WPSumo Promo Code – August 2011 Edition

It’s that time of the month again, namely the time when we’re adding the promo code for WPSumo. If you don’t know what WPSumo is, well, then it’s time to find out that WPSumo is a great WordPress framework, with a ridiculously high amount of features. I’m a partner on this project, so it’s not a surprise that I run my own blog on this framework.

So, without further ado, let’s see the code:

wpsumobest

This promo code will give you an instant 30$ off of the Developer License. The one that lets you use WPSumo on unlimited domains, that is. In order to use it, you just have to click on this link:

WPSumo Developer License

and then scroll down to the field where it says “enter coupon code” (obviously). Enter the promo code and then click “Proceed To Checkoout”. You’ll be taken to PayPal where you can finish the transaction. The total amount should be 99 USD.

Why You Should Do This?

In last month’s promotion (which wind up pretty well too) I gave this URL: 12 Reasons To Switch To WPSumo, for those of you unaware about the possibilities of the product. I also promised that I will give a new reason each and every month. So, here’s the 13th reason to switch to WPSumo: “All the cool kids are using it”. I’m serious

How To Create A Landing Page In Less Than 5 Minutes

But I know that being cool has no meaning whatsoever if it’s not doubled by some serious knowledge, especially in our business. Internet, that is. So, I’m giving you access to another screencase, in which I’m creating a landing page in less than 5 minutes, using WPSumo.

Just remember, the promo code is

wpsumobest

It will shave an instant 30$ from your purchase, thus leaving the Developer License at only $99. All you have to do is to click the link below:

WPSumo Developer License

Enjoy

WPSumo Promo Code – July 2011 Edition

I know many of you were waiting for the usual Mariner Promo Code fiesta here, but alas, all good things come to an end. The Mariner promotion, allegedly one of the longest promotions on the internet, with more than 2 and a half years running, is currently on hold.

So, long live our newest promotion, the one related to the ultimate WordPress framework, WPSumo. As you may already know, I am a partner in this project. That means that I know pretty much everything about it. So, without further ado, let’s see the code:

wpsumorocks

This promo code will give you an instant 30$ off of the Developer License. The one that lets you use WPSumo on unlimited domains, that is. In order to use it, you just have to click on this link:

WPSumo Developer License

and then scroll down to the field where it says “enter coupon code” (obviously). Enter the promo code and then click “Proceed To Checkoout”. You’ll be taken to PayPal where you can finish the transaction. The total amount should be 99 USD.

Why You Should Do This?

So, let’s pretend you’ve never been on my blog before and just stumbled upon this post by doing a search for “premium wordpress frameworks” (which is very likely to happen, by the way). What can you actually do with this WPSumo? Well, you can do a lot. I strongly advise you to have a look at this article

12 Reasons To Switch To WPSumo

and then come back here. Because, from now on, I will publish an extra reason in each monthly promotion about WPSumo we’re going to have.

How To Create A Work With Me Page

Have you noticed my latest Work With Me page? Kinda neat, isn’t it? I’m not talking about the content here, but about the look and feel. Well, believe it or not, I did it in under 5 minutes. And I also created a nice screencast in which I’m taking you through this process, step by step. Yes, I did that in under 5 minutes and you can watch the proof right now:

Just remember, the promo code is

wpsumorocks

It will shave an instant 30$ from your purchase, thus leaving the Developer License at only $99. All you have to do is to click the link below:

WPSumo Developer License

Enjoy

12 Reasons To Switch To WPSumo

I’ve been an early adopter on many toys and gadgets. I’ve written about iPhone on this blog when the iPhone was just a rumor. I bought Thesis in its early days. And I also downloaded, tried and promoted Scribe SEO when almost nobody knew what it was all about it.

But what I am going to do today will be quite different. Because it’s not technically about being an early adopter, although it may certainly look as it is. Fact is I am a third of WPSumo, the newest and brightest wordpress framework in town. Yes, a wordpress framework. But not a regular one. WPSumo is something that will really, really rock your socks.

The Reasons

Everything in this Universe has a reason. Newton apple felt down because there is this thing called gravity. On a much simpler level, we usually get or do or attract things because we need them. So. WPSumo was born out of my need for something better than what I had so far.

No pun intended to what I used so far, and I mean Thesis. But there is a time when something better comes into our lives and we just have to go with it. I’m not alone in the WPSumo team. There are two other wordpress wizards who not only made this possible, but also made it possible in an incredibly short amount of time. We spent only 100 days on development. For what we were able to come up with, 100 days is like a minute. We packed an amazing amount of features straight from the day one of availability. Yes, we do have a roadmap and we plan to add even more features. But we just thought it wouldn’t be right to launch it without each and every thing we can think of. Let’s get down to it. I left the paragraphs intentionally short because there will be much more info at the main WPSumo website. But it’s also nice to have an overview of what features we think are crucial for this product.

Reason 1: Mobility

WPSumo comes with an integrated state-of-the-art mobile theme. It’s like a child theme, only for mobile devices. It’s for free, you know, and integrated with the main framework. And you can customize the hell out of it. Read more…

Reason 2: SEO

I know how important SEO is. As a matter of fact, a third of my blog traffic is coming from search engines. I know, it’s not as it should be. That’s exactly why I’m using WPSumo advanced SEO settings. Title, description, metatags, robots, all from within a handy setting tab. Read more…

Reason 3: Child Themes

Although DragosRoua.com is my main blogging outlet, I do have another blogs. And I want a single solution to manage all of them. This is why we packed child themes into WPSumo from the day one. Read more..

Reason 4: Developer

I do write some PHP code every once in a while. So I wanted to have an open structure, a structure upon one can build his own features, if need will be. WPSumo features a very interesting back end structure which can have both hooks and extensions attached. Read more…

Reason 5: Export. Import

I like to tweak my theme on the local machine, most of the time. Then, I do the same things (more or less) on the live machine. You know the drill. Well, not anymore. WPSumo settings can be exported and imported into any WPSumo instance. Read more…

Reason 6: Style Editor

Although I know a bit of CSS, I’m not a big fan of hand styling my theme. On the contrary, I’d rather spend that time writing or coding interesting stuff. This is why we created a very powerful visual style editor. Pretty much everything can be styled form within this. Read more…

Reason 7: Shortcodes

Think of shortcodes like the brick and mortar for a site. Buttons, tabbars, titles, you name it. We have packed a lot of shortcodes into the default WPSumo installation. Making a button or a tabbar is just a matter of point and click. Neato. Read more…

Reason 8: Social Media

I get around 70% of my blog traffic from social media. That’s a lot. And I really want to take care of this visitors stream. So we paid extra attention to the social media integration. That means every button, from Twitter to Facebook and even Facebook Comments (enabled by default on this post). Read more..

Reason 9: Layouts And Sidebars

That’s where it gets interesting. Some of my posts have a life of their own, so to speak (and I’m sure many bloggers experienced this). So I wanted a way to create a more customized experience for them. Like having a different sidebar for each popular post. And to do this visually. You got it. Read more…

Reason 10: Ads

I admit, this was not one of my requests, but rather a general need in the market. After all, we did this framework for other people, not for us. And these people need a  very flexible and customizable solution to manage their ads. That’s exactly what we did. Read more…

Reason 11: Portfolio And Featured Area

Another thing that isn’t really my thing, but it’s huge for other people. We created a featured area (an extremely diverse and complex featured area) and a very powerful portfolio feature. So, if you create something visually and want to promote it with wordpress, you’re in it. Read more..

Reason 12: Blog Audit

When we decided to create WPSumo, I realized that my plugin, Blog Audit, just needed to be in it. If you don’t know what Blog Audit is, very briefly, it’s a piece of functionality which is unique (as far as I can tell) that lets you measure your blogging effectiveness (how often do you write, how many comments you generate, etc). Read more…

Reason 13: Affiliate Program

Yes, I lied, there are 13 reasons. This one is for you. We decided to create an affiliate program for WPSumo. Basically, you get 30% off of any sale you made. And that’s on top of riding the wave of the latest and brightest framework in town, you know. You get that for free, because you’re smart. And cool. Seriously now, here’s where you can sign up.

Well, that’s it. If you’re serious about blogging, you should get that baby.

Scribe: Pull Your SEO Together!

I don’t get SEO. Really. It’s like advanced math to me. I mean, I know the concepts and how things are actually working, but every time I try to really put myself into it, I get that strange feeling of nausea. It just doesn’t work. And unless you’re working for Google or make a living out of keyword positioning, you’re totally with me in this one. Honestly.

So, when I saw Brian Clark launched a product which is supposed to take the burden off of my fragile blogging shoulders, I was like instantly into it. The product is called Scribe, and aims at making your SEO copywriting exceptional. In today’s post I’ll describe my experiences with Scribe. You can even take this as an introductory tutorial.

What Is Scribe SEO?

It’s a wordpress plugin combined with an online service. It blends with your WordPress admin interface and once you’re ready editing your post, it goes online and check your content against a set of rules. In seconds, you get back a report telling you which are the main keywords of your post, a general SEO score and a few suggestions. Now, all you have to do is to follow the suggestions and improve your SEO readability in minutes.

Yes. It’s really that simple. But you need to know that Scribe SEO needs some prerequisites in order to function. As of right now, it needs Thesis as your blog theme, but it also works if you have All In One SEO plugin. That being said, let’s start a regular SEO session.

First of all, make sure you have a custom title tag for your blog post (may be the same as the normal blog post) and also a meta description. For Thesis users, there is a place right under the WordPress editor to add these values. If you don’t have this, Scribe won’t let you start an analysis:

Once you’re ready adding a custom title and a meta description, the Scribe box will change accordingly:

The most interesting change is the new button, called “Analyze”. That’s the juice of Scribe. Don’t just click it right now, please resist the impulse. First, be sure your post meets at least some basic SEO requirements, otherwise you’ll waste a valuable analysis.

Now, suppose you did your best to SEO your post and finally hit the “Analyze” button. Here’s what happens (click for larger picture):

By the way, this is a real life analysis, precisely the very post you’re reading right now. The main screen of Scribe shows a general SEO score, along with some recommendations. Your job is to follow those recommendation to increase your SEO score. In this case, I may be lucky, because I already have a green background (green is good) and a quite high percentage. But there are cases in which your content doesn’t meet even 45% of those requirements.

Now, we know the score, but how do we know if we targeted the right keywords in our post? The “Keyword Analysis” tab to the rescue (click for larger image):

Fortunately, the two keywords I wanted to target my post to are “scribe” and “seo”. Both seems to do a very good job at frequency, and “seo” does especially well on the annual search volume. Looks like a valuable keyword to target.

But what happens if we target the wrong words by mistake? Did happened to me, if you’re curious, and not only once. Well, there is a way to do it, and Scribe has a specific tab called, you guessed, “Change Keywords” (click to enlarge):

But things are much more nicer than they look because Scribe is capable to actually suggest tags for my blog post. How cool is that? That’s a rhetorical question, by the way:

One other neat feature of Scribe is that it shows how my blog post will actually look in SERP (that’s what I call a touch of awesomeness):

The witty reader of my blog already saw that there is one more tab in the Scribe report interface, called “SEO Best Practices”. Well, I’ll leave it up to you to find out what is all about, once youre’ going to get your own copy of Scribe SEO.

But wait, there’s more! What if I’m not satisfied with 88% SEO awesomeness? What if I want to go up to 100%? I simply make the adjustments and voila, we have SEO perfection:

That’s all. Just by tweaking some simple things in your post, you reached an incredibly high SEO compliance. One more thing: after you run your first analysis, you’ll notice a new button on Scribe’s box, called “Review”:

If you have a lot of suggestions in your first SEO report, you don’t need to press “Analyze” every time (because it will actually consume one analysis from the number you’ve bought) but press “Review” and you’ll have the results of the last analysis.

What Are The Benefits of Scribe SEO?

First of all, you’re learning by doing. The more you use it, the more you’ll incorporate some tricks into your writing.

Second, you’re following best SEO practices, and that will surely help stay in the game and avoid accidental blocking. Happened to me a few times to be banned by Google and, although it was entirely by negligence, it was a really bad time.

Third, you’ll stay alive: the online component of Scribe pulls the keyword statistics live so you will always know of what’s hot now. Maybe “altavista” was a really cool keyword a decade ago, but things are changing really fast.

And last, but not least: the Themes guarantee. One of the men behind this project is Brian Clark, famous not only for his very popular CopyBlogger.com, but also for launching very successful products, like Thesis and Teaching Sells.

Where To Get It and How Much Does It Cost?

The price structure of Scribe is based upon the number of monthly analysis you buy. As I told you, this is the real juice of Scribe, those analysis are the cornerstone of this service. So you’re actually buying a monthly subscription. Prices vary from a very affordable 27 USD / month, up to 97 USD / month. But wait! There is this huge promotion running right now, which gives you the best product at the lowest price! Meaning you get the 97 USD package for 27 USD!

Go get it! Now!

And if you’re pondering why you should pay for such a service, I kindly invite you to make the difference between a free hosting service and an incredibly reliable paid one. That’s the exact difference between your copywriting as it is right now and as it will be after you buy – and, of course, use – Scribe!

Thesis Hooks for Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit

I love my wordpress theme, I really do. In case you haven’t noticed so far, this is thesis, one of the best commercial themes for wordpress. I don’t like it only for the crisp appearance and nice layout, you can get that nowadays from any decent free wordpress theme. What I like it for is the unparalleled flexibility of the backend. Not only it has 2 different admin pages full of options but it comes with one of the best features in the PHP frameworks: hooks.

Now it’s time to take a break and announce to our precious reader that this post will be a moderately technical one (yes, I know PHP pretty well, among other different skills ) and it will involve some coding. Now, let’s explain what this is all about.

Take Care Of Your Users

I use several social networking sites these days: StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit and of course, Twitter. During the last few months I managed to attract a fairly amount of traffic from those services. To be honest, this traffic exceeds by far anything I get from search engines. And what I really appreciate at this type of traffic is its “human” touch. I might get some huge impact from a lot of bots that are searching for “iPhone 3g applications” (btw: I rank pretty well for that) but in the end what counts are the real persons who are seeing my posts promoted on the social networking services.

So, I thought it would be courteous for me to let those people know that I know from where they are coming and to start a little bit of interaction with them. I decided to have this interaction on two very hot spots in the wordpress territory: just before the post and just after the post. Sidebars, header and footer are not so hot when it comes to user action, the content rules. So, I wanted to have a simple line that would say hi to the visitor and tell him I’m on that specific social network too and a little reminder to help him promote the post, and another simple line in the end, letting him know how he can befriend me on those networks.

Pretty simple, of course. I know you can get tons of social networking features packed in a number of very specialized plugins but I didn’t wanted to use another plugin for that. I wanted to keep it extremely simple and easy to control. So, here’s how I did it (don’t worry now for the technical part, all the source code is packed and ready to download at the end of the post). (more…)

Blogging with an iPhone…

…Is not at all a very difficult task. To be honest, it’s quite enjoyable, as long as you’re not on EDGE. From my experience, is very important to have a very good internet connection, otherwise the touchscreen keyboard will give you some very strange delays. But that keyboard also is the main reason for blogging with an iPhone, it really makes typing text a breeze. And I mean that, is equally easy either if you’re writing the post title:

either you’re working on the content (and we’re talking wordpress rich text editor here, not a regular textarea in a form):

You can see all your work in a glimpse:

And you can also easily preview what you are working on (as long as you don’t have more than 8 Safari windows opened at the same time, which seems to be the limit of concurrent opened windows for Mobile Safari):

Now that we’ve seen how it looks, lets’ see why and when you’ll be blogging by iPhone?

Well, most of the time you’ll be micro-blogging – on platforms like twitter, for instance – if you’re not choosing some other clients for that. But you can do some – let”s call it mini-blogging – on one of the following situations:

• you’re on the road, and you enjoy some Wi-Fi on your airplane or train, that’s a reason enough to quickly post something on your blog
• you’re in a hurry, and putting together all your equipment – laptop, power cable, internet connection – will take so much time that will make you lose your patience. And, maybe, your ideas
• you’re in a boring meeting and you’ll be blogging about your last seen rock concert, while letting other people around you think that you’re checking out and respond to vital email for your company
• you’re just in love with your iPhone and you’d started to use it more than your eating tools (those little things called fork and spoon, if you remember…)

Joke aside, blogging with an iPhone is really an option for the travelers and busy people, but there are some important drawbacks, and since we’re pointed out the pros, it’s honest to outline a few cons:

• you don’t really have a rich editor on your Mobile Safari, instead you will be working on the “HTML” switch on your main editor, and by that I mean that you will actually have to write html code in order to have links or ordered lists in your posts
• adding images directly is not supported (yet) so you will have to tweak your post further by accessing it later via a laptop or desktop in order to manage your images (if you need to upload them, if you’re only linking to some images, you’re set)
• you can’t really work your categories – for some reason Mobile Safari doesn’t work well with the category selector in wordpress admin area
• it will take you at least double the time you’ll need for blogging by a reasonable device, even if you’re a piano player and your fingers are dancing on the iPhone touchscreen

All in all, blogging with an iPhone is really fun, you should try it some time (you can even try this at home, you know?).

And yes, almost 90% of this post was actually written on my iPhone.

[tags]iPhone, blogging, wordpress[/tags]

My 7 essential wordpress plugins

Later update: One of the plugins I use a lot during the last few months is Blog Audit, which I wrote myself. Find out more about Blog Audit, download it, give it a try and don’t forget to send your feedback in the comments. It’s the only way I can make this plugin better. Thank you.

I blog for about 2 years now, and the only platform I used so far is WordPress. No need to argue here about the reasons, enough for you to read some statistics on the internet and you’ll see that WordPress is giving the best feature / learning balance that you’ll need when you want to easily publish yourself. And one of the most important advantages of WordPress in front of the competition is its plugin structure. Or, simply put, on demand functionality, when the need appears.

During those 2 years I used dozens of plugins, most of the time just to see what exactly that wordpress plugin does. But, as the blog grew, and as I started to focus more on the content than on the form, I started to let go the plugins that I didn’t really need. And I eventually come up with a list of only 7 essential wordpress plugins. Don’t expect any bells and whistles from the list below, just essential functionality for the every day blogger.

Your time is precious, so is mine, so let’s get started:

Akismet

No wordpress blog is launched today without a very strong protection against spam. Having relevant comments on your blog is very important, but your comments form is the gateway for the spammers too. Amongst a very long list of spam protection plugins, I found Akismet to be by far the most effective and relevant. No false positives, no tricky configuration options, just no more spam. Brilliant. Don’t forget that you will need a WordPress.com API key in order to activate your Akismet plugin. Almost any wordpress package comes today with Akismet pre-installed, but if, by any strange accident, don’t have it by default, you can download it from here. And don’t forget to check out the akismet blog in order to keep you updated with all the anti-spam news.

Google XML sitemaps

Having a blog is just not enough. You must tell people about it, make your ideas known. And search engines is the mass media of the blogger. Google XML sitemaps creates a sitemap of your wordpress blog, which is a very easy to read image of your blog for the search engines. I have been worked several months with sitemaps for other projects I had, and I must tell you is not the easiest task in the world. Having somebody – like a wordpress plugin, in this case – to automate all the tasks for you is a huge time saver. The plugin has an enormous list of configurations, and is also a very “quiet” one: once you’ve installed id, you’ll never heard back from him. You can download the plugin from here. If you want to stay in touch with development news, you can follow the author’s blog here.

Simple tags

Apart from Google, there is only one major online service that can make tremendous service to your blog, and that is technorati. I’m sure you know everything about it so far – admit that you’re checking your authority and ranking stats daily, ok? – so I’m not gonna tell you again what technorati is. Instead, I will recommend you this very simple, yet powerful wordpress plugin, called Simple tags. Whenever you are using it – by enclosing your tags within [[tags]] tags your words will be expanded to technorati tags. I found this plugin especially useful at the beginning of my wordpress blogging experiences, but I must recognize that I still use it from time to time. The recent changes in the WordPress tagging / category management are looking promising, but since I’m quite used to this plugin, I find it very easy to use it. You can download the plugin from here.

Brian’s latest comments

Another veteran here, Brian’s latest comments is a wordpress plugin that will publish on your sidebar links to the most recent comments (and their associated posts, of course). Having a quick way to show your comments to your blog visitors is one of the “must do” things if you are writing a blog in order to create a community. Even if your blog is just a simple publishing service, showing the most recent comments is a way to prove your transparency and need to communicate. Not much to say more about this, so here is the link for the download.

Sociable

This tiny little wordpress plugin is a mashup of several tiny little plugins that will basically do just one thing: allow your uses to share your posts within the social networks of their choice. Nobody can ignore the social networks today, even if nobody really knows what are social networks good at. Nevertheless, by using this wordpress plugin by the end of each post you will have a list of small icons that will put your post on all the hyped networks: from Digg to netvibes, from reddit to del.icio.us. You can find more info about the plugin here and you can download it from here.

WordPress download monitor

From time to time I find enjoyable to add some type of downloadable content to my posts. Most of the time is just a mind map, but it can be anything. Using this wordpress plugin I can do (in a very simple way) 2 things that I am very interested in, when I add downloadable content: 1. I can do this from the wordpress admin panel and 2. I can see the number of downloads for each content I set up. As in my list of the most downloaded mind maps for instance. The author of the plugin – who also has a wordpress blog for himself, of course – have several other interesting plugins, but I found only the wordpress download monitor plugin to be useful for me. If you want to see the rest of the plugins visit his blog by following the link above, but if just want to download the plugin now, click here.

WordPress Reports (formerly known as tan tan)

The following wordpress plugin is one of my all time favorites. From the time we all knew it as “tan tan noodles” I was delighted by such a complicated and useful functionality, brought to you in such a simple way. And that functionality was no less than your very Google Analytics stats. No more extra logins, no more extra browser windows, check out your blog statistics from your wordpress admin console. The latest version of the WordPress Reports (which seems to be packaged with the latest wordpress 2.5 version) add an extra statistics screen, and that is feedburner circulation for your blog feed. Once you added your account information for Google Analytics and Feedburner (which needs to have the Awarness API set up, by the way) you will be enjoying blog statistics from your very own wordpress admin console. More info about the plugin here, and you can download it from here.

Bonus: WordPress automatic upgrade

Yeap, I know, this is the eighth plugin, and I’ve only talked about a list of seven. Take it as a bonus track, if you want, but please take it into consideration, because this wordpress plugin is really a gem. It actually upgrade your wordpress version to the latest available, from within a web interface. Now, I have to admit, I do know how to manage a Linux server, from the bottom up, but still, when it comes to upgrading a wordpress installation “by hand”, I have my hesitations. It’s a tedious task, and it requires a lot of attention. The WordPress automatic upgrade plugin allows you to skip all this and enjoy the latest and most secure wordpress version, without any knowledge of system administration. Check out the plugin home page here, and download it from here.

Well, that’s my list. I hope you find it useful. If not, you can always check out the wordpress plugin repository and find other plugins, most suitable for your needs.

By the way, most of the plugins listed above are donationware, so if you find them useful, you can leave a donation for the authors.

[tags]wordpress plugins, wordpress, plugins, wordpress blogging[/tags]