Make Your Content Publishing Auto-Pilot

How do you update your blog? Do you write every post, one at a time, and then post them immediately? Do you ever get a day off?

As a Blogger, you may want to start thinking like the producer of a TV Series. Plan out your season, lay out the story line you want to convey for the entire season. This will give you much better control of your blog. By planning your season of blog posts, you can produce posts in advance, schedule interviews with Market Leaders in your niche, produce videos, and many other things you cannot do on the spur of the moment.

You may be wondering what do I do with all of this content, now that I’ve created it ahead of time. You go ahead and load it into Wordpress, and schedule your posts to happen when you want. That’s right, you could take a week or two off and your blog would continue updating without you behind the keyboard. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

Of course, the first thing you need is your content, you’ll need to prepare a fair amount of content ahead of time. You’ll need to decide the schedule for your posts, and then setup Wordpress to post on the schedule.

Here’s the steps to setup your scheduled posts:

1. Logon to your Wordpress administration page.
2. On the “Posts” tab, click “Add New” to add a new post.
   
3. On the right side of the page (Publish Section), click “Edit” on “Publish” line.
   
4. Put your desired time on the provided field. Then, click “OK“. Once, you have prepare your post and other details and click “Publish“.
   
5. The post will be published to your page on the defined time.

There are a few niches where this does not work well. If you were going to setup a blog with several months worth of posts in the Digital Camera or Laptop market, by the time your post or review was published, it would be old news. No one would be searching for the product any more. For fast moving product reviews you may still need to post manually, or at least on a much faster schedule. I still like to use the schedule function, and write a weeks worth of posts at one time and have them post during the week. This gives me more time for promoting on other days, instead of always feeling pressured to finish a new post.

Is this practice commonly used by bloggers? You bet your bottom dollar!  Even the great teacher, John Reese, of Traffic Secrets 2.0 recommends this process. If you’re ready to take control of your blog, start working with scheduled posts, and take a day off!

Hey, What is This Font?

Have you ever been browsing around the internet and found a great looking website, and you simply love the font they are using? I used to just stare at the font, trying to figure out what it was, or browse through a directory of fonts, hoping I could find it.  Many times I would spend hours, browsing through font directories, until I thought I was going blind.  Most times I did not have much success on locating the font I wanted, and just went on my way, frustrated. I had already envisioned, in my mind, using that exact font on my next project.

Then finally, one day I found the solution to this dilemma. While I was searching on Google for a font, I came across a great website, www.myfonts.com, which has a great feature called “WhatTheFont”. Using their website, you can upload a graphic sample of the font you like, and their program will attempt to identify it. I uploaded the font I had been trying to identify, and I was amazed as seconds later I knew the name of the font.

If you have a font you are trying to identify, here are the steps to using their site for font identification:

1. Visit http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/
2. On the upload field, Click “Browse” and pick the image that contains a font that you want to find out and hit the “Upload Image” button.
   
3. On this tutorial, I use this image as an example.
   
4. On the next page, you will have to verify the letter which shown on the image. If the text field is blank, you will need to write down the correct letter on the text field.
   
5. Hit “Search” and you should be able to compare your font with the search result and find the closest match for your font.

WhatTheFont is very good at identifying many fonts, but it is not always accurate.  You will still need to compare the results with your font to make sure it identified it correctly.  Sometimes it may not identify the font at all, but there is a great alternative on their site.  You can upload the font to their forum, and have the typography guru’s who frequent their forum attempt to identify it.  You’ll get the best results if you use a large image of the font.  Though WhatTheFont works great, there will always be those rare times when no one can identify the font for you.

Using the proper fonts in your heading, and subheading can greatly enhance the appearance of your site.  When you can not name the font you are wanting to use, WhatTheFont can save the day!

Moving Big Files from a Hosting Server to Another

At some point in time, you will probably need to move your website to a new host, whether it is to save money, for new features, or to increase your storage and bandwidth. The process of moving your website to a new host can seem very intimidating.  You want to make sure you get all the files moved, without bringing down your existing site first. If you have a slow or non-reliable internet connection, then downloading your site to your local PC, and then uploading to the new host can be time consuming and may fail.

It would be much better if your could use the high speed connections of the two ISP’s, and transfer directly from one server to the other. This will be much faster, and definitely a more reliable way to transfer your site. The best way to accomplish this is using LFTP.

If you’d like to try this method of transfer, you’ll need to verify your hosting is Linux based (most are), and that you have SSH access to your account. Also, check with your ISP and make sure the LFTP command is available. Once you have verified those few items from your new hosting company, you are ready to move your site.

Here are the steps for mirroring your site with LFTP:

1. Access the destination server using your SSH access. You can use SSH client like PuTTY for it.
2. Connect to the source server using this command :
    lftp -u username, password, ftpsite
   Where :
   username is your source server FTP username
   password is your source server FTP password
   ftpsite is your destination hostname
3. Then, after the FTP connection is established, type this command to transfer the data from your source server to destination server :
   mirror /path/to/source_directory path/to/target_directory
4. The transfer process will begin after you type it.

A few things you need to watch out for, first, make sure you choose the correct directory structure for your new host, or you may end up with the files nested inside of another directory.  Secondly, if you are using any database driven sites, like Joomla, OSCommerce, Mambo, and Wordpress, the database will not transfer properly. All the files will mirror across perfectly, but the database will not be up and running. LFTP will not transfer a password protected folder either. You would need to remove the password, transfer the folder, and then assign a password once the folder is transferred.

Even though there are a few shortcomings to the LFTP mirror, it is one of the best ways to quickly move your entire website from one ISP to another. It is a fast and reliable way to move your website.

Add Digg-This Button to Your Blog Posts

One of the first places I want the word about my blog posts spread is on Digg.  Digg gives a good boost to my traffic, and to the rankings of my blog post on the search engines.  Digg is even more powerful if it is not only me “digg’ing it”, but if my readers submit a digg comment also.  Most people do not even think about submitting a Digg about our blog posts, unless we ask them.

Just putting a comment on our blog requesting they Digg the article is usually not very effective.  How often do you take the time to go open Digg, login, type up a comment, and submit it, just because someone asked? If we really want our readers to Digg the story, then we need to provide them with a fast, simple way to post their Digg, and right at the moment they finish reading our article.  The best way to increase your readers Digg’ing your article is to provide them with a simple link to Digg that fills out most of the information for them.

The Wordpress Digg This Plugin can fill our needs for simplifying the Digg submission process for our readers.   When they click the Digg It icon, it will take them directly to Digg’s site, letting them quickly Digg your post.  The Digg this plugin will even show the Digg count for our blog post.

To install the Digg plugin only requires these few steps:

1. Logon to your Wordpress administration page.
2. Once you have logged on, go the “Plugins” tab on the left panel and click “Add New“.
   
3. On the search field, put “WP Digg This” and hit the “Search Plugins” button. Once the search result appears, hit “Install” link on the “WP Digg This” plugin.
   
4. On the plugin description Window, click “Install Now“.
   
5. Once the installation has complete, don’t forget to click “Activate Plugin“.
   
6. To add the Digg button to each of your post, createedit a post. On the New/Edit Post page, scroll to the bottom page and you should see the “Custom Field” section. Put “digg” on the “Name” field and “1” to the “Value” (without quotation mark) and click “Add Custom Field” button. Then, you could proceed with editing and publishing your post. The digg button should be showing on your blog post if your plugin is correctly installed.
   

Like many plugins, if you want to change the location of the button, you will need to tweak your theme code.  In most cases the default location works great.

Digg is a very powerful method of promotion, and one you should not overlook.  Installing the Digg This plugin will increase your number of Diggs, which increases your traffic.  We all know, increased traffic results in more income, and I really Digg increased income.

Adding Retweet Button to Your Blog Posts

Twitter has become a big part of most bloggers promotion efforts, and is a key way to keep in contact with their followers. Twitter becomes even more powerful, for our blog promotion, and communications, when our readers retweet our blog posts, spreading the word about our blog wider and deeper through the market. The time when our readers are most excited about our post is the moment they have just finished reading it, and this is the exact moment we’d like them to tweet about our article. Most of our followers are not going to think about tweeting or take the time to open Twitter, login, type in a message about our post, and send it. If we want to have our readers help us by tweeting about our blog, we need to make it easy and immediate for them.

Once again, a Wordpress plugin can come to our rescue. If you use the Tweetmeme Button Plugin for Wordpress, you will add a Twitter ReTweet button for every post in your blog, including both new posts, and all of your past posts. The ReTweet button even has a cool counter, showing how many times it has been used to tweet about your blog post.

When your user click the Twitter Retweet button, it takes them to their Twitter login page, once they login, the plugin has automatically inserted the RT @yourblogname and the title of your blog post. All the reader needs to do is push send and the tweet is on its way. You can’t make it much easier for your followers.

If you’d like to start having your readers promote your blog, you can install the Tweetmeme Button plugin by following these steps:

1. Logon to your Wordpress administration page.
2. Click the tiny arrow on Plugin tabs and click “Add New”
   
3. Put “Tweetmeme” on the search field, and hit the “Search Plugins” button. Once the search result appear, click “Install” on “TweetMeme Button” plugin.
   
4. Click “Install Now” on the plugin description window.
   
5. Once the installation has complete, click “Activate Plugin“.
   
6. The new tab will appear on your Wordpress administration page. Click it to visit the plugin setting. You could modify how the button is shown on this page.
   
7. The TweetMeme button will appear on each of your blog post and ready to be used.
   

Moving the button location is not as easy as I’d like to see. If you want to move the button from the left hand side to the right hand side of your blog posts, you would need to modify the code in your theme. It works great on the left hand side for most themes, I usually leave it there.

Install the plugin today, and give your readers a quick and easy way to Tweet about your blog, it is a great way to increase your readership without additional work on your part.

How to Make Your Wordpress Blog Becomes iPhone Friendly

One big challenge we face today is the proliferation of smart phones like the iPhone or Blackberry, and other handheld mobile devices like an iPod Touch.  Many people searching and reading information today, read them on their mobile devices while they are on the road, sitting in an airport, or even eating lunch in a fast food joint.  While we are thrilled they are reading our pages on their smart phones, normally our Wordpress blogs look terrible, and load very slow.  Our Wordpress themes don’t translate well to the small LCD screens, making it difficult for people to read our blogs on their devices.

Another shortcoming of many mobile devices is their inability to display any flash or java animations or ads we might be using.

We need to solve these shortcomings if we want the readers to keep coming back to our blog.  Luckily there is a great Wordpress plugin which can solve most of these issues.  The plugin I like the best is the Wordpress iPhone plugin.  The plugin takes our existing content, and converts it into another set of blog pages, optimized for reading on an iPhone or other mobile device.  When the reader comes to your blog, the plugin will detect what type of device, and direct them to either the normal blog, or to our mobile device optimized pages, automatically.

To install the plugin is very straight forward.  Just follow these few steps, and you will have it running in just a few minutes:

1. Logon to your Wordpress administration page.
2. Once you are there, click the tiny arrow on the plugin section and click “Add New“.
   
3. On the search field, type “Wptouch iPhone Theme“. The search result will appear and click the “Install” link to begin the installation.
   
4. Click “Install Now” on the new plugin description window. After the plugin is installed, click “Activate Plugin” to enable it.
   
   
5. To setup this plugin options, visits the Settings > WPtouch tab.
   
6. After setting up the plugin (which depends on your needs), your iPhone plugin is ready to be used now.

The iPhone plugin creates pages with the look and feel of an iPhone app.  Sometimes this is a bit annoying to users of other devices, but most people are appreciative of having the blog posts configured to work on their mobile device.  If someone prefers reading your blog page in its normal appearance, they can easily switch to view the standard blog pages.

Installing the iPhone plugin for Wordpress will make it much easier for your visitors to read your blog on their mobile devices.  This will produce more repeat visitors, and gives you the opportunity to successfully extend your marketing to mobile users.

How to Monetize Your Blog with Adsense

Google’s Adsense is one of the easiest and surest ways to monetize your blog.  You are able to direct your targeted traffic to sites they would be interested in, and you get paid for the clicks. It is a surefire way to make money with your blog. You don’t need to go out and figure out what offers are focused on the readers of your post, Google does it for you.

The challenge of using Adsense is getting the code inserted in every post. This is especially tough if you have a blog that you have been posting to for a long time. If you’re like me, you sometimes forget that important step of inserting your money making code, and by the time I notice, my post has aged and the initial traffic jump for a new post is already past.

You could go into your Wordpress Theme, and modify the code so your Adsense code is always on your posts. I’m not a big fan of tinkering with my theme code when it is working great, and looks good.  The other option is to install an Adsense plugin for Wordpress. You then tell the plugin what your account code is, and the plugin takes care of inserting the Adsense code on every post, even all your historical posts. I love to see revenue start coming in from my old posts without needing to go back and work on them again.

Here’s the steps to install the Adsense Plugin for Wordpress that I use:

1. Open your Wordpress administrator page.
2. On the left side panel, Click the tiny arrow on the plugin section and click “Add New“.
   
3. On the search field, type “Adsense Manager“, hit the “Search Plugin“. On the search result that appears, click “Install” on “Adsense Manager“. The plugin description window will appear. Click “Install Now” to begin the installation.
   
4. Click “Activate Plugin” once the installation has finish.
   
5. Once you have activate the plugin, go to your Wordpress administration control panel and click “Adsense Manager” under “Settings” tab.
   
6. On the “Getting Started” page, click “Manage » Ad Units” link. Go to your adsense management account, Create a new ad unit, Copy the ad code generated to “Simply paste your Ad Code below and Import!” box and click “Import to New Ad Unit”.
   
7. On the next page, define your adsense appearance. Once you are done with it, hit the “Save Changes” button. And you are done.
   
8. This plugin is also supports most Ad networks including AdBrite, AdGridWork, Adpinion, AdRoll, Commission Junction, HTML Code, CrispAds, ShoppingAds, Yahoo! PN and WidgetBucks.

After you install the plugin, make sure you test on your theme. There are a few Wordpress themes where the plugin will place the Adsense Ads incorrectly. If this happens you have a couple choices, modify or replace your theme to work with the plugin, or of course, if you’re playing with the theme, you could modify it to insert the ads.  Using the Adsense plugin is the easiest method for me.

For most marketers the easiest, quickest way to start making money is to create blogs, use the Adsense Plugin for Wordpress, and start getting money from Google every month.  Take our simple steps above, and monetize your blog today.

Contact Form 7 : Easiest Way to Add Contact Us Form

Having contact with your readers is a very important part of any marketers day. Many of your readers want direct contact with you through email, and not in the public arena of comments. If you, like many new marketers, add your email address to your blog, the next thing you know, your email box is full every time you look and none of it is important.  Someone has harvested your email address from the blog and is spamming you. This makes it almost impossible to find the legitimate emails among all the junk email. There is nothing that loses a sale faster than not answering someone’s email.

If you don’t give your readers an easy way to email you, you will lose potential sales, and a possible follower. You can’t afford to lose a potential sale, that you have worked so hard to bring to your blog.

The easiest solution is to add a contact form to your blog, but you need to make sure you choose the right contact form and install it properly, to avoid possible contact form spam. The contact form I use is Contact Form 7 for Wordpress. It is easy to install, and you can even integrate it with a Captcha box to eliminate possible spambots. Adding Contact Form 7 will allow your readers to fill out a simple form, enter the Captcha, and click the button to send you their questions by email. It solves the issues of easy contact, and helps eliminate the potential spam flood to your inbox.

Here is how you install Contact Form 7 on your blog:

1. Logon to your Wordpress admnistration page.
2. On the left side control panel, click the tiny arrow on the Plugin section and click “Add New“.
   
3. Put “Contact Form 7” on the search field, click the “Search Plugins” button and click “Install“.
   
4. On the installation Window, click “Install Now“.
   
5. After the installation process has finish, click “Activate Plugin“.
   
6. Go back to the “Add new” plugin page. Type “Really Simple Captcha” on the search field. And repeat the installation process which mentioned on the step 3-5.
   
7. After the CAPTCHA plugin is installed, you can start to create your contact form by clicking the Plugins > Installed > (Contact Form 7) Settings.
   
8. Click “Add New” to create a new form. And click “Untitled” to change the contact form title.
   
9. By default, you already have “Name“,”Email“,”Subject“,”Message” fields provided on the form coloumn. To add the CAPTCHA field, click “Generate Tag” on the right side of the form coloumn and pick “CAPTCHA“.
   
10. Choose your desired image size, background color and foreground color. After you complete the setting, copy and paste both codes which shown on the bottom to the left form coloumn on HTML format.
    
    
11. Scroll down to the Mail section on the bottom and change “To” Address to your email address.
    
12. After you’ve done with the setting, go back to the top page and click “Save“. Copy the code which shown under the title to your blog posts, pages, or widgets.
    
    

How to Show Related Posts in Wordpress

Many of the new readers to your blog came looking for one piece of information where your blog is listed on the search engines.  Once you have them to your blog, you want to keep them reading, and looking through your posts. But since they came with the intent of reading only one thing, how do you keep them interested?

If you have other related posts, wouldn’t it be great if they could just click a link in the post they are reading to find more information to satisfy their curiosity? As we know, that is not the way our Wordpress blogs work, we would need to search on Google again, or just browse through your posts looking for more information. Once they are back at Google searching again, the chance of us getting them back to our blog immediately is not very high.

You can quickly change Wordpress to add this feature for your readers, keeping readers on your site for a longer time, giving you more opportunity to market to your readers.  The best way to add this feature is to install the Related Posts Plugin for Wordpress.  This plugin adds a box at the end of each of your posts, showing the other related posts on your blog. The plugin determines what articles are related by examining your titles, tags, body, and categories. You can choose which one of these critera are used, or you can use all of them.

The best way to learn more, is to see the plugin in action. Here’s are the steps to install it on your blog:

1. Login to your Wordpress administration page.
2. On the left panel, click the tiny arrow on Plugins section then click ‘Add New‘.
   
3. On the search field, type “Yet Another Related Posts” and hit the “Search Plugin” button. Once you see the search result, click “Install” on the “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin“.
   
4. The installation Window will appear. Click the “Install Now” Button to begin the installation.
   
5. Once it’s finish, don’t forget to click “Activate Plugin” to enable the plugin.
   
6. Browse your FTP file, copy the sample templates file on “wp-content/plugins/yet-another-related-posts-plugin/yarpp-templates/” into your “/wp-content/themes/default” directory.
7. Installation finish. You could go to “Settings > Related Posts (YARPP)” to modify the plugin setting based on your needs and your plugin is ready to be used. Check out each of your blog post to see the result.
   

The related posts plugin works great for extending Wordpress, and helping your users find more posts, but it is not as powerful and efficient as Google’s search algorithm.  You will need to take a little extra time, making sure the tags for related articles are matched so the posts show up in the related articles list.

Using the related posts plugin is going to keep your readers on your site longer, building more trust, and in the process more sales. Spending the few minutes to install the plugin, and to keep your tags in order, is a small investment for increasing your sales and readership.

Allowing Your Reader to Subscribe for Comments

How often do you have readers on your blog leave comments, and you reply asking them a question, and they never come back? You know interacting with your readers is one of the best ways to keep them coming back, and to turn them into buying customers. But how do you get a commenter to come back and read your answers? How will they know you have answered?

One of the best ways to get great interaction with your readers is to offer to email them the answers to their comments on your blog. Of course you don’t want to spend your time only sending an email to one person, if many people are interested in yours, or other readers replies. You can accomplish this task easily, and without much work on your part, by adding the Subscribe to Comments plugin on your blog.

The Subscribe to Comments plugin allows your readers to subscribe to the comment section of your blog. This way they get your answers to their questions directly to their email inbox. Which will help you draw them back into your blog.

The Subscribe to Comments can be installed by following these steps :

1. Login to your Wordpress blog to access your Dashboard.
2. On left side, click tiny arrow on Plugins section then click ‘Add New’.

   

3. Type ‘Subscribe to Comments’ on search box, hit ‘Search Plugins’ button. Click ‘Install’.

   

4. Click ‘Install Now’ when description window appears.

   

5. Wordpress will do the installation for you, don’t forget to click ‘Activate Plugin’

   

6. Just like installing thread comments plugin, you don’t have to do anything else after this plugin is activated, unless you want to customize it. To customize, click ‘Subscribe to Comments’ on Setting section (bottom-left of your screen).

Subscribe to Comments definitely will help build up your conversations with your readers, but you should know, sometimes the emails go into your readers Junk or Spam folders. This depends on their settings, and possibly the settings of their ISP. You may want to recommend on your blog that they add the email address to their safe senders list, or into their contacts list. Most times this is not an issue, but if a reader complains, you’ll know your answer.

Your subscribers stay in complete control of their subscription, and can change their settings by returning to your blog.

You will enjoy the benefits and fun of continuing conversations with your blog readers.  Building a two way relationship increases your fun, increases their trust, and by doing so, increases your bottom line profits.