The WordPress Podcast » Podcast

So, you want to be a professional blogger? But what exactly do you need to do to make money from this? This week we take a deeper look at how to start generating revenue from your blog. Whether you have a fledgling WordPress blog or are a well seasoned blogger with an entire community built up, there are a number of avenues you can go down. But which is best? And how do you actually make it all happen? There are always some growing pains as every new blog strives to get its feet off the ground, not least of which is trying to generate revenue. We start off this week by taking a closer look at the stages of development a site goes through as it matures. Joost gives an insight into the journey of his own site, Yoast.com, and gets down to the nitty gritty of what worked for him and what didn’t. Joost lifts the lid on Google AdSense, and explains its pros and cons. Affiliate marketing; we explain the importance of having both high readership and the trust of those readers. We recommend taking a look at PepperJamNetwork and Commission Junction. We explore other avenues within traditional banner advertising, including some surprising and very neat little hints and tips! The value of the personal brand: In the long haul, this could be the most beneficial thing you do. We explain the how and the why. Joost tells us how his blog has lead to consultancy work for some top customers. Frederick talks through the benefits of monetising old blog content by selling it as an eBook. Producing products that can be ‘built’ once and sold multiple times has huge benefits. The importance of scarcity! Who you take advertising from is important – if they are ads for less than respectable services or products it could be incredibly detrimental to your personal brand and the reputation of your blog. There is no escaping accountability, and especially not on the web! Why you should tread carefully when asking your readers for money. The bottom line? Make money, but always keep your readers in mind! Some useful links: Mashable.com css3.info Chris Brogan

This week we decided to dedicate the entire show to helping you bootstrap your blog! Just because something is free doesn’t mean people are going to want it, so we delve into some of the top tactics and tools for drawing in those readers, and get to the bottom of what really matters. The big issues: How to boost subscribers to your blog How to increase the number of comments on your posts How to turn your blog into a real community Who do we recognise as subscribers? There is a huge array of subscribers, from those that use RSS feeds, to newsletter subscribers, commenters, regular site visitors, and not least those who ‘like’ your Facebook fan page or follow your brand profile. Two vital ways of pulling return visitors to your site: RSS and email In terms of cultivating subscribers and followers to your content, what are the key steps you need to go through? We talk about how your blog post could act like as forum for great discussions by making the most of threaded comments. Facebook plugins: The pros and cons of using plugins such as Disqus, Intense Debate & Facebook Comments. We analyse the SEO issues they come with and debate their value in terms of providing leverage for your blog. So, what are the high profile bloggers doing? We debate the increasingly popular Lightbox popups, and plugins such as Popup Domination. Do they add value? To grow your reach and subscribers you should be commenting elsewhere too. We talk through how, where and why you should be doing so. Create evergreen content with great comments! We get to the bottom of how to master producing content like this and reap all the benefits. If you are not so hot with creating great content, there are some useful tools you can use to pull in the subscribers Once you have built momentum and amassed a handful of subscribers, what are the next steps and how can you make money? WordPress 3.1 is around the corner, but what should you be looking out for? Check out all the updates on codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.1 We want to hear your ideas on what topics you would like us to talk about, and which guests you would love to hear from! Leave a comment with your suggestions below. Useful links: Great blog post by Rand Fishkin on seomoz.org - Recommendations For Blog Commenting As  A Marketing strategy Yoast.com – Joost de Valk’s WordPress SEO post The Cathedral and the Bazaar – an interesting read if you have some time to kill This is a true example of evergreen content. A top notch post written by Avinash Kaushik – Blog Metrics, 6 Recommendations For Measuring Your Success. Check out W3 Total Cache by Frederick Townes

We are kicking things off this year with Christina Warren, a writer, podcaster, blogger, twitterer (@film_girl) and all round gadget-junkie. Christina is a full time writer for mashable.com and you can find her blog at www.christinawarren.com. She also co-hosts ‘Briefly Awesome’ on 5by5.tv We start this week’s show off with Christina as she fills us in on what she is up to at the moment, including heading to Las Vagas this week for the Fourth Annual Mashable Awards, and coverage of the 2011 International CES Convention. WordPress 3.1 release candidate 2 has just come out, and in line with this we get down to the nitty-gritty of custom post formats. Christina explains what they are, and how it all works. The admin bar is a new addition to WordPress 3.0.1 rc2 and is already the source of much discussion. We find out who likes it, who doesn’t, and debate whether it should be an option rather than a default. Christina lets us in on some great tips when it comes to writing and blogging. Considering she writes an average of 1.5 million words a year, we highly recommend taking her advice! One of the tools she uses is TextMate, a Mac text editor. She explains its bundle system and how easy it makes her life when writing blogs and articles. Christina tells us all about the Mashable Awards, its nominees and who to look out for. She lets us in on some of the more unusual companies she will be looking out for in 2011 including the Quora.com Q&A service and Kickstarter.com, a crowd funding platform. Christina gives her top tips for WordPress, talking about Markdown Quicktags, reducing the number of plugins on your site, jQuery and using spiderbug, and some fantastic advice on becoming mobile friendly (essential if you have a business based on offering a service). We talk about the WordPress apps that are out there for the iPad and iPhone. Improvements are inevitable, and we discuss what is really needed, and our opinions on some of the changes that should be made. Christina’s plugin picks and plugins she mentioned: WP Admin Bar Removal Disable Admin Bar Blogsmith Bundle – Has a lot of useful tools for blogging, including IOS linking and a built in thesaurus, word count tools and much more! Markdown Quicktags Joost’s plugin picks of the week: Comment Email Verify – This plugin forces people to verify their email address when they post a comment

We are back! And this week we catch up with Ryan Imel. The Editor-in-Chief of WP Candy, he transformed what was once a tutorial site for the past years into a fast-paced breaking WordPress news site. Ryan is a serial entrepreneur having created projects like COMMENTbits and others. To kick things off this week we talk shop with Ryan as he tells us about the brand new iPhone app – WPCandy WordPress News - wpcandy.com’s first venture into the App Store and is available right now. This is one of the means by which the community can support wpcandy.com, and as such we open the discussion on different monetization methods outside of ads on your site. Joost and Ryan talk about interesting news and developments that have caught their eye over the past couple of weeks such as: The WordPress SEO Plugin on Yoast.com  - Joost talks about the work he has been doing on this and how it is developing Joost does a live launch of the brand new them Frederick and the W3 Edge team have built for Yoast.com. Joost talks about exactly how he plans for this new theme to improve conversion rates Tip from Joost: have a look at a great Theme Tester plugin by donncha that he has been using recently Theme frameworks: we open the debate on what a framework is and how it should behave. Will an ideal framework emerge? And should there be one theme framework to rule them all? Should SEO functions reside in a theme or a plugin? Those in our live chat room ask the question ‘are there any conflicts between SEO and frameworks?’ Joost asks Ryan when wpcandy.com plan to launch a new theme design, and the pair discuss what could be changed within its current site design - with an SEO perspective on things from Joost. Picks of the week wpcandy.com’s shiny new iPhone app - WPCandy WordPress News The  Edit Flow plugin is incredibly useful for managing and assigning on a multi author site and comes highly recommended by Ryan who himself runs a multi author blog on wpcandy.com. WordPress SEO Plugin on Yoast.com Theme Tester plugin by donncha allows a blog administrator to test out a new theme before launch whilst your old theme is still live SEO Data Transporter plugin which allows you to easily transfer your inputs SEO data from one theme/plugin to another. Here is the alternative to having to write code when you need to regenerate your thumbnails:  the Regenerate Thumbnails plugin. Bookmark this one! Joost calls for someone out there to build a replacement plugin for a slider on a front page. There seems to be no single plugin that allows you to determine the order of the slides and that does the simple things really well. Go to wp-community.org and tell Joost what plugin you think he should be using!

This show was posted a bit late due to a miscommunication, we're sorry about that. This week we are joined by Andrew Nacin. Andrew is one of the WordPress core developers and a member of the commit team, he also works as an independent WordPress consultant and, as he aptly describes his daily activities; “I wrangle contributions, develop new features, and try to fix more bugs than I create”. Andrew became instrumental in the development of WordPress in an astonishingly short space of time. Within 11 months to be precise, and in this week’s show we kick things off by asking him how. Andrew talks about what being a core developer involves on a day-to-day basis. We discuss the inner workings of multi-site, how you can utilise it, and what the future may bring from its inclusion in core. Andrew tells us all about the 3 major features he has been working on recently, blowing away some of the smoke surrounding custom meta data capability handling, custom post types, and improved in menu handling. We discuss how far away WordPress 3.1 is, and what changes we can look forward to seeing We tackle the debate on whether hosting companies are on top of what their actual deliverables are to customers – do they need to innovate faster than they have? We get down to the practicalities of performance and security and ask Andrew why the versions of software that run on your computer are important. What is the significance of these versions and what do they matter? How comfortable should users be with upgrading and/or switching host companies? Some quick tips and tricks for the developers out there - Andrew talks about leveraging API’s. Last week he held a talk on WordPress API's which will be available on Wordpress.tv soon. Andrew talks about how WordPress are taking a step back from the codex and building curated edited handbooks on specific topics. We discuss the use of xref.yoast.com which Joost has modified to make searching through functions a lot easier. Picks of the week: Developer oriented: Use the WP_DEBUG constant – this turns on all sorts of notices, and lets you know about deprecated functions you are using. Andrew talks about this in his article "Deprecated functions and WP_DEBUG" Log deprecated notices by Andrew Nacin. It logs all the different things your plugins are doing on your install and puts them into a neat table Core control WordPress beta tester User oriented: Use screen options to hide or show what you want – e.g. custom fields. Use the Help – for links to the WordPress codex and support forums. WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk