Blogging with WordPress – tools, tips and tutorials
I bet you log into WordPress as an Administrator, right? Yup, so do I. Nothing wrong with that – after all, most of us run single-user blogs. But did you know that WordPress has built-in support for a wide range of Roles and Capabilities?
By default there are five Roles, each of which has progressively more power:
Just time for a quick tip today. If you’re using PerformancingAds, it’s essential that you remember to tick the No Follow checkbox in your region settings:
It’s not ticked by default, so it’s up to you to do it for each of your regions. Why?
Continue reading ‘Don’t forget to Nofollow your PerformancingAds’
There’s recently been a small debate about Google’s stance on paid links in the comments section of one of my posts, and whether or not you run the risk of being penalized if you buy or sell links. Mitch helpfully pointed us to an article by Matt Cutts on the subject. In case you don’t know, Matt is a Google policy maker who had a big hand in drafting the original quality guidelines.
I spent an enjoyable afternoon reading that and a few other related articles (and their comments) on Matt’s site and the official Google guidelines to try and clarify exactly what Google’s position is. Needless to say some of the comment exchanges are fairly heated, with a lot of emotion on both sides. This is my understanding of the issues:
Continue reading ‘Does Google penalize paid links?’
With blogging, as with anything in life, success is not guaranteed. This may sound like an obvious thing to say, but when you read a lot of blogs in the blogging and make money online niches, the overwhelming message is that “anyone can do this – look it’s easy!”. Well, in many ways it is easy to start a blog, but making any serious money out of it is not (or I must be doing something wrong).
Image courtesy of Tom@HK
Seth Godin makes a good case that there is still a high correlation between hard work and success. Sure, a bit of luck doesn’t hurt, but as Gary Player once said:
“The harder I practice, the luckier I get.” - Gary Player
Continue reading ‘Success is not guaranteed – and why that’s a good thing!’
Since I talked about dofollow commenting the other day, I’ve been involved in a few comment exchanges about the benefits of installing the Dofollow and Top Commenter plugins. The benefits for commenters are fairly obvious – you’re rewarded for your comments with free backlinks. The benefits for the host blog are perhaps not as obvious, but I’ve definitely seen an increase in the number of comments on this blog since installing both these plugins a few weeks ago, and have hooked up with a few new blogs (new to me, that is) as a result. I imagine it’s the same for others.
That’s all very well, but as a commenter, how do you identify these blogs amongst the vast ocean of nofollow ones? I’ve heard of a few methods, for example doing a Google image search for the you comment, I follow graphic which some sites display. There are also several sites that publish lists of blogs using these plugins – see Yan, Peter and Simon’s for example. These are pretty hot posts with lots of interaction – precisely because they’re providing some very useful information – they may be all you need to comment effectively, but for me there is one missing ingredient – the ability to search for specific topics and information in the lists.
Continue reading ‘Dofollow Search Tool is online’
