Savvy Affiliate

Day 17 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

There are basically two schools of though when it comes to any business.

1) You can do it cheap

2) You can do it right

And blogging is no different.  Although you can get away with setting up a blog for practically zero investment, if you want to make money over the long term you need to invest in your tools and pay for the services which are worthwhile.

That’s not to say there aren’t good free tools out there.  In fact the internet abounds with excellent free tools for starting your blog.  In my list of the Top 5 Tools every Blogger Should Use, 4 of the 5 tools are free.  But you can’t get everything for free.  Here are some things that it is worth the money to invest in.

1) Get Your Own Domain - It is possible to blog for free with blogger or wordpress, but you shouldn’t do it.  Take the time to get your own domain.  It will save you the trouble of switching from your free account to your own domain later on.  It will make your site a lot more brandable, and lend it an air of authority.  It will also allow you to do a lot more with your site with many fewer restrictions.

2) Get a fast internet connection - Take this connection speed test.  How fast are you?  If you are running under a couple hundred Kbps you should consider upgrading your connection.  The time you spend connecting to the internet is worth money!  If you have to constantly wait to download files and upload changes to you blog, you are becoming much less productive, and it is worth it to speed up your connection

3) Get a faster computer - How old is your computer?  How long does it take to load up?  Are you constantly having to fix software problems?  If you think that your computer is crappy, then it probably is.  Calculate how much time you waste every year fixing and waiting for your old computer, then see how much a new computer would cost. Are the dollars/hour worth it?  Most likely the answer is yes.

4) Upgrade Your Workspace - What is your blogging workspace like?  Is the chair comfortable?  Is there enough room on your desk for whatever you are working on?  Is everything well positioned ergonomically?  If you are uncomfortable when you are blogging, chances are you won’t want to do it regularly.  Upgrading your workspace with a desk and chair that fit together well will help your health, and your attitude toward blogging.

5) Get Good Antivirus Software - If you are making money on your computer, you need it to be secure.  Invest in some good, up to date, anti virus software and a good firewall.  Although you may think that it can’t happen to you, it can.  The worst thing would be if you have all your files on your computer and a malicious piece of code wrecks your hard drive.  You are out days of work, assuming you can recover your data at all.  (Note, this is also a good reason to keep several backup copies of your site in separate places)

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Are You Using Only Content AdSense Advertising?  Then You May Be Missing Out

Are you completely happy with the Search widget that you’re currently using?  Is it making you any money?   If not, perhaps you should consider using Google Search… With AdSense on your site.

Using the Search with Adsense can often make a blogger as much money as AdSense alone.  If you haven’t incorporated the AdSense search into your page, you could be missing out on half of your profits.

Additionally, AdSense for search is a great way to monetize your blog unobtrusively.  Almost every other method of making money with your blog requires that you display Ads on it somewhere.  Although readers accept this, if you have too many ads it will turn them off.  With AdSense for search, your visitors don’t see any ads until they do a search.  Even then the ads are still pretty unobtrusive.  It is the best of both worlds.

AdSense for search is easy to install in your blog - If you have any trouble installing it, head over to LiewCf who has written a great article about incorporating the Google search function into your theme, and how to make the results show up in your own page.

Trackback - Thanks RT for putting me on AdSense for search.

 So do you use AdSense for search?  Has it made any money for you?

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 I recently installed the Do Follow trackback plugin, which means that whenever you ping me with a link, the trackback that you get is SEO Enabled.

I went looking for other sites with Do Follow Trackback enabled.  Here is a list of sites I have found so far with it enabled.   If you have the plugin and would like to be included on list, drop a comment.   If you would like to encourage other people to use the plugin , please copy it and paste it in your blog.

• Savvy Affiliate
• Life Googles
• Robinsongo

That’s it so far.  This list need more people!  So sign up and reward the people who link to you.

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Some things are good to outsource, others, not so much

Recently I had written about some parts of my blog that I would be interested in outsourcing.  I wrote about how some bloggers are able to greatly expand their sites, and make a lot more money, by outsourcing the tedious and time consuming aspects of blogging, leaving themselves more time to focus on making money.

The impetus behind this series of post is a recent book called the 4 hour workweek.  The author extols the virtues of outsourcing, and people are quoted as loving the book with such quotes as

“With this kind of time management and focus on the important things in life, people should be able to get 15 times as much done in a normal work week.”

 That is all well and good.  However, although there are some parts of my blog that I would like to outsource, there are others which I would never consider doing.  Here are some things which I can never believe I will pass off, and that will always cause me to have a greater than a 4 hour workweek.

1) Give up writing any content - Although I would love to have contributing authors on this blog, I would never give up writing content.    Other authors would be a great way to expand this blog, but I think that my posts would be necessary to keep the flavor of the site the same.  Additionally, if I stopped writing content I would stop learning more about blogging, and may quickly lost interest in the site.

2) Let other people handle the money - I would never pass off the monetizing aspects of the blog to anyone else.  Learning how to monetize a blog effectively is arguably one of the most important skills you can acquire while blogging.  I am willing to take the time, and maybe even do it less effectively than whomever I would hire, to gain experience on monetizing a blog.

3) Build Blogging relationships - I have stressed many time that building up relationships with other bloggers is vital if you want to be successful.  I think that it would be disingenuous to hire someone to build up relationships for my blog.  Additionally, if I did that, there would be nothing to stop my employee from taking his relationships with him if he stopped working for me.

4) Back up my blog - Regular backups of your blog are essential.  Let someone else do this at your own peril.  If you keep this to yourself you know that it will be done, and done correctly.  If you pay someone else to do it, you won’t find out about a problem until your site crashes, and then it is too late.

5) Control over employees - If I do hire people to help me run this site, I would maintain the relationships with them myself.  I have no interest in adding another level of management, i.e. hiring an employee to run the employees.  I think that maintaining control would enable me to ensure only high quality work was being done, because in the end everything that goes up on this site reflects on me.

So do you outsource?  What are you interested in shipping off, and what will you keep for yourself?

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When you visit a site how active are you?  If you’re just lurking you may want to rethink

I have written several times about how one of the best ways to get attention to your site is to comment on other people’s posts.  Now RT over at untwistedVortex has written a post about How Commenting is Better Than Lurking

RT states that

I didn’t get the urge to become more prolific until I started receiving a lot of comments the following month. I notice that a lot of bloggers give up at the 6-7 month mark and part of it may be that they’re not getting the stimulation provided by commentators.

Which I think is completely true.  Many of my posts currently get no comments.  However when I do get several comments on a thread, it helps inspire me to write more and better about that topic.  I can’t imagine that any blogger could go 6 months without getting feedback and still feel enthusiasm for keeping it up.

RT also mentions that several times he has left comments which are more or less just a “I’m here, nice page”    Although in the past I’ve tried only to comment when I had more to say, I think RT is correct that even short comments are better than none.   Leaving any kind of comment on a blog you like is a great thing to do, even if it is just an I’m here kind of thing.

So why should I leave a comment, what will I get out of it? Leaving a comment will benefit you as well as the blog.  Here are some reasons why

1. The blogger will trace back to your site - Make friends with other bloggers by commenting on their blogs.  Chances are they will come to yours and do the same.  If you are blogging only in your own world you will never expand
2. Attract their readers - Insightful and well thought out comments can attract the readers of the blog to your page.  They figure that if you were smart enough to have an intelligent comment, maybe your site is worth reading
3. Do Follow - More and more blogs are enabling do follow in their comments.  If you can comment and get some link love out of it, why wouldn’t you?

The bottom line - Make a habit to be more active in blogs.  Take the minute necessary to comment on a blog and it will turn out to be a good investment in time

So how bout you?  Do you usually comment on blogs?  This would be  a great chance to leave even an “I’m here comment”  Let me know who’s reading.

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Day 16 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

Yesterday I blogged about how you can improve your SEO in less time by tracking what works and what doesn’t.  But there is more to building a site than search engine optimization.  What about the rest of it?  Are there any tools for comment moderation, for spell checking, for networking?  What else can a blogger do to get more done in less time?

In fact there are a lot of tools and tricks out there improve your blogging productivity.  Take comment moderation for instance.  Every Wordpress blog comes equipped with Akismet.  But if that is all you are using, then you have to waste some time checking the spam Que to make sure that you don’t just delete real comments.

I used to spend time deleting 100-150 junk comments from Akismet a day.  But thanks to a post on Blog-Op I decided to get more spam blocking power with this Quartet of plugins

1) Bad Behavior - Bad behavior is designed to identify malicious bots and throw them off your site before they have  a chance to do any damage.  Using this will help keep your server from being overloaded if you get too many malicious bots on there.  It will also stop the bots from harvesting your e-mail address. As an added bonus, you can specify a bounce page to send their bots to.

2) http:BL -  Made by Project Honey pot, this plugin comes with a huge database of malicious IP addresses.  If one of those IP addresses comes to your site they will be booted.

3) Simple Spam Filter - Not all spam comes from bots.  There is human enabled spam out there, and if it is a first time spammer http:BL may not catch them.  This checks the comment to see if any words in the post are from a small list of forbidden keywords.  If they are, the post is not allowed and the user is given an error message saying what went wrong.

4) Akismet - Akismet is like a trusty friend who you may be angry at for while, but is always there when you need it.  Anything which slips through the other three plugins will be caught by Akismet. However since using the other three plugins, the number in my spam Que has dropped from 150 a day to about 2 or 3.

So now that you are spending less time working your comments, you can spend more time writing content.  What is one of the annoying things about writing content, and how can we fix it?

Wordpress built in spellchecker is slow and annoying.  It does not remember words, it doesn’t even know common blogging words like blog, blogger, or Wordpress.  Using it saves some time over proofreading yourself, but not that much.

But you can get more efficient by using the Google Toolbar spell checker.  Truly a wondrous tool for efficiency, not only will it check your post itself, it will check your post slug, your excerpt, and any other forms on the page.  You can remember words, set it to autocorrect, or just make it highlight misspellings.   If you aren’t using this, and are still using wordprocessor spellchecker, consider making the switch.

Finally, how can you get more networking with other bloggers done in less time?   There are two powerful tools which every blogger should be using.   The first is MyBlogLog.  Mybloglog lets you track other bloggers who are visiting your page.  This enables you to visit their page, contact them, and begin forming a stronger relationship.  Blogging is all about building relationships, and MyBlogLog is the tool to do it with.

Additionally you can build up your networking with Digg.  If all you are doing is Digging your own posts, and not working on getting Digg friends you are making a mistake.  A great passive way to get Digg friends is to simply put your Digg Id in your about page or on the bottom of your posts and ask people to link up with you if they like the site.  Many will and it will be great for your long term traffic.

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So feel free to go gangbusters on the comments

I previously had comments held for moderation if the commentor didn’t have at least 1 approved comment previously.  I had this function on to fight spam.

 But given my new and improved comment spam protection, that turns out to no longer be necessary.  So that function is now turned off, comment at your leisure.

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BloggingToFame is having a contest with over $100,000 in cash prizes.

As they say

What is Blogging to Fame?
Now as many times we have good blogs, in fact great blogs, which are either new or existing from over years but with a very few readership. You always wished more fame and more recognition for them. Now fame them and tell all your friends, colleagues to fame your deserving star icon blogs and bloggers, and bring them in front of the whole world.

Blogging to fame is a powerful platform for any blogger who really want to establish their authority in blogosphere

Well I want to be famous, so I have signed up for Blogging to fame.

Please go and vote for me

Now why should you vote for me?

1. It is absolutely free - I wouldn’t expect you to vote for me if it cost you anything.  Heck I wouldn’t even vote for myself if that was the case.  But you should be able to swing free
2. Link Love To Me = Link Love To You - I try to hand out links like they are candy.  More traffic income to my site mean I can pass on more traffic to your site.  If I haven’t given you a link, I’ve probably never been to your site, so let me know in the comments and I can check it out
3. Reciprocal Fame - You fame my back, I fame your back if you so desire.  Very simple, but effective
4. You don’t need to give fame to get it - You don’t need to give me fame to get it.  If you post a comment in this thread to a post where you are asking for fame, I will check your site out and probably fame you.

That’s all, and thanks for everyone that voted

Want a free backlink?  I have Do Follow enabled on my trackbacks.  So if you ping this blog by linking to it, and what better post to do it with than this, you will automatically get a free link.

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This is an experiment to see if you can do everything you need to to write a great post in 10 minutes

I starting writing this post with a stopwatch.  I will stop at 10 minutes, but before then I will try to do several things necessary to write a great post.  I want to ping at least 3 bloggers, make my text scannable, reference a post in my own site, write an interesting title, ask for comments, and use blockquotes.

1:28 Gone

Step 1 - write the title I used the 10 Tips for writing great titles from Problogger to come up with this, “How Some People Can Write Great Posts Quickly”  It can’t be that bad, as it got you to read this post

2:54 Gone

Step 2 - make my content scannable  

The internet isn’t a book.  You can’t expect people to read your information if you don’t make it easy for them.  Make it easy for people and they will stay.  Otherwise they will leave.

There are several things I need to do to make my content scannable 

• I need to use small sections
• I need to use lists and blockquotes
• I need to highlight and bold important points

5:00

Step 3 - ping some writers

It is important to ping other bloggers in order to get their attention, now I will ping a site letting you know about the comprehensive list of different ping services you can use.  2 pings down, 1 to go.

Step 4 - write a good excerpt

I need to write a good excerpt for this page in order to attract search engine searches.  Here are some tips for writing good excerpts

7:54 down, running out of time, better write my excerpt, put in keywords, spellcheck and go

Excerpt written - 9:07.  Time to spell check.  Luckily, since I use Google toolbar spell check, it goes quickly.

9:39

That’s all the time I have.  How long to you spend on your posts?  Did you find this interesting at all, or just a waste the 2 minutes you spend reading it?

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