The three meta tags the plugin adds to your home page are;

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="******" />
<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="******" />
<meta name="y_key" content="******" />

Naturally you get to specify the content values. You get those from the webmaster area of each search engine;

Google: http://mail.google.com/webmasters/
Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster
Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

When you activate the plugin, under your blog Settings menu you'll see an extra menu item called  PC Search Engine Verify. Click on that for the plugin options page where you can enter the information you've got from the webmaster tools for your domain.

Once you provide a content value for a specific search engine, the meta tag will be displayed in the head section of your home page. If there's no content value, the meta tag for that search engine isn't displayed.

The plugin has been added to the official wordpress plugin repository, which is where you should download it from to make sure you get any updates ..etc. You can get it from here;

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pc-searchengine-verify/

Let me know how it works for you…

That'll be why I'm really pleased that the guys at WordPress have kicked off their very own series of WordPress video tutorials, which you can find at http://wordpress.tv/

The most interesting bit for me is the how-to category at http://wordpress.tv/category/how-to/ where the videos are broken down into sections including;

• Admin
• Discussion
• Publishing
• Users
• Widgets
• Themes
• Media
• Blog Management
• Set-up

Each section has a collection of videos that take you step by step through the subject. Needless to say these are top quality videos on pretty much all the popular topics.

I think this is one for my bookmark list…

Apart from the obvious answer that maybe you don't stop working on it ever, you stop working on it when it's achieved its goals. What? You don't have a goal for your website? Hmmm… so how are you going to decide what you should be working on? How will you tell whether your website is a success?

Goals are an essential part of any project. They should be set as part of the project planning process really, but at the very least you should have a goal as soon as you're up and running.

You don't have to set complicated goals for your website, you can have one goal and it can be as simple as something like a certain number of visitors per day or a specific amount of income per month.

To be honest, the goal itself doesn't matter nearly as much as having a goal in the first place, because without a clear goal you're just guessing, and that means you'll be all over the place.

Yep, I still forget to set goals, and when I do, without exception stuff just doesn't work out the way I expected it to.

Imagine you've set a goal of 100 visitors a day to your website. Once you have that, you can start doing what you need to do to achieve it. As you're thinking what to do next, you can ask yourself how it will help you reach your goal. Because your goal is clear, the answer will be clear.

Concentrate on the things that help you reach your goal and you'll find yourself spending less time on peripheral stuff and more time on the things that count. You will become more productive and you will become more successful. I guarantee it.

So, make sure you have a goal for your website. If you don't have one, set one today. Don't worry about whether your goal will be relevant next month or the month after. That's the good thing about goals – you can have as many as you like. Once you've reached a goal, you're free to set another one.

Having goals really does make all the difference to your success. I can't remember the last success I had that didn't have some sort of goal. Goals give you something specific to aim for, but they also give you much needed motivation when you reach them. Will you experience success without setting goals? I'd say it's unlikely.

This review is on WordPress Goldmine (aka WPGoldmine) by Mark Thompson who owns and runs the Income Academy. In case you're in a rush, the short version of my review is this: if you want to know how to make money from your WordPress blog, this book probably has everything you need. Go get it.

Here's the slightly longer version…

It's not often that an ebook is produced which makes all other books on the same topic redundant or almost useless overnight, but when WordPress Goldmine was released that's pretty much exactly what happened.

Mark's ebook takes an in-depth look at not just the nuts and bolts of putting up a WordPress site, but also the different kinds of sites you might build, depending on how you choose to monetize them.

It also gives you live examples showing exactly what Mark does when he uses the formula himself, which is one thing that helps to make this ebook stand head and shoulders above the rest. Also, something that might make this book even more attractive to you, is that those people who have already used it (you'll find them in the forum) have found it extremely easy to follow.

In section one you look at different ways of building a WordPress blog, plus the steps you need to take in order to get your blog up and running in the shortest amount of time possible. Also this section has some bonus videos, which help you to understand the whole process from beginning to end.

Section two of the book explains about the different kinds of content you can use in your blog. In this bit Mark covers everything from using PLR articles to your own original content. You also find out how to have unique content posted to your blog regularly and completely for free, which will help you to build your blog in super quick time.

Of all the sections in the book, it's probably section three that is the killer as far as I am concerned. In it, Mark clearly explains the different ways which you can monetize a WordPress blog. However, it may take a bit of time to work through this section. In it, Mark reveals detailed information on how he himself made a $15,000 income through just one blog post!

Not only does he explain how he made money himself but also shows ways in which you can make money with your blog offline. There are plenty of products out there which claim you will be able to make huge amounts of money in just 30 days, but for most people this is simply not realistic. But, by following the plan laid out in this book you could be realistically earning an extra $1,000 a week after only a few months.

When you get to section four, you'll be shown the various ways to promote the sites that you have built. There's a very easy to follow diagram and a full list of the sites which can make the difference between your success or failure. Of all the sections, this is probably the most important – very rarely do successful people reveal details of their traffic generation system, especially one which anyone else can easily master.

Section five of this book helps you take your sites to a completely different level and compete more effectively against any competitors. Some people, especially beginners, might find this section a bit challenging at first. Mark does include several warnings at the beginning of it that you need to have mastered the previous sections before you move on to this one.

To finish up, the book has a grand total of 110 pages, and I can confirm that each one of them provides value for money. It doesn't matter whether you're complete novice or have been doing this stuff for a while now, I guarantee you will find the information inside this book useful.

WordPress Goldmine is a quality product, and I like the fact that it's written with a commonsense approach rather than hype… probably one reason why I rate it so highly. I'm just hoping that other internet marketers (we all know who they are) pay attention and start to do likewise.

If you really want to start earning online income through affiliate marketing then I strongly recommend you grab a copy of WordPress Goldmine today. By the way, I understand Mark is putting the price up shortly, but you know what? It will still be worth it whatever he decides to charge.

That works out well, for me and you both. For me, I don't have to write many reviews, for you, you only get reviews of products or services that are being used in real life, and are worth using.

Ok, so what exactly is Article Marketing Automation? Well, This is a service from the guys at PLR Pro – Marc and Dan – and they are good guys. What they've done is create a system that allows you to do two things;

• get free, unique content for your website
• submit your own content for publication on other people's websites

Yes, there are two distinct services here, which can operate independently of each other. I'm going to look at them separately because it makes things much clearer.

Free content for your website

Firstly, if you are a website owner, you can register here for free and add your own website to the system. It's a pretty easy process;

1. register for an account
2. add your site details
3. select your article topics
4. specify how many articles you want to receive each day

That's pretty much it really. Once you've set your site up in the system, you will start getting articles posted to it. You do get the chance to specify whether articles are auto-approved and posted, or whether you want to approve them manually. If you're an auto-approval kind of person, I'd advise you go for manual approval at least for the first few days, just to make sure you've got the right categories and your articles are all relevant.

By the way, you also get the opportunity to link the article categories to your own website categories. For example, if the system has a category of "Internet Marketing" and your blog has a category of "Online Marketing" you can link the two so that any articles sent out in the "Internet Marketing" category are posted to your site in the "Online Marketing" category.

Posting your articles to other websites

This is the killer for me. If you're reading this, you probably know all about why you need links back to your website. This is an extremely effective method of getting them. In short, this system allows you to submit as many articles as you like and have them published on lots of other websites. In those articles, you can include up to three links back to your website, or to any other website.

It's difficult to explain how valuable this is, without starting to use hype, but I'll just say that without backlinks (links back to your website) you won't get any visitors, at least not from the search engines. Generally speaking, the more backlinks you have, the more likely the search engines are to show your site for any given search term. And that means more people clicking on your link and visiting your website, which is what it's all about.

This is what will make the difference between you having a website that has visitors and one that doesn't. The search engines still attach weight to links from other sites – they see links as a vote of confidence. If your site has votes, the search engines will assume it has useful content, they will display it in the search results, and you will get visitors. It's that simple. Well, ok, there are other factors involved, but this is the fundamental one.

There are other services out there (I have used them) that charge far more each month, have fewer sites that you can distribute your articles to, and are harder to use. Article Marketing Automation is one of only three tools that I regularly use for getting backlinks through articles, and it is the cheapest. This is definitely the one to start with, but that doesn't mean it's just for beginners. It has plenty of features for the more advanced article marketers out there, but it's also really easy to use so is ideal for beginners.

I know I haven't given very much away, the truth is I'm not sure how grateful Marc and Dan would be if I revealed the internal workings of their service, but hop on over to the sales page and read about it from the guys.

Can you use this to get on the first page of Google? Absolutely. Click here to go to the site.

As you probably know, WordPress keeps all your content in a database, and it uses themes to determine how to display that content. That's why when you change your WordPress theme you can get an entirely different looking blog with exactly the same content – it's because content and presentation are kept separate.

Each WordPress theme is kept in it's own folder which contains specific files for displaying the various pages of your blog. For example, if there is a file called "single.php" in your theme folder it will be used to display any single post on your blog. By changing "single.php" you can alter how single posts are displayed.

Because we're going to be creating a custom page template, we'll be looking for a file called "page.php" in your theme folder. This is the file which determines how individual pages are displayed. The first thing we want to do is make a copy of it and name it something like "template_page.php" so we can identify it later. By the way, if your theme doesn't have a file called "page.php" you can just make a copy of the "index.php" file instead.

To make this page into a template which WordPress recognizes (and that you'll be able to use), we need to add the following code right at the top of the file;

<?php
/*
Template Name: My Template
*/
?>

The text after "Template Name" can be anything you like, but bear in mind it will appear in the "Page Template" drop down box, so be sure to give your template a meaningful name. Once you've copied this file to your theme folder it will be available to WordPress.

Well, believe it or not, you have just created a page template. Quick, let's see if it works… Go to your blog admin section and create a new page, but before you publish it, scroll down and look for a "Page Template" section with a drop-down box. Click it and you should see your template listed in there – it's name will be the same text you put after the "Template Name" at the top of the file. Select your template name and publish the page. Congratulations!

Hmmm… it probably doesn't look any different. Well, that's because we didn't actually change anything in the file, apart from making it into a template, so it will display content in exactly the same way as the file we copied. Let's make some changes and see what happens…

In your new template file, you've probably got a line of code that looks something like this;

<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>

That basically tells WordPress to display the Title of the page. Add an extra line right after it that contains this;

<?php echo '<p>This page was produced by my excellent page template!</p>'; ?>

Browse to the page which uses your page template, and you should see the text "This page was produced by my excellent page template!" right after your title.

That's pretty much how page templates in WordPress work. I find them perfect for such things as contact pages and sitemaps ..etc, but you can put just about anything you like in your template and it will be displayed by WordPress. Your imagination really is the limit.

As an example I've created a page template which aims to help you find a ClickBank winner by showing items from the ClickBank marketplace that have a minimum commission and gravity. I used exactly the same principle as I've outlined in this post. Let me know how you get on…

When you go into your admin pages and choose Settings, Reading, you can specify whether you want to display your latest posts on the front page, or one of your existing pages, i.e. a static front page. You can also specify a page to display your posts.

The good thing about the latest version, is that all the "behind the scenes" stuff works. For example, the front page responds to the is_front_page() function whether you're displaying a static page or your latest posts.

The is_home() function returns true for the page displaying your latest posts. Be careful thought because this can change…

If you have your blog configured to show your latest posts on the front, then the front page will respond to the is_home() function.

If, however, you have a static front page, then it will be the page which you choose to display your latest posts that will respond to the is_home() function instead, and NOT the front page.

This setup is great if you have a site based completely on WordPress, but you want it to look like a normal website with a blog in a /blog/ subfolder for example. All you need to do is set a static page as the front page, and then choose a second page to display your blog posts, making sure the page slug for the second page is '/blog/'. That's it.

Now I no longer need any plugins to give me decent static front page functionality. Cool…

/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%/

This was all well and good, until I needed to move one of my blogs. I couldn't do a database move and had to export and then import the blog content. That's when it all started to get messy. When I imported the posts into the new blog, all the post IDs changed.

You'd sort of expect that really, but what I never thought about was that it also meant all the post permalinks changed too, because the post ID formed part of the URL. Ummm.. bad. Permalinks are supposed to be permanent.

So then what I had to do was start creating permalink redirects ..etc to make sure that people following the old links found the new posts, and this created a lot of what I'd consider unnecessary work – which is something I am allergic to.

The WordPress documentation recommends using a number as part of your permalink structure, primarily to avoid confusion with existing files such as stylesheets ..etc so that's what I did. I did read somewhere that using the post ID can decrease server load, but I couldn't find that article again and I haven't heard anything about it since. Please let me know if you have any experience of that.

After a bit of a rethink about the problem caused by using post IDs in the permalink structure, I considered the available alternatives. Maybe I could use the minute from the post date? I'm guessing that would be imported successfully, so my post URLs would stay the same if I ever needed to move a blog again.

But then I thought, just how likely is it that any of my post URLs will clash with any existing URLs, if I just use the category and post name? I think it's extremely unlikely.

So, in the absence of any real evidence that not using post IDs increases server load, and on the assumption that I'm unlikely to have URL conflicts, I've decided to use the following permalink structure;

/%postname%/

and if I ever need to move a blog again, I predict life will be very much easier.

Here's one of the themes I use – beachbum – which is what I want to be when I grow up…

This theme is designed to be used for a review or single affiliate product type site. To that end, it's got an extra sidebar on the left which is ideally suited to your recommended product. The theme supports widgets so the easiest way to include a review or recommendation is to add a text widget to sidebar2.

One of my pet hates is having to edit theme files once they're up on the server, so what I started to do was include a Theme Options page whenever I made a new WordPress theme. This allowed me to add options to the theme which I could change easily, without editing any of the theme files.

This theme has options too. When you're in your admin pages and you choose this theme, you'll see an extra menu appear alongside the "Theme Editor" menu – Theme Options. Click on that to see what you can configure for this particular theme.

Theme options

At the moment, these are the things you can mess with;

1. Main keyword phrase
2. Color scheme
3. Font family
4. Whether to show the header text
5. Which pages to appear in the menu bar

Most of them are probably obvious except perhaps the "main keyword phrase" which I'll explain now.

Main keyword phrase

As I mentioned, this theme is designed to be used with a particular niche, which often means a particular keyword phrase. If you type your main keyword phrase into this box, it will be used instead of your blog title in the meta title tag and within an H1 tag at the top of every page, along with the post or page title. Basically, it's a more keyword focused alternative to your blog title. You can leave it blank and your blog title will be used in the normal way.

Color scheme

The theme comes with 12 color schemes, which saves me trying to find a separate theme for each niche – I can usually find a color that fits.

Font family

It also comes with a choice of 6 font families. I admit I don't use this, but I know we all have our own favorite fonts so I threw it in to make it that bit more useful.

Show header text

Quite often I have a theme header graphic that already has text on it, so I wanted the option to turn off the blog title and description that normally appear in the header. The "show header text" option allows me to do that easily.

Pages for menu bar

Lastly, you can specify the WordPress page IDs of those pages you want to appear in the main menu bar, under the header. This is handy for linking to a review page ..etc.

These are the other additional options and features which aren't available as a setting in the Theme Options page.

Header image

To change the header image, just overwrite the existing one at wp-themes/beachbum/img/header.jpg with your own. It should be 750px by 150px, but it will get trimmed if it's any bigger than that.

Custom CSS

If you want to add any custom CSS code, all you need to do is create a CSS file called "custom.css" and drop it into the theme folder. It will automatically get picked up and applied.

HTML Sitemap

Oh yes, I almost forgot, it's got a built-in HTML sitemap template. Using this is as easy as assigning the "Sitemap" template to a page. Create a new page in the admin section, scroll down until you see a section for specifying the Page Template, and choose "Sitemap" from the drop-down list and save it. Hey presto – you have a sitemap page for your site with all pages, posts, categories, and feeds in a lovely list.

Ok, here is the download link. Don't hesitate to come back here and ask questions, make suggestions, or let me know about bugs.

Remember when you used to see the list of post and pages and there was a column with the page ID of each one? I found that really useful. Ok, it was probably because many of my plugins use the page IDs, but nevertheless, I miss being able to see them at a glance.

So, I set myself a mission to discover how to get them back and hopefully find an easy and simple way of implementing the solution across any blog. Well, it was indeed a journey of discovery, but persistence paid off in the end and I now have myself a plugin which will automatically add a new column to the Manage Posts and Manage Pages admin screen, containing the ID of the listed posts and pages.

As I say, this was one I created mainly for myself because so many of my other plugins make use of the post or page IDs, but I am hearing that other people also miss being able to see these IDs so here it is for everyone.

There's no configuration or options, just upload and activate it and your IDs will appear.

By the way, I probably wouldn't have been able to do it without the info provided by Edward Dale. Thanks buddy :-)