Fishing Nihonquality and original articles

For those of us interested in Internet Marketing, setting up an article directory is a good idea. It is one way to get free content with which to populate or blog and gain keyword authority. Before I set up this site as a WordPress article directory I thought the process was confusing. However like most things, when you know how, it becomes very easy. I used information I found on a few different sites as well as help from friends (in particular the admin of The Best Article Directory) to get this site up and running. There may well be a page somewhere online detailing the whole procedure, step by step, but I didn’t find it. So to serve as a record for the next article directory I set up and to possibly help one or two people wanting to set up there own WordPress article directory, here are the steps I took to get this site looking as it does today.

These instructions assume that you have a self hosted WordPress blog set up.

Step 1: Member registration. To allow people to contribute articles to your blog you need to allow them to register. On your blog dashboard choose Settings. This will look similar to the screenshot below. Simply add a check mark in the box next to “Membership”. I also changed the “New Default User Role” Contributor. Contributor status still means that an admin will have to approve each post before it is published AND that Contributors cannot then re-edit their posts. This is optimum just in case a spammer manages to register because it prevents them from going back and adding 100s of links to dubious websites. And there posts in the first instance will not be approved.

Installing the theme: Step 2. The theme used on this blog is the Article Directory WordPress Theme. To install it, simply download the package from the link above then upload it to the appropriate directory via FTP. For me this was /public_html/wp-content/themes. Once you have done this the theme will be available for you to select on the Appearance > Themes page of your WordPress admin control panel.

Step 3: Adding a contact form. I chose the Contact Form 7 from the Plugins > Add New section of the WordPress admin control panel. There are a load of contact forms available so if you don’t like the look of this one just select one more to your taste.

Step 4: Editing header.php file. I edited this file so that it displays the page names on the top navigation bar. I simply edited the contents of the nav div to contain my page names. As follows:

<ul id="nav">
 <li<?php if(is_home()) echo '' ?>><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/">Home</a></li>
 <li><a href="/about">About</a></li>
 <li><a href="/joining">Joining</a></li>
 <li><a href="/submission-requirements">Submission Requirements</a></li>
 <li><a href="/contact">Contact</a></li>
 <?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&include=3,4,6'); ?>
</ul>

The next steps are populating your article directory site with loads of quality content and garnering backlinks so that all the contributors are able to send some decent link juice to the sites that they want to publicise.