How to Create a Professional-Looking WordPress Admin

hether you build WordPress sites for clients, have your own multi-authored blog, or just want a more personalized look for your site, there are many cases when you may want to change the design of the WordPress admin panel and the login page. You can install a pre-prepared admin theme plugin for sure, but what if you want more freedom? Branding the WordPress admin is not just about design, it can be a smart way of self-promotion as well. In this post we will take a look at how you can customize the WordPress dashboard and the login page, add your own logo, remove or change menu items, remove links pointing to WordPress.org, and fine-tune many other admin settings with the help of the AG Custom Admin Panel plugin.

1. Install the AG Custom Admin Plugin

First of all, navigate to the Plugins > Add New admin menu item in your WordPress dashboard, search for the AG Custom Admin plugin, install and activate it. The plugin places a new submenu called AG Custom Admin inside the Tools menu, and a button onto the top Admin Bar to help you quickly reach the settings.

2. General Settings

In the first tab you can configure the General Settings. One of the great things about this plugin is that if you move the cursor over the option labels, a small tooltip pops up in which you can read more about that specific option.
The first option in General Settings is the “Exclude AGCA admin from customizations” where you can quickly switch on and off the customizations for admin users. This can be useful if you want users with the admin role to see the default WordPress dashboard.

The next two settings hide or reveal the “Screen Options” and the “Help” menu located on the top right corner of each admin page (see below). Too many choices can confuse less tech-savvy users, so it can be a good idea to get rid of these two options.

General Settings also allow you to choose the WordPress capability that gives users access to the settings of the plugin.

3. Hide or Customize the Admin Bar

The Admin Bar Settings tab helps you hide or customize the admin bar, the horizontal menu on the top. You can completely hide it from the admin panel, and show only a stylish Log Out button on the top right corner.

In other cases you may just want to simplify the admin bar by removing some of its less important items. The Admin Bar Settings have many options that allow you to hide each part one by one, customize the blog heading, add your own logo instead of the default WordPress logo, or completely remove it.
On the screenshot below I modified the blog heading to “Change View” to indicate that this is the place where they can switch between the frontend and the backend.
I also removed the WordPress logo altogether, but didn’t replace it with the Hongkiat logo, as I’ll rather add this to the vertical admin menu (Step 7). From the next step I’ll go on with the completely removed admin bar.

4. Brand The Footer

In the Admin Footer tab you can either completely remove the footer from the bottom of the admin panel, or change its text to whatever you want. It can be a good idea to place a link to the home page of your business, so your clients can quickly contact you if they need some support.

5. Clean Up the Dashboard

The Dashboard Page Settings allow you to modify the home page of your admin panel. This is the screen with the dashboard widgets such as “At a Glance” and “WordPress News” you see at first when you log in as an admin.
In the first setting you can change the text of the heading from the word “Dashboard” to your own brand name, and you can also add your custom content below it.
It can definitely help users if you place a “More info” link below the headline (as I did it on the screenshot below). This way they can easily reach you. A quick “Welcome in our admin area” intro can be useful as well.

The AG Custom Admin plugin also makes it possible to hide the dashboard widgets one by one. I only leave two, to make my branded admin less cluttered. If you hide the widgets here they won’t be available for users from the “Screen Options” menu.

My customized WordPress dashboard looks like this right now, every reference to WordPress.org has disappeared, and it looks cleaner and more straightforward.

6. Add Your Logo to the Login Page

The Login Page Settings allow you to customize the login page of your site, replace the WordPress logo with your own graphics, and hide or reveal the “Back to blog”, “Register”, and “Lost Password” links.

On the screenshot below you can see that just changing the logo and pointing the link behind it to your own site can give a customized look to the login page, and can definitely help promote your brand.

7. Change the Admin Menu on the Left

The Admin Menu can be found on the left side of the admin panel. It has many items, and even more subitems, many of which don’t really have the most self-explanatory label. That can make the learning curve steep for non-tech people.
The Admin Menu Settings help you quickly clean up the admin menu. You can remove the whole admin menu if you want, but it’s probably better to just hide the items that your users won’t need.

You not only can make the top menu items invisible, but the submenus as well; just click on the top-level menu, and a handy dropdown list will appear. Moreover, you can rename the labels to something that is easier to understand for laypeople, just like I did it with the “Dashboard”, “Media”, and “Appearance” labels below.

You can also change the basic design of the admin menu if you want. You can hide the icons, the menu item separators, the submenu arrow, and the “Collapse menu” button, add round the border of the submenus, and insert your own logo on top of the admin menu.

For myself, I added a Hongkiat logo to the admin menu with a link behind it pointing to the homepage of hongkiat.com, which clearly brands the whole admin panel, but not in an intrusive way.
I renamed 3 menu items (the new ones are “Admin Home”, “Images”, and “Design”), removed the “Plugin” menu altogether, and added a 10px radius to the corners of the submenu popups.
Here is how it looks like:

8. Colorize the Admin

The Colorizer tab allows you to spice up your WordPress admin by changing the text and background colours of the main elements. The colorizer function is real-time, so as you pick up a new colour you can see the change at once without saving the settings.
Here I only modified the default background colour to light blue, so now it matches the royal blue of the Hongkiat logo, but you can alter other things if you want. It’s probably a good idea to play around with the colours a bit to see what looks best where.

You can not only change the colours of the admin panel, but also the background colour of the login page, too.

9. Add Your Custom Code

If you are an experienced front-end developer, you can add your custom CSS and JavaScript code to the admin area as well. With the help of your browser’s developer tools you can easily grab the CSS selector of the element you want to modify.
In this step, I make the panel on the login page a little bit wider with the help of the following code snippet:

1 2 3 4 5

#login {     width: 480px;     max-width: 90%;     margin: 0 auto; }

As you can see, the login panel has become wider but is still responsive thanks to the max-width rule. Most likely this change will provide a better experience for most users. You can even save your custom code by exporting it into an .agca file, and later importing it to other WordPress sites.

10. Install a Pre-Prepared Admin Theme

The last tab called Admin Themes allows you to install a pre-prepared admin theme on top of your settings. If you do so, you will lose the custom colours you set in the Colorizer tab, but still can keep other settings.

Free Work at Home Jobs and Earn Money in Pakistan: Top Ten Android Games January 2016

Free Work at Home Jobs and Earn Money in Pakistan: Top Ten Android Games January 2016: Elune Saga Elune Saga is a new role playing game from Gamevil, where you collect and upgrade heroes(called soul cards)and create a person...

How Google Page Rank works

Imagine a library containing 25 billion documents but with no centralized organization and no librarians. In addition, anyone may add a document at any time without telling anyone. You may feel sure that one of the documents contained in the collection has a piece of information that is vitally important to you, and, being impatient like most of us, you'd like to find it in a matter of seconds. How would you go about doing it?

Posed in this way, the problem seems impossible. Yet this description is not too different from the World Wide Web, a huge, highly-disorganized collection of documents in many different formats. Of course, we're all familiar with search engines (perhaps you found this article using one) so we know that there is a solution. This article will describe Google's PageRank algorithm and how it returns pages from the web's collection of 25 billion documents that match search criteria so well that "google" has become a widely used verb.

Most search engines, including Google, continually run an army of computer programs that retrieve pages from the web, index the words in each document, and store this information in an efficient format. Each time a user asks for a web search using a search phrase, such as "search engine," the search engine determines all the pages on the web that contains the words in the search phrase. (Perhaps additional information such as the distance between the words "search" and "engine" will be noted as well.) Here is the problem: Google now claims to index 25 billion pages. Roughly 95% of the text in web pages is composed from a mere 10,000 words. This means that, for most searches, there will be a huge number of pages containing the words in the search phrase. What is needed is a means of ranking the importance of the pages that fit the search criteria so that the pages can be sorted with the most important pages at the top of the list.

One way to determine the importance of pages is to use a human-generated ranking. For instance, you may have seen pages that consist mainly of a large number of links to other resources in a particular area of interest. Assuming the person maintaining this page is reliable, the pages referenced are likely to be useful. Of course, the list may quickly fall out of date, and the person maintaining the list may miss some important pages, either unintentionally or as a result of an unstated bias.

Google's PageRank algorithm assesses the importance of web pages without human evaluation of the content. In fact, Google feels that the value of its service is largely in its ability to provide unbiased results to search queries; Google claims, "the heart of our software is PageRank." As we'll see, the trick is to ask the web itself to rank the importance of pages.
How to tell who's important

If you've ever created a web page, you've probably included links to other pages that contain valuable, reliable information. By doing so, you are affirming the importance of the pages you link to. Google's PageRank algorithm stages a monthly popularity contest among all pages on the web to decide which pages are most important. The fundamental idea put forth by PageRank's creators, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, is this: the importance of a page is judged by the number of pages linking to it as well as their importance.

We will assign to each web page P a measure of its importance I(P), called the page's PageRank. At various sites, you may find an approximation of a page's PageRank. (For instance, the home page of The American Mathematical Society currently has a PageRank of 8 on a scale of 10. Can you find any pages with a PageRank of 10?) This reported value is only an approximation since Google declines to publish actual PageRanks in an effort to frustrate those would manipulate the rankings.

Here's how the PageRank is determined. Suppose that page Pj has lj links. If one of those links is to page Pi, then Pj will pass on 1/lj of its importance to Pi. The importance ranking of Pi is then the sum of all the contributions made by pages linking to it. That is, if we denote the set of pages linking to Pi by Bi, then

\[ I(P_i)=\sum_{P_j\in B_i} \frac{I(P_j)}{l_j} \]

This may remind you of the chicken and the egg: to determine the importance of a page, we first need to know the importance of all the pages linking to it. However, we may recast the problem into one that is more mathematically familiar.

Let's first create a matrix, called the hyperlink matrix, $ {\bf H}=[H_{ij}] $ in which the entry in the ith row and jth column is

\[ H_{ij}=\left\{\begin{array}{ll}1/l_{j} & \hbox{if } P_j\in B_i \\ 0 & \hbox{otherwise} \end{array}\right. \]

Notice that H has some special properties. First, its entries are all nonnegative. Also, the sum of the entries in a column is one unless the page corresponding to that column has no links. Matrices in which all the entries are nonnegative and the sum of the entries in every column is one are called stochastic; they will play an important role in our story.

We will also form a vector $ I=[I(P_i)] $ whose components are PageRanks--that is, the importance rankings--of all the pages. The condition above defining the PageRank may be expressed as

\[ I = {\bf H}I \]

In other words, the vector I is an eigenvector of the matrix H with eigenvalue 1. We also call this a stationary vector of H.

Let's look at an example. Shown below is a representation of a small collection (eight) of web pages with links represented by arrows.

The corresponding matrix is

   

with stationary vector
   

This shows that page 8 wins the popularity contest. Here is the same figure with the web pages shaded in such a way that the pages with higher PageRanks are lighter.

Computing I

There are many ways to find the eigenvectors of a square matrix. However, we are in for a special challenge since the matrix H is a square matrix with one column for each web page indexed by Google. This means that H has about n = 25 billion columns and rows. However, most of the entries in H are zero; in fact, studies show that web pages have an average of about 10 links, meaning that, on average, all but 10 entries in every column are zero. We will choose a method known as the power method for finding the stationary vector I of the matrix H.

How does the power method work? We begin by choosing a vector I 0 as a candidate for I and then producing a sequence of vectors I k by

\[ I^{k+1}={\bf H}I^k \]

The method is founded on the following general principle that we will soon investigate.

General principle: The sequence I k will converge to the stationary vector I.

We will illustrate with the example above.

I 0     I 1     I 2     I 3     I 4     ...     I 60     I 61
1     0     0     0     0.0278     ...     0.06     0.06
0     0.5     0.25     0.1667     0.0833     ...     0.0675     0.0675
0     0.5     0     0     0     ...     0.03     0.03
0     0     0.5     0.25     0.1667     ...     0.0675     0.0675
0     0     0.25     0.1667     0.1111     ...     0.0975     0.0975
0     0     0     0.25     0.1806     ...     0.2025     0.2025
0     0     0     0.0833     0.0972     ...     0.18     0.18
0     0     0     0.0833     0.3333     ...     0.295     0.295

It is natural to ask what these numbers mean. Of course, there can be no absolute measure of a page's importance, only relative measures for comparing the importance of two pages through statements such as "Page A is twice as important as Page B." For this reason, we may multiply all the importance rankings by some fixed quantity without affecting the information they tell us. In this way, we will always assume, for reasons to be explained shortly, that the sum of all the popularities is one.
Three important questions

Three questions naturally come to mind:

    Does the sequence I k always converge?
    Is the vector to which it converges independent of the initial vector I 0?
    Do the importance rankings contain the information that we want?

Given the current method, the answer to all three questions is "No!" However, we'll see how to modify our method so that we can answer "yes" to all three.

Let's first look at a very simple example. Consider the following small web consisting of two web pages, one of which links to the other:

   

with matrix
   

Here is one way in which our algorithm could proceed:

I 0     I 1     I 2     I 3=I
1     0     0     0
0     1     0     0

In this case, the importance rating of both pages is zero, which tells us nothing about the relative importance of these pages. The problem is that P2 has no links. Consequently, it takes some of the importance from page P1 in each iterative step but does not pass it on to any other page. This has the effect of draining all the importance from the web. Pages with no links are called dangling nodes, and there are, of course, many of them in the real web we want to study. We'll see how to deal with them in a minute, but first let's consider a new way of thinking about the matrix H and stationary vector I.
A probabilitistic interpretation of H

Imagine that we surf the web at random; that is, when we find ourselves on a web page, we randomly follow one of its links to another page after one second. For instance, if we are on page Pj with lj links, one of which takes us to page Pi, the probability that we next end up on Pi page is then $ 1/l_j $ .

As we surf randomly, we will denote by $ T_j $ the fraction of time that we spend on page Pj. Then the fraction of the time that we end up on page Pi page coming from Pj is $ T_j/l_j $ . If we end up on Pi, we must have come from a page linking to it. This means that

\[ T_i = \sum_{P_j\in B_i} T_j/l_j \]

where the sum is over all the pages Pj linking to Pi. Notice that this is the same equation defining the PageRank rankings and so $ I(P_i) = T_i $ . This allows us to interpret a web page's PageRank as the fraction of time that a random surfer spends on that web page. This may make sense if you have ever surfed around for information about a topic you were unfamiliar with: if you follow links for a while, you find yourself coming back to some pages more often than others. Just as "All roads lead to Rome," these are typically more important pages.

Notice that, given this interpretation, it is natural to require that the sum of the entries in the PageRank vector I be one.

Of course, there is a complication in this description: If we surf randomly, at some point we will surely get stuck at a dangling node, a page with no links. To keep going, we will choose the next page at random; that is, we pretend that a dangling node has a link to every other page. This has the effect of modifying the hyperlink matrix H by replacing the column of zeroes corresponding to a dangling node with a column in which each entry is 1/n. We call this new matrix S.

In our previous example, we now have

   

with matrix
       

and eigenvector
   

In other words, page P2 has twice the importance of page P1, which may feel about right to you.

The matrix S has the pleasant property that the entries are nonnegative and the sum of the entries in each column is one. In other words, it is stochastic. Stochastic matrices have several properties that will prove useful to us. For instance, stochastic matrices always have stationary vectors.

For later purposes, we will note that S is obtained from H in a simple way. If A is the matrix whose entries are all zero except for the columns corresponding to dangling nodes, in which each entry is 1/n, then S = H + A.
How does the power method work?

In general, the power method is a technique for finding an eigenvector of a square matrix corresponding to the eigenvalue with the largest magnitude. In our case, we are looking for an eigenvector of S corresponding to the eigenvalue 1. Under the best of circumstances, to be described soon, the other eigenvalues of S will have a magnitude smaller than one; that is, $ |\lambda| < 1 $ if $ \lambda $ is an eigenvalue of S other than 1.

We will assume that the eigenvalues of S are $ \lambda_j $ and that

\[ 1 = \lambda_1 > |\lambda_2| \geq |\lambda_3| \geq \ldots \geq |\lambda_n| \]

We will also assume that there is a basis vj of eigenvectors for S with corresponding eigenvalues $ \lambda_j $ . This assumption is not necessarily true, but with it we may more easily illustrate how the power method works. We may write our initial vector I 0 as

\[ I^0 = c_1v_1+c_2v_2 + \ldots + c_nv_n \]

Then

\begin{eqnarray*} I^1={\bf S}I^0 &=&c_1v_1+c_2\lambda_2v_2 + \ldots + c_n\lambda_nv_n \\ I^2={\bf S}I^1 &=&c_1v_1+c_2\lambda_2^2v_2 + \ldots + c_n\lambda_n^2v_n \\ \vdots & & \vdots \\ I^{k}={\bf S}I^{k-1} &=&c_1v_1+c_2\lambda_2^kv_2 + \ldots + c_n\lambda_n^kv_n \\ \end{eqnarray*}

Since the eigenvalues $ \lambda_j $ with $ j\geq2 $ have magnitude smaller than one, it follows that $ \lambda_j^k\to0 $ if $ j\geq2 $ and therefore $ I^k\to I=c_1v_1 $ , an eigenvector corresponding to the eigenvalue 1.

It is important to note here that the rate at which $ I^k\to I $ is determined by $ |\lambda_2| $ . When $ |\lambda_2| $ is relatively close to 0, then $ \lambda_2^k\to0 $ relatively quickly. For instance, consider the matrix

\[ {\bf S} = \left[\begin{array}{cc}0.65 & 0.35 \\ 0.35 & 0.65 \end{array}\right]. \]

The eigenvalues of this matrix are $ \lambda_1=1 $ and $ \lambda_2=0.3 $ . In the figure below, we see the vectors I k, shown in red, converging to the stationary vector I shown in green.

Now consider the matrix

\[ {\bf S} = \left[\begin{array}{cc}0.85 & 0.15 \\ 0.15 & 0.85 \end{array}\right]. \]

Here the eigenvalues are $ \lambda_1=1 $ and $ \lambda_2=0.7 $ . Notice how the vectors I k converge more slowly to the stationary vector I in this example in which the second eigenvalue has a larger magnitude.

When things go wrong

In our discussion above, we assumed that the matrix S had the property that $ \lambda_1=1 $ and $ |\lambda_2|<1 $ . This does not always happen, however, for the matrices S that we might find.

Suppose that our web looks like this:

In this case, the matrix S is

Then we see

I 0     I 1     I 2     I 3     I 4     I 5
1     0     0     0     0     1
0     1     0     0     0     0
0     0     1     0     0     0
0     0     0     1     0     0
0     0     0     0     1     0

In this case, the sequence of vectors I k fails to converge. Why is this? The second eigenvalue of the matrix S satisfies $ |\lambda_2|=1 $ and so the argument we gave to justify the power method no longer holds.

To guarantee that $ |\lambda_2|<1 $ , we need the matrix S to be primitive. This means that, for some m, Sm has all positive entries. In other words, if we are given two pages, it is possible to get from the first page to the second after following m links. Clearly, our most recent example does not satisfy this property. In a moment, we will see how to modify our matrix S to obtain a primitive, stochastic matrix, which therefore satisfies $ |\lambda_2|<1 $ .

Here's another example showing how our method can fail. Consider the web shown below.

In this case, the matrix S is

   

with stationary vector
   

Notice that the PageRanks assigned to the first four web pages are zero. However, this doesn't feel right: each of these pages has links coming to them from other pages. Clearly, somebody likes these pages! Generally speaking, we want the importance rankings of all pages to be positive. The problem with this example is that it contains a smaller web within it, shown in the blue box below.

Links come into this box, but none go out. Just as in the example of the dangling node we discussed above, these pages form an "importance sink" that drains the importance out of the other four pages. This happens when the matrix S is reducible; that is, S can be written in block form as

\[ S=\left[\begin{array}{cc} * & 0 \\ * & * \end{array}\right]. \]

Indeed, if the matrix S is irreducible, we can guarantee that there is a stationary vector with all positive entries.

A web is called strongly connected if, given any two pages, there is a way to follow links from the first page to the second. Clearly, our most recent example is not strongly connected. However, strongly connected webs provide irreducible matrices S.

To summarize, the matrix S is stochastic, which implies that it has a stationary vector. However, we need S to also be (a) primitive so that $ |\lambda_2|<1 $ and (b) irreducible so that the stationary vector has all positive entries.
A final modification

To find a new matrix that is both primitive and irreducible, we will modify the way our random surfer moves through the web. As it stands now, the movement of our random surfer is determined by S: either he will follow one of the links on his current page or, if at a page with no links, randomly choose any other page to move to. To make our modification, we will first choose a parameter $\alpha$ between 0 and 1. Now suppose that our random surfer moves in a slightly different way. With probability $\alpha$ , he is guided by S. With probability $ 1-\alpha $ , he chooses the next page at random.

If we denote by 1 the $ n\times n $ matrix whose entries are all one, we obtain the Google matrix:

\[ {\bf G}=\alpha{\bf S}+ (1-\alpha)\frac{1}{n}{\bf 1} \]

Notice now that G is stochastic as it is a combination of stochastic matrices. Furthermore, all the entries of G are positive, which implies that G is both primitive and irreducible. Therefore, G has a unique stationary vector I that may be found using the power method.

The role of the parameter $\alpha$ is an important one. Notice that if $ \alpha=1 $ , then G = S. This means that we are working with the original hyperlink structure of the web. However, if $ \alpha=0 $ , then $ {\bf G}=1/n{\bf 1} $ . In other words, the web we are considering has a link between any two pages and we have lost the original hyperlink structure of the web. Clearly, we would like to take $\alpha$ close to 1 so that we hyperlink structure of the web is weighted heavily into the computation.

However, there is another consideration. Remember that the rate of convergence of the power method is governed by the magnitude of the second eigenvalue $ |\lambda_2| $ . For the Google matrix, it has been proven that the magnitude of the second eigenvalue $ |\lambda_2|=\alpha $ . This means that when $\alpha$ is close to 1 the convergence of the power method will be very slow. As a compromise between these two competing interests, Serbey Brin and Larry Page, the creators of PageRank, chose $ \alpha=0.85 $ .
- See more at: http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fcarc-pagerank#sthash.Xz8rRklr.dpuf

Payoneer MasterCard In Pakistan

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Have You Applied for Your Payoneer MasterCard?

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Note: when you fill the sign up form just type your correct details: real name, home address as your card will be sent to your home by Pakistan post in 30 to 60 days after ordering. The main benefit of this account is that you can easily verify your PayPal account and also you can withdraw money as well with SkrillMoneyBookers, Yahoo, Google and many more options, so this is a lifetime opportunity for us.

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Bloggers 100 Easy Tips and Tricks

Coming Up With Post Ideas

1) Use Google autocomplete.
Not sure what to blog about? Type one of your search terms into Google and see what starts to fill in. Often, it's a good long-tail variation of a head term.
2) Mess around on the internet.
If you can't think of what to write, spending some time on social media or non-industry-related sites can help break you out of your rut. It's kind of like how you think of your best ideas in the shower.
3) Go take a shower.
Your best content ideas usually don't happen when you're in a content brainstorm. They happen when you're doing anything other than your job.
4) Talk to Sales and Services.
Ask your Sales and Services teams for FAQs. It's great blogging topic fodder because it's helpful content for your leads and customers.
5) Evernote it.
Keep a running list of awesome campaigns, interesting ideas, and fascinating data that may come to you while you are on a run, at the grocery store, or even just waking up in the morning.
6) Trello-dump it.
Trello's perfect for brain-dumping topic ideas and organizing them however best suits you. You can also have multiple people on the same board or even the same idea "card."
7) Keep a running list of questions.
Whether they come from customers, prospects, colleagues, friends, or your own brain, if one person has asked the question, you can be sure others have thought it. Refer to this list of questions when you're looking for new blog post ideas.
8) Newsjack from RSS feeds.
Create a group of RSS feeds in an RSS reader like Feedly -- just for identifying news to jack. Fill it with news publications and other sites that publish news about your industry. Check it once or twice a day for newsjacking opportunities.

Blogging More Efficiently

9) Use "The Laptop Trick."
If you're on a deadline, go write somewhere without your power cord. Set the time it takes your battery to die as your time limit to finish the piece.
10) Embrace the power of the site:search.
Perform a site:search  to look up past data points you've cited on your blog or to make internal linking simple. It's way easier than maintaining 8,483,923 bookmarks of the stuff!
11) Browse Factbrowser.
Can't find the data you need? Factbrowser is a data search engine. You're welcome.
12) Make browser shortcut folders like it's your job.
Don't hunt for links to things like your company's style guide, your favorite photo search engine, or your monthly leads report. Organize them into folders in your browser to cut down on time you spend looking for things.
13) Find photos on Creative Commons.
Speaking of finding photos, you can locate some for your posts easily on Creative Commons. Be sure not to grab images that look like stock photos or you'll be breaking copyright laws. Eep.
14) Keep a list of pages to link to.
Internal linking's great for SEO, but annoying when you're finishing up a post. Keep a spreadsheet for the 20 or so pages you want to increase authority for -- just one page for each topic you care about.
15) Keep a list of a few HTML hacks, too.
We use HTML hacks every once in a while to make content look nicer. Just copy and paste the HTML somewhere for safekeeping and easy reference.
16) Ship now and edit later.
If you need to get something out the door quickly, ship it with small errors, then go back and change them.
17) Use Skitch and Clarify for screenshotting.
You can use these for easy and awesome screenshots.
18) Create filler text quickly.
If you know you've gotta write something ** over there ** but you don't have the words yet, stop typing textexttexttexttext. You can auto-generate filler text in Word by typing =rand(x,y) and pressing Enter. In this, x and y are numbers of your choice -- for example, =rand(3,4)<Enter> gives you 3 paragraphs with 4 sentences each.

Making Writing Easier

19) Talk it out on Evernote.
Sometimes, it's easier to speak than write. Use Evernote on your phone to translate text from speech.
20) Crowdsource examples.
Need examples to support your claims? Can't think of any? If you need more ideas for your blog post, ask your social media followers what they think.
21) Set up Google Docs to collaborate.
Gdocs are also great for collaboration with teammates. In fact, this post happened in a Gdoc! We used the Excel one.
22) Turn off your chat clients.
If you're like me, one bleep from a chat client can throw me off my game. When I really need to get some blogging done, I sign out of all that jazz. Stat.
23) Block off writing blocks on your calendar.
Block off writing time like you block off meetings. It'll help you bucket your time more efficiently and prevent you from getting pulled away by the 1,000,000 other things you have to do that just can't wait.
24) Interview smart people.
Freaking out because you're not a subject matter expert? If you know someone who is, set up an interview with them to get your content written. You ask the questions, and they sound smart (and you do, too, by extension).
25) Write like you speak.
Not only is this a better reader experience, it's way easier to write that way. (Because you're being yourself! You know how to be yourself, don't you?)
26) Email examples to yourself.
If you're always hurting for examples, email stuff to yourself as you see it. Categorize it in your inbox with folders, and just pull from it when needed.
27) Write a descriptive working title first.
It doesn't have to be the final title, but make it reflective of exactly what the post is about. This will help you stay focused on the topic you originally set out to write and prevent pointless tangents.
28) Learn to love the outline.
Outline your post before you write it, directly in your CMS. It helps get you out of a "blogger's block" rut if all you have to do is fill in the blanks.
29) Follow a formula.
A formula that implements all the basic elements of a post is a great way to get started writing. For instance, I like to plop down an intro if it's already in my head, then add my primary and secondary CTAs, the headers I know I want, and, if it's a list post, some of the items I know I want in there. Then comes the preview image, the meta description stuff, and voila! I'm not looking at a blank screen, and I'm less likely to forget all that stuff before I publish.

Improving Content Quality

30) Use a thesaurus.
It's the fastest way to break out of saying "Great" in every single title ... which is pretty great.
31) Fall back on data.
Not sure how to add validity to a point? Look for some data. Data is a quick way to back up your points without having to explain yourself to death.
32) Befriend a copy editor.
Even if you don't have a full-fledged editorial staff, you can still find someone you work with who has a good grasp of grammar and content and use them as a gutcheck for stuff so you're not flying solo.
33) Leverage your strengths.
Not everyone needs to write their blog posts. Feel free to do whatever's easiest for you -- video, infographics, data roundups, etc. If you have multiple contributors, you'll have a nice mix of content formats.
34) A picture is worth 1,000 words (and then some).
Writing a how-to post? Try to include screenshots when possible. It's amazing how many sentences of explaining and describing one little screenshot can replace!
35) Write for your grandma.
Big words and fancy jargon are not your friends. Whatever you're trying to explain, keep it simple and conversational. Your readers will love you for it.
36) Run stuff by subject matter experts.
If you're not totally sure what you're talking about, ping an expert -- internal or external -- to fact-check your content. It might help spread the reach of your content, and no one hates being asked to flex their smarts.
37) Title brainstorm with someone.
Title brainstorming is the practice of talking through (or if you're me, typing through) titles. It helps you test different variations and work out kinks. The result is something that's more accurate, SEO-friendly, and clickworthy.
38) Remember that no one likes reading.
If you can say something in less words, do it. No one likes reading.
39) That also means you should keep paragraphs short.
If it looks hard to read, no one will.
40) Tell a story.
Having trouble with your introduction? Start your post off with a personal story that will 1) make you more comfortable writing and 2) actually provide an engaging opening.
41) Internalize the fact that you are not your persona.
Well, most of you aren't. Get out of your own head. If you're saying things like "I would LOVE if someone wrote that" -- well, it doesn't really matter. Think about what your persona would love, not you.

Improving Your Editing Process

42) Stay on top of the news.
It's good for newsjacking, but also important to be aware of any sensitive subjects that might impact your editorial calendar or content being published.
43) Fact-check newsjacks.
You have to be fast with a lot of your newsjacks, but you should never sacrifice factual accuracy. It hurts your credibility. Take the extra time to check your sources.
44) Don't freak out about revisions.
If you're doing guest blogging, or just working with an internal editorial team, revisions aren't your enemy. They're supposed to make your content better, not signal that you're not a good writer. Don't let it slow your mojo.
45) Don't freak out about giving revisions.
See above.
46) Use Google Docs for feedback.
If you're sending feedback to a contributor, Google docs are a great way to add in-line comments and prevent working off a million versions, which can get confusing and unruly.
47) Create and use an editing checklist.
Instead of wondering if you missed something every time you schedule a post, refer to an editing checklist that can set your mind at ease.
48) Create and use a writing style guide.
If you don't have a writing style guide, create one.
49) But don't stick too hardcore to that style guide.
Make room for other people's writing styles. A blog should be a mix of voices, not an overwrought corporate one.
50) Link to other content for more in-depth explanations.
If you've covered a topic in-depth in the past, link to it instead of re-explaining it (or not explaining it) in your post. It saves space. And your sanity. And your reader's sanity. It's just a general win-win for everyone.
51) Cite original sources (religiously).
Often, you'll come across a statistic or quote on another blog or website that you want to use in one of your posts. But that article may not be the original source of the info. Do your due diligence to find the original source, lest you cite something out-of-date ... or just totally wrong.
52) Organize in Google Calendars.
Use Google Calendars as a free editorial calendar, if you're working with a multi-person editorial team. You can plan ahead, move things quickly, and add people to events as writers or editors.

Optimizing the Performance of Your Posts

53) Check out Google Trends.
Not sure which title variation is more search-friendly? Google Trends helps compare the two terms so you can quickly determine the best choice.
54) Use link shorteners to see where people click.
Ever wonder if anyone actually clicks images, internal links, or in-text CTAs? Use a link-tracking tool to shorten the link before you hyperlink your text to get some quick metrics and insight.
55) Then, place links strategically.
Every post has natural reader dropoff. If you want people to click stuff within your post, place it near the top or bottom for the most clicks.
56) Make in-post links stand out.
There are two ways to do this: making them bold, and making them longer. They'll probably get more clicks.
57) Link your images.
People love clicking pictures. We're silly that way.
58) Use CTAs as your content starting point.
If lead generation is a big goal for your blog, use the offers you already have as starting points for blog topics. This will result in a super relevant blog post that segues seamlessly into the CTA for your offer at the end -- increasing conversions!
59) Secure Google+ authorship for your content.
Search engine results with your smiling face tend to get more clickthroughs than those without. Set up your Google+ authorship so you can reap those benefits.
60) Update the CTAs on high-performing posts.
If you have a post that's been rocking it in search engines from a traffic perspective, check that the CTAs are the best they could be. Lackluster CTAs could impact your overall conversion rates, and updating CTAs to current, more relevant ones could help you generate more leads.
61) Add tweet links to tweetable facts.
Data and facts make people sound smart. That's why they tweet them. Make it easy for them to do so, and your post will get promotion from it, too.
62) You can do it using
It's an easy, free tool -- and a quick way to add social sharing CTAs within the content of a post.
63) Add social sharing buttons.
Adding social sharing buttons seems obvious ... but only once you already know it. Most people won't grab your link, go to social, and share. Make it easy and you'll expand your reach with no effort whatsoever.
64) Promote your posts on social (even the old ones).
If a post has worked really well for traffic or leads in the past, and is still up-to-date, repromote it on social media periodically.
65) Customize your blog post promo for each social channel.
Readers consume content differently depending on where they are. Spend time creating visual representations of your posts for networks like Pinterest and Facebook -- and even Twitter, now that it has inline images -- and create custom text for the rest of your Twitter posts and LinkedIn updates.
66) Work your network.
If you mention someone in a post -- an individual or a company -- let them know once it's up. They might promote it, extending the reach of your post.
67) Include the content format type in the post title.
It tells people what they're getting into -- whether it's a SlideShare, a video, an infographic, whatever. Setting expectations properly generally helps clickthrough rates.
68) Don't forget a lead gen CTA.
Duh. But like the tip about social-sharing buttons, it seems obvious ... except for when you didn't know it was obvious.
69) Don't forget secondary CTAs.
Not everyone's ready to become a lead. Give them other options. Good ones are subscribing to your blog or social follow and share buttons.
70) Use smart CTAs.
Get more bang for your buck with smart CTAs. They're easier to customize and personalize, which means better and more conversions.
71) Use blog content for sales enablement.
Blogging isn't all about traffic and lead gen. It can be used to help move leads down the funnel -- if your sales team knows it's there. Make it easy for them to find relevant posts, and be a resource to help them unearth helpful posts for their prospects.
72) Review topic performance in analytics.
Every couple of months, review which subject matters readers prefer. Then, write more of that stuff. Keep doing it until it doesn't work anymore.
73) Review format performance in analytics.
Do the same with content format types -- infographics, videos, templates, etc.

Finding Quick Sources of Blog Content

74) Set contributor requirements.
If you're short on content, implement contributor requirements from your team. HubSpot started with a monthly quota for the entire marketing team. Do your own version of this.
75) Reposition seminal pieces for niche audiences.
Write an awesome ultimate guide to something? Find a niche audience that would like to hear about that topic, but positioned toward them? Cool, tweak your post! People love content that's highly targeted, and it can help you win coveted long tail traffic.
76) Write easy posts when you're in a pinch.
There are easy posts and hard posts. Easy posts are basic news reporting (with little to no analysis), FAQs whose answers you could recite in your sleep, curated posts for which you already have the curated material, or list posts for which you already know the components. Write these when you're hard up for content, not the difficult stuff.
77) Update the content of out-of-date posts.
The post is already written! You just need to tweak the out of date stuff, and boom -
78) Change the format of posts.
If you've got a post that performed well, see if there's another content format it can take -- written, video, visual content, and the like.
79) Excerpt lead gen offers.
Excerpting chapters of your ebooks, sections of your whitepapers, and other parts of your lead generation content is a great way to promote those offers. Conveniently, it also provides a quick piece of content that's already written and edited.
80) Ask someone a question via email.
If you ask someone an FAQ, oftentimes, the response is a great little blog post all on its own! The cherry on top is that it's often a really search-friendly post. (And a fun way to trick non-bloggers into blogging.)

Fun Little Tricks

81) Ramble when you write.
Go a little bit nuts with the brain-dump when you're writing a first draft. You can always cut down later. Better to have too much than not enough.
82) Sexify boring images with text overlays.
Establish the colors and fonts that you'll use and it's easy to grab a pull quote from your post and overlay it on an image with a bit of whitespace.
83) Don't underestimate the power of the puppy.
Cute works. If you've got a picture of a cute puppy, kitten, baby, whatever -- and can tie it into your post -- it's a good preview image. You'll notice I used a rabbit in this post. Yeah. Dose of the ol' medicine.
84) Food works, too.
People love to look at delicious food. Get something tasty up there as your preview image if nothing cute makes sense. It works particularly well for social sharing and engagement. Seriously,
85) Don't use boring, generic stock photos.
Pick something that pops. That way it'll pop in people's news feeds ;-)
86) Embrace humor.
Even if it seems "unprofessional," it actually humanizes your content. No one doesn't want to chuckle. Especially if they're expecting to be bored. (Wudup B2B content peeps!)
87) Match the length of your list with the depth of your examples.
If you're writing a 3-point list, your audience will be bummed if your explanations are surface-level (like the ones in this post). If you're writing a 10-point list, you can be a little less in-depth. And if you're writing a list of 20, 50, or 100 ... well, you know. This route I'm taking here is just fine.

Maintaining Your Overall Sanity

88) Feel free to end list posts on weird numbers.
Did you start out with a Top 20 list and only have 13 examples? That's cool. Thirteen is enough. Who said everything had to end in 5s and 0s, anyway?
89) Chill out about length.
People are always in a tizzy about how long posts should be.Keep writing til you're done.
90) Calm down about minor spelling and grammar mistakes.
If your grammar and spelling mistakes aren't impeding meaning, and they're infrequent, it's not a big deal.
91) Accept help where you get it.

92) Don't ever let anyone tell you that curation is easy.
Really good curation takes a la-ha-hot of time. Every time I've said "I'm just guna write a quick examples post!" I've hated myself for it. Finding the quality examples takes serious research time, as does the formatting that comes with it. Don't bank on these, if you're short on time or unmotivated to blog.
93) Know when to ship it.
Know what's going to move the needle ... and what's not ... and spend time on moving that needle. Debating the use of a hyphen or a semi-colon in your blog post title? I'm guessing that's NOT going to bring in 1,000 new leads. So learn to let. it. go.
94) Don't count comments.
The quantity doesn't really matter. If you're worried if people are reading your content and find it interesting, metrics like traffic, social shares, and leads generated are better metrics.
95) Don't give in to impostor syndrome.
A lot of people think they can't blog because they're not bloggers. Whatever. Blogging's barely old enough to babysit your kid. It's not that complicated -- just write stuff down.

Parting Advice

96) Blog early. Blog often.
The more frequently you write, the easier it will become. Getting into the habit is the hardest part. Set aside some time to work on your blog in the morning when you're fresh and alert.
97) Limit the ghostwriting you do.
It's not under your name. Lame. Let people blog for themselves.
98) Don't worry if a post bombs.
It's just one post. The next one can be better.
99) There's enough room for everybody.
Work with the other people writing in and about your industry. You can help each other get to the top better than you can operating in constant battle mode.
100) "Write drunk, edit sober."
Advice from Hemingway himself. Can't argue with that.