All blogs end up with broken links eventually. The older your blog is, the more likely it will have a broken link somewhere–in a comment, in a redirect, in an affiliate link or something else. The link could have been a good one when it was created and then the referenced site or webpage could have moved or the domain name might have expired.

Whatever the reason, it is important to keep broken links cleaned up not only for your readers, but for the search engines as well. If you have been blogging for a while and have hundreds or even thousands of links within your blog posts, comments, images and pages, you have to have a mechanism to uncover broken links.

Two Ways to Find and Fix Broken Links

Google Webmaster Tools — Since broken links are a problem when Google or other search engines “crawl” your site, Webmaster Tools provides a list of broken links. First create a Webmaster Tools account with Google if you don’t already have one. Next add your site and follow the instructions to verify it. Google will need time to crawl your site and index your pages and if it finds broken links, they will be listed under Health>Crawl Errors. Once you have fixed them, mark them as fixed and they will be removed from the list. If they have not really been fixed, they will show up again next time Google crawls the pages containing the links in question.

Broken Link Checker Plugin — Another easy way to find and fix broken links is with the Broken Link Checker plugin. This is a free plugin and can be downloaded and installed from the Plugins section within WordPress or downloaded from the WordPress.org directory.

Once the plugin is installed and activated, you’ll find the options under Settings>Link Checker

Most of the default settings will probably work fine, but there are several options you can tweak such as how often to check existing links. New links will be checked right away. You have the option to make the broken links look different and to stop the search engines from following the broken links.

You can choose the time limit for determining a broken link. For example if you set the limit to 30 seconds, then a link will be considered broken if the page takes more than 30 seconds to load.

Once the plugin is activated, it will begin looking for links. Depending on the size of your blog, this could take an hour to complete. Broken links will show up in a new tab under Tools called Broken Links. You’ll see a number of broken links in the sidebar menu (similar to Comments or Updates).

I recommend that you select the option to have a report emailed to you. That makes it very easy to know when corrections are necessary.

The Broken Links tab will list the link, the problem encountered and which page on which the link is located. You can actually take some corrective action directly from this tab. NOTE: I encountered a problem once using the bulk action feature, so now I only make corrections one at a time. You might want to make sure you have a recent backup before correcting links from the Broken Links tab.

From this tab you can:

• Edit the URL — if, for example, you had used a raw affiliate link that is no longer valid, you could replace it with a redirected link.
• Unlink — this is handy for broken links in comments where you could leave the text, but simply remove the link behind the text.
• Not Broken — if you know for sure that the link is not broken, you can mark it as such. Perhaps the page happened to take longer to load when the link was checked.

Broken links need to be corrected to eliminate search engine crawl errors and to avoid sending your readers down a dead end alley. I recommend using both Webmaster Tools and the Broken Link Checker plugin.

When you publish a new post or page on your blog, you definitely want the world to know about it. WordPress has a built in notification tool in the “Reading” settings that “pings” blog servers automatically when you publish or update a page or post. On the surface that seems like a really good thing — and it is except for the problem of excessive pinging.

Before we get to the problem, let’s understand what pinging is and why it benefits you. According to Wikipedia:

In blogging, ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent to one or more “ping servers” which can then generate a list of blogs that have new material.

Think of it as a robocall where your blog website calls up other servers and says, “hey, I just published a new blog post” and they send the news out to people and web robots who monitor those servers for new content.

Why is that a good thing? Because you get…

• listed in directories
• backlinks
• indexed by search engines
• your blog added to blogrolling scripts

So What’s the Problem?

As with any good thing on the web, there are people who want to take advantage and they “spam” the pinging services. If a service determines that they are being spammed, they block sites which are engaging in excessive pinging. For the rest of us who are trying  to be good netizens, we could unknowingly be labeled as a spammer.

Why? WordPress explains about this tool, “WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post.” Yes. Even if you update a post! That’s not good.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution. Just install the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. This plugin is free if you are willing to optin to their list. I prefer this solution over the one from cbNet because it cleans up the logs automatically and they keep up with the active pinging service list.

Here are the steps to install and configure MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer:

• Go to MaxBlogPress to download the zip file and save it to your computer
• From the plugins area of your WordPress dashboard, select Add New Plugin
• Select upload, browse to the saved zip file, install and activate
• You’ll find the options under the Settings area
• Click the link for the latest pinging services list, copy the list and paste it into the “URIs to Ping” box.
• Click “More Options” and check the box to avoid excessive pinging within a certain time frame. Set the “Clear Log” timing.

Once that’s done, you don’t really need to think about it again. Just go ahead blogging and editing confident that you are not ticking off the pinging services and instead getting all the benefits.

When you start up a new blog, there are several plugins which should be installed right away. One of those is Login Lockdown which you can download free within the Plugins area of your WordPress dashboard or from the WordPress plugin directory. I count this one as essential because it is critical to have security on your website.

Bad people will absolutely try to hack into your site! I used to think that since I was not one of those blogs with thousands of daily visitors that I would fly under the radar, but not so. This plugin has locked people out.

I don’t know who they are or what they would have done if they had gotten in, but I’m sure they were up to no good!

It costs a lot of money to have a hacked website cleaned up so it is definitely worth your while to take all the security measures you can to avoid having to hire the hacker attacker.

Login Lockdown is super easy to install and the default settings will work just fine but I’ll go through them in case you want to change any of the settings. Just follow these 3 easy steps:

• Go to the plugins section of your dashboard; Add New; Search “Login Lockdown” and it will be the first one in the list; Click Install
• Activate the plugin
• Login Lockdown can be found in the Settings Menu of your dashboard. Below is an explanation of what you can change but I usually just keep the default settings.

Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery.

Another feature that I like is the notification on the login screen that the form is protected by Login Lockdown. I think that cuts down on people even starting to try to break in.

Once you have the IP address of someone who tries repeatedly to hack into your dashboard, you can block that IP address permanently from your entire site.

Another measure I’ve taken is to have a service called Sucuri scan my sites looking for trouble. Sucuri’s scans will detect whether your site has been blacklisted, contains malware, malicious javascript or iframes, suspicious redirections or spam.

Please take website security serious and don’t think that just because you are new or have little traffic, that you are immune from hackers. A simple step like installing Login Lockdown can save tons of grief later.

Getting your WordPress blog up and running is relatively easy but where many people get bogged down is choosing a theme. There are thousands of free themes to choose from so why do you need a premium theme?

With premium themes, not only do you – usually – get a higher-quality, better written theme, but they also come with support you won’t find in the free versions. User forums, help desks, and extensive documentation are all a part of the premium theme landscape, where with free themes, you’re most likely on your own if you run into a problem.

With all the free themes available, you might be asking yourself, why would I pay $25 or $50 or even $100 on a so-called premium theme? Certainly there are some beautifully designed free themes available, and with a little knowledge of CSS, even a beginner can tweak a theme to make it unique.

But free themes aren’t really free…

They all have a price tag; it just isn’t expressed in dollars and cents. Instead, the price of a free theme is in backlinks.

Backlinks are critical to SEO (search engine optimization) and when you see WordPress themes offered for free, they almost always contain links in the footer that you are required – according to the license – to keep. Web designers looking to build their portfolio and drive traffic to their site might build a theme and offer it for free, provided you keep the link back to their site intact. That’s a pretty reasonable price to pay if the theme fits with your site.

But beware of who is behind the free theme. It might not be a friendly web designer. It might be an unscrupulous spammer trying to link to sites you wouldn’t want to visit if you know what I mean! Google might even blacklist you and that would be a terrible cost to pay.

WordPress is constantly updating and your free theme (or even some inexpensive paid themes) can have a conflict resulting in parts that don’t work or don’t look right. If the developer of the theme is no longer around, you are pretty much out of luck unless you want to pay someone to fix it for you.

My favorite premium themes…

are developed by Studio Press. They have a core theme framework called Genesis. Think of a framework as being the part of your house behind the walls–the studs, pipes, insulation, etc. Then they have “child” themes that add the design or the look and feel of the site like furniture, paint, draperies, flooring, etc.

Most of the child themes require some knowledge of theme coding (css, functions) if you want to change them. It’s not hard and searching their support forum and tutorials will usually reveal the answer. If getting your hands dirty in the code is something you avoid like the plague, then choose a child theme that matches the look and feel you want or choose one like Prose which has a design admin area within WordPress. It looks kind of plain on their website, but you can do a lot with it. For example author, Cindy Bradford’s blog is using the Prose theme.

Another bonus of working with Studio Press themes is that they have a variety of plugins available to make customizing your site easier. You’ll find custom sliders, social media plugins, custom sidebars and more. A list of the Studio Press plugins is on their website. No other premium theme has developed plugins to enhance user experience, so this is definitely a selling point.

When you purchase Genesis and a child theme, you can use it on as many websites as you want. You can even sell the site to someone else. The buyer, however, will need their own license if they want support in the future. Downloads for Genesis and all child themes are accessed inside the support forum which is available only for license holders.

If you find yourself starting to build websites for others, you’ll probably want to get their Pro Plus All-Theme package which includes all the child themes they develop now and in the future. I am so glad that I did this in the beginning as I feel free to choose whichever child theme fits my purpose without worrying about extra cost.

Another cool feature of the Studio Press website is the Showcase of sites where you can browse through pages and pages of sites built on the Genesis framework. If a site used a child theme, it will be identified. This showcase gives you great ideas for your own site.

You can see a mini-showcase of websites that I’ve built for myself and clients at Christine Cobb Marketing, many of which were built on the Genesis framework. If you are thinking about using Studio Press and have questions, please ask them in the comments section or fill out my contact form. I’m glad to help.

You may have heard that membership sites are one of the best online business models that you can use. So you may be wondering if you should create a membership site and if you have the know-how to pull it off. Read on for 5 great benefits of this model to consider and a solution for making the process much easier:

• Monthly recurring income

  This has to be the number one benefit of starting a membership site. When you have 100, 200 or even 500 members paying you on a monthly basis for your information, that’s pretty cool. Imagine the possibilities! At just $10 per month, you could be looking at  $5,000 a month with 500 members.  The question to consider is: Do you have enough content to keep 500 people or more interested and engaged to continue their membership?

• Affiliates promoting for you

  Affiliates love membership sites. Think about it. If you, as an affiliate, have the choice between recurring monthly income and a one-time ebook sale in the same niche, you’d most likely choose the membership site all day long. The question to consider is: Do you have an affiliate program that makes it easy to integrate with your membership site software?

• Dominate your niche

  When you create a membership site, you have a platform to totally dominate your niche. Within the gates of your membership site, you can offer a wide variety of content like articles, short reports, teleconferences, videos, webinars, podcasts, ecourses and more.  There’s no faster way to brand yourself as an expert within your niche than by creating a membership site. The question to consider is: Do you have the expertise or access to the expertise to produce high quality content on a regular basis?

• Backend sales opportunities

  The income from a membership site doesn’t stop with the monthly membership fees. There are plenty of opportunities to make additional income from your site. You can sell private tutoring, advanced products and platinum memberships. Once your membership site grows sufficiently, advertisers will be interested in paying you to place their ads on your site. The question to consider is: Do you have a plan to leverage the membership site content into other products?

• It’s never been easier!

  It used to be that a web programmer was needed to create a membership site. Today with WordPress and membership site scripts like Digital Access Pass, for example, you can have a site up and running in a few hours. The question to consider is: Will the prospect of making steady monthly income in the future allow you to invest a few dollars in the tools that will make it all happen?

I have built several membership sites for myself and others and have discovered along the way, the best and easiest tools to use. I have recently launched a new course that will show you step by step how to create a membership site. It’s called “Deliver Digital Coaching — The Secret to Delivering Your Expertise to Thousands“. You’ll have illustrated ebooks as well as screencast videos to look over my shoulder as I show you everything from how to install the best software to how to run a successful affiliate program.

If you answered yes to the questions above and the thought of steady monthly income appeals to you, then you should create a membership site. Take a look at Deliver Digital Coaching to make the whole process easier!

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?