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Archive for 'WordPress'

10 Essential WordPress Plugins For The Smart Blogger

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 at 12:32 am

Comments (87)

I reckon there are two things that set WordPress apart from other blogging platforms, the amount of quality themes available and the plugins. There are so many plugins out there that you can do almost anything you want with your blog. I don’t know about you guys but while visiting other blogs I’ve often wondered what plugins they were using, That being the case there may even be some of you who are wondering about the ones I use.

The obvious ones are commentluv, dofollow and keyword luv plugins, but for the purpose of this post I won’t be including them as I figure most bloggers are familiar with them. I think it more appropriate that I write about the ones that work behind the scenes, the ones you don’t see, or even the ones that you may see but don’t know what plugin is making it work.

Quick Cache: Over the years I’ve tried several caching plugins and I settled on this one because apart from doing the job well it is the easiest caching plugin I’ve come across. It even has a ‘clear cache’ icon that can be accessed from every page of the dashboard.
FT Signature Manager: This plugin’s actually designed so the blogger can place a signature at the end of the post. I on the other hand saw another use for it, one that’s proven to be quite profitabe. I’ve used it to advertise the Flexsqueeze theme, yep, that’s the one you’ll see at the bottom of thisand every post.
Insights: This plugin is a real time saver as it can search the net for information, pictures and videos etc. for your blog posts. It will even search your own blog.
LMB^Box Comments Quicktags: This plugin inserts a quicktag toolbar above the comment form. The toolbar alllows the commentator to insert smilies, links, quotes and other funtions into the comment. What I love the most about it is that it has a large selection of smilies. You will have to modify your comments.php for this plugin to work.
Max Banner Ads: I did a post on this plugin called Rotating Banner Problem Resolved By Max Banner Ads.
Microkid’s Related Post: This plugin allows you to select posts that are related to the one you’re currently working on and places them at the end of the post. Great for interlinking your posts and for giving your reader a selection of related posts.
WordPress Database Backup: This plugin is absolutely essential, especially if you’re a slack blogger like me who never backups their blog. With this plugin it’s all done automatically. I have mine set up so that it sends me the backup via email on a daily basis.
WordPress.com Stats: I love this plugin. It supplies all the stats I need. At the top of the page it gives you a line graph of views per day. It will also show you the top posts and pages for today and yesterday, as well as referrers for the last two days. The best thing is that it also shows what links people have been clicking on, and all on the same page.
OIOpubliasher: This is another essential plugin that I use on all my popular blogs. It allows advertises to automatically pay for adspace on your blog. It’s one of the few plugins that I’ve paid for, and it’s paid for itself many times over.
SEO Smart Links: I use this plugin to link keywords and phrases with affiliates that I am promoting. You could even use it to link to individual posts in your blog that’s been specifically written to promote an affiliate. You can have it set up so that it only works with your posts or you can include your comments as well.

Naturally I use a lot more plugins but I consider these to be a more essential than the others, yeah, even the smilies, I can’t live without those. If you had to pick just one of these plugins which one would you choose and why?

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

To Moderate Or Not To Moderate, That Is The Question

Thursday, January 20th, 2011 at 5:33 am

Comments (90)

As far as I’m concerned the answer is obvious, there is absolutely no reason today for anyone to moderate their comments. Sure, once long ago it was necessary because there was no real way to combat all the spam that was out there. That’s not the case today because there are plugins that will deal with just about everything that the spammers, those low life miscreants, will throw at you.

I actually use two plugins. The first is the GrowMap Anti-Spambot Plugin, better known as GASP! The guy that put this plugin together is the very same guy who developed commentluv, the one plugin that almost everyone loves. If you’re still using those annoying captchas I seriously suggest you switch to GASP. I was shocked at how much of the spam I was getting was from spambots.

The other plugin I use in conjunction with GASP is Akismet as it catches all the human spammers. Using the two together frees up my time, time better spent doing other things like commenting on other blogs.Knowing all this I can’t imagine why so many bloggers waste their precious time moderating their comments. Get with it you guys, STOP MODERATING YOUR COMMENTS!

Still not satisfied? I mean it’s your blog right, and if you want to moderate them you should be allowed to? Why should you listen to me anyway, who am I to tell you how to run your blog.? Your problem is that I am not a lone voice on this matter. Just the other day I was reading one of Mitch’s post where he was talking about decluttering his online life. Mitch went so far as to say he would no longer subscribe to blogs who moderate comments!

I’m sure if I did a search I would find many more examples of people who are pissed off at their comments going into moderation. I know I am. I take a lot of pride in my comments. I take the time to read the post, to think about what I’m going to say and the the writing of the comment itself, only to find that it goes into moderation or it disappears altogether and I think to myself, ‘What the frack is that all about’?

If there was one other plugin I would say is essential if you want a successful blog it would have to be a subscribe to comment plugin. There’s a lot of them around, just pick one that only notifies the commentator when someone replies to his actual comment. This is important as some plugins send an email every time someone leaves a comment and this can be quite annoying, especially if you have a busy blog.

Rotating Banner Problem Resolved By Max Banner Ads

Friday, January 7th, 2011 at 4:38 pm

Comments (42)

Let’s face it, the majority of bloggers out there all hope to make a little money from their online journey. Even those who claim to blog for the love of it usually place an ad or two on their blog in the hope that someone will click on them. There’s nothing wrong with that, I mean as long as they’re online why shouldn’t they make a little something for their efforts? The problem most people have is the majority of surfers suffer from banner or ad blindness. What this basically means is that after awhile people just tune out and fail to see these ads, and they can’t click on something their subconscious fails to see.

I discovered this ages ago and I knew the solution would be to constantly change the ads on my blog. If you think about it the greatest mistake a blogger can make is to place and ad in the sidebar or post and then forget about it. There is two major flaws with this, the first being if someone sees the same ad in the same place each time they come to your blog they develop ad blindness. The second is having only one ad results in minimum market exposure.

: Image via Wikipedia

Unfortunately constantly changing the ads resulted in too much effort and I gave it up pretty quick smart. I knew they’re had to be a solution and so I started digging around and I came up with my post on CJU’s Rotating Banner Function! The results spoke for themselves as my click through rate rose dramatically. The problem was that not everyone offered this feature and then the other day I stumbled upon Max Banner Ads.

Max Banner Ads is a WordPress plugin made by those guys at MaxBlogPress, who are famous for producing high quality WordPress plugins. Other popular free plugins they’ve produced include MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder, MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer, MaxBlogPress Stripe Ads and so many more.

Not familiar with those free plugins? Then perhaps some of their professional paid plugins will ring a bell. The more popular ones that spring to mind are Ninja Affiliate and Subscribers Magnet but they do have several others.

Enough about that, let’s get back to their Max Banner Ads plugin. This plugin is the ultimate one that I’ve come across so far. I did trial one or two others, sorry but I don’t recall which ones they were, suffice it to say I couldn’t have been too impressed otherwise I’d still be using them today.

Max Banner ads has several features that appeal to me;

It allows you to input simple ads, the ones that just need an image and url for them to work.
You can use more complex ads that include tracking information. CJU ads come to mind. I used to use just the link and the image url until I discovered it needed all the other stuff that came with it for it to accurately track clicks, sales and such.
It allows you to include those scripts we’ve all grown to hate, the ones that can cause havoc with the way your blog behaves. These could include Amazon widgets and even your ClickBank hoplinks.
You can select where they appear on your blog and you can even choose to have the text wrap around the ad itself.
Installation is so simple and you don’t have to play around with your WordPress theme for it to work.
It tracks the ad’s impression and clicks and even calculates their CTR, Click Through Rate!
Being able to have rotating ads means you can now display more ads on your blog without making it look cluttered. By this I mean instead of displaying 10 ads you can now have one rotating ad which will display a new ad every time the page refreshes.

There’s so much more but I don’t want to bore you with all that it can do. I’ve configured it to show the ads at the end of the post, even if someone lands on my Home Page. Unlike CJU’s rotating ad feature which showed the same ad on every post, one of the reasons why I stopped using it in posts, Max Banner Ads shows a different ad in each post.

The one flaw is that the free version shows the ‘Powered by Max Banner Ads’ link at the bottom of the ad. You can have this removed by buying the pro version of the plugin or you can do as I did and use your ClickBank affiliate ID from within the plugin. That way you get the commission if anyone clicks on that link and buys one of their products.

DoFollow NoFollow War Compared To The Toilet Seat Saga

Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 4:01 am

Comments (48)

What’s that, you don’t know what the toilet seat saga is referring to? What planet are you from, Venus or perhaps it’s Mars. Well, for as long as I can remember there have been arguments between men and women as to which is the natural position for the toilet seat, is it up or is it down?

Most women will say that it’s down, not surprising as that saves them the hassle of putting it down if it’s currently in the up position. Men on the other hand don’t particularly care, if it’s down those who love their wives lift it up rather than having to rely on their aim. If they remember they will place it in the down position but normally they just wander off in search of another beer. This could result in having to put up with their wife screaming at them because they failed to check before sitting down. Honestly ladies, you just have to be more observant.

You’re probably wandering what all this had to do with dofollow and nofollow? It only just came to me today during a conversation with Mitch via the comments on my post about the T op 5 Reasons That People Aren’t Advertising On Your Blog. Most people who do not want to piss Google off do not do paid ads and if they do they insist on using the nofollow attribute. Even the guys who developed WordPress built it into the code so that all links showed up as nofollow in the comment section.

To me the question is what is the natural attribute on a link, is it dofollow or is it nofollow? Unlike the toilet seat saga I believe that there is a definitive answer and that is it’s obviously DOFOLLOW? Think about it, whenever you link to a site it is automatically a DOFOLLOW link, you have to physically add the NOFOLLOW attribute to make it do something that is unnatural to it’s true being.

So, who do we blame all this confusion about what form of link one should be using? Ultimately it’s all Google’s fault, Google and the other search engines. Originally it was touted as being the savior for all the comment spam that was hitting the blogs but I personally feel it goes deeper than that. Later on we’re told that it was interfering with Google’s algorithms and how they wanted to represent a ‘purer’ search results to their users. One can only wander if that’s the absolute truth or if there is an anterior motive?

So when you are deciding which path to take when choosing between the two types of link think about the link itself and how it must feel when you force it to do something it’s not designed to do.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010The FlexSqueeze Theme gives my blog that professional look. I loved it so much that I bought the developers license. It's the easiest most customizable theme I've come across. See how easy it is to change your theme's appearance! Compare it to Thesis to see how much better it is! Check out some of the latest Latest Updates

I highly recommend you to get your FlexSqueeze copy today!

The Results Are In! Disqus Does Cost You Comments

Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 8:02 pm

Comments (76)

I did a post not all that long ago that’s turned out to be one of my top ten posts. I conducted a poll on that post in order to find out whether or not Disqus was actually stopping people from commenting on blogs. To date I’ve had 105 people vote. The question asked was Have You Refrained From Commenting Because It Was A Disqus Blog? to which 55 (52%) replied no and 50 (48%) replied yes.

I find that quite staggering. You can almost say that there is a 50/50 chance that people are not commenting on a Disqus blog. So, if you’re starved of comments at the moment and you’re running Disqus, then perhaps you should rethink your choice of commenting system.

Some like DiTesco commented that they voted no, not because he liked Disqus, but because,

there are too many blogs that I like and belong to friends that are Disqus powered and I am taking that extra mile to comment.

Unfortunately not everyone is willing to go that extra mile. There were a lot more comments that you may find interesting, both for and against, but when you consider those results I’m glad that I decided against Disqus and stuck with the one that comes with WordPress.