Today is 10/10/10, and we won’t have another day as exciting as this until 11/11/11, so here’s Ten Top Ten Lists you might enjoy or learn from.

1. The 10 Social Media Metrics Your Company Should Monitor— A pretty straightforward article. Whether you agree you can (or should) calculate ROI for social media, I think few of us will disagree that keeping track of blog interactions is a good thing.

2. Top 10 Expectations of Social Media in 2010— This one is fun because it’s almost the end of the years, so you can see if they were right.

3. Top 10 SEO Myths of All Time— #8 is my favorite since I deal with this one all the time.

Client: I got a call last week from a company that guaranteed my first page ranking.

Me: For pay per click?

Client: No I’m pretty sure it wasn’t pay per click.

Riiigggghhhhtttt.

4. Top 10 Google SEO Ranking Factors— Of course, this assumes that Google hasn’t changed anything in the past ten months— or the past ten minutes. But it’s still a pretty good list.

5. 10 Ways to Reduce Friction in Your Purchase Process— There’s nothing more frustrating than losing a client at the shopping cart. Basics on reducing those chances.

6. Top 10 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog Using Linked In— LinkedIn is an untapped gold mine for many. It’s worthwhile to learn a bit more about it and use that knowledge to your advantage.

7. Top 10 Ways to Tweak Your WordPress Theme— These are easy for just about anyone to do.

8. Top 10 Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress— Which is your favorite? I like Get Social.

9. Top 10 Funniest Fail Blogs— Every Top 10 list needs a little levity.

10. The 10 Best Top-Ten Lists And, of course, what’s a best top 10 list without a Top 10 List of Top 10 Lists

WordPress is a good CMS that makes it easy to add/edit content on your site and I planned on talking about using it to create niche sites at some point. Also, the Stompernet trial had some really nice video lessons on using WordPress to set up niche sites. Anyway, click here to download the free ebook. It is definitely worth checking out!

I made a few small changes to my current theme, but they are only temporary. The main change was the new menu bar at the top and I made some minor changes to my sidebars.

I am going to be working with a wordpress theme designer to come up with a new theme for this blog. I am also going to be creating some free wordpress themes along the way that you and others can download. And yes, the free themes are partly influenced by this discovery back in March. Shortly after making that post, quite a few people (including my competitors) started creating free wordpress themes and now I am going to.

So, do you like the changes to my current theme?

Is it easier to find stuff, or harder? Would you prefer my content on the left or the right? Should I start adding pictures to my posts? Do you want videos? Anything else you would like to see changed?

Please let me know…

“... if you use wordpress, how do you set your blogs to go out on time…”

Here are five easy steps to set your posts to appear at a future time on your wordpress blog…

Step 1:
Write your post, but DO NOT PUBLISH IT.

Step 2:
Scroll down and look for the “Post Timestamp” navigation bar on the right side of your wordpress dashboard. It will look something like this:

Step 3:
Check the box to the left of the words “Edit timestamp”.

Step 4:
Change the date and time you want the post to be published on (the date you want it to appear on your blog). The time is in military hours and is based on the time where your web host resides. If you wanted to change the date and time to July 4th, 2007 at 7:00am, then the wordpress timestamp screen would look like this:

Step 5:
Click on publish to publish the post.

That’s all there is to it. Now, your post will publish on the day and time that you chose. In the example above, it would publish July 4th at 7:00am.

You may wonder where your post went to when you changed the timestamp. Well, when you set the post time and/or date to the future, your post won’t show up on your blog until that date/time. You can however see it by going to Manage – Posts, and looking for it on your list of posts.

I know that’s half the point in going with WordPress. It’s open source, which means you get to do fun things with the themes. And of course, a little bit of blog personalization is a necessity. Otherwise, your potential visitors can’t differentiate your money-making blog from the crowd, which isn’t good for your bottom line.

Now, there’s the obvious:

• Your own list captures.


• Possibly your own header graphic.


• And if you want to monentize it, you had better know how to place ad images and ad scripts.

But how much do you like to improve your themes? Are you satisfied with using a theme as it is and then just adding plug-ins and pages? Or have you modified one so much you can’t even recognize what it used to be?

Here’s the survey from 1-5:

1. You just use the WordPress Template and add plug-ins and pages as you need them. Fast, easy, and vanilla.


2. You’ll modify basic things in the CSS file and code to add some personal touches, but otherwise, just like number one.


3. Themes are a framework where you rearrange all the smaller details until you get what you like. But you can still tell what it used to be.


4. Themes are putty in your hands and you’ll customize yours to the point it qualifies as a new theme.


5. Forget the prefab stuff. Your WordPress theme started as a blank Notepad file. Then you added what you needed and built your own personal theme from scratch because you’re a hyperactive supergenius.

Ok, I’m guilty of being a 4 just that one time. My current blog template is a 2. I like prefab themes, but they always seem so basic to me. In my opinion, just using an unmodified theme all by itself makes it impossible to differentiate you from anyone else who’s also using it. And being generic is just not where you want to be.

So where are you on the theme tweaker scale? Leave your vote in the comments below.

The do-follow plug-in removes the no-follow attribute from all of the links in your blog’s comments. Not only does this make me happy, but it should encourage you to comment more on this blog. The links you provide in the comments “count” to the Search Engines.

Either way, it’s a win-win plug-in in my eyes…

New Calacanis link-baiting rules
Jason Calacanis’ post on how to link bait him is an EXCELLENT read for those wanting to learn how to link bait top bloggers. Jason left me a comment last year when I listed him as one of the people I would like to meet in this post. I think that I followed most of his rules, which would explain the comment. I would still like to meet him, along with the other people on that list. I should probably write a new list, since the list of bloggers I would like to meet has grown quite a bit since last year.

Tim Ferris Interview – Part 1
Tim Ferris Interview – Part 2
This two part interview by Darren Rowse provides some excellent business advice. Tim’s book sounds like a really good read.

WordPress Theme Generator
This was a pretty cool find by Mark. The only thing I didn’t like about the wordpress theme generator is that it can’t generate three column themes. Otherwise, it’s pretty cool.

The Ultimate Guide to Productivity
I really liked Wendy’s simple tips in this post.

Using Stumbleupon and Squidoo Advertising to Promote Blogs
Chris Garret reveals his results with Squidoo and Stumbleupon advertising. Based on his results, I might test out Stumbleupon’s paid ads.

The Husband and Wife Blog Traffic Battle
Now this was real interesting. A husband and wife are doing a year long contest to see who’s blog can get the most traffic. Found this via the Sitening Blog. Something worth keeping an eye on.

Develop Your IM Network
If you are interested in gaining some new Instant Messaging friends, then check out Daniel’s invitation. Personally, I don’t use Instant messaging systems. I will probably join one in the near future, because so many of my online friends use instant messaging.

I went ahead and modified one of John’s themes and made it look the way I wanted it to.

Another reason I changed themes is because I have been wanting to move the ads on this blog to less noticeable positions. A large portion of my target audience is annoyed by ads, so I knew that I needed to make them less noticeable to get more traffic. That said, I happen to know that on my “non-techie” blogs, my visitors are much less bothered by ads. I find technical types to be much more annoyed by web advertising than non-techies.

Anyway, what do you think about my new blog theme?

The blog I found is Brian Gardner’s blog. Brian even wrote this post about reaching the top 500 and how he was on his way to the top 100. Well now, Brian’s blog is all the way up to 71 and climbing.

How did he make it in to the top 100 so fast?

Brian designs really nice free wordpress templates. In fact, he has 14 free wordpress themes so far! At the bottom of each theme is a link to his blog. When people use one of his themes, they are linking to his blog from their blog. Technorati’s rankings are based on the number of links other blogs have to your blog. So, in Brian’s case he is getting tons of links from other people’s blogs, which is quickly raising his Technorati ranking.

What a brilliant way to get on Technorati’s top 100 list!

Anyway, if you want to do what he has done, just follow in Brian’s footsteps:

1. Create lots of free wordpress themes or hire someone to create them for you.
2. In the footer of each theme, have a link to your blog.
3. Submit your themes to all the free wordpress theme sites and theme viewers out there.
4. Watch your blog climb the Technorati ranks.

That’s all there is to it…

Best WordPress Plugins: Custom Query String – Great wordpress plug-in for managing the pages on your blog. I have been wanting to be able to do this for quite some time.

Managing your Affiliate or Internet Business – Free Web 2.0 Tools – Nice list of free tools you can use for your business.

New Keyword List Cleaner Tool – Cool new tool for cleaning up keyword lists by Aaron Wall.

The Power of “Know thy customer” – Brilliant marketing article by Dan Kennedy.

Startup to Freedom – New video from Rich Schefren that explains how to get your business started and get the momentum to make big money online. I recommend you watch this more than once.

Sometimes I forget to check through it, because quite frankly it’s boring and tedious. I can’t just leave it alone, because I find that about 1 legitmate comment gets marked as spam by Akismet for every 100 comments that are marked as spam. Akismet does a great job of catching spam, but it’s not perfect.

If your comment is ever put in moderation on this blog for a long time, you can just assume that Akismet ate it. If that’s the case, email me at info @ mantyweb. com and I will try to recover it.

The latest comments to be eaten by Akismet on my blog were from Daniel and DotMySpot.

PS. Daniel, I plan on posting a response to your question, when I do more experimenting with MyBlogLog.

I have been putting this off for at least 6 months, but it didn’t take long at all to set up. Jill bought the wordpress template for their blog from template monster. It’s really nice and professional looking. We were originally going to try a free template, but we stumbled across the paid templates and decided to go with one of them. I made a few changes to it and have a few more changes left to make.

I think in the long term it will be a really good blog for Jill and Laura, because using natrual products is something they both have a big interest in. Also, they are both very passionate about using natural products, so their passion will show up in their blog posts.

Another good thing about their new blog is that it is a more focused niche than Natural Family News, which I think will make it easier for them to get regular readers.

Also, it should not be too hard for them to establish some initial traffic to the site. So many of our friends are also into natural products, which will give them some good word of mouth traffic to the blog. Plus, Jill and Laura already have a small community built up with their Natural Family News blog, most of whom will be interested in their new blog as well.

The last thing I wanted to say about their new blog is that at this point it is monetized with Adsense only, but once it is established they may find other ways to monetize it.

So what do you think about the new wordpress theme I am using? Do you love it, hate it, does it even matter?

What do you think? Is WordPress in the wrong?

I caught a cold last night that has been going around our house over the weekend. So I didn’t spend much time on the business (or anything else for that matter).

Sunday night I went to this blog to finish a post I started last week. To my surprise all I saw on my blog was a string of error messages that looked somethng like this:

WordPress database error: [User has exceeded the ‘max_questions’ resource (current value: 50000)]
SELECT option_value FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = ‘siteurl’ LIMIT 1

Unfortunately, my blog limits the amount of queries it does per hour. I had never run into this problem before. In fact, when we were blogging the olympics we got “WAY” more traffic than I ever get to this blog.

So what went wrong?

Well, it seems that the plug-in I recently installed to show related posts was creating too many queries to the database. This is partially because of the WordPress Template that I am using and partially because of how many posts I was showing on the main page.

Anyway, for now I have removed the plug-in.

The good news is that my blog has gotten over it’s cold! The bad news is that my fever and stuffed nose are signs that I am not quite over my cold yet…

One of the things that I really like on some blogs is seeing a list of related posts at the end of a post. I have been meaning to install a plug-in to do this, because I think it ads so much value to a blog. I for one, stick around on blogs longer when they have a list of related posts at the end of a post. In other words, it’s a great way to make your blog “sticky” (ie. make it so people stay on your blog longer).

So, this weekend I installed the related entries plug-in that you can get by clicking here. It was easy to install. The only problem I ran into is that I had to run the longer setup, but it worked fine (and was pretty quick).

If you have a blog, I highly recommend adding the related entries plug-in. It will give your readers a better user experience, which in the long run is bound to make your blog more successful.

What are your thoughts? Do you like the new plug-in, hate it, don’t care either way?

I have never liked the way wordpress displays the title by default. I wanted my blog to display only the title of the post in the title bar when you were on the post page. So I decided to change that.

NOTE: If you don’t know what the title tag is, go back and look at this post on my other blog.

To change the default title tag in wordpress you need to edit the header.php for the theme that you are using.

The line of code you want to change will look something like this:


<title>< ?php bloginfo('name'); ?> < ?php wp_title(); ?> </title>


Replace that code above with the code you want to use. Here is the code I am using on this blog (and will be soon using on all my blogs):

< ?php if(is_home())
{ echo '<title>'; echo bloginfo('name');
echo '< /title> '; }
else
{ echo '<title>'; wp_title(' '); echo '</title>'; } ?>

The code above displays the name of my blog as the title if you are on the home page. Otherwise, it only displays the post name if you are on a post page, the name of the archive page if you are on an archive page, or the category name if you are on category page.

It’s kind of funny how long it took it me to figure this out. I made it much more complicated than it needed to be. At one point the code looked like this:

< ?php if(is_home()) { echo '<title>';echo bloginfo('name'); echo '< /title> '; } else if ( is_category() ) {echo '<title>'; wp_title(); echo '</title>';} else if ( is_archive() ) { echo '<title>'; wp_title(); echo '</title>';} else { echo '<title>'; the_title(); echo '</title>'; } ?>

While it did the job, it was overkill.

Fortunately, I found the WordPress wiki and was able to quickly find the code changes I needed to make from there.

Another option for changing the way your title displays in WordPress is to use the Optimal Title WordPress Plug-in. But I prefer making the code change above.