In this video, I give you the basics of using OIO Publisher to create ad zones and ads for your blog. This plugin is a staple on almost every blogger that monetizes their blog.

OIO Publisher allows you to create ads of any size, custom ad opportunities, text links, and sponsored posts. And you can sell the ad spaces and sponsored posts automatically.

As I mention in the video, you can create any type of banner ad, of any size for any section of your blog and it's really easy to do. I show it step by step in the tutorial.

The video may seem long but I address a few important topics related to your monetization strategy as well as some questions and feedback. From the previous video and I broke down the timecodes in case you want to skip around.

During both parts of the video, the driving part and the tutorial I cover two methods you can use monetize your blog, including a hands-on WordPress tutorial on how to do it.

One thing I didn't mention in the video is that you can use the code area to insert your Adsense ads or Media.net ads or another type of ad codes as well.

Links and references:

• OIO Publisher - Get it here.
• Adsanity - Not shown but mentioned, get it here. Will cover in a future blog post.

Monetizing your blog with content and OIO Publisher

There is a timecode table below the video if you want to skip to certain areas.

Timecodes:

0:00 to 2:00 - Recap and follow up to video about how much to start your affiliate business. (https://notagrouch.com/how-much-do-i-need-to-start-an-affiliate-marketing-business/ )

2:00 - Two methods to make money with your blog.

3:15 - First method.

4:20 - Sourcing new content.

6:15 - Doing reviews with a low budget.

8:15 - Getting products for free

8:24 - Disclosure with the FTC - I'm watching ya guys.

9:25 - The review policy for free stuff.

11:03 - Method 2

12:03 - OIO Publisher - Get it here.

14:15 - Tutorial start, install and basic OIO Publisher configuration.

17:35 - Adzones and banners.

20:11 - Adding media for an ad.

20:39 - Add a banner section to the sidebar (widget area)

23:00 - Getting an affiliate link and banner from Shareasale ( http://oglink.it/shareasale-youtube )

25:13 - Adding an ad using HTML (or Javascript, or PHP) code.

26:50 - Adding an ad using image and link.

29:55 - Creating your own advertisement ad.

31:00 - Inline ads for every post.

32:00 - Define your own ads.

The post Introduction to OIO Publisher and Two Methods to Monetize Your Blog appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I like knowing a few blogging statistics about my blogging habits. Things like how many words I've typed using Word Count Pro, which type of grammatical errors and spelling errors I make with Grammarly, and specifically for this plugin, how much time spent actually editing a specific blog post.

It is really simple

Install it just like any other plugin. Search for Worktime Logger in your dashboard from your WordPress blog to install automatically, or go directly to the plugin's page to download and install manually.

Once you install it and activate it, the default settings are fine for most cases.

The moment you start a new blog post and while it's being edited, the plugin keeps track in minutes and it provides you that information directly on the edit screen or in the "all posts" listing in its own column. Just make sure you do a quick save as soon as you start a blog post.

Easy to configure

If you'd like to adjust the settings, you'll find them really straightforward. Here's a screenshot of the settings available and my actual current configuration.

If you don't like the idea of the plugin tracking your time automatically, you can change the settings to manually start, stop and pause the timer as you wish.

Current worktime on your blog post

But in the case of this plugin, what will happen is that it will show you how long you've been working on the post under the edit window. At the time of writing this sentence, this is what it said I had spent working on this blog post:

All view shows in a column

And if you want to see the "all posts" view or "all pages" then you'll see the time tracked for each blog post. It looks something like this:

If you install the pluginWorktime Logger right now, the plugin can't tell how much time you spent on posts created prior to the installation, although it would be cool if it could give a rough estimation based on the revisions time.

Each time you save or WordPress autosaves a post, that is timestamped, so I suppose it would be cool if this plugin could calculate that for posts created prior to its installation, but for the time being that's what it is.

Maybe the author will read this and consider that an update for a future release. Which leads me to one more thing.

A small warning the plugin hasn't been updated in a few releases of WordPress and it has a very low numbers of people using it. This could be just because it's not very well marketed or cataloged or maybe people just don't see the need for this yet. But it can also be that the author has abandoned it. I'll ask and see if the author replies.

In any case, I think it's a useful plugin to give you an idea of how much time you spent working on a blog post. This is especially important if you're writing sponsored posts or editing for multiple authors. I also checked and it works just the same with custom post types in case you need that functionality.

In Conclusion

I think this is useful and well done. Easy to install and configure, it keeps track of time spent writing a blog post or a page on a WordPress website or blog. There's one small warning about the reliability of this plugin as future releases of WordPress are made available. I also think there could be a neat feature added to the plugin in regards to the calculation of time.

But If I can pass this over to you, Do you find this plugin useful? Do you already use it and would you use it now that you know about it?

The post WordPress Plugin to Keep Track of Time Spent Blogging – Worktime Logger appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

If you don't know what the difference is between the two, WordPress.com is the commercial version of the free and open source software provided in WordPress.org. The goal of WordPress.com is to get you to sign up for a free account which provides a free basic blogging experience.

Eventually you'll realize you can't do much with it and you'll need to upgrade, or better yet move to WordPress.org which is a self-hosted solution.

Self-hosted means you need to get a web hosting account and setup WordPress yourself, have someone like me help you or have the web host do it for you. The benefits is that you can do whatever you want with it and aren't restricted too much.

A few years ago, Automattic, which is the parent company of WordPress.com and the biggest contributor to WordPress.org started merging little plugins into Jetpack. But Jetpack sucks. I've always thought that and even years after it came out, I still dislike it a lot.

I wish they'd leave the plugins as standalone modules. There's quite a few plugins and functionality that have fallen "victims" to the Jetpack beast.

Getting Rid of Jetpack and Reliance on WordPress.com

I've decided to get rid of Jetpack in my sites after I went through a catastrophic website crash where I had to deactivate all plugins and carefully fix the problem before reactivating plugins.

My entire site was only partially functional for two or three days. This wasn't the fault of Jetpack, but Jetpack added to the headaches when restoring it.

I'm still fixing things now, but the process of reactivating Jetpack was painful and frustrating so I decided that it was enough and I started to find replacements for any of the modules that I use which Jetpack provides.

I also want to replace any plugin that requires a WordPress.com account.

There are two main plugins that I care about. Jetpack stats, formerly known as WP Stats. And Akismet a plugin designed to prevent comment spam. Akismet is actually standalone plugin but still requires a WordPress.com account.

I might also address the caching module and the "better search module soon.

But First, Akismet.

The first plugin I want to replace is Akismet. Akismet is great at preventing spam, and it's by far the biggest anti-spam comment plugin for WordPress, but it isn't the only player in town.

Furthermore, the terms of service clearly state that Akismet is NOT free if you're monetizing your site or if your site is a business site.

I've never heard of Automattic going after someone for using the free plan of Akismet in a commercial site, but the terms are pretty clear:

Akismet Is Not Free

If you want to do the right thing, you will not use Akismet for your money-making blogs. That's just what the terms say. But you can find other plugins that are free and you can use without paying.

I'm going to try the plugin that is the most popular and seems to cover what I need. Even though I don't get a lot of comments on this blog, when I had Akismet deactivated for two days or so, I received over 150 spam comments so it's necessary to have something in place to prevent comment spam.

Free Alternatives to Akismet

There is a trend where the best plugins are getting converted into a hybrid model of free and paid features. Many of the alternatives to Akismet aren't free either, but there are still some. That was one of the requirements I have for this type of service.

Other things I considered were wether the plugin is actively updated and how many active users it has.

I consider it active if it has been updated within the past few months or up to a year, and it should have about 10,000 active installations or more (Akismet has over 5 million).

Here's are the alternatives I found:

Spam protection, AntiSpam, FireWall by CleanTalk

No CAPTCHA, no questions, no animal counting, no puzzles, no math and no spam bots. Universal AntiSpam plugin.

Free trial, then yearly subscription (link)

Shield Security for WordPress

Shield is easy to setup – you simply activate it. Then a step-by-step wizard will walk you through the basic configuration. Shield Security does it what it needs to do, and alerts you if and when you need to informed.

Free version and Pro version with extra features (link)

Stop Spammers

Stop Spammers is an aggressive WordPress defense plugin against comment spam and login attempts. It is capable of performing more than 20 different checks for spam and malicious events and can block spam from over 100 different countries. Stop Spammers uses multiple methods for detecting spam and may be too aggressive for some websites.

Free  (link)

Anti-Spam

Anti-spam plugin blocks automatic spam in comments section. No captcha required. The plugin is easy to use: just install it and it should just work.

Free and Pro version available (link)

Antispam Bee

Say Goodbye to comment spam on your WordPress blog or website. Antispam Bee blocks spam comments and trackbacks without captchas and without sending personal information to third party services.

Free (link)

I Decided to Go with Antispam Bee.

Antispam Bee has a good number of downloads and active installations at a little over 300,000. It also gets regular updates.

The plugin was easy to install through the regular dashboard, and after activating it the settings page is really simple and straight forward.

So far it seems to be good and working as expected. I haven't received any spam comments in a few days but it caught about 65 of them so it seems promising. In a few months I might come back and do an update to this or a proper review.

Let me know in the comments if you think there's anything I should add or if you have any questions!

In Conclusion

Despite what some people will tell you, Akismet isn't technically free. I also don't like the reliance on WordPress.com so I decided to do away with it.

I evaluated a bunch of plugins first, and decided to go with Antispam Bee. It seems reliable, it's free, and it has a good amount of usage. It also gets regular updates.

I'll run with this for a while and post back if I find any problems with it, but if you're looking for an alternative to Akismet, then this should be a good place to start.

The post Gripes with Jetpack and Alternatives to Akismet Plugin appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Now, 3 years later, 2017 has been deemed the year of SSL, and it even seems that maybe it will be required for some sites. Heck, Moz shows that at least half of first page results are served via https.

SSL is no longer for Ecommerce and geeks only

It used to be that you really only needed SSL if you were collecting or providing sensitive information. Personal, financial or healthcare data. But due to problems with phishing, spoofing, and the growing number of vulnerabilities, it makes sense that all websites should be "verified" through an SSL certificate.

Until the past couple of years, SSL was really only an option that bloggers would consider if they were making money because it was an added cost to hosting, domain registration and any other paid service they needed like Vimeo, or Aweber and similar.

There was also a technical challenge with setting up an SSL certificate in a shared hosting environment. I won't get into the details of it but it's a bit of a challenge to make a certificate work when there are shared accounts under one IP address --the way that most shared hosting works.

SSL is now free... mostly

But recently a few companies have surfaced that provide free SSL certificates, and they take care of the technical issues regarding multiple websites under one IP address and one server.

For the free SSL certificates offered by these companies to work, your host has to support their process. Both of my preferred hosting companies did not support this fully, until recently. Greengeeks and Inmotion required that you have a dedicated IP and at least a virtual server in order to install an SSL certificate, and you had to purchase it from them or from a 3rd party.

But to my delight and yours, Inmotion has just enabled the use of free SSL certificates in all of their service plans.

Quick guide on how to set up free SSL for your Inmotion hosting

If you have a shared hosting account, you'll find detailed instructions on how to setup the SSL certificate here. If you have a VPS account then you'll need to follow this guide instead.

In the process of doing this for my own VPS, I only had an issue with the guide because I had forgotten how to login to WHM as the root user. I tend to use SSH and I have that setup without the need for a password. But I was able to look up my password on LastPass and a few moments later, I was logged in.

To login as the root user, you need to go to the WHM address for your server directly and enter the root username and password. The URL for your WHM panel should be something like this: https://serverid.inmotionhosting.com:2087.

If you have any trouble with this, just open up a support chat with them and they'll help you right away. After I enabled auto SSL in my account, it took about 30 minutes for the SSL certificates to be ready.

I was expecting the process to be more complicated than this, but it wasn't. The next step was to activate the certificate on my WordPress blog, here at Notagrouch.com.

To "turn on" the certificate for WordPress, I used a popular plugin that takes care of most of it. The plugin is Really Simple SSL. If you want to follow my steps, then install and activate the plugin (instructions here).

Once the plugin is active, go to the Settings area in your WordPress dashboard and click on SSL. Then click on enable SSL.

Your settings screen should look like this afterwards:

The settings tab in the configuration screen also has a few options. Ideally, you should make the plugin work by using the htaccess configuration instead of the WordPress or Javascript options.

If everything works fine, you may want to try switching to using htaccess for a slight performance boost.

Once everything is installed and configured, you may get kicked out of the WordPress dashboard. This is expected, and you just need to log back in. Notice that when you log back in, you'll be accessing your site via "https" instead of regular "http."

To verify the plugin is working, just visit any page on your blog and look to make sure your browser shows that the connection is secure and the protocol (the part before the URL) says https.

Conclusion

Inmotion introduced free SSL for all plans. It's easy to install, follow the instructions for shared hosting accounts or VPS accounts. You can then use a plugin to activate the SSL on your WordPress website. Voila!

The post How to Get Free SSL Certificate from Inmotion Hosting appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Not so fast. Doing this can land you in some trouble with the person or entity that owns the photos or graphics. You may be able to get away with using a photo without permission for a while, but you could also get some nasty letters and legal action brought against you.

I know a friend that had to settle out of court for a little over $700 after she used a photo owned by Getty without permission. There are tons of similar stories out there, so why risk getting in trouble and why risk all the hassle?

In today's video, I discuss the issues surrounding using images without permission, and how you can find copyright-free images to use in your blog posts, legally.

If you're too busy to watch the video, too bad. Let's just suffice it to say that there's a little-known trick to use Google to find images that are licensed for use on your blog post.

But because you're a good blogger and are using WordPress to run your blog (right?), you can also skip the video and check out another blog post I wrote about a WordPress plugin that solves this whole issue of acquiring images.

The plugin is called Imageinject; with it, you can search for images and insert them directly into and from your blog post; you can find my write-up about it here. But the video above has the method you can use to get images from Google to use in your blog posts legally.

The post How to Find Images to Use on Your Blog Posts Legally appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

When I was going through the earlier videos my friend Harsh reached out and told me about his Youtube subscription plugin. So this is what we're talking about today.

The plugin can be found here, and it's only ten bucks, $9.60 to be exact. Of course, like most things on this blog, I got it for free so I could tell you about it and take it for a test run.

First The Downsides of This Plugin

As usual, I'll tell you about the downsides of this plugin before I get into the good stuff; there's only one. The only issue I found so far is that it doesn't play nicely with another plugin I use called Fitvids for WordPress which takes care of making the videos responsive so they resize to the correct size for every screen.

When you use Fitvids with Youtube Viral Subscribe, you break the responsiveness. This may or may not be a huge deal to you, so act accordingly. I reached out to Harsh from Shoutmeloud and brought this up and he said they'll have a fix sometime next week so in reality, this may not be an issue by the time you read this.

Update 12/30 - The plugin has not been updated so I had to deactivate it for now. The demo may not work currently on this site, I will update this when there is an update to reflect a fix for the responsive display of the videos.

Now Onto The Review

The official name of the plugin is: Youtube Viral Subscribe, but you'll find it in your dashboard as Youtube Viral Growth. And it works pretty simply, by adding a link to subscribe to your YouTube channel directly on your WordPress blog.

[bctt tweet="The purpose of this plugin is to increase your subscribers, plain and simple." username="notagrouch"]

Installation is basically the same as all other plugins for WordPress. Download the plugin, install it to your WordPress dashboard using the upload feature and then activate the plugin. Once activated, you'll need your license key which you get when you buy the plugin. Plug your license in place and voila, the plugin is ready for use.

The settings are pretty straight forward as you can see in the following screen:

After the plugin is installed, activated and configured, a button to subscribe to your channel will show up under your Youtube videos embedded in WordPress and this makes it really easy for readers of your blogpost to subscribe to the channel without leaving the blogpost.

This is what it looks like on my blog as of right now:

Overall, this plugin has a lot of potential. As with any social network and social media growth tactic, you still need to put in the work and effort to create good content.

In this case, you need to make sure the content is attractive to your readers and make sure you configure your videos to be shown in the best light possible. Each video you embed in your blog becomes an invitation to subscribe to your YouTube channel so make sure it's compelling and attractive!

The post YouTube Subscriber Growth Plugin for WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

This move was a bittersweet experience because I've used NextGen for every single photo project and for all my blogs since it came out.  I used it for client sites too, but over the past couple of years and since they were acquired by Photocrati, I've had many problems. It served me well for many years.

For a while, my publish button would disappear if the plugin was activated so I had to play this game of deactivating the plugin, publishing my posts and then reactivating it. Then it started getting really complicated to use. On top of that, P3 profiler would report that it was taking over 30% of my server's resources.

Even though I have a dedicated server with Inmotion Hosting, 30% of resources for a photo gallery plugin is not acceptable. Actually that's not acceptable for any type of plugin unless it's doing some really active heavy lifting, all the time.

Configuration wasn't simple, neither was user adoption whenever I installed it for a client. That part was great because the client would have to hire me again to help them learn it or customize it, but it certainly didn't help the client much to have to pay every time they needed something changed. That kind of defeats the purpose of using WordPress.

The plugin used to have really high ratings, but lately they've decreased to around 3 in the WordPress.org codex so I'm not alone in the feeling that NextGen needs a good kick in the ass to get it back on track, or it just needs a good replacement. I was not in the mood to do any ass-kicking so a new plugin was in order.

The time to move to a new plugin came

Unfortunately there were no good plugins available to replace NextGen, that is until Envira Gallery came along. Even then, I waited until now to make the transition.

I wanted to see how the WordPress community would react to it, and how the market would react to yet another photo manager plugin, and a paid one at that.

Then I saw enough good things that I decided to jump on it. It had everything I think I wanted and then some, and a great pedigree. One of the features I like is that it is lightweight but extensible with a huge collection of addons.

I'm still working through migrating all my photos over to it and recreating some of my galleries and albums. Most of my previous albums and galleries were broken already anyway so I'm in no rush to fix all that. But I tried using the NextGen to Envira migration tool and it worked flawlessly, it took a looong time, but it worked great.

You can see some of my photo galleries over here. Let me know what you think.

My experience with Envira has been awesome so far

Before, managing photos on my blog was a dreadful proposition. This is why I don't have many recent photos. But now, it is different.

I like how well integrated Envira Gallery is with WordPress. It uses the built in media library to hold your photos so even if you create a new gallery and upload the photos directly to a new gallery, they will still be available in your media library. The opposite is true too, you can create a gallery from existing photos in your media library.

Creating galleries and albums is really easy. Drag and drop type of stuff, and you can customize the galleries very easily through a few screens available to decide how your pictures should be displayed.

This is very handy because you can use one of the photos from a gallery as a featured image on your post. NextGen never got this right. They tried to give you a "featured image from gallery" option but that never worked for me.

It's very easy to add galleries to your posts and pages too, you create your gallery in the Envira Gallery section in WordPress, then you click on the icon to add it to your post. But you can also use WordPress shortcodes or even PHP functions to add your galleries to your website.

One feature I'm really excited about is the dynamic galleries feature. This feature is available through the addons, and it allows you to tag photos or designate certain rules that will automatically place photos into a gallery. This way, whenever you upload a photo, if it matches the desired parameters then it will automatically show up in the gallery. Pretty neat huh?

It is not just for bloggers

You can also use it to run a full blown photography ecommerce site. First, setup your WordPress site (I can do that for you at no cost - ask me how), then add the Woocommerce plugin.

After that, add and configure Envira Gallery Pro, then get the Envira Gallery Woocommerce addon. If you are a portrait or event photographer then you might want the proofing addon so your clients can review the photos. If you feel particularly feisty about copyright then you'll need the watermark addon.  After that, give yourself a high-five, because that is basically all you need to setup a photography ecommerce site with WordPress. Boom!

I am taking Envira Gallery for a spin, and I will give you a full review and all the notes I can about the plugin, including some of its addons.

Should you get Envira Gallery Pro or Lite? Anything that is worth doing, is worth overdoing so go all the way and get Envira Gallery Pro.  It is the best premium WordPress Gallery Plugin I could find so far and I'm not just saying that because I got it for free. Stay tuned for a full writeup about it.

If you're interested in a side by side comparison to NextGen, then I might do it if enough people ask for it in the comments.

I should disclose to you that I received Envira Gallery Pro at no cost. In fact if I haven't told you before, most of the plugins you see me using here or on any of my blogs are usually given to me for free in exchange for serious QA & feedback and to tell you about them. So there, that's my disclosure. The FTC thinks I should tell you this stuff, I think you're smart enough to understand this.

The post Envira Gallery Pro Replacing NextGen Gallery appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

It's pretty awesome and I've been using it for the better part of 2 years now. They keep adding new useful features but one of the things that sets them apart is their speed.

You have also heard of WordPress, I hope. WordPress is a content management platform that lets you create landing pages, blogs, pages, forms and more. It is free to use but you have to pay to have it hosted somewhere.

Both Leadpages and WordPress are standalone products and both can do some similar things, but they also work together if you use the Leadpages plugin in your WordPress installation.

Leadpages lets you use their full infrastructure to create and promote your landing pages, but you can also make it work with WordPress so your landing pages are inside of your domain even though Leadpages is hosting them.

Take for example my new landing page for my book. Here are two examples of pages that illustrate what I said before.

1) Using ONLY Leadpages: https://websystem.leadpages.net/work-anywhere-profit-online-free/
2) Using Leadpages on my own domain: notagrouch.com/work-anywhere-profit-online-book

Those two pages are identical except for one thing. One of them is displayed through my Leadpages account, while the other one is displayed here on my notagrouch.com domain.

The benefits of using option 1 is that you don't need a website of your own. You pay for Leadpages and you can start building pages immediately, like option 1. The downside to this is the URL branding; notice it says "websystem.leadpages.net." Some people would prefer to have it like option 2, under their own domain.

The key benefit of having your pages hosted in Leadpages exclusively is that you'll get the fastest speed possible. When you use the Leadpages WordPress plugin to bring in your landing page under your own domain, like option 2, then you will give up some of that speed.

In my testing, the speed difference has been significant, between 1 and 1.5 seconds.

One or two seconds may not seem like a big difference but in the world of websites, speed can make or break your business. Most people will wait about 3 - 4 seconds for a page to load, that number is decreasing fast as websites improve. It is critical for your pages to load as fast as possible.

Check out the test between the two different methods of loading the same page.

Method 1, Leadpages directly.
Load time 1.99 seconds, size 729.3, grade 86/100

Method 2, Leadpages using WordPress plugin.
Load time 2.74 seconds, size 756.6, grade 86/100

Almost a second slower when using WordPress. This could be for a number of reasons which we won't get into, but the important part is that Leadpages is built for speed; use it for your most critical time-sensitive pages that need to be served fast.

Use Leadpages with WordPress when you want to extend the branding of your own domain to your promotions, but a slightly slower speed may not be a big deal.

Overall in a simple test like this, page to page I have found Leadpages Always performs faster than Leadpages with WordPress. If you think you want to check out Leadpages, I would recommend it for sure. I use it and recommend it to most of my clients.

The post Is Leadpages faster than WordPress? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

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Most hosts offer built in backups but these come with restrictions and are only kept for a limited amount of time. Ideally, I like to keep nightly back ups for about 9 days, weekly backups for about 5 weeks and monthly backups for 13 months. Notice I always have a little bit more than that cycle of time ranges. That just makes me comfortable but you can choose to keep as many or as few archives of your site as you wish.

[pullquote position="left"]You never need a backup until something happens. Don't wait until then to set it up! #wordpress[/pullquote]

There are several backup plugins that you can use in addition to the one offered by your hosting company. If you are relying on your hosts backup system only, make sure you review the instructions from the host and make sure the backup ssystem is active. Some hosts don't have backups turned on by default and require you to turn them on if you want to use them.

A backup is very important if you care at all about your website. The reason I think you should do it immediately after you start your website, is so that you don't loose anything! Sometimes people start blogging, and they make a couple changes here and there. Then they get excited and one thing leads to another and next thing you know, the blog is broken. This recently happened to a friend of mine and it cost her about $200.00 to fix.

There are two backup systems I use when backing up WordPress. There is a third one that is also highly recommended and I'll tell you about all three in brief. By the way, if you get the free wordpress website service I offer then this is something else you don't have to worry about. I do it all for you.

Best Backup Plugins for WordPress

Backup Buddy

My plugin of choice for backups. It is a premium plugin so you'll have to buy it but I think it is worth every penny. It allows you to create as many backup schedules as you need. It gives you granular control of which directories and files to back-up or exclude. Additionally it comes with a malware scanner to keep your site safe from bad files.

Backup WordPress

My second choice for backups for its flexibility of timeframes and consistency. It is missing some features and I may replace this choice in the future when I have some time to re-evaluate more backup plugins. The main feature it lacks is moving the backup to a safe "offline" location. This is the backup that is setup for your free WordPress website, but if you buy the license for Backup Buddy, I will set that up for you instead.

VaultPress

Some people swear by VaultPress. Vaultpress is a service offered by the WordPress guys themselves. It is a bit pricey but it offers peace of mind and continuous backup solution. The backups are done offsite automatically and they offer real time backup for the continuous solution I mentioned. That's about $15/month and it's the only reason I would use them. It would be good to have this service if your blog is huge or gets a lot of updates constantly, like comments or if you have multiple authors.

The post Setup a Backup system for WordPress Tip #02 appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

This video shows you the easiest way to add youtube (and other networks too) videos to your WordPress site. I picked up the tip at the Orange County WordPress Meetup group where Jeff Turner showcased the plugin. I also cover a couple other tools I used during the video. Hope you enjoy it.

If you want something else in particular, just leave me a note in the comments. I'd also appreciate it if you could thumbs up the video, and share this post and the video to your favorite networks.

The post Posting Youtube Videos to WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Well let me tell you, there's plenty it can't do. Gravity Forms is by far the best form maker system I've used in WordPress.

I know it may seem pricey, but when you really explore the form making capabilities, you can do almost anything with Gravity Forms. If you couple it with some custom post types you can create any kind of website you need. Check it out when you can, it's worth every penny. I use it on all my sites and it comes included in our packages at OscarsTech and OC Web Pro.

You can get Gravity Forms right here.

So far I've used it for a restaurant menu, for standard contact forms, surveys, and for a donations collection page. In a few weeks I will show you how I integrated Views, Types and Gravity Forms into a really cool Wedding registry. Views & Types are two other plugins I'll tell you more about soon.

But you could start a free WordPress website and with Gravity Forms, you could start taking surveys like the one in the picture. You're not doing paper surveys still are you?

I've heard of some amazing sites and tools built on Gravity Forms, have you done anything exciting or out of the ordinary with them?

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So far these are the ones I've found:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/fblikebutton/ (out of date)
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-like-button/

The post In search of the perfect Facebook plugin for WordPress appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Optional plugins:

Adsense-Deluxe
All in One SEO Pack
Articles
Category Posts Widget
Contact Form 7 ((With one basic contact form installed.))
Display Widgets
Inline Posts
Lifestream
NextGEN Gallery
OpenID
Ozh' Who Sees Ad
Page Links To
Photo Dropper
Popularity Contest
RSS Footer
Redirection
SEO Smart Links
SexyBookmarks
Statpress Reloaded
Subscribe to comments
Subscribe-Remind
TweetSuite
Twitter Tools
WP Since Last Visit
WP-Polls ((Installation only))
WP-PostRatings ((Installation only))
WP-SpamFree Anti-Spam
WP-Syntax
WordPress Download Monitor
cForms II ((Installation only))

Included:

Akismet
Google Analytics for WordPress
Google XML Sitemaps
Maintenance Mode
Ozh' Admin Drop Down Menu
Really Simple CAPTCHA ((Included when you use Contact Form 7))
WP-DBManager
WordPress.com

Additional Options

There are some plugins that require extra configuration. The plugins listed below can be installed for an additional fee.
wp-e-commerce ((Please note: This plugin is free, but desirable addons may be purchased directly from Instinct))
Featured Content Gallery
FeedWordPress

More Plugins

If you would like to add a plugin to the list, please speak up in the comments. I'll probably add it to the next revision of this list, or you can do it in private.

The post Favorite WordPress Plugins List appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I list a few more I haven't tried at the end of the listing, and if I've missed any others feel free to leave a comment. Keep in mind that these are to help with writing and not with blog maintenance, comment management, SEO, and other blog related tasks. I found a number of other posts out there with titles like: A gazillion WordPress plugins for writers, and they list many plugins that are irrelevant to the craft of writing.

I hope to keep adding and maintaining this list as time goes by but I will also aim to keep the focus of the title. There are many other fine plugins out there but they don't necessarily help a writer's task, I hope the ones listed here do.

Footnotes. I use footnotes a lot, perhaps more than I should. Think you need footnotes? I found the perfect plugin to help with this, WP Footnotes is the plugin you need to compliment your articles with fancy, well organized and auto-generated footnotes. All you have to do is place double parentheses around the text.

The plugin will automatically parse the footnotes and display them at the end of your article in order and with a small link back up to the location that originated the footnote. Thats it, wrap it ( ( and ) ) with no spaces and you'll see it in action. ((See, this is a footnote, I just had to wrap it in double parentheses.)) ((YMMV. Some people report having some problems in WordPress 2.8 and maybe report some conflicts with other plugins.))

Article Listing. Another way of listing your articles, this plugin allows you to selectively display articles on a page. Its called Articles and its by Alex King. You can find it here, about 7 plugins down --yeah most of them are worth checking out while you're there.

Including Posts. If you have pages in which you want to include posts, you can use Inline Post Plugin for WordPress. This is useful if you often write pages or formal posts which you want to compliment with more dynamic and informal blog posts inline with the main content.

Thesaurus. The official Plugin repository for WordPress has a Thesaurus plugin listed, but it shows that it hasn't been updated in a while. Furthermore, I'm not sure if it will add itself to the writing panel. The page instructs you to install it on your sidebar but why would ou want it there and not in the edit post/page pages? Anyone else know of a good thesaurus that is available while you edit? Maybe even a FF plugin?

Columns. If you want to split your text into columns and you don't want to mess with tables (because you shouldn't), you can use this plugin to get you out of prose boredom. WP Post Columns helps you split your text into as many columns as you want easily. You simply use a short tag notation of [ column ] [ / column ]. To wrap the text, at the end you close with [ end_columns ]. You can specify width and padding for each column independently. Its neat and it seems like a great plugin so far. Here's a nice example page. I wish it would support this though: [ column automake="2" ] content [ / column ] so where that would automatically split the text evenly into two columns, right now you have to split it manually.

Acronyms. Acronyms are used a lot in technical writing and so you should help your readers understand what each acronym stands for. The plugin for this is titled Acronyms and it has tons of built-in definitions. You can easily add or remove any terms as you see fit. To show you how a visitor benefits from this plugin, look at this: "YMMV" is an acronym, if you mouse over it it will show you what it stands for.

Auto linking. If you're a journalist or a very active blogger you may find this useful. SEO Smart Links is the plugin I like to recommend for auto linking. The admin panel offers a lot of options and lets you automatically define certain words to link to any URL you want. You can also let it automatically link to categories, tags, and posts which can dramatically increase the amount of information you convey to your visitors.

Templates. If you often need to post articles with the same outline, or skeleton you could probably save some time with a template. Check out Post Templates, this plugin allows you to save a template for future use. You can use it for both posts and pages and if needed you can use a page or a post to create a template.

Series. If you want to tie your posts under a general taxonomy, you put them in categories. If you want to file them away you can list them in pages and you could use tags to assign them to topics. But what if you want to tie an arbitrary group of posts that have different categories and tags? You could use what is known as a series.

I have a couple of them around my site. ((Example here, and here, look on the beginning it shows a link that expands to show you the rest of the articles in the series)) Justin Tadlock describes how to do it here if you're familiar with your theme or want to learn, that's a great way to do it, but I found Hackadelic Series. Hackadelic Series works great and it does the job just like I want it. It is similar to plugins that do related posts but you have a little more control over the articles that get listed.

To use it, put the name of the series into a custom field with the name of series ((This is customizable from the admin panel.)) and the plugin does the rest. Don't look for many configurations under the hood, "it just works" I say. I've yet to have a problem with it and I'm using it in 4 different websites.

Software Code. If you're a technical writer and often need to present code snippets, you can use WP Syntax. It will help you highlight code so it is easy for your visitors to read and follow.

--
Also see:
FD-Footnotes. I've never used it, but it has a high rating.
Annotation Plugin. I've never used it, and activity on it seems low. nyone tried it?
Magazine Columns. Also haven't had a chance to test it yet, the download history doesn't build much confidence either.
Organize Series. Haven't tried it yet.
WP Print. By WordPress Guru Lester "GaMerZ" Chan, if you want to offer a nice print view for your visitors, check this one out.

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