Here at MyNameIsAngie.com, I’ve ALWAYS offered a free video course teaching the basics of WordPress. The opt-in for it has ALWAYS been in the upper right sidebar and has always included basically what it does now. And, I’ve always had very minimal success with gaining subscribers. Go figure. I mean, who needs a free 8-video course to learn how to do what some pay a designer hundreds or even thousands to do for them? Anyway…

You should also know that I don’t get thousands of visitors a month. Mostly because I don’t usually DO the things for myself that I teach OTHER people to do which would drive traffic here! Not enough time in the day to teach, design, mother and wife (read: poor time management)! So when you see the opt-in numbers below, they might not look impressive to you. Look beyond the actual numbers, and simply compare the before and after opt-ins.

I installed PopUp Domination on May 19. In the 53 days PRIOR to installing it, I had 2 subscribers. In the 53 days since installing PopUp Domination, I’ve had 37 optins for my free video course. That’s an increase of 1,750%.

I don’t know what else to say. I changed the design of the site a few times, but the new design has actually worked against the other stats of the site (retention, pageviews, bounce, etc…). There is no other explanation except for the in-your-face popup opt-in! I have about a 5.67% opt-in rate right now, with very little effort to either drive traffic to my site or to get what traffic does come to opt-in. I can’t imagine how this little plugin would help turn my visitors into subscribers if I was actually TRYING. What would YOU do with a 1750% increase in subscribers this month?

Click here to purchase your copy of PopUp Domination.

And here is a quick video showing exactly how to use the Editorial Calendar directly from the EC plugin authors.

The WordPress Editorial Calendar Screen Cast from Zack Grossbart on Vimeo.

Screenshot of widget output on "Open Source" page under top level page "My Portfolio", running Twenty-Ten theme

The title of the widget is the top level page within the current section (but you can change that in the widget’s settings) . It will show all page siblings (except on the top level page), all parents and grandparents (and higher), the siblings of all parents and grandparents (up to top level page), and any immediate children of the current page. If you’re a programmer, you can also use it inside template files using a function.

If you’re just using WordPress for simple blogging, then you might not need this plugin. But, if you develop sites for clients who sometimes have complicated page structures or hundreds of pages with groups of pages, then this is definitely something you can use.

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Last year, I designed a site for a tutoring franchise in Canada. They wanted each of their franchises to have several pages dedicated to their location and for one of those pages to be that location’s blog…but to only display those three pages in the sidebar navigation when a visitor was look at that location. Makes sense. Someone looking at Location A doesn’t need to be distracted by all of the pages for Location B, right? So here’s how using the Simple Section Navigation looks on that site:

To install Simple Section Navigation on your site, navigate to the Plugins tab on your dashboard, click Add New, and search for “Simple Section Navigation.” Install it, then remember to activate it, too. Once you’ve done that, go to Appearance>Widgets, and you’ll see a new widget called “Simple Section Navigation.” Drag it over to the sidebar where you’d like it to display.

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There are a few settings you can play with once the widget is in place. For example, you can change the title of the widget. If you don’t, it will simple display the top level page’s name (for the Scholars example above, that would have “Our Centres.” You can choose how to sort the pages, to exclude particular pages from that section, whether to show the widget on the home page, whether to make the title of the widget a link to the top level page (in our example above, “Our Centres” could either be a link to the “Our Centres” page, or just be the text “Our Centres,” to show all the pages in a section, to show the widget even if there are no pages in that section to show, and to not show the navigation on pages that are excluded.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site. (sitemaps.org)

How to use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin:

• Once you have logged in to your WordPress website, scroll to the PLUGINS tab in your dashboard’s sidebar. Expand it and click ADD NEW.
• Search for “Google XML Sitemaps.” At the time I’m writing this post, it is the second plugin returned in that search. Click INSTALL NOW, and confirm YES, you do really want to install this plugin.
• After the installation process is complete, remember to click ACTIVATE, or your plugin will not be available for you to use…it will merely be installed on your site.
• Once you do that, scroll to the SETTINGS tab in your dashboard’s sidebar and expand it. You should see a new link for XML-SITEMAPS. Click it.
• You will see a notice at the very top of this settings page that tells you to build your sitemap for the first time. Click that link… and the magic will begin!

Once your sitemap is built, you will not need to make any other changes to the settings on this page. This plugin is fantastically configured straight out of the box! I know – it almost sounds too easy… but it’s true. So take four minutes and go install this plugin on your site right now.Then, if you have any questions, feel free to pop over to the forum and ask!

First, let’s install and activate the plugin. Then we will look at the basic instructions you’ll use to tell your widgets when to display.

Now, let’s learn how to create some snippets of code that will tell your newly installed Widget Logic what to do with your widgets.

is_home()

just the main blog page

!is_page(‘about’)

everywhere EXCEPT this specific WP ‘page’

is_category(array(5,9,10,11))

category page of one of the given category IDs

(hint – installing the plugin WP Show ID will be helpful for finding the category ID’s for this one)

is_single() && in_category(‘baked-goods’)

single post that’s in the category with this slug

current_user_can(‘level_10′)

displays widget only for administrators

strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'], “google.com”)!=false

widget to show when clicked through from a google search

is_category() && in_array($cat, get_term_children( 5, ‘category’))

category page that’s a descendent of category 5

global $post; return (in_array(77,get_post_ancestors($post)));

WP page that is a child of page 77

global $post; return (is_page(‘home’) || ($post->post_parent==”13″));

home page OR the page that’s a child of page 13

Have questions?

Join our forum and ask away!

Here’s a quick video showing how to use the All In One SEO Pack.

PS. If you haven’t yet signed up to receive my latest tips delivered to your inbox, you can do that here. I’ll even send you a free video course on how to build your website from scratch using WordPress!

Google Analytics lets you track all the things you’re curious to know about your site but didn’t even know you wanted to know! Are visitors to your site returning or new? How long do they stay? What page did they leave from? What city are they from? What did they click on once they were there? All that and SO much more.ff

I’m going to walk you through the three easy steps to creating a Google Analytics account and associating that account with your WordPress website.

1. Visit http://www.google.com/analytics/and register for an account. Follow the prompts after you’ve entered your email and password.

2. Install and activate the Google Analyticor plugin.

3. Navigate to Settings>Google Analytics, and authenticate your account (leave all settings just as they are with the obvious exception of “enabling” the plugin.

Pretty simple. If you’ve followed these simple steps, you should start seeing the statistics for your website in your Google Analytics account, and also on the dashboard of your website.

If you’re using WordPress (please, tell me you’re using WordPress already), the videos below will show you how to find, install and use a plugin called Organize Series. Keep your hard earned series from being relegated to page 28 of your site.

And yes, I know I could have made a series of these four videos…

INTRO TO ORGANIZING SERIES ON WORDPRESS

HOW TO ADD A SERIES

A POST IN A SERIES USING THE DEFAULT SETTINGS

HOW TO ADD A POST TO A SERIES

Undoubtedly, this video has been shared on Facebook and Twitter the same number of times. I’m not even an OSU fan, and when President Gordon Gee comes across with Brutus Buckeye, I almost shed a little tear.

So this post you’re reading right now…it could be about anything, right? It just happens to be about OSU because that’s what was hot in my neck of the woods this week. Whatever you write about, you obviously want your readers to share with other people, whether those people are at your site or not. Now visitors can simply click a Facebook LIKE button on your site and just as they LIKE a link or video on Facebook, they can LIKE your article. Once they LIKE it, a short line will appear on their Facebook wall that says, “Angie Meeker likes Adding a Facebook Like Button To Your WordPress Website,” except that it will have their name, and their article, obviously. Let’s get people showing their friends on Facebook how much their like your website.

Here’s how to install the NEW Facebook LIKE button on your WordPress site.

BTW – It didn’t show up in my feed because when I tested it earlier, and it DID show up, I hid it…so that it wouldn’t be there when I went to show you it magically appear for this video. Try it yourself and see it work!

With that said, here is how I do it here at My Name Is Angie. I use a plugin called Cute Profiles. The video below shows you how to install it and get networking.