Ultimate WordPress Ping List: Free PDF Download

June 10, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 5 Comments

I always teach my article marketing students that it’s to your ultimate advantage to write and publish some of your best articles to your own website, preferably a WordPress blog. So as you write new blog articles and post them to your WordPress blog, a great way to attract more traffic to those articles is by letting other people know (right away) that you have posted new articles on your blog. This is done very effectively via WordPress through your ping list.

If you have a WordPress blog already, it is currently set up by default to use a service such as ping-o-matic to announce on the web that you have posted new content to your blog – but to really see a significant traffic increase to your website there are quite a few other services that you should use and add to your ping list.

It’s important that your ping list stay fresh AND that you do not ping the same service with duplicate content. That’s why I have compiled an ultimate ping list that should help improve traffic and buzz for your blog. Plus – no opt-in required and it’s free:)

DOWNLOAD THE WORDPRESS ULTIMATE PING LIST

One more thing, remember that implementing your ping list is only part of an overall healthy SEO Article Marketing plan. There are plenty of other tweaks you can make that will make your WordPress blog even more of a traffic magnet. For example, there is a WordPress plugin that I use in conjunction with my Ping list that enhances its usability. These are SEO tweaks that have been crucial to the visibility of my site in a sea of tough competition. Anything you can do to help your content stand out among the rest, is a tweak worth the time and effort.

Enjoy!

Related Websites

Ezine Articles WordPress Plugin

May 2, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 51 Comments

Have you heard about the new Ezine Articles WordPress Plugin?
People who use WordPress as their blogging platform, do so for many reasons, one being that it has the unique capability of utilizing a variety of WordPress plugins that can do very powerful things — and all for free! Well, this new Ezine Articles WordPress Plugin doesn’t disappoint either. It’s powerful and a great time saver.

I had the advantage of testing the article directory’s WordPress plugin in Beta and while it was first quite “buggy”, I looked forward to the day when they worked out the kinks, because I saw the potential in a plugin that you could use to submit articles directly to Ezinearticles.com. It simply cuts down on the step of opening another tab, logging into Ezine Articles, and copying, editing, and pasting my articles for submission.

So now the new version of the ezine articles WordPress plugin is released, and I honestly feel that it was worth the wait. This is how it works…

<== This is the control panel that you will see in the top right hand corner of the admin area of your blog. You write a blog post like you would normally would and use this to select the options you need to make for submission.

1. Pick your article category

2. Choose your pen name

3. Select and/or customize your resource box

4. You can choose to use the first two sentences of your article as the summary or you can edit it.

5. You can choose to use your post tags as the tags for the article over at EA.

6. If you are a premium member, you can choose to make a scheduled release of your article, otherwise it will publish once approved by the editorial team.

7. You can press the validate button (I love this feature:) to check and make sure that your content is suitable for submission. This will really cut down on reasons why editors would kick-back your article and get you published that much faster.

8. Then you click submit and you’re done.

What also makes this plugin a great time saver is the fact that after you’ve done that, you can tweak the article (add your affiliate links etc.) and somewhat refresh or rewrite the article and submit to your blog as a totally separate article. All during the same writing session.

So now that the bugs are all worked out, I highly recommend using this plugin to seamlessly submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. You will wonder what you ever did without it.

Thesis Template: How To Change Error 404 Pages

March 16, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 8 Comments

Want to change your Thesis error page? Well, if you write and publish articles to your own WordPress blog (which I highly recommend), then I’m sure you have seen the ugly little error 404 page on other blogs and no doubt visitors have seen them on yours as well. Well thanks to Thesis, we can easily change these pages to something much more useful for people who end up on the wrong page on your site.

This is the typical error page:

You 404’d it. Gnarly, dude.

Punt.

Surfin’ ain’t easy, and right now, you’re lost at sea. But don’t worry; simply pick
an option from the list below, and you’ll be back out riding the waves of the Internet in no time.

Hit the “back” button on your browser. It’s perfect for situations like this!
Head on over to the home page.

This is how you can change your error pages easily on Thesis:

1. Download the Thesis Open Hook plugin. It’s a great plugin. I highly recommend it for all owners of this great template. And it will help you make changes to all of the pages and sections of your blog easily.

2. Click on Thesis OpenHook link under the Appearance section on left hand side of your admin.

3. That will open your options page. In the bottom right hand corner, you should see a drop-down “select a hook” box.

4. Select and scroll down to the Page Templates, Archives and More heading. Under that heading you will find an option for thesis_hook_404_title & thesis_hook_404_content.

5. Fill in your new title for the page and make sure you check the box to remove the default 404 title box. Click the blue “Little Ass Save Button” and you’re done.

6. Same thing for content. Fill in your new content and make sure you check the Remove default 404 content box. Click the blue “Little Ass Save Button” and you’re done.

7. What should you put on your new 404 page? Well, that’s a whole different article:) but I recommend helping your visitor get to the content they were looking for OR apologizing deeply and giving them a “gift” for the inconvenience. Here is an example.

Have any questions? List ’em in the comments section.

Related Websites

Update Your Copyright Information

January 3, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 8 Comments

It’s that time of year again where all of us blog, website, sales page, and squeeze page owners need to change the copyright information at the bottom of the page. Now for some of us, this might be quite a few pages, and oh what a pain if you can’t outsource it. But I think it is absolutely worth it.

I for one hand am one of those people that visits websites and looks at the copyright date. I think it says a lot when I visit your website in March and the copyright information is still from last year. I wonder just how much attention is being paid to the website, at least by people who care. Not just “workers”.

Sure it’s a small thing, but go ahead and take out about 60 seconds or a little longer for some of you to go update your site’s copyright information. It will let everyone know who has taken the time to visit your website, that you are there, that you are present, and that you give your sites a little TLC.

*If you own a Thesis blog, here are some easy directions to update your footer in 60 seconds!

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How To Update Footer In Thesis

January 3, 2010 By Lisa Angelettie 5 Comments

If you need to update say your copyright information in the very bottom of your footer, on your Thesis blog, here’s how to do it in about 60 seconds!

* I use Thesis version 1.6

1. Go To Appearance section found on the left hand column of your dashboard.

2. Click on the Editor option

3. Look to the right hand column under Templates.

4. Click on custom_functions.php template

5. This will load the theme for editing

6. Scroll down to the bottom of that template

7. You should find your current copyright information somewhere after the add action footer hook or function my footer hook. The one for this blog looks something like this:

add_action(‘thesis_hook_footer’, ‘custom_footer’, ‘1’);

function my_footer() {
echo ‘<p>Copyright © 2010 Lisa Angelettie — Powered by Pepsi, Chips & Grow Your Self Inc.</p>’;
}
add_action(‘thesis_hook_footer’, ‘my_footer’);
remove_action(‘thesis_hook_footer’, ‘thesis_attribution’);

5 Reasons Why You Need To Write Blog Articles

October 13, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 19 Comments

Most marketers teach the bare basics of article marketing. That’s because article marketing isn’t the newest bright and shiny marketing gimmick on the market, so most marketers aren’t really going to be bothered with it. They want to talk about the newest thing that they can make an affiliate income off of. So that’s why you probably haven’t heard that the BEST place for your articles to be published is your own website a.k.a. WordPress blog. This is why…

1. The search engines absolutely love blogs, especially WordPress blogs. While I have never truly learned the technical reason why, the bottom line comes down to the fact that the blogs feed the freshest content to the web in a way that the search engine spiders can easily identify as “new”. This means that your content will be crawled and shown in search engine results faster than someone who just posted a page on a regular site. So it should not be a question whether or not you need a blog in your business – you need one. It would be absolutely silly not to create this free treat for the search engine monster:)

2. When you write articles on your own blog you create a direct connection from the reader to your website – no middleman. When you write and submit articles to a directory, the article directory becomes your middleman. The reader searches for information, finds it via a search on the article directory, clicks on the link to the directory, reads the article, and then hopefully clicks on your link(s) in your article to your website or squeeze page. That’s a lot of steps the reader has to take to finally make it to your site. The more optimal scenario would be for someone to search for something, find a link to an article on your site, which of course takes them to your site. Better odds for more traffic, more opt-ins, and more “fans” of your work.

3. Readers can read and subscribe to your blog articles. An RSS feed allows readers to subscribe to your articles via RSS reader or through email. A few article directories offer RSS feeds for individual authors, some only have it for the author’s topic, and many others don’t have RSS feeds at all. If you have your own blog, that people can subscribe to, readers will have consistent and direct access to your articles which only supports what we know statistically about people who invest in your product or service. Prospects need at least 7 exposures to you before they can trust you enough to buy from you. Giving prospects solid content on a regular basis is a great way to support this.

4. Blog articles are easy to write and publish. Out of all the ways there are to publish your own content online or offline, blogging is the easiest. The biggest task is the initial set up of your blog, and after that it’s pretty easy. Get into the backend of your blog, write your article, make a few SEO tweaks like adding post tags or meta tags, and click “publish”.

5. While writing tons of articles and submitting them to the directories can create a surge of traffic to your website, writing tons of articles on your own blog can create something more. A base of people who follow your articles. Who actually look forward to your next article and know where to find it – on your blog. I call it building your article brand and building your reader fan club. Building this community of “fans” is crucial to the long-term success of your business online. These are the people who will buy from you over and over again.

*Bonus Tip
6. Writing articles on your own blog, versus an article directory, allows you to place live links within the article. Links that link to other articles on your blog to create stickiness, links to your own products and services, and affiliate links to products that you are promoting. See how that works!

Top 21 WordPress Plugins For Article Marketing

September 22, 2009 By Lisa Angelettie 35 Comments

I’ve been using a WordPress Blog to publish and promote my blog articles for several years now, and one of the features that makes a WordPress Blog so appealing to a marketer is the fact that you can make so many essential tweaks for SEO purposes and for monetization with the use of WordPress Plugins.

Now it’s important that you not use a million plugins, because they will slow down the speed of your blog; And then of course there are some plugins that are better than others, which leads me to my list. These are what I consider the Top 21 Essential WordPress Plugins that every article marketer should be using on their blogs. This isn’t some random list to get people to read this article – these are the exact plugins that I use on my site that I see have been key to sending more organic traffic to my articles.

There are about 14 plugins that I have eliminated from this list since I have started using the Thesis WordPress template (a super SEO friendly template), so I highly recommend that you use the template if you want optimal SEO results. So without further ado, here’s my Top 21 WordPress Plugins…

1. Akismet Plugin
This plugin weeds out comment spam. Everyone gets this plugin with a wordpress blog, the only thing is that you need to go to WordPress.com to get an API key to use it. Make sure you do. This plugin works fantastically. As of this writing, Akismet has kept over 5000 spammy comments off my site – and when I have checked them, they were all definitely spam. They never missed the mark!

2. All In One Adsense and YPN Plugin

This plugin is great for adding adsense or Yahoo ads to individual posts or to the sidebars. I don’t do a whole lot of advertising, and there are other ad formats that bloggers often use (ex. Chikita), but this plugin allows me to easily and tastefully place ads where I want, and I do make a nice chunk of change from them.

3. Amazon Widgets Shortcodes Plugin

If you want to add Amazon recommendations to your blog articles, then you will need this plugin. If you don’t know by now, WordPress strips the code from Amazon ads if you try to copy and paste the html in your posts – so you will need this plugin to insert the code properly. Great idea if you add “additional resources” at the end of your articles which I occasionally do on this site, but do a lot on my other sites.

4. CommentLuv Plugin

This plugin allows you to show the last post from a commenters blog. Commenters love this plugin and often ONLY pick blogs that have this plugin enabled. So it provides a good incentive for folks to leave decent comments on your blog articles. A win-win situation for everyone.

5. Comment Relish Plugin
If you don’t have the time to respond to every commenter on your site, this plugin helps by sending an automated “thank you” email note to users after the FIRST comment on your blog. Although it’s automated, you still get to write a personalized note, so it really gives your site a personal touch. Not everyone does this – so you will stand out. (I use this in addition to replying to the commenter on my blog)

6. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator Plugin

This plugin generates a fully customizable sitemap for your site visitors. You’ll want this in addition to the Google generated xml sitemap for a better visitor experience.

7. Enhanced Recent Posts Plugin
This plugin enhances the built-in recent posts widget in your WordPress blog. Instead of limiting you to the # of posts, you can determine what categories etc. the posts are pulled from. Important for site stickiness.

8. FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin

This plugin will detect all routes to your WordPress RSS feed and redirect them to your Feedburner feed so you can track subscribers. I deactivated this one at first, when it was suggested by Feedburner to just use their feed address directly on the blog (which I did) – so visitors would subscribe directly to that feed address.

That was until I discovered that if should something ever happen to Feedburner or if they ever decide to charge for their service – I could lose those subscribers. That’s why it’s better to redirect, and this plugin will help you do that.

9. Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your blog which is supported by all the major search engines. The point of this sitemap is for the search engines to easily be able to crawl your website and find your content.

10. Lijit Search Plugin

I use this instead of the traditional search function on a WordPress blog, because of the ability for Lijit to send you vital statistics and information on what people are searching for on your site. They send you your stats daily or weekly via email. Nice little graphs are included.

11. MoFuse Plugin

You will need to install this plugin if you have a free mobile version of your WordPress blog up through Mofuse.com. This is essential in today’s age of cellular phones. You want people to be able to read your blog – not just pull it up and move on because it is to small to read.

12. Nofollow Reciprocity Plugin

This plugin searches for links to big sites that use “nofollow” tags on their links, and returns the favor. Examples are Wikipedia or StumbleUpon. This is not just about link karma, but the fact that you lose vital “link juice” from your site by following their links when they do not do offer the same benefit.

13. Post-Plugin Library Plugin

It does nothing by itself, but you will need this plugin to supply code to the Recent Posts, Similar Posts, Random Posts, or Recent Comments plugins.

14. Robots Meta Plugin

This plugin will allow you to add appropriate robots meta tags to your page and feeds, and disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

15. Similar Posts Plugin

This plugin will display a list of related posts. You can configure how this plugin determines what is related based on content, titles or tags. This plugin is a must have to keep visitors reading more articles.

16. Tweetbacks Plugin

This shows the tweets about your posts and pages as comments on your blog. Very cool in this Twitter age.

17. Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger

This replaces the built-in ping function of WordPress by pinging only when publishing a new or future article – not when editing one. Also the new post’s url is pinged – not the main site’s url. Great for SEO.

18. WordPress.com Stats
This plugin will track views, post views, referrers, and clicks. Gives you a quick look at what posts are more popular which can help you write more relevant content for your readers. This plugin also requires a WordPress.com API key. You can use the same one you established with Askismet.

19. WordPress Tweaks
Adds a variety of useful options and settings for different sections of your blog such as admin, comments, SEO, security, etc.

20. WP Super Cache

This plugin makes your WordPress blog run faster by generating html files of your pages without having to process heavy PHP scripts. This will really mean more as your blog begins to pick up steam and/or your articles are featured on heavily trafficked sites such as Digg, Slashdot, etc.

21. Do Follow

WordPress stopped following links in the comment area to stop comment spammers, and so what this plugin does is to remove the nofollow attribute that WordPress assigns to links in the comment area. Now that you can effectively screen out spammers (with Akismet), following back your commenters’ links is good blog karma.

Is your site optimized for the search engines?

The #1 place for your articles to be published is on your own site so that there is a direct path to you, but only if the search engines can find your content. The best way to do this is to build a search engine optimized site with WordPress, and specifically tweaked with the Thesis wordpress template and these plugins I just listed.

When Someone Scrapes Your Blog

February 6, 2008 By Lisa Angelettie 20 Comments

If someone scrapes your blog, it means that a very lazy person out there is stealing content from your blog and pasting it in theres to create the illusion of original content. Most of these people build blogs around various popular topics, scrape blogs for content, and profit through adsense and other monetization options.

It use to be that scrapers only stole content from the big bloggers. But now that’s getting a little too dangerous for them to do, so it’s much easier to steal from the smaller blogger who may not even know how to check to see if someone is stealing their content. This could be you!

Now, when someone scrapes your blog…

1. You may feel helpless and angry and want to call the copyright office, but that’s not the right protocol nor the way to get matters resolved quickly. Trust me – I’ve been through it.

2. The first step is a simple one and that is to contact the owner or webmaster of the blog usually by email. And give them the url of the content they scraped and the original url of where they can find your content. Make mention to them that they have used your content without your consent and you would like them to take it down within 24 hours. If you can get a hold of someone, this step is usually the last step. Most people will take it down fast. End of story. But if not…

3. The second step would be to contact them again if you haven’t heard from them via snail mail, telephone, etc.

4. The third step if you haven’t been satisfied is to contact the webhost and/or domain host of the site which has a responsibility to help you seek a resolution. You can check this by using the WhoIs database through GoDaddy.com. Just plug in the domain name and after it says that the domain is already taken – there will be a link next to it that you can click on which says “click here for info”. Click on that and you can usually find the owner’s name and contact information for the site.

Remember that anything you write on your blog that is your original content is protected under the copyright laws of the U.S. So you are in your full rights to pursue this course of action.

*Also if you own a blog powered by wordpress (like this one) or a blog which is actually on wordpress.com (a free one), then your rights and how you pursue copyright infringement can be a little different depending on which one you own. Learn more about wordpress content theft at Lorelle’s blog.

Ultimate WordPress Ping List: Free PDF Download

Related Websites

Ezine Articles WordPress Plugin

Thesis Template: How To Change Error 404 Pages

You 404’d it. Gnarly, dude.

Related Websites

Update Your Copyright Information

Related Websites

How To Update Footer In Thesis

5 Reasons Why You Need To Write Blog Articles

Top 21 WordPress Plugins For Article Marketing

When Someone Scrapes Your Blog

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