Over the years I’ve posted quite a few video tutorials on here and on other sites.  The problem is that they were scattered all over — many on here, quite a few on Google Earth Blog, various ones on my Google+ account, etc.  Recently I set out to get all of those organized, and the result seems to be pretty good.

With the help of Ali Green, we’ve put together a new site called A Brighter Web.  On the site we have over 60 video tutorials on topics such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and WordPress.  We’re adding a few new videos every day, and we’ll be expanding our range of topics over time.

With that in mind, what would you like to see on a site like that?  More social platforms, like FourSquare and LinkedIn?  Or perhaps software tutorials, like Photoshop?  Leave a comment and let us know what you’d like to see, and we’ll certainly take your ideas into consideration moving foward.

Thanks!

Working toward A Brighter Web is a post from: MickMel

Over the years, I’ve discussed a lot of ideas to help your business flourish online and today I’m going to show you what it looks like when it all comes together.

The East Cobber is a free local magazine in Marietta, GA that was created back in 1993, and they’ve had an online presence for nearly a decade.  However, with the ongoing shift from print to digital, they realized the the site could do so much more.  Last year they enlisted the help of Green Mellen Media, and the results have been amazing.  Here is a chart showing their growth since the new site launched last fall.

The beginning of that chart is October, 2010, when they had 1,509 visitors.  Last month they had a total of 16,498.  For a year over year comparison, they had 1,691 visitors in May 2010, and then the 16,498 in May 2011 — an increase of 875% in a single year!  Even better, this wasn’t from a brand new site; this was a very well-established site from a popular magazine.  So what made the difference?  There were quite a few things, but here are some of the big ones.

WordPress

We moved the entire site over to WordPress, which helped with quite a few things.  It not only made it easier for them to publish articles, but WordPress has excellent Search Engine Optimization by design.  Using a StudioPress-powered theme helped even more, as they add some additional SEO tweaks to the mix.  Here is their incoming traffic from search engines over the past eight months:

Content

This is the big key.  Rather than posting a few articles each month when the new issue came out, they’re posting multiple stories every day to keep the community informed of local news and events.  They’ve published over 2,900 entries since the new site went live, making them a true hub in the community.

Social

I recently pointed out how you can’t fake your way to social media success, and they’re an example of social media done right.  Their Facebook page auto-posts some new items from the site, but they’re quick to respond to comments and often run contents to give away prizes from area businesses.  They’ve gone from just a few hundred likes on the page to well over 1,000 and it continues to grow quickly.

The key here is that they work hard at it.  People are always looking for shortcuts, but the East Cobber folks simply got to work and are engaging with the community daily.  We’ve given them some tools to help make it easier, but there is no substitute for actually diving in and connecting with people.

The Little Things

Little things can add up too:

• We didn’t put our name in their footer in order to help them rank as well as possible in Google.  The results above speak for themselves.
• They post a new photo of the day on their home page every day to keep things fresh.
• They trusted us and we trusted them.  When we assured them that a feature or idea wouldn’t work, they believed us.  When they told us that their readers were interested in certain topics, we believed them.
• We used most of my favorite WordPress plug-ins, plus a few others to help add additional functionality to the site.
• We use Google Analytics (which generated the charts above) see what content people read the most, what needs to be improved, etc.

The magic solution

People are often looking for the magic solution to put their online business on autopilot, but things just don’t work that way.  A properly configured site, using a solid platform, with lots of hard work put into building content and the community, can lead to a very successful site.

Traffic is continuing to grow for them, and I expect it will for some time.  Congratulations to Cynthia and her team for such great success over the past year!

How to make it all come together is a post from: MickMel

Three years ago I wrote up a list of my favorite plug-ins, and decided that it was well past time to give the list a fresh look.  While many of them have stayed the same, I’ve got a few additions and a few deletions.

The ones that stayed the same

These plug-ins have certainly been updated in the past few years, but remain part of every blog I manage:

Akismet – Amazingly awesome spam fighting plugin.

FeedBurner Feedsmith – I still run all of my blog RSS feeds through FeedBurner, and this is a great plug-in to quietly redirect visitors over there.

Google XML Sitemaps – A simple way to generate an XML sitemap and automatically notify search engines of your new posts.

Highlight Author Comments – Make your replies stand out when you reply to comments on a post of yours.

Subscribe to Comments – Allow users to get email notifications of new posts after they leave one.  I love when blogs have this, so I can be notified if someone replies to my comment and then we can continue the conversation.

The ones that I’ve moved away from

Here are the plug-ins that I no longer use regularly, for one reason or another:

All in One SEO Pack -Most of the themes that I use (typically from StudioPress) have great SEO baked right in and this is less important.

Enhanced WP Contact Form – I’ve switched to Wufoo for virtually all of my forms.

Fancy Zoom – I still use it from time to time, but most themes have better image management.

Top Commentators – This isn’t really a bad plug-in, I simply don’t use it any more.

Sociable – I’ve removed this in favor of Twitter and Facebook-specific plug-ins, shown below.

Twitter Tools – I now use dlvr.it to handle this instead, but I use it rather sparingly; be fresh on Twitter, not automated!

WordPress.com Stats – Still a great plugin, and I use it on a few blogs, but I primarily rely on Google Analytics.

The new additions!

I’ve dropped some plug-ins, but also added some new ones over the past few years such as:

Canonical URL’s – A very simple plug-in to add the canonical tag to your pages.  Not overly helpful in many cases, but can be excellent for your SEO sometimes.  (What is the canonical tag?)

PuSHPress – This enabled PuSubHubbub support for your blog. In short, it makes sure that RSS readers and others will get your posts instantly, rather than the next time they check in a few hours.  (more about the PuSHPress plugin)

RSS Footer – This adds a line of text (with a few links) the bottom of each post in your RSS feed.  The basic idea is that if someone is scraping your site and posting it as their own, you’ll at least still get some free links back to your site!

Twitter Button for WordPress – A simple way to add a “tweet” button to your posts.

WP FB Like Button – A simple way to add a Facebook “like” button to your posts.

WPtouch – A great plug-in that creates a mobile version of your site and automatically serves it to mobile phones when they connect.

You?

What about you?  Any other killer plugins that I’m missing from the list?

My favorite WordPress plug-ins is a post from: MickMel

A lot of you have been watching my “How to install WordPress in less than 10 minutes” video, but I’ve been asked the same question a few times: “After I install it, then what?”

This short video will show you some of the next steps I take after I’ve installed WordPress to help make the site ready for prime time — setting up comment features, permalinks, etc.

If you need additional help with your blog, I’m continuing to add more videos to my “Simple WordPress Tutorials” post, so check it out.  If you’re trying to do something that isn’t listed on that page, let me know and I’ll create a screencast for you.

Update: This video can now also be found at A Brighter Web.

I’ve installed WordPress — now what? is a post from: MickMel

If you’re just getting started with WordPress and you’re stuck on how to use some of the features, I hope that the videos below will be helpful.  You’ll find four short videos in this post, to show you how to create links, add images, add PDFs and embed videos.  Enjoy!

These videos have been moved to the WordPress section of A Brighter Web, along with many others to help you with your WordPress site!

Some simple WordPress tutorials is a post from: MickMel

I talk about WordPress quite a lot on this blog.  It’s an excellent blogging platform, and it’s a great addition to almost any site — as long as you have time to write on it.

However, some people get intimidated by the idea of installing it and end up using Blogger or something else instead.  Long-term, having the software installed on your own server offers a lot of advantages, so here’s how it’s done.

Before we get started you’ll need to do a few things:

• Get hosting established. For this tutorial I’m using a cPanel-based host (like ClickHost), though most hosts will be similar.
• Get your FTP software installed and configured. The FTP software I use is completely free and is called FileZilla.  Your hosting company will provide your username and password, which you put into the software.
• Find the location of your hosting “control panel”.  Again, this will be provided by your hosting provider.

During the install, I’ll be going out to wordpress.org to download the software.  Note that wordpress.com is something different — be sure you’re going to the .org site.

Ready? Here we go.

After you’ve finished installing WordPress, check out “I’ve Installed WordPress — now what?” for some suggested next steps to take.

Update: This video is also now available over on A Brighter Web

How to install WordPress in less than 10 minutes is a post from: MickMel

Right now I’m in the process of changing up some of the social icons on my various sites.  For a few years now, I’ve been a fan of the Sociable plugin for WordPress.  It’s an excellent plugin that makes it easy to add quick links to various social site (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) for users to click on.

It looks something like this:

It’s a great plugin, but I was wanting more.  A few months ago, Facebook released a pretty slick “Like” button that could be added to sites, and just recently Twitter added a similar “Tweet” button.  Rather than being simple links like the buttons above, these buttons are much more interactive.  You can see who else has tweeted/linked the post, and users can tweet/like without having to leave the page.

The problem then became clutter. If I added both of the new buttons and still kept sociable, I’d be making things rather messy.  So, Sociable had to go.

You can install the buttons manually if you want, but I found a few simple plug-ins to do the job for me instead.  There are many to choose from (and all of them are quite similar), but I’m using:

• Twitter Button for WordPress
• WP FB Like Button

So far, I like them!  While it’s kind of a shame to lose the other icons, these are the two that people use overwhelmingly, and I really like how much cleaner things look.

You can see the new buttons just below this post.

What do you think?  Have you installed either of these on your site yet?

WordPress plugins; less clutter, more Facebook and Twitter is a post from: MickMel

I’ve worked hard for the last few years to be productive while away from the office, but a recent trip to Michigan showed me what I was lacking.

I have three primary computers; a beefy desktop, a solid laptop, and a netbook.  My goal is to be able to pick up any of the three machines at any time and have virtually all of my tools available to me.  Using web-based services such as Gmail and Nozbe are easy, but the challenge has been with desktop-based software like code-authoring and FTP tools.  I’ve just about got it worked out, so here’s what my arsenal looks like today.

The tools I’ve used for a while

Gmail – Love it. Being web-based it’s available on any computer I’m using and has a great interface on my Droid X

Google Reader, Calendar, Analytics, etc – All are web-based.

Nozbe – For task management. I have dozens of projects in there and it works great. Despite searching for something better, I haven’t found it.  Nozbe is still doing a great job.  No Android app yet, but their mobile version is good enough.

Evernote – I have it loaded on all three computers (along with their weak Android app), so they’re always in sync with my 500+ notes.

Dropbox – Aside from personal photos and videos, ALL of my files are in there; more than 15,000 of them, taking over 13GB of space.  Every file is accessible from any of the three computers and from their Android app.

Tweetdeck / Sobees – I use Sobees on my main computer (more screen real estate to play with) and Tweetdeck on the laptops.  On Android I’m currently using Seesmic and I’m quite pleased with it. Since they all pull directly from my Twitter account, they’re automatically in sync.

The new tools

Now, none of that stuff is particularly new to me.  I’ve been doing that for a while and it’s worked great.  My problem is when a client needs something fixed and I’m on the “wrong” computer.  I’ve used Dreamweaver for years (love the way it handles FTP and code coloring) and a variety of FTP clients.  The problem is that I’d add FTP info on one machine, but I’d need to add it on the others as well.  This wasn’t a big problem since I keep that information handy (mostly in Evernote), but it was a pain.

The problem became worse because WordPress 3.0.1 was released while I was up north this time.  I’m responsible for nearly 80 WordPress installations (some are mine, some are friends, some are clients, etc), and the quickest way to update them is to find the “changed files” each time and push them up via FTP.  I had all of those sites saved in my FTP software at home, but only a handful on the laptop.  Finding and loading the credentials for the others would have taken quite a while.  Even then, I still wouldn’t have them on the netbook or in Dreamweaver on either machine.

My solution was a few portable applications. “Portable” applications are designed to run off of a thumbdrive.  It’s quite cool; pop the thumbdrive into a computer, and run the application directly from there — no installation necessary.  For an IT person that needs to carry around various anti-virus and other tools, it’s gold.

For me, the great part about these apps is that they can be installed within Dropbox and run from there.  I loaded FileZilla Portable to handle FTP and I purchased phpDesigner7 Portable to handle code writing/edits.  I spent a few hours and loaded the credentials for all of my sites into both programs, and now I’m rolling!  Any edits to either program get automatically saved to Dropbox and synced to the other machines.

So far it’s working out great.  Not only am I looking forward to my next trip, but it’ll make purchasing a new computer much easier; I simply install/sync Dropbox and Evernote and I’m nearly done!

How do you manage software/data across multiple computers?

Being productive on the road is a post from: MickMel

A nifty new plugin has just been released for WordPress.  It’s tiny, requires no configuration, and does it’s work behind the scenes.  The plugin is called PuSHPress, and it helps get your content out there much more quickly.

The past, Google would check your site periodically and then post your new content to Google Reader (and other places) after it was discovered.  Last year, a new protocol called PubSubHubbub was introduced, as a way to speed up that process.  In short, it gave you an easy way to tell Google (and others) when you had new posts ready for them, rather than waiting for them to find you.  Here’s how it works:

This new WordPress plugin is a simple way to enable PubSubHubbub on your blog.  No tweaking, no setup.  Just install and activate the plugin and you’re done!

For more, check out the full article on 10e20.

If you have a WordPress blog, install the PuSHPress plugin right now is a post from: MickMel

WordPress 2.8.5 has just been released and (as always) you’re advised to upgrade immediately.  I couldn’t find a list of files that were changes between 2.8.4 –> 2.8.5, so I spent some time and figured it out.  I hope this is helpful for you:

List of changed files in WordPress 2.8.5 (download 2.8.5 here)

readme.html
wp-app.php
wp-trackback.php
xmlrpc.php
wp-admin/edit-attachment-rows.php
wp-admin/install.php
wp-admin/page.php
wp-admin/post.php
wp-admin/import/wordpress.php
wp-admin/includes/post.php
wp-admin/includes/update-core.php
wp-includes/author-template.php
wp-includes/bookmark-template.php
wp-includes/capabilities.php
wp-includes/category-template.php
wp-includes/classes.php
wp-includes/comment-template.php
wp-includes/formatting.php
wp-includes/general-template.php
wp-includes/media.php
wp-includes/post-template.php
wp-includes/rewrite.php
wp-includes/theme.php
wp-includes/version.php

List of changed files in WordPress 2.8.5 is a post from: MickMel