Archive for February, 2011

Revision Delete!

I’ve found another useful little plugin that has just halved the database space used by one of my larger blogs!

It is called Revision Delete! It is quite simple to use and install and I am using it in partnership with Revision Diet. What the Revision Diet plugin is to delete extra revisions.

For example, if you save 10 updates of the post as you are writing it then they are all saved on your database. If you realise you have made a mistake, you can roll back to an earlier save. But this means there is a lot of space used. So Revision Diet deletes the extra revisions, allowing you to just maintain enough revisions in case you have to roll back a mistake.

However, once you have finished updating the post why do you need the revisions? That is where Revision Delete! comes in. You can set it to delete the revisions of old posts and by doing so you really tidy up the database, the space that it uses and hopefully your access time.

You probably could just use Revision Delete on its own if you wanted to, but for maximum tidiness, I like to use both of them.

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A Good Looking Idea, Not Quite There

The last time I wrote I was talking about signing up to postlinks.com and the account problems. Still no joy, but a bit more understanding.

The problem, it transpires, is that there is a check not only on the authority of the userid you have given them, but also the user name. They told me that I had to give them the access details to the userid Admin for the system to authorise me!

It was not explained if I could change the logon details once validated, but the issue I have is that I prefer not to set up blogs with a userid of Admin. But that is what they want.

It is a basic security step to use a user name other than “Admin”. If you use Admin then hackers only have to guess at your password. Use a different user name and they then have to guess both the user name and the password in the same attempt. Combine that with the Limit Login Attempts plugin and you are protecting yourself from brute force attacks.

Hopefully, as postlinks.com is a new system they will soon realise that not every blog uses a user name of Admin and accept a variation of other names. But until then I’m stuck, unable to validate my blog.

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I was sent an email this afternoon with the tempting title ‘New Service to Monetize WordPress Blogs’ advertising postlinks.com. It looks quite good, however, I have a problem with it.

I’ve signed up and added one of my WordPress blogs. That bit went very well and there is a plugin to add to your blog, to do something that isn’t fully explained. You also set up a new user within the blog and tell the system the details. It has to be an Author or an Admin, so I created an Admin. Why? Well I’m not giving an external service full access to my blog, but an Author has enough privileges to be able to add and maintain its own posts.

Then comes the time to verify / validate the blog (they use both words) and start earning and that is when it went wrong. I clicked on validate and the system said that I needed to create the userid as an Author or an Admin. However, I checked and I had.

So I’ve got no idea what to do to get going on the system. A shame, it looks like a good idea as you get paid monthly for every link that they post as either a brand new post, a content link from a post or from a comment link. How much depends on the blog’s PR, but every little helps.

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Some people will fret over adding a Pay Per Post site wide disclosure to their site. It sounds difficult and complicated, but it isn’t.

The purpose of a disclosure is to ensure that American regulations are kept. Whether this affects you if you are not a US citizen and not blogging from the US (like me) is open to debate, but systems like Pay Per Post insist that all blogs have a disclosure.

They are quite simple. All you are saying is that you do write paid posts, but your posting is always based on your own opinions. For example, take a look at my own disclosure that reads:

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post may not always be identified as paid or sponsored content.

The owner(s) of this blog is compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers’ own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.

To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org

Quite easy! Just copy and paste something along those lines onto a page of your blog and ensure that page is linked to from every post you write.

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This Week You Have Been Reading

What pages have other visitors to this blog found the most interesting this week? Which pages are you most likely to be here to read?

Making Money From A Blog
So everyone is interested in setting up a blog and earning money from blogging. Well I have no problem with that as a large percentage of bloggers are doing just that, along with me over on my other blogs. Find out what I, and other bloggers, do to earn some extra cash!

Setting Up A Blog On An Existing Site
Quite interesting that this is a popular page, but it also seems that another popular page is about setting up a blog on your website. Do you already have a website and are wondering how to add a blog to that, or convert it to a blog?

Voucher Code Websites
A good use of a blog is affiliate selling and setting up a voucher code blog is a simple and effective way of doing just that. And a lot of you are reading it!

Where To Get Paid Posting Work
This was a quick summary of different paid to post schemes, but I am glad to see that lots of people are reading it. All I will say it is an honest assessment of some of the schemes that I have worked with. Almost a 5 month old page, but I still back what I said there (and there’s a link on that page to a newer version of the information).

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Some people think that pre written Adsense blogs are a great money spinner. But to be honest, they are not and if you want to run a blog the easy way, you still can. Why are they so bad and what is the alternative?

You have probably seen plenty of the adverts offering you a complete blog with a variety of themes to choose from along with loads of content. It sounds like a great offer and an easy way to make some extra cash, but it is far from that. The main problem is that the content you are publishing is duplicate. You and loads of other blog owners are hosting the same material and the theme might even have a link back to the seller’s website, just to make sure they get the benefit of your work.

All of this duplicated content is picked up by the search engines and they quickly notice the plethora of blogs displaying the same articles. And when the search engines apply their filters, you are left without any traffic on your website. So, what is the alternative for the automated blog?

The alternative that works
Well you are left doing a lot of the work yourself, but even with an off the shelf package, that was still the case. In either case you are left trying to optimise the website and getting more traffic onto the website, the only difference is now you also need to provide some content.

But that is not all that difficult. There are plenty of systems that you can sign up to and be sent plenty of free guest posts to publish on your blog, maybe even automatically publishing them. Some systems will even send you multiple posts per day, so you quickly build up a huge stock of fresh content on a day by day basis.

And best of all, these posts are unique and written specially for your blog. You are not at risk of being found to be hosting duplicate content and the penalties that go with it. And all that these guest bloggers require is a couple of links back to their blog.

Why do they do this?
In return the guest bloggers want some “link juice” and maybe some traffic. They want to be placing their posts on blogs that have some sort of Google PageRank and some relevant traffic. So you really do need to build both of these to get the best results, but there are still guest blogging sites that will provide you with plenty of posts, for free, even if you are a brand new blog.

So do not pay for a pre written Adsense Blog. Just set up a simple WordPress site with a theme of your choice and then sign up to publish guest posts. Much more effective!

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It might sound totally daft, but by the simple process of reviewing your traffic logs you really can increase the traffic to your blog. What are you looking for and what do you do to increase traffic?

When we are talking about increasing website traffic we can increase it in two totally separate ways. The first is by increasing the number of new visitors to the site and the second is by increasing the number of pages each of your visitors are looking at. Both aspects will increase your overall visitor count.

What are your popular posts?
So we pander to the search engines and to new visitors alike in the first stage of the process. Look through your traffic logs and see which posts visitors have been looking at the most recently. You might want to look back over the last 7 days or the last month, it is up to you and really just depends on what levels of traffic you have and the how current your posts are.

Then simply write a post that talks about the top 5 or so posts by traffic and link to each of these posts. It is a simple trick. but new visitors arriving on your website will see it and be directed to some of the best content on offer. You might like to make the post ‘sticky’ so that it is always at the top of the home page, or write a new such post often or even a combination of the two (for example, write it each week and leave that week’s post as the sticky post).

Why does this help?
And what does this do for the search engines? Well you are also directing the search engines to your most popular posts. You are making sure that they can always find your best traffic posts. This works because not all search engines give the same results.

Time to review your work
At the same time look at your most popular posts. Actually open them and review them to see what they are saying. Are there any other posts on your blog, maybe written since that post, that explain part of the post in more detail? If so (and especially if the detailed post is not getting a lot of traffic) link to the detailed post. This is having the same double effect – search engines are being helped to find the posts that you want them to find and real visitors are being guided around your blog in the direction of where they can find more information. And by starting on popular posts, you know that a lot of people are reading these.

Sort high exit pages
Also, if you are using a statistics tool that shows exit pages, you can do the same trick there. Look at the high exit pages and see if you can suggest further reading from them to other posts. If you can’t then there is an idea for a new post! See if you can reduce those exits and give readers something else to ponder!

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Filling your website with plenty of Adsense blocks might seem to be the easiest way of making a lot of money through clicks, but too much Adsense can quickly become a bad idea. When is too much just too much for your blog and when should you reduce your Adsense blocks?

As a newcomer to Adsense it is easy to fall for the trick of putting every available advertising block onto your blog. You could go for the maximum – three large content blocks, three link blocks and a search box. But once you fit these to your screen, no doubt along with some other money making schemes such as affiliate links and paid adverts, your blog screams out that it is just there to turn your visitors into cash.

This means that they are likely to not have confidence in your blog and may even just hit the back button straight away, without even reading it. The initial impression is not that of a professional site but that of a blogger desperate to make a quick buck.

How many is not too many?
So too many blocks of adverts will put readers straight off your site and reduce your visitor rate and thereby reduce your income. But, how many can you get away with?

The secret is to use the available space well. Typically you will find that two blocks of advertising will fit in with a blog layout and leave it still looking professional. And whilst this might not sound much, you really can get away with a lot of adverts in this space.

Successful placement
Remember that the people most likely to click on advertising are not those that are avid readers. If someone gets to the base of a post they are more likely to either go back to a search engine and start a new search, happy that they have found what they wanted, or better still browse your website for something new.

Those that are likely to click on adverts are still looking at the top part of the page. They might not even have scrolled down yet. So include your two blocks there. Maybe one at the top of the post and one in your side bar navigation.

1 Adsense unit does not have to be 1 advertising block
But a block does not mean 1 Adsense unit. If the shape suits better, use 2 or 3 units to form the block. I regularly use 3 small units together to form 1 simple advert block.

Anything more than these two blocks will be likely to look ugly and scream out that you are just interested in your audience for their income potential. You will lose their faith in you. So don’t go to the maximum allowed adverts, just fit in 1 or two blocks of adverts that will catch their eyes and be useful. But you can also use the Google search function and Adsense in your RSS Feed if you want more opportunities.

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Stuck For Something To Post About?

Have you ever sat down ready to write a post or two and not had any inspiration as to what to write about? Possibly even got up an hour later with nothing written? Take some inspiration from here!
By Keith Lunt, ©howtostartmyblog.com

Your Traffic Logs
If you haven’t done so recently, then the look through your traffic logs and look to at the search terms that people are searching on to find your blog. Sometimes these will match previous post titles, frequently they will not.

Go through the list and for every search term that can either be used directly as a title or just changed slightly to make a title, open a new post, give it the title and save it as a draft. I like to insert a hyphen in front of the name so that I can see those drafts that are waiting to be written and those that have been written.

I also do this weekly, looking back over the last week’s traffic. If you haven’t done it ever, then look back as far as you can. On a good week I can create 20 new titles and these are based around search terms, so you are helping your search engine optimisation as well.

Your Popular Posts
Look at which posts are getting the most traffic. Were they written a while ago? Could you rewrite them with a slightly different slant and a little tweak to the title? Doing so will generate a few more titles.

Give A Post A Different Feel
You can also completely turn around how you have written popular (and not so popular) posts in the past. If it was a discussion post, could it be rewritten as a list of Frequently Asked Questions, a Pros and Cons post or just a simple refresher article with a few bullet point lists?

Bring Together Your Best Work
I tried this one in the week and my traffic increased overnight – not because I was getting more visitors, just because the visitors that I was receiving were spending more time on my blog. And it is very simple to do.

Just look for a few of your most popular posts and choose several along a theme. Maybe add some not so popular posts as well. Maybe pick 5 – 10 posts, depending on how you feel. Then write a post that just briefly brings these all together and links to the individual posts. I gave a summary of the post name as a title then a paragraph about the post. This was easy as it was on a home working blog and I just picked 7 of the best ideas I had posted about and wrote an introduction on each one.

Look At Google
Go to the Google keyword selector tool, type in a search word or two that is relevant to your blog and look at the results that come back. Making some of these into article titles is usually very easy to do.

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This week you have been reading…

In the interests of trying to help new visitors find their way around the website I am going to start reviewing which posts people have read the most, and hopefully this means they are the most useful posts. So, here we go!

Set up a voucher code blog
It seems that a lot of readers want to create a blog that makes money for them through affiliate selling and voucher codes are the Unique Selling Point for their blog. I keep meaning to set up my own voucher code website to demonstrate the process fully, maybe one day I will have the free time I need!

Different paid to post schemes
PayPerPost, InPostLinks, Sponsored Reviews, Blog Distributor and more. Some I love, some I have had bad experiences of. And it seems that a lot of people are trying to work out which of these schemes they should also be getting involved with.

Setting up a blog on my website
This post might be almost a year old, but it is one of the favourites on the website. It is all about how to set up and get working with a blog on your website. If you have not already started blogging, here is all of the information that you need.

Monetise your blog
Another olden goldie! A short post on different ways to make money from your blog. Maybe it is time to review this post and give it some links to other, more detailed, posts on the website.

Lock down your admin login
You like the older posts on this site! Written last August about a security plugin, however shortly after I wrote that post I found a way to get around that plugin and instead installed Limit Login Attempts.

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