Do you use the social WordPress plugin called Sexy Bookmarks by Shareaholic? If you look at the bottom of this post, you’ll see that I do and have used it on this blog for a while (even before Shareaholic took them over).

Yesterday, I was working on one of my other sites OnlineCopywriting101.com and noticed that some of the pages were loading really slow and I then noticed the reason. In the task bar of my browser, it said…”Waiting for map.media6degrees.com”! Panic struck me!

Had I been hacked? Did I have malware on my site? Good grief!

So I quickly Googled the site and found some old posts where people were complaining about a plugin called AddToAny that was sending tracking data to this site. I’ve never had that plugin, but I suspected if that social plugin was doing it, maybe others are too.

Further research uncovered a new setting in the Sexy Bookmarks plugin that allows it to send tracking data to Media6Degrees. Besides the fact that it was slowing down my site, I don’t really like the idea of sending tracking data that I have no access to and can put in my privacy policy. So, I’ve turned it off on all my sites that use the plugin.

In case you want to turn it off (or on), here’s how to do it:

1. Click the Shareaholic link in your WordPress Admin Dashboard left sidebar
2. Look for the Functionality Settings section (see image below)
3. Select “No” next to “Track Performance”
4. Save Changes

How do you feel about plugins sending tracking data without letting you know?

What does it mean to SEO your blog? And why would you want to? And how can Scribe help? If you are blogging for anyone other than yourself and your best friends, then you need to do things that help Google find your website and display it to Google searchers when they type in your keywords. So let’s look at these questions:

What Does It Mean to SEO Your Blog?

SEO stands for search engine optimization and means to optimize or enhance something (a website, a post, a sales page, etc) for the search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. These search engines use techniques to evaluate content on the web to determine the ranking or placement of web pages in response to keywords typed into the search boxes.

So to SEO your blog means to add titles, tags, descriptions, content and keywords that will enhance its chances of ranking higher in the search engines.

Why Would You Want To SEO Your Blog?

Traffic is the first reason. And the second and the third! No purpose of your blog whether it be to get subscribers or get customers will be realized without traffic. In other words you need people reading your posts and one of the ways to get those people is for them to find you in their search.

If you believe that just sitting down at the keyboard and typing a clever blog post will automatically get Google to stand up and take notice, you are kidding yourself. After all, we are talking about a robot–not a magazine editor.

How Can Scribe Help?

Scribe is a WordPress plugin and an external optimizer that evaluates your posts or other content against a set of criteria that you must use in order to SEO your blog. Instead of guessing whether your blog post is constructed to perfection, Scribe will tell you in a few seconds and point out where you should improve. All this is done before you hit the publish button.

Watch this video to see Scribe in action:

Scribe is the brainchild of Brian Clark of Copyblogger, considered one of the most influential blogs in the world. Click here to grab your free SEO copywriting report.

Thesis theme customization is a hot topic among the growing crowd of enthusiastic Thesis theme for WordPress users. This WordPress theme is pretty cool right out of the box, but eventually users want to tweak the functionality or the look and feel of their website.

Since I wrote my review of Thesis theme, the DIY guys have continued to improve it. Some of the improvements in version 1.7 are:

• Thesis 1.7 is noticeably faster and more efficient
• Easy redirects for affiliates — there is now a box on every post and page to redirect that page to another URL
• Cool new Options page that allows you to save your settings to use on another installation or you can share you settings with a friend. Skin developers can use this to easily transfer their skins with customers.
• More SEO customization — robot meta tags, title tags, noindex, nofollow, noarchive at the site and individual page and post levels
• Easy access to Javascript libraries

Cool Trick #1 — Among the standard Thesis theme customization tools is the option to change the color of the navigation menu. One of the consequences of changing the text color to a lighter color or a white color is that the “Subscribe” link text at the top right of the screen disappears. Here’s some code to add to your custom CSS that will override the color for that link.

/*---Make SUBSCRIBE black color---*/
.custom .menu .rss a, .menu .rss a:hover { color: #111111 }

Of course you can change the color: setting to any color you  want.

Cool Trick #2 — Sometimes you want to turn off comments on a page. You can easily do that in the settings for that particular page with any theme, but then you are left with text on the page that says “comments are closed”. Here’s some Thesis theme customization CSS code for getting rid of that text:

/*Remove Comments Are Closed from pages */
.custom .comments_closed p { display: none; }

Both of these should be placed in the custom.css file. This file can be accessed from the Thesis menu in your WordPress dashboard. However, I suggest you save a copy of this file through your ftp program or Fireftp or your cpanel file manager just in case you mess something up and need to restore the working copy.

Thesis theme customization can add your own personal look and feel to your website or blog. I recommend buying the developers option because once you use it on one website, I guarantee you will want to use it on all your sites!

WordPress, in my opinion is the best software to use for your blog.  As with any software, you have to learn how to use WordPress properly. I especially like that you don’t have to download software to your computer which means that you can update your site content from any computer, netbook or smart phone.  It’s no wonder that it’s become so popular.

You’ve probably heard that WordPress is incredibly user friendly – and it is!  Still, most first time users find it overwhelming at first.  If you ever tried to tackle WordPress on your own and felt like giving up, you’re not at all alone.  There’s a lot to take in at first.

Being the techy type, I just learned it on my own with some help from friends who helped me when I got stuck.  The more I got to know it, the more I realized that WordPress is both simple and complex all at the same time.

If you only want to use WordPress to publish content, it’s pretty darned simple.  The visual editor operates like any basic word processor.  You enter content, press publish and voila! you’ve got a blog post for all to see.

Think of WordPress as being three things at once.

1. It’s a Content Management Script that runs on your web server, letting you enter content as easily as writing an email.
2. It’s storage for your content in a database on your web server.
3. Finally, it sports a Theme which determines the look and feel of your blog.

Entering content is easy.  The database takes care of itself.  Once you want to customize it or to alter your design and manipulate the database for special needs, you have to tap a whole other area of knowledge and that’s where many get stuck.

There’s good news and bad news for those who want to learn more about managing their WordPress site.  The good news is that there’s a huge resource of documents and a large community of developers and users who are willing to answer your questions.  The bad news is that there’s a huge resource of documents and a large community of developers and users…

The trouble for newcomers is usually that they don’t know how to ask the right questions to produce the answers they really need.  In other words, you don’t know what you don’t know! Then once you zero in on the right question, the answer can be so complicated you would swear it was written in a foreign language.

My advice?  Don’t give up.  It does get easier over time. Keep asking questions.  To get the best answers, provide as much information about your problem as you can.  If you’re persistent, you’ll find that things come easier over time.

There are two great learning tools that you will want to check out. The first one is Kelly McCausey’s WordPress Orientation sponsored by Mom’s Talk Biz. Kelly presents live web conference sessions to answer all of your questions. And once you pay the very low price for the first one, you can keep coming back for free, so as your expertise grows and you feel confident to try new things, Kelly is there to take you to the next level.

The second learning tool is a self-paced eCourse from Traci Knoppe called Beginner to Blogger in 4 Weeks. You can either take the online course or order the DVD with all the courses to play on your computer. Traci takes you step by step in video + PDF formats so you can go back and review the techniques as many times as you like.

My Recommendation:

1. Start with Traci’s course to get familiar with the basics of WordPress ==> Click Here For Beginner to Blogger
2. And then attend Kelly’s live web conferences to ask your questions and learn from other attendees questions. You will probably get some tips you haven’t even thought of ==> Click Here For WordPress Orientation

WordPress is easy, flexible, convenient and is my software of choice for blogging. Learn it from a couple of excellent teachers. You can do this!

A key component of building a subscriber list is an autoresponder. Autoresponders provide several services to automate the entire process by:

• Providing code for the sign in or opt in form and many offer templates to make the opt in form look better and improve conversions.
• Providing a double opt in process to ensure that people don’t get on your lists by accident.
• Providing a system of follow up emails that can be scheduled for delivery in a manner of your choice.
• Providing a way to send a broadcast email other than the scheduled follow up emails. Many offer a way to automate a broadcast email announcing new blog posts.
• Providing a system whereby subscribers can update their own contact information or unsubscribe without intervention on your part.
• Providing tracking information and reports to assist in improving your email marketing strategy.

One of the most popular autoresponder services and the one I use the most is Aweber. Sometime over the past week or so, Aweber’s system was hacked. Interestingly enough, I first heard about it from Darren Rowse at Problogger.com on December 20, not from Aweber themselves.

Darren suspected that something was fishy when he saw an increase in unsubscribers who complained that they were getting spam email to an email address that they only used for his emails. (As an aside, those unsubscribers have a right to be perturbed at the spam email, but not to blame Darren. He’s the last person who would compromise someone’s email! Their loss.)

One thing about Internet problems, the word spreads like wildfire. Rumors were going around on the social networks that Aweber had been breached. Darren was careful on his blog not to jump to any conclusions, but rather stated his intention to contact Aweber and report back. He even sat on the story for 18 hours hoping to get a response to post.

Shortly after posting the blog, Aweber finally did contact him and he updated his blog post with “They’re not ready to make a public statement on this but are happy for me to pass on that they’re aware of it and are “doing extensive investigations into any possible issues.”

I received notice of the problem today from Aweber that there was a security flaw in a third party application they were using. They also said that only emails were taken by the spammers and no other personal data was stolen. I immediately sent a notice to my subscribers about the situation.

Like ProBlogger, I had to think about how I felt about a company sitting on serious information involving its customers and not apologizing until they were called on the carpet for not doing so. I’m going to give them a pass on this one. I’m convinced that they were waiting to have complete information before making a public statement. The breach wasn’t as serious as it might have been and they have taken steps to avoid a repeat problem.

In the end, Aweber has a great service and continue to make enhancements to make it even better. I can make two recommendations — if you need an autoresponder, give Aweber a test drive and if you have been receiving an increase in pharmaceutical spam, don’t unsubscribe for that reason alone.

I would be interested in your take on this. Would you take your autoresponder business elsewhere?

I have been using the Thesis WordPress theme for a few months now and all I can say…It Rocks! It was a little overwhelming at first as I am not a CSS or PHP expert, but the developers have continued to improve the customization interface which sits right in the WordPress dashboard.

Right out of the box, the theme looks pretty good. In fact, I am seeing more blogs where the blogger has just left the default settings and started posting. And there is nothing wrong with starting there until you have time to start tweaking the various design options.

Version 1.6 (the latest as of this writing) is chock full of easy-to-do design & setting options such as:

• Site Layout — Select a 1, 2 or 3 column layout and the exact size of each column
• Multi-Media Box — This is a box in the sidebar. It comes with an image rotator feature where images in a folder rotate as the page changes or you can put in your own custom code for a video, opt-in box or some other image.
• Fonts & Colors — You can customize every font and color in the content, in the nav menu, in the header, headlines, bylines, sidebars, and footers. They also give you the color charts so you don’t have to figure out the color codes on your own.
• Title Tags — You can decide whether or not you want to show the site name and/or the tagline in the title.
• Feed — If you use a service like Feedburner for your RSS feed, you can easily drop in the URL of your feed.
• Nav Menu — This feature is very cool! You can include or exclude pages with simple check boxes (you don’t need to know the code of the page). You can also change the name of the page that appears in the menu bar simply by typing a new name. This does not change the permalink of the page at all. You can drag and drop the pages to reorder. And in the new version, Thesis now features automatic dropdown menus, so if you have nested pages or categories, you’ll save space and gain style points with your slick new nav menu!

For you experienced CSS folks, Thesis 1.6 now incorporates the custom.css, custom.layout and custom_function.php files right in the dashboard. It is no longer necessary to edit the raw files in your cpanel or through ftp.

If I had to point out a negative, I would say that it does not have an easy way to add header images or background images. You can certainly add images using the custom files and they do have a good tutorial on adding a background image, but it wouldn’t be easy for a newbie to accomplish this. So here is how you install a simple header image:

1. Upload the graphic you want to use to your server in the Thesis>Custom>Images folder
2. Go to the custom_functions.php file editor found in the Thesis options in the dashboard
3. Place the following code at the end replacing the urls with your own and adjusting the height & width if needed:

/* Custom Header Image */
function add_header_image () {
echo “<a href=\”http://www.yourblogurl.com/\” title=\”Your Blog Title\”>
<img src=\”THE-URL-OF-YOUR-LOGO-GOES-HERE\” alt=\”Your Blog Title\” height=\”170\” width=\”528\” style=\”border:0px\” />
</a>”;
}
add_action(‘thesis_hook_after_title’, ‘add_header_image’);

I learned some of the customization I needed from Sugarrae’s “Hooks for Dummies” site.

Sometimes a video is worth a thousand words, so here Chris Pearson of DIYThemes shows you step by step how easy it is to customize the default Thesis theme.

If you are looking for a custom theme for your blog that allows you to easily create the look and feel you really want, I recommend that you go with Thesis Theme for WordPress.

I would be interested in your experience with Thesis and any special formatting you have implemented.

This post in the New Bloggers series covers WordPress plugins. As we discussed in the other posts in this series, WordPress is the software of choice for most bloggers who want their own domain name rather than using free blog sites like Blogger. This allows you to have www.mysite.com rather than www.mysite.blogspot.com for example.

We also discussed the numerous “themes” that you can choose to make customizing the look and feel of your blog site easier. Another tool set you will want to investigate is called Plugins. This is software that is attached to WordPress that gives specific functionality such as building a Google friendly XML sitemap, optimizing your site for SEO (search engine optimization) or managing spam comments. WordPress 2.7 has a plugin installer or they can be manually installed by uploading the files to your wp-content/plugins folder on your server and then activating them within WordPress.

Here are a few I regularly use:

• Akismet. Spam comments run rampant in the blogging world. Spammers look for WordPress blogs that allow anyone to comment. That is why it is a good idea to check the setting that requires an administrator to approve comments before they are posted. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” This plugin comes with WordPress and just needs to be activated and your API key inserted.
• All In One SEO Pack. Optimizing your blog for the search engines is very important. This plugin gives you easy fill-in-the-blanks for the site and each page and post to assist with this function. If your WordPress theme has SEO built in, you may not need this plugin.
• Google XML Sitemaps. Another important part of your SEO efforts is to have a Google-friendly sitemap. This plugin does the job automatically and also submits the sitemaps to Yahoo and MSN as well.
• Share & Bookmarking Plugins. I’m sure you have noticed that most blogs have the ability for you to bookmark a post or share it with a friend or submit it to sites like Digg or Stumbleupon or even Tweet it in Twitter. I use the Add To Any plugin but there are many to choose from. If you install the Onlywire plugin on your site, you can use their automatic bookmarking service for free.

Hop over to the Warrior Forum to see a great post about popular plugins to consider. By the way, you should join this forum because there is a world of helpful information there and really smart Internet Marketers willing to help.

In this Part III of the series for new bloggers, let’s look inside WordPress 2.7 at some of the basic settings. Look for a time-saving tip at the end of this post.

• General — This section is for setting up your blog title and tagline. You will want both of these to contain the keywords you are targeting. Also set your timezone on this page.
• Writing — This section has settings to customize how you write and post your blog posts. For example, you can enlarge the editing box by setting the “size of post box” to a larger number. After you set up some categories for your posts, you can come back here and set the default category.
• Reading — This is an important section for determining which page will become your “home page”. Most blog sites’ home page contains the most recent posts, but if you have a static page you would rather use such as a sales or pre-sell page, you can select that here. You will also set the number of posts that will appear on the home or posts page and how many will be in your RSS feed.
• Discussion — This section controls how comments on your blogs are handled. You decide if comments are allowed and by whom and what information commenters must provide. I would suggest that you check the box “An administrator must always approve the comment” which will allow you to delete spam before it posts. You will also want to activate the Akismet plug-in which will look for spam comments.
• Media — Controls the default sizes of post images. You probably will not need to change these settings.
• Privacy Settings — Leave the default setting here to allow the search engines to find you.
• Permalinks — This is an important section to change. This controls the URL of each post. The default is ugly like http://yoursite.com/?p=5. Instead select the custom structure box and use /%category%/%postname%/ which will produce or use /%postname%/ which will result in .
• Miscellaneous — You probably can keep the default for this section.

Time Saver: If you want a very easy 3-step installation of a WordPress blog fully configured and customized, my friend Alex Sysoef has a very simple and free system that will get you up and running in minutes. I recommend you check out Expert WordPress.

In the next blog, I’ll look at some cool WordPress plug-ins.

If you are brand new, I’m starting a series of blogs to help you get up and running with your own website. I’m assuming you have started with a free site like Blogger.com or WordPress.com and want to branch out on your own domain.

Step 1. Get your own domain name. If you started with Blogger, your blog’s web address is mysite.blogspot.com. If you want to jump out of the nest, you need to register mysite.com. The question is, does someone else already have that name? Simply browse to GoDaddy.com and type in your desired name in the search box to see if it is taken. If not, then great, grab it. If someone has it already, you have several options. Maybe the .net version is available or the name with a hyphen might work such as my-site.com. Keep working with the variations until you get one you like that is available. At GoDaddy, domain registration runs around $10 for a year.

Step 2. Find a host. Your website needs to reside on someone’s server. I like to host my website on a different website than the one who registers my domain name. The terms of service for some registrar/hosting companies suggest that if the company is the registrar as well as the hosting company, they may own your content. I recommend Hostgator because you can host several websites on one account. If you plan on having more than one website, start with the Baby account.

Step 3. Assign your DNS servers. Once you get your hosting account, they will provide the DNS or nameserver account names. If you got your domain name at GoDaddy, after logging in to your account, browse to the Domain Manager where you will see all your domain names listed. Click on the desired name and then click the Nameserver icon. Enter the nameservers provided by the hosting company. This information redirects browsers to your hosting company where your website is residing.

Now you are ready to start your blog. I’ll cover WordPress, the most popular blogging software, in the next blog.