Use Flickr For Your Wordpress Blog Images - Flickr Photo Album Plugin
September 29, 2008
Reasons to use flickr instead of the built-in wordpress imaging tools:
1. Flickr’s website gets a lot of internal traffic and you could increase your page views and website traffic just by putting all your images on flickr. I personally have images with over 20,000 views that generated at least 1,000 click throughs (you can put live html links in the image descriptions). Not bad considering it’s traffic I would have missed entirely. Additionally flickr has been expanded to become a full fledged social network to include friends and messaging.
2. Flickr offers a wide variety of image tools, like resizing, resamplling, and ajax grouping that completely rock and are far superior to anything built into wordpress. IT’s fast too. Upload a large image and flickr automatically provides multiple sizes and allows your visitors to do everything from favorite it to order prints. Read more
Microsoft Word Blogging Tips – Change The Curly Quotes To Straight Quotes
September 22, 2008
photo credit: Eric F Savage
One of the most annoying things in Microsoft Word that bloggers run into, is that it uses fancy curly quotes that aren’t supported in the default character set of Wordpress and other blogging platforms. If you copy and paste directly from MS word into Wordpress or your blogging platform of choice you’ll end up with weird &@39; and other character numbers inserted to replace single and double quotes. Read more
How To Change Your Wordpress Blog To Display Excerpts Instead Of Full Posts
September 22, 2008
photo credit: adria.richards
The first question is why? Most wordpress templates display full content posts on the front page, making the main page of your blog have a lot of scrolling and only reveal a very limited amount of content to a first time visitor without lots of scrolling. Additionally for SEO (search engine optimization) it’s a good thing to reduce the amount of duplicated content (same content word for word as located in other areas). Here is a previous article I’ve written on how to identify and fix common SEO problems in wordpress. Read more
New Low Prices For A Social Media Blog: Only $479.00 Down!
September 9, 2008
Be sure to check out our new pricing structure: see our services: now you can have a social media marketing system blog by purchasing stand-alone services, or complete with ongoing monitoring, strategic content posting and promotion, and ongoing training, promotion and support for as little as $379.00 per month on our new annual plan.
Why have a website that nobody sees? We promise traffic and functionality that puts you in control of your own destiny.
The best things on the web are either free or so inexpensive that anybody can get in the game - it is consistent performance and success that are hard to find!
7 Common Wordpress Seo Mistakes And Their Easy Solutions
August 17, 2008
photo credit: magerleagues
1. Problem: The homepage doesn’t target a specific keyword combination that people actually search for.
Solution: Add specific keywords to the homepage title, use a plugin like ALL in One SEO Pack to rewrite the default wordpress titles. If you don’t know any specific keyword phrases offhand that also sound good to use for marketing purposes try keyword research. An easy starting place is: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Read more
How To Put A Wordpress Blog On A Subdomain Using A Separate Host Account With Cpanel And Whm
August 17, 2008
photo credit: Tim Dorr
Many businesses are still only blogging on blogger or other platforms away from their main website. Others go the route of getting another domain. One great way to maximize the power of your blog and build links to your main site at the same time is to create your main company blog on a subdomain of your regular website. You can even have it point to a completely different server. Some reasons why you may want to do this include if your main website is just a shopping cart, has very strong security, or is in a different scripting language or under ‘corporate control’. Read more
Link Bait: Blogging For Two Audiences
July 2, 2008
Here is the paradox: you must reach your market with a message that will generate leads to feed your business.
You must also reach the geeks and journalists who may republish and link to your articles, creating traffic and search engine rankings.
For Social Media Marketing purposes, you are really writing for two completely different audiences:
Example:
We are published here at http://WebProNews.com, amongst other ientry publications (http://ientry.com) who reach over 4,000,000 opt-in subscribers.
These are mostly techies and website developers, who are not our target market: some of them are even direct competitors: yet we intentionally write informative articles for this market, not so much to sell our services, but instead to be branded as an authority for our topics, which in turn ranks us for searches like ’social media marketing services’, on Google, Yahoo and MSN in the first page organic results.
This is because the most powerful link to your site for this purpose is for someone inside your industry to link to and consume your content: Google and the other search engines follow the trail back to the source of the information, making you the ‘authority source’ for your topic, and /or Geographic location.
However, this will not necessarily sell product for you. Once someone actually finds your website by way of a key word search as a result of your status as an authority and your relevant rankings, you also need to write content, like this article, which, while it will never be republished by my competitors, nor in any technical authority publication, it does help to explain to you (my target audience) exactly what I do, and how it may benefit you.
Likewise, you must reach consumers, and, one way to do that is to be an authority who is quoted about your profession, and/or location so that you can achieve organic rankings for those words.
Plugin Free Wordpress Profile Gravatars - Enable Them In Your Blog Comments Now!
June 18, 2008
As a web designer, I’ve long held the stance that it was better to have the visitors of your website upload the photo / picture of themselves to use for profiles and comments directly on your site ( local avatars). I knew of many third party websites that with plugins allowed you to use a universal avatar, but making each of your visitors leave your site and sign up it’s own set of problems. Plus there were lots of competing ones to choose, which third party service should you use?
With the new release of Wordpress (the most popular online publihsing platform in the world) support for an globally recognized avatar (gravatar) is built right in. Read more
Should You Use Wordpress To Build Your Next Website? Beginning Wordpress Basics
June 12, 2008
photo credit: Sicos
Wordpress is web software for online publishing. Notice that I didn’t use the word blog, even though wordpress is blogging software. It has been expanded to be A LOT more then that and shouldn’t considered in the same class as most blogging software. It’s a robust CMS (content management system) that empowers every type of website with users that include CNN, Playstation and the New York Times.
With website technology changing daily, choosing the right content management system or simply the actual software that organizes and runs a website is absolutely crucial to your success online. For most websites I’d highly recommend building with Wordpress and here is why: Read more
Why Does Internet Advertising Not Work For Everyone?
February 11, 2008
We hear this often: these guys had results immediately, while I have been doing everything and got no results. It is true: the same people continue to succeed, while others continue to fail: our beta testers in Denver who got immediate results, continue to succeed: they got 42 leads last month we just learned.
There are many reasons for this: I will list a few: Read more
Blogging Errors & Puretext
February 3, 2008
Many of our readers use Wordpress, and frequently run into the common mistake of copying text from Word or some other program, pasting it into Wordpress and finding it has numerous formatting errors and rich text code errors they didn’t know where there.
PureText is a free little utility that allows you to copy and paste items from rich text editors (Word, Outlook, Browsers, etc) and strip all the garbage code off of it.
“PureText only removes rich formatting from text. This includes the font face, font style (bold, italics, etc.), font color, paragraph styles (left/right/center aligned), margins, character spacing, bullets, subscript, superscript, tables, charts, pictures, embedded objects, etc. However, it does not modify the actual text. It will not remove or fix new-lines, carriage returns, tabs, or other white-space. It will not fix word-wrap or clean up your paragraphs. If you copy the source code of a web page to the clipboard, it is not going to remove all the HTML tags. If you copy text from an actual web page (not the source of the page), it will remove the formatting.
PureText is basically equivalent to opening Notepad, doing a PASTE, followed by a SELECT-ALL, and then a COPY. The benefit of PureText is performing all these actions with a single Hot-Key and having the result pasted into the current window automatically.”
To use PureText- simply copy as normal, but when you need to paste the item in Wordpress or your blog platform, use Windows-V (or an assigned hotkey) instead of Ctrl-V. In an instant, now you have some clean text. Check out PureText and streamline your blogging today.
Video Blogging In Real Time From A Phone!
January 27, 2008
photo credit: Leonard LowThis is really great: I learned how to operate this Nokia n93i (which i had to buy overseas, it is not here yet) in only a couple of hours, and this is the first video I recorded: it is already on Youtube and Google video automatically! Read more
Wordpress Plugins - Turn Blog Into A Social Media Community With Forums Features
December 17, 2007
I was able to create this robust setup using an off-the-shelf theme, the latest Wordpress, and a new forums plug-in in two hours flat: http://dobusinessinoregon.com/, and another where my rep has already started adding content: http://businessinthebayarea.com/:
Now the real work begins, customizing the templates, calls to action, the distribution of the feeds, the manual submission work, the regular posting and monitoring, the moderation of the forums, and the hardest part: getting people to participate.
The new WordPress has many of the coolest features we used to have to create with separate plug-ins already in widgets out-of-the-box: but installation and troubleshooting would still be difficult for non-developers if they did not have excellent aptitude and some knowledge of code and troubleshooting scripting installations. Read more
Business Blogging Tips For Non-writers
November 12, 2007
I run into a lot individuals and companies afraid to jump into blogging, because they aren’t natural writers. Here is a video with some tips on how you can use blogs to increase your business even if you’re not a natural writer.
Why Your Business Blog Should Absolutely Not Be On Blogger!!
September 24, 2007
Here are just a few reasons why your main business blog should absolutely not be on blogger.com or really any of the free blog sites.
• Blogger is notorious for spam blogs and blogger has a (next blog) by default
• Can’t upgrade or add features because you don’t control the software.
• Splits link popularity
• Everyone knows it’s free, harder to attract links with a free blog or something that shows less commitment.
• Your Co0branding your site with blogger which can mucks up your marketing message
• Since you don’t own your blog software, it can’t be leverage and sold the same way custom sites / domain can ( website are just like real estate)
• The default settings are attrocious for search engine optimization and social media marketing, so you’ll have to spend tons of time and have technical knowledge to fix this. Most people don’t, so their blogger blog dosen’t rank very well or spread on social media sites.
• Most of the design templates are overused, so your site will be recognized as a “generic” template which makes it way less impressive.
• Makes achieving any kind of wow factor difficult.
• Your allowing your content to profit / benefit Google.
• You account comes with a default subdomain - whatever.blogger.com
• None of the cool kids are doing it. (ok this one isn’t entirely true 
)
High Quality, User Generated, Easy Streaming Video On Your Pages: The Technology Arrived!
August 27, 2007
Did you ever dream of sitting at your computer, and recording streaming video for viewing by visitors to your website?
DREAM NO MORE! You can shoot video like this, at home, or even sitting at your computer:
It is a brave new world online! Expect to see lots of this around here, on our website, on our client’s websites, on Utube, Google Video…See
http://socialmediasystems.com/services/internet-marketing-and-website-design-solutions/
Msm Vs. Online Publishing - Freedom Of Expression Is A Valuable Commodity
June 24, 2007
It annoys me to no end that people in popular MSM publications who know almost nothing about the internet feel they are qualified to comment on some aspect of it.
For example, I recently happened upon an article in the Sunday times by columnist David Bullard.
Here’s a sample of what can be found:
“Most blog sites are the air guitars of journalism. They’re cobbled together by people who wouldn’t stand a hope in hell of getting a job in journalism, mainly because they have very little to say. It’s rather sad how many people think the tedious minutiae of their lives will be of any interest to anyone else. It’s even sadder when someone reads them. Many bloggers prefer to remain anonymous and with good reason. The content of their sites is so moronic that even their best friends would disown them if they knew they were the authors.”
Instead of a well-written, informed op-ed piece looking objectively at the flaws and beauty of the blogosphere we have someone who is mostly out of touch with what the blogosphere represents and doesn’t have a clue what its all about.
Talk about ignorance.
Sadly, this attitude is simply indicative of a larger attitude towards blogging and bloggers in general that is entrenched in the minds of those who don’t understand the internet and those who are scared of it.
The article appeared to be about “shameful” and “offensive” bloggers, but on a deeper level focused on the general idiocy the author seems to find in the blogosphere.
Yeah, there are a lot of bad, pointless blogs, but that’s not the point; the point is that the blogosphere creates a rich, vibrant ever-changing community where a Muslim girl in Afghanistan can report on what’s going on in her country, a soldier can show us videos of the realities of war, a search engine marketing company can offer tips on how to improve a website and a stay-at-home-mom can make it big as a columnist.
It is a world that is self-moderating, where the flow of information is continually updated and analyzed and people have the freedom to express themselves however they want.
And that’s what he misses. No, there aren’t enforced standards; perhaps some sort of loose journalistic standards should be set, I’ll agree with that; however, when all is said and done, what is the point in policing a world where freedom of expression is one of the most highly valued commodities? The beauty of a blog is that anyone can say whatever they want and people can read it if they choose to. Information is free and it is up to the reader to do the research and form educated opinions. It is the user community who organically chooses which sites to give their time to and which to leave in the dust.
If you don’t want to read about X’s new adventures in being a mommy or why A hates B, don’t. It’s that simple.
He says, “are there really 70 million bloggers out there hoping that their writing talents will be recognized, or is this just another example of modern narcissism?”
The world is shades of gray, not black and white. The reasons people create blogs,the way they use them and what they do with them are so varied a statement like that makes me shake my head, bemused. People make such large generalizations about blogging and other online publishing media (e.g. video) without realizing the potential of this vast online community is far more powerful than mainstream media is even capable of anymore.
Not to mention the fact that “print standards” and journalistic ethics are often tossed aside by mainstream media (MSM). Look at Michael Finkel, Janet Cooke, Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass. These are just some of the more well-known journalistic “sinners” of MSM; there are plenty of others.
Additionally, its rather hypocritical to point fingers at bloggers while writing for a paper that, like most print publications today, takes a wealth of information from the blogoshpere.
A Trek Through Wordpress Mailing List Plugins - Email Mailing List Manager
June 6, 2007
I recently had a client who needed an easy way to manage e-mail lists from within their wordpress blog. The requirements included the ability to support multiple lists with additional properties and an easy import / export feature. I thought finding a wordpress plugin to take care of these tasks would be simple, but I was wrong. It appears that one of the big features left out of the 15 or so wordpress mailing plugins I tested was the ability to export the user list in .csv format so it can be used in other programs (like CRM). Technically you can export this list directly from the mySQL database, but that’s cumbersome and not “client friendly”. I wanted an option that worked through a simple admin interface that allowed for easy exporting and importing.
There was a nice solution which still integrated into wordpress. I installed PHPlist a stand alone, open source, powerful mailing list manager. I then used the wordpress plugin PHPlist form integration to integrate the various forms. So users can subscribe, and unsubscribe without leaving wordpress. The customer can then login to PHPlist and have access to a powerful but simple admin with capabilities that including multiple import and export options.
Here is a brief list of the wordpress mailing list plugins I checked out in no particular order.
MailList for Wordpress
http://blue-anvil.com/archives/maillist-for-wordpress-a-mailing-list-mass-mailing-mailer-plugin
Looks great, but couldn’t get it to work. The author is no longer supporting it, so I don’t recommended using it.
WordPress Email Notification Plugin
http://watershedstudio.com/portfolio/software/wp-email-notification.html
Mainly designed for sending e-mail notifications when your blog is updated. Isn’t this sort of thing outdated by e-mail RSS subscribptions?
Subscribe 2
http://subscribe2.wordpress.com/
Contains a nice widget version widget compatible themes. Works with the latest version of wordpress , but again setup mainly to send updates on when blog is updated. Seems unnecessary with e-mail RSS.
Subscribe Me
http://www.octeth.com/products/freetools/subscribeme/
Didn’t get a chance to test this one, but it looks the most promising out of this list because it includes the ability to export subscriber data to a common CSV format so you can use it easily with other programs as well as having a confirmed opt-in and opt-out. By default it only records the visitors e-mail and name. You’ll have to do some code editing to expand the list and attribute sections.
WP-Campagin-Monitor
http://www.instinct.co.nz/wp-campaign-monitor/100
very simple with no way to export users, but comes with built in integration with WP-liteecommce plugin so is an excellent way to capture a mailing list if you’re using that shoping cart. Also is very fast to install and supports a sidebar widget “out of the boxâ€
Wordpress Newsletter Plugin
http://www.shiftthis.net/wordpress-newsletter-plugin/
Full features, excellent easy administration features. Can create multiple lists, send mail or newsletters, contains every feature I wanted except 1. There is no included, fast or easy to export the lists. So you can’t get the lists out without using other software. I need the client to be able to export the various maililng lists in a standard format like CSV. Not to mention this plugin cost $20 (which is cheap if it ONLY had tat one feature).
PHPList Form Integration
http://projects.jesseheap.com/all-projects/wordpress-plugin-phplist-form-integration/
A nice simply way to integration the forms form PHPList into wordpress. Includes admin functionality so you can adjust the list options and attributes from PHPlist in the wordpress admin. I love this plugin and I’m using it for all my mailing list needs. Only problem is you have to install and work with a separate program PHPlist, but once you get use to it, PHPlist is full featured and does everything I need it to do including multiple import / export options.
PHPlist Helper
http://zeroasterisk.com/w/WP_plugin_PHPlist_helper#Download
Another PHPlist integration wordpress plugin. This one requires changing a few lines in the core of PHPlist so I choose to use PHPList Form Integration instead.
Is The New York Times On The Way Out Due To User-generated, User-filtered Content?
June 1, 2007
With the New York Times likely to change hands for the first time in over fifty years, and the AP reporting the fastest newspaper circulation decline in over 15 years:
NEW YORK (AP) - Average weekday circulation at U.S. newspapers fell 2.6 percent in the six month-period ending in September, the latest sign of trouble in the newspaper business, an industry group reported Monday. Sunday circulation also fell 3.1 percent at newspapers reporting to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, according to an analysis of the data by the Newspaper Association of America. In the previous six-month reporting period ending in March, weekday circulation fell 1.9 percent at U.S. daily newspapers and Sunday circulation fell 2.5 percent.
Circulation at the country’s three largest newspapers was relatively stable, but many others showed significant declines.
Gannett Co.’s USA Today, the largest-selling daily, slipped 0.6 percent from the same period a year ago to 2,296,335; The Wall Street Journal, published by Dow Jones & Co., fell 1.1 percent to 2,083,660; and The New York Times Co.’s flagship paper rose 0.5 percent to 1,126,190.
One must truly consider that this is not just a sign of the times (the internet); but also a hug
e shift in trust factoring: Read more
Mainstream Media Vs New Media | Blogging To Build A Community.
May 28, 2007
This week I had the joy of looking for a blogger to write a weekly column for a social media site centered around movies, filmmaking and pop culture that I’ll be launching next month. In my ad I explained my goals, gave my bio, pointed to this blog and asked to see a writing sample.
I received an enormous response, but surprisingly most of them completely missed what I was going for. So I wrote this to address how many freelance writers missed the purpose and intent of blogging to build community. Instead they resorted to sending me dry content that lacked personality and was like a clone of what you can find in the main stream media.
The requirements were very simple.
Read more
