Strategy - BlogCraving

The Best WordPress Video Plugin

March 17, 2010 By Travis Lusk 2 Comments

We all know that WordPress is the best CMS and blogging platform on the market today. No argument there. However, it can sometimes be tricky to embed videos into your posts with the stock version of WordPress.

So what’s the best video plugin to handle all of your video embed needs? Viper’s Video Quicktags is the absolute best.

I’ve been using this plugin for years now. It is regularly updated and improved. Each time WordPress itself is updated, the plugin is always compatible.

The plugin is so good that the creator was just recently hired by Automatic. (He’s made many other plugins as well.)

If you would like to start embedding videos from various major video hosting providers, get Viper’s plugin installed ASAP.

Video embed possibilities with this plugin include:

YouTube
Google Video
Daily Motion
Vimeo
Veoh
Viddler
Metacafe
Blip.tv
Flickr Video
Spike
MySpace Video
Generic FLV or Mov files (self hosted)

Filed Under: Technology, Video

Top 5 Best Twitter Plugins for WordPress

March 16, 2010 By Travis Lusk 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 Lusk 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

Blogging Greatness Takes Time

March 12, 2010 By Travis Lusk 3 Comments

Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Viddler video.

Most of the advice published here on BlogCraving comes from the perspective of taking your hobby blog and turning it into a small business. Do we mean “quit your day job” type business? That would be awesome, but no.

By business we mean a site that can easily pay for itself (hosting cost and what not) as well as put a few extra bucks in your pocket each month.

For those that are really dedicated, you can keep your forward momentum going right into the kind of business that becomes a full-time job.

Unfortunately, what most people don’t realize is the time it takes to reach these milestones.

Waking up one day and deciding that you want to turn your hobby blog into a money-making enterprise is definitely the first step. Congratulations!

Step 2: Don’t stop. It won’t happen in 3 months. It might not happen in 6 months. Honestly, it may be well over a year before your site really starts to get traction. That’s totally normal.

The trick is to just keep going. There are so many opportunities along the way just give up. It can be depressing in the early days when you don’t have many people reading your great content. That’s ok. Just keep moving forward.

Patience is the key. And if you don’t believe me, take it from social media and video blogger Gary Vaynerchuk in the clip above.

Filed Under: Strategy

How many ads should I have on my site?

March 11, 2010 By Travis Lusk Leave a Comment

If one ad unit is good, two ad units must be twice as good. Right?

Not exactly. One common mistake made by noob bloggers looking to start monetizing their sites is getting over excited by how easy it is to put up ads.

9 time out of 10, the new blogger joins every ad network they find and starts putting up one skyscraper after another. Before you know it, there’s 8 ads on a single page from 4 different ad networks.

It’s a flashy, animated, blinking, weight loss, acai berry drinking good time all right.

Unfortunately, that means they’ve made one of the critical mistakes in blog business. They took their eyes off the ball. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Business, Don't Do It

Get Your Blog Hosted for Free

March 10, 2010 By Travis Lusk 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

Don’t Tell Me About Your Business

March 9, 2010 By Travis Lusk Leave a Comment

That’s right. Don’t.

Bear with me on the following journey. I promise, there is an important lesson to be learned that will make you money.

I happen to find myself at a variety of business networking events in New York City through out the year. I tend to go there because I have to go. I’m usually dragged there by co-workers.

Hey, if there’s an open bar, why not.

Inevitably, someone ends up trying to force a conversation on me about their business. Most of the time, I could really care less.

Can you tell I am not in sales?

Well, since I’m not in sales, I end up telling these guys what I do, and start asking some questions about their websites (or lack thereof) because I really don’t want to them give me their hard sell anymore. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Don't Do It, Strategy

Cache Your WordPress Blog to Make it Faster

March 8, 2010 By Travis Lusk 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...]