Part One: General Tips to start making money on Blogs.

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badboyant

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I hope that this will get stickied. Here are my set of tips and tricks to get anyone who is interested in working on setting up a blog to make sure that you can earn some cash. And I am talking about serious cash.

I will make this post in the form of an FAQ based on the questions that I have seen in this section. All these are experiences from setting up my blogs in the past.

I have used all these blogs for a variety of purposes from affiliate marketing, to my own personal blog which is my latest creation(see www.anthonyjudelawrence.com) to check that one out.

I have used the same techniques on all of my blogs in the past and my own personal blog is that latest one to undergo such a treatment.Anyway, I digress... on with the show, and I hope that you guys find this post helpful.=)

What is the best blogging software?

IMO, the best blogging software is Wordpress. There are many reasons for this, and among them include the following:-
  1. Its frigging stylish.
  2. Its uber cool.
  3. Its free.
  4. More importantly, it has an amazing userbase which equates to an amazing lot of people who will churn out plugins for pretty much anything under the sun that you could possibly need in the future.
  5. There is also an amazing lot of third party extention/plugin type products created with the specific goal of marketing your blog/product etc. These would include plugins such as AutoSocialPoster or even something like ViScript or even sociable. The possibilities are endless.
  6. There are amazing themes available that have great SEO out of the box and these can be taken one step further and be pushed right to the limit. Chris Pearson has a great theme called copyblogger on his website Pearsonified. Cutline is pretty cool too. These themes are all free and are pretty decent in terms of SEO. No need to spend hundreds of bucks putting more cash into setting up a blog than you need to.
Anyway, moving along, you can also soup up an already SOUPED up copyblogger theme by adding a little sumthing under the hood. I added the Semiologic theme and custom hacked the frontend using OsCandy's three column variant of CopyBlogger. Semiologic is a a theme which is used by all my personal friends in the biz and they absolutely swear that its great and getting their sites indexed. It comes with a lot of custom plugins that helps your site get indexed faster.

What free plugins are worth using in Wordpress?

Here are some of the plugins that I use on my site. Please google for the links to download each.
  1. Akismet - great antispam plugin
  2. Adsense Deluxe - you're going to need this to market Adsense properly onto the blog
  3. All in one SEO pack - uber SEO genius plugin
  4. Better Comments Manager
  5. Contact Form ][ - adds a bit of professionalism to the site
  6. Feedburner Feedsmith / FD Feedburner Plugin (more on this later)
  7. Global Translator - great for increasing search hits thru google in foreign languages.
  8. Google Sitemaps generator - makes it easier for the big G to index your site.
  9. Link Exchange Manager - reciprocal link exchange manager.FREE.hehe
  10. myBlogLog widget
  11. NoPingWait - so you don't have to wait ages for all the ping services to update.
  12. PermalinkRedirect
  13. PPP AddReviewMe Sig - great for getting extra PPP signups.
  14. RelatedPosts
  15. Sociable - A great social bookmarking service bookmarklet. Supports 61 services.
  16. UltimateTagWarrior - this will definitely help you tag everything u need.
  17. 3rd Party plugins that connect into Facebook,Friendster etc such as Wordbook
  18. wp-cache - speed up reload times, and lower site load.
I have also got the following plugins activated in my wordpress installation.
(these are not necessary, but I use them for my site)
  1. ViScript
  2. SnapShots Plugin
  3. Google Analytics
  4. Full Text Feed - Gives users the full feed and overrides any software dependant probablities.
  5. DealDotCom Widget
  6. BlogRush Widget
  7. FCK WYSIWYG Editor
  8. AutoSocialPoster
  9. iMP AutoSlimbox for style - this is an ultimate lightbox clone but built on the mootools framework instead. To see how it works, go to this post of mine, and click on any of the images. (http://www.anthonyjudelawrence.com/join-the-bandwagon-with-dealdotcom-make-money-the-easy-way/) or (http://www.anthonyjudelawrence.com/payperpost-review-my-post-other-tools-to-get-more-signups/) and you'll get the idea of what im talking about (click on the images). This plugin is great for making things stylish, but it has a setback as it negates images in RSS feeds. I am currently working on a fix for this though.
  10. Oh and I use Mint for my stats. With all the peppers of course.=)
That should help you guys get started on building a world class site.

So what should I do next?

The next step is obviously setting up your feed and making sure you have feedburner feed. And making sure you have a giant ass button. I cannot stress this enough. a BIG HUGE MOTHERF**KING BUTTON so that people subscribe to you. Also use the feedburner plugins that I have linked to earlier to ensure that all your feeds forward to Feedburner for correct stat reporting.

To top it off, write a short ebook and PDF it and package it into a nice package and offer it as a FREE ebook for people that both subscribe to your feed and those that give you their email. Yes people, please have an opt-in email list. There are a few reasons for this, including the fact that people are fickle and can always choose to remove you from their RSS subscriber list whenever they want to. Once you have their email though, not only will you be able to covertly build a huge list over time, but you will also be able to email market them when the time is right. Double whammy.
 
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Addendum to Part One: General Tips to start making money on Blogs.

I hope a moderator will be able to combine this as a reply to my first thread. I continue here to help all aspiring affiliate bloggers with a few of these tips.

How do I get people to visit my blog?

There are a few rules to this. Unless you are trying to create a blackhat blog or a cloaked domain linked blog, I would suggest that you follow the golden rules:
  1. Write great content. Content is king. Always put the reader first, and money making second.
  2. See rule one.
I cannot stress this enough. Yes, as a blog, you are allowed to include posts about your daily life, to shake things up a bit.

Search the latest news feeds/etc for something interesting. Something like andrew meyer getting tasered at the Kerry talk. Make sure you blog about it first. Then technorati it. And Digg it. And social bookmark everything you can get. Whenever you can get it. Include pictures and videos. As much as you can. Make the site content rich. Put the effort into it and you will be paid back in full.

Which services should I ping?

I personally use the following:-
  1. Pingomatic
  2. Pingoat
  3. PingMyBlog
You can also directly input the following list (which I built up myself using a combination of a few lists available) into your wordpress admin options->writing->update services panel. Just cut and paste people.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
bhttp://log.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
home | 1470.net
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.feedster.comping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
Yahoo!
http://api.my.yahoo.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.comping
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://bblog.comping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
goo ¥Ö¥í¥° ̵ÎÁ¤Çblog¤òºîÀ®
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
Blogbot
Blogbot
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/
http://blogmatcher.com
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://bulkfeeds.net
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://coreblog.orgping/
http://mod-pubsub.org
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
Yahoo!
Yahoo!
http://ping.blogg.de/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
FeedBurner
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://rcs.datashed.net
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.britblog.com/
Trend Tool - IceRocket
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.technorati.comping
Weblogs.com : Weblogs
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.wpkeys.com/
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://signup.alerts.msn.com/alerts-PREP/submitPingExtended.doz
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.netping.php
http://topicexchange.com
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
A2B Location-Based Search Engine
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
Blogdigger : Blog Search Engine - Search Blogs
Blogdigger - Add Feed Form
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
BlogPeople - ƒuƒ�ƒO�î•ñƒ|�[ƒ^ƒ‹�Eƒuƒ�ƒOƒ‰ƒ“ƒLƒ“ƒO
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
Fantasy Blog Share Market | Blogshares
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogsnow.comping
http://www.blogstreet.com
cPanel®
http://www.holycowdude.com/rpc/ping/
Welcome to www.imblogs.net
http://www.lasermemory.com
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/ping.php
http://www.mod-pubsub.orgping.php
NewsIsFree: Your Personal News Portal
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
Popdex
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
SnipSnap :: start
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
Weblogues.com
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
cPanel®
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xping.pubsub.comping/
https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast

Now, even though I already have this list updating my services, I still manually ping my site using pingmyblog. A little extra pinging never hurt anyone. Be careful though of pinging too quickly. This will result in the services thinking that you are spamming and ban your URL.

How do you automate your posts?

Now, please understand the following. Up till this point, there is no plugin out there which can truly fully simulate a human user. This means that people will eventually know that its just another spam blog, and eventually the blog will die out. There are exceptions to this rule and I will explain them.

There are a few niche markets out there which do not really require long posts about the nature of civilization or why anything is the way it really is. An example of such a niche, would be a pornoblog. Just think of the following. If you wanted to automate something... just set up the following site. Wordpress self hosted blog (on an ISP which allows Porn). Then set it up as a cam site type thing. Its a big market out there. Next, automate it with something like ViScript. Instead of having piddly Adsense adverts (which are against Google TOS anyway) run instead CPA for Passion.com or AdultFriendFinder.com via the affiliate system. You will be earning a massive income in a few months time.

However, if you are instead more into setting up a whole slew of mini niche markets which require a more text based input than not, you could try any of the following options. wp-o-matic, feedwordpress, or any one of the RSS feed to wordpress post type posters out there. There are even dedicated solutions for those of you not interested in starting wordpress blogs. BlogsolutionLSA is one such mass blogger.

IMO though, I prefer blogging manually for the most part, or at least allowing guest bloggers to blog under my authority (there are a lot of people out there that are very passionate about certain topics - anime, astronomy, you name it... but yet lack the technical knowledge and knowhow to blog. They want to blog, but do not want to go through all the trouble to set up a blog etc. So you can get them to blog and build up your blog for you. I myself have done so in the past. Easy. And better than RSS to content rewriters to wordpress posts mashup.


End note: If you guys like this post, please let me know, and also please feel free to add on to this post. Tomorrow, if there seems to be a relative interest in this thread, I will continue to give you more of my tips on how I make money on all of my blogs. =). In the interim period though, I hope that you guys visit Make Money Online|Become a Web Mogul — Anthony Jude Lawrence Dot Com and subscribe to my RSS feed. Let me know if you have any questions etc, and I will try to answer them for you ok? Cheers.
 
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Maybe blogs were cool 2 years ago BUT currently there are LOTS of better things to do, wouldn't you agree?
 
Sorry guys, there are a few mistakes in the thread and for the life of me, I can't find the edit button. Grrr!!

KrazyJosh5 = thanks for the invite.
Rob_TID = You can get ASP for free if you know where to look for it. ;)
 
OT - how come this guys (the original poster) post count is only 1 when he has 3 posts in this thread.

Is he an evil wizard ?
 
I was wondering that myself actually. I have no idea why my first two posts seem to have not counted...considering that those were my longest posts. =(
 
Addon to General Tips Part One. =)

Hey guys, I did 5 posts today as a follow up on how to make money blogging. The posts today main concentrated on the plugins which I discussed earlier in this thread.

Here are the links to those five posts.
Boost Your SEO, Boost Your Traffic
Permalinks Increase Blog Traffic by 45%
Ping Google Automatically & Get Loadsa Traffic
Readers + Comments - Spam = Great Blog!
Blog & Make Tons of Money Easily

I am going to post all those articles here to make it easy for you guys to read, but I would suggest visiting my blog as there are tutorial videos also posted within the blog posts which I do not know how to embed here.

From the Permalinks Post (contains video)

Due to the nature of Google’s indexing bot, permalinks are an absolutely vital hack for your wordpress blog if you intend to survive out in the harsh blogdom these days. The rate at which blogs are being created, as well as the rate at which people are blogging in general, means that you have to truly truly stand out from the crowd in every possible manner so that you can generate the traffic that you so well deserve.
To do this, you need to ensure that you have the best possible chance at indexing as many pages on google. You not only need to be indexed by google, but you also need to ensure that google serves up articles written by you which are relevant. For example, if you write articles about PARIS HILTON NAKED, you need to ensure that your within your URL itself, you get a pretty link which says sumthing along the lines of www.thisisyourwebsite.com/paris-hilton-naked/ . This will allow Google to index and to serve up your URL whenever someone searches for that particular thing.
Wordpress is a great platform, and its extremely versatile too. As with anything good though, it requires a bit of tweaking to get every bit of juice that you can from it. Permalink hacking is one such way.
Search engines want a frequently updated site with good information, and that also has a solid, navigable directory structure with meaningful URLs. Oh, and it’s also a huge bonus if your XHTML markup is both valid and semantically sound. So check out the following video tutorial on what permalinks are all about, and how you can use em to ensure that you get your site in tip top shape! =)


From the Ping Google Automatically post (also contains video)

Further to the tutorial page that I put out yesterday entitled Part One of General Tips of Earning Tons of Money on Your Blog I want to dicuss more in detail about some of the plugins which I use to generate traffic and get people to visit my site. An important plugin for wordpress which is simply GREAT at letting google know that I have updated with another post to my blog is Arne Brachold’s Sitemap Genrator for WordPress. I have already listed all the ping services used by blogging search engine indexers out there to get your blog indexed. This tool on the other hand pings the big G instead, letting Gbots know that its time to hit your site again.
This is why its absolutely paramount that you see this video in action below which tells you why and how to get your blog set up with this plugin.

From the Readers + Comments - Spam = Great Blog! post

When you first decide to open up a blog, for white hat purposes, I would suggest, as a general rule of thumb to never put up your email address (even one that you created using the domain that you purchased). Instead, it is much better (and much more professional) to have your own contact form, like for example, mine. This will slow the flow of spam and thereby save you time from going through all your emails manually to determine if they are spam or not. Having your own contact form is a great way of announcing yourself, and also allows anyone who is truly interested in getting in touch with you (as opposed to spammers that mass spam thousands of emails at a go). To check out how to set up a contact form, take a look at the video below.

What happens though, once you’re a famous blogger that has hundreds of blog comments a day, or even thousands? How do you sift through everything that you need to and also have time to blog? You won’t. That’s why Akismet is quite simply…brilliant! This plugin allows you to stop spam dead in its tracks!
Here are some of Akismet’s stats from the combined pool of all the people that use it :-
2,796,407,265 spams caught so far ( TWO BILLION SPAM!! TWO BILLION SPAM!!!)
1,550,069 so far today
93% of all comments are spam
By using this plugin, you’ll be able to get all those Buy Cheap VIagra, Cialis, Naked, Nude, Breasts, Tits, Bum, Penis enlargement, Match.com, Fling.com type memberships out there. which are absolutely annoying.
So check out this video to see how to set it up and how to get your Akismet API key.
Between these two plugins, you’ll be able to set up a two way communication section between you and your blog readers quite nicely.

And lastly from the Blog and Make Tons of Money Easily post



As an even further addendum to my earlier post about using the various plugins and how to earn money the easy way blogging part one (for that post, check here) , I want to talk a little bit more about one of the plugins that you could use on your blog to earn you money.
Google Adsense, is perhaps the most famous contextual advertising platform currently on the market. Granted that there are probably other platforms out there which are just as good if not better, but Google being google, have the best marketing people in any business and managed to corner the market in just a few short years. Anyway, I digress. Google is a great source of income regardless of what niche/blog site you may run, be it anime, or pets, or even a personal blog about your good ol’ boring existence. It doesn’t matter. As long as the content is clean (i.e. no FREE PORN, PORN, or HACKING or any crap like that) and you’re just fine! What this means is that its completely ripe for the taking. Just load up Google Adsense and enter your pub-id into the required fields and cut and paste the necessary code, and you’re good to go.
Or are you?
Truth be told, its a lot more complex than just slapping your code in any ol’ post and hoping that someone clicks on the site. There are dozens of sites out there which have been developed just with the specific purpose of creating Made for Adsense (MFA) wordpress themes and so on and so forth. The purpose? To blend in those Adsense ads so that they do not stick out from the rest of the site. To make it all seamless. Furthermore, research has been shown that the best selling ads are the large square ones (compared to the other banner ads). But nevermind all that at the moment. Ensuring that you get your best possible click-through-rate is not something which you should be bothering about before you have even installed a plugin to take care of all the ad placements in the first place.
Enter Adsense-Deluxe. This plugin will take care of all your worries with regards to Google Adsense. With this free plugin, you can insert contextual ads from Google or Yahoo closer to your content where they are more effective, PLUS manage multiple ad sizes and formats with a simple control panel that is integrated directly into the WordPress Admin area.
Check out the video below to see it in action.


I would still recommend that you guys visit the actual blog and take a look at all the videos which have been posted there. They are great tutorial based videos and will help you with the installation as well as running of said plugins. Cheers.Once More, here are the posts below. =). Id also appreciate it if you guys told me if you like what I'm writing about, or if you guys would like something different.

Boost Your SEO, Boost Your Traffic
Permalinks Increase Blog Traffic by 45%
Ping Google Automatically & Get Loadsa Traffic
Readers + Comments - Spam = Great Blog!
Blog & Make Tons of Money Easily


-Anthony-
 
A good start for a new forum member but the thing I don't like about this is

1) The first two fonts are too small and hard to read.
2) See number one and the right size fonts are not formatted properly.

Call it picky but thats just me, writing an excellent post requires at least some readability to it. I did like the part where you mentioned ViScript its a strange feeling having people talk about something you created even after you long sold it, speaking of which I wonder what the hell is going on with the new owner having the site offline for so long.

Anyway Nice Start.
 
Hey Aequitas, I have been trying to look around for the edit function on the posts, but I do not seem to have one. Furthermore, I still need to get posts approved by the mods. Perhaps this has something to do with it. I am somewhat of a perfectionist myself. Take a look at how my site is (www.anthonyjudelawrence.com). I do not seem to have this function (http://www.wickedfire.com/faq.php?faq=vb_read_and_post#faq_vb_edit_posts) within my membership. Do I need to get admin to enable it? I have also started Part Two of the series, and that one has a proper font to it. =)

Aequitas said:
A good start for a new forum member but the thing I don't like about this is

1) The first two fonts are too small and hard to read.
2) See number one and the right size fonts are not formatted properly.

Call it picky but thats just me, writing an excellent post requires at least some readability to it. I did like the part where you mentioned ViScript its a strange feeling having people talk about something you created even after you long sold it, speaking of which I wonder what the hell is going on with the new owner having the site offline for so long.

Anyway Nice Start.
Click to expand...
 
badboyant said:
Hey Aequitas, I have been trying to look around for the edit function on the posts, but I do not seem to have one. Furthermore, I still need to get posts approved by the mods. Perhaps this has something to do with it. I am somewhat of a perfectionist myself. Take a look at how my site is (www.anthonyjudelawrence.com). I do not seem to have this function (http://www.wickedfire.com/faq.php?faq=vb_read_and_post#faq_vb_edit_posts) within my membership. Do I need to get admin to enable it? I have also started Part Two of the series, and that one has a proper font to it. =)
Click to expand...

Your posts have to be approved by mods because you have under 10 posts, when your post count gets over that you will be able to post without having to get them approved and you can go back and edit your posts but only for a certain amount of time before you are no longer allowed to go back and edit that post.
 
For General Tips this seems really intense (notice I'm in the newbie stage). I've not yet set up a WP blog yet, but reading this post and others about WP blogging it seems there's so much more stress on adding dozens of plug-ins as opposed to the original point of blogging in the first place. I don't mean blogging just to blog but I would think a niche-specific enough blog would rank without all the serious added action here. OR, I would suppose all this would be required if your blog is about a super saturated topic? Question 2 - Is a blog superior to a website in terms of ranking simply because all these plug-ins for generating extra traffic are available, and pehaps, easier & faster? Thanks!
 
auctarb said:
For General Tips this seems really intense (notice I'm in the newbie stage). I've not yet set up a WP blog yet, but reading this post and others about WP blogging it seems there's so much more stress on adding dozens of plug-ins as opposed to the original point of blogging in the first place. I don't mean blogging just to blog but I would think a niche-specific enough blog would rank without all the serious added action here. OR, I would suppose all this would be required if your blog is about a super saturated topic? Question 2 - Is a blog superior to a website in terms of ranking simply because all these plug-ins for generating extra traffic are available, and pehaps, easier & faster? Thanks!
Click to expand...

I think you've got the wrong point, most plugins are tools to help you rank in Google better, the next plugin you'll need will be an anti-spam plugin, you can also use a related post plugin good for deep-linking and keeping older posts alive for much longer, you can use social plugins to increase traffic as people have an easy way to add your site to the major social networks floating around. It might seem like a lot of plugins but in reality they all only take about 10 minutes to set up but they will save you 100 hours in the longer run.

No a blog is not better then a website, the only reason why the search engines like blogs more is because they continually change there unique content WAY more then a website does, most websites are considered static and only get newer content once a month or once every 2 weeks where most blogs recieve several new content in a single day.
 
OK, I guess what was confusing about blog vs website is, for example, whenever I do a search, almost always-> websites show up. I'll see a blog occassionally, which led me to believe they tended to have maybe quicker, but less staying power than a website - even old, static ones like you mention.
 
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