Guide To Blogging

Archive for the ‘WordPress Plugins’ Category

A little while ago I made a post discussing the default blog settings regarding the Nofollow Attribute - which basically means that if someone leaves a comment on your blog most of the search engines will follow that setting and not follow that link through to the commentors blog.

Within that post  (Nofollow/DoFollow) I listed a couple of ways you can change that to DoFollow those links in both WordPress and Blogger blogs.

Another WordPress Plugin I recently came across that will help you share the link love is the Link Love Plugin - once activated this turns off the NoFollow for commentors who have left more than 10 comments - this can be changed to a lower number quite easily - read the readme for more information - but you can either change it by opening the php file in notepad and changing the settings to 2-4-15 etc and then saving and uploading to your plugins or edit via your plugin page in your dashboard)

When it comes to blogging most of us like to know who is linking to our blog often for a variety of reasons; where our traffic is coming from, so we can visit them easily, so we can return the favour etc.

There’s many ways we can keep track of where our incoming links are coming from; using a statcounter of some sort, via technorati, wordpress has the incoming links in your dashboard etc etc.

For many blog owners they in turn want to say thanks for the link or put a reciprocal link in their blogroll or on a separate page, in a post or whatever other means they may use to say thanks for the linkage, sometimes the problem with this comes when those return links or posts end up moving deeper and deeper into your blog and you end up not giving the incoming linker the promotion you feel they deserve.

There’s many ways you can show your appreciation for those that take the time to link to or comment on your blog; adding a top or recent commentors  plugin, creating a separate page or manually adding those links to your blogroll etc.

Or you could try some of these plugins

wholinked add to the sidebar of you blog which shows the incoming links - available for different blog formats

Technorati Incoming Links Widget 

This one - who link here is in Spanish but here’s a translated version 

When it comes to blogging many people become almost addicted to it and soon find themselves having (or wanting to have) multiple blogs. Because they are so easy to set up it’s not hard to have a new blog up and running within minutes, often the hardest thing to do is to come up with a name and your first post.

Once you’ve used a WordPress blog you quickly decide what works for you and your blog’s topic/theme etc and what doesn’t so when you’re ready to start a new blog odds are you’ll use much the same thing again (the themes may vary, but most plugins etc will probably stay the same) It’s at this point that you realise just how handy it can be to keep a checklist and folders of your most commonly used themes/plugins etc.

While for the most part it’s pretty standard when it comes to setting up a WordPress blog there are a few changes you may want to make and there’s nothing worse than establishing a blog, writing a few posts only to realise you forgot to activate or change a default setting etc.

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One of the best things about having a blog as opposed to a static webpage is the ability you’re given to easily interact with your readers or customers etc.

As a blog owner we love to receive comments; whether it’s to ask and answer questions, find out what our readers think of our opinions or advice  or to just generally interact with others in our chosen communities.

As a blog reader we use comments for much the same reason; interact with the creator of the blog (or blog poster), inform them of posts on our own blogs (links) or get them to clarify certain points etc

While the standard leave a comment box is easy to use for those wanting to leave a comment there are a variety of plugins that can make the experience much more beneficial (to both blog owners and those leaving a comment) and fun.

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Sometimes when it comes to adding an Amazon product to your wordpress post it can either be a little tricky or time consuming - tricky because at times wordpress seems to rebel against using certain codes and time consuming because often once you’ve added your post you then need to go and find the product you want and get the code you need etc.

Well thanks to this great blog (Mom Gadget) I was pointed in the direction of this cool wordpress plugin that makes it quick and easy to add an Amazon product to your page

Simply put once you’ve uploaded and activated your plugin (and set the configuration to put your affiliate code etc in) depending on which version you use there’s either a little link under where you write your content that says insert content from Amazon or to the right of your screen a quick tab.

WordPress 2 (Visual QuickStart Guide) Just click on that and it brings up your search. Once you’ve found the product you want simply drag the image and/or the text link across to your post.

That’s it you’re done

You can get the plugin in here WP-Amazon

I’ve mentioned in the past a way to embed a video in a wordpress blog  and in all honesty that’s pretty easy to do, but…

I just came across this plugin Viper’s Video Quick Tags - which makes it even easier - simply put once you’ve downloaded and activated the plugin you just need the url to the video you want to embed and then paste that into the box that pops up (there’s a little Youtube and Google video button you can click)

Here’s the end result - a quick video on how to make your blog search engine friendly that took all of two seconds to embed (the longest part being finding the youtube video)

I was wandering through How To Grow Your Blog Traffic earlier and came across another great plugin for wordpress blog users. This is the same guy who gave us the buy me a beer plugin, only this plugin enables blog users to monetise their rss feeds.

Simply put (and I’ll leave it to him to explain it properly ) the plugin allows you to put html codes in the footer of your feeds - so you can put your chosen product(s) (clickbank) etc in your feeds which gives you the chance to earn from them. You can rotate up to 10 ads or add copyright notices etc to your feeds.

Feed Footer Plugin 

I have to admit that I’m not using it (at least at this stage or on this blog) but I wanted to share it with others who may find it useful. His blog is well worth taking a look through too while you’re there.

I came across this interesting little plugin the other day: Buy Me A Beer.

If you run a blog that provides a service,  is related to a charity or would like to offer your readers the chance to send you a donation via PayPal then this plugin might be right up your alley. While the actual plugin is titled buy me a beer both the wording and the image can be altered to suit your needs.

There’s a variety of options that come with the plugin: whether you want it added to each post or your sidebar and what currency you want the donation in etc.

Take a look and download it here