading WordPress theme provider; the designer Brain is famous in this area. If you are looking for high quality professional premium tempaltes, you can find your favorite WordPress themes on StudioPress. While selecting from online sites, you have to ensure that the site offers its themes rich with high quality and great appearance.

A genuine magazine WordPress theme with pure articles or blog posts, minimalistic illustrations or photos and usable layout, structured to focus between visitors interest around the content and ads, instead of designer graphics. If you have a bit of knowledge in PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript then you can make your own themes for WordPress that can be sold over the net for a nice profit. But there’s one important part that reflects the image of you and your niche as a blogger, and it is what we call design. Although design is just secondary to the content, it is still very potential for the blogger to make it look very attractive.

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Follow people on Twitter

By on October 20, 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

Follow people on Twitter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ways to Build Your External Links

By on October 20, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Ways to Build Your External Links

When you blog you’ll need to build external links to your blog so that the search engines think you’re worth ranking high. The more links you have pointing to your blog the better it will be for your search engine rankings and you should notice solid traffic over time. Search engine traffic isn’t built over night and you’ll need to spend countless months building links to your blog before you see much of a profit. You should start seeing some profit after a couple months but it takes roughly a year before making any serious money off of a blog. In order to keep your blog alive for a year though and to make it successful you’ll need to constantly build incoming links to your blog. There are different methods for doing this and you should make sure you use them at your own risk and understand the risk involved before trying out each method. Typically the methods are safe but there is a chance that you could get banned. If you want to start getting countless amounts of targeted search engine traffic then you need to start working immediately on building links. There is never too many links as long as they are built naturally.

The first way to begin building backlinks for your site should be through free methods such as article submissions, directory submissions, social bookmarking and blog commenting. All of these methods can bring you a lot of search engine traffic over time but you should make sure that there do-follow links before spending your time submitting. If it isn’t a do-follow link then it still can bring traffic to your blog but typically the link won’t be worth much.

The second way to accumulate external links is through using other sites and blogs that you already own on the same topic and link to it. This is not considered a safe practise but typically if the blogs are on separate IP’s then you should be fine. Many people run multiple blogs and link them together for the SEO benefits and nothing happens so although there is a risk it’s slim. Don’t make the links appear like link farms is vital though but other then that you should be fine. You can also exchange links with other webmasters, which should be done in three way exchanges. You should have a site or blog where you can put other people’s links on and then have them link to the blog that you’re trying to build links for. If you do it this way then you will have one way links in the eyes of the search engines and if there on topic to your blog then they should help your search rankings considerably.

The final way you can build links for your blog is by buying them which although is frowned upon by the search engines it’s still done by most webmasters. As long as the link looks natural then typically you should be safe with the search engines, and if you manage to buy some nice page rank links then you can boost your page rank the next time it updates which is a huge benefit for your search engine rankings.

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How I Crashed My WordPress Site (forever)

By on October 19, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

How I Crashed My WordPress Site (forever)

I was making an instructional video on the topic of installing WordPress onto a domain.  In order to show the process, I was using my own account, by installing WordPress on one of my own domains.  I completed the video and was very pleased with the results.

I went to my main domain to upload the video and was shocked to find that my site was gone and in its place, the default template you get when you first install WordPress onto a domain.  Confused and panicking, I called Bluehost (the greatest hosting company out there) thinking they would have a way of fixing what I had done to my site.

I heard the words that everyone who has a site on the internet fears hearing: “”I am very sorry ma’am, but there are no backups to roll your site back to.  Your content is gone and not recoverable.””

Having always assumed that my site was being automatically backed up, I was shocked to say the least.  How could this happen?  Technical support informed me that my account had long ago exceeded 2 gigabytes, and that after the 2 gig size has been reached, they cannot guarantee that the sites will be automatically backed up.  In fact, it is very unlikely that the sites will be (automatically) backed up.

So what have I learned about hosting that could help you in the future?

That once your account (not just your site) gets bigger than 2 gig, it can and will no longer be backed up automatically.  You either need to go to your hosting and back it up yourself, or add a plugin that will do it for you.
That you do not get any warning that lets you know you are close or have exceeded the 2 gig limit.  But you can go into your C-Panel (the back end of your hosting) and check the file space and usage anytime to see how close you are to the 2 gig point.
You can backup your site yourself and I highly recommend that you do this.
Bluehost has wonderful tutorials that will walk you through this process.  Go to tutorials.bluehost.com for the best info available.
That PARKED domains are redirected to your main domain.  What you do to a parked domain, you will be doing to your main domain.  (Remember I installed WordPress on a domain I wasn’t using? It was a parked domain.)
I highly recommend that you learn all you can about your hosting package.  Bluehost offers C-Panel which is a user friendly, highly intuitive program allowing end users (you) to manage your hosting/sites/account yourself. Read up on all that you can get your hands on from your Hosting company.
Wherever possible, use other sites to upload content to. For example, did you know that you can create the coolest sales page in Twitwall?  And you can host your videos on YouTube and so on.  Get really creative and monitor the size of your account frequently.

What causes your site to exceed 2 gig? 

For one thing, it is not just any one site that you have hosted that is considered in the size-it is your

whole ACCOUNT. 
If you have a couple of sites hosted, they are both factored in on the size. 
Extra templates, unnecessary plugins, files you don’t use, and too many video and audio files.
Files in your directory.  If you don’t use the file any longer, take it out of your directory.

So please, go and create a backup of your site (s).  Never assume anything.

Oh, and I still highly recommend Bluehost.

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