Ahem.

Pre Party

I arrived fairly early on the Friday, checking in to the obscenely swanky (by my standards) City Inn Hotel in Leeds City Centre, when I was greeted with messages to meet in the Skybar (the 13th floor bar of the hotel) for a pre pre party party (if that makes sense), was greeted with smiles of various SEO’s and after an Indian meal, and a few drinks (including me shouting “Twat” at the TV with events that were happening at Wembley, an enjoyable networking session was had. We shared tips, tricks & a few stories, often rarely talking about SEO.

Onto the talks now, and I’m desperately trying to keep these brief, as a lot of other people covered them in a lot better detail (more links at the bottom).

The Talks

There were multiple talks spread over two rooms, here’s just a brief overview of said talks.

Mel Carson (@melcarson) – Learning & Earning Through Social Media

Mel works as Community Manager for Microsoft Advertising, and his talk centred on how Social Media can provide a real return on investment – but only if done correct. He shared examples of eventual ROI of Social Media, which were the following:-

• Mel shared a twitter picture of a magazine seen in a drugstore in Washington DC, within half an hour the CEO of the drugstore (who monitored brand related keywords on Twitter) contacted him online, and despite having a two minute, whimsical discussion, Mel would now visit said drugstore over the others, because they care about him now. He may not do it immediately (after all, the store was in Washington DC), but for two minutes investment it could convert into a client for life.
• The second example was a monistary, who wanted to recruit monks online. So with a small adwords campaign targetted at monks, with a low CPM (Cost Per Monks), they were able to cost effectively recruit a new monk, which took them two years.

Both had ROI from their niche.

So in summary, to earn through social media, it’s important to keep costs down – for example Microsoft Advertising’s social media presence is 1 blog, 1 forum & 2 twitter accounts – easily manageabe & more authoritative than a number of other sources.

Another way this keeps costs down is that they now release news on their blog, rather than traditional press releases.

Gary Taylor (@garyptaylor) – Keyword Domains & Mini Sites

Something I’ve done more & more with, as well as see incredible results with, is exact match domains dominating search engine rankings. Gary’s talk was how to research them, and what they are & how to have successes with them.

First of all, forget creating a huge site, exact match domain sites need to target at most one or two keywords. They need to be fairly long tail (or rather they usually are, as a lot of the top ones have already been snapped up) or geographical based. They are small websites that are easy to replicate & maintain, with one or two ways of making money (usually CPC, affiliate programmes, or a link directory).

They need to make a minimum £3 per domain per week, as this helps keep them running, and if you have over 100 off them, that’s £300/week. Not bad for no work, is it?

A fascinating talk, Gary gave real insight into how to approach keyword domains & how to make money from them.

Lisa Myers (@lisadmyers) – Social Media for SEO

Lisa’s talk and insight given in her talk was great for bloggers looking to gain links. Links & Social Property are the currency of the web, crucial for ranking highly. Before creating a piece of link bait, you need to find a target age, gender & location – examining what they would search for, as well as sites that they would visit.

She also gave a massive secret about link bait- that it needs to be simple, well marketed & easy to share. Linkbait doesn’t need to be groundbreaking, and in the example she shared was for an advent calendar link bait, with a few inexpensive prizes, that was marketed to the correct audience.

Of course, it’s also worth remembering that linkbait needs to be hosted on your own site, rather than on social networks, as it’ll offer no value to your brand if links are going to Facebook or Youtube.

In result, the client got the following:-

• 50% more traffic to the site
• An increased email database
• Twitter followers jumped 300%
• And significant exposure

Lisa also talked about Article Marketing to help improve the link count to websites & generating buzz for websites. Content must be relevant to their site, in fact really relevant to the site you’re targetting, so don’t just jump straight in with a blog post – examine discussion & the links of the sites you want to target.

When you have about 10 or so sites, hunt down the appropriate contact and approach them directly. Calling or Skyping somebody can get a lot more done than an easily ignored email, but be direct.

Finally, the best way to get your content out there is by trading content, be it exclusive news, products or discounted products or competition. This also needs to be super relevant.

Jaamit Durrani (@jaamit) – Linkbuilding In Real Life: A Practical Guide to Dominating the SERPS

Jaamit’s talk was about Linkbuilding, and how to do it effectively. Most bloggers from my experience are actually quite shit hot at this, but there are a lot of things that we can do better. Nonetheless, Jaamit had a few home truths to share:-

1. Linkbuilding Can Be Daunting – Plan it each month, break it down & do it slowly if need be.
2. People Choose Between Quantity of Links & Quality Links - Why not use both?
3. Build internal links as well as home page links.
4. Anchor Text of the links is your friend.
5. Content is king is misleading - and you need a network of influencers.
6. Forget about black or white hat links – you need to test links anyway.

Spam links work because there’s nothing else is better, so if your competitor is using spammy links (with a tool such as Link Diagnosis), don’t immitate, but understand how they work.

The first time of links Jaamit recommended were Low Level Anchor Text Deep Links – these are links of spun articles, with three links on each article, submitted to a number of article directories. Boom, you get domain diversity for your articles.

The second method is Guest Blogging – which as most of you guys know is a great place to get links. To get guest blog post opportunities, you can go to the following:-

• My Blog Guest
• Google [your chosen keyword] “guest post” (so if you’re writing about SEO, Google “SEO Guest Posts“) – this will bring up a range of guest blogs in most niches.

Finally, Jaamit shared ways of getting links from .ac.uk (as well as .edu) domains, which involves running competition with schools & colleges. You need to google the following:-

• inurl:ac.uk [keyword]

Karyn Fleeting (@karynfleeting) – PR’s Guide to World Domination

Karyn Fleeting’s talk surrounding write great press releases & pushing them to the right people. For a great press release, you need a following:-

• A great database of contacts including a correct name, what their job is, email address & any associated information, that can be easily copied for each press release.
• A great first line hook:-
• Inverted Pyramid Writing, which included the following:-
  • Important information at the very top.
  • Additional information 2nd
  • And the least important information going down.
  • However, each paragraph much have a meaning.
• Date
• Contact Details, such as your phone number & your email
• Stockist information & telephone number (If you’re selling a physical product)
• Price

Karyn told us a great site for Press Release following the Inverted Pyramid Writing – the Daily Mail site.

Tailor each PR to each to each journalist, and avoid language such as “revolutionary”, “iconic”, “leading” & “unique”.

As somebody who gets shed loads of unsolicited press releases for Retro Garden, I’m in the process of creating a page on that site aimed at what Karyn suggested for a covering email to each press release:-

• Addressing me by name.
• Big sell early on.
• And a high res image.

Again, will let you know when it’s done, and to see what I’ve learnt.

If you have a successful press release picked up, put the logo of the website on your website with a link to the coverage, furthermore it’s a way of saying thank you (plus gives social proof to your readers that you’re more important!).

In Conclusion

I loved this weekend. I always was terrified with conferences, thinking I was sacrificing my weekend for an overly stressful retreat. However, meeting likeminded SEO’s & webgeeks, in such an informal atmosphere, it was great to network, and may have been the best thing I’ve done for my career.

Although I may be saving up to be at Wrestlemania XXVII in or around the next Thinkvisibility, I would love to go to another one. Meeting friends (and yes, I do consider people I meet on Twitter “friends”), learning & having access to some of the finest minds in this industry, as well as drinking copious amounts of alcohol, is well worth going.

Bravo to The Hodge for organising a remarkable conference!

Other Things I’ve Learned

1. Despite being one of the most popular niche for SEO, an amazing number of SEO’s don’t have a clue of the rules of Texas Hold Em (much to the dismay of myself & Ian Pouncey. How Al Carton kept his cool I’ve no idea).
2. These people are the most dangerous when it goes to poker.
3. Goosh is The Geordie Jason Manford, and is an accomplished poker player, despite what anybody says.
4. Calling for a big 6 in Blackjack usually gives a big 6.
5. To work in the SEO industry, you need a liver that’s as good as filtrating shit than North West Water’s treatement plant.
6. If you are to write a blog post on a conference, getting a post out there first & foremost is very good, as people who would rather play Tiger Woods for 6 hours instead of writing a blog post will link to you (may expand this in a blog post soon!).
7. If you want to get the most retweeted tweet at a conference, swear creatively.
8. I really need glasses.
9. Never trust a croupier.
10. SEO’s bake the best cookies (seriously, who baked them for lunch?!?)

Other Conference Round Ups

Here are some other conference notes & round ups:-

Slides

• Keyword Domains and Mini-sites – Gary Taylor’s Slides
• Using Social media for SEO – Lisa Myers slides
• Link Building in Real Life – Jaamit Durrani slides
• The PR’s Guide to World Domination – Karyn Fleeting slides

Transcriptions

• How to Gain Ranking Dominance in Any Market Sector – Dave Naylor (Transcribed by Saurav Rimal)
• Learning & Earning Through Social Media – Mel Carson (transcribed by Peter Young)
• Various Think Visibility transcripts – Dave Chaffey
• Submit your site for review with SEO, Design and CRO – Notes by Dave Naylor

Opinion Pieces

• Think Visibility: Cherry Popping SEO Goodness – Claire Carlile
• Think Visibility live blogging – Kieron Hughes
• Think Visibility 4 Roundup from @ismepete #thinkvis – Peter Handley
• Think Visibility 4 Catchup – Scott McLay
• 10 Reasons Why Think Visibility Rocked – Illiya Vajestica
• Key Takeaways from Think Visibility September 2010 – Paddy Moogan
• Think Visibility - A Love Letter – Annabel Hodges
• Think Visibility 4; Discoverability, Linkerati, and Hat Burning – Iain Harper
• ThinkVis – Social Media, Spamming & SERPS – Carla Marshall

Photostreams

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/sk8geek/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/martin_88/

Opinions?

Were you there? Do please share your thoughts in the conference!

In any rate, I’ve been around & you can see me at the following places:-

• Holistic Search Guest Blog - A few weeks ago I wrote a guest blog on Holistic Search SEO blog, entitled “City Agencies vs. Country Agencies: What’s the Difference?“. You may want to check that out.
• Thinkvisibility – This weekend I’m off to Thinkvisibility in Leeds, a search engine marketing & affiliate conference. I am well and truly a conference virgin, so I’m really looking forward to it & meeting people I’ve spoken with online, anybody going to this conference? I’ll be looking to post a round up sometime within the next few weeks.

As my head has been down, I’ve missed a lot of blogging, missed anything good?

Of course, if there’s a cause you want to start, the barrier of entry is lower, with often a well constructed hashtag and a few select followers getting behind it and boom – you’ve got a phenomenon on your hands.

One such tweet is a cause close to my heart – #nonleagueday.

Non League Day is on 4th September 2010. Which is the first Saturday of the first international break in the football season. With the league’s top flights taking a week off to spank Estonia or whatever, Non League is encouraging you to attend a lower league game.

Why? Well a number of reasons:-

• Much Needed Money - A lot of these clubs are owned not by Russian Ogliarchs or Middle Eastern Oil Millionaires, they’re owned often by fans, or local businessmen, or a combination of both. They are often run by volunteers. Money is tight with these clubs. So your £5-10 on the door (along with £10-20 spend in the club, at stupidly reasonable prices, more on that later) can help pay a player’s wages for a week.
• Much Needed Exposure - Your local club, beyond the odd  appearance on the back page and a whimsical look at it on Football Focus when they go far in the FA once every 20 years, gets sod all coverage off their own back. Often through community initiatives or just giving free tickets to local schools. Causes like this help improve the exposure of the club in the local area, so get you & your friends involved!
• You Will Enjoy It - I love live football. I’ve been trying to do the 92 as well as see as many games as possible. Compared to on the box, which I struggle to watch sober, live football is an enthralling experience, and probably the best view of British Male culture you can get, and if you think footballers are overpaid prima donnas, you’d be pleasantly surprised by non-league football.

There’s a map on the Non League Day site of games that are on, if you’re short of things to do, I’d recommend taking in a game. You will enjoy it!

Unfortunately, I won’t be attending the Colwyn Bay vs. Hucknall Town game, as I will be attending Think Visibility (more on that next week!), but I’m attending Colwyn Bay vs. Bradford Park Avenue this weekend to make up for it.

If you do attend a game, do please let me know!

photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

For those of you who were on Twitter yesterday, you may have seen your friends tweet about Twifficiency, a service that offered to calculate your Twitter Efficiency based upon Twitter Activity, written by James Cunningham.

I saw several people tweet about this, so I myself gave it a go. Which realised why people were tweeting about it.

Basically, after authorising access to your profile (via OAuth), it gives what I think is an arbitary number, which is then automatically tweeted to your twitter feed.

Immediately people began crying spam, scam & leaving your profile open to attack, but I am not so sure.

Yeah, it’s a bit deceitful in that twitter automatically tweets things to your profile, but I don’t think that any malice behind it. After all, James put his Twitter handle on the site to hopefully create connections (it was something similar I did with UKSEOHere). If he was to use it to spam, would he have attributed his work to his site?

When I got into programming, there wasn’t the social API’s that is available now, so the worst I got was a corrupted database or server load being high. Now with the wealth of technology available, it’s remarkably easy to create something that interacts with popular websites (as demonstrated by UKSEOHere). To create an OAuth login for Twitter, followed by a tweet, it is impressive (I’ve been pissing around with the OAuth for Foursquare, and it’s not as easy as it seems).

Often the only way to test things is to test them in a real life environment, which is something I did with UKSEOHere, which got a bit out of control with Twifficiency, leading to what was seen yesterday.

I’d hate to see James – who is a 17 year old kid – be labeled as a scammer. From reading his twitter feed he realises he screwed up, and a temporary fix has been added (basically a disclaimer in bright red on the site), with hopefully a fix coming later. Being a smart lad, I imagine it won’t take long.

Nevertheless, if you want to get rid of it (which I do recommend anyway, just to keep your profile clean), you can revoke access using the Twitter Connections page.

What is Google Alerts?

Basically, Google Alerts is a service that sends you email whenever a relevant update is made to the Google Search Listings. It’s more about new pages being indexed, and covers News, Blogs, Discussions, as well as the original search.

Notation

I will use some odd notation to format some of these alerts, this is to replace with your own stuff.

• Square Brackets [] - Replace what ever is in the square brackets with what’s described in the square brackets (for example, with this site, replace [your url] with http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/
• Standard Brackets () - This is optional & can be removed. I’ll explain why in the description.

[blog name]

This should only be used in blogs/web 2.0 search & news search. This simply tells us when you are mentioned. I’ve seen this utilised by many big web brands, with high up brand members commenting on the site to

If you release anything associated with your blog that you’ll later sell, it’d be stupid not to have this.

@[twitter name] -site:http://twitter.com (-site:[your url])

Unfortunately, you cannot find links to your twitter page (or I don’t really know how if it’s possible!), but often when people who link to your twitter page will use the keyword (in my example) “@rhyswynne”. You can track linked pages in Google Alerts, but Google is remarkably slow in showing new links to sites, so instead we’ll just search for your twitter handle being mentioned on sites.

We add the negative site operator, as we don’t want any mentions of your twitter handle on Twitter, and I also like removing my site URL as I have a lifestream on this page. You may want to add this or not.

“[a query that you can answer]“

A good one that I’ve used in the past is to monitor discussions & everything for queries you can answer quickly & easily. Say for example you sell tea cosies on your blog, you can search for “Where can I buy tea cosies online?”. Be creative. There’s no limit to the amount of searches you can do for this.

What you are searching for here is forum posts & discussions. Places you can join & answer questions. Try not to spam the forums but be useful, even answering a couple of threads before & after the target thread & contributing to discussion.

Over To You!

These are just three Google Alerts I have on my account. Do you have any that differ from the above? Do share them in the comments!

Sponsor: Get Ads for Your Feed via text link ads

I got myself locked in the shower of my house & after screaming out of my window to get a passer by to ring for the fire brigade, I was rescued. It was an amusing story which resulted in a lot of discussion (often laughing, often directed at me).

Furthermore, in doing so, I gained about 60 new followers in about 2 hours.

I wouldn’t call myself a social media guru, but if I was, I’d call what I created a buzz. A humourous buzz with me in my smiley face boxer shorts, but dammit, it was a buzz. A buzz that many people would probably pay good money for.

After a tweet from Han saying I should write a blog post about it, I thought about why I got the response I did. In the end, I could only give one example.

People actually like me on social media.

I wouldn’t call me incredibly popular, but rarely do I talk about my job or my skills (SEO, PHP & Internet Marketing) on twitter. Instead a number of my posts are observations, thoughts or just random. Which seems to cause people to give a damn about me.

People Giving a Damn – Real Life Example

I’ll give you an example from wrestling. For years Stone Cold Steve Austin was “Stunning” Steve Austin, and “The Ringmaster” Steve Austin, a talented wrestler who was always there or there abouts. His problem was a lack of character – people didn’t really connect with him. In the mid 1990′s he became “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, a beer swilling, swearing, arse kicker. Crowd responses went through the roof, with massive “pops” – (huge Beatles esque cheers from the crowd). Austin was destined to rise to the upper echelons of super stardom, with a combination of a red hot character, and being an amazing wrestler.

Half way through the megarise, at Summerslam 97, he suffered a serious neck injury which threatened his career.

In reality his career should’ve been over, but within a few short months he was back. He lost a lot of his wrestling ability, with his matches being a lot more punches & kicks than technical masterpieces, but the crowd didn’t care, as they cared more about him.

And therein lies the issue, getting people to care about you & you can get away with being lazy. The Undertaker gets a bigger reaction from diving over the top rope twice a year than Yoshi Tatsu gets from doing it every night. Seth Godin gets more reaction from his 200 word blog post every week than a blog post with 2000 words of dry crap 12 times a day. Both Seth & The Undertaker connecting with people, and the easiest way to do it is just being yourself.

So on Twitter, Facebook or other social media channels, don’t just spam your followers, get to know them, show a human side. Not a “look at me! I’m working from home with a new car! Find out how by clicking here! ($9.95 a month)”. But talk about events (it really annoys me when the world is suffering a crisis, or there’s a world cup, and people who I *know* are interested in it are instead tweeting about the latest post or affiliate post), just come across as human, as it’s amazing how many “Social media gurus” don’t. I’m not saying you should deliberately lock yourself in a shower & call the fire brigade, but talking about everyday stuff, like the rest of us, and you’re more likely to connect.

Do this, and you’ll get a lot more buzz for when you actually want it, and not when you’re standing in front of 3 firemen wearing nothing but smiley face boxer shorts.

I’ll leave you with one more tweet from yesterday’s event:-

Further Reading

To find out more about buzz, connecting & being human on social media, I recommend reading these two great posts.

• How To Get People to Like You On Twitter? – Peter Handley, who doesn’t consider himself to be a social media expert, shares his experience in becoming a nice guy on Twitter.
• How To Write Awesome Copy With Experience – Carly shares her tips on writing like you’re an authority on a subject, using forums.

Sponsor: Your Ad Here?

Dear Webmaster,

My name is Mark. I recently came across your website through search engine and found it is informative for our website’s visitors.

I would like to exchange link with our websites spammydomain.com.

As you are probably aware, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising the search engine rankings and generating more traffic to both of our websites.

If you would like to do the link exchange with us, please place our link on your website with the following details.

Title : We’re Spammers
Desc : We spam you like mad!
Url : http://spammydomain.com/

Then, please inform me by replying to this email with your details (title and description) or use the following links to post your details. Your links will be shown once we approve them within a few days.

http://spammydomain.com/link-to-us

Look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
Mark Spamboy

What To Watch Out For

• They don’t address you by name - Okay, not a deal breaker, but often they will address you as a webmaster, or the site owner, not your name or your site name.
• They try to create confidence - The link spammer will explain why you should link exchange with them, but also doesn’t really give any sort of examples, other than “it increases your ranking in search”.
• They give your specific details to link to - The spammer will not give any sort of leeway for linking to you, giving you a defined anchor text, an anchor URL (sometimes internal) and a line of text with it.
• They will put your link on an internal page, buried where nobody can see it…. - Link Spammers live in the hope you’ll get a page within a site that’s actually quite well placed, rather than on a links page. Will you get one in return? Of course not. You’re more likely included in a directory which is linked to from the footer of the terms of conditions.
• ….and the link won’t be up for long…. - Often as soon as they place a link to your site they will remove yours. Again, this doesn’t always happen, but it can.
• ….or unindexable - Again, if your link is within a directory, it’s fairly easy to block the indexing of this area of the site using robots.txt or the Robots meta tag.
  
• They use a pseudonym – The thing that cause the most amusement? They use names such as “Rudy Rogers”, rather than their standard Asian sounding name. Like that’s an issue?

What’s a Good Link Exchange?

There are great link exchanges out there, here’s a few ways on how to identify them:-

• They Benefit You & Your Readers - Problogger said it best, great link exchanges are a win/win/win situation. You get a link, they get a link, and your readers have access to another resource.
• They are familiar to you - If I approached you out of the blue, I’d expect you to ignore me. If however I leave a few comments & get a few responses, I expect you to give me a little more time of day. Have they been commenting on your blog? Are you familiar with their work? That’s always a great start.
• They’re Not Technically Link Exchanges - As I mentioned in my blog newsletter a few months a go, often I am a lot more open to linking to people if I get a link back first. It’s subtle but it shows that they link to me because they think I’m a great resource, not because they want something back in return.
• There’d Be Link Freedom - I would link to a post, or a page I like, rather than necessarily the home page. Furthermore, I’d also link how I want it. If the person has problem linking to me, I’d suggest a format (this would include my keywords usually!).

My Perfect Link Exchange Email

If I was writing a “link exchange” email, it’d be more of a “raise awareness in exchange for a link” email. Here’s what I would write.

Dear Mr Wynne,

I am a big fan of your blog and your recent posts (such as: xyz.com).

I especially liked this post (abc.com) and as a result I wrote a post stemming from this on my own blog (def.com). As you can see I’ve linked you from this post.

I’d love to know your thoughts on my posts, and if we could set up some sort of partnership (be it a link exchange, content exchange or anything else) I would be receptive to this.

Do let me know your thoughts.

Cheers

Rhys

def.com

That’s how I would approach this (and I’ve also told you guys the best way to get links from this stunning PR4 blog ;P), what would be your approach? Do share your thoughts in the comments.

However, despite all it’s brilliance, it does have one fault, the WordPress Official Support forum is terrible. Questions get unanswered, and moderators work behind the scenes, so even if there is a problem, you’re not sure where to go.

I’m not the first to notice this – Devon Dudgeon in a guest post on Robert Bravery’s Blog said the following:-

“This is probably the most popular blogging service but without technical help it can cause a few tears (or was that just me?). “

There are places to look though. Here’s three places I look.

Sitepoint Forums

I’m a huge fan of the Sitepoint Forums, although they’re not specifically about WordPress, they do have great CSS & PHP forums. There is also a WordPress subforum which is far more useful than the parent “Blogging” forum, who’s posts are all “how to make money blogging?”. It’s not great for plugin support, or more specialised WordPress help, but for general PHP & CSS help, it’s great.

WordPress Tavern

One forum that pops up time & again for specialist queries is WordPress Tavern, which seems to be a community of developers with in depth knowledge of WordPress. Seems to me that the discussions are a lot more specialised than both on the Sitepoint forums & the official forums.

Paid Support

Other than that, there are plenty of places to go to for paid support. There’s sites such as Odesk & elance for freelancers, as well as the WordPress Pro Mailing List. I’ve never used these though.

These are the solutions I use, how about you? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

I don’t really understand the ins and outs, but it seemed to all stem from two tweets.

1. The first was that pearsonified tweeted that a developer Bill Erickson, was taken off the WordPress Consultants list because he promoted Thesis.
2. The second was a tweet where an exposure in Thesis’ was shown. This was retweeted by Matt Mullenweg with an (admittedly very sarcastic comment on Thesis). From then it went onto a discussion about the GPL.

What Is The GPL?

The GPL, or the GNU General Public Licence is the licence that WordPress is under. The licence is simple, you’re free to do what ever you want with it, make money with it, go nuts. However derivative works need to be under GPL.

What Is The Problem?

Of course, what counts as a derivative work? WordPress says that premium themes & plugins are included in this. Of course, by having effectively open sourced themes, it will allow other people to propetier from your work. For free software, this isn’t much of an issue. I’ve used code before that people have made within WP Email Capture. It’s made the software better. Of course, when I finish WP Email Caputre Premium, I’d like to think that I can make a little bit of cash out of it, and not have it ripped off.

Am I Breaking The Law?

A lot of software I use on this blog such as OIO Publisher & Maxblogpress Ninja Affiliate aren’t in the GPL. I use them because they’re useful. Technically though, they’re breaking the law. Am I breaking the law for not only using them but promoting them (I am not a big fan of Thesis, hence why I don’t promote it)? Developers are rightfully a little up in arms over this, as they believe it hampers their right to make an income (see Why The GPL Doesn’t Apply To Premium Themes).

I’ve been advised by experienced members of the WordPress community when I do finish my plugin whether I should release it or not under the GPL. I’m not sure whether I should or not. What I do know is that the GPL needs some sort of clarification, because I cannot make head nor tail over it.

Copy page.php file & rename it to something else.

Very simple, go to your theme folder in your wp-content file & copy your page.php file. Rename it to the category you wish to target (such as 1.php or more useful web-tips.php for your “Web Tips” category).

Add The Following Lines to the page

Open the page within your web design software & add the following to the top of the file:-

<?php
/*
Template Name: Web Tips
*/
?>

Replace “Web Tips” with the name of your category.

Also, find the line that looks something like this:-

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

And replace it with this:-

<?php query_posts('category_name=catname&showposts=-1&orderby=title&order=ASC'); ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

An explanation of the “query_posts” Line

Within the brackets of the query_posts(”) command, is where all the posts are retrieved. You may need to make a few changes. Here’s what each command (the bits between the “&”) do:-

• category_name – The name of the category you want to show posts from. Change this to your category name you want to list on your page.
• showposts – The amount of posts to show on the page. -1 means all posts will show.
• orderby - How you want to order the posts, “date” is default, for this we will use the word “title”.
• order – Can be one of two things. ASC (which means posts go from A to Z), and DESC (which means it goes from Z to A).

For this tutorial, you need to change the category_name to the name of the category. Other than that you can leave the rest.

Create a New Page With This Template

You then need to create a page with this template. To do this, click on “Page > Add New” in the sidebar, give the page a title, change the page template in the “Additional Attributes” box in the sidebar to the name of the template given in the previous step, and click “publish”. You now have a page which can be linked to from throughout the site.