January 31, 2008 By

Netizens Media Advertising Network by Lim CS

netizens-mediaLim CS from WebmasterMalaysia.com alerted me a few days ago to his new advertiisng network, scheduled to launch soon.

According to their blog:

We have a lot of ambitious goals of revolutionize the online advertising scene, with the final goal of beating Google (hmm). You must think we are crazy – and you are right. We are.

Lim CS is a Malaysian with extensive knowledge on SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Recently I approached him to do some SEO for my sites but Lim said he doesn’t do SEO anymore and want to focus instead on building his advertising network.

More Info: www.netizensmedia.com

Filed Under: make money online, Website Reviews Tagged With: ,
January 31, 2008 By

Video Blogs Where Are They?

I spend a lot of time online every day. Between my freelance writing work and blogging I also read a lot of blogs online. A year ago I firmly believed that video blogging would become the next thing for bloggers on the net but now I have to say that perhaps I had it all wrong.

As far as I know, there are hardly any video bloggers out there and yet video sites like video.google and youtube are growing like mad with people submitting their videos as if they were paid to do so.

So what happened? Why hasn’t video blogging taken off? Don’t we love recording our life for the world to see – judging by the success of formerly mentioned sites and reality programs we do. So how come bloggers don’t bother with having a purely video content blog were they record a span of their life for others to see?

I don’t know these answers and can only speculate. Personally I don’t like to have every person in the world taking a seat on my couch to see what’s happening in the Mundell household. Privacy levels differ between blogging and video blogging. When we record a video we also show every emotion we feel at the time.

But by blogging we can be madly upset, stark naked, happy as chum or silly and nobody would ever know.

So, why have you not considered video blogging?

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , ,
January 31, 2008 By

Bloghology, An Anthology of Bloggers by Mert Erkal

bloghology Bloghology is a collection of bloggers, their profiles, photos, and links to their best posts. It is a PDF e-book which can be easily circulated throughout the blogosphere for personal branding and marketing of selected good quality bloggers.

Mert Erkal has been working on this for months now, and I’m glad he finally launched it. I’ve read Bloghology before and from what I saw, this is more of a “coffee-table” kind of e-book which you can read for leisure, but it doesn’t talk about anything in specific.

I think Mert will be coming up wit his second edition in a few months, so if you want your interview to be included do contact him and submit the necessary info. If you have a blog, you can use the Bloghology buttons to show your support for the project.

More interesting was the poem I fund on Mert’s blog, which really made me laugh:

Empty spaces – what are we blogging for
Abandoned places – I guess we know the Alexa score
On and on, does anybody know what we are looking for(traffic?)…

Another blogger, another mindless crime
Behind the curtain, in the pantomime
Hold the (ADSL) line, does anybody want to take it anymore
The show must go on,
The show must go on

Inside my heart is breaking
My make-up (theme) may be flaking
But my smile :) still stays on.
Whatever happens, I’ll leave it all to chance
Another heartache, another failed (link exchange) romance

On and on, does anybody know what we are blogging for?

I guess I’m learning, I must be a problogger now
I’ll soon be turning, round the corner now
Outside the dawn is breaking
But inside in the dark I’m trying to promote for free
The show must go on

My blog is painted like the wings of butterflies
Fairy-tales of yesterday will grow but never die
My blog can fly – my friends
The show must go on!

More info: Bloghology

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: ,
January 31, 2008 By

Is Internet Marketing Dying?

Perhaps I got up on the wrong side of bed today, but I kept asking myself a question: “Is Internet marketing dying?”

Of course the possibility of making money online by itself will stay alive forever, but what I mean is selling stuff in the “How to make money online” market.

Some of the issues I’m concerned about:

  1. There are no real new products left to buy, just spin-offs and remakes of the same products we bought 2 years ago
  2. Paypal is still top, Clickbank is still top, Google is still top
  3. Internet marketers are getting more arrogant by the day – now its “You want me to promote your products? Then promote mine first!” attitude.
  4. No one seems to care about putting up good products anymore, all they care about is the system of making money – the OTOs, downsells, upsells.
    • Reminds me of the MLM industry where are the products are usually overpriced crap but the entire selling point is about how much money you can make when your network reaches 10,000 people.
  5. Almost all new social media / social networking seems to target established bloggers, and work the best for them. How about the little guy…

Anyways, just some food for thought. I haven’t been posting here regularly, and I will let you know why in the next post.

Filed Under: General Tagged With:
January 30, 2008 By

Video That Helps Install WP Locally

I wrote a post last year on how to install WordPress locally on your hard drive. The benefit of this is that you can tamper with your theme and plugins until you are happy to go live. It is a huge benefit to your readers, since they won’t be distracted by changing presentations.

To help those who are still somewhat confused about this issue, it might be beneficial to check out the video below. It walks you through the steps necessary to install WordPress on your local hard drive.

Hope you’ll like it.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , ,
January 30, 2008 By

A Typical Example of Why You Need Self Hosting

An acquaintance I met in a forum has recently asked the question on how to best move her blog from being a free WordPress blog to a self hosted one instead. The lady in question has been blogging on her free WordPress blog for 18 month before she realized that she needed to go self hosted in order to make money.

self-hosted-blogs.jpg

She soon enough realized that all the hard work she had previously put into her blog to build backlinks were lost to her because she lost them all when she did the move. As free WordPress blogs don’t allow for a 301 redirect (apparently), where we could permanently redirect traffic from the old to the new blog, she had to forfeit the lot as well as her Technorati and Alexa ranking.

How many of you use free WordPress blogs?

Perhaps you need to clearly define on why you are actually blogging right now.

  • Is it to sell affiliate products
  • Maybe you are thinking of launching your own product
  • Or else you want to build niche sites that earn money with Adsense

All these ideals have one thing in common. That one thing is the fact that you CANNOT use your free WordPress.com blog to sell anything from it. If you have, it only means that you got away with it so far – but before long you will be terminated and that’s it. You will wake up one day and find that all your hard work for month is gone.

Here comes self hosted blogging

Self hosted blogging is the solution to all your blogging needs that involve making money with WordPress. Please note that I’m not including blogger blogs because you can use them too. But since this is a WordPress oriented blog I wanted to keep the focus on WordPress.

When you go self hosted right from the start you’ll have plenty of room to grow. You will never have issues with not being able to earn money from or with your blog or being terminated because you do.

The other thing is that self hosted blogs can be hosted for as little as $5/month with some hosting companies.

I do however strongly suggest that you are using a well respected hosting provider and pay a little more. I’ve heard a few horror stories lately from friends who got shafted by their little known host because they were hoping to save a dollar or two every month.

Dedication matters

I don’t buy into the excuse of not having enough money for hosting and running a business anymore. After all, even if we are strapped for cash we still manage to buy coffee, cinema tickets, alcohol, smokes, occasional dinners and more.

If you are serious about the longevity of your business, then dedication starts by giving up on those little luxuries (if you have to financially) and pay for hosting and other essential business tools instead.

You will do yourself a huge favor and if you throw in some stickability with this, then you can afford all the luxuries you want in the future.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , ,
January 29, 2008 By

The Right And Wrong Ways to Link

Linking is big business for all bloggers. After all we all want to have plenty of incoming links to rank better in search engines. And for those of you who think that linking to a competitor the right way is damaging for you, think again.

Not many bloggers actually have the knowledge on how to rank well for any chosen keyword. Their futile attempts of getting better placement with Google is often lost because many parts of the equation are missing.

linking

For starters, to rank well not only do we need to use keywords well, but we also need plenty of incoming links that count. If you link to another blogger with the words click here or read more here or Monika wrote this, you are not doing this blogger a favour. Unless of course you are spammer and don’t give two hoots.

Likewise if others link to you this way you won’t get credit from the search engines for any keywords except the crappy (link here version). To climb the ranks of Google you need valuable incoming links which use your chosen keyword as a hyperlink. If the site linking to you is in a related field and carries some page rank, then even better for you.

This is very important and gets overlooked by most bloggers all around the net. It is time that we start linking the right way to others just as we would prefer ourselves. By giving more than hoping to receive, we will get back tenfold. But not only that, bloggers will slowly learn how to link to others properly instead of using crappy hyperlink text.

Just to make this clear, if you were to link to my Manifesto blog I would prefer that you use “Freelance Writing” as the hyperlink since that is the keyword I’m targeting to rank in Google.

If you are not sure what the blogger you are linking to prefers, you can always ask or get clues by reading his/her posts.

It also helps to use your preferred keyword when making blog comments. I used to write Monika @ The Writers Manifesto Blog but had to change this since I realized how important it is to try to rank for a keyword. Now people everywhere know me by this name which is ok for me as a person but does nothing at all for my rank.

Never mind, I have learned my lesson and I hope you have learnt yours too.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , , ,
January 25, 2008 By

Argumentation Behaviour

Arguments are part of live. They can actually be very healthy for relationships as long as they stay in context. The problems with arguments start when people start to become abusive and hurt each other intentionally. So how do we deal with this kind of situation as a blogger?

Bloggers are normally quite behaved in regards to arguments. But having said that, I’ve seen a disturbing trend of bloggers starting to use abusive language while blogging. Sometimes they even go as far as directly insulting others about their beliefs, behaviours and the way they write.

Are we on the verge of becoming swearing fffing this and that or are we bloggers that only feel too comfortable to adopt to the language of a certain blogger when we are one of the regulars hanging out? Does a swearing blogger give us permission to drop all our own values (whatever they may be) and swear too, or are these people merely individuals who know nothing else?

Let’s remember that arguments can be beneficial to any relationship, but they should be done with respect for each other. Once the respect goes, there is no hope for peace.

So please, next time you are having an argument try to acknowledge the person opposite you by:

  • Respecting him/her as an individual entity
  • Acknowledging that their opinion is just as valuable as ours, even if we don’t agree
  • Refrain from dishing out nasty swear words (the world has already plenty of them)
  • Giving the other person chance to say what’s on their mind too
  • Not attacking them for a weakness (we all have them)
  • Shaking his /her hand when you are done and saying thank you

Maybe you have something to add like your own opinion or tip on how to stay human whilst having an argument.

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , ,
January 25, 2008 By

How To Get Blog Traffic from StumbleUpon

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With all the hype about social bookmarking these days, it’s near impossible to separate the myths from the facts.

Myth: Use social bookmarking, it’s sooo easy to get tons of traffic

Fact: It’s not easy but done the right way, you can get a lot of traffic

stumbleupon StumbleUpon is a great way to get huge amounts of traffic to your site, web 2.0 style – as long as it’s done right. Daniel Scocco from Daily Blog Tips got over 140,000 visits in 7 days to a single blog post titled Top 6 Bizarre Online Gaming Incidents

It’s not a fluke either, as Daniel consistently gets a few thousands SU visitors to a lot of his blog posts. If there’s anyone out there qualified to teach you how to get StumbleUpon traffic, Daniel’s the man.

Listen in to the podcast where I interview Daniel about his secret tactics on getting traffic from StumbleUpon. You can also download and read the PDF transcript, or read the shorter, condensed version below.

You will get the most out of this interview if you actually register for a StumbleUpon account first, install the toolbar, and then follow along as you read / listen in.

Lastly, practice makes perfect! Don’t forget to click on “Stumble It” at the bottom of this blog post and write a short review about this blog post or at least give it the “Thumbs-Up” in the toolbar, since you liked it that much :)

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Free Tips Tagged With: , , ,
January 24, 2008 By

Streamyx Problems Connecting to International Sites

As much as I’d like to keep today’s free teleseminar on schedule, it seems that the Streamyx connection in my area (Sunway) is very bad. According to Streamyx support, this problem only effects access to sites outside Malaysia but I’m not sure how true this is. InternetMillionaires.com.my is also hosted in Malaysia but I seem to be having problems access the blog admin and other parts of the site.

According to the Streamyx support, this issue should be solved by midnight today but I am not taking any chances since the teleseminar service is hosted outside Malaysia, and the last thing I want is to be disconnected every few minutes. A new date will be announced as soon as possible.

So we’ll have to wait till the connection is smooth again. Are you experiencing any problems?

Filed Under: General Tagged With: