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I’ve been guest blogging as long as I’ve been blogging: for about 3 years now. All my self-branding achievements as well as all my most notable career ups would not have been possible without guest posting. Throughout my guest blogging career, I have been wondering if that would be a smart idea to attempt to create such a place where guest bloggers might get connected to the blog owners who look for good free content for their sites . In the end, I thought that would be a a useful tool actually because such a service would be a place where everyone wins and quality plays a decisive role : guest bloggers get links and exposure , blog owners get free content (which means extra traffic, more search referrals, more social media shares, etc) and poor quality posts get rejected. This is why, a bit more than 3 months ago I launched: My Blog Guest : the forum that targets guest bloggers and aim to connect them to the blog owners. It’s been a long way to that site. I had no idea which form it should take. Many of my contacts who I had shared my plans with thought it should be a market place (ala text-link-ads.com) where a blogger comes, chooses his category and adds the best blogs “to cart”. I thought this would diminish the most important role of the project (and guest blogging in general). The main goal of the site is not to help users build free links with content: it is to connect people to bloggers in the target niche for more benefits in the long run. Except for the basic forum features, I added just a few more options to help the members find each other: Tag-based system : one can add as many tags as he or she wants. Tags reflect the areas of the user’s expertise and his/her interests (for guest bloggers) or the topics the user’s blog focuses on (for blog owners). Tags are integrated in the user search. Alert system : users can subscribe to email alerts to get notified of the new sites added to the category they are interested in (there are currently Health, Finance, Technology, Entertainment, LifeStyle, Creativity and General. The latter one is for those blogs that fall under more than one category or just are about something else. Rating system . Blogs are rated based on their Google PR, domain and content age and backlinks. This should be a bit of help to those who need to quickly evaluate the blog power. Users are rated based on their social media activity. This metric should reflect the estimated ability of the user to help promote the posted content. The service is still in beta, I am constantly looking for feedback to try to improve it; so more features might be added soon! I do hope the place will turn useful for those who are interested in guest posting and I am going to keep it free and free of any self-promotion. This is a guest post by Ann Smarty. Ann is an Expert SEO blogger who manages http://www.searchenginejournal.com/ Do You Have 4 Minutes? Than Allow me to give you Secure, Web 2.0 Enabled, Search Engine Optimized, Cash Sucking WordPress Blog! Create a Blog in 4 Minutes (Video Proof) . Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation Related posts Your Blog As A Core Content For Email Marketing (19) You Are Not Ignored (1) WordPress Web 2.0 Guide Looking For Guest Bloggers (10) WordPress Security Guide (4) WordPress Howto Spotter Gets Facelift, Do You Like It? (23) WordPress Forums Plugins To Build Community (30)

Here I go again! Talking about Fighting Comment SPAM on the blog and how to deal with never-ending stream of attempts to sneak one in! But this time I want to discuss something that I have seen increase lately, maybe just on my blog but still quite annoying: Foreign Language Comment Spam Because of the plugins I have already implemented on my blog – automated comment spam is non-existent but I still get a few comments, manually submitted that need my attention, evaluation and finally determination if they should be approved. WORD OF WARNING TO SPAMMERS: I can click “SPAM” button a lot faster than you can type your comment! But I have to admit, when a comment comes from someone not native English Speaking and links back to a NON-English site – it is sometimes not very obvious if it is spam or valid comment by someone who doesn’t have a solid grasp of English. Here is latest example… First of all – I want to be fair to all commenters on my blog! I want to approve your comment and give you benefit of a backlink, even if your language is not perfect (god knows my own English desires improvements too). And I even approve some comments by accident, since it looks like a VALID comment and even calls me by name – see below: And quite frankly that Name got me confused at first because it IS NOT a site name, which is often used by these type of spammers. In most cases it would have probably made it through, since on first glance it seems like valid comment but unfortunately for that person I had a bit of time to investigate and eventually send this comment to SPAM! And here is why… When I visited the URL provided by commenter – nothing obvious jumped at me and only my curiosity forced me to look a bit more. Interestingly, even without understanding the word, I found that it is one keyword that site is optimized for – see image below: Hello Mister Spammer! Click Goes The “SPAM” Button! Was it worth the time I spent on it? To me it was, but I would appreciate your thoughts and ideas on this topic! Related Comment Spam Articles Is your site hacked? New Message Center notifications for hacking and abuse (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) Comment spam: using Backtype to spot it (malcolmcoles.co.uk) Hard facts about comment spam (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) Open Letter to Blog Comment Spammers (socialmediatoday.com) How Blog Spam Works (joetech.com) FREE DVD! Ultimate Video Guide to a Complete WordPress Security as my gift to you! Secure Your WordPress Blog Now! Absolutely FREE!. Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation Related posts Your Blog As A Core Content For Email Marketing (19) Write Blog Headlines To Explode Article Views And Create Stampede Of Targeted Traffic (11) Write Better With After The Deadline (10) WPAffiliate As A Bloggers Weapon For Higher Profits (4) WordPress Wish List (8) Wordpress Web-Design for Web 2.0 (22)

This is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh. Stacey is from the UK and works in online marketing for Tecmark: SEO London Earning from your blog will always depend on getting people to that blog and then getting those people to take the action required – whether that is to click on an affiliate link or an ad or something else completely. But it all starts with generating traffic. So where you can market your blog online for free? Technorati At one point, Technorati was pretty much the only decent blog search engine, of sorts. Of course we now have the comprehensive Google Blog Search, but Technorati.com remains an excellent blog directory and one you should definitely be listed in. Twitter How could we mention traffic generation for blogs without talking Twitter? The micro-blogging platform has huge traffic generation potential for bloggers. However, it’s not all about just registering and posting links. You need followers and you will only get those by posting relevant material, by networking with people in similar areas and with similar niches and by learning about the platform. Don’t assume you can just register and paste links. You should really take time to see what other people in a similar niche are doing on Twitter and begin to network. On Blogs Belonging to Others Guest posting! This is a great way not only to get some of you written material exposed to a different audience, but also to drive traffic to your own site. Guest posting isn’t as simple as just sending any old article through to a blogger though. Successful guest posting comes from learning more about your target blog. Read it! Read the comments from the other readers to get an idea of the material they are interested in reading and write up a UNIQUE article tailored just to that blog. Why should a blogger run your material if you cannot be bothered to spend the time making sure it’s relevant? Getting this right is a great way of driving traffic and again of networking with other bloggers in a similar area. These are just three ways of almost countless means of marketing a blog online. Social Media is hugely important in traffic generation to blogs now. But generating traffic is only the beginning. There’s little point in getting traffic if the content on your blog isn’t of a high enough quality to keep them coming back! So, before you begin marketing, it’s worth making sure that everything on your blog is in exactly the shape you want it to be and offers something of quality to your readers. Related posts Your Blog As A Core Content For Email Marketing (19) You Are Not Ignored (1) WordPress Web 2.0 Guide Looking For Guest Bloggers (10) WordPress Security Guide (4) WordPress Howto Spotter Gets Facelift, Do You Like It? (23) WordPress Forums Plugins To Build Community (30)

I love Internet for providing us with wealth of resources that help us develop better blogs and as result gain more or achieve our goals faster. But finding tools you can use and understand what exactly they are telling you can be challenging. In this post I want to share 3 webmaster tools that will help you improve your blog performance and do my best to explain what they should be used for. Let’s dig-in… 1. Is My Blog Working? I loved the concept behind this one small, nifty tool – http://ismyblogworking.com . Alone with providing some important details at the very top, such as availability or robots.txt and feed and presented me with list of potential problems. I have shown with arrows that my server is not compiled to do gzip compression of the pages and as result pages are uncompressed with size of 45,044 bytes that takes an average of 469 ms to download. While I’m fully aware of info provided above as gzip disabled for very specific reason on my server – for many of bloggers it might come as surprize and enabling it via plugins will greatly improve your visitor’s experience! 2. Search Engine Optimization Analysis Tool http://www.seoworkers.com/tools/analyzer.html – while might be not most accurate, this tool will still present you with a lot more details on your blog post SEO aspects then you might have bargained for Please remember that this tool is created for web pages analysis and you shouldn’t attempt to match all parameters to blog post. For example – number of outgoing links for blog post with any number of comments will considerably higher than tool can handle without severe panic! As long as you are aware that some things will not be applicable – it can be quite useful for identifying some issues, such as one I show in image below: 3. Who Is Talking – Social Media Search Tool http://www.whostalkin.com/ – this one is great to learn where your name or your blog URL is mentioned. Unless you are using Google Alerts to identify all the mentions of the above or in fact ANY topic of your choosing – this one works fairly nice. Using it I actually found some looser trying to blast me in comments to some other blog. Obviously disregarded as worthless rubbish that doesn’t deserve more attention that I already given to it but interesting what you can learn! Just enter your blog URL, your name or whatever other options you choose and see who is talking about your blog or perhaps even yourself! Just remember – any tool you find is only as good as how you choose to use it! Happy hunting! Related Performance Related Articles SEOmoz | Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience (seomoz.org) The Critical Mistake that Keeps Bloggers Broke (copyblogger.com) How did you do on the Webmaster Quiz? (googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) Turn Your Opinion Into Ca$h! Get Paid For Your HONEST Opinion…While Letting Other People Do The Selling For You.If You Can Talk, You Can Earn! Get Review Blog System Now! Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation Related posts Your Blog As A Core Content For Email Marketing (19) Write Blog Headlines To Explode Article Views And Create Stampede Of Targeted Traffic (11) Write Better With After The Deadline (10) WPAffiliate As A Bloggers Weapon For Higher Profits (4) WordPress Wish List (8) Wordpress Web-Design for Web 2.0 (22)

Usage of the WordPress plugins on your blog is highly subjective matter since no blog is the same. In fact I always advocate using as few plugins as possible to achieve the results you want and offer functionality you target market expects. But reality is – sometimes we don’t even realize that functionality we are looking for is already implemented by someone and is available in form of simple plugin. And all you are left to do is make decision – Just How Badly You Need This Functionality? While digging through the latest released WordPress plugins in search for one very specific function I was interested in for one of my Niche Blogs – I have run across 5 Plugins that could be used to HUGELY boost your blog success by providing more functionality, not available otherwise. So here they are in No Specific Order: Links Page – Boost Your SEO Links Page plugin is simple in its design and I think one of the perhaps most useful to bloggers, although too often overlooked. Idea is very simple – instead of having your blogroll seen on each and every page of the blog, which some SEO Experts said can damage your SEO – create a Separate Page designed to do one thing and one thing only – show relevant links. Great option for Manual Link Building effort , which nobody have discontinued yet as effective means of SEO boost. Using it as simple as creating a page dedicated to links exchange, add short-code to it and then just build blogroll as you normally would: WordPress Ultimate Toolkit – Boost Your Relevancy Any time you can somehow present to your readers extra content relevant to what they are currently reading, enhance their engagement and participation with your blog – you have a lot higher chance of them coming back to your blog! WordPress Ultimate Toolkit plugin does just that – allows you to give readers access to relevant content depending on what they are reading now, as well as boost Commenters! And while it has more functionality then what is mentioned above – I think it deserves evaluation just on this merit alone. See image below, as it is self-explanatory: As you can see – relevant posts are shown ONLY on single content pages. Great way to present more reading to your visitors! LiveHelpNow Help Desk – Boost Your Reader Engagement LiveHelpNow Help Desk is actually a full suite of tools that allows you to integrate a full-fledged support system into your blog. I think it can become a major separator from competition if you choose to offer this type of support to your readers and visitors. While it might not be applicable for every type of blog – it should do wonders for people who are into Coaching, Mentoring, Network Marketing to boost authority status and increase number of leads! Static Feed – Boost Your RSS Load Speed Static Feed plugin is not for everyone and will not work on hosts that have mode gzip disabled but if you host support it – you can gain some speed on page load, RSS and XML feed page load that is as unnecessary queries to database are removed. Think of this plugin as WP-Super Cache for your RSS RSS No More – Boost Your RSS Interaction I always prefer to display a Full RSS Feed from my blog, meaning that entire content from each of my blog posts is made available to my readers. I believe that readers who choose to sign up for my feed do so to take advantage of convenience it provides and I don’t mind if they don’t have to visit my blog to read full post. Opinions on this subject split pretty much down the middle and many prominent bloggers don’t allow Full RSS Feed in order to have you coming back to the blog every time. I think RSS No More plugin allows to somewhat bridge the 2 and while providing only partial feed – it cuts off the content display at same place where you placed “MORE” tag, making your RSS Feed similar to your blog home page. It basically gives more content to a person to allow him or her make more educated decision on whether visit to blog is needed to read the rest than “castrated feed” provided by WordPress when you choose to show excerpts. Once again – this is just my opinion but this plugin CAN BE helpful to you. Related articles 9 More Essential WordPress Plugins (kevinworthington.com) -Podcasting Options for WordPress (bloggingministry.com) How To Get More Traffic To Your Blog By Getting Rid Of Bloat (howtospoter.com) FREE DVD! Ultimate Video Guide to a Complete WordPress Security as my gift to you! Secure Your WordPress Blog Now! Absolutely FREE!. Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation Readers who read this page, also read: WordPress 2.5 Is Coming Related posts WordPress Plugins You Need To See (16) WordPress Guide – Installing Plugins And Themes (3) WordPress Caching (14) WordPress and Twitter Integration Guide (37) WordPress 2.9 Upgrade And Simple Tags Solution (43) What Is In Your Blog Pantry? (2)

WordPress 2.9.2 was quietly introduced last night to the community as an upgrade option and as always creates the question – should you upgrade to latest version or not? I upgrade my blog with no issue but before you choose to do so I recommend you read the release notes. It is a fix for a bug that becomes apparent only on blogs with multiple users and ONLY if you trash posts that you don’t want others to see. If that fits your blog description and you don’t want others to be able to dig through your “Trash” then upgrade is an easy decision but knowing that new release is probably not too far off – it is not mandatory upgrade. But on side note – it didn’t introduce any issues and with new, Automated Upgrade options we have under Tools-> Upgrade , I don’t see why Not To Upgrade! Worry FREE Niche Content Each and Every Month! For Less Than A Price Of Pizza, You Get Over 300 Brand-New, Top Shelf Blog Posts Each Month… Without Having To Write A Single Word … Get PLR Content Super Cheap here! Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation

Getting targeted traffic to your Niche Blog or a Sales page is one of the most hardest things and all of us strive to achieve best results. What if you could serve relevant ads in Gmail? While people reading an email from friend or industry related newsletter and have your ad provide them with an answer? I have recently purchased a quick video tutorial product from Ryan Deiss where he teaches how to do “mind reading” and ad serving at the exact time people have a problem in their mind but obviously I can’t share details. What I can do is provide a video tutorial available on Youtube that teaches you how to advertise directly on Google Gmail! See if it works for you… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NItbmssVqoY Turn Yoyur Opinion Into Ca$h! Get Paid For Your HONEST Opinion…While Letting Other People Do The Selling For You.If You Can Talk, You Can Earn! Get Review Blog System Now! Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation Related posts Why Do You Hate Me? … A Question For Google (7) What Does BUM Marketing Have To Do With Blogging? (7) Traffic Secrets 2.0 Videos (1) Latest On Google Algorithm Change (15) It’s All About Traffic You Need Desperately (13) Increase Targeted Website Traffic With SEO Articles (24)

2010 Winter storm hit South East, specifically Virginia Beach with a very expected consequences: Public school system shut down and my son got himself extra couple days off (so far..) Entire region in panic mode Roads are horrible since nobody is ever prepared for the snow But perhaps best of all and my favorite – people got to enjoy the snow! It will be a short lived fun for sure since the temperatures are already going into plus category and snow will melt – right now it is a blast for kids! Here are a few pictures I took right outside the house… 1. That is me caught by my wife while getting some of the snow off the driveway, right in the middle of the first day with snow storm still going… 2. A rare view of the street cover in snow: This is the first time we got so much snow since 2004 when we had a similar storm and last time it lasted couple weeks. I wonder how long it will be this time… I do know one thing for sure – my kids LOVE the opportunity to play in the snow and little one seeing the snow for the first time. Got your own story? Share! FREE DVD! Ultimate Video Guide to a Complete WordPress Security as my gift to you! Secure Your WordPress Blog Now! Absolutely FREE!. Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation Related posts WordPress Web 2.0 Guide (120) What You Should Know About How to be Your Own Investor (0) What Impact “Grandma Factor” Has On Your Business? (0) Web 2.0 Wealth Made The News! (3) Vacation At Home – Do You Take Those? (12) Technical Issues (1)

This might sound strange coming from me, considering that I make my online living taking full advantage of the capabilities offered by WordPress and yet, here is my statement: You Should NEVER Use WordPress For Membership Management! On last webinar for Expert WordPress members I have shared this opinion and received quite a feedback, which is greatly appreciated. I know that my statement goes against what many other people are currently teaching but I have very good reasons! Reasons I will share in this blog post and let you decide if my opinion makes sense or not, it is YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS after all! First allow me to repeat the obvious… I love WordPress and I think as Content Management System it simply has no equals when it comes to functionality, simplicity, extendability and customization options! WordPress, thanks to its modular design and huge support by community, developers and designers has a solution that can be applied to pretty much any kind of need to present content! WordPress is constantly developing and enhanced in functionality, new plugins to extend its ability are introduced, mostly free and some are with a price tag and this is one of the reasons I will recommend to anyone reading this post Do Not Use WordPress For Paid Memberships Anytime we use paid membership, we build business. Business that we rely on to provide us with a steady flow of income we can depend on and build upon. But as part of running a membership business model we commit to our customers to provide them with secure access to our site and to ensure their private information stored within our membership system doesn’t get into hands of hackers! We Are Obligated To Do All In Our Power To Protect Our Customers! And here is why I think WordPress is a bad fit for this model… Membership Management functionality currently provided to WordPress via several plugins. Some are commercial and some are free but it doesn’t matter which one you will choose to use as they all share one big flaw – their dependency on the core of WordPress! By themselves they will not function and same goes the WordPress core – without one of these plugins you can’t have paid membership! This is fact #1! WordPress is constantly evolving and new versions are released that sometimes make plugins incompatible with latest version and you either have to wait upgrading to latest WordPress core version until plugin is updated to be fully operational with it or you have to look for new plugin to replace functionality, especially true with free plugins. This is fact #2. WordPress is Open Source and its code is constantly under scrutiny not only by the good guys but also by people who are looking for a way to compromise your site. If you have been blogging for a while I’m sure you have seen those WordPress security releases that simply HAVE TO BE doneASAP in order to avoid being hacked, as exploit is in the wild and actively used by bad guys. This is fact #3 Now imagine this scenario: You have a WordPress blog used to manage membership system. You have several hundred customers paying on monthly bases (or whatever schedule you use). As any WordPress blog you have several plugins to add functionality for SEO at the very least and obviously at least one plugin that is responsible for turning your blog into membership system. Now imagine that WordPress core team just released a security upgrade that have to be applied ASAP or your blog can be compromised and hacker can take control over every aspect of it, including FULL ACCESS to your customers information. You quickly contact support of the developer who created the plugin you use for Membership Management before jumping into upgrade, as you have to ensure that it will continue to work with new version only to learn that he is taking romantic vacation on secluded island somewhere in Fiji and will not be back for next couple weeks… What Do You Do? Do you upgrade the WordPress core, as you should, to protect your blog and your customer data and risk that your membership management portion stops working and no support for it will be available for a while? Or do you continue using insecure version of the blog praying that it doesn’t become a target for attack until plugin is compatible with it, as you simply can’t afford loosing income? What if you actually did what you should and have upgraded and your membership plugin is now broken, your customer support swamped with complains from customers and you know that you will not be able to fix the problem for next 2 weeks, while developer enjoying the vacation? Which scenario fits you better? I know those are some extreme scenarios but not uncommon! I know there are always solution to any problem and you can actually outsource fixing the plugin in scenario above but I personally prefer that my membership script is separate and with dedicated support! If you are planning to start membership site I highly recommend you avoid doing it with WordPress! There are plenty of scripts that will provide you with all the functionality you need – securely and safely! I personally use and recommend either Launch Formula Marketing or Easy Member Pro . Each one is great at what it does and comes at different price points. EMP is actually one that would be great fit for many! Do You Have 4 Minutes? Than Allow me to give you Secure, Web 2.0 Enabled, Search Engine Optimized, Cash Sucking WordPress Blog! Create a Blog in 4 Minutes (Video Proof) . Copyright WordPress Guides Blog . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report violation Copyright WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-Er . All rights reserved. If reading this content on site other then origination blog – it was stolen and publisher is in direct violation of copyrights. Please report Related posts WordPress Security Presentation (6) WordPress Security (15) WordPress 2.8.6 And Your Responcibilities (14) WordPress 2.2.1 – Why You Have to Upgrade Now (1) Triple “P” Of Total WordPress Security (81) 5 Steps To Practical WordPress Security (34)

After receiving a few emails through contact form I figured I better write a quick post on Why I haven’t posted in a while. No! I do not plan to retire and I have every intention to continue providing information, same as I did before. Reason for my absence and lack of posting is very simple… I put my house on the market right before the Christmas, got it under contract right after New Year and now I’m quite busy dealing with all the things that has to be done since house was FSBO and I’m responsible for handling the seller part. Not to mention that I still don’t have a place to move my family to Needless to say that my wife is slightly anxious and I spend a lot of time looking at properties and concentrating on family but I will be back in full swing once the dust settles. Thank you everyone for the emails! I promise – I’ll Be back! Related posts WordPress Web 2.0 Guide (118) What You Should Know About How to be Your Own Investor (0) What Impact “Grandma Factor” Has On Your Business? (0) Web 2.0 Wealth Made The News! (3) Vacation At Home – Do You Take Those? (12) Technical Issues (1)