Surf the Mind

Archive for the ‘Online Publishing’ Category

Just a quick note to say that The Wealthy Blogger has released his Google Subscribed Links Toolkit for WordPress.

It is absolutely awesome. The plugin is newly coded, designed for 2.5.x WordPress blogs, but is backwards compatible so if you’re still running a 2.3.x blog it will still work like a dream.

Aside from the plugin, the kit contains complete instructions from install to setup of your feed on Google. It simplifies a complex process quite well, and warns you when things might take a while to happen so you don’t panic and think you’ve done something wrong.

It also includes 10 nice 125×125 pixel banners that you can use to promote your subscribed links on your blog. That’s handy because the size of the banner Google offers is in a size that is probably a little awkward in many blog designs. 125×125 is quickly becoming the size of choice, especially for a lot of probloggers.

The toolkit also includes an AWESOME report offering five brilliant ways to get people running to subscribe to your Google links. These are five REALLY good ideas.

The price is cheaper than dirt, so if you’ve got a WordPress blog, it’s something you should be jumping at. I’m sure you’ll find it worthwhile.

Click here to check out the sales page.

I have been checking out some of the preseason videos for The 30 Day Challenge, and today was a particularly intriguing one. Check out this video about Google Subscribed Links.

Coincidentally, I have been asked to test out a product that could really help with this. I hope I’ll have permission to let you know about it in the next day or two.

In the meantime, why not subscribe to the Surf the Mind Subscribed Links feature!

Once you’ve subscribed, check out how it works by clicking this link. Or how about this one. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an image-highlighted link for every major product launch? Pretty exciting stuff.

Today via, MindValleyLabs, I learned about Quantcast.com.

Quantcast is a new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence. The free service empowers publishers to demonstrate the unique value of their audiences by tagging their websites, videos, widgets and games for direct measurement.

I plugged in the URL of my flagship site and was amazed at all the information about my audience that I could immediately glean from Quantcast’s reports.

I was actually shocked at how young my visitors are, and now that I know, I feel I can target ads and products toward them much more effectively.

I also saw that I have a high percentage of ‘drive by’ traffic compared to loyal visitors. Adding a blog or forum will, hopefully, alter that ratio.

Give it a try and see how your perceptions of your audience differs from Quantcast‘s profile of your site. You might be surprised too.

Today is a holiday. To be specific, it’s the very first Family Day Ontario has ever had. Back in Alberta, we had family day holidays for years, but this is a first for Ontario.

Anyway, being a stay-at-home, homeschooling family, we get enough family time. If we tried to add any more, we’d get sick of eachother.

So I’m spending part of Family Day working on my site.

While I haven’t worked out all the complexities in my theme design, I did easily set up everything else. Using plugins for contact forms, a forum, and a way to take charge of my menus was a breeze.  I’m using pages for the actual site and posts for the back-end blog, and the whole thing seems to be coming together sooo much more smoothly than I thought it would.

I had initially decided to use XSitePro for my new site but after beginning to read “How to Build An Affiliate Website with WordPress” I’m reconsidering that decision. After all, there are a lot of advantages to using WordPress for any site – - from RSS to built in commenting abilities, to the myriad of plug-ins that could make life and expansion much easier. Templating WordPress, though, is harder for me than making a template for XSitePro, and it’s harder for me to wrap my head around the changes that’ll need to be made to a default WordPress theme to make it work for what I’ve got planned.

Decisions, decisions….

So, I’m going to take tonight to study the WP Affiliate book, along with the free “WordPress SEO for Beginners” from Blog Oh Blog and Teli Adlam’s free “Beginner’s Guide to Using and Building Traffic with Feedburner” report.

If I feel confident and enthusiastic enough to proceed with WordPress tomorrow, I’ll set up a blog and see where it leads. Otherwise, I’ll go back to my XSitePro plan and save WordPress for a future project.

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