Posts Tagged Quick Tips
Kirsty’s Affiliate Quick Tips – WordPress Plugin To Allow HTML in Category Descriptions
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on July 13, 2010
One of my readers brought this plugin to my attention recently (thanks Chris). Basically, there is a plugin that will override the function in WordPress that’ll strip out all but the most basic tags from your category descriptions. Allow HTML in Category Descriptions means you can add a nice content unit or similar and take advantage of and monetise any traffic your blog categories may be getting.
This Plugin Hasn’t Been Tested by Me!
Usually I’ll thoroughly test anything before I mention it on the blog, but I’m very short on time at the moment and it’ll likely take me several weeks to have a play with it. I think this plugin could be a juicy one so I didn’t want to make y’all wait to hear about it.
But I Think I Can Put It To Very Good Use If It Works Well…
As you all might know, I add descriptions to my WordPress categories to get a chance at some additional search terms. I also use the Thumbnails for Excerpts plugin to display nice product images at a category level so visitors hitting those pages have something to browse through.
It’s A Good Idea, But It Looks A Bit Pants!
You can see an example of this on my mens underwear site, here. It’s not the smoothest looking solution in the world, but as I was putting out so many posts at the individual product or collection level for this site I thought it’d be a shame not to take the time to write a few hundred words and jam them into the category descriptions to try and get some extra traffic in. This has been very successful on Blokes Undies and I now rank very well for most terms around my categories.
The only issue is that the categories have a relatively high bounce rate. Previously I’ve always just figured it’s worth having the traffic going to those sections till I work out a solution. If this plugin does what it says on the tin I think I might have found it! I think it will create a very nice, integrated looking blog structure that’s very efficient with no page going to waste for either SEO purposes or traffic channelling.
I’ll probably try it out in the next few weeks. I’ll let you guys take a look when I’m done (I should really tidy those category images as well – I’m sure we can have them looking better than that!).
If you try this plugin please let me know how you get on 
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Kirsty’s Affiliate Quick Tips – WordPress Plugin To Allow HTML in Category Descriptions
Affiliate Quick Tips – Recycle Old Blog Posts With Timestamp Plugin
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on June 1, 2010
Hey guys, I’ve been tinkering with the Scheduled Post Shift timestamp plugin for the last few weeks so thought’d I’d share it on here.
This plugin will take the timestamp of your oldest post and make it look like your latest post. I was a little concerned about this plugin (I was a little concerned Google might take umbrage at such tactics) so I tested it on two older sites of mine that have bags of content but have been sadly neglected for the past year or so.
Both sites had an upturn in traffic, one around 15% the other around 30%. I’ve been running the plugin on one of them for around 3 months and no signs of anything other than positive effects.
If any of you guys try it out do please let me know how you went with it as my two sites aren’t really enough of a sample to definitively say this plugin has a positive effect.
Happy blogging
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Affiliate Quick Tips – Recycle Old Blog Posts With Timestamp Plugin
Kirsty’s Affiliate Hangover Cure – Cleansing Lemon and Ginger Tea!!
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on May 11, 2010
In honour of the fact I know a number of UK affiliates will have been “networking to the max” at the Buy.at Speakeasy last night I have decided to help out all those poor delicate souls by publishing my very own cleansing hangover cure.
This should help rehydrate, calm those churny tummies, and make all the affiliates who have partied just a wee bit too hard at the free bar feel a little bit better again!
Kirsty’s Affiliate Hangover Remedy
Ingredients (based on using a 2 mug tea infuser):-
Half a Lemon
Half a Lime
1 – 2 tsp of freshly sliced ginger.
Boiling water.
Optional: 2 Hedex Extra to serve.
Instructions: -
- Chop lemon into 3 or 4 slices whilst attempting to stay upright. Wonder why the knife sounds so damned loud. Place lemon into teapot.
- Repeat with lime, and try to ignore the flashbacks from the evening before. Do so with only one eye open if it helps you aim the knife more effectively.
- Add your chopped ginger.
- Pour boiling water into the pot, leave to infuse for 5 minutes. Use the time to ponder if those last 5 rounds of Sambuccas really were the hilariously good idea they seemed.
- Serve in the drinking vessel of your choice.
- Repeat recipe until you feel human again.
My recommended method of intake is to have 2 mugs of this, let it rest in the tummy for 5 to 10 minutes, and then complete the hangover cure with a monster bacon sarnie with lashings of sauce. Allow bacon to do its stuff, before treating your poor punished body to some more cleansing tea for dessert.
This recipe will also work if you use a mug to infuse your ingredients and can also be used in non affiliate hangover situations. These include, colds, flu, tummy upsets, and when you’re just feeling golly gosh darned sluggish and under the weather. A great detox that’ll leave you feeling lovely inside and out 
Now don’t say I never try to do anything to enhance your health and wellbeing. This blog is also about the affiliate mind and soul don’t you know. Well, either that or I’m burning time instead of working again. You decide!!
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Kirsty’s Affiliate Hangover Cure – Cleansing Lemon and Ginger Tea!!
Affiliate Quick Tips – Stopping Wordpress Removing Line Breaks
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on April 7, 2010
“Arrggh!!! F***ing Wordpress!!! Why won’t it just leave my damned formatting be????”
Sound familiar? Then you may be suffering from a well known affiliate affliction known as “Wordpress Formatting Rage”. Commonly experienced right after you’ve spent an age carefully positioning text or images to create a landing page that is the very epitome of perfection – right up until you hit the save button. At this point Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor code cleanup thingamyjig springs into action like a lithe gazelle and proclaims “Oh ho!! Look at all those line breaks. We don’t want those cluttering up the place do we?”
The result is often less than pleasing and results in a frustrating few minutes spent laboriously re-entering those line breaks (It just must have been a mistake after all. What system would be silly enough to remove them?). This then brings us back to the first line of the post with a few extra profanities added to reflect the increase in general frustration levels.
Fortunately There is a Fix
Tiny MCE Advanced (download & more info here)
Simply install this wonderous little plugin, and select the “Stop removing my damned well line breaks” option which is located in the big red box on the plugin admin page.
You can then enjoy the bliss that is being able to add line breaks wherever you please as well as having access to some other cool additions such as emoticons, search and replace functionality whilst editing, support for tables, and heaps more.
“Ahhhh…. that’s better!!”
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Affiliate Quick Tips – Stopping Wordpress Removing Line Breaks
Affiliate Quick Tips – Google Ad Planner For Niche & Competitor Research
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on March 16, 2010
Google Adplanner has been around for a little while now, but I don’t see it widely spoken about in forums as a niche research tool so I thought it was worth flagging here as a Quick Tip.
If you’re researching a new niche this interesting tool can tell you how much traffic a top ranked site is getting as well as key visitor demographics, other sites visited, and keyword data. Definately handy if you are interested in ascertaining just how much traffic volume there might be around your chosen niche area and perhaps also a way to ascertain potential earning power if you use it in combination with network EPC data. Great to have a wee nosey at how your competitors are doing too
As for how accurate the data is? This blog post by Kevin Hague, who co-owns Petplanet.co.uk and Greenfingers.com gives insight into how he rates it in comparison to the Hitwise data and his thoughts on its accuracy levels (quite good to be succinct!).
Check out the Google Ad Planner here and do post back comments re: what you think of it. Interested to hear other people’s experiences and how the data can be used by affiliates!
This post is from: Kirsty’s Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Affiliate Quick Tips – Google Ad Planner For Niche & Competitor Research
Stopping Wordpress Using Category Descriptions As Link Titles – Affiliate Quick Tips
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on November 11, 2009
A while back I shared how I’d discovered you could create descriptions for categories, thereby giving those often useful resources a chance at ranking.
Having FINALLY gotten around to getting some content created for the categories on the website I intend to use this handy dandy little tip on, I was moderately horrified to discover that Wordpress will use these descriptions as link titles (well my theme does anyway). That sort of volume of text showing up when someone hovers over one of your links is very unappealing as is the thought of how Google may react to 3,000+ words of text on every page of the site that isn’t always visible and is the same on each page!
So, if you decide to create nice unique content on your category page and don’t want mahoosive chunks of text flying all over your site, here’s how to fix it!
Just A Simple Edit…
One file controls all this hoo ha, and you’ll find it in: WP-Includes > category-template.php
Simply open this file and do a search for the following text snippet: ‘use_desc_for_title’ => 1
Change the 1 to a 0 thusly: ‘use_desc_for_title’ => 0
Save your changes.
And the pesky link titles should be gone!
That’s A Fascinating Looking File…
And I’m pretty sure it’ll do lots of cool things which I will investigate and report back upon in due course. However, I might just leave it alone for now as I can do without accidently turning my site upside down, inside out, and back to front without knowing how or why I’ve blinking well done it in the run up to Christmas!!
Oh, and do take a back up of that little file before you change it, just in case you have an accident. I’m way too good at editing the original file and accidently deleting a single (but crucial) character somewhere along the way whereupon our neighbours hear something close to the following: -
“Arrghhh, ohhhh, Noooooo!!!! F**K!!”
Then the line my long suffering and lovely husband is all too familiar with;
“Duncan! This f**king Wordpress has f**cking well stuffed up the site again. Get it Fixed!!”
“What were you doing right before this happened, my love?” He will say, mild mannered as always.
“Oooh… Arrghhhh, I dunno! Fix the chuffing thing, quick!”
*Ahem* so yeah, I hope you guys find this tip useful! Particularly the bit about backing up your files first. You don’t all have Duncan sitting in your office to swear at and make it all nice and functional for you again should you make a small error
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Stopping Wordpress Using Category Descriptions As Link Titles – Affiliate Quick Tips
Adding Unique Descriptions to Wordpress Categories – Affiliate Quick Tips
Posted by Kirsty McCubbin in Affiliate Marketing on August 26, 2009
Greetings copy and paste fans! Here’s something I am messing around with this week – I want to see if I can get my categories to rank on one of my blogs. The reason I’m trying to do this is that I’ve realised they have created a good shopping resource, gathering together hard to find products which I am reviewing and categorising as part of the broader content strategy on the site.
I have already found the categories ranking in a few different places without any input from me so I figure what the hell. I won’t lose anything and I’ll only learn something! With that in mind, i’ve decided to create some unique text in each one describing the type of products within them.
To Do This is A Simple Cut and Paste Job
1. Go to “Categories” which you will find located under “Posts”.
2. Add in your desired description in the appropriate box. Basic HTML markup will work, so you can make your text look all nice
3. Locate the file controlling your categories – most likely archive.php
4. Pop this code in wherever you want your description to turn up: -
<?php $description=category_description(); echo $description; ?>
And You’re Done!
I’ve popped mine in after the post and gone through the category page titles using my SEO plugin and given them a quick optimise as well. I think I’m going to try to make the description a nice robost 250 to 300 words. I’ll be interested to see if I get any additional traffic from this. I’ve already fiddled around and created thumbnails of each post image contained within the category so in theory it should be an attractive page for users.
As always, I’ll let y’all know how I get on!
This post is from: Kirsty's Affiliate Marketing Guide - Affiliate Stuff UK
Adding Unique Descriptions to Wordpress Categories – Affiliate Quick Tips