Aggregate your social networks with Lifestream WordPress plugin is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

The social web has gotten out of control with most power users having upwards of 10 or more social profiles to manage. Not only do we have MySpace and Facebook but many web professionals have LinkedIn, Digg, Stumbleupon or Reddit accounts to manage. If you like pictures you probably have a Flickr account and maybe you use Picasa for web albums. If you listen to music you may have iLast.fm to go with your Zune card or maybe you’re a simple kind of person and you just have MSN or GMAIL as your contacts manager.

If you are reading this blog then odds are you have all of these and more to manage and bringing it all together in one place is kinda cool. The wordppress plugin Lifestream makes this happen and keeps all your social activity in one location with a few simple clicks. Your social feed can be used as an online resume with a history of everything you do online as a bit of job history for those of us who live and work online.

My Lifestream shows you that I spend much of my time online reading news sites and promoting stories from not only my own websites but the millions of other websites I read each day. I use my del.icio.us account to list my favorite urls and my Facebook account includes links to lots of this as well. I’m looking forward to see what new social networking opportunities my Facebook account brings to me once I start using the new Facebook Connect feature.

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Bridge your WordPress Blog with a Simple Machines Forum is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I have a few websites built using WordPress as my CMS but there is one feature WordPress is lacking and that’s a decent forum for robust discussion on topics with features like file sharing and all the other wonderful toys bulletin boards have to offer. BBpress.org is weak at best and not even compliant with the latest version of WordPress.

I have been using Simple Machines Forum for my message boards for over 2 years now and it’s a wicked piece of software you can download for free and build a great website with. I love the admin features you find in SMF and I really like the packages feature that allows you to so easily add on features and even updates. Downloading new packages and adding a new feature to your forum has never been easier and the online template mods make site changes fast and easy. The ease of use and numerous features has allowed me to make some heavy modifications to my default forum installations.

One of my favorite mods is to combine my two favorite site building software applications using some modified software bridges to join them. The first is a WordPress plugin that merges the WordPress login and creates a new forum member for each blog user who to join. The combined accounts allow one login to post comments on the blog and topics in the forum. This plugin is the one I use to bridge my WordPress blog users and SMF forum members but its modified using some tips I got here in the SMF forums and it only works by using the SMF_WordPress package installed in your forum that you can download here.

This setup allows my members to use both sections of the site with one login but they do still have two profile pages. The bridge links select fields from the WordPress users page with the SMF members profile. The SMF profile has more options but with a little custom coding you can add these to your WordPress blog and create a very customized look.

This worked fine for me until I came to realize that what I really wanted was for each new blog post to have a forum topic for discussion of each article and to handle comments from the blog. I found a plugin for wordpress that does just that and now I am hoping to have it customized to do even more. The SMF Commenter takes each new post from your blog and creates a new topic for your forum so long as they are installed in the same local database. It creates a link back between the post and the topic and helps move traffic from both sides of the site. I’m hoping to show the discussion of each topic on the blog home page with some future modifications but for now I have to settle for a simple link between the two.

It is however really nice to have the automatic topic creation for each new post. This only works on posts made from within WordPress Admin. If I make a post using something like Performancing for Firefox then I have to save it as a draft and then manually post from within WordPress to get the plugin to create the topic but that’s good enough for the sites I have that need this.

If you have any other ideas on integrating WordPress and Simple Machines please make a comment and let me know.

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Maintaining a posting schedule for my blogs is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I’m not very good at schedules and I have been neglecting some of my better performing blogs because I don’t have time to write. A lot of my time has been spent on offline projects and my online time recently has been buying and selling domains. I’m going to write more on that soon.

My blog posting has been sporadic and even non existent on a number of my blogs. I had most of my sites up and running on a normal posting schedule but my personal life was suffering. I was writing many of my posts live and not taking advantage of the scheduling features available in WordPress.

If I had taken better care to plan out my writing I could have made the articles I already wrote last a bit longer and made a more consistent posting pattern. I don;t know if it matters but I would think its better to be regular with the blog posting and content updates. Blogs are supposed to be the latest and greatest or fresh news so why let your blog go stale?

I’m going to write a bunch of articles and then post them out at least a couple weeks in advance so we can try to keep up with the content delivery you have come to expect from us.

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No more parked domains is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I’m tired of having some domains that have been parked for over 2 years now as I was never able to get them all developed and now I want to go back and build out the rest of my domain portfolio. I need to hire a web savvy person locally to train to manage some of this work load for me because with over 500 domains and 350+ sites to manage I’m overwhelmed already.

I have been partial to building blogs lately and I guess I’ll probably keep doing the same thing with lots of new blogs for my keyword targeted domains. I’ll need some content writers to spin up some new articles for these blogs because I can’t write much more than I am already. I think I’m burned out and I have found many of my articles are starting to sound the same.

Anyone want to write a few thousand articles for me?

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WordPress blogs for musicians is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I’ve been building a lot of blogs lately with great success on most of my sites. I’ve been able to use them to kick start a number of new websites and boost traffic to what used to be some parked domains.

I started to work with some musicians here in Jamaica that were in need of more than a website. I’m hoping to use the blog as a communication platform for a group of Jamaican musicians who want to post their music, videos as well as sell music online. The music selling is going to be a trick I think but I’ll get to it over the next few weeks.

The first three sites are still in early content stages and I am hoping to have the artists and their fans help us with the content development because I simply cannot do it myself. My first blog was for my bredren Ras Slick who turned out to be a much better performer than I expected. His live shows are great and he has a way with the crowd that seems to set him above so many other musicians around here.

I’m looking for the best solution to allow music downloads from these blogs. Anyone got a tip on the ebst way to sell mp3 files in a wordpress blog?

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Outsourcing blog content and where to find the best bloggers is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

When I started blogging it was because I could easily write an article on just about any subject. I began to realize I could build a blog for just about anything and soon enough my army of blogs was up to 20 or more sites requiring fresh content each and every week. I soon found myself burned out on writing and many of my articles were starting to sound the same or even worse I just quit updating a few blogs. I had about a half a dozen old blogs that needed some new content and I had ideas for at least another halfdozen sites. How could I keepup with this?

My first effort was to try to find guest bloggers for some of my sites and this worked to a certain extent. People are only willing to write bu so much for a site without some soliod dollars behind it though and the traffic and link trade ideas only allowed for so many blog posts. I decided I needed to hire some new content writers that could produce quality work but still keep my cost per article down under $10 each. Updating a blog every 3 days would require 10 articles per month or $100 at that rate. It’s tough to put so much into a site if it’s not making any money and even harder for a dozen sites in different niche categories.

My goal was to find one person who like me could write on just about any subject with a little research and effort. I searched high and low for advice on information on content for blogs and I came up with some interesting articles from places like Icontact but no real sources for what I wanted. In the end I turned to the Forums at Digital Point where I hired just that perfect content writer who now blogs with me on 15 or so different blogs in a wide variety of subjects. She can produce 350 word articles for under $10 each and she writes for the search engines with some nice keyword research and more in each article. With her working steady my content production has tripled and all of my blogs have fresh nerw articles posted to them on a very regualr schedule.

I have been purchasing articles in packs of 100 or 200 and this allows me to post the articles to my WordPress blogs using the timestamp feature so I can post into the future as far ahead as I wish. Right now 85% of my blogs have unique posts created until March or April of next year. The blogs will automagically make the post and ping the top 50 servers to announce each one to search engines. All I need to focus on now is proper link development and the sites are on cruise control for the next 90 days or so. Many of these are new blogs or old blogs with few recent updates. The 90 days of fresh content should make a marked difference in the sites traffic. I’ll post a review some time later with performance updates on the content.

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WordPress 2.3.1 in review is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I have been using WordPress since Version 1.5 but most of my blogs were installed as 2.04. With the recent upgrade released I though it was time to upgrade some of my blogs. I have since moved ahead with updating them all as it was pretty simple really. No, I have not done this one yet but thats for other reasons. I have some custom work I’m working on before I upgrade this blog. Upgrading the others has opened up some pretty neat features and made me lose one plugin I really liked. I was really surprised to see whats happened with Ulitimeate Tag Warrior a former must have WordPress plugin and no longer operating under 2.3 because of the built in support for tags one assumes.

Aside from losing such a cool plugin everything else was great and the new software seems much better. I don;t know if it’s me but it seems posting is smoother and I get less errors or timeouts on my customized blogs. I added some new plugins to my list of faves and I’ll have to write some more about them soon. All in all I think WordPress 2.3.1 is a vast improvement over 2.04 and well worth the trouble for one or even 100 blogs.

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Google Sitemaps plugin for WordPress is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I have been gaming the search engines as a search engine marketer or seo consultant for quite a few years now. The game has always been about Google for me and I was happy to pick up great results in major engines like Yahoo and MSN as a bonus. The reasons are obvious, Google has the greatest volume of traffic and even better is that I have found it converts better for me as well.

When I began building WordPress blogs and customizing them for better search engine results I had no idea of the number of great add ons or “plugins” as they are called. Using a site like WP Plugins I have found an incredible assortment of plugins designed for seo and all of them are great but I think one of the better ones I use now has to be the Google Sitemaps plugin.

For the first few years of my seo work a sitemap and proper internal navigation were lots of work. I manually updated most of my pages and whenever I wanted to make changes there was a lot of repetitive copy paste. Maintaining a proper sitemap was an important chore. Organizing hundreds of individual pages and keeping track of things like url changes or modifying anchor text was a real pain. This handy little tool takes the guess work out of building a decent sitemap for Google.

Google recognizes a specific Sitemap Protocol as described here:

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. The protocol was written to be highly scalable so it can accommodate sites of any size. It also enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL (when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

The Google Sitemap Protocol has recently been accepted by both Yahoo and MSN as an industry standard. You can view more details and the latest version of Sitemap Protocol 0.9 at http://www.sitemaps.org/

Installing the Google Sitemaps plugin for WordPress from http://www.arnebrachhold.de was as easy as uploading the file and clicking Activate. The plugin installs and configures itself to produce an updated sitemap.xml file in your root directory every time you post to your blog. Whether adding a new post or page the sitemap automatically updates and includes your entry for the search engines to conveniently read in a standardized format. Thats simply sweet by itself but it also pings the google servers to let them know whats up.

Thats the best thing I ever heard of as far as seo tools goes. I mean that. What other tool can be more valuable? The goal has always been to get Google to recognize my content and properly index it. Now we have a tool that will notify Google I have just posted this lovely unique article to my blog and they can run over and check it out, cache a copy and label it as mine before any content scrapers can steal my work and claim it as their own. Google gets exactly what they want, fresh update and unique content from a now known and trusted source. Outside of some keyword research, which I never really bother with, proper content formatting and succesful organic link building I could do no more for my site as far as seo work is concerned. Can I?

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The Wonders of WordPress is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

I built my first WordPress blog just a few short months back. I’ve had a blogger account up for a couple years now but I never built my own custom blog configuration. With some of my sites I even use blogger to upload files direct to my own domain but I never realized the power in installing my own WordPress blog until I got into ZuneMAX.com. This site grew fast and I know that the tools I used in the blog we’re an important part of it’s success and growth. With this site I have developed WordPress more into a Content Management System (CMS) by adding features such as the SimpleMachines.org forum and the CopperMine Gallery scripts. I’ll write more about those integrations at a later time but for now let me tell you why I love WordPress.

I guess the first things one notices with WordPress is just how easy it makes web publishing. I built my first website in 1997 and since those days it has become almost too easy for anyone to publish anything online. The rise of the blogosphere and power wielded by elite bloggers has been awesome. Bloggers have struck fear in the ruling power structure. Newspapers ar eon edge over lost strength in news and politicians ar flipping over what the influence bloggers have on elections. I don’t fancy myself a powerful blogger or political activist but I do understand business and WordPress is a business tool for me.

I have taken this free blogging software and adapted it to my own needs with a variety of free plugins from WordPress developers and the community as a whole. Another piece of beautiful open source software has established a strong business site for me at little or no cost beyond my time and efforts. I have learned quite a bit about web development in the past few months just by playing around with this tool and all it’s wonderful features. I think the SEO advantages to running a WordPress blog are worth the time and learning curve on their own. Built in features such as SEO friendly "PermaLinks" and "RSS Feeds" have shown a great benefit in getting the site spidered and content indexed properly. The Google Sitemap plugin and Ultimate Tag Warrior are awesome and powerful tools you can pick up for free on the web.

I’ll be going into much greater detail with the WordPress tools and Plugins tips on this blog for some time to come. I now feel comfortable with all the built in features and I’ll go over use of those some more but it’s the customization that makes this software so awesome and that’s what we’ll be showcasing here soon.

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Affordable Web Pro is a post from: Affordable Web Pro

Affordable Web Pro has been about affordable website development and marketing services since 1999. In that time this site has undergone many changes. Today we announce yet one more change and a new direction for AffordableWebPro.com in general. The old site is gone and has been replaced by this WordPress Blog you see before you. This new blog will showcase the development of the Affordable Web Pro network of websites and the tips adn tricks we use to make affordable websites.

Our primary focus will be on open source development platforms and scripts and aoftware used to power the Affordable Web Pro Network. Stay tuned to some great tips and articles on PHP, MYSql, WordPress, SMF and so manyother great open source projects.

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