Planning your Social Media Campaign

Before you do anything, draw up some plans about what you want to achieve (goals), how you are going to get people coming to your profiles and what you’re going to do to keep them coming back for more. Having a clear set of goals will help you shape up your campaign and more importantly, let you measure and repeat success.

Make sure you’re on the right Social Networking site

Following on from Planning, you need to make sure that you’re on the right social networking websites. Whilst it makes sense to secure your brand name on every site you can using a service like KnowEm, the amount of effort you put into certain sites may be better used on sites where your customers are likely to be. Do a little research and see what successful companies in your field are doing. You wont find a lot of people getting business through LinkedIn selling cupcakes, whereas on Facebook they might be creating quite a stir.

Know the Rules, in particular the Facebook ones

Facebook have a set of guidelines which you should adhere to when using their pages. Failure to comply with their rules could see your page removed by Facebook. To summarise what the guidelines go over any offer or competition run through Facebook must not,

• Use Likes, Wall Posts or Comments as the entry process.
• Provide benefits to selected fans, not all.
• Announce or contact winners via Facebook.

In addition to this, you must,

• State publicly that the promotion is not endorsed or sponsored by Facebook.
• Post a disclaimer advising that all information provided by applicants is shared with you, not Facebook.

This begs the question, so how can you run a promotion on your page? Well, you can use Facebook to promote a competition that’s not hosted on Facebook – so something that’s running on your website for example, as long as the entry process doesn’t rely on likes, wall posts, comments, etc. And of course you don’t contact the winner through Facebook!

If you see a competition running which offers a prize to a random fan after 1,000 likes, or offers a prize to whoever shares a picture and gets the most likes, then you know now they are breaking Facebook’s Terms and Conditions. Stay safe.

Make conversation, not spam

People don’t want to follow or like you just to get advertising about your business. It’s quite likely that they already know, or don’t care about what you might be trying to ram down their throat. Social media marketing is about interaction, not strictly about advertising. The last thing you want to do is annoy your customer base by saying five times a day “come buy this”, “look at me”. Make sure you ask questions and put effort into following up peoples responses and follow your potential customers back instead of ignoring them.

Give the punters what they want

When people follow you on Twitter or like your Facebook page they are authorising you to promote directly at them. They probably visit these social networking sites in their free time to catch up with friends and family, sharing what they are up to and their holiday snaps, they don’t want your nose in telling them to buy your sewing kits. Don’t abuse it, and give people what they want. They’ll want to get something in return for them allowing you to advertise on their turf. This might be a discount code for your services, some great fan only content, opportunities to book events early or even have a chance of getting a freebie! Whilst doing this, remember it’s a social networking site so be social and create relationships.

Get the word out

Follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. See what I did there? Now you know that you can find Dot Monster on Twitter and Facebook. Just because you’ve created your accounts doesn’t mean people will flock to them on their own. Only the really big brands are likely to gain from just being who they are.

If you’re a small company start off by sharing your social media websites with friends and family. Just due to the way social media sites work some of their friends might pick up on it, and before you know it you’ve got a little boost with little effort.

If you’ve got some form of database with contacts for a mailing list or similar – use it! Send your customer base a little mail to let them know about your great new voyage into social networking. Just because they might have already been and gone as your customer doesn’t mean their input into your social networking campaign is of a lower value, it’s quite the opposite if they are likely to spread the word with recommendations!

Make sure your website has links through to your social networking sites. If you write a blog, link to your social sites at the end of it and let people know that more great content comes out your mouth.

You can also utilise your email signatures, forum signatures, business cards, use your imagination!

Monitor results

When you started you should have set out goals. Perhaps these goals were to get a certain amount of followers or likes to help increase brand awareness. Or maybe you wanted to get an increase of 10% in sales in products you pushed out through the campaign.

With your goals in place you need to work out the best way for you to monitor the results. There is a few ways in which you can see how well your campaign works. You could create a discount code which ran with the campaign, or actively ask customers how they got to your site and products in your contact form. You might even use analytical software such as Google Analytics to track referrals and statistics.

Repeat what works

Infographic by Infovisual from visual.ly

Once you have a rocking recipe – keep it! If you found out what really works for your customer base use it again. One thing you don’t want to do is repeat the same campaign over and over, mix it up with other offers or fan content to keep your social profiles fresh and current. Generating new stuff for your customers will keep them coming back.

It takes time to make things work. Others might lead you to believe that Social Networking Campaigns are a quick money, all gain approach – they’re wrong. It’s all about building relationships and trusts. People often untick that box on a website which says “Please don’t spam me”, so why would they jump on your Social Networking ship to get the same?

Using a Quiz to Stop Contact Form 7 Email Spam

Using the Quiz tag inside Contact Form 7 is a quick and easy way to add a spam shield to your contact form. You can see it in action on the Dot Monster Contact Page.

To create the Quiz, visit your Dashboard and go to the Contact menu item where you manage your Contact Forms. Create your form as you normally would, but just before the Submit button generate a new tag for a “Quiz”. The format for a quiz answers are question|answer. Here’s a little look at how you might use this;

It’s up to you how much you put in. It only shows one of your entries – not them all! If you want to use these ones feel free just to copy and paste the code onto your contact form;

[quiz spam-quiz 2/2 "What comes first, c or y?|c" "What is 3 + 2?|5" "What is 2 - 1?|1" "What is the capital letter of y?|Y" "What is bigger, 7 or 9?|9" "What is smaller, 6 or 2?|2" "What is 5 - 2?|3" "What is 6 + 2?|8" "What is bigger, 3 or 7?|7" "What is bigger, 6 or 5?|6" "What is the capital letter of j?|J" "What is smaller, 8 or 9?|8" "What is bigger, 8 or 2?|8" "What is 2 x 4?|8" "What is 3 x 2?|6" "What is 8 - 3?|5" "What is the capital letter of k?|K"]

Using CAPTCHA in Contact Form 7

There is a built in anti-spam method for Contact Form 7, and that’s to use the CAPTCHA tags but you need to have Really Simple CAPTCHA installed to use it.

Nothing is Bomb Spam Proof

Whether you use the Quiz, or CAPTCHA, or another method you will never cut spam out 100% as some spam might even be a human on the other end. These two simple methods in Contact Form 7 will help you however – I just prefer using the Quiz as it doesn’t require another plugin and is easier for a human to answer than an obscure image. It takes a bit of trial and error to see what works for you.

If you’re looking for anti spam techniques for WordPress comments check out this blog post from a few months ago.

It’s a little different when it comes to making images just for a screen, as we’ll briefly look into.

What is Image Resolution?

Resolution is in basic terms, the size of an image. It’s the density of dots that make up the image when printing. The bigger resolution, the more detailed it is, the lower the resolution, the less detailed and fuzzy it becomes. DPI (dots per inch) and PPI (pixels per inch) are often used and are much of the same thing. When going into the sizes there is a lot of background reading to be done, I would suggest reading this article called Say No to 72 dpi, it outlines resolutions mainly for screens very well and explains why the concept of PPI for web design is a bit of a myth and is often misunderstood – simply as video works in pixels, not inches.

Image Resolution for the Web

The goal of an image on a website is to get it to load fast. It’s useless to have massive images on your website and it takes forever to load – especially on mobile devices using a slower connection. There is no notion of DPI on a computer screen, it’s done in pixels, not dots and inches like a printer. Without going into massive detail here, check out the Say No to 72 dpi article linked before if you’re really interested. Equally there is a good article on the Myth of DPI at the Web Designer Depot website. But to keep it simple, if you need an image to be 100 pixels by 200 pixels, make it that size, the DPI or PPI doesn’t matter if it’s just for viewing on a screen.

Image Resolution for Printing

Normally printing firms require work to be at least 150 DPI, but often at least 300 DPI is required. Some specialist printers might require even more, it’s a good idea to check with the printers before carrying out work if you know it’s a larger printing project. Generally the bigger resolution the better the image can be printed.

Vector Images

Vector images don’t use resolution the same way as normal images. Vector images are based on maths to calculate paths and a frame of where the image goes. It has no concept of sizes and resolutions. Basically speaking, if you want your image 100 times larger the calculations are multiplied by 100. This means that vector images are not tied to the same constraints other images are, they can be scaled up and down as much as you want without losing quality. If you’re printing something really, really large then a vector would be the way to go. It keeps your file sizes low and you don’t need to worry about quality. The trade of is you need specialist software and knowledge to create these images and not everyone has both in their head or installed on their PC! A common application used to work with vectors is Adobe Illustrator. Sometimes your printing firm will prefer it if you can provide artwork such as logos in vector format as it allows them to scale it as they need without worrying about quality.

To Summarise All That!

If you are making an image for the web or digital displays, ignore the DPI or PPI just use the dimensions you need it to be such as 400 pixels by 800 pixels. After all, 400 x 800 pixels is always going to be 400 x 800 pixels.

If you are making an image for print, create your document in the physical size you need. If it’s for a 40″ x 40″ print, make your document that size and set it to 300+ DPI. It’s easier not to work in pixels here, it confuses matters. This is because having a higher DPI/PPI requires less physical space to fit those pixels in. Confusing? Try create a document that’s 1000 x 1000 pixels at 300 DPI. Then create another document that’s 1000 x 1000 pixels at 72 DPI. You might think that the document that’s 300 DPI is going to be bigger right? Wrong. The 300 DPI document is 8.47cm x 8.47cm. The 72 DPI document is 35.28cm x 35.28cm which is bigger! This is because the 300 DPI image is squeezing in more of your pixels per inch. The 72 DPI image is squeezing in less of your pixels per inch, so it spans a larger area. If you work in the physical size you need from the off, it makes things much simpler.

If you are making an image which might be used for a bit of everything you should really work with a vector, or at really large resolutions. Failure to do so might find printing on larger surfaces impossible without re-creating your image.

No problem now though, using this script!

Simply visit the interconnect/it website and download the Search Replace DB script then upload it to your server and run it by visiting the URL, http://yourwebsite.com/nameofscript.php. There is instructions on the screen as you run through it.

IMPORTANT: This code is supplied with no warranty or support implied. You use it entirely at your own risk. Currently it is supplied under the WTFPL but this will change to the GPL eventually. And when you’ve finished using the script, PLEASE delete it as it can pose a serious security risk to your site.

In this article we’ll run through identifying spam, WordPress methods of reducing spam, plugins to help reduce spam and a custom function you can add to your theme. Keep in mind however that there is no method of keeping all spammers out automatically, spammers change their methods and even manually add comments to try and bypass your protection.

How to Identify WordPress Spam Comments

You would think that identifying spam comments would be easy, and quite often it is. Take a look at this one with the links removed:

“As I website possessor I believe the articles here is rattling great , regards for your efforts. cpanel reseller | whm reseller |”

Here the poster is trying to link back to a website. A quick Google search inside “quotes” returns quite a few results where this spammer has wrote the same thing over and over again.

Google search for spam comment

Here are a few pointers for manually identifying spam comments. Whilst sometimes a real comment might fall under one of these, they are generally good guidelines to follow.

• Unrelated Links: If a comment has links back to an unrelated website it’s probably spam. Why would someone link to buying a new car on a bread recipe website?
• Many Links: If a comment has more than one link then it may be spam – sometimes it can be real to link more than once but it is rare.
• Generic Comments: If the comment content isn’t really related to the post or is very generic then it just might be spam.
• Wow, you’re really awesome: Similar to the above point, if the post is very complimentary then it’s probably rubbish also.
• Name Field: A big hint is in the name field. If someone says their name is “Car Seller Brighton” instead of “Jim Bobbins” then alarm bells should be ringing.
• Multiple Comments: If the comment is posted twice on different articles they both are probably going to be spam.
• Fake Quotes: Sometimes a spammer will quote your post or part of it without actually replying to the post itself.
• Old Posts: If a post is old real posters normally don’t comment as they realise that the subject is dead.
• Language: Posting in another language is often a big sign. If you’re site is in English why would someone reply in another language?

Using WordPress to Reduce Spam Comments

WordPress actually has a few useful tools built in to help reduce spam, without using any plugins. All of these methods are in some relation to the list above for identifying spam. The first one we’ll look at is what WordPress can do about Links.

Post Links. WordPress allows you to set the number of posts within a link which flags the comment for manual moderation. This attempts to stop spammers who leave multiple links. If you visit your WordPress Dashboard and go to the Settings > Discussion panel, under Comment Moderation you can set the number of links to 1, when the default is 2.

Spam Words. WordPress also allows you to block certain words. In the same area as before, Settings > Discussion, you can add words to the text area. WordPress has a list of Spam Words which you can use and add to. Put each word on a new line and be careful not to have any empty lines!

Blacklist Words. Similar to blocking words, you can create a Blacklist in the same area. This is more powerful because anything that matches a term wont even sit for moderation, it’ll be totally destroyed from view. The comment will still be in the database however marked as [spam]. It’s not really advisable to use the Blacklist unless you’re certain of what you want to destroy as partial words can match. If you put in “ass” words like “assistance” would result in a match.

Closing Comments. As mentioned before, sometimes spam comments are left on old articles. Under Settings > Discussion you can enable “Automatically close comments on articles older than X days” and enter in a value. If you are writing a personal blog perhaps comments only need to be open for about 90 days?

Moderate, everything. You probably don’t want to take this action for larger websites where you get a lot of comments, however on smaller blogs it’s fine. Ticking the box “An administrator must approve the comment” under Setting > Discussion will force all comments to be checked before going onto the site. You can take a similar approach by checking “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” – this is pretty self explanatory, anyone who leaves a comment needs their first one manually checked.

Registered User Comments. Forcing users to register before they leave a comment is a deterrence for spam comments, however it can also be a deterrence for real commentators. Visitors might not want to go through the bother of registering before leaving a comment, it’s something you need to weigh up – there is better alternatives out there. To enable this visit the Dashboard and under Settings > General panel select “Users must be registered and logged in to comment”.

WordPress Anti-Spam Plugins

Akismet. As mentioned before, WordPress comes bundled with Akismet. This works by using an algorithm combined with a community driven database to “learn” which comments are spam. To use Akismet you need to register with them over at Akismet.com to get your API Key. If you make money from your website you need to pay for your subscription however it is free for personal websites.

Bad Behavior. This plugin works well with Akismet as it provides a different type of protection. It acts as a blanket over your site to stop spammers from even looking at your site, never mind leaving comments. This helps keep your sites load down and keeps the logs clean. For more information check out the description on the plugin page of WordPress.org.

WordPress Hacks and Modifications to Reduce Spam

So your WordPress is all setup, your plugins are ready to rock, that’s enough right? Yes, it probably is enough however more protection wont hurt. These next steps are not recommended for average users, you should really have an understanding of how WordPress works and editing files before doing any of this. As normal – take a backup of any files before you change or delete them in case you break something!

Deleting Files. If you want to totally remove comments you can delete wp-comments-post.php. This will effectively disable comments on your site. The end. If you have troubles with trackback spam, you can delete wp-trackback.php. Just like deleting the comments file, this will totally disable trackbacks.

Function. You can add the following code into your themes function.php file. This code gets the referrer (address of the page which got the user to this post) and if it’s blank they are blocked.

// Anti Spam Function - Referrers

function verify_comment_referrer() {

     if (!wp_get_referrer()) {

          wp_die( __('You cannot post comment at this time, may be you need to enable referrers in your browser.') );

     }

}

add_action('check_comment_flood', 'verify_comment_referrer');

// END Anti Spam Function - Referrers

WordPress Anti-Spam Check-list

Time to sum everything up into a check-list for combating spam on a WordPress site. Some of the methods have been left out of this check-list as I feel some of them are too drastic or are not that useful. The following check-list could be used in almost all setups:

• WordPress: Limit the amount of links visitors can leave without being moderated from the Discussion panel.
• WordPress: Setup your spam links from the Discussion panel.
• WordPress: Close comments on old articles on the Discussion panel.
• WordPress: Force all first timers to have their first comment moderated from the Discussion panel.
• Plugin: Install, activate and sign up for Akismet.
• Plugin: Install and activate Bad Behavior.
• Hack: Add the verify_comment_referrer function to the themes function.php file.

Back in the old days using “Click here” provided some form of instructions to users. Publishers of web content decided that visitors needed pointers of carrying out basic tasks such as clicking on links. Surely you want to write your content without worrying about users being able to navigate around, after all they got to your page in the first place so it would be a safe assumption to assume they know how links work. Especially when “Click here” implies they are using a mouse to actually click…

Why using Click Here is bad

• If you print out the page, “Click here” suddenly becomes useless and doesn’t look very professional.
• Search engines use the text in a link to help identify what the link is about. The link isn’t really about “Click here” is it?
• “Click here” applies you have a device to click with. Not all users do have that device, or chose not to use it.
• “Click here” is useless when taken out of context in a list of links.
• Quite often users just scan a page, stuff like hyperlinks stand out – make use of them with descriptive text!

Examples of Good and Bad links

Here is some examples to show the usage of links.

See the difference? When calling a user to action try to follow the link guidelines from w3:

• provides some information when read out of context
• explains what the link offers
• doesn’t talk about mechanics
• is not a verb phrase

A great way to backup your files is to sync folders with Dropbox using symbolic links. Backing up files is important. At any time your hard drive could fail, rendering all your files inaccessible. Without a backup, all your photographs, documents, spreadsheets could be gone!

Here we’ll go through using Dropbox as a backup solution and how to use Symbolic Links to automatically Sync files with it.

What is Dropbox and where do I get it?

Here’s part of the tour from the Dropbox website: “Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. This means that any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website. Dropbox also makes it super easy to share with others, whether you’re a student or professional, parent or grandparent. Even if you accidentally spill a latte on your laptop, have no fear! You can relax knowing that Dropbox always has you covered, and none of your stuff will ever be lost.”

Desktop Icon

To download Dropbox and create a free account visit their website. Once you have it installed and logged in you’ll notice you have a new icon on your desktop similar to the one shown here. If you double click on that it’ll open up just like a normal folder. This is your portal into your Dropbox account! Files put in here will automatically sync with your Dropbox profile.

So already you could just manually backup the files you want by dragging them in here. Which is all great and such, if you remember to do it. You could work straight from this directory, but for me I would rather keep my files where I want, physically on my hard drive; this is where the Symbolic Links come in!

What are Symbolic Links?

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it: “In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a special type of file that contains a reference to another file or directory in the form of an absolute or relative path and that affects pathname resolution.”

This basically means your computer has a shortcut or reference point to an actual file which is stored elsewhere. So what we’ll use it for is almost to trick Dropbox into thinking files on our hard drive are actually inside the Dropbox folder so it syncs them.

Linking Folders to Dropbox with Symbolic Links

These instructions will work with Windows 7 and Vista.

Assuming you have Dropbox installed and have an account as described before you firstly want to check where Dropbox is saved. Double click on your Dropbox icon and click in the address bar to display the path where it’s located. In Windows 7 it should be, by default, C:\Users\yourname\Dropbox.

Search Bar in the Start Menu

Next you need to open up a command prompt as an Administrator. To do this, Press Start and in the search box (shown to the right) type in cmd. You then want to right click on the cmd icon the search returns and press Run as administrator. This will bring up a black box with a command prompt.

In your command window you want to change to the Dropbox folder. This is the path you noted from the first step. So taking the Windows 7 default path enter the following:

cd "C:\Users\yourname\Dropbox"

Now you will be inside the above directory. Remember to change yourname with the actual folder! Now onto creating the actual link. For this we’ll be using the mklink command. For this you need to know where your files are. If I have a folder inside My Documents called “Work” and I want to use this to sync with Dropbox you would enter the following:

mklink /d "Work" "C:\Users\yourname\Documents\Work"

Specific Example of Creating a Symbolic Link for Dropbox

I thought it would be handy to show a picture of this last command prompt bit, since it can be a little confusing! Here, my Dropbox is located in C:\Users\Rab\Dropbox. The folder I want to sync is E:\Path To\Pictures\Holiday Pictures. Here is all I enter into the command prompt:

cd "C:\Users\Rab\Dropbox"

mklink /d "Holiday Pictures" "E:\Path To\Pictures\Holiday Pictures"

Creating a Symbolic Link for Dropbox

So what now?

You can almost forget about Dropbox. Carry on using and updating your files. Because of your symbolic link it’ll auto update and sync itself with your Dropbox folder! Should your hard drive fail, or you need to access your files from another computer simply login to the Dropbox website to see your files.

A common confusion with people who are new to websites is the difference between hosting and domains. Yes, both of these are required to display your website but the hosting is just the place where your files are stored. Hosting, or hosting server contains your websites pages, images, videos, etc. A domain name is registered to you for a contracted amount of time, often one or two years, and is provided by a registrar. You must have both a domain name and hosting for your website to be visible to people. If you don’t have a host, when people go to your address they wont see anything. If you don’t have a domain name, you might have your site sitting on a server somewhere but how to people get there in their browser?

Before you register a domain you should keep a few things in mind.

Keep it simple and short, try to avoid hyphens

I think it’s always good to try and imagine yourself telling someone your address over the telephone. Let’s look at a few examples of this.

“Yes we can do that for you, just take a look at our website. The address is w w w dot i dash like dash registering dash domain dash names dot com” ~ www.i-like-registering-domain-names.com

“Yes we can do that for you, just take a look at our website. The address is w w w dot domain dash names dot com slash services” ~ www.domain-names.com

“Yes we can do that for you, just take a look at our website. The address is w w w dot domain names dot com slash services” ~ www.domainnames.com

See the difference? Hyphens aren’t all bad. Just don’t over use them. Using one is often okay, but personally I would rather have none. You would be surprised how many people type dash as “dash” from a telephone conversation.

Relate it to your content, relevant domain names are easy to remember

Relating to your content may not always be relevant. There are two ways you can go with this. Firstly you can simply use your company or organisations name, this is fairly straight forward. eBay is the company www.ebay.co.uk is the address. Who would have guess it? Well, hundreds of millions of people.

Secondly you can have your address relate to what it is you offer. Do you know the DIY supplier B&Qs domain name? It’s www.diy.com, I bet you’re saying “I see what they did there”. In terms of search engine rankings keywords in your domain name do have some weight, there are many other factors which contributes to the rankings.

Different types of domains

There are different types of domain names out there which you may want to consider before registering. They are loosely tied to meanings. These are just a few of the common ones…

.com - traditionally these addresses are used for companies inside the USA, but over time they extended to companies who trade globally. Most companies will look to get a “dot com” address just for the branding factor.

.co.uk – these addresses are typically businesses within the UK.

.net - traditionally used for Internet Service Providers (ISPs) but in practice anyone can register a “dot net” address.

.org – these are supposed to be used for non-profit organisations but again, anyone can register a “dot org” address.

.biz – created for business websites but again anyone can register them. See what I mean by loosely tied meanings?

.info – this one was created for information websites.

.tv - this was actually the top level domain for the Tuvalu islands, but it is now marketed for use in television and radio.

All set?

Once you have decided on your domain name you’ll want to register the domain. There are thousands of places you can register a domain, and most places which offer you hosting packages allow you to also register domains and most of these will have a special tool you can use. You will need to find out if your domain is free and this is where the tool comes in handy. A hosting company such as UK2.net has a tool you can use here to check what is free and what is taken. Don’t be too upset if your dream domain is taken, there is plenty more out there. Just try different combinations until you find something you like. If you really are struggling take a look at the websites which are taken. Sometimes people have registered domain names but they may be in a parked state. This means that although they have it, they have not pointed it to a hosting package. Perhaps they are willing to sell it for a fair price – drop them an email and find out.

Protecting Privacy

When you are registering your domain on a registrars website often they will have an option to keep the domain name private. This will exclude your details from a large internet database. This is not mandatory and is just down to your personal preference. Do you want people to find out your contact details to querying the database?

Summary

So let’s break this down a little.

1. Write down some names you would like, relating to your company name and what you offer.
2. Try to keep them nice and short. Keep it simple!
3. Remember, how would you tell someone the address over the telephone?
4. Check that it’s free.
5. Register! The sites which allow you to register give you step by step instructions – don’t get too worried about it. It’s straightforward.

If you are ready to register (and get hosting at the same time if you require) we recommend UK2.Net.

Enjoy!

Like most things in WordPress, the solution lies with a plugin and in this case the Ultimate Category Excluder which is available from the WordPress plugins directory does everything for you.

All you need to do is download, install and configure under Settings > Category Exclusion. In here it will give you little tick boxes to allow you to exclude your categories from the Main Page, Feeds and (or) Archives. Press update and off you go!

Excluding Categories without a Plugin

If you would rather not use a plugin for this you could do it by editing your themes functions.php file. By adding in the code below you’ll exclude categories 1, 2 and 3. Remember be careful when editing files, be sure to make a backup in case something goes wrong!

//Exclude Categories from RSS Feed
function ExcludeFromRSS($query) {
  if ($query->is_feed) {
    $query->set('cat','-1,-2,-3');
  }
return $query;
} add_filter('pre_get_posts','ExcludeFromRSS');
//End Exclude Categories from RSS Feed


Google defines the button as “The +1 button is shorthand for ‘this is pretty cool’ or ‘you should check this out.’ Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1′s can help friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.”

When you click these little +1 buttons you’ll get a nice little popup asking you to login if you’re not already and give you a couple of settings to confirm your recommendation. You’ll only get this popup once, afterwords when you click a +1 button it’ll automatically add the website to your recommendations on your Google Profile. If you would like to remove your recommendation simply click the button again to remove the vote.

Create Your Google Plus One Button

Head over to the button creation page I mentioned before and customise your button. You’ll see a little preview on the right. You can dive into the Advanced Options if you wish as Yoast does when creating vote tracking for Google Analytics.

Google's custom button creation page

Install the Script

The install in WordPress is simple. First up you need to add the script tag into your pages, I’ve used the footer just before the tag. Note, you don’t copy the whole of the code box supplied by Google here, just the top section. The bottom section of the copy box is your button code which we use in the next step. You can edit your footer through your WordPress dashboard by navigating to Appearance > Editor and selecting footer.php.

Install the Button

Try it out down the bottom!

Now for adding the button itself. Simply edit the file where you want to place the little button and paste in the code generated at the bottom of the copy box on the Google creation page. It will look like this, . For mine, I placed it in the footer like the script. All done! Remember, this will +1 the current page, it’s not a site wide thing – pick your location appropriately!

Watch the Video

Here’s a little video from Google about the whole thing.