KnowEm

URL: http://knowem.com/

KnowEm is a service that will check over 500 social networks and sharing sites to see if your username is available.  You never know when some network may become the next big thing, but if you used KnowEm to reserve your name, at least you know your territory is claimed.

FreeWpThemesBlog

URL: http://freewpthemesblog.com/

Not satisfied with the default themes that come with WordPress?  Don’t want to spend money on a premium theme yet?  FreeWpThemesBlog.com has hundreds of high quality, visually appealing themes for free.

CamStudio

URL: http://camstudio.org/

CamStudio is free, open source software for making screen capture videos.  It is very useful for making how-to type videos where the subject is best taught by showing how something is done, rather than using text or a series of pictures.

DMCA Request Templates

URL: http://www.mcanerin.com/EN/articles/copyright-03.asp

Has someone stolen your content and posted it on their own website?  You can use these templates to craft a DMCA takedown notice and force them to remove your stolen content.  Erica Douglass also has a great article explaining how to use these templates here : http://www.erica.biz/2008/scammers-stealing-your-content-how-to-craft-a-dmca-takedown-notice-and-where-to-send-it/

Privacy Policy Online

URL: http://www.privacypolicyonline.com/

If you intend to use Google AdSense to monetize your blog, you will need a privacy policy.  Privacy Policy Online has an easy to use template that allows you to create your own custom privacy policy for your site in under a minute.

Google PageRank Checker

URL: http://www.prchecker.info/

PageRank is a system that Google uses to determine the authority of your site.  This affects how you are ranked in search engine results.  This free tool will tell you exactly what your PageRank is.

Alexa

URL: http://www.alexa.com/

Alexa is a site that ranks other web sites by how much traffic they receive.  Sites are sorted according to the number of visitors they receive per month.  If you are curious to see where you stand, Alexa will tell you for free.

Pingdom Tools

URL: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/

A web page usually consists of many files.  When a web browser requests your page, it will grab the main page and then load all of the required components before displaying it to a visitor.  These components can include images, css stylesheets, and javascript code.  Pingdom Tools will measure the total time it takes to download all of the files needed to load your page and display it.

Google PageSpeed Insights

URL: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights

This tool is similar to Pingdom Tools, but instead of just telling you how long your site takes to load, it will give you hints on what you can do to decrease your load time.

FreeDigitalPhotos.net

URL: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/

This is a great site where you can find free stock photos and illustrations for your blog.

Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The post 10 Useful Free Tools and Resources For Your Blog appeared first on Nathan Peters.

In this video I will demonstrate how to find and install a professional looking WordPress theme for your blog.

By default, WordPress is installed with a rather plain looking theme.

There are other themes included in the WordPress package but none of them are very esthetically pleasing.

Luckily, there are other sites where you can find professional looking themes for free.

In this demonstration we will be using the free wp themes blog.

Browse to http://freewpthemesblog.com and find something that catches your eye.

Click on the demo link underneath the preview that you want to view.

This theme looks pretty good.

It has a featured posts slider, a nice 3 column layout, dropdown menus for both your categories and your pages, and a spot to place a banner ad when you are ready to monetize your site.

When you have found a theme that you like, and are ready to install it, look for the download button near the top of your screen and click it, then save the file to your hard drive.

Next, login to your WordPress dashboard which is usually found at your domain name / wp-admin

Hover over the appearance link on your main navigation menu and click themes.

Click on the install themes tab near the top of your screen.

Click on the upload link found directly underneath the tab.

Click the browse box or button to open the file upload dialog.

Find the zip file containing the theme that you downloaded earlier, select it, and click the open button.

You should now be able to interact with the install now button.  Click it.

Next, click the activate link that appears on your screen.

Your new theme is now active.  To visit your site, hover over your site name on your WordPress dashboard bar, and click visit site.

The post How to find and install a professional looking WordPress theme for your blog appeared first on Nathan Peters.

How to install WordPress using the DreamHost 1 click installer:

1. First, browse to https://panel.dreamhost.com/
2. Enter your username and password and click the login button
3. Next, look for the ‘One-Click Installs’ link on the left hand side of your screen near the top and click it
4. On the next screen scroll down and find the WordPress icon and click it
5. Then click the ‘Custom Installation’ button
6. From the first dropdown menu that appears, select the website that you wish to install WordPress to and click ‘Install it for me now!’

The DreamHost installer will now install and configure your WordPress site for you. Within a few minutes you should receive and an email in your inbox with a link that will allow you to immediately log in and start using your WordPress website.

The post How To Install WordPress appeared first on Nathan Peters.

Here are some completely free plug-ins that I have found quite useful and couldn’t live without.

Akismet

At one point, I noticed the comments section on my blog had been spam bombed by over 2500 links to various Russian web sites.  There was so much spam that I actually ended up deleting every comment on my blog to clean it up.  This is not a great option since I’ve heard that Google considers the number of comments on blog entries to be an indicator of engagement and can affect your search engine rankings.  Akismet promises to remove comment spam automatically.  Does it work?  I’m not really sure but I can tell you that I haven’t had any comment spam since I installed it.

All in One SEO Pack

By default, WordPress prints your titles in the form ‘Blog Name >> Post Title’.  This isn’t very useful because when a page shows up in search engine results, I want the post title first.  I also want the post title first when the entry is shared on social media.  All in One SEO Pack not only allows you to customize how your titles display, but also what description will show in the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).  This is important because if you don’t control that description, you are at the mercy of whatever snippet from your page the search engine decides to show.  There are many more options, but I just wanted to highlight my favorite 2 for now.

Exclude Pages from Navigation

Another default behavior of WordPress is that every page you create gets stuck on the main navigation menu of your site.  If you are creating a privacy policy or something else that you don’t want showing up, this plug-in is very useful.  It adds a small check-box to the editing page of the post that allows you to control whether or not it will show up on your main menu.

Google Analytics for WordPress

I hate to admit it, but my awesome web host, Dreamhost, has horrible statistics that I find nearly useless.  Google Analytics is definitely the way to go if you want good stats on the number of unique visitors, what keywords people are finding you by, and who your top referral sources are.  You can either mess around with your templates or install this plug-in and simply enter your google tracking code in a box and let this plug-in take care of the rest for you.

Google sitemap plugin

If you want to make sure that Google has indexed every page on your site, just install this plug-in and it will create a nice XML site map that Google understands.  You can ask the plug-in to reference the site map in your robots.txt file or you can manually update your listing in your Google Webmaster Tools console.

Shareaholic

With a billion people using Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, or Twitter, you want to make it as easy as possible for your content to be shared on social media.  Shareaholic allows you to ad some very sexy buttons to the bottom of each post that make it super easy for people to share your posts.

Social Metrics

Although Shareaholic allows you to add counters to see how many times your content has been shared, you would have to individually visit each post and look at the counters.  Social Metrics adds a page in your WordPress admin console where you can look at all your posts at once and get a high level view of how often your content is being shared.

Image courtesy of jiggoja / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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