Picture of the Day

The post Picture of the Day appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.

If you could bring back one dinosaur, which one would it be?

There is a Hindi saying “?? ??? ?? ?? ??? ??…” which i am translating here for this post which says if something is gone by it is gone by. And hence presence of anything which was present before we came in this world is neither of significance nor it is in the interest of the Humans. So I don’t want to bring any Dinosuar from past and let them be part of our Geography.

#HappyGeographying #RIPDinosuars

The post None appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.

1. Make a Decision: Homepage or Blog Page?

Decide whether your visitors will encounter a homepage or a blog page when they visit your site. The strategic choice between the two depends on your overall site planning.

2. Build Connection with an Email List

Cultivate a genuine connection with your readers through email, leveraging the intimate space of the inbox. Utilize resources on creating engaging emails and treat your readers like valued individuals.

3. Give a Reason to Share Email Addresses

Offer a compelling reason for visitors to share their email addresses. Consider creating valuable content such as ebooks, audio interviews, videos, or courses in exchange for their email contact.

4. Track Your Progress

Implement Google Analytics to gain insights into your site’s performance. Understand your traffic sources, popular pages, and user behavior to optimize your content and offerings.

5. Put the Power of SEO to Work

Utilize SEO to enhance your site’s visibility. Consider tools like Scribe for content optimization, ensuring your site ranks higher in search engine results.

6. Create a Brand Experience

Establish a memorable brand experience by using consistent fonts, colors, and images unique to your business. Leverage premium themes and visual elements to brand your site effectively.

7. Supercharge Your Site with One Plugin

Install the Jetpack plugin, a versatile tool offering various features, from site traffic review to social sharing and short links. It streamlines several tasks and is a free, all-in-one solution.

8. Make Spammers Work for a Living

Activate Akismet to filter out spam comments on your blog efficiently. This helps save time and ensures that genuine comments receive the attention they deserve.

9. Thank First-Time Commenters

Express gratitude to first-time commenters on your blog. Use plugins like Comment Redirect to redirect them to a thank-you page, encouraging a positive interaction and potential return visits.

10. Plan Your Posts

Install the Editorial Calendar plugin to plan and organize your posts efficiently. Maintain a broad vision for your content to ensure consistency and alignment with long-term business goals.

11. Bring Commerce Into the Picture

When ready, introduce e-commerce by using the Premise plugin. Create sales pages, protect content, and establish members-only sections for added revenue streams.

12. Keep It Safe and Sound

Implement a robust backup system, ensuring daily database backups and weekly full backups. Consider plugins like BackupBuddy or WordPress Backup to Dropbox for added security.

Charge up your WordPress site systematically, working through these steps to create a fully charged platform ready to power your business. Share your favorite ways to empower your WordPress website in the comments.

The post WordPress Tips for Every Blogger appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.

1. Themes- Eye catching themes are making WordPress websites though prevailing and crowd pullers. The variety of free and payed themes are actually making tougher for other contemporary CMS to fight back with WordPress. Because the people who are engaged in WordPress community are huge and are dedicated as well as organised to make  WordPress more friendlier.

2. Plugins- Plugins are making the default functionality of WordPress more beautiful and is adding up the new features to the existing kitty.

In this Post we are going to look at those WordPress Plugins which can make your Blog more interactive as well as a big crowd puller. As per a survey the most loved and most hated thing in WordPress is the same thing i.e. Plugins. Plugins can make your WordPress life beautiful and can make your website fall prey to the outage trends in shared servers. So here are those Plugins which can be used in a WordPress site keeping in mind the limitation of resources in the shared servers.

1. Jetpack

This is the plugin application which gives a beautiful view of your site suiting into the eyes of viewers by beautiful signup form as well as making stats easier for the webmaster to have a look at. 

2. WordPress SEO by Yoast

To address all the worries of SEO for your site. WordPress SEO by Yoast is the best plugin available and I have tested it on my own sites it has done a fantastic job in terms of making my life easier in terms of doing every bit to make every post SEO.

3. Akismet

Akismet is one of the most important plugin and is found on almost every site of WordPress it is mandatory because you need to take care of the security of the site by yourself. And akismet is your helping hand in fighting with Spam and ham, so best is to keep Akismet installation up ready and up to date and keep on deleting the spam comments.

4. Limit Login attempts Plugin

I wrote a detailed post on Limit Login attempts Plugin and its usage, functionality and its rising importance with hackers trying to break into your website’s setup. Limit login attempts is the nice answer to make your hackers using brute force to guess your user id password and break in by limiting the attempts an ip can make to login. And thus ultimately banning it make way through into your setup.

5. W3 Total Cache

Caching is important factor in determining a better speed for the website with the similar resources which others have. So best is to ensure that you have a cache plugin which frees up those resources and delete those unwanted cache files which can prove a potential risk and also puts the server at an extra load. And this plugin is more useful when you are into a shared server, wherein any extra resource may cost you increase in downtime for your site.

Final Verse

When you are into share resource server you have to make sure that you are not pulling huge chunk of resources which lead to severe outage and downfall in website Google Juice and Page and Traffic Ranking.

The post 5 WordPress Plugins to make best of your Blog appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.

1. Being Proactive

As a WordPress blogger you are expected to react to good and bad things of world around you. And hence if you are not reacting to these things you are not justifying being a blogger. Catching up with the latest happenings and going to happen events is the way you are making community around you aware. This awareness makes more and more people connect with you and this connection makes your responsibility bigger.

2. Objectives

The day you become a WordPress Blogger you should have a mindset clear that what are your Objectives and what you want to meet through this Blog. Few need money and fame and few wants to share the knowledge they have with the world. But my perspective is different I want to make sure that the way I fought in finding information for me and enriching experience of my readers. My new perspective blogger friends need not to thus I am sharing the knowledge which ever I have and thus doing my bit to share the things which i learned with the hard work to others so their way becomes a bit easier.

Read: 5 Slipups of WordPress Setup

3. First In First Out- Placing first things first

When you are goals are clear and you are proactive enough to build story with latest happenings around you. Now the next task in hand is to place first things first which means writing a course of action and thus moving according to it. Set priorities right and hence you develop the course of action which your whole online world rotates and success and failure depends on this. Like I enlisted these priorities for setting up blog:-

• The look and feel of the website should match your content and writing style.
• The content should be managed and you should have a stock of atleast hundred posting ideas to start with so you never fall prey to Writer’ block.
• Time management is the key and learn this skill to manage time better and hence work so.
• Being Patient is the only way for the success so learn this technique.

These are the few of the ways I will do to make my blog running we are not going in detail as they could be covered in some other post.

4. You Win I Win, We all Win

Opening a WordPress blog has a basic need of being a giver, a giver of experience, a giver of ideas, a giver of analysis and the shortcut trips and tricks. If you make people win they will help you win and if you both are a winner the community will win. Contribute and connect with the people and build winners slowly you will become winner of your own.

Read: 3R’s of Blogging Success

5. Convince yourself before you convince others

You are doing a tutorial on an app and you just copied from somewhere and pasted it in your website this is a wrong approach rather you should try to use it yourself and develop your own experience and if you feel convinced with the usage of that app. Explain others why they should use the app and by this you will see a huge change the way you present the article. Feel the reviewed product yourself and then as per the importance of it in life contribute to the community with your own experience.

6. Synchronizing Efforts

Command and conquer was the game we must have played in our childhood but have you seen what are those things which these computer and video games use to teach us. Combine the competencies and the hard work of different people and mix and match to give the solution for every one. This is called synchronizing the efforts and delivering best results, this means that every thing on your online effort is not meant for you. But you can collate the ability of every end of the online world and thus bring the best on your website.

7. Putting Effort in Right Direction

When you are aware of the core competency within you and are also aware of what people are reading on the web this will lead you to decide where to put in the effort to extract the best results for you and your Blog. Now the right direction can be known only by reading the path of the people who are getting the best in making small efforts. So you know what is the right direction to do the best output and this is possible when you are aware of the surrounding. Read as much as you can extract the best results from these efforts.

Now you got the best 7 ways to make the best of your online effort and hence grab right path of success. This is how you are going to build achievements for your blog for others to follow. Now I am looking for you to share your thoughts on the subject.

The post 7 Best Ways to Rock your WordPress Blog appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.

Back up of your CSS When you want your website stand away from rest of the weblogs of internet you have to make many changes on your CSS stylesheet and unlike other normal as usual HTML pages CSS are completely different. So the slight mistake in it can make your website look bad. Which you don’t want to happen so in that case it is always recommended that you have a backup of default stylesheet and infact if possible pre change and post change backups as well. So your backup will be like windows restore point and will never let you rework on the picture.

Google’s AuthorRank

In Google search result you must have noticed a major change over the years and this is the Google+ Profile which is displayed along with each link of your website present on internet. It shows well how many people have you in your circle and the links to other contents that you have published till now. Addition to all this the content sent to Google Plus gives you dofollow backlinks which are precious for any blogger.

Heap of Categories and Insufficient Tags

Category is usually the indicator of what the overall field of the article and tag is the enlist of important keywords which are marked for understanding of Google. Now if you are talking about the latest Apple Iphone the category can be Mobile Review and the tags could be Apple, Iphone, Review, Latest tech update.

Mobile Readers are you There?

Mobile readers are those which were found to be remote users who are not of much importance and donot contribute much to the traffic of a website. But now the situation has changed in fact the Google Search Engine team has informed via email to all the webmasters that whichever site is optimized for Mobile will rank higher in the search engine. Mobile visitors strength and say in contribution to the total visitors is increasing. Even adsense has come up with the ads which are optimized for mobile browsers. Make sure your website is not missing the bus towards the visitors who are searching your website on their mobile. They also are potential users and you have a good chances of building up a user community around your blog which are always available to read your content on their handheld.

Permalinks

Nothing is permanent in the online world except permalinks they are the permanent address of your article which could be reachable only if someone knows this address. You have to be very careful in making these addresses look better and easier for the search engine as well as readers to never judge your content with the date of publication. But with the quality in it and hence you should avoid to use the date/month/year format or any other format other than name-of-post.html format. Even format which is name-of-post/ is not good as it is difficult for some of the browsers to resolve the address without html as extension. So to avoid this and not to loose potential visitors you should keep permalinks clean and clear and should be easy for readers to understand the meaning of them and relevancy with the article title.

Hope you are not in front of any of the slipups as they are most common and impact traffic and page ranking along with the reputation of your website. So keep them clean and stay away from these mistakes and build a beautiful website loved by readers and the search engine. Now concluding this post I want to ask you few questions:-

What mistakes you recognize are threat for a website reputation?

What are your ways to skip away from the mistakes while setting up your WordPress site?

If you liked this article share it with others and if you have suggestions on this topic let us know via comments below. For the best updates hook up to our Email subscription and If you want to connect with me directly you can follow me on twitter or on Google+ or Facebook.

The post 5 Slip Ups of WordPress Setup appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.

Webhosting has the two ways to get yourself a hosting, Linux and Windows Web Hosting. Linux has the benefit of being free in support a huge community of experts are behind it to give you support to troubleshoot troubles. Free Linux Support as well Linux OS is also free so the cost of operations of Linux Server is cheaper. Plus if you are using Content Management System like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal based on php it is recommended that you use Linux Hosting. Whereas although if you are building a website based on ASP.NET you should go with the Windows Hosting it is recommended so because latest version of ASP.NET is not supported in linux. If you are looking for new webhosting you should go with Dreamhost or Hostgator. Dreamhost has a really awesome customer service and Hostgator has Linux and Windows Hosting. You can go with any of them but dreamhost along with nice customer service has awesome discount coupons as well. They are both reliable and is recommended by many prominent bloggers.

Why Linux Hosting?

Uncomplicated

Though Windows server do also supports PHP based sites, but you many a times you fall into trouble if you are running them on windows. Because most of the PHP based content management systems(aka CMS) are designed to act primarily under Linux platform, and the differences in how linux and windows php sites react to these php base content is the cause of trouble. So if you are trying to run PHP based website under windows hosting, you can expect troubles ahead.

Cheaper

As most of the linux based Operating Systems are free or almost free to hosting companies, they hunt a cheap linux hosting plans. Whereas Windows Hosting becomes costly in this aspect as the Operating System and support is not free (Rather it is premium price) which means a big dig in the pockets of hosting companies which passes to the consumer on Windows hosting.

Faster

When you are running WordPress similar website in both Linux and Windows, you will see the page load speed which holds a god amount of weightage in SEO is much faster in linux hosting. Aside to SEO Page Load time has quiet big to do with User experience, thus Page Load time is definitely worth considering.

Fewer Resources

When I moved my hosting from Windows to Linux hosting same website need more memory on Linux as it used to on windows. Virtual private server (VPS plans) price is based on your memory need , thus by this you end up saving money on your web hosting Bill.

Hence to conclude that you should opt for Linux hosting over windows hosting. With so many offerings on display Linux is the best option to go for as it is cheaper, Uncomplicated, Faster and requires fewer resources. So what is your opinion in hosting platforms Linux or Windows. Many a hosting providers are now coming up with cheap hosting plans but cheap should not be a criteria your main concern should be server is clutter free. And second the website is fast and third is your server downtime is lesser.

The post Web Hosting: Linux Vs Windows Hosting appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.

This is an irony with the self hosted WordPress bloggers as they are left with not much information and as the reputation grows so are the devils looking to hunt their website down. But thanks to Google even they are supporting cause of these webmasters stuck in hacked websites situation. Crawling immediately stops once the site is found to be hacked or with malware with it. The content is auto deindexed and webmaster effort is die off. But now the situation has changed hacked sites when recovered if appealed to Google gets reindexed and the backlinks and page ranking reinstated by google on appeal.  Coming back to the topic in hand the Limit Login Attempts Plugin and how this simple plugin can help you being saved by small bots attack or password stolen situation. Now  your site is constantly growing in traffic page rank with lots and lots of readers coming to read what you think about a topic. Suddenly some silly password hacker who is trying to sneak into your website gets hold of your password then? Now to save yourself of this situation a plugin is introduced called as Limit Login Attempts plugin by johanee with a Super Solid reputation of 4.8 Stars out of 5 this plugin just nails the password poachers down. But this plugin needs to be tweaked with few configuration and I am going to tell you how to do it.

Now you got the plugin and installed in your self hosted WordPress blog, you get below menu with following items on display-

1. Total lock Outs- It indicates the number of attempts to hack your password is foiled by this plugin.

2. Active Lockouts- Number of IPs which crossed the max number of attempts and hence being blocked to attempt login any further.

3. Options- It is the main area where in you can play around with the settings of this plugin and hence utmost care should be taken to never yourself get locked out or your IP Blacklisted through this plugin. The ideal configuration is to keep 9999 Minutes of Lock out, plus 1 Lockout increases lockout time to 9999 Hours.

This way you discourage the possible poachers who try to hunt in your website through you wp-admin log in page. Another security tip which I mentioned in the initial of the post is that to never use admin username as the administrator. This is the common mistake by the bloggers that they keep administrative username as default admin. Where in I recommend to infact delete the admin user itself to eradicate any possible threat. You can use another username as administrator this way you save your website from unwanted sneakers. How you keep your blog safe? Share your thoughts via comments below. If you liked the article share it on Facebook and Twitter.

More Read:-

Hit Bull’s Eye of Success

Substitutes of Best WordPress plugin

The post Why is it required to use Limit Login Plugin for Self Hosted WordPress Blog appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.

In shared hosting the website uptime is a challenge as many websites are together pulling up the limited resources of a server. As a webmaster you have to be alert to keep your website up and running and to give the best experience to your readers. Server uptime has a major impact on your website page ranking. There are many ways you can look at your website uptime and in this post we are not going to look at the how reason of Monitoring Website Uptime, but the reasons should check the website and the take away of the performance log . When you look at the website uptime the log will show many things but what you should look at is error of site down due to some login failed issue, mentioning Brute Force. You immediately need a plugin called Limit Login Attempt. This is an awesome plugin which will control the several times a login attempt could be done from an ip address. As wordpress gives unlimited attempts for accessing your site it is very important to control the brute force attack on your website. Features provided by plugin are as follows:-

Limit Login Attempt

• Limits number retrials while login for each IP Address.
• Limits login attempts using authorized cookie in a similar way.
• It Informs admin about remaining amount retry attempts or lockout time on login page

If your website logs talk about caching error you must a cache plugin (I recommend wp super cache). This most popular cache plugin on the web which takes care of  your caching trouble has a very nice configuration recommendation by a leading web hosting service provider Hostgator. You can use the configuration steps here and along with this you can look at your websites performance overall and as well as your hosting providers server load. If you feel there is a big fluctuation in your website you can get in touch with your hosting providers to move your website to less loaded server.

The above said steps are most recommended steps if your site is on shared hosting servers. Whereas if you are on dedicated servers it is no more a pain as the resources are not limited and you will never be worried about such things.

If you are looking for resources to check your website uptime the below are few of the links which you can refer.

http://www.labnol.org/internet/website-uptime-monitor/21060/

How you check your website performance and implemented correction in it. Share your ideas via comments below. If you liked this article share it on Facebook and twitter. You can also drop me a tip at social forums or drop a ping in contact us.

The post Monitor Website Uptime appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.

This is a very decent fight between two sisters one is a leader of hosting domains and other leaders of self-hosted domains.  Despite odds the biggest gap felt by webmasters against WordPress monetization. How to monitize blog in WordPress.com sites is always a big question. Fortunately WordPress.com answered this big question with the launch of Wordads back in 2011. The popularity touched the heights as Wordads is the way where in a webmaster with a custom domain and decent traffic and recognizable reader base and for sure a recognized content will be given an opportunity to monetize its blog. But few things I felt should be changed if Automattic is really serious about this Ad business and want to give tough time to competitor Adsense.

1. The monetization should not be restricted to custom domains hosted on wordpress.com sites only.  As few webmasters with huge reader base fantastic content but holding a wordpress.com domains are lagging behind. The turf should be equal for all of them.

2.  The paid upgrade is another put offer as you have to pay wordpress.com 13$ for mapping your custome domain with wordpress.com.

3. The WordPress.com only domains should not be a constraint to apply for wordads.com.

So above are the show stoppers of wordads.com but when we talk about wordpress.com it has features which are unmatching and the servers maintained by peer`

WordPress.com has a huge visibility and should be best used if the wordads are available for free. Webmasters will be ok to wait for some time or norms to get the website added but paying for mapping makes some eligible and popular blog owners to move to other options.

Permalinks should be allowed to change in wordpress.com, the flexibility of blogspot.com is missing in wordpress.com. WordPress.org has multi dynamic options being  a self hosted platform. It is doing wonders for the webmasters and authors. The flexibility and options which are available in wordpress.org is making wordpress.com users envy since long. If paid upgrades are even cheaper for the webmasters who are investing so much time to enhance contents should get low price upgrades. I am unsure what difference it makes for wordpress.com to cut the price of paid upgrades. As many users will be queue up happily opting for these services on lower price point and earning will surely be higher despite lower price.

Second reason I advocate to reduce price is the cost of operating servers of wordpress.com by Peer1 hosting. The ads visible on sites will surely be not compensating expenses of operations and maintenance of Peer1 servers. Whom you feel comfortable to write upon WordPress.com or WordPress.Org? Looking ahead to hear from you. If you liked this post don’t forget to share it on Facebook and Twitter. You can Always connect with my website Tele-Columnist! for latest tech updates.

The post WordPress.com Vs WordPress.org appeared first on Mohit Mathur: Blogging, Wordpress and How things Work.