How to…

Top 5 Best Twitter Plugins for WordPress

March 16, 2010 By Travis 2 Comments

Twitter integrations into WordPress blogs are all the rage these days. It is the most commonly asked for feature among our clients.

With that, here are the Top 5 Twitter Plugins for WordPress.

1) Twitter Widget Pro:

This plugin creates a sidebar widget with tons of configurable controls to adjust the Twitter feed’s display. You can also control things like showing the date/time stamps, etc. This is great for pulling your Tweets right into your site, or pulling in Tweets from a group of people based on a subject. It is also a great way to keep some fresh, active content going on your site until your next post.

2) Twitter Feed:

Got friends? Ha. By that I mean do you have multiple people working on your blog? Or do you have multiple Twitter followers/accounts that you would like to display on your site’s sidebar? This is the plugin for you. Easily pull in Tweets from multiple users and control the slick graphic display of them on your site. Includes the Twitter user picture and more. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Technology, Wordpress

Start Building Your Email List Today

March 14, 2010 By Travis Leave a Comment

How big is the email list for your blog?

Wait…what do you mean you don’t have a list?

You have no idea how much traffic, loyalty, and revenue you have already missed.

If you have a fairly new blog, you’re off the hook. I will just assume you did not know any better.

However, if your site has been around a for while and you’re getting over a thousand visits a day, you should already be in the process of building an email list.

The benefits of good old-fashioned, home-grown email lists cannot be understated.

So how do you start your list?

First, you need an email system to manage your list. At BlogCraving, we use Aweber to run our mini courses and newsletters. Constant Contact is another good one that I’ve used in the past. I just prefer Aweber.

Once you’ve signed up, I believe both will allow you a 30 day free trial, so there’s no risk.

The next thing you have to do is start getting your blog readers to subscribe. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as it sounds. You could throw up a post that says, “Hey…sign up for my newsletter.” You’ll probably get a few people to actually sign up, but not the volume that you are looking for. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Strategy

Get Your Blog Hosted for Free

March 10, 2010 By Travis Leave a Comment

I always encourage bloggers that want to take themselves seriously to get their own hosting, and manage their own site. The most common pushback I get is the price of hosting. You can get your blog hosted for free. It is pretty easy.

First some perspective.

Let’s say you really do have your blog hosted for free right now on a site like Blogger or WordPress.com. That’s great. If you are happy, god bless. If you want to step up you game a little, you are going to have to move on to a self hosted solution.

What are we talking about price wise? Roughly $80 – $120 per year. You can pretty easily get your hosting done for about $7.95 per month. That’s really cheap. Granted, that is much more expensive than free…I will give you that. However, it is a small price to pay for the potential increase in revenue and content flexibility that is then afforded to you.

How to get your hosting for free?

There are two easy ways, but first consider our goal. We need to come up with $7.95 in revenue every month to offset the cost of hosting. That is not a lot of money. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Technology

Cache Your WordPress Blog to Make it Faster

March 8, 2010 By Travis 1 Comment

What’s the most common problem that growing blogs always run into? Their WordPress site needs to be cached in order to handle the growing influx of traffic.

The lifespan of the common blogger goes something like this.

Blogger starts blog at WordPress.com, Blogger, or Typepad.
Blogger realizes they want more flexibility and ability to generate a little revenue.
Blogger moves their site over to a self hosted WordPress.org setup on a cheap blog host.
Blogger’s traffic continues to grow.
BOOM. Site begins to fail because their shared PHP server and database are overwhelmed.

That’s where most bloggers start scratching their head. They start to do some research about all the errors they are getting. Of course, their lame hosts have no good answers and just tell them to upgrade their hosting plans. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Technology

How to Make Your Own WordPress [Shortcode]

March 5, 2010 By Travis 6 Comments

Making your own custom WordPress shortcode is actually very easy to do. All you need to do is add a little bit of code to your site to generate a new WordPress shortcode.

Everyone loves the convenience of shortcodes such as the built in WordPress gallery shortcode. All you do is put [shortcodehere] into your post, and the gallery shows up

You may have used some plugins that implement their own custom shortcodes as well. For example, if you want a poll in your post, your plugin may just tell you to throw something like this in your post:

[poll id=43]

That tells your blog to go get poll number 43 and place it into the post with all the proper formatting. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Layout

Got Speed? The Problem with Slow Loading Blogs

January 5, 2010 By Travis Leave a Comment

Does your blog load slowly? C’mon. Be honest…we’re all friends here.

If you are not the tech savvy type, I’d be willing to bet your site loads slower than it should. Most amateur bloggers (and some professional ones) are not very good developers. Here’s where I would normally make the case for hiring a firm like BlogCraving to handle these things for you, but this time I will spare you.

Let’s just jump right to the point and find out if your site is a load hog.

The speed test

Head on over to tools.pingdom.com. This site will tell you definitively how fast your site loads. All you have to do is put in your website’s URL and run the test. It will show you the load time for every single element on your site.

Pingdom Tools 480x142 Got Speed? The Problem with Slow Loading Blogs

Then, just scroll down to the very bottom of the report to see the total load time for your site. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to..., Layout, Strategy, Technology, Wordpress Tagged With: Theme Optimization, Thesis

How To: License photos for your gossip blog

January 3, 2010 By Travis 1 Comment

Many of my clients are celebrity gossip and entertainment bloggers. The gossip niche has been our bread and butter for many years now. We stumbled across the category by accident really. It turns out that in 2006, there were a lot of high traffic gossip sites that needed real technical management in order to keep growing. Now, the category is huge.

The biggest traffic drivers for gossip and entertainment sites are photos. People love to click through photos of celebrities doing everything from walking the red carpet to getting their morning Starbucks.

For your average work at home gossip blogger, getting licensed images legally was always a challenge. Photo agencies like x17Online, Bauer Griffin, Getty Images, etc. can charge thousands of dollars a month for a subscription. Exclusive photos can cost 10 times that. For years, that made the entire concept very cost prohibitive.

Sites that were able to generate enough advertising revenue were the only sites able to afford these fees (other than major media sites).

However, in the last year, the game has changed. There are some affordable options out there.

The Game Has Changed

Photo agencies used to have a monopoly on the paparazzi style photo market. That’s not the case anymore. Virtually everyone in LA and New York has a camera with them 24/7. It’s called a cellphone. [Read more...]

Filed Under: How to... Tagged With: Content, Photos