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Expert WordPress is a new blogging system that allows bloggers to save time and get more done after they create a blog. Not only that, but the system is actually a full on blogging suite with your own WordPress theme, plugins, video tutorials and instructions, all packed into one. Expert WordPress was created for the WordPress community to counteract the limitations and problems they usually face when they want to create a blog.

The Expert WordPress system takes you by the hand and explains in detail what you need to do and when. Setting up a blog couldn’t be easier and more straightforward than this. Since WordPress is the number one choice blogging software on the market, most bloggers will eventually migrate to it, even if they first create a blog with one of the dozen of the free blogging tools available on the market.

You can choose Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal and even the free option of http://WordPress.com for your blog, but none of them will give you the benefits and choices of the WordPress software that runs on a self hosted domain.

Self hosted WordPress blogs are by far the best blogs for search engine optimization, great placement and the ability to monetize them in many possible ways. Smart Internet marketers have recognized this fact a long time ago and wouldn’t ever go back to whatever they used prior to hosting their own WordPress blog.

Some features that really make the WordPress software stand apart from the others is the versatility of it. There are just so many options in which we can build WordPress blogs and with a bit of coding knowledge in HTML and PHP, anybody can actually design their own WordPress theme.

There are plugins, widgets and many other pieces of coding than can be integrated into WordPress. Best of all, nothing is set in stone. If you ever wanted to change the look of your WordPress blog you can do so easy with a few changes in the stylesheet.

To make the process of starting out to create a blog, by moving to your own self hosted WordPress blog a lot easier, Expert WordPress has been designed for you.

It is the system if you are sick of trying to lean code or spend hours finding the right plugins. The creators of the software have actually built in the required plugins to help you with your search engine rankings. All you need to do is activate them with a few clicks. This will not only save you a lot of time, but you won’t have to worry whether the plugins you use are the right ones.

Another benefit of using Expert WordPress opposed to doing it yourself is the fact that is comes with its own support forum. Should you ever get stuck you won’t need to purchase expensive eBooks or even search for answers online. You’ll have your very own help support community right at hand.

It’s up to you whether you want to create a blog the traditional way, or use Expert WordPress and fast track your blogging experience to something more pleasant. Either way, WordPress is the software to choose for sure.

The “WordPress” developer team has successfully launched their latest version of WordPress, called “WordPress Ella”. Numerically, the version number is called version 2.1

To the uninitiated, news like this seems like a normal announcement from software developers and are often passed on by. However, from the eyes of a trained mind and savvy businessman, the news of “WordPress Ella” contain many benefits that online business owners can immediately tap into and profit from.

“WordPress Ella” comes with the following enhancements which are a great resource for online business owners.

1. First on the list of enhancements from WordPress Ella is an ‘autosave’ function that ensures you will never lose a post again. This is an invaluable tool especially at times when you have spent a lot of time in front of your computer screen, brainstorming on what to write to promote your business.

Imagine the horror or frustration especially in instances where the battery of your notebook died and you forgot to save. Or perhaps there was a blackout or you accidentally closed the browser window without saving your work.

“WordPress Ella” autosave function is a real time saver and is an abosolute must for any online businesses.

2. Next in line on “WordPress Ella” is the “Import” and “Export” functions. Let’s talk about the import function first.

The latest release of “WordPress Ella” has an import function that allows you to import your blog created from other popular blogging platforms such as ‘Movable Type’, ‘Typepad’, ‘Livejournal’, ‘Blogger’ and so on, into WordPress itself.

This way, you don’t have to lose any important data such as your blog posts and comments. This flexibility is another reason why WordPress itself is so successful and continues to gain a huge following and user base.

Why would anyone want to transfer their blog from another platform to WordPress? Well, one reason is because with most of these other blogging platforms, the user has to pay a monthly fee. WordPress, as almost everyone knows is free, and you can easily install with a few clicks using Fantastico from within your hosting account’s Cpanel.

Another reason to migrate or transfer the entire blog to WordPress could be due to the limitation of some blogging platforms. Blogger, for example does not support the use of categories, which are critical when it comes to optimizing the blog to rank high for specific keywords related to the business.

Now, let’s discuss about the “Export” function.

“Export” as the name implies, will export all the WordPress posts and comments into a file (called XML). This file can then be imported into other WordPress blogs. It’s like a cross transferring of data between similar or related “WordPress Blogs”.

This is useful when one is starting a new blog and perhaps need to populate the blog with useful content instead of just displaying news feed. For example, if you have a blog on muscle building, and you started a new blog on weight loss, you can import the content (which are the posts and comments) from the muscle blog into the weight loss blog.

This way, when you drive traffic to your new weight loss blog, you can at least provide the reader with some useful content while you build up the content around weight loss. Naturally there is some correlation between these two topics. After all, if you want to build muscle, naturally you need to burn off the excess fats and turn them into muscles!

3. Another enhancement of “WordPress Ella” is the new search engine privacy. What this means is that you can indicate whether you’d like your blog to be indexed or ping by search engines, especially Google, Yahoo or MSN, which are the three top search engines online.

Most experienced marketers know about the pinging power of blogs. Everytime when a post is published, WordPress will ping or notify specific blog directories about updates to your blog, causing them to index or visit your blog, brining you that additional and much needed targeted traffic.

As crazy as it sounds, considering that most business owners would like to get their site listed in the search engines, there are also times when you might want to hide or mask your blog from the radar screen of search engines. This is true especially in cases where it’s only meant for paid customers only. For example, you might be providing some sensitive information meant for paid customers and you don’t want anyone doing a search on the search engines to stumble upon your blog and have access to the information.

4. Another powerful upgrade that “WordPress Ella” brings is the ability to specify a static page as the front page for your site or blog.

Most savvy marketers employ the use of a mini site or a one page only sales letter when marketing their products or services. Normally such one page sites will also contain an opt-in box, where visitors and readers are enticed to provide their email address in exchange for a free gift, software, e-course etc.

When they do so, they will normally be enrolled in an autoresponder course that automatically does the follow-up with the said subscriber which either results in a sale or no sale.

With a blog, however, the main page or the front page will always a display of the latest chronological posts. You can create pages for a blog, however, in the past it was not that easy for the layman to do so.

With “WordPress Ella”, all you need to do if you want a static front page is to select this option in the WordPress control panel. It can’t get any easier than this.

These are just some of the enhancements that you can immediately benefit from “WordPress Ella”.

This article assumes you already have some basic knowledge about the marketing power of blogs in terms
of its syndication power, targeted traffic and search engine optimization capability for keywords.

There has been talk about using WordPress beyond the typical blog set-up, into the realms of a full-fledged content management system or CMS. Yet, most people have no idea how this is even possible.

I have to stress that the default WordPress software is intended to be a blogging tool, so if you’re trying to make it work like a different type of content management tool you’ll have to use the correct plugins (enhancements) and have the a clear idea of what you want to achieve.

While the exact step-by-step method is out of the scope of this article, lets explore some of the ways you can use WordPress, as I have personally done before.

1) WordPress as An Article Directory

To make WordPress work as an article directory, you’ll need a special plugin, and a source for the articles. MyArticleMarketer.com is the perfect tool for this, as the articles there are usually human-approved. They also encourage free distribution of their articles to other article sites.

After you have set-up the WordPress plugin, you need to sign-up for Article Marketer’s distribution list. By filling in their form and specifying the categories (or choose all categories), you automatically qualify to receive all old and new articles that are submitted to MyArticleMarketer.com

However, with WordPress as an article directory, you’ll only be able to receive syndicated articles. Authors won’t be able to sign-up or create an account directly with you. It’s also against MyArticleMarketer.com’s terms or service to encourage authors to sign-up directly with you.

2) WordPress as a Membership Site

You can set-up a free or paid membership site using WordPress. All it takes is a few simple plugins to get the job done. Once you’ve installed the plugins, members will need to login to your site in order to view the content. You can also place a login form in your WordPress theme files to make it easy for users to lo in and out of your membership site.

However, the plugins only create a simple membership system, so if you’re looking to create different membership levels and more advanced features, you’d probably want to sign-up with a professional membership system like AmemberPro.net and use their available plugins to ingrate with WordPress.

At the time of writing, AmemberPro.net has available plugins for a reasonable cost and these will be installed by their support team, so you don’t have to worry about the technical setbacks.

3) WordPress as a Classified Ads System

WordPress can work like any other classifieds website too. Users can sign-up on your site and place classifieds in the form of new blog posts. They can even set expiry dates for their ads and specify listings or “wanted” ads.

However, you will need to create all the necessary categories and even create a sign-up information page to teach your users how to place ads. The upside of using WordPress as a classifieds site is that you can also use tagging tactics to get traffic from social bookmarking sites and sites like Technorati.com

4) WordPress as an Audio / Video Training Site

Using the membership plugins mentioned above or AmemberPro.net’s WordPress compatibility plugins, you can create a membership site with WordPress. Then, all you need to do is to add the “Podpress” plugin which takes care of all audio and video elements on your website.

You will be able to display and stream MP3 audio or FLV video using their built-in players. The Podpress plugin is really robust and also allows you to specify setting on iTunes, so you can make this commercially and available to the entire iPod / iTunes community.

As you can see by now, there’s a whole lot of possibilities when it comes to using WordPress to the extreme.

I’ve created an entire video training system to help newbies and advanced marketers alike master WordPress. Yet, every day brings new possibilities to using WordPress as a complex CMS instead of the modest blogging tool it was designed to be!

People with Internet and web experience of all levels have worked to make sure that their websites, web service accounts and browsers were as safe as they could be from computer hackers. However, the hackers practice an old baseball saying which goes, “If you want to be a success you have to hit ‘em where they ain’t.”

The weakness that the hackers have found is the WordPress Blog. Many may have never considered a blog to be worthy of a hacker’s attention, yet with the way that advertising and marketing dollar potential have soared, that’s what sets a hacker off on their hunt for a victim.

The hacker attacks on WordPress Blogs take the person who wants to come to a particular blog to a different site that’s full of ads, many of them obscene and many of them virus filled, which obviously does not present what was the assumed landing point blog in the best light. In fact, one hacker attack, no matter how quickly it’s spotted and dealt with, can destroy all the work that the owner of that blog has done. If it’s a blog full of content with years of archive material, a hacker’s attack will turn all of that work into worthless untrustworthy words.

The attacks launched on WordPress Blogs by hackers get even worse for the blog owners. Google, for example, when (not if) their robots detect something suspicious about a WordPress Blog will include the following in the search result for that WordPress Blog.

“This site may harm your computer.”

If a person clicks on that phrase, which appears as a link within the search result listing, they will be taken to a page that will repeat the warning of harm to their computer and suggest that they go to another site or blog that came up in their search results.

Even if a WordPress Blog owner catches the damage quickly, the time it will take to repair that blog’s reputation will be costly at a variety of levels. People will remember the warnings of computer harm no matter how strongly it’s presented that all with that WordPress Blog is well. A loss of blog traffic will mean a loss of ad revenue. In many cases this could mean the loss of advertisers since many affiliate ad programs require a specific level of traffic activity.

WordPress Blog owners make the mistake of thinking that since the warning signs that their blog has been hacked are so obvious that they’ll be able to catch the problem before it becomes a major disaster. They would have to be proactive rather than reactive and monitor their WordPress Blog every minute of every hour of every day. Just five minutes under a hacker’s control can destroy the connection that WordPress Blog had made with the thousands of people who visit it at any point.

While WordPress does the best they can with security updates, that’s still just a reactive option for the WordPress blog owner. There is a proactive step every WordPress Blog owner can take to prevent hackers from destroying the work and reputation of their WordPress Blog.

Internet developer and expert James Stein, with 15 years experience in the development of programs that assist and educate people, has created WordPress Secured. Instead of one plug-in fix after another, WordPress Secured brings total security to every WordPress Blog that anyone can learn and benefit from.

WordPress Secured teaches how to close the many open doors WordPress Blogs contain which hackers exploit. It teaches how to find a blog’s softspots and strengthen them. Users discover how to protect their important avenues of ad revenue. WordPress Secure makes the blog owner not only more secure but more smart and aware about their blog.

WordPress Secure also includes a special feature called BadBot Killer. This program stops the scanning bots that seek out a WordPress Blog’s weaknesses that are the welcome mats for computer hackers. BadBot Killer stops the hackers even before they can find the front door to a WordPress Blog.

The amount of knowledge and information required to do a WordPress Blog post-hacking repair is large and above the heads of many WordPress Blog owners. WordPress Secure is one easy and educational package that keeps the WordPress Blog owner steps ahead any hacker.

Introduction

WordPress has become one of the most popular blogging packages on the Internet; this is largely due to its ease of use and its object oriented design which allows the user to easily extend its capabilities in the form of WordPress Plugins. The WordPress plugins repository is a high-availability set of development tools — a wiki, version control using Subversion, and bug tracker — that aims to nurture the active WordPress development community.

Plugins

Plugins are tools to extend the functionality of WordPress. Plugins offer custom functions and features so that each user can tailor their site to their specific needs. Plugins are one of the most valuable elements of WordPress as a platform. You can download a fresh version of WordPress with the plugins you select, or just a zip of all your favorite plugins. More and more plugins are starting to use AJAX techniques. For any WordPress user, plugins are essential. Luckily there is already a few plugins out there for that, but sometimes your readers will suggest something that has yet to be implemented as a plugin. Semiologic CMS is a set of plugins and themes for WordPress that work together to turn a WordPress blog into more of a content management system. Each plugin is activated separately, so if you want to use a couple of the plugins, you can do so without running the plugins you don’t want.

Tag

Tags in the Head is a WordPress plugin that attempts to make your website both more machine and human readable by using the ‘Tags’ you specify as META keywords in a page’s header. When using this plugin, you can use the WordPress’ categories as tags — no additional tagging plugin is needed. Some search engines are supposed to love this tag, so I guess we should, too. This plugin is extremely easy to install and it will create a dynamic Meta Description Tag for every page on your blog, based on post excerpts or on the first words of the page.

Video

WP-FLV is a plugin to help you add flash video to your WordPress site. It holds the URL to your Flash Video file. For instance generate a list of video links rather then show the player. It was really easy to get this running, and I think it looks more professional then most of the non-free flash video players. It is easy to simply pop it up, but its hard to specify the sizes of the windows they open in, especially when all the videos have different resolutions.

Ads

Adsense Deluxe allows you to automatically insert Google Adsense with ease. Adsense-Deluxe allows you to test your Adsense styles without having to edit your WordPress templates. There are a lot of ways you can add ads to your WordPress blog. Google Adsense has become the most popular online contextual advertising program. WordPress allows bloggers to easily integrate Google Adsense inside wordpress using plugins.

Social

Social Bookmark Plugin : Make it easy for users to bookmark your posts in del. Socializer is way to submit your post to all of the social bookmark networks at once. It include 37 social bookmark networks (digg, de. Bookmark Me by Denis de BernardyLists links to common social bookmarking sites. This is an excellent way to promote your articles on one of the most popular social bookmarking sites around. This plugin is very useful for handling sudden bursts of traffic coming from social bookmarking sites like Digg and Slashdot. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

Conclusion

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of WordPress plugins available for download. Top 10 Underrated WordPress Plugins those plugins are certainly awesome, but there are many others out there that can be life savers, and people often neglect them.

The purpose of this article is to outline three different ways of getting a WordPress blog up and running. WordPress is a free blogging software, has many benefits and is supported by a large community of users and developers.

A “blog” is abbreviated from the term, “web log” which is a form of online diary or journal.

Since its advent a few short years ago, blogs have found numerous uses. Just to name a few, these include:

- teenagers putting their thoughts and ramblings online
- hobbyists giving updates about their interests and passion
- people staying updated with friends overseas
- professional bloggers updating specific niche products
- multinational corporations (MNC’s) such as Microsoft & General Motors using blogs as marketing tool

Like a web site, a blog has global reach. However, it’s far cheaper, quicker and definitely easier to maintain a blog than a traditional web site. A blog’s contents can be easily updated by submitting short or long articles (commonly known as blog posts) through an easy-to-use graphical interface. As a blog’s content is updated regularly, they naturally attract both human readers as well as search engines hungry for fresh content.

To set up a blog, we need some form of blogging software or platform. There are free software like Blogger and WordPress and there are paid platforms like Moveable Type and Typepad.

Blogger is owned by Google. It’s free and perhaps the easiest way to create a blog and your first post, literally within minutes! Howeer, its features are somewhat limited.

Thus, WordPress is a good alternative if you are looking for free blogging software. As it is an open source software, it is literally supported by a huge community of users and developers that assists both new and experienced bloggers. Not only feature rich – it supports categories, pages and trackbacks, just to name a few – it is constantly being updated through its core software as well as through software plugin’s which are bonus software components that extend the basic functionality of WordPress. For more information, visit WordPress.org

Here are 3 different ways to get a WordPress blog up and running:

1) Via WordPress.com

2) Via WordPress.org

3) Via CPANEL’s Fantastico

VIA WORDPRESS.COM

Like Blogger, you can get your WordPress blog and first post up and running within several minutes through WordPress.com! This site is meant for people to get a taste of WordPress without having to go through the somewhat involved procedure via WordPress.org (see the section below). If this is the first time you are getting your WordPress blog up and running, you should definitely give this a shot.

It’s as easy as going to WordPress.com, clicking the button that says “Get a WordPress Blog Now>>” or something like that and following the directions there. And then, you start posting!

In this case, your WordPress blog will be hosted on WordPress.com totally free. Therefore, you do not need your own web host. The only drawback is that there are limitations such as you can’t install your own themes or plugin’s.

VIA WORDPRESS.ORG

Instead of having your blog hosted on WordPress.com, you can install WordPress on your own web host. (Of course, in this case, you need to have your own web hosting account which preferably comes with a version of “CPANEL” – a an easy-to-use graphical control panel to manage your web host.)

Setting up of the WordPress blog comprises the 3 main steps below.

Step 1: Visit WordPress.org and download the WordPress installation files which are free (since it is open source software as mentioned before). As the files are in a compressed format, run your compression utility (such as Winzip) to expand the files to your hard disk..

Step 2: Run your File Transfer Protocol (FTP) program and connect to your web hosting account. Then upload the installation files to the domain (if you have multiple domains hosted) and folder that you want your WordPress blog installed.

Step 3: This step is going to be challenging for the non-techie type if they managed to survive Step 2! You log into the CPANEL of your web host and create and configure your MYSQL database. After this is done, you need to configure some files to complete your installation.

Next, launch your browser to access your blog and start making your 1st post by running the “wp-admin.php” script that has been installed.

As you can see, this is the “normal” but very tedious way of setting up of your WordPress blog.

However, the effort you expend is worthwhile as you can configure all aspects of WordPress like installing the theme you like and adding HTML codes to include Google AdSense on your blog to earn some profit, etc.

VIA FANTASTICO

Again, you install WordPress on your own web host but this time through FANTASTICO. In this case, not only would you need to have your own web hosting account, it MUST come with a version of “CPANEL” that includes “FANTASTICO” – an advanced script installer that automates a 1-click WordPress installation! (Actually a few clicks are needed.)

With FANTASTICO, all the 3 steps above are automated for you. All you need to do is to log into the CPANEL of your web host and then click the FANTASTICO icon, which is a smiley face.

In the next screen, click on “WordPress” and then click on “New Installation”. FANTASTICO will open a form and you fill in a few things like which domain (if you have multiple domains hosted) and which folder to install to. Once you have typed in the information and pushed a button, FANTASTICO will install WordPress in a few seconds!

How is that possible? That’s because the installation files are already at your web host. This saves you time as you don’t have to download them from WordPress.org, expand them and upload to your web host. Likewise, the databas is also automatically created and configured for you.

Next, launch your browser to access your blog and start making your 1st post by running the “wp-admin.php” script that has been installed.

As you can see, this is the “preferred” method of getting a WordPress blog up and running, also within minutes.and yet you can have all the benefits of configuring all aspects of WordPress, such as adding Affiliate Programs easily (including Amazon.com) and Google AdSense to make a handsome profit month after month!