November 30, 2007 By

Get Protected, Copyright Your Blog Feed

Blog content theft is everywhere. Spammers are using blog feed URLs and showing someone blog’s articles as their content. You loose your blog content prestige, fame, links and many more. Fighting against this plagiarism is very important.

To overcome this mayhem, Quick Online Tips has made a new plugin called Simple Feed Copyright. Simple Feed Copyright adds a simple copyright statement at the end of your blog posts’ feed and help you against getting your content stolen.

Pros:

  • Helps you to protect your blog content
  • Makes easier to track content thieves
  • Helps you make credit links from the thief’s blog

Cons:

  • No advanced functionality
  • Sometimes clashes with SpamKarma plugin if you use it

Simple Feed Copyright is a really effective and fast way to make your blog and its content more secure and accessible on the Internet. This plugin is highly recommended if you blog good ;) !

Simple Feed Copyright Plugin

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November 30, 2007 By

Your One Day Plan

Most people who get into Internet marketing, do so either because they lost their jobs or can’t find one. Or else they are looking for a way out of their current work situation like I did. Either way, they need the money desperately and they need it TODAY. As a result, when nothing happens right away, they get into a panic.

Many people just don’t have that kind of long term commitment that is needed to succeed online, so they give up.

It is often overwhelming to soak up all the info we read and ingest daily. We get information overload very quickly and burn out.

In order to keep that from happening, you MUST take things one day at a time. And there is a way to do it…a way that I wish I knew about when I first started out. Today, I am going to share this simple system with you.

The first thing you have to do is decide what it is you’re going to do to make money online. After you’ve done that, and you’ve gotten all your ducks in a row, realistically sit down and decide how much you’d like to make after 1 week. Then project out for 1 month. After you see what your numbers are like, see if you can improve on them for month number 2. Keep your initial numbers modest so that you have a chance of reaching them. Trust me, you’ll get less discouraged this way.

Over time, what you are going to find is that your income will slowly increase every month until it reaches a point where it seems to level off. That’s where you’ll know that you’ve reached the point where you’re not going to make any more money from your business until you either put more money into it, such as advertising, or branch out and do something else. At that point in time, you’ll have to decide which direction you want to head in.

By keeping your goals modest at the start and by taking it one day at a time, you’ll find that it will be easier for you to keep at it. And the longer you keep at it, the better your chance for success.

Monika

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November 29, 2007 By

Do You Really Care About PageRank?

Come on, out with the truth. Do you or do you not care about the world’s most feared little green bar, PageRank?

Some people check their Pagerank everyday, especially those hoping on using it to get better rates for their advertising, text links and paid review. Others gave up trying to figure it out a long time ago and instead focus on looking at the numbers that matter – traffic and ROI.

So do you, or do you not? No in-betweens. Take the poll.

[poll=2]

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November 29, 2007 By

10,400 Blog Subscribers Without Using RSS

At ProfitBlogger.com, I’ve never intended to use an RSS subscription service like Feedburner to gather readership. Instead, from day one I preferred to build an optin email list using Aweber and it’s blog broadcast feature to build a pre-web2.0 styled ezine. To do this I offer a free Super Adsense Theme and 2 free chapters from WordPress Adsense System.

ewp-subscriber-stats

To send our ezines automatically / semi-automatically, I use Aweber and their “Blog Broadcast” feature. Done properly, this works just as well as Feedburner or any other “subscribe to RSS by email” service.

Last week, the number of ProfitBlogger Ezine Subscribers reached 10,200. Pure RSS feed subscribers via Feedburner measured only 303. These have to be users who know where to find and how to subscribe to our RSS feed, simply because we do not publish a “Subscribe by RSS” or “Subscribe by Feedburner” link anywhere on ProfitBlogger.com

We collect leads and send out weekly / bi-weekly ezines to all our subscribers, and it’s been working really well fro this blog at least. We do not depend on search engine traffic, although we do get our fair share of it.

But why don’t we use RSS subscription solely on our blogs, like John Chow or Problogger.net? The answer is simple:

  • This is not just a blog; we have a forum, a directory, and soon a subscription-based video tutorials site for beginners. We have a few RSS feeds, and I don’t want to scatter my traffic everywhere.
  • We do not depend on advertising income (Adsense or banner ads). Since we do not do it the “John Chow way”, there’s really no reason to aim for a high PR 6 or to show off the number of RSS subscribers to would-be advertisers. We do not need to cramp 8 banners into our sidebar :)
  • We no not do paid posts or reviews for example ReviewMe.com or PayPerPost.com. So again, there’s no need to impress advertisers. We do reviews to make money from affiliate products, not from the reviews themselves.
  • We target a different market. Personally I was “thought” in the direct marketing field of Internet marketing. I believe in all sales pages and selling information products using direct Internet marketing, with affiliates, offline marketing and the whole shebang. My target market (blogging beginners) do not even know about RSS readers or how to use an RSS feed until they have at least bought the WordPress Adsense System. So, I use the best medium to reach them – email!

We simply chose a different path by creating products, and getting traffic to those products. We get lesser traffic, but target that traffic to an income source which delivers over 2,000 constantly in product sales, and over 2,100 in affiliate sales.

Even the John Chow “gang” have recently started to offer free ebook downloads in return for a name and email, something which they themselves would have considered “old school” and “repulsive” a few months ago. Needless to say in the herd mentality when one high-profile person does it, everyone follows without thinking twice.

If you have a blog, and want to make money online, do it your way. It’s ok to test what others are doing, but don’t force yourself to use methods that may not work well for you.

Advantages of Using Ezines Instead of RSS:

  • You get 100% control of your subscribers, and can send them other emails not intended for your blog
  • You get to send out 5 or 8 or any amount of recent blog posts together instead of daily updates like Feedburner does
  • You get to format your emails properly and even include other affiliate links or ads

Disadvantages of Using Ezines Instead of RSS:

  • You cannot show off readership easily to would-be-advertisers
  • You cannot command a higher price of paid review services like ReviewMe or PayPerPost (you can always sell reviews yourself with OIO Publisher)
  • You cannot command a higher price for Text Link Ad sale (you can always sell links yourself with OIO Publisher or the WP Text Ads plugin)

I do not recommend that you try to get optin subscribers AND build RSS subscribers at the same time. Just focus on building one source of readership, and it will be more than enough.

Basically, if you want to make money from Google Adsense, Text Link Ads, and other forms of advertising, build a RSS readership base. If you want to make money from your own products or affiliate products, use Aweber and build an optin list instead.

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November 29, 2007 By

Lucia's Link Love Plugin

Lucia’s Link Love Plugin is a great way for WordPress bloggers to show some love to their most frequent commenter’s. What I really like abut this one is the fact that I can set the time when a commenter’s link becomes a “do follow” link.

Traditionally all WordPress blogs have inbuilt rel=”nofollow” attributes. What this means is that search engines don’t get to crawl the links with these attributes attached. Your link will still send traffic to the sites, but they won’t see an incoming link from you. In essence it is a self preserving safety mechanism that protects bloggers from becoming an unknown link farm.

But using “no follow” also has its disadvantages since many bloggers only comment on blogs that have the “do follow” attribute installed most often done with a Plugin. So it could potentially stop you from getting comments on your blog. There is a whole trend with bloggers that use the “do follow” attribute because they want to give back to their readers. But it also has its drawbacks.

For example, you might get more spam comments or even more sblog ( spam blogs) trackbacks if you are using do follow. But one good thing is that with Lucia’s Link Love Plugin you have some measure of control.

Here are the main benefits:

  1. It encourages good comments from regular readers
  2. It helps to encourage links to your blog
  3. Inbuilt security with peace of mind
  4. You can control extra long URLs by excluding them from do follow
  5. More overall control opposed to traditional do follow Plugin
  6. Allows you to set a number between 3-10 of when a link does become do follow

As with all good things, there is always a negative side to it because there are some people who just can’t resist to ruin a good thing.

Negatives:

  1. The main point would be that you might get more spam comments trying to slip through the net. All though I have found this to be no problem myself since I swapped to this Plugin on my own blog.
  2. Giving our more links from your blog

If you are interested in having a go at this Plugin, then you can click to download.

Below is a screen shot of the admin section and to read about the installation go directly to the site.

image

It is entirely your own choice of whether you like to adapt to the do follow movement or not. I guess I did and I’m happy for now. But that is not to say that I might change this in the future depending on the effect it has for my SEO.

Monika

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November 28, 2007 By

Don't Forget to Backup Your Online Business

image

I had to post this as it might prevent some annoying issues for some of you. Yesterday I lost something…something that is essential to my online success and essential for my work. So what have I lost that is so important?

Well it was…the Internet!

You can stop laughing now, it isn’t a joke and I tell you what happened. I was browsing the net with Firefox as I always do and read about some cool add-ons that might be useful for myself. So following the advice I downloaded them and then.

Nothing!

Without warning, my browser died and no matter which first aid I applied, it didn’t work. All I heard was the beep beep beep of the machine but that was about it.

As you can imagine I panicked, and you know why? Because I was silly enough to uninstall IE some month ago and that silly mistake left me without any browser to access…the Internet!

So guess what, I was a prisoner to my own mistake and I had to find a way to fix it fast. Luckily I had a backup copy on an external hard drive and this allowed me to get a new version installed.

I suppose that either of these add-ons was corrupted which made my browser really sick to the point of dying.

The moral of this story is simple really. Always back up whatever you have, do and save! I know this isn’t breaking news, but we simply tend to take things for granted when they work seamlessly without thinking about the consequences of when they don’t.

Hopefully this will animate you to act now and prepare for when unexpected stuff ups happen.

Monika

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November 27, 2007 By

What Is Your Blog's Main Source of Income?

One mistake most bloggers make is to think that the only way to make money is to be a better John Chow, or at least a “John Cow”. In truth, Adsense, text links and advertising is not the only way to make money blogging.

[poll=1]

Take this poll, tell us what your blog’s main income source is, and see the overall results. I choose “Affiliate Programs”. Even though I do make money from selling my own products, affiliate income has recently become the number one earner for me.

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November 27, 2007 By

Advantages of Blogging Through WordPress

Blogging through WordPress gives us bloggers so many extra opportunities compared to blogger dot com for example. I have used both Blogger and WordPress for a while now and every time I’m inclined to start blogging on yet another new blog, WordPress is my choice.

blogging

Probably the main advantage of blogging with WordPress is the fact that I can upload the software to my own domain. Blogger is ok if you are blogging in a niche and using adsense and maybe affiliate marketing as your main source of income.

But you will never really own the blog with Blogger and in my eyes that is too risky for me if I invest a lot of time into blogging.

Many bloggers get held back to start with their own domain because they are afraid of setting up WordPress on their own domain.

If you are still unsure about doing this, you might want to start here:

I blogged about setting up WordPress on a domain a little while ago and these tutorials should get you up an running. I have planned to write some more tutorials in the near future on setting up sub domains etc too.

Having a blog on a stand alone domain makes blogging simply more fun since we can sleep at night without worrying that we could loose it all in an instant.

For those bloggers who are looking to make the transition from Blogger to WordPress, I can highly recommend this as it will make your blogging experience a more versatile and fun one.

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November 27, 2007 By

Find Blogs With No-Follow Removed and Get PageRank

A lot of my subscribers have been asking me the same question: “How do I find blogs with the no-follow attribute removed?”

They want to comment on blogs (proper comments I may add) but they feel their time would be better spent if they can somehow find blogs in their niche market that rewards them for doing so, in terms of passing PageRank. If a blog imposes a “no-follow” on comments, it tells search engines not to follow the links on the comments section, and not to pass any PageRank to them.

A lot of blog owners do this with rather basic reasons:

  • They have no idea what no-follow is or the fact that it’s already there on their blogs by default
  • They don’t want to attract spam comments or “PageRank hunters”
  • They don’t want to lose their precious PageRank to others and keep it all to themselves

Personally this blog still has a no-follow tag for reason number 2. I’m not sure if I can cope with the comments by PR-hunters if I remove them, although I do plan to at least try this soon.

But some blogs actually remove the “no-follow” tag attribute, either manually or by using a specific theme or plugin. These blogs are sometimes terms “do-follow” blogs, a coined term to mean the opposite of no-follow. (The actual “do-follow” codes themselves can’t be found in the coding, it’s either you have a “no-follow” or you remove it)

The question is how to find them.

John Leger has a $1 video that shows you to do exactly that and you can get it here. Then, he also offers a list of blogs he’s personally researched that have removed the no-follow attribute from their comments section.

It’s a simple technique really, but in respect for someone else’s intellectual property I’d rather ask you to pay the $1.00 for access to the video instead of listing it here, especially since I didn’t know of this before I watched the video itself.

See: Find Blogs With No-Follow Removed

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November 26, 2007 By

Blog Traffic That Works

When I started my own blog a little over 6 month ago I had enough of spending money to drive traffic to my site. Previously to getting serious with blogging I dabbled for 2.5 years in network marketing and my monthly advertising budget was around $1500. Guess how much money I burned.

But this is history and therefore I didn’t want to and couldn’t spend any money to attract blog visitors. I had to think up other avenues to do this cost free and that’s exactly what I did.

To this day I haven’t spend a penny on my site for advertising and I don’t intend to in the near future either. Instead, I like to show you how I managed to get around 600 visitors a day to my blog after 6+ month.

image

This is certainly nothing flash, but I’m actually very happy with my stats so far as they are progressively moving upwards.

So let’s look at ways you can use to drive traffic to your blog without spending dime. The following methods are the same I used and still work well now.

  1. Forum participation – when I started out again back in April I visited at least 3 forums every day on a regular basis. This in essence is what kicked of the traffic to my site. I made sure to comment in each forum at least 5 times and was also making sure that my comments were helpful and valuable for the others. Please don’t visit forums to spam.
  2. Press releases – they are an often under looked form of free advertising and work quite well. But not every press release platform works the same and in this case it is hit and miss.
  3. Article submission – I used to submit articles to the big article submission sites such as Ezine Articles and Go Articles plus some others. This allowed me to place an author box at the end of the actual article and also brought me some good traffic.
  4. (Social Media) – I used to self promote on these which I know know is a bad idea and not kindly taken to on those sites. I have since taken a total different approach and help others to promote their site instead. The results have been astounding. I’m getting more and more incoming links who blog about me these days than ever before. So even it isn’t advertising, it can also help you with traffic.
  5. Commenting on other blogs – this has by far been my most effective method. Again, I don’t just write “great post” and then leave, but try to add some valuable comment that helps the discussion instead.

That’s it for me. I have to warn you though. I spend around 3.5 hours/day on commenting, reading and submitting to social media so it is a big slice out of my day. But it works for me and I happen to love what I do.

Naturally these are only but a few ways to get blog readers and they aren’t suitable for everyone.

What you should try to remember is that regardless of what you do, do it regularly and you will see results.

If you’d like to add to the conversation and tell us what free methods have worked well for you, then please do so in the comments section.

Thank you for stopping by

Monika

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