I just installed Google’s +1 button (it’s like Facebook’s Like button) so people can vote for my stuff.

Why do I care?

Well obviously more votes helps my over-inflated ego.

But seriously, the hope is that Google will take votes into consideration when ranking search results; the more votes your page has the higher it ranks.

That’s the theory anyway.

How do I create one?

It’s easy.  Just go here and follow the instructions.

But Nick, don’t we have enough “vote for my crap” buttons??

Yes, there are too many for sure.  But I am willing to try it out if it might help me rank better.

Vote for Pedro!

Okay, don’t vote for Pedro. Vote for Nick, or more specifically, vote for this page.

More Resources

• It’s Here: Google +1 Buttons For Websites
• Official: Google +1 Button For Websites Comes Tomorrow

Most WordPress themes allow you to have widgets in your sidebar. And there are several widgets that will help you get more return traffic & page views.

RSS and social media

One of the simplest ways to get your RSS button and twitter buttons noticed by visitors is to you put them in a widget on the sidebar.

Offer assistance

In my sidebar I have a widget called “How Can I Help?” which contains links to posts where you can e-mail me or leave a question on my blog.

Having a section like this helps you engage with your community and increases the chances that people will come back to your site.

Offer free stuff

People love free stuff so it’s a good idea to have a sidebar widget with links to different free things that you give away.  And you don’t have to give away your own stuff; you can give away other peoples’ ebooks as long as you have their permission.

If you added something new to your free stuff category each week you would increase the number of return visitors to your site.

Facebook Fan Of Page

Utilizing Facebook is a good way to build community and get return traffic to your site. All you need to do is log into your Facebook account, create a fan of page, and then get the code from Facebook to insert your fan of widget into your sidebar.

What’s new

Returning visitors to your site are most interested in what’s new on your blog. And WordPress has a built-in widget for this called “Recent Posts”.

Most commented

5% of my posts receive 95% of the traffic and the Most Commented Widget makes it easy to display a list of most commented posts in my sidebar.

(See more cool WordPress plugins that Nick uses.)

Top commentators

The top commentators widget allows you to reward people who leave the most comments on your blog. There is even a famous back linking strategy based on the top commentators widget.

With so many publishers large and small running on the WordPress platform it is a natural target for hackers. The overall security of your site depends on a lot of factors, including the security protocol your hosting company implements at the server level. Some hosts are more secure than others. You should investigate your host for yourself.

Don’t take their, “we take the security of your site very seriously” corporate nonsense at face value. If lots of people complain about their sites being hacked and the common denominator is their host, well – that pretty much speaks for itself.

Read more: How To Secure WordPress Against Disasters & Being Hacked

In the last few weeks I have been thinking a about my blog’s design and how it impacts readers. It didn’t fully realize how a crappy blog design can hurt your traffic and drive readers away.

I have been struggling to improve blog’s design and have spent countless hours trying to improve it.

Today I found a list of 100 different WordPress themes with a picture of each theme included. This is a fantastic resource that I wanted to share with you today:
Check out 100 High Quality free premium wordpress themes

Here is a WordPress plugin that will help your site and its pages get indexed faster by Google.

I want to show you a simple WordPress plugin that help you increase your page views without doing any extra work.

In the past couple weeks I’ve had several people ask me what theme I use for my WordPress blog. And for every person that asks there are usually 5 to 10 also want to know but haven’t asked.

So I am going to take a minute and tell you about the theme that I use and why I love it.

I have tried about 20 different themes for my WordPress blog in the last couple years. Some were good and some were terrible. But none of them had everything I wanted.

I wanted something that would look professional. I wanted something where I could adjust the number of columns my blog had. They go through different periods where I want my blog to have 3 columns and other periods where I wanted to have 2 columns.

I found Thesis

The WordPress theme I finally found is called Thesis. It has a professional look and feel and let me change the number of columns I have on my blog.

Thesis gives me the ability to change the width of a column. This was very handy when I started publishing videos and I needed the main column to be 200 pixels wider. This would have been a major pain with any other WordPress theme that I have tried.

All of this was done without having to know HTML or code anything.

Instead he says give you options to you can choose how many columns you want and how wide you want to:

It also allows you to choose what order your columns are in:

Search engine optimization

Thesis takes care of search engine optimization for me so I can spend more time writing blog posts and building my community.

The one downside to Thesis

The one downside I have found to Thesis is that it is not free. When I first heard about it I was reluctant to pay for a WordPress theme when there were so many free options available. After wasting many hours trying to find and customize various free themes I finally decided to pay for thesis. Since then I have saved a ton of time and never looked back.

So I understand if Thesis is not for you but it least take a look at it before you rule it out. They have several nice videos that go over its various features.

I used to use Tweetmeme

I used to use the Tweetmeme plugin for WordPress.  It made it very easy for other people to retweet my posts.  This resulted in more traffic to my site.

But I noticed recently that the plug-in was having some issues and wanted people to sometimes take extra steps to retweet one of my posts.

Tweetcount Plugin

So I did a little searching and I found a new WordPress plugin that effectively does the same thing.

It’s called Tweetcount Plugin and you can download it here for free:
http://www.backtype.com/plugins/tweetcount

I used to get a ton of spam

If you have a blog then you probably have had to deal with comment spam.  I know I certainly had my share of spammy comments left on my blog.

I have nearly 14,000 spam comments on my blog:

I didn’t enjoy digging through a ton of spam to find a handful of good comments.

Traditional Captchas

So my solution was to install a traditional captcha system that required visitors to type in the letters displayed in an image like this:

Unfortunately these captchas are often hard to read and can drastically reduce the number of your blog posts receive.

This happened for my blog; my comment count plummeted.

I knew I had to find a better solution.

I Installed WP-Num-Captcha

After a fair amount of searching I came across WP-Num-Captcha and I installed it.

This plugin places a small math question (i.e. 7 + 2 = ? ) that must be answered when a comment is posted.

Since installing it my comment count has returned to its normal level and I now receive virtually no spam.

Can’t spammers get around it?

In theory spammers certainly could get around this and it would not be difficult.

But thus far they have not.  I believe they are too busy attacking sites that have no captchas.

Download the plugin here

You can download the plugin for free here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-num-captcha/