The BookmarkMoney Blog

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 →]

Tags: Blogging, Plugins, Psychology, Themes, Tools, WordPress by Jotun
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Last night I had the pleasure/misfortune to install WordPress 2.5 on (shudder) Yahoo! Webhosting for my brother. Yahoo’s tools for small business are extremely backwards and easily some of the most unfriendly, unintuitive ’services’ I’ve ever had the misfortune to use.

If it weren’t for this tutorial from Nate at Nates Post, I don’t know if I would have ever gotten the damn thing installed. As it was, I spent almost an hour and a half just trying to connect to the SQL server. It turns out that I missed setting the database server as ‘mysql’ instead of ‘localhost.’

I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a server that didn’t use ‘localhost’ for scripts, and the inability to edit your .htaccess file is a huge hindrance. I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated HostGator as much as I did after my experiences last night.

Anyway, after the trials of installing WordPress I logged into the Dashboard to start doing the routine of configuring a new website. What the crap? I was expecting something akin to the usual Dashboard, but instead was presented with the WordPress equivalent of Microsoft Windows Vista.

Instead of having all of the options out in the open like before, they’ve been condensed down and hidden in various submenus. I have to say that I’m not a fan. Everything has been simplified to the bare minimum.

I hate having to play hide and seek with options. I’ve spent years learning WordPress, and now everything has changed. It may have been the mood I was in last night, but color me unimpressed. Until it becomes a security issue, I’m staying with the 2.3 branch. Your mileage may vary.

Tags: WordPress by Jotun
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If you’re at all familiar with WordPress, you noticed that version 2.5 was released. If you’re like me, your WordPress Dashboard is nagging you incessantly about upgrading. Seeing as how the new version is a feature release, not a security release, I don’t truly feel compelled to update to version 2.5 yet. I’ve spent almost two months hammering this site into a shape that I like, and until I know that the plugins I use are compatible with the new release, I think I can resist the temptation to upgrade.

The Roundup:

Dougal Campbell
Peter Westwood
WordPress DevBlog
Lorelle on WP
Weblog Tools Collection

Developer Alex King has been hard at work updating his plugins. I expect a lot more updates from various developers are in the works.

Tags: WordPress by Jotun
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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.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Datafeeds, Gurus, Internet Marketing, Link Building, Mashups, Plugins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Tools, Traffic, Viral Marketing, WordPress by Jotun
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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.

Tags: Blogging, Entrecard, Psychology, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by Jotun
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Tools

Icon Interactive has Four Free Tools for your use: Link Popularity, Search Engine Submitter, Keyword Suggestion, and Word Cloud. Of them, I found the Link Popularity to be the most informative, whereas the Search Engine Submitter and Keyword Suggestion tools kept breaking on me. I guess you get what you pay for.

Wordpress

Via Weblog Tools Collection: Blueprint Design Studio graces us with a list of their Top 10 Essential Plugins for Wordpress. I’ve used a lot of the plugins on this list, but TinyMCE always was a pain in the arse to get working properly. Subscribe2 is what all of the big boys use on their sites, but for some reason PlugInstaller breaks it, so I’m out of the loop on that one too. Finally, CFormsII seems to be powerful in the right hands, which are obviously not mine - I’ve never had any joy in getting it to work.

Performancing has a great article on using WordPress to build a web directory which is centered around two plugins; Alex Tang’s Link Directory plugin, and Links Back’s plugin WP Directory. I’m interested in trying this out, but according to Mr. Dash they’re both broken in WordPress 2.3.2, which means they’re probably just going to frustrate me. Still, something I’m going to keep on the back burner.

Search Engine Optimization / Link Building

Blogging Mix has a two part tutorial on how to get Google to crawl your website. They’re full of great ideas, and you’re probably already doing them, but a refresher course never hurts. The one tip that I always do that isn’t on this list, is adding your website feed to iGoogle. I remember reading somewhere that if you add your RSS to iGoogle it helps bump up your place in the queue. If your feed is provided by FeedBurner (a division of Google) then you should be doubly covered, right? Part 1 | Part 2

Build a Blog asks the question “To promote using blog directories, or not?”

Thanks to the post above, I was introduced to Skelliwag’s tutorial on Hansel and Gretel Link Building which is a straight forward guide to getting quality incoming sites.

Do Follow Directory is a directory of sites that have “do follow” enabled.

Info Doorway has a large list of “do follow” sites and forums arranged by Page Rank.

Eric Mitz tells us how he uses forums for backlinks.

Courtney Tuttle has a list of 102 ways to make your site a backlink superstar.

Micro Persuasion opines that we’re like a million monkeys on treadmills. Odd title aside, it’s a thought provoking discussion on channels and internet trends of the past few years.

Affiliate Marketing

Squidoo Lens on using Squidoo for Affiliate Marketing

My Web 2.0 has 5 tips for creating powerful text ads.

AffiliateSeeking.com is a directory of the various programs by which you can become an affiliate marketer.

Paul updated his Affiliate Marketing Guide. Awesome advice from somebody who is making 6 figures a month.

This post has been a week in the making, so I hope it’s not a total deluge. I plan on adding a lot of these links to the main site as time permits this week.

Tuesday I go see a specialist for my hernia and see when they want to perform surgery. I’m praying that it won’t be until after my wife returns to work. I’ve been dealing with this for several months now, another one shouldn’t hurt as long as I take it easy. A little Alieve generally keeps me on my feet, and that’s all I need. If I do have to go in fo surgery, expect posting to pick up dramatically.

I’m currently hatching several mini e-books, and when I finally hatch them, you’ll be the first to know.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Linkdump, Plugins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Tools, WordPress by Jotun
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6 Ideas for viral marketing

10 Free Ebooks on Earning Money Online/Blogging

More Free Eebooks on Blogging

Affiliate Toolbox - Free ebook debuting friday | Posted!

3 common mistakes to avoid as an affiliate

Great primer on how to write a headline

How Cisco Leveraged Web 2.0 to launch a new product

An advertising designer weighs on headline writing

Google Checkout Trends

How to use Wordpress as a Membership directory

Product Datafeeds for Affiliates 101

CaRP/WP: Include RSS Feeds inside Wordpress Posts

Affiliate X posts his thoughts: The Death of Crap. This rant inspired Vishen at Mind Valley Labs to post his own thoughts: How Internet Marketing Gurus are Screwing The Public and Making it Increasingly Harder for Newbies to Gain Guidance.

Via Affiliate Toolbox - 100 Landing Page Tips and Tricks

That Blog Site has yet another Affiliate Link Cloaking Tutorial

Tags: Linkdump by Jotun
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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

Tags: Blogging, Entrecard, Plugins, WordPress by Jotun
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