Wordpress Lets You Do That?

If you have a look at a lot of Wordpress blogs out there, especially the monetized ones, there are images in the side bar that are Call To Action buttons. If you click on the image then you will get taken to another page or website. This is very cool if you are an affiliate marketer and want to drive traffic from your blog to another site where your reader can be presented with an offer.

We put images in the sidebar of our blog through use of a Widget , or to be more specific, a Wordpress text widget. You get to your Widget toolbar by hitting Design, then select Widgets from the Nav bar. From the left hand side, you will want to select a new text widget and add it to your sidebar. That being done we can now add the image that you want to display there.

A couple of choices here, have a image that has no clickable properties, or one that does, and takes the reader to a new page. Which ever one you want, you still have to insert HTML code into the text edit. Do you have to know HTML to do this? Well it doesn’t hurt to know a little for tidying things up, but it is easier to use an HTML editor (Frontpage will do), so you can insert you image in design view , and then just copy and paste the source code into your text widget.

Your HTML should look something like this:

<p align=”center”><a href=”http://clintmaher.com/feed/atom/”><img src=”http://clintmaher.com/wp-admin/images/rss_logo.gif”></a></p>

This tells the browser how the image should sit on the page, and it also tells it where the image lives, which could be on your server (remember FTP uploading), or it could be on someone else’s server, and you are just borrowing their image (with permission of course).

Once you have done this, save your changes and check out your blog. If you have done everything OK then there should be your image in the sidebar for everyone to see. Try this with your blog. You’ll probably have to play around with the size of your images to make sure they fit in the sidebar and inside of any borders and the like.

With a bit of practice you’ll have a pretty funky site in next to no time.

You may have noticed some people have nice looking signatures at the bottom of each blog post they write. I’m sure most of these people don’t type in this signature each time they write a post so how do they do it? Is there some setting in Wordpress that you can add this?

Well, no, there isn’t. There is however a tricky little plugin called funnily enough, Add Signature from the team at Dagon Design. Once you download the plugin and unzip it to your FTP Folder, you can upload it to your Plugin Folder on the remote server.

All you have to do now is login to your admin area and activate the it by going to the Plugin area. Once you have done this hit the settings tab and look for the DDAddSig button along the top nav bar.

Once in this page you can choose how your signature displays and on what posts and pages. Try writing your signature in HTML to get some great backlinks and anchored links back to your other Wealth Creation sites. Great for SEO. It might take some playing around but it doesn’t take too long to figure out.

The standard Wordpress format is pretty cool to start with, and it’s even free which is amazing. However we want our blogs to do even cooler stuff, so that they not only look nice and pretty, but do some pretty tricky stuff that will help you out as an author, the end user, and most importantly, help us in terms of SEO so that Google demands to put you on its front page.

The type of things we can upload to our server where our Wordpress blog lives, are things such as Themes and Plugins. You’ll get pretty used to these two things and learn to love them.

A theme is a design or layout that is made specifically to work with Wordpress. There are thousands of free themes hanging around on the Internet waiting for you to use. If you want a customised theme to suit you or your business, then it is pretty easy and inexpensive to get one made up on somewhere such as getafreelancer or Elance.

Plugins are backend pieces of code that are designed to do different things but we will get into that later. For now, we need to know how to get these things on to your server.

FTP, or File Transfer Protocol for the geeks among us. A technical term that really says put something from my computer on to a remote computer (server in this case). Very easy to do once you have done it a few times.

First you will need an FTP Client (software) to do this. If you’re a real tech, then you can do this through Windows, but if you are like me, use a separate program designed to do FTP. A fantastic client around at the moment is FileZilla, an open source program (free) that is worth its weight in gold. CuteFTP is another, and if you’re a designer, then you may choose to use Dreamweaver.

Once you have your FTP client, you have to punch in the setting for your server, such as root directory, user name and of course password. Hit connect and if everything is OK you’ll connect to the remote server and be able to see in real time the entire file layout of your blog.

Now as this is a blog, personally I do not get the entire remote site and make a copy on my own computer like I would if it was a static website, but you can, especially if you want to back up the site. The simple thing to do here is to drag your theme and plugin files from your computer and drop them to the correct folders on the remote site. The correct folder is usually found in /wp-content/. Do this for as many themes and plugins that you may want to upload.

It may sound difficult (or maybe it’s the way i explained it that has confused you), but it really is easy once you have done it a couple of times. Uploading is not just limited to these things either. Images, webforms and documents can all be uploaded just like a normal web site.

Soon, we’ll look at what to do with these things that you have uploaded and how to use them.

First things first. There are a couple of ways to host your Wordpress blog. You can use the services of a free Wordpress host easily enough but as we know free things usually have their downfalls. By hosting on a free host your blog is at the mercy of their rules, and if your blog happens to go outside of these rules your blog can be shut down without warning. With some free hosts this can be something as simple as putting in an affiliate link. They can change the rules overnight so be warned.

The alternative to this is of course have your own host and install Wordpress yourself. Hosting these days is very inexpensive and there are some excellent services that allow you to host unlimited domains with your package. When you have a lot of blogs and websites this could save you a lot of money.

The majority of hosts use a backend platform called C Panel. C Panel is very easy to use and work with, and makes installing Wordpress a breeze as it does it all for you. Your hosting company will tell you where in C Panel you can find the install application, but usually this is found in the Fantastico script library. You simply choose  where you want the Wordpress install directed to, and it automatically does the rest. If your site is hosted with a Plesk panel, then I would suggest that you speak to the server administrator for assistance:)

If you will be using the  domain name as your blog, then you would point it to the root folder. If you want to make the blog a sub-directory, then you just type in what you want it called, and point it to that.

You can install more than one version of Wordpress on your server, it is just a case of repeating the install process.

Once you have done your install you will be automatically emailed your login details for later reference.

Now that we have a nice shiny new version of Wordpress on our server, we want to start making some modifications. To do this we will need an FTP client, and that will be the topic of the next post.

If you had asked me what Wordpress was six months ago, then I would have had no idea what you were talking about. After continuing my quest on becoming a Super Affiliate, it seems that blogging is the future of online publishing. Of all the blogging platforms available, one name kept coming up, Wordpress.

Wordpress is the blogging platform of choice for those in the know. Why is that? Mainly because of the way that you can tweak Wordpress and get it to do exactly what you want, and more importantly from the view of an  Internet Marketer, it has superior SEO characteristics that ultimately effect our bottom line.

This blog is about exploring the possibilities of what Wordpress can do for you as a blogger, and as an Internet Marketer. We’ll go through some of the basics and then get in to the little things in the back end that just could make the difference between being on page one of Google or page 487 of Google. After all, it’s no point having a blog if no one can find it right. And if you happen to monetize your blog you could do with some extra traffic I’m guessing.

So stay tuned, and I’ll do my best to enlighten you to the wonderful world of Wordpress.