The BIG Wordpress Thread

THE BIG WORDPRESS THREAD​

No matter whether you're a newbie or an expert Wordpress user, I'm sure that you'll find many gems in this thread, especially in the first post.

It's like an encyclopedia for WP users. Btw there are no affiliate links in this list.

This is what you can read about in this thread:
â–ºBasics
â–ºHosting
â–ºWordpress Tips & Tricks
â–ºPlugins
â–ºThemes & Design
â–ºMaking Money With a Wordpress blog


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â–ºBasics

My advice: Always use your own domain name, especially if you put a lot of work in your blog. Maybe you don't see now why you need your own domain name, but when you want to promote your blog/build links to it or you want to sell it, than you're going to regret that you didn't buy a unique domain name. Btw YourBlogRules.com sounds much better than yourblogrules.wordpress.com.

Anyway, here are some cool resources for newbies:
-A video about installing Wordpress: http://courtneytuttle.com/2008/07/18/finalizing-hosting-and-installing-wordpress/
-Official Wordpress Basics guide: http://codex.wordpress.org/Getting_Started_with_WordPress
-Wordpress SEO ebook (Free)



â–ºHosting

Hosting is also crucial, let me copy a part of one of my earlier blog posts about this: If you are a newbie, or you don’t want to spend more than 10 seconds on installing Wordpress on your web host, than you need a “Wordpress friendly” hosting package. What does it mean? You need a web host that has Fantastico installed on it’s servers. What is Fantastico? It’s an online application installer, and with the help of this script library it takes only 10 seconds to install Wordpress on your web host. Fantastico is fantastic, and it’s useful for everybody -not just for bloggers-, that’s why I created a list of the biggest hosting companies that use Fantastico on their servers. (You can read the whole post about Wordpress hosting, but it's filled with affiliate links, so be careful where you click.) Btw at the beginning of your blogging career a shared hosting account will be enough for your blog, unless you plan to write posts that will be featured on Digg/Stumbleupon.

The keyword is Fantastico, you'll need a webhost which has Fantastico installed on it's servers. A couple of web hosting companies that support Fantastico (zero affiliate links):
-Hostgator - You can try their Wordpress hosting for 1 month for only 1 cent, just Google it and you'll find tons of affiliates who promote this offer. Personally I think it's one of the best Wordpress hosts, so it's a good idea to try their hosting service for one month.
-Hostican - Their shared hosting services are great, but stay away from their VPS services.
-Lunarpages - Another big company that supports Fantastico.
-MediaTemple - #1 hosting company, awesome service, but it's not really cheap. As far as I know they don't use Fantastico, but they have another software on their servers that offer 1-click install for Wordpress.
-BlueHost & DreamHost - I don't know too much about the quality of their hosting services, but I know for sure that you can install Wordpress on their servers with 1 click.



â–ºWordpress Tips & Tricks

There are soooooo many posts out there about Wordpress Tips, Tricks and Hacks, so I rather collected some articles that contain links to tons of WP related tricks & hacks.

How-To Guides
-How to make your blog Digg proof
-How to create a CMS of your blog
-How to speed up your Wordpress blog
-How to create a mobile version of your blog (1, 2)
-How to add a stripe ad to your blog (you know it's the yellow stripe that you can see on John Chow's blog at the top)
-How to hack together a user contributed link feed with WP comments
-How to embed an ad into a post
-How to make a featured post box
-How to create a Peel away effect on your blog (I think it's lame but many people like it)
-How to give each Wordpress post a thumbnail

Article compilations
- 40+ Most Wanted Wordpress Tricks and Hacks
- Wordpress Hacks - Theme, CSS, Comment, Post, Page, Categories hacks, pretty cool list
- 63 essential Wordpress Hacks



â–ºPlugins

Plugins add more features to your WP blog.

My personal favourites:

1. All in One SEO Pack
It’s the alpha and omega of SEO plugins for Wordpress, it should be the first one you upload to your plugins directory. This is how I set up the All in One SEO Pack.

2. Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps plugin creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-
Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It’s also a must have plugin. (Btw the basic setup of this plugin is ok, you don’t have to change anything.)

3. OnlyWire Autosubmit
If you don’t know what OnlyWire is, than go to their website and check it out. Basically you can submit your blogposts to multiple social bookmarking sites with the help of Onlywire. Although it’s great for newbie’s, you should use something more professional (eg: Bookmarking Demon – I’ll talk about it later) if you want to build many niche blogs.

4. Wordpress Related Posts
WordPress Related Posts Plugin will generate a list of related posts via
WordPress tags, and and this list appear usually at the end of your post.

5. WordPress Database Backup
If you want to build a blog that you’ll update multiple times every week, than it’s a great little tool that can save and send you the database of your blog to your email address. Safety is the first...

6. WP Affiliate
If you want to sell something as an affiliate via CJ.com’s system, than you
should use this plugin.

7. Wordpress Automatic upgrade
Wordpress Automatic Upgrade is a plugin that automatically upgrades your
Wordpress version to the latest files provided by wordpress.org. It can also
upgrade your plugins. You don’t have to download zip file from the site of the plugin’s author, you don’t have to unzip and upload files to your web host etc... all you have to do is click on the “upgrade now” button.

8. Sociable
Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

9. OIOpublisher
A great plugin that helps you to sell reviews, ads, digital downloads and services on your blog.

10. Top Commentators plugin
It shows a list of top commentators on the sidebar of your blog.

11. WP Super Cache
It makes your blog faster.

12. Similar Posts
Similar Posts plugin displays related posts on your blog.

13. Wordpress E-commerce
A fantastic shopping cart application to sell products and services on your blog.

14. Adsense Manager
Adsense Manager helps in managing Adsense, Adbrite ads on your blog. It's really useful, especially for niche bloggers.

Compilations of plugins:
-Top Wordpress Plugins for the Smart Blogger at the LifeHacker
-Wordpress Plugin list and setup at Blogger Unleashed
-30 essential and advanced Wordpress plugins at SpeckyBoy
-Wordpress Plugins & Tutorials: Your Pick at Smashing Magazine
-50 Best WordPress Plugins for Power Blogging at Quick Online Tips
-Best WordPress Plugins at HackWordpress (my personal favourite)



â–ºThemes & Design

Simple themes for niche blogs
-18 Adsense ready adsense ready themes: These are great for niche blogs as those type of blogs don't need flashy designs.
-SEO Wordpress Themes: Most of them are ugly, but these ugly themes will help you to make more money, than nice WP themes.

Premium Themes
If you want a theme that is better than a free Wordpress theme, but you can't afford a custom design, than buying the license of a premium theme is your only choice.
-Revolution Theme - Multiple theme styles, great support, buy a theme from them if you want to have a "newspaper" styled blog.
-WooThemes - They offer newspaper/portfolio/company homepage styled themes, and these themes are pretty cheap considering their quality.
-One Theme - It makes a feature rich CMS out of a simple Wordpress blog. This theme is brilliant.
-Theme Spinner - Their themes are similar to the Revolution themes, but these are cheaper.
-WordpressThemeMarket -They have some pretty cool themes.
-iThemes - Some of their themes are created for small companies and ecommerce sites.

Movie Themes
-Press75 - I saw many movie/video related Wordpress themes, but their quality was far from the quality of the Press75 themes. Unfortunately these are not free.

News Themes
Although some of the news themes are not free (like the Revolution Themes), there are many great, free newspaper styled themes.
-14 free, newspaper styled themes at HackWordpress


Themes for blogs in the "make money" niche
-WP Remix - It's a nice, feature rich, elegant theme and of course it's free.
-WP Polaroid - An elegant, quality theme by Adii.
-4 free themes by the WordpresThemeDesigner.com
-WP Vision - Beautiful blue design.
-DailyDiary - My personal favourite.



Interesting themes

Turn your Wordpress blog into an online shop with the...
-Market Theme - Market is the revolutionary theme which can turn any plain old Wordpress install into a fully functional store front.

Turn your Wordpress blog into a classified ad site with the...- ClassiPress theme - "ClassiPress is the first and only wordpress theme dedicated to classifieds websites. It comes with a settings page from where you can change and edit all theme settings and features.It is simple, clean so your visitors will never need to know what wordpress is."

Turn your Wordpress blog into a job searching portal with the...
- JobPress theme - "JobPress is a wordpress theme that turns your website into a perfect working Job Board Software."



â–ºMake Money With a Wordpress blog

Selling links

Google doesn't like it when you sell links on your pages, so you have to "mask" the links you sell. There are a couple of companies out there that can help you in selling links such as: TNX, Text-Link-Ads etc. I wrote a blog post about them a half a year ago, it's much easier for me to copy that post here:

• TNX.net - TNX is a great site for buying links. It’s easy to use, and if you’ve $20-$30 that you can spend on advertising, you should definitely try it. For $25/month you can buy 2200+ PR 0 links, or 44 PR 1 links, or 22 PR 2 links, or 11 PR 3 links. You can also buy some mix the PR of the links you buy, so for your $25/month you get some PR 0, some PR 1 and/or some PR2+ links.
• Text-Link-Ads - Although Google slapped them, they’re still a great company, and it’s a good idea to buy links through them.
• Linkworth - Linkworth is similar to Text-Link-Ads, it’s not that easy to set up everything at them, but you can buy a lot of links from their publishers.
• Text Link Brokers - They sell text links with PR 4 - PR 9, I don’t know too much about their service because I haven’t used it.

When you sell links on your site, be careful, never sell links on your flagship blog (eg: the blog that makes the most money), sell links on smaller blogs, on blogs that you don't care about too much.

Reviews
There are companies that pay for 200-500 words long articles about their product/services/new site etc. The only thing that you have to do is join some of these networks and if you have a PR 2 - PR 6 blog, than you can make a handful amount of money by writing paid reviews. A couple of companies:

1. PayPerPost
2. SponsoredReviews
3. ReviewMe
4. Blogitive
5. Blogvertise
6. Smorty
7. Pay2UBlog
8. Paid2Review
9. LoudLaunch
10. BloggerWave
11. BloggingAds
12. CreamAid
13. V7N Contextual
14. LinkWorth
15. BlogtoProfit
16. InBlogAds
17. LinkyLoveArmy
18. Dewitts Media

The list of these companies was collected by Alvin Phang at GatherSuccess.com, you can read the original post by clicking here.


Selling Digital Products & Services

What kind of digital products or services can you sell? First of all you can sell ebooks (no matter whether you wrote them or you have PLR/MRR ebooks), you can sell lists of eg: DoFollow blogs, you can offer directory submission, article writing designing services etc. If you want to sell ebooks, than the best choice is: E-Junkie. Basically the customer pays via Paypal, and E-Junkie's system automatically delivers the product by sending an email and a download link to the buyer. For this service you have to pay a measly $5/month -if you sell less than 50 types of different products-. It's a pretty sweet deal if you consider that they store the product files, they store customer data, and you can set many details, like how many times can the customer download the product, how long is the download link active etc.

That's all for now, I'll add more info about these things to this thread later.

Please, if you have any suggestions regarding this thread, feel free to comment. If you wish, feel free to add rep, although it's not needed, I didn't create this to increase my reputation or to make money.

 

Awesome post, very useful to have all of this info in one thread, thanks.

 

Here is a list of some more top wordpress plugins.

Nice thread.

 

Great post, and some awesome tips, thanks
Is there any plugin or script that i will post to one blog and it will autoamticly post other 25 wordpress blogs of mine?

 

Great thread.. Keep it up fellow blogger.. I also made a thread dedicated to some unusally good wordpress plugins only. You know beside the usual all in one and sitemap, cache etc. I'm hopeful that it will help to keep things more useful and knowledge worthy. Here is the link:

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=917057

Once again, great thread!

 

Thank you guys, I'm thinking of adding some information about money making opportunities that are related to Wordpress. If you have any other idea, or you want something to see in this thread/in the first post, just post here.

 

Gott add my 'thanks' for this one

 

Feel free to add reps Steupz, or if you have any suggestions that PM me or post here.

 

A bloody marvellous thread with great effort and time put in.

 

awesome post if i do say so myself

 

Thank you very much guys. I worked on it about 5 hours.

 

Thats a damn cool post dude!
Thats sure gunna come in useful for people asking "Which plugins to use" or other common questions.

5 hours? Damn!!!! Something coming your way just for been so hardcore!

 

Great post Jeremia, I'll request mods to make it sticky.

 

And how many ppl here use wordpress as seo? Is there any directory plugin of wordpress? For eg embedding a directory in wordpress page.....

 

cucumber: By directory you mean link directory?

Wohooo it's my 600th post.

 

Awesome...really a very nice tutorial..thanks rep added...

 

One question, if someone can clear out - What's the Difference between Wordpress.org and Wordpress.MU?

 

Wordpress.org is the download place for the basic Wordpress blog software, while Wordpress MU (http://mu.wordpress.org/) is a multi-user version of Wordpress, it is used on sites like Wordpress.com where anybody can register a blog for himself/herself, and than he/she'll have a subdomain on Wordpress.com, so for eg you'd like to have a Wordpress blog, but you don't have a web hosting account, and a domain name so you go to Wordpress.com and you register an account. After that your blog will be at xavier3d.wordpress.com.

 

Wordpress MU is script which can be used to create multiple blogs on a single domain. Each blog can be managed by different users (just like blogs at wordpress.com).

 

YIAM: I'd really appreciate a request to the mods to make this thread sticky. Btw I wanted to add more information into the first post, but appearently there is a 20 000 character limit/post, so I couldn't add more info to it.