It doesn’t take a lot to install and set up your new WP-Vybe WordPress theme. Read on, and you’ll have it knocked out in a snap.

Step 1 – Unzip the File

The file you downloaded can be unzipped with any standard unzip program (if you don’t have one already installed on your computer, Stuffit Expander is a popular option for PC or MAC users). When you unzip the file, you’ll end up with a folder named “wp-vybe.” Within it are all the theme files along with the end user license agreement (please take a moment to read over the license agreement).

Step 2 – Upload the Theme Files to Your WordPress Site

For this step, you’ll need an FTP (file transfer protocol) program. An FTP program allows you to transfer files between your computer and your web hosting account. There are several available, but I use SmartFTP. You’ll want to upload your theme folder to the /wp-content/themes folder in your WordPress installation.

Step 3 – Activate WP-Vybe

Login to your WordPress control panel, and click the Appearance link on the left. On the next page you’ll see all your available themes. Simply click on the WP-Vybe screenshot, then click the Activate link in the upper right-hand corner of the pop-up screen.

Step 4 – Set Up Your Featured Articles Section

If you don’t already have a “Featured” category, you’ll need to create one. Click the Manage tab, then Categories on the sub-navigation bar. Create a new category named “Featured”. Also, be sure the category slug is “featured”.

For the Featured Articles function to work correctly, you may also need to modify your permalink structure. To do that, go to Settings -> Permalinks. Just be sure that any option other than the default permalink structure is selected.

Finally, the only thing left to do is to place some of your posts/articles in the Featured category. By default, the theme is set up to display your 5 most recent Featured Articles in the featured article box on your home page. You can change that number on the WP-Vybe Theme Settings page if you like.

Step 5 – Install and Activate Plugins Supported by WP-Vybe

WP-Vybe has built-in support for the following plugins:

Recently Popular – Your Most Popular Posts will appear at the top of the right sidebar in the tabbed navigation box as seen on this site. In WP-Vybe the plugin is configured to look at the past two weeks but this can be changed by modifying the plugin code in side-tabs.php:

<?php get_recently_popular(2, ‘WEEK’, 5, 0, 2); ?>

The first number within the parentheses is the interval length and the word following it is for the interval type (HOUR, DAY, WEEK, or MONTH). See the plugin’s page here for more details.

WP-Print – If you install and activate WP-Print, a printer icon will appear at the top of each Single post page. See this post for an example. If you don’t install it, the theme will function just fine without it; you just won’t give your readers the option to print out your posts. Note: Be sure to Update Permalinks AFTER you activate the plugin as mentioned on the “Installation” page for the plugin here.

Get the Image – This is a sweet, little plugin from the very brilliant Justin Tadlock. It will make it easier for you to include post thumbnails and featured photos for all your posts without using custom fields. More on that in another tutorial. Again, if you decide not to use it, the theme will function fine without it.

Be sure you download the latest version of each plugin and upload them to your wp-content/plugins folder. Then activate them. The theme will do the rest.

Step 6 – Add Some Content to Your Sidebars

Go to Appearance -> Widgets and drag some content into your sidebars. Be sure to click the ‘Save Changes’ button when you’re done.

Step 7 – Be Sure to Visit the WP-Vybe Theme Settings Page

The link for this page is available under Appearance. I’ve given you a whole slew of optional settings for the theme, so feel free to change a few of them, and see what sort of site you can create for yourself.

Optional Step 8 – Make Your Featured Articles Scroll Automatically

See this comment.

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This is the H1 Heading

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This is the H2 Heading

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This is the H3 Heading

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This is the H4 Heading

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This is the H5 Heading

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Here’s an unordered list.

• Proin lacinia nibh quis massa.
• Sed sed justo sodales justo scelerisque ultricies.
• Ut sodales pretium augue.
• Proin interdum, enim ut ullamcorper hendrerit, felis turpis malesuada risus, ac gravida nulla mauris et odio.

Here’s an ordered list.

1. Proin lacinia nibh quis massa.
2. Sed sed justo sodales justo scelerisque ultricies.
3. Ut sodales pretium augue.
4. Proin interdum, enim ut ullamcorper hendrerit, felis turpis malesuada risus, ac gravida nulla mauris et odio.

This is a Definition List

WordPress Themes

A WordPress Theme is not a “skin”. Though many young people call it one. The reality is that a WordPress Theme contains many files that come together in various ways to generate a WordPress web page. A “skin” simply changes the look, and rarely the results.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress Plugins add flexibility, features, and capabilities to your WordPress site. There are hundreds to choose from. Some add power and control like monitoring and busting comment spam and enhancing your adminstration features. Others add fun things like random elements and polling and rating systems.

Here’s a blockquote.

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Here’s a Table

Here’s an image aligned to the left.

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Here’s an image centered.

Here’s an image aligned to the right.

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Testing Font Looks – H3 Heading

You will need to test the looks of the different font styles, too. This is bold and THIS IS BOLD. This is italic and THIS IS ITALIC. This is bold and italic and THIS IS BOLD AND ITALIC.

This is code and THIS IS CODE.

This should be back to the normal paragraph style and we hope you have been paying attention to the margins and paddding around each element, including the paragraph, so you can position things appropriately to the rest of the content.

H3 Heading

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Morbi quis risus at nisl blandit feugiat. Ut vel orci quis sem dapibus iaculis. Aliquam ut nunc quis nisi tincidunt tincidunt. Pellentesque enim. Sed et leo nec augue mollis pharetra. Etiam non pede quis ante convallis convallis. Cras at tortor euismod leo molestie aliquet. Quisque posuere ornare nulla. Proin scelerisque dignissim erat. Donec dapibus euismod est. Nam molestie consequat lacus. Fusce euismod dignissim libero. Morbi laoreet dolor sed mi. Aenean urna diam, malesuada eu, tempor non, euismod sed, arcu. Nullam egestas nisi non nulla bibendum pharetra. Cras pellentesque nunc nec odio. Aliquam sed eros eu lectus congue rhoncus. Praesent accumsan nisl at leo. Sed enim. Integer nisl.

You’re either in front of a client making your pitch or you’re trying to get in front of a client to make your pitch.

You also learn sales is a numbers game. For life insurance agents, the numbers game was the ratio 100:10:3. That meant for every 100 people you actually spoke with, you’d get appointments with 10 of them and sell 3 out of those 10. And that meant I had a phone growing out of my ear. I’d carry around a stack of index cards with names and phone numbers on them. Almost every evening after dinner, I’d retire to the bedroom to make at least 20 telephone calls; most of them cold calls. Yea, those were the days . . .

Every industry/product has its own version of the numbers game. I think it’s a security thing. It helps takes the uncertainty out of being being self-employed. It also helps focus your energy and activity. If I know I need to speak with 100 people this week to make 3 sales, you can bet I’ll be on the phone with at least 100 people trying to get 10 appointments.

Naturally, it’s a tad more complicated than that. Ultimately, the number of sales I make depends a lot upon the makeup of those initial 100 people. If I decide to speak with 100 people who are all over the age of 65, I’ll certainly get much worse results than the life insurance formula suggests. If I were selling long-term care insurance, however, those are the peope I’d want to be in talking to.

It’s not rocket science. It’s merely knowing who your product or service is best suited for and then doing everything you can to engage those people in a conversation. It works pretty much the same way on the web.

1. Make your off-site links open in a new window.
At one time, this was “convetional wisdom” for websites. The idea is you want people to remain on your site as long as possible, so if you link to an outside site, open that link in a new window, and thereby leave your website alive in the previous window.

That line of thinking is so Web 1.0. The reality is people will leave your site whether you want them to or not. Methods to trap them or keep them there just irritate them. Let them have the option to open links in a new window (or new tab for us Firefox users) if they choose.

As for blogs, some people go so far as to say the best blogs send their visitors away. Kevin O’Keefe, for instance, writes this:

“Some of the best blogs are what Buzz Bruggeman describes as intelligence agents. They post what they believe would be of interest to their target audience. Look at Steve Rubel’s Micro Persuasion or Dave Winer’s Scripting News. Read their blogs. They cover the globe for their readers by sharing via links what they read and hear. Mixed in you’ll get their strong commentary.”

2. Throw a pop-up box in front of me within 5 seconds of landing on your site.
Have you heard the term “pop-up blocker” before? There’s a reason people want to BLOCK pop-up boxes. They’re irritating. It’s like walking into a grocery store, and as soon as you do, an obnoxious clerk jumps in your face trying to sell you their latest brand of toilet bowl cleaner. He gets your attention, sure, but you’d rather punch him in the head than buy something from him. Websites are the same way. It doesn’t matter if you’re popping up ads, a newsletter sign-up box, photos of your kids or whatever. Pop-ups are irritating. Just don’t do it.

3. Create a cool, trendy Flash-driven site that takes more than 5 seconds to load and/or opens in a new window.
No offense to Flash developers, but most Flash-based sites are the ultimate in pretentiousness. They’re like buying the fancy sports car just to buff up your image. Flash sites are typically more about the site and/or company than they are about me the user. They usually take an inordinate amount if time to load, and if they have to open in a new window … well refer to number 1 above.

4. Make me try to figure out who you are and/or what your site is about. Bloggers are especially notorious for this. When I arrive on a site for the first time, I want to know one thing. What’s here that can improve my life? Unless I can figure that out within 5-10 seconds, I get irritated, and I leave. If it’s a blog, I want to know who the writer is. A picture would be nice, although a simple “about me” page will suffice.

5. Use an opening headline laced with hyperbole and ridiculous promises. Like this one:

“Discover the Amazing Scientific Breakthrough that Leads to Overnight Riches.”

I respect good copywriters for their ability to clearly and quickly communicate the value of a product or service without hype and/or BS. To this day, one of the best headlines I’ve seen on a website is for a product called Blinksale.

“The easiest way to send invoices online.”

Some may argue the word “easiest” is hype, yet for some reason, it’s believable to me as it’s used here.

I have to confess, in fairness, these are the things that irritate me about blogs and websites. Perhaps the best thing to do is ask your visitors what irritates them about blogs or websites. With any luck, you’re not doing any of them.

By the way, what irritates you about blogs and websites?

1. Write keyword rich post titles – it almost goes without saying, but the post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling title helps them decide if your post is worth reading or not. From an SEO perspective, think about the keywords or phrases people might type into a search box to find your post 2 months from now, and use those words or phrases in your post title. For maximum benefit, try to avoid titles that are cute, clever or cryptic.

2. Make your post titles live links – many of the WP themes already do this, but if yours doesn’t, you can add the necessary code pretty easily. In your Main Index Template and Page Template, find the code for the post tiltle. It’ll probably look like this (without the “#”):

<#h2><#?php the_title(); ?><#/h2>

To link your post titles, you’ll want to replace that code with the following (be sure to leave out the “#” symbols):

<#h2><#a #href="<#?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <#?php the_title(); ?>“><#?php the_title(); ?><#/a><#/h2>

3. Optimize your permalinks – the default WP 2.0 installation displays permalinks this way: http://www.savvysolo.com/?p-123. A more search-engine friendly permalink includes the post title in the link, like this: http://www.savvysolo.com/2006/01/16/keyword-rich-post-title/. This is a simple change to make. In your WP admin panel, click on the “Options” tab, then the “Permalinks” sub-tab, and choose the option just below the “Default” permalink option. See the WordPress Codex for more on permailinks.

4. Optimize your page titles – According to most SEO experts, the page title tag is one of the most important tags on your page. In most WP themes, you’ll find the page title tag in the Header Template, and the default version ususally looks like this (without the “#”):

<#title><#?php bloginfo('name'); ?><#?php wp_title(); ?><#/title>

The best tweak I’ve seen to optimize this tag comes from Stephen Spencer, who suggests using the following code for page title tag (omit the “#”):

<#title><#?php if (is_home()) { print "whatever title I want to have on my blog home page."; } else { wp_title(' '); print " : "; bloginfo('name'); } ?><#/title>

This tweak does a couple different things. First, it allows you to use a more descriptive, keyword-rich title for your blog’s main page. And second, for the individual post pages, it will use the title of your post as the page title, which is another reason to follow the advice I mentioned in #1 above.

5. Use the related posts plugin – Alex Malov’s Related Entries plugin is a neat little addition to any WP blog. Not only does it enhance your blog’s usability, but it also helps create a dense link structure throughout your site, which makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find and index older blog posts.

6. Use the Google sitemap plugin – According to Google:

“Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google.”

WordPress user Arne Brachold has made the sitemap creation and submission process fairly simple with his Google Sitemap plugin, which was recently updated for WP 2.0. This plugin will create a sitemap for you and submit it to Google.

Additionally, Elliot Kosmicki offers a script that will convert your Google sitemap into a Yahoo compliant sitemap that you can submit to Yahoo.

7. Add meta keyword tags and Technorati tags to your posts automatically – although it’s questionable whether or not meta keywords are still valuable when it comes to SEO, ultimately, they can’t hurt. As far as Technorati tags, they have little impact on SEO, but they can help increase your traffic directly from Technorati, so it’s a good idea to use them.Rick Boakes created the Autometa plugin that will add both tags to your posts automatically.

Another simple and effective Technorati tag generator I’ve used is Broobles’ Simple Tags plugin.

8. Validate your code – Use the W3C Markup Validation Service to ensure the code behind your pages is clean and valid. If you find your pages have errors in the code, hire or make friends with a savvy web developer to help you clean it up. See Google’s Information for Webmasters for more info on creating a technically valid site.

If you have further SEO tips for WordPress blogs, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

10 Tips for Writing Better Articles

Writing articles is a great way to create exposure for yourself and your business. In fact, I’d suggest it’s one of the best marketing tools you can use. Webmasters and newsletter publishers are always looking for good content. Further, aside from your time investment, it’s completely free advertising.

Here are 10 practical tips to ensure your articles get published and read by others.

1. Write to serve.
Before writing an article, ask yourself what problem it will help others solve. Some of the more common issues people deal with revolve around a lack of something, whether it’s time, money, self-confidence or just joy in life. How will your article help with these issues.

2. Grab their attention early.
If possible, intend to “hook” your reader right from the get-go. Ideally, your title should be the hook. When creating the title, ask yourself if it would make you want to read the article. Your first paragraph should also serve as a hook , as well as a general introduction to the article content.

3. Write to one person only.
Forget the fact your article will be read by many people and write to only one person, just like I’m doing with you now.

4. Keep the flow logical.
Don’t bounce around from one idea to the next. Each paragraph should logically follow the next. Although there may be different ideas expressed in each paragraph, they should dovetail off each other.

5. Use quotes to support your main idea.
Quotes from famous people are a great method to reinforce your ideas. They help you make your point and add credibility to your overall message. I use the quote library found at Motivation Mecca http://www.joshhinds.com or Uinspire at http://www.uinspire.com

6. Keep your paragraphs short.
Ideally, 4-6 lines per paragraph is what you want to shoot for. It looks and feels much more appealing to the reader to see “bite-sized” paragraphs.

7. Inspire action in your article.
If your article is, in fact, intended to solve a common problem, give people practical suggestions for taking action. Remember the formula “insight + action = growth.”

8. When possible, tie your message to everyday activities.
A good example of this is “life is like a box of chocolates.” Make it easy for your reader to relate to your ideas. That will also make it easier for your reader to apply your ideas in their life.

9. Summarize the article in the final 1-2 paragraphs.
Briefly summarize the main points of your article, how people can take action from the information and what results they can achieve.

10. Don’t forget the resource box.
Provide a brief resource box following your article. It should tell a little about you, your business, how you serve others and how to contact you. Be sure to include your URL and email address with an invitation to contact you or visit your site.

Using these 10 tips should help you write powerful articles that get published and read. Above all else, remember this. A writer writes. So – first – be a writer in your own mind.

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