2012 is here. Like Kendrick says, “I was a black sheep, but now I’m just a goat”. This year, I won’t be following anyone, or trying to be coolcat like others I admired, this year I’ll be a goat. the greatest of all times. Wishing all of you the same, and lots of luck, health, and self-growth. Happy new year and welcome to the future.
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By now you all know that Bloginity is growing and expanding as fast as possible. I am a true believer of the web’s development, and there is no time to rest, in order to keep up with the internet you must always push for the maximum innovation.
Here are the latest updates in Bloginity.com.
We have upped our Beauty site, http://www.blogintiy.com/fashion/beauty
Bloginity Beauty
It now offers sidebar:
- “Meet the Editors”
- They now include Follow Buttons
- New archives page design, all based on HTML/CSS
We have upped our Photography section too. Similar changes, this one features an Index widget (A-Z) with a weekly featured photographer. To the right is an A-Z (that we buzz about) magazine index.
Bloginity, Photography Section
Our fashion section has been divided to many categories.
Each one of the following is it’s own landing page, pulling Twitter hash keys and displaying the widgets all with the shows hash keys (e.g. #MFW, #PFW, #LFW, #NYFW).
By City
- New York Fashion Week
- London Fashion Week
- Milan Fashion Week
- Paris Fashion Week
By Season
- Pre Fall 2012 (ranking front page on Bing.com for that keyword too)
- Spring / Summer 2012
- Spring / Summer 2012
- Fall / Winter 2011
Two widgets are found there:
All models (that we write about from A-Z)
All designers, that we write about from A-Z).
It looks like this:
Bloginity - Fashion
Bloginity, New York Fashion Week Page
We have added a new tool in the site, that is basically arrows, positioned on each corner of the (larger) screens, you can easily navigate between articles within the category you are browsing.
Bloginity, Inner Page
What the future holds.. You’ll see :-)
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Found these historic screenshots of Bloginity from 2009 or so. Design by Benjamin Tse & I.
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FILE - In this 1987 file film publicity image originally released by 20th Century Fox, Charlie Sheen, left, and Michael Douglas are shown in a scene from "Wall Street." (AP Photo/20th Century Fox, File) NO SALES
These past few weeks I’ve been heavily consumed by watching motivational movies for entrepreneurs. I’m interested in consuming information, data, new thoughts, thinking outside of the box and have done some research for “must see movies for entrepreneurs.” One of them, was Wall Street.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from that movie.
“If your enemy is superior, evade him. If angry, irritate him. If equally matched, fight, and if not split and reevaluate.”
“Life all comes down to a few moments. This is one of them.”
“The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”
“What’s worth doing is worth doing for money.”
“The most valuable commodity I know of is information.”
“I look at a hundred deals a day. I pick one.”
“Money’s only something you need in case you don’t die tomorrow…”
“If you’re not inside, you’re outside”
“Jesus, if this guy owned a funeral parlor nobody would die!”
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I’ve been guiding several web owners this past few years. With continuos support and help I’m asking nothing back in return besides me learning on how to work with people better, you see – guiding them, helps me guide myself and bring new innovative ideas to the table.
I find myself in late-night Skype conversations that can last for hours sometimes, full of motivations, ideas, and brainstorming and when we are usually done with the conversation there’s a new goal – the question is, will they stick to it?
Here comes the part where you need to take action. It’s all about taking action in this industry. If you’re not taking action your idea sucks (referring to Neil Patel’s #37 on the list)
In Bloginity’s 2010 Business Plan, the first page of the presentation reads a quote, “For tomorrow belongs for the people who prepare for it today.” most of you out there come up with fantastic ideas that end up nowhere. If the idea is so great – deliver it, overnight. Nothing should stop you. My team and I came up with a concept and overnight we brought results to the table, so what if we stayed up for nearly 18 hours and got around 4 hours of sleep for a whole week. We delivered results and that’s what it’s all about, taking actions. You must memorize that, it’s not about what you know, it’s what you do with what you know.
Most of you all don’t realize that one thing – two years ago, Bloginity didn’t exist. Today, it’s a brand.
Taking Action Quotes
“You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.” – Les Brown
“He who has begun is half done.” – Horace
“Well done is better than well said.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Many great ideas go unexecuted, and many great executioners are without ideas. One without the other is worthless.” – Tim Biixseth
“The world is more malleable than you think and it’s waiting for you to hammer it into shape.” – Bono
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“You’ve got to love what you do to really make things happen.” – Philip Green
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About a week ago I had the pleasure of meeting with Avi Domoshevitski of Yatir VC and he told me something that affected my life very much. He has been working with an ex-IBM guy, and his quote was something along the lines of “If he learned something at IBM, it’s not to make a prototype but a finished product.” and that quote needs to affect all of you. Stop making betas, focus and make something useful.
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I think I solved it. It’s all theoretically but it actually works, and works quite good so I encourage you guys to try it as well and let me know if it worked or didn’t.
It’s something all high quality entities on the web should try at least once. Basically, a string of code that pulls thumbnails at the bottom of my site has been added about 10 months ago. I’ve been playing with, changing it’s code for about 6 months now whether it’s featuring titles, or removing them, presenting title on a “a:hover” command and whatnot and I believe I just found the perfect way to present it.
It’s called “The Inspiration Box” and if you’re a follower of Bloginity then you’re well aware of that section on the site. It’s presented with every article on the site and pulls random categories according to the browsing section.
Everything nowadays is about relevancy, that’s why when you visit our fashion blog you’ll notice that the header changes as well. It will now present related content to fashion. For instance, Beauty, Collections, Runways, Galleries all relevant to the fashion side of the biz. If you visit our Arts & Culture section you’ll now notice that it’s presenting Photography, Exhibitions, Visual Arts, Design, and so on. Introducing this feature, or should I say, re-coding a new header for each section is a simple task. You have to build you hierarchy properly and find what’s relevant and what’s not while the homepage is pretty much featuring the focus itself.
The code looks something like this:
$attachments = get_children(array(‘post_parent’ => get_the_ID(), ‘post_type’ => ‘attachment’, ‘post_mime_type’ => ‘image’, ‘orderby’ => ‘rand’));
While most of you can't understand PHP, you'll notice a simple line that reads "rand", a short for "random" that code displays random images that are attached to the post. This way, with every new pageview the user will see a new selection of images on the bottom of the post, engaging them to click if they didn't find the last image relevant to them. Genius? Sure, it's how we're pulling a 11 page/visit for each user.
Pull #1 -
Pull #2 -
This will work only if your content is timeless. I have spoken about timeless content many times in my blog, and encourage most of you to do so as well. It's referred to as "Green content" content that will never go out of style, and is always readable. Usually works great for photography, arts and culture, type of sites.
Anyway, this is just a thought because I truly believe that sharing is caring and want each and every one of you to succeed and ride the wave along with us.
Good luck!
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I was already planning schemes when I was a teenager – how I was going to take over any arena where I participated. For instance whether it was a video game I was playing I was always pushing to be #1 in it.. And I did, in the old days of Diablo II (Classic for those who wonder) I reached a level 96 in Hardcore mode (meaning that if you die, you start over) and was #4 in Europe for 6 months, the funny part was that #5 would have needed about 3 months in catching up to do prior to winning and I was only able to play over the weekends since I didn’t have a computer where I studied (North Israel). The point is that everything you do you nowadays has to be done to the max. Utilizing everything that is involved within it. That’s every tool that’s given to you, even people you meet that are involved in it.
The way I reached level 96, was because I made friends who were also serious players and we created a team that whenever I go to sleep, they’re playing the character and when we’re playing we had a team of over 100 members, creating games for the character to join making sure I’m only killing the biggest mob in the game to gain the highest amount of experience, meaning, I spend an average of 30 seconds in each game just giving the last hit with my sword and moving to the next game to do what we call “Rinse & Repeat”. The goal was for the entire team to participate in a lifetime event of becoming #1 in Europe, which ones again, we did and that took us 9 months in total.
How to utilize everything in your life
Let’s take Twitter for example. How many tools are built for the usage of Twitter? Way too many. Socialite, TweetAdder, Twitter Dock etc. But which ones are good? Since there are plenty, master each of them one by one and focus your efforts. That means, pick up a tool and make sure to go into each of it’s preferences to ensure that you have seen everything that tool can do for you.
A recent tool that was introduced to the market it Crowd Booster (http://crowdbooster.com/) it enables you to see statistics of how many impressions your tweet delivered. Although I’m quite skeptical about the algorithm that’s used (I believe it’s measuring the amount of followers via who RT it and totals the impressions now although that’s quite weak I’m certain that they’ll update their algorithms within the next few months) What’s beautiful is that Crowd Booster is also utilizing Klout and lets you know which influential individual has been engaging with your twitter account. This enables you the opportunity of connecting with those who are influential, that are following you.
The point I’m trying to bring above is that Crowd Booster is utilizing Klout in order to make their platform better. We need more things like that in our lives.
You see, in today’s world you cannot become a sole leader anymore. For example Apple has utilized AT&T to deliver the first iPhone but if it was back in the 80′s perhaps Steve would have said let’s launch a carrier and rival against Verizon, AT&T and so on.
We must all work together as a team in order to make our world a beter place. Don’t lead, let the leaders lead, join them, utilize them, and collaborate with whatever tools they are giving you, enhance your platform and with their tools make your platform unique. If you’re working on a start-up and have a rival, merge and become a sole, together. If not merge, work together, do business, don’t just look what they’re doing and think how you can do it better. If it already exists bring them the idea of making that tool better so you can utilize best.
Here’s a minor example, recently we launched landing pages for several fashion week events (Milan, Paris, New York, London etc). each of these pages are pulling custom RSS feeds of “competitors” (once again, there are no competitors) Bloginity’s only goal is to deliver information to the user, therefore we are also utilizing a Twitter widget that pulls the latest hashkey.
Let’s say you landed on New York Fashion Week page, you’ll now see a #NYFW (“New York Fashion Week” hashkey on Twitter) stream on the right hand side of the page. I couldn’t care less what the buzz is around Twitter – whether it’s users submitting blogs that are irrelevant, low quality, that’s the buzz and we need to respect it. You cannot filter the web anymore.
Utilize every person in your life. What are they good for, are they good for anything at all? You only live once in this life so “using” people is not a bad thing, it’s the only thing you can do to lift up, together, as a platform.
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My good friend Matt Plunkett launched his photography website earlier this week. Plunkett, a young photographer from Los Angeles has been doing an incredible job producing high quality photographs for his clients. Check out some his photos below and make sure to stop by his portfolio site to see more.
MATT PLUNKETT PORTFOLIO – www.mattplunkett.com
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If you’ve got a massive site like Bloginity, that features over 37 categories in total then you know you want to seperate these categories and make sure they are all laid out in a good way.
That’s why I created completely different archive pages for:
LIVE EXAMPLE OF CATEGORY/TAG TEMPLATES
It’s so easy to achieve, head over to WordPress Codex and read up on the category/tag template and if you’re running into trouble then you’re obviously not doing it right. But if you are, and you were able to create a template for a tag, category then here’s the code on how to exclude certain categories and or tags from that category itself.
How to exclude a category from an archive template
Example: You have a category that’s name is “Food” and it’s ID is 3298 (use “Reveal IDs” plugin for WordPress to find the category ID).
Simply minus it, from where the cat= begins.
Throw this code in the template code and it should do the job just right.
query_posts($query_string . '&cat=-3298');
NOTE: You have to wrap it in a proper ?php open/close.
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By default the code will organize and display your posts in descending chronological order: newest first, oldest last. My good friend Alexander Patino is launching a fashion section on his site and want to organize his posts alphabetically (designer name) the code is fairly simple to achieve.
Find your category archive, e.g. archive.php or category-”name”.php and search for where the loop begins, e.g.
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
add the following code above it
$posts = query_posts($query_string .
'&orderby=title&order=asc&posts_per_page=-1');
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That’s all.
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Google, 1998
If you follow me on Twitter you would know that I rarely sleep. I truly stand by the quote that says “Sleep is cute when it’s trying to compete with the internet”. I code HTML, and optimize SEO, CSS and many more things on daily basis. If you follow my website, you will notice that there’s a slight change in either typography, color, shapes, borders, every day according to my mood, or the way the site is currently structured. Why do I change so much? Bloginity.com publishes a large amount of articles per day, with high quality images along with them. Those images are in different colors, shapes, seasons change and just like in the fashion world, the web has seasons too. You have to work with the images around your site to ensure that it’s all laid out properly and that’s the hardest job of all, especially if you’ve got a homepage with over 50 thumbnail images.
Gary Vaynerchuk explained it best in his 2008 keynote presentation, we are in a gold rush and if you’re not going to be doing it someone else will, and you will miss your chances. That quote is genius and here is why: it reflects to just about every single thing you do nowadays.
The world is transforming, every single day. The web is reshaping our culture, industries, improving our businesses, and connecting us with new people. You can’t expect to create an amazing website, whether it’s e-commerce, a resource site, a news site, or a platform and not innovate, innovation is the key for success.
This brings me to SEO – if you’re using a tactic you’ve used 6 months ago, that tactic might be irrelevant to today’s date and that said you’ll need to come up with new theories, new tactics, you will have to look around and do research. Let’s say you’re running a website similar to Bloginity.com, while you’re browsing other sites whether they’re your competitors or not at all. Look around, find out what they’re doing, how they’re transforming and what new tools they’re introducing to the market, how can you utilize their tools and how you can improve their tools on your own.
Here’s a thought that came to us, Vogue launched Vogue Archives the other night, for $1600/year. But who is going to pay it? We could buy that subscription, and pull out archives from the 50s, and do a daily roundup on what happened in the industry 50 years ago. You can monetize it by selling Vogue Archive subscriptions and also by bringing traffic and high retention to your site. All of this combined goes into SEO. You are producing quality material,
“if you pump up good shit, people will follow.” – also Vaynerchuk.
Languages – whether you can write HTML, CSS or PHP that’s great but the most important language you can speak is having your brain work and come up with ideas. To code a sidebar widget, can take me 30 minutes or less, something coders charge web owners about $200 a piece. So if you can learn these languages you’re not only going to be saving you some money but you’ll be able to brainstorm with the code on your own.
Brainstorming is the key for success. Leave me in a room with four creative people, let’s just talk for an hour and come up with strategies together. Put together a blueprint, and start going down that list.
Share that information with people, even your competitors. Heck, there’s no more competition, the competition should become your partner, just join them, collaborate with them, and together you can take over the world.
I’m done.
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Being a “victim” of the fashion industry had given me the “pleasure” of testing out several networks that consist of different revenue models (The obvious ones: CPM, CPA, CPL, CPC) and I’m glad I’ve went through each and every one.
It’s common sense for those who start a new blog to join the first network that approaches them and if you’re setting your site up for the first time most likely you’ve been approached by Google AdSense’ network while grabbing the script code for your Google Analytics.
And always remember – revenue is not profit.
Here’s why: You will never make a solid revenue using Google AdSense. Their ads are poorly selected and have hundreds of thousand of advertisers. They pay by CPC only, which means only if your visitor clicks on the banner you will generate. I’ve tested this revenue model on a website with 325,000 impressions per month and generated about $6 – $11 a day. That’s a slap in the face and I refuse to expand why you should never bother using Google AdSense or any CPC model.
If you ever do get approached for a CPC model on a banner (not text link) I suggest asking $3.5 minimum for the CPC that is of course considering the quality of your website. I’ve had the chance of meeting some kid who was an intern at PR.com and had access to their revenues, over a short conversation about my obvious opinions about Google AdSense he said they are generating over $20,000/m in revenues which I believe, however they branded their website to look like pure shit.
Here’s an example of what PR.com did with their website to maximize revenues from Google AdSense. If your website resembles this look, I suggest you go to hell.
A screenshot of PR.com's Google Sponsored Links section.
Breakdown of PR.com
What they achieved:
Smoke & Mirrors
Or of course, you can always learn from the best.. Dwight Schrute..
Because Dwight's website is full of "The Office" keywords, AdSense will advertise relevant links that actually work for Rainn Wilson.
I think I’ve clarified the Google AdSense part. Right? Let’s move on. Here’s why BuySellAds should either close their network, or have a bunch of websites protest against their existence.
Ok next.
Remember Rule #1? Yeah, don’t be a whore. You need to respect yourself.
First and foremost, BuySellAds are … … . And their entire algorithm of selling to advertisers is foolish and is a lie. I personally had Bloginity.com listed there a few months back and they gave me some sketchy code they wanted me to include in the site that slowed down my site by 1.9 seconds via JavaScript load and refused to let me host the site on my CDN Network with NetDNA. After many long emails I’ve calmed down and let them do their thing but what annoyed me the most is that BuySellAd required us to add a stupid looking banner 300×250, or 728×90 that literally reads “ADVERTISE HERE.”
In one word: No.
In a few words: No freaking way.
I am not giving away a 300×250 zone in my site for a grey background ad that reads that statement especially if it’s going to be sitting there for 750,000 impressions just to see if one of my readers will actually bother buying it. Which brings me to my next issue with BuySellAds’ marketplace. The end of the story goes that Bloginity was advertised with a premium page for approximately 2 month period, and finally, a sale came, which I immediately declined due to insufficient design of the banners.
I don’t want my readers to buy ads on my site!! They are not the good advertisers!! I want premium advertisers!!
Their marketplace is full of trolls who literally think about every dollar they spend. I mean, seriously look at the screenshot below and see what Nexus Radio advertises (not directly, but what BSA advertises for them). 19,401,345 est impressions for $200.
That’s less then 0.01C CPM for full 30 days.
You are insane if you don’t buy their entire stock for that kind of impressions.
You won’t get that traffic. Nexus, most likely, has a network of their own which gives BSA the opportunity of being included in that loop, which finally, gives them about 2,000,000 impressions per month for that ad unit, which they give away for $200. Whores. But with all seriousness, I checked out their sold stock on BuySellAds and they only have 1 banner sold out of four. I laughed.
For summarization, BuySellAds’ marketplace is full of online-store owners who have very little budget to spend (most likely around $400/month) and buy ads from several sites for around $25/m. That’s no way to go. You’ll earn more money from joining Google AdSense which we all know what you will need to sacrifice.. The worse part about this whole deal is that BuySellAds doesn’t do anything about upraising their premium advertisers and letting everyone sell their stock for so cheap.
An overview of BuySellAds.com's Marketplace.
Ok, enough of the Thou Shall Nots and let’s talk about what you should do.
Focus on getting yourself a media kit. Once you got that, consider hiring a sales force on commission plus salary. If you don’t have that budget to spend, consider joining a serious CPM network that will benefit you. Once again, do not join a network like ValueClick Media I am talking a serious network that will actually take care of you and actually has a nice list of advertisers.
I highly recommend the following networks. And if you’re declined, request for a feedback and work hard to work with them.
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Team Orange is planning a fun brunch at LAVO in New York City this weekend. Arranged by our good friend Joe Nemcheck who took the time to put this amazing email together which enlists the most important fact of all:
Training begins at 2PM.
And boy am I ready.
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A few months ago I had a conversation with someone who is very close to me and I told her that I’ve been dreaming about this moment for the past two years, that dream was being where I am today. The progress, in general; and here I am today but nothing has really changed.
Perhaps in my lifestyle, but nothing else. I’m not sure if I’ve personally changed either; I’m still chasing that dream which is much bigger now and I ask whether that original dream I once had has become a balloon that will eventually explode or whether one day I will reach that final goal – but I also wonder if my dream will continue to grow and whether my entire life I will be chasing something that I will never have.
All I know is that I’ve created a platform that is built out of my personal belief in visions of others. So what does that make me? “Am I just a pixel pusher”? These are the people who deserve the love, and I give them all of it and encourage them every day to continue being themselves. They are Bloginity: Alice Byrne, Julia S. Dalton Brush, Katherine Gould, Nancy Cristina, Iain Alexander, Emmett Lindner, Marius Troy and the rest of my team.
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them. Leaders aren’t born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that’s the price we’ll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal. A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at so I have to remind myself continuously that what I am doing is good for me and that this roller coaster is in fact that “silly thing” we call life.
Whatever happens, here are my promises: I promise to never change and to continue believing in individuals who influence other’s lives and guide the ones that share that passion. I promise to always give you the real me.
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It’s been months since I’ve sat down in front of the computer and wrote a proper SEO article. Not even a few months maybe 6-7 months, at the least. But yesterday things have changed. I had a good friend who’s got an upcoming Men’s Lifestyle website join me for the day for a full introduction, SEO presentations and that has woken up a lot of muscles that have been sleeping deep inside my brain.
There are many ways of doing SEO. Link building to your website is always the easy path to go, especially relevant anchor texts – but you see sometime around June 2011 I decided to stop focusing my entire effort on SEO as I brought over 5,000,000 unique users to the site just from Google.com. The value of these users was poor and I am not sure whether it was because the site was poorly designed but here I am months later sitting on an actual brand and the user base is a lot of percentages less but suddenly I have what I was missing – retention, loyalty, and steady growth.
I am really not shy to share the analytic with you. Sharing is caring and if we all shared data then we’ll be able to understand and estimate, not just guess.
The traffic I brought from social media such as StumbleUpon, Digg was not good. 15 seconds to 1 minute average time on site, browsing an average 1.7. The traffic I brought from Google News, MSN, Bing and Yahoo was also, not the best, averaging at 2:30m average time on site with browsing 2.5 – 3.3 page per session. 4 page/visit if I was very lucky.
And here I am today, it’s October 16th, 2011 I am no longer focusing on optimizing every single title, or bolding keyword, nor building links (whatsoever) but basing my entire growth on natural growth, focusing on delivering the best navigation and getting a high retention. The hierarchy of the SEO is a given. I do make sure that I’m using the right H1′s, H2′s, that the code is clean and neat. I must make sure that my homepage is positioned right but most of all I have the user in mind. But yea, here it goes:
Today I am proud to announce that our user spends an average of 31 minutes on site with a high 7.7 page per session. Search engine traffic is still at high 43% but not as close as it was before.
So what have I done to change?
I stopped writing about trending topics, to begin with. I stopped writing about celebrity news and focused on material that’s “forever” and “timeless”. For example, photography blog is forever, Arts & Culture is forever, interviews, profiles and Q&A’s are forever. Am I ranking high in search engines? Honestly I don’t know and don’t care enough to bother. What I do care about is that I am delivering the best content and that my users enjoy to browse the site. And I am certain that they do because we are getting a massive feedback and the analytic speak for themselves.
So if you are breaking your head on SEO – you must understand the basic of all basics.
What is Google’s primary goal: Provide users the information they were looking for. And instantly.
If your site is optimized, not caring about what the user is actually reading – you will not get anywhere. You are most likely still using AdSense or another poor CPM network (will not mention names again but let’s just say VCN for those who know what I’m talking about) on 20cents CPM or even less (sorry) while we’re lounging on a $200 CPM campaign with half your traffic making 3000000% more revenue then your site will ever make. Unless you change your ways.
What’s my point?
Get to know your readers, become a good editor and make your online entity as best as possible. Enjoy the growth, the success – will come with it.
Understand the basics of SEO, but focus on what your user wants. Word to mouth is a hundred times more powerful then any SEO traffic. And remember, this article is speaking to those who run a website that is not based on sales and has no end-goals (e.g. e-commerce). This article is directed to those who are looking to make a brand over a high-trafficked website.
If I was to share a few additional tips. Let this article inspire you and not make you envious. Get a good editor, and get a good team. Last week I had a really great conversation with Qianna Smith of Fashion Q&A and she said something along the lines of “You cannot make it in this industry as a sole, you must have a good team and a platform” and that is the key for everything. You truly cannot make it on your own, or with a bad team. Which goes back to what I advised everyone months ago. Hire hungry employees, hire employees slowly, fire bad employees.
And of course: Good luck,
As always, feel free to reach out for any advise. I am here to help everyone grow.
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During my stay in Los Angeles back in April I had the opportunity to share insight for a study on the fashion blogger’s influence on the luxury fashion industry for London University. The main aim of the project is to explore and analyze the influence of blogs for fashion consumers in the luxury industry.
The following PDF includes interviews with me (yes, that’s Daniel Haim), Fats Shariff of Fatsarazzi.com, Brenda Fuentes, Katherine Kramer, Nolan Bryan and Sharon N. Hughes.
In my interview I revealed my personal sources of inspiration throughout my daily life while discussing bloggers vs journalists sharing tips on starting out a new blog, debating viral marketing vs PR advertising, opinion leadership and how fashion bloggers influence the fashion luxury consumers.
You can download the PDF right here.
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From L to R Anya Barker, Darren Hau, Leonie Manners, Rosie Ellis, Katherine Gould, Dean Hau and Daniel Haim (that's me!)
I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with a brilliant up and coming photographer during my long stay here throughout London Fashion Week, his name is Elliott Morgan (http://www.elliott-morgan.com) and you might recognize the name already as he’s been featured on Bloginity.com several times (check the Q&A section).
With the little time that we’ve had, we put together the team of all teams. We started this project just on Monday (last week) in a York & Albany in Camden. Both Elliott and I were on a “mission impossible” type of quest. Because finding a stylist in London while #PFW is in it’s peak. Everyone was out of town but we didn’t give up and had collaborated with Dean Hau, the Editor in Chief and founder of 7th Man Magazine who brought over an incredible wardrobe in just a few hours (Dior, Burberry, PPQ, and plenty of Couture pieces). Darren Hau who is truly a beautiful person and as a bonus an amazing hair stylist. Katherine Gould (http://www.kmgould.com/) who brought a lot of creativity through her vision to the makeup on the set and of course, needless to mention – Elliott Morgan who photographed the editorial.
They say that doing business is difficult. But it could be approached two ways: Seriously, or with the same way you’re doing your job, with entertainment aspect, with pleasure, with fun. I am very proud of the end result and encouraged everyone on board to socialize, and be themselves. The team clicked. Power Circle style. “Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist.”
Big ups to all of the people who collaborated with us on this day, I am very honored to have them in our friendship circle make sure to follow each and everyone of them on Twitter and check their portfolios out. Stay tuned and we will be publishing the full material on Bloginity.com
From L to R Carlos, Charlie, Anya Barker, Darren Hau, Daniel Haim, Leonie Manners, Rosie Elis, Katherine Gould, Dean Hau
From L to R Anya Barker, Elliott Morgan, Leonie Manners, Daniel Haim, Rosie Elis
And a special thanks to Elliott for taking capturing the following moment:
Portrait by Elliott Morgan
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I was recently introduced to an editor at PMc Magazine, Jillian Mercado who profiled me for Patrick McMullan’s “Who Am I” section.
I really didn’t want to be boring and provide a photo of me, so I decided to photoshop one for the hell of it. Have a read: http://pmc-mag.com/2011/07/daniel-haim/
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I was just stopping by JV Studios in New York City and asked my good friend Victoria Janashvili to take a snap a few pics so I could fix up my profile picture once and for all. Luckily our friend Sasha was around as well so she pimped me up.
Portrait by Victoria Janashvili, JV Studios
Portrait by Victoria Janashvili, JV Studios
Portrait by Victoria Janashvili, JV Studios
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I had the pleasure of chatting with Iain Alexander about the upcoming projects for us here at Bloginity. The interview focuses primary on the future of the business as well as it’s grounds that we’ve tested in the past (what worked and what didn’t). As always I am open about what we’re working on, believing in, and how we measure the success in order to help everyone out there on the same path a clear vision to how we did it.
Learning from mistakes, and learning from others.
You can read the interview here.
As always, feel more than welcome to shoot me an email if you are working on an interesting project and would like an opinion on.
- Daniel
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I had the pleasure of being a guest of Mercedes Benz at the US Open (2011) for a night session. Free drinks, great food, great hospitality. I didn’t end up watching the game itself as my crew got hammered that said I had a great time and left before the game even started. Oh well.
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Since you are curious about Affiliate Marketing I have decided to create a step-by-step article to guide most of you who are still trying to make it within the industry.
There are few websites that offer affiliate programs but avoid joining most of them (trust me from experience)
The best ones to start with, and join to are the following
Commission Junction (www.cj.com)
LinkShare (www.linkshare.com)
After creating your account you begin by creating a profile for your website and applying for programs. I suggest joining programs very slow and experimenting one by one. Do not apply to many at once because then you’ll get confused also there’s a lot of notes you should look into within the program details (e.g. does the user pick up a cookie when he is referred with your link?)
One note – banners don’t work. So avoid making baners – however. If you put an image of a bag on your sidebar, and put a little text next to it – something along the lines of “I love this Mulberry bag and it’s $875 on sale click here to buy” you will most likely get about 5% more click through rate vs a banner that you will receive about 0.1% 0.9% click through rate.
So making posts with a ‘Shopping‘ section has been the most successful thing for Bloginity.com.
How I make an affiliate post using SEO (search engine optimization)
It’s a long process, but hey – nothing comes easy and if you want to make money you have to work for it. After understanding what I want to write about (bags, shoes, socks) I head off to Google Keyword Tool to analyze the keyword volumes and see what people are actually looking for – and this is how I create the title, permalink and content. Since the article I write is about socks I look for the keywords related – Cotton Socks, Richard James, Corgi.
What I discovered:
Mens socks – 74,400 (searches)
Socks men – 74,400 (searches)
Richard James – 70,000 (searches)
Knee High Socks – 60,500 (searches)
Corgi – 550,000 (searches)
High Socks – 90,500 (searches)
Black socks 60,500 (searches)
Woolen socks 60,500 (searches)
Red socks 49,500 (searches) – this could be mistaken for Red Socks the sports team.
This gave me enough data so I know which keywords I need to include within my article to make the articles rank. The more relevant and related keywords you have in your article – the better and your article content for SEO purposes should always exceed the 150 words and recommended is 300.
I created my content and I will bold the keywords which I focused on:
My content:
I will begin the article by keeping it simple – I’m a man of socks. I love mens socks. It’s what I live for. You can see me in plain blue jeans and beautiful shoes but whenever I sit down and I cross my legs, you will notice a fantastic knee high socks, a woolen sock or a black sock with details on it. But I love colors – so I’ve got a pair of pink socks, green socks, light blue socks with hearts to circles – it doesn’t matter. It’s all we men have. It’s your tie, your underwear and your socks and now when MR PORTER is having a giant sale on it’s site I found Corgi & Richard James socks at below $20/each. That’s a bargain not to mention that some of these socks are ultra exclusive on MR PORTER like the red socks by Corgi.
The next step is making the title
Always make sure your title does not exceed the 69 characters. Avoid using signs (& for example is actually four characters by code so you are better writing ‘and’ instead)
In my case, I would like to focus on the keyword ‘Mens Socks’ but I don’t want to ruin my article as it will focus only on SEO – it needs life.
My title: Mens Socks – A Selection of Corgi, Richard James Socks Under $18
total characters: 64 – however i’m using a sign “$” and that falls exactly into 68 – 69 characters total
I will now create a custom permalink on WordPress – mens-socks because that’s by far the best keyword for me to rank for, with that keyword, you can rank for all the rest as well. (see screenshot below)
The only thing that’s missing before this article goes live is getting backlinks to it so I can promote it better. What I’m going to do is head over to my personal website and post this entire guide how to create an affiliate article (www.danielhaim.com) and I will send a backlink to it using an anchor text mens socks pointing to that article
Also, I will now change the header of Bloginity (top right) and have a tiny banner, pointing to the article so it’s getting a homepage link which is a powerful link alone.
The next step is wait for the bait to work.
Other options – promote the article on Digg, SU, Twitter, Facebook – share it with your friends and family and share the love. Remember – sharing is caring.
Finally – here is the finished version http://www.bloginity.com/blog/2011/06/13/mens-socks/
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SEO’s often refer to link-building in the same way you would hear wine lovers refer to an old bottle of wine, e.g. the older link is, the better.
Search engines know. They know everything and they analyzes everything. Search engines record the moment an anchor text link was added, to the point it has been bolded, Capitalized, or UPPERCASED to if you decided to change the title of your blog post or the position of a link within the blog itself. And these type of things may hurt you if you don’t know what you’re doing.
SEO is about taking opportunities, trying new thing and experimenting what works and what doesn’t. But experimenting might also bring your traffic down drastically and if that’s a chance you cannot risk to take then you are probably getting good traffic. I remember the day when I learned SEO content writing in depth. I used to get home late at night after meetings and apply all the new tricks on my old blog posts which turned out to be a huge mistake.
With today’s search engine algorithm of knowing your geographical location, the exact minute your post has been published to what food you had for lunch (#truth). The bottom line, everything is measured. Yes, everything.
If you already Published an article and realized you should have re-written the title (e.g. moving a keyword from one area to another area) grab the link, and run in the search engine the following command:
site:website.com/article=?123 (website = your domain, /article=?123 your permalink extension)
If that permalink is not appearing in the results then it means it hasn’t been cached or indexed which is a good sign. But you must act quickly.
Updating your blog with new information
I’ve seen many websites continue to update blogs for several reasons.
And surely, if the post itself is ranking high in Google News, Bing News, or Yahoo News, or even the organic results and it’s a trending topic most websites would like to provide updated information on that landing page. A few things you shouldn’t do to your post is re-edit the words within it. If you want to edit add a “del” function (on WordPress)
Breaking news! National Geographic discovered a barking <"del datetime="2010-11-05T18:13:28+00:00">turtle</del> dog.
Adding new sections to existing blog posts is a good thing as well.
Example:
Breaking news! National Geographic discovered a barking turtle dog.
11:01 AM UPDATE: The turtle was not actually barking, it is now believed the turtle is actually a green dog.
Changing the posts date after it has been published
Bumping articles
This is possibly the worst thing you can ever do to your blog. I’ve met webmasters who “bump” articles back to the top of the page by changing the time on the post to right now. If you must do that, make sure that your permalink structure does not include “/date/time/” because changing the date/hour around you might actually change the permalink structure which will create a 404 page on your site that is previously indexed by a search engine. In addition, you are re-notifying a search engine about an existing post that they’ve indexed just several hours (or days) ago and asking them to recrawl a brand new page, with a new permalink.
Changing text links within the existing posts
This could be misleading but hear me out. The more links your article contains the better. It’s a fact, search engines want to provide one thing and only for their user: good quality information. Since the engine doesn’t have a brain of actually understand if it’s really qualifying information or not – it measures keyword density.
An engine has crawled XYB amount of pages that contain the keyword [Clark Kent] and it has realized that in XBY amount of these pages, the keyword [superman] has been found as well. That said, if you edit your content in a relevant way you will rank higher on search engines. Adding links to your site is a very important aspect as well. While many SEOs believe it is bad to share your link juice, and just link internally – that’s false information. Link out, and link to specific articles.
[example]
If TMZ has written about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie break up, don’t quote “TMZ.com reports that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have gone publicly with their break up. E! Online has began a rumor that Angelina Jolie will get to keep the kids.” [-false information-]
Hyperlink “Angelina Jolie will get to keep the kids.” to the E! Online where this was stated. Hyperlink TMZ.com reports to the exact link where they reported.
The sarch engine will now crawl through your article to E! Online, and TMZ and realize that the three of you are all talking about the same thing: [angelina jolie], [brad pitt], [divorce], [breakup] [kids] and so on.
Note that I’ve added [divorce] because if that keyword has been found on either E! Online, or TMZ.com it will often be a related density keyword with “break up” (explained above)
Changing these links afterward to better articles, is bad. Don’t change these links, ever! Not unless they have been 404.
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When it comes to SEO everyone knows I am a walking & talking encyclopedia. When it comes to WordPress SEO there’s plenty I’ve got to say as well. But aside from SEO, today I’m going to talk about WP Plugins. I always tell my clients who use WP to try to eliminate as many plugins as they can from their site. For many reasons aside from the speed, JavaScript, AJAX and all that other stuff.
Today I truly felt like a kid opening a present when I discovered Joost’s latest project.
Until right this second I’ve always used by default the following plugins (on every WP installation).
1) Breadcrumbs
2) SEO Title Tag
3) Headspace2
4) All in One SEO
5) Google Sitemap
6) Google News Sitemap
7) Robots Meta.
And today, I’ve eliminated all of the above. Literally, disabled 7 plugins.
Yoast is my new Jesus. WordPress SEO is currently in beta. It’s a newly released plugin which literally combines all of the plugins I mentioned above plus it does more. I think the idea when he created this tool was to create something so powerful people will possibly feint. But that’s not all, because the plugin itself is so easy to configure and not overwhelming at all. It took me about 15 minutes to fully configure it.
The News SEO module, which is already in the download you can currently get from WordPress.org, is and will remain free. It allows generation of an XML News Sitemap, which you’ll need if you want to be included in Google News. More features will be added to that later.
The other two modules will be paid modules; they serve a more niche market and will require quite a bit of work to get right, hence the need for them to be paid. All three modules are developed by me in partnership with a subject matter expert, what they’ll do and who these guys are is outlined on the pages above. Trust me, they’re the best in the business.
Beta period
Second: this plugin is STILL in beta. It will probably remain in beta for at least another 2 weeks, maybe more. Your testing is very much appreciated and will remain to be very much appreciated. Whether you’re sending me technical things that don’t work or lines of text you don’t understand or could be improved: it’s all great.Integration
I’m happy to say that Scribe SEO has been updated to work well with WordPress SEO, and the needed adaptions have been made to make it work well with Genesis too. The same work is underway for Thesis, and I’ve also been talking to the WPML team to make sure the WordPress SEO plugin is fully compatible with WPML as well.Lastly, Nathan Rice of StudioPress has been so kind to promise to update his SEO Data Transporter plugin soon to work with the plugin too, so you can easily move data back and forth between this plugin and other SEO plugins, should you ever want to switch away from this one…
This is a very exciting time for me, and I’m very thankful for the help that everyone has provided so far, let’s make this a great success together!
In one word: OMG.
In greater detail: This plugin enters the top 5 must-have plugins for every WordPress user. You must have it by default in every WP installation you do. There are no words that can describe how powerful this plugin is. It’s literally the ultimate SEO solution and more. You can edit out your .htaccess files, and edit the appearance of your RSS feed. For example, I added a HTML banner code to my feed to display between every other post. Yes, it’s an easy deed but it eliminates other plugins, and eliminates the headache of going and editing the files.
You can control everything from meta titles, to meta descriptions just like in Headspace2, All in One SEO (which I find kind of useless). The WordPress SEO plugin is now a combination of Robots Meta and Breadcrumbs as well. So you do not need to have two additional plugins installed.
For those who are lazy and do not want to reconfigure their Headspace2 or All in One SEO Joost included a button that helps import all the previous settings from Breadcrumbs, to Robots Meta, to Headspace, to All in One SEO and by a check button he also helps you clean the unused MySQL tables that are now useless from the previous plugins.
Try it out now. Download the beta version today at Yoast.com
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Many SEO people think they know how to do a proper On-Page optimization but when it comes down to it, it’s one of the hardest and most dedicated areas of the entire process. For me the entire process is fun but on page optimization could be the best part which I enjoy most. For those who are still afraid of search engines.. It’s not rocket science. There are three keys to good SEO: communication, content and back links
There are so many things to consider
1) What is the content speaking about?, What length is the content going to be? Which keywords will I highlight and will they repeat themselves?
Am I going to include an image? Two images? A gallery? Is there a video I can include? Does that even matter?
There are a few things I’ve realized in the past few months one of which is – don’t create too many pages. Many online companies do the mistake of creating several pages to define their company (About, Contact, Advertise, Staff, Shipping, Policy, Terms) etc. Creating all of these pages can heavily affect your on-page SEO and here’s why.
Each one of your pages is sending X amount of links. Perhaps even, XXX amount of links (hundreds). Once you realize that Google ranks pages and not websites your understanding of SEO has gained another level.
Let’s say your page is ranking PageRank #5 and that page is linking internally, to another 200 links (Navigation bar, footer links, sidebar links internal and external, on page links and hypered imagelinks that could also be banners) what you are actually doing is creating a formula
5pr/:200l=0.025
So you’re actually sharing the “Link Juice” with 200 pages, giving each of them a 0.025 PR. Somewhat like this.
Conclusion? Eliminate the pages! Combine, and combine as much as you can.
Take the pages like
About, Contact & Staff and put them together. Take the Terms & Privacy pages and combine them in one page and once you’re done with that don’t forget to redirect (301) all of these pages that you’re about to delete to the page that you will be combining with. And how do you choose which one to keep? Simple: the one that has the higher PR.
Next step. I always say choose your titles wisely. I’ve decided to make things a bit clearer now this is completely based on personal experience on what’s been working for me (September 2010)
X = Random word
Y = Keyword
Titles should look like this: (69 characters max)
X Y X X X X
X X Y X X Y
X Y X Y X X
X Y X X Y X
X Y Y X X X
Titles like this do not work for me: (69 characters max)
Y X X X X X
Y Y X X X X
Y X Y X X X
How to do a proper on-page optimization. First thing’s first. Every article you write, take it easy, take your time and research. I use Google Keyword tool for every article I write. I find the keywords i want to focus on and I never repeat the same keywords within the same paragraph.
Here’s an example of a paragraph I will write
We will focus on the following keywords:
[dog breeder] = 1600 Global Monthly Searches
[dog breeders] = 8,100 Global Monthly Searches
[florida dog breeders] 170 Global Monthly Searches
[texas dog breeders] 140 Global Monthly Searches
[dog breeders uk] 720 Global Monthly Searches
[local dog breeders] 480 Global Monthly Searches
[find a dog breeder] 210 Global Monthly Searches
[boxer puppies for sale] 12,100 Global Monthly Searches
And we’ll construct the article, let’s start with the title
I’m Searching for a Local Dog Breeder in Florida – Help me Find Him (total 68 characters)
Keywords we’ve got there:
Local Dog Breeder, (not breeders), Florida Dog Breeder, Find a Dog Breeder
And through out the article I will repeat certain keywords however I will not repeat the keywords Local Dog Breeder, Florida Dog Breeder, or Find a Dog Breeders. I will repeat the other keywords instead and have a good usage of bold on these keywords. Example of a paragraph:
|– Example Starts for SEO Optimized Content –|
[image goes here, perhaps even centered]
I’m right now in the process of looking for a [B]breeder[/B]. I’ve been searching for a [B]dog breeder[/B] in my area for quite some time now. I’m traveled to [B]Texas[/B] where I found several [B]dog breeders[/B] but I prefer to stay [B]local[/B]. I’m currently in [B]London[/B] area of the [B]UK[/B]. If anyone can help me [B]find a dog breeder[/B] please send me a private message.
Here is a video of the cutest Boxer Puppies for Sale <– this should be a H1 or H2.
http://www.youtube.com/videolink
Here is a great gallery of several puppies I’ve found across the web <– this should be a H2 or H3
– gallery code goes here — <– whatever WordPress code you choose to insert.
|– Example Ends for SEO Optimized Content –|
At the same time, I will also recommend to attach a large photo (not a tiny .gif icon one) and even be friendly with YouTube. Since I know that Google is YouTube, by adding a YouTube video I am actually enhancing the quality of the article itself, by providing video content. This should make the article more popular.
After that, I recommend even commenting on your own articles. (not more then once, since it’s your own IP it’s considered only once). But leaving a comment does two things
A) Enhances the “flaming comments” – in other words, someone will respond to you.
B) Enhances the “popularity” of the article itself.
WordPress acts in a funny way. Since comments are actually being pulled by wp-includes/wp-comments.php and within your Gabfire Theme as a “comment.php” search engines understand that your article has a comment on it, and they reward you for having more comments.
The more comments the article will have the more popular it will rank on search engine. Also the reason I’m recommending to add a good size image is because Google Image search now weights images. The better quality the image is the higher it will rank on Google.com. Now don’t get me wrong you don’t want to insert a 5000×5000 image that weights 3MB. That’s just wrong, it will slow your site down and Google rewards users who manage to have their site weight less then 100KB in HTML (excluding CSS, Scripts) and the faster your site loads the higher it ranks.
I am currently taking small projects to optimize WordPress sites for less then $500. If you are interested in getting your entire site checked and completely optimized feel free to contact me with your budget and expectations and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
Last but not least – Remember: SEO is a noun, verb and adjective.
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Facebook.com has been acting up a bit today – giving some errors, slow browsing and even DNS failures. During that time, I was confused and was not sure what else I was capable of doing besides browsing Facebook.com. At first, I found myself refreshing the page continuously, waiting for it to resolve quicker. That didn’t work, so me (Daniel) and Brian came up with a list of stuff you can do in the meantime, while Facebook fails on you.
1) Start an actual farm. Since so many people are obsessed with FarmVille, it might be a good business. After actually plowing fields and milking cows, you might realize that a) this isn’t your ideal field, and b) that farming on Facebook is pointless.
2) Close your browser, stop trying to log into Facebook and get back to your real day-time job. Yeah, we know you’re checking Facebook to avoid work. Despite what you tell your boss, this is not a “public relations effort” or an “online networking seminar.”
3) The Mafia Wars game was always lame, I suggest we join an actual street gang. Seems like a fun, lucrative, low-risk investment opportunity.
4) Remember outside? With the fresh air? And the actual people? And no maximum resolution? Go there!
5) Create a Twitter account and follow @Bloginity
6) Dig out your old Myspace password and finally delete your Myspace account
7) Visit the awesome website Snacksandshit.com and read up ridiculous rap lyrics.
9) Some other options include washing a tree, waxing the ceiling, boiling ice cream, weld your car doors shut and of course our favorite Dial 911 and breathe heavily.
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The other day I woke up to a very disturbing email from Google Webmaster team. For the first second I thought it was a spam but I realized, it is not. The email warned me while Google crawled one of my domains it found a malicious code installed on it. I was very surprised but a quick look had me discover it. I went to the homepage of my domain and right click with the mouse, and “viewed source”. The first script on the site was something linking to a russian site “addonrock.ru” obviously, this is nothing I know of. The malware was installed on many default.php and index.php and required a deep cleansing. I had downloaded the entire folder to a local folder where I searched the keyword “addonrock.ru” and found tens of files with that script code installed on it. I’m starting to take heavy caution now and wanted to recommend a good solid plugin that can help you be more safe. WP Secure – it is a plugin that was developed as a benefit to the community for free from the leading Malware and Web vulnerability company – SiteSecurityMonitor.com developed this for their customers initially, and decided to release it to the community.
Site Security Monitor scans, cleans and protects your website, web server and applications from malware and hacker exploits – and keeps your site secure using advanced SaaS technology. I highly recommend for everyone to run a security check on their site and make sure that you change your database on daily basis if not then weekly. To quickly optimize my database I use WP-Cleanup a plugin that by a single click removes all the unused database including spam comments (which is another way of malware attacking your site). Click to download -
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A few months ago I struggled to understand what script code a website was using that whenever I copied their content to quote them, and pasted it into my HTML editor it literally added a “Read more – URL” right below the text. I was amazed, what a great link bait. Heck I’m an SEO person myself so I will obviously be removing the link from it but a lot of other bloggers out there don’t consider this option and don’t even notice the automatic link bait.
So I present to you with the solution: Tynt Insight
Tynt Insight automatically adds a link back to your original content with every paste. The attribution link ensures you get credit for your work, drives new visits back to your site and improves your SEO results.
Get your Javascript code right here, and protect your content from being stolen without a link-back.
http://id.tynt.com/script/attribution_link
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There are several plugins that I’ve been going with since day one for every WordPress installation I’ve done but their customization could be a bit more painful then you’d think – that’s right. Having SEO plugins is not just installing them and checking your Google Analytics and waiting for results – it takes patience. One of the biggest steps in the ‘SEO Cycle’ is patience, monitoring after all.
I’ve made a collection with a few SEO tips for all WordPress users. Please notice that this takes a bit more then just installation – so web-masters prepare yourself for some hard work :)
My first one on the list is
SEO Title Tag by net-concepts. Title tags is perhaps the most important thing in current web optimization. You should also work very hard on your titles and make sure you include a good juicy keyword and maintaining the 69 characters (note that anything like space, periods, dashes or pipes are considered a character. In my opinion characters like &%$#@ are considered sometimes 5 characters.) This plugin takes a bit of installation and touches HTML and PHP. You will need to re-construct your current “” command inside your header.php or single.php
See instruction below on how to incorporate SEO Title Tag plugin with your post.
Afterwards you will be able to mass edit the title tag for all of your tags, posts, pages, categories.
After the installation of SEO title tag comes another favorite plugin of mine called Headspace2 by urban-giraffe. This plugin can help you auto-edit all of your posts, pages, categories, 404, search results etc but what’s good about this plugin is if you don’t define a title it will not edit it. This is something All In One SEO plugin does not do. When you activate All In One SEO if you check the box where you’d like to “rewrite titles” it will rewrite it for all. For headspace, it’s only what’s defined. That’s a great add-on.
For your site optimization I recommend checking WP-Cleanup made y JortK it’s a simple plugin that helps you manage your MySQL optimization. For example let’s say you’ve installed a plugin last year, set it up and then deactivated it. Most likely the MySQL tables still exist incase you will ever activate the plugin again. These tables grow your MySQL to a monster-size and affect your site speed, it is highly recommended that you will optimize your MySQL and make sure you avoid all unused MySQL data – always. It’s a simple clean up, you check what you want to remove there is no danger involved.
Ok, the next one on my list is Simple Tag it is THE perfect tool for mass editing tags, auto-tagging articles (and avoiding stupid tags) some of it’s really cool functions include auto link tags in post content, type-ahead input tags which could be a bit annoying, related tags, you can define it that it will only tag untagged posts and to tag posts with only pre-existing tags if the keyword is found in full. You can also define that anytime a keyword appears in your post that is an existing tag it will auto-hyperlink it to the tag itself eventually creating a beautiful SEO crawl. It also helps mass editing tags, organizing and even getting rid of unused tags.
Automatic SEO Links – that’s a nice tool to have if you understand the concept of anchor texting. It works pretty much the same way Simple Tags works that when ever a keyword is found and appears as a tag it will auto-link to it’s tag however automatic seo links work in a way that when ever a keyword is found (that you select) it will link to a landing page – which you choose. So, define the anchor text, define the link (no-follow do-follow target_blank etc) and it’s landing page.
Redirection – another plugin from urban-giraffe. Redirection plugin for WordPress is a nice tool to carry as it manages all the 301 redirection and keeps track of your 404 errors. I personally don’t like it because it carries a JS file with it and a heavy database which increases my loading time but overall it’s a good plugin to have, don’t get me wrong it’s only a tiny second loading time that bothers me.
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You must have heard the saying “Cash is King” in the past. It’s a simple expression that is sometime used in analyzing businesses or investment portfolios. It may refer to the importance of cash flow in the overall fiscal health of a business. For investors it may also describe times when it is advantageous to have a large percentage of cash or short-term debt instruments available either due to falling financial markets or due to the availability of investment opportunities.
In the SEO world, it’s “Content is King” and that is it.
Last year Google has changed about 500 things to it’s search engines, more than one change per a day – which makes our daily SEO research much harder but it’s a daily discovery because we learn new things every single day.
If you are planning to buy content via XML feeds for your site or just wonder how to get more search engine visits to your site you came to the right place and I know that many SEO sites claim “you came to the right place” but trust me, you came to the right place.
The following are the things you should consider for each page or article you submit:
UNIQUE CONTENT – Copying content from other sites, or buying articles which are duplicate content will not only not get you traffic but will hurt you on the long run with penalization of pages and low indexation from search engines.
Don’t ever use copied content on your site. Generate it your own, regardless if your grammar is pretty crappy like mine this is how my pages rank front pages for good keywords, it’s just because I write the content myself.
UNIQUE TITLE TAG: I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. The biggest aspect of SEO is your title tag. Make sure you do not exceed the 69 characters, ever. Do not repeat exact titles in any of your pages – that said, make sure that each of your pages has it’s own unique title and try to not replicate a title from another site as well – be creative but maintain the SEO keyword which you’d like to rank for even if it’s a high volume keyword. Because you must remember that Google does not read more then 69 characters of title so putting more then 69 characters, it is simply a waste of time.
CONTENT LENGTH: The recommended content length would be 300 + words for each of your articles. If you must copy some one else’s words from another site make sure you are using block-quotes, or italic and mention the source, with a link as well. That’s right!
META’S: Don’t forget to use Meta description or ‘excerpt’ for each of your posts. Even try to have a unique excerpt and do not just copy paste a paragraph from the article itself. The time consuming is worth it when you will have 20,000 visitors.
CONTENT PROVIDERS: Over the past year I’ve had the chance to meet with 10s of content providers who offered their services. Their services varied from $4.00 an article to £16,000 a year. I recommend that if you do choose to buy repeated content try to work a solution with your content provider to deliver you the news first – before the rest of his clients. If you’re buying XML feeds check out AutoBlogged plugin for WordPress.
BUYING CONTENT FOR WEBSITES VIA XML FEEDS
Here is a list of my recommended content providers in the entertainment and showbiz, politics and more:
BANG Media International – BANG Showbiz is the premier entertainment news agency providing the most exciting entertainment news all over the world. BANG is the leading supplier of global entertainment news for online, print and broadcast media outlets.
Associated Press – RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a popular way to get news and information from across the Internet. RSS software regularly pulls headlines from news sites and Web journals and presents them within e-mail software, Web browsers or standalone programs known as readers. Frequently Asked Questions about RSS. Our FEATURED FEED is changed regularly with new or topical feeds.
Press Association – As home to the national news agency of the UK and Ireland, the Press Association proudly takes its place at the heart of the UK media news providing a continuous feed of text, pictures, video and data into newsrooms around the country.
Brafton – Custom News Marketing: Brafton specializes in providing unique and exclusive custom content marketing solutions for businesses and their websites. Leveraging the power of breaking industry news, Brafton helps businesses engage and convert their target audience through custom news that is published in full and exclusively on a business’ website.
Bummers: Price tag, they are based in the US. Seem like good fellas to reach out to if you’ve got the cash.
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What do you do now that you have built your website and optimized each of the pages for the search engines, but still are not getting the traffic you desire? You answer probably lies in your link building strategy or lack thereof. Here are vital steps to generate a great link building campaign.
1. Submit your website to quality web directories. Links from quality, authority web directories can give you inbound links and traffic. There are many directories to choose from, but to get the best results you should concentrate on those quality directories with authority.
2. Make a plan and designate time for link building. Plan an hour or two into your schedule every day for link building until it becomes a routine, or you could also designate one day per week as your link-building day.
3. Carefully choose the websites that you link to as search engines take relevancy into account. If a website is not relevant in some way to yours, you may want to avoid linking to it. If you link to bad domains the search engines may penalize you.
4. Find websites that are related to your niche and develop relationships with the Webmaster. Send them an email to introduce yourself and make sure they know you are a real person and not automated software. Let them know about your website and what you are hoping to accomplish.
5. Prepare the linking code to your website and give it out. When you do find someone wanting to link to you make it easy for them to do so. This way also enables you to choose the pages on your site that you want to gain additional links to.
6. Many websites may be willing to link to yours if you have something to offer them so learn how to trade. Maybe you can add a link to their website in exchange or swap an article. Offer to promote their website on a forum you are a member of. Any of these may work, but it should be customized to what you can offer of value.
7. Write articles and submit them to article directories. This can be a form of viral link building if your article is good enough as it is published with a link to your website in the resource box. Any other website that republishes your article must keep the link intact.
8. Offer a valuable tool, resource or information on your website as link bait. It would need to be something of value to your niche market that others would want to refer and link there. If you would like to learn more ways to generate links and build a high traffic website, there are more articles published at the Authority Directory.
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I’ve been doing major research on the latest news for SEO and wanted to update everyone that’s been in our little yet superior community.
Let’s go over the facts
What do I need to know?
How a search engine works:
The next one is
Where do they come from? Why do they link to you?
The Building Block of SEO
Technical SEO
Code Optimization / Site Performance / Usability / Site Architecture
Content Keyword Research and Selection – Keyword Targeting and Allocation / On page Optimization content Development and Distribution
Popularity and Trust Link Building / Social Media
The SEO Cycle
What you need to do
Make sure your articles have
The anatomy of a link
(1 lowest 5 highest)
Do not copy articles from other websites and repost – you won’t get any hits even if you are, and especially if you are in Google News. Work on UNIQUE content. Take an article, reword it and submit.
Don’t ever exceed the 69 character title.
Use “link bait”
Press releases, articles submission
http://www.prweb.com http://www.articlesbasecamp.com http://www.searchguild.com/redir/o.php?out=http:// http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art12838.asp
And ANALYZE.
Conclusion
What you should do is go into your PHP and all the anchor texts that have ‘Read more, previous or next article’ ‘more information’ ‘privacy policy’ etc makes them no follow. The good juicy articles, titles, make them do follow. Use ALT for every button you have on your site including and especially your navigation bar.
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Hi guys, I was recently asked a very good question:
“I am THE marketer for my company and wear too many hats. I can’t “do” SEO by myself. Any suggestions on a wallet friendly company that can help with our SEO needs?”
Since my reply was in such greater detail, I decided to share it on my journal.
Whatever it is, examine the links that you are getting yourself. It’s almost liked a “I can’t trust anyone, anywhere, no matter what”. Some links may hurt you when link building. A lot of services that offer SEO claim you are in a high ranked directory when it’s actually a auctioned domain with an average PR on it that they’ve installed a ‘Directory Template’ on.
You must always follow the steps, and examine one by one – and that process, costs money. So wallet friendly, I’d have to say you could do a nice link building for a company for approximately $5000 (without labor).
Look closer.
Take your time, spread approximately 200 – 300 directories which are good value, make sure they are indexed and get page rank, make sure you find yourself the exact niche within the directory – don’t be so quick to submit. Remember that if the directory itself, within the niche has pages (1,3,4,5,6,7) go all the way to page#7 which is most likely where you’ll be listed when approved and make sure that page#7 is getting a PageRank, and who else is listed there with you.
In regards to your question Alexander I would like to write this publicly.
Let’s take this domain for example
Http://www.skyalliance.net/ – looks like a normal directory right?
Let’s use the ‘WayBackMachine’ and see what this site looked like in 2003.
Http://web.archive.org/web/20021114152532/http://www.skyalliance.net/
You see what I mean? This is in some Asian language, nothing related to a directory. Which means the owners of this domain purchased it because it had a nice PR and it was auctioned at the time.
In 2004: http://web.archive.org/web/20030210053650/http://www.skyalliance.net/
In 2005: http://web.archive.org/web/20040210060512/http://www.skyalliance.net/
In 2008: http://web.archive.org/web/20050109041248/http://www.skyalliance.net/
In 2010: http://www.skyalliance.net/
Other things you should take a look into when doing link building (if you do it yourself, and trying to search the directories by yourself) I would recommend to use a nice FireFox tool called ‘Flagship’ which declares where the site is hosted, and it’s IP.
Remember that if the site is hosted in Germany, and it is a .com – that might be a bad link for you.
If it’s hosted in Germany, and it’s a .de – that might be a good sign, and will help you rank in Google.de, but not in the .com engine.
If the site is hosted in USA, and it’s a .com – that will help you rank in the .com engines (or USA engines) but then the next directory you choose – make sure it is not hosted at the same place, with the same exact IP – that would not count as two different links.
Be VERY careful using SEO companies that charge under $500 for link building of 30-50 links. This amount does not exist, I saw a company offering $80 for 1000 directory, you will end up hurting yourself, and working double time because you will either get penalized, or have to manually go into these directories and remove the links yourself. And trust me when I say you will be hurt being listed in sites like that.
TIPS:
When a company offers SEO services for directory listing always ask for their excel sheet to see their plan, Examine the links, make sure they are not hosted same place, they are all USA, or European hosts, then carefully choose which ones you want and where you want to be listed. Send it back to them and tell them these are the links you are interested and how much they will charge you for them.
This narrows down their job, and helps you get efficient links, and powerful link building.
NOTE:
There are MANY more aspects when doing link building like making sure that Alexa, Compete and mozRank and PageRank and similar within values, If a website is pagerank #1 and mozrank is 5.8 – something must be wrong (either mozrank did not update it yet) but that page might have gone through penalization.
If the page does not get a PR, and receives Alexa, Compete and Moz – that means it might be penalized. Take the URL, and search it in Google like this:
Example #1: site: http://www.url.com/
example #2: site: http://www.url.com/subpage
See if the actual domain (not sub pages) comes up in search. (Or the sub page that is not getting a page rank).
Let’s do some SEO!
For more information about this thread please go to http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?vi…%2Egmp_2976409
Feel free to find me on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/danielhaim
Read about my progression in Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/businesswire/2010/08/03/businesswire143344209.html
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August 01, 2010
When I first wrote this article, I was a bit upset with Value Click’s services, but I learned to work with their team and we’ve come a long way since. Some of the stuff I’ve noted in the article still bother me, but I stopped carrying because I only care about one thing and that’s: Getting Paid. I will be going through this post, and commenting in red anything that I think should be updated, or noted but won’t get rid of my original thoughts.
May 4, 2010
Hi everyone, over the next 30 days I will be examining and detailing the top CPA, CPC, and CPM networks including CJ, Linkshare, ADSDAQ, Pulse360, ValueClick Media. I currently have the upper hand: I have is a domain that receives approximately 750,000 – 1.8M unique visits in a 30 day period – it should be a good place to start making money - right? Well, to my discovery – not really. It’s not easy making money with CPA, or CPM.
My first review is: Value Click Media a great and friendly CPM network.
Value Click Media – A company who claims to be a leader in the CPM Network industry. ‘Voice Ads’ “You have been selected to receive a free iPod” have you ever gotten those? Value Click Media has them! – It’s disappointing, but you can filter them out. In my opinion a CPM network should exclude all bad ads, even to those who pay top notch to be in it.
This evening I had a 300×250 CPM for 0.01 cent about Jesus Chris and converting to Christianity. Fantastic.
Day 1 with Value Click Media was pretty confusing. I couldn’t get my account activated and had contact their customer support which has been on the phone with me for approximately fifteen minutes but waited for approximately 1 hours for the account to mysteriously activate itself until one of their representatives said “Oh, your account has not been confirmed yet – that’s why it’s not working” – Silly me.
Finally, I’m in the backend, I’m ready to make money. First thing I’m headed towards: Filters – because who wants to have voice ads, massive diet pop up ads on their domain – Are you still following?
When that was done I was headed to see what’s running on their site – what CPM as well as trying to Excel exactly how much money the company would be making every single month.
I selected 728×90 banner to appear on my site, and guess what? I have both 728×90 banners and 468×60 banners appear within the same code.
I was about to email Value Click Media once again, and let them see a 2nd screen-shot which I was about to take and as I opened my domain, I loud noise was heard, saying, “You’ve been selected to receive a Wal-Mart Gift card” NO! I’ve filtered those
It really didn’t take too long to disable that, I just reached out to a representative who quickly had that removed from my domain.
Value Click’s back-end panel
Media Management is the area where you see the available campaigns, their CPM, CPC and sizes (468×60, 728×90, 300×250 etc). I started going over one by one – some, It is a bit disappointing that you have to select one by one but their filtering let’s you bulk-select by category (Casino, Pop Ups, Diet, etc).
Nowadays I have migrated our domain to being able to advertise 2x 728×90, 3x 160×600/120×600 300×250 and 180×50 thus will ensure a successful revenue model.
To anyone who is interested joining Value Click Media I truly recommend it. Just be smart, and you will be able to make really good money by reading their targeted ads, and how much CPM they are offering using SEO content.
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Every now and then I hop on these freelance jobs that assure me the quality time for SEO research, which is described best by my trademarked philosophy tag line
“If you wanted to learn SEO, all you had to do is search“.
This time a year, I’ve been lucky enough to be assigned to a new full-time job in New York City optimizing three very interesting domains that will assure me the continous exploration into Search Engines. Now I know that approximately 75% of my readers are very interested about SEO tips and if the company let me I will even pull hands-on examples to optimization.
The three new projects, which I’ve been assigned to optimize, are
Very exciting! But before we begin let me summarize these three so you can quickly select which area you are most interested in reading about:
Retail E Commerce SEO – There are many aspects to look into when building a retail E Commerce website, especially with all the niched categories, landing pages and title tags. This post will cover all the necessary tools and tips needed to build a successful SEO optimized E Commerce website. Read more below
Username Protected Wholesale E Commerce SEO – While there might be a debate on which platform to choose for a wholesale, I will always stand by and recommend to create a few landing pages focusing on your wholesale material, and giving an additional back-end user-name and password afterwards. Article coming soon
Hardware Website (CMS) SEO – A regular 5-6 page HTML based website with no PHP or MySQL functions. How to optimize a landing page? Well, that’s a great question. Article coming soon
The journey for Search Engine Optimization for E Commerce site begins.
There are many aspects to look for when building a site, especially a E Commerce site. I’d have to say follow the first moves like I do. I keep a folder, that contains 3 different files, they are the site-map validated for the following engines: Yahoo! Bing and Google. Right after I create, I will always generate a site-map, and once the site is completed I will submit it to the following
(You can also submit to more search engines like Ask.com, but most likely they will find you after you appear in the top three).
Tips for Optimizing E Commerce site
Avoid Manufacturer Product Description – RESIST THE URGE! DO NOT COPY PASTE! Building an online shop might be a pain to generate a lot of content however you should consider it a must. Search engines hold a grudge against Ecommerce based sites. Often times, I agree. Many online stores offer little useful content – if it’s Cellphones, just the main description (weight, color, type) the excerpt that is used includes dry manufacturer product description, poor internal linking and no unique user generated content. Without thinking about it twice Ecommerce sites have unique challenges when it comes to SEO. As much tempting as it is to copy paste – avoid it. Even if you do copy paste, at least write your own unique content around it or change a few words here and there.
Create a SEO Keyword field in Product Database – Sounds confusing? It might just be as well. Just as every product record in your catalog has a name, price, SKU and other attributes, you should also create a SEO keyword field that is displayed in the title tags, meta tags, and preferably the body as well. As you add products to your Ecommerce site, enter commonly search for keywords (use Google Keyword Tool to search Keyword examples and volumes). Remember: not everyone will search by the brand name or item number, so this will greatly help your product pages rank for long tail searches.
All products 2 or 3 Clicks from the Home Page – Look, I’ll keep it very simple for you: The homepage is the highest ranked page in your site. It’s the juiciest highest ranked page, and the first page that an engine looks it every time they go into your site. You don’t want the crawler to have to go through 20 different pages to reach an item. Keep your product pages as close as possible to your greatest source of PageRank. I’ve seen many Ecommerce sites bury part of their product catalog deep within dozens of pages of categories and subcategories and sub subcategories. Using SEO friendly rollovers or increasing the number of products per page can accomplish this. I recommend, at least 24 products per page if not 50 and try to not exceed 4 pages of products.
Use iframes for Duplicate Content – If you have repetitive content that must appear on every page, or your product description is not unique, consider placing them inside an iframe with an invisible border. Users will not know that the data technically resides on another page search engines will not penalise you for duplicate content. It’s a win win.
Create a Product RSS Feed: Creating a product feed and submitting it to relevant content aggregators such as Google Base, which accepts an XML file like product feed and displays your results for Google Base searches. (‘Shopping’) Product feeds can be a great way of picking up free backlinks directly to your product pages. Including Retweets.
Unique Keyword Meta Tags – Meta tags including keywords and description should be entirely unique on every single product of the page. Though Meta content does not directly affect your ranking (yet), unique tags will prevent duplicate content penalties.
Product Reviews – A perfect strategy for guaranteeing unique content is displaying user-generated content from customers who previously purchased, or just feel like reviewing a product they’ve seen or used before. Allow your customers to review products they’ve purchased.
Avoid Session IDs in URLs: Many Ecommerce software platforms use cookie-less unique session IDs in the site URLs. Unfortunately, this creates an infinite amount of duplicate content for the Search Engines to crawl. There are always ways to prevent this using an ethical type of cloaking which serves URLs to spider without the session ID.
Crawlable Navigation - AVOID JAVASCRIPT based navigation structures that don’t allow spiders through. If you’re stuck with one, at least duplicate your navigation in the footer of every page with normal hyperlinks. In addition don’t rely on form-based navigation such as drop down lists since the engines can’t follow them.
Don’t stuff Keywords in your navigation bar – This is useless and very tacky. Keywords are placed in navigation bars are not as important as they used to be. Instead use keyword rich anchor text pointing to the landing page, which is rich with SEO, optimized content for that specific landing page.
Optimize your images – I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again. Don’t upload images to your site that are called ’12498172.jpg’ or ‘iphone3333.jpg’ Be specific! People today are searching Google Images, or other Image search engines like crazy. And if they are looking for a specific Cellphone type, such as Nokia N95 they will Google it, and if you had changed ’12498172.jpg’ to Nokia-N95.jpg you will most likely rank for it. Another tip: only use – and not _, &, ~.
Use Alttributes in Links – If you asked me about link alt 1 year ago I would say avoid it, it’s just a hassle. But today it’s a very important aspect of a link, some might say more then the anchor text itself. Always use the link alt=”description”.
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Thanks to Neil Patel for making this great collection
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At the start of 2008 there were over six-and-a-half billion people on the Earth, with just over 1.3-billion of us on the Internet. At the same time, there are almost 100,000,000 top-level domains registered, quite a few of which are held by private citizens. What does this mean to the average person? It means that if we want to protect our brand or our name on the Internet, we need to move quickly.
Why not buy a .jp?
Invest in a .jp domain name
Japan is a funny country when it comes to rules. Anything that can be governed will be governed. This is true with everything from ketchup to nuclear power to domain names. In order to have a .jp, certain conditions need to be met.
Note: Don’t let these prices scare you! Keep reading for cheaper alternatives.
.co.jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy
limited to only one per registered business must have at least one working office in Japan .ne.jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy
Can be owned by citizens or businesses no limit on number of domain registrations must have a Japanese address .or.jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy
Must be a registered non-profit organization in Japan limited to only one domain per year .jp [w/Alphabetic Name ( ¥9900/yr.)] click here to buy
Can be owned by citizens or businesses no limit on number of domain registrations must have a Japanese address With these prices, it’s no surprise that people aren’t picking up .jp domains as quickly as we see with other country-specific extensions. But it doesn’t always have to be this expensive.
Buying an IDN Multilingual Domain
Since 2004, it’s been possible for us to purchase Internationalized Domain Names using non-alphabetic characters. This means that if you wanted to buy something like ジェイソン.jp, you could. The advantage here is that very few Internationalized Domain Names have been purchased using westernized names converted to Hiragana, Katakana, Kanji, Hebrew, Hindi, Arabic and Chinese characters. That said, with so many people who use these writing systems coming online all the time, it’s only a matter of years before all the common or otherwise desirable names are taken.
Luckily, there are places where we can purchase top level Japanese domains and, as luck would have it, they’re often cheaper than buying the Romanized TLDs.
Get TWO .jp domains for $40
JP-Domains, a Canadian company that helps with Japanese domain registration for foreigners and non-residents, currently offers one of the best deals on the web. As of this writing, they’re offering customers two IDN .jp domains for a price of $40 USD. Considering how a single Romanized .jp is $99 USD per year, it’s hard to complain with the price. Of course, if you absolutely must have a Romanized .jp address, you can buy one for the low(er) price of $69 USD per year.
With the weak US dollar, though, these prices may go up substantially in the near future.
Attaching an IDN to Our Website
We can attach an Internationalized Domain Name to our website one of two ways. We can either forward all visitors to our main site (e.g.: http://ジェイソン.jp will take you to http://www.j2fi.net/), or we can buy the name and then edit the name servers through our account’s control panel to point to our webhost’s name servers. The first option is quite simple, but I’ll show you how to do both.
Forwarding an IDN with JP-Domains
When you click on the “Edit Name Servers” link in your left panel, you should see the same thing on your screen as the image below (click for a larger picture). From here, you simply need to click on one of the DNS addresses.
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After, the longest search of all to find the best ‘Related Posts’ I’ve always ended up with the same plugin: YARRP.
Although Mitch (@yarpp) is a great man and developed a text tool that is beyond good. It is not attractive enough. And the guides he provides to Display thumbnails for Related posts in WordPress are beyond ridiculously long and more then that -tiring. Because right after you’re done with that guide you realize that now you have to go to each and every single article and add a custom note ‘wp-thumbnail’ and attach a 125×125 url. OK That’s obviously not happening with our blog (2000+ blog entries)? Are you INSANE?
My top best ‘Related Posts’ in WordPress Plugin are:
The crown goes to WP-Thumbie by Blogsdna.com
What does it do? – WP-Thumbie displays a list of Thumbnail related posts for the current post.
Features
YARPP – ‘Yet Another Related Post – Takes 2nd place for being most clever, (reading both content & tags & titles).
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GUIDE: HOW TO FIND THE WORDPRESS PAGE ID / POST ID / CATEGORY ID With WordPress 2.5 being released, the IDs on all admin pages have been removed as it is. For more advanced WordPress Users/ developers those IDs were quite interesting for some plugins or template tags.
In order to perfect your Transcript theme you can simply eliminate useless pages, or pages that you prefer to appear on the Footer instead of the Navigation bar. To do that, you have to find the Page/Post ID/Category ID.
Example of Transcript’s “Exclude Page from Navigation” -
(Transcript is one of the most advanced WordPress Newsletter based Premium WordPress theme that is currently offered in the market).
Method 1 - after you’ve logged into your WordPress dashboard, (http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin). Go to Pages > Edit or Posts > Edit and from the list of Pages/Posts hover over the Page/Post title you want to find the ID of. Every time you hover over, your browser’s status bar will show you a URL ending with a number like this.
This might be a painful process. Method 2 - If you don’t see anything when you hover over, click on the Page link to open edit Page screen. Now, look in your browser’s address bar and you’ll find the URL ending with a number. And that is your Page/Post ID.
Method 3 - what this plugin does is to reveal most removed entry IDs on admin pages, showing the entry IDs, as it was in versions prior to 2.5
Features: Following IDs can be revealed: Posts, Pages, Categories, Links, Media, Users, Comments, Link categories, Tags (WP 2.8 and above) Each ID can be de-/activated seperately, plus you can allow/permit user roles to see the IDs
DOWNLOAD THIS PLUGIN: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/…r-wp-admin-25/
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Don’t bother with splash pages.
A splash page is normally a pointless page people put on their websites as an introduction. The page normally contains some sort of image on with a big click here to enter sign, or sometimes people don’t say anything and just hope you will click on the picture to enter their site. Splash pages are fairly pointless and it is just creating more work for your visitor as they have to click the mouse button an extra time just to see the content of your site. By removing the splash page the visitor can get to see the best parts of your site straight away, without having to wait for a pointless page to load.
Keep your navigation simple.
To put it simply if your navigation is too complicated and people don’t understand how to get around your site this is a huge web design fault. If a visitor doesn’t know how to navigate around your site they will get frustrated and end up leaving. Keep your navigation simple and try to avoid using scripts or complicated flash based menus, not all browsers support scripts, so some of your visitors might be missing out on important.
Keep your paragraphs reasonable readable lengths.
Although having lots of relative and informative content on your website is good, it is a bad idea to have the blocks of text to big. Not everyone likes reading and to much can deter a visitor. If you keep your paragraphs in reasonable lengths it is much easier for a visitor to read and absorb.
Use CSS for style.
Make sure your text is readable by using a standard font which is compatible with other systems. While some fonts may look good on your computer other people might not have that font installed. It is good web design practice to use CSS when building you site. CSS or Cascading Style Sheets are a perfect way to set and adjust your websites font and size settings. The great thing about using CSS is that you can change the look of your whole site simply by editing the one file.
Test how your site looks in other web browsers
When you are building your site and still in the web design stage it is important to check how it looks on other browsers, just because it looks fine in internet explorer doesn’t mean it looks good on Firefox or Opera. A lot of people use alternative browsers and if the website looks like a complete mess then you will loose that visitor for ever. You can check your sites web design to make sure it complies with the web standards at the w3.org website. Validating your page will help to ensure it works properly on other browsers.
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Web site hosting, MySQL and PHP development are like two sides of the same coin. They work in tandem to create dynamic and comprehensive web sites. Having MySQL and PHP programs for our website shall always give a competitive edge to our business. Since, the massive range of flexibility offered by these programming languages assists in achieving our prerequisite business goals.
Therefore, creating targeted website for promoting business online is a must for all corporate entities. Some of the pertinent questions that come to our mind while structuring the site are:
If we are looking for long term advantages from php mysql development programming language, integrating PHP and MySQL in the project shall give the website different kind of impetus. With php mysql web development, the open source code developed by the system analyst enables achievement the of project goals with little effort. The usage of these programming languages also ensures the future up gradation and storage of content in database for software application venture.
Pre Defined Functions- Php and mysql web development in general is capable of many simple functions such as date functions, file manipulation, mathematics, and logic. But on the other hand php mysql web development doesn’t expand its credentials over database driven web applications. Basically, with the help from MySQL library the integration of database in to our project is made hassle- free through these applications.
Characteristics Of MySQL and PHP Programs- If you’ve decided to automate your web site, and are not aware of the know- how, then php mysql development is the solution to your problem. In PHP, the actual coding is easily available and that too for free for the public. Since, by nature PHP is open source, therefore there is a large community of programmers who can always assist each other with code. Thus the system analysts can now use codes or functions that have been already applied, rather than reinventing them. This can dramatically cut down production time.
Why php and mysql web development? – In short, php and mysql web development is flexible, cheaper and community generation oriented. Whether we are an entrepreneur starting a website business or just a website programmer looking for quality website hosting services, it is advisable to gather considerable knowledge about php mysql web development to ensure smooth online launch of products and services.
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The question you should be asking yourself is this:
A. Do I want 1000-3000 PAID targeted clicks per month?
B. Do I want 50,000 FREE targeted clicks per month?
If your answer was A. please leave my site and go to hell.
Search Engine Marketing VS Search Engine Optimization.
Let’s begin with the basic – what is SEM? – Paid inclusion – Traditional Ads – Pay Per Click Advertising
In contrast to pure SEO, these SEM practices offer the advantage of immediacy. If you need to increase your traffic and your visibility right away, and you don’t have a problem with spending a lot of money, this may be the way to go. However your traffic will stop once the campaign stops.
SEO – There is no SEM campaign without a tiny bit of SEO, but this is “light” SEO, simply Google Keyword research tool can do the job (see url, insert a keyword and see how many people Google it every month and if you should advertise for that keyword, URL: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal)
Do you really need to hire someone to click a button for you? No.
SEO is much more constructed then that. We take pride in what we do.
SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic towards your website from search engines via “natural” or un-paid, (“organic”) traffic as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive.
I’m including a Google engine heatmap that shows where people look, and where people click. Note that where the paid ads are is on the right side while the organic begins on the left.
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When choosing the right colors for your website you are to make a very serious decision. You can’t simply say to yourself, here’s a great color let’s do it, there’s so much more into that and you must give it thought.
Web colors are colors used in designing web pages, and the methods for describing and specifying those colors. Authors of web pages have a variety of options available for specifying colors for elements of web documents. Colors may be specified as an RGB triplet in hexadecimal format (a hex triplet); they may also be specified according to their common English names in some cases. Often a color tool or other graphics software is used to generate color values. The first versions of Mosaic and Netscape Navigator used the X11 color names as the basis for their color lists, as both started as X Window System applications.
Web colors have an unambiguous colorimetric definition, sRGB, which relates the chromaticities of a particular phosphor set, a given transfer curve, adaptive whitepoint, and viewing conditions. These have been chosen to be similar to many real-world monitors and viewing conditions, so that even without color management rendering is fairly close to the specified values. However, user agents vary in the fidelity with which they represent the specified colors. More advanced user agents use color management to provide better color fidelity; this is particularly important for Web-to-print applications.
A hex triplet is a six-digit, three-byte hexadecimal number used in HTML, CSS, SVG, and other computing applications, to represent colors. The bytes represent the red, green and blue components of the color. One byte represents a number in the range 00 to FF (in hexadecimal notation), or 0 to 255 in decimal notation. This represents the least (0) to the most (255) intensity of each of the color components. The hex triplet is formed by concatenating three bytes in hexadecimal notation, in the following order:
For example, consider the color where the red/green/blue values are decimal numbers: red=36, green=104, blue=160 (a greyish-blue color). The decimal numbers 36, 104 and 160 are equivalent to the hexadecimal numbers 24, 68 and A0 respectively. The hex triplet is obtained by concatenating the 6 hexadecimal digits together, 2468A0 in this example.
Note that if any one of the three color values is less than 16 (decimal) or 10 (hex), it must be represented with a leading zero so that the triplet always has exactly six digits. For example, the decimal triplet 4, 8, 16 would be represented by the hex digits 04, 08, 10, forming the hex triplet 040810.
The number of colors that can be represented by this system is
An abbreviated, three (hexadecimal) digit form is sometimes used. Expanding this form to the six-digit form is as simple as doubling each digit: 09C becomes 0099CC. This allows each color value to cover its full range from 00 to FF. The three-digit form is described in the CSS specification, not in HTML. As a result, the three digit form in an attribute other than “style” is not interpreted as a valid color in some browsers.
When designing a stylesheet.css, make the right choice and know what the colors that you are choosing actually resemble. I recently stumbled over UrbanOutfitters.com’s website and nearly puked when I saw their design. I once tried to present this yellow over black color to an art directors and her words were “This should be on a Fuel or Oil product and I agree.
Study the colors, see what they resemble, then head to websites like Color Blender (http://www.colorblender.com) and begin sampling your idea.
Color is symbolism. We say someone who is jealous is “Green with envy”. Someone who is sad is said to be “Blue.” When we are angry, we see red.” Colors affect us psychologically. They can stimulate our appetite or suppress it. They can make us happy, excited, angry or sad. Let’s take a look at colors and what they mean to your visitors. Then we’ll discover the different color combinations and how they apply to your Web site.
Warm Colors
Red: Red is one of the most powerful and attention-getting colors. Red symbolizes passion and fire, love and lust. It has been proven to raise blood pressure and cause perspiration. Red reflects energy and can motivate an individual to take action. It can also symbolize war, violence, blood, and aggression.
Pink, however, is the softer side of red. Pink is romantic, calming and feminine.
Orange: Vibrant and warm, orange is associated with autumn, pumpkins and Halloween. It inherits many of the traits of red, but is less passionate. Orange has been known to stimulate the appetite. As a citrus color, it can also symbolize health.
Yellow: Yellow symbolizes sunshine and warmth. It can mean hope, light and energy. On the other hand, it can mean weakness or illness, or symbolize cowardice.
Cool Colors
Green: Green signifies health and growth (vegetation) and wealth (money). Green symbolizes spring, renewal, and fertility. It can also mean jealousy or inexperience.
Blue: Blue is one of the most calming colors and is associated with the sky and the sea. It is considered to be a “safe” color and signifies intelligence, reassurance, and trust. Blue has also been known to be an appetite suppressant and can signify depression and sadness.
Purple: The combination of red and blue, purple is one of the most intriguing colors and symbolizes creativity. Purple is spiritual and mysterious. Deep purple is associated with royalty and richness while
lavender is associated with romance and nostalgia.
Neutral Colors
Black: Black can represent power, elegance, and sophistication, but it can also represent death (Western culture), evil, anger and sadness.
White: White represents cleanliness, purity, and spirituality. It represents life and marriage in Western cultures, but it represents death in Eastern cultures.
Grey: Grey is the combination of black and white. It is a conservative color. Grey can symbolize security, maturity and reliability, but it can also signify gloominess and sadness.
Brown: We like to classify brown as a “special” color. Sometimes brown can be used as a neutral and sometimes as a warm color. Either way, brown represents credibility and stability, the hearth, home and the earth.
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We’ve recently rolled out four new FQL tables, added a new field to a fifth table, and released new features giving users more control over their privacy on Facebook Platform.
New FQL Tables and Features
FQL is a powerful, flexible, and faster way for you to get Facebook data to your applications. We’re always looking for more ways for you to query for the data you need instead of calling the RESTful server. We’ve released some new FQL tables recently and have updated the album table.
privacy: This table returns the user’s privacy settings for a video, note, link, photo, or photo album. See below for more details.
like: This table returns a list of IDs of the users who like a video, note, link, photo, or photo album.
developer: This table returns a list of application IDs for your user ID.
permissions_info: This table returns more descriptive information about an extended permission.
Also, we added the can_upload field to the album FQL table. This lets you check to make sure the user can upload to a given album before you try uploading a photo on the user’s behalf.
Platform Privacy Settings
Users can now set privacy for content they post through your applications and Facebook Connect implementations with the same detailed level of control that they have with Facebook itself. These privacy controls are available in your Publisher integrations and Feed forms.
In addition, you can prompt users to set the privacy for content that differs from their default settings when your application, on behalf of a user:
Publishes directly to the stream with stream.publish.
Uploads videos with video.upload.
Creates new albums with photos.createAlbum (users can now customize the visibility of content beyond friends, friends-of-friends, networks, and everyone).
Users always have control over who their content is shared with via “Posts by Me” in their privacy settings and through the Publisher and Feed forms for specific pieces of content. When you want to display content a user has created, check the privacy for the content by querying the object_id in the privacy FQL table or by calling privacy.get.
By giving users greater control over how they share from your applications we hope they will feel more comfortable sharing a wide variety of content with the audiences of their choice, and begin sharing even more. These controls extend to applications and Connect implementations of all kinds, including desktop applications like Seesmic. In the coming weeks, Seesmic will be adding additional privacy controls to Seesmic Web and Seesmic Dektop.
Stay Informed
Keep checking the Developer Roadmap so you can have advanced notice of what we’re releasing for Facebook Platform. We also publish a weekly article that lists each week’s code check-ins that impact Platform.
We hope you start using these features and we welcome your feedback on the Developer Forum.
Pete, a technical writer in the Facebook Developer Network, wants you to embrace FQL queries.
Read more…
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LinkShare, a leading performance marketing network provider, today announced the LinkShare TweetShop Tool that enables anyone with a Twitter following to monetize their Twitter feeds, and easily turn customized tweets into an effective shopping tool. Generally available to publishers in its network, this innovation further demonstrates the company’s commitment to creating applications that are Easy, Fast and Open – easy-to-use, fast-to-market, and open across channels – and is the latest feature in LinkShare’s Bento Box, a showcase of new tools and applications.
More than 50 million live Twitter accounts exist today with approximately 4.6 million people using Twitter on a daily basis, according to recent research by RJMetrics and Quantcast. These numbers represent a massive demographic with huge market potential that is largely untapped as few companies today have successfully created ways to monetize Twitter feeds.
Additionally, nearly half of all “value hunters” – a new market segment identified in a recent survey by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates – are searching online for the best deals and promotions. Since this growing segment of online shoppers purchase something online once a week or more, they represent a growing consumer base that will be using tools like Twitter to find new products, search for deals, and satiate their everyday retail needs.
“With the holidays around the corner and seasonal online shopping on the rise, the LinkShare TweetShop Tool comes at an opportune time for publishers to share more online and take advantage of increased interest among online shoppers,” said Mark Kirschner, CMO, LinkShare. “In the advent of the Twitter-adoption explosion, this new tool brings a host of new possibilities to our affiliate network that is easy, fun and effective at driving revenue.”
With the LinkShare TweetShop Tool, publishers can easily customize tweets through the user interface which automatically creates a shortened URL that directs an online shopper to the landing page for the recommended object of affection.
Through three easy steps, publishers can turn their Twitter stream into a new revenue channel. Just Pick, Point and Post.
Pick the item to tweet about.
Point out the cool-factor.
Post as an updated tweet without the hassle of having to both find the webpage of that item and shorten the URL to fit into his/her tweet.
In light of the recent FTC rulings regarding full disclosure for endorsements, sponsorships and the terms and conditions that apply to any special offer, LinkShare recommends following common sense guidelines when using its new LinkShare TweetShop Tool, such as those developed by the Performance Marketing Alliance:
Avoid tweeting false or unsubstantiated product claims
Never create a fake/spam twitter account just to post new advertisements
Clearly and conspicuously disclose any connections with the advertiser and/or the affiliate network
Be creative! If it is an ad, it should sound like one, but go beyond a product pitch
Don’t abuse it. Daunted followers will stop following you and this will undermine your credibility you have built up in your online community
To check out the buzz on this new LinkShare TweetShop Tool, hear what industry experts have to say and add to the conversation, search and / or tweet on the following hashtag: #TweetShop.
For consumers interested in using Twitter as a shopping tool, check out and follow the publishers in LinkShare’s network already signed up to use the new tool:
Canadacoupons: @Canadacoupons
Fabulous Savings: @FabulousSavings
MyCoupons: @mycoupons
Simply Best Coupons: @SBCoupons
SurfMyAds (CouponWinner.com & PromotionalCodes.com): @CouponWinner
Upromise: @upromise
ThisNext: @thisnext
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In the past several months I have been asked by many friends and colleagues “Which affiliate networks are good for me to join to”. When the actual question you should be asking is – Who is my audience (e.g. Target Audience). and as an affiliate, how do I market myself better (e.g. Banner placements usage of text links).
What’s an Affiliate Network? An affiliate network acts as an intermediary between publishers (affiliates) and merchant affiliate programs. It allows website publishers to more easily find and participate in affiliate programs which are suitable for their website (and thus generate income from those programs), and allows websites offering affiliate programs (typically online merchants) to reach a larger audience by promoting their affiliate programs to all of the publishers participating in the affiliate network.
The first thing you need to do in your search for an Affiliate Network is simple.
Also very important is their location, where are they located (United States or Europe, demographics of your website has a big role in SEO). and also try to research what other people have to say about them. (I personally only like to hear the bad ones because they play the actual role, these stories might happen to you..)
My first on the top five list is LinkShare Affiliate Network. Just because their network is genuine and stylish. Getting links is so simple and they have such a great network of advertisers. One of my favorite affiliate programs that LinkShare has is iTunes Music store, although it’s 5% commission it is still good. Besides iTunes LinkShare is affiliated with Office Depot, SEPHORA, Enterprise, Walmart, Macys, Delta, 1-800-FLOWERS..
As a well known and trusted online marketing channel for finding new customers, the affiliate marketing industry continues to grow by leaps and bounds. As an advertiser, the question is often not should you have an affiliate marketing program but which partner (or agency) and which technology is right for your business.
Click here to read more about LinkShare and possibly, sign up.
“Making affiliate marketing more productive” Google Affiliate Network connects advertisers and publishers who want to increase sales and drive leads through affiliate marketing.
As an advertiser using Google Affiliate Network, you’ll discover pre-screened publishers who can refer consumer traffic to you. As a publisher, you can market your site to advertisers in the network; If selected to participate in an advertiser’s program, you’ll earn a percent of sales or a referral bounty.
Click here to read more about Google Affiliate Network and possibly, sign up.
CJ also known as “Commission Junction”. CJ in my opinion has been a work in progress. When I first joined CJ (2008) their website looked like it was from before the Internet was invented but they aim for innovation and also, meeting them in the Affiliate Summit of 2009 in New York City has changed my opinion towards their company and aspects a lot. They are great people to work with and besides, their affiliate network talks by itself. They have everyone from Blockbuster to Adidas to eHarmony, Expedia and more. If you’re looking for a wide variety of advertisers and good affiliate template CJ should be a good place to start out.
Commission Junction says “Drive quality results and extend your reach by partnering with affiliate marketing’s most productive network of publishers. Further increase sales by complementing your customized affiliate marketing program with a fully-managed and integrated, comprehensive search engine marketing solution.”
Click here to read more about Commission Junction and possibly, sign up.
Affiliate Network ShareASale which I choose third before anyone else just because of their advertisers but as far for site performance it is laid out poorly and highly confusing. However, money is money. Sign up to their program and stop whining.
There are currently over 2,500 Merchants click to preview plugged in to the ShareASale Network. Each of these merchants has a different type of product that they are selling – and each is ready to commission you on that sale if you bring a customer to them
Click here to read more about ShareASale and possibly, sign up.
Casino Affiliate is PartnerLogic (Casino Affiliate) Every PartnerLogic Affiliate Partner has the ability to earn up to 40% commission every month plus a straight flush of unrivalled Affiliate benefits. Its easy to see why ‘Gambling Online Magazine’ readers voted PartnerLogic the ‘Top Affiliate Program’ of 2004.
Certified on Casino Affiliate Programs (CAP), PartnerLogic continues to show our high status within the industry. Reaching all affiliates on the CAP forum and providing an additional way for affiliates to stay informed when it matters, PartnerLogic truly is the affiliate program who works with all affiliates, supporting them from their first day of sign up. If you’re after the Big Bucks $$$$$ this is where the money is.
Click here to read more about PartnerLogic and possibly, sign up.
Click here to read more about AffiliateFuture and possibly, sign up.
Overview
This guide has been taken from the Guidelines for Apple Online Store Affiliate Publishers
The Apple Online Store is the world’s #1 resource for the purchase of Apple products online. When your company is approved to use an Apple-provided asset such as a web banner or Apple Store web badge to direct your customers to the Apple Online Store, it is important to use those assets correctly as shown in these guidelines.
The Apple banner must be positioned in the advertising area at the top or side of your web page, preferably near content related to the Apple promotion shown on the banner.
Do not use more than one Apple banner.
Do not use multiple Apple banners to create your web page content. Your web page should feature content created by your company.
This example leads with an Apple banner followed by an editorial headline, suggesting that Apple has endorsed or provided the editorial content. It must be clear to readers that the a∑liate is the source of the content.
Do not remove an Apple product photo from an Apple banner and use it alone. Do not rearrange the elements of a banner or create a new banner. Never display only a portion of an Apple banner.
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If you’ve recently upgraded your WordPress platform blog from 2.8.x to 2.9 you might (and most likely) be experiencing issues and bugs with your website or blog platform. Please note that this post is only treating the Facebook Thumbnail bug.
Let’s begin with a tip for the future,
Sometimes upgrading may result in plugins that are a bit behind, and deactivate them, cause errors along the site and might even mess up your whole site platform. As far as I know, blippr does not corporate with FCG in WP 2.9.
One of my major problems with upgrading to WordPress 2.9 was the sharing ability, and the thumbnailing of each shared post to Facebook. This resulted in a discussion board under the topic of “BLOG THUMBNAILS NOT SHOWING!” which is why I originally created this blog post, to help you figure this issue out.
If what’s stated in the picture below, happening to you this is the post for you:
Worry not guys, the issue will be solved within a few minutes. Here is the 5 steps you will need to follow to restore your blog from WordPress 2.9 to 2.8 (or downgrade WordPress version) in order to have those thumbnails appear on Facebook Shares / Digg submissions / StumbleUpon submissions – that is until WordPress resolves the WP 2.9 issues.
Download WordPress 2.8
Back up your database MySQL using phpMyAdmin – if this is Chinese to you don’t hesitate to ask me “Hey, Daniel, how the hell do I back up my database?” because I will help you! (Can give detailed support for any WordPress blog hosted on GoDaddy) but if you want quick instructions without screenshots just sign in to your GoDaddy account, click on Hosting>Manage Account>Databases(tab)>MySQL> Under “action” click on that little pencil and then hit “Backup” (The backup process may take up to 2 hours. The file will be available at the time in the folder listed below.)
Now that you’ve done both basics it’s time to open up your FTP client I use Cyberduck it is one of my favorite Mac FTP clients
Follow these careful steps
>Select the files in the WordPress 2.8 folder that you downloaded earlier, and excluding (do not copy) the wp-content and wp-config (if it’s in the folder, most likely it is not but if you’ve got wp-config-sample unselect that one as well) if you don’t follow these steps this will result with you losing your plugins, themes, so remember, don’t copy wp-config, wp-content, wp-config-sample. Once you’ve got that under control – paste them into your FTP root. Note that when you drag those files a message will pop up and will have you overwrite your WordPress 2.9 files, click accept, don’t be afraid. Now that it’s really happening, go make yourself a cup of coffee and know that in just a few minutes your issue will be resolved.
Note: this might take anywhere between 3 to 9 minutes.
If you are running Meebo Bar and still experiencing issues with “Share this page” or “Drag to Share” ability you will have to follow different steps which is, contacting me.
If your website is running any e-mail marketing campaigns consider to switch to MailChimp, free, and much better then any other e-mail marketing service, awesome templates, fonts, and easy service.
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If you’ve been on the search for a powerful comment box for your blog/website (like I am continuously) you might be amazed by what you’re going to find here.
DISQUS pronounced as “discuss” and no, not from the word “Disgusting”. DISQUS is a service and tool for web comment and discussions. DISQUS comment system can be plugged into any website, blog or application. It makes commenting easier, and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community.
In my previous post “Tweak that comment box” I suggested, and recommended to tweak it up into a Facebook <script> file with a xdreceiver that automatically syncs with your Fan page and as good as that was, while it lasted (2 days) it was not good at all – and you might ask yourself why
Also, and should have been the first, it didn’t have the “comment count” on category.php // index.php and in addition to that you never really knew if people left a comment on your site and where they left it. So by now – we agree that Facebook Comment was not the best idea.
Let me express it with a photo:
Here is by far, the best comment box for your WordPress. Say hello to DISQUS.
What is DISQUS? – A comment system and moderation for your website, track and manage your own comment on the web (regardless where you comment) includes a Facebook Connect + Twitter + many many more features that will stun you. The best thing about this plugin is that it syncs with your old WordPress comment, and will automatically migrate them into the DISQUS plugin. And if you need Support, God, they are the best. I was trying to import some 300 comments into the DISQUS comment plugin and failed, I just submitted a question in the forum and not even an hour later, someone replied to me “Can you forward me a copy of your comments export? WP Admin > Tools > Export (all authors)” not one hour later, all my comments appeared on the site – and showed in the category.php comment counter, index.php comment counter, pretty much – everywhere. DISQUS WordPress plugin seamlessly integrates using the DISQUS API and by syncing with the WordPress comments.
DISQUS for WordPress
DISQUS Features
How to import WordPress comments to DISQUS Comment
Yes, it’s that easy.
How does it look in MySQL?
DISQUS also replaces your back end of WordPress Comments, to a fancy layout that will look like this:
More documentation go to http://disqus.com/docs/wordpress
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Everybody needs feedback, and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than paying a trainer. If you don’t get feedback from your performers and your audience, you’re going to be working in a vacuum.
Sometime’s I just don’t understand Companies.. Let me begin this post with a question. Are you familiar with a “Feedback form”? Of course you are. Incase you are using a Apple machine and your Safari just crashed while reading this post you should be getting something along lines of:
Regardless of what the message might be, you can select to ignore, report.. or relaunch the application. Once you report, Apple gets the feedback and their robots begin to work on these type of errors. Are you familiar with StumbleUpon? Well they have been changing their template for Hmm.. I’d say at least 6 months if not more. Through out the whole time they have a “feedback” button on the middle right screen. Black icon on a white background, you cannot miss it – and so far, they’ve received about 5000 feedbacks out of the 8 million users that they have.
Everybody needs feedback, and it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than paying a trainer. If you don’t get feedback from your performers and your audience, you’re going to be working in a vacuum. You cannot be sensitive, you cannot be vulnerable to criticism.. A good feedback is nice to have, but a bad feedback is the good feedback you want to have, otherwise – what will you be improving when it’s not working right?
By now you can guess how important a feedback is for the development team. I mean, see for yourself StumbleUpon with 8,865,182 registered users get 5000 feedbacks – how powerful are they? Exact same thing with Facebook who have their own Feedback system which is the dev.facebook team.. Same thing with WordPress.com blog, who have their own polls, and their feedback system.
If you’re in the SEO / Social Media business you are probably wishing the best for Bing! Who is another Search Engine who takes feedbacks like it’s their jobs:
But here comes a brand Vevo.com who think they are too good for having a feedback while they are the ones who need a feedback the most. I’ve traveled their site and discovered two major things which I wanted to report and see how my feedback would have been detailed:
Step 1: I’ve searched for a video in Vevo.com directory, keywords: Scatman. I found: Scatman John
Vevo found the right video for me, with a heart that says “0″ right next to it. What the hell is this? Are they trying to be like Facebook and have the “Like it” Heart is too girly. That’s to begin with. (Notice the black and white heart is right underneath Scatman John)
Step 2: I clicked on the Scatman John to view the awesome video which brought me to my breakdown point. It was just an image of Scatman John, there is no video there. Just an image, nothing to click, nothing to view, the site emptied. So like Scatman John VEVO has a lot of broken videos who just appear as an “image” in their database. But, who can you report this too? And god knows how many of these they have.. I’m sure their development team has been doing a really good job because I’ve actually dugg out in the website for about an hour a few emails who I’ve reported this issue (Dec 12th) today is Dec 19th and of course, Scatman John is still a screenshot and not an actual video: See link here to view the VEVO search. (Notice that this will not work for you if you are living outside the US you can read my other post on how to bypass HULU.com and VEVO.com how to watch youtue / hulu / vevo from another country
What were the results? I headed back to Google.com, looked Scatman John and watched it on YouTube joyfully, with a 14,508,225 views no silly heart ratings.
My main point is that even after looking for about an hour for an e-mail address to contact VEVO they still have failed to reply to me, or refer to me to where I can send a regular feedback. So, my hopes are that this will appear in their Google Alerts and they will read this awful post that I’ve written about them and realize, that they can’t play around with feedbacks anymore.
My overall experience with VEVO is – I don’t know. As a video personal I have 65GB of bought material from iTunes, I prefer to watch Music Videos over listening to music anytime. And when you come to my house, it’s actually all I play. I’ve got the iPod Touch just so I can watch these videos all the time, where ever I go. It was a dissapointment to me that VEVO thinks they are too good for feedbacks. And don’t get me wrong, I loved the VEVO idea, and was kind of really happy to check it out at first.
I just discovered the other day that Scatman John died, no, not a recent death. But may he rest in peace. What a legend. If you are sitting down on your chair do stand up stare at the ground while the following video will play it’s sound.
Here’s Scatman John – Everybody Jam on YouTube.
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SEO is the simplest words – Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which details with paid inclusion.
Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.
The truth is that at heart, I am an SEO “alchemist” and when it comes to SEO & Social Media tweaks I’m the one conjuring his own strategies; bringing personal new techniques brought to the forum desks. Enchanting the search engines making them point to a direction which I choose. In this blog I will not be teaching how to do link building but I will disburse free tips, unseasoned tricks as well as the simple guides to help you learn how to optimise your site for search engines, better.
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I’m always on the look for a new plugin and if you’re reading this post that means that you’re looking for some interesting ones as well. Here’s a list of the best WordPress Plugins / WP Plugins you were looking for.
WordPress Toolbar is a unique plugin which will automatically enable a toolbar for all outgoing links from your blog post, similar to stumbleupon and facebook. Often the visitors on your blog clicks one of the outgoing link for more information. However, s/he often forgets to comment back or social bookmark your blog. WordPress toolbar will float on the top of all these outgoing links from your blog post, showing options for either visit back your blog post from where s/he came from, comment back on your blog, social bookmark you blog in one of the famous bookmarking sites and finally an option to leave this toolbar. Support for tinyurl and sociable are added since version 2.1.
This plugin is a result of day to day observations of my wordpress blog stat. I analyzed that 75% of my blog’s visitors were leaving my blog posts by clicking one of the out-going links. I doubt how many of them were coming back to leave a comment or to bookmark/share my blog post on one of the social bookmarking sites. I can say this because, even I too forget to press the browser back button and visit the blog again. Also, when you get 10k+ pageviews and 1 comment, something is wrong!
Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. See it live on our other domain Bloginity.
I tend to like this one much better then the other Contact forms that WordPress has offered me since it’s a organic looking form, nothing too fancy.
Featured Content Gallery creates an automated, fully customizable rotating image gallery anywhere within your WordPress site. Choose your images and display categories, pages or posts with custom overlay text and a thumbnail carousel. Custom options include gallery size, color, style and more. Featured Content Gallery home page: FeaturedContentGallery.com.
This I prefer better then NexGEN gallery for WordPress. Although it’s a bit more techy and you might think ” I’m not going to type these codes for every article I want to feature ” you actually get used to it, and it’s a very simple method. If you’re having problems with the installation of Featured Content Gallery they have a great forum support but mark my words before: You need to add a custom field name “articleimg” and specify the URL img you want the gallery to show. Also “featuredtext” for the short excerpt on the image. The rest of the setting are done from the application. In addition, remember that you need at least 5 listed for the Gallery to begin sliding.
See it live here
Google Sitemap Generator (XML) – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. This is a must for every website.
Breadcrumbs Easily add breadcrumbs to your template. If you’re using one of the supported WordPress frameworks, it’s as easy as enabling the plugin and checking the “Try to add automatically box”, if you’re not using one of those, adding it is as simple as adding one line of code to your template. This a must for every website.
RobotsMeta – There’s no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.
This plugin makes it very easy to:
WP SuperCache – If you’re aiming for speed then this is what you need. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
@Reply – This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.
Link Juice Keeper – Mmmmm.. As you probably know, incoming links play important role in ranking well in Google and other search engines. Therefore you should assure that every incoming link leads to one of pages on your blog. This may be a challenge, because World Wide Web is dynamic and changes every day.
Shoot me an e-mail if you’re having issues with the installation or would like to suggest that I will add anything here.
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If you’re looking to enhance performance on your website’s search engine here is a very easy method that will benefit you in two ways.
If you’re not an AdSense member it’s time you start reading more about how Google can give you the money you’ve been avoiding.
So what is Adsense Search? AdSense for search is a free solution that allows publishers to place a search box on their site and earn revenue from relevant ads on the search results page.
See it in action:
So how do we do this? Easy Peazy.
STEP 1 (Getting the Google Code)
- You will need to go to Google Custom Search http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ and register for an account if you dont already have one. Follow the steps to create a new search engine.
- In the “Look and Feel” tab, you will need to choose the “iframe” option
- Specify a URL in your site where you want the search results to appear: eg http://your_domain_name/search/
- Make sure you specify the advertising be placed on the top and bootom
The Search Box Code and Search Results Code will look like this:
<div id="cse-search-results"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
var googleSearchIframeName = "cse-search-results";
var googleSearchFormName = "cse-search-box";
var googleSearchFrameWidth = 600;
var googleSearchDomain = "www.google.com";
var googleSearchPath = "/cse";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/afsonline/show_afs_search.js"></script>
STEP 2 (Create a Search Page to Display the Google Custom Search Results)
You will need to create a search page for the google search results to be on. Making sure the permalink for the page is the same as you specified above.
- Create a new page named Search via the Pages -> Add New command on the left menu in the Admin panel.
- Edit the post slug if needed to ensure the Permalink is http://your_domain_name/search/
- Click the HTML tab in the post editor.
- Paste the Google Search result code.
- Save and publish the page.
STEP 3 (Modify the searchform.php file)
You will also need to modify the searchform.php file. Replace all the contents of the searchform.php file and paste in the Google Search Box code.
For example your new searchform.php file will look like this:
<form action="http://www.yoururl.com/search/" id="cse-search-box">
<div>
<input type="hidden" name="cx" value="017284621037843979677:6xpazlqjxva" />
<input type="hidden" name="cof" value="FORID:11" />
<input type="hidden" name="ie" value="UTF-8" />
<input type="text" name="q" size="31" />
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
</div>
</form>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&lang=en"></script>
STEP 4 Style the Results Page
The default google custom search results page may be too wide for the themes page if you dont specify the advertising be placed on the top and bootom. To make it fit on the page change value=”FORID:10″ to value=”FORID:11″ in the Google Search Box code. If you need to style the results further you can directly download and manipulate the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) files that control results styling. Refer to the documentation here http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/ … index.html
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In today’s economic climate, data-driven marketing and website decision making is increasingly important. If you have solid Google Analytics skills, more than ever, your talents are needed. But, even if you’re just starting out learning Google Analytics, we have some good news for you.
Since March of 2009, Google has been offering an online course in web analytics techniques and Google Analytics implementation, administration, and analysis tools. The course is offered free of charge to everyone who is interested. In addition, They’re also offering a test you can take to prove you are qualified in Google Analytics — the Google Analytics Individual Qualification — or “IQ| test.
It costs $50 to take the test. Once you pass, you’ll be registered as Google Analytics qualified. You must receive a score of at least 75% to pass, so even if you already consider yourself an expert, be sure to at least review the online course before taking the test.
For more details or to start the course, simply visit this link. There’s a F.A.Q with all the details and a link to the Google Analytics IQ test.
Best of luck! And if you need any help, tips, feel free to contact me!
Daniel.
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There are plugins – and then there are plugins. During the whole of my blogging career I’ve customized a fair amount of plugins, I’ve also cultivated a fair amount of fine head aches that are only found while reading those fine prints of HTML. The core of what I’m trying to say is I did not have that extra £ £ £ to hire a coder. I spent a large part of the day after sundown and before sunrise, impartially trying to figure out why things are not working the way you want them to.
It’s safe to say I had a can of worms in my hand, but I always tried to give it my old college try. I told my father, “I’m now an entrepreneur.” Because I hear that’s what you’re called when don’t have an actual job. I’ve commit oneself to open my own domain where I will tell you exactly why you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing on your site. I will go into detail and illustrate what you’re ought to do. I made this short list of the must-have WordPress plugins for every WordPress site. These are the plugins I apply even before setting up a FeedBurner.
If I had someone teaching me why it was better to use Flash then HTML when I first started.. I would have rescued approximately a year that’s gone to waste, let’s not even mention the stress and effort spent. There are certain things you must know about choosing the theme. Use organic, anatomical, basic and most of all natural theme. Not the ones that look cool, and slide up and down when you move your scroll bar.
Sitemap Generator by Dagon Design – Everyone should have this plugin. A site map is a list of pages of web sites accessible to crawlers, spiders, monkeys, or whatever you want to call them. Think about it as your Family Tree. But in this case, it’s your “Family Forest”. (Double click to view image)
Smart 404 – Michael Tyson – You never ever wish to hand your readers a nice 404. Instead of quickly giving up and moving to the next site, this plugin redirects them to the homepage. No matter how cool your 404 image is, or if you think to yourself “Hey, this is will go so viral on SU !!” <- That’s a bold No.
Theme Test Drive – by Vladimir Prelovac – Do you really need a reason why? Here’s a reason: I don’t want to see you test how your new theme might look. (Only logged admins will be able to see the new look, this way, you could tweak and code what ever you want and only when you’re ready – Activate!)
SEO Friendly Images – yet another fabulous plugin by Vladimir Prelovac. If you’re looking to have an entertainment blog, or a fashion blog or actually, any blog with images this will draw you a lot of traffic on the long run. You need to make sure that you do add a description to your images, and do title them for what they are. For example let’s say you’re about to upload a this image below – but it’s titled: n1507600716_8844.jpg don’t leave it like that, that’s just wrong! What you want to do is just the title to “Fat cat” and add a description again, “White cat, fat cat”.
User Locker – Daniel FrużyÅ„ski – Not much into it. This is a brutal way of dealing with site hackers. Simple, 5 times wrong pw and you’re account gets locked.
FeedBurner – You must feed your readers. Must.
Blogroll NoFollow – James Morris – This plugin will help you maintain your Page rank. It adds the nofollow value to the rel attribute of a all blogroll links. If you’re not sure what “nofollow” is, read article here.
Platinum SEO Pack by Rajesh – Certain themes are not fully supported by this plugin which is why I chose to list it last. This plugin is to create homepage title, description, title tags and so on. I’ve had a few issues using this plugin. It resulted by me re-coding it and making it better so if you’re interested let me know and I will instruct you. Make sure that ONLY your header gets the title you chose and not every article you’ve posted.
SEO Title Tag – You don’t really need a plugin for this, you can manual it by choosing custom structure and type %postname% this way, you will get a permalink with the post names, and that will help search engines find your posts as well as title tags.
There are more plugins that I can recommend using like Link Juice Keeper, User Photo. If you’ve got any issues installing any of the plugins, or questions regarding custom coding feel free to shoot me an eMail! and please don’t forget to burn my Feed :)
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Daniel Haim is the Editor-in-Chief and Founder of Bloginity Networks. An entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word, he began learning code and writing computer software at the tender age of 14. Three years later he moved to America where in late 2008 he founded the Bloginity Networks and its platform as he honed his SEO and programming skills. In London, UK (2008) he had the opportunity to work with the top SEO professionals within the industry and picked up most of the strategies that led to the surge of engaged users at Bloginity.com. read more.
