Posts by Lorette

WordPress Wednesday –>Creating a Custom Widget

Oct05
2011 10 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette

When building your WordPress Blog, you have many options to add widgets to your sidebars. WordPress comes with a variety of default widgets such as Calendar, Recent Posts, Recent Comments and more.

But, what if you want to add a banner or an image to your side bar, how do you do that?

Personally, I used to use the Text Widget option and hard code html in the text widget…which is very old school and I can’t believe that is how I was doing it :-)

This is the quick and easy way….

1. Click on Posts, then Add New

2. Now you will create a post with the images and text that you want to put in your sidebar (insert images, text, links etc)

3. Click on HTML and copy the HTML code <– this is the secret tip!!

4. Now you can close the post (don’t actually make it a live post). When you leave the site, it will ask you if you want to save the post, go ahead and choose “No”

5. Click on Appearance, Widgets, then Text Widgets. Drag the text widget into the sidebar that you wish for it to appear.

6. Paste the HTML code into the Text widget

7. Save the widget, now check your blog. You may have to do a little editing, but it should look like the post you created.

This tip allows you to make a custom sidebar widget … and it’s so quick and easy!

P.S. I learned this great tip from Nicola Grace from http://www.infullflightonline.com/ – thanks Nicola!

Posted in Wordpress Tips - Tagged , ,

Testing It Tuesdays –> Premium List Magnet

Oct04
2011 3 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette

This weeks “Testing it Tuesday” is focused on List Building!

As Internet Marketers, I know you’ve heard over and over, “The Money is in the List”….but how do you get that list?

The first step is to register for an autoresponder service. The one that we recommend is www.icontactautoresponder.com, not only is it a great service, but you can get the first 100 subscribers FREE.

The next step is to integrate the autoresponder into your website or blog. Ok, so how do you do that?

Well, there are quite a few plugins that have been popping up lately that have a bunch of bells and whistles…so, we picked one and tested it out and love it!

The plugin is called Premium List Magnet and it costs $67. Check it out in action below.

(click on the icon in the bottom right of the video to make it full screen for clear viewing)

Premium List Magnet a thumbs up from us!  Now, we need to add it to this blog :-)

To order or find out more about Premium List Magnet, click HERE.

 

 

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Posted in Testing It Tuesdays - Tagged , , , , ,

WordPress Wednesdays –> Adding Cool Images To Your Posts

Sep28
2011 3 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette

When you are writing your blog posts, sales letters or creating your membership sites, make sure you incorporate the use of images.

Whether these images are pictures that you’ve taken or graphical images, you will gain more attention to your post/page when you have visual images to break up the straight text.

BUT, make sure when adding images and icons to your site that they are royalty free. This means that you can’t just go to Google, find a picture and post it on your site, its not your picture! Although, some sites allow for reprinting/reposting of images on other sites, to stay on the safe side you should use images that are made for the purpose of republishing.

Icon Sites

Icon Archive – I love this site, all the graphical images I put in my blog posts are from here. A huge library of free icons.

Find Icons - Another great site to find free icons. Also gives upsell option of great paid icons.

Photo Sites

IStockPhoto - Great site to provide high quality royalty free stock photos. Monthly Subscription payment as well as pay-as-you-go program.

Dreamstime – Royalty free photos on a pay per download option of a monthly subscription option.

There are many more sites out there for royalty free photo options, but the ones listed above are the ones that we currently use and some we’ve been using for several years.

Remember, the use of images, pictures, icons and videos are a great bonus when creating website and/or blog posts to grab your readers attention.

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Posted in Wordpress Tips - Tagged , , , ,

WordPress Wednesday –> Keeping Your Old Blog Posts Alive

Sep07
2011 7 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette

You work hard and write a awesome WordPress post. You send it out to your Facebook fans, maybe send out a Twitter alert, send out an email, people like it and comment on it…but then after awhile it fades away.

How do you keep the traffic comming back to your old posts ?

Here are two plugins that can help.

1. Yet Another Related Post Plugin

This plugin presents the reader of your new blog post with other older posts that are related to your new post. It uses a fancy algorithm that takes into consideration, post title, description, tags, content and categories and calculates a “match score” for your posts.

Therefore, after someone is finished reading your post, then are now presented with related posts. Since they were reading the new post, they are more than likely interested in something related.

2. Tweet Old Posts

If you have a Twitter account, this is a great plugin for you. Tweet Old Posts is a plugin designed to randomly pick your older posts based on the interval specified by you.

You enter in your Twitter account details, then set how often you want your old posts tweeted. You can exclude certain categories as well as add additional text to each tweet. This plugin automates the entire process and does a GREAT job of keeping your old posts “alive”!

Sceenshot below of some of the settings that can be edited to your specific needs.

Thanks Devon at renegadesuccess.com for suggesting this plugin!

Posted in Wordpress Tips - Tagged , , , , , ,

WordPress Wednesdays –> How To Hide Your Posts

Aug31
2011 3 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette
WordPress is a great tool for publishing content for the world to see. But what if you want to publish a post and/or page and keep it private, maybe only for friends or family to see?
Or maybe just a specific user group, like coaching clients, or team members? Well, I am gong to show you how to protect your posts and/or page with the use of a passwords or by setting user roles.

First of all, when you write your post and/or page, most people immediately push the blue “Publish” button and then they are done. But there is also an option called “Visibility”. This is by default, set to “Public”. The “Visibility” option is available for both posts and pages.

Click on “Edit” to see your options.
The easiest way to make your posts and/or pages private is to choose the “Password Protected” option.
When you choose that option, you simply enter in a password and share that password with whoever you want to have access to that page.
 The screen shot below is what it would look like for a post and similar for a page.

The other option which is called “Private” makes the post/page only available to other admins or editors of the site.

This is a great function if you are working with others on the post and it needs to be reviewed by other admins or Editors before it is published.

You can add an “Editor” to your site by going to “Users” on your left navigation and choose “Add New”, then add a new user with “Editor” status.

These are quick and easy ways to protect your content. There are more advanced ways to protect your content by using membership site plugins, which we will conver in another post.

 

But, if you are interested to learn more about membership site plugins for wordpress, we use and recommend WPWishlist.

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Posted in Wordpress Tips - Tagged , , , , ,

WordPress Wednesdays –> Pinging Your Blog

Aug24
2011 8 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette

Are you continuously adding fresh new content to your website, but its just not getting noticed like you want it to?

Or maybe your pages are getting indexed but it is taking a long time and some of your site pages are getting skipped over completely?

This is where “pinging” your website will help.

What exactly is “pinging”?

Pinging is like ringing on someones doorbell and letting them know that you have some fresh new content and you want them to come check it out.

When a website is “pinged”, it is ringing the doorbell of several search engines as well as directories to let them know you have new content. After you ring their doorbell, it is now up to them to see if they want to open the door and check it out, this is done by “crawling” your website.

When should you “ping” your site?

Your site should only be pinged when you have fresh new content. Pinging your site several times will not benefit you, and may even backfire because search engines may look at you as a spammer and block your IP.

With that in mind, as long as you are providing new content, your site can be pinged multiple times a day, but only on new content.

Does WordPress automatically ping my site with any new changes?

YES! But the problem with the auto “pinging” is that if you make multiple changes to one post for example and update it throughout the day, the search engines will frown upon it, because it will keep pining with each change.

Therefore, it is recommended to install a plugin to monitor your pinging.

Recommended Ping Plugin – CBNet Ping Optimizer

Prevent your blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin.

After you install cbnet Ping Optimizer:

  • When you create a new post, your blog will ping and notify all the ping services that it has been updated. This encourages search engines and different blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly.
  • When you edit an existing post, it won’t send any unnecessary ping to ping services and saves your blog from getting banned by such services.
  • When you post a future post by editing the time stamp, it will ping only when your post appears in future. It won’t unnecessarily ping many times when you schedule posts as WordPress does by default.
Posted in Wordpress Tips - Tagged , , , , , ,

WordPress Wednesdays –> Understanding WordPress Permalinks

Aug17
2011 6 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette

What is the world is a Permalink?

Permalink is how a URL of a WordPress post and/or page appears to a visitor and search engines. By default your WordPress URL will have a bunch of numbers and will say something like “page ID = 32″ – which means nothing to a user or to a search engine.

These urls will stay this way until you change it, this should be one of the very first things you should do after installing your WordPress blog. This is because once you post your first page, search engines begin to index your blog based on the post URL and if you change it at a later date then you will lose your rankings and the old links will no longer work.

So let’s get started on how to edit your Permalink structure.

Editing Your Permalink Structure

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard and click on “Settings” then “Permalinks”.

2. On this screen you will see several options. You should choose “Custom Structure”.

In this box you have a few options based on how you structured your site…

/%postname%/

This structure will display the post name in the URL. This is a good standard if you are unsure what format to use. This is also good if your posts cannot be efficiently categorized well.

/%category%/%postname%/

This structure shows what category your post belongs to, then the title of the post. Here is an example. – www.domain.com/shoes/womens-running-shoes

Here are some other structures that may be good for your specific blog

Year & Category: /%year%/%category%/%postname%/

Time sensitive data: /%year%/%day%/%hour%/%postname%/

Optimize author names: /%author%/%year%/%postname%/
Edit Your Post-Specific Slug

After you create your post, WordPress will automatically generate a “slug” for your post. Depending on the title of your post it could be very long and contain extraneous words that should be removed.

Before you push “Publish” on your blog post, you should edit the link to only have keywords. Remove words like “the”, “and”, “a”, “you”. This allows your links to be focused, short and search engine friendly.

The two factors to keep in mind when editing your post-specific slug

1 – Does it  make sense to your user?

2 – Does the permalink match the content of the site?

So, take a look at the new blog you are creating and set up your Permalink structure to what best fits your site. Then optimize your “slug” to not only be user friendly, but also search engine friendly.

Spending a little bit of time on this, can turn into some great organic search engine results!

P.S. We are guilty of not doing a good job of this ourselves, but will be sure to do better at it :-)

Posted in Wordpress Tips - Tagged , , , , ,

WordPress Wednesdays –> Cleaning Up and Eliminating Spam

Aug10
2011 7 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette

If you have a blog, then I’m sure that you’ve been attacked by spam at one point or another.

So, here are some tips to clean up the spam and then stop it in its tracks…

1 – Cleaning Up Comments

When you log into your WordPress Dashboard do you see a large number of pending comments like this screenshot – 342 pending comments yikes!

Unfortunately, most of the time majority of the comments are spam. Here is a quick tip to clean that up….

Click on Comments and on the top right of the screen you will see where it says “Screen Options”, click on that.

Where it says “Show on Screen”, change to something high, like 999 and all of the comments will be listed on the page.

Then simply do a Bulk Action and delete the list of comments.

If for some reason that doesn’t work for you, there is a great plugin that makes it easy, Bulk Comment Remove

2 – Preventing Spam Comments

Akismet - Visit Plugin Page

Every new install of WordPress comes pre-loaded with some plugins, and one of them is Akismet – which is a great plugin to protect your site from spam. What Akismet does is that it checks every comment that is posted on your blog, then it sends the comment to the spam box if it seems like spam or has been already marked as spam by any other blog owners. In order for Akismet to work, you will need an API key . This is free for personal use and affordable for non-personal use.

WP-Hashcash – Visit Plugin Page
This is an anti-spam plugin that works on getting rid of spam and sending the spam to the Akismet section. Next step is to verify if the visitor is a person or simply a robot or automated system.  This plugin claims to be 100% effective at blocking all spam and no real comments. Also blocks most pingback & trackback spam.

Bad Behavior – Visit Plugin Page
This is a great plugin that not only stops spammers from posting on your blog but it can also block them from even visiting your blog. This is one that can be used in addition to any of the other spam plugins.

There are many more spam plugins that are out there, this is just a pick of 3 of some of the most popular. What plugin are you using to prevent spam on your blogs?

Posted in Wordpress Tips - Tagged , , ,

WordPress Wednesdays -> Cool Blog Themes

Aug03
2011 5 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette

One thing I LOVE about WordPress is ease of adding and changing themes. You can literally change the entire look and feel of your site with a few clicks! I remember the days of HTML static websites and the long process of getting a site designed and coded…good riddance!

There are tons of cool themes out there…here are some that I’ve personally used and recommend.

EvoLve - (the free theme on this blog)

EvoLve is a premium WordPress theme with advanced features including lots of options. It features a modern design with up to 14 color variants, fully customizable layout, post excerpts with thumbnails, post boxes, author gravatar support, up to 10 subscribe/social customizable buttons, custom logo, header widgets, recent posts slideshow, footer widgets, custom footer, customizable font styles, custom CSS, ads spaces. The EvoLve theme also comes with custom Menus support and other cool features. Tested with WP 3.1 and major browsers – Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Chrome.

WooThemes

Top quality, cutting edge designs. Very user friendly and easy to use.

See why our 96 themes have been downloaded over 1,799,723 times and why 38826 people prefer us as their theme provider.

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Elegant Themes

Get unlimited download of all themes for only $39. Each premium WordPress theme comes expertly coded in valid XHTML and CSS, and all are made compatible with the latest version of WordPress. I make sure that each template performs flawlessly in each of the most widely used browsers to ensure maximum functionality. Furthermore, all sidebars are made widget ready for your convenience.

What are some of your favorite places to get WordPress Themes?

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WordPress Wednesday –> Top 3 WordPress Statistics Plugins

Jul27
2011 5 Comments Lorette Written by Lorette

Wordpress Stats Tracking ToolsIt’s a great feeling to put up your blog, start writing posts or creating content, but to really grow your blog, you need to understand the statistics of your site. You need to know who is visiting, what they are looking for, where they came from and even where they are going.

The more information you have about your visitors, the more opportunity you have to grow your site. For example, lets say you just spent money on advertising, or you just posted on your Facebook page for people to visit your site, how do you know if anyone did? How do you know if your what you are doing is worth the efforts?

Recently, we were working with a friend and we were looking at his statistics for his site. He was paying a monthly fee for banner ad placement on a site. When reviewing his stats, he had only 29 visitors from the banner ad, but over 180 visitors from a free forum that his virtual assitant was posting in. We were able to track the conversion of the forum visitors versus the banner ad, and the conversion and ROI showed that the visitors from the free forum had a significantly higher ROI than the monthly payments for the banner ads.

But, if he didn’t have tracking in place to see these results, he would not know which service was worth his time. He was about to give up on the forum posting because he didn’t know if it was getting any results.

Now, there are tons of statistic plugins out there and I do not have a definitive answer as to what is THE best stats plugin, but that’s mostly because ‘best’ may vary based on what you are looking for. Therefore, I am going to highlight the three plugins that we use in our business. After testing several, these are the ones that work best for us.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics PluginGoogle Analytics has been around for a long time. We used Google Analytics for tracking and statistics for our HTML static websites.

Now, plugins have been created to easily incorporate the service into your blog. This service has pretty much all the statistics  your need. Stats by the hour, day, month and year and much, much more.

To use Google Analytics on your blog, you have to set up a Google Analytics account.

Here are plugins to add Google Analytics to your WordPress site.

Google Analytics WordPress PluginGoogle Analytics

This plugin adds the required javascript for google analytics. Install, then enter your Google Analytics code. Very simple to set up. This is the one we currently use.

 

Google Analytics WordPress PluginGoogle Analyticator

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Also includes widgets for displaying data in the admin area.

WordPress.com Stats

Wordpress Statistics

WordPress.com Stats Plugin

This is a very simple plugin and gives you a great overall picture of what is happening on your site from a day to day basis. It is great for checking referrals, keywords, as well as the clicks for the day.

To install this plugin on your site you have get a WordPress.com account. After you sign up for an account, login to your account and obtain your API key which is located in your profile.

Once you upload and activate the plugin, they will ask for your API key and thats it! After a few minutes you will be able to see statistics on your site.

StatPress Reloaded

Wordpress stats pluginStatPress Reloaded Plugin

This plugin is by far the easiest of the the three. The reason is because you don’t need any external accounts set up anywhere else. You simply upload and activate the plugin and almost instantly you can see real time statistics with your site.

It tracks more information that WordPress.com Stats, but not as much information as  Google Analytics, so it falls in the middle.

This one is the best for a quick snapshot and also allows you to “spy” on visitors that are currently on your site. This one is quick, easy and accurate.

There are a few other statistic/tracking tools we use, but what statistic tools do YOU use and why do you like them?

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