How to Make Money Online Fast » wordpress

Friendly Affiliate Links with WordPress

Jamie Faidley — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:45:25 +0000

I run several different affiliate sites, and one program that I think is a must have is MBP Ninja Affiliate. This program allows you to easily change your affiliate links to something more friendly. In fact, it doesn't even have to be an affiliate link at all as it can convert anything to something else of your choosing. Instead of having my twitter link be twitter.com/jamiefaidley, I can make it jamiefaidley.com/twitter.

While the twitter address isn't tough to remember, if you are a Commission Junction affiliate you know that the links are random letters thrown together. There is no way that I can remember what my Godaddy affiliate link is, but I know that sending people to jamiefaidley.com/godaddy is simple and maintains tracking.

MBP Ninja Affiliate does more than just help you with friendly links, it can also find keywords associated with that link and convert them. So let's say you are promoting hosting companies. In each of your posts that have the text "cheap hosting" you can convert that to a link to HostGator (and see, it's my nice and pretty jamiefaidley.com/hostgator link that it sends you to!)

Friendly affiliate links also help if you have additional writers. If they are supposed to be including text link ads in their work, having them us something simpler will lower the risk of mistakes being made. Any mistakes in the URL would lead to your visitor not being tracked to you and you would miss the chance to make any money off of the sales that you generated.

Must Have WordPress Plugins

Jamie Faidley — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:45:06 +0000

Each team I create a new site that uses WordPress, I use plenty of different plugins depending on the needs of the individual site. However, there are six that I use every single time, and I think you should too. These are the must have plugins for running any WordPress site:

1. Akismet - You need to check your spam comments and if you run a popular site, you can't manage it all yourself. This plugin will check your comments with the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not.

2. All in One SEO Pack - The must have if you want to rank highly in google. This allows you to customize your titles, descriptions, and tags in posts. Plus you can noindex categories, tags, and archives and customize your title and description for your homepage, plus titles on other automatically generated pages.

3. Google XML Sitemaps - Automatically generates a sitemap of all your posts and pages that is supported by the major search engines.

4. SEO Slugs - This shortens up your URLs by removing common words like "a", "the", and in" from the permalink.

5. WordPress Database Backup - You don't want to lose all of the posts you worked so hard to create do you?

6. WP Super Cache - Saves your server resources in case your site gets hit hard with a ton of traffic.

Robots.txt for WordPress

Jamie Faidley — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 15:28:47 +0000

For those of you who do not know what a robots.txt file does, it basically tells the robots which pages on your site they can and can not crawl. This is important because there are certain things you do not want to show up in the index, like if a folder contains duplicate content, or it's a private membership site then you don't want google giving away information for free that you are charging people for. Here is the current edition of the robots.txt file I use for all of my sites, both to give the search engine robots access to my sitemap and also to block them from directories I don't want them having access to:

Sitemap: http://www.jamiefaidley.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin

Disallow: /wp-admin

Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins

Disallow: /wp-content/themes

Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Sitemap: http://www.jamiefaidley.com/sitemap.xml
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?

How to Set Up Blogging Content Automatically

Jamie Faidley — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:32:13 +0000

Want to set up your own automated blog? Check out Auto Blog System X!

The goal of everyone who starts a blog is to find a niche market that they are really interested in, provide quality content that people enjoy, create a huge following of these people, and then make money via advertising and sales conversions. Of course, this takes quite a bit of time and you might not have hours every single day to spend working on content. If you don't provide a constant stream of quality updates to your blog though, people will stop coming back to see if you have published something new. Well have no fear because I've done a little work to see what tools and options are out there to help you keep your readers interested without putting in as much work and effort.

Embedded RSS Feeds

If you want automatically updated blog content without having to write it yourself, then set up an embedded RSS feed from someone else's site. The easiest way I have found to do this is to rely on Google's AJAX Feed API. It's simple to set up as you can enter a keyword or name of a site that you want and hit generate code. I should note that you do not want to rely entirely on embedded RSS feeds for your information, because why wouldn't the reader just head over to that site to check the new content instead?

News Related Content

Not only does Google do RSS feeds, but you can also add news-related content to your site that covers your niche. Head over to the News bar wizard to cover the expressions that your site deals with. This allows you to cover a lot of different websites with the topic that you are intersted in, rather than just a single website and listing everything they put up like with the RSS feeds.

Free Article Directories

If you are struggling to think up a topic to write about and want to just use something that someone else has already published then check out the free article directories on the web. I like using EzineArticles since it has quite a few different topics. Not all of the articles are of a high quality, so you have to search through them a little bit before you find something that is worth posting and you have to remember to keep the authors byline included so they get a little link love. Articlesbase is another free article directory that I use, and there are countless others out there if you want to do your homework.

21 Best WordPress Plugins

Jamie Faidley — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:22:04 +0000

I know there are all kinds of best of lists for WordPress plugins, but I figured I would put together my own. I can vouch for all of these and use them personally on every WordPress blog that I create. So let's get down to it:

Advertising

1. Ad Rotator - I like to use big banners, but in order to give each sponsor love I rotate through them. This is a free, simple plugin that just reads from a text file.

2. Stripe Ads - A great place to put a text link advertisement is on top of your site. This is the first place a new visitor will look when they come to your site, so it's a great way to sell them on something you beleive in!

3. Ninja Affiliate - Convert keywords to outgoing links for products that you are affiliated with!

Spam Protection

4. Askimet - The standard is as good as anything else I've found out there. I feel like it works good enough so that I don't even really have anything else.

SEO

5. All-in-One SEO Pack - Pretty much what the name says. If you want to get as much search engine exposure as possible you need this plugin.

6. Google News Sitemap Generator - If you have a site listed in google news, then this is a great way to make sure that all of your stories get indexed quickly.

7. Google XML Generator - This works great if you have webmaster tools through google and you want to keep your XML file up to date.

8. No Follow Plugin - This gives you the option when creating a link to make it no follow, which you should do if you don't "trust" the site you are linking to, or if you are getting paid to link there.

9. SEO Slugs - Keeps your URLS shorter and sweeter.

10. SEO Friendly Images - Automatically adds title and alt tags to the pictures that you post.

Comments

11. Comment Relish - A great way to engage the visitors to your blog who end up leaving a comment. This sends them an email if they are a first-time poster, a great way to thank them and tell them about the different options to subscribe to your blog.

12. Subscribe to Comments - Encourages discussion by allowing commenters to be notified via email of any further comments relating to the post.

RSS

13. Feedsmith - Redirects all of your feeds to your Feedburner account.

14. Feed Statistics - Tells you who is reading your blog via RSS and what they are reading.

15. RSS Atom Avatar - Adds an image and favicon to your RSS feeds.

16. RSS Footer - Adds a line of text to the bottom of your RSS feed. Great for getting the anchor text you want if scrapers are stealing your content, advertisements, or a copyright notice.

17. More Feeds - Use this plugin if you want your readers to be able to subscribe to specific categories. Applicable for large blogs that have a large amount of content and specific categories.

Misc

18. WP Super Cache - Simply put, this makes your Word Press blog faster.

19. Get the Image - If you like to post pictures with each post, this will grab the image so you can post a thumbnail on your archive, category, or home page.

20. Database Backup - You are backing up your data right?

21. WordTwit - Sends out a tweet every time you update your blog.

WordPress Comment Hacks & Plugins

Jamie Faidley — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:14:26 +0000

One of the things I love about having a blog over a traditional website is the feedback that you can receive via comments. I get comments on my blogs from readers on how helpful they have found an article, if I've made a mistake, or about just anything else. Yes, there are a few bad apples out there who want to bash you any chance they can get, but engagement with your readers is worth the slight pains the few can cause.

I've talked about a few tricks I use in the how to get more comments post, but it does help to optimally set your site up to increase discussion. Let's take a look at a few helpful hacks and plugins I've used in the past.

Comment Link

I often see the plain "No Comments" text at the bottom of posts, but what if instead you put "No Comments yet, but what are your thoughts on this article?" If you ask your readers their opinion then they are more likely to give it to you. This is an easy fix. Open up your index.php template and search for the comments_popup_link() and change the value from the one above to something more engaging.

Thank Your First Time Commentors

A great way to get people to keep doing something is to praise them, so how about after they finally post their thoughts on one of your articles you redirect them to a page that thanks the reader for taking the time to comment on your post. For this you can use the comment redirect plugin, or if you just want to send an email instead of a redirect us the comment relish plugin. Both of these will only effect first time commentors, so you won't be bugging your every day readers.

Keep the Conversation Going

A great way to keep the conversation going is to display the most recent comments first. This way the user doesn't have to scroll down to the bottom of a long list to see if there are any updates. Also, if you have a long lasting post recent comments can be valuable to let a new reader know the post is still valid.

Once people actually start discussing something on your blog, you will want to keep them in the conversation and a great way to do that is with the subscribe to comments plugin. This plugin will send the commentor an email when there is an update to the comments, getting them to come back and keep the conversation alive.

Also, by allowing readers to subscribe to your comments via an RSS feed you can help them stay up to date on what others are saying.

I also like to style the author comments, so people know when I'm responding to comments or have anything extra I would like to add.

Are there any other hacks or plugins you use to increase reader comments? If so I would love to hear about them.

How to Start a Blog

Jamie Faidley — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:57:19 +0000

A question I am often asked by my friends is "how can I start a blog?" Most of the time they either hate their jobs or want to earn a little extra money and they have seen from my experiences that making money online by blogging offers a great lifestyle with plenty of personal freedom. Of course, just putting up a site and writing a post every now and then isn't going to open up the flood gates so cash can start pouring in, so I thought I would create a complete series for people to use as a guide on how to start a blog, and then how to monetize the site after traffic picks up.

Before Your First Post

The first thing you have to do when starting you blog is to decide what you want to write about. You need to find a niche that you are passionate about because you are going to be writing about the topic so frequently. This is a subject area that you are going to have to read a lot about and cover in-depth so focus on something you already enjoy doing. To help you get started, make a list of areas you are interested in and ask your friends to make a list of your interests. A mistake too many people make is to try and start blogging about something they think will make them money but have no interest in. These blogs die out quickly as the owner loses interest.

The next thing you are going to want to do is pick a domain name for your site over at GoDaddy. Be creative, but think short and sweet. You want your name to be brandable and not "thebestblogonnflfootballplayers.com." Who is going to remember that? By the way, there are plenty of free blog hosts out there, but you definitely want to spend the few dollars and get one you host yourself. It's more professional and there aren't as many limits on what you can do with your site.

After you have your domain picked out you are going to want to find a good hosting company. I personally recommend HostGator as the top choice. First off, it's fairly cheap and more importantly they are incredibly reliable. If you are just starting out with building your website, another great feature they offer is Fantastico to install WordPress, so you will not need any technical knowledge whatsoever.

The last thing you need to do before you get started is to download a theme for your blog. This is the design or the look and feel of your blog. You might have to shell out a few dollars if you want it to look professional, but there are plenty of free choices out there as well. If you are going to do it yourself then here are some resources to help you get started:

After you have completed these four steps, you will have started your very own blog. Pretty basic and easy right? Now for the hard part as we get into the details of what pages you need to have, how often should you post, and other blogging tips and tricks designed to help you make money online.

WordPress SEO Tips

Jamie Faidley — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 14:12:01 +0000

There are a lot of things that go into optimizing your site for the search engines, but with a minimal amount of effort you can cover about 80% of the important stuff. While the list below isn't all inclusive and isn't going to have you ranking number one for competitive terms, it will at least give you a fighting chance to get noticed.

Optimize Permalinks

How many blogs have you seen rank well that don't use the postname for the URL? The answer is "not many." Go to settings/permalinks in your backend, select the radio button by custom structure and enter "/%postname%/". This will help you with SEO but also make your post URL's look cleaner and more professional.

All-in-One SEO Plugin

Install the All-in-One-SEO plugin. This will allow you to enter a custom title, description and keywords for all of your posts. Make the title of your post different from what you put into the All-in-One SEO's title field. why? Because your post title will be the

tag on your page, and if that is the same as your title tag you can get penalized for overoptimizing or stuffing keywords. It's better to be safer than sorry.

Next, click on the plugin options for All-in-One SEO and enter your home title, description and keywords. Then check the box next to rewrite titles and make sure your post title format says "%post_title%" and page title format says "%page_title% ". You want to get rid of your blog name to keep all of your pages and posts with just your keywords that you want to rank for, no sense wasting juice on your blog name since you should rank well for that anyway.

One of the great things about WordPress is that it does a great job of organizing your past content for you and your readers, but the bad thing is that in doing so there are a lot of duplicate content issues to overcome. The All-in-One SEO pack makes it easy to prevent this. Click on the plugin options for All in One SEO and check the box next to noindex for categories and noindex for archives. This way the spiders will go to your category and archive pages and follow the links through, but won't index those specific pages that contain nothing but excerpts from your other pages.

How easy was that? I know there are a lot of other ways to optimize your WordPress blog for the search engines, and I'd love to hear what you have to say in the comments. I will be adding more content later detailing tips and tricks for SEO, but this should be a simple starter plan.

Related posts:
Must Have WordPress Plugins

21 Best WordPress Plugins

WordPress Comment Hacks & Plugins