Mining Twitter for Blog Readers
When you first start a new blog, and no one knows about it, it can seem a thankless task crafting beautiful blog posts. Having no-one to read them but your mother and your cat, let alone throw you the life line of a nice psot comment is a hard feeling, that is why so many blogs are started then dropped after a few months.
Here’s a little tip there are seams of readers on twitter always on the lookout for new content just waiting to be mined
What is Twitter Mining
It’s about looking for places on twitter where large numbers of potential readers congregate. It’s about knowing who is big in your niche with lots of followers and then introducing yourself to these people.
You introduce yourself by following these people.
Here’s An Example
I write about the blogging niche, with a particular bias towards WordPress. I know who the big people in my niche are, they write about similar things to me, so I would go to their followers page, this is the seam. As an example the Darren Rowse from the Problogger site’s followers can be seen at:
http://twitter.com/problogger/followers
Look at the people there, check out their profiles, see what they are tweeting about and if they look like a good match for what your blog is about follow them.
There will be a temptation to follow thousands of people, but my advice is to only follow a few and build a real rapport with these people. This is far more likely to make them loyal readers. A thing to note if you start to mass follow you will be marked as a spammer.
Once you have followed someone, there will be an inital sizing up of you to see if your are worth following back, so make sure you are adding value to twitter whilst you are mining for new readers.
Follow is Like A Handshake
You may think this seems a little spammy, but as the great Gary Vaynerchuck says “It’s not stalking it’s a darn handshake” http://garyvaynerchuk.com/post/78972633/its-not-stalking-its-a-darn-handshake. A follow is like shaking someones hand and having some small talk, if you are interesting (in your tweets and blog content) the converstation will become deeper.
Building on The Follow
Once you have followed someone, you may picque their interest. They will visit your twitter profile.
Make sure you are linking back to your blog from your profile. I recommend that you link to a sneeze page on your blog rather than the front page of your site.
A sneeze page is a special page on your site which tells new visitors what your blog is all about, in that hope that they will be propelled deeper into your site like a sneeze.
Darren Rowse of Problogger wrote an excellent article on a sneeze pages at, something that will propel people deeper into your blog archive http://www.problogger.net/archives/2009/04/23/create-a-sneeze-page-for-your-blog/
You can see the page I link to from twitter at wpdude.com/welcome, note I don’t advertise this along the top navigation of my site, this is not for everyone only people coming from other social media sites.
Start Mining
Grab your miner’s lamp, heft your pick and shovel and go looking for those readers, they are unlikely to come to you when your blog is a fledgling.
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How To Change the Order of Your WordPress Pages
By default your WordPress pages are displayed in alphabetical order. Sometimes this is not what a blogger wants, here is a quick hack to change the order of your pages.
Why Change the Order of Your Pages?
You may want to change the order of your pages to make more important pages stand out, for example on my site, I want hire me to be on the right so it is more prominent or you may want to improve your sites usability by clustering like pages together.
Sometimes you just want to rebel, the OCD of developers may get you down, ordering everything and indexing and categorising can overwhelm the more free spirited.
The Out of the Box Hack
Here is how you can modify the order that your pages are displayed.
From the edit pages section, select one of your pages and you will see the following attribute box on the right of your page copy:
As you can see their is a numeric option for the page order. By default all pages are set to zero, but if you set a value for each page you can control the order. e.g. about =1, contact =2, testimonials =3 and this order will be displayed on your page layout.
As it says above, this is a little bit “janky” if you add new pages you will need to modify the order again. If you want a simple page order change this hack does exactly what it says on the tin.
Mirror Mirror on the Wall What’s the Best Page Order Process of All
You oh Dude tell everyone the out of the box hack which is fine, but lo what’s this I see, a plugin is more fair than thee.
If you are looking for something a little more polished then why not check out the My Page Order Plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-page-order/
You Are A Free Spirit
Don’t let the “Man” tell you which order your pages should be in. Go out make a stand and break their structured universe 
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Indirect Blog Monetisation
Yesterday I made the following comment on Twitter, I thought I would follow it up with a full blog post explaining what I mean
If you can write a decent blog post on a subject, you can probably do it for someone, for a fee, that’s one way blogging can make you money
What I mean here is that you can indirectly monetise your blog, it’s not always about adsense clicks or ad sales.
What Is Indirect Blog Monetisation
Indirect Blog monetisation is about making money because of your blog not through it. You write your blog posts to create authority in your niche and to direct your blog readers to a desired monetisation method. Some examples of indirect blog monetisation are:
- An online store behind your blog
- Consulting / coaching
- A Service business for example Wordpress services, more about that later
- Speaking
- Book sales
- Freelance writing
To Quote Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett from their book Problogger Secrets fort Blogging Your Way To A Six Figure Income, you should look at indirectly monetising your blog if you meet one of these criteria :
- I blog to help me promote my business
- I blog because I want to promote my writing
- I blog because I want to make myself know
Is It Better Than Direct Monetisation?
I cannot answer that one, I would love to be a Problogger, so my ideal is to directly monetise my blog, but the time when I can make a living just from writing blog posts is away in the future, right now I am making about 95% of my income from indirect methods. But what I can say is that indirect methods are far better when you are growing your blog. You need to look at your own desires to answer this question.
To earn a decent living as a problogger, you need traffic, and you ain’t going to get that for a few months or even years when you first start a blog. Therefore my roundabout answer is yes indirect monetissation is better for the new blogger whilst they are building their profile.
My Example of Indirect Monetisation
The best way to illustrate indirect monetisation is with a case study of my business.
You may see ad banners and affiliate reviews on my site but they are secondary to my main income stream which is my WordPress services business. My blog is to attract people to my site and give me the opportunity to present my offering through my sales page. I offer WordPress technical support services to bloggers wanting to concentrate on content creation and leave the backend technical stuff to someone else. I have the technical expertise to fix your problems more efficiently than many bloggers, this then frees up time for their main task of writing excellent blog posts.
My blog posts help to provide organic search engine traffic, give me something to add value to my social media streams ; twtitter and Facebook, but most importantly they allow me to show my expertise at WordPress. As I said on twtitter, if I can write a competent blog post on how to do something then I can probably do it, that is why many of my blog posts are case studies if my services – how I solved a problem or telling people how to do something. I am providing social proof of my expertise.
Many of my readers are not my customers, and that is fine. I run with a freemium model, I write my blog posts for all to enjoy, for free, and that is great I love doing that, but if you need more than my writing, my direct help, or you know someone else who does. Then though my blog post and your exposure to my soft sell marketing you will know where to come.
As I have mentioned my sales funnel is all about the soft sell. Prove my authority and then give a call to action at the top of my site, the less than subtle hire me button. I have a footer on my rss feed suggesting people may want to hire me, and another at the bottom of each post. It’s not too pushy but it lets people know there is more than just a series of blog posts to this site.
Can You Retrospectively add Indirect Monetisation
I think yes, add a services page detailing your offering, then inform your readers via your email list or a blog post to your RSS subscribers and there you go. Be preapred for some backlash, there is still a movement that believes blogs should be non-commercial. You may loose readers.
Another thing I would recommend is to look at your existing ads / adsense config. Are your advertising services which are in conflict with your offering, you may want to remove them. If you look at my affiliate reviews and banner ads, they are for things I do not offer, so I feel they are complimentary.
Jobify Your Passion
There is a good change you love the niche you are writing about, if you could take that to the next level and jobify your passion what would that mean to you?
As with all blogging activities, indirect blog monetisation is not a get rich quick scheme. It takes hard work and dedication, I am worse off since I started wpdude.com leaving my very lucrative corporate freelancing gig, but I love what I do, I get to interact with some cool people running excellent blogs. I’m not going back to a corporate gig again.
If any of this break free and work for yourself resonates with you, I heartily recommend a couple of unconventional work products:
F2 Firefly Manifesto By Jonathan Fields
A Brief Guide to World Domination by Chris Guillebeau
So What Are You?
Direct or Indirect let me know, also another of my indirect methods is Wordpress coaching (can you see what I’m doing here) if you want a one-on-one session to talk about how to market your services through a Wordpress blog please contact me.
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Promoting Your Blog Posts on Twitter
If you follow me on Twitter (@wpdude) you will know that I promote my own blog posts there. I do this because of the large audience looking for and consuming blog posts on the topics I write about.
Twitter is a great place to promote your blog and the business behind it. Here are the ways I promote my blog posts on Twitter.
As a Blog Post Is Written
When I publish a post to my blog, I also automatically publish a tweet which links back to my blog post, to do this automatic integration I use Twitter tools, I wrote a blog post on the subject called Integrating WordPress and Twitter. The tweet will look something like this:
New blog post: WordPress Membership Plugins http://bit.ly/Y1is8
I usually write and publish my blog posts mid morning UK time, the majority of my followers are not in this time zone, so I usually post a second announcement of my blog posts at my peak Twitter time which is about 19:00 UK time. I am not always available at this time to do a manual update so I write and schedule a tweet using the Tweetlater service. This excellent tool allows you to write your tweet and to schedule it at a time of your choosing.
As I can craft my own tweets, I usually add more information than the “new blog post” title of the twitter tools integration, here is what I used for the same membership plugin post:
Thinking of starting a #wordpress membership site? Check out my post on what to look for in a membership plugin http://bit.ly/Y1is8
One From My Archives
Another technique I use is a “one from my archives” tweet. When I do this, I pull up a post from my blog archives which has not seen the light of day for some time and promote it again on twitter.
I do this to breathe life into the post and to keep adding value to my followers with new (to them) content. Not everyone has been reading your blog from day one and there may be a real wealth of blog posts to pass onto your Twitter followers.
I only do this with posts I am really happy with and feel adds real value.
In Reply to the Conversation
If you see a question in your twitter stream that you have addressed in a blog post, bring it to that twitterer’s attention. For example I often see questions on how to integrate WordPress and twitter, so I @reply to that person with a link to my blog post on the subject.
This is excellent blog marketing, your site had an answer to their question as they asked it. What is the bet that they will be crawling around your archive in the very near future.
Search.twitter.com
The next technique I use is far more proactive and may not be for everyone, but you can search for questions you already have the answer to. This is an excellent tool for finding prospective clients without being too in their face. The best type of marketing in my opinion.
From the twitter search page search.twitter.com type in a phrase you know you have an answer for. Again back to my example I could be searching for “integrate wordpress and twitter”. If someone is asking this of the twitterverse, and I can answer this with a link to my blog post I am immediately establishing my authority and expertise with this person.
I would ask you to be wary of pushing your affiliate link filled posts when proactively searching or replying to the conversation. If all you do is push your money making links into people stream you will be marked as a spammer and unfollowed.
Measuring the results
Everyone’s blog is slightly different, so what works for me, might not work for you. The answer to this is to test the results of your tweets and see what gets a click through.
To do this I use the URL shortening tool bit.ly. It records how many people have clicked on the link for more details and who actually clicks through to your site. It also gives you a breakdown of the timing of the most clicks. This can help you to find your optimum tweeting time.
Does This Replace RSS?
No, Twitter is too dynamic and people could easily miss your updates, if people really want to engage with your content they will still subscribe to your RSS feed.
Consider these techniques as a promotional activity not a content delivery system.
What Is The Key To Twitter?
The key to Twitter is adding value. If you can bring your blog post to a persons attention when they have a problem you are providing excellent value.
You may feel a bit sleazy about marketing yourself like this, but don’t be. There is a saying where I come from “Shy bairns get nowt” translation “Shy babies get nothing.” I am one of the most introverted people I know and self promotion does not come naturally, but if you are adding value and you are helping people I don’t see a problem with pushing your blog post across people twitter stream for their attention.
If you liked this post, please get in touch on twitter @wpdude to talk some more.
Further Reading
Why Bloggers Need Twitter by Hunter Nuttall – a free ebook and excellent resource
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WordPress Membership Plugins
WordPress membership plugins and the sites they help you to build are the new hip way to make money as a blogger. This is largely thanks to the hugely successful programs from Yaro Starak Membership Site Mastermind and Brian Clark Teaching Sells.
In this post I want to talk about what WordPress membership plugins do, the criteria I use when selecting a plugin and lastly I stack three popular plugins up against each other using my criteria to see how they perform.
What Is A WordPress Membership Plugin?
A Wordpress membership plugin is an extension of your existing blog which allows you to protect certain areas of your blog and only let registered users read or download content. You can then charge for that content, whilst giving away other posts for free. This is also know as the freemium business model. This is great as you can prove your authority over time with quality free blogs posts and then create a premium section. Your existing readers are already sold on your knowledge and are likely to take up the premium section.
Why is this good for bloggers? Well you can create your own products to monetise your site rather than relying on adsense or other peoples affiliate programs. This creates an income and increases the value of your blog if you want to sell it on in the future as a going concern.
The plugin will deal with the complex process of signing up new users, integrating with a payment processor such as Paypal, granting access to content and protecting content if someone leaves your membership site.
These plugins are inevitably premium and you should expect to pay in the region of $50-$100 for your membership site config.
What To Look For In A WordPress Membership Plugin
I have worked with quiet a few membership site plugins, here is my shopping list of features you should look for:
Payment Processing
You want to look for a plugin which can handle the major payment gateways, by that I mean Paypal,1Shopping Cart, Clickbank etc. Your plugin developer should already have done the hard work integrating with a credit card processor, you should only need to supply your credentials so money is deposited to your account.
You should also look for a membership site plugin which will deal with cancellations of the recurring payment on you site and automatically remove premium content from users who do this. An example of this is Paypal IPN integration. If a user creates a subscription and then cancells it, there should be a system in place for paypal IPN to contact you site and mark a user as unsubscribed and be removed from access to your system.
Affiliate Marketing.
Ideally the plugin you choose should allow you to record affiliate sales. Affiliate sales are when you partner with other site owners to promote and sell your membership site. In return you will pay them a commission for each sale made.
Affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful way to market your site to a wide audience, and since a membership site is a write once, sell many model, you can quite happily sell in bulk and pay your affiliates a decent commission.
The way an affiliate marketing system works is that your partner will signup and be given a specific URL to direct people to your site e.g.
wpdude.com/?aff=bob
Your affiliate software will pickup that the visitor is from Bob’s site and setup a cookie, if a sale is made, another script is run, if the cookie is set then a sale is attributed to bob.
The thing to look out for in your membership plugin is the ability to run that second script which records the sale. There is an alternative to this, and that is to use a payment processor which has an inbuilt affiliate system such as Clickbanks or 1shoppingcart
For more details on affiliate marketing, I suggets you read Darren Rowse’ category on affiliate programs http://www.problogger.net/archives/category/affiliate-programs/
Protecting Content
Your membership site must have the ability to protect content from none paying site visitors, this is an obvious thing, but content can be protected in a number of ways.
Protection of pages – restrict if a visitor can see a particular page
protection of posts – have the ability to mark a particular post as premium content
Partial protection of posts – Does you plugin have the ability to provider a teaser of a page or posts content and have the rest password protected.
Categories – Other things you may want are to protect whole categories
Downloads - If you site has multimedia content, you may want to protect what can be downloaded from your site, check to see of your plugin of choice can protect a link to a file on yoru system.
Membership Levels
You may want various levels of content protection in your program for example there may be some free basic protected content and then a gold level membership.
Another area to consider are free trials, does your plugin give you x days free before locking down asking for payment?
Integration with email autoresponders
Conventional internet marketing wisdom says get someone onto your email list and you can convert that users much more easily, so is there the ability to integrate your membership site with an autoresponder?
Sequential content delivery
Membership sites attempt to retain members for as long as possible and recharge them with a recurring subscription fee. I like a membership site config which allows me to drip feed users with content allowing a controlled delivery of content rather than informaiton overload which can cause people to drop off your membership site.
After sales support
These types of plugins are complex. You need to have confidence in the after sales support of the team who developed the plugin. You are fundamentally changing the way your site works when you install a membership site plugin, can you be confident that there is support at the end of an email to help you out of your site goes phutt once the plugin has been installed.
The Plugins I have used And How they stack up
I have worked with three of the top wordpress membership plugins, they are:
- Your Member
- WP-Member
- WishList Member
Here is a matrix of how they stacked up using my critera above:
| Your Member | Wp-Member | Wishlist Member | |
| Price | $50 | $44.99 | $97 |
| Payment processing | all main suppliers covered | all main suppliers covered | all main suppliers covered |
| Affilaite Marketing | You can run scripts on payment completion | You can run scripts on payment completion | You can redirect to a specific page which can contain your code upon payment completion |
| Protect Pages | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Protecdt Posts | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Particl Protection | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pay per post | Yes | Yes | No |
| Download protection | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Autoresponder support | need to code or use their premium autoresponder plugin | No | Yes – aweber and autoresponse plus |
| Sequential content delivery | Yes, | No | Yes |
| Multiple levels of membership | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Support | Not the fastest, but answers were there after a couple of prompting emails.The support forums are a bit cumbersome |
I have not used their customer support | Excellent customer support, my query was answered quickly and the resolution was excellent |
| URL | newmedias.co.uk | wp-member.com | member.wishlistproducts.com |
| Misc. Notes | Stouts lads from the north of England just like me. | Caused me problems creating a page with the same name as a deleted protected page, Annoying nvaligation nosises on their site:) |
My Recommended Plugin
I recommend wish list members, it is a very close call with Your Members, but the after sales support is more slick. It is the most expensive, but the native Aweber support makes up for that cost.
Need Help Building A WordPress Membership Site?
If you need help integrating your blog with a membership site plugin, I would be happy to give you a quote, please visit my service page and let me know your requirement.
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WordPress Performance Tuning Tips
UPDATE JAN 2010
I have developed an indepth performance tuning course, please check out performance.wpdude.com for details.
Here are my top five WordPress performance tuning tips. If you have a poorly performing blog, you may want to try some of these procedures.
What Do I Mean By Poor WordPress Performance?
I don’t mean that you have no readers or comments or that your content is not very good, that is up to you 
what I mean is that your pages are rendered very slowly and the usability of your site to open posts or pages, search for content or pull things back from your archives makes your visitors experience very poor and possibly turn them off from yoru site altogether.
There is also a school of thought in SEO circles that slow loading sites are not as well regarded as a fast loading site. So poor performance could be effecting your search engine ranking.
Before we begin
All of this is information is fairly technical, please backup your site before your begin.
Here we go, my top 5 tips for improving WordPress performance:
1. Install a Cache Plugin
Cacheing in computer speak is when you take information usually recovered from back end database and hold it in memory or on disk. When the information is next requested it is served up from the very fast memory/disk store rather than recovering it from the slower backend storage. The cache is held for a set lifetime and then renewed once the cache has timed out. This means only one access of the backend is requried for a set period of time.
Think of your blog home page, it is fairly static so loading all of the logo images, blog posts, CSS files etc etc into memory and serving them up can save a lot of time.
The plugin I recommend is wp-super-cache, this can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/
A word of warning on using a cache, if you use dynamic content on your pages for example an adrotator where each page load should show a differnt banner ad, using a cache will cause this to fail and only show one banner. wp-super-cache has the ability to mark certain scripts or comands as not for cache.
2. Activate the Inbuilt WP Object Cache
WordPress comes with it’s own inbuilt object cache. this allows you to save certain database queries to disk, and recover them much more quickly than accessing the database.
To activate the inbuilt cache you need to edit the file wp-config.php. This will be held in the root of your blog installation. To activate the object cache, add the following line ot your wp-config.php file:
define(ENABLE_CACHE, true);
3. Reduce Plugins
Everytime we add a plugin to our blogs, we add an overhead. Every bell and whistles on your home page needs ot be rendered and displayed. This will slow down your blog. My recommendation is to remove all plugins which are not entirely needed on your site.
I wrote an article about performing a plugin audit earlier this year, why not use that as a tool to find out if you need a particular plugin
Database SQL Cache
The query cache holds regularly run queries in memory to speed up the return of database results. We are getting into real techie land here, and that is to check if your back end MYSQL database has a query cache installed and how big it is.
If you are not happy messing about with your database why not submit a technical support request to your hosting company to do this for you.
To find out you have a query cache installed and it’s status, run the following queries from a MYSQL tool such as PHPMYADMIN
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE ‘have_query_cache’;
This will return a yes or no value, if it is no ask your hosting company to activate a cache.
To show the status of the cache run:
SHOW STATUS LIKE ‘Qcache%’;
This second command will tell you how the cache is being used and if it needs to be tuned. Here is an excellent resource from the MYSQL site which tell syou much more about query cache settings and configuration.
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/query-cache-status-and-maintenance.html
5. Look to Your Hosting
This is my last but least popular recommendation, and that is to look at your hosting provider. You may be in the enviable position that your blog has grown so popular that you have out grown your hosting account, or you may be too cheap, I bet that $3 per year hosting account doesn’t look so good now it takes ten minutes to load your blog.
If you are still having performance problems after the first four steps, look to upgrade your hosting to a more powerful setup, this will cost more money, so you will need to weigh this against the value of your blog.
Checking Performance Improcements
You need something to prove that the performance changes you have implemented have provided an increase in speed, you can spend lots of money on traffic analysers to look at the underlying http calls and see response time, me,I go for cheap and cheerful everytime, I use the basic (read free) version of httpwatch a browser plugin which shows your page being rendered and what is taking the time, a very useful tool. The key point is I can use it to do a before and after comparision of page load time. It also shows me which components are being cached.
Wrap Up
Performance tuning any computer system is a dark art, where you tune in one place you can introduce new bottlenecks elsewhere. This list is not exhaustive, there are tweaks to php.ini, your web server config file, or you could be having performance problems due to incompatible plugins or themes making outdated DB calls.
My advice change one thing at a time and roll it back if you see no improvement.
UPDATE JAN 2010
I have developed an indepth performance tuning course, please check out performance.wpdude.com for details.
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