I went to Raincamp Boston on Monday. I highly recommend that everyone go to the one in their area. Sure, it’s Real Estate specific but I learned so much there. Ben Kinney is so knowledgeable about how to use social media to get business. Although my brain was fried at the end of the day, Ben gave us many ideas that could be implemented immediately. If you want your site to come up when people are searching for what you sell, then you should implement these strategies too.

The first thing I did when I got home is went to my site and added titles and descriptions to every page. My site is built on the WordPress platform which gives my site an advantage because many SEO (search engine optimization) strategies are already built into it, and the ones that aren’t built-in are easy to add. Not that you can’t SEO a site built in HTML – but because WordPress is actually a blog, it has the advantage of built-in changing content. It’s less work for me to maintain it.

I then added titles to all the links in my pages – not any titles. I used keywords. When you create links here on ActiveRain, they ask you for a title. The title is not the word that you are linking, it’s the word that you believe people will type into a search engine so that your post pops up first.

Oh, most important about keywords, when choosing a keyword, try to get very specific: ie if you are writing about Worcester real estate, using the keywords (key-phrase) “WordPress blogs” is probably too broad and there’s too much competition. They may type in “how to SEO my blog” though. That is called The Long Tail, just to give you the technical term.

Now, on each page and when writing a blog post you should use your Long tail key-phrase at the beginning (in the title) and also at the end of each article, then once or twice in the middle of the article. Ben suggests 2-3 times for every 100 words that you write. A typical blog post is 300-500 words long. Any more often would be considered spamming the search engines.

Of course the most important SEO strategy is to write good content. Write for your reader first, the search engines second.

Another tip you can implement easily is to get other sites linking to yours. I use blogsearch.google.com to find other blogs to comment on. Since I am a WordPress expert, I look for blogs that write about WordPress. Oh, do not leave your URL (web address) in the post. WordPress is set up so that your name is linked to your site automatically. Leaving your URL is considered spam in the outside world.

I can go on and on with more SEO Strategies that you can implement right now, but I don’t want to leave you in overwhelm so I’ll save some strategies for later posts.

Once I purchased my hosting I found out that I get a free domain name for the entire time that I am with them. So I purchased a second domain name – crystalpina.com. Domains are cheap, but it’s pretty cool that they offer that.

Dreamhost doesn’t come with phone support but they answer their emails almost immediately. Not only do they answer the email, they go above and beyond to make sure that my support question is resolved. Since I help people set up their blogs, I’ve needed support a bit more often than the average web host user. I’ve gotten the same fast response every time.

In the 3 years I’ve been with Dreamhost my site has never gone down.

Dreamhost also offers 2 extra tidbits that make using them pretty enticing. First, you can set Dreamhost to automatically upgrade your blog when an upgrade comes out. Second, you can backup up to 50GB of files from your computer to their Backup User area. Ok, that’s not a whole lot of space, but it’s a lot more than the free 2Gs offered by Mozy and DropBox.

If you are interested in hosting with Dreamhost, use the coupon code VISIONS for $50 off your first year of hosting.

Mark your calendars. The grand opening of the new WordPress training site is March 1st from 7-9pm. I’m working on getting prizes. Anyone want to donate, the target market is virtual assistants and entrepreneurs who want to maintain their own blogs.

During the grand opening call, I will show you around the site and introduce you to what it has to offer. It’s what you’ve been asking for!

Details will follow.

About a third of my inquires lately have been by people wanting me to teach them WordPress so that they can maintain – and even customize – their own sites. Makes sense. Most people create blog sites because you want control. You’re tired of being held hostage by a web designer who’s too busy to make a 15 minute change at the time you want it changed.

Before you can customize a theme, you need to know HTML. The best HTML tutorial I found is . Scroll down to the Basic Tutorial Mini-Chapters and begin. At the end of the tutorials I promise that you will have a good understanding of HTML.

Dave also has CSS tutorials too. Don’t worry about those just yet. Just get the HTML down.

Knowing HTML will also help you with formatting your pages. You will be able to fix formatting issues using the HTML editor because we all know that the Visual editor doesn’t always fix the problem.

(poolparty)

(swear)

(bug)
(fubar)
(tmi)

(mooning)

(finger)
(bandit)

(drunk)
(smoking) (smoke) (ci)
(toivo)

(rock)
(headbang) (banghead)
(flag:US)

(flag:CA)

— Imagine going to your WordPress site and finding that part of it is gone. Either there are no posts, or your pages have disappeared. Would you know what to do?

Recently I learned a very important lesson about WordPress when not one, but two, people I work with lost part of their blogs. As far as I can tell, their databases somehow corrupted leaving one woman with no blog posts and the other with no pages. Because we took the appropriate steps both blogs were fully restored.

Would you know what to do if this happened to you?

Let’s back up a minute so I can explain what I am talking about. WordPress runs on a database.  A database is information placed in tables so that it can be retrieved easily when WordPress calls for it to be loaded onto a web page. Someplace in MyPhpAdmin-land is where your database lives. Many hosting companies allow you direct access to your database. Most of us have never gone to MyPhpAdmin-land – and never will. We just post our blogs the way we always did, confident that the universe is doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

For most of us this cozy little world we live in will never, ever change. But, every once in a while something happens to that database. It could be a WordPress version update that breaks the database, it could be a plug-in conflict. Most times we will never know the reason it happened. We will just wake up one morning to find out that our posts or pages (or worse, our posts and pages!) are gone.

Tips to Survive a Database Malfunction

1. Stay calm. Accept the fact that technology malfunctions. There’s probably nothing you could have done to prevent this from happening. And freaking out doesn’t get your blog back.

2. Become proactive. Make sure your database is being backed up on a regular basis. I use a plug-in called WP-DBManager. This plug-in backs up your database on a regular schedule that you pre-determine. You should back up as often as you post. If you post weekly, then you want to back up weekly, etc.

This plug-in will also optimize your database. Each time WordPress calls for information, there’s a good chance that it won’t be put back in the right order. Just like you need to “defrag” your computer, your database needs defragging also.

3. Find out if your host backs up your database and what you need to do to ensure that they do it. Also ask them if there is a charge to restore the database in the event of a catastrophe.

In both cases above the hosts had backups. The first host only backed up monthly and discarded old backups. They also charged $100 to do the restore. The second host didn’t automatically back up databases. I had to go in to the control panel and tick a box that asked for the database to be backed up. But in a time of crisis, they had several restore points available and I was able to do it myself with, again, a tick of a box.

4. Go to your blog often. In one of the cases above, the site was down a while before we knew that her pages were gone. It was less than a week but it may have been more than a few days. How long can you go with your site down?

5. If you find out you didn’t have a back up system in place, you can try using Google Cache or the Way Back Machine to see if they have copies of your old pages. I’ve used that method in the past to find old things I’ve deleted then changed my mind and decided I wanted.

6. This may not be the best alternative but if you want to be super-sure that you have backups, you can keep copies of all your posts and pages in Word documents and store them on your own file back up system.

The rules are simply to write 100 articles between now and July 1st and then submit them to Ezine Articles . Some have asked if there is a prize. There isn’t a prize from Jeff Herring, but there is a natural prize – increased web traffic to your site.

Each of my articles will also be posted here on this blog so my faithful readers will not have to go anywhere else to read them.

Imagine what you could do with your business if you had 100 articles to work with? You could bundle them into an ebook. You could make them into teleseminars. You could turn one or two into white papers and give them away free to your subscribers.

So, how does one begin writing 100 articles in 100 days? Well, you could begin by repurposing what you already have. If you have old newsletters, teleseminars, parts of an ebook, old blog posts, anything that you’ve written, you can turn those into an article and it will count.

You can use search.twitter.com to find out what people are talking about for inspiration on what to write about. Just type in your keywords and all the current conversations will pop up.

So what’s the difference between an article and a blog post? Well, a blog post is typically 350-500 words long while an article can be 750 words long. But I think it’s more than just the length. A blog post can come off the top of your head. And it’s written in a more informal manner. An article usually involves research on the topic you are writing about.

If you decide to join the challenge, please comment here so I can subscribe to your blog.

Someone shared this image on Twitter this morning. I wanted to share it with you because although it was meant as a joke, as with most jokes, it’s based on fact. In a traditional office, how much time is wasted talking or playing on the computer? Sheesh, in your home office how much time do you waste talking and playing on the computer? When we work from home we only get paid for actual work done, yet you have to eat.

It’s all about balance – and being honest with yourself. Are you working towards turning your fantasies into reality or are you just dreaming? Are you chatting with buddies or are you networking? There’s a difference. Not that chatting is a bad thing. Just be aware of the time you spend chatting vs the time spent networking.

Shelly says…

The latest release (2.7 at this writing) has many security upgrades. And if that doesn’t concern you, then maybe Google blocking your site will. (Because they will.)

Starting several months ago, Google started going through the blogs they index. They found that any installations older than version 2.3.3 were subject to a TON of injection/spam/hacking attacks. (If you didn’t know, if someone hacks your site, and you’re on a shared server, you are compromising *everyone* on that server – not just you.) So they began issuing a warning that most browsers pick up, where if someone visits your site, instead of seeing the blog, you get a page with a big red banner that says something about the site having been a source of bad content that’s harmful to your computer, and you cannot get around it. In the last 4 months, I’ve had to “fix” 4 client sites due to this very issue. You have to go through a process (usually a few days, but I had one case that took 6 weeks) to get your site back up and running again.

I’m not kidding about this either. It’s not meant to scare you, it’s just a fact that you should be aware of. The security releases on any blogging platform (not just WordPress) are, indeed, very important.

If your WP installation is older than 2.3.3 it’s definitely time to upgrade. And don’t worry – you don’t *have* to upgrade every time there’s a release. WordPress puts out a new version about once a year. They are *constantly* trying to improve it (I currently have version 2.8 from the subversion repository – they began work on it last month.) The little releases in between each one – read your dashboard. Many are just bugfixes or aesthetic improvements. You don’t have to install them. However when they release a *security* fix – THAT is the one you need to pay attention to.

unstoppable movie in english to download

Now quick, go check to see what version WordPress you are using.

This call is for anyone who wants to know the basics of using Twitter.

This call is not for anyone who’s been using Twitter and wants to know “secrets” or “tips and tricks”.

For access to this call, sign up here

I will ask be asking you to follow along with your own Twitter account so try to be in front of a computer during this call. If you haven’t signed up for Twitter yet, or if you’ve forgotten your log in details, you will need to have that settled before the call. You can sign up free at

In the meantime, enjoy this video that explains Twitter in Plain English.