My Favorite WordPress Keyword Research Tool

I have talked about in the past about the importance of using the right keywords on your WordPress blog to make sure you get ranked high on Google and don’t have to burn money on PPC. Using a good keyword tool not only allows you to find the keywords that will drive traffic to your blog, but also find new ideas for your future blog posts.

I have talked about my love for WordTracker in the past. It’s a great keyword research tool that allows you to find thousands of cool keyword phrases for your blog posts. But the truth is WordTracker can be expensive for many folks. After all, paying $330 a year or $59+ monthly for keyword research service may not be for everyone. That’s why I recommend using tools such as Keyword Elite. 

Keyword Elite only requires a one time fee, but provides you with awesome features that you can use to dig up valuable keywords. Here are the features you can expect to get with KE Elite:

The first option is very powerful. All you have to do is enter a keyword or domain (recommended), and it shows you the phrases that you can go for.

I usually use Ask and Yahoo!, but for the purpose of demonstration, I have only used Ask! here. Once you click OK, you are going to get a bunch of phrases that you can rank for. I recommend you enter your main competitor’s domain in the box to see what keywords they are ranking for that you should as well.

I entered the term making money online with blogging, and as you can see I have got some long-tail keywords that I can use in my blog posts. But more than that, you can use these money making ideas and blog about them.

The other features that KE Elite has to offer are useful as well. You can do the same process for pay per click listings, and also spy on pay per click ads. Watching out for your keyword competition allows you to go for keywords that are less competitive or “rankable.” 

The reason I like KE-Elite is due to the fact that you only make one payment, and you are set for updates for the life of the product. With WordTracker, you will have to spend $60 a month or pay up $330 right up front, and let’s not forget WordTracker does not cover PPC listings and the whole spying features like KE Elite does. There are of course other tools out there, but I have not seen one that provides as much blogging value as KE Elite.

Your take: feel free to share your experience with KE Elite or other software packages here.

Learn How To Run an Automated WordPress Blog

I don’t know about you, but when I started my blogging journey with WordPress, I was always interested to find more efficient way to get things done faster. One way to do it is of course to run an automatic WordPress blog. What do I mean by automatic? Well. Let’s say you have 5 blogs that you update on a daily basis, and you provide very useful information to your readers. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have day off (for whatever reason) and still manage to post some useful content to your blog? That’s all automated blogging is about.

Believe it or not many folks run semi-automated blogs and get away with it. In essence, they post 3 times a day and the other days, they use a software such as WordPressDirect to post useful articles or videos to their blogs. There are other solutions that you can use to run automatic blogs, which is why I decided to dig in to find out if there is anybody out there teaching how to run a fully-fledged automatic WordPress blog.

The one I found on Amazon is “how to create an automated WordPress blog.” The author has many other training packages for sale, and the content is in general top notch. With the right combination of plug-ins and other tools, you can effectively run an automated blog without having to pay for a service such as WP Direct. Automated blogging is in early stage right now so you should definitely mix automatic posts with real posts to keep your blog fresh. Having said that, it’s good to have an insurance policy in case you get sick or break a leg.

Press75 Themes To Go Out of Sale

Press75 is one of the most innovative WordPress Theme sites on the Web. Jason has moved to join forces with Revolution2, which means he will not be selling his awesome Press75 themes starting Monday, November 17th. These themes are great for videobloggers, so if you are interested in getting them, you have only a couple of days left to get these themes.

Jason is one of the super guys in the WordPress world. He is so creative, and his themes are just a testament to his dedication to bring unique high quality themes to the WordPress community. Here are the themes that won’t be sold after Sunday, Nov 16th:

• OnDemand Videoblogging Theme (read review here).
• TV.Elements Vlogging Theme (read the review here).
• Video Elements WordPress Theme (check it out here).
• Video Flick WordPress Theme (check it out here).

Thee themes are definitely worth checking out if you are into video-blogging. There will be new themes on Revolution 2, but the above themes will not be sold ever again (according to Jason). But you still get support for them in the future, so it’s a win-win situation to me.

eVid Premium Video Blogging Theme

I don’t know about you, but I am a sucker for videoblogging themes. There is just something so attractive about the whole videoblogging issue that makes me a bit biased towards these themes. evid is the latest theme by elegantthemes that is designed for super videobloggers. In a glimpse, it is attractive and has everything videobloggers need to succeed.

eVid video-blogging theme comes with a news slider that allows you to feature your best WordPress video posts and allow your readers to slide through them. Call to action is built in, encourgaing folks to follow to your video page. The post pages all come with the below video player which not only is attractive but makes it easy for folks to embed your videos on their sites.

The main page also comes with proper ad places, which means you can easily monetize your videoblog. In addition, you get a recent news and videos section that you can use to get your visitors to go through your posts more easily.

Overall, eVid is an extremely attractive videoblogging theme, and it does come with the Photoshop files you need to modify the theme as you wish. You can get eVid theme and a selection of other themes on elegant themes. Here are some of the features in summary:

Run A Tech WordPress Blog With ModBlogger

I don’t know about you but I have always been fascinated with new technologies and what’s better than blogging about what you are passionate about. It’s true that Slash Dot has been very successful at running their tech oriented blog (though they are not more than just about technology). But you can always a micro-niche in this broad niche and make decent money. Technology blogs can be monetized easier through media ads and contextual advertising than other types of blog but that is a discussion for another story.

ModBlogger – Tech WordPress theme is designed for folks who are looking to run a super geeky WordPress blog. The designer has put a lot of time and effort to get the colors right for the theme. Tech ModBlogger is XHTML and W3C compliant, and it is optimized for SEO. You have breadcrumbs all over the blog which makes it yummy for search engines.

The pages are drop-down-based, which makes it very easy to add multiple pages and sub-pages. You also get to highlight the products you want on the top of your blog in a slide-show fashion.

The RSS button is located in a prominent place, making it easy for folks to subscribe to your RSS without having to search for it. And finally pagination is also provided with this theme.

ModBlogger is an excellent theme if you are trying to get into the tech blogging niche. It’s very attractive and highly customizable. I would’ve liked to see different colors to choose from for this theme. Also, having the popular posts section is great, but there is no place to show the most recent posts (which could be added in form of a tab). Finally, since the logo is text-based, you will most definitely have to create one from scratch. I would’ve liked to have a sample Photoshop logo to work with.

Verdict: 4/5. Modblogger Tech WordPress theme is an attractive theme that can be used for tech bloggers. It’s highly optimized for SEO and uses JQuery to give a Web 2.0 look to the blog. It could use some minor improvements but in general is worth the price if you are starting a tech blogging business. You can see a demo here, or you can buy it right here.

How To Protect Your WordPress Against Hot Linking?

A lot of us have done it in the past, hopefully without knowing. You read a blog, you see a nice image that you can link to, and you do it without really thinking about the ramifications of your actions. In general, you should not link to an image that you do not have the right to, and you should not others’ bandwidth to serve the image on your site. But a lot of folks do it, and that’s a big problem for folks.

You have two options at this point. You can either watermark your WordPress images (read a tutorial on it here) or you can use .htaccess to protect your images from getting linked. Hot Linking is not a big issue if you are not serving that many images or your blog is not that popular. But once you start getting real traffic, it’s easy to get over your monthly hosting limits if people hot link to your images. That’s why I prefer using the .htaccess instead of watermarking my images. I rather cut off the access altogether.

So here is how I would do it using .htaccess. Please note that there are plenty of tools that you can use to customize your htaccess, and there are multiple ways of doing this, but here is what has worked for me:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?wpjedi.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|png)$ - [F]

For those of your not familiar, here is what we are saying. We are saying that if the referrer is not WPJedi.com (not case sensitive) or any of the sub-directories, return a 403 error code. Now you can grab this and use it on your own domain, but make sure that you change wpjedi.com with your own domain. Also, as you can see, WPJedi currently doesn’t host any video files, but if you are doi10ng that, you want to make sure you add .mov, .avi or whatever extension you are using for your videos to the fourth line.

Did I miss anything? Do you do it another way? Please share your experience with the code.

Blogging To the Bank 3.0 Preview

Blogging to the bank 3.0 has finally been released by the Rob Benwell. Blogging to the bank is probably the most popular digital blogging product on the market. Now, I usually don’t recommend any digital product as most of these products disappoint. Blogging to the Bank is close to my heart as it helped me get started with blogging.

Blogging to the bank has something for everyone. If you are a beginner, blogging to the bank shows you how to set up your blog from scratch. In essence you learn how to:

• set up blogs for fun or for your business
• drive traffic to your blogs through promotion and other methods
• blog for success (how blogging works as a business).
• how to promote your side businesses with your blog.

Now if you are a super expert blogger, you probably won’t need this product, but if you have set up your WordPress blog and want to follow a decent blueprint to build your blog up, then you should consider blogging to the back 3.