Introduction

Hello ━ thank you for downloading this eBook! My name’s Alex

Denning and I wrote this thing! Before we get started with the

book bit, here’s a little bit about me and why I’m qualified to write

something worth reading.

I founded WPShout back in 2009, back when I was 16. The site was

originally called Nometech.com, but soon after launch it rebranded to

WPShout.com, where it’s remained since.

I started out blogging in 2008, writing for sites like WPHacks and

CatsWhoCode, sites which allowed me to push WPShout over 1000

subscribers in its first year. My work with WPShout has allowed me to

work with some of the most prestigious names on the web, including

the likes of Smashing Magazine.

This eBook, WordPress Blogging Guide, is the second eBook I’ve released

on WPShout and hopefully it’ll give you some insight into how I’ve

attempted to merge “blogger” with “WordPress developer”. The bulk

of this eBook is made up articles written for WPShout over the last two

years, but they’ve been updated and added to to keep them up to date.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 1

Throughout the next fifty or so pages, we’ll be starting off with the

basic things you need to get running with your blog. One of the things

it’s important to get sorted early is your email newsletter so you can

start building your subscriber list, before putting in place the comment

rules which will allow you to build a manageable, decent community.

In the second section we cover that blogger’s holy grail of effective

monetisation through two of the most popular ways: selling your own

products and doing effective affiliate marketing.

Finally, we move on to the fine tuning you need to do in order to keep

your visitors coming back for more. With this we cover just exactly

what SEO is with the help of some very highly respected people, after

which we learn how exactly to do it. The final section also covers some

simple optimisation as well as Facebook integration.

And then we’re finished! If, at the end you’re after more, hop over to

WPShout.com and the fun continues there!

Alex Denning.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 2

A brief note from our sponsorGabfire Themes designs WordPress themes that are highly functional

and backed by an active support team and community. We’ve built

themes for some of the largest sites on the web. Get your site online

today and find out why thousands of sites are powered by Gabfire

Themes.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 3

Section 1: Blogging Essentials

Creating email lists

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 4

Creating and then building your email list is one of the most important

things you’ll have to do when creating your blog.

Something which used just WordPress was what I was originally after,

so I set out the following criteria:

Powered by WordPress, ideally with custom post types or a

simple admin interface.

Double opt-in, with a nice bit of code I can put in my sidebar and

style for signups.

Import and export of lists as CSVs.

Shortcodes or similar for unsubscribe links.

Some sort of performance tracking.

Cheap; either a premium plugin or something with low monthly

costs.

It turns out this was a fairly comprehensive list of criteria and it wasn’t

possible to fulfil all of the criteria.

This left me with two options:

Use a premium plugin, such as WordPress Email Newsletter, and

sacrifice functionality I wanted such as tracking.

Or use a third party service such as MailChimp or Aweber and not

be able to send out newsletters from my WordPress dashboard.

In the end I went with MailChimp as I didn’t want to sacrifice

functionality and it’s not too much of a hassle to send emails out from.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 5

I went for MailChimp over Aweber simply because I’m familiar with it

(and it’s free!).

Creating a signup popup

One of the things I wanted to be able to do was create something

similar to what the likes of Darren Rowse on ProBlogger use — a little

modal popup which shows to first time visitors inviting them to signup

to the newsletter. I initially tried to do this plugin-less, but it didn’t

turn out well and so I ended up using a plugin called WP Super Popup,

which essentially does the same thing as the Popup Domination plugin

on ProBlogger, just there aren’t pre-designed forms.

Not having pre-designed forms was fine, though as I wanted to show

my MailChimp signup form which I embedded by using an iFrame (as

there’s no embed code for larger forms on MailChimp, oddly).

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 6

Obviously I don’t have any historic data to go on, but so far the popup

has accounted for 1/3 of new subscriptions, so seems to be doing

relatively well.

Signing up in the sidebar

The other thing I wanted to do was set up a sidebar subscription

form. This too was relatively easy — I just grabbed the embed code

off MailChimp and pasted it into the sidebar. I did then do a couple

of tweaks though — instead of adding another stylesheet to Shout

by using MailChimp’s stylesheet on its CDN, I put it at the bottom of

Shout’s.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 7

I then had a play around with the styling to make it look like the rest of

the site, moving the buttons around so they fit in Shout’s lovely uber-

wide sidebar.

And that’s all there is to it, so go and create that email list!

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 8

Stopping comment spam

I recently set up a blog for my band, Ellipsis. Just using a simple

theme which I customised a little so it worked better as a band website.

There’s also a load of fancy CSS3 goodness, naturally.

I ran into a problem, though. The blog was getting a ton and a half of

comment spam. All of it was being blocked by Akismet, which is great,

but that wasn’t stopping it getting there in the first place.

This is where we roll out the super-duper-ways-of-stopping-comment-spam.

There are a number of little tricks I’ve got implemented on WPShout,

largely using the .htaccess file.

What’s .htaccess? Excellent question! It’s a little file you’ll find in the

root of your WordPress install and lets you do all sorts security and

speed tricks. For further reading, I’d recommend Jeff Starr’s excellent

Perishable Press.

Trick 1: Only Let Actual People Comment

Captchas! Make would-be commenters do sums! All good and well, but

also a pain.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 9

We can use the .htaccess file to block comments which haven’t actually

come from your blog. These are going to spammy types. Add the

following lines, adding your blog’s name:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*wpshout.com.* [OR]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$

RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]

Trick 2: Stop Spammers Getting Near

If you want to see how this post was made, have a read of Art Direction

for WordPress.

Once again I can’t recommend Perishable Press enough. Jeff has a

blacklist which he keeps regularly updated. Implement the Perishable

Blacklist and all sorts of bad things will be halted from getting

anywhere near your blog.

Trick 3: Close Comments After 60 Days

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 10

Spammers will tend to target your most popular posts and they’ll only

know if a post is popular after it’s been online for a while. Meaningful

discussion also generally happens only soon after a post is published.

WordPress offers you the option to close comments a certain

number of days after a post is published, as seen on DigWP. Close off

your comments after 60 days and you’ll have had your meaningful

discussion and spammers can’t then spam all over the place. It’s like

having a cake and eating it!

Under Settings, Discussion, you’ve got the option to “Automatically close

comments on articles older than 14 days”. Change the number of days

to 60 to allow somediscussion to take place and tick the box. Save, and

you’re done!

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 11

That’s more or less all there is to it, surprisingly. Any one of the three of these tricks will stop your comment spam, but all three combined should eliminate most spam from your lovingly created blog.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 12

Section 2:Monetization

Sell products

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 13

I recently worked on a typical small e-Commerce site: about twenty

products, a couple of buying options, a couple of pages for about and

whatnot and a little blog added on the end.

The site’s end result in action.

Naturally, I looked to WordPress to handle everything — the products,

the blog and the pages. With custom post types, this wasn’t a problem;

a custom post type for the products and then an individual entry for

each of the products, with standard posts being used for the blog and

custom page templates for the pages. We’re not going to look at those,

though, instead we’re going to look at how the e-Commerce part of the

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 14

site worked.

Choosing a shopping cart

The problem was going to be the shopping cart itself. I was only after

something lightweight — a full plugin like WooCommerce would have

been overkill — and thus I turned to my (trusty?) friend PayPal.

The first thing to do was to sign up for a PayPal Business account

and then get started with Website Payments Standard, the free

PayPal checkout tool. There is a pay-monthly version, but it’s more

complicated than we need to worry about.

Creating your button

The button creator tool is surprisingly easy and versatile. You

can choose from a couple of different button types — shopping cart,

recurring payment or just buy it now are the ones you’re likely to use

— depending on what you want to sell. I used the shopping cart button.

You can then add an item name and ID, price and currency.

We’re then onto the useful part: customising the button.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 15

I needed to be able to select different types of bracelet (which cost

different amounts), so the first customisation was adding drop down

menus with a price option. I then needed sizes, so a drop down menu

with the different sizes was the next customisation. If you need text,

add a text field.

It’s all fairly standard at the moment, though. Clicking the “customise

text or appearance” button will open up the important section,

though, which allows you to use your own image instead of the PayPal

“Add to Cart” button.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 16

Here I headed over to GraphicRiver and picked a button pack that

suited the design, customising a little in Photoshop. Once I’d uploaded

it, clicking the “use your own button image” option and then linking to

my button let me use my custom button instead of the standard PayPal

look (the end result is below).

The rest is something you’ll have to do yourself: shipping, tax and

adding inventory. Once you’re done, click “Create Button” and copy

the code you’re given.

Adding to WordPress

Actually adding the button to WordPress

was quite simple, with the help of our

good friends custom fields.

For each bracelet entry, I added a custom

field paypal, where I pasted the button

code. I then added the following to the

single-bracelet.php file (as I’m using custom post types):

<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'paypal', true); ?>

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 17

This gets the custom field and spits out its contents, adding my lovely

button! I added a div around the code above in order to let me style the

button; once the styling was applied, I had a lovely new button!

No plugin here

I’ve slightly over-simplified things here; there’s slightly more to it than

just creating a button, putting it into a custom field and watching the

money roll in — I also used custom fields for the images you see on the

product page and had to add a second button for international postage

as PayPal wasn’t quite flexible enough.

I also had to add a div to each button code in order to get my styling

how I wanted it; it’s not a perfect system, but for a simple shopping

cart, it’ll do just fine.

Over simplification or not, though — plugin-less e-Commerce is a cost

effective, quick and easy way of setting up a shopping cart on any

WordPress powered site.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 18

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing has been my top way of diversifying my site’s

income. There are a couple of ways I'm now handling my affiliate

marketing through my WordPress Dashboard and this section will run

down the different ways I'm now doing this.

Making links nice

The first thing I've now got is all my links in one place and

standardised, all going: wpshout.com/go/product-name. I'm doing

this with a plugin called Thirsty Affiliates. It's the only premium plugin

I'm using on WPShout and it's a great way of sorting and organising

affiliate links, as the picture below shows.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 19

Using custom post types, Thirsty Affiliates provides an awesome way

of giving your affiliate links a really professional look. You can sort

all your links in one place and change them universally if the seller

changes affiliate provider instead of having to go into every single post

and page you've mentioned. It's also got a neat little addon for the post

editor screen which gives you all of your links in one place so you can

easily add them into a post. It really is an awesome little plugin and I

thoroughly recommend you check it out.

Automatically linking

All we've achieved so far is make our links look nice, but that's not

too much of a help; we want to have our links added automatically to

certain words or phrases for maximum profit.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 20

I do this by using a slightly unorthodox method: a plugin called SEO

Smart Links, which is meant to be used for setting up internal links to

improve SEO, hence the name.

Install the plugin as usual from the Plugin Directory and activate it.

Then, under Settings find Automatic SEO Links. You can then add a word

to automatically link and a URL to link to, and that's it.

That's all there is to it

This really isn't complicated stuff and I'm just using two plugins

here to make links look nice and then automatically add them into

posts. It's another one of those things that could have been really

complicated, but with the right help from a couple of plugins isn't.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 21

Section 3: Social &Analytics

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 22

Why do SEO?

I've always had questions about SEO, but nobody's ever been able to

explain it in such a way that sets out what it is, why it's important and

how I can benefit from it. This post aims to do exactly that, with the help

of some people much more qualified to tell you about it than I am.

My thanks to three awesome people for their help in writing this:

Nathan Rice, Lead Developer at Copyblogger Media, Jeff Starr, WordPress

Editor at Smashing Magazine as well as author of the excellent

Perishable Press and co-author of Digging into WordPress and finally

Alex Moss, Head of SEO at Banc Media and a Partner at Pleer.

So what is SEO?

Jeff hits the nail on the head when he describes SEO as "The optimization

of web pages for success with search engines." That's pretty much it in a

nutshell. Alex's definition takes us through the slightly more complex

definition:

"SEO is a process where you try to make a page, pages or domain as a

whole get as high up as possible in search engines for the keywords

you choose to target. These keywords would be chosen through

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 23

research based on how hard it would be to get to page 1. The effect of

SEO is made from 2 sources - one being what you do to the site/page

itself and the other is based on how other websites link to you."

Why is it important?

I asked Nathan why SEO was so important: "To me, SEO is about

optimizing your code and your content in a way that search engines

find easy to parse. I know there is so much more to SEO, like acquiring

backlinks, interlinking your content, pagerank sculpting, etc., but in

terms of return on your time investment, code and content seem to

matter the most, in my experience. "

I also asked Alex whether you or I -- average bloggers -- should be

paying for SEO to reap these amazing benefits:

"It depends on what you blog about and what you want to rank for.

If you blog about iPads, it's going to be practically impossible to rank

on page 1 for iPad. This is because you will be in competition with

companies who have more money and more resources. However, if you

are a blogger who writes about a certain niche it would be easier to

rank for the less competitive terms."

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 24

The answer is more or less no, unless you're trying to rank highly for

a competitive keyword, in which case you're probably not an average

blogger.

So how do I optimise my content?

Clearly, there's something to be gained from "doing" SEO. I asked Jeff

what he does to optimise content as Smashing Magazine WordPress

Editor.

“Smashing Magazine has an existing SEO strategy that involves

keywords, meta descriptions, permalink and title optimization,

internal linking and much more. Additionally, I like to focus on anchor

text, keywords, and above all quality content that will benefit the WP

community. My current SEO strategy is mostly aimed at optimizing for

people not machines. Great content is still king.”

I also asked Nathan to what extent having an "SEO optimised" is

important, or whether just having a sensibly coded theme will do the

job:

"A sensibly coded theme, along with a decent SEO plugin, will work

for most people. But all things being equal, a person with a theme

coded with SEO as a specific goal (and data to back up the choices they

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 25

make) will have an advantage. Markup output (HTML) matters. Speed

matters. Control matters. These are things that only a well optimized

theme can offer. So yeah, any sensibly coded theme will do. But for

a small investment, you can really step up your odds by going with a

theme that is built for SEO."

How can I benefit from it?

SEO plugins aren't the set-it-and-forget-it kind of plugin,

unfortunately. You actually have to do something with them in order

to get them to work for you.

There are a couple of places I'd recommend you start. WPCandy has an

excellent guide which runs down the basics.

It's likely you've got some sort of SEO plugin installed; pretty much

everyone has, and they improve your SEO, right? I mean, that's what

everyone says so it must be true. For years I had the All In One SEO

plugin installed on another blog, but I never actually did anything with

it. In hindsight that was incredibly silly, but at the time I thought I was

improving my SEO. I mean, I had the plugin installed and everything!

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 26

SEO plugins aren't the set-it-and-forget-it kind of plugin,

unfortunately. You actually have to do something with them in order

to get them to work for you.

I'm a big fan of Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin, which has a number of

awesome features -- as well as the usual changing of the <title> and

description, it handles XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs and can insert

certain content at the beginning and end of your RSS feed.

Have a browse through WPCandy and get Yoast's plugin. Read up and

it's likely you'll not make the same mistake I did all those years ago.

Thanks again to Nathan, Jeff and Alex for their invaluable

contributions.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 27

SEO tactics

I’ve always been sceptical about what benefits an “SEO strategy”

for your blog can actually bring, but I’ve been persuaded by things

I’ve read recently - including the contents of the previous section

- and so I decided it was time for an SEO strategy of my own. This

doesn’t involve “writing for search engines” or anything, just some

simple analysis of what works well and what doesn’t - and then some

optimisation of this.

Let’s break it down into a couple of steps.

1. Find your best posts

Head over to Analytics (or whatever you use), set the time back to the

beginning of the year and see what your best ten results have been. It’s

important to you’ve got a wide date span so results aren’t skewed by

your most recent posts.

I did this and found there were eight posts which were all a couple

of thousands visits ahead of the pack. I focused on these eight;

statistically, they’re my best posts.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 28

2. Find your best keywords

Whilst you’re still in Analytics, see which keywords people are using

to find your site. Again, there are probably a couple which stand out

as your top ones. Pick these out and then see where you’re appearing

in the results for these searches. If you’re halfway down the first page,

then it’s time to roll out the optimisation. Actually, regardless of where

you are, it’s time to roll out the optimization.

3. Redirection

My theme options tutorials have always been popular, to the extent I

updated the whole lot last year. The trouble was the original, not-so-

good original tutorial ranks very highly and visitors would often not

see the link to the new version. Plus, it made Shout look bad, having

a fairly bad tutorial getting thousands of visits — these thousands of

visitors would assume the site was horrendous.

The solution was to use a plugin, the first of a couple. This one’s

called “Redirection“. Essentially, it’s an easy way of adding 301

redirects to posts which tell search engines the post has permanently

moved to a new location — soon the updated, better post will be the

one ranking high.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 29

It works, too; as you can see I set up two redirects, the first to test

it out and the second redirecting the aforementioned post. At a

glance I can see 79 people have been saved from seeing the old post.

It also tracks 404 errors and seems to be working well! Thoroughly

recommended if you need to redirect posts.

4. Auto linking keywords

Google needs to know if your post is relevant to a certain keyword, we

all know this (or at least, pretend to). Therefore it makes sense to link

words of phrases on your blog to relevant posts.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 30

A quick bit of Googling and I found a plugin: “Automatic SEO Links“. It

pretty much does what it says on the tin: goes through your posts, if it

finds the word you’ve asked it to find, it links it up to the link you’ve

asked it to. And that’s pretty much it:

It is worth noting that after the “Penguin” update to Google’s Search Algorithm

in Spring 2012, this technique may in fact harm your site rather than helping

it.

5. Updating better posts

Some of my more successful posts were older and as a result weren’t

quite as good as the newer ones. They were still bringing in a ton of

traffic though, so I went through and made sure they follow the best

practices of today, not the best practices of a year ago.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 31

This may not help your SEO, but it will increase your readership as

search engine visitors will find your content interesting and thus come

back for more, instead of leaving immediately.

6. Change titles

I make a point of not writing my titles for search engines, instead

writing them for readers.

Lately I’ve started getting quite good at combining the two: short,

punchy titles that tell you immediately what’s in the post and also are

keyword relevant. The title of this post, for example, couldn’t really be

much shorter or more relevant.

On my older, successful posts I started changing the titles to make

them lean further towards keyword relevant rather than reader

relevant as the majority of readers will now be coming from search

engines and thus they need to be able to find the post. In my mind, it

makes sense to change the titles so they’re shorter and punchier.

7. Short, relevant URLs

Along with long post titles, in the past I’ve had long URLs which

I’ve kept the same as the title. Turns out this too was a bad idea: if

you’re not writing your titles for search engines (as you shouldn’t be)

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 32

then it seems reasonable to write URLs for search engines; they’re

not designed to show you what the article is about, they’re just the

location of the article!

I first noticed Chris Coyier doing this: wordy titles and short URLs.

Take the latest post, for example: “Tips for Web Design that Crosses

Cultures” or, http://css-tricks.com/cross-culture-design/.

Ideally you do this before you publish, but if not, you can use the

plugin from earlier to give a permanent redirect to the new URL. This

should have a noticeable impact.

That’s it. More or less all I did in a couple of hours. Already, as I said

at the top of the post, it seems to already have had an impact on my

search engine results and visits from search engines.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 33

Optimising your blog

In this section we’re exploring how to optimise WordPress for high

traffic. We’ll take high traffic in a small blog context — 1,000 or so

visits in a day, but exactly the same techniques apply to much larger

traffic blogs.

The average WordPress theme isn’t optimised. Whilst it may claim

to be or may in fact be to an extent, the nature of WordPress themes

means they have to be able to fit in any situation and so they are never

going to be as well optimised as a theme which has been designed

specifically for a single purpose. I’m not saying don’t use an off-the-

shelf theme, just you’ll need to customise it in order to get the best

performance out of it.

As we go through this post, the methods we’re going to use will get

increasingly complicated — start with the first and go as far as you can!

Get a good host

You can do all the optimisation you like, but if your hosting isn’t up

to scratch, it’ll have absolutely no use. Avoid over subscribed shared

plans on the likes of GoDaddy and HostGator and get a plan that

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 34

suits the level of traffic you’re likely to get. WPShout is hosted by

WPWebHost and is on the equivalent of the Buddy Plan but is still

on a server with 164 other sites — something far from ideal. I would,

however, recommend WPWebHost. The support is on the whole good

and, more importantly, the site stays up the vast majority of the time.

You can see which other sites are on your server with this tool.

Use a caching plugin

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 35

I can’t recommend W3 Total Cache enough. Whilst there are other

caching plugins are available and they all have their own pros and

cons, W3 Total Cache has a couple of extra features like support for a

CDN and auto-minifying which make it invaluable.

It is worth noting, though, that unless you set it up correctly it will

have little or no effect and may even slow your blog down, as this

post shows!

Things like the ability to minify and compress your HTML just by

turning on the setting are great to have. Have a look at WPShout’s

source and see for yourself!

Running a CDN is vital and WPShout runs on WPCDN – a service a

can thoroughly recommend. Mark Bailey from WPCDN explains the

advantages:

“A CDN can increase a website’s performance by serving items from the closest

possible location to the visitor. The web server would still provide the pages,

but images and other larger items would be served from the CDN.”

–Mark Bailey, WPCDN

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 36

If you, understandably, don’t want to pay for something which isn’t

essential for your blog’s existence, have a look at the Free CDN plugin.

I’ve no idea what speed boost it’ll give you, if any, so make sure you

compare it with your blog’s current loading time.

Get rid of unnecessary plugins

Plugins which have extra Javascript files are a pain because they have

a direct impact on the load time of every single page. Whilst you could

do what I’ve done on Shout and manually combine the files and then

remove the function that adds the JS in the plugin, you could just ask

yourself whether you really need the plugin. Michael Martin from

ProBlogDesign is currently redesigning PBD and had this to say:

“The big thing with WordPress is working out what plugins you really need,

and which actually aren’t worth the extra load times.”

–Michael Martin

And he’s right! Do you really need a widget on your sidebar that shows

the timezone in Australia? Review your plugins and only keep the ones

you really need.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 37

Experimentation is the way forward. Try out various combinations or

plugins, caching, getting rid of things and the like and you should be

able to find something that works for you. Good luck!

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 38

Facebook integration

Even in my time blogging, Facebook integration has shot up the list of

important things to do on your blog. It’s now pretty much inexcusable to

not have a Facebook presence on your blog, and this final section of

the eBook will show you how to make your own awesome Facebook

presence. We’ll be taking this one in a question and answer format.

Which are the best Facebook plugins?Is an excellent question and one which over the course of this post I

shall attempt to answer. Regular Shout readers will know, though, that

I’m a strong advocate of doing a little bit of coding and not using a

plugin for everything, a trend I shall follow in this post.

How can I add a Like button to posts?

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 39

Facebook has a series of “social plugins” which are an excellent place

to start for all sorts of little code snippets — and this includes Like

buttons.

Their website explains it much better, but the basic embed is:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?

href=YOUR_URL"scrolling="no" frameborder="0"

style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>

But of course, manually changing your URL isn’t practical, so replacing

YOUR_URL with<?php the_permalink(); ?> will automatically add the

current post’s link:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?

href=<?php the_permalink(); ?>"scrolling="no" frameborder="0"

style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>

There are, of course, an endless number of plugins which will do the

same job for you. If you’re after one of the aforementioned plugins,

Like seems to be a solid option.

How can I let users comment with their Facebook

profiles?

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 40

Excellent question! There are quite a few neat little plugins which

will do this for you. Facebook Comments for WordPress looks like an

impressively comprehensive choice. Whilst this is never something

I’d do on Shout, I will admit it could be quite handy to let your visitors

comment with their Facebook profiles to save them filling out the

Name, URL and email every time they visit your site (although a lot of

visitors will have this saved with their browser, so don’t use it for that

reason alone!).

How can I embed content from Facebook into posts?The trend of oh, there’s a plugin for that continues here, with the Embed

Facebook plugin providing this function.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 41

The plugin literally takes any link to a public page, album or whatever

and embeds the content into your post — the plugin’s site has the

picture below showing you how to use it:

This could get a bit annoying — personally I would have preferred

a shortcode so if I wanted to link to something on Facebook without

embedding it I could.

How do I get a widget like box?

Ah, the old “like box” in convenient widget

format that everyone has!

This is another case of get the plugin cause

it’s vastly more convenient. I’m sure there

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 42

are ways of doing it manually, but in this

case, the plugin is just so much easier. Facebook Fan Box seems to be the

one to go for here.

How can I automatically post to Facebook?

There are all sorts of plugins that’ll do this for you and they’re not very

interesting so you can just read them in convenient list based format

on this handy website.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 43

EpilogueAnd that, my friends, is it! We’ve reached the end! Thank you very much for reading and I hope you’ve learned something whilst reading. If you haven’t, then sorry about that - I’d recommend you hop over to WPShout and you’ll be able to learn something there. If you have, then that’s great! I’d recommend you hop over to WPShout and you’ll be able to learn even more over there. You might also want to follow me on Twitter - come say hi and let me know you’ve got to the end of the eBook! I’ll look forward to hearing from you :) Alex.

Kindly sponsored by Gabfire Themes © 2012 WPShout.com 44