WordPress Tip of the Day #0034

Title: Get advertisers for your Blog!

There are several ways to get advertising for your blog, amongst the most popular ways are paid to click ads like Google Adsense, and affiliate links like Commission Junction. The reason they are popular is because they are easy to get access to and even easier to set up.

Usually they only work good if you have a decent amount of traffic, which is the norm for most of all advertising online or even offline like on TV, or in newspapers and magazines.

That’s all fine and dandy if you have or are planning on having a huge amount of traffic, but what if your blog is defined to a smaller audience?

Well there’s a solution for that, and that is to get what is referred to as sponsors, which is basically someone that will pay you a fixed rate for either a post on your blog, or an ad spot.

This solution obviously pays more if you have more traffic like the others, but in this case it could allow you to get more money for your smaller traffic site. What you want to look for are companies that deal with the same type of subject as your website or that will appeal to your readers or visitors.

The best way to do this is to seek out websites or companies, online or off, that could be of interest and then you can e-mail, mail or fax them a letter with your advertising offer.

Even better if you have the time and desire would be to call or meet them in person to set up the deal, a lot of people are afraid to do this, but there are tons of smaller companies out there that are looking to place ads but don’t know where to do so.

This works specially well if you have a website aimed at a local area, you can go see the local merchants with your offers, chance are you’ll find a few willing to give you a shot.

WordPress Tip of the Day #0033

Title: Make a Checklist

I’m a strong believer in making checklists, and I find it’s one of the best ways to organize your time, and make sure you don’t forget to do anything. I use it to effectively manage several different blogs, as with many bloggers who managed and write on several different blogs know, sometimes it’s not to hard to ignore a blog for a while, well this makes sures that I don’t.

Here’s an older checklist that I based my current one one, it’s from http://max.limpag.com:

It’s important to make it as quick to use as possible, you don’t want to spend more time figuring out your checklist or filling it out than actually doing the tasks listed.

WordPress Tip of the Day #0032

Title: 5 Security Musts

We have had our issues with WordPress security back in Fall 2009 when our website got hacked, and since then we have tightened things up a little, I’m sure we are still vulnerable, as are most websites, but we aren’t making it easy for anyone.

Here are five things that you should always keep in mind, thanks to Mashable for their post about this.

1. Always do the Upgrades. (This is what got use hacked last time)

2. Use good passwords and change them often.

3. Use secret keys in your WP-Config file.

4. Keep your Htaccess file in check.

5. Know your file permissions.

For more information on each of these check out the original post at Mashable.