It’s time for another little Wordpress plugin, which helps you spread the word about your website, but also spreading the word with the idea of show casing it with your best information.

Recommend It is a simple to install wordpress plugin, which gives users the ability to recommend your website to other people. This sounds rather normal and straight forward, but the beauty of it, is that you can recommend them to your best articles. A lot of the time, you latest article might not be your best article, and therefore you might lose new readers through this - so with Recommend It, your new readers will arrive at posts, which are your best ones. The installation process is fairly straight forward, take a look:

1. Download recommendit.rar, extract the .php file and upload
it to the /plugins/ folder in Wordpress.

2. Activate the Plugin in Wordpress, as per usual.

3. index.php - add the following code before any other code:

<?php
if(!isset($_SESSION[’recpost’]))
{
		session_start();
	    session_register(’recpost);
     $_SESSION[’recpost’][0] = -1;
}
?>

4. Add the following code where you want the "Recommend this Article"
button in your single.php:

<?php RecommenditPlugin(); ?>

5. To add it to your sidebar, add this code to the sidebar.php:

<li><h2>Recommended</h2>
<ul>
<?php get_recommends(); ?>
</ul>
</li>

You can use get_recommends(5); or get_recommends(5, 60); for limitation purposes.

6. If you would like to style the button, add div#recommendit,
form#recommenditform and input#recommenditbutton into your css file.

These six simple steps can lead to a nice increase in reader loyalty and traffic. Play around, style your button/link appropriately, and enjoy the sharing of your information!

Today I am going to show you a pretty decent way to make some extra cash, or to at least increase your website traffic.

Everyone has used a screensaver, and there are plenty of people who still do. A screen saver is not just a collection of pretty picture moving around on your screen, they actually do play a role in saving your screen! Screen savers are one of the easiest ways to attract people to your website. When a screen saver is made, you are able to put a footer message, for example, on the screen saver, perhaps saying, “Created by Webtrepreneur.co.za”.

Before we start making a screen saver, we need to things:

• Screensaver creation software
• Stock photographs

A program which I have used to create screensavers is called Saver Forge. It is freeware, and is downloadable here. The download is small, and the program installs in a few seconds, and allows you to create a screen saver in a few minutes. Stock photographs - A stock photograph is a photograph with no royalties, which basically means that the photographer took the photograph and has not claimed it as his own property, and is therefore legal to use and distribute how you wish. Finding websites which offer free stock photos is not a simple task, so I have included a few links below for you to start with:

• http://www.free-photographs.net/index.html
• http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php
• http://freestockphotos.com/
• http://www.freeimages.co.uk/

There are actually plenty of resources online, which offer free stock photographs, you just need to spend some time googling for them. But for now, just take a look at the ones I have listed above.

I am not going to go into explaining how to create a screensaver with Saver Forge, as the process is extremely easy, and once you have installed it, I don’t think you will have any problems, of you do, leave me a comment here, and I will help you out. Below are two screen savers I made, which you may download and look at if you want an example:

• Ferrari Screensaver
• Audi Screensaver

Right, let’s talk a little more about monetizing these screen savers. This is where things will get a little more technical, but if you can take your time reading through this, I’m sure you will be able to follow.

There are a number of affiliate companies online, which pay for installations, one easy example, which most of us know by now is Google Toolbar. Each time someone clicks your referal link and installs the toolbar, Google pays you out a referal fee. What does this have to do with a screensaver? Well, read this next paragraph and hopefully feel inspired.

When you create a screensaver, you can compile it into an install file, which is effectively an .exe file. Most people know that an .exe file cannot be edited, even with some fancy software you will struggle. So, what we want to do, is rename this screensaver.exe file to perhaps images.db. Now we need to create something to link us between installing software and installing the screensaver, so what we are going to do is create a batch file. At this point we will have three files:

1. Images.db - the actual screensaver.exe file renamed
2. Tempfiles.db - this is actually an .exe file to install the google toolbar, for example.
3. Screensaver.bat - the linking file, which can be renamed to .exe as far as I know.

The batch file will contain commands to rename Images.db to screensaver.exe, and rename Tempfiles.db to googleinstall.exe and then run both of these programs at the same time. We will first execute the screensaver.exe file, which will ask the user if he/she would like to install the screensaver, and then it will run the googleinstall program, which will ask the user if he/she would like to install Google Toolbar. I’m sure that you can now put two and two together and successfully arrive at the beauty of this idea. You can get information on the various commands required for the batch file here or here.

Once you have created the three files above, you will need to zip them up together, and then distribute however you choose to do so. Perhaps on freeware websites, perhaps on your own website, or even via email to your friends. Beware of install programs which install spyware or adware, you don’t want people downloading your screensaver and finding out that they suddenly have spyware running on their computers, as this is just not fair!

Give it a bash, perhaps you will land up with some nice extra revenue, and if you use your mind here, I’m sure you can think of many other ways of incorporating interesting things into your screensaver install file. *hint* launching a website while they are installing, leading them to your website, which contains Google Adsense or other information

The Webtrepreneur wishes you luck!

Most bloggers these days use precoded systems such as Wordpress, b2evolution, pMachine Free or Nucleas rather than developing their own systems. It is obvious why they choose this approach, so I will not waste your time explaining. I suppose we could say, “Why reinvent the wheel?” These systems are secure and very flexible, so all the hard work has been done, and all that is left is writing your articles, selecting your topics and hitting publish.

I know a number of bloggers who use these systems, including myself, but have taken it a tiny bit further, and started to learn how to control things, and change things slightly, whether this means installing plugins or just changing general settings. Then another step further is actually wanting to add code into the already existing .php files; adding modules, etc. I am sure most people have had a look at the code and not understood a single word/line, and then some people who have a little experience with programming have looked and sort of followed, but when it comes to adding code, things seem very jumbled. I have a tiny solution, to make things slightly easier for you.

When I edit files, such as sidebar.php (Wordpress), I often use the reserved php function include(); or require_once();. The basic layout of the include function is include(’filename.php’); and what the function does, is basically it pulls your external .php file and includes it within the current php file which contains the include() function. This allows you to keep your origonal files very neat and untampered, but at the same time, allows you to play around as much as you like. For example..

In your sidebar.php file, you might see something along these lines:

<li><h2>Archives</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives(’type=monthly’); ?>
</ul>
</li>

This piece of code basically lists all the months, which you have written posts in. But more importantly, if there are a whole collection of these snippets, and you are interested in adding some of your own code, which is say 35 lines long, it would be risky, unless you know what you are doing, to simply cut and paste your code inbetween the snippets, as things would become very unstructured and messy, and this is turn would lead to a problem if something goes wrong, and you need to track down the error. So let’s say you have written some code, which just displays the date, you code would look something like:

$today = date(”m.d.y”);

and would display: ‘ 03.10.01′. Now this isn’t the best example seeing that the code is only one line long, but for the purpose of explanation, I wanted to keep things simple. This code may be currently sitting in a file called showdate.php, and now you would like to include this in your sidebar. You would simply view the source for your side bar via Presentation > Theme Editer, and add the following code to the file, just below the code I pasted four paragraphs above, and you would simply change it to:

<li><h2>Archives</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives(’type=monthly’); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php include(’showdate.php’); ?>

This would include your file, and run the code, without having to cut and paste the code from showdate.php into sidebar.php. Useful? Webtrepreneur thinks so!

This article was rather technical, and for those of you, who are not into the whole technical side of things, I hope you can find another article, which suties you better, but for those who are interested in adapting and editing themes, I hope you enjoyed this one.

This must be one of those topics which is very often neglected, but so important! We all know that choosing a book, or renting a DVD relies a great deal upon the name of the book or DVD. Humans are fairly lazy by nature, and if a title is not attractive, the chances of making an effort to read the back of the book or DVD is slim. I am not going to go into telling you about the importance of domain names, but rather look into the importance of post titles.

Each post made on any form of webblog requires a title. Now, it’s obvious that the post title should sum up the post which follows, but should we take time planning our title? Indeed. The post title on most blogging software is hyperlinked automatically, this allows quick referencing, and is used for back links and RSS feeds. Just looking at back links and RSS feeds, we can tell how important the title is. If the title in not attractive, the chances of getting a click through are slim. Furthermore, knowing that the title is a hyper link, gives us a great way to target search engine spiders correctly. Search engine spiders read these titles, and find keywords. That being said, it is important to try and include your keywords in the title.

Often when I write articles, I try and decide my post title, before I start writing, and I try and keep the post as closely related to the topic as possible. Systems, such as, Delicious, Digg and Stumble are perfect examples of where titles are key. Hundreds of people surf around these web sites, looking for interesting topics, so if you can hit a great topic, the chances of someone clicking through is high. One can go as far as constructing a topic which sounds like one thing, but it actually another, playing with peoples mind so to say to increase your traffic, and hopefully, even though the person clicked through with one idea, perhaps the material he/she stumbles upon will be of interest! When trying this approach, just remember that you do not want to go too off topic, or try and be too clever with the title.

Another thing to consider when choosing a topic, is the categories you use on your web site, you want to hold things together, don’t make a paste about fish breeding and lodge it in the ‘fish types’ category, and entitle it ‘Fish Breeding’, rather try and entitle it ‘Breeding for different fish types’. This holds your topics together, and the idea behind this is that a visitor will read the topic, and then hopefully read other topics under the same category!

Play around with titles, see which titles get the greatest click through ratios, and work up a system as to how you decide your topics effectively!