Web Marketing HowTo

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WordPress.com API Keys

WordPress.com has an additional offering of their “API keys” that enable you to leverage features of the WordPress.com platform. Free for personal use, and cheap for businesses, this is a simple, no brainer investment in your WordPress blog. You needn’t have a blog hosted at WordPress.com, since you can just sign up and create a login without creating a blog there. Instead of the default choice “Gimme a blog!”, just select “Just a username, please” instead.

You will get an email shortly thereafter with your username and login information, but the main item we are looking for here is your WordPress.com API key. You will need this to activate Akismet and WordPress.com stats.

Akismet

Akismet is the anti-spam service created by Automattic, WordPress’ parent company. According to the blurb at the top of their website, 92% of all comments are spam. Instead of spending all your timing pruning spam, Akismet makes the process easy for you.

After you download Akismet, upload it to your site, and activate the plugin, on the Plugins / Akismet Configuration page you simply paste in your WordPress.com API key and you’re done! I find the option to automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month is also a good option to check, since spammers like to dig deep and hope to escape your notice. This way you don’t have to bother with approving / disapproving any old comments, since they are doubly likely to be spam. Your Akismet Spam admin page is linked right off of the main dashboard page for your blog. From there it’s simple to delete them all at once and mark the rare miscategorized comment as “Not Spam”. I don’t think I’ve ever actually run into one mistakenly marked as spam yet, for what it’s worth. I usually give a quick glance over and hit my friend, the “Delete All” button.

WordPress.com Stats

There are many ways to get stats on your blog but WordPress.com Stats provides an easily integrated, simple overview that’s easy to understand. Since you’re going to want to get an API key you may as well give the stats a shot at the same time, since it also needs the API key entered into its configuration. I recommend using these in conjunction with a full featured stats solution like Google Analytics, but using the WordPress.com Stats to examine the ordinary traffic while using Analytics to delve more deeply into a much wider breadth of information.

What stats to you get out of WordPress.com?

• Total views on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis
• Referrers for today and yesterday, with number of views
• Search Engine Terms used to find your blog — this can be quite entertaining, actually. The things people search for!
• Top Posts and Pages for today and yesterday, with number of views
• Clicks on links in your blog for today and yesterday
• Blog Stats - Total Views, Best Day Ever, and Views Today

While your at a glance view only gives you two days of information, it gives you a good idea what’s happening with your blog and is easy to use and read. You can click on each section heading for a 7 day summary of that particular statistic, and for specific pages get a viewcount graph going back even further. Incidentally, if you have multiple blogs tracking stats on the same API key, you can switch back and forth between them without having to open up the other blog’s Dashboard first.

Simple, quick, easy, and well integrated — that’s what I call a pretty good deal!

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Or, more properly Web Marketing By Dummies!

You may have seen the Google Adsense ads:

I Was Scammed 37 Times!
These sites are absolute scams! I will show
the ones that work!

I Got Scammed 27 Times
Avoid Work at Home Online Scames! I will show
You the Ones That Work.

Stop Getting Scammed
Do you want a real business. OK. I was amazed.
Testimonials

Now, I’m no genius, but I have to figure someone who’s been scammed an awful lot of times IS NOT the person to warn you about them. I’m more of the old “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” school. That scale doesn’t even go up to 37. It only establishes the credibility of the fool, however there are still an awful lot of people who fall for these kinds of things, because they are desperate for the easy way out.

These types of scam review sites have sprung up everywhere, typically clones of each with minor differences, if at all. They have their sad sack story about how they hit a rough spot in life (just like you could, brother!), tried several different money making programs (haven’t you too, friend?), and got scammed almost all the time (woe is me!). But at the end, they discovered a light at the end of the tunnel (and there is hope for you, too!) and now just want to share it with the world.

What you are seeing then is a website designed to market and pimp out affiliate programs, or get rich quick schemes that primarily involve you marketing to other people with an affiliate link that pays them a percentage off of the “programs” that you order. There is no shortage of these types of affiliate programs out there on the net, and some of them are even legitimate. How do you spot the fakes?

• Unrealistic income claims - They tell you that you’ll make an unbelievable amount of money, knowing that the dollar signs will flash before your eyes and reduce your IQ sharply.
• Short time frames - You’ll be making money immediately! Yeah, right.
• Little or no effort involved - As much as we’d all like that to be true, it simply doesn’t work that way.
• Products you have to buy - That makes someone else money. It costs you money. Not a good sign.
• Hype hype hype - There’s lots of information on how great the product is, but nothing on what it is. Hype is the thing that they are selling you. What can you do with that?
• Testimonials - A paid actor standing next to a day-rented sports car in front of someone else’s mansion doesn’t take long to photograph. If they don’t give full names and contact info, that person probably doesn’t exist. If they do, they’re in on it.
• Limited time offers - Hurry! Buy now before you think about it too long and realize it’s a scam!
• Limited memberships - The program is only open to xx number of members, join now before it’s too late!

There are certainly legitimate programs out there. They’ll tell you it takes work and time. Any program that goes on and on about how simple and easy it is will just be preying on you. They’re making money on you in a way that you haven’t picked up on yet, either by you buying a useless product from them designed simply to sell you another product and so on, by affiliate links such that the scammer makes money by selling you web hosting so you can be an affiliate pushing the product that he sold you, using software you buy from them, etc. Ever seen an offer that includes a web site “that only works with SoandSo Hosting”? Think about it.

Want to make money online? Come up with something people want - a widget (fictional or WordPress!), a book, hula doll bobbleheads from Hawaii, consulting on some some subject you’re an expert it, etc. and put the work into it same as you would for any other real world business, but with a larger potential customer base.

* Disclaimer - I’ve got an affiliate link to my long-time hosting provider, but I’m not trying to sell you anything nor convince you to do anything, so it’s ok.

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WordPress is great right out of the metaphorical box, but there is a wide array of thousands WordPress Plugins out there that will help you leverage the platform and make the most out of it. Here’s a list of the 16 WordPress Plugins that you need to have to get your site ready for prime time and make the most out of it and the information it can feed you.

On to the list!

1. Akismet - Akismet helps protect you from comment spam. Very easy to use and extremely effective. You’ll need to get a free WordPress.com API key to use this.
2. WordPress.com Stats - Since you’ll be getting a WordPress.com API key anyway, go ahead and download this plugin that gives you basic but useful stats in a nicely formatted and easy to read style.
3. All in One SEO Pack - Gives you quick and easy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your WordPress blog. Re-writes your page titles first, adds in meta keywords and descriptions, allows you to eliminate apparent duplicate content simply and easily.
4. Contact Form ][ -This is a drop-in form that you can use so site visitors can send you messages, as opposed to restricting them to comments on your posts.
5. Executable PHP widget - Sooner or later, you’re going to decide you need to have PHP snippets in your sidebar, and this modification of the standard WordPress text widget will allow just that.
6. FeedBurner FeedSmith - This plugin redirects all your feeds to your FeedBurner Feed so you can track them.
7. FeedBurner StandardStats - Helps you integrate FeedBurner’s StandardStats into your site.
8. Google Analyticator - Enables Google Analytics to log visitors and other critical information. This information is more detailed than some other stats but somewhat unwieldy for daily “how are things?” checking.
9. Google XML Sitemaps - Generates XML sitemaps usable by Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. This is critical to helping drive search engine traffic to your blog.
10. Popularity Contest - Allows you to rank posts by popularity using a configurable score based on type of view.
11. Show Top Commentators - This plugin encourages reader comments by displaying the most active commentators and their linked websites, if given.
12. Simple Tags - All sorts of great options for tagging your posts, managing tags, Related Posts, and more!
13. Subscribe To Comments - Notifies commentators of replies as they are posted so they can continue the discussion.
14. WordPress Database Backup - Backup your database on-demand or via basic scheduling.
15. WordPress Reports - Provides good at a glance stats from Google Analytics and FeedBurner data.
16. WP Super Cache - Enable caching for your blog to help you over the Diggs, Stumbles, and Slashdottings.

These are a list of the basic plugins you’ll need. You’ll notice that several revolve around WordPress.com, Google, and FeedBurner. These sites have a lot to offer and future posts will detail the things you’ll use them for.

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You’ll be happy to know that the process of downloading and installing WordPress is delightfully simple, and depending on your web hosting provider, they may even provide a 1-click script via Fantastico that will make it even simpler. If they don’t, never fear: it’s only 4 simple steps!

Requirements

WordPress has pretty simple requirements. Check that your web host supports:

• PHP version 4.2 or higher
• MySQL version 4.0 or higher

These are not the newest bleeding edge versions, so this should be easy. If you don’t already have a Web Host, then I recommend pair Networks. I’ve been using them since 1997 and am very pleased.

Step 1: Downloading WordPress

Go to http://wordpress.org/download. See the “Download .ZIP” button to the right? Click on it. That’s it for Step 1.

Step 2: Set up your MySQL database

Create your MySQL database and a full-access user. Back in the wordpress directory, you’ll need to rename the wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php, and enter your database information. There are 4 lines we are concerned with:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(’DB_NAME’, ‘putyourdbnamehere’); // The name of the database
define(’DB_USER’, ‘usernamehere‘); // Your MySQL username
define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘yourpasswordhere‘); // …and password
define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost‘); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

Step 3: FTP Upload

You’ll need to upload WordPress to your web hosting provider. You can put your WordPress installation in the root of your domain like I’ve done here (www.domain.com), or a subfolder of your own choice (www.domain.com/wordpress or www.domain.com/blog, for example), but whichever folder the wp-config.php is in will be where your WordPress install will “live”.

Step 4: Run The Install

Go to your web directory where you put WordPress and start the installation. If you installed at the domain root, you’ll go to www.domain.com/wp-admin/install.php, and if you installed in a subfolder the address will be in the form of www.domain.com/subfolder/wp-admin/install.php.

This will take you to a page with the 3 big choices you need to make:

• Your Blog’s Title
• Your Email Address
• Whether or not you want search engines to see your blog

Then you click the big grey button that says “Install WordPress”. WordPress will do its thing and quickly you will see a page with the default login of “admin” and a random password to use, along with the login page link. Congratulations! You’ve installed WordPress!

From here, you could literally post away without customizing your installation, but there are many good reasons why you’ll want to do some customization like installing plugins, setting your feeds, linking, networking, and marketing. These will be the subject of future posts.

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