If you haven’t checked out our WordPress tutorials yet, you’ll notice that we’ve created a bunch of video tutorials to help you with WordPress. The topics we covered include topics like themes, monetization, and plugins. We’re currently adding as many videos as we can to our collection and hope to continue in this manner.

However, we are currently on the lookout for suggestions as to what we should cover in our videos. Are there any things that you struggle with when it comes to WordPress? Do you have a certain plugin that you can’t seem to figure out? Perhaps you’ve downloaded a theme but cannot get it to work?

Regardless of what the problem is, we want to hear from you. So please leave any suggestions or questions you have as a comment on this post. We will then try our best to create a high quality video that answers your question (or solves your problem).

It can be very overwhelming when you start looking for information about blogging, especially when you are just getting started. Worse yet, it usually leads to information overload.

In other words, you lay in bed at night and can’t stop thinking about blog post titles, comments to leave, or widgets you should add the second you wake up the following morning.

For this reason, I’m not surprised that the most common question I get is how to (easily) build a successful blog. Unfortunately, there isn’t a blogging easy button that does it automatically.

The good news is that you’re probably already on the right track to building a successful blog. It seems that everyone knows the basics, they just don’t know how to put everything together to create a game plan that can be executed over time. It’s no secret that launching a blog takes a lot of time, sweat, and patience.

(Photo Credit: Boltron)

When’s the last time you took a good, hard look at your blog? Was it a month ago? 6 months ago? Either way, it’s important to evaluate your blog on a regular basis.

Why?

If you don’t analyze your blog on a regular basis, it can easily become cluttered. It’s a common occurrence to constantly add new plugins, widgets, and other features as you discover them.

The problem is that you usually don’t remove other features when you add new ones. This leads to things piling up, which can cause blog clutter. This is bad, very bad. You’re readers want to read your content, not sort through your garage looking for things that might sell for 10 bucks on eBay.

Personal branding – the one thing everyone should be concerned about. Why? Because all it takes a quick Google search to pull up information about who you are, what you do, and why you matter.

So how can you start building your personal brand? A good place to begin is by creating a “landing page” for your personal brand. A page that lets people know who you are and links to your social media profiles, your blogs and websites, and any other information you deem important.

The best way to build your landing page is by utilizing the WordPress platform. That way you can spend less time on your website and more time building your personal brand . There’s already a few free personal branding WordPress themes available, which we’ve listed below…

From time to time, we’ll log in to someones blog to help them out with various things. One of the things we often notice first is that they are running a lot of plugins that are out of date.

How Do We Know This?

By looking at the little orange notification that shows up next to the plugins section in the navigation menu (see picture).

Whenever you see the orange notification, WordPress is letting you know (in a nice way) that one or more of your plugins needs to be updated. The main reason it does this is because older plugins can cause issues, whether it’s a security issue or an actual problem with the functionality of your blog.

Popular Plugins Update Often

Another thing you’ll find is that a lot of popular plugins will be updated often. This is a sign that the plugin is well maintained and constantly being updated, fixed, and improved. If you happen to find a plugin that hasn’t been touched in a long time, it may be better to look elsewhere.

However, there are a few plugins out there that don’t require much attention in terms of upgrades. These are usually simple plugins that do things such as insert your Google Analytics code into your theme.

In case you didn’t know, the month of October is International Breast Cancer Awareness Month. So everyone should help do their part to raise awareness, whether it’s through blogging, walking, or anything else you can think up. The more people that help, the more people will become aware of this deadly disease.

I’m also pleased to announce that the people over at WooThemes are running a new campaign this month entitled “We Love Boobs.” They will be donating 20% of total sales of any of their business themes and 100% of their total sales of two of their new themes to a local breast cancer charity.

It’s great to see people from the WordPress community helping raise awareness. It really shows how nice of community we have going on and it’s what I enjoy most about using WordPress.

So if you’ve been thinking about purchasing a premium WordPress theme, now is the time to do it! Head on over to WooThemes and check out their business themes.

After a few months of debating, we’ve finally decided to launch a WordPress Crash Course!

So what’s included? We’ve put together 16 high quality videos showing you how to use the WordPress dashboard. The course covers everything from the dashboard all the way up to managing your content.

The course is broken down in to 10 different sections. That way each video is short enough to watch in a few minutes. Plus we wanted each video to only cover a certain topic. That way you can easily skim through and find the one you want to watch at any time.

Here’s a quick look at the various sections…

Lets face it, problems happen. Especially when it comes to running a blog or website. From time to time, people will follow a bad link your website that leads to a page that doesn’t exist. This will result in a 404 error. Which isn’t the best thing in the world.

However, you can add a 404 theme to WordPress that will not only make your website or blog look more professional, but it will also help your readers. Depending on the theme you are using, you might already have a 404 page template that can easily be customized. If you don’t have one, you can easily create one using the instructions below.

Add A 404 Page Template

To add a 404 page template, all you need to do is create a file called 404.php and upload it to your themes directory. Make sure…