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Author Archives: Graham
My MailPress Hacks
I have a small list of hacks that I make to MailPress every time I upgrade. It's been shrinking as some of the issues have been addressed in the plugin, but I thought I'd share my local modifications with you:
Remove "[Blog Name] New post" from Subjects
I'd rather have the Subject line of my newsletters read like a personal email than an automatically generated one, so I change:
mp-content/advanced/newsletters/new_post.xml:
<mail><subject>
Strip '[%1$s] New post : '
mp-content/advanced/newsletters/categories/categories.xml:
<mail><Template>singlecat</Template><subject>
Strip '[%1$s] New post in {{the_category}} : '
Friendlier Messages
I like messages that are clear to non-MailPress users, so I change:
mp-content/languages/MailPress.pot:4149 &
mp-includes/class/MP_Widget.class.php:104:
Change "Waiting for your confirmation" to "Check your inbox and confirm your email address"
mp-content/languages/MailPress.pot:4133 &
mp-includes/class/MP_Widget.class.php:99:
Change "Loading..." to "Processing..."… Continue reading…
How to get Free Viral Traffic to Your Blog
Let's assume you've followed all my good advice to build a blog with natural Search Engine Optimization, great content, and all the best WordPress plugins. You're reaching readers and getting traffic, but you still want more.
Well, me too. So I recommend you check out FreeViral.com. It's like a free, legal pyramid scheme for traffic generation. As part of the sign-up process you visit other user's sites. Then you recommend it to other webmasters who want more traffic. They sign up, sending you free traffic. Their visitors also sign up, sending you and me even more traffic. And so on and so on.
In return, you agree to a weekly promo email. Doesn't seem unreasonable.
Of course it only works if you sign up. Having great content on your blog which makes it worth your new visitors staying around and possibly buying your product, if you have one, … Continue reading…
How to Send Your Newsletter Subscribers A Welcome Message
On The Confident Man Project, I wanted to send my new newsletter subscribers a Welcome message including a link to a bonus audio download that I promised them in the subscription box.
There are two ways to do this:
Using an Autoresponder
Create an autoresponder triggered by new newsletter subscriptions, and attach your welcome email to it. With this approach, the subscriber gets both a confirmation email, and a welcome email.
Here are the steps:
On the WordPress dashboard click Mails → Autoresponders
Add an Autoresponder Named newsletter, Slug newsletter, Description New newsletter subscriber. Make sure you select Active, and choose the Event Subscription activated. Then click Add Autoresponder.
Now go to Mails → Add New and write the Welcome email that you would like to send. For the recipient, under All choose one of the Newsletters. At the bottom of … Continue reading…
Posted in MailPress 8 Comments
Comparison of ClickBank Vendor eBook Sales Plugins for WordPress
If you want to make your fortune selling ebooks to the masses, ClickBank is the platform for doing it. Most successful ebook and other digital download sales sites use it for their payment processing and affiliate support. ClickBank handles credit card payments for you and the affiliate system makes it dead easy for other people, including competitors in your own niche, to promote your product for you in return for a proportion of your profits.
To sell an ebook on ClickBank you need:
- A ClickBank Vendor account
- Your ebook product listed in the ClickBank marketplace
- A Pitch page on your blog describing your product with your Buy Now button linked to ClickBank
- A Thank You page where the customer lands after they pay to download your product
Thank You page handling is the trickiest part of this process, because you want to secure your site so that people can't steal … Continue reading…
Posted in Plugins Tagged clickbank, Digital Product Demon, ebook sales, make money, Marketing LaunchPad, WP PDF Stamper 4 Comments
How to Enable Comment Processing in SEO Smart Links Pro
Note: This feature is back in SEO Smart Links Pro 1.8.1; so if you want comment processing, just upgrade and enable the option. For historical interest...
Back when I did my review of Automatic Keyword Affiliate Link Plugins, my preferred choice SEO Smart Links Pro supported keyword matching in comments. So if one of my blog commenters mentioned HostGator say, that keyword would automatically turn into an affiliate link.
I liked this feature.
Unfortunately it led to so many support requests that the plugin author removed it. Apparently on blogs with large numbers of comments, the extra processing time is too much for many servers. So if you have a blog with thousands of comments, just live and let live. But if you only have a few, and really want this feature, and promise not to hassle the plugin author about it... Here's how to re-enable comment processing in … Continue reading…
MailPress Enhancement/Bug Fix Wish List
MailPress is the most powerful free email newsletter plug-in for WordPress. Its ability to generate automatic newsletters from your posts is a great time-saver. Plus it has some powerful advanced features like open rate and link tracking, mailing lists and autoresponders.
Yet MailPress 5.1.1 also has some limitations, missing features and bugs which can really get in my way when I use it. At present it's merely great; once these issues are addressed it will be awesome.
So here's my list of enhancements I wish MailPress had, which would bring it much closer to replacing commercial email solutions like MailChimp and Aweber which don't integrate with WordPress anywhere near as cleanly. If you're a developer, I encourage you to give Andre a hand by submitting patches to add these enhancements, and fix these bugs.
I've ordered the list from most important to least important (to me, anyway):
Easy Subscribe to … Continue reading…
Build Traffic By Promoting Your Blog On My Blog
Here's a free opportunity to get a quality dofollow backlink to your blog, and let the world know what you're up to. Just leave a comment below letting us all know what your blog is about, and a link to it. Other readers will be able to find out about your blog, and search engines will see the link you've left to it. This is a great way to kickstart traffic to your blog if it's new.
Please Like, Tweet and +1 this page using the buttons at the top or bottom, so other people can find out about it too. The more you share it, the more people will see your comment about your blog and get to visit your site.
This page is currently Page Rank (PR) 4, so your backlinks will be super-valuable. It's even higher than Ana Hoffman's Traffic Generation Cafe promotion page which I … Continue reading…
How To Add Users To Your MailPress Newsletter Manually
Every now and then you want to add a new user to your MailPress newsletter and/or mailing list, without them having to go through the normal subscription process. For example, to create test users or for people who you meet and give you their email address offline.
It's easy to do this, but not so easy to find. On your WordPress dashboard, select Mails -> All Users. Scoll down to the bottom of the Users list. Click in the box next to the Bulk Add button. Options appear magically to allow you to select a mailing list to add them to, and whether you need them to confirm (i.e. Require Authorization) or not (i.e. Activate); generally, you want to select Activate. Enter pairs of email addresses and names, separated by , and ;. Then click Bulk Add. All new additions get added to the default newsletter … Continue reading…
Increase Traffic to your Coaching Blog by joining The Man Coach Web Traffic Tribe
Do you have a website/blog aimed at helping men live a richer, more fulfilling and more confident life? Want to get more comments, web traffic, higher search ranking, business leads, and sales? If so, join the Man Coach Web Traffic Tribe.
Based on the idea of a commenting tribe I learned from Ana Hoffman of the Traffic Generation Cafe, I've created a Web Traffic Tribe for life coaches, dating coaches, relationship coaches, confidence coaches, therapists, and organisations whose target audience is men wanting a better life.
The basic idea is that we all read, comment on, and share each others blog articles on our social networks and Twitter feeds. This creates social proof online, builds visitor engagement, promotes our content more widely, increases our search engine ranking and generates more web traffic. By each of us giving a little to the tribe, we all end up gaining a lot.… Continue reading…
No more dofollow for this blog, I'm afraid
I'm getting way too many spammy comments from visitors who are clearly only interested in a dofollow backlink. Many of them look like they've been human generated but they're not adding value, so I've decided to disable the Do Follow plugin on this blog. I no longer recommend this plugin as it attracts too many link seekers who aren't really interested in engaging with you as a blogger.
From now on if you want a dofollow backlink, you'll have to play by CommentLuv Premium's rules and share the article before leaving your comment.… Continue reading…