ovblogger : SEO News – WordPress – Marketing Blog

I’m constantly answering newbie questions at the ListBuilding Club, which is great fun. Helping people to learn how to create an online business is probably the most fun part of being in online business, for me. And as the Project Manager for the LBC, I do lots of training for our members. I can tell you… there are questions that come up over and over and over again.

The biggest one is, “Why do I need a blog, and why can’t I just use a free one?”

I get that. People don’t have a lot of money to spend, especially in this economy. And they want to go the “Free” route every time.  Can’t say I blame them. When you’re making no money yet, online expenses can mount. Yet, the old saw “You have to spend money to make money,” applies online just as it does off. You cannot possibly have a successful online business without breaking a few dollars. You just can’t!

Host Your Own

One expense that is really important is that of self-hosting your blog. I know there are lots of free blog sites like WordPress.com, Blogger, ClearBlogs.com, and Tumblr to name only a few, but guess what? You can’t be commercial at any of those places. Blogger allows you to use AdSense, but that’s about it. The other sites will just shut you down without warning for marketing on your blog–even just posting an affiliate link, and you’ll lose every bit of work you put into it. No recourse, and no, they won’t give it back.

The cheapest and fastest way to have a powerful website is by setting up a WordPress blog. This comes from WordPress.ORG, and it’s open source (=free), search engine friendly software that is also so user friendly, it’s amazing. I’ve used WordPress blogs for years and I haven’t found an equal to them. Oh sure, people swear by Drupal, TypePad, and other platforms, but they’re just not as customizable and marketer friendly, at least in my experience.

So, you have a free WordPress blog. The next step is buying a great domain for it. At GoDaddy, the cost of a domain is currently under $10 a year.  That’s like 3 cents per day for your own domain, 21 cents a week, or 90 cents a month. Cheap! So, decide what your blog will be about and get a domain that includes a keyword for that topic in it. Keep it short, make it a .com, and stay away from dashes or anything hard for people to type into the address bar or remember. If you want to get maximum SEO benefit, register the name for 2 years. This way, Google will look at you as a more serious blogger, and it will be easier for you to rank.

OK… we’re up to 90 cents a month… cool.

Now, you need a place to host the domain and your blog.

The best hosting company I have found online (and I’ve been doing this for almost 6 years, remember) is HostGator.  Don’t get the minimum account because you’ll outgrow that much too fast. Cough up the dough for the “Baby” Gator account, which is only $7.95 a month if you pay for the entire year up front. That would be $95.40. Sweet! But if you can’t afford that, you can go the monthly route, and pay $9.95 a month for your account.

Check this out: For around $11 a month, you now have your own domain, a powerful hosting account, and with Fantastico (which is available at HostGator), you can install a WordPress blog with the push of a button. It will take you all of about 5 minutes to do it.

Your in business, baby!

Where else can you spend $10.85 a month and have a business? Only online!

Other concerns

There are other considerations, like you have to change your nameservers and such, but there is a solution to that, if none of this is making sense. The ListBuilding Club will take you by the hand and walk you through all of this in easy-to-understand videos. Brian Edomondson, my good friend and Chief Video Instructor, is a natural teacher, and he makes it all very easy for you.

Right now, there’s a trial membership going, so jump on over and sign up! I only wish that I had had the option of joining the LBC when I was starting out. It would have cut my learning curve by more than half.

Anyway, blogging is a great way to start out! AND, when the blog is on your hosting account, you can do anything with it you like. Nobody can tell you what content you can have or that you aren’t allowed to advertise. Plus, nobody can shut you down for that. Blogging is really a great way to begin, so don’t wait… get your blogging engines started!

OK… Didn’t get those 10 comments, so… you lose. Can’t give you the rest of that really, really cool advice. But, I’ll give you another chance.

You win!

I’m doing a call about blogging for business with Rick Burdo for his Disabled Veterans Teleseminar Training Series tonight. I’m kicking things off!

So, if you’d like to hear what I have to say, along with 11 other smart speakers, including Tellman, Erik Stafford, Kyle Battis, Mike Purvis, Jeff Mills, and a bunch of other cool people…

Click Here to Sign Up for the Disabled Veterans Teleseminar Training Series that starts at 8 p.m. EST tonight!

Oh, yeah… it’s free. How cool is that?

WordPress came out with version 2.8 today and I didn’t wait an hour to install the new version. Why would I when the blog will do it for you, eh? I mean, they’re making things easier and easier and I’m loving it!

So, what’s new? The color of my dashboard changed. It’s now a putty grey with blue headers. Hmm… not that thrilling.

But there are some things that don’t show. They have fixed some 790+ bugs. That works for me. I’ve been getting kicked off Firefox when trying to add an image. Let’s hope THAT one is fixed.

One of the coolest improvements is that WP2.8 allows you to search for and change themes without leaving your blog. Not too bad. As a constant theme changer, this is very cool for moi.

The widgets interface looks different now, too. Plus, you can drag and drop to add or delete, and I like that the old information goes away when you get rid of one. Plus, now, when you add a widget, you don’t have to save the content in it and the sidebar, too. Only one save is sufficient.

Anyway, here’s a list of all the upgrades, if you want to read through it: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_2.8

The changes aren’t quite as sweeping as they were with WP 2.7, but hey… they’re still pretty sweet.

If you have studied copywriting at any level, you’ll have heard the term “swipe file” often. That’s just a collection of headlines or really good sales copy that can be modeled. It can’t be used verbatim, of course, because that would be plagiarism, but you can rewrite what you find, and even the best copywriters do this all the time.

The constant pace of blogging can be demanding. When you’re first starting a blog, it’s important to write in that blog seven days a week. Then, once you have a following, you can cut back to five days and then three, and still maintain an audience. But the reality is, the more you post, the bigger your audience will grow, unless you’re a total moron and posting crap all the time. Hopefully, you have some cool stuff to mention about your niche to keep your audience engaged, but you must be consistent.

Sporadic blogging is very bad. It just shows that you’re lackadaisical, that you’re not really passionate about your topic, and it might indicate to the people you’re trying to impress that you’re a slacker. Not good.

However, potential bloggers are often aghast at the idea of writing every day!

You have to realize that blogging isn’t ALL about writing. It can be about video. You can make them yourself or just snatch them from YouTube. You can make audio recordings. You can add pictures with captions. There are lots of ways to be blogging.

You don’t have to be tied to your computer, either. WordPress allows you to write now and publish later. You only need click the “edit” link next to “Publish immediately” in the right-hand side of the “Add New Post” page and set your posting date and time. So, you can add 5 posts at the same time, and schedule them to go out 5 days in a row.

This is great for people who like to write Looooong posts. They shouldn’t be more than 500 words, so break them down over two or three days, if that’s the case. A good length is really about 350 words.

A good way to get ideas is by keeping a blogger’s “swipe file.” During the day, as I’m working on other projects, I see sites I may want to blog about later, so I just bookmark them and add them to my blogging ideas file. Then, later in the day, I can go back and write about what I found. These files can include Twitter remarks, websites, even emails that I get. All of them go into the hopper.

It sure makes writing a lot easier. Instead of sitting here at the keyboard trying to come up with something at the end of the day when I’m exhausted, I just go to my file, check around for something I can write about and then, I’m here pounding the keys or posting something to amaze and delight.

Well.. at least I hope so.

Click Here to Learn More about Writing from a Professional Writer

Too late for Stanley because he’s already left the planet. No, I’m not talking about the director… I’m talking about the theme!

I do a lot of quick blog evaluations for people for Website Spotlight calls for The ListBuilding Club, in ListBuilding 411 and in my own Blogging4Boomers, and I always want to cringe when I see the old WordPress blog default theme… Kubrick.

It’s a nice, clean theme, I agree. But it just SCREAMS, “Newbie!”

You totally need to get a new theme and upload it to your hosting account, then change it on your blog. And no, changing the color of the header won’t do it. Get off your bum butt and get a new freakin’ theme! They’re free at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes, and they’re quite easy to install.

Here’s how it works:

1. Go to http://wordpress.org/extend/themes and find a theme you like
2. Download it to your desktop
3. Unzip it
4. Look inside the theme folder to see if there’s another folder inside.
5. Open an FTP program
6. On your server, navigate to wp-content/themes folder
7. If there’s a double folder for the theme, you want to upload the one inside to wp-content/themes
8. Go into your blog admin area
9. Click Appearance in the left-hand navigation panel
10. Select the new theme
11. If you like the preview, click “Activate theme” in the upper right-hand corner

If you decide you hate the theme, you can always go back to Kubrick by clicking the theme, as above.  Then, go find another.

Usually, I download 3 or 4 at a time, upload them all and then, pick the one I want. Not all themes will work with your content or what you have in your sidebar, so don’t think you can pick any theme and it will be fine. Usually, that’s the case, but not always.

But it’s that simple… do it!

I was reading through my feeds today, and came upon a post from Marko Saric’s How to Make My Blog blog and he was talking about all the traffic he’d got from one post. Of course, it was about Twitter, and it outlined some of the great Twitter plugins available: Top 5 Twitter Plugins to Incorporate into Your Blog.

In it, Marko outlines WP Twitip ID, which allows you to add a field to your comment form for your commentors’ Twitter IDs.  This is cool for your commentor because it links their Twitter username to the comment and to their Twitter profile. Nice! So, I installed that one.

Another is Twittar, which allows the commentor’s Twitter Avatar to be shown next to his/her comment.  Kind of nice. And there’s TweetBacks, Tweet This, and Twitter Tools.

You can check them all out on Marko’s blog. But here’s the thing. They all do very cool things, but they’re not for blog beginners. Well… except for Twitter Tools. Anyone can use that one. It’s a pretty standard plugin.

But if you don’t know how to edit your theme files, the others are advanced. They’re not hard. You just need to put snippets of code where you want the items to appear, but one of them, TweetBacks, for example, takes a little more finesse.

Yet, I do have some advice.

If you’re not really into editing the PHP files, don’t be scared to get in and try it. That’s how I learn to do things. I just forge ahead, and do things because I know I can go back and fix them, if I screw up (and I have done that more times than I care to mention).

Save your theme. If you mess up one of the files, you can just go to your saved theme files and upload the clean file to your theme folder. For instance, if you screw up comments.php, just go to your saved theme and upload the original comments.php to the theme folder on your hosting account. Just like new!

Never be afraid to try things. That’s how you learn.

If you read this blog, you know that I think what Jeff Johnson does is pretty interesting. I’ve watched scores of his videos, and have always planned to do something with all that knowledge. He’s a powerhouse of an affiliate marketer, and I need the time to find a niche where I can rule. Time is the enemy in my world. Anyway, I think Jeff is a pretty smart guy.

So, today, I got about 6 emails from him. (I think I’ve joined his list at least a dozen times.)

He was advertising this new SEO-friendly plugin for WordPress. Pat is all eyes.

I went over to his blog and read more about it. What it does is find plugins for you that are important to your blog’s SEO profile, and it tweaks the settings to match Jeff’s. I thought, hmm… I need to check this out, just because — SEO and all.

I downloaded it.

I let the blog install it and activate it from the zip file. No problems.

It was pretty happy with me because I already have most of the plugins Jeff recommends, but there were a couple, like the CAPTCHA code plugin for comments, which I had mused about but never installed, and the Google XML sitemaps. I had the plain Google Sitemaps, but hey… If Jeff wants to give me his settings, I’m going to download the right plugin, eh?

Once I had them all, I told Jeff’s plugin to change the settings, and bingo! I’m 99.96% optimized.

I had to go in and change the number of posts to show setting because he had it at 5. It left a bunch of white space at the bottom of the blog, so I changed it back to 10, hence my not perfect 100%. Oh well… Not changing my theme. Sorry.

The drawback?

Well… You have to agree to allow Jeff’s blog feed to sit at the top of your dashboard. To me, this isn’t a big deal. In fact, it’s kind of a blessing. I read his blog anyway, and now, I can come here and read from here. Nifty.

I’d recommend this plugin to you, especially if you don’t know what plugins or what settings to have to make your blog SEO-friendly. Two caveats…

First, you must be using WordPress 2.7. You should be anyway, but don’t use Jeff’s plugin if you don’t have it running now.

Second, not all plugins work with all themes. If you install it and something goes glitchy, just deactivate the plugin. Or worse, if your blog goes away, just rename your plugins folder and it will come back. then, delete the plugin and you should be back to normal again.

With those two things in mind, it’s a great free tool. I’d check it out: http://budurl.com/jeffj

So, my friend Brian Terry, who’s an awesome graphics designer and just as awesome a marketer, has come out with a new plugin I know you’ll love. It’s called “Optin Pop,” and if you’re a regular reader here, you’ve probably seen it on this blog. I’ve been testing it over the past few weeks, and it’s increased the optins from my blog by about 30%. Not too shabby.

And it’s your typical WordPress plugin. Nothing fancy.

But here’s the sweet part…

It allows you to create 10 different optin boxes and it rotates them for you. So, every time people come to your blog, or every 5 times or whatever you set, they see another message. Not every message will resonate with everyone who sees it, right? So, it you can create 10 messages, you have a much higher chance of getting their attention.

You can choose a lightbox effect, where it darkens the screen, while putting your optin box right in the reader’s face, or you can be a bit more subtle and use a standard pop-up.

You can choose to make it grey, blue, red or white.

You can set it to appear on all pages, just your permalink pages, on comment pages, or category pages.

You can set the width you prefer.

You can have it appear on load or on close.

And you can decide how often you want people to view it.

Plus, it’s unblockable. How cool is that?

What all this adds up to is more optins and a bigger list for you, and we all know that list just equals money!

It’s totally worth getting, so don’t wait. Snap it up at http://easyseotricks.com/op

Go to: http://overcomeeverything.com/blogging

I have spent the past couple of years touting the coolness of the All-in-One SEO Pack plugin for WordPress. This one lets you add a title and description to every post you make, which is super important for SEO. As I’ve mentioned here before, the title and description are the most important parts of any web page, and the benefit of being able to add these to every post you make is HUGE!

Then today, I was reading an article in SiteProNews, “Blogs, WordPress and Google,” by Scott Van Achte and I was curious. So… I headed over to Urban Giraffe, and watched the video:

So, I’m thinking I’ll give it a try. I installed it and then went in to tweak the settings. Wow! You can give a title and description to every KIND of page in your blog: categories, tags, about, even 404. Making each one individual is a great help for your SEO advantage.

And, as you see in the video, it will suggest tags and keywords for you from the post. Pretty cool, I’d say.

I’m going to try it for a few days and see how I like it. If it’s as good as it looks, it could be my new recommendation. So far, I like it!

After you make a post, you go down to the HeadSpace area, and click on Page Title. Your title automatically populates. It creates a description for you that you can easily edit. AND, it suggests tags from what you’ve written, too.

I think I’m in love.

As I was cruising Twitter today, I found a link to a blog post about plugins. I should write these things down, but I just go from place to place and then forget to note my breadcrumbs so that I can give proper credit. Every time I do that, I’m kicking myself, and I deserve it. I just open a bunch of links and have so much fun with them that…

Like that?

It’s from a plugin called WP Note and you can create lots of intersting and fun notes with it in different colors, from: http://www.hityou.net/wp-note/

Check this out:

That’s not really a warning, but I wanted you to see how cool this plugin is.

If you like this type of thing… I totally do. Hop on over to http://www.hityou.net/wp-note/ and check it out.

As a professional writer, I found the Internet to be an answer to my prayers way back in 1996. That’s eons in Web time, eh? Well… it used to be that I had to figure out what it is I needed to know about a topic, go to the library and schlep home a pile of heavy books. If I wanted something in a newspaper or magazine, I had to stay in the library. And if I wanted something fresh and unique, I’d interview an expert. These are still quite viable ways to research pieces, but today, the choices are just wide open for finding everything you need online, even experts.

I learned that quickly because I had a small child at the time, and getting to the library and all that it entailed was difficult. No babysitters and this full-time mom had to be creative about getting her research done.

When I finally got online in ‘96, I was completely thrilled to find so much information at my fingertips. I set about doing a very complicated piece about circumcision, interviewing 42 men, women, and professionals on the topic via email. I got way more input from folks than I ever could have by phone.

Then, a couple of years down the line came blogging. Blogging! It meant that writers, pro or amateur, could write what was on their minds and have it published immediately for anyone who was interested to read. Wow! Being published in print is a hard row to hoe. You have to know the proper formats, go through the proper channels, and often wait a very long time before an editor finally shows interest.

Yet, blogging wasn’t serious quite yet. Blogger was the rage and people writing about what they had for lunch wasn’t terribly exciting. Traditional publishing was actually LATE to the online world, so there weren’t as much cogent and useful writing as one would hope in the early days.

All of that has changed. Now, there’s more good writing on popular blogs than bad, and running a blog ticker on blogs in your niche is almost imperative. For me, keeping up with the news in SEO is imperative, and so, I read lots of blogs pertaining to the topic. It’s easy for me because there are places like SEOMoz, Search Engine Land, SEOBook, and the essential Matt Cutts. I try to read these at least once a week, each plus others as I see fit. The information isn’t just accurate, it’s timely. I don’t have to wait for this month’s issue. I’m getting input every single day.

But sometimes, you’re in a niche that isn’t quite so easy to find information in, and this is especially true when it comes to blogs. Let’s say you’re in the knife throwing niche, for example, or coin collecting or fishing. There are corporate blogs in each of those, I’m sure, and you can find some stuff that’s reliable. But when you go to a blog that’s not a company’s blog, is the information you’re getting correct? Anyone can throw up a blog and may not be expert in the niche you’re working in. You may have more smarts about the topic than they do! So? Reader beware.

Kendall Allen wrote about this very topic today in “The Love/Hate Livelihood Of The Blogosphere” at Online Spin at Media Post. The good news is that the blogosphere seems to be improving in quality. But she’s coming at the topic like an offline person, asking about metrics and such. Any online marketer worth his/her salt and any blogging pro knows that there are lots of great measurement tools to use. Her approach is rather stuffy. She’s talking about standards and in some respect, regimentation.

I’d hate to see that, really. Regimentation will squeeze all the life out of blogging, just like it squeezed the life out of the publishing industry. Only the very accurate in form are even considered for publication. Seriously. If you don’t have your format correct, editors may not bother with your writing no matter how great it is. They figure that if you haven’t done the background work to find the proper forms that you’re not serious and pffft!!! You’re out before you even get to the plate.

The talk of “best practices” in Allen’s article just chills me to the bone. I embraced the blogosphere simply because there was none of the regimentation and picky B.S. that accompanies the offline publishing world, and I’ve written for all print media types — newspapers, magazines, and books. It’s not that she’s saying that the information should be accurate. I’m 100% on board with that, but…

Bloggers should be policing themselves, not some set “standards.”  That would just take all the fun out of it.  What would that mean for sites like ” Boing Boing,” which is almost 100% scraped content. It’s not a particularly well written blog, but it sure is a ton of fun.

And I totally don’t think it can ever happen.

But I assure you that the first time they try to set “standards” for blogging, I’m off to fight against it.

Ever look through a ton of blog themes and think that none of them really suit your vision?

I know I have.

I find themes I like, but they have a left-hand sidebar, or the colors aren’t right or for whatever other reason, I just can’t hang with it.

In steps Artisteer from http://artisteer.com, which allows you to create your own WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla theme in a matter of minutes.

The way Artisteer works is very simple. The software will suggest elements for you, or you can choose your color template, the way the header is shaped and colored, whether or not to use photographs, and all of the other stuff that you want your blog to do. The combinations are myriad.

I’ve used Artisteer to create a few themes for my free website EasyBlogTricks.com where I give people the technical aspects of blogging in video. I show folks how to install a WordPress blog from scratch, how to use plugins, how to upgrade, and so on. I need to go back in and upadate for WordPress 2.7, but the operations are fundamentally the same in most instances. Still, I wanted to give members a bit more, and so, I’ve been having fun creating themes with Artisteer.

Brian Terry, of BigSellingWebsiteDesign.com who’s an incredible graphics designer without Artisteer, even gave the software the thumbs up. I can only imagine the very cool stuff he’s doing with it. (And if you’re not subscribed to his blog, you should be.) But the point is, you don’t have to be a graphics designer to make Artisteer work for you in some very professional ways.

I’m in the process of downloading version 2.0.2.150 right now, which is still in beta, but the awesome thing about buying the software is that you get free upgrades for a full year. I bought it a few months ago, so I’m good to go. Wish Camtasia worked that way.

Anyway, you can get a trial version that will allow you to play with the software, but not download the pages for your new theme, unless you cough up the dough.  The Home edition is only $49.95, but the pro version comes with a lot more and you can use it commercially for only $129.95. If you buy blog themes, it’s totally worth the price.

Here’s the thing: You really don’t want your blog to look like everyone else’s, do you? Artisteer gives you a very cool way to have a totally unique theme, and you can create one any time you wish. It’s worth a try.

Here’s a video I made for Overcome Everything About Getting Traffic to your blog:

One question that I’m often asked by my customers is, “How do I find stuff to post to my blog?”

Seems really tough to some folks. I get that. I really do.

I have always had a love/hate relationship with writing. I’m a professional writer, so the words just flow out of my fingers, more or less, but even for me, it’s sometimes hard coming up with what to write on my own. In fact, I rarely use my own brain to come up with topics, in case you haven’t noticed.

At the end of my work day for Overcome Everything, it’s time for blogging, which I try to do Monday through Friday. Sometimes, that doesn’t happen. This week, I spent most of my life on the telephone between the re-launch of The ListBuilding Club and the “Listathon” which we did Wednesday and Thursday. Ahhhh!!! It’s so much fun, but at the end of a day like those, you’re just exhausted.

So, I don’t rely on my own brain, which is very tired by the end of one of THOSE days.

First, I go into my email. I get newsletters from Site Pro News, Media Post and several other sites about search and Internet marketing, plus Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report. I can usually find something interesting in one of those that will give me an idea for blogging. I read articles on the SEO sites and such, too, so it’s easy to bounce off one piece or another.

Or, I can go to You Tube and find a video to post, or I post a video of my own.

I can go into my member calls from Blogging4Boomers and select a bit of audio to publish.

It’s totally easy for me to find stuff to blog, and it can be easy for you, too. Learn something you didn’t know before. Catch up on the news in your niche. Make a video or find one on one of the video sites, or interview someone — an expert — and post that interview to your blog.

There are so many ways to blog, it really boggles the mind.

So, have you taken the plunge and upgraded to WP 2.7 yet? I waited a while because of the complete overhaul. I decided I didn’t have time for any hassles in that moment.

But I had to install a new blog for work, and Wow! It’s pretty slick, eh? I think it will be much easier for new bloggers to find things. You know that Posts means you can write, edit, and create categories.

Media means pictures and videos, though I was never able to get that feature to work in 2.6.3. Maybe it will work now. One can hope.

Links… Simple. Blogroll and links of any kind.

Pages and Comments are self-explanatory.

And then, there’s Appearance. How much clearer is that than Design? I mean, we cyber-ninjas know what design means, but new people could get confused, no? Appearance relates to Windows  desktop “Appearance” and it seems to click right in. Great!

Then, there’s Plugins, Users, Tools, and Settings. All pretty straightforward, and all in ONE place! That’s what always griped me. I love the new interface, how it’s all organized intelligently on the left side of the screen.

I also like the “Quick Edit” option for posts. What used to be the “Manage” tab, with posts and pages is now just “Pages,” and then”edit.” When you go there and rest your mouse on the post you want to change, a menu comes up, and you can edit, quick edit, delete, and view. If you just need to change a category or add tags, “Quick Edit” is neat.  You just change it/them quickly without needing to go to another screen, save, and go.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with WordPress 2.7, but I really am tired of ugrading and I just read a post that they’re already working on WordPress 2.8. Ah well… Long as you guys keep making WP better and better… It’s a fabulous software, and hard to believe that it’s still free.

All you WP devs rock!

Oh, and I upgraded today. Glad I did. Mike Paetzold told me it was great. That’s not to say I didn’t believe him, ‘course. There was just a lag between when he told me it was cool and when I had time to make the change.

Thanks, Mike! You’re 110% right, as usual.

Are you afraid of your blog?

I mean, does the idea of getting into the guts of it kind of freak you out?

Well… don’t let it.

I have learned EVERYTHING I know by fooling around with stuff. Seriously. I never had a computer class in my life. But… I can do techy stuff, and often surprise myself by figuring out stuff that people much smarter than me can’t.

So, play with the blog. Get into it and learn every part of it. You can’t kill it, not really. As long as you back everything up before doing things like upgrading, you’ll be fine.

And playing with the themes seems daunting, I know. Did to me, too, and I still don’t really know PHP. But, I can get in and make changes to it so that it does the things I want it to do.

Usually…

I make mistakes. Of course, I do! Everyone does. Even people who think they know what they’re doing.

But you always have the original files to fall back on. If you screw up your main index in the template, no big deal… just go into your FTP program, delete the one you messed up and replace it with the original that you have sitting on your hard drive, right?

And if you’re so new that you’re still using the Kubrick theme or the other default theme in WordPress, no problem. You can just go over to http://WordPress.org and download a new copy of WordPress. In the wp-content folder, you’ll find the theme with all fresh pages.

Playing around with codes and stuff can be scary, and it was to me at first, too. But if you don’t get your hands dirty, you’ll never learn.

My hands and fingernails are perfectly black. I do this stuff every single day.

And I’m still alive.

OK, I’m going to give you a cool way to bring life back into your blog. This site has been around a while because I’ve been using it for at least six months or more, but it’s a site where you can get people to do anything you want them to do, anything that requires a human set of eyes and action.

The site is called “Mechanical Turk,” and it’s an Amazon.com site. You can get there by going to http://requester.mturk.com and you can use it to get readers for your blog, and here’s how:

You set up what’s called a “HIT,” which stands for something like human interactive task. To create the HIT, you simply fill out some very specific instructions. “Go to http://OVBLogger.com and read a post or two. If you find something of interest that you enjoyed, please leave a comment. The comments can be positive or negative. Just write what you feel.”  But you can make up your own, and then, pay people to do this.

The great part is that you don’t pay very much. Different tasks go for different amounts of change. For example, you can get someone to vote for your posts on social bookmarking sites for 1 – 3 cents. I pay ten times that for a good comment, but you can see how it’s still inexpensive. I just put about $10 a month into my account at Mechanical Turk and it lasts, though comments have been coming by the boatload lately. Still, I can double that and… please. It’s el cheapo.

One of the by-products of this, of course, is that you’re getting traffic. Usually when people read the blog but it makes no sense to them, they just return the HIT and go on their way. So, I’m getting qualified, targeted readers, too, which is cool.

There are two caveats. One is that you have to explicitly put in your HIT that you won’t pay for drive-by commenting, such as “nice post.” That’s just unacceptable. You want your commenter to have at least read the post and agree or disagree with what you’ve said. Also be sure that the commenter is able to comment in the language of the blog. I made that a spec of my HIT, as well.

The second warning is that I’m not sure Google likes this, but they don’t like my paid links, either. The dropped me back to a PR2 because of one or the other. But do I care?

No.

I want readers, and it would also be nice for Google to see things my way, but that may not happen. I figure that paying for readers is something that is working extremely well for me. It’s no different than paying for traffic, right? That’s basically what I’m doing. I’m getting people to come and see my blog that would probably have never found it in a bazillion years. And I’m getting new fans, too.

That totally works for me!

Also, you can put other HITs up, if you’re really creative. Get people to evaluate your copy, or to compare one page against another. Ask if they like an image you want to use. Ask them to complete a survey. You can get answers to many of your marketing questions this way and it’s dirt cheap.

My advice is to start slowly. I wouldn’t recommend getting posts Dugg or Stumbled Upon. It’s just not that effective. But, getting people to read your blog surely is. Try it.

Oh, and if you need a way to make a little extra cash… try Mechanical Turk from the other side of the coin. Because it’s an Amazon.com site, it’s totally on the up and up and there’s no need to worry whether you’ll be paid or not. You won’t earn much, but you will make some cash over time.

So, what do you think? Should I take the plunge? I mean, I always get excited by new interfaces and software but hmm…

I think I’ll wait.

I just spent the past week getting all the Overcome Everything blogs up to version 2.6.5! Gaaaa… That pickles my brain.

But that’s not why I’m deciding to wait a while, of course. You know if you’ve read other posts  on this blog that I would totally love it if WordPress just gets the bugs out first. You can’t do that unless a bunch of people are playing with your software and trying to make it break, of course, so I’m sure that a lot of people were doing that today.

So, not changing… not yet. Not on the important blogs. It’s just too much of a pain you know where, and then if something does get buggy I’m not that talented to figure out the whys and where fors. Pat’s method is to do things, even if they don’t make sense, until something works. Not a programmer, though I very often wish I were. It would make things so much easier to be enlightened. Think?

I’ll probably upgrade one of the minor blogs to WP2.7 and see how that goes first.

Here’s something weird that happened when I upgraded one of the blogs to 2.6.5… It wouldn’t accept my login information! So, I decided to try the blog in Internet Explorer, and it worked! In Firefox, it tells me my login is bogus. How’s that happen?

I’ve done at least 59 upgrades and this is the first time that I’ve run into that. I’m thinking it may be the theme, which is an older one and I haven’t changed it because it suits the purpose and just looks nice. But maybe it’s time for a theme change, and since it’s one of the minor blogs, I’ll try the newest version of WordPress and see how it goes.

Why not? If something is broken, why not fix it with something else that might be broken?

That’s Pat logic.

Anyway, once that’s done, I’ll give you my report.

Love WordPress. Just wish they’d be less like Microsoft and more like, “Here… This is great! You won’t need another upgrade for a full year.”

But how can we really complain? WordPress is the greatest blogging software on the planet, and it’s free. Gotta love that.

Today, I got an email from one of my customers, who wanted a refund. No problem. That happens.

He bought my writing book, and said it was about writing, that he was more interested in tagging and article marketing and stuff like that. OK, I do have a free report that gives my exact article marketing strategy for getting to the top of the search engines at Pats7Secrets.com. But it really doesn’t say much about tagging because when I wrote it, the social bookmarking sites or folksonomies (which means collections of tags), as they’re sometimes called, were just beginning to take off.

Amazing how things change so fast in cyberworld, isn’t it?

Anyway, people don’t seem to get two concepts that are very, very simple. Yet, not many of us “specialists” talk about these terms. Let me ease your pain.

First, tagging is nothing more than creating categories for whatever it is you’re tagging — articles, blog posts, videos, press releases, etc.

Tags are created by you. The search engines pick up on the terms if you use them in your work all the time.  Yet, they are simply words that people might search for, specifically in Web 2.0 sites that have something to do with your work.

For example, I’ll tag this post, “seo, search engine optimization, tagging, pinging, Web 2.0, folksonomies, Pat Marcello” and maybe a few more in a second or two. I’m interested in classifying my post for anyone who cares to search for it, no matter what they type in to find it. I’m also promoting me. I want people to find me, so I’ve decided to create a “Pat Marcello” category.

Someone can go into my Delicious account and find that my biggest tags are internet-marketing and ADHD. I studied that a lot when I was writing about it for Tellman. Very interesting stuff, but you can see what my major interests are when you look at my tag cloud.

That’s another way that you can help people to find you. People click on a cloud and find everything you or anyone else has written on the topic. Of course, if you own the cloud, like some people have tag clouds on their blogs, you’ll get back all the work that you have tagged with that word.

Tag wisely. Just decide all the categories that your work falls under, and tag it!

But let’s dive right into pinging. All that means is you’re nudging the blog search engines and telling them that you’ve made a new post and that they should go to your blog and find out what it’s all about.

You can ping manually by going to sites like Pingoat.com or Ping-o-matic.com and just plug in some information and BANG! You’ve pinged!

Or… if you’re smart like me and you have a WordPress blog, WordPress can do it for you. Just plug in the services you want to ping.  Here are mine:

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

All you need do is copy and paste that list into your WordPress blog under “Settings” (on the right) and then, “Write.” Then, scroll all the way at the bottom of the page. Select the pingomatic URL because it’s already in the list. And paste the ping list above right into the blank. Save.

Then, you write a post and sit back and put your feet up. WordPress does the work for you.

Tagging and pinging are pretty easy, eh? Well… now you know.

I was using Market Samurai to come up with something to write about today, and let me tell you, there are tons of articles to choose from. But something I read in one of the blogs interested me because it was so true.

The article was about business blogging, and the first paragraph said something about people not getting immediate results, and so they think it’s a waste of time.

Not true!

Blogging is infinitely wiser than many traffic tactics. Sitting in front of a screen clicking away at a traffic exchange won’t get you where you need to be.  Buying banner ads or using free blasters to blast emails or ezine ads or whatever out. All a freakin’ waste of valuable time!

Commercial Blogging gives you an edge for several reasons. One of them is that blogs are extremely search engine friendly. I won’t go into the reasons for that right now because that’s rather out of focus, but just know that writing in a blog, using keywords you’ve researched and found to be great ones for your niche is what you need to do.

And, you need to do it every day or almost every day when you’re starting out. If you read my blog, you know that I try to post at least 5 times a week. That’s because I want to keep on building readership and momentum. Once a blog is rolling, you really don’t have to blog so much, but three times a week is good.

Surely you can find something to write about in your niche 3 times in a week! If not, hire someone. Use videos or podcasts, but just blog! Become respected in your niche, and then, make money with your blog.

It’s true that blogging won’t make you rich overnight. But, if you have a following of people that trust you, you might write a review about a product that you recommend (using your affiliate link, of course), and guess what happens? People are interested in your recommendations because you’ve built a “trust” relationship.

So, you’re branding, too. People will come to recognize you for your expertise, and it’s really, really cool when that happens. Then, you start to make bigger and bigger chunks of money. And you’re all set.

Don’t ever think that blogging is a waste of time. If you want free search engine traffic and the respect of people who come to see what you have to say each time you post, you’re on the right track! Develop a blogging personality and let it shine!

So, I opened this free site last week called EasyBlogTricks.com, right? It’s all about the tech stuff when it comes to blog. Just simple stuff, like installing a blog on your own server, using plugins, changing your theme and stuff like that. Easy for me, but hard for people who aren’t experienced, and so…

Everything was working until I got an email from one of my site members saying that the video wouldn’t play. I’m like, “Sure it does. Just let it load.” Mea culpa. I didn’t check the site in Internet Explorer, a HUGE duh on my part, and something I never remember to do.

So, then, the trial became how do I do this so that the videos play in Internet Explorer, right?

Grr…

It is very difficult to find out how to do that online, and so I thought I’d give you the simple, down and dirty.

Down at the bottom of your HTML page for the video, there is a <–comment–> that says:

“<!– Users looking for simple object / embed tags can copy and paste the needed tags below.”

and it makes this block of code all comment because it ends with –>

So, I’m thinking, OK (and while we’re at it, let’s just say I’m a very good PHP guesser. I haven’t a clue how to write it. I understand what it says, and over time, I’m sure I’ll be clicking away writing code, too. Don’t know why, but I just think it’s a good skill to have.

Anyway, I copied this whole block of comment, and added it into the HTML Write window of WordPress, it didn’t work. So, I looked at the code, and realized that I needed to add the full path to my video, so it’s like this:

<div id=”media”>

<object id=”csSWF” classid=”clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000″ width=”400″ height=”318″ codebase=”http://active.macromedia.com/flash7/cabs/ swflash.cab#version=9,0,115,0″>

<param name=”src” value=”ping.mp4″/>

<param name=”bgcolor” value=”#1a1a1a”/>

<param name=”quality” value=”best”/>

<param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always”/>

<param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”/>

<param name=”scale” value=”showall”/>

<param name=”flashVars” value=”autostart=false”/>

<embed name=”csSWF” src=”ping.mp4″ width=”400″ height=”318″ bgcolor=”#1a1a1a” quality=”best” allowScriptAccess=”always” allowFullScreen=”true” scale=”showall” flashVars=”autostart=false&color=0×1A1A1A,0×1A1A1A” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash”></embed>

</object>

</div>

But here’s what I did wrong…

All I needed to use was what’s inside the <embed></embed> tags, and center them. Then, put <div></div> tags around it, so make it look like this:

<div>
<center><embed name=”csSWF” src=”http://yourdomain.com/video/video.mp4” width=”400″ height=”318″ bgcolor=”#1a1a1a” quality=”best” allowScriptAccess=”always” allowFullScreen=”true” scale=”showall” flashVars=”autostart=false&color=0×1A1A1A,0×1A1A1A” pluginspage=”http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash”></embed></center>

</div>

Notice the path to the video. Just tell the browser where the video lives, give it the URL.

And voila! It worked. I should have saved the page that, just in passing, mentioned that you only use the portion that says <embed>.  Argh! I mean, it was obscure information. Why should it be so hard?

I’ll bet you that there are programmers having a good laugh.

But you know, being stupid about a subject is great! You get to learn every single day. I learn by doing, so the more I do, the more I take chances and mess around with this stuff, the more proficient I become. It’s great! Learning things is what really turns me on. Love to learn.

What’s that Nike used to say?

“Just do it!”

So, I finally did it. People are always asking me:

“I don’t have Fantastico. How do I install a blog?”

or…

“I don’t know how to install plugins.”

or…

“Why do I need to ping my blog and where do I go?”

And other similar really new person blogging questions. Well… If you’re one of those folks, who wants to start a blog but doesn’t know where to begin, I’m yer gal.

Just go to http://EasyBlogTricks.com and sign up. I’ll send you 6 videos (so far), one a day for 6 days that will teach you all of those things.

Oh, yeah… The site is Free. Check it out and tell me what else you’d like to see.  I just hope it helps folks who want to use WordPress blogs for marketing, but just don’t know where to start.

It seems like every couple of weeks, we’re asked to upgrade our version of WordPress. I used to wait around for Fantastico to catch up, but one of my oldest online friends and blogging buddies, Mike Paetzold, said that it’s best to do it when there’s a security issue. Hmm… OF COURSE! So, I decided to learn that end of things, and not wait the two to three weeks that it takes Fantastico to catch up..

Know what I found?

It’s not hard at all.

And WordPress.org has a guide to help you.

Basically, these are the steps:

• Make a backup of your database. In cPanel, you go to MyPHP Admin, select your blog’s domain from the dropdown menu and go to export. There are some checkboxes, and WordPress.org shows you which ones you want to check on this page: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups Not only that, but you get pictures to show you exactly what to do in Plesk, Direct Admin, Ensim, and vDeck, as well.

• The next step is to deactivate all of your plugins, just to be sure they won’t muck things up in case they aren’t compatible with the new version.

• Download the latest version of WordPress at http://wordpress.org and save it to your desktop.

• Extract all the files from the download and save them to your desktop.

• Pull out wp-config-sample file from the root folder (the main folder) and copy it to your desktop

• Open your .ftp program and copy the existing wp-config file from your database to your desktop.

• Copy your database name in the wp-config file and paste it into the wp-config-sample file in the appropriate place, do the same with your db_username and db_password.

• Save the wp-config-sample file as wp-config.php in the root of the new WordPress folder that you downloaded and extracted.

• In your .ftp program, delete the wp-admin and wp-includes folders in the existing blog

• Upload the new wp-admin and wp-includes folders from the new version of WordPress that is on your desktop. ***Don’t mess with the wp-content folder because that’s where your plugins and themes live. If you want to change the Kubrick theme or the Default WordPress theme to keep up with the newest version, do them individually. If you’re not using those, don’t worry too much about it.***

• Copy all the files in the new wp root directory (Control+A, and then deselect wp-admin, wp-includes, and wp-content folders) and upload and copy them over the existing files in your blog’s root directory. (I you open the main blog folder, you’ll see the wp-admin, wp-includes, and wp-content folders. Below them will be the files in question.)

• Go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin. You’ll probably have to log in again. But, you may also need to upgrade your database. Here’s what WordPress.org says about that:

“If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions. This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code. If you fail to do this step, your blog might look funny.”

• Reactivate your plugins

You should be good to go from there, but not to worry. If you screwed up somewhere, you have the backup that you did as your first step. You can just restore from there. Here are the instructions for restoring: http://codex.wordpress.org/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup

Still, upgrading is a pretty simple procedure when you break it down. In about 12 steps, you’re done. If you need more on this, go to: http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress and let WordPress show you the way.

I’ve done this about a gazillion times now, and it’s not really as big as deal as you might think. I’ve never once had to go back to the database backup, and I”ll be you don’t either.

http://www.addsyou.com
username=MjAwOC0xMS0yOCAxOTowODoyMQ==

Wow… Another great piece of software from social marketing expert, Jack Humphrey. And it’s free!

Get it here: http://budurl.com/vxtu

It gives you all kinds of cool information. You can use it just to find out what others are doing in your niche, or what I want to use it for is creating content. I mean, writing in a blog every day really isn’t that hard when you check out what’s going on around you.

You don’t have to come up with stuff on your own every single day, you know. If you’re one of my loyal and totally cool readers, you’ll know that I often write about other people, things going on around the Web or like this post, some useful tool that I’ve found and want to share with you.

Blog Talk Monitor runs your searches as often as you want it to from every five minutes to every 24 hours. You select the topic, plug in some keywords and this little program does the rest. It’s sweet!

The only issue for me was that my Microsoft .NET framework wasn’t up to date, so I had to go and download .NET 3.5 and then the .NET 3.5 SP1. Gotta have those service packs. So, that took a bit of time, but not a big deal really.  You can go to: http://budurl.com/gb2p to download .NET 3.5 and if you scroll down the page, the service pack, too.

So, now I have my services up to date and Blog Talk Monitor!

Oh, and you can monitor the same terms in Google Blogs, Google News, Technorati or RSS. Sweet!

What can I say, but again, “Thanks, Jack!”  (Now you know why I promote his stuff. Always, always useful.)