Well, Wordpress 3.0 is official out and I’ve held my breath for a while on it until I got over the initial birthing pains.

You see, I’ve been in the computer business for some time and I really do avoid major updates to any software. I prefer others to run ahead and ‘test the waters’ so to speak. This way, they can initially iron out the major bugs and I can reap the benefits.

It may sound a bit selfish, but experience tells me that this is the best way. As it turns out, there were a couple of troubles that came out of the word work after release. Nothing earth shattering, so I give my congrats to the hard working Wordpress coding team!

I’ve begun to work with Wordpress 3.0. Nothing dramatic, mainly just using it on some of my online Amazon store fronts to see if there are any conflicts with any of my plugins.

For the moment, I’ve just encountered a couple of code burps – nothing to panic about. I have noticed that Wordpress 3.0 is just a speedy as 2.9.2, which sometimes is not the cause. I’m also glad of the further cleanup on the interface.

Some things in the Administration Dashboard were in kind of the wrong places and the folks at Wordpress have definitely seen to fixing this small shortcomings. I’ve yet to try to get it working with Thesis, as I’m sure you’ve heard that there are issues.

Other themes like the Headway theme, seems to work pretty well. The menuing system (a sorrily needed thing) new in Wordpress 3.0 is not compatible with Headway, but Headway is already got a pretty nice menuing system in place, so no loss.

I’ve also begun to write dedicated themes and plugins and will see how well things pan out in that realm as well. I’ll be sure to keep you up to date on that if I encounter any noticable changes.

Otherwise, I’m pleased to say that the Wordpress 3.0 is pretty much like 2.9.2 with one noticable exception. The integration of the mu code into the platform.

I’ve done some reading regarding multi-site setups, especially with multiple domain names. That to me, is very exciting. If this works well, it will definitely be a big time saver. Imagine administrating over 300 domains, each with it’s own install.

Right now, I’ve had to depend upon writing automated tools to perform things like updates to the installs. This can be hit and miss at times, but a tremendous time saver. Now imagine running 20 domains on the same Cpanel account on ONE wordpress install.

This literally could reduce my workload to 1/20th. That is staggering as right now it can take months for me to get back to a blog and make some changes. Again, I’ll definitely post my failures and successes as I battle that one out.

Well, all in all, I take my hat off to the Wordpress team. Great update for sure! Be sure to post what you’ve found about Wordpress 3.0 below in the comments!

I recently had a funny thing happen to me about two weeks ago that involved WordPress and my wife. You see, having someone in the house that understands wordpress is just too handy to let go by. So, she had me setup a site for her and she has started to blog in earnest!

But it didn’t take long for her to run into troubles. She is running a slightly older laptop that is running Vista with just enough ram to say that she has a computer. Whenever she fires up her WordPress site and goes into the administrative back end, her browser window locks up.

Believe me, it had me stratching my head just for a few moments. I’ve been administering well over 300 blog installs for the past two years and this has never happened to me.

With investigation, I could only come up with the fact that the javascript on the page was just bogging down vista too much. Fortunately the fix is pretty simple too.

It was just a matter of performing a ’Turbo’ install. You’ll find the turbo application in your administration panel at the top right hand corner.

It’s literally the matter of clicking on Turbo and then selecting the ‘Turbo:Speed up WordPress’ install now button. Follow through with the install and quickly reboot your computer.

Now, my darling wife is very happy to blog to her heart’s content. With the local cached copy of page elements right on her computer, everything clicks along as it should.

After performing on her computer, I did the same to mine. I did notice a small difference in speed, but my pc has more ram and isn’t running Vista.

So, I hope that this very quick tip helps you with your Wordpress slowdown problems, if you are having them!

’sDo you remember way back when in the 1980’s when Billy Crystal used to say “You look mahvelous” on Saturday Night Live®? Take a peek at the video below for a refresher:

It’s certainly a cute parody but there’s a serious side to this idea too.

Did you know that you could be hurting yourself more then you realize by a poor looking site? Let’s just say that the 90’s just don’t cut it any more when it comes to web site design. The average web surfer has become a very savvy surfer and expects to surf to sites that look, as Billy would say, mahvelous.

With Wordpress, you can definitely shortcut your web development time greatly by using pre designed themes that plug right into Wordpress. Now, themes define the look and feel of your site.

Consider a theme that gives your site the professional look that you are looking for and fits the actual theme of the web site itself.

I always start my hunt for a good wordpress theme right on wordpress.org. Many of these themes are completely free, but don’t let the low price fool you. There’s some very nice themes in there.

But there’s a lot of trash too. Always analyze the theme you decide upon and make sure that there is not encryped or hidden code in the theme. I once downloaded a free theme that contained an encrypted header.

After running the theme for a few moments, I found out why. The header is loaded with hidden links back to the authors site! Great for the author and terrible for me!

I’d also recommend that you check out some of the pay for theme’s too. If you are looking for a general purpose theme that you can do a lot with, consider the Thesis theme. Now, this theme isn’t for newbies. I’d recommend a bit of experience with Wordpress before using it, but it’s a great theme. I run this theme here on this site, with modification. And that’s why thesis is so great. Consider it more a framework and less a theme.

Also another great source for themes is Themes Forest. Actually this site has become one of my favorite hunting grounds to find progressive, modern and sexy themes for Wordpress. I’d recommend you take a peek there too.

But why the bother? Why not just use plain Jane? Doesn’t content matter at all? Yes content is very important, but consider your web site a gift.

If you were to receive 10 gifts and you were told to open them up. Within a split second, you’d probably choose the prettiest wrapped gift of the bunch to start. Why?

You don’t know what’s in the gifts? You are automatically making a judgement call on ‘value‘ of the gift on it’s wrappings.

You and I and everyone who surfs the web does exactly the same thing. If you don’t capture the attention of your web surfer in under 5 seconds, you’ve lost them to someone else. And you may have had the exact information that they were looking for!

As you can see the wrapping on the gift is probably more important then the gift, in the first 5 seconds.

The moral of the story? Make sure you have great content, but when someone comes to your site, their first thought should be “Baby, You Look Mahvelous“!

Looking for more resources on themes?

• Check out Anatomy of a Wordpress Theme
• Graph Paper Press is putting  Multimedia theme- lots of jquery – sounds cool!
• Authors! 8 Tips For Your Website’s Usability and Design
• 100+ Resources for WordPress Theme Developers

When considering a web site, definitely give WordPress a try. There is tons to be gained from it. But there are pitfalls you should know about it too.

Let’s just take a moment to analyze what you should watch out for before looking at what makes WordPress a great choice.

First, WordPress is a complex system to run a web site upon. This sophistication comes at a price. WordPress is much more hackable then a static web site. Fortunately, protecting your administration directories in WordPress can protect you against about 95% of all hacks.

Next, there is a lot of ways to setup WordPress. What plugins should you use? What theme is the right theme? What’s a theme? Oh boy. But these are things you need to consider before using WordPress.

Personally, it took me about two years of use to really get a hang of successful WordPress installs. This included well over 300 site installs and fixing dozens of other people’s installs in the process.

Think of WordPress as the Mustang of web sites. Press the pedal too hard and you will find over 300 hp of raw power crashing you into another car.

What’s the good of WordPress. If you know how to properly drive this powerful web site engine, it can be a very potent ally to your quest to get ranked by the search engines.

Personally, I find that I can dominate a niche over time for many keyword phrases with very little outside backlinking.

If you are incline to learn WordPress and you are willing to establish many web sites with WordPress, then you can definitely do very well with WordPress, generating a secondary income.

In my opinion this can be accomplished very quickly with very little expense on your behalf. This investment into your future, learning how to flex WordPress, can pay you back very well indeed.

Learning WordPress doesn’t have to be too hard. It is a complex system, but stick to it and over time, you’ll find that you too can become a WordPress expert!

Well life has some funny twists. In the search for ways to automate functions that I perform on the web, I’ve come across a great piece of software called Ubot Studio.

It’s a really powerful piece of software that I’ve used to create some pretty complex automated tasks. One of the bots that I’m working on right now is a bot that can handle submitting to a random set of article directories.

What makes this different to other article submitters, is that this will submit to several types of article directories. Many will only submit to article friendly sites or article dashboard sites. Plus, I’ve hand picked the sites that are submitted to and so far it works pretty good!

Next, I’ll be creating a bot that will then submit spun articles to web 2.0 properties like Squidoo and the such.

So, very interesting indeed. But as I mentioned in the first paragraph, life has some funny twists. With all the bot creation that I’ve been doing, I’ve gotten pretty proficient at using UBot Studio and have had others ask me to creat bots for them!

It’s normally not cheap to do, as its custom work, but I believe that it can save a lot of money in the long run!

Here’s a sample bot for you to download for your use. It’s a simple bot that queries the goDaddy® web site and checks to see if keywords that you have are available as a .com, .net or .org domain name. The bot will complete by inserting the keywords into a file called godaddy.txt in the same directory that you put the bot. If it doesn’t find any keywords, it will not write a file.

So, to use this bot:

1. Download it from here: Sample UBot Keyword to Domain Name Hunter
2. You will insert your keywords. They can be comma seperated or one keyword per line. The bot will handle either.
3. Next, you’ll click the play button.
4. Sit back and wait a few moments until you see this web page displayed in the bot. If you have found keywords that you can register, congratulations! The bot will write the godaddy.txt file for you. You can then resubmit them to goDaddy for registration.

So, what are you interested in automating with your web businesses? I’ll be offering some bots that are centered around WordPress related tasks here, but the sky really is the limit. If you can do it in Internet Explorer, then you can pretty much automate it!

Drop me a line if you are interesting in automated your life!

It’s hard to believe that already a year has flown by here at usingwp.com! The first post was written exactly on the 20th of March 2009.

Things have changed quite a bit here on usingwp.com too. When I started this blog, I thought that I would make it very techie like, but as time marched on, I found that my readers enjoyed a blog that was more informative then techie.

Sure there is some technical things mentioned but overall, the site talks about general use of WordPress and topics that surround these ends.

But here’s a bit of a highlight of some of the articles that appeared here over the past year:

• March 22, 2009 – Best Free Wordpress Plugins
• March 24, 2009 – Best Commercial Wordpress Plugins
• April16, 2009 – Search Engine Web Marketing
• April 22, 2009 – Free Wordpress Plugins
• May 1, 2009 – Monetize Your Blog
• May 5, 2009 – Why WordPress Sucks
• June 12, 2009 – Dealing with Wordpress and the robots.txt file
• July 7, 2009 – Secure Wordpress From Hackers
• July 7, 2009 – Cash Cow Guide To Adsense Wealth Review
• July 24, 2009 – Thesis Theme Review
• July 28, 2009 – Dropshipping and Wordpress

I know that this is a short post this week, but there’s plenty to read in the posts mentioned in this post. I’ll be picking up the year in review in the next post.

As always, I’m interested in hearing your comments!

If you are looking for part one to this article, you can find it here: How To Get Those Articles Done!

WordPress To The Rescue

If you get really stuck, use some of the features of WordPress. One thing that occurs as you write articles with WordPress is that they will slowly but surely get buried as they get older and older.

Take a moment to reflex upon your comments once per month and one per year and write a post that links to and takes about the posts that you made in the previous month(s).

Not only will it make your life a bit easier and offer you direction for the future, but your readers will love it too, I’m sure.

With that said, make sure you understand how to use your website engine to search for and revitalize your posts. I went to search for something today and discovered that I’ve never put a search box on this site. Well, it took me 10 seconds to correct that problem!

Finally, when it comes to using WordPress, learn the shortcut keys when creating posts. It really does save time.

Don’t Eat The Whole Elephant

One point made by a reader was the idea of trying to write  365 articles back to back for a web site. In one word, DON’T!

Never try to write all the articles that you need for your web site in a three day gruelling marathon. Two things happen.

First, you’ll hate the site by the end of day three. Second, your information can easily become dated. You don’t want to write articles that may be very relevant today and in nine months, are totally irrelevant.

My recommendation is to sit and write two or three articles at a time. For instance, this article is article two of a three article batch that I’m writing for this site. Using WordPress, I can write the articles and then schedule them to occur over the next week or so.

This is the way to write articles! You’ll find that you will spend normally no more then 30-45 minutes and you have all the content that you need for your site done till next week. Even if you run up to 10 blogs, it gets pretty easy to get the content done. Just choose one or two blogs per day to write on and get it done!

Getting Help

Next, never think that you are an island on your own. Some of the best articles I’ve gotten for sites is from other readers and contract writers.

I run several sites that require fresh content on a regular basis. I don’t think twice. I’ll already hired several great writers that are passionate about the sites that they write upon and deliver fresh and tantalizing content to the readers of those sites.

Second, you may find someone who comes to your site and leave some very interesting and enlightening comments. Why not ask them to write for you on an ongoing basis? How you arrange the deal with this person is your business, but there are plenty of people who will gladly offer up information to be a highlighted writer on your site!

Don’t think it possible? Ask Ezine Articles who writes their content and how much do they pay their writers? (Here’s the quick answer, several 1,000’s and they pay them $0!)

So, I hope that helps you to write the articles you need to write for your site. Coming up is a great article on a tool that I use to build articles in lightening speed, say tuned! And please, leave your comments! I really do enjoy reading them and responding back.

Just recently I had written an article on getting your unique visits up to higher and higher numbers.

To summarize, the number one on site technique was to create more and more original content posts. I had one read make mention that it can be tough to write up to 365 articles in one sitting.

Very good point and I want to offer up some great ideas how to get those articles done so it’s fun and not a chore!

Listen To Your Readers

Probably the number one point is to listen to your readers. Certainly this will take time, and some article written, but I too get stuck when writing and sometimes the best inspiration comes from your readers.

After I had read that comment (thanks Mike!), I had realized that I had assumed way too much when writing that particular article. And I had at least two more articles to get out to fill in the details.

Make Sure You are Interested

Next and probably more important, make sure that you are interested in the content that you are writing. It’s tough to write on a topic that does not interest you.

On the other hand, you can normally have way too much to say on a topic that interests you. Some of my most successful sites consist of information that is very much of interest to me.

Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mention of Other Sites

If you are interested in the topic that you write upon, you too will be looking for more information all the time too.

If you come across someone else’s post that you found particularly great, don’t be afraid to write a summarization of your thoughts on the post and link to the post you liked.

Three things then happen. First, you have gotten your post done. Second, you’ve given recognition to another with the same interests. Finally, you will create a pingback to the article that could give you a valuable backlink!

If you are linking to someone else’s work and made comment on it, they will be very grateful and will more then likely give you a pingback for it! These are the comments we all like the very most.

Find Automation Tools

A great tool to use to collect information on your topic of interest is called Google alerts. I’d recommend that you take a bit of time and discover the dynamics of this great tool to locate information on the topics that are of interest to you.

In a nutshell, Google is the 800lb gorilla of the world wide web and whenever it sees new information that fits an alert you’ve created, it will send you that alarm to tell you of it.

So, instead of having to search all the time for timely info, it comes to you!

Next, if you will be writing a lot of posts, you should consider some voice dictation software. This will permit you to write as fast as you think! (More coming up on this topic soon!)

Stay tuned for part two of ‘How To Get Those Articles Done!’.

There’s quite a bit of hype in regards to the feature of multiblogs within one installation of Wordpress. This has been a feature of WordPress mu, the cousin of WordPress.

It’s actually been stated on several other sites that this a code merging between the two platforms. I’m not sure I’m too pleased about this, just yet.

Why? Well, I’ve worked with the wordpress mu code quite extensively and found many (did I say many) shortcomings to the code base.

Security Issues

In the forefront we can talk about security. WordPress natural has it’s security issues which can be overcome, but WordPress mu is a nightmare in comparison.

I run a BuddyPress site that uses the mu version of WordPress as it’s core and trying to secure it is impossible. I had a run in with an automated spammer that continued to generate new accounts, even after I turned off new account generation in the settings!

Now, I’ve read plenty of articles that talked about manually changing the core code to ‘fix’ the issue, but that to me is not a fix. Whenever you have to alter the core code of WordPress, you are asking for future problems. One update and all of your changes could very well be gone.

Also, you are moving into no-man’s land. If you are altering core files, you may also break many plugin and themes.

Spammers Ahoy!

Also the code base of WordPress mu seems to scream ’spammers ahoy’! Time and time again, I’m finding it close to impossible to control content created by spammers.

First, when a new person registers, it will gladly send you an email with the IP address listed. But nowhere within the control panel of WordPress mu is the IP address listed, or is searchable. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see all the accounts created by a single IP address? Hmmm.

Next, if you wish to search across multiple blogs that were installed with WordPress mu, you simply can’t. No functionality is there for this critical function.

The search, sort and action functionality is completely inadequate in WordPress mu right now. Sorry, but that’s the truth.

But Am I Blowing Things Out of Proportion?

I’ve sorrily discovered that 1 (just 1) spammer can create several hundred accounts and 1,000’s spam blogs overnight! That’s just one spammer.

I recently had to spend 3 – 10 hour days to clear out spam from a Wordpress mu install and found that I only cleared out maybe a week’s worth!

Maybe I’m spouting off where there is no need to and maybe I’m just a tad ungrateful. But there have been many posts about this very issue within the WordPress mu and BuddyPress forums on this very topic.

In my opinion, it just doesn’t seem to be too much of an issue to the developers. Again, I haven’t seen what is coming out, but this is a big problem if things are placed as they currently are.

So, first off, sorry to the developers who are working hard on this, but please listen to the users. Security and spammers are a huge problem within WordPress mu and I’d hate to see it become a general WordPress problem.

It could mean the end of what we currently enjoy with WordPress.

Ok, I’m off of my soap box.

Nothing will help you make more money then increasing the amount of unique visitors who visit your site each and every day.

I’ve been privileged to see the strong effects that can occur when you can see thousands of visitors to your site each and every day.

Yes, it is possible! The most that I’ve seen to any one site was 4,000 unique visitors per day. This was a standard niche blog too, not CNN.

But how do you go about building your unique visits list? There are several things that are required but today I’m going to touch upon one that is critically important.

You need to continuously increase the number of posts that you have on your website. The more content that can be indexed and ranked by the search engines, the more the traffic you will obtain.

But as like other things, there are some very important rules for you to follow in regards to this.

1. Original Content

If you want to waste your time, please purchase an automated scraping tool that will scrape other sources and just post it to your website.

You may have mixed luck here, but I personally have had very little luck. I’ve tried several.

But there is one exception to the rule. If a majority of your content is original, you can slip in some duplicate content here and there. But it’s the exception and not the rule.

2. Re-Write PLR or Scraped Content

Now, you can repurpose content if and only if you take a few minutes to rewrite that content. It doesn’t have to be completely redone. I’ve used some excellent spinner programs to make content at least 30% original and it has gotten ranked.

But you do have to re-write the content. I performed an experiment where I create about 130 websites only using PLR and scraped content. Over 4,000 pages indexed. What was the result? About 30 unique visitors per day. Truly not worth it.

3. Use A Combination of Keyword Research and Natural Writing

Do use your keyword research to write focused keyworded articles.

But also take the time to let the artist in you write a masterpiece without worry about keywords. I’ve found that I’ve gotten ranked well for keywords that I’d never had thought of in articles that were relevant topics but no keyword research. And some of the most commented too!

4. Allow commenting

Do allow others to comment on your articles. Every time someone provides a clean comment they’ve contributed to your pocketbook!

Do moderate spammy comment too. Spammy comments do nothing but drag your bog and your rankings down.

5. For Goodness Sake, Make It Interesting!

There is no proof to this, but if you can get your readers engaged with relevant and interesting content, then they will read more! The more that they read, the more they will trust you and want to read more! Heck, they may even bookmark your site and come back again and again!

6. Write As Many Posts as You Can!

Make it a yearly goal to write one post per day. If you can do it, write two per day. Now, you don’t have to make each and every one a perfect work of art, but do work to make it interesting. If you want your site to get to 1,000’s per day, you need to do this! This is critical!

At the very least you will want to post 3 times per week. The more you can post the better. Give the search engines coming back every couple of hours. You will be rewarded in two ways. Very fast rankings. (My record is 7 minutes in spot #1.) You will be apt to get ranked for more keywords per article too.

So, does all of this work? You bet! If there is any one activity, next to backlinking that will help building your unique daily visits is a continous flow of fresh content.

So, what do you think? What are your experience with posting content? Do you agree or disagree? Leave me a comment and tell me what you think!