I see this happen all the time with clients. The write up content in Word or Wordpad, and then later try to copy and paste into Wordpress. The resulting mess usually confuses many. In fact even if there isn’t an obvious mess to the user, there is sometimes a very large behind the scenes mess.

So how do we copy this content into our blog?

It doesn’t matter what you are using, whether it’s Open Office, Pages on Mac, or even copying and pasting content from another website. If you paste formated text into a WYSIWYG editor you will end up with a mess.

What is a WYSIWYG editor?

When you are in the back end of Wordpress and you are posting a blog entry, you’ll notice that you post it into a box with formatting icons on the top of it. You can make text bold, change it’s font size, colors, the list goes on. This is a WYSIWYG Editor, it stands for What You See Is What You Get.

If you paste already formated text from an external source into a WYSIWYG Editor you will find that it tries to keep the formatting intact. This results in a bunch of text, possibly an entire post, that doesn’t match the formatting of the rest of your site.

In fact, even if you paste the text into the box and it comes out looking half way decent, you might be surprised to find out there is a lot of hidden code in the background. You can’t see this code but it could be there.

The reason you want clean text, is not only because you want your posts to look like the rest of your site, but also because if there is a bunch of hidden code that serves no purpose it can possibly dilute what the search engines see on your site as content. In all cases I think it just serves your blog best if you keep it as simple as possible. It’s really not difficult.

How can I clean the text before pasting?

The easiest method is to just click the “Paste as Plain Text” button, or for a really cool effect “Paste from Word”. The first option will just clean all formatting from the text and you will need to reformat it all to match your document. Personally I use Google Docs and I just don’t ever use formatting, I just format it when I get it over there. It makes it pretty easy to manage topic ideas and content on the go from any computer.

The latter option is for if you actually drafted your document in Word. What this option does is take and remove all the formatting that MS Word adds, and replaces it with valid clean HTML markup. This is handy because it will keep bold text bold, but with proper HTML code. It will keep text that you marked as a “Heading” as the same heading you formatted it as. It won’t necessarily be able to replace all the formatting properly, but it should do a pretty good job of it. If you use this feature you’ll quickly be able to learn what will work and what won’t.

To find these buttons you have to make sure that you turn on “Show Kitchen Sink” it’s the last button on the top row, this will display a second row, which will give you the buttons we’ve talked about above.

You see it all over the web these days. Tons of blogs and websites are forever popping up. The problem is that a lot of them are just garbage sites trying to walk the line between valuable information and getting buyers into their affiliate junk.

A lot of them are really good at what they do. They talk about how much money they are making and how easy it is and how you can be right there with them. Problem 2, you just need to sell your soul and turn to spamming.

What content do I consider part of the problem?

To me it’s those people that have a blog, maybe a couple of attractive posts to reel you in. They get you subscribed to their newsletter and every single thing you get from them is selling you something.

And the biggest problem is that the stuff they are selling isn’t teaching you how to be a better blogger. Most of it is all teaching how to maximize visibility by duplicating content, shows you how to spam all the online resources along with the tricks not to get caught as a spammer.

They don’t really teach how to be a real asset, but instead how to work the system so that if you just sneak away a piece of the online business, you can make money for very little work. And when I talk about work I’m not referring to methods of rewriting the same article 20 ways and spamming the article networks, or spamming social networks with the same garbage.

Do you really think that you can make your fortune with very little work?

How can you turn your Wordpress website into an online asset?

If you want the real rewards, it’s going to take real content, real dedication, real value. You are going to need to produce content that people want to read.

You’ll need to prove yourself to visitors and create real followers, instead of just grabbing traffic, exploiting it, and then trying to get more.

The key points I follow on a new blog:

1. Don’t trying to sell – There is so much hype online these days you probably aren’t going to be good at it anyway, focus on the content, build your traffic. You aren’t even going to sell anything if you have no one to sell to anyway.
2. Learn how to deliver what your visitors can really use – As you build your traffic pay attention to what people really need and learn the right ways to share it with them. Naturally, you want to make money with your blog, but make sure you aren’t running off your visitors by pushing crap, or by over doing it with hype.
3. Strive to add real content daily – This might be a lofty goal but if you try to write daily and push out 4-5 articles a week, that’s an accomplishment. Make sure you are delivering real and unique content. Prove you are an expert, help your visitors and they’ll help you.

So here’s a fun story about some wasted time.  I configured feedburner a while back to use as the RSS Feed for the site.

I like the way Feedburner looks compared to the default RSS Feed.  The social icons are better, you can get better statistics out of the system.  Plus, it’s owned by Google.  Never hurts to supply Google with as many links to your site as possible (don’t quote me on that, I really doubt it actually matters).

A lot of times, I like to be a log junkie.  I sit back and hunt through my site logs on occasion.  I like to look for errors with the site, and fix them before they cause to many issues. Sometimes I even find malicious bots trolling the site and I can block them or deal with them at least.

Anyway, I noticed that there were several attempts to hit the Wordpress RSS feed that is the default.  The systems ( a Google Gadget, something from Yahoo, etc. ) were hitting the site on a regular basis.  It’s not that they were getting old information, but it was quite a few subscribers that weren’t getting the legitimate feed, and thus I wouldn’t see the proper tracking.

I started scouring the Google Search for a method to redirect the feed via a redirect in the htaccess file.  I didn’t want to use a plugin and create additional overhead when it can be done so easily with the htaccess.  And I didn’t want to spend the time to write it myself, when I’m sure it was out there several times over.

I found a code block from Perishable Press:
# temp redirect wordpress content feeds to feedburner
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedValidator [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordpress-master/feed [R=302,NC,L]


Naturally if you are going to use this code make sure you change out my feedburner address for your own.

The problem was that after I added it to my htaccess it didn’t work.  I just popped it in really quickly, wasn’t paying attention at all.

After spending a lot more time than I wanted to spend on it, researching alternatives online.  I finally started reading comments.  There are several posts out there that all use this code, but none solved my problem.

Reading the comments, someone mentioned that the code has to be before the permalink rewrites that Wordpress uses.  Doh, I’m an idiot.  If I would have just spent two seconds to actually look at the code I would have realized it.  But instead I tried to save time and just do it quickly.

I guess in this case trying to NOT “reinvent the wheel” I cost myself a lot of unnecessary time.  Especially on something this simple that I could have just written myself.  Oh well, live and learn.

There is no reason for me to beat the dead horse about how important content is for your site.  If you are running a blog it’s really obvious, how do we brainstorm for new content ideas?  Especially if you are running a quality niche blog, it can be really easy to run out of “hot” topics for your niche.

There are hundreds if not thousands of websites out there with writers posting content and ideas about everything under the sun.  Naturally, if you start searching the internet for a list of websites to keep on your bookmarks list, and then try to keep up with them every day you’ll end up just blowing all your time on reading instead of writing.

Luckily most websites these days syndicate their content with RSS Feeds.

I use Google’s Reader to keep track of several websites.  It comes in really handy to visit one website and see the content of many websites all in one spot.

Did you know you can customize your Wordpress Admin with aggregated content about your topic for idea surfing?

Feed Reader in WP Admin

When you log into your WP Admin you’ve probably noticed a couple boxes, one called “Wordpress Development Blog” and the other “Other Wordpress News”.

I’ve found that many people don’t realize that if you mouse over the title bars a little “Customize” link shows up.

Clicking on this link will give you settings screen so you can change the Feed you want to display here as well as the title.

Feed Settings in WP Admin

You can set the number of items you’d like to display as well as a few other settings such as displaying content.

So if you are managing a blog, maybe you don’t really need to see Wordpress Development information every time you log in.

Instead let’s make it a little more valuable.

First though, let’s consider.  Maybe we don’t want to be limited to only two feeds. Maybe we are looking at this as a method to not only keep in touch with the competition, but to also feed us as many ideas about our own content as possible.

So to do this we’ll need some way to create a RSS Mashup of sorts.

Head on over to Yahoo Pipes.  This service is really excellent for combining RSS Feeds, and they in turn provide you with another RSS Feed of all the feeds combined.

I tried another site called xFruits, but I couldn’t even get their accounts to work.  I tried 2 different accounts over the course of a week and it would never work.

So once I created a Yahoo ID, I was able to log into their Pipes Utility.  I was pretty impressed with what you could do with this tool.

Yahoo Pipes

Take a look at the picture to see how I created a mashup of two feeds, and sorted the content by published date.

After I saved the Pipe, I just clicked over to view it and then selected the “Get as RSS”.  I plugged in my new Mashup feed in the WP Admin.

Now every time I log into my WP Admin I see all the content from these feeds.  Sometimes I see articles I disagree with, sometimes I see content ideas that I could expand on in more detail.  Sometimes reading through the titles I’ll get hit with a completely unique idea.

Either way it’s a very beneficial tool.  I’d love to hear from some readers about if this is beneficial, or any other “tricks” you might have found.

I was scanning my usual news online today, and I stumbled upon something I find hard to believe. But strangely if I think about it, I guess it actually makes sense.

Google did a recent random survey in Times Square, New York. There is a little video floating around on YouTube that is worth the watch, It’s pretty funny.

So anyway this is kind of scary for website owners, developers, and especially people like Google who are trying to get their new browser out there. If people don’t even know what a browser is then how do you get them to use a new browser?

For website owners and developers I think the issue comes down to supporting all the old browsers.

IE6 is a pain.

You can get your website looking perfect for all the new current browsers that are all standards compliant, whether that’s IE8, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome.

Then you pull up your site on a friends computer still running IE6 and you think, “holy cow, that’s not what it’s supposed to look like”.

It’s a sad day indeed to realize how unaware people are about what a browser is.

Google has created an entire campaign around educating people about what is a browser. Checkout the website, and here’s another short video that is also available on their website.

Content is an important part of your blog.

There are always arguments online, SEO is more important, Content is king, etc. But regardless of the debate, when talking about a blog, content is important. Without content nobody has a reason to visit.

But do you ever get stumped trying to write new blog content. You run out of ideas. Can’t decide what to write?

How can you brainstorm for content ideas?

It’s highly important if you own a blog that you constantly come up with new content for your blog. And it can’t be just anything. I doubt if I was writing in this blog about what I ate yesterday that anyone would find it beneficial.

So naturally, the content you write must be in context to the subject at hand. A great article that can further explain content is Why Content is No Longer King (and who’s taking his place)

So let’s see if I can help by providing some methods of brainstorming ideas.

It’s not as easy as it looks. Have you ever tried to just sit down and write out a list of ideas? Sometimes for me it seems the harder I try the fewer ideas I have.

So, sometimes the first thing I do is go hit up a keyword research tool.

Same thing you would do when trying to create some SEO on your site, but in this case we are just looking around for relevant ideas.

I pulled up a search for “golf” using the Google Adwords Tool.

At first glance I don’t really see anything special, but I click the “add” for “golf courses”, “golf clubs” and “golf putters”. Next I hit the Get more related keywords buttons, since these are more specific to what I’m interested in today.

So now I get a more centered listing of keywords that might be good to use. Scrolling down the list I see a few that I’ve never written on, so I figure maybe that would make for an interesting change of content for my blog.

I take a piece of paper and in a spread out fashion I write down all my new ideas or potential interests.

Now I head over to the regular Google Search. I start plugging my new ideas into the box, and off we go. Sometimes if I get a lot of results focused on eCommerce or something I might add in “articles” or “forums” or “blog” to the end of my search.

I’ll look through the list, scanning quickly. Pick a couple topics and scan those. I want to be careful not to waste an entire day on playing, I want to push myself to scan for my goal, content ideas.

For each batch of keywords I’ll write down different ideas that I’ve never thought of as I come across them in my searching. Now don’t go stealing content, just look for ideas and topics.

Within an hour I can usually come up with 10-40 pretty decent ideas. Occasionally I’ll take the time to fully read an article, and sometimes I’ll find something I completely disagree with. I have to say, nothing sparks my typing fingers like writing about something I read that I disagree with.

What if I’m still stuck actually writing my blog content?

This happens to me from time to time as well. I might have a whole list of ideas in front of me but can’t seem to write anything down.

Sometimes, I believe it’s because I’m stuck in the wrong side of my brain. I’m a very logical person. I like to plan things out, step by step. It is difficult for me to think creatively sometimes.

If that’s the case I found it’s helpful to do something that forces me to use my spatial brain. I’ll read over all my ideas. Grab my voice recorder, and maybe jump in my car for a ride. Or possibly even go for a walk, fresh air can help.

But the key here is that your brain can’t think okay that car is traveling approximately 32 mph and it will hit the intersection in 2.4 seconds so I need to slow down to avoid a collision.

Nope, that’s thinking logically you’d end up in a wreck if you spent that much time thinking about one car. Instead your brain will switch over to the spatial side of your brain, and just judge it, or guess it if you will.

Now that you are using the other side of your brain, and thinking spatially and creatively turn that voice recorder on and start talking about your thoughts (in regards to your content ideas of course).

If you are like me sometimes your best ideas come to you in the car or taking a walk, and it’s all because you switched out of “logic” mode and started using that creativity to your benefit.

If you’ve studied SEO techniques at all you already know how important it is to have backlinks to your site. Doesn’t really even matter what kind of site you have, links from other sites to your site is how the search engines find you. In addition once you are found the search engines use these links as kind of a “voting” system to determine the value of your site.

The more backlinks to your site the better, but the quality of the links you are getting is also very important. So don’t just immediately think that getting 1,000’s of links will do anything for you if they are just from random no name sites.

Another reason to go after high quality backlinks is the larger benefit than just SEO purposes. I was talking with the owner of a large blog once and he brought something to light that I never realized before. He said that his number one source of traffic was Google. He received probably 30-40% of his traffic from searches on Google. But if you looked at the rest of the traffic as a whole, he was receiving 60% of his traffic all from other sites that were linking to him. While he’d never wish loosing Google’s traffic, the rest of his traffic all came from backlinks, and it was even more valuable from him on it’s own.

So let’s talk more on getting a backlink booster shot

The hottest topics these days are social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, social everything. While many of these areas offer opportunities lets just focus on the social bookmarking in this article.

There are literally hundred’s of websites dedicated to bookmarking sites online that might have valuable information and sharing those bookmarks with others. These networks are like large databases of links.

Lately, I’ve been investigating how to properly add links to my own sites into these social bookmarking sites. Not only could this mean lots of backlinks if done properly but with attractive listings you could open your site up to these networks of people looking for quality information.

There is an easy backlink builder for you to utilize

Creating and managing 100’s of bookmarking sites will be difficult, but it will also be well worth it. If you’d like to learn more about exactly how to create bookmarks and why there is a correct way and a wrong way, then you must read this quality PDF on generating free backlinks.

While I would highly recommend reading the PDF first because it is important to understand how to do it on your own, if you’d like to also learn an automated method of generating these backlinks, learn how to Drive Hordes Of Targeted Traffic In Minutes!

Now this is very cool! I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the “Kindle” from Amazon.com right. Well, this new tech-toy has been getting bigger and bigger as time goes by and many people are actually making some pretty good cash with it.

Not only that, BUT – you can now also publish YOUR blog right on the Amazon Kindle and start adding new blog readers by the thousands.

Imagine that, Amazon.com publishing YOUR blog to thousands of people for you.

The great people over at ‘TechCrunch‘ did a little blog post on it.

“All you have to do is make your blogs feed available to the Kindle Store, and Amazon will do the rest, formatting your content for the device. According to the email from Amazon, after a few easy steps, your blog should be up and ready to go in the Kindle Store after about 12 to 48 hours of processing. Not bad.”

Read more at: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/13/kindle-publishing-now-open-to-all-blogs/

Blogging is moving into an all new and massive mobile market people and now is when you need to get in on the ride, because waiting will only leave you in the dust.

I’M GUILTY!!!!

I have not been doing something that, I myself, teach people to do so they never run out of good blog posts, and never leave their blogs sitting dormant for more then a few days.

See, one of the things I teach my clients and coaching program people, is that you should always have backup content all ready to go and be posted.

Why? Well, because your blog is important. It’s a driving engine that keeps visitors coming back to your site and provides a way for you to get a message, any message, out to your prospects and loyal reads. If you neglect this driving engine you’ll notice that eventually it stops doing the driving for you. Your website traffic starts to go away and it becomes harder to start getting it back.

Plus, our lives get in the way more often than not. Things happen and stuff piles up and emergency situations come smacking you in the head like a pile of bricks.

• Work
• Product launches
• Product completion
• Clients
• New interests
• Family (which is a good thing)

All of these things take up our time and it’s easy to get side tracked and forget your blog.

So what do I mean by “backup content all ready to go“?

Well, exactly that really.

I’m talking about having a few already written, ready to go blog posts. Blog posts you wrote ahead of time and have sitting in a folder somewhere on your computer.

Something that you can just open, copy and paste, enter title and keywords and post.

Pre-writing your blog posts is a HUGE life saver when time is tight but you need to get a post done and online fast.

Think about it.

You put up a blog, do a few normal on the fly blog posts, and you write 3 or 4 blog posts ahead of time and put them in a folder on your desktop.

A few weeks go by and you’re doing great with your blog. You’re posting on a regular basis, traffic is coming in, you’re getting comments and all sorts of clicks on the links you have in your content.

Then, without notice, something VERY important comes up and you know you’re going to be all tided up for about 2 weeks with no time to sit down and write a new post for your blog.

Well, normally you’d be a little screwed and freaking out.

But, if you had a few posts that you wrote ahead of time, you’d be all set and ready to deal with your new very important problem or situation, and still know your blog will get the attention it needs!

You just open the folder with your blog posts in it, pick one and copy and paste it into your blog and BLAMO – you have a new blog post that you wrote and you still have all of the time in the world to deal with your other issues.

Believe me, you’ll be thanking yourself later if you take this one tip and write 3 to 5 blog posts ahead of time.

Now, don’t write them and pre-schedule them in your Wordpress blog. Just write them and save them on your computer for later use.

The really cool thing about doing this – once you’ve gotten the posts written and saved, you can be walking out the front door to some shmantsy-pantsy restaurant with the family and remember that you haven’t posted a new entry in a few days, then run in the office open a pre-written post, copy and paste it and click the publish button and STILL be on your way to the restaurant 5 to 10 minutes later.

This IS a huge time saver.

RECAP!

1. Write 3 to 5 blog posts ahead of time
2. Save them to a folder on your computer
3. When in need, smash glass and use emergency copy and paste blog post

This is will keep your blog cookin’ even if you’re running a million miles a minute and have no time to stop

Comment below!

Face the fact – your blog needs to be regularly updated to maintain its readership! Hence, you must always find fresh topics to write about, and we’re going to discuss how to do just that in this article.

We have discussed how to write attractively, so now we are going to discuss what we are going to write on.

[ad#post-side]The very first option that I think a blogger should write on is a topic that he or she feels passionate and interested in. If you’ve chosen to make blogging your career because you want to escape a mundane job – forcing yourself to write about something that you’re not interested in is as torturous as as your mundane job!

The other reason I advise you to write about something you’re passionate about, is because your feelings and emotion shows through your writings!

If you feel indifferent to a certain subject but still write about it just for the sake of it, your readers will notice it. Remember the advice about writing with a personality? Forcing yourself to write will not establish a welcoming style at all.

Once you have chosen your main theme, start posting to your blog about it and make it a habit to post at least once every day, even if it’s only a comment on the newspaper article you read today. Think of yourself as a gigantic train. It takes a lot of effort to get you moving. First, you might just budge an inch, and later trudge slowly on until you finally reach your full speed. Then, it’ll take a lot of effort to stop you!

However, no matter how well you know your topic, your brain is bound to get exhausted over some time, so here are methods to brainstorm for content for your blog.

1. The very best way to brainstorm is to see what other bloggers have to say about stuff happening in your field. And the very best way to find related blogs is to use http://blogsearch.google.com or http://www.technorati.com There are other decent search tools too, you just have to look around. From other blogs, you can gather more knowledge on your subject and you can also comment on what others have to say on your own blog!
2. Once you’ve established contacts with other bloggers in your field, you’ll have quite an inexhaustible “conversation” ongoing, so you’ll not need to actively search for content to write about. But, if you’re still stuck, search for news articles related to your niche in the local newspaper or online through sites like http://news.google.com and http://news.yahoo.com.
3. You can also have conversations with people with the same interest as you in the particular niche you choose, so you will eventually build up a bank of questions and answers and interesting discussions to write about in your blog. To do this, join forums related to your niche, but don’t join every forum there is out there. Stick with one or two with the biggest number of members or the one which is most focused on your niche. This will also come in handy much later in gaining traffic and generating profits.

Remember to keep up your momentum of posting at least once per day (or more if you have a lot of content to write about) so that the major search engines will know that your blog has fresh content everyday. This will attract the search engines to spider your page on a more frequent basis, hence gaining you extra traffic.

Don’t worry about the paragraph above about generating traffic and search engines, because we’re going to talk about that in more detail later. For now, remember to keep a consistent effort everyday and build up momentum like a locomotive!