Entries Tagged as 'Blogging'

How Hard is Your WordPress?

Jeffro2pt0’s post at WebLog Tools Collection tipped me off to Speckyboy’s list of Top 10 Security Plugins for WordPress. There’s a lot of good plugins listed, and I was happy to see WP-SpamFree made it on the list.

I’ve been using WP-SpamFree since about the second week of this blog, and it’s been amazing. I don’t know anyone blogs without it. I use quite a few security plugins myself, but I won’t say what, since that might decrease my security ;)

From the same post, Jeffro2pt0 also points us to the WordPress Codex article on Hardening your WordPress.

In a separate post, at Weblog Tools Collection, Marc Ghosh linked to a post at Scripty Goddess entitled “Fun Tools That Will Eat Up the Spare Time You Don’t Have.” Her recommendations:

Stripe Generator, which is an AJAX background designer will give your website that oh-so-sexy Web 2.0 look. Looking at their blog, I came across a post announcing two companion generators - Reflection Maker, and Tab Generator. Three awesome tools to take some of the grunt work out of website design.

WordPress Theme Generator, which does exactly what it says, for those who are mystified by the intricacies of building WordPress Themes.

WordPress Pad has an article on turning your WordPress Install into a Directory with the WordPress Directory Plugin from Links Back.

Miscellaneous

I read an article on Live Science about why hot women marry ugly guys, and it’s not just about the money - which came as quite a shock to me.

For a laugh, read this comment on the story Why Linux Won’t Displace Windows. I can’t tell if it’s satire, or the guy is serious, but I laughed until I cried. It’s people like this that remind me why I got out of computer related customer service.

[Read more →]

Breaking the Silence

It’s time to break my self-imposed silence. I know I haven’t posted in almost two weeks, due to illnesses making the rounds in my household. This cold, damp spring has been killing all of our health, and some days checking my email is a herculean task. I’m on the mend though, and received my first affiliate marketing check yesterday, so I’m feeling revitalized.

With my renewed sense of purpose, I realize that I need to focus on what’s important: making money. As it stands, I need to focus on the prize, and blogging isn’t going to get me any closer to it.

I know I’m not going to make money by blogging, and that has never been the intention. If I want to make money by writing, I’ll do it in a different fashion than by writing about how to make money. There are no ads on this site, and I plan to keep it that way. This is my personal blog, and I have no intention of whoring myself like John Chow, or others like him. Not that I have anything against what he’s doing, but that isn’t me.

This blog is still going to be a dumping ground for information I need to keep an eye on, but I don’t think I’m going to be blogging per se with any regularity, since I feel that my time and energy needs to be focused on making money, not just watching others make money and talking about it.

Last night I watched the 2002 John Leguizamo movie “Empire.” It’s the story of a drug dealer trying to go legit after he finds out his girlfriend is pregnant. The story has some parallels to my life. Although I’m not involved with anything illegal, I want to legitimize my life and what I do.

When I was a kid, I was continually beat about the head constantly hearing about my ‘potential’ and failure to live up to it. I’m smart, testing somewhere in th 140 range on my IQ. I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I am smarter than your average bear.

As soon as my teachers found that out, I was constantly lectured about my potential. The problem is, none of them, not a single one, actually told me how to realize my potential. I later learned that the majority of education majors graduate in the bottom 50% of their college class.

Anyway, I’ve had the onus of realizing my potential saddled upon me for most of my life. The fact that I work in a factory and am wasting my fabled ‘potential’ means that I’ve become the black sheep of my family.

I make decent money, but I have to kill myself to do it. I come home every day bleeding from dozens of sheet metal cuts, metal slivers everywhere, coated in grease and hydraulic oil, coughing out the remnant of burning heavy metals that I’ve had to breathe in for 8 hours.

That’s why I decided to try affiliate marketing - so that I could enjoy life, and eventually rub everybody’s noses in my success. The check sitting here on my desk proves that I can do it, as long as I put my nose to the grindstone.

I’m going to finish this post with a monologue from Empire. The truth in his speech inspired me, and helped me to clarify what’s important.

We all know selling and competition, that’s what this country’s built on.
It’s all about one thing: making money.
Money, baby. Simple as that.
Everything else is just bullshit.
Money is why people come here from every country in the world.
It’s what the American dream is all about.
You think people come here from all over the world to live in East New York…
in Harlem, the South Bronx…
because of the beautiful views, because of the fucking quality of life?


For everybody– everybody– money is what life is all about.
Getting it, keeping it, losing it, holding it…
needing it, living it and dying for it.
You have to look like you got it, whether you do or not.

Black Hat Mashups

First off, I’d like to extend congratulations to Ruck, at Cash Tactics. This week he announced that his first daughter was born. It sounds like everything is going well, so I’d like to welcome him to a new world of concern. As the old saying goes: If you have a son you only need to worry about one prick. If you have a daughter, you need to worry about every prick in town. My daughter is only 17 months old, and already the boys her age are giving her the eye. I fear that it will only get worse from here.

Now, on to the goodies.

Affiliate Marketing

For those just getting started in affiliate marketing, Sean at the Warrior Blog has a tutorial that takes you through all of the steps - researching, locating, and then finally cashing the checks. I wish I had known about this when I had first started out. Your First Clickbank Sale.

Build a Niche Store (BANS) is something I’ve been looking into for a while. When my wife goes back to work, I may just break down and purchase it, since I’ve heard noting but good things about it. Affiliate Confession has a 7 part series on setting up and using BANS. A very good place to start if you want an easier entry into affiliate marketing.

Build A Niche Store Tutorials Overview - Parts 1-7
Part 1 - What BANS Does And Does Not Do
Part 2 - Niche Brainstorming And Getting A Domain Name
Part 3 - Installing And Setting Up Your BANS Affiliate Store
Part 4 - Tweaking Your eBay Affiliate Store
Part 5 - Adding Some Content To Your eBay Store
Part 6 - Article Marketing And Getting Links
Part 7 - Using USFreeAds.com For Traffic And Getting More Links

Article Marketing

The Warrior Blog has a tutorial on Article Marketing for promotional purposes. I know that a lot of people recommend doing article marketing, but it seems like a lot of work, that I’d be better off channeling elsewhere.

Mashups

Although it’s over a year old, Paul O’Brien’s list of Mashups created with Yahoo! Pipes is still a pretty good read to help inspire ideas for your own mashup.

I’m not sure of the date on this one, but SEO Book had a nice roundup of specific Pipes.

If you’ve been dying to create a mashup, but can’t program and can’t afford a program, Open Kapow may be for you. Using their simple tools, literally anyone can create a mashup in minutes just by pointing and clicking. Extremely useful if you want to use data from sites that don’t provide an Application Programming Interface (API) or Ready Site Syndication (RSS) feed.

Black Hat

If you have a Wordpress Blog, then Jimmy at Seeds for Wealth has a technique for raping Digg’s traffic. At best this trick is grey hat, at worst it’s black hat, but getting links from Digg is never a bad thing.

Continuing along the path to the Dark Side, Jimmy has tips on getting big trafic from BlogCatalog, and another one for using your avatar as visitor bait.

If you’ve been wondering how certain sellers always rank so high on eBay’s Pulse page, someone placed them under the magnifying glass, and found out that there’s a lot of cheating going on behind the scenes. estreet at Watched Item watched some top sellers on eBay Pulse, and gathered some compelling evidence that there is rampant cheating going on.

Datafeeds

5 Star Affiliate Programs has a pretty extensive list of affiliate datafeeds ready for integration into your website. Affiliate Datafeeds are great, because they help generate a lot of content for search engines to spider, as well as helping to monetize your website.

Extensive Squidoo Lens on Datafeeds

Tools

Marc Ghosh at Weblog Tools Collection posted this week introducing us to Zemanta. Zemanta is a contextual content suggestion engine that works with Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com, and self-hosted WordPress installations.Zemanta is a simple FireFox extension that creates a little AJAX box on the side of your write panel in WordPress, and makes real-time suggestions for related news stories, Wikipedia articles, and Flickr photos. I’m very excited to start using this. You can also keep up to date with the latest happenings at Zemanta’s Blog.

WordPress Plugins

Jeffro2pt0 at Weblog Tools Collection rounded up 10 WP plugins that fight comment spam. I personally use WP Spam Free from Hybrid 6, and have no complaints with it. I do disable it every so often to see how much it actually stops, and It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes.

Freebies

Since I like free stuff, here’s my link to Robbing Craigslist. If you want a free copy, just link to it from your blog too.

Emarket Scout tipped me off the the following: Freebies for Writers, Authors, and Screenwriters., Self Growth Freebies, and Free stuff for Windows Power Users.

Productivity, Link Building Quickies

Productivity

Alicia Forest at Solo E has written an article entitled When Doing Less is More in Your Business, and reminds us that sometimes you shouldn’t do things just because you can. If your energy is being misdirected into ventures that are beneath your skill level, you’re wasting time, money, and effort. This short list will help you refocus and see that sometimes doing less is more.

Tools

SEO 4 Expert has a roundup of 40 Unusual Websites for you to visit. To paraphrase, this page lists “under the radar web services that are original, unique, unusual, useful, free, and of the must-be bookmarked type.” Some of the sites listed are built around some very unique ideas.

Traffic / Link Building

Via HomeBiz Marketing Tips: Jonathan Leger shares with us his 4 Legged Approach to Link Building. Although I’ve seen these tips floating around in various forms, it never hurts to return to the basics. An excellent reminder to avoid putting all of your eggs in one basket.

Set AdWords Times to Save Some Dimes

Affiliate Marketing

Looking to save to some money on your Google AdWords? According to Online Money Dot.com your bids may actually be cheaper at night.

Jay at Online Opportunity has a pretty good tutorial on how to split test ads.

Y! Store Tutorials has a “dummies” guide to building landing pages. If you can’t build a landing page after reading this, then abandon all hope.

Blogging / Writing

If you’ve been writing an ebook, or just thinking about it, Hendry Chang has a laundry list of 18 reasons to give it away. If you’ve been waffling about the fate of your ebook, then this might just push you over the edge on pricing.

Traffic / Search Engine Optimization

The eBusiness Banter Blog has posted a three part tutorial on building traffic to your blog.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Software Marketing Secrets has a good article explaining why you should be building brands for your products.

Writing Tips For Us All

Michael Martine of Remarkablogger shares his tips at Pure Blogging on how to make your tutorials must have resources.

Online Opportunity lets us know how to pick the subject when writing an ebook. I came across this about halfway through writing my own ebook. It wouldn’t have helped me choose my subject, but writing tips are always appreciated.

Finally, although it’s not a a writing tip per se, I had to include this: Six Revisions rounds up a list of 10 AJAX effects to sexy up your website. There’s a lot of cool stuff there, but I fear they wouldn’t be dialup friendly. Half of writing is in the presentation.

Email Subject Success, Blog Traffic Attraction

Blogging

Aseem Kishore from Online Tech Tips guest posted this week on Pro Blogger. His article on why in order to survive, mimicry is key was quite spot-on.

Cash Marble reveals how to generate traffic as you surf.

E-Mailing

The Marketing Tips Blog keys us in on four proven subject lines to use in email.

Computer Geek Stuff

If you’re interested in tunneling through SSH, I ran across an awesome tutorial. Although it seems to be directed at Internet Explorer, I don’t see why it couldn’t be adapted to any web browser. I’m also totally in love with his WordPress Theme.

Charity, Linux, WordPress

More EntreCard powerdropping fun.

Wow. Fine grained paranoia taken to extremes.

andLinux is a Linux install that runs inside your Windows NT based Operating System through the wonders of virtualization. Very nifty for people like me that are interested in making The Switch(tm) but can’t go cold turkey.

WordPress Pad has a great tutorial on customizing your WordPress login page.

Free Rice: Learn Vocabulary, Combat Hunger. Good way to kill some free time, learn some new words, and help out those less fortunate than you. I’m a big supporter of voluntary charity, but have paying my own bills, so I don’t give as much as I’d like to.

Skelliwag posts his thoughts and tips on surviving in underserverd niches.

Chairman Ling details her offline marketing campaign. This lady eats and sleeps ‘viral advertising.’

Using WordPress to manage a mostly static website.

How to convert any web template into a WordPress Theme.

More CNC Fun:

3 axis CNC Router

Friday Freebies

Affiliate Avalanche: Network Your Way to Success

Hack WordPress: The Ultimate Guide to Pwning Your Software

Daily Moolah: 6 Social Media Optimization Plugins for Wordpress

The Dead One: Turn Your WordPress Into a Fully Functioning Forum via ReviewOn

From Zen Cart Optimization: 200 Words That Make Money, and 14 Words That Lose Money

Affiliate District: Lay Out a Good Affiliate Marketing Plan

Viral King’s Viral Marketing Tips

7 Steps to Creating Your Own Product

Moms Prosperity Network: Law of Attraction, Good Things Happen to Bad People

Comment Sniper Software Guarantees you first post bragging rights!

Best Free Autoresponder Roundup

Super Blogging Tips: 75 Ways to Increase Your Site’s Traffic

And to cap it all off, 15 Reflexology Healing Techniques. Skip the Kinoki pads and use your hands!

Plug it in, Plug it in

Between tending to my sick daughter, and drooling over the thought of Bruce Campbell doing a guest post (*sigh* he’s dreamy), I’ve found a second or two to work on the site backend.

Most importantly, I’ve installed NoFollow Free which strips out all of those pesky nofollow tags that are used to discourage comment spammers. I check and approve all comments, and if I don’t want them here, they won’t live very long. I realize I’m nobody, but dammit, this is my soapbox, and if people who visit here want to comment in good faith, a tiny trickle of linkjuice from yours truly is the very least I can do.

If you look at my posts, I am a prolific linker. Depending on the day, I read several dozen to several hundred different sites. I’m an information addict with strong exhibitionistic tendencies. That’s my nature - I gather lists of items that interest me, and present them to the world at large. Sometimes they are similar, sometimes they’re WTF?, but I always present them to help share the knowledge. Not for trackbacks. Not for shameless self promotion.

If somebody is interested enough in what I say to mention me, I’m more than happy to pass a link on to them. The internet is built on links after all. I’m not all that concerned by the two scraper sites that are currently broadcasting my thoughts around the internet. Why?

Firstly, RSS Footer makes sure I’m being credited.

Secondly, if you believe the Open Source evangelists, knowledge wants to be free. hax0rs want free knowledge. Either way, I’m really not saying anything profound, and they are helping get the word out. I ran a scraper site once upon a time. The purpose wasn’t to make money, it was to keep up on news from dozens of sources on a topic I was passionate about. It eventually evolved into a Syndic8 style site, which I relaunched this year as an article directory site. I understand that not all scrapers are in it for the money.

In addition to every comment, I check every trackback. I think I’ve notched up about four or so, but that’s not the point. If somebody is watching the watchman (upcoming post alert re: The Watchmen Movie) it makes me curious. If they like what I have to say, then they probably share similar interests as I do, and I’ll spend a few minutes noodling around their sites. Often times I find amazing gems that I never would have had I not visited.

So anyway, feel free to comment knowing that your effort may be rewarded by a search engine that has yet to be developed. Free link love forever!