Exploring The Internet » Blogging Tools

Monetize Your Blog With a RSS Plugin?

Lanna — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 03:07:04 +0000

Updated on 2/19/10: For some reason the website of firstRSS plugin is no longer available.

I recently found a very useful RSS plugin that will allow you to monetize your blog with it. It will permit you to place RSS feeds below each of your articles. With it you can now promote eBay’s products, ClickBank products, and any other affiliate products that allow you to generate RSS feeds with. I am so excited that I want to share this great tool with you.

This simple RSS plugin is called FirstRSS. Download it from its owner’s website. Did I mention that it is Free? After that unzip that file and upload it to your blog’s directory like this: /public_html/wp-content/plugins/. (assuming that you are using self-hosted WordPress blog too).

One drawback that I found out so far is you can only be allowed to show its default feeds which is 10. I don’t know about you but I think 10 feeds for an article is too many. I want to show less than 5 feeds or at most 5 feeds. Here is the solution for that:

Click on Plugins/FirstRSS/Edit.

Before you attempt to make any changes, make sure you save a copy of it.

Find the following codes in firstRSS.php:

foreach($rss->items as $item) { $title = $item[title]; $link = htmlentities($item[link]); $desc = $item[description]; if ($title != '') $disp .= "\t$title\n "; if ($desc != '') $disp .= "\t$desc\n "; }

And replace them with the codes below:

$i=0; foreach($rss->items as $item) { if($i < 5) { $title = $item[title]; $link = htmlentities($item[link]); $desc = $item[description]; if ($title != '') $disp .= "\t$title\n "; if ($desc != '') $disp .= "\t$desc\n "; } $i++; }

This will allow you to control how many RSS feeds you’ve preferred. I like to display [rsspara:URL] instead of [rsslist:URL] below my post because [rsspara:URL] will allow me to show not only links but images and descriptions of the products as well. Make sure you get a RSS url from any affiliate site you’ve participated and replace the URL with the feed’s url that you’ve got. If you’ve done it right, you will see an example just like the one below.

Another drawback is that it shows what category and keywords with a logo in its feeds. I don’t like that. I am still searching an answer for it. I’ll keep you posted once I find the solution.

Update: The solution for the above question is shown below. You need to find the following three $disp code lines and comment them out. Make sure you save the file:

$disp .= "\t \n"; $disp .= "\t$title \n"; $disp .= "\n\t \n";

Now go ahead to test it out. Does it work? Mine is working. See the example below.

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All in One SEO Pack for Your WordPress Blog?

Lanna — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:55:19 +0000

All in One SEO Pack is a must-have plugin for your WordPress blog/website. It allows you to do the following things:

Automatically optimize your blog/website’s title for search engines.

Generate your meta description automatically.

Edit you own keywords.

Avoid duplicate contents found on your WordPress blog.

And more…

It is currently compatible with WordPress 2.5.1. The sad thing is it will no longer to be updated or supported by its original author in the near future; but the good thing is it found its new home – read All In One SEO Pack Finds New Developer to find out more.

I just installed it and loved it. If you are interested, download All In One SEO Pack here.

Unzip the all-in-one-seo-pack.zip file you’ve download.

Use FTP to upload the file to this folder /public_html/wp-content/plugins/.

Now configurate it by clicking on Options/All in One SEO (for WordPress 2.3.x) or Settings/All in One SEO (for WordPress 2.5.x); see how it is done from here.

Some themes may not show the meta tag. That is because those themes may miss the appropriate call to wp_call() usually found in head.php. You can fix this by logging in to your WordPress Dashboard, clicking on Design/Theme Editor/head.php file. Insert right above and save your head.php file.

One more thing, once you use this All in One SEO Pack, there is no need to use other plugins such as Head Meta Description and SEO Title Tag. Otherwise you’ll produce duplicate title and description for your blog/website.

That is it. Once you set it up, It will automatically optimize your WordPress blog/website for search engines.

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A Stats Plugin to Analyze Your WordPress Blog?

Lanna — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:15:39 +0000

If you’ve ever signed up for a WordPress.com blog, you’ll know that Blog Stats is one of the features that came with it. According to Automattic‘s blog, a Stats Plugin focuses “on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.”

Bloggers who use a full version of WordPress blog (WordPress.org blog) now can use the same feature to track their blog/website. Since this feature is hosted within WordPress.com‘s server, your blog will not be affected much in terms of speed. So this is the biggest advantage if you use this Stats Plugin. Here are some screenshots I took from My Internet Stuff – a WordPress.com blog:

Shows your blog’s days, weeks, or months statistics.

Click the above picture to enlarge

Shows you where the referrers come from and what are your top posts and pages people have visited.

Click the above picture to enlarge

Shows you what keywords or phrases people have used to find your blog & what links people have clicked in your blog.

Click the above picture to enlarge

Shows the overall stats about your blog, incoming links to your blog, amounts of spams being caught, and etc.

Click the above picture to enlarge

For a full version of WordPress blog, you can download

a Stats Plugin here to your PC (personal computer).

Unzipped the file that you’ve just downloaded,

then uploaded it to this folder /public_html/wp-content/plugins or /public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins depends on how you set up your blog/website.

You’ll need your API Key to use it.

The only drawback I found so far is that once you login to your WordPress Dashboard, you’ll need to login to your WordPress.com account to use this feature.

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Solution For WordPress Uploading Image Problem

Lanna — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 23:31:54 +0000

After upgrading to WordPress 2.5/WordPress 2.5.1, I couldn’t upload any pictures anymore. When I clicked on Add an Image/Choose File from the editor, a window showed up: From Computer; HTTP error… An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later. See the screenshot below:

Click the above picture to enlarge

This was so frustrated since I uploaded pictures a lot. After a couple days of searching on the Internet, I finally found a solution to this problem. Hopefully you can be benefited by this too if you have the same problem like this. Just follow the steps below to fix this problem:

Using FireFTP to download your .htaccess from your WP folder to your PC (Personal Computer). If you don’t have FireFTP, then use whatever FTP you have.

Edit your .htaccess file by inserting the following codes:

SecFilterEngine Off SecFilterScanPOST Off

See the highlighted portion of the codes that I inserted in my .htaccess file:

# BEGIN WordPress RewriteEngine On RewriteBase /blog/ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]

SecFilterEngine Off SecFilterScanPOST Off }

# END WordPress

Make sure you save the .htaccess file

After you’ve done that, upload .htaccess file back to WP folder

Does this tutorial solve your problem? Feel free to talk about in the comment section.

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Free SEO Tips for WordPress

Lanna — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 04:29:09 +0000

If you search in Google or Yahoo about Search Engine Optimization tips, there are countless information out there. Optimizing your website is a must if you want to do good about it. Here I want to talk about how to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. There are ten important things you need to know if you want the search engines to find your blog.

Use Head Meta Description – This plugin here automatically creates a dynamic header description for your blog. So make sure you get it.
Use SEO Title tag – Title tags are the most important factors for on-page optimization. With this useful plugin, your blog will work like a charm.
Use permalinks – It is very important that you use permalinks so that other bloggers can use them to refer to your posts. My blog only uses %postname% and it is so far so good. Some people like to include /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ and it is fine too.
Make sure your title is in front of url – Suppose you title looks like this: WordPress >> Free SEO Tips for WordPress. You don’t want that. Instead you want this: Free SEO Tips for WordPress<<WordPress because your want the search engines to read your post title first instead of read your blog title first.
Use tags – Download this useful tool here. They are not only allow search engines to crawl your site efficiently but also create specific pages for your tag/keywords.
Put keywords in your title – Keywords are very important words about your blog so make sure you place some keywords in your title.
Use ping service – If you use WordPress software, your default ping service is provided already. I just leave the way it is. Ping service will notify your related sites that you have just posted your blog.
Use Google Sitemaps – Google Sitemap will help index your blog. It will also analyze your blog. If anything is wrong, it will show it to you so that you can fix your problems right away.
Use WordPress robots.txt for your blog – A robots.txt not only helps your blog rank higher in search engines but also increase your blog traffic as well.
Tag related posts together – It helps to link related posts together. It also helps your visitors to learn other relevant information to a specific topic. Besides it allows search engines to crawl deeper to your blog.

Update 7/21/2008: For tip 1 & 2 & 4, now you can replace them with All in One SEO Pack. For more information, read this post: All in One SEO Pack for Your WordPress Blog?

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Sitemap? What is it? How to Add it to Our Website?

Lanna — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:22:41 +0000

Why do we need to add a sitemap to our website? The answer is that it will help Googlebot to crawl your website more efficiently. Instead of just crawling your main page it will crawl more deeply about other pages of your website as well. Thus it increases the visibility of your website showing up on Google search engine. This means that more people will find your website. If you are running a business website, then you are more likely to get more visitors. Thus you will increase your sales.

Here I want to show you how to add a sitemap to your website using Google Webmaster Tool’s account. If you have a website self-hosted by a web server, then it is easy. Just create a sitemap using Google Sitemap Generator here. Then save it as sitemap.xml file. You can name it whatever name you want. After you’ve done that, upload it to your web server in the root directory using FTP, and finally submit it in Google Webmaster Tools‘ account like this http://www.yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml. Make sure you change yourdomainname to be your own domain name. It did not give me any problem when I submitted mine.

However it took me pretty long time to figure out how to add a sitemap to my blog which is hosted by Google Blogger and my other blog which is a self-hosted WordPress blog. The self-hosted WordPress blog is in my website’s sub-directory. It gave me hard time when I tried to submit a sitemap through Google Webmaster Tool’s account. In order to make it work I found out from this feed validator web tool that I have to submit it like this http://www.yourdomainname.com/blog/?feed=atom for atom or http://www.yourdomainname.com/blog/feed for RSS. Make sure you change yourdomainname to be your own domain name.

The blog with Google Blogger also gave me hard time. I searched Google Webmaster Help Group and I was guided to add atom.xml to the end of my Blogger’s URL, but I just kept getting errors. At the end I found one error saying, “Paths don’t match. We’ve detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that includes the www prefix (for instance, http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml). However, the URLs listed inside your Sitemap don’t use the www prefix (for instance, http://example.com/myfile.htm).” So I just submitted it like this http://yourdomainname.blogspot.com/atom.xml without www and it works! Make sure you change yourdomainname to be your own domain name. Now all of my sitemaps in my three websites work fine!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comment section. Good luck to all of you!

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