Posts Tagged ‘Word Press’

Time to talk monetized blogs and social media marketing.

As I am sure you have noticed High Tech Affiliate like many blogs is monetized by advertising revenues and combines both affiliate marketing and PPC Advertising from sources like Google Adsense, Adbrite, and programs like our own Velocity Marketer Hosting and outside programs like It’s Your Net and Viral Networks. We deliver some of thes ads through Slayer’s Ad Integration plugin for Word Press and will explain more on that below.

A blog is a social interactive medium allowing posting, reviews, and comments so readers can engage the author.

Social media marketing is the fastest growing segment in advertising because it allows companies to interact with potential customers and clients in an environment that has the full attention of the website visitor. Let’s face it, advertising on TV is usually lost to bathroom and snack breaks. Radio advertising is losing market share to satelite radio with more selection and less comercials. Magazines still offer some value but online editions are growing in popularity, and news paper advertising is losing ground at record numbers as a slanted media is being replaced by online blogs and community pages.

Fact is that paper in the yard is quickly becoming something only seen in history books as most blogs do not charge a subscription. Here is a little advice to newspaper owners around the globe who wish to stay in business. Offer both online and offline editions free and focus on selling more ads to pay for prinitng and delivery.

A prime example would be here in Yuma Arizona where there are nearly 200,000 year round residents but the main newspaper reaches only around 42,000 homes. The White Sheet is free and reaches twice the market and has roughly 400 times the paid advertisers. Deliver a free newspaper to every home and ad prices can be increased because of the greater circulation, and more advertisers will want to advertise with you.

It’s simple website and blog mentality at it’s best. Give free news and information and attact millions of readers, then charge more for advertising and have advertisers lined up begging to hand you money. Stop shutting down and just learn to work smarter.

On to Slayer’s Ad integrtion.

Slayers is a simple to run advertising insertion plugin for Word Press. You simply take the ad code and drop it into a new ad box, select the number of times it should appear on a page, and select the maximum number of total ads on the page and it will rotate the number of banners and text ads you want on your post and pages for you. Slayer’s accomplishes a great task in taking advertising from the sidebar, reducing the banner farm look, and putting offers directly in front of your readers.

If you are on Word Press version 2.7 or above the import and install of the plugin takes a matter of seconds and within minutes you can have ads in live rotation on your pages and out of that side bar area. Face it free is tough to provide when the cost is time and sometimes requires a lot of promotion and advertising. A blog that is not monetized is hard to come by but a good looking blog with smart advertising is worth a mint, fun to read, and will be around for a long time.

Andy Zeus Anderson

High Tech Affiliate

Wow, Velocity Marketer Hosting gets a major face-lift with a new clean look that shows the power of Word Press a more than just a blog. In fact as we progress we are coming to see Word Press as one of the ultimate CMS or Content Management systems for building not just great blogs but also amazing websites.

Simple to get started a Word Press based website is included in your hosting C-Panel here at Velocity Marketer Hosting as a self installer. It requires that you choose a location, a username and password, and then click install.

Once you are online with it you will need some power tools to get your Search Engine Optimization up to par and to escape the two major drawbacks to a open source solution such as Word Press. One plug-in needed and there are several fine one’s fixes a little glitch in the system that can cause Word Press to send an update to search engines on a page update through what is called a RPC Ping Service. You want your pages and post submitted when new content is added but if you do it every time you find a miss-spelled word you will actually find your site banned by search engines very soon.

The next thing that is a top priority is to activate the Akismet Spam Filter. Face it, any major CMS is a target for SPAM and Word Press is probably one of the most attacked systems because of the number of users. Akismet takes known SPAM and traps it and auto deletes it for you cutting down your time spent moderating comments. I always recommend setting your comments to a minimum setting of hold for moderation when they contain more than 2 links so that admin must approve a comment that is potential SPAM before it becomes live on a website.

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The Benefits of Word Press based Websites.

As you can see I made a quick change in the settings under Reading and have created a page called Home and a page called News. The News page is a blank page used to deliver blog post. This post for example will appear on that page as well as create a stand alone article page on our website. In that reading tab I clicked on the start page preference to use a static page and set the start page to Home and the default post page to News. This turns Word Press from being blog first to being a website with a power blog built in.

From there we can build out pages and set the order we want them to display. If you use the auto installer under plug-ins in the Word Press control panel you can download a wide range of plug ins like All in One SEO Pack and Google Site Map Creator. These two plug-ins are a absolute must for a blog as they allow you to make each page and post search engine friendly and add things like meta tags to them to improve your indexing in the search engines.

Those two plugings can save you hundreds of dollars on SEO in your early days.

SEO or Search Engine Optimization  does not end at the meta tags on your site like Title, Description, and Keywords, but they are the minimum required to get a good page rank and start getting free traffic for your website from the search engines. When you are ready for more talk to us about our Search Engine Optimization services at Velocity Marketer Hosting.

Other Word Press Plugins we like are video perks like Kultura Interactive Video, Smart YouTube Video, Twitter tools, Social Bookmarks, and WP-Polls. These tools all help engage your readers and visitors and allow them to share your website with the masses. Your inside the site will benefit from adding these simple tools and then choosing the theme of your website is the only major task left before actually adding content. With tens of thousands of read made and free themes out there for Word Press choosing a look will have tons of options, there are also great builders to make your own in a snap.

One thing I love about Word Pres based sites is that if you decide to move or replicate your site and content to a different domain name.

Example: You buy mysite.com, .net, and .org and want them to all look like the same site but want them to be able to gain search engine rankings that using a domain redirect just doesn’t allow. You go to the tools section of word press and click the link that says export and save that file, go to the other domain and install Word Press using the one button installer. Upload your chosen theme and set it to active and then go to tools again and select import. Upload the file saved and now you have a perfect mirror to the other site.

What is amazing about this is that using the blog based site is something even some major corporations have done, you get a professional website you can manage with tons of free training, so simple there are 8-10 year old kids with blogs, and the design and script are free with even the cheapest hosting account. Take one look at this site and ask a website designer what they would charge to hand code a site like this and you will find starting prices at around $800 for the first 3 pages and $250-$400 for each additional page, then have to pay a SEO expert to do the search engine optimization on top of it. We did it all ourselves without cost above our hosting account and you can too.

Sign up for a basic hosting account at Velocity Marketer hosting for just $4.99 a month plus domain name and see how simple it is to be online today.

Andy Zeus Anderson