The BookmarkMoney Blog

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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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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What Sells Online: SEO With Long Tail Keywords.

Download “The Long Tail” ebook for free courtesy of Change This.

LongTail.com is the homepage of Chris Anderson, author of “The Long Tail” and is filled to the gills with lots of good ideas and observations on ‘free.’

Lawrence Lessig’s novel The Future of Ideas has been released under a Creative Commons license.

SeoQuake is a Firefox extention that will show you Google PageRank, the amount of pages indexed by Google/Yahoo/MSN, the age of the page, and many, many more amazing features. It’s an amazing free plugin that will help you spy on the competition.

Media Viper’s list of negative ppc keywords.

WHDB.com has a very thorough list of free alternatives to commercial software.

If you’re doing any kind of video marketing, DeskPing has a list of 5 royalty free music sites.

If you’re looking to finance your next business venture, Mind of a Hustler suggest you try the stone soup method.

Dustin Brewer shares his thoughts about creating interesting content for social networks.

Saturday Morning Sweeties - NSFW!

This last bit is just for the guys. Egotastic was kind enough to bless us with Olivia Munn’s Complex Magazine photo shoot. If you have basic cable, and have ever stumbled across G4 (formerly TechTV), you’ll recognize her as the hostess of Attack of the Show. Honestly, she’s the primary reason I tune into the show, although Layla Kayleigh and Kristen Holt don’t hurt the eyes either.

Anyway, enjoy the eye candy, and I have a couple of big announcements coming down the pike this weekend. Stay Tuned!

Tags: Linkdump, Plugins, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site News, Tools, WordPress by Jotun
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Well it has been a few days since I started my first Adwords campaign. 9,000 impressions, 0 clicks. Time to rewrite that one I think.

I created two more on the spur of the moment on Wednesday night. Campaign 1: 900 impressions, one click. Campaign 2: 2,500 impressions, three clicks. Slightly better than my first campaign, but only in very relative terms.

Total time spent to setup my campaigns - 50 minutes. Total cost to me - $.38. Money made - 0. Time to dust off the old thinking cap.

Still, I’m not really discouraged. I am getting ideas and insights from the campaigns I’m running, and since I’m a kinesthetic learner, I’m learning by doing. I have a thousands of ideas, so two spur of the moment ones not making money isn’t a heartbreaker. What I’m learning is well worth the $.38 I’m out so far.

Never Blue Ads called yesterday. I need to find a minute and call them back. If I’m not home I’m working, and if I am home I have to use a spatula to pry the kid off of my leg. *sigh* I really wish I had started this two years ago when I wanted to, before the mortgage and kid.

I’m working my way through Ruck’s 60 Days to List Profits in fits and starts. I know I write about him a lot, and it makes me feel like a suck-boy, but I can’t help it. He’s the first affiliate marketer that isn’t peddling re-heated two year old material (on his blog at least), and his insights make me feel like I can do it too. His recent series on the potential of Kaboodle are amazing. Catch up on them: Day 1 |Day 2 |Day 3 |Day 4

I see from my referral logs that Ruck visited here after a trackback. Probably laughed his ass off. I know that’s probably what I would do if the roles were reversed. That’s ok, hate makes me stronger

Spent 4 hours last night looking for software to power the backend of my as yet unannounced project. I swear it’ll blow your mind if I can afford to pay somebody off of eLance to write it for me. I spent a couple hours noodling around with Yahoo Pipes. Talk about your object oriented programming! Very powerful and yet very limited. Spent hours trying to get yahoo to categorize 3 different sets of rss feed items by date posted without regards to the blog they were coming from, but the closest I ever got was listing them by date yet still seperated.

Finally, I’ve noticed that every time I break out “Are You Dead Yet?” by Children of Bodom, it always starts with “In Your Face,” which is my favorite song on the album, and may just be the best one too. I’m definately looking forward to the new album and hopefully I can catch them on tour again. The last time I saw them, they were with Slayer and Mastodon. Mastodon sucked ungodly amounts of ass, and the only reason I stayed for Slayer was so that my friend could say he had seen them. Two songs later we were gone.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Music, Site News by Jotun
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