This article is a continuation of the article “Ten Essential WordPress Plugins“. One thing I noticed while writing the original article is the fact that more than ten plugins are necessary for both security and functionality reasons. WordPress has easily become my favorite content management system, but the version that is available for download is somewhat stripped down so-to-speak.
In this article, we will continue with ten more essential WordPress plugins. This set, as the previous set of WordPress plugins will continue to focus on security and functionality as well as usability and copyright protection. Lets get started. Since this is “ten more” plugins, we will start with number eleven.
11) Page links to. I know that is a rather plain name, but this plugin gives a great functionality. It allows you to directly link to a webpage off of your site with a 301 or 302 redirect if you do not want to pass on your Page Rank. Great for linking out, especially if you are selling links.
12) TweetMeme Retweet Button. Are you part of the Twitter craze? Even if you are not, many people are and many fellow tweeters are looking to pass along useful information to their followers. The TweetMeme Retweet Button allows your visitors to easily post a link to your article to their Twitter as well as TweetMeme account. This gives your article great potential to go viral.
One point of interest for all webmasters is and will always be traffic. Traffic is the life-line of any web site. It can be a blog, forum, social media site, business site, squeeze page, or simply a sales page selling one product. Whatever the case, traffic is and will always be key to the success of your website. Your website can lay claim to the most fascinating and informative content available online. However, if it does not have traffic, it may as well not exist.
So how does a webmaster go about obtaining the most important aspect of an online existence? How does a webmaster draw or drive traffic to a website? There are several ways. This article discusses a handful of potential sources of traffic that you can use as a means to drive traffic to your site.
1) The first source of traffic is original content regularly posted to a website. Search engines love original content. Even if the content does not relay anything more than simple or common knowledge, unique and original content always has potential in the eyes of search engines. The value of unique content is found in the potential that it has to relay information in a way that has not been expressed before thus giving rise to ones understanding of a subject from a new and refreshing perspective. Search engines always like to serve new and unique content to their customers in the hopes that they may strike gold so-to-speak. After gathering some data on a particular article, for instance, a careful consideration by the search engine algorithm will then rank or place the fresh content where it deems appropriate in the search engine rankings.
Ask any business owner if running a business is tough and the word ‘YES’ will probably be your answer. In the virtual world of Internet Marketing this is even more true. Why? It is true because of the sheer level of competition. People absolutely love the internet marketing niche and many enter it with the hopes of making a good living.
If one is so bold so as to actually attempt conquering this niche, there are three internet marketing skill sets that will be absolutely essential to success. If these skills or skill sets are not understood and practiced, failure is statistically imminent. So what are these skill sets? Let’s explore them one-by-one.
Skill set number one is copyrighting. The ability to write compelling and interesting promotional copy is the most important skill that one can learn. Have you ever heard the expression ‘knowledge is power’? Well, here is another one for you: ‘information is money’. Without a doubt, information IS money.
If you are a blogger or an internet marketer you want to get the most mileage you can out of your original content which means using it to drive traffic to your website in a variety of creative ways. Let’s face it, writing articles takes time and effort. Contrary to what many think, writing is work and writing quality content takes time and research. Fortunately, for article marketers and bloggers as well as internet marketers, there are ways that you can reuse or recycle your old content and obtain new traffic from it. Welcome to the world of Web 2.0.
Before we talk about the subject of reusing your articles and content, we first need to mention that before articles can be reused they first have to be served, meaning that they have to appear and be indexed on your site first. Your website or blog has to be given the credit for the article. The only way for this to happen is to let your article sit on your blog or website and wait to be indexed. The amount of time it take for this to happen will vary depending on how actively you pursue having it indexed. Sometimes it may take weeks or months for you new articles to be indexed.
The best way for you to check to see as to whether or not your articles have been indexed is to go to the Google search engine home page and type “site:your-web-domain.com” into the search box. You will immediately see listed all of the web pages and articles that have been indexed. Articles and content on web pages that have been indexed are available for recycling and reuse on Web 2.0 properties.
The importance of context links, contextual ads and contextual advertising is more important now than at any other time in history. Never before in the history of advertising and marketing have potential sales lead and customers become so desensitized to advertising. We are literally surrounded and bombarded with advertising everywhere we go. The airwaves and webpages we are exposed to constantly feed us with ad after ad and promotion after promotion to the effect that in most cases, we hardly ever see them anymore.
If you look around at this blog, you will see a large variety of instances where advertising is used. You will see affiliate and freebie links at the top of the page in the form of drop down menus. You will see special offers and “click here” links beneath the titles of the articles. You will see a large list of link exchange partners down the right side of this and usually any other blog that has exchanged links with other bloggers and webmasters. You will see post article affiliate links designed to temp readers and subscribers into clicking through if they read through to the end. You will see a slide up ad slide up from the bottom of every page advertising some promotion. You will see a bloc of free marketing tools after each article. You will see blocs of text or image ads at the beginning and end of each article. If you visit this site and many others via the root or homepage, you will be presented with a giant pop up that literally covers the majority of the content.
If you are interested in learning Internet Marketing, depending on your level of experience, you may have a very large learning curve ahead of you. Many internet marketers are quickly overwhelmed by amount of information that they try to absorb when getting started with just the basics.
Depending on how much time you have spent researching this subject you may or may not still have to learn about the following: niche selection, keyword research, domain name selection and acquisition, hosting acquisition, domain name forwarding, HTML coding and/or PHP script selection, file transfer protocol, script installation, MySQL database installation and usage, content generation, search engine optimization, traffic generation, autoresponders and opt-in forms as well as squeeze pages, sales pages and landing pages, not to mention list building and all of the traditional marketing techniques. In addition to all of this, you have to maintain, build and nurture a brand.
It quickly becomes clear why many new to this business, which has become a highly technical version of a very old traditional trade (i.e. traditional marketing), quickly go in to information overload mode.
There are tools, however, that can help…at least with some of the items on the list of things to learn above.
One main item that can be of great help to assist someone interested in internet marketing is the new Internet Marketing Basics Resellable Ebook and Minisite available for download at TheBitBot.com.
Promoting a website, blog or business can be very tough if you do not know some of the secret tricks of the marketing trade. There is so much competition. If you are going to succeed as an entrepreneur, you must think outside of the box if you are going to succeed and hopefully advance.
One trick that I have picked up on is the production of mini-site give-aways. Just what are mini-site give-aways?
Simply put, a mini-site is a small website consisting of a handful of pages specifically designed to sell a product. Generally, this product is a digital product such as a piece of software, an e-book, of some specialized report. When a webmaster produces a mini-site as a give-away, the item being sold or given away as a promotional item is always added to the package.
If you are an internet marketer, odds are at least some of your marketing is centered around information or informational products such as reports or e-books, video tutorials or any other of a variety of media forms. Generally, the toughest part of coming up with a new product is researching and gathering the necessary information used to create your informational product. Well guess what. I have good news for you. If you are creating an informational or promotional product to be used as means of building a mailing list or something similar then you do not need to worry about the content’s uniqueness or originality. Additionally, it doesn’t even have to be optimized for search engines because the search engines will never see it. Welcome to the world of PLR, also known as Private Label Rights.
A product that is released with PLR status is available for modification and use by the receiving party in any way desired within the confines of the sellers or publishers restrictions. This means that the person receiving or purchasing the articles can slap their own label on them and use them to promote their own business or website. Be alert to any and all restrictions on PLR content which may include but may not be limited to posting the article to article directories, blogs, ezines or ebooks. Just check with the seller or vendor to see if there are any restrictions of this sort. In some cases, an easy to way to check is to look for a “Read Me” file in the package. It is not uncommon for the original author to state the terms of usage in the “Read Me” file.
If there are no restrictions, then you can use the content as you see fit. Keep in mind that since it is PLR content, odds are that others already have it and it has already been crawled and indexed by search engines already. So, as far as SEO or SEM value goes, there is none, but you can use it in the following ways:
Making money with blogs is not difficult but at the same time, it is very difficult. What does that mean you ask? Simply put, there are two different methodologies that you can follow if you are going to launch a website or blog and use it as a source of income. One of these methods is quick and can earn you a small amount of supplemental income and the other one is very slow and has the potential to turn into an online business.
The first method, the simple one, entails signing up at at one of the following outfits or something similar:
1) https://www.blogger.com/start 2) http://www.weebly.com/ 3) http://www.sosblog.com/ 4) http://www.thoughts.com/ 5) http://wordpress.com/ 6) http://weblog.com/ 7) http://wordpress.org/
Please note that number seven does not include hosting. You will need to acquire free hosting if you are going to use the WordPress.org PHP blogging script. Additionally, your host will have to allow PHP and FTP. There are some free hosts that do allow these. Some will install it for free in the CPanel.
Whenever browsing SEO forums, it is not uncommon to see threads dedicated to “techniques” built around manipulating search engine results. Recently, I posted on this blog about how SEO techniques, if used incorrectly, can actually harm your search engine results. I am not talking about getting “slapped” by the search engines for using “black hat” or “spamming” methodologies, I am talking about “white hat” techniques used incorrectly. What?!? White hat techniques used incorrectly?!? Is that possible? Sure it is.
I am actually thinking about writing a series of articles that hopefully debunk a variety of myths concerning SEO techniques that have long been used and considered “white hat”, but, in actuality, do absolutely nothing to help the search engines determine what your page is about or give your visitors what they need, that being relevant information.
So, for my first installment in this series, I will discuss one thing that I have personally done in the past that does not work and makes your copy of very poor quality for your readers and that is keyword stuffing.
