Top blogs have a large number feed subscribers and with services like feedburner, one can optimize as well as monetize a blog feed.

Before getting into all that, one needs to visualize how your blog feed appears on popular readers like Google Reader, Feed daemon, etc.

Quick steps to setup your blog feeds;

1. Go to Word Press Admin panel -> Settings –> Reading. Select Full text for feeds.

   

2. Log on to feedburner and create an account. Add and verify your blog.
3. Head over to Your Feed burner feed management section, click on your feed and select Edit feed details. For Original Feed URL put http://www.yourblog.com/feed

 

4. Go to Optimize -> Summary burner and make sure that Summary burner isn’t active.

   

5. Use  Flagrant disregard Feedburner Plugin to allow automatic detection of your feedburner feed when a visitors subscribes to your blog’s feed.

Now that everything is done head over to Google Reader, or any Feed reader and check out your feed. It should display the full feed!

When you’re done, you’ll have better looking feeds that are easier to read and look far more professional.

Further, you may explore feedburner’s possibilities which include features like monetizing your feeds, analyzing your feed readers, etc.

With feedburner, there is always more that you can do. Burn your feed today, if you haven’t already. Happy feed burning!

Here’s what David Cavanagh has to say about our offer:

You have full control over all videos. Sell them and keep 100% of profits. Package them into membership sites, DVDs or live coaching material. We provide full promotional materials, sales pages, website set-up and even assistance in uploading your videos.

More info: PLR WP Videos

So how about spreading this tweet that a new WordPress theme called LiveTwit is up for grabs? This is made simple by the theme itself which allows streaming live news of a topic or streaming tweets from a particular twitter user. All we are required to do is configure the theme to do its bit.

Layout

• LiveTwit is a typical two column layout theme with the left column making up the descriptive part of the website, i.e.; it contains the logo and a message to convey the highlight of the site. Also we would find the FriendMeUp box where the user may provide links to some external social media profiles.
• The right column is where all the streamed tweets are posted. This is continuously updated ensuring the reader follows the tweets as and when they are posted.
• The theme also has 5 vibrant color schemes to choose from depending upon the mood of the topic posted on the site.

Control Panel

Now to the all important question- how do we configure the theme to spread the word? This is very simple, just manipulate some 100 lines of code and we are all set to go. Already thinking of disowning this theme?

Well manipulating 100 lines of code is definitely not the way to go, for this very reason this theme offers a very simple built-in theme control panel which helps the user to setup and change any aspect of the theme. A few tweaks in the color scheme, search criterion – be it a particular topic or a particular twitter user, logo URL and the social media links and the site is up and running with all the tweets related to the search criterion being displayed.

This theme is definitely the easiest way to create a quick site to give a heads-up on some hot ongoing topics, events or even businesses.

View the demo of this theme and ofcourse it is free, so go ahead and download it.

Tweet!

I’ve just put the finishing touches on my new Private Label WordPress video tutorials site, and it’s going to make a whole lot of Internet marketers pretty happy. Of course, there are a few people who are going to have a hard time now.

That’s because my new site removes a HUGE obstacle for anyone out there trying to get into the WordPress game by creating a video tutorials site.

Although WordPress was relatively “unknown” to the Internet marketing circle when I first made money teaching people how to use it, right now most marketers are using WordPress. However, there’s still a huge number of beginners or “newbies” entering the market. The Google trends data below shows that this trend is only going to increase in the near future.

There’s a lot of money in WordPress, and most of revolves around “How to” questions. Not everyone who wants to use WordPress is ready to browse through forums and blogs to find out how to get started, or to do more advanced stuff. That’s where step-by-step “screen cam” video tutorials provide tremendous value.

With PLRWPVideos.com, you’ll get an edge over other marketers since:

1. I create all the videos myself, from my 4 years experience with WordPress. No rehashed materials or reused PLR here.
2. All the videos you get were actually used by me in some of my best-selling products like WordPress AdSense System and Super Affiliate Blogger. That means I didn’t create them for the sole purpose of selling them to you – which is what most PLR sellers really do! They can’t make any money themselves with the PLR crap they are peddling.
3. All videos are updated constantly to catch up with all the changes and new versions introduced by WordPress. Other marketers would probably be selling outdated videos showing WordPress version 2.3.
4. You can request your own videos, and I will add them based on popular demand, This is my way of making sure I give you exactly what you need, and not what I think you need.
5. Membership is limited, which means that only a small group of people can have access to the videos. Currently the site is in BETA and I’m accepting about a small group of members only. When memberships are sold out, you can only get in if there are dropouts or if I reopen new slots.

Membership is pretty flexible, and you pay for what type of source files you want. There are pros and cons of each membership level, which I will explain here:

• Silver Member (Beginners) – Basically you get only the Flash files, and you customers can watch the videos online. The good news is that this membership is the cheapest, and most suitable for tons of new Internet marketers. It’s also great as supporting tutorials for your other products. However, you will not be able to cut, edit and mix the videos themselves.
• Gold Member (Intermediate) – This is the membership that gives you the most value for money. You get videos in Flash, AVI and other formats. If you are an intermediate level marketer, you would definitely want to offer you customers more download options as not all of them want to watch online videos. It also give you more flexibility as you can package the videos into physical DVDs if you want and sell them that way. Plus, you can also upload them to video hosting websites (provided they require a password) and distribute it that way. You can use them “out of the box” or you can edit the videos themselves, including adding watermarks, logos and much more.
• Platinum Members (Advanced) – The ultimate level of video marketing you could want, as you get the source Camtasia Studio files. With the source files you can pretty much do ANYTHING – translate the videos into a different language by adding your own voice over, add subtitles, merge or split videos, add background music, etc. Then, you can also produce these videos into any size, quality and file format you want.

So go ahead and get your PLR WordPress Videos membership today, and you’ll see why I managed to make a full-time living since 2005 just teaching others how to use and master this unique blogging platform.

If you do not have Adobe Photoshop and do not want to spend for one, I highly recommend that you get GIMP, which works like Photoshop and is free.

There are plenty of places where you can find tutorials online on how to use Photoshop, but my personal favourite is <a href=”http://pixel2life.com”>Pixel2Life</a>. You can find a tutorial of almost anything you want there, including how to create different types of banners step-by-step from scratch.

Many of the tutorials will ask that you use different types of brushes to create effects, but not all of them will tell you where to get them. One of the best resources for brushes is DeviantArt. It’s also a great place to find texture and stock images.

A simple banner with a light gradient background works for virtually any type of blog and looks clean and professional. All you really need is one single image, and you can find plenty of royalty free images at sites such as iStockphoto.

Always opt for an image with either no background or a white background, which you can easily clean up to use on your banner. Just select your “Magic Wand” tool, click on the white background and hit delete. Unless you have the patience to clean up the image manually, never go for photo images.

Using the right fonts also affects how your banner will turn out. Avoid using the default set of fonts and go for something that has a different style. You can search and download new fonts for free from sites such as 1001FreeFonts.com and dafont.com.

Here’s an example of a simple banner image that I made in less than 5 minutes after finding a good image to use:

You can download the psd file for that banner here: Download header psd file

So, what does the final result of the theme looks like?

Here’s a screenshot:

You can download this theme directly from here and edit it any way you like: Download Free Action Theme

If you want to see a live blog running this theme, head on over to my upcoming Diablo 3 blog. I did a bit more editing to basic design of what we’ve created here and the result is as you can see it.

Watch the video below where I show you how to do it, by simply dragging and dropping the modules to where you want them to be.

In the previous videos I have shown how to install plugins automatically and also how to upgrade plugins automatically. Now lets look at how to get rid of them

Plugins are now sorted by “Active”, “Most Recently Used” and “Inactive”. Just select the plugins you want to eliminate and choose “Delete” from the “Bulk Actions” tab in your plugins page.

Then you’ll be asked to confirm if you really want to delete the plugin. Of course the answer is Yes or why would you be doing this in the first place?

Then you’ll be asked for your FTP url, user name and password. Unless you’re using some ancient plugin that stopped working ages ago, you should be able to delete your plugins easily.

Watch this YouTube video to see how it’s done:

If you have the latest version of WordPress installed, you should be able to upgrade your plugins automatically via the plugins page. However I find most people aren’t using it yet.

To use this all you need to do is to click on “Upgrade Automatically” and follow the instructions.

You’’ll be asked for your FTP address, user name and password. Once you enter those and click on “Upgrade” your WordPress software will automatically deactivate the older version, download and extract the new version, and re-activate it.

How’s that for a time saver?

However, it may not work for all plugins, especially older ones which were not downloaded from the official WordPress plugins site. The good news is that even if it does fail, it probably won’t mess up your blog.

Watch the YouTube video for a tutorial:

This cool feature was in ancient time done by a plugin called “The Installer” but like most plugins, it eventually got forgotten amidst the never ending WordPress version updates. Now not only is it built-in by default, but you can also directly search the WordPress plugins repository and find your favorite plugins.

Or you can also select a plugin in ZIP format on your PC and use that.

The process is darn easy too, I’ll show you how to do it in this video:

Unfortunately sometimes due to heavy traffic or database connection problems, this may not work, But try again later and the auto-install feature will be back in action.

This new feature will definitely help us plugin-obsessed bloggers!

Blogs have limited online real estate, and if you link to all your favorite bloggers without getting anything in return, that’s not all too fair isn’t it? Wouldn’t it be better to link to other bloggers who would return the favor, getting you valuable backlinks and improving your SEO score?

For some of my niche blogs, I’ve been looking for a way to create some 2-way / 3-way links exchanges with related blogs. I’ve searched high and low for a solution, and ended up using the LinkEx software along with a WordPress widget that was developed specifically for it. The ironic part is that I finally found the solution by going through massive amounts of Google results and ending up at a adult webmaster forum.

Using LinkEx to Manage Your Link Exchange

Although there are tons of link exchange software all called “LinkEx” or some variation of the name, the one I am referring to is at www.Linkex.dk – which should be the original website for the software. It’s free to use, no catch. Just download the entire thing and upload it to your web server. It contains just one php file and requires no MySQL database, so all the better!

The initial set-up page is very simple too, all you need to do is select your admin username, password, email, web URL and website title. Make sure you set the file permissions to “766” or “755” depending on your type of blog hosting.

Next what you want to do is click on “Categories” and change the name of the default to whatever you want. By doing this you can specify the limit of links, or break up links into different categories and display them on different parts of your blog.

Then you need to edit the way links are displayed. If you want link to be displayed in your current BlogRoll / sidebar area, you need to make sure they are “list items”, which means you have to add the <li> tags before and after like this:

If you want to display only links and not descriptions, you can edit be removing the {$DESCRIPTION} part of the code.

Activate 2-Way / 3-Way Link Exchange?

The good part about using LinkEx is that you can do more than just a simple link exchange. Since you can specify alternate backlinks you can literally have a 3-way / X-way link exchange and also do some deep linking.

Click on “Settings” and edit your link requirements. Make sure you know which keywords to use or you’re just wasting time.

I highly recommend that you use more than one url. The easy way is to specify your category / tag URLs as alternates.

Keep Your Link Exchange Tightly Controlled

From my experience, if you fail to set strict rules people will always manipulate the system. So go to “Settings” and click on “Link Verification Settings”. Make your rules:

I highlighted the changes I usually make to ensure my links do not end up on some spammy sites or link farms, but you should edit it based on your own preferences.

It’s important to set character limits for links to keep links looking short and real. When setting “Max Outbound Links” take into consideration that most blogs would have at least 20 outbound links on the main page. If you set this too low almost every other blog would be disqualified.

You can set the maximum amount of links you want to accept, and when that limit is reached your submission form will be automatically closed.

Displaying The Links On Your WordPress Blog

If you click on “Categories” and “edit”, at the bottom of the page you should see the exact PHP code you need to include into your template / theme files:

If you generated multiple categories, you can put different codes into different parts of your theme.

However, if you want to display links on your sidebar using WordPress widgets, you need to download and use the LinkEx Widget. This is specifically built for the LinkEx software. Just download it here and upload / activate it. Then in your Widgets area you can control this easily and the default setting should work unless you installed LinkEx in another folder.

One thing I didn’t quite like is that fact that the widget inserts a backlink automatically to their site. This is ok with me, except that the site is some dodgy-looking porn / skimpy girls website. So I’m sorry I had to remove it but I replaced it with a link back to the plugins page to be fair.

(How did that porn link get through WordPress admin anyway?)

I highly recommend you do this too unless you want to tarnish your image. If you don’t know how to do it you can simple download the modified version here (at the end of this post).

Now any links that you process with the LinkEx software should automatically appear in your sidebar widget.

Should You Start a Link Exchange Project?

I know not many people are keen on the idea of exchanging links right now, but before you shout “Google will ban you” to me, let me explain. Link exchange is good if you:

1. Only exchange links with quality sites – PR or PageRank can be a good indicator but really you need to look at the whole blog
2. Do not link up all your sites together (please)
3. Do not depend 100% on link exchange – explore other ways of getting 1-way links or 3-way links and maybe even article marketing
4. Don’t stuff your link title with keywords – make it short and more natural
5. Allow some non-reciprocal links – Put in some no-reciprocal links to other sites as well just like a normal blogroll

On Profit Blogger and my Work at Home blog, I use it only to hook up with “partner” sites that I have personally identified and that have a good overall ranking in Google. If your blog has a PR of 3 and above, and you consider it as fairly “authoritative” blog in the online marketing / web development / blogging / you can exchange links with my sites:

• http://www.profitblogger.com/linkex/
  (blogging, internet marketing, web stuff)
• http://www.gobalakrishnan.com/linkex/
  (work at home, internet marketing, web stuff)
• http://www.internetmillionaires.com.my/linkex/
  (malaysia-themed sites only)

I for one has lost faith in the primitive act of goodwill-based blogrolls. If you still want to do it the old way you can find blogroll partners in the forum, but you have to admit this solution sounds better.

This is the best solution I can come up with and it seems to work, so enjoy!

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