The art of coming up with great content

Last time, I talked about setting up your WordPress blog. If you missed it, you can find it here.  I have  also talked a little about the importance of positioning yourself as an expert in your blog posts, here. 

In this article, I am going to talk about the next step in creating your blog, your content. Read the rest of this entry

Make money from home with the Essential WordPress Plugins

If you ever talk to me, you may discover that I am a huge fan of WordPress. When marketing your home based business or any business you need to create a web prescence. WP is so easy, yet, flexible. It’s so easy, it’s almost like using a word processor like MS Word.

Anyway, often I help a lot of people get started with their blogs and the topic of plugins comes up.

BTW, a plugin is just a piece of software that adds functionality to your blog. Think of them kind of like the options on your car. You buy a basic car and then you add the options like heated seats, power mirrors, backup camera, etc. The basic car is just like all the rest of the cars, but the options extend the functionality.

When I help these people with their blogs, I often have to send them a list of what I call the essential plugins. So, instead of sending them out each time, I have decided to post them here with links:

1. All in One SEO Pack – this is probably the most essential one of all. When I first got it, I did not understand how to use it. However, there is a great video right on their webpage that explains how to use it.
2. Site Stats - WP plugin that give you basic stats on the number of visitors you are getting
3. Embed it – allows you to easily embed HTML code right into your pages. I find it useful when adding signup forms from autoresponder services to my pages/
4. Exclude Pages from Navigation – behind the scenes (so to speak), I have several pages that function as sales landing pages. I don’t want those pages showing up in my user menus. This plugin lets me exclude them.
5. Google Website Optimizer – this plugin allows you to conduct split tests on your website. For the newbie, a split test will let you put up two pages that are similar, but may have something slightly different about them. You may have one color banner on one and another color on another. Or perhaps, one word is slightly different on one page vs. the other. You just run some traffic by both pages and see which one performs best.
6. Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog.
7. MaxBlog Ping Optimizer – Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin.
8. Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
9. WP Stats Dashboard – puts your site stats up on your Dashboard.

These are not all that I use, but are the essential ones. If you need help installing them, I found this video for you.Installing WordPress Plugins