Take Back Control With WordPress, The Content Management System

The days of the static website are truly over, It’s replacement? Content Management Systems! The reason Content Management Systems are leading the way is that they give control back to its users.
Content is made in minutes and is available to the world in seconds. WordPress is a CMS made simple for users but is powerful enough to run shopping carts ,communities and business websites, all thanks to the multitude of plugins and widgets freely available which really make this content management system a cut above the rest.

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Links from the show:

• WordPress
• ipad
• Drupal
• Joomla
• Tumblr
• Blogger
• Dreamhost
• 99designs
• Themeforest.net
• Template Monster
• Akismet
• Platinum SEO
• SEO Smartlinks
• No Follow Links
• Google Analyticator
• Quantcast
• Blubrry Powerpress
• Regenerate Thumbnails
• Metatag Manager
• Digg Digg
• Tweet Meme
• Disqus Comment System
• WP Super Cache
• CDN Tools
• Shopp
• Shopzilla
• Shopify
• Sociable
• WP Touch iPhone
• Contact Form Seven
• FD Feed Burner

Transcript:

Welcome to Automate My Small Business where we show you how to set up and run your own automated business on the cheap. So get ready to take back your life and add a little spice. It’s time to build something automated.

MATT: Hello and welcome to episode #16 of Automate My Small Business. I’m Matt.

BRANDON: And this is Brandon.

MATT: And today we have an episode for you about WordPress, the great content management system you can use to set up your website. But before we get too deep into that, Brandon, what have you been up to?

BRANDON: Well, I had probably one of those weeks where things just don’t go your way and you kind of try to scramble to get everything put back together. I had probably what any of us would consider a meltdown for a solo-preneur. My fulfillment company is kind of crumbling beneath my feet here and I’m trying to figure out to patch it altogether. There are regional fulfillment house and I’ve talked about them before. They’re here locally in Southern California and the reason I’m using them is because they can assemble my product and put it together and get it out the door and very customized, you know. I can also get anybody on the phone anytime real quick. So that’s good. You get some really good customer service but the risk you take is exactly what happened this week was you know the main person who was handling my account basically left the company or I guess also got fired, if you want to call it that. But they’re pretty much weren’t around at the end of the week.

MATT: That sucks.

BRANDON: Yeah. And so I have to decide, do I stay with the company? Do I hire the person that just got fired so the orders can keep on moving and actually in the end I did decide to hire her and now I have her full time as my first true employee and I’m patching the rest of the, as we speak.

MATT: Well, that’s good. Maybe you’ll get that proposed $5,000 tax credit that they’re throwing around in the political arena.

BRANDON: That’s right. I’m excited about that.

MATT: Did that sway your decision at all?

BRANDON: Not at all but I’m going to take it. Yeah. That’s kind of the debate, right, on Capitol Hills whether that’s actually incentive or not.

MATT: I don’t think it’ll be incentive for me but I’m glad you’re going to get some of it.

BRANDON: Yeah, so my philosophy on this decision was you know I built the business around the idea of not having any employees and I think we’ve all talked about that in the past and gotten feedback from you all out there that you’re saying you agree but I felt like there’s a gap that I needed to fill and that was you know once you get to a certain growth point in your business having that first employee is something that you kind of have to break through that glass ceiling that is like okay, do I really want to start managing people? Is that truly where I’m at? Do I really need this? And I think I’m there. It was a hard decision to make but I’m really happy I made it. I think it’s going to help grow the business pass that.

MATT: And truly to move more stuff off of what you’re doing.

BRANDON: Exactly. You know and you get to that point where okay should I automate everything? In this case, she’s business manager, right? So she’ll be handling the entire business from end to end which means that I can take another business and build the same way I did the first and the second and the third and really have you know multiple streams of revenue coming in from different areas and having one person manage the entire business from end to end is really a weight off my shoulders. You know because there is even though we try to automate it through our systems and everything that we’ve talked about, there is always going to be something that a human has to do and if it’s not me, it’s the best way to go. So I’m happy about that decision.

MATT: Cool. Well, I haven’t been doing anything nearly that exciting but I have been listening to a couple of audio books. I finished Crush It which is kind of one of the business best sellers right now. I thought that was a pretty good book especially given the light of the social networking stuff that our last episode was about, it’s good introduction if you’re just trying to get into the social marketing. If you’ve already done some research and really got into it, it might be a little repetitive.

BRANDON: Yeah. He’s really all about getting your name out there and getting them, a lot of the feedback and social credit actually …

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: … out there and spending a lot of time doing it which kind of goes against our Automate My Small Business philosophy but at the same time it is a good way to build credibility out there.

MATT: Yeah, I mean definitely I agree with a lot of things he did in the social realm. I actually really like the audio book because he doesn’t stick to the script of the book. He actually like goes off script and gives a little bit extra information that I thought was really cool. So that was nice. And the other book I just finished listening to was the Viral Loop which talks about building viral businesses that expand exponentially. That was an excellent book. I really liked that one a lot.

BRANDON: And what’s the main premise there?

MATT: Basically it looks at different case studies like you know how Facebook grew so fast and how YouTube grew so fast. Even going back into historical terms of how like Tupperware grew by using like this social dinner parties to sell Tupperware and how you know they turn a customer into someone that propagated the business and got more customers in and that’s the same thing that Facebook does, right? Once you’re friended, now you’re going to find all your friends and you get more and more people and they exponentially pull people into the business. They talk about the viral coefficient of how fast the businesses grow by you know how fast each member pulls in more members.

BRANDON: So it has a lot of case studies that it uses as examples but does it give you any tools or techniques to …

MATT: That’s one thing I didn’t like about it was there’s a lot of case studies but not so much about how to like how did this company structured their business that it did this, at least talk about what they did, yeah.

BRANDON: And more importantly how do you make your own business do the same.

MATT: Exactly. Although I liked it, I like the case studies, there was a little bit to be desired and I wish it would have a little bit more about that.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: But it definitely get you thinking you know. You’re starting to think how can I design my business to be viral and expand like that.

BRANDON: Right. So we’ve been doing a few updates on the Automate My Small Business website.

MATT: Yeah and that’s kind of lead into this topic of going to the WordPress is we started out with kind of a generic template that we bought and as we expanded and got more podcast up there and different articles and different things that we want to share, we’re starting to really need a customized theme and so as I’ve been working this week on defining what we need and setting up some wire frames, I thought maybe we should do an episode on WordPress because we never really talked about it that much.

BRANDON: Yeah, I think we’re going to have a good episode today. What’s in the news? We’ve got a few things that kind of come up. Apple has their new iPad that’s all over the place.

MATT: Yeah. What do you think about the iPad?

BRANDON: I’ve checked it out. I’m pretty impressed with it. I mean I’ve never really used the tablet. I’ve tried them but it never really seemed to be the tool choice.

MATT: It just looks like a giant iPhone to me.

BRANDON: It does look like a giant iPhone but you know what, with all the customization that they’ve put into that, they’ve taken it to a new level that I don’t think a typical touch pad or a tablet has had in the past which I think really does make a difference. And I think that we’re going to see all sorts of new applications, not just software applications but actual practical applications of it that are going to be rolling out. You know you kind of thought at the beginning of the iPhone generation that, “Oh great, it’s a phone and it’s a smart phone. You can keep your contacts and it’s touch screen.” But no one really anticipated all of the million of applications that kind of just came from nowhere. I mean I was just blown away you know a year after the iPhone was launched, how many new ways you could use it that I had no idea of, for you know when it was launched. So I have a feeling it’s going to be the same with iPad.

MATT: I’m a little skeptical of it like I think they’re pushing the iBook. You know you buy books and read them on there and for me the battery life is just so critical. On my kindle I can have it for two weeks and I don’t even recharge it. Like I don’t know if I could deal with four hour battery life the iPad’s going to have.

BRANDON: You know one thing I find it could be really useful for me is I do carry around a paper notebook just for ideas and notes when I’m on the phone and that’s the one thing that I have kept paper in my life. Everything else is digital and I’ve gone paperless otherwise. But I’ve always kept that because they really didn’t have a device to replace it and I’m kind of thinking that this iPad might be that device.

MATT: Okay. Well, you get one and you tell us what it’s like.

BRANDON: Alright. I’ll definitely report on that.

MATT: So the other thing in there is Google pulled out of China, right?

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s right. And in fact, after my China trip which I reported on a couple of months ago, I’ve met a lot of locals in China that have been helping me out finding parts and sourcing parts and stuff like that and talking to factories and validating them as real factories and all that for me. So that’s been nice and then until one day Google decides you know, oops, we’re not going to be in China anymore because we don’t want to be told what we can and can’t have censored in the whole country of China so they pulled out and then all of a sudden my Google connection, like my Gmail or their Gmail I should say and Gtalk which I’ve commonly used to chat with people there just went out the window. This is like, okay, no more Google for them.

MATT: Yeah. I guess when you hear Google’s pulling out, you just think about the search engines but you don’t think about all the email and docs and all those things…

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: … that affect everyone. They got to get new email addresses. How do they contact anybody?

BRANDON: I know. You know how many millions of Gmail accounts are there? They couldn’t have just pulled the plug. I mean they must have had a back up. I don’t know what they’re going to do with that but oh man, that’s a big deal, for China that is. I mean to us if you don’t have anybody living in China or know anybody there, it’s no big deal but to them I’m sure it’s a big deal and then we got, I think we talked about the tax credit that’s proposed for any employee that you hire, you get a $5,000 tax credit. I believe its 5,000.

MATT: They haven’t decided yet so I’m sure it’ll go through all the …

BRANDON: Yeah. It’ll go out so, yeah, it’s been a lot going on. Tonight, we’re talking about WordPress.

MATT: Yeah. So what is WordPress?

BRANDON: Well, I think if anybody hasn’t tried WordPress, I think it’s one of those applications that you just need to get into and dive into and try because it is by far the most popular blog CMS or content management system out there.

MATT: Yeah. It really kind of start out as a blogging platform but it’s grown over different versions into a little more like fuller featured CMS. I mean it’s definitely have the CMS with the most features out there but there’s a couple of things that make it really powerful which are really the plug in. There’s thousands of plug ins that make it do things that it wasn’t designed to do and make it into what is essentially a very full featured CMS.

BRANDON: Yeah. You can use it for a shopping cart. It has an e-commerce shopping cart plug in. You can use it for just static website. You can use it for blogging as it was intended to. You can use it for community wiki question and answers we have on ours. You can do all sorts of social networking, so to speak, on it. It’s a great platform.

MATT: So before we get too deep in those, let’s kind of talk about what a content management system is and what you would have done traditionally if you didn’t have that?

BRANDON: Well, you know, traditionally we started off kind of early internet on the HTML page which was very static, not easy to update. You can change it but once you change it, that’s all you’re going to get. And with the new CMS systems, you can pull information in from all over the web and you can insert updateable content that changes on a daily basis if you want or even in real time.

MATT: Yeah, really I mean, traditionally, if you wanted to change some content, you had to know HTML. You have to go edit that file and then ftp and back up to your site, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: Whereas the CMS is kind of within the context of the website, you can just go to an admin site of the page and edit everything, just directly in your web browser. You don’t need any other tools.

BRANDON: Right, which makes it great for seo and being able to update the URL friendly links that we talked about in the past.

MATT: Yeah, I mean the good thing is that WordPress does that stuff for you so you don’t have to think about, right? You don’t have to think about adding those meta tags. It’ll just pull the title on your post and make that title in the HTML. You know you don’t really have to do all that fundamental groundwork stuff and because that you know you’re going to be following best practices, just because you’re using WordPress and some of the plug ins that we’re going to recommend later.

BRANDON: Yes. There’s this thing called plug ins and what I think is even better are the themes and they ability to basically pick a theme which there’s thousands of them out there and a lot of them are free, I’d say the majority of them are free, wouldn’t you?

MATT: Yeah. There’s a lot of free ones. There are some that you can pay and then you can have a theme custom design for you.

BRANDON: Yeah. Each theme is different. They may have different options behind it which is also unique compared to traditional sites is that you can even have certain customization with the options built into the theme where you don’t need to know any coding at all to change those just drop down list kind of ….

MATT: Yeah. Okay so we kind of gotten the difference between a CMS which you know you edit the content within the web browser. You don’t need any other special tools. There’s all this fundamental stuff there for you and a lot of the extensions like plug ins and themes that you can just drop into it and not have to deal with versus traditional where you’re editing the HTML by hand, ftping it up or using something like Dreamweaver. You had to have a lot more technical knowledge to do that and it was a lot harder to change things as you’re trying to update the content to keep fresh content on your site. Any other benefits that we might have missed?

BRANDON: No, I think that pretty much covers it. Just stepping back one step, because of all the simplicity and how easy it is to get it up and running…

MATT: That’s a really good point that you mentioned is a learning curve, just getting up running and using it as far less than you would trying to design an HTML page from scratch or any of that stuff, right?

BRANDON: You know we talked about getting you know getting business up and running on a site real quick for testing purposes. If you’re going to be using that as a main strategy, it’s important to be able to get a site up and running with proper SEO best practices and running ads on Adwords, driving traffic to that site and finding out real quickly what kind of market you’re looking or not if this is a viable business or not. You know this is become our choice CMS to put websites up quickly, find out what kind of market response we get and move quickly from there.

MATT: You bring up a good point which is you know this is our choice but there are alternatives out there, right? So what are some of the other ones that are available?

BRANDON: Well, there’s a couple of them. Drupal is a pretty popular one. It’s a little bit more complex. I wouldn’t say much more but definitely more powerful and I think Matt you can probably say it’s harder to maintain. You’ve done one recently.

MATT: Yeah. One of the great features I like about WordPress is that there’s a single button that you click when a new version comes out. It says, hey, you know, version 2.9.2 it out. You want to upgrade. I’ll say yes, I want to upgrade. Same is true of one new versions of the plug ins come in. You know if you have an iPhone it’s kind of like you know you go in the app store and say hey, there’s updates. You want to install? Upgrading WordPress is that simple.

BRANDON: And in fact, you can even toggle on automatic update, right?

MATT: I don’t know if they automatically do it but you can just say, you know, just do it now. I don’t want to deal with it.

BRANDON: Right. Exactly.

MATT: But Drupal doesn’t have that yet. They’re working on it. It will be a big improvement when they had it but right now you have to download new files, ftp them up over top of something. It just gets really messy and all these plug ins are dependent on each other in Drupal. It’s not as clean of an upgrade and it’s a little bit harder to manage.

BRANDON: That maybe because Drupal is open source completely through and through.

MATT: Yeah, I mean it’s community supported and community developed. One other thing about Drupal is like they have three different versions of major versions that people are actively using and some plug ins work on one version and not on another so you get all these versions and compatibilities and you know they’ve been trying to release version I think it’s six or seven. One of the latest one is for like a year, it’s been like half released in beta and I don’t know, just not quite there like as far as ease of use and getting into it but it is kind of more powerful and gives you more options for things other than just blogpost and pages and you know all different sections on pages and things like that.

BRANDON: Alright. So real quickly, what are the other…

MATT: So Joomla is another one that’s pretty similar functionality to Drupal. I haven’t used Joomla too much, I don’t know kind of the benefits or not benefits of it. Tumblr which is more of a blogging platform, it’s very simple, a lot easier kind of video and photos and kind of media stuff than WordPress is out of the box but it’s really kind of for a blog only. There are templates that can turn into a corporate website or a magazine style thing. Very simple blog, doesn’t have, you know, static pages or anything like that. I’ve actually tried out Tumblr and I like it for my personal blog but not necessarily I wouldn’t use that for a business yet.

BRANDON: And then there’s Blogger which is by Google.

MATT: Which is also basic blogging software not so much of a CMS.

BRANDON: Yes. Anytime you see Blogspot.com, that’s what that is.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: Yes. So there’s some options out there but again our choice of CMS is WordPress so we’re going to stick to that one today.

MATT: And when we say WordPress, the first thing that people get confused about is WordPress.com versus WordPress.org.

BRANDON: Yeah.

MATT: You want to explain the difference between the two?

BRANDON: Okay, well, so WordPress has given us the option of having them host the site for us or for you and also providing the software to download and then install on your hosted site of your choice. So you have a self-hosted version version versus the WordPress.com version.

MATT: And so if you choose to use WordPress.com which is they host it for you, you end up with the name like matt.wordpress.com or you know matt’s business, mattspizza.wordpress.com. So the domain has wordpress.com in it. It’s never going to be your own personalized domain.

BRANDON: Right. So it is good for somebody just getting started and really doesn’t want to have anything to do with hosting it themselves or doesn’t have a hosting account, but I think there’s enough benefit to self-hosting it. It’s worth the extra 10 minutes it takes to get your hosting site up and running.

MATT: Yeah. I mean I really wouldn’t recommend anyone just getting a blog on wordpress.com, at least for a business. If it’s personal and you’re not going to deal very much with it then hey, wordpress.com might be fine. WordPress.com has some limitations like you can’t install the plug ins that make WordPress great. You just get the basic kind of functionality.

BRANDON: Which is I mean without the plug ins, what’s the point, right?

MATT: The plug ins are what make it such an amazing platform.

BRANDON: It does allow you to have the custom themes but it does not allow you to have the theme editor.

MATT: Oh, I didn’t know you can do the theme editor.

BRANDON: Yeah. There’s no theme editor in the wordpress.com so that’s another reason why having the self-hosted version is better.

MATT: Okay. So let’s go into some basic terminology you might hear as you get into WordPress. Post versus page. So a post is really kind of a blogpost. It’s maybe an article like has some sort of time that you publish it and you’re going to use post a lot for your blogposts. A page is more of a static page, something like you might post your privacy policy on a page or the disclosure policy we talked about in the previous episode. You want to put those on pages that are static that always have the same length and more article based things or more timely posts as a post. There’s not really that much difference between them other than a post shows up on your RSS feed and a page doesn’t. And your themes may deal with post versus pages slightly different. So one of the other things you have is the trackback which is when someone from another blog links to your blog, it will show as trackback. And we talked about this in the social networking episode. This is one of the social aspects of blogs. It will show up kind of above your comments or around your comments saying, you know, so and so is talking about this article on your site. They’re talking about that on their site and they’ll give you a link to their article. So it’s kind of a way of crosslinking between different blogs. That’s kind of a nice feature as you talk about someone else and you get readers from their blog and they get readers from your blog so it’s kind of the social aspect that we talked about in the last episode.

BRANDON: And then a comment in a WordPress blog is anything where you might post a blog and somebody wants to comment on it so you’re probably familiar with these. They are those comments listed all the way down the bottom page of any post.

MATT: Yes. So it’s really the reader has a chance to get feedback about the article. You know we do this in Automate My Small Business. All our podcast episodes are post on the website and so if you have feedback about that episode or you know add extra information for other people to see, go and post it as a comment.

BRANDON: And you have some customization that you could make those turn off or turn on or you can even make sure that they’re something you want to have posted there. You can let it ride and just make it something that you know if anybody puts a comment in, it just automatically post.

MATT: Yeah, you can do some moderation to make sure that you’re not getting spam and we’ll talk about some plug ins that do some automatic moderation for you to check for spam against the central server. One other piece of terminology you might hear is a blog roll and a blog roll is really just a list of links to other blogs that you read. You can have this or you cannot have it. It really depends on what the purpose of your blog site or WordPress site is. I don’t think we have that on Automate My Small Business but I know on my personal site, I usually put those out there.

BRANDON: Alright. So with that in mind, let’s talk about installing WordPress. This is where a lot of people get hung up because they don’t know where to start. If you go to wordpress.org, you can read out more about the details of how to get this installed but the easiest way that we found is to just go straight to your hosting site. We like Dreamhost. We’ve actually mentioned this in the question and answer site. Dreamhost is our choice of hosting ISP’s but I know there’s a lot of good ones out there and to be honest but a lot of them are kind of the same.

MATT: Yeah, I like Dreamhost but we’ve also used Poweb for some of the sites I’ve done and that’s pretty good. It really comes out in the control panel you like but one thing you’re looking for when you’re trying to find a hosting account if you don’t already have one, if trying to find a hosting account for WordPress, you want something that has a one-click install. And that means it’s not really one click in any of them but …

BRANDON: Pretty close.

MATT: … it will install WordPress for you. You just give it a couple parameters like where do you want the title of the site to be and you know what URL you want the site to be at and it will install WordPress and it’ll set up the database and do all that work for you so…

BRANDON: And WordPress, it does say it’s a one-click install however if you really want all the functionality and features of the plug ins, that’s one little tip that we can give you here and that is you should click on choose advanced and that will get you a full data base set up in there and get you what you need.

MATT: Yeah, that’s Dreamhost specific, that’s not necessarily true of other host but if you’re in Dreamhost, underneath one-click install is you’ll have you know the simple install which you can’t install any plug ins which we said means WordPress is not going to be as good as it can’t be or the advanced which is really not anymore advance I don’t think to install. So choose the advanced version. Don’t be afraid.

BRANDON: Right. So if you have an ISP or hosting company that does not have a one click install, that doesn’t mean you can’t use WordPress. It just means that you’re going to have to take a little bit longer getting it all put in.

MATT: It’s not really that much longer. You just have to download the zip file from WordPress.org and ftp it.

BRANDON: Yeah. But you have to create a data base you know usually using my sequel and get that name directly and then there’s a few steps to get it put in right but it’s not that big of a deal. It’s workable.

MATT: And the instructions on wordpress.org are pretty decent to help you figure out how to do that. So once you kind of have the base install, the first time you go to your site, you’re going to have a few things that you have to add in there. It’s going to ask for the title for the main page. It’s going to ask for a password for the administrative user or some information about the user. It’s going to give you this auto generated password which you want to copy before you go to the next page and then once you log in with that, you can change it to something that is more memorable for you. Otherwise you won’t be able to log in.

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: I guess one of the other things that we forgot to mention was if you’re not installing the root of your domain, you know, mydomain.com, maybe you already have something there. You have a couple of other options on where to install it. You can then install a sub domain like blog.mydomain.com or you can install in a sub directory which is mydomain.com/blog, right?

BRANDON: Right. I think this is a good point because depending on what your business model is, if your focus mainly on like a shopping cart, you know, we’ve talked about using Volusion in the past and Matt recently has been playing around in the new shopping cart called Shopify. You know if your main site is you know e-commerce based and you really want to focus on that being the main home page and then go from there, a lot of people do have sub domain maybe called blog.myshop.com and use the blog features kind of a side bar to the main e-commerce.

MATT: Yeah, I mean if you can get into a subdirectory that’s maybe a little bit better for SEO because all those articles end up being on the same domain as the rest of the stuff that you’re trying to SEO but it’s always possible like WordPress runs on Php and Linux and some things like that whereas you know your shopping cart maybe at a completely different host that’s using their own technology, it won’t let you host anything but their shopping car there. Volusion is a good example. So the only way to do that is to use sub-domain. If you’re using something like Zen cart or something where you’re hosting your own shopping cart in your own Dreamhost account, then you might be able to do a sub-directory.

BRANDON: Right. So there’s options out there and it kind of depends on your needs.

MATT: Okay. So once you do that basic install and you’ve logged in the administrator and you’ve changed the password, you’re now in the admin section of the site which is where you’re going to create a new post, change some settings, add plug ins, change your themes, all sorts of stuff we’re going to go through. The first thing I’d like to do before I get too far into this is to change some of the basic settings and the first thing I always go for is to change the permalink structure and permalink is really the URL that all your articles are going to be at. They call it permalink because it’s never supposed to change. They’re supposed to stay the same forever. So I’d like to change that before creating a post so it really can stay the same and I won’t have things that have the wrong URL in Google once I change it. The default structure is kind of has like a question mark and an article number like 12345 which really gets you no SEO credit so I always change it to if you go into the settings area, under permalink, that’s going to let you change it to a custom structure and I say %postname% and that just will take whatever the title of the article is and put that as the full URL so it allows you to get a lot of rich keywords in that.

BRANDON: Right. And then if you have any specific theme that you’re using, they usually have its own set of themes …

MATT: Right.

BRANDON: … that you can change, not modify and each theme is different so there’s no use in going into detail about that here but there’s a lot you can do.

MATT: You probably want to go into the user’s area and add any other users that might be you know logged into your blog. You know, Brandon and I each have our own account to log into our WordPress site so we can have the things and see things and it will show up as whatever we write or the author of. You can add a picture for your profile.

BRANDON: And that’s kind of a neat benefit of having the CMS that you can have multiple users editing your site on different permission levels so you could have somebody that just the contributor and you just want them writing content or you want somebody who actually go into the administration area and change the look and feel of things if you have a designer working with you but even more so you can have a very, very low level subscriber which has no permissions other than maybe making a comment and you can even have people self register themselves if they wanted to and then you’ll get into like kind of a forums area or if you have a membership site you can do it kind of along those lines too. So there’s a lot of flexibility there on the user level of the admin site.

MATT: Yeah. And so you can add all those kind of users but you’ll also add information about yourself you know as the first administrator user. You want to add your profile picture and WordPress uses this thing called a Gravatar which is you know I think it’s globally recognizable avatar which is just your picture but it will show up wherever you post on a WordPress blog if you use the same email address. It will pull that same profile picture. So it’s good to have one of those set up even if you’re just you know a reader of a blog, you know, whenever you make a comment, they’ll have your profile picture. Oh one other setting that you probably wanted to set as you’re going through installing is there’s a check box that says I would like to be visible to everyone including search engines. If you uncheck this, then basically your WordPress site is going to deny the Google crawler and the Bing crawler from coming in indexing your content and you’re not going to show up in search engines. As the business site, I don’t know why you would ever uncheck this. The only time I ever uncheck this is if I have kind of a temporary domain or a beta domain that I’m playing with it. I don’t want to get indexed in the search engines because it’s really redundant of what the production released version of the site is. I’m just playing with it and trying to try and plug in or some…

BRANDON: You don’t want anybody coming around and looking at it because it’s half baked, right?

MATT: Exactly. So if this is your real site, I would always have that checked. You always want Google and Bing and everyone to index it.

BRANDON: Alright. That’s kind of getting in the settings started. You know we’re going to try to post more screen shots and how to videos on a lot of this because this is kind of hard to do through audio only but …

MATT: Yeah, I know we’re working on some of those for the membership sites once we get that up and running but it takes a little while to make all these videos.

BRANDON: Yeah, it does. So you know that’s getting kind of the basic settings in place then you got to deal with your theme and this may sound like a lot of work but really if you just went with the basics, you can get this thing up in 10 minutes, to be honest.

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: So let’s talk a little bit about themes. You know you can work on your own and do a custom theme but more probably practical solution would be to just get a theme that’s already made and pre-existing. But if you did decide to go the custom route, we’ve talked about 99designs.com before. They can definitely get you a custom theme and you can get multiple themes coming from different people.

MATT: If you’re going to build your own custom site, you want to proceed in a couple of different steps and a lot of people would just right off the bat go to a designer and say, hey, I need a website. Design me a website. And you go through all these iterations because you’re really trying to figure out two things in the beginning. One is the structure and the navigation of what you want to have on your website and how you want your users to navigate and the other part of that is the graphical artsy element of, you know, what color is in, what’s the feel of the site going to be. And I really like, if I’m going to design some custom to separate those out. When I go to the designer I want to have an idea of what are the pages I need. What informations are going to in those pages? How are users going to navigate between this page and this page? What’s my menu going to look like? What things do I need on the footer? And so if you could come up with that information architecture of what are all the different pages and what’s the content that’s going to be on those pages, having the set designed after is going to be a lot easier.

BRANDON: I think you make a great point because I’ve done it many different ways. I had to learn the hard way in you know hiring a designer. My first experience was website designer. It wasn’t the WordPress design. It was just an HTML site but it was out of India and I’m thinking okay, if I’m outsourcing this to India, they’re good at technical stuff and they’re good at design and web development, I got this all wrapped up. This is going to look great. It’s, you know, inexpensive and then two or three months later I’m just barely crawling along the path of getting this completed and it almost felt like I needed to be like right there talking to him as he’s designing it because I felt like there’s so many iterations but what it turned out to be was that I didn’t really know what I wanted and you know it’s one of those if I could see it, I can say yes, I want it or no, I don’t like it. But because of that fact, if you really are doing this for the first time, it’s really good to just like you said do a wire frame.

MATT: Yeah, and so what I mean by wire frame is really just a sketch of you know, just take a pencil and paper and say, you know, I want a picture here, draw box. I want the title here, you know, write title and kind of figure out how it’s going to lay out. I want a you know link to sign up for my newsletter in my header so it’s on every page. This is really a wire frame. It can be as simple as a piece of paper that you draw with a pencil or you can create kind of a HTML mock up if you have some HTML skills or anything like that. People use Visio. People use Illustrator. You know there’s all kinds of tools that you can do for this. It’s as simple as this just a piece of paper and a pencil and if you have HTML skills, I really like creating kind of something in HTML so you get that feeling of navigating from other places. But don’t do any colors, just black and white, simple text. Don’t choose any real fonts, very simple. So once you have that, you can give it to the designer and they get an idea of how the navigation is suppose to work and then it’s easy for them to just plug in and drop backgrounds and some gradients on the buttons and make it look really great because they’re just focused on making it look great as opposed to trying to figure out navigation which designers are really not specialized in doing. They just happen to have to do it a lot.

BRANDON: Right. They’re kind of forced into that circle peg…

MATT: Yeah. So once your designer is done, he’s going to give you a Photoshop file which is a PSD file and you can’t just dump that up on your website. So the next step after getting that design is you need to have that design coded into either you know HTML if you have a static site or into a WordPress simplicity you can import that. And there’s a couple of different services that do that. If you use 99designs I think they use PSD to HTML on the back end of the design so once you pay $300 for the design, you pay another $200 to get it translated into WordPress theme. So basically the minimum you’re looking through 99designs is like $500 to get a custom design site. There’s another services like I’ve seen some xhtml shops work and they look pretty good. They did pretty good coding for the sites I saw but you know when you’re the customer and it’s going to cost you a lot more than just finding something out of the box. We’ll get into finding those pre-existing things in a minute but one of the other things you want to look out when you’re kind of trying to figure out what to put in that wire frame is you want to go to other websites and look at what they did, how do they do their navigation, what kinds of information do they have on their site. Go look for inspiration from other sites. And one place that I really like for looking for inspiration is Smashing Magazine. They’re a web design magazine and have lots of articles about best practices and they have you know one article that shows 20 different ways that sites do navigation or different ways that they do menus or footers and you can kind of go and pull different things that you like at it. It’s a great way to compare things side by side and see lots of different options.

BRANDON: Yeah. You know and if you do have some programming background like I feel like I can get around HTML pretty well but I am not a programmer. I don’t have that PhP background or any sort of programming language background. Matt does. So he’s much comfortable in that language and can maybe even build a template from scratch I think you’re doing right now, aren’t you?

MATT: Yeah. I’m at least doing our HTML mock up from scratch and then I’ll turn it over to a real designer and will outsource the actual coding of it.

BRANDON: Yeah. So I guess my point on that was that I wouldn’t touch this with a 10 foot pole. Really not something that you want to do if you’re even a little bit technical but not a lot. This is something you want to leave to the pros because they really does get technical very quickly.

MATT: And really if you’re just starting out, I wouldn’t even start with the custom thing. You know I would start with the pre-existing template so you can kind of prove to yourself that this is a viable idea and you’re going to learn a lot from that existing template that you’re going to translate that custom area so like as we had our Automate My Small Business site, we noticed areas that we want to improve, those things that we want to move around so they’re more featured on the home page and after having like a template, we know what kind of areas that we want to improve are and all that gets translated into our custom design. We wouldn’t have known that and we probably would have made mistakes if we just started from custom.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think if you’re going to do this really to be honest that anytime I don’t think that you should start with the custom design. If you can first and foremost get a template that looks at least close to what you’re trying to go for and then if you want to modify it, you can go from there. I think you’re going to save time by going that direction. So if you are going to go and look for these templates as we said earlier you can find them. They’re all over the place. There’s thousands of them.

MATT: You can even search from directly from your WordPress admin console. If you go to the themes tabs down there on the left, you can say add new and they will let you search the WordPress directory of themes, right?

BRANDON: Which is wordpress.org/extend/themes. Yeah, will get you right there and so you have your choice of hundred if not thousands of themes available to you that are just basically click once and they’re installed.

MATT: You know every WordPress theme is not that directory so you can also just Google WordPress themes or a site that I like that does paid themes is themeforce.net. They have some really good looking web 20E themes that I use a lot on some sites.

BRANDON: And what are the price ranges?

MATT: They’re anywhere from like $10 to maybe $40 on Theme Forest and if you go to somewhere like Template Monster, they go to like $80-$90 but I would stay away from Template Monster. I’ve had nothing but bad luck with their themes. You know if you’re buying a pre-existing theme, it’s not just the look that you’re going to be stuck with, it’s also how customizable that theme is and whatever parts you do install and other things so just kind of talk about what to look for when you’re looking for a pre-existing theme. The first thing is different style of the theme.

BRANDON: Yeah, there’s a number of different styles and if you go poke around on the internet, you’ll start to notice some once you start looking around. The typical on is the blog which is kind of based on the default WordPress template.

MATT: It’s kind of just like a one page site that has all your blogpost like listed down in order, right, and you scroll forever.

BRANDON: Yeah, it’s a sequential, chronologically ordered list of posts pretty much and you’re able to categorize them and tag them with keyword tags.

MATT: Yeah. And usually a sidebar on the right or left, right?

BRANDON: Right.

MATT: Okay. So that’s kind of the basic blog template that’s what everyone thinks of when they see a blog but you can make WordPress look like almost any different type of website. You can make it look like a corporate website. So if you want something that looks like a business home page with the product on the front and your information about the business and all sorts of stuff, you can search for a corporate WordPress theme.

BRANDON: Right. So basically what you’re doing is you’re taking what normally would have been a blog post and you’re creating a static page with that.

MATT: Right. Or you know different articles about the corporation like you know your press releases then just become post, right? Your blogpost but they’re in the press release category and they show up looking like press releases on a corporate site.

BRANDON: Yeah. I think one of my favorite styles is the magazine style.

MATT: Yeah. I really like the magazine style. I use it for my review website where you know you have a lot of photos and you know you have this kind of home page where you can see just 10 or 20 articles on the homepage and dive in and it’s very rich, very stylish feeling.

BRANDON: Yeah, that’s the TheCamcorderReview.com…

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: So if you can check it out, you can kind of get an idea what that looks like.

MATT: Another option is for your own personal sites, you can have a portfolio site which has maybe your résumé or CV or anything like that. And the last is a newspaper theme which is kind of similar to that magazine style but you’ll see kind of the newspapery fonts and maybe less photos and looking more like if you open up the New York Times.

BRANDON: Right. So you know there’s a lot of styles to kind of choose from and you kind of pick which one works best for you like we said before the templates are plentiful. So go through them, choose which one you like, color schemes and I think going with the pre-existing template is your best bet.

MATT: Yeah. You know some of the other features you might look for is the number of columns you want or whether or not it supports widgets, you know, to have a side bar that you can add things in. We’ll get into widgets file a little bit later but one of the other things I want to mention about Theme Force is that it has ratings about those themes that people have used and so you can kind of get an idea how hard it was for them to implement that theme. So look at that, look at the comments on any of the themes to get an of idea of you know the difficulty or ease of implementing those themes because that’s not just the look but also how hard it is to get implemented on your site. Most of them are pretty easy so…

BRANDON: Okay so we’ve been able to install WordPress within a few minutes. Get the settings kind of basically set correctly and get a theme chosen and installed within minutes if it was a pre-existing theme and you know real customization and then the real meat of it comes in when you start changing the plug ins and adding plug ins.

MATT: Yeah, the plug ins really add all the functionality to it and make it just an awesome platform to be on and there’s thousands and thousands of them. And you can get to the plug ins just inside the admin console. If you have a plug in you click add new and just from within WordPress itself you can search a library of all these plug ins and install them.

BRANDON: There’s a few default when you should start installing right off the bat. Which ones would you recommend, Matt?

MATT: Well, we’ll go through the list of all the ones that we installed on almost every site we do and kind of by category so my first category that I install anything for is spam and there’s a plug in that comes from the WordPress community called Akismet, a-k-i-s-m-e-t. I have no clue what it stands for or what it means. But basically it compares all the comments on your server against wordpress.com and so it will see who the spammers are across all the different WordPress sites out there. And so it’s able to filter out like 99 percent of the spammy comments and you never even have to deal with them. It’s a great plug in.

BRANDON: I think that’s a default plug in that you just need to activate with a click, right?

MATT: Yeah. You need to activate it. You also need to go to wordpress.com and create a username so you get an API key and put that in so it can call the wordpress.com and ask is this comment spam? So it’s a little bit more complex to set up as a plug in but when you go to wordpress.com it will ask you, do you want to create a blog or do you just want to use your account? You just want to use your account so you can log in and get the API key.

BRANDON: Pretty Simple

MATT: Yeah. So the next thing I set up is my SEO plug ins and there’s really three that I use. One is Platinum SEO which will allow you to have a little bit more control over the titles and the descriptions of each of the pages and how it generates those, where it gets it from and gives you just a little bit more customizability around that and I like that. It’s a derivative of the very popular all in one SEO plug in. They just kind of cleaned some stuff up and I found when I was using all in one SEO, when I upgraded it, it would turn itself off which annoy me and platinum SEO doesn’t do that so I like platinum SEO. Another thing is Google site maps, so when you have a website when the Google crawler comes, one thing it’s going to look for is a site map which basically tells you every page and every post that onsite so that Google can index it. This is a really simple plug in. You just install it and it starts working. You don’t really have to customize it at all and it’s really helpful for getting your pages index especially as you get lots and lots of pages. Google may not want to crawl if it can’t figure out how to navigate to them. So the last SEO plug in that I install on almost everything is SEO Smartlinks and what that does is it links any text that’s into your site no matter what post it in to a specific URL. This is really easy for you to manage, certain links on like Automate My Small Business. Whenever, we mention WordPress, we have a specific link and we want it link on every article no matter where it shows up. With SEO Smartlinks, we just go and we put that word WordPress, the link and now in every post that we had it will link to that. It makes it a lot easier to manage and you don’t have to go through you know thousand word articles looking for every instance of WordPress or you know the first three or whatever you want to do. It’s a really great plug in.

BRANDON: For that kind of tightens up everything across the entire blog type…

MATT: Yeah. It just makes it a lot easier to manage all those links so you don’t have to click on every instance in every post to make sure that you have links.

BRANDON: That’s a good one.

MATT: And the last one that install sometimes depending on what kind of site it is and if I have a blog roll is there’s a plug in called No Follow Links which will just mark all the links and any sort of link list like a blog roll or anything else as no follow so you’re not giving away the Google juice.

BRANDON: It isn’t bad, I guess but you don’t want to give it away, you don’t need to…

MATT: If you carried all and you want to keep it in your site then you can keep it in your site.

BRANDON: So the No Follow Links aren’t by default? I thought it was …

MATT: The No Follow is by default in the comment area but not necessarily in the link area.

BRANDON: Oh, okay. That makes sense.

MATT: Yeah. So our next category is analytics.

BRANDON: So we have Google Analyticator which basically takes all your Google analytics. Once you get a Google analytics account you can install the Google Analyticator plug in and it pretty much just displays the stats from your Google analytics account right into your admin account based on all the traffic you’re getting from the site.

MATT: It also puts a java script link in so you don’t have to modify any of the HTML so when someone will visit your site it actually sends that information to the Google analytics. So it does both the reporting of all the visitors and you know the visual stuff that you get to see in your admin console.

BRANDON: And there’s Quantcast quantifier which if you haven’t used Quantcast in the past, it’s a great site to get traffic reports on not only yours but even your competitors or other sites out there and it even gives you in depth analysis about demographics and …

MATT: Yeah, the demographics is what I really like about it. So we have both Google analyticator and Quantcast running in our site. So we can kind of get not just the raw traffic and what page are they viewing from Google analytics but also what type of people are coming to your site or what at the other sites that they like to go to and so maybe when we start doing some marketing, we can target marketing more at what are the sites that they would be on or anything like that, right, because you really want information about your customers.

BRANDON: And speaking of analytics, if you do have a podcast like we do, there is a specific plug in you can use. We use Blueberry Powerpress. So if you are a podcaster, Blueberry Powerpress basically gives you statistics about how many people are downloading and how many repeat listeners you have and so that’s kind of a neat analytics tool.

MATT: So there’s a couple of different podcasting tools and I tried somewhere like I think there’s one called Podcasting which got abandoned and since all these are open source, you want to see that they’re upgrading them as there new versions of WordPress because you don’t want to be on something that gets broken. And Blueberry seems to be a very active company and they have their own podcast directory and so I felt a lot more comfortable with them, keeping the thing updated with the new versions of WordPress.

BRANDON: Okay. And then another category, thumbnails. What do we have for thumbnails?

MATT: Yeah, so it will depend on your theme if you need this or not but a lot of like the magazine themes will have an image that’s associated with every single post. You can see this on our site, you know. We always pick an image that we want to associate with the post that really drives home the point and what that post is about or what the podcast episode is about. And WP Post thumbnail is a pretty good thumbnail modifier or uploader. The thing I really like about it above all the other thumbnail post plug ins is that it lets you crop the image right on the screen so you know you make it something from iStock photo that’s square and you really need a 200 x 100 rectangle and so you can crop that right on there. You don’t need to use Photoshop or anything before you upload it.

BRANDON: That’s so cool especially since the default photo image size is that come in WordPress I think you only get really three choices: thumbnail, medium and large. So if you have the ability to customize the sizes right on the screen, that’s even better.

MATT: Yeah, and WordPress 2.9 which just came out not too long ago has more thumbnails built right in and I don’t know if the repeat post thumbnails kind of working with that because our theme doesn’t use that yet. So hopefully they’ll update that when you know more of the themes start to get advantage of the new built in thumbnails.

BRANDON: Okay.

MATT: And them sometimes when you change themes so you know maybe you have a pre-existing theme and you got to a custom theme and you have a bunch of images that are already pre-cropped, there’s another plug in called Regenerate thumbnails which will re-run all the cropping based on the new size of the pictures. You probably don’t need it off the bat but if you’re ever trying to get your thumbnails to change size because your theme has new sizes, Regenerate thumbnails is a good option to that.

BRANDON: Alright. So what do we have for other SEO stuff like meta data if you want to manage your meta data?

MATT: Well, one of the main reasons you ever need to touch the meta data is when you’re trying to add your site into Google web master tools or Bing web master tools. They want to validate that you’re on the site and one of the ways they do that is to say hey, put this meta tag that says you know Google and this random string. Well, that’s kind of hard to do off the bat without going in at HTML and the template editor but there’s this plug in called Meta Tag Manager which just lets you drop in you the name and the value of the meta tag you want to have and it’s really easy to validate that you’re on the site.

BRANDON: Well, that’s a good plug in then. So we got meta data. We talked a lot about social media in our last episode so this is our opportunity to kind of connect with others and have others you know vote for us using that a lot of the social networks out there.

MATT: Yeah. I think one of the voting that you really nailed is one of the key ways you connect your site up into the social media area. So you really want like Digg links so people can Digg it or retweet this or put this on my news stream on Facebook and there’s individual plug ins that do all those things. Recently, I found this plug in called Digg Digg, d-i-g-g d-i-g-g, which I think used to just do Digg but now gives you the option to put all those voting buttons right at the top of your article that you want and you can pick and choose so you can kind of eight of the major ones.

BRANDON: And then Tweet Meme, tweet m-e-m-e, is a great little plug in that lets your users retweet any post that you put out there.

MATT: Yeah. I used to use Tweet Meme but I switched over to Digg Digg because Digg Digg puts the same button up there and it goes to options to put other things so…

BRANDON: So it’s an all in one.

MATT: Yeah. And there’s another one called Sociable which comes like 40 or 50 different social sites that you can repost on. But what I found in especially in my Camcorder site and you know some were the ones that get more traffic. When those buttons are small and there’s so many of them, people just don’t click on them so I think my recommendation is they pick one or two that your users will use and they’re clicking on whether it’s Twitter or Digg or Reddit or whatever the buttons that you’re going to use are, you know, pick a couple of them or one or two of them and put them up on the top and just those are the ones that you’re going to try to target because otherwise, you’ll distribute across too many different things. You don’t get enough clicks through and people just don’t like clicking on them because they’re so many.

BRANDON: Yeah. Facebook is good but you know if you can actually cross that threshold and dig and you actually get…

MATT: Oh man, and get the Digg effect…

BRANDON: You get the Digg effect on the first page, you’re gold then ends.

MATT: Yeah. I only have that happen once and it was awesome. It pretty much brought down my site but it was great.

BRANDON: To which site was that?

MATT: That was TheCamcorder site.

BRANDON: Is that right?

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: So what else?

MATT: One of the other social things I really like I just started using this you know in a last couple of weeks is the Disqus Comment System and really this ties in your comments and allows you to whatever comments are used or their posting they can also tweet about or tie into Facebook and it lets you pull in comments from all around the web that people are make in other blogs and pull them back into your site. It’s D-i-s-q-u-s Comment System. I really liked it so far and I’ve only been using it a little while but I think it’s a great tool.

BRANDON: So once you get a little bit more traffic on your site, you’re going to want to monitor the performance of the site.

MATT: Yeah. We mentioned the Digg effect and really Digg effect is once you get on the front page of Digg, you know, suddenly you have this rush of thousands of users because they have such a intense following. Well, one of the number one things you can do to make your site more scaleable and deal with that load is install somtehing called WP Super Cache and what this does is instead of every time you get a request, you know, creating a data base and rendering everything and pulling back the different articles, Super Cache will do this up front and just save that rendered HTML. It will cache it so that it doesn’t have to load up the Php script and use all the memory that created the data base. It will cache it for eight hours a day, two hours, whatever you decide but it make it so that every request is really fast except for that you know once every eight hours it needs to regenerate the cache. One of the other tools that I like, I like it but sometimes it has conflicts with the themes so you got to test it out in isolation to see if it’s going to work is CDN tools, which basically changes all your java script downloads you know all those little things that need to make your site run and it tries to pull this down from things like Google which has like the Jquery java script and some of the common java script some of the themes use. It will pull down from Google servers which are going to be way faster than your server and saves you bandwidth. So CDN tools is cool but turn it on isolation and see if everything still works once you turn it on. Super Cache has some of that same conflicts with other plug ins as well so have everything turned on and the performance theme should be some of the last things you turn it on.

BRANDON: Okay. So I know these list of plug ins is kind of lengthy. We’ll make sure we have the list posted on our show notes. But we just have a few more here. On terms of navigation, you can actually put a plug in called WP Touch iPhone theme which will allow people who use iPhones or iTouch and able to surf your WordPress site without really any problem…

MATT: Most of the themes will probably work but what this does is it really formats all theme to look like an iPhone app, right, so it shrinks down the screen so you don’t do the zoom in and zoom out in Safari but yeah, that’s certainly something that you want to test with your theme is whatever theme I use, does it look good in iPhone or iTouch. A lot of people are using those to surf the web and so you want to make sure that it’s not just you know completely whacked out. Another navigational plug in I like is yet another related post plug in and basically what this does is it allows you to put a widget or some little text somewhere that will show other articles that are similar to the article that they are reading. So as people are coming to your site from the search engines, they’re probably not going to come to your homepage, they’re going to come directly to the article that has the keywords that the search engine referred them to and you want to make it as easy as possible for them to get to other pages from whatever page I land on. So making sure that your menus have all the navigation is good but also having related post that are on your site that they might be interested in is a way to keep them engaged them at your site once they come to you and land on some random post that you have.

BRANDON: Exactly. So and we mentioned earlier that you can put a shopping cart directly into WordPress. There’s actually a number of plug ins but one that we’ve used in the past and tried is Shoppe, s-h-o-p-p-e.

MATT: Yeah. And this is the premium plug in. I think it’s going to cost you like $60 or $70 to install but its superior plug in. The one thing I don’t like about it is that it didn’t integrate with Shipwire which was a deal breaker for me but it was a pretty full feature shopping cart and I like the idea of having a rich CMS system like WordPress with the shopping cart in it. Especially you know for smaller shops, if you have a lot of advance management, you know, you have kitting and all kinds of advance shopping cart features, it may not work for you but you know if you’re pretty simple store and just a couple of products, I think it would probably turn out to be a pretty good bargain.

BRANDON: And then there’s some simple stuff you can do with the WordPress site. You can, of course, add a quick form, something that your visitors can fill out. There’s one called Simple Form Seven that is popular and you know just a simple form filler that you can use.

MATT: Yeah and then the last thing that we have in here is feeds. And so one of the key things you want is you want people to be able to subscribe through RSS or through email subscription. And one good way to do this is using a reading article called the Feed Burner. I did this for my Camcorder site. It gives you analytics about how many people are downloading your feeds. So there’s a plug in called FD Feed Burner which will redirect your feed to Feed Burner and you can get all the great analytics. And then you know there’s all kinds of different things for adding extra information into your feeds like RSS footers, another plug in if you want to put some sort of display right in the bottom of your feed. There’s lots of things like that. You know we’ve covered some of the core ones that we install on almost every site but there are thousands and thousands of things that you might use for special cases, pulling in advertising or you know whatever else. There’s tons of things for that.

BRANDON: That’s right. That’s a whole area that a lot of bloggers, in fact, I would say the majority of bloggers uses their revenue sources, Adsense and with Google and pulling in ads. If you’re just a strict blogger and all you’re doing is writing blogs, it’s hard to monetized that unless you have some sort of advertising on the side or along the top and that’s really kind of the revenue stream or a diehard blogger so that’s how it works.

MATT: You know I have used the Google Adsense in the past. I don’t find like I get a lot of money out of the Google Adsense so I used to use affiliate links, right. So there’s plug ins for Amazon. There’s an Amazon widget short code which allows you to drop you know some widgets or things in your side bar. I use Shopzilla on TheCamcorder site so that pulls in the list of like all the prices from all different stores at 15 different prices from the top 15 stores and I’m able to drop that in. There’s plug ins for just about every affiliate system out there whether it’s Commission Junction or Amazon or whatever, you’re going to find the plug in that is going to work and makes WordPress great because there’s so many plug ins.

BRANDON: Yeah. And then the last thing we haven’t talked about is the adding of pages and that’s different than adding plug ins or adding themes or settings. It’s actually just creating new pages that you can add content to if it’s a privacy policy page that you want to put up there or disclosure policy page, your About Us page, or your Contact Us page.

MATT: Yeah. I think some of the basic ones that I always put out there, that’s kind of the last thing I do to set it up once I have the themes and the plug ins. And then I guess widgets, we didn’t really mention widgets.

BRANDON: Well, the widgets are kind of you can change your contents around the pages.

MATT: Yeah. So usually you have a side bar and then you’ll see different areas right in the side bar whether it’s the you know advertising we talked about. Especially on our site, we have the you know sign up for newsletter and the widget lets you just kind of post some random text there or some pre-packaged little features like tag cloud but the empty text widgets are great for things like pulling our Aweber sign up form and just dumping that on the side bar or putting just random notifications and links to other things that we want on that side bar.

BRANDON: You can’t put script in there though.

MATT: I think you can put script, yeah.

BRANDON: Oh you can even in the basic text box widget?

MATT: Yeah.

BRANDON: Yeah, okay so you can …

MATT: It’s a great way to dump whatever in that area.

BRANDON: Yeah. So there’s a lot of flexibility. You know WordPress is becoming that one application out there that I think a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of drawn to because of its simplicity, its flexibility, the ability to be SEO friendly and get on the search engines quickly. All in all it’s a great platform.

MATT: Yeah. I mean I didn’t really know much about it until about a year ago when I started building some of these sites and I’ve just been really impressed with it. It’s been super easy to use and you know there’s a plug in for everything. I really haven’t found anything that didn’t have a plug in for it so that makes it really easy that you don’t need to hire someone to do all these custom coding for you. You just, you find someone that did it and they give it to you for free. It didn’t get any better than that.

BRANDON: Yeah. And this was a hard episode to do because I felt like you know you’re either a WordPress know it all or you’re WordPress know none of it all. And so I hope we’ve been able to kind of either open your eyes if you’ve never done WordPress to kind of show you how easy it can be and not to be afraid to start or if you are a WordPress junkie and you already know a lot of this, you know, hopefully we have given you some plug in that you haven’t heard of before that you can go test out.

MATT: Yeah. Like we said there’s thousands of them so we probably missed some and there’s actually a good question on the community set right now which is which WordPress plug ins do you use? So if we missed your favorite plug in, go to ask.automatemysmallbusiness.com or just click the community button on the top right of the website and you know go answer the question and add the plug in. And if you use some of the ones that we mentioned then we’re going to put all those on the questions and vote for the ones using the up and down arrows on the left hand side saying, you know, I like this plug in. This one’s really good so people know which ones are the best ones.

BRANDON: Yeah and of course you know you have an opportunity to vote or even give feedback on iTunes feedback page if you get a chance. That would help us out and let everybody else know what you think.

MATT: Yeah, definitely. That’s you know really key whether you’re in iTunes or Zune or whatever you use, use the feedback mechanism in there and you know vote for the episodes if you like it. It helps other people find it. It helps us know if we’re doing a good job and we appreciate everyone that’s already done that. So thank you.

BRANDON: And then of course, we got our newsletters. So if you’re not a part of our newsletter, get on and we’ll get you a copy of our top tools that we use that we personally use in our business that saves us time and increase our productivity and I think that’s pretty valuable and of course you’ll get custom newsletters from us what’s going on with us.

MATT: Yeah. We always try to give people on the newsletter little heads up whenever we release something, give them the first look so you do get some priority being on there.

BRANDON: Yeah. Well, that wraps up our episode 16 with WordPress. If there’s any questions, shoot us email.

MATT: Or post them on the community site, right?

BRANDON: Or post them on the community site on our question and answer page automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for listening, guys. We’ll see you next time.

You’ve been listening to Automate My Small Business. We hope you enjoyed this episode. To get a list of the links we’ve just talked about or download more episodes and How To videos, go to automatemysmallbusiness.com. Thanks for being with us and catch us next time on Automate My Small Business Podcast.

Podcast music features, “Nothing’s Got Me” by Big Bad Sun, distributed by Magnatune and licensed under Creative Commons. The Automate My Small Business podcast is engineered by Vincent Furlong and transcribed by Flo Umali. And licensed under Creative Commons Attribution No Derivative Works license and may be freely distributed to share with friends, co-workers and strangers.