Tag Archives: Wordpress

Increase Your Blog Traffic and Engagement with CommentLuv

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I have been using the ComLuv plugin for WordPress on my site and love it, no pun intended. You may think at first glance that it is a comment plugin to replace another plugin you already use but that is not the case. CommentLuv, as it is called, does not displace your current commenting system. It merely enhances it.

What is CommentLuv and How Does it Work?
First you install the plugin on your own blog, see below. Then you become a member, registration is free, and include your blog in their system. Become a member here. Now when you leave a comment on a blog that also has CommentLuv enabled you will obtain a link back to your website. Typically when you leave a comment on someones website you either cannot leave a link back to your site or the link is tied to your user name. You more than likely would like a return link so others will find your blog as well. Enter CommentLuv.

comment luv choose post

When you leave a comment you will then see a drop down list of the most recent posts from your website.

You can choose which one you would like to have a link back to.



commentluv chosen postTherefore when someone reads your comment they see the title of your article, that you choose, and it is hyper-linked back to your site. This is much better than the default commenting system that either strips links or links them from your name. It is also a good system for webmasters because the individual leaving the link has to first register at CommentLuv and can only choose one of their most recent blog posts as opposed to linking to some other site. It is a win-win plugin. There are over 190,000 downloads to date.

Install CommentLuv
commentluv enabledHere is a link to the CommentLuv new version of the plugin for WordPress 2.92 and above get CommentLuv 2.80b here. For versions up to WordPress 2.92 see the WordPress.org CommentLuv page here.

CommentLuv Author
The CommentLuv author is an extremely nice individual that works very hard to keep his plugin community happy. I have found Andy Bailey to be very humble and gracious. You can follow the latest CommentLuv information on twitter here @commentluv. Give the plugin a try.

New WordPress Stats

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WordPress announced two new statistic features in the Site Stats. Here is the official WordPress post.


Home Page Stats
You may not have realized but the statistics did not show your home page in the past. In other words the front page of your site was not listed in the statistics. Therefore you would not know, other than through a statistics provider such as Google analytics, how your home page performed.

Posts On Which Day
If you host your blog on WordPress.com you will also, as you move your mouse on the statistics, see which posts were created on each day. A nice feature, however you can obviously also find this by simply looking within the posts which are sorted by date.

WordPress Comment System Intense Debate

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intense_debate_logo
Blog Post Comments
I have long searched for a commenting system for my site. There are a couple popular commenting systems that I will not mention by name but have been around for a while. None of them seem to fit what I was looking for. Then I came across a system by intense debate. Not only does it have a nice clean, neat interface on the blog itself, but the feature list is quite impressive. The creators seem to have thought about the needs of the users of the system as well as the administrator. It was very simple to install and basically set itself up. As a disclaimer I need to say I do not know anyone at this company nor did they ask me to try their product, I merely ran across it and gave it a try.

I seem to have a disease when it comes to new plug-ins for WordPress or new software. Ever since the days of downloading shareware via modem and a BBS trying everything under the sun, installing so much that I constantly had to reinstall my operating system, I have no problem trying something new.

intense_debate_wordpress_syncComment Syncing
One of the first things to note, as a feature, is that your comments are uploaded into their system. However, not to worry, as there is always a sync between their system and yours in case you ever want to deinstall. That of course was the first hurdle I had to come over because I was not sure if I was going to keep it. By merely installing the sync feature they calmed my fears and I gave it a try. Brilliant customer acquisition feature on their part.

Comment Threading
I personally enjoy the comments and the dialogue around each post. However sometimes when you have 10, 20 or 100 comments it becomes difficult to follow the conversation. This is probably due to the fact that there are actually many conversations within the comments. While people reply to others comments, some people choose to post new questions or comments. This system allows for comment threading so that you or others can reply to one particular comment. Instead of the reply being added to the bottom of the list it is indented along with the comment it replied to.

User Profiles
Here is something I did not think about, and that is the relationship between the various commenters on your site. Most of those who maintain a blog think of themselves as the one individual that everyone is having a conversation with. A one to many relationship. However intense debate has implemented commenter profiles so the readers can learn about one another. Therefore you have a many to many relationship as readers can learn about each other and comment to each other. While users have always been able to comment to each other, this allows them to know more about one another.

Login
comments_facebook_twitter_openid
No one, myself included, wants to create a new ID or account at every blog they read and comment on. There is the ability for you to login via Facebook, Twitter, or open ID. Now your users can login and comment on your site with an ID they actually created elsewhere and do not have to create a unique one for your site. This helps because now everyone has an instant profile and the comments among users becomes more likely.

Admin Features
There are many administrative features, if you are the site owner, to make your life much easier. One that I think is excellent is the reply-by-email. Therefore you can respond to and moderate comments via email without having to log into the site.

There are many other administrative features, take a look at what they have the offer and try out the system by posting comments to this post if you like.

Conclusion
There are many reasons to give the system a try, I suggest you take a look at intense debate and what they have to offer. I am very glad to consider my search for a worthy commenting system to be done. Whenever you use a service or a product that you do not think is just right, it is always in the back of your mind, however I am glad to put this one to bed.

Coupon Page for Savings

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I added a Coupon and Promo Code page today. I only put coupons that I found and are helpful, such as non-expiring GoDaddy coupons (domains and hosting), Petco coupons (pet products) and Finishline coupons (shoes and athletic gear), from big brands.

However what is most interesting to me is that I created the main Coupons page the parent page in wordpress. Then I made pages under the parent page, if you look at the page directory on the side of the site you will see the parent page and child pages are indented. The child pages are currently GoDaddy Coupons, Petco Coupons and Finish Line Coupons.

Therefore I have created a subgroup of pages under Coupons and most importantly I applied a new template to these pages so they look different than the rest. Take a look at my home page then look at a coupon page and you will see there is alot less in the sidebar, just a page menu and ads. I wanted to keep it simple and direct.

Adding a different template to wordpress pages is simple and I will discuss in an instructional article next.

Top 10 WordPress Plugins You Must Have

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Here are my Top 10 WordPress plugins if I were to start a new WordPress blog (and I do often) here are the plugins I would immediately upload and activate before all else.




Search Engines & Optimization
Your site needs to be listed in search engines and optimized to be found.

  • 1. Google XML Sitemaps : A sitemap will be generated for you and will work with Google, Google is the largest of all the search engines so you need to be indexed properly before you can be found.
  • 2. All in One SEO Pack : Once your pages are indexed in Google, and other search engines, you need to be sure to have Title, Description, and Keywords for your site. Just as important is the ability to easily change the Title, Description, and Keywords for every post you make as the topic and discussion is different it is best to have the Title, Description and Keywords match the content. This plugin provides all that and more as you can modify the above when you post or write a page.




Visitor Retention
Make sure your visitors continue to receive your stories after they visited your site and hopefully return.

  • 3. Add to Any Subscribe Button : Make it simple for visitors to easily add your feed to their favorite reader and receive your posts, hopefully returning as well.




Visitor Acquisition – Virally
Once you have visitors, the best reference is a friend so have your visitors tell others through services such as Digg and other social bookmarking/sharing services. You cannot beat referrals, they are strong and free.

  • 4. diggZ-Et : Adds a Digg button to every post, a simple click and submit from a visitor and you are referenced in Digg, finding a new audience and traffic.
  • 5. Add to Any : Share/Save/Bookmark Button or Sociable : As there are many different sharing and social bookmarking services, you want to easily be able to offer the visitors preferred provider, such as Reddit Del.icio.us and others, with a click of a button. These two, pick your preference, provide them all.




No Spam
Comment spam is no fun when you get 100 a day, bots typically spam your site by leaving comments and it is best to block them or make them more easily identifiable then to allow them all and clean it up yourself.

  • 6. Akismet : An excellent tool for blocking and highlighting spam comments for you.
  • 7. reCAPTCHA : Stop bots from leaving comments by providing a confirmation code that can only be read by human eyes, I am sure you have see the word on a background which is difficult but possible to decifer.




Track Progress
Statistics help you to determine the traffic from your site, where they come from and where they go.

  • 8.Google Analytics for WordPress : Google Analytics is a free, and very impressive, statistics package. Easily add the tracking code to your pages with this plugin and track your progress.




Administrative
Here are some plugins to make the administration of your blog easier.

  • 9. WordPress Automatic Upgrade : Every now and then you need to upgrade WordPress to the latest version, with this plugin you can do so by clicking to upgrade and it is taken care of for you, even backing up your site before the upgrade.
  • 10. WP Super Cache : Just in case you site becomes popular, or even on the more reasonably priced web hosting plans they may turn off your site if too much traffic comes and your site is putting too much of a load on the web server, with this plugin a static page is rendered and served up thereby saving server load.

These are incredibly easy to install, just download from the link above, unzip, upload to your /wp-content/plugins directory the entire plugin folder and activate from your plugin menu option within the WordPress admin.

Hope these help, and let me know if you have others you would prefer in your top 10.



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Step 2 Setup the Site

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Once you have your site hosting and domain name you need to setup wordpress by downloading it, then uploading it to your site and installing.

First – Download WordPress

First you will download the free WordPress code and save it on your computer desktop.

Go to the WordPress site here and click to download the .zip file.

Second – Install Yourself or Obtain Help

To install yourself you will need to first get a file transfer program in order to transfer the files to your webhost you will need a file transfer program (called an FTP program).

I use CyberDuck for the mac – Cyberduck is found here or FileZilla for Windows – FileZilla is found here.

To have the site setup for you, I recommend you use a freelance site to have it installed for you. You simply post a request such as “install wordpress”, receive bids, choose one, escrow payment and release payment once your site has been successfully installed.

I recommend Scriptlance here or oDesk here, if you want someone else to install.

If you decided to host at HostMonster they will send you the FTP information to enter into the FTP program. Here are the steps to install.

Third – Copy WordPress Files

After you have downloaded and installed one of the above ftp programs you will enter in the host name, which is your domain name such as longest.com , your User name and Password which are supplied by HostMonster. See the image below.


ftp program
Click the Connect button and you will be connected to the server. Next you will see the screen below.

ftp program view
The left side will show the files on your desktop computer and the right side will show the files on your server. You will navigate on the right side to the /httpdocs/ directory. On the left hand side you will find the WordPress files after you unzipped the file you downloaded. This image shows all the file and directory names.

wpinstall_3.jpg

You then highlight the files on the left and drag and drop them on the right. You will see the status in the bottom frame of the program while the files are uploaded.

Fourth – Create Database

Login to your HostMonster account and choose the database icon to create a database, user name and then associate the user name with the database. Once logged in click this icon wpinstall_create_db_1.jpg

Next you will create a database name, pick any name you like, see below:


wpinstall_create_db_2.jpg
Next you create a user name, pick any name you like, then use the drop down under User to choose the user name you just created and use the drop down under Database to choose the database you just created. See screenshot below.

wpinstall_create_db_3.jpg
Now there is only one remaining step.

Fifth – Modify One File and Done

Next you open up the file named wp-config-sample.php, but you will need to rename it to wp-config.php when done. There are instructions included with the WordPress download – the readme file. So either read that file or simply add the database name, user name and password you just created above in the wp-config file and re-upload using the ftp program. Next go to your domain name and include /wp-admin/install.php, for example http://www.domain.com/wp-admin/install.php. You will be asked for a title for the blog, your email and then receive a login and password. That is it, you are up and running!

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Find all Steps Here to walk you through each step of setting up a money making site.
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Adding Keywords and Description to a WordPress Template

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Description and keywords are important tags for your website. Search engines look at both of these tags as one of the many ways in which to determine how to rank your sites relevance.

In the WordPress installations and themes, the keyword and description code is not in the template. The code is simple to copy and paste and looks like this:

< meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword, keyword, keyword” />
< meta name="description" content="description of the site" />

To determine if the template you are using in WordPress has these tags or not, follow these steps:

  • Login to your WordPress admin
  • Choose the Presentation menu item
  • Choose the Theme Editor menu item
  • on the right hand menu choose the header or sometimes header.php

Now you scroll down through the code to determine if the items above are present. If not, you then place them between the < head> and < /head> tags. To make it easier you may paste them just above the tag.

The keywords should be keywords that you would like your site found under. A tool to help uncover keywords is Wordtracker (get a Free Trial here). Add you keywords separated by a comma.

Next write a concise site description also using keywords.

It is that simple.

Free Blogs

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Two excellent sites providing free blogs are WordPress.com and Blogger.com. Both sites are quick and easy to sign up to. You may create as many blogs are you like within each account.

These have come a long way from previous free blog services. WordPress allows you to choose from many different layouts and choose what they call widgets to provide various other features on the blog. Blogger allows you to add various sections and move them around on the layout. Each one provides drag and drop abilities.

Find WordPress.com here to sign up.
Find Blogger.com here to sign up.