The trick is to make it EASY for others to share your content on the network, if someone has to jump through hoops or worse has to leave your site to do so, what a major fail.

However you can add the appropriate Pinterest buttons on your blog scattered about, such as on the sidebar for others to follow you and your various boards. On single post pages for others to Pin your content or dedicate a special social network page where all your accounts can be found and followed at the click of a button.

Below we cover three easy and free ways to add Pinterest to your blog via the various methods available on the web.

1. Pinterest Button -

This is the default button found on the site that you simply add to the sidebar of your blog for others to follow your main Pinterest account. It’s quite straight forward in nature, you simply add the HTML code in a WordPress widget and add it to your blog sidebar. See screenshot below of the red Pinterest button in action on a sidebar.

2. Pinterest Pinboard Widget WordPress Plugin -

If you have quite the collection of board and pins and wish to share it with the world then have a look at the Pinterest Pinboard WordPress plugin by Codefish. This neat plugin allows you to display all your recent pins on your blogs sidebar, and if others wish to see more they can click the See More Pins link at the bottom.

3. Pin It Button On Single Post Page -

For bloggers this is crucial as it makes it super duper easy for others to “Pin” your content on the site via a simple click. You add the button via the “Pinterest Pin It” WordPress plugin by P Derksen and it will place it right underneath each article title and if its the only button you place there, it will truly stand out. You can specify if you want it to appear on your homepage or single posts only or whichever combination you prefer. It’s quite simple add and use. The button is small, looks great on most sites and blogs and it integrates well with the other popular social networks out there.

If you have yet to sign up and use Pinterest, give it a try today and see a new traffic source show up in your Google Analytics account. Maybe because it’s quite new and is receiving loads of hype, the site does drive traffic to sites or maybe users are quite the active bunch. Regardless of the reason why, you have nothing to lose and a lot to gain. Hope our three tips above help you get started with Pinterest.

3 Easy Ways To Add Pinterest To Your WordPress Blog is a post from: WP Kube

As the name indicated cheap web hosting can provide you only cheap services that may fail to meet all you needs and requirements for your growing web network.

If your ultimate goal is to create a network of sites that provide you with a constant income online then cheap webhosting would fail to provide you with all the essential needs. You have to widen your choice while choosing the webhosting services. If you really want to have a good website then you must be ready to spend in some money for hosting as well as it is considered to be a very crucial part of the web. This article will provide you with five good reasons why you should never prefer a cheap web hosting services in the future.

1. Cheap webhosting is cheap

You might end up with a cheap webhosting company that provides advertisement on the internet which will be quite hard to believe. Many of us just click it in order to save some money while hosting but we fail to realise that we are compromising on the quality of the website by doing so. Most of the advertisements may annoy the users and may be false. The cheap webhosting companies are not user friendly and are most likely to cause problems in the future due to their poor service.

2. Unlimited hosting is actually limited

Most of the webhosting companies advertise saying that they provide unlimited hosting but in reality most of them find it to be limited. Never rely on a web hosting company that provides you all the services for cheap. They fake most of them and you might end up losing the money you have too. Hence it is very essential to think twice before you choose a cheap webhosting company. Most of the webhosts today are in a situation to cheat and sell “unlimited hosting” as there is a tough competition in the business.

3. Cheap webhosting – Unreliable

Due to the increased competition in the business, many webhosting companies compete with each other in providing the largest disk space, greater bandwidth and unlimited hosting packages in order to attract more customers. In reality all of them fail to meet the needs and requirements of every client. The companies have to cheat in order to be in the business and gain income. Hence it is very important to know that all of the cheap webhosting are just eyewash and they are unreliable when it comes to service.

4. Poor customer support

Customer support is a very essential factor that needs to be considered for any business. When you choose a good webhosting company make sure that you get a good customer support which can help you in times of need. A cheap webhosting company will not usually have a live customer support and the only way to contact them would be through mail. Since you are using a shared hosting program you are entitled to more problems in hosting than a normal hosting wherein the entire server belongs to you. You might face interrupted server problems every now and them if the customer care fails to solve the problem on time.

5. Branding

This is the most important factor that you need to consider if you are looking to brand your website. When you get a free webhosting service, you will get a sub domain under the domain that you have. The cheap webhosting companies will not let you to host the main domain in the server. When you think of moving your web out then you might not be able to get the same domain and hence it might cause a major problem in branding. All your marketing would have gone in vain. You might have to start everything from the beginning.

These are the five major reasons that tell you why cheap hosting can be the worst option when you decide to build a new website. It is always better to choose a good hosting service where you can enjoy good benefits.

WPkube Recommendations

Hostgator

HostGator is amongst the leading webhost company providing superb Customer Support available 24hrs for your queries. HostGator offers web hosting through three different plans with names that fit the company logo: Hatchling, Baby and Swamp.

Bluehost

Bluehost only provide shared web hosting, and only offer one plan. But that plan beats most, if not all, competition. They have very affordable pricing for this plan and it includes unlimited storage and data transfer with a Free Domain.

Always remember to go for a decent and reliable hosting. If you are concerned about the prices you can always use discount coupons as that of westhost coupon and yahoo small business coupons

Five Ways Cheap Webhosting Can Hurt Your Small Business is a post from: WP Kube

We’ve teamed up with WinWPStuff & ThemeFuse to giveaway 2 x Theme Fuse WordPress Themes.

The site relies on eagle-eyed internet users and webmasters submitting new giveaways that they find, or are hosting. The intent is that, as the site gains in popularity, giveaway hosts will flock to the site to list their giveaway to gain exposure for their giveaway and earn new readers in the process.

About Win WP Stuff

Win WP Stuff is a new website whose sole purpose is for listing giveaways where there are WordPress-related prizes on offer.

There are always giveaways going on all over the internet, where you can enter for the chance to win a variety of WordPress prizes, including themes, plugins, memberships, hosting and other services. Win WP Stuff is your one-stop resource for staying on top of them, so that you can be notified of all the new giveaways that are going on.

Listing a giveaway is free, and the submissions are moderated to ensure only genuine, high-quality giveaways are listed. Giveaways that require any sort of financial transaction to enter are not eligible for listing on the site, so you can be sure that you can enter all of the giveaways without parting ways with any money. However, there may be entry requirements such as requiring a tweet, or a follow on Facebook, for example.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

So head over to Win WP Stuff and see what giveaways have already been listed, and be sure to list any others that you come across.

This giveaway ends on Sunday, February 26, 2012. The winners will be announced on a separate post. You are advised to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you can be quickly notified when the winners announcement post has been published.

WinWPStuff Giveaway: Win 2 x ThemeFuse WordPress Themes is a post from: WP Kube

So if you really want a custom look for your login page, then you have to create your own custom logo page by digging into the WordPress code. To customize your login page, it isn’t all that hard, you just need to be able edit and create a couple pages of code. Even if you can’t code, you can still create your own custom login for your WordPress site. All you need is a guide that walks you through the steps to creating a killer login page.

How To Create Your Own Custom WordPress Login Page

Earlier today, I came across a guide that will walk you through the steps to create a killer login page. The guide is from Speckyboy Design Magazine, one of my favorite design magazines, and it breaks the steps down into a few easy steps.

Take a look at the guide and try it out. Let  us know what you think and if you created your own custom login page.

How to Build a Custom Login Page Design for WordPress

A Guide to Building a Custom Login Page for WordPress is a post from: WP Kube

For those who don’t know, Rich Snippets are markup tags that webmasters can put in their sites that will give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance.

It is  a new presentation of snippets that applies Google’s algorithms to highlight structured data embedded in web pages.

Here’s a short video explaining, what exactly Rich snippets are and how they work.

Use AuthorhReview plugin for adding the rich snippets for reviews in WordPress.

AuthorhReview is fantastic plugin coded by Hesham Zebdia of FamousBloggers. Every setting of this plugin can be set on the options page of the plugin. It won’t take you more than 5 minutes to install and set-up the plugin.

Add hReview and AggregateRating support based on schema.org, increase search traffic by making SERP results more eye-catching. This plugin supports only the editorial ratings submission (edito/author rating), this means customers and site visitors are not involved in the rating process, this means rating reflects only the author opinion.

Here’s step by step guide on how to install & configure the AuthorhReview plugin.

Step 1: Navigate to Plugins > Add New > search for “Author hReview” or if you’re familiar with installing plugins in wp than you might want to download it from the WordPress directory and upload it manually.

Step 2: Activate the plugin and configure the plugin from widgets area. Configure the options from the plugin Options Page and put a nice widget either in sidebar or footer.

Step 3: You’re almost done. All  you have to do is to complete the settings on the your Review posts.

What are your thoughts on the Author hReview Plugin? Please let us know in the comments below.

How to Implement Google Rich Snippets for Reviews In WordPress is a post from: WP Kube

This post is part of a weekly series, Weekly Roundup. Feel free to read and enjoy some of these great posts I have found this week.

Here are some of the best articles I have read, shared, retweeted on @wpkube, and found on Blokube this week.

WordPress Blogging

Surefire Tips for Getting Blogs to Cover your Product or Service

I receive quite a few emails from individuals and companies wanting me to post about their product or service on WPLift, unfortunately quite a lot of these don’t get any coverage so I thought I would write this post offering advice. 1. Customise the email for me I dont really like receiving a blanket press

How to Add Pinterest “Pin It” button in your WordPress Blog

Recently while monitoring our blog stats, a new traffic source was popping up enough for us to notice. This traffic source was Pinterest. We started using the platform and saw great potential in it therefore we have added it on List25. In this article, we will show you how to add the Pinterest “Pin It” button to your WordPress blog.

6 Best Hello Bar Alternative WordPress Notification Plugin

Hello bar is one of the best notification bar for WordPress and also for any web publishing platform. I really liked their concept and personally that inspired me to create Mintbar – an opensource notification bar. So, why am I writing about Hello Bar alternatives? Well, Hello Bar’s free account offers just 25 click/month which I think is way to low for small blogs.

WordPress Resources

The Ultimate Guide to Implementing Facebook Comments on your Blog

Using Facebook Comments on your blog offers your readers a way to instantaneously comment on posts, as well as to share them without having to do any work. If you think this type of commenting system will suit your audience, read on to find out how you can implement it the right way.

Style Individual Blog Posts And Pages with WP Post Styling

If you’re looking to add custom CSS styles to your WordPress blog on a post-by-post (or page-by-page) basis, then the WP Post Styling plugin is a great option. It’s an easy-to-use tool for creating unique looks and adding custom styles to single posts and pages. You can even go a step further and add custom mobile styles

How to Set Up Blog Comments as Goals in GA Using WordPress Hacks

As many of you know, I love writing about Google Analytics. I’m a data junkie, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than learning more about the visitors coming to my blog. One of the best ways to get actionable data out of your Google Analytics is to set up goals.

WordPress Themes

Daily Tip: Download the Free Danko WordPress Theme for Charities

It comes with a built-in PayPal gateway, allowing you to take credit card payments via PayPal directly on your site. It also includes tons of admin options, custom widgets, a shortcode generator, contact form, and even the original Photoshop files for further customization.

25 WordPress Real Estate Themes for 2012

The real estate market is one that has long embraced WordPress as a CMS – there have been premium real estate themes around since near the start of the premium themes industry. Using the custom post types and taxonomies, WordPress is perfect for listing houses for sale and rental. In this roundup post, I will…

You just don’t need a magazine theme

Magazine themes are quite alluring. Sliders, pictures, columns, unique blocks of different content on demos. But beyond the perfectly crafted demo marketed to entice you to purchase what you’ve convinced yourself you must have, you probably don’t need it at all.

What are some of your favorite articles from the last few weeks?

Weekly Roundup #7: The Best WordPress Resources from Around the Web is a post from: WP Kube

This web app saves time and money in you having to develop and manage web forms and surveys.

About 123ContactForm

123ContactForm is a service developed by a young enthusiastic team located in Timisoara, Romania, EU. Founded in 2008, 123ContactForm has become a worldwide top class online form and survey builder, with a substantial investment in 2011.

It is one of the easiest tools to create custom web/surveys/subscriptions forms and you can use 123ContactForm’s robust and user-friendly WYSIWYG form builder, which has standard input fields and controls such as text boxes and dropdown menus. It comes with with powerful SSL encryption.

123ContactForm was set out to explore and implement close to exhaustively all web form development possibilities. Some of the main features are:

Submissions management – Users can customize notifications by entering multiple e-mail adresses and choosing where to direct submissions based on submission content.

Form building - It is a fast and easy 3-step process. 123ContactForm displays modifications as soon as fields are added or updated, with a real-time form editor.

Email notifications - Receive the content of your form by email the moment it is completed. It can be automatically sent to multiple email addresses or to a specific address depending on the field’s value.

Customizable form themes – Make your form blend in with your website. Use custom CSS or one of our many predefined free form themes.

Aesthetics – 123ContactForm offers full CSS customization, so that users can tweak the code of each form field.

Form publishing options – As a main use, for regular webpages we provide various publishing options: JavaScript, iFrame, Inline HTML etc. Businesses can also use the forms in order to enhance their social media presence.

Payment integration – 123ContactForm integrates three of the most popular payment processors: PayPal, Google Checkout and Authorize.net, that can be used within forms to accept payments from submitters.

123ContactForm WordPress Plugin

Contact Form WordPress plugin from 123ContactForm. Building any type of form and survey for WordPress pages is an enjoyable experience with the user-friendly interface of 123ContactForm. The form generating process takes just 3 easy steps – edit the form, choose settings and publish. Allows adjusting codes.

Features:

• Easy form building: real time WYSIWYG editor, form branching (conditional logic for dynamic web forms), file upload fields
• Efficient submissions management: multiple recipients, custom “thank you” page, export data to CSV, reports over submissions
• Security: CAPTCHA and smart CAPTCHA, password protection, SSL encryption
• Style: theme gallery, full CSS customization
• Integration with payment processors: PayPal, Authorize.Net, Google Checkout
• 3rd party apps integration: SalesForce, VerticalResponse, MailChimp, WebHook, Google+Yahoo Groups, Google Docs
• Mobile version of web forms.

How to Win

In order to get a chance to win one of the annual Platinum licenses, please mention “How you will use 123ContactForm plugin for WordPress” in the comments and winners will be selected randomly

Details

This giveaway ends on Wednesday, February 15, 2012 after which the comments section on this post will be closed and you will no longer be able to leave a comment.  The winners will be announced on a separate post. You are advised to subscribe to our RSS feed so that you can be quickly notified when the winners announcement post has been published.

Giveaway: 123ContactForm Web Form/Survey Builder Subscriptions is a post from: WP Kube

A lot of WordPress plugins help creating online registrations. The solution we share today is a web form created with 123 Contact Form. Using this service you will be able to register submitters in real time, automatically generate tickets and even receive payments with your form. Forms blend visually with any WordPress theme, as they can be styled using CSS.

For embedding a fully featured registration form on your WordPress page, just follow the steps below:

1. Install the plugin

Download the 123ContactForm plugin for WordPress and unzip it. Next, move the folder 123contactform-for-wordpress into your wordpress/wp-content/plugins directory. Then go to your WP dashboard -> Plugins -> 123ContactForm for WordPress and click Activate.

2. Create the form

a. Log in / sign up to www.123contactform.com. In your dashboard, click on Create New Form and choose the desired type – Event registration form. It contains the basic fields that you will need. Next, Edit your form. Make sure you include:

• a suggestive title and a brief event description
• a Google map to boost visual impact and to spare attendees from doing searches on the internet (sometimes a simple postal address does not make sense at the first look)
• a field to gather feedback for you (with a question like “Where have you heard about the event?”)
• demographic data about the attendee (gender may be useful to know, especially if you plan to offer them small business gifts such as T-shirts).

Tip: Keep it tight and simple, don’t request too much information from the submitters. The names of your guests are surely important for printing on reservation cards. Their phone numbers and e-mails are equally significant. But not the postal address, maybe – will you be sending them stuff?  Stick to the details you are sure to be needing.

d. Go to the next step, Form Settings. Here you can choose the options that will make the form work:

• email address for receiving notifications – you will be able to track submitters in real time
• CSS customization – style the appearance of the form, include your company’s logo to be more representative
• recording entry ID – this is important for ticketing, to track the number of guests and  assign a ticket to each of them
• a receipt for the submitters – you can set the form’s autoresponder with a confirmation message that sends each submitter the data he/she has entered, so that it can easily be printed from the e-mail client.
• anti-spam options – use CAPTCHA wisely, you don’t want to scare away legitimate applicants. Instead, choose smart CAPTCHA, that only appears if there is a sign of abuse to the form.
• payment integration. Here you can set your fees for the event and integrate the payment processor you need from the available options: PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net.

3. Publish the event registration form on WordPress

In the same 123ContactForm menu of your form, access the tab Get code & Publish. Choose the WordPress option in the left menu and copy the line provided. The code is simple, it will look something like this: [123-contact-form i239584]. Paste the code into your WordPress post.

That’s all folks! Have a great deal of fun on your events!

How to Create Event Registration Forms for WordPress Using 123ContactForm is a post from: WP Kube

However, there will come a time when your WordPress blog starts to feel bloated and slow. The following tips will help get your blog back to the smooth experience it needs to be for your readers.

Update and Clean Up

Inefficiency is a major culprit when it comes to poor performance in any software. Ensure you keep your WordPress installation and plug-ins up to date. Developers will often improve efficiency on their software as they continue to work on it and refine their approach. Do not have old plug-ins wasting valuable memory and bandwidth. Uninstall it if you are no longer using it or it ceases to be supported. There are plenty of other options out there. Be certain your plug-ins benefit the functionality of your blog.

Speeding Up php Execution

WordPress was created using a database retrieval of information method of display. The platform utilizes php to pull the requested information out of the database for display to the user. Thus, a php code accelerator, such as eAccelerator, can be used to significantly increase performance. eAccelerator is a good choice as it is stable with great performance. The minimum amount of RAM to assign with it is 128 MB (eaccelerator.shm_size=“128”).

Tweak MySQL Parameters

The default installation for MySQL utilizes minimized settings. The installation is set up to be useful even on low end systems. However, the minimum settings do not allow MySQL to use the fullest capability of the hardware available. Tweaking the settings can provide an improved experience. A number of performance guides on MySQL are available that can be consulted for greater scope than this article can provide. The following are but a handful of parameters and settings that can be adjusted for performance.

key_buffer=256M
max_allowed_packet=1M
table_cache=256M
thread_cache_size=8M
tuery_cache_size=16M

Create Static Pages With wp-cache 2

Wp-cache 2 is an incredibly useful WordPress plugin that will cache a page when it is requested. Future requests of the page are then drawn from the cache instead of the database being queried for the information with additional php execution. The only downside is its inability to alter content stored in the cache. If something changes in the database, the plug-in wipes the cache to rewrite the page. A blog that generates a lot of comments will not gain as great of a benefit from wp-cache 2 without some fixes implemented.

Improving WordPress Efficiency

There are a handful of tactics that can be used to increase the efficiency of the coding of a WordPress blog. These won’t necessarily shave off a huge amount of time. One should consider the number of times the code is actually executed for the given action and how much time is lost over the duration.

External Scripts

Instead of adding more code to improve functionality, integrate external scripts. Essentially, a command is added to the base code so when a visitor takes an action that would require that script, it will call and execute it. If a script is integrated directly into the code, 100 visitors would have it executing 100 times. However, by using an external script, only those visitors that specifically undertake the action requiring it would trigger it.

Utilize CSS Short-Hand

Coding has a lot of ins and outs, shortcuts and tricks. Many languages have shortcuts built in just to improve efficiency. Familiarize yourself with CSS short-hand to remove excess text from the actual piece of code. Sub-labels are typically a major contributor. They generally aren’t necessary but are included by the coder anyway.

Speeding Up Your WordPress Blog is a post from: WP Kube

It easily lets you set up a business website or blog with few clicks.

One of the main advantage of WordPress is, availability of tons of premium business themes to choose from. Below are 10 of what I think to be the best premium WordPress themes for business websites.

1. Aggregate

Aggregates comes packed with tons of content and widget-ready areas, and manages to display everything in a clear and readable manner. We have also added some handy new widgets, as well as many new advertisement areas. If you have been searching for a feature-rich Magazine-style theme for your blog, then look no further!

Demo Download

2. Marisa

Marisa is a simple, clean and beautiful WordPress magazine theme with great features, such as the built in review system that lets you review whatever you want and gives you up to 5 rating criteria. Furthermore you can add a “Buy now button” which you can use for example an affiliate link. The theme comes with 2 skins, a light & dark.

Demo Download

3. Insomnia

The Insomnia theme is great for online magazines and personal blogs. The stunning design and clean grid layout makes the perfect backdrop for any type of content. Plenty of layout and customization options will help you personalize to suit your needs.

Demo Download

4. Goodnews

Goodnews is Premium WordPress News / Magazine Theme Fully Customizable , has an extensive Theme Options with Import/export System ,WPML Ready, RTL Full Support.

Demo Download

5. Landpost

Landpost is a powerful Premium WordPress Magazine, News, Community & Blog Theme. It is an excellent choice for any kind of website that deals with a massive amount of content, such as News related websites.

Demo Download

6. Converse

Converse is a clean, modern magazine WordPress theme with loads of shortcodes and options.

Demo Download

7. Rewrite

Rewrite is a versatile WordPress theme with a super clean, responsive design. This theme looks just as great on the iPhone as it does on the desktop. Rewrite has built-in swipe support for your portfolio images and videos. That means your entire portfolio is now fully scalable AND swipe-able. That’s pretty rad!

Demo Download

8. Averin

Premium Magazine Theme that comes with great set of features.

Demo Download

9. MultiPro

MultiPro is a multiple WordPress Theme to online magazines, corporate websites and creative portfolios.

Demo Download

10. Resolution

Resolution WordPress is a professional theme suitable for both blogging and showcase purposes. With Resolution the power is in your mind: create your own home page with the home page builder, and customize almost any style and font with our Style customizer panel. You can really rock up your theme, by using custom pictures and videos all in an integrated fashion that’s as easy as it gets.

Demo Download

Which of these looks best for you? Aside from magazine wordpress themes, what other style of wordpress themes are you looking for? Please let us know in comments below.

10 Premium Magazine style WordPress Themes for Business sites is a post from: WP Kube