Navigation

Tag Archives | Technical Knowledge

Boost Your Affiliate Commissions With WordPress

By on June 21, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Boost Your Affiliate Commissions With WordPress

Any affiliate marketer would love to increase their earnings. If the increase in earnings can be made without additional work then that will be fantastic for you.

Now many marketers will promote affiliate programs through web 2.0 properties or article marketing, but that isn’t the only way. What if you could increase your commissions whilst building valuable virtual real estate?

Hosting a site on your own domain is a great way to build your virtual real estate empire. Throw WordPress in to the mix and it quickly becomes the affiliate marketers dream. WordPress is such a powerful piece of software you will soon wonder how you managed without it for so long.

WordPress has many benefits for the affiliate marketer. Firstly, it is loved by the search engines and is simple to set up. You can create an amazing looking site without any technical knowledge and in just a few clicks of a mouse.

WordPress also allows you to extend its functionality by using plugins. This means that with a couple of clicks you can enhance existing features or add new features to it. This allows you to create the website you want with advanced features without a technical background.

WordPress is very useful for the affiliate marketer. Out of the box it is already very search engine friendly, but add in one of the popular SEO plugins and it becomes a dream piece of software that the search engines will literally drool all over.

On top of that you can get free plugins which will not only cloak your affiliate links but also track clicks for you. Often affiliate marketers spend a lot of money on software like this, but here you can find it for nothing with advanced features.

Plus it is very easy to make very pretty looking sites that your visitors will really like. It doesn’t take a lot of work and you don’t have to know any HTML or other web design languages. So long as you can point and click you will be able to configure WordPress and make it look fantastic.

If you also monetize your website through AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network then plugins exist which will allow you to instantly add these contextual adverts to every page on your website. If you have pages on your website already then this is a massive time saver for you.

With additional plugins you can add ClickBank products, turn keywords into affiliate links and without any additional plugins put Amazon widgets anywhere in your site.

WordPress is a very powerful platform that if you are not using as an affiliate marketer then you are missing a trick. By building valuable virtual real estate built on the WordPress platform you are creating a long term sustainable business that will earn very well for you.

0

5 Easy Steps To Build A WordPress Website

By on January 6, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

5 Easy Steps To Build A WordPress Website

Are you planning to build your own website and yet you don’t have enough technical knowledge and don’t have enough budget to hire someone to build it for you? Worry no more because building a website is not really difficult as it sounds and it cost only a few bucks. With WordPress, it is now possible for ordinary people to create their own website easily. What is WordPress? WordPress was launched in 2003 as a blogging platform, but it has evolve as a legitimate CMS (content management system) in fact it has numerous awards already, in 2007 WordPress won a Packt Open Source CMS Award, in 2009 WordPress won the best Open Source CMS Award.

And in 2010 WordPress has won the Hall of Fame CMS category in the 2010 Open Source Awards. More than 10% of the top 1 million websites uses WordPress already. Perhaps its growth is phenomenal because it is really easy to use. Here Are the Five Easy Steps in building your own WordPress website starting from scratch:

1. Choose a Domain Name – A domain name is the address that you type in your browser that ends with a.com,.net,.org and etc. You can register in an accredited domain registrar which is accredited by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN. There are hundreds of registrars out there, and the price of each domain is usually lower than $15 per year.

2. Host your Domain – A server that rents you a space so that your site will be visible on the internet. This would cost about less than $10 per month for a shared hosting account which is already reliable.

3. Installing WordPress Software To your Web Host – You can install or upload WordPress software using an ftp client like Filezilla or some hosting companies provide one install click to make it easier.

4. Making a static page – It is important to make a static page so that your site does not look like a blog. You can make a static page easily in your WordPress dashboard.

5. Selecting A Theme – There are thousands of free themes that you can choose, themes are extremely important because the appearance of your site depends on it. There are also premium themes available that are quit expensive but free themes are good enough. The bottom line here is that WordPress is really a great software to start-up your new website.

0

Installing WordPress Plugins – A Little Goes A Long Way

By on August 20, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Installing WordPress Plugins – A Little Goes A Long Way

WordPress is the most popular blogging and CMS (content management system) platform used by inexperienced webmasters. The reason it is so popular is because you can add plugins to increase the functionality of the site without having to have any kind of technical knowledge. However, there are some very important factors you should know about before adding plugins to your WordPress website.

What is WordPress and What is a Plugin?

WordPress, on its own, is a very powerful and stable program. It is an OpenSource (free) program that is installed on a database and is designed to manage the content that you input into it. It is updated regularly to correct any known issues or to add more features to the core program. You should always make sure you are running the newest version on your website. Upgrading to the newest version is as easy as the click of a button in your user dashboard.

Plugins are scripts that are developed as add-ons to the existing program. These give you the ability to add new features to the program to help customize the site to your needs. Because WordPress is OpenSource, it means that any web developer can use the source code or API to create new scripts for the program.

Caution is Needed When Adding Plugins

Because plugins are created by all different developers, they are not always compatible with each other. When compatibility issues arise, it can make the database unstable. In other words, the engine driving your website will begin to fail. This can result in your site crashing.

Another reason to exercise caution when installing plugins is because every one you add on to your site adds more code to the core program. Adding too many will bloat the code and make your website slow and sluggish. It can also hamper the ability of search engine bots from crawling your website effectively.

Which WordPress plugins should you install?

I cannot give you a definite answer to this since every webmaster and every website has different needs and functions. What I can advise is this; only install the plugins you really need. Typically this would be an SEO plugin such as All In One SEO, a database backup plugin such as WP Database Backup, a contact form plugin such as Easy Contact, and a social plugin such as Sociable or Share This. These are the plugins I consider to be essential.

Any other plugins you should only install one at a time and tested for compatibility before adding any more. Always do a database backup before adding new plugins as a safety net in case any issues arise and you need to restore your website.

WordPress plugins are wonderful inventions and can help you create the website of your dreams, but before you go on a wholesale plugin installation spree, be aware of the consequences.

0

Is WordPress the Best Choice For a Content Management System

By on July 31, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Is WordPress the Best Choice For a Content Management System?

Many of us will have a need for a Content Management System (CMS) at some stage in our Internet marketing careers. There are plenty for us to choose from on the market such as Drupal, Joomla and many others, but a lot of these require specific technical knowledge to use and are not intuitive.

Setting up a content management system can be a difficult thing to do without either hiring a techie or struggling to learn some unfamiliar software that takes hours to learn.

This of course, may not be ideal.

So what are your other options?

Most Internet marketers are familiar with a program called WordPress. It’s a favorite with marketers at the moment because it is easy to use, requires no technical knowledge and is quick to configure. Many of us are already using it somewhere within our Internet empire.

But is WordPress any good as a content management system?

It is incredibly powerful and very good as a CMS program. The only issue with WordPress is the lack of structure navigation. Setting up good and clear navigation is an issue with versions before V3, but the latest release (version 3) has a much better navigation system built in out of the box.

With a version such as 2.9.2 (the last before version 3) you can still use it as an effective CMS solution nusing some of the plugins that have been released.

The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (or YARPP as it is better known) is a great plugin for allowing you to create relevant navigation menus for each post. By giving related posts the same tags, you can very easily create menus of related posts on your site. It’s not the best solution, but it works and is very effective and easy to use.

Another useful plugin to help with your navigation is the Exclude Pages From Navigation plugin. This will give you the choice to hide pages from the navigation menus, which is very useful. It means you can create pages and not have them appear by default in navigation menus.

Let’s not forget that you can create custom page templates within WordPress and set up custom navigation menus within these templates for related pages. This is another powerful method of creating custom navigation menus but requires a little bit more work than using one of the plugins.

WordPress is a very powerful piece of software and unless you are after specific CMS related functions only provides by software like Drupal or Joomla, WordPress is more than adequate for most of your needs to manage content.

Anything that is lacking in its CMS functionality is more than made up by it’s ease of use and simplicity of installation. If you are after a simple to use CMS system then WordPress may be ideal for your needs.

0