Automated Wordpress

WordPress is a great blogging tool. It makes blogging easy and has plenty of powerful features as well. But before you can jump in, you need to pick the right theme; you need to decide how your blog will look. This is a critical decision because the look of your blog will play a big part in its success.

A WordPress theme is what determines the look of your blog, like a website design. And it’s not easy to pick! There are hundreds and hundreds of them…and some are definitely much better than others.

The theme you pick is essential to your blog’s success. First impressions are key, and a visitor’s first impression to your blog will be largely dictated by the theme.

Here are 4 things you should think about to help guide you through the process of picking the best WordPress theme for you:

1. Your blog’s subject matter is key. What’s it about? Really, the content of your blog should strongly influence the look of your blog. For example, it would make sense for a corporate/business blog to look similar to your existing website. A blog about partying should be colorful and exciting, while a blog about yoga or meditation would have a completely different feel.

2. Do you want to make money with the blog? Google AdSense is the most common way of doing this, you see these ads everywhere. And, some themes are better suited for using Google AdSense than others. Of course, there are other ways of making money from your blog – affiliate marketing, selling text links, Amazon, etc.

Not everyone wants to make money from their blog, but if you do, here’s some tips:

3-column themes (particularly with 2 columns on the left or right side) are becoming more popular. Part of the reason is that they provide a lot of space for advertising above the fold (above where a user has to scroll to see content.) Ads that are above the fold typically do better. So pick a theme with plenty of space at the top to include advertisements/sponsored links. While ultra-simple themes might be quite vogue they often lack the space needed for proper advertising.
3. Your technical know-how is important. Most WordPress themes are quite easy to use right “out of the box” but there are some themes definitely geared to beginners and others aimed at experts. Your skills in HTML and even in coding with PHP may play a factor in your successful use of a given theme.

Some themes come better equipped with instructions; so take a look after downloading a theme to see if there’s any advice or information in the files that you’ve download.

If you’re a beginner look for contact information and/or an active community around the theme (like a website or forum.)

Quick Note: Make sure your theme supports the version of WordPress that you’re running. Some themes might only work with a later version of WordPress (2.0+) but you might still be on an older version of the blog software.

4. Don’t forget to test the theme thoroughly! Once you’ve found a theme you like, at least do the following:

Write a few sample posts. Vary their length and style to see how each looks. Try including some images as well. On occasion when you start experimenting with the positioning of images you might see it actually breaks the theme. Submit some comments. Comments are important to blogging so try this out and make sure you like how they’re formatted. Make sure you click on a few posts to look at them individually. Click on the category names that you’ve setup as well to see what those pages look like. Generally speaking, try and click throughout the blog because when you first setup a theme or see one you like online it’s not going to be showing you everything. In the WordPress Admin go to the Theme Editor and look at a few of the files listed there. The idea is to just get a feeling for what the code looks like – how well written it looks – because once you start editing that code you’ll want it to be as neat as possible.

Remember, you can always change the theme on your blog, but you want to get it right the first time, if you can. Do some research, look around, find examples of themes you like in use and always test as much as you can.

Once you’ve found a great theme and started editing it you won’t want to get away from it; and that first impression for visitors to your blog is going to help guarantee your success!

By: Benjamin Yoskovitz

About the Author:

WordPress is a great platform for very simple blogs but in order to give them a more professional look and to make them function more efficiently themes and plugins are essential.

Basically a theme is what makes your blog look the way it does whereas plugins take care of a lot of the functions behind the theme. Think of the theme as being the outside look of your car, WordPress itself as the engine with the plugins being the things such as the lights, indicators, warning lights etc that are good to have but not essential to run the engine of the car. I am no mechanic but you get the idea.

What are WordPress plugins?

I guess the simplest explanation is that they are a bit of code that make things easier to do or allows you to do things that without the particular plugin are very difficult to do and beyond the capabilities of anyone other than a person with a technical knowledge of WordPress.

Why use WordPress plugins?

They allow you do to do things with WordPress that without them would be either time consuming and may also require technical expertise in WordPress beyond that of the majority of WordPress users.

What are some examples of WordPress plugins?

Akismet is a popular plugin that checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” Without such a plugin your blog could easily become full of undesirable comments that you certainly do not want your readers to read.

All in One SEO Pack is Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. You can use this plugin to tweak the default options for title, description, keywords and duplicate content.

Google AdSense, Chitika and Kontera plugins allow you to monetarize your blog and make an income from an information only blog.

Contact Form 7 allows you to create a “Contact Us” page with a form people can fill in for further information or questions about your products.

These are only a few of the many plugins you can use on your blog and it all depends on what you want your blog to do as to what plugins you need to install to make it work more efficiently and save you extra time in maintaining your blog.

By: Kerrie Sheehan

About the Author:

I recently received an email with the subject line, “Did your blog pay your bills last month?”. The answer to this question for many of you blogger is an emphatic NO. This is because many still experience rabid challenges in making their WordPress blog generate income especially on a consistent basis. But there ARE people whose blog paid their bills last month and these are ordinary people like yourself. But how can you transform your blog to become an extraordinary cash-generating machine?

Before we see some extraordinary techniques that can help your blog become the income generator that you want it to be, let us look at why you need to use WordPress as the blog platform of choice:

WordPress has a larger online community than other blogs WordPress has more plugins and technical support online than other blogs WordPress is extremely flexible

It therefore makes sense to use WordPress as the blogging platform of choice. Because it is also the most popular online for building and maintaining professional blogs, WordPress is also the easiest to monetize. The coding community has also come up with many innovative ways of tweaking the themes and adding super-plugins that do everything from blogging on autopilot to rotating and sharing ads with others. WordPress also has plugins that make it possible to have people other than yourself post content to your blog. Below are the list of things that you want your WordPress to do:

Be SEO friendly Be able to be indexed by Google in 24 hours or less! Generate money on autopilot Be able to update itself

There are many other things that a WordPress blog can do including making actual non-blog websites (something that is becoming very popular)

Killer techniques

Many people want their WordPress blog to stand out. One of the ways to do this is to tweak the theme. Many people are unable to do this for obvious reasons (they are not graphic design or php experts). But this is one of the easiest things to do. Tweaking the theme allows you to place ads in strategic places throughout the blog to maximize the click-through-rate.

Another technique is being able to make the blog SEO friendly and extend that beyond what WordPress offers as the default settings. Links must be optimized to be keyword-friendly thereby allowing the blog to dominate search results for that particular keyword.

Other techniques include:

Auto-upgrade to the latest version without taking the site down Backing up your blog in case of system failure Auto-blogging – ensuring the blog posts articles when you’re not there

If you can do all these, you are a WordPress expert and the WordPress expert videos can show you exactly how to do that.

By: Jimmy Jamm

About the Author:

Are you a new WordPress blogger and you don’t know where to start? I was in your position and I will try to help you as much as I can.

First of all, before you start blogging, I suggest you customize your blog. To do that, considering you are a new blogger, it will take you sometime. While you are customizing your blog, you don’t want search engines to crawl it so I advise you first to create a file “robots.txt” and write the following code:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Then upload it to the folder containing WordPress (using ftp). That way you will have all the time needed to finish the customization of your blog. When you finish, you remove that file.

Now, you can choose a theme of your choice (in your admin panel, choose appearance -> add new themes). You will be provided with some search options to help you choose the one you like.

After choosing a theme, I suggest you install some plugins (in your admin panel, choose plugins -> add new). Some must have (in my opinion) plugins are:

All in one seo: This plugin has some seo options for your blog.

Google XML sitemaps: It creates a sitemap for you and it automatically notifies Google.

You can also try to search some plugins that you need and experiment. If you plan to use Google AdSense, you can try “AdSense now!”. It’s a very simple plugin that automatically import ads in your posts.

Now, you can delete the robots.txt file you uploaded earlier and start blogging.

Good luck with your new blog!

By: Epameinondas Xydis

About the Author: