The best Amazon affiliate WordPress plugin, Product Style 2: amzps.com This Amazon WordPress plugin allows you to quickly generate completely customized affiliate advertisements and comparison charts by using Amazon Product Advertising API directly through your WordPress blog. Typically, ad information will have to be manually obtained from Amazon, but Product Style 2 will generate all of this information for you. It will even locally save product images to optimize them for search engine rankings – this plugin has a track record of top ten and even number one Google rankings for many different affiliate sites. In addition to creating image or text affiliate ads with this plugin, you’ll also be able to automatically generate product information to be displayed next to the advertisements. This product information creates an affiliate ad that is actually useful for website visitors, which results in higher CTR and more commissions. Unlike other plugins that automatically generate Amazon affiliate ads for WordPress blogs, Product Style 2 encourages unique content with a creative way to use Amazon Product Advertising API. Instead of creating the exact same ad as all other affiliates, Product Style actually lets you pick and choose the product information you want to display with your affiliate ads. You can also edit this information and even rearrange it to suit your needs. Since you can customize the way ads are created with this plugin, the plugin will actually remember an …
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The Importance of Using a Unique WordPress Theme
The Importance of Using a Unique WordPress Theme
If you’ve used WordPress to blog already then you will know that you have the ability to choose a WordPress theme for your blog, and your options are either choosing a paid or free theme. The difference between the two themes is simple, the free WordPress themes will be available to anyone, but if you buy a WordPress theme then you can make sure it’s unique to your blog only. Now a unique theme isn’t very important for every blog you own, but for your main blog you should make sure you have a unique WordPress theme for numerous reasons. For adsense and niche blogs there isn’t much need to create that unique appeal to the visitors and you don’t need a unique theme for these blogs.
There are lots of reasons why you should use a unique theme on your main blog and we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons right now. The most obvious reason is too create a unique appearance and appeal to your readers. Most of your readers will read other blogs and with over a million blogs and not too many free themes there are a lot of people using the same theme. If you have a unique theme then you will stand out from all of the bloggers using a free theme. Most blog readers also state that they will typically stay longer on a blog that has an appealing and attractive theme.
The most important of your theme is that it functions correctly and is carefully coded so that everything is clean looking. If you don’t have these skills then you should make sure you hire a professional for the job so that it’s done right the first time. Once you have the theme coded you need to ensure you have a very attractive header. You’ll notice a lot of the new bloggers are using cartoons in their headers to create a sharp looking and appealing image for the readers. I think it’s a great idea and they look awesome so make sure you have a colourful and attractive header with some sort of a logo. It’s important that you have your own logo in your header so that you can use the header down the road when branding your blog. If it’s a catchy and attractive logo then you’ll typically draw in more visitors and you’ll also be remembered by people by the logo which is the point of a logo, so this is good.
Apart from the header you want to make sure that the sidebar or sidebars are constructed with the readers in mind. You should try blending in all the widgets you plan on using into the sidebars so that they look like there apart of theme. It may take some struggling trying to do this, but in the end you’ll have a very attractive blog that is sure to retain its visitors. Creating your theme to retain visitors is a very important feature that most free theme bloggers never can utilize, so if you use a unique theme you’re one step ahead of most people. Now all you need to do is send traffic to the blog and write great content.
Two Free WordPress Themes That Can Reduce Your Blog Setup Time by Half
Two Free WordPress Themes That Can Reduce Your Blog Setup Time by Half
WordPress themes are also known as layouts or templates. These are files that create the look and feel of your blog content. WordPress themes can be very simple, like the one that comes standard with every install, to the complex. Bloggers can choose from free and paid versions of templates. When choosing a template, you should choose one that will give you a lot of ability to easily customize the template to fit your branding needs. This article discusses 2 templates (or themes) that have a lot of customization features which are relatively easy to a create unique brand.
All WordPress templates allow you to customize them by going into the Edit page of the Appearance tab. If you are not comfortable with PHP and HTML code, then you may have some trouble in customizing your appearance. One benefit of the themes mentioned in this article is they are customizable through a special theme options page, which means you can get your WordPress site up and running much more quickly.
1) Atahualpa Theme
This theme is a free theme that was created by ‘Bytes for All’ and can be found on their web site where you can ask questions and get community support for this theme. Once this theme is installed, you can customize the theme in the Appearance >> Atahualpa Theme Options page. Once here, you will find a host of options to highly customize your theme. Webmasters can configure special CSS styles for things such as the header, the layout, and page features such as headings, links and menu bars. Users can easily upload header graphics that can rotate through the header graphic.
Other options that can be customized include the number of columns you want on your blog (technically you can have from 1 to 5 columns), which side you want you sidebars to be on, or what you want your widget boxes to look like. The look and feel is highly customizable and is a great start to quickly getting a professional look to your blog.
2) News Magazine Theme
The free News Magazine theme was created by Anti Social Media LLC. This theme gives you several easily customizable options that can be set in the Appearance >> News Magazine Theme 640 Options page. The News Magazine theme doesn’t have quite as many options to set up as the Atahualpa theme, but you can add code for site tracking (can be done through the use of plugins), ad rotating and just adding text or java script code to parts of your template.
One nice feature of this template is that you can easily take featured categories and spotlight them on your blog through simple dropdown selections. One very nice feature is that you can control the excerpt length of your blog postings on the index page. On 99.9% of the WordPress blogs out there, the home (or index) page prints the entire text of the blog post. A better format for visitors is to have a post excerpt and they can click a link to read the entire blog. Currently there is no function in WordPress that allows you to display excerpts of your blog postings. This blog theme allows you to display excerpts with their ‘Blog Mode Excerpt Length’ setting.
These two WordPress themes are varied enough to get you started and well on your way with your first (or second) WordPress blog. The ease of these customizable settings should greatly reduce your setup time while creating a fairly well customized blog. To make the most advantage of setting up your blog for more traffic and more automation, taking a WordPress training class will speed up creating a decent blog following.
The Dawn of a New WordPress
The Dawn of a New WordPress – V2.5.x
Not long ago, the ever popular blog hosting site which goes by the name of WordPress gave their system a remake, thus giving birth to a newer and better WordPress 2.5. It is a major improvement over WordPress 2.3 and these are the areas where the new features are prominent.
Dashboard
The dashboard is now designed to look very much like your blog’s hub and is designed in a sleeker and more focused manner which provides you an interesting choice of colour schemes. The new layout is now more organized with quick links at your disposal and easy to use. Also, feeds are now customisable for your viewing convenience and are not only limited to WordPress Development Blog or WordPress Planet feeds. To add to that, the displays of incoming links such as the ones from Google Blog Search are can now be personalized.
Navigation Menu
One feature which went through a major revamp is the navigation menu which has shrunk in menu items, a number of which have been renamed. Renamed items include Presentation (changed to Design) and Options (changed to Settings) and these are now included under Manage.
Post & Page
This area had a major overhaul which leaves bloggers who use the ‘tag’ and ‘trackback’ features needing to scroll more when using the new WordPress. There is also no more drag and drop option for items. However, WordPress 2.5 will provide the option to add pictures and videos directly from the likes of YouTube and Flickr.
Post/Page Management
Navigation and management is now a lot easier as users can now skim through and edit their posts according to tags or authors. Also, there is now the ability to mass delete unwanted entries. An interesting change is the date format, which will give displays such as “3 hours ago” for any edits or posts within short periods of time.
Edit Post Page
Basically, the most prominent change would be the renaming of ‘View This Post’ to ‘Preview’. However, it is now more convenient and faster when it comes to post editing and there is a quick link for quick post deletion. Overall, it is a whole lot more convenient.
Miscellaneous Management
There is now a ‘Tags’ option for easy tag addition, editing or deletion. As for media, there is now a Media Library which supports more file types than what WordPress 2.3 could where all your uploaded files can be managed. Also, it is easier to manage widgets now than before. They are easy to add onto the sidebar and once there, can simply be dragged as you wish for your desired arrangement.
Other Changes
There is now an improvement on the user filters which makes it more user-friendly. Also, you can now see the exact number of comments in the navigation menu pending your review. One last notable addition is the ability to support avatars directly from the box. Overall, WordPress 2.5 is quite an improvement but the changes make it a love or hate affair. Either way, it is certainly the talk of the blogosphere.
Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere
Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere
There are millions of blogs out there on the internet and thousands of them are promoted on a daily basis and updated regularly. This means that in most cases there will be other bloggers in the niche that you choose to blog about, and although there your competition they can also help you out. You don’t always want to look at your competition as your enemy when it comes to blogging because there are ways you can benefit from other bloggers in your niche. The importance of becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche is becoming more important as each day passes and you should make sure you start commenting now. If you’re unsure as to why you should spend time becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche that’s fine as we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons now.
Reason #1
The first reason you want to become active on blogs in your niche is for the backlinks. The backlinks only count in the search engines if there do-follow, but nowadays there are lots of bloggers who use the do-follow feature on their comments. You should find all of the blogs that offer do-follow comments in your niche and you should make a note of commenting on these blogs regularly. The search engines love relevant links so by commenting on blogs similar to yours you’ll be getting about as relevant as links as you possibly can manage to get.
Reason #2
Commenting on blogs helps to also gain traffic for your blog over the long-term, and is one of the main benefits of commenting on blogs in your niche. As visitors see your comments on the blogs they’ll be able to click your link and visit your blog. You won’t get to much traffic from doing this, but it adds up over time and you should use any advantages you can over your competitors. The traffic you get from the comments will also be targeted and could result in a long-term reader of your blog or even a customer.
Reason #3
If you comment regularly enough on the authority blogs then the owner will begin to take notice of you and it could benefit you and your blog. As you grow a relationship with the other bloggers in your niche you open up your chances of exchanging links with them. To get an authority backlink in your niche usually means spending a lot of money, but if you can grow a friendly relationship through blog commenting then you may be surprised what the bloggers may do for you. If your blog has good content then they’ll have no problem linking to you in one of there posts, and this is when you get the real traffic.
There are even more reasons as to why you should become active in the blogosphere, but these three are the main reasons that I do it. You don’t need to go to blogs in your niche and spam all the posts on them as this will just upset the blog owner. You should comment on a regular basis as the blogger adds new content, as then they’ll know that you continually check their blog out and will make them more likely to check out your blog.
Seo for WordPress
To answer this question, we need to define what WordPress, Blog and SEO are. WordPress is free journalism over the Internet. It is an entity in the Internet that allows a person to express himself by creating a Blog. A blog simply means writing online individual journals, feedback, commentaries, and while maintaining it on a Website on the Internet.
There is a couple of this online journalism on the Internet and one is BlogSpot, a competitor of WordPress. There have been comparisons between the two Website by users. Both have tactical features that make each individual unique from each other. However, this article will explain more on WordPress and why it is so SEO friendly.
Search Engine Optimization or simply SEO as explained. This is the application of optimizing and maximizing the accessibility of your site or blog on a Search Engine by strategies and tactics. A Search Engine Optimizer is an individual who performs these functions.
SEO function is to assure that a Blog or site on the Internet will come out on the first couple of pages of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) using strategies and discovering other means of obtaining this goal. This is significant because Search engine categories rely critically on the rank and number of links to your blog while they launch the positioning and the optimum technique to attain links that are by customary suggestions from other bloggers or web site holders.
WordPress which is defined on the first part of this article seems a favorite among several SEO who are keen to work on this site. Why is WordPress so SEO friendly? There are a couple of reasons why.
WordPress is SEO friendly because a plugin can be predetermined to strongly produces a XML sitemap which is proposed to Google, MSN and the likes as soon as you issue your post. This plugin will also advance your sitemap to Yahoo if you install it by going to your Yahoo API which can be obtained free of charge, and a plugin can be set up to energetically generates a sitemap for your guests.
Moreover, WordPress can also be adapted to supplement many different customs and a lot of these enhancements will connect to the common functionality of making visitors and SEO to bond more on the site. The confident figure of inbound link by WordPress is auto-generated with every post by pinging the blog index and compliance to RSS Feed aggregators. WordPress has numerous plugins that will gather stats on your guests. (A number of these will actually swell your file and make it a little sluggish behind your load period so you are advised to only implement those that you really wanted.)
Last but not least, WordPress is an interactive Website that is search engine responsive, guest friendly and is easy to put in content without as much as thinking too much about SEO since it has in-built or added functions. Rest assured that the people behind this site are doing all they can to enhance and develop the online journal to be more user responsive and definitely, more SEO friendly.
SEO Tactics All Bloggers Must Utilize
When you blog you need to make sure that you use all the proper SEO tactics that you possibly can in order to rank well in the search engines and it takes a ton of work to start ranking well. There are many things that you need to do, some being common and some being more advanced. In this article we’re going to walk through some of the common more basic SEO tactics that you should be using. SEO is a never ending process for your blog and you will always be trying to improve your SEO so that you can attract more traffic to your blog. The problem is beginning SEO because often most people have no clue where to begin, and quickly become lost in the hype.
The first thing you need to do is make sure that you’re optimizing your blog for the right keywords, and once you do that then you’ll be a lot more successful. Most people try targeting unreachable terms or terms without any search traffic and this results in low SEO conversions for your blog. To improve your search engine friendliness try optimizing your blog for keywords that you stand a chance in ranking for and also make sure you’re optimizing searched phrases.
Another way to attract more search engine traffic is through your content. The more content you add to your blog, will equal more pages that will be indexed in Google. Now each page can also be set-up with different titles, descriptions and keywords which mean you can use each post to rank for different lowly searched longtail keywords. This is how you slowly build up your search engine traffic, because eventually all your posts will start ranking in the search engines and the more content you have the more traffic you’ll get. It’s also good to make sure that you try researching your keywords to use in each article and then make sure you write the article with a certain keyword density.
The last thing you need to do is broad and can be found discussed in detail in other articles but here it’s just brief. You need to build links to your blog, all kinds of natural links so that you rank well. The more incoming links you have the better your SEO score will be, and the more outgoing links you have the worse your SEO score will be. You need to make sure that you only build natural links as well because then you can ensure that you won’t be punished in the search engines. You will need to always build links to keep the growth of your blog going and link building is the most important part of maintaining search engine rankings. You should aim for in-content links with your keywords being used as these are the best and the higher of page rank links you can find the better it will be for you. Just make sure you remember that SEO is constant and not a one time deal so you need to be ready to put in the work to see results.
So What
So What’s New In WordPress 2.5.x?
In the beginning, everyone was excited about the news of the release of WordPress 2.5 but just when it was about to make its official debut on March 10, 2008, the release date was pushed back crushing the hope of millions of bloggers worldwide waiting anxiously for its release. Now, the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 2.5.1) is available for download at http://wordpress.org/download/
However, as of the time of release, it’s still in its early copy and was still under some concluding rounds of testing the program and also tweaking it; but it is now stable enough to provide you with a quick overview of some of the feature changes and additions, along with a brief comparison against its predecessor, WordPress 2.3.x series. It’s time to change!
i) The Dashboard
The very first thing you laid eyes on will be the dashboard which is similar to the hub of your blog. The new dashboard now not only features a sleek and more focused design but also comes with a few colour schemes which has switched from very cool, cool blues to the even colder icy blue, sexy dark grey and exotic burnt orange. The other change you will notice right away is the content’s layout. You will no longer have the content on your left and the blog statistics on your right but now you have a single column which has some quick links to the post composing screens, followed by blog stats, any recent comments you received, incoming links and lastly aggregated feeds.
On the plus side, now you can customize the feeds to the feeds that you want to see at a glance. Thus, you are no longer restricted to feeds from the WordPress development blog or WordPress planet. You’ll also be able to personalize your incoming links display such as from Google Blog Search to Technorati.
ii) The Navigation Menu
The navigation menu also has been changed from the straight forward menu of items in WordPress 2.3.x to a reduced menu with a few menu items completely renamed. While Write, Manage, Design, and Comments could be found in the usual spot, but the Plugins, Users, and Settings are now in the mid-upper right corner. The name changes are Presentation to Design, Options has become Settings and Blogroll renamed to Links and can be found under Manage. Under Write, there is also a Link navigation item where you’ll be able to add links to your blogroll.
iii) The Post and Page
The write pages have also undergone complete overhauls, leaving power bloggers who has grown accustomed to the many of the advanced WordPress features such as tags, categories, and trackbacks to do quite a bit of scrolling. Gone is also the option to drag and drop items in the order you’d prefer as you could in version 2.3.x. However, you may find a cool new addition which is the media manager. Currently, it only supports uploading from your computer but soon, there will be an option to add media from popular services such as YouTube and Flickr.
iv) The Post/Page Management
The Manage page no longer has the manual one at a time posts delete or clicking on the Edit link next to a particular entry. In version 2.5.x, to edit post, instead of edit link, just click on the post title while to view posts with a particular tags listed on the Manage page, just click on the tag and WordPress will list all those posts, the same with clicking on the author or category. As an added bonus, you can now mass delete entries.
The date format has also changed to sporting a user friendly “2 hours ago” as opposed to an actual date. After a 24 hour period, it will change to the usual date format. Besides that, you’ll also be able to see the posts’ tags and publication status.
v) The Edit Post Page
Most notable change is the “View this Post” button which has replaced the “preview” link that was hidden between the title and post content. In addition, you’re also able to quickly edit the post slug on the fly. Finally, there’s a quick link for deletion that enables the users to quickly delete their posts and there is an option to view the comments associated with the post, all comments, or even all posts.
vi) The Tag Management
Under Manage, you’ll probably see a brand new sub-menu named Tags. It allows you to do some basic tag management such as adding, editing, or deleting individual tags similar to category management page.
vii) The Media Management
The other new link appearing under the Manage tab is called Media Library, which has replaced Upload, and it’s where you can find and manage each of your uploaded files. WordPress is now supporting a multitude of file formats, such as video and audio.
viii) The Widgets Management
There will also be no need for you to click on any particular widgets onto the sidebar because you now can click on an Add link next to it and it is added! Once it’s already on the sidebar, then you’re free to click and drag however you want them to be arranged. To help beginners, each widget now comes with a brief description detailing what the widget does and widget filters as well as a search function (in case you lose track).
ix) The Other Changes
First, the user filters have been improved a little and clicking on a specific role’s link will only display users with that particular role. Secondly, WordPress will now show you exactly how many comments you have waiting for review in the navigation menu so you no longer have to click on comments to discover them. Third, there is an option (you can also disable it) to support avatars straight out of the box.
In conclusion, this version seems to be heading in the correct direction which has improved over the previous version with several small, yet significant changes to WordPress. For the most part, most people will either love it or hate it. But one thing for sure is WordPress will certainly leave a lot of commotion in its wake.