Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

Somedays WordPress Can Make You Want To Pull Your Hair Out!

That’s why we’ve added a new weekly event for you to Kimberly Castleberry’s Facebook Fan page!

Hey everyone, I’m Kimberly Castleberry and for those that don’t know me I’m a WordPress tech that specializes in supporting small and home business owners in getting the most from their WordPress sites without having to become geeks themselves!

I run a number of events including #TribeTuesday and #FanPageFriday on my page throughout the week that provide you with opportunities to promote others as well as yourself. Check them out for more details.

I put #WordPressWednesday together to give anyone that is feeling stuck, confused, baffled, or generally curious about something related to WordPress or use of WordPress in marketing an opportunity to come out and ask questions and get them answered! Even better… its FREE!

Several generous individuals, including Nile here at WP Addict and others graciously join me in the fun and help answer a wide range of topics.

While there are some questions that are not possible to answer in a Q&A format, you’d be surprised what we can find a way to answer!

Whether its a plugin setting, questions about what plugin to use, difficulty with a configuration, puzzled over the difference between contact forms and optin forms, or wondering what the pros and cons of wordpress.com and wordpress.org are – we got you covered!

How does it work? Just come over to my page – ( Kimberly Castleberry Facebook fan page )], hit the “like” button if you haven’t already, and then go to the Wall tab and start a new message/conversation! As soon as I can I will answer you back to the best of my ability!

Now, of course actual support work is going to be required in some cases but generally with a little discussion most things can be answered right there on the page!

Even if you don’t have any questions, watching the questions that come in can be a great way to pick up pointers and ideas.

Skilled in WordPress? Come join us and flaunt your WP muscles! It’s a great opportunity to help answer questions, build your reputation and foster the love of our beloved WordPress in new users!

I look forward to seeing you on Facebook each week!

Kimberly

PS: Also be sure to check out #WordPressWednesday, #FanPageFriday, and #SharingSundays on Nile Flores’ fan page for another great place to promote your most recent blog post AND ask those WordPress questions!

I have been tagging quite a few commenters for spam and noting at other WordPress related sites, that there have been a lot of people leaving comments for their premium plugins.

The message has nothing to do with the original post and in my case, it was on a post of a plugin that had nothing to do with the premium posts.

Rather than go about it this way, perhaps the plugin makes should consider releasing the plugin to notable people in the WordPress community to try out and write their feedback. Commenting and leaving a spammy link does nothing but go to the trash or get ignored.

There are better ways to get the word out including affiliate programs, effective advertising on various networks, and as I have said, through word of mouth through product testing. My concern is that these commenters are the type who were hired cheaply at some freelancer website and by someone with no grasp on how to use social media marketing effectively.

Of course, there are individuals that are merely affiliates and do not work for a particular company, but they can be just as much as a nuisance.

So, this is just a heads up to those in the WordPress community and even bloggers who do talk about WordPress from time to time. Yes, even if you talk about WordPress or WordPress plugins, you might be targeted for comment spam.

How can you prevent this?

Obviously blocking every IP address involved in spamming is not going to cut it as you could accidentally block one of your regular visitors.

You can install spam plugins, but you still get spam. What you can do it visit the site of the plugin and report it. Make sure that if it is an affiliate link, to include that. In the case that you get excessive comments, find out where the domain is hosted and report it on a host level. The host may do several or some of the following:

• Terminate the violator’s account
• Blacklist the user’s IP
• Email the user to warn them of their violation and inform them of what actions will be taken if further behavior continues.

Have you experienced this? How did you respond to it (or did you)?

Direct linking also known as hotlinking where a person uses the image source link on their site instead of hosting it on their own space, is a very common problem. Direct link steals not just the fact that the image was made by another person, but that very person’s bandwidth. Those that pay for their site diskspace and bandwidth have a problem as this drains their bandwidth. If they run out for the month, they face site suspension until the end of the month or paying out of their pocket for extra bandwidth.

To combat this problem, there are several ways to deal with the situation:

1. Contact the webmaster responsible for the problem and inform them that you do not allow people to direct link your images. Give them 72 hours (3 days) to correct the problem. If they do use the image, remind them to give credit back to you.

2. If you cannot contact the webmaster at all whether it is by no response back or no email address given, contact their webhost. Both paid webhosts and freeserver hosts have similar policies on stealing and will either inform the webmaster or immediately remove the problem.

3. If you own your website and have some type of control panel with a Hotlink Protection feature, use that and disbable the ability to allow others to direct link.

4. You can go the mischievous way and give your direct linker an eyeful by creating an image that says something like ‘Stop Stealing my Images’ or ‘Stop Direct Linking’ and replace the image that is being hotlinked while renaming the image that was direct linked to something else. That image will show up on the culprits site and is sure to be removed. If you cannot make a graphic or want to use something, I made the image below and use it. By the way, save it to your own computer or I can make something even cruder.

Do you have any other suggestions?

I recently decided to try out Fiverr, a site where you can put up a service and charge $5. While it works great for a lot of things, it was an Epic fail for WordPress support questions.

I specifically worded my “gig” to not accept advanced questions or questions that would require me to fix a plugin or do something that took more than an hour. Frankly, I was not even up for dealing for a 30 minute problem because… well $5 is not even worth it and I would prefer to give it out for free or not at all.

Perhaps my expectations are high, but this was only an experiment. I do not know the people who have offered WordPress support for quite a while on Fiverr, but I am certain they have been wasting their time. I have had people asking for plugin support on premium plugins from other places, which means… they probably did not buy the original copy or… in the case they did actually pay, they never even bother contacting the plugin developers. The other requests were to add functions to existing plugins.

It was enough to make me click delete on the fiverr gig after two days.

So, while Fiverr is great for a lot of different services, it may not be worth it for WordPress support. People do not read the gig’s description and want you to bend over backwards. Those wanting to try their own venture, good luck, but you will get a lot of inquiries that will want you to do more than $5 worth of work.

If you are going to get a job done, get the guys at WPQuestions to do it. They will do it right and for a fair price.

It has become increasingly annoying to see some of my WordPress colleagues’ works being sold for $5 on places like Fiverr. Here is a quick search access on Fiverr to see if any WordPress themes are being redistributed.

The site does have its uses – that is, as long as people are not abusing the system. This extends to even some of the premium landing and squeeze pages being offered.

One example of redistributing on Fiverr is:

While GPL allows a user to use and alter a theme, and even redistribute it as long as it is under the same license. Software under this license can ALSO be redistributed for free or for money, regardless if the original product was free.

I do know for a fact there are plenty of plugins and landing page packages out there that do not embrace the GPL license. And while, I believe that having free software out there like WordPress is great – and the millions of users out there on self-hosted WordPress powered sites alone that make money through their own business or advertising, is this redistribution/ reselling of premium paid themes acceptable to those developers out there? Do they turn a blind eye?

It is funny, around 2005, in the blog community, I remember a whole uproar and “witch hunt” over webmasters who were being accused of copying other site’s code and design. This is about the time celebrity designs and copyrighted graphics were being blended together and put up on personal sites. Since then the community has changed to accept GPL. I mean- how did everyone learn how to web design…ANSWER: from viewing the source code from the cool code and design ninjas they regularly visited. Well, not everyone, but I am sure some of you reading this may have taken a more than a handful of peeks in the past few years.

Like I said earlier, I do support the concepts of GPL, and understand much of both sides of this coin. I wanted to know from some of the theme designers and developers who have premium themes out there in the online market to share their thoughts on sites like Fiverr re-distributing premium paid themes for a couple dollars.

Your thoughts?

Klout, an Izea property that measures how much reach and influence a person has over several social network platforms recently rolled out a new algorithm. Along with this, an influx of angry users due to their major drops in their Klout scores.

According to Klout, they score individuals based on three areas: True Reach, Amplification, and Network Impact.

Together these mean that Klout measures how many people you really are reaching, and if you are influencing them to actually do something. For example, doing something could mean retweeting a link or your words, or even talking with you.

According to Klout’s post A More Accurate, Transparent Klout Score they added subscores to allow you to see how your score has changed. They also mention that there may be people that do have drops, but significant ones are rare.

A lot of people use Klout for advertising, whether for their own website, or even monetizing their Facebook or Twitter Streams. Izea definitely uses this in consideration with working with advertisers for SponsoredTweets and some of their other properties.

As for this new algorithm, for those who experienced that “rare” significant drop in score, is it just the new Klout system trying to catch up, or how flawed is Klout.

Here are some of the reactions in the community.

Facebook (from Klouts fan page)

From Twitter:

Oh, and do not forget about Yoda!

What are your thoughts on Klout, either before or after this new algorithm implementation?

I happened upon Gail Gardner of Growmap.com through my connected with Kimberly Castleberry and Kristi Hines, and noticed how she was interacting and putting out great content to her followers. I knew with the unveiling of GrowMap Anti-Spam Plugin, I wanted to interview Gail.

The biggest thing that set her apart from other bloggers, in my opinion was her thorough coverage on topics that other bloggers would timidly touch on.

Gail focuses on her brand, rather than herself and for a reason most bloggers might shut shop for, and she does discuss valid reasons in one of the questions below that I asked her.

So, here is my interview with Gail Gardner.

Nile: What inspired you to start blogging, or why did you start blogging?

Gail: Before there were any such things as blogs way back in the mid-1990s when Web pages were new I used FrontPage to create a huge horse related Web site to organize and save my research. When I discovered StumbleUpon I found it a great place to save links with annotated comments – basically a super micro-blogging site before blogging became cool.

Blogs simply allow me to do faster and more comprehensively what I used to do on a regular Web site, then on StumbleUpon and in forums. I find blogs far more usable and better for discussions in the comments than any other format.

Nile: How did you go about promoting your own blog/ website?

Gail: My primary method of promotion is building relationships with other bloggers who use Twitter effectively. I add their RSS feeds to my Twitterfeed and they add my RSS feed so that all of our followers see our new content. I focus more on promoting other blogger’s blogs than my own. A primary way I do that is to write a Twitter length review that contains their Twitter username on StumbleUpon. That review gets fed to Twitter and Facebook and I pull it into FriendFeed.

If I really want to promote one of their posts I will manually add it to Facebook and/or FriendFeed, schedule extra tweets for the busiest Twitter times, or link to them from my own blogs. Another powerful method I use is to actively comment in other DoFollow CommentLuv blogs, I don’t get to do this as much as I would like, but I do it when I can. Whenever I comment in another blogger’s blog I make it a point to share that post – again using my StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed strategy.

Nile: Have you ever had some difficulty in the beginning when trying to reach a target audience? If so, how did you overcome that issue?

Gail: I intentionally originally targeted other bloggers and social media users by following them on Twitter. I started out by locating them on Twellow, using Twitter Search and FeelTipTop.com. Later I started following those who follow the bloggers who write similar content to mine such as @AskKim and @Kikolani. More recently I have used the new PeerIndex Firefox addon to follow Twitter influencers who are interacting with people I already follow.

Now I really want to reach more small businesses so my plan is to do guest posts for blogs they already read. I am also encouraging bloggers to make geographic locations part of their niche because by reaching a local audience they can improve their own communities and give themselves a built-in way to monetize. If you can reach a local audience it makes sense for local businesses to hire you to write about them, teach them to use social media (or manage their accounts for them) or buy ads on your blog.

There is much more detail on that in my post Your Geographic Location IS Your Niche.

Nile: A lot of people in social media have not been kind to blog owners that are not transparent. I noticed that you do not put your picture up nor have more information about yourself. Has that ever been an issue with Growmap.com and yourself, branding-wise?

Gail: When I first started GrowMap I did not even have a name associated with it, but that was awkward and caused challenges when I wanted to comment in some blogs. What I know that many other bloggers do not know is that there have been many instances that put bloggers who share too much online in danger. I know of many more than those I can share, but there are two that were very public.

The best known was when Kathy Sierra cancelled speaking engagements and quit blogging for a while due to death threats. The other was Techcrunch blogger Michael Arrington who took a break from blogging due to death threats and someone spitting in his face.

Each blogger must decide how much to disclose. Many people, including me, have stalker issues and for us it is wise not to make it easy for people who won’t let go to find us. That is the reason I prefer not to use my photo online and use a pen name for my blog. If a new blogger asked me I would advise them to do the same if they can handle the peer pressure to conform.

One of my favorite quotes is from Eleanor Roosevelt: “Great minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, and small minds talk about people.”

I believe in writing with substance and integrity and do not feel a blogger’s appearance or personal details are necessary unless they choose to become an online celebrity. Is the wisdom of Mark Twain any less wise because he used that pen name instead of his given name Samuel Clements? I think not.

Nile: You have teamed up with Andy Bailey of CommentLuv to produce an anti-spam plugin named GASP for short. Can you share a little about it and how the idea of this popular WordPress plugin came to be?

Gail: We actually have Phil Hollows of Feedblitz to thank for getting Andy to create the GrowMap anti-spambot plugin. Maybe he was tired of my complaining about the 1000+ spam comments a day I had to wade through to find my best comments that Akismet was putting into the spam folder or maybe he just had Andy’s ear more often than I did. However he convinced Andy to make the time to work on it, I and many other bloggers will be eternally grateful.

We need GASP because the way Akismet works it will keep banning more and more of our favorite readers’ comments because there is no consensus among bloggers regarding what spam is exactly. Many bloggers are over-sensitive and mark comments as spam far too quickly. It doesn’t take having your comments being flagged many times to end up marked as a spammer. Some bloggers I know have been repeatedly flagged. I did a survey and here are some of the definitions bloggers gave: spam is: any comment I don’t like; comments from anyone I don’t know; comments that link to any site that sells anything or has an ads on it.

It doesn’t make any sense that Akismet lets so much spambot spam through. When I first installed GASP I immediately went from about 1000 spam comments a day to less than 45 which shows that 955 of 1000 were automated spam messages left by bots. Blocking those spam comments – which are often clever enough to fool many bloggers into thinking they’re real – makes the process of moderating comments even in a very busy blog so much easier – and faster.

Nile: In your opinion, what is it that you believe a person must do in order to become influential amongst their niche?

Gail: Build relationships. IMHO, that is the key to influence. I believe there will be a great divide between those who give freely of their time, knowledge and influence to benefit others and those who are only interested in supporting others if they get something out of it first. The influencers I work with most – and I make and share influencer lists and blogger lists all the time – give first and know that paying it forward works. They don’t keep score and they don’t worry about whether you reciprocated or not. They just do what needs doing to create a better world and benefit everyone.

I am always looking for different tools out there for bloggers who have at least a minimal knowledge of putting together simple graphics. I stumbled upon Pixlr, which is a free online image editor.

Now, the site looks promising at a first glance and has an editor that you can use without having an account. The setup looks clean and has plenty of options, except for the fact that I could not use vector imaging to create.

(You can right click and open the image in a new window to see the full size of the image.)

This program even with just creating a simple image was a bit disappointing. When merging the layers of the background and text, and then saving as a JPEG at 100% quality, the image was a bit rough around the edges of the text.

Example:

For me, this is a big problem. Most of the people I know who have little knowledge of graphic design at least know how to put text on an image. If the text looks like this in the end result, the graphic editor is not worth using. Maybe in the future the editor may improve, but right now, even for basic text on graphics, this was a fail.

I did mess around with some of the brushes and effects, but it was nothing like using GIMP or Paint Shop Pro or even Photoshop. In fact, far from it. I think the best tool out of it was the free hand pencil. It has this shading feature that reminds me of studio art drawing.

Have you tried Pixlr? Are there other online graphic editors that you have tried?