MailChimp Plugins

I searched the web and found seven free plugins that integrate with MailChimp. They include:

• MialChimp List Subscribe Form
• Newsletter Sign-Up
• Nmedia MailChimp Widget
• YIKES, Inc. Easy MailChimp Extender
• OptinCrusher
• And more

I also found two premium plugins, including OptinSkin and WPSubscribers.

Each plugin is reviewed and rated with plenty of screenshots to show you the type of setup and configuration options you’ll encounter, plus the MailChimp info you’ll need to make them work.

MailChimp Form Code, List ID, and API Key

The first section of the report shows you how to get the raw form code from MailChimp and how to strip it down to the essentials you will need to create your own custom forms.

You’ll also find sections on how to locate your List IDs and API Key that are needed to integrate with each plugin.

Get the Free Report Now

MailChimp Signup Forms, Plugins, and Widgets Review is a zero obligation report, meaning that it really is free. You don’t have to sign up for anything, just download it. So, what are you waiting for? Go get it!

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

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Hello Happy Site Owners!

Do you enjoy Tips Tuesday? Share it with your friends!

WordPress Tips

Thinking of redesigning your site or want to know if it measures up to current browser standards? Tom Ewer has a nice post on The Truth About Browser Compatibility, and What You Need To Do over on WPMU.org. I was happy to see a list of current popular screen sizes. And, he gives you easy ways to see what your viewers are using.

WordPress Plugins

Loved this post from Tom Ewer on WPMU.org about one of the new features on the revamp of the free WordPress plugins repository, which is a way to check on how well supported the plugin is. Read Free Plugin Support – How to Know Who is There to Help for a balanced take on what the numbers mean and the sometimes unrealistic expectations of what plugin users demand related to something that they never paid a dime for, and probably never will.

The links below are to the plugin developer’s page, but you can find most if not all of these plugins in the WordPress plugins repository.

Recently Updated
The Backup to Dropbox plugin was recently updated with a major overhaul. I’m going to be checking into this to see how it well it works. I’ll also be in touch with the developer to see how he’s now getting around the transfer limit that Dropbox imposes.

Redirection is the best plugin for redirecting folks from one site to another. I use it in the main nav of BlogAid to send folks from the main site to the WordPress video tutorials and vice versa.

If you moved from WordPress.com to a self-hosted WordPress.org site, you may have taken Jetpack with you, which was recently updated. It was great on the WP.com version because they limited the 3rd party plugins that you could use. But, honestly, now that you’re in control of your site, get the individual plugins that do a better job.

Plugins to Check Out
Google+ is playing a bigger role in your site rank these days. And, it’s especially important since the Penguin update to let Google know that you are the original author of a post. There are a lot of was to accomplish both of these tasks. One is by using the AuthorSure plugin.

NOTE: Before you install this or any similar plugin, check to see if something on your site setup is already providing this service, such as your theme’s built-in author resource box, the theme’s SEO functions, or an SEO plugin you already have. If you don’t know what your theme functions and plugins do, get the get the 20 Point Site Inspection and Tune Up and KNOW what’s going on under the hood of your site.

Blog Tips

Excellent advice from Michelle Linn on How to Make Content Marketing A Habit on the Content Marketing Institute blog.

This post on Blogging Tips is worth a read as it’s a balanced assessment of How Important Is a Strict Publishing Schedule for My Blog? There are a couple of links to other posts in there that you’ll want to read too.

Remember, no one relates solely to your website. They relate to the person writing it. Jeff Sexton’s spot on post, Content Marketing Requires a Point of View on Web Marketing Today does a great job of illustrating this point.

SEO Tips

This is exciting. Google Introduces Webmaster Academy. As the article states, “Webmaster Academy provides practical and easy-to-understand lessons for beginner webmasters to help you improve your site with topics like getting your site in our index, providing search engines with helpful information about your video and image content, and understanding Webmaster Tools features.”

I don’t know that I agree with all of the ideas given in this post on WPBeginner about what makes a theme SEO friendly or not. But I do agree with the conclusions that site owners should rely on plugins and on-page tactics for it instead, especially the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. Read for yourself Why WordPress Themes Should Not Have SEO Options and Why They Do and decide for yourself.

Site load speed counts with Google these days. Here are 8 Free Tools for Testing Website Speed from the nice folks at Web Design Ledger.

Do you know if you’ve been hit by the Penguin update? Here’s how to check and what to do if your search rankings were hurt from the nice folks at HubSpot.

Marketing Tips

I hope you take this seriously because it is spot on. A Marketing Secret That May Change What You Do Tomorrow. Every other day I’m helping someone clean up their site from going after all that glitters.

Carole’s story is one that site owners of all levels will find both powerful and inspirational. In her original online business she worked with WordPress, but found it difficult or time consuming to manage to create a site that was reflective of her core business skills. And, it wasn’t attracting enough of her ideal client base.

In this candid interview you’ll hear what lead Carole to rebrand and reimage her online presence, and how she created compelling content and a site that now gets found, read, and acted upon. During this process Carole redefined her target audience and created a site that catered specifically to their needs, and it worked. She was able to capture more qualified, targeted leads in the first month with the new site than in the previous year on her old site.

Listen to Carole’s story now.

As the owner of Seek Social Media, Carole is passionate about helping business owners leverage the power of social media to grow their companies, and connect and engage with their target clients. She has a BA in Journalism and Advertising and Public Relations and an MS in Human Services and Counseling. Her professional background is in the entertainment, education, and non-profit arenas, with over 10 years of marketing experience. Carole is also a founding member of the Global Social Media Managers Association.

Ready to revamp your site?
See how BlogAid can help you

Hello Happy Site Owners!

Be sure to follow BlogAid on your favorite social media site so you can stay right on top of what you need to know. Just click the links in the sidebar or in the author resource box at the bottom of the post.

Featured

The purpose of a business website is to either sell directly or support what you sell. This is a super post on KissMetrics to Help Your Website Sell More: 11 Overlooked Page Elements That Drive Online Sales. These tips work great for landing pages too.

WordPress Plugins

Memphis BBQ goes great with a side of plugins. Well, at least BBQ made the WordPress guys happy while they were refreshing the plugin directory.

The links below are to the plugin developer’s page, but you can find most if not all of these plugins in the WordPress plugins repository.

Recently Updated

Plug up WordPress SEO by Yoast was just updated. This is one of my top fave plugins. It just beats the pants off everything else when configured and used properly.

Blog Tips

Stanford on Pushing Social is one of my fave bloggers. He’s got a new series of posts you’ll want to check out on How to Grow a Spectacular Blog Even if You Have a Day Job.

The money is in the list – that’s the rule of thumb these days. Here’s a nice guest post by Christine Brady on Kikolani about Why Bloggers Need to Build a Subscriber List.

How to Plan Your Blog Posts a Year in Advance is a nice post by Laura Roeder on Content Marketing Institute that will get your creative juices flowing for a long time.

SEO

With the new Penguin updates in place, you can no longer afford to let folks to get away with scraping your content. A Beginners Guide to Preventing Blog Content Scraping in WordPress on WP Beginner will give you several good ideas for stopping current scraping and prevent it in the future.

So glad I never participated in sketchy backlink schemes or gimmicks. And, that I always give proper attribution to the authors and sites displayed in the Tips Tuesday posts. This Penguin thing is about to get hairy. Read In the Wake of Penguin Could You Be Sued for Linking to Others on Search Engine Land.

Here goes Google un-leveling the playing field again in favor of its own products. First it was showing preference in search results to anything that had been +1′d. Now it’s a preference for any site that favors a special feature for Chrome users. Basically, it makes more pages load instantly on sites that are set to trigger The Instant Page feature in Chrome, but only if users have it turned on. It measures the speed load time on the user’s end. This is whack. Your site’s ranking could now be determined by what browser the viewer is using and whether they have a feature turned on. Really, Google?!?

Here’s the link for how to trigger pre-rendering. It’s sort of in beta, and looks like they are trying to see if they can distinguish it from the way Firefox speeds up load times.  And now that Chrome Has Overtaken Internet Explorer as the Web’s Most Used Browser they have a real case for it.

Now you can see your offsite conversations on social media via the new Google Analytics Backlink Report. Note that they are lumping backlinks and social triggers together.

Marketing

Scott Langdon has a super nice post on Higher Visibility about the Best Practices for Creating the Perfect Call to Action. The top ten tips he cites really do work.

More Tips

Do you have videos on YouTube? Perhaps you’d like to connect them to your G+ account and vice versa. This post from Video Leads Online will help. How YouTube and Google Plus Connect. Notice the section near the bottom indicating this is not as seamless as it ought to be. It’s Google, what else is new?

I read this, re-read it, then started checking around to see if it’s a common hack. I’m all about prevention, but wonder if this is almost to the point of overkill. I’ll let you decide. 8 Google Analytics Features. Skip down to part about creating a test profile first. Then read this on protecting your Google Analytics with Filters.

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

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About WP Tables

The WP Tables plugin provides an interface where you can build many types of tables without knowing HTML or CSS coding. You can customize the colors of every row and control the look of the text. The plugin comes with a large set of small icons like check marks, sales tags, and purchase buttons that can easily be integrated into the table as well. It also has the option to include HTML5 code to make a table section seem to float up a bit when hovered over.

Ease of Use

I’m an old coder and have built many tables from scratch. So, the user interface terminology didn’t throw me for a loop. But I suspect it would for folks who are not versed in HTML. Plus, it’s a little odd how it requires you to work differently with rows and columns. Equally odd is how it jumps back up a level in the process once you save the section you’re working on.

In other words, the user interface has a learning curve and has a few quirks unique to this plugin. Once you get used to all that, it’s fairly easy.

The plugin does have a few video tutorials, but they are more feature-oriented than step-by-step instruction.

The Result

Once I got over the learning curve and quirks, I was able to customize a large table to my heart’s content. You can see an example of the table I created for the WordPress Training packages below.

However, I was never able to get the HTML5 feature to work properly, which a real disappointment because that gave the table a cool factor.

The Errors

After a few days of using the WP Tables plugin, I began to get the following errors every time I uploaded a new image to the Media Library.

Warning: session_start() [function.session-start]: Cannot send session cache limiter – headers already sent (output started at blogaid/wp-content/plugins/wp-tables/admin/main.php:197) in blogaid/wp-content/plugins/wp-tables/main.php on line 33

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at blogaid/wp-content/plugins/wp-tables/admin/main.php:197) in blogaid/wp-admin/async-upload.php on line 26

One of my clients who also uses the plugin was getting the same error and had contacted the developer. She initially received a reply from him right away that he was checking into the problem, but then never heard back again.

I also contacted the developer about it and have yet to receive any reply. The plugin’s site has no changelog page, so I don’t even know if they are working on this issue or if others are having the same problem, although I suspect they are.

As far as I can tell, these warnings are not causing any problems on my site and do not keep me from uploading my images.

Wrap Up

WP Tables does build complex tables that can be customized far better than any other plugin I have seen. The extra icon/graphics bundle is especially nice. But, the user interface is too complex not to have better tutorials. And, the lack of response and support for warnings does not inspire confidence.

Bottom line, this is a premium plugin. I would expect the previously mentioned shortcomings from a free plugin, but not from one that has a price tag.

Since I’m an old coder, I can just as easily build my own tables and drop use of this plugin. I can no longer recommend it to my clients now because of the lack of support and lack of good tutorials.

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

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Backup Backup Backup

I simply can’t stress this point enough. Without a solid backup that you know how to use properly, if you’re site goes haywire that’s it, game over. As a site owner, you’re primary responsibility is to protect your investment.

Backing up your site is not a place to scrimp. It HAS to be right or it’s useless.

Here’s a free report with every plugin and storage solution worth knowing about that will allow you to choose the best backup solution for your site. Download How to Backup Your WordPress Site. It’s a zero-obligation download.

Don’t have time to read a report and configure everything? Fine. Hire me to set your site up with the exact same backup solution I use on BlogAid.

There is no such thing as a bullet-proof site. You can do everything right and be the lucky first person that a hacker hits once they find a WordPress or plugin vulnerability. It takes a few folks reporting the problem before it’s fixed for everyone via an update.
You MUST backup your site on a regular basis.

Protect Your WordPress Login

Would you leave the doors and windows to your house wide open all the time? Of course not. Then why do you leave the front door of your site open to hackers? Here, read this Protect Your WordPress Website with a Strong Login and put your login to the test. The least secure of the ones I use would take 71,000 years to crack. See how yours measures up.

And, by all means, take a minute to install this one little plugin called Login Lockdown. It locks hackers out for about an hour after three failed attempts.

Update Update Update

You must keep WordPress, your themes, and your plugins up-to-date because each one of them is a potential security hole in your site. In fact, that’s what most of those updates fix, instead of adding new features.

Remember at the start of this post when I mentioned someone contacted me because they updated a plugin and their site went whack? Well, it only took us a few minutes to fix that problem and I’ll probably do a blog post or video on it soon.

Check Your Site for Other Security Holes

There are at least five major areas where hackers can enter your site. Some involve WordPress and related items, and some involve the files in your root directory and the way your database was set up. If you used a 1-click installation for WordPress, I can guarantee that your site can be hacked. Read WordPress 1-click Installation is not Secure.

Do you know what all of your plugins do? Do you know if any of them are in conflict with one another? Are they configured properly?

If you’re not absolutely positive that you have the answers to these questions, it’s likely you have at least one problem on your site that is either offering a security hole, or confusing the heck out of Google, or slowing down your site.

Get a Site Review and Evaluation

Get a 20-point Site Inspection and Tune Up for $25. It only takes half an hour and you’ll see every single thing I’m checking. I don’t need any passwords to do it either. That’s seriously cheap peace of mind to know how your site’s doing under the hood.

Remember me saying I helped someone fix that plugin scrambling problem? It was easy to fix, but it scared her silly because she knew she didn’t have her backup and everything squared away on her site. That’s when she got serious about wanting to know the health of her whole site and she signed up for the 2 hour inspection session that checks everything, including SEO. (Just click on the Schedule Now button and you’ll have a choice to do the 30 minute or 2 hour site review.)

Unfortunately for the other person who contacted me, the site was hosed and there was no choice but to start over from scratch. That kind of thing breaks my heart because it can be prevented. Don’t put it off. Rest assured that the database, root files, and WordPress are all installed securely now. (See Site Setup)

Plus, I want to be very clear that I don’t run a site support service for the general public. Both of the folks who contacted me are colleagues. I support my training clients fully because they’ve been through my WordPress classes and know how to stay out of trouble on their sites. Plus, they have solid themes and plugins. It’s all about prevention.

How’s Your Site?

Tell us about your site’s health and the measures you take to keep it happy and secure.

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn

Hello Happy Site Owners!

Featured

Since you run a super quality site you may think the Google Penguin won’t get you. Think again and look at what happened to one of the best sites on the web that was unknowingly being bolstered by spammy sites. When Google devalued those links the legit site suffered – big time. Read WordPress, Penguin, Google and Matt Cutts’ take on WPMU.org Be sure to read through the comments too. And here’s another from Higher Visibility asking Google’s Penguin Update was Supposed to Clean the Web, Right? You can see the actual tests they ran and the mixed results. Finaly, one more from Denise Gabbard on Geeks4Share to ensure your site won’t get hit with a Penguin penalty. Read Google Penguin – Fix it and Forget it.

WordPress Plugins

Good news! The folks who monitor the WordPress plugin repository are making more changes. A few months ago they started removing plugins that hadn’t been updated in a long time. Now they are putting warnings on plugins that were initially rejected from being listed, but you might be able to download elsewhere, stating the reason you don’t want them (such as those that include malware). See this post on Sucuri titled Official WordPress Plugin Directory Forcing Plugin Updates for more info.

Blog Tips

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income has two back-to-back posts everyone in business online should read. The first is If I Had to Start Over, this is What I’d do Differently and the second post is What I Know I Did Right.

Authors, this is a must-read if you plan to actually sell books too. Why aren’t More Writers Blogging? by Nina Amir on Write Nonfiction Now! Listen to my recent interview with Nina on How to Blog a Book and more.

Real gem from Linda Dessau on Content Mastery Guide that Done is Better Than Perfect but Good is Still Better Than Bad.

A good rule of thumb with blogging is to make your content easy to scan. Bullet points are a great way to do that if you use them properly. Beth Fox tells you how to Make Your Content Pop with These 5 Bullet Point Basics on Content Marketing Institute.

If you ever considered blogging a book, you’ve got to read this post by Joseph Foley. He absolutely outdid himself on this one. It has so many tips and pointers that I found inspiration for using them for other things. Read How to Organize an Online Book in WordPress (Novel or Non-Fiction) on WPMU.org.

SEO Tips

Google Webmaster Tools has done a little spring cleaning. See the new Navigation, Dashboard and Homepage.

Claire McDermott shares her Interview with Google’s Sam Sebastian About the Future of Search on Content Marketing Institute.

Dave Clements believes that most of the SEO advice out there is over-the-top hype and he put his money where his blog is. in has recent post on Do it With WordPress, he tells you What You Really Need to Know about WordPress and SEO.

Marketing Tips

What is the purpose of your site? If it’s to generate leads, you may want to think about changing your call to action. On FlyteBlog, rich Brooks tells you How I Increased Conversion Rate 50% in 30 Days.

Kaya Singer has a nice guest post on the Action Plan site titled 5 Tips to Create Freebies that Rock and it really works. I followed this advice for a free report that brings me all kinds of traffic and leads.

More Tips

To avoid getting ripped off, you need to properly vet the coach or expert you plan to hire. A lot of my clients are second site owners and I spend a good deal of time with them undoing the damage their original site has suffered from following bad advice. Here’s a super post on American Express’ Open Forum site about the 5 Ways Coaches and Experts can Hurt Your Business. Every word of it is true.

Nice post from email marketing expert Carolyn Nye on 4 Triggered Emails for Business Websites. I’m using the first two. Are you using these tips?

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn

Measuring Your Site’s Success

Here are a few questions you should be asking yourself:

• Is Google indexing your site properly?
• Are you watching your analytics to see who is coming to your site and how they’re finding you?
• What’s generating your traffic?
• Are you getting leads that are converting into clients and buyers?

Let’s take a look at each of these measurements.

Getting Your Site Found

The main goal of a site is to have it found, read, and acted upon. Meeting that goal starts with being found.

You can see how many pages of your site Google has indexed by going to http://www.google.com and then in the search field, type the following:

site: http://www.yoursite.com

Substitute your domain for yoursite.com and leave off the www if you’re not using it.

Keep in mind that it takes Google about three months to fully index your site.

Register Your Site with Google

One of the best ways to ensure your site gets found in search results is to tell Google it exists. Register your site with Google Webmaster Tools. Plus, you’ll get all kinds of extra goodies that go deeper than your standard analytics, including being able to see what sites are linking back to you.

SEO Plugins

I use and recommend the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast to help Google index your site properly. (You can find it in the WordPress Plugin Repository and it’s free.) It simply beats the pants off any other SEO plugin, including the kind that’s built-in to some premium themes. And, it includes an XML sitemap that makes it easier for Google to index your site.

(Be careful. If you’re already using another SEO plugin and a plugin for a site map, you’ll want to ensure that you transfer the info from them over and then deactivate them properly. If you’re using All-in-One SEO Pack, here’s a post from Yoast on how to migrate to his WordPress SEO plugin.)

There is no SEO plugin that will help your site if you don’t configure it properly.
So, no matter what you use, keep up with changes in Google’s preferred ways
of doing things and set your plugin properties accordingly.

Your Stats

It also takes about three months for a new site to build up enough analytic data to see trends in your traffic and to know what your audience is responding to most. Plus, if you make any major changes to your site, it takes another three to six months to see their full affects in your analytics.

If you’re not paying attention to your analytics, you’re just shooting blind
with your posting efforts. You need that feedback to tell you what’s working and what’s not.
You also need to know where folks spend time on your site and where they leave it.

I use and recommend the Google Analyticator plugin to all of my clients because it places a module in your WordPress Dashboard that gives you a quick view of your analytics including top referrers and the posts and pages that are getting the most attention. (You can find it in the WordPress Plugin Repository and it’s free.)

No matter which analytics plugin you use, you’ll still need to visit your Google Analytics account to get the full story of what’s happening on your site.

Direct Referrals

Google does not own the Web and they are not the Internet police. But, if you want to be found via search engine results, it’s best to follow their rules. However, a search engine is not the only way to be found.

Participating in other online platforms brings traffic. Engaging folks via social media and in online groups is a great way to get found. The gold standard is by word-of-mouth referral. Until this year, that’s how BlogAid got most of its business leads. But now, referrals from online platforms are overtaking that stat.

Don’t Waste a Year

My clients enjoy hitting the ground running with market-ready content and search engine optimized sites the day they launch. My clients also do the real work of making it happen. They’re not just tip collectors.

If you don’t invest in your online education, you’ll waste at least a year of try-this-try-that and still never reach your site’s full potential. You could spend all of your time chasing rainbows that are no more than generic hype, or you could get help that is tailored to your unique site and audience. Getting a plan and putting it into action is what it takes to have a successful site.

Get the Right Help

Properly vet every coach, expert, and guru you follow or plan to hire to help you with your site. Do the same with every plugin and strategy someone tells you is important or will make your site better. See if it fits with your current plugins or overall strategy.

While there are some basic principles to follow, there is no magic bullet, no generic formula, and no one-size-fits all approach to having a successful site. I spend a LOT of time with my second site clients and site review clients cleaning up the mess that was made by not properly vetting each shiny new thing they added.

Understand what each plugin on your site does. Understand how each marketing strategy fits into the whole. It is the only way to have a successful site.

How’s Your Site Doing?

Are you paying attention to your analytics? Why or why not? Do you know what’s working on your site? Have you been ripped off by pie-in-the-sky promises and gimmicks? Leave a comment and let us know where you are in your site journey.

Are you ready to invest in your success? If you’re serious and ready to become
a confident, successful site owner, I can help you get the solid foundation you need.
See all of the WordPress Training options.

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn

The Best Browser for WordPress

I’m not going to keep you in suspense about my top browser choice. It’s FireFox and here’s why. It works without freaking out. WordPress has some quirks and, as a site owner, you’ll save yourself frustration if you throw some of your logic out the window and just get with WordPress’ way of doing things. Firefox handles the quirks better than any other browser.

Here’s how I know.

Seen It, Done It

I teach WordPress classes to folks all over the globe via secure desktop sharing meaning that I see the client’s screen and it’s like I’m sitting right next to them. They learn by doing on a real WordPress site. It’s far more effective than having them just watch me do things.

Teaching classes this way also means that I have to interface with every type and level of browser on their computers.

By far, the most stable browser of them all, on both Windows and Mac, is Firefox.

The Next Best Browser

The next most stable browser is Safari on Mac. It can handle just about everything WordPress throws at it and only becomes unstable when you jump back and forth about ten times on the same tab when viewing/editing a page.

(There are several ways to view/edit pages and some work better than others. See the short video tutorial on How to View WordPress Pages and Posts.)

The Worst Browser for WordPress

The worst browser for managing WordPress is one that needs updating. An old browser is not going to handle new features well and will become unstable quicker.

If you’re using an older browser, the moment you log in to WordPress and land on your Dashboard, it may boldly display a module stating that you have an outdated browser. It will show up where the Right Now module is in the top left. If you see that notice, update your browser.

The Worst All-Around Browser

The worst browser on the planet is Internet Explorer, and has been for years. It is the bane of every site designer and WordPress has even cut off support for older versions. If you’re using it for anything, you’re missing way too much of what the Web has to offer. Yeah, it’s a pain to get to know a new browser, but you’ll get over that quickly when you see so many more fun things on the Internet. Then you’ll wonder what took you so long to switch.

Other Reasons to Use FireFox

Most all of the web designers I know use FireFox because of the super duper add-ons that aid in figuring out how a site is put together. Those little insights go way beyond viewing source code.

There are also add-ons to make managing social media platforms a breeze too.

A Word About Chrome

Chrome has a lot of nice features and nifty add-ons. However, I found that it was not as stable for me as FireFox. But then, I try to blow up sites as part of my job testing them. Unfortunately, I’ve also seen it become unstable during training classes too often to recommend it either.

What Browser Do You Use?

Some folks are very attached to the browser they have for personal use. If that’s not FireFox, then they only use it for managing their site. So, you don’t have to switch permanently if you don’t want to.

What browser do you use? Have you tried other browsers? Why do you like the one you use better?

There’s a difference in having a site and having a successful site.
Get the WordPress foundation you need to be a confident, successful site owner.

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn

Hello Happy Site Owners!

Featured

From the horse’s mouth. 53 Highlights of Search Quality Changes in April posted on Google’s Inside Search blog. Among them:

• Anchor bug fix (it’s about time!)
• Improvements to local navigational searches
• Improvements to how search terms are scored in ranking
• More text from the beginning of the page in snippets. (This is huge. Hope you’re using a good plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast to help you take advantage of it in the best way.)
• Improvement in a freshness signal and no freshness boost for low-quality content.
• More concise and/or informative titles.
• Sub-sitelinks” in expanded sitelinks.
• Better ranking of expanded sitelinks.

Visit the post for details on these and more changes.

WordPress Tips

WordPress 3.4 Beta was released, meaning that we’re close to a final version. Watch the video on What’s New in WordPress 3.4 to see the updates.

One of the new under-the-hood features in WordPress 3.4 is the new mobile API. Specifically, support has been added for touch screen devices like iPad and Kindle Fire so you’ll be able to better manage your site on the go. I’ll report more on this after I see it actually work.

WordPress Plugins

The links below are to the plugin developer’s page, but you can find most if not all of these plugins in the WordPress plugins repository.

Recently Updated
Social Login for WordPress lets your users log in and comment via their accounts with popular ID providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, and more. I don’t know if this is compatible with other comment services, so don’t add it willy nilly if you use those.

Blog Tips

I remember when this happened to me. The Shocking Truth About Launching a Writing Career by Jeff Goins.

Authors are familiar with writer’s block. Maybe we should come up with a new phrase for content marketers called topic block. See how to get over it in this post from Grow on What Do I Write About?

Even if you already have a site, this is worth reading to help you stay on target with your goals. 7 Things to Consider Before Creating a Business Website on CSS Reflex.

I guarantee you this has more than three worthwhile tips. From the Client Attraction coach herself, 3 Fast and Easy Ways to Make Client Attraction a Priority.

Need three more good ones? Here you go, from Roger C. Parker on Content Marketing Institute, 3 Tips for Increasing Your Content Productivity.

SEO Tips

Want to know how your competition is doing? Here are 15 Questions to Unravel Your Competitor’s Online Marketing Strategy from super blogger Kristi Hines. It includes links to useful tools too.

Want to know more about SEO? From Amanda DiSilvestro on Blogging Pro, here are the Top 8 SEO Blogs You Should be Reading. I do.

Got a spammy-looking site? The Google Penguin is coming after you.

More Tips

Did you get a message that your site was hacked? Google sent a hack notice to 20,000 site owners recently. These notices come from profile on Google Webmaster Tools.

Did you find this video helpful?
See the WordPress Video Tutorial Course from BlogAid.

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn

Strong Login

There are two elements to your WordPress login and you need to be smart about making both hacker-proof. The first is your username and the other is the password.

Username

If your username is admin, you’ve just given hackers half of the combination to the lock on the front door of your site. If you did the 1-click installation of WordPress, that’s likely how you got admin as your default login. (Read Why the WordPress 1-Click Installation is Not Secure)

There is only one way to change your username and that is to create a new User with a better login and delete the old one. It’s easy to do, but be very careful. There is one critical step in it and if you miss it, you lose all of the posts and pages assigned to the old user. (BlogAid has a video tutorial on the User Profile and how to do this.)

Giving Hackers Clues

Are you advertising to hackers that you’re using admin as the first part of your login? Check your post meta data. It’s just below the post title and displays the by line and the date if you have those enabled. If the by line is admin, you’re advertising to be hacked. (See Invite Hackers and Shun Viewers with Bad Meta Data for examples.)

If you really want to invite hackers in, make few posts or tell folks on your social media sites that you won’t be logging in for a few days. Both things tell hackers you’re not looking at your site and they can break in undetected.

Good Username Examples

Your username needs to be at least eight characters and contain at least one capital letter and one number. You can have more of each, but it needs to contain at least one of each. WordPress is not fond of special characters in the username. Following are a few examples.

• MsBlogAid2
• Gypsy4Rose

Bad Username Traits

• Your name
• Your first initial and last name
• Less than eight characters
• No capitals or numbers

Password

Every password you use anywhere needs to be strong. Hackers use sophisticated algorithm producing software to break passwords. They are very fast and a weak password can be broken in less than a second. Don’t believe it? See for yourself. Go to How Secure is My Password and start typing. Below the input field is a status report that evaluates your password with each character you type. It will take 71,000 years to crack the first password I typed in. (See Good Password Examples below.)

How Passwords are Made Strong

While there might not be much difference to you in a lower case a and an upper case A, there is a huge difference to a password cracker. Each is a different character. The way password cracking software works is to run through all available characters in sequence. It runs through all 52 lower case letters, all 52 upper case letters, all ten numeral characters, and all special characters like #%&! (not necessarily in that order). It has to do this for each character in the password.

The more and different characters you use, the harder the password is to crack.

Good Password Examples

It’s important to mix your password characters, but you need to create something you can remember too. Perhaps switching the number 0 with the letter o or substituting an exclamation point ! for the letter i are choices to consider. Here are a few examples that are all very strong.

• Gold!Rush69 – takes 71,000 years to crack. See, it just doesn’t have to be hard to remember to be strong.
• go!ng4(br0ke – takes 8 billion years to crack
• i8DaWh01eTing – takes 5 trilliion years to crack

Weak Password Traits

• password123 – although it would take 16 years for simple algorithm checkers to crack this password, the more sophisticated ones know to look for common patterns such as a word and then a few numbers. So, it’s not just the length or throwing in a few capitals that make a password strong. Be sure to break up the pattern, just as the ! broke up the pattern in Gold!Rush69.
• Avoid using words and numbers that are connected to you like your name, your pet’s name, your birthday or anniversary, etc.
• If possible, avoid using whole words. Notice that the Gold!Rush69 example uses whole words, which would be far harder to crack if a zero were substituted for the o in Gold, and the u were taken out of Rush.

Change Your WordPress Login Password

Changing your password is very easy. Be sure you keep a copy of it somewhere safe.

From your Dashboard, go to Users. Then click on your User (it will be the only one in the list if you are the sole administrator.) Scroll to the bottom of that page and you’ll find a section titled About Yourself. Just below your bio are fields to enter a new password.

While you’re there, if you haven’t filled in the rest of your User info, see this post on why you should and how to get the most out of it. How to Show Up Everywhere Online Consistently.

Rotate Your Passwords

You might also want to consider changing your password every quarter. I do this for all of my passwords and keep an Excel file with them. FYI, I keep that file on a thumb drive so if my computer gets attacked, they won’t find the master list. I also write the password cryptically. For example, if my password were Gold!Rush69, I might write it in that file as G!R69. So, even if someone gets the file, they still don’t have the password.

I have four master passwords for each type of account such as sites, social media, membership sites, etc. It’s easy to rotate them every quarter and just update the number at the end or the special character. The point is that you change them regularly and you don’t have to make it hard on yourself to be protected.

A Little Extra Insurance

Another thing you might want to add is a little plugin called Login Lockout. After three missed attempts, it locks out that IP address for about an hour. Hackers hit that with their auto-cracking software and move on to an easier target.

How’s Your Site Security?

There’s a lot more to site security than just making your login hacker-proof. If you don’t know whether your site is secure, it probably isn’t. Most of the issues are easy to fix. If you want a review of your security on the front and back end of your site, and a list of exactly what needs attention and what’s okay, it’s fast, easy, and inexpensive to do.

Hello Happy Site Owners!

Featured

Having a site and having a successful site are two different things. New site owners usually start their online adventure by going to a designer who they think has the expertise to help them create a great site. The fact is, and my standing complaint about designers, is how few of them understand online marketing. The truth is, the prettiest site on the planet will not help you make a dime unless you’re selling pretty site designs too.

This post from Small Biz Trends are the Ten Questions Your Web Designer Should Be Asking You if they do understand marketing. And, you’ll need to have the answers before you’re ready to even think about starting a design project because they will help you develop the marketing mindset you need to have a successful site.

This is the way BlogAid teaches too – WordPress fundamentals first, content second, and design last. There is no other way for you to become expertly qualified so that you can confidently participate in your site’s design.

WordPress Tips

If you thought the TimThumb vulnerability was over, think again. If you use it and have not scanned your site for the. Ode virus, you’re still at risk. See the TimThumb Vulnerability Still in the Wild post on WeblogToolsCollection for info and links to scanners.

WordPress Plugins

The links here are to the developer’s home page, but you can find most if not all in the WordPress plugin repository.

Recently Updated
Akismet has been updated. It does a lot more than protect your blog comments from spam. It also scans your contact forms and works in conjunction with other plugins. Here’s the combo I use.

BackWPup is the best of the free backup plugins available. See all of your backup options, including the one I use on BlogAid.

FoxyPress http://www.foxy-press.com/ is the best plugin for those running FoxyCart e-commerce sites.

Plugins to Check Out
Need to list posts from a specific category on a page or other post? Yep, there’s a plugin for that and it uses shortcode. It even has a sidebar widget. See How to List Category Posts in a WordPress Post or Page with Shortcode on WP Beginner. I’m thinking this would be especially helpful for folks who have recipe sites, or tutorials, or even a good way to do that custom archives page I like so much on ProBlogger.

Blog Tips

We’ve all been here. What to do When Nobody Comments on Your Blog by Chris Peterson on Blog Engage.

Are videos part of your marketing mix yet? If you need some help getting started or making them better, or maxing out your SEO, check out this site on YouTube Tips and Tutorials.

Cheryl Pickett has just about the best, and to the point explanation I’ve seen on this topic. Read Are You Selling When You Should be Marketing?

This works. 15 Ways to Repurpose Content and Add More Value from Fabienne Fredrickson on Client Attraction.

FYI, you may also want to see this post on the kind of money Google is releasing to bump up the use of AdWords on YouTube. Google Giving Away $50 Million in Free Advertising to Promote Video AdWords. This is definitely something I’m going to be checking into on both sides by getting free ads and allowing ads on some of my free video tutorials.

SEO Tips

SEO is such a cloak and dagger game sometimes. Every time Google closes an algorithm door they open 5 leaky windows. Now folks are figuring out how to trick rich snippets. For more, see Faking a Breadcrumb Trail to Stand Out on Google from Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land.

Matt Cutts has a short video on How Google Search Works.  As the folks on Search Engine Land say, “Study up. There will be a quiz.”

If you’re taking advantage of rich snippets to improve your SEO, and I hope you are, Google just announced a change to include products. There are star ratings attached to them and I’m betting those correlate directly with hits on G+ and/or local reviews on Google Places.

More Tips

Do you use MailChimp? They just released a new version and 36 new templates to go with it. Do you use templates? I did for a while then went back to plain text. Seems to work better on all devices.

I could hardly believe it when I read this. A few years ago Google purchased FeedBurner, made a few changes to it, and it’s pretty much been stuck in a dark corner ever since. This is the first mention they’ve made of it in I can’t even remember how long. Webmaster Tools Spring Cleaning. If you’re using your site’s raw feed instead of taking it through Feedburner, you’re missing a lot of great opportunities and stats.

How to Make a Video Playlist on YouTube on VidiSEO. You can even create a playlist of your own videos.

If you’re an author, see how to Plan a Book Launch Party for an Ebook from my fave author coach Dana Lynn Smith.

Think ebooks are just for authors? Think again and read How Content Marketers Can Redefine the Ebook on the Content Marketing Institute site.

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn

The Magic Site

Before I tell you what I learned, you may want to go visit the site that Ross used as a case study example in the meeting. It’s http://www.usa-flag-site.org/ and is all about the American flag. This is just one of his sites that help generate his total Adsense revenue.

I’m not going to cut Ross any slack here on the design because that’s what so many site owners think is the most important element. If anything, the case study on this site should prove to you that it’s not.

The site is not on WordPress. It’s a static site, which was common nine years ago when he built it. And, it has the design flavors that were typical then too. There are only about six core pages on the site and a forum that has a slightly more modern design flavor. In other words, it’s a little bit boring compared to today’s standards and trends.

The site doesn’t have pretty permalinks. There’s no opt-in list, no blog, and no social media links to follow the author. In fact, there’s only one indirect reference to Ross at all and that’s his link, in tiny text in the footer, for 2TheTopDesign.

How Ross Makes Money

With such a simple looking site you may be wondering how Ross makes money with it. After all, he’s not offering anything but info on the flag.

Did you notice the unobtrusive ads between the header and the content and then down the sidebar? Every time someone clicks on one of those ads, Ross makes money. On all his sites, the range can be $.50 a click and up to around $5.00 a click. Over time it adds up – enough to buy a modest house. (FYI, he also mentioned hearing of some super traffic sites that make as much as $18.00 a click!)

How Google Adsense Works

Let’s say I sell flag poles and I want to buy an ad with Google. The search engine knows what sites are ranking high for related content and/or sites that have the same demographic as my potential buyers. Google places my ad on relevant sites that are participating in the Adsense Program. In other words, some site owners allow their site to be used as a billboard for Google ads.

I bid on how much I’m willing to pay for every time that ad is clicked. That’s why it’s called Pay-Per-Click (PPC). The more I bid, the better a placement Google gives my ad. In other words, if I bid high enough, Google will put my ad on a billboard with a lot of traffic. For simplicity, let’s say I want to pay $1.00 per click.

Google thinks Ross’ site is highly relevant to the search word “flag” and is considered authoritative on that topic. That means it is likely to attract the kind of traffic that might be interested in seeing my ad for flag poles. So, that’s where Google displays my ad.

Every time someone clicks my ad, the $1.00 I bid per click is split between Ross and Google, meaning that they each earn $.50 and I get a well-qualified prospect. If that visitor buys a $500 flag pole, my ROI is through the roof for that $1.00 ad.

But, of course, it doesn’t work that way. It’s likely that many folks will click the ad, visit my site, and never buy anything. So, in a sense, I’m paying for traffic. But, it’s highly targeted traffic, and that’s what I crave.

The Kicker

Here’s the beauty of Adsense. After Ross sets up the initial parameters of his Adsense account to tell Google what his site is about and what type of ads he is willing to host, the whole thing runs on auto pilot for him. And, this is the best part, Ross gets paid for every click whether or not the visitor buys anything on the ad owner’s site.

The Rules

With that kind of easy money up for grabs, you can bet that every Adsense site participant wants to ensure that the ads on their sites get plenty of clicks. To keep things fair, and to help foster a pleasant experience with the site visitors, Google has certain rules about what you can and cannot do with your ad display areas.

Ross broke one of those rules and got banned from Google Adsense for nine months. He didn’t mean to break it, and he learned two valuable lessons.

The Two Sides of Google

Like most corporations, Google is a big umbrella with many different departments and they don’t always talk to one another. In other words, the left hand of Google doesn’t know what the right hand is doing any more than most big companies.

The Adsense folks say it’s better to place ads near the top, above the fold. The Google Search folks say they will penalize any site that puts too many ads above the fold. They also don’t exactly specify what can be around the ads, sort of. There’s a bit of gray area in this matter and it’s what got Ross busted. He put some flag images just above the horizontal ads that run above the content. Then came along the rules enforcer branch of Google and banned him for image alignment breaches in the Terms of Service. In other words, you can’t draw attention to the ads with nearby images.

Learning the hard way that Google had this type of penalty about highlighting ads was one lesson Ross learned. The other lesson was that his wife really enjoyed the extra cash flow that site brought in. Needless to say, he was highly motivated to get that site un-banned. And he did by attending a conference where a Google Adsense police person was talking. After much begging and groveling, his site was reinstated.

Best Practices

Ross covered several other valuable lessons in the meeting, including the most popular ad sizes and formatting. Basically, there are certain ad dimensions that are more attractive to clicking viewers than others. And those sizes vary depending on where the ad is placed on the site.

For example, there’s a popular skyscraper size for the sidebar, a popular banner size for placement between the header and the main body of content, and a nearly square size to wrap inside the content.

It’s also best to format the ad placement areas so they naturally blend into your site. The ads can be as blaring as Google allows, but the area around them needs to be unobtrusive.

Wrap Up

There are a lot of other factors that make Ross’ flag site a high traffic source and why he can attract the high-dollar PPC (pay-per-click) ads. They include domain age and length of term owned, and the type of SEO that drives traffic to a site in the first place. I’ve been picking up those little tips along the way as I go to more of these meetings. And, I plan to put those tips to use soon.

Google opened up AdSense to YouTube videos in December and is now offering free ads for select small businesses. I’ll definitely be checking into that for my free WordPress video tutorials on YouTube. And, I’ll be armed with all of the info I’ve gleaned from the meetings.

So, if you want to know all the details about making money with Google Adsense, ask Ross. Or, better yet, if you’re in the Nashville area, drop by the next Nashville SEO MeetUp group. Be sure to say hey to me, I’ll be there!

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn

Global Settings to Receive Trackbacks and Pingbacks

Before we get into the differences in trackbacks and pingbacks, let me show you where you can find the settings for them on your WordPress site.

There is a global setting in WordPress to allow your site to receive both trackbacks and pingbacks.

From your Dashboard, go to Settings > Discussion.

At the top you’ll see the Default articles settings section, as shown below.

Per Page and Per Post Settings

You have the opportunity to override the global settings above on any post or page. Below the text editor, there is a Discussion module, as shown at left.

Since WordPress 3.0, the Discussion module was hidden by default. If you don’t see the module, click the Screen Options tab in the top right. (It’s just under the link you click in the black admin bar to log out. Be sure you’re in the text editor when you do this. The options shown vary depending on the admin page you’re viewing.)

Click the checkbox for Discussion and you’ll now see the module below your text editor.

Differences in Trackbacks and Pingbacks

On a superficial level, trackbacks and pingbacks serve much the same purpose and that is to notify a blog owner that someone has linked back to their site. The difference is, trackbacks appear as comments with content. Pingbacks appear as a link with no content.

Trackback Example

In my weekly Tips Tuesday posts, I share links to specific posts on other blogs that I believe my readers will find helpful. That sends a trackback and/or pingback to the sites I linked.

Where and what it displays. The other blog owners will see a notification on their site in the Comments section of that post that I sent a trackback, but only if they allowed for trackbacks on that post. They will also see the content I created that surrounds the link.

Because it displays in their Comments section, the other blog owners can elect to approve it or not. If they approve, it will be displayed along with their other comments.

Why it’s good. It’s not exactly like I left a comment on their blog post, but it’s close. So, the other blog owner may want to include it in their comments.

Why it’s bad. Spammers do this sort of linking hoping that the owner of the original post will allow the comment to show on their site.

Pingback Example

When I share a link on Tips Tuesday to another site’s post, the other blog owner is notified in their site’s Incoming Links module, but only if they have pingbacks enabled.

Where and what it displays. The pingback is displayed in the Incoming Links module on the other blog owner’s Dashboard admin page. In other words, it’s simply a one-way notification. There’s nothing for the other blog owner to approve, and it doesn’t display anywhere on their site, sort of.

Most themes are now set up to also have pingbacks appear on the admin side of a site as a regular Comment for moderation/approval. However, if it is approved, it still doesn’t display as a regular comment on the viewer side of the site (the way the public sees the site). Instead, it displays in a line below the post, but above the Comments. It’s just a link to the post/page that sent the pingback.

Here’s an example. The red arrow points to the pingback. As you can see, it’s the title of the post where I mentioned the Taking an SEO Tip Trip post. If the pingback were from another site, it would have a link to the post on their site where they mentioned my current post.

Below is how it displays in your master Comments list. (This is not the Comments section below the post. It’s the master list of all comments on your site that you will see when you click the Comments link in the left sidebar of your admin pages.)

The red arrow points to the pingback. On the left it shows the title, URL, and IP of the site that sent the pingback. In this case, it was BlogAid. In the center you’ll see the surrounding content that was near the link. Notice that the content is there just for me to view in the admin area. It does not display in the pingback link on the site (as shown in the previous image). On the far right is the post title that received the pingback.

Below the pingback is a regular blog post comment.

Why it’s good. It’s good for you to know who is linking to your site. So, set your posts and pages to allow for pingbacks.

Why it’s bad. Well, there aren’t many disadvantages to allowing for pingbacks unless you don’t moderate them. You don’t want to give a spammer a link on your site any more than you would give them a comment.

Here’s the Rub

Go look at the image of the Discussion module near the beginning of this post. You see that there is only one checkbox for both trackbacks and pingbacks. You can’t allow for one without the other.

As your site becomes more popular, you’ll attract more spammers, which means more of them will be linking to you from their sites to get a trackback in your Comments area.

Of course, you want all of the backlinks to your site you can get because Google will rank you as more important. So, you have to be careful not to let the spammers sneak in too. Here’s the thing, Google is going to count those backlinks whether you display them on your site or not.

Most extremely popular sites simply turn trackbacks and pingbacks off. They know they’re being shared and the extra work it takes to sort the good from the bad is not worth it. They know that folks who leave real comments are much more valuable.

Self-Pinging

The beauty and downfall of pingbacks is that they are automated. (There was a time when trackbacks were not automated, but now they are too.) The problem is pingbacks self-ping. For example, if I publish a post and in it I link to a previous post on BlogAid, I’ll get a pingback notice, just like the one shown previously. If I don’t want the pingback link to show above the Comments area, I have to unapproved it.

If you internally cross-link your posts and pages a lot, this could turn into a bit of moderation work. To tell you the truth, since the pingback displays as another link on my site, I really don’t mind it being there.

Your Turn

Do you allow for trackbacks and pingbacks on your site? Do you moderate them like you do comments?

Hello Happy Site Owners!

There are only a couple of slots left in May for WordPress Training classes. If you’re ready to be a successful site owner and get your new site launched before summer, contact me quick!

Featured

These are the Top 100 Social Media Internet Marketing SEO Blogs of 2012 as ranked by Cision. I’ve spent the last week having a look at every one of these blogs and suggest you do too. I’m down to around the mid 70s at this point and what I’ve found has been shocking. Expect a blog post on it soon, but you should really see for yourself what it takes to get in the top 100.

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WordPress Tips

A WordPress 3.3.2 security update is available. So, be sure to update your site asap.

Also, the Beta 3 version of WordPress 3.4 is out. I’m a beta tester and will have a full report for you soon.

I don’t like to knock other folks’ helpful WordPress posts, but this one is a bit of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. 5 Handy WordPress Features You Might not Know About from WP Manage. The reason you don’t know about them is because it’s not a good idea to use most of them. So, go have a look and put them on your beware and forewarned list.

WordPress Plugins

Recently Updated
The WordPress SEO plugin is hands down the best, but a minority of folks are experiencing 404 site map errors. If you’ve had this issue, the nice folks at WP Beginner have the fix, but it does require some coding.

Plugins to Check Out
Cheryll Picket has a nice post asking Is Your Blog Missing This Important Piece and it’s about a plugin you’ll want to check out. I don’t have it on BlogAid and I should.

On a previous post I mentioned an archives page layout on ProBlogger that I really liked. Well, this may be the poor man’s version to that high-dollar custom design. Tom Ewer has a post on WPMU.org on How to Create Custom Post Lists and Display them Anywhere on Your Blog. It uses a plugin called List Category Posts. As you’ll see in his posts, there are formatting concerns that require a few theme edits, but they’re not difficult or would be an inexpensive thing to have a designer do.

Maybe this should be labled “Plugins to Check Out From” because I’m done with Broken Link Checker. I’ve been using for several months and the amount of false positives grows with every Tips Tuesday post I make. When I go back to check them manually, the links are fine. Done with the emails telling me stuff is broken when it’s not. Would far rather rely on my nice readers who are quick to tell me when they find a broken link to a page on BlogAid.

Blog Tips

Good advice from Mitt Ray on 7 Ways to Launch White Papers with a Bang.

How I Increased my Email Subscribers 500% in One Week is a nice post by Francisco Rosales on his Social Mouths site. He details a few small changes that he made that resulted in a significant increase. Definitely worth a read.

More Tips

Many of my clients already use gmail and simply set up another account their to handle their website email. If you want to make the switch from your desktop client, here’s a tutorial that can help you Import and Manage Multiple Email Accounts to Gmail.

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn

Nina has several Launch Day Specials you’ll want to participate in immediately!

There is a launch day teleseminar at 5 p.m. PDT. And,see how to get a free consultation session with her when you pre-order the print book from Barnes and Noble.

Visit How to Blog a Book for more on both.

In this podcast we discuss:

• The release of her new book How to Blog a Book
• The difference in blogging a book and booking a blog
• The benefit business owners receive from blogging
• The multiple benefits of participating in blogging challenges
• How blogging improves your Google ranking
• How blogging helps you grow your author platform and makes you attractive to publishers
• The benefits of writing short books

A few of the links you’ll hear in this podcast are below for easy reference.

How to Blog a Book
Copywrite Communications
NinaAmir.com

Listen to the podcast now.

Nina Amir is the Inspiration-to-Creation Coach, who inspires writers to create the results they desire with publishable and published products and careers as writers and authors. She is the author of How to Blog a Book, Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books), and a seasoned journalist, nonfiction editor, proposal consultant, blog-to-book coach, and book and author coach with more than 33 years of experience in the publishing field. Additionally, she is a popular speaker on topics related to publishing and writing and the regular writing and publishing expert on the Dresser After Dark radio show. Nina is the founder of Write Nonfiction in November, she writes five blogs, including Write Nonfiction NOW! and How to Blog a Book, and has self-published 10 short books.  Also a popular human potential and spiritual writer and speaker, in all she does Amir encourages people to combine their purpose and passion so they Achieve More Inspired Results.

Introducing Prelude

The Prelude premium child theme runs on the Genesis framework. With 12 built-in color schemes and 5 page layouts, plus all of the super built-in Genesis widgets, this powerful and flexible theme can be configured to suit any site layout need.

Best of all, Prelude is easy to use and it can grow with you as your site needs change.
And, full customization is included! See Prelude all dressed up on the Learn theme.

New Class Packages

There are now five WordPress training options on BlogAid that are sure to meet your unique site needs and budget. The WordPress Video Tutorials can be purchased as a standalone course or as part of a one-on-one class package.

Six new videos on Genesis have been added to the library too!

There are two new One Day Class options. The first is for folks who need a little help on their current site. And the other includes a WordPress foundation course plus the Prelude premium theme and how to configure it to best display your site content.

The Scratch to Published class package has been extended to four sessions, and you can get Prelude with it too. The course comes with a private training site for six weeks and access to the full video tutorial library. Plus, all training clients now start on the premium Genesis framework.

Thank You

Thank you to my favorite site designer, and StudioPress expert, Cyndi Papia of Office To-Go whose help in creating Prelude has been invaluable. Not to mention her super creation of the Learn design.

Get Your Class Scheduled Now

Because so much attention is given to each client, the open BlogAid class slots are limited and fill fast every month. Contact me asap to make the best investment in yourself as a professional site owner – the confidence to know exactly what you’re doing and why.

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

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By the Numbers

Google Analytics offers some of the best feedback you can get about your site. Not only can you see what content is drawing the most traffic, you can also see the type of device folks are using to view it.

In the case of BlogAid the ratio of computer to mobile viewers is 200:1. Yep, you read that right. 200 times more people are viewing BlogAid on a laptop or desktop than on a mobile device. That alone is enough for me to table the idea of going mobile.

Seek and Ye Shall Find

Another thing Google Analytics tells me is that 75% of the traffic to BlogAid is new viewers. My new client list bears this out too. More than half of the folks who hire me found BlogAid via a Google search. In the past six months, that type of new business has been quickly overtaking word-of-mouth referrals, which have always been high. So, it’s a significant increase in leads.

Obviously folks are searching for the type of services, classes, and info I offer while they are at home or in the office and not on-the-go with their mobile device. One way I know this because more and more folks are finding BlogAid on YouTube. When they are seeking WordPress video tutorials, they are usually at their main computer and logged in to their WordPress site. That’s just not something folks do on their phone.

Loss of Leads

One of the other main reasons that the BlogAid blog doesn’t have a mobile version is loss of leads. On most mobile blog versions, the sidebar is not present. I give away a lot of super info on BlogAid that folks download by the dozens every single day. Those links are in the sidebar. It’s not in my best interest to remove those offers from the very content that brought someone to my site.

Loss of Layout

The biggest percentage of the new visitor traffic from Google to BlogAid lands on pages with WordPress tutorials or videos. If those posts were in a mobile version, the alignment of the screenshot images or the video may not display properly.

Another Kind of No Follow

With a mobile blog version, there’s no good way for folks to be invited to follow me on social media sites. That would allow me to continually put good content in front of them and alert them to breaking news that affects their site.

Yeah, there are ways to put social media icons on a mobile version, but they are not good in my opinion. I especially dislike the ones down the side that cover up the content. So, if you’re using a mobile version of your blog and using one of those social slider thingies, maybe you should go see how it looks on a few mobile devices including an iPhone, an Android phone, and on a tablet or two, like iPad.

Crazy RSS Feed

Some plugins that folks use for creating a mobile version of their blog send a crazy RSS feed URL that can’t be subscribed to directly by those using Google Reader and not at all by those who prefer to subscribe to posts via email. If your site is using a mac.reader feed on your mobile version, don’t complain that you have few subscribers. You’re making it too hard for them to do.

Wrap Up

Now you know why BlogAid doesn’t have a mobile version and why I’m not jumping to a responsive theme design either. How about you? Do you know how people are reading your site? Do you know if you are missing valuable leads with the way you have it set up? Are you missing subscribers to your newsletter or RSS feed? Can folks easily follow you on social sites?

MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn

Hello Happy Site Owners!

Featured

Super post on 5 Ways to De-Clutter Your Website for Better Conversion Rates by Sherice Jacobs on CrazyEgg. The first step is to plan your website backwards, which is exactly what I teach in my WordPress Training Classes because it really does lead to a successful site.

WordPress

The WordPress Beta 2 version is out. In the week since the Beta 1 version, 60 bugs have been found. Expect at least two or three more Beta versions before the final public release sometime in June.

WordPress Plugins

The links below are to the plugin developer’s page, but you can find most if not all of these plugins in the WordPress plugins repository.

Recently Updated
Bad Behavior is a comment spam blocker that I’ve been hearing good things about from users. However, it’s not made to work alone. Best if used in conjunction with Akismet.

Fast and Secure Contact Form has been updated twice since last week’s tips post, and has been updated on a near weekly bases since the release of WordPress 3.3.1. I used this form for a couple of years, but it’s gotten so unstable that I had to switch to Contact Form 7. How about you, are you seeing issues with it?

I really feel for these developers. It has been such a great plugin and easy to use. But, sadly, I may have to remove it from my recommended plugins list at this point.

Plugins to Check Out
Google Reader makes it possible to view what’s on the 80-100 blogs I surf each week to keep up with the website and online marketing industry. Most of those feeds have images that look great on the original blog post but are misaligned in the feed. I use the Align RSS Images plugin to take care of that issue on the BlogAid feed.

The above plugin is great for most blog post images in feeds, but what if you use a featured image? Many times they don’t even show up in the feed. To solve that issue, see this review by Sarah Gooding on WPMU about the a plugin that will let you Add WordPress Featured Images to Your RSS Feed.

SEO

Pat Flynn has a very good take on the recent (and still to come) changes in Google policy toward black-hat link building tactics in his post A Step Towards Ethical Link Building – What Happened and What Now?

Everybody is guessing as to what the new Google algorithm that penalizes for over-optimization really means, including professional SEO folks. Here’s Amanda DeSilvestro’s take, What Does the New Over-Optimization Crack-Down Mean For Your Blog? on Blogging Pro.

There’s one guess about it that is going to be a huge problem for some folks, and that is Google’s crackdown on domains that reference a brand. That’s going to hit folks who have words like Facebook or WordPress in their domains between the eyes.

It takes 2-3 months to see the results of any Google algorithm change. So, expect more posts on this topic over the next month or so.

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MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, small businesses, solopreneurs, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.

 

Chat with MaAnna on Facebook | Google+ | LinkedIn