Sometimes It Is Just For Fun Version 2

Last week Morgan from Domainvestors.tv and I did a coordinated post for FUN just being goofballs and taking  5 made up things you did not know about us and making a post from it. We knew the posts were not serious commentary but thought why not? Blogging does not always have to be serious opinion and news or indepth technical detail. We knew most people could care less but sometimes things are just for fun.

Well, it seems a few people do not appreciate the fact that these are blogs and we are not pretending to always be the most serious of news sources. Other people do that great, this is a blog and at times the posts may be off topic or even just for fun or a laugh (DomainGang.com understands this and people with any sort of sense of humor should get this).

If you expect serious posts day in and day out then I may disappoint at times, I do my fair share of serious posts but I also do not take myself so seriously that I cannot have some fun on this blog here and there. Loosen up people.

I read comments on another site specifically pointing out the posts we did and also received one email pointing out the lack of relevance. I am sure that it must be really offensive to some people when others have a sense of humor and they do not, but most people I know like a little fun in their reading here and there. I am not Domain Gang but do think it is possible to have a serious blog mixed with fun.

To those that do not appreciate a little looseness I say: Smile people, don't take yourself so seriously life is much more fun that way.

Top 5 Posts From My Last 100 On BruceMarler.com

Well I was sitting here looking at my Wordpress admin panel wondering what to write today, there about 50 ideas swirling around and then  I looked at my post number and it was 199 which means this is post #200. I got from 100 to 200 much faster than 1 to 100. I had just told Morgan last week when I hit each increment of 100 I would do a review of the last 100 posts and pick out my 5 favorites as a review so here we go, my top 5 posts from the last 100 I did:

Open Letter To Small Business Owners - This one has really done wonders since I posted it, this has become standard marketing material for us, albeit in a cleaned up form. I also have new customers who found it through various searches online and then contacted us.

Buying Domain Names For Investment Vs. Development - This post was inspired buy a conversation I had with a good friend about the thought process I go through when buying a name. Sometimes I have to where domainer hat, other days it is a developer hat.

Focus On What Could Be And Not What Is - This post is all about focusing on what the possibilities of a development or domain name is and not what you see right now, in otherwords focus on the what the business could be instead of just the name.

Why Small Business Should Advertise During Bad Times - This was inspired after seeing a local business start booming after they started spending on promotion rather than holding everything back due to the economy. There business is still booming BTW.

Stop Blaming The End Users It Is A Domain Industry Problem - OK, so obviously I knew the post would get some attention but not as much as it did, I am STILL getting questions and comments about it. Whether you agree with me or not the conversation that ensued in various places was very good and brought up new issues and concepts of promotion for the industry. Read the 50 plus comments and the post if you have not, the post is not so much mine anymore , there is a ton of info in the comments alone.

Well there they are. Thanks for continuing to read.

Buying Domain Names and Blogging In Flight

I am sitting in seat 21F (exit row and nobody in middle seat YES!!!! next best thing to first class) on American Airlines flight 1727 somewhere between St. Louis and Los Angeles and on one hand loving it and the other thinking CRAP there goes any disconnect time I ever had.

I remember being jealous when I heard how there were so many flights in Europe with wi-fi aboard but as I thought about it at the time I realized I really did not want Wi-Fi on board. Why? Well one of the rules I always had during my business travels was that plane time was disconnect time for me.

When you spend your days filled with meeting after meeting and then working at night to prepare for the next days bid or presentation, etc the flight time was the only time to not have the laptop or cellphone attached to you.

Well, I knew American had put Wi-Fi on many of their flights and as luck would have it my second flight after leaving my old world has Wi-Fi. And what do I do 10 minutes into flight, yep you guessed it, booted up. There goes downtime.

Luckily now it is not quite the same since in reality what I do now is something that interests me and that changes things a bit, and I had several domain names I needed to pick up for customers (hand reg names, yes!) so I can whip ou out a quick post, respond to comments on my post about traffic coming from unlikely sources then buy some names. Then it is back to my Bose Quiet Comfort 3s and music.

Here are 5 reasons I like Internet access in flight:

1) I get to feed my addiction

2) I can catch up on other blogs, etc while in flight with no interruptions

3) I can respond to comments so people do not think I am avoiding them, just kidding:)

4) I get to buy domain names instead of you (yes you) grabbing them before me

5) Because I just like being connected

Now for 5 reasons I do not like in flight access

1) Because I have to admit I have an addiction

2) Because I now have no excuse not to respond to an email

3) Because the person next to me may watch some stupid video and think that I may be interested

4) Because the person in front of me is bound and determined to push their seat back and make me hit the publish before I am done

5) Because now I will have to go buy the power adapter for my laptop to fit the sockets on the planes.

Well, it is a 4 plus hour flight and I have one hour of battery left, at least that sets a timer for me to get off.

Top Twitter Plugins For Wordpress

As I work with customers more and more everyday I get asked more and more, can you set my site up to work with Twitter, can you have my new content or products automatically go to Twitter and so on.

Usually if more than one person asks me the same question it turns into a blog post, below I outline several of the top Twitter plugins for Wordpress and some other tools that you can use to integrate Twitter with your website or blog.

Twitter Tools - The Twitter Tools plugin is probably one of the most widely used plugins for Twitter and Wordpress integration, until recently this is the plugin I used and still do on a few of my sites. It provides a very high level of configuration and allows for digests of your Tweets to be sent out or blog posts to be created from your tweets. It also allows for very simple ways to show your Tweets in your sidebar.

Twitter Tools Bit.ly URLs - We are all choosing our favorite URL shorteners as we use Twitter more and more to promote our content or sites, Bit.ly is extremely popular and this plugin allows Twitter Tools to use Bit.ly as the link shortener when posting links to Twitter.

Twitter Tools HashTags - This allows you to set the # hashtags in the Tweets you send from Twitter Tools to allow for easy searching for your Tweets on Twitter.

Tweetmeme Retweet Button - It used to be that everyone showed their Digg count, now more and more showing your ReTweet count is important, this tool also allows for you to easily have users ReTweet your content straight from your site. It uses the very popular service Tweetmeme.com.

My Twitpics - This allows your to show your pictures you have posted through the Twitpic service that allows easy posting of photos to twitter in your sidebar. I use this on BruceMarler.com

Twitter Style Links -This one is pretty cool, if you post a message to someone on your blog using the standard Twitter @NAME it will search their comments and then add a link to their name, in other words @NAME will be automatically linked.

Twitter Widget - Very simple plugin, simply adds a sidebar widget to show your Tweets.

Twitter Tracker - This allows you to show a Twitter sidebar based on  a search term, it can be used to track certain topics, such as domain names, social media, etc.

And one that is not a plugin but still very useful, this is something I have used for quite sometime with very great success on some of my automated news aggregators, it is Twitterfeed.com , this allows your to schedule a set time to have an RSS feed sent to your Twitter account, this could also be used to post news that is not from your blog but instead from another source that your followers may find of interest.

Post your favorites in the comments section, there are pages and pages, the above are a few I have a tried with success or have heard of other people using, I am sure you have many more.

How To Build A Wordpress News Aggregator Version 2

After seeing all the downloads of my original free E-book on how to create a Wordpress news aggregator in 15 minutes I realized that it was probably time for an update. In this version I will show a more streamlined approach to creating the news aggregator, once again it is not my place to judge the value of Wordpress news aggregators, people love them or hate them. I can say I have had very good feedback on the ones I have implemented to the point where I have actually had people request their feeds be added based on traffic to the site.

Assumptions before we start:

Domain name has been purchased, if you are a domain investor you probably already have your favorite domainer friendly places, if you are not and you need a domain name to start your aggregator you can go to the consumer friendly GoDaddy.com

Hosting account has been setup, if you need hosting check at Hostgator.com for great packages for Wordpress hosting, I use Hostgator for this blog and also use their dedicated servers for Missouri.me.

DNS has been switched over to your hosting provider.

Last assumption, your hosting provider uses Cpanel for the management of your account and has Fantastico installed which allows for easy as can be Wordpress installation.

After the steps above are taken care of it is time to install Wordpress, as mentioned you will want to first login to your cpanel account, to do this go to:

InsertYourDomainName.com/cpanel

Example for the site I am using for test here: http://NewspaperHeadlines.net/cpanel

After doing this a login window should pop up, here is an example:

After you have logged in with your username and password it is time to find the icon for Fantastico and install Wordpress, in my case Fantastico is at the far bottom right of the rows of icons. In your case it may be elsewhere, it is the icon that is a little blue smiley face, here is an example:

Click on the icon and you will get a screen with a row of menu items on the left, under blogs you should see a menu item called Wordpress, click this. You will then want to click on New Installation, you will then get a screen with several items to fill in that looks like this:

In my case I am wanting to install this as the main site for the domain name so for directory I will leave blank, for admin user id you can input what you want to have as the admin id and then select a strong password.

For admin nickname, this can be anything although I tend to make it either the name of the person who is writing if it happens to be a blog, but in this case I am using reporter as the nickname.

Choose the email address you want to use unless you are using the default that it sets and then select a site name, in my case I am switching this from the domain name NewspaperHeadlines.net to Newspaper Headlines.

For description something short but descriptive, somewhat like a tagline, should be used.

After those fields are completed click the Install Wordpress button.

It will take you to step 2 of 3, click on the Finish Installation button and Wordpress is installed. If you want the details of the installation sent to you input your email address into the box shown in step 3 of 3 and click send email.

At this point you are done in Cpanel and Fantatsico and will be doing the rest of the work from the Wordpress Admin Panel.

To get to the Wordpress admin panel go to:

YourDomainName.com/wp-admin

You will see a screen that looks like this, login with your admin login and password that you created previously.

At this point you are ready to start making some tweaks in Wordpress, although going through all the various plug-ins and site tweaks I like to make is outside the scope of this how-to there are a couple things I do want to point out before we do show how to install the plugins required to start the news aggregation.

First off go to the menu item posts in the left hand menu, you will see a screen that has Hello World as the only post in your installation, if you mouse over the words Hello World you will get a little menu that gives you the option to delete that post, delete it.

After this you will want to click on the links menu in the left hand menu, you will want to check the box next the the word name in the gray menu bar, this will select all the links automatically installed, after doing this click the drop down box where the words Bulk Action are and select Delete and then hit the Apply button, this deletes all the automatically installed links.

Now, one more deletion and then we move on to just a couple more tweaks, click the Page button in the menu bar on the left, you will see an About Page, high light the text and delete that page or you can keep the page and edit it later to show what your site is about.

At this point you need to click the Settings menu button on the left menu bar, after doing this you will see a list of menu items drop down under where the word Settings was by itself before.

First you will want to click the menu item under settings that says Privacy and select that you would like for search engines to be able to index your site and hit Save Changes.

After this click on Writing in the left menu bar, after doing this you will want to click the boxes for Atom Publishing protocol, and the one below it that starts with Enable the Wordpress, etc,etc, publishing protocols.

Save changes and then we have one more tweak to make.

Under the settings menu select Permalinks, you will want to select custom structure, this allows for Wordpress to have title names that are readable by the search engines and more likely to be indexed. I would use the custom format of /%postname%/

This uses the title of each post name as the file name that the search engines will see. You also may want to use keyword rich category base and tag names as well.

After completing this you will want to click Save Changes.

Now it is time to install the Wordpress plug-ins required to run the Wordpress news aggregator, to install plug-ins you will first want to click on the Plugins item in the menu bar on the left, in this case I am only going to show the specific plugins required but if you want more information on the Wordpress Plugins I use on a full installation of a blog check out Wordpress Plug-ins.

For this though we will want to install FeedWordpress and the FeedWordpress Duplicate Post Filter.

After you clicked on the Plug-Ins menu item you should see a couple additional items below the Plug-ins button, hit the Add New button. You will see a screen like this:

You will want to do a search for FeedWordpress and hit Search.

The top one in the list will be FeedWordpress. You will want to hit the install button, and then when you get the pop up you will want to hit the orange Install button, and then after that you will be at a screen that gives you an option to activate, hit the activate button. After you activate you may get a pink box at the top of your Wordpress admin panel that says that Magpie RSS is out of date, hit the upgrade button, it is a one second upgrade with one click.

Now it is time to install the duplicate post filter. Once again you will want to hit the Add New button below the Plugins menu item on the left and now search for Feedwordpress duplicate by hitting search plugins. Just like before you will want to hit install next to the top item which is FeedWordpress Duplicate Post Filter and then hit the orange install button in the popup and then activate.

At this point you have what you need installed to start your aggregator, now it is time to add a feed to the site so news will start to flow, you can add as many as you like but for purposes of this example we will just do one.

You will want to first hit the Syndication button on the left, now you will see something like this:

In my case, for testing purposes only I chose StlToday.com which is a news source in the St. Louis, MO area. Long term I would choose many options and have them in different categories.

To select StlToday.com I put the URL http://StlToday.com in the Add New Source box and clicked syndicate, after going to the next screen I clicked Use This Feed.

Technically at this point you are complete but there are a few more tweaks. You will notice after going back to the syndication page it shows that automatic updates are not on, it is possible to hit the Update button and have the news fed in now but lets make it easier on ourselves and turn on automatic updates.

You will want to click on Feeds and Updates in the left hand menu under Syndication, there are a ton of options for FeedWordpress which are outside the scope of this post, they are all very well defined and you can determine how you want to configure each option, in this case though we will simply turn on automatic updates so each time new news comes into the feed it will be posted automatically.

You will see under Update Scheduling a drop down, the top item is cron job or manual updates, in this case we will set it too automatically check for updates after pages load.

After doing this go to the bottom of the screen and select Save Changes.

Now click on Syndication again and click the Update button. It will automatically load the news from the feed, and now every 60 minutes get any additional news.

You will want to read through the various options for the FeedWordpress configuration, there are options to have clicks of the titles automatically direct you to the feed source or to keep the content on your site and then after reading the article they can click through to the source.

Although outside the scope of this how-to you will also want to configure categories and other items to finish up your Wordpress installation and also want to upgrade your theme. Although there are plenty free ones out there I am been really pleased with the themes as StudioPress.

Thanks for taking the time to read, hope it helped you get moving.

Optimizing Revenue From Old Website Content

One of the things I have been taking the time to do lately is watching to see which one of my posts from the past receive traffic from highly searched terms and then optimizing the affiliate links and other info on the site to get the most out of the current traffic.

This is something I had really never done before but a few months back I remember reading (and unfortunately I cannot find it now) a post by someone about making sure you go back to old posts and update them, add a link to a new resource, add a new sponsored link, etc. This made absolute sense to me and I made a commitment to start to do that. In many cases when you build a website, or in this case a blog. You write the post and basically leave it as is for the lifetime of the site.

But doesn't it make more sense to watch watch posts are getting traffic and for what specific terms and then optimize the ads around that term, that is very targeted advertising and even though I have just started down this path it seems a pretty obvious way to generate revenue from old work.

One example is that quite sometime ago I did a real quick ebook that was really just my notes on turning up a Wordpress News Aggregator, although not my best work it does continue to get traffic. A quick optimization I did was added a Hostgator.com banner that focuses on Wordpress hosting. This is very targeted towards his post and the conversion rate will be hire than if I slapped it into a completely unrelated post.

Just wanted to give a little tip if you see you have old posts continuing to get traffic you may want to go back to them and optimize a bit. If I find the post where I found this little idea I will update this post with it.

Yet Another List Of Wordpress Plug-Ins

After my blog redesign I had several people ask me about who did it (Tia Wood) and what plug-ins I use. Rather than reply to all the emails with the same answer over and over again I thought I would put the list out here.

Akismet - This plug-in is a must, it is an automated spam comment catcher. Enable it and paste in your Wordpress API key and it is ready to go. Saves a lot of time.

All-In-One-SEO-Pack - Although there are a ton of SEO packs for Wordpress now I still continue to use this one. Allows you to set keywords and description per post along with title.

Contact Form 7 - A VERY easy to use contact form plugin. Select your fields, cut and paste one line of code and your contact form is there.

Contextual Related Posts - This has helped drive my pageviews upwards, this plugin will determine related posts to show at the end of you post based on titles, etc. Very easy to use.

FD Feedburner Plugin - Serves one purpose, to redirect my RSS feed to Feedburner.

Full Text Feed - Allows for the full RSS feed to show after post excerpts is turned on.

Google XML Sitemaps - This allows for automatic generation and submission of Google compliant sitemaps after a new post is created. Very configurable and also submits to Yahoo, Ask, and more.

My Twitpics - This automatically shows a list of the last pictures I have sent through Twitpic, adds a bit of a personal touch to the blog.

PHPBay - This is a paid plugin and allows for automatic creation of Ebay links in my sidebar or in posts. I use it mainly on some of my sites but also use it here as well to allow people to see some of the auctions happening at Ebay.

SEO Smart Links - This is a great plugin that allows you to set keywords and then have those keywords automatically link to other posts or sites. Very useful for building targeted anchor text.

Sexy Bookmarks - I just recently started using this, this is the plugin that shows the social bookmarking plugins at the bottom of each post. Nicer looking than some of the older plugins out there that do something similar.

Statpress Reloaded - I use this to watch real time results of keywords, etc driving traffic to the blog. To be honest I prefer the type of data Awstats provides but this is useful for a quick look at why a traffic spike may be occurring or other things like that.

Subscribe To Comments - The name says it all, allows a use to subscribe to follow up comments, helps drive conversation and continued traffic.

Supr By Stumbleupon - Su.pr is my link shortener of choice, this, for the most part, automates that. I will say there have been times that it has not actually posted but when it does work it helps automate a very simple process.

Top Commentators Widget - A nice way to show the people commenting the most and give them a link. Easy to install.

Tweetmeme Retweet Button - As more and more people use Twitter to share links this makes it easy to share the post right from the post itself.

Wibiya Plugin - I will let the plugin explain itself. See the toolbar at the bottom of this screen, yep, pretty cool:) Thanks to Tia for finding this one, from what I understand it is a beta plugin but it has worked fine so far.

Wordpress.com Stats - This is another stats program that uses the Wordpress key and API to share info with Wordpress press to generate very key data (what links are being clicked, how many times, etc). I like statpress for real time, I like this to see where people go on the site but I really installed it so the next plugin would work.

Wordpress Popular Posts - I wanted a way to show people what was being read, not necessarily based on comments like many popular posts plugins due, but using other variables. This allowed me to do that. You can see it in use in the box under the first post on the main page of the blog.

WPTouch iPhone Theme - I did a post about WPTouch iPhone Theme recently and have been very happy with it. Makes the site very usable from a mobile interface.

Well, there is the list. Thanks to those that have commented on the new theme and sent the questions hopefully this answers the questions:)

New Custom Wordpress Theme on BruceMarler.com

Just a quick note for you coming in and wondering what the heck you are seeing. Last night Tia Wood and I worked to get my new custom wordpress theme up and running. There are still several tweaks to make but for those that have been here before it will be a bit different than what you are use too.

When I first launched this blog I was not quite sure which way I was going to head, or if anyone would even read it, so I did not really invest much in the layout or design and did not plan on advertiser space very well. Now that my traffic has went up significantly  I thought it best to invest in a custom blog theme that allowed me to be more flexible with layout and advertising space. There are alot of good free themes out there but I could not find one that did quite what I wanted but Tia has done a great job taking what was in my head and building a custom one.

We will be working over the next day or so finishing it up so bear with me if you see some thing moving around on the site or something seems broke, we are trying to keep the reader impact low as we make these changes.

Google Adsense For Mobile Surprising In Just 24 Hours

Well, not something I planned on blogging about today but when I first installed the WPTouch Wordpress plug-in last night it was more for usability for mobile users than it was about monetization. When i configured the mobile plug-in there was a place that you could simply paste your Google Adsense publisher code to enable mobile Adsense. I did this not expecting much.

Well, this morning I woke up and did my morning check on stats and noticed that I had a few bucks from the mobile ads from my iPhone news aggregation site. I checked back a little bit ago and sure enough had another couple bucks. Not bad for a change that took me less than 2 minutes time.

What I think is really working in my favor here is that there is only one mobile ad being shown per pageview which means it is normally the highest CPC advertiser which in theory means the largest payout to me the publisher.

Moral to the story, if you are not using Google Adsense for Mobile along with a mobile Wordpress plug-in you may want to give it a shot. It may be a fluke (it has not been 24 hours yet) but not a bad start.

Free Minisite Ebook – Wordpress News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

Wordpress Minisite News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

UPDATE: A new version also now exists at How To Build A Wordpress News Aggregator although not in downloadable format, if you want a PDF this is the post for you.

Minisites for your Domains come in many different forms. One that has become popular is taking a niche and building a news aggregator using Wordpress and the FeedWordpress Plugin which is built specifically to aggregate RSS feeds from sources that you choose. This How-To Create A Wordpress Minisite Tutorial will show you how to create a Wordpress Minisite aggregating news for a specific topic, in this case using Cpanel and Fantastico.

If you do not have hosting with Cpanel and Fantastico then you should head to Hostgator.com, since they have packages that allow for unlimited Wordpress installations at very low prices, I use them for all of my hosting for both my dedicated servers and blog hosting for BruceMarler.com
Originally I was going to paste all pictures and info in one blog post but after seeing the length of the post I feel its best to offer it is a PDF document in a sort of informal E-Book format (for free of course).

To download the Wordpress News Aggregator in 15 Minutes Process click this link (its free) Wordpress Minisite News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

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