Blogging Your Brand With WordPress

Whew! Services Page Finally Done

Have you ever had a task you knew you had to get done, but had been putting it off for so long that you lost track of everything you planned to do?

Yeah, me to. The Services Pages was one such project for me. In fact, to be fair, the Blog Installations, Plugins and Consultations, Theme Modifications and Coaching pages also needed updating as well. So, I unplugged the phone, closed Skype and turned off auto-retrieval for my email and got busy.

If you are even remotely interested in services offered here, feel free to poke around. If, like my daughter, you could care less… then just forgive my absence from the blogging scene and move along.

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Headspace2 Tutorial: Exploring SEO Through Plugins

Featured , SEO

A recent coaching session covered the SEO benefits of installing and using Headspace2 to increase your Online Marketing and Personal Branding. As members of that call will recognize, about 45 minutes was cut from this video. All the wasted time on technical difficulties is gone. Areas where the information was repeated (as in answering questions or covering the same concept on a different part of the call) were removed or spliced together to provide a single explanation.

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Defend Your Blog: Scan For Vulnerabilities

Defend Your Blog

I hate to do it. Tempt the fates that is. After weeks of effort, lost time, missed billables, disappointed clients and frustrated days — I think I am free. Virus free that is.

And even as I am writing this post, I feel a tremor in my loins. A quick check of my site in my FTP program shows a cache directory I didn’t update! Run the file permissions recursed into subfolders and update the .htaccess file to protect the directory. Am I ready? Maybe.

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Pardon The Dust And Swearing

Announcements , Defend Your Blog

It’s likely to get bad around here for the next couple of weeks. In fact, it’s bad not just here!

I own and update more than 50 blogs, and every single one of them is currently *under construction*. Or to be more accurate, being moved from one hosting control panel to another.

See, I got tagged with a virus. A little bit of injected code that someone managed to get past the defenses that were in place at the time. (Admittedly, not as much as is in place now). After chasing it for almost 2 months now, I broke down and requested my hosting company move me to a new server. They graciously agreed.

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Protecting Your Blogs FTP Area

Defend Your Blog

Some %$@#$>%$@#$#^& found/hacked/stole your FTP account password. Now what? Well, change it of course, but that might not be enough.

(Can you feel my self restraint in not actually swearing?)

Here is a simple method you can use to prevent anyone other than you from uploading or downloading files.

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Defend Against The Bot’s

Defend Your Blog

(Part of an ongoing series on protecting your most valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal, your Wordpress blog)

Sabre: Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine

Sabre is an acronym for Simple Anti Bot Registration Engine. It’s a set of counter measures against spam registration on your blog.

Your visitors are granted permission to register freely on your blog and now you are plagued by fake users automatically created by spammers?

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Firewall For Your WordPress Blog

Defend Your Blog

(Part of an ongoing series on protecting your most valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal)

In the military, they call it “hardening targets” when they take steps to make it harder for the enemy to attack an asset. Here in the real world, it’s hard to think like that. But not thinking like this could cost you time, money, reputation and frustration.

I know from first hand experience.

When I started this series, it was in response to the attack my personal hosting account suffered. And because it was my hosting account, and not a single blog, but rather every single one of my sites was hit.

Take my advice and harden your assets now.

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18 WordPress Plugins I Can Not Live Without

Featured , Plugins , SEO , Wordpress

I have been promising a list of my personal *must have* plugins that I install on any new blog. Today, that promise is kept.

These are the plugins I install on every blog I create, regardless of niche or specialty. There are a few that I add to certain types of blogs that will won’t be discussed, but you can get more information on these in my book, the Ultimate Guide To Wordpress Plugins.

They are listed alphabetically, not in the order of installation.

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Your Blog Is At War, Help Defend It

Defend Your Blog , Wordpress

Yep, you heard me right. Spammers, hackers, trogans and viruses… it’s a jungle out there. And your blog is a sitting duck.

I have a series of suggestions I will be making over the upcoming days to help you defend this valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal, so stayed tuned. And if you haven’t grabbed the RSS feed yet, this might be a good time…

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Add Amazon Store To Your Blog

Monetizing Your Blog

One way to monetize your Authority Niche Site is to add an Amazon store as a page within your blog. If it’s featured on the first page and contains items that your visitors are interested in, it can be a great way to bring in additional revenue.

This How To Video walks you through the process of logging into your Amazon Affiliate account, and creating a store with exactly the products you want. Adding the store to a page in your blog is shown, along with techniques to get it looking good. There is an additional video showing you how to remove the blog’s sidebar from a page template so more of the Amazon store shows up.

With the Amazon store, once it’s created, you can add products and change colors without making a change to your blog. You can have additional categories and a search feature that works within your store. Each item sold from your Amazon store pays you a *commission* or referral fee.

Watch this video if you want to start bringing in additional revenue from the traffic you are already getting, or want to increase the traffic with SEO optimized new search terms.

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