If you’re tried to write code in WordPress for displaying to readers, you’ve probably found out it doesn’t work too well, even using the ‘blockquote’ or ‘code’ tags before and after.

There’s three ways to publish code in WordPress:

1. Copy and paste your code into DreamWeaver while in the ‘Design View’, then click to the ‘Code View’. Your code is automatically converted to the correctly escaped characters. Just remove any additional code DreamWeaver added, like <br> or <p> tags, and copy and paste back into your WordPress blog posting. (easiest)

2. Take your code and either paste it in Dreamweaver or Word. Then manually do a search replace 4 separate times for this code. (harder)
a. Search " and replace with &#34;
b. Search ‘ and replace with &#39;
c. Search / and replace with &#47;
d. Search < and replace with &lt;

Then copy and paste your replaced code back into your WordPress posting and it will display so readers can see it.

3. Take a screenshot of your code, crop, make smaller, save, upload, and link to the image URL (hardest, and has a drawback of losing SEO of the code as text in your blog).

Don’t download any software. That is unnecessary- but is just a way for a guy to get extra links to his site.

Simply go to your WordPress folder (the root of where all your files are installed), then open up ‘wp-content’ then open your theme folder. If you’re not using a custom theme, then just enter the ‘default’ folder, then open footer.php.

In your HTML editor, copy and paste your Google tracking code immediately before the tag. You get your code from within your Google Analytics account.

So, your footer code will then look something like this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/ javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct="UA-000000-0";
urchinTracker();
</script>

</body>
</html>

Wait a few days, and your visitor statistics should then be included in your Google Analytics report. Nifty.

1. Play the Numbers game. Just as your odds of winning the lottery increase with each ticket you buy, your odds of getting an outstanding photo from a photoshoot also increase with the more photos you take. It is not uncommon for professionals to only use 1% to 10% of the photos taken. If you take 100 photos of a subject, the odds are, you’ll have 1 to 10 great ones. Digital cameras are perfect for this, as you can take unlimited photos- as long as you have unlimited hard drive storage and continue to recharge your battery. While you want to take lots of photos, you also want each photo to be your 100% best.

2. Think Simple. Less is more. When you ‘notice’ a neat scene and decide to take a photo of it, try to determine the exact elements which made you ‘notice’ it. For example, you drive by a park and see something that looks cool. You see a duck, a pond, a playground, light rays from the trees, background fog, grass, a bucket, and some neat grooves in the sand. Analyze what caught your eye and test each item to see exactly which combination of elements made it look good. First determine which is the main dominant element? If it’s the duck, then you may want to avoid the playground and bucket from the scene. Perhaps combining the duck with the background fog is what you noticed. Or was it the light rays coming down from the trees. Once you narrow down and decide what you ‘saw’ you can then start shooting and taking various angles, playing with lighting, and foreground, background options, etc. Do not include any extra elements you do not need. If, by adding them it does not improve the scene, then remove them. Less is more!

3. Avoid ‘hot spots’ in your photo. Our eyes tend to be drawn to areas in a photo that are bright or high in contrast. Make sure you don’t have unnecessary hot spots detract from your main subject. For example, if you take a photo of a bridge, but see a white bucket on the ground, make sure you position yourself so it does not appear in the photo. You can always crop or edit such things out later in Photoshop, but it is far easier to recognize and avoid them before you even take the photo.

4. Use the rule of thirds. Rather than having a subject directly in the center of a photo, make it either 1/3 or 2/3 from the left and either 1/3 or 2/3 from the top.

5. Use creative angles. Diagonal lines tend to be more interesting than ‘normal’ horizontal or vertical lines. Showing perspective or depth in a photo also creates interest and impact.

6. Make lighting your friend
a. Take outdoor photos in the morning or late evening for most interesting lighting and shadows
b. On overcast days, take photos which do not include the sky or clouds. Taking photos of foliage or flowers is nice to do on an overcast day for smooth, consistent lighting and to bring out the vibrant colors of green grass or red flowers.
c. Avoid using a flash as the dominant source of lighting. If possible

7. Always hold the camera still and or use a tripod. If you are without a tripod and cannot get a photo to expose properly at 1/60 second or higher, try to find something you can rest the camera on and use its self-timer. A fence, table, branch, or the hood of the car- anything that keeps the camera still, but does not block the camera’s view works just fine.

8. Think smart when taking travel photos.
a. Want to get some ‘postcard’-like photos? When traveling, check out the existing postcards from local convenience stores or gift shops. By looking at enough postcards, you can learn where the most photogenic scenes are in a given area. For example, it can be difficult to find where to get a good city skyline view. By looking at enough postcards, you will find that some reveal where the photo is taken from. Then go there, get your shots and save time!
b. Looking at existing photos may also inspire you to do something new. What angles of a certain monument have not been taken? What works well and what doesn’t?
c. When traveling, remember to bring your chargers, laptop or portable hard drive, and power converters if you travel outside the country. It’s nice to have the comfort of knowing you won’t run out of batteries or storage space.

Can you count how many times a piece of software has asked you to “upgrade now!”? Upgrade offers are always presented as if you’ll be behind in the world if you continue using your now ‘outdated’ software. The upgrades usually comes at a cost. “Yes, it can be yours for the low, low price of just $99.99.”

Before you fall victim to the upgrade trap, just remember the current version of software you have will always continue to work fine as it is, just as intended. Don’t fall into the upgrade trap- it’s another marketing device aimed at convincing people to spend more money on a typically insignificant change of software.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

There is risk involved in upgrading your software. In fact, an upgrade can sometimes be a downgrade.

If you ever used Adobe Photoshop, you will know indeed that some of the ‘upgrades’ are actually ‘downgrades’ in disguise. Let’s take Photoshop 7.0 for instance. One of its features is it shows thumbnail previews of .psd files right on your operating system, such as Windows XP. So, it’s convenient and expected behavior, actually, to browse your files and see what your images look like before opening them up. Enter Photoshop 8.0, which boasted huge essential and urgent features. Well, if you upgraded, you just lost your ability to view your .psd files. Yes, you would then have to open every one up one by one to see what they were. What a pain! In fact, it was such a pain, Adobe tried to release its own ‘workaround’- Adobe Bridge- to address the issue. Another example of a piece of crap software. It was clunky slow, and riddled with bugs. Having the ability of previewing .psd was so essential, I kept my older version of Photoshop on my machine. It was not worth upgrading and losing that!

Another example of poor upgrades includes piece of graphics software called Extensis PhotoTools. The Photoshop plugin used to include a great filter, called PhotoGroove. It really made incredible effects to typography. But when they ‘upgraded’ to be compatible with a newer version of Photoshop, the PhotoGroove was quietly left out. It lost the most important and useful tool in the package.

The same thing occurred with Extensis Portfolio. The entire application was coded for one of their newer versions and unfortunately, the html output was no longer clean. It had all kinds of Javascript garbage code which left it very hard to edit or validate for W3C standards. They tried hard to improve some components, but in doing so, made others worse.

Those who have used graphic design software for a length of time may remember the big Quark 3.3 upgrade to Quark 4.0. It was supposed to be a big leap, adding editable polygon boxes and additional drawing tools. What it did, however, is cause a lot of crashes. Those who paid the hefty fee for the upgrade traded a stable version of the software for one that was full of bugs and ready to crash at any time. Printers took time to even accept the new format, making it a rough transition, and an open door for another competitor program, like Adobe InDesign.

Another graphics program that has a worthless upgrade was FlexiSign Pro- a program used for plotting and cutting vinyl sign decals. When they urged for a certain upgrade (at a premium price, of course), they did not inform you that you would lose the use of many of your fonts. The new version simply was not programmed to be compatible with the other fonts like the previous version. Plus, you could expect a lot of crashes and system incompatibilities. Was it worth the upgrade? Probably not, even if it were free.

Upgrade scams extend far beyond graphics software. Common software such as antivirus programs can be plagued with problems. The two largest antivirus programs, Norton AntiVirus and McAfee VirusScan are both spammy applications that have continual popups pestering you to upgrade. There is no way to turn them off either, without disabling the program. It’s like having a used car salesman always on your screen, ready to harass you at any moment and halt your productivity. They make you stop what you’re doing to click a button to continue or ignore until the next day. It never ends. The software also tracks your behavior and connects and sends your information to their internet database and is a drain on your system resources. When you try to uninstall, it is embedded into your registry where it requires heavy research and multiple complex steps to remove it. The antivirus software has every characteristic of being spyware in itself. How ironic that the software we buy to help avoid spam and spyware actually causes it. These software upgrades are only to keep the virus settings ‘current’. There are other free options out there that will do close to the same thing. This upgrade is just another marketing scam and the software is garbage.

Many people have complained about the Windows ME (Millennium Edition) upgrade from Windows 98. It was apparently hard to install and had huge compatibility problems. PC World named this software one of the 25 worst tech products of all time. So, clearly, this was not worth the upgrade.

It gives me a headache just thinking about all of the upgrade offers and all the marketing ploys out there- all in effort to slide more bills out of your wallet in exchange for a product that in many cases, could be worse. Think twice before upgrading and “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The following techniques may not be ethical. It is not recommended that any of these techniques be duplicated, but the intent is to inform you what techniques others may be using to market their business online. This information is presented for educational use only and is not endorsed by its author!

1. Posting help wanted when you are aren’t hiring

Employment sites receive a lot of traffic. It is suspicious how many companies tend to list the same position over and over, multiple times per week, for months and months. This especially can happen on Craigslist, where posting is still free in most cities, and traffic is VERY high. These positions suspiciously never seem to get filled, but are still listed and the company continues to receive the traffic. Are they harvesting people’s emails, resumes, and contact information? Similarly, a previous employer I worked for posted ads on various websites, including Craigslist. They then filled the position, but the positions were still advertised to the public. Did it benefit the company, drive traffic and allow a build up of candidates in the case of any future openings? Yes. Was it unethical to post something that doesn’t exist and wrong to cause harm to the seekers who tediously research the company and prepare special resumes and cover letters specifically for that position? Yes.

2. Taking content from other sites

Most everything on the internet is vulnerable for taking. In any browser you can view the html source by choosing View > Source in Internet Explorer, for instance. You can also save any web page by choosing File > Save As… (Web Page… Complete). This will take the html code, images, css files, and at times other linked files, such as javascript code. Additionally, you can download entire websites (multiple pages) by mirror software, such as the free website copier software, HTTrack ( http://www.httrack.com/ ).

So, instead of designing a site from scratch, some people find an existing site design they like, download it, and use as a template for their own site. They just modify and remove any recognizable tags and attempt to transform it into their own work.

The problem is copyright issues. Obviously, if someone spends thousands of dollars developing a website, they don’t want someone to use it. If borrowing content is ever done, permission should be asked, or else the content taken should be significantly modified to become a transformative work, and thus, fair use (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use ). Commercial uses are also subject to more scrutiny than a personal or educational site.

The abundance of rich text content that is free in the public domain may explain why Wikipedia is copied so much by other websites. People frequently harvest this public domain content and use it on their own site to try to increase their organic traffic and make money off their ads. Answers.com even does it and says it plainly. Imagine the cost for a company to actually produce their own content!

Wikipedia is duplicated so much, however, it’s possible your content may not be considered ‘original’ by Google, thus having a harder time ranking well. It is also something the website Copyscape would find. Those that are successful in harvesting content for their website will do a mashup, combining multiple sources of data, where your content could then become a seemingly original work.

3. Using your competitor’s content against them

Some websites take their competitor’s products, description, and part number information and use them to advertise on webpages showing their own products. For example, one client I had gathered all of its competitor part numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. These part numbers were then incorporated into their own website, and each part number represented a new web page. Using the part numbers as the keyword, thousands of pages were submitted, and it then started receiving more traffic and sales- often showing up when the competitors were not showing up in search engines at all. For information on how best to optimize your website, visit: http://www.trentmueller.com/5-Essential-Tips-for-Great-SEO_Article/ To build thousands of optimized pages from an Excel spreadsheet, you will need to use a database such as MySQL, then use a mod rewrite to modify all of the URLs for SEO. Just do a Google search for “mod rewrite” and “seo” and “htaccess” and you’ll eventually get it. I will probably make a posting in the future about how to do it, so feel free to subscribe to this blog for updates. But again, this practice of using competitors information against them is not encouraged.

Those are three evil web marketing tricks out there. If you search, I’m sure you can find many more. Maybe this information can help protect you from the other evil marketers out there. But don’t fall to the dark side yourself!