FiddyP

The nice folks at PacktPub sent me a pretty good book called “WordPress For Business Bloggers” by Paul Thewlis. I’ve been reading it for a couple of weeks and it turned out to be an excellent read.

Who is it for?

It makes it clear in the beginning of the book that you should at least be familiar with WordPress as a blogging platform. It doesn’t expect you to know any HTML or PHP skills, just a working knowledge of the WP interface for adding posts and pages, activating plugins and general use.

The book says it is aimed at anyone running or starting a business blog using WordPress. It can be for PR, marketing, profit or driving traffic. Whatever you use it for, if it’s for a business then this book is for you.

My own addition to this is that it will be perfect for someone who runs their own personal blog and is used to people asking them blogging questions. Why? because with this book, you could move from doing minor updates to personal blogs to heading up a business blog for your workplace or local businesses. You will see why below…

The Plan

One of the things that really impressed me with this book was how Paul gives good examples of specifics, what makes a great blog is the first question covered in the book. It doesn’t try to explain from the beginning what a blog is which would take a whole book but instead, it gives an example of different blogs that are aimed at;

• Increasing sales
• Adding value
• A dialog with your customers
• Raising awareness
• Showing expertise
• Customer Service
• Public relations
• Driving Traffic

The first chapter will give you an excellent summary of what you will learn from reading the rest of the book including, monetization, promotion and statistics.

The Case Study

This is where the real value of the book comes into play. So many “how to blog” books and blogs don’t go into specifics. They go on about how you should do this and that but not exactly how to go about doing this and that!.

The WordPress for business bloggers book has it’s own case study site to take you from planning (including strategic goals, tactical goals and implementation) all the way through from Chapter 3 – Designing your blog, how to install to your local machine so you can develop a blog before it goes live to blog design principles, layout, typography, colors.

Images, video and content are all covered in chapters 4 and 5. I was really impressed by the content of these chapters, every sub heading had a gold mine of information associated with it and was able to cover a large amount of the whole blogging for business idea without getting too wordy or cluttered with random information. It’s quite clear that Paul knows an awful lot about blogging and WordPress!

Through each chapter you get to work on the case study and see it grow as you complete each chapter and learn how each new bit of information gets applied to a real blog.

Why would you buy it?

Far from being just for business bloggers, I think this book would be an excellent resource for anyone wanting to know a bit more about blogging. All the information and guidelines would be applicable to any new blog.

You could even use this book as a self study course, work through each chapter and follow the case study and by the end, you will not only know how to make a full site but, you will know why you put headings here, how you should respond to comments, what to do with SEO and how to apply it and much more.

The case study site is quite simple and will give you a good ‘heads up’ on how to add and remove items from an existing theme so you could adapt a regular theme to word specifically for your business.
The code is available to download from the packtpub website.

If you’re working for your company and they don’t have a blog, just the information in Chapter 1 and 2 about mapping out a strategic plan and how to implement solutions would arm you with enough ‘know-how’ to talk your boss into getting your company into blogging. And wouldn’t it be nice if you knew just how to start?

Click here for WordPress For Business Bloggers

Get ANY book from PacktPub for FREE

Being the nice folks that they are, Packtpub has offered up 2 books from their vast collection as ebook downloads. My first packtpub book was an ebook and from it, I learned all that I needed to know about wordpress design so I really recommend that you enter this contest!

Requirements

1. Visit the PacktPub website and browse their collection and leave a comment here with what book you would like to win.
   (link to the books page at packtpub if you like)
2. Write about this contest on your own blog and link to this post.
   (it doesn’t have to be a whole post, it can be included as part of a new post but mention “wordpress for business bloggers” or “packtpub” in the paragraph and link directly to this post)

Details
Contest will run until Jan 16th 2009.
Winners will be chosen by a magic script at Random.org
Please use an email address that you can be contacted on when you comment, this email address will be used to receive the ebook

Hmmm, what to do?

I know! write a post about what to do when you have so much to do that you can’t do anything.

this is it. the post that is.

can’t do any more.

The title of this post is the question I asked myself many times.. before I used it myself that is.

For the first months of Twitter being talked about I deliberately kept away from it thinking that ‘micro-blogging’ was a complete waste of time. Who the hell would want to know if I’m going for a coffee or what page I’m interested in at the moment?.. turns out, quite a lot of people do actually.

I’ve been using Twitter through an application called Tweedeck for a couple of months now and I’ve really grown used to it taking up almost all of my second monitor space. I’ve discovered many reasons to use Twitter and I thought I’d share my thoughts on twitter here;

It’s not an IM

I hate IM programs, msn, yahoo, gtalk and all the rest because they just suck time away from you while you wait for someone to respond. I’m a fast typist so it’s painful to wait 3 minutes watching the “soandso is typing..” only to get a “yeah, I know!” in the message window.

They’re distracting too, I hate having a “tiddly-dum” noise happening all the bleedin time while I’m trying to watch something. Even though I’m committed to the tv at the time, a “tiddly-dum” will cause me to come to the computer to see what it was. 9 times out of 10 it could have waited but like brown on finger, it had to be investigated.

I’ve switched off all my IM stuff now and my productivity has massively increased! That’s why I like twitter, it’s like a thought catcher. It allows you to put up in less than 140 characters what’s on your mind without needing an immediate response.

If someone asks me a question via Twitter, it doesn’t make a flashing button on the taskbar appear demanding immediate attention. Instead, I can see it when the tweetdeck window gets the focus on my many many windows open.

You can download tweetdeck here, I really recommend using it. This is what my screen with twitter window looks like.

I use 3 columns. One for replies, one for the whole tweet stream and one for direct messages.

It can change the world (in 48 hours)

I donated some money to an organisation that wants to build a new classroom for a school in Tanzania. It was set up by http://tweetsgiving.org during the thanksgiving run up in America. The whole point was to raise 10,000 dollars in 48 hours by using twitter to promote it.

It was an amazing idea and executed wonderfully, people were retweeting messages about it all through the 2 days and before the time was up, 10 grand was raised just from the kindness of tweeters.

It’s not full of spam (yet)

I have seen very little spamming going on with it which is such a change for a 2.0 web thingy. Usually the first thing any popular company does is switch on the money making adverts or get bombarded with cialis (ab)users.

There are a couple of advertising options open to twitter users but not by twitter itself. Magpie is one of them, I used it myself recently to promote some ebay listings using keywords like ipod and ebay. It generated a lot of click thrus and coincidence or not, I sold out of everything I advertised. Just before Christmas too! woohoo

It’s organic networking

I really like this part of it, it’s not like other places where you have to join someone and jump through some hoops to be part of their group. You can just click their follow link and get their tweets in your stream of all tweets. If you think they self promote too much, just unfollow and they’re gone!

You get to see what people are like a lot easier than by reading their blog, just 140 characters forces the person to not over-edit or revise their text.

From this you can see who you want to deal with and not be bowled over by a slick sales page or well crafted and heavily edited authority article. Straight to the brain is the game. I love it.

You find out what’s happening straight away

Just seeing a stream of tweets going by you can quickly pick up a repeated phrase, when the Mumbai attacks happened I knew about it before Sky news that was on in the background!

Shopper gets trampled on Black Friday sales in Walmart? I heard it on twitter first.

It really is a way to get a pulse on the world and especially useful if you’re a prolific blogger who’s hungry for news to post. If you’re early on breaking news or big things to happen then you’re on to a stumbleupon golden egg page.

If you need to know something, like, right now

This is fast becoming one of my favourite things about twitter. The ability to throw a question out there and have it answered within a few minutes or see it get retweeted (re-broadcasting the question to ones own network of followers) is just amazing.

My partner wanted to know how to attach a zipper to a home made woolen cardigan. I had no idea but I thought someone out there in the twitterverse (you’ll get used to these twitterisms) might know or at least, know someone who would know.

One of my followers saw the question and broadcasted it to her own network, within a couple of minutes I had a message with a link to a picture of exactly what to do. That’s the first time my pc has got some praise from ‘her indoors’

You can use the wp-twitip-id plugin!

Ok shameless self promotion here but you can take advantage of the wp-twitip-id plugin which allows you to add a twitter username field to your comment form on your wordpress blog and display a “follow me” link or image next to the comment authors name.

Another reason for people to leave good comments on your site!

You can download wp-twitip-id plugin here

It’s got a really cool api

API or Applications Programming Interface is how so many cool widgets and gadgets get made by the geeky. It’s a way for developers to interact with the twitter server and pull loads of interesting information about the twitterverse.

There will be more and more applications coming out for twitter in the near future, there are already some incredible 2.0 web applications that give a sneak peak of what the internet of the ’10s will be.

Follow me on twitter if you haven’t already and get up to the second updates on my plugins and offers

Follow Me@commentluv

After deciding to take the day off, I managed to play a Jedi mind trick on myself. With all the pressure off for creating, my juices started flowing!

I have now updated the CommentLuv WordPress plugin to work with WP2.7rc1

It was working before but not if you wanted to change the settings. I’ve fixed that now and added some extra checks to the javascript so it shouldn’t need any more editing of the settings other than to enter the commentluv member id number.

You can download the very latest version of CommentLuv 2.6 here

It’s a beta version so you only need to download this one if you have 2.7 WordPress and you need to change the settings. Otherwise, wait for the big update to 2.7 when it happens in the new year!

Back to my off time!

I’m going to disappear later today and not come back until Monday. I might be on and off the internet via twitter or email but I am knackered and I want some time away from the keyboard before I go mental!!

This has in no way, anything to do with getting a new Blackberry Storm phone.

It will be nice to have something to play with though

Commentluv and the featured site and other stuff will have to happen next week now, I deleted all my emails from my inbox to start again and mistakenly deleted the response from the next featured site! grrr.

straw, back, last, camel.

don’t cry, I’ll be answering all emails and support requests when I get back

I’m working furiously behind the scenes at CommentLuv and haven’t been able to squeeze in any time for Fiddyp.
For good reason though, I am working with another blog owner to produce a free email course called Blog From Scratch which, unlike other “how to blog” tutorials and series, will show you exactly what you need to know from the beginning of creating a blog to the methods used to promote it, populate it and of course, monetize it!

The first part is up and ready and the rest is being edited by me and will be up as soon as possible.

There will be an extra oomph to the whole thing though, that’s where it will get interesting! For now, know that it will offer something that no other site can give you and will be a significant benefit to you and your own readers. I’m not ready to say what it is yet but I honestly think it could be massive for the commentluv site!!

Have to go now and get the rest of the lessons online..