Your cannot move on the Internet at the minute without the word authority or trust popping up. Using blog posts to prove your credentials or authority in a particular niche is a great way to build your business.

What’s The Problem?

If you work over the net delivering goods or services, there is a chance that your clients will never meet you except via emails or possibly telephone calls.  You need to have some social proof that you can do what you say you can do.

Your clients will be handing over their cash to a total stranger in exchange for your goods or services.  They need proof you are qualified to deliver on your sales copy’s promise.

This is where blogging comes in, if you can write an in-depth blog post about a topic in your niche that solves peoples problems there is a good chance that you can do it for real for them too as part of your service offering.

Writing Blog Post To Prove You Have the Stuff

To prove your credentials through your blog you need to write a lot of blog posts on your subject which can solve peoples problems.  This is important, it’s not about writing blog posts which market your service, it’s about writing blog posts that help people solve a problem for free in the hope that you can prove you have the stuff to help them in the future.

Use Tools to Market Your Posts

Once you have written your post, if  you market that article correctly, you can get other people to sing your praises . This (often informal) testimonial again proves you have the stuff.  This can be in the form of a link to your blog post, re-publishing your content, voting on social media such as Digg or re-tweeting your blog post on Twitter.

My particular preference is to market my blog posts on twitter, the type of testimonial I am looking for is a re-tweet.  This is an informal testimonial but it gets my name in front of an audience who may not know about my WordPress expertise.

Check out my post on how I market my blog posts on twitter.

The Search Engines Want To Link To Authorities

The job of the search engines is to provide the most authoritative result to any particular search query.  Writing an excellent blog post which generates links and traffic is a good way to get Google and Co to see you as an authority.

Blog posts are particularly well suited to rank on search engines because of the density of keywords that can be placed in a post and the ease of tweaking SEO configurations on WordPress means it is relatively easy to make your blog posts rank well.

Getting on the first page of Google is yet more excellent social proof that you know your subject inside out.

Wrap Up

Write in-depth about your professional niche to prove your credentials and show you are an authority in your subject.  If done well this is excellent social proof to potential clients that you know your stuff.

When you first start a new blog, and no one knows about it, it can seem a thankless task crafting beautiful blog posts. Having no-one to read them but your mother and your cat, let alone throw you the life line of a nice psot comment is a hard feeling, that is why so many blogs are started then dropped after a few months.

Here’s a little tip there are seams of readers on twitter always on the lookout for new content just waiting to be mined

What is Twitter Mining

It’s about looking for places on twitter where large numbers of potential readers congregate.  It’s about knowing who is big in your niche with lots of followers and then introducing yourself to these people.

You introduce yourself by following these people.

Here’s An Example

I write about the blogging niche, with a particular bias towards WordPress.  I know who the big people in my niche are, they write about similar things to me, so I would go to their followers page, this is the seam.  As an example the  Darren Rowse from the Problogger site’s followers can be seen at:

http://twitter.com/problogger/followers

Look at the people there, check out their profiles, see what they are tweeting about and if they look like a good match for what your blog is about follow them.

There will be a temptation to follow thousands of people, but my advice is to only follow a few and build a real rapport with these people.  This is far more likely to make them loyal readers.  A thing to note if you start to mass follow you will be marked as a spammer.

Once you have followed someone, there will be an inital sizing up of you to see if your are worth following back, so make sure you are adding value to twitter whilst you are mining for new readers.

Follow is Like A Handshake

You may think this seems a little spammy, but as the great Gary Vaynerchuck says “It’s not stalking it’s a darn handshake” http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/78972633/its-not-stalking-its-a-darn-handshake.  A follow is like shaking someones hand and having some small talk, if you are interesting (in your tweets and blog content) the converstation will become deeper.

Building on The Follow

Once you have followed someone, you may picque their interest.  They will visit your twitter profile.

Make sure you are linking back to your blog from your profile.  I recommend that you link to a sneeze page on your blog rather than the front page of your site.

A sneeze page is a special page on your site which tells new visitors what your blog is all about, in that hope that they will be propelled deeper into your site like a sneeze.

Darren Rowse of Problogger wrote an excellent article on a sneeze pages at, something that will propel people deeper into your blog archive http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/04/23/create-a-sneeze-page-for-your-blog/

You can see the page I link to from twitter at wpdude.com/welcome, note I don’t advertise this along the top navigation of my site, this is not for everyone only people coming from other social media sites.

Start Mining

Grab your miner’s lamp, heft your pick and shovel and go looking for those readers, they are unlikely to come to you when your blog is a fledgling.

By default your WordPress pages are displayed in alphabetical order.  Sometimes this is not what a blogger wants, here is a quick hack to change the order of your pages.

Why Change the Order of Your Pages?

You may want to change the order of your pages to make more important pages stand out, for example on my site, I want hire me to be on the right so it is more prominent or you may want to improve your sites usability by clustering like pages together.

Sometimes you just want to rebel, the OCD of developers may get you down, ordering everything and indexing and categorising can overwhelm the more free spirited.

The Out of the Box Hack

Here is how you can modify the order that your pages are displayed.

From the edit pages section, select one of your pages and you will see the following attribute box on the right of your page copy:

As you can see their is a numeric option for the page order.  By default all pages are set to zero, but if you set a value for each page you can control the order.  e.g. about =1, contact =2, testimonials =3 and this order will be displayed on your page layout.

As it says above, this is a little bit “janky” if you add new pages you will need to  modify the order again.  If you want a simple page order change this hack does exactly what it says on the tin.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall What’s the Best Page Order Process of All

You oh Dude tell everyone the out of the box hack which is fine, but lo what’s this I see, a plugin is more fair than thee.

If you are looking for something a little more polished then why not check out the My Page Order Plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-page-order/

You Are A Free Spirit

Don’t let the “Man” tell you which order your pages should be in.  Go out make a stand and break their structured universe 🙂

Yesterday I made the following comment on Twitter, I thought I would follow it up with a full blog post explaining what I mean

If you can write a decent blog post on a subject, you can probably do it for someone, for a fee, that’s one way blogging can make you money

What I mean here is that you can indirectly monetise your blog, it’s not always about adsense clicks or ad sales.

What Is Indirect Blog Monetisation

Indirect Blog monetisation is about making money because of your blog not through it.  You write your blog posts to create authority in your niche and to direct your blog readers to a desired monetisation method. Some examples of indirect blog monetisation are:

• An online store behind your blog
• Consulting / coaching
• A Service business for example WordPress services, more about that later
• Speaking
• Book sales
• Freelance writing

To Quote Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett from their book Problogger Secrets fort Blogging Your Way To A Six Figure Income, you should look at indirectly monetising your blog if you meet one of these criteria :

• I blog to help me promote my business
• I blog because I want to promote my writing
• I blog because I want to make myself know

Is It Better Than Direct Monetisation?

I cannot answer that one, I would love to be a Problogger, so my ideal is to directly monetise my blog, but the time when I can make a living just from writing blog posts is away in the future, right now I am making about 95% of my income from indirect methods.  But what I can say is that indirect methods are far better when you are growing your blog.  You need to look at your own desires to answer this question.

To earn a decent living as a problogger, you need traffic, and you ain’t going to get that for a few months or even years when you first start a blog.  Therefore my roundabout answer is yes indirect monetissation is better for the new blogger whilst they are building their profile.

My Example of Indirect Monetisation

The best way to illustrate indirect monetisation is with a case study of my business.

You may see ad banners and affiliate reviews  on my site but they are secondary to my main income stream which is my WordPress services business.  My blog is to attract people to my site and give me the opportunity to present my offering through my sales page.  I offer WordPress technical support services to bloggers wanting to concentrate on content creation and leave the backend technical stuff to someone else.  I have the technical expertise to fix your problems more efficiently than many bloggers, this then frees up time for their main task of writing excellent blog posts.

My blog posts help to provide organic search engine traffic, give me something to add value to my social media streams ; twtitter and Facebook, but most importantly they allow me to show my expertise at WordPress.  As I said on twtitter, if I can write a competent blog post on how to do something then I can probably do it, that is why many of my blog posts are case studies if my services – how I solved a problem or telling people how to do something.  I am providing social proof of my expertise.

Many of my readers are not my customers, and that is fine. I run with a freemium model, I write my blog posts for all to enjoy, for free, and that is great I love doing that, but if you need more than my writing, my direct help, or you know someone else who does.  Then though my blog post and your exposure to my soft sell marketing you will know where to come.

As I have mentioned my sales funnel is all about the soft sell.  Prove my authority and then give a call to action at the top of my site, the less than subtle hire me button.  I have a footer on my rss feed suggesting people may want to hire me, and another at the bottom of each post.  It’s not too pushy but it lets people know there is more than just a series of blog posts to this site.

Can You Retrospectively add Indirect Monetisation

I think yes, add a services page detailing your offering, then inform your readers via your email list or a blog post to your RSS subscribers and there you go.  Be preapred for some backlash, there is still a movement that believes blogs should be non-commercial.  You may loose readers.

Another thing I would recommend is to look at your existing ads / adsense config.  Are your advertising services which are in conflict with your offering, you may want to remove them.  If you look at my affiliate reviews and banner ads, they are for things I do not offer, so I feel they are complimentary.

Jobify Your Passion

There is a good change you love the niche you are writing about, if you could take that to the next level and jobify your passion what would that mean to you?

As with all blogging activities, indirect blog monetisation is not a get rich quick scheme.   It takes hard work and dedication, I am worse off since I started wpdude.com leaving my very lucrative corporate freelancing gig, but I love what I do, I get to interact with some cool people running excellent blogs.  I’m not going back to a corporate gig again.

If any of this break free and work for yourself resonates with you, I heartily recommend a couple of unconventional work products:

F2 Firefly Manifesto By Jonathan Fields

A Brief Guide to World Domination by Chris Guillebeau

So What Are You?

Direct or Indirect let me know, also another of my indirect methods is WordPress coaching (can you see what I’m doing here) if you want a one-on-one session to talk about how to market your services through a WordPress blog please contact me.

If you follow me on Twitter (@wpdude) you will know that I promote my own blog posts there. I do this because of the large audience looking for and consuming blog posts on the topics I write about.

Twitter is a great place to promote your blog and the business behind it.  Here are the ways I promote my blog posts on Twitter.

As a Blog Post Is Written

When I publish a post to my blog, I also automatically publish a tweet which links back to my blog post,  to do this automatic integration I use Twitter tools, I wrote a blog post on the subject called Integrating WordPress and Twitter.   The tweet will look something like this:

New blog post: WordPress Membership Plugins http://bit.ly/Y1is8

I usually write and publish my blog posts mid morning UK time, the majority of my followers are not in this time zone, so I usually post a second announcement of my blog posts at my peak Twitter time which is about 19:00 UK time.  I am not always available at this time to do a manual update so I write and schedule a tweet using the Tweetlater service. This excellent tool allows you to write your tweet and to schedule it at a time of your choosing.

As I can craft my own tweets, I usually add more information than the “new blog post” title of the twitter tools integration, here is what I used for the same membership plugin post:

Thinking of starting a #wordpress membership site? Check out my post on what to look for in a membership plugin http://bit.ly/Y1is8

One From My Archives

Another technique I use is a “one from my archives” tweet.  When I do this, I pull up a post from my blog archives which has not seen the light of day for some time and promote it again on twitter.

I do this to breathe life into the post and to keep adding value to my followers with new (to them) content.  Not everyone has been reading your blog from day one and there may be a real wealth of blog posts to pass onto your Twitter followers.

I only do this with posts I am really happy with and feel adds real value.

In Reply to the Conversation

If you see a question in your twitter stream that you have addressed in a blog post, bring it to that twitterer’s attention.  For example I often see questions on how to integrate WordPress and twitter, so I @reply to that person with a link to my blog post on the subject.

This is excellent blog marketing, your site had an answer to their question as they asked it.  What is the bet that they will be crawling around your archive in the very near future.

Search.twitter.com

The next technique I use is far more proactive and may not be for everyone, but you can search for questions you already have the answer to.  This is an excellent tool for finding prospective clients without being too in their face.  The best type of marketing in my opinion.

From the twitter search page search.twitter.com type in a phrase you know you have an answer for.  Again back to my example I could be searching for “integrate wordpress and twitter”.  If someone is asking this of the twitterverse, and I can answer this with a link to my blog post I am immediately establishing my authority and expertise with this person.

I would ask you to be wary of pushing your affiliate link filled posts when proactively searching or replying to the conversation.  If all you do is push your money making links into people stream you will be marked as a spammer and unfollowed.

Measuring the results

Everyone’s blog is slightly different, so what works for me, might not work for you.  The answer to this is to test the results of your tweets and see what gets a click through.

To do this I use the URL shortening tool bit.ly. It records how many people have clicked on the link for more details and who actually clicks through to your site.  It also gives you a breakdown of the timing of the most clicks.  This can help you to find your optimum tweeting time.

Does This Replace RSS?

No, Twitter is too dynamic and people could easily miss your updates, if people really want to engage with your content they will still subscribe to your RSS feed.

Consider these techniques as a promotional activity not a content delivery system.

What Is The Key To Twitter?

The key to Twitter is adding value.  If you can bring your blog post to a persons attention when they have a problem you are providing excellent value.

You may feel a bit sleazy about marketing yourself like this, but don’t be. There is a saying where I come from “Shy bairns get nowt”  translation  “Shy babies get nothing.”  I am one of the most introverted people I know and self promotion does not come naturally, but if you are adding value and you are helping people I don’t see a problem with pushing your blog post across people twitter stream for their attention.

If you liked this post, please get in touch on twitter @wpdude to talk some more.

Further Reading

Why Bloggers Need Twitter by Hunter Nuttall – a free ebook and excellent resource

Here are my top five WordPress performance tuning tips.  If you have a poorly performing blog, you may want to try some of these procedures.

What Do I Mean By Poor WordPress Performance?

I don’t mean that you have no readers or comments or that your content is not very good, that is up to you 😉 what I mean is that your pages are rendered very slowly and the usability of your site to open posts or pages, search for content or pull things back from your archives makes your visitors experience very poor and possibly turn them off from yoru site altogether.

There is also a school of thought in SEO circles that slow loading sites are not as well regarded as a fast loading site.  So poor performance could be effecting your search engine ranking.

Before we begin

All of this is information is fairly technical, please backup your site before your begin. I offer a wordpress performance tuning service if you would prefer to hand this over to me. request a quote from my WordPress Technical Support page for details

Here we go, my top 5 tips for improving WordPress performance:

1. Install a Cache Plugin

Cacheing in computer speak is when you take information usually recovered from back end database and hold it in memory or on disk.  When the information is next requested it is served up from the very fast memory/disk store rather than recovering it from the slower backend storage.  The cache is held for a set lifetime and then renewed once the cache has timed out.  This means only one access of the backend is requried for a set period of time.

Think of your blog home page, it is fairly static so loading all of the logo images, blog posts, CSS files etc etc into memory and serving them up can save a lot of time.

The plugin I recommend is wp-super-cache, this can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

UPDATE: I now recommend w3-total-cache it’s mninify and CDN capabilities knock the socks of wp-super-cache http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/

A word of warning on using a cache, if you use dynamic content on your pages for example an adrotator where each page load should show a differnt banner ad, using a cache will cause this to fail and only show one banner.  wp-super-cache w3-total-cache has the ability to mark certain scripts or comands as not for cache.

2. Activate the Inbuilt WP Object Cache

WordPress comes with it’s own inbuilt object cache. this allows you to save certain database queries to disk, and recover them much more quickly than accessing the database.

To activate the inbuilt cache you need to edit the file wp-config.php.  This will be held in the root of your blog installation.  To activate the object cache, add the following line ot your wp-config.php file:

define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);

3. Reduce Plugins

Everytime we add a plugin to our blogs, we add an overhead.  Every bell and whistles on your home page needs ot be rendered and displayed.  This will slow down your blog.  My recommendation is to remove all plugins which are not entirely needed on your site.

I wrote an article about performing a plugin audit earlier this year, why not use that as a tool to find out if you need a particular plugin

Database SQL Cache

The query cache holds regularly run queries in memory to speed up the return of database results.  We are getting into real techie land here, and that is to check if your back end MYSQL database has a query cache installed and how big it is.

If you are not happy messing about with your database why not submit a technical support request to your hosting company to do this for you.

To find out you have a query cache installed and it’s status, run the following queries from a MYSQL tool such as PHPMYADMIN

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘have_query_cache’;

This will return a yes or no value, if it is no ask your hosting company to activate a cache.

To show the status of the cache run:

SHOW STATUS LIKE ‘Qcache%’;

This second command will tell you how the cache is being used and if it needs to be tuned.  Here is an excellent resource from the MYSQL site which tell syou much more about query cache settings and configuration.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/query-cache-status-and-maintenance.html

5. Look to Your Hosting

This is my last but least popular recommendation, and that is to look at your hosting provider.  You may be in the enviable position that your blog has grown so popular that you have out grown your hosting account, or you may be  too cheap, I bet that $3 per year hosting account doesn’t look so good now it takes ten minutes to load your blog.

If you are still having performance problems after the first four steps, look to upgrade your hosting to a more powerful setup, this will cost more money, so you will need to weigh this against the value of your blog.

Checking Performance Improvements

You need something to prove that the performance changes you have implemented have provided an increase in speed, you can spend lots of money on traffic analysers to look at the underlying http calls and see response time, me,I go for cheap and cheerful everytime, I use the basic (read free) version of httpwatch a browser plugin which shows your page being rendered and what is taking the time, a very useful tool.  The key point is I can use it to do a before and after comparision of page load time.  It also shows me which components are being cached.

Wrap Up

Performance tuning any computer system is a dark art, where you tune in one place you can introduce new bottlenecks elsewhere.  This list is not exhaustive, there are tweaks to php.ini, your web server config file, or you could be having performance problems due to incompatible plugins or themes making outdated DB calls.

My advice change one thing at a time and roll it back if you see no improvement.

UPDATE: WordPress Users And Roles Training Available

I have recorded a video training session on WordPress performance tuning for my WordPress training and support community the WP Owners Club.

I’ve got a 14 day free trial at the moment, why not take out trial membership and check out the training, here’s what you need to do

1) Sigup for a 14 day free trial account at wpownersclub.com/sign-up

2) Go to http://wpownersclub.com/performance-tuning-workshop and watch your training

I was planning to develop an information product to teach WordPress blog owners all about SEO with a particular emphasis on how to setup the various plugins and settings of WordPress.

As part of my research I began to look at the various products already out there, I was feeling quite good, the majority of products were generic seo not wordPress specific so I thought I had a good chance of finding a market niche.

That was until I found out that Michael Martine of Remarkablogger fame had already beaten me to the market with his e-book and webinars product WordPress SEO Secrets.

I was very downhearted I had done a lot of research for my own e-book and so I decided to download and read Michael’s work to see if I was going to continue with my info product, and the answer is no.

Mr Martine has done such a thorough job I don’t see the point in writing a wordpress seo book, I am just going to tell you about his instead and encourage you to buy it if you are looking to improve your WordPress seo.

Who Is Michael Martine

Michael is one of those bloggers who is always being talked about by other cool bloggers.  He gets mentioned in one of those name dropping list, you know what I mean:

I was tweeting with Naomi, Dazza, Dav-o, Yaro and Mike the other day and we decided to re-write the paradigm of how you live

He gets mentioned a) because he knows his shit b) The content he produces for free on this blog and for a fee via his information products is first rate.

I’m a subscriber to his blog and I rate what he has to say very highly.  This is why I was a little down when I saw I woudl be competing with him in WordPress seo info product circles.

Who Is SEO Secrets For?

I’ll cut and paste the section from the book that tells  you exactly that:

WordPress SEO Secrets is for bloggers using WordPress. No other blogging systems are covered
in this book. You still might get some great info if you‘re using Blogger or TypePad, but none of
the step-by-step instructions cover those blogging platforms. Only WordPress. Why? Because
WordPress is far more customizable and controllable than the other guys. Between the zillions
of themes for its design and bazillions of plugins for its functionality, WordPress WINS for SEO.
Period.

WordPress SEO Secrets is for beginners who aren‘t afraid to learn new stuff and get their hands
dirty. I‘m not going to talk down to you, but I am going to assume you‘re computer and internet
literate. You should know a little HTML. If you have already been learning about SEO,
WordPress SEO Secrets will help fill in some gaps at both the conceptual and at the practical
levels. If you‘re more advanced, it will at least confirm what you already know (hopefully with
some great tips and tools you hadn‘t yet encountered).

WordPress SEO Secrets – Michael Martine

My Review

So here us my review of WordPress SEO Secrets., all links are affiliate links, I think I deserve a few quid for my research 🙂

The product comes in two formats, the book only version, which I bought, costs $47 or the book and a series of acompanying audio and video walkthroughs of how to implement the changes required which costs $127.

The book is only 38 pages long (mine was going to be 39, so much more value) but it is packed with focused WordPress seo tips.  It talks about the plugins you need for best result,  something I touched upon in my All In One SEO Pack review.

WordPress SEO Secrets also goes into some detail about changing your permalinks, keyword density in posts and it also talks  about offsite SEO techniques, keyword research and the various tools available to help your SEO efforts.

The most striking thing about this book is the ongoing statements that SEO should be secondary to quality content, I cannot agree more, you are not writing for a search engine or for a click, you are writing for real people.  If you can solve someones problem, then they are engaged and more likely to come back and click on your adsense links, buy your info product or take out your wordpress coaching services.  Write for people first then tweak it for the search engines to give your content a nudge in the right direcion..

Did I learn something new from this e-book? The answer is  yes.  Something I had not considered but will now is my outbound linking strategy, if you link to poor quality sites you will, by association, be treated as a poor quality site, if you link to authoratitive and quality sites, that will rub off on you too.

Are there any downsides to this book, yes, you need a certain level of technical skill to implement any of the changes recommended, my second small concern is that whilst it has razor sharp focus on WordPress SEO, some of the more general SEO topics are treated lightly.  My recommendation, read Naomi Dunfords Seo School first (Parental guidance she swears like a trooper), this can be your SEO primer, then move onto the more involved aspects of WordPress SEO Secrets. which is designed specifically for WordPress owners.

Here is my key recommendation, I use the techniques Michael talks about here at wpdude and I know they work, I rank for the keywords I want.  I was planning to write this very same information product, I coach my clients on wordpress seo using these techniques.  This is what you need to do.

Funny story – I bought a copy of the e-book, but unfortunately I had set a cookie on my affiliate link before I bought it.  This then generated a commission sale for me.  Not long after the download an email drops into my box from Mr Martine, clearly unhappy that I had used my own affilaite link to buy his product and thereby get a discount.  He wanted to know what was going on.  Tail between legs I ‘fessed up what I was doing.  He seemed okay with that, but that is definetly not the way you want to be having first contact with an influential member of your niche.

Back To The Drawing Board

So it’s back to the drawing board researching my own info product, but if you want to learn how to optimuse your wordpress blog to get the maximum amount of organic search traffic then I recommend WordPress SEO Secrets.

It comes with a 100% money back guarantee, so there is nothing to loose, only organic search traffic to gain.

Did you know that WordPress can be used as the content management system (CMS) for “real websites”? I want to take a look at how post and blogging functions of WP can be repackaged to work as a back end content creation management and placement system for a traditional non-blogging web sites.

I have worked with professional CMS tools from companies such as IBM which cost tens of thousands of dollars per processor not per license, and in my opinion, a certain level of this can be done with humble, free WordPress.

What Is The Difference Between A Blog and A CMS

A blog publishes posts in reverse chronological order usually with a list of previous posts available to read from the front page, whilst a CMS is a system to create content easily and then publish it in a predefined section of a web site.

For example all news articles will appear in a news section of a site, all special sales offers may appear on the front page. It’s all about easily creating content and pushing it to it’s predefined location on the site.

Static Home Pages

If you are building a CMS the likelihood is that you will not need a series of blog posts on your front page, rather you will have a static front page and have content or posts pushed into their own container.

WordPress allows you to change the front page of your site to do exactly this. From your dashboard goto settings -> reading, and you will see the following options:

Change the setting from your latest posts to a static page, create a page with your home page content and you are good to go, it’s as easy as that.

CMS Theme

The selection of your theme will probably make or break your CMS installation. You are looking for something with lots of sidebars into which you can push content. The task will be made easier if the theme is widget ready.

Check out the WordPress theme directory at http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/, you can search for themes by the number of sidebars and widgetization (is that a real word?). Your other options are to buy a premium theme or have one tailored made for you by a theme designer. A search on google for CMS wordpress theme will return a large number of pre-made themes ready to act as a CMS.

The use of the term sidebar is a bit of a misnomer, think of a sidebar as a slot into which you can place widgets. An example of this misnoner can be seen on my site, I have four sidebars in my configuration, and only one runs down the side of my site, the other three are in the footer.

Organise By Categories

Once you have a static front page and a theme of your choosing you need to start pushing content into its correct container. I think the best way is to orgnanise your content is by category.

For example you may have a section on your site for your sales team, put all of their content into a wordpress sales category, this can then be extracted and published to the correct location using the techniques outlined below.

Widgets to Push the Content

Once your data is categorised, you can then use widgets to position your content. Using the “list category post” widget you can push a list of posts from a particular category in your sidebars.

This is done from your wordpress dashboard -> appearance -> widgets, then drag and drop your widgets onto the appropriate sidebar.

Plugins to Organise Content

You may want to position content in locations where widgets don’t easily work, for example you may want a static page called news into which news items about your organisation are displayed. To do this there are a number of plugins out there, the one I use is Sobek’s post In Category plugin. Using this I can pull all of the posts in a particular category and display them as a linked list for people to click through to the acutal post. These can be shown on pages or posts.

Using plugins in this fashion allows you to extend the WordPress page function to act as a new container for content.

User Management

You may want your CMS to be updated by many people, WordPress has the functionality to allow multiple authors and editors of your content. Using the roles built into WP you can allow people to write content but not publish it, create editor level users who have the permission to edit and then publish the posts.

Full details of the roles available can be seen at http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities the roles are fairly granular so control over what your contributors can or can not do is available to you.

Controlling Who Sees Content

Another function of a CMS is controlling how can see which content, with the addition of a plugin or two, WordPress can do this .

For example you may have a customer only area on your site where they can read order information. Using the user management functionality areas of your CMS could be password protected.

Check out my post How To Integrate Paypal with Your WordPress Blog whilst this is about monetising your site with paypal, it also discusses the various membership site plugins available. Using these type of plugins you can create login IDs to protect certain pages or posts making them available to a subset of your site users.

Time Delayed Posts

Using the scheduled posting function of WordPress the site can be updated at set times. An example of this may be a sale. Write up details and set the post to appear in the appropriate container when the sale begins.

Check out my post Write Now Post Later for the mechanics of this process.

Removing Old Content

You may find that you want to add content to the site then remove it when it is not valid, not like us lazy bloggers who just want to pump out more and more content and leave it online for posterity. Using the post editor, content can be marked as draft or deleted very easily to make visible or remove content on the site.

When Is A Blog Not A Blog

.. when its a CMS, WordPress is not just a blogging tool it can be used to update and present content on a traditional more static site. Your usage of WordPress as a CMS is limited only to your imagination for organising content into containers.

I hope this posts has prompted you to think of WordPress as more than just a blogging tool.

Examples Of WordPress as A CMS

I put a call out on twitter to find out who was using WordPress as a CMS, here is a list of sites configured in this way, have a look and get inspiration.

• http://www.morethanadmin.ca/
• http://www.maestroquality.com/
• http://www.ogagym.org/
• http://simmsfurniturewarehouse.com/

Special thanks to Charlene Polanosky, she not only sent me links to sites but detailed desciptions from her own site on building sites using WordPress as your CMS

• http://essentialkeystrokes.com/project-files-wordpress-as-a-cms-comes-through-again/
• http://essentialkeystrokes.com/project-files-using-wordpress-as-a-cms/
• http://essentialkeystrokes.com/project-files-using-wordpress-to-build-a-traditional-web-site/
• http://essentialkeystrokes.com/project-files-is-that-really-wordpress/

Planning To Use WordPress as Your CMS?

If you need some assistance making WordPress work as your CMS, please visit my WordPress coaching page.

When you logged into your blog today, you probably saw a new banner running across the top like this:

This is an announcement that the latest version of WordPress is available for you to download and install.

This release is a bug fix to the version 2.8 release which was sent out about a month ago.  Here is a link to the fixes and changes available in this new version just in case you are into that kind of thing http://wordpress.org/development/2009/07/wordpress-2-8-1/

With this in mind I thought I would link up all of my posts on updating to the latest version of wordpress.

Please remember to backup thoroughly before you upgrade.

• https://dev.neilmatthews.com/shoud-update-version-wordpress
• https://dev.neilmatthews.com/wordpress-271-upgrade
• https://dev.neilmatthews.com/plugin-review-backup-plugins

A few days ago I wrote about the trial I was interested in conducting on RSS advertising.  Adding Google adsense to your RSS feed has been around for some time now, but no-one is saying how well it performs as they do with on-site Adsense.

This post is the result of my great RSS experiment.

My One Word Conclusion

Indifference.

My Thought On RSS Advertising

People taking RSS subscriptions are pretty tech savvy and they want to read content not respond to advertising messages.  I think people are ad blind and not interested in clicking on the offers put before them.

I think you need a large number of subscribers and some compelling ads (perhaps graphical ads) to get the clicks required to make this worthwhile.

There are bloggers in my RSS reader who use RSS advertising, but I have never clicked on an ad what about you?

Income

I have a modest RSS following, and the ads have had a relatively large number of impressions, I was expecting some action, let me give you the numbers …

It is against the rules of the adsense program to discuss your earnings but since I earned nothing I am happy to report my income was zero.  No clicks no cents nada zip.

Drop Of Subscribers

As I said I think people are indifferent to the ads, my subscription rate has continued to gently climb, there has been no drop off of subscribers that I have noticed.

People just don’t care about the ads.

Moving Forward

<shrugs shoulders> I don-know I’m indifferent about it all.  I don’t think there will be an impact if I remove the ads or leave them there.  My spidey senses are saying get rid of the ads in case   I alienate anyone into unsubscription.

Please leave me some comments before apathy on the subject overtakes me completely 🙂

Advertising in your RSS feed has been around for a while, but I have not seen anyone crying from  the rooftops on how effective it is.  There are not images of people holding up their cheques for $$$$ sayng RSS advertising is the best (as they do for traditional AdSense).  Since no one is saying how effective it is, I thought I would run an experiment on my own feed to see how effective it is.

I’m not a fan of traditional AdSense, the idea that someones comes to your site to read your quality content and then clicks away for a couple of cents does not sit very well with me.  I have yet to make my mind up about RSS feeds, and I will probably only leave it up for a couple of weeks.

So I’ve laid my cards in the table and full disclosure has been made, now lets move forward this post is all about adding AdSense to your blog’s RSS feed.

If you want a quick lesson on RSS, you can check my post on the subject Beginers Guide to WordPRess RSS.

Step One Get and AdSense Account

The first step is to sign-up for an adsense account at http://adsense.google.com

Once you are in go to adsense setup and then to adsense for feeds.

Why Google Bought Feedburner

You can only add adsense to RSS feeds which are served up by Feedburner.  Feedburner developed itself as the leading RSS hosting company before being acquired by Google a couple of years ago.  It has taken some time but finally they have fully integrated the adsense platform with Feedburner.

Google bought the top platform with a ready made user base to serve up ads.

Change the Look’n’Feel

So your have decided to add RSS, there are a number of options you can set:

Ad type – you can specify that text and image ads or text only ads are shown on your feed.  I have selected text only.  Since I have very little control of knowledge of what will be advertised, I thought text will be less disturbing to you my jolly readers if something unpleasant is pushed upon you.

Post interval – a nice touch is to control how often ads are served.  You can select every post, or set an interval of every x posts so part of your content can be ad free.

Post length – you can specify ads over a certain word count to only display ads.  I was thinking why Google would do this and my thought is that a reader needs to be completely engaged to read a long post, and perhaps they are more inclined to click on an ad at the.  I’m not sure but the massive heads at Google will have done that for a reason.

Location – you can serve your ads at the top of bottom of the page

Colours – you can let adsense detect the colours of your feed, or you can setup a custom palette.

Assign this configuration to your feed from Feedburner and click save, it really is as simple as that.

Beware Click Fraud

Click fraud is a cancer on pay per click advertising, do not click on my feed ads unless they are of real value.

In case you did not know click fraud is the process of clicking on paid ads without a desire to review or buy the products.  Click fraud is done by bloggers trying to increase their income or by advertisers competitors trying to deplete advertising budgets.

Watch This Space

I will report back in a couple of weeks on how effective RSS advertising has been (or not been).  I would love to hear your opinion on advertising in RSS, it’s something I know will polarise people.

Many people subscribe to RSS to get away from the ads, how do you feel about them coming after you.

Are you tempted to unsubscribe from my blog because of it?  Please let me know before you click unsubscribe  this is just an experiment I don’t want to fall out over this :).

Tell me your stories about adsense, show me that RSS advertising can work or not in the comments section.