Remove “Category” Base from Permalinks in Your WordPress Blog

Everyday I am learning new stuff about wordpress, such as new plugins new functions and my adoration to it grows by so. This one took a lot of my time to finally find a decent solution.

I was looking for a way to remove the “category” base from the permalinks on one of my other wordpress blogs. The link structure that wordpress inserts automatically is as follows:

http://www.yoursite.com/categories/category1

Although you can change the word “categories” to anything you like from the dashboard>permalinks by changing the category base in the optional section, I needed to completely remove it and have permalinks such as the following:

http://www.yoursite.com/category1

I searched how to do this a lot on the forums including the wordpress support forum, and tried all the things they suggested. Nothing worked. Finally, I found a plugin called WP No Category Base that did the job exactly as I needed. The good thing is that it is free and installable from inside the dashboard. Just do a search with the name of the plugin and you will find it. You simply install it and it is done, no modification needed.

You can also go to the official page of the plugin here to download it manually and read more about how it works.

As you can see, it works flawless on this blog too, however I can’t guarantee that it will work with any theme or any other plugins. You have to see it yourself.

What I Learned Today

For the last couple of weeks, I have been busy with lots of different stuff like building adsense friendly wordpress sites, testing some adwords campaigns, promoting CPA offers on Youtube, writing and submitting articles and doing some freelance stuff. Meanwhile, I kept learning about all these things in terms of both marketing and technical parts as much as possible.

Now, I see that all these stuff got a bit scattered and disorganized. And I need some sort of organization and keep track of what I learnt and what I applied, what worked and what did not. Hence, from now on, I decided to update this blog with my daily progress whenever I have time. I will include anything I learn and try that day so that I can keep track of the progress and learn better by noting it down. Also, I will keep updating the results of my efforts.

This post will expectedly be a milestone for my affiliate marketing blog and from now on it will evolve into a much better blog, full of useful information, resources and real life experiments.

Now I will go back to work and update here as soon as I come across anything worth to mention.

My First CPA Money Ever, Comes From MaxBounty

I am glad to announce that two days ago I made my first CPA money ever. And in the following two days it continued to build up. Although the amount is not something that will shock you, what is important here is I found something that works after long trials and errors, and better than that, it is scalable and I am working on it now.  I wanted to share my story here with you, I hope some of you will benefit from it.

Just before starting, let me mention that I am a member of MaxBounty and I don’t have an account on other networks yet. I had been reading lots of ebooks and forum posts for months though I hadn’t done exactly what they suggested. I tried promoting some of the CPA offers in a poor way.

I had started with a Blogger blog about internet tips, a general one and put some general CPA offers on it. Although I got some clicks, I had never made any leads from that blog. I was doing something wrong and I didn’t know what. All I was expecting was some magical things will happen and people will click on my links and sign up to offers.

All I saw whenever I checked my account was a big “0″. Then I changed my approach and the picture changed a bit.

first-cpa-money-maxbounty

So, what did I do to change the “0″ into “$11.19″ in three days?

I was full of ideas but I had no experience and taken no real action yet. So, I decided to focus on one single idea and follow it until it works. I don’t remember from where or from who I heard that idea, but it is not mine. Anyway, I want to thank them for sharing this idea. I want to work on this a bit so that I can trust that it will work for a long time, after that I will post here what did I do in detail.

See you by then and do not forget that, it is not about the method, it is about sticking to it and applying it until it works.

How to Write an Article About a Topic That You Know Absolutely Nothing About

First of all, let me tell you this: I don’t recommend you write an article about a topic that you know nothing about. Though, I know that sometimes you may need to do this.

It is apparent that, there are people who can create really high quality articles about topics they are totally a stranger, in a short time. This is a skill that’s developed in time with practice and experience. So, hearing claims such as “Give me any keyword and I’ll write a 300-words high quality article around it in less than 30 minutes.” shouldn’t surprise you.

Writing is a skill that is built and developed over time with more and more practice. If you keep writing and follow the ones who are good at it, your writing will become better eventually.

write-better-articles

If you want to write quality articles in any topic, you need to start with exercising it on subjects that you are familiar to. By doing so, you will build your own style of writing and your writing speed will increase too.

Once you are comfortable with the articles you’ve written, submit them to article directories and see if they will approve them. Approval will be a measure of feedback. Furthermore, it is also a good idea to ask your friends or others to review your articles. Take all the feedback you can and adjust your articles accordingly.

At some point, you will feel confident enough to write about things that you know less about. Try writing on some subtopics that you will not need to do further research to write. It will be slightly difficult at the beginning, but when you start writing, it will flow naturally and you will not know when you are finished a 400-words article.

The next step is to write about topics that you will need to do a little research to be able to compose an article. For those kind of stuff, make a preliminary research and try to base your article around a question related to the subject or make a list of items to write about.

A how-to article will be easy to start with. for example, “How to register a domain name?” or “How to install a wordpress blog?”. You will be able to find a great deal of information on how-to subjects on the internet.

Another type of article to start with is a list of items like “7 things to keep in mind before starting a web business” or “Simple steps to build a wonderful garden”. The idea here is to split the article body into smaller parts and complete it step by step. In a short time, you will notice how fast you’ve become in writing.

Finally, and the hardest one, we come to the topics that you know nothing about and the ones that you hear for the first time. Anyone can write crappy content about anything, however, as a wannabe quality article writer, we are after quality content here.

To accomplish this, you will need to do more research and will be reading until you get to a point that you learnt enough to start writing. For some topics, this may take hours, yet for some others, this may take days or even weeks. And for some specific ones like extremely detailed medical subjects or engineering trends, which will require professional background, you may not be able to write at all. That’s fine, hey, you don’t need to write about everything right?