The StudioPress sale is ending on Cyber Monday at 5:00pm PST. This is a great chance to save 40% on a really great WordPress premium theme.

Just a quick note that DIYThemes has put out a short little video about using the 301 Redirect feature of Thesis 1.7. This is just one of the many new features of the latest upgrade.  Check it out and let me know what you think. If you don’t have the Thesis theme for WordPress yet, what are you waiting for? As this site can attest to, it doesn’t have to be a plain jane, boring white website when you use Thesis.

The latest version of Thesis is now available. Yesterday Thesis 1.7 was released with reports of some brand new features and having much faster and efficient code. Some of the new features are pretty cool. The code, well I can’t speak for that, but faster and more efficient means faster loading times for your readers and that is a good thing.

One of the new features which is going to come in very handy for affiliate marketers is the ability to create 301 redirects easily. So easily that it is as simple as building a new page. You just create a new page and name it whatever you want. For this example I used Thesis. Then scroll down and there is a box labeled ’301 Redirect for this Page’s URL’ and cut and paste your affiliate link into it. Publish the page and http://marketingelf.com/thesis now redirects to the DIYThemes site. Very cool. No more needing to edit your .htacess file or using a plugin.

It also gives you greater control of the title and meta tags in the head of each page. There is now a box to easily add custom title, meta description and meta keywords to the main page of your site on the Site Options of your Thesis dashboard. Plus you can also add them to individual category and tag pages as well. This is so very important for SEO purposes.

The Thesis dashboard now has 5 options rather than 3 which include Site Options, Design Options, Page Options, Custom File Editor and Manage Options. I have just begun playing around with it all, but I know that web designers are going to love the ability to save and restore Thesis options on a client’s site. There is also a built in Javascript library and you can also reorder how comments appear on your blog posts with a simple drag and drop to move around comments, comment form, and trackbacks.

If you are looking for a great WordPress Theme that is built to help your website rank well in the search engines, then download Thesis 1.7 today.

Recently I made the decision to change an old website over completely to WordPress.  It had wordpress installed in a /blog directory and I wanted to move it into the main domain. I knew that it would be good for this old site that had been cobbled together with a combination of hand coding & Frontpage. It was badly in need of an update.

I asked around for some recommendations on how to do it and did some reading. I think the best resource that I came across was from the WordPress Codex on moving wordpress within your site.  The other great resource was my computer savvy hubby that said “let’s just do it!”

All in all it went much better than I expected. I am still in the process of changing over some old pages to the new format. It is really important to remember to 301 redirect all the old pages to the new ones. Plus I need to have a new header & logo designed, pick out colors, you know make it pretty.  For now though it is so much better than the old site and my traffic from the search engines is already increasing.

I have been testing out some modifications to this website to see what works as far as banners, widgets, and the like.  I am using the Thesis theme for WordPress. While it comes with a steep learning curve for someone that knows little about programming, such as myself, fortunately there is a wide knowledge base out there that is just a Google search away.  A couple of weeks ago someone on Twitter asked me how I put the 6 buttons inside the multimedia box on the right.

It is a pretty easy thing to do.  Here are the directions and code needed:

This allows the various images, as well as making them clickable.  125×125 size button ads are what I used and they fit perfectly.  The code is attributed to Satish Talim who can be found on Twitter as @indianguru.  I like this one as it only requires very little changing of the custom.css file plus the ads are easy to change from within the Thesis design panel.

Most of my affiliate sites are run on the WordPress platform.  Not just for blogging, it is a great solution for someone that doesn’t want to hand code sites in html but produce vibrant, beautiful, & easily customizable websites.  Making this customization even easier is hundreds (if not thousands) of WordPress plugins available.  Most of them are free and with the latest version of WordPress you can upload them right from the back end, no FTP program required. Here is my list of the top 10 wordpress plugins that I feel every affiliate marketers need for their websites.

1. Akismet – This plugin works to cut down on the amount of comment spam so you never even see it.  Let’s you spend more time working with legitimate comments.
2. All in One SEO Pack – Get help optimizing your website with the help of this plugin.  It provides fields on every post page to optimize your title, description, and keywords. As someone once told me though “this plugin only works if you input the data. You can’t just intall it & forget about it.” This plugin is made unnecessary if you are using the Thesis theme though.
3. Broken Link Checker – Running a very active affiliate website means creating lots of links pointing away from your site. You don’t want to be sending all that traffic to nowhere though. This plugin runs a check to make sure the links are not broken and reports back what it finds.
4. Contact Form 7 – Make it super easy for people to get in touch with you. With this plugin you can create a contact form in seconds.
5. Easy Privacy Policy – Running an affiliate site means making sure all of your t’s are crossed and your i’s are dotted. This plugin allows you to put up a privacy policy quickly with various check boxes to fit your situation.
6. Exec-PHP – Many affiliate marketers love the ease of creating product pages with the help of Popshops & Goldencan. You do not get an SEO benefit with using the javascript version of their code though.  This plugin allows you to use the php version within your post.
7. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin automatically creates a sitemap of your entire site allowing letting the search engines index your site much easier.
8. Pretty Link – Shrink down those huge affiliate links to something that is branded with your website’s url.  It has the added benefit of allowing your to track how many clicks you are receiving too.
9. TweetMeme Retweet Button – Make it easy for people to share your blog posts with others through Twitter. It also shows a count of how many times a post has been tweeted.
10. WordPress Database Backup – Never rely on your webhost to create backups of your website for you. This plugin allows you to easily backup your WordPress site and create a scheduled backup as well.

There are certainly lots more WordPress plugins that are helpful to affiliate marketers but these are the ones that are found on all of my sites.  Watch for another installment with more useful ones.  What are your favorite plugins for WordPress?

The Underground Training Lab has just released the latest version of their free Traffic Getting SEO Software 2.0 plugin for WordPress.  This awesome plugin helps you configure your blog with the right settings to improve your SEO and increase traffic.  It also has a suggested list of plugins to install for even better results.

I like the meter that shows you how optimized your blog is as well as suggestions for how to improve things.  Best of all the plugin is free.  Plus there are training tutorials to use it so that your blog is making you more money every day. Some of the big gurus would charge $297 for software and training like this.  You get it for free right now though.

Check it out today.  Let me know what you think and what your results have been with it.

I upgraded computers in November and finally got my very own, brand new laptop. I’ve gotten new computers before but never a new laptop. Previously I had just used hand me downs and then used remote access on it to my desktop. It has been a slow process of switching over completely to my laptop. There have been a few things that I just don’t want to let go of.

Frontpage is the big one. When I first started building websites, I used Frontpage. It has many faults and is super frustrating at times. But well it is what I learned on and I like it. I did purchase Dreamweaver a few years back but never really got into it. I really didn’t have the time to learn something new when I had something that was working.

And then Microsoft announced it would no longer be supporting Frontpage and they wouldn’t be replacing it with anything right away. No biggie, I just kept on using my old version. Well now that I have switched to a new computer and I don’t have an install disk with Frontpage on it, I am stuck. I pulled out Dreamweaver and am hoping to use that to update some pages on my sites. I miss Frontpage. I’m so glad I am building my new sites with WordPress. So much easier.