It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how long I do it, and how many blogs I build, there always seems to be something new to learn. It definitely keeps it interesting.

Anyway, in my post about the glitch when you input a “Custom Field” to place a thumbnail next to the excerpt of your posts on the main page, I told you that you can’t enter the entire URL of the image, you can only enter the directory and filename.

So, when I tried doing this for the images that show up in the slide show using the “Featured Content Gallery” I found that the opposite is true.

After installing and activating the “Featured Content Gallery” plugin, you’d normally go into the posts that you want to show up in the slide show and create a custom field called “articleimg.”

If you find yourself getting errors, like the images not showing up, go back and check your custom field within the post. If the entire url isn’t there, that could be your problem.

Example:

Wrong: /images/graphic.jpg
Right: http://www.yourdomainname.com/images/graphic.jpg

It can be confusing to remember that each of these custom fields need to be entered differently. The way I remember it is a bit simplistic, but it works.

The term “articleimg” is longer than the term “thumb.” So, I know to add the “longer” url to the longer term, “articleimg” and the shorter url to the shorter term, “thumb.”

Hope this helps. See you on the web!

For those who may not know, a “plugin” is a small program that you “plug in” to your blog. Each plugin does something different. But basically, they add more functionality to your blog.

I’ve been building blogs for a long time and have been using the same plugins for a while. I had my list and just mindlessly uploaded them to each blog.

But recently I had a client send me a list of plugins she wanted and it made me open my eyes to more of the thousands of plugins available.

So, here is a list of some cool plugins that you may not know about:

Contact Form 7 – Automatically creates a page with a contact form for your visitors to email you with.

Link Cloaking Plugin – Once you activate it and set the options, it automatically cloaks any and all affiliate links on your blog.

MaxBlogPress Favicon – Actually, MaxBlogPress offers many cool plugins, but this is one of my favorites.

Privacy-Policy – Automatically creates a pre-written privacy policy and creates a page for it.

Sexy Bookmarks – I used Sociable for a long time, but I like this one better. It offers more social bookmarking sites for your visitors and it looks a lot nicer.

WP-Cumulus – Creates the coolest tag list I’ve ever seen.

WP Robot – This one isn’t free, but it is worth just about any price, especially for a blog flipper like myself. It turns your blog into an “Autoblog.” It automatically posts articles, posts from Amazon, Clickbank and eBay with your affiliate links, YouTube videos and more. With no work from me! I rarely build a blog without it since I found it.

It’s been so much fun, finding these new plugins, I’d love it if you would leave a comment and tell me what your favorite plugin is.

Anyway, after I posted last night, I continued my search for the answer. I watched video after video teach me how to place thumbnails on my home page next to the excerpts of my posts.

Then, I found it. This videos’ narrator mentioned, in the most off-handed way, that there is some glitch in the Lifestyle 4.0 theme. That if you enter the entire URL of the image nothing will show up except a repeat of your post title.

That was exactly what had been happening to me. She said to just input the directory and file name where I had the file stored.

So, instead of entering;

http://www.yourdomain.com/images/thumbnail.jpg

you would enter;

/images/thumbnail.jpg

Well, I can’t tell you the relief I felt when I tried it and refreshed the blog.

So, if you’ve been having this same problem, try this trick.

Anyone who knows about building blogs and has seen any of the blogs I’ve built will not be surprised to hear that the Studiopress Lifestyle theme is my favorite. In fact, I love it so much that I’ve been using the same version for over a year. And, even though two new versions have come out since I stared, because I’m not a huge fan of change, I’ve stuck with the 2.0 version.

But, this post is not about how great the theme is. It’s about how great it’s not. Let me explain.

A few days ago I finally broke down and got the 4.0 version. I read about it and even saw a couple of videos about it and so, kicking and screaming, I got myself a copy.

Well, I am currently working on the second blog I’ve tried to build with Studiopress Lifestyle 4.0 and I gotta tell you, I’m not lovin’ it. In fact, the first blog I tried to build with it, I needed to finish in a hurry because it was for a customer so halfway through it, I trashed the whole thing and started over again with 2.0.

The blog I’ve been working on today does not have a time limit so I thought I’d take my time and learn about the new theme. I’ve found one problem so far and I cannot get past it. Unless one of my readers can tell me how to fix this, I’ll no doubt be giving up on 4.0 entirely.

Here’s the problem;

It’s with the thumbnails on the front page. The little pictures next to each article? In 2.0 you could create a custom field for each post and put up a unique thumbnail for each one. But, if you have too many posts, or just don’t feel like it, you can simply upload a default thumbnail and if you don’t define a unique thumbnail for a post, the default will automatically show up.

Enter Studiopress Lifestyle 4.0. If I don’t enter a unique thumbnail for a post, nothing shows up on the home page! Even though I uploaded my default thumbnail, the new theme doesn’t care. Either I enter the URL to a thumbnail or I get nothin’.

What’s up?

If I’m right and this is, in fact, a change in the theme, I think it’s definitely a negative. But, I’m more inclined to think that I’m making a mistake somehow. Missing something maybe.

I’ve searched the web for something about this issue and found nothing. Nothing! So, I”m turning to my readers, all seven of them. LOL.

No, seriously, if you’ve got any experience or pearls of wisdom to share about this issue with Studiopress Lifestyle 4.0, I’d love to hear from you. Even if it’s just to agree with me and vent about it! I’d at least like to know I’m not alone.

If you’ve been doing any kind of reading about link building, then you’ve probably seen people mentioning “nofollow” and “dofollow” links. These are very important terms to understand when you are trying to build great links back to your site in order to increase your search engine rankings. But, to the person who is new to all of this, it may be kind of confusing. I am going to help break it down for you.

The coding for a link includes the HTML tag, the URL the link will be going to, the text that will be shown on the webpage for that link, and the closing HTML tag.

You are able to add more HTML to the code in order to tell the search engine spiders whether or not you want them to follow the link when crawling your website. You may be thinking… “Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site?” This is a very valid concern, which I will address further down. First, I am going to show you how to modify the HTML in order to tell the search engine spiders to crawl a link or not.

To tell the spiders to crawl a link, you don’t have to do anything. Simply place a normal link and the search engine spiders will crawl the link provided.

To tell the spiders to NOT crawl a link, you need to add the following code to the HTML code:

rel="nofollow"

Basically, there is no true “dofollow”, it is just NOT using the “nofollow” tag. Pretty simple, eh? (No, I am not Canadian… well, kind of.)

Why does this matter?
When you are using different methods (hopefully from this site) in order to build links on other websites to increase your search engine rankings you need to determine if the websites you are attempting to get your site listed on use the “nofollow” tag or not. If they do, it may still be a good idea to try to get that link there, but it is generally regarded as not the best use of time since the search engines don’t follow that link and you don’t get any increase in search engine rankings from that link.

So, when you are looking for sites and blogs that you could leave your link on (through reciprocal links, commenting on a blog, directory submissions, buying links, etc) figure out if the links in the particular section of the site you are aiming for uses “nofollow” or not.

Why wouldn’t I want the search engine spiders to see all of the links on my site? (Or, Why would I use “nofollow”?)

There are many reasons you would want to use the “nofollow” tag, such as:
1) Paid Links: This is recommended by Google. Essentially, your sites page rank give a small amount of rank juice to the sites you link to (which helps their search engine ranking, which is the purpose of link building, to get that juice from others). If you have a paid link on your site, it’s essentially buying a higher rank in Google. They don’t like that.

2) Maybe in your blog’s comment section (if using most blog software, this is automatic). It is up to you if you want your commentators to get link juice back to their site. It is personal preference.

3) When linking to major, very popular sites. If you are linking to google.com, yahoo.com, digg.com (the front page), cnn.com, or whoever else, they are already popular, so you might as well use “nofollow” since your link won’t make or break them.

I hope this has been helpful. Feel free to comment or use the contact link in the top right of the page if you have any questions about this, or any link building subject.

This post courtesy of InlineSeo.com.

It can be hard to make your blog stand out these days. There are so many blogs available for readers to choose from.

No matter if you’re just starting out, or have one or many existing blogs, the key to making your blog stand out is to target a high-response, distinctive niche.

If you can identify a group that has a unique problem, or interest, and provide good answers and information to them, you’ll have an easier time building and maintaining readership. And, more readership means more money.

All ‘great’ blogs started with a ‘great’ idea and yours won’t last if you don’t have one. That sounds harsh, but there’s simply too much competition out there now to be successful without one.

Basically, to stand out, you need to offer something that no one else, or at least very few others are offering. That sounds like a tall order though, doesn’t it? You have another choice.

You’ve heard the term “why reinvent the wheel?” Well, you can follow other successful bloggers’ methods. I’m not saying to outright steal from them, but watch what they’re doing, and do the same thing while putting your own unique spin on it.

Look at some of these successful sites. Take their ideas and strategies, and put your own personality into it. Give your blog your own voice while following others’ models.

Once you’ve accomplished this, the only thing left is to put the word out and attract readers. A high-response niche and a unique approach won’t get you anywhere if no one sees it.

You’ll need a marketing plan. The best thing is, once you’ve got a reader, it’s pretty easy to keep him coming back with your sparkling, witty, personality-infused writing.

What will you do to keep the content fresh and insightful? Are you feeling that the content you offer on your blog is lacking? Is your blog boring?

Maybe you can’t even pinpoint what exactly is “lacking”, but you just feel it. Possibly, you just don’t have the time to put into writing 1000 word articles every couple days.

If this is you, it’s time you look into using other people’s articles!

No, I’m not suggesting you steal or copy other people’s articles. However, I am suggesting that you utilize websites that offer free web content in your particular niche. There are many free web content sites, or ‘article directories,’ that offer free articles for you to use on your blog or website. You are able to use these articles totally free without a problem. The only thing you are required is to give credit to the author who wrote the article. Fair enough?

Now you ask, “Why would I want to use someone else’s articles? Isn’t that just being lazy?!” It’s actually not lazy at all. Think about it. There are thousands of other people offering new, unique insight on exactly what you’re writing about. You’ll find that different people offer a different point of view or perspective on the same subject.

A different perspective or a new idea can be very refreshing for your blog. To even go further, find those articles that offer new thoughts and respond to the author’s thoughts.

Consider the benefits of using free content articles for your blog or website:

• When you post articles, you’re offering your visitor some useful content and encourage him to come back for more.
• Using free web content will allow you to keep your blog fresh and updated on a daily basis, which search engines love.
• Other people’s articles can inspire new thoughts and ideas for your blog.

How do you find quality free web content for your blog?

When you find an article that you would like to put on your website, jus sure you are permitted to actually use it. You can usually find that information right on the article page or in the website’s terms of service.

When you’re positive that you can use the article, read it over to make sure it’s applicable to your website. Run it through a spell check to make sure that a level of quality is portrayed in the article. If there are a bunch of errors, don’t change them because that might violate the terms for using the article. Instead, move on to the next article.

So, just do some searching. Find that interesting web content and post it for your readers! Delight your readers with something interesting and exciting!

When you open your morning newspaper you read stories from around the world that have been assembled by editors from different sources. Each paper prints the same news stories and you choose which stories and sections you wish to read.

Having RSS Feeds delivered to yourself is much like how you read the newspaper, only your favorite stories and sections are delivered to you online via a free “Blog Reader” or “News Aggregator.”  It’s as easy as creating a personal page in your web browser loaded with news, or “blog posts,” about the things you want to read about.

Setting up your “personal newspaper” involves a few steps and can seem a little tricky. But, if you follow my step-by-guide below, you’ll be reading blog posts from all over the web, on one web page, in no time.

Ready?

Since most bloggers don’t post on a regular schedule, you never know when your favorite blogs are being updated. That’s why you need a “blog reader,” technically known as an “RSS Reader”.

What is an RSS Reader?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Just like your morning paper relies on syndicated news from Assoc. Press or Reuters, your blog reader will rely on the fact that most blogs “syndicate” their news – they “feed” it straight into your RSS Reader.

A news reader or aggregator checks a list of feeds for you, on your behalf, and displays any updated articles that it finds. It is common to find web feeds on nearly all blogs as well as many websites such CNN.com. RSS programs are available for various operating systems.

How do I find an RSS Reader?

A few popular RSS Readers are Newsgator, Google Reader, Rocket, and Bloglines. I, myself, use Bloglines so the rest of this guide will be customized for that reader, but the same principals will work for all of them.

Step-by-step Guide:

[1] Open two browser tabs/windows.

[2] In the first browser tab, link to my blog at http://www.theblogmaker.com (or any other blog you’d like to follow).

[3] In the second browser window, go to http://www.bloglines.com and fill out the “Register” form. Don’t worry, it’s 100% free. Before you can continue with this guide, you’ll have to click on the link that Bloglines emails to you to confirm your account.

When you click on that link, you’ll be taken to a page that offers suggestions of blogs to subscribe to.

The next bit is tricky, but try to stay with me.

[4] Once you’ve chosen a few things to subscribe to, you’ll be taken to your main account page. On the left, under the “Feeds” tab, click on the ADD link. On the right, you’ll see a page with a text box to add the URL of the blog you want to subscribe to.

[5] Now, go back to my blog and at the top right-hand side of the page you’ll see my RSS Feed symbol.  Hold your mouse over that symbol, right click, and choose “Copy Link Location.” Either that or simply click on the link at copy the URL of the page that comes up, which will be http://www.theblogmaker.com/feed.

Then, go back to the Bloglines window and paste that URL into the text box.

[6] Hit “Subscribe.” Bloglines will search and find my blog feed. You’ll be taken to a page where you must click on the check box next to the name of my blog, set a few variables, and then hit “Subscribe” again at the bottom of the page.

[7] You have now subscribed to my blog “feed” and whenever I publish a new post, an update will show up on your Bloglines account.
[8] The last thing you need to do is bookmark your Bloglines account page. From now on, to check on your favorite blogs and to see if they’ve been updated, you just have to visit your Bloglines page. That’s it.

Now, every time you’re on a blog that you’d like to keep up with, you know how to subscribed to its “feed.”

A few ways to find some blogs that interest you:

[9] Start by searching Bloglines. Poke around in your account a little and you’ll quickly see how easy it is to navigate and search for info that interests you. You can even create folders in Bloglines for different topics, if you like.

[10] Other places to find blogs:

- Google -> More -> Blog Search
- http://www.technorati.com -> Search
- Search “blog directory” on Google. You’ll come up with lots of directories dedicated to listing blogs.
[11] Another good way to find quality blogs is to check out the “Blogroll” or list of links on your current favorite blogs. The author will sometimes list blogs that they recommend.
[12] Final tip. You can search Google News on your favorite topic. And, you can subscribe to this as a feed as well! Look to the right side and do the right-click thing where it says ‘RSS’ and add it as a feed to Bloglines.

So! Now you know exactly what your readers are doing when they click on the RSS Feed link on your blog.

We do build blogs and sell them on Flippa. Some of these blogs get offered to those on our mailing list, at a discount, before we list them on Flippa. Fill out the form to your right to join our list. And, we’ll give you two free downloads just for subscribing!

Blogs To Order

Have an idea for a great blog, but lack the skills or the time to build it? No problem!

The Blog Builder will build you a blog for any niche you choose.

You’ll get:

• A professionally designed blog on a Premium Word Press Theme ($59 value)
• An un-edited copy of that Premium Word Press Theme to use on other blogs ($59 value)
• 10 professionally written articles on your niche, keyword optimized ($280 value)
• Custom-built graphics
• Free submission of the blog to 30 social bookmarking sites ($10 value)
• 5 of the 10 articles re-written and submitted to EzineArticles.com ($50 value)
• 249 Ping servers, pre-loaded into your blog, that will automatically be notified whenever you post

This entire package is worth $458+ but you can get it right now for just $150.00!
Completion Time: ~5 Days

Read what a recent customer had to say:

“Kim Miller is profoundly creative and really knows her business! I am a complete newbie to building and maintaining a great blog. Kim has always been extremely patient with me and very helpful. I bought one of her blogs for sale on Flippa and she was more than generous with her time and in helping me understand how to make it my own. It was an easy decision to choose her for the next blog I wanted to create, and she helped me every step of the way. I feel lucky to have had the pleasure of working with her and will most definitely use her again! Keep her in mind when you are looking for services that she provides, it is so hard to find good people anymore! ” Dawn Forman, The Women’s Realm

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Acne Treatment Guide

The Baby Stuff Blog

The Anger Management Hub

Farmville Confidential

Fat Burning Furnace Truth

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Home Fitness Hub

Make Money Online Toolkit

Quit Smoking At Once

The Best Teeth Whiteners

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Ever since people recognized the power of SERPs (Search Engine Result Page), they realized the value of having quality back links. And instead of depending on someone else to embed a link, SEO gurus felt it would make more sense to host a site by themselves, and primarily the job was to ensure traffic flowing into the main site.

For instance, if there is a website dealing with high quality gadgets, along with the rest of the SEO promotional techniques, the owner chose to create a group of blogs or get someone in his team to do that. These blogs have good and interesting content – all related to the niche being promoted on the main website, and whenever a related keyword came by in the content, it linked back to the main website. These links are doubly valuable –

1. They drive traffic that is already interested in the genre
2. They add to the credibility of the main website as the link is considered to be on a third party site.

Enough of introductions, here is how you can build a blog farm with ease, and sustain the interest generated by it.

• Choose a quality blog provider, so your links will be valued higher. We recommend WordPress, but if you are more comfortable with Blogger, you can use that as well. Don’t go beyond them.
• If you are serious about building quality links, don’t use automatic content generators. Even if it is more difficult to find good content writers, find them, and get them to constantly create good content. Remember, a blog farm is not for the short term. The longer your blogs are maintained, the better rankings they get, and the better your purpose is served.
• Cross linking these blogs is of utmost importance, as it will increase the page ranks of these blogs. A link from a blog of a higher page rank is much more valuable than one of a fresh blog.
• Don’t just maintain a blog farm to boost your original site. Make them into authorities on the subject so reader interest is maintained. Don’t link only to your main site. Use reference sites like Wikipedia wisely and build up the blogs’ credibility. These will augment well in the long run.

The best part of blog farms is that they are quite economical to maintain. While most of the blogs can be hosted free, getting a domain name to be registered and hosted will cost you a small sum each year. But the traffic you get from these blogs is more than worth the investment. If you have an SEO consultant, ask him about the best way to optimize these blogs into your promotion strategy.

This article was originally posted at Metafever.com.

Traffic is a part of the formula that you must have for the success of any internet venture. Without people coming to your web site you will have no sales. Without sales, you have no income.

In this article we’ll discuss how to get links to your  WordPress blog. You see, just buying a new domain name and puttin a WordPress blog on that domain will not get you any traffic.

Unless you have lots of links pointing to your blog. Remember, “no links = no visitors”.  Let me say it another way; you have got to get links pointing to your site or you will not succeed!

These links should be high quality. If you get twenty five links from sites that are not authority sites, it won’t do you much good. It would be much wiser to get five links from web sites that have good page rank and are closely matched to the overall theme of your blog.

There are basically two ways to get these types of links. First, you can research the web and find high quality web sites that are theme related to your’s and email them asking for links to your site. However, most will say no. Why? Think about it; why would they want to link to your new site that’s a page rank zero?

One way to get better results is to build a “Blog Farm.”  A blog farm has one distinct advantage over asking for links from other blogs; it’s under your complete control. Instead of having to panhandle for links, you’ll have the ability to post a link from your blog farm to your new WordPress blog yourself. You will have the power to add a link to any new blog that you build in the future.

Tomorrow I’ll go over exactly what a blog farm is and how to build one.

But what is a blog without traffic? Exactly. Here are five quick ways to boost traffic to your blog and start seeing those big sales.

1. Build a list of blog services to ping

There are a lot of blog services you can ping. This means that you notify this “RSS” service that you’ve updated your blog. These services then list your new posts and you get the traffic from them. One good free ping service to get you started is pingoat.com.

2. Add buttons to popular news readers

What does this mean? Well there are sites like Yahoo or Google or Bloglines etc, which have a members area where you can select sites with RSS feeds to fetch the latest updates from different blogs. That way you can have the latest updates from let’s say 50 blogs listed on one page. I have a list of these popular pages on my website plus the buttons which link to them. Users can then easily add my blog to their news reader members area.

3. Update your content regularly

Search engines and blog services love regular updates. It’s very likely that you will get targeted traffic from search engines if you post regularly. That means you should make a new post to your blog at least once per day. But be careful. Too many updates per day can harm your search engines position and hits. What’s too many? 10 or more.

4. Post in forums

Post in forums, but don’t spam them. Post something fresh and interesting and put a link to your blog in your signature. Don’t just post in any forum. For example if you’re selling cd’s, post in forums that are about music and cd’s. Don’t post in car forums if you’re selling furniture. By posting in forums you will get one-way links which are good for search engine position in search engines like Google or MSN or Yahoo.

5. Submit to blog search engines

There are masses of search engines available that list only blogs. Just searcg Google for “blog search engines” or “blog directories” and you should find at least 20 of them. These blog search engines will help you with targeted traffic. Be sure to write a good title and a good description to your blog, so that people will easily find it and click on your link.

Follow these 5 steps and you will start seeing lots of traffic to your blog. And the so long awaited sales will start coming in. And don’t forget to update your blog with fresh unused content that you write yourself.