For a startup business, it is always an exciting moment when you get your first client.  Last Saturday, I officially was given my first client?  I say given, because this client, who was a former business colleague, contacted me. I don’t have much time to write, as I need to be working on this project. It is a website for an insurance agency and I will be building it with the Thesis Theme for WordPress.

I’m excited!

Mike

This past week, I purchased a new book called Digging into WordPress. This book really takes you from the basics to extensive customization of WordPress – all in a very easy-to-understand format. There are two purchase options – (1) PDF only, or (2) Print and PDF.  I purchased the second option. The print book has one feature that really sold me and that is the spiral binding. It allows you to open the book to the page you want and it won’t flop back closed.

While I am waiting for the printed version to arrive,  I was able to immediately get my hands on the content with the PDF download.  Once the download was completed, I took some time to page through the PDF, reading segments as I went along.  I have a lot of WordPress sites and I can’t wait to start applying the information in this book. I found the book’s presentation to be easy and entertaining to follow.  This is not a boring technical manual.  It is organized so you can go to a specific subject and use it right away.  While you will benefit by reading it from cover to cover, this is not required if you already have a basic understanding of how WordPress works.

The authors give you lifetime access to updates of the PDF ebook.  They also have an active blog with even more useful information. Both the beginner or experienced WordPress user will find this book a fantastic resource.

Disclaimer: This blog post contains affiliate links that will provide compensation to our company if a purchase is made.

In my recent post, Now I can get going!, I mentioned as my next step is to create an affiliate marketing site. The first question that comes to mind is, “How do I do that?” I have subscribed to a newsletter from Dr. Andy Williams called ezSEO. I always liked Dr. Andy’s detailed and methodical approach to doing things and remembered that he had a course for creating fat affiliate sites in WordPress.  Since I build all my sites using WordPress, I thought I would check out Andy’s course to see if it could teach me how to create profitable affiliate sites.

His course is called WordPress for Affiliate Sites.  It is a subscription course that costs $47 per month and runs for about five months.  It does have an option to purchase the entire course at once, but there are a couple reasons to subscribe monthly.

• Course modules are presented on a schedule of about one a week.  This is the right pace if you are doing this course on a part-time basis.
• There is a 14-day money back guarantee offered with the monthly option.  This is not available if you purchase the whole course.

On the flip side, if you are able to focus and do this full time, then purchasing the whole course might be right for you.

Each lesson comes with a PDF guide, video, and action plan.  Some lessons also come with a mind map. I just finished the first lesson. The PDF is 18 pages long, so it was easy to read in a short setting. The video is just short of 37 minutes long.  You can complete the first step on the action plan in about an hour. I did this today, Saturday, and then planned the remaining activities for the rest of the week.  Following this approach, I can make progress toward my goal every week!

I also want to mention that the quality of the materials is very good. You can definitely tell the skill, knowledge, and experience that Andy applied in making this course.  If you are wanting to setup quality affiliate sites, I definitely recommend that you give WordPress for Affiliate Sites a try for the 14 day guarantee period.  I am going to see it through to completion.

I am amazed at the amount of instant traffic you can get to your blog by tweeting your posts. Twitter is quite the phenomenon on the Internet today. If you’re not on Twitter, I suggest that you sign up and start tweeting.  Once you are on Twitter, you can follow me at twitter.com/mikesmind.

This morning, I wrote a post for one of my blogs.  This blog has about three to five views per day.  It is a WordPress blog, so I added a plugin to automatically tweet a link when I publish a new post.  Within a couple hours, I had 30 views.  Now, that is pretty powerful and it doesn’t take much imagination to see how a plugin like this can really get you new readers for your blog.

Here are two plugins that I have tried that automatically tweet your blog posts when published.

1. Twitter Tools – This is what I am using on the blog mentioned above.  It is written by Alex King, who is well known in the WordPress plugin world.  It is configurable and I have included a screen shot of the options page.  As you can see, it is pretty straight-forward to configure.

   

   I found this plugin easy to use and it works like it is supposed to.

2. Another plugin that I am using to automatically tweet my blog posts is a commercial offering called TweetMyBlog.  This is an affiliate-based plugin that gives you the opportunity to make some money.  I have it installed on this blog, but have not made anything from it, yet.  It is free for you to install, but it does have a commercial intent as well as look and feel.  I found the extra graphics too much for many of my blogs, but if your blog is about making money, then this plugin should help you do that.  As you can see below, it doesn’t have as many configuration options as Twitter Tools.

   

   This blog has a few hoops to jump through as you get set up to receive affiliate commissions.  If you are looking to add another income source and increase traffic by automatically tweeting your blog posts, TweetMyBlog is a good option.

Either option I listed above will help you build traffic to your WordPress blog by harnessing the power of Twitter.