You will have gathered by now I am an enthusiast for Semiologic Pro. Particularly as it's author, Denis de Bernardy, clearly knows what he is talking about not only about blog software but also about how to use it for SEO purposes.
I have criticised him in the past for not providing enough guidance to users on how to extract the maximum benefit from his technical efforts so I was interested to see that he has recently been 'giving some love' as he puts it to the help areas of his web site to advise users how to make best use of the blogging phenomenon.
You can find his thoughts on the subject at: http://www.semiologic.com/resources/blogging/ and my own thoughts on the subject on my Blogging page.
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For those using the vanilla flavour of free Wordpress it is worth remembering that no website is ever completely safe from the unwanted attentions of those who have nothing better to do than try to screw up other people's hard work.
A colleague of mine in the Smart Marketing Coaching Club recently reported an email he received from Google telling him of problems on one of his blogs. You can read his story and about the solution on his blog here.
There is a secondary word of warning to build in to this story. His first concern when he received the email from Google was his suspicion that it was not genuine – and quite rightly too. This is very similar to those infamous phishing emails asking you to log in to your bank account or Paypal in order to verify your details. Don't do it – no reputable financial institution will ever ask you to log in by any other means than through your normal login. In this case it turned out to be legitimate but it was worth checking in any event.
So the story is to keep your Wordpress blog up to date with every update just as soon as they become available on the Wordpress site.
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In my last post I talked about my decision to convert this site to a Wordpress blog in order to take advantage of the ability to add and edit content from anywhere that I could log in to the web, internet cafe's, friends houses even colleague's workstations.
But although I now had maybe 80% of advantages I was still struggling with 20% technical issues.
So where did that take me? The solution to the last 20% of my 80/20 problem I stumbled across when browsing the web – as happens so often. I was looking at a technique for affiliate marketing and found myself on an attractive looking site that I realised was a blog. I looked down to the bottom of the page among the small print (always a good place to go when you are researching) and I found a reference to Semiologic and from there I found Semiologic Pro.
That's a rather long story to tell you how I came to be an enthusiast for the Semiologic Pro Wordpress package. Now I had best tell you what it is.
Wordpress blogs can be structured in different ways and you can choose these 'templates' from many hundreds possibly even thousands available from various sources. (Put 'free wordpress template' into Google then stand well back). Semilogic is a Wordpress template but it also has a whole bunch of plugins already incorporated, tweaked and finessed so that they all work out of the box. So you are actually killing several birds with one stone.
Firstly, you do not have to worry about building your site as everything works out of the box.
Secondly, as a consequence of not wasting your time on technical issues you can devote the majority of your time to marketing – which is the only way you can make money.
Thirdly, the plug-ins used are the most effective ones for the purpose so you don't have to waste time evaluating different plugins that might do the same job. Granted you have to put a degree of faith in the author, Denis de Bernardy, but everything you see and hear about internet marketing is about 'emulating' those who are already successful and from my experience Denis certainly knows what he is about.
While the advice for all internet marketers is pretty well always; 'Start a blog', your first blog is not the issue. The simplest solution for your first blog is to use blogger.com which is absolutely free – but rather limited for all sorts of reasons. The problem arises when you realise the advantages of Wordpress as a blogging tool and that Wordpress is so versatile that you can use it for all sorts of purposes. That's when you start putting up many blogs.
Everything is now working fine – until Wordpress is updated – and you have to go back and update all the software on all your blog sites – and hope and pray that all the plugins continue to work with the new version.
Now I liked Semiologic before, but the recent upgrade to version 5.x really seals the deal for me. Your subscripton now buys you an API key. Don't bother if you don't understand that, nor do I. It just means a string of numbers/letters that you put into your blog. This allows your blog to communicate directly with Semiologic servers so that when either Wordpress OR Semiologic is updated you just log into your blog, hit the Semiologic Update Wizard and Semiologic will update everything required while you make another coffee. Don't I just love it!
Now comes the bad news. As always, you get what you pay for and Semiologic Pro costs $295 for 12 months then $175 per year renewal. That might sound expensive until you calculate what your time is worth.
Let's say if you do not get your internet business of the ground within 2 years then you really need to be thinking if you are doing the right things. So 2 years is going to cost you $470 divided by 104 weeks = $4.50 per week. Then ask yourself how much of your time does $4.50 buy? If you are spending more time than that on fixing your websites and blogs then Semiologic is the blogging tool for you.
If you would like to read more about blogging and various tools then go to my page on blogging.
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If you have been here before you might remember that this site used to have a static front page like many websites although it is, in fact, a Wordpress blog. You can still see that page under 'The Internet Marketing Jungle' under 'Discover more..' in the right sidebar – it just no longer fronts up the site because my objectives have changed.
This was a reflection of the original purpose of the site which was very simply for my personal use to collect useful information relating to internet marketing in one place that I could access from anywhere – even if I was not lugging my laptop with me (whoever invented the phrase 'mobile computing' still has a lot to learn!)
After a while I realised that I was referring my friends and colleagues to the site so they could access useful information or software that I had accumulated and I was losing the potential of making affiliate sales – so I started methodically converting the links to affiliate links and most importantly I converted it from a standard html coded site to a Wordpress blog.
This was at about the stage when I realised just how futile and timewasting it is to struggle with technical issues when you are not a technician. A blog, especially Wordpress which has become the 'de facto' standard, dispenses with the majority of tech problems and made it easier for me to add or edit content directly and from anywhere I could access the web without having to worry about webmasters and/or the necessity to have an html editor available. So I converted the site to a Wordpress blog.
That's not to say that it all went swimmingly. I soon found that Wordpress can have it's own technical problems and although it is written as open source software one of the results of that is that there are occasions where the programmers perception of the world is not quite the same as that of the innocent user. Nor, despite it being open source with a supposedly common core, do all of the plug-ins that provide the different types of functionality necessarily work seamlessly together without some technical massaging by someone who knows what they are doing.
So now I had my content on a Wordpress blog but being a non-techie I was still struggling with some aspects of Wordpress. I'll bring you up to speed on the solution in my next post.
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