6 Vital Plug Ins to Tune up Your WordPress Blog

If you want your readers to enjoy your blog and easily navigate through your pages, you need to keep on top of maintenance and ensure everything is running smoothly. Website competition is fierce and readers will make up their minds about your site in a matter of seconds. A broken link, a comments page full of spam or an empty front page could turn your hard earned and valuable traffic away for good.

Of course not everyone has the skills or experience for website maintenance. But WordPress makes it easy, with essential plug ins that do most of the work for you. As soon as you’ve downloaded your free website builder program, install these 6 essential maintenance plug ins from our resources page. They are completely free to download and give you peace of mind that your blog is running smoothly and your visitors can easily enjoy your great content:

Redirection: this plug in deals easily and effectively with broken links, which are really annoying for your visitors and lead them to blank pages or a 404 error message. Broken links can be created for many reasons, the most common is when you change a webpage file name, perhaps to improve search engine optimization. This changes the URL address, which means that any search engine with the old URL address will direct visitors to the broken link. This might annoy your visitors but also affects your search engine ranking. The Redirection plug in is so easy to use and redirects visitors who click on broken links to a different page on your site. For more information on how to use this plug in and repairing broken links, this article about fixing broken links is packed with information.
Maintenance Mode: from time to time you may need to do some front end maintenance that means shutting down your website for a short period. This plug in creates a splash page that informs your visitors that the site is under maintenance and for how long, which will encourage them to come back later rather than simply going away for good. While you’re working on maintenance, as blog owner and administrator you can see the site and check how your updates look.
WP-DB Manager: this is a really useful plug in that helps you to protect your valuable customer information. It allows you to back up, optimize and manage your database with a simple tab in the admin panel.
Akismet: one of the most annoying things for visitors and bloggers is spam. No one wants to read a comments page full of it and it’s a real pain to remove and check your site regularly. That’s why WordPress is such a great free website builder program, giving you plenty of plug ins and tools to deal with spam. Akismet is a favorite of bloggers worldwide, taking the hassle out of spam prevention and keeping unwanted code at bay.
Antivirus: another really useful plug in for security and maintenance. It checks your blog daily for malicious code that could inject spam or even worse a virus. Security is a huge issue you need to be aware of and if you don’t protect your site you could end up losing hours of work. As soon as you’ve downloaded your free website builder, install a plug in such as Antivirus to protect your site. This plug in gives you an alert message if code is inserted and tells if you a virus is suspected.
Theme Tester: part of maintaining your blog is ensuring you keep the content fresh, up to date and with an impressive visual impact that grabs your visitors quickly. There are hundreds of themes released every month and you don’t want to change your theme too often. However every once in a while you may want to give your website a fresh look. This plug in is a perfect addition to your free website builder program. It allows you to test a theme without changing it permanently on your site, giving you time to decide whether you like it before you install it.

Growing Traffic To My WordPress Website With Twitter

In December 2009, Twitter recorded nearly 20 million visitors, a growth in traffic of 900% on 2008. That’s over 10% of all internet users following the website, with up to 10,000 people joining every day to take part in the constant stream of communication. Imagine if you could tap into some of this regular traffic and bring them to your blog or website. You could increase your traffic dramatically and more importantly develop a loyal following of subscribers interested in your niche, which in turn means greater profits for you.

This article shows you exactly how to tap into the Twitter phenomenon and use their high traffic to bring more visitors to your WordPress website.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking site that allows you to keep people updated about what you’re up to at any moment of the day. Each Tweet has a limited number of words so it’s like sending an SMS text message to all your friends and followers. Some people talk about what they’ve had for lunch, others tell their followers about new posts on their blogs or exciting news about their industry. Some people are just Tweet followers, which means they don’t Tweet at all but simply follow that others are up to.

How to Use Twitter to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Direct Publicity: Once you’ve set up your WordPress site using the website builder, you’ll need to get a Twitter account. Then do a Twitter search for relevant people who are interested in your niche and begin to follow them. Then start to comment on their Tweets and hopefully they will start to follow you back. The idea is to create a large group of followers, who will then encourage their own followers to follow you, and so it goes on. As you write comments, you can then leave remarks such as, “on my blog at the moment (with the URL) everyone is talking about this.” Also if you sell through your WordPress site, you can tell everyone about your latest promotions. It’s like a massive advertising campaign that’s completely free!
Twitter Feed: this is a really useful plug in which allows you to put your latest posts as RSS feeds on your Twitter account. Also it updates your blog with any Tweets. This is great for increasing your search engine ranking, because it increases the number of external links, as well as bringing new traffic directly to your blog.
Thread Twitter: another really useful plug in which fetches your Tweets and displays them in a thread style, which helps to get people involved in the conversation and create a loyal readership who want to keep coming back to join in.
Other Essential Twitter Plug ins: if you’re serious about boosting your traffic from social networking sites such as Twitter, there are a couple of essential plug ins. ShareThis and Sociable are two really useful add ons to your website builder, which make linking to Twitter very easy for you and your users. Sociable is particularly great because it automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your post, pages and RSS feeds.
Make Tweeting easy: if you want Tweeters to spread the word about your website, you need to make it easy for them. TweetThis adds a link to every post and page with the words, Tweet this Post, as well as the ability to automatically Tweet your new and scheduled blog posts. Tweetly Updater is another easy to use plug in that updates your Twitter account every time you post, keeping your followers up to date on your site and saving you valuable time. All the Twitter plug ins mentioned are available completely free on our resources and plug ins page.

Don’t forget that using Twitter is about a two-fold strategy. It can really help to increase traffic and generate a loyal interest in your website, as well as increasing your search engine ranking by adding external links, which in turn also generate more traffic. A win win situation for any WordPress site!

WordPress Survey Plugin

SurveyGizmo’s survey plugin for WordPress gives you the best of both worlds. Use SurveyGizmo to build powerful, sophisticated and custom-styled surveys, but stay in WordPress to monitor responses. The survey plugin also makes it easy to quickly edit, preview, or grab your publishing links.

How to Get a Job Using WordPress

Blogging is becoming an essential tool for career development and success, highlighting you as a leading expert in your field and setting you aside from the competition. Unemployment rates are rising, competition for jobs is getting tougher and you need to prove you’re at the top of your game. Increasingly employers are searching online to find out more about candidates, so having an online presence that projects the right image for your industry is crucial.

If you are looking for a new job or want to advance your career it’s time to take your blogging efforts seriously and use WordPress to launch yourself online. Here’s everything you need to know about how to use WordPress to get a job and blog your way to a highly successful career.

Promoting Yourself Online

Creating a WordPress blog where you can demonstrate your expertise is like a public relations campaign. It’s a way of letting potential employers know your views about your industry and hopefully show them you’re at the cutting edge of development.

It’s easy to create a website resume and blog using WordPress. First choose your domain name, which should probably be your name or name of your company, then download WordPress and your free website builder program Next you’ll need to choose a theme to suit you, your resume and your blog. There are hundreds to choose from but it’s best to go for simplicity and elegance. Calligraphy Document and Work Mail Delivery are ideal, projecting a professional image that’s easy to navigate. Both are available for free on our WordPress themes page.

You can also buy various resume templates from $10 which you give a resume that can dramatically improve the impact of your skills, experience and information. You can choose from a whole host of templates, depending on your line of work and image you need to project.

Top Plug Ins for Your Online Resume

Contact Form 7: make it easy for employers to contact you, ask questions and find out your rates. This plug in is a really simple one to use. Just create a new page, use the title “contact” and paste in the code.
WP Resume Park: you can embed your Resume Park hosted resume on your blog using this plug in.
NextGEN Gallery: your online resume would be pretty boring if you didn’t have any images. Create a portfolio of your previous work, clients and anything that sells who you are and what you can do using this brilliant plug in.
Resume Extended: this plug in gives you the tools to create a resume to view on your blog. You can save it as a separate page, with a template nicely divided into categories. You can also import a pre existing resume into the template and export it to PDF and Microsoft Word.
LinkedIn Resume: displays your resume on your blog from your LinkedIn public information page.

Projecting a Professional Image

If you want your blog to form part of your resume you need to come across as professional and make your posts engaging and focused. Once you’ve installed your website builder and chosen your theme and resume template, you’re ready to start promoting yourself with blog content. Here are 10 top tips for writing a professional blog to entice employers to headhunt directly:

Write your blog with focus and a purpose. Don’t just put together a collection of random thoughts. Stay on topic.
Highlight your expertise, outstanding achievements, training and experience through your blog.
Tell everyone you’re available to hire. Don’t be afraid to state the obvious.
Quality writing is essential with impeccable grammar and spelling.
Add your blog URL to all your business cards, resume and correspondence.
Write about leading experts and companies you might like to work for to get their attention.
Interview leading experts and put excerpts of their interview in your blogs. This is a great way to network.
Give your posts a purpose. Think of each as a story with a beginning, middle and end and don’t just shove your expertise into people’s faces.
Include your contact details, a biography and your resume beautifully presented and easy to find.
Use images to add weight to what you’re saying and make your blog more interesting.

10 Awesome WordPress Sites

When you download your website builder and create your WordPress website, don’t fool yourself into thinking that WordPress is only a platform for small scale bloggers. The sky is the limit with WordPress and celebrities, politicians and huge corporations are using it to power their websites and blogs. Everyone from Yahoo to CNN, Ford to Playstation, musician Thomas Dolby to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi… these are just a few of the giants using WordPress to build their websites.

If you have a WordPress site, there’s no better way to learn about the infinite possibilities and beautiful design features this software has to offer than to learn from the best sites already out there. So we’ve trawled the internet to find you 10 absolutely awesome WordPress sites to inspire you to get creative with your site.

Yodel Anecdotal: this is Yahoo’s corporate blog where you can go behind the scenes at Yahoo and find out more about the company, market trends and information about their users. Simple, eye catching and effortless to navigate. A great model for any blog.
CNN Political Ticker: this is a WordPress.com VIP Hosting Site that really shows you what WordPress can do. It takes the essence of blogging and makes keeping people up to the minute on what’s going on in the political scene both easy to follow and engaging and interesting.
ChickSpeak: this site projects a friendly, professional image that is perfect for the target market of young women going through college. More of a social networking website you’re bound to pick up plenty of ideas on how to format your own site and create engaging content for your readers.
The Gavel: this is the website of Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives. This site really proves how WordPress can be used to project a professional image that can help to raise the power of your message.
Delicious: Days: as professional and slick as any website you’ll find on the internet, this food site is beautifully presented, using an elegant theme alongside high quality images. This site really proves how powerful WordPress can be.
Fernwood Coffee: simple yet beautiful. This is a really great site to look at if you’ve just downloaded your website builder and are worried you won’t be able to project a professional image with your website. You don’t need to have a blog on your site and can just as easily use WordPress to run your business website.
Ecoki: this is an eco-friendly lifestyle community website that showcases its content brilliantly. Really easy to navigate, with a nicely set out homepage and images to grab your attention.
Adaptik: a corporate website that’s clean, simple and portrays the brand in a professional and eye grabbing manner. This site is a great inspiration for anyone deciding whether WordPress is the right platform for their company website.
University of Colorado at Boulder: this university website demonstrates how WordPress is perfect for educational websites, both as a promotional tool and for linking students. Great choice of theme alongside relevant and interesting content.
Welovewp: this is a brilliant site to look at before you begin to use your website builder and create your WordPress site. It showcases some of the best WordPress sites around and will fill you with inspiration and ideas for developing your own site. Plus it’s also an awesome site in its own right and is also powered by WordPress.

6 Best SEO WordPress Plug ins for 2010

The way search engines crawl websites looking for content and then rank them in search engine results pages is constantly changing. Therefore your efforts at search engine optimization (SEO) need to keep up with these constant developments. Unless you’re an expert in this field it’s difficult to keep on top of the unwritten rules of SEO and make sure your site stays at the top of the ranking and continues to generate organic traffic.

The answer is to stay ahead of the game and keep updating your own WordPress site with the latest SEO plug ins, which take the hassle out of SEO and almost do the job for you.

Here are 6 of the best SEO plug ins that have been released in 2010 and that can ensure your blog continues to hit the top spot. As soon as you’ve downloaded your website builder program, download these plug ins from our resources page:

HeadSpace 2 SEO: unfortunately far too many blog owners are forced to spend so much of their precious time on SEO and not enough on writing great content. This plug in is being tipped to replace the All in One SEO pack plug in and helps give you the time to focus on writing by doing all your SEO work for you. It allows you to tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that can help increase your search engine ranking, with tons of shortcuts to reduce your efforts and the time it takes to optimize your site.
I Love Social Bookmarking: social networking sites are a global phenomenon that continue to expand at a rapid rate. By encouraging visitors to rank your posts on social media sites you can draw in huge amounts of traffic as well as increasing external links, which is good for search engine ranking. This plug in prevents the need to have a long list of social media icons, instead using an attractive drop down menu at the end of each post so that visitors can submit and rank your post on over 10 different sites without leaving your blog.
Google XML Sitemaps: statistics show that Google performs the vast majority of searches on the internet, up to 85% by some estimates. So it’s vital your WordPress site is Google friendly. As soon as you’ve set up your site using the website builder program, install this plug in which is an XML sitemap providing a directory of all the pages on your site. According to Google themselves, this can help make sure that Google can detect all the pages on your site, including those that may not be seen by the normal crawling process. Every time you add or modify your content new sitemaps are also submitted automatically to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.
SEO Slug: if you’re new to WordPress, this plug in is a great add on to the website builder program. It optimizes blog post titles to allow search engines to detect them more easily. It edits keyword strings and removes conjunctions from titles, such as “the” and “a” to allow search engine crawlers to find content keywords more easily.
Robots Meta: a really useful plug in that quietly works behind the scenes to improve your SEO without you even realizing it. It automatically inserts “no follow” tags on any internal site links, which are completely irrelevant to search engines, such as login, admin, register and results pages. This allows your site to be crawled much more efficiently and directs search engine crawlers to your most important site content.
SEO Smart Links: another busy plug in that keeps on working while you can concentrate on creating brilliant blog posts. It automatically links keywords to your pages, posts, comments and categories, which makes older content more search engine friendly. It also helps to keep your visitors interested in your content and hopefully makes them stay on your site for longer.

How to Write Posts that Everyone Wants to Read

Content is king! Let’s face it, no amount of search engine optimization, advertising initiative or blog promotion will bring your website long term success if you don’t write good content that people will actually want to read. Yet if you create a loyal following through interesting and engaging posts, more people will want to comment, come back for your next post, subscribe and promote you to their friends.

Here are five top tips on how to create brilliant blog posts that keep visitors coming back for more:

1. Choose a topic you’re passionate about

Bloggers who have any kind of success from their website pick a topic they’re passionate about. As soon as you upload your website builder, it’s important to think truthfully about the topic you’ve chosen before you write your content. Is it something you’re interested in and can write passionately about? If it is your readers will naturally become engaged in what you’re saying because it’s something you know a lot about and can provide an interesting angle on. If you don’t actually enjoy what you’re writing about this will come across in your words.

2. Add a Competition

When you first start up as a blogger you may have downloaded your website builder, uploaded a bit of content but feel demoralized because no one seems to be visiting your site. It does take time to build up traffic but one way to quickly boost your numbers is to add an incentive to people to visit you and leave a comment. A competition is a great way to do this, offering a prize for the best comment of the week. Choose something that’s relevant to your website and that could spark interest in your site, such as your latest eBook or a product you’ve reviewed.

3. Get personal!

One of the best ways to get people to engage with your blog is to share your own personal stories. It makes what you’re writing more human and appeals to your visitors on a personal level. For example, if your blog is about rare dog breeds, chances are you have your own rare breed of dog. Add some photos and talk about your own dog and any funny experiences you’ve had looking after this breed. Or you maybe writing a blog about generating an income as a stay at home Mom. You could include success stories about you and your friends, give your own tips about how to juggle work and looking after a toddler or ideas you’ve used successfully to create some extra money. It’s all about giving your readers something interesting that adds value to their lives and makes them feel they can’t live without your latest post.

4. Ask your visitors direct questions

The key to making your visitors feel engaged is to motivate them to comment on your blog. One of the easiest ways to do this is to ask a direct question at the end of your post. For example, you may have been talking about the latest digital cameras available on the market. Ask a question which is sure to fire a debate, such as, “What is the best digital camera?” Or you could add a question that gives them the opportunity to share something about them, or have a little bit of publicity for their site. For example, “Share Your Best Photo and Prove Your Digital Camera is the Best!”

5. MegaLists

This can be quite a bit of hard work but one of the easiest ways to get traffic to your blog is to create a couple of Megalist posts. These are lists of “the best” of something. For example, “50 of the funniest websites,” or “20 of the best stock photography websites.” Whatever is relevant to your blog. It will bring people in to see who’s on the list, as well as motivate people to comment with complaints on who’s in and who’s out. Commentators may also suggest ideas for your next list!

Checking your comments levels is a really good measure of your post and website success. When you first set up your site using your website builder, you may become disheartened at the low levels of traffic to begin with. Try to look past these figures and assess the quality of traffic you are earning. Comments analysis is sometimes a better measure of success because it shows you that people have actually bothered to read your post, taken the time and effort to post and comment and may be more likely to come back for more.

Growing Traffic To My WordPress Website With Facebook

Facebook facts speak for themselves: over 300 million active users, with an Alexa ranking of second, behind Google. People spend an average of over 20 minutes on Facebook everyday (most other websites get an average of 10 seconds) and the fastest growing demographic is the over 35s, who tend to have and spend more money. Facebook also recently became the top source of traffic for entertainment and news sites, as well as many other of the internet giants.

The simple fact is that any website or blog owner would be foolish not to tap into these extraordinary numbers and claim a piece of the Facebook pie for their own site. Here we tell you exactly how to use Facebook to your advantage and generate valuable and quality traffic to your WordPress site.

How To Use Facebook To Your Advantage

Officially you’re not supposed to directly sell or promote anything on Facebook. However, the boundaries are pretty blurred and it’s relatively easy to create a snowball effect in traffic levels as well as increasing your conversion and sales rates. The really good thing about Facebook is that it allows you to directly connect, interact and establish trust with your potential customers and website visitors, targeting your niche market.

When someone joins your Facebook friends network you are effectively tapping into their network of friends, and so on, until the message about your site becomes viral. That’s because every time someone joins your Facebook friends, all their friends are notified, creating more interest. You can then directly target your niche market to raise your profile and send messages to them about promotions, new posts and anything of interest. It’s easy to see how your traffic can snowball within a short period of time.

Facebook Plug ins

So we’ve explained how the Facebook phenomenon works, so here’s how to put the theory into practice. The key to Facebook success is making it easy for your users to link between Facebook and your WordPress website, as well as showcasing their favorite posts on their Facebook page. This enables you to build a large Facebook friends network and use these contacts to your advantage. The easiest and best way to do this is to make use of the various WordPress plug ins created specifically with Facebook in mind. Here’s the top 5, which are all available on our plug ins resource page:

Add to Facebook: at the end of each post, this plug in inserts a link that the user simply clicks to add the post to their Facebook mini feed. You can choose either a Facebook icon or the words “Share on Facebook.”
Facebook Comments: this is really useful for connecting your WordPress site with your Facebook page. All the comments from Facebook about a particular post are imported to your WordPress blog, allowing visitors to see the conversation. This is great for adding external links to your site, which can boost your search engine ranking, as well as creating great content and lively debate that brings readers back for more. You’re also boosting your loyal readership, who you can then directly target with promotional campaigns and new ideas, creating a quality following that’s interested in your niche.
Facebook Dashboard Widget: this widget can be added to your sidebar, allowing you to see what your network of friends (and customers) are up to on Facebook without having to log in. This allows you to keep an eye on what’s being discussed, easily jump in when you feel you can comment and perhaps attract more people to your blog.
Facebook Photos: as soon as you add photos to your Facebook page, this plug in automatically displays them on your WordPress website in a “photos” tab. Then as you create new posts, it’s easy to insert any photos direct from your Facebook page without having to leave and log in.
WP-Facebook Connect: for full synchronicity between your Facebook and WordPress website, this plug in is really simple to use. It adds Facebook functionality to your site, allowing you to sign in through your Facebook account, publish any comments via the newsfeeds and display Facebook profile photos as comments avatars.

WordPress: Engage Your Readers and Increase Sales with Embedded Video

If you’re looking to improve conversion on your WordPress blog, look no further than embedded video. Adding video is very simple, and can often have incredible results. For instance, in November of 2008, the brains behind Monty Python made their clips available for sharing and streaming online. These videos linked back to their Amazon DVD sales page, and sales of their DVDs went up by 23,000 percent.

It’s pretty clear that no matter what your end goal is, be it sales, click-throughs, sign-ups, or referrals, embedding videos into your blog increases the chances of you reaching that goal.

Video Works:

From 2007 to 2008, the global viewing of retail videos online increased from nearly 25 million unique viewers to almost 35 million, an astounding jump of 40%. Video been proven to reduce abandoned shopping carts and generate higher sales; since actual visitors only increased by 4%, any site featuring video has a clear head start on the competition.

Embedded video will keep your visitor’s attention and keep them actively involved in a purchase. It creates a central focus point with a set duration (the length of the video) that requires the full visual and auditory commitment of the visitor. This keeps them on your site longer, building your brand recognition and increasing the odds they will look at other parts of your site. And implementing video is pretty simple with an easy website builder like WordPress.

How to Embed Video:

The easiest way to pull video from a site such as Youtube or Google Video is copying and pasting the embed code. You can traditionally find this code on the site just under or right next to the video you wish to embed (Youtube’s is right below the summary, for instance). Some sites may have a “share” button instead; just click that button for the code.

The other option is using a plug-in. For instance, the aptly named “Embedded Video” plug-in will allow you to embed videos from a variety of sources (including your own uploads) with very little headache. This plug-in currently supports Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, MyVideo, ClipFish, Metacafe, Myspace Video, and quite a few more. You can find this plug-in here: Embedded Video for WordPress

If you’re serious about creating a lasting relationship with your customers and building a business, then you have to find ways to engage them on your site. Embedded video is a powerful weapon in your arsenal and will help ensure your visitors stay on your site longer. When used effectively, you should see not only an increase in the duration of visits, but an increase in sales, sign-ups, or whatever it is that you’re trying to accomplish. Use your WordPress website builder to add embedded video to your site and see the results for yourself.