2009 January | CarmelBaird.com

Archive for January 2009

RSS Bot, Content Mania, Kwedit, Keep Me ‘Nice’!

I love it when things just ‘work’ and really dislike intensely when they don’t.

Yesterday I had one of the latter.

Why do people say their program does XYZ, when it only does X. Two years from now it could possibly do XY and in about ten years will probably do the XYZ.

This happened with not one program but three and I wouldn’t have minded if they were fairly simple to set up but they weren’t. I had to go through all the setting up because it said on the ‘box’ that this neat program would do the XYZ and of course I was looking for it all and expecting to get to it eventually. Never did because it had only been set up to the X stage.

Luckily I had taken the 30 trial option as I wasn’t sure if it would be right for my client so no dollars lost just my time.

So three like that and several frustrating hours. There is another thing and that is the way it affects your thinking, you have to keep walking away and coming back with the hope that it will all be different and it isn’t.

Okay enough of that, that was yesterday. Today the sun is shining, birds are chirping and all’s right with my world. Still haven’t found what I wanted for my client but what I have turned to today has been very good.

I’m a bit of a fan of Big Mike and his trusty sidekick Diego and their tools. I have had their RSS Bot for a little while and hadn’t used it until today. Very neat and works just like it says on the box and in the PDF “how to” that comes with it.

Another of their tools is the Content Mania and this one works very well too. This won’t rewrite your content for you but it will let you know how you are going while you are doing the rewriting.

It has the original article in a section at the top and adds it to a section at the bottom. This bottom section is where you do your rewriting and the comparison is done as you go. Keyword density, paragraphs, sentences, wordcount etc. Even has a built in dictionary and helps you out with LSI too, lots of good stuff and it all makes rewriting for your sites so much easier.

I have been looking for something like this and was about to source out someone who would build on a tool that I have had for a few years and can’t find the person who programmed it. It ‘s called Kwedit.

This one is basic and doesn’t add the original article like Content Mania but for writing you can add your list of keywords you want to use, like the LSI type and it keeps a running count of the number of times the word/phrase has been used plus the percentage density. There is a section at the top to enter the keywords.

For writing any content for WordPress this is a great tool, it doesn’t seem to have any coding going on in the background and when pasted into the WYSIWYG stays formatted as you intended.

So the moral of the story, keep plugging away when things are not going so well as tomorrow will be a better day.

See, RSS Bot works like a dream, Content Mania does too, my cup of tea and dark choc covered mint bikkie (cookie) was yummy and the sun is shining, my wild birds are calling to be fed, my lovely very old cat is asleep nearby and all’s right with the world.

Take care

BTW Big Mike said I could pass on to you this report about understanding RSS so all you need to do is click on the title and save it on your desktop.
http://incansoft.com/Understanding_RSS.pdf

This is where you can find the neat tools from Big Mike and his trusty sidekick Diego. I’ve got a few more I’ll let you know about, need a little time to go try them out.
http://www.incansoft.com/

Posted in Article Writing

One (Feels Like Two) of Those Days!

This has been one of those days, no matter where I went, there was a holdup, not the bank robber kind, just the two steps forward and a half one back.

The day started off a little slow, had to take the little kittens back to my son last night, they are beautiful kittens, they will be missed, have to go over more often to visit. So the kittensitting is over till another time. Using the keyboard is strange without one on my lap and the other wanting to control the mouse, told her it wasn’t a real mouse too.

Mind you the holdups were all related to offline stuff. I would like to start a petition for, every keypad to have the numbers and letters in the exact same carmelbaird.com order and all companies who want to employ the press this and press that, to have it all in the exact same order too, with the Press #1 if you want to speak to a real person and if you want to go the try every number on your keypad route then have fun and see where you get to. That’s for when you are really, really bored and have nothing better to do, which would probably be never.

But there was one ray of sunshine, admittedly it way early in the day and that was my Infomillionaire package arrived. I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet and must admit I wasn’t expecting it until maybe another two weeks or so as I’m right over here in Australia. I’ll settle down after dinner tonight and start going through it.

So well done Frank and Trey and thank you very much. I missed out the first offer so this is from the second offer, great service.

I know there is a lesson to be learned from today, just can’t see it yet, maybe when I’m a littler, older lady, who knows…….

Tomorrow, I think I’ll stay indoors all day, maybe do a work in the PJs and not put my head outside. Hopefully I’ll get a lot done and I’ll not phone any companies, just stay in my cubbyhole.

Catch you later

Take care

Carmel

Posted in Tutorials

Get Your Headers Here!…Too Good An Offer To Miss!

I’ve become a bit of a fan of Big Mike and his trusty sidekick Diego from Icansoft.

They have produced some neat tools, like Social Bot, Directory Bot and RSS Bot. I call this my Web 2.0 Stable.

Big Mike and Diego have a freebee at the moment that I wanted to let you know about.

Header graphics, you get the header, footer, background plus the # numbers for the colors.

If you want to have a look at this good one I’ll give you the link and no I’m not an affiliate, just think it is good value.

Put your cursor on this line, follow along here and then do the click thing NOW

One header pack is delivered every day, so far they are numbered but there is a list coming soon of what niche each pack is but you can always name them yourself.
.
The headers are nice, not overly done, clean and plenty of room to add your text. The size is a good average size so will fit most sites and at a good average size, if you wish to increase or decrease then that works out well too.

So if you want to build up a file of headers for niche sites, you can’t go wrong with these and the price is right.

That’s it for now, catch you later, off to do website building.

Take care

Carmel

Posted in Internet Marketing

Learn To Flip Websites, School’s In Soon!

carmelbaird.com One of the things I really like to do on the Internet is build WordPress niche sites and flip them on Sitepoint.

So far I have only flipped the startup sites or turnkey as they used to be called. I learnt how to do this from a very nice young man who maybe, bit off a little more than he could chew or maybe was one of those people who goes all gungho and then the novelty wears off or gets bored and moves on to greener pastures.

It was really a shame as he had built up a great community, he was offering really good value, great videos to show how everything was done, really good.

Then one day he just disappeared, left all his charges to fend for themselves and it didn’t take very long for everything to go wheels up. Sad, very sad. Because there were many people there who had never made a dollar online and all of a sudden here they were making much more than a dollar.

I made many dollars just doing what he taught and best of all, I loved the doing.

Why am I telling you all this? Well I have found another tutor and this one doesn’t look like he is going to do a flit. He has set up a really good ‘school’ as he calls it and I didn’t think I would be looking forward to going back to school ever!! but I am.

This time I’m going to learn how to go up a level or two from the startup sites. Maybe I’ll concentrate on just one level to start.

There is a lot in flipping these sites, like anything else, once you sell something to someone, you have to make sure they receive that something, intact. You don’t have to wrap it, just make sure they get it.

I’ve bought many info books on site flipping, joined many courses too and the one way I have learned to judge if someone knows what they are teaching is, if they know the process of moving the site over to the buyer when they sell it. And… you know what? Only the first guy has, until now all the others have either glossed over that part or say they pay someone else to do it for them, or just send the zip file to the buyer.

There is a lot to knowing how to make the site eligible for the next level too and that does take work, well it all takes work, we know that. Contrary to what many think, you don’t need to do any work to succeed and make your fortune on the Net, ha de ha ha ha!

Okay now I’m going to tell you where you can come to school with me. We might be able to have lunch in the canteen, you never know, glad it’s a school for mainly big people, I can have coffee instead of milk.

Alright, enough, I’ll tell you where to go get yourself enrolled.

Head on over to the Warrior Forum to the WSO section and check out Site Flip School or take this link here to be able to head back to school with me. Or click on this big URL below, (copy and paste it if it’s broken).

http://www.warriorforum.com/warrior-special-offers-forum/35958-siteflipschool-pre-launch-just-few-seats-remaining-newbie-friendly.html

I think it will only be available until the end of the month because, school’s in come the first of next month.

Let me know when you enrol so we can hang out together.

Till then

Cheers

Carmel

PS Forgot to mention, our teacher knows exactly how to transfer the site to the buyer and lots of other stuff too.

PPS another thing, I’m not an affiliate, don’t think there is an affiliate program, just like to pass on something good when I see it, never know who may be wanting to learn this.

Posted in Website Flipping

Embedding And Making Videos Private For Membership Sites

I have this awful feeling that I might be developing into a WSO junkie.

carmelbaird.com But, mostly the special offers that I have bought have been good value and the one I got today, I think will be the same.

As the saying goes, it is all in the timing. and the timing today couldn’t have been better.

I have been looking for a way to embed videos without the expensive bandwidth. As I use mostly WordPress for the sites I build, I haven’t had much success with plugins that embed videos.

Youtube videos can only be the under 10 minutes variety too and I find it very difficult to keep mine under that. And keeping them private is a problem too.

Well this WSO, which you can find out more about by clicking here, is my answer. I won’t try to explain it, it’s Alan Petersen WSO and he does a much better job than I could.

But I will tell you, it works and following Alan’s easy instructions and videos, I had my videos embedded in no time amd private too. He doesn’t use Youtube and the site he uses allows bigger videos than Youtube. And……the WSO was only $10…..bargain!!!

I love it when things just ‘work’ like it says on the box and this does that.

So here’s the link.
Alan Peterson’s WSO.….well worth it.

Posted in Internet Marketing, Tutorials

WordPress Plugins, Three Handy Ones.

smashyaliennews1 Three plugins I’ve found recently, thought you might like to take a look.

So this first plugin was just what I’ve been looking for.

StatPress Reloaded

From Manuel Grabowski

I know most people use Google Analytics and yes, they are good and your stats from your web host cpanel are excellent too but this one is right on your site, in your Dashboard and so easy to check.

You get in the Overview (Includes Column Graph for daily quick comparison)

Hits (date, time, IP etc)
Search Terms
Referrers
Agents (bots)
Pages
Spiders

There are many options to enable you to collect data on your site’s stats,
and you get all this right there on your Dashboard, no bringing up a new browser.

WordPress.com have great stats built in, and I’ve tried the plugin for my own hosted sites but no matter what, I’ve never been able to get the API key to work on a WordPress.org site.

This plugin (previously known as StatPress) shows you real time statistics about your blog. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect information. Using StatPress you can see your visitors actions while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories. In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed). StatPress also includes a widget you can add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).

StatPress speaks English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Norwegian, Dutch, Brazilian, Turkish, Swedish!

—————————–

SEO Smart Links

From Vladimir Prelovac

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.

Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

—————————————

WP125
From redwall_hp

Easily and efficiently manage your 125×125 advertisments with this plugin. Used on The Theme Blog’s sidebar, WP125 provides a simple admin panel system for creating new ad campaigns, setting a time for removal and reviewing click statistics.

This plugin is for the little 125×125 ad blocks like the ones on my sidebar or similar type ads, you can use this plugin on a single colums too.

From this plugin’s admin panel, you can control those little 125x125s.

The features included are:

* One or two column ad display, and support through template tags to implement your own unconventional design.
* Show as many ads as you want, and in either manual or random order
* Keep track of how many times an ad is clicked
* When creating a new ad, you don’t have to calculate the end date yourself. Just input how many days you wish the ad to run for, and the correct date will be applied. The ad will be automatically taken down when the time comes.
* When an ad run is over, the record is archived on the Inactive ads screen, so you can check on the final click count, or revive the ad for another run.
* When an ad slot is empty, a placeholder ad of your choice will be displayed. This could be a �Your Ad Here� image linking to a page with statistics and pricing, or an affiliate link.
* Optionally recieve email notifications when an ad expires. Useful if you send follow-up messages to advertisers, or if you just want to stay in the know.

Hope you find these useful

I’ll add these three to my WordPress Plugins page.too.

Catch you later,

Cheers
Carmel

PS if you check out the last sentence above, the link for “WordPress Plugins” was done by the SEO Smart Links Plugin automatically……Nice!

Posted in Wordpress, Wordpress Plugins

30 Day Challenge Plus, The Awesomeness Of It!

There is “No Charge For Awesomeness”, that is the catch-cry for the 30 Day Challenge, and a better catch-cry there couldn’t be.

Yes! the 30 Day Challenges have been definitely awesome, I would go further and call them A A, Absolutely Awesome!

I think I’m called a 30DC Veteran as I’ve done every one so far and while I haven’t made my $1 or $10 each time within the 30 days, (have twice), I have made my more than one dollar and my more than10 dollars very soon after the thirtieth day. And…..might add am still doing that using the 30DC process.

Ed Dale, in case you don’t know and have been never on the Internet until this very moment, is the person behind the 30 Day Challenge.

When I started the first 30DC, I couldn’t believe what was being taught FOR FREE! , yes!, free, zippo, zilch, such valuable information.

I learnt how to do so much and each year that learning has been built on by Ed and his team. Ed’s generousity is part of the awesomeness.

But wait there’s more!

Now Ed Dale and Crew are taking the Awesomeness to the next level.

Yes, it’s the 30 Day Challenge Plus and it will take you to the next level for sure.

We are in the first month, and already the content is A A (Absolutely Awesome) and will only get better and better.

Okay now the 30DC Plus is not free, and neither should it be but the price is A A too, in that it is incredibly reasonable. The membership may not stay at this price, so you want to get in early. I can assure you, you will be amazed at what is being given in the training and video/audio/PDF tutorials.

This is what Ed says,

“Every single month, we’re going to show you a completely new way to develop products easily and simply – including all the cheat-y tricks we use to create them super fast.

Some of these methods will literally take a couple of hours. (Incredible!)

If there’s a way to capture & package content for sale, we’ll bring it to you inside Thirty Day Challenge Plus.

We’ll show you audio, we’ll show you video, we’ll show you ebooks.

We’ll show you podcasting and producing DVDs.

We’ll also show you good old-fashioned printed books – we’ll even do comics!

We’ll show you how to create every type of product that is making money right now.

We’ll also explain how to pick the best format for your product. And let me tell you, picking the right format and delivery method is more than half the battle. (This is something that other people just don’t cover!)”

And that’s not all………….

So don’t say “later”, go do it now, join here and take your knowledge to the Awesomeness Next Level!

Posted in Internet Marketing

WordPress or Blogger, Back Up Your Blog.

Since I have my ‘focus’ turned on, that is my Corkboard, there are many things that I have been doing on a regular basis. I still have stuff (love that word, applies to so much) that I need to add. But best of all I am getting into a better routine.

Don’t know about you, but one of the things I’ve been very remiss about is backing up my blogs, especially the Blogger and WordPress.com ones. You know, you start working on something and think, I’ll do that later, then later so much more interesting stuff has come and gone that the simple little thing like backing up is forgotten and then before you know it the day is over and the procrastination begins, “I’ll do that first thing tomorrow”.

You know what happens with tomorrow, it’s always there, just over there but we are always getting to it but never making it.

We get pulled back into making tomorrow today when we try logging into a Blogger or WordPress.com blog, that we have been happily feeding off for a main site, and oops!, it ain’t there, been deleted for some unknown reason and the reason can stay unkown too, you see, we don’t have control, we have been using the free blog platforms.

What we do have control over is, backing up that free blog by using the easy to use, Export feature. Both Blogger and WordPress.com have this option and it is so easy and quick to do.

The posts and comments on your Blogger blog can be exported and saved to your computer, the file is an XML file and can be imported into another Blogger blog or any other blogging platform that supports that type of file.

I’ve just been through the paces with Blogger and this is what you do.

In your Blogger blog dashboard, go to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Basic’ and you will see the option the Import, Export or Delete the blog.

bloggerbu1

bloggerbu2

To save your blog, select Export Blog, you will then be presented with the option to Download Blog, click on that and your blog will be saved to your computer, file it in a safe place.

bloggerbu3

bloggerbu4

When you want to import the posts and comments into another Blogger blog, then all you need to do is go to Settings, Basics, Import Blog.

bloggerbu5

Select an exported blog by using the browse option, enter the Captcha, tick the Automatically publish all imported posts and then click on Import Blog.

Even if you have posts already on this new blog, the imported posts will be merged in with them.

WordPress.com is similar, same type of file, an XML. You will find the export and import options under Tools.

Make sure you select “All Authors” if you want everything saved.

wpcombu1

All the posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.

wpcombu2

This works for your own hosted WordPress blogs, that is the WordPress.org blogs/sites.

The export and import option is an easier way to transfer a WordPress blog/site site from one hosting account to another.

To do this you simply set up a new WordPress blog using your Cpanel Fantastico. If it is a .org blog to a .org blog, then install the same theme and plugins, activate the plugins before you import the XML file.

Set your permalinks the same as the original blog, this is very important, actually this is the first thing I do after installing a WP.org blog. Configure the new installation how you want it . If you have used Widgets for your sidebar on the original blog then set these up too.

Now click on the Import option under tools.

wpcombu3

As you can see there are several options for importing, not just the WordPress. Select the platform, this would be WordPress in this case and import the file.

wpcombu4

All your posts, pages, categories, tags etc will now be installed on your new blog on your new web host. This is so much easier than the other way.

There is only one snag, the maximun file size is 15MB, so if you have a big, big blog then you will probably need to transfer the other way. I’ll go into that another day.

You’re welcome to download my Back Up Your Blogs PDF, just click the Smashy download icon

Posted in Wordpress

WordPress Insights Plugin, Makes It Easy!

Okay, now here is the other WordPress plugin I was referring to in the earlier post for adding images etc to your WP sites.

It is called Insights and makes working on the sites so much faster when you want to add an image, video, a map or even a link to another post on your blog. There is no need to go searching, opening another browser, looking through your folders,

When you are adding a post to your blog, then just below the WYSIWYG/Post Editor you will see….Insights….. and this is where the action happens. If you wish to use Google Maps, then you only need to get an API key from Google Maps, it’s free and maybe another little bit of info Google will have on you, but, they know most things now, so……just get the API key and under the Settings tab you will see the place to enter it.

img-01options

This is where you add your keyword or search term, you will find it below where you write your post. Select from the radio buttons what you want to look for.

img-02select

You can select Images

img-03images

A link to somewhere on your site
img-04myblog

A video

img-05video

Something fromWikipedia

img-06wiki

And a map
img-07maps

All these options will add to the content for your site, you may only have a little to post about, so by the time you have checked out all the options for the Insights plugin, you could have a very nice and newsy post that your visitors will find very interesting. You know those times when you sit looking at the computer screen……what to write……well those times are now short lived.

The Insights Plugin can be found here

Take care

Cheers

Carmel

PS I know Zemanta can do some of this, but Insights plugin goes a lot further.

Posted in Wordpress

Not Desperate But Definitely Dateless WordPress Themes Good Ones!

To get a basic Worpress theme, one that is not too fancy, and that you can tweak to suit how you want your site to look, can take some finding.

I think when you are using WordPress as your personal blogging platform then having a date for each post can be a good thing.

However if you are using the WP platform for a niche site, one that you don’t want “to date”, then having a theme without any dates keeps the site looking fresh and the content up to ‘date’ so to speak.

Well, if you want to go this way I have found for you not one but seven themes without dates, definitely not desperate and dateless, just beautifully dateless. No more going into the codes and removing the date codes from all the places the coder has put it.

The themes are stripped down to the bare bones, so they are good basic sites to build on. You can add your own header if you wish but the theme will pick up the site title and description for you.

These are nice clean sites and won’t distract the visitor with lots of fancy bits and pieces, you add what you want them to see. You can add your own images etc as per usual and WP 2.7 makes that easier too.

There is another plugin for adding images etc, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Okay! Better tell you where you can get these great themes, here is the link Dateless Themes
Scroll down the sidebar, the link to download the seven themes is towards the bottom.

Also while you are there, check out the Theme Switcher in the menu at the top, you will be able to see all the different themes right there. As I said, nice clean sites.

They are all widget ready too, so your sidebar can be exactly what you want it to be too.

Take care

Cheers

Carmel

Posted in Wordpress