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WP e-Commerce Plugin

Garen — Sat, 05 May 2012 19:31:56 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)- E-Commerce websites are now being used widely by most businesses. Who can blame them? The Internet now is one of the biggest markets one can have for his/her product. Apparently, even small websites which is not mainly created for business do a bit of selling through his/her blog. Since most of blogs are hosted on WordPress platform, an e-Commerce plugin would really be helpful for this.
Fortunately, WP e-Commerce is one of the free solutions for this problem. It is basically made for the purpose of being able to sell products or services without having to change your CMS platform or even change scripts on your blog. But apparently, it has a lot more features than this only. Basically a shopping script directly on your WordPress blog! And the best part is, it goes completely compatible with all themes in WordPress, uses shortcodes and tags, and can even be created on WP subdomains.

So simply put, WP e-Commerce plugin:

Is highly customizable. Yes, this plugin is 100% customizable. You can modify the scripts all you want depending on your store page to fit your overall theme.
Is integrated through most payment gateways for easy payment. Paypal buttons for standard, pro, Payflow Pro and express checkout can be added, as well as manual payments. Google Checkout, Chronopay, Authorize.net, FirstData/LinkPoint, eWay, iDEAL, BluePay, DPS, Paystation, and SagePay are just some other payment methods/gateway that can be used with this plugin. It’s definitely something, right?
Is perfect for marketing. Yep, it also has the option where you can add coupon/discount rules, monitor specific product sales and quantity of discounts given, and program free shipping. You can also create search engine friendly URLs for each product page. Options to display new products, share on Facebook, as well as for integrated SEO are also present on this plugin. Products can also be displayed on a slide for easier viewing. Catalogs can also be displayed and optimized for easier browsing. You can also categorize and sort products to help visitors choose.

A must for busy users! If you have lots of products and you cannot handle all the orders, this plugin can help take care it for you. You can set up email notifications for orders made for faster transactions, as well as print receipts and invoices.

Is customer-friendly! Your customers will have no problems with checkouts, as this plugin offers stepped as well as one-page checkouts, with tax and shipping estimates. And they would not worry about their privacy, as it offers SSL security on these pages.

Is for everyone. Since this plugin offers multilingual support, international customers can buy from you. It also has amounts displayed in international currencies.
Above are just some features this amazing plugin has to offer. Apparently, from ordering to shipping, everything is handled by this multi-purpose plugin. You basically will have the stuffs some custom-scripted e-commerce site has with one plugin! Even if you aren’t knowledgeable in HTML and coding, you can simply create your very own e-Commerce site, and no one will ever complain about it being non-functional. And if ever that happens, you can expect an amazing support from its developers, providing lots of video tutorials and guaranteeing instant response.

Building your shop online? WP e-Commerce plugin is perfect for you.

Strategies For GoDaddy Auctions

Garen — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:07:39 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)- For most people who’ve got multiple sites running, such as myself, GoDaddy Auctions has been one of my favorite places to help me find domain names that will be worth every penny. Through this, I’ve learned some strategies to be able to effectively gain an advantage over other people who are going through the auctions altogether, and be able to win every auction you go for.

First things first, be aware of how the trade goes. It means you have to evaluate some auctioned domain names, and how they were closed. You should know how much they were closed at, how long were they auctioned, and how many people went through the auction. You can make a search within the auction page, and search for the above-mentioned details of the recently auctioned domain names.

Now, go through the domain names currently being auctioned. If you see a domain name you’re interested in, mark it first as watched by clicking the blue ‘eye’ on the listing page. Do not enter one specific domain auction just yet, as you can find some more other domain names you might be interested in. Another reason would be because once a person or two bids on a domain name, it would be placed on the “active auctions” list. And it would certainly be harder for you to fight against multiple people bidding for the same domain name that you really, really want. Another thing is that, most lazy domaineers just check this list to find the domain names to buy, instead of going deeper on all the auctioned domain names. You also would not want them to get that domain. So just let it play dead for a while, and check for the next detail.

After identifying your favorite domain names, you should check their expiration date and time, and record it on your calendar, along with a reminder. This is for every favorite you watched. This might be tiresome if you’ll be buying multiple domain names, but certainly worth it.

Again, those dates must be set with a reminder on the specific time they will close. Ten minutes before the auction expires, log in to the GoDaddy auction website. The trick is to be the last one to bid with even a bit of higher bid. So stay there just before the bid closes, and on the closest time possible, place your bid. Most of the time, other bidders aren’t available on the closing time, and you would be the last one to place a bid. And it’s yours!
The problem with bidding too early is the fact that once you have already set a bid in a domain name, you will be watching it continuously, and you would be moved to fight with anyone who places a bid on it. For instance, the auction is still going to be for 4 days, but you already set a bid in the 2nd day, someone bids higher in the morning of the 3rd day, you’ll go bidding in the afternoon of the 3rd day, after which another one would bid after you, and you will bid again, again and again, until it is very expensive for you already. Bottom line, someone who becomes the last one to bid will win, and apparently, it will become too frustrating, as you already had spent so much time with the bid.

So that’s basically the secret with it. Be the last one to bid without setting the bid too high. Be wise, and you’ll fairly see you’re winning every auction you bid for. Now, it should be noted that I don’t recommend GoDaddy for web hosting (See GoDaddy review), but I have no problem with there domain names .

Why Use Myblogguest.com To Guest Post

Garen — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 18:54:17 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)- While there is recent news of paid private blog networks being canned by Google because of the latest panda update, there are still much more ways to speed up and carry yourself up the Google rankings. One such thing is doing a guest post. Apparently, this still (as far as this very moment is concerned) is a safe way to do SEO (whitehat).

Guest blogging revolves in doing guest posts in a guest blogging community, and in this case, Myblogguest.com is a good one to start with. MyBlogGuest.com is started by a smart woman named Ann Smarty (well, obvious with her last name). This community was inspired by how she found guest posts to be beneficial in the online blogging world. She has realized how effective this is for going up the search engines.

Before, people would just find a good ranking blog, and request that he/she makes a guest post in it. This thing is a tiresome task, and to be approved to write a guest post, the website owner must feel that he/she will also get benefit from you, and not only you will be getting the benefit. Now, with MyBlogGuest.com, it will be easier to find the most suitable and good ranking site to post your guest post on. It has a script feature that ranks users on his/her influence as well as backlinks. Seeing this, you can look for those who are playing in front of the line, and then it will be easier for them to approve your post because they also see your ranking based on the script.

How to maximize this community’s potential? In order to utilize posting guest posts on My Blog Guest, it would be beneficial for you to find a blog that has a higher ranking than you, has more influence than you, and is getting more traffic than you do. It would also be better if that site already has some loyal readers that will surely go visit the blog and see your guest post.

A question might come into your mind, “What if people use this service only for themselves?” Fortunately, My Blog Guest has its own rules on doing the guest blogging. Its main objective is to mutually benefit each other, while keeping everyone safe. Once someone tries to do something against the rules or to harm other bloggers, he/she will first be warned and later on banned from the network. My Blog Guest also does not tolerate spammers, as it is definitely serious in helping its members grow. All users also have a panel where they can interact with other members. This is mostly utilized for promotion and requests for blog posts.

Apparently, given that it is still safe to do guest posts, and it is a healthy way of doing SEO, this can still stay longer regardless the freight the panda updates have been giving us these past year. I personally believe there’s nothing wrong with doing the guest posts, and given that this service is free, Google will not see it as an enemy, and will mostly likely let it stay.

So, just had problems with blog networks? Do some guest posts in MyBlogGuest.com.

LightBox Plus Plugin – WordPress Plugin

Garen — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 23:45:36 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)- You have been lurking on a certain website, found an interesting image but it was too small. You clicked it and a larger image pops up on the window. Ever wondered how that effect is done? You may have, I know I did, but I thought that it was some kind of a complicated script and so I haven’t tried it. Until I realized that it became possible because of a simple plugin – the Lightbox Plus.

Apparently, Lightbox Plus is a simple script that enables the images to be displayed as an overlay on a certain page. You may have wondered what the difference is. Usually, if you click on a certain image (without the plugin), it will be opened on another tab or window to be viewed, or worse, if it does not work, you have to right-click on it just to view the whole image. In case of the Lightbox Plus, the only thing you have to do is the click on the image and if you’re using a supported browser, the image will be shown in its original size. If in case, it’s bigger, it will auto-resize to fit on the browser.

For what purpose is this plugin useful? Some people love taking pictures and sharing them on posts. So if you don’t want to eat up a lot of space on the page and in turn irritate your visitors, you may want to lessen the size of the image display on the page. But if you do that, the image becomes smaller, of thumbnail size, and people would not also appreciate the image you just posted. There goes the purpose of the Lightbox Plus. People will still be able to enlarge images they want to enlarge. It also enables them to view posted pictures on a slide show display, with Previous and Next buttons to easily browse through them. They no longer have to click on individual picture to know what’s in it. With Lightbox Plus, not only images can be displayed, also videos and other external content.

The feature offers the users an eye-friendly effect. It will dim the page and use a dark or light background (depending on the webmaster’s choice) to enable the user or visitor to view the image without distractions. Pretty cool, right?

With its elegant design and cool feature, Lightbox Plus is a very popular plugin for the purpose of displaying images. As the webmaster, you can have total control of how you want it to look like, how dim the background would be and how large or small the thumbnails displayed are. Apparently, as stated above, the enlarged image will be automatically resized on the browser tab so you no longer have to configure this.

Basically, if you’re an image poster (but not so much), having Lightbox Plus is a must. You may use NextGEN gallery for album sharing. But if you only love sharing pictures one by one, this plugin is a perfect fit for you.

View the lightbox plug plugin here.

Why Private Blog Networks Are Bad For SEO

Garen — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 18:48:52 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)- Just some months ago, people were getting crazy on posting on blog networks in order to optimize their sites for search engines. And for those months (even years), people were benefiting from these private blog networks. However, just this March 24, 2012, it has been a fact that private blog networks will no longer be good for SEO.

Yes, the newest Panda update comes rolling out now. Apparently, those websites of low quality will be highly affected. And these low quality websites were apparently making it high on previous updates because of joining private blog networks.

One of the biggest private blog network affected is the BuildMyRank (BMR) site. From its March 19 post, BMR admitted that it already had majority of its network deindexed by Google and decided to discontinue its operation. BMR has been an established company and already resulted in successful website owners. However, due to the new algorithm of the Panda update, Google has blocked the blog network’s way of creating incoming links to blog posts.

This update is not only limited to BMR, as this is also the same with all private blog networks. Blog networks work the same way. Sites that are in the network all help each other to create backlinks on different sites. Previously, this would help you go up in rankings, but for some reason, Google has already created a way to find the pattern and stop it, thereby lowering the rankings of the sites, and worse, deindexing them from the results page. And once a site gets deindexed, and you’re linked to it, then you’ll also feel the sting or be affected by it. You’ll soon lose your ranking too. And there goes the cycle.

That’s probably the reason why BMR decided to stop its operation. Cause it can no longer find a way to recover at this rate. All backlinks were provided randomly, and the deindexing by the panda update will be faster than the BMR’s ability to remove links and posts from getting crawled on.

It’s basically understandable why Google made this move. With blog networks, you pay for the service, making this entirely a paid way of indexing your site. While this may not be entirely a bad move or even a black hat technique, Google hates those who pay to move up rankings. They want to monopolize the industry by getting their own services to optimize your site for their own search engines.

So if you want to survive this update, and the frightening incoming panda updates, you may want to go back to basics. Keep your SEO as white as you can, with quality content, and without employing the service of a paid private blog network. While it might be a hassle thing to do, you should go back to the slow but surely way of moving up the ranks, well, until a new technique comes. But for now, focus on your visitors instead. Don’t risk your chances to staying on top of the search engines. Apparently, you can no longer fool Google with these private blog networks. And who knows, the next panda update can affect a much different field of SEO.

5 Tips For Backlink Building

Sociable – WordPress Plugin

Garen — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 23:32:27 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)- With all the sharing buttons and plugins used for WordPress, Sociable is by far one of the most widely used by all bloggers. It has been downloaded a million and a half times now and continuously being shared. This is apparently due to the fact that it, although focuses mainly on sharing buttons, has everything you will basically need to market your own website and interact with your visitors.

Its latest version, Skyscraper, can be used to integrate most social networking and microblogging sites on your pages or individual posts. Want your posts to be shared and liked on Facebook with just one click? You can do so with Sociable. Want your visitors to retweet your posts on Twitter, that’s a piece of cake with Sociable. Need +1 clicks for Google Plus? Buttons can also be added via Sociable. And there goes the long list of other sites, such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Del.icious, MySpace, Technorati, Yahoo, and even FriendFeed, Posterous, Sphinn, and Tumblr.

But wait, there’s more – yeah, the list of customization you can do with these buttons is pretty long. The buttons will be displayed on rows under each page or under each post. The old Share and Enjoy note above the rows is now changed to Be Sociable, Share, however, this can be changed to whatever message you would like.

You can add ratings and reviews on your individual posts as well as individual comments via Sociable. This is typically a great feature, especially for the purpose of giving your visitors the reason to go back to your site and check if anyone ranked or rated their comments to you. This is typical of the Youtube feature, where people can like comments if they want to or if they support you on a specific post or comment. You can also display your latest tweets, posts, follows, and mentions through this plugin. Want to track visitors coming from different sites such as Facebook or Twitter? You also won’t be needing a separate visitor counter for this purpose, as Sociable Skyscraper also has this option available for you. Want a Go to Top or a Home button for easy navigating? Sociable also has it for you.

With the recent update, this plugin also loads faster than ever. However, for some, it might seem a little bit buggy, not because there are problems in the system, but because scripts are changed overall and thus, there would be problems on some themes. Tweaking and fixing those themes to work with Sociable will do just fine. And you’ll soon be looking at your cool website perfectly in no time.

Nevertheless, if you don’t want that much about your plugin, and you only want a simple plugin which can help your visitors share your posts and pages, Sociable Classic is still available for you. The icons are now upgraded and more appealing, as well as larger so the visitors can see the buttons easily.

Haven’t tried Sociable yet? Check it out its pretty cool!

GoDaddy Auctions – Buying And Selling Domains

Garen — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 17:09:45 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)- Being the largest domain registrar in today’s world, GoDaddy also hosts one of the biggest domain marketplaces in the interwebs. This comes in the form of an auction, thus called GoDaddy Auctions. I do NOT recommend GoDaddy for web hosting but domains names are fine with GoDaddy. To see why I don’t recommend GoDaddy for web hosting please see this GoDaddy review.

There are a lot of domaineers who earn through buy and sell in GoDaddy, and there are also lots of webmasters who made their riches buying those marketable domain names through the GoDaddy Auctions.

In order to participate in the auctions, you will have to have a GoDaddy account. You can opt to pay a membership fee if you’re going to be always there, but can also get a free membership if you’re just using the closeouts.

Now, after logging in to your GoDaddy account, click the Auctions tab, and you’ll see the marketplace.

You’ll see featured domains being auctioned, and mostly they are auctioned because they were to expire soon enough, meaning they were already registered in GoDaddy, and these auctions can last 10 days. Starting price for any domain name would be $12, and apart from this, you would be able to see some data on how many are bidding at the domain at the current moment, what is the current bid, how many people views the domain, the GoDaddy valuation and the remaining time for the auction. Just note that the valuation is just an opinion, and this would not be the actual price the bid will close.

These things apply for most of the auctioned domain names. But if you don’t want to go through this and would want to buy a domain name straighthand, you can check the Closeouts section. Again, this doesn’t require any membership fee if you’ll be buying from this section.

Closesouts are expiring names that didn’t get bids or interest after getting auctioned for 10 days. There will be an extended 5-day auction for them, where the names would be priced at $11 for 24 hours. The next day, it will be moved to $10 and will stay like that for another 24 hours. On the third day, it will be priced $9, then $8 on the fourth day, and then down to $5 on the fifth day. Anyone can buy these domains buy clicking on the Buy Now option.

Remember, you are just paying the right for the domain name with these bids. Since they are expiring domains, you will have to pay to renew them for another year, on top of what you paid for the bid.

There are some tools to help you look for suitable domain names, and one is advanced search. You can search by expiration date, by price, or by extensions.

You can also sell your domains through the GoDaddy Auctions. You can list it as a Buy It Now which means it can be bought for a fixed price. Or you can list it as an Offer/Counter offer, where people will place offers for it. Another would be the Offer/Counter offer with a buy it now, meaning they can offer and they can buy it if it is agreeable to your price. Or you can place the domain in the 7-day auction listing.

So that’s basically how GoDaddy Auctions work. Many people rely on this section of the GoDaddy marketplace to find the best domain names. You can, too. Just be sure to be wise and find strategies to be able to get the best out of it.

In order to get started with GoDaddy Auctions please click here.

WP-Polls – WordPress Plugin

Garen — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:33:28 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)-Polls are now getting widely used by many bloggers. For the most part, it’s used to get the opinions of the visitors about certain things, their preferences, or maybe just plain answers to questions. Microblogging and sharing sites already have polls integrated on their system, so it will be easier for people to create and answer polls. However, WordPress has none, only plugins that can help you create and display polls on your WordPress site.

One such plugin is the WP-Polls. This plugin is highly customizable unlike most of the plugins of the same kind. It can be customized via templates and injected with CSS styles. There are also lots of other options that can help you customize your poll display, as well as the results page.

The main difference of WP-Polls to other poll widgets that you can use is it’s a plugin integrated to WordPress itself. You can use a widget, like PollDaddy, but it will have to take a few more steps to completely mix it with your blog. WP-Polls on the other hand, since it is completely integrated on your website and it will be easier to create polls depending on your preference straight from the admin panel.

Also, unlike PollDaddy, WP-Polls will let you edit its HMTL template fully for advanced tweaking. You definitely would want the poll to display as a part of the whole site, won’t you. Also, you can configure the CSS style of the poll you’re making based on your site’s CSS design and play with it.

Though third-party poll widgets are useful, given that they are external, you don’t actually “own” the poll. The polls you create must be within their terms and conditions, unlike if you own the poll yourself, it can be about anything and everything under the sun. For third-party solutions, you may have the dilemma of them closing your poll at any time if they wish to, and though it’s not that often, it still can impact a blogger greatly. So there goes the benefit of using an integrated poll manager such as WP-Polls.

Also, access and configuration to these polls are in your hands. You have access to who participated in your polls, their IP addresses, the exact time they voted, to name a few. This also gives your visitors the security that they will not be sharing information about themselves through a third-party application, and it reassures them that only you as the webmaster can see who they are and where they are from. The advantages of owning the poll are endless. Even php codes can be configured to work the way you want them to. And don’t forget, you won’t have to bear with the third-party site mark on the bottom of the widget (i.e. “Brought to you by WEBSITE”, or via Website.com).

Apparently, there are more advantages to having your own poll via a plugin such as WP-Polls rather than a third-party application. The only downside I guess is the fact that it will be down if there happens to be some problem on the plugin, unlike in PollDaddy where their servers are monitored. But nevertheless, any application or plugin undergoes the same, so that won’t be too much of a problem.

Check out the Wp-Polls plugin here.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Garen — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 22:34:09 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)-You’re reading a certain post. You maybe have landed on that post via Google search or another search engine. However, at some point you wanted to see if there are more information on that site related to the topic you need. Would you browse each post by the owner one by one? You wouldn’t. So you’d definitely leave and go somewhere else.

If you’re the webmaster of that site, you already lost a visitor. Apparently, he/she may have not found anything more helpful than that specific post he/she went to. If only you could find a way to let them stay.

Good thing there’s plugins in WordPress which offer listing of some related posts on the bottom of each post. Your visitor would not leave once they find more information on your blog about a certain topic. Chances are, they would click on the different links posted, trying to find more and more. Very helpful, eh?

One such plugin is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). It gives you relevant content on your whole site, whether it’s a page or a post. So how does it differ to the other related posts plugins?

It does have an advanced and versatile algorithm that other plugins of the same kind don’t have. This algorithm enables you to customize the relevance of each posts to each other, whether it’s related by title, by content, by tags, by category, or even by taxonomy. Through this, you would be sure that you only have the right posts listed on the bottom of your post that would potentially be useful for your visitors.

It does have a unique templating system that enables you to control how the related posts are displayed on your pages. Since the list would take up space on your page, you won’t have to worry about it going against your template. At most themes, you actually don’t have to do anything to tweak your theme again to work with this.

It does have caching ability that records how related posts are visited to improve performance. The more visitors come to look at your related posts, the higher chances of improved suggestion.

It has the ability to also display related posts even on RSS and Atom feeds. And the best part is, they are also completely customizable.

It offers you the ability to disallow or remove certain tags and categories from the algorithm. This basically means that the plugin would not search related posts via the disallowed tags or categories anymore, increasing the relevance of each list.

It enables you to have complete control over your related posts and pages listed, and it supports PHP5 and MySQL 4.1 or greater.

Nevertheless, YARPP or Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is a favorite amongst all related posts plugin downloadable. Not only will you stay once you use it, but you’ll be amazed by its big help on your site being visited frequently every time. Not still using it? I highly recommend for you to try this.

All in One Webmaster

Garen — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 21:16:31 +0000

( The Best Web Hosting Service)- If you are a webmaster, you may have tried different webmaster tools to help you in optimizing your site for search engines and for better marketing. You may have already been familiar (or you may have tried) Google Webmaster Tool. And in case, you may have also tried Yahoo’s SiteExplorer or Bing Webmaster Central with the same purpose. These tools are used to help you monitor the indexing of your site on those search engines, and get detailed statistics for better earnings.

All-in-One Webmaster is a WordPress plugin that has the similar purpose, but without any complicated codes. Contrary to the abovementioned tools of the same kind, this plugin enables you to monitor and add all webmaster codes for the above sites. Yes, whether it’s for Google, for Yahoo, or for Bing, you can simply monitor activities through this plugin. Aside from those sites, you can also access the tracking codes on Clicky, Compete.com, Quantcast, and SiteMeter.com for advanced monitoring of your site stats.

This plugin adds specific meta tags in the headers of your blogs, as well as JavaScript codes on your site’s footer. Apart from the above, it also enables you to create XML sitemaps that you can submit on the above sites for better search engine optimization. And if the submission failed, it will also prompt and update you. You also have the option to manually edit the HTML header and footer section to further filter your meta tags.

With this plugin installed, you no longer have to install the above tools one by one. You only need the All-in-One Webmaster plugin. That’s it. It’s a one-stop solution to meta tags integration problem. You just of course have to access the codes to be copied to the text area on the sites themselves.

The latest version of this plugin has an updated asynchronous tracking snippet as per the latest version by Google. It also has a PRO version, with the addition of the StatCounter analytics option and Facebook Insight option. The analytics options for each site – Google, GetClicky, Quantcast, and SiteMeter are present. And apart from Google, Yahoo and Bing, you also have the ability to check on your Alexa ranking and BlogCatalog, as well as Facebook Insights.

Apparently, for most webmasters, this tool is among their top ten favorite plugins of all time. Not only does it enable them to maximize their site’s potential for earning, they are also helped by this plugin to prevent wasting lots of time doing the coding themselves, especially if they aren’t knowledgeable at all with the codes and the likes. Imagine being able to optimize your site, allowing it to be indexed by all the top search engines, and maximizing your visitor count even if you are just a beginner or you have just created your site. What else? You can track everything, do more action if needed to, in order to know if you’re succeeding or not in your blogging venture. Definitely a great plugin to try. So, haven’t tried All-in-One Webmaster yet? Download it now and optimize your blog!

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