Well it was a great week … After almost 2 years of development we just released a new WordPress Membership Plugin called MemberPress.

MemberPress is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily accept payments for access to your content. So if you’re in the content business (wether it be serial / blog-style content, e-books, software, design files, tutorials, etc) then I think you’re gonna dig this thing.

What makes MemberPress different you ask? Well, it offers a simple & intuitive setup (and user interface for that matter), easy to create (and understand) access rules for controlling access to your content, and an easy to configure, seamless interface with payment gateways. Our customers have been reporting that with MemberPress they are actually able to start charging their customers within minutes of installing … and that it’s super solid.

You should go checkout MemberPress—we think it’s a great WordPress Membership Plugin.

We’ve already had a huge response to this plugin … I mean I’ve never had a launch like this in the past where people are literally trying (and failing) to purchase even before the payment gateway is live or have had so many people blogging and talking about the product within hours of launch, literally. Here are a couple examples of these awesome posts:

Executive Order Go Checkout MemberPress

MemberPress: Just Another Membership Plugin?

So, if you aren’t convinced by now, you should go try it out for yourself (we have a 30 day money back guarantee) — let me know if it doesn’t work for you and we’ll hook you up with a refund … but I’m sure you’re gonna love it!

Br’er Fox sets a trap for Br’er Rabbit and captures him. Br’er Fox wonders, out loud what he should do with Br’er Rabbit.

Br’er Rabbit says to his captor that he can do anything he wants to him if he promises not to throw him in the Briar Patch.

“Drown me! Roast me! Hang me! Do whatever you please,” said Br’er Rabbit. “Only please, Br’er Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.”

Of course, Br’er Fox looks at the Briar Patch as an inhospitable place where Br’er Rabbit would instantly die.

“The briar patch, eh?” said Br’er Fox. “What a wonderful idea! You’ll be torn into little pieces!”

So, of course, Br’er Fox throws Br’er Rabbit into the Briar Patch. But instead of hearing the agonizing screams of death, Br’er Fox only hears silence. Then a moment later he sees Br’er Rabbit behind him:

“I was bred and born in the briar patch, Br’er Fox,” he called. “Born and bred in the briar patch.”

Of course, Br’er Fox then leaves for his home … unwilling to go into the Briar Patch to re-capture Br’er Rabbit.

The Best Niches are Briar Patches

In this story, Br’er Rabbit was an expert at surviving in the Briar Patch … he was happy in a place that most other animals were either afraid or unwilling to enter. He must have known how to avoid being hurt by the sharp briars, to find food, water & shelter — and thrive.

To be highly successful, you need your own Briar Patch … a skill or niche that most others instantly dismiss as “too mundane,” “too technical” (I hear this one a lot) or just plain “too hard.”

Briar Patch niches usually pay more money and have less competition because others either dismiss them or have no desire to enter them themselves.

So, the next time you need to decide on a new niche to enter or skill to learn, remember Br’er Rabbit and don’t be afraid of becoming happy in your own Briar Patch.

I’ve always been somewhat disappointed with the available options for running WordPress locally. There are pros and cons to each method (MAMP, WAMP, XAMPP, native, self-compiled, Fink, Homebrew, etc) … but they’ve taken too long to setup, don’t allow for enough configuration options (or in most cases allow me to run multiple WordPress websites at the same time) and leave unused config files and data deep inside my computer when I decide to uninstall. Vagrant is a new way of approaching this setup and seems to solve all of the issues I’ve had in the past when trying to get a local environment up for WordPress.

Vagrant makes it easy to run a full virtual linux (or Unix) server on your local machine … kind of like you’d run windows on a mac using VMWare (only with much less RAM & CPU being drained on your local machine).

Vagrant isn’t always used to run WordPress locally (obviously, it has many…many other uses) but I’ve found that one of the main ways I use Vagrant now is for running a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) server locally … which I then run WordPress on.

Why Vagrant?

There are several reasons why I think Vagrant is a great solution for running WordPress locally. Here are a few:

1. Its relatively easy to get working
2. You can create a LAMP server that will run the same whether its on Mac or Windows
3. If you work in a team then you can make changes to your LAMP server specific to your team and each member can have identical local environments
4. You’ll be running your site with Linux locally (most webhosts run on Linux) … so your local environment will be as close as to your production environment as possible
5. Your website files will be located locally (for development / design purposes) and can be edited with your favorite editing software (TextMate, Notepad++, Sublime, Photoshop, Espresso, vi, emacs, etc) … when you’re done editing, and things look good locally you can ftp the files up to your web host.
6. You can run several (possibly conflicting) environments side by side in different vagrant boxes on your local computer. I have a lamp box and a ruby box now … But I could configure boxes to run Java, ffmpeg or any other number of different environments that would be difficult to setup together in a clean way natively.
7. Advanced users can ssh into these virtual machines, add new virtual hosts, install new software (via apt-get, yum, etc), run nginx instead of apache or pretty much anything else you want to do  … you can even create your own network of vagrant servers if you want
8. Vagrant boxes are easy to remove from your computer without leaving unused files cluttering your system

Setting Up Vagrant

Here’s how you can set up Vagrant on Mac (the Windows setup should be almost identical) for running WordPress locally. The box that Vagrant maintains (http://files.vagrantup.com/lucid32.box) is a basic Ubuntu Linux virtual machine … so, I took that box, added the LAMP stack on top of it and have made it available for you to easily get this working on your computer:

1. Download & Install Oracle’s VirtualBox application from VirtualBox.org
2. Download & Install Vagrant from VagrantUp.com
3. Download WordPress from WordPress.org
4. Unzip wordpress anywhere on your local machine (double click the latest.zip file you just downloaded)
5. Open Terminal (its in Applications -> Utilities)
6. Drag the wordpress folder you just unzipped from Finder into the Terminal icon in your dock (or just “cd” into your this directory if you’re comfortable with the command line)
7. Now issue these three commands (don’t be alarmed if the first command takes a while — Vagrant is downloading a full virtual machine) …
8. Go to http://localhost:8080 in your browser, you’ll magically see the setup for wordpress (if all went well). When setting up you can use the following database credentials:Database Name: vagrant
   Database Host: localhost
   Database User: root
   Database Password:vagrant

   I’ve also installed PhpMyAdmin with this box so if you need database access you can just go to http://localhost:8080/phpmyadmin and use the database username / password from above.

Getting to Know Vagrant

Here are some other useful commands that you can run in the terminal to interact with vagrant now that its installed:

To power up your vagrant box:
vagrant up

To access your box via ssh:
vagrant ssh

To suspend your vagrant box:
vagrant suspend

To shut down your vagrant box:
vagrant halt

To destroy your vagrant box (this will remove it from your wordpress directory):
vagrant destroy

To remove the vagrant box from vagrant itself:
vagrant box remove caseproof-lamp

The Vagrantfile

You may have noticed that when you ran vagrant init ... that it created a file in your wordpress folder named ‘Vagrantfile’ … this is the vagrant config file for your current vm. It has all kinds of useful options … but perhaps the most useful one is for forwarding ports which you can use to change the port your local website will be available on (so instead of http://localhost:8080 you could access it on http://localhost:4567) which is going to be necessary if you use this same box for multiple different websites on your local machine.

Vagrant everywhere

Now, of course, this vagrant box is a full LAMP server so now if you wanted to run Drupal, Joomla, or CakePHP you could easily download into another directory and since you don’t need to add the caseproof-lamp box twice — just issue vagrant init caseproof-lamp, edit your Vagrantfile to forward to a different port (remove the # before the forward port line and replace 8080 with whatever port you want), issue vagrant up and you’re done.

One thing to note is that if you need to do some more advanced things with your Apache or PHP configuration … you’ll have to ssh into your box and configure it just like you would a Linux server. So, if you have this requirement and you’re uncomfortable with editing files on your vagrant box then it may be best to go with MAMP PRO or something that will provide a GUI for this. However, if all you want is to get a standard WordPress site up locally then this box should work well for you.

I’ve also got a ruby box that is configured with Ruby, Rubygems, Apache, Passenger, Git & MySQL (yeah, you can install Postgresql or Mongodb if you need to). I find that with ruby I still like to ssh into vagrant (mainly because of all the commands you have to run within the ruby environment) … the shared folder with your vm is located in /vagrant/ once you’ve ssh’d in. I’ve also set this box to run on port 3000 rather than 8080.

If you want to do some more advanced stuff or need more detail than I’ve offered here, there’s quite a bit of documentation over on the Vagrant Website.

I’m still playing around with Vagrant though. If you’re doing something cool with Vagrant I’d love to hear about it here.

Who do you know that is writing a blog for their business and doesn’t want to make money? Stupid question huh?

We all know the best fix for this — get some ads up on your site, right? Have you tried doing that? There’s all kinds of HTML to copy & paste, then you have to figure out how to put the ads on the sidebar of your site (or other places) and then figure out how to rotate ads — trying to manage ads manually can be an absolute nightmare — gah.

Well, my good friends, Brandon & Jeff over at PixelJar have now created a plugin that is in my opinion the perfect addition to WordPress for displaying, rotating and tracking ads on your website — its called AdSanity.

Brandon and Jeff are masters at user interface design and haven’t bloated this ad management plugin with unnecessary features (although I have a feeling they’ll be launching add-ons for this in the future — including maybe one for integration with Affiliate Royale ) but have made the simplest, cleanest plugin for ad management you’ve ever seen with everything you need to start running ads and making money on your blog today.

AdSanity makes it easy to get ads displaying on the sidebar of your WordPress website, it automatically tracks how your ads and will report to you all the information you’ll need to see how your ads are performing.

Check out how easy it will be to start running ads on your site today:

Even better, AdSantity just launched today so there’s a 25% discount that you can take advantage of if you get on top of this fast. Just go to the AdSanity website and just enter the coupon code t25launch and you’ll get the 25% discount at checkout.

Congratulations to Brandon and Jeff on their big launch! WordPress websites have needed this plugin for a long time so I’m glad that its finally here!

In a nutshell, Affiliate Royale is a full Affiliate Program for your products that runs on your WordPress website — it just installs like any other WordPress plugin and is easy to get working with your shopping cart.

Anyway, go check out this awesome, new WordPress plugin over at http://affiliateroyale.com

Oh yeah, as promised we’re offering a special deal on it for the launch, but you know that won’t last long … so don’t wait, get over there asap.

1. Pretty Link (Lite and Pro) is now 100% compatible with WordPress 3.1 and Multi-Site. Pretty Link has been running well with WordPress 3.1 but these Pretty Link fixes have been put in place so that future updates will work properly (especially when a Pretty Link release updates the database).
2. Link slug availability routines have been shored up to allow pretty links from being able to utilize all slugs that truly don’t conflict with page, post, category and tag slugs.
3. Fixed link rotation form in Pretty Link Pro so that the link weights won’t reset when the page is reloaded.
4. Fixed a minor auto link creation issue that affected posts when the Default Group was set to “None” in Pretty Link Pro.
5. Made several modifications to the hit resetting routines especially when Simple Click Tracking is enabled.
6. Made several enhancements to the Keyword Replacement Routines in Pretty Link Pro.

We recommend that all Pretty Link Lite & Pro users upgrade to 1.4.56.

Reports about this release that have been coming in from users this morning have been very positive … so you have no excuse but to upgrade …

I’ve been working with the guys at wordpress.org this morning to get Pretty Link back on the repository. The only way to do this was to remove link cloaking, pretty bar and pixel tracking from the Pretty Link Lite versions 1.4.51 and beyond.

How will this change affect me?

Here are the facts you need to know about this significant change:

1. Pretty Link Pro users will NOT be affected by this change. If you’re a pro user your cloaked, prettybar, and pixel links will continue to function as they have in the past. Since Pretty Link Pro is actually a separate plugin not hosted on the wordpress.org plugin repository it is immune from this policy change.
2. What good is the lite version of Pretty Link without cloaking? The lite version of Pretty Link that’s on the wordpress repository will still be able to do temporary (307) and permanent (301) redirects … so if you don’t use cloaking, the prettybar or pixel redirects then you won’t be impacted by this change at all. All of the other Pretty Link features such as tracking, parameter forwarding, groups, nofollow/noindex, etc are all still there and still work great.
3. What will happen to prettybar, cloaked and pixel links? If you are a Pretty Link Pro user or upgrade to Pretty Link Pro then your prettybar, cloaked and pixel links will continue to function normally. Otherwise, these links will start using Temporary Redirects … your links will still work but won’t be cloaked.
4. Help Me! I just upgraded to Pretty Link 1.4.51 and now none of my links are cloaked anymore! Good news, if you upgrade to Pretty Link Pro today then these links will continue working as they always have. Its a pretty simple process to purchase and install Pretty Link Pro — so you’ll be back in business fast.

I’m really sorry about this change — I always hate removing features like this … but in this case it was necessary to keep Pretty Link on the WordPress.org repository. If you have any issues upgrading or questions feel free to drop a note on my Contact page.

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.

1. Advertise as an Affiliate

   Many products out there offer some kind of affiliate program — the idea behind becoming an affiliate is that you promote other people’s products and get commission payments for each sale. The thing that’s great about becoming an affiliate is that you can promote products that you actually believe in and use.

   The downside to becoming an Affiliate advertiser is that sometimes these products don’t convert all that well for your audience … Since you don’t get paid unless a sale is made, it can be a bit more risky. However, in my experience, if you promote quality products that your audience is actually interested in, you’ll see decent conversions.

   Signing up for Affiliate Programs is typically pretty easy — you’ll usually find the link to a product’s affiliate program on the footer of its landing page (although that can obviously vary). When I started adding more affiliate links to my site, I found it fairly difficult to manage all of them so I wrote a WordPress plugin called Pretty Link Pro. Many of the top affiliates out there are now using Pretty Link Pro to manage and track the usage of their affiliate links — it simplifies things by allowing you to choose how your affiliate links appear (cloaking) and have some unbiased and centralized tracking.

2. Sell Ad Space on your Site

   If you have enough traffic coming to your site you can actually sell ad space on your blog. There’s a really good plugin for WordPress called OIO Publisher that will give you the tools you need to get this going today. This approach is great because once you sell advertisers on putting their ads on your site, you’re guaranteed revenue (as opposed to Affiliate ads which can be hit and miss).

   Sometimes though, this strategy can be tricky because you don’t necessarily end up promoting products you know & love — remember, what you promote is kind of an extension to your personal brand. So if you go for this approach, I highly recommend that you use OIO Publisher to screen ads & products before allowing them to show up on your site.

3. Sell Your Own Products

   You can typically make more money selling your own products than you can through any type of advertising on your site. The drawback to this approach is that you need to research and figure out a good product idea and then you have to actually execute to create a great product. This is actually a massive barrier to entry (which is probably why product creation can be more lucrative) because creating a product and support around that product can really take some planning and long hours to get ready for launch.

   Technically speaking though, its never been easier to actually get a system in place to sell your wares than it is today. I recommend keeping it simple and using something like PayPal + the Shopp Plugin for WordPress or just using Authorize.NET with 1Shoppingcart.

4. Create and Manage a Membership Site

   I think this is possibly the best way to make money online. As with selling your own product, coming up with an offering for a membership site can be daunting though. You also have to put a system in place to keep people interested and engaged once they’re a member of your site. But once you have a valuable offering that works for your audience, you can start collecting recurring income from these types of sites.

   A great example of a membership site out there that has been at it for a while and is quite successful is the Internet Business Mastery Academy (the first membership I joined). IBMA has all kinds of resources on Internet Marketing and a pretty extensive forum for some really good networking. I think whatever membership site idea you have — you should at least see what these guys have done and try to model your approach after them.

   WordPress is the ultimate platform for membership sites because of all the features you can make available and it makes it so easy to deliver content to your audience. Here are some awesome elements that you can get setup in WordPress with ease:

   • Premium audio and video content can be delivered with the help of the Flash Video Plugin
   • Thow a social network on your site (complete with friend requests, activity feeds and profiles) with the Mingle Plugin for WordPress (here’s the Mingle Community site — you should really go check it out)
   • Add an awesome, simple forum to your site with the Mingle Forum plugin (by cartpauj)
   • These are just a few examples of ways you can provide value to your users but there are literally thousands of additional features you can easily offer to your users with WordPress.

   Once you get your WordPress site setup with the features you want to offer — all you need is a way to protect your premium content and features behind a “Pay Wall.” There are actually 2 good solutions for this, the first (and easiest to setup) is Wishlist Member and the other (which takes a bit more technical moxie to setup) is aMember. Again — with the payment processing, I recommend keeping it simple and just using PayPal or 1shoppingcart with Authorize.Net (these solutions will integrate with either Wishlist or aMember).

Usually, you don’t have to pick just one of these strategies — why not try a few of them? Every audience is different and so one or more of these solutions will work for each one. But whatever strategies you decide on, you can rest assured that any of these here will bring you more money than Google Ads on your site.

Here are the slides for this presentation: How to Create a Premium WordPress Plugin

Here are the slides for this presentation: Pimp Your WordPress Plugin

Okay, I’ll admit, hooks are only available in the code — but I believe they’re simple enough to be used by anyone technical enough to use a text editor and FTP.

WordPress has a really good Intro to Hooks and there are a couple of WordPress Hook databases out on the web too … but these might be a bit technical and overwhelming for many users wanting to customize their blogs.

This is my basic overview of what hooks are for and how they can make your life easier as a WordPress user.

What are Hooks?

Let’s say you are using the Thesis theme for WordPress and you want to add something above my blog’s title. The most obvious option would be to go to the Theme files and modify them directly.

Easy enough huh?

Well, lets think about that cowboy — editing your themes, plugins or WordPress directly will work well … but what happens when a new version of your customized theme, plugin or wordpress comes out and you upgrade?

Yeah … that’s right, you’ll have to either overwrite all of your customizations or remember to re-write all of your customizations every time you upgrade.

Luckily WordPress has provided us with a way of modifying code, HTML and styling in WordPress, WordPress Plugins and WordPress Themes without modifying the actual source. This means that your customizations will be located somewhere else and will be present even if you upgrade.

Many WordPress Themes & Plugins and WordPress itself provide hooks for doing all kinds of things. A good example of this is the Thesis theme for WordPress — Thesis provides great documentation on its wide array of hooks that enable you to do everything from adding text above your title to altering your sidebars.

How Do I Use Hooks?

Now back to my Thesis example — instead of looking through it’s source code, I can just use it’s ‘thesis_hook_before_title’ hook.

Here’s how my code would look to accomplish this:

add_action('thesis_hook_before_title','my_cool_before_title_html');

function my_cool_before_title_html()
{
  ?>
  <p>I really like cheese -- a lot.</p>
  <?php
}

After putting this code in place, my blog’s title that used to look like this:

Now looks like this:

Breaking It Down

Now that you’ve seen some of the possibilities of hooks, let’s look at what I just did in the example above:

add_action( 'thesis_hook_before_title', 'my_cool_before_title_html' );

Okay, this line tells WordPress that we’re going to add an action hook (there are actually 2 types of hooks — actions and filters but for this example we’re only going to worry about actions). The first parameter (‘thesis_hook_before_title’) tells WordPress which hook we want to use and the second parameter (‘my_cool_before_title_html’) tells WordPress which function (a function is just a named block of code) will be used when the hook is executed.

The hook name is defined by wordpress, your theme or a plugin but the function name is defined by you. You want to make sure your function name is absolutely unique so that it doesn’t conflict with any other function names (for instance, you wouldn’t want to name your function “title” — you’d name it something like “blair_title” or something like that).

Now let’s look at the handler function:

function my_cool_before_title_html()
{
  ?>
  <p>I really like cheese -- a lot.</p>
  <?php
}

This is a simple PHP function that just returns HTML code. You could put any HTML code you want between the ?> and <?php tags in this scenario. Just be careful, not all hooks expect HTML — so your PHP function may need to do a bit more than just writing HTML — to be sure consult the hook’s documentation.

Where Do I Put My Custom Code?

This is a question I hear all the time. Really, you can place your customizations any place that code gets executed in WordPress.

Quality themes and theme frameworks like Thesis, Hybrid and Thematic have a specific place to add these customizations. For instance, in Thesis you can rename the “custom-sample” folder to “custom” and then add your code to the “custom_functions.php” file.

However, I recommend creating your own plugin. Yeah, I know this may sound scary but it’s really not too bad.

All you have to do to turn this code into a simple plugin is:

1. Create a new php file named ‘blairs_thesis_customizations.php’ or whatever you want your plugin to be named
2. Add a plugin header to the top of the php file. This is a pre-defined set of code that tells wordpress the name of the plugin, etc. You’ll see it in the example below.
3. Add your custom code to the php file.
4. Upload your plugin to your blog.
5. Activate your plugin like you would any other plugin.

… And here’s a complete example. You can actually use this as a template to create your own plugin:

<?php
/*
   Plugin Name: Thesis Customizations
   Plugin URI: http://blairwilliams.com
   Description: My Own Thesis Customizations
   Version: 0.0.01
   Author: Blair Williams
   Author URI: http://blairwilliams.com
   Copyright: 2010, Blair Williams
*/

add_action('thesis_hook_before_title','mythesiscust_before_title_html');

function mythesiscust_before_title_html()
{
  ?>
  <p>I really like cheese -- a lot.</p>
  <?php
}
?>

You can, of course, add more add_action statements and functions to do all kinds of customizations within this file.

The beauty of this approach is that your code will always be 100% separate from your theme or other plugin — which will make upgrades with your consistent customizations a snap!

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!

Here’s how easy it is to get Pretty Link Pro’s auto tweet feature set up:

If you didn’t quite catch it from the video — here are the steps you need to go through to get auto tweeting to work for you.

1. Go to “Pretty Link” -> “Pro Options”
2. Click the link titled “Automatic Pretty Link Creation and Posting Options” to expand these options.
3. Enter your Twitter Username & Password and hit the “Save” button (must be your valid Twitter credentials — don’t worry, your credentials are stored on your own Database — nowhere else! ). You can add as many twitter credentials here as you want.
4. Check the box under “Create Pretty Links for Posts” or  “Create Pretty Links for Pages” (one of these must be checked or the auto tweet option won’t be visible) that is labeled “Automatically post to Twitter when a Post/Page is published.”
5. Hit the “Save” Button again

That’s it!

Pretty Link Pro also provide ways to throttle the number of keywords replaced per post, number of replacements per keyword per post, and specify link attributes like styling and nofollows. These options will allow your posts to not get too “spammy” — which can be very bad for affiliate link campaigns in particular.

Setting up Pretty Link Pro to replace keywords is a cinch. Here are the steps I covered in the video so you can follow along at home:

1. Go to “Pretty Link” -> “Pro Options”
2. Click the link titled “Keyword & URL Replacement Options” to expand these options. Here’s a break down of the options in this section so that you can configure it for your needs:
   1. Enable Keywords and URL Pretty Link Automatic Replacement: This option enables keyword replacement on your site. It needs to be checked before you can do anything with Keyword Replacement … so check it …
   2. Enable Content Replacements Caching: Yeah, so as it turns out, if you’re replacing a lot of keywords then it can really degrade the performance of your blog — that’s why I cache your replacements so Pretty Link Pro. If you’re already using wp-super-cache then you don’t absolutely need this turned on (although it won’t hurt anything) — if you aren’t using it then you should really turn this option on. Don’t worry, Delete Content Cache just deletes the cache records in the database — you won’t lose anything permanently by clicking this link … its there in case you run into some issues with old content, keyword replacements or url replacements showing up on your site.
   3. Set Keyword Replacement Thresholds: If you leave this unchecked then Pretty Link Pro will just replace every instance of a keyword with a URL in all your posts and pages. If you want to throttle that down a bit then you can use these to control the number of keywords you’ll allow to be replaced per page and how many times each of these keywords can be replaced. This option & accompanying text fields are there to help your site so that it doesn’t look like a spam blog.
   4. Open Pretty Links in a new Window: When a keyword is replaced with a link with this option turned on then the link will open up a new window (it basically adds the <code>target=”_blank”</code> attribute to the link).
   5. Add the html nofollow attribute to all Keyword Pretty Links: When a keyword is replaced with a link with this option turned on then the link will send a nofollow (it basically adds the <code>rel=”nofollow”</code> attribute to the link).
   6. Custom CSS Styling for your Keyword Replacements & Custom Hover CSS Styling for your Keyword Replacements: You can actually make your keyword replacements stand out from other links on your site by using these custom styling fields. For instance if you wanted your link to be red but then turn white with a red background when the user hovers over the link then you’d add <code>color: red;</code> to the Custom CSS Styling for your Keyword Replacements text field and <code>background-color: red; color: white;</code> to the Custom Hover CSS Styling for your Keyword Replacements text field.
3. Go to back to “Pretty Link” -> “Pretty Link” and click “Edit” under the link you want to replace keywords on your blog with.
4. On the Edit page you’ll want to click “Pro Link Options” and then enter a comma separated list of keywords or key phrases for this link into the keywords field.
5. Click “Update”

I hope this video showed you how easy it is to blanket your site with affiliate links and links for SEO with Pretty Link Pro. I’ve seen huge impacts in my own affiliate link campaigns and SEO since I started using this on my own site and I know it will do the same for you.

SEO = Witchcraft?

Google has always been tight lipped about how to influence rankings because they want the best content to appear in their results — not sites gaming their algorithms … But this leaves SEO as a pretty deep mystery for most of us and to spend months working on a blog without any real traction in Google could be the cause of some serious angst for any blogger.

To make matters worse, self-proclaimed experts in search have spread so many bizarre techniques to get rankings throughout the web that it has begun to look more like witchcraft than a logical set of rules.

The New Science of SEO

Luckily, there have actually been some credible SEO experts who have applied both what Google has revealed to us about getting rankings with some good old fashioned experimentation to come up with a relatively decent set of to-dos for any website. And yet, even this is troubled because going through this to-do list for every piece of content you post can be extremely time consuming and difficult to check.

Among these SEO to-dos are technical and content based tweaks you should make on your site. Now if you use WordPress with a decent theme (like Thesis), the first part of the equation (the technical tasks) are, for the most part, already done for you. But the second part of this, the content has been difficult if not impossible to get right … until now.

SEO Scribe

Recently an amazing WordPress SEO tool was released called Scribe.

Scribe is a tool that analyzes blog posts and pages on your site to help you with SEO. What makes it different than Thesis for WordPress SEO is that it has the ability to look at and score your content on how search friendly it is.

Scribe works with Thesis (or the All-In-One SEO plugin) to make sure your title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, link densities and keyword densities are adequate. It will pull the keywords out of your post that Google would see and shows you a detailed analysis of what you need to do to get rankings on the keywords you’re interested in. Scribe will even grade your post on the Flesch Reading Ease Score to make sure it’s accessible to a large audience.

In short, Scribe is like having a credible, SEO expert analyzing each piece of content before it goes out to the world! It rocks.

Scribe was created by a team organized by Brian Clark — the Copyblogger — who was also behind the awesome Thesis WordPress theme.

Any Serious Blogger, Affiliate Marketer or Online Entrepreneur should use Scribe

I signed up for scribe right after it came out and since that time I’ve been using it on new posts and on older posts (yeah — it does help to go back and update your old posts to optimize them) and I can honestly tell you that it is the best SEO tool to hit wordpress in a long time.

If I were you, I’d pop over to the scribe website to learn more — you’ll be glad you did.

So, granted, there are some small hurdles to get through initially but you’ll find that it’s quite easy to put your short links on another domain name and continue to manage them from your wordpress admin — even if your wordpress blog is in a subdirectory of your website.

Here’s what you’ll need to do to get a custom short link working:

1. Register or select a short domain name — for example if my blog’s domain name was example.com then you might try to register ex.com or something. If you’re just trying to get your short links to be created from your top level domain or want to eliminate the “www” in your short links then you could just use http://example.com as your short domain instead of your blog’s http://www.example.com/ or http://example.com/mycoolblog/ url.
2. Set your short domain name to point at the top level of your website — Of course, if all you’re trying to do is get the wordpress path removed from your domain name you can skip this step (sub directory installs) because your short domain is just your top-level website’s domain name. But this is probably the trickiest part for most people … because they think they can just setup a domain name forward through their domain name service and it will work. Forwarding will not work — you have to set the nameservers & DNS of your short domain so that its settings are identical to those of your website’s main URL. Sometimes this will also entail configuring your webserver (for instance if you’re using apache, you’d add ex.com as a domain name alias) to accept the new domain name. You’ll know you’ve got this set up correctly when you can type http://ex.com and it will go to your website at http://example.com but your address bar still reads “http://ex.com” …
3. Forward Short Link Requests – you only need to go through this step if your WordPress is installed in a sub-directory. Also — I’m quite sure this step won’t work on anything but an apache web server environment (if you don’t know what you’re running — it’s probably apache).
   1. Create a file with Notepad (on Windows) or TextMate (on Mac)
   2. Paste the following code into the file (this is just the standard rewrite stuff found in WordPress’ .htaccess file):

      <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
      RewriteEngine On
      RewriteBase /
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
      RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
      RewriteRule . /mycoolsubdir/index.php [L]
      </IfModule>

   3. Replace the word “mycoolsubdir” (above) with the actual path to your wordpress installation — for instance if my wordpress install was at http://example.com/myblog/ then you’d change that line above to read RewriteRule . /myblog/index.php [L] instead.
   4. Save this file as htaccess.txt
   5. Upload htaccess.txt to the top – level directory (Document Root) of your website via FTP.
   6. Re-name htaccess.txt to .htaccess
4. Add your short domain to Pretty Link Pro — This one’s quite easy:
   1. Log into your WordPress admin (http://example.com/wp-admin)
   2. Go to “Pretty Link” -> “Pro Options” -> “Global Options”
   3. Check “Use an alternate Base Url for your Pretty Links”
   4. Add your short domain name in the “Pretty Link Base URL” text field
   5. Hit Save

That’s it! Okay — so that may seem a bit intimidating to some but it’s really not that bad and certainly easier than any alternative. And the best part is that once you get it setup you don’t have to mess with it again …

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.

When running WordPress, you can pretty much bet that the core code will be optimized and won’t drag the performance down — but your plugins and themes (which are written by 3rd party developers like me) can sometimes run afoul.

Over the last couple of months I’ve really been optimizing my own plugins (Pretty Link & Mingle) as to not contribute to the poor performance of blogs but many plugin & theme developers just haven’t gone through the extra effort to keep up with the ongoing effort of optimizing their plugins. And up until about a month ago, I was even flying blind when it came to all 3 of these factors on my own blog.

Luckily, as I’ve been optimizing my plugins and blog I’ve found 4 awesome tools that have been helping me to ramp up the performance of my blog (I’m still in the midst of optimizing my site) — and I thought I’d share:

1. WPDB Profiler — This plugin analyzes all of the database queries your blog is making, times each of them for you and tells you where they are occurring in the code. It is better than other page speed plugins because it breaks the queries down individually so you can see what plugins (or theme) are your biggest offenders. It is a bit unnerving to see all of this diagnostic data which appears after the footer of every page on your blog — but just know that non-admin users on your site never see it (I’m using it on this site — right now and you don’t see it do you?). If you see a large number of the same queries from a plugin or some really slow queries from a plugin then you may want to either disable it or notify the plugin / theme author to fix their code.
2. TCP! Memory Usage — This plugin absolutely rocks — it will show you first of all how much memory your page loads are consuming on your web host. For those on shared hosting this is a valuable tool as well because it will show you more about your php configuration and make recommendations based on it. It will show you settings that should be changed in order to maximize the performance and security of your blog.
3. Google Page Speed — This isn’t a WordPress plugin but is a FireFox Addon. This tool is awesome because it analyzes how long each element of your page takes to load. This will take into account for script execution time and general load time. It will make recommendations based on the bottlenecks it sees.
4. Google Chrome — Okay, so this isn’t a WordPress plugin either — its a full on browser. Chrome has a lot of performance, page speed and Firebug features built into it. These are called “Developer Tools” and can be found in “View” -> “Developer” -> “Developer Tools” … When this option is selected, Chrome will pop open a new window with an entire suite of tools. It will show you how long each page on your site takes to load — and which components in your page load are the slowest and which files on your load are the largest. Chrome will allow you to edit HTML/CSS and enter custom javascript commands into a console — this is particularly helpful when tracking down performance bottlenecks. I’m using this more and more in conjunction with the technique of disabling / enabling plugins to see where performance bottlenecks are creeping in … it gives me a visual picture of how performance is affected by each plugin.

I of course realize that I have omitted the very popular wp-super-cache and wp-cache plugins from this list — which are also really great plugins for boosting your blog’s performance. I have them disabled on my site just because of many different compatibility issues between them and certain things I want to do — but they can bypass all 3 of the issues from above by just loading cached, static html instead of generating it every time a page is loaded…

Anyway, I really hope these tools are a huge benefit to you as you go about speeding up your site … I know I use them every day.

I guess calling this plugin a simple “form builder” is a bit of an understatement — people with no knowledge of HTML, CSS or programming can create extremely complex forms with ease. In fact, you can script and build all kinds of user interactions on your site with Formidable Pro. Check out some of these features:

• Fully AJAXified Form Builder – This makes it dead simple to build any kind of form you want within seconds. With pure, drag & drop controls and in-place editing you don’t need to know the first thing about HTML or CSS to be extremely effective immediately.
• A Huge Array of Field Types – Build your form from these field types (with pre-defined input styles and validation): Text Input, Paragraph Input, Multiple Selection (check boxes), Select One (radio buttons), Drop Downs,Section Dividers, Phone, Email, Date (with a Javascript date selector), Hidden Field, Hidden User ID, Website/URL, Image URL, Scale (1 to 10 input), Dynamic Fields (dependent on other data in the field) and even File Uploads!
• Fully AJAXified Form Styler — You *have* to see this one to believe it — I’m not kidding, you have 100% control over what your forms look like. Not only can they be easily embedded in your site but you can use this graphical form styler to add whatever polish you want.
• Ability to Embed or Link Directly to Forms – Quickly send out a survey to your email list or post a poll on your website, no matter how you want to deliver it, again, Formidable makes it easy.
• Form Templates — These are pre-configured forms that you can choose from. Formidable Pro ships with 4 preset form types — a contact, real estate listing, bug/defect report and an address collection form — all of which are common types of forms. But you can create your own templates and use them to create forms instantly. Steph has plans to continue adding preset template types as updates come out.
• Statistical Reports – Once you’ve sent your forms out to your audience you can see exactly how many responded and the breakdowns for each of the fields in your form. This feature is especially effective when surveying your audience.
• Data Analysis and Export — You can view all the entries from your form and export them to csv.
• Setup Custom Displays to Showcase your Data Externally — Do you want to show the results of a survey or a poll? Quickly setup a custom display and you can show the results of your survey or form on your external website.

I just can’t wait to start sending out surveys now that I’m in possession of this killer plugin!

Really, the only downside I can see to this plugin is that it’s brand new — so I suppose there could be problems with it here and there (all though in my usage of it this week, I’ve seen no signs of any instability — it feels exceptionally solid). But I’ve known Steph for years and she’s literally obsessed over this plugin so I know that if there are any problems — even small ones they will be fixed lightning fast.

The other thing that’s really impressive about this plugin is that it is so inexpensive. The single website version is only $35 and for that amount you still get lifetime support and updates. I actually think Steph isn’t charging enough for this plugin — I’ve seen other form building plugins out there going for upwards of $200. And in addition to this, she’s got a 30 day money back guarantee.

Overall, this plugin is well thought out, feels extremely solid and is impressively powerful. I’m a Formidable Pro affiliate, but even if I weren’t, I’d still highly recommend it — I’m switching all of my surveys over to it next week. I’ll try to keep everyone here informed about updates to it and how it’s working for me though — so I can hold Steph’s feet to the fire …

Among all of your New Year’s Resolutions, there is one that you should pay special attention to.

No, it isn’t lose 35 lbs or stop eating Twinkies (my other goal for 2010), the goal I’m talking about is you taking your Online Business to new heights in 2010. Whether your goal is to make a million dollars online or you just want to make enough to cover your car payment, you should write it down, put together a plan and start working.

Don’t make excuses, there are plenty of ways to do something great online this year and make money doing it but they pretty much all involve the same strategies and tools. Whether you’re a blogger, affiliate marketer or have your own products — here are the strategies you absolutely need to learn and use in 2010 if you want to ignite explosive growth in your Online Business:

My Top 10 Online Business Building Strategies for 2010:

1. Give, Give, Give and Give More to Your Audience! – This is really the key to all success online — the more value you provide to your audience, the more your business will grow. By this, I don’t mean to completely “give the farm away” — people will generally just take advantage of you if you do that. I mean that you should give some of your best stuff away for free and go way overboard to provide value for things you charge money for.
2. Simplify … EVERYTHING – Don’t think about what you can add to your business — but what you can eliminate from it. The simpler your products are, the happier your customers will be and the simpler your website is, the more conversions you’ll get. The best way I’ve found to simplify a website is to identify the 1 or 2 actions that you want your users to take, get rid of everything else distracting your users and then re-design your pages so that those 1 or 2 actions appear in a clear, centralized location on your site.
3. Listen – You’ll never know what your audience wants unless you listen to them. I read all my emails, blog comments, forum posts and entries over on WPMingle — and I try to answer as many of them as I can. The reason? Well, first of all, I really enjoy interacting with my audience, but I also get my best ideas from this valuable feedback. You need to be careful with this one though … about 1-2% of any audience can typically be classified as very vocal crazy people … so don’t let these people with strong opinions necessarily determine how you drive your business. Instead, try to look for trends in your user’s requests — if you get 1 request for something then that’s one thing but if you get 100 requests for something else then you probably should do something about it.
4. Create and Sell Your Own Products — I was at a conference of bloggers a few months ago where the panel asked people in the audience to raise their hands if they had 50K or more visitors to their sites — about 10 people raised their hands. Then the panel asked this group how many of them were making $1,000 a month or more on their sites — only 2 hands stayed up! WHAT!? This completely floored me! I have a fraction of the traffic that these “big” bloggers have but they are only making a fraction of the money I’m making every month. Why? I promote my own products. If you want to make some “real” money online in 2010 then the best and fastest way to do this is by creating your own product to promote.
5. Become an Affiliate for Products You Already Use – Unless you already have a massive amount of traffic on your site, traditional Google Adsense advertising can be a waste of time. Revenue from promoting products and services can be much more lucrative for low to medium traffic sites. Most products and services these days have affiliate programs you can enroll in and make money every time someone referred by you makes a purchase. I would recommend using the following criteria to choose an affiliate product to promote: Do I use and love this product? Does this product offer a decent affiliate commission (I don’t generally promote products actively unless they pay out at least $25-30 per sale)? Does this product convert for my audience (you generally have to just test this one out — but some products will convert better than others depending on the audience).
6. Organize & Automate — I love Online Businesses so much because of this fact — you can structure your business to deliver products and services by way of completely automated processes. Setting up a system like this is much easier than you might imagine. There are many off the shelf software solutions and services that allow you to set systems like this up in a very short amount of time.
7. Yes, YOU NEED TO BLOG! — If your goal is to be invisible to Google and don’t want anyone coming to your website then a static, unchanging, brochure style website is great — but if you actually want to use your blog to help you build your business then you need a blog. A blog will give you an avenue to speak directly with your audience and really give you a forum for building your brand.
8. Become a Master of Non-Google SEO – What is non-Google SEO you say? By this, I mean concentrating on optimizing your presence on sites other than Google. You need to start thinking of YouTube, Flickr, and many other domain specific websites as specialized search engines that can bring your website attention. Often times these sites have simpler algorithms that will enable you to move up your rankings faster and more effectively.
9. Start tapping into the power of Pay-Per Click Advertising – SEO with Google can take some time, depending on your domain it could take months and at the end of the day, you don’t always have control over where your site shows up with Google. This is not true with Pay Per Click (PPC) — with Google PPC you can setup a campaign and within minutes you can have targeted traffic coming to your website. Just make sure your keywords, ads and landing pages contain similar ideas & keywords and that your landing page converts — remember you’re paying for traffic and so if people aren’t buying, you can start burning money really fast. If you start with a low dollar amount though and keep a close eye on it then you can always turn it off if your traffic isn’t converting.
10. Be Consistent – The more consistent you are when it comes to delivering your product and putting content on your site, the more your online presence will grow and your credibility will increase.

I’m going through and refining my business this week to work on these things throughout the year and I challenge you to do the same. I hope you’ll feel free to leave me a comment if you know of any other strategies that can help us grow our businesses in 2010.

Time to Stop Using Whois Privacy?

His article inspired me to write about this topic and to extend his thinking a bit beyond Private Registrations.

Scocco’s argument is that using private registration on your domain names leads to less trust. This is 100% true but here’s another big reason not to use Private Registration if you ever plan to install an extended verification SSL certificate on your site you’ll have to remove the privacy registration settings (and trust me, that can be a pain in the butt).

One of the reasons privacy exists is that whois records are public and you don’t necessarily want your personal information out hanging in the wind when don’t use private registration. Since private registrations are no good for business sites I recommend that you create a special email address or email address alias for your domain name registrations (so that your main email address doesn’t get hit with spam) and that you don’t use your home address (so people don’t show up at your doorstep). If you don’t have a business address, go down to your post office and get a PO Box — you don’t necessarily need to use “PO Box” nomenclature on your address, just enter the street address of your post office then have your box number appear as the suite number.

Some other practices that will help to get you more credibility with Google, other services and your audience would be to do the exact opposite of what the spammers would do, right? So here are a few tips for you when registering your domain names and setting up your website:

1. Don’t use private registration — yeah, we’ve already talked about this.
2. Register your domain name for longer than the 1 year minimum – I’m not sure I’ve noticed extreme benefits from this one but I feel like it gives you a sense of permanence and credibility.
3. Use a unique IP address for your website — if you’re going to be using SSL on your site then you’ll need to do this anyway. You can still be on a shared or virtual server — just see if your web host can make this happen for you if you don’t already know how to do this.
4. Get a custom graphic design or a customize an existing template — Okay, I’m a bit of a hypocrite here since the graphics on my site suck — but I’m working on it! Web spammers would never spend the money to roll out their own custom graphics — it would be too expensive for them. And yes, you can get a graphic designer to create custom graphics for you if you’re using a theme framework like the one I use — Thesis.

Every little bit of credibility counts and so even if any of these suggestions don’t give you huge benefits immediately you should still adhere to them because they’ll pay off over time. The less you look like a web spammer and the more credibility you have with Google and your audience the better …

Do you need help with:

• Getting started with Pretty Link on your WordPress Website
• Setting up Pretty Link Redirects
• Organizing your links with Pretty Link Groups
• Advanced Link Options
• Tracking Hits on your Pretty Links
• Pretty Link Global Options

Well, I just put the first 6 videos that cover these topics up today. You can get a hold of them by signing up for them on the following page:

6 Free Lessons on Pretty Link

If you feel like there’s a video I’ve forgotten, let me know and I’ll try to produce it and add it to this site.

What Startups Are Really Like by Paul Graham

Some of my favorite quotes from (because I’ve seen these things in the startups I’ve been a part of) this were:

On Use of Time:
“Most hacker-founders would like to spend all their time programming. You won’t get to, unless you fail. Which can be transformed into: If you spend all your time programming, you will fail.” — DOH!

On Product Development:
“Now, when coding, I try to think ‘How can I write this such that if people saw my code, they’d be amazed at how little there is and how little it does?’”

On Product Development Strategy:
“It’s so important to launch fast that it may be better to think of your initial version not as a product, but as a trick for getting users to start talking to you.”

The more I work on my own products and the more I consult with businesses, the more I can see how true the open source mantra of “Release Quickly, Release Often” is in all areas of business as well.

Download (Right-Click & Select “Save-As”)

Luckily, I was usually on a team of highly motivated, competent people — so we were actually able to hit many of our deadlines but the products we were delivering weren’t the highest quality and I started to get burned out. However, when I endured a hellish project that ultimately ended up in failure I finally saw the light. I started to realize that these tight deadlines were not only consistently making my clients upset but were ruining my life — it was then that I realized that I needed to:

LOWER THE BAR!

Okay, by this I don’t mean that you should take advantage of clients or that you should be lazy … but that you under promise and over deliver. Make sure that when you estimate the scope of a project that you double or triple the number of hours you’d normally bid — so that you can account for any problems that you ABSOLUTELY WILL ENCOUNTER.

Clients don’t typically like seeing estimates for large figures so you’ll sometimes have to make small concessions — but if you aren’t up-front with your clients from the beginning then once you start the work, your life can become hell on earth and they will be consistently disappointed. Trust me — sometimes its better to just not get the job than to work off of an unrealistic estimate.

Don’t short-change yourself and do give yourself a chance to succeed by not pushing the envelope too much. Once the expectations and estimates have been set realistically and you actually come in under budget and ahead of schedule — you’ll look like a rockstar instead of a buffoon for blowing it! You’ll be happier and so will your clients.

Day 1 (Thursday):

The 2 highlights for me on Day 1 were the “Internet Marketing for Smart People” Session and the End of Day Keynote from Chris Brogan.

The “Internet Marketing for Smart People” session was a panel by Sonia Simone (http://www.remarkable-communication.com), Chris Brogan (http://chrisbrogan.com), Brian Clark (http://copyblogger.com), and Darren Rouse (http://problogger.com). This session was packed and rightly so, there was some phenomenal information shared–it even had it’s own Twitter hash tag: #3tribe … The gist of the 3 tribe thing a reference to Seth Godin’s Tribes book. The panelists showed that there are currently 2 accepted tribes on the Internet now, those who feel its unethical to turn a profit on the Internet and those who fall into the get rich quick scheme mindset. The panelists were pushing the notion that there was a third, emerging tribe that wants to do well by the community, provide value and ethically earn a living. They also announced a new community around this subject (the third tribe community). Since I agreed 100% with the 3rd tribe philosophy — I want to be a member of it for sure.

Chris Brogan’s Keynote rocked. He talked about this huge shift in interpersonal communications due to social media and blogs.

Day 2 (Friday)

The big highlights for me on Friday were the session on building a loyal audience through Podcasting by Jason Van Orden (http://jasonvanorden.com and http://internetbusinessmastery.com), the Win or Die session in WordCamp by John Pozadzides (http://onemansblog.com) and when me and 9 others went to the Blue Man Group!

Jason Van Orden has the top podcast for the “Marketing” and “Internet Business” keywords. I’ve been a listener and a big fan of his for quite a while — so this session was a real treat. He diagrammed out not only how he writes and produces podcasts but how he promotes them. Some of the major take aways from this session were to re-purpose content and to push it to as many places on the Internet as possible. He recommended shooting video and then uploading it to a service like Tube Mogul or Traffic Geyser.

John Pozadzides’ session at WordCamp was a much more intimate setting — there were only about 20 of us who were there. John P. is the former CMO of the Layered Tech hosting company and is the current CEO of iFusion Labs that created the awesome Woopra analytics package. His message was basically that you’ve got to take no prisoners when it comes to your website — and some strategies on how you can do it. John P. has also been a user of Pretty Link Pro and talked about it at the end of his lecture as a way to aggressively market your site.

Later that night, I went to the JET Nightclub (at the Mirage) for a scheduled BlogWorld party and rounded up 9 people to go to the Blue Man Group with me. For full disclosure — I got the tickets for free from Partner Fusion who manages the Affiliate Program for the Blue Man Group. I have to say that I’ve seen the Blue Man Group before but trust me, it never gets old. I think that The Blue Man Group is by far the best show on the strip. One of the ladies in our party, Danielle Williams was actually called out of the audience to eat Twinkies with the Blue Men. Here are some pictures:

Oh, and if you ever wondered what is that crap that shoots out of their chests — it appears to be some kind of mixture of bananas and vanilla pudding or something.

Some of the other awesome people that attended the Blue Man Group with us were Brandon Dove (http://pixeljar.com), Bonnie Schroader (http://blogbonnieblog.com), Russ & Danielle Williams (http://russwilliamsdesign.com), Jason Van Orden (http://jasonvanorden.com), Ronjini Mukhopadhyay (http://theindianfever.blogspot.com), Drew Stronjny & Jennifer Boydstrun (http://jestro.com) … We had a blast!

Day 3 (Saturday)

There was an awesome panel on Saturday morning about the Money Making Potential of Continuity programs. On the panel was Tim Kerber (http://www.membershipsiteowner.com) and Ryan Lee (http://www.ryanlee.com) … This was possibly the most inspirational of all of the sessions I attended — these guys have figured out how to engage, provide solid value to and monetize an audience. They offered a ton of little tips & tricks — but the best part was when Tim started putting numbers up on the projector about revenue coming from some of his membership sites — it was off the hook!

That afternoon, I went back to WordCamp and attended an awesome session by Aaron Kronis (http://www.aaronkronis.com) on “Rockstar SEO” … He reviewed a lot of information that I already knew but also threw in several gems that will help in my SEO efforts in an ongoing basis.

At 7pm, I met John Pozadzides (http://onemansblog.com), Cali Lewis (http://geekbrief.tv) and about 10 other people for a photowalk. This was the first photowalk — but really fun. We got some great shots of Vegas — in many interesting and different perspectives than you’d normally think of. Here are Cali’s shots from the photowalk — I know you’re dying to see mine — I’ll post them soon.

Some Other Awesome People I Met

Leo Laporte — Okay, I briefly talked to him and shook his hand — he was very nice — it was cool.

Tracy Childers & Stu McLaren — these guys created the Wishlist Member plugin for wordpress and are really cool. I’ve been looking into it as a replacement for AMember so it was awesome to meet them.

Vic DaSilva — he’s the owner of uberreview.com and weinterrupt.com — really cool guy.

Shannon Yelland — She’s doing some really cool stuff over at seedtheweb.com

John Reece, Kevin Williams, and Cameron Gawley — I must have bumped into these guys 100 times at parties and on the Expo floor. They are doing some great stuff for the National Breast Cancer Foundation and are expert online marketers.

Take Away

I had no complaints about this conference — really inspired me to come back and take more action. For the most part, the speakers were great, it was a great environment for networking opportunities and I learned a lot. I’ll definitely be returning to BlogWorld next year — hopefully I’ll see you there!

In addition to multiple twitter accounts, we’ve optimized the page load time for users of the social media button bar, re-tweet badge and of Pretty Link. Many of the SQL queries were slowing down some of the page load times.

Finally, we made many back end changes to the system so that it will be able to accommodate some of the awesome new features we have planned next (some of which were revealed in this month’s survey). Enjoy!

UPDATE: Okay, so there was actually a significant bug that was released with version 1.4.27 — if you haven’t done it already go out and upgrade to 1.4.28 where it has been fixed! Sorry for any issues.

Let me know if you’ll be there so we can meet up.

There are already a few activities that are being organized after the conference that I’m planning on attending.

1. Thursday Night @10pm — There’s a photo walk out on the strip that I’m planning on attending. This one’s been organized by Victor Cajiao of the Typical Shutterbug Podcast.

2. Saturday Night @7pm — John P. from One Man’s Blog & Woopra has organized another photo walk that will be down on Freemont street in old Las Vegas … looking forward to this one a lot. You can read more about it on his blog.

Of course, I’m sure some fun stuff will come together for Friday night as well … but no matter what, feel free to contact me so we can hang out.

Several years ago, a former boss of mine had a poster of Winston Churchill hanging on his door. It depicted Mr. Churchill pointing to you saying “Deserve Victory!” — underneath it, there was a large piece of paper that someone had taped that interpreted the meaning of the poster — it read:

“Our Business Deserves Victory”

Was that really true? Did our company deserve victory?

Well, unfortunately in the case of this former employer, the answer was a resounding no — the company itself had a badly flawed business model to begin with, didn’t have high enough margins and wasn’t listening to its audience–yet the perception among most of the employees was that the company still deserved victory.

Well, about 6 months after the poster went up the company failed — the market had spoken — the company was undeserving of victory.

Success in Internet Business Doesn’t Reward Slouches

My boss had it all wrong–in this poster, I’m pretty sure that Winston Churchill wasn’t saying “everyone deserves victory (even if you’re stupid, lazy and/or have no idea what you’re doing on a day to day basis to grow your business).”

This poster is actually all about accountability — it’s about Winston Churchill staring you down, telling you that “You need to do everything in your power to be deserving of victory!”

I think it was a brilliant marketing piece and must have been successful–it pushed the responsibility of winning the war to every individual citizen.

Who Decides If You Really Deserve to Succeed?

If you’ve got your own Internet Business then you know that just like the British in World War II, you are fighting a war every day. You’re fighting against competitors, time, Google and ultimately yourself … you’re fighting for higher rankings, more clicks, more leads, more sales. And just like the British in World War II, each Internet Business owner is responsible for his or her own success.

Of course, ultimately, only your market will determine whether you Deserve Victory or not.

So How Do You Become Deserving of Victory?

In order to be successful in Internet Business, you must live consistently live by a code. Here are the 4 fundamentals of what you’ll need to do to be deserving of victory:

1. Select a Good Market – Whoa there, how do I find out if a market is good or bad? Well, there are several indicators that can help you. Look at the keywords and number of relative clicks to gauge size of market (you can use google’s amazing keyword tool for this), and follow people from this market on twitter and become active in forums to find holes in the market and how passionate people are about finding solutions. If these seem to line up you can launch a blog or small product for the market to see what the response is. Even if there seems to be a great niche and you have a great idea, don’t count on it being successful — trial and error is the only constant in Internet Business.
2. Listen To Your Market — Yeah, uh, listen to your prospects & customers — novel concept eh? Well, from what I see out there, this is actually more rare than you’d think. Listen to your blog’s audience and/or customer feedback you get in any form and use it to drive your business. Sometimes this can be hard — such as when your market says it doesn’t care / like your product — that could be an indication that your time could be better served in another market.
3. Develop Your Business Around Your Market – The most successful online businesses craft their products and services around feedback from their customers & prospects. Who knows what will sell in a market better than the market itself?
4. Work Like a Mad Fool to Consistently Provide Value to Your Market — Look, Internet Business is a battle — if you don’t expect to have to work long hours consistently and sacrifice then you might as well give up now.

DESERVE VICTORY!

So, print that poster of Winston Churchill out, hang it on your wall and look at it every morning before you go into battle. Let him remind you that if you fail — you only have yourself to blame. If you get motivated to create value for your audience by listening to their needs then who knows, your market might just deem you victorious!

Robot Hit Filtering

This one has been a long time coming. You can now go into “Pretty Link” -> “Options” under “Reporting” and select Filter Robots. Robot Filtering will only work for new links — any robot hits that were recorded in a version of Pretty Link before version 1.4.21 won’t be able to be filtered. With that said, if you’re really wanting your old hits to have the ability to be filtered just comment on this post — if there’s a demand, I’ll post some code that you can run on your server to do this effectively. Another thing to know about the robot filtering is that it will eliminate the lion’s share of bots (like 99% of them) — but there may be a few that slip through the cracks — I’m working on some future enhancements that will close the gap on this — but for now, if you still see 1 or 2 bots in your hit list don’t be alarmed.

Pretty Bar Attribution Link

Another big one is that Pretty Link Pro users can now modify or completely remove their attribution link on the Pretty Bar (the one that says “Powered by Pretty Link”). This is a big one because many of you have been having to modify this link every time you upgrade — which is a pain in the butt. Now Pro users can just check a box to remove this link or enter their affiliate URL which will replace the default URL for that link. This is cool because Pro users interested in promoting Pretty Link Pro for a 50% commission can get exposure every time they share a link.

Public Link Creation

After launching the public link creation feature for Pretty Link Pro users a few weeks ago, I’ve had several requests for a few additions to it. The first was that the default success page (the page that the Pro user’s visitor will go to after they create a link) didn’t do enough for the visitor. Now that page has link URL, title and a row of social buttons so they can send the link to other sites like Twitter, Facebook & Linked In. If you want to retain your own branding on the success page, there are also several new shortcodes you can put on your custom success page:

• prli_public_link_url — this does the same thing as the original prli_create_display shortcode (which will still work) — but I think makes a bit more sense …
• prli_public_link_title — this tag will display the title of the link.
• prli_public_link_target_url — displays the Target URL of the link that was entered into the public URL creation form.
• prli_public_link_social_buttons — displays the social buttons bar that will allow your users to post this link to several different social media sites.

Unicode Support

I had several users complain that Pretty Link wasn’t handling international character sets very well. International characters weren’t being recorded properly in the database and so Pretty Link wasn’t working properly for them. Well, the database tables have been fixed so any new unicode (utf8) characters entered into the database will be correct (just so you know, any unicode characters previously entered into the database will still be incorrect — since they weren’t recorded properly the first time there’s no way for the system to correct them).

I’ve also altered the validation on pretty link slugs to include the use of utf8 characters. This means you could create a pretty link for your copywrite notice like this: http://example.com/© — this is really cool but should still be used judiciously because there are still many places where these types of links could be posted to that won’t recognize this as a valid URL.

Pro users also noticed that the automatic tweets weren’t showing utf8 characters and twitter comments coming in from twitter weren’t showing utf8 characters correctly. Both of these issues have been fixed.

Bug Fixes

In addition to all these feature enhancements, there have been numerous bugs squashed. There was one particularly nasty bug affecting a few Pro users that was fixed (I had some awesome help on this one from Clay Loveless of KillerSoft). In addition to this one there were bugs in the JSON decoding routines, database models and many other places.

I’m still in the process of updating the Pretty Link Pro User Manual to show all of these changes and exactly how to use them — but if you have any questions you can always post a comment or send me an email and I’ll see if I can help.

I’ve been using several great tools to find out what people are saying about me for a while now. Its really cool when I can respond to potential customers who are having troubles — without them even contacting me first! I’ve been able to do this many times and it inevitably leads to a great relationship with these people. Its funny how confused they are when I contact them — they generally have no idea how I could possibly have seen their blog post or tweet.

You can find out when people are happy with you and when they are not — but either way it gives you the opportunity to build great relationships.

Here are 3 tools that I use on a consistent basis:

1. Google Alerts — http://google.com/alerts
   

   You can set up search terms into Google Alerts and Google will actually email you on a daily basis with any content it finds on the Internet about the search term. You have several options with Google Alerts, you can just grab an RSS feed or have it email you. You can set it up to update you in real time (as soon as Google sees something) or once a day. Typically this pulls information from any indexed websites on the internet so you can get a really good idea about what people are saying.

   I actually set Google Alerts to monitor my name “Blair Williams” but in my case, it showed me just how little people are talking about me … but I have learned plenty about the beautiful female character from Terminator Salvation named Blair Williams who apparently “Kicks Ass and is All Girl!” Luckily, my monitoring of “Pretty Link” has gone much better — naturally, the more unique the term you’re searching is to you, the more relevant the results … So if your name is John Smith, it may not do you much good.

2. Twitter Search — http://search.twitter.com
   

   This is a great way to search for what people are saying about you in real time on Twitter. Twitter search isn’t foolproof — some users aren’t even included in the search results (a problem I haven’t seen Twitter acknowledge anywhere — but my Twitter username: @supercleanse isn’t included in the search results for some strange reason) — but for the most part it ROCKS! I can type in “Pretty Link” and see any tweets containing that phrase within the last 7 days.

   Twitter Search is novel at best when used as a search engine for tweets — because who wants to sit there and refresh the search results all day. The real benefit is found when using Twitter Search within a tool like TweetDeck: http://tweetdeck.com/beta/ … In TweetDeck you can setup a feed that regularly updates the most recent tweets on any given search term.

3. Collecta — http://collecta.com
   

   

   Collecta is a brand new search engine — the first “real-time” search engine that I know of. It aggregates all kinds of information on the web as it happens and so it will show all of the tweets about a given topic, any blog posts, blog post comments, videos, or photos anywhere, anytime they are published!

   Collecta has a great User Interface — I just open a new window in my browser and get a few searches going. I leave it on all day … so if anything comes across, I’ll see it immediately. I still use TweetDeck a bit more just because I have to set everything up again if I close my browser — but hopefully soon there will be a tool that works with collecta.

I’m sure there are several tools I’ve omitted from this list — if you have any real-time search tools you like to use feel free to share … But hopefully these will help you to start monitoring your online presence.

To enable this feature, just go to your “Pro Options” menu item, click “Page and Post Options”, make sure Automatic Pretty Link creation is enabled on pages and/or posts, and then click the checkbox to enable the social networks button bar… Now you can configure which buttons to display and where to display them (above or below your page/post content).

I’m personally excited to start using this feature on all of my sites — you can actually see it on this post. While this feature is cool and very useful, it is only the beginning — you can expect to start seeing even more exciting enhancements to this feature very soon.

1. Automatic Tweeting of scheduled & XML-RPC posts
2. The Pretty Link Bookmarklet (for creating pretty links outside of your WordPress admin)
3. Bulk Editing / Bulk Deletion UI enhancements for the Pretty Link Management page
4. Public Link creation widget and shortcode (for site owners who want to allow their users to create pretty links using the website’s url)
5. The Quick Add Dashboard Widget
6. Alternate URL configuration (you can use a shorter version of your url)
7. Short URL auto-discovery for Posts & Pages
8. Randomized Keyword Replacements when using replacement thresholds
9. Slug & message customization for automatic post tweeting
10. URL Aliases for counting tweets that go to your blog post but are different from your pretty link
11. Many more smaller fixes & refinements …

Roadmap

Pretty Link Pro has rapidly become a solid and feature rich link management platform that many websites owners are relying on more and more every day — and it’s only going to get better! Here’s a small roadmap of some of the upcoming features will be available exclusively to Pretty Link Pro users in the coming months:

1. PrettyBar enhancements — I’ve had many requests for ways to make the Pretty Bar more customizable, more interactive and more helpful. Here are just some of the enhancements I have planned:
   1. 100% control of the HTML & CSS without having to modify files every time you upgrade PLP
   2. Tweet badge which can be optionally integrated into the PrettyBar (you’ll be able to get a tweet count on any link you create that uses the prettybar)
   3. Ability to modify or remove the Pretty Link Attribution link on the PrettyBar (PLP users are starting to manually replace the standard link I have there with their affiliate links — which I think is a fantastic idea so I’m making it easier to do so)
2. UI enhancements — there are a myriad of enhancements to the UI that are in the works right now. These enhancements will make creating and managing your links sooo much easier
3. Better website analytics compatibility
4. Group specific link defaults — you’ll be able to override the global link creation defaults depending on what group a link is placed in.
5. Firefox Pretty Link Pro Sidebar Widget — this will be a *huge* enhancement — since Pretty Link is getting more hooks into twitter and other social media platforms, you’ll be able to do many of the tasks you’d normally perform within your wordpress admin right from Firefox!
6. Many other smaller — but awesome features

And remember that even if you purchase PLP today, you’ll receive all of these future updates absolutely free!

Affiliate Program

Also, don’t forget that when you purchase Pretty Link Pro, you’ll automatically be enrolled in the Pretty Link Pro Affiliate Program … So you’ll get a 50% commission for every person that purchases PLP using your affiliate link (which you’ll get when you purchase)! This is great if you have an affiliate marketing presence, have clients that need Pretty Link Pro or just have friends that need it.

I’m pumped about all the activity that’s been going on surrounding Pretty Link Pro and the cool features I’m working on right now. Seriously, between the fact that this the best link management software in the world, you’ll get lifetime updates, there’s a 100% money back guarantee on it and there’s a generous affiliate program along with it — why don’t you just get Pretty Link Pro today, start using it to build your brand and make some money while your at it? Sounds like a no brainer to me.

1. The first is with the keyword replacement algorithm in Pretty Link Pro. When keyword replacements were turned on and a threshold was set of say, 3 keyword replacements per page, my algorithm was just replacing the first 3 keywords it saw. In this release I altered the algorithm so instead of replacing the first 3, it will now replace them in a more distributed randomized order. This feature request was from one of my users that noted some other apps that were doing this. I dove into the code and luckily my existing algorithm was such that it only took me about an hour to modify.
2. So, remember how I released the Pretty Link Bookmarklet yesterday? Well, I was immediately flooded for 2 additional features to be added to it. The first was that the title of the URL should be used as the name of the Pretty Link and the second was that people wanted a way to post this link to some of the social networks. In the 1.4.12 release today these features are available.

Here are some screenshots of these features:

Some users have been happy but some others have been a bit bothered that I’m pushing so many updates lately, well don’t worry too much … I’m just ramping up for the Official Launch of Pretty Link Pro on September 1. So get ready for some awesome new features to get rolled out next week — I’m working on some really cool stuff for the free & pro users alike!

If you aren’t familiar with what a bookmarklet is, it’s basically a button that you can add to your browser’s toolbar that will do some action–in this case it’s creating Pretty Links. Bookmarklets are great because they are very simple, javascript based buttons that work in practically every browser.

The Pretty Link Bookmarklet is available starting in Pretty Link version 1.4.11. Here’s how you’ll go about installing it in your browser once you have version 1.4.11 or greater installed in WordPress:

1. When inside your WordPress admin, click the menu item: “Pretty Link” -> “Tools”
2. You’ll see a link named “Get PrettyLink” under the Bookmarklet section … you’ll want to drag that link to your Browser’s bookmark bar

That’s all you have to do to install it. Now let’s look at how you’d use the Pretty Link bookmarklet:

1. When you’re browsing the web and you find a page that you’d like to create a Pretty Link for, just click “Get PrettyLink” in your toolbar while on that page.
2. Pretty Link will automatically create the link for you and redirect you to a page where you can copy your newly created Pretty Link.

Here are a few screenshots of the bookmarklet in action (in Safari — but the same steps go for FireFox, IE, etc):

I’m currently working on some other ways to easily create Pretty Links soon — so it’s only going to get easier to manage your entire link portfolio from Pretty Link!

Well, I’d like to announce some new features that I’ve rolled out in Pretty Link Pro this week:

1. Bulk Actions – Pro users can now delete and edit multiple Pretty Links at once.
2. Alternate Pretty Link URL – would you love to use Pretty Links in your twitter stream but your domain name is just too long? Well, now in Pretty Link Pro you can use a different domain name that you own for your pretty links on your blog.
3. Public Pretty Link Creation - Now with Pretty Link Pro you can roll out your own link shrinking service! You can now put a form on your blog in a sidebar widget or by using a WordPress shortcode in any Page or Post. Users have been requesting this one for a while and I’m excited that its finally here.

I’ll be working on some additional features over the next few weeks to prepare for the Pretty Link Pro official launch on September 1. I’ve got some really cool stuff planned.

• Replace keywords throughout your blog with Pretty Links
• Replace URLs throughout your blog with Pretty Links
• Rotate up to 5 URLs from one Pretty Link
• Split Test these URL rotations for a Pretty Link
• Setup Conversion Reports
• Import / Export Pretty Links
• Automatically create Pretty Links for each Post / Page
• Automatically Tweet each Post / Page when it is Published
• Display a Tweet Badge on Pages and / or Posts that contains the number of tweets that this page has received
• Display a Re-Tweet button on every Page and / or Post that incorporates your twitter handle & Pretty Link into the Re-Tweet

Along with these features, I’m providing:

• Premium Support (Premium Support Forum will be launching in August for now it’s via email/twitter)
• 30 day money back guarantee
• Lifetime updates on all the sites you own

Pretty Link Pro will revolutionize how you approach your business by allowing you to automate repetitive tasks, optimize your site with testing, see the results of your campaigns immediately, virally spread your links and by being able to replicate your sites — including all your links within minutes! I’m really excited about this release — please go check it out at http://prettylinkpro.com.

Pretty Link Pro is in Pre-Launch — I’ll officially launch it and start promoting it more on September 1, 2009. This means that people purchasing it from now until then will be able to get it with a $50 discount … so now is the time to consider making a purchase. You can get it at a discount and be on track to receive all the cool new updates to Pretty Link Pro in the coming months!

Sweet — now we’re getting somewhere! If you still have issues, just drop a comment on this page.

Many years ago there was a traveler who journeyed from village to village, helping those in need of good SEO on their websites. He possessed un-imaginable SEO skills and a limitless powers to promote websites to the highest positions in the night sky. This traveler was no ordinary man, not only was he a master of the art of SEO but he was the chosen keeper of the “Google Scroll” which contained the secret to ultimate SEO POWER!

SEO was difficult for the traveler in the beginning

SEO didn’t always come easy to the traveler. When he first began the journey to get top rankings for his website he struggled. He went around the village and saw what some others were doing. Some of the other villagers had been taught by wise men living high in the mountains, near the Temple of the Search Engines and gave the traveler some advice. Some of this advice worked and some didn’t — he gained some success on his first website but never enough for the Bots of the Search Engines to take it to the top of the night sky.

One day the traveler overheard some of the other villagers talking about the “Google Scroll” and the secret that was written upon it. The villagers explained to each other that anyone who knew the secret on that scroll would be an unstoppable SEO juggernaut. Once he heard that a secret to ultimate SEO power existed he wanted the scroll more than anything else. He decided to set out on a journey to the Temple of the Search Engines where he would find this “Google Scroll.” The next day, he and several other villagers started on the long trail to the temple.

The Journey

As he journeyed the traveler noticed strange men trying to lead the villagers down unknown paths. These men were self-proclaimed “SEO Warriors” and claimed to already know the secret of ultimate SEO power — many of the villagers gave them all their provisions in return for the secret. The traveler noticed that these “secrets” would work for the villagers’ websites for a time but would almost always end in disaster — leaving them impoverished and without power to correct their mistakes. The traveler was wise enough to ignore these men as he continued his way along the path to the temple.

The traveler journeyed for several days until he could see the temple in the distance. As he walked, he noticed an old man lying on the ground along the side of the road. The other villagers seemed to be ignoring the old man but the traveler went to him and asked if he needed a hand. The old man stood and pulled the hood down that was covering his face — the traveler immediately recognized him … It was Master Oogley, the creator of the sacred algorithms of the Temple of the Search Engines!

Teacher and Student

Master Oogley and the traveler became fast friends — Oogley invited the traveler to become his student. Even though the traveler was still interested in seeking the scroll, this was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. Oogley taught the traveler the unique title, unique header, and hierarchical website organization techniques. Oogley also taught him the way of the nofollow link, canonical link and most importantly, the way of the good content. Despite this instruction, the traveler was discouraged at first because he’d already learned all this stuff from the villagers — how would this help him now? When the traveler would complain, Oogley would just reply, “Patience, patience.”

After a long period of consistent effort, the traveler began to notice his website rankings beginning to climb — Oogley’s teachings were working! He gained confidence and continued with these simple, logical exercises on his website every day. It wasn’t long before several of the traveler’s websites had climbed high into the evening sky — people from the village even started to talk about them. The traveler was becoming an SEO master.

The SEO Master

Over time, the traveler continued to work on his craft — he helped himself and others to launch their sites. At night, everyone in the world could see his websites lighting the sky. He even started to accelerate the simple techniques taught to him by Master Oogley by using tools like WordPress and SEO Optimized WordPress themes like Thesis. It seemed that his powers of SEO were vast and almost unstoppable.

The Google Scroll

Just when the traveler had all but forgotten about the “Google Scroll” Master Oogley called for him. Oogley was preparing himself to pass on to the next plane of existence — Oogley told the traveler that he was to be the new keeper of the “Google Scroll!” Oogley then pulled a golden scroll from his pocket and handed it to the traveler. This was the moment that the traveler had dreamed of — to hold the Google Scroll in his hands. He opened it and was shocked to find that the scroll was completely blank! The traveler and Master Oogley had a good laugh because at that moment he realized that there was no secret after all–he had spent his life promoting websites in the right way.

Even though many years have passed since the traveler walked the earth, his websites are still among the brightest sites in the night sky…

If you’d like to see me do a Tutorial on a certain topic or you have any questions or comments feel free to comment on this post.

This really makes me wonder how many people are slaving away on their websites and blogs all the while their site is dying a slow death because of a WordPress Theme that they think is fine.

When most people think about WordPress themes, they think of graphics. How good does the theme look? Will the theme make my business stand out? Will the theme help me feel good when people see my website? The fact is, none of this will matter if your theme is preventing your audience from finding your site.

It’s important to know that a WordPress Theme is much more than just graphics — themes are at the heart of how your customers and Google experience your website and it’s critical for your business to make sure this experience is excellent.

The main idea behind this article is to help you make a good decision when you’re choosing a Theme for your website. After suffering through these issues myself I’ve finally bucked up the money to pay for the Thesis WordPress Theme which successfully avoids almost every single one of these problems:

1. Not Widget Enabled — Widgets are dynamic blocks of code that usually appear in the sidebars of your Website. They make it possible to add polls, list recent comments, place ads, etc. If your Theme isn’t Widget enabled then you lose out on these features and if you want anything in your sidebars you have modify your theme’s php files directly (which we don’t want to have to do).
2. Comment Formatting Sucks — In the world of Web 2.0, comments are *absolutely* critical. It’s extremely important to attract comments to your blog posts and to start a conversation with your audience. If your Theme doesn’t do a good job of making commenting easy, showing avatars, or formatting comments then you’re site will be dead in the water.
3. No Comment Template At All — I downloaded some really beautifully designed free themes a couple of weeks ago and was shocked to find out that comments didn’t appear anywhere. A surprising number of WordPress Themes I’ve installed still don’t support Comments AT ALL!? Seriously, before you settle on a theme, at least try to comment on some posts and see how it handles them — because if you download one of these jewels, you’ll see pretty quickly that its not the theme for you.
4. Comments Not Enabled on Pages — Most themes show comments on Posts but some don’t allow the option of Comments on Pages. Even if the box is checked to “Allow Comments” on the Discussion tab when editing a page — these themes won’t show them.
5. No Landing Page Templates — I don’t know of a Theme in existence that does this out of the box. I always have to add custom pages to the theme manually later on — it would be a great feature for a theme to include some alternate page templates to use for landing pages.
6. Bad HTML Practices — Clean HTML is important for the performance and function of your site, not to mention how Google looks at your site.
7. Too Much Javascript Loading — Some WordPress themes love to load every Javascript library in existence and implement a ton of unnecessary Javascript. This can make your site sluggish or downright slow.
8. Poor HTML Formatting — Even some of the best looking free themes out there haven’t taken into consideration the formatting of text. Most of them have a bizzare way of handling bullet lists, <code> blocks and blockquotes. They don’t get line spacing at all and sometimes use bizarre colors and fonts for headers. Yeah, this stuff won’t kill you but it can make you look like an idiot.
9. Incomplete Header and Footer Templates — If your theme doesn’t have complete footer and header templates then many plugins won’t work. Case in point, I had to modify a theme last month so that the Google Analyticator plugin would actually work. Google Analyticator is great but the theme was missing some required code for it to put my tracking code at the footer of the site.
10. Bad SEO Practices — SEO is uber-important when marketing a website. Many WordPress themes violate every rule of SEO in the book … one of the most pervasive issues is their use of h1 & h2 tags as formatting elements rather than as guideposts to important titles. Unique and properly used H1 tags are one of the most important elements of your site that Google looks at. For Google to index your site properly you should have exactly 1 unique h1 tag per page and unique h2 tags for sub titles. The only theme I’ve ever seen that handles these properly is Thesis.

So now you’ve got a WordPress theme that does everything you want but may not look very good — does that mean your site is consigned to look like crap? Look, I know my site isn’t the most visually stunning website in the world (at the time this post was written I’m just using the default look & feel of Thesis) — but at some point it will experience a profound transformation which will make it look great too. That’s another benefit of Thesis — it enables you to easily customize your CSS & images to make your site look any way you want. You don’t necessarily need Thesis though — you can actually customize any theme — it just may take a bit more work.

As long as you have a good, SEO optimized theme and good content you can do very well with your marketing efforts — many people read blogs via RSS anyway so they won’t be physically visiting your site anyway. Maintaining a website is all about constant daily improvement so you can obsess about your graphics later — along with me.

Are you a WordPress plugin developer? Or are you developing a killer app for Twitter, Facebook or other Social media? It is now possible to give your users the ability to create short links with their own domain name (in addition to offering them with the options of Bit.ly, TinyURL, etc).

There are 2 ways that the Pretty Link API can be accessed:

1. As a Local WordPress API — there are a set of Pretty Link functions that have been defined and are usable by other WordPress plugin developers.
2. As a Remote XML-RPC API — there are a set of XML-RPC based functions that can be used by any other application that is Internet enabled. It doesn’t matter what language your App is written in, if it is Internet-based or a client app running on the desktop — you can now offer your users the ability to create short links on their own domains.

For more details about the Pretty Link API, please visit the Pretty Link API page here:

http://blairwilliams.com/pretty-link/api/

Next week I’ll go a little more in depth about the awesome options you can set for your links in Pretty Link. Seriously, Pretty Link has many options that will help you build your SEO efforts, mask your links and create buzz for your brand.

Feel free to leave a comment about this video, if you have any questions about pretty link in general or if there’s a Tutorial you’d like to see. Later.

1. Viral Twitter Campaigns – Use Pretty Links in your Twitter posts instead of bit.ly or tinyurl.com and use the Pretty Bar. Not only will you be able to accurately track these links in Pretty Link but you’ll have a built in way for your link to be re-tweeted.
2. Website Promotion – If you send out a lot of links, just think of the impact of giving the end viewer of the link a way to get back to your website! You’re effectively posting ads out on the internet that have a built in way for users to get back to your site. Even if only a small percentage click the link to your blog, it is better than nothing .
3. SEO Link Building – Imagine the possibilities of every URL you post to Twitter, Facebook, or wherever having an automatic link back to you! I mean you can link to news stories, youtube videos, whatever — and get some links back to you.
4. Sandbox User Comments – okay I haven’t gotten this feature fully completed yet … but soon, you’ll be able to replace all links in your user comments with Pretty Links with (or without) the PrettyBar. This will keep users tethered to your site for a while in a non-threatening way.

Here are some links I’ve already created with it:

http://blairwilliams.com/x0z

http://blairwilliams.com/j8u

I’m really excited about this feature for my own marketing efforts… Please leave a comment and let me know what you think of this feature!

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!

I’ve been developing websites for years and have used about every technology available for creating them. First of all, let me make a distinction — by “website” I mean any content driven website or blog — as opposed to a custom web application (I love using Ruby on Rails for functional webapps). I’ve used Perl/CGI, Java, Straight PHP, Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Ruby on Rails and python to develop content driven websites for myself and my clients … these all inevitably result in disaster because I (the programmer) have to continue to maintain and update these sites over time. Also, the client usually has feature requests that I then have to build for them — these features cost them money and suck away my time.

About 2 years ago I started messing around with WordPress and have been deploying WordPress based sites ever since — because they are simply better, here’s why:

1. WordPress is SolidWordPress is the basis for thousands of high-traffic websites and is now a refined, well-tuned app for creating websites. It’s more solid than anything that a developer could create on a first try (yes, even me) because its been in the “wild” for years and has gone through many iterations.
2. WordPress is SimpleSeriously, who likes working through FTP, SSH or a programmer to update files on their website? No one. WordPress has done a better job of making it easy for non-technical people to update and contribute to a website than any other technology I’ve seen. It’s even made Theme & Plugin development really nice which is why there is a large and expanding number of them out on the web.
3. WordPress has an Unbeatable Feature SetSome of my favorite built in features are WordPress’s rich text editor (that I’m using to write this blog post), media uploader (which allows you to upload multiple files at once), dynamic RSS feeds, category management, tagging and comment management. This is a well thought out, cohesive environment for managing a website.

   But what if you want your website to do that WordPress doesn’t currently do with its built in features? I’d wager there’s a plugin built for it. You can replace the graphics on your website in no time with WordPress’s outstanding theme management or extend its feature set with a WordPress Plugin. There are plugins to help your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), release a Podcast, store all of your media files on Amazon S3, customize your login screen and even create shortlinks on your site (I wrote that one). Currently there are over 4,000 plugins and 700 themes that are listed at wordpress.org! If you want your site to look good and do a lot in a short amount of time, you can’t do any better than WordPress.

4. WordPress is Easier to MaintainWhat if you have a custom website built by a programmer … who then decides not to work for you anymore? You are screwed — the ramp up time for another developer to come in and reverse engineer his code could be enough to send you reeling. But if you base your site on WordPress, you can easily find another developer to work on it … most freelance developers and graphic designers out there simply can’t afford not to know their way around WordPress anymore.

   In addition to this benefit, WordPress has a built-in updating mechanism that pretty much puts updates on autopilot. Open-source developers around the world continually release updates to WordPress and its plugins for free — this is huge! If you hire someone to build your site, you have to pay them every time you need an update and you’re pretty much guaranteed that you won’t be commissioning developers to update your site with security patches. Let the WordPress developers do the heavy lifting–take advantage of their free work.

5. WordPress is Open-Source!Not only is WordPress the absolute best system to base your website on but it’s 100% open source and doesn’t cost anything (free as in free speech and free as in free beer). This is great for me since I feel like there are very few software providers that actually give me the flexibility to do what I need to do who don’t charge me an arm and a leg.

Does WordPress have any problems or limitations? Absolutely — it is an evolving application — but it is much better and cheaper than trying to get someone to build a content-based website from scratch for you.

• User Interface Enhancements — I just added some nice javascript enhancements to make things easier. I had a few people tell me that they couldn’t see the calendar dropdown on the stats page (sometimes flash likes to stay above javascript pop overs) — this has now been fixed. I’ll probably be making more of these types of enhancements in coming weeks.
  

  A shot of some of the new enhancements

• Simple Link Sharing — Post your links to Twitter or share them via Email … these can be done from the new quick actions link list under each slug name on the main Pretty Link page:
  

  A shot of the new actions bar for each slug

• Awesome Click Tracking — You can now see information about each individual click on your site including: Operating System, Browser, Browser Version, Referring URL, IP Address, and even the remote host name.
  

  A shot of the new click tracking details

What do you think?

I seriously want to make this plugin great and I have several ideas for features that I’d like to add soon. Here are some of the possible features I could add to Pretty Link in the near future:

• Goal Tracking — say you have users going to a sign up page for your eNewsletter and you want to be able to see how effective it is. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do that easily in Pretty Link? I’m needing this in my own efforts and that’s why I’m thinking this would be something useful to most users.
• Pretty Links Widget — I’m thinking that you could put a sidebar widget on your blog that would show all, a selected group or a randomized group of your pretty links. This could be great for Affiliate marketers who promote several different products.
• Download Click / Goal Data — I’m pretty sure this one will happen soon, I want to be able to download click data and stats to Excel so that I can analyze it more carefully.
• Link Names and Notes — In an effort to keep the interface simple I haven’t added a field for a name and description on the edit / new page of Pretty Link. I’m thinking that this may be important for the Widget feature and to generally keep track of links as users have increasing numbers of pretty links (especially if they’re using the randomly generated slugs).
• Link Filtering & Searching — This would allow users who have large lists of Pretty Links to manage them a little easier — they’d be able to search or filter them.
• Optional iFrame Redirection — Okay, now I know that Digg and several other sites that redirect but keep users in their own iframe have been taking a lot of heat lately — but this may make sense for some of us — on some links. I’m thinking this would be a simple bar at the top of the site the user is redirected to that would have your Blog name & subhead and a way to close it. Of course, this would be an advanced option on each Pretty Link and not turned on by default.
• Enhanced Reporting — Of course if goal tracking is added, there would have to be goal tracking (with calculated conversion rates) added to the stats page but I’m thinking about adding some other charts including a pie chart of Operating Systems and Browsers. If you have any other stats you’d like to see added to this plugin, please let me know.
• Pretty Link Groups — I’m not sure how helpful this would be — or if it would just be confusing but for some users it may be very helpful to be able to group pretty links.
• Click Geo Location — I’d love to do this one right now, unfortunately I haven’t found a really good way to do it technically in a 100% open source application. If anyone out there knows of a good solution, let me know.

I’d like to thank all of you who have gone out and given me a good rating on Pretty Link’s WordPress Plugin Page and have helped to promote this plugin — that kind of response is really fun to see. Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions or ideas on how I can make this plugin better … THANKS!

This is a MacWorld article from a year ago that reviews different third party microphone adapters:
http://blairwilliams.com/y1x

This is a link to the Griffen Mic Adapter which was the #1 mic adapter MacWorld reviewed — I’m probably going to get this one, it’s only $19.99:
http://blairwilliams.com/8v2

The Apple iPhone headphones will also work with the iPod Touch 2G — This one should definitely work but costs $29.99:
http://blairwilliams.com/kzm

With this small cost (assuming you already have an iPod Touch), you can have yourself a skype phone that you can use anywhere you can get wireless Internet. Well, even though I don’t have an iPod Touch, I’m planning on taking advantage of Skype to help me keep my minutes down. I’ve got my Google Voice account and I’ll be using it to route calls to skype first and then my phone — since I’m around a Wi-Fi connection 90% of the time, this should help me at least conserve minutes.

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:

http://blairwilliams.com/download