Today’s post looks at whether your site is mobile ready, and how to do it. The mobile web is beginning the growth phase and could be even bigger a phenomenon than the current web, as the number of mobile units out in the market, many of which are mobile internet ready, is huge!

The results are pretty good, too, if you take a look.

Of course, this is fortuitous because it means I can figure out if people are actually seeing the sign in our target area and visiting our site from the URL or not. But the risk is if you are on the street, and you want to check the details before you call, and your site isn’t mobile you’ll likely discourage the visitors because of what they might see.

What do they see when they get there? Well, before they would have seen a busy site in mini-view with lots of places to click, and not suited to the mobile experience at all. But I installed one plugin called WordPress Mobile which …

WordPress Mobile Edition

A mobile/phone/PDA friendly interface for your blog with progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers.

This is a combination theme and browser checker that delivers a mobile view if one of the user agents matches the list of mobile browsers. With so many mobiles out there, the list of browsers is quite diverse, but the user experience is great.

Once you install the WordPress Mobile Edition, and activate it, it’s pretty smooth. You can test your site at Ready.Mobi to see if it is compatible.

The stats are meaningless without taking a screenshot of the site in mobile view, but that’s a little tricky! Any suggestions how to get a pc to view a mobi.site? Are you a mobi developer? Do you have a mobile site? Do you have a regular site and are you getting it ready for the mobile world?

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I logged into one of my blogs today to see that WordPress 2.9 is already out! I’ve updated a couple of my sites already, and I’m noticing several improvements, including a slightly snappier speed on some actions.

But the biggest news is the addition of a trash bin so when you go to delete your posts, they’re archived in the trash should you wish to recover them at some point. This is a very handy feature as I’m sure most bloggers recall having to scour feeds, Google and a bunch of other places looking for posts that were accidentally deleted. (see image for details under Trash).

There are a number of other usability improvements, too. So check in your blog to get the new release. of course, it will break some things, so you may want to hold off updating until 2.9.1. I jumped in early with some of my blogs, and will phase it in across my network of blogs as this month progresses!

Brief Notes: On December 18th, 2009, WordPress Version 2.9, named for Carmen McRae, was released to the public. For more information on this enhancement and bug-fix release, read the Development Blog and see the Changelog for 2.9.

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Zemanta LiveWriter Plugin | Zemanta Ltd.

I’ve used their Zemanta blogging tool, but as a plugin to the popular LiveWriter, it could be pretty helpful to bloggers.

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Steve Sutherland, the "The Start-Up Expert" wrote:

I hear that all the time on WarriorForum – stick with one thing, choose one business model and persevere until you succeed. Unfortunately my business model involves content creation, copywriting, website development, article marketing, other SEO techniques and pretty soon email marketing etc! (Hardly getting good at one thing).

And in the same breath and email:

Sales are up anyway …!

So he was doing something right, for sure! However, I was turning this over in my own mind when I wrote my reply to him, and also to you:

I don’t think they mean get good at one (discrete) task, I can’t see how success could be based on one task, ONLY. I think they simply mean one business (this may involve multiple tasks) but keeping the focus on what YOU are good at. It doesn’t mean you have to be a MASTER of all trades! Obviously, you have to be reasonable at all of them and in some tasks you may have to be even better.

For example, when you buy a car, you could choose a Ferrari that excels in speed and acceleration. But the repair bills for simple things like oil changes are huge, AND, you won’t be able to drive it on less than standard roads. So you look for something more reasonable, say a Toyota. Toyota excels in producing great cars at affordable prices, but NONE of them will race as fast as that first car you looked at. However, that is their focus. And their customers like that. Toyotas are successful, not because they everything perfect, but because they do well in most important areas: engine capability, comfort, economy, efficiency, pricing, and repair service. They may not be the best, fastest, cheapest, MOST reliable, most comfortable, most powerful… but they are certainly successful. I think that’s the point.

I think the focus is what you said earlier: "The Start a Business Niche Expert". You’ve found a number of useful and sellable products, developed a marketing approach and put it into action more than 8 times already. Even better, you’re getting great feedback on sales/visitors on what sells, what is profitable, what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t. That is YOUR thing, isn’t it?

Even as a blogger, you have to know a bunch of skills, in some ways similar to Steve’s skill set, but you also have to know how to use WordPress, LiveWriter, and a whole bunch of skills. Being even a moderately successful blogger requires development of more than one skill, even though you may excel at one particular skill or subset of skills. Without some grasp of other skills, you will not achieve your aims.

What do you say, gentle readers?

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I have in the past used monitoring services when this blog had outages in December, but sometimes they reported false outages. So for my blogs which I visited daily, it was quite unnecessary. For sites that don’t require much maintenance, though, having a monitoring service could be useful especially if you’re doing Internet Marketing, and have dozens of sites.

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Whether or not it is true, it highlights a problem I’ve been having recently: keeping a track of those flashes of insight, ideas for posts, quotes, and other memes that come to me, as the muse does. Whenever I have one of those flashes of optimism, I really try hard to remember it so I can use it in a post later in that day.

The sad thing is: I then sit down to blog about those very topics, only to find that the ideas are evanescent as the warm winds of September in Taiwan. What am I to do?

So I have adopted several means to help record them: I’ll use email to send notes to myself, it’s easy to open, and create, and save. If a computer is not available, then I’ll keep some notes in my little notebook, small enough to fit inside my own wallet. If not, I’ll find scraps of paper to write down whatever I need to remember. Then I’ll collate the notes into titles or first sentences, and save them in my blog.

The result can be quite effective, but if not done properly, it will fill up notebooks/wordpress with numerous headers. These are easily recovered but making sense of them later is often a challenge, especially when the original mood is gone.

For example, I wrote a long half post about frustrations dealing with our photocopy company, then I saved it. A month later, the original mood is gone, facts are half-remembered, and I wonder if I will ever write it. At least I have the basics that I could write or re-write as needed. If I didn’t have these, I wouldn’t have the choice to develop the post or not.

So, if you are stuck for ideas: remember – your best ideas will often come to you at very odd times. Find a way to take some notes so that you will have a list of topics that you can write about when things are a little dry.

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Tools I do not use much any more

1. SocialSpark*
2. PerformancingAds (they lost my money)*
3. Alexa (for increasingly inaccurate stats)
4. TopSpots*
5. BlogCatalog (too much like MyBlogLog)
6. Dreamhost Referrals (never had one successful referral)
7. TTZMedia*

Tools I would never use again

1. Scribefire
2. Widgetbox
3. Sitemeter
4. Smorty
5. Blogsvertise*
6. Blogitive
7. SponsoredReviews
8. AdBrite*
9. AdToll*
10. NewsRoom*
11. Picasa Online
12. CafePress
13. A GuestBook or Hit Counter (so 1990′s!)

*these sites marked all owe me money (in some cases more than $10). In total, I’m owed about $60 which would be better in my bank account than theirs.

These are the tools I can think of right now, but I’m sure that the lists could be much longer if I thought about it.

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This is a repost from blogging Charlatans: I re-read the original post and felt the content of this stood better as a single post than attached to that.

Five Values for blogging: Learning, Voice, Authority, Integrity and Audience

So what should the budding blogger do to save their blog? Actually, it’s quite simple: I think there are five qualities that will ensure you do get back links, traffic, money, and whatever your definition of success is.

1. Learn to Write.

Sounds simple enough. But it’s amazing how many bloggers fail at this first hurdle. Learning to write is a skill that takes time, effort and practice to develop properly. Of course, your average blog Your Way To Success PDF will not tell you how much of each you will need. It will take you much longer than you first suspect, certainly longer than you hope, and likely will end up being far longer before, as an accomplished blogger, you actually dare to call yourself a ‘good’ writer. I’m somewhere in the second stage right now, most likely nearer the beginning than the end. Where are you?

2. Find your voice.

That’s been the hard step for me. But finding a voice in the hundreds of millions of blogs out there with many blogging on similar themes as I do. How do I define my blog in relation to all the others? By finding my voice. A voice can be defined in so many ways, none of which are exclusive. Your voice could be your blog’s niche, or your blog’s choice of topics. It could be the way you treat your topic. Or it could even be the way you write about dull subjects and inject personality, enthusiasm, and a sense of humor. It could even be as simple as your posting schedule or mix of posts through the week. Have you found your voice yet?

3. Build your authority.

No, I really don’t mean anything to do with another of the web’s charlatan’s: Technorati’s Authority Measure. I don’t even mean ‘pagerank’. Neither of these is a measure of your authority, rather it’s a measure of their decision making vis-a-vis your blog and its readership. As such, it’s subject to arbitrary adjustments up, down and sideways. Your authority is your ability to be thought of as someone who has understanding, insight, learning or skill and which achieves a greater degree of respect from your readership. That is your authority: do people approach you for advice (as readers or as emailers) or help when they come across issues that you have faced?

4. Keep your integrity.

With many companies out their encouraging bloggers to blog for dollars, it’s easy to sacrifice all of these qualities that you need for a few dollars in your PayPal account. Very easy. There have been times when I have sacrificed my own integrity for a few dollars. I regret it now. Now, I don’t tailor reviews to advertisers’ whims and unspecified needs, I try to tell the story as I see it, I try to keep readers informed of my conflict of interests, I try to keep my words honest and pure. I still do reviews, I still do buzzes but I will not write something that is dishonest or shortsells my readers. Do you feel you sold your integrity?

5. Connect with your audience.

That’s always the hard part. blogging, for me and many readers, started out as an expression of personal and private writing that somehow managed to garner a small audience. If I’m always caught up in my own little bubble, and it’s pretty easy for me living where I live, doing what I do and seeing things from an “Asian” or “European” perspective, I will fail to connect with my readers and their interests. I’m trying to remind myself that I should be striving to connect more with my readers, wherever they are. How do you connect with your readers?

While I can’t guarantee that these alone will lead you to success in blogging, I feel strongly that success in blogging without these values will be fleeting.

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Any business needs a steady hand… If you don’t have a steady hand at the tiller, you get this situation: sudden changes to the system without notice, promises that go unfulfilled, new users barred, old ones excluded, parameters changed without notice, …

EC, this is why I dropped your card before from ALL my blogs; don’t make me drop you again! PLEASE.

Keep a steady hand, announce changes, keep people informed… I have still no idea why you did what you did. But one thing is sure: you depend on your users, not the other way around. If you didn’t have users, you wouldn’t have EC. And the web is littered with failed dot coms for the same reason.

So, try to respect your users, even if you disagree with them. Remember: you can disagree and say:”This is my website. We’re going to do things this way or that, please understand.”

But don’t do this. Don’t suddenly pull features, concoct half measures that don’t work properly, and treat your EC users like dirt.

If you treat us like this, then that is what you will get.

Kenneth

On a forum, one of the worst things that you can do to members is to reset the forums, remove all the posts or reassign privileges. It is the fastest way I know of to kill an entire community.

Take a look at the GeekySpeaky Boards to see what I mean. These boards have been around for over two years, but last year the owner cleaned out the forums, reset the users and set everything back to zero. It’s nearly a year later, and of 10,000 members, there are ONLY 436 articles.

A forum used consistently over a period of several years becomes a valuable source of wisdom, information, support and community among its users; a group of people who become involved and will give back to the community far in excess of any monetary gain they may have; and the SEO benefits of having a large inventory of posts, searched, stored and organised in Google bring residual traffic for years.

Unfortunately, all of this is user-contributed; and as such, they members become co-shareholders in the ‘community’. Their opinion counts, as does their support. To ride roughshod over users as EntreCard has done.

Other posts: EC founder fakes his own posts.

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Qumana: a blog editor that allows you to use their adservice, too! Of the three tools I like, it’s the ONLY one available as a cross-platform blog editor!

BlogDesk: a simpler tool that I use for most blogging that I do. Unfortunately, it’s not compatible with blogger at all. WordPress and Movable Type are fine.

LiveWriter: Of course, my favorite application is LiveWriter because it seems to be the most powerful. Unfortunately it isn’t supported on older installations of XP.

And for those who like integrated applications: Flock, which includes a browser, social media tools, and a blog editor in one package.

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Oh, and the feed’s borked at Google for some reason. I don’t quite know why but the stats aren’t working properly at all. Perhaps it was to do with the new theme that I put up last month. The theme had some options for setting feed, and so I used that instead of the FeedBurner plugin. Turns out it may have been a bad decision! I have only 1/5 of the regular number of readers being reported. And Google hasn’t really fixed things since January. TechCrunch has written about this issue, too. What is going on?

However, this shouldn’t affect the competition at all. And even better news about EntreCard.

The EntreCard Advertising Network that was announced last week is finally here. Check the blog to read the announcement:

Our much anticipated Ad Network is now online and fully operational! As a blogger, from your dashboard, you can toggle your “advert settings” for control over what ads can even apply to advertise on your blog, and each paid ad that wants to advertise on your blog will show up in a new column on your dashboard labeled “paid ads” just under the normal blog ads. From here, you can reject any paid ad you like, freely and quickly. Revenue generated from these paid ads will go to fund our future operations, feature development, more servers, and all that good stuff, as well as a war chest to cash out all your credits with (or all the credits of those who wish to cash them out!). So please approve paid ads proudly knowing you’re supporting Entrecard and the only true virtual economy in the blogosphere!

And rates are good for advertising at the moment! I’m tempted to run ads just to test the results. Pricing will adjust as time goes forward to reflect market rates. Promotional rates are just for the initial period. But will CTR be worth it? Would it be more cost effective than just buying credits and advertising on the regular network? At least with the regular network, you can get a day long ad! Could it be that the ad network’s greatest competitor will be their own EC system?

For bloggers, there will be the option to trade EC for cash by selling your EC back to EntreCard for cash. That system is still in the works at the moment! No wonder EC outlawed EC farms earlier this year! It would have ruined the whole economy. Of course, for your site, as blogger or advertiser, you still have to decide if the real estate you give to EC is worth the visits/traffic or time on site. My first experience wasn’t so positive for InvestorBlogger but this second effort may be better. Let’s see.

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However, with a few tweaks of your themes, a couple of plugins and a bit of work, you can easily create a site that is functionally bilingual. How? Well, that’s the purpose of this post.

Ingredients:

• A WordPress blog with your own domain, hosting and FTP access;
• A selected theme;
• The theme switcher reloaded plugin;
• And a dash of guts; and
• (if applicable, turn off any caching software).

Stage 1: Setting up the bilingual site theme

Step 1: Install the plugin as usual. Activate it, too.

Step 2: Set the theme you want to use as your default. Then copy the entire contents into a new folder renamed as your ‘language 2′ – L2 – folder. (in my case this was ‘English’. To reset the name, go to the CSS file of the theme and edit the text in the first two lines: Theme Name: L2.

Step 3: Activate your theme to the new language L2.

Repeat the steps 2 and 3 for your primary language or L1.

Go back to your Appearance >> Themes window inside WordPress. Check that you have two themes: one is clearly named L1 and the other L2.

Step 4: Then create the code or widget you need in the appearance >> widgets box. I ended up just writing the code by hand and pasting the resulting code into a text widget box. Ugly, but functional.

The code looked like this but it was hidden in regular HTML.

Sample
<a href=”http://domain.com/index.php?wptheme=L1″>L1</a>

and similarly for L2. Once this is put in the sidebar, you’re at the end of stage 1. You can now switch between two identical themes that are differentiated only by their name.

Stage 2: Differentiating the themes

Page Structure

Now you need to create some additional structures inside wordpress to hold your pages. I had a number of pages that I wanted to create in two languages. So I created a page structure to make management a little easier, using the ‘page parent’ setting. So the L1 about page was under the L1 page header. L2 about page under L2 and so on. Since each page has a unique number, making the pages appear at the top of the site as many blogs do was simply a matter of calling the page number in the <header> file for each theme.

Thus L1 about page with page number 71 would be called as

<?php wp_list_pages(‘include=pagenumber&sort_column=post_title&title_li=’);?>

You will need to edit this line in your header for both L1 replacing pagenumber with the number you want. You can edit the header in Appearance >> Themes.

Rinse and repeat for each page you want to use in each language.

Sidebar Structure

Set up your Sidebar as you wish, then open the page in your browser, and copy the Sidebar HTML into your notepad.

Clear all the widgets you used. Since you can’t call different widgets in each theme, sidestep the problem. Go to your theme, and edit the ‘sidebar.php’. Replace the content with the code you want to use. Remember to do this with both L1 and L2 theme language, changing the items and translating as you go. Initially, you won’t be able to change the sidebar once you save that… you will have to edit the sidebar.php files by hand.

Theme pages/post pages/etc.

You will need to go through the theme page by page and translate the output comments into your target language. This will take time and you will likely have to check everything several times to make sure things are changed. You will also need to translate the output comments in the header and footer files as well.

It’s possible to go further than this in a number of ways, but once you complete Stage 2: you will have a fully functional bilingual website on the outside, and a mono-lingual site on the admin side. You can’t change the sidebar (yet) with widgets as easily as before. To see what I did on my site, go to NozKidz dot com and click on the English and Chinese buttons at the top. You should see things change smoothly.

Posts aren’t translated yet, either. As there is only one stream of posts so both languages will be presented on each language page. For my site, this may be okay because parents want to see stuff in English written by their kids, they may read them, too. I know there are automated translation tools but I don’t particularly trust them to turn out good quality translations so I’m not implementing them on my site yet. There may be good SEO reasons to do so, but the translations are awkward at best and misleading at worst. I cannot put such translations in front of my group of customers.

Post Structures

I can see a way to create a category for posts in each language, then simply call posts from one category or other depending on the language you want to show. That shouldn’t be difficult. I’m not sure that is something I want to do yet. It would be straightforward to create single languages by editing the PHP in the posts or index.html in each theme. I don’t have the code for doing that. It couldn’t be hard, could it?

Have you tried this? For me, though it took more work than creating another blog, I didn’t want to use WordPressMU to do this or install another blog, because it was just adding an extra layer of complexity. Both of these solutions would have worked nicely, but this way I can have my cake and eat it. I get differentiated blogs with one stream of posts.

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I have separated the pages into Chinese and English groups, but the bloggings themselves are still the same. However, the changes should help both audiences feel a little more comfortable with the format. The English side located at http://www.nozkidz.com/en/. We’ll be able to drive a lot more traffic that way! Be prepared if you do check it out: use Firefox (for easy language switching) or install East Asian languages in your PC (it’s on your XP disk – you do still have that, right?).

I wonder if you can figure out how I did it! Clue: Theme Switcher and Sidebar editing!… Do you want to know how? The posts are still mixed so you will encounter Chinese in the blog. But that’s not a problem is it?

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If you already have a blog or site that you are working with that is live, you can create a full version on Wos. It’s a little fussy but you can do the following things…

For parts 1-5, see WosServer: A Useful Tool in your Armoury.

• Step 6: Download a copy of the database from your website (via the PHPMYSQL interface or wizard).
• Step 7: Get and install the WP PHP Admin plugin. Activate it as usual. Head over to the new tab.
• Step 8: Activate the plugin. Then carry out an import operation to import your downloaded file into the WosServer MYSQL database.

Image shows: plugin activated and accessing my database.

• Step 9: (optional) If you encounter a problem with the size of your file, you will need to go into the PHP files in Wos Server, and edit the php.ini file to increase the permitted size from 2M to something more reasonable if you have a BIG blog, like mine.
• Step 10: Download the complete wp-content/ folder with ALL the pictures, too.
• Step 11: Move the wp-content/ folder to its rightful location, images, plugins, themes, etc.
• Step 12: You will also need to change the database name in wp-config.php to your imported database name.
• Step 13: You will need to edit the ‘options table’ in your database from http://www.yourblog.com to http://127.0.0.0/wordpress twice or you won’t be able to access your blog. It will keep taking you to the live site. You will see the first of the two entries in the wp-options table in the first row named ‘siteurl’, the second entry is on page 4 of the list, entitled ‘home’. Change both of these to your new URL. It’s difficult to change them within WordPress like this, because you will end up on your live blog.

Oh, and when you login for the first, do remember to use your original blog password, not admin/password for the WosServer. Oh, and there’s no email reminder! So don’t forget! The good news is that the plugins/wordpress core updates all seem to work fine as they do in version 2.7. Good luck.

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Look closely at the browser bar. This is InvestorBlogger on my stick! I’ve managed to import all the posts, plugins and themes. Now I can carry my blog, and work anywhere my computer and cruzer can take me!

Wos server is an installable application that you can put on your stick or anywhere. It includes a full version of apache for serving pages, PHP for parsing code, and MYSQL for your database. You can download and configure your own version of the server yourself at the website. There are a wide variety of apps that you can install, of course, bloggers can choose WordPress! But here’s a selection of other packages you could try!

1. DBHcms
2. Drupal
3. Joomla
4. MediaWiki
5. Moodle
6. OpenDB
7. Textpattern
8. WordPress

You can visit their site, or download my own customized version with themes, and plugins to get you started. The WordPress user is admin and the password is password.

Additional steps to setting up your blog on a stick or desktop.

• Step 0: Copy your files/themes/plugins to your desktop and anything else you want to use in your install in the wp-content folder at your site…
• Step 1: Download the file and unzip it on your desktop.
• Step 2: Open the folder and find the file mowes.exe. Hit that and open it. Wait a few seconds.
• Step 3: Your browser window will open. Look for the entry ‘wordpress’ and click on that link. (or type http://127.0.0.0/wordpress/ or http://localhost/wordpress/)
• Step 4: You will see a mini-version of a blog… with themes and plugins.
• Step 5: Customize your blog by copying the files/themes/plugins you use from your site to the same location in the wosserver (ie. wos server/www/wordpress directory).

Login details are on the folder in step 2. This is not a real blog, just a mini-blog. You can play with it all you want. Break it, too. Your real blog will be safe and carry on regardless. Some plugins may not work because they require additional features, or are not necessary at all (spam plugins, for example). If you want to import your database, you could do that, too. But you will need a plugin that allows you to import your db into the wosserver: wp-phpadmin plugin might work.

Have fun blogging, but don’t worry about borking your blog!

Update: I’ve had a weird issue with this software. If you download and expand the files to your desktop area, and run from there. It seems to work. Otherwise it won’t run properly if you put the files elsewhere. Apache seems to be  hurdle but I’m not sure about this. This is a pity: if you are like me, and you use your stick on a number of machines, the server may not run properly. Another possible workaround would be to set the drive for your USB stick to the same drive on all your machines. That might work. I’ll let you know.  The obvious solution: download the entire original file from the kind people at Wos.

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• 1. Introduction to blogging.
• 2. Quick introduction to WordPress (only got to lesson 7).
• 3. Posting reviews for all the companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Averages.
• 4. A daily posting schedule.
• 5. Monthly Income Reports.
• 6. More disclosure on personal finances.
• 7. New blogs, subsequently closed and remerged.
• 8. Can you spot any more?…

When you blog, there are so many things that can catch your eye if you are as unfocused as I was that it’s easy to be sidetracked. And I am. Easily sidetracked. Really.

I guess I will have to work harder and smarter on posting to my blog. I could blame my tools, the awkwardness of scheduling posts and whatnot, but truthfully, it’s all my fault. All mine.

So, if you like reading InvestorBlogger, I do hope you’ll overlook the incomplete nature of posting in this medium… Now if I could find a tool to help me upload, schedule and routinely manage posts by the bunch rather than one by one! Perhaps I could improve on that, but don’t hold your breath!

How do you manage your posting schedule? Do you schedule posts months in advance? Or do you fly be the seat of your pants?

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Over the past two years, I blogged on a huge variety of opportunities for PayPerPost (and much less so, SocialSpark). At one point, I even experimented with being an Advertiser and created several opps for InvestorBlogger Dot Com.

But business for PayPerPost has been up and down for me for the past twelve months. Some months I had a good run at the opps, but in the past six months, I have only taken a few opps. Mostly because I have been segmented out of these opps by virtue of being in Asia.

Then in September, I returned to the UK where I updated my address for comparison. I was shocked at all the new opps that were available to me just because I was now in “Europe”. So after returning to Taiwan, I had to consider what my course of action was to be.

At that point, PayPerPost suddenly dropped all the floors on opportunity pricing from $5.00 to 50c or less. While there were a lot of opps now in the system, in what was disingenuously called ‘an experiment’, most were for very little money at all. At that point, I called it quits. I wrote and requested to be removed from Payperpost and SocialSpark.

This post outlines my initial response, Izea’s reply, and my response to them (since I couldn’t login to post the comment to the author of the reply). I’m now posting it here instead.

Post 1: Quitting

Please remove my account. I’m done with SocialSpark and Izea in general. Sorry. I don’t do blog posts for 25c and links for 50c. I would rather find other ways to monetize my blog.

Post 2: Idea’s Reply

Jamie Kite, Official Rep, replied 2 hours ago

Hi Kenneth,

I am sorry to hear that you are leaving the IZEA network. Before you go, there are a few things I wanted to clarify for you. First, the minimum offer amount for a Sponsored Post in SocialSpark is $5.00. You may have noticed other Opportunities out there that pay less, specifically Affiliate programs, blog Sponsorships and CPC Opportunities. None of these Opportunity types requires you to write a post.

Affiliate Opportunities pay per conversion, so you can earn the offer amount over and over again, as many times as a visitor to your site completes the advertiser’s requirements (this may be filling out a form, purchasing a product, or signing up for a service). The offer amounts on these vary from a little less than a Sponsored Post to many times the average offer amount for a Post, depending on the requirements for conversion. Payment for Affiliate Opportunities happens 30 days after a conversion occurs.

CPC Opportunities provide an even greater opportunity for monetization. You get paid each time a visitor, follower, or friend clicks a link to an advertiser’s site. If you’re on Twitter or Facebook this can be especially lucrative if you have many friends or followers. As always, we require disclosure on these paid links. And what’s better, you get paid within a few days (or less) after each click.

blog Sponsorships may also have an offer amount that is less than a typical Sponsored Post, but they are payed per day. So if you take a $1.00 sponsored post for 30 days, you end up with a much bigger payout in the end. All you have to do is make sure you have ITK on your blog(s).

We’re sorry to see you go, but I did want to reach out and clarify the difference between the Opportunity types in SocialSpark so that your expectation wasn’t that you would get anything less than $5.00 for a Sponsored Post. If the other Opportunity types with lower offer amounts aren’t your thing, that’s okay…

Post 3: My response to Izea (since I couldn’t post it on their network)

Thanks for contacting me.

I saw the new opportunities on SS, but it’s been such a while that I found anything I could do. Despite having two fairly popular blogs with largely N.American traffic, I repeatedly found myself with the bottom of the barrel opps in both SS and PPP.

Even having a PR3 didn’t make things much better. Being based in Asia, I find that there is almost nothing I can do on PPP/SS these days. So, until things look up for me on Izea, I see little or no point in having the code on my blogs… It’s sad, but there it is. The system that Ted created for bloggers ends up excluding bloggers whose blogs are fairly decent. But then Izea spends undue effort removing all the splogs that can legitimately get into PPP/SS and legitimately take those opps.

I”m afraid I have much more success blogging for another company than Izea now. Each time I login to SS/PPP just reminded me of how I was segmented out of the running for 99% of the opps available. Even when opps are available in SS, I’m unable to take any of them for similar reasons: I’m based in Asia.

So for a trial I switched my PPP account to ‘uk’ region, my home and I was shocked at how different things were. I couldn’t legitimately take any of the opps because of the zoning issue. So I didn’t. That’s when I stopped blogging for Izea.

If you could understand my frustration, I have two good blogs (one pr3, one formerly pr2), both Alexa 1million and under, with over 5000 page views a month between them, and majority N. American traffic, and there is so little I can do, it’s not even worth the time logging in. Eventually, enough is enough.

Wishing you all well,
Kenneth

So that’s it. I already removed all the PPP/SS codes from all of my blogs, converted the links, and removed all traces of Payperpost except the archives. If you’re based in North America, then this may be a valuable way to make some money. You’ll certainly learn a lot. I did. I’m extremely grateful for the experience of blogging for Izea. But all good things must end, and indeed they have. It’s time to move on and find new ways to blog, new readers to read my blogs, new topics to write about, and new methods to monetize. Good luck, Ted and all at Izea. I’ll check back from time to time.

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Are you considering having a blog to complement your existing website? Do you need help to get started with the whole blogging thing? If so, then this paper outlines the basic idea in section 1; the steps to implementing the program in section 2; and Developing your Properties in section 3.

1. A blog: A natural traffic magnet

I think the best way to attract traffic to your website would be to use a blog as a blog has a natural advantage over a static site. In fact, a blog can attract traffic with quality posting as long as you have something to say of interest to people. Additionally, having a blog allows you to build traffic through RSS Feeds, comments, trackbacks and a whole host of online aggregators and web 2.0 media.

This would be the fastest approach to gaining traffic, though when I say fast it would be some months to build up a following. The blog would need an identifiable persona that can play off the notion of credit cards and build some fun into the whole process of searching, applying for and using credit cards. It is also a way to bring people BACK to the website… otherwise you may see traffic apply for cards and NEVER come back because they can’t find or don’t remember the website.

2. Steps to Implementation

1. First, Setting Up A blog. Establish a blog (WordPress 2.7) with a bunch of themes, and a selection of plugins in a subdirectory of your main website. Set up a blog as integral part of your site, linked from an obvious place in the top of the bar and in a very similar ‘theme’ to the website. The blog of course would have links to the rest of the site as well.
2. Second, Metrics. Establish some metrics as a base from which to start. The metrics would help establish tracking and even help target customers to the offers in the other part of the site.
3. Third, Regular Posting. Start a regular posting schedule. With some initial content, say 20 posts that are quality and not too long, begin the next step. Do make sure your content is unique, well written. It doesn’t have to be long, but it has to be pertinent.
4. Fourth, Publicity. Have the blog join all sorts of Web2.0 communities to gain friends/traffic, such as Technorati, and several other blog services. This would certainly help but it would require some weeks or even months of work. There are a number of other tips and tricks that can help to establish a blog that can drive traffic to your website.
5. Fifth, Capitalize on the Traffic. This is where your efforts on the website would pay off by capitalizing on the resultant traffic. Slowly add advertising in whatever form you think is appropriate for your audience. Don’t go overboard.

3. Developing your Property

There are tons of new ways of getting traffic these days: Twitter, Flickr, Squidoo, Hubpages, Technorati,… while it’s not important to stay on top of them all. There are just too many to start with. You may want to pick a few of the services, and learn how to use them. Each one you learn paves the way for a future project, traffic or opportunities.

Much is made of Web 2.0, and much is hot air. But you may find that there are valuable tie-ins to your proposed blog from communities of like-minded people. Then you’ll find that Web 2.0 really works.

Conclusion

Obviously you have to decide if this is a route you want to take, whether it is worth spending so much money on your website, and what metrics you will need to use to evaluate success or failure. I do believe that adding a blog can really add a whole new dynamic to your existing site. But it isn’t an instant success. It needs application, focus, and time.

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“It’s funny, the more blogs I read, the more I discover how other people DEEPLY want to tell me how to write my blog:…

It’s not something unique to PPP, BTW. It seems every where from ProBlogger onwards.

And the odd thing is: the more that the language is couched as imperatives and obligatory language, the less I could care.

Why should all my titles start with “5 Things you wish you knew before you got out of bed” crappy titles… Really, is this Cosmopolitan magazine or what? I know BTW, I like Cosmo. But it seems that the whole of the US publishing industry is writing magazine stories drawing on the same textbooks the editors studied in college.

I used to subscribe to a computer magazine for YEARS until I wrote to them protesting at the increasingly Inanity of their story titles, and topics. I was a loyal reader. The terrible thing is: it’s gotten worse, not better since then.

So I switched to a real magazine for PC stuff from the UK, and took a real breather… but in many ways: CNN’s journalism standard has fallen into line with the same ideas as COSMO, and it’s sorely depressing.

So you’ll rarely find titles on my blog that start with numbers, … and I’m sure I break quite a few blog POLICE rules, but it’s my blog after all.”

What do you think? Do readers all follow the same mindset or is this what we’ve all been brainwashed to accept as REAL blogging?

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Time: Not enough?

I just don’t have enough time to develop content for all of the blogs that that would have entailed. I already have two pretty active blogs (this one and Obblogatory) but adding four or five more would have been just too much work. In fact, I currently have under my own registration approximately 20 domains. To develop more than one or two would have been quite difficult.

Focus? Focus?

With regular content needed for the other blogs, writing would have been a full-time occupation. I do enjoy the creative process very much, but the time developing such content and marketing these blogs just would have been too much.

Monetizing?

Is it possible to monetize so many domains? Well, it surely is. In fact, I have money dribbling in from three domains now that are my own. The possibility of expanding this by adding domains was an attractive one. But each of the domains requires quite some work to get things done.

Do Blogs Convert Visitors?

The last issue is perhaps the most important one: do blogs convert visitors? My experience has been that a typical blog (like this one) really draws a large and non-specific audience to its site. That is part of the attraction for me to write and manage this site. But these visitors do NOT convert very well. Adsense CTR rates, private ad sales, affiliate products, etc.. all seem to be much lower than more targeted sites have.

Too little knowledge?

With all that I learned from blogging over these past few years, I’ve become aware that my online IM skills are woefully short. I need to invest time and energy in learning how to research and build a crafted site. To that end, I’m now considering joining a program to help me learn these skills.

Server Capabilities

I’ve been using several hosting companies for my sites: and I’ve had a number of ongoing problems with each of them over the last few months. The worst has been that many of my smaller sites have been on one company. So when that had problems, life became very difficult. These issues are far from resolved at the moment. But they did soak up a lot of hours that could have otherwise been spent.

Life changes

We’ve been running our own business for four years or more with some success, but each minute I work on these blogs is a minute less to work on that business. And vice versa. My wife and I have talked about making changes to our lives, but we’ve yet to really bite that bullet. It seems as if we’re stuck where we are right now.

I’ve already outlined a plan where we could make quite a bit of money with a lot less work, but at the moment implementing that plan is just a bridge too far. It seems we’d have to make changes in our lives that might make the other half a little uncomfortable. So we’re just not ready.

I like what I’m doing with InvestorBlogger Dot Com very much. I like the fact that I don’t have to have the discipline to stay within one topic area; but that makes it difficult to achieve other goals such as increasing online income successfully. Perhaps it’s time to change.

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If you want to add some IP addresses, do let me know by adding them to this form, it’s pretty easy. Just use the form below to add the IP Addresses you want me to include on my list.

Include only IP addresses that spam your blog more than once. And remember I can’t include EVERY spam IP address. But banning 80% of the spam before it hits the blog will make your life MUCH easier. I promise I won’t spam your email address, just to keep you update with the latest list, that’s it! To use the list of IP addresses, just download Lester Chan’s wonderful WP-Ban plugin, and paste the entire list into the Banned IPs area. Then hit ‘submit’. You should see far fewer comments than before.

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Overall, I’ve been very impressed with WordPress 2.7, in the few days that I have used it, and I’m a little frustrated that some of the hosting companies I work with haven’t updated the software on CPanel yet. Of course, Dreamhost jumped in pretty early, and that’s why I was happy to try it out. I’d say that there are five basic reasons I like this version of WordPress more than any previous release.

1. A Simplified Dashboard: You can eliminate clutter!

The dashboard has long been a bone of contention for me, because of the tendency of WordPress to want to flaunt its gimmicks, updates and features to all and sundry. In this version, though, users get to turn off the feeds, through the screen options at the top right. Simply uncheck the things you don’t want. Voila!

Additional features that are helpful are the little downward arrow that occurs at the top of most boxes, in the top right corner of each box. Simply clicking on that arrow or area closes or opens the dialog box in an obvious fashion. You’ll see the downward pointing arrow next to tools (see highlighted area). It works simply in a toggle fashion. These toggle switches are all over the admin area. To find them, just hover over the task bar for each item on the right hand sided.

The dashboard area is divided into three areas: the sidebar on the left where each of the menu items can be opened and closed; the central column which includes the stats box, the writing box; and the right column that pretty much includes everything else. As you can see from mine, it’s easy enough to pick things up and move them around a lot. Clicking on the words “screen options” highlights an area where you can turn off things you don’t want to see.

The right sidebar includes several new designations which may be confusing to new users. First the ‘pages’ button has moved to just below ‘links’. It used to be located right next to ‘posts’. This confuses me now. I often hover between writing posts and pages, and now I have to look further afield to find the pages button. It seems illogical to place it after ‘links’.

The old ‘design’ menu has been renamed ‘appearance’ on 2.7 but functions in pretty much the same way as the its predecessor. The Tools menu, however, is a new one and features several items that were moved from the former ‘Manage’ menu, including import/export functions. The Upgrade items, though, hint at some of the new features of WordPress that make management much easier (more later).

2. Keeping Upgraded – it’s getting easier!

Plugins are getting easier to manage: You will soon no longer need to use FTP to upload stuff – plugins and core upgrades can all be done within WordPress itself. This leaves ‘themes’ as the only item that now needs FTP. I imagine that future versions of this will remedy this. Other software, such as Joomla or SMF, have long had this ability. Right now, you can upgrade a plugin in much the same way as uploading other items. Find the item ‘plugins’ on the left hand menu. Click it, and you will see it open slowly to reveal four options. To add a new plugin, click on the words ‘add new’, and you will be taken to a page where you can upload a zip file of the plugin which is uploaded and installed. After it’s done, you can activate it straight away. A nice touch. Just hit ‘install now’ to upload the plugin!

It’s also much easier now to find new plugins. Take a look at the next screenshot: you will see what I mean! The tags below the upload button hint at the next page. These plugins are from WordPress.org’s own plugin area, and clicking on the tags reveals that they can all be downloaded and installed quickly and without any fuss.

In fact, activating and inactivating plugins has also got easier as has removing unwanted plugins. Simply just click on the plugins area on the sidebar, usually under ‘plugins’ >>> ‘installed’ menu option. You’ll find it easy to manage plugins from there, including removing them completely!

But this plugin management hints at another feature (one that I have not needed to try yet)… upgrading WordPress can now be done entirely from WITHIN the admin panel. Take a look for yourself! Under Tools >>> Upgrade, you’ll see the following dialogue.

Very tempting when you can choose to download and reinstall automatically. I have no idea how this works, yet. But it would be a neat variation IF you could upgrade from WITHIN the admin area. Perhaps this is just teasing us.

3. Commenting from WITHIN WordPress

Admins often had to comment in a very odd fashion before: read the comment in the comments area; find the post in the archive, read the post, and then comment in the comment box AFTER the end of the article. Now it’s much easier:

Just hit ‘reply’ to answer the query and a simple but functional comment box will appear just below, enabling you to answer without messing around in the archives! Of course, this presumes that you remember what you wrote!

4. Quick Posting and Quick Editing

The commenting function also has another feature that hints at much more power: the quick edit button. Clicking on the Quick Edit enables you to edit the comment very quickly, without calling up the entire post or page where it is entered. But the ‘quick’ idea has been extended with in several ways: making a powerful trio of blogging tools.

QuickPress : on the admin page, when you login you’ll be taken to a dialog box that enables you to write a short post, with media and tags and publish it in a matter of minutes! While you don’t have a WYSIWYG editor, you can learn some simple codes to faciliate quick blogging (they’re all available in the Write Post area).

Quick Edit is also enabled in the post and page view, and allows you to quickly update a number of features (the usual suspects that a busy blogger will forget in the heat of the moment!): such as tags, categories, slug, date or more…

This combined with Press Links (shouldn’t it be called ‘Quick’ Links?) means that posting, editing, linking and commenting can all be carried out fairly rapidly.

5. You can now add media without creating post

This is another puzzle from the previous version that was finally finished! For years, I never thought about uploading media to WordPress. I simply created a post and added the stuff I wanted… until last month when I created a batch of videos and wanted to upload them all at once. I would have had to create a post and add each one one by tedious one! Now it seems, I can simply upload media as I need and when I’m ready I can create a post and find the media I already uploaded! It’s funny, but that’s something you don’t need, until you really need it! And now it’s here!

Now it would be nice if I could upload a number of files at one go! Oh, wait! It does! Or at least I think it does! I’m practising uploading media now! Now I wonder how I can create a simple gallery from these files! …

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Who are the candidates? Well, step up.

1. Payperpost
2. ReviewME
3. Blogitive
4. Blogsvertise
5. SocialSpark
6. Linkworth
7. PayU2Blog
8. Smorty
9. SponsoredReviews
10. LoudLaunch

So which of these really pay? Let’s find out. I should mention that I’ve done paid posting on this and several other blogs for some time with all of the companies listed above. In today’s post, I’ll look at PayPerPost and ReviewME. Over the coming months, I’ll look the others as well, so stay tuned. Do also be aware: doing paid blogging runs the risk of losing any PR ranking you may have obtained, especially if you are using bare links without the no-follow tag. Google has seriously frowned on this activity and taken steps to limit its effect.

Payperpost

I’m not sure if Payperpost is the grand-daddy of all the blogging companies out there, but it sure is one of the oldest, and in fact, I was one of the earliest to sign up in August 2006 and completed my first ‘opp’ in Sept. 2006, just as the company was starting out. So how have I fared? Well, since then I’ve earned approximately $1900, most of which has been paid out already. Some bloggers have earned 10x that amount. So it is possible to make quite a lot of money.

Requirements and Potential

The requirements for having a blog included in PayPerPost are relatively simple: The blog must be 90 days old with over 20 entries MINIMUM. The blog must also be kept current with 20 posts in ANY 90-day period. The primary means for earning money is through the MarketPlace and opportunities are generally available there depending on your blog’s PR rank, Traffic, blogger’s Country, your selected categories for your blog. Once you login, you will see the offers listed as well as those applicable to you. It is possible to earn upto $50 per opp, but at the start your more likely to be in the $5~15 range. My own long term average is a shade under $10.

Required Metrics

Metrics used for measuring the success of your blog include: Page Rank, Alexa Ranking and Izea’s own Real Rank. You can receive a vote on your post’s quality called ‘tack’ which is out of five as well. There are additional quality features, but these are the ones you can control more directly.

Other Opportunities

There are additional opportunities for earning cash: through Direct offers placed by Advertisers for you, through Referrals, and any follow up work an advertiser may require. However, this is all the exception. I have never been paid a dime for either of these, and doubt that it is possible to make much money on Direct Offers or Referrals with PayPerPost. With the direct offers, you can choose your pricing.

Drawbacks

Overall, the system is a good system: is fairly well-policed and strict but not overly so. Additionally, there are feedback systems, and help available. You are required to have a viable blog with a regular posting habit. The downside is that offers can be low-ball, though you are not required to take any offers that you don’t want. The other issue is with disclosure (or informing your readers that you are paid): many advertisers do not like in-post disclosure (which I think is somewhat dishonest), though blog disclosure is mandatory. Other advertisers won’t accept non-full domain blogs or free blogs – when I advertised, I did not accept them either. Currently, with PayPerPost, no-follow is not mandatory, though it is supported if an advertiser requires it.

Overall, I’d recommend PayPerPost for those with a general blog or those in a popular niche (such as mommy blogging or tech) you’ll find the posts and rewards encouraging. However, many blogs that have relationships with PayPerPost have found their Page Rank completely dissed.

ReviewME

The first company that I actually heard of was ReviewME. I have only ever been able to complete three posts for ReviewME, and only earned a grand total of $45.00. In fact, one of my submissions was late, so to compensate the advertiser, I finished the review and submitted anyway. I felt that that was the only responsible course of action for that review. Otherwise, though, ReviewME has been a dead loss for me. Other bloggers have found ReviewME to a very viable source of income, so it depends on what your blog is, your metrics, and your own skills in marketing it.

Requirements and Potential

While the requirements are expected, they are not clearly stated on any page that I could find.ReviewME notes only that “… a blog must meet a minimum number of citations, subscribers, and traffic.” Unlike PayPerPost, the bloggers create the marketplace, and advertisers pick and choose which blogs they want to call up for a review. You are not required to provide a positive review, though you can set your own pricing in the system.

Required Metrics

ReviewME uses three primary metrics in assessing the value of a blog (and whether it’s included or not): Alexa Rankings, Feed subscribers, and Technorati rankings. In fact, it’s one of the few paid blogging companies that still uses Technorati at all. As such, it calculates the price of a review on your site and makes a recommendation. You can choose to accept this or not. I think mine is currently ranked at $60.00 of which the blogger (me!) would receive 50%.

Other Opportunities

You can also opt in to their avertorials and you can take part in their ClearingHouse. Advertorials are sponsored posts that are provided by the advertiser for placement. The ClearingHouse is lower priced opps that are available under ‘Campaigns’. I have never taken part in either. In fact, the ClearingHouse produces very low ball offers that I would not take under any circumstances.

Drawbacks

In fact, the last two or three reviews for me have been for Casinos. I don’t always accept such reviews as it’s usually outside my range of interests for one of my blogs. I also used to display a widget for them on my site, but since I was getting few reviews, it was a waste of space. There is no referral system in place, either. They can pay via Check or Pioneer but when you don’t make any money, that’s a moot point, really.

Overall, once your review is published (and review of your post is light handed compared to PayPerPost), you will receive payment in the next payment round. It has been an effective way for popular bloggers to make money but for bloggers starting out, it is very difficult to get any reviews that are worth doing.

Payperpost 2 vs. Review ME 0

I’d recommend doing PayPerPost at the beginning because you can get a range of work, you will get valuable exposure to blogging, blogs and bloggers through their community, and you will possibly earn some money. If you choose ReviewME, don’t hold your breathe.

When you finish reading this article, you may also wish to check out these posts I wrote earlier.

• PR vs PPP: Just who is winning?
• Payperpost: a good way to make some dosh for bloggers
• Five Values for Blogging: Learning, Voice, Authority, etc.

What is your experience with PayPerPost or ReviewME? Have you had any success? Did you feel that either of these was a waste of time or a valuable opportunity?

First published on EeeBlogger.

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So how do you deal with a huge queue of spam like that? I spent ages clicking page after page when I realized that I was doing it the stupid way.

Stage 1: Filter the spam properly

• Step 1: Install Akismet in your plugins. You can either download it from the website or search within your plugins “Add New” option and add it or upload it.
• Step 2: Get a WordPress.com API Key from here.
• Step 3: Activate Akismet, then go to the Akismet Configuration Page under Plugins submenu. In the space, enter your API Key and check automatically discard.

Stage 2: Check for spam in the Pending Queue

Step 4: Once Akismet is activated, head to the comments page, where you will see a button clearly marked “Check for Spam”. Hit it. If the Spam queue is long, it may take a while to get through the queue or your server may time out. Just refresh the comments page. If necessary repeat.

Step 5: Get the plugin called Clear Spam in which “…adds an option to clear spam messages from the WordPress database” under the Comments section right next to the “Check for Spam” button. On my server it caused a couple of Server 500 errors but it did work after a refresh.

But after cleaning the spam out, all gone!

Stage 3: Prevention is better than cure

Stage 6: Akismet works very well on filtering comments out so that your queue is empty, but it does very little to prevent spam. And it does remove spam after 30 days or so automatically, so you really shouldn’t see any. But…

Stage 7: Install Lester Chan’s wonderful plugin called IP Ban which in his words helps you to “Ban users by IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referer url from visiting your WordPress’s blog. It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name, user agent or referer url tries to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned.” One word of warning: do not enter your own IP Address in the Banned IP address box. You will have a lot of trouble to restore your own access!

Stage 8: Enter the IP addresses that you are being spammed from. This is the option that I mostly use because I find that these addresses generate the most vicious and most frequent comment spams. You can use my list, but you will also be able to buttress it with your own list of IP addresses, too.

194.8.75.*
194.165.42.*
87.118.118.133
91.121.21.190
64.87.9.82

Drop me a note with some other common IPs so I can ban them, too!

Or you can simply add them via this form!

Note the use of wildcards (in this case, an asterisk) to deter users from any of these IP addresses. Be careful: you may ban too many users if you use too many asterisks! If you don’t know what you are doing, just stick with Akismet until you understand more about the Internet!

The proof is in the pudding.

In the time that it has taken me to write this posting for EeeBlogger, you will see that IP Ban has already prevented at least four comment spams. Yes, it tracks stats, too! Take a look.

A final note: You may feel tempted, esp. to read through the comments to make sure there aren’t real comments being misidentified. Do not be tempted to click on any of the links in the spam to find out what it takes you to. I had a harrowing experience a few months ago when I did that out of curiosity. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Seriously. Don’t even think about. If you do, you will be taken through numerous redirects, stuff will be loaded on your PC, your anti-virus will be disabled, and your PC will be compromised. So don’t.

What’s your experience with Spam? What plugins do you use? Drop me a line…

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