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WordPress for Android Now Available

Justin Wright — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 18:31:48 +0000

WordPress is now available for Android powered devices. That way you can upload new posts and manage your blog or website even while you are away from your computer. Best of all, it is free for download.

Here’s a video with a brief overview of all the features:

A Few Upcoming WordCamps

Justin Wright — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:46:46 +0000

As many of you know, we love WordCamps. They are a great place to learn new things about WordPress and get a glimpse of what’s happening on the development side. Plus they’re a great venue to meet local bloggers, developers, and WordPress fanatics.

Here’s some details about a few upcoming WordCamps:

WordCamp Boston

January 23
Boston, Massachusetts

WordCamp Indonesia

January 30
Jakarta, Indonesia

WordCamp Greece

January 30
Greece

WordCamp Miami

February 20
Miami, FL

WordCamp Fukuoka

February 27
Fukuoka, Japan

To see more details along with a list of all the upcoming WordCamps, check out the official WordCamp website.

New Features Of WordPress 2.9

Justin Wright — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 17:03:43 +0000

When WordPress version 2.9 was released, it added a few new features that some people didn’t notice. Here’s a quick video that goes through all the new features and demonstrates how to use them:

Our personal favorite is the new photo editing tool. It makes cropping, rotating, and editing images a lot easier now that you can do it directly in WordPress. Awesome!

WordPress 2.9.1 Has Been Released

Justin Wright — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:54:27 +0000

If you didn’t noticed, the guys over at WordPress released version 2.9.1 yesterday. It contains a few small fixes, as well as fixed the scheduling issue that a lot of people were having. We’re glad to see that this one of the problems they fixed, as we’ve heard from a few people that they were having issues scheduling their blog posts.

If you haven’t updated your WordPress website yet, we highly recommend doing it as soon as possible. Just go to the tools section and choose upgrade.

New Crash Course Affiliate Program

Justin Wright — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:50:37 +0000

If you haven’t noticed, we have relaunched our WordPress Crash Course and now offer two different packages. One of them is the online course while the other one includes a 3 disc DVD set. So far, we’ve had a lot of success with the course and hope to see it continue.

One of our customers emailed us asking if they could promote the course in exchange for a commission. Unfortunately, we did not have an affiliate program setup when we launched the course. However, we have since decided that it would be a great idea to add one.

Our New Affiliate Program

We’ve gone ahead and listed our online WordPress Crash Course in the Clickbank marketplace. Now you can promote our course on your website or blog. We’ll pay you a 40% commission every time you make a sale through your affiliate link.

To become an affiliate, you need to head over to Clickbank and sign up for a free account.

Once you create your account, all you need to do is send traffic to the following link:

http://YOURID.one1000.hop.clickbank.net

Make sure to replace “YOURID” in the link above with YOUR ClickBank Username!

Free Banners

We’ve also put together some banner ads that you can use for free on any of your websites. To access the banners and get more information, please check out our affiliates page.

We look forward to bringing you on as an affiliate!

Link Bait: Hook, Line and Sinker

Justin Wright — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:37:18 +0000

What’s it take to write good link bait? Look, I’ll level with you, seventeen monkeys in a corrugated steel shack writing on IBM ThinkPad’s with dead batteries could very likely come up with an article for a blog that would run up Digg quicker than you could say “Copy pasta.”

But can they do it consistently?

Rule One: The Hook

The appeal of a good link bait article isn’t what you’re saying, but how you’re saying it and what you’re saying it about. Yes, it has to be factual (usually), and it has to be well written (always), but most importantly, it has to be appealing and engaging. The most important thing is to hook your reader with the concept of your article first. A cursory glance at one of the more popular social link-sharing sites has an article on the front page lauding the “Greatest Fake Bad-Asses in Music.”

In the grand scheme of things the topic of this article and its information is unimportant, insignificant, and completely subjective. It is based on circumstantial evidence and observational humor. Here’s the thing, though: it’s not the New York Times, it’s the internet. The concept article is catchy: I like music, I like bad-asses, and I want to seem like a bad-ass. Would I rather spend five minutes scanning an article about how I may fake being a bad-ass or spend those five minutes collating the data in my .xls spreadsheet for this afternoon’s meeting? In other words, I’ve been hooked.

Rule Two: The Line

Unlike the bottom line, or the pickup line, this concept keeps with the ‘fishing’ analogy in the sense that if you don’t have the right line, you’ll lose the fish.
People browsing the web have little to no attention span. In fact, I’ll take a second to thank the three of you who have read this far, and in doing so, lose two of you.

The body of your link bait is your fishing line. Your article has to be engaging, it has to be well written, succinct and scanable. It has to be written with the reader in mind. You’ve hooked your reader with your concept of the ‘Nine Things You’d Hate to Find in Your Parent’s Room’ title. Good, that means you’ve gotten a page-view. Now get them to click that little social networking ‘Share this’ button by writing a good article and making it worthy of the five minutes and two seconds it takes them to read it.

The point of link bait is to draw traffic to your site with engaging articles, images, videos or audio. When it’s really engaging (note that I didn’t use the word “good”), it finds its way to the social news sites and from there, in front of exponentially more eyes each time a reader clicks ‘Digg this.’

Rule Three: The (you guessed it) Sinker

Here’s a cold, hard fact about the internet. It’s been monetized. We live in an age of misinformation. That article I mentioned before about the musicians pretending to be bad-asses? It’s for a site whose main demographic is white males, ages 18-24. The intent behind that article is to draw traffic to a site so a guy in an office with a slick silk tie can tell the new body-spray company executive how many page views their site gets so he can quantify (justify) the cost of his advertising space.

It’s about money. There’s your Sinker.

So the third rule is “Always Consider Your Reader.” Your article has to appeal (loosely) to the broader interest of the people who you want to visit the site it’s being posted on. You’re strengthening your ability to sell advertisements by focusing on your intended demographic. Bringing Granny to your site with an article about ‘How to Knit A Wig’ is fine and good if you’re writing for ‘Women’s World,’ but it may be drawing the wrong kind of traffic to a site dedicated to high end car audio.

Reeling It In

Promise, Perform, People: the three basic building blocks of solid link bait. Hook potential readers with the promise of a good article, perform to a standard where they’re proud to share it with others, and remember the specific people you are making promises to and performing for.

You know something? I’d read that article by the monkeys in the steel shack. I’d even post it on FaceSpace for my friends saying “check this out,” but it wouldn’t be long until I’d be on to something new.

Unless those monkeys can deliver consistently, then I might hire them myself.

Jake Walker is a freelance writer and has been working on the web on and off for the last 10 years. An avid blogger he has had many posts featured on major social networks and other news portal websites. He currently works as a search engine optimization consultant with the other smart people at SEOP.com

Photo Credit: L. Marie | CC 2.0

WordPress Version 2.8.5 Released

Justin Wright — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:38:31 +0000

If you haven’t done so yet, make sure to upgrade your WordPress installation(s) to version 2.8.5. The latest version was released yesterday and has a handful of security fixes. A few worth noting from the WordPress development blog include:

A fix for the Trackback Denial-of-Service attack that is currently being seen.
Removal of areas within the code where php code in variables was evaluated.
Switched the file upload functionality to be whitelisted for all users including Admins.
Retiring of the two importers of Tag data from old plugins.

As always, it’s important to upgrade as soon as possible to give yourself the best protection against attacks and hackers. So make it a goal today to get all of your blogs/websites upgraded to the newest version!

WordPress

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Need Help With WordPress?

Justin Wright — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:08:06 +0000

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).

We really look forward to hearing from you!

How To Add A Custom Field

Justin Wright — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:29:29 +0000

In this video, we’ll show you how to add a custom field to a blog post. This will come in useful if you plan on using a theme that uses features such as thumbnails.

No related posts.

6 Steps To Build A Succesful Blog

Justin Wright — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 18:16:17 +0000

(Photo Credit: Jason Gulledge)

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.

So here’s my super simple guide on how to build a successful blog. It started out as a shorter post over at Digital Point but I’ve since added to it:

1. Start A Real Blog

In other words, don’t build a blog that has Google Adsense built in to the navigation bar or tons of crazy looking ad blocks covering up the actual content of your blog. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a great article that I couldn’t finish because of the fact that an ad block was literally over the top of the content (most likely a design issue).

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of room for advertisements. I even recommend adding a few to start, that way your readers won’t freak out later on when you decide to put them everywhere. Just don’t make them the main focus, especially not in the beginning.

As far as platform goes, choose whatever works for you. I’m an avid user of WordPress but there’s plenty of options available.

2. Create Some Amazing Content

If you really want to see some great results, produce some amazing content. This is especially important for your first few posts since these will be the landing page for all of your new readers. If you can suck them in early, you’re already on the right track.

Putting out the content is like wiping the crap out of your eye in the morning. It’s just the beginning.”

- Gary Vaynerchuck

Have something your passionate about? Make it the topic of your blog. Regardless of what it is, make sure you’re actually willing to put in the time to do research and produce great content on a consistent basis. If you can’t think of more than a couple blog posts off the top of your head, you’re probably going to get the dreaded writers block sooner than later.

NOTHING can drive you more crazy than sitting at your computer with a new post started, only to sit there and watch your cursor flash. Trust me, I’ve done it a ton of times.

So my advice is to pick a few topics and then jot down as many post ideas or titles as you possibly can on a real sheet of paper (the tree kind). The more you can come up, the better off you will be.

And that my friends, is just the beginning…

3. Find Your Readers

When you first start your blog, it’s going to be a really quiet place to hang out. It might remind you of those lonely nights you spent in your parents basement back in high school. It’s okay, no one asked me to prom either.

Anyways, It took me months before I was able to get a few comments on my first blog. I couldn’t even convince my friends to leave a few just to keep my motivation up. So the key is to go out and FIND your readers. Don’t hang out on your own blog waiting for someone to come across it by accident.

Find blogs and start leaving comments. And by no means leave short non-relevant spam comments. Instead, go out and find blogs related to yours and leave mind-blowing comments. If you can manage to put together a super thoughtful, engaging, or crazy comment that not only blows the mind of the blogger but also his/her readers, you’ve done it right.

Why? Because they will be VERY curious to see who you are and where the heck you came from. They will click on your name looking for more information and end up on your blog, which is now full of amazing content.

Once you master the process of leaving awesome comments, set a goal on how many comments you want to leave each day and stick to it. If you can stick to your goal and consistently leave great comments, you’re readership will increase like you wouldn’t believe.

4. Write For Other Blogs

Remember when I told you to write some amazing content? I forgot to mention that some of it isn’t even going on your own blog. I know, it’s tough to envision but it needs to be done.

Believe it or not, one of the best ways to build your own blog is by writing for other blogs. Why? Because a lot of bloggers who accept guest posts are more than willing to let you put a short bio (with a link) in the article. That way you’re reaching out to a completely new audience that will more than likely want to read more about you. Plus it’s a great way to start building backlinks to your website.

So spend some time looking over blogs in your niche and see which ones are accepting guest posts. if you don’t see a write for us page, don’t be afraid to fill out contact forms or send direct emails. Most bloggers enjoy getting guest post requests, especially since it means less writing for them.

Just like commenting, you should make a goal to produce X amount of guest posts every week (or month). That way you can start to get your name out there and get yourself known in your niche.

5. Utilize SOCIAL MEDIA

One of the quickest ways to start sharing your content is by utilizing social media. However, the last thing you want to do is start submitting every one of your blog posts to 900 different social networks only to see mediocre results. Just like commenting, it takes some real work to actually get the results you are hoping for.

Instead of spamming your links, become an active member in a few networks and take the time to interact with people. Start building relationships and before you know it you’ll have people sharing your content for you. And don’t forget that it’s a two way game, so don’t be afraid to share other peoples content.

6. Wash, Rinse, and Repeat

Boring isn’t it? There are no secret tactics, methods, or programs that can do this stuff for you. From this point on, you just need to make it habit to repeat steps two through four. Keep producing content on a regular basis, as well as writing for other blogs. Leave tons of great comments on other blogs and stay active in a handful of social networks.

If you stick to these steps, you can build a highly successful blog without spending a dime. Best of all, you’ll be building a legitimate blog that will only grow as time moves on. You won’t have to worry about those black hat methods coming back to haunt you.

It may take some time, but you will look back in a year (or two) and be stoked at the progress you made. It’s important to remember that building the blog is the fun part. It’s no fun if you start out on top.

Have any other tips? Please share them below!