• BP Group Hierarchy: ” group creators to place a new group under an existing group. There is currently no limit to the depth of the group hierarchy.”
• BuddyPress Group Email Subscription:” allows people to receive email notifications of group activity, especially forum posts. Weekly or daily digests available. Each user can choose how they want to subscribe to their groups. “
• BP Group Management:  ”..site admins can manage BP group membership by banning, unbanning, promoting and demoting current members of any group, adding members to any group, and deleting groups.”
• BuddyPress External Group Blogs:  ”Give group creators and administrators on your BuddyPress install the ability to attach external blog RSS feeds to groups. Blog posts will appear within the activity stream for the group. New posts will automatically be pulled every hour, or every 30 minutes if someone specifically visits a group page.”

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I get  pretty ecstatic when I find a open source program that is versatile and user friendly.  So I while exploring options for creating a membership based site I’ve come across BuddyPress. After playing with it for a few days and toying around with other options (Dolphin, Elgg, etc.. ), I have determined that BuddyPress is the best fit for me.

What is BuddyPress?

BuddyPress is:  

•  a free, open source  Wordpress plugin,
•  for creating a social network using through Worpdress,
• written mainly in PHP and MySQL,

Features of the BuddyPress Plugin

The following are just the basic features BuddyPress, all of which can be disabled and modified.

• User Profiles
• Activity Streams
• Personal Sections
• Avatar Uploads
• Group Creation
• Forums
• Group Page
• Friend System
• Adding
• Messaging
• Theme
• WordPress Blog Per User

Undisputedly Facebook has become the standard for a social network. However, this doesn’t mean that you cannot create your own unique social network online. I mean besides modifying BuddyPress to look like a much earlier version of Facebook you can also add plugins or modify this plugin for a variety of other things:

1. Shopping site,
2. Online Course,
3. Information gathering,
4. Small Business,
5. Sporting Competitions,
6. Recipe site,
7. paid memberships,
8. Educational (for safe online student interaction),

So basically any community driven site…

You can make such sites without programming or prior experience with BuddyPress. How?  The other great thing about an open source projects (a good open source project) is that there are always talented and generous people who make plugins to help you modify your WordPress experience. Not only is other WordPress plugins compatible with BuddyPress, but there is also 700+ plugins that are BuddyPress specific. A lot of them help you manage your groups, make your social network private, multi user account creation, mass email to your users, create levels of memberships, create an hiearchy of private or public groups, assign tasks and control over groups and forum, event planning, database collection etc… And if you honestly, cannot find what you are looking for there is a Buddypress plugin that is a skeleton to writing your own Buddypress plugin.

Why should you use BuddyPress?

Still not convinced? Well, to start off with,  Wordpress is a solid foundation to build your site on, the user interface is direct and flexible to the point where non-programmers can use the site without resorting to a face-to-desk meltdown.  Buddypress is the nice house with solid framework built upon the solid foundation of WordPress. Buddypress, itself, has the very basic foundations of a good social network (activity stream, user profile, groups, private messaging, forums). Unless you intend on building the next “it” social network, then Buddypress is a good starting point for you to grow your business, community, or friends.

Showcase of sites using Buddypress: BPinspire

Plugins for BuddyPress: BuddyPress.org

Stay tuned for an upcoming article on a list of useful and powerful plugins for Buddypress! 

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Spammers have been attacking blogs for a very long time and targeting image and media file attachment pages. If you wonder what I mean by that, click on the thumbnail image above. You’ll see that it takes you to a page with a bigger embedded version of the image. Normally, those pages allow you to leave comments (you’ll notice that here on OMB it doesn’t).

Comment Spam on Images

I have been getting hammered with comment spam on images and was looking for a solution for some time, until finally today I came across the Disable Comments plugin.

This video demonstrates the seriousness of the spam comment problem with regards to images. As you can see, the vast majority of spam comments are on image only pages of the site.

5 minutes later, my site was impervious to comment spam on images because this beautiful plugin disable comments on ALL media across the website!

The Hard Way

Now, if you know what you’re doing and you’d rather do it by hand you can run the following MySQL query using PHPMyAdmin or whatever way you like:
UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status="closed";

But I don’t know why you’d want to do that when the plugin takes care of it for you automatically. Give it a try and enjoy your new spam free image pages plus your faster website since this will deter spammers and decrease the load on your server.

Frankly, I don’t understand why the WP core development team hasn’t added this as a basic feature yet. It would also ease the pain on the Akismet anti-spam service dramatically.

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While it’s impressive how many add-on’s are available for the WordPress platform for free, the reality is that everything comes at a price. Usually it’s the developers time, but it can also come at a price to the community. When a theme or plugin we rely on crosses a certain threshold of complexity and need for support, it can become difficult or even impossible for the developer to keep up with; and when they can’t we all loose.

Pods CMS – WordPress Plugin

I make a considerable portion of my living from WordPress work and know its themes, frameworks and plugins well. One of the most amazing plugins built for WordPress is Pods CMS built by Scott Clark. Pods serves to extend WordPress’ CMS functionality and take it to the next level. So as WordPress usage grows and we continue to push it into new places, the need for the functionality that Pods provides becomes ever more important.

Pods is not a lightweight plugin and is probably best served in the hands of an experienced developer to get it to do what you want, but if you’ve ever heard someone say “WordPress” can’t do that, think again, it can, and there is a good chance Pods can help it get there.

One of the more interesting examples of Pods capabilities is the scheduling system Scott and Matthew built for OpenCamp 2010. It’s all Pods! But Pods doesn’t stop there, when you look at the Pods showcase and get a sense of the companies that use it you’ll want to explore the ways it can work for you.

Pods 2.0 

Because of it’s complexity, the development effort has grown to a point where it needs a little help. Pods 2.0 is about to come out with a major overhaul of the UI (and much more) and we want to help Scott push it over the finish line.

In order to wrap up 2.0 over the next couple of weeks, Scott has made Pods a Kickstarter project to raise funds so he can focus exclusively on finishing it up.

If I had my way we would raise so much money that Scott would never have to do anything again but keep developing and supporting this amazing plugin. If you’ve not used Pods, be sure to check it out at PodsCMS.org. If you have benefitted from Pods then I would encourage you to step up and make a donation to push 2.0 over the finish line.

If you have a project that’s used Pods leave us a comment and link below, we would love to see and hear what you’ve done with it.

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Avatar in Google Search Results

In attempting to get this working with my various sites I quickly discovered that WordPress is stripping all of the REL= language from any Author field. In other words, you go into your USERS area and try and enter rel=”author” along with a link in one of the Author Bio areas, but WordPress leaves the link and removes the “REL=” part.

Now, it does this to try and protect you from users entering malicious code in their bio area. But if you have a blog where you implicitly trust all of your authors you might want to enable the ability for them to put in a link to their Google+ profile. For this reason I’m releasing a very simple plugin that will “fix the glitch”.

Allow REL= and HTML in Author Bios WordPress Plugin Download

You can download and manually install the plugin from the following link. Just drop it in your WordPress plugins directory and activate it:

• Allow REL and HTML in Author Bios (WordPress Repository)

Feel free to let me know if you encounter issues, but it should work with just about every version of WordPress still out there.

Have fun linking your Google Profiles to your search results! I can’t wait till there is widespread adoption of this as it will really assist with deciding whose link to follow!

EDIT: What to Do After Installing the Plugin

Since there have been a lot of questions about what you need to do after installing the plugin I’ll try and explain a little more of the process.

First, you need to go into your WORDPRESS ==> USERS area and edit your users Biographical Info areas to include a link to their Google profile. So, for example mine says:
<a href="https://plus.google.com/109938202835872364257/posts" rel="author">John's Google Profile</a>

Next, you need to go to your Google profile page and make sure that it has a link back to the domain that you are linking from. This ensures that the reference is circular. You claim to be that person… and that person claims to be writing on this blog.

Finally, you need to wait until Google enables this functionality for your site. It is in very, very, very limited release currently. I don’t know when it will be enabled for everyone, but if you aren’t seeing it yet I’d recommend leaving it and just waiting.

Hope that helps! And by the way, feel free to Circle me on Google+!

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Here’s a little video introduction to explain what this is all about:

In less than 24 hours we have nearly 1,000 members! In fact, we were averaging over 100 new members per hour for most of the working hours of the day, so thanks to everyone for joining and supporting the community!

Joel Comm did a great job of describing the benefits of membership in his newsletter:

Gain access to some incredible benefits and resources.

• The Blogging & New Media Report online magazine, a $97 value – free
• Discount on popular WordPress Tools, Services, Plugins, and Themes
• Over 100 hours of WordPress training courses
• An Official WPUA Seal for your Website
• Member’s only special discounts
• Inclusion in Members Directory
• Huge selection of WordPress themes
• Community support through forums
• WordPress quick launch and marketing guides
• Exclusive Access to closed door sessions at industry events
• And much more, so click here to learn more now

So, if you are a WordPress user, head on over to WPUA.org and join the WordPress User Association!

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Now, it caught my eye for two reasons:

1. They left a URL in the comment. I’m constantly on the lookout for that because I don’t want YOU guys (my real readers) to be subjected to spammy comments.
2. They claim to be a long time reader who visits constantly.

So I figured that if they visit as much as they say they do, I’d see some verification of that in my Woopra stats. I pulled it up and did a quick search based on the IP address that the comment came from. Here is what we find:

Let’s break it down:

• They arrived at my blog by doing a Google search for the keywords “australian comedy blog”.
• Woopra only finds their visiting address having been on my site one single time. Although its possible that they visited previously from a different IP address, I highly doubt it.
• They spent a total of 4 minutes on the site – including posting the comment. And the video alone is 2 minutes. It takes about another minute to read the page.

So, what we really have here is someone just doing a search and finding high ranking blogs so they can leave a comment and drop their URL in the hopes that some innocent visitors will click through to THEIR website.

This kind of drive-by commenting adds no value whatsoever, and is only intended to hijack visitors. So, if you have a Website I would encourage you to look out for these things and mark them as spam when you see them.

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That is not to say that I am not finding OpenCamp to be an incredibally rewarding experience! It’s definitely worth every minute spent on it! I’ve made lots of close friends and had amazing experiences already. And I know that OpenCamp will change some people’s lives!

We have a lot of interesting stuff going on, and one of those things is that Dr. Nico Martini’s students from UTD will be attending OpenCamp as a mandatory part of class! So for a little fun Cali and I put this video together for them. Though everyone might get a kick out of it…

Hope to see you all at OpenCamp!

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I Googled like a madman, and searched the WordPress site too, but there is no documentation as to what to do to get it out of this mode! So, I fired up my FTP browser and manually performed a complete upgrade of WordPress. Still no luck!

Next I checked the .htaccess file to see if the system had added some sort of line to it, but no luck. Finally, I noticed a strange file in the root of the site called .maintenance. The date stamp was just minutes old, so I deleted it and VOILA, the site was back to normal.

So, if you are unable to load WordPress because it’s stuck in Maintenance mode, just FTP into the root directory and delete the .maintenance file. Too bad this wasn’t documented somewhere, and too bad that with this in place you can’t even access the WP Admin area. Sheesh…

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So let’s get started learning how to use WordPress, shall we?

Tutorial: How to Use the WordPress Dashboard

The first thing that happens when you log into any WordPress installation is that you are taken to the Dashboard. So we might as well start out by learning what’s here and how to customize the Dashboard.

Tutorial: How to Write a Post in WordPress

There’s nothing more important to your blog or Website than the content! So, it’s fitting that the first question we should answer is, “how do I write a post in WordPress”?

Tutorial: Saving Draft Posts and Pages in WordPress

Now that you know how to write a post, it’s important to know that you can actually start a post now, but save and finish it later! Indeed I usually have about 50 blog posts in draft format in my blog, so if you think of something interesting just get a post started and come back to it later. Here is how to save your post as a draft.

Tutorial: How to Embed Images, Video and Audio in a Post in WordPress

To be honest, if you just put a bunch of text on a page with no images or multimedia it’s going to be really, really boring. So next lets take a look at how to embed pictures, video and audio in a post.

Tutorial: How to Create Categories in WordPress

Now that you know all about writing a post let’s make sure that you are keeping things nice and organized. Here is how to add or delete a Category. You should assign categories and keywords to each of your blog posts so that visitors can later find related content.

Ok, I’m not going to keep going on and on here. If you’ve been through these videos I think you’ll be able to get the hang of WordPress and I recommend you just play around and experiment with the rest of the stuff. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything and it’s really easy to get around in WordPress!

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Well, if you are one of those people you need to know that there is a brand new top level domain that ends in .CO (as in Company or Corporation, etc.) which was just released in the last 48 hours. This are still a HUGE number of awesome .CO domains available, so if you are thinking about registering anything ANY time soon you need to head over to GoDaddy and try and snag some of these good ones NOW!

Top Reasons to Go Register a .CO Name Now:

• Get it for branding purposes
• Protect your main URL by getting the .CO (for when people accidentally forget the M on the end of your .COM)
• Plan for future websites, promotions or projects you might ever want before the domains are gone!
• Get it to sell later

Remember, if you don’t buy these domains now you will be at the mercy of people who want to sell them to you for thousands of dollars each once they are snagged. Personally I bought $1,200 worth of domains in the last 24 hours and I’m thrilled with the ones I got. So invest in your future by snagging some good domains today!

I recommend GoDaddy for registrations so here is a link that will take you straight to their .CO registration page. HURRY!!!

GoDaddy Coupon Codes

I searched forever for coupon codes for these domains, but I wasn’t able to get any to work on the .CO domains when I was trying to checkout. However, these are the codes that I was given directly by my contacts at GoDaddy which work for other types of domains.

They might start working for the .CO domains, but if not don’t wait to find one just to save a couple of bucks! You might miss out on registering a domain if you don’t do it as fast as possible. I lost a couple that were already in my cart!

• IAPt3 = 10% off
• IAPtfif1 = 15% off $75
• IAPtft1 = $5 off $30
• IAPtdom1 = $7.49 .com
• IAPth1 = 20% off hosting

Remember, you’re better off choosing a few, paying, then doing it again. Don’t spend hours saving them to a cart or some WILL be gone by the time you try and pay for them. Remember, you don’t own them until you’ve paid! Not just because they are in your cart.

What are you waiting for? Go Register .CO Domain Names!

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By the way, you ARE coming to OpenCamp right? I mean… if you don’t show up you are instantly disallowed from ever asking me for blogging, Web authoring, or other general advice of this nature. :-) Seriously, you’ll learn more in two days than in at least a year on your own. For $99!!! I mean holy crap, other conferences with inferior speakers will charge you $1,000+ for two days OR worse yet, make you sit through sales pitches! AAAaarrrgghh!

The amazing thing about events like this one is that the speakers volunteer their time. So the fact that you get people like Leo Laporte, Cali Lewis, Giovanni Gallucci, Trey Ratcliff, Chris Pirillo, and more is just unbelievable. The speaker lineup would cost $100k at any other event. So again, if you don’t show up for OpenCamp you are missing out on something you simply can’t duplicate anywhere else.

There are only 2 weeks left for early registration. Hurry!

Did you make an OpenCamp video? If so, let me know so we can feature it!

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Now, some of you may have been to WordCamp Dallas in the past, and some of you may have seen me lecture on blogging and other related topics, but I assure you – nothing you’ve seen in the past will compare to what we’ve got planned for OpenCamp!

We’re going to bring together about 1,000 bloggers, webmasters and podcasters all in one spot for an entire weekend of lectures, entertainment and networking. I promise you, it’s going to be absolutely amazing. And best of all, while other people are charging $1,000 for conferences half this good, we’re keeping OpenCamp CHEAP!

Here is a little intro video we put together to explain the concept:

Now, hurry up and get registered! Attendees are going to be listed by order of registration, so trust me YOU WANT TO BE FIRST ON THE LIST! Of course, there is a little issue at the moment with the automatic feed, but get registered anyway because the clock is already ticking and there are people ahead of you now!

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Anyway, some people seem to think that they are not spammers as long as they leave a nice sounding comment along with their spammy “made-for-adwords” website link. And I guess they even think it’s ok for them to use different names on different comments… and different spammy MFA website links.

Another Spammy Example

In fact, here is an example of someone who used 4 different domains and two different names when leaving comments. Of course, they didn’t take into account the fact that they have the same damn IP address on every comment (all of which have now been deleted).

Oh, by the way, normally I would feel bad about putting someone’s name or email address up in an image, but since I don’t believe the names are real anyway, I have no sympathy.

By the way, before anyone points out to me that we could be dealing with multiple different people behind some sort of proxy server, let me point out that:

• This doesn’t explain away the same URL with two different names…
• I verified all this in Woopra too.

Why This Is So Very Wrong

The thing is, comments existing here ON MY BLOG for only one purpose. To facilitate discussion between people. But those who come here using fake names and linking to spammy blogs are clearly, clearly, clearly only doing so to attempt to sucker other people in clicking through to THEIR sites in the hopes of making money off of them.

There are many people out there advising bloggers to go and leave comments on other, more popular bloggers, websites. And this is not really bad advice – as long as it’s taken properly! The goal is NOT to fill popular blogs with spammy comment links! (The whole God-damn world is not about siphoning cash from your fellow man!) The goal is to try and develop some sort of a relationship with that person so that you can get them to take an interest in what you are doing and occasionally link to your material or offer assistance in some other way.

But there are so many people who just don’t get it… And to illustrate this point, right now there are about 14,250 bonafied comments on this blog, while Akismet has caught 440,000 spam comments. Over 97% of the comments left are spam! And in order to make sure that real readers want to participate in a site’s conversations, you better delete the hell out of anything that looks fishy. I do.

Bottom line: if you can’t walk up to me in public and introduce yourself with your real name, and have me know something about you personally from the link you left on my site, then your comment is suspect. In fact, I do not want any link from you unless IT TELLS ME EXACTLY WHO YOU ARE! And for God’s sake, I even spell that out clearly in the rules, which you spammers just don’t bother to take seriously.

So shape up, or kiss off.

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Well, what I didn’t realize was that the compression is only being performed on the cached files apparently. Because I did some testing and on the non-cached files there was no compression. So, I’ve got a really, really easy trick that anyone can do on their PHP blog to enable GZip compression.

Of course I’m going to show you how to do it in WordPress because that is what I know – but a simple one line addition to your theme file will enable it on any PHP based system (Drupal, Joomla, or whatever). If you have instructions for another CMS please let me know and I’ll add them here too.

What we are going to do is add a very simple line that tells your server to compress all of the HTML pages that it creates using the build in function that PHP has. In order to do this in WordPress all you need to do is go into your Admin control panel, and choose the Theme Editor under the Appearance menu.

Instructions

1. Select the Header.php template
2. Add the following line to the very beginning of the template (before anything else)
   <? ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); ?>
3. Save the template
4. Have a cold beer.

That’s it. Your job is done.

GZip Compression Improvement

What will this do for you? Well, in my case lets look at the before and after results from OneMansBlog.com. These results were measured by the Firebug plugin for Firefox and each example was the best of three back to back pageloads. I also enabled the compression immediately between the before and after reloads to try and ensure similar load circumstances. The test was conducted via a 15mbps cable internet connection.

Prior to implementing GZip Compression the homepage was 99.6kb and took 1.96 seconds to download (click the image to view full size):

After turning on GZip compression in WordPress the homepage was compressed to 18.3kb, and it took only 1.15 seconds to download. The 80% page compression saved about 40% of the download time (click the image to view full size):

Once you’ve enabled compression you can go here to test your Webpage to see if it is working.

Whoopee! 1 Second. Who Cares?

Hold on there honcho. I managed to save about one second on just one pageload. On average I routinely get over 20,000 page loads per day. So that would be 20,000 seconds – or 5.5 hours – per day saved. That is 2,027 hours per YEAR – or the equivalent of an entire full time employee.

In addition, we saved over 80kb of data from being downloaded or 1.6 gigabytes per day. That is almost 600GB per year (128 complete DVDs) in what would have been completely wasted bandwidth.

Now, just imagine if everyone did this how much time we would save, and how much faster the Internet would be going. Heck, its a moral imperative for everyone to turn on compression!

So, what are you waiting for? Your readers are begging you to speed things up for God’s sake!

PS – You can try and find a plugin to do this for you too. But it’s so easy why not just add the line and be done with it?

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Creative ideas are everywhere, if you know how to listen.

In this article I’m going to show you how you can automatically split videos into images and then use those images to generate traffic for your website. When John Pozadzides (aka the man behind One Man’s Blog) did this, he got 10,000 pageviews on a single blog post in just 7 days.

At a recent Dallas WordPress Meetup, John P. gave an excellent presentation on how he uses content to attract visitors to OMB. John gave a lot of great tips and advice during his presentation, and the one thing that stuck with me most was the few minutes he spent telling us how he used screenshots from a video to attract a ton of website visitors.

As a traffic experiment John had manually screen captured a bunch of images from a Lady Gaga music video, cleaned them up, and then uploaded them to his WordPress blog. He included the final 60 images in a blog post using the built in WordPress photo gallery feature.

Since the gallery is meant to take the work out of displaying images in columns and rows, it also automatically created the thumbnails he needed to present the images as a collection. When his blog visitors click an image in the post they’re taken to another page that shows a larger version of that image. At the bottom of every one image John links back to the 60 images he posted.

I thought this was a great idea for a couple of reasons. He is feeding Google images, which a lot of people use to visually search for popular celebrity figures like Lady Gaga. That means he is using more of Google’s power to attract visitors to his site. Also, by using the photo gallery feature he is automatically getting 60 pages created for him that all point back to one topic related Lady Gaga post.

Each of these images can be tweaked for keywords using titles, descriptions, and captions so they are keyword searchable, which is a good thing for Google images and a good thing for Google search in general.

So, with all these benefits, I definitely wanted to do something similar on my own websites. The only problem is, I am extremely lazy and the idea of manually taking hundreds of screen shots, cleaning them up in photoshop , and then sorting through the images to pick the best ones doesn’t appeal to me at all. That’s when it occurred to me, why not automate the process?

After a few minutes on Google I found a collection of tools that let me automatically download videos, convert those videos into images, and then quickly filter those images to help me pick the best ones.

Here’s how the entire process works.

Downloading Videos

Since I’m assuming the video John used was from Youtube or some other video sharing site, I found a tool called iSkysoft Free Video Downloader with a built in sniffer that would automatically download the Flash format video file to my computer when it detected them on a webpage. This is very cool because most the other Youtube downloaders make you copy and paste the embed code or the video url into a text box. The one draw back of the tool though is that it doesn’t let you pick where you want your video downloaded to, so I had to accept the default download location. It wasn’t a show stopper, but it would be a nice to have.

Converting Videos
Once the videos were downloaded, I could manipulate them however I wanted. Before I could strip the video to images though, I had to convert them from Flash format (.FLV) to a format that my video to image stripping software would accept. That means I needed to convert them into another format like .MOV or .AVI.

By design the iSkysoft Youtube downloader has a video converter built into it. So, if I was willing to pay for that feature, I could have converted the videos straight from the tool. But I already own a copy of another iSkysoft video conversion tool that provides the same video end product, so I decided to use it instead.

Because I use a Mac, I usually convert my videos to .MOV format, but I would recommend that you play around with settings and formats because the quality of your video will directly affect the quality of the images that are produced. I know this for a fact because I stripped images from a lower quality Youtube video and then compared that with images stripped from a high quality DVD movie. The high quality movie produced great images, while the low quality video produced lesser quality images.

Stripping Video Images

With the video in .MOV format, I could then run the video through software to automatically convert the video to a series of images. The software has several options for stripping images. It let me create images using frames, second, minutes, or hours. This is very handy because not all videos are the same length or have the same frame rate.

Most videos are produced at either 15 or 30 frames per second (FPS). That means there are 30 images between each second of video. If I wanted I could tell the software to create an image for each frame. That might be a little over kill for most videos, but depending on your subject matter and the quality of your video, it might be exactly what’s required.

As an experiment, I decided to create one image for every 30 frames. For a 4 minute video that translated to 241 images in 27.7 seconds (yes, I timed it). The software let me preview the images before exporting them, so I could try multiple settings before picking the one that worked best for my video.

Filtering Images

You might think that 241 images is a lot to pick through to find the best shots, but I found a tool for that as well called Xee. It’s a photo viewer that lets me quickly flip through images in a folder and delete the ones I don’t want.

Before I used that tool though, I opened up the exported images folder, bulk deleted all the obvious images I didn’t want and then used the tool to refine the list. Xee lets me use arrow keys to flip back and forth between pictures and deleting an image automatically takes me to the next image. So I was able to get down to just the images I wanted very quickly.

Renaming Image Files

At some point during the process I noticed that my image file names weren’t named what I wanted, so I found a tool to bulk update them as well. The tool is called “Name Mangler” (yes, I love that). It lets me find and replace words within a file name, number file sequentially, add a prefix or suffix, etc. Using Name Mangler, I can rename all 241 images just as quickly as I created them originally.

Posting To WordPress Gallery

Once the images were all created and filtered, it was time to post them to the blog. Creating a gallery in WordPress is not a straight forward process so there are a few things you have to remember when creating a gallery in WordPress.

The first thing I had to do was upload the images to my blog using the WordPress Media Uploader.

This next step is very important, so pay attention here.

When you upload images to WordPress it puts them in the Media Library. If you click the “Save All Changes” button after the images are finished uploading, the media uploader will association those images with your post and it will automatically create a gallery tab in your media uploader. This is an important step for getting all the images into the gallery and associated with that post. If you miss this step the gallery won’t be automatically created and you won’t know why.

The other important point I discovered is that the image descriptions must be updated directly after the gallery is created. So I had to expand each image and insert the text I wanted. In John’s case, he probably copy and pasted the same text and link in all 60 images. Once the descriptions are inserted, I had to click the “Save All Changes” button again to update the images.

Again, this is important so pay attention

Make sure to update your image descriptions when you create your gallery. As of WordPress 2.9, descriptions don’t seem to update on the page once they have been updated in the editor. I don’t know if this is a glitch, but it drove me nuts during testing. So play it safe and make sure your descriptions are correct from the start.

Once the images were uploaded, I still needed to keyword tag them so that Google Images and regular Google Search would be able to properly understand what they were and index them. This process took a good bit of time. I would recommend that you take as much time as was necessary to get all the images done right. This is a value add part of the process, so I didn’t try to automate it.

I made sure to update all the image titles, alternate text, and captions.

After you click the “Save All Changes Button”, you can click the “Insert Gallery” button to insert the gallery place holder into your post.

The resulting gallery should show up as a collection of thumbnails in your post.

When visitors click one of the images they are shown a page with a single view of that image along with your image title and description. If they click the image again they will see the full size image that you uploaded to the media library.

And that’s it. You can use this process to create picture galleries, attract visitors to your website, or export images of your kids first sporting event. All the pieces can be easily mixed and matched to meet your needs and although I referenced Mac tools in this article, you can find Windows equivalents just as easily.

One thing to keep in mind in term of traffic though. John P. picked a popular subject and used provocative headlines as a traffic experiment. Depending on your subject and audience, you might not get the exact same results that he did. But, with a little creative application, I’m sure you’ll do just fine.

By Guest Star: Charles McKeever of OpenSourceMarketer.com.

Charles is the Founder and co-geek at Open Source Marketer where he shows people how to use open source tools to run their online businesses.

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As a follow up and companion to this lecture I also posted “The 8 Best Ways to Earn Money With Google Adsense Alternatives“, and I suggest that you investigate that post as well, but not until after you’ve endured this grueling 1.5 hour lecture. I know it’s long, but just remember that it took me many, many more hours to prepare for and deliver this lecture than it will take you to view it. And I’m holding nothing back here, so if you want all the secrets this is the price you have to pay.

Huge thanks go out to Cali Lewis for filming and assembling the video for this lecture, and also to Giovanni Gallucci for assisting with the videography. Also, show some love to Tony Cecala for talking me into doing this and organizing the entire venue and event, and of course thanks to the Art Institute of Dallas for hosting. Now, without further ado, here is the lecture.

By the way, Viddler allows you to leave comments right on the video, so feel free to make those comments. They are most useful when you create a “marker” for a particular point which you might want to go back and reference later.

I also uploaded the presentation to SlideShare, so you can now browse through the slides if you are having trouble with seeing the detail within the video. You can do both at the same time, so feel free to work the slides independently as you are watching the video.

When you are done with that, you may be interested in the follow up show we did on Wealth Nation, Episode 16 Increase Blog Visibility and Revenue.

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Below you will find the best Google Adsense alternatives I could find, complete with a little description and a link to the provider, in the hopes of helping you put a little more cash in your pocket.

If you have any first hand experience with these please drop a comment below and let us all know. Especially if you can share some light on actually getting paid by these advertising providers. How long it takes, how much you made, and what your general impression of working with them would be most valuable! Also, please help me spread the word on this particular post since I know it’s something a lot of people are looking for.

1) Free PagePeel Plugin for WordPress

First of all, lets start this post out by explaining that funky little thing we’ve got going on up in the top right corner of the blog here. It’s a Free WordPress Pagepeel plugin called PeelEar. The author provides this plugin for Joomla and Drupal as well, in addition to the standalone script version you can use on a non-CMS based website.

I don’t suppose I really need to tell you what it does, because you can see! Essentially you create a little ad that sits in the corner of the site which is covered up until people decide to hover over it. Then it reveals it’s self. Brilliant! And you can link to anything you want. Feature a page on your site, a welcome video, or an affiliate ad! Whatever you want!

2) AdBrite.com

AdBrite, is a top competitor is to Google adsense. If you are looking for inline ads where words on your page become links to ads, AdBrite has got em! They also have interstitial full page ads that you can insert to intercept all of the search engine traffic that is coming to your site.

Oh, and don’t forget that AdBrite can overlay ads on the images on your site, giving you a way to make money off your blog that virtually no other competitor offers.

Bloggers can set their own ad rates, and you can approve or reject every ad or choose to have AdBrite auto accept ads. AdBrite also lets you place a “Your Ad Here” link to sell ads to your visitors, in addition to the AdBrite marketplace and sales teams.

The payouts are competitive and they are more accepting of smaller publishers like bloggers. Commissions are split with the publisher (blogger) getting 75% and AdBrite keeping 25%. Go ahead and give AdBrite a try, though realize that it can take a few days before the ads start being highly targeted. You just have to stick with it, but it’s a great alternative to Google AdSense.

3) BuySellAds.com

Over 750 successful bloggers use BuySellAds.com to power their online ad sales, and these ads are very different from all of the other providers listed. With BSA, you set a price for different ad positions on your site and basically auction off the spaces to anyone willing to pay your asking price to put them there.

You can set it up so that you have different sizes, different pages on your blog to sell, etc. And one of the most valuable things is having the ability to search the available inventory of ads and see what is selling and for how much before you start setting your own prices.

4) Clicksor.com

Clicksor is one of Google Adsense’s best alternatives. They pay up to 85% commissions, making them one of the top advertising payouts on the Internet. This is especially impressive since Clicksor offers context sensitive ads just like Google Adsense. Context sensitive ads show visitors ads that are related to the content on the page they are reading, which makes for a better fit.

Clicksor offers 15 day payouts on advertising on your blog and they offer text, image and multimedia ads for your website or blog. They also have:

• Flash Ads
• Animation Ads
• Banners
• Pop unders
• Interstitial Ads
• Text highlighting Ads

The only bad news is that when you sign up for Clicksor it takes a day or so for you to get approved and be able to start inserting code. But given the high payouts and the wide range of ad options available, I think it’s worth waiting to get in and see how these ads do on your blog.

Go ahead and sign up and give them a try.

5) Chitika.com

I really like the way Chitika (pronounced CHIH-tih-ka) encourages users to hide ads from normal visitors while showering search visitors with them. This is right in line with my philosophy, and if you want to actually see them here on my blog just go to Google and do a search for “lady gaga writhing”. I should be the first one. Follow the link to my site and look in the top right above the Woopra and Pretty Link Pro ads. You should now see a Chitika ad.

Chitika takes a different approach from the others and show targeted products from different manufacturers on your blog. If you write an article, you’ll see related and competitive links, and if people purchase these products you get a paid a commission. I’ve attached a screen shot of the earnings from the first three days after placing just that one tiny little link. As you can see, I’m getting paid $.05-.10 per click, which I suppose isn’t really that bad just to get started, though it will need to improve over time.

Chitika allows you to display targeted products based on what people searched for to get to your page and you get paid for clicks. It provides a robust comparative shopping experience for your visitors. Visitors will love the interactive search code — and it makes you money

Click here to give Chitika a try now.

6) AdToll.com (Peel away Ads)

AdToll is a CPC or cost-per-click alternative to Google Adsense. They offer a wide range of both payment options and advertising formats. One of their options includes Peel-Away ads similar to the first one that I mentioned at the top of this post, but served by AdToll.

I’ve noticed that the Page Peel ads get a lot of traffic, so they can really earn you some good cash in addition to the other ads that you can place on your site. Go ahead and give AdToll a try, and let me know how it goes for you in the comments below!

7) ExitJunction.com (Exit Ads)

Now here is something very unique and specialized. Exit Junction can be used along side all the other Ad Networks (including Google Adsense), but what they do is essentially interrupt the browser’s natural “Back” button to place ads inbetween your site and the search engine for customers who came from the search engine and are just looking to go back.

So, what I mean is, the visitors who were leaving your site anyway, will be shown ads and you get one last bite at the apple to generate revenue before they go. Although this is a great Google Adsense competitor, it’s also a great compliment to existing Google ads and it won’t interfere with them at all.

In all fairness though, I do have some concerns about Exit Junction. They are not forthcoming about exactly how the revenue is earned, plus they take a long time to pay out revenue. This leads me to believe they are keeping a much bigger slice of the pie than their competitors. I did have a conversation via email with someone over there (they responded to me anonymously) as follows:

Hi guys. Just signed up and installed the code today on my site as a test for an article I’m writing on my blog (OneMansBlog.com). We’ll see how it does on the site and whether I keep it, but in the meantime can you please explain the revenue model to me? Although I added the code I don’t see anything anywhere on the site explaining where the ads come from, what the rev share is, or anything like that. I can send a lot of folks your way, but I have to have some idea of what to advise them the CMP or CPC or whatever it is, is going to net them for adding these ads.

Also, out of curiosity, why does it take so long to send payment for the ads? Nowdays even 30 days is pretty long. But it looks like you guys are pushing 60 days and beyond. That is a long time to ask people to wait for commission checks.

Looking forward to your reply.

Cheers,

John P.

We usually send payments net45 but but we say 60 just in case. With our ads most people are earning around $2/cpm but its not for all your traffic and only traffic from search engines get monetized.

So, that answer was pretty unsatisfying for me, but on the right I’ve attached a screen shot of the stats they are gathering and it is indeed working and generating a little money on the site. You do need a lot of search traffic for this tool to matter though.

Exit junction also covers all countries so go ahead and follow this link to signup.

8) ValuePopUp.com (Popups for Search Visitors)

Ok, all that stuff I just said about ExitJunction? Same thing with ValuePopUp, except that what it does is show popup ads to search engine visitors. So, it’s another method of placing ads on your site that only search visitors will see, which is always a good thing.

It comes from the same company that does ExitJunction, so the same lack of information applies. But if you are in the mood to show popup ads, I can’t come up with any reason not to give them the benefit of the doubt and at least try them on the site for a while to see if it makes more money for your website.

Summary

So, that’s about it for now. It should give you a wide variety of alternatives to choose from, and I hope you’ll let me know if you give some of these a try! By the way, a few of the links on this page are actually affiliate links because I’d like to see what happens from those. So if you don’t mind, follow them when you sign up so I can report back later and tell everyone if referring people is even worth it.

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• Social Bookmarking – (delicious.com, stumbleupon.com)
• Social Networking – (facebook.com, myspace.com)
• Social News Aggregation – (digg.com, reddit.com)
• Social Q&A – (answers.yahoo.com, answerbag.com)
• Media Sharing – (youtube.com, flickr.com)
• Micro-Blogging – (twitter.com, plurk.com)

The use of social media as a marketing and promotional tool and strategy is becoming more and more popular with businesses because it can be an extremely effective way to promote products and services to a targeted audience. Websites can function as a static billboard to promote products, services, or ideas – but social media opens up a dynamic dialogue with your audience, allowing for interaction and personal connection.

All too often I’ve witnessed people shying away from social media for one of two main reasons:

• They don’t understand it, or don’t know how to use it.
• They don’t believe in its true value.

I’d like to provide some insight into the value, benefits, and Return on Investment (ROI) involved with social media to prove that it’s worthwhile for you to take the time to participate. I’ll then provide information how to get started, what to do, what NOT to do, and how to manage your time doing so.

Social Media ROI

Whenever we think about investing our time, ROI is an important criteria. Although success metrics will vary between individuals, and even different sized businesses (“SMBs”, or Small/Mid-sized Businesses, vs. Fortune 500), each will need to establish the criteria they wish to measure.

For example, a Twitter campaign for a major corporation might be more focused on the number of followers (quantity) while a SMB Twitter campaign could be more focused on demographically and geographically targeted followers (quality).

In addition, more quantitative campaigns like content creation (also known as “linkbaiting”) can deliver ROI through increased search engine rankings from inbound links to your Web property. Promoting content through social media channels will also bring social traffic, traffic from links, traffic from increased rankings, increased comments and subscriptions on the site; which in-turn brings more organic sales and leads as a direct result of your Social Media efforts.

As you can see, it’s a matter of setting up and defining qualitative metrics or quantitative metrics for a campaign depending on your end-goals. Some examples of ROI you may wish to pursue and measure include:

Qualitative

• Brand Awareness
• Interaction/Engagement
• Trust/Loyalty
• Influence/Authority

Qualitative metrics are much harder to measure since things like brand awareness and loyalty are difficult to track. Since qualitative results are tricky to measure, they are often broken down into micro-quantitative metrics. For example, a campaign to increase “authority” would result in breaking down micro-quantitative metrics to analyze increases in influential Twitter members retweeting you or the number of influential blogs linking to you, etc. A service like Twitalyzer might help measure these metrics.

Most social media campaigns are comparable to traditional advertising and promotions in regard to the fact that they both have the intent to create brand awareness and mindshare, but also both have a hard to measure direct ROI. This is where micro-quantitative metrics can really help.

Quantitative

• Sales
• Leads
• Traffic
• Links (Rankings)
• Subscribers (RSS/Newsletter)

These are the traditional metrics that most people judge marketing success by. But the fact that they are simplest doesn’t mean they are more valuable. For example, sales may be the most desirable end result but they will be hampered by a lack of Brand Awareness or Loyalty.

How Can I Monetize Social Media?

That’s not an easy question to answer but one asked by every business looking to invest their time. The easiest way to start is to consider this simple truth:

In order for a site or business to be successful it needs brand supporters and advocates helping build buzz.

Your site will build perpetual motion and pervasively spread if it can win over supporters and advocates. Social media marketing is an excellent way to get people to come into your site to take a look at what you have to offer. If you are successful in earning your visitors trust, and you can gain permission and marketing privileges within your community, there will always be a loyal audience for you to promote to.

The immediate value of social media comes from the direct and indirect traffic you can drive to your site by providing and promoting great content. A decent percentage of your visitors will be people who publish their own content, have their own sites, often share links, etc. Some of these people will become your advocates in sharing content and linking back to you so it’s important the content appeals to the emotions that drive them to do so.

The links you’ll receive count as votes in the eyes of search engines. The more votes you have, and the higher quality they are, the more your search engine rankings will increase. The more your search engine rankings increase the more qualified traffic you have coming to your site on a residual basis.
If that’s not enough, here are more reasons why you should consider using social media:

Purely Organic

The traffic patterns and link patterns your site gains through social media efforts are detected as completely natural and warranted by search engines. This means that Google will elevate your content in search results when there is a large amount of social media activity pointing to it, whereas a large burst of links from traditional methods, most likely, would look highly unnatural and raise red flags.

High ROI

If you’re doing it yourself the only cost to you is time. I’ll get into how much time you should spend later in this article. The benefits will often exceed the cost. It would take you thousands of dollars to buy just a few links, but social media has the ability to give you that for free!

Versatile Benefits

There’s no department in a company that can’t benefit from social media. Social media helps PR, sales, marketing, advertising, and everyone else. This is tricky because companies often have specific budgets allocated to individual channels, so in your organization you may need to seek matching funds for social media efforts from complimentary departments.

Efficiency

There’s no other way you can spread a message to millions so quickly without spending a dime. Also, there’s no other way target messages to specific niches and audience so easily.

Personal Connection

Social media opens up a two-way dialogue between consumers and the organization, company, or brand they are dealing with. This allows the consumers voice to be heard and listened to a lot more carefully. Ideas, suggestions, and opinions can be expressed and heard by anyone. This feedback can help with product development, improved service, and repeat business.

Don’t take my word for it. There are a plethora of case studies where you can read about how business have used and benefited from social media here: http://www.interactiveinsightsgroup.com/blog1/social-media-examples-superlist-17-lists-and-tons-of-examples/

Participation

Where Do I Begin?

Patience is a virtue since it often takes months for social media to provide results. Unfortunately, many people and companies dive into social media without knowing how to use it properly. Let me provide you with a bit of advice before you begin.

Where many people get frustrated is in the time gap it takes to start seeing results. You must have faith that you’ll get out what you put in eventually. So allocate at least 3-6 months to test any social media program, and make sure you pursue it vigorously during the test period! Also, remember that Social media focuses on the “7 C’s“:

• Conversation – Have them
• Connections – Make them
• Community – Build one
• Consumer – Is King
• Creative – Stay fresh
• Collaboration – Team effort
• Content – Add constantly

Before you unknowingly dive in on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else, observe the conversation in these communities. Get a feel for how they collaborate, how the site works, what content thrives and what content doesn’t. Once you have a feel for the community, and have read some general do’s and don’ts, dive in! But remember that different platforms have a different feel, so don’t treat them the same or you’ll get a harsh reaction from users on one or more of the social media platforms.

What To Do:

These general tips apply to all of the social media platforms.

• Have manners and use proper etiquette as you would in real life.
• Listen first, respond second.
• Contribute to the community.
• Be yourself but watch what you say.
• Be honest and transparent.
• Be concise but personal.
• Give credit where credit is due.
• Practice good karma and you’ll receive favors.
• Invest time and resources.
• Measure results of actions.

What Not To Do:

Commit these cardinal sins at your own risk. These are the surest routes to failure in the social media world.

• Be fake
• Only talk and never listen or respond
• Be overly self-promotional
• Repeat yourself
• Strictly focus on sales
• Spam

Further reading: The 12 most annoying types of Facebookers

How Much Time Should I Spend?

I wish there was a simple answer for this. It all depends on what your goals are for trying to communicate online with others.

Each social media site operates differently so each will requires different amounts of time. Time will also vary depending on goals and what kind of user you have to be to achieve those goals. There are many different user-level activities you can participate in. You’ll want to participate on all levels but ideally you’ll want to be at the top of the ladder as a creator.

Allow me to demonstrate:

Like I mentioned, activities and strategies vary across different social media sites. Here are some diagrams to help shed light on what I mean:

As a good rule of thumb, here’s a good way to start spending your time:

• Listening/Monitoring 25% of the time
• Communicating/Engaging 50% of the time
• Creating/Promoting 25% of the time

After that you can adjust your time based upon your results, metrics, and goal achievements.

Conclusion

If you’re new to social media this is a lot of information to take in but don’t be intimidated. Social media is simply community interaction. You do it on a day-to-day basis anyway, this just changes the platform of communication. Be brave and don’t be afraid to ask for help and advice!

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Thanks to Dave Curlee for filming and editing this, as well as incorporating the sign language interpreters into this video, and the other videos from WordCamp Dallas 2009. You can also follow Dave on Twitter or Spamboy on Twitter.

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