Written by blazelook.com on 07 April 2010
There has been talk about using WordPress beyond the typical blog set-up, into the realms of a full-fledged content management system or CMS. Yet, most people have no idea how this is even possible.
I have to stress that the default WordPress software is intended to be a blogging tool, so if you’re trying to make it work like a different type of content management tool you’ll have to use the correct plugins (enhancements) and have the a clear idea of what you want to achieve.
While the exact step-by-step method is out of the scope of this article, lets explore some of the ways you can use WordPress, as I have personally done before.
1) WordPress as An Article Directory
To make WordPress work as an article directory, you’ll need a special plugin, and a source for the articles. MyArticleMarketer.com is the perfect tool for this, as the articles there are usually human-approved. They also encourage free distribution of their articles to other article sites.
After you have set-up the WordPress plugin, you need to sign-up for Article Marketer’s distribution list. By filling in their form and specifying the categories (or choose all categories), you automatically qualify to receive all old and new articles that are submitted to MyArticleMarketer.com
However, with WordPress as an article directory, you’ll only be able to receive syndicated articles. Authors won’t be able to sign-up or create an account directly with you. It’s also against MyArticleMarketer.com’s terms or service to encourage authors to sign-up directly with you.
2) WordPress as a Membership Site
You can set-up a free or paid membership site using WordPress. All it takes is a few simple plugins to get the job done. Once you’ve installed the plugins, members will need to login to your site in order to view the content. You can also place a login form in your WordPress theme files to make it easy for users to lo in and out of your membership site.
However, the plugins only create a simple membership system, so if you’re looking to create different membership levels and more advanced features, you’d probably want to sign-up with a professional membership system like AmemberPro.net and use their available plugins to ingrate with WordPress.
At the time of writing, AmemberPro.net has available plugins for a reasonable cost and these will be installed by their support team, so you don’t have to worry about the technical setbacks.
3) WordPress as a Classified Ads System
Wordpress can work like any other classifieds website too. Users can sign-up on your site and place classifieds in the form of new blog posts. They can even set expiry dates for their ads and specify listings or “wanted” ads.
However, you will need to create all the necessary categories and even create a sign-up information page to teach your users how to place ads. The upside of using WordPress as a classifieds site is that you can also use tagging tactics to get traffic from social bookmarking sites and sites like Technorati.com
4) WordPress as an Audio / Video Training Site
Using the membership plugins mentioned above or AmemberPro.net’s WordPress compatibility plugins, you can create a membership site with WordPress. Then, all you need to do is to add the “Podpress” plugin which takes care of all audio and video elements on your website.
You will be able to display and stream MP3 audio or FLV video using their built-in players. The Podpress plugin is really robust and also allows you to specify setting on iTunes, so you can make this commercially and available to the entire iPod / iTunes community.
As you can see by now, there’s a whole lot of possibilities when it comes to using WordPress to the extreme.
I’ve created an entire video training system to help newbies and advanced marketers alike master WordPress. Yet, every day brings new possibilities to using WordPress as a complex CMS instead of the modest blogging tool it was designed to be!
Written by blazelook.com on 07 April 2010
You’ve started a blog that has a great layout(from free WordPress themes), interesting content, and is overall a high-quality blog. Even if you have all these great things about your blog, it can still be hard to engage your readers with you. So how can you do this?
First, let viewers comment on your blog posts. Sometimes bloggers disable comments because of spam which can occur often. Even if you try to block spam by requiring registration to comment, it can still be a turnoff because people don’t want to put effort into it. What you can do is install Akismet or another spam blocker application to prevent this. A lot of times people can comment and then the blog will ask for your approval to post it.
When you allow comments to be posted, you should consider allowing users to track their responses. This means after they comment, they can subscribe to comments through a plugin that allows it. What this does is send them an e-mail when you or someone else responds to the comment. It allows for more conversation when you do this.
You can also enable trackbacks in your comments. This is where someone could respond to your blog post by writing a blog post about it, but wants you to be aware of it so through trackbacks they can have an excerpt of their post in your comment section. You may also want to consider putting an RSS feed button on the top area of your blog. This allows people to subscribe to your blog feed.
There are several ways to engage your reader into conversation through your blog, these are just a few of the ways you can do it. Blogging can become a type of virtual community when the right tools and options are available on blogs. Make your blog part of the virtual community by allowing comments, trackbacks, and RSS feeds.
Themefury.com is a premier website offering custom-made, free WordPress themes. Our high-quality themes set a blog apart from all the others. Our mission is to provide the public with a variety of free WordPress themes so your blog can stand out and look good.
Written by blazelook.com on 07 April 2010
As the popularity of weblogs increase so does the demand for efficient content management systems. Blogs as a web site platform have become popular due to their easy to manage interfaces and personalized looks. This system is better defined as a personal publishing platform.
Today, blogs are used for may purposes and not only as a personal publishing tool. Weblogs are being used to promote businesses, services and products. Depending on your blog’s theme, you will need a certain set of tool from your hosting company.
WordPress has two main areas which are referred to as the user or public area and the admin area. The public area is where the final product and information can be accessed and the admin area provides special tools for administration purposes. Just like other CMS blogs can generate pages and posts dynamically to be shown to the visitor upon request (the click action).
The requirements to run this blogging system is not that extensive. The platform is designed to be compatible with most hosting services who offer PHP and MySQL databases. Of course some hosting providers offer improved solutions and alternatives to make webmaster’s use of time more efficient.
Following WordPress installation procedure, the entire platform should be installed and ready to be customized within just 5 minutes after providing the right information available through the hosting administration area but as many will agree, a 10 second installation sure beats a 5 min. one, and that ‘s exactly what hosting companies are offering to those webmasters and social people who wish to publish their thoughts throughout the world.
When choosing the right hosting provider, bloggers need to take in consideration all the ‘specialized features’ offered to publishers on this niche platform, blogging. The main factors to consider are: technical support, one click WordPress installation, WordPress themes availability through the hosting admin interface, blog optimized servers, blog tutorials, disk space as well as bandwidth.
Since blogs tend to be “viral” in nature, it is always important to constantly check traffic statistics which may change after every post or publication. WordPress has an automatic ping system which informs social sites that your blog has been updated, thus increasing your readers and subscriptions.
Whether you want to publish your thoughts or promote a product/service, blogs are one of the best CMS tools available to webmasters which will improve the time spent on text formatting and aesthetics through a properly hosted and managed environment.
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Written by blazelook.com on 07 April 2010
Here are six reasons why you should consider blogging.
Blogging is fun! Yes, blogging can be great fun. Just open you posting window and go for it without the restrictions of corporate style guides and other impediments to creativity. Got something to say? Just say it. The other fun aspect of blogging is that people can post comments about your blog posts. You posts plus reader comments all become valuable food for the search engines.
Blogging is dirt cheap. The most powerful blogging systems are free. WordPress seems to be the blogging standard and now comes standard with many cheap web hosting packages. For less than $100 per year anyone can get their own domain with blogging included.
I wouldn’t use one of the free blogging services unless you are really desperate. You can’t be sure if they will always remain free and your posts will be building up someone else’ asset rather than your own.
It’s fast and easy. If you can use notepad you can blog. The user interface is very intuitive and allows you to add and edit, text, pictures, videos, whatever you want. Want to change the look and layout of your blog? There’s literally hundreds of themes available that take less than a minute to upload and install.
It gives you products and services personality. People like to do business with people they like. By blogging you show your target market that there is a real person behind the company you represent. By reading you blog posts thet get an idea of what you’re all about – warts and all. The personal aspect of blogging is one of it’s most powerful characteristics.
Your blog site becomes another Internet asset. Some blog sites get thousands and thousands of readers each day. This traffic can be converted to hard, cold cash through Google Adsense advertising, affiliate programs and straight advertising space sale. Once you blog increases it’s Google PageRank, you also get the benefit of linking out from your blog site to other web sites you want to promote.
Search engines love blogs. It is said in many SEO forums that Google staff are great bloggers and subsequently Google spiders and indexes blogs more frequently that normal web sites. This may just be a rumour, but I have found it to be true in my case. If you blog every day there’s a good chance Google and the other major search engines will spider your blog every day looking for that new content.
Convinced? Give blogging a try. There’s stacks of free resources listed in article directories like this one that will help you get into blogging.
Written by blazelook.com on 07 April 2010
Expert WordPress is a new blogging system that allows bloggers to save time and get more done after they create a blog. Not only that, but the system is actually a full on blogging suite with your own WordPress theme, plugins, video tutorials and instructions, all packed into one. Expert WordPress was created for the WordPress community to counteract the limitations and problems they usually face when they want to create a blog.
The Expert WordPress system takes you by the hand and explains in detail what you need to do and when. Setting up a blog couldn’t be easier and more straightforward than this. Since WordPress is the number one choice blogging software on the market, most bloggers will eventually migrate to it, even if they first create a blog with one of the dozen of the free blogging tools available on the market.
You can choose Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal and even the free option of http://WordPress.com for your blog, but none of them will give you the benefits and choices of the WordPress software that runs on a self hosted domain.
Self hosted WordPress blogs are by far the best blogs for search engine optimization, great placement and the ability to monetize them in many possible ways. Smart Internet marketers have recognized this fact a long time ago and wouldn’t ever go back to whatever they used prior to hosting their own WordPress blog.
Some features that really make the WordPress software stand apart from the others is the versatility of it. There are just so many options in which we can build WordPress blogs and with a bit of coding knowledge in HTML and PHP, anybody can actually design their own WordPress theme.
There are plugins, widgets and many other pieces of coding than can be integrated into WordPress. Best of all, nothing is set in stone. If you ever wanted to change the look of your WordPress blog you can do so easy with a few changes in the stylesheet.
To make the process of starting out to create a blog, by moving to your own self hosted WordPress blog a lot easier, Expert WordPress has been designed for you.
It is the system if you are sick of trying to lean code or spend hours finding the right plugins. The creators of the software have actually built in the required plugins to help you with your search engine rankings. All you need to do is activate them with a few clicks. This will not only save you a lot of time, but you won’t have to worry whether the plugins you use are the right ones.
Another benefit of using Expert WordPress opposed to doing it yourself is the fact that is comes with its own support forum. Should you ever get stuck you won’t need to purchase expensive eBooks or even search for answers online. You’ll have your very own help support community right at hand.
It’s up to you whether you want to create a blog the traditional way, or use Expert WordPress and fast track your blogging experience to something more pleasant. Either way, WordPress is the software to choose for sure.
Alex Sysoef is the Co-Creator of Expert WordPress. His experience with the WordPress software has allowed him to become a wealthy Internet marketer, working from the comfort of his home.
Written by blazelook.com on 06 April 2010
WordPress is simply the best blogging platform on the planet! Being open source software, developers around the world have produced hundreds of plugins to enhance its basic functionality, as a result blogging has never been easier, and the search engines love it!
Blogging with WordPress offers two huge advantages:
1. It’s FREE to download and use
2. The Search Engines, in particular Google, love WordPress blogs
WordPress is open source software, which means it’s free to use. When you choose a hosting account, try and choose one that uses a control panel called “CPanel”, because installing WordPress becomes as easy as clicking a handful of icons, it really is simple!
So you’ve bought a domain name, found a hosting company with CPanel and installed WordPress on your new domain! In theory you’re ready to make your first post! But before you do, read on!
Before you post, you need to configure your blog and optimise it for the search engines, doing this before you post makes life a lot easier for the future.
As WordPress is open source, developers around the world have written literally hundreds of plugins that enhance the functionality of your blog, and again the majority are free to install. Take a look at WordPress.org where you’ll find hundreds of free plugins. Ones I recommend are:
- Installer (install this one first, simplifies plugin installations)
- All In One SEO Pack (optimises your posts)
- Adsense Manager (adds Adsense blocks to your posts)
- Google XML Site Maps (creates a site map for your blog)
- Ultimate Tag Warrior (essential plugin for managing tags)
- Sociable (assists with social bookmarking)
Next, within your dashboard, select Options in the menu and then Permalinks. You need to change the settings on this page in order to optimise your post’s url for the search engines, this change will ensure your keywords appear in the url. In the Custom Options box, insert the following text:
/%category%/%postname%/
Typing this will optimise your posts, but you must be careful only to ever select one category per post in the future, and not change a post’s category after you’ve published it!
When you post with WordPress, it automatically notifies (known as pinging) blog directories of your new content, they index it based on the tags you assign. The search engine robots regularly visit these directories, and as a result your new post will be indexed by them very quickly. Rapid indexing is one of the huge advantages of blogging!
In your blogs configuration, you should add as many directory sites as possible to ping, in addition to the default url. Simply search on the web for “ping list”.
Finally, you need to optimise the appearance of your site. You don’t want to use the basic template that comes with WordPress. If you do a search online for WordPress themes, you’ll find hundreds to download for free.org again in their themes directory. Whilst there are hundreds of free themes around, I never seem to find one that perfectly meets my needs, so I often end up buying one!
Once you’ve installed the theme of your choice, activated all of your plugins, and made the configuration adjustments I’ve recommended, you’re ready to post, so what are you waiting for!
Written by blazelook.com on 06 April 2010
The rise and rise of blogging as part of the web 2.0 phenomenon has taken the Internet by storm. Savvy web marketers are now using blogs as an additional weapon to generate leads, add credibility and improve their search engine rankings. Here are six reasons why you should consider blogging.
Blogging is gret fun! Yes, blogging can be great fun. Just open you posting window and go for it without the restrictions of corporate style guides and other impediments to creativity. Got something to say? Just say it. The other fun aspect of blogging is that people can post comments about your blog posts. You posts plus reader comments all become valuable food for the search engines.
Blogging is dirt cheap. The most powerful blogging systems are free. WordPress seems to be the blogging standard and now comes standard with many cheap web hosting packages. For less than $100 per year anyone can get their own domain with blogging included.
I wouldn’t use one of the free blogging services unless you are really desperate. You can’t be sure if they will always remain free and your posts will be building up someone else’ asset rather than your own.
Blogging is fast and easy. If you can use notepad you can blog. The user interface is very intuitive and allows you to add and edit, text, pictures, videos, whatever you want. Want to change the look and layout of your blog? There’s literally hundreds of themes available that take less than a minute to upload and install.
It gives you products and services personality. People like to do business with people they like. By blogging you show your target market that there is a real person behind the company you represent. By reading you blog posts thet get an idea of what you’re all about – warts and all. The personal aspect of blogging is one of it’s most powerful characteristics.
Your blog becomes another Internet asset. Some blog sites get thousands and thousands of readers each day. This traffic can be converted to hard, cold cash through Google Adsense advertising, affiliate programs and straight advertising space sale. Once you blog increases it’s Google PageRank, you also get the benefit of linking out from your blog site to other web sites you want to promote.
Search engines just love blogs. It is said in many SEO forums that Google staff are great bloggers and subsequently Google spiders and indexes blogs more frequently that normal web sites. This may just be a rumour, but I have found it to be true in my case. If you blog every day there’s a good chance Google and the other major search engines will spider your blog every day looking for that new content.
Convinced? Give blogging a try. There’s stacks of free resources listed in article directories like this one that will help you get into blogging.
Written by blazelook.com on 06 April 2010
Whether your blog is related to your business or its just a personnel blog we all want our visitors to stay and read our content. But if your blog takes a long time to load chances are your visitor will click the close button before they even get to see the content. That is why it is very important to optimize your blog so that it will load quickly or at least in a reasonable time period. According to research if your blog takes more than 3 seconds to load you are losing around 40% of your visitors.That rate goes to 90% if it takes more than 8 seconds to load. Now that you understand the importance of reducing your load time lets see some simple things that you can do to improve the load time of your WordPress blogs. Important to note that most of this apply to free WordPress that are available for download.
Removing Unnecessary Database Calls
Free WordPress themes are coded in a general way so that it can be used by many people without a problem.The problem with this approach is there are few unnecessary database calls that can be removed. For example if you are using self hosted WordPress and have access to the header file you can remove some unnecessary calls that get the header name, style sheet information etc and hard code the values in your header.
Optimizing Images
Definitely one of the biggest headaches for blogs , because of there high file size images usually take a while to load, so if you are using images in your blog you should optimize them as best as you can. You should be careful of the type of images you upload as well, although Bitmap type images gives you the best quality there large file size greatly reduces load time, so JPEG and PNG formats are the best to use in your blog. Other than that you can use free image optimizing software available in the internet. Plenty of them come up with a Google Search and they all have there advantages and disadvantages. Pick the one that best suits your needs.
Using Plug-ins
Also you can use plug-ins like WP-Cache which really helps improve the load time of your blog if you are getting lots of visitors. Also after adding a plug-in its always a good idea to check the load time of your blogs because some plug-ins tend to make the blog load very slow. Of course if that plug-in is essential to your blog you have to consider other ways to improve performance.
Getting Rid of Ads
if your blog is cluttered with ads then chances are its performing slowly, instead of displaying lots of ads which the user even want see because they take a long time to load, you are a better off showing few ads to visitors that actually see your page. So reducing the number of ads in your blog can go a long way in reducing load time.
Follow this simple steps and you can see a great increase in the average time spent on your site.
Written by blazelook.com on 06 April 2010
Online blogging has been generating cash for thousands of people. Creating your own blog is a really easy route compared to getting your own website. Having a blog has many benefits over having a website they are as follows:
No paying for hosting – When you do get comfortable and start making money with your blog you’ll want to expand and you’ll need to get hosting but when your starting out it’s an unnecessary expense. When you have your own site you have to get it and it costs on average $200+ a year for competent hosting. No learning how to build a site – When you have a site you have to worry about getting your template looking the way you want it, this takes advanced knowledge in CSS and HTML. When your doing a blog all you do is dig through the thousands of different layouts and just download and install the template.
There are only 3 steps which are very easy to follow to starting your own blog. They are as follows:
Pick out a blogging service – Your options are either Blogger or WordPress. There are other choices but these are the easiest to use and find templates for. Both of the options are free services and give you a free URL. Pick out a URL – Picking out the perfect URL for your blog that is both keyword friendly and relevant to your site is important to SEO. To get the perfect keyword rich URL for your site I recommend using the GoogleKeywordTool, it’s free. It’s best to register your own domain(URL) this is easily achieved through GoDaddy.com or NameCheap.com. Pick out your template – This is a very easy thing to do if your looking for WordPress themes just type in on Google “Free WordPress Themes” and you’ll get thousands of results. If you want some Blogger templates you’ll just need to do the same thing.
Written by blazelook.com on 06 April 2010
We often come to a term called BLOG and BLOGGING and think too much or mostly get confused about it. This is because most of the Blog systems available are either too complicated to manage. Also the management section is not so appealing.
Here we want to introduce a blog engine which is most powerful and easiest to manage the content you publish as a post. WordPress installation is very easy and takes around 3 minutes to install and configure. WordPress, a multi tasking Blog engine has very nice, clean, catch and appealing content management section. A feature rich HTML (YSIWYG) editor helps you format the content for your web pages. WordPress has a Media Management section where you can manage your Images, Videos, and Files easily to use within or outside your Blog. Also it has a Links section where you can publish your other websites or related websites to your Blog on any of your Blog page.
A page management section makes it possible for you to publish the information pages with formatted text, images, videos and almost every type of content you think of publishing within pages. WordPress is a true Web 2.0 Blog Engine helps people to post comments on your blog. WordPress has a modular development methodology and is easily configurable with widgets management feature.
A huge WordPress community of 6706 Plug-in, 995 Templates (Theme Design), and 2842 Ideas helps you Setup and Manage your blog website easily. To start with you can find thousands of WordPress Themes for free just like any other Open Source product available on the internet. It has got trouble-free user management section where you can manage all your registered users at one place. An easy Import-Export feature is available to speed up the work. And last but not least, if you want to upgrade your WordPress website to a newer version, just click one button and there you are with a new version. Now WordPress is also available as a one click installation in mostly all Hosting Provider who uses Fantastico like application management software.
Creating new Design and editing the same in WordPress is easy with the inbuilt template editor. Alongside WordPress Customization is as easy as writing about self.
Above all, WordPress is all FREE and can be used as multiple types of websites like Blog, Content Management System, eCommerce Website and more.
