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Bloggers are wrong if they think all they have to do is add a link to an affiliate product or their own product from a standard post on their blog!

Now that’s a bold statement that will have some bloggers jumping up and down, crushing their trilby hats beneath  their feet as they curse “that Wizzer doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

So before those money wizard guys who are doing well shout at me I need to explain a little.

It’s all about choice.

And it’s all about confusion & distraction.

Or rather it shouldn’t be!

If you give people too much choice they simply don’t make decisions.

Ever been to a restaurant with a really long menu?

There’ll be 3 or 4 items you’d really like – how difficult is it to make up your mind?

And what about kids in a sweet shop?

Or visitors to a blog that has adverts and links and other distractions all over the sidebars – take a look at my sidebar to see exactly what I mean.

It’s all very well providing a blog full of useful information BUT if your objective is to lead your visitors somewhere in particular, say an affiliate link, you need to resist the temptation to bury that link amongst the other distractions.

I’ve written about this subject before and I was reminded to do something for our Blogging Beginner members by a video I watched earlier made by Jack Humphrey.

Some while back I produced a template for the Mandigo Theme that enables pages to be created without sidebars – you simple select the template from the drop down list of options as you write your page. I forgot to upload the template and then watching Jack’s video that talks about this issue and explains it extremely well, I remembered I needed to do so.

Such a page should be used if you have a strong message you want to get across with a specific call to action – perhaps a follow this affiliate link or sign up for a newsletter.

Minimising the other distractions on the page is essential and studies show a substantial increase in success rates when a clean page with just one option is prevented.

I’ll let you watch the video – Jack explains it so well there’s little point me doing so again.

Click the highlighted text here to take a look at the video Jack created, my page without sidebars and download your NoSidebar template for the Mandigo theme

One of the members at Blogging Beginners – Mark from Insomnia Cures – introduced me to TweetSuite a few days ago.

I’ve checked so many Twitter related plugins and tools lately I thought this might be just “another” idea.

But, in fact I was pleasantly surprised. I can see some real value in this one.

There is a WordPress plugin – that always gets me onside!

Once uploaded and activated you can position the Tweet icon to the left or right of every post you make. Automatically the plugin adds a footnote to every post you make suggesting “be the first to Tweet this post”.

As soon as a visitor Tweets the post – either the icon at the top or link at the bottom of the post, their Twitter icon shows up below the post – try it – click the link at the foot of this post and see what happens. There – you now have a link to your Twitter account.

And now my reservations.

The plugin installs a number of widgets which you can add to your sidebar(s) to show your latest Tweets, Most Tweeted, Favourite Tweets etc. The widgets don’t work too well with the Mandigo theme. Each Tweet that shows up manages to attract the bullet point icon (in my case the blue arrow) and looks really bad. I haven’t looked into why this is yet – I probably won’t in fact because I already use Tweet My Blog which provides much the same information.

I’m happy to have my hat put on straight if I’m missing a point here – so do let me know if you know different.

I think it’s a great plugin though even if you don’t use the widgets (simpl;y don’t add them to your sidebar). You can download it at TweetSuite.

Here’s a screen shot of the backlink to my Twitter link I got in seconds. – I captured that screenshot with Jing by the way – remenber I told you about that a few days ago.

Imagine if all sites were using TweetSuite – how long would it take to create a massive following?

Tom, the author of the Mandigo WordPress theme showed me the best way to avoid losing any customisation in the event he releases an upgrade to the theme.

He has built in some automation that makes it so easy – I’m really impressed with this theme!

The following video shows the steps to take – it can be done in minutes, so you have no excuses. Don’t run the risk of losing your customisation. Create your own customised scheme right away.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

I just upgraded my Mandigo Theme to version 1.39.

Simple to do of course. Just download, unzip and ftp to server.

But…

If you are doing the same please remember that if you’ve customised your site there may be some over-writing that you don’t want.

You may notice that I changed the “stars” that sit against headings to a curved arrow. I was lazy. I just created the image and named it star.gif and then over-wrote the original. I thought I was being clever as that was easier than going into the stylesheet and changing the image name there. I was thinking ahead too – I assumed the stylesheet would get overwritten in an upgrade and by leaving it standard I wouldn’t have to worry about going ahead with the upgrade.

I just forgot that the images would also get overwritten.

Just a warning in case you do the same thing.