The ever evolving WordPress is user and SEO friendly, it comes with options such as the ability to install themes that let users change the look of their websites, and there are literally thousands of high quality themes and widgets to choose from to help users personalize. WordPress also allows for easy import and export and has mobile apps for on the go management. But perhaps one of the most popular features that this tool has to offer is plugins.

The WordPress plugins directory houses thousands of different add-ons that make it possible to improve the abilities and quality of a WordPress blog. There are plugins for every objective, including plugins to help improve SEO optimization, to track post popularity, plugins for smoother import/export and the most popular type; plugins aimed to speed up your blog and for improved performance. Below are three awesome plugins that do just that.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is the impressive WordPress plugin which has received 4 ½ out of 5 stars. It promises and delivers up to 10 times overall site performance. Pages load faster, downtime is reduced and quality is drastically improved. This is one must have plugin for your WordPress blog to improve its speed and overall performance.

WP Smush.it

WP Smush.it is a behind the scenes image optimization plugin. With this add on, users can convert GIFs to indexed PNGs, enhance JPEG compression and it shrinks the images so load time is faster and more accurate. This highly rated plugin has received 4 ½ out of 5 stars.

Instant Highlighter

Instant Highlighter is a really awesome social media share plugin for WordPress. With this plugin, visitors can highlight your content and quickly share it on over 100 social sharing sites including Facebook and Twitter.

Conclusion

WordPress is a flexible, powerful and scalable blog publishing system ripe for use by any webmaster, SEO or small business owner. You just need to know how best to use and manipulate the system so that it works for you and your intentions. A speedy, good looking and smart layout is what you want for your blog and what Google likes as well. Keep this in mind.

About the author

Missy Diaz writes for a few good UK based internet providers on the web.

If you already looked around for WordPress hosting, you’ll probably have noticed that there are so much companies offering so much different kinds of web hosting. That’s why I wrote this article, to help you choose the right hosting for your site or blog!

Some Web Hosting Basics

As I mentioned before, there are a lot of differences in web hosting. In this part, I’ll tell you something more about the basics of web hosting.

Windows vs Linux

If you want to run PHP / MySQL – based applications (like WordPress), then Linux hosting is the best choice. Windows hosting will also do the job in most cases (with some tweaks), but it’s important to know that WordPress is optimised for Linux hosting.

Shared Hosting, a Dedicated Server, VPS or Cloud Hosting?

Shared Hosting

Shared hosting means that your site or blog is hosted on a server running different sites. This makes shared hosting much cheaper, but also slower. Speed can vary a lot, depending of the power of the server and how much sites are running on that server.

Shared hosting is a great choice for those projects with just a couple of hundred visitors a day:

• a new site or blog
• a site or blog for a little company

Dedicated Server

A dedicated server is a physical server just for your site or blog. Dedicated servers are more secure, can be very powerfull, but also very expensive. Another negative point is that dedicated servers are not scalable, so they can’t grow with your site. If you’re looking for fast web hosting, you better take a look at VPS or Cloud Hosting.

VPS

A Virtual Private Server is a server that runs virtually on a physical server. This makes it possible to run multiple Virtual Private Servers on 1 physical server. The VPS acts like a dedicated server, but it’s easier to scale it to the user’s needs. VPS is cheaper then dedicated hosting, while it offers the same possibilities.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is also a virtual server, but this virtual server runs on different physical servers. In most cases, multiple virtual servers will run on multiple physical servers.

This also makes it very easy to scale the hosting, to create very powerful hosting and it means extra security: when 1 of the physical servers fails, there is always another physical server that keeps running.

WordPress Hosting

Some web hosts offer “WordPress hosting”. In fact, WordPress hosting is just linux hosting that is optimised for WordPress. In most cases, WordPress is already pre-installed, so if you’re not comfortable with installing WordPress yourself, WordPress hosting is a good choice!

Which Hosting Company to Choose?

When searching a web host, it can be very interesting to compare different companies on:

• Support (is there 24/7 support, support through mail / telephone?)
• Backups (do they take a back up every day?)
• Speed (that’s difficult to know in advance, but reviews and forum comments can help)
• WordPress Installation (do they install WordPress, is there a 1-click-install option?)
• Security (some companies offer better security then others)
• Pricing (prices can vary a lot!)

Because there are so many companies, I created a short list of web hosting companies which are known for hosting a WordPress blog or site.

Before you take a look at this list, I also want you to give you 1 advice: write down what YOU need and then compare all the features of the web companies. For example, some companies are cheap if you host 1 domain, but charge a lot if you want to host multiple domains on your hosting. While others offer that option for free…

When doing my research for this article, I was amazed of the extra costs some companies charge. Basically, if it’s cheap, you just get the basics and you pay a lot for extra opions. Just don’t expect to get a Bentley for the price of a Volkswagen .

Basic WordPress Hosting

Bluehost

• Starting at $6,95 / month (36 month account)
• .com domain name: 1 free domain the first year, $11,95 / year after that
• Shared web hosting only
• Free 1-Click Script Installs
• 24/7 support through chat, e-mail and telephone

Visit www.bluehost.com for more information or check the full pricing table here.

Hostgator

• Starting at $3,96 / month (3 year contract)
• .com domain name: $15
• Shared web hosting, VPS or dedicated server
• One-click WordPress installer
• 24/7 support through phone, live chat and email

Visit www.hostgator.com for more information.

Godaddy

• Starting at $3,74 / month (3 year contract)
• .com domain name: $11,99
• Shared web hosting, VPS, dedicated server, cloud hosting and managed hosting
• One-click WordPress installer
• 24/7 support through phone and email

Visit GoDaddy for more information.

Professional WordPress Hosting

Dreamhost

• 2 week free trial
• Starting at $8,95 / month (2 year contract with prepayment)
• .com domain name: 1 free domain ($ 9,95 for contracts less then a year or additional domain names)
• Shared web hosting, VPS or dedicated server
• One-click software installation
• 24/7 support, depending on your hosting plan (premium support costs extra)

Visit www.dreamhost.com for more information or check the full pricing table here.

Vps.net

• Powerful hosting
• Starting at $20 / month
• .com domain name: no information found
• Shared cloud hosting, cloud servers
• One-click WordPress installer
• 24/7 support through phone, Twitter and email

Visit VPS.NET for more information.

Managed WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress hosting is an excellent choice if you:

• really don’t have any technical knowledge
• don’t want to care about updates, upgrades, security…
• want to focus on the content of your blog and not on the maintenance

Page.ly

• Fully managed WordPress hosting
• Automatic updates of the WordPress core & plugins
• Enhanced security
• Starting at $19,95 / month
• .com domain name: no information found
• Cloud hosting
• Quick 2 minute setup
• 24/7 support

Visit Page.ly WordPress Hosting for more information.

WordPress hosting: Conclusion

As you can see there are many companies offering WordPress hosting. I can only advise you to compare between the different hosts and the different packages they offer. I know, this is a lot of work, but hosting is a very important issue of your blog or web site! That’s why I already created a small list with companies offering WordPress hosting.

Determining What to Test

A good rule of thumb is to test all elements of your email campaign – call to actions, subject line, images, time of delivery – to create the most effective campaign possible. With that said, it’s best to test one element at a time. This way there is no question in your mind as to what caused an increase as that variable was isolated. 


Analyzing the Subject Line

Subject lines have the potential to resonate with an audience, and marketers spend alot of time constructing the right ones to aide in this effort. In generating subject lines that inspire clicks, consider the following: Specific vs general.

It’s often thought of as beneficial to have your subject line be as specific as possible. In a saturated web, being direct is a way to stand out. This doesn’t necessarily ring true in all cases. “Ring in the New Year” could be just as effective as “Sale starts Dec. 31st.” In this case it’s best to test both a general and specific approach to email subject lines to determine which meets the demands of your audience.

Create a Deadline

We tend to respond quickly when we know there’s a deadline to meet. This same practice can be applied to your email newsletter headlines. Examples may be adding a ship-by-date to your subject line, like “Only 3 more days to get guaranteed shipping by Christmas!” and compare it against a date-less one, like “Get guaranteed shipping by Christmas.”

From Line

Let your subscribers know who the email newsletter is from by experimenting with different subject lines. For instance, try incorporating your name into the form field, or simply listing the company. Be sure to experiment to see which gets the most open rates.

Time of Delivery

Will subscribers respond more favorably to email sent in the morning or late afternoon? Open rate may vary depending on when the email is sent out, so run a test to determine what the best time.

Call to Action

The call to action plays a hugely important role in users into conversions. In your testing, try different sizes, colors, and text in determining which inspires the most action.

Layout, Colors, and Format

This should be easy if you’re working within existing brand guidelines, but try variations in your testing to see which combination elicits the most interaction.

Offers/Discounts

Not sure how many offers to include in your newsletter, or stumped about how to present discounts? A/B testing will give you a glimpse into how many offers should be included, as well as the best method for wording discounts: “30% off” versus “Save $40″, for instance.

Conclusion

To see the true value email marketing holds its best to set up some tests and monitor the results. The advice laid out in this article may increase the overall performance of your campaign and drive up sales and conversions. You’ll also have the satisfaction of knowing your campaigns are meeting the expectations of your subscribers. What do you have to lose? Give a/b testing a shot to see how it works for you.

About the Author:

Brad Weitz, Director of Client Services, Maxymiser, Inc.

Formerly the Vice President of Operations for Autonomy Optimost, Brad has been at the cutting edge of online marketing for over 8 years. Now Brad has joined Maxymiser, Inc. where he develops and oversees all client relationships with a 360-degree digital marketing strategy for improving content optimization, increasing website conversion rates and producing outstanding marketing ROI.

WordPress 3 Cookbook differs a lot from other WordPress books. Most books are written to read from the first page to the last page. This book offers answers to particular questions, called recipes. For example, if you want to include an image gallery in your blog, this book tells you which plugin to use and how to use it in a couple of pages.

Who This Book Is For

In the first place, WordPress 3 Cookbook aims for WordPress users who just started with WordPress. If you’re blog is running and you know how to write post, but you still have a lot of questions about which plugins are best to install, this book is perfect for you.

But also experienced users who are comfortable with WordPress can learn new things, or how to do things better. Especially the manual code changes (for example) could be very interesting. If you’re an experienced user, just take a look at the table of contents to see if WordPress 3 Cookbook for you.

WordPress 3 Cookbook Content

WordPress 3 Cookbook is devided in 9 chapters:

• Chapter 1: The WordPress Cook’s Tools
• Chapter 2: Installing and Customizing Themes
• Chapter 3: Working with Plugins and Widgets
• Chapter 4: Customizing Content Display
• Chapter 5: Building Interactivity and Community
• Chapter 6: Implementing Online Sales and Advertising
• Chapter 7: Making an SEO Friendly Site
• Chapter 8: Enhancing Usability and Accessibility
• Chapter 9: Managing Maintenance and Improving Security

What You Will Learn From This Book :

• Turn any free WordPress theme into a powerful and polished premium theme by changing colors and fonts, inserting your custom logo, and more
• Learn how plugins and widgets work, and how you can create your own
• Integrate popular services into your site including Twitter, facebook, and FeedBurner
• Learn proven techniques to attract more readers and comments
• Incorporate advertisements into your RSS feed and add a shopping cart to your site
• Tips and tricks to secure your site and optimize it for SEO

What I like about this book

This “hands on” book is written in clear language and is very accessible. The idea of recepis is great: they always start with a problem and then a solution is offered. Step by step you’ll learn how to implement the solution and most recipes end with related recipes or more information.

In most cases the solution is a plugin. So after reading this book you’ll know which plugins to use. Some solutions also offer code changes. If you have some php knowledge, you’ll see this is very easy to do.

You can read the book from beginning till the end and it won’t bore you. Thanks to the recipes, there’s a lot of variation. But you can also choose to read the recipes you’re interested in.

Conclusion

WordPress 3 Cookbook reads very easy and fast. In short, this is the book I needed 2 years ago when I just started with WordPress. I spent hours and hours searching for information about which plugins I should install. This book handles most of them. I can only highly recommend WordPress 3 Cookbook to anyone who wants to get more out of WordPress.

Two readers contacted me with the message that there were some changes in the newest version of Artisteer (thank you for that Lee and Pete!). The “problem” is that my solution to resolve the Artisteer 3 header issue doesn’t work anymore in Artisteer 3.1. Luckily, Artisteer provides us a built-in solution now.

Choosing the header tags in Artisteer 3.1

Before you proceed, be sure to:

• create a theme in Artisteer 3
• export that theme and install it in your WordPress installation
• activate that theme

Select “Theme options” under “Appearance” in the left menu. Scroll to the bottom of that page and you’ll see the following options:

The H1-tag is one of the most important tags of your page. This is one of the first things Google looks for when indexing a page. Each page may only contain 1 H1-tag, so be think twice before you assign the H1-tag. If you don’t know what to select, just select the same as I did in the image above (this will put your article title between H1-tags, which is best for SEO).

Click the “Save changes” button, that’s all you have to do!

Conclusion

Artisteer is a great tool. It’s so easy to create professional looking templates. However, there was 1 really big downside in my opinion, and that was that out-of-the-box the blog title (and not the article title) was between H1-tags. Finally this problem is solved in the newest version, Artisteer 3.1.

Important note, you must have installed qTranslate first!

1. Translate Your Widget Using the qTranslate Tags

The first option is by using the tags. For example:

This is very simple, just add the tags for every language  you need and write the text between these tags.

Translating the title won’t work this way, therefore you need the 2nd option:

2. Translate Your Widget Using the Widget Logic Plugin

First download and install Widget Logic.

Once installed and activated, you’ll see that you have an extra field at the bottom of your widgets, called “Widget Logic”. You can use this field to add a condition of when the Widget must be shown.

Here you can also add the code to show the widget depending on the language your visitor chose:

The code filled in in this field is:

qtrans_getLanguage()==’en’

Don’t forget to save the widget!

Conclusion

Translating your widgets is an important part of translating your blog or web site. Thanks to the qTranslate tags or the Widget Logic plugin, translating the text inside your widgets is very easy!

1. NextGen Gallery Tutorial for Beginners (February 2011 – 8,396 page views)

2. How To Add a jQuery Datepicker To Your Contact Form 7 (June 2011 – 7,349 page views)

3. The Ultimate Guide To Use WordPress As a CMS (February 2011 – 5,034 page views)

4. Contact Form 7 Step By Step Tutorial (May 2011 – 3,290 page views)

5. How to Turn WordPress into a CMS in 4 Simple Steps (January 2011 – 3,046 page views)

6. How to Configure WPML Multi Language Plugin (February 2011 – 2.748 page views)

7. 13 Best New Features of Artisteer 3 Exposed (June 2011 – 2,733 page views)

8. Artisteer 3 Review (July 2011 – 2,276 page views)

9. Step By Step Guide to Create a WordPress Theme With Artisteer (March 2011 – 1,906 page views)

10. Using GTranslate to Translate Your WP Blog With Google Translate (March 2011 – 1,753 page views)

Let’s start with the begin. I bought the domain name www.wordpressninja.com in december 2010 from an Australian guy. In January 2011 I started blogging on wordpressninja.com as you know it today. In that time I had between 15 and 25 visits a day! When I look to my last month’s stats, then I see I have around 280 visits a day! So that’s a nice improvement, but I want to do much better in 2012.

The focus of 2011

The focus of 2011 was creating a blog with quality articles and good SEO. Today, 68 articles are online and 78% of my visitors comes through search engines. Although 68 articles might not seem a lot (and maybe it isn’t), for me this is much. I wrote around 60 articles this year, and that’s not bad because I have a full time job and a little web development company.

The focus of 2012

Now I have a solid base, it’s time to go for more visitors. That’s why I’m preparing a PDF tutorial that will be available as a free download. The main goal of that is collecting email addresses which I’ll need for my weekly newsletters later on. And of course, I still will try to write around 50-60 articles this year. Next to that I’m also looking forward to great guest articles.

Some stats

Google PageRank: 4

Total amount of visitors in 2011: 51,904

Total amount of page views in 2011: 79,366

Total income of 2011: around $ 450 (but costs were much higher so it’s not that I’m making any profit)

At first, to be stated: the form that displays your products and allows you to receive payment can be a dedicated order form or even a simple contact form. What’s important is just to have the integration at hand with the form builder you use, so that you won’t need to personally contact the payment processors and set up the coding of your forms. That would require more time and effort that you may be willing to give on this.

We are now going to cover the stages of creating a simple WordPress contact form with order fields and payment integration. To keep things simple, we are going to name it “order form” from now on. Just 3 steps that give you a small piece of embeddable code and we’re good to go!

For posting any type of form on your blog, first you need to install the 123ContactForm plugin for WordPress.

Install the 123 Contact Form plugin for WordPress

Step 1

Download the 123ContactForm plugin for WordPress (from the plugins directory).

Step 2

Install the plugin to your WordPress database:

• unzip and move the downloaded folder 123contactform-for wordpress into your wordpress/wp-content/plugins directory;
• access your WordPress dashboard -> Plugins tab -> click on the Activate button for the plugin named 123ContactForm for WordPress.

Create Your WordPress Form With Payment Integration

Granted Yaro made this comment back in 2005, but if you look at affiliate marketing products being produced today, opinions haven’t changed much. You’re still encouraged to create affiliate websites targeting low to moderately competitive topics.

Don’t get me wrong, the idea makes sense. Create a website around something low key such as building dog houses, cordless drills or HDMI cables and write some content, build a few links and make a couple bucks. Rinse and repeat. Simple….right?

Sure, it’s simple. But I can think of more cons to building these types of websites than pros:

• Low income – Either the commissions are low or the traffic is so low that you don’t make that many sales.
• Not a long term strategy – It’ll be hard to earn trust with a thin affiliate site which will impact the number of leads or sales you generate.
• Not Google friendly – The recent Panda updates have punished sites like these — sites that have few page, or have tons of redundant pages that offer nothing of value to the reader.

So while the strategy works, I think the benefits of targeting more competitive niches far outweigh those of lesser competitive niches.

When the Pie is Bigger, It’s Easier to Get a Slice of It

The thing about targeting a competitive niche, like web hosting, is that the overall money pie is big — it’s huge. It’s dense too. What I mean by dense is that you can have a smaller slice of the web hosting niche compared to a niche like “how to build dog houses,” but because there is so much money in the hosting niche the slice is worth more.

Think of it this way: say you can generate 100 visitors to a hosting website everyday. Your site converts at 1% and each sale is worth $100 (so your site makes $100). Another blog that you own that reviews dog collars generates 500 people a day and converts at 5%. The sales, however, are only worth $1 each. Which would you rather have?

The choice should be simple. While the dog collar niche is easier for generating traffic and making sales, you still make $75 less per day than the hosting site. That small slice in the hosting niche is simply worth more.

Competition Forces You to Be Creative

Jumping into a difficult niche will force you to be creative. There were 21.4 million websites launched in 2010 — that’s nearly 30,000 new websites per day. Not all of these websites will be competition, nor will many of them live longer than a couple of months, but there will be a few sites that will put the effort in to standout. So you need to, too. Whether that’s creating all videos when other sites use plain text, or coming up with your own images or simply talking from experience, it’s got to be something. Otherwise you’ll get lost in all the other “noise.”

Easier to Come Up with Content Ideas (or Anything Else)

How many content ideas can you come up with for building dog houses or flight simulation games? Unless you’re an avid dog house builder or flight simulator junkie, probably not a lot. Worse yet, your content won’t be any different than the other guys that are following the same strategy. And how do you expect that to please Google?

Larger and more competitive niches are easier. Granted, you may know just as much about web hosting or dating as you do building dog houses (little or nothing), but there is more information on the internet about web hosting, losing weight or dating that you can learn from, and then use to come up with your own opinions (aka unique content).

There Are More Products to Promote.

Competitive niches will have more products that you can promote. Not just that, but you’ll find more opportunities too, whether it’s in the form of white label products, multiple tiers, backend sales and/or recurring income.

Don’t get me wrong, you can definitely jump into an easier niche and find a product, or even create your own. But then you have to ask yourself — is it really worthwhile? Is there even enough people interested in this kind of product?

Those are the same questions you need to ask yourself before you start a site in a non-competitive niche. In many cases I think you’ll find that for the same amount of work, you’ll go much further, and make more money, in a competitive niche.

About the author

Matt is an internet marketer and freelancer. His current project is Website Mechanics, a website that will teach you how to work on your own website. Sign up to the Website Mechanics newsletter to get post updates, website tricks and tips, and other neat stuff.