Almost everyone is using WordPress these days. If you have a blog, then chances are that at some point you will end up using WordPress for it. Wordpress is popular, very well designed, extendable (with plugins), easy to customize (with themes), easy to use and a really painless to install. Thus, it is no wonder that you will find many tutorials, guides, and tips on using WordPress. However, most of those guides are not videos.

Enter, http://css-tricks.com and their great list of video tutorials. Chris Coyier at http://css-tricks.com has put together a nice list of very useful WordPress video tutorials from various sites. Follow along with these video tutorials to learn how to:

• Design a WordPress theme
• Create a WordPress template
• Use lots of customization tips and tricks
• Use WordPress as a CMS (content management system)
• Install WordPress Locally (great for testing things out on your computer)
• How to Modify a WordPress Theme
• Add a Twitter Field to Your Form
• And, much more

Further reading

• Find some great free themes at the official WordPress showcase site.
• Find 20+ Great WordPress 2.7 Compatible Plugins.
• Interviews with some of the best Web Designers and their favorite themes at SmashingMagazine.

Related content

• 15 Attractive (WordPress) Blog Designs

Content is king, as always, in the blogging world. Without it your blog will whither and die a slow death. Bloggers are always looking for something new to write about, report on, and inform their readers about. But, sometimes you need content and you are fresh out of ideas.

One way to get new content into a blog is to piggyback onto RSS feeds. If you don’t have anything original to blog about, or you just want to get the latest scoop from news sources, then you can pull in content from RSS feeds, and even automate the process of creating posts from them.

Be careful! Do not abuse this method. Do not simply copy blog posts from other Websites. It should be ok to post snippets of content from other sites, along with a link back to the original article so the author gets full credit for his or her work. However, if you want full articles without upsetting anyone, you can always pick up RSS feeds from article directories like eZineArticles.com – but I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s first look at some options to pull RSS feeds into WordPress: below are plugins you can use with WordPress to accomplish this.

WP-o-Matic
Download from: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-o-matic/

• This free plugin allows you to add and import RSS feeds, and sort them into campaigns and categories. You can then automatically generate posts from the feeds. This plugin also allows you to relink specific words as well as rewrite words within the new posts.
• One major problem, as of this blog post: it does not work with WordPress 2.7

AutoBlogged
Buy from: http://www.steveatwal.com/recommends/autoblogged.php

• This is a more polished plugin that does what WP-o-Matic does and more.
• Has numerous pre-defined searches to locate articles via Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, MSN Spaces, Yahoo! News, Flickr, YouTube, and others.
• They have a new version that is supposed to work with WordPress 2.7

YAAB-Autoblogger (Yet Another Autoblogger)
Download from: http://www.psypo.com

• This free plugin is still in Beta, so you may experience bugs. But it tries to do what WP-o-Matic does. Try it and see if it works for you.
• It is supposed to work with WordPress 2.7

FeedWordPress
Download from: http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/

• This free plugin is similar to the ones above and works with WordPress 2.7

So, once you decide which of the above plugins works for you, you will want to decide which RSS feeds to pull content from. There are many RSS feeds out there, so just pick the ones you like the best – Google is your friend in this respect. Below are two Websites with RSS feed listings to get you started:

• Yahoo RSS Feeds: http://dir.yahoo.com/rss/dir/index.php
• Top 150 Media and Marketing Blogs: http://adage.com/power150/

There are basically two types of bloggers in the world – reporters and experts – and some people perform both roles (usually the experts, it’s hard for reporters to become experts, but it’s easy for experts to report).

If you have ever taken an Internet marketing course or attended a seminar specifically for beginners, you have probably heard about the two different methodologies. Whenever the business model is based on content, and if you blog for money then the model is based on content, people are taught to either start as reporters, or if possible step up as experts.

I’ll be frank; you want to be the expert.

Reporters leverage the content of the experts and in most cases people start off as reporters because they haven’t established expertise. Experts enjoy the perks of preeminence, higher conversion rates because of perceived value, it’s easier to get publicity, people are more likely to seek you out rather than you having to seek others out, joint ventures come easier, etc. Experts in most cases simply make more money and attract more attention.

Most Bloggers Are Reporters

The thing with expertise is that it requires something – experience. No person becomes an expert without doing things and learning. Bloggers usually start out without expertise and as a result begin their blogging journey by talking about everything going on in their niche (reporting) and by interviewing and talking about other experts (reporting again).

There’s nothing wrong with reporting of course and for many people it’s a necessity at first until you build up some expertise. Unfortunately the ratios are pretty skewed when it comes to reporters and experts – there are a lot more reporters than there are experts, hence reporters tend to struggle to gain attention and when they do, they often just enhance the reputation of the expert they are reporting on.

Don’t Replicate Your Teacher

If you have ever spent some time browsing products in the learn Internet marketing niche you will notice a pattern. Many people first study Internet marketing from a guru (for lack of a better term). The guru teaches how he or she is able to make money online, and very often the view that the student gleams is that in order to make money online you have to teach others how to make money online.

The end result of this process is a huge army of amateurs attempting to replicate what their teacher does in the same industry – the Internet marketing industry – not realizing that without expert status based on a proven record and all the perks that come with it, it’s next to impossible to succeed.

Even people, who enjoy marginal success, say for example growing an email list of 1,000 people, then go out and launch a product about how to grow an email list of 1,000 people. Now I have no problems with that, I think it’s fine to teach beginners and leverage whatever achievements you have, the problem is that people gravitate to the same niche – Internet marketing – and rarely have any key points of differentiation.

How many products out there do you know of that all claim to teach the same things – email marketing, SEO, pay per click, affiliate marketing, and all the sub-niches that fall under the category of Internet marketing. It’s a saturated market, yet when you see your teachers and other gurus making money teaching others how to make money (and let’s face it – making money as a subject is one of the most compelling) – your natural inclination is to follow in their footsteps.

If the key is to become an expert and you haven’t spent the last 5-10 years making money online, I suggest you look for another niche to establish expertise in.

Report on Your Process, Not Others

The secret to progress from reporter to expert is not to focus on other experts and instead report on your own journey. When you are learning how to do something and implementing things day by day, or studying other people’s work, you need to take your process and what you do as a result of what you learn, and use it as content for your blog.

It’s okay to talk about experts when you learn something from them, but always relate it to what you are doing. If you learn a technique from an expert it’s fine to state you learned it from them (and affiliate link to their product too!) but you should then take that technique, apply it to what you are doing and then report back YOUR results, not theirs. Frame things using your opinion – your stories – and don’t regurgitate what the expert said. The key is differentiation and personality, not replication.

Expertise comes from doing things most people don’t do and then talking about it. If you do this often enough you wake up one day as an expert, possibly without even realizing how it happened, simply because you were so good at reporting what you did.

You Are Already An Expert

Most people fail to become experts (or perceived as experts) because they don’t leverage what they already know. Every person who lives a life learns things as they go, takes action every day and knows something about something. The reason why they never become an expert is because they choose not to (which is fine for some, not everyone wants to be an expert), but if your goal is to blog your way to expertise and leave the world of reporting behind you have to start teaching and doing so by leveraging real experience.

Experience can come from what you do today and what you have done previously; you just need to take enough steps to demonstrate what you already know and what you are presently learning along your journey. I know so many people in my life, who are experts simply by virtue of the life they have lived, yet they are so insecure about what they know, they never commit their knowledge to words for fear of well fear.

Blogs and the Web in general, are amazing resources when you leverage them as a communication tool to spread your expertise because of the sheer scope of people they can reach. If all you ever do is talk to people in person and share your experience using limited communication mediums, you haven’t much hope of becoming an expert. Take what you know and show other people through blogging, and you might be surprised how people change their perception of you in time.

Reporting Is A Stepping Stone

If your previous experience and expertise is from an area you want to leave behind or you are starting from scratch, then reporting is the path you must walk, at least for the short term.

Reporting is a lot of fun. Interviewing experts, talking about what other people are doing and just being part of a community is not a bad way to blog. In many cases people make a career of reporting (journalism is about just that), but if you truly want success and exponential results, at some point you will have to stand up and proclaim yourself as someone unusually good at something and then proceed to demonstrate it over and over again.

Have patience and focus on what you do to learn and then translate that experience into lessons for others, and remember, it’s okay to be a big fish in a small pond, that’s all most experts really are.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information, visit BlogMastermind

It seems that in the neverending fight to win users over to use their services, companies like Google are offering up tools that they gave only to priveleged users of their services before. Case in point is the Google Gadgets. Yes, you could use them on your desktop just like the Yahoo Widgets, but to use them online, you could only use them on websites hosted by Google. Well, I guess they’re feeling the pressure from Microsoft who has their Live Gallery of widgets for you to use with their Microsoft Live Writer blogging software. I think this is all good – but do they have to paste the Google logo everywhere on their gadgets? Shucks! I guess they do need some credit and some kickback for their generousity. Not sure which gadgets I would use, from either Microsoft or Google, but they look cool! Take a boo below, which shows one Google Gadget and one Microsoft Gadget: all I had to do was paste some code from the Google Gadgets page (to search the Wikipedia);and insert the appropriate gadget from within the Microsoft Live Writer (to show an Event).

Google Gadget to Search the Wikipedia

…and a Microsoft Live Writer Gadget to show an Event

Blogging by visiting your Website every time may seem a bit tedious now. There is software available that will allow you to post to your Blog much more quickly and efficiently. One such software is from dear old Microsoft, and it is surprisingly a nice piece of software. It is called the Windows Live Writer. To get your copy, head on over to:

Essentials Beta

and then click on the Writer Beta download link under Blogging. Install is a breeze, but if you want to use it with a host of other blogging software like WordPress for your site then click on the link other than the Windows Live Spaces when you start it up.

Here, briefly, are some key features of this easy to use software:

• WYSIWYG Authoring. Huh? you say. Well, if you are complete non-Nerd then this means you don’t need to know any programming languages like HTML. If you know how to use a word processor then you can use Windows Live Writer.
• Photo Publishing. What this means is that this software makes it so easy to add, customize, and upload photos to your blog that even your monkey can do it. Unless, of course, you’re a monkey already, in which case no offense intended.
• Map Publishing. Want to insert a map of your favorite hangout or the next place your friends are going to party at, or some of the places you wish you could visit if only you had the time? Well, whatever you want to show, you can easily insert a map of that place with this software.
• Writer SDK. Well, this one is for the geeks, but you don’t need to be a geek to use it. What this means is that all those geeks out there (aka programmers with little else to do but get their thrills from coding late into the night) can make some nifty tools available for you to add into Windows Live Writer and use. These include, but are limited only by the vast imagination of the geeks: images from popular online photo publishing sites like Flickr; embedded audio and video players; tags from tagging services; links from e-commerce sites such as Google Adsense.

The coolest thing about this software is, of course, the fact that Microsoft designed it so that it will work with not only their own Windows Live Spaces, but also with the host of other blogging software out there like WordPress (my current favorite), Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, Movable Type, etc.

BTW, in case you’re wondering, this was posted using Windows Live Writer! They even have a way to post this into the right category using the category dropdown box on the top right of the Windows Live Writer screen. Now that is cool!