A little banner greets the person and invites them, after welcoming them to stay in touch via RSS or email and you can customise it to say what you want. For a small fee you can remove the creator of the plugins name

This marvelous tool is WP Greet Box. I love it, I love it to bits. If someone visits from a social bookmarking site they are welcomed, fellow Googler, Stumbler etc. I am a member of a forum and when people pop over to view a post from that forum, I personalise that greeting to them, and demand they leave me a comment, they know who they are and are bemused by it. On one social network, Nikki Pilkington, Ida Horner and Steven Healey regularly post links to their works on Birds/ Blokes on the Blog and the Greet Box welcomes them appropriately too. Often  it simply says ” Thank you for clicking Nikki, Ida or Steven’s link”.

Yesterday on twitter I was chatting to Graham Hunt of Entrepreneur Solo fame, and author of the Bootstrapping guide and he had seen the Greet Box and loved the idea of it. Sadly it conflicts with another plug in or the theme of his site, whilst he is working it out, there is another option.

Referrer Detector You can read all about the similarities and differences between the two plugins on the download page. Given the choice, I’d use the WP Greet Box, when there is no choice for reasons of conflict then I use Referrer Detector. No point in missing out on greeting our readers is there?

Ian McAllister pointed out that sometimes the conflict is another plugin called YARPP. YARPP shows related posts in your side bar or elsewhere on your blog. If you get the time, check out the link – the floating tabs are sublime, just run your mouse across them.

Now if only someone would invent a wave goodbye box for when someone leaves my site, I’ll be truly happy

Sarah

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Actually, I think we all hate untargeted advertising that sells to us, drives us a bit mad, and constantly tells us that our lives will fall apart with out this essential item. For a blogger some advertising is essential. As a reader you may think it’s wonderful that a blog has no advertising and heaps of free advice, but someone, somewhere is paying for that. Yep, they are paying pounds, shillings and pence so you can read, learn and hopefully interact and become part of their community.

Some people don’t like the interact part, they just prefer reading and that’s where the advertising aspect comes in. The blogger may choose to use adsense, affiliate links etc to help cover those costs. The real clever ones source, test and market products to their readers, whom they know inside out through their interactions.

In the mean time, building a blog and recouping some of the costs means looking at things from the ‘selling’ point of view as well as the ‘being sold to’ point of view. This can mean finding what you are comfortable with and using adsense and contextual links advertising to start with and then building it to a sustainable level – the balancing point between earning some money and not alienating your readers. That also means rotating the ads so regular readers are not oblivious to them.

How do you prevent ad blindness?

I looked into some ad supporting plugins over the weekend, they were recommended by fellow bloggers and I tried them out on Birds on the Blog.

The first was Ad Buttons, this plugin rotates 125 x 125 ads in one of the sidebar widgets. I downloaded the plugin and then went to look at their website, sadly Google told me this site may harm my PC, so be forewarned I clicked the link and my anti virus system went berserk. All that was missing was the klaxxon and the flashing lights.

I decided to uninstall it at that point, although the plugin worked perfectly well, I was unable to access the support function.

WP 125 was my next recommendation, and this also had the facility to show in house ads, so obviously this was of great interest to me

Sadly, the formatting of the plugin didn’t like the theme very much and overlapped the sidebar widget. I thought it might adjust, it may have just needed time to settle in, but sadly, it didn’t look right after several page refreshes and cache clearances. It probably was conflicting with another plugin, but I didnt have the energy to sort out which one, so it was Au Revoir.

The final free suggestion was the ad rotator plugin, and I am looking at that now.

Anyone use it?

Sarah

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Image via Wikipedia

Moving from a WordPress.com blog to your own domain is said to quite easy and it is, to a degree.
There isn’t a lot of information available online, for some strange reason it’s a closely guarded secret and some of it is wrong or misleading (so I found out when I tried it).

Lots of us start out with a free wordpress site, if your blogs domain ends in .wordpress.com then you have a free one. These are great for learning how to blog and practising on before you decide whether or not to go the self hosted route. WordPress place advertising discreetly on these blogs and they get the revenue which is only fair, they are hosting your site and it does cost money to do so.

In my case my blog was to become part of the Essex Virtual Town Hall, and I needed to control the advertising that was on the site. So it had to be moved to it’s own domain on my hosting.

What did I do?
I exported all my blogs postings from WordPress into a file on my desktop, just in case.
Then I set up my WordPress blog on it’s own domain and then imported all the blogs to it.

See simple. Pah, what about all those broken links when I deleted my site from the free wordpress site?

The solution is out there, and we have it here too. This document can be distributed freely with links etc, it explains how to move your wordpress blog without breaking all the links you have built up. you can download it from here, it’s written by Blogwell.com

how-to-redirect-a-wordpresscom-blog

Wished I had found it before I had imported mine, but it works fine so I am not complaining

Anyone else tried it? What did you do?

Sarah

Related posts:

1. Yikes! someone is going to steal my blog…
2. Encouraging sharing of WordPress blogs
3. Republishing old WordPress blog posts

I recently discovered Facebook sharing   this button when added to your site allows the post to be posted to your Facebook profile so those that see your status updates might like it and have a look. I have used this one a lot lately and now I look for it more when I am looking to share posts.
If you want to try it, you can download it from here and then upload it to your plugins  http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/facebook-fb-share-wordpress-plugin.zip

I still love the most popular plugin that Babs installs on every Blogmistress blog, the TweetMeme button that little green button will tweet the blog from your twitter account sharing it with your followers and helping to attract people with similar interests to you. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetmeme/ It’s not just me who loves it, it’s installed on 100,000 other websites who want to make sharing their content easier.

But what about sharing buttons? How do they work for you? You see, many sites have the addthis sharing widget and I have never used it, not once, not ever. Even though I can still share on Twitter and Facebook using it, for me there is something about the button that just makes me want to press it!

More enticing is Sexy Bookmarks, anyone use that? I saw it on someone else’s site (and I forget who, as I look at so many) and it said “Caring is Sharing” and then there is a drop down box with just about every share site in the world on it! They also have one that says “sharing is sexy”. How can you not use that?

Last, but by no means least – has anyone installed a Google Buzz button yet? I tried it on one of my blogs, but it conflicted. If you use it – how does it work for you? Love it or Loathe it?

Sarah

Related posts:

1. Sharing is caring
2. What, Why, How – WordPress Plugins
3. Handy WordPress Dashboard Notepad

I discovered Zemanta 18 months ago, and I love it. It’s a powerful little tool that gives your blog the edge in terms of images, links and related posts.

How do we use Zemanta?

When you are writing a blog, you have other things to think about aside from the actual words. Sometimes you need good images, other times you need to quote from another blog and sometimes you will need to add references or links to explain uncommon terms or a particular point in more detail..

Zemanta does all of this and more . It can be downloaded into Firefox and then used on any blogging platform, but not forums. It can also be used in email such as Gmail.

Firefox download.

When you have download it into Firefox, it will appear in a column on the right hand side of your screen. As you type your blog post it will start to make suggestions so it’s dynamic and ‘listening’ to your words.

Adding an Image – When you add an image from elsewhere on the internet, it’s probably subject to copyright and needs certain things even if you have permission to use it – like accreditation and /or a link back to the owner. When Zemanta is downloaded, in the right hand side tool bar will be thumbnail suggestions of suitable images. Right now it’s showing me the firefox logo as a suitable match to the text I have typed so far. If you have a Flickr account, then you can add images from that when you set it up.

Images are also searchable – just take a look at this little box here – you don’t even have to leave WordPress to search!

If you are typing your blog posts int he visual section, you can drag and drop the image to where it suits you and set defaults so that the selected image is always on the left or always on the right, whatever you prefer.

In text links. Underneath the text box as I type is a list of suggestions that may need explaining, so far thumbnail, copyright, Zemanta, and Firefox are all appearing.

Tags – When I have finished typing I can move back to the right hand side toolbar and have a look and see what tags it suggests for the post, if I like them then I only have to click on them and they will be added.

The ones boxed in orange in the image are the ones I have chosen to use. In each section the option selected is highlighted with an orange box making it easy to know which you have selected.

Related articles – if you don’t use a plugin on WordPress for related links, or use another blogging platform, then Zemanta will also suggest related articles that you can add yourself.

If you click the ” my sources” tab, you can suggest where to get related links from – It can be other blogs you own, or blogs you like by your favourite bloggers. Again it’s all in the right hand tool bar. It allows you to link to other blogs with ease and in time, your blogs will be added and people will link to your content if they like it – it can be a good traffic builder

At the end of every blog post you will see a little orange icon, saying get Zemified (or similar). On this post it’s a blue ‘reblog’ button If you click this it will allow you to take parts of this post and link back to it, in other words it makes things very easy to quote extracts from this blog and any others you find with the little orange icon.

No blog is an island, it needs to link out and reach other blogs and it needs other blogs to link in to it, to grow both readers and traffic. This little orange button helps create a good link with the source credited, enabling your blog to reach out to others.

The last nifty little trick Zemanta has up its sleeve is very useful to those bloggers that want to monetise their blogs, it allows you to add your Amazon Associates ID. Then if you write book reviews or movie reviews, it will add to the list of in-text links the most suitable Amazon links for you to use. It has the default for it’s own Amazon account, so if you are planning to use this you will need to add your own details as soon as you can. I don’t mind not having my Amazon account added, as Zemanta is a free tool to use, giving them my Amazon revenue is fine with me.

A quick video, showing you just how easy it is to use.

Zemanta in 60 Seconds from zemanta on Vimeo.

And as you can see, it has added its own links giving the video the correct accreditation.

Let me know how you find it; I couldn’t do without it now.

Sarah

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