Ping Service Wordpress Plugins
Posted May 8, 2009 
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Posted May 8, 2009 Comments(0) Best Wordpress Plugin for Adsense
Posted April 27, 2009 Comments(0) 
1. Download the plugin to your computer and upload it to your web host server under ”wp-content’ – ‘plugins’. The best way to upload the plugin is by using FTP. If you have not already found a free FTP service, try Core FTP. Once the plugin is uploaded, go to your Wordpress control panel and there are two quick things to do.
2. Click the ‘Plugins’ section and you should now see an entry for ‘Adsense Injection’. If you look at the ‘Action’ column you just need to click on ‘Activate’
3. You will now see a button called ‘Adsense’ in your ‘Options’ section. All you have to do is click on this and fill in your Adsense publisher ID number and check the colour codes for your ads.
The only thing lacking in this plugin is the ability to exclude Adsense image ads, because most Adsense publishers find that image ads do not get such a high clickthrough rate as text ads. If I find out how to exclude image ads using this plugin I will post an update.
The best features of the “Adsense Injection” plugin are that it will insert Adsense codes automatically into every blog post, including older posts. This is great if your blog already has a lot of existing content, and you don’t want to insert codes manually into all of them. As the name suggests, when you use Adsense Injection you “inject” your Adsense codes automatically and randomly into all previous and future blog posts.
Thus, you will not have to worry about what’s called “ad blindness” as your Adsense blocks will appear in different positions within your content. You can also randomize different ad formats and different alignments to make sure that no two pages have the exact Adsense codes on them.
Tags: Plugins, wordpressRelated posts
Best Wordpress Plugin for Higher Affiliate sales
Posted April 23, 2009 Comments(1) Finding affiliate programs to use for making money from your blog is quite simple. I am signed up with two of the biggest marketplaces for affiliate programs – Commission Junction, who call themselves CJ, and ClickBank. It is completely FREE to join, they pay your commission by cheque (check) . CJ pay in sterling over here, but Clickbank pay in US$ checks unless you are generating a lot of sales. If you are outside the US this is not so convenient as getting your payments through Paypal and I suggest you opt to receive payments once they are above $100 otherwise bank charges will swallow up your earnings.
How to post your Affiliate Links
As soon as you are a registered affiliate, log in to your dashboard and you can search the marketplace for products in your niche that you can sell. Most merchants supply a variety of banners and text links with your affiliate ID coded in to them. It is easy to insert the code into your website, blog, email or forum signature and start promoting the products.
But you might not want to show your affiliate name, and there are people out there who could hijack your link ad get the commission for themselves. You also want to manage the placement of your links and update them fast if they change.
There is a great Wordpress plugin that you can use for this to protect your earnings, and it will help you sell more as an affiliate. It is called Wordpress Affiliate Link Cloak Plugin. The way it works is to link words and phrases in your blog content to one of your affiliate links, taking your readers straight to the product without the need to add an affiliate link every time. When you write a blog post about handbags, there will be a link to a company that sells accessories.
For me this plugin made all the difference in successful affiliate marketing: until I started using Affiliate Link Cloak, I spent hours messing about with affiliate codes without getting a decent payback for the time involved. Once the account details were programmed in, the links appeared like magic and my earnings soared.
Tags: Affiliate Link Cloak, affiliate programs, Clickbank, Commission Junction, Making Money at Home, PluginsRelated posts
Sitemaps for your blog
Posted April 1, 2009 Comments(0) Every blog or website needs a sitemap so that the search engines can find your web pages. Navigation on your web pages is also important, of course but today I discovered a tactic used by a competitor of one of my SEO clients that reminded me of the role of sitemaps. My client was getting really upset because his site had fallen down in the SERPs results for his search term. His business is in the service sector so the search phrases are geographic. His web pages have nice search engine friendly titles, of course. This means they describe the page content – for example this page could be named website-sitemaps.html and that would indicate the subject matter. I had analysed his competitor’s site for keywords and phrases and there was nothing radical going on. The site navigation was on dropdown boxes – nothing special there, either. But when I looked at the sitemap I found that there was a separate page for each district and village where the company wanted to rank. They were not apparent on the navbar, but they were being fed to the search engines and the website was ranking high for all the districts where they operate.
So the sitemap is crucial. If you are using Wordpress, all you need to do is get the free Google Sitemaps plugin, install it and forget about it. It is almost as easy to get a free sitemap for regular (HTML) websites as well, thanks to Sitemap Builder. Just visit the site, enter your site URL, check the pages that Sitemap builder finds and click if you are happy. A Google-compliant sitemap will be generated. All you need to do is paste the content into a new sitemap.xml page on your cpanel and it will be there to tell the search engines about your website content. If you have registered your website with Google Webmaster Tools you can check that the status of your sitemap is OK.
Tags: Creating Websites, Plugins, sitemaps, wordpressRelated posts
Sploggers and Badware mean you cannot comment
Posted July 30, 2008 Comments(1) I am sorry, I have had to remove the comments facility from this site until I can work out a way to protect it from automated registrations. These are carried out by hackers, who then proceed to upload spam links or, even worse, malicious software, on to the site. I only discovered this today and since then I have been through a fast learning curve to fnd out what ‘Badware’ means. As I was browsing through my site stats this morning I noticed several searches for specific pages and categories within my site. For example, one search showed
“http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Abrilliant4biz.com%20pr”
That search brought up a post from last October, plus a warning from Google that “visiting this web site may harm your computer”! I was horrified, to say the least. I was a victim of spam links a few months ago when spammers managed to load up reams of porn links on to some html pages, but I thought my Wordpress posts and pages were reasonably secure. Only one blog post was hacked, but the category and monthly archive containing that post are also carrying a Google Health warning at the moment. Now I will have to search around for a suitable plugin to allow legitimate comments to be posted without giving the spammers and hackers a way in.
That was not the case – strange new users were registering them on the site and although I deleted them as soon as I saw them, they still had time to do their worst. The reason for this dilemma is that Wordpress only allows two options in its settings – either “anyone can register themselves” or “users must be registered and logged in to comment”
These are the actions I have taken to restore my website to its former good standing:
1. I visited Google Webmaster Tools, where the site is registered, and followed their guide to checking for malware on my site. The good news is that Google had NOT found any harmful software on its last two visits. I then put in a request for the site to be reconsidered.
2. I checked out the guides at the stop badware site – which really was not very helpful for the average webmaster – prbably very easy for hackers to understand, but the content did not tell me how to identify Trojans or malicious software on my site
3. I visited badneighborhood.com, which has a very useful free tool to scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas. All you do is type in the URL of the home page and the results appear within 90 seconds. These will flag up any sites that could possibly be involved in search engine spamming. You may not be aware of these sites: for example, you could link to a respectable site but they may have links with a site involved in the adult or pharmaceutical fields, and thus harm your website’s position. I am pleased to say my site got a clean bill of health at Bad Neighborhood to day.
In the meantime if you are one of the regular commenters please email me (comments@brilliant4biz.com) and I will send you a user name and password.
Related posts
Wordpress Plugin Stops Scraping of Your Posts
Posted April 21, 2008 Comments(0) If you have fallen victim to web ’scrapers’ you will know how annoying and frustrating this can be. You spend time researching and writing blog posts, only to find that someone is systematically scraping them and publishing them to their own website or blog as if they had written the original article. This has happened to me more than once, so I was very pleased to find the ‘RSS Footer Plugin’ for Wordpress Blogs. The way it works – the people who want to scrape your posts use your RSS Feed to automate the process. This plugin allows you to add a line of content either at the beginning or the end of your RSS feed articles: you can also Include a link back to the post, with post title as anchor text too. That is an aspect of this plugin that will really frustrate the web scrapers and, hopefully, make it pointless for them to plagiarise your original blog posts.
Tags: Creating Websites, Plugins, wordpressRelated posts
Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin Update
Posted April 16, 2008 Comments(0) If you are using Wordpress on your own server or your web host’s server, then you have probably upgraded recently to Wordpress Version 2.5. I am generally pleased with this upgrade so far, and it appears to work well with my existing plugins – except the Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin. When I reviewed this Plugin for Wordpress last Autumn I was happy with its performance but then there were several mini upgrades of Wordpress software that were incompatible with this plugin. The author of the Plugin offered some extra code on her website but when I tried to use this my sudebar content disappeared with a ‘parse error’ message. Unfortunately Lucia, the writer of the plugin, has not updated her blog for several months now and the Plugin no longer serves to Hide Sponsored Categories. So there appears to be no ongoing support for the plugin. For the moment I have deactivated it until I find another. When I searched for more plugins to serve this purpose, one of the top results was a link to my own blog post – I must be doing something right, then!
Just to remind you of the reason for using this plugin: many bloggers – like me – use lots of different categories for their blog posts, as a kind of filing system. Readers of the blog really want to see the most interesting categories and this plugin promised the facility of keeping outdated or less interesting categories out of the sidebar list.
Update – 15 June. The Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin is no longer being supported and is not compatible with the most recent Wordpress software updates so I have removed it from my Wordpress Dashboard.
Tags: Plugins, wordpressRelated posts
Plugin Makes Your Blog SEO friendly
Posted March 16, 2008 Comments(2) Wordpress is such a user friendly blogging tool and some great plugins have been developed to make it even better. The All in One SEO Pack Plugin for Wordpress is one of my favourites, because it does all the search engine optimization (SEO) work for your blog in a couple of simple steps, and will help you make more money blogging. If you do not know much about SEO, no need to worry: the plugin asks you a few simple questions and you include your information in boxes on the ‘options’ page once the plugin is installed. If you are a complete newbie to SEO then you can download this excellent free ebook, SEO Made Easy, that will give you a good understanding of search engine optimization. Maybe you think that organic SEO sounds a bit geeky? Is it boring to talk about your SERPs position? Well there is nothing geeky in getting lots of free traffic from the search engines and Making Money From Your Blog!
The All in One SEO Pack plugin sets up all the key on-page ranking factors. For me the cleverest part is the way it deals with titles. The SEO plugin for Wordpress changes all page or post titles from the Wordpress default style, which is not search engine friendly as it starts with the main blog title. So every page has the same initial title. The plugin puts your post or page title first when seen through a browser bar. This is a handy tool – I spent ages changing the Wordpress code manually to do this, and now I find it is available in a simple plugin. Remember, when you download this plugin: it can seriously improve the money you make by boosting your search engine rankings.
Tags: Keywords, Make Money Blogging, Plugins, SERPSRelated posts
Adsense Wordpress Plugin recommended
Posted February 21, 2008 Comments(1) Here is the best plugin I have found for putting Adsense contextual ads on Wordpress – this easy little plugin will integrate your Adsense ads in your Wordpress posts and pages and float the text round them seamlessly. This has to improve your clickthrough rates! I found this free plugin by searching on Google Code and I am sooo pleased with it. I had already tried some widgets and other plugins, and I was looking at some paid tools. They were all complicated to install and manage. I was starting to wonder if I would ever be able to place Adsense ads around my Wordpress blog posts. So what is the magic Wordpress plugin that I love so much? It is called ‘Adsense Injection’, and it will insert Adsense into your blog without a lot of ****ing about. That is just the type of thing I was looking for. And if I managed to install this plugin in less than five minutes, then you can probably do it in three! All you do is download the plugin and upload it to your server under ”wp-content’ – ‘plugins’. The best way to upload the plugin is by using FTP – my favourite is Core FTP, which is totally free and simple to use.
The “Adsense Injection” plugin will insert Adsense codes, for example, automatically into every blog post, including older posts.
This is great if your blog already has a lot of existing content, and you don’t want to insert codes manually into all of them. As the name suggests, when you use Adsense Injection you “inject” your Adsense codes automatically and randomly into all previous and future blog posts.
You will not have to worry about what is called “ad blindness” as your Adsense blocks will appear in different positions within your content. You can also randomise different ad formats and different alignments to make sure that no two pages have the exact Adsense codes on them.
Once the plugin is uploaded, go to your Wordpress control panel and there are two quick things to do.
1. Click the ‘Plugins’ section and you should now see an entry for ‘Adsense Injection’. If you look at the ‘Action’ column you just need to click on ‘Activate’
2. You will now see a button called ‘Adsense’ in your ‘Options’ section. All you have to do is click on this and fill in your Adsense publisher ID number and check the colour codes for your ads.
You can choose the “Do not show me my own ads” option – so if you need to view your own wordpress posts, there is no risk of clicking your Adsense ads in error. You can also block Adsense from appearing in individual posts by inserting the tag <!–noadsense–> at the start of the blog post.
The only thing lacking in this plugin is the ability to exclude Adsense image ads, because most Adsense publishers find that image ads do not get such a high clickthrough rate as text ads. If I find out how to exclude image ads using this plugin I will post an update.
Tags: Plugins, wordpressRelated posts
Wordpress Kontera Plugin
Posted December 13, 2007 Comments(0) I have been displaying Kontera ads on my websites and blogs for a few months but I was holding back on using Kontera on many of the blogs because some of them were also selling paid blog reviews and the sites that pay you to post do not want to see other people’s ads in their sponsored post. One of the main Paid Post companies requires that posts submitted to them should not contain any advertising that overlaps the text. I already have an excellent plugin that can easily stop Adsense ads showing in paid blog posts, and I wanted to find a similar tool to manage my Kontera ads efficiently.
So I decided to find out how I could start displaying Kontera on my Wordpress blogs: I thought there should a a Kontera Wordpress Plugin somewhere on the web, and I found one quite easily a Karol Krizka’s Blog. This is a great site for all sorts of technical help: I downloaded the plugin, uploaded it to my blogs using FTP and activated it then I inserted my Kontera Publisher number in the Options screen then, of course, I changed the link colour from orange to blue. Now the Kontera integration Plugin is managing all my Kontera ads and I am looking forward to making more money with higher Kontera earnings on all my blogs.
Tags: Make Money Blogging, Plugins, wordpress
