Maximise Ad and Affiliate Revenue with Geolocating Plugins

Christian | May 10, 2012 - 4:15 pm

Geolocation Plugins or Affiliate Link Localizer

You run a successful blog, popular with readers in various countries around the world. But how do you make your content relevant?

The chances are your articles and related services are already ideal for most of your users, but what about adverts? Perhaps you have affiliate ads linking to products that are unavailable in some territories, or you might even need to publish an article or display some other content specifically for readers in a particular country.

A quick look around at some of the mainstream media and big corporation websites reveals that this is possible, so how might you incorporate this kind of targeting into WordPress [...]

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Choosing the Best WordPress Contact Form Plugin for Your Blog

Christian | May 8, 2012 - 10:46 am

Generating feedback from your readers usually involves polls and comments on your blog posts, but from time to time they might wish to contact you personally. For instance, they might have a suggestion for article content on the site, or – if you run a news-based website – a tip-off might be left by a helpful visitor.

Tricky to code by hand, forms are potentially very powerful so it should come as no surprise to learn that there are several very good contact form plugins that you can install on your WordPress website.

While they are all capable of doing much more, the following “top five” have been tested to see how they fare with the basic task of creating a standard email contact form [...]

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Cut Down on Social Sharing Buttons

Christian | May 2, 2012 - 7:43 am

Barely a day goes by without happening across a new blog and finding that the owner has littered the site – their public face on the web – with Twitter boxes, shout-out widgets and social networking buttons.

The intention, of course, is to enable promotion of the website by visitors who might find something useful and share it, perhaps on Facebook, Digg or a similar service. By displaying a Twitter box in the sidebar, the site owner hopes to impress upon visitors the notion of following the site on the popular microblogging service.

In most cases, however, using all of these services untempered usually results in a mish-mash, a blog that looks a mess and lacks focus. This can severely impact the image of the site.

The important thing to recognize is that you need to be careful not to overdo things. After all, you don’t know who is reading [...]

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WordPress Spam Management: Is RetinaPost a Captcha Alternative?

Christian | April 25, 2012 - 9:19 am

Recently we collected together a selection of the top captcha tool choices for WordPress, presenting you with five plugins that could be employed to reduce spam and minimize attempts at forced logins.

There was, however, one plugin which was overlooked, mainly because I was unaware of it at that stage. We’re going to redress the balance here by taking a good look at the RetinaPost plugin, a quite ingenious approach to the shortcomings of most of the captcha plugins we featured previously [...]

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Automatic WordPress Backup – Great Online Cloud Backup Solution for WordPress Sites

Christian | April 16, 2012 - 11:21 am

There is a lot more to backing up your WordPress-powered website than instructing your web host to keep an archive or using dedicated plugins to enable you to download the site and database on a regular basis.

As useful as downloading a backup of your blog as a precaution against server damage/destruction can be, the act of backing up often ends up with the blog owner leaving the data on the server!

Clearly this largely defeats the object of creating a backup. While you might not have time to download the data, however, there are alternatives in the shape of online backup and storage solutions [...]

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WordPress Poll and Survey Plugins

Christian | April 12, 2012 - 9:50 am

Reader interaction is paramount on any blog that aims to be successful. Your community needs feeding, not just with fresh new articles but with the chance to let you know what it thinks.

Most of the time this will be via the comments section; a great way of gauging your readership’s feelings about recent articles. However this isn’t the only way to get feedback from your audience.

Posts – unless they are calls to action – tend to be passive in their impact. The reader will scan through, gain some interesting facts, and often move on. If the post touches upon an emotive subject, your community might be inspired to comment. This is usually good, but from time to time you might require something more [...]

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WordPress Statistics Options You Should Consider

Christian | April 5, 2012 - 9:34 am

Keeping track of which articles are being read (and why) is a vital element of running any blog. Whether you publish your thoughts for fun or you have a more profit-driven attitude to blogging, there are various tools available that can be used individually or in conjunction with others that will allow you to see which posts are being read, when they are being viewed, how many visitors your blog receives, how they arrived at your website and [...]

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Driving Traffic with Pinterest

Christian | April 3, 2012 - 8:09 am

It seems sometimes that there is a new social networking or social bookmarking service starting up every week, and in some cases this is true.

Pinterest is a little different, however, as it works as a visual medium, as opposed to something like Twitter which is almost exclusively text-based. If you’ve found Twitter lacking as a means of spreading the word about your blog, Pinterest offers an interesting alternative.

While this might not be suitable for everyone (most will notice that using Pinterest alongside Twitter is the best option) it should be ideal for you if your blog is a largely [...]

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Best WordPress Backup Solutions

Christian | March 30, 2012 - 11:16 am

With the amount of work that goes into maintaining and updating your blog it makes sense that you should regularly back up your data.

Yet many blog owners forget to do this, instead relying on the automated options provided by their web hosts.

This is leaving far too much to chance. If you truly value the blog and the work you (and others) are putting into it then you should be taking steps to ensure that regular backups are made. It might be reasonably straightforward to create a backup of your WordPress installation directory or theme via FTP and to create a dump of the MySQL database in phpMyAdmin, but these can be time consuming and confusing if you’re not technically-minded.

Fortunately there are various time-saving tools and plugins that can manage the creation and download of backups of your WordPress site [...]

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Going the Extra Step – Helping Your Readers Understand Your Mumbo Jumbo

Sharon | February 29, 2012 - 9:24 am

How many times have you read an article which was full of terms and words you didn’t understand? Frustrating, isn’t it? You are trying to find out some information. You find a good article to read that gives you the information that you are looking for. But the person who wrote the article filled it with a lot of words and phrases that you need a college degree to understand.

Too many writers make this exact same mistake. They want to impress their readers with their knowledge. Therefore, they write a lot of long words that makes them look like they know what they’re talking about.  The problem is that they lose their reader and make their reader feel dumber than they are.

Here are some suggestions on avoiding this problem with your audience [...]

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