Hello Happy Site Owners! Hope you had a wonderful end of summer weekend holiday. Things have been cranking up at BlogAid with the new WordPress Video Tutorials. Guess everyone is in the mood for back-to-school and learning how to make their site better. It’s inexpensive and you learn on your schedule.
I cull the best tips from all over the ‘net for Tips Tuesday. And, if you’re an author, or if you want to self-publish an ebook for your business, you’ll be delighted with all the tips just for you this week. If you know an author or pro writer, be sure to share this post with them.
Featured
Facebook announces October 1st deadline for having all of your fan page embedded content stored on a site that has an SSL Certificate. Here’s my post about Facebook iFrames and SSL Certificates Explained without all of the geek-speak.
Tech Tips
If you use the popular TimThumb plugin to manipulate your site images, you probably know about the hacker attack last month. Here’s a nice follow-up from Phillip John on WPMU.org on How to Protect Your WordPress Site as Hackers Exploit TimThumb Security Hole.
Part of your site’s Google ranking has to do with your page load time. Faster loading means better SEO. But, the really important stat is that most viewers expect a page to load in three seconds or less. If it takes longer than that, they bounce without ever seeing your site. Here’s a handy online page load time checker from Pingdom.com Scroll below the chart and look on the right for the How it Works section to see an explanation of the bar colors. Keep in mind that everything you’re seeing in the chart is for the one page you are checking. You may be amazed at all of the objects that have to be loaded just to display a single page.
This is good news. Plugins that have not been updated in two years will be hidden in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Now we won’t have to filter through dead plugins to find the currently supported ones.
Got Gmail? Now you can use Google Docs with Gmail as a Mail Merge program with HTML templates for sending personalized mass mailings on the go.
Shelley Hitz has gone and done it! What a great list of tools she’s made. In fact, she’s made two – one for PC tools and one for Mac tools. She made them to help authors who want to self-publish, but if you run an online business, you’ll find all of them helpful too.
Blog Tips
And, if you are, or want to be, a self-published author, then you’ll definitely want to read this story by Terry Tracy on The Savvy Book Marketer about how The Media is Paying Attention to Self-Published Authors.
Have you ever been through a site redesign or are you thinking about doing it? You’ll want to read this post from Pat Flynn on his Smart Passive Income blog about his latest switch to a Thesis theme and how he has lived through a total of nine theme redesigns.
Maybe the problem is not your theme. Maybe it’s just time to pull the plug on your blog and start over. I did it with the predecessor to BlogAid and it was a good move. Here’s a nice post by Jeff Goins, featured on ProBlogger, about the 7 Lessons I Learned by Starting Over with Blogging. And, if you’re a pro writer, you’ll probably want to visit Jeff’s site directly too.
Online marketing is a lot like cooking. It takes finding the right mix of elements to work. This is a tasty post from James Martell on Expand 2 Web for the Three Ingredients for Successful Marketing.
And, if you love leftovers as much as I do, you’ll want to read this post on how to repurpose old content. Pat Flynn shows you 10 Ways to Bring New Life to Old Blog Posts.
Social Media Tips
Hugh Briss, one of my fave Facebook techie and page creator guys, has a nice post on a new Facebook feature about How to Edit the Titles and Descriptions for Links on Your Facebook Posts. Didn’t even know you could do that, did ya? Me either. Be sure to find Hugh and follow him on Facebook. He posts under his biz name Social Identities. He’s a great source of info about the new SSL Certificate stuff too.
MaAnna is a geek who can still speak in plain English and mashes up her background in both the techie and artsy worlds to teach non-geeks, authors, artists, and other creative folks the ways of WordPress.
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I read your Tuesday Tips and could hear your voice narrating at the same time! Guess who has been imprinted with your video tuts…..
Nice job once again on all your tips. Thanks, MaAnna!
Thanks Donna! I had another client say that to me yesterday. I believe writing has made me a better speaker, and vice versa.
Very nice compilation of tips for this Tuesday, M, and thanks for the mention.
Anytime, Hugh. Happy to let my peeps know about the good guys!