So you want to make money with your blog? You want to cash in on this blog money making thing?

Sounds like a great idea to me! But how do you pull this off? You don’t know what to advertise, where to get banners and links, or how to get them on your blog. What is an up and coming blogger to do??

Drum roll…..enter, THE WEB TRAINER!

Conceptually, making money with your blog is straight forward. Write great posts, tell the world, and count your money. That’s it!

Ok, not quite.  In addition to great content, you’ll also need some affiliate banners and links.  Here’s how to add them to your site.

Downloading a Banner Plugin

Before you can get affiliate banners and links on your site, you gotta get your WordPress blog ready to accept them. You can do this by manually by placing ads directly into the WordPress theme files, or choosing to use a cool WordPress plugin.While there are advantages to both, let’s just work with the plugin option.

Step one:  Go to the Interweb and download an easy-to-use, highly effective banner ad WordPress plugin called “Max Banner Ads”. Get it here.

Step two:  Download the plugin to your computer.

Step three:  Login to your WordPress administrative area and head to your “Plugins” tab and click “Add New”.  Look for the”Upload” link on the Install Plugins page.

After you upload the plugin, WordPress will ask if you want to activate the plugin. Make sure you activate it, otherwise it won’t work. WELL Duuuuu!

Making the Plugin Work

Now that the Max Banner Ads plugin is installed and active, we need to fiddle with the settings.  Head over to the “Tool” tab in your WordPress admin and look for the “Max Banner Ads” link.  You guessed it… click on the link!

At first glance, you might want to bag out of this banner thing.  Don’t.  We can get passed those icons, zones, clicks, impressions, and controls settings.  Just stay calm; The Web Trainer will explain all those headings.

Let’s start with a zone. In online advertising, a “Zone” is nothing more than a location on your blog that is designated for ads. Kinda like those annoying highway work zones that are marked off with cones and flashing barriers.

With the Max Banner Ads plugin, there are four pre-set zones. I recommend that you just stick with the default settings.

• Within The Post
• Sidebar Widget
• Top of First Post
• Bottom of Last Post

Preview: This will show you what the banner or text link looks like in the zone

Impressions: This is how many times the banner or text ad is displayed on a page. If you look at a blog post 3 times for example, you would have “3 Impressions” for that zone. Make sense? This number will always be higher than clicks.

Clicks: This numbers tells you how many times someone clicks on the banner or link.

CTR (%): This is “Click Though Rate”. This number gives you the ratio in percentage on how many clicks you are getting against the number of impressions. (clicks / impressions) × 100
For example, the CTR on a 120-impressions per 12 people who have clicked through to your blog or affiliate program is a 10% CTR.

Plugin Controls

What exactly do these silly drawings (icons) mean?

Red Cross Icon: You can add a banner or link ad to this zone from this icon.

Pencil Icon: You can edit the zone setting here.

Green Circle Icon: Resets your banners impressions and clicks back to “0”.

Red X Icon: Deletes the zone including all the banners associated with it. I HIGHLY recommend you don’t delete the four pre-set zones unless you’re a WordPress wizard!!

Bracket Icon: This is WordPress short code that you can use if you want to place your zones manually in your WordPress template.

I think that covers the major things you need to know for now. But as you know, nothing beats the tried and true method of just trying it out and see what happens!!! Now let’s move to adding a banner to your site!

Adding a Banner to the Side Column

Adding a banner to your side column on WordPress is the most common area or “Zone” bloggers use to display ads and promotions.

Now a bit of TWT (The Web Trainer) advice. Try to promote just one or two products in your side column. The temptation for bloggers is to load your site bar column with a bunch of banners, with the thinking that your visitors will need what you’re offering. And that may even be the case. But advertising studies show that focusing on one or two products results in higher revenue. I know, hard to believe it’s true since many big name bloggers run multiple ads on their sites. So you ask, if the big guys do it, shouldn’t you do it too?

NO.  Let me explain why.

Big time bloggers have built a massive following – people who love and enjoy their content. The ads at this point become more like resource links than ads to their readers. They have built loyalty and trust. two things you need before you do much advertising on your blog. Now back to installing the banner.

Make sure you have a banner that will fit in the side column area. If your banner is too wide, the plugin will resize it to fit. A 125px to 150px (pixels) wide banner seems to work well.

Go to your Max Blog Ad dashboard and click the “Red Cross” icon to add a banner. It looks like a lot to do here, but really it’s quite easy. Just follow these steps:

1. Under “Add New Banner” choose whether you are going to place a banner or a text link. In this example we will be doing a banner, so leave the default setting to “Banner Ads”
2. Name your banner. This is for your reference only, so name it something you can quickly look at to identify, like, “AnytimeBlogger 125×125 Red Banner”.
3. Then you need to add the image URL: If you are getting the link directly from an affiliate program, you could put the URL to the banner here. Otherwise, click the “Upload Banner From My Computer” radio button and browse your computer for the banner you want.
4. Next, put the URL linking the banner and its site. If this is an affiliate program, you will need to get the link from the affiliate site.
5. Last but not least, I always click the “Open in new window”.
6. Then hit save!

Now go out to the front of your blog and refresh! What do you see? NOTHING??? WHAT? You broke it! Just kidding, you’re not quite done yet. We need to do one more step.

We need to add the MBAN Sidebar Widget to get our new banner to display.

Displaying the Banner

Head on over to “Appearance” then “Widgets”.  Look for the MBAN Sidebar Widget tool and drag it to the sidebar widget where you want to display the banner.

When you open the MBAN Sidebar Widget, you will more settings. I recommend leaving the default settings until you get more comfortable with using this plugin.

NOW refresh your blog and you should see your new shinny banner! Just to be safe, click on the banner to make sure it is linked to the correct site.

You are now a banner master ninja.  I’m so proud of you.

In conclusion, always remember less is more with ads on your blog!  If you want to learn more about WordPress, scamper on over to my WordPress Training Video site AnytimeBlogger and get your WordPress basic training NOW!!

‘Til next time, Rock on!

Resource Links:

Max Blog Press Banner Ad Plugin
WordPress Training 

So what exactly are WordPress permalinks?  Here’s a great explanation from the peeps at WordPress.  I know it’s hard to believe that WordPress can explain something better than TheWebTrainer!  I promise I won’t let this happen often.

“Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.”

Nice work WordPress gang.

In my video, these are the two permalink settings we talked about in the video:

/%category%/%postname%.html

or

/%postname%.html

I highly suggest the first one. It gives you better seo opportunities than the second one. Why? Well, because if you get your blog categories correct, you increase your URL keyword strength by having your keyword in the URL twice.  I’m not sure if that really holds true for everyone, but it seems to work for me.

Also, you don’t need to put the .html at the end of the WordPress permalink structure. I do it just so the URL looks more natural. Again, I haven’t found any guru ninja research stating it makes a difference, but I’m here to share my successes with you and it definitely works for me.  As always, it’s your call!

Rock on kids!

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WordPress link categories are a part of blogging software that stays hushed in the corners.  Personally I don’t get why nobody talks about link categories.  When used correctly, they greatly enhance your WordPress blog’s ranking and end users experience.

As with many areas of WordPress, setting link categories is simple and straight forward.  The most important part is the brain- strain thinking part.  You need to make sure you choose the link categories that fully optimize your seo potential. Example: http://yourdomain.com/keywordcategoryname/keywordpostnam.html

Managing a set of links, or a blogroll

Use the Links menu in your dashboard. These links will show up on your blog if you have added the Links Widget from the Appearance -> Widgets page.

Manage link categories

Click the Link Categories option in the Links menu.

Adding a new Category

Use the Add Category form on the left. Fill out the Category name, a Description (optional), and then click the Add Category button. The link categories you have already created will appear in a list on the right.

Modifying existing link categories

Hover over the Link Category name and then click on the Edit, Quick Edit, or Delete. These options appear below the Link Category name. Link Categories don’t have many options, so Quick Edit will usually be the best choice.

The Links column on the right shows how many links are using that category. A link category will only show up on your blog if the category has one or more links. To learn how to assign link categories, see the Edit a Blogroll Link page. If you click on the number listed in the Links column, you will be taken to the Edit Links screen filtered by the Link Category.

If you don’t assign a link category for a new link, it will be assigned the default link category. This is managed in Settings -> Writing.

So, as you can see, this is no big deal. Enjoy the link love!

Rock on kids!

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This process can be done using FTP, but in this lesson I’m going to do it without, so hold on tight!!

If you prefer pictures over words, stop reading and just you play the video above this post! I’m sure you will find me to be quite the online thespian. But if you are a die-hard reader, this post will tell you everything you need to know about favicon making! So here we go!

First, what is a “Favicon” anyway?  Favicon stands for “Favorites Icon”. It’s a little custom icon that appears next to a website’s URL in the address bar of a web browser. It also shows up in your bookmarked sites, on the tabs in tabbed browsers, and as the icon for Internet shortcuts on your desktop or other folders in Windows. And little would be an understatement! A Favicon is only 16×16 pixels in size.

So Mr. Web Guy, why would I use a Favicon anyway? Generally, bookmark lists get messy and cluttered. Having your bookmark stand out with a nice graphic reminder of your site is a great way to get noticed. HEY, LOOK AT ME AND MY COOL ICON!!!

 Now that we have that BS (basic stuff) out of the way, let’s put a little favicon on your WordPress blog.

In order to make this an easy process, you will need a few things. Here is the list, in no specific order:

1. A graphic for the favicon
2. Your WordPress administrator login access
3. Your cPanel login access
4. A bag of fruit snacks

You will first need the graphic you want for your favicon. It can be anything you want! But, there is something you should know. The image will be shrunk down to 16×16 pixels. Frickin small! So you might want to avoid a photo. It’s just that the image is so small; photos sometimes end up looking like a blur or a smudge mark.

A logo or an image seems to work the best. Take a look at Amazon, ebay and Google to see what they have done with their brands. There are places online you can go to and make one from scratch:

• http://www.favicon.cc/
• http://favicon-generator.org/

This method is ok for creating a icon, but you might find it a bit hard to work your way around  these programs; and quite frankly, you will get almost as much mileage out of just uploading a very clear image of a graphic you have.

Go to this website: http://faviconr.com. This cool site will take your image and convert it to a 16×16.ico file format.  Very slick. Then you just save the file somewhere on your computer so you can upload it.

TWT Note: http://faviconr.com

To get your new .ico image, just click the “Choose File” button on the faviconr.com site, find your image on your hard drive. Then click the “Generate Favicon” button and let the site do its magic! Within a matter of seconds you will have a spiffy new “favicon .ico” image to use on your WordPress blog.

Now let’s upload the new favicon .ico to your blog root directory. This may sound a bit techy, but it really isn’t. First, login to your web hosting cPanel and scroll down to the “File Manager” icon.

Once you’re in your WordPress files, look for the file named “wp-content” and double click to open it.

Then double click and open the “themes” folder.

Look for the blog theme you are currently using. Double click and open that folder.

TWT Note: If you change themes, you will need to move your favicon.ico image to the new theme.

This is what your WordPress Root folder should look like. If it does, you’re in the right place!

Now, upload your new favicon.ico file into this directory. Simple.

 Click the “Upload” icon in the upper right side menu on your File Manger page. This will open a new window and it will ask you to “Choose a file” and upload it. This is such a small file that it won’t take but a second or two. You will know it’s done uploading when the progress bar in the lower right hand corner of the page displays “Complete”. This part of your mission is now complete! Nice work!

 TWT Note: To make sure your icon is there, click the “Reload” icon just above all the files.

Now comes the really fun part…diving head first into CODE!!!!

I know what you’re thinking…if I see all that WordPress code, I’ll freeze! Like a deer in the headlights! What if I break my site??? What if I erase something important??? Well fear not my WordPress grasshopper. I have some very insightful advice for this part of the tutorial. Follow my instructions and you’ll be fine. If not, you’ll screw up your site and you will be down for days!!  LOL!  Just kidding (sort of). Really, this isn’t very hard. Let’s look. (To be on the safe side, you can always make a backup of the file you are going to edit, so you have a backup, just in case you do mess something up.)

First log into your WordPress admin and go to the “Appearance” tab.

Then go to the “Editor” tab and click on it. Below is what you will see once you click the “Editor” tab.

TWT Note: In the dropdown menu o the upper right, make sure your theme is picked.

Once you arrive here, make sure you are looking at the correct theme files. Look at the upper right corner of the page and make sure the dropdown menu has your theme picked. If not, click the dropdown menu and pick your theme. This will load all the pages for your theme.

TWT Note: Once you click this file, it will load all the code for that page in the editor window.

Here comes the tricky part. Scroll down the page and look for a line of code that looks something like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="<?php bloginfo( 'stylesheet_url' ); ?>" />

Find this line of code, place your cursor at the end of it and hit “enter” on your keyboard to make room for one small line of code that will be place directly under it.

Now place this code directly under it:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/favicon.ico" />

Then, here we go, click the blue “Update File” button on that page. Wait to make sure it saved. Then go to the front of the site, refresh the page and you should see your new favicon in the browser tab!

TWT Note: If the icon appears, have a drink to celebrate! If it doesn’t, drink two and try again!

And there you have it WordPress fans! That wasn’t so bad, was it???

Now, a few more things you should know.

You could get by with using a .png, .gif or I believe .jpg image. You would just need to adjust the last part of the code you put in your WordPress header code to reflect that.

• <link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/favicon.png" />

• <link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/favicon.gif" />

• <link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/favicon.jpg" />

However, I have noticed that Internet Explorer won’t display the icon if it is not a .ico file. Same goes for some older browsers. So, to be on the safe side, I would just make your icon a .ico file and move on with life!

There, you have found another great nugget of wisdom from The Web Trainer. Or you have just found a new way to waste a little more time! Either way, I’m glad you stopped by and I’ll see you at the next tutorial!

Installing WordPress Themes are not as difficult as they seem! In this lesson, I will show you how to install a WordPress theme I downloaded from a WordPress developer’s site. WordPress has made it so darn easy to install a theme that even a politician could do it. No. Wait. Never mind. But you can! You need zero coding skills or software to do it! Just point, click and configure.

But wait, what is a theme you ask? According to WordPress.org:

Fundamentally, the WordPress Theme system is a way to “skin” your weblog. Yet, it is more than just a “skin.” Skinning your site implies that only the design is changed. WordPress Themes can provide much more control over the look and presentation of the material on your website.

A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog. These files are called template files. A Theme modifies the way the site is displayed, without modifying the underlying software. Themes may include customized template files, image files (*.jpg, *.gif), style sheets (*.css), custom Pages, as well as any necessary code files (*.php). For an introduction to template files, see Stepping Into Templates.

Let’s say you write a lot about cheese and gadgets. Through the use of the WordPress Loop and template files, you can customize your Cheese category posts to look different from your Gadgets category posts. With this powerful control over what different pages and categories look like on your site, you are limited only by your imagination. For information on how to use different Themes for different categories or posts, see The Loop in Action and Category Templates.

So, if all that gibberish makes sense, your WAY smarter that me!

Enjoy and Rock On!

Download the TwentyTen Tech WordPress theme here.

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Part 2

Part 3

This was a little talk I gave about why I think WordPress is the best solution for most small businesses. I was presenting at WordCamp Kansas City 2011 in Overland Park , KS. What a awesome event! Everything from the organizing to the speakers and yes, even the food was top notch!! Check out our local site and see what else Kansas City is up too!

In this WordPress tutorial, I cruise though how to add audio to your WordPress blog with the “Audio Player” plugin by Martin Laine, Version 2.0.4.1.

Using Audio Player for WordPress is simple and straight forward, even for WordPress newbies. After trying a bunch of the available audio player plugins for WordPress, I have found this plugin to work the best. It’s fast and easy to use, unlike a reciprocating saw.

Some helpful links:

• WordPress Audio Support
• Plugin Website
• Free Audio Recording Software
• Reciprocating Saws

Getting your WordPress setup correctly may seem like a very basic and simple task. And it is! But, as with anything in WordPress, the simple things are sometimes overlooked and/or the last items to receive focus. So, in this WordPress tutorial I will show you how to do a basic WordPress setup to get your blog started on the right foot. Let’s rock and roll.

I will be picking up this WordPress tutorial under the assumption that you have already installed WordPress. If you haven’t, please visit my other posts, “Install WordPress” to get that part completed! Hurry back!

Now, out of the box WordPress is very close to being ready to go. Heck, you could just start posting as soon as you can log in! However, depending on what your goals or business objectives are, there are a few house- keeping items you should do to maximize your WordPress blog’s effectiveness. These are:

1. Remove the main admin account: This one may seem unimportant to most WordPress’ers, but it may be one of the best moves you can make to keep your blog safe. First, create a new user in the users section of the WordPress admin. Make sure you make it an “admin” account. Then, log out and try to login with your new user (juuuuuust to make sure it works). If that works, then you will need to login into your cPanel, get access to your MyPHPAdmin, click the wp_users table and “delete” the default admin account.I know this all sounds like a pain -in -the -ass, but trust me, you need to do this on any WordPress setup you do – or any current WordPress sites for that matter.
2. Next, go to the “Post” tab and remove the old default “hello world” post. Most everyone knows this, but believe it or not, some people forget.Also under the Post tab, you will see your “Categories” link. By default, the only category installed is the “uncategorized” category. You can’t delete this category as WordPress needs one category for it to function properly, but you can edit it to something new. So change it to your main blog category. You can add more later if needed.
3. Working our way down the left navigation, you will see “Links”. This area has some editing to do. First, you will see a whole slew of links that are added by default. Documentation, Plugins, Suggest Ideas, Support Forum, Themes, WordPress Blog and WordPress Planet. Don t get me wrong! All very important and useful links! But unless you’re building your WordPress theme self’s or are building a WordPress only blog, cut them loose! These should be for your links or affiliate links!
4. Continuing under links, you will see “Link Category”. As with the Post Category, you have a default Category of “Blogroll”. You can’t delete this Category either, but, you guessed it, just edit it to something you like.
5. Under pages, you will see that Automattic Inc was so kind to add an “About us” page for you. This one, do with it what you may!
6. Comments. The good old ‘Mr. WordPress” strikes again with his “ Hi, this is a comment” comment. Delete this ASAP as it will give you the practice needed to delete all the SPAM comments blogs tend to get.
7. Plugins: By default, these are the only two plugins installed, Akismet and Hello Dolly. For sure, KEEP the Akismet. This will help fend off WordPress SPAMMERS! When activated you will randomly see a lyric from Hello, Dolly in the upper right of your admin screen on every page. Not sure what for, but I would “Goodbye Dolly!. Delete. (unless you’re into Hello Dolly)Post Intermission (bet you thought there wasn’t this much crap to change, did ya!) Moving along…
8. Next, under “Settings”, click the “General” link. Make sure your email is correct here. Any comments that are pending review will be sent here.
9. This next one is important. Make sure the “Timezone” is correct. Otherwise your post will have the wrong times on them and if you are using certain plugins that look at that time, they may give misleading data. The rest of the data you can change here is self- explanatory.
10. Under Writing, make sure you put an updated “ping” list. There are hundreds of Ping sites that can be notified when your WordPress site is updated other than just http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ (default ping site) . I will have an updated ping list in the next week or so for ya!
11. Under “Discussion”, there are a lot of setting for comments. Again, your business objective will help determine what boxes you check here. NOTE: if you do have comments available on your blog, I highly recommend you check the two boxed under “Before a comment appears”. This way you can see what the comment is before it gets posted
12. Just take a quick look under “Privacy” to make sure you have “I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers ” turned on, unless your business model has other plans.
13. Permalink Settings are by far one of the most important settings you have on your WordPress blog – in terms of getting found by search engines. This one you need to make sure gets completed the way you need it before your site goes public. You don’t want one pemalink structure and then change it after the search engines have been there and spider-ed it. It will make finding your awesome blog posts a bit more difficult! It would be the equivalent to planing the world’s biggest New Year’s party and just before the first guest shows up, you change the location.
14. Depending on the goals of the site, your Permalink Settings may need different requirements, but this is the one I have found that gets the best results for us: %category%/%postname%.html. Just copy and past this into the “Custom Structure” field.

WOW, did I make it to the end???? I hope this little WordPress tutorial helps in getting your WordPress setup completed more quickly and effectively! Next post we will install a WordPress Theme. Oh, is this going to be some kind of fun or what?!?!?!

Please leave comment or a question and I will be more than happy to help.

Rock on…rick

On a day to day basis, we have seen so many people struggle with this to the point where they don’t want to even get started on Niche Blogging. Just to much to do and learn.

That’s why when I received this email today, I felt obligated, as “The Web Trainer”, to pass this very cool site on to you.

It’s called Easy Niche Blogs. They are turn key, WordPress Niche blog sites that are equipped with pre-written content, as well as monetization links for Amazon, ClickBank and Google AdSense. The themes are very professional and appealing. I think they did an awesome job and worth every single penny. And here the part that is great for all of us…you can buy one for just $9.97. $9.97?? Do you realize that’s like paying a programer and designer for around 10 min of their time? Sometimes I wonder how they can ever make money doing it, but, I’m not complaining.

I bought these immediately and discovered…WELL WORTH THE MONEY! Get this, you can buy all 7 for $27.00! Hell, the code that pulls in the Amazon, ClickBank and Google AdSense ads into the sites are worth that! Click here to view all 7 blogs.

Here are the screenshots:

So Mr. Trainer…what’s the catch? Well, here are the things you need to be aware of if you get these themes:

Not perfect. While they are great looking themes and well put together, they still have a bit of a “template” feel to them. If you’re looking for brandable or killer visual themes, these are not it. If you are looking for mechanics and simplicity, you have it with these.

If you’re a rookie, not the easiest to install. While installing a WordPress theme is simple, these require a bit f know-how for setting up your affiliate information. And it’s not even that it’s hard, you just need to know where to get your affiliate ids and affiliate codes. If you don’t, it might slow you down.

Content. Unlike most themes, these Easy Niche Blogs themes come with pre-populated content. So getting them up and running is not for the first time WordPress user. It will require some code changing and importing a MySQL database.

And last, duplicate content. Since these are only $9.97 for each or $27.00 for all, you shouldn’t expect that the content will be different for each affiliate ninja that buys these themes! So you will need to get creative in changing the content around. If you need a tool to do that, I have article spinning software I will proved if you purchase the themes from my link below..;)

Click here to view all 7 blogs

NOTE: If you want someone else to set up the sites for you ..say..me, we can set up all 7 for you on your cPanel hosting account for $50.00.

But overall, you can’t go wrong with theses themes. Even if 1 theme was $27.00, you would be miles ahead of the game.

I hope this helps in your journey to Affiliate income stardom (or gets you started anyway).

Please leave me some feedback and let me know how you liked these themes and how they are working out for you!

Till next time..rock on!

Click here to view all 7 blogs.