When setting up a WordPress blog that allows for multiple authors, it seems many people think all that is involved is to setup additional author profiles and/or start accepting guest posts.   Unfortunately, it really isn’t that simple if you want to create a high quality WordPress blog.

Setting up a multi-author WordPress blog may require you to use a number of WordPress plugins to support a variety of functions.   Ideally you’ll also want your theme to be hacked to help maximize the exposure your authors get.   Examples include creating a “Write for Us” page, creating author profile pages, setting your theme to display the author’s profile below their posts, etc.

Multiple Author WordPress Plugins

Here are a couple WordPress plugins that we’ve covered in the past that are ideal for multi-author WordPress blogs:

• Author Exposed – Adds a full featured display of the authors profile.
• Role Manager Plugin – Allows you to control what the various WordPress user roles can and cannot do.

And here are a few other WordPress plugins that you may also have an interest in (we use a few of these here at WordPress Hacks):

• Author Advertising – Plugin that allows you to share Google AdSense income or other advertising between multiple authors.
• Blog Metrics – Collects blog metrics based upon the author of the posts.
• List Authors Widget – Displays a list of authors in your widgets panel linking to the authors.php page.
• Multiple Authors – Allows multiple authors to be listed for an individual WordPress post, automatically keeping track of who has edited the entry.

Multiple Author WordPress Hacks

Here are a few WordPress Hacks we’ve published in the past to help you hack your WordPress theme to be more multi-author friendly:

• How to Add an Author Page to Your Theme
• How to Change the Author Archives Permalink
• How to Single Out Author Comments
• How to Link Author’s Gravatars to Their Posts
• How to Add Bio Information to Your Posts
• How to Point Author Links to the Authors Website
• How to Create a Maximum Size for Your Images
• How to Use Multiple Stylesheets

I’m sure there are also some WordPress plugins or WordPress hacks which aren’t listed above.   Have any multiple author tools or resources you’d like to add to this list?  Let us know in the comments so we can update our post!

If your WordPress blog has been around for awhile, chances are there is some clutter in your MySQL database.   For these situations, Joost De Valk of Yoast.com has an easy to use WordPress plugin called Optimize Database.

This free WordPress plugin simply needs activated, then whenever you click Optimize Now, the plugin runs an optimize table command on your WordPress tables, effectively defragmenting it. This is very useful for tables that are frequently updated. If you’d like to learn more about why this WordPress plugin might be necessary, you can read more information on this post.

Great plugin Joost!

[Download the Optimize Database Plugin]

About a year and a half ago we wrote about how to backup your WordPress blog.   In that post, we covered a few different WordPress plugins to manage your database backups, and explained why that was so important.  

For the record, the plugin I primarily recommended back then and still prefer today is the WP-DB Manager plugin.  This plugin allows you to backup and restore databases, as well as delete database tables, giving users full control over their database backups.

Unfortunately, that plugin only creates a backup for your database.   What about everything else?   WordPress blogs have a theme (or multiple themes), many use several WordPress plugins, and most bloggers use images that you’ve created to help draw attention to your posts or to illustrate a point.

Blog Exchange Traffic decided to fix this with their WordPress plugin release, the WordPress Backup plugin.   This plugin backups up your themes, plugins, images, and gives you the option to download these backups or have them emailed to you (this only works if it is a smaller sized backup).   WordPress Backup also works along side the WP-DB Manager plugin mentioned above, so it is recommended that you use both.

What do you use to manage your WordPress backups?

Over the past week we’ve had a good response from the affiliate marketing topics we’ve covered, so I wanted to draw your attention to what I’m now using to build my affiliate marketing landing pages with WordPress.

In the past I’ve gotten to work with Unique Blog Designs and have always enjoyed their work, so I have to admit I was excited when I saw that they have released some new affiliate landing pages for WordPress.   This new theme package, known as the Affiliate Theme, is an affiliate marketers dream!

With the purchase of this premium WordPress theme you get 6 different landing pages, 30 different header graphics built into the affiliate landing pages, and lifetime theme support.

Here are the features listed by the creators of the Affiliate Theme:

• Choose From 6 Layouts to Improve Conversion – If you are an experienced affiliate marketer, you are probably familiar with manually updating multiple layouts in order to split test your affiliate landing pages. With WordPress, it is easy for you to input all of your affiliate offers and tracking URL’s and then easily change the layout for the purpose of split testing. We have built six (6) effective multi-post layouts. Say goodbye to the days of wasting time re-creating variations of the same landing page, review site, or blog. Save time (and money).  This theme would also work brilliantly with the LP Jumper plugin.
• Optimized for your PPC and SEO Campaigns – Once you have set up Affiliate Theme, driving targeted traffic is, of course, the next step. That is why we coded Affiliate Theme to improve the SEO (search engine optimization) over the standard WordPress theme. You write the headlines and page copy, Affiliate Theme takes care of the rest! Proper use of header, alt, title and META tags can go a long way in improving your search engine ranking and quality score. Also, save time by integrating tracking scripts from the Theme Options panel.
• Built-in Color Picker (Perfect for every niche) – Our advanced “Photoshop-like” color picker makes it easy for you to change Affiliate Theme to any color scheme you want! Red for dating? Blue for web hosting? You will be amazed at how effortlessly you can rebrand your Affiliate Theme. You can change the color of everything from post headlines to button rollovers and site background.
• Lifetime Access to Resource Center and Support – Need help using Affiliate Theme? Excellent! Watch over a dozen video tutorials, browse and search through our extensive knowledge base, and even post your questions to the Affiliate Theme support forum. Watch tutorials and read articles on everything from how to use Affiliate Theme to creating specific types of affiliate websites.
• Need to test more? Change everything you need – Want to try a larger call-to-action button? How about changing the size of the product image? Button color? Font-size? Keywords in the title? Don’t worry about going back to Photoshop or hacking code to change any of that – Affiliate Theme allows you to change all of this and more! We wanted to make it as easy as possible for you to build dynamic sites that require no skill to modify.
• Hate coding? No problem. Love it? Great – Coding newbies, rejoice! You will be able to take full advantage of the powerful Affiliate Theme Options Panel, allowing you to change the layout, logo, colors, fonts, background, header graphic, even rollover button color – all without touching a single line of code. If you are a code-head, you will Dig the clean XHTML + CSS + PHP, fully commented source code. We even have put together an advanced customization guide for people who want to get extra friendly with Affiliate Theme.

Pretty much everything is done for you, allowing you to avoid touching code and giving you the ability to create an affiliate landing page using WordPress in under 5 minutes!    Here is the control panel so you can see what I’m talking about:

And here are a few of the templates which are included with the Affiliate Theme:

Affiliate Theme (Dating Version)

Affiliate Theme (Ringtone Version)

Affiliate Theme (Make Money Version)

Affiliate Theme (Acai Berry Version)

You can view the live demos of each of these landing page themes here.

My favorite part when I learned of this new affiliate theme was the price.   You have the following three purchase options: Single-Use ($97.00), Multiple-Use ($147.00), or the Developer’s Pack ($197.00).

If you’d like to learn more about the Affiliate theme, or are interested in purchasing a copy for your affiliate landing pages, you can get additional information here.

For a couple of years now I’ve been a very active affiliate marketer, but when it comes to the subject of affiliate marketing, I always feel there is more I can learn.   Techniques change, new products are released, and the internet goes through a number of trends.   As a result, when I learned about a new WordPress eBook called WordPress for Internet Marketers, I felt I had to get my hands on a copy and see what new things I could learn.

Upon downloading the ebook, I was surprised to see that this book is an amazing 950 pages!  In fact, the author did readers a favor and broke it down into a few PDF files for more convenient reading.  If that sounds like a lot of pages, that is because there are a number of screen shots included by the author which inflates the page count a bit, but helps readers to learn and follow along with what the author is saying.

One thing I really liked about this ebook is that the author really goes out of her way to provide options to readers.   Most sections take the time to explain a variety of options to the reader and allows them to figure out what plugin, theme, etc. works for them.  Here are some of the sections within the book that I really enjoyed:

• Creating Membership Sites with WordPress
• Integrating Podcasts into your WordPress Blog
• Creating a Sales Page with WordPress (this is a big part of what affiliate marketers do!)
• Adding a Help Desk to a WordPress Blog
• Building a Jobs Board with WordPress

Some of the sections which could use a little improvement in my opinion:

• More Bookmarks – This ebook comes with some bookmarks, but not as many as I would have liked to see due to the huge size of the ebook.   This of course is not a knock on the book itself, but rather with how the information is presented.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This section has a lot of good but basic SEO information which is geared specifically towards WordPress users.  This is great for someone learning WordPress, but I would have liked to see some more advanced techniques included as well for WordPress veterans.
• Improved Forums Section – I’ve always felt forums are an important part of any successful WordPress blog.  After reading the forums section, I felt like a few more pages could have been dedicated to this section.  It covers WordPress plugins which create forums, but doesn’t appear to cover things like vBulletin or PHPBB, which are probably the most commonly used forum software for WordPress blogs.

Overall, I have to say that I am pretty happy with the WordPress for Internet Marketers eBook.   If you are interested, all 950+ pages are available for only $77.00.   This price includes a document filled with WordPress resources, free updates to the ebook as future versions of WordPress become available, and 100 WordPress themes which can be used to put some of the tips provided in the ebook into practice.