Let’s cut to the chase – there is a lot of information to share with you:

Step #1 – Build a Communications Calendar

A Communications calendar is a simple but effective way to ensure your communications strategy is actually targeted as opposed to random.

Here is a sample of what a communications calendar looks like (built in Excel):

• You can see above that for this example we are using 6 Keywords for the month of April.
• We started by focusing on only 1 week, then extended this across the entire month
• 80% our communication via our various channels will focus on these 6 Keywords.
• Communications across all channels will be directly related to the Niche Categories that we are targeting
• Blog posts, articles for marketing, social messages and other communications such as videos, webinars or pod casts.

We will mainly focus on Blog Post, Articles for Marketing and Social Messaging, the communications calendar is extended to include all your communications efforts.

Step #2 – Build your list of Keywords you want to target for next month (in advance)

Now that you have a better understanding of what’s involved with a communications calendar, its time to figure out what you will be focusing on this month.

We are going to be assuming you have already generated your list of Keywords using Google Adwords, Google external keyword tool, or other tools you use.

Pick your top 6~8 Keywords but no more. Too many Keywords will not be effective and will cause you grief in your efforts.

Step #3 – Schedule the Keywords you want to communicate by day of the week.

In the above example, we have chosen to use only 6 Keywords for this month and we rotate them accordingly across the various days of the week.  These keywords are statically set to repeat themselves across 7 days a week. However; it would be just as easy to rotate these keywords on a week by week basis.  For simplicity we have opted to keep the keywords static throughout the month.

During this time, you should also go through the weeks posting schedule for your Main Website Site.
Answer these questions:

• How many do you want to do in a month… realistically how many could you do?

• Do I want to do a blog post for every keyword? Do I have time?  Can these be outsourced?

At first we recommend that you take it slow, you can post 1 new article every 2 weeks or if you have the content ready, you could schedule a post every 4 days.  You can further define and then determine the frequency once you have completed the next step…

Step #4 – Articles for Marketing

Now that you have defined the Keywords and understand your desired blog post frequency, you can then incorporate these Keywords into your articles.  Remember that you need to write for the readers 1^st, make these articles engaging, high quality so that your readers will share and engage them.

Since we are targeting 6 Keywords in this example, you will want to have a minimum of 6 source articles that you either create or get created by a writing service (outsource) that specifically discuss the Keyword topics you are targeting.
NOTE: If you outsource, ensure the quality of the articles are high with a higher word count.

If you write the source articles, you can either rewrite the articles or use a service that will rewrite the articles for you, thereby creating a UAW Set of articles ready for input and scheduling into the Wizard. – In today’s environment its better to focusing on higher word count and quality articles, thin is not in!

Now that you have your article written and ready, what’s next?

Step #5 – Make a Blog Post

You now have unique articles ready to go but your site needs to become the authority for this article content, how do you do that?

Use a unique version for your Blog, this is the very 1^st place that you will be posting and then informing the Search engines that you have just made the post.  We recommend for best results that a minimum of 4 days after posting is when you schedule the release of your content to the community.

You need to let the engines know you have fresh content, that its there ready for the indexing…  Let it get indexed 1^st through your social sharing, light ping or other methods used to get noticed – such as our Social Beta

After you have posted to your blog, this is the time that you would input and schedule the article set to be released to the community, schedule their release for 4 days after your initial posting to your blog.  The Wizard has a great scheduler that will enable you to do this.

Example:

Post Unique Version to Blog – April 4^th

Do social signals about the new post – April 4^th

Schedule release to the UAW Community – input April 4^th, scheduled for April 8^th to begin

Step #6 – Write Your Daily Social Messages for each Keyword (or outsource these)

It is important to be consistent in your messaging ensuring that your efforts are concentrated across all your communications channels.  We find that the various social networks are weighted in the time that they hold value for your various social messages.  For example, Tweets seem to last 1~2days, Facebook 2~3days, LinkedIn 3~4days. Remember that frequency does matter.

Its important that you mix up your communications socially so you don’t just look like a spammy advertisement… this does take some effort but it is very well worth it. You will be surprised to see the natural following that will take place within your niche. This following is in addition to the new direct traffic that will occur (over time).

Using your articles for marketing, you should now be able to quite easily come up with your social messaging.  You can take snippets of content from these articles that are focused on your Keywords to be used across your social channels.  For example:

Keyword: Dog Collars for Poodles
Article Title Example: How To Select The Best Dog Collars For Poodles
Article Snippet: When you are researching the best dog collars for poodles, how do you know that you are getting the best deal?
Social Message (Twitter): The Best Dog Collars For Poodles – a great article on how to decide what collar is best for your poodle – http://<yoursite URL linking to a deep page>.com

You would then go through this process for each day, you can reuse your messages but we recommend that you rewrite them in a manor that will make them appear unique each time you post them to a social network.

Once you have written your messages for the week/month, you have the ability to either schedule the social messages to be time released or you can do this on a manual basis.  Tools such as Hootsuite enable you to schedule social messaging to your various networks in a time released, scheduled manner.

Step #7 – Finalize your Communications Schedule and Go For It!

Now is the time to ensure that you have all your items ready for the week/month and when you do, you can finalize your schedule. Input all the necessary communications messaging into your communications calendar accordingly and implement your strategy each  and every day.

Let’s recap of the process you can take to effectively increase your communications, engagement and messaging across multiple channels:

1. Create A Communications Calendar
2. Build your Keyword List
3. Schedule your Keywords and Blog Posting Dates
4. Write your Articles for Marketing
5. Ready Your Blog Posts
6. Write Your Social Messages
7. Finalize and Start

As you follow this process each month you will see your communication plan grow steadily from the first month.  Not only will it keep you on track but it will enable you to rank with social signals, help create engagement that surrounds your niche content and create authority in the niche you are promoting.

Optimizing your WordPress site

Today, I’ll be talking about some techniques you can use to help improve the performance of your WordPress blog that is hosting the UAW plugin or Directory in a Box.

All that free content is great, but once your blog gets really large, or starts attracting a lot of traffic, the performance of the site may begin to suffer.

There are literally hundreds and thousands of optimizations, tweaks and tricks you can do improve the performance of WordPress. Some of these you may have previously heard of, but I hope you’ll find some useful information.

I’ve selected a few optimizations that I know will have an impact and generally anyone can implement.

A Host is a Host is a…

I realize this is not an optimization, but the hosting plan and company you choose can drastically affect the performance of your site, so it is something you should really consider.

All hosting plans and companies are not created equal. Generally, but not always, the saying “You get what you pay for” applies to web hosting. You can’t expect a $1.99 per month account to support tens or hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors…

Bandwidth restrictions, CPU utilization, memory and MySQL usage restrictions all become a concern when your site passes a certain threshold. Unfortunately it’s not easy to determine that threshold until it’s too late. That’s when your hosting provider starts sending you those cheerful emails regarding your site hogging all the resources on that cheap shared hosting server you’re using.

There is a lot of information and reviews out there for practically every hosting company and plan you can find. Do some research up front and it will likely save you some pain down the road.

But what’s the Cache?

WordPress caching plugins work by creating a static version of your posts and pages that are stored on your server. When a post or page is viewed the plugin serves up the static page rather than dynamically creating it each time, this can reduce server load significantly. The downside is the cache can use up a lot of storage space depending on the number of posts and pages on your site.

There are a lot of really good caching plugins out there.  WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and my favourite: Hyper Cache. My preference has been for Hyper Cache because of it’s ease of use as well as it’s performance.

Hyper Cache can be installed just like any other plugin:

1. Select Add New from the Plugins control panel
2. Search for it and click Install Now.
3. Once it has been downloaded, click Activate.
4. Now go to the Settings->Hyper Cache panel and make sure you click the Update button, even if you don’t change any settings.

• In my experience this plugin often doesn’t start caching until after you’ve clicked the Update button.
• Check back in a couple of days and you should see your Files in cache count starting to rise.
• If it is 0, then something is wrong. Try deactivating the plugin, activate it and click the Update button again.

The Disabled List

Every active plugin that is installed is doing some processing and slowing your site down. Any plugin that you are not actively using should be deactivated or deleted. If you’re not currently serving up ads then disable any ad plugins such as Quick Adsense. If you’re not currently tracking your analytics then disable Google Analyticator.

If you want to test out new plugins, run them for a day or two and then make sure you deactivate them once you’ve decided you don’t want to continue using them.

A word of caution regarding Google XML Sitemaps. Once your site becomes sufficiently large, this plugin can have difficulty finishing building the sitemap before the default PHP script timeout. This will result in a message such as:

When this happens, you can try setting some of the advanced options:

Beware of setting the execution time limit too high as that will slow down your site while this plugin is building the sitemap. Definitely do not set it to “0” for unlimited. I would suggest trying to limit the number of posts in the sitemap first to find a compromise.

Another option to try is the Google Monthly XML Sitemap plugin. It claims to be the only Sitemap plugin that works for large WordPress sites.

To Revise or not to Revise?

Generally neither the UAW nor the DIB plugin will create post revisions, but if you are actively posting content to your blog then you may want to disable post revisions.

Post revisions add multiple rows to the wp_posts table and can cause bloating which slows down access to this table as it grows.

To disable it, you can add define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false); to your wp-config.php file.

Click here for more information regarding revisions.

Get Back, Pingbacks

If you have outdated sites within your Update Services list (found in Settings->Writing panel) that can slow down posting to your site. By default WordPress will attempt to notify the sites in that list and if one (or more) are timing out, it can slow down the entire posting process.

Click here for more information regarding the update services.

What’s the Theme?

If your theme uses a large number of images or JavaScript, it can drastically slow down the loading of the page because of the significant amount of data being transferred. If you suspect that your theme may be slowing your site down, try switching to the default Twenty Eleven theme to compare page load times.

If you find your theme is slow there may be some options that you can disable to help improve load times. This is something I am considering for a future blog post.

Conclusion

There is plenty more information on the web regarding optimizations for WordPress, so go out and explore and perhaps you’ll find something else relevant and helpful. Of course if you have questions, or need further clarification, please let me know and I’ll do my best to answer.

If you have your own techniques, please share them with us so we can all improve our sites which improves the Unique Article Wizard network.

PS: Don’t forget to Tweet/Retweet and Fan Unique Article Wizard on Facebook!

Link Diversity – Why you need it and how to get it!

When it comes to SEO there are two primary areas of concern: on-page and off-page optimization.

• On Page SEO deals with everything related to your site structure and the keywords within that structure.
• It is great that many blog platforms handle a lot of this for you these days.

• Off Page SEO mainly relates to link building.
• In the past few months we have seen a change in the way links are counted and how we need to get the most from our linking strategy.

As I am focusing on Link Diversity, we are only going to focus on Off Page SEO:

When we are building our backlinks, the general rule is that the more diverse  Class-C Domain links that are driving traffic to your site, the better. This is why Unique Article Wizard has been so popular and is so effective as UAW provides links from a very large, highly diverse group of sites that vary from category to category.  The need for this type of link diversity has not changed.

Diverse backlinking to your site is only ½ of the link diversity puzzle that you must consider when developing an Off Page SEO strategy.  The last part of the strategy does not relate to any network you are using or the number of sites linking to your site, rather it concerns where you point those links to for your website! (home page, inner pages etc.)

What do we know?

• Beside providing Higher Quality Articles to readers, the search engines continue to tell us they want to see natural growth and natural linking patterns

So, what can you do to stay within the guidelines and not draw negative attention to your site?

–> Landing Page Link Diversity!

• It does not look natural to the search engine for all your links to be going to your home page.
• It does not even look natural for all your links to be going to 2 or 3 pages.
• It certainly does not look natural for two keywords within the same article to be going to one page of your site.

Therefore you need to develop a plan to link to as many pages within your site as possible!

Unique Article Wizard enables you to have up to 2 links in your resource box and 2 contextual links in the body of your article. These 4 links are not designed to all go to your home page. They are designed to enable you to diversify your links to various landing pages within your site. As a matter of fact, UAW will not allow you to use the links to go to the same page because they understand the benefit of link diversity to your success.

Here is a personal example of how important Link Diversity is and how it affected my rankings:

Recently, I had a site that has been on the 3rd page of Google for 6 months, crummy… and no matter what I did I could not get any higher for the search terms I was targeting

What did I do?

• First I used MajesticSEO to analysis my links and found that 96% of my links were going to one page…my home page.
• I immediately realized this was not natural looking to Google and decided to test out an idea…
• I decided to use UAW to link all future articles to blog posts within my site.
• I removed all the home page links in past articles and replaced them with deep links into my site.
• I used the resource box creator within the step by step wizard to generate over 1000 resource boxes with different anchor text keywords.
• I then started a slow drip feed the articles using UAW.

What happened next?

• Within 30 days I had made it to Page 2 …

• Just recently made it to Page 1 for a very competitive targeted keyword!

What do I believe caused this increase in rankings?

The only changes I had made were:

• the URL’s within my articles
• diversifying the anchor text to include LSI keywords

So how do I apply it today to my Article Marketing today?

• I use one home page link and one deep link within the resource box
• 2 additional contextual links (deep-inner page links) within the article body
• The ratio used is 3 deep link –> 1 home page link
• My test results showed me that this  is a much better linking pattern for the search engines to see.
• It is more natural and provides an added benefit of getting more visitors to my site because I have varied my anchor text keywords.

In closing:

Landing page link diversity is one of the most important aspects of your article marketing plan and should not be overlooked. Yes you need a large number of linking sites from various Class-C domains (UAW provides this), but you also need to create a natural linking pattern with every article you create!

Here are the prizes up for grabs:

1)      $1000 cash!

2)      $500 cash or 1 year free membership to the Wizard (worth $804)

3)      $250 cash or 6 months free membership to the Wizard (worth $402)

4)      50 individual free one-month memberships worth $67 each (or equivalent credits)

Ok, so here is the plan:

We have released some great tools that enable you to rapidly set up and manage your own article directories and auto blogs through the use of our >> Unique Article Wizard Auto Content Plugins & >> Directory in a Box. Why would you want to do that? Well, the short answer is that it is a great way to achieve the following:

a)      Make some money! The more such sites you set up, the more you could earn. Get your sites indexed and matured, ready for future development.

b)      Do Market Research on potential niches while getting paid for it

c)      Build Sites that you can then flip for a 10x profit, and more

So, we want you to set up a whole bunch of sites, and we are going to give some prizes to those that put up the most!

Why would we do that?

Well, we have an ulterior motive that also benefits you…

You see, over the past couple of months we have had to evict a number of sites from our submission network because they were poor quality or failing to follow our terms of use. Unfortunately that has decreased the numbers of submission results some of our members are getting.  Perhaps you have noticed that yourself.

We don’t want that. While we are still, by far, the most effective article submission service on the net, that is not enough for you. We want to totally blow your mind with the kind of results you get. But to do that we need to expand our network. Not with junk sites. Not with sites that receive low quality or machine-spun garbage from other services and automated bots, or scraped content from Yahoo Answers and other such services. Not with sites that hijack your resource box links.

Which is why we need your help. You see, we know that you value quality; otherwise you wouldn’t be using our service. So what we want is for you (and our other quality members) to put up some directories and niche auto blogs so as to expand the network. If we all do that everyone will benefit.

And, the cool thing is that those sites will be of value to you anyway and nearly free to setup because all you need is domains!

So, here is how it works:

We want you to set up at least ONE directory (a site that accepts 200 or more articles per day on a broad topic such as Health, Fitness, Sports, Pets, Finance ,etc) and TWO autoblogs – a niched site that accepts 2- 5 articles per day on a small niche, for example the same niche as your current money site that you are promoting through the Wizard. Do this, and make sure your sites remain live for the complete duration of the contest and we will send you $10*.
*Sites must be actively receiving article and remain active for the entire duration of the contest.

But it gets better:

We are also offering valuable prizes to those members who put up the greatest number of directories and autoblogs:

To qualify for a prize you must have:

1)       At least TWO article directories on different broad topics

2)      At least FIVE autoblogs accepting articles on different keywords though they may all be in related micro-niches

3)      The sites must be NEW to the Unique Article Network (not currently registered on our plugin network)

4)      The sites must be live, receiving articles for a full 3 month period from close of our contest entry date, and must actually publish the articles received – The directories should be on auto-publish (no work for you), the niche blogs must publish at least 2 articles per day (if you like, you can accept more than that so that you can choose the best).

5)      Naturally, your sites must conform to our terms of use of the articles – ie you must not tamper with the articles or the links within. All links must be obviously visible as such, in the same font and size as the rest of the article, and must NOT be ‘no follow’.

6)      Your sites may accept content from Amazon, Clickbank, YouTube and other such sites but NOT from Yahoo Answers, or other unreviewed submission services or autoblogging tools. This is for your own protection; we don’t want your site to get de-listed from the search engines.

7)      Your site must be indexed by Google.

8)      No more than 20 sites per IP. For your own protection, best if you can set up your sites on different C-class IP’s, but this is not essential for this contest.

9)      Compliance with these rules will be determined by our own judges, and all decisions will be final.

10)   Contest is not valid in jurisdictions that do not permit contests of this type.

11)   Points will be awarded based upon the PR of your site:

1. PR 0                 1
2. PR 1                 2
3. PR 2                 3
4. PR 3                 6
5. PR 4                 9
6. PR 5~7           16
7. PR 8+             20

To WIN a prize, all you have to do is set up more sites than the others and gain more points!

Once again, here are the prizes up for grabs:

#1 – $1000 cash!

#2 – $500 cash or 1 year free membership to the Wizard (worth $804)

#3 – $250 cash or 6 months free membership to the Wizard (worth $402)

#4 – 50 individual free one-month memberships or equivalent credits

How to Get Started

Just start setting up the sites! Full Instructions can be found here:

Instructions for setting up a Directory in a Box.

Instructions for setting up an Auto Content Plugin

Closing Date

We are giving everyone just over 1 month from time of this post in order to set up their sites, add our plugins to their existing sites & activate their plugins.

New Site Activations must be live & actively receiving content prior to our contest entry date closing of January 31^st 2012 therefore no new site entries will be eligible for this contest after January 31^st 2012.

The contest will run through until April 30^th 2012

The winners will be contacted directly on or near May 1^st 2012 via the email address we will have on file for your account!

Best Regards!

Jason Arnold

PS:  during this contest period we are unveiling some hidden Easter Eggs and don’t forget about the free $10 per eligible account!*

Josh:

WordPress on it’s own is not half bad, but what makes it truly great is the number of extra features you can add on for free through the use of plugins.

Setting aside the obvious UAW plugin (which I’m sure you already have installed to receive TONS of FREE Unique Content to your sites) there are four main areas you might want to enhance.

#1 – SEO

Whether you’re looking to make it to the cover of W or the front page of Google, you need to look your best, and that’s what SEO is for!

Picture yourself at a professional photo shoot. Flash bulbs going off in all directions, beautiful people posing and posturing, while someone yells “Make love to the camera, baby!”…

Lets face it, ordinary people, doing ordinary things, don’t attract the camera’s attention; that’s why professional models exist! Well, ordinary websites, doing ordinary things, don’t attract the search engines attention!. But of course, you are an expert on business, not necessarily fashion, so you want something that works right out of the box, instantly sprucing up your blog:

For this, I recommend the All-in-one SEO pack. Install, activate, and you’re good to go – no configuration needed, although there are plenty of options if you want to mess around with them.

Still, to seduce that kingpin of the modern web Google, you may want something a little more specific. To that end, I present the Google sitemap generator. Specifically designed for compatibility with Google, it will make it much easier for Google to index your site, helping to boost your ranking and making sure that nothing is missed.

#2 – Networking

Now that you’re finally on the cover of… er, I mean the first page of Google, and you’re starting to see some visitors. That’s a good start, but what you really need is, well, more visitors. Wouldn’t it be great if people had some way to tell their friends about you? Well, now they do!

There are a lot of social media tools, and more plugins than you can shake a stick at, but unfortunately I only have space here to cover one or two, so let’s keep it to the big ones:

First, the 800lb gorilla in the room, yes, it’s everybody’s favorite Google.

With this plugin, you can add the Google +1 button to your blog, allowing your visitors to ‘like’ it and reporting to Google just how awesome you are. Speaking of ‘like’, there’s an equivalent button for facebook – the facebook like button.

These are the simplest, easiest like button I could find, but if you are looking for more customization options, there are plenty of alternatives.

Finally, on the subject of alternatives, I can also recommend the official WordPress Tweet button. For those who like nothing more then a good twitter, this is the button of choice – it not only counts up the users who like your blog, but clicking on it will let them automatically post a link to your site on their twitter feed.

You can include any of these, or none of them, it’s really up to you. If you prefer simplicity, the google +1 button is as simple as you can get. For a more sophisticated, and effective, social networking tool though, you really can’t beat the twitter button.

#3 – Caching

You know how it goes…

Your sitting there, quietly blogging away, watching your hit counter slowly roll over into the double digits… and then it happens. You get cited on slashdot, and suddenly a hundred thousand visitors are pouring into your site. You, of course, are absolutely thrilled – with all this traffic, your ad revenue must be going crazy! Except wait, it’s not – the huge influx of new visitors have overloaded your server, and your site has crashed!

If only you had thought ahead, and installed some sort of caching system…there are certainly no shortage of caching tools for WordPress.

You may have heard about the wp-super cache plugin, but as a matter of fact it’s actually not the best, just the most common. For most people of course, it doesn’t make any difference, as they all do the job. I, however, being the over the top obsessive that I am, actually went out and researched the differences (by which I mean I found someone who had already done it ).

As it turns out, the Hyper Cache plugin is at least 10% more efficient. The setup is dead easy too – you can mess around with the settings if you want, but you don’t really need to. Just install and activate it, and you’re ready for anything. Best of all, being built with the low resource user in mind, it’s guaranteed to work on any system and could even save you money with your hosting provider.

#4 – Spam Protection

So now you’re popular, and the entire internet is abuzz about your amazing blog, which means a lot of back links to you… and a lot of spam! Unfortunatley this is unavoidable 

Whether you take the time to carefully read each comment and reply, or if you prefer to leave your site to it’s own devices, spam does nothing but get in the way.

There are two core plugins that I suggest you include in every one of your blogs. First of all, the universal standard, Akismet. You’ll need an Akismet API key to use it, but it is very effective at intercepting and marking spam for you.

While akismet is great at catching spam comments and preventing them from being shown, I think it’s better not to have them submitted in the first place. That’s why the second essential anti-spam plugin adds a captcha to the comment form.

There are plenty of different plugins, and they all work more or less the same. I find that the SI captcha for wordpress plugin is a good one, but if you don’t like it there are again plenty of alternatives.

A Final Word

As I am writing this, I see that there are 17,276 WordPress Plugins. That’s a big number, and it’s growing daily. Out of so many options, it’s really hard to pick and choose which are the best, but if nothing else I hope I’ve given you some food for thought.

So take this article as a starting point, and whenever you need some new feature on your blog, well, you know where to look.

Good luck, and happy blogging!

~ Josh

Plugin Permissions

A Common problem that our Network Plugin partners experience when setting up their Unique Article Wizard Plugin, is the UAW plugin’s inability to write necessary files… therefore I wanted to take the time to help explain the processes required for you to perform this successfully!

WordPress has a great guide (found here) that provides you with an overview of how permissions work, the nomenclature used, as well as how to set them. I definitely recommend you read it if you ever are having problems with permissions or just want to understand them better.

With this new understanding of permissions (if you read how they work) you still need to know both where and what to set the files and directories permissions to, which is where this guide comes into play!

Lets start by a Quick Overview:

The Unique Article Wizard plugin, requires the ability to write to the directory that it lives in, and the files contained within. This is so it can save configuration changes, auto update itself and possibly add new files when a new version is released. This can only be accomplished if the web server is allowed to write to the directory, and if the permissions are not set correctly it will not be able to do this. While this might not seem like a bad thing, it means the plugin won’t update meaning that our new features and fixes won’t be received and none of your settings will get updated.

NOTE: These updates are super important as we are continuously updating our Plugin’s performance, tuning in addition to new functionality that we are continuously releasing…

Starting Out
Beginner/Novice:

- Setting the directory permissions to be read, write and executable by user, group and other/world (or commonly known as 777) is the simplest starting point.

- You will also want to set the permissions to be read and write (or commonly known as 666) for all the files in the,/WORDPRESS_HOME/wp-content/plugins/unique_articles.

- A file does not need to be executable unless it will be running on its own. In the case of the web server it reads all the files so it does not need to be executable. In the case of the directories executable, it needs to be set as it controls whether you are allowed to enter the directory or not.

This is all you need to do to get running, and you’re good to continue on the setup process. The main downside of this approach is that it gives more access than is strictly needed to accomplish our needs, so if you are security concerned or want to learn more I would recommend that you continuing reading the next paragraph.

Intermediate/Advanced :

For intermediate/advanced and security conscious administrators, we want to be a bit more restrictive with the permissions and only set them to what is necessary to get the job done. This way others can’t accidentally update or change the files.

To accomplish this you will need to know what user and group your webserver runs as. This could be apache, httpd, or IIS_WPG to name a few, depending on operating system or webserver that you have chosen to run.

Once you have this information you will want to set the owner and group of the directory /WORDPRESS_HOME/wp-content/plugins/unique_articles and all files within it to be the user and group that your webserver is running as.

Now we will want to set the permissions for this directory to Read, Execute for User, Group and Other/world, but only write for user and group (or commonly known as 775).

For each of the files contained within this directory you will want to set the permissions to be Read for User, Group and Other/world but only Write for User, and group (or commonly known as 664).

This now will allow anyone to read the file but only your webserver or a member of the same user group to be able to modify the files or add new ones to the directory. This results in a more secure installation without impacting functionality.

While this may seem all complicated, it is not. Once you understand the basics its simple as knowing what’s needed and where!

Cheers!

Sam

PS, if you missed it before, here is the link to our UAW Free Content WordPress Plugin

Google announced that pages would be made publicly soon.. but we wanted to let you know that you can now get yours today (or at least we did at the time of this post)

How do you get yours?

–> When you log into your Google+ account you will see a new addition on the right side of the Page:

–> When you do this, you will be taken to the next step to create your page:

–> Next you will want to click “Local Business or Place” and add your details:

–> If it can’t locate your telephone number, its ok, continue to the next step, we have selected we are a Service:

–> You will then need to agree to the “Page Terms” and click “Create”

• Once you have created your page, you will be prompted to add information about your page and subsequently share information which is related to your Google+1 page.

–> When you click the “Getting Started” link, you will be taken to your control center where you can connect your website and get the Google Badge:

You will be able to insert your badge where you like in your posts where you wish

Now that we are up and running, lets see what happens over the coming weeks/months!

Happy Marketing!

Jason —

Step 1. Sign up to Amazon.

The first thing you need to do, is to sign up for an affiliate account.  In this case, we’ll be using Amazon, so go to https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/.   As you can see here, on the right hand side there is a login form, as well as a link to sign up if you haven’t already.  You’ll need to fill in various details about yourself and your site when you register, but it’s not too difficult.  Go do that now – don’t worry, I’ll wait for you.

Once you have signed up, you will receive your unique Associates ID.  This will be something like examplesi-20.  This is important because it links the ads to your account, but you don’t need to worry about it right now.  As long as you are logged in Amazon will automatically fill this in for you, so you don’t need to make a note of it.  After you enter your payment details, you will be taken to the main associates centre.  You’ll find here that there are a lot of different ads you can use, and it may seem a bit overwhelming, but for now we’ll just focus on two of them.  Links and banners are easy to apply – you just need to copy and paste the code that Amazon gives you.  So let’s look instead, at creating a widget for your site – something that’s actually interesting for your visitors to look at.

Click on the Widgets link at the top of the page.

Step 2. Generate the Widget

You’ll now see a selection of available widgets – at the time of writing, there are 14 listed there, although they may have released new ones by the time you read this.  We’re going to look at two of these.

First of all, the Contextual ads. This is the simplest option, which is most useful if you plan to put them on an article directory where you aren’t sure what the articles are going to be about.  ‘Contextual’ here just means that Amazon will automatically select the products in the ad for you, based on what is showing on your site. So click on the entry near the bottom of the list, called Omakase.

The Omakase widget will automatically select the products itself, so you don’t need to do that, but you do need to change the shape and style to match your site.  Let’s say for instance that you’re using a standard wordpress blog, and you want it to go in the sidebar. First thing you need to do is change the orientation – this is the drop down labeled Banner Size. Click that drop down menu, and change it to 120×600 or 160×600, depending on how wide your sidebar is. The 160 is better as it shows product pictures as well, so sue that if you can. This gives you a narrow, tall banner that will fit neatly into your sidebar. I would suggest you also change the Border from Show to Hide (just makes it look better). You can have a fiddle with the rest of the controls, which are really not that important, but the one thing you do need to do is to change the colours.

If you already know, or can find, the hexadecimal color codes for your blog, then great; use those! If you can’t, or if you want the banner to stand out rather then blending in, you’ll need to pick colors for it somewhere else. You can just do a google search for ‘hex color picker’, and it will give you plenty of options. The one I like is the nice, simple one at www.colorpicker.com, which really does everything you need, including offering advice on complementary colors to use, which I think is just cool. So pick out some colors, and put them into the Amazon form to see what they look like. When you’re done, you’ll have the completed HTML code in the box below the preview. The HTML savvy among you will quickly spot that the settings you chose are included in this code as JavaScript variable, giving you all sorts of automation options, but that’s a more advanced topic. For now, just copy that code, and go to Step 3.

Still reading?

Well, I said I would talk about two types of widget, so here’s the second one…

Back on the Widgets page (just click that link at the top if you’re not still there), click the link through to the Carousel widget. You’ll immediately be presented with a whole bunch of options, as to which products to display. Since this ad isn’t contextual, you need to pick them yourself, which you can do either by adding the products in manually, or selecting a category and letting Amazon fill them in for you. If you want to search for products yourself, you’ll see a search box is already open and waiting for you. You can use that box to search for some products, and add them to the list – it’s all very clear; just type in a search term, click go, and you’ll see a list of matching items with an ‘add product’ button next to them.

For this example however, I’m going to let Amazon decide what to show. Underneath the Search and Add products menu are several others, including Search Listmania, Best Sellers, Hot New Releases, etc. Click on Best Sellers. I don’t believe Amazon has a category for examples, so let’s pick one at random here and say Automotive. You should pick whatever category is most applicable to you. The Automotive option opens out into some more, so I’m going to pick Car Care here. My example blog is called ‘Caring for your Car’, so this would be appropriate. I don’t need to narrow this down any further, and general car care seems fine with me. When you have likewise found a category you like, click the Next button to the right of the list of options.

Now, you just need to pick the layout!

As you want this to fit in the sidebar of a blog, pick the Ferris Wheel pattern, and then select size 160×600. Wow, that is a nice display – just look at all those cleaning tools! Almost doesn’t even look like an advert. Except that it’s still called ‘Best Sellers’ – so let’s change that! You’ll see the title entry box is just above the Orientation options. So, I’ll take out what’s there, and write in ‘Recommended Tools’ instead. Fits quite nicely, and looks better. So, having now chosen products, a layout, and a title, I’m ready to add it to the site. If you want to leave and come back later, by the way, you can save what you’ve done so far using the ‘Save’ button at the bottom. In this case, just click the ‘Add to my Web page’ button, and we’ll have a popup appear with the code in it. Copy this, and you’re ready to add it to your site – go on to Step 3!

Step 3. Add to your blog

Unfortunately I don’t have space here to cover every major blog, so I’m just going to describe how to add your new widget into WordPress. Which looks to be the most popular blogging software at the moment, a title that it well deserves for it’s amazing ease of use and customizability – an example of which you are about to see. So, let’s fire it up.

Go to your blog, and log in as normal to the admin dashboard. In the sidebar on your left are various menus – open the Appearance one, and click on the Widgets link. You’ll see a big box with all the available widgets in it, and on your right, are the areas the widgets can go. So, to display your Amazon ad, you first need to find the Text widget. It’s probably at the bottom of the list of available widgets. When you see it, click and drag it across to one of the areas on the right. For demo purposes, let’s put it in the Primary Widget Area.

NOTE: If your blog doesn’t have a Primary Widget Area, that means you’re using a different theme – I’m afraid you’ll need to figure out yourself which one to use. If they aren’t labelled clearly, just try them one by one until you find the right one. If you don’t see where to drop the widget, you probably need to open the sidebars widget area (wish I knew what the official term for it is). Click the downward pointing arrow in its top right corner, and it will expand down, giving you space to drag the Text widget into.  Once you let go of it, and the text widget drops into place, it will open out into a large text area you can type in. Ignore the small text box at the top for the title, as it’s really not necessary here, and paste in the widget code (that you got from Amazon) straight into the larger text area. DO NOT check the automatically add paragraphs option at the bottom – you don’t want that! Then click save, and you’re done! The widget should now have been added to your sidebar. So, go to your blogs home page, and take a look.

If you can’t see the widget, double check that you copied it correctly from Amazon, and that you put it in the right place, and of course that your theme supports widgets. Some don’t, and you may need to change themes to find one that works.

If you’ve followed all these instructions, you should now have an Amazon ad displayed proudly in your blog, just waiting for customers to click through and bring you all that affiliate commissions you just know is waiting for you.

Good luck & Happy Marketing!

~ Josh

I wanted to point out some key points that we would like to share to help speed up the overall support process for you!

Let’s get to it!

When writing a support request it’s helpful to be as informative as possible. Questions or statements such as: “The website isn’t working for me. What do I do?” is a surefire way to add hours or even days to getting the issue resolved.

• If you’re looking for speedy assistance, don’t leave the support team guessing…

• Taking the guesswork out of what’s causing your issue is half the battle, so let us know who you are!

What did I mean by, “Let us know who you are?”

• First, it means when you write a support ticket you should use the same email address as the one you use for your account. If that’s not possible then at least provide your username in the request.

• When the email address you have provided isn’t found in our system and you haven’t provided us with your username, then it’s up to the support agent to respond asking you to provide this so we can look at your account.  This can add hours to the resolution of your issue.

• Lastly, if the problem is related to your blog, don’t forget to provide the URL.

• If the problem is happening on a particular web page, share the URL with us so we know where to look!

Tell us what kind of operating system you’re using! What browser are you using?  Is it Firefox with Windows XP?

• These are often very important items for us to know if your issue involves display issues!

• If support knows how your system is configured, then the same test environment can be created so support can try to recreate and troubleshoot this issue.

What if I am having problems with my blog or web server?

We need to know:

• What operating system is the server running?

• What server software (Linux/Widows 2000 etc.) and version number is being used?

• You need to provide us with as much information as you can so that our support team has as much information available to them to help track down and resolve the problem in a timely manor!

Where can I find this information?

• You can often find your server information from your hosting provider on the cPanel or hosting account page for your server.

Can you faithfully reproduce the problem?

• If you have access to another computer, see if the problem exists there.

• If you’re doing all the same steps on another computer and everything is working fine, please tell the support team because they will likely not be able to reproduce the issue as well!

What if I don’t have access to another computer but instead try to recreate the problem using another web browser?

• The support team will likely ask you what steps you performed to cause the issue in the first place.

• Perhaps the issue only crops up when you press Enter to submit a form but it works fine when you press the submit button with your mouse?

• No detail is too trivial when it comes to us helping to solve your issue.

You’ll notice I used the term ‘helping us’ throughout the article. That’s because your role in resolving the issue is just as important as the support team’s. Without you and your assistance, we on the support team could only approach the issue using guesswork.

Sometimes an issue affects many people but without an assistant willing to provide the necessary information, the issue takes far longer than it should have to be fixed.

Don’t be shy when writing your support requests!

So far, there’s no magical algorithm that tells us what you were doing, on what operating system, in what browser when the problem occurred, so we need as much information that you can provide us!  The more information, the better we can assist you in a timely resolution to your problem!

Best Regards,

Kyle,

UAW – Technical Team Member

P.S.

By all means, you can leave us guessing and support will eventually get around to asking you the right questions… but keep in mind that, every question support has to ask you just adds hours or days to the resolution of your issue!

With the official opening of Google+ to the general public, this earmarks Google’s 100^th feature release over the past 12 months.  Google is taking this very seriously; they are building their own universe – “Googleverse”

Facebook has implemented a number of updates to combat the live launch of Google+ however; as we have seen in the past, when Facebook makes changes, there are plenty of Facebook users that don’t adapt to well to change.

One of the changes to the Facebook Fan Pages comes into effect Sept 30^th.  Facebook will discontinue support to their notes application where auto posting from your website was previously possible through the use of an RSS feed subscription:

 

“Changes to How You Share Content on Your Page

We want you to connect with your fans in the most effective ways possible. That’s why as of September 30th you’ll no longer be able to automatically import posts from your website to your page notes. The best way to get people to interact with your content is to give them insight into the links you share on your Wall by adding personal comments and responding to feedback from fans.

We’re focused on creating even better tools for pages – look for announcements soon.”

One of the most visible changes to Facebook is their redesigned News Feed.  This modification seems to us like somewhat of a knee jerk reaction to combat Google+’s Feed implementation which has sparked many negative comments such as:

• “ah… where did Facebook go?…”

• “Dear Facebook… if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

• “facebook sucks, Lets go skiing!!!”

Will these changes naturally cause attrition from Facebook to Google+ now that there is a viable alternative to Facebook?   I would think the Google Executives have a semi perma-grin on their faces today while monitoring their impact… big news means big waves; this is the beginning of the Google+ Tsunami!

BTW: We are waiting to see what additional new tools Facebook will be implementing and reporting back on how they could be used to support our Article Marketing efforts .

Now more about Google+…

Google+ is rich in features and can sometimes overwhelm its users especially if those users are coming over from Facebook to use this service.  As we know, more isn’t always better especially when you consider that Facebook was able to capture such diverse demographics from children to Grandparents.  Is Google+ too tech savvy in relation to these demographics?

One of Google+ coolest features that will definitely gain popularity is Hangouts.  Hangouts is a tool that anyone would have a purpose to use.  Hangouts is a “Go To Meeting meets Justin.tv meets Social Media” hybrid application that has real legs to stand on.  Imagine being able to educate your non techie family member on how to use a certain software programs over the internet from the comfort of your own home… what about a group of friends just “Hanging out” chatting with real-time audio & video …

The Hangout service includes:

• Screen Sharing
• Collaborative Drawing
• Topic Hangouts
• Android Smartphones can host hangouts (another + for Google Android

As it relates to the newly released search function from within Google+, it allows you to search three sources all at once: people on Google+, posts on Google+, and relevant content from around the web.  You can see the importance for Internet Marketers to be on top of this new form of media.  We will be focusing many of our up & coming blog posts on this very topic!

Q: Will Social Media be the biggest looser in this fight or will we adapt, adopt and support only our favorite “social network” moving forward?

I know where I would put my money, how about you?

Regards,

Jason Arnold