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Why you Should use Self-Hosted WordPress for your Blog

by Blair Williams · Jul 19, 2010

There was a great writeup on WebProNews about a blogging service (Blogetery) housing 70,000 blogs was shut down today by an unnamed government agency. Apparently it was due to some user generated content on Blogetery's servers.

Seriously — if your blog is at the center of your business, don't trust it to a free (or ultra-cheap) hosting service… Get some decent hosting and use self-hosted WordPress — it will give you more control and peace of mind.

Filed Under: Hosting, Websites Tagged With: blog, blog software, blogging service, blogs, computing, content management systems, government agencies, Internet, self host, Wordpress

4 Bulletproof Strategies for Making Money on Your Blog

4 Bulletproof Strategies for Making Money on Your Blog

by Blair Williams · Jun 28, 2010

You spend insane hours on your blog — don't you think you ought to make some money from it? Yah — of course! Well, I'm here to tell you that there are many more ways to fund your blogging than just Google Ads. I want to show you the 4 most solid, bulletproof ways you can make money on your blog.
[Read more…] about 4 Bulletproof Strategies for Making Money on Your Blog

Filed Under: Business, Internet Business Tagged With: ads, advertising, affiliate marketing, affiliate programs, affiliates, authorize.net, blog, blogging, bulletproof, Business, ecommerce, Google, google ads, internet marketing, making money, Marketing, strategies, Wordpress

WordCamp 2010 Orange County Style

WordCamp 2010 Orange County Style

by Blair Williams · Apr 7, 2010

OC WordCampI'm excited to announce that I'll be speaking at WordCamp in Orange County, California on April 24th! The organizer of this event — Brandon Dove (of Pixel Jar, Think Press and @brandondove fame) and I met & became friends at Blog World / WordCamp Las Vegas last October.

Brandon has asked me to cover two topics related to building WordPress plugins — here they are with a link to the blog posts I did over on OC WordCamp's blog for each of them:

  • Pimp Your WordPress Plugin — this presentation's going to show people how to create their own Platform Modifying Plugin (PMP or Pimp) using a Model View Controller (MVC) approach … you can expect that I'll be sharing some tips & tricks of plugin development in addition to the MVC stuff as well 🙂 .
  • How to Create a Premium WordPress Plugin — In this presentation, I'll be covering some material that I have seen nowhere else — trust me, as I've been building premium wordpress plugins I've had to figure this all out from scratch … This presentation will cover a lot of strategy, higher level architecture but will also get into the nuts and bolts of how to do this technically.

You might now be asking yourself:

Uh … is this just one of those technical conferences? … No, it is going to be much more than that.

My topics are fairly technical but OC Wordcamp is going to have something for writers, entrepreneurs, bloggers, developers, graphic designers and marketers alike. If you'll be in or around Orange County that weekend then I hope you'll attend — it's going to be awesome!

Filed Under: WordCamp Tagged With: announce, blog, blog software, computing, content management systems, exciting, Las Vegas, oc, orange county, php programming language, spoke, WordCamp, Wordpress, world wide web

Optimize your Blog with these 4 Powerful Tools

Optimize your Blog with these 4 Powerful Tools

by Blair Williams · Mar 29, 2010

If you haven't heard yet Matt Cutts (Google's SEO Spokesman) announced last month that performance (measured by page load speed) is a big indicator in SEO now. I've taken that indication seriously and have been searching out some ways to optimize the performance of my blog and think you should too.

When assessing your blog, there are really 3 separate factors that play into it's performance:

  1. Number and Complexity Database Calls pages on your site are making: This performance issue is caused by code running on your blog that is reading and / or writing to the database. The only way it can be fixed is to identify code that is making too many database calls and eliminate it or get the author of the code to optimize it. Take it from me — database queries can be tricky and small changes to them can either make them run quickly or grind your server to a screeching halt. If a software vendor releases something without optimizing queries (which, sadly, I have been guilty of in the past as well) then they could be responsible for slow performance on your site. To optimize your site you absolutely *need* some kind of tool that will show you what calls are taking the longest and where they are located.
  2. Script Execution Time: There are many different factors that can influence this one. Poorly coded software in your website, your server's hardware or just your web server software settings.
  3. Memory Management: This is possibly the most elusive problem of the three. This one could be caused by how much software is loaded by your website on page loads, poor software implementation or just software that is just crunching a lot of data.

[Read more…] about Optimize your Blog with these 4 Powerful Tools

Filed Under: How Tos, Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: blog, blog software, computing, content management systems, Database, loads, Memory, optimizes, optimizing queries, Page Speed, performance, performance issue, php programming language, Profiling, SEO, speeding, system software, Wordpress, world wide web

Tweet Your Blog Posts … Automatically

Tweet Your Blog Posts … Automatically

by Blair Williams · Mar 23, 2010

Shrinking your blog posts' permalinks (on existing or newly created blog posts) and then sending a tweet out for them can be a hassle — especially if you have multiple twitter accounts. Luckily, you can automate this process and auto tweet your blog posts right from your wordpress website using Pretty Link Pro. Hopefully this article will show you how this can save you time and the simple steps you'll need to go through to get this auto tweet feature working for you.
[Read more…] about Tweet Your Blog Posts … Automatically

Filed Under: How Tos, Marketing, Plugins, Pretty Link Pro, Pretty Link Pro, Software, Tutorials, Twitter, Wordpress Tagged With: Automation, blog, blog software, blogs, communication, creating blog, online social networking, permalink, Pretty Link Pro, tweet, twitter, web 2.0, Wordpress, world wide web

Launch Your Website Today!

Launch Your Website Today!

by Blair Williams · Apr 30, 2009

building_wwwOne of the biggest mistakes that online businesses make is not to put a marketing website up until after they have they have their product, service, graphics or brand launched and utterly perfected. Well, those things are important but shouldn't stop you from building your website today. It's extremely important to get your website up and running sooner rather than later — even before your product launches. Because if you have no marketing efforts in place then you have no customers and if you have no customers then you have no money — and that is a sad place to be.

If You Build it They Will Come … uh

What a load of crap! I recently had a client show me growth projections for their product after it was to launch — it showed exponential growth on day 1 and they had no marketing site up! These guys obviously didn't hit their sales projections by a long shot but once they started actively marketing they were alright. This just illustrates that there's a big misconception out there among people who haven't ever tried to promote a website that once you put a website on the Internet it is like flipping a switch and your site is immediately flooded with visitors lining up to buy your product — this is simply not true. If you think about it — there are billions of websites on the Internet, most of them clamoring for attention — why is anyone going to care about your little website when it launches?

The reality is that it takes time to build an effective website with a high volume of traffic — sometimes months, sometimes years. You have to give yourself time for the right Audience to find your site and for a community to come together on it. You have to have time to submit articles, get involved on other related sites, build reciprocal linking relationships, test landing pages, etc. You may have the greatest product, service or message in the world but if you don't get any attention then your business will fail — and despite what any so called Marketing expert tells you, it takes a rock solid plan, a lot of hard work and some money to drive traffic to your site.

I attended a seminar a few months ago where a prominent blogger talked about the success he's seen on his site. He started blogging in 2005 and before his blog hit its stride it only had about 30 visitors a day for 2 and a half years! He loved what he was talking about on his blog though and eventually it began building momentum. His blog currently sees hundreds of thousands of visitors a month and he makes his living from the community he's established. Now that is an extreme example but it shows that you need to be patient, continue to improve your site daily and find ways to promote your site on the Internet.

Don't Build a Website … Build a Community

Really, when you think about it — building a website doesn't matter nearly as much as building a community of people around you that love what your doing — or at least have strong opinions about what you're doing. This is why you want to launch a site that enables you to start the discussion with your audience.

Don't worry so much about what people will say on your site … If you launch your site using WordPress or any other CMS worth its salt you should be able to moderate any comments coming in. Trust me, I've launched sites dealing with very sensitive topics and it always amazes me how being sincere and helpful on your site can lead to some great comments when you're targeting the right audience. It has been my experience that visitors to your site won't comment on a post unless they are interested in it or are angered by it (you may have to moderate some of those) — so you won't typically get as many negative comments as you think you will starting off.

Once you have a people who are interested in your message coming to your site and interacting with each other you'll naturally see links and pingbacks coming back to your site from people talking about your site on Twitter, Digg, Forums or other websites. This kind of organic promotion is critical to your long term success — if your message is good enough for people to care about what you're doing then they will promote you, how cool is that!

Build the Community First — A Case Study

A buddy of mine is consulting with a startup who has done it right. This startup will be selling a physical product that will help keep kids safe — so they have a message that people actually care about. They are still in product development right now but rolled out their marketing site several months ago. They now have hundreds of people who have commented on their blog, thousands of people on their email list, an active affiliate program with over 2,000 affiliates and are even generating revenue on their site by accepting pre-orders for their product. The crazy thing about this company is that they just used a template for the graphics on their site (and their blog is just the WordPress default theme), haven't even established the final graphics for their logo — yet they've been generating revenue for months now — and their product won't even launch until August!

If you're waiting for your graphics to be perfect, your product to be complete, a “killer” flash piece for the front page or anything else — don't. Get your website online today and start building your community now. No website is perfect on day 1 — its virtually impossible to get the message right and make it as effective as it can be instantly. What matters when launching a website is that you are committed to making daily, incremental changes based on the data coming in from your community (analytics, comments, surveys, etc) and you'll have a killer website that actually turns a profit!

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: audience, blog, build, CMS, Comments, community, content, Marketing, reach, SEO, startup, website, Wordpress

Don’t Use TinyURL – Create and Track Links from your WordPress Website

by Blair Williams · Mar 29, 2009

A few weeks ago I started getting frustrated because I had to go into my apache config file every time I wanted to add a redirect link. I stopped using BudURL and TinyURL some time ago because my users have started to realize that they're being tracked whenever they see a link from one of these services. I've talked with several other Affiliate marketers and they've been saying the same thing, “don't put a tinyurl on your site.” Affiliates are always concerned with masking their URLs and with tracking so these link shrinking services seemed perfect for them… well, now users have caught on.

Last week, I started working on my own replacement for TinyURL, a WordPress plugin named “Pretty Link.” The thing that's great about this plugin is that I can now generate ultra small urls that redirect wherever I want and hang off of my domain name! I'm also able to track clicks on these URLs and in future releases of this plugin more stats than just clicks in future upgrades.

I just released this plugin tonight and can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin directory here:

https://blairwilliams.com/download

Filed Under: Plugins, Software Tagged With: blog, link, pretty-link, projects, redirect, shortcut, shrink, Software, tinyurl, url, website, Wordpress

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