Darren Singleton » WordPress Plugins

John Chow’s Latest Giveaway

Darren — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:40:00 +0000

Blogging and contests seem to go hand-in-hand and giveaways are an incredible way for bloggers to gain attention for themselves. John Chow is one of the giveaway kings and tends to offer products for free in return for back links.

Obviously, this method of promotion works. You are reading this post, it’s sole purpose is to draw your attention towards John’s giveaway of two copies of OIOPublisher Direct in return for five entries to his giveaway where I may have a chance of winning.

As well as exposure on other blogs for John, there is greatly increased exposure for OIOPublisher through this contest. I’m not aware whether they have paid John any extra for him hosting this contest I’m not sure, but for the price of two licenses ($94USD) they have already made their money back and more.

I had planned a post regarding OIOPublisher Direct for this blog; once the website had increased traffic numbers and then this plugin would become beneficial to advertisers and myself by by-passing third parties and automating the selling of advertising space. This contest has brought OIOPublisher to the front of my mind again and if I don’t win this contest, I will still be very likely to purchase the plugin in the future.

This post has originally been published on Darren Singleton .com. Darren Singleton is a Blogger, Webmaster and Internet Entrepreneur posting about his experiences of making money online on a daily basis.

John Chow’s Latest Giveaway

RSS Footer Links

Darren — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:23:00 +0000

Publishing an RSS feed from your blog can be very beneficial, both to yourself and your readers. For you, there is the reassurance that people are more likely to read your content once it has been published. For your readers there is the ability to keep informed of updates to their favorite websites, without having to remember to visit each and every day.

One problem that comes from publishing a RSS feed is that people will abuse this and republish your content to their own blogs/websites for their own benefit, not crediting you at all. One of the best ways to combat this is to add links to the footer of the RSS feed so that a link back to your website is included wherever this may be displayed.

Luckily for us users of WordPress there us a great plugin which adds content of your choice to the footer of your RSS feed automatically. You even have the choice to add HTML content to the content you add and it can be set to be displayed above your feed content rather than above.

Some people may also add paid links to the footer of their feed in order to generate an extra income stream. With my 13 current subscribers, adding a link will not be of much value – so I’m sticking with the following text at the bottom of my feed for the moment:

This post has originally been published on http://www.darrensingleton.com“>Darren Singleton .com. Darren Singleton is a Blogger, Webmaster and Internet Entrepreneur posting about his experiences of making money online on a daily basis.

I will see how this turns out with regards to my feed appearing on other websites and the possibility of selling adverts in this area in the future is always open.

WordPress Plugins : Cloaked Links

Darren — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:15:00 +0000

One of the easiest ways to earn money from a blog is by promoting affiliate products within your blog posts. The problem is that they can look rather unsightly and will possibly confuse the readers with the long URL containing a string of random characters.

If you take a look at the URL’s below, which one is nicer to look at?

http://www.woothemes.com/amember/go.php?r=5159&i=b0

http://www.darrensingleton.com/loves/woo/

To be fair, the examples above don’t show how unsightly a URL can become – but they do illustrate how much nicer they can look.

I currently use the WordPress Link Cloaking Plugin from W-Shadow which is available for free. As well as allowing you to cloak URL’s, it keeps track of the number of clicks each URL has received and you can also customize the text used to differentiate between site-wide links and your cloaked links. Above, you can see I have used the word ‘loves’ but others choose to use the more obvious ‘goTo’ or even ‘more’.

As well as cloaking individual links manually, you can choose to automatically cloak certain links – all managed from the administration panel within WordPress.

If you are going to be promoting affiliate links, I’d highly recommend the Link Cloaking Plugin, you should see an increase in clicks straight away.

I have posted previously about WordPress plugins that I recommend. You can read these posts by the links below:

WordPress Plugins : Akismet
WordPress Plugins : NoFollow Free
WordPress Plugins : Increase Sociability

If you enjoyed this post, please sign up to the RSS feed to keep up to date with the latest updates.

WordPress 2.8 – Have Your Say

Darren — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:49:00 +0000

The release of WordPress 2.7 received an overwhelming response, with significant changes to the Admin Dashboard and they way plugins are handled. There was also the possibility to customize the administration section with drag-and-drop panels and most importantly, automated upgrades.

Following 2.7, the next big step will be 2.8. What features do you feel should have been included in 2.7? What features do you feel are missing from WordPress in general? You can have your say on the prioritization of features being integrated into WordPress 2.8 and beyond via the survey here.

For me, the main features to work on would be the speed of the administration section along with the ability to perform a database backup rather than having to use a plugin. I believe the database backup should have been integrated a long time ago and would be a welcome addition for most WordPress users.

WordPress Plugins : NoFollow Free

Darren — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:16:21 +0000

Looking back through the posts on Darren Singleton, you may have noticed that there are quite a few comments on each post. I can attribute this increase in commenter’s to two plugins. The first is ‘NoFollow Free‘.

By default, WordPress tells the search engines to ignore external links when they are crawling WordPress-powered blogs. By disabling the NoFollow attribute on links, search engines won’t be prevented from crawling links in your blogroll or links that commenter’s post.

As long as the comments posted are related to the post and haven’t been picked by Akismet as being spammy, I generally allow any comments to be displayed on this site. By disabling the NoFollow attribute you can also get yourself listed on DoFollow lists, which will drive traffic and possibly get you more readers than before.

This post has been the first of a variety I have planned regarding WordPress plugins that I make use of on a daily basis. If you would like to keep track of the posts, sign up for my RSS feed or alternatively enter your email address in the form to the right and get them delivered directly to your email inbox.

WordPress Plugins : Akismet

Darren — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:04:00 +0000

To start off my series of posts regarding WordPress plugins, I felt that I should first review the one plugin that comes with a clean install of WordPress that I ensure I enable straight away.

Akismet is a web service that checks each of your blog comments as they are made and attempts to determine whether they are legitimate or would be considered spam. Looking at the stats in my WordPress dashboard, my installation of Akismet on this blog has caught 596 spam comments so far with an accuracy of 96.622%.

According to the Akismet website “86% of all comments are spam“. If you aren’t using Akismet then you are leaving yourself wide open for a barrage of spam comments, especially as your blog has been online for a while.

Although I do occasionally get a ‘false positive’ (where Akismet has labeled a spam comment as being legitimate) the amount of time it saves me from going through each comment on a daily basis is enormous and best of all it is free. You can download and use Akismet for free on your blog, as long as your return doesn’t exceed $500/month and if it does, you only have to pay $5/month for the privilege of using this great plugin. The only requirement for this free service is to sign up for an API key via WordPress and you are all set.

If you have a blog, but you aren’t yet using Akismet to prevent spam comments on your blog then you need to download the plugin right away and get started.

DoFollow Blogging

Darren — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:42:21 +0000

I’ve just installed two more plugins to this blog which I hope will encourage more people to visit and begin posting relevant comments regarding topics I am covering.

The first is a removal of the nofollow attribute that is, by default, attached to links on the name of people who comment on your blog posts. This plugin is called NoFollow Free and is very simple to install and customize. Customisation options include the ability to only remove the nofollow attribute once a user has posted a certain number of comments and the addition of a CSS stripe in the corner of your blog to publicize the fact you are now ‘nofollow-free’ . I have opted to remove the nofollow from all comments (aslong as you get past Akismet and my approval.

The second plugin is called CommentLuv and will display an exerpt of your latest blog post when you comment on one of mine (if it is able to ‘grab’ it). In order to better explain what this plugin achieves, here are the plugin authors comments:

“Pass a bit of luv onto your commenters by providing a titled link to their last blog post. This plugin attempts to parse the feed of the comment author by visiting their site and looking in the standard locations for a feed. If no default feed is found, it will attempt to parse the users page for a feed link and parse that instead.“

If you like the sound of either of those two plugins, be sure to comment and let me know I have also got other plugins currently installed and running, I’ll be sure to keep you updated shortly with what they are, and how they are benefiting my blog.

Increase Sociability

Darren — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:35:53 +0000

Using WordPress for my blogs back-end and structure there are a vast array of plugins that are freely available to change aspects of my blog, add new features or improve on current features. As soon as I installed this blog there were a selection of plugins that I installed straight away.

There is always discussion about how much traffic services like Digg and StumbleUpon can bring. Why not greet the visitors from these services with a nice welcome message. Personalising your blog could be one way of getting visitors to return and it can’t harm your readership by doing so.

The Increase Sociability plugin is very simple to install:

Upload the plugin to the WordPress plugins folder
Install the plugin from the Plugins tab in the WordPress Dashboard
Configure the Plugin from the Settings Menu

There are a variety of customisation options included with the plugin.

Your message can be displayed before, after or before and after each post.
You can customise the message text for visitors who arrive at your site from Digg.
You can customise the message text for visitors who arrive at your site via StumbleUpon.
You can even setup a message for visitors who appear from a customisable website of your choice.
While your at it, you can also choose to display a link back to the plugin author in your footer, although it is entirely up to you wether you wish to or not.

It has taken me just a couple of minutes to install the plugin and customise it to my liking. I am aware that none of my posts are currently showing up in either Digg or StumbleUpon but I am now prepared for when visitors begin to arrive from those resources.