Search Results for: WordPress

April 22 2024

How To Set Up Google Site Kit In WordPress

In this video, I would like to show you how to set up Google Site Kit in WordPress. The good news is that this WordPress plug-in makes it much easier to install Google Search Console and Google Analytics on your WordPress website. It used to be a slightly painful process, but it’s great that the plug-in simplifies the process so much!

Apparently, the Site Kit plug-in from Google was first released in December 2018, I must admit that I have only just started using it. The amazing fact is that the plug-in enables the user to use Google search console, analytics, AdSense and page speed insights, which is very useful data.

To use Google Site Kit, you will need to have a Gmail address. If you don’t have one, they are very easy and quick to set up. You can see a previous video and blog post that I have about setting up a Gmail account.

Take A Look At My Video on How To Set Up Google Site Kit In WordPress Below

Login To Your WordPress Dashboard

First, you need to log into your WordPress dashboard and then go to plug-ins. Once you are in plug-ins, then go to add new and carry out a search for Site Kit, it will probably be at the top of the search as it’s a popular plug-in.

All you need to do then is install the plug-in and follow the process that I showed in the video.

Installing Site Kit By Google

So first of all, click on install and then click activate plug-in. We can now go to our plug-ins page and you will see Google Site Kit, which will say congratulations; the site Kit plug-in is now activated.

We then need to go to site set up. You also need to check the box that says connect Google Analytics as part of your set up. I would definitely check this box, as Google Analytics can give you so much free information. Further down the page, there is another checkbox that you don’t have to check. It’s supposed to help Google collect data; it’s up to you if you check the box. I personally didn’t check the box as I believe that Google probably knows enough about me, probably more than we could ever imagine!

So now we are ready to sign into our Google account. Obviously, you need to have a Google account already set up. I did put a link in earlier which explains how to set up a Google account, if you don’t have one.

You can see that I have a list of different Google accounts; however, I’m going to sign in with my Google account that I use for this website. Personally, I always advise people to have a Google account for each individual website. Not everyone would agree with me, but I believe it keeps things simple and much more easy to manage.

Signing To Site Kit

We can now sign into Google Site Kit. It will then say that Site Kit wants to access your Google account; I just clicked on the select all, as I want all the features available to me. We can then click continue.

Google Will Now Verify Your Site Ownership

Google now ask you if you want to verify your site, You need to click on the verify ownership button. I must admit that the Google Site Kit plug-in is so much easier and quicker than varying your site the old-fashioned way! The next thing we need to allow is for the metrics to be turned on in a dashboard, so click on allow.

Set Up Search Console

We can now click on the setup button, which will enable our website to be attached to Google search console. So click on the setup button. Google Search console is a great piece of software which gives lots of useful information. It helps the user to improve their website results, more on that in another video.

Set Up Google Analytics

The final setup process is setting up Google analytics. This is so we can understand how visitors find and use your site, so we definitely want this. So we need to click on next and this will take us to the Google analytics connect service. The form should be prefilled for you, but just check that everything is correct, including your country and the time zone. We can then click on create account.

It will then ask you to choose an account, your default account should be showing as it’s showing in the video. We then need to click on this account which will then sign a centre Site Kit. It will then say that Site Kit once additional access to your Google account, so we then need to click on continue. This will then take us to the Google analytics terms of service agreement.

We need to accept the Google analytics terms and conditions. There are also some data sharing settings, most of these are already checked, but I’m going to check the Google products and services box. This is optional. We then need to go and click on accept. Once we have carried out these tasks, we are ready to start.

Getting Your Data

You can see that in the video it’s telling me that site Kit is gathering data. We actually need to come back in a few day’s time to see the real data. This is a relatively fully new website with not that many posts on the site, so there’s not a huge amount of data to see. However, it’s good to have Site Kit up and running on the website so we can measure future traffic.

March 16 2024

How To Change A Page To A Post In WordPress – And Vice Versa

Roy Bretton How To's, WordPress

Today, in my video, I want to show you how to change a page to a post in WordPress – and vice versa. I think we’ve all done this; we’ve written a post or a page, and we have meant to put it, perhaps, as a post, but we put it in as a page. I generally write posts rather than pages, but occasionally, for some reason, I’ve just written it as a page. You can see my previous blog post about Google’s core update here.

Now, there are two ways of doing this. There’s one way that looks quite good, but the way I normally do change a post to a page or vice versa, which I think is probably the easiest way, I will show you in a minute. So, if we go to our plugins page here, and here you can see that I have typed in “post type switcher,” which you can see has come up here. Basically, I’m in plugins and I’ve gone to add a new plugin and then typed in “post type switcher.” And then, if we click here, it gives us some more information —I always like to look at the ratings.

You Can See The Video below On How To Change A Page To A Post In WordPress – And Vice Versa

Use A Plugin

There are two things I look at: ratings and to check that the plugin has been updated recently. Also, it’s important to make sure that it is compatible with your version of WordPress. Now, there are 13 one-star reviews but there are 215 good reviews, so nothing in between, funny enough, which sounds good.

And here, it looks very simple. You’ve got a drop-down menu, and you can just simply switch it over. I must admit, I try to avoid having too many plugins, but this certainly looks like a good way to to change a page to a post. However, let’s come back to the way that would normally change a page to a post.

Copy And Paste In Text Mode

So, let’s have a look at this post here. Take this post here, “Why Your Website Should Be Your Priority, Not Social Media.” So, I am in edit mode here, so I’m in “posts,” “all posts,” I’m in this post here. So, I’m going to go to—at the moment, we’re in visual, but I’m going to go to text, and then I’m going to put the mouse here, going to highlight it, and then I’m going to copy.

Now, let’s open a new, in fact, no, let’s go now to get a page and let’s go to “add new page,” going to paste, and I won’t worry about the title, and then we’re going to go visual, which shows us how the page will look, and then we literally just press publish. Now, I don’t need to publish the page because I’m not going to use this page. But you’ve got everything there, and that seems to work quite well. You have to do it in text mode to change it, copy the text, and then that’ll copy everything over.

To Conclude

I like to try to keep my plugins to a minimum, so the way that I have shown you seems to be a simple and effective way to change from a page to a post or vice versa. Of course, you can always disable the plugin once you have carried out what is necessary. However, copying the page in text format seems to work absolutely fine for me. I have always enjoyed learning new tips and tricks online. One of the places that I recommend for up-to-date training online is a membership site that I am part of. You can see my profile here to find out more about me.

January 26 2024

How To Create Menus In WordPress 2024

Roy Bretton How To's

In this video and blog post, I want to show you how to create Menus in WordPress 2024. So I am on one of my websites here; you can see that I have on my top navigation bar home, about me and privacy policy. I’m going to show you how to create and add some posts to the menu. I have previous videos and blog posts on creating menus here. You can see my video of how to create Menus in WordPress 2024 below.

Let’s Navigate To The Dashboard

You obviously need to be logged in to be able to get to the WordPress dashboard. Once you are logged in, if you navigate to appearance and then to Menus, this will take you to the required area. You can see the existing menu that I have already created. I’m going to change the menu name to “Top Navigation”.

We need to go to the area on the left-hand side of the page that says posts, as we are currently on pages. I’m then going to “view all”. I’m going to then check the post called “arrested again for praying” and I will then click on add to menu. You can now see that this has been added to our menu structure. I want to change the name, so if we click on the arrow, it will enable me to rename the category within the menu. I can change this to “News Items”. The menu can now be saved.

Sorting The Menu

We can sort the menu to any order that is required just by left-clicking on any menu and then dragging it up or down, depending on where it is required. Once again, you need to save the menu once you have sorted the menu. So will now go back to posts and view all. I’m going to add another post to my menu. Let’s use “Bank Bullies Vicar”, I’m going to click on the add to menu button, which will immediately put it with my other menu categories. I’m going to drag “Bank Bullies Vicar” slightly to the right, which will make this item a subcategory of “News Items”. Let’s do exactly the same with another blog post and make it a subcategory of “News Items”. Once again, I can click on “News Items” and drag it to whichever position I prefer.

Click On Posts

Let’s Create Another New Menu

I’m going to create another menu item now, this one will be called “Devotionals”. Once again I can change the name of the menu category to whatever I want. I can move the “Devotionals” to wherever I want to within the menu and so forth. Once again, I need to save the menu.

Don’t Forget To Save The Menu

Let’s View Our New Menu

So let’s now go back to the website and have a look at the menu navigation. As you can see, nothing has changed yet, as I have the website open in a different tab. However, once I have refreshed the website, the menu will appear. You can see the new menu and the drop-down menus that have more than one post attached to them.

New Navigation

To Conclude

The menu can be changed at any time, you can remove and add and reposition the menu, just through a few clicks. If you have any questions, please feel free to comment on the YouTube video, I do try and respond to questions.

December 14 2023

WordPress – How To Avoid Featured Image Duplication

Roy Bretton How To's, WordPress

**WordPress – Avoid Featured Image Duplication**

Today, I would like to share a helpful tip for WordPress – how to avoid featured image duplication. I look into this common issue in my latest video and offer a simple solution.. You can either read this blog post or watch my step-by-step video. You can find other videos and blog posts on my website about WordPress here.

Identifying the Issue

In my WordPress post titled “Stop the Music,” I noticed an issue with image duplication. This is a problem that many WordPress users often face.

Adding the Featured Image

Go to the ‘Edit’ section of your post. Here, you can add a featured image. In my example, I selected a specific image to set as the featured image and then updated the post.

Checking the Result

After updating, open the post in a new tab. You might notice two featured images appearing – the original thumbnail and the new one you just added.

The Solution

To resolve this, head over to your WordPress dashboard. Navigate to ‘Appearance’, then ‘Customize’, and finally, ‘Additional CSS’.

Applying Custom CSS

This is where I applied a specific CSS code to fix the issue. I used GeneratePress for this example, but the concept applies broadly. Once the CSS is copied and pasted into the ‘Additional CSS’ section, publish the changes. This is the code that I used.

.single .featured-image {
display: none !important;
}

Observing the Changes

Return to your post and refresh the page. Now, you should see only one featured image, effectively resolving the duplication issue.

To Conclude

This simple yet effective method addresses many common annoyances in various WordPress themes. You can see the CSS code that I used above in this blog post.

If you have any comments, questions, or thoughts, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment. I’m here to help. Thank you for following along, and I hope this guide makes your WordPress experience smoother.

November 18 2023

Creating Your First Blog Post In WordPress

Roy Bretton Affiliate Marketing, WordPress

Today, I want to talk about creating your first blog post within WordPress. Recently, I created a video about keywords, etc., which you can see below. I mentioned, don’t get too hung up with keywords. It can slow people down sometimes. If you know your niche, which should be something you’re passionate about, then just write freely. But please, don’t get me wrong; as I mentioned, the Jaaxy free keyword tool is excellent.

In my previous video, I was looking at my original search, which was “Christian books.” So, if you look at history, you can see “Christian books.” If I put that in, it comes up, but you can put whatever niche you have. You can put whatever Word you want in here and find more words. I won’t go into that because that’s in this video and blog post. So let’s get started and add some content to our website. The easiest way to do this is by watching the YouTube video which is embedded into this video below.

Login to WordPress

So, let’s get on to adding some content. I’m actually logged into my WordPress site now. If you’re a Wealthy Affiliate member, you can log into it through websites. Here it is, countrymensview.com, but I’m already logged in.

I’m in the dashboard, or back office, whatever you like to call it. I’m going to add a new post. This is going to be the first post. Now, I have a Word document on another monitor that you can’t see, so I’m going to copy that. I’m going to go visual here. Right-click, and for some reason, it’s not letting me paste as visual, so I’m going to paste it as plain text because I’m pasting from a Word document.

I Prefer To Type Into A Document

I use Word, but you can use Google Documents or any document software. It’s important to paste in as plain text because documents like Word can add formatting, and you just want to keep everything simple in your blog post. Let’s paste that and go to visual.

Now, I’m going to drag this up. This is the title here. I’m going to get rid of that. I have a YouTube video that I’m going to upload here. What I normally do is click the enter button three times. I don’t know if this is correct, but that’s how I do it, and then I go back to the middle there.

Embedding A YouTube Video Into A Blog Post

When it comes to a YouTube video, we need to go to text here, so we put in text. You can see there we’ve got these little three lines. We’re going to go to my video, click “Share,” then “Embed.” If I wanted this to start at a given time, I could click here, but I want people to see the whole video. Let’s highlight that, click “Copy,” and then we’re going to put that in. I’m just going to have it as plain text. Then, let’s go back to visual.

We can see that it’s over to the left, and the cursor is flashing away here. If we go up here to what we call the kitchen sink, we can see we can align it to the right, and I’m going to put it in the middle and leave it there.

Grammarly And Formatting Etc

Now, here you can see there are a few red lines. This is because I use something called Grammarly, which I do recommend, although it can be slightly annoying. It helps to spot spelling mistakes, but sometimes it can overdo things. Here, a comma that’s in the wrong place, so let’s change that. Grammarly picks out things that sometimes the human eye doesn’t.

Then, we want to highlight titles, which I do not have that many titles. I may add more, but this is just for the video. If we come up here, I’m going to highlight and go bold. I’m going to go heading two. That’s a heading. I’ll probably put some more headings in here.

Uploading A Photograph Or Picture

If you want to upload a photograph, go to “Add Media.” I’ve already uploaded this, but if you wanted to, it’s already in the library. You could go to “Upload Files,” “Select Files,” and then it can go to your folder wherever it may be. Let’s cancel that. Let’s go to the Media Library, click here.

I normally put the title all in the same box, and then it can say alignment, which is left, centre, right, none. I want it aligned on the left, a bit like what we’ve done with the YouTube video. Let’s leave that there. This is the size. There are various sizes. You can always come back and edit it. We’re going to insert that into the post. So, there it is. I’m going to make that bold, so we highlight this and just click on Bold there, just so that it stands out a bit more. That’s my personal preference.

Yoast SEO

Now, down here, I use a plugin called Yoast SEO, so I’m going to put a meta description down here. What I do is take the first line. You can only put so many words in, so I’m going to put the meta description down here. I’m going to do plain text again. If I had put more words, just as an example, I’m going to put a word, but then it goes brown. It’s saying there are too many words in there, so that’s why I only put that many words. I can’t remember how many characters it is now, maybe 144, but I can’t quite remember. It will say somewhere.

This is the slug, so this is what will be in the address bar. It’ll be countrymensview.com/forward-slash-end-times-people-will-become-offended. Once we’ve got the slug, we don’t want to change that, and we want to keep that the same. So, we’re going to do the SEO title, which is scrolling down, plain text. The title is, “in end times people will become offended”

I’m going to put the key phrase, so I’m going to put the title in for the moment. I’m going to leave it at that. Now, some people might put “end times” in, but I’m going to put that full title in. At the moment, it’s glowing orange, so we need to see what we need to do.

Linking Content

Bear in mind this is our first content, so we can’t link to anywhere else. There are no outbound links, no internal links. I haven’t got anywhere to link to. The Focus keyword was only found two times, so I may want to add that in again. It says the focus keyword phrase was found two times. That’s less than the recommended minimum of three times for a text of this length. So here, this will show us where our keyword is. So, that’s where it’s showing us. Somewhere in here, I will try to add the keyword in somewhere else. I’m going to pause the video for a moment and come back in a second when I’ve added the Word, rather than waste time on the video.

Okay, so I have added the SEO title again, as it was telling me the SEO title wasn’t showing. I just added it once more, and you can see now this is glowing green. That’s all I’ve done. Normally, I would link to another blog post, but I can’t because there isn’t a blog post to link to.

You can see here that the readability says it’s okay, but it could be better. Here we have these tabs, so we’re going to click on the other tab. It says passive voice. Well, to be fair, I dictated this from the video, so it sounds like I’m speaking in passive voice. I’m not going to change that.

Yoast Is Only a Guide

Some people can spend too much time trying to get everything right in Yoast SEO, just remember it’s a guide! It’s got subheading distribution. The beginning of your text is longer than 300 words and is not separated by any subheadings. So, let’s see if we can put a subheading in. Let’s put a heading in here. I’m going to paste this in now. I’m going to bold. So, that’s the heading in. Maybe something to do with the SEO thing shouldn’t be, let’s turn it off so that we can, no.

So, another heading. I’m going to publish this because it’s going to change things. Let’s publish it. It’s saying SEO is good. Let’s go down to readability. So, one section of your text is longer than 300 words, and this is over 300 words, so I need to add something. If I add something down here, let’s paste this title in here again, plain text. Then I’m going to bold.

So now we have this. It’s great. SEO is glowing green, and the readability is glowing green. Now, like I said, we’ve only got one post, so we can’t link. So, at the moment, I’m going to keep it like this. Let’s view our post here.

And there it is. There’s the video and so forth. So, that’s our first post uploaded. A lot more to do, so if you’ve got any questions, I’m here to help. Please feel free to leave a comment in the YouTube video or on my Wealthy Affiliate profile. I’m here to help. Thanks very for watching.

To Conclude

If you would like to learn more about creating websites and how to create an online business. I do recommend the Wealthy Affiliate platform that I have been a member for nine years now. It is a 100% genuine platform that teaches you the right way to build a business online.

If you would like to know more about me, you can see more about me here.

November 28 2022

How To Create Custom Menus In WordPress

Roy Bretton How To's, Internet Marketing, Wealthy Affiliate

In this video, I would like to show you how to create custom menus in WordPress. In the previous video, we were talking about how to create our first website content.

Before I start, I just want to take you to the Wealthy Affiliate platform, which is where I build my WordPress websites. You can see here that this is my home page or profile page on the platform. I have been a member of the platform for eight years, in fact I’m just starting my ninth year.

The Wealthy Affiliate platform teaches you how to build an online business, even if you know absolutely nothing. The platform takes you through the complete process from start to finish. There are over 2 million members; I appreciate that they are not all active. However, it does prove how popular the platform really is.

How To Create Custom Menus In WordPress

Once again, I’m on the Wealthy Affiliate platform, as that is where I host my WordPress website. The hosting is something that’s included within the Wealthy Affiliate platform if you are a paid member. I’m going to click on the website tab; this takes me to my recent website logins. I’m going to then click on a countrymans view, which will enable me to log into my website. You can log in to your website in a different way, however, as my website is hosted at Wealthy Affiliate, it’s easy for me to log in through the Wealthy Affiliate platform.

Go To Appearance

So, as you can see, we have the dashboard menu on the left-hand side; I am going to scroll down to appearance and then click on menus. So here you can see that we have a menu structure, which is currently called menu one. You can see that we have our home page and our privacy policy within the menu. If we go to another tab where I have the front end of the website open. You can see that we have a privacy policy in the top right-hand corner, and then on the home page, we can see my about me page.

We will now go back to the dashboard and to our menu. You can see that on the left-hand side of the page, we are in pages. Within pages, we can see our privacy policy, as in my last video, we created the privacy policy in pages. If we come down the page, we can see that our next heading is posts. Within posts, we can see the about me page, which I uploaded as a post, in the previous video.

Below the posts, we have custom links and categories, I’m not going to look at these two sections today as I want to keep the video simple and straightforward. I will create another video at a later date to explain more about the categories and the custom links etc.

Let’s put a checkmark on the about me page and add it to our menu. Now just click on the “and to menu” button, and you can see it is added to our main menu. You can see the about me page below our privacy policy. We can move the various pages up and down by clicking on the icons and dragging them up or down.

Name Our Menu

You can see that by default, the menu is named as “menu one” I’m going to change that to “main menu”. This can be changed at any time if you want to change the menu name. I’m also going to click on the primary menu below; I will then click on the save button to save our menu.

Now we are going to have a look at the front page of the website. Here you can see on the main navigation menu we have a privacy policy, about me and home. The menu can be extended at any time and run along the navigation bar.

Changing The Order Of Our Menu

We are now returning to the dashboard again. If we want to move one of the menus, we can drag it up and down, as I mentioned earlier. Or we can create a subcategory by moving it slightly to the right. We now need to save our menu before we leave the page.

So now we are going to go back to the front end of the website again; we need to refresh the page. Now you can see that below we have the privacy policy, we have about me and then our homepage button to the left. I’m not going to leave the menu like that; it was just a demonstration to show how easy it is to move the menu around and create subcategories.

I will now put the menu back to how I want it, and then once again, we need to save our menu. Normally if you forget to save the menu, WordPress warns you not to leave that page until you have made the necessary changes or clicked on the save button.

Widgets

Now that we have completed the menu training, we will have a quick look at the widgets area. As you can see, we are still in appearance and we just need to come up one level to the widgets section. You can see all the various widgets that are available, they can almost be placed wherever we want.

If you have a look at the front page of our website, you can see the various widgets. First of all, we have the search bar, then we have the recent posts and finally, recent comments. These can be moved around and the order can be changed by going to our dashboard and to the widgets section.

Widgets Everywhere

You can see that there are widgets for the sidebar, header, footer area, footer bar etc., the list goes on. I will talk about the widgets more later on; this is just really an introduction to what the widgets offer.

You can see our widgets that are in use now we have recent posts and recent comments. We can add a button text and various other labels etc.

If you have any questions about how to create custom menus in WordPress or you think that I can help with something, please contact me here.

To conclude

If you would like to know more about the Wealthy Affiliate platform, you can sign up for a free account here. There is no need for a credit card to be used for the free starter account. The free starter account does exactly what it says, you can test the system to see that you are satisfied. I actually immediately went to the paid membership as I was already working online. I could see that the platform was very impressive. However, it’s good to check out the free starter account with no obligation, you can always move up to premium level or premium plus level, at any time.

November 19 2022

How To Start A Web Business – Setting Up Your WordPress Website

Roy Bretton Uncategorized

Today we are looking at how to start a web business – setting up your WordPress website. In the previous video, we built our website; we just need to review some of the settings.

I am on a platform called Wealthy Affiliate; you can see my profile page here. It’s a great platform, I have been a member of the platform for precisely eight years. I plan to be here for many more years, as it’s a great platform! The platform teaches you how to build an online business, it’s not just for beginners it’s for people of any level.

When I joined Wealthy Affiliate I was already making money online. However, I really like the idea of being around like-minded people and having regular updated training. There is also an area where you can ask questions; as you can see have asked 247 questions so far. There is no limit on the number of questions that you can ask.

You can join as a starter member, which will cost you absolutely nothing; you don’t even need a credit card. You won’t have full access to all the functionality. However, it gives you enough access to start a web business and to see if you want to move further.

Let’s now get back to setting up a website.

Setting Up Your Website

The first thing we need to do is to log into our WordPress website. The easiest way to do this is to go to the Wealthy Affiliate platform, click on the websites tab and then go to site manager. It will take you to your recent websites, you can also view all your websites in the same area.

We can then click on login, and that will log us into our WordPress website. You can see the back office or the dashboard of the WordPress website. If we click on the top of the left-hand corner of our website, you can see the website name. Every time you click on the name it will go between the front page of the website and the dashboard.

If ever you have a problem logging in, the great thing is that hosting a website at Wealthy Affiliate gives you full access to site support. I have found that site support generally gets back to you normally within a few minutes. That includes night and daytime and weekends.

The WordPress dashboard

Now I want to go through briefly and explain what the various buttons do within the WordPress dashboard. First of all, we have posts, this is what the majority of people will use to update their website. For example, this video transcription will be uploaded to a post on my WordPress website.

Posts

When I want to write a new post, I go to “add new”, which enables me to write a new post. I don’t actually use the block editor; I will probably add a plug-in that will let me bring back the classic editor.

We will now go to “all posts” you can see that we have one post at the moment. This is set up on our WordPress website by default, but we can delete it.

Media

This is where we can upload any images, where videos are stored etc. When we want to add a new image, we can just go to “add new”; we can either drag an image across or select a file from our computer.

Pages

Moving down the line, we come to the pages section, which are very similar to posts. Many people are confused between pages and posts, let me quote you this from the web below, as this is the easiest way to explain it.

“Posts are timely, and pages are timeless. WordPress posts are meant to be shared on social media, and pages are not. Posts are organized using categories and tags, while pages are hierarchical and organized as child and parent pages. Posts have an author and published date, while pages do not.”

When we click on pages, we can see we have a privacy policy and a sample page; we will delete these pages shortly.

Comments

Now we have arrived at comments, so we click on comments, we can see there is already a comment on our website. This is automatically added when we set up our website. I will delete this comment shortly.

Comments are great to have on our website as we can get people interacting with our content, as it is excellent for search engines. We can also delete comments at any time and also respond to the comment.

Appearance

Now we come to “appearance”; this enables us to customise our theme and do all sorts of amazing things!

Plug-ins

Here we have the plug-ins section, which enables the website to have various different types of functionality. There are thousands of plug-ins available that can help to enhance our website.

As you can see, we have the image optimiser, this is on the website by default. And then, we have the SEO framework, which checks our content and helps to improve it for the search engines. I normally use Yoast SEO, but I think I may try the SCO framework to see how I get on. Once again, I can remove this plug-in at any time and add the Yoast plug-in if required. I will now activate the SEO framework.

Tools And Settings

Tools and settings are really self-explanatory; however, I will explain more about the functionality in a later video. We will go to settings shortly in this video.

Deleting

Now we will go to the post section and I will delete the post by clicking on the “trash” button, which will delete the post. The great thing is that we can bring that post back if required at any time.

Deleting A Page

So now we are going to go to pages, we will delete the privacy policy and we will trash the sample page. Once again, we can undo what we have deleted or trashed. This is very useful if we trash a post by mistake!

General settings

Now we are going to go to settings and general. You see that we have the site title, “a countryman’s view” I will leave that as the title. However, the title can be changed at any time. We then have the tagline, which says just another WordPress site, although it is greyed out. I will leave this blank for the moment as it’s not required. On some websites, it will add a tagline below the site title.

We then come to site language; this needs to be set to your own country. I will set this to the UK as this is my country. As you can see, there is quite a long list of countries divided into sections. Many times we have these drop-down style menus, the U.K.’s right at the bottom. However, in this case, it is under Europe.

You have a choice of date formats, I will leave the dates and time format the same. And then, we have the option to set which day the week starts. I will set my weak start on Sunday, as for me, that is when the week starts! So now I have set my general settings, just make sure and press the save button!

When going back to the website’s front page, you can see that it says nothing found, as we deleted the post. Sometimes we have two click on the refresh arrow at the top of the page, or we can press F5, which will refresh the page on a PC.

Logging out

If we need to log out of our website at any time, which I don’t suggest unless you are using a public computer. If you go to the top right-hand side of the page where it says “Hi admin”, you can see that there is an option to logout. I normally stay logged in as I use my own computer.

To Conclude

That is all for this video; if you need help or have questions, please comment on the YouTube video, or you can contact me here.

In the next video, we will be setting up a website for SEO. It’s important that we follow the steps in each video.

You can find the training here on Wealthy Affiliate, and if you haven’t signed up, here is the link to the signup form.

October 10 2022

How To Add A Banner To A WordPress Sidebar Widget

Roy Bretton Uncategorized

How To Add A Banner To A WordPress Sidebar Widget

In this video, I would like to show you how to add a banner to a WordPress sidebar widget. I already have three banners on the website and I would like to add a fourth banner to my website. The idea of a banner on a website is to send the viewer to a special offer or something that may be of interest to the user. In this case, I’m sending customers to my domain and hosting shop.

So, first of all, we need to go to our WordPress dashboard. I am then scrolling down to appearance, where you will then see widgets. I want my widget to send people to my domain and hosting website here.

Go To Appearance

I then want to find the text box, I have marked the text box with an arrow. By left-clicking with the mouse, I can then drag the box towards my sidebar. I can change the position of widget at any time. The diagram shows where I’m drying the text box to the side widget.

Drag the Text Box To The Right Sidebar Widget

Add media

Let’s now go to add media; you can see that there are already a number of diagrams and photographs in my media library. I have already loaded my banner into the WordPress library. If you need to add images at any time, click on the upload file button and then go to where you’re required file is on your computer. You can load multiple images at once. I probably wouldn’t upload more than 10 images at a time, just to avoid the server crashing.

Inserting An Image Into The Widget

We then need to click on the required image or banner in our media library. It’s very similar to uploading a photograph to a blog post or webpage. In the attachment display settings area, I have set the alignment to none. The link to the drop-down menu to none and set the banner to full-size, which is 350 square pixels. If you scroll to the top of the screen, you can see that WordPress gives me the details of the size etc. We can now click on insert and that will put the banner into our widget.

It’s always good to give files and folders a name; in this case, I will call this widget “domains and hosting”.

We can actually edit our banner from within the widget area if we need to; I do not need to do anything this time.

Adding A Link To Our Widget

I now need to click on the link button to add my link that goes to my domain and hosting store. It’s always good to paste website addresses in to make sure that the address is accurate; otherwise, it may go somewhere else! Once I have pasted my website address into the widget, I then need to click on the cog. I normally tick the box that says open in a new tab, you don’t have to, but I prefer to. We must link click on update or save as shown in the diagram.

Make Sure And Click Save

The Widget Is Now Ready!

We Now Need To Save The Widget

We can now go across to the front end of our website and see the widget displayed. You may have to refresh your website by either clicking on the refresh button or pressing F5 on the keyboard. You can see that there our new widget is on the top of all the other widgets.

Widgets Can Be Moved

Widgets Can Be Moved

Any widget can easily be moved up and down by going back into the dashboard and right-clicking on the mouse over the widget that we want to move. Please see the diagram, WordPress automatically saves the widgets.

If you have any questions, I am here to help; just leave a comment within the YouTube comments.

You can visit my number one recommendation here if you want to know more about setting up an online business.

March 6 2022

How To Build A WordPress Website And Data Feed In Under 20 Minutes

Roy Bretton How To's

In this video and blog post, I would like to show you how to build a WordPress website and data feed in under 20 minutes. And at the same time add a data feed to the website which will automatically add new products to your website.

In the video, you can see one of my websites that is populated with around 8000 various products that are all categorised. A data feed allows me to import various products onto a WordPress website. You can see that in the video I have many different product sets of various products.

You see that I have added various plug-ins to my WordPress website. These plug-ins include various Datafeedr plug-ins and the WooCommerce plug-in which can all be downloaded.

Let’s Build Our WordPress Website

You can see that I am at my homepage on the Wealthy Affiliate platform. I’ve been a member of this great platform for over seven years now. I guess I will probably be a lifetime member! The platform allows you to build many websites and host them on the platform. I have some websites hosted on the platform and larger websites hosted on a dedicated server.

So, if we click on websites and then we have the option to click on build a website. I am then asked what type of website I would like to build. I’m going to go for the option of going for a domain that I own as I have already purchased a domain of my own. If you haven’t purchased a domain, you can find great prices for domains and hosting here.

We then have the option to choose a domain name for a website, I will put in firstclassmodelrailways.com. We don’t need to add https or www. This is a domain that I purchased earlier. We then need to enter a title for our website. Don’t worry if you can’t think of a title, just put something in as it can be changed later.

Build A WordPress Website

We are now ready to choose a theme. There are loads of themes available which can make it very confusing. As you can see in the video there are 4721 available themes. I have saved a few favourites, the great thing is a theme can be changed at any time. Just make sure that your website is backed up before you change a theme. Also when you’re choosing a theme make sure and check out the reviews to see that the theme is still supported.

Build Your Website

We can now click on the build our website button and hopefully, after around 30 seconds the website will be built! As you can see our website is now built, it really is an amazing way to build a website quickly. We can now log into our website through the Wealthy Affiliate platform by going to websites.

We are now ready to install Datafeedr. There are some people that say you need to do various things with your website first. For example, hello world, sample page etc. However, I like to install Datafeedr on my website quickly so that I can start adding products to my website instantly.

Let’s Get Ready To Install Datafeedr

We need to log in to our WordPress website and in the dashboard, we then need to go to settings and then a general. Most of the settings can remain the same, I am going to add a tag line and keep the same as the site title. Check your language is set to the correct country, I will set mine to English UK.

I will now set the time zone to London GMT. We can choose which date format we prefer which is obviously a personal preference. I prefer to have my week starts set for Sunday, once again that’s personal. Of course, we must make sure and save our changes. More changes can be made at any time, however, I like to do these small changes before I get started properly.

It’s Time To Install The Plug-Ins

If we now go to the plug-ins section on add dashboard and click add new. We can then carry out a search for the WooCommerce plug-in. Once you start typing the plug-in should appear, the plug-in we want is the WooCommerce plug-in by Automatic. We can now click on install now.

Now we need to search for our Datafeedr plug-ins, type in Datafeedr to the search box and the plug-ins will appear. The four plug-ins we need are Datafeedr WooCommerce importer, Datafeedr API, Datafeedr product sets and finally Datafeedr comparison sets.

We can now click on the install now button on each of the four data feed plug-ins. Once all the plug-ins are installed, we can now go to installed plug-ins and activate our five plug-ins.

You can see in my installed plug-ins that I have the SEO framework; this is something that I don’t use. I actually use the Yoast plug-in for all my websites. It’s something that I have used for years and as far as I know, it’s the most popular SEO plug-in. I see no point in changing a plug-in when it’s working perfectly fine. It appears that people are enjoying the SEO framework plug-in. I just like to stick with what I know, it takes time to learn various different types of functionality!

Installing The Plug-Ins For Datafeedr

WooCommerce Settings

WooCommerce seems to update its settings quite regularly so you may see something slightly different to what I am seeing! As we are selling affiliate products and not physical products many of the settings do not need to be activated or filled in.

Here I am going to my country which is the UK, there are quite a few countries to go through. I will also add my address. You will probably get a table come up which asks which industry you work in. Just find something that is appropriate to your niche. In my case, I’m going to put home as it’s a hobby. The next box to appear is what type of products will be listed? I’m going to put downloads as I will be using affiliate products. And then finally how many products there are going to display, I’m going to go for a 1000 plus.

WooCommerce may ask you what theme you want to use I will continue with my active theme. For Datafeedr, there are a lot of questions that WooCommerce asked which do not apply. Just skip over some of these questions, the majority of the questions are if you have a physical store.

I’m going to go in my WordPress dashboard to WooCommerce and settings. Here we can add our address and check our currency, once again, most of the settings can be left untouched. We then need to save settings.

WooCommerce Settings

Product Settings – Attributes

We are now going to go in our WordPress dashboard to products and then attributes. We are going to add a new attribute, the first attribute is network. And then we need to change the default sort order to “name” this is in the form of a drop-down menu. We now need to click on add attribute which will save settings.

The above process must be carried out three times. So, the second attribute is going to be “Merchant” and custom ordering. And finally, the third attribute will be “brand” and custom ordering. Once again, we need to save our work by clicking on “add attribute”.

Product Settings – Attributes

You Need To Enable The Cron

You will probably see a warning message at the top of the page telling you that the Cron is disabled. This is totally normal, in my case I will have to contact my hosting provider to tell them to enable the Cron. Depending on what type of hosting you have you can enable the Cron yourself. However, in my case, I will have to speak to my provider to turn it on. The data feed cannot function without the Cron being turned on.

You Need To Enable The Cron

Datafeedr API Configuration

It’s now time to configure our Datafeedr API, you can see at the top of the page that WordPress is telling us we need to configure our data feed API. We can either click on this or go to Datafeedr API and click on configuration.

We now need to add our API access ID and our API secret key. This is something that receive when we pay for the Datafeedr software. There is a link that will show you where your data feed API keys are. They can also be found in your signup email.

AWIN Settings

Below the API secret key you can see that there are AWIN settings, for this website I will not need Awin. However, if you do there is a link that shows you how to find your AWIN settings. Once again, we must make sure and save our changes!

Datafeedr API-Networks

We now need to set up our Datafeedr API networks. Once again we need to go to our WordPress dashboard, and then go to Datafeedr API and then networks. There are many different networks that you can add, I’m going to add ClickBank to start off with. We then need to tick the ClickBank box as shown in the diagram and add our affiliate ID.

In my case, I’m just going to add two networks. You can come back at any time to add further networks. I’m still waiting for an application to come through from one of the networks so I will come back later and add the extra network. We need to save our changes when we have finished adding our affiliate ID’s.

Before you can add any of the networks you do need to create an account with all the various networks you require. Without signing up for new networks it’s impossible to add your affiliate ID.

Datafeedr API-Networks

Datafeedr API Merchants

We now need to go and select our merchants. I will go to the WordPress dashboard and Datafeedr API and then merchants. You can see the two merchants that I have added ClickBank and Paid On Results. In ClickBank we only have the choice of one merchant, so I will click to add, you can see that as selected merchants have been added.

The same process is repeated with other merchants. You only need to add merchants that you are going to use. You can see that in Paid On Results there are many merchants available. We only need the merchants that are appropriate to a niche. In my case, none of the merchants are appropriate for my niche. We also to make sure that we are signed up to the various merchant’s affiliate programs. This is important otherwise we will not receive commissions.

Select Merchants

Adding Product Sets

I can’t show you how to add a product set in this video as Cron is not enabled. However, I do have a video and instructions on how to add product sets. I will just open up the product sets for the sake of this video to show you what to do.

So, let’s go to product sets and add a new product set. We can then give our product set a title related to the products that we want to import. The title can always be changed at any time. We would then go and carry out a search for the associated products. You can find the video on creating product sets here.

To Conclude

I have been using Datafeedr for several years now. I find that a data feed is a great way of adding product store website and keeping everything up-to-date. Datafeedr will remove all products and add new products automatically once you have the software set up.

The first thing I do when I create a new website is to install Datafeedr and then start adding products. I can then blog to various products within the website without having lots of affiliate links on my page.

If you would like to find out more about Datafeedr, please feel free to find out more here. And if you would like to find out how I started online and what my number one product is for Internet marketers, please go here.

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comment section of YouTube.

February 13 2022

How To Create A Gmail Account For A WordPress Website

Roy Bretton How To's

In this blog post and video, I would like to show you how to create a Gmail account for a WordPress website. I always like to try and create a separate Gmail account for every website that I create. There are several reasons for this; one of the reasons is that if I ever want to sell the website, I have everything in one place. Secondly, I can create various Webmaster tools through my Gmail account. For example, Google search console, Google Analytics, Google Kepler and much more. And of course, we can also associate a YouTube channel with an email address. To me, this is the most organised way to have everything in one place and keep things simple.

You Can See The Video Below That I Have Created, Or You Can Follow The Transcript Of The Video With Diagrams

How To Create A Gmail Account For A WordPress Website

Most of us already have a Gmail account, if you haven’t, then you need to go create one. If you already have a Gmail account, just go and click on the photograph on the top right-hand side of your Gmail account. You will then see a drop-down box that says add another account. Click on, “add another account” add your name, your new email address and create a solid password. You can see the diagram below.

If the email address that you already want is taken, then choose something similar or something that relates to your website. We can then click on next.

Create Your Gmail Account

Use Your Telephone Number For Recovery Purposes

It’s always good to use your telephone number and a different email address should you need to recover your Gmail account. I will add the necessary and my date of birth. We can then click on next where we will be asked to verify our account. Once we click on the send verification code, it will come through quickly. As you can see on the video, a text message has been sent through to my computer, via my phone.

We can now paste the verification code into the verification box. Just take care when you copy and paste verification codes as sometimes an extra character can be added in by mistake. We can now verify the Gmail account.

Recovery Details

Personalised Gmail Settings

Once your account has been verified Google will take you through a few personalised settings. For the sake of the video, I will skip through the personalised settings. The settings can be changed at any time in the future. There are normally a few privacy settings that we just need to confirm if we want to use a Gmail account.

Your New Gmail Account

Now You Have A New Gmail Account

You should now be able to see your Gmail account. A box will normally open asking you if you want to access smart features, I normally say yes to smart features. So now your Gmail is ready to use.

There are a few other settings that you can personalise. For example, you can customise your inbox, I normally use the default settings. You can add a profile image to your Gmail account. You can import contacts and emails to your Gmail account. And finally, you can add Gmail to your smartphone.

To Conclude

I have been working online and researching Internet marketing since 2004. The power of the Internet and its potential never fails to amaze me. If you would like to find out more about how to start an online business you may like to read my getting started guide. You can also find out more about me here and my top recommendation for getting started online.