Why should you offer a partial feed?

1. If you offer a partial feed, your readers have to visit your blog every time they want to read your article. This counts towards Alexa average and pushes your blog up in ranking.

2. Every time your readers come online, there is a chance that they might buy an advertising spot there. After all repeated exposure can lead to such an action.

3. You do not want to post full posts in your blog. You always use the “<more>” tag for people to click to continue reading. You basically do this to stack up more posts in the front page.

Why you should offer a full feed?

1. If you offer a full feed, your subscribers do not have to go through the “inconvenience” of visiting your site every time you post an article. They can read it right from their desktop or online reader. After all they have subscribers to many other blogs too.

2. The chances of retaining your readers are high. Even if a subscriber doesn’t like your content, he may stay for the heck of it or due to laziness of having to manually un-subscribe.

3. It also portrays the picture of a responsible blogger who cares for his readers and wants to make it as easy as possible to read and benefit from your content.

Personally I like full feeds. I offer full feeds to my readers too. I share my sentiments with them. So far all the feeds I have subscribed to offer a full feed except one. His name is David Ledoux and he is a make money online “expert” who shares his money making “tips” at didyousmellthat.com. Oh, you are wondering why the quotation marks. Well, read on. I have been a subscriber of his blog for sometime and even though he offers a partial feed that drives me nuts, I have not closed my subscription. I may never. He amuses me with his content. He really does.

Out of sheer concern, one day, I penned a comment. You can see it in this link.

“Hi,

Been reading your blog for sometime now and I think you should avoid posts like these. I come here everyday hoping to find something valuable and get disappointed seeing these. You may want to meet them, but how will it help me?

Kindly take my feedback positively.”

My comment was out of a genuine feeling and I decided to let him know so he could do something about it. Pat came the reply:

“If you were on the list you wouldn’t say things like that…

How will this help you? Why is this not valuable? Allow me to enlighten…

Do a search on Google for “link bait”. And then do a search for “Google Alerts”. I have a Google Alert set up for anytime my name appears on the Internet. So do a lot of celebrities with publicists…some of which are web savvy and want to get blogged about and appear on Dave TV.

Incidentally…I blog for myself. Not you. Sorry my trained monkey act didn’t entertain you this morning. Feel free to post a rant in the forum about how shitty I am at xyz forum”.

I was blown away. What an attitude. I wasn’t even offering help, for him to feel so inferior. My comment had victimized him after all. I thought we bloggers were community people and so expressed my thoughts about his content. Re-read his response in red. He says he is blogging for himself. Wish I knew that before. So, I concluded that he was a make money online “expert” sharing his “tips” for himself and not the world. I wonder what kind of ROI will I get if I advertise at his place.

The above is the reason why I decided not to close my subscription to his blog. He amuses me, you see.

I apologize I got carried away a bit, but reading this experience should be a lesson for you on a better behavior with your blog readers and not the “Trained Monkey Act”. LOL.

So, if you want to offer a full feed while offering a “Continue Reading” option in your blog, here is a sweet little Plugin for you. It does all the job for you. Just install and activate. Its called Full Text Feed and can be downloaded here.

Lastly, make up your mind, what you want to offer your email and RSS readers. If at all, I land up at your blog, I definitely will be looking for a full feed.

Full Feed Vs Partial Feed: The Debate Continues

Winston S. Churchill. Speech given at Harrow School (1941-10-29)

The above is a very famous quote from the Prime Minister of Great Britain during the World War II. It is one of my favorites. He is one of my favorite personalities. An iron man indeed.

This chapter concludes the series I began a couple weeks back. I had initially decided to close it with a chapter on monetization, but then decided against it. Who doesn’t know how to monetize a site? Who doesn’t know about text links and paid reviews and banner ads? Pretty easy huh?

But, do you have a Success Quotient? That is what I want to cover in this part.

Let us first take an aerial view of the past. You signed up with a web host, got a domain name, setup your Wordpress platform, optimized it for Search engines, researched on your niche and wrote your first post. The time came to promote the content and so you did, getting you a stream of visitors.

You ask, What Next? Hmmm.

Your next priority is to keep your vehicle running, to make sure you don’t run out of gas. The Blogosphere is full of competition. Evil men and women lurk in there, waiting to prey on you, given the slightest chance. How do you thrive in such conditions. How do you graduate the test of time and establish yourself?

Patience, Courage and Determination.

The above are the 3 qualities that will propel you from a mediocre blogger to a successful one and will turn you into a Rags to Riches story. They are your Success Quotient, your ticket to achieving anything you want in life.

When you start blogging, you should set a realistic time based goal to achieve your target. After you have worked on the broad target, you should narrow your focus on your immediate steps that will take you to the end goal. One of the immediate steps is taking stock of the situation and understanding and accepting reality. Unless you have big money to blow, you have to understand that it will take you at least a year or two to reach the critical mass.

If you are thinking, it is all about efforts, you are wrong. It isn’t. It is about the level of your creativity and how much you are willing to be original and different that will decide the actual time factor for your success. My blog is 29 days old as of today. I haven’t had any spectacular, out of the world growth, but it has definitely got out of it’s comfort zone, which is the first step.

What did I do? To start off, I ran a contest worth $450, so that the word about the blog could spread, while at the same time building the RSS Subscriber list. After the contest buzz cooled down, I released my long due book. I was waiting for the right moment and this was it. 2 of the top bloggers picked up my book release story positively and reviewed it for me. It got me 1000s of visitors within days and nearly 200 people downloading the book in 2-3 days.

Does the above put me in the celebrity list? No, it doesn’t. I just did something that threw me out of the comfort zone quicker than a normal blogger. At this stage, I can tell myself “ In the next 6 months Al, you should see yourself in the celebrity bloggers list”. Not bad.

Back to the topic. You cannot succeed without the 3 elements I mentioned above. You will go through a lot of frustration, disappointment and feeling of failure. You have to stick to your vision and your goal. You have to develop the courage to think differently from the crowd and act upon it. If you want to kick your boss’s arse, wanna take your family out when you want to and they want to, then you have to develop an iron will and determination. You really have no choice. The bloggers who took advantage of the beginning of the blogging era made it to the top in the shortest time. It isn’t the same anymore. It is the Survival of the fittest now. You have to prove every step of your journey. Either to yourself or your readers.

Thomas Alva Edison is supposed to have tested hundreds of different substances for filaments for the light bulb. The problem he faced was with the filaments burning out very quickly. After all the repetitions and financing expeditions all around the globe to find substances, he got a bulb to glow continuously for 40 hours and knew he had the problem solved. This was after he experimented with them nearly 6000 times. Imagine the man’s patience, his dedication to succeed and his determination to get there no matter what. Do you see my point now?

So, your priority now is not to think about monetizing your blog. It is about continuing to do what you are doing now. You need to focus on creating ultra quality contents and promoting them to benefit yourself and the community. Slowly and steadily, people will pick up your blog, start referring to it and accept you as an authority. It is when you have established yourself can you go ahead and benefit monetarily. Until then, the only mantra will be “Patience, Courage and Determination”.

Remember, there is no shortcut to success. There really isn’t. You gotta believe it.

Closing Thoughts – The Success Quotient

To start off, you need a tool called FTP. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and connects your computer with your WordPress hosted server. I personally use SmartFTP, but you can use any of the available softwares in the market. For the sake of this chapter, I will be using SmartFTP.

Once you install and open SmartFTP, this is how the interface looks:

The small window on the left side shows a summary of your webhost content and the big window on the right side shows the specific folder contents. WordPress has 3 main folders called wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes. Our business today is with the wp-content folder. You can find this with the public_html or www folder.

Alright, click on the wp-content folder. Now again, you will find 3 sub-folders called Plugins, Themes and Uploads folder. Our immediate concern is with the Plugins folder. Click on the Plugins folder. Once you are there, right click and in the drop down menu, choose Upload -> Direct -> Select. When you click, you will get a pop-up that will ask you to either add a folder or add files. Depending on what you are uploading, select one and start adding files/folders one after the other. Once done, click Ok.

The files will start uploading.

Let me quickly cover up the Themes part here. Just the way you clicked the Plugins folder and uploading the plugin files, go to the Themes folder, follow the same process and upload the themes folder.

If the files and folders are uploaded properly, it will show a Success message.

Your next job is to login to your admin panel and go to the Plugins section. You can do this by clicking on the Plugins link in the top navigational bar. Once you are there, this is how the Plugins page looks like:

You will see the list of all the Plugins you have uploaded. One by one, activate each of them. Once activated, you can find their config panels under Options. You can do additional modification if you wish. Most of the Plugins come with default settings that you don’t need to tweak. Again, they differ by purpose. So, do take a look at their config panels under Options.

That’s about it with the Plugin management. Now, moving ahead with the themes, in the top navigational bar, click on Presentation and under Presentation, go to Themes. This is the page shown by default. The page looks like this:

The page will show you the current theme you are on as well as all the available themes that you have uploaded to your themes folder in the past. You can always click on them and the theme will change automatically. Under available themes, look for the theme you just uploaded and click on it to activate it. You are done.

In case you want to edit a theme, click on Theme Editor under Presentation tab and you will be taken to the coding page that looks like below:

On the right of the page, you can see a list of all the php files you can edit to tweak your blog’s look or add further functionality. If you are a programmer, you can definitely play with the codes; otherwise, your best bet is to hire a freelancer who can make the necessary changes for you for a fee.

Again, that’s about it with the themes.

With Part 5, we are actually closing the first phase of blogging. You now have a fully functional blog with the necessary Plugins and the design you want. In the second phase of the series, we will talk about the actual process of choosing your niche, building content and promoting it using various distribution outlets. Stay tuned!

How to install Plugins and Themes for Wordpress – Part 5

There are a million Plugins out there and everyday new Plugins are created by programmers and developers. While you cannot use each and every plugin, you can and should use a certain handful of them. Today’s chapter will cover the recommended and popular Plugins in the blogosphere. Click on the name to visit the respective sites to download the plugin.

Akismet: This is a plugin that comes together with the WordPress Installation. This is basically an anti-spam plugin and the most powerful among all the anti-spam Plugins. Akismet requires a API key to work. You can get one by signing up at WordPress.com. Once confirmed, they will email you your personal API key.

Advanced WYSIWYG Editor: WordPress comes with a basic word editor that has limited features. This plugin enhances the editor functions and adds a lot of styling options. I would never do without this plugin.

All-in-One-SEO: I covered this plugin in the previous post. Make sure you get install it. One of the best SEO Plugins I have come across.

Challenge: I treat this plugin as a companion to Akismet. While Akismet catches most of the spam, there are some well thought out spasm that get through to my blog. The Challenge plugin simply challenges the bird brain of the spammer by asking him “did you pass math” and posing a 5^th grader question. Obviously the spammer fails in answering the question as he hasn’t passed 1^st grade yet.

Contact Form: When you run a blog, you obviously want a contact form through which people can contact you and possibly build relationship. This plugin can help you build a contact form with the least hassles and zero coding.

Feedburner Feedsmith: In layman’s terms, this Plugins make sure that you do not lose any potential subscribers by getting them to land on pages other than the subscribe page. In the long run, this plugin will definitely save a lot of pain.

Firestats: A very powerful visitor statistics plugin. It is Ajax based and has a lot of features. Even though I don’t use it, I am told it is pretty reliable in its output. Give it a try.

Google Analytics: If you are a blogger, you will be using Google Analytics for visitor statistics. In case you are not, and I don’t know, go ahead right now and sign up for an account. Google Analytics will provide you a tracking code that you have to add to every page of your site to be tracked. I know, it is a very daunting task. This Plugins makes the job easy. You paste the copy in the admin panel of this plugin and it automatically replicates the code in every page of your blog as they are created. Cool huh?

Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo. Sitemaps are very essential from a Search Engine optimization point of view. This plugin not only creates the sitemap, but also pings the Search engines successfully.

Got Banners: Though I am mentioning this plugin here, you should think about getting it only when your blog is ready for monetization. This plugin is a widget based tool to display banner ads in the sidebar of your blog. It not only displays the ads, but rotates them randomly every time the blog is refreshed giving equal exposure to every banner.

Lucia’s Link Love: This is a do-follow plugin. If you want to reward your blog commentators with a backlink that Google can follow and count, then you need this plugin. All no-follow links will turn to do-follow and will be counted as an active backlink. I will explain this in a separate post. Do not crack your head now.

Maintenance Mode: Once in a while, we all perform maintenance activity on our blog. Be it database optimization, theme modification or some other activity, it can interrupt the visitor’s experience in your site. At such times, it is best to use this plugin. As soon as you activate it, it will show a maintenance message on the homepage with a time of 60 minutes or whatever you set. This way your visitors will know there is serious work in progress and to come later.

Subscribe remind: See the Subscribe request message in the footer of every post in my blog? It is the work of this plugin. It places a footer message in every post reminding them to subscribe. A marketing tactic indeed.

Subscribe to comments: This plugin allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted after their comments to an entry. This is just a way to keep the readers connected to the blog and its activities. Another marketing tactic.

What Would Seth Godin Do: This plugin displays a custom welcome message to your first time visitors. Alternatively, you can set the number to zero and the message will be shown always. You can place a message asking your visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed.

WP-Sticky: Have you ever wanted to highlight a particular post or keep it at the top of other posts for a longer time? This plugin does just that. It adds a sticky post feature to your blog’s write section. Whenever you want to highlight a post, enable the sticky option and it will stay there for as long as you want it to.

Wp-table: This plugin helps create tables easily. Whenever you want to present statistical data or information involving numbers, this is the plugin to bank on. It creates tables without you having to dirty your hands with coding.

Apart from Firestats, I use each and every plugin stated above and so I can tell you they are very reliable and highly recommended. Let me close this part here. In the next part, I will cover how to upload and install Plugins as well as custom themes.

Essential Plugins for your Wordpress blog – Part 4

It is called All-in-One-SEO. It is a WordPress Plugin. You can download it here.

Extract the plugin from the zip file. Upload it to the Plugins folders using your FTP program. You can find the Plugins folder inside the wp-content folder. I will cover this part more in a later part in the series.

In your WordPress Admin panel, go to Plugins section. You can find the link in the top navigational folder.

Click on the activate button next to All-in-One-SEO Pack. It is on the right side. In the image above, you can see I have already activated it. Once you are done activating, click on Options in the top navigational bar. Under Options, you will find a link called All in One SEO. Click on it.

You will arrive at a page similar to the above. Alright, I will quickly go through the options:

Home Title: This is where you give a description that will appear in the browser title of your blog. It is important that you give important keywords here. Limit the keywords to 5 or 6 to avoid keyword stuffing. If for example, your blog is about Blogging Tips, give keywords such as Blogging tips, Problogging, Blogging for Income, etc. Give, what you consider the most important 1 word descriptions for your blog.

Home Description: This is the description of your blog. This is the meat of the content. The Search engines when crawling your site will look at your site description very closely. Make sure you provide a good keyword rich description. You can add keywords in the description too. For example “Blogrepreneur is a top blog that deals with Blogging tips, blogging for income, making money online, home business, affiliate marketing, WordPress tutorials and blogging tutorials”.

Home Keywords: This is the place where you put in the Meta keywords. Like description, this too is picked up by Search engines. Although, there is an ongoing discussion whether keywords are used anymore by Search engines to rank websites and blog, you can nevertheless use it. Limit the keywords to 10 to avoid abuse. If there are too many keywords, the Search engines consider it a spam.

As for the rest of the options, leave them as they are. They by default have been made to abide by the Search engine rules. You can click on each of the link to know more about their purpose.

Once done, click Update Options.

All in One SEO Plugin’s feature doesn’t end here. When you go to the “Write Post” area, below the Tags box, you will notice 3 form fields with the same names as explained above. The purpose here is to perform internal SEO for every post you write, so they can individually rank better in the Search engines as well as contribute collectively to the Blog’s growth and ranking. There is nothing much to explain as the process is identical to the above performed. Let me share the screenshot below for a better idea.

Although the process is complete with you clicking Update options, SEO is an ongoing process and so you should continue researching which keywords are best and result oriented for your blog and should adjust accordingly from time to time. If you don’t, you will definitely be left behind. One of the simple ways is to do SEO on every article you post so they can individually bring in targeted Search engine traffic.

To learn more about SEO, read the book by Aaron Wall called “The SEO Book”. Every page is worth your time.

Talk to you soon!

Advanced Internal SEO for WordPress – Part 3

Let’s start off. First, go to your WordPress admin login area. It goes something like:

http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin

The above is the login interface. Type in your username and pass and click Login. You will be taken to the Dashboard that looks like this:

The Dashboard is your main control panel. You will find navigational instructions to every part of the admin panel here. On the right is a preview of the activities going on in your blog like recent comments, Blog stats, incoming links, etc.

Now, go ahead and click on Options in the top navigational bar. The General Options page will load.

Here you can change the details to anything you want. You can change your blog title, you email address, etc. For now, look at the 3^rd form field that say WordPress address (URL). It will show http://yoursite.com. Please add a www and change it to http://www.yoursite.com. Do the same in the fourth form field called Blog address (URL). Once done, click Save. WordPress will log you out to reflect the new URL. Login again and go back to General Options page.

In the Options page, click on “Writing” in the sub navigation bar. The writing page looks like this:

Scroll down the page and you will see Update Services. You will see a box with a URL http://rpc.pingomatic.com/.

A little info here. The URL above is a ping service. As soon as you post an article, the URL pings various services on the Internet informing them of your latest post or update. This is important for 2 reasons. First, the services online that will be pinged like Technorati.com, icerocket.com, will have 1000s of members browsing them for content and new information. This gives you free publicity and possible readers in the long run. Secondly, the Search engine robots crawl these big service sites frequently and once they find your information, they eventually follow the links and arrive to your site and get them indexed in their database.

Enough of the boring jab. Let’s get to work. Here is a list of ping URLs that I want you to add in the box.

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

This is a good list; enough to get you indexed in the Search engines. Click Update Options.

Next, click on Permalinks in the Sub navigational bar. Permalinks are basically the structure of your inner page URLs. WordPress has 4 different methods of structuring the URLs. We want our URLs to be as Search Engine friendly as possible. This is how the Permalinks page looks like:

You can structure your URL based on date and name, numerical value, default structure and custom value. Ignore the first three. They are not the choice for SE friendly URLs. In the custom field, type /%postname%/. This will structure the URLs based on the names of the post. The search engines can easily find your post based on the keywords in your title post. Get the idea?

Alright, I will close this post with the above. By now you know how simple tweaks within WordPress can give us powerful results to rank better in the Search engines and gain an edge against competitors.

Stay tuned for the next part in the series.

Basic Internal SEO for Wordpress – Part 2

Today we start with finding a web hosting company that supports WordPress, and preferably has a 1 click installation feature for WordPress. Before delving this, I want to briefly cover why you should go with WordPress over other publishing platforms.

There are platforms such as Blogger.com, MovableType, Typepad and others who provide a similar setup for online publishers as WordPress does. The reason why you should to opt for WordPress is the versatile features it comes with as well as the almost unlimited number of Plugins that are available for free to enhance it and make your life easier. Another reason why WordPress is better is, for some mysterious reason, Google and other Search engines tend to love the system and index contents way faster than any other system out there. I have seen Google indexing WordPress content in as little as 2 hours. In other words, WordPress is the most Search Engine friendly content publishing system online.

Let’s move on.

There are many web hosts that have a control panel which supports 1 click installation of WordPress including auto creation of the required database. BlueHost, Host Monster, LunarPages are some of them. I am personally with LunarPages and so far they have proved worth the price. They cost about $7.95 if prepaid for a whole year and $6.95 for 2 years. You also get a domain name free for the life of your hosting with them. Here is a tip. When you signup with them, use the coupon 28offplus2 and you will get a discount of $28 plus 2 months extra hosting.

http://www.lunarpages.com

I could have given you an affiliate URL and made some commissions out of your purchase, but I did not. It isn’t unethical, but this is an educational series and I want to keep it free from any personal gains.

Ok, I take it you have signed up with LunarPages and are ready to roll. Go to http://www.lunarpages.com/login.php and type in your username and password. The screen looks like this:

Once you login, you will be taken to the navigation page. Click on Control Panel logo on top.

You will be taken to another page where you have to click the cPanel button again. This is an unnecessary step by LunarPages, but I guess it is a marketing gimmick. They get another chance to highlight a product and possibly gain affiliate commissions.

You can see the button called cPanel on the left side. Click on it and you will be taken to the heart of your hosting account, The Control Panel.

The above covers the entire cPanel home. By the way, cPanel is a trademark name of a company that provides control panel software for hosting companies.

In the above screenshot, you can see an option called Fantastico. It is the link with a smiley icon, the last in the line of icons. Fantastico is a third party 1 click installation software that provides seamless 1 click installation to over 50 different softwares. WordPress is one of them. Click on the Fantastico link.

The above screen is the home of Fantastico. In the main page you can see in bold “WordPress”. These are my current WordPress installations in my account. The system is asking me to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, which again is a 1 click process. LunarPages lets you host up to 10 domains in your account. I have hosted 6 so far.

On the left, you see a host of softwares that Fantastico currently supports. The 5^th link is WordPress. Click on it.

This is where the installation process begins. In the main page, click on “New Installation”.

The above screen page will ask you for info regarding the installation. Let me quickly brush you on it.

Ø Install on Domain – Choose the domain name you want to install WordPress on.

Ø Install in Directory – If you want to install on a sub folder give a name here. It is preferable to leave it empty unless you have a site installed in the same domain already.

Ø Admin access data – Give a username and password. This is your access code for WordPress admin panel.

Ø Base configuration – Admin nickname is the name you want the public to see under the articles you post. You can give as admin or your name. Next is the admin email. This is the email associated with you WordPress account. Sitename is the name of your blog you want in the header area of the blog. People will associate the name with you. For example, Darren Rowse from ProBlogger. Normally it is the same as your domain name, unless you want something else. Description is a byline that goes below the Sitename. For example “Toy business -A Business Blog”, where A Business Blog is the description.

Ø Email account configuration – This is where you configure your email address so WordPress can send you alerts on comments and feedbacks left by readers. Leave the POP/SMTP server details as it is.

Click on “Install WordPress”.

This page confirms to you that Fantastico has created the necessary MySQL databases for the installation. It also gives your access URL to your blog. Click on “Finish Installation”.

If everything goes fine, you will get the above page. The installation is complete now. Please bookmark your admin panel URL. You can see it below the “Pease Notice” heading.

You have setup your WordPress platform and are ready to roll. Stay tuned for the next part where I show you how to setup your WordPress admin panel for a better blogging experience.

A Guide to WordPress and Blogging – Part 1