How To Integrate Google Buzz With WordPress

Here is how we integrated Google Buzz with WordPress on this site…

1. Go To Plugins -> Add New

2. Search For Google Buzz

We chose to use the Google Buzz WordPress Plugin WP Google-buzz

3. Update Settings

Under Settings -> WP Google-buzz you can setup where you wan the button to display, among other things…

Here’s what it looks like when you are done…

5 Ways To Make Money With WordPress

1. E-Commerce

Selling products using a shopping cart…

Tools: WordPress E-Commerce Plugin

Example: RiptApparel.com

Sells custom made graphic tees using WordPress and a shopping cart.

2. Membership

Selling monthly, recurring access to a site for consulting, content, coaching, news, etc…

Tools: WishListMember

Example: OperationRedState.com

Sells a membership program to help candidates run for office online.

3. Sell Digital Products

Sell courses, e-books, consulitng, reports, music, video, etc using WordPress

Tools: 1ShoppingCart, E-Junkie, or PayPal

Example: WebStrategyWorkshop.com

Sells digital courses to help you run your business online

4. Advertising

Sell advertising on your blog or site

Tools: Google AdSense, Google Ad Manager, Text-Link-Ads

Example: ShoeMoney.com

Sells advertising inventory on his WordPress Blog

5. Affiliate

Sell other people’s products online and make commission

Tools: Google Affiliate Network

Example: ChrisBrogan.com

Earns commission by selling other people’s products

How do you make money with WordPress? Do you have any questions on setting up one of these models? Leave us a comment or jump into the forums!

Bonus: There are more than five ways to make money with WordPress in the graphic

Comment Spam Hurts SEO

Google says comment spam may hurt your search engine rankings and offers this advice to avoid spam on your WordPress site…

• Disallow anonymous posting.
• Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
• Turn on comment moderation.
• Use the “nofollow” attribute for links in the comment field.
• Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
• Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

They also offer some other great advice which we often say here… Most times having a great content strategy is the best SEO technique…

FACT: Having original and useful content and making your site search engine friendly is the best strategy for better ranking. With an appealing site, you’ll be recognized by the web community as a reliable source and links to your site will build naturally.

via Google – Hard facts about comment spam

How To Take Care Of WordPress

A number of our WordPress sites got hacked recently. The same thing happened to Robert Scoble and Allen Stern – A-List bloggers. This has become a widespread problem and will inevitably get worse. Don’t worry, the latest version of WordPress fixes this problem – but the threat exists. As with other popular software and services – Windows and Twitter come to mind – that have enormous critical mass, WordPress has succumbed to being a target of hackers.

If you had visited this site recently (or our company website, tech blog, and internet business podcast site) , you may have seen something like this…

Some of you may see similar warnings now. This sucks.

Our sites are being “reconsidered” by the powers that be – which is a process we’ll cover in a separate blog post. We’ve taken many steps to ensure that this disturbance in our business is not felt again. We want to share this with you – so you to can avoid having your WordPress site compromised. This is business afterall – and we need disaster plans.

Here is our plan for keeping our WordPress sites humming like a well oiled Honda.

Keep WordPress Up To Date

This is huge – and also the reason we got hacked. You see, we were too busy to update our WordPress sites when WordPress 2.8.4 came out – which happened to include major security fixes. Lesson learned.

1. Subscribe to this RSS feed to stay in the loop on new WordPress releases
2. Subscribe to the email newsletter on this page
3. When you are notified of a new release, upgrade immediately – it is easy

Had we been doing this previously we would have avoided this outcome. You see – we should have known and taken action when the founder of WordPress alerts both aforementioned lists that…

“A stitch in time saves nine. I couldn’t sew my way out of a bag, but it’s true advice for bloggers as well — a little bit of work on an upgrade now saves a lot of work fixing something later.”

Again, lesson learned.

UPDATE: WordPress 2.8.5 Released

Always Have A Backup

We had been backing up WordPress when it got hacked – but only the database using WP-DB-Backup (an excellent plugin but only has database backups). The problem is this security vulnerability had something to do with the filesystem and the files were targeted, not the database. Specifically, your theme files were targeted and malicious code was placed inside of the footer.php file in every case we had.

So we developed a WordPress Backup Plugin that met our needs. This plugin backs up both the WordPress database and files – including themes and uploads – to Amazon S3. This literally costs us pennies per month across a network of WordPress blogs. Our backups run daily and it’s a great relief knowing that if this happens again we can fix it immediately and don’t have to worry about storage.

While we charge for the plugin, there are many free alternatives. You can very easily manually backup WordPress to your hard drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3. You could also use plugins like WP-DB-Backup in combination with another plugin like WordPress Backup to run automated WordPress backups.

It doesn’t matter how you backup your WordPress site – it just matters that you do it. So go do it. Now.

We’ll be here when you are done =)

Keep It Clean

How many of those plugins are you using? Do you really need that one? How about all those themes that you never used? That’s right – get them out of there. Delete them or, if you want to keep them for some reason, put them in Dropbox or on Amazon S3. The less clutter you have, especially in unused or inactive plugins, the better your site will run.

Keep the spam problem under control. Delete spam comments on a regular basis or use a comment system like Intense Debate or Disqus. Always use Akismat to help out – it’s by WordPress for WordPress to control spam comments. It has blocked hundreds of thousands of spam comments for us. An out of control spam problem will affect performance and create tons of busy work for you when you want to clean it up.

Use The Right Tools

We found out our sites got hacked via a notification from the extremely useful Google Webmaster Tools. If you don’t have an account get one immediately. There are several reasons you should – among them you get malware notifications telling you about your problem.

Use the WP Super Cache plugin. This plugin makes your site run much more efficiently and helps it to load faster. Another plugin we recommend – aside from a WordPress backup plugin – is WP Security Scan. This excellent plugin scans your WordPress site for security vulnerabilities and tells you how to correct them. Do this once a month.

UPDATE: Check out the WordPress Exploit Scanner to see if this has happened to you!

Summary

1. Stay Up To Date
2. Always Have A Backup
3. Keep It Clean
4. Use The Right Tools

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Do you have a question or comment? Let us know below or jump into the forums!

Also – we want to thank those of you who dropped us a note to tell us about the issues on some of our sites. It is great to know there’s a community out there looking out for you! Thank You!

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Real Time Social Media Press Releases – Episode 3

In this screencast we show you how to create a real-time social media press release using our content, FriendFeed, and WordPress. You can see the final product here.

This real-time information shows what our company is doing right now – from what we are working on to what we are talking about – giving our community a quick snapshot into who we are and what we do.

Show Links

• FriendFeed
• WordPress
• Social Media Press Release Template (pdf)
• 48Web Social
• FriendFeed Group
• Web Strategy Workshop FriendFeed Group

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3 Tips For Writing Findable Posts

Over the couple years I have gotten really good at writing for SEO. What’s this mean? It means that when I write a blog post I always have SEO on the back of my mind. How will this post become findable? What are the best keywords to use? What’s a good headline to bring in people from our content outposts? Here are 3 tips that helped me get started writing for SEO.

1. Think About Search

This is the most valuable tip but yet the most basic. When writing a new post, think about what you would search for to find the post you are writing. Condense that to 4 or five words if possible and use that as your post title.

2. Use Keywords

Not only should you sprinkle the keywords you are targeting within your post, use them in your meta data too! Use your keywords in tags, and most importantly for your meta data using an SEO plugin or something similar.  Some SEO’s will say to use a different Page Title than your on page header. In this case you can override the page title using your SEO plugin. This is done because you can target two keyword phrases for two of the highest ranking on page SEO factors.

You should take advantage of a killer plugin from our friends at WordTracker to help you figure out the best keywords to target while your writing your post. This is a firefox extension that you can pop open while you are blogging to help you figure out the best keywords to target. Download it here.

3. Don’t Forget Descriptions

In the world of content outposts descriptions become even more important. Often times the excerpt or meta description travel farther than just your site but to your content outposts as well. The excerpt and meta description travel in your RSS feed and are used by content outposts and aggregators as descriptive text along with the link back to the original blog post. This is important for two reasons.

First, it helps your content outposts to rank in search results. This is important because it creates a scenario where you can rank multiple items on the first page of results for your targeted keyword. Secondly your descriptions help people that are active in your content outposts determine whether or not they will click through to read the full posts. This is also very important.

What tips do you have? Let us know in the comments or jump over to the forum!

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BackType ReTweet Button For WordPress

Earlier today we wrote about the TweetMeme ReTweet Plugin For Wordpress. After this post we alerted by one of our readers of the BackType ReTweet plugin for WordPress – after which we promptly switched to.

Why? There are several reasons we switched to BackType’s TweetCount plugin.

1. Uses bit.ly API for click tracking (TweetMeme uses bit.ly but not the API)
2. It uses custom Google Analytics tracking parameters so you can measure click-thrus from Google Analytics
3. The button is customizable – notice how it matches our site now? Yay!

What do you think? Do you have any questions on how to integrate Twitter with WordPress?

ReTweet Button For WordPress

Behind organic traffic, FriendFeed and StumbleUpon – one of the biggest traffic generators to this website is Twitter. In order to optimize this I’ve added the ReTweet button and so far it’s worked beyond what I had expected.

If you want to drive more traffic to your site and increase the amount of retweets your content gets – this button is necessary.

You can download or install the ReTweet button for WordPress here.

Straight From Google: What You Need To Know About SEO

Block WordPress Before You Launch

If you are working on a WordPress site and do not want anyone to see it before you launch there are several things you can do.. I’ll start with the easiest first.

To block your WordPress site from search engines, click on Settings -> Privacy. Choose to block your site from search engine spiders. But don’t forget to switch this back when you go live! If you don’t – you won’t get any organic search traffic.

We call this security through obscurity – no one should be able to find your WordPress site unless you give them the direct URL.

Secondly you can use a plugin called “Registered Only“. This plugin allows only registered users (in this case your Admin user) to view your WordPress site.

Our last recommendation depends on what web host you are using.. But most of them will allow you to lock down a directory to a specific username and password. This is the most effective way to secure your site before launch.

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