Archive for the 'Interviews' Category

Digg Star Muhammad Saleem on Tech Talk

Recently, I was lucky enough to have a chat with social media maven Muhammad Saleem for Tech Talk Radio. It went to air in Australia March 3, 2008 – this is the transcript. If you want to listen to the Podcast, you can find it here; you can hear Muhammad at T/C 1:12:05 – 1:22:43.

Please enjoy.

Intro: Today I’m having a chat with one of social media’s most influential mavens Muhammad Saleem. Muhammad is considered one of Digg’s top diggers, pretty much anything he touches turns to Digg gold; here is what he has to say about social media:

LD: You seem to be very much a whiz kid at all this type of stuff. What is social media?

MS: Well I think there are several different niches within social media. First there’s social news sites, where you have Digg, Propeller, Reddit, and StumbleUpon and those kind of sites, and then you have social networking, where you have Facebook, MySpace, and so on, and then you have sites like Flickr, and YouTube. So social media is any kind of site where you have community participation, where the people that sign up for your site are the ones that are creating the content, or finding and uploading the content, and they can share it with each other.

LD: I fell in love with bulletin boards years and years ago, and this is all starting to remind me of that, where we all chat to each other and help each other - how do I do this, and where do I find this - that type of thing seems to be happening now with social media. Do you agree with that or do you think it’s a completely different thing?

MS: In a lot of ways this is similar to that, in fact there are sites that are coming up now, where the community helps you make tutorials for sites, and helps you figure out what’s going on, or there is community powered message boards you can ask questions and they help you figure out how to do something, or how to figure out the problem you’re having, so, yeah, in many ways, it is similar to that.

LD: There are a lot of marketers out there at the moment who use or abuse these sites to promote a product or a brand. At the same time, I wonder whether they also need a space to go and talk about their product. What can they do to make it better for them?

MS: In a way it’s self regulating because if you try to push a product and the community doesn’t like it, the community is going to bury it, for example if you’re on Digg or StumbleUpon, they’re just going to mark you down; your content is not going to get promoted to the front page. Only a couple of people see it before it just disappears.

So one of the things that marketers have to do is to lay it out in a way, or present it in a way that appeals to a specific community and when they do that, the community just enjoys the piece you’ve written or the way you’ve presented it, and they’ll promote it. So you’re happy because your product gets promoted, and the community is happy because a piece of content you’ve created, the way you’ve presented it, is enjoyable for them to read.

And the other thing is that there are sites that are specifically designed for marketers. For example, there’s one social news site called Sphinn, and that’s specifically for online marketers to share their content on.

LD: And Sphinn is one of the very few sites that says its okay to submit your own stuff, isn’t it?

MS: Right.

LD: Whereas the others don’t like that so much.

MS: It’s tough to be submitting your own stuff because the community doesn’t like it. They want you to have more of the natural kind of participation; they want you to share. Once in a while submitting your own stuff is okay, but they don’t want you just to be a part of the community so you can push your own stuff.

LD: Do you find people try to game the system?

MS: Yeah, a lot of people try and game the system, and being an active community member on a lot of these sites, I find a lot of people coming to me a lot of the time and saying: “hey, can you submit this piece of content for me?” and in most cases, if it’s interesting, and it’s good enough, and I think the community will enjoy it, I’ll put it in. But, a lot of times, I’ll say “No, I don’t think this is a good fit for the community,” and so I’ll say no. So I think it’s not necessarily gaming the system, just they feel if one user has more exposure within a community, and they have a good piece of content, they just want to submit it so the most number of people get to see it and vote on it.

LD: What would you say are the five elements that would be crucial to make it on Digg?

MS: I don’t even thing you need five elements. To begin with you need to understand the community and the kind of content they like. You can’t just pick up a piece from Science Journal which is very academic, and submit it to Digg and hope it succeeds. You can’t have it too long, so the length is important, maybe 500 – 700 words. The way you present it is important; a lot of times if you write a list, it’s much better than just writing paragraph upon paragraph of content. Because, you know, lists are easier to read - more fun to read a lot of the time.

Know the content you’re creating, know the kind of audience you’re targeting, and present it in a way that the community finds it fun to read; with pictures, and videos, as a list. Just don’t make it very academic and very long. Because social media is about instant gratification, nobody wants to spend like 15 – 20 minutes reading an article.

LD: What about the five no-no’s for submitting content?

MS: There are a lot more no-no’s; don’t put too many ads on your site, don’t make it seem like you’re just creating content to make money, don’t do blatant self promotion; don’t make it look like a product page. You just want to make it feel like it’s a good piece of content and you just want to share it with the community. Don’t make it seem like an ad farm, don’t have a lot of affiliate links, things like that. Don’t make content very specifically SEO so the community just thinks that you’ve created a piece of content to get it on social news just so you can get ranked on Google.

Make it a good piece of content that the community is going to want to read and I think that’s still the easiest way to succeed.

LD: It’s a matter of really getting to know the community first, isn’t it?

MS: Exactly. Yeah, before you start submitting content, you really have to participate and understand the community – who the community is composed of and what kind of content they really love. And that’s why a lot of people who just join these sites make mistakes, because they join and they immediately start to submit content, and they’re surprised why they’re not getting any votes.

LD: The biggest sites, I’ve seen, the most talked about are Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon. What are the differences between those three particularly?

MS: Del.icious is purely bookmarking, where you bookmark a story and pick it up later, or you share the bookmark with your friends within the network and so on. They do have a front page in a sense that if a lot of people instantly bookmark the same page, you’re on the hot page and that can send you a lot of traffic.

But, for the most part the difference between Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon/Digg is that StumbleUpon and Digg are ways to discover new kinds of content, and they’re more a social news site than they are a bookmarking site. You don’t use Digg or StumbleUpon to bookmark stuff; you use them to share a piece of news or submit some interesting content you just discovered, and so for the most part, to find interesting content that other people have submitted.

Apart from that, Del.icio.us is kind of universal in that you can save whatever piece of content you want in there and that’s okay, whereas Digg and StumbleUpon, the communities on both sites they have their own unique characteristics. StumbleUpon tends to be a little more on the creative side, whereas Digg tends to lean more towards science and technology, and sometimes politics and world news.

LD: What should corporations and marketing teams do if they want to get involved in social media?

MS: I think the best thing they can do is use the systems and participate as actual community members, rather than try to abuse or/and game the system. If you’re interested in participating, and if you’re interested in getting any sort of credibility, you have to actually participate. You have to submit content from diverse sources, you have to comment on other people’s submissions, you have to vote on other people’s submissions, and you can’t just come in as a new user and submit your marketing content and expect it to be successful.

LD: Digg used to have a list of top diggers. Now they’ve taken that down – do you know why?

MS: The official reason for that was they didn’t want people to abuse the top diggers list. They felt that if there is a list a lot of people are going to be approaching the top diggers with really crappy content to try and get that submitted. But quite frankly I think the reason they removed it because they don’t want the most active community members to have that kind of visibility within the community.

They don’t want it to be a community of 3-4 million people who looks up to a group of 10 or 20 people because they’re on the top of the list, because it is worrisome for them as a business to have an entire community look up to small number of people. I guess that’s why they removed it.

LD: Muhammad thank you so much for talking with me, it was really lovely that you gave me your time.

If you’re interested in learning more about social media, tune into Muhammad’s weekly show on Ustream.tv where along with Mr. Babyman and Zaibatsu, two other top diggers, they talk news, technology and social media. Visit The Drill Down for more information.

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Piggy Bank Pie Blogger Patrick Bisaillon Talks About Guest Blogging

So you’re a small company with little or no marketing budget.  What do you do?  Guest posting on well known blogs is one way to get your name, your product, or your service out there.

Recently, Patrick Bisaillon of Piggy Bank Pie wrote a guest post for John Chow; a major coup.  Originally, I had intended to interview Patrick for a follow up post here on how to contact bloggers, but his answers were too good to incorporate into a larger post.

As a result, I have chosen to publish his thoughts about his blog, his ideas for the future, and how he managed to get a guest spot on one of the biggest blogs around with his article: The Guest Bloggers Guide to the Blogosphere.

Please enjoy!

Lid: When did you start Piggy Bank Pie?

PB: I officially launched PiggyBankPie on Oct 1st 2007.

I’ve started working on the project around mid August, when I dropped out of the 30 Day Challenge.  Now I guess I need to explain why I quit the challenge. ;-) Well, for those who have been active in the 30DC forums last August, I was the leader of The Teamless Team, until I couldn’t connect to the Internet for 3 days because I moved out to a new house.

When I came back 3 days later, all members had vanished and I ended up being team less. So after that I continued listening to the 30DC podcasts, but I decided I would not go for the gold and I’d simply try to get the most out of the learning material.

I started reading blogs about 2 years ago. Then, I discovered JohnChow.com via an interview on a TV show in Canada called The Lab with Leo Laporte (also broadcast in Australia.) I learned 3 things from this interview:

  1. The Make Money Online niche
  2. The existence of something called the blogosphere
  3. The power of blogging.

For me blogs were great sites where I was reading tech reviews, I had no idea bloggers were blogging about… blogging!

So while I was dealing with the idea of starting my own blog, I was also trying to find a niche. I came really close to start a blog on HDTV and Home Theater.  But then came the 30 Day Challenge.

Lid: What are the original goals of Piggy Bank Pie and are you reaching them?

PB: My ultimate goal is to make enough money to pay guest bloggers publishing articles on PiggyBankPie. Am I reaching my goal? Slowly, yes.

In October there was not enough revenue to do such a thing.  But November was different, and I was able to purchase 1 article per writer who contributed since the beginning. How’s December going? Can’t wait to see, but you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed for latest details on the story ;-)

Lid: Where would you like Piggy Bank Pie to be in one year?

PB: By being active as a guest blogger and expanding collaboration with other bloggers, I am hoping to enlarge my RSS subscribers and get better visibility. This should lead to increase in revenues for PiggyBankPie Writing Services and therefore money to pay authors contributing to my blog.  If I have enough revenue in 1 year to purchase 2 articles per week, then I will be very happy.

Lid: Is this the first time you have guest posted at John Chow? 

The Guest Blogger’s Guide To The Blogosphere was my first guest post on John Chow dot Com, and there will be a next time ;-)

It was the second post I sent him and John refused my first one because it was about Making Money Online. I guess he wants to protect his site’s credibility and I agree with that. We all know he’s making lots of money online, so he’s the best person to blog about this topic.

Lid: What type of relationship did you have with him prior to this post?   E.g. commenting periodically for two months, subscriber for two years, uncle… ;)

PB: He’s my father! :-)

Just kidding.

I became a daily around May 2007. Then when I started the PiggyBankPie project, I thought it would be a good idea to launch an advertising campaign at the same time that I would officially launch the blog.  So I contacted John by email and booked an RSS spot for $200. Basically, you get a note in the RSS feed saying  “This post was sponsored by PiggyBankPie…”  You may say it’s a lot of money, true, but it really helped me to get respectable traffic rapidly.

When you become an advertiser on a blogger’s site, I think you naturally open a channel that other bloggers don’t have access to.  Since then I emailed John a few times and always got a reply.

Lid: Can we include a portion of his reply?

PB: You know, John is quite a busy man (John Chow dot Com, The Tech Zone, TTZ Media), so his replies are often straight to the point:

Hi Patrick,

Thank you.  I will post this tomorrow.

John

Lid: Would you consider John Chow to be your mentor?

PB: I could say that, but my journey in the blogosphere came to a turning point when I met Maki from Dosh Dosh. Not long after I discovered John Chow dot Com I stumbled on Dosh Dosh and became a frequent reader.

Today I would say that both John Chow and Maki are great sources of inspiration for me.

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WordPress for Dummies

  wordpressfordummies.jpg

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking with Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author of the new book, WordPress for Dummies, for Tech Talk Radio Australia.

Unfortunately my recording didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped :-( and the interview was cut down to about six minutes; my producer, Andrew McColm has promised to do another interview with Lisa in the coming weeks. 

In the meantime, here’s a transcript of the interview:

Lid: WordPress for Dummies.  Long time needed; now you’ve done it, what inspired you?

LSW: Very long time needed.  It’s about time WordPress got into the dummies format for WordPress users everywhere.  What inspired me to write it is my love for the product

I’ve been using WordPress since 2003 which is when it first came out.  I was originally using Six Apart’s product, Movable Type, to blog with, and when WordPress came out I made the move and haven’t looked back since

Lid:   So why is WordPress so great?

LSW: There are several reasons why WordPress is so great.  It’s free; and that appeals to people everywhere, from all walks of life.  The biggest reason - it is so easy to use. 

The really great thing about WordPress is that is perfect for the beginner who doesn’t necessarily know anything about coding HTML, or PHP, or CSS, or any of those alphabet type names.  It is perfect for the new user because they can just log in; start posting, publish, and they’re done; their blog is up and they’re speaking to the world. 

But what is excellent about it is that the product is so flexible, and so sensible that advanced users who do know, and who are savvy with web development, CSS, theme development, and PHP can also extend the product to fit and suit their needs as well. So it kind of covers all walks of life from a technology standpoint. 

Lid: It also doesn’t dump advertising generally on your site

LSW: No it doesn’t advertise at all on your site

Lid: Tell me about the different flavors because this is where a lot of confusion stems from: dot com, dot org and MU.

LSW: There are the three different versions which are covered in the book; it gives a version of WordPress for everybody.  So if you start with WordPress in its basic, simplest form, you’re talking about WordPress.com which is the hosted version of WordPress. 

And what’s really nice about WordPress.com is that anybody can set up a WordPress powered blog within five minutes.  They don’t have to install any software, or configure anything, or pay for Web hosting because it is all free, and the WordPress.com folk take care of all of that for you.  It’s all right there and you don’t have to do a thing.

The next step from there is the WordPress.org software which is considered self hosted.  What you need for that, is you do need a Web hosting account, you do need to have a domain name, and you will have to install the software on your own server, so WordPress.org does require a bit of technical knowledge and ability, whereas WordPress.com doesn’t require that at all.

And then WordPress MU – MU stands for multi user, and you will find sites like James Farmer – who is down there with WordCamp [Melbourne] this week, using it for his very, very successful place at  edublogs.

WordPress MU is actually the software that WordPress.com runs on, and it allows you the ability to run several blogs on one domain.  So you can have users signing up with just their user name and they could have a blog on like lidija.wordpress.com, and it allows you to have several hundred, up to thousands of blogs, within one network.  So, it’s really good for blog communities and blog networks; people that want to really go in that direction. 

So WordPress covers all genres of bloggers out there, which is a whole other thing that makes them really great.

Lid: With MU – is there a cost involved with that?

LSW: No, as with everything else with WordPress, MU is free.  WordPress.com, WordPress.org, WordPress MU – it’s all free, open source software and anybody can use it.

Lid: What about spam - how do they deal with that?

LSW: Spam is a problem with any blogging platform, it doesn’t matter what you’re using whether WordPress, Movable Type.  The folk at Automattic, which are Matt Mullenweg and the guys who are behind the WordPress development, developed a plugin for combating spam called Akismet

It is a very popular plugin for WordPress, that kind that stops spam in its tracks.  It checks the comments and trackbacks that are coming into the blog, runs it through several different spam filters, and makes a determination on whether or not it is a legitimate comment or if it is spam.

When Akismet hit the market it really made a huge - tremendous - difference with the amount of spam bloggers were getting on a daily basis, because we get upwards of several hundred, several thousand comments per day and it gets a little hairy.

Lid: Should users delete it, or mark it as spam?

LSW: Akismet learns, it learns with user input, so if everybody is marking these comments as spam, it allows Akismet to recognize these types of comments, either from their IP, or different headers they are sending to the server, so that they can filter them as spam in the future.  Hopefully at some point they’ll be able to catch all the spammers - which would be really nice.

Lid: How does WordPress compare to the other products – Movable Type, Blogger, TypePad

LSW: To be fair to the other products out there, and I do want to be fair, each provides a different type of service depending on what you want to do for your blog; I’ve worked with probably all of the blogging platforms available out there and what I’m finding is that WordPress is easy to use. 

I set up Web sites and develop Web sites for my clients.  My goal is to create and set up sites that my clients are able to manage and maintain themselves - not have to pay me to maintain them for them.

[Lid: Lisa’s business is E.Webscapes]

Lid: Wall Street Journal, New York Times:  Who else is using WordPress?
 
LSW: Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Le monde in France, Harvard University, CNN, and lots of celebrities are using it.  Rosie O’Donnell is using it to power her blog.

WordPress exploded; it really exploded.  It is a very popular software and I still believe the reason for that is because it is so easy to use.  And that it’s free.  These companies are able to pay, but they choose wordpress because they find it to be easier for them and the people that work for them to use and update and maintain their websites

Lid: So who is blogging - why do people blog, and what types of people blog?

LSW: Types of people range from people who want to post pictures of their cats and dogs, to people who are running businesses large and small.  Personal bloggers use WordPress and blog on the Internet to keep in touch with friends kind of as a hobby to do, but you’ve also got businesses who are using blogs to reach their consumers and reach their client base interact with their client base and create more of a presence the Internet, which is really, by the way, important for businesses these days - to have that Internet presence.  And to have a blog really allows you to do that, because not only are you present on the Internet, but you’re interacting and there is feedback back and forth between you and your consumer base, which consumers are expecting more and more of. 

Lid: Tell me a little about plugins and themes and tricky things

LSW: With WordPress.com you’re not able to use plugins.  You’re not able to install them and you can only use the themes that they have available to you.  So, what we’re really talking about when we talk about using WordPress plugins is the WordPress.org self hosted software.

So you have your hosting account, you’ve installed WordPress, and now you’re able to expand your blog and your site through the use of WordPress plugins.  And there are literally thousands of them available out there.  You can find them by searching Google, but you can also find them at the WordPress.org website. [ WordPress Plugins]

These plugin developers create plugins that allow you to do things like give your readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog via e-mail.  If you subscribe to my blog via e-mail then you would get an e-mail every single time I made a new post to my blog.   So if you were that interested in what I had to say that would be great. 

But that is not something WordPress does out of the box.  That would be an example of a plugin or if you want to think of it as an add-on.  

There are literally thousands of possibilities of what you can do in terms of managing comments, managing your posts, creating image galleries, using a lot of the social media sites, like Digg, Technorati, or Netscape.com.  You can do anything from provide a better experience for your readers, increase publicity on your site, and even revenue - make money with your site.  A lot of big bloggers are making some decent cash running WordPress blogs.

The themes, same as the plugins, there are thousands of WordPress themes out there.  There is one website, themes.wordpress.net.  There, users can find thousands of themes that they can just download, install on their blogs and activate with just a click of a button.  It allows you to have a different theme, or find a theme that you like, or change your theme every day if you really wanted to; I mean the possibilities are really endless.  And again, all; of this stuff is free.

Recently Matt Mullenweg who is kind of the head honcho over there, came in and took over the theme site a few moths ago, and cleaned it up, and made sure that the themes there were decent working themes and good representations of WordPress.  That would be the best bet for people looking for free wordpress themes

Lid: He pulled out stuff that had ads embedded in it didn’t he

LSW: There was a strange trend going on for the last year.  We were speaking of spammers, comment spammers, and the same genre of people found out that it is not that difficult to get a link to their site by creating WordPress themes and putting their links, in essence, in the footer of the site.  So all of a sudden at the WordPress theme site, you saw hundreds of themes going up with gobs of advertising links at the bottom.  Same type of stuff you see in your comment spam box – Viagra, porn sites, pharmaceutical companies - all in the footer of these WordPress themes.  It kind of left a bad taste in the mouth for a lot of people in the WordPress community. 

Lid: What are your 3 favorite plugins?

LSW: There is a plugin Alex King made called Share This.  Once you’ve installed it on your blog, it puts a little icon on every singe post you make that allows users to submit your post to the various bookmark sites Digg, Technorati, Netscape. 

Before Alex’s plugin, you would have seen a lot of blogs with all of those different social bookmarking icons underneath the post – so you could have anywhere from 5-12 icons mucking up the look of the post.  That I love, my clients love that.  It cleans everything up and it makes it very simple. 

He’s got his WordPress projects listed on his site, and he’s developed several very useful [plugins].  He’s actually one of the original developers of WordPress.  I don’t think he’s working with them anymore but he is very involved in the WordPress community through providing great plugins and again, free. 

Lester Chan.  He is a student, and he uses his WordPress plugins to put forward as he is going through school.  People make donations to him because his work is fabulous.  He’s got a couple of plugins that are just fabulous and one is called WordPress Print, and once you’ve installed it, it allows you and your readers to click an icon in your post, and it creates a beautifully formatted post that you can print

WordPress Database Manager, which is not a plugin that provides much value for your readers but it is a good plug in for you, the person that is managing the website because it allows you to manage your database, which is your mySQL database, that stores all of the data from your blog; all of your posts, comments, trackbacks, all settings, links categories – everything.

And it allows you to make a very nice back up.  If I can just say a word about back ups – any WordPress users, it is really essential and extremely important to keep that database backed up because should anything happen to it; you lose everything you’ve worked for. 

Lid: Business blogging - where is that going?

LSW: Business blogging has yet to reach its potential.  I think that over the last couple of years there has been a real surge in business blogging and business are trying to make their way, and muddle through, and find their niche in the blogging market. 

I think that as time goes by, people that are consumers of Internet technology are really learning and discovering the potentials are there.  You’re seeing the emergence of social networking, you know like Facebook and My Space and Twitter, and all of these different types of social networking sites that are changing the face of PR and Marketing.  I think we’re going to see some more refined emergence of business blogging out there as people really fine tune what they’re doing.  Using blogs for business is really a great tool, really a super tool for reaching consumers, client base, colleagues, and networking.
 
Lid: Future of Web publishing?

LSW: Interesting.  You talk to people and think, what is the next great thing, what is the next new thing?  And blogging really hit the Internet 2004 ish, 2003 – when it really became the big thing, and as I said, it is going to become more refined now as people are using it more as community rather than individual blogs.

We’ll start seeing communities of niche areas and niche markets when it comes to businesses and when it comes to personal blogging your going to a see a lot more communities revolving around different interests.  It already is becoming more of a group effort as people contribute to the discussion and conversation regarding several different topics of interest – you can find a blog on about just about anything; and if there is a blog about it there is a group about it; changing the conversation and changing the discussion on the Internet.  It’s very exciting to watch and experience. 

Lid: Blogs – the word blog – had this awful stigma attached – that’s changed a lot recently

LSW: I have been doing it since about 1998.  In terms of Internet years, I’m just ancient.  Then, you didn’t even want to admit you even had a blog because it was so ridiculous and it had that stigma attached to it you know, “Internet blog” but it has really gained a lot of street cred; credibility because people are seeing it as a really viable tool.

We talked about business, but aside from business blogs, in the area of politics, at least in this country, in the United States, blogs have a real strong voice here and politicians in our government, from 2004 have really recognized the power of what they call the citizen journalist; the power of the voice, and blogs really started giving the average Joe a voice in what is going on in this country.  I think that blogs now are recognized by media, by government, by business, as a real solid strong force to be reckoned with

Lid: Your website, Just a girl in the world, how did you get the name?

LSW: So many people ask me that, and it is such an easy question.  It is the name of a song by a group called No Doubt, and a singer by the name of Gwen Stefani.  I like that song because it just says, tongue in cheek, I’m just a girl - what could you expect form me? The feeling behind it is, don’t underestimate me just because I’m a girl.

In the tech field, not so much now, because we are becoming more aware, but back when I first started in technology, women were a rare presence and so I became the token geek girl in my professional circle.  I’ve had the domain for about 5–6 years now.  Just a girl in the world

Lid: If anyone wants to know more about your book, they can just go visit your site at just a girl in the world – links form there I take it?

LSW: I do post regular updates – I have been writing this book since January 2007 and so though all that if anybody is interested, they can read my archives.  Sort of read the path and journey that I’ve been on with this book during this past year.

Lid: Give us a brief overview of how it all came to be?

LSW: I was approached.  It came about from a speaking engagement that I had in 2006.  I spoke at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference, an annual conference held in Texas every year.  I was a panel speaker there on the topic of Web design and blog design, and of course using WordPress as an example of what you can do with blogs and how you can make them look nice. 

Through that I made several contacts from the industry and one of them was with an author who had authored several Wiley books in the past, and she had approached me with a publisher, one of the acquisition editors from Wiley Publishing, whether or not I would be interested in publishing, co-authoring a WordPress for Dummies book at the time.  And I thought I can co-author, that is not a big deal, I can write a few chapters on WordPress and what I know about WordPress.

And that worked.  As long as I’m sharing the blame with somebody, and that was in March 2006.  I really didn’t hear anything for the rest of the year until December 2006 when the editor from Wiley contacted me and said, “You know, we thought you’d like to be the co-author, but how would you like to be the lead and only author of the book because the other person we have in mind just can’t.”

I like WordPress, I love WordPress.   I’ve used it so much and the opportunity to share my knowledge and to share my passion about the product really inspired me to say, yeah I’ll take a chance, and jump off that cliff and write a book.  My English teacher would be laughing right now. 

I started in January of 2007 and finished officially in September of 2007 and it was quite a ride because between those months, WordPress released 3 or 4 different versions of the software.

Every time I got one of those e-mail updates, “We’re anticipating the release of the new version of WordPress,” I’m going ‘NOOOO – stop” but, WordPress is a very progressive platform and the developers are aggressively trying to make it the best it could possibly be, so I can’t fault them for that - and I couldn’t ask them to slow down just because I was writing the book.

Lid: Google likes WordPress; they seem to get into results very quickly.

LSW: WordPress blogs do that.  It has a lot to do with how permalinks are structured in WordPress.  If you’re using the custom permalink option you can set your permalink to whatever you’d like, but if you do a post called WordPress for Dummies, those words are actually in the URL and search engines love that.

There are some SEO or search optimization tips for WordPress in the book as well.

SEO, a lot of it is common sense if you start to understand how the search engines work, and what they are looking for.  And really, anyone can do SEO on their own site by doing a little bit of research and using WordPress.

Lid: If you had to recommend three really great sites for bloggers to get reputable information from, what would they be?

LSW: To blog well, as business and to make money, Pro Blogger.  He runs an extremely successful, very popular site and it is that way because he provides very useful content; brilliant content.

Weblog Tools Collection.  That is a site that provides you with all sorts of information about blogging, but they have a special focus on WordPress.  You will find weekly updates about new WordPress plugins, new WordPress themes, new that you can do with WordPress to make your blog better, or make more money, or that type of thing

The final place that I would recommend for bloggers that are looking for information on WordPress is Blog Herald

Lid: Lorelle is writing there now isn’t she?

LSW: She blogs at lorelle.wordpress.com, you can also find her at Blog Herald.  She recently wrote and published a new book called Blogging Tips: What bloggers won’t tell you about blogging, and I have read, I haven’t gotten myself a copy yet, but I do have it on order,  but I have read extremely good reviews about that book where she provides information to bloggers about content, about keeping readers engaged and she is just a vessel of knowledge when it comes to blogging and when it comes to WordPress.  She has got an amazing knowledge about WordPress; I believe she is one of the main contributors to the wordpress codex. 

Lid: She is.  She spoke at WordCamp here in San Francisco and gave a book to everyone who attended. 

Lid: If you’re a WordPress user, Google WordPress for Dummies, go to amazon.com, buy the book, and then you should do a review because people like to see what others think.

LSW: Yes, the reviews are very, very helpful, and I would be interested to hear feedback from readers of the book.  It is something to work on a project for an entire year, but it is really nice to get feedback on it, and to know that your hard work really resulted in helping people find their way

Lid: Lisa thank you so much for your time.

LSW: Thank you Lidija, it’s been a lot of fun

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