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A Detailed Look at Some of the Most Popular WordPress Plugins

By on November 18, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

A Detailed Look at Some of the Most Popular WordPress Plugins

One of the most popular WordPress plugins being downloaded on a daily basis is WordPress.com Stats, in fact at the time of writing it has been downloaded more than 37,000 times. To be able to use this WordPress plugin you will need to be running WordPress version 2.1 or higher. It is also compatible up to 2.7 beta.

WordPress.com Stats offers you a really simple way of retrieving data. I sometimes find that the more complex stat systems such as Google analytics or mint provide far too much information which can be confusing especially if you are new to blogging.

Installation is extremely easy, and is done in 4 steps

1. First you will need to upload stats.php to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory.2. Then activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.3. It will then ask you to enter your WordPress.com API key, you will need to do this to enable it to work.4. After a few minutes your stats will show.

Once installed you can view the stats in less than 20 minutes. It also has the added function of not including the hits of logged on users, which is especially handy if you are constantly updating and adding new posts.

This WordPress plugin will provide you with valuable information such as letting you know which pages and posts are the most popular, what people are clicking on and where your traffic is coming from. The way the information is viewed is very simple and easy to understand.

You can use the plugin on either a hosted or unhosted accounts and because all the data collection and processing is not done on your server it does not effect the load on your hosting account making it one of the fastest stats systems you can use.

Another of the most popular WordPress plugins is Google XML sitemaps. Over 1000 people per day are adding this plugin to their websites and blogs and the main advantage is because as you update or create a post the sitemap is automatically updated and the new information is passed to all major search engines such as Google, YAHOO, MSN and ASK.

You will need to be running WordPress 2.1 or higher to be able to install it and also have access to an ftp programme in order to create the files needed to install the software.

Adding WordPress plugins to your blog will not only give you access to a lot more information, these plugins are designed to make your website more pleasing to the eye and far more user friendly taking it to the next level.

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Nextgen Gallery WordPress Plugin

By on November 16, 2011 in Randy Roedl

www.profitblog.com nextgen wordpress plugin NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a slideshow option. Before I started writing the plugin I studied all the existing image and gallery plugins for WordPress. Some of them are really good and well designed, but the gap I filled was a simple administration system at the back end which can also handle multiple galleries. Features Templates You can add custom templates for your theme. Media RSS feed : Add the Cooliris Effect to your gallery Role settings : Each gallery has a author AJAX based thumbnail generator : No more server limitation during the batch process Copy/Move : Copy or move images between galleries Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of images Upload or pictures via a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode) Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text JavaScript Effect : Use any available popular image effect : Shutter, Thickbox, Lightbox or Highslide Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file Slideshow : Full integrated slideshow as jQuery or Flash solution TinyMCE : Button integration for easy adding the gallery tags Sidebar Widget : Show a slideshow, random or recent picture at your sidebar Language support : Translated in more than 30 languages Translation downloader : Download with one click the new translation file Upload tab integration : You have access to all pictures via the upload tab Tag support for images …

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The Thesis WordPress Theme – Perfect For Beginners and Experts Alike

By on November 6, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

The Thesis WordPress Theme – Perfect For Beginners and Experts Alike

Almost anyone who has ever set up a blog or tried to design a website will probably have used WordPress at some time or other. It’s one of the most powerful, and popular, pieces of software to be found on the internet today.

Most people think that it’s just useful for blogs and they do little more than install a copy and add some content. However, if you search around the internet you will soon discover that WordPress can do much more than just act as a blogging platform. Its great popularity comes from its customizability thanks to the huge number of plug-ins and widgets that you can download for free. These add-ons enable you to configure WordPress for almost any kind of website from simple sales pages to complete e-commerce stores complete with payment gateways and so on.

Its other great feature is the ability to change the look of your website at the touch of a button using templates, or as they are referred to in WordPress circles, themes. Some themes offer little more than a change of colour or some extra graphics, but the better ones enable complete customisation of your website, right down to individual page level. Using such a template can really make your website seem individual and make it stick out from the crowd.

One of the best themes in terms of the level of customisation it offers is the Thesis WordPress Theme by DIYThemes.com. This amazing template enables people with little or no web coding skills to completely customise the look and feel of their WordPress installation. Non-techies can adjust a whole range of parameters from right inside the WordPress control panel itself without ever changing a line of code.

There are 3 different ways to alter the look and feel of the Thesis them. These are listed under 3 menu options named Thesis Options, Design options and Custom File Editor from inside the control panel. The Thesis Options menu allow you to change things such as the layout of your navigation menus, add analytics and stats tracking code and gives you a fine degree of control over the display by tuning the headers, the posts, comments, sidebars and even tags that are used. The next menu option covers the design aspects of the Thesis theme. Here you have a bewildering range of choices that allow you to change the colours and fonts of every part of the site individually. You can have a feature box, a multimedia box for displaying video and even drop in a custom stylesheet if you have one.

Finally, you have the custom file editor. This utility allows even the most hardcore technical wizard full control over every aspect of the themes design. There is literally nothing that you cannot customise as long as you are familiar with WordPress and PHP.

The Thesis Theme is amazingly versatile, as can be seen by some of the showcase blogs that are demonstrated on its homepage. If you are en expert you can play about with it to your hearts desire but if, like most of us, you never want to see a line of code, then you can still change almost every aspect of the design. You can really allow your creative juices to flow without your getting your hands dirty, making the Thesis WordPress Theme one of the best available on the market.

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Monetizing your Blog

By on November 1, 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

Monetizing your Blog

After you have set-up your wordpress blog and begun getting some traffic to your blog from your link building and from the search engines you can begin monetizing your blog. You shouldn’t start monetizing your blog too early because it will turn some people off from your blog. Also make sure that you don’t make each post a big advertisement for some product or advertisement because your readers won’t enjoy that too much. You need to figure out the perfect combination of ads to make money off of your blog while keeping your readers happy.

Pay-Per-Click Ads

Google Adsense is the biggest ad network for bloggers and you’ll be best off using them for your pay per click ads. You simply make some pay per click ads to the size you need them in the Adsense admin section and implement them into your blog. The size of the ads will make a big difference so make sure you don’t try adding too big of ads into your blog. You should try to implement the ads into your blog so that they fit right into the content as it will draw in more clicks.

Affiliate Leads

Many of the affiliate networks offer leads that you can add to your blog and what this means is simply that you send your readers to a lead page where they sign-up for something free. Leads don’t pay that much when there free, but some of the leads which cost money will pay a lot of money. You’ll also find that you have better luck trying to get people to join leads then buy products.

Affiliate Products

All affiliate networks have products that you can promote and you can either add links or banners to your blog to promote these products. It’s best to generally write a review as a blog post to promote the product this way it won’t interfere with your blog. You will be paid on a commission basis for the products you sell ranging anywhere from 5-75%.

Link & Banner Sales

There are lots of webmasters and businesses that will buy links and banners from blogs with traffic and you can make lots of money with ads. You can choose to find the people privately on webmaster forums or you could advertise your blog in some of the networks out there that allow you to advertise your blog in hopes of selling links and banners. Many of the networks work great and will find you advertisers quickly, it’s best if your blog is niched based though when looking for private ad sales.

There are lots of ways you can monetize your blog as you can see, and I haven’t touched all of the methods either. I’ve gone through the most popular methods, but there are some other things that can make you money depending on your website niche. I’d recommend starting out with these monetization methods first so that you can make some money before moving onto other areas. Also remember that you should stay with the same networks until you reach minimum payouts so that you don’t have money sitting in a bunch of networks that you can’t withdraw. It’s a rookie mistake that many webmasters make and I don’t want to see you waiting months for your first check.

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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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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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Unique Content vs

By on October 14, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Unique Content vs. PLR Content

Bloggers have the decision to make between whether or not they will be using unique content or PLR content on their blogs, now if you don’t know what this means I’ll define it quickly. Unique content is written by either yourself or someone you hire, and when compared to with other articles on the internet it shouldn’t be the same as anything. Now of course a ton of articles will be on the same topic, but if you write it without copying from the internet then it would come up as unique. To check if your articles are unique you should use copyscape.com which only costs $5 for 100 credits. This will give you 100 credits to see if your article is unique which should last you minimum a few months. PLR content or Private Label Right content are articles written by writers who then turn around and sell multiple copies of the same article. Some PLR content is more used then other content, but generally this content isn’t too good. There is a chance the search engine might pick up the content as duplicated and they will then block your site from the search engines. You need to decide if your site is worth the risk of being blocked by the search engines, and if isn’t then don’t use PLR content.

I only use unique content on all of my blogs that I write and from doing so I get all my posts indexed quickly and also bringing in search engine traffic. The search engines absolutely love unique fresh content added to websites and if you consistently add content to your site then you will notice the search engine ranking love start coming in from the likes of Google and Yahoo.

The one problem most webmasters have with unique content is either that it takes too long to write content or it’s too expensive to buy articles that are unique. Now this is mostly true, which comes to the question again of do you think your blog is worth it? If you plan on keeping your blog for a long time and make some revenue from it then you should only post unique content as you want to keep the search engines happy. You also want to post fresh information for your readers because with PLR it gets sent all around the internet and chances are some of your readers will have read the article before. Now if this happens it could mean you have one less visitor coming to your blog now because most people don’t read blogs that use PLR and information that’s everywhere already.

Having unique content is also beneficial for when you decide to sell your blog, because most webmasters won’t even consider buying PLR websites. You may find some new webmasters willing to splash $20 at your PLR content site, but this is hardly worth the effort of even posting PLR content. When you use unique content you will fetch a much higher price when selling your blog, so even if you invest in some content from a writer it generally pays off in the end when you sell your blog. So you can think of buying unique content almost as a low risk investment, simply because you can set-up a site and try promoting something to earn some passive income or you can always turn around and sell the site to get your investment back. This is what I would call a low risk investment when dealing with internet real estate.

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Top WordPress Themes

By on October 11, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Top WordPress Themes

With thousands of WordPress themes now on the market for free and for money you can bet it’s hard to decide on the top WordPress themes, but I believe I have come up with a great answer to this burning question. Now there are many free WordPress themes that are very nice and I use many of them but they can’t justify being number one on the list.

To be number one the theme needs to have some exclusiveness, but at the same time still be available to the general public. I’ve seen some very incredible WordPress themes that are unique to just one person’s blog but in this case we won’t be choosing from that.

I have looked through the top WordPress themes on the internet that cost anywhere between $20-$200 and I have come up with the top WordPress themes.

It was a fairly difficult decision to come up with a winner for the top WordPress themes but after viewing themes for a long time I decided on choosing the Revolution WordPress themes.

There are currently eight Revolution WordPress themes for sale and each one of them are very well designed and thought out. Each one of theme are designed for a specific niche blog and I feel that the designs were kept simple enough to use and didn’t go overboard on the options.

The two themes I like the most from the Revolution series is the news theme and the sports theme which are somewhat similar but both very nice magazine style blog themes. Magazine style WordPress themes have been very popular and I have seen them on lots of blogs recently, but most of the free magazine themes aren’t very well designed.

Now I don’t have much coding knowledge so this is why spending a few bucks on a well designed WordPress theme is worth it. With a revolution WordPress theme you will stand out and look like one of the top dogs of blogging.

Now this exposure is excellent when starting out a blog and this is why I give the Revolution WordPress themes the number one WordPress theme.

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