WordPress and Semiologic

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.