Before we start

Lets cover some basics regarding terminology and technology. Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who enter your site and “bounce” (leave the site) rather than continue viewing other pages within the same site. Page view is a request to load a single page on an internet site. We use Google Analytics to track our data. You are welcome to use another analytics service, or you can simply install google analytics in your WordPress site.

Now that we have taken care of the basic terminology, you are probably wondering why the heck do these numbers matter?

If you are running a site that is primarily monetized by banner ads, then the number of pageviews matter. If you are trying to build a loyal audience, then the number of bounce rate matters. Also the lower your bounce rate, the better ads eCPM (cost per thousand) or CPC (cost per click) you will get. When the same user views the next page, your ad provider most likely has a better ad to serve them thus giving you a higher eCPM or CPC.

We have consulted with a lot of clients helping them increase their pageviews and reduce bounce rates. We have also done a lot of experiments on our own sites like List25. So all the methods that we will share are the ones that we have used in the past and know that they work.

P.S. These techniques will ONLY work if you have Good Content.

Interlink Your Posts

Anytime that you can interlink your other posts within the post content, you are going to see an increase in pageviews. In WordPress 3.1, interlinking got even easier because you can simply search for the post you want to link while adding links. Interlinking techniques work great when you have a site with a lot of articles. If you are just starting out, then you will be a bit limited. So how do you go back and interlink older articles when you have something new? You can manually do it, but it will take some time. There are plugins that lets you automatically link keywords in WordPress (Although that article is showing you how we did this for affiliate links, you can use it for internal linking purposes as well). Not only does interlinking help you increase pageviews and reduce bounce rates, it also helps with SEO as well.

If you want to see an example of interlinking, then just look at the paragraph above.

Show Related Posts After the Post

One of the main reasons why the user leave your blog after reading the post is because you are not showing them what to do next. By showing the user with a list of “related posts” or “other popular posts”, you may get them to go on to visit another post in your site. There are a lot of ways you can add related posts to your blog. You can use a plugin called YARPP that has its advanced algorithm that picks the related post. You can show related posts by category or tags without using a plugin. You can also show related posts by showing other posts by the same author.

Show Excerpts on Front / Archive Pages

Showing excerpts on front/archive pages have two advantages. First, it decreases page load time. Second, it helps increase the pageviews. You should almost never show full posts on your front page or archive page. Imagine having like 25 images in one post, and then have 5 of those on one page. It would be a horrible user experience because of (slow load time and super long page) which would make the user leave your site. We have a tutorial on how to display post excerpts in WordPress themes. Most good theme frameworks like Genesis, Thesis, Headway etc. already have this option built-in.

Splitting up Long Posts

Are you writing a super long posts? Well, you can split it into multiple pages using the WordPress <!–nextpage–> tag in your post. Simply add it wherever you want, and your post will split into multiple pages. You can see an example of how we split our posts into two pages or even into five pages. You have to be very careful when doing this because if you do not have a sufficient amount of content on each page, then the user might get pissed of. We have seen a lot of big name sites like Forbes, NY Times, Wall Street Journal and others utilize this technique.

Interactive Sidebar

Your sidebar can play a crucial role in increasing pageviews and reducing bounce rate. You can show your popular posts in the sidebar. You can even customize it to show popular posts by week, month, all time. You can also show your most recent posts only on single post pages. We have seen sites that create custom images to navigate to specific posts of theirs. You can integrate other sections of your site in your sidebar for example look at our WordPress Coupons section or the gallery section in the sidebar.

Encourage Random Browsing

On List25 we created a feature called I’m Feeling Curious. When a user clicks on this button, they will be redirected to a random post in WordPress. We put the button in our header bar which was a very hot spot. After seeing good results, we ended up putting it on WPBeginner as well and called it Explore.

Results

When we started out List25, we faced a lot of criticism. People were saying that sites like these fail to grow because it is hard to keep a loyal audience. We asked around and a lot of people who had done something similar in the past reported that the bounce rate for a siimlar site was soaring in 80% range. Average user would view only one page per visit and leave. We started the site out to get some base data. Our bounce rate was in the 75% range. We slowly started implementing the changes mentioned above. Bounce rate decreased from the average of 76% to 42%. Our pageviews per visit increased to 2.79 / pages per visit. Average time spent on page went to the average of 3 minutes and 40 seconds << This is the average time spent for our 1 million unique visitors!

What are you doing to increase pageviews and reduce bounce rate? Share with us.

How to Increase Pageviews and Reduce Bounce Rate in WordPress is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

First thing you need to do is upload your image. You can add it while you are writing a post or by going to the Media » Add New tab.

Then once your image is uploaded, you just need to click on the little button that says Edit Image.

You will be taken to an screen that looks like this:

Just select the area you want to crop. Or click on the rotate / flipping icon. You can click to scale. You can even crop based on ratio. Pretty handy little feature right?

Have you used it before? We know we have.

How to Crop, Rotate, Scale, and Flip Images in WordPress is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

What is a Site-Specific Plugin

Site-Specific WordPress plugin is a specific place to add snippets that you find on the web that performs functions that are not theme related. In other words:

Time to time again, you will read “how-to” articles related to WordPress all around the web (including our site) where we share snippets and suggest that you add them into your theme’s functions.php file. These snippets are not huge enough to be justified as plugins of their own, but some of them are certainly great to add specific functionality to a site that is not theme-dependent such as redirecting users to random post. Whereas other functions can be key to your specific site such as Custom Post Types.

This is when you need to add a site-specific plugin which essentially will serve as the same purpose of your theme’s functions.php file, but it will allow you to retain all these functionality when you are changing themes (see our checklist of things to do when changing WordPress themes).

Why You need a Site-Specfic Plugin for WordPress

As we mentioned above, it will allow you to retain all key additions to your site that you may have done overtime. Some functions that belong in a site specific plugin would be Custom Post Types, Adding Shortcodes, Adding WordPress Thumbnail Support, Redirecting users to a Random Post, and other independent functions that does not rely on your theme.

Above functions are something that you will need whether you change your theme or not. Can you imagine disabling a theme and then losing all of your shortocdes? That would be a total nightmare.

One of the reasons why we pasted beginner’s guide to pasting snippets from the web in WordPress was to prevent white screen of death that users get when pasting the snippet with wrong formatting. Often new users simply edit themes using the WordPress back-end to prevent the user of FTP. We have helped countless users who got locked out of their site when they pasted the wrong snippet.

When you use a site-specific plugin, you somewhat have a break-proof site. When you paste a snippet with wrong formatting, instead of the white screen of death the built-in plugin editor will recognize the error, and it will deactivate the plugin. Ofcourse this will break your site for a few seconds but at least you can go to the admin panel and rectify your mistake.

It is like choosing lesser of two-evils. Would you rather be locked out and have the site be broken. Or would you rather have the site broken but have the ability to fix it in seconds by simply undoing your mistake.

How to Create a Site-Specific WordPress Plugin

You may think that it may be super hard, but it really is not.

• All you have to do is create a new folder in the plugins directory. Example: /wp-content/plugins/yoursitename-plugin/
• Open a blank file and save it as “yoursitename-plugin.php”
• Put the following code in the file:

  <?php
  /*
  Plugin Name: Site Plugin for example.com
  Description: Site specific code changes for example.com
  */
  /* Start Adding Functions Below this Line */
  
  /* Stop Adding Functions Below this Line */
  ?>
  

• Now upload this file into the folder you created in the plugins directory. Then simply activate the plugin.

From this point on, we will recommend adding the appropriate snippets we share into site-specific plugins rather than theme’s functions.php file.

We hope this will start a new trend that others will follow. We have already joined the band-wagon, and we recommend that you do this as well. It is a best-practice that will save you time in the long-run.

What, Why, and How-To’s of Creating a Site-Specific WordPress Plugin is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

1. Create a Google+ Brand Page

First thing you need to do is signin to your Google account and then head to:

http://www.google.com/+/business/

Click on the Create your Google+ Page button as demonstrated in the image below:

2. Pick a Category for your Google+ Page

On the second step, you will be asked to pick a category. You can choose from:

Local Businesses or Place

Great for hotels, restaurants, places, stores, any other local service business.

Product or Brand

Great for any other product that is not local. For example, WPBeginner is an online brand.

Company, Institution or Organisation

Great for company pages, non-profits, organizations, schools, etc.

Arts, Entertainment or Sports

Great for books, bands, movies, shows etc. This can be a very broad category.

Other

If you can’t fit your business in any of the categories above, then you put it in here.

3. Adding your Information for your Google+ Brand Page

Once you select your category. We selected Product or Brand, then you will be prompted to fill out additional information.

Fill out your page name, Website, pick a category. You can select who can view your page. The default is any google user, but you can restrict it to 18+ or 21+.

4. Tagline and Photo for your Google+ Brand Page

After you fill out your information, you will be asked to enter a tagline and a photo for your brand.

5. Spread the Word out and Tweak Things around

You will be prompted to spread the word out to your friends. You should. After that, you will be given a URL for your page. Sadly it is no Vanity URL yet. I wish that we can have something like plus.google.com/wpbeginner but you can’t just yet. You will be given a string of random characters like the one we have:

https://plus.google.com/101634180904808003404/

But you can use Bit.ly to shorten it. If you have a customized short URL for your site, then you can get really creative like this:

http://wpbeg.in/gpluswp

If you are using Simple URLs plugin or something similar, you can create something like this:

http://www.wpbeginner.com/gplus

There is a photostrip similar to Facebook. Except you can control which order they are displayed in. It would be interesting to see what people come up with. We are trying to think of creative uses ourselves.

Hopefully this guide helped you in creating a Google+ Brand page.

How to Create and Setup Google+ Brand Page for Your WordPress Site is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

1. Take Notes on Your Current Theme

Many WordPress users surf the web to find solutions to their problems. Often they find those solutions in form of snippets that they add manually in their theme such as the functions.php or another file. Because these changes were made once, people have a tendency of not remembering them. Go through your theme files and note down all additional code that you added. You also want to check your current theme’s load time because this way you can compare the two. Go to a site like Pingdom Tools or use YSlow to test out different pages (Yes different pages, not just the homepage).

2. Be cautious of the Sidebars

You must make sure that your new theme is widget-ready. Sidebar widgets are really easy to use therefore a lot of users use it to customize it. We notice that sidebars are probably the most user-customized area of WordPress sites. People make tons of changes such as adding custom texts, images, links, advertisement, and other widgets. If you are using a widget-enabled theme, and you switch to a theme that is not widget-ready, then you will lose all of that. If you are using a widget-enabled WordPress theme, then this is not an issue.

Also anything that you modify in sidebar.php file of your old theme, will be overwritten. So make sure that you add those codes in the new theme sidebar.

3. Don’t lose tracking

Most bloggers use some sort of analytics whether it be Google Analytics, or one of the other services. A lot of us don’t use plugins to add the tracking codes. Some of us open the footer.php file and modify the codes. Some of our themes have a spot to place the adsense code. Whichever one is your case, you want to make sure that you copy and paste your tracking code to your new theme. This is one of the things that is very commonly overlooked by users. Because it is so simple, most of us forget about it.

4. The Good ‘ol RSS are you working?

A lot of us use FeedBurner for our WordPress RSS Feeds. One of the parts of integrating FeedBurner into WordPress is pointing your default feeds to FeedBurner this way you can have analytics on your feed subscribers. A lot of themes like Genesis, Headway Theme, Standard Theme, and others allow you to integrate FeedBurner from their settings panel. You need to make sure that you keep the feed directed to FeedBurner otherwise there will be two RSS feeds for your blog. The main WordPress one, and the FeedBurner one which is taking the info from your WordPress RSS Feed. Except, you will lose count of a lot of the subscriber that you had because they were subscribed using the /feed/ url which no longer points to FeedBurner. Again, this does not mean you lose them, it just means that you can’t see them in the FeedBurner count.

5. Backup!!

You never have anything to lose by creating a backup. As a precautionary measure, you should backup all of your theme files, plugins, and the database. Although nothing should happen, but you can never be to safe. You can use BackupBuddy to create a full-site Backup for you.

6. Maintenance Mode

You probably don’t want your users to see while you are making the switch because they will end up seeing a broken site or such. It is best to turn on Maintenance mode for 15 – 20 minutes that it may take you to make sure that everything is working properly. Once you have setup Maintenance mode, you are good to go ahead and activate the new theme.

7. Testing all functionality and plugins

Once you have the new theme activated, you need to make sure that you retain all the functionality and plugins still work. Remember that good ol’ notes list that you created in step 1. This is the time where that can come handy. Go back and add any and all functionality that you want to bring from the old theme into the new theme if you haven’t done so already. Try out all the features including but not limited to the commenting process, single post pages, search, 404 page, archive page, contact page etc. Make sure all of your widgets are still there and are working.

On the plugin front, you just want to make sure that the formatting is still the same. A lot of plugins utilize your existing styles to display their output. So you probably want to make sure that they still look good with the new theme.

8. Cross Browser Compatibility

Test your site in all browsers you have access to. Browsers have a tendency of rendering things differently. Specially Internet Explorer. You want to make sure that your design looks good in major browsers. Some pretty looking themes have a tendency of breaking in various browsers. So if a lot of your audience is using Internet Explorer, then you want to make sure that it is still accessible to them.

9. Make those Third Party Items look pretty

If you are using Google Adsense or another ad company that allows you to format them, then your best bet is to customize them. For example, you previous site was orange, so you had orange links for Google Adsense. Now if it is blue, then you probably want to take that into account.

Same goes for twitter widget, facebook like buttons etc. Adjust those with your new color scheme. If you are going from a light to a dark design, or vice-versa, then you need to make those changes.

10. Let your Users Know

Turn off maintenance mode, and write a quick blog post to let the users know. Notice, you only spent like 15 – 20 minutes on checking things. There is no way that you could’ve catch all the bugs. By letting your users know, you can expect to get bug reports. We often ask our readers on twitter (@wpbeginner) for bug testing. Ask your audience via twitter, facebook etc to see if the site looks good in their browser. If they say YES, then its good news. If they say NO, then ask them to please take a screenshot of the issue. You can take a look at the issue and try to fix it. If you can’t fix it, then kindly ask the developer of the theme to fix it. Notice: unless you paid for the theme, these developers are NOT required to fix those issues for FREE.

People have all sort of browsers, screen resolutions, etc, so getting their opinion is important. Don’t forget to remind your RSS readers to visit the site as well, so they can see the goodies.

11. Pruning plugins

Themes are now coming pre-loaded with a lot of features. For example, if you are using Genesis or another theme that has BreadCrumbs, then you can get rid of Breadcrumb plugin of yours. The concept is simple. Get rid of things that you don’t need. One thing you should make sure though is often plugins can do the job better. For example a lot of themes are coming with tons of SEO features. Genesis, Thesis, Headway, Standard Theme, and all others boast their SEO features. We’d rather use a much more powerful plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast. Make your choices wisely.

12. Take Baby Steps when Changing

You are working with a new theme here, so it is probably best that you make changes carefully. Change smaller elements to make sure that it behaves properly in all browsers. Then once you are comfortable enough, then you can make drastic changes. It’s important to learn the structure and semantics of the new theme before you make huge changes. This will allow you to detect the problem right away.

13. Test Loading Time

Take the load time numbers that you had on your old theme (from item 1 of this checklist), and compare the two. See what you can do to improve load time by checking out Syed’s presentation on Slideshare.

14. Monitor Bounce Rate

After switching themes, you want to make sure that you are monitoring bounce rate. Some themes are just more friendlier than others when it comes to navigating the readers around your site. If your bounce rate has increased compared to the previous theme, then you should probably work on that. Add related posts widgets, popular posts widgets, or simply have a better call-to-action for new readers.

15. Listen to your readers, and IMPROVE

When a new design comes out, users always have suggestions. They either love a specific feature, or hate a specific feature. Communicate with your audience using surveys or Facebook Polls. See what they would like to see improved, and then work on getting that done.

Do you have a checklist of your own when changing WordPress themes? would love to hear it if we missed something.

Checklist: 15 Things You MUST DO Before Changing WordPress Themes is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

Note: Theme’s functions.php file is located in /wp-content/themes/yourthemename/ folder. This is NOT the same as the core functions.php file located in the /wp-includes/ folder.

To understand how to properly paste the code, you need to understand the basic semantics of PHP.

//This is the opening tag of a PHP Code
<?php

//This is the closing tag of a PHP Code
?>

The reason why you need to familiarize yourself with this is because over 95% of the issues we have fixed for our users involve pasting the code in a wrong spot. So knowing the PHP semantics are very helpful. Below are some of the most popular mistakes we see.

1st Most Common Mistake

User finds a code on the website that is wrapped around with PHP like the one below, and they paste it on a wrong spot.

<?php
add_filter( 'login_headerurl', 'custom_loginlogo_url' );
function custom_loginlogo_url($url) {
	return 'http://www.wpbeginner.com';
}
?>

Example theme’s functions.php file code (Note usually theme’s functions.php file has a lot more code, but the idea is the same):

<?php
//Tons of mumble jumble PHP code that already exists in your PHP file is here

//User would copy and paste the snippet they found on the web like this:

<?php
add_filter( 'login_headerurl', 'custom_loginlogo_url' );
function custom_loginlogo_url($url) {
	return 'http://www.wpbeginner.com';
}
?>
?>

Now this will obviously freak WordPress out because you have a PHP tag opening without closing an existing PHP tag. There are two ways of going about and fixing this issue. The first method is that we paste the item on the right spot:

<?php
//Tons of mumble jumble PHP code that already exists in your PHP file is here

//See how we properly closed the first open PHP tag
?>
//Now we can open the PHP tag.
<?php
add_filter( 'login_headerurl', 'custom_loginlogo_url' );
function custom_loginlogo_url($url) {
	return 'http://www.wpbeginner.com';
}
?>

Notice, how we properly pasted the PHP code after the previous one was closed.

Another method is to simply strip out the opening and closing tags from your new WordPress function. So the example would look like this:

<?php
//Tons of mumble jumble PHP code that already exists in your PHP file is here	

// New code just goes here (Notice how we stripped out the opening and closing PHP tags from the new code)

add_filter( 'login_headerurl', 'custom_loginlogo_url' );
function custom_loginlogo_url($url) {
	return 'http://www.wpbeginner.com';
}
?>

2nd Most Common Mistake

Each tutorial writer has their own style of writing. Some keep their snippets wrapped around with PHP tag which you saw in the example above. Other authors do not wrap their snippets around with PHP tags. This brings us to the second problem. If you have a code like this:

function custom_loginlogo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
h1 a {background-image: url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/login_logo.png) !important; }
</style>';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_loginlogo');

The author is assuming that you know that this code is supposed to go within the PHP tags. Some even suggest that you place their code at the bottom of your theme’s functions.php file. Example of a rookie mistake is:

<?php
//Tons of mumble jumble PHP code that already exists in your PHP file is here
?>

//Then the user paste the code here (Notice the PHP tags are already closed above):

function custom_loginlogo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
h1 a {background-image: url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/login_logo.png) !important; }
</style>';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_loginlogo');

If you notice the user has pasted the code outside the PHP tags. WordPress doesn’t know what the code is, thus it break. A proper code would look like this:

<?php
//Tons of mumble jumble PHP code that already exists in your PHP file is here	

//The new goes here
function custom_loginlogo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
h1 a {background-image: url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/login_logo.png) !important; }
</style>';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_loginlogo');

//PHP End Tag
?>

3rd Most Common Mistake

Now that we have covered the opening and closing PHP tags issue, the last most common mistake that we see involves user pasting new snippets within an existing function.

Anatomy of a function usually looks like this:

function custom_function_name() { // This is the opening tag of a function

// code specific to the function goes here

} // This is the closing tag of a function

If you paste another function inside a function, then it will cause your site to break. Example of this mistake would be like:

function custom_function_name() { // This is the opening tag of a function

// code specific to the function goes here

function custom_loginlogo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
h1 a {background-image: url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/login_logo.png) !important; }
</style>';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_loginlogo');

} // This is the closing tag of a function

You cannot do this. Each functions are independent, so you cannot put the two together. Proper way of pasting would be like this:

function custom_function_name() { // This is the opening tag of a function

// code specific to the function goes here

} // This is the closing tag of a function

function custom_loginlogo() {
echo '<style type="text/css">
h1 a {background-image: url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/login_logo.png) !important; }
</style>';
}
add_action('login_head', 'custom_loginlogo');

The above three mistakes is probably the reason why your theme broke when you copied and pasted a snippet from web into your WordPress theme’s functions.php

Other Tips

There are times when we ran into issues just to find out that the pasted code had errors. Some are really careless errors like the developer not putting ; or closing a quote. Whereas others were functional errors with the code itself or user not following the instructions properly.

It is crucial that you have the plugin activated if it is being used in the tutorial. Some tutorial authors just call the plugin function directly in their snippet without having the conditional statement to check if the plugin exists. You can blame both the user and the author for this. The author should have had the conditional statement in place, but the user should also have read the article properly and installed the required the plugin.

There are times when you encounter long snippets that you really want. For example our Gravity Forms snippet. Authors have a tendency of explaining the code to their users (which is a good thing), but it also causes errors in the code. So one thing that we do is scroll down or up to get the final code snippet rather than putting the pieces together by ourselves.

Have you encountered these mistakes? How did you dealt with them? Did you encounter an issue that we didn’t mention above? If so please share it in the comments with us.

Beginner’s Guide to Pasting Snippets from the Web into WordPress is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

Activate Pingshot

If you followed our step by step guide to setting up FeedBurner, then you should already have Pingshot activated. If you haven’t, then you should try activating it. Once you log into FeedBurner, select your feed and click on the publicize tab near the top of the dashboard. In the left column you will now see a button for “Pingshot”. Click on this and select “activate”. This will cause your feed to ping every time there is an update.

Some users suggested that this fixed the issue for them. Since we already had this activated, it was not a solution for us. So we jumped into the Troubleshootize tab in FeedBurner where it told us to Ping our feed.

Ping Your Feed

In the “troubleshootize” tab, click on the “pinging feedburner” link. This will bring you to a page where you can type in your blog’s URL. Press the “Ping Feedburner” button to update your feed immediately rather than waiting on Feedburner’s automatic update that happens every 30 minutes.

We tried doing that, but it did not work. It returned error saying invalid address. Again in forums, folks suggested that this worked for them. But as you can see with our reaction, it did not work for us. As we scrolled down the list of troubleshooting options, there was the option to Resync your feed.

Resync Your Feed

On the troubleshootize page if you scroll down to the bottom, you will find a button labeled “Resync Now”. Clicking on it will clear Feedburner’s cache and refill it with your new content. We clicked on that button and “WOOT” it was fixed.

Our new content was now appearing on the feed, but why should we have to do this every time? There should be a solution that would fix the issue permanently. After doing a bit more research, we found that this issue was being caused by caching plugin. We did a quick research and found several users having this issue while using W3 Total Cache. Frederick Townes, developer of this plugin, had also suggested a fix for these.

Not Caching Feeds

As a matter of last resort, if you have a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache or WP-Supercache installed then you may have to clear the cache from your admin panel or simply disable caching the feeds. Although this is written for W3 Total Cache, a similar method will work for other plugins. Go to “Performance” in the left hand column. Under that there should be an option for “Page Cache”. Click on it and then uncheck the box that reads “Cache feeds: site, categories, tags, comments”. This will prevent your plugin’s cache from backing up and not allowing Feedburner to display new content.

Also note that FeedBurner will not process an original feed over 512kb. If you find yourself into this problem a lot (or notice the solutions in this article aren’t working), reduce the number of posts displayed in your WordPress feeds by going to Settings &raquo Reading page.

Now you have the way to fix WordPress FeedBurner feeds not updating. Did these methods worked for you? or did you try something else that worked? Do let us know in the comments.

How to Fix WordPress FeedBurner Feeds Not Updating is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

Why knowing how to FTP is important?

There are times when you install and activate a plugin using the WordPress dashboard just to find that this plugin is incompatible with an existing plugin. The incompatibility sometimes causes a white screen of death through out the site which locks you out from doing anything. If you know how to use FTP, then instead of freaking out, you will simply login-in and delete the plugin using the FTP connection.

Often when you are trying to paste codes from tutorials into the functions.php file of your theme, you can accidentally lock yourself out. This can happen if you paste the code in the wrong place, or the code wasn’t semantically right. Knowing how to use FTP can get you out of trouble in a matter of minutes.

There will be times that you get a permission error upon activation of a plugin. The error will say, plugin cannot create XYZ folder because of the file permissions. That is when knowing how to change CHMOD permissions help.

Last but definitely not the least, knowing how to use FTP is the next step up from a beginner. It will save you a lot of time and stress.

Having that said, go ahead and watch the video:

If you are looking for other FTP clients, then here is a list of few that are good:

Filezilla (All Platform)
FireFTP (All Platform)
Cyberduck (Mac Only)
WinSCP (Windows Only)

How to use FTP to upload files to WordPress for Beginners is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

What is BuySellAds?

BuySellAds is an online marketplace that connects website publishers and advertisers. No Fancy algorithm, no complex methods, it is very simple. The advertiser searches for a niche that they are targeting, bunch of site pops up (you might be in that niche) – Advertisers look at your site’s stats, and buy the ad. BuySellAds handles the transaction, provide advertisers with analytics, and deposit the funds in your account every month. Pretty straight forward stuff. You are still in control because you get the final say in which advertisers you want to approve, and which advertisers to deny.

Why use BuySellAds?

There is no better way to explain this aside from sharing our story and experience. We started using BuySellAds in September 2009 (WPBeginner was founded in July 2009). By this time, we have built-up a fairly decent amount of readers to the site, however the site was still very new. The only way for us to get advertisers would be to create a list of companies that might be interested then send out an email asking for them to advertise (Yes, that comes of pretty SPAMMY). So this could potentially hurt our reputation, but it would have also been very time consuming. Finding advertisers (sending and replying to all those emails), keeping the current advertisers happy (offering them analytics), collecting payments (reminding those who haven’t paid), etc. By no means, we are suggesting that there are not plugins which cannot do that. OIO Publisher Plugin that we use on this site, does that job very well. However, BuySellAds provided us with something that no WordPress plugin can provide: good base of advertisers who are looking to spend money on advertisements.

Aside from that, it saved us all the time which really helped us increase our growth rate significantly because we were focusing our energy on the right area: writing quality articles and building our user base (exactly what every blogger should focus on). All we had to do was go in, create our profile page for the site, create ad zones (areas where we want to sell ads on), select the prices and quantity of ads we want to sell, and then place their script within our design. They took care of pulling in our site’s screenshots, providing advertisers with social proof (statistics for your site). Check out the example of our Property page:

For all this, they took a 25% cut of the ad price which covered transaction processing fees, support for you and advertisers, and all the services that BuySellAds provide for you. You might think that is a lot of money, but we paid it happily. Because if you dedicate a person to do this for you, or spend time out of your day to do this, you will end up spending more. Because not every email you send out will convert into buyers. Often, you will exchange emails and the deal will end up falling. So it was really well worth it for us to use BuySellAds as a service and focus our efforts on what we do best.

It is not just us by the way that feels this way. Tuts+ Network, The Next Web, Search Engine Journal, Dynamic Drive, and many other big name sites use BuySellAds to sell their ads. They have some very well-known advertisers as well. See what others are saying about BuySellAds.

Through out our years of using BuySellAds, we made numerous suggestions on things that we saw need improvement. We suggested new features a lot of them were implemented. We even had the honor of creating the blog design for BuySellAds built on the best WordPress Theme Framework: Genesis. Basically what we are trying to get across is that they CARE about their users. They will help you pick the right price, right ad zones etc.

Enough of our story on why we use BuySellAds, lets get into how you can start selling ads in your WordPress Blog with BuySellAds.

Note: It is important to establish the point that you have to be using self-hosted WordPress blogs to sell ads.

How to use BuySellAds with WordPress?

First, you would need to register for a BuySellAds account (it’s FREE), and then add your site (create a property). You get to add numerous ad zones for that web property of yours. Ad formats include (Image Only, Image + Text, Text + Description, Sponsored Tweets, RSS Feed Ads, and more will probably come in the future).

You get to select your own price, you can select per month or impression based. You can select to rotate ads if you want, select ad sizes and much more. Once you are done creating your ad zones, all you have to do is simply drop the codes into your template. Or alternatively, you can use the official BuySellAds WordPress plugin.

You are probably wondering, why we are not providing a step by step guide of doing this? Because it is very easy to follow once you are on BuySellAds. They have created a very neat User-interface that will guide you step by step.

Is banner advertisement the only way to make money? Certainly not. There are tons of other ways to make money from your blog. Check out Syed Balkhi’s presentation on Monetizing your Blog from WordCamp Miami.

Are you already using BuySellAds? Just signed up, or have used it in the past? Please share your comments, experiences, and questions in the comments below. We would love to hear more.

How to Sell Ads in Your WordPress Blog with BuySellAds is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.

Here is a short summary of the infographic:

WordCamp is a community-organized conference centered on the WordPress publishing platform. These events are organized, paid for, and attended by the local WordPress communities in accordance with guidelines published at WordCamp.org and the principles of the WordPress Foundation. The first WordCamp was held in San Francisco in 2006, and each subsequent year has brought growth in the number of cities in which it is organized. As of 2010, there have been WordCamps on every continent except Antarctica.

WordCamps should be attended by everyone who uses WordPress, and everyone who should use WordPress. This category includes bloggers, designers, developers, authors, marketers, SEOs, Businesses, Non-profits, photographers, realtors, consultants, entrepreneurs, etc.

The content of WordCamp presentations are highly focused on using or developing on WordPress. Issues around blogging, business, and social media that are related to WordPress use may be included. While WordCamps are not big, fancy, expensive conferences, the material shared is highly valuable. Don’t be surprised if you see a big name speaker at a low-key local gathering like WordCamp. Even though the purpose of WordCamps were to be low-key, major cities have large enough WordPress community to have an event attendance of 700+ people. You should be prepared to learn a new dimension of WordPress because there are a lot of unique ways people are using WordPress. You should be prepared to have fun with other people who are just as obsessed with WordPress as you are (or just as NEW to WordPress as you are). There is usually a casual afterparty for you to meet new friends, business partners, employees, employers, and life partner (who knows?)

We highly encourage you to attend a WordCamp that is in your area. If there is not, then you should consider making it happen. To find out more about WordCamps check out the official WordCamp website.

If you are not able to attend, then you can always consider supporting/sponsoring our trips to the event, and we will bring you the highlights of the event. Plus, it is a great way to get more exposure as your name or your company name will be mentioned in all posts regarding that WordCamp. To sponsor please Contact us.

What is a WordCamp and Why You Should Attend? [Infographic] is a post from: WPBeginner which is not allowed to be copied on other sites.