Online Marketing Tips and Tricks» Online Marketing Tips ~ Blogging Your Brand with Cenay Nailor

Create Posts That Engage Your Readers, Attract The Search Engines and Invite Comments

Cenay Nailor — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:40:05 +0000

I know, it sounds like a tall order, doesn’t it? But you can do it with a little forethought, some planning and an eye on the SEO ball. Here is a checklist I use for my posts. Understand though, sometimes I get two out of three, sometimes only 1. A really good post will have all three, so that’s your goal.

Post Preparation Checklist

Gather Your Intel.

In this step, I gather up the research I am performing, material I want to quote, related sites, links or resources I want to include. I gather all that into once place. I use notepad or Dreamweaver for this, since a post’s resources will grow as I build it. Remember that to benefit a reader, it needs to offer them exactly what they are looking for.

If you reference a cool piece of software or a great online tool, be sure to include the link!
Find/Create a Photo.

Since I tend to select themes that are thumbnail driven or that look good with images added to each post, I spend a little time on this step. A photo or image can engage your reader, connect with them emotionally or set the tone for the content piece.

In fact, while I am creating a post, I have both my image editor (either Fireworks or Photoshop) open and a browser window with Google Images open.

I am careful to optimize the images (see 3 Ways To A Faster Page Load for more info). I am careful to only select images where I won’t be violating owner copyright or to create my own.
Create A Clickable Headline.

Do not scrimp on this step. Remember, Google serves your headline to the searcher. This means your potential visitors evaluate this before deciding to come visit or not. A lousy headline will turn off your visitor before they ever had a chance to see your photo or content.

I recommend writing 5-10 headlines AFTER your post content has been written to find the best one. Still having trouble? Here’s a tool I use from time to time to Create Eye-Catching Headlines in 32.4 Seconds.

My headline must contain my primary keyword for the post. That keyword (or keyword phrase) should be as close to the beginning of the title as possible (for maximum search engine benefit). Google weights the first 65 characters of the title as more important than the rest (some even say Google does count anything after 65 character). So, important up front!
Create A Clickable Description.

Like the step before, I know that the description is the “ad” for my post. I know that directly under the headline, they are going to read a description of the post that will decide them on whether they make the click or not.

What is the implicit or explicit benefit to the reader? What will they get out of it? Does it solve a pain? Answer a question? Then I need to clearly state it. The primary keyword I have determined is applicable to this post also needs to appear in my description. Be consistent.
Determine Your Top 3 Related Keywords.

Semantics. Something to avoid in normal conversation if you don’t want to upset your conversational partner, but Google isn’t just anyone.

May the computer gods forgive me saying this, but Google is stupid. Well, okay, not stupid, but software none-the-less. And software — as a rule — is stupid. It can only do what it was programmed to do, and we humans lack the necessary skills to even approximate human decision making.

So, we have to teach Google what we mean, what we intend and what’s important to us (and likely to our visitors). We do this with clear and defined keywords, and semantically related words. As humans, by the age of 3, we understand that car and automobile mean the same thing. Google has to be taught. And it takes a lot of repetition. It takes a lot of validation. Google compares your site about RC models to other sites about RC models to see what words you each think are important.

So, a little research into common phrases and semantically related keywords is a necessary step in producing content Google will serve to your intended target audience. You should use those related keywords within the body of your content to help teach Google when to serve your content.

Part 1 of 2 on Creating posts that engage your readers, attract the search engines and invite comments. Stay tuned for part 2 shortly. In the meantime, start putting into practice your checklist. Like baking a cake, following a recipe can help ensure success.

Are there things you do to get ready for a post that I didn’t list? I would love to hear your ideas

SenSEO: A Checklist For SEO

Cenay Nailor — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:32:18 +0000

As anyone who knows me can attest, I am a rabid Firefox fan.

I found one more reason to crow about the virtues of Firefox. It’s an addon for Firefox that allows you to check your site and give you a grade based on selected criteria.

It shows you what your competition is doing right, and what they are doing wrong. You can use Sen SEO as a checklist on your own blog. Go through this process after each new post, and you can stay in Google’s good SEO graces.

This video will discuss what Sen SEO shows you when evaluating your site, how to use it to spy on your competition, and how to stay ahead of the curve. We also discuss some of the elements that Sen SEO evaluates and why you should care about it.

Updating your theme to meet Google’s requirements
Posting techniques to get your primary keyword on your homepage
How to use Headspace to get a meta-description on your home page
How to correct some of what Sen SEO reports is wrong

Once the video starts playing, click on the video to expand it full size. Press Escape to return to normal size

Blog Success — The Jack Humphrey Way

Cenay Nailor — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 17:04:16 +0000

Some of my students have asked me who my mentor was…where did I learn what I know about Online Marketing. I tell them I am too much of a control freak to follow in someone’s footsteps.

Truth is, I watch what others do and then strike out on my own to test theories, try to duplicate and basically blaze my own path. And though my answer hasn’t changed much in the last 3 years, there are a couple of so called *gurus* out there that actually are honest about what they are doing.

One of them is Jack Humphrey. Though I don’t do everything Jack is doing, I do listen to what he has to say… hey, he has been online and making money successfully in a big way for a while.

If you are like me and wanting to blaze your own trail — I completely understand. But, take a minute and watch this video that Jack put together about one really simple and easy to duplicate method of making money online. Watch the free video, check out his 10 / 30 method and then decide… can Jack show you how to stop chasing the shiny objects thrown in front of you by every guru out there, and start making money online.

Go watch the free 16 minute Blog Success video where Jack reveals one method of making money online that almost all of the big-time guru’s use to make money online — even if you didn’t KNOW that was how they were really making their money.

Whew! Services Page Finally Done

Tracking Traffic: Where Do They Come From, Where Do They Go?

Cenay Nailor — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:17:51 +0000

Before you can increase website traffic, and improve your online marketing and personal branding, you really need to know a few things. Installing a way to track traffic is the first step in learning how to increase website traffic.

Today, I wanted to address a little bit about tracking traffic, a necessary component to improving your online marketing and branding efforts. That’s tracking where your visitor comes from (how they found you) and where they go within your site. Their navigation path is a wealth of information if you will take the time to follow along.

What page are they on when they lose interest and move on? That one website tracking metric alone could be worth a sack of gold coins to you if you know what to do with it.

There are quite a few different types of website tracking scripts and plugins you can use for your blog, but for today, let’s not get fancy… let’s get detailed.

Tracking Traffic with Google Analytics

Google is probably the single best form of traffic tracking you can have on your site. Multiple views into the exact traffic patterns of your visitors — means understanding how to increase your blog traffic If you know what is working, do more of that. See what’s failing? Do less of that.

It does require a Google Analytics or Adwords account though. If you haven’t taken the plunge on one or both of those yet, it’s time.

There are a few reports that I strongly recommend you get into the habit of checking if you are a blogger (which you are or you probably wouldn’t be reading my site).

Referring Sites
This report is especially important to you if you and your blog are heavy into social media sites like Twitter, Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon. This tells you exactly which domain referred traffic to your website.
Keywords
You are spending your nights optimizing for specific keywords (right?) so use this report to tell you if you are succeeding or not. What other keywords are being used to find you? How many visitors are coming from each keyword? It’s all here.
Content by Title
We all want to know what posts are being read and this report will tell you. It’s worth paying attention to the “Time on Page” and “Bounce Rate” columns, since a short time on page and high bounce rate might indicate a page driving visitors away from your blog. A quick look at this report is also a great way to generate that “Most Popular Posts” list.
New vs Returning
This report details your visitors into two major segments. New visitors (meaning first time only) and returning visitors. Again, a wealth of knowledge can be gleaned just from the fact your fans come back (or don’t).
Map Overlay
You’ll probably have to drill down to the country level for it to be useful, but knowing where your readers are in the world can be important information. You may discover that your audience is more international or localized than you would have guessed, allowing you to better target the content and timing of your posts. Are all of your visitors in Arizona? Time your post for 8:00 MST so it’s at the top of their feed readers in the morning.

The Google Analytics interface allows you to save these reports to your dashboard (using the “Add to Dashboard” button at the top left), so you can quickly review your favorite reports without all the fuss.

For more advanced tricks, here is a PDF I found on the net that I used to get up to speed on some of the other features. It goes into a lot of detail so print it and keep it handy: Complete Google Analytics Power Users Guide

Tracking Traffic With FireStats Plugin

I love Firestats for the quick views and immediate traffic patterns that are visible when you view the dashboard. There are a few sections to the statistics tab, all of which I review pretty frequently.

Status
There are only four numbers in this section. Visits in last 24 hours (think unique people here), Page view in the last 24 hours (what those people looked at), Visits (unique people since the plugin was installed) and Page views (unique pages viewed since the beginning of time – or rather since you installed Firestats). While it doesn’t have the detail of Google Analytics, I use this plugin more for a brief overview type look-see.
Recent Referrers
Again, think overview here… this section shows the top 10 domains that are referring traffic your way. There are three settings in this section you can change. The number of items to show (10 in this example, but can be anything you specify), the number of days to include in the view and how you want it sorted (most hits first, or most recent first).
Search Terms
One of my favorite sections, this tells me how my visitors found me. Exactly what keywords were typed at Google (or MSN or Bing or Yahoo) to get to one of my pages. Like Recent Referrers, there are a couple of settings… Number of items to show and time period to include. First time I looked at this data over a 90 day period blew my mind. People were finding me on keywords I hadn’t realized I was even optimizing for.
Recent Popular Pages
Again, 5,000 foot overview here… but which of my pages are getting the most views? Typically, the blog’s index will be on top as the logical entrance point into the blog, but sometimes and well optimized page or one that went viral on the social media circuit can out weigh even the root domain.

Like Google Analytics, there are also views into my visitors machines, operating systems, browsers, and country of origin to help me understand my target audience a little better.

There isn’t a reporting mechanism yet, but the daily view is very intriguing to me and worth the time to review from time to time.

You can start tracking traffic by downloading FireStats for Wordpress here.

Tracking Traffic With Psychic Search

Not strictly a tracking metric, this plugin shows me what my visitors were searching for on my site, once they got here. This is more about learning what they want from me, once they find me, than how they found me.

And this can be very powerful information if you think about it. They found my site because of a keyword they typed in, but once they got to explore a little and see what I offered, it prompted them to look closer. For something specific. Hear me?

Now, all I have to do is deliver what they are looking for. Can you say … this is my next post?

You can get Psychic Search from MaxBlogPress right here. And check out some of the other plugins he offers. I use two or three of his since they are so well written, do exactly what they say they will do and are a bloggers best friend.

Okay, this isn’t all the traffic tracking I use, but this does represent the minimum I put on each blog.

I also use Where Did They Go From Here? A Wordpress plugin modeled on the Amazon feature that helps them sell millions of dollars of products by placing unique views into their other products. Same concept, you just show them that visitors that read XYZ also enjoyed ABC. But that isn’t really about tracking traffic either, and is probably best served by a post all its own.

Zooming Images: Adding Cool Features To Your Site

Cenay Nailor — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 19:27:57 +0000

It doesn’t matter if you are an online retailer, an affiliate marketer or just an avid blogger sharing photo’s of your hobbies, the ability to zoom into an image is a cool feature that will capture the interest of your audience and keep them on page longer. And a longer visit duration is better, right?

I am sure your imagination can take the lead here, but I thought a quick sample would serve to really highlight my point. Here is a small image of my granddaughter Raven. If you hover your mouse over her photo, a larger *zoomed* image should appear so you can really see some of the detail.

Hover Mouse Over Image

Now, try to imagine something like an image of a motorcycle you are selling or a photo of a laptop with extra and lots of little pieces. A book image or a Halloween costume. I think you get the idea.

There are several tools that will add this function to your website or blog. The one I chose is MagicZoom, which is a commercial grade tool but comes with lots of features and options. I examined others (mostly free) which I listed below. One of them should suit your needs, no matter how complicated you want to get.

MagicZoom

The one I am using is Magic Zoom, a commercial JavaScript zoom tool with its price starting at $25 for a single license. Available in several different versions, it works by hovering your mouse over the image to see a magnified version of it. Magic Zoom loads the high-resolution image in the background thus allowing your page to load faster. It offers several customization options like skinning, size and supports multiple image zooms. Check out their demo page to see all the options available. (I didn’t see any reason to reinvent the wheel here)

MojoZoom

MojoZoom is a free JavaScript Image Zoom script that works by moving your mouse over an image to see an zoomed version of it. It places a square to the right of the image with the magnified portion of the image. In addition to adding the zoom effect to your image, it will also automatically link it to its high resolution version. The developers also released a slightly modified version of the script called MojoMagnified. Both of these are independent scripts and do not require external JS libraries to work. (A personal note: I tried to get this one to work here but couldn’t. I am sure I am doing something wrong, but the doco didn’t point me in the right direction. If you are the author of the tool and would like to help me resolve that issue, please use the contact me link)

TPJZoom

TJPzoom is more or less similar to other image zoom solutions but it offers a few different options. For example when hovering over an image, you can drag up and down to increase or decrease the zoom ratio. Similarly dragging left or right will increase or decrease the zoom window size. If you specify a high resolution image, TJPZoom will use it when someone zooms on your image showing the little details of your image. The script is compatible with all major browsers including Internet Explorer 6, and setting it up takes roughly less than a 5 minutes. I personally didn’t care for the default settings which required a larger image on page and would embed the magnification within it. Just not my cup of tea, but might be exactly what you are looking for.

JQZoom

JQZoom is a JavaScript image magnifier built at the top of the popular jQuery JavaScript framework. jQzoom is a great and a really easy to use script to magnify what you want. It supports different type of zooming like standard, reverse and zoom without lens. If you’re familiar with jQuery, you can add several effects to your zoomed images like fade in or fade out. This was the first one I installed and bouyed my spirits since it was so easy to implement. I uploaded the files, added a little one liner in my post and viola! Done. My only downside was it wouldn’t wrap text around the small image — it left this huge empty space… a real no-no on web pages…

Mootools JavaScript image zoom

Based on the Mooltools JS framework, Mootools Image Zoom attempts to mimic zoom effect we see in Flash applications. It works by assigning a thumbnail of your image to its corresponding high resolution version that should be in proportional size. The zoomed area can be updated by either moving the zooming region on the thumbnail or by dragging the zoomed image. Styles are set up into stylesheet so that no modifications need to be made from JavaScript.

Whew! Services Page Finally Done

Cenay Nailor — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:05:46 +0000

Have you ever had a task you knew you had to get done, but had been putting it off for so long that you lost track of everything you planned to do?

Yeah, me to. The Services Pages was one such project for me. In fact, to be fair, the Blog Installations, Plugins and Consultations, Theme Modifications and Coaching pages also needed updating as well. So, I unplugged the phone, closed Skype and turned off auto-retrieval for my email and got busy.

If you are even remotely interested in services offered here, feel free to poke around. If, like my daughter, you could care less… then just forgive my absence from the blogging scene and perhaps do a little jig with me to celebrate.

And if you were thinking you needed to do something similar on your blog, let me know. I found a great plugin (inexpensive but lots of options) that let’s me add products, images and check out options. Please note the Shopping Cart on the pages that offer services. Click “Add to Cart” on a product or two to see how it behaves. (Don’t worry, you don’t have to checkout if you don’t want to). I can say with a lot of enthusiasm that WP eStore Plugin rocks!

All in all a very elegant option for bloggers who sell the occasional product, don’t have a merchant account and don’t want to build PayPal buttons for every product.

Blog Success — The Jack Humphrey Way

Animoto : Bringing Homemade Video To A Whole New Playing Field

Cenay Nailor — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:53:17 +0000

It used to be that only geeks with expensive software could build a video message.

Not any more.

Introducing Animoto. An online service (free accounts still available) that allows you to upload images and / or video clips and turn those into professional looking videos.

And even though I am a geek (and still kinda proud of it), I can tell you that it’s easy to use (and not just for geeks).

Here’s a sample video I created in under 10 minutes, without any forethought or organization (an unusual process for this Virgo!) After watching the video, go check out Animoto and sign up for your free account.

I am looking forward to seeing your videos so drop back by and leave a comment pointing to what you create.

Create your own video slideshow at Animoto.com.

Interested in creating videos longer than 30 seconds? (the free account only allows 30 seconds per video) Then use my promo code to get $5 off your All Access Pass. Promo Code: lkbvpahs

Curious About Web 2.0?

Write Eye Catching Headlines In 32.4 Seconds

Cenay Nailor — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:02:00 +0000

As you navigate the world of Internet Marketing, one thing should be becoming very clear to you. In fact, if this one single fact isn’t in stark relief in your mind, you might be in the wrong business.

Copywriting Is The Million Dollar Skill

Seriously. You need to convey/convince/entice your readers/buyers/customers to take an action. Read an article, buy a product, download a book….whatever.

But before you can even start on that message, you have to convince them to read your content. And we all know that starts with a headline.

I have read some of the copywriting books floating around, and paid attention to the successful marketers. I watch the email’s that come in and the links that Google indexes for keywords. Want to know what I have noticed?

An excellent headline will cause someone to open the email, click the link or follow the thought 185% more often than a poorly written one.

(Okay, I made that number up, but you get the idea)

Some of the better copywriters say you should craft your headline. Write out 20 – 50 for each piece of content you write so you can see the best one. (You can’t see the best one if you only write one, now can you?)

I don’t know about you, but for me, this was hard in the beginning. In fact, if I let it, it can still be hard. So, I work really hard not to let it. And when I get into trouble, I stop by this webpage, fill out 4 simple fields on the web form and click Generate Headline.

Instantly, I get 20+ headlines to select from. Maybe I just use them to spark an idea, but more often then not, when I generate headlines using this tool, I use one of them exactly as is.

And in case you are wondering, this is not an affiliate link or a paid service. In fact, this is a free service. Zip, zero, nada. That’s exactly how much you will pay.

The Lazy Man’s Way To Write Eye Catching Headlines In 30 Seconds Flat

Remember, No hoops, no hassles, no catch, no cash.

Clickbank Hop Ad Builder

Cenay Nailor — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 12:09:43 +0000

If you are doing any type of affiliate marketing, you might want to take a closer look at the Clickbank Hop Ad Builder.

This sweet little tool from Clickbank allows you to create tabbed boxes stuffed full of products that might be related to your readers interested. It can be targeted on an “ad by ad” basis. You can include one link, or 10. Multiple tabs or a single box.

The look and feel is also controlled by you.

Their interface is not overly complicated (though it could use a little work) and allows you to just cut and paste the code into a widget, post or website, exactly where you want the new ad(s) to appear.

Try the tabbed version for a well placed themed set of products your readers might enjoy.

Check out Clickbanks Hop Ad Builder here

Headspace2 Tutorial: Exploring SEO Through Plugins

Cenay Nailor — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:25:01 +0000

A recent coaching session covered the SEO benefits of installing and using Headspace2 to improve your Online Marketing and Personal Branding. As members of that call will recognize, about 45 minutes was cut from this video. All the wasted time on technical difficulties is gone. Areas where the information was repeated (as in answering questions or covering the same concept on a different part of the call) were removed or spliced together to provide a single explanation.

If you are looking for a bit of help in improving your organic listings in the search engines or improving your online marketing efforts, then check out this video. Additional concepts covered include the right way to post to your blog, what the search engines are evaluating first, and the one thing every post must have, in order to get found by both the search engines and your visitors.

Resources For Video

Once the video starts, click on the video to expand to full screen. Escape will restore size

My Profound Apologies

Cenay Nailor — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:11:39 +0000

If you are a part of my Tech Based Marketing Newsletter Subscribers, you have my heartfelt and profound apologies. As many of you know, my sites were hacked, my control panel invaded and 2 months of my time lost chasing the #@%@# hacker(s).

I was able to resolve my problem thanks to the wonderful folks at IX Web Hosting and their tireless efforts to help me get my sites clean and a complete backup on my local computer.

Here’s the rub.

Not sure exactly how, but my AWeber account got reset as well, so when my video site came back up, the first 10 video entries were revived and passed back to AWeber as well. Most of you got 10 emails in one day!

As you know from reading my email’s, I am not a rabid marketer. Yes, you get occasional offers from me, but mostly you get solid content from my blog. Typically, you never get more than 4 email’s in a week, and that’s only if I have been really busy creating new blog or video content.

On the day that 10 emails went out, several subscribers unsubscribed. I don’t really blame them. But I wanted you to know, it wasn’t intentional.

As a thank you for those that continued to read through to this message and didn’t unsubscribe, I have a gift for you. It’s called 7 Keys To Success. It’s a 22 page look at the 7 traits a successful entrepreneur has. No opt-in’s, no sign ups. No hassles. Just right click the link above and select Save Link As (Firefox) or Save Target As (IE) and save to your local computer.

Enjoy. And thank you again for your loyalty. I appreciate you one and all.

One Service Rep – Above and Beyond

Make 2010 The Year You Acheive Your Dreams

Cenay Nailor — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:10:05 +0000

At the end of each year, most of us spend a few moments reflecting on what we have accomplished during the year.

Are we were we wanted to be?

Each year, at least for me, there is a little disappointment when I realize that – no – I did not achieve what I had set out to get done.

Is this a case of dreaming too big? Or perhaps dreaming big, and then spending too much time on other tasks?

Either way, the result is the same. Disappointment. This year isn’t any different. Well, okay, perhaps a little different. I am still a little disappointed. Still fell a little short of the goal… but not as bad as most years. The difference?

Focus. Consistent effort. And a little grit.

2009 for me, was a good year. A profitable year. I made more from my Internet activities than I did from my programming activities — a first for me. But in many ways it was an up hill battle. See, I am easily distracted. The next hottest product comes out and I want to jump all over it and test it, tweak it, make it better. What can I say… I am definitely a geek.

Having someone reign me in from time to time, and suggest that I stay on point has been a huge help (thanks Carol!). Getting a day planner and mapping out the tasks I need to accomplish also helped. Getting better at what I am doing online helped too. So did a lot of little things… so for me, it’s time to take stock of what worked and what didn’t.

So pardon me while I brain storm here…

In the “worked for me” column goes

Taking action while the thought was fresh
Not being afraid of wrong action (wrong action is a teacher)
Remembering to jot down a followup appointment to check results at regular intervals
Finding ways to automate as much as possible
Placing a value on my time and sticking to it
Brainstorming with the right people
Buying a personal or business development product and working through it front to back (and taking notes)
Stop smoking. The extra time not spent outside huffing away has been a boon.

In the “didn’t really work for me” column goes

Buying three new IM products in a week and not completing any of them
Being on the “mailing list” of 109 different marketers (too much lost time reading and sorting)
Over extending myself and not placing a value on my time
Not allowing enough personal recreation time. (It’s important to chill from time to time)
Trying to remember everything without crib notes.

I have never really been the “make a new year’s resolution” kinda gal, so I am not proposing anything so bold. I do better with little changes repeated until they become habit. Then adding another little change until it becomes habit. So, in keeping with that tradition, no bold statements earnestly stated during an alcohol induced stupor. Just plain ole fashioned statement of purpose and a recognition that I have it within my power to achieve my dreams.

Starting today.

How about you? What were the top 3 things you learned should be in the “didn’t work for you” column, or the top three things that were definitely in the ‘worked for you” column? I would value your insights.

Link Building For SEO

Defend Your Blog: Scan For Vulnerabilities

Cenay Nailor — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 05:59:37 +0000

I hate to do it. Tempt the fates that is. After weeks of effort, lost time, missed billables, disappointed clients and frustrated days — I think I am free. Virus free that is.

And even as I am writing this post, I feel a tremor in my loins. A quick check of my site in my FTP program shows a cache directory I didn’t update! Run the file permissions recursed into subfolders and update the .htaccess file to protect the directory. Am I ready? Maybe.

Not sure why some people feel the overwhelming need to trash someone else’s hard work, but it’s a fact of life. And one you better be prepared to guard against.

To help you with this, I have been posting some Defend Your Blog type posts. Today is the latest one, a new plugin I found that will help you evaluate your security and make suggestions where you are vulnerable.

WP Security Scan

WP Security Scan will scan your Wordpress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggest corrective actions. And though some of the suggestions are a little vague, some are spot on and specific.

This plugin checks:

passwords (for strength)
file permissions within your installation
Database security
Version hiding
Admin protection and security

For me, this was an education on additional things to do to my site to secure it, and now that I know what to do, I will be doing these things on other blogs without installing the plugin. Just one or two blogs? Install WP Security Scan and follow what it says!

Fix The Wordpress Blank Page Error

Cenay Nailor — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 00:53:55 +0000

So, has this happened to you? You install a new upgrade or plugin, and suddenly, various places within your dashboard no longer work? You happily click the Dashboard | Posts | Edit link to be greeted by a stark white and completely empty page.

I know. Me too.

And like you, I started Googling the answer, only to find there were dozens of “solutions” out there, and not one of them helped me. I will, for the sake of consolidating the answers into one convenient place, assemble those other solutions as well, but here is what worked for me.

A little background. PHP is the language Wordpress uses to display it’s content to your visitors. It’s software that displays an admin area to you, that allows you to insert posts, pages, links and so on.

Solution 1 – Remove Blank Lines

There are a couple of files which are used pretty much by every function in your dashboard, so there is where I wound up. See, PHP has a challenge under certain circumstances. If there is a blank line AFTER the closing PHP tag (which looks like this ?>), PHP chokes on itself. Stupid huh?

So, when you download the latest greatest version of Wordpress, I recommend you do so to your local machine first. Open wp-config.php and wp-settings.php and make SURE there is no blank line after the closing PHP tag. You know, for that matter, it wouldn’t hurt to check all of them.

Yes, the programmers at Wordpress know that PHP has this challenge. I think they just get into a little bit of a hurry when it’s time to release a new version. One extra Enter key tapped, and life for us bloggers can get real interesting.

Special Tip:
Open each PHP file in the root directory and ensure there are no blank lines at the bottom of the file. Ideally, there should be only ONE PHP tag begin and end as well.

Solution 2 – Disable Plugins

Another potentially stupid exercise that often leads to a solution is to disable your plugins. All of them. In a second tab of your browser, click onto the link that gives you the blank white page. Refresh. Did the page come back? Then it is probably a plugin. Re-enable them one at a time (checking the edit post link – if that is your error page) between each plugin.

One or more of them can cause it to break again. If that is the case, update the plugin, or remove it in favor of one that doesn’t break your admin area.

In my case, I found that three plugins AND the blank line in wp-settings.php were to blame.

Solution 3 – A New Install

Yep, a corrupt file can account for this problem as well, though you will likely see this on the entire admin area, not just one file or link. If that is the case, use a good FTP program and upload the entire folder again.

Warning:
Please note that some FTP clients can make a mess of the upgrade. I recommend Filezilla FTP Client, located at http://www.filezilla-project.org.

Solution 4 – Adding a New Define Security Keys

Wordpress has evolved over time. Settings that are required now, weren’t even a glimmer in their daddy’s eye in previous versions. The defines that make Wordpress more secure is a case in point.

If your blog has a little age on it… you might have been told you need to update the wp-config.php file to include those new define statements. Great. Follow directions but whatever you do, do NOT put them below the /* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */ comment.

More About Security Keys
Beginning with Version 2.6, three (3) security keys, AUTH_KEY, SECURE_AUTH_KEY, and LOGGED_IN_KEY, were added to insure better encryption of information stored in the user’s cookies. Beginning with Version 2.7 a fourth key,NONCE_KEY, was added to this group.

You don’t have to remember the keys, just make them long and complicated or better yet, use the the online generator. You can change these at any point in time to invalidate all existing cookies, though this does mean that all users will have to login again.

Solution 5 – Blank Admin – Bulk Disable Plugins

Sometimes, it might be necessary to disable ALL the plugins in one throw. For example, after an upgrade, NOTHING is visible in the admin area. No login, no dashboard, nothing. In this case, you can rename the plugins folder (to something like plugins-temp) to disable all plugins at once. Just login via your FTP client and rename. Attempt to log back in.

If a plugin was causing the problem, you should now be able to get in and move around. I wouldn’t bring all the plugins back online at once though. I would do it one at a time, testing dashboard features as you go.

Okay, this list probably isn’t complete, but it does contain all the major suggestions I encountered via Google. Though I read more than 2 dozen sites and their suggested solutions, they all pretty much distill down to these 5.

If you encounter another, please let me know so I can add to this list.

Pardon The Dust And Swearing

Cenay Nailor — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 04:00:36 +0000

It’s likely to get bad around here for the next couple of weeks. In fact, it’s bad not just here!

I own and update more than 50 blogs, and every single one of them is currently *under construction*. Or to be more accurate, being moved from one hosting control panel to another.

See, I got tagged with a virus. A little bit of injected code that someone managed to get past the defenses that were in place at the time. (Admittedly, not as much as is in place now). After chasing it for almost 2 months now, I broke down and requested my hosting company move me to a new server. They graciously agreed.

I began moving every domain this morning at 2am. If there is a site of mine your normally visit (for example, the How To Videos over at *I Can Do It Myself* or the behind the curtain look at Internet Marketing Techniques) then please note it might not be available for a few days. The videos occupy more than 20 gig of storage space and moving them is time consuming.

The accumulated files on a domain like images, audios, videos and PDFs has to be painstakingly placed back in exactly the same place. If you find a link or image broken, I would appreciate you letting me know. God I hate hackers.

Hopefully, more soon.

Social Media No Longer A Fad

Cenay Nailor — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:29:52 +0000

If you are still having trouble with email, then this news isn’t going to make your day. If you are one the billions that have embraced the social landscape, then this video won’t shock you.

Either way, I think you might be surprised by the numbers involved.

Building your brand online? Then you need Social Media.

Speaking of Social Media… follow me on Twitter?

Add Page Peel Effect To Your Blog

One Service Rep – Above and Beyond

Cenay Nailor — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 06:08:04 +0000

Actually, it’s more like 5 service rep’s over the last two months, but today’s rep at IX Web Hosting really impressed me. Let me share a little about Carson with you.

A little background… a hacker POS found a way into my hosting account. An unsecured back door or careless password from someone on the server and the little scum sucker wiggled his or her way in. IX notified me immediately that my account password might have been compromised. They changed ALL passwords immediately and required me to do the same.

However, in the short time between hack and discovery, they were already at work. Automated bot’s ran scripts that propagated itself into thousands of files. I have spent a lot of time over the last two months restoring files, reinstalling Wordpress, updating Plugins.

Today, I went to my site (as I do almost every day) and Avast screamed a warning at me. My site was infected with malware! An iFrame was injected into my site doing God knows what. (As far as I can tell, nothing, but you know how those sneaky little devils can be).

Refresh the page, and it disappears. Owwww. This is gonna make it hard to find and fix if it won’t stay still more than a minute.

I reinstalled all files again and then went to the site again. Still there. Frustrated and pretty upset at the absolutely worthless crap some people have the need to share with others, I called IX. They offer live chat (which I mostly use), and a 24/7 ticket system (which I have to use sometimes when the live chat guys can’t help) and phone help.

Today, frustrated and ready to pull my hair out, I needed a real live human being to vent to. Someone to ask questions of. Someone who would let me know I am not alone out here. Today, that was Carson.

Carson of the southern drawl. Carson of the enormous patience. Carson, my hero.

More than 40 minutes on phone as we explored every security measure possible, Carson never once was anything but a gentleman. This despite the fact that I was a woman on a vent. Not to him certainly, but rant just the same.

By the time I got off the phone with Carson, I felt pretty good about what we were able to accomplish, and what the next steps were. It’s a rare service tech that can calm me down once I am pissed off, but Carson managed to do it without even seeming to try.

Thanks Carson. I really appreciate you.

And to those of you worried about your sites, let me share something I learned today. Make sure your permissions are no higher than 755 for any file or folder on your site. Above that, and anyone can use the *open door* to inject code. I found more than a 100 open doors!

Don’t depend on a new upload to just set the permissions for you (like I did). Make sure they are set correctly. That little extra step would have saved me a lot of grief.

So, need a host that has excellent tech support with compassionate people on the other end of that lifeline? You really have to give IX Web Hosting a try.

My Profound Apologies

Protecting Your Blogs FTP Area

Cenay Nailor — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:54:00 +0000

Some %$@#$>%$@#$#^& found/hacked/stole your FTP account password. Now what? Well, change it of course, but that might not be enough.

(Can you feel my self restraint in not actually swearing?)

Here is a simple method you can use to prevent anyone other than you from uploading or downloading files.

FTP.ALLOW

This is a simple text file you create that contains a list of allowed IP addresses. In other words, yours – both at home and work – but yours alone. It has the following syntax and does require one blank line after your instructions. (Please note, I am using bogus numbers rather than a real IP address, you will replace with yours)

ALL: 1.2.3.4

(intentional blank line)

Don’t know your IP? No problem. Just visit http://www.WhatIsMyIP.com and it will tell you your IP address. Have an IP address that changes from reboot to reboot? Again, no problem. Just add this to the line where you are defining your IP…

ALL: 1.2.3.0/255.255.255.0

(intentional blank line)

This will match against any IP in the range 1.2.3.0 – 1.2.3.255

If you have ftp-subusers defined, and they have a home directory different than the main ftp user, they will not be affected by ftp.allow and ftp.deny in your home dir. If you want to restrict their access, you need to place similar files in their home dirs.

FTP.DENY

This text file has the opposite effect. Have an IP address that is just slamming you? Ban them. Place their IP address in this text file and upload to your root, and they won’t be able to access any part of the FTP account. It has the same format as the allow file above.

ALL: 1.2.3.4

(intentional blank line)

So, let’s recap. Hackers are assholes (pardon my French). You have to take measures to keep them away from your precious data. Let’s look at two real life scenario’s.

Scenario 1

Block everything, except IP address 76.188.2.141 which is my home IP address, and IP range 12.44.215.0 – 12.44.215.255 which is the range of IPs that I have at the office (again, these are not a real IP’s, I invented them for the purpose of this example)

The file ftp.allow should look like this:


 ALL:   76.188.2.141
 ALL:   12.44.215.0/255.255.255.0

(intentional blank line)

This will specifically permit access from the said IP Address and range. Note the file ends with an empty line. Now, to deny everything else, we create a ftp.deny file that looks like this:


 ALL:   ALL

(intentional blank line)

Again, make sure you have an empty line at the end of the file.

An extended version of this scenario would be to completely disallow ftp access, except for the webshell access, and then your ftp.allow file will only contain an empty line.

Scenario 2

Allow everything, except the IP addresses that you don’t like (maybe because it was your ex-webmaster that now is trying to hack your site, or because you noted there are hackers that are trying to break into your site from those ranges, or whatever reasons you may have). Say you want to allow everything but block IP ranges 8.0.0.0 – 8.255.255.255, 176.162.54.0 – 176.162.55.255, 212.35.128.64 – 212.35.128.95 and 213.1.2.4.

Your ftp.allow file will only contain an empty line. So nothing will match, and ftp.deny will be checked. Your ftp.deny file will look like this:


 ALL:   8.0.0.0/255.0.0.0
 ALL:   176.162.54.
 ALL:   176.162.55.
 ALL:   212.35.128.64/255.255.255.224
 ALL:   213.1.2.4

(intentional blank line)

Again, don’t forget the empty line at the end. An extended version of this scenario would be to allow everything (the situation you are in probably now). If that’s the case, you don’t need to do anything, not even to create these files.

I hope this little trick will help you defend your blog. Just writing about it will place me on the radar of the assholes with nothing better to do so I better go make sure all my ducks are in a row and my backups are current.

Joke: Top 10 Candidates To Run GM

Cenay Nailor — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:18:26 +0000

Okay, was surfing today and came across this short article on AllTop (link below) that had me laughing right out loud. Now, since this is somewhat rare, I decided to share it with you. (yes, I do have a sense of humor but it tends to be dry. Even funny stuff is just a smile rather than a guffaw)

There’s a vacancy at the top of GM again. The company faces great challenges, so it’s time to think outside-the-box for a new CEO. Here are my ideas.

1. Steve Jobs (Apple). GM would create the most beautiful cars, but you’d need to refill it once a day. You could only buy accessories from the GM store after Phil Schiller approved them. Gas pumps would need new nozzles because Steve mandated non-standard gas-tank fittings.

2. Steve Ballmer (Microsoft). GM cars would look similar to those of German and Italian marques, but it would be seven revisions into the car’s lifecycle before they ran decently.

3. Sarah Palin (Unemployed). Palin would introduce cars that you couldn’t brake or steer called Rogues. Shotgun racks would be a factory option on the Cheney model. However, before they ship, she would resign. When Katie Couric asked her which car magazines she read, she responded, “Most of ‘em.”

4. Michael Arrington (TechCrunch). If Mike ran GM, any documents that you that left inside your car would be considered public information, so you might see them published in CarCrunch. When asked how he could do this, his response was, “They were sitting in our car, so we considered them our property.”

5. Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) Mark would reposition GM as the car company for young people. It would have advanced features like updating all your friends with your location. However, GM would implode as parents began buying its cars. He would face some personal issues when his former classmates accuse him of ripping off the idea of running GM.

6. Martha Stewart (Martha Stewart Living) Martha’s GM would offer cars in every shade in the pantone book. (Her personal car would be an Escalade in robin’s egg blue with a Carmel-dusk interior.) Midway in her tenure she would serve some prison time, but GM would keep rolling on.

7. Robert Scoble (RackSpace). Citing the trend of social motoring, Scoble would add recording capability to the backup cameras of GM cars. Early adopters would drive their cars around backwards, share their videos online, and then split ad revenue with GM.

8. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.). Rupert would revolutionize the car business by requiring that people pay to visit GM.com and pay for GM brochures. In addition, searching Google for any GM cars would yield no results.

9. Tony Hsieh (Zappos). Tony would make it so that you can order a GM car online and have it shipped to you. Then you can use it and return it if you don’t like it—no questions asked, free freight both ways. After twelve months, he would sell GM to Toyota for $200 billion.

10. Biz Stone (Twitter). Biz would raise more money from the government and then give cars away with no definitive plans for achieving revenue. (He would hire Chris Anderson (Wired) to implement the idea of free cars. During times of heavy traffic, however, GM cars would sporadically fail.

Source Article: Holy Kaw! Top Ten Candidates To Run GM

Bing To Pay News Sites To De-Index From Google

Cenay Nailor — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:52:48 +0000

The fierce battle between Microsoft’s Bing & Google is getting fiercer. Ever since the launch of Bing in June 2009, Microsoft has been trying to capture the online search engine market share. Though Bing has come out as the fastest growing search engine in recent months, it still falls way behind Google. From online advertisements to cash back rewards campaigns, Microsoft has spent millions already to attract online surfers to use Bing. But now they have come up with a new strategy to garner more search volume.

As published in Financial Times on November 22, 2009, Microsoft is in talks with various news publishing companies like News Corp who owns The Wall Street Journal (in US), The Times (in UK), Daily Telegraph (in Australia) etc to have them de-index or remove their content from Google. In return, these media companies will get paid!

If that happens, we all would be really interested to see how will Google react. Will they pay more than what Microsoft offered? And if they do, we will see a new money making opportunity for the media companies to pull back their sinking ship. If search engines starts fighting for the exclusive rights of the content, we will be in a new era of web search.

Microsoft is in talks with News Corp to De-index its pages from Google

I can’t just imagine a scenario where the roles will be reversed. Google, Bing ,Yahoo and Ask are competing not only for internet surfers but they start bidding for crawl-able content on the web. Obviously, news websites & bloggers are the clear winners here. Not only are they getting paid from their advertisers, they will see a new stream of revenue flowing in from this. And I am sure this stream will get them much more than what they get paid now. I can’t stop myself from thinking of a day when every single internet user is becoming a journalist, capturing the latest news & writing a unique content to post on his personal blog and wait to be contacted from the search engines to buy his content.

We may even hit the era where more players join the search engine war. Every warrior shows the unique content. So if I want to read health news, I will go to, say, healthyengine.com (a fictitious search engine which publishes exclusive news about health industry) instead of Google because Google does not have the rights to publish those news!

Was exploring some new SEO tools when I came across this article I just had to share with you all. Watch for a new post about Rank Checking your site for specific keywords using a tool this site provides!

Source: The KPMRS Blog : Bing to pay news sites to get their content removed from Google!

Defend Against The Bot’s

Cenay Nailor — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:40:00 +0000

(Part of an ongoing series on protecting your most valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal, your Wordpress blog)

Sabre: Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine

Sabre is an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine. It’s a set of counter measures against spam registration on your blog.

Your visitors are granted permission to register freely on your blog and now you are plagued by fake users automatically created by spammers?

Sabre is the solution to stop these robotized visitors!

Sabre has a number of options you will need to complete to protect your blog, and some will probably need to be changed over time as you learn what they do. These include things like including a captcha form on the registration page to providing a special invitation code they must use.

All the features are activated by parameters so it is pretty flexible.

Download Sabre Wordpress plugin here

Here’s Some Additional Info I Found About Bot’s

Google + reCAPTCHA could raise bar in anti-bot, anti-spam battle … – Locked in a cat-and-mouse game with spammers who use bots to defeat anti-fraud mechanisms and create fake accounts, Google today announced a deal to a.

Preparing for Battle | Tamao – No need for a log-in, but there is a ReCaptcha anti-bot thing. Apparently, votes only last for seven days, which makes sense given the ephemerality of web fiction, so I’ll probably have to ask again, if it produces any visits. …

Myqanda, Possibly A Simple Anti-Bot Solution To Fight Coment Spams … – Myqanda, Possibly A Simple Anti-Bot Solution To Fight Coment Spams? I just checked my server log between Dec 19, 2006 and today. SCode Plugin has successfully prevented 2140 comment spams, but there were 122 spams which slipped through …

Installing Anti Bot Question Mod to PhpBB Forum – Each and everytime I do this it takes me at least an hour .. unlike the instructions which say 5-10 mins. Mostly because I forget all the lessons previously learned so here are my notes for next time. …

Firewall For Your Wordpress Blog

Cenay Nailor — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:22:03 +0000

(Part of an ongoing series on protecting your most valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal, your Wordpress blog)

In the military, they call it “hardening targets” when they take steps to make it harder for the enemy to attack an asset. Here in the real world, it’s hard to think like that. But not thinking like this could cost you time, money, reputation and frustration.

I know from first hand experience.

When I started this series, it was in response to the attack my personal hosting account suffered. And because it was my hosting account, and not a single blog, but rather every single one of my sites was hit.

Take my advice and harden your assets now.

Wordpress Firewall

The second recommendation in the series is that you go and install Wordpress Firewall. This one takes a little more to setup, but guards against a wider range of threats.

This WordPress plugin investigates web requests with simple WordPress-specific heuristics to identify and stop most obvious attacks. There exist a few powerful generic modules that do this; but they’re not always installed on web servers, and difficult to configure.

It intelligently whitelists and blacklists pathological-looking phrases based on which field they appear within in a page request (unknown/numeric parameters vs. known post bodies, comment bodies, etc.). Its purpose is not to replace prompt and responsible upgrading, but rather to mitigate 0-day attacks and let bloggers sleep better at night. Its features include:

Detect, intecept, and log suspicious-looking parameters — and prevent them compromising WordPress.
Also protect most WordPress plugins from the same attacks.
Optionally configure as the first plugin to load for maximum security.
Respond with an innocuous-looking 404, or a home page redirect.
Optionally send an email to you with a useful dump of information upon blocking a potential attack.
Turn on or off directory traversal attack detection.
Turn on or off SQL injection attack detection.
Turn on or off WordPress-specific SQL injection attack detection.
Turn on or off blocking executable file uploads.
Turn on or off remote arbitrary code injection detection.
Add whitelisted IPs.
Add additional whitelisted pages and/or fields within such pages to allow above to get through when desirable.

(More about the Injection Security Filters)

Download: Wordpress Firewall plugin here

18 Wordpress Plugins I Can Not Live Without

Cenay Nailor — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:05:19 +0000

I have been promising a list of my personal *must have* plugins that I install on any new blog. Today, that promise is kept.

These are the plugins I install on every blog I create, regardless of niche or specialty. There are a few that I add to certain types of blogs that will won’t be discussed, but you can get more information on these in my book, the Ultimate Guide To Wordpress Plugins.

They are listed alphabetically, not in the order of installation.

Each of these plugins play nice with all the plugins listed here. No animals were harmed during the making of this list.

Add Signature

This plugin lets you display a custom signature at the bottom of your posts. Simply type the text you want in the options page and configure it to display on every post, or manually display it by adding the trigger text wherever you like. You can also add in author information using the included variables – login name, first name, last name, nickname, email address, website, and description/bio. And since this embeds the signature into the “content”, it is ALSO displayed if someone pulls one of your blog posts using RSS, so you still get credit and a link back to your blog (if you included a link in your signature).

Version: 1.32
Plugin Location: Dagon Design Add Signature

Advanced Excerpt

This plugin adds several improvements to WordPress’ default way of creating excerpts.

It can keep HTML markup in the excerpt (and you get to choose which tags are included) so that formatting isn’t lost when displaying an excerpt.
It trims the excerpt to a given length using either character count or word count.
You can customize the excerpt length and the ellipsis character that will be used when trimming to the specified length.
The excerpt length is real (everything belonging to HTML tags is not counted)
Possibility to ignore custom excerpts and use the generated one instead
Theme developers can use the_advanced_excerpt() for even more control

Version: 0.2.2
Plugin Location: Spare Pencil’s Advanced Excerpt

Antivirus for Wordpress

Though this only scans your theme files for potential problems, it does a good job. If you are hacked and they inject code into your PHP files, one of the first places to be infected is your theme. This early warning system will monitor and clean your theme files.

Version: 0.5
Plugin Location: Antivirus for Wordpress

CommentLuv

Comments are a wonderful thing to receive on your blog, with CommentLuv for Wordpress and Wordpress MU you can give something back to your community straight away by including a titled link for their last blog post or tweet on the end of their comment.

The plugin fetches the feed found at commenters site URL. While they type their comment CommentLuv extracts the last blog post title with link and displays it below the comment form. When they submit their comment, the last blog post link gets added on the end of their comment for all to see! If you are trying to encourage blog comments, this comment works wonders since it rewards the commenter with a “deep link” back to their site.

Version: 2.7.63
Plugin Location: CommentLuv For Wordpress

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. This file isn’t the sitemap you want to display for your visitors, this one is for the search engines only.

If you have an adsense or video “site” you want to tie to your blog, there is an option to “add pages” to the sitemap so Google can get to them all.

Version: 3.1.9
Plugin Location: Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress

Headspace2

This shouldn’t come as a shock to you if you follow any of my videos or posts about SEO for your blog. HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more. Need to know more about how to use it? Check out a few of the videos I have created to show how to get the most out of Headspace2.

Version: 3.6.32
Plugin Location: Urban Giraffe’s Headspace2

Max Banner Ads

Normally adding banners to your Wordpress blog would involve either buying a premium theme that already contained code to display a banner, or breaking out your coding hat and updating your theme. Not anymore. With Max Banner Ads, you just copy and paste in your banner code/links or Google javascript snippet and then tell Max Banner Ads where to put it by clicking a link or two. Max Banner Ads gives you statistics like banner impressions and click through rates to let you correctly track how good your banner is doing.

This is ideal if you are adding new ads or banners to old post content since you don’t have to edit the older posts to get ads inserted.

Version: 1.3.6
Plugin Location: MaxBlogPress’s Max Banner Ads

Max Ping Optimizer

Getting found by Google, Yahoo and MSN requires you to let them know every time you post new content. But edit the post more than once, and you run the risk of pissing them off and being accused of *ping spamming*. Yuk.

With this plugin installed and set properly, you can throttle back the pings to once per hour, or once per day, or even once per week. (Tho why you would only ping once a week I can not imagine). This plugin allows you to correct Wordpress’ built in *bug* of pinging when ever anything changes.

Version: 2.2.5
Plugin Location: MaxBlogPress’s Max Ping Optimizer

Ozh’ Who Sees Ads

This sweet little plugin allows you to decide who sees your ad’s, and who doesn’t. Want to display ad’s to your one time visitors that came from Google, but not a returning visitor? This plugin will allow you to do that. Want to place an ad only once the post is 20 days old or more? Or until an ad has been display [X] times, or if the visitor is logged in.

And it offers these features for more than just ad’s. Any valid HTML can be displayed conditionally. And while he offers you a lot of choices to use, if there isn’t one that matches what you want, any valid Wordpress code will work — ie: On a category page, or a single page (for example).

Version: 2.0.2
Plugin Location: Planet Ozh’ Who Sees Ads

Psychic Search

One of my favorites, this plugin allows you to figure out what your visitors are looking for on your blog, and not finding! Once installed, this plugin tracks every search done on your blog, and lists all searches that yield no results. Want to impress them with your psychic ability? Try posting a new post that exactly matches what they just looked for yesterday.

As you can tell, I really love the plugins from MaxBlogPress because they are intuitive, stable and work every time. I highly recommend most of the plugins you will find here.

Version: 2.0.4
Plugin Location: MaxBlogPress’s Psychic Search

Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation. It also works well if you just change the post title or category since changing either will make the original link invalid.

I created a couple of videos that do into a lot of detail about how to stop losing the search engine optimization on your site with this plugin.

Version: 2.1.24
Plugin Location: Urban Giraffe’s Redirection

Reveal ID’s

Many of the functions or options settings in today’s newer premium themes require you to know the category ID or page ID, but finding those can be a little trying. With this plugin, the ID’s are added to the edit list so you never have to wonder again.

Version: 1.1.2
Plugin Location: Reveal ID’s for WP Admin

SEO Post Link

Automatically make your post link (URL) short and more SEO friendly by removing unnecessary words from the post slug. You can adjust your settings, add words to be removed automatically and establish a limit on the page slug length. This is great for building SEO optimized URL’s.

Version: 2.0
Plugin Location: MaxBlogPress’s SEO Post Link

Subscribe Remind

Designed to help you increase your readership on your RSS feed, this plugin places a reminder at the bottom of each post (or page). You can customize the message with a little HTML knowledge. This is a no-fuss plugin that simply reminds your readers (after they finish reading your great post) to grab the RSS feed to get more like the one they just read.

Version: 1.1
Plugin Location: Trevor Fitzgerald’s Subscribe Remind

Thank Me Later

Automatically send a ‘thank you’ e-mail to those who comment on your blog. This plugin engages the visitor by reminding them to check back for responses or new blog posts. The plugin is highly configurable with multiple messages, variable delay and restrictions. You can also add the last [x] posts to the footer of the message so they are tempted with the titles of your latest content.

Version: 2.0.0.1
Plugin Location: Brendon Boshell’s Thank Me Later

Tweetmeme

The TweetMeme button plugin allows you to easily integrate the TweetMeme button into your WordPress blog. The plugin will put the button into both your content and your feed.

Using the TweetMeme Button you allow visitors to discover your new content and tweet about it. The button provides a fully integrated URL shortener and the title of the story or page. Each link which is posted on Twitter adds one to the tweet count for that story.

Version: 1.7.1
Plugin Location: Tweetmeme

WP-dbManager

Most Wordpress plugins that allow you to backup your precious database, only allow you to back it up. This plugin also allows you to schedule an optimization of the tables, send the backup via email or store on the server (or both). You can select either the normal backup method (an SQL file) or the popular gzip file (smaller file size).

This is one of the first plugins I install and one that I make sure is on every blog.

Version: 2.50
Plugin Location: Lester Chan’s WP-dbManager

WP-Greet Box

This plugin lets you show a different greeting message to your new visitors depending on their referrer url. For example, when a Digg user clicks through from Digg, they will see a message reminding them to digg your post if they like it. Another example, when a visitor clicks through from Twitter, they will see a message suggesting them to twit the post and follow you on Twitter. You can also set a default greeting message for new visitors (not matching any referrer URLs) suggesting them to subscribe to your RSS feed. Professional bloggers know that having these targeted suggestions on their blog increases their blog exposure and loyal readership. Best of all, this plugin is compatible with various WordPress cache plugins so you do not have to sacrifice speed. Even Smashing Magazine is using this plugin.

Version: 5.5.1
Plugin Location: WP Greet Box

Your Blog Is At War, Help Defend It

Cenay Nailor — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:24:45 +0000

Yep, you heard me right. Spammers, hackers, trogans and viruses… it’s a jungle out there. And your blog is a sitting duck.

I have a series of suggestions I will be making over the upcoming days to help you defend this valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal, so stayed tuned. And if you haven’t grabbed the RSS feed yet, this might be a good time…

Wordpress Antivirus

The first recommendation is that you go and install the Antivirus plugin to help keep your beautiful theme files from infecting visitors that land on your site. There is no bigger turn off for a visitor than to have YOUR site infect them.

AntiVirus for WordPress monitors malicious injections and warns you of any possible attacks. With multilingual support. Simply, the plugin you must have.

Ideal as a supplement to the manual security measures in your blogs. Hey, it’s free!

Settings include a manual scan, an auto-scan with email alerts in the effect it find something suspicious.

Download: Wordpress Antivirus here

Fake Adobe Flash Player Install – Don’t Be Fooled

Cenay Nailor — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 20:09:24 +0000

This ugly critter has raised it’s head once or twice in the past (June 2007, Sept 2008), but seems to be back and even more realistic than ever.

You are surfing along and when you land on a site that contains any type of flash movie (and some that don’t!), you get a popup box that says your Adobe Flash version is out of date and needs to be updated.

Since it appears real enough, and because most computer users know they have Adobe installed, many will click on it. Don’t. It is Malware.

Malware often use many techniques to manifest itself onto their host, including these fake warnings to update something on your computer. This piece of malware masquerades itself as a flash player plugin for the Firefox browser (detected by Sophos as Troj/FFSpy-A, and TrojanClicker.VB.395 as detected by TrojanHunter ).

To Repair Your Machine

Take these steps to clear your machine, and remember, a daily complete virus scan by reliable scanning software can save you a lot of grief.

First, since this is a FireFox Addon, open FireFox –> Tools –> Addons

You are looking for an addon that looks something like the one above. Remember it has undergone revisions over the years, so it might not appear exactly as shown. Uninstall this nasty little guy.

Next, the extension works in conjunction with a trojan executable. In the recent past it was smc.exe, though there are probably others by now. And if you are running SyGate as your firewall, smc.exe is a legitimate file! You will need an up to date virus and Trojan scan to remove the rest of the malicious software from your machine. TojanHunter is not a bad tool to add to your arsenal. You can download a free 30 day trial at that link.

Authors Note: Recently a few students have called to report my sites were infected. After 3 days of extreme review and re-installations of all the major files, I discovered it wasn’t me or my sites that were infected, it was the end users that were visiting. Please, take the steps above right now to clear your machine of any threat and let your surfing buddies know as well.

To Determine Your Real Version Of Flash

When in doubt, you should always visit the Adobe site for your downloads. In fact, this is true for ANY legitimate software or extension you have installed. Just like the fake email’s from PayPal or your bank, don’t trust the direct link. Type it into the address bar or closely review the link you are about to click. It should not have any extra characters in the link (for example www.AdobeX.com).

To determine the exact version of the flash player you have installed on your computer, you can visit Adobe’s Version checker at http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

Add Amazon Store To Your Blog

Cenay Nailor — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 03:52:38 +0000

One way to monetize your Authority Niche Site is to add an Amazon store as a page within your blog. If it’s featured on the first page and contains items that your visitors are interested in, it can be a great way to bring in additional revenue.

This How To Video walks you through the process of logging into your Amazon Affiliate account, and creating a store with exactly the products you want. Adding the store to a page in your blog is shown, along with techniques to get it looking good. There is an additional video showing you how to remove the blog’s sidebar from a page template so more of the Amazon store shows up.

With the Amazon store, once it’s created, you can add products and change colors without making a change to your blog. You can have additional categories and a search feature that works within your store. Each item sold from your Amazon store pays you a *commission* or referral fee.

Watch this video if you want to start bringing in additional revenue from the traffic you are already getting, or want to increase the traffic with SEO optimized new search terms.

SlimStat: Stats Tracking For Your Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog

Cenay Nailor — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:12:58 +0000

Knowing what your target audience is reading is another of the steps in the journey to web success with your Wordpress blog.

There are a lot of tracking tools and plugins out there, but I wanted to introduce you to one I found which really provides some amazing insights into your traffic. You can drill into a month, week or day. You can review everything that’s happened on a single URL.

Your referring websites are listed and the search terms used to find you are displayed. I think you will be impressed with the detail this small footprint *script* yields. Want to see my stats? Check out http://www.CenayNailor.com/slimstat.

Want to know how long they were on your site? Where they went? How they found you? How many pages they viewed? It’s all here in this free script called SlimStat

Follow along with this video to find the software, install it on your server and get it tracking your visitors — in under 10 minutes.

ATTENTION: You can view the video full screen by clicking the mouse anywhere on the video while it’s playing.

Resources In Video

Redirection and 301 Via Plugin: Stop Leaking SEO and Visitors

Cenay Nailor — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 08:05:51 +0000

Over time, your blog evolves (hopefully). This means category names change, posts are updated, files move or subdirectories are deleted. What happens when someone clicks a link to a post or file that is no longer there?

They get a 404 Error.

Even with a Custom 404 Error Page, you didn’t deliver the content they thought they were getting. So they might leave.

And if you published that link in a number of places (as you should be doing), you now have *deadlinks* that aren’t getting your visitors to the content you promised them.

You can stop the leaks, plug the holes and deliver the content you promised, no matter where it moved to, even a new domain.

Watch the video and then go grab the Redirection Plugin and start plugging up the holes that evolution leaves behind.

Customize Tag Cloud Appearance To Help Visitors Find Your Content

Cenay Nailor — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:31:44 +0000

I know you thought you’d never hear me say this, but a plugin isn’t always the best way to handle a small change in your Wordpress Theme. Especially since each plugin adds it’s own load time to the overall page load time. Fast = visitors stay longer.

Come on, we are a generation of short-attention spanned humans, struggling to assimilate the thousands of bits of information that flow like a river into our awareness. The longer a page takes to load, the less inclined we are to look at other content on a site. One slow page, especially the main page, and most folks will pack up their little red wagon and move on.

Default Appearance of Tag Cloud

So, keeping page load time down is critical for your web success these days. You want those visitors to peer into every corner of your site and stay as long as possible.

Intuitive navigation is also extremely important. They shouldn’t have to look hard for what they want to know. It should almost jump off the page at them.

A Tag Cloud can be an effective search tool for your visitors, and should be something you add to the mix. What this means is that when a visitor clicks on any particular tag a page displaying the tag cloud and all posts tagged the same will be displayed.

You want them to find the content you have added, right? A series of words that represent other topics on your site shown on the sidebar and lead a visitors into parts of your site they might not otherwise find quickly. (The default Wordpress settings for a Tag Cloud are shown here)

So, if changing the appearance of your Tag Cloud is your goal, don’t add another plugin, make a small change in your theme. If you can cut and paste, you can do this.

Most themes, free or otherwise, use the standard Wordpress call to pull in the tags assigned to your business blog posts. It’s a little snippet of code that looks like this:

Depending on where your tag cloud is located on your blog, will determine which theme file you need to open and edit. It might take a little poking around to find, but just click each file name down the right border at Dashboard | Appearance | Editor and do a search (Edit | Find) for the phrase.

Once you found it, change the line (shown above) to look something like this.

Now save the change by clicking the “Update Changes” button. Refresh the page of your small business blog.

In this sample (the code shown above, the photo shown below), I limited the number of items in the cloud to 25, changed the minimum and maximum sizes and placed them in random order.

You can change any of the options shown below. In this list, the default values (if you don’t specify a change) are shown:

Modified Appearance of Tag Cloud

smallest – The smallest tag (lowest count) is shown at size 8
largest – The largest tag (highest count) is shown at size 22
unit – Describes ‘pt’ (point) as the font-size unit for the smallest and largest values
number – Displays at most 45 tags
format – Displays the tags in flat (separated by whitespace) style
orderby – Order the tags by name
order – Sort the tags in ASCENDING fashion
exclude – Exclude no tags
include – Include all tags
link – view
taxonomy – Use post tags for basis of cloud
echo – echo the results

You can learn all about each of these options at the Wordpress Codex pages for the Tag Cloud here, but the little snippet above should give you an idea of what to do.

Setup and Tweak the Revolution Streamline Theme (secretstowebsuccess.com)
Theme Tweaks: Add Dropdown Category (secretstowebsuccess.com)
Add Page Peel Effect To Your Blog (secretstowebsuccess.com)

Giant List Of Ping Servers ~ Fast Track Your Google Notifications

Cenay Nailor — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 07:41:23 +0000

If ping servers are a foreign concept to you, you probably won’t appreciate this list of ping servers. And since I value *appreciation*, let me explain exactly why you should care about ping services — first.

And no geeky-technical-only-your-IT-manager-will-understand-it jargon.

The term *ping* dates all the way back to the early days of computer networks – which pre-dates the Internet. It was a service on the computer that would allow network administrators to check to see if a connection was present.

Sort of like a bat sending out sonic sound waves, a computer would *ping* another, and record the time it took to *hear* the return message. If it heard it at all, the network admin’s knew the network connection was *live*.

And while the *ping* tool is still available today to check for connections to other computers, with the introduction of blogs, the ping server was born.

Basically, the ping service is a tap on the shoulder of the service provider and search engines. It quietly says “Hey, Cenay posted a new article, come see”. And since many ping servers also talk to Google, Yahoo and the other search engines, this is like telling Google… “Hey, come crawl my site and see my new content”.

Since a *crawl* is the only way to get your pages listed in their index, you really want the search engines to show up as often as you post.

Wordpress contains a built in feature to allow you to do just that!

On the Dashboard | Settings | Writing tab of your Wordpress blog is a box called *Update Services* where you can list ping servers you want to notify every time you add a new blog post.

When you first create your blog, there is one ping server listed by default. You can add to this list, one URL per line. To fast track your notifications to the search engines, add more ping services from the list below.

http://1470.net/api/ping http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/my/cgi_rss_submission http://api.feedster.com/ping http://api.feedster.com/ping.php http://api.moreover.com/ping http://api.moreover.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2 http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping http://bblog.com/ping.php http://bitacoras.net/ping/ http://blawg.org/modules.php?name=Web_Links&l_op=AddLink http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC http://blogbib.com/submit.php http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc http://blogdigger.com/add.jsp http://blogintro.com/?page_id=925 http://bloglines.com/register http://blogmatcher.com/u.php http://blogs.botw.org/helpcenter/submitblog.aspx http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 http://blogsforsmallbusiness.com/directory/add.html http://boingboing.net/suggest.html http://bulkfeeds.net/app/add http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc http://chordata.geckotribe.com/suggest.php http://coreblog.org/ping/ http://dir.nooked.com/submit.dir?action=Start http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Weblogs/ http://dmoz.org/ http://feeds2read.net/Suggest-A-Feed http://feedshot.com/ http://findingblog.com/add_blog.php?cat= http://geekphilosopher.com/MainPage/gpBlogLinkAdd.php http://gnoos.com.au/submitFeed.jsp http://gob.phaeba.net/register.php http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/sign-up http://ngoid.sourceforge.net/sub_rss.php http://ping.amagle.com/ http://ping.bitacoras.com http://ping.blo.gs/ http://ping.blogg.de/ http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/ http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc http://ping.feedburner.com http://ping.myblog.jp http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php http://ping.weblogs.se/ http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/ http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2 http://pingomatic.com/ http://pingqueue.com/rpc/ http://portal.eatonweb.com/add.php http://pub41.bravenet.com/freelink/add.php?usernum=3492821172 http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2 http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/ http://reader.rocketinfo.com/desktop/AddRSSFeed.jsp http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2 http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ http://rpc.britblog.com http://rpc.britblog.com/ http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://rpc.newsgator.com/ http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2 http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2 http://rpc.wpkeys.com/ http://scienceport.org/index.php?show=add&PID= http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz http://smallbusiness.com/wiki/Weblog_directory_company_blogs http://strategicboard.com/?s=h:addblog http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php http://topicexchange.com/RPC2 http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php http://w.moreover.com/cgi-local/site/sourcesubmission.pl http://weblogs.about.com/library/nosearch/blsubmit.htm http://www.2rss.com/index.php http://www.5starblogs.com/Add_blog http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b http://www.all-blogs.net/submit.php http://www.anse.de/rdfticker/addchannel.php http://www.answers.com/main/new_blogger.jsp http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php http://www.blogadvance.com/signup.php http://www.blogarama.com/add-a-site/ http://www.blogbib.com/submit.php http://www.blogbunch.com/suggest/ http://www.blogcatalog.com/blogs/submit_blog.html http://www.blogcode.com/signup.php http://www.blogdigger.com/add.jsp http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2 http://www.blogdir.com/dir/formreg.php http://www.blog-directory-submit.com/RSS/l_op=Addrss.html http://www.blogflux.com/add.php http://www.bloggernity.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi http://www.bloghop.com/account/index.htm http://www.bloghub.com/cgi-bin/add.cgi http://www.blogion.com/?p=submit http://www.bloglisting.com/addablog.html http://www.blogmighty.com/link_submit.php http://www.blogmopolis.com/submit.php http://www.blogoole.com/ping/ http://www.blogoon.net/ping/ http://www.blogoriffic.com/add_blog.php http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates http://www.blogpulse.com/submit.html http://www.blogrankings.com/addblog.php http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1 http://www.blogscholar.com/index.php?option=com_registration&task=register http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/ http://www.blog-search.com/blog-submission.html http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php http://www.blogsnow.com/ping http://www.blogsoldiers.com/links/links.php http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi http://www.blogsweet.com/suggest_link.php http://www.blogtopsites.com/register.php http://www.blogtree.com/ http://www.bloguniverse.com/ http://www.bloguniverse.com/radlinks/ http://www.blog-watch.com/add-url.php http://www.blogwise.com/submit http://www.bloogz.com/man_en/add_your_url.php http://www.blurtit.com/ http://www.bulletize.com/add.php?sid=0 http://www.bulletize.com/index.php http://www.canadiantechmob.com/form.php http://www.contentsmatter.com/add.php http://www.crayon.net/using/suggest.html http://www.csthota.com/blogmap/submit.aspx http://www.diarist.net/ http://www.esperanto.se/kiosk/engindex.html http://www.everyfeed.com/addsite.php http://www.feed24.com/?c=add http://www.feedage.com/submit.php http://www.feedbomb.com/ http://www.feedboy.com/ http://www.feedcat.net/addfeed1.php?lng=en http://www.feed-directory.com/addfeed http://www.feedmap.net/BlogMap/submit.aspx http://www.feedminer.com/addfeed.aspx http://www.feeds4all.com/AddRSS.aspx http://www.feeds4all.nl/AddRSS.aspx http://www.feedsfarm.com/a.html http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2 http://www.findory.com/submit-blog/ http://www.findrss.net/A55711/rsscatalog.nsf/submit?openForm http://www.flookie.net/ http://www.fybersearch.com/add-url.php http://www.getblogs.com/ http://www.globeofblogs.com/register.php http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html http://www.headlinespot.com/site/suggest.htm http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/ http://www.iblogbusiness.com/add.html http://www.icerocket.com/c?p=addblog http://www.imblogs.net/ping/ http://www.industry-blogs.com/submit.php http://www.jordomedia.com/RSS/l_op=Addrss.html http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/ http://www.lsblogs.com/howtosubmit.php http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php http://www.news-feeds.org/addfeed.php http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/Folksonomy.aspx http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php http://www.newsmob.com/register/register.php http://www.newzalert.com/AuthorCenter/ http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php http://www.plazoo.com/addrss.asp http://www.plazoo.com/en/addrss.asp http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php http://www.postami.com/rss.finder/submit_feed.php http://www.pressradar.com/suggest http://www.pubsub.com/add_feed.php http://www.rateitall.com/s-4679-blog-directory.aspx http://www.rateitall.com/suggest.aspx?WL=0&TopicID=20004 http://www.readablog.com/AddFeed.aspx http://www.redtram.com/pages/addsource/ http://www.rss-clipping.com/ http://www.rssfeeds.com/suggest_wizzard.php http://www.rssmad.com/ http://www.rss-network.com/submitrss.php http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/add.php http://www.search4rss.com http://www.shas3.com/submit/ http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2 http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2 http://www.sphere.com/feedback http://www.syndic8.com/suggest_start.php http://www.tailrank.com/import http://www.thefeeddirectory.com/p/Add-A-Feed___255.html http://www.thevital.net/ http://www.topix.net/member/register http://www.truthlaidbear.com/addtoscan.php http://www.wasalive.com/ping/ http://www.weblogalot.com/Ping/ http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/ http://www.wilsdomain.com/add-url.html http://www.wilsdomain.com/blogs/wilsdomain9b.php?op=newsubmit http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php http://www.yourwebloghere.com/add_url.php http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/ http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/ https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast https://www.gobignetwork.com/blog/AddBlog.aspx

Warning!

Wordpress, by default, will ping the services every time you add a post, or update a post. This means that if you edit your posts more than once, you are pinging the services each time you edit. This can lead to *ping spamming*, and getting your blog banned.

There is a way around this.

I highly recommend a Ping Optimizer which will selectively ping based on when the last ping happened. MaxPressBlog’s Ping Optimizer will allow you to set a “throttle” on the number of times it will ping in a given time frame.

This will ensure you can happily blog like crazy, update your posts to your heart content and NOT get your blog banned from the ping servers.

Action Items

Select 8 to 10 of the services listed above and add them to your blog’s Dashboard | Settings | Writing page. Save the changes.

Install MaxPressBlog’s Ping Optimizer and set the “optimizer” to ping no more than once every 120 minutes (or more).

If you find a ping server I didn’t list, let me know. Find one that no longer works? Let me know as well. Just drop a comment below!

Happy Birthday Wishes Had Me Rolling On The Floor

Cenay Nailor — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:16:32 +0000

One of my coaching groups got together and built me a couple/three videos as a birthday present. After laughing so hard I hurt myself, I called and shared with some of my family, which resulted in ANOTHER fit of laughter.

I really wanted to share their efforts with you. How inventive and touching. I can’t tell you guys what it means to me that you took the time to do this.

For the rest of you.. enjoy!

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

Blog Traffic Techniques You Might Have Missed

Cenay Nailor — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:36:21 +0000

As we all know, it doesn’t matter how bright and shiny and full of excellent advice your blog is, if no one is visiting. And while I won’t belabor the point on a few of these techniques, there are others you might not be aware can bring in steady streams of visitors.

So, here are some of the best blog traffic techniques you can use to ensure Web Success with your blog, your small business and your online efforts.

Participate In Blog Aggregators And Communities

MyBlogLog and MyBlogCatalog are just two examples, but there are many blog aggregators out there where you can create a profile, add friends and broadcast messages when you post new content.

These services also provide *widgets* you can place on your blog to highlight who’s visiting from that community. And since these communities feature other bloggers in your niche, you can connect, create cross posts, find folks to do a joint venture or just connect on a personal level.

A side benefit of just browsing the related blogs in these communities is that they are notified you visited. Many will visit back to see what you are about.

Join Newsgroups In Niches Related To Your Small Business

Newsgroup first appeared on the web long before personal blogs, and are still going strong. Though they go by different names now, the concept is remarkably simple. A newsgroup or forum is a group of people that gather together to share ideas, discuss issues, request help and otherwise communicate.

Create a profile in one or two of the more popular forums within your niche, create a signature line and post! That’s it.

Add to the conversation, ask questions, answer questions or post relevant content related to the topic and your signature line will be sending people that click on your link to learn more about you, to your blog.

Visit And Comment On Related Blogs

Not only are you keeping your finger on the pulse (so to speak), but by leaving comments (and backlinks) you are increasing your exposure to people already reading content like what you offer.

Every blog likes it when there is conversation on a post, so take the first step and *prime the pump* for other bloggers by leaving valuable comments. They might return the favor, but even if they don’t, you are getting additional exposure which means more eyeballs on your small business content.

I personally keep a list of my favorite blogs in my Feedly RSS account so I can visit, comment and stay abreast of what’s happening in my niche or business model.

This also sparks fresh ideas for posts on my own blog.

Make Sure Your Small Business Blog Has An XML Sitemap

Just having it isn’t enough, you also have to submit it to Google and Yahoo! This ensures the search engines crawl all the pages in your small business blog and will deliver your content when it is relevant to a keyword search.

I would also suggest you add the sitemap to your Google Webmaster Account Dashboard so you can track any warnings or errors Google finds.

My personal favorite for Wordpress is a plugin by Arne Brachhold called Google XML Sitemap Generator.

Don’t Forget The Offline Traffic Methods

Many bloggers forget this since they are focused on online techniques, but offline adverts are a great way to generate blog traffic. Including your Blogs web address in all your offline literature will ensure a whole different set of *eyeballs*. Some examples are

Business cards
Letterhead, envelopes and stationary
Pamphlets or brochures
In-store signage, banners or message board
Magnetic sign on your vehicle
On your shopping bags (think Wal-Mart or Walgreens)
On your giveaway’s such as pen’s, refrigerator magnets and calendar’s
T-Shirts or Hats

Use Ping Servers On Your Small Business Blog

The Wiki Definition

In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated.

Plain English

Tap the search engines on the shoulder after every post and let them know they need to come crawl your site again, there’s new content.

By updating your Wordpress Dashboard with additional ping servers, you ensure a timely re-visit to your site, which keeps their indexes fresh with your content.

A little can go a long way, so I use MaxBlogPress’ Ping Optimizer. There are some major flaws in WordPress’s pinging system that can get your blog banned (which will cause you to lose traffic!). The Ping Optimizer ensures you are pinging the right people, at the right time, without pissing them off.

Start or Join A Group

MySpace, Yahoo, and Google all feature an area on their sites that allow folks like you and me to join or start a group in our niches. Creating new topics with summary’s of recent blog posts and a link back to the complete article adds another steady stream of visitors to your small business blog.

Groups are a lot like forums (just slightly different web software), but offer a lot of the same benefits such as a signature line, profile exposure, introduction to a new community and an outlet to discuss topics near and dear to your heart.

Publish Articles You Are Proud Of

It probably goes without saying, but I am verbose by nature, so I will say it anyway. Your content should be stuff you can be proud of, delivers real value to your target market and gets talked about on social sites.

Some example types of posts:

Comprehensive examination of what people talk about superficially
Great big list of resources that are related to your niche
Step by step tutorial that shows people how to do something they are interested in
The solution or steps to a problem you have faced in your business

I hope by now, one thing is clear. It’s all about community. Joining. Promoting. Participation. Conversation.

I really hope this post has helped you consider some new blog traffic techniques for your small business blog. If it has, I would love to hear about it. Found something unique that brings in traffic and willing to share with others? Leave a comment and let us hear your brain-child.

Affiliate Theme In Review

Cenay Nailor — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 03:49:57 +0000

Converting An Existing Blog To Affiliate Theme

There are a lot of Wordpress Themes out there, but none that could make affiliate marketing easy. Until now.

I recently purchased Affiliate Theme by Unique BlogDesigns to give it a whirl. Before getting the Affiliate Theme, I had to find a Wordpress theme that somewhat matched my *market*, and then make extensive edits and upgrades to make it work. Getting the Affiliate Theme was like getting an *Easy Button* for affiliate marketing.

The real test came when it was time to convert an existing site over the Affiliate Theme. This video shows you exactly what I did and how I did it. It wasn’t painless (because the blog already had a numbers of *posts* or products I was reviewing), but it was easy. Let me show you how.

To see their video on features and what is offered, click the Learn More About Affiliate Theme link here. Oh, and tell them Cenay sent you. They already know my name, I spent some time in the support forums helping folks out that were asking questions about how to set it up.

Acronis Imaging Software

Cenay Nailor — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 01:48:18 +0000

I have written before about the importance of backing up your computer, so I won’t belabor the point here. In fact, I have recommended Acronis True Imaging Software as a way to recover your computers complete installation in 4 hours or less.

I mean recover like it never happened.

Recently I was doing a video about the Redirection Plugin and using it to stop leaking visitors. In making the video, I came across a link that no longer worked. The link was to Acronis!

Turns out they moved from one affiliate program to another, so my link was no longer valid. In trying to get it reconnected correctly, I had a chance to work with the Acronis people and the affiliate network where they are listing the product. Superior quality custom service and amazing support. Once again, I am renewed in my faith with them.

Not yet backing up your computer? Not yet secure in the knowledge that if a power failure takes out your hard drive, you could recover from it? Then stop what you are doing and go get Acronis True Imaging Software.

You can thank me later.

SEO Tips For Your Blog Success

Cenay Nailor — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:38:32 +0000

We’ve been talking for a while now about search engine optimization techniques for your small business or personal blog, but mine isn’t the only voice making this primal cry.

The blogosphere rings with the cry’s of other voices extolling the virtues optimizing your site and making sure each and every post contains your keywords, a well defined description and the important SEO elements.

I have gathered some of the best messages around the blogosphere together into one place as references for you. Each of these tips contain an important message, so take a few minutes and give them a look-see.

Why Small Business Owners Should Care About SEO

Your customers are looking for you. Can they find you?

When potential customers have a problem and need somewhere to go, they search for it. They head to their favorite search engine, type what they want and are presented with a list of results Google promises can help them. If you don’t appear in those results, you don’t exist. You miss out on the sale, the branding opportunity and the ability to convert that targeted searcher into a lifelong customer. And that’s the value that search engine optimization (SEO) brings to small businesses. It puts you in your customers’ line of sight and establishes you as an expert.

Source: Small Business Trends

9 Must Do Wordpress SEO Tips That You Might Have Missed

I’m not going to talk about the much repeated permalink editing or heading changes here. Instead, I’m going to share with you some SEO tips for WordPress that you might not have bothered to check, the fine details that is. Keep in mind that some of them are the result of recent updates from Google. Let’s go.

Source: Daily SEO Blog

SEM Training: Do You Make These 14 Common SEM Errors?

There are a lot of parallels between Google AdWords and SEO, and a lot of the beginner mistakes are the same for both traffic acquisition strategies. I figured it would be worth outlining some of the most common ones to help save you money on your search engine marketing campaigns.

Source: SEO Book Blog

Warning: Do You Recognize These 21 Blogging Mistakes?

Here are a few quick mistakes that I see new bloggers making (some of which mistakes I made myself). They’re listed in no particular order and I’d love for you to continue the list in comments below:

Giving up too early – blogs take time to take off

Putting off starting a blog – waiting until everything is just right before launching can mean you never do it

Echoing what everyone else is talking about – say something unique and share your opinion

Source: Pro Blogger

Don’t forget, there is absolutely no substitute for meaningful and valuable content. All the SEO in the world won’t help you if your potential client lands on your blog and finds nothing of value to justify their time.

[Video] Unzip Files On Vista

Cenay Nailor — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:01:49 +0000

I just posted a new How To video on my *I Can Do It Myself* Video site and thought I would share it here. If you haven’t visited that site recently, you should check it out. I completely revamped the theme, added new features (like embed codes for the videos) and gave it a facelift

I know, you used to know how to unzip files, right?

Then along comes Vista and everything changes. Your drag and drop no longer works. Right click and extract and Vista complains about duplicate files. It’s crazy.

A friend recently ran into this problem trying to unzip a template file I sent him.

After several frustrating minutes we figured out how to do it so Vista doesn’t complain and we got what we wanted. This video shows the end result. The right way to unzip files on Vista.

A Custom 404 Page : An Opportunity To Impress* Your Visitors

Cenay Nailor — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:53:49 +0000

(* By impress, I mean engage, wow and help your visitors)

When something goes wrong on your site, your visitors will land on a 404 page, or to their way of thinking, the Twilight Zone.

Most standard Wordpress blogs come handily equipped with a 404 Page. The problem is it is absolutely worthless for helping your visitor get back on track.

There could be a variety of reasons they landed there:

They typed the URL incorrectly (don’t tell them this, no one wants to know they made a mistake)
Google sent them to a link you used to have, but deleted during spring cleaning
One of your posts linked to another post that was related, but that you later renamed to improve your SEO

The reason doesn’t matter. A user-friendly website or blog will give the visitor a helping hand. Point them in the right direction. Reassure them it wasn’t their fault. And most of all, engage them.

Your 404 page is an opportunity to showcase your best work, or list your archives. It also let’s them know you care about them… that you want to help them find the content they are looking for.

Here are a few suggestions for your customized 404 page.

Don’t blame the visitor. Seriously, no one wants to hear they made a mistake, even if they did.
Provide a search box, sitemap or another way for them to find what they are looking for.
The 404 Page should have the same look and feel as your blog or site. Features they are accustomed to seeing should still be there.
If you have a very popular page or post that gets a lot of traffic, perhaps that is what they were trying for — so highlight it or provide a direct link.
Have a product? A mini sales page here (after you provide options for them to get back on track) let’s you make use of normally *dead* web real estate.

You don’t have to know HTML to make custom changes to your 404 either. You can *borrow* the Add New Post feature to type up your message. Click on the HTML tab and copy the *code* there. Then open the 404.php file in the theme editor of your dashboard and paste over the *error message*. The template provided by Wordpress (by default) is pretty minimalist. Just look for the two lines shown below. These are the two lines you replace with your fancy customized message.

Want to see what my 404 page looks like?

I found a few other sites that used their 404 page as a way to express themselves. A couple of samples are below but feel to explore the world of 404 pages. Just type any URL (after the main domain name) that doesn’t exist. My favorite is to add *bite-me* after the domain name since I am pretty sure most sites will NOT have a page with this name. Color me warped.

Hootsuite.com has a missing fowl theme with a brief explanation of why the page was not found and a link back to the homepage.

Mundofox.com
A 404 error page with a not-so-eloquent Homer.

Unfinity Design gives a short explanation that the page can’t be found and a number of links back to various parts of their site.

DigiGuru has a very interesting 404 page, which transitions through a number of pictures, whilst giving links back to the main site, his email and phone number, AND information about a walk through the South Pole.

Apartment Home Living offers a quite unusual 404 error page.

Related Information

5 Tips to Make Your 404 Page More Usable (uxbooth.com/blog)
404 Error Pages, One More Time (smashingmagazine.com)
How To Customize Your 404 Page (sitepoint.com)

Group Coaching Overview

Cenay Nailor — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 17:26:01 +0000

As many of you know, I now offer a *Group Coaching* option. This option is specifically designed for groups at the same level, trying to accomplish the same goals and willing to work together.

Rather than one on one coaching, the group call will focus on the goals of the group, with 1/5th of the time spent answering an individuals questions. You will also get to see me solve or explain the other 4 individuals questions or concerns. The learning process is focused on the goal(s) of the group.

I was recently approached by a group of MMA independent agents. I recorded the *overview* call we shared and reposted it here so you can get an idea of the options available and the type of training that will be involved. The training calls focus on both the technical aspects to accomplish online branding and many of the concepts necessary to achieve profitability online.

MMA Group Coaching Overview

June 17th, 2009 [60:00]
(To download, right click here and save)

Please note: There is a 5 person minimum for the group training, special discount applies.

There is also a Coaching Overview Video shot at the same time, which you can see at that link, if you prefer to *see* the same things they did.

3 Ways To A Faster Page Load

Cenay Nailor — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:22:08 +0000

Its true. Fancy blogs look good, but they take time to load on your visitors browser, and that can cost you. If it takes too long to load, that little voice in their head says “All the pages will take this long, do I really want to click the next link?”

At that point, you have lost them…many for good.

Although I have no hard numbers to back up this statement, I figure you have about 8 seconds. If they aren’t seeing real content delivered in 8 seconds, they are thinking about the next site.

Sorry.

You not only have to focus your small business blogging efforts on delivering great content, you have to ensure it’s formatted well and displayed on screen in a pleasing, well organized way. And fast.

So, let’s take a look at 3 ways you can speed up your small business blog’s page load time with just one factor, images.

Optimize Your Images

To many of you, this might be a foreign concept. An image is an image, right? Wrong. Even within an image type (JPG, GIF, PNG), there are differences.

For example, look at the two images below. They look the same to the naked eye, right? Well, okay, not exactly the same but really really close, yes?

Although they look the same to the human eye, their file sizes differ wildly. The top one is 739,133 bytes, and the one on the bottom is 129,643 bytes.

The one on the right would take only 17% of the time it would take to load the one on the left. Let me put it into perspective for you. The top one takes 13.1 seconds to download to your visitors computer at 56K, and the bottom one takes 2.3 seconds.

You can optimize your images using an image compression tool either online or with your favorite image editing software such as Fireworks, Photoshop or Paint.NET. Just open the image and use the Save As option. Select JPG and choose options. The sweet spot is about 80% (to 90%) of original *quality*.

Resize Your Images

There is a second difference between these two photo’s that isn’t immediately visible.

The top image was left at it’s original size (1024 x 768) and *resized* with the width and height feature inside the blog post editor to match the bottom image (500 x 375). (You can test this by clicking the image. It will display at it’s original size which is much larger than the bottom one, don’t forget to come back and finish reading how you don’t have to live with slow loading blogs)

If you plan to display it at 500 x 375, resize it to 500 x 375. Again, your file size will go down, and smaller is better in our situation.

You can resize your images using an online image editing service or your favorite image editing software such as Fireworks, Photoshop or Paint.NET. Just open the image and select the *transform* tool. Grab the corner of the image and drag until it’s the size you want. Save as instructed above.

Select The Right Image Format

They are not all created equal. You can read more about the differences between image types at Sitepoint, but let me summarize here.

JPG format is intended for photograph type images with lot’s of detail and color changes, like the images shown above. Saving an image at 80 – 90% of original quality hits the sweet spot for image quality and file size.

GIF format supports a maximum of 256 colors, which makes them practical for almost all graphics except photographs. Generally, GIF files should be used for logos, line drawings and icons.

PNG format, a relative newcomer to the web, PNG was designed to surpass the limitations of GIF (256 colors) but provide smaller file sizes than JPG with better compression.

Picnik : Online Image Editing Tool

As a developer, I have access to lot’s of really cool toys and image editing applications, but I could just as easily use the very popular Picnik to do most of what I do. It’s an online service (free to use) that allows you to upload an image, crop, resize, add text (etc) and then save back to your computer.

It’s quick. It’s easy. I recommend you make Picnik (or something similar) your new best friend.

Optimizing, resizing and selecting the right image format based on the image itself will go a long way to making your blog load faster.

Source: Secrets To Web Success. A blog I co-author with Dali Burgado, Deontee Gordon, and Carol Hansen. Together, we help small businesses find their online voice.

Intro to Blogging and Small Business Internet Marketing (secretstowebsuccess.com)
How to Optimize Images in Adobe Fireworks CS3 (5min.com)
Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 – How to Optimize Images for the Web (5min.com)
GIF, JPG and PNG File Formats: Pros and Cons (graphicrating.com)
8 Simple Free Photoshop Alternatives that are under 2 MB (makeuseof.com)

Traffic Formula Interactive Webinar

Cenay Nailor — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:42:46 +0000

One of my mentors who is one of the Internets leading success stories (Mike Dillard) is hosting an Interactive Webinar Series much like the one he did three years ago. That one was called M.L.M Traffic Formula and went on to become the de facto standard in how to generate leads and cash for your business. Any business.

Well, three years has past and though the techniques are still working, technology changes and the newer social environment has prompted a lot of questions. He is breaking his silence this month.

I am offering you a chance to be a part of history in the making, learn the exact techniques that have created more M.L.M successes than any other method, and do it at a 70% discount off the normal course price.

Hurry, you only have 20 hours (or less) to sign up.

No more talking, head over there now and see exactly what I am so excited about.

Interactive Traffic Formula Webinar Training Series

Your 70% discount will expire on June 11th, and the price will absolutely increase to $997.00, so do not wait.

PS: If you are on the fence about this webinar series, let me tease you with this. Immediately after the webinar series ends, I will be hosting a series of FIVE free webinars to answer questions about the technical aspects of implementing what you learn in Mike’s course.

22 Things You Should Do After Installing Wordpress

Cenay Nailor — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:58:16 +0000

I know the list sounds long, but trust me, do these things right after installing your new Wordpress blog, and you will start to see immediate traffic, it won’t take as much work to manage your blog, and your visitors will love it!

Little Tweaks With A Big Impact

First and foremost are those little annoying tweaks, that left undone now, can have repercussions later. (These are presented in no particular order since I make sure ALL are done before I install plugins or start posting.)

Update Your User Profile: I say this one is first because some of the other steps below will require you to log back in, and who can remember that crazy randomly generated bit of garbage they call a password?Dashboard | Users | Your Profile
Change the password to something you stand a chance of remembering before you do anything else. Then, when you get kicked off (and you will for some of these settings), you can get back in without referring the email they sent you.
Change Your Blog Tagline:Yes, it true. If you leave it as Wordpress creates it, you are branded as a noobie from the word *go*. By default, Wordpress inserts *Just another Wordpress Blog* as the tagline. Go change it.You should be stating your purpose, provoking thought, asking a question – anything but *Just another Wordpress Blog*.
Dashboard | Settings | General

Be creative, this is one of the first things your visitors see.
Permalink Structure: Right out of the box, Wordpress will display a link structure something like this for your posts: http://www.YourDomain.com/?p=101 which means absolutely nothing to you, your visitors or Google. Get rid of it.Dashboard | Settings | Permalinks
There are five different options there, and while this post isn’t about a best SEO practice, I will mention that using either Day and Name or Month and Name do nothing for you from an SEO standpoint. I hope I don’t have to say that the Numeric option doesn’t either.

I use a custom structure that let’s me benefit from the category name (as a part of the URL) and the Post Name. It looks like this:
```
/%category%/%postname%/ 
```
Decide on WWW or not: Again, by default, Wordpress just includes your blog’s domain name here. If you plan to be giving out your link as www.MyDomain.com, then you should change it now on your blog. Since this affects your tracking analytics, it’s best to do it up front.Dashboard | Settings | General
Please note, doing this will log you out. Just log back in with your handy new password.
Discussion Settings: Boy, we could write a whole book on this topic, but let me just hit the highlights. You want folks to comment on your blog. You just don’t want the pill pushers and porn queens to have the run of the place.I setup comment moderation with 3 or more links (I use CommenLuv which inserts one link, their web URL is a second link, so 3 would be if they included a link in their comment. If you don’t plan to use CommentLuv, change this to 2).
You can also include a list of words that are *iffy* in the box below this setting. Any comment with that word would *trigger* moderation. (Moderation just holds the comments until you stop by and approve or trash the comments).

The Comment Blacklist box is where I spend my time. I include a list of words that I really don’t want on my site such as viagra, penis, enlarge, and the names of several popular drugs. I have nothing against the 60-something year old man who wants to improve performance, my site is just not the place to promote that. I also include words of a sexual nature, including rape, porn, xxx, sex, virgin, lesbian, gay, etc. Trust me, this helps.
Activate (Turn On) Akismet:This often overlooked step can mean the difference between 384 spam messages a day, or not. Akismet is one of the very best *anti-spam* plugins and comes preinstalled with Wordpress.Use it. One note though: Wordpress requires an API key, something you can only get by registering on the Wordpress.com site (profile only, no blogs required).
Once you register, they will send an email with your API key. Insert that in the appropriate place in your Dashboard. (Once you activate Akismet, it will be at the top of every Dashboard page until you activate it).
Turn Off Post Revisions: Post revisions is a great idea that Wordpress takes to an extreme (in my mind, you might disagree). The basic premise is this. Every X seconds, Wordpress will create a backup of your post.Great, right? Here’s the rub.
Each *revision* it saves creates a new record in your database (making it bigger) and Wordpress has the annoying habit of displaying a complete list of every revision you ever made in your life, when you go in to edit a post.

If you are like me, and blog via a Desktop Client, you already have a backup of your post.

So, to turn off this annoying feature, open your wp-config.php file in Notepad or something similar and add this line somewhere near the other define you find in there.
```
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false); 
```
You can optionally just reduce the number of revisions Wordpress will keep on hand by adding a number as the second parameter
```
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 2)
```
Where the number (2) represents the numbers of revisions (not counting the auto-save) you want to keep on hand.
Setup Categories:At least one. No, you don’t have to know the entire category structure at this point, but it is helpful to have at least an idea of the categories you will use most often. Once you have created your most often used category, change the default category to this.Dashboard | Settings | Writing
Change the default post category to your newly created category. While you are on this page, here’s a Bonus Tweak: Change the Size of the post box from 10 to 20. By default, Wordpress will create the “post body” box to be 10 rows high. I don’t know about you, but this feels a little crowded to me.
Setup Ping Services:This one isn’t strictly a *do-it-before-you-do-anything-else* kinda tweak, but will go a long way to getting you that coveted traffic.By default, Wordpress added one ping server to the list of possible servers you can use. (Just one?) So, I went out and found some of the best servers. I just copy the list into the area for other update services. Rather than include them all within the body of this post, I am attaching a text file you can download and copy from.
Dashboard | Settings | Writing

Copy the list (or select the ones you want) from the List of Ping Servers
Install Google XML SitemapsGoogle XML Sitemaps generates a compliant XML-Sitemap for your site, allowing the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN) to easily index your site. Every time you edit or add a post, the sitemap will modify itself unless you tell it differently (see below).Click here for Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
This part is optional, but highly recommended! Go to Google Webmaster Central and log in with your Google Account (you do have a Google Account, right?). On the first page, there will be a link to “Verify” your site. Follow the instructions there.

Once that’s done, you can then click the *Add Sitemap* link from the first page and put in the URL to your sitemap, which will be something like this (non-working) link: http://www.yourDomain.com/sitemap.xml
Install A Database Backup Plugin:Wordpress is software that is driven by a database. All your posts, pages and links are stored in the database. If it crashes, your entire *blog* could be lost, so take a minute and install a backup plugin to protect yourself.I have tried three or four, but the one I like best (and make sure is on all my blogs now) is the WP-DBManager Plugin.
Once installed and activated, just go to Dashboard | Database (it’s on the bottom) and select DB Options. Select the maximum number of backups to keep on hand (mine is 10) and setup the auto-email feature. This will send a zipped copy of your database backup to your email address. Sweet, huh?
Change Media Settings:Wordpress will (somewhat) auto-size your content based on when and where you insert it into a post. If your theme allows 400px for the content width, and your max width for a large picture is 1024, you have a problem.You can manually resize any photo, but taking the time to update these media values before you get started is a real time saver.
Dashboard | Settings | Media

Adjust according to *taste*, but make sure your large size is no wider than your post content area as defined by your theme. For example, mine is 580px to fit in this area.
UPDATE! Wordpress has changed since this was written so this is now causing errors, just skip to the next one!
Change Plugin and Theme Location:Okay, don’t be scared, but this is moving a little towards the advanced side. First, the logic behind this…Wordpress is open source software. It is maintained by a whole team of community minded folks who are constantly improving it and adding new features. As a result of all this busy activity, from time to time you are going to have to upgrade your Wordpress software (and yes, it’s still free).

However, the upgrade process (without the proper plugin) can be a little scary and a bit tedious. To prevent accidently overwriting your plugins, themes or special settings, there is a way you can move your static (unchanging) files to a different location.

It can be anywhere on your webserver. All you have to do to implement this strategy is copy the entire directory (wp-content) to another location and then tell Wordpress where it can find those files. Like we did to turn off revisions, just edit the wp-config.php file to include the define statement shown below.
```
define(’WP_CONTENT_DIR’, ‘http://www.labnol.org/assets/wp-content’); 
```
Don’t forget to upload it back to your blog’s root folder.
Prevent Visitors From Browsing Your Wordpress Folders:Okay, there are the curiosity seekers, and there are hackers. I don’t want either one accidently wandering around my Wordpress installation. For ANY reason. There are a couple of ways you can prevent this. One is simple, one is not so simple. Select the method you are most comfortable with.
- Method 1Create an empty text file and save (name) it index.php. Upload this file to wp-content (wherever you placed this), wp-admin, and wp-includes. The empty file will be read when they navigate to that location and display a blank white page, rather than a list of your files.
- Method 2Add the following line to your .htaccess file that exists in the main WordPress installation directory.
```
Options All -Indexes 
```
  This will turn off the auto-feature to *list* files that exist in a directory without a default page.
Make It Harder To Hack Your Site:Along those same lines, I want to make it a bit harder for the hackers to find weaknesses in my installation. Knowing my Wordpress version can provide them with enough information to attack me, I remove the temptation. (And no, it doesn’t happen often, but yes, it does happen).I remove the little snippet of code that is present in almost every theme out there.
And while that’s almost enough to discourage most, you can completely remove the feature from Wordpress by adding this line to your theme’s function.php file.
```
 
```
Change The Location Of Your Upload Folder:By default, Wordpress will put any photo’s you upload to a directory called wp-content/uploads. First and foremost, uncheck the “Organize my uploads into month and year based folders”. It makes absolutely no sense in the real world, and we like working in the real world.
Dashboard | Settings | Miscellaneous

You can optionally tell Wordpress to use any folder on your webserver for the default location, but if you plan to do this, include the *path* to your folder, and the full URL as well. (ie: *path* would be ../../images if you want the photo’s to go to http://www.MyDomain.com/images. (The ../ tells Wordpress to move up one directory))
Add Your RSS Feed To Feedburner:Yes, you can use the built in RSS feed that Wordpress installs, but Feedburner is such an excellent feed content delivery and tracking system, why would you want to?Burn your feed with Feedburner, and then either install a Feed plugin that will force all your feeds to your Feedburner account URL, or update the theme header.php file to add the following line:
Activate Your Analytics:Keep track of your users and traffic, there’s a lot you can learn from who visits, how they found you and where they go from your place.I recommend Google Analytics, Woopra, Firestats and Psychic Search. Other good analytic services available include Mint and StatCounter.
You have a couple options here. The first is plugins (always recommended for the value they add to your blog), or manual theme edits. For example, Google will provide you with a little code snippet. Just open the footer.php file and just above the closing body tag, add the chuck of code.

I prefer a good plugin like Ultimate Good Analytics. Both Psychic Search and Firestats are plugins as well. Woopra is a service that also offers a plugin (optional).
Custom 404 Page:It happens, people make mistakes… they type the address wrong, or you move a page. They land from the search engines from a link that no longer exists. Bam! 404 Error. (A fancy-non-geek-way of saying the dang thing is just gone).Now, you can just hope it doesn’t happen (it will), or you can plan on it now, and get the most use out of that page. Do you offer a product? Place a mini-sales letter on your 404 Page Template with a link to the full letter. Add things like your Top Posts, or Most Actively Discussed Items to the 404 page to give them options to consume your content.
A 404 page doesn’t have to be a death-sentence. Give the visitor options and she won’t leave your blog just yet.
Help Google Love Your Blog:It’s a sad fact that most bloggers don’t do this step until they have been blogging a while and realize there are things they should be doing to optimize for the search engines. You can be ahead of the game if you install Headspace2 or All In One SEO right away, and start completing the extra fields they give you.I won’t go into detail here (that’s a whole ‘nother post), but each of them offers fields for Title, Description and Keywords on the New Post screen. You should complete all three. Make sure you use your primary keyword for the post at least once in the title and description, and place 1-5 keywords in the keyword field.
Create a Contact Me Page:Do not over look this important step. You want to be accessible. You want them to feel you are a real person they can reach out to. If you don’t provide a way to *connect*, they won’t. And they will wander off, never to be seen or heard from again.
Create a Visitor Site Map:This is different than the one you created for the search engines… this is a page that provides a quick overview of everything on your site.Don’t assume your navigation is working for your visitors (it might not be). The more ways you provide for them to find your valuable content, they more they will.
If your theme doesn’t include an archives.php file to allow this, get Dagon Design Sitemap Generator or SRG Clean Archives. Both are plugins and make this process almost painless.

Anything Else?

I know, I know… this post was a little longer than I had planned, but these are the things I do to every new Wordpress blog I create (40+ and counting). I have found these tweaks to be the absolute minimum required to get a blog that is easy to maintain, and gets found by the search engines. And though I mentioned some very important plugins, there are many more you should consider using.

And while this isn’t the sum total of what I do to setup a blog, I would value hearing what YOU do when you setup a blog (if you have already), or come back and comment to tell me if I missed something.

Please share so others can save a step or two.

Entrepreneurship Workshop – Direct Access To Success

Cenay Nailor — Sun, 31 May 2009 17:55:09 +0000

Want to change the way you do business online?

Then you need to think outside the box, talk with folks who are doing it successfully and model yourself on those successful tactics.

But getting direct access to successful entrepreneurs is sometimes a bit of a challenge. Afterall, they are busy doing what they do best. You could pay hundreds, even thousands of dollars for coaching by one or two before your budget runs out…

Or, you can take advantage of something that my friend Paul Cooley has spent the last few weeks putting together just for you. It’s an all star lineup of the brightest up and coming entrepreneurs that are rocking the Internet Marketing world. Folks like Paul Counts, Coach Deb, Nicole Dean, Ben Settle, Alejandro Reyes, and Eric Farewell.

Paul is putting on a virtual workshop with these great online guru’s, where he will grill them, question them and ask them to explain exactly how to duplicate what they are doing right, how to avoid what they did wrong and what their plans are for the future.

Paul has made this amazing seminar affordable for everyone (who can’t afford a measly $27?) and will be recording the entire thing and giving you the recordings to watch again and again (no extra charge).

What could this be worth to your business success?

So, if you need to know more about:

Social Media Marketing
Niche Marketing
SEO and Traffic Generation
Copywriting
The Secrets of Outsourcing,
Blogging Strategies
Building a Tribe of Loyal Followers

then check out the Entrepreneurial Workshop.

I’ll be there and I am looking forward to hearing your questions about Blogging Strategies That Succeed.

PS: Remember, even if you can’t attend, grab this now and get access to the video recordings of all these successful entrepreneurs sharing candid strategies about succeeding online!

SEO: The Side Benefit Of Good Content

Cenay Nailor — Sat, 23 May 2009 12:00:26 +0000

I was talking with a blogging student a couple of days ago, and explaining the importance of publishing good content, that goes beyond the obvious and thought I would share those thoughts with you.

Publishing Good Content Affects SEO In Two Beneficial Ways

Searchers Are More Likely To Click

The first is sort of obvious. If you are publishing good content, ie: something people are looking for, then when your content is served by Google in the organic search results (SERP), people are more likely to click the link.

This is especially true if you take the time to craft both a great title that states (implicitly or explicitly) the benefit they will gain from clicking the link, and a well thought out description. Remember, Google reads the descriptions in the meta-tag IF it contains the keyword(s) the searcher typed in so give this some thought.

The Side Benefit Of Good Content

The second benefit is a little less obvious, but even more powerful a reason than the first. If you are writing about what your *niche* wants to know and providing great content, other blogmasters and webmasters will link to your post, or even better, publish your post and include the resource box you took the time to include.

You did include a resource box, right?

I know some bloggers get upset when their content is republished on other blogs, but not me. I just make it easier for them to grab my post and make sure I include a resource box that explains who I am and a link back to the original post. If they are within my same *niche*, that backlink’s value to me is way more than any hurt feelings I have.

Perhaps A Third Benefit?

Something I haven’t finished testing yet, but suspect is a third benefit is the *shareable* nature of good content through the social networks. I know that Twitter (for example) uses *nofollow* on all their links published to the Twitter Timeline, but there is still the clickable nature of a link shared socially.

So, while it might not be a direct SEO benefit, it definitely helps in getting more eyeballs.

Source: Secrets To Web Success. A blog I co-author with Dali Burgado, Deontee Gordon, and Carol Hansen. Together, we help small businesses find their online voice.

Can Your Site Survive A Digg?

Cenay Nailor — Fri, 22 May 2009 06:00:57 +0000

Most bloggers blog away, and slowly — over time — build up their readership. They are rocking along on a hosting company pretty much like everyone else’s and not giving much thought to bandwidth or page views.

Oh sure, we all want more, I mean who doesn’t want more page views? But what happens to your site if suddenly, with no warning — 30 thousand people show up? It can happen if you land on the front page of Digg. That’s right… just one great blog post that goes viral, and they could literally be beating down your virtual door.

If your site is setup like most blogs using your average hosting companies… your site might not survive the day. It could come to a screeching halt 30 seconds into your 15 minutes of fame.

“But It’s A Blog? What Can I Do About It?”

While it true that a blog is software running on the web, accessing records in a database (your posts and pages), there is something you can do to ensure you survive a Digg.

It’s a process called “Caching Your Site“, and it involves reading the page, creating a *cached* version of it, and serving that to new visitors. When a page changes (new content or updates to an existing page), the cache is refreshed. (Okay, I know it’s boring stuff, please don’t write in to tell me that)

A normal blog will take 40 – 70 database “reads” to build the home page, depending on the theme and special features. Imagine that happening a hundred times a second. It’s enough to melt a server.

So, the obvious goal here is to create *cached* pages for often viewed content and serve those pages to visitors.

There are plugins that will make this pretty much painless to do. Simply edit your wp-config.php file with notepad or an HTML editor to include the line shown below and install one of the plugins listed. That’s it.

(Be sure to upload your changes to your domain)

Plugins To Help You Survive A Digg

Hyper-Cache

My personal favorite, this is the one I am running on several blogs. It’s pretty much set it and forget it, which I really like. Click the link above to read more about it, or to download the plugin. If you are using Plugin Central, you can simply copy the Hyper Cache Download Link here (right click and select Copy Link Location) and paste it into Plugin Central.

WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. WP Super Cache Download Link.

WP Widget Cache

The caching plugins show above cache the page part of the blog. This plugin caches the widget part of the page. This plugin is highly customizable and will allow you to NOT cache some widgets (that display dynamic information that changes frequently (for example). WP Widget Cache Download Link

One other note…although I used Digg in this example, any social site like Twitter or Facebook can create the same problem for you. All it takes it a really great (read viral) post that gets *talked about*.

[Disclaimer: Even with cached pages, if your content is really really good and gets talked about on all the social networks, you still might melt your servers. This blog post does not consitute any type of guarantee against the aforementioned server melt down.]

SEO: Is Your Blog Search Engine Friendly?

Cenay Nailor — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:53:41 +0000

I recently came across a short *Check List* to help you determine if your site is *SEO Friendly*. I am including that list and a couple of additional notes here. Use this checklist each time you post new content, and you will get *found* much faster.

Is the Title appropriate to the content? Does it let the reader know what is contained within and does it build interest or ask a question?
Is the Title unique for each page or post? (Duplicate titles only confuse your readers and Google)
Is there at least one Hx Tag with your primary or secondary keywords?
Are URLs User friendly? Are they short enough to be memorable and contain one or more keyword
Is the content really worth linking to? Is it valuable in some way to the reader or search engines?
Have I avoided all the blackhat SEO methods like hidden text and keyword stuffing?
Is my post or page visually appealing?
Do I have a Sitemap for the search engines (XML) and another for the readers?
Is the robots.txt file correct and not blocking any needed url?
Are any meta tags stopping Google from indexing anything which needs indexing?
Are the meta keyword and description tags there for all pages?
Are the alt tags of any images descriptive to both the content and the purpose?
Have you added rel=”nofollow” to all external and internal non content links ?

I would add:

Have you completed the All In One SEO or Headspace2 (depending on your preference) additional fields that increase your SEO on each post?
Did you include your primary and secondary keywords in the description?
Did you build your custom, hand-crafted HTML rich *Excerpt*?

Online Marketing Tips and Tricks» Online Marketing Tips ~ Blogging Your Brand with Cenay Nailor

Create Posts That Engage Your Readers, Attract The Search Engines and Invite Comments

Post Preparation Checklist

Related Articles

SenSEO: A Checklist For SEO

Related Articles

Blog Success — The Jack Humphrey Way

Related Articles

Tracking Traffic: Where Do They Come From, Where Do They Go?

Tracking Traffic with Google Analytics

Tracking Traffic With FireStats Plugin

Tracking Traffic With Psychic Search

Related Articles

Zooming Images: Adding Cool Features To Your Site

Hover Mouse Over Image

MagicZoom

MojoZoom

TPJZoom

JQZoom

Mootools JavaScript image zoom

Most Commented Posts

Whew! Services Page Finally Done

Related Articles

Animoto : Bringing Homemade Video To A Whole New Playing Field

Related Articles

Write Eye Catching Headlines In 32.4 Seconds

Related Articles

Clickbank Hop Ad Builder

Related Articles

Headspace2 Tutorial: Exploring SEO Through Plugins

Resources For Video

Related Videos

Related Blog Content

Related Articles

My Profound Apologies

Related Articles

Make 2010 The Year You Acheive Your Dreams

Related Articles

Defend Your Blog: Scan For Vulnerabilities

WP Security Scan

Defend Your Blog

Related Articles

Fix The Wordpress Blank Page Error

Solution 1 – Remove Blank Lines

Solution 2 – Disable Plugins

Solution 3 – A New Install

Solution 4 – Adding a New Define Security Keys

Solution 5 – Blank Admin – Bulk Disable Plugins

Related Articles

Pardon The Dust And Swearing

Most Commented Posts

Social Media No Longer A Fad

Related Articles

One Service Rep – Above and Beyond

Related Articles

Protecting Your Blogs FTP Area

Scenario 1

Scenario 2

Related Articles

Joke: Top 10 Candidates To Run GM

Most Commented Posts

Bing To Pay News Sites To De-Index From Google

Other articles of interest

Related Articles

Defend Against The Bot’s

Sabre: Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine

Here’s Some Additional Info I Found About Bot’s

Related Articles

Firewall For Your Wordpress Blog

Wordpress Firewall

Related Articles

18 Wordpress Plugins I Can Not Live Without

Add Signature

Advanced Excerpt

Antivirus for Wordpress

CommentLuv

Google XML Sitemaps

Headspace2

Max Banner Ads

Max Ping Optimizer