Hello Happy Site Owners! It’s April Fools, but you won’t find any tricks here, just the best tips from around the web. And this week I’ve got a shout out for all you podcasters about the very best support person on the planet, more super plugins from Yoast, WordPress leaking your username, info on the recent HootSuite attack, tips on how your readers buy, finding your ideal client, a super post on creating blog post images, setting and achieving your business goals, what I’m reading to help me do better on G+, and a new feature that was just rolled out. So let’s dive in. Listen to the podcast.
Featured
Google April Fools’ Pranks 2013: YouTube Closing, Google Nose, Gmail Blue & More!
It’s April Fool’s Day! So, be looking for pranks all over the Internet. Here’s a post with the best pranks from Google, including the one that probably got the most attention, which was an announcement of YouTube Closing. My favorite was Google Nose, which would send smells through your phone.
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Bluebrry Podcast Support
I want to give a huge thank you and shout out to Michael Dell for all of his help in getting one of my client’s podcasts all squared away. Michael works for Bluebrry and I bet all of you podcasters listening know about that plugin. Mike is the 100% BEST support person I’ve dealt with in a long time. I was already happy with this plugin, but that just sold me for life!
And, if you want to hear more from Mike, check out his show Podcast Help Desk. He’s in the process of revamping his site, so keep checking back for updates.
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11 Brilliant Podcasts To Help You Improve Your WordPress Blog Significantly
Thank you to the uber helpful +Ileane Smith for mentioning BlogAid Tips Tuesday in her list of WordPress podcasts!
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World Backup Day
Yesterday was World Backup Day. That’s for your site, your computer, and every device you have too. Keep in mind that hack attacks are on the rise and a backup is your only real security blanket these days. Y’all know I use and recommend BackupBuddy for my site. And I use Carbonite for my computers. That also backs up the backup of the devices I hook to my computers for syncing, like my iPad and iPhone. Everybody’s always looking for good backup solutions, so feel free to share yours in the comments. But be careful. If it looks like spam, I will delete it.
WordPress Tips
WordPress 3.9 Beta 3 is out
This may be the last one before the full release. I’m going to give it a few days before making a video on what’s coming. They made over 200 changes since Beta 2, so I want to ensure those bugs are worked out first. I expect the full release to be in the next couple of weeks, or at least before the month is out.
Plugin Tips
Top 25+ Best WordPress Plugins by Yoast
Y’all know how much I love the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. Did you know he’s got over 25 other free plugins. Thanks to the nice folks over at Softstribe for this full list of them.
Security Tips
Why Showing The WordPress Username Is Not A Security Risk
Is this BS or what? Maybe I’m just old school. But if my online banking system said, “We’re going to make public half of your login, and if you want to actually secure it, you need to rely on a 3rd party apps” I’d be crying foul!
I’m not a fan of WordPress leaking the Username part of the login. I am a fan of 2 step authentication, but do not want to rely on a plugin for it.
This has been an issue since Day 1 of WordPress development. Total waste of time to make your username cryptic. There is a crazy simple string to input after the domain name to find the username of the author archive page. (And no, I’m not going to tell you what that script is.)
One of the best things you can do is have the link to your author archives point to something like your About page or such. Very easy to do in Genesis. You’ll need to check with your theme designer to see how to do it with your theme if you don’t use Genesis. There are also htaccess rewrite tricks and plugins. But, that just removes this super easy way to find it, there are plenty of others.
Is this really the best way we can come up with to handle this? Read the post on WPTavern and decide for yourself.
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HootSuite Responding to DoS Attack, User Data Secure
The CEO of HootSuite, Ryan Holmes, responded to users on March 20 about the DoS attack the service suffered. Now this is a little different than a DDoS attack, which is a Distributed Denial of Service with many computers attacking from many IPs. A DoS is usually coming from one source.
And that’s the scariest part of this whole thing. One source shut down HootSuite.
You can read more about in my post from yesterday One Hacker Disables HootSuite in DoS Attack
I give blurbs to what all the different attack types are in that post, but for more, you’ll want to read the next one too.
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Understanding Denial of Service and Brute Force Attacks – WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin
This is a bit of a long read, but I know a lot of you are interested in what exactly is a DDoS and then a Brute Force attack. They are different animals with different purposes. And Tony Perez at Sucuri details them here for you.
The only thing I disagree with him about is why folks do this. He doesn’t mention how much money is involved except for a passing reference to attack-for-hire firms. And yes, they really do exist. They are as real as slander rating firms that post bogus low ratings and attack SEO on the competition of the company that hired them.
Content Marketing Tips
It’s not about how you sell. It’s about how I buy
In the last couple of Tips Tuesdays I’ve shared tips for turning your About page into a sales funnel. Well, this post from David Meerman Scott on Web Ink Now helps you expand that idea to your whole site and the way you do business. In it he relates the story of how he chose a moving company. Well worth the read.
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How to Find Your Ideal Client on Social Media
Finding your ideal client. Social media plays a huge role in content marketing. And social media plays a huge role in getting that content in front of your target audience.
+Denise Wakeman has put together an uber helpful post, packed with resources to help you use social media to find your ideal client. This is a most definite must read.
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How To Create a Blog Post Image That Gets Noticed And Drives Traffic
Two of my fave folks +Ana Hoffman and +Darren DeMatas have teamed up to bring you a power packed post on creating images that get noticed and drives traffic to your site. It’s way more than the typical how to post and gives you lots of points, with delicious screenshots, to consider. Well worth having a look.
SEO Tips
The CMO’s Guide to the 2014 Social Landscape
Social media is not just for relationship marketing. It’s good for SEO too. Now, we all have time limits and need to be choosey about ROI. This excellent post on Digital Information World has a nice infographic about each of the top eight platforms based on four criteria, including:
SEO
Brand Awareness
Customer Communication
And Traffic Generation
The background color of each section tells you how well each platform is doing for that criteria.
I want to thank +Denise Wakeman for bringing this post to my attention.
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The Best Add-on For Google Docs & Sheets
If you use Chrome you’re going to want to know about this post on the Labnol blog. The Google store has about 50 things you can add. The reason I’m telling you about it in the SEO section is because of the last one listed, which is Analytics Canvas. It helps import your Google Analytics reports into Google spreadsheets for further analysis.
Business Tips
Anybody Got Time for Goals?
That’s an interesting question that intuitive business coach mentor, +Donna L Ward asks in a recent post.
It’s chock full of tips about your habits, and making time to work on your business rather than in your business. And I think these tips will benefit most folks. But at BlogAid, I’ve found that being in reactionary mode more often is the key to success. Sort of a Johnny on the spot thing with the right info and solutions for whatever pops up.
I do have goals for the business. And there will be seasonal slow times when I can do more of that. I just can’t do it every day or every week.
So, jump on over to Donna’s post and what’s working, or not, for you. I’m betting she has a tip to improve your system. Or, to help you come up with a system if you don’t have one.
G+ Tips
This weekend I went through the excellent first book in +Stephan Hovnanian’s Google Plus Pro Tips series, which was about posting on G+.
Besides the posting tips, there was one little section in there that completely changed the way I use G+ and will most definitely affect the blog posts I write for BlogAid and what I post on G+. The whole book is like that. Totally full of golden nuggets.
Now I’m on his second book, which is managing Your Google+ Circles.
And I’m still on the first step, which is cleaning up the Circles I already have. Looking at all of those profiles and what folks are posting has given me a whole new perspective on what and how I should post too, and how I don’t want to use G+ as well. I ended up un-circling several folks. I think somewhere along the line they decided to use their personal profile for general life posts and perhaps they have a biz page now for their expertise. So, I would like to invite you to have a look at your feed on G+ and see if what you post, and the frequency, is something that would attract readers to Circle you or not.
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G+ Rolls Out Profile Views
Yesterday afternoon G+ was totally abuzz with a new little feature that was rolled out. Besides showing your Circle Count, G+ now displays how many times your profile has been viewed. There are LOTS of opinions flying about what this is and why Google decided to include it. They also took away +1s for Pages. Nobody knows why they did that either.
Here are a few posts from some of my fave folks.
Google Plus Adds View Count to Profiles and Pages by +Mike Alton
Google+ Profile Analytics? by +Stephan Hovnanian
NEW: Google+ Displaying Total Profile Views by +Mark Traphagen
Total content viewer numbers added to Google+ profiles & pages by +Ana Hoffman with tips for how to turn it off.
Wrap Up
That’s a wrap for this week’s Tips Tuesday podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review for it on iTunes or Stitcher. That is so helpful to support BlogAid and get the word out about this super resource. Be sure to visit BlogAid.net for tips, tutorials and resources to make your site better. And I’ll see you online.
You're reading Tips Tuesday – Podcast Help, Yoast Plugins, Hack Attacks, originally posted on BlogAid - WordPress for Non-Geeks and copyrighted by MaAnna Stephenson.
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