Learn WordPress in 24 Hours With Expert Video Tutorials

WordPress as a blogging platform has literally changed the way we blog and disseminate information. There are other platforms that are also quite effective, such as Blogger from Google and others such as Expression. Then there are CMS (Content Management Systems) such as Joomla and Drupal which can not only create outstanding websites but can also blogs. But WordPress is unsurpassed in its flexibility, agility and power. It also enjoys a very wide online community that almost shares virtually any information you'd like to know regarding the platform.

Why you need WordPress video tutorials 

Whether you are professional blogger or a casual writer who blogs as a hobby, you want to make sure that your blog looks presentable and professional. Because of the sheer number of blogs online right now, there is intense competition and surfers are extremely choosy. They have zero tolerant for a blog that looks amateurish or that isn't maintained.

1. Search engines love blogs 

You need to educate yourself with WordPress video tutorials because you need your blog to stand out. Search engines love blogs and if your blog is properly optimized it can rank well and bring you a handsome volume of traffic. Unfortunately the majority of bloggers do not have a clue as how to best optimize their blog for search engines. This is where the video tutorials come in handy.

2. Creating a buzz with social media 

Crafty webmasters and bloggers are now reaping a ton of daily and consistent traffic by using social media tools together with WordPress. If successfully employed, this tactic can totally transform your level of traffic. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, StubleUpon, MySpace and Digg can be configured to work with your WordPress blog and share information. Again, few know how to do this and are indeed missing out on awesome traffic and interaction opportunities. Without WordPress video tutorials, it is hard for a regular blogger to fully tap into the raw power of social media.

In many blogging conferences and seminars, we here of a select few who are making almost six figure incomes through blogging. Others have made blogging a full time job. Unfortunately, most bloggers are far from attaining this goal. This is because they have not yet learnt how to utilize WordPress to the fullest.

Creating a Sticky Homepage in WordPress

The process is relatively simple and is very effective when you want new visitors to your site to read an introduction to your site, but have more instant news updates appear as well.

First, navigate to Posts > Add New and write the content you'd like to always be present on your homepage.

Under Publish > Visibility (top right side) click Edit. Next, click the check box to "Stick this post to the front page". Publish your document, then navigate to Settings > Reading.

The default setting for WordPress front page displays is "your latest posts" and this what you'll need to be set to for your latest post content to appear on the homepage. Now that you've made a "sticky homepage" that particular post will always be at the top.

Further customizations can be made under Reading Settings, such as the number of blog posts to show on the home page and whether to include the full text or a summary. In the case of our Site Sparker website, our blog posts are very short so we've chosen to post the full text. But if your blog entries are very long, then you should choose the Summary setting so that only a portion of your blog appears on the homepage. That will ensure visitors can scroll very quickly through all of your posts to find what they're looking for.

If this is at all confusing, you can find a video version of this tutorial at the link below, where it's explained visually, inside the WP interface.

WordPress - How to Add a Contact Form to Your WordPress Blog

It is so important to have a contact form on your WordPress blog. Having a contact form gives other bloggers or potential clients the ability to contact you easily and in a straight forward manner. This will add functionality to your WordPress blog. How to add a contact form couldn't be easier as you will see as you follow along.

The way in which we are going to add a contact form to your WordPress blog is in the form of a plugin, there are various plugins available to you for adding a contact form but I will be showing you using 'Contact Form 7'

The first thing you will need to do is login to the Dashboard area of your blog. Once there, click on the plugins tab over on the left hand side and then the 'Add New' tab. You will now be able to enter a search term, enter the name of the plugin 'Contact Form 7' and click 'Search plugins'. You will now see the plugin appear in the list which you are presented with, all you need to do is click on the 'Install Now' link under the plugin name. You will be asked if you are sure you wish to install the plugin, just click OK. Once the plugin has finished installing you can click the 'Activate Now' link to activate the plugin. Your contact form plugin is now installed and active.

You now need to add your contact form somewhere on your blog and I always find this works well as a separate page with the name 'About Us' or 'Contact Us' but the choice is yours, for this example I'm going to add mine to the 'About Us' page which is automatically created when you install a new copy of WordPress. How to add the contact form is simple enough, if you go over to the left where all your tabs are you will see a new tab called 'Contact' - click it to go to the contact form settings.

You will see a contact form called 'Contact Form 1' has automatically been created for you. If you are happy with the tags and the email addresses it has added you can simple copy the text it tells you to or you can add in or take out any tags you would like and change the email address before you copy the text. Once you have copied the information click on the 'Pages' tab.

Once you arrive at the 'Edit Pages' page you will see the 'About' page which was pre-installed with WordPress, hover your mouse over it until a menu appears then click on the 'Edit' button. You will need to edit the text to suit your blog, once you have done this, paste the text which you copied from the contact form settings and click 'update'. If you now click on 'View Page' at the top of the page you will see your new page with the contact form in.

As you can see this is easy enough to do and really adds to your blog, and your readers will love having the ability to contact you easily.

Alester

'WordPress How To' is a valuable resource for anyone that wants to get started with WordPress. The tutorials are easy to follow in a step-by-step process. By the time you finish each tutorial you will be able to carry out what you have learned with ease.

Top 10 Reasons Why EVERY Small Business Website Should Be Built With WordPress

I'll tell you the same thing I tell every one of my new web marketing clients, "WordPress is incredible - and you should be using it for your website." It can save you both time and money, while making it far easier to build a beautiful and limitless website that you can manage and control yourself.

Once you learn more about WordPress, you'll understand why over 80 MILLION websites are built on WordPress, and why NOW is the time for you to learn what WordPress is all about too, and how it can provide immense value to your small business.

Here are my Top 10 Reasons why you should strongly consider WordPress for your website, regardless if you already have one or not.

1. Incredible Power Straight Out of the Box

Immediately upon installing WordPress, you'll have power features that make it easy to manage your website. You'll have a Content Management System that allows you to add/edit/delete your own content, including images and videos, a User Access system that controls who can access your Admin Center and what level of access they have, a powerful Blogging software, and a central location to manage virtually all aspects of your website.

2. Quickly Build Beautiful Websites with Existing

Themes Forget spending $1,000's on a custom website design when there are hundreds of highly professional themes for under $100. Simply find the theme that projects the right image for your business, install it in WordPress, and badda-bing, your new website has a top-quality look and feel to it. Any aspect of any theme can also be customized to suit your needs.

3. Add Powerful Features with Thousands of Plugins

Forget spending $1,000's on custom websites features when there are thousands of Plugins that can easily be installed and utilized instantly. Need a Calendar, there's plugins for that. A shopping cart? A Contact Us form? A Image Gallery? Yep. If it's a common feature, chances are you can find a plugin to use, most of them for free. If not, you can have custom features developed.

4. It's Completely Open Source

Is WordPress starting to sound like a website builder so far that you can buy for $5/month? In some ways it is, but here is where the similarities stop. WordPress is 100% Open Source, and is written in a industry standard web-programming language. This means that your designer/developer is able to work directly in the code of the software to make ANY changes to the system and your website.

For instance, you may have a theme in mind, but the colors don't match your logo. Your designer can easily go into the code of the system and change the colors, or the layout, or the images used, or anything. Perhaps you are using a Plugin, but it lacks an option that you'd really like to have. No problem, your developer can adapt it for you to any specification. With WordPress, anything is possible.

5. Focus on Proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

WordPress gives you a big head start in the SEO race by providing the core features for you to implement your keyword strategy. You can use search-engine friendly URL's, edit the META tags for each page, and include Header Tags and Alt Tags directly in the Content Management System. In addition, most theme designers take SEO very seriously and code their themes to strict SEO best practices.

6. Constant Development and Enhancement

Technology is progressing faster and faster, and WordPress more than keeps up. New versions are constantly being developed and released to take advantage of new technologies, to enhance existing features and security, and to develop new, cutting-edge features that make managing your website easier.

7. A Strong and Active Community

In addition to the team that develops the core of WordPress, there are millions of active users of WordPress that can help you in many ways. These users develop new plugins, new themes, provide professional services, and happily answer questions for you in WordPress forums around the world.

8. Keep Your Website Safe and Secure

You invest a lot of time and resources in your website and you need to know it's safe and secure. In addition to security being hardened in every release, there are also tools that make it easy to keep backups of all your website files and data, allowing you to restore your website in the worse of circumstances.

9. Never Outgrow Your Website

Your data, settings, and design files are completely separate from the core of WordPress. This makes it easy to upgrade any area of your site - whenever you want. And, since it's open source, you can build features as complex as necessary. Once you build your website with WordPress, you'll be able to grow your website to keep pace with your business, no matter how big your business grows.

10. It's Free!

Perhaps best of all, WordPress is completely free. Zip, zilch, nada. Just download it, install it on your server and start using it - without spending a dime on the software.

I hope this article has helped you get an idea of how powerful and valuable WordPress can be to your business. It will take some time and effort on your part to really understand how it works and operates, but it will be extremely well worth the effort in the long run.

Blogging Tutorial

I. Overview of Topic

How to blog is a question on many people's minds these days. Blogging has taken the world by storm. Since 2004, when it first made its appearance, this popular medium of having your own little corner of the world to express yourself has turned into a veritable deluge. Today there are more than 120 million blogs that are currently tracked by the Tecnorati blog search engine. No wonder then, that owning and maintaining a blog has become almost a fashion statement, especially in the U.S.

When first embarking on a blogging journey, there are some knotty questions that usually beset one's mind regarding how to blog. Let's start with the basics.

What kinds of topics can be the subjects of blogs?

Just about anything. Simply put, a blog is an online personal diary on just about any topic you care to write about, ranging from politics to sports and fitness to religion, health, freelancing, literature, or whatever suits your fancy. But picking a subject you have solid experience in will enable you to write meaningful content that will pull in an audience for your blog. Without an audience you'll soon tire of your blog and it will join the millions of abandoned blogs lost in cyberspace.

How are blogs categorized in blog search engines?

Blog search engines like Technorati and IceRocket categorize them by subject. The most general categorization, though, is personal vs. business-oriented blogs. Yours will probably fit into the former of these categories.

Are blogs only text or can they have other features as well?

Though basically consisting of text, many blog users make their web pages more attractive by adding pictures, audio and video files.

How can I make my blog easy to navigate and attractive to readers?

A successful blog usually follows a clear simple format with its articles plainly delineated, archives (in a sidebar), and a place at the bottom for visitors to leave comments. Some also include blogrolls, which are just lists of links to other similar blogs. The best bloggers are usually people who are able to connect with their visitors' emotions, by means of artistic expression in many cases. To learn how to blog with the winners your number one teacher is other blogs - read and study a lot of them before starting your own. A good place to research blogs on your topic is Icerocket.com.

What are some tips for setting up a blog?

- First, remember your blog is a reflection of your personality. Pick a theme or a topic close to your heart or one you know something about. Correction, one you know a lot about.

- Be consistent. If you want your blog to get really popular you need to connect with your visitors on a regular, predictable schedule. Plan on publishing at least twice a week. If that sounds like too much work, once a week is the absolute lowest you can go, say blog gurus.

- Connect/network. Connect with other blog writers by leaving comments on their posts and by providing links to their blogs on your website. This kind of networking will do wonders for your traffic.

- Keep it simple. Don't clutter up your blog with meaningless details. Select a simple clean appealing design. Use fonts and colors which increase text visibility. Add videos, audios, photographs and music files only if these make your blog more attractive and/or useful.

- Don't stick your neck out - or not too far anyway. Blogs can get opinionated, which is fine, but don't put yourself at risk of a heavy-duty defamation suit. It's fine to express your opinions - so long as you make it clear they're just that, your opinions -- and always be sure that your blog is not defaming somebody, divulging sensitive information, or giving away corporate secrets.

Okay, I get the feel about how to blog. Now where do I go from here?

To get started, you first need to select suitable weblog software. This is necessary in order to create and manage your blog. There's quite an assortment of blogging software out there. Some offer ease of design and development while other programs offer more elaborate features, for example, allowing you to add discussion forums, message boards etc. Some weblogs can be downloaded and installed directly on your system. Freeware and open source software are available, though these programs are not as feature-rich as some of the paid proprietary software. Here's a rundown of the most popular blogging software:

Wordpress

Wordpress is the number one blog publishing software. Why? -- because it's freeware, easy to install, and has a minimal learning curve. Its extensive documentation and step-by-step installation guide make it a cakewalk even for a novice user. Among its most salient features are --

Easy installation - Even a newbie can get Wordpress up and going in 5 minutes. Moreover, web pages are generated dynamically by using thousands of built-in templates thereby greatly reducing your time and effort.

User Management - Restricts access to users while you're making modifications in your weblog. So in effect you have separate access for readers and administrative users.

Saves precious bandwidth through its Gzip feature, which reduces blog transmission size.

Enables you to place RSS feeds into your blogs and also aids in inter-blog communication by providing features like pingback and trackback.

Comes with lots of plugins making it possible for you to incorporate any feature you want. You can also integrate Wordpress with Akismet, a popular anti-spam software program used to protect blogs from spammers.

Other useful features include a database of visitors, capability to save previous drafts, blog previews, and easy formatting.

Want to see some popular blogs that use Wordpress. Two to start with are: Ilovetypography and Problogger.

OTHER WEBLOG SOFTWARE

Typepad

Created and owned by Six Apart Limited, Typepad is a blog hosting website currently used by many large organizations in the US, such as Sky News, BBC, and MSNBC for hosting their weblogs. Launched in October 2003, Typepad today can boast that it's the number one paid blogging service worldwide. Available in multiple languages in different parts of the world, users have three different subscription options: $4.50/month for a basic subscription to $14.50/month for the pro edition. Among its features: The software enables you to associate each article in your blog with a URL, and easy uploading and sharing photo albums from multiple authors have made this a vox populi among professional bloggers. So if writing is your passion and you want to make it a profession, you can start by signing up for Typepad.

Movable Type

The first blogging system developed by Six Apart Limited in 2001, Movable Type hosts some of the world's top blogs, such as Huffington Post and Boing Boing. Developed using Perl, Movable Type supports LDAP protocol for efficient user management and automatic provisioning of blogs. This blogging system is extremely useful if you want to run multiple blogs using a single installation. The system is enriched with all possible features you could possibly think of, such as a customizable template library, ability to create categories and sub categories of articles, efficient user management directory servers and hordes of independent plugins that can be used to support different services, like creating discussion forums. This blogging system is an attractive choice if you have a technical bent.

Text Pattern

Developed by Dean Allen as an open source content management system, this is one of the simplest blogging systems available today. The most useful feature of Text Pattern is textile that helps in converting simple text documents into stylish HTML web pages using built-in style sheets. Text Pattern has a built-in CSS editor that simplifies the task of changing your web site's designs, fonts, position of the text and the background color. You can also password-protect certain sections of your blogs and keep regular track of visitors and their comments. The date and time stamp of each article is adjustable and you can save drafts of your blogs for future publication. What makes it most attractive is that Text Pattern provides a built-in search engine and the users can also link XML feeds into their blogs. The simplicity of Text Pattern is its USP. For most beginners choosing this service is almost a nobrainer.

Blogger

Developed by Pyra Systems and bought by Google in 2003, Blogger is one of the most popular blogging systems to date. Google subsequently acquired Picasa in 2004 and integrated the latter's photo sharing feature 'Hello' into Blogger. Alexa ranks Blogger as the 9th most visited site worldwide, indicating its enormous popularity. Blogger offers multiple author support allowing the user to create group blogs. Bloggers can even earn revenue from Google AdSense by integrating it into their blogs. Another interesting feature provided by Blogger is a free add-in for Microsoft Word called "Blogger for Word" that helps blog users save their blogs directly in Blogger from their Word document. Bloggers can also customize their blog templates as per personal preferences. For users having a Google email account, it is a pretty simple matter to link to Blogger and then start writing and maybe earning some extra income.

In addition to the above five blogging systems there are a number of up-and-coming lesser-known blog systems which include all the aforementioned features but don't require any plugins for extending their feature list. Some of the best of these second-line blogging systems are:

Habari

Habari, meaning 'news' in Swahili, is one of the most promising new blogging platforms and one of the finalists in the 'Best New Projects in 2008' Sourceforge Community Choice Award. Habari allows the user to launch multiple blogs using a single installation, supports multiple writers and has a modular structure for easy extendibility. All these features will make Habari a formidable competitor in blog publishing.

Symphony

Created for ultra-serious bloggers, Symphony has been developed in XML and XSLT. This is a blogging system for web developers and has an MVC architecture which gives the blogger full control over their website. An extremely versatile system, Symphony can be customized to a high level making it popular among bloggers who want to keep a tight grip on all aspects of their website.

Pixie

Positioning itself as a small, simple website maker, Pixie is also a great blogging platform for all of you who are new to the world of blogging. Ease of installation, lots of creative CSS themes, search engine optimized clean URLs for your website, spam protection, a file manager which supports tags for easy sorting of files and a small memory requirement of just 1 MB are some of the features which explain 

Pixie's fast-rising popularity.

That's it, our ten minutes are up (okay, maybe eleven or twelve). Below are additional resources on How to Blog.

II. FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Following are additional research resources on "How to Blog."

Tumblr

Tumblr is a popular micro-blogging site where users create and share small posts of about 140 words or less. What makes these micro-blogs, popularly known as tumblelogs, all the rage is their ease of customization and the freedom they provide for posting everything from photos to quotes, to emails, and even links. Moreover, signing up for Tumblr really does take only about 10 seconds. More and more people are attracted to micro-blogging due to its capability for posting short, incisive and hopefully witty messages about the poster's latest doings, inventions, discoveries, observations, misadventures, etc. Tumblelogs even make it possible for people to post their art works and music audios and videos for public viewing.

Clubmom

If you are a homemaker who loves sharing recipes, health tips, beauty secrets and child care advice and also love getting similar words of wisdom from others, Clubmom is the place for you. It's a blogging site/forum where moms can meet and share their experiences while at the same time having a chance at winning exciting gifts. From family anecdotes to home remedies, careers to kids, this is a bonding place for moms of all age groups. Joining Clubmom means connecting with individuals at a personal level and sharing information which benefits all.

How To Quickly And Easily Embed YouTube Videos In A WordPress Blog Post

In this article, I will describe step-by-step how you can quickly and easily embed YouTube videos in a WordPress blog post.

It's true, a blog with nothing but text can be pretty boring so it is a great idea to add things like pictures and video to your blog. One of the most common question we get asked over at Learn WordPress Visually is how a YouTube video can be embedded into a WordPress post. 

YouTube 

Step 1: Create a new blog post

Step 2: Give your post a title and type in any text that you would like in your post. Note: You can have a post that only has the video or you can have the video in the post along with text that you have added in.

Step 3: Click on the "HTML" tab

There are two tabs on the upper right side of the WordPress posting area. One tab is called "Visual" and the other is called "HTML"

Important: This is the step that most people forget to do so make double sure that you have selected the HTML tab and not the Visual.

Step 4: In another internet window, go to YouTube and find the video that you would like to embed in your blog post. This is the other step that many people get wrong. Make sure that you are not just clicking on the channel, it's important to actually click on the title of the actual video that you would like to embed.

Step 5: Click the "Embed" button which is located on YouTube and directly under the video window.

Step 6: You will now see the HTML code that is needed to embed that particular video. You will also see some options below that code which you can select. Once you have the options selected (you do not have to select additional options if you don't need them) click your mouse in the box with the code and it should automatically highlight the code. Once you have done that, right-click and copy the code (or click on "edit, copy") which will copy the code for that video.

Step 7: Go back to your WordPress window (or tab) and again, make sure that the "HTML" tab is selected. Click you mouse in the posting and put it where you would like the YouTube video to show up. Once you have done that, just right-click (or select edit) and paste that code into that area of the post.

Step 8: That is all there is to it. You can now click back to the "Visual" tab to get back to your normal view. You probably won't be able to actually see the video until you publish your blog post so go ahead and click "Publish" to publish your post and you will now have a post that has a YouTube video right in it which means that people can watch the video without even leaving your blog!

Final tip: When you are choosing the embed options on YouTube, I usually uncheck the "show related videos" box which means that when the YouTube video is done being viewed on my blog, it will not someone else's related video.

WordPress Permalinks

A "permalink" is how the URL (website address) of a WordPress post appears. It is very important that you set your desired Permalink structure first thing after building your new website for a few reasons. First, because search engines index your blog based on your post's URLs, and if you change from one to another you will loose any rankings that you have already received for that post. 

And second, any other incoming links to your post from other websites will no longer work causing you to loose out on any traffic from those links as well. As a general rule of SEO, it is best to have the keywords that you would like any given post to rank for located within the posts permalink.

So then which Permalink Structure Is the Best?

To configure your Permalinks click the "Permalinks" tab in your WordPress Dashboard located under "Settings" on the left side of your screen.

Well now that we know that having your keywords which you wish to rank for located within your post's permalink is best for SEO purposes, it is obvious that the "Default" and "Numeric" settings are not your best options. The "Day and name" or "Month and name" option will place your post's name (which should be the keywords that you are targeting for any given post) into your post's permalink, but they also include a lot of numbers before hand which is not ideal for SEO purposes. The most ideal permalink would be your website address followed immediately by your post's name (which again should be the keywords that you are targeting for that post).

Example: [http://www.YourWebsiteAddress.com/post-name]

Custom Structure Permalink Settings

To accomplish this you want to use the "Custom Structure" option to display your permalinks. You can use a number of different variables to define your Wordpress permalinks, but most of the time you will really only need two. These are the %category% and %postname% permalink structures. You will need to enter these into the "Custom Structure" option box using forward slashes ( / ) to separate these variables so that they look like this: /%category%/%postname%

This structure will display the category that the post belongs to as well as the post's name in your permalink. If you are not using categories to separate your posts or you simply do not want to include the category in your permalink (which I personally do not do, again because the "optimal" SEO permalink is the cleanest, shortest, and simplest) then you can instead just place the /%postname% structure into the option box so that your permalink will only display your website address and the post's name.

If you do chose to use the /%category% structure and your post belongs to two categories, then the one with a top category ID will be selected as the category name (note that the category IDs are assigned according to the order you created them and not according to alphabetic order).