Work At Home Business Blog

Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com

I have seen a few comments in my WordPress blogs Akismet spam subpanel. They are coming from a site called Trackback submitter.

Trackback submitter is a spamming software tool used to automatically post comments on blogs to generate backlinks. The WordPress plugin Akismet filter caught all of these spam comments with no problem. So if you think this is a shortcut to getting links to your website forget it, it’s a waste of time and money.

From the looks of the comment:

This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title ss Blog Can Generate Website Traffic | Work At Home Business Blog. Thanks for informative article

The software tries to use the title of the post to make it look like a real comment. As you see in the above spam it didn’t get the title of my blog post correct with the ss in front of Blog.

The Trackback submitter spam is coming from a spammer named Eric, his email address is eric25@yahoo.com. The URL is submit-trackback.com, IP address 64.22.110.34.

If you don’t have a spam filter on your WordPress blog you can blacklist this or any other comment spammer by clicking on Options, Discussion and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Paste the URL of the spmmer in the Comment Blacklist, and click Update Options.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against automation when it comes to making money, hell I even contemplated placing an affiliate link to the software in this post! I just don’t want some lazy, ignorant idiot spraying his Internet graffiti on my website!

About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog, WordPress plugin, WordPress blog

Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com

Mostly those new to Internet marketing ask this question quite a bit on various forums. There are plenty of reasons to use a WordPress blog on your own site and most of them contribute to the biggest and most sought after, website traffic.

First to clear up some confusion: WordPress.com offers a free blog that is hosted on WordPress.com just like you can start a free blog on Blogger. A different site, WordPress.org is where you can download all the files, for free, to upload and run a WordPress blog on your own site.

The blogs hosted on blogger and WordPress.com are limited in options, and customization. To customize these blogs to any extent you need to know how to open and manipulate the templates php or HTML code.

A self-hosted WordPress blog is highly customizable, extremely flexible, and you need not worry about it being shut down like a blog can be on Blogger or any other site you don’t control. There are thousands of free WordPress themes available so finding the right look for your blog should not be a problem.

Adding items to the sidebar on a self-hosted WordPress blog can easily be done within the dashboard using widgets. Simply add a text widget, write your text, paste in your affiliate links, newsletter sign up form, Goggle ads, pictures or anything you want. Then simply drag and drop the widgets into your desired position. No need dig around in the themes code to add anything.

When you write a blog post you are actually adding another content page to your website. The search engines love to see and crawl a site with fresh content. And another page on your website raises your chances of more traffic.

The most valuable feature of a self-hosted WordPress blog are plugins: Almost all plugins are free to download and they add features or change the functions of your blogs behavior. Plugins cannot be added to the WordPress hosted free blog.

Here is what WordPress and some of the thousands of plugins can do.

Search engine optimization – As stated above, when you write a new post you are actually adding a new content page to your website. By default It will be seen by the search engines like this: My Blog | Keyword Rich Title Of Post. With a few plugins the post’s page can be automatically optimized, adding keywords and descriptions and swap the title around to a more search engine friendly Keyword Rich Title Of Post | My Blog.

Then by placing your post in a keyword targeted category and using a custom Permalink structure the posts URL will look like this: www.myblog.com/keywordCategory/titleofpost. Another tactic the search engines like. A blog post can very quickly find its way to the top of the search engines, sometimes in just one day.

Tagging plugins are used for better internal linking structure and additional search engine optimization. A keyword phrase, or in blog terms, a tag in your posts will link to other posts with the same tags. Top blog directories like Technorati can also be tagged within a post. This will automatically alert them that there is content related to the tagged phrase on your blog.

WordPress can be setup to ping a list of directories automatically when you publish a post. Getting back links and traffic very quickly. You can add as many of these sites as you want.

There are several plugins available to setup a Google sitemap for your blog that automatically notifies Google and Yahoo of any changes to your blog.

Social bookmarking and Web 2.0 are the big buzzwords online now, and WordPress plugins are available to take advantage of this too. By allowing your visitors to comment on your blog and using a plugin to subscribe them to the post, they will be notified of any new comments, repeat traffic.

There are plugins available that show the most popular social bookmarking sites on each post. So you and your visitors can bookmark your posts. Adding links to your blog on these sites, more links means more traffic.

I briefly touched on social bookmarking but that is probably one of the most powerful and viral methods of driving targeted traffic your blog. I highly suggest getting a free copy of the Authority Black Book to learn more.

Utilizing Trackbacks are another feature to increase traffic to your blog. Find another blog with content related to yours. If you like a specific post on another blog write a post about it on your blog. Place a link to it in the Trackback section, and a link to it in your post also. Then if the other blogger approves it, an excerpt from your post including a link to it will appear in the comment section of the other blog.

Installing WordPress on your own site can be confusing and time consuming for first timers. You need an FTP program, know how to setup a database, how to CHMOD files on your hosting account, and must also tweak some code in one of the files. You may also need to add a few lines of code to your sites .htaccess file.

As you can see all different things I touched on about a self-hosted WordPress blog all add up to one thing, increased traffic. Of course you need to provide your visitors with quality content, post on a regular basis, and utilize all of the tools and WordPress plugins to get the most out of it.

About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog, WordPress blog, Social bookmarking, WordPress plugin

Adding content to your WordPress blog can be easily automated with the right WordPress plugin.

How would you like to setup a blog and have content posted to it on a regular basis without writing anything? Then WP-o-Matic. The Wordpress RSS Agreggator may be just what you are looking for.

WP-o-Matic is an easy to use WordPress plugin that pulls content from a feed, and posts it automatically on your blog. I couldn’t get it to install from the WordPress Dashboard using the Installer plugin so had to use the traditional FTP method to get it installed. Installing consists of uploading a folder with six files in it and changing permissions on one of the files.

Once installed it is very easy to use, click Options, WP-o-Matic, add the feed URL and choose what category to place the new post in. You can also configure how often to check the feed for updates.

WP-o-Matic is a nice tool for those with multiple WordPress blogs who want to post the same content on all of them.

You can get WP-o-Matic here: WP-o-Matic. The Wordpress RSS Agreggator

About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog, WordPress plugin, WordPress blog

Why Wordpress is now my Blog of Choice
By Linda J Bruton

The more I use Wordpress, the more I love it. It has 2 very important features that Blogger doesn’t yet support.

Number 1, you can set up a WordPress blog to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of traffic right away. On top of that, you’ll be quickly developing backlinks to your blog almost automatically.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog

I started this WordPress blog back in late January 2007. Not knowing very much about blogging or WordPress for that matter. I did know that a blog on my site, if used correctly could start generating traffic for my entire website.

Then around late March 2007 a friend of mine recommended that I read the Authority Black Book by Jack Humphrey at the Friday Traffic Report.

After studying the Authority Black Book it came to my attention that I had a lot to learn about properly setting up a WordPress blog to take advantage of the Web 2.0 tactics that Jack was writing about.

While the ‘Black Book’ gives you the overall picture, it is not a step-by-step guide to properly installing and using all the WordPress plugins needed to generate more website traffic.

I began to get things setup; finding the WordPress plugins, configuring them and signing up for all the right social bookmarking sites. And everything else that I was reading about in the Authority Black Book.

Then slowly I started seeing results. Below are the stats for my site in March 2007, this site was a few months old at the time and was not getting tons of traffic. Keep in mind I was blogging almost every day at this time but without using any of the recommendations from the Authority Black Book.

Average daily visits for March were 295 and the most in one day were 428.

After several months of Authority Site Building my average visits per day in June are up to 635 and have spiked to a max of almost 1000 visits for one day. As Shown below:

I know for some veteran bloggers traffic like this is a drop in the bucket, but for some just starting out it can be very encouraging.

Since March the average daily visitors has increased by 100 per day every month. There are several reasons for this. One are the back links that are getting spread around the Internet from consistent blogging and social bookmarking. Others are coming from search engine traffic for long-tail phrases used in the blog post titles. Using the proper WordPress plugins for SEO some of these posts can and have climbed to the top of the search engines very quickly, sometimes in one day.

Continue to post good quality content, use all the tools that a WordPress blog offers and you too can see your website traffic grow exponentially with each new post.

Questions? Comments? Submit them below and I will be glad to help!

About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog, WordPress blog, WordPress plugin, social bookmarking, WordPress plugin, WordPress blog

Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com

Blogging has become one of the most popular and easiest forms of Internet marketing, and though I may be biased, WordPress hosted on your own domain is the best way to generate traffic.

Lately my WordPress blog installation service has been getting requests for WordPress blogs from the AssociatePrograms.com forum, mainly due to a post made by Jeff Schuman of Make Money Online whom I had recently setup a blog for. Most of these requests are from Site-Build-It (SBI) members.

While SBI is a terrific program for newbies it doesn’t offer, from what I can tell, a full hosting account solution. Or one that supports a WordPress blog anyway.

The options for anyone that wants to start blogging are numerous. I really believe that a new site can be setup entirely as a WordPress blog. With the option of having a static home page and the blog behind the scenes driving traffic to it, is one of the easiest website solutions available.

If you need a good hosting account that supports WordPress
Check out BlueHost.com here .

The other options, of course are the free Blogger or WordPress blogs but you are at the mercy of Google and WordPress and you are not going to get the benefits and the options that only a self-hosted WordPress blog can offer.

Find out more about a self-hosted WordPress blog here: WordPress Blog Installation Service.

About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog

With the growing popularity of blogs and in particular a WordPress blog, it is getting easier for everyone to establish an online business presence.

Using a WordPress blog, a small business owner can target a small geographic region in the keywords chosen to write about. In fact I will be doing a similar blog in the coming weeks for my wife’s small medical transcription business. She is a one-person business and the target market is very small. So by using a title and keywords focused on a small geographic area she could easily dominate the search engines in a short period of time. I will try to keep a record of the progress of this new site as soon as it starts.

So what is stopping a small or any size business for that matter, from keeping its customers up to date and informed using a WordPress blog? I think most business types think of a blog as something like what I am posting right now; which is just a collection of my random thoughts, or something like Myspace for teenagers to brag about their latest antics. Or for political pundits to spin their latest tin-foil hat crackpot theories about whatever they disagree with. Some of those myths can be dispelled here:Entireweb Weekly Newsletter

While a blog can be all those things it can be much, much more.

A WordPress blog can be setup to look like professionally built website. The latest version of WordPress allows for a static home page. This can allow the business to show the same consistent information about its offerings while driving traffic to the site using the effectiveness of a blog platform. For a small business owner setup and cost is minimal, and once setup maintenance can be as easy as writing an email once a week or more.

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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog, online business

Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com

Using a custom permalink structure for your WordPress blog not only enhance the look of your posts URL but will also help search engine rankings.

One of the first things to do after installing your WordPress blog should be to customize permalink structure.
Follow these steps for a more SEO friendly WordPress blog URL structure.

Login to the WordPress dashboard, go to Options, Permalinks.
The four options are:

Default
» http://www.esmartjob.com/blog/?p=123

Date and name based
» http://www.esmartjob.com/blog/2007/05/29/sample-post/

Numeric
» http://www.esmartjob.com/blog/archives/123

Custom, specify below
Custom structure /%category%/%postname%

If you noticed I use and recommend the custom structure /%category%/%postname% this will change the URL to http://www.esmartjob.com/category/titleOfPost

With a good SEO friendly category and post title your chances of ranking higher in the search engines will increase.

If the title of your post is too long you can shorten it in the write post screen using a shorter but relevent Post Slug found on the right side just under the Post Password box.

What if you have an existing WordPress blog and changing the URL structure will lose many of your incoming links? There is a WordPress plugin for this called Permalink Redirect.

The Search Engine Journal has a recent post describing how they implemented a custom permalinks structure to their existing blog. Check out the post here: SEO Friendly URL Structure for Wordpress Blogs

Don’t like or agree with my recommended permalinks structure? Check out more permalinks customization options at Wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog, search engine ranking, WordPress blog, WordPress plugin

Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com

There are numerous ways to make money online with a WordPress blog or any other blog for that matter. Goggle AdSense is probably the most common method that most bloggers consider first. However there are othe ways to use your WordPress blog to make money online.

Another Google-like advertising method is In-Text Advertising. One of these types of content links advertising can be found at http://kontera.com/ . As you can see I have recently implemented this on my site and will monitoring it for the next few days.

If you have a WordPress blog you can easily add the script from Kontera with a nice little WordPress plugin called Kontera DynamiContext Plugin. This WordPress plugin handles the Kontera script quite well without the need to edit any of your template files.

Another way to monitize your blog is joining one of the pay post sites. Get your blog approved on one of these sites and you can get paid by advertisers to write posts about their product or services. The Make Money Online blog has more about pay per post here: Making Money From Blogging.

Other ways to make money online with a WordPress blog are quite obvious and apparent right here on mine, with the inclusion of income opportunities for programs I belong to as well as ClickBank products.

Remember there are many different ways to make money online so make sure to capitalize on all available income opportunities.

About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: make money online, WordPress blog, Goggle, WordPress plugin, income opportunities, make money online

Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com

Placing Google AdSense in the right areas of your WordPress blog can make a big difference in your earnings. I have found a nice resource for free WordPress themes that utilize the proper placement for Google AdSense code.

The templates have been designed around the Google heat map. So you can be almost guaranteed a higher click through rate than other templates. Also, they are based on 5 very popular themes; Business, Diet, Travel, Loans and Real Estate.

A unique WordPress theme can mean the difference between ranking well in the search engines and not ranking anywhere at all. So why use the same theme that literally thousands of other people are using. This is your one opportunity to make your blogs unique to everyone else’s. Not only that, they are optimized highly to earn money from Google Adsense, so you simply cannot lose.

Get Free Blog Templates Now… Click here!

About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: Google, WordPress blog, WordPress theme

Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com

The default WordPress theme is probably one of the most used WordPress themes. This is most likely because it is so easy to customize.

Unlike most other themes it is very easy to change the color of the WordPress default themes header right from within the WordPress blog dashboard. After you login to the WordPress dashboard, click Presentation, in the dark blue sub panel directly below the main menu panel, click Header Image and Color.

The WordPress blog default theme’s header will appear with several option buttons shown below it. The theme has a gradient color scheme and you can choose two different colors that will blend together in the middle if you wish.

Clicking on the Upper Color or Lower Color buttons will show a color chart to choose from. If you don’t like the color options available in here you can click the Advanced button and place a hex color code in the box. What’s a hex color code? It is an alpha numeric code that tells a computer how to render a color on the screen.

To find a different color to use you can find more hex color codes here: http://html-color-codes.com/ or Google hex color codes. Just find the colors you want to use and place the 6-digit codes in the Upper Color (Hex) and Lower Color (Hex) boxes shown when you click the Advanced button and make sure the # sign is in front of the hex color code.

After making your changes click Save and view your new header color. There are ways to change the entire header image but that is for another day.

About the Author:
—————————————————————–
Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: WordPress blog

Copyright © Jeff Houdyschell
http://www.eSmartJob.com

Should you install WordPress blog on your site in a subfolder or in a sub-domain ?

www.yourdomain/blog/ This is in a subfolder or subdirectory

The above example is a typical WorPress blog setup and for SEO purposes you are adding content pages to your website with every post. The search engines love to see new content added to a website. Then If you utilize the correct inter-linking structure, linking your main website and other pages from within your site from your blog posts you will also gain page rank. Each page will pass Google Page rank to any links on that page. In Goggle’s page rank hierarchy, each sub directory will have a value passing PR to any pages in which you link. You should link using keyword-anchored links to both the sub-directory and the main index page in the footer and even in the body of your blog posts.
Here is an example:

[html] Major Keyword
proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Technorati Tags: install WordPress, WorPress blog