Posted in plugins on April 8th, 2009 by The BlueCow – 3 Comments
WordPress is not known for it’s ecommerce prouess but there is a plugin that adds a shopping cart to WordPress. That plugin is called the WordPress eCommerce Plugin from Instinct Software.
The WEP is a wordpress plugin, so it installs the same way that your would install a normal plugin. WEP integrates with Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, Payment Express and many other trusted payment processors. WEP has a classic shopping cart as well one-product-click-through-to-pay system that you see on other ecommerce systems.
It is fully tailorable and templatea-able the same way that you do for WordPress so you can integrate it seemlessly into your existing blog.
While the core WEP version is downloadable for free, additional modules are charged for. You can find a full list of modules to purchase here.
The WEP plugin solves a real need for bloggers wishing to integrate ecommerce into their site. We think that the ability to sell ebooks and other digital products will be a real revenue stream for our partners and customers.
So start thinking about that ebook you want to sell.
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Posted in backlinking, page rank, seo, social bookmarking on April 7th, 2009 by The BlueCow – 4 Comments
This is part three of a series on Google Page Rank. You can start here.
Inbound or back linking is the most talked about aspect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and has a material effect on your Page Rank. As we discussed earlier, your PR can only be maximized in one of two ways, firstly by correctly structuring your internal links to the new and increasing quality content and secondly getting people with PR to share their vote with you by linking.
read more »
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Posted in Problogging, seo, Uncategorized on April 5th, 2009 by The BlueCow – 3 Comments
Uploaded on Flicrk by Lampwork Diva
I want to spend some time better understanding page rank before we move onto how to make your site PR friendly. In the first article we discussed what Page Rank was and where it came from. We tried to make it a primer, but there was still some confusion, so lets break it down further.
- A website has a maximum amount of PageRank that is distributed between its pages by internal links.
- The maximum amount of PageRank in a site increases as the number of pages in the site increases.
These first two rules are important. Your internal site rank is based upto a point on the amount of quality content you have on your site, but there is a maximum amount of PR you can have.
read more »
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Posted in Problogging on April 5th, 2009 by The BlueCow – 1 Comment
We get asked that question a lot. Just how do you get information on a blog. It is of course useful to understand what goals you should be looking at. One should always be realistic what they can achieve given their niche. Obviously entertainment rags (eg Perez Hilton), techno-geek sites (Techcrunch) and big news aggregation (Huffington Post) sites get big rankings so they are difficult to compete with, but it is very possible to get good traffic in your own area such as opinion on politics and the law.
The is one reliable source and that is Technorati. As you can see above Blogcritics, which we write for from time to time, has a weekly page view of 1/2 million so 2 million per month. You can find it at http://beta.technorati.com.
Head over and wander around, it is very enlightening.
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Posted in plugins, Problogging, seo on April 4th, 2009 by The BlueCow – 1 Comment
WordPress 2.7 introduced a new feature that better manages multiple numerous comments on a post. They created multiple pages to delineate the comments. Below is an example:
http://example.com/my-post-permalink/
http://example.com/my-post-permalink/comment-page-1/
http://example.com/my-post-permalink/comment-page-2/
However there is a problem with this, Google will look at this as multiple pages with duplicate content. And as we talked about here, that is behaviour that can get you penalized.
However there is a plugin that will put an extract on each of the subsequent comment pages. “It is in the repository under SEO for paged comments”.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-for-paged-comments/
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Posted in backlinking on April 3rd, 2009 by The BlueCow – 1 Comment
As an inevitable part of blogging is the need for building discussion around your site. What that means is that you have to go out and build the conversations with other people. You do this obviously through commenting on other peoples blogs.
This is probably the most time consuming part of building your on line presence. We put aside hours each week to do the comment building for our blogs and we do it regularly. Do get you started we have our own do follow list that we keep track of who posts regularly and are good conversation sites. You can find that list here. You can find information on why Do Follow Lists are important here.
Here is our post on building your conversation online. You can read it here.
Matt Keegan has a good post on how to comment correctly and you can read that here.
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Posted in backlinking, page rank, Problogging on April 3rd, 2009 by The BlueCow – 6 Comments
Uploaded on Flickr by HOLLi*
A lot of new bloggers are very confused with all the new terminology that they have to know and understand. One of the biggies we are asked is “What is Page Rank?” or PR and “Why should I care?”.
We am glad you asked, so being the friendly people we are here is the answer:
read more »
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Posted in plugins on April 2nd, 2009 by The BlueCow – 1 Comment
Last night we released a new version of the Date Exclusion SEO plugin for WordPress.
It has a lot of new features. The biggest request was to add specific text like “….some time ago….” to each of the options.
- Alternative Text for “Remove from Post”
- Alternative Text for “Category Pages”
- Alternative Text for “Tag Pages”
- Alternative Text for “Aged Post Pages”
- Option to remove date from specific post ids with Alternative Text
- The ability to turn on and off each applied date function
You can find the plugin page here.
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Posted in widget on March 31st, 2009 by The BlueCow – Comments Off
We have release version 1.0 of the Flickr Photostream Widget.
We wrote this Widget for a customer of ours. They have a large photographer blog and wanted the Authors Links to connect to their respective Flickr Accounts rather than the Author Profile, which is the default behavior of wp_list_authors() function.
Description
Rather than linking to the authors profile, this widget modifies the link to connect to the authors flickr photostream. This was designed for photoblogs that have multiple authors/photographers.
If the shadowbox JS plugin is install the Flickr Photostream is rendered in a Lightbox, otherwise it will goto the flickr website. Uses the Yahoo IM account if in user profile, otherwise uses nickname.
This should be up in WordPress repository sometime tomorrow. You can find the plugin page here.
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Posted in email marketing on March 30th, 2009 by The BlueCow – 2 Comments
Back in 1998, I had a blog called Cafecrowd. Back then we didn’t have the fancy blog publishing platforms like we do today. I had to create HTML templates and cut and paste into HTML by hand. Each day I would get content from various means delivered by email and I would mark it up.
There was no community systems, no social networks, no twitter, digg or anything else. What I had to do was build email lists using list aggregators. This is where I would find people who would opt into my site, then I would put that person into an email bank and then I would get an email address back for the benefit.
This was a great way of building a list up if you could keep people on your mailing list. We managed to get it to 3000 odd people by early 2000, sending an email a day to them with the content of our “blog”. However the difficulty was monetizing your blog to justify such an effort. Today we have many ways to monetize, and I laugh at what we were doing 10 years ago with such basic tools.
However what we did learn was the power of email to build your online presence.
Darren Rowse has a good discussion here:
Blogs and Email – How to Get the Best of Both Worlds
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