How To Make Super Affiliate Commissions

Changing the Admin User

By default when you first create a WordPress installation a single user is created for you called admin so that you can login. This user has full privileges for the site but it has the name of admin.

However if you create posts whilst logged in as the admin user they will show up with ‘admin’ as the author and this is undesirable if you wish to promote a personal or business brand with your blog.

Seeing as you are the blog owner you obviously also need full privileges so what I tend to do is simply to edit the default admin user and give it the chosen name. You still login with the username of ‘admin’ but posts are published, they come up as having being written by the name you chose.

From your WordPress dashboard, click on the ‘users’ link and find the ‘admin’ username. From here you can edit various details such as the first and last name, the email address and some other fields. Type in the chosen name but for it to be shown on posts you will also need to click on the drop down box entitled ‘Display name publicly as’ and select the new name you entered.

Also, for security purposes change the generated password to something more secure and then save the user.

Setting up Comment Moderation

A good blog will attract comments which unfortunately will include plenty of spam as well as legitimate comments so we’ll need to fiddle around with the settings a little. Go to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Discussion’ and look through the options.

The default settings have changed a bit in recent WordPress releases but here are some of the points to be aware of:

There are two checkboxes that specify whether users are allowed to comment and allowed to leave trackbacks. Both of these boxes should be checked or you will not be allowing any comments at all!

You can alter the email settings here. This is largely a matter of preference. By default WordPress will send the administrator an email when a new comment is left but that can soon become overwhelming if your blog becomes popular. I turn this off and make a point of checking my comments on a daily basis.

By default, when somebody leaves a comment it is published immediately and of course that can be good or bad depending on your point of view. If somebody posts something abusive or spammy then you might want to know about it beforehand and this is largely dependent on the topic of your blog.

Generally speaking, the comments that are left by real people (as opposed to spammers) are fine. There is a plugin called akismet which is installed with all WordPress installations and that will catch 99% of spam so I rarely feel the need to moderate my comments too much. However, one thing that can be irritating is when people drop in too many links so I specify that any comment with 2 or more links will go into the moderation queue.

When a comment enters the moderation queue you will physically have to click the ‘approve’ button for each comment before it gets published live which obviously causes a delay for the comment poster so my advice is to use moderation sparingly.

Setting up a Contact Form

It is surprising how many bloggers there are that do not have a contact form on their blog. But why would you want one? Well if you want to market something, either yourself, your services, a brand or even a product ? anything, you will need some way for those that are interested to be able to contact you. Unfortunately, these days spam is a big problem so publishing your email address online is probably the last thing you want to do. A contact form will allow people to reach you via email but will keep your email address hidden away on the server.

You can manually create a form with HTML but that?s quite a lengthy process and there is really no need unless you want something specific. If all you want is an easy way for your visitors to get a message to you, then the WordPress plug-in, available at The Marketing Technology Blog is great.

Once installed login to your WordPress dashboard, click the ‘Settings’ link and you will see a new option called ‘Contact Form’. Click this to bring up the contact form editor.

You’ll need to fill in the email address to send the email to (don’t worry, this is hidden), a subject line for the email, and some standard messages. You can also put in a question that your visitor must type in to avoid spammers.

Once setup, you still need to create the form itself. You can use a WordPress post or a page. All you need to do is put the following text in the body of the page and when it is displayed on your site the text will be replaced by the actual form: %%wpcontactform%%

And that is all there is to it! One last note, make sure you test your form by sending an email to yourself

How to Make an Archives Page

WordPress does have built-in archives features but they will only show the full post, it provides no simple way to merely see a contents table at a glance. Luckily, plug-ins come to our rescue yet again. There is a great one at idunzo.com.

What this plug-in does is it creates a single page that can display a single link for each post. It groups the links by months and can also show how many comments were received for each post.

Once installed, the plug-in will give you a new option called ?SRG Clean Archives? within the ?Settings? menu. There are several checkboxes which allow you to adjust the output, but in many cases the default settings are just fine.

The process for making the archives page is similar – you have a piece of text to insert which gets replaced by the actual archives output when the page is published. However there is one subtle difference – you have to type in the text in the HTML view of the page, and not in the Visual view.

This is what you should type in: <!–srg_clean_archives–>

This is actually an HTML tag (a comment) which is why it needs to be input in the HTML view. If you type it into the visual view then this is what you will actually see on your page when output.