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Although Commission Bot is impressive it still leaves some work for the WordPress web site administrator. Some of the things that it doesn’t
do are setup the WordPress site, remove the demo items that are installed by default during the installation of WordPress, or make any
basic improvements to the web site. Commission Bot does change some settings, but these relate directly to the content which
Commission Bot is going to publish to the web site.
There are many other changes that you should make to help improve visitor experience, after all if your web site visitors are not satisfied with
your web site they won’t buy from you or buy the products you are recommending and they won’t be back.
They won’t recommend your site to their Facebook or Twitter friends! The most basic of changes are explained here.
Read other posts and watch other videos on this site or on our YouTube channel for more ways to improve your WordPress web site after you have
performed the basics.
These instructions assume you are using WordPress version 3.3 for your site.
By default a WordPress installation creates a demo post with one comment, a post category, a demo page, a link category and several links.
Neither the links or the link category are shown on the web site by default. All of these items need to be removed or changed since they will
most likely be irrelevant to your sites content.
Let’s get started.
Log in to your WordPress web site. You can either click on the ‘Log in” link on the ‘Meta’ menu or add ‘/wp-admin/’ to your web site URL.
for example ‘mysite.com/wp-admin/’.
Now that you have successfully logged in to your web site, let’s make the basic changes necessary before using Commission Bot.
The admin menu is along the left of the page. There are menus and sub-menus. The menus are a combination of drop down and pop out
style menus. So you can click on a menu item to see it’s sub-menus or just hover your mouse over the menu and wait for the pop out sub
menu list to appear.
Let’s remove demo post first. To do this: on the menu click on ‘Posts’,
in the list of posts you will see ‘Hello World!’, 0:03:25.533,0:03:32.666 hover your mouse over the title ‘Hello World!’ and wait for the post options to appear under the title, 0:03:32.666,0:03:41.532 click on ‘Trash’, note this does not actually remove the file from the web site it only moves it to the trash bin.
No posts or pages in the trash bin are visible on the web site front-end (that is to say, the public side of the web site),
the administrator panel is often referred to as the back-end, 0:03:54.866,0:04:04.932 notice that above the column header ‘Title’ there is now a link labeled ‘Trash (1)’ it did not appear until there was an item in the trash bin, in this
case there is just one item, 0:04:08.266,0:04:13.666 click on ‘Trash (1)’ to list all items in the trash bin, 0:04:13.666,0:04:21.199 hover your mouse over the title “Hello World!” again and notice the option to ‘Delete Permanently’, 0:04:21.200,0:04:29.066 click on ‘Delete Permanently’ to completely remove or delete this post from your web site, 0:04:29.066,0:04:36.232 note that when you delete a post you also delete all the comments that were connected to the post.
Now let’s rename the default post category since ‘Uncategorized’ doesn’t make much sense for a category name 0:04:45.000,0:04:53.600 on the menu under ‘Posts’ click on ‘Categories’, you will see the default ‘Post’ ‘Category’ named ‘Uncategorized’, 0:04:53.600,0:05:03.333 to rename it hover your mouse over the title and wait for the options to appear and click on ‘Edit’ or just click on the title, 0:05:03.333,0:05:10.133 change the ‘Name’ field to something more meaningful such as ‘Articles’, 0:05:10.133,0:05:21.066 delete the ‘Slug’ leaving it blank, WordPress will fill this in automatically changing all letters to lower case and if there is more than one word in
the title the spaces will be changed to dashes, click the ‘Update’ button at the bottom of the page. 0:05:27.500,0:05:32.733 Next let’s remove the demo page that was created. 0:05:32.733,0:05:52.333 on the menu click on ‘Pages’, delete the page and then empty the trash bin just as you did with the post. 0:05:52.333,0:05:56.933 Next let’s delete the demo links. 0:05:56.933,0:06:01.333 If you want to use these to learn more about
WordPress then visit the front end of your web site now and bookmark the links, then return back here and to your WP-Admin panel to finish
deleting them. 0:06:12.533,0:06:19.433 In the menu click on ‘Links’, hover your mouse over the link ‘Name’ and wait for the link options to appear, 0:06:19.433,0:06:25.033 click on the ‘Delete’ link option for each link to remove it from your site, 0:06:25.033,0:06:35.733 alternatively you can check the ‘Name’ check box at the top or bottom of the list to select all links then from the ‘Bulk Actions’ drop down list
select ‘Delete’ then click on the ‘Apply’ button. 0:06:49.233,0:07:02.633 The default category for links is ‘Blogroll’, which is a typical link category on WordPress sites so we’ll just leave it as is. 0:07:02.633,0:07:12.133 You probably don’t like spam anymore than I do. There’s email spam, web site comment spam, guestbook spam, and more!
In this post of basic changes there are two changes to be made to help reduce the comment spam that our site receives. 0:07:20.233,0:07:29.533 Although you can disable all comments and that would certainly prevent all comment spam, that will not help with visitor engagement, SEO or
affiliate commissions, to help with these three things we are going to allow comments.
But we are going to require all commenters to create an account on our site.
By requiring a real email address in order to comment we reduce the amount of comment spam the site receives.
This can also help to build an email list as well, to which we can later email relevant product offers. 0:07:56.433,0:08:04.833 When a user creates an account on a WordPress site, WordPress will send them an email containing an auto-generated password.
The user is required to use this password to login so that they can leave their comment.
Requiring an email address will reduce the overall number of comments, but in my experience sites get far more comment spam
than they get real comments. This tactic is only the most basic in comment spam reduction, there are other methods. 0:08:28.033,0:08:35.633 On the menu click on ‘Settings’, next click on ‘Discussion’, place a check mark next to ‘Comment author
must fill out name and e-mail’, 0:08:39.733,0:08:47.233 place a check mark next to ‘Users must be registered and logged in to comment’. 0:08:47.233,0:08:55.633 One last basic setting to change will prevent any comments from appearing on your sites front end without your express approval. 0:08:55.633,0:09:01.133 place a check mark next to ‘An administrator must always approve the comment’, 0:09:01.133,0:09:06.633 scroll down the page and click on the ‘Save Changes’ button. 0:09:06.633,0:09:15.033 Requiring a registration email address in order to leave a comment and emailing the user their password does mean that email services for
your web site must be properly configured on your web server for your web site.
Most likely your web hosting account includes email addresses and you only need to use your hosting control panel to setup an email address
for your web site. Most hosting services provide video tutorials on such things. 0:09:34.933,0:09:42.233 A lot of people use something like ‘admin@mysite.com’ for the site administrators email address.
While this may seem to make sense it is also a predictable behavior.
Many spammers send email to admin@mysite.com or administrator@mysite.com.
To cut down on the email spam you receive on this account be more creative than just ‘admin’.
This should be an email address that you will be using only for the purposes of receiving emailed status updates from your web site.
This should NOT be an email address that you use to engage site visitors, it is too impersonal.
Perhaps using your first name, an alias, or make up a nickname for yourself for this site when engaging visitors or web site members. 0:10:27.866,0:10:41.266 One last change! This one is to help improve how your URLs appear. Rather than have something like http://mysite.com/?p=345,
which is not only ugly it also gives no SEO benefits at all. It’s much better to have the title of the post in the URL,
this is the purpose of the ‘slug’ mentioned early. This way not only does it look better to visitors or when people see your links in directories,
Facebook, etc, but it also helps improve your on-site SEO. 0:11:03.366,0:11:05.066 To do this: 0:11:05.066,0:11:10.766 Click on ‘Settings’, then click on ‘Permalinks’, 0:11:10.766,0:11:14.666 click the radio button next to ‘Custom Structure’, 0:11:14.666,0:11:38.266 in the text box to the right type in ‘/%postname%/’, with out the quotes, click the ‘Save Changes’ button. 0:11:38.266,0:11:43.766 Well that concludes the basic changes we need to make before using Commission Bot. 0:11:43.766,0:11:50.066 But that doesn’t mean there are no other changes to be made before using Commission Bot! 0:11:50.066,0:12:05.232 Have A Nice Day!