I was surprised how quickly WordPress 2.6 was released. I still have an unresolved bug about the WordPress 2.5 wp_list_pages function. Unfortunately, they did not fix this bug or maybe they don’t plan to.

Back to WordPress 2.6. I am kind of confused by all the features WordPress has to offer. This video from WordPress will show you some of the new features in WordPress 2.6.

Upgrading from WordPress 2.5.1 to WordPress 2.6 was a snap for my blog. If you have not started with WordPress 2.6, now is a great time to start.

Tagged As: Plugin, wordpress

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | No Comments »

Last year, I posted a list of my favourite WordPress plugins. Today, I use a slightly different lineup of WordPress plugins because I have found better plugins to replace some of the older plugins I used and the latest WordPress has made certain plugins obsolete.

The 2007 WordPress Plugin List

1. Akismet - Default WordPress plugin but worth keeping.
2. WordPress Database Backup - Default WordPress plugin but worth keeping.
3. Similar Posts - This plugin now requires an additional plugin to work. You may find out more by visiting their wb site.
   
4. Subscribe To Comments
5. Math Comment Spam Protection - Prefer to use word verification spam protection like WP-reCAPTCHA. Some spam bots have figured out how to do some simple math calculations. 1 + 1 = 2 isn’t hard for them to figure out.
   
6. Simple Trackback Validation
7. Social Bookmark Creator - ShareThis is an upgrade of this plugin.
   
8. Ultimate Tag Warrior - Obsolete now because WordPress now has a built-in tagging feature.
   
9. Another WordPress Meta Plugin - All in One SEO Pack is an upgrade of this plugin.
   
10. Feedburner Feed Replacement - FeedBurner FeedSmith is an upgrade of this plugin.
    
11. Feed Control
12. Filosofo Home-Page Control - Still works way better than the default WordPress feature because you do not need to install your blog in a folder like “/blog” to display your posts in the “/blog” folder.
    
13. My Page Order
14. Google Sitemaps
15. Smart Archives
16. monthchunks - Removed because I do not want too many outgoing links on my web site.
    
17. wordTube - Still has a place for the playing of FLV videos and MP3s.
    
18. WP-ContactForm

The 2008 WordPress Plugin List

1. Akismet
2. WordPress Database Backup
3. Similar Posts
4. Subscribe To Comments
5. Simple Trackback Validation
6. Feed Control
7. Filosofo Home-Page Control
8. My Page Order
9. Google Sitemaps
10. Smart Archives - There should be better ones available.
    
11. wordTube
12. WP-ContactForm - There should be better ones available.
    
13. All in One SEO Pack - Replaces the Another WordPress Meta Plugin and SEO Title Tag plugins.
14. FeedBurner FeedSmith - Replaces the Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin.
15. ShareThis - Replaces the Social Bookmark Creator plugin.
16. WP-reCAPTCHA - Replaces the Math Comment Spam Protection plugin. You need to sign up for an account and enter the keys to use this plugin. This plugin has an additional email address protection feature.
17. Zemanta - A great blogging helper tool that lets you find similar content to the post you are creating.
18. Google to Yahoo Sitemap Converter - This is not actually a plugin but a normal PHP script, which needs to be run on a regular basis via a cron job. It will be obsolete soon once Yahoo and MSN adopt Google’s sitemap standards.

Happy blogging!

Tagged As: All in One SEO Pack, FeedBurner FeedSmith, ShareThis, wordpress, wordpress plugins, WP-reCAPTCHA, Zemanta

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | No Comments »

John Reese just launched his new blog syndication site called BlogRush. It works like a traffic exchange service. You display related blog posts of other blogs on your blog X times and your blog posts will get displayed on other people’s blogs X times too. There is a ratio of how many impressions you get in return for displaying the BlogRush widget. This depends on the number of people you refer to BlogRush. The basic level is 1:1 and you will get better ratios like 1:2 as you progress.

It is important to understand that impressions does not equals to traffic. An impression like most banner ad systems, is simply the instance an ad is displayed in front of a person. Whether the person feels compelled to click through to your web site depends on a lot of other factors.

I am testing BlogRush right now and I hope it makes a substantial difference in my blog traffic.

Tagged As: blog-syndication, blogrush, john-reese, traffic-exchange

Categories: Blogging | No Comments »

I know I should have “claimed by blog” on Technorati but I could not be bothered until today. Let’s see what happens….

Now that I have claimed my blog, I get my very own page on Technorati. I wonder what difference does this make.

Tagged As: Technorati

Categories: Blogging | No Comments »

PayPerPost is a blogging advertising network. They pay you to write about advertisers who list their products or services in their directory. I am not 100% sure about the blog requirements but here’s what I know at the moment:

• You need a blog with at least 20 posts in the last 90 days. Therefore, you cannot simply create a new blog and blast 20 posts to qualify. You need a blog that is relatively popular and active to get accepted.
• You will need a PayPal account to get paid.
• You have to post a “disclosure badge” to show readers that your post is a sponsored post.

You can make money with PayPerPost in the following ways:

• Blog about a product or service in their directory.
• Refer people to the PayPerPost network. Your referrals get $15.00 once the their first blog posting is reviewed, approved and then finally accepted 30 days late.
• After you have referred a new member to PayPerPost, you get paid $7.50 if they signed up through a “Review my post” PayPerPost link.
• Advertise your blog with the “PayPerPost Direct” badge to tell prospective advertisers your blogging rate so that they may contact you to blog about their products.

PayPerPost does not enforce you to say nice things about the products and services in their directory. It is totally up to you. However, I am not sure what will happen to you if you write negative reviews about some of their products. There will be lots of opportunities in their directory that will have almost nothing to do with your blog’s target audience and I hope people do not “sell out” by blogging about something totally unrelated to their blog’s main topic just to make a few dollars.

You’ll see more and more bloggers put the following banner at the end of every post. If you sign up and get approved by PayPerPost, you have to option of reviewing this post to make money while I get $7.50 as described above. As of now, I still cannot find anything suitable from PayPerPost to promote on this blog… I hope you can find something suitable.

Tagged As: Blogging, make-money-blogging, PayPerPost, PayPerPost-review

Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing, Blogging, Internet Marketing | 3 Comments »

The blogging universe changes at break-neck speed. I started this blog with Blogger.com till my needs outgrew the limited Blogger engine so I moved it to a WordPress blogging platform.

In the beginning of my WordPress blogging days, I wanted to try out all the different plugins to enhance my blog. I was tempted to add all these cute little buttons to “add my feed to Yahoo, MSN, Google” etc but I didn’t understand how it could help me increase my web site traffic. During my blogger.com days, I even put up a lot of “badges” of the blog directories I belonged to.
As you can see in my blog, there isn’t any “Add feed” or “blog directory badges” anymore. What I have right now is simply 2 links at the footer to my blog rss feed and my forum rss feed. I removed all of them because they are rather ugly, confusing, take up a lot of space, and because I now have FeedBurner to replace them.
Introducing FeedBurner…

FeedBurner isn’t new at all. I ignored it for a long time because I didn’t quite understand how it could benefit me. I used to think “Why do I need FeedBurner when my blog generates an RSS feed for me automatically?”.

Now I know better.

FeedBurner adds a lot of useful bells and whistles to my blog’s RSS feed that WordPress simply cannot do. Now I am able to track the number of people subscribing to my feed, limit the number of characters per feed item, and have my own FeedBurner feed page.

Take a look at some of my RSS feeds. Click on them and you will see a nice FeedBurner page with all those “add feed” buttons and a list of compatible RSS readers. The old feed was simply a XML file and if you clicked on it with your browser, you would see a bunch of meaningless text.

• Vincent Rich’s Internet Marketing Blog
• Vincent Rich’s Interent Marketing Forum

All my RSS feeds are now processed through FeedBurner. I think of FeedBurner as clothes for my “naked” RSS feeds. FeedBurner makes my RSS feeds look good. I highly recommend you to use FeedBurner if you have a blog. Take an hour or so to configure it at your blog. It’s well worth the effort.

Introducing Tagging…

Before I learnt about Technorati tags, the only tag I knew about in the internet world were HTML tags. Technorati tags are similar to HTML tags but they serve a unique purpose.

See those links at the bottom of this post after the words “Tagged As”? Those are my Technorati tags. I am very new at this and I think they are supposed to add this blog post’s link to a Technorati tag page.

WordPress has a built-in pinging tool that activates after you create a blog entry. Technorati.com is one of my ping URLs and after I ping them, they should visit this blog post and see my Technorati tags.

I actually hid my tags in my source code. Simply view the source and you will see some tags at the end of this blog post’s content. I am not sure if this will work with Technorati because I hid them from human eyes but I am sure a machine will be able to read it. The tags are still part of my RSS feed so I don’t think it will be an issue. I’ll have to wait and see.

Introducing Social Bookmarking…

I personally haven’t used these sites. You can bookmark this blog post at some of these social bookmarking sites by clicking on the square icons at the end of this post. I am not sure how these bookmarks will help my blog, I suppose they will help me get some incoming links to my blog when you bookmark this post.

Tagged As: Blogging, feedburner, internet+marketing, rss, tag+and+ping, tagging, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | 3 Comments »

If you missed my previous post on my Major Blog Renovation, please take a look at the “before photos” to see how my blog used to before today. After watching Michael Cheney’s AdSense Videos (AdSense Videos review coming soon), I realised I wasn’t maximizing my blog’s Google AdSense earning potential. Therefore I made the following changes to my Google AdSense ads:

1. I dumped the leaderboard ad at the top of the blog

I wonder why I put this up there in the first place. I guess it was convenient to do so at that time. The clickthrough rates for this type of ad sucks pretty bad because it looks too much like an ad.

What I have right now is the 336 x 280 large rectangle ad you see on the top left of every screen below the post titles. I embedded the ad seamlessly into the content without using any HTML tables. You can resize your browser window and the text around will “wrap” perfectly around the ad. I suggest you view the source code of this page to see how it is done with a simple “div” tag around your Google AdSense code. It’s much easier than using a HTML table and it looks prettier as well.

I had to do a little bit of PHP programming to show this ad only on the the first post of the page to prevent it from displaying an ad at every single blog entry. If you’re interested to know how it’s done, contact me and I will send you the WordPress template source code. You can’t tell by looking at the HTML source code.

2. I removed the Google AdSense affiliate ads

I used to have these square Google AdSense ads at the bottom right of my blog. If someone registers after clicking on my ads and makes $100, I get $100 from Google AdSense too. I also randomly shuffle between this Firefox with Google Toolbar ad and I get $1 when someone installs Firefox with Google Toolbar.

The earnings from the Firefox ad was too pathetic to justify taking up space over there. Furthermore, I haven’t seen any of my sub affiliates make over $100 yet.

I replaced the ads with a tiny 160 x 90 link unit. Check out the “Vincent Rich’s Network” box and you will see the ads over there.

3. I am finally tracking my Google AdSense ads

I didn’t want to pay money to get a Google AdSense ad tracker so I didn’t track my ads for a long time. Then I stumbled on the open source AdLogger script while I was browsing some Google AdSense related forum. I bet some of the paid scripts are actually AdLogger modifications.

I can now track how many clicks were made on my site and which ad they clicked on. The default Google AdSense tracking ability can only track how much money you made on your web site but it doesn’t track which ad or which page the click came from. You can even prevent click fraud by limiting the number of clicks on your ads. If the number of clicks exceeds your desired number of clicks, your ads will automatically disappear to that click fraudster.

The road ahead…

I will have to monitor my Google AdSense earnings and my AdLogger logs to see if my current setup is actually more profitable than the previous one. I am confident the large rectangle will work better than the leaderboard but I have doubts about the adlink unit ad. Only time will tell….

Tagged As: Blogging, google+adsense, internet+marketing, make+money, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging, Google AdSense | 3 Comments »

I have decided to give my Google AdSense ads a little reshuffle. This will probably be the last post with the “old” Google AdSense ad layout. I’m going to make some changes and you will be able to spot the difference with my “before photos” below.

Moreover, I need to keep my blog up to date with the latest blogging technologies. I’m going to add stuff like FeedBurner RSS feeds to replace the existing blog feeds I generate with my WordPress blogs, social boomarking to let people bookmark pages of my blogs, and tagging on sites like Technorati.com.

I will cover these topics in greater detail when the my new blog layout is up and explain the reasons for doing so. I am very excited about this new blog update because it could potentially drive a lot more traffic to my blog.

Tagged As: Blogging, google+adsense, internet+marketing, make+money, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging, Google AdSense | 2 Comments »

I recently deleted all my html files from my web site. I created WordPress pages instead. I find its easier to edit my pages with the WordPress 2.0 built in WYWISWG html editor rather than editing it with Dreamweaver and uploading the html files to my web server.

WordPress uses Apache’s mod_rewrite functionality to create pages. There are 2 types of pages as I call it. There are blog posts and pages. WordPress pages are not part of the blog archives. I customize the “permalink” of the blog posts to end with a “.html” filename. The cool thing is WordPress doesn’t actually creatre a real html file, it is simply telling the Apache web server that anytime someone requests for a html file, redirect that request to a php file that pulls data from the database. Too bad I haven’t found a way to create html files with the WordPress pages. I can do it with the blog posts by changing the “permalink” options.

How to create “page sections” and pages in WordPress?

Try clicking on any of my “About Me” section pages and you will see that it looks like there are files in the “/about/” folder. I did this by first creating a WordPress page with the page slug “about” and set my other pages to link to this “about” page as its page parent. That’s all!

What do I do about my existing HTML files?

I had 1 major concern when I was removing my html files. What if someone clicks on a link in the search engines for one of my html pages? Wouldn’t that bring them to a broken page on my site?

No worries! Simply use the Apache’s “301 redirect” to redirect my html pages to my new WordPress pages. WordPress uses the “.htaccess” file in the same folder as your WordPress installation to handle these redirect requests. Check out the screenshot on the left. Simply add the 301 redirect code below the existing WordPress code in the “.htaccess” file and its done!

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging, Search Engine Optimization, Web Development | 3 Comments »