Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

How NOT to Get Free Links

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

While browsing for new sites using StumbleUpon today–I do this a lot and there’s a ton of great stuff out there I might not find otherwise–I found an interesting blog on Internet marketing and on top of the blog itself being pretty interesting it had this neat little plugin that displayed a special one line message across the top of the page.

What struck me was the message seemed customized to me. I’m assuming it uses the referrer data but it appeared to know I had entered the site from StumbleUpon and greeted me saying something to the effect of “You found me from StumbleUpon, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed if you like what you find here.”

I thought that was kind of cool and can see a lot of great uses for such a on niche blogs as well as here at the Leap.

The plugin also gives the developer who made it free links with anyone using it, if you look at the image you’ll see the link to the far right of the yellow stripe… so that’s cool for them and was lucky for me since I wanted to grab this plugin.

So I go to the developer’s site from the link and find that not only do they want free links on my site in exchange for using the plugin, but I’ve also got to join their mailing list before I’m able to download the plugin???

Really, you want free links AND and an email capture for the plugin? Sorry, you lost me there.

I’d have used your plugin, I’d have provided you with tons of free backlinks in exchange, or I might have subscribed to your list if the backlink wasn’t included on the plugin.

But I won’t do both. The plugin isn’t really that cool after all, and if I want its functionality in the future I’ll pay someone $30 over at elance or Rent-A-Coder to get it on more friendly terms.

The lesson here is it’s okay to try to get the most out of what you’re doing, but force people through too many hoops and they’ll start weighing the value of your offering against the efforts neeeded to get it… and then you risk losing them completely.


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Make More Use of WordPress

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

Here’s a tip that’s something I’ve done for a long time and I think will be of use to many of you.

I have a private blog running on my desktop PC, and I use it for storage of all my articles. Most are my own articles, but some I’ve paid other writers to create and even a few are from PLR (private label rights) packages. In all over the years I’ve accumulated a lot of articles and just storing them as individual documents became very disorganized quickly.

So, with the help of a free and super easy program called (there are others out there, this is just what I’m using now) I’m able to run a small local apache server complete with PHP and MySQL database access on my desktop–and that allows me to run WordPress or any other type of PHP/MySQL based programs I want on my local machine. (Instructions for setting up WampServer and WordPress will be included below)

Like I said, I use WordPress for article storage. I’ve got it setup with lots of categories, and it’s searchable; so it works nicely for this.

Here’s why that’s important for me. As someone who does a lot of article marketing, I often use my own old articles as inspiration for new articles in niches. For example, let’s say I was going to create a new niche site about mortgage loans, and in the past I may have created a niche site about personal or auto financing loans.

I can’t really just reuse those old articles because they aren’t perfectly on topic, plus there’s the whole duplicate content concern… but a lot of the information in them will still be valid so I can use them as inspiration while writing the new articles.

And of course with PLR packs you’re purchasing articles that you will rewrite into your own words and publish. So again, having them available in an organized and searchable manner saves lots of time. You can find and display the article you want to work with, and then begin writing in seconds.

And you aren’t limited to WordPress. I know another article marketer who runs a copy of ArticleCMS on his desktop for the same purpose. I just like the WordPress interface a little more, but really you can use any PHP/MySQL based software you want.

Article Storage isn’t the only way to use this:

I also have another copy of WordPress running on my local server which has my theme files for the Leap blog. This allows me to make tweaks and adjustments to the theme and test them out before applying them to my live blog online.

As someone who likes to tinker with things, and often breaks what he tinkers with that’s a life-saver for me.

Another use of running a local server on your desktop is for site development. Right now I have the files for about a dozen new niche sites I want to launch but haven’t purchased domains or hosting for yet. However, the sites are sitting there ready to go, so when I get around to it I’ll be able to have them online and ready to earn revenue in minutes.

I really can’t list all the uses you could come up with for this, and the fact that it’s so easy to do makes it a double bonus in my mind.

Setting up WampServer on your PC

To run an apache server with PHP and MySQL database access on your PC you have to just download the free WampServer installer.

Once the download finishes (about 20MB) double-click the installer file.

You’ll have to accept the license and then click “Next” once or twice.

You’re done!

Seriously, it’s that easy to install.

To run the WampServer once it’s installed

Simply click the desktop icon that was created during the installation, or if you didn’t have a desktop icon created just go to the Windows Start menu and locate the WampServer folder. There you’ll have 1 option, “Start WampServer”.

After you start WampServer you’ll see a new icon in your system tray (lower right corner of Windows near clock).

If you hover over the icon you’ll see that the WampServer is running, but in an “offline” status:
WampServer Offline

Just left-click the icon and in the popup that appears select “Put Online”:
Put WampServer Online

You can now open your web browser and go to “http://localhost/” and you will see an information entry page that links to your projects (you won’t have any yet), and also to PHPMyAdmin. There’s some additional stuff there too, but that’s mostly for more advanced users so unless you have detailed knowledge on server administration I wouldn’t mess with any of it. There’s really no need to for most people.

Adding a project

To add a new project to your local server–each project can be thought of as adding a new web site online–you’ll go down to the WampServer icon in your system tray again and left-click it.

This time in the popup that appears, select the “www directory” option:
WampServer WWW Directory

This will open Windows Explorer to your projects directory.

Simply create a new folder for your project, place your files into this folder and they are now live on your local server. To visit the new project in live mode simply use your web browser and go to “http://localhost/ProjectFolderName”

Or you can just go to the main entry page at “http://localhost/” and all of your project folders will be listed there as clickable links.

You can have as many projects as you want (and your hard drive will accommodate).

Installing WordPress on your WampServer

This is literally no different than installing WordPress on any hosting account.

Simply download the latest version of WordPress and unzip it into your “www directory”. By default it will create a new project folder named wordpress, but if you plan to run more than 1 local blog for testing or whatever then I’d rename that folder to something else.

From your browser load the WampServer main entry page and click the PHPMyAdmin link. When PHPMyAdmin opens up find the field for creating a new database. Give it a one-word name. Okay, that’s done so get out of PHPMyAdmin and go back to your entry page.

In Windows Explorer (not Internet Explorer, but the file manager of Windows that comes up when you select the “www directory” option from the WampServer icon) navigate into the wordpress project folder that was created when you unzipped the WordPress download and rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.

Now, open that file (wp-config.php) in NotePad or WordPad and edit your database details.

Your database name is whatever name you gave it when you created it in PHPMyAdmin.

The database user should be “root”, and the password should be empty like so: “”.

A note on security here, you can modify it to give a password to your databases, and probably should, but since I run a good firewall and don’t actually store anything sensitive in my WampServer projects I don’t bother with that. For information on adding or editing passwords you should use the help and forums sections of the WampServer web site.

Save the wp-config.php file and then in your browser go to “http://localhost/ProjectFolderName/wp-admin/install.php” (replace “ProjectFolderName” with the actual name of your project folder) and follow the on-screen instructions. In just another minute your WordPress blog will be up and running on your PC for you.

Running a local server has allowed me to do a lot of things on my desktop that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to, and I can honestly say it’s improved my productivity by leaps and bounds.


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Niche Mini-Sites and WordPress?

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of Caroline Middlebrook’s. I’m sure I’ve mentioned her here on the blog before and also linked to postings on her own blog as well.

While going through my daily reading list of RSS feeds I came across another fantastic posting by Caroline titled “A Simple Strategy to Make Money Online with WordPress”

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time at all you should know I’m a big fan of small . I’ve been building these things for years now and I’ve even written a book on the topic.

The concept is really simple and the practice is a sound business (or money making) model as I can personally attest to. I’ve got over 70 mini-sites operating right now. Most earn me between $25 and $40 per month, some earn me over $200 per month; and while those numbers may not seem Earth shattering at first glance, the key factor is that none of them cost me anything in time and only pennies per month in money for the hosting since I use hosts that allow multiple sites on a single account.

That’s the gem with mini-sites, once you build them you can forget about them and spend your time on either building more or getting into other projects while those mini-sites keep earning you a steady stream of income–and there’s nothing special needed to do this, seriously I believe anybody willing to do the tiny amount of work involved in making these quality mini-sites can do it the model is so simple.

In Caroline’s words:

1. Pick a topic
2. Do some keyword research
3. Write or buy some articles on that topic targeted to those keywords
4. Use the articles as your site content
5. Monetize the site with ads of your choice
6. Allow the traffic to come in from search engines
7. Go to Step 1

Now, Caroline takes a slightly different approach than I do with the idea only in that she promotes using WordPress to build niche sites from. I don’t disagree with her by any means, in-fact it’s something I’m going to look at to see if there’s any benefit to doing so. But my concept has always been that a niche mini-site is going to be between 1 and 6 pages at most, so using strict XHTML validating templates from places like Open Web Design was perfect.

The search engines love the compliant coding of these templates (though a good WordPress theme should also be compliant) and I have a couple that seem to work perfectly in how they’re designed for advertising placement that facilitates high click-thru rates.

That’s my only concern with using WordPress for a mini-site really. The fact is mini-sites tend to get very low traffic levels and so making money from them depends upon being able to maximize that traffic for the highest click-thrus and sales. I’m just not sure that I’ve ever seen a WordPress theme that was designed perfectly for optimal ad placements, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any out there.

And if using WordPress has some SEO benefits that might increase traffic over the use of an ordinary template that could be a mute point anyway. So I definitely intend to do a little personal testing for myself to see what I feel works better for me.

The Real Key

Okay, the most important thing I want to comment about is step 7 in Caroline’s description quoted above.

Read it over and over again as many times as it takes to sink in deep.

Honestly, no matter what you’re doing online to make money–it doesn’t have to be mini-site related–this is the #1 rule of every successful business.

Find something profitable that you can do on a regular basis, then rinse and repeat.

Seriously, I don’t care what you’re doing to make money, if you find something that earns you a profit from your time and money investment and you do it over and over again you’ll be able to build a solid business from it.

Everything else you ever read or hear about making money online or tweaking this and that to increase the bottom line… it’s all just peripherals! Those are important, but they won’t make or break your efforts alone. It all really comes down to being able to do something that’s profitable over and over again.

Once you’ve got that core principal in place, then the peripherals become important.

Some Final Thoughts

Caroline touches on most of this in her posting, and I really urge you to check it out if the topic of niche mini-sites interests you, but here are the basic reasons I’ve always supported this model so strongly:

  1. The startup investment is almost nil. A basic hosting account (and some include the domain registration free), a domain name and a little bit of time to research and write about your site topic. I can’t image an easier or cheaper business model to start from for anyone with so little risk versus potential rewards attached.
  2. To be effective a niche mini-site must be of value to visitors. Call me prudish but there’s plenty of garbage on the web already. Quality mini-sites are of informational or resource value to visitors, so when you add in that they’re profitable to the owner it’s a win-win situation in my mind.
  3. There’s no Google-dance worries to fret over. I say Google-dance because the term is popular, but what I’m really talking about is you never have to worry over a specific site or topic falling from favor with people or the search engines–and that can happen to any site in an instant. If your business is built around a single site or topic that suddenly falls off the radar it can be back-breaking to your income. But if one of my mini-sites drops off I’m able to easily absorb the loss of revenue and replace it fast with another.
  4. There’s no earnings ceiling. As long as you’re able and willing to do the little bit of work behind creating a niche mini-site you’re able to continue growing your income. There is no maximum level to it as there’s always something to talk about, which means there’s always something to build another mini-site about.
  5. I get bored easily. It’s true, that’s why I don’t post to this blog more frequently. I simply get bored talking about the same topic every day. Mini-sites allow me to explore and work on new and different topics with each one though, so that’s a huge bonus for me.

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Another Addition to WordPress I’d Love to See as Standard

Wednesday, November 14th, 2007

After writing this post about what I see as a significant lacking feature in the default WP (WordPress) installation, I got to thinking about another component that I believe should be standard and included in the default install.

As with that last post, I’ll emphasize again that I love WP and think its fantastic. An 11 on the scale from 1 to 10, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some room for improvements still, and here’s a functional application that I believe should be a standard feature with WP out of the box: an auto device detection and text based mobile device page delivery system. There should be a default “mobile device” theme for this that’s used.

When someone visits from a PDA or other older (than 6 months) handheld device WP should recognize that and serve up pages in pure XHTML without any layout styling that slows the download and/or detracts from the visitor’s experience.

There’s several plugins that can do this, and I use one on this blog called WordPress Mobile Edition, but given the nature of blogging, bloggers and those who follow blogs–a very mobile crowd–this feature just seems like something that should be a standard component on the best blogging platform.

I visit tons of blogs every day, often from my PocketPC or even my Phone while on the move and I can’t tell you how many times I reach a blog and have to wait crazy lengths of time for pages to download because of bloated graphics and scripts that don’t work on the device anyway, and often the pages look like crap on the device because the formatting gets skewed.

I know this is a problem on the device end more than anything else in not handling the displays better, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be addressed by the blog (as a known issue) to ensure a better visitor experience regardless of what display device is being used.

It can be said that this is why plugins are such a big part of WP, and that’s even supported by the fact that plugins exist to address this very issue, but because I see it as a platform functional issue rather than a feature since it affects how the blog presents data for display to some users it just seems to me that it probably should be something built into the application core.

And if it worked using a default mobile device theme, bloggers could still customize it as they see fit for personalization, or to add default advertising if they wanted.

Again, this isn’t a rant against WP. I really love the software. But I believe this would (and should) be a giant step to further separate WP from the rest of the pack.

I’ve mentioned previously that I have over 80 blogs on my daily reading list in just the money making genre alone, and only 12 of them are mobile device friendly at this time…which means that there are 68 blogs I don’t visit as often as I would otherwise. And I’m not the only one like this I know, because I saw in this site’s stats after I added the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin that my return visitors jumped by over 8% almost overnight, which tells me that a lot of people were turned away because of formatting previously. To me, that’s a problem, and since its a problem with how data is presented to some visitors I’d like to someday see it addressed at the core rather than with plugins.


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Some Thoughts on WordPress Theme Design

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

I know several people who are building niche and mini-sites using the WordPress platform as an easy CMS (content management system), so even though the points I want to make here are more directed towards WP as a blogging application for average bloggers rather than a CMS for web developers, I hope they’ll be of interest to all regardless of how they’re using WP.

First, I think WP is fantastic. That has to be said because it really is a simple install for anyone to perform and even the least technical user can have a site or blog up and running in minutes with it out of the box.

Its also highly stable with active continuing development and has a loyal user following of talented (some more than others) coders who supply endless numbers of additions, plugins, widgets and themes to the WP community.

Over the years I’ve paid high dollars for software and webwares that didn’t have half of the features and support levels that WP comes with, so at “Free” WP is an 11 on the 1 to 10 scale.

However, as with anything that’s widely used there’s never going to be out-of-the-box solutions to meet every specific need or desire of every individual user. I understand that and don’t even see it as a limitation in any way. As I see it, the open nature of the application and user following allows for these issues to be addressed easily and often distributed freely for others to benefit from, making it a hidden strength rather than limitation.

Still, one aspect of WP that I think could be more readily addressed “out of the box” but isn’t is with theme creations. For example, the default install of WP comes with 2 themes. They’re both fine looking, however neither is really suited to major customization nor serves well as starting points for developing a custom theme off of.

It would be nice if there were several plain (no graphics and only styled for layout structure, not design) themes–skeleton themes if you will–included with the default install or readily available for download from the WP web site that would serve as launch points for users to build a graphic theme from.

Its not that designing a WP theme is really that complicated, it isn’t. Then again, I have a decade of experience in web design and PHP coding…not every user of WP does, and the truth is to develop a theme from scratch you really do need to hack into both the HTML/CSS and the PHP scripting.

There are far more people out there with graphic skills and the ability to make basic HTML/CSS modifications than there are people who can do that plus hack the PHP. Those are the folks who would benefit most from some kind of skeleton layout themes being available.

Experienced users would also benefit too, basically in saved time from having these starting/launching point themes to build from. For example, I’ve long wanted to create a custom theme for this blog. One that really fits the nature of the site as well as highlights my Irish Clan connections. Its not that I don’t like the current theme, I really do, but it’s not absolutely perfect and a little limiting to some things I’d like to do with the blog.

While I have the ability to build a theme from scratch, and even have the graphic files I intend to use for the theme eventually… what I don’t have is the time to get it done. I first started working on my custom theme in June, 5 months ago, and still don’t have the main page completed. Not because its hard, but because I never have enough time to work on it. If I had started with a skeleton theme layout that I could basically “plug” my graphics into and not have to start from blank pages and worry about all of the PHP scripting being included in all the right places as I went along I’d have had it completed months ago.

Here’s the basic “skeleton” layout I’m working on for my theme:

Desired Layout

It shouldn’t exactly be rocket science should it? It’s complex I know, in as far as the sidebar setup goes, but still not something that I feel should have taken me more than a few hours to accomplish. As it is I have close to 15 total hours invested and am still fighting with the basic coding for the 2 widgetized sidebar columns, which I’ve found to be a coding pain trying to use multiple widgetized sidebars.

Sure, if this were a commercial venture I’d have gotten it done already, or more likely paid someone else to do it for me. But its not really a commercial project, even though I do make a little money from my blog each month its still just my blog and I don’t have the free time available for the hassle that this custom theme creation has become, nor the desire to spend money paying someone else to work on it for me.

In my opinion, it would be an amazing and wonderful addition to WP if the developers were to visit the Dynamic Drive CSS Layouts pages and picked a few different layouts, 2 columns, 3 columns, fixed width, fluid width… and incorporated them into the default install as skeleton themes for users to build from.

I know this still wouldn’t address every user’s theme desires and my own desired layout in the image above wouldn’t be included I’m sure, but it would give users a lot more easy options to start from and I imagine wouldn’t take all that much effort from the developers since editing one’s own code is always easier than trying to edit someone else’s existing code.

Then again, maybe there’s a market out there for some “skeleton WP layouts” and some experienced theme designer is working on a package or web site for distribution right now? If so, I wish he or she would get in touch with me.

Until then, that’s how I think WP could further improve and expand itself as the top blogging platform available. Here’s to hoping a future release of WP will include more theme options that make customizing layouts a little easier on end users… and Happy Hump Day.


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