October 30, 2007 By

What Others Are Saying Plugin

Do follow comment links and blogrolls have become very popular lately. We basically fall over each other trying to follow the movement of giving out some link love to those we deem worthy enough. Blogging is all about sharing and social networking and right now we can see proof of this everywhere.

A great WordPress Plugin that can help you to link to your friend’s latest blog entries is the “what others are saying Plugin”

image

The Plugin is available from Sarah who is a very helpful UK marketer. You can download the Plugin by visiting her website and if you follow the instructions, it should be a breeze.

The way it works is that it pulls feeds from your blogroll links. You will need to input them yourself, but it is very easy to do so. This will allow you to display others feeds right in your sidebar and it is a great way to share some luv.

To see how the Plugin works, head over to Sarah’s Blog. It is displayed at the bottom of her left sidebar.

Enjoy

Monika

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October 29, 2007 By

Blog Traffic That Works

Even the newest of bloggers hopefully realize that without traffic we are doomed to fail. After all we need readers to absorb our various blurbs unless of course we absolutely don’t care for this and choose to keep our blog private.

For all others, there are literally thousands of ways to generate traffic to our blogs. There are paid ways and many free ways to achieve this and for this particular post I have chosen to write about a sure fire way to generate tons of new readers and clicks.

So without keeping you in a shroud of mystery, here it is:

box with ribbon Host a Blog Contest!

This isn’t really news in regards to being a secret way that only a handful of chosen bloggers in the know use to generate readers frenzy.

But it is certainly in my eyes a very under valued and hardly used promotion overseen by thousands of new and old bloggers worldwide. I’ll let you in on a secret:

You don’t always have to give away money as a contest prize! Sure, I do agree that monetary prizes pull a lot more traffic because we all want more of this “papery stuff”.

But if you are strapped for cash, you can use other means of rewarding your competition participants.

Here are a few ideas to help you brainstorm the options:

  • Offer advertising space
  • Offer a review
  • Give them a place in your Blogroll
  • Give them a free ebook of yours
  • Offer them a free product of yours
  • Give them link love if you have good PR
  • If you are a software creator, offer your software as a prize
  • If you are a writer, offer to do a few guest blogging entries or write a set amount of articles that belong to the winner. They can then use them for their own business.

Blog Contest not only help to get more regular readers, but they also create buzz in the blogosphere. The better the prizes, the more buzz you will receive from others.

If that is not enough, there are many dozens of Contest Directories you can utilize to submit your contest to. And I advice you to do this, especially if it is your first time.

The Contestblogger blog offers links to 23 sites that offer to post your competition. The negative side of this is that you will need to invest some time to do this. Each site needs to be contacted individually as they belong to different people. But it is well worth your time.

Even if only 6 pick up your contest it could mean that hundreds of interested readers help to spread your contest message for you. The more people know, the more entries you will get.

I have just successfully finished my first contest and have already planned another one for next month. I simply love what it can do to both blog traffic and new friends being made on the Internet.

Monika

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October 28, 2007 By

Revolution Magazine & CMS WordPress Theme

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Fancy your WordPress looking like an online magazine, a sports portal or a news site? With the Revolution magazine theme, and variations of the theme, you can!

Developed by Brian Gardner, these themes break away from the common blog interface by changing the home page of your site. Depending on what you want, you can can totally modify your WordPress theme to look like it belongs to some big news agency like CNN or USA Today.

Brian also has a collection of some really sweet free WordPress themes, but these magazine-style themes are paid themes. It doesn’t come cheap either:

revolution Original Revolution Theme

  • Perfect for WordPress blogs that do not add much content on a daily basis. It can transform your blog into a CMS portal, pretty much like what I did with EasyWordpress.com (with a lot of hacking)
  • Retails for $59.95 single domain and $199.95 for multiple domains
  • Footer credits can be removed for multiple domain license
  • I got the multiple domain version for this theme, and with some hacking, will implement it to some of my other blogs.

revolution-news News Revolution Theme

  • Perfect if you have a lot of content every day, and you focus on a more serious topic like business, politics, or other boring stuff :)
  • Retails for $99.95 single domain and $249.95 for multiple domains
  • Footer credits can be removed for multiple domain license

revolution-magazine Magazine Revolution Theme

  • Perfect if you have a lot of content every day, and you focus on a more relaxed topics like music, health, games, etc.
  • Retails for $99.95 single domain and $249.95 for multiple domains
  • Footer credits can be removed for multiple domain license
  • I got the multiple domain license for this one too!

revolution-sports Sports Revolution Theme

  • Made for sports or sports-related content, but really it can be used for anything you want to use it or.
  • Retails for $99.95 single domain and $249.95 for multiple domains
  • Footer credits can be removed for multiple domain license

All Brian’s themes look good right out of the box, and at most you’ll just need to create a new header image for your blog. As good as these themes are, before you get them you may want to consider these:

  • Professional Vs Friendly – If your theme is too serious, you may actually discourage people from commenting on your blogs. Sometimes, people prefer to comment on a websites that is owned by a “person” rather than a “company” and some of these themes will really make your blog look like it belongs to a news agency.
  • Amount of Content – If your content production is high, these themes will definitely give equal exposure to all categories on your blog, since you can choose to customize the categories and amount of excerpts that appears on the home page. If your content is low, it’s best to try the Original Revolution theme.

Some things I didn’t quite like:

  • No documentation – You’ll expect a theme as advanced as this to have proper documentation, but all it has is an online tutorials section with only a handful of questions answered.
  • No “Theme Options” Page – It would be better if some of the hacking / modification you’ll need to do can be accesses via a “theme options” page in WordPress dashboard under “Presentations”. I’ve seen a lot of themes include this page and I will be using it too for the latest version of the Super Adsense WordPress theme.
  • Inadequate support – You better be confident of looking into PHP code if you’re planning to get these themes. On the website it says that you need to submit your support inquiries as a comment on the support page, and your question will be answered in the form or a blog tutorial. In other words, it can take you forever to get a problem solved.

Overall, these magazine WordPress themes are perhaps the best I’ve seen to far. I’m sure in newer versions, it will be much easier for newbies to use and customize the theme. For now, however, please make sure you have some technical help on your side before investing in these themes.

There has been a lot of talk about WordPress being used as a CMS or Content Management System, as a magazine, and even as a complete web portal. With Brian’s themes it’s finally taken a serious step towards realizing that idea!

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October 28, 2007 By

Golden Tips To Get Better Google Pagerank

Google’s recent Pagerank update which is still going on has been a maniac for the whole blogosphere. Every blogger tried his best to get a better pagerank but ended up with nothing or a downfall in his previous rank.

Before I start, let us first confirm what exactly Google Pagerank is and how it works.

Google Pagerank is nothing but a complex mathematical algorithm which ranks websites and webpages according to there relevants. Things on which this algorithm works:

  • Inbound links
  • Outbound Links
  • Site Quality
  • Search Engine Ranking
  • Reputation over the web

So to increase your Pagerank, you need to work on these things but HOW? Here goes my tips to preserve your pagerank and try to get a better one too. :)

Links

Links are the base concept of the Google Pagerank algorithm. The number of incoming links to your blog and the number of outgoing links from your blog is a big pagerank factor. The more no. of incoming links you have and the less no. of outgoing links you have determine the best pagerank for you.

How To Get More Incoming Links?

This is a tough topic. If you want more incoming links and authority links, you need to follow some steps:

  1. Write content worth linking to
  2. Comment on Other Blogs to establish a better relation which then leads to link sharing
  3. Never ask for link exchanges directly
  4. Add your blog URL in your other websites and webpages
  5. Add you blog URL to your social networking site profile pages

How To Decrease Outgoing Links?

If you want to link to some product your are reviewing, it is very important to mind that you are not overlinking to the site of the product. To take care of it, here are some easy tips:

  1. Include links at the end of post with the an anchor text
  2. use URL covering
  3. Add ‘nofollow’ attribute to the links

Another thing you should be more careful about is DO NOT SELL LINKS. This is very important if you want to please the Google God.

Site Overview

This point has been always forbidden and not taken care of but it is very important and matters a lot. Your website structure is the main thing. Things like javascript errors, wrong HTMLs, errors in CSS etc. can make Google Pagerank spiders hard to crawl through your website and so your indexing is not done properly.

What Can I Do To Make My Blog Perfect For Crawlers?

To make sure that your blog is perfect for spiders and crawlers, validate your blog. Goto W3C Site validator and enter your blog URL there and check.

W3C validator will show you the errors in your blog structure which then you can improve and correct. If you blog is totally valid, your blog is then perfect for spiders and crawlers.

Search Engine Ranking

Pagerank affects your better SERP but it also need a better ranking to get a better pagerank. Your blog posts should get good ranking in there specified category or niche for them to get a rocking pagerank.

How To Get A Better Search Engine Ranking?

  • Use All-In-One SEO plugin
  • Use better and more specific blog post titles
  • Include more niche keywords
  • Write the post smart and in simple language

Follow these steps and you will surely get a better Search Engine Ranking.

Site Reputation

Your blog’s reputation over the web matters in your Pagerank. If you have more no. of links from authority sites then it will bring more reputation for your blog. There is no tip to increase your site’s reputation other than to play safe in the blogosphere. ;)

Other Tips

  • Try to concentrate for more incoming links on your blog homepage
  • Try to nourish the pages which already have a pagerank to maintain them
  • Try to including ‘nofollow’ attribute maximum in your blogrolls or outgoing links.
  • Interlink blog posts whenever you write posts which are related.

Hope these tips will help you get a better pagerank in the next PR update!

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October 27, 2007 By

It is Official Google Has Updated Page Rank

Google PR Updated! We can all put our speculative minds to rest, as of today Google has updated Page Rank. My blog went from a 0 – 3 and my brand new JV blog who is barely 1 month old went straight to a 2.

I bet this update will make many bloggers very happy indeed, as a lot of newer blogs are particularly favored compared to the older ones.

Don’t ask me why, as nobody except Google can answer this question and they won’t either. But not all bigger blogs have suffered. Some actually went up and increased their rankings. So finally after many month of guessing and at some stage heavy discussions we can now relax and get back to blogging, etc. with a leveled out playing field. In my eyes this is great as it makes for a more interesting playing field. Don’t you agree?

Getting a Page Rank is simply a great bonus for me personally, but it won’t stop me from doing what I do anyhow, trying to write good and related content. Meanwhile I will put my head down to think up some creative ideas on non PR related promotions.

Anyway, I congratulate those that managed to grab some PR and for all the others I’d say it is “business as usual”.

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October 26, 2007 By

Minding Your Own Business

When it comes to our online businesses we all have something to say. Some say more than others and yet we don’t always agree with one another. Here is the thing, we don’t need to!

We are after all individuals on a mission to achieve. Some are anyway and for those people the worst thing they can do is to compare themselves to others. Hence the title of this post. You will have to learn to mind your own business and accept that we are and always will be in different stages in life. Even if we pursue the same dream. The dream of getting financially independent via the Internet and all its facets.

There will always be better people than you, more successful and more happy. On the contrary there will also always be those that are a lot worse of and miserable. Those who are slaves to society’s common beliefs.

The sooner we learn to understand this, the better and quicker we can move on. I often come across blogs that seemingly grow overnight and after only 2-3 month they show a huge rise in Alexa, Technorati and sometimes even Google. One of the first reactions most people would have (me included) is to think “how the heck has this person’s blog grown so much while I’m still here trying to get decent rankings after x month.”

Well, I’ve got news for you: how do you know where they come from? And how dare you compare yourself to somebody like that. For all we know, this person might have been working for Technorati, Google or whatever. They might be industry insiders with a huge background in web design and SEO. And here are you, trying to get ahead on the Internet with nothing else but your determination and a certificate as a trained butcher.

Do you get the picture?

If you compare yourself to others, it would be the worst possible thing you could do to yourself and to your business. By the way, that doesn’t mean you cannot compete with those people for higher rankings. It should simply serve you to learn more quicker and play your own strength to your advantages.

What do you think?

Monika

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October 24, 2007 By

Self Hosted WordPress Tutorial Part 2

In the first post of this WordPress Tutorial Series we looked at getting your domain registered and your host set up. So hopefully by now your DNS has propagated and you are ready to set up your domain.

To get started with the next few steps you first will have to log into your Cpanel account. With most hosts you can do this by going to

www.yourdomain.com/cpanel

and then use the login details you were given in the welcome email of your host. Whatever you do, never misplace those, otherwise you might not be able to login again.

The following screen shot will show you how Cpanel admin looks like partially and you will want to look for the “Fantastico” Icon on the bottom left.

wordpress tutorial0

Once you find the Fantastico Icon, click on it and it will open up a new window as seen on the next image

wordpress tutorial1

This is the home view within Fantastico and in the left hand side column you will see “WordPress” under Blogs. It is the 6th one down.

wordpress tutorial2

Click on the WordPress line and it will open up another window. in the next part we need to decide whether we want the blog installed on a sub domain or on the root.

wordpress tutorial3

In this view you can see a title called “New Installation“. It sits just above the yellow text bar I have put into the image so you can find it better.

Click on it!

Now you will have an option as to either install the blog on the root domain, or a sub domain. let me explain what the differences are.

A root domain is when you leave the field empty and therefore it will install the WordPress files onto your domain name. It will read http://www.yourdomain.com

A sub domain means that you still have your original domain as before (like the one you registered but your blog would then sit on an extension and will read

http://www.yourdomain.com/blog to choose this option you will need to input blog into the field of the directory name. Alternatively you could choose something else.

The following is what you will see in the admin section after the last image above.

Install WordPress (1/3)

Installation location

Install on domain: here you should choose the domain you registered with GoDaddy

Install in directory: see notes below

Notes: Leave empty to install in the root directory of the domain (access example: http://domain/). Enter only the directory name to install in a directory (for http://domain/name/ enter name only). This directory SHOULD NOT exist, it will be automatically created!

  • Admin access data
  • Administrator-username (you need this to enter the protected admin area)
  • Password (you need this to enter the protected admin area)
  • Base configuration
  • Admin nickname
  • Admin e-mail (your email address)
  • Site name
  • Description
  • E-mail account configuration
  • E-mail account username
  • E-mail account password
  • POP/SMTP server
  • POP/SMTP server port

Some of the fields above will automatically be populated for you.Others might be filled in by yourself. Just remember to click the Install WordPress Button at the end.

Then in the new window that opens you will see a success message if you did it all right. Also, make sure you send yourself an email with all the installation data and keep it safe. You have an option to do this as well in the new window after you click the Install WordPress Button.

That’s it, you just installed WordPress on a brand new domain and in the next part we will go into changing your theme and uploading files via FTP.

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October 24, 2007 By

Synonymizer WordPress Plugin For Duplicate Content

When it comes to autoblogging or automated blogging, the main concern is the Duplicate Content penalty imposed by Google and other search engines. synonymizerWhen you put up an exact version of someone else’s content, and your site does not rank higher than the other site, chances are Google will not index your content and give you any search engine ranking.

If you’re using publicly available articles, PLR content, RSS to Blog or other automated content generators on a WordPress blog, you always face the problem of duplicate content. To pay someone to make your content unique defeats the purpose of buying PLR content in the first place, since it would be more cost-effective to pay someone to blog for you or write original content.

Anthony Ellis’ new plugin, called Synonymizer, is a WordPress plugin that works just like the more-famous Article Content Spinner. While Article Content Spinner spins the content before you put it up on your site or blog, Synonymizer can spin both existing and future content on your WordPress blog.

Here’s what Synonymizer does:

synonymizer1

  • Replaces words with synonyms (same meaning) – All this happens quite smoothly within your WordPress dashboard itself. Just install and activate the WordPress plugin.
  • Comes with 600 synonyms, you can add more – The more synonyms you add the better, but be careful not to make the content itself a mess.
  • Works on both CURRENT and FUTURE content – This is what I love about Synonymizer, the ability to modify existing content which is already on your WordPress blog. It also automatically modifies future content.
  • Gets you more search engine traffic – Gets you more search engine traffic, and it’s recommended that you make your content at least 30% unique to avoid being flagged as duplicate content

The part I love about this plugin is that it’s so easy to use, and can really make PLR content work without any additional effort once it’s set-up. I will run it on my Health Articles test blog and I’m hoping to see some great results from it.

Anthony Ellis’s WordPress plugins and tools are almost always error-free, and he builds them for simplicity so you can use it even without referring to the manual.

Get it: Synonymizer: Duplicate Content WordPress Plugin

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October 23, 2007 By

What Are Your Intentions with Blogging?

I know, most probably it is to make money – right? If it is, then have you got a plan? See, when starting out on any blog it is helpful to have a plan in order to help us move along. Admittedly the plan can be changed along the way, but if there is no plan it means no revenue.

I’m using my own blog to become a well known blogger and freelance writer and hopefully one day I will earn enough money to be financially free. That is the plan and currently I’m right on track with the Intention of quitting my twice a week day job for good by July 2008. Ideally would be to help my husband quit his job for good too, but that’s a story in the making I guess and if I don’t at least try, then I’ll never know.

But doing this isn’t the only plan I have. I also have a backup plan. Actually several. One of them is to develop my own products and the other is to use niche marketing (not IM related) to earn residual income.

I know that as a writer I won’t be earning residual income and neither will I as a blogger. Unless of course I’ll get traffic like TechCrunch and earn tons of money from advertising. Then I could employ other writers and make a guest appearance every now and then whilst focusing on building my empire.

With the growth of the Internet it is very much possible for any of us to achieve such a rate of success.

dollar house1

But in order to get there you will need a plan. And then stick to it. At least until your honeymoon period has passed (3-6 month) and you are well on your way to become a regular and consistent blogger.

Any blog that consists of good written content cannot do no worse than attracting at least some decent advertisers in the long run due to its growth and Page Rank. Even if Google ever got rid of PR the blog would still grow to be an authority in its field as most bloggers will give up eventually.

If you have a plan, then why not share it with all of us here in the comments section? I would love to hear yours.

Monika

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October 22, 2007 By

WordPress.com Vs WordPress.org

Despite many millions of bloggers being on the net every day, thousands more enter the Internet every day. Those folks are still confused about the difference between the Free WordPress.com version and the WordPress.org version.

WordPress.com Vs WordPress.org – Which version should you choose?

So in this post I’ll try to explain the difference in both and what can and can’t be done. Let’s get started with WordPress.com. It is a free open source software that allows us to start a blog for free without hosting. The benefits of this is that anybody can start a blog within minutes and start posting instantly after verification has been completed.

But what many bloggers don’t realize is that they cannot use WordPress.com to blog about anything related to making money. This includes writing reviews for sites such as Pay Per Post, Review Me, affiliate programs, Google ads and more. If they catch you doing this (and they will eventually) they will shut you down in an instant. If you are lucky they will let you download the blog to your hard drive before they shut you down so you can reuse your posts for another blog.

The free WordPress platform also doesn’t allow us to integrate WordPress plugins. You can read some more about this on Lorelle’s Blog.WordPress.com is simply a great platform to blog about our everyday life without monetary intent.

Alternatively, if we want to make money from our blog (and most people do) we need to hop over to WordPress.org and download their software. Don’t worry, it is free too.

If you are considering this, then you will need a domain name and a host. If you are totally lost now, then help is at hand with my new series of Self Hosted WordPress Tutorials.

You will learn step by step on setting up your self hosted blog and be on your way within days from reading.

WordPress.org will give you the freedom and flexibility to do whatever you wish with your site. Since you will be paying for a domain name and hosting, you will be the master of your own destiny.

WordPress, whether free or self hosted is certainly not the only way to go, but for me it is the number one choice when it comes to blogging because of the versatility.

So, WordPress.com Vs WordPress.org – which one do you choose?

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