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.

Visit InvestorBlogger Dot Com to find out what’s happening! If you’re interested in personal finance, blogging and tech stuff, check out InvestorBlogger Dot Com NOW! You can also subscribe to our feeds via email.

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.

Ads by our sponsors.

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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So, if you are going to manage any more than a couple of sites, split your eggs between baskets to ensure that WHEN one of your sites/accounts goes down, you can still be productive on the OTHER sites until service returns. This is what I’m doing at the moment to keep sites up and running.

Keep your domains and hosting SEPARATE

Domains are registered at NameCheap. If one host turns out to be really hopeless, as long as I can retrieve the most recent data, I can be up and running on another host within 24-48 hours as long as it takes the DNS to resolve properly. Recently, it’s been within 12 hours for some changes.

Separate Crucial Sites

Customer sites are generally hosted on their own accounts, separate from my blogs, and separate from each other. With domains registered elsewhere, it makes switching sites a breeze. Also, it largely protects sites from mistakes made by their owners having an effect on other unrelated sites.

Keep redundant back ups

My own blogs are generally hosted on one personal server, but the biggest have their own space on another server as well. Smaller blogs, though, share my VPS solution. Unfortunately, this means if my server goes down, most of my blogs are inaccessible. Since most repairs are quick, and data is generally unavailable during outages, moving the domains at that time is impossible.

However, if you have a daily backup of your blog, including the database and the files, you should be able to get up and running quickly on another hosting company. I don’t have a copy of the latter stuff. More fool me.

Redundancy: An Expensive Option

For my most important blogs, I’m looking at creating some form of redundancy so that I can switch and keep things up. But for most small blogs, this is quite expensive to achieve. It’s called Failover Web Hosting where your site is accessible from a number of IPs should the original site fail. This would work well with HTML based sites, but dynamic sites which lots of commenting and posting would have issues with keeping the data synchronized properly.

I’ve been using BlueHost, BlueFur, Hostmonster and Dreamhost for hosting these past few years. Though each has had intermittent problems through that time, I found Dreamhost has been the most reliable in the past six months, while BlueFur turned into a bit of a disaster as we kept getting locked out of our account/Cpanel/Website. It got so ridiculous that we stopped using their service. I can’t particularly recommend BlueFur but you may get different mileage. Still, let me know how you plan to keep your sites running in an emergency.

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I recently received an email from Ted at Payperpost who writes:

As you know we recently made some changes to the PayPerPost platform. While the feedback regarding our interface refinement has been great, we have also received some concerns relating to our pricing adjustments.

I am sensitive to your pricing feedback and would like to try a new model for a limited time. My hope is that we will find a balance that works financially for advertisers, bloggers and IZEA. With that in mind, we have made the following changes: – Minimum total cost per post reduced to $1.00 – Minimum word count reduced to 25 words with a link only option This is a limited time promotion that starts today and ends at the end of the month.

I’m not surprised at this announcement. I also wonder how long PPP will run these announcements for because of their recent drastic price increases. It’s likely true that PayPerPost’s cost structure was untenable originally.

However, their timing in increasing pricing was just awful. Increase prices as advertisers and everybody else start trimming budgets and spending. It’s also clear that there are competitors out there that offer more for less in advertising and blogging terms. Perhaps Payperpost is now trying to attract advertisers away from competitors.

But there are just too many problems for me working with Payperpost now, and not much upside at all.

You need to be in North America or even Europe to have a chance of good posts; you need some PR; you need to maintain posting even if you don’t get opps; you have to follow the rules for Opps; you have to follow the requirements; you have to include links, codes, word requirements (200 words are increasingly required), style of opp, you have to have Alexa rankings, PR ranking, RR ranking, your own domain name, your own hosting, a decent tack rating, and you have to reside in certain countries, … all to get a share of $5.00 opps that require 200 words or more for a blog with a PR of three! Wow! And that’s if your blog is still considered ‘acceptable after the audit.

Whither now?

It’s a telling sign of where blogging is headed: prices are going down, Payperpost’s share is going up, traffic from India is up (Alexa cites India as the primary source of traffic for PayPerPost) as bloggers there find they have a competitive advantage. But worse seems to be in store: Compete is showing that time on the site is down considerably since last year, as are monthly visits. This means more competition for fewer opportunities.

Competitors abound?

There are indeed many wannabes in the marketplace, and in fact, I’ve been blogging for several of them over the years, and I much prefer PayU2Blog which pays a standard rate per link only, there’s no censorship of content or links provided you have a minimum number of words; and there’s no hassle getting assignments. You either have them or you don’t. If you don’t have them, check back next week.

Compared to the hassle of PayPerPost, it’s seeming a viable even pleasant alternative to Payperpost without most of the downsides. So I’m still sitting on the sidelines with PayPerPost. SocialSpark has no interest at all for me now, more’s the pity.

Any thoughts about these two blogging companies? Owen’s already posted his thoughts, but I wonder what’s going on… Owen…

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• <a href=”http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>Google</a>
• <a href=”http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&amp;url=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>Yahoo</a>
• <a href=”http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>MSN</a>
• <a href=”http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>AsK</a>
• <a href=”http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>Moreover</a>

Step 1: edit each link code with the url to your site’s sitemap.

Step 2: then copy the code for each line to a new page/post or html document.

Step 3: create the rest of the page.

Step 4: publish it. Each time you need to ping these sites, open this page and click on each link. It only takes a few seconds, and is ideally done as part of a checklist of things to do.

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1. BlogMad
2. BlogSoldiers
3. ClickPirate
4. EntreCard
5. Traffic Swarm
6. AutoHits
7. AussieEarners
8. BlogExplosion
9. BlogAdvance
10. Google Ads

So here’s the truth. This is an non-scientific analysis of how traffic generators actually work, despite whatever statistics they provide in their system. The effective sites were counted as providing more than an average amount of time on the site, over 2 years that was approximately 02:12 minutes.

Of the ten sites that I surveyed, only one merits any real ad spending. And that’s the first one. Please note, though, I don’t use Google AdSense anywhere that it matters, so if you are using any of these sites, you may find that you are violating AdSense TOS.

Better than Average

1. ClickPirate – accounted for only 269 trips to my site but the traffic stayed much longer (11:26 minutes), viewed nearly 3 times as many pages and had a much lower bounce rate. I regularly purchase advertising through ClickPirate, and would recommend it. Grade: A++

Around Average

2. Autohits.dk – only generated 126 actual hits to my site, but the average time on site was a decent 3:38 minutes and a respectable bounce rate. I have purchased advertising on this site several times and been pleased. Grade: A+

3. AussieEarners – only recently added to the stable but in that short month generated about 195 actual hits with a decent 2:01 on the site. Its bounce rate wasn’t that hot, but at least the traffic seems reasonable quality. I haven’t purchased any advertising on this site yet. Grade: A-

Shorter than Average

4. EntreCard – accounted for over 640 visits in two years, but with an average of 43 seconds on the site, it was marginally better than BlogSoldiers. I gave up on EntreCard mostly because it failed to demonstrate any value, and the system kept changing. You might have better luck with them than I did. I stopped when they deleted two of my sites for alleged TOS violations despite the fact that they were quality sites. Pity they couldn’t remove the EC farms and the porn effectively. Worse, it wasn’t worth buying advertising on here because of the gross mismatch between EC prices and actual traffic. Grade: C+

5. BlogSoldiers – generated slightly more interest than BlogMad, but it’s average time on site was 29 seconds! I’m still using this site, as it does generate fairly decent traffic levels. I also purchased advertising for both banners and blogs through their service. I quite like the fact that you can create banners and text links and try them out over extended periods. I have purchased advertising here, and would probably do so again. Grade: B-

6. BlogMad – in two years BlogMad generated 575 visits for my blog, but with an average time on my site of just 7 seconds, it was largely ineffective. Worse, I tried to buy advertising but this company’s got a really ineffective ecommerce system that prevented me from buying any credits at all! Sorry but that is really shooting yourself in the foot, is it not? Grade: C-

Largely Useless

7. BlogAdvance – was a very dark horse in the race, and in only one respect did it manage a less worse than average result: time on site – 1:19 minutes. The site is currently non-functional, and fails to accept my sites. I couldn’t figure out why, and generally reckon that this site is now over. Grade: F

8. BlogExplosion – Really only created an average time of 4 seconds on site, and a little more than 1 page! With a high bounce rate, it’s not worth it. Worse, I had a problem on my account and it was never fixed. Grade: F

9. TrafficSwarm – generated no hits to my site at all. Complete waste of time.Oddly, though, my Google ads only attracted 51 viewers to my and they only stayed 19 seconds! 19! Wow! Grade: F

Unknown Potential

10. AdWords – But the biggest surprise was for me, AdWords. AdWords produced really poor quality traffic overall with 51 visitors and a time on site of just 19 seconds. Most likely this reflects the complexity of the AdWords system. I’m still not convinced AdWords is an appropriate tool for InvestorBlogger at this time. Grade: Unknown.

These stats are from over 57000 page views taken over 2 years. Not all sites were tested for 2 years. Nor were all sites tested continuously. But this reflects my own personal experience with these ten sites. Your own mileage may vary considerably from these statistics!

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Once you have created your admin user:

• 1). Login and set the password to something you can remember!
• 2). Update any pre-installed plugins that you need, remove any that you don’t.
• 3). Set the title and Tagline in General Settings
• 4). Check your WordPress address is correct
• 5). Update your email address.
• 6). Check the membership of the blog including the New User Role
• 7). Don’t forget to check your timezone!
• 8). Go to the writing tab, and check the size of the post box! I usually set mine to 15 lines.
• 9). For remote publishing, I always check the XML-RPC box.
• 10). Add any Update Services that you want to ping.

On the reading tab in Settings:

• 11). Set your frontpage, to either blog style or have a static page.
• 12). How many posts do you want per page? Five is a reasonable number
• 13). Set your feed to show the ‘x’ most recent posts. I usually set that to 10 if I’m doing full feed or 25 if not.
• 14). Set your feed to show the full text or summary. Most people recommend the full text for feeds.

On Discussion Settings:

• 15). I always set “An administrator must always approve the comment” which is ideal for a new blog, and prevents unnecessary spam.

On the Privacy tab:

• 16). I always set to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” but if you’re for a small or private audience, then check the other option.

On the Permalinks tab:

• 17). Set the options for your permalinks. I usually use the /%postname% tag with something else, for example ../archives/%postname%/

Plugins – There are two plugins that are pretty useful to get at the beginning:

• 18.) Akismet for spam. You’ll need a WordPress.com API key for this.
• 19.) WP-Cache Manager. You’ll need to activate it, enable the manager and set the time (in seconds).

Users Tab – On the Users tab, click to find your admin profile:

• 20.) Set the Nickname to something you like. Hit ’save’.
• 21.) Set your “Display name publicly as” to the Nickname in 20.)
• 22.) Check your basic details, Website, and any Bio. Info.
• 23.) Go to the Design Tab.

If you have a good host, you’ll have a variety of themes pre-installed.

• 23.) Find a good one, activate it.
• 24.) Go to the Widgets and select the ones you need.
• 25.) Go to the Theme Editor…
• 25.) Add your Google Analytics code in the footer!
• 26.) Add any other code that you might need to the footer.

General Tidying Up: Let’s set the links categories

• 27.) You will need to decide what links categories you need.
• 28.) Remove or add any particular links you need in the blogroll.
• 29.) Set your initial categories for posts, too.
• 30.) Remove the Hello World post and default links in the blogroll!

This has been honed over numerous installs of WordPress, but is by no means the only possible set. If there are any errors, please read the comments and submit one!

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If you are deciding to blog, then you need to consider what your priorities are. Having blogged on and off since 2005, I think that they can be boiled down to five points

1. Goals – These are often the most obvious, and they are often met with blank stares: I just want to have a blog. But what is your blog for? Who do you expect to read your blog? What do you expect to put there? There are a million answers available for each question. If you’re not sure, perhaps look around and make a list of things you think are important.

2. Expandability – Often when you start with a blog, you’ll find that you may want to have two or three blogs or that your blog takes off in a totally unexpected direction. With many hosting plans, you can be sure that you can have the additional resources for expanding your online presence without adding much cost.

3. Platform – Choose a broadly supported package or platform to support your blog! When you face problems, you will find it easy to get support, both free and paid-for support. Choosing one of the lesser known platforms will make things a lot harder when you have issues or bugs. Also, choosing a broader platform will mean more choice over plugins, themes, and additional services.

4. Pricing – If you are starting out blogging, affordability can often be a problem. Decide what your budget is for hosting. Don’t expect to make much or any money at the beginning. If you do, you’ll only be disappointed. Really. By choosing a host with room to grow, you’ll also avoid future extra costs should your site become popular.

5. Reliability – I was quite happy with my original host for a long time, but then we started to have lots of issues with their servers. While they were forthright, and I felt comfortable staying with them, not all hosts are able, or willing, to fix the issues as responsibly as mine was.

These concerns will surely be uppermost when you start to seek out your own web hosting however you decide to do it.

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New Features and Bugs

Take a look… I won’t be in the first wave of upgrades at all. I’ll likely hang around for version 2.7.1 before upgrading unless there’s an immediate requirement to upgrade.

I think the interface will be useful and more friendly, but I won’t really know until my customers have tried it out! For more information, check out an extended discussion at WebTools Collection.

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SideBar Changes: Adsense, Stats, and more…

I’m planning to remove the Adsense from all of my blogs to get impressions back to zero. It’s obvious from the number of clicks, payment rates and so on that my Adsense account has been targeted as ‘underperforming’, or to use Adsense’s euphemism “smart-priced”. I’m not sure what’s covering that phenomenon, but once I reduce my impressions to zero, I can begin giving them a test to see what the source is. Right now, my publisher code is spread across numerous sites.

Financial stats are outdated by more than a month. In fact, in September I easily broke through US$12K earned since I started blogging online! I have now averaged a little under US$500 per month, and recent months have edged towards US$600 in all, though the past two months or so have been weak. But I’m not keeping up with the ads, so I need to find some way to tame the information.

Trimming one sidebar, and standardizing the content much more would also help, as each sidebar appears different. This also makes trouble when widgets need to be pulled. I typically add as much to one widget to cut processing time, so I have to hack the HTML code in each text widget to make sure things are okay. It’s a bummer if I didn’t tag the code properly! I can’t find it! Right now, I need to move the BlogRush code because the BlogRush Project hung up its shoes (not surprisingly).

In future, I think I’m only going to have one major sidebar on my blog, likely on the right. It will it make finding things much easier! But there are other changes afoot.

InvestorBlogger and DollarTravels

I recently merged all my blogs into one ’superblog’, and created URL redirects. I figured it would be much easier to manage one superblog than numerous mini-blogs and each blog would benefit from the ‘traffic’ juice, thus gaining more exposure. The results have been pretty mixed: traffic is up, but I noticed a couple of things that give pause for thought: the sub-blogs are much stickier than the original blog itself; the original blog is ’somehow’ lost … and some traffic is not clicking through in quite the same way. I also preferred having an automatically updated blog. WordPress MU isn’t much fun. Many plugins just don’t work properly. Some of my favorites cause problems for search engines by not working properly.

It seems that I’ve underestimated the hits on traffic to InvestorBlogger as a result of the Google Spank last year. My blog has failed to gain any appreciable increase in PR since then, and advertising revenue has not increased much since then. Some advertisements are sold, but many are not. This all-in-one strategy hasn’t really worked as it has also undermined mini-blogs by not providing a more focused and more ad-ready audience!

So, it looks like I’ll be reestablishing some of the original domains with the original content sometime soon, as well as adding one or two more. InvestorBlogger will remain but minus some of the financial content. It *could* be that InvestorBlogger in its current form is now reaching the end of its useful life: but then I thought that last year, and, if anything, content and traffic are 100% better. So who knows? It is clear that some refining of InvestorBlogger’s focus is becoming necessary at some point.

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As a blogger, though, there are some problems that I’ve had with the platform, most of which is that I’m not getting enough work from them to be really bothered. Still, I’ve maintained my blog in the system to get access to the stats, keep an eye on SocialSpark and perhaps be able to take part on a better level in the future. So I’m keeping an open mind.

Izea Does Affiliates

Recently, though, Izea expanded the platform even more by adding affiliates . I’m naturally interested in affiliate marketing so I was pleased to see this opportunity in the marketplace. You can take a look for yourself.

There are only limited opportunities right now, but the payouts are quite generous. A smart blogger, for example, could easily attract extra income to the blog by posting certain affiliate type banners and links on their blogs. Of course, one has to ask the question: are blogs could places for making conversions? So far, I’ve not had much success with conversions, so I’m not convinced yet. But that may be due to my own limitations, rather than anything problems inherent in using blogs for affiliate marketing.

There’s a big but. It doesn’t seem to work like traditional affiliate programs. Why? There’s a time limit to the opportunity of one year. This would preclude certain types of sites that would be built to a longer time horizon. A friend of mine has just spent a lot of time and money building a website to market lawncare products and services, it’s taken him months to build his website, do the SEO, and start the marketing via AdWords. If the marketer only had a window of 12 months to pursue an affiliate program, it just wouldn’t make much sense: the first three months would be gone in the build-up period.

Since SocialSpark is simply trying out affiliate programs at the moment, we’ll see if they take a different tack in the future on this issue.

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When traveling in the UK (my home country), I was pleased often to find hotels that offered various forms of broadband or wifi. During my stay, I stayed with friends, small inns, student accommodation, and a formal hotel, and I was quite surprised how many places actually had good broadband. It’s quite a different scenario from just three years ago. But …

BEWARE: high charges and poor connectivity

But I realized that there are still too many places that charge an arm and a leg for wifi service that is at best mediocre, T-Mobile, for one, had spotty coverage and iffy bandwidth. Worse, they promised a full 24 hours but I was unable to login the last sixty minutes or so, purportedly because of IP issues. It’s not a great idea to pay so much money for iffy and intermittent connections.

There are many coffee houses that provide both good coffee and free wifi to attract customers, including the BeanScene in Edinburgh, so it’s wise to check ahead and see if you can find such coffee shops or other free access. Checking accommodation to see if broadband is provided is now a priority on my list of criteria for a decent guest house, so much so that I would prefer a place to stay without a TV, if it had some form of WiFi. But why on earth are ethernet cables so expensive here?

Great Websites: for Travel and Hotels

There are many great websites for booking rooms and flights, both company specific sites (like BMI of http://www.flybmi.com) and vacancy aggregators (such as LateRooms of http://laterooms.com). I appreciated these sites for several reasons: online booking from abroad was possible, credit card payments were accepted, and there was little hassle – bookings were made, checkins were swift and payments were trouble-free. So, as a traveller, I don’t tend to prebook a lot of things as it’s always difficult to accommodate last minute changes into a rigid itinerary, and just sometimes very early or very late bookings can get discount rates that will make your eyes water.

Preparing BeforeHand

While away, my posting schedule was really awful. Some days none, some days just one across the entire InvestorBlogger network. Mmm. I discovered that I was only able to really focus when I had peace and quiet, a good internet connection, and a good cup of tea. But when I was in Scotland, I rarely had all three in one place at the same time. This was despite the best intentions to keep up a regular posting schedule. But it all fell apart, and I was powerless to prevent it, or at least, lacking willpower to insist on personal space. I should have at least prepared some more irregular filler posts or published some feature articlels that are half-written or mostly edited. But alas! I didn’t.

Travel Equipment: Tools on the Go

Since buying my AspireOne, I have found it to be a wonderful tool, fully capable of supporting quality blogging on my blog. I’ve installed nearly all my standard ‘blogging’ applications without a hitch, and found that with Skype set up, it actually becomes a very powerful, very inexpensive communications tool slashed the exorbitant fees charged by my cellular company. Of course, a USB handset really helps set the mood. Additionally, a decent camera is essential, but photos taken on the SD Card can be rapidly uploaded to the PC, incorporated in a blog, and published within minutes. I know I’ve already done it. When I get back to Taiwan, I will register for a mobile broadband account, and should be able to blog from almost anywhere.

There are three tools that I would consider adding: a GPS tracker for USB or BlueTooth so I can find out where we are whenever we are lost; a decent mouse as the trackpad is frustrating for big fingers like mine; and (maybe) a larger keyboard. Other than that, I can’t see what I’d buy… Though I was envying a solar charger or a handpowered charger (just in case).

Quiet Time: Well, quite…!

But most of all, I’d try to make quiet time, time away from everyone, time away from books/tv/papers, etc.. It’s too easy to be swamped by stuff, and to forget that I have to make that quiet time to sit and think and reflect and write.

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PPP vs. PR – Why PPP won’t drop PR any time soon or ever?

“…I did get my own PR back, though only a 2 compared with the three or four I used to have. I’m not exactly sure why I lost my PR in the first place, I think I had partially destroyed my PR in 2006 when I refounded my blog… My other blog is slowly regaining PR too, so even with PPP posts and not kowtowing to Godgle, it’s possible to have a PR. But certainly doing PPP can and usually does lead to PR0 so it’s no wonder that PPP constantly needs a new influx of PR rated blogs.

The thing is: PPP has been promising since LAST summer (2007) to remove PR from the rankings … I think all PPP’s bloggers know now that that isn’t going to happen any time soon. In fact, it is UNLIKELY it will happen IMHO, despite claims otherwise.

The reality is: PPP provides a lot of income while SS is still starting up. So it’s difficult for PPP to cut out one revenue stream while the other isn’t fully developed yet. PPP is slowly encouraging uptake of RR and alternatives to PR but without removing it from the options in the Advertisers section completely, the advertisers will still likely use it as a means to filter blogs.

If you blog because you like blogging, then do what’s best for your blog… accept or refuse PPP posts/links as you think fit. If you just blog for money, then you can keep feeding the demon by starting new blogs and repeating the process. In either case, don’t hold your breath waiting for PPP to remove PR requirements. They won’t do it to suit you, or me. They’ll do it to suit their own needs.”

Google’s Rank Spank: Part Deux

Well, it seems Google is doing that big dance again with its pagerank. Has it really affected me? In some ways, the answer is a resounding ‘yes/no’. Since November 2007, my blog income has become more stable since then, my traffic is up leaps and bounds, and my blog is improving in many ways! While income from companies like Payperpost is definitely on the wane, other sources are picking up to replace them. Hence, this justifies my belief: diversifying your income sources is VERY important both online and offline.

Have I given into Google’s demands on ‘nofollow’ links? Well, truthfully, I’ve been tempted to do so, but only mildly so. I’m too busy running the blog, developing my audience, and so on. I have considered giving in, but it’s just too complicated now to do so. I’d have to backtrack on promises I made to my advertisers, my own pride helps that to stick in my throat. So it’s a road I don’t want to travel.

Yes, I sell links

And yes, I’m still selling links. No, really, I do. I have done for ages, through text link ads, through my own sales, through PayPerPost, through paid posts, etc. I sell them simply and I choose NOT to add the rel=nofollow tag that Google virtually demanded everyone use because their search engine formulae weren’t upto snuff.

In reality, I don’t sell text links for PR. I sell them for traffic, for advertising, for people to check out on this blog and on others. I sell them so that advertisers pay me to cover my server costs, I sell them to earn a little extra money. If I had to rely on Adsense I’d be running ALL my blogs on Geocities instead simply because Adsense clicks have been very poor performers for me, across ALL my sites.

Links vs. Adsense

Also, I BELIEVE selling links is a far better model for most advertising purposes: it’s easier to track, easier to set up, virtually fraud proof, and very reliable. Using Google’s alternative method is (AdSense) is fraught with issues, including fraudulent clicks, banned accounts, optimizing the positions, quality scores, … the list goes on and on. Many bloggers have been burned by AdSense for fraudulent clicks or impressions, and many bloggers have lost all the monies in their account. For advertisers, click fraud is equally a huge problem: I’m not allowed to divulge how many clicks I don’t get credited for as an Adsense advertiser, but the number is significant. AdSense also takes up space, and typically when users don’t click, the website DOESN’T get much or any credit.

For Advertisers, clicks make sense

I also sell links for advertisers to garner traffic, and I believe selling text links is a lot less hassle than AdWords for advertisers. Why? Simply, you buy them once, and you forget about them until the subscription expires or renews. Users can click on them as many times as you like, you won’t experience click fraud. Really, text links are a much simpler form of advertising, and quite effective. You don’t have to play with your keywords, positioning, or watch your budget eaten up. Prices also don’t vary that much in a short time, on AdWords the prices of keywords seems to vary as the wind.

So, with a PR0, am I going to kowtow to Google this time? Unlikely, i think there will be a time when Google search engine is implicitly able to determine which links are paid and which are not, without any nofollow. I see little or no reason to change, esp. as Google sells links that transfer pagerank. Worse, if everyone nofollowed every link on their blog, as some bloggers and sites have done, it will make pagerank virtually useless. So, I’m not changing my ways; Google, if it wants to remain relevant simply has to figure out this issue for themselves.

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For those who are starting out: there are a number of post that you could make. If you’re looking for a little sizzle, then try these:

1. Picture of the Week

Many bloggers are also amateur or professional photographs. Adding a regular or irregular photographs as your post with a very brief description can liven up your blog from the all text look, and fill a regular post slot. (click to see an example)

2. Video Post

A short post can include a video that you have uploaded to YouTube or even a video that someone else uploaded. Embedding the code is a very simple task these days. Simply copy and paste into your post.  (click to see an example)

3. Quotation

Short quotations on your blog’s theme or topics or that you find in your other reading are worth doing. They’re quick to copy down, don’t forget to add biographical details and also the source.  (click to see an example)

4. Link Posts

There are many kinds of link posts but one that I like is the post that links to recent readings and articles and websites that I’ve found across the Internet. Recently, StumbleUpon has been taking up this slack for many, but adding them to your blog is much better for your readers.  (click to see an example)

5. Buzz Posts

These are short posts that feature one particular blog or website. You can write them to highlight something you like. Keep them short (50 words or so), include an image, and there you go. (click to see an example)

6. Recent Posts

This is similar to #4 but instead you are featuring some of your own posts in the recent month or week. It’s well worth doing especially for blogs with a lot more posts and can draw attention to some that might otherwise be missed by readers.  (click to see an example)

7. Word Power

Post a word or phrase that you have learned. English has over 1,000,000 words (estimated!) but choosing a few careful terms or phrases that are not well-known can provide an inspirational post.

8. Sharing an Email

This can be an easy way to find a post. My email archives (and yours) are doubtless full of emails that are worth sharing. Raid those archives and see what you can find that would be worth posting! Of course, if you are sharing an email from someone else, make sure you have their permission! (click to see an example)

9. News Posting

This can be defined as widely or as narrowly as you like: include items in a short ‘what’s happening post’. These items might include competitions, invitations, news items, and anything else you might like! (click to see an example)

10. Review Something

You can always write a review of something related to your blog’s sphere of interest. Good suggestions include a book, a movie, a website, a product or service, etc. It needn’t be in depth but it should be appropriate and something you’re familiar with. (click to see an example)

These are just some of the ideas that I have tried on my blogs over the past two years. Of course, these types of posts are just the ‘sizzle’. If your blog doesn’t have any steak, then they won’t really help. Good luck blogging, and let me know what kind of sizzle or steak you are cooking up on your blog!

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For this little experiment, you will need a GMail account and Google Reader, and a little app that sits in your tray called BlogComment from Legal Andrew. You’ll also need some saved feeds in your Google Reader account. If you don’t have any, borrow mine ( post / RSS feeds )!

Step 1: Log into your Gmail account, go to Google Reader then in Options/Goodies, you’ll see the menu. Simply choose the right tag, and drag the link to your ToolBar.

Step 2: Download and install BlogComment from LegalAndrew. When you run it the first time, you’ll need to enter basic comments: name, email and URL.

Step 3: Launch BlogComment and it will sit in your tray.

Now you’re ready to read and comment.

Step 4: Click on the ‘Next’ link in your linkbar, read the post that loads in your browser, and go to the comment area.

Step 5: Simply type ‘bcomment’ in the first field for your details. Then these fields will be filled in a jiffy, leaving you free to write your comments. When done, fill out any captcha and hit submit.

Rinse and repeat steps 4-5. It works a charm.

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In the agreed number of years for your term, you will only pay the $9.95 for your domain for that year. After the initial term expires, you will be required to fork out nearly $35 for the domain thereafter. This is a deal that just doesn’t make much sense: many hosting companies charge $15, $10 or even less for standard domains, so why would you?

So, I guess I’ll be using GoDaddy or NameCheap for my next domain purchases, it’s a pity Yahoo! Such tactics are very mercantile, and don’t make for good customer feedback! Who do you use for purchasing your domains?

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It’s not for newbies!

WordPress is a great application for bloggers, and it’s a great way for relative newbies to cut their teeth on managing, installing and updating a PHP based system. It’s fairly robust on the installation front, quite stable once running. However, WordPress MU shares many of the features, it’s a little more tricky to set up; but the limitations (mostly for security) really drive me nuts at times!

Stubborn and spiteful

There are quite a few issues with plugins, themes and general wordpress functionality in the MU environment. In general, Javascript and other scripts DO NOT work out of the box. Additionally, some common and important plugins just don’t play nice with MU at all. I’ve had problems with the sitemap plugin, and several that share the database. Any themes that require any plugin with javascripts or popular database reliant plugins will likely encounter severe problems. And you can forget YouTube Videos out of the box, though there are solutions.

Forums and Advice

If you are considering switching to MU, then consider this: many of the plugins that I have tried, (for example, to install Adsense or YouTube) simply don’t work, though you’ll find the odd one that is worth it’s weight in Gold. Similarly, advice that is posted on forums, blogs and the Codex may or may not be relevant to your install, and there’s little to tell either way.

So, if you are considering switching, I’d suggest a trial install of MU on another domain so that you can figure out if you will be happy with the switch. I’m still finding the problems annoying, but I am not switching back: the power of this platform is surprising, and I’m only beginning to understand what I can do.

Have you tried the switch? Let me know how it went!

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Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that”s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger”s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it”s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it”s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it”s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it”s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it”s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about blog Mastermind click this link:www.BlogMastermind.com

Ads by our sponsors.

Here are the top 10 techniques new bloggers can use to find readers. These are tips specifically for new bloggers, those people who have next-to-no audience at the moment and want to get the ball rolling.

It helps if you work on this list from top to bottom as each technique builds on the previous step to help you create momentum. Eventually once you establish enough momentum you gain what is called “traction”, which is a large enough audience base (about 500 readers a day is good) that you no longer have to work too hard on finding new readers. Instead your current loyal readers do the work for you through word of mouth.

Top 10 Tips

10. Write at least five major “pillar” articles.

A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

9. Write one new blog post per day minimum. Not every post has to be a pillar, but you should work on getting those five pillars done at the same time as you keep your blog fresh with a daily news or short article style post. The important thing here is to demonstrate to first time visitors that your blog is updated all the time so they feel that if they come back tomorrow they will likely find something new. This causes them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your blog feed.

You don”t have to produce one post per day all the time but it is important you do when your blog is brand new. Once you get traction you still need to keep the fresh content coming but your loyal audience will be more forgiving if you slow down to a few per week instead. The first few months are critical so the more content you can produce at this time the better.

8. Use a proper domain name. If you are serious about blogging be serious about what you call your blog. In order for people to easily spread the word about your blog you need a easily rememberable domain name. People often talk about blogs they like when they are speaking to friends in the real world (that”s the offline world, you remember that place right?) so you need to make it easy for them to spread the word and pass on your URL. Try and get a .com if you can and focus on small easy to remember domains rather than worry about having the correct keywords (of course if you can get great keywords and easy to remember then you’ve done a good job!).

7. Start commenting on other blogs. Once you have your pillar articles and your daily fresh smaller articles your blog is ready to be exposed to the world. One of the best ways to find the right type of reader for your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs. You should aim to comment on blogs focused on a similar niche topic to yours since the readers there will be more likely to be interested in your blog.

Most blog commenting systems allow you to have your name/title linked to your blog when you leave a comment. This is how people find your blog. If you are a prolific commentor and always have something valuable to say then people will be interested to read more of your work and hence click through to visit your blog.

6. Trackback and link to other blogs in your blog posts. A trackback is sort of like a blog conversation. When you write a new article to your blog and it links or references another blogger”s article you can do a trackback to their entry. What this does is leave a truncated summary of your blog post on their blog entry – it”s sort of like your blog telling someone else’s blog that you wrote an article mentioning them. Trackbacks often appear like comments.

This is a good technique because like leaving comments a trackback leaves a link from another blog back to yours for readers to follow, but it also does something very important – it gets the attention of another blogger. The other blogger will likely come and read your post eager to see what you wrote about them. They may then become a loyal reader of yours or at least monitor you and if you are lucky some time down the road they may do a post linking to your blog bringing in more new readers.

5. Encourage comments on your own blog. One of the most powerful ways to convince someone to become a loyal reader is to show there are other loyal readers already following your work. If they see people commenting on your blog then they infer that your content must be good since you have readers so they should stick around and see what all the fuss is about. To encourage comments you can simply pose a question in a blog post. Be sure to always respond to comments as well so you can keep the conversation going.

4. Submit your latest pillar article to a blog carnival. A blog carnival is a post in a blog that summarizes a collection of articles from many different blogs on a specific topic. The idea is to collect some of the best content on a topic in a given week. Often many other blogs link back to a carnival host and as such the people that have articles featured in the carnival often enjoy a spike in new readers.

To find the right blog carnival for your blog, do a search at blogcarnival.com.

3. Submit your blog to blogtopsites.com. To be honest this tip is not going to bring in a flood of new readers but it”s so easy to do and only takes five minutes so it”s worth the effort. Go to Blog Top Sites, find the appropriate category for your blog and submit it. You have to copy and paste a couple of lines of code on to your blog so you can rank and then sit back and watch the traffic come in. You will probably only get 1-10 incoming readers per day with this technique but over time it can build up as you climb the rankings. It all helps!

2. Submit your articles to EzineArticles.com. This is another tip that doesn’t bring in hundreds of new visitors immediately (although it can if you keep doing it) but it”s worthwhile because you simply leverage what you already have – your pillar articles. Once a week or so take one of your pillar articles and submit it to Ezine Articles. Your article then becomes available to other people who can republish your article on their website or in their newsletter.

How you benefit is through what is called your “Resource Box”. You create your own resource box which is like a signature file where you include one to two sentences and link back to your website (or blog in this case). Anyone who publishes your article has to include your resource box so you get incoming links. If someone with a large newsletter publishes your article you can get a lot of new readers at once.

1. Write more pillar articles. Everything you do above will help you to find blog readers however all of the techniques I’ve listed only work when you have strong pillars in place. Without them if you do everything above you may bring in readers but they won’t stay or bother to come back. Aim for one solid pillar article per week and by the end of the year you will have a database of over 50 fantastic feature articles that will work hard for you to bring in more and more readers.

I hope you enjoyed my list of traffic tips. Everything listed above are techniques I’ve put into place myself for my blogs and have worked for me, however it”s certainly not a comprehensive list. There are many more things you can do. Finding readers is all about testing to see what works best for you and your audience and I have no doubt if you put your mind to it you will find a balance that works for you.

This article was by Yaro Starak, a professional blogger and my blog mentor. He is the leader of the Blog Mastermind mentoring program designed to teach bloggers how to earn a full time income blogging part time.

To get more information about blog Mastermind click this link: www.BlogMastermind.com

Ads by our sponsors.

You can see the original. Then look at this jpeg of the article on his website.

This guy stole my article, and even kept the original funky formatting that I used in this article. He didn’t even bother to change anything… just copy and paste. What is a blogger to do? Well, I posted a comment in the article, then fired off a polite cease-and-desist type of letter to his hosting company. It’s amazing how much you can find out from doing a whois search. Within an hour or so, it seems that the owner of this site removed the content as I was forced to go to Google’s cache to see the original entry. It’s still there (though it will be gone soon), and it’s still linked on his blog in his article directory.

Basically, though, the site is a splog for articles from article directories and (probably) other stolen articles from innocent bloggers. In fact, the articles from the directory are all unattributed as well, which means that the break the article directories’ TOS. I doubt that anyone would find useful information on the site, which is why I didn’t post any links to this site. No sense giving it link-love.

I guess it’s flattering but it still makes me mad when someone copies my entire article or blog without any attribution or permission to do so. Who knows? If he bothered to ask, I might have said okay. If he had asked. But then thieves don’t ask. They just take.

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Coercive Non-Disclosure

I’m pretty sure that’s a phrase you haven’t heard of, it’s not one I had thought of until a few days as affecting bloggers, until I got a rejection for one of my opps in my inbox. I took a look at the comment and was informed that I had failed to abide by one of the requirements, that of disclosing the post. Irony of ironies was that I’ve run a disclosure on my site since late 2006. In fact, in those days, few opps would require such a non-disclosure.

What is Coercive Non-Disclosure?

Coercive Non-Disclosure is a requirement imposed by some advertisers that the blogger NOT reveal the sponsored nature of the post. In other words, the blogger is not able to reveal to his readers that payment is being made. In the beginning, I never used to worry about such things (I’ll be honest about that!), but having worked with several sites on Sponsored Posts, including PayPerPost, SocialSpark, SponsoredReviews, Blogsvertise and one or two others over the past two years, I’ve become MUCH more discerning about such posts, and usually avoid them. In fact, looking through several of these systems, they can constitute upwards of 30%-50% of the available opps. In December or January, I was looking through my own ‘About‘ page, and started reorganizing that, trimming the fat, and trying to make something that resembled what I actually did. In that page, I made a promise to my readers: I will endeavor to disclose that relationship.

Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa

And I did fail at that. Thanks to Payperpost, I got the opportunity to revisit the post, and disclosure page, where I rediscovered that sentence. I faced no other choice: to remove the links, and other accessories. Fortunately, I had written a fairly decent post about servers problems anyway, so the neutered post fitted in well as it was. I’m pleased I spent that much time writing it. However, I had to eat humble pie on that one! So I’m now making my own confession about this. I think I did feel shame about this.

It got me thinking!

I hadn’t paid attention to such posts in the past, but somehow the whole affair got to me. I started to read the Terms of Service that PayPerPost has on their website: it clearly states -

Round #1: Needing a Little Support

I’ve created an image showing the TOS as of the writing of this post and linked to it for you to read yourself. Anyway, that’s when I fired off this email to Customer Love: asking whether this coercive non-disclosure isn’t in fact an infringement of their own TOS. I also flagged a few advertised opps to bring it to their attention. This is the email/support ticket I submitted:

It’s come to my notice that a number of advertisers are actually infringing on the rights of bloggers as per your TOS… This is called co-ercive non-disclosure…

Phrases like no-in post disclosure or similar are now illegal under PPP’s TOS: and the statement is NOT hidden away…

Could you comment on this… Please?

Excerpt from TOS
2.1. TRANSPARENCY & DISCLOSURE.

PayPerPost requires full disclosure by all Marketplace participants. Any attempt to instruct, coerce or manipulate a blogger into hiding the commercial relationship between you and the blogger may result in removal from the system. Advertiser agrees to comply with Our Advertiser Code of Ethics, the Federal Trade Commission’s Staff Opinion Letter dated December 7, 2006, WOMMA’s Ethical blogger Contract Guidelines, and all applicable laws and regulations, including but not limited to Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guidelines.

Care to make any comments?

I think I was a little mad at the time, because I didn’t argue my case very well. I merely asserted what to me had become obvious. To which, I received a nice reply from Gordon at Customer Love who wrote:

Hi Kenneth,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

All opportunities and blogs that participate in the PPP marketplace do require disclosure. There are 3 types of acceptable disclosure in this marketplace.

• 1) In post disclosure – e.g. this post is sponsored by ABC company
• 2) Bubble disclosure – this is the bubble add at the end of a post that states sponsored by ABC Company
• 3) Site-wide disclosure – this is an overall policy for the blog, where the blogger would have a link to Disclosure Policy, or something similar.

When an advertiser requests no in post disclosure, they are requesting that neither 1 or 2 are used, but 3 must be present, in order for a post to be approved. Therefore, an advertiser’s request for no in-post disclosure is not infringing on the rights of the blogger. If a blogger does not feel comfortable posting for an advertiser that requires only site-wide disclosure, then the blogger has the right to not take the opportunity.

All opportunities are reviewed and approved by IZEA employees. We will not approve any opportunities for which the advertiser is requesting NO disclosure, at all.

I hope that this answers your question.

Best Regards,

Gordon

I wasn’t satisfied with this explanation. Why? Because instead of putting the choice in the hands of the blogger, it clearly allowed the advertiser to dictate WHAT kind of disclosure was required. So I wrote a detailed reply that examined each of the documents that was sited and am posting it below for your information.

Round #2: Reopening Old Wounds

After the ticket was replied by Gordon, he closed it. Mmm. Of course, this was just the thing I needed to start my next rant, this post, and hopefully, an interesting discussion.

I just wanted to say that I took a look at the opp I took and I was personally ashamed about taking an opp that required no inpost disclosure.

I had made a pact with my readers about this a while ago, and hadn’t noticed it until I was forced to look at the post as part of a revision requested by PPP editors.

Unfortunately, when I read the post, the coercive non-disclosure of the posting made me very unhappy… Then when I read the TOS, I began to see things quite differently.

It’s difficult to imagine that this is NOT infringing the rights of the blogger: “Any attempt to instruct, coerce or manipulate a blogger into hiding the commercial relationship between you and the blogger may result in removal from the system. Advertiser agrees to comply with Our Advertiser Code of Ethics, the Federal Trade Commission’s Staff Opinion Letter dated December 7, 2006, WOMMA’s Ethical blogger Contract Guidelines, and all applicable laws and regulations, including but not limited to Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guidelines.”

I fail to see HOW this coercive non-disclosure DOES NOT infringe not only the blogger’s freedom… it is specifically telling the blogger HOW he or she MUST disclose. Moreover, the failure to include a specific disclosure specifically suggest that the post is NOT sponsored, and that therefore the blogger is hiding the nature of the commercial relationship between him- or herself and the advertiser. It is also against the trend of fully disclosing relationships that we see in other media…

But worse, a closer reading of the wording of your own Guide of Ethics states: “That’s why we insist on a strict policy of full-disclosure when you discuss an advertiser’s product or service on your blog. By receiving payment for blogging about a certain topic, even if you would have written about that topic anyway, you run the risk of giving the impression of a conflict of interest. By showing your audience, in a very visible and proactive manner, that you are being paid for that content, you will maintain the trust of your readers and avoid any appearance of impropriety.”

Anything other than stating a particular post is sponsored is not, and cannot be, a full-disclosure. A blogger is hiding details of a relationship under the guise of a general blog disclaimer. Other words that are used include: “conflict of interest”, “impropriety”, … I’m sure you can pick up a few more.

Having read through the letter from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), I can only cite the conclusion of the letter: “the decision … should NOT (my emphasis) be construed as a formal Commission determination…”. Such lack of specific guidelines are only appropriate at the time the letter was issued (nearly 3 years ago!)…

As far as the WOMMA guidelines go, I can’t see how coercive non-disclosure in posts is NOT in contravention of this spirit. The words read: “… we do instruct them to be open and honest about any relationship with a marketer and about any products or incentives that they may have received.
* We stand against shill and undercover marketing, whereby people are paid to make recommendations without disclosing their relationship with the marketer.
* We comply with FTC regulations that state: “When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product which might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement (i.e., the connection is not reasonably expected by the audience) such connection must be fully disclosed.”

Gordon, I’m sure that you know the guidelines at least 10x better than I do, yet I fail to see how PPP can condone such a practice. PPP is barely within its own TOS, its clearly contravening the spirit of the law, though the letter of the law may not be spelled out clearly as yet, and it’s way over the limit in terms of WOMMA’s Code of Ethics.

Don’t get wrong, Gordon, … I’m a huge supporter of PPP, but I stopped using other services when almost 90% of the posts required non-disclosure. After looking at my opps yesterday, I saw 2/3rds of them also required coercive non-disclosure. It’s that hidden, secretive nature of paid blogging that is really undermining the whole industry. On this point, Payperpost SERIOUSLY needs to reconsider its position, and make the RIGHT decision for its own advertisers, bloggers, and their readers. Otherwise the lawyers will have a field day, if they have a chance, and Ted’s dream will be sued out of existence.

BTW, to open up discussion on this whole issue, I’m posting it on my blog for my own readers to discuss. I’d certainly be grateful of feedback on this issue, if you have time, though you seem to regard this issue as already decided. I’m not so sure the FTC feels that way, though.

Having read through the letter from the FTC, the words that keep coming to mind are: ‘deceit’, ‘trickery’, ‘omission’, etc… Since I reopened the ticket, I’m still looking to a reply from Gordon. This is a crack that’s been open for a while, and hasn’t been repaired properly yet. Let’s see if they see it that way, though!

Personal Reflections

Regardless of the way PayPerPost’s lawyers choose to frame the discussion, I’m finding myself somewhat unhappy nowadays with the sense that I’m working with a company or advertiser that would encourage me to engage in such practices. I’m happy though to be working with PayPerPost’s successor, SocialSpark. Though SocialSpark is a sister company of PayPerPost, and the TOS is remarkably similar in this paragraph:

SocialSpark requires full disclosure by all Marketplace participants. Any attempt to instruct, coerce or manipulate a blogger into hiding the commercial relationship between you and the blogger may result in removal from the system. Advertiser agrees to comply with Our Advertiser Code of Ethics, the Federal Trade Commission’s Staff Opinion Letter dated December 7, 2006, WOMMA’s Ethical blogger Contract Guidelines, and all applicable laws and regulations, including but not limited to Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act and the Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guidelines.

I know for a fact that SocialSpark does not permit such disclosure practices, all posts are fully disclosed. I’m quite perplexed how an identical statement can be used to say one thing for SocialSpark, and another for PayPerPost. Given that SocialSpark is considered to be PPP2.0 in many respects, it’s quite clear that PPP’s current view of such coercive arrangements is not how things will be done at some point. I, however, feel that we need to press harder for clearer standards on this point.

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photo credit: andyp uk

In Lesson #3, we are going to have a look at writing that first post, what you can blog about, and so on…

Writing that first post

When you sit down to write your first post, no doubt your head fills with the countless blogs and examples of great articles that you have read in your excitement to get started. You sit down to draft your first blog post, and bam! all those thoughts and ideas that you have been collecting just evaporate leaving you staring at your monitor, and your fingers poised over the keyword. “What on earth am I going to write now?”

Step 1: Put your keyboard away and get out your pen and paper.

There are a lot of bloggers who fail at the first post. So let’s make it easy: you’ve probably got a simple idea of what your blog is supposed to be, but you may not be sure of what to write – try listing. That’s it: simply list all the ideas you have on a piece of paper for that first post. Spend five minutes simply listing the ideas. After you’ve reached the time limit. Stop.

Step 2: Examine your list.

You’re going to look through your list of ideas to see if you could find something you could blog about. The criteria should be simple, too: can you write 100 words about it? Do I feel comfortable to write about that? Once you’re done, see which of the topics you feel more strongly about.

Step 3: Choose your topic and write 100 words.

Your first post needn’t be long, the whole point of blogging is that you get into the habit of writing your ‘journal’ on a daily basis. So, write that 100 words or so. Don’t forget to hit ‘Save’ so that you can return to your post later. It’s amazing how many people forget to do that, then there’s a power cut, an accident, or you just close your window. Woops! It’s gone! – I know I had to rescue a post from somewhere else once!

Step 4: Edit it, esp. if your writing is weak – do pay attention to spelling and grammar.

It’s worth checking your spelling or grammar. If you’re intending to be serious about blogging, you will need to put more emphasis on this. Nothing is worse than a blog that is carelessly written. Really. But it’s crucial: you should only edit the text when you’re pretty satisfied with WHAT you want to say. If you try to edit as you write, you will find that you don’t write very much.

Step 5: Hit “Publish”.

Re-read your post once you’ve checked the grammar, spelling and so on. Then hit that button. Don’t dilly-dally. Hit it. Once you hit that “Publish” button often enough, you will stop feeling self-conscious such that pushing the ‘Publish’ gets easier. You’ve got no idea how many great writers have got novels stuffed inside their disk drives, in old parchments, in notebooks, … great writers who never had the confidence to publish their writings. Hiding your posts in your ‘Drafts’ section will ensure that you get NO recognition, NO traffic, NO comments, and NO readership!

Finding other content

Publishing content may not come easily at first, most likely you will want to stick to short posts until your comfortable with the technical side of things at the very least. In the meantime, you can post a wide range of intermediate posts, while you struggle over your longer postings. This is a short list of things you can post without much work. As you get more confident, you’ll find it easier to add extra comments.

1. Picture of the Week from snaps that you have taken yourself.
2. Video from YouTube on music, products, or whatever.
   
3. Quotations from people you are interested in.
4. Buzzes for sites and products you like.
5. Good Reading for articles that you thought worth reading and sharing.

These are some samples for content. Of course, if you are interested, download my top 20 money making feeds and see how the top 20 bloggers deal with this, what they post, and what works.

Look out for lesson 4 soon, which looks at some ways to get traffic for your blog and which ways are a waste of time in this regard! I’ll be posting this shortly.

Ads by our sponsors.

Is the latest version of WordPress eating posts or not?

This is the second time I’ve had to write this post. I posted a stub just a little while ago, and it’s gone. Since this is the second time I had a problem with a post in the last week, I’m beginning to think there’s a serious bug in WordPress 2.5 that eats posts that are just published.

I recently posted a long article on WordPress that I had reason to edit after the posting. When I went to find the article (I had seen it on the front page), I hit ‘Save’ only to find the article gone when I came to view the front page. I then received an error message when I tried to edit the post again. Luckily, the post was already archived on BlogLines so I was able to paste the entire contents in, bar a few minor edits, though it did not show up in Reader.

So for the meantime, I’ll be writing posts on other media then uploading them or pasting them. Have you had any experience of this? Could it be my fervent imagination? Let me know.

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Unfortunately, for number 6, Strategist takes a bow on this blog! Strategist has been churning out a lot of posts over the four months since it started! I tried to find the first post to get an idea about the writer but no luck. The topics this blog covers are somewhat similar to this one but the blogger covers in much more depth and very high frequency.

There’s no about page at all. Nor is there a contact page! So I was unable to find out much about the author. In fact, I only found the review to my blog when I was checking SocialSpark’s update page.
strategist.org.uk. Then I went onto search for the first post, which I didn’t find. What I did note was more alarming, there was no way a blogger could turn out this number of articles on a daily basis. So then I chose several articles, and searched on Google for duplicate articles. A look at the results will show you what I mean:

This article is supposedly published on this blog but …

a quick search from Google highlighted the article in its search engine as being from another blog:

A second search produced results from Google here. A third and fourth search produced similar results. So I stopped at that point. This may fit the definition of a “splog”, or more accurately, a scraper blog, which Wikipedia cites:

“Blog scraping, is the process where automated software scans hundreds of thousands of blogs per day, searching for and copying content. The process is sometimes referenced by the name given the software or individuals responsible for the action, “blog scrapers.”"

It is likely that this blog is breaking the law (though I’m no lawyer), and I would encourage the owner of the blog to stop this practice immediately, delete the entries (or at the very least limit entries to a few basic words, ie. a teaser and a link to the original blog), and create something worth reading with his or her own unique input. At the very least, the blogger runs the risk of having the Adsense account pulled, his SocialSpark status revoked, and losing all the money earned so far. At the very least.

To anyone who submits a request for a Blogbuzz, the quality of your blog determines whether you will be blogged about on this blog. I reserve the right at all times to monitor the quality of submissions. Editorial decisions are final. Sometimes other people leave me with no choice.

On a final note, I’d just like to say 90% of the submissions for Blogbuzzes have been outstanding, but this is the first and last time I will ever blog about a Scraper blog.

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In the first article

In the first article, we looked at how to find a suitable place for blogging. There are free hosted solutions but these entail a number of limitations, and most people share the same opinion as Michael commented in my review of his blogger blog, The View from Taiwan, does:

“…I face similar dilemmas with my own blogger template, and wish now that I had used WordPress from the beginning. blogger is just too antiquated, buggy, and sluggish to do anything …”

What’s the difference?

It’s important to choose between having your blog hosted for you (as at blogger or WordPress.com or similar hosting companies – and there are many) and hosting it yourself on your own domain. For new bloggers, though, without much technical background, the issue boils down to:

Your own hosted domain gives you:

• a place to try out blogging;
• it costs some money; and
• you get your own FULL url, ie. http://www.yourdomain.com

BUT

• you don’t get much help to RUN your domain;
• there’s quite a learning curve to running your own site; and
• it costs some money.

Using a blogger or similar hosted service gives you:

• a well tested service;
• fairly decent startup templates; and
• it’s usually free

BUT

• if you decide you like to blog, moving can be a pain;
• some people regret the complexity of moving; and
• you DON’T get a decent domain name, usually http://yoursubdomain.blogger.com

For this article, we are going to assume that you have chosen to host the blog on your own domain, in the main folder for your website, http://yourdomain.com or whatever.

What is a blogging Platform?

A blogging Platform is the actual software (or computer program) that you place (or upload) to your server via FTP. For this you will need an actual database set up as well, whichever platform you use. For many of the hosting companies, though, when you login into your panel (that website thath controls the functions of your hosting account), you’ll be able to set up your blog, e.g. WordPress, in one or two steps. I’d suggest that you choose the easiest setup yourself at the beginning.

One-Click Install on Self-Hosted Domain

Dreamhost offers one blogging option on its Easy Install and one in its Advanced Install mode: WordPress 2.5. I’m including this as an example of a one-click install.

You simply fill in the name of the blog, the email address you will use, and the (sub)domain you want to host it on. As you will see, there are some limitations on this install, but it will give you a perfectly functional install of WordPress that you can easily update to a full-blown install. Many hosting companies, including BlueHost, Dreamhost, MediaTemple, etc. offer one-click type installs that make it easy to install a blog. You may not always get the platform of your choice, so check first before you hand over the dosh. A typical choice would be WordPress, B2, or any of a dozen other second-tier blogging platforms.

WordPress vs. Moveable Type – Tier 1

Is WordPress #1?

Perhaps this is the best known blogging platform. In fact, if you are seriously considering using this, sign up for a free blog at WordPress.com account and test out the latest blogging tools in WordPress BEFORE you even install it. Once you’re ready, just use the one-click install feature on hosting account.

It’s a pretty good platform overall, and you can be posting within minutes, if you wish, too.

Moveable Type: Confused?

MoveableType is the next major choice for an independent platform. In fact, some of my favorite blogs are hosted using MT software, such as Scott Sommers’ blog on Taiwan. I haven’t used MT yet myself, though I am interested in trying it out for its native support of multiple blogs (it’s uploading now).

The tools operate in a similar fashion to WordPress and it is a very worthy choice. BUT users need to note that there are free options and commercial options.

On your own host: If you wish to host MT on your own host, then you can download one of the different versions: Personal (ie. non-commercial) Edition, Commercial or Enterprise editions. The key to the different versions seems to be how many users will be editing the blogs and/or whether the primary motive is running a commercial or non-commercial site. Then, of course, there’s the OpenSource version, too.

On their hosting: Moveable Type also provides their own hosting on TypePad that you can pay for an annual basis from $4.95 per month right on upto Premium and Business Class plans.

So will it be OpenSource, MT or TypePad?

Confused? I know I am. Also the other concern is – what is non-commercial?… A popular choice – undoubtedly! A solid choice – certainly! A confusing choice?… For sure. Also, if I were setting up a blog, I’d be much more inclined to pay for their own hosting on TypePad or choose the OpenSource version for my own hosting plan.

While nothing beats free, TypePad offers an easy solution to bloggers not wanting to deal with the hassles of setting up, configuring and updating the software or the database. Of course, you’re subject to some similar restrictions as on blogger or WordPress.com but for beginners that may be okay.

And my conclusion?…

There are a lot of second-tier blogging platforms out in the wild, but for beginners it would be wise to choose one that is first-tier to make the transition to blogging easier. There are enough problems to deal with, without worrying about technical details, too. To make it easier to choose, try this:

1. If you have money but lack time or technological background, paying for TypePad would be a good place to start.
2. If you have some money and some time/skill in technology, self-hosting either WordPress or MT (OpenSource) would be a good choice.
3. If you have a little money but no skill in tech, self-hosting but going the one-click route would be appropriate for you.
4. If you have no money and no skills, then WordPress.com would be the best as it leaves you with an upgrade path (though money making options may be restricted somewhat by the TOS – and blogs are removed for breaking TOS). blogger would also be a choice for you without the TOS restrictions on advertising.

What did you choose…?

Let me know what you chose for your first platform, why and what problems you faced in your choice.

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