Buttons make the world go round. The reason for using buttons is that a lot of people don’t realize they are using social bookmarking services or RSS Feeds. They just call it Twitter, Facebook or Yahoo. They know clicking on those links adds it to their page or helps them share it. That’s why a simple RSS button or no social bookmarking links won’t help our cause.

 

Adding RSS Feed Buttons To Your Blog

 

Go to http://www.totallyfreeblogtools.com

Click on RSS Feed buttons tool.

Scroll down.

You should see Choose Feed Type . Choose the appropriate option. Type in your RSS address in the box or boxes that appear. Then right down you will see a couple of buttons.

Choose the buttons you wish to appear on your Blog or Site. Subscribe , Yahoo, Google and AOL.

Click on the Get RSS Feed Buttons Code.

Select the Code and Copy it All.

Once you’ve done that, log in to your WordPress Blog‘s Admin Section.

After logging in click on Appearance.

Click on Widgets.

Add a Text Widget to the Sidebar.

Open the Text Widget to edit it.

Before pasting the code that we copied, type in <ul>

Paste the RSS Feed Buttons Code.

At the end type </ul>

You can add a Title to the Text Widget if you like.

After that Click on Done.

Then Save Changes.

And You’re done.

 

Adding Social Bookmarking Buttons to Your

WordPress Blog.

The easiest way to do this is to install the Plug in called Sociable. There are a few other plug ins but Sociable in my opinion is the neatest and works best.

So Log in to your Blog’s Admin Area.

Click on the Plug ins tab.

Click on Add New.

Type Sociable into the search box that appears on the page and click search plugins.

Sociable should be the first plug in that turns up. Install it.

Once Installed you should see it under the Settings Tab.

Go to Sociable Settings.

Select the Sites you want displayed.

Scroll Down to Position. Select the options you want.

When you’re done scroll down and click on Save Changes.

That’s pretty much it. That is bare minimum you should choose to do. You can mess around with the other settings if you want to. But this is all that’s required.

 

Hope this helps. Would love to hear your Feedback . A lot can be found through Google for FREE. I suggest using it often.

 

As Always

Take Care.

Have a Great Day !

Twitter is becoming popular amongst marketers. The important thing is that it works. You are in all honesty better off not ignoring it. Today’s short Blog post is about adding a “tweet this” link to your Website or Blog.

You can achieve this by copy pasting the code below and of course changing the web address and message to suit your needs.

 

 

 

<a href= ”http://twitter.com/home?status=Serving Niches (http://servingniches.com/testblog)”>

Tweet about Serving Niches

</a>

 

 

 

The end result of this above code will look like the Link below.

Tweet about Serving Niches

 

 

 

<a href= ”http://twitter.com/home?status=Google (http://google.com)”>

In this part you should replace the (http://google.com) with your site address or whatever you want it pointed to .

“status=Google ” Here “Google” should be replaced with the message you want displayed.

Tweet about Google

</a>

and you would want to replace “Tweet about Google” to what you want displayed there.

When a visitor clicks that code , they will taken directly to twitter.They will have your tweet and your site address in their update box. All they have to do is press the update button. You can click on it yourself and test it.

Watch out for tommorow’s post if you found this one helpful. I’ll explain how you can put up those wonderful twitter , facebook and other logos of bookmarking sites in much more detail.

As Always

Take Care .

 

 

 

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Using RSS Feeds to write posts on your WordPress Blog.

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Hello. Its been ages since I last posted. For those of you wondering why that is, all I can say is Mom , India, No Internet Access, Hospital , everything’s okay. Moving on ….

 

This is ridiculously Easy. Don’t worry about it too much . A site filled with some original content and RSS feed content isn’t going to have any problems.

You can do this only if you have a WordPress Blog. You don’t need one that hosted somewhere. One on WordPress.com should do.

First you need to download FeedWordPress plug in.

Click here to download FeedWordPress Plugin for wordpress

For more detailed info on the plug in itself or the makers. Visit http://feedwordpress.radgeek.com/

OR

login to your wordpress administartion area. Choose plugins and click on add new. Under the search tab in the empty field ,type feedwordpress. its the first one that turns up. install and activate the plug in. If you’re asked to Update Magpie RSS please do so.

You should now see a tab called Syndication in the administration area.

Congratulations ! You’ve successfully downloaded and activated the Plug In.

Here’s the wonderful part that not everyone knows. So we need good and useful Feeds to put on our Blog. Fret not. Finding them isn’t as hard as it sounds. These days they’re basically everywhere.

For the sake of keeping this Post short and not driving you nuts, we’re only going to discuss a few sites you can use to get RSS Feeds. You know them, you’ve already heard of them and have probably used them. Just not this way. You’ll know more than enough to do this by yourself at the end of this article on any site that provides this feature.

Example using Digg –

Digg  ( http://www.digg.com/search)

this should take you to the Digg Search Page. On the search page choose all. Search for your choice of keywords until you are happy with what you see.

What we’re going to do is save the RSS Feed of the Search result. What this does is that everytime a new result or new news item or video or article gets added to Digg, you get updated automatically.

Save the RSS feed for this search by right clicking on the orange RSS icon in the top right and click “Copy Link Location”. This link is your content specific RSS Feed.

Basically you can do this on a lot of sites. Technorati, google blog search , youtube, PRWeb, Yahoo News! etc.

We’re not done yet. So after clicking on “Copy Link Location”. Go to the Administration Area of your WordPress Blog. Click on the Syndication Tab. On the right , you should see “Add new source” . Paste the link location in the field provided and click on Syndicate. If the whole thing was successful , you should see a button saying “Use this feed” . Click on it. It should now be added under syndicated sources. Click on the box next to it and click Update Checked. You should have a few posts waiting for you.

Should you wish to review the posts before anything gets posted, click on posts under syndication. Choose the option you prefer and you should be done.

And that’s all there is to it.

Have Fun with It.

See you soon !

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Posting To Your Blog , Screenshots , Lifestreaming and Cool Tools You will love Using

Do you think Lifestreaming is here to stay ? Stay for more than 5 weeks that is ? The end result is gorgeous though

 

Part One 

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“I have installed an interesting application – BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com”

"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination." — Albert Einstein

What you see above is the default post for BlogJet. It does not post that automatically but its what you see when you open up BlogJet for the first time.

Yes, I’m afraid its True. I’m cheating on Windows Live Writer. I was running around looking for lighter software to use. I came across Blog Jet . It wonderful. Its not free though. There were a few others that were recommended to me. I could have sworn I had bookmarked them. Can’t seem to find them. Will mention them when I do. 

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A little Windows Live Writer tip

Was having trouble getting Windows Live Writer to work with WordPress initially. That was the day I first downloaded it. I just wanted to share how I got it to work with my WordPress Blogs. It wasn’t detecting anything initially. Here’s what you have to do.

When you’re asked to enter the web address of your blog, enter the same address you would have to enter to log in to your Blog. What I mean by that is

Example –  http://yourwordpressblog.com  is the location of your WordPress Blog

               to login via the admin login you’d type

               http://yourwordpressblog.com/wp-admin <— this is what you have to enter when asked for the web address of your blog. You will have to replace “yourwordpressblog.com” with the name of your blog.

Everything else should go along like Clockwork. Hope that makes sense. Seeing as how everyone running WordPress is bound to run into this problem , I thought I’d share it.    

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Make Screenshots

More than anything this blog post is about amazing apps and add ons and thingamagits you see the cool people using in the Blogosphere and everywhere else. Yes, looking pretty or handsome while Blogging or Internet Marketing is a Good Idea. It scores points with a lot of People. I don’t mean that looking pretty part literally but that would help too I imagine.

On the Left is a picture of my screen usually referred to as a screenshot. Sometimes you’ll feel the need to share an image of your screen or while performing an action or simply running a program. I use a program called ScreenHunter 5.1 Free. It is free and very flexible. You don’t have to take a snapshot of the entire screen if you don’t want to. Its a really great program and you can get it here. 

Its Freeware and can run in the background . Great stuff , absolutely love it and use it regularly for all sorts of strange purposes.

 

 

Another Screenshot of my desktop. That wallpaper looks awesome. I don’t remember where I got that from though. But it looks cool. So here’s the link if you would like to download the program.

http://www.brothersoft.com/screenhunter-free-71629.html

Its free and quite intuitive. You shouldn’t have any problems using it.

 

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Downloading Videos Via Firefox and Getright

Ever found yourself wanting to download one of those tutorials. The ones that were made with Camtasia. This pretty much works with everything. It also works with Camtasia videos. Now I’m not suggesting you go and break the law whenever possible. Every now and then I’d find myself subscribed to a site with videos. I’d want to download those videos because I’m not perpetually online and would want them available offline . Thats where the Flashgot and any well known download manager comes in handy.

First you’ll need Firefox. Firefox is a browser like Internet Explorer. Secondly you’ll need what are known as add-ons. Add-ons are plug ins for firefox. What you need is the add-on called Flashgot. Lastly you need a download manager called Getright. There are quite a few you could use. Flash Get is another program you could use instead of Getright.

So basically you need

1. Firefox

2. Getright or Flash Get

3. Flashgot

Install them in that order and you should have them working.

 

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As Always

Have a Great Day

Much More Next Post

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Lists, Opt-In Forms, Aspirin,

Coffee and Email Marketing

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Hello Again. Wow. So much worth discussing I’m not sure where and how to put it all out there.

What put a dent in my Email Marketing Posts were Mailing Lists and Autoresponders.  I haven’t posted them yet.  Simply because I am not trying to put out brief paragraphs. I wanted to explain the Landing Page and Opt-in Form in Detail. Most Importantly I wanted to explain how You could set up One right away while reading this Post.

Building a List is ridiculously important. It can be ridiculously Good . It should also be Ridiculously easy. It is. Depending on what You decide to Use.

I’ve been wrestling Code and Settings everyday last month. To Setup the Mailing List for Free.  I loved the Big Complicated looking stuff . Explaining it to You would have been no small task though. Not to mention the amount of errors turned up.Made me wonder if an error free installation was even possible. Right Moving On.

You’ve heard about Lists and how important they are. You’re probably on several already. Make no mistake, email is the internet’s number one tool.

Today we’re going to Set up an Opt – In Form for a WordPress Blog. A Really Nice Opt -In form too. Using free autoresponder/mailing list service and a free wordpress plugin.  Can’t beat that.

Step 1 – Subscribe to Get Response

Now I’m not talking about signing up for their trial period offer. That wouldn’t exactly make it Free. They have a Completely Free service in addition to their Paid Service.

http://www.getresponse.com/orderfree.html

1. The above link should take you to the free Sign-up Page.
2. Fill in the name, email , country , your chosen get response username and how you plan on using it.
3. Ignore the Preload messages box
4. Click on Submit when you are done.
5. They will then take you to a Page where they ask you once again to choose between the Pro version and the Free Version.
6. At the bottom of that page you should see a button saying “Click for GetResponse FREE !”
7. Then comes the page where you are asked to check your inbox. Thats a good Idea. Check your inbox . You will need your password.

Take a Break
We have survived the Subscription Process

Step 2 – Configuring Get Response

1. You need to login into Getresponse. Click on link below to go to Login Page. http://www.getresponse.com/login.html
2. Sign in and You will be asked for contact information. Fill it all Up. Click on Next Step.
3. You should then see a link saying “You can now start using your account”
4. Yes , we are going to click on it. Click on it. You should be taken to the Control Panel .
5. There You will see a block called “Capture Subscribers”. Click on it . The reason we aren’t going to use this form as is is because we can do better.
6. The HTML Form option is the only option available in the Free Version .
7. Click on the “Start Capturing” Button.
8. You will be taken to the “Create HTML Form Wizard”. Look in the  Pass Subscriber Details block. You can’t use the other options in the Free version except tracking code and custom fields. We won’t bother ourselves with it now. Make sure the “Use Standard Settings for my customized landing pages” is selected . Also check “No Thanks. I won’t use custom fields in my form.” is selected.
9. Click on Next Step.
10. You will be presented with HTML Code . All You have to do is Copy that code. Click Select all. Right Click and copy it . Save it in notepad. We will need it later.

Woo. That’s all we need to do at Get Response for the Form. Congratulations on making it this Far.

Step 3 – Getting and Installing the Opt-in Form Adder

Now we can put the form on the Blog as is. Just so you know. But this way is Better.We need to download the wordpress plug-in MaxBlogPress Optin Form Adder. Relax . It is Free.

1. Open the Link Below in a new Window or just link on it.The choice is upto you. The Link
2. Once you click on the link, you will be taken to the plugin download page. Scroll Down . You should see a Big “Download Now” Button.
3. Download the Plugin.
4. Install the Plugin on your blog.
5. Once installed you should see “optin form adder” under Tools. Click on it.
6. You will be asked to Register. All You have to do is click the Register Button. That was the fastest and easiest registration I’ve ever gone through. Probably yours too.

Congrats! You survived the Installation. The hardest part would have been reading the instructions.

Step 4 – Configuring It.

This is last part of the entire process. Its now Man Vs. Plug-in.

1. Under Tools select Optin Form Adder.
2. Choose the Optin Form Settings tab.
3. Remember the Code we copied and saved into a txt file ? Copy that code into the empty box.
4. After you have pasted the Code. Click on the Detect Button. The Next Step button should appear.
5. Everything on that Page should be self explanatory. You need a Headline. In the body text type in the benefits and whatever else you want.
6. Click Next Step button if you are happy with the way the box looks. Most People should find this part easy to deal with.  I had to make the hard decision to not describe literally everything. Otherwise this will come to be known as the “Never ending Blog Post”.
7. Once again the Next Page should be self explanatory. Click the Finish Button when you’re done.
8. Now we are done with tools Part. Look under the Blog’s Appearance tab. Click on Widgets.
9. Under Current Widgets Choose Sidebar. Depending on your theme you might have two sidebars on maybe just one. Choose where you wish it to appear.
10. Add the “MBP optin form adder” option to the sidebar. Just click on add.
11. Then click on the Save Changes Button.

And You are Done !

You have now successfully set up an opt in form on your blog. Either this was a lesson in how to set up an opt-in form for free. Or why using a Paid service that offers support is a Good Idea.

There are a few things I’ve left out because it had nothing to do with setting up a form. But they are important. In Get response, it will be a ridiculously good idea to personalize the campaign. We only looked through the capture subscribers block. Go through the others. Set it up. We’ll discuss that another day.

Much Love.

Have a Great Day.