Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner
I was more than tired of seeing the ‘configuration errors detected' on my Contact 7 contact form.
It didn't matter what I did to try and fix the errors, I still got the notification.
Granted, the form actually worked, but the error notice bugged me.
So, I decided to find a new plugin and the WPForms Contact Form came up second in the search results.
Seeing the same sidebar on my site day after day gets boring — even for me — so I can just imagine how blind regular readers become to sidebar messages when the message never changes.
There is a solution to sidebar blindness though — create different sidebars for different categories, posts and pages.
In this post, I'll show you how to create a custom sidebar for categories, posts and pages using the Genesis Simple Sidebars plugin, designed specifically for Studiopress Genesis users.
[Read more…]
I like to search Google ‘smart' as I expect most of my (and your) blog readers do as well.
When I search Google for a product type, I limit my search to articles posted within the last year.
The following graphic shows results for a recent search when I was researching water filter pitcher dispensers for our RV.
The birds are singing, the posies are popping and spring rains are making everything look shiny and new. Here are 10 tips to dust off your blog and give it a fresh spring feel.
Have you gained experience or earned new credentials since you set up your blog? Has the objective for your blog changed?
Have YOU changed? One of the most frequent complaints that online daters have is that “in person, they looked nothing like their picture” — meaning that the picture showed a younger (and probably skinnier) version.
Edit your About page as necessary to reflect those changes and add a new picture, so people will recognize you when they see you at the next conference you attend.
Are all your links and images working correctly? Activate the Broken Link Checker plugin to find out quickly.
Note that I said to “activate” the Broken Link Checker plugin. if it is allowed to run continuously, you can suffer some serious ramifications.
Sign up for your own email newsletter in each of the forms you use (e.g. Aweber, Popup Domination, Sumome) to make sure they all work. You should also use Aweber's test function each time you plan to send an email out to your subscribers to make sure that the formatting renders correctly.
Make sure each of your social share buttons works correctly and that you've added your Twitter account name.
Consider adding the Pinterest Pin It Button On Image Hover And Post plugin which allows readers to pin your blog posts, pages and images.
Be sure to remove social share buttons which are no longer applicable.
Updating your header graphic can be fun, such as what I did here for St. Patrick's Day.
If you don't know how to work with a graphics editor, consider having a professional header graphic created for your blog at Fiverr or 99Designs.
If you'd like to learn how to design your own graphics, check out the design courses available on Udemy.
Have you been running the same banners on your sidebar for as long as you can remember?
Confirm the efficacy of each of those banners to make sure they are earning their keep. If not, replace them with tried and true merchant links (banners) or something completely new.
Less tends to be more when it comes to navigation bars.
Limit reader options by placing only your most valuable (best-converting) categories and pages in your primary navigation menu. Readers will drill-down through your content from primary pages.
Contact and other administrative links belong in a secondary navigation bar or in a widget in your blog's footer.
I doubt anyone is still searching for “WordPress 2.9.1”, yet that tag, along with numerous other old versions of WordPress, was still in my tag collection.
You can edit tags or delete them outright. In the WordPress 2.9.1 case, I changed that to “WordPress”.
To check for and delete unused tags, try the ‘Mass delete unused tags' plugin.
I have a tendency to test multiple plugins before settling on the one that best suits my needs.
After all that testing, I'm eager to get to work using that new plugin and often forget to delete the rejects.
Keeping only plugins that you use is a good security measure and also helps speed up page loads.
Last, but certainly not least, review your blog posts for content that is no longer relevant.
Start with those posts that Google Analytics reports as being most visited. Updating information in those articles might reduce your bounce rate and increase the time visitors spend on those pages and your site in general.
I hope you've found these tips helpful. If you have comments, questions or suggestions, please share your thoughts below!
In the meantime, I'll be working on those broken links. 🙂
Cheers,
Did you know that each time you save a draft post to your WordPress blog, the mySQL database stores a record of that post?
Your WordPress database also contains records of each update you make to published posts, and all those spam comments you thought you were deleting when you clicked the ‘Empty Spam' button? Each one of those was also saved to your mySQL database.
Now, while a very large database won't affect your blog's performance speed-wise, it does increase the potential for mySQL database errors, so it is best to get rid of all that useless junk.
If you like to tinker with the inner workings of WordPress, you can modify your wp-config.php file to automate the junk removal.
I however prefer to use WP-Optimize, a free WordPress plugin which completely removes:
The plugin will also inform you how much space can be saved, how much is saved and exactly how many of each type of trash was removed from the database after the process is complete — as shown in the following screenshots.
WP-Optimize also allows you to schedule automatic database optimization with the option to retain data for a selected number of weeks and remove any garbage accumulated before that period.
Happy optimizing!
Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!
Cheers,
Here's a heads up about what happens to your Akismet plugin once you install WordPress 3.3
First, ALL comments posted to my blogs were going into spam after I installed WordPress 3.3. Ergo, I wasn't getting email messages about comments being held in moderation. Thought no one was enjoying my latests posts until I found nearly 100 ‘good' comments in the Spam box.
Then the BBPress Forum on Affiliate Blogger PRO stopped working. I got a message from one of our members that they couldn't post to the forum. I checked and it seemed to work, so I asked him to try again and never heard anything back. I received an email about the same problem from another member this morning and discovered that new posts to the forum were automatically being deleted.
Suddenly something in my tiny cranium clicked that the problem must have something to do with Akismet.
Sure enough, when you install WordPress 3.3 and do the Akismet upgrade, things go awry.
The fix?
Easy enough. Go into the Akismet configuration panel on your WordPress blog and you'll discover that the API key is no longer there.
Once you re-enter and save it… all is well once more.
Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!
Cheers,
I'm finally getting around to upgrading my last few blogs to the Genesis Framework from StudioPress and have decided to spare my readers the ugliness that usually accompanies such a change.
In this video I discuss how to use a plugin that allows you to test drive a new WordPress theme in the background, so that you won't miss a single click, commission or subscriber signup from your blog's readers. 🙂
Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!
Cheers,