Welcome to the Blog Marketing Guide!
Click the green double arrows to expand/contract each section.

Introduction

There’s a LOT of things you can do to promote your blog and improve your rankings on the search engines. Some of them you may know about already and some of them you won’t. You’ve probably heard of many that you aren’t actually using yet. So since I’m going to be promoting this blog using these strategies anyways, I decided that writing a guide detailing what I’m doing would be a VERY good idea (for both of us.)

Having a cohesive and integrated plan helps you stay focussed and not get bogged down anywhere. It also let’s you get the ‘big picture’, building your confidence in what you’re doing. Marketing can be an overwhelming exercise for anyone – there are just so many options. This short guide will hopefully make the whole process a lot easier to deal with. My main advice is: don’t get stuck anywhere, if you’re having troubles with one method, just move on and come back to it at another time.

I’m not going to go into paid advertising here, in my experience it is usually a waste of money, if you really have the money to invest consider PayPerClick to get some instant traffic to your site to test conversions, but that isn’t the subject of this guide. Why cut into your profits? I find free methods better, there are plenty of places online you can submit your content too, and there are options here too:

1. Do the submissions manually yourself. Time-consuming but budget-wise.
2. Use trial software automatic submission tools and buy them later if you need them.
3. Outsource single tasks. Easier than it sounds when you use a service such as Fiverr.com. (everything at Fiverr is just $5, whether it is doing directory submissions or social marketing accounts or just about anything else. I wish I had access to this kind of cheap outsourcing ages ago!)

So, this basic Blog Marketing Plan is based on content marketing. Content is King (and Quality is Queen) when it comes to marketing. Now that ‘content’ might take on a number of different forms as you market it, starting as an idea for a post and spinning out from there. You may have been lead to believe that you need to learn “internet marketing” secrets and stuff like that, but you don’t need to go down that road, this is the tried and tested way… read this report instead, it gives you a MUCH better approach:

Sticky Organic Marketing by Darren Warmuth of Unique Article Wizard (Right click and select Save As)

So you should have a Content Marketing Plan similar to the one on the last page of that report and stick to it. But before we get to content rewriting strategies (in Step 3) and what you should do with them, there are a few simpler and more important things to do first. Well, you would think that the first thing to do is write a blog post and publish it, right? But my question is, do you have WordPress set up properly yet?

Step 1: WordPress Setup Necessities

Here’s a checklist for the essential parts to having your blog set up properly, BEFORE you publish anything (or anything more!) The more advanced stuff we’ll get into later. See my Blog Setup Guide for detailed steps or if you are starting a new blog project. All the quick steps are there to have a blog up and running in under an hour. (Yeah I know it’s the customization that takes time – do I ever know it Okay, here’s what you should have:

1. Make sure you have your own self-installed copy of WordPress on your own domain, anything else and you are wasting your time, sorry! If you think this is too hard or don’t have $10 to spare on a domain name, you’re probably not ready for this whole process anyway.

2. Have the right permalink structure. The best permalink structure is “/%category%/%post%/” (without the quotes) because your keywords end up in your post’s URL, and thus majorly affect your SEO. Put this is your Settings->Permalink page in WordPress and Save. If you have already been publishing, don’t panic. Just install the Redirect Old Slugs plugin (just search and install it via your WordPress plugins menu) and people will still be able to find your posts by their old address.

3. Install the right third-party plugins. This is going to make a huge difference to your SEO. It can be time-consuming to get them all working properly sometimes I know, so start with the essentials and add more as you have the time. You don’t need all the plugins straight away, but some of them like All in One SEO and a few others are still a must off the bat. Check out my list of Essential WordPress Plugins.

4. Make sure you have a good ping services list. Your blog’s RSS feed (basically a list of all your latest posts) will be pinged to all the major RSS engines automatically with your WordPress ping list. If you’ve never updated your site’s ping list, DO IT NOW. SERIOUSLY. Go HERE to get a great ping list and paste it into the Settings->Writing of your WordPress admin area and Save. This will ensure your latest posts get indexed by as many search engines as possible in the shortest time.

Like I said, there’s more advanced stuff to set up on your WordPress blog, but on the other hand there’s no point having a fully pretty blog with all the bells and whistles if there’s no content on it, and thus no traffic to it, so let’s move on and we’ll come back to this later.

Step 2: Blog and Ping / Post and Rank

Having set up your WordPress blog to ping those ping services in the last step, you can now publish your post. YAY! This is often simply called ‘blog and ping’ or ‘post and rank’, because you ARE going to get noticed and ranked somewhere by doing this, and the more regularly you do it the better your rankings will be.

Because, it really doesn’t matter how often you write – so much as that you write regularly. If you ever get lost for ideas on what to write, brainstorming keywords that relate to your niche is a great way to come up with new writing angles. Simpler yet, just do a search for any of your major keywords on Google or an article directory. DON’T copy someone’s article – you want unique content on your site! Rewrite it instead and improve on it, or rewrite two related articles into one, taking the good points of each, and then improve that. The length is not as important as the quality, remember she is Queen!

And now… *drumroll*… for your Post Publishing Checklist:

1. Once you’ve published, don’t forget to add tags for your main keywords. To help with this you can install the free Simple Tags plugin (just search and install it via your WordPress plugins menu.) This helps your keyword SEO for the post, and later you may want to add a tag cloud to your sidebar menu of your site for even more SEO value.

2. Where possible, include links to relevent blog posts within your post. These will be pinged automatically by WordPress, giving you targeted quality backlinks. If the pings fail, check them with my free Pingchecker plugin (or if you have it use Pingback Pro for the same.

3. Now for the simplest and most effective way to get relevent backlinks to your blog post. Yes, it’s time for a quick sales pitch (look I waited until now didn’t I?) Get your copy of the Pingback Pro plugin for WordPress so that you can easily search and ping up to TEN top-ranking blogs for each and every post you make, for any keywords you like. If you make this an integral part of your publishing process, it’s not going to take very long to massively increase the number of quality backlinks to your blog. What I love about this (and why I spent months creating it) is that it is one of the only ways to get targeted backlinks with almost instant gratification. Click here for all the details and to see a realtime demo video of Pingback Pro in action. And don’t forget you can go back to all your old posts and add pingbacks to them as well… how many posts do you have already? At 10 pings per post you could have hundreds or thousands of pingbacks at your fingertips! But I digress…

4. Set up what I like to call the “$5 Social Marketing Strategy”. Head on over to Fiverr.com and search for “onlywire account”. You will be able to find someone there will create the 40+ accounts and link them into an Onlywire account. Yes you can do all this yourself for free, but I would rather pay the $5 to save me the hours of tedious signups. Up to you. Once you have all your accounts setup, you can use Onlywire to social bookmark all your posts automatically using the “Official Onlywire Plugin” (yes, use those search terms to install it from your WordPress plugins menu.) Add your Onlywire account login to the plugin settings page and that’s it, each time you publish it will send your blog post link and description to all your social networks! (You might want to login to your social network accounts a few at a time at a later stage and tweak them a bit, but only as a break from your content development okay?)

Step 3: Content Rewriting Strategies

You might think that one post on your website is very little, but it can be the core content that can be recreated in a number of different forms, and doing it this way a single post can count for a great deal. Any post is basically an article, or the basis for an article, but can also be rewritten (at least once) or made into other forms, giving you further opportunities to market your content elsewhere. The core strategy is basically this:

1. Create your content and publish it on your blog.
2. Create different forms of the content.
3. Publish these in multiple other websites.
4. Create backlinks to all these websites.
5. Create backlinks to your backlinks.

Obviously not ALL of your content is worth changing to several other forms, but at the very least you should consider it. The majority of your informational posts can be rewritten and used for article marketing. Each of the methods below will bring you new backlinks to your website (some more relevent and valuable than others of course) and it will depend on your time and abilities which you choose. But WAIT, before you go submitting everywhere, a piece of advice! Keep it in mind to do your best to collect the links to where your submissions appear as you will be needing all these backlink locations later.

Article Marketing
Take your rewritten article (look you don’t have to change that much to make it unique again, so long as it isn’t verbatim what you put on your own site) and submit it to article directories. Click here for the 14 Day Trial of Article Submitter (then click Download at the top of the page.) This one will submit to 500+ article directories. Or if you have the money and are publishing regularly (surely!), try Unique Article Wizard. One place you won’t want to miss out on is EzineArticles, it’s free to publish there and many marketers use it as a resource. Also very worthwhile is installing Pingback Optimizer once you start getting pingbacks to your site from your article distribution, as this will greatly improve the results from your article backlinks.

Press Releases
Is your article newsworthy? A lot of the time it is but you may just not be thinking of it that way. Take a different angle by considering why people need the information in your post and rewrite it from that point of view as a press release. It may need some spin or consideration but it’s worth it. There are plenty of free press release distribution services out there such as PRWeb with high page ranks that you can get links back from in the author resource boxes.

Standalone Webpage
There are two standout informational sites out there that let you create individual webpages on any topic you choose and get great rankings for them. They will bring you extra visitors too for sure as they actually have traffic! I’m talking about Squidoo and Hubpages, maybe you’ve heard of them. Look, it doesn’t take much to put up a Squidoo lens or a Hubpage, just take a quality article or consolidate a few on a particular topic and be scatter some links to your blog or even directly to your salespage and related affiliate products. Don’t try to sell, that’s what salespages are for, just describe and recommend.

Video Marketing
Take your content and use it to do a quick video. You can use Camtasia studio for a screen capture while doing a voiceover like you see on my salespage. Or maybe a powerpoint presentation, whatever you’re more comfortable with. The great thing about video is it can get ranked very highly in Google and show up on the first page for keywords your site will take ages to get up there for. Start with uploading to YouTube and then see what other video sites you want to get to. Embed your video back into your own website and make another post, your subscribers and visitors watching it will increase it’s popularity on YouTube and drive it’s rankings up getting it even more views. A video marketing program like Instant Video Uploader or a service such as Traffic Geyser is very helpful if you plan to do this a lot or have a video blog, it really takes the time out of uploading and submissions.

Audio Marketing
It’s really such a simple thing to read your article about it and discuss a few points here and there, call it internet radio or podcast if you like! Maybe you can take the audio straight off your video if it doesn’t need the visuals. In any case there are plenty of places to submit your podcasts, definitely consider creating a separate feed for them so you can submit that too. I’m not really experienced with this yet so I won’t go into it, but it’s a very worthwhile option especially if you have the gift of the gab.

Consolidate Content
Ever thought of compiling some of your best content into an ebook or report? Hey, why not? It could be offered as a free gift on your blog to encourage visitor retention and drive further sales. (Hey this isn’t part of my plan is it?) You could also consider submitting it to free ebook sites, some of which will give you backlinks, and readers downloading it will get linked back to your site or directly to what your recommend from within it. And if you have an affiliate program you can make it brandable so your affiliates can distribute it for you too (I’ve used this cool Html2Pdf program for this before.)

So that’s a lot of different content ideas for you. Now, you’re probably thinking about the content you have right now and wondering if it’s going to fit any of these, but don’t sweat it, you can always create new content in any of these forms tailored to what you need. If anything is all too much and too technical for now, skip it and just keep publishing to your blog and using the other strategies until you feel it’s time for something different. You don’t want to get too sidetracked from your main content creation, just keep these in mind and they will find the right place in your overall strategy. Seriously though, at the very least do some rewriting and article marketing on a regular basis so you get more backlinks to your site.

Step 4: Backlinks to Your Backlinks

It may sound a little funny at first, but it’s actually a really good idea. Boosting your backlinks by linking to them from elsewhere is going to make them more important to the search engines, and thus more important to your rankings too. Actually, more likely is that linking to your backlink locations will get them re-indexed sooner and so actually count as an incoming link a lot sooner, increasing your rankings faster. In some cases they don’t get indexed at all otherwise and don’t ever count, and this is the way to fix that. Now, remember I said you should be collecting all the links to where your content appears? Whether it is articles or press releases or videos or standalone pages… or whatever, being able to link to them from somewhere else is going to help.

Pingback Boosting
One program that does something like this is Pingback Optimizer. Unlike my own plugin, Pingback Pro, which works on SENDING revelent pingbacks – this uses the opposite approach, creating links to pingbacks which you RECEIVE through your article marketing efforts (your resource boxes contain links that give you pingbacks when other blogs publish them.) So if you are doing article marketing (and I hope you will be!) then this is one way to make your articles really count for something. It works really well with Unique Article Wizard or Article Submitter (depending on your budget.) Fortunately, Pingback Optimizer is a WordPress plugin, and how it actually does this is to create an RSS feed of your pingback locations from within your blog and submits it to RSS services regularly.

Remote Blog Backlinks
You can easily get many free offsite mini-blog accounts these days, similar to your main blog but where you can post little resource links and blurbs that link to your published articles or press releases or videos or other places where your backlinks appear. Of course you don’t want to bother setting them up too extensively as they probably won’t get seen much, but hopefully they will get indexed! The advantage of this is that blog accounts such as Blogger or LiveJournal or WordPress.Com have good page rank and do get indexed regularly. Of course you want your main site to rank, and these can be one good way of feeding some link juice to your site indirectly by strengthening the sites that DO link to your site directly. This is not to be underestimated! If you want to do this with another cool automated plugin then get a copy of WPSyndicator.

Here’s a list of some of the major blogging site you can use, though of course there are many more out there:

WordPress.Com, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Xanga, BlogHi, Blogware, Thoughts, Weebly… I could go on… there are 31 top free blogging sites here40 listed here.

Social Bookmarking
Remember those social network accounts we set up for Onlywire in Step 2? Well, we can use those to link to list of places where our backlinks appear too. I would use them sparingly though, it is probably enough we are using them to automatically link to our main site already. You can experiment with this depending on your social network savvy and inclination. Personally I prefer to use satellite sites for this technique, but if you are spending a little time each week tweaking a social network profile here or there you can always throw in a few links for good measure, it may actually help to have your social account look like it is linking to something other than just your own site.

Step 5: Essential Blog Marketing

There a few other things you can do to market your blog as a whole, basically by generating more backlinks to your site by getting it listed elsewhere. In this case though, it’s not really worth collecting your submission addresses once you receive them, it would be far too time-consuming and in many cases not even possible – save that for specific content. Instead you may wish to consider collecting all the reciprical linking URLs and putting them on a link or partner page (often directories actually require this.) Actually I’d recommed you create a page for this before you start as many directories have an instant check for their backlink.

Submisssions can be quite time consuming, though there are many automated or semi-automated submissions you will need to be there for manual inputs, so set a number of hours aside. different websites require different information, mostly it is finding the right category for your website. Honestly though don’t expect all the sites you come across to accept your submissions, many of them are poorly set up and just don’t work, but the majority are fine. The good news is you really only need to do this once for each site and you can run a couple of submission programs simultaneously.

RSS Feed Submissions
Having your feed ping all those ping services automatically as we set up in Step 1 is essential to marketing your blog. Now, to supplement this, you can also submit your feed to even more RSS directories using a tool such as Feed Submitter. This will get you even more backlinks to your RSS feed from lesser known but still well-ranking feed searches and directories. Click here for the 14 Day Trial of Feed Submitter (then click Download at the top of the page.) There are other submitters out there, but this one I really like and it submits to 200+ feed sites.

Directory Submissions
Website directories have been around for a long time. Directories submissions are still very much worth doing, as some of these directories are still quite valuable for gaining backlinks to your site, though of a general nature. More specific page promotion methods we’ve already been through are arguable more powerful, but this step is not to be ignored. If you’re just doing this for one site, simply outsource the directory submissions on Fiverr.com for $5. If you want to do it yourself or are planning to do market multiple sites, get some Directory Submitter software. Click here for the 14 Day Trial of Directory Submitter (then click Download at the top of the page.) This one will submit to 4500+ search engines and directories. But since there are SO many directories and the trial version will only submit up to 50, start by auto-selecting categories that are relevent to your site, then do more general directories later.

Forums and Forum Signatures
This can be a little time-consuming, but sometimes forums are a great place to get backlinks. Many forums allow you a forum signature, so if you are posting anywhere regularly do consider this. If you have an affiliate program, some forums have a category where you can post it, such as the highly-trafficked Digital Point forum. One thing you might like to do is put your website in a related forum and ask for feedback, so long as it isn’t some spammy trash site you might even get some good suggestions for site improvements yeah? Got a salepage? Get a free critique at Copy Writing Board. Another thing to consider is whether a forum has publicly viewable user profiles, because these also get indexed by the search engines! It doesn’t take much to sign up and put your website link on your profile, unfortunately these can be really hard to find, but it’s still something to keep a look out for.

Blog Commenting
If reading and responding to other people’s writing is more your style, there’s another good way to find blogs you can comment on, and that’s by using Fast Blog Finder. It is of course more time consuming than using pingbacks from your posts like you can with Pingback Pro, but it does also mean you can get links from high-ranking blogs that AREN’T in your niche. So long as you can make a relevent on topic comment (otherwise it is unlikely to be approved.) Here’s the Direct Download link for Fast Blog Finder. The free version is limited to 50 website per keyword search, more than enough.
Another option is to use Google Alerts to get notified to your email inbox of the latest content from blogs for the keywords you’re targeting.

Step 6: Essential Product Marketing

You may wish to just promote affiliate products and there’s nothing wrong with that – there’s a LOT of work that goes into creating your own product (take it from me) and you may not have the time or experience (I would simply just make sure you create multiple affiliate blogs so you don’t have all your eggs in one basket.)

But this section is for those of us who DO have their own product or software that they are selling (or intending to sell.) You can get some great results with these methods, they are used by extremely profitable internet marketers everyday.

Joint Ventures
This topic is too extensive to get into here, I will consider writing a separate post about it at a later date. But if you have your own product and affiliate program and do this right, it is probably THE fastest free way to make real sales, by leveraging other people’s lists and visitors and splitting the profits. But it requires some thought before you go for it. Read this First Contact PDF to get an idea of what I mean. If you’re serious about launching a product, get a real guide such Chris Rempel’s Instant JV Success System.

Affiliate Directories
If you have an affiliate program (which if you have your own product is a no-brainer) then you will of course want to include your affiliate program in as many affiliate directories as you can so people can find and sell your product for you. You can do this manually of course, it is rather tedious, but like most other things there is a faster way, use a submitter such as Instant Affiliate Submitter. I wouldn’t expect a flood of affiliates from these directories necessarily, personally I think it’s better to track down affiliate partners directly for joint ventures, but you will get some this way over time, and listing in these directories will give you some good backlinks too as they tend to have good rankings.

Software Directories
If you have software to market – especially if you have a free or trial version! – then you will definitely want to get it out there to software directories, as these are one of the few places you will actually see not just backlinks from, but they also tend to have enough traffic of their own to drive you some direct visitors to you as well.

Get the 30 day free trial of Rudenko’s Robosoft. The great thing about this one is it helps you generate a valid PAD file (a software description file) which many software directories require. It’s a little bit of work to fill in all your software details and get everything together for submission, but well worth it. Set a day aside just for this. I did for my free WordPress plugin Pingchecker, and it consistently brought me a flow of downloads every day. Heck, it will also do some directory and press release submissions for you too.

The following list can be copied and pasted in your Settings->Writing section where you have the box for update services. Alternatively, consider installing the cbnet Ping Optimizer plugin (which only pings on new posts not on edited posts, preventing your blog from getting banned from ping services.)

This is an updated list for 2011 that I found here, done by someone who’s put in the hard yards checking which ping services are still valid. There’s extra ping services for adult sites there too if you need them.

What next? Easy. Read part four of the blog setup guide: Essential WordPress Plugins.

PS. If you would like to find out how to create and promote a successful blog then I highly recommend you check out BlogSuccess.Com

Here’s a good overview for monetizing your blog, whether you’re just starting off or have a blog that’s getting traffic but isn’t making you any money yet. I know I do, so after putting together a new site recently, I thought I’d put down what I’ve learned before applying it to my old sites. You can check out what these strategies might look like in action at my new niche blog: Hypnosis Gnosis.

Generally speaking, because blogging is content marketing, your visitors come through organic search engine traffic keywords and as such you can’t just redirect them to a direct sales letter. You need an in-between step…

You are basically looking for just one of three actions from your visitors:

1. Subscribes to your mailing list to be followed up leading to a purchase.
2. Clicks on an advertisement of some sort to make a possible purchase.
3. Arrives at a product review on your site directly linking to a salespage.

As far as I’m concerned, where money is concerned anything else is just talk.

So instead, let’s talk about those…

But first, a sidenote, because all these things have something in common: you’re always going to need links that take visitors where you want them to go, whether you are linking to your own products or affiliate products, having a link like: http://myblog.com/recommends/Widgets/
is going to make a difference to your clickthroughs, and being able to track them is handy too.

To get that all set up, check out my post:
Link Cloaking, Link Tracking and Redirection.

Okay, now that’s sorted, time to monetize your blog by those three key strategies.

1. Publishing Profitable Product Reviews
2. Setting up an Autoresponder or Mailing List.
3. Contextual Advertising on Your Blog
Back to Blog Marketing Guide
]]> http://pingbackpro.com/blog-marketing-guide/monetizing-your-blog/feed/ 1 http://pingbackpro.com/blog-marketing-guide/monetizing-your-blog/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/HmKOvVYPfrY/ http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/related-posts-plugins/#comments Sun, 09 Oct 2011 21:58:00 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=137 One of the things that’s come to my attention when blogging is the importance of a good internal linking strategy. While WordPress has it’s own links and it’s important to set up a good permalink structure, it’s also important to cross-link to related posts from within single posts.

To that end, using one of the number of available ‘Related Posts’ plugins available is a very good idea. Having a look around these ones seem to be some of the best options:

Similar Posts (requires Post Plugin Library.)
Efficient Related Posts
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

It will of course depend what kind of options you are after for the plugin (whether you want to include related posts in your RSS feed for example) but any of these can do a really good job. For more information on their various features, check out
this discussion of related post plugins.

As you can see on this blog I have one installed, in this case YARPP. Unfortunately I find there is very few plugins that let you change the display option order in their settings and this is one of them. Instead, you can edit yarpp.php and change this line:

add_filter('the_content','yarpp_default',1200);

to this:

add_filter('the_content','yarpp_default',9);

(I don’t know what the 1200 is about, the valid values are from 1 to 10, 10 being the latest.) But here I am using it in conjunction with the Pingback Pro list which is set to 10.



]]> http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/related-posts-plugins/feed/ 0 http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/related-posts-plugins/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/XEj8sUPufKw/ http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/basic-wordpress-setup/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 22:03:02 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=117 Here we are at part two, mostly easy stuff deleting and modifying a few default options… Login to your WordPress admin at yourdomain.com/wp-admin and select these from the left hand menu.

* Posts
- Edit..
..Tick ‘Hello world’, Delete, Apply
- Categories
..Change ‘uncategorized’ to main theme Category
..Add any other main categories and subcategories

* Links
- Edit
..Click box next to name to select all
..Select Delete from actions and Apply
- Link Categories
..Change ‘blogroll’ to ‘Useful Links’ or similar

* Users
- Your Profile
..Fill in any details, name and website etc.
..and Click Update Profile

* Settings
- General
..Set Title, Subtitle, Timezone, Save Changes

- Permalinks (*VERY IMPORTANT SEO STEP!*)
..Select Custom Structure, then input:
/%category%/%postname%/
..Update Settings

- Discussion
..Modify to suit your own purposes

- Reading
..Change Blog pages to your desired display.
..Increase Syndication Feeds to show 20-30.

* Spend some time choosing a theme at:

http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

* Appearance
- Themes
..Click on Add New Themes and search
..Activate a Theme and View your site
..Keep going until you like the look of your site!
You can always change the header and/or background later,
but try to get the general look of the site how you want.

* Appearance
- Widgets
Add your menu widgets as you’d like to have them.
Simply drag the desired widgets ontto the sidebar.
Here’s the rough selection and order that I go for:
..RSS Feed
..Search
..Categories
..Recent Posts
..Recent Comments
..Archives
..Tag Cloud
..Links

..Edit your widget options to enter titles etc.

- Options
Some themes will have additional options you can set.

- Editor
If you have any CSS knowledge you might want to make some tweaks to your theme’s stylesheets.
** This is the hard part folks, it’s time-consuming but worth it to make your site look the way you want it to. **
It takes a bit of experimenting to get things in the right place if you make changes. You can always play with this later if you’re unsure about it, more important for now is to move on and get your third-party plugins and content up and running.

What next? Read part three of the blog setup guide: WordPress Pinglist

PS. If you would like to find out how to create and promote a successful blog then I highly recommend you check out BlogSuccess.Com

]]> http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/basic-wordpress-setup/feed/ 0 http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/basic-wordpress-setup/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/ACEDkadossA/ http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/essential-wordpress-plugins/#comments Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:59:43 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=124 There are so many WordPress plugins come and go, it’s really hard to keep up with a list of the best ones. But to me these ones have really stood the test of time.

Now, it’s so much faster to search and install them from within WordPress these days than to download them and upload them to your plugins directory, so rather than give you links to them (except where necessary) I’ll just give you their exact names and what they do.

Simply repeat this procedure for each plugin: Go to Plugins-Add New, type the name in the box and click search, find the right plugin, click on Install, then click on Activate. Easy!

The Essentials

All in One SEO Pack – Awesome plugin that rewrites all your meta tags and so on for the search engines.
Google XML Sitemap – Yes indeed if you want to see your blog in Google as soon as possible (err try 24-48 hours people) then you want this one.
Smart Update Pinger – Pretty cool, stops pinging when you just update a post rather than add a new one. Click here for the latest version. Don’t forget to copy and paste in the latest pinglist like in the last step.

Stopping Comment Spam

WP-SpamFree, NoSpamNX, Bad Behavior, Simple Trackback Validation and bcSpamBlock … together do pretty well!

For Feeds and More Subscribers

Feedburner Plugin – redirects your normal feed addresses to your Feedburner feed. Your normal feed address is http://yourdomain.com/feed/rss/ Go to feedburner.com and get an account and burn this feed. Then come back to WordPress and enter your Feedburner feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName) into this plugin.
What Would Seth Godin Do? – Adds a welcome message to your blog reminding new visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.
DD Add Sig – Add a signature to your blog posts… OR, use it to add a message to all your posts driving readers to your main site offer! (or reminding people to subscribe to your RSS feed.) Note: You will need to manually download and install this plugin from Dagon Designs
Subscribe Remind – basically similar to Add Sig for reminding people to subscribe to your RSS feed.
AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button – Adds a social bookmark button at the end of your posts. There are a number of similar plugins but I find this one is very good.
Easy Retweet – Similar to AddToAny but just for Twitter.

Miscellaneous

Redirect Old Slugs – Useful if you ever change the structure of your site, old post links will be redirected.
Search Hilite – Highlight search terms from Google traffic to your blog.
Simple Tags – Very helpful in adding tags to your posts, getting related and suggested tags from third-party services.
Title Capitalization – Nice way to give your post titles standard capitalization for consistency.
Old Post Promoter – Takes old posts and republishes them keeping your blog fresh even if you don’t.
Wassup – Great little visitor stats program, giving you a graphical representation of your blogs visitors.

Sure there are hundreds more plugins to be found for specific purposes at the WordPress plugins directory, but these should get you started.

What’s next? Ahh… well… don’t forget to go through and set up all the plugin options for the plugins you just installed, and make sure they all are displaying okay on your site!

PS. If you would like to find out how to create and promote a successful blog then I highly recommend you check out BlogSuccess.Com

]]> http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/essential-wordpress-plugins/feed/ 1 http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/essential-wordpress-plugins/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/ul7-GKhVh10/ http://pingbackpro.com/blog-plugin-guide/essential-wordpress-seo-plugins/#comments Sun, 28 Aug 2011 12:49:43 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=499 Here’s a shortlist of my favourite and/or essential free Search Engine Optimization plugins that you can use on your WordPress blog. Just search for them from within your WordPress Add Plugins page and enjoy the benefits to your SERPs!

Google XML Sitemap - Creates a Google compatible sitemap file for your blog and automatically submits it to services too. Essential.
All in One SEO Pack - Essential plugin for your blogs search engine optimization. Alternatively you can use Platinum SEO.
 Headspace2 SEO - Extremely flexible SEO options for all the different types of pages on your site plus a whole lot of cool features.
 Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - Creates an SEO friendly user navigation sitemap for your site.
 SEO Smart Links - Really cool plugin for internal cross-linking of posts within your site plus being able to link them straight to products.
SEO Friendly Images - Make the most of your images by adding  SEO friendly tags to them.
 SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2 - Has some cool features for using search engine terms as tags.

Optionally also…

Bridge SEO Tag Wrap Keywords - Wrap your chosen keywords/tags in underline, bold, italiacs or other code.
 Nofollow Blogroll SEO - To add a nofollow tag to your sites blogroll of outgoing  links.
Date Exclusion SEO – If you want to remove the dates from your posts for SEO purposes.

Incoming search terms:

• Mouse here for Related Links plugin
]]> http://pingbackpro.com/blog-plugin-guide/essential-wordpress-seo-plugins/feed/ 1 http://pingbackpro.com/blog-plugin-guide/essential-wordpress-seo-plugins/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/ylxaIf2R4qA/ http://pingbackpro.com/blog-marketing-guide/link-cloaking-link-tracking-and-redirection/#comments Tue, 23 Aug 2011 22:02:00 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=399 You’re always going to need links that take visitors where you want them to go, whether you are linking to your own products or affiliate products, having a link like:

http://myblog.com/recommends/Widgets/

is going to make a difference to your clickthroughs, and being able to track them is handy too. Affiliate link cloaking is a big deal for some people, but it doesn’t have to be hard.

The easiest way to do this is to just install the simple free WordPress plugin called Redirection and you’re away. It’s fast and it works great, and it will tell you how many times your redirected URLs have been visited, you can even click on them to see where the visits came from, and mostly that’s all you’ll need so you know which badly performing ads to replace etc.

Using it is simple… Install the plugin and in the Redirection admin menu (it’s under Tools if you can’t find it), enter a source URL (your new link) like /recommends/Widgets/ and a target URL (your affiliate link) like:

http://somebodysaffiliateprogram.com/?affid=293848743

and create the redirect. Then you just point your advertising links to:

http://myblog.com/recommends/Widgets/

(which you may notice is what I’m doing.)

There’s plenty of other professional options out there for click tracking, link cloaking, etc. but for now I’ll just mention if you’re looking for a more advanced solution I’d suggest getting one that handles in-post contextual advertising links for you as well (which we’ll talk about later) such as MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate so check that out.

Back to Monetizing Your Blog.
Back to Blog Marketing Guide.



]]> http://pingbackpro.com/blog-marketing-guide/link-cloaking-link-tracking-and-redirection/feed/ 1 http://pingbackpro.com/blog-marketing-guide/link-cloaking-link-tracking-and-redirection/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/KqiwuOPrRgA/ http://pingbackpro.com/videos/pingback-pro-realtime-demo-video/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 22:02:03 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=203 Click Play to watch a realtime demo of Pingback Pro at work:


“8 New Targeted Backlinks in 8 Minutes!”
(slow connection? click here to download the video and watch it offline.)




]]> http://pingbackpro.com/videos/pingback-pro-realtime-demo-video/feed/ 0 http://pingbackpro.com/videos/pingback-pro-realtime-demo-video/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/FN_-rg095O0/ http://pingbackpro.com/articles/essential-free-software-for-everyone/#comments Sun, 14 Aug 2011 10:08:19 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=219 After years of downloading and using free software, there are just some programs you end up using all the time. Here’s the essence of mine, that have stood the test of time too… Replace those crap programs like Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer, Paint, Notepad, Windows Media Player today.

My advice: Download and install them all as you need them.

Browsers and Web Programs Web Browsers: Opera (fully featured) Chrome or Kmeleon (light) FTP Manager: Filezilla or AceFTP Download Manager: Orbit (also grabs web video!) File Sharing: uTorrent Files and Stuff File Manager: FreeCommander *** DON’T MISS THIS! PDF Viewer: Foxit Reader Archive Processing: WinRar Drive Space Graph: HDGraph Word/Design Editors Great Text Editor: TextPad *** Another Don’t Miss Word Processor: Open Office WYSIWYG Webpage Editor: (WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet) NVU Komposer Graphics Graphics/Photo Editor: Paint.Net GIF Animation: GIMP Graphics Manipulation: FastStone.Org Screen Capture: Screenhunter Sound Sound Editors: GoldWave or Audacity Music Player: WinAmp with Winamp Deskband Video Video Player: VLC Media Player Video Converters: MediaCoder, AnyVideoConverter AntiVirus/Spyware Anti Spyware: Spybot Search and Destroy Lavasoft Ad-Aware Anti Virus: AVG Free

Incoming search terms:

• pingback software



]]> http://pingbackpro.com/articles/essential-free-software-for-everyone/feed/ 0 http://pingbackpro.com/articles/essential-free-software-for-everyone/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/9kUhI9NOeUY/ http://pingbackpro.com/articles/what-is-a-pingback/#comments Sat, 13 Aug 2011 09:58:19 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=185 To put it simply, a pingback is like a link exchange between two WordPress blogs. For example, I link to your blog and you link back to mine, or vice versa. Pingbacks are a powerful way of getting relevent quality backlinks from blogs that would otherwise be costly or impossible to get links from.

So how do they work? First, I put a link on my blog to a post of yours. Then I tell you about it by sending your blog a ping through WordPress. You approve my pingback, and then the link back to my blog will appear in your blog post’s comments section.

This is a win-win situation, because I send you a new incoming link (or backlink) and get one in return, and this improves both our search engine rankings. Technically it’s reciprocal linking, but it’s a lot easier and far more automated than the bygone days of webmasters emailing each other and offering a link exchange.

Sending a pingback is easy with WordPress. Just include the link in your post’s content and when you publish, WordPress will automatically try to ping it for you, and if successful, the link will appear in the trackbacks section under your post writing screen. Unfortunately, if the ping fails, WordPress doesn’t tell you why. So I suggest you grab my free Pingchecker plugin, which was created to fix this problem.

Better yet, I’ve created a fully featured WordPress plugin (addon) that will enable you to search, select, and ping multiple blogs for a single post, all in a fast and easy to use interface. If you’re interested in maximizing the backlinks to your blog, I recommend you grab a copy of Pingback Pro as soon as you can.



]]> http://pingbackpro.com/articles/what-is-a-pingback/feed/ 0 http://pingbackpro.com/articles/what-is-a-pingback/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/RkLaC1toCFg/ http://pingbackpro.com/news-and-updates/pingchecker-press-release/#comments Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:59:59 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=201 “WordPress Pingbacks Take on a New Lease of Life”

Are you getting the most out of your pingbacks for your SEO? If you use WordPress you may want to know whether they are really working for you and if not, why not. Especially since there’s something very easy you can do about it…

Brisbane, QLD, Australia 04/28/11 – Since the introduction of pingbacks into WordPress as a development of trackbacks, WordPress bloggers have had a simple and powerful way of exchanging incoming links with other bloggers. This not only helps with search engine rankings but provides readers a great way of travelling an author-driven network of relevent information. Well, that’s what it’s supposed to do, but does it work? And if not, why not?

Just include a link in your blog post’s content and WordPress will attempt to ping it automatically, right? Well, yes and no… According to recent tests, up to 50% of your pingbacks might not be working, and worse, the WordPress platform doesn’t tell you why. They just simply don’t appear in your trackback list. Can you say ‘frustrating’?

Unknown to many WordPress users, attempted pingbacks actually do return a ‘pingback fault code’ for failed pingbacks, it just never gets displayed. There can be a number of reasons why pingbacks don’t work… perhaps you are linking to the blog’s homepage instead of a pingable post, perhaps the blog isn’t pingback-enabled though it seems to be, perhaps you have a temporary connectivity problem and just need to try again… but it would be nice to know these things so you can do something about it.

There’s just some times when automation is put in place a little too soon, and a manual facility would do better. For this reason, there is a new free plugin for WordPress that let’s you ping resources manually and see the results: get Pingchecker here.

This plugin also includes an instant workaround for the most commonly experienced error (that you’ve probably never heard of, because again, WordPress never tells you about it!) where due to a bug in the server code the blog server you ping can’t find your link to them on your blog page, and so doesn’t accept the pingback. Depending on your template this can account for up to 25% of failed pingbacks!

For all these reasons, Pingchecker greatly improves your chances of a successful ping, and that in itself makes this a worthy addition for your blog plugin arsenal, and a veritable necessity for anyone wanting to use pingbacks to increase their search engine rankings. And the best part is it’s completely free: get Pingchecker here.

Incoming search terms:

• pingback



]]> http://pingbackpro.com/news-and-updates/pingchecker-press-release/feed/ 0 http://pingbackpro.com/news-and-updates/pingchecker-press-release/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/PingbackPro/~3/iOBbV13BOxs/ http://pingbackpro.com/blog-setup-guide/the-right-way-to-backup-wordpress-database/#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2011 21:58:58 +0000 PingMaster http://pingbackpro.com/?p=432 You put a lot of work into your site. You want to optimize your WordPress database or update something big (like a very old site to the new version of WordPress) but you haven’t backed it up yet and can’t bring yourself to upgrade until you do. This is not somewhere to take shortcuts.

Or maybe it’s a new site or you’ve never backed up your website’s files and/or database, and your mind is screaming at you for fear of loss, and you’ve decided it’s time to do something about it. So here we are…

Now there’s plenty of plugins for WordPress that will do backups for you, so you’re kind of spoiled for choice. But I happened across a really cool one called XCloner Backup and Restore.

It does everything a premium backup plugin would do for free and has all the config options already set up in the right place for basic users, as well as all the advances stuff available. You can optionally FTP your backup to another server or even email it to yourself (not that recommended but you can.) Very handy if you ever want to change hosts or restore your entire site too as there’s a way to run it from outside WordPress.

So install XCloner – the only tricky bit it doesn’t do for you manually is to create a temporary working subdirectory of /administrator/backups/ in your sites root directory. So you can quickly do that through your Cpanel file manager or FTP program.

Apart from that, you just need to tell it which directory you want to put your backup in (you may want to password protect this directory from your cpanel), check any other config options, and change your XCloner admin password. Click on Generate Backup, you can include everything or exclude certain tables or directories from your backup. Sweet.

After you’ve downloaded that (and don’t forget it may be pretty big if you included all your files!) you will want to set up a Cron job to do backups regularly. Now that your files are backed you might want to change to database backup only and send via email, and do the file backups yourself every month. Or if you’re serious about not losing anything get another server you can FTP your entire site to (and DO make it another server entirely, what if you server crashes?!)

To set up the Cron, click on Adminstration-Cron in XCloner to get the cron job execution line, then go to your Cron Jobs in your Cpanel and add the line and specify how often you want the autobackup to take place (once a day or once a week maybe?) What a convenient and well made plugin and a load off my mind (and no I’m not getting any money to say that.)

Then you are free to optimize or otherwise screw with your tables as much as you like since you can always get it back if you need to. All this came about because I wanted to run WP Optimize on my sites to get rid of all the spam comments and old post revisions taking up space and slowing sites down for no reason. Also I wanted to update to the new WordPress version version on some old sites and since I had quite a few different versions running I didn’t want to risk losing any information in from my WordPress database.

And if you’re doing that, updating your plugins and making sure everything is still working fine and dandy, do another full site backup so if anything goes to the wall later you have your first clean backup too. After doing this repeatedly to get all my sites up to date I thought I’d write it down for everyone else too. Enjoy!



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