A blog post title that is boring will get passed by and the awesome content that took hours to create slips off into nowhere land.

Why are blog titles so important?

They are important because this is what the human reader sees before visiting your content. Just think how you search for information? You scan through the results fast until you find something that grabs your attention. If there is nothing there you try another search. This is how SEO works under the hood of our websites as we should just be thinking about how the humans will find our content.

The readers see blog titles:

1. In the search engines
2. In RSS feeds
3. In social media sharing
4. On the front page of most blogs
5. On Commentluv links

Search engine traffic is free so why not grab it if you can?

It would be great if we could put a big arrow pointing to our blog post titles to tell people to click on it but we cannot. We have an amazing weapon in hand though and we should use it.

I really think that Google is not god in this situation because if the humans do not click on your listings, Google’s algorithm will naturally move your listing further down the rankings.

10 Tips for Creating Eye-Catching Blog Post Titles

When crafting an eye-catching article title, you are generally trying to catch a reader like you would catch a fish. Firstly you must figure out what bait you should be using to catch that fish.

You should ask yourself these questions:

• What type of information should I be providing to attract the right people to my website?
• What would the reader be typing into the search engines in order to find this information?

When you know what your content is supposed to be about you can now go ahead and create a blog post title to match.

Writing Great Blog Post Titles – 10 Tips

I love writing top 10 list posts. They just work. Therefore I will use that type of post as an example title here.

1. Always set aside 10 minutes to work on your eye-catching blog title. Many people leave this to the last minute and the title simply suffers.
2. Research your competitors because they might have an awesome title that will give you an idea. You can see how much one title gets shared compared to another.
3. Research keywords and make a list of possible combinations that suit like “blog post title”, “article title”, “post title”. I use Google Keyword tool. You should find out which term has the least competition in the search engines and one that has people actually searching for it.
4. Write out some descriptive words like ‘eye-catching”, “attention grabbing”, “gob smacking” “boring”, “cool”, “critical”, “crazy”.
5. Choose how many tips you want to share. Let’s say I have 5 tips. Not always about giving tips but it is a great way to start learning how to write awesome titles.
6. Mix up some titles until you see one you like.
   • 5 Crazy Ways To Create Attention Grabbing Blog Post Titles
   • Boring blog Post Titles SUCK! Here’s 5 Tips Steel The Lime Light From Your Competition
   • Are Your Blog Titles Making Your Readers Snore? Here’s 5 Tips To Wake Them Up
   • 5 Ways To Lose Precious Website Traffic With Your Lame Post Titles
   • Awesome Content But Dead Boring Post Titles – 5 Tips To Fix This Stupid Mistake
   • How To Write Gob Smacking Blog Post Titles and Steal Those Precious Clicks
   • Are You an Idiot? Blog Titles Are Important and Here’s 5 Reasons Why
7. Make sure your title is capitalised correctly. If it is not you will look like an amateur.
8. When crafting your title, even though you want it to be eye-catching, you cannot sacrifice grammar and spelling for attention grabbing.
9. Always write your post title for the humans because that is who you want to ultimately impress. Then if the humans are impressed, the search engines will also be happy.
10. Never copy another sites post title as this is bad web-master etiquette.

The competition for your reader’s attention is more than fierce nowadays. There are so many publishers out there with equally awesome content but you have to find out how to turn your reader’s eyes to your content.

How are you going to make your blog post title stand out?

Common Mistakes With Blog Post Titles

1. The main problem is dead set boring blog post titles.
2. Your title is over-exaggerated.
3. Your title has nothing to do with the content.
4. Your blog post title is awesome and your content is crap.
5. Your title promises the world and delivers crumbs.

Blog Post Titles Examples

Here are some of my most popular posts where the title has helped get the traffic.

Google Is Not God! Make Up Your OWN MIND About SEO

Get Started Blogging For Business – 7 Essential Tips To Make Your BOSS Happy

9 SEO Tips To Dominate Google Search Results

Two Years Blogging And No Real Income! 8 Reasons Why

How To Monetize A Website – The Rocket Science Behind It All

Website Traffic Checklist – 25 Concrete Ways To Get Website Traffic

20 Often Forgotten Website Traffic Tips

18 Ways To Turn Your Ordinary Blog Into A Million Dollar Business

How To Create A Successful Website With WordPress – 12 Point Checklist

Which blog post title do you like the best?

Can you see how having dead boring blog post titles can bring your content down?

SEO goes deeper than what you can see sometimes, especially when you find duplicate site titles added to your listings in the search engines and in social sharing. This problem is not easy to find as you cannot really see the second site title on too many of my pages as the search engines only show a certain amount of characters.

Over the years I have seen all sorts of problems arise but this one was just too simple for me to see and I was looking in all the wrong places.

Check out the screenshot below of a listing in the search engines. Ouch!

Also when I went to share my site on Twitter I noticed the duplicate site title there too!

I had to find the answer to this quickly as my rankings were in shatters.

What Caused the Duplicate Site Title?

I Googled this situation and found a common result. The Yoast SEO Plugin. I was shocked. The funny thing is, I use SEOPressor on all of my sites except for this one. I like to experiment and I had seriously forgotten that I had this plugin installed.

So apparently the Yoast SEO plugin had added a site title and so did either my new theme or my previous one. Hmm I had no idea that was going on in the background, causing my website rankings to drop fast.

How Did I Fix the Duplicate Site Title?

1. In the WordPress dashboard, click on appearance, then editor.

2. On the left hand side you will see a list of files. Click on the header.php file to edit.

3. In that code look for the tag as shown below. Also look for where it ends and delete it all.

4. Now replace that old code with this below.

<title><?php wp_title(''); ?></title>

5. Press save. Now you can see only one title there. See the screenshot below when I tried to share my link on Twitter.

Please note that the search engine results will not show up changed until the search engine bots have crawled your site to see the changes.

I also had to make sure the Yoast plugin rewrite site titles option was not checked!

Lets take a good look at some extremely ugly websites that make money by the truckload.

POF (Plenty Of Fish)

AS EASY AS IT LOOKS Markus Frind and his girlfriend, Annie Kanciar, have loads of time to play in their Vancouver, British Columbia, apartment. Image source

Markus Frind, the founder of plenty of fish, lazes around most days after completing a gruelling 10 minutes work on his super ugly, but profitable website. Markus has no college degrees to speak of yet rakes in over 10 million dollars a year at pof.com, approximately 5 million in pure profit.

The site itself is so simply that it is really ugly. In fact POF looks even worse when you actually try and see how Markus makes his money.

Craigslist – Ugly Websites That Make Money or “Could Make Money”

The Craigslist business model seems crazy to some, but Craigslist President and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster says this company has no plans to make more money. It seems they only need enough money to pay a few business expenses like web hosting services, electricity, and staff wages. The potential for this ugly website to make millions upon millions is obvious. There is no advertising, or none that is obvious to me anyway.

WiseGeek Making Money on the Back of Quality Information Only

The screenshot below shows the main menu on the Wisegeek homepage. Simple and ugly. But investigate further and you will see a huge amount of advertising on each and every content page.

If you press on one of these links that lead to a category page you will see 4 featured graphics at the top, then after that the page has literally thousands of links. It looks like they have listed every article in that section on that page.

Then when you look at one of these articles, the post has a huge amount of ads scattered through the content. I do not really know how much money this site makes but I guarantee it is a big chunk of change.

The one thing that all these ugly websites have is content that matches what their users want. They are simply providing what is needed and doing it well.

Therefore in this case, content is king here.

1. The first one is building websites for other people and making money.
2. The next one is building websites for yourself that actually make money.

#1. Building Websites for Money

So if you choose to ‘build websites for other people’ and get paid for your work, this will essentially mean you are not building a website for yourself. :(

Disadvantages to Building Websites for Money

1. You only get paid a set amount and when the job is done your payments are over.
2. The potential of the actual website is worth far more than what you are getting paid for it.
3. Once you have made the website and sold it, there is no asset to hold on to.

Advantages to Building Websites for Money

1. You might not be good at making money on your own website, therefore selling websites might actually bring you some income.
2. You might not be a good business person and preferred to work for other people, therefore building websites to sell and make money would be good for you.
3. Some people sell one or two websites a day which can turn out to be good money.
4. You can build a reputation for building awesome websites and then charge more money.

How To Make Money Building Websites for Others

It can build a few websites each day and sell them on Flippa.com but you will not get much for them. There is so much competition out there that you will need to have more value in your websites. For example a website that earns a tiny amount of money through AdSense every month gets more people interested in it and is more likely to sell. Also a website that might have an original product with it also attracts interest. A straight out the box template website does not bring in a high price.

Many people make money building niche websites and sell them but you would have to be organised to pump the websites out faster so it is all worth the effort.

Websites Get More Bids if:

• The website earns even a tiny bit of money.
• The website has an original idea.
• The website has an original product or original content.
• The website has a community of followers attached.
• An aged website that has untapped potential. (rare if you are churning out websites)

#2. Building Websites that Make Money for You

Building a WordPress website from scratch and making it successful enough to earn money is not a quick and easy task. Having said that, this is exactly what I do for a living. I build websites that make money.

Advantages to building websites that make money if you

1. You are building something that will become an asset or virtual real estate.
2. It is hard work in the beginning to build a website up, but later it gets easier and you work less.
3. You feel free because you have no one to answer to.
4. You have the potential to earn crazy amounts of money and you also are building an asset to sell.
5. Learning how to make money with WordPress websites is an amazing skill to learn and will allow you to be successful in many area

Disadvantages

1. Building a successful WordPress website or blog takes time and patience.
2. It is far easier to build a website from scratch than it is to actually create a website that makes money.
3. Building a website that can make money requires many skills.

I have never sold a website at all. I will tell you why.

My first offer to buy Tips4pc was for $22,000 and I thought that was simply wonderful. I had built this website in my spare time, as a hobby, but now someone else thought it was pretty valuable.

You see at that stage Tips4pc was bringing in over $1,000 a month and I really had no idea what I was doing. I really did not know how to build a website that made money, it was all about luck at that time.

Anyway I thought about selling as I did not know if I could take this website any further, but luckily for me, I did not sell.

Why didn’t I sell? Well my dad said something that made me think. “You can buy a house for $300,000.00 and not get the return you are getting for basically out laying only time.” He made me think. OMG he was right!

Tips4pc went on to make $2,000, then $3,000, then $5,000 a month. Where is the limit you ask? Well to tell the truth, now that I know how to make money from a website, there is no limit to what I can make.

So Do You Want to Build Websites To Make Money?

Interesting topic, don’t you think? Imagine if I was building websites for other people and taking money in the short term? The same website could have made me either $1000 in one shot or $1000 month after month and then some. Although I had to wait a year or two for the real decent income to flow in, the wait is definitely worth it.

Precautions Before Using this WordPress Website Maintenance Checklist

You are the webmaster so you will need to take responsibility for your website files. Before installing, deleting, optimizing, updating anything on your blog make sure you do the right thing!

1. Backup your database: You can install a plugin to do this or do it manually. See the links below for more information.
   
2. Backup your posts and pages: You can do this by entering your WordPress Dashboard, clicking on Tools in the left menu, then choosing export. This will take all your pages and posts, but does not always get your special settings or all of your images. This is why we also need to backup files as well. I have used this option to move a website into WordPress but just had to bring the images over manually.
3. Backup your server files: You can access your WordPress website files through FTP. You will see all of your files in the installation directory where you first installed WordPress. For example if you install WordPress into the root of your domain then the files will be there. If you installed WordPress into a directory on your domain then they will be in that folder, looking something like this www.yourdomain/blog. Browsing your server is a lot like browsing through a computer.
4. Backup your theme files: If I am upgrading my theme or moving my website I like to copy any customizations that I have made. For example I might have changed the CSS file or maybe I added some code to the header.PHP file. Either way I like to backup these files if I am changing something with my theme. If I am doing a full backup of my website or backing up all the files on the server, then it is not necessary for me to perform this step also.
5. Use A script or software to backup the entire Website: In this case I like to use WPTwin as it will clone your entire installation including images, users, comments, in fact an exact replica of what you have on your website.

Cool Resources for Backing up your WordPress Installation

http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_WordPress_Files Backup your files

http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database Backup your Database

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/ WP database backup plugin

#1. Website Maintenance Checklist – Visit Your Website

This is my number one rule on my website maintenance chekclist! Visit your own website as a visitor, not just in the dashboard! If you have your blinkers on and just go into your WordPress dashboard you will be missing out and the whole website functioning. This is just so simple but webmasters forget about the outside functioning website.

I visit my website every day. Sometimes I find errors myself, and sometimes people e-mail me and tell me. For example one time I went to my blog and clicked on a link on the homepage. It came up with a 404 error. If I did not visit the blog I would not know that there was an error. It turned out to be a plug-in I had installed, messed with the permalink structure, therefore making every link on my blog broken. Luckily I had seen this error before and picked it up straight away.

#2. Update Your Blog

WordPress makes it easy to update or blog. You will see a link to your updates in your WordPress dashboard and when there are updates, there will be a number next to the link.

When you see a number next to the updates link in the menu, all you have to do is click on the update link. This will take you to the WordPress updates page and you will be able to see all of the updates that your blog needs. This could be a plug-in or a WordPress theme, or even WordPress itself. Again, before doing any of this, I like to backup my website just in case.

#3. Check Loading Times

The loading times of your WordPress website are very important. It is like working on a slow computer. You simply get less work done, and when it comes to website visitors, they visit less pages on a slow blog. You want your website visitors to feel good about visiting many pages on your website so you need to make it load up quickly. Speeding up your website loading time has proven to not only bring in more income, but give your users a fantastic experience on your website.

#4. Check for Broken Links

Years ago one of my websites suddenly dropped out of the search engines and I had no idea why. I discovered it was because I had too many broken links on my website. At the time, I had never heard of this. Anyway I have repaired the links and my website went back to the previous rankings in the search engines. This was when I decided to add checking broken links to my maintenance schedule for my website.

Now in WordPress I use a plugin called broken link checker and it is free. I do not leave it enabled full time because I beleieve it slows down the blog. I simply activate it when I am performing the tasks on my website maintenance checklist.

#5. Delete Unwanted Plug-ins

Everyone has plug-ins that they have installed into their WordPress website and either have deactivated them or have activated ones but are not really using them. these plug-ins are just taking up space and should be deleted. Of course, before doing so, you should backup your files just to be on the safe side. I also suggest that you deactivate the plug-in before actually deleting any files.

See this screenshot below. As you can see there is an inactive section for plug-ins. There is no real reason why there should be inactive plug-ins on your blog.

#6. Delete Unwanted Themes

Many Webmasters install new WordPress themes and always forget to actually delete them afterwards. You only really need to keep the one that you are using, and also the default WordPress theme. This is usually used for when your theme crashes, as you can always switch to the default theme.

See the screenshot below. I investigated one of my websites and found eight extra themes installed. This also means that eight of these themes need to be kept up to date as having out of date themes and plug-ins can leave you open to hackers. Therefore it is better to only have the theme you are using, and the default WordPress theme.

#7. Optimize Your Database Tables

To optimize database tables, I use WP-DBManager. It is a free plugin available from the WordPress Plugin site and it lets you take control of your database. It also allows you to delete unwanted tables but you would have to be careful with this. Using this plugin to optimize your database does really speed up your website. I like to delete old database tables that have been created by plug-ins that are not using any more. If you are not experienced then you should get some help when doing this as you can crash your entire website by deleting the wrong database table.

#8. Delete Spam Comments

Many webmasters do not realize that most of us that own the new

I had no choice but to generate traffic any way I could as my site was too young for anyone to notice it by accident.

Web traffic generation pros know that the techniques for attracting traffic to their sites vary depending on how popular the site is already. Obviously, already popular sites have an advantage over unknown sites—but you can easily start attracting more traffic to any site with just a few tricks.

Now I have both large sites (over 10,000 visits per day) and smaller sites. The process to build up traffic is the same but it just becomes easier when your site is well-known and shows some well respected age.

Traffic Generation For The New Site

A new site has few or no incoming links, so nobody knows how to find it. That’s your first problem to remedy. Look for ways to get high-quality incoming links to your site from other sites in your niche or related niches. Your top three techniques for attracting incoming links are:

1.   Guest posting on other sites

2.   Commenting on other sites

3.   Paid advertising which, ultimately, leads people to link to your site

Guest posting is the easiest and usually most effective of these techniques. It’s also explained my other articles like my traffic generation checklist and 20 website traffic tips, so we won’t cover it in detail here.

Commenting on other people’s sites is also a well-known technique, but you should remember that only high-quality and insightful comments work. You want to make the owner of the site you’re commenting on interested in reading your site—and only interesting comments will do that. The best way to get people interested in you is to be interested in them.

Using paid advertisement is an advanced technique and one which obviously costs money—so it should be saved for people who need to build traffic quickly. It’s important that you don’t just advertise your site but that you get the people who click the advertisement to also link to your site.

Write advertisements which will attract website owners, especially bloggers, and use the classic “tempt and reward” method to tempt them into linking to your site and then rewarding them for their link. For example, you can offer blog owners a product they can give away to their readers if they link back to your site using the advertisement headline: “Bloggers: Get Free Products For Contests”.

Traffic Generation For Established Sites

Established sites should use their current traffic to get more traffic. The key to this method is high-quality content which makes people want to link to it. If people want to link to your content, you don’t need to waste time guest posting or waste money advertising just to get links—the links will come naturally.

But there are also a few specific techniques you can use to encourage people to link to your site:

1.   Run a contest. I use Raflecopter or Punch tab to run my contests professionally.

2.   Write linkbait as others are watching what you publish.

3.   Reward incoming links with outgoing links.

Running a contest is my favorite method because it makes everyone happy. Look for a few vendors in your niche who are willing to give your established site a few promo products. Then announce a contest on your blog. You don’t need to require people to link to your site, but do encourage them to promote the contest.

Linkbait is another well-established technique about which I won’t go into detail. Just remember to use your linkbait to lead into the parts of your site which are likely to keep readers coming back.

Finally, remember to reward the people who link to you by linking back to them. Of course, make sure they’re not spammers before you link to them—Google and other search engines reportedly penalize sites which link to spammers. If you reward people for helping you, they and others like them are more like to help you again with traffic generation.

Here are 5 top premium WordPress themes for business that you should not miss:

1: Powered

Everyone loves a drag and drop theme and this one is great! It has 6 modules you can drop into your homepage alone. They include the slider, tagline, video, highlights, recent work and static page. You can easily move them around with a drag-and-drop function as well as disable the modules you don’t wish to use. You do not have to hire a web designer to create a professional looking site as Powered is just easy to customize.

For those who want their WordPress site it looks absolutely unique, the unlimited number of colors on Powered header will be sheer joy. You can also change the background to anything you want and achieve custom visual appeal. The other feature that appealed to me was the fact that this theme comes with loads of page templates like the normal blog, full-width page, full-width centered, photo gallery, portfolio, portfolio with filter, services, sitemap, staff and staff by department.

There is definitely a great collection of basic templates and incredible business tools to make keyword WordPress site highly business optimized and this is why Powered is a great theme.

2: Kraken

If you’re looking forward to building a website where you can just share your product portfolio or similar items, Kraken can work wonders for you.

With unlimited color mode you’ll find exceptional simplicity, Kraken does an awesome job by providing an engaging visual appeal to your online portfolio and this is a very good theme for those who want to sell their products or services online. It also boasts unlimited homepage combinations with customizable modules and the amazing built in shortcodes. For example you can add an image slider to any page by simply adding a shortcode.

This theme includes everything that a business theme should, social bookmarking links, responsive pricing tables, awesome graphics displays, and so much more.

3: Karma

Karma is probably one of the most popular WordPress themes out there. It has unlimited features and awesome potential for customization. It’s customizable to such an extent that you will lose focus after one point of time!

However, the team offers numerous features such as search engine optimization tools and logo builder, making your website creation and easy task.

You can find several 3-D sliders and pricing tabs along with decent customization potential. This 100% responsive theme has a gorgeous design that would catch any customers eye and hopefully entice them to buy.

Karma is also known for offering excellent customer support to its users and that is a big PLUS!

4: Unite

Unite comes with five skins but this is probably one of the best looking butever created.

The textile and combat ability and an amazing portfolio display feature, Unite is the best theme for artists to showcase their work.

If you’re adamant that your website should match with your artistic skills, make no mistake; Unite is the right WordPress theme for you.

5: Classy

Classy comes with more than 20 navigation icons and offers support to the latest WordPress. It has the pitch slider feature and an amazing design that makes it suitable for any business website. I think the main attraction to this theme is that it is very simple yet elegant, just like the minimalist WordPress themes I also recommend now days.

This is an absolutely fantastic theme – not only does it look fantastic, it functions flawlessly and the documentation is so comprehensive it’s unbelievable!
- centraldesigns

These are 5 top premium WordPress themes for business and they will no doubt boost your brand name and make your business look professional, no matter how large or small it is.

I will try anything to get rid of spam comments on my website and having a comment policy message on your website is a good idea.

Just a simple message just above the comment form does wonders.

Quick Tips for Adding a Comment Policy:

1. When editing the code of your website, make a copy of the code and paste it onto a notepad. That way if you make a mistake you can use the original code to fix your problem.
2. One tiny error in your code, as tiny as a missing semi colon, it can render your code useless.
3. Do not make your commenting policy too harsh because you might stop valuable discussion from forming.

Add a Comment Policy Message to Your Comment Form in WordPress

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.

2. Click on the Appearance menu, then click on Editor. See the screenshot below.

3. When the editor opens you will see code on the page, do not touch it.

5. Go to the Template menu on the right hand side. Find comments.php and click on the link. See the screenshot below.

6. Look for the end of your comment section. Mine has

</div><!–comments–>

at the end.

7. Paste your comment policy message above that.

8. Press on update file to save the changes.

Here are the results below. My comment policy stands out.

Example Commenting Policy Messages

COMMENTING POLICY: We love comments here but we have rules. Please do not use keywords in “Name” field; you MUST leave a real name in order to get your comment approved. Spamming for a link will not be tolerated on this site so do not waste your time.

WEBSITE COMMENT POLICY:
**Please be aware that all comments made are moderated and SPAM will not be published.
**Comments must relate to the post topic. This website is here to help people, not for your advertising purposes.

Watch this video tutorial to see how I embedded this message into the php code of my WordPress website. Please note: This video shows how to insert this comment policy message into an older WordPress website.

CODE I USED

Comment Policy in force from 01 Nov 2010

**Please be aware that all comments made are moderated and SPAM will not be published.
**Comments must relate to the post topic. This website is here to help people, not for your advertising purposes.

Does This Comment Policy Message Work?

In a nutshell, yes. I have Commentluv Premium to take care of most spam but small amounts were getting through (unfortunately human spammers). This way it makes them think twice before even bothering to put a comment that will only get deleted in the long run.

Besides the money though, continual server downtime can also kill your search engine rankings dead!

All you have to do is think about how you would feel if you clicked on search results and came up with a website that was not working. You would undoubtedly be annoyed and look for another website to visit.

So the human is annoyed, but what should the search engines do? Should they continue to serve your website in the search results, hoping that the error would be fixed shortly? Or maybe they should remove your website immediately because of the error.

Here are a few ways server downtime can kill your rankings dead!

Creating a Bad First Impression

Let’s just say a human visitor tried to visit your website and the server was down. This is obviously a bad first impression, but you have lost more than that.

Here are a few things:

1. The search engines are presuming that the humans do not like your site because they are bouncing back to the search engines.
2. You have lost the chance to impress that visitor or convert them and turn them into a loyal visitor.
3. The chances of that visitor coming back are very low.

And that’s just about the humans, what about the spiders that crawl your site to index it? What do you think they are doing when your links are not available? Yes they go and index someone else’s site.

Downtime When the Traffic is Thick

This is the absolute worst nightmare for any Webmaster. You plan a massive launch or have a truckload of traffic coming to your website and then your server goes down. Sometimes you have so much traffic that your server is overloaded and then crashes.

If that traffic came from the search engines in the first place, you now have a massive problem. For example, you just finally ranked at number one for an amazing keyword, and then the traffic started flooding in. Your server crashes and the traffic have nowhere to go. This is not a good look and can ruin not only the humans experience with your website, but the search engines as well.

The more traffic that cannot access your site, the more damage it is doing.

Search engines watch what users do when they visit your website.

For example:

• Do they click and stay on your site or leave instantly.
• Are there errors on your site? (Yes if your site is down)
• Is your site getting more clicks than others and proving it is worthy of them?
• How many visitors encountered errors?

Downtime Means No Publishing

If you are experiencing server downtime often, this obviously means that you will be having trouble publishing fresh content to your site. Everyone knows that the search engines love fresh content and you need to keep the ball rolling. Server downtime can see you miss out on fresh listings because you have no fresh content to share. Also, as mentioned above, the spiders cannot index this new content. Oh no!

SEO Goes Out the Door

Most sites invest a significant amount of money or time into their search engine optimization efforts. When you are faced with continual downtime this has a negative impact on your search engine rankings. Obviously people can’t get to your website because it is not available on the Internet.

The search engine optimization that you invested your time and money in can turn out to be useless because SEO is a continual process and does not like to be stopped. It is like stopping a cake from baking as we all know that it will most likely flop in the middle.

Server downtime is simply something to be avoided by any Webmaster and the only true way to avoid this problem is to buy from one of the top web hosting companies that pride themselves in awesome uptime. The best hosting does not always mean the most expensive either; it is all about a quality service, with the least server downtime possible.

Please share your experiences with server downtime below. How did this impact on your search engine rankings?

In this tutorial I will show you how to deactivate WordPress plugins manually, without having to login to your WordPress dashboard.

How to Deactivate WordPress Plugins

I will show you two ways to deactivate WordPress plugins when you cannot login to WordPress Of course you need to be able to access your server either through your domain cpanel or FTP software.

1. Deactivate WordPress Plugins Manually Through

Through either FTP or your cpanel file browser and renaming the entire plugin folder so they actually do not exist in your WordPress site.

2. Deactivate WordPress Plugins Through PHPmyadmin

Entering the PHPmyadmin area and changing your active__plugins within your options database table.

IFRAME Embed for Youtube

This is a great tip to know because we often install plugins that can cause errors with our blogs. If you can disable WordPress plugins just so you can access your admin area to delete the offending plugin, you will be saving loads of money on DIY fixes.

Take a look around my site and you will see that I am not too keen on the word blogging as I have even branded this website as a website and not a blog. I am from the old school of website building and a blog still feels like a personal journal to me and a website is the real thing.

I recently published a huge article about how to blog, only because that is what people are searching for, but throughout the article I slip from the word blog to website. I guess a newbie would be confused by this but you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. The point is, I cannot really call myself a blogger, it irks me.

Unfortunately calling your site a website or a blog will not matter in the end. It will all come down to how you build your site and the methods you follow when ruining your business.

Why Am I Writing this Article?

Well I am writing this article because Ryan Deiss said that “blogging was dumb” and definitely caught my attention with that statement. At first I thought that this was an extremely dumb thing to say, that was until I actually listened to why.

So Is Blogging Dumb?

I am not here to judge if you call your website a blog or your blog a website, but I have to go with Ryan Deiss on this one. Why did he say blogging was dumb? Well Ryan explains that when he stopped blogging and started building authority, that’s when the success flowed in.

It all comes down to building a website the smart way and not the hard way.

The smart way is to build an authority website by getting other well known people to publish content on your blog. The hard way is to simply create every piece of content yourself and struggle to build your own little reputation. After all, the search engines just want great content.

When you build a website the smart way you:

You Build an Authority Site Not a Blog

Rayn says you should go for it and start creating an authority website that is going to also create an asset. I call my websites virtual real estate so this idea did not surprise me at all. Download 79 how to blog tips and you will see that it is all about building authority.

Work on Building Authority

Your precious time is spent building authority and not slogging it out creating content. Hmm that sounds like a good idea.

Use The Oprah Model

We all know Oprah Winfrey. She is famous for interviewing famous people. That’s it.

If we apply this to the website world, we need to get well known writers that bring their own following with them.

Attract Better Writers = More Buzz

When you get the authority you attract better writers Those writers have their own reputation to live up to and they usually like to promote the content they publish on your site. This is a win win situation for you.

So who makes the money? The writer or the publisher?

Ouch!!! I hate to mention this but there is no point keeping it a secret. The thing is, if writers knew what the publishers made from their content they would not be letting the content go so easy and cheap.

But on the other hand, my simple content marketing strategy that leverage’s the power of other sites makes me a decent income. I might be making other sites money by providing them with content but I am also making money from this as I have somewhere to take the visitor.

Here is an example of what one article can earn on a website (or blog) without even trying, and within one week.

I wrote this article about how George Brown from Google Sniper was giving away $5000 worth of products for free. I also linked to a previous review that I wrote about this Google sniper product. I am almost embarrassed to publish this article as it is extremely short and not up to my usual publishing standards.

Here are the results below. I made $177.00 from that article but two of the commissions are recurring. Not a bad start for an article that will stay on my blog for years.

The sad thing is that a paid blogger would only have earned about $5-$10 for this article (as it is very short), whereas I have made $177 plus more! This is a tiny example for me. I have articles on some pages where I make $30 a day and others can make $100 a day. That is NOT a whole website, that is one piece of content that generates its own income.

Publisher vs Blogger – Creating an Authority Website

So we have established that a publisher makes the money when comparing to the writer, but who makes the money when it is publisher vs blogger? Well I can tell you now that both do but there is one big difference, the blogger has to work a whole lot harder.

Conclusion

After watching Ryan’s video, which turns out to have awesome tips for creating authority websites, I have to agree with his theory that blogging is dumb, especially the way he describes it.

So what I really want to know is…

Are you a creating an authority website or building a blog?

What Is WordPress?

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS) used to manage text, pictures, and videos on tens of millions of websites around the word, making it the most popular content management system in existence.

WordPress lets you enter your website text in a simple online form that looks like Microsoft Word. After you type and format your text by pointing and clicking, WordPress automatically inserts all the necessary HTML tags and website programming so that your page looks attractive and professional.

Why would software that does all of that be free? Because programmers hate doing the same thing over and over again—like inserting an HTML tag for every new paragraph—so they wrote WordPress to do all of the boring parts of creating a website. Programmers are lazy, so they gave away WordPress for free in the hopes that other programmers would add new features—and they did, making WordPress today the best content management software for the Web.

How To Use WordPress

Getting started with WordPress is easy. First you need a website that supports WordPress. (Almost all paid hosting services offer one-click WordPress installation.) Then you need to create an initial WordPress account by entering your username (email address) and password.

After logging in the first time, you can create your first webpage immediately, or you can spend a few minutes customizing your theme. You don’t need any special training to do either of these things—you don’t even need to read the manual. Everything in WordPress is obvious.

After you create your first page, you can create your second page. If you want to change your layout, you can do that at anytime. All previously written pages are automatically updated to use the new layout, so everything is as simple as pointing and clicking.

If you let people comment on your pages like a blog, you can approve or reject comments using another obvious point and click interface.

Extending WordPress

WordPress gives you a complete content management system out of the (imaginary) box, but you can add more features later. There are hundreds of free themes that will personalize your blog appearance for you. Many of these themes were designed by the Web’s top graphic artists, so they’re both classy and cool.

More advanced WordPress features can be installed as plugins. For example, I use a plugin called SEOPressor that helps me write great articles that attract extra traffic from search engines. Other plugins help you customize all aspects of WordPress without forcing you to learn programming or deal with nasty HTML or CSS internals.

Conclusion

WordPress puts website design into a point and click interface that’s as easy to use as Microsoft Solitaire, giving everyone the opportunity to start a professional-quality website in as little as 15 minutes.

Computer hard drives often die from preventable problems. If you know why they die, you can either prevent the problem entirely or backup your data before the computer hard drive dies.

Don’t Drop Computer Hard Drives

The most obvious reason computer hard drives die is because they were physically abused. Magnetic hard drives—the classic type of computer hard drives—are the most susceptible to physical abuse.

Inside a magnetic hard drive is a set of magnetic disks, called platters, and a magnetic needle on a long arm. Also inside are a set of tiny ball bearings on which the platters rotate and a small but powerful electrical motor to turn the disks.

Dropping your computer hard drive can damage any of those parts, and all of them are required for the hard drive to work.

Computer Hard Drives Wear Out

Magnetic computer hard drives wear out. Solid State Drives (SSDs) have a different problem we’ll discuss in the next section.

The magnetic parts of a hard drive will never wear out on their own. (But you can permanently destroy a magnetic hard drive by sticking it in a demagnetizer.) That means it’s the other parts of the hard drive which wear out.

The motor on a hard drive is usually so well built that it won’t wear out for decades—but most magnetic hard drives fail after two to five years of constant use. Why? Because they wear out their ball bearings.

The ball bearings spin around thousands of times a second for years on end in a nearly friction-free environment. But that tiny bit of unavoidable friction takes its toll over billions of cycles. As the ball bearings wear down, they begin to wear down faster, so a hard drive can go from slightly bad to dead within a week or less.

You know a magnetic hard drive is dying because it starts to make groaning noises. That’s the motor trying to compensate for the increased friction in the ball bearings.

As soon as the friction is greater than the strength of the motor, the computer hard drive dies. That’s when the drive starts making the dreaded clicking noises which indicate it’s dead.

Some people try to fix failed hard disks by performing risky FBI “like” data recovery methods. Ones like popping the hard drive in a sealed bag in the freezer. Not a good idea for the average computer user as it is dangerous.

Computer Hard Drive Write Cycles

Solid State Drives (SSDs) don’t have any real moving parts like ball bearings, so they don’t suffer gradual wear. Instead, the system which allows them to store data only has a limited number of write cycles.

Every time you write a piece of data to your hard drive, whether you’re saving a file for the first time or the hundredth time, the hard drive uses one of its write cycles for the part of the drive which stores the file.

After approximately 100,000 write cycles, that part of the computer hard drive dies. You can still read the data off of it, but you can no longer write to it.

As more and more parts of the hard drive die to write cycle fatigue, the drive quickly becomes less and less useful. The only good news is that you can continue to copy data off of a SSD when it dies this way, instead of losing everything when it dies like on magnetic computer hard drives.

Start Social Media Content With What’s Hot

It’s much easier to ride the coattails of a current trend than it is to start your own trend. Check the news and the top hashtags to see what other people are talking about and jump in the conversation.

The key to success in creating social media content is follow-up. You can’t know ahead of time which of your posts will gain traction and which will be ignored, so you have to prepare in advance with the assumption that every post you make will be a wild success.

If a significant number of people retweet or share your social media content, you have a brief window during which you can attract a significant number of new followers or fans. People will be visiting your profile and if they see content similar to the post they just saw, they may start to follow you.

That means if you see your posts being retweeted or shared, you need to follow up that post quickly with several other similar posts on the same subject. It’s best if you have these posts prepared and ready to go when you make your original post. This may seem like a lot of work, but it isn’t. There’s a trick in the next section:

Headline School For Social Media Content

Copywriters—the people who write advertisements—spend an incredible amount of time trying to write short headlines which attract attention. On social media, you probably spend an incredible amount of time trying to write short posts which attract attention. It follows then that you can learn a lot from the ancient art of copywriting.

When an ad agency hires a contract copywriter to create headlines, the copywriter usually doesn’t write just one headline—he writes about a dozen and then lets the client choose which headline they like best. When you write your social media content, you can do the same thing. Write each post several times and then post the version you like best.

If your social media content takes off and gets shared and retweeted, look at the versions you didn’t use and see if you can post any of them now to attract more followers.

This copywriting-inspired method has two advantages: writing multiple drafts helps you produce the highest-quality content and having extra content means you can quickly capitalize on any gains you make. Furthermore, you can get fancy and post different versions of the same post on different social media networks to discover which version gets more responses. You can use this information next time to write even better social media content and increase your social media ROI.

The whole process was a big ordeal but of course the error was finally fixed.

Unfortunately this error started to haunt me again recently. I employed a brilliant editor to put the finishing touches to articles and schedule them in. All was fine until she came across this error of not being able to login to WordPress. This error was only for one of the sites but it could not be left for too long as content needed to be published.

Please note that my passwords were correct and valid so there was no point trying to get a new password or using PHPadmin to reset my WordPress password.

Common Symptoms

1. You try to login to WordPress admin area and the screen stays the same.
2. You login and then you see an error message.
3. You press on the “forgot password” link and never get the email to reset.

Ultra quick solutions to login to WordPress admin area

All I could do was help her login so she could do her job. I did not have time to actually fix the problem completely.

Here is what I suggested to her:

1. Clear out your browser cache and cookies.
2. Use another browser to login. Maybe Internet Explorer.
3. Instead of going to /wp-admin go to /wp-login.

Clearing out the cookies and browser cache did not work in this instance, however I know it works for some. Trying another browser worked but was a hassle as all the rest of the work was open in the other browser. This was wasting time.

Finally I tried the /wp-login trick and it worked. You must make sure you have typed yourdomain.com/wp-login and then pressed enter to actually be on the right page. I noticed that when typing yourdomain.com/wp-admin to login to WordPress, you are then redirected to the login.php page anyway. This did not work though, I needed the full wp-login without the re-direct attached for it to work.

Of course this did not solve any problems but she could now login and finishing editing the posts.

General settings Not Configured Correctly

I think this solution applies to the problem of trying to login but the redirect does not work and your login page just flashes in front of you.

You know you have the right password but when you try to login to WordPress admin area the screen just refreshes and nothing happens.

This is very frustrating but it is a simple solution. In your WordPress dashboard, in settings, in the general section, simply make sure the website URL is configured correctly. Watch the video showing all the details below.

IFRAME Embed for Youtube

Rename Your Plugins Folder

I found this tip here http://wordpress.org/support/topic/cant-login-16 when I was actually going to fix this login problem. An overwhelming amount of people mentioned that this solution of changing the plugins folder did work for them.

1. Via ftp rename “wp-content/plugins” to “1.plugins”
2. Create new folder or dir called “plugins”
3. Login to WordPress.
4. Via ftp remove empty “plugins” created in step 2
5. And rename “1.plugins” back to “plugins”

Replacing the wp-admin files

This is risky for the non techy person but this worked for me! I did not replace the wp-admin folder, I replaced the files within. I did not touch the other folders either.

1. Go into the server of a site with WordPress that had no problems.
2. From the root of the domain or where WordPress is installed, enter the wp-admin folder.

The screenshot above shows the folders and the files contained in the wp-admin folder.

3. Simply select All the files only by making them blue. Every single file in there.

4. Then right click on the blue area to see a menu. Choose to compress these files. This does not take them away from their position, it only makes a copy and compresses them.

5. Download the compressed file by right clicking on it and choosing to download. Note where the file is downloaded to on your computer.

6. Go to your problem website server root or where WordPress is installed. (Some have WordPress in a blog folder)

7. Go to the wp-admin folder and double click to enter.

8. Press on the upload icon at the top. Choose your zip file you created.

9. When you have uploaded the zip file and you can see it in your folder, right click on it and choose extract.

This will replace the files and possibly fix your problem.

Change Your Theme

As the wp-admin and wp-login are separate from the themes folder, I did not suggest to change the WordPress theme. However if you get desperate you can easily revert to the default WordPress theme by simply deleting or zipping up the theme you are using now via ftp. Obviously you cannot login to change your theme.

Systematically Ruling Out Plugins

Deactivate all WordPress plugins to see if this resolves the problem of not being able to login to the WordPress admin area. If this works for you then re-activate the plugins one by one to see which one is causing the problem. I actually do this troubleshooting tip for a lot of problems I have in WordPress. It works 80% of the time.

Notes:

• Make sure you have not got a “Limit Login Attempts” plugin installed that is locking you out.
• Perform these troubleshooting tasks at your own risk as this should really be left to a professional.

However before you make a serious commitment to Twitter, Facebook, Pintrest or another network, you should consider whether or not the social media ROI is worth your time. All I can do is show you the information I have below and let you decide if your social media ROI is worth it or not?

Social Media ROI: Time Versus Lifetime Value

The major expense in social media for small businesses is time. You only have 24 hours a day—less if you subtract necessities such as sleeping and eating. Should you be spending 30 minutes or an hour of you valuable time every day on social media? I know many people include this into their blogging routine which can make the day stretch out even further.

The major value in social media is new customers. Whenever you think about customers, you should think about lifetime customer value—the total profit your business earns from a customer over the lifetime of your relationship with them. Most customers don’t buy from you just once—they buy multiple times, so make sure you don’t just count sales.

The trick to computing your social media ROI (Return On Investment) is computing a value for your time, computing an average lifetime customer value, and then determining how many customers social media attracts to your business.

How To Value Your Time On Social Media

The simplest way to compute the value of your time on social media is to imagine paying yourself an hourly wage and then multiply the number of hours you spend on social media each week by that hourly wage. For example, if you pay yourself $20 an hour and you spend 5 hours a week on social media 50 weeks a year, your annual social media expense is $5,000.

That’s a lot of money.

But if you pay yourself full wages, you might get a bad social media ROI calculation. It’s important to value your time accurately, and time spent doing something you enjoy should not necessarily be paid at your full wages. If you enjoy engaging in social media and you’d do it for someone else at reduced wages, then you should also charge yourself those same reduced wages. For the purposes of an example, let’s say your social media time is worth $10 a hour, 5 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for a total cost of $2,500 a year.

Your Lifetime Customer Value

It’s up to you to compute your lifetime customer value. Take the total income you’ve earned from all of your customers and divide it by the number of customers. That will give you a rough estimate.

If you run a website business, a customer is anyone who clicks on an ad, buys a product from you or a site you’re affiliated with, or signs up to your mailing list. That means customers aren’t the same as visitors to your site—customers are the people who make you money.

Calculating Your Social Media Referrals

The final figure to compute your social media ROI is the number of new customers your social media presence attracts. To estimate new customers, run a test:

Make an offer to your followers and fans similar to previous offers you’ve made and track how many new customers you get—just new customers. Don’t count repeat customers.

Putting It All Together

For example’s sake, lets assume the following:

1. Your time spent on social media is worth $2,500 a year.

2. Your average lifetime customer value on your affiliate advertising-based site is $5

3. You make one offer to your followers and fans every month which attracts 50 new customers—that’s 600 new customers a year.

Here’s the math: (600 x $5) – $2,500 = $500 profit.

Your social media marketing earns $3,000 a year but costs $2,500, so $500 is your social media ROI.

Increase Your Social Media ROI

To increase your social media return on investment,the best way is to either save time for increase the value you receive from your time spent on the social media sites. Most people would find it easier to save time.

The most simple way to save time when using social media is to firstly use social media management software. This is when you use software to schedule tweets and posts, monitor your connections, and much much more. You wonder why these types of software are so popular? Now we can now see why.

The next way to save time on social media is education. Learning how to use social media efficiently, without posting useless junk that does nothing, is a huge priority for people using social media for promotion. After all, the promotions you do all take the same amount of time, but some are highly effective while others are not. This method will also increase the value of your promotions as you learn to become an expert at this process.

Free Can Cost

The problem here is that people often presume that promoting through social media is free when in fact it actually costs huge amounts of time. People neglect this fact and when calculating the ROI for social media, they often do not add time in as a cost. It is like buying hosting from a cheap website hosting company. You think you are saving money when it is actually costing you more money in time and stress.

If you calculated the time you spent on Twitter, Facebook, Pintrest or another network, would your Social Media ROI be worth it?

Selfishness is the Key

The first and foremost thing that you need to remember while working on your site’s content is that it should be something that the user can use for himself. Your post should solve a burning issue that he’s having. Alternatively, it should be something really pleasing to your reader. We all love stuff that is good for us. Face it, we don’t really care what it does for other people. Why do you think your site visitors are different? They all want something for themselves. So, give it to them! If you do, they’ll return to your site for more. Plus they’ll do it over and over again. Event if you stop giving that much stuff to them over time, you still will be able to sell something now. They’ll keep on returning because you made a great first impression by giving them what they really wanted when you first “met”. Again, people don’t care about you. They care about themselves. Just like you do.

Get Interactive

It’s not Ok just to provide something cool on your site, you need to make friends with your site visitors. If somebody retweeted you or repinned on Pinterest, make sure to thank them for doing so. Ask what they do for a living and what they like about it. Where they’re from and so on. There’s a whole lot of instructions and how-tos on how to behave online, but the whole shebang boils down to being yourself. Just act online as you would in real life. And that’s about it.

Be Fast and Furious

If a user actually clicks on your link in his search engine result pages, it’s not the end of the game. It’s just the beginning, because if he does not like what you offer or you just don’t make it clear, he’ll leave your site before you know it. Except for losing a lead, it’s also bad for your SEO, because Google thinks as follows: “Ok, the user checked the site and, quite fast, got back to me instead of consuming content of that site. It really sounds like that site just sucks”. You don’t want the major search engines to think so about your site, right? That’s exactly why you need to explain what’s so cool about your offer right on the homepage of your site . Make sure to do it in one-two sentences tops. You need to make sure that the user understands what your site is all about and if he needs your services or products. You have about 10 seconds to make it clear to your visitor how THEY can benefit from the things you offer . Otherwise he’ll go away for good.

Be Loud and Clear

Since users read about just 20% of the textual content that you have on your site, you godda make sure that your main message is big and clear enough so that the user can get it within his first 10 seconds on your site. Again, you can keep his attentions by quenching his selfishness. Tell him what’s good for HIM. Though I would not recommend using Flash banners or stuff like that, you still need to make sure that your message is really obvious and the user gets it right away. You need to keep in mind that users make snap decisions all the time, because most sites are not worth THEIR while and they value their time too much to waste it. Just like you do. You see, another proof that we are all really selfish beings, which is OK.

Be Natural

Often, we try to speak or write like someone else just to sound or look smarter than we are. The thing is that if you do so, you actually look really ridiculous. I’m not exactly sure how it happens, but people – your site readers – can get it somehow. And once they do, they just won’t come back to your site, because they’ll think that you’re just another charlatan who says the stuff that he does not really know about. They’ll go away momentarily because they don’t want to waste THEIR time. Instead of pretending to be someone you aren’t, be as genuine as possible. It’s OK to be wrong if you say stuff honestly. We are all wrong from time to time. If you have a case study that is relevant to the niche you’re catering to, just write a blog post about it. Even if it shows that you made pretty major mistakes, it’s still valuable to your readers, because it’ll help them to avoid the mistakes you did. That’s the way to connect with people. Say, you launched a parallax scrolling site, but they you realized that it’s a bad idea from an SEO standpoint (if done wrong). I’m sure that your readers will be thrilled to hear why you think so, because it’ll make THEM smarter.

Test as You Go

When we make decisions, we just try to guess something. That’s exactly why we need to test whenever possible. In order to see if something really works as you expect it to, you need to run regular tests. If you run your blog on your own, you need to test content strategy decisions just to see what your readers like. You may want to set up a poll that prompts your users to provide you with valuable feedback that will make it clear what direction your content strategy should move to. In case there’s a team of guys who run a site, you need to run tests just to see whose assumption as for content strategy was right. Testing makes perfect, as they say.

Conclusion

We browse the web because we want something for OURSELVES. Your visitors act the same way. So, make sure that your visitor groks what you got for HIM on your site the moment he lands on your homepage. They don’t have all day to figure out what your site is all about. You actually have one twentieth of a second to draw their attention. If you fail, you’ll most likely lose another customer.

I’m a big fan of WordPress, SEO and salsa. I’m sure that creating WordPress-based sites with SEO in mind can literally make the web a better place to be in.

What is a Blog?

Back in the old days (from where I originate) a website was a place where a business or individual could publish content to share with the world. This required a lot of geeky coding and was not for the non technical people out there. Building a website used to cost big dollars, but then blogs came along. Blogs were free to build and use. They used a blogging content management system that was easy to use which meant non technical people could build a blog. Blogs were so popular, namely blogger.com and WordPress.com that the WordPress content management system started to be used on real websites. It was just easier to manage a website using this software as it allowed a webmaster to enable amazing features without the technical know-how. With WordPress you can change a website theme at the push of a button, install a plug-in that will add an amazing features to your site, and you will organise your content to make it easier for the reader to find what they want.

A blog (web log)) is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries (“posts”) typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first). Source.

Blogs have evolved into a world wide business and to create a website using any other software is just a stupid business move. (That is my opinion) Why make things difficult when they do not have to be. Anyone can build a WordPress website from scratch within minutes, because if you buy the right website hosting, it is a simple press of a button.

Blog website, website blog. Who cares now?

79 Ultimate Blogging Tips – How To Blog

Creating a successful blog or website is a big job that can takes months or years to complete, depending on the magnitude of your intended site. I personally go for big sites with loads of great content. I like to create a real asset and I call my sites “virtual real-estate”.

Here are some of my on how to blog.

Your Niche

1. Most people know that if you have a passion for your topic you will jump out of bed every morning with true enthusiasm.
2. Choose a main topic, then drill down to a more focused topic. This website is about building websites to make money. Simple.
3. Blog about information that your reader wants to see. Write for the humans not the search engines.
4. Never forget that the key to a successful blog or website is to engage your audience.
5. Do not just publish content for the sake of it. Make sure it belongs within your blog topic.
6. Make everything related, your content, your categories, your pictures all fall within a main topic. This is what helps create a successful WordPress website.
7. Do not stray off topic because you think the grass is greener on the other side. It is not!

Site Foundations

1. Buy web hosting and a domain name so you are in control of your own blog.
2. Use WordPress to manage your content on your own hosting. This is a no brainer.
3. Setup WordPress correctly in the first place. Customize settings before you launch!
4. Create your blog categories from a list you plan, do not make them on the fly.
5. Choose your important main topics for your static pages.
6. Don’t go crazy on tags, plan them and choose at least two relevant ones for each post.
7. Create a clear contact page and an awesome about page.
8. Don’t forget to add a privacy policy page, a affiliate disclaimer, advertising policy, if needed.

The Layout of Your Site

1. Where do people expect a navigation for a website to be? Why make it difficult.
2. A minimalist WordPress theme is all you need to let your content shine.
3. Your website layout can affect your traffic so keep it simple for the humans.
4. Considering your user experience, choose a premium WordPress theme accordingly. Free themes have no support.
5. Include an optin box in a prominent place to build a list from day one.

Get Ready for Criticism

1. When your content goes public you will be open to all comments and opinions.
2. You can delete comments on your own blog but not on other sites so get ready.
3. Be prepared to be abused, called an idiot, a douche, called wrong, and more. See how I cop the criticisms on Yahoo Small Business Advisor but the same article on B2 community got praised.
4. Do not let the fear of being criticised stop you from publishing what you are good at.
5. Do not let this fear form your opinions.

Get Social

1. Set up social media accounts for each website you create. See my social media checklist.
2. Add social media buttons and icons to your site to enable sharing.
3. Brand your social pages with your logo, tag line and more. Match them up.
4. Hook up some auto sharing options for your blog. EG. Tweet old posts plugin.
5. Schedule social promotions and make them hands off. Try Hootsuite as it is the best social media manager.
6. Do not try to be everywhere at the same time. Choose your one or two main social sites and concentrate on them.
7. Remember that social media will expose you to the world and you may not have total control over the feedback you receive.

Education

1. Choose at least two mentors that comply with your standards and follow them.
2. Buy tools to improve your business not courses you will not complete. If you must choose a course try Google Sniper. It is down to earth and shows a true way to become successful in blogging.
3. Change your strategies with the times, evolving into new ways. Technology moves fast and we need to ride the wave.
4. Follow (OP) other people’s strategies and learn from their mistakes and successes.
5. Learn what you need to know, not everything that is placed in front of you.

Content is Mostly King

1. You must realise that quality content is very important when blogging and nothing but the best will do.
2. Great content alone does automatically equal success. That is one of the main factors.
3. Content not only includes text, it also includes video, pictures, pod casts, and more.
4. All quality content is valuable if is appreciated by its readers or viewers.
5. Copying someone else’s content in full is bad etiquette. Quoting them and leaving an attribution link is good etiquette.
6. Brief content is only okay if you have covered your topic. For example a video tutorial along with a 100 word description can rank well in the search engines.

Publishing Content

1. Publish content at a regular pace as the search engines love fresh content.
2. If you cannot keep up with fresh content, do you really want to create a successful blog?
3. Publish your posts on your WordPress blog correctly.
4. Never use of free blog for a serious business. You need to own your content.
5. Never publish unfinished or not up to standard posts.
6. Always schedule posts in advance just in case you cannot find time to publish.

How to Blog For Business – It’s Different

1. Publish content that your customers would appreciate, not your business colleagues.
2. Always include all contact details on your blog so you look like a legitimate business.
3. Do not post boring content about the technical side of your business.
4. Do not allow someone from the tech department manage the content on your site. Use someone that knows what your customers want to see.

Regular Maintenance and Security

1. Install spam protection. I use Commentluv Premium as it has amazing protection.
2. WordPress website maintenance is just as important as computer maintenance.
3. The first step to security is having an exceptional password and locking down your site with too many attempts. See simple login lockdown.
4. There are many aspects to WordPress website security. You wil need to learn about it all.
5. Keep all plugins, themes, and WordPress updated as not updating leaves your blog open for attacks.

SEO Blogging Tips

1. If you want your site’s content to be listed in the search engines then you need to use search engine optimisation.
2. SEO is not all about Google, write for your readers and please them first.
3. You can ignore SEO but you will be saying goodbye to extra free traffic.
4. Obvious SEO alone can be ugly so if it feels wrong then don’t do it.
5. Search engine optimisation is a skill that develops over time with experience. You must learn you own ways.
6. Offpage SEO is just as important as onpage SEO.
7. Link building can bring traffic directly to your site and does not always mean you have to rank to get a bit.
8. Always perform onpage SEO for all content. Then do more SEO for proven money making pages.
9. Do not participate in shady SEO strategies.

Monetizing Your Site

1. Monetize your website now! Do not generate good traffic that leads nowhere for no purpose.
2. Put in a call to action or goal for each page! If you do not have this then how can you make money?
3. Treat each page and post as its own precise topic when monetizing.
4. Track your sales from the beginning.
5. When have a proven money making page, tweak it, test it, promote it. Do not let it die.
6. Start creating your own products ASAP, even if you only create an eBook to sell on your site.

Traffic – How to Blog

1. Never underestimate the power of traffic, not the quantity but the quality.
2. More traffic does not always equal more money.
3. You need targeted traffic, junk traffic brings your conversions down.
4. Catch and engage your traffic when you get it. Do not let them leave without a way to return.
5. Getting traffic is not a rocket science but it is hard work.
6. Never put your eggs into one basket when it comes to traffic. Especially not just the Google traffic basket.

Share Your How to Blog Tips

Please help me add to this list and share your best tips on how to blog below. Any great tips contributed will be added to the PDF file for everyone to share. I will also add your name as the contributor along with a link back to your blog. :)

You can also download this article as a PDF file 79 Ultimate Blogging Tips

Creating A Website Business Homepage

Every website has a homepage, but if you’re creating a website business, you need a strong homepage. Here’s one place where your competition can really help you out—look at their home pages and find the one which most makes you want to buy and then emulate it.

(Note: emulation doesn’t mean copying or plagurizing. Instead, use the same basic themes but write your own copy and provide your own images.)

Your home page will be the most visited page on your site, so you want to make it strong and persuasive. Remember that your home page also sets the mood for the rest of your site, so don’t make your home page serious if the rest of your site will be airy and funny.

Creating A Website Business Products Listing

Small businesses with just a few related products should put all of their products on the same page so that page collects more incoming links. If you have more than a dozen products (or unrelated products), each product should get its own page.

When you describe your products, don’t describe their features—describe their benefits. For example, you sell honey; its feature is that it’s 100% harvested from pesticide-free farms; its benefit is that it won’t make people sick.

Creating A Business Website About Us Page

One of the most neglected pages, especially in small businesses, is the about us page. I know it’s hard to write about yourself, but people want to know who they’re buying from. If you can tell people an interesting and endearing story about yourself, your customers will not only buy again, but they’ll probably also tell other people about you.

Great stories for your website include how and why you started your business, how you source your product, and how you give back to either your local community or the global community of people using products like yours. Don’t hide yourself under your business as people want to see a real person.

Creating A Business Website “Why Us” Page

Savvy shoppers are always wondering why they should buy from one place instead of another. If you compete on price, then your prices can speak for themselves. But if you compete on anything else, you need to make clear to your shoppers exactly why they should buy from you instead of another site with a lower price.

Create a page on your site titled something like “why buy from us?” Fill it with reasons to buy from you. Again, remember to describe benefits of buying from you instead of features. Tell them about your quality control, your zealously safe shipping, and your no-questions-asked return policy. Show them exactly why you’re the best in the business.

Creating A Business Website Education

Not everyone who comes to your website will be ready to buy immediately, so you need more than just products and sales information—you need to educate curious shoppers so that when they become ready to buy, they buy from you.

These days the best education feature you can add to your site is a blog. Every week, write a few hundred words about a topic related to your products. At the end of the year, you’ll have 52 blogs all which educate people and make them want to buy from you, further creating a business website. Blogging for business is not easy because you cannot post about the boring side of your business, you need to blog about what your customers will be interested in.

Choosing The Right Theme to Sell Your Product

Creating a business website that sells products is not just about creating pages. You will need to choose a template or theme that suits your needs. There are many WordPress business themes that will make your site instantly look professional and also add an amazing capabilities without the need of coding. for example you can install and e-commerce theme, a product theme, or a corporate theme. There are so many choices but when a business has a tight budget, a ready-made WordPress theme can give you a professional design within minutes.

Create A Mobile Website Using A Theme Or Plugin

Many major CMSes offer one or more themes or plugins which help you quickly create a mobile version of your existing website. These work in two different ways.

The first set of themes creates a version of your website using standard HTML which can be viewed easily on modern mobile phones and tablets. This theme will usually override your existing theme, so you should make sure you like the theme before making it your new default.

The other set of themes can only regularly be viewed by mobile devices. They won’t override your existing theme, but they probably will look quite different than your main theme, which can be a problem if you’re trying to brand your site.

Many of these second category of themes also require a plugin to let you manage different sets of themes for different sets of devices. Check your CMS’s plugin directory for details.

There are many amazing premium WordPress themes that will take care of everything for you. Of course it does take a small amount of work to change an existing website theme, but if your starting a new site it is best to start with the right theme in the first place.

Create A Mobile Website The Hackish Way

If you write your own website code—a dying art—or you use a platform which doesn’t offer a free theme to help you create a mobile website, you’ll need to create a mobile website on your own.

The good news is that 90% of what you want your mobile website to do can be accomplished with a few tweaks to your CSS code. Note that these changes won’t work for older mobile phones which require simplified mobile HTML code; happily, the changes will work for all post-iPhone smartphones and tablets.

The CSS tag you want to use is max-width. This tag can dynamically scale text and images on your site down or up depending on how you use it.

If you use wide images on your site—images too wide to fit on a narrow mobile screen—you can use “max-width: 100%” on your images to prevent them from taking up more than one screen width.

If you want to keep text on your page from appearing too wide on widescreen desktops, but you also don’t want to specify an exact width so they overflow the screen on mobile devices, you can use “max-width: 60em” to prevent the text from ever taking up more width than the equivalent of 60 letter Ms. (Em is typesetting jargon for M-widths. Sixty em is the text width most commonly used in books.)

Applying max-width to various elements in your CSS stylesheet will help you quickly create a mobile website.

How Important is a Mobile Site?

If you are asking that question, what planet do you live on? Don’t worry about boring statistics, just take a good look around you. Look at the technology the people around you rely on day in and day out. It is very scary how technology is changing our lives and creeping into every aspect of it.

So do we need to make our sites mobile friendly? Yes. As soon as possible.

Advice from Social Media Strategist Cindy Morrison

Cindy Morrison says, “Look at every fan/follower as a potential client/customer. They already like you enough to check you out.”

This advice may seem obvious, but it’s advice few businesses follow. Too many people try to acquire as many fans and followers as they can without any strategy for turning them into paying customers.

It’s great to be liked and to know that thousands of people listen when you speak, but if you spend money or time acquiring your followers, you should plan how you’ll recoup your investment and turn a profit. That’s why you hire a social media strategist.

Advice from Social Media Strategist Jamie Duklas

Jamie Duklas says, “Excite your [core customers] and they’ll do a lot of the marketing legwork for you.”

This is without a doubt the biggest advantage of social media over traditional marketing. Advertising and other older marketing methods mostly went from the company to the customer and the sale went from the customer back to the company, but social media lets your best customers market you to other potential customers at no additional cost to you.

But to take advantage of social media marketing, you need excited customers. You need people who will absolutely rave about you—people who are willing to dedicate part of their time to promoting your brand.

Businesses which exceed their customer’s expectations are the most likely to succeed in social media marketing for this reason, say social media strategists. Boring businesses in established markets can’t exceed their customer’s expectations, so they’ll probably never be able to use social media marketing—but new businesses in new markets using new ways to serve customers can use social media to grow like wildfire.

Advice from Social Media Strategist Kim Garst

Kim Garst says, “Marketing is about providing your message to your ideal customers—wherever they are.”

Kim reminds us why we’re marketing on social media—it’s where customers are today. Twitter, Facebook, Pintrest—none of these matter at all except that people are spending minutes or hours everyday using them.

It takes a superior social media strategist to look at your business and ask you whether or not your ideal customers are on social media—and whether or not they’re receptive to recommendations made on social media. Twentysomethings are on social media, so you should be too if they’re your ideal market. But if your target market is elderly computer illiterates, social media is probably not where you should focus your energy.

And that’s the final and most important reason you should hire a social media strategist—they’ve conducted campaigns, they’ve seen real-life statistics, and they’ll be able to tell you whether or not you should keep spending time and money on social media marketing.

Conclusion

Listen to Cindy and turn followers into customers. Listen to Jamie and excite your followers into promoting your brand. And listen to Kim and go where your customers are, with or without a social media strategist.

Problems With Designing My Own Website

The more your website looks like other websites on the Internet, the easier it will be to use. Consider the default WordPress theme—you’ve probably seen it on dozens or hundreds of websites. The main column has the blog posts. The right column has navigation links and links to the monthly archives. Under each post is information about the post and, optionally, its author. At the top of the page is the blog name on a banner. The familiarity of the default WordPress theme leads visitors into exploring your site. Everyone knows how to browse the archives. Everyone knows how to explore all the posts from a particular category. Everyone knows to look for the RSS subscription link in the right column. But if you want to “design my own website”, nobody will automatically know how to browse your custom design. You’ll have to put a lot of thought into making things obvious—and if you get it wrong (as many sites do)—you could discover that most of your organic search traffic leaves after reading a single page or blog.

If you look at the screenshot of the Max Mag WordPress theme you will see the menu in the typical place, the social icons, the search box, a sub menu with boring main pages and more obvious design choices. When you visit a post you will see black text on a white background.

If You Must Design Your Own Website

Here I should admit I’m a bit of a hypocrite—I rarely use the default template for websites without making a few tweaks. I still try to keep things as close to default as possible, but I’ve discovered there are several things you can do to help your readers. All of the ideas below come from my own experience as a website reader. Too many times I’ve stumbled across an interesting website with a horrible design. I’ve sworn not to make the mistakes they made when I design my own website.

Design My Own Website Error #1—Black & White

Nothing makes a website more difficult to read than a bad background color or image which blends into the text. You want your text to stand out, not disappear into the background. The easiest and most effective color layout for the text part of your site is black text and white background. Not gray text or gray background, but simple and 100% contrasting black text on white background. You’re free to add a background image or color to the non-text parts of your website, but make the text parts easy to read.

I know this sounds boring but I am all for a minimalist website theme as we are not here to whack people with way out designs when they are visiting our websites for our fantastic content.

Deisgn My Own Website Mistake #2—Tiny Fonts

Consider that you’re probably going to “design my own website on my PC or Mac.” That’s going to give you a lot of screen space to fill and, if you’re a novice, you’re going to feel like you have to fill every inch of your website with text, images, banners, and advertisements. I’ll discuss why that’s wrong in the next section; for now consider what that does to your text. When you crowd in your text, you get short lines, which don’t quite look right. (Most people think lines look wrong if they have fewer than 40 characters or more than 80 characters.) So instead of getting rid of the crud which crowds in your text, you simply shrink the text. That’s a bad idea. Most people sit a foot (1/3 meter) or more away from their computer monitors. That means any decrease in the text size makes reading your website very hard. And, if it’s hard to read your website, who’s going to bother to read it at all when there are so many websites which are easy to read? I recommend you never shrink your text size. Better yet, I recommend you try to increase your text size when possible. My own personal website uses a font size of 16pt—that’s 30% larger than the 12pt default and 60% larger than the 10pt many websites use.

Build Your Own Website Mistake #3—Big Design, Little Device

Have you tried reading websites on your mobile phone or small-screen tablet or netbook? Some sites are a pain, aren’t they? Pay close attention to which sites are a pain—it’s almost always the sites with multicolum, crowded layouts. Some of these sites scroll off the side of your screen; other sites assume your cell phone has the resolution of a 30-inch (90-centimeter) computer monitor, so they crowd out the text with advertisements and navigation features.

There’s no magical way around this problem. More and more people in the future will read your site from mobile devices, so when you start think about how “I’m going to design my own website,” make sure you test your design on mobile phones, tablets, and other small devices. (A quick way to test mobile design on your computer is to open a new Web browser window and resize it until it isn’t very wide. A longer but better way to test mobile website design on your desktop is to install the free Google Android Emulator.)

Conclusion

Except for the above tweaks—black text on white background, large font, and uncluttered design—I highly recommend you stick with a popular website layout theme when you start to design your own website.

So what did I do? I Googled it! (Even though Google is not god I use them at least 10 times a day)

I found this code by Johnathan Dingman on WPForce.com. I must say, I would never have thought that this would be so easy to do, but when I saw Jonathan’s code, I immediately gave it a try.

How to Set Featured Images Automatically?

1. I edited the post attachment number within this code: set_post_thumbnail($post->ID, ’414′); to a default post on my blog.
2. I placed this code into my functions.php file and saved it.

The following code does two things. It takes the image from the post and automatically makes it a featured image. Then if there is no featured image it will use your default attachment as the image, using the attachment ID.

function autoset_featured() {
 global $post;
 $already_has_thumb = has_post_thumbnail($post->ID);
 if (!$already_has_thumb) {
 $attached_image = get_children( "post_parent=$post->ID&post_type=attachment&post_mime_type=image&numberposts=1" );
 if ($attached_image) {
 foreach ($attached_image as $attachment_id => $attachment) {
 set_post_thumbnail($post->ID, $attachment_id);
 }
 } else {
 set_post_thumbnail($post->ID, '414');
 }
 }
 } //end function
 add_action('the_post', 'autoset_featured');
 add_action('save_post', 'autoset_featured');
 add_action('draft_to_publish', 'autoset_featured');
 add_action('new_to_publish', 'autoset_featured');
 add_action('pending_to_publish', 'autoset_featured');
 add_action('future_to_publish', 'autoset_featured');

Where is the functions.php file to edit?

1. Go to the appearance menu and choose editor.

2. Go to the right template menu and click on functions.php.

3. Now you can edit this and save the changes.

WARNING: One mistake can give your website errors so make sure you are ready to undo what you just did.. That means backup your file first, make a copy, or trust that you are in fact a whiz with all this code.

How to find the attachment ID for an image in WordPress?

1. In your WordPress dashboard, go to the Media menu. Choose library.

2. Find the image you want to find the attachment ID for and hover over it.

3. Look at the far bottom bar to see something that looks like this: domain-etc?post=10161&action=edit

4. Now you can see in the screenshot below that the ID is 10161.

Please note that once you have set a default Id to use when posts do not have images, it can be hard to change later, so choose wisely.

By the way, how do you like my new theme?

I will have to add Max Mag to my list of premium themes I have. I guess they are just tools of the trade and totally tax deductible for a blogger.

WordPress makes it really easy to drag and drop widgets into your sidebar and this can be both a blessing or a curse. It is a blessing when you stick to WordPress sidebar etiquette, but it is a curse when you break all the rules that I am about to show you. Hopefully if you are a sinner then you will be able to brush up on your WordPress sidebar etiquette and reform yourself.

I was reading this article about blog design that gave me the idea to write this post about WordPress sidebar etiquette. As you know I like to ramble on and cover the absolute details so you better get comfortable!

How Important is Your WordPress Website Sidebar?

I would say that your WordPress sidebar is one of the most important aspects on your blog or website. We all know that the sidebar usually shows up on every page and post of your WordPress theme. Of course this depends on which WordPress theme you use. Some premium WordPress themes let you choose which pages and posts your sidebar shows up on, but nevertheless it is an important part of your website. Or you might want to add a WordPress plugin to control sidebars and widgets.

Controlling Yourself

Here are a few WordPress sidebar etiquette tips that I have made up myself. There is no obligation to follow these tips as every website is different. All I want to do is make you aware that WordPress sidebar etiquette does exist. Hopefully you can develop your own rules for your own website.

Advertising in Your Sidebar in WordPress

Both new and experienced WordPress website builders often fill up their WordPress sidebar with far too much advertising. We know we all hate this and yet we all still do it. I have to be truthful here and let you know that I do not have much success with banners in the sidebars all headers of my website. ( This is different for AdSense websites though)

Most of my affiliate sales come from in text links and sometimes a highly targeted 300 x 250 banner in amongst the content. The WordPress sidebar is not a major moneymaker and you shouldn’t be plastering your blog with too much advertising there.

Links to Everything

People often try to help their website visitors navigate through their website. This should not be done by placing 1 million links in the sidebar. You should have a navigation menu at the top of your website, where a website visitor can easily access different categories all sections of your website. Everything you have should come under these categories.

Webmasters who place too many links in their sidebar are really confusing their website visitor and not helping them navigate through the website at all. Not only that, you are leaking good PR juice to pages and posts that may not need or deserve it. Take a good look at the pages that link from your homepage. They usually have a page rank of one below the home page because that page is passing on authority. For example this website has PR 4 and links from this page get a PR 3.

Irrelevant Stuff

I often visit peoples websites and notice that they have irrelevant advertising or information in their sidebars. For example, I went to a local news website which showcased local news and community events for a particular town. In the sidebar I saw links to affiliate programs for making money online. These people have come to read the community News and have no idea about making money online. If these links were on a website that was in the niche for making money online, then this would be passable for WordPress sidebar etiquette.

Widget Happy

WordPress widgets are the easiest things to use as most of them are drag and drop. This is great but not when you are WordPress widget happy. All you have to do is basically choose a widget and drag it into your chosen sidebar. You can see the screenshot below showing how easy it is.

Because this process is so easy, you will need to control yourself in this area. Take a good look at your WordPress website and see if you are using WordPress sidebar etiquette.

Too Much Social Networking

Social networking is huge but do we really need all of those social networking buttons. Should they really be taking up all of our valuable website real estate? I think not.

This will stir up some conversation as it seems to be the normal procedure to put social networking buttons at the top of your WordPress websites sidebar. Of course I am guilty of this on some of my websites, however I have been testing this and I do not believe it is necessary to have all of these buttons in such a prime position.

I used to have links to my Facebook page, my Twitter, my Google plus account, the RSS feed, and maybe a few more. Did anyone click on these? Not really…

How do I know this? I went to Google Analytics and used the In-page Analytics feature. You can find this option under the content menu in Google Analytics. This is one of many basic Google Analytics tracking tips that I use often.

The screenshot below shows my in page Analytics which shows a percentage of clicks that a link will get. As you can see in the sidebar, some of the links do not get clicks at all. This is how I know that my social networking links were not worth putting in the sidebar.

If you look around my blog now you will see a simple Facebook like button in the sidebar and an RSS subscription box in the footer. When you actually go into each individual article, I have various social media buttons to enable people to share my content. This method is working for me. I still get followed on twitter and re-tweeted, but this is through my content.

Too Many Sidebars

If you have read through all of these points mentioned above, then you might realize that you do not need too many WordPress website sidebars on your website. I am a great believer in the K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid) method and having too many sidebars, or too much in your sidebars is just overkill.

I do have websites that have two sidebars but I always make sure they do not have too many items in them. These have been made for design purposes only. I still stick to my WordPress sidebar etiquette rules when feeling my sidebars with information.

WordPress Sidebar Etiquette – What you Should Have?

I am not here to tell you what you should or shouldn’t have in your WordPress sidebar. Of course the final decision will rest with you and you will need to see what suits your website. I like to keep it simple though, and let my content shine through. :)

About Me

When people visit a website or blog, they want to know the person behind the scenes or in charge. Even massive websites made by big companies have showcased their employees who run the blog to make sure they have a personal touch.

You need to connect with your website visitor and having an about me section in the top half of your website is a great way for them to get to know you. I will be doing this but I haven’t got around to taking a nice photo as yet. A great example of an About me in the top of the sidebar is at Ileane’s blog called Basic Blog Tips. This is a perfect example as people immediately feel a connection with Ileane.

Every time I see Ileane’s smiling face it makes me smile too! :)

Optin Box

We can look at the screenshot above again. You can see that Ileane has an optin box as the next most important item in her sidebar. I agree with this, even though I did post this article titled “Do you really want to be on my list?”.

I agree that an optin box is important but I also think that you need to engage your subscribers quickly and work out what they want. There are a number of factors that cause a website visitor to sign up or subscribe to your list. If you have fantastic content they will probably search around your blog just so they can subscribe. That’s actually the kind of person I want on my list, however having a sign up box in the top of your sidebar has definitely proven to gain more subscribers.

Popular Posts

I have noticed, when investigating my in page Google Analytics, that my popular posts do actually get clicked on. Of course they are popular for a reason and obviously the titles can attract more clicks.

If I compare the clicks I get on a recent posts widget, the popular posts wins hands down. I think this is because the recent posts are available on the homepage anyway. As you can see I only have my popular posts showing on this website, whereas on others, I might have the recent posts showing as well. You need to test what is best for your website.

One Ad

I like to have one banner and possibly a few links in the sidebar. As I have stated before, when making money online, most of my sales come from in content advertising. Therefore I am only adding a banner to the sidebar for design purposes.

Different Sidebars For Different Pages

Having the same sidebar widgets for your homepage, your pages and then your posts can be down right silly. These different pages sometimes call for different content in the sidebar.

For example, showing the recent posts in the sidebar on the homepage is overkill when you have them showing as an excerpt anyway. But showing recent posts in the sidebar of other posts is not such a bad idea.

If your theme does not allow you to manipulate your sidebars you can buy a Sidebar and Widget manager plugin to help you customize these areas. This is a smart way to show the right content for the right page which reduces bounce rate and gives the reader what they want.

I would really love to hear everyone’s opinion about my WordPress sidebar etiquette article. Do you agree with me when I say that we should “keep it simple” and not clog up our WordPress website sidebars with junk?

It is even worse when I visit the link they have left and they actually have a dodgy SEO company website. I could slam up one of those websites up in five minutes and claim that I am a SEO expert. I can even hang out on SEOmoz or guest post on any of the top SEO blogs.

WOW that does not impress me at all because I live SEO every day. I am in the trenches of SEO and my way clearly works so why should I change my ways?

Here is some of the crap the SEO sheep say:

• Oh so and so said that SEO was dead, why are you saying it is alive?
• Oh that sounds like reciprocal linking to me, didn’t you know that was banned?
• I heard that Google will ban you for that.
• Matt Cutts says we shouldn’t do that.

I seriously wish people would form their own opinions from experiences they have instead of what someone says.

Check out this persons comment after reading this post about the Google SEO guide. I won’t expose his name because he thinks he is a Guru and it seems that he wanted to show his authority. I would have agreed that he had some authority (probably because I respect others work), but when I read this comment I changed my mind. Leaders in the field educate and help people, not belittle them.

If he wanted to disagree with me, he could have showed a bit more tact, as he is definitely not the only one that knows SEO. In fact I feel sorry for this person for thinking that there is only one way to perform SEO. Actually it seems it is his way or the highway!

Here is my response:

Why get worked up about something like that? (Ha ha I am worked up now) The title and meta description, along with the tags are included in nearly all WordPress themes. Tags are also used in WordPress as a type of categorization and also help you focus on your topic because you know what keywords you should be mentioning to cover your information.

But the question again is, why get so worked up about something that is so completely harmless? Is this to prove some authority in SEO? I wonder?

I did not say to mass create links to your site or buy auto commenting software. I said that you should not neglect tags. But wait a minute, Google said not to bother with tags, although they still read them, but don’t take any notice. Oh shit my bad!

Google is Not God

First thing you have to realize is that there are other ways to get traffic without using Google, therefore not all SEO stems from what Matt Cutts says. I am not bagging Matt out here though, as his videos are very helpful. The problem is that idiots are interpreting what he says and others that just see it as GOSPEL. He tries to be very diplomatic and I can see that Google itself does not want be called a one man band, or a complete dominator, but people see them as the one and only.

When he says Google are not taking any notice of tags does it really matter?

Here is a video where Matt says that nofollow links might not be great for search engine optimization but they DO have other uses besides being useful for Google.

IFRAME Embed for Youtube

Well I’ll be? Maybe there is a world after Google? At least Matt can see that there are other uses for the actions we take, besides having to please Google. Well derr!

What Does Google Really Want?

Warning: this is my opinion and you are most welcome to have yours in the comment section below.

The truth is really that Google is just looking for properly formed websites that provide their customers, the people that type queries into the search box, with the most accurate information to answer their query. Google is not out to penalise people on purpose, they just want to serve the best results to their customers. This is not rocket science and if you are a business person, to do the right thing all you have to do is think about your customers. Isn’t that what normal business people do?

If you think Google has a conspiracy going on you are wrong. If you think a website will not succeed without the help of Google you are also wrong. Google just wants to serve the right results. End of story.

Is Google going to penalize me for putting meta keyword tags in, no way! Is Google going to penalise me for doing reciprocal linking, are you kidding? Is Google going to punish me for having broken links, definitely YES.

Does anyone see where I am going with this?

What I Think about SEO?

To me SEO is about more than ranking in the search engines. It is also about strategically placing links and keywords around the internet that will attract a click from a real customer. It is about optimizing my content to give it the best chance to get some of that free search engine traffic. SEO is about relationships too. Every time I think I am performing search engine optimisation, I actually building more relationships online.

How does this happen?

• I publish an awesome article on my blog and another blogger links back to it. I send them an e-mail to say thank you.
• I publish an awesome article on my blog and people enjoy my content and comment at the bottom. I reply and we become friends.
• I publish an article on another blog. I become friends with that blogger.
• I publish an article on another blog and gain new followers from that audience and build more relationships.
• I leave a link in a forum, along with some fantastic information, and I get an e-mail from a stranger saying thank you.

So I thought I was getting around the Internet and building links for my site, when in fact I was really building relationships. And when some idiot comes along and says that reciprocal linking is not good for search engine optimisation, I say I do not care because it is good for relationships.

The strategies I use add up to real sales and not just rankings. To think of search engine optimisation as simply link building and ranking in the search engines is a very closed off point of view.

My Advice to Any So Called SEO Gurus

Firstly, stop chatting about SEO and do some.

You cannot learn SEO from the google SEO Guide (although it might help) and you cannot learn SEO from random’s posting well written articles on the internet. The only way to learn SEO is to look at the SEO under the hood of your website and get your hands dirty. You need to make your own mistakes to know what you can and can’t do. Yes I have learned my lessons over the years, and the main one is not to listen to all the bullshit on the internet.

I form my own opinions and SEO rules THAT WORK and I believe that the proof is in the pudding. Make up your own mind about what Google wants when it comes to SEO and make sure you let your conscience guide you.