A to Z of Wordpress Facts
Love Wordpress but not sure if you know as much as you should? Our A to Z contains the 26 things every blogger should know about the world’s greatest blogging platform.
Know nothing about Wordpress?
If you’ve heard all the buzz about Wordpress, but don’t want to wade through reams of web pages and tutorials to understand it better, then kick back and read our little list of Wordpress Facts and you’ll be up to speed before you can say:
“What’s the difference between Wordpress and a blind chicken walking naked through McDonalds?”
A – Akismet
Akismet is one of the plugins that comes with Wordpress by default. It automatically blocks spam comments from your blog. It’s free to use for personal use, but if you are a pro blogger (making income via your blog) you have to purchase a key to unlock it if you are making more than $500/month. It’s a great plugin and works beautifully.
You can get away without using it by setting your blog up so that you have to approve all comments (which is a good idea anyway), but you’ll still have to go through a delete all of the spam from your Wordpress admin console which can waste valuable time on a big and popular blog.
B – Best Blogging Platform
Wordpress is the platform of choice for anyone building a pro blog. Through it’s open software environment and massive array of plugins, you will be able to make your blog do pretty much anything you desire.
To give you an idea of how good Wordpress is, let me quote a friend:
Every time I think of something I want to do with my website/blog, I simply search
wordpress plugin <insert name of thing I'm looking for>and someone has dreamed up and built a solution to my problem. Every time.
FYI – everything on OneNightSite.com is build and managed using Wordpress.
C – Comments
Comments are one of the foundational features of any web 2.0 community, and a staple of blog functionality. Wordpress has fully integrated commenting built right in. Getting people to comment on your blog posts is key to making your blog a success. If a visitor sees that others are commenting and engaging in discussion they will gain confidence that your content is worthy of their readership.
How to get people to comment
It can take time and traffic before you start getting comments on your blog, but in general there are a few simple rules to remember when writing your blog posts:
Blog Comment Tips
- Write great content. Sound obvious, but if you are to choose between quality and quantity, I would choose quality every time. Try to spend a little extra time on your posts to make them worthy of peoples time.
- Pose a question at the end of your post. If you purposely engage your readers with a challenge or a question (for their opinion perhaps) then you will elicit a greater number of responses.
- Be controversial. This doesn’t mean being disrespectful in any way, rather you might post your feelings about a controversial or socially relevant topic. Nothing drives a debate (heated or otherwise) like a little controversy. Just remember that your blog is your branding platform and you don’t want to damage your reputation, so tread carefully.
D – Documentation
It’s a very nerdy name, but the main hub for all things Wordpress is the codex. A website where everything that you can do with or to Wordpress is explored. Go take a look and search for something you’re trying to do. they also have some good tutorials for beginners.
E – Earning Money From Your Blog
Pro blogging is the term commonly used to describe bloggers who use their writing to generate income. There are entire books and sites/blogs dedicated to this subject as it’s a tough and vast concept. It is very possible though if you find the right approach and couple it with great writing, patience and dedication.
People are attracted to the concept of making money from their blog as it’s typically seen as a form of passive income – money that you make essentially when you are not even doing anything, like sleeping.
Some of the ways you can earn money are:
- Advertising – placing banners and Google AdSense ads on your blog. To make this successful you require a large readership and lots of traffic.
- Affiliate Marketing – where you pass prospective customers through to a 3rd party site where they make a purchase (and you get a piece of it). There are many things you can recommend as an affiliate, from sign ups at online poker sites, to book on amazon.com.
- Selling a digital service – perhaps you have a wealth of content or online tools that people find useful enough to pay a subscription to you in order to gain access.
- Selling an eBook – a variation of the previous idea, an eBook is an online digital copy of a book that you either give away or sell for a small fee. So this one requires that you write a book. Not easy. But it can be a good goal to have if you are writing great content for your blog. After a year or so you will have more than enough content to re-purpose as an eBook. It’s good to plan this type of thing in advance to ensure your subject matter is tightly related to a single core subject.
For great advice on becoming a pro blogger and earning money from your blog, check out problogger.net.
F – Feeds & Feedburner
Feeds (RSS feeds in particular) have been described to death, so I won’t waste space recapping the basics. However, if you are unfamiliar, this video provides a quick primer of what RSS feeds are.
Wordpress will automatically create an RSS feed for you, which makes it super simple and if you use Feedburner to manage your feed, you can take it to another level.
Feedburner is a service – recently acquired by Google – that helps you to manage your blog’s feeds. It has many uses, but our two favourites are:
- It allows you to send email newsletters to your subscribers
- It gives you quick access to a count of how many subscribers you have
G – Gorilla Themes
Gorilla Themes is a Wordpress theme design studio, and one of about 6 that we recognize as being really good. The thing that differentiates Gorilla Themes are the intricate background designs they use for their blog themes.
Check out their gallery of themes and if you like one, you can get a 10% discount using our exclusive coupon code ‘onenightgorilla‘.
H – Hosting a Wordpress Blog
Hosting is pretty cheap at most places you’ll find out there, but hosting a Wordpress blog is a little different. Most places allow you to install Wordpress (if they operate on a Linux platform), but some are better becasue they are differentiating themselves by having knowledge and support for Wordpress (a good thing as they probably understand it’s architecture and deal with lots of Wordpress blogs).
In Step 1, we recommend our top 3 including WP Web Host who provide specific Wordpress support, a rare and sweet bonus.
I – Installing Wordpress
Don’t be scared, it’s dead easy. Just go and check out Step 2 for guided instructions. You don’t need to be a nerd to get ‘er done.
J – Jobs
This one might sound a little strange, but due to the growing phenomenon of Wordpress websites (and it can be used equally well for a fully fledged website as opposed to just a blog), there is a growing need for people with Wordpress skills. The framework that Wordpress build on is purposely open and extensible, which allows thousands of third party developers to extend it to a point where you can do just about anything.
As such, it takes skill and experience to really know how it works beneath the sheets, and if you can figure out how it works you will find yourself in a desirable position in today’s web economy.
K – Killer Apps
Wordpress is too big, too open and too wide ranging in it’s use to really be a killer app per se. However, the plugins that are built to extend it’s use could be considered as such, and with their help you could make your own killer web destination.
(The photo is supposed to be Norman Bates mother btw).
Here’s a quick top 5 coolest things you can do with Wordpress:
- Live Blogging – see L (below) about how you can blog live from your phone.
- Tweet automatically – plugins like Twitter Tools allow you to update your twitter account whenever you post a blog, and in reverse, you can create blog posts from your Tweets!
- Notify Google every time you post – a crucial way to keep your blog up to date in Google via XML sitemaps.
- Create photo galleries – effortlessly create different styles of photo gallery.
- Embed YouTube videos – with a simple cut ‘n’ paste you can have video from almost any source in your blog.
See Step 4 for more of the best Wordpress plugins.
L – Live Blogging
Using Twitter LiveBlog you can couple two technologies (Twitter & Wordpress) to enable live blogging right from your phone (or computer). Imagine you are at a conference or public event; you can send a special code to Twitter from your phone which will automatically start a Wordpress blog post.
Now each of your subsequent Tweets will be broadcast not only to your Twitter timeline, but also added with a live timestamp to your blog post, in sequence. A magical way of keeping all of your audiences up to date on important events. Not to mention a great way to keep your readers glued to your blog.
M – MU
If you’re not into the lonely individualistic side of blogging, then why not start a community? Wordpress MU is a multi-blog version of the blogging platform that lets you run 1000’s of blogs off your single installation. So if you have a vision of a blogging empire with writing minions all working their own magic under your domain then this is the way to go. Check it out here.
N – Ninjas
Ok, I got stuck on N. I will try and come back to it. But as an exercise, I typed the single letter N into Google. The second site listed has a page title that says:
N – Inadvertently Homicidal Robots, Evasive Ninjas and a Whole Whack of Style.
That’s probably way better that what I would’ve come up with anyway, so be happy.
O – One Night Site
Of course! If you are here just checking out this blog post, skip on over the homepage to see what we’re all about. In a nutshell, we provide a FREE 14-step guide that shows you how to create a pro Wordpress blog in one night.
P – Plugins
Instead of building the core of Wordpress to do a million things, the creators of Wordpress were smarter and made the infrastructure open and extendable. As a result, a large community of software developers are building Wordpress for them.
Plugins are the building blocks of Wordpress and allow it to do everything and anything. You can view a complete list of Wordpress plugins on their site. Browse or search and you’ll find some amazing things. Alternatively, just search Google for wordpress plugin "thing you want to do" and you’ll be laughing.
Q – Quiet Riot
I couldn’t think of anything for Q either, so I listed an 80s Heavy Metal band for good measure. They really only had about 2 good songs, but hey, they were smart enough to market themselves as a band that starts with an awkward letter, so I’m sure they made a couple of sales over the years due to the lack of competition in their section.
R – Revisions
Wordpress is essentially a CMS (Content Management System) for blogs. As such it provides some compensation for writer error. If your blog posts evolve over time (note: they should, you should revisit and update old posts to keep them fresh), you are bound to make a few mistakes here and there.
The revisions feature in Wordpress lets you roll back (like Wal Mart) to an older version if you need to. You’ll find it buried way down at the bottom of the edit screen for a post with time and date stamps. You can preview the old versions and pick the one that’s correct for your rollback.
VERY handy if you do the occasional drunk post!
S – SEO Enhanced
One of the biggest advantages of building a blog/site with Wordpress is that it’s built from the ground up to operate at maximum SEO efficacy. With the combination of clean body content (you’ll have to use header tags yourself in the code when you post blogs), SEO plugins like Headspace 2 (get it now), RSS feed generation, Google XML Sitemap production (see X below) – you are getting a major head start on your Internet Marketing infrastructure.
T – Themes
Wordpress Themes are the designs that you can apply to your Wordpress blog to make it look purty. They range from the standard default one that comes with Wordpress (which is guaranteed to homogenize you in seconds), to a massive selection of free ones spread all over the web (some are great – check out GameZine in Step 3 for a beautiful example of a free theme – but most are horrible), all the way to premium Wordpress themes which are designed by professional design studios and cost you anything from $20-$80. Probably the best investment you can make when trying to build a pro blog.
U – Users
In Wordpress you can have other people sign up for an account which will let them write posts on your blog. This is really helpful for having a team of writers working on your blog. You can assign different permissions ranging from Subscriber (wants to hear from you) to Administrator (full control). If you want to get your readers involved you can open it up to everyone and potentially get some free writing done for you from interested parties.
Here’s a great video describing user roles in details.
Note: the video talks about an older version of Wordpress, but the principals still apply.
V – Vipers Video Quicktags
I’m covering a few plugins to fill in the really difficult letters in this A-Z, but only because they are so worthy. Vipers Video Quicktags is a plugin that places buttons at the top of the post edit box (alongside classics like bold and italic). Simply clicking one of these allows you to embed a video from virtually any provider right into your blog post.
As an example of how easy it is, I’m going to search YouTube and Vimeo for videos using the search criteria Viper. The two videos below were added by simply copying the URL of each video, clicking the appropriate button in my Wordpress post edit screen (after installing the plugin) – and Bob is now officially your uncle…
From YouTube: Viper – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbpH9FrMAG4
From Vimeo: Viper – http://www.vimeo.com/4811446
http://www.vimeo.com/4811446
If you can’t see the epic potential of this you are either blind (maybe blinded by a Spitting Cobra which is almost a viper) or dumb. Trust me, it’s cool and very, very simple.
W – Wordpress!! Did you expect something else from W? Come on… Ok, fine. Widgets
Wordpress Widgets are like mini versions of plugins that appear in the sidebar (or other areas) of your blog. some plugins are designed specifically to appear in the sidebar. An example might be a widget that displays the Categories in your blog, or a Search feature. In the Wordpress admin console you can specify which widgets you want to use, and you can ever drag and drop to re-order them.
There is a default set included when you first open the Wordpress box, so to speak, then as you add new plugins, you’ll notice that some of them have Widgets to allow you to place the tool or not.
X – XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps are the most predictable way to have Google index your site properly. There is a Wordpress plugin that does it all for you automatically (no surprise there). All you really need to know is that this is a great thing to have/do, and Wordpress makes it easy. You can find out more on the plugin page in Step 4.
Y – YARPP
YARPP is the acronym of one of the best Wordpress plugins available. It stands for Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. You can rightly infer from the name that there have been several attempts to create such a facility. In a nutshell it looks at certain criteria in your blog posts and matches them up with similar ones based on those criteria (all fully configurable depending on your needs). To gain benefit from this you will typically have a list of related posts placed at the bottom of a post, providing readers with a ‘Next Step’. Sort of along the lines of Amazon.com’s “if you like this book, then you might also like…”.
You can download the YARPP plugin here. You can find a list of the best and most necessary Wordpress plugins in Step 4.
Z – ZZZZ. Pro blogs earn passive income while you sleep.
We covered this concept in ‘E – Earn Money’, so all there’s really left to say is that you can make money from your blog, but it won’t happen overnight and not everyone is successful at it. However, if you are planning on taking the first step towards pro blogging, then you need a pro blog. That’s where the 14-steps of One Night Site come in.
Srsly, how much better than Sesame Street was that?!
Now that you are up to speed on what Wordpress is, and what it can do for you as a blogger, you might want to try our free 14-step guide to building a pro Wordpress blog in one night. It’s free and easy if you follow the 14 steps.
Build a pro blog before bedtime…
Cheers,
