Internet Marketing Strategy

I’d like to re-address the topic of Wordpress plugins. Last time, when I shared with you my must haves for deploying Wordpress based websites, I touched on the fundamentals. What I’m going to show you today is how to make your Wordpress website soar above your competitors!

First, I must stress how IMPORTANT it is to have a MOBILE ENABLED website. If your website cannot be read easily on a web capable phone or mobile internet device, your website is CRIPPLED! You’re in a 100 yard dash and you’re JOGGING! If you’re equipped and capable enough to make your own mobile theme, the more power to you, for those of you who don’t have a designer’s or coder’s bone in your body, you have several viable options:

• WPtouch is a hybrid Wordpress theme/plugin. It allows you to pick and choose what content you want to display to mobile browsers, and based on your formatting, plops your data into a beautiful, easy-to-read, mobile Wordpress theme.
• Mobify is more of a manual tool, you kind of have to know what you’re doing, or at least have someone who does at your disposal. It has a web editor that allows you to style your mobile them yourself. Just using the default style it has after choosing your content won’t cut it. You have to work some CSS magic.
• Wordpress Mobile Edition will give your website an iPhone-like makeover. Not much room for customization here, but you can add more mobile user-agents via the settings page.

Now, this last little tidbit isn’t a plugin, but it definitely helps amp up your Wordpress. Encouraging communication between yourself and your readers is an endless task, so give them more reason to respond to you by reversing the order of comments, displaying the newest comments on top, right below your post. It’s just a simple setting change, go to your Discussion Settings in the administration area, and choose to display newer comments at the top of each page.

Remember, the internet is always changing, and so are the ways we communicate on it. Show your readers you are informed AND HAVE AN OPINION about current events in your niche, and they will be drawn to speak to you.

I set up so many Wordpress blogs, for myself and others, so its really easy to overlook a step or two during the setup process once in a while. Let this post be a reminder to you, readers, and myself, to add these five nifty plugins. We do want our websites to be the best that they can be, no?

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
I definitely try to remember to install this on all of my Wordpress blogs, it saves so much time when you have twenty or more blogs to upgrade when a new version comes around. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does exactly what the name details, automatically (well, you click a button in your control panel after it alerts you a new version is available) downloads the newest stable release of Wordpress, and installs it. Perhaps we’ll see this plugin included like Akismet someday?

Live Comment Preview
Shows your readers exactly how their reply to your post will appear, in real time. Pretty neat feature that really increases the interaction between the user and your website.

WP Auto Tagger
WP Auto Tagger makes great use of the Yahoo! API to match search results against your current post’s content and provides relevant, popularly searched tags automatically. It doesn’t override any tags you suggest, either.

Nicer Trackbacks
The way Wordpress displays trackbacks to your posts from other websites is kind of ugly, and kind of not that SEO friendly. Well, don’t forget to change all that to suit your needs with this Wordpress plugin.

Most Commented Posts
Show your hottest topics with this plugin, which displays these posts in your sidebar much like the “Most Popular Posts” or “Recent Comments” sidebar items.

Don’t forget to bookmark the Five Most Overlooked Wordpress Plugins, so you don’t forget next time!

Neighbr is a social networking service that takes microblogging to the next level. Never before has it been this easy to share any type of media with your friends and colleagues.

Want to share a note or image with a friend? Upload it right to the neighbrood and give them the link.

Perhaps a YouTube video, or your own FLV? It’s stupid simple to do that, too!

What, you need to help a colleague with a little programming trouble? Post that snippet and have it syntax highlighted in some pretty colors.

Every note you share, be it text, image, video, file, or code, is blended into the website seamlessly for the easiest of browsing.

So, with all that, won’t you be my neighbr?

Please note, neighbr is currently in its beta stage and not all of its features are fully operational, but you should definitely check it out

I was so involved in writing up 5 SEO No-No’s on Friday that I completely forgot I was supposed to shoot you guys a blog related comic. (Really sorry folks!) So, to make up for it, I present…

Beware The Dark Side

Cheers!

There are many heated arguments on the internet (via message boards, blogs, social networks, and other community type sites) over which blogging software can provide the best seo optimization features for your own blog.

Well first of all, you have several options. You can use a free hosted service (the most popular being Google’s Blogger), use blogging software you can upload to your own server and domain (the most popular here would be Wordpress, which also offers a free hosted version, but it lacks the customization options you will want), or using a CMS software to manage your post items and other integrated plugins that come with software like Joomla or Drupal.

Google’s Blogger is GREAT for creating and managing many blogs on a smaller scale. If you want to make a bunch of AdSense ready websites swiftly and with ease, I would recommend using this blogging platform. You can manage posts, themes, and advertisements from the Google Dashboard, and the new widgets coming in Blogger Draft look really appealing.

However, if you want to create one to a few really great blogs with decent traffic and authority, you should option for Wordpress. It’s a fine piece of software with many built in features that Blogger does not have. It’s easier to customize themes (in my opinion) and create your own modifications to the software (or use a user created one that already exists and is widely supported) as well as better for handling larger loads of traffic and spam comments. Speaking of comments, I believe Wordpress is better for user participation, when I moved to Wordpress, my comment rate increased five fold … sure the spam comments increased too, but Akismet has literally filtered them all.

I hope this gives you a better perspective on how to choose your seo optimized blogging platform.

Arrivederci!

Many people complain that when they ask for links, or try to share their link on various communities, that they experience little to no success, or even get banned from the venue they are trying to reach.

Well, you have to make sure to follow the rules!

When you’re posting your links on forums, make sure it is allowed by the community to append your link to your signature. Don’t post your link in new threads and replies all throughout the message board, instead, look for an advertising or promotion specific forum where the administrators want these sort of threads to be placed. (e.g. a “post your link” forum, or a “review my site” forum.)

When posting comments to blog, don’t clutter your post with links to your blog, instead focus your energies on contributing something back to the blog (provide information, ask a question, etc.) and leave your link in the URL field. I can pretty much guarantee your comment will be approved and you will gain a relevant backlink.

I hope this has helped you out, following these guidelines has ensured that 99.9% of my comments get approved, and I’ve never been banned from a message board for promoting my website within a reasonable means.

If you run a blog with a technical base, I’d be sure to read this article and cover your bases. : )

I loved the way this post used sarcastic humor to inform people of how NOT to be a blogging newbie.

10 Easy Ways To Make Yourself Look Like A Blogging Newbie

Ever wonder why you seem to not be growing within your niche or constantly having your link requests rejected by the powerhouse blogs and websites?

There’s two reasons.

First, you don’t focus enough on generating new, thought-provoking content for your readers. Authority bloggers usually only mention or link back to websites or articles they find interesting, have a certain ingenuity, or bring something new to the table. If you’re not doing this, and just regurgitating information that is already found on thousands of other blogs, there is going to be no outside interest because it is already involved somewhere else.

Second of all, you haven’t even begin to establish yourself as an authority. You constantly try to get high traffic blogs to link to you, but they notice that you don’t even have the support of your fellow small to medium sized fish. Don’t set unrealistic goals and only ask for links from people like John Chow, Shoemoney, or Darren Rowse … look for websites and blogs that are experiencing the same growth and traffic rates as you. In a likely case, they will also have more feedback for and information to share with you.

It’s just like fishing, you aren’t going to land a three hundred pound tuna your first time, just take your time, enjoy it, and fish.

Someone asked this question on a message board I frequent, and, while this question is asked all the time, day in and day out, I realized that no-one in all the blogs, message boards, and documentation websites I visit has seemed to visit this topic yet.

There is really only one answer.

Ready? I’m going to sound like a broken record.

Constantly update your site with fresh, related content and always be on the lookout to build quality backlinks with other sites in your niche.

Sound familiar?

Also, be sure to stay on top of new search trends and marketing strategies, you must stay informed so you can inform others.

Now you have the knowledge of how to receive 10,000 visitors under your belt, happy?

GoogleSystem has created a really useful widget for Blogspot bloggers, similar to the Wordpress Top Commentators plugin.

Introducing, the Google Blogger (Blogspot) Top Commentators Plugin!

Utilizing Yahoo! Pipes, it sorts the information stored in your comment RSS feed, and parses out the users who have posted the most comments on your blog. There is also options to filter your own name from the list, which you will probably want to do, and you can set the widget to display however many top commentators you want!

I kind of wish I tried it out a little more before I migrated to Wordpress, but it’s still a worthwhile mention, I hope you folks can use it.