How To Increase Your RSS Conversion Rate?

If you are running any blog (WordPress or not), you know how difficult can it be sometimes to get your RSS subscription rate up. A lot of people still don’t feel comfortable enough with RSS feeds, and a lot of them just ignore RSS subscription buttons. So what can you do to improve your subscription rate? You can put your button in front of your visitors and also provide them with other ways to subscribe to your feed. Here is how:

• Position: put your RSS feed where it matters. Put your RSS feed either on the top right or left side of your page. Don’t put RSS feed all the way down your pages as people will not notice it. You can of course check services such as CrazyEgg to create heat maps for your pages and put your RSS boxes where your users pay more attention to.
• Call To Action: don’t be shy to ask your users specifically to subscribe to your RSS feed. Use services such as Feedburner to create graphical representations for your RSS feed and specifically ask them to sign up after each and every post.
• Bribe: give your user a bribe of some sort. A chance to win $200 or a free report that they can download if they sign up to your RSS feed. Giving away things usually gets the most stubborn people to sign up for your service.
• RSS E-mail: use services such as Feedburner to allow people to subscribe to your feeds via e-mail. Believe it or not a lot of people still use e-mails to keep in touch with the latest news in their industry.
• Enhance WordPress: this is my favorite strategy. If you are using WordPress as your CMS, you have a huge advantage over other people who don’t have the luxury of having access to functionalities that WordPress has to offer. Besides, you have access to a community of people who are determined to help WordPress stay as the No. 1 content management system around. Use plugins such as WWSGD plugin to ask new visitors to sign up for your RSS. You want to put your RSS subscription links in front of people, but you don’t want to go overboard. Fortunately, there are many plugins you can use to make WordPress super’er. Use WordPress to your advantage.

The freebie approach has worked the best for me but it could be different for you based on your niche or your blog design. But as long as your provide good solid content you are 80% on your way to achieving a huge RSS subscriber list.

Zoom Out Your Pictures With Viva Zoom

Have you seen these new Web 2.0 sites that come out with all kinds of cool features? You have probably seen the photo sites that have pictures that literally pop out when you take your cursor over them. If you are running a photo blog or you tend to have a lot of picture on your personal or business blog, I know you would love to have that feature too. I literally spent weeks searching for a programmer to implement that feature for me but guys at rentacoder were asking for $200 to get that done for me. I got lucky when I found Viva Carousel. on the very same page, I found Viva Zoom.

Viva Zoom is surprisingly easy to use. You basically upload your photos and the plugin automatically creates thumbnail for each image, and then your images pop out on your pages when clicked (see an example below).

That’s pretty much why it’s called Viva Zoom. You can Zoom in on your images. You can also move the thumbnails and open multiple ones. Now I am going to be honest with you. I don’t run a heavy photo blog per se’. But whatever kind of blog you run is going to look more professional with this plugin. It’s just more attractive.

Price: You can currently get this for a single site for $19.95 (usually retails for $24.95), but the developer license can get expensive. I personally can’t handle more than a couple of blogs, but if you want to use this plugin on all your sites, then you should consider the more expensive licenses.

Verdict: 4.75/5. The plugin is simple to use in general and does what it’s supposed to do magnificently. It does not however support external images (linking to images hosting on let’s say CNN). But if you upload the images to your server, it works like a charm. Best of all it’s very affordable.

Run A Video Blog With “On Demand” WordPress Theme

Videoblogging is one of those trends that is catching fire these days. Videoblogging is becoming more and more popular as people spend more time consuming video online. Besides, there are things that you can only communicate through video and audio. Press75 has been known for having some of the best video blogging themes available on the market (I personally use TV.Elements for my blog. The good news is that Press75 has just released their best video WordPress theme in “On Demand.” So let’s dig in and see what makes On Demand WordPress theme special.

Design: I am sure you have heard of love on the first sight? Well, On Demand is absolutely incredible looking. You get a featured video section with the ability to flip videos by clicking on the left or right arrows. In addition, you get a category section, where your users can search for their favorite video posts based on your defined categories. The “sideblog” on the sidebar allows you to point to your non-video posts, which I think is great. The dark/light contrast of color on this theme makes it an incredible videoblogging theme. Let’s say you want to run a movie trailer blog. You can do so easily with On Demand (check out the sample site here).

Functionality: like other video themes by Press75, On Demand comes with a host of features for video bloggers. You can import posts from high definition video services such as Blip.tv or Vimeo. In addition, your users can rate videos and your highest rated videos show up in your right sidebar (see picture below). Of course, this theme is widget ready and compatible with the latest WordPress release.

Cons: This theme is great looking and comes with a lot of features, but no alternative CSS is provided unlike some other premium WordPress theme. In other words, you will need to either change the CSS yourself or hire someone to do it for you if you want a drastically different look. In addition, we would have liked to see the videos zoom out and play on the same page rather than opening up on the new page. That can however be fixed with minimal coding.

Pricing: On Demand comes with three different types of licenses. I do recommend you signing up for the developer license if you plan to change and reuse the theme for your clients:

• Single License: $75, and includes lifetime updates.
• Developer License: $250, which can be used with unlimited sites and the footer can be removed.

Verdict: 4.75 out of 5. The theme is great looking and a must have for new video-bloggers. There are a few small areas that can be improved but nothing that should stop you from getting this theme. Considering that lifetime updates are included, we wouldn’t be surprised to see this theme get improved further in the near future.

Can You Put Your Favorite Posts On WordPress Direct?

Just a quite clarification about WordPress Direct service. We posted a story about Viva7 Theme that has just come out a couple of days ago. This is an absolutely brilliant theme that is a must have for anyone interested in running a magazine style blog. But then, a lot of people got back to me yesterday about WordPress Direct service, and whether they  can use the theme with WordPress Direct. The answer is yes really. WordPress Direct works with your host or a free host, and you can ftp and upload this theme. I do recommend getting developer licenses for a theme that you really like to use on WordPress Direct.

Having said that, you should make sure that you write original content on your blog in addition to eZine articles and other content that WordPress Direct allows you to post automatically to your blogs. You simply don’t want to use such a cool theme just with free public content. But most themes are compatible with WordPress Direct. There are some themes that don’t use WordPress plugins but other than those, everything else is fair game.

Automated WordPress Blogging With WordPress Direct

If you are involved in the WordPress community on a daily basis, you have probably heard about all the buzz that WordPress Direct has generated. WordPress Direct is a WordPress auto installer that allows you to log on to your hosting interface and install and run multiple WordPress blogs with no problem. WordPress Direct product one key issue for bloggers, content generation. If you have a single blog that is making you a lot of money, you probably know how tough it is to keep providing good content on your blog to not only keep the users coming in, but also keep the search engines satisfied. WordPress Direct creators claim that you can get around this problem easily, so I decided to take a closer look to see what’s true and what’s not.

We logged on to WordPress Direct website to figure out who we can achieve the hundred thousands of traffic that is apparently possible using this service. The promise of the service is simple: just set it or forget it. In fact, you can see the claim on the website: you pick a theme, you pick a keyword, and your blog will be updated with relevant content periodically (you can define the period). The good news is there is a free demo available. That will get you three website installations, which should be more than enough for us to figure out if this product is what it claims to be. So let’s jump in.

Once you sign up, you are offered with two sales letters, which we found annoying to say the least. But the offers did look attractive on the paper. Once you get past those, you will see a dashboard that will show your current installed sites.

The selection of themes available right out of the box is just impressive. Most of the themes are free themes, but a lot of them are rare, which make for great testing. Once you choose a theme and decide to install, you will get the option to choose your hosting account or allow WordPressDirect to host it for you using free web services. If you have accounts with Hostgator or Dreamhost, you can use WordPressDirect to install the WordPress on your web space automatically. But for testing purposes, we used the free account service.

The word Mixed Martial Arts was available as the starting point for our domain.

The system is sophisticated enough to allow us to enter the keywords that we want to target and the type of content that we want to post per keyword. Very interesting indeed! You can also put your Google Adsense and Google Analytics information into the system here. So far so good. Once the installation is complete, you get the chance to setup the autoposter software (set the type of content you are looking for and the period in which you want posts to be sent to your WordPress blog automatically).

So here is our site after posting a bunch of videos with WordPressDirect to it automatically. Best of all, we absolutely had to do nothing, and the whole process took about 3 minutes. You can post ezine articles, private label rights articles, and of course videos from YouTube, VEOH, and other sites to your blog if you decide to get a paid membmership.

The Cons:

There were a few issues that kept us from giving this service 5 stars. Understanding that no system is perfect, WordPress Direct came closely to the ultimate blogging solution. Here are things that can be improved:

• WordPress Updates: WPDirect was not using WordPress 2.6.1 at the time of our writing. It was using just the previous version, which maybe OK, but we would like the software to be using the updates sooner.
• DreamHost issues: While we had no trouble using the WordPressDirect service with our HostGator service, DreamHost was not fully compatible with it. We have been told that this issue is going to be fixed soon. No support for GoDaddy or 1&1. I like HostGator but not everyone has it. Support for other hosts are essential at this point.
• Presentation Issues: depending on the type of content that you choose to post and the theme that you choose, some posts may not get shown properly. You can go in and edit them one by one, but it would look more professional.
• Cost: The cost for the best WPDirect Plans are just too high. You may be able to justify $200 a month for a system that allows you to automatically manage 100 blogs, and depeding on the niche you choose, you may actually make it work. The free service is great. The next lever, Silver, is also affordable. But after that, we pretty much get to the expensive category.

Verdict: 4.25 out of 5 stars.

The system is perfect. We had to do nothing to start a blog with comments and content in under 3 minutes. The posts were sent to our blog automatically. This service can be a powerful link-building tool as well. But the high cost as well as minor glitches, doesn’t justify a 5 for 5 score for this product. But right now, WordPress Direct is the best automated WordPress blogging system.

Add META Robots To Your WordPress Blog with META Robots!

Getting your WordPress SEO right is probably the most important part of running your SEO blog. It’s true you can drive to your website with PPC, Article marketing, or various other ways, but it is essential to use SEO to your advantage to keep your costs down. After all, who doesn’t like getting free traffic.

One of the issues that many wordpress bloggers have to deal with is the issue of content duplication. The template that you use, and they way WordPress is designed in general can get you in trouble with search engines. For instance, in most blogs, domain.com/cat1/cat2 story and domain.com/cat1/story return the same page which could be counted as duplicate content on major search engines. So you want to make sure you address potential duplicate content issues with your WordPress blog as soon as possible.

The issue of link weight is also important towards for your SEO efforts, so you want to make sure you are not leaking pagerank by linking out to unrelated sites (either through comments or links on your pages). Well you can address this issue by adding the META Robots tag as below:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>

If you are familiar with HTML, you know that the above meta robots tags, when added to your pages, instructs search engines to follow the links on the page and index them as well. Now if you have 200 pages, you simply cannot customize your robots tag per page easily. That’s just not how WordPress is designed right now. But that’s where META Robots plugin comes in.

META Robots WordPress plugin allows you to apply the above tag to all your pages. In addition, the box below shows up under each and every post, allowing you to override the settings for each post. This plugin allows to avoid indexing your META pages and other useless pages as well, which can only help your SEO efforts.

Now here is what you should know before using this plugin:

• You want to make sure your WordPress template comes with a call to wp_head().
• You want to make sure your theme is using wp_list_categories for listing categories. META Robots is not compatible with older function calls such as list_cats.
• You want to make sure you don’t add no index or no follow if you don’t know what you are doing. If you add no index to your homepage, your homepage will not be indexed by Google, and your site could drop from the face of the earth.

But give this a try. It’s simply an amazing simple but powerful WordPress plugin and it’s free too!

Optimize Your WordPress Titles For SEO

One of the shortcomings of WordPress is the fact that it comes SEO-unfriendly in the box. When you install a WordPress system, you are basically left with default options that are not very SE-friendly. As you know, the title of each and every post is your greatest opportunity to rank on Google and receive free traffic. SEO Title Tag SEO WordPress Plugin is one of the best in allowing you to manage your title tags.

SEO Title tags wordpress plugin allows you to modify your title tags for each and every page on your blog. You can also modify the title for your category pages, your tag pages, and your 404 and archives pages. You can also put in customized title tags for each post when you are writing them. I personally prefer this approach to the automated one as you get to customize for the keywords that you really want. The plugin is free of course, and you can download it here. Don’t forget to make sure that you have only one title plugin active. There are people who have multiple active plugins that do the same thing. You don’t want to do that when you are doing SEO for your WordPress blog. That’s if you want to show up high up on Google.