Tag: WordPress

How Upload a PDF Files Into WordPress Blog

I love blogging in my free time and share what I know and have learned along the way. It is my way of writing about things I am passionate about and create some passive income earning from site.

If you have looked in to blogging, you may want to try it. There are free blog platform as well as self hosting word press account. I have done it many ways from site build it site, to free blogging platform and now self hosted wordpress account through bluehost hosting.

I like WordPress as a blogging platform, it is easy, powerful to use and does not require any html or coding background to get started. However, if you know a little blogging tricks along the way making your blogging job much easier.

While I am not Word Press or Blogging expert, I am sharing a bit of knowledge I have learned from my blogging so far.

How to add PDF file in to your Blog Post?

Let’s suppose you are blogging away and you want to create a free or paid ebook and you want to share it on your blog post. How does one go about doing it?

There are many ways to do it. For sake of simplicity, I want to focus on free ebook give away on your blog.

  1. You can use free or paid email marketing tools such as mailchimp or aweber to get readers to sign up for your blog or newsletter.
  2. You can use feedburner to get reader sign up and send ebook manually. But that can be time consuming.
  3. If it is ebook that people should pay for it, you can use other services to have it handled and we will look in to this later in detail.

I like the method of quick and easy download for any PDF files I have created, specially without any sign up worries. Let’s look in details, shall we?

Assumptions:

I have made a few basic assumptions here.

That you know bit about wordpress blog and have basic knowledge of using it. And you have PDF file already created on computer.

How to upload a file in to a WordPress Blog Post?

  1. Go to WordPress Dashboard and Click on new post.
  2. Go to edit mode, give title of post, that will make saving draft much easier.
  3. Just above the post, click on “Add Media” button.
  4. Use file section and select your PDF file from your computer hard drive and click on “Upload” button.
  5. Make sure PDF file is less than 8 Meg. If it is larger, you may want to upload it via your hosting account. It will depend on your hosting site on ways to upload it through it.
  6. Another window will pop up with shows a Title, Caption, Description, and Link URL.
  7. Fill in any of the fields the way you want, including Title and Link. If you will not Type URL link, it will create it for you.
  8. You can go and see URL through what is is uploaded in Media section. You can do that Via media section on your WordPress dashboard.
  9. Now, click file URL or copy paste URL in to your post. If you are using html, do following; <a href=URL Iink from media here>eBook_name </a>. If you are using Text editor, you can put a link through chain symbol and place your URL link there.
  10. You “file URL” and can insert in to post or manually type it in as written above.
  11. Now, you have PDF file posted, save on “save draft” before you publish it.
  12. After saving the file, click on “preview” to see how your file and post looks and click on PDF link to see if file is downloading fine and it is same you intended to put it on your blog.
  13. Once you have it set, write information regarding the PDF file, add appropriate image or videos and publish it.
  14. Now your readers can download PDF file for easy click and free.

Hope you enjoyed this small tutorial. You can take a look at the video for any clarification as something seeing things makes it lot easier to follow.

How to post a PDF file in to WordPress Blog

Must Have Free Plugins for Every Blog: Part 2

This article is a Part 2 in series, If you have not already read it, please check out Must have Plugins for Blog: Part 1 First. Now, read on.

6. Broken Link Checker

As a blogger or even static website that does not change, we often share web links. How to know if any of those links are broken much after we have written about it? We have usually two choice, go manually and check each link manually periodically or have some reader/clients tell you about it as they find it. However the best way is to install broken link checker plug-in, that does superb job for finding such links and show you location of it so either you can fix it, delete it or keep as it is (if it is still working).

Click here to download Broken Link Checker Plug-in

7. WP Cache Plug-in

Have you visited some cool website, only to find that website is taking too long to respond? The reasons are many, it could be our internet connection or web server itself. However often time it is problem with cache within our site itself. WP cache plug-in reduces the load time of your blog by caching your post and pages and speed up the process of viewing. It does this by giving static file to your visitor instead of making several calls and downloads to your database. Must have plug-in for your blog, even if you do not have lot of images or content, it sure helps the loading faster.

Click here for more info and download on WP Cache plug in

8. Add to any

If you use social media such as Twitter, Face Book, this plug in can help your reader bookmark your articles to various popular bookmark sites and social media.

This is one of the best and complete plug in that I found as it does three things in one. This plug-in can share your posts, bookmark your site to social medias and email your articles to other people. This plug in has all of top favorite sites such as Twitter, Face Book, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious and over 100 sites to pick and choose from. You can decide if you want to add the icons on bottom of posts or top or both as you can customize it based on what you want to use.

Click here to download Add to any Plug-in

9. One Click Plug-in updater

I have noticed one thing that themes and plug-ins gets updated frequently and one can get tired updating all plug-ins, one by one and manually. This One click plug in updater will come to rescue to make a quick update by pressing “update all” just once making recent upgrades and updates making your life much easier, leaving you to do better things.

Click here to download One Click Updater

10. LinkWithin

You will not find Linkwithin Plugin from Word Press plugin site, how it is very powerful plugins that shows related posts at the bottom of the articles saying, you might also like this , with images and little blurb about the post. You can show 3-5 similar posts and set up is very easy. If I can do it, any one can do it. It is free plug-in that is similar to Yet another related plug-in, but powerful and easy to install.

Click here to install Linkwithin

Summary:

There are still great many plug ins that available for free and fee based. These are the best ones that I have found for blog sites. One caution, do not add so many plugins, it can effect your blog site negatively.

Do you have other great plug-ins to share?

Click here to download the Membership Site Masterplan free report

Related Articles:

5 Tips To Create A Website
 Free Plugins : Part 1
 10 Traffic Tips that Every Blogger Should Know

Must Have Free Plugins for Every Blog : Part 1

We have been blogging for sometimes and learned what are best plugins for a blog with experience. I want to share some of the best and successful plug-ins that are must for any blog out there, regardless of what subject your blog migh be in. Here are some of the best plug-ins that we have found, with link to how to get it. Best part? They are all free.

1. Akismet

If you have comments enabled on your blog, Akismet can be a life saver, catching spams before it reaches you. So far 99.99% of time Akismet has been right for possible spams on our blogs. You can set up an option to delete all month old spam comments. Before you go out buy any spam catcher, try Akismet out, you will be happy with it.

Click here for free download Akismet Plug-in

2. All in one SEO

As a blogger we all know the importance of SEO and if you type SEO, you will find many good plug-ins for it. After trying out a few, I have settled on All in one SEO pack as it is one of the best. You may need some basic knowledge of keywords and SEO to set it up directly such as no follow, do follow, title page attributes and meta title and meta descriptions. Since many of us are not blog designer or know coding, having this powerful plug-ins does a great job for saving us time from learning coding and enhance our blog’s standing in front of search engine eyes.

Click here to download All in one SEO Pack

3. CommentLuv

If you have not used the CommentLuv plug-ins, you should, it shows your blog’s latest post title as you leave a comment on your own or other people’s blogs. Majority of commenter are also bloggers too. It has two benefits, one it encourages and appreciates other bloggers for leaving a comment. It actually helps others to find your blogs as you write thoughtful comments with catchy title showing up on CommentLuv.

Click here for download CommentLuv Plug-in

4. Google Analytic for WordPress

I just learned recently about the plug-in and it has saved lot of my time. To see your traffic analysis, I had to log in Google analytic after midnight to see my site’s traffic pattern and sources where traffic came from. Now it is lot easier as all I have to see the basic analytic information via my blog’s dashboard without special login process. All if you is to set up and configure your Google information and analytic ID once and you are set. You will be able to track your most visited articles, keywords and sources and where visitors are coming from information.

Click here to download WP Google Analytic

5. Google XML Sitemap

This plug in is more for search engine’s robots crawling but essential for search engine finding your site. Google XML site maps plug-in creates new site map automatically every time you write a new post and submits to all major search engine on your behalf every time. Just set it up and forget it. You will not feel the effect right away but it is very powerful for search engine’s eyes. I wish I had known about it sooner.

Click here to download Google XML sitemaps

Read more about Must have Plugins at Part 2: Must have Plugins

Related Articles:

5 Tips To Create A Website
Part 2: Must have Plugins
10 Traffic Tips that Every Blogger Should Know

Click here to download the Membership Site Masterplan free report

Reporter vs Expert – Why Most Bloggers Are Stuck Reporting

There are basically two types of bloggers in the world – reporters and experts – and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc� experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something – experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts – there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a �guru� (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry – the Internet marketing industry – not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche – Internet marketing – and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things – email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it – making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) – your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not there’s. Frame things using your opinion – your stories – and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of�well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from �scratch�, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

10 Blog Traffic Tips that Every Blogger Should Know

In every bloggers life comes a special day – the day they first launch a new blog. Now unless you went out and purchased someone else’s blog chances are your blog launched with only one very loyal reader – you. Maybe a few days later you received a few hits when you told your sister, father, girlfriend and best friend about your new blog but that’s about as far you went when it comes to finding readers.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don’t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily remember-able domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that’s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commenter and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger’s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it’s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it’s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it’s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it’s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it’s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

Related Articles

5 tips for creating a website
Blog Reporter Vs. Expert: Why Most Blogger are Stuck Reporting
How to Find out What your Blog Readers Want