Well it is Saturday night and I thought this would be an exciting night to start a Twitter account for this blog. You can follow me on Twitter at ibusblogger on Twitter.
I hope to post other peoples great posts as well as all of my own on there so follow me and watch and learn what you may have never known or forgotten about.
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I have a bit of respect for the code that I can write and understand in HTML and PHP although I am not and kind of coder really.
I bought a Wordpress template that has a great “single” page that involves Wordpress Custom Fields and Tabber to make a beautiful review page. I use the Wordpress Post Template plugin on most of my blogs so that I can add reviews easily as a new page without having to recode every post that is a review. The plugin is pretty slick and a huge timesaver in this way.
The trouble with this review page in the theme that I bought is that it is tightly linked with the Wordpress theme and I am having trouble coding this page in HTML instead of the PHP that a Wordpress template is coded with. A job that looked like 1 hour is now looking like five and one of my real problems is that I think that I know the tech well enough that I will waste a lot of time to try to make this work.
I shouldn’t
So now I am taking this time to make this post so that I can decide what to do. I should go to elance and get someone to code is but I think that what I am going to do instead is email the guy that created the theme and see what he would charge to make this page work, a third option is to just leave what I have now and not make these changes but there is no real way that I could let myself continue using sustandard review pages now that I have found something that would work so much better.
I use a plugin on many of my Wordpress blogs that is called “what would Seth Godin do” The plugin is fantastic for showing something different to now visitors then returning visitors.
The basics of the plugin is that when someone new comes to your site they will get a message on the top of the post as a welcome and to let people know what you would want to let them know about and at least introduce them.
I have now noticed that there is a secondary part of this plugin that actually will give returning visitors to your site another message that you would like to remind them of.
Try out the plugin and think of the things that you would like to tell new people to your site about. You can give things like:
There are lots of others probably. What do you think? Can you think of other things that you would like to alert your visitors about.
I find myself treading water lately as I try to pick up traffic and more affiliate revenue. I have seen for years now that if I take solid action towards increasing my income that it takes a month or two to actually manifest and during that time I always feel uneasy becasue I ma working hard with no payback.
Have I mentioned before that doing and thinking about doing are not the same thing?
I tend to do some of those stupid things that are spinning wheels, things like reading books, surfging blog posts, reading an writing lots of Twitter messages but these are not really work, the things that are work are
Posting
Creating content
Blog post commenting
Traffic Generation in all forms
Creating sales funnels
Most other stuff is crap. Well I seem to have tried to move off of the other stuff and am now back to creating lots of content and I have to admit it is initially tough, but it does get easier as you get the flow of it.
I just read an article on Problogger about a fellows bad experience moving from Movable Type to Wordpress. The problem was not the data move but the names of the posts.
Last fall I moved nearly all of my blogs from Movable Type to Wordpress and it did go fairly smoothly although I did have a bit of a problem and have some ideas on making the process easier. Here are the steps.
In this step you will just be going and creating the title of the blog and the permalink structure that you have on the old blog. Thei mportance of this is that when people go from the old location to the new location you do not want anything to break. Google is not very smart for finding your new post names when you break the permalink structure.
The other thing that may happen is that you may be moving a blog from one domain name to another, in this case you will be doing a 301 redirect so that people and search engines and incoming links can still find your content even with a new name of your domain. I did exactly this with three of my blogs. Read the rest of this entry »
I use Google Analytics and so today I am looking at some of my worst performing pages, you know some of your pages will get 100 or more visits a day but other pages get 0 or maybe 1 pageview a week.
I set up my Google Analytics view so that I could see the number of pageviews over the last week and then scrolled way down to the bottom and for all the posts that had one view (some of them anyway) I went into my Wordpress editor and looked at the post.
What is the page about?
What are the keywords that this post should have?
Is there any post structure?
Is the topic interesting?
What can I add in content to fill out the idea that the post is about?
Can I add subheadings to the post itself
I would quickly analyze and then fix the page and save. Each page probably took about 5 minutes or so because the structure in the first place was already there. In some cases I did do a lot of rewriting of the content.
In one case I actually liked the new content enough that I changed the date of the post and made it my new post for the day…nice having content that goes back a couple or three years, most of my visitors had not seen this content ever.
Busy couple of weeks so far fixing my blogs and optimizing. I have also been posting up a storm over the last couple of days but still have not been adding many affiliate links like I should be.
This week, More Review Pages!
I have no problem writing blog posts. I kind of look at a blog post as a bit of conversation that I m having but just in my own head. Many other people I find though seem to have a lot of trouble getting started. There are all sorts of reasons that people can not write a blog post including the following:
Nervous about what people will think
Not knowing how long to write
Not knowing how to structure the post
The biggest problem though is that people are always having trouble figuring out what to write and how to keep the flow going in writing a blog post.
Chris Brogan has written a pretty detailed post on how he starts and writes a blog post but I will try to also follow up this week with losts of blog post writing tips
I am not sure how I missed this yesterday but Wordpress has been updated to version 2.5. The new version of wordpress adds lots of new features but is a real departure from what you are used to.
As an internet marketer you may want to wait until next weekend or a slow night this week sometime so that you can upgrade and get used to the interface. The last thing that you want to do is upgrade and have to take a hit on your productivity or suffer with nonworking plugins.
After you try it out let me know what you think. New streamlined interface, picture galleries within posts…what else do you like.
Do you write dry content? I know that i have been accused of just that in the past. I just found a free Firefox plugin called Zemanta that adds a bit of a sidebar applet to your Wordpress Write window that gives you one click access to adding pictures and links to articles. On a meta basis it will also add ideas for keywords and of course this may help give you more ideas for the articles and posts that you are writing in Wordpress. Best of all it does all of this on the fly.
Installation of this Firefox plugin is of course very easy. Just go to the link, download the add-on and then after Firefox is restarted you will notice nothing new until you go into write a new blog post, then Zemanta sitting is in the right hand side of your Firefox as if it was a piece of Wordpress. Read the rest of this entry »
I often think that I educate in my posts but not always. I just read a post by Liz at Successful Blog that really brings me back to adding value for blog readers.
Liz says rightly that (and I really paraphrase here) that you need to give more of yourself to your readers and give them a reason to come back. Make them think, force your readers to act and comment, don’t have your readr leave having think that they have learned something instead write so that they are thinking of your posts message later in the day and tomorrow.
The post is great and I have committed myself to rereading the post every day this week so that I am forced to give more of myself in my blogs.
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