With the increasing popularity of using affiliate links to generate income online, it can significantly improve your conversion rate on affiliate sign-ups by disguising your affiliate links using a URL with your domain name, then redirecting them to the appropriate affiliate. 

The idea behind using this theory is that readers will click on it thinking it is an internal link on your site, rather than taking you to a third party site.  Another benefit is that all of your blog’s links point toward an internal address on your domain, giving you control to update the URL easily. This helps avoid dead links whenever a company changes a URL and makes it easy to update your affiliate links when the need arises.

Redirects can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but as this blog focuses on self-hosted WordPress, I will be going over an easy way to do this using a PHP redirect.  Here are the steps I took when I hid my affiliate links for this website:

1. Create a folder called “Go.”
2. Create a .php document (this can easily be done with Notepad or any similar program) and name it after the appropriate affiliate link you are using.
3. Now paste the following code into the document: <? header("Location: http://youraffiliatelinkurlhere"); ?>
4. Save it into the “Go” folder created above.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 until you’ve created a .php file for each affiliate link.
6. Go to your FTP and upload your “Go” folder directly to the public_html folder.
7. Update all your affiliate links to point towards your new redirect!

Your redirect will look something like http://www.yourdomainname.com/go/phpdocumentname.php.

You can name the documents whatever you want, or you can use a different name than “Go” for your folder name.   The important thing is that you remember what you named it so that you can use your new affiliate link!

If you are planning on making a WordPress theme available to the WordPress community, it has become somewhat of a necessity for it to support widgets. This is especially true now that recent WordPress installs now come with this ability built-in, meaning you no longer need a plugin to accomplish this. This will make your theme more appealing to a larger number of WordPress users because they will not need any coding knowledge to set up their sidebar to look how they want it to.

If you would like to set up your theme to support widgets, I recommend you check out this post by Garry Conn entitled How To Widgetize a WordPress Theme. In his post, he provides a detailed walk through of how to widgetize your sidebar for a 2-column theme.

According to Automattic, it is also really easy to add widget support to 3-column and 4-column themes:

Instead of register_sidebar() you should use register_sidebars(n) where n is the number of sidebars. Then place the appropriate number in the dynamic_sidebar() function, starting with 1. (There are several other ways to use these function. See the API). You can even give your sidebars names rather than numbers, which lets you maintain a different set of saved sidebars for each theme.

My favorite part about widgets is that it provides a extra option for theme users, but isn’t required to be used.  A theme that supports widgets can still be adjusted manually if you prefer to do things the hard fun way.

There are only a select few WordPress plugins that I would consider “must-haves” for all types of blogs, no matter what the blog is about.  Whenever I set up a new WordPress blog for someone, the first plugin I install is called Permalink Redirect.  Everything can be controlled from within the Options panel, and it works out of the box without anything manual to set up.

What does this plugin do?  If you are using the most current version of this plugin, you’ll see that it is able to manage several different aspects of your WordPress blog.   Its main function is to do a 301 redirect for all of your pages.  This means that it will redirect any alternate URL’s to the URL of your choosing.   For example, this plugin automatically does the following for this blog:

Wrong URL(s):

http://www.hackwordpress.com

http://www.hackwordpress.com/

http://hackwordpress.com

Correct URL:

http://hackwordpress.com/

If a reader enters one of the above incorrect URL addresses trying to reach my homepage, it will automatically redirect them to the correct homepage for this blog.  Your browser already does this you say?   That is probably correct.  Most 2nd generation web browsers do in fact do this for you, but search engine spiders don’t use web browsers.   Instead, search engine spiders would actually count these as 4 different web pages and could penalize you for having duplicate content.

This plugin will also do the same 301 redirects for all individual webpages, as well as give you the option of manually redirecting certain pages if you change the post slug of that particular post or page for whatever reason.

One often forgotten feature is the ability to redirect your posts if you were to change the permalink structure of your blog.  For example, if you were to start out with the popular URL structure that many WordPress users use for their blog that includes the dates of the posts in the URL, you could later switch to a different structure (such as removing the date information to improve your search engine rankings) and redirect it with this plugin.  It will automatically redirect all of your old posts to your new URL structure and make a flawless redirection for any old inbound links, as well as guide the search engine spiders to index your new post structure.  An example of how this would look if I did this for this blog:

Old URL:

http://hackwordpress.com/2007/10/06/wordpress-plugins/

New URL:

http://hackwordpress.com/wordpress-plugins/

What about feed redirection?  Many bloggers now take advantage of the amazing features Feedburner has to offer by setting up their blogs feed with them.   This can prove to be a bit of a headache to adjust all of your blog’s feeds to point to your new Feedburner feed, so this plugin will also take care of this for you.  When in the options panel, simply enter your Feedburner feed address and save, and any time someone clicks on your default feed, they will automatically be redirected to your new Feedburner feed.   This will help ensure you have an accurate count of feed subscribers, rather than splitting them up on multiple feeds.

Overall, I am a huge fan of this WordPress plugin, and encourage anyone with a WordPress blog to use it.  Now that tags are built into the default install of WordPress, I’m hoping this will be the next feature to be built into the software.   It is definitely crucial in my opinion.

This site has been up for about a week now and things are starting to come into place.   Now that I’ve established some content and good references, I’d like to open up this blog to advertising opportunities.

If you are interested in promoting your blog, product, or service, you can now purchase a link at the top of my sidebar for only $15.00 a month through Text Link Ads.   You can also now purchase a link on individual posts if you would like.

If you’d prefer to purchase a link directly through me, you can check out details on my Advertise page, then Contact me directly.

The great thing about using open source software is the fact that it is constantly being tweaked and improved. The WordPress community is no exception. Despite the recent major release of WordPress 2.3, they already have released some information about what is in store for WordPress users in the future.

As usual, Blogging Pro has the latest about upcoming releases and conferences. On the releases side, it looks like we have some good stuff to look forward to:

On the releases side, you will see some updates to WordPress 2.0, 2.3, and a full 2.4 release by the end of this year, or early in the new year.

Releases
WordPress 2.0.12 is listed as three weeks late according to WordPress’ trac system, meaning it should be out any time now. I would guess that it will be released at the same time as Wordpress 2.3.1 which is due November 15th.

WordPress 2.4, which should see some very visible changes to the WordPress administration panel is currently set to be released December 12th of this year, but The Blog Herald has it listed as being released January 15th of 2008, which I think is much more realistic to their development cycle. Either way, it should be interesting.

Then for all those keeping track, we will see a WordPress 2.5 in May, 2008.

It looks like WordPress 2.4 is well underway, and I look forward to an improved administration panel. I’m still holding out hope that they can continue to integrate more plugins into the actual WordPress software.

With all the WordPress themes available to WordPress users, it always surprises me how these incredible theme authors don’t take a few extra seconds to separate their theme’s trackbacks from the comments. It doesn’t look very professional and it can make it extremely difficult to follow a conversation in the comments.

Separating your trackbacks and comments requires a minimal amount of coding work to set up. First, you’ll want to make a backup of your comments.php file just in case something goes wrong. Next, follow these three steps:

1 ) Access your comments.php file and locate the following code:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

Immediately after the above code, you’ll want to place this code:

<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type == 'comment') { ?>

2 ) Next, you’ll want to scroll down a little bit and locate the following code:

<?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

Immediately before the above code, you’ll want to place this code:

<?php } /* End of is_comment statement */ ?>

This will filter out all of the trackbacks and pingbacks from your main comments loop. Now we need to create a second comments loop to display the trackbacks and pingbacks.

3 ) Almost immediately below the code from step 2 you should find this code:

<?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ?>

Immediately before the above code, you’ll want to place this code:

<h3>Trackbacks</h3>
<ol>
<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type != 'comment') { ?>
<li><?php comment_author_link() ?></li>
<?php } ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ol>

You can adjust this code to display how you want to, including using a different header if you have a specific look for your header 3.