Account settings to modify:

Let’s start off with some basic WordPress account settings you are going to want to update first. Go to Settings in your WordPress back office and click on General. Make sure you blog’s web URL doesn’t have a www before it. This is not needed, so if you have a new site, don’t use www.

Next, click on Reading under Settings and change blog pages show at most from 10 to 5 or less. This will dramatically speed up your blog.

Next, go to Privacy, make sure your blog is visible to everyone.

Finally, go to Permalinks and make sure to check Custom Structure and put in this:

/%postname%/

Doing so will make sure there are no unneeded dates in your blog post URLs as well as making your URLs look pretty.

Websites you should have an account with:

Let’s move on to websites you should have an account with. For Google sites use your gmail email address for all of them so you’ll be able to link your accounts together easily.

Google Analytics – Tracks visitors to your website, how long they were on your site, keywords they used to get to your sites, where they came from, etc… It’s an excellent free tool that comes with a Google Adwords account. Highly recommended and will help you immensely.

Google Adsense – This is the best way to monetize your blog to show relevant ads on your site and you’ll get paid per click.

Feedburner – This will replace your feed and you can link your Google Adsense and Feeburner accounts together to increase income and track your subscribers better. Make sure subscribes can subscribe via email in your settings.

Google Webmaster Tools – You will want a webmaster account to check stats and see how many pages of your website are indexed in Google. When submitting your site, make sure to give them website with no www and specify this in your site’s settings.

Yahoo Site Explorer – Yahoo’s webmaster center to see what pages are indexed with them.

Bing Webmaster Central – Bing’s webmaster center to see what pages are indexed.

Plugins you should be using:

So, let’s move on to needed plugins to make your blog search engine friendly and more profitable.

All in One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert – This allows you to give every page and blog post on your website a unique title, description, keywords, and canonical link. A must have for every wordpress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold – This awesome plugin automatically generates and updates your sitemap for search engines and pings out to the 3 major search engines every time you publish a new blog post.

General Header by David Gibbs – If you’re not programmer savvy, this plugin gives you the ability to add unique code to the header and footer of your site. You will want to put your Google Analytics code in the footer to track your visitors and length of time on your site. You can also add a unique favicon to your header, this is optional of course.

FD Feedburner Plugin by John Watson – The generic WordPress feed you get with the standard installation doesn’t give you the ability to monetize your feed and allow email subscriptions. This plugin makes it easy to link your Feedburner account to replace the generic feed.

WP SpamFree by WP-SpamFree – You won’t need this right away, but once your blog starts getting out there, the spammers will come knocking at your door with tons of spam. So this plugin will block a majority of this for you to save you time.

WP Greet Box by Thaya Kareeson – This plugin will increase subscribers to your blog by recognizing where visitors came from before they went to your site and offering them to subscribe if they are new or not logged in.

Placing Google Adsense on your blog:

Yes, there are plugins that will do this for you, but in my experience off them stealing my clicks leads me to never want to use them again. So I will quickly show you how to manually add Google Adsense to your blog. You can only have 3 ads per page, don’t break those rules or your Adsense account could get deleted.

I would first go ahead and add a google ad to one or more of your sidebars. To do this, in your WordPress back office simply go to Appearance, then Widgets. Make a new Text widget and simply copy  the Google ad code in and save it.

Now modify your template by going to Appearance, then Editor. This is the template files for your current theme. I would add one to single.php and page.php. If you only have an index.php, then I would add the Google code to this file, do so right after the:

<div id="content">

That’s what I did for this site. Just wrap the Google ad in a paragraph tag like so

<p align="center">Google Adsense code goes here</p>

Now you should have all the required tools to make your WordPress blog a successful one. The final thing I would like to note is the titles of your blog posts are so important. Make sure they are descriptive as possible and use good keywords and link to those keywords whenever you can. It’s also a good habit to make sure external links open in a new window and internal links open in the same window.

I know I didn’t go into too much depth on each individual task, but it is pretty self explanatory and I know you’ll be able to figure everything else out after getting introduced to these various products and services.

What happened? A genius programming hacker figured out the password to my ftp server because the one I had wasn’t strong enough. After that, a script was run on the main directory of my server that found any javascript, xml, and php file where the script could input a line of php code at the top of each file. On my server we’re talking hundreds of files getting changed against my will.Luckily in my case only the php code was compromised for whatever reason I do not know. This also jacked up my site because certain areas wouldn’t work properly on top of the spam ads.

What did the php code do? It made pop ups come up on pretty much every page of my site to visitors all over the world. Pop ups aren’t usually a bad thing, but these were labeled attack sites with malicious malware that could potentially spread viruses to many individual computers or steal information.

How did I fix it? First thing I did was updated my poorly thought out password and made it very random with numbers, special characters, upper and lower case letters, etc.. Thanks to the hosting Company I have, GoDaddy, they automatically make back ups of previous day’s file structures. All I had to to was go back one day before the incident and restore the non corrupted files in each main directory. This worked like magic, but was still time consuming taking about half a day to complete. Doing the restore this way also ensured I didn’t miss any hidden files in sub directories.

I also checked to make sure there weren’t any extra files after the individual directory restores. Then I double checked to make sure there were no other users on my server.

What did I learn in this whole crappy experience? Passwords are pretty damn important. Make sure to properly strengthen all your passwords because they could be compromised otherwise. Also, if you use 3rd party open source code, which I do, make sure it is updated to its latest version. This wasn’t a problem for me, but it could be for someone else.

I’m learning new things about web programming and web design all the time. The reason I never made these  changes a while back was because I didn’t know how to set up my own local server. Once I figured out how to accomplish this it was just a matter of setting up a copy of my site on my local computer. I prefer to use wamp, but there are other free ways to accomplish this besides manually setting up php, apache, and mysql.

My site (Signupandmakemoney.com) uses third party software such as wordpress, simple machines forum, and affiliate pro 4. It first started out as a simple static html based website. Along with the new look, I also parsed all the html files to act as php files with my .htaccess file. This makes it way easier to update the site. I can make one header for the entire site and only have to make one change verses 70+ changes with my old html files. That’s right, I got a lot of pages on the site.

The reason I made the changes was to make a better user experience at the site. Each section had a different header, width, and footer. Now I can gladly say they all look much like the same site. The other reason I made these changes was to hopefully increase the value of the site. Which I think this will.

I still have many more updates and changes I would like to make to the site. But for now this has been a huge step forward in the right direction as to what I believe the site should look like.

Let’s face it, you can’t just follow anyone on Twitter unless you want to end up following a whole bunch of people that will most likely never follow you back.The list below shows how you can steer clear of this so you’re ratio of followers to who you’re following stay pretty close.

We all know that Twitter is an awesome tool when it comes to building a network of people online and getting traffic to a particular web URL. I never got the whole update status thing though since I use Facebook for doing that anyway.

With Twitter I use as an avenue to get people looking at the web URL in my Twitter profile. Other than that, it really has no other value to me. Another thing that makes Twitter useful is finding other sites to link to online. Everyone I follow, I also try to comment on one of their blog posts getting me a link back to my site for free every time.

We all know how expensive advertising online can be. This makes it even more important that we take advantage of the free ways to get traffic to our websites, don’t you agree?

Now, you have to be careful who you follow on Twitter if you’re looking to keep your ratio of followers to people you are following at least somewhat near the same value.

Who you SHOULD NOT follow on Twitter!

• People that don’t have a picture in their profile.
• People that haven’t tweeted very much, 10 or less tweets.
• People that don’t have a web URL in their profile.
• People that have way more followers than they are following.
• People that are following way more people than they have following them back.

Now that we know this, the Twitter users below will be more likely to follow you back.

Who you SHOULD follow on Twitter!

• People who have pictures and a customized background for their profile.
• People that have lots of tweets.
• People that have a web URL, especially if it has a blog of some sort so you can comment at it.
• People with lots of followers with not too much of a gap between who they’re following and who’s following them.

What is a good way to follow people?

I’m glad you asked. What I do is simple. I look at my current network of people following me and just start going through the list. I try to go through about 20 a day at this point. I won’t follow all of them, but the ones I do follow I’ll try to comment at their blog or becomes friends with them in Facebook as well if it’s available to me. Sometimes I won’t follow a particular person, but instead just leave a comment at their blog because this gives me free traffic as well back to my sites.

This, simply put, is the main reason why you wouldn’t want visitors to leave your site completely. Unfortunately, most WordPress blog theme templates don’t set this up for you automatically. If you’re not sure if yours does, just go to one of your single posts and click on one of your comment author links. If it removes your blog completely from the browser, then you don’t have the target=”_blank” attribute set up properly.

Thankfully, I came across a really cool site that explains exactly how to set up your WordPress theme’s function.php file to open comment author links in a new window.

If you’re not concerned about all the ins and outs of how to accomplish this, just follow these instructions:

Once logged into your WordPress admin area, go to Appearance, then Editor. Once there, find your functions.php file. Click on it, and simply paste the following php code at the bottom of the file before the php closing tag (looks like this “?>”.


// Make comment author link URL open in new window
function comment_author_link_window() {
global $comment;
$url = get_comment_author_url();
$author = get_comment_author();

if ( empty( $url ) || 'http://' == $url )
$return = $author;
else
$return = "<a href='$url' rel='external nofollow' target='_blank'>$author</a>";
return $return;
}
add_filter('get_comment_author_link', 'comment_author_link_window');

Hope this code is of use to you.

By doing what any member of a social media site would do, naturally commenting and replying to comments, will get your where you want to be online. Of course you’re not selling anything except for having your main site in your social media profile. That’s it, everything else is natural commenting and interaction to get free traffic to your profile, which in turn will get free traffic to your main site or business.

It’s not rocket science by any means, but it does take a good amount of time and effort on your part. This is why I recommend taking advantage of such social media tasks when you’re bored. Why not? You don’t have to be 100% focused when doing such a thing. You could be watching TV or listening to some music while keeping interaction going in your social networks. Am I right about this or what?

Alright, let’s get straight to the point on some goals you can try to reach while you’re in that state of boredom. A good note to take here is that moderation is always the key to success. This is why I recommend limiting to your efforts to 5 at a time. You can do more a day, but 5 things per social network is actually quite a bit of work if you are legitimately commenting and making friends online.

Here we go!

Make 5 new Facebook friend requests

Go through your Facebook friend’s friends and see who else you know. If you don’t know them all too well, make sure to leave a quick message in your initial friend request to help break the ice. Things like, “I’m a friend of so and so and we both like music.” Doesn’t have to be complex. Go to your news feed as soon as you log in and reply a couple comments as well.

Comment on 5 videos and request friends with 5 people on Youtube

This doesn’t take very much time and it’s always a whole lot of fun to watch neat videos at Youtube. I can almost guarantee you that every person that accepts you as a friend will check out your profile. This will get traffic to your videos, which will then hopefully lead them to your website.

Follow 5 people on Twitter

Go through people you’re already following and see other Twitter profiles that have the same niche as you. Become a follower, then you will get exposure to your site. I don’t like using programs and scripts to build my Twitter network, instead, I prefer to do it the old fashion way.

Comment on 5 blogs in your niche

Simply do a Google search and find similar blogs to yours and submit natural comments and actually take the time to really find out what the blogger is writing about. Make sure to only comment on blogs that take a name and url so you can always get a link back to your site as well as most likely having the owner of that blog definitely take a look at your site. You know they will too, blog owners don’t want to link to bad sites, so they will take a quick look at your site. I know I do.

Do 5 forum posts or replies

If you’re not already a member of some forums, you definitely should be. Forums have always been a good way to get traffic and links back to your sites. Just make sure you fill out a simple signature in your forum’s profile area for everyone you’re a part of. Then just naturally reply to people’s posts and people will see your site, you will get traffic from this. You’ll at least get a hit from the person that started the topic in the first place. Starting your own unique topic will get you even more traffic.

Do 1 blog post for the day

Constantly getting unique content out on the world wide web will always give you free targeted search engine traffic. I try and make it a goal to do at least one blog post a day because I know over time every one of these blog posts are getting me visitors to my sites and at the same time I’m helping people find information on the web.

I know that was a lot of information. Now, I mentioned doing these things when you’re bored online. Now imagined if you made these things a daily endeavor. Think about how much traffic this would generate, over time, to your main website(s).

Well, let’s take a look, shall we?

With 365 days in a year, you’ll end up with results similar to these:

• 365 unique blog posts and pages to your site.
• 1,825 forum posts and replies, your link will be on all of these.
• 1,825 blog comments on other peoples sites, your link will be on theirs.
• About 1,825 new Twitter followers, if they follow you back.
• 1,825 comments on Youtube with link to your profile plus the friends.
• About 1,825 new friends on Facebook.

I know it is almost impossible to accomplish these kinds of results in our busy lives, but a little bit everyday can and will add up. I don’t waste my time with smaller social networks either. In my mind, the 3 social networks you should put your time and effort into building are Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. I see the most potential with these 3.

Even though the crappy browser is still being used, it’s not being used by individuals per say, but by Government and other networked entities that still use the old Windows framework to keep all their systems networked.

The reason why this is good is because Government and private employees are not supposed to be browsing websites unrelated to getting their work done anyway. This means the likely hood of your website even being seen by this small percentage of people is pretty slim to begin with.

Even individuals of third world Countries aren’t using Internet Explorer 6 anymore. It’s so easy for individuals to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer, but like I said before, it’ not so easy for a Government entity that is still using the old Windows network to get so easily upgraded.

A large majority of us hate Internet Explorer 6 and the entire series of Internet Explorer browsers in general because of their strict conformance rules on w3c css and such anyway. One of my biggest pet peeves about Internet Explorer in general, even though it’s still the super power when it comes to Internet browsers, is the fact that they still haven’t conformed with the border-radius css rule that automatically rounds all corners to make your site look really cool without images.

Anyway, back to my point. I would only focus your efforts on making sure your sites work in the latest and greatest browsers and totally forget about Internet Explorer 6 all together. It’s just not worth the time for the low amount of traffic you’ll get from that particular browser.

How do they scam affiliate programs?

Well, the easiest way for them to do so is by owning multiple e-mail addresses and knowing how to manipulate IP addresses so it looks like they are signing up a new unique individual each time when they really are the same person. It’s usually someone who doesn’t have a real stake in the affiliate program with nothing to lose.

Don’t believe me? Here is an example affiliate program scammer I recently caught signing up multiple accounts in my affiliate program under multiple affiliates.

You’ll notice how similar the e-mail addresses are and also the IP addresses a very similar. This is a sign of an affiliate scammer in your mist.

Let me quickly go over some affiliate program essentials that you should have to protect yourself against fraudulent sign ups online.

• A confirmation link in initial sign up e-mail to confirm affiliate accounts so they don’t use someone else’s e-mail address.
• Require the affiliate to manually log into their account before they are approved.
• Manually approve all affiliates so you can check for any fraudulent activity.
• Make sure your affiliate program checks for unique IP addresses
• Look for similar names when someone signs up, could be a sign of the same user signing up multiple times.
• Make sure your affiliate program can quickly and easily manage and check through all affiliate sign ups for duplicates because sometimes you’ll miss some.
• Affiliates that sign up with weird names that don’t make sense like (bat man, super man, spider man) these are probably scammers.
• Building a relationship with your top producers is a good idea because these are the ones most likely to sign up the most fraudulent sign ups at times.
• Requiring your affiliate program to accept e-mails as user names is a good idea because that way only one unique e-mail address per affiliate can be used.
• Make sure the terms and conditions of your affiliate program note that fraudulent sign ups will be deleted and that all affiliate sign ups are approved according to your terms that the affiliates must follow in order to be accepted.

Your affiliate program might not need all these safety credentials if you don’t offer any incentives for affiliates signing up, but if you do, then it is a smart idea to protect your affiliate program from scamming affiliates.

I use Post Affiliate Pro 4 to manage my affiliate program. Don’t worry, I don’t have a Post Affiliate Pro affiliate link to promote them. I am a real customer of them and they are who I use. I chose them because I knew designing my own affiliate program from scratch would take forever and that I would have a whole bunch of security loop holes I would have to learn the hard way without them.

After discovering how many affiliate scammers there really are out there, I am proud to say I really did make the right decision to go with a professional service. Otherwise my affiliate program would probably be out of business by now with all the fake sign ups I would’ve had to have paid by now.

So how do we as bloggers and website owners follow the new FTC guidelines correctly?

I searched all over the Internet for some good straight forward answers on whether I should simply put a disclaimer at the end of my blog post if I make money when someone signs up through my affiliate link that I wrote only good things about. Or instead, should I be able to do a site wide blanket disclaimer for everything? I’m not sure.

Here is all that Mary Engle, the Associate Director – Bureau of Consumer Protection, says about what you need to do.

According to Mary Engle it shouldn’t be too complicated. But my concern is before I go through all my websites and their corresponding pages (over 1,000 pages be honest), I want to make sure that I am updating them correctly.

It looks like the FTC is leaving it up to us to be creative in how we disclose our relationships with the websites and products we write about.

If you write a review about a website or product and you make money off people signing up or purchasing, we simply need to disclose this in our own unique way to our readers and visitors.

Even after looking through the new FTC guidelines I was unable to find a really good example. So I can only assume it really is up to us.

I believe the best way to disclose that you are either making money off of a product you are writing about or have received some sort of compensation for writing about a product or website is to simply leave a note at the bottom of the blog post or page it was written about on.

There are no real rules on how you can do this, none that I’ve found anyway. Please let me know if I’m being an idiot on this one or not.

Example #1

You just wrote a review about a website using a referral link from the advertiser’s website. At the bottom of the page or blog post you could simply write something like this:

Disclaimer - An affiliate link from Company "XYZ" is used on this page.

You could add more to this, but according to the FTC, they only expect you to be straight forward and open, they don’t give any other instructions on how to disclose your relationship with the website or product you just wrote an article about.

Example #2

You just wrote a review about an Amazon product using your Amazon affiliate link. At the bottom of the post or page put:

Disclaimer - The product link on this web page is an Amazon affiliate link.

That should do according the the FTC’s vague guidelines.

Example #3

You wrote an article about a video game that you were given free from the gaming Company in order to say good things about them. At the bottom of the page or post simply put this:

Disclaimer - XYZ Company gave a free copy of this video game for reviewing purposes.

That should do. Notice how I’m not referring to myself in these disclosures, I’m just letting the readers know someone is making money off of it whether it is me or not.

Are you getting where I’m going with this? The FTC didn’t set any strict guidelines on how you disclose your relationships with the advertisers you write about. So as far as I see it, you just need to disclose it somewhere on the same page and you should be good to go.

Good luck on the December 1st, 2009 switch over!

In my opinion, some of these plugins should just come with the standard installation of WordPress on your server. Don’t worry, you won’t miss a single important plugin after reading this post.

Just so you know, all of these plugins can be installed from your WordPress back office. Just go to the left hand side and find Plugins, then Add New. Make sure the plugin name matches the author, otherwise you will be getting a completely different plugin than what I’m talking about.

14 WordPress plugins you should have installed:

1. All in One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert – This is one of the essential plugins I believe should automatically come with your WordPress installation. This plugin allows you to give a unique title, description, and keywords for every single page and blog post on your WordPress site.
2. General Header by David Gibbs -This plugin allows you to add to your head tag and footer div. You might use it to add or change your favicon, add Google Analytics tracking code, etc.. Whatever you would want to use it for.
3. Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold -Yet another essential plugin that should come automatically installed with WordPress in my opinion. This excellent plugin not only generates your sitemap for you, but it also pings out to the Search Engines for you every time you do a new post on your blog.
4. WP-SpamFree by Scott Allen -You probably won’t see the need for this plugin right away, but it is another essential plugin for your WordPress blog. It stops all the spammers and bots from attacking your blog with fake, generated comments full of really bad ads.
5. Contextual Related Posts by Ajay D’Souza -This plugin automatically sorts all your posts for you. After someone visits one of your posts, they can then see a list of related posts that the reader may also be interested in checking out as well.
6. FeedBurner FeedSmith by FeedBurner -This plugin will allow you to redirect your feed url to Feedburner for both your RSS fee and your comment feed.
7. Get Recent Comments by Krischan Jodies -This plugin may not be necessary as some WordPress blogs might already have a recent comments script already included with their theme. But if not, this plugin will get all your recent comments that you can show to your readers in the sidebar or wherever you would like to show it.
8. Kahi’s Notes by Peter Kahoun -This plugin is for you back office only. It just helps to be able to take quick notes on tasks related to your blog or future posts you may want to write about.
9. PingPressFM by Sold Out Activist -This plugin will ping out all your posts to your favorite social networks. You won’t believe how much extra traffic this will produce for you in the long run. If you have a problem with PingPressFM plugin not allowing you to add triggers, here is a solution.
10. Sociable by Blogplay -This plugin allows your readers to easily tweet and share your blog posts if they really like them. Makes it easy to print and e-mail posts as well.
11. Twitbar Widget by C. Finegan – This is a simple plugin that allows you to put your latest twitter tweets on your blog’s side bar. Just another way to get traffic to previous blog posts.
12. WordPress Popular Posts by Héctor Cabrera – This plugin tracks hits and comments on posts to determine which blog posts on your site are the most popular. It’s a way for you to see what posts are your best work and displays them on your sidebar.
13. WP Greet Box by Thaya Kareeson – This plugin tracks where your visitors come from and politely asks them to subscribe. For example, if a visitor comes from Google, it will say, “Welcome fellow Googler, please subscribe.” You can personalize the greetings any way you would like to.
14. Follow Me by Brian Chappell – This plugin makes it very easy for readers to follow you on various social networks without taking up a lot of space on your blog. There are similar plugins, you just need to find the best one for you.

I hope this information is helpful to you, keep on blogging.