Since the plugin was new and I just installed it on my blog, I didn’t have any results to share with you. Of course my hopes were high as this looked like the ideal setup in getting relevant backlinks.
Well, I just received an email from the owners yesterday that pretty much fortifies what I’ve already been saying about this plugin. So far they are seeing tremendous growth in the network and have started distributing backlinks.
I still have high hopes and look forward to the potential that this neat little plugin will have for my blogs, including this one.
I would recommend grabbing this plugin and utilizing it on your blogs. You have absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain. And don’t worry, I’m not getting paid or anything to promote it. I just see a lot of value in this and hope all of you will too.
Here’s a really cool plugin for all of you WordPress users out there. If the idea of building relevant and natural backlinks to your blog appeals to you, which it should, then this plugin is for you. It’s called the Contextual Partnership Plugin.
The basic gist behind the plugin is that you do nothing different from just blogging as you always do. For each post you have, past and present, you can build backlinks with your chosen keywords on other relevant blogs in the network.
Notice I said network. This means that there is a network of bloggers who all have this plugin. As the network grows, there will be more and more blogs available to earn backlinks from. So, this is important as you need to spread the word to everyone you know about this plugin and have them install it on their blogs.
There’s an approval process before your blog will be available in the network. It took my blog about an hour to get approved, so you shouldn’t have any trouble either. You can install this on as many blogs as you own, which I would recommend.
The only guidelines is that you have at least five posts, have contact information readily available, and provide value in your posts.
I just installed this yesterday, and it could take a few weeks before I start seeing backlinks. I’ll keep you updated on the results.
This is one very easy and automated way of building more links to your blog. Another free method that is similar to this is the Free Taffic System. I’ve been using the Free Traffic System for quite some time now and have seen excellent results. With both of these at my disposal, I’ll be able to work less to build high quality, one way backlinks.
I recommend you take a look at the Free Traffic System and also download this free plugin so that you can start to experience the same awesome results I’m getting.
I’ve decided to start doing a roundup of all of last month’s posts. This is in case you happened to miss one along the way for whatever reason, and it never hurts to refresh your memory with an idea.
I’ll start from the beginning of the month and move to the most recent. So here goes…
If you’re starting up a new blog, or you have a blog that could use more traffic, then you have to get this plugin. It’s free to download and will optimize your blog for the search engines and pull in laster targeted traffic.
Learn about my experience of switching web hosts and why Host Gator was my preferred choice. If you’re looking for reliable hosting at a super affordable rate, then this is a post you don’t want to miss.
If you’re looking for big-time exposure for your make money online site, then you must check this out. Learn how to get your site seen by thousands of targeted visitors and make more sales.
An online marketer knows the importance of using an autoresponder. It’s necessary if you’re going to use email marketing to bring in more sales, and you should be. Learn more about GetResponse and why I chose them.
If you’re struggling to do all the necessary tasks of marketing your website or just don’t have the time, leave it up to professionals. Learn more about my partnership with a proven company that can handle all of your internet marketing needs.
If you happened to stumble onto my blog last evening and early this morning, you probably noticed that it looked very weird. No, it wasn’t your computer or browser. The design was messed up.
What happened was I trying to fix a simple write error by changing the permission settings for a particular directory. Instead of fixing the simple problem, I inadvertently created a much bigger problem. The main functions of the blog still worked and navigation shouldn’t have been a problem, though.
Without trying to sound too “techie,” the read/write permissions that I screwed up caused my WordPress theme to not show up. So, you saw my blog, but without the header and other graphics. The layout was also messed up as a result.
I’m just happy everything is working properly again. I have folks from the Warrior Forum and my web tech guru from Niche Power Group to thank for helping me resolve this issue.
This is a good lesson to remember that if you plan on making changes to your blog, no matter how small, to first make a backup of your blog in case something terrible goes wrong. All I can say is… lesson learned!
The title says it all. Those are the reasons that this site is now hosted by HostGator web hosting. If you tried visiting my site yesterday, you may have been presented with a blank page or a database error message. For that, I apologize.
My site had been hosted with Host4Profit as part of the PIPS program. I still like Host4Profit as their support is one of the best around, probably second to HostGator’s. But, I wanted to consolidate my sites and save a bit of money every month. You can’t blame me, can you?
The steps involved in transferring a complete website is a bit complicated, and having never done it before, I was a bit overwhelemed. Thankfully I had tons of support from fellow peers as well as both hosting company’s support departments. Without them, I would have never gotten it done.
With that said, I highly recommend HostGator for all of your cheap web host needs. They provide cpanel web hosting, which is a huge lifesaver, especially the one click WordPress setup. You can host unlimited domains without the price ever going up, which is real handy if you have quite a few sites or plan to build more than one. And, as I said before, their support is top notch. They’re very hard to beat in price, and the site up-time is also the best around.
After the switch, I was recommended to transfer my domain to NameCheap.com. What a lifesaver that was for me. I was looking at paying $25 or more for my domain renewal every year. With NameCheap, it’s less than $10 a year for domains. My transfer was even less. I highly recommend them!
Another awesome benefit about NameCheap, which I didn’t know about until I transferred my domain, is that they offer free WhoisGuard protection. This means the Whois information for your domain is guarded. Very cool and makes them even more worth it!
So, if you’re looking for reliable yet cheap web hosting, make the switch to HostGator. You can’t go wrong. And, I’ll even throw in a little bonus if you sign up through me. Sign up for a hosting account through my links, and I’ll setup a WordPress blog for you free. That’s my way of saying thanks. Then you can take what you’re learning here and apply it to your new site.
Are you using HostGator? What’s your feelings about NameCheap.com? Have you gone through the hassle of switching hosts?
I’m all for getting more traffic to my blog. Traffic is a good thing, especially when you’re trying to sell products online as an affiliate. You won’t make sales if you don’t bring in any traffic.
I’ve been a subscriber of Jeff Johnson’s for quite some time now, and he provides some top notch tactics on getting more traffic and sales. And believe me, I don’t use the phrase “top notch” lightly at all.
Jeff knows his stuff and tests everything he does. It also helps to have a team working for you, which of course, Jeff does. He had his team put together new software that could get more traffic to his blogs by optimizing them for search engines and utilizing various plugins.
Jeff provides a lot of awesome content on his Underground Training Lab blog, and for free. He’s really a down to earth guy that enjoys sharing what he’s learned with others. I’ve learned a lot just from his videos. If you’ve never seen any of Jeff’s videos before, you can check them out on YouTube.
Jeff decided to give away his SEO blog software for free. I’ve already downloaded my copy and plan to install it here on this blog shortly. I wanted to make all of my readers aware of this software and how it can really benefit your blog by bringing in more traffic, and hopefully more sales.
You can grab your copy of Jeff’s Free Traffic-Getting SEO blog software here. All you have to do is simply enter your email address… no name required. You’ll also get full instructions on installing the simple plugin and setting everything up.
If you don’t yet have a WordPress blog setup and want to take advantage of this software, simply sign up for a hosting account through HostGator, and I’ll help you set up your new blog and software. HostGator is my recommended web hosting company as they provide the best support, and their prices are very hard to beat.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how this software is bringing in more traffic for you. Did you find it easy to install and setup? How much more traffic are you getting from it?
Once I get it up and running on here, I’ll be back with an update.
I’m not a huge Twitter user, personally, as I don’t spend hours at a time chatting with my fellow tweets. I guess you could say I don’t use it for its intended use of socializing with others and building relationships. I make occasional updates about what I’m doing or thinking, but I don’t usually chat with anyone.
Nonetheless, I can’t ignore the fact that Twitter can bring in a lot of traffic. Twitter does have many advantages, and I continue to get more and more followers daily. Because of this, I use a service to automatically post my blog updates to my Twitter account.
As a marketer I try to capatalize on my efforts to get as much traffic with as little effort as possible. I’m sure others could agree that they strive to do the same. What better way to do this than to have others help bring you more traffic? That’s what the TweetMeMe WordPress plugin is designed to do. You may notice a little box above every post showing how many tweets that post has. There’s also a little green rectangle that says “ReTweet.”
If you find my posts useful and would like to share them with your fellow followers on Twitter, you can simply click that button at the top of the post to ReTweet it. Of course, you’ll have to have a Twitter account first. You can sign up for free here.
If you realize the true potential of social media and how sites like Twitter are gaining a foothold in the marketing world, you may want to consider adding this plugin, or a similar one, to your own blog.
I monitor a lot of blogs, forums and news sites with my trusty RSS reader. One of my favorite sites is SitePoint, which is a terrific discussion forum for webmasters, programmers and domain name investors.
I’ve had some great conversations on the forums and via IM that have been very enlightening.
In a recent post, one of the SitePoint forum guys was lamenting the fact that he was having trouble getting to 100 unique visitors per day.
There was some good, solid advice that I would like to share and build upon:
1. Make sure your posts are optimized with popular keywords. I would be careful with this one because you don’t want to lose your blogging voice or make your pages read awkwardly by jamming in as many keywords as you can. Do check for the most popular keywords in your universe, though, using a tool like WordTracker or Google’s External Keyword Tool. As a poster on SitePoint said, using the competition values in WordTracker allows you to pick keywords that haven’t soaked the web yet.
2. Use a service like PinGoat to ping blogger indexing sites every time you change your site. Pinging is basically extending an invitation to indexing services like Technorati, IceRocket and Feedster to come to your site and index it. The more indexing you get, the more exposure you get. PinGoat is a terrific service that pings them all at the same time. If you use WordPress, pinging is done automatically for you everytime you publish a new post.
3. Update your Google Sitemap every few posts and resubmit it. A Google Sitemap is an interesting and amazing phenomenon. Here is how Google explains it:
The Google Sitemaps program is two-way communication between webmasters and Google. You can give us information about your site so we can index it more effectively, and we can show you how we see your site and tell you about any trouble we’ve had crawling it.
Basically you create a special xml file and tell Google to go look at it. It uses the file to better index the site. And it definitely works. There’s even a Plugin for WordPress that will build the perfect sitemap for Google. You can read more about sitemaps by visiting the Google Sitemaps page.
4. Post relevant comments on blogs related to your content area. Look around, find people blogging about the same stuff as you. Monitor their blog sites and participate in the discussion. Be sure to include a link to your site in all of your comments. It’s a great way to correspond with like-minded people and get your name and site name out there.
5. Search for link partners and link exchanges at least once a week. If you find a site you like, include it on your link page and drop the site owner an email. He or she will most likely list your site as well. Join a couple of free or cheap link exchange sites and stick to your subject area when exchanging links. Always visit the prospective link exchange site and ask yourself if you would be doing your readers a service by sending them to that site. If not, don’t link to the site.
6. Write great content, and don’t plug stuff unless you are familiar with it and approve of it. If you write interesting content about subjects that interest people they will always find you. Don’t hustle your readers — if you are going to plug something for money, make sure the product or service is something you would use and recommend. If people sense a hustle they will not convert and they will not come back.
7. Watch your keywords and make sure they are performing. DigitalPoint has a terrific tool that will help you track your keyword placement over time so you can see how your efforts are doing.
8. Perform some basic Search Engine Optimization. Learn how to not only optimize your posts, but optimize your entire site. You can get some great tips and tools at SeoChat.com. For a more thorough explanation of how to optimize your site I highly recommend Suzanne Morrison’s 3 Steps to Search Engine Success.
9. Shake loose a couple of bucks and buy some ad space. Once you’re certain your blog looks and operates perfectly, spend $100 on Adsense ads and see how that helps.
10. Be patient. It isn’t going to happen overnight. It will take weeks or months to get things rolling.
Here’s a video I found on YouTube about generating traffic to your site…
Firstly, we all want to know How to Make Money Online, and one of the best ways I have found is by creating blogs. In this article I intend to show you how you too can learn How to Make Money Blogging by telling you how combining the techniques I have gathered from across the web helps to make me $$$ every day. Secondly, I am not trying to sell you my latest “Get Rich Quick” scheme because I don’t have one. Each eBook you read will have a wealth of information within them which will, without a doubt, help you to discover the secrets of How to Make Money Online. I am only going to tell you which ones out of the 100′s available you SHOULD read if you too want to make lots of money.
I use a 10 step guide to setting up and starting all of my blogs.
I will give you a list of the top 10 resources later that I use and recommend to everyone who is serious about making lots of money online. One of the vital aspects people seem to miss out when they first get into blogging is the fact that their blog must contain information that people want to read.
Many bloggers are looking through closed eyes in this regard and if you browse through 50 blogs you will notice that most will tell you they know How to Make Money with Blogs when really all they tell you is where they went on their vacation or how many cars they have.
Are you ready to learn How to Make Money Blogging?
If the answer is YES then read on and start to make money with your blog. I am not here to tell you how to write your blog, that’s up to you, but what I am about to tell you is the 10 things I use to make money on the internet. You can choose to use these techniques or not, that’s your prerogative.
Step 1 – Finding a Topic
Turn off your computer, grab a pen and some paper and sit somewhere you can relax but also stay focused (if you are just starting out this step can be a pain because we all want to know How to Make Money Online and we want to know how to make it NOW). Think of a topic you are interested in and write it down (this helps because you will be more committed to trying instead of giving up in a day or two) and also make sure it is something other people are interested in too. A couple of ways I use to think of a topic is by using MetaSpy to find out what people are searching for, Ask IQ to find what’s popular and VRE Toolbar to find out how many people search for the topic (this is also useful later on to get traffic). Write down your top five keywords, you will want to use them later in your blog.
Step 2 – Create Your Blog
Find and create your blog online. I like to use WordPress for it’s SEO benefits but there’s also Blogger and Movable Type. You can find all the help in the program you use to get information when setting up the blog. Create your content, make it original, and make it informative. This is one of the main keys to learn How to Make Money with Blogs. You need to include the keywords you wrote down in Step 1 in the content of your blog. Try not to overuse these as it sends out bad signals to the search engines, and this is 100% not what you want.
Step 3 – Go Google
Sign up for Google Adsense and insert the code in the margin of your blog. You can customize your ads in many ways, such as including text links or image links. I prefer the text links only, as they are easier to blend in with your blog and don’t take the focus away from the information. Google Adsense will probably not make you a millionaire but it is an instant way of generating a small amount of money.
If you want to track where your visitors are coming from with regards to direct hits or from search engine results then I would suggest you use Google Analytics and again you can get all the help you need setting that up from within the program.
You will also want to add your URL to Google’s index.
Step 4 – Find Something to Sell
If you don’t want to sell anything and are happy with the income Google Adsense is bringing in then you can skip this step. If you want to maximize your income and truly learn How to Make Money with Blogs you will want to find an affiliate program to join. A couple of affiliate programs I would suggest are ClickBank and Commission Junction. You can sell anything from office furniture, pet supplies, movies and clothing to PC games, Dieting tips and Audio software.
Whatever program you join will give you help inserting the code you will need to insert into your blog, but be sure you do this correctly or you WILL NOT earn money from your visitors. If you do not know how to edit HTML, W3Schools HTML tutorial is a great place to start.
Step 5 – Social Bookmarking
There is no better advertising than word of mouth, but the next best thing is social bookmarking. You will want to make things easier for people to do this. Social bookmarking sites I use and recommend are OnlyWire and SocialMarker and they are used for people to share their bookmarks or websites that they have liked with other people in their online community.
I would not suggest you add your own links to these services, but provide visitors to your website the ability to do so.
Step 6 – Write an Article
Whether your blog is about a specific product, for example a certain MP3 Player you are promoting, or just about giving people information, I would suggest you to write an article or a review of it. Most article directories require articles of 500 words and over so I would use this as a rule when writing to ensure your article is published.
Submit your article to any of the 100′s which are out there. I personally use a few of the Top Article directories such as EzineArticles, Article Dashboard, Amazines.com, isnare and SearchWarp. I also use a nifty piece of software called Article Submitter which will submit your articles to over 600 article directories, which saves you lots of time and leaves you to focus on writing your blogs.
Step 7 – Ping The Hell Out Of It
Every time you add new information to your blog, you want to let the blog directories know about it, this is known as pinging. Some Blog providers automatically send out pings when you update, but to be on the safe side you will want to do this manually too. WordPress already does this for you. Add any pinging services to the list already provided. Word of note – ONLY PING WHEN YOU UPDATE.
There are a couple of Ping sites I use which will send a ping to multiple blog directories at the same time. PingMyBlog would be my first port of call and then if for some reason that site is down I would use Ping-o-matic. Remember, to only ping when you update or you could get blacklisted, and that is bad.
Step 8 – Yahoo! Answers and Forums
One of the easiest ways to get targeted visitors to your blog is to make use of the people you want to target. I would suggest you sign up to at LEAST one forum in the topic you are writing about, and don’t just go straight in there and start posting comments for people to look at your blog, they won’t.
The secret is to add the link to your blog in your signature and actively become a member of the forum, posting relevant topics and starting debates within them. The more you post, the more your link will show, and if you provide someone with good info the chances are higher they will click your link.
Yahoo! Answers is along the same lines as forums but the beauty of this is it’s viewed by thousands of visitors each day. If you don’t already have a Yahoo! account get one and then login and search for questions relating to the topic of your blog and answer them well. You can then insert the link to your blog and as with the forums, if you answer well you may have not only earned yourself a point or two on Yahoo!, but also earned a visitor to your blog.
Step 9 – Update Your Blog
This can be by several means, one is to add new reviews or content to your blog, and if you are going to do this I suggest updating every couple of days. This helps to keep the search engines happy as they love to see new and original content.
Another way of updating your blog and keeping the content fresh is to add RSS feeds to it. Make sure the feeds are relevant to your blog and provide visitors with helpful information. Visitors to a World of Warcraft blog don’t want to read feeds about knitting, or do they?
Step 10 – More, More, More
Repeat steps 1 – 10, this is the only way How to Make Money Blogging.
Step 11 – A Bonus Step
If you have your own product or newsletter, give your visitors an easy way to sign up to receive updates or information. This helps you to contact the visitor again with more great info or products you wish to sell.
How to Make Money Online is easy if you follow the above steps.
Some important things to remember so you don’t get disheartened with your blog is the fact that you will not become a millionaire overnight, it takes hard work and a lot of effort. If you are really serious about learning How to Make Money with Blogs then stick with it and eventually you will have an Ah-Ha moment. This is when things start to work and you think to yourself Ah-Ha, that’s how they do it! Your moment could be sooner than you think.
My Top 10 resources I use and recommend are:
1. Rob Benwell’s Blogging to The Bank 2.0
2. WordPress Goldmine
3. Rob Atherton’s Building A Blog Empire For Profit
4. The Blog Challenge
5. Hinge Marketing Magic
6. Blogging For Riches – Complete Video Tutorial
7. Social Bookmarking Demon
8. Adsense Inbox
9. WordPress SEO Sniper
10. RSS, Blogs and Syndication…
For a couple years now I have used Blogger as my blogging platform. I like blogger; it’s simple to use and setup. There’s one downfall to Blogger, though. It hasn’t yet caught on to the social aspect of the internet. Everything, and I mean content, is streamed through social networks (aka social bookmarking sites).
These sites are kind of like a “vote” for your content. The more people that bookmark your blog or blog posts, the more votes you get. This is big news considering Google loves content. When these social sites are all linking to your content, Google picks up on this. This means big news for you. Your blog will get indexed higher in Google. This means more TRAFFIC!
So how do you utilize the power of social sites with your blog? Well, with Blogger, the only way to do this would be to manually bookmark your posts to all the major bookmarking sites. Very time consuming! Of course, you could use OnlyWire or SocialMarker to do this for you, but you still have to take the time to use those services.
There IS a much easier way to get MORE traffic to your blog. The answer is WordPress. WordPress is the most popular blogging platform, and for good reason. It’s a little more technical, but that shouldn’t scare you away. The benefits outweigh the technically challenged, by far!
WordPress utilizes the power of Plugins. Plugins are basically little applications that perform a function or process. There are hundreds of Plugins available for WordPress, and they all serve a different purpose.
Here are some Plugins that you DON’T want to be without:
AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – Allows your readers to bookmark your posts Only Wire Autosubmitter – This will automatically submit your posts to your OnlyWire account… a true time saver! Tweet My Blog – This will automatically post a tweet to your Twitter account when you make a new post, thus driving more traffic to your blog. Sign up for Tweet My Blog. Of course, you need a Twitter account to do this, so sign up for a free Twitter Account as well. ShareThis – Allows users to share and bookmark your posts Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites
There’s a small example of the kinds of plugins you can use with WordPress. You can obviously see the potential here, and you would be out of your mind to not take advantage of WordPress.
This is the main reason I started a WordPress blog. I saw the potential and the advantages WordPress had over Blogger. I still have my Blogger blog as well and will continue to use it, but WordPress will be my main blogging platform from now on.
Don’t have a WordPress blog yet? Sign up for a free WordPress account today and get started blogging!
This is my first post on my WordPress blog! I’d love to hear your comments. This is a DoFollow blog, so your comments are welcomed and encouraged. Thanks!
I’ve decided to start doing a roundup of all of last month’s posts. This is in case you happened to miss one along the way for whatever reason, and it never hurts to refresh your memory with an idea.
of being ReTweeted.
