Filtering Comments On Your Blog Is Easy With Akismet

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All WordPress installations come with 2 plugins already installed (though not activated). They are Akismet and Hello Dolly. I always delete the latter one. Hello Dolly is just a novelty for your admin area. I am sure it is very small, but I don't use it so I delete it. The other one is Akismet - I suggest you definitely use this. It's main job is blocking spam comments and although it doesn't catch them all, it does a great job.

Set up is simple:

Navigate to your plugin menu and activate Akismet. You will get a warning saying you need a WordPress API key to use it. This is also simple to get. You have to start an account at Wordpress.Com (free). You don't have to set up a free blog or anything, just an account. Since I was creating an account I made a quick free blog to drop some backlinks to my site, but that is a story for another article. Anyways, once you have a WordPress.com account, you can find the API key in your profile. You can also request a free API key from Akismet.com if you don't want to start a WordPress account. Once you have the key you can use it on multiple sites.

After a fairly simple set up process Akismet will instantly go to work. Using a huge database, Akismet will check all incoming comments and automatically mark the comments that match the database as spam. This will save you a lot of time, because you will be receiving spam not long after your site is up and running. I have sites that haven't even been completed before they were spammed.

Another great feature of Akismet is that it learns, if it is missing spam and you routinely mark those comments as spam it will learn to mark those comments as well. Conversely if it is marking comments as spam, that aren't you can teach it by marking those comments approved. Although I trust Akismet on my blog, I do check the spam comment area to see if it caught anything it shouldn't have. If you are wondering about it's effectiveness - here are the actual numbers from my site since the end of January: 870 Spams caught at an accuracy rating of 99.686%. I am not saying everyone will see those kind of numbers, but that's how well it is working for me. Quite impressive.

Spam comments are going to aggravate you eventually. If you don't have this plugin it will happen sooner than you can imagine. WordPress packages this plugin for a reason - it works. Don't waste your time pouring through spam comments in your email or on your site. Activate Akismet now and thank me later.

Online Marketing Strategies Beyond Compare

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Whether you are are all on your own or you own a big internet business, you will need to find the best online marketing strategy for your business. There are various elements to putting together an effective marketing plan. If you can do it yourself, great, but if you think you need some help hire a company to do the work for you.

There are a lot of issues you need to keep track of in order to have your online business be profitable. Things like creating an effective marketing funnel and choosing the right product or service to sell.

But the one biggest thing you have to do to have a successful online business is to use multiple sources of traffic generation to drive traffic to your website. This traffic will be your customers. No business, online or off, can survive if they don't have plenty of customers.

One of the first things you need to learn is that when it comes to traffic online you will need quantity and quality. For these purposes, quality means finding people who love the product or service that you are selling and who are actually willing to spend money on it.

If you can get enough qualified people to your website it is like shooting fish in a barrel. Putting your offer in front of those people who are looking for your offer is about as easy as it gets.

But how do you get the traffic to your site? With hundreds of various options to use to get traffic which one do you choose to do? For most people starting with some free online traffic generating methods is the best way to go.

Simple things like search engine optimization and article marketing are great ways to get started. They are easy to learn, don't take a lot of time to do and they are free.

As your business progresses it's pretty common to add other forms of traffic generation, some paid and some free. At this point you may also decide that your time is better served elsewhere so you might want to hire a company or individual to do it for you.

It's generally a good idea to have between 3 to 5 different methods that you use to generate traffic. The whole don't put all your eggs in one basket thing. The only problem with this method, especially if you have several sites online that you are promoting, is that keeping tabs on all your promotions can get pretty overwhelming.

That is why hiring a company to take care of the day to day activities associated with it can make your life much easier. True, you will have to pay them and that will cut into your profit margin, but your time is worth something too and the overall cost shouldn't be that much.

So, to sum up: your biggest job online is to get quality traffic to your website so you can make sales. Doing much of the work yourself when you first start to save money then hiring a company to handle your online marketing strategy once you are profitable is an excellent game plan to follow.

Why You Should Use Premium Wordpress Themes

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WordPress is a one of the internet's most popular web publishing platforms. One of the biggest reasons for this are the themes. With WordPress themes you can instantly change the style and look of your website, with literally a click of a button. Another great feature is that many of these themes can be found for free. If you have been using WordPress you have probably done many Google searches for free themes. They are out there and in some cases they are fabulous. What about paid themes though? Have you ever thought of paying for a theme? Would you? I think in the right case, a paid theme makes a lot of sense. What are the benefits? Well here are just a couple...

1. Support: When you are paying for a good WordPress theme you are also paying for support. Any reputable dealer of WP themes will offer support, and most likely in the form of a forum. If you have any issues with your paid theme you can check out the forum and by either searching or asking you will get an answer. The support team will be able to troubleshoot any problems you have with the theme. They will be able to diagnose any plugin conflicts. They may even help you with some custom coding. On a premium theme forum I belonged to, the mods would even give me the exact code I needed to customize my site. You will not get any or much support with a free theme. Certainly not at the level described earlier. For the most part you are on your own. The time saved on troubleshooting alone will be worth the added price in no time.

2. Under The Hood Features: A lot of free themes look great, but they lack the under the hood features of paid themes. Most paid themes will add a settings panel in your WordPress back office that is unique to that theme. These control panels can make tasks like logo upload, favicon upload and other design features a snap. These admin areas will also help you control what is shown on your home page and in any featured posts areas. Sometimes you will even be able to change the color scheme of your premium theme from this area.

3. Removing Attribution: This might not be a huge deal for you, but if you are working for a client it might be to them. Almost all free WordPress themes require you to keep a credit or attribution to them in your footer. It isn't a huge deal but it might mean your footer says something like; "Powered By Apple Green Designs" which is a link to the free theme home page. If you are designing a site for a client, they might not want that. In fact, even if it is your own site you might not want that. Paid themes will usually offer you the chance to get rid of the attribution. In fact some will have an option in their control panel so you can just click it off or replace it simply.

4. Subscription Opportunities: One last bonus I will mention is that many times theme developers will let you pay a cost to access all their premium themes. This way you have access to a lot of really well designed themes. These themes are often geared towards a different use too. There are themes for photographers, tube themes, eShops, real estate etc... Their will be a theme for just about any use you can think of, as well as a wide variety of style choices. These kind of packages are great for the home based web designer.

These four reasons alone might be enough for you to make the change to a paid theme. Free themes have come a long way and they offer some great features and design, but to really kick your site up a notch you might need to make the switch to a premium theme. When you want to take your WordPress site to the next level - think premium.

Essentials of using Gravatar to personalize your blog interaction

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Video: Using Gravatar to personalize your blog interaction

Essentials of Inserting an aweber lead capture form in your WordPress sidebar

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Video: How to insert an aweber lead capture form in your Wordpress sidebar

Is Money Really Being Made On The Net?

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People e-mail me all the time with the question of how to make money online. Although the question itself sounds simple enough, the reality is that without some direction from you in terms of what your current skill set is you might as well be asking me how to get a job. When you want a job you usually pick a field that you have already worked in or have education in. Making money on the Internet is not a whole lot different.

Chances are you know how to do something that other people need to be educated in. Maybe it's as simple as you being a plumber. You could easily make videos about how to fix common household problems related to plumbing and sell them for a small fee online. Maybe even give some away as a way to build reciprocity with your audience. If you don't have a formal education or training, perhaps there is something that you have learned recently that you could leverage into a product.

Something as simple as setting up a proper profile on twitter, YouTube, Google maps etc. might be second nature to you. But a small business owner may not have the first idea about setting these things up. That's the business that almost anyone could do in their hometown.

It has never been cheaper to start a new business than today. You can have a free website running in less than 30 minutes. There is no excuse for not trying something new every day until you find what works for you. Your online business is no different than the off-line business world. You need to try new things constantly to see what works. Once you find something that works all you need to do is work on scaling it as large as you can.

If you are still asking the basic question, "how do I make money online?" Consider that you might really be asking "what do I want to do when I grow up? If you still don't know the answer you should probably consider looking at additional education for yourself.

Is Paypal The Best Payment Processor?

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One of the most often discussed debates when it comes to the world of online business is the method with which owners offer their customers to pay for the services rendered. Everybody has heard the tale about the witless consumer who gave his or her credit card number to some nameless company on the Internet and ended up with thousands of dollars charged to his or her card. There are about a thousand variations on the same horror story, which means that customers have high standards when it comes to giving out access to their financial resources online.

Namely, your site is going to have to offer your customers a way to conduct transactions with you in a method that is both secure and user-friendly. Not having a payment method listed on your site that is well-respected and trusted will seem unprofessional and send the vast majority of potential customers elsewhere. With the competitiveness of the online market, there’s no reason to lose a customer base due to perceived overtures of unreliability.

Most online businesses these days conduct their transactions through PayPal or through some form of online shopping cart. The pros and cons of both can be debated for days on end, but here is a quick overview of both.

PayPal is well known and proven, and has high levels of customer satisfaction. Even more intriguingly, it’s free of monthly fees for the user. The payment for services through PayPal is docked through a service charge, which is taken out of every transaction. There is much debate about at what point PayPal starts to become less cost-effective than a shopping cart, but the overall rule of thumb seems to be that if your business does less than 1000 dollars a month of money exchange, PayPal seems to be the best option. If your revenue level is higher than that, it’s best to have both a PayPal option as well as a shopping cart.

A shopping cart system requires a monthly maintenance fee, which can seem prohibitive to smaller businesses. However, once your business sees serious growth, it’s a good idea to invest in shopping cart services, if nothing else than for the peace of mind they can bring. Paying the fee means that somebody else deals with the hassle of embedding the software into your site, takes care of all the bugs that pop up, and generally ensures that things are running smoothly. With a PayPal account, the owner has to add this to the list of responsibilities.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that as a respectable online business owner, you must offer your customers some form of reliable payment method. Otherwise, you can kiss a great deal of potential revenue goodbye when customers seek out your competition for a more secure method of payment.