Wordpress Automation - Automating Your Wordpress Blog Posts

Filed under:Blog, Feeds, Writing — posted by admin on August 10, 2007 @ 7:46 am

By Samuel Ng

Would it nice when your wordpress blogs are being updated with highly relevant content automatically? Without you having to do anything except for an initial quick set up.

First & foremost, why do attempt to automate blog posting? Sometimes you as a blogger run out of ideas on what to blog about, sometimes your readers what to read more than what you can post. Maybe you’re not posting on a regular basis, or just you just want to go for a long vacation away from your computer.

You can grab rss feeds & allow them to be posted on your blog based on your keywords & categories.

You can do that by using rss plugin called smart rss or another rss plugin called name. Simply search for it on Google & it’ll appear quick.

This is a great way to add more content to your blog, not just content but relevant & keyword target content.

Sounds like a good idea? Unfortunately many people have no clue that such plugins actually exists! There are also those that use these plugins the wrong way.

Instead of getting keyword targeted & setting them to be posted on the right category, they just throw in a bunch of generic keywords & allow the posts to be posted automatically, then they forget it & move on.

That’s not the way to do it, we must selective with rss feeds & which category to use. Posting frequency is also an important thing, too often, such as 8 times a day will raise a red flag with the search engines.

Using news feeds is a great way to get fresh updated content, on top of that you won’t get penalized for duplicate content by the search engines, because they know that the same news is being broadcast on many different channels.

Here’s how you can create self-updating, money-making blogs, quickly & easily.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Samuel_Ng

How to setup a (monetizing) blog from scratch

Filed under:Blog, Domain, Feeds, Money, Tools, Traffic, Web hosting, Writing — posted by admin on June 24, 2007 @ 8:30 am

Get a domain name.

I’ve previously written about getting a domain name. The main two recommended patterns for domain names seems to be; get a name that describes your site, or a pronounceable word that means nothing at all.

Here is a Google search for domain name registrars.

Get a web host.

Choosing the right web host is almost like a lottery these days. There are tons of hosts to choose from and it is hard to find out the terms for most of the ones I’ve looked at. If you decide to let your web host manage your domain name registration make sure it is you who actually own the domain.

Here is a Google search for web hosts.

Update DNS servers.

Now that you have a domain name and a web host it is time to tell the world where your site is. DNS servers are a bit like the yellow pages for the web. When a user enters an address in the browser it uses DNS to look up a numeric address that the computer can understand. It can take up to 48 hours for the DNS change to propagate all over the Internet so when you have recently updated your DNS entries you might end up at different sites depending on where you are when you look for a domain. You manage DNS settings from your domain name registrar account.

Write for 48 hours.

The two days it takes for DNS to propagate are perfect to write your initial content. If you are going to blog about a specific subject I would recommend that you write ten posts that you can publish right a way. That way your index page will be fully populated since most blogs show ten posts up front. It is also a good practice to write a couple of extra posts that can be published when you don’t have the time or inspiration write.

Time to get the blog up and running

By using the Google tools for webmasters you can submit your site to the Google indexer so it will find it a little bit faster. You can also tell Google that content on http://yourdomain.com is the same as content on http://www.yourdomain.com, otherwise Google will classify all your content as duplicates and that is a bad thing according to all SEO experts online.

I use Wordpress as my blog tool so further on all my recommendations will be based on that. It is included in Fantastico, a web site configuration tool that exists on most LAMP based web hosts.

Go to your Fantastico control panel and install Wordpress. If you do this before the DNS information has propagated the site will look weird and some things will not work at all.

Get a good looking theme. There are lots of free themes at Wordpress. There is some debate of how important the look and fell of a site is for a steady user base. I think the most important thing is that you should feel comfortable with it. Time spent on content is usually better than time spent on your theme.

Since the spamming business seems to grow faster than anything else; activate the Aksimet plugin. You have to get a free API key from Wordpress.

Feed readers can check your site quite often so to save some bandwidth and get some nice statistics go to Feedburner and create an account. Feedburner has an excellent article on how to get the Feedburner plugin to work.

If you intend to make it on the social networks then theShare-this plugin will enable your readers, or your self, to easily submit your posts to a variety of them. I’m not sure if it is a good idea in the long run, but you will get some readers by self submitting articles to Digg.

If your content makes sense even after a couple of months it can be a good idea to configure your permalink structure. I use ‘/index.php/%category%/%postname%/’ on all my blogs. The default configuration just adds the post id number to the URL and if you use a predefined one with dates in it your posts might look old in a while.

Lets earn some money


, but there are other alternatives that looks and works almost the same. BidVertiser is one of them. The Adsense Delux plug-in makes it simpler to incorporate ads, not only adsense, into your posts.

You should set up a merchant account at PayPal since many offers to make money online offers payment to PayPal. That way you don’t have to pay for checks or wire transfer of money to your domestic bank.

There are several ways other than plain advertising to make money from your blog. Both Bloggerwave and PayPerPost offer payment for reviews. You can also sign up as a publisher for an affiliate network. Affiliate networks gathers advertisers and lets web site owners publish links and/or banner ads to the advertisers. The site owner can get paid depending on the readers actions, such as clicking a link, signing up for a newsletter or buying something from the advertisers store.

Bring on the readers

If you are curious about how many readers you have, what they read and where they are from, you can fulfill your curiosity with Google Analytics It is a free web site statistics package that keep track of more stuff than I could imagine before I saw it. Don’t fall in the trap and check your Google Adsense and Analytics statistics every 30 minutes. Make it a habit to check them once a day and leave it at that. You should put all your effort in producing high quality content.

Good luck!

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RSS, subscriptions and feed readers

Filed under:Blog, Feeds, Tools, Traffic — posted by admin on June 22, 2007 @ 8:30 am

RSS is a standard protocol to publish the content of a blog. By consuming RSS you can keep track of several blogs without having to visit their web pages frequently.

For consuming RSS feeds there are both applications to run locally on your computer and services that run in your browser.

The most known web based feed readers are:

You can find a lot of programs on the Internet to download and read RSS feeds on your computer. Those I have tried are:

… but I got hooked on Bloglines since it allows me to read my feeds everywhere.

If you are a blogger RSS can help you retain your readers even if you post infrequently since they don’t have to visit your site to get your new content.

If you get many feed subscriber it can be a good idea to use Feedburner. It is a service, recently bought by Google, that publishes your feed from their servers. That way you don’t have to pay for the traffic. Feedburner also offers a way to monetize your feed and some statistics about your readers and their behavior.

If you are using Wordpress; here is an instruction about how to enable the Fedburner redirection.



image: detail of installation by Bronwyn Lace