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?

The other day, I was over at SmartPageRank.com checking on this blog because I heard that Google had updated PR rankings again, and was curious. I had recovered from the paid links drop to PR0 back up to PR3 again, and was hoping maybe I could see a PR4 (where the blog was before the nasty debacle). I really shouldn’t care, and I’ll tell you why in a minute. But… I was totally surprised when…

I saw a PR0 again! Wow! That really pissed me off. And sure enough… days later, the PR0 appeared in my Search Status (see yesterday’s post) toolbar again.

I’m sorry but I won’t stop selling links. So, there, Google! My links have been there a long time, and so, people are obviously finding value in having them there. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to take that away from them. They were loyal to me before Google decided to penalize people for having paid links, and I seriously doubt that those links continue because the folks who are buying them wants to get some link juice. They didn’t leave me when I was a PR0. They just get clicks on the links or they wouldn’t keep paying for them, right? I mean, if Google took my PR away before…

I’m guessing that’s why they did it again.

So be it.

Does it hurt me? Well, if I was trying for some reciprocal linking, I’d say yes. But I’m still ranking #2, right under Matt Cutts (the Google spokesperson), for “seo canonical” for my post on canonical linking. And I’m ranking #3 for “WordPress marketing,” and #5 for “twitter nofollow,” and various other terms on page 1 that are pretty competitive. My page rank, though now bupkiss, hasn’t hurt me at all.

I was on the phone with Brad Fallon one time, when Tellman wanted me to find out why a site I’d been working on for a few months still had no page rank, and he told me that page rank means nothing. We all still worry over it and think about it, but the proof is in the pudding, people! PR means zip, zilch, zero.

What matters is where you land in the results.

So, I’ll keep selling links. It’s a matter of principle.

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I think Jeff Johnson is a pretty smart guy. He’s got some smooth tactics going with SEO, selling affiliate products from Amazon, and using blogs to run the whole shebang. I know. I’ve been through just about all of his free videos, and let me tell you… they’re KILLER.

But there are pieces missing. Jeff ascribes to the old Jimmy D. Brown adage: “Give them incomplete information,” apparently, and good advice that is. Jeff really knows how to whet your appetite for learning his systems. I wouldn’t say they’re for newbies, but…

I think that with his help, people could get this all together pretty quickly, even if they knew very little of Internet marketing and how it all fits. Don’t get me wrong. Jeff’s stuff is advanced strategies, but as a member of his Underground Lab, I’m sure anyone could pick it up and run with it.

You may want to check it out: http://easyseotricks.com/jj.

There’s lots of money to be made.

I won’t kid you, the price tag isn’t puny, but the potential is HUGE.

Yesterday, I advocated the idea that you should always use a sitemap on your blog to be sure that all your permalink pages are indexed.  But what is a sitemap and why is it so important?

A sitemap gives search spiders information about your website. It tells the bots what pages are on your site, when they were last changed and when it’s likely that they’ll change again. Search bots love information that updates frequently, and it’s part of the reason why spiders love blogs. If you’re blogging consistently, and using keywords associated with your niche you’ll find yourself in the results pages pretty easily, providing you’re not competing for terms that are uber competitive.

Sitemaps also give spiders information about pages that they might not discover otherwise, which is great, and sitemaps allow you to prioritize your pages, if you want to do that.

The bottom line is that they just provide more information and make it easier for spiders to crawl your site. The easier you make it the more likely it is that they’ll discover everything that you want them to. If you’re using flash, or Ajax for example, having a sitemap is mandatory. Otherwise, you might lose the opportunity of having your page crawled at all because spiders find information in those formats hard to parse.

Having a sitemap doesn’t totally guarantee that your page will be indexed, it just increases the likelihood.

Sitemaps are easy to create, whether for a blog (get Google XML Sitemaps plugin) or a website.  Just go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ where you can set priorities, and the dates/rates of change for your website. Then, take the file and upload it to your root directory via FTP. It’s really simple.

To make this more powerful, you should have a Google Webmaster account. It’s free to set up, and when you do, you give it the URL of your sitemap and you’re all set.  XML-Sitemaps.com will index up to 500 pages for you for free. It’s a great deal. Totally take advantage of it.

I can tell you what the wrong choice in terms of SEO is and that’s keeping the “http://yourblogdomain.com/?postnumber” that is the WordPress default. It doesn’t tell folks or search spiders anything about the post, except what number the post is.

Your SEO-friendly permalink will include your keyword rich title as well as the post number, and it should look like this:

/%post_id%/%postname%/

You can add the category (/%post_id%/%category%/%postname%/) in addition to or instead of the post ID #, but you should only do that if your categories are set up as your main keywords. A “General” category, for example, won’t help at all.

To change your permalink from your WordPress dashboard, you simply go to Settings, then Permalink.

You’ll see them right at the top of the page. Click on “Custom Setting,” and either fill in what you want or copy and paste the above.

However, this is something that should be considered when you start your blog. Do NOT alter your permalink structure if your blog is old or you’ll lose all SEO goodness that you have built up for ALL of your previous posts.

If your blog is new and you don’t have too many posts, change it now. It will be well worth the effort and help your SEO efforts.

To assure that your permalinks will be crawled and indexed, you should also have an XML Sitemap in place. You can get the XML Sitemaps plugin at http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins.

When I talk to people that are relatively new to Internet marketing, I’m astounded that they don’t see the value of building a list. Your list is the most important asset of your entire business! Without a list, you don’t make money, it’s just that simple.

Oh sure, there are some folks that have cracked the AdWords code, who know how to make AdWords pay off, but I guarantee that they’re also building a list around that activity. If they’re smart enough to conquer AdWords, they’re smart enough to know that the list will help them to make even more money, and not only that, but it will cost them far less cash. Emails are free, whereas we all know that AdWords is definitely not.

There are all kinds of ways to build a list, too. Obviously, you can put up a squeeze page and drive traffic to that. You can have an opt-in box on your blog. You can start a free site of some kind and pick up a huge list that way, or you can even buy a list through co-registration. But there are plenty of other ways to build a list, and if you aren’t doing it… good luck.

I spent the first couple of years online thinking that a list didn’t matter. I wasn’t making any money, either. It wasn’t until I connected with Tellman that he smacked me upside the head (virtually, of course), and said… “Start NOW!” And so, I did. And I have to say that my list means more to me than all the tea in England. Really. And my life is very different from what it was three years ago, too. It’s all because of my list.

Your LIST is your bread & butter. If you’re not building it… Start TODAY!

And if you need help with that, if you’re not sure how to begin… there’s always the ListBuilding Club. I assure you, it’s worth every single penny. Yes, I”m prejudiced, but I also know that you can’t find better training anywhere. We have thousands of satisfied customers, and I know that because they send us wonderful testimonials every single day. It’s really great to be part of that.

And it’s great for members because every single one of us at Overcome Everything cares. That’s our edge. We’re not just in it for the money. We want every single person that comes to us for help to succeed in a BIG way, and many have.

If you’re drowning out there and feel like you’re overwhelmed and don’t know where to start… Click Here and STOP the frustration. We really can help. And when your list is growing and you start making regular, steady money from it every day… you’ll “get” it, and be totally glad you did.

I’m always looking for interesting sites, and sometimes when I join here or there, I’m asked for a logo.

Well… I don’t have one.

At least I didn’t, until Now!

What d’ya think? It goes with the whole SEO theme, right?   It’s colorful and fun, and oh yeah… it was free to make.

I stumbled on a stie called “Logo Creator” at http://creatr.cc/creatr/

You can choose from 5 different preset designs, add your own colors and styles, and voila! You’re logofied.

But… Maybe you’ll like this one better:

It’s got my blog colors, and a little “wheelie” thingy that indicates a techy feel.

I made this one at SimWebSol Logo Generator and you can find it at http://www.simwebsol.com/ImageTool/Default.aspx

So, now I have too many logos…. What to do?

I’d love your opinion.

Vote!

Tell me which logo I should use, and I’ll give you access to the first lesson of Spider Language. You’ll love it so much that I’m betting you’ll want to stick around.

So, let me hear your comments, even if you only want to say that they both suck.

Wow! I just found an incredibly awesome and potentially valuable site today called “eKstreme.com” that has a whole section of SEO tools.

One of them is called, “What’s the Buzz?” and when you a keyword into the search box, it comes back with:

• popularity of the term on Technorati
• a Google Trends report
• blog posts tagged with the term
• blog posts with the term in their titles
• bookmarks for the term.

Just for the heck of it, I typed in “Twitter,” and was amazed to find that the popularity at Technorati has dipped dramatically over the past month. Not as many posts about Twitter as there once was.

Yet Google Trends says it’s more popular than ever.  But here’s news… it’s most popular in Ireland! Who knew?

Anyway, this is a quick and easy way to figure out whether there’s any interest in a niche, or just a good way to get more information from all the blog posts this returns. And if you read my blog, you’ll know it’s also a great way to get ideas about what to write.

Cool,  non?

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

Ah, yes… time for another post about… TWITTER!

Aren’t some of us spending inordinate amounts of time there?  I was at a conference with Carrie Wilkerson–the Barefoot Executive, who has like 52,000+ followers, and I thought she was going to wear out the keys on her Blackberry, I swear. She’s amazing.!

I’m lucky if I get to tweet a few times a day, and really feel inadequate there to be sure. But I try to offer blog posts and such to help people along the way, as well as retweeting cool stuff and communicating with the followers on my list and the people whom I follow. ‘Course I follow just about everyone that follows me. Why not? It’s only respectful. The only ones I don’t follow have no avatar and are obviously trying to scam the Twitterverse.

And then, there are those who follow you and then, unfollow you right away just to build their Twitter list. That’s really sleazy, in my book. And I used to hunt those people down and unfollow them back. Sheesh. It’s what they deserve, right?

But it’s nearly impossible. Qwitter works sometimes. I’ll get a whole bunch of emails for a day or so from Qwitter, and then, pffft!!! NAda.  I’m hoping that nobody is being an ass, but somehow, I’m thinking not. There will always be as many asses as there are chairs and you just have to run into one every now and then, right?

But to track them manually?

Here’s the thing: You can’t trust Twitter! When it looks like there are a bunch of people who aren’t following you, it might just be that they are following you and that Twitter is messing things up. Unfollowing them will do you a world of  hurt People who are following you don’t like it when you unfollow them. They take it as a personal affront.

And, you can’t use the services that tell you who the people are who aren’t following you back. They mess up because Twitter messes up, and tell you so in their terms of service.

What’s the solution?

Even though it might piss you off, you have to go about your business and just not worry at all about the people not following you back! It really doesn’t matter, does it? I mean, sure… it would be nice to nuke the nasties off the face of the planet, but there are just too many things to do in a typical entrepreneurial day, right?

The moral is: Don’t waste your time worrying about who’s following you or not following you. Use Twitter for the fun application that it is, and make lots of friends that are interested in the same things as you are. That’s really what’s important and what will keep your Twitterverse clean and clear. Just Tweet away and ignore the rest. There just aren’t enough moments in the day.

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!

Anyone who’s anyone in social marketing knows about Ping.fm . It’s a site that will post to multiple social sites for you, and you design the setup. You can hook into Facebook, MySpace, or LinkedIn. For micro-blogging there’s Twitter, Plurk, and Jaiku.  And there’s regular blogging if you have Blogger, WordPress.com or TypePad. And a whole bunch of sites that you may or may not belong to.

Imagine how much time you’re going to save because you don’t have to go from site to site, posting the same danged information. It’s really sweet!

If you don’t yet have a Ping.fm account, you need to get one today. Just post to Ping.fm and you’re done!

I have to admit that I’ve been lazy (= no time) to set it up. I don’t belong to all of the around 40 social sites that it supports, but that’s my bad.  Like everyone, I’m often thinking, why bother, if you don’t have time to be an active participant.

So… I’m kicking myself.

There are lots of important sites that I never mess with just because of the lazy (= not time) situation. It’s kind of like buying in bulk. You know it’s a good idea but you hate to spend that much at one time, eh?

Well… I managed to get my sites set up today, so look out. I’ll be posting to Ping.fm from now on! Lots more updates. And maybe…

Even a little more time.

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.

SEO is a huge consideration in everything you do for your business. Using a blog? Obviously, SEO is important. Creating a squeeze page? SEO… Writing a sales letter… SEO… Twitter… SEO. Everything you do online is about you and your keywords.

And yes, even Twitter.

I’m all about blogging and SEO and people are beginning to know that because of all the stuff I have out there in regard to blogging and SEO. As a joke, I bought the domain BlogQueenoftheUniverse.com, which redirects to this blog. It was a joke, and my friends thought it was pretty funny. But…

I actually saw someone refer to me that way on Twitter the other day. How cool is that? I obviously know that I’m NOT the be all and end all of blogging. Nobody is, but becoming a presence and “branding” yourself as one thing or another is a huge part of making yourself successful.

So, who do you want to be? What’s your niche? Are you the “Hunting King?” or how about “The JV Queen,” like Gina Gaudio-Graves? Or the “Niche Prof,” like Ron Capps? Try to position yourself as the expert in whatever field you want to conquer and then, back it up.

If I knew nothing about blogging or SEO, it would be stupid for me to try and be the queen of those fields. People would guffaw, and I’m certain that the people who DO know more than me in those areas most certainly are already.

But I don’t care.

Those aren’t the people I’m trying to impress and help along the way. My target audience are new bloggers and people who are new to SEO and this whole Internet marketing world. To them, I am the Blogging Queen of the Universe because I totally know a LOT! Certainly not everything, but enough that I do seem like an expert to people learning this whole confusing world of IM.

So, who are you? Who’s your target audience and who do you want to be to them? That’s what you should be striving to establish. Learn all you can about your niche topic and then, use the appropriate keywords surrounding that area in everything you do.

You’ll be amazed at how people respond to your expertise. It won’t happen overnight. I’ve been at this 5+ years and only now are people starting to know who I am and what I do, and it’s pretty sweet. I love working with folks, and so coming to them with some credibility is very, very important. I never want to disappoint them — evah.

I really like the WordPress plugin HeadSpace2.  It’s easy to use and much quicker than using All-in-One SEO, but let me tell you…

I installed it and have been using it for the past few weeks. I decided that I liked HeadSpace2 a lot better than All-in-One because I have very little time, and it saves me a ton of time. So, I uninstalled All-in-One…

HUGE mistake!

I lost all of the titles and descriptions to every post for the past two years that I’d done with All-in-One. Argh! That’s like 325 posts!

So, I’m going back, and one-by-one adding the titles and descriptions back in. It’s pretty quick because I’m using HeadSpace2, but it will still take me several days to get it all done. GRrrrrr….

Here’s the deal: All-in-One will run with HeadSpace2, so if you want to switch over, just don’t uninstall All-in-One. Don’t use it, but let it sit on your blog so that it won’t lose all your information. You don’t have to see it.

Just go to the upper right-hand corner of WordPress 2.7.1 and click on “Screen Options,” then unselect “All-in-One SEO” and you won’t see it again.

Thanks to Brent over at ListBuildingNexus.com, who pointed this issue out.  Luckily, it is fixable.

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

Do you like the ability to interact with your audience? I do, and about six months ago or more I found a great plugin that allows me to answer questions people have about my niche. Notice the top navigatin panel, which has “Blogging Questions,” “SEO Questions,” etc. Those are the result of using FAQ-tastic.

FAQ-Tastic isn’t hard to use, but don’t try it if you’re a beginner. It does involve adding pages and code to those pages so they pages will interact with the software. I mean, it’s not rocket science, and anyone who knows HTML probably won’t have any problems with it at all.

But what it does is give your readers the opportunity to ask you questions. They can be questions about what you’re posting or anything having to do with the categories you design in FAQ-Tastic. Pretty neat. I love helping folks and answering questions is what I do about 55% of my time, so it’s a no-brainer for me to have this plugin. It’s a way for me to keep in touch with my readers, too.

Another great plugin is Comment Remix (and you can search for either of these plugins right from your blog). This allows you to order the comments the way you want them to be (newest first, rather than the other way around), and the sweetest feature perhaps is that it gives you a “reply” button. You can hit it on any comment and just reply. If you don’t have this, you have to edit the post in most themes, and put your answer into the original comment, which is a pain in the butt.

With Comment Remix, you simple click the reply button, and a write blank opens up. You reply right there and be on your way.

I really like these two plugins and I’ve been using them long enough to recommend them. I hope you’ll love them as much as I do.

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.

It allows you to highlight the cool part of a web page, and it saves whatever you choose as an entry in your Inbox on the site. You can go there, and compile a blog post from it or you can just Twitter stuff.

Very sweet!

You can also publish what you find to Wiki-Lights, a sister site by the same people.

You have to register, but TwitterLights is free to use and enjoy. It will make tweeting a tad simpler, if you’re someone who likes to present interesting finds to your Twitterverse.

Blogging what you find along your day is made simple, too, which will really come in handy for me. Plus, you can add notes to what you find, like adding a Post-It® Note, right? It’s totally cool.

Take this one to the bank, my friends! It’s a winner!

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.

I have to say that I’ve never seen such a definitive, easy-to-follow guide to WordPress SEO than I found today at: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/ from Joost deValk. Wow. Very comprehensive, and well done.

Joost starts with the proper structure of permalinks and carries through to Titles, Descriptions, all the way to using Twitter. Very sweet!  It’s especially useful for non-SEO types as it gives pretty explicit instructions on how to make this all work for your WP blog. I would advise anyone who isn’t up on all the latest stuff when it comes to SEO for blogging to go to the site and check it out.

There’s also a great new post about Facebook at Mashable today: http://mashable.com/2009/03/04/new-facebook-pages/ Go here to get some “opportunities” and learn the drawbacks from Curtis Hougland. Great article about Facebook’s changing landscape. If you use Facebook as a marketer or just as a social networker, you need to check this out.

And finally, check out “Don’t Make These Mistakes When Blogging” by Mert Erkal’s blog. He’s a Twitter pal and I couldn’t agree with what he has to say in this post more.  There are no “get rich quick” schemes that work and link exchanges are lame. Just saying.

These are a few of the sites that I found useful today. Hope your day was as productive!

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.