Blogger vs WordPress Blog

2015 ElegantThemes WordPress themes

October 30th, 2015 By:Benjamin Ehinger

As 2015 comes to a close, it's a great time to look at some of the best themes offered by ElegantThemes this year. Which ones were the most popular and which ones should I consider using for my blog? Being one of the most successful theme houses in the WordPress universe, this 8 year old business has 87 themes available to its 250,000 customers.

Along with offering some of the best graphics, clean code and responsive designs, the pricing is very reasonable for everything they have to offer. For under $80, you can have year-long access to their 87 themes and 5 amazing plugins as well. Here is a look at the best themes for 2015 from ElegantThemes on WordPress.

Explorable

The Explorable theme is perfect for the traveler. Pin your posts to locations to show the places you are writing about or where you were when you wrote the post. If you are a travel blogger, this is a great way to show where you've been and the journey you are on. This is the perfect theme for travelers, travel guides and business directories. It's responsive and offers features like user star ratings and a background design of a world map.

Fusion

Check out the Fushion theme if you are in the tech world. Startups and design firms will also find this one appealing as well. It combines a professional design with an attractive and fun, attention-grabbing look. The responsive design is a great choice for these types of industries and you'll love the style it offers.

Foxy

Foxy is another popular ElegantThemes choice for WordPress, especially among the e-commerce sites. The theme design is perfect for selling your product online. You'll love how functional and structured it is while offering a modern design.

Divi

Probably the most popular theme for ElegantThemes in WordPress is Divi. It's a flexible theme that offers a Divi Builder for creating visually stimulating websites easily. You can modify how the website looks without messing with any code. They have 18 pre-made layouts in the theme and you can create your website layout with the Divi builder. Enjoy the convenience of high security through Sucuri and multiple modules to guide you in building your website.

Vertex

If you want to display your portfolio especially for the professional photographer, Vertex is the way to go. The theme is designed to display a catalog of products in a visual environment. Enjoy scrolling features and a home page with plenty of room for an impressive photo in the background.

In addition, check out TheStyle for entertainment or political blogs, Nexus for a magazine theme, Gleam for a whimsical appearance that dazzles audiences and Origin for the blogger with tons of images to share in a beautiful display.

Finding the right theme for your WordPress website isn't easy. These are easily the most popular theme choices for WordPress users that want to go with the obvious theme house choice, ElegantThemes.

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Source: Which WordPress Theme from ElegantThemes are the Best for 2015?

Hot Off the Press What Inspires Us to Blog?

Mike Dang

Oct 28, 2015 @ 4:00 pm

Community, General, Writing

blogging, Busy Mockingbird, Community, Developing Dad, Problems With Infinity, table twenty eight, writing

Previous Post Join Automattic's Worldwide WP 5k 2015

Please do not use these comments for asking questions, support, or bug reporting. Use the forums or support contact form for that.

Please read our comment guidelines before posting.

Source: What Inspires Us to Blog?

In this photograph taken on October 26, 2015, Afghan householders stand on the roof of a house Faizabad in Badakhshan Province after a powerful earthquake hit the Central Asian nation. PHOTO: AFP

If you knew the world would soon end,

And we both would perish,

When this moment is spent,

This jiffy would die and with it,

Our spirits would burn and fly!

Would you care, my love, to dance with me,

When we have time to dance,

To the end of the sky?

Let's dance, my love,

Before dreams are lost,

And longing is rusted,

In our hearts and eyes,

For the dead dance not,

Nor ashes cry!

Before the lights are out,

And the doors are closed,

Wild hearts are muted,

No more they pine and sigh.

Here! Before the world ends,

Dance with me, my love!

Dance to the end of the sky!

Or would you not clasp your hands,

In mine, nor hold my arms?

Or look into my eyes?

And suppose you don't…

The world would end!

Our bodies desecrated,

This moment would fly!

Let me see what you see,

And feel what you feel,

Let me put my arms around your form,

Hold you close and feel once warm,

Before our bodies turn cold…

And you bid me goodbye.

Dance with me, my love,

One last dance!

To the end of the sky.

on Twitter, become a fan on Facebook

Muhammad Shafiq Haider

The writer is a sustainable development practitioner with expertise in governance, policymaking and implementation. He holds an M.Phil in Public Policy with a specialization in Political Economy. He blogs at shafiqhaidervirk.wordpress.com and tweets as @SHVirk.

The views expressed by the writer and the reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of The Express Tribune.

Source: Dance with me, my love!

Anybody who has ran or developed a WordPress-powered site, be it a humble blog or something more complex, knows that it's pretty easy to make undesirable changes. This can be either content-related or a change to the WordPress theme or plugin you're running. While backing up is crucial, a primitive backup doesn't always let you roll back to the exact point where everything was fine.

Enter VersionPress, a Prague-based startup that offers version control for WordPress. The company essentially wants to create an 'undo button' for changes you make to a WordPress site, with software built on top of Git, the popular open source version control system. To help further develop its offering, VersionPress has picked up $400,000 backing from Prague's Credo Ventures.

"WordPress is a great publishing platform but has certain drawbacks that affect almost any website powered by it," VersionPress founder Borek Bernard tells TechCrunch. "One example is that if something breaks a site, be it a failed update or a human mistake, there is no easy way back. It's like if MS Office had all the rich functionality but no undo button. It's hard to imagine but WordPress is like that today, which we aim to fix."

Calling itself 'WordPress meets Git', VersionPress, which is currently running a paid-for Early Access Program, aims to offer full version control for the popular blogging/CMS platform. Unlike incremental backups, no matter how often you run them, proper versioning means you can revert changes at any time.

"The nice thing about VersionPress is that we do not have a single feature in mind; instead, we focus on the core problem which is versioning," adds Bernard ."You can find it everywhere today, from Wikipedia to Google Docs to virtually every software project in the world, and it revolutionized many of the areas it touched. VersionPress is the first tool to bring it properly to the world of WordPress, including files and the database (the latter being historically the biggest challenge)."

More "technically exciting", he says, is that VersionPress isn't re-inventing the versioning wheel but instead relies on Git, "a world-class system" used by some of the biggest software projects in the world, citing the Linux kernel, Twitter, and Facebook as examples.

This means that VersionPress integrates with advanced workflows for teamwork, staging — that is testing site changes before they go live — and many other available tools built to run on Git.

Source: VersionPress Picks Up Backing From Credo Ventures For 'WordPress Meets Git' Solution

Creating and managing websites is very simple and easy nowadays, with many online services that let you create websites quickly.

WordPress is the world's most popular content management system to create websites and blogs, if you want a simple blog you can start a free blog at WordPress.com, using one of these top WordPress tutorials to help you along the way. But if you are a power user and want more control over your blog then you will need to set up a self-hosted WordPress blog via WordPress.org.

With a self-hosted WordPress site you will have full control but you will have to be more careful as well, because security is a big issue.

So many websites get hacked every day. What if your websites is targeted and hacked by someone what if the bad guy delete all the files and data from your server? What will you do? Alternatively, sometimes you, or your clients, will accidentally delete the wrong file or make a change that breaks something. Or the entire server may crash.

Unfortunately, lose all your essential information (articles, images, files etc) and your website is gone forever.

Back up for free

Thankfully, WordPress has many powerful, free and premium plugins that help you to easily back up and restore your entire websites in case of any problem.

In this article I'm going to list some of the most popular and free WordPress backup plugins. You can choose any plugin that suites you needs. All these plugins have been updated recently and are Compatible up to WordPress 4.2+

01. UpdraftPlus Backup and Restoration

UpdraftPlus is one of the most popular free WordPress backup plugins, with more than 500,000+ active installs with 1600+ five star ratings. UpdraftPlus is Compatible up to WordPress 4.3.1 (Current version od WordPrss as of October 2015). UpdraftPlus requires WordPress 3.2 or higher.

UpdraftPlus is the highest-ranking backup plugin on wordpress.org (it ranks in the top 40 out of over 30,000 WordPress plugins for quality on rankwp.com).

UpdraftPlus is the highest-ranking backup plugin on wordpress.org

With this plugin you can backup and restore your WordPress blog. You can backup your blog automatically on a repeating schedule and restore both file and database backups quickly.

You can back up WordPress blogs to UpdraftPlus Vault, Amazon S3 (or compatible), Dropbox, Rackspace Cloud Files, Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, DreamHost DreamObjects, FTP, OpenStack (Swift) and email.

With updraftPlus premium and paid add ons you can do much more. If you have a large website it can be split into multiple archives.

02. BackWPup Free

With 400,000+ active installs, BackWPup is the second most popular free plugin for WordPress back ups. This plugin requires PHP 5.2.7 required, WordPress 3.4 or higher version and compatible up to WordPress 4.3.1. To use BackWPup Free with full functionality, PHP 5.3.3 with MySqli, FTP,gz, bz2, ZipArchive and curl is needed.

The free version of BackWPUp lets you schedule complete automatic backups of your WordPress installation and you can choose which content will be stored to your desired service. The BackWPup Pro version offers more support.

Schedule complete automatic backups with BackWPup Free

With BackWPup, you can back up your database and export WordPress XML. Another good feature of this free WordPress backup plugin is you can check, repair and optimize your WordPress database easily.

You can create backups in zip, tar, tar.gz, tar.bz2 format (needs gz, bz2, ZipArchive) and store your backups to directory, FTP server, Dropbox, S3 services, Microsoft Azure and more.

03. Duplicator

Duplicator is most popular WordPress plugin to duplicate, clone, backup, move and transfer an entire website from one location to another.

Duplicator has 500,000+ Active Installs and current version 0.5.32 requires WordPress 3.9 or higher. Duplicator is compatible up to WordPress 4.3.1.

Duplicator plugin requires above average technical knowledge

The Duplicator plugin serves as a simple backup utility. It supports both serialized and base64 serialized string replacement. If you need to move or backup your site, this free WordPress backup plugin can help simplify the process.

However, be warned. Duplicator does require above average technical knowledge. If you are new to WordPress or have a limited technical background, you should not attempt to use this plugin.

04. WP Clone by WP Academy

WP Clone by WP Academy is another popular free WordPress back up plugin, with 200,000+ Active Installs. Current version 2.1.8 requires WordPress 3.0 or higher and compatible up to 4.2.5.

WP Clone lets you move or copy any WordPress website to another web server or to another domain name. You can also move to/from local server and yes, you can also backup your sites.

WP Clone does not require FTP access to either the source or destination site

If you are a plugin or theme developer or develop websites for clients then this plugin can help you to easily move your websites from local to live web server.

WP Clone does not require FTP access to either the source or destination site – just install a new WordPress on the destination site, upload and activate WP Clone, and follow the prompts. This plugin just back up and restore user content and database, which reduces upload time and improves security of your site.

05. BackUpWordPress

BackUpWordPress is another one of the most popular WordPress backup plugins around. It requires WordPress 3.9 or higher and compatible up to WordPress 4.2.5. BackUpWordPress has 200,000+ active Installs and 600+ 5 star ratings.

BackUpWordPress plugin requires PHP version 5.3.2 or later. It can back up your entire WordPress website including your database and all your files on a schedule. This plugin will work on shared host because it does need too much memory.

BackUpWordPress plugin doesn't require too much memory

BackUpWordPress plugin will work on both Linux and Windows Server and uses zip and mysqldump for faster backups if they are available. You have the option to receive back up files via email and exclude files and folders from your backups.

Translations for Spanish, German, Chinese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Lithuanian, Italian, Czech, Dutch, French and Basque are also available.

06. WordPress Backup to Dropbox

DropBox is a popular online storage service, and offers free online storage. With the WordPress Backup to Dropbox plugin, you can very easily back up your WordPress website to Dropbox.

With more than 100,000+ active installs, this is most popular WordPress to Dropbox backup plugin. This plugin was last updated in October 2015.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox Version 4.3 requires PHP 5.2.16 or higher with cURL support and WordPress 3.0 or higher. This free plugin is compatible up to WordPress version 4.3.1

You can set where you want your backup stored within Dropbox

This free plugin allows you to back up your WordPress websites on a regular basis very easily. You can choose day, time and how often you wish your back up to be performed.

You can set where you want your backup stored within Dropbox and on your server as well as choose what files or directories, if any, you wish to exclude from the backup.

Final words

There are many other free and premium WordPress back up plugins available, but in this article I have listed only free, most popular and recently updated plugins. Which plugin or service do you use to back up WordPress? Do you prefer free plugins or use paid services?

Words: Tahir Taous

Tahir Taous is frontend developer and blogger. Currently he is working on JustLearnWP.com an upcoming Wordpress beginner to advance training site. Download his free eBook Ultimate Cheat sheet to start a blog that matters

Like this? Read these...

Source: Top 6 free WordPress backup plugins

Hot Off the Press Join Automattic's Worldwide WP 5k 2015

Mo Jangda

Oct 23, 2015 @ 4:00 pm

Community, Events

fitness, running, wwwp5k

Previous Post Five Ways to Boost your Site with Social Media

Please do not use these comments for asking questions, support, or bug reporting. Use the forums or support contact form for that.

Please read our comment guidelines before posting.

Source: Join Automattic's Worldwide WP 5k 2015

Misconfigured and unpatched WordPress sites are causing a rash of problems both to themselves and the wider internet. In fact, this ever-present internet security threat has flared up again over the last week because of several new issues.

The most pressing problem involves a recent brute force amplification attack on WordPress-based website via the XML-RPC API. Researchers at Sucuri discovered a way to carry out the attacks against WordPress' built-in XML-RPC feature.

More details of a proof of concept demo of the flaw can be found here.

The vulnerability allows an attacker to bypass web server rate limits. The practical upshot is instead of limiting websites to one query with a one password at a time, the flaw means a hacker can now send one query with 500 passwords via XML-RPC API.

XML-RPC is a protocol for securely exchanging data across the internet. The technology supports the ability for an application to execute multiple commands within one HTTP request.

Attacks are happening against WordPress sites, so the bug is far from merely theoretical. El Reg has seen evidence that the XML-RPC vulnerability is being actively abused by hackers for all manner of malfeasance, from brute forcing passwords to attempting to take sites down.

Regular sites are getting affected by attack traffic even though the main brunt of the attack is being thrown against sites using the popular CMS platforms.

Separately, WordPress users need to make sure their Akismet anti-spam plugin is up to date following the discovery of an unrelated security bug. The vulnerability might potentially be exploited through cross-site scripting attacks.

Lastly, security researchers at Swiss firm High-Tech Bridge have identified a critical vulnerability in WordPress's Gwolle Guestbook plugin, which has over 10,000 active installations. The vulnerability, a PHP File inclusion, could result in an attacker controlling a filename or reading and writing files, as well as created the potential for hackers to push arbitrary code onto target systems.

WordPress has a bad name when it comes to security but vulnerabilities are normally patched quickly.

Sponsored: Analyzing the economic value of IBM FlashSystem

Source: WordPress blogger patch foot-drag nag: You're tempting hackers

The gatekeepers are gone.

Just a couple decades ago, if you wanted to get your message to a massive audience, you had to work your way up a very hard, long ladder.

And every step on that ladder had a media gatekeeper who could stop your progress.

Publishers said "no" to book ideas and magazine articles. Station managers said "no" to TV and radio shows. Producers said "no" to a movie distribution deal. On and on it went.

There were very few media distribution channels and they were well guarded.

Not today.

Right now, there's no one to stop you from creating great content and distributing it to millions of people.

There's no to stop you from creating great content and distributing it to millions of people.

It can be a TV show, a movie, a magazine, a radio show, a newscast or a book. Through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, iTunes, Amazon, iBooks, Periscope, Wordpress, Blogger and so many other venues, you can produce any content you want without asking for anyone's approval.

You can record a radio show and podcast it today. You can shoot a movie or start a series of short films and put them on the internet in less than an hour. You can write your thoughts and ideas and send them out through a blog within minutes. All at no or minimal cost.

You don't even need a cameraman. Just a smart phone and a selfie stick.

The only person who can stop you is you.

New Ways to Proclaim Eternal Truths

You are reading this blog post on the most powerful information-sharing device ever created. And it gets more powerful every day.

The average smart phone, tablet or laptop has a higher definition camera than George Lucas had when he filmed Star Wars. It has access to a better editing suite than he had, too.

The device you are holding has wider worldwide distribution capabilities than any TV network had on 9/11.

The era of needing approval from anyone but God and ourselves to produce and distribute the eternal truths of the Gospel in fresh, new ways to millions of people is long gone.

You don't need a stadium to do it. Or a church building. Or denominational support.

You don't need a record contract, a movie offer, a TV network or a radio station.

All the technology you need to reach millions of people is literally at the tips of your fingers right now.

All on virtually no budget.

The Next Generation of Ministry Innovation

The world is changing at a mind-numbing pace.

We need to change too. Not our theology, but our methods.

We need to be innovators. Creators. Producers and distributors of life-changing content.

There's never been a better, easier, more cost-effective time to do that than right now.

What's holding you back?

Copyright © 2015 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal.Click here to contact me concerning reprint permissions.

Source: The Gatekeepers are Gone: What's Holding Your Ministry Back?

In this article, we'll go over the 5 best WordPress audience plugins that will help you better understand your website users, get information from them, and keep your website more secure.

Most website owners probably already use Google Analytics (GA). It is the leader in free website analytics and tells you a lot about your users, what they do on your website, and how you can get them to convert easier and more often.

The Google Analytics plugin by Yoast doesn't just track pageviews like most other GA plugins. It will also track outbound links and file downloads as well.

In addition, you can also view helpful metrics on your WordPress dashboards so that you do not have to login to GA every time.

If you promote affiliate products on your website, this plugin will also help you keep track of those links better.

GetSiteControl is a fairly new service that allows you to easily create surveys, contact forms, promo boxes, subscription forms, social media follow buttons, share buttons and chat functionality.

The basic service is free but they also offer premium version which adds some additional features. The best part about it is that it actually makes your website look good and modern.

Implementation on your website is very easy. All the setup is done on their website in a user-friendly interface, and then when you're done, you will just need to add a small JavaScript code to your website. That's all there is to it.

That one JavaScript code will need to be implemented only once, no matter how many changes you make or widgets you add to your website.

One awesome feature of GetSiteControl is the ability to select when and how often the popup will trigger. This ensures that the popup doesn't annoy your audience and if they decline to take action, they can simply be left alone.

Asking your users to subscribe to your newsletter has never looked better!

If you're a big marketer and analytics person, you will understand and appreciate the ability to track each and every phone call you receive from your website.

That's what CallRail enables you to do. In a nut shell, it assigns a unique phone number to each of your visitors which keeps track of visitor source, keyword, campaign, and so on. That way when the user calls the unique phone number they were assigned, you know everything about how they discovered your website and where they came from.

It features some of the most advanced call features such as call recording, dynamic number swapping, and whispered messages.

Unfortunately, the service is not free as it starts at around $30 per month. However you do have a couple of weeks to try it out before you commit to it fully, so I highly recommend giving it a shot to see if it can help your business.

One major issue I've seen over the years is websites utilizing WordPress Contact form plugins such as Contact Form 7. There is nothing wrong with Contact Form 7 except the fact that if you do not receive the form submissions to your email, they are basically lost forever.

That's where Contact Form DB comes in handy. Not only does it track Contact Form 7 submissions, but it also supports 8 other contact form plugins.

The way it works is very simple and does not require any user configuration. It will simply record every form submission into the database and allow you to view it anytime you want. No more lost form submissions due to misconfigured email services and spam filters.

If you've used contact forms on your website before, you probably know that email delivery can be very unreliable and it highly varies from one web host to another. Don't put your business' success in the hands of your web host. There is absolutely no reason why you should lose valuable form submissions due to the fault of others.

And finally we have the Login LockDown. This is not something you want to have, it's something you NEED to have.

Login LockDown tracks IP addresses and timestamps of every failed login attempt to your website. That means you can see if and when someone is trying to break in.

This plugin will also disable login functionality for all offending IP ranges if they fail the login attempt specific number of times. You can change this number to whatever will work best for your website.

Source: 5 Best WordPress Audience Understanding Plugins

Chef, cookbook author, newspaper columnist... there are some really high-profile "foodie" jobs out there that look fun and exciting. But how about the rest of us regular folk who want to work in a food-related field? Are there opportunities? The good news? Yes, and in many of them, you can transition gradually and make money while you do so. Here are 12 cool foodie jobs that "regular people" can do.

1. Cake Decorator

The best special-occasion cake that I ever purchased was for my daughter's 18th birthday. Her high school art teacher made it. Not only were the cake and frosting delicious (and you know this can be a tricky point), but the decorating was stunning. Due to her art background and love of baking, her teacher was able to successfully move into a new career.

Another example. When my daughter was four, I ordered one of those cakes with the Barbie doll in the middle. I had to order it six months in advance because they were so popular. A local stay-at-home mom had made a niche business of doing nothing but kids' birthday cakes and they were in huge demand. She could barely keep up with the orders.

Looking for a side job that can move into a full-time gig? If you have artistic ability, and love to bake, this might be for you. No formal degree is required, but you might want to take classes at a culinary school. Growth is predicted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to be better than average, and specialty cake decorators make between $21,000 and $42,000 per year. My job search revealed that those employed in supermarkets can obtain "...Competitive pay plus benefit packages of health, dental, vision, and 401K." Smaller bakeries did not tend to offer benefits and pay was based on experience.

2. Niche Farmer

Do you have a green thumb, or are you really good with livestock? Niche farming may be just the ticket for this "foodie" job.

The beauty of it is that you can start niche farming while you still have your day j ob. Some of my "niche farmer" friends raise lamb, grow mangoes or coffee, keep bees, sell worms for gardens, and have free-range chickens. All are employed by full-time day jobs, but are working toward easing themselves into farming. Here is the amazing thing: It'sworking for all of them. They are able to farm, or garden, on the side and sell everything they grow/raise/make.

People love high-quality, organic products. Making the bridge from full-time worker into full-time farmer is a little anxiety-provoking, though. My friend Thomas, who raises sheep, tells me "I need to be hungrier" — meaning, he needs to be motivated to give it his all. Erick, who raises worms (vermicomposting), says he needs to work on his marketing and not rely on word of mouth. Scott, who grows coffee, found that re-branding and getting his product into a local grocery store made the difference.

Having niche farming as a sideline gives you the space to perfect your craft, until you are in a fina ncial position to make the jump. There is a lot of information to pore over about the necessary education and the economic outlook for organic farming.

Interested in niche farming?

Do your research. 

Hit the farmers markets. 

Talk to meat and produce managers in grocery stores — Would they be able to buy your product? Do you need organic certification? 

Become an expert in your product. 

Check zoning laws. 

Learn marketing, or hire someone who knows how and has a successful track record 

Start small.

3. Caterer

Love to cook for others? Have access to a commercial kitchen? Catering may be the ticket for you.

Let's discuss two levels. First, as a professional caterer, it isn't a cheap career to get into. You will need access to a certified kitchen, a business license, and insurance. In most states you will need to pass a health inspection and food handler class, too. Check your state's requirements before you leap.

Caterers also need strong marketing skills (you need to get the word out) and some technological ability (for a website). Catering isn't just about cooking what you want to make, either. Although you should be able to offer standard items, you will need to be able to present other ideas to a client (along with prices per head) and test recipes ahead of time. Finding wholesale vendors is another must.

Lastly, you will need to hire help, so you'll need a short course on Business 101 (payroll, I-9's, workers' compensation, billing, etc.) As you can see, startup costs can run a minimum of $10,000. How much will you earn? The average looks to be between $27,000 and $35,000 per year. If you are strongly drawn toward catering, try it out. Go to work for a caterer or a restaurant that offers catering.

Now, a second option. If you are someone with a great home kitchen and you love to cook, you may still be able to pursue this on another level. You may be hired to make dinner for friends, a birthday cake, hors d'oeuvres for a party, etc. My friend Jane did this for years, while practicing psychotherapy as her day job. She'd suggest a menu; show up with the food and flowers; serve, and clean up. I would only suggest doing this on a small-scale level, for friends or well-known business contacts, and I wouldn't hold myself out as a professional — just as a friend who loves to cook. Jane enjoyed her day job, but just loved to cook so much, that she wanted to do more of it.

4. Food Blogger

I just Googled "food blog" and was return ed 420,000,000 results. So yes, a lot of people are already doing it, but if you want to do your own, there is no reason that you shouldn't.

Every blog I follow (and I follow a lot of them) brings something different to the party. I am never at a loss for cooking ideas. What sorts of skills do you need? Some technological ability is a plus, although you can put together a blog in an afternoon using Weebly, GoDaddy, Blogger, WordPress, or another easy web-building package. Being able to write well is essential. Taking good photographs is also important. And bloggers who blog regularly will get more traffic.

If you want to set up your own site and earn money, I strongly recommend you read this post from Sally's Baking Addiction. You will also benefit from some networking (both on the Internet and in person). Surprisingly, the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't list "food blogger" as a separate occupation yet (they should Google it); they lump it in with bloggers. They do, however, offer a very informative article about how to blog.

You can also sell your blogging work on a freelance basis. Sign up for a number of sites that will send you alerts for work. It's best to set up a PayPal account, as many employers like to use this service for payment.

5. Candy Maker

As I write about this fun job, I am munching a piece of lemon bark recently sent to me. It's delicious! I have known this particular candy maker for close to 15 years, and am delighted to see she's still doing her thing.

Candy making is an art as well as a science. It's very challenging. I only know how to make one kind of candy, and it's exhausting every time I do it. My friends who use Etsy to sell candy claim it is easy to set up shop. (Here are their requirements for selling edibles.)

The aforementioned lemon bark is made in a culinary incubator facility — offering shared, part-time kitchen rental. You may also be able to rent space in a commercial kitchen durin g their off hours. Your best bet may be a church kitchen, which otherwise does not get a lot of use.

Other considerations: packaging, mailing, a website, marketing. How much can you expect to earn? Working for yourself, maybe initially $10 an hour. If you want to work on a candy production line in a candy factory, you will probably make more like $8.25 per hour, although some do offer benefits. It would probably be great experience, though, if you want to go into business for yourself eventually.

6. Restaurant Critic

I doubt I am alone in picking restaurant critic as a dream job. Eating delicious food, writing about it, and no dishes to wash! Nice work if you can get it, right?

The average annual salary is around $47,000, but can be a lot more if you're working for television or a prestigious food magazine. Some critics have backgrounds in journalism or communication, or are experienced writers. I was surprised to read that up to 30 or 40 dishes are tested after multiple visits. Food critics may join the Association of Food Journalists, which sets forth standards for objectivity and provides resources. Like other jobs, though, there are drawbacks:

"Nobody will think you deserve the gig you've got, including your friends." —Todd Kliman, Washingtonian wine and food and editor and critic.

Or this, from NYT Restaurant reviewer Pete Wells: "You can put down your tiny violins; it doesn't take much to see that the problems of an overfed restaurant critic don't amount to a hill of fava beans in this crazy world."

"You will gain 20 to 30 pounds. Even if you exercise four days a week. More if you don't." — Jonathan Kauffman, editor of Tasting Table SF and former dining reviewer for SF Weekly and Seattle Weekly.

Interested in becoming a food critic?

Learn to write well. 

Develop your palate and become very well-educated about food and food preparation. 

Gain some restaurant experience. 

Read cookbooks, study various cooking methods, and try them yourself. 

Blog, volunteer to write reviews for small-circulation papers, and apply for food-related writing jobs.

7. Cookbook Author

Yes, you too can write a cookbook. Finding a publisher, alas, can be a more difficult project. However, don't give up! Thanks to the advent of self-publishing, you can write your own book, market it, and sell it yourself, or team up with a bigger outfit, like Kindle. You can buy cookbook-writing software. There are how-to books on how to write cookbooks. There are many resources available, as this field is huge.

Can you make money at it? Yes, but the trick seems to be to find a popular subject (i.e., gluten-free cooking, or vegan recipes, for example). You need to find a good niche, which means doing a ton of research. I have purchased cookbook e-books; they are usually less expensive and some have great recipes. However, unless you can hit the trifecta (writing, editing, and photography), you should probably consider hiring recipe testers and a cookbook editor, described below.

8. Recipe Tester

These jobs are hard to find, but I promise, they are ou t there (and I have done it). Aspiring cookbook authors (above) need to test recipes. A recipe tester does just that — makes the recipe to the author's exact instructions.

You need to take copious notes and probably complete questionnaires electronically. Pay varies, which can be a challenge, because you will need to purchase many ingredients to test. If you can take a decent photograph to send to the cookbook writer, so much the better. An important aspect of being a recipe tester is confidentiality, and in my experience, you'll be asked to sign an agreement to ensure it.

A good place to find recipe-testing jobs is to look on popular food blogs wherein the blogger has published cookbooks. A second recipe tester industry exists with large companies, but those jobs are harder to come by.

What sort of a background do you need to get hired?

Experience in cooking 

Excellent written communications skills 

Decent photography skills 

Diplomacy — to communicate needed changes without offending the cookbook author 

The ability to move quickly — you may be testing 10 recipes per week, and feedback must be given on a weekly basis

9. Cookbook Editor

Continuing in the vein of cookbook author and recipe tester, a third party needs to come into play: the editor. Recipes need to be appealing, clearly written, and list items in a logical sequence. It is vitally important to keep the author's "voice" intact (after all, it's their book, not yours).

This is another very ticklish job, because like a recipe tester, you do not want to offend the author. Pay varies. Some editors work for famous publishing houses; some work freelance. If you work freelance, you will often be asked to bid on a job. If you think you'd like to take a crack at freelance editing, check out Upwork, Freelancer, Craigslist, or LinkedIn, where you can find job notices. Some go beyond editing — check out this gal's fun job.

What makes you a good editor candidate?

Excellent command of English

Experience with proofreading

Diplomacy skills

Above-average knowledge of food

Above-average cooking skills

10. Cooperative Extension Educator

Cooperative extensions are often found in places where agriculture is a big part of the community. I knew two ladies employed by cooperative extensions, Carol and Evelyn, and they both loved their careers. Their daily duties were largely made up of teaching cooking, teaching food safety, presentations, and leading 4-H groups.

I took many a class at my California cooperative extension; I learned a lot about food safety. I can still hear Carol's mantra: "Keep hot foods hot, and cold foods cold." They had large classroom-style kitchen facilities with state-of-the-art equipment. Another co-op extension acquaintance was Gary, who was a livestock specialist. He would perform home visits and offer advice about keeping livestock.

You can still take classes at some cooperative extensions — the one closest to me just taught "Mastering Food Preservation." In perusing available jobs, they appear to be mostly benefited, with pay based on experien ce, and a master's degree required. These were also family-friendly jobs; all three of the people mentioned above had families. You also need above-average communication skills (written and oral), and to be able to effectively work with kids and the public.

11. Food Product Demonstrator

I think there are two camps of demonstrators — the ones who have it sort of rough at Costco, trying to describe the product before it is snatched off of their trays, and the ones in upscale markets who actually get to visit a little and tell you about the food. I still remember trying my first bite of Dubliner cheese from "Irene" in an upscale market. And yes, I bought the cheese.

Entry-level average pay for a food product demonstrator is $11 per hour; more experienced demonstrators can command $20 and up. Average growth is predicted in the field. If you are looking for seasonal, part-time, or temporary work in the "food field," it might be perfect for you. Demonstrators should be person able, engaging, patient, and well-groomed. Training is on-the-job.

12. Food Stylist

Ever make something really delicious, and want to post it on Facebook , only to find that the picture looks terrible? Why does food look so great in the magazines or on TV? The answer: Food stylists.

Food stylists make food look amazing in pictures (or on television). It's tricky stuff, keeping food looking great under hot camera lights and/or for long periods of time. Some food stylists are also photographers, or at least have a strong knowledge base about photography. They also need to know a lot about food and cooking. Some work for television shows or magazines, some are freelance. The BLS does not give a specific economic outlook, but I was surprised to find seventeen job listings in a quick search.

Interested in this field? Consider what you need.

A degree in Culinary Arts (helpful) 

Above-average knowledge about photography 

Creative background; really good at art 

Good "people" skills to enable you to work with chefs, photographers, clients, etc.

Source: Twelve cool jobs for foodies

In this article, we'll go over the 5 best WordPress audience plugins that will help you better understand your website users, get information from them, and keep your website more secure.

Most website owners probably already use Google Analytics (GA). It is the leader in free website analytics and tells you a lot about your users, what they do on your website, and how you can get them to convert easier and more often.

The Google Analytics plugin by Yoast doesn't just track pageviews like most other GA plugins. It will also track outbound links and file downloads as well.

In addition, you can also view helpful metrics on your WordPress dashboards so that you do not have to login to GA every time.

If you promote affiliate products on your website, this plugin will also help you keep track of those links better.

GetSiteControl is a fairly new service that allows you to easily create surveys, contact forms, promo boxes, subscription forms, social media follow buttons, share buttons and chat functionality.

The basic service is free but they also offer premium version which adds some additional features. The best part about it is that it actually makes your website look good and modern.

Implementation on your website is very easy. All the setup is done on their website in a user-friendly interface, and then when you're done, you will just need to add a small JavaScript code to your website. That's all there is to it.

That one JavaScript code will need to be implemented only once, no matter how many changes you make or widgets you add to your website.

One awesome feature of GetSiteControl is the ability to select when and how often the popup will trigger. This ensures that the popup doesn't annoy your audience and if they decline to take action, they can simply be left alone.

Asking your users to subscribe to your newsletter has never looked better!

If you're a big marketer and analytics person, you will understand and appreciate the ability to track each and every phone call you receive from your website.

That's what CallRail enables you to do. In a nut shell, it assigns a unique phone number to each of your visitors which keeps track of visitor source, keyword, campaign, and so on. That way when the user calls the unique phone number they were assigned, you know everything about how they discovered your website and where they came from.

It features some of the most advanced call features such as call recording, dynamic number swapping, and whispered messages.

Unfortunately, the service is not free as it starts at around $30 per month. However you do have a couple of weeks to try it out before you commit to it fully, so I highly recommend giving it a shot to see if it can help your business.

One major issue I've seen over the years is websites utilizing WordPress Contact form plugins such as Contact Form 7. There is nothing wrong with Contact Form 7 except the fact that if you do not receive the form submissions to your email, they are basically lost forever.

That's where Contact Form DB comes in handy. Not only does it track Contact Form 7 submissions, but it also supports 8 other contact form plugins.

The way it works is very simple and does not require any user configuration. It will simply record every form submission into the database and allow you to view it anytime you want. No more lost form submissions due to misconfigured email services and spam filters.

If you've used contact forms on your website before, you probably know that email delivery can be very unreliable and it highly varies from one web host to another. Don't put your business' success in the hands of your web host. There is absolutely no reason why you should lose valuable form submissions due to the fault of others.

And finally we have the Login LockDown. This is not something you want to have, it's something you NEED to have.

Login LockDown tracks IP addresses and timestamps of every failed login attempt to your website. That means you can see if and when someone is trying to break in.

This plugin will also disable login functionality for all offending IP ranges if they fail the login attempt specific number of times. You can change this number to whatever will work best for your website.

Source: 5 Best WordPress Audience Understanding Plugins

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Source: Odin Adds UX Enhancements, Security Options and WordPress Toolkit in Latest Plesk Release

October 13, 2015 by shamim_mahi

I find the most effective way of keeping track of comments on your blog posts is to look on the WordPress Dashboard.

This is located at http://my.stg.ign.com/blogs/YourUserName/wp-admin/

There you will find all sorts of useful stuff like the QuickPress box for quick blogging action!

And if you look below you will see the Recent Comments box.

Click for bigger picture

This works great if your getting less than 3 comments/hour.

But there are other times where there are just to many comments comming in for that tiny box to be useful.

When that happens you should click through to the edit page for your blog post.  To do that just click on the title of your blog post.

Once there you can scroll down to find a much larger comment box that will display all the latest comments on that blog post!

Click for bigger picture

BONUS!  You can also post reply comments from the same edit page by mousing over a comment and clicking reply.  (note: your reply will show up as a new comment  on your blog post and not directly under the comment you are replying to )

Anyway I hope this helps!

Submit Blog Love this blog? Send it to submissions@ign.com to help us recognize and promote great bloggers on IGN.
Source: Best Way to Keep Track of Comments On Your Blog Posts

Setting up a blog has become quite simple these days. You don't have to have any technical expertise or knowledge to make your own blog. Today, there are literally millions of blogs that you can find on the internet, but most of them don't go anywhere because they don't have any strategy in place. It is no longer enough to just start a blog; you also need to how to run and operate it in order to be successful.

Image credit: Mike Licht

It doesn't matter if you don't have any experience as the tips outlined below are going to teach you how to blog effectively:

You need to bear in mind that there are no shortcuts on the road to success. Don't just set up a blog when you are in it for making money. When your aim is to develop a blog that brings it substantial revenue, you will have to make a lot of effort. The only way you will stay motivated is if you blog about something you have a passion for or have an interest in.

It is essential for you to have a purpose or else you are not going to last long in the blogging business. Understand why you wish to start a blog and what you are expecting from it. You will be able to deal with the problems and troubles along the way only if you are sure of why you wish to succeed.

Finding your niche is the next step. Every day, lots of blogs spring up on the web and you can only stand out amongst them if you become an expert in a specific area. Rather than providing general tips on a variety of topics, you should give some thought to turning your blog into a book. You will go far if you go specific.

Once you have chosen your niche, you need to make sure that it can solve a problem. You can only make money if you are able to provide solutions to people's problems. Do some research to know if people are willing to pay for getting the particular issue resolved or not.

If you don't want your blog to come off like thousands of others, you have to inject some expertise and personality in it. Most of the blogs that are established these days are run by people who have absolutely no knowledge or experience of what they are teaching. You should get some experience before blogging about something because you will be able to connect with the audience as you have gone through similar stages. This will get them to trust and like you.

Sure, you can find endless suggestions about domain names online, but the final decision rests with you as you need to think about the kind of brand and name you wish to build. Your domain name has to be concise and unique while being easy to spell and memorable at the same time. Don't go for a name that's tough to remember or you will never be able to develop a large following.

While there are free blogging options you can find these days such as Blogger.com, it is always a sound decision to go for self-hosted service. It is not difficult to find such services, which charge you a few dollars every month and give you control over your blog. You have to freedom of customizing your blog and giving it a personal touch to make it unique. You can also sign up with a good hosting company and setup your blog on WordPress. VPS hosting is a preferred choice of most businesses and bloggers these days.

Now it is your turn to opt for a WordPress theme for your blog, which can be used for giving it a professional look. Again, you will find free themes, but remember that these will be used by others as well. It is better to spend some money and go for a premium theme if you want your blog to be different.

Getting your plugins in order is the next step when you have your web host and a theme. However, you shouldn't add too many plugins because this is only going to slow down your blog. Plugins should only be kept to a minimum and they should be immensely useful such as those that prevent spam, reducing file size, removing and fixing links and playing podcasts and interviews.

Source: Some Brilliant Blogging Tips for the Novice So Their Blog Can Survive

"Free" is the most awesome price of all. "Free" gets you started when you have nothing. "Free" took me from 0 to the first 1,000,000 visitors to my blog.

Related: 5 Tools For Entrepreneurs to Grow Their Online Presence in No Time

"Free" is also the price that most people gravitate to when they are first starting out. But, the trouble is, most of those people also think that you have sign up for some big, expensive service once your audience numbers get serious.

Nope.

You don't have any excuses, because free web services and products available today are so good that you can easily use them to build up your own blog to 1 million visitors. You can start today, from scratch, and use every single one of these every day along your journey. From idea creation, to producing, publishing and designing your content, to sharing, marketing and promoting your brand, you'll find these tools free and accessible. Here are the 17 best ones I myself used to grow my blog at iDoneThis:

1. Quora

At its most basic Quora is a Q&A site -- you go there, ask a question and get an answer. It offers a seemingly infinite array of knowledge. But, when you start using the site properly, and you're interacting with others, Quora blossoms into so much more.

Quora is a great place for content ideas. You can search for a topic, see what others are asking, and answering and then write it up, adding to the conversation. But there's more: Kevan Lee at Buffer recently set out all the ways you can use Quora to market yourself for your business. Quora helps you establish yourself as a leader in your area, if you use it right. If you have a product, you can use the site to get feedback from users and to generate new feature ideas.

2. Feedly

Feedly is the best blog reader around. You have to be reading a lot of other blogs if you want yours to stand out. Once you start reading the top blogs from key influencers, you will learn the right style that drives traffic, and what sets top blogs apart from the rest.

When Google Reader shut its door a couple of years ago, almost everyone flocked to the then-new Feedly app. You can sign up for blog feeds from the app, share your favorite posts, bookmark the ones you still have to read and read them, in Feedly's intuitive, magazine style.

3. Buzzosumo

BuzzSumo is an awesome tool,with one simple aim: It helps you find what articles people are sharing, and who is sharing them. From this simple start, you can gain a wealth of information: the best length, type and content for a POS. With the free account , you can only get limited information, but definitely enough to find out what works and what doesn't.

The site can also help you target the key influencers in your area of expertise. One of the reasons I love BuzzSumo is that data is at the heart of it. The folks behind the site recently analyzed all their data to find out what goes viral. They found that having just one key influencer share your post can increase your number of shares by over 30 percent. Just having three will double the number of times your post is shared.

4. Quip

There are a trillion word processing apps available, but Quip has my vote as the easiest and most intuitive app to use. It is by your words that you are going to live or die. So, write them in style.

What's unique about Quip is that it was designed, from the ground-up, to be a mobile-first word-processing app. Bret Taylor, the co-founder, says that, "Offline and online are no longer separate binary states." Quip works as quickly as a local app, but everything is in the cloud. This particularly works well for companies like iDoneThis, where team members might be thousands of miles apart but working on the same post. With Quip, we can all edit documents as if they were on our local machines.

5. Hemingway

The Hemingway app is all about making your writing clearer and more accessible. For some people, writing flows naturally through their fingers; for the rest of us there is Hemingway. The app helps you avoid complicated, hard-to-read sentences, passive voice and adverbs. Hemingway is ideal for people who have to explain complicated ideas to a lay audience.

6. Trello

Trello is an organizational tool, letting you organize work via "boards" where different ideas, pitches, outlines, drafts and articles are in your publishing pipeline. Richard White, CEO of UserVoice, described Trello as "a very open-ended product." Yep. When you first open Trello, it seems both simple and daunting. But what wins me over to Trello is that so much of the organization is left up to you -- there is no right way to use Trello, just your way.

7. WordPress

There are countless content management system (CMS) options, but WordPress is still the best. Once you have got your site up and running, you need a way to publish your stories. Somewhere like Tumblr is great for your own personal blog, but if you are looking to get north of a million visitors, then you need the type of platform WordPress provides.

On WordPress you can customize your site and add plugins for a ton of different needs, from SEO optimization to image presentation, from email forms to capture. Plus, other apps on this list, like SumoMe and Google Analytics, have one-click setup plugins to get you up and running immediately.

Related: 10 Affordable Tools to Help Online Entrepreneurs Succeed

8. Canva

Canva is a design service for people who can't design. An image in a post will increase shares, and increased shares means more visitors. Ergo, you need images. So what happens if you are artistically-challenged? Welcome, Canva. Anyone can use it for anything: A sheriff even used the site to design a wanted poster. The site uses simple drag-and-drop principles to help you create art and design for your site, allowing you to choose from thousands of images, fonts and colors to get exactly what you need to illustrate your story.

9. Share As Image

Images are also the best way to share ideas on social media, and Share As Image lets you create amazing text-based images, helping you get more engagement and shares on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

You can create quotes and daily inspiration messages, or just have a line from your latest blog post as a teaser. You can also take in information from images ten times faster than from text alone; and because visual processing is what our brains are designed for, sharing ideas as images immediately invokes a reaction in your audience.

10. Death to Stock Photo

Death To Stock Photo is what stock photo services should be like. A few years ago Wired published an article about stock photography, or laughing-stock photography as it should be called.

When the Wired article came, out Death To Stock quickly contacted the editors to say that not all stock services are bad. And they were right. Death To Stock Photo shows that you can have awesome image content for your site for free. As I said earlier, images increase shares, and having great images will definitely get your blog noticed more.

11. Typeform

Typeform helps you build contact forms and surveys, meaning you can interact with your audience and become a meaningful place for dialog. Tasked with surveying some of the top business leaders in the world, Mia Mabanta at Quartz turned to Typeform. She got a survey completion rate of 55 percent (which is awesome) and surveyed 940 top executives. She spent zero dollars doing this.

Her team chose Typeform because responders could easily navigate it whether they were on a desktop or mobile, and users could stay on the page throughout, rather than wait for the next page to load -- one of the main reasons people bug-out on a survey.

12. TinyLetter

TinyLetter is a super-simple app that lets you create and distribute email newsletters, which are a great way to get your ideas into everyone's inboxes each week.

Alexis Madrigal, deputy editor at The Atlantic, has grown his own newsletter to thousands and thousands of readers using this tool. TinyLetter let him get set up the moment he had the idea and distribute the newsletter to all his readers; it even lets people sign up straight from Twitter. The simplicity and ease of use of TinyLetter is why it is a great place to start building a following.

13. SumoMe

SumoMe is a suite of apps that lets people interact with your site better using share and social buttons. It also helps you build up an email list with popups, and can even tell you where people are clicking on your site. Noah Kagan, founder of SumoMe and AppSumo, and employee #30 at Facebook, built a massive email list of over a million emails for AppSumo, so he obviously knows what he is talking about.

SumoMe gives you an in-depth analysis of what works on your blog and what doesn't. It also integrates with other services' email lists so you can seamlessly build your email list to grab all your visitors.

14. Wisestam 

Wisestamp lets you link to your online presence automagically in your email signature, adding links to your social media, blog and latest posts.

A story illustrates its use: British Cycling used to be terrible. When Dave Brailsford took over as performance director in 2003, Britain's best Olympics haul in cycling was still the one it had achieved in 1908. But since 2003, British cyclists have won 18 Olympic gold medals, 59 World Championships and -- though it hadn't ever won the Tour de France in the race's 112-year history -- British cyclists have won it three out of the last four years.

Brailsford puts this down to marginal gains: If you break every problem down to its components and improve each by just 1 percent, you will have a significant improvement when you put it all back together.

When I saw Wisestamp, it reminded me of this story. Most people won't see their email signature as a way to gain traffic, but that is exactly how Wisestamp sees it. If you want to hit a million users, you have to look for every single marginal gain. Find all of Brailsford's 1 percent improvements and add them up and they will eventually lead you to your million visitors.

15. Print Friendly and a PDF

Print Friendly is a Chrome extension that will transform your blog into a PDF, getting rid of all the extra crap and just leaving your audience with a well-formatted booklet of your posts. A great way to gain a following is to create an ebook that's a "content upgrade," in the form of a PDF that visitors can download and read offline -- in exchange for their email address. 

This is an awesome trick that Noah Kagan used to gain thousands of more subscribers from his guest posts. This might seem like an major extra hassle, but thanks to Print Friendly, it doesn't have to be. The strategy is particularly great if you have a long, detailed post that would work well as an ebook. You just need a couple of clicks with Print Friendly. 

16. Buffer

Buffer seems like a simple tool to manage your online social media presence. But, in the right hands it can be turned into a demon of analysis, allowing you to reach more people with your posts and tweets and optimize your content for social sharing.

Madhav Bhandari handles growth at Hubstaff, and is using Buffer to analyze the site's posts. Hubstaff has used Buffer to boost its social traffic by 350 percent, simply by analyzing what makes posts shareable and what doesn't. Once you start to analyze your posts at this level of depth, you will quickly realize what is worth the effort, and what is a waste.

17. Google Analytics

So, how do you know when you have hit that cool million? You need Google Analytics. In fact, you need it way before then. You should be checking out your visitor numbers from your very first post, analyzing what posts get the highest views and where those views are coming from. Then, you can start to tailor your operation around those ideas. Keep what works, and throw out the rest.

Google Analytics is the most extensive suite out there, and even the biggest sites are still using it. Google obviously knows its numbers, and if this is a major place your visitors are coming from, who better to tell you the good news?

Over to you

What do you use to grow your blog traffic? I'd love to hear about what you think the best free services and products out there are to grow your audience.

Related: 10 Must-Have Tools for Entrepreneurs With an Online Presence

Source: 17 Free Online Tools to Help You Grow Your Blog to 1 Million Visitors

Posted by Danielcrustove on Yesterday

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Source: I Will Set Your Wordpress Blog Up For Free!

"Free" is the most awesome price of all. "Free" gets you started when you have nothing. "Free" took me from 0 to the first 1,000,000 visitors to my blog.

Related: 5 Tools For Entrepreneurs to Grow Their Online Presence in No Time

"Free" is also the price that most people gravitate to when they are first starting out. But, the trouble is, most of those people also think that you have sign up for some big, expensive service once your audience numbers get serious.

Nope.

You don't have any excuses, because free web services and products available today are so good that you can easily use them to build up your own blog to 1 million visitors. You can start today, from scratch, and use every single one of these every day along your journey. From idea creation, to producing, publishing and designing your content, to sharing, marketing and promoting your brand, you'll find these tools free and accessible. Here are the 17 best ones I myself used to grow my blog at iDoneThis:

1. Quora

At its most basic Quora is a Q&A site -- you go there, ask a question and get an answer. It offers a seemingly infinite array of knowledge. But, when you start using the site properly, and you're interacting with others, Quora blossoms into so much more.

Quora is a great place for content ideas. You can search for a topic, see what others are asking, and answering and then write it up, adding to the conversation. But there's more: Kevan Lee at Buffer recently set out all the ways you can use Quora to market yourself for your business. Quora helps you establish yourself as a leader in your area, if you use it right. If you have a product, you can use the site to get feedback from users and to generate new feature ideas.

2. Feedly

Feedly is the best blog reader around. You have to be reading a lot of other blogs if you want yours to stand out. Once you start reading the top blogs from key influencers, you will learn the right style that drives traffic, and what sets top blogs apart from the rest.

When Google Reader shut its door a couple of years ago, almost everyone flocked to the then-new Feedly app. You can sign up for blog feeds from the app, share your favorite posts, bookmark the ones you still have to read and read them, in Feedly's intuitive, magazine style.

3. Buzzosumo

BuzzSumo is an awesome tool,with one simple aim: It helps you find what articles people are sharing, and who is sharing them. From this simple start, you can gain a wealth of information: the best length, type and content for a POS. With the free account , you can only get limited information, but definitely enough to find out what works and what doesn't.

The site can also help you target the key influencers in your area of expertise. One of the reasons I love BuzzSumo is that data is at the heart of it. The folks behind the site recently analyzed all their data to find out what goes viral. They found that having just one key influencer share your post can increase your number of shares by over 30 percent. Just having three will double the number of times your post is shared.

4. Quip

There are a trillion word processing apps available, but Quip has my vote as the easiest and most intuitive app to use. It is by your words that you are going to live or die. So, write them in style.

What's unique about Quip is that it was designed, from the ground-up, to be a mobile-first word-processing app. Bret Taylor, the co-founder, says that, "Offline and online are no longer separate binary states." Quip works as quickly as a local app, but everything is in the cloud. This particularly works well for companies like iDoneThis, where team members might be thousands of miles apart but working on the same post. With Quip, we can all edit documents as if they were on our local machines.

5. Hemingway

The Hemingway app is all about making your writing clearer and more accessible. For some people, writing flows naturally through their fingers; for the rest of us there is Hemingway. The app helps you avoid complicated, hard-to-read sentences, passive voice and adverbs. Hemingway is ideal for people who have to explain complicated ideas to a lay audience.

6. Trello

Trello is an organizational tool, letting you organize work via "boards" where different ideas, pitches, outlines, drafts and articles are in your publishing pipeline. Richard White, CEO of UserVoice, described Trello as "a very open-ended product." Yep. When you first open Trello, it seems both simple and daunting. But what wins me over to Trello is that so much of the organization is left up to you -- there is no right way to use Trello, just your way.

7. WordPress

There are countless content management system (CMS) options, but WordPress is still the best. Once you have got your site up and running, you need a way to publish your stories. Somewhere like Tumblr is great for your own personal blog, but if you are looking to get north of a million visitors, then you need the type of platform WordPress provides.

On WordPress you can customize your site and add plugins for a ton of different needs, from SEO optimization to image presentation, from email forms to capture. Plus, other apps on this list, like SumoMe and Google Analytics, have one-click setup plugins to get you up and running immediately.

Related: 10 Affordable Tools to Help Online Entrepreneurs Succeed

8. Canva

Canva is a design service for people who can't design. An image in a post will increase shares, and increased shares means more visitors. Ergo, you need images. So what happens if you are artistically-challenged? Welcome, Canva. Anyone can use it for anything: A sheriff even used the site to design a wanted poster. The site uses simple drag-and-drop principles to help you create art and design for your site, allowing you to choose from thousands of images, fonts and colors to get exactly what you need to illustrate your story.

9. Share As Image

Images are also the best way to share ideas on social media, and Share As Image lets you create amazing text-based images, helping you get more engagement and shares on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.

You can create quotes and daily inspiration messages, or just have a line from your latest blog post as a teaser. You can also take in information from images ten times faster than from text alone; and because visual processing is what our brains are designed for, sharing ideas as images immediately invokes a reaction in your audience.

10. Death to Stock Photo

Death To Stock Photo is what stock photo services should be like. A few years ago Wired published an article about stock photography, or laughing-stock photography as it should be called.

When the Wired article came, out Death To Stock quickly contacted the editors to say that not all stock services are bad. And they were right. Death To Stock Photo shows that you can have awesome image content for your site for free. As I said earlier, images increase shares, and having great images will definitely get your blog noticed more.

11. Typeform

Typeform helps you build contact forms and surveys, meaning you can interact with your audience and become a meaningful place for dialog. Tasked with surveying some of the top business leaders in the world, Mia Mabanta at Quartz turned to Typeform. She got a survey completion rate of 55 percent (which is awesome) and surveyed 940 top executives. She spent zero dollars doing this.

Her team chose Typeform because responders could easily navigate it whether they were on a desktop or mobile, and users could stay on the page throughout, rather than wait for the next page to load -- one of the main reasons people bug-out on a survey.

12. TinyLetter

TinyLetter is a super-simple app that lets you create and distribute email newsletters, which are a great way to get your ideas into everyone's inboxes each week.

Alexis Madrigal, deputy editor at The Atlantic, has grown his own newsletter to thousands and thousands of readers using this tool. TinyLetter let him get set up the moment he had the idea and distribute the newsletter to all his readers; it even lets people sign up straight from Twitter. The simplicity and ease of use of TinyLetter is why it is a great place to start building a following.

13. SumoMe

SumoMe is a suite of apps that lets people interact with your site better using share and social buttons. It also helps you build up an email list with popups, and can even tell you where people are clicking on your site. Noah Kagan, founder of SumoMe and AppSumo, and employee #30 at Facebook, built a massive email list of over a million emails for AppSumo, so he obviously knows what he is talking about.

SumoMe gives you an in-depth analysis of what works on your blog and what doesn't. It also integrates with other services' email lists so you can seamlessly build your email list to grab all your visitors.

14. Wisestam 

Wisestamp lets you link to your online presence automagically in your email signature, adding links to your social media, blog and latest posts.

A story illustrates its use: British Cycling used to be terrible. When Dave Brailsford took over as performance director in 2003, Britain's best Olympics haul in cycling was still the one it had achieved in 1908. But since 2003, British cyclists have won 18 Olympic gold medals, 59 World Championships and -- though it hadn't ever won the Tour de France in the race's 112-year history -- British cyclists have won it three out of the last four years.

Brailsford puts this down to marginal gains: If you break every problem down to its components and improve each by just 1 percent, you will have a significant improvement when you put it all back together.

When I saw Wisestamp, it reminded me of this story. Most people won't see their email signature as a way to gain traffic, but that is exactly how Wisestamp sees it. If you want to hit a million users, you have to look for every single marginal gain. Find all of Brailsford's 1 percent improvements and add them up and they will eventually lead you to your million visitors.

15. Print Friendly and a PDF

Print Friendly is a Chrome extension that will transform your blog into a PDF, getting rid of all the extra crap and just leaving your audience with a well-formatted booklet of your posts. A great way to gain a following is to create an ebook that's a "content upgrade," in the form of a PDF that visitors can download and read offline -- in exchange for their email address. 

This is an awesome trick that Noah Kagan used to gain thousands of more subscribers from his guest posts. This might seem like an major extra hassle, but thanks to Print Friendly, it doesn't have to be. The strategy is particularly great if you have a long, detailed post that would work well as an ebook. You just need a couple of clicks with Print Friendly. 

16. Buffer

Buffer seems like a simple tool to manage your online social media presence. But, in the right hands it can be turned into a demon of analysis, allowing you to reach more people with your posts and tweets and optimize your content for social sharing.

Madhav Bhandari handles growth at Hubstaff, and is using Buffer to analyze the site's posts. Hubstaff has used Buffer to boost its social traffic by 350 percent, simply by analyzing what makes posts shareable and what doesn't. Once you start to analyze your posts at this level of depth, you will quickly realize what is worth the effort, and what is a waste.

17. Google Analytics

So, how do you know when you have hit that cool million? You need Google Analytics. In fact, you need it way before then. You should be checking out your visitor numbers from your very first post, analyzing what posts get the highest views and where those views are coming from. Then, you can start to tailor your operation around those ideas. Keep what works, and throw out the rest.

Google Analytics is the most extensive suite out there, and even the biggest sites are still using it. Google obviously knows its numbers, and if this is a major place your visitors are coming from, who better to tell you the good news?

Over to you

What do you use to grow your blog traffic? I'd love to hear about what you think the best free services and products out there are to grow your audience.

Related: 10 Must-Have Tools for Entrepreneurs With an Online Presence

Source: 17 Free Online Tools to Help You Grow Your Blog to 1 Million Visitors

Two days ago, as I'm checking my twitter feed, the Sonic the Hedgehog account posts that Sonic Lost World will be coming to the PC. This stopped me in my tracks as I exclaimed "WHAT!?"

This was the best thing I could think to say as this raised several questions at once. First off, what happened to this game being part of the three Sonic game exclusive deal Sega had with Nintendo? Sonic Lost World was the first game in the deal and I wasn't aware the deal had been met. Some research revealed that Mario & Sonic at the Sochi 2014 Olympic Winter Games actually counted as one of the games and Sonic Boom ended the deal, which I knew about. However, what is interesting is it appears that the deal meant that these exclusivity deals were only temporary. Even though it's going to be two years later, Sonic Lost World seems to have just been a timed exclusive.

Second thought was how this could improve the game. I'm a big Sonic fan – Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the Sega Genesis was the first game I EVER played – and I enjoyed Sonic Lost World, even if it wasn't what I would call a memorable game in the franchise. So the prospect of playing the game on the PC, where it can run at 1080p or higher at 60 frames per second, something all Sonic games should run at due to the speed, is an exciting one. I know the Wii U ran at 60fps but it was at 720p upscaled to 1080p, not true 1080p. The only downside to this port is it won't include the Legend of Zelda and Yoshi's Island DLC stages as they of course feature Nintendo owned properties. The Nights into Dreams stage is included though so that's nice. So I'm thrilled by this news and will definitely be checking it out when it's released November 2nd.

What do you think of this game coming to PCs two years after it was released? I personally think all Sonic games should come to PC as they can benefit from the power PCs have to offer. Hell, give Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 and Sonic Boom a second chance and bring them to PCs fixed, glitch free, and with graphical improvements! Throw Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Colors while you're at it too! But that's just my opinion. Let me know your thoughts in the comment section and be sure to check out my wordpress blog for more stuff like this. Peace and Love, Gamers and Players! Colorwind out.

Source: Colorwind Reacts: Sonic Lost World Coming to PC

SAN FRANCISCO — Publishing site Medium has unveiled a slew of updates today for its iOS and Android app at an event focused on showcasing how to build a sustainable platform. Company chief executive Evan Williams took the opportunity to set the record straight on what his company is all about: the point is about moving ideas forward.

Within the 45 minute presentation, Williams and his team showcased new tools around the mobile apps around discovery, interacting, and publishing, and what other offerings Medium will do to create a much smarter world. Here's the tl;dr of the announcements: a form of commenting, better discovery, a publishing API, the ability to migrate your content to Medium without sacrificing your URL, and eventually a way to monetize your work.

Interacting on Medium

When it comes to the interaction on Medium, product manager Brian Ellin spoke  about most people are probably consuming content from the mobile app. Some of the updates to the company's iOS and Android apps that should be available now include deep linking (just type in the @ symbol and you'll be able to reference other content on Medium), support for 3D Touch, syncing of stories and drafts, new typography, enhanced ways to interact, better profiles that shows you what people have highlighted and recommended, and features to surface top stories and other recommendations.

In addition, responses have been added that's equivalent to commenting. Instead of adding discussions at the bottom, you can respond to any quote. Once compiled, the original post will have a denotation that shows a response crafted. "Every sentence or word can be a spark to encourage you to write," says Ellin.

What's interesting is in-line denotations that subtlety show you when someone has responded to a particular part in your article. If you see an asterisk (or star-looking symbol), by tapping on it will show you the response from another user — you're answering right in context and add some additional insights. "When you know that it's going to show up in context, it's going to be easier to compose a response," says Williams.

From VentureBeat

Other updates include better notifications as well as new communication tools that lets you chat directly with the author.

The new version of Medium's iOS and Android apps are rolling out now.

Discovering by exploring

But being able to compose content isn't enough — it's about being about to discover new ideas. To that end, Medium is further leveraging tagging and a recommendation algorithm. The company says that 80 percent of stories are now tagged and those that have at least a keyword tagged are at least three times more likely to be read. You can even follow specific tags, with some having thousands of followers.

Starting today, Medium has added an Explore feature which offers a "ton of new ways to explore great stuff." In addition to displaying tagged stories you're interested in along with top stories, Medium will also promote interesting authors, stories deemed "conversation starters", those that have lots of responses, and of course recommendations curated by Medium's staff.

"We're trying to find the best content from whoever wrote it, whenever they wrote it, and bring it to you," the company said.

Getting it out there by publishing

The last piece of the Medium puzzle is about helping publishers get their work on Medium. Katie Zhu, who works on engineering and product at Medium, says that organizations are turning to her team for help on getting content on the platform. There are those that have built and audience on Medium just like they would with a standalone website — something that's proven to be a powerful tool for those wanting to get their ideas shared.

To date, there are 1,500 active publishers on Medium, including The Synapse and Those People and Zhu says these publications are garnering hundreds of thousands of readers each month. And brands are paying attention as now The Awl, Discovery Communications, Fusion, How We Get To Next by Steven Johnson, Mic, MSNBC, and Travel + Leisure have joined as content partners.

In order to facilitate more publisher interest, starting today Medium has partnered with NameCheap to help content creators move their content over to its platform without giving up their web address. This follows along with a release earlier this year of support for custom domains.

Additionally, a publishing API has been made available for people to easily share their content on Medium that uses OAuth2 for authentication. Zhu says that the company has built a great tool for writing, but it's not the main value — it's the publishing network. Through this API, content creators can share their story on the platform from anywhere. The API supports Markdown and HTML content formats, canonical URLs for cross-posting, and the full range of licenses available on Medium.

The API will be available in limited early access today with plans to open it to the public in the future.

Other partnerships announced today is with Ulysses and iWriter to port content over to Medium, as well as the introduction of a WordPress plugin. Medium is also launching an IFTTT channel designed to help publishers create their own interactions with its platform.

In the future, there will be new ways for publishers to monetize their work on Medium, but more details will be revealed "in the coming months." The company did say that the user experience as well as their users' needs and rights will "be front and center."

A more modern brand

Medium has also debuted a brand new logo and brand. While not drastically different from its letterhead "M", it adds a bit more creativity to the company image. The previous version is reserved, but now it's all about thinking forward. — better reflects of what Medium is about and highlights "modern ideas".

Rethink publishing

When Medium first came onto the scene, many thought that it would be equivalent to the likes of WordPress, Tumblr, Live Journal, and even Blogger, which was created by Williams before it was acquired by Google. It wasn't a service where anyone could just create an account and then blurt out whatever they're feeling. No, in fact, it was a matter of curating who could really publish.

Williams spoke about the problem that his team set out to accomplish over the past 16 years, starting back when Blogger was created. "It was a fun side project," he said. However, "as the web grew, we realized it (open free publishing) wasn't just only fun, but potentially important." It wasn't just about the content, but about the ideas that were being shared: "What else could make the world a smarter, better world than that?"

"Today, putting stuff out on the Internet today is easy. Our devices are constantly connected and we have a variety of apps to put content out there," Williams explained. "It's easy to trivialize all this stuff, but the fact that billions of people have the power of the printing press at their finger tips is a huge idea. It's a huge advance for society."

Medium has tried to establish a culture whereby people could expect to receive insightful posts about issues instead of what people did that day. Williams has said in the past that there's "more people publishing" on the site every day, but it's facing competition from a lot of entities. Will its seamless reading and writing experience across both the web and mobile, along with its interesting take on offering content creators increased exposure really help it standout in the crowd?

Playing with house money

The announcement of these product updates and partnerships comes as the company celebrates raising a $57 million Series B investment round led by Andreessen Horowitz. This came nearly two years since the last raise of $25 million. Certainly the company isn't struggling for funds. But now it looks like it wants to begin playing with house money to kick things in high gear.

Launched in 2012, Medium's original vision was to be a "new place on the Internet where people share ideas and stories." Prior to today it was reported that more than 20,000 people were composing content on the platform each week. It has become a place used by people to pen "personal news", while others have used it to write thoughtful pieces, and even defend their ideas on how to make the world a better place.

Even brands like BMW has found Medium interesting — in 2014, the car manufacturer became the publishing platform's first collections sponsor, rolling out paid content.

To date, Medium has only made one acquisition: long-form journalism site Matter. More than a year later, Matter relaunched as a digital magazine.

It shouldn't come to a surprise to know that the publishing industry is an unrelenting monster and it takes a lot emerge victorious. Medium finds itself neck-deep in this and has been looking to help push along original content on its site by bringing on board former Wired journalist Steven Levy to create the publication Backchannel. Powered by Medium, Levy's team has covered a wide range of topics, including about how Steve Jobs "fleeced" Carly Fiorina, Chicago's use of sensors to improve services, Internet access in Cuba, how Harper Reed became President Obama's first chief technology officer, and Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's progress.

Other updates include rethinking how people accessed content. Earlier this year, Medium introduced Letters, a new way that delivers blog posts straight to your inbox.

It's about "moving ideas forward"

"Medium is a network that taps the collective intelligence of the audience," Williams remarked in the beginning of his presentation. The hope is that these updates will enable people to share ideas without encountering the negative feedback loops creators often encounter in the current publishing space.

"Medium is the default place to share perspectives on a number of issues that matter. As increasingly the place to find the best opinion and commentary for what's happening in the world."

Between large and small…There's Medium. A versatile digital agency with limitless creativity and resources. Specializing in Drupal, we craft online experiences that are both modern and measurable to elevate brand awareness and drive ... read more »

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Source: Medium opens up publishing API, adds WordPress plugin, and adds new content partners