When we were building lots of blogs for other people we discovered that the search engines seemed to particularly relish content on the static pages.
We would add content to static pages that defined the style and theme of the site and once the pages were indexed they’d often be among the best ranked pages on the sites we made.

There is a problem though - our basic promotion strategy was to syndicate the rss feeds from these sites to a network of rss directories and aggregators and, as you probably already know, WordPress does not include pages within the feeds it produces. This meant that the first pages to be indexed were rarely the best quality content for which we wanted the sites to be known.

The normal way round this is to make a short post that links to the page but this can be quite time consuming.

Today I came across a plugin that helps a lot. This plugin, when activated, adds pages to one’s rss feeds. Rss Includes Pages is by Marios Alexandrou and works on Wordpress versions from 2.5 onward.
Here is a link to Marios’ blog where there are user comments on the plugin.

One important point, if you want to use the plugin to publicise pages on a new site but do not want to continue having pages in your feeds then you simply deactivate the plugin and pages will no longer be shown. No muss, no fuss!

I had an email from a reader the other day:

What is the benefit of me adding an rss feed to my WordPress blog…..how does it work and what do I do?

This is a big question but one that might help quite a few readers so here is a brief overview that will help you get started.
The purpose of RSS feeds is to be able to add fresh content to a site giving fresh content on an ongoing basis without additional work from the webmaster.

IMHO the first thing you need to consider is why you are adding the content.

Do you simply want to freshen up static content on pages that never change?

Do you want to provide a resource for your readers so that you become a kind of news aggregator within your niche?

These are the two basic reasons for having rss on your pages and your response will tend to affect how you implement rss.

I used to add keyword based feeds to my blogs knowing that the content was going to be a bit poor but also knowing that it gave search engines a good reason to visit. It always seemed that humans were bright enough to avoid the rubbish.

Nowadays I try to provide decent quality content for the benefit of real readers. Done well this can also serve to meet the needs of option one, above, but it can be harder to find the feeds you want. I have published a list of sources for keyword based rss feeds, it is a little out of date but is still a good starting point.

These days we have more choices than simply hoisting in rss feeds, we have blog networks such as Article Marketing Automation or Syndicate Kahuna, tools that scrape article directories and other content syndication tools. These latter may well provide a good source of on theme content and are probably worth a good look.

When considering automated feeding, be it rss or other forms you might want to think about whether the content is self contained or is just a snippet of a larger item hosted elsewhere. If you get complete articles are you also hosting somebody else’s links and if so is this an issue. Basically, how well does the source and content match with your business objectives.

Of course you need to have a way of adding feeds to your blog, one of my favourites is SmartRss, a WordPress plugin from DevPlug. I like this one because it enables me to easily use several feeds at once and even turn them on or off frm the plugin management page.

I’d strongly recommend using rss feeds to add content to your WordPress blog. If done well rss feeds will add interest for your readers and search engine spiders and save loads of work for you, the webmaster. One final point, I’d not use rss feeds as the sole content source, use them as seasoning for an already wholesome meal.

We know that setting up a WordPress blog is going to take 30 minutes or more, unless you have a fancy schmancy mass installer. Not everyone wants to pay the money for such a thing and only a very few such as the WP-Installer and WP-Cloner combination from Mass-Automation work!
Unless you have such a wonderful tool I think you may be interested in a way to save a little time.

Here is what I have so far…
1) Put all the themes and Plugins you are going to use into folders with the same name as they have on your host. Instead of uploading plugins and themes one at a time, now you can keep a standard pair of folders and when you have installed WP, just FTP up the two folders and overwrite whatever is already there.

2) Use a single page to do most of the settings for your blog. For example, set names, titles, default category, numbers of posts, length of RSS feed, moderation - you name it and one hidden page has all this and more:

http://myblog.com/wp-admin/options.php?option_group_id=all&updated=true

(Be careful with this page, along with the power for good comes equal power for harm!)

3) There is a free plugin/script that activates all installed plugins at once, you can get it here: http://www.wppluginpro.com/ It’ll cost you an email address though.

The reason that you want to use this plugin is to save the time that you’d otherwise spend clicking buttons to make the plugins work. Not an issue with just two or three, but with 15 or 20 it gets a tad boring.

Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos is now in its 2rd month and so far nobody has ended their membership.

Having taken some surveys of what people would like to see as extra content we are now adding much more content. This has started with a series of videos on Social Marketing (some call it Web 2.0) and right now I am just adding a WordPress training course which teaches how to install WordPress and then goes on to show exactly how to make a membership site based upon WP. We even provide a specially modified plugin to make the job even easier.

Here is a brief listing of some the topics covered by our video training in just two months:
Press releases
List building
SEO
Internet marketing
How to install scripts on your hosting server
How to use Dreamweaver to build websites
How to use many social marketing sites
How to use and install WordPress

All covered with in depth video, much in two versions - for your PC viewing pleasure and for taking away on your iPod.
In addition we have a monthly ‘business in a box’ all ready for you to promote and start earning money and even a range of ebooks and software covering the major monthly topics.
Check out Andrew Wilson’s Internet Marketing Videos to find out, from the basics, how to make a mint from your online business!

Recently Google Adsense have made some changes to the terms and conditions. From now on all websites that carry Adsense need to carry a page with a privacy policy. This will be a bit of a pain for many people however I came across a plug-in for WordPress that will automatically add a privacy policy to all WordPress blogs. The plug-in can be downloaded from the following URL: http://www.synclastic.com/plugins/privacy-policy/

This privacy policy plug-in is compatible with all versions of WordPress from version 2.0 upward and therefore will work with all automated blogs. I suggest that all automated blogs owners add this plug into their websites as soon as possible.

Normally I don’t give much thought to WordPress themes, I pick one for the purpose, install it and use it.
Recently though I got involved with themes in a little more detail as I commissioned a customised theme that will shortly turn up for the WordPress Blogs we build.
I had to get the hang of what went where so that I could get changes made and to add some functionality that will be quite cool.
Anyway, this made me think a little.
What goes into a theme?
How does a theme work?
How does one make a theme?

These questions led me to a post by Richard D. LeCour at Richards Ramblings where he shows how to make a WordPress theme in just minutes. If you want to understand what makes your blog tick,or even to make your own basic theme then this post is well worth reading and bookmarking. He provides the code and an explanation. For building basic niche blogs this might form a worthwhile base from which to work.

Andrew.

We have today added two new plugins to the standard automated blogs package. The first is a Google Analytics plugin to enable you to track your WordPress blog’s stats in all the interesting ways that Google Analytics provides. The second new plugin is an autoresponder plugin. This enables you to easily insert a newsletter/autoresponder signup form into your sites. just activate the plugin, and add the tags shown in the readme file (in your plugins folder) to any post, page or even to your sidebar in a text widget and you are good to go.

Both these plugins are supplied without being activated as many users will not need them. If you need ‘em you probably know how to use them… right…?

I finally did it…

After many months of asking clients to use text based template I finally bit the bullet and installed a swish new order form for ordering automated blogs. To use it all that is needed is to copy/paste the information that we need to share into the form. When the ‘Submit’ button is pressed all the data is uploaded to a server and I get an immediate notification that the order has been placed.

Because I am using a trusted 3rd party server to host the form there is no worry about spam or hijacking of the form. I am aware that some people prefer to be ultra-cautious about data and so it is still possible to send hosting account info to me by email, but, in my opinion, this system is more than secure enough for our needs.

If there are any questions about this improved system please just send me an email.

Andrew Wilson.

When we receive files for building blogs sometimes clients want to have anchor text links embedded into their articles. Occasionally things do not go according to plan and the links we receive do not work.

In order to make sure that articles with anchor text links in work correctly when inserted into WordPress two things are needed:
1) The files should always be sent as .txt files. Any other format allows characters that may interfere with the appearance of the article when it appears in the blog.

2) The links should be ‘fully formed’ in the following format:
<A HREF="http://littleautomaticmoneymaker.com/order-form"> The text you want on the page </A>
This format gives you the following appearance:
The text you want on the page

Now all your links will work properly.

Until using links in this way becomes second nature it might be worthwhile to copy/paste from the example above. After a few times it’ll all fit together and writing links will be just a normal thing to do.

As a standard tool in all our blog installations we use a plugin that automatically turns ordinary text such as knowhow-now.com or www.armyofexperts.com into live links. This is a very useful function and can be a big time saver when writing posts with lots of web addresses.

I hope this helps!

Andrew.

You won’t see many of these posts from me, after all, I have a DealDotCom.com banner in the sidebar.

But, WP Cloner is a really good piece of software. It does what it says it does and reliably. If you are managing a network of blogs then WP Cloner will quickly become indispensable. If you are planning a network of blogs then buy WP Cloner and use it to help you grow your network. It is a real timesaver.

NB. WPCloner does not install WordPress, it’ll install plugins and configure the sites you have set up already. To be honest, installing takes only seconds per site the time is taken up in uploading plugins and configuring your options.

PS. I forgot to include a ‘real’ link because this post will be around long after the DealDotCom promotion is over: WP Cloner, clones Wordpress blogs.