Home Office Organization–21st Century Style

Useful WordPress Plugins, Part I

Most of us who blog seriously use WordPress software, own our URLs and pay for private hosting. It’s the most secure and flexible solution for a blog. WordPress has its limits, however, and lots of developers solve this problem by creating a plugin to perform a specific function, like allowing people to subscribe to comments.

In this article I review the following plugins I’ve recently found at MaxBlogPress.com:

• Different Posts Per Page
• MaxBlogPress DealDotCom Widget
• BlogRush Click Maximizer
• MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup

These plugins require free registration and a password to download them. You will also see some one-time offers when you register your first plugin. Since blogging is a business for me, I find the offers, in the form of an upsell, very interesting. The marketing techniques that go along with the plugin registrations are a lesson to behold. Some may find the offers a bother, but as students of internet business and marketing, as well as business owners and operators, I think we should all study the process when we sign up to download one of these plugins.

You will only see the one-time offers once when you register your first plugin, no matter which one it is. If you don’t take advantage of the offer or offers then, you won’t see them again when you register any subsequent plugins. These are truly one-time offers!

How to Install These Plugins

There is a little different procedure for installing and implementing these plugins than the ones you get from WordPress.org. Here’s how to do it:

1. Download the plugin, unzip it and upload it to your server into the wp-content/plugins folder using your FTP program
2. In the WordPress administration panel, click on plugins, locate the plugin and activate it
3. Click on settings in the admin panel (options in older versions of WordPress)
4. Click on the newly activated plugin and register it (enter your name and email address)
5. Once registered, set the plugin’s options and save them
6. If the plugin is a widget, go to design and add the widget to the sidebar or where ever you want it to display on your blog
7. You’re done!

Different Posts Per Page

One thing I find cumbersome about WordPress is you can set the number of posts per page, but it’s static across all your pages, categories and archives. If you set 5 posts per page, you’ll have 5 posts on your main or home blog page, 5 listed per page for each category and 5 per archive page (usually archives are stored by month and year).

What if you want 3 posts on your home page but 10 listed on each category page and maybe 30 on each archive page? You can’t do it without a plugin. The plugin that does this easily and seamlessly is Different Posts per Page. You can download it at the following link:

Different Posts per Page

This plugin lets you put different numbers of posts on each page, including each category page. It’s amazing to have total control over this function. It gives you the flexibility to easily display each part of your blog the way you want it displayed.

If you click around to the different pages on this blog you’ll see I have 3 posts on the home page, up to 20 on each category page, up to 20 on each archive page, and 5 posts will be displayed through my RSS feed.

You can set a different number of pages for each category. This is handy for grouping notes together or perhaps keeping all posts together that form a course of study. I plan to use that benefit on my Thirty Day Challenge blog.

The training category on that blog needs to be split up into years (2007 & 2008), and all notes from training for each year need to stay together in ascending chronological order. Yes, you read that right. You can set the order on each page to ascending or descending. Blogs default to descending order only, which makes sense on the home page, but not on pages where a topic starts at the bottom and ends at the top of the page. When you want to organize a category from day 1 to day 30, you want the page to start at day 1, and this plugin allows you to sort posts in ascending order!

I absolutely love this plugin and all the flexibility it gives me.

MaxBlogPress DealDotCom Widget

If your blog is an ecommerce blog, you can join the affiliate program and display the DealDotCom deal of the day using this widget.

What is DealDotCom? I’m glad you asked. DealDotCom is a sales website that sells only one, single product each day for a very low price, a real steal of a deal. A product is available for one day and the price is usually insanely low compared to its regular price. There is a limited amount of the product for sale each day, and it’s available until midnight or until it sells out. Once it sells out there won’t be any more available.

The DealDotCom commission structure is generous. Affiliates earn 35% on direct sales from their widgets and 15% on the second tier. That means if someone goes to the DealDotCom site and joins the affiliate program through your widget, you earn 15% on the sales through their widget. You also earn a commission if a buyer buys anything again in the future from DealDotCom, no matter how they return to the site.

Here’s the link to the MaxBlogPress DealDotCom Widget:

MaxBlogPress DealDotCom Widget

I have this widget installed on this blog in the sidebar and on a couple of my other blogs as well. The thing I like about the MaxBlogPress widget over the DealDotCom widget is you can adjust the width it displays in pixels. The other widget isn’t adjustable, hung over the edges of my sidebars and was kind of tacky-looking compared to my blog themes.

If you want to offer useful software, ebooks and training courses for insanely low prices to your readers, this widget is the one to have.

BlogRush Click Maximizer

If you’re a member of BlogRush you know that sometimes the post titles that show up in the widget are way off-topic to the category your widget is supposed to contain. As bloggers we also maintain the right to publish an off-topic post we want our regular readers to see. We may not want that post syndicated all over the blogosphere, however.

To make sure only your best posts are syndicated through BlogRush, BlogRush Click Maximizer is the tool to use. When you write a post you have the option of including that post in your BlogRush feed and you can change the post title to something short and catchy so it will fit in the widget. Here is the download link:

BlogRush Click Maximizer

The widget is located on the write page in the WordPress administration panel and you set it when you compose or edit a post. If you don’t tick the “include this post in BlogRush feed” box, it won’t be syndicated. Since you have to turn it on, you control which posts are syndicated. The rest aren’t syndicated.

BlogRush has an automatic filter you can set on your account page, but the filter has to be specific enough to not filter out too many of your posts. You run the risk of syndicating something you don’t want on the widget or filtering out something you do want on the widget. I don’t like hit-and-miss when it comes to building traffic to my blogs and this plugin lets me make sure I only put highly targeted posts out on the blogosphere.

If you’re a member of BlogRush, this plugin is necessary to increase traffic through the widget to your blog.

MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup

Ordinarily I hate popups, all popups. But there are a few places where they are beneficial to the reader. They can be used to remind a visitor to register for an event, direct them to special offers, highlight an update, subscribe to your RSS feed or a newsletter or join an email list. Popups are also useful when they are specific to a particular page or post, so you’re not seeing random ads popping up all over the place.

This widget allows you to customize popups for your site. The annoyance factor is easily eliminated by only allowing the popup to appear to any visitor on a single visit and then they will never see that popup again. If they’re interested in what was offered in the popup and you want it available, they will be more willing to look around your site to find the update or subscribe button or email signup box. But they don’t have to see a popup ever time they visit your site.

Honestly, if I saw a popup every time I visited a site, I would hit the unsubscribe button so fast it would make your head spin. This plugin allows you to use popups without the annoyance of popups.

I’m not currently using this plugin, but I have some ideas and future plans where it might be useful to something specific. If used wisely, I believe this plugin can be used to the benefit of your readers and you. You can download it here:

MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup

I’ll be writing about some more useful plugins in future posts. I hope you’ll give these a try. I find the first three very handy. When I try the unblockable popup plugin I’ll post an update about it.

Here are the plugin links again:

• Different Posts Per Page
• MaxBlogPress DealDotCom Widget
• BlogRush Click Maximizer
• MaxBlogPress Unblockable Popup

When you get to the download page, you can go ahead and download all the plugins at once or you can download them as you need them. You will see the one-time offers when you register your first plugin only. After that you will never see those one-time offers again. The marketing strategy is really interesting and I hope you’ll study it closely and go through the whole process to see how it’s done. It may be something you want to use in the future when you launch a product of your own.

Blog Catalog

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10 Blog Traffic Tips

In every bloggers life comes a special day - the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader - you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry - it’’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important - it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have - your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about Blog Mastermind click this link:

www.BlogMastermind.com

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Cost-Cutting in Your Small Business

I just read a great article on the Energy Boomer blog about ways to cut costs with the high price of gasoline. It’s only going to get worse this summer, so implementing fuel-saving measures is getting to be critical. I know I’m doing everything I can think of to cut down on the number of trips I make and keep my car performing at it’s peak to use fuel more efficiently.

Here’s the link to the article: 7 Ways Business Folks Can Cope With High Fuel Prices

It seems things that help the environment save us money.

I hope you’ll hop over and have a read.

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