Your WordPress Video Tutorials

I am very excited today because I have just come across something that quite blew me away, it is so fantastic! It is called WordPress Classroom 2.o. I absolutely wanted to see what it is all about, because I love WordPress and building blogs and websites with it, I think it’s the coolest blogging (and website) platform out there. So I signed up and got hooked!

I remember what a hard time I had when I wanted to learn the “How to” of WordPress, and all the associated options with it. There is a lot to learn, and it is just so much easier if you have a good guide that shows you how to do it. And that’s exactly what WordPress Classroom 2.o does. A pretty well known guy (in the Internet Marketing world, anyway named Matthew Wolfe created it, and the best part is it is all VIDEOS!!! – I personally learn a lot better if I can follow a video rather than just writing! His WordPress Classroom 2.o is packed with clever videos doing the “show all” and “tell all” of WordPress. You will really be a pro after going through all his stuff!

Matthew is just such a nice guy, because he created these really cool instructional videos that teach you how to set up your own blogging business and now he is giving them away for free!! There are something like 15 videos that walk you through the whole thing step by step.

I only had to look at 2 of his free videos and already learned something really cool I had no idea about – it’s about hiding affiliate links (if you click on that, you will get to my “old” post about hiding affiliate links; that’s the hard way of doing it). Matthew has shown me something so simple in his tutorials, it’s crazy. No more stuffing around with .php files and FTP! — I won’t tell you what it is, that would somewhat spoil it for you .

If you have followed me for a while, you should know that I never recommend anything if I am not convinced it’s really good. After all, I have been burnt so many times, and I don’t want anybody else to go through what I did.

So, trust me,  if you really are serious about making money with WordPress blogs and websites, then head over to WordPress Classroom 2.0 and grab the free videos before Matthew decides to pull them down!

Never mind, I still want you to have this post, I might just try and leave out the screen shots I did – you will still be able to follow, trust me. So here it goes:

Have you ever wondered how to create a flash looking banner or button to advertise your website? I certainly did, and a little while ago I actually found out, from one of my fellow webmasters Maya, who runs a very successful blog for beach lovers called Completely Coastal. I came across her blog searching for possible sites for a link exchange to my beach site. And there it was, in her sidebar on the right hand side – a great button to advertise your site, even with a copy-and-paste html code for anybody to grab it and display it on their site! Of course I needed to know how she did it. And Maya was so nice to explain it to me.

One thing I changed in her instructions, though – she said she created the button with Paint.net, and I tried that, but I have to say I found the program too complicated for me, I just couldn’t work it out. (Blonde? )

The software I have been using to create my banner is called XHeader, and it is probably one of the best free website tools I have downloaded so far. It is absolutely free and so easy to use, it’s not funny.   In fact, all the header graphics for this site and for my site Healthy Diet Weight Loss have been created with XHeader. It really comes in handy for all sorts of graphics for your site.

So after Maya explained to me how to create a banner or button for my sites to advertise them, I played around with XHeader for a while to create a nice 125×125 graphic. If you have a look at my website Lighthouse Home Decor

(note: this is my Beach Decor website, and I am starting to build backlinks to some of the inner pages of it now to get the pages ranked in the search engines, too, not just the home page, that’s why I use another one of my keyword phrases “Lighthouse Home Decor”; this will over time give me more visitors to the site through my other keywords, too),

you will notice the new “button to grab” on the left hand sidebar towards the bottom. This is exactly what Maya has on her site, too, and that’s what I want to show you. You can create all sorts of sizes of banners or logos with XHeader.

When you create a button or banner for your site, I believe it is important that you keep it in line with the theme of your site, like colors, pictures, etc. What I have done for my Lighthouse Home Decor site is just grab a piece of the site graphics and incorporated it into the button (you find the crab and the thong at the bottom of the site )

So, here is what you do:

1. Download your free software XHeader and install it on your computer.
2. Have a good play with the software – you can’t do anything wrong! Here is what I usually do:

• Click on “new”

• Click “Create a blank header”

• Enter the size of your graphic. Now, the square little button is 125 x 125 pixels. But you could really make it any size you want.

And then just start having a go at creating a nice button! I usually start by importing an image, then adding text and transparency etc.

Once  you have created your masterpiece, just save it as .jpg in a location of your choice. (I always go for “superb” size).

Once you have done that, you need to upload the image to your website. I have a self-hosted WordPress blog, so I uploaded it (from the folder I had saved it to) via my free FTP program FileZilla to my website (wp-admin/images/YourImageTitle.jpg). You need to do that because you will need an URL for the image.

TIP: If you do not know much about file transfers via FTP, there is another solution: Photobucket, a free image hosting site. Just become a member of photobucket, and you can upload any number of pictures or graphics from your computer to your account in photobucket, and each of the photos will then have an URL for you to use.

So, once your image is uploaded to your website (or Photobucket) and you know the URL, here is the magic:

To display the button on your site, including the Text window with html code for other people to “grab it”, you need to use this code:

<img alt=”Your keywords for your site” src=”the URL of your Image“/><br>
<textarea style=”width: 125px; height: 125px” name=”textfield”><a href=”The URL of your Website” target=”_blank” title=”The Title of your website“><img border=”0″ src=”the URL of your Image“/></a></textarea>

The red colored text is what you will have to fill in with your details. Voila!!! Isn’t that cool??? I thought so.

…I am going to upload my new button for this site straight after doing this post, so check out my sidebar and let me know what you think!! And if you like, you can also grab my new button and put it on your site…

Thanks, Maya, for your very much appreciated help!

I would love to hear back from all of you who try this out, to see how you go. And of course, if you create a banner or button for your website or blog like I have done with this method, let me and my readers know and leave us a link to your site so we can check it out!

Anyway, there I was, not looking to create favicon icons ’cause I didn’t know them, and then I stumbled across this blog post on 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website (great site, btw, you should bookmark it). And there, as the first item to do/check for your site was – to create a favicon! Favicons help brand your website, and your visitors will be able to visually pick out your site amongst others much easier.

Well, I obviously could not resist temptation and start looking around for everything favicon after I now knew what these little pictures were called, and as you might see, – I even created one myself!

What is a favicon?

“A favicon (short for favorite icon, sometimes understood as favorites icon), also known as a website icon, shortcut icon, url icon, or bookmark icon is a 16×16 pixel square icon associated with a particular website or webpage. A web designer can create such an icon and install it into a website (or webpage) by several means, and most graphical web browsers will then make use of it. Browsers that provide favicon support typically display a page’s favicon in the browser’s Address bar and next to the page’s name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers that support a tabbed document interface typically show a page’s favicon next to the page’s title.” Wikipedia

So here is how it goes (even for non-techies!):

1. There are quite a few sites out there which let you create favicon icons for free; you can choose any one of them. I created mine through http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/ You can browse your computer for the image you want to use (I first copied my header picture into my free photobucket album and then cropped it, and saved it back on my computer). Then click on “Generate FavIcon.ico”. Pretty self-explanatory, really!
   

   create favicon

   This will create your first favicon.

2. Once created, you will be on a page where you can either download your favicon straight away, or customize it first; you can also add more favicons if you are not happy with the supplied favicon preview (still or animated)
   

   create favicon

   So have a bit of a play around until you come up with one you like!

3. Once you have created a favicon you are happy with, click on “Download FavIcon Package” to download it to your computer. Unzip it. There are quite good instructions on the website as to how to proceed from here, but I am going to go through it anyway.
4. When you have unzipped the Package, you should have an “animated favicon” and a “favicon” picture plus the “Read me” text on your computer. It can’t hurt to read through the “Read me” text.
5. I would only upload the favicon you are going to use to your website. I have chosen the normal “favicon”, not the animated one. So you need to log into your FTP program (I am using FileZilla) and upload your favicon to your webspace. All you have to do is locate the favicon on your computer and then drag and drop it into the public_html folder of your webspace:
6. In the instructions it reads now “Add following HTML tags to your web page after the <head> tag but before the </head> tag:“

• if you have a WordPress site, log into your wp-admin and go to “Appearance” and “Theme Editor” (I am in WP Version 2.7, previous versions it would be “Design” and “Editor” I think). You will find your <head> </head> tags in the theme file called header.php. I would go ahead and add the provided HTML tags straight after the <head> tag.
• if you do not have a WordPress site, you need to open your website with your HTML Editor (I use Kompozer) and do the same.
• Make sure you distinguish between the favicon.ico and the animated_favicon1.gif:
  • if you use the favicon.ico, only add it’s respective HTML tags to your web page ( <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”favicon.ico”> )
  • if you use the animated_favicon.gif, add it’s respective HTML tags to your web page ( <link rel=”icon” type=”image/gif” href=”animated_favicon1.gif”>)

There you have it – you have just created a favicon for your website! You have to be a bit patient though – what threw me after I had created mine was that it didn’t appear straight away. So I thought I had done something wrong and started looking for answers. But I had to find out that it sometimes can take up to 24 hours for the favicon to appear. So be patient, and your favicon should show up in your browser soon!

This is a post that has been inspired by my fellow internet marketer friend Gary Packer (Hi Gary!), who has helped me out a couple of times already when I was faced with a technical challenge on the way. He also helped me with the task of hiding my affiliate links in my ebook (which is just about finished!!! ). What he has shown me works fantastic to hide any affiliate link anywhere – but you need to have your own self hosted blog or website to do it. Thanks for all your help, Gary!

Like many of us, I was faced with the problem of ugly looking affiliate links that everybody could see through straight away, and as you probably know, plain old ugly affiliate links will not be as successful in converting into dollars as the one’s that are more cleverly disguised.

The question was: How could I hide affiliate links so that they still redirected to my affiliate product, but looked a lot more appealing?

What I have used for most of the time over the past year is a free service called TiniURL to hide affiliate links when doing blog posts, or email promotions, or commenting on other blogs, or in forums, social networking sites…. TinyURL is actually quite a good service, the problem is though that it still doesn’t look very pretty, and people know over time that the “tiniurl” is hiding an affiliate link. Especially in the Internet Marketing niche!

So I was keen to find another way of hiding my affiliate links. And that’s what I found when I came across Gary Packer’s Blog! I noticed that his links looked rather like they were part of his blog – very clever! He had created a “Recommends” folder and within that just recommended the products he thought worth promoting. The affiliate links end up looking like this: http://www.petra-weiss.com/recommends/johnthornhillmasterclass.php

Pretty good, I thought! So I had to ask him how he did it (because I am still a learner regarding all this “stuff”). And here it is:

1. First you have to create a “Recommends” folder for you blog or website on your computer. Like this:
2. Within that “Recommends” folder, you need to open up a notepad and copy this code into it I called my notepad “Code for Recommends”. Once you have done that, you are all set!
3. Every time you want to promote an affiliate link now, the first thing you have to do is put the affiliate URL in where it says “youraffiliatelinkhere.com” (it is usually a www. address). Like this (I had to block out the nitty gritty of my affiliate link…):
4. Then you have to save this code as a php file. To do this, click on “File” – “Save As…” and you will see the window below pop up. You now need to name the File what you want to name it – so if I want to promote Wealthy Affiliate, I name it “WealthyAffiliate.php”. Please be aware that upper and lower case DO matter, so if you want to use the link later on your site or anywhere else to promote, you need to make sure to display it exactly like you named it, including upper and lower case. It is also extremely important to name the file “.php” at the end, otherwise this whole thing won’t work. It is also important to save it as “All Files”, or if you have the option in your dropdown menu as “php file/document” or something (I only had “Text Documents” or “All Files” to choose from). It won’t work otherwise.
5. Next you will have to head over to your FTP Program and connect to your webspace (that’s why I said you have to have a self-hosted blog or website). I have to assume that you have done this before and hopefully know your way around in there a little What you have to do is create a “Recommends” folder in your public_html folder for your blog/site. Now, I am with FileZilla, so what I explain here is done within FileZilla. You might have a different File Transfer Program (FTP), but they all work very similar once in. – So when you have logged into your webspace, click on “public_html”. Then right click on the empty folder to create a “new directory”. Name that new directory “recommends”, then click on “OK”. Just like I do here:Yeah, you have got a recommends folder!
6. All that’s left to do now is to upload your previously created php-file to your new “recommends” folder in your webspace. As you are in the FTP program already, this is easy. Find the “Recommends” folder on your computer (within FileZilla, your computer files will be on the left and your webspace on the right. Some FTP programs have it the other way around). Once you have located it, click on it until you find the php-file you created earlier. Mine is the “WealthyAffiliate.php” file. So I left click on my “WealthyAffiliate.php” file and then drag it to the “recommends” folder in my webspace and drop it in there! DONE!
7. So go ahead and test it! Your new hidden affiliate link should read like this (just on your blog’s URL, of course!): http://www.petra-weiss.com/recommends/WealthyAffiliate.php

I hope you have had success with it! Once you have done it a few times, it will be a lot easier. It sounds very complicated, but is not really so. It’s just something that is quite hard to put down on paper (like so many things having to do with the technical side of websites!!!)

And the good thing is, you will not have to create a “recommends” folder in your webspace every single time, that is something that gets done only the first time you set it up. Then it’s there, and all you have to do is create your php file and upload it to the existing “recommends” folder on your webspace.

There you have it – how to hide affiliate links like the pros!

We all know that “the money is in the list”, so everybody is trying to build a list of buyers/subscribers by putting a sign up box on their blog or offering a free product or something. So everybody is out trying to collect as many subscribers as possible, because the longer the list, the better the profits!

Now, I am still on the “subscriber” side of the game, as I have not got my own list yet (I have started trying, though, as you can see there is a “Subscribe to this blog” box on my blog ). What I want to talk about here comes from my experience as a busy subscriber.

You have to know, and I am sure many will agree with me here, if you start out in Internet Marketing, there are so many programs and offers out there, and you just try to get the most info together in the shortest amount of time. So what I did is every time I saw something on the net which I thought worthy, I subscribed to it. My inbox started filling up quite rapidly with all these emails from all these lists I was subscribed to!

And you know what has happened? Many of the emails I get from lists I subscribed to state only the name of the person who is behind the list. There is NOTHING there telling me any more where this subscription originated from! So I get so many emails from “some name” like “Mike” or “Sean ThisandThat”, and I wonder – what do these guys have to tell me? What was the reason I subscribed to them in the first place? Where did I sign up?

So what I have started doing is deleting ALL the subscriptions which I cannot work out any more where they came from. Period.

It is so easy to lose track. I think every marketer who wants to keep people on their list needs to make sure that any emails they send state the origin of the subscription. For example, when somebody will subscribe to my blog (want to be my first subscriber??? ), any emails they will get will state the following “From”:

Petra [petra-weiss.com]

So if they want to know where they subscribed, they can just look it up again! Simple!

It is SO easy to do, but so many marketers don’t do it, and I am pretty sure there are many subscribers out there like me who further down the track think “What is this? Who is this guy?” and simply go and delete the subscription.

I would like to hear some opinions on this, see whether there are more people out there thinking like this, or whether I am totally wrong!