Tim Ferriss Interviews WordPress Creator, Matt Mullenweg

Take the time to read this great article. There is so much to learn from both of these people on generating information products, creating a new lifestyle, and freeing yourself for the 80-hour workweek.

Then go out and buy Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek. It is a great book and will change your life.

We at chimp-simple use WordPress to build all of our sites and for our clients as well. It is a powerful tool that does not require a extensive computer knowledge to maintain and run. I would argue that anyone can build a WordPress site and sell products in 1 day or less.

Also, we are creating a new ebook on how to generate 4-Hour Workweek sites using WordPress, plugins, and themes. We are doing the editing now and should have it out by late September/early October. We will post more details when the Editor is finished.

» Simplicity and Start-up Alchemy: An Interview with WordPress Creator, Matt Mullenweg (Plus: 4HWW Party in SF and Stunt Competition)

We All Make Mistakes: Top 11 WordPress Don’ts

I love WordPress but it has taken me a while to figure out what not do to when setting up WordPress. Here is my list of things not to do or not to forget to do.

11. Forget to Share - Install plugins to share your content with others. This will help to drive traffic to your site. Also take time to visit other sites and post comments where you have information that helps out. This have driven a lot of traffic to my site. But, make sure it adds value and doesn’t become comment spam.

10. Forget to Change the Generated Admin password. They are definitely randomly generated and there is no way you can remember them without writing them down. So I change them after I finish the install. Also, consider making a backup admin account just in case something happens to your original account.

9. Forget to Change Permalinks - With the need for Search Engine Optimization and Search Ranking in Google, Yahoo, MSN you have to change the permalinks to something that has some keyword value. Go to Options -> Permalinks and switch from the “default” to “Date and name based” or “custom” and use %postname%

8. Forget to Dress Up with Themes - the default themes are nice but everyone should have their own twist. Go download a new theme with widget support and start moving things around.

7. Forget to Use Post Slugs - When posting messages make sure and take a look at the postslug option. Think about the title you have and how the search engines will index it. Does it have the keywords you want. If not add a post slug with the ones you do want.

6. Post your email Address on Your Pages - I did this on some of my early blogs. Now I have an email account full of offers for more companions, larger parts of my anatomy, prescription drugs, and fortunes from dictators in other countries. Please don’t post your email on your pages like this - Steve@some-domain-name.com. The search bots will suck that up and feed it to the great Spam Devils and your time will be spent cleaning up emails all day long. Some people use this method - Steve at some-domain-name.com and I’m not sure how much this will help. I personally use contact forms to ward off some of the spam.

5. Turn off Commenting - If you have a blog and you want to have a dialog with your users then leave commenting turned on. Otherwise your site looks “lifeless” to your readers. For those of you worried about comment spam we will cover this on item 1.

4. Forget to Install a Weblog program - I use Firestats for my weblog to see who is visiting, what pages they like, and what countries they are coming from. This tells me who my readers are, what they like, and where they are from. I use this data to produce new articles they will like. Without this date how do you know who is visiting your site.

3. Forget Every Page is a Landing Page - You don’t know how people are going to get to your site so make use you have your most important information on each page. I like to include Most Popular Posts, Recent Posts, Comments and Subscription options as widget. I also have a menu with Contact Us, About, and Products. This will cover most of the items people are looking for. Lastly, make sure and include a Search option otherwise people will not be able to dig deeper.

2. Forget to Backup Your Database - It is so easy to backup your site with plugins that there is no excuse to not do it. Trust me once the data is gone it will take a lot of time put back in the post that you can find in some of your files. Take a minute install the plugin and save yourself a lot of wasted time.

1. Allow Comment Spam - Turn on Akismet otherwise you will spend a lot of time clean up ad leaches from your site. I have made this in the past with other blogs and my email still shows it.


These are some of the mistakes I have made, take a minute and make sure you are not doing the same.

Have you made any mistakes you would like to mention? Post a comment.

Google My Blog:Creating Speed Link Sites with WordPress

What is a Speed Link Site?

I came up with the name based on “speed linking” in blogs. This is where you have a group of links together in a post based on a specific topic. A lot of blogger use these for weekly News summaries. Here is an example from Problogger.

These are interesting but I thought they would even be better if you could automate the whole process so little interaction is required.

By using free software (WordPress & Plug-ins) and automated searches (Google Alerts) you can create sites that don’t require a group of researchers and web developers to create and maintain.

Creating a Speed Link Site

Here is how I think this can be accomplished:

1. Download and Install Wordpress on your webserver.

2. Create Google Alerts to search for a topic and then post the results back to an email address. I would setup the alert for “as they happen” so the messages are posted as individual entries (more on this later). Also use “text alerts” so they do not mess up the formatting when posting in WordPress.

3. Setup email posting in WordPress so the Google Alerts are automatically sent to WordPress. Setup a category for each alert in WordPress. This will keep the postings cleaner looking.

4. Then using an update program in WordPress like Cron Demo from Designpraxis it could automatically gather the email posts on a daily basis.

5. Install a WP-PostRatings Program to allow users to rate the postings. This way the readers do the sorting and rating work for you. This is why you want to setup the Google Alerts as the happen so each alert is its own posting in WordPress.

6. Display the top rated posts in a widget so the best article “float” to the top of the list.

Example Sites

Celebrity/Fan Site

Come up with a list of stars (Paris Hilton, Brittney Spears, etc) you want all the updates on and create alerts for each with their own WordPress categories. Now you will get alerted each time something posts about them and an new entry in WordPress.

Technology Site

Setup your own version of Digg with automatic subject feeds posted in WordPress and user ranking the content. This can be a site for WordPress, Web 2.0, Web 3.0 or any other technology you can think search on.

Final Thoughts

This type of site can be used to create a new site or add to an existing site as a new information source for your blog. In addition, it runs itself so you don’t have to spend hours each day searching on the Internet for new topics. Let Google do that for you using its spiders and then post it with your bots.

Could it get easier than this?

Has anyone created a WordPress site like this?