Archive for '2008'

The amount of money you earn blogging depends on the amount of time you invest. But your blogging “skill” level determines how much you can make from a block of time, and how much you need to learn before you can earn more in less time. Don’t you wish that 10 minutes blogging can be worth as much as an ounce of gold? It can, but not overnight.

Let me explain…I own a lot of web sites. Er…rather I have a lot of domains, and quite a few web sites online. But there is only so much time in the day I can devote to setting them up, creating content, and maintaining them. If I worked on only one site per day I’d be working 48 days (since I own 48 domains). I am an interpreneur, webpreneur, an online business man or marketer – if you will. I get ideas all the time and find myself buying domains with the intention of setting up these “future ideas”. The problem is I haven’t fully finished setting up all the ideas I already have – so new ideas just make it worse.

What do I do in the course of a day? As I said – I have many sites, and you can view them in the footer of any page on this site in “The Smorgasbord Network” block. I write for this site, I write about geeky gadget stuff, I write recipes and home cooking info, and about my Windows Vista laptop and it’s problems. I write about designer handbags, and funny top jokes. I even write about my guitar gear and my classic rock cover band T-Town Sound. These are the main web sites I work on every week. I have a few others that I only post to a few times per month. Let’s say I regularly work on a dozen web sites. I have enough trouble creating new content and posting to all these web sites and blogs as regularly as I should. Can you imagine what an effort it is to upgrade WordPress on all of them? I just wrote about stripe ad, and OIOpublisher – and I just love both plugins. So now I have to set both of those plugins up on a dozen web sites. Ouch!

When I said that I was the most successful blogger in the world, I said that my blogging plan for success would be 20% setup, 30% content, and 50% promotion. I still stick to that premise since if you have really good quality content you don’t have to post 10 times per day. You can get away with 3-5 good posts per week no problem. The problem I was having was that if I worked 10 hours and did 2 hours setup and 5 hours promotion – I wasn’t actually putting in the 3 hours content creation like I should have been. I just kept working on issues and problems or promotion. You can really get caught up in that. What you have to do is treat blogging more like a job – a real professional full time job (even if you are still working you day job).

I just had to explain this to a friend last night, so it’s fresh in my mind. I got a phone call and my friend had asked if my “course for online success” was worth the money or not. I said “What?!” After some prodding I found out he had visited this site (he’s not a blogger) and clicked on one of the Adsense ads (not understanding those were ads and not my articles), and he was reading some page about a guy who now vacations in the bahamas because he made millions blogging on the Internet. I had to explain to him that it was possible to make lots of money online, but it was like a business and would take a large investment of time. I also explained that he had a lot to learn about technology and marketing if he wanted to become successful.

That’s when I explained that the amount you could make for the time invested was directly relevant to your knowledge. I said 10 minutes of his time (blogging) was probably worth a lump of coal. 10 minutes of my time blogging is probably worth about $6.50. 10 minutes blogging for John Chow or Shoemoney is probably worth about $175. Lots of things factor into what a person’s time can be worth. I don’t think a lot of bloggers starting out realize all the different things becoming successful entails. I realize a lot of it as I go – which is why I setup this web site, so I could write about that process.

There are three main areas you can focus to increase the worth of your time blogging. I think that the first thing that denotes what your time is worth is your blogging skill level. This is something you can’t “buy” – you have to invest time and earn it (using the next two areas). A lot of things could make this sort of “ranking” more complete, but mainly I think it has to do with how successful you are in terms of readers and montly income. With readers and income, you must have strength in other areas – and with income you can pay other people to do things you aren’t strong at, or take time to lean the additional skills you need to become even more successful.

A mock blogging “skill level chart” might be like this…where do you think you rank?

Skill level (time on the job)
Student
Novice
Amateur
Intermediate
Semi-Pro
Professional

The second area is training. I call it OJT or “on the job training”, because that’s what it is. Blogging is learning as you go. You should constantly be reading, learning, trying new things, and becoming stronger in areas that you think you are weak in. Remember, blogging is a business and your site is your store front. You can become good at writing content, buy maybe you aren’t bringing in any new readers. Time to bone up on advertising and marketing. Maybe you don’t have very good search engine listings? Learn how to become better at SEO. Have your blog reviewed and see if maybe the layout needs an overhaul. Can you install your own plugins and customize your own theme? Do you know how Digg and StumbleUpon work? Do you know how many visitors per day you need to get to make money? Do you even know how many visitor a day you get, what they view, and how long they stay before leaving? You are running a business and you are the only employee (for now). You are President, chief cook, and bottle washer. Figure out what your strengths are, build on them, and start learning in all of your weak areas.

Here’s a short list of things you should be thinking about:

On the job training (learning as you go)
Adversiting and Marketing
SEO
HTML and Coding
Graphic Design
Web Based Tools
Communication Skills
Creative Writing
Accounting
Analytics

So now that you have some skill and a bit of training you should be accomplishing something – right? Keep track of those accomplishments and milstones because with each one you should be earning more money and building a greater montly income. Track your daily/monthly traffic and RSS subscribers you have now. As it rises so should your income. Does it? Set goals – and strive to reach them. Each week you post more content, you should be getting more search engine listings. Are they quality first and second page SERP’s? Improve your SEO skills until they are. Do you have complete profiles in all the right social media places? Like Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, google, Yahoo!, Facebook, myBlogLog, BlogCatalog, entreCard – the best ones that apply to you? Are you spending enough time in those networks to build connections with other sites? Are you building a “name recognition” and a “brand” so people know who you are? Basically accomplishments and milestones equals “reputation”. Are you building an online reputation? You should be, because that reputation make your time online worth more money.

Accomplishments and Milestones
Amount of daily Traffic
Number of RSS Subscribers
Quality Search Engine Listings
Number of articles
Profiles in Social Media
Networking with other Bloggers
Amount of Monthly Revenue

I hope this helps you in some small way and makes you realize that whatever your successes or failures in blogging, you are only at a particular phase in your journey to success. Using my 3 areas for blogging improvement find out what phase you’re in and where you need to improve to move forward. Only then will your time become worth an ounce of gold! If you don’t think it can be – think about this…when ProBlogger, or John Chow writes a quick review of a product they’re endorsing that includes an affiliate link, and 10,000+ RSS subscribers read that article – how valuable do you think their time is? Without foaming at the mouth, now think about how many thousands of hours it took them to get to the point of having 10,000+ RSS subscribers! There is a dramatic payoff – but are you willing to put in the same amount of time to be able to play at their level?

For questions, or comments regarding your success level please comment now!

There’s a great new free WordPress plugin by MaxBlogPress out called “Stipe Ad” that enables a small strip at the top of every page on your blog. You can place an endless list of rotating text links in that ad block from your WordPress dashboard. It’s great for Clickbank offers, promoting your own eBook, landing pages, PLR offers, you could even promote your own feed there.

Once you download the Plugin, just enable it in your Dashboard and go to “Options -> MBP Stripe Ad” to setup. This is the first part of the setup screen:

You can see that setup is very simple, just add in the text title and the URL for a link, whether you want it to open in a new window or not, and you have the option to assign a weight. The weight determines if want certain links to appear more often than others in the ‘rotation’. Once you add in some links you have a rotation queue that you control. You can disable links if you need to, delete them, change the weight, or change the URL or name once they are in the queue.

You have some additional settings for removing the “close” button, disabling stripe ads temporarily, or making the stripe “stick” to the top of the page (even when pages scroll). The advanced options are nice because you can completely control the layout of the stripe ad block. All the normal stylings like font, size, text color, background color, border, alignment, bold, italic, underline – are all available for update. I like the fact that you can change how the stripe is displayed and randomize it a bit if you prefer, every so many visits or days, all the time, after so many visits, etc.

You may have seen the clickbank ID at the bottom of this block. This is one of the few free WordPress plugins that you can make money from. The entire plugin I just showed you is completely free. There is a “pro” version coming out with additional features, like the ability to “sell” stripe ads, accept payment and automate placement, etc. In the free version there is a link to MaxBlogPress, which of course can be removed in the free version. If someone clicks that link and buys the pro version, or other plugins or products at MaxBlogPress you get an affiliate commission. Not bad!

I like the stripe ad because it’s non-intrusive and it’s using a space I hadn’t previously taken advantage of. I’m trying some clickbank offers there for now to see how well that works. In the future I may sell spots there. I see even John Chow is now using Stripe Ad! To download Stripe Ad for your WordPress blog Click Here! If you’re using this plugin now and have a question or want to tell about your experience with it – comment now!

If you want to fully monetize your WordPress or other blog by selling advertisement space, like 125×125 blocks, links, or paid posts you need a system to take ad submissions and payment, but also to automatically place and expire the ad placement on your blog or web site. OIOPublisher does all that and more – automatically, you just need to set it up.

First – let me be up front about this. OIOPublisher offers a WordPress plugin, but can (and does) also work with any other type of web site or blog, like Drupal, Xoops, Mambo, Geeklog, or even hosted blogging platforms like Blogger, Blogspot, MSN Spaces, whatever you have. OIOPublisher is NOT free – but you pay a ONE TIME FEE of $37, and that includes future upgrades. You may be put off to pay $37 for a WordPress plugin or any system like this. So was I, I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth and I won’t have to pay for future versions! I use WordPress – so I’m going to talk about the OIOPublisher plugin that am using. If you’re using another blog system or CMS OIOPublisher will work for you – but for my instructions your mileage may vary!

I noticed that most even semi-popular blogs have some 125×125 block ads in their sidebar, and they are selling spots to make money each month. I’ve thought about this for some time, but who wants to keep track of payments and ad placement and expiration? On the flip side of that – who wants to pay a service 50% of the ad revenue just for managing the ads? The other day I came across this post by Toast Egg & Me about selling Direct Ads with OIOPublisher. I went to the OIOPubisher web site and read about what they had to offer and it sounded really good. I would have liked to see some screenshots of the ads on a blog in action – so I kind of took a leap of faith when I signed up and paid my $37. I mean, they have a demo – but I only understand it now that I’ve setup the WordPress OIOPublisher ad plubin on my blog. I would rather have seen screenshots with annotations detailing the adspots and showing examples, etc. I’ve never paid for a WordPress plugin before, but what I’m about to show you should blow your mind! I’m going to take you through the process of OIOPublisher installation and how-to get it up and running as if you just purchased the WordPress plugin and were following an install and setup guide. This will give you a good idea of what’s possible and help you make the decision of you should spend $37 to get it for your site.

Installation of the WordPress OIOPublisher plugin is the same as any other. Extract and upload to your plugin directory and enable in your dashboard. Once you do this the setup process begins. The readme file in the docs folder was very basic – mostly installation stuff. I learned what I need to know for setup by fumbling around. Once the plugin is enabled, you go to the “Business” tab in your WP Dashboard. The first tab you see “Business -> Business” has a setup checklist at the bottom of the page you’ll need to view. In the ‘Overview’ the only thing you need to pay attention to (assuming your plugin works) is #4: your header has wp_head() and your footer file contains wp_footer() before continuing. In the ‘Purchase Module’ section – you need to do #1, #2 and #3 – enable your paypal email, set the prices, add the code (or widgets) to your sidebar. You’ll notice I skipped the step #5 in ‘Overview’ – the API key. You don’t need this to sell ads on your site, just to connect to the OIOPublisher Marketplace and list and sell your ads there. You can do that later – right now we’re just concerned with getting the ad system up and running.

In “Business -> Settings” you need to add in your paypal and payment info:

On the same page setup your advanced settings such as approving ads before payment is allowed, allowing the purchase of links after content, allowing people to ‘subscribe’ to the same ad spot (renew automatically), and whether to disclose paid posts (and what to say).

In “Business -> Settings -> Posts” (or Links, Inline ads, banner, or Custom) you’re going to set the pricing and options for the various types of ads you wish to sell. I want you to note that you can set not only the price and duration, but also the size if you want to go with something different other than the standard 125×125. You can also set how many you want and how many rows and columns. I choose the standard 4 block and standard size. You can rotate them, or keep the same for payment duration, use nofollow (or not), you even get to set the spacing and a default image. You have an incredible amount of options.

The other ads are very similar with great options. With link you can sell link right after content (per post), or in your sidebar (a paid blogroll), or even just a link on your homepage. You can even do paid reviews and paid posts. Bye-Bye Review Me, who needs you anymore? One really cool thing I’ve not seen before is the “custom ad” option. It’s great that you can create custom ads and sell them – maybe someone would want a “Peel” ad in the corner, or a special footer or header ad. But there’s a field I wasn’t expecting. Take a look at this image and see if you can find it.

Hopefully you saw the “download file” field at the bottom. How awesome is that! You can actually sell ad ad spot that has a zip file attached. So if someone wants to market their free ebook, you can take that advertisement as well AND have their link go directly to their ebook. This is pretty darn flexible!

Within the “Business -> Purchases” tab you will manage and approve ads when they come in. If you need to approve a purchase you’ll click on the appropriate option for the type of ad – link, banner, custom, etc. But I posted this images because I wanted you to see that you could “create a new purchase”. In other words, you can manually create an ad if you want at any time. This is handy if you give away an ad spot in a contest (like I did), but it’s especially useful if you need to place an ad where the person couldn’t pay you by paypal (or you maybe traded or bartered ads or services).

In the “Business -> E-mails” tab you’ll find that you have complete control over all the emails that are sent out to customers placing ads, from purchase, to payment and renewal (and more).

Before you setup your site to show the ads the last thing you need to do is enable the tracking and reports (if you’re going to use them). You’ll find this option under “Business -> Tracker”. You can leave most other options alone for a future date if all you need to do (initially) is get ads up and running on your site.

Now go back to the “Business -> Business” tab and on the ‘Setup Checklist’ on the bottom of the page choose a link in #3 to setup your ads either manually or using widgets. Once you do this you are ready to sell ads!

The system as it stands is fully capable of selling ads and more. Out of the box the only thing that I really didn’t care for was the fact that I didn’t have any obvious setup options to control my purchase pages. The basic information was there, but I couldn’t add in a header or footer, or pertinent information to give someone enough information to be able to make an informed decision about purchasing an ad. I posted in the forum and got a pretty quick response. Simon (the project owner) responded and gave me two options. The first was to modify the purchase pages themselves (which I did). I added a header graphic to each page, which is clickable to take people back to my blog home. His second option was to change the purchase URL in the plugin to point to a custom advertisement page. What I did was setup this Advertise with Us to fully explain all the types of adverts to everyone. It, in turn, points to the actual OIOpublisher purchase page. This involved modifying the includes/output.php file and changeing the purchase.php URL’s to point to my new Advertise With Us page. I would not attempt this unless you are proficient in both HTML and PHP.

Simon writes in his OIOpublisher blog that he realizes documentation is sparse, and creating robust docs and instruction to setup and use OIOpublisher are now a high priority. At $37 OIOpublisher is worth every penny only providing the ability to sell ads on your site. I haven’t even begun to scrape the features of the API and other abilities. You can advertise and sell your ads in the OIOpublisher marketplace, you can even post and reply to their jobs board (beta) and participate in ‘conversations’ via OIOpublisher groups. Both of these features aren’t used much quite yet. But it’s easy to see the potential. Imagine posting a “job” looking for people to write content for your site instead of begging for a guest poster? Imagine posting a ‘conversation’ from 10 blogs – ongoing – in your site dynamically without having to individually post on the meme over and over again manually? OIOpublisher will sell you ads, but if these current and future enhancements are what I think they are – it will finally connect bloggers in a way that mybloglog, blogcatalog, bumpzee, technorati, entrecard, text link ads, review me, and all the others only wish they could!

One last disclaimer…I found OIOpublisher through the post on Toast Egg & Me as mentioned earlier and I purchased it last night. I set it up and had default ads running and purchase pages in under two hours. If fact it’s taken me longer to write this massive post about OIOpublisher than it did to set it up. This is not a paid review, and all the details you just read about were my first impressions of the product since first setting it up. I’m sure you’ll read many future posts about it from me. I’m very curious to hear if you like it as much as I do – or if you are using something (to sell and manage ads) that you consider better (or worse). Please comment now!!

Oh -and if you read this far to the end of the post I’m going to reward you with one tidbit of incredible information. You can use OIOpublisher on an unlimited amount of web sites! That’s right. Pay $37 one time, get future upgrades, forum support, and you can use it on as many web sites or blogs as you want. This is great for me since I have an entire network of sites!

Click here to visit OIOpublisher

Click here to advertise with us

Last week I was messaged on Entrecard by Mike over at Bloggin’ Ads and he asked me help sponsor his new contest by supplying a prize. I’ve written many times about how running a contest can drive tons of traffic to your site and get your lots of new rss subscribers. In spite of that – I’ve still not run one to date! Shame on me! So I didn’t think twice about helping to sponsor Mike’s One heck of a giveaway contest – why not? By Sponsoring the contest we’re of course giving away a prize – a 125 x 125 ad for an entire month! I was thinking of adding some 125 x 125 blocks anyway to help monetize this site, and they’re becoming more and more standard – we’ll like I read on one blog yesterday “the 125×125 advert has become the official blog ad now…”.

So why is this contest One heck of a giveaway? You wouldn’t believe the amount of prizes Mike has amassed – check this out:

One Heck of a Giveaway Contest by Bloggin’ Ads – Prize List

Prizes

There are going to be 12 different groups of prizes, which means there are going to be a total of 12 different winners. By adding up the value of all the prizes, I would say it is worth a least $1,000. Just for Max’s sponsorship of “500″ One Buck Wiki pages total a value of $500, which makes it one heck of a contest.

*Group 1*

• 1 Month blogroll and 125×125 ad spot (Blog About Your Blog)
• Detailed blog review (Yimto)
• 1 Month 125×125 ad spot (Read To Me Dad)
• License for PopUp Loser (Semmy)
• 50EC (Julianas Lair)
• 4 Hour Week Workbook (Money Relations)

*Group 2*

• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Peter Foti)
• 500EC, 1 month 125×125 ad spot (3rd World Blogger)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Contest Time)
• Blog review (Belolats)
• eBook – Wealthy eBook (University Kid)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Mixed Market Arts)

*Group 3*

• 1 125×125 logo, 125 ad spot, blow review, and 3 backlinks (A Frog To Kiss)
• 1 month 100×100 ad spot (Lankapo)
• 500EC, 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Web Blog Money)
• 100 One Buck Wiki pages (Zedomax)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Flat Water)

*Group 4*

• License for PopUp Loser (Semmy)
• 3 months 468×60 ad spot (Ryan Yockey)
• 200EC (Aims Graz)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Contest Time)
• 100 One Buck Wiki pages (Zedomax)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (To The PC)

*Group 5*

• Harmonica DVD (Blog Money Wiki)
• 1 month 300×250 ad spot, 3 month blogroll link (VolkDefense)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Scholarpreneur)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Ben Spark)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (I Make Money On Facebook)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Mixed Market Arts)

*Group 6*

• Domaining Manifesto eBook (DNXpert)
• 100 One Buck Wiki pages (Zedomax)
• 100 One Buck Wiki pages (Zedomax)
• eBook – Wealthy eBook (University Kid)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (EZ Money Online)

*Group 7*

• 250EC (Dorm Earning)
• “The Baby Jesus Butt Plug” book (Cyber Fizzle)
• License for PopUp Loser (Semmy)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Contest Time)
• 250EC, 1 month 125×125 ad spot, 1 month rotated text link (EZ DIY Electric)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (PixToo)

*Group 8*

• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (My Blog Contest)
• 1,000EC (Article Snatch)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Wired Kayaker)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (JTPratt)
• 125×125 ad spot until April 1st (1 Man And His Blog)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Mixed Market Arts)

*Group 9*

• 200EC, 1 month text link via RSS feed (Slyvisions)
• 50 EC, 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Ideas and Money)
• License for PopUp Loser (Semmy)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Sean)
• 1 month ad spot (size up to 336×250) (That Single Guy)

*Group 10*

• 1,000EC (Toast & Egg & Me)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Blogging 4 Cash)
• Blog review (Andrew Benton)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Ben Spark)
• License for PopUp Loser (Semmy)

*Group 11*

• 1 entry to Sam’s Superbowl Contest (Controversial Marketing)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Orange Inks)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Blogigs)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Singapore Entrepreneur)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Gorilla Sushi)

*Group 12*

• 500EC, 2 month 125×125 ad spot (ABC)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Contest Time)
• 1 Month 125×125 ad spot (Read To Me Dad)
• 1 month 125×125 ad spot (Rhyan)
• Blog directory submission (5 keyword phrases) (SEO News)

Every contestant is only able to win once. *EC = Entrecard Credits*

That’s one heck of a prize list isn’t it? There are 12 prize categories so there will be 12 winners! There are 60 prizes in all (each person will win 5 for each category) and they are valued in total at over $1,000! Now that is “One Heck of a Giveaway Contest”!

Visit Bloggin’ Ads now to find out how to get tickets for the contest!

Are you participating or sponsoring this contest? Have you run a successful contest before? Let us know by commenting now!

If you need to post some html, css, or other kind of programming code in your WordPress blog – it all gets eaten up when your save or publish the post – especially if you use the visual editor (tinyMCE). Highlighting or escaping that code in it’s proper syntax is easy – if you have the right WordPress plugin.

I’ve downloaded and tried quite a few of these over the last year, and none really seemed to work that good for me. I don’t know if it was because I was using the visual editor most of the time or what – but they didn’t seem to escape code like they said they would. With some of these recent WordPress hack posts I’ve had a need to post code – so the issue arose again. After googling around a bit, I figured that this problem already had to be solved by someone already. So I took a look at the WordPress 2.3 Plugin Compatibility Page to see what was listed there for code syntax highlighting in WordPress and found 3 options.

I’ve seen so many broken plugins on the web – if you ever have any problems with your WP install always check the latest compatibility page to make sure that everything you’re using works with the WP version you have installed. Two out of the three options I had trouble with for one reason or another – and that left one to try which is the Code Autoescape WordPress plugin. It works like a charm for me is is very easy to use. Just escape code with the code tag, or pre and then code tag for multiple lines – and makes your code block.

let’s escape some code here:

.style {
padding: 10px;
}
<title>goes here</title>

that’s it – all there is to it! The only reason I type up little tips like this is usually because it was something I had a hard time finding in google myself. I’m hoping that someone in need google’s this page and finds their fix quickly! If this post helped you or if you have an additional quesiton – comment now!

Give your wordpress blog better comments by making them stand out, look more professional, and using WP plugins that encourage people to comment more often! I will show you exactly how to customize your default WordPress theme installation and turn bland comments in a world class comment system!

One of the key features of a blog is the interactivity, the ability to comment on every page. Sometimes it can be a struggle to get people to comment, especially to comment regularly. You should already be encouraging people to comment at the end of each blog post, but what else are you doing to enhance and encourage comments throughout your blog?? If your answer is nothing – you are missing out on a great opportunity. Comments can be a huge driving factor for getting repeat visitors and building community around your blog. The biggest blogging mistake you can make is not taking full advantage of your commenting system.

You have to change the comment process from the default WordPress standard which is this:

• Visitor submits somment
• Blog owner approves comment
• Comment is displayed on post page

To something better looking, more professional, and interactive like this 12 Step WP Comment Process:

1. Visitor is encouraged in last sentence of post to comment
2. Appealing graphic encourages them to comment – including dofollow info
3. Smilies are available to customize the comment
4. Visitor has ability to “subscribe” to comment thread
5. Human interaction must be proven with captcha form
6. Visitor submits comment
7. First time visitors are emailed with courtesy thank you
8. Admin approves comment
9. Comment is posted “dofollow”
10. Visitors with URL’s that have a feed will have their last post title parsed and linked as a byline at the end of their comment automatically
11. Top Commenters are displayed in sidebar widget
12. For updates to comments, those subscribed will get notification when new comments are added or theirs is replied to

Now I’ll describe exactly how to customize your default wordpress install and theme for professional WordPress comments!

Step #1: Visitor is encouraged in last sentence of post to comment

You should already be doing this. In the last sentence of your thank you visitors and solicit a comment – “if you liked this post and have a question or something that would make it even better, please comment now!”

Step #2: Appealing graphic encourages them to comment, including “dofollow” info

This is one that I think most blogs miss. If there’s something special about your comments – be sure to let your visitors know in a way that will encourage them to comment. I edited my comments.php in my theme folder and placed a new div just below the H2 header with a nice animation and reasons why they should comment. You can see this in action at the bottom of this (or any) page on this site. If you need some css styling info to create a box like the one I use – visit this page on CSS drop shadow.

Step #3: Smilies are available to customize the comment

People love to add a little emotion to their blog posts and content – and everyone loves little custom smilies and emoticons. Just install the custom smilies WordPress plugin and you’ve got this one covered. The cool thing about this plugin is that once you install it, you can add your own custom smilies to your library and make your site different than anyone elses! You can also enable the docking bar and add your smilies to your posts.

Step #4: Visitor has ability to “subscribe” to comment thread

Before blogs were uber-popular most of us posted in web based forums. When you posted you could “subscribe” to a thread and get email updates anytime someone replied to the post. If you were an avid poster, this was the only way you could keep track of which posts had new responses. If you expect interactivity on your site and people comment – how can you expect any interactivity beyond that initial post unless they can get a notification when they have a reply or there’s a new comment? I have seen some of the biggest sites on the web not have this ability – and it’s a shame (and also why I don’t return to them that often). This is easy as pie to enable – just install the subscribe to comments WordPress plugin.

Step #5: Human interaction must be proven with captcha form

I know you’ve filled out a captcha before – that’s a text field where you have to type in some words displayed before you can submit a form. WordPress comments don’t have a captcha, and there are many automated programs all over the web that allow people to bulk submit comments just to try and gain links. If you had a captcha in your form a human would have to fill out the captcha field before the form could be submitted. This also cuts out almost all spam. Askimet is great, but it only gets 98-99% of the spam. You still have to delete 1-2% of it by hand, and if you get a lot of comments this can be time consuming. So a captcha cuts out spam – but what if you could implent a captcha that also served a good purpose outside your blog? Read about Re-Captcha and how you can help digitize books by using it in your WordPress blog. All you have to do is download and install the Re-Captcha WordPress plugin to have a professional looking captcha in your WordPress comment form today!

Step #6: Visitor submits comment

Wow – you get a buy here. I didn’t notice that for this (necessary) step there’s nothing for you to do! A Visitor has to actually submit a comment.

Step #7: First time visitors are emailed with courtesy thank you

The majority of your visitors that submit comments will do it once and never again. That’s because there’s so many sites on the web they may never find (or need) yours again. So why not send them a complimentary “thank-you” courtesy email for submitting a comment? It’s so easy, all you have to do is download and install the Comment Relish WordPress Plugin – and it does all the work for you! If you thank someone in person they are usually genuinely touched because of the infrequency people do it nowadays. I think most peope that comment are surprised and grateful to get a response back.

Step #8: Admin approves comment

This one is of course self-explanatory. The best advice I can give you is to be sure and approve comments as soon as they come in. The faster you do, the faster they’ll be read – and the more comments you approve and reply to, the more you’ll get. Some larger sites have so many comments coming in they have to designated people just to handle them all.

Step #9: Comment is posted “dofollow”

You probably already know how valuable links are, and that google follows the links on your site when the search crawler comes. If you have a bunch of links leading to irrelevant content or sites of ill repute you could be in trouble (visit bad-neighborhood.com). Good links are great, because when relevant sites link back to you normally that’s how you get google pagerank. But you can add a tag to your links, the rel=nofollow tag to tell google not to follow those links. Many blogs (like WordPress) have automatically added the rel=nofollow to comments, so when people add a URL they don’t get a credited link back. You’ve probably seen the “You comment, I follow” graphics on sites (like this one on ours) that tell patrons – if you comment I don’t use the rel=nofollow tag and you will get a credited link. Why not? If you’re moderating your comment appropriately this shouldn’t be a big issue and really encourages people to participate. To do this all you have to do is download and install the dofollow WordPress plugin, and you’re good to go!

Step #10: Visitors with URL’s that have a feed will have their last post title parsed and linked as a byline at the end of their comment automatically

CommentLuv is a newer WordPress plugin that I hadn’t seen before. Once a comment is submitted, it uses the URL field of the comment form to grab the commenter’s last post from their web site and leave it as a byline at the bottom of the comment. This of course encourages more people to visit the commenter’s web site and it’s great because it’s automatic! It starts working once installed, so of course it’s not going to go back and do this for all the previously submitted comments, just the new ones submitted after it was installed. There are no options, so if you want to test it you have to logout of WordPress and submit a test comment yourself using another valid URL (that has a feed to parse), and then approve your comment to see it. An awesome way to encourage visitor’s to comment!

Step #11: Top Commenters are displayed in sidebar widget

This one seems pretty popular on quite a few blogs – especially the bigger and busier ones. When people submit commets, the “Top Commentators” are displayed in a sidebar widget. The stats reset every month so someone can’t dominate forever. It gives the most frequent visitor’s that comment a link to their blog in the sidebar in addition to the number of comments they’ve made. I’ve used this WP plugin for quite awhile and it works nicely.

Step #12: For updates to comments, those subscribed will get notification when new comments are added or theirs is replied to

This is of course automatic now – thanks to Step #4 and the Subscribe to Comments plugin you enabled. Visitor’s also have the ability to “manage” their subscription anytime in the future for any or all posts, including choosing not to receive email anymore at all.

There you have it – Rock Star WordPress comments in 12 easy steps! If you did everything now your visitors will have much greater reasons to leave a comment, you’re encouraging them to come back time and time again with notifications, and you’re helping to stomp out comment spam on your blog all at the same time! You have successfully conquered the blogging mistake of a bland default WordPress commenting system with world class comments! The only additional things I can offer is if you want to tweak the appearance of your comments, two very popular ways are by using the nested comments WordPress plugin (like I do), or the fancier Collapsible WordPress Comments Plugin.

If this post helped you, or if you have a question or contribution to make it even better – please comment now and share with everyone!!

I’m going to show you how to add some simple PHP code to your WordPress template and make linked images appear instead of text for your categories in posts. All you need to know is simple PHP, some basic HTML, and how to make your own graphics.

**UPDATE** May 2008
As the last comment at the end of this page shows there is now a Category Icons WordPress Plugin you can download to install to manage your category icons right in your dashboard. If you prefer to hack your theme, the code below will work just fine! The cool thing about the plugin is that they give you ways to do one or multiple category icons, but also a methods for putting icons with your categories in the side bar as well! I’m always very grateful when a good plugin come along! Now back to the original post…

Have you ever wanted to hack WordPress and just make it do something you always wanted it to do? I think of things I want it to do all the time but don’t always have the hours to devote to finding the answer. I’ve searched for PHP code snippets for WordPress and tutorials and how-to articles as well and haven’t seen much that really helped me. Until today – when I read the tutorial page at WPDesigner today. I didn’t get exactly the code I needed, but pretty close. I just needed to hack it a bit to get it to do what I wanted.

First, this WordPress tutorial hack assumes a few things.

1. You’ve modified your WordPress template code before
2. You can modify simple PHP
3. You can write simple HTML
4. You can make your own graphics

First things first – here’s the code:

<h3>Posted in:</h3>
<?php foreach((get_the_category()) as $cat)
	{
	$catname =$cat->category_nicename;
	echo "";
	echo "<img src"/wp-content/cat-icons/";
	echo $catname;
	echo ".png" alt="$catname category image" border="0" />\n";
	}
?><br />

I hacked this code from this tutorial page on WPdesigner. The code they had was only good to display one category per post. I hacked it because my blogs all have posts assigned to multiple categories. Also, I wanted the images to all be linked so people can just click them and go right to that category page. Let’s look at the pieces of this code you might need to modify.

In line 1, you might want change “Posted in:” to alternate text like “Filed under:”, etc.

In line 5, if your permalink structure is different than the default, you may need to change /category/ to what you are using.

In line 8 change /wp-content/cat-icons/ to wherever you will be storing your category icons in your site.

In line 10, if you are using gif’s or jpg’s change .png to your graphic file format.

Now all you have to do is create one image for every category you have an place them in the folder you just created on the server. Make sure that the graphics are named exactly as your categories, and if your categories have multiple words just add a hyphen in between each word. That’s it! All you have to decide now is where you want these category icons to appear, before or after your post – and add them into the appropriate place. I placed mine just after the title of the post on my single post pages – as you can see at the top of the post on this page. You can hack this category icon code a hundred other ways to do what you want. I think in the future I’m going to use it to replace the text category links in my sidebar. The only caveat to this (and the code hack above) would be the fact that if you don’t have an image a text link will display (in FF, or broken image in IE). So – if you create new categories in the future, make sure you create a new image for each.

My Blogging Mistake for this post is that I didn’t decide to customize and hack my WordPress Theme before now to create my own layout. Do you have a question or a new way to hack up this wordpress category icon PHP code? Comments and post it now!