12 Best WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

Posted on February 11, 2009 by William

These are the wordpress plugins I use for almost all the blogs I run and although the list is very small, it does covers pretty much all the bases when it comes to running a blog.

Please feel free to suggest more plugins in the comments section.

Akismet – Akismet checks incoming comments to your site to see if they look like SPAM or not and puts them in a SPAM bin. This tool is absolutely priceless as the amount of SPAM you receive in your comments section is completely insane.

All in One SEO Pack – This tool handles all your SEO needs, from adding your meta tags (title, description and keywords) as well as formatting things such as your Blog title (top left corner of your web browser) and rewriting post titles.

Feedburner Feedsmith – This plugin is required to forward your regular feed to feedburner.com (now feedburner.google.com). Using Feedburner to manage all your feeds simplifies things especially if you run multiple websites.

Get Recent Comments – Displays the most recent comments on your blog. More customizable than the default one that comes with WordPress.

Google Analyticator – Allows you to add Google Analytics tracking to your blog by just inserting your tracking ID (rather than pasting the code into each and every page on your site).

MyBlogLog Widget – Adds the MyBlogLog ‘recent viewers’ widget to your sidebar.

Sociable – Allows your users to quickly and easily submit your posts to a number of popular social bookmarking sites.

Twitme – Updates your Twitter status automatically every time you publish a post.

Whydowork Adsense – Automatically places Adsense code into various positions on your pages/posts depending on how you set it up.

WordPress Database Backup – IMPORTANT! This plugin helps you regularly backup the mySQL files that are used to run your blog. They can be used to save your blog in the eventuality that everything is deleted.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Automatically checks the keywords used in your post and displays posts that are related to the one your visitor is reading (to try and keep them on your blog longer).

WP Super Cache – Caches regularly visited pages on your site so that there is less load on your webserver. This could potentially prevent your site from crashing if a large number of visitors come to your site at the same time.

Know any more?

-William Lee

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What Does 20 Million Unemployed People Look Like?

Posted on February 7, 2009 by William

Following up from the last post I wrote about unemployment in China, I made a quick presentation and uploaded it to some presentation sharing sites to see if I could get some traffic back to my site as well as send some traffic over to one of the affiliate products I am pushing.

See if you can spot which product I’m trying to sell…

What 20 Million Unemployed People Look Like

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What A Million People Looking For Jobs Looks Like

Posted on February 6, 2009 by William

Countries around the world are in recession. Unemployment levels are on the rise. People are losing jobs and then looking for new jobs.

Nowhere has the sheer number of people who have lost their jobs been as large a number as those in China. Unemployment is usually given as a percentage of the population, 1%, 2% etc.

So to many, it seems that the unemployment rate in America seems high, with the latest released numbers being 7.2% or 11.1 million people.

I’m not sure what the percentage of unemployment is in China, but I read a recent article the other day that claimed that 20 million people have lost their jobs. As a percentage of their total population that’s nothing, barely 2%.

So what does 20 million people out of a job look like?

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So how bad is the recession going to effect you? Well with Internet marketing, you can lessen the blow, or even avoid it altogether. I’ll tell you why in a later post.

Recession Schmesession,

-William Lee

[Photos: People’s Daily, Mails I Read, Global Voices]

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How To Install WordPress With Cpanel

Posted on February 4, 2009 by William

Continuing from where I left off telling you about WordPress as a blog platform, I’ve put together a short tutorial on how to install WordPress onto your own server using Fantastico in Cpanel.

First off, you’ll need to a) buy a domain name and b) purchase hosting on a webserver, may I suggest:

(Yes I admit I’ll make money if you decide to buy from Hostgator, but I use them myself and find it to be good value for money.)

For the rest of the tutorial, I find that putting the information in a video format or a slideshow (powerpoint) format gets the message across the easiest as you can see exactly what to click.

You’ll need flash installed on your computer to view the presentation or the youtube video, so for you reading this at work, you’ll have to go home and check out the tutorial… sorry.

Feel free to share the video/presentation with friends and embed it on you’re website/blog as well if you want.

Hope you find these useful:

Video

Presentation

Installing WordPress Using Cpanel

View more presentations from William . (tags: blog blogging)

Blog blog blog and blog some more,

-William Lee

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What Is WordPress?

Posted on February 2, 2009 by William

“From Wikipedia.com: WordPress is an open source blog publishing application. WordPress is the official successor of b2\cafelog which was developed by Michel Valdrighi. The name WordPress was suggested by Christine Selleck, a friend of lead developer Matt Mullenweg. The latest release of WordPress is version 2.7, released on 11 December 2008.”

Above that, WordPress is the next evolution for people who currently have their blogs on free blogging services such as (@Blogspot.com) www.blogger.com or WordPress’s own free blogging platform, (@Wordpress.com) www.wordpress.com.

The main functions of the WordPress blog CMS (Content Management System) is that it allows you to edit, create and modify your blog posts directly from your web server rather than log on to a 3rd party site such as Blogger.

WordPress is also highly customizable, with the ability to modify the entire look and feel of the site as well as usability functions via themes and plugins that are readily available for WordPress.

Just type in ‘Free WordPress templates’ or ‘Wordpress Plugins’ in Google.com and you’ll see what I mean.

Templates

The use of many of the free templates out there can give your blog that look that you’ve always wanted it to have but could never quite achieve in your free blog host.

Better still, you can modify an existing template to give yourself a more unique look, or create a theme from scratch for a one of a kind blog.

Plugins

WordPress plugins or widgets give your blog more functionality for both your readers, and for yourself.

You can add plugins to show the most recent comments, the most popular posts, add polls and more for the benefit of your user and their interaction with your site.

For yourself, in the backend, plugins can automatically make your site compatible with Google Analytics, automatically place Google Adsense for you and even catch spam comments from flooding your site.

All in all, WordPress is a must for those who want to start blogging seriously and want and added bit of functionality to their blog. For Internet marketers, it is a must, period.

In my next post I’ll make a quick tutorial on how to install WordPress on your server via cpanel and fantastico.

Gong Xi Fa Chai,

-William Lee

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An SEO Upper Hand With The SeoQuake Toolbar

Posted on January 25, 2009 by William

The SeoQuake toolbar plugin for Firefox is a great tool for Internet marketers and bloggers alike. With it, you’ll at one glance be able to see the Alexa ranking, Google Page Rank as well as other useful information for any website.

You’ll be able to check how your website/ blog is doing or even be able to spy on competition.

My ranking isn’t that great.

On top of that, the program is free and packed with tools to boot, giving those starting out an advantage to learn SEO and page ranking first hand.

Get yourself a copy from the SeoQuake website here: http://www.seoquake.com/. Once installed, I suggest to set it to show you links which are ‘nofollow’.

I switch on this setting because a) you can see if you can get some free Google love by leaving comments on other people’s blogs and b) if you’ve arranged a link exchange, to see if the links to your blog are ‘nofollow’, that wouldn’t really be fair now would it?

Below I’ve made a short and simple video on how to activate the plugin once it’s installed (Mozilla Firefox).

I’ve also made a more detailed presentation of the process for those of you who need a bit more details. (Sorry, the font is a bit small)

Adding SEOQuake Toolbar To Mozilla Firefox

Happy SEOing,

-William Lee

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A Good Example Of Marketing – Using Just A Slide Show

Posted on January 23, 2009 by William

Would you have thought that a simple slide show would be a good advert for anything? After all, you only view one page of it a time.

Slideshows at work are usually boring, with each slide having a couple of sentences of boring text. It’s hard to tell a story using slides, I’m sure you’ve given a presentation before using slides right? Not easy getting your point across eh?

But this guy makes an awesome slide show. Check it out:

The BIG Idea

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: management business)
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Why I Don’t Use Nuffnang Or Adverlets

Posted on January 22, 2009 by William

In Malaysia we have Nuffnang (Nuffnang.com) and Advertlets (advertlets.com), two blog aggregators that act as a middle man between local blogs and local advertisers. For now however any maybe for the near future, I won’t be using them.

They use our sites to sell advertising space to local advertisers and fyi, some international equivilants are Foodbuzz.com, Adbrite.com (to an extent) and of course there’s Google Adsense. They are encourage us to use their services to make money from our sites. But it doesn’t always work out that way.

The main problem I have with Nuffnang and Advertlets are the way the adverts work and the amounts they pay to you. Personally I have nothing against the owners of the 2 companies, heck, if I stay in this line of business long enough, I’ll probably meet them one day.

It’s just that a) their adverts take up prime real estate on your blog, b) their rates are quite low compared to even Google Adsense (which you must admit have random rates at times) and c) their ads, as of yet, are loosely targeted at best.

Have a look at the Google ads on my site, I’m guessing you’ll have about 30%-40% adverts on making money online or something similar.

For Nuffnang/ Advertlets you’d be lucky to get an advert based on the finance or the Internet, although you may get Nike Ads, or even maybe a Heineken (will Google slap you for having an advert on alcohol on your site? You have to check) advert. But is that what your site is about?

I’m guessing more often than not it’s not and that it might adversely effect how you brand yourself.

You might as well save that space, put a nice auto responder box or a nice affiliate banner.

I’ll pick up more on this subject in a future post.

Good morrow,

-William Lee

p/s: Some people DO make money using Nuffnang or Advertlets. So don’t say I didn’t mention at least that in my post. Thx!

Posted in Selling Advertising Space | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

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