RosalindGardner.com

Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner

Feedburner to Google Account Deadline Today

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Today is the deadline to have all your FeedBurner accounts moved over to your Google account.

Although I've heard various opinions on whether the old Feedburner subscriptions will continue to work – with some bloggers reporting that subscriptions should work indefinitely and others already reporting glitches with the old addresses – I'd trust the Feedburner to Google FAQ which reads:

“It is our intent to keep backward compatibility with your feed address as long as this service exists.”

I updated my accounts last week and haven't yet changed all the feed addresses, but the old one's are redirecting just fine.

The real issue is in updating your accounts. According to the FAQ, if you don't update your account:

“…you will no longer be able to access your account at http://www.feedburner.com, and your feeds will either begin returning a “404 Not Found” response or a “301 Moved” response back to your source feed.”

Learn more on the Feedburner to Google FAQ

Blog Bloat? Pull that Plugin!

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The other day, I was chatting with my friend Michael Lovitch (Hypnosis Network – their Productivity & Engineering procrastination-solving product is amazing BTW, I can't believe how much I've accomplished so far this year!!!) — and he was mentioning how his company uses WordPress, but has had the backend completely redesigned to minimize the relentless program calls and speed up the software.

That reminded me that the WordPress installation on this site (and only this site – 101Date.com and the others are fine) had been running notoriously slow for awhile and I still needed to figure out the cause.

Now I didn't think it had anything to do with the fact that I have:

  • 865 Posts
  • 48 Posts in Draft
  • 9 Pages
  • 35 Categories
  • 291 Tags
  • 3,657 Approved Comments
  • or 3 Zillion Spam comments removed.

No, my thoughts went immediately to the plugins for some reason.

And lo and behold, there she was… ShareThis, still activated after I'd removed the code from the Loop and replaced her months ago with the AddThis bookmarking tool (in the second horizontal navigation bar).

And sure enough, when I deactivated and removed the ShareThis plugin (you should delete plugins that you don't use) … no more waiting years to get an Add New Post page to open.

Hurray!

So… do you know any more plugins that cause blog bloat? Leave your comments below!

My 3 Favorite Ways to Generate Traffic

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Need Traffic Now? Here are 3 Quick Ways to Get Visitors to Your Site

After working long and hard to get your new web site up and running, you probably have little patience left to wait months and months to start getting traffic to your site and start making sales!

But those search engine submissions are taking a lot of time to bring in traffic. You've also discovered that link trading, joining web rings and posting free-for-all classifieds are time-consuming activities that produce just a trickle of traffic, IF you're lucky.

Moreover, you don't want to blow huge amounts of money on advertising just in case your site doesn't convert visitors into buyers at a rate that nets a fair profit.

You want lots of traffic and you want it now! So, what do you do?

Well, here are my 3 favorite ways to bring visitors to my sites quickly and easily.

1. Blogging for Free Search Engine Traffic

Last but not least, to keep the search engines on my side, I post entries to my blogs.

Search engines like Google reward sites that provide fresh content for their visitors on a regular basis.

Of course, your regular visitors love it too, so blogging has the added benefit of bringing visitors back to your site, as well as generating new traffic.

Furthermore, blog content can then be used and revised to create new articles that is placed on article directories… see the next item.

2. Article Marketing

Articles aren't much different or any more difficult to write than all those product endorsements for your site. You DID write product reviews, didn't you?

If your site is about beer, and promotes a variety of products related to home brewing, write an article called “10 Secrets to Your Best Batch Ever”. Include a resource box below your article that gives your name, a brief description of your site and its URL.

Now start submitting those articles to article directories such as GoArticles.com and EzineArticles.com. You can do this manually or save time by using Jason Potash's “Article Announcer” software to automatically broadcast your article to all the major directories in just minutes.

To learn more about the importance of article marketing, read Jason's article “Google is Watching You” and Jim Edwards' “Increase Sales By Flying Under Your Prospects' “Radar Defenses” listed in the Related Articles section below.

3. Pay Per Click Search Engine Advertising

The fastest way to get traffic to your site is to buy keywords and keyword phrases at PPC's (pay per click search engines) such as Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture), Google Adwords and MSN AdCenter.

Google is definitely the fastest PPC account to set up. Simply write your title and description, choose your keywords, make a deposit and you're up and running. Set a daily maximum budget, and check your income and expenses frequently until you ensure that the former consistently exceeds the latter.

You will know within the week how well your site will convert visitors to buyers, which beats the heck out of waiting months for feedback!

You can drive tons of highly targeted traffic to your site in a very short period of time, sometimes doing a great test with as little as $20 bucks. Calculate your conversions, ‘tweak' your site, then re-invest your earnings to drive even more traffic and gain even more sales.

Be sure to check out my “Get FREE Traffic from the Pay Per Click Search Engines“

Stick with the plan, and in no time at all, you'll get to sit back and enjoy one of those home brews while watching your sales numbers climb.

I've listed 3 ways to bring traffic to your sites in this article.

However, you'll learn 31 ways to bring free and paid traffic to your sites in the “Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 in One Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online”.

reCAPTCHA Troubles with WordPress 2.7 Upgrade

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After manually upgrading the NPT blog to WordPress 2.7, I was feeling pretty proud of myself… and relieved. Because the blog was installed manually, I do manual upgrades and hold my breath in suspense each and every time until the very end of the process when the software tells me that the upgrade was performed ‘successfully'.

Around the same time I sent out a newsletter alerting folks to the latest blog post about PPC (link below).

Strangely, the post received a pingback, but not one single, solitary comment in 24 hours. Very strange in fact, considering comments usually start coming in within minutes of posting.

I felt a little dejected and conjured up excuses like “everyone's too busy watching Anderson's interview with Barack to reply”. Weak, I know — especially considering I didn't put one and one together to think that the lack of commentary had anything to do with the upgrade.

Thankfully, Gill Clark sent a message through our Support Desk to let us know that there was a problem with the reCAPTCHA code and an error that read “This reCAPTCHA key isn't authorized for the given domain”.

AH-HAAAAA.

Weird, considering I entered the exact same key that I'd used before when I re-activated the reCAPTCHA plugin after the upgrade.

Anyway, the reCAPTCHA has been temporarily removed. Now make my day — I'd love to hear your comments about the “Losing Money on Your PPC Campaigns?” article as well as any thoughts on the reCAPTCHA issue. 🙂

What is a Blog?

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During a conversation over dinner about making money online with blogs, one of my guests piped up and said, “So what's a blog, anyway?“

Aargh.

Sometimes I forget that most people don't live online like we do, and I'd neglected to fill in the blanks.

To rectify matters, here's a short article that answers the question “What is a Blog?“.

The term blog is a derivative of the phrase ‘web log' typically used to describe a regularly updated online diary or journal.

The word ‘blog' is also used as a verb as in ‘those who blog are bloggers‘ and ‘are you blogging yet?‘

A blog is both a website and a content management system that allows the blogger to post entries (articles) using an online interface. This eliminates the need to learn HMTL or create individual pages on one's computer that then need to be uploaded to the web.

Blog content is usually displayed in reverse chronological order, i.e. the last entry made appears at the top of the page. Once an entry ‘disappears' from the first page it can be found either through the blog's ‘archives' or a keyword search.

Blogs can be either ‘stand-alone' or set up on third-party host.

Hobby bloggers typically use the latter option, using free blogging platforms such Blogger.com or WordPress.com. Entire communities of bloggers that share similar interests have popped up in recent years. For example, two sites that offer travel enthusiasts free blogs are Travelpod and Travelblog.org.

The primary disadvantage of using a third-party blogging platform is that you are restricted by the host's terms and conditions. Here's an example of the restrictions placed on travel bloggers who blog on VirtualTourist.com.

  • Advertising or commercial material of any kind will be deleted.
  • Off-Topic material will be deleted.
  • Political or religious rhetoric is not allowed and will be deleted.
  • HTML & Javascript are NOT supported. For customization, use VTML

Furthermore, third-party blogs typically have URL's that are subdirectories of the host. For example, Blogger.com bloggers have URL's like MyBlog.Blogspot.com.

Business bloggers therefore typically prefer the stand-alone option, to avoid having restrictions imposed on their ability to write freely and earn from advertising placements.

To set up a standalone blog, you need to register your own domain name, get a web host and install blogging software.

NOTE: Bluehost offers free domain registration with their hosting services.

Although some bloggers use Moveable Type and Typepad, the most common blog software is WordPress, which is available for free and is easy to install on a host that offers CPanel, such as BlueHost.

To learn how to set up your own blog on a Cpanel host, please read How to Install a WordPress Blog in Minutes. The tutorial includes screen captures of every step of the process.

The standard WordPress template design (also called a ‘theme') is very basic, so most bloggers elect to change their blog's appearance by installing a new theme or making heavy modifications to the original. A good selection of free templates is available through Themes.wordpress.net.

Newer template designs, such as those used on my this blog and personal blog, allow bloggers to display posts in a news magazine style format.

The themes used on those blogs are by Brian Gardner of StudioPress.

The main advantage to blogging is their ability to attract search engine traffic, due their dynamic nature. Blog posts are quickly indexed by the search engines and almost immediately available to searchers, providing the blogger with a free source of traffic.

Another benefit is that bloggers can create community by allowing visitors to post comments in response to individual blog posts. Such interaction increases the amount of content on the site. Regular fresh content increases a site's search engine rankings which is then rewarded with more free traffic.

In summary, a blog is an easy to set up website with the added benefit of attracting free traffic when it is regularly updated with fresh content.

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Ros

Video: The Lighter Side of Blog Comment Spam Moderation

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I found 265 spam comments in my blog's comment moderation queue this afternoon.

This video shows how I actually do filter through mountains of spam looking for valid comments that go astray and get mistaken as spam.

And although it seems like I'm scrolling through the list pretty quickly, the video (or running Camtasia) seems to slow my scroll rate down by about 20%. So imagine it happening that much faster.

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Ros

BlogRush: Death of a Widget

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Although I never became a fan of John Reese's BlogRush widget – having placed it on my site and removed it after only 2 days – I was still sorry to hear that due to “dreadfully low” click-rates across the network, John announced on October 29th that the BlogRush site and widget would be shut down.

Just in case you missed it, here's the email John sent to BlogRush users.

After careful consideration, we have decided to shutdown the BlogRush service. If you have the widget code on your blog you will need to remove it.

When BlogRush launched in late-2007 it spread like wildfire all over the Web. Thousands of bloggers were talking about it and the service exploded to become one of the fastest growing free services in the history of the Web. During the first year of the service it successfully served 3.4 Billion blog post headlines and the BlogRush widget could be found on blogs all over the world; even up until the moment we closed down the service.

BlogRush didn’t grow without its fair share of problems — from security issues to abusive users trying to ‘game’ the system to much lower click-rates than expected. We also had some problems with trying to fairly control the quality of the network, and in the process made many mistakes in deciding what blogs should stay or go. All of these issues, ultimately, limited the service’s full potential.

Our team worked very hard to try and build a service that would truly help bloggers of all sizes get free traffic to their blogs. This was our primary focus. Not once did we ever try to monetize the service with ads or anything else. BlogRush never made a single penny in revenue. We wanted to be able to help our users FIRST and then worry about monetizing the service later. Unfortunately, the service didn’t work out like we had hoped. (It happens.)

I want to say “Thank You” to all of the great bloggers that at least gave BlogRush a test to see if it would work for them. We sincerely appreciate you giving the service a try.

We have received several offers & inquiries about acquiring BlogRush, but we are choosing not to go that route. While many might think this is crazy, we truly feel it’s the ‘right’ thing to do for our users. Believe it or not, it’s not always about the money. In fact, BlogRush will have lost a small fortune when it’s all said and done, and it was by choice. There were many things we could have done to monetize the service but we wanted to make sure it was going to benefit our users first.

Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from “going for it” to just try and see if something will work. Without trying there can be no success. And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.

On behalf of the entire BlogRush team, we wish the best of luck to everyone with their own blogs, ideas, and crazy ventures.

Sincerely,

John Reese

You win some, you lose some… that's life in the entrepeneurial lane. John makes the point as follows:

“I’ve become a successful entrepreneur (online since 1990) because I am not afraid to fail. I’ve had many ideas that didn’t work, and this one certainly won’t be the last.

I know that my overall success is a direct result from taking action and trying a lot of things. THAT is the real secret to building wealth.”

Or, in other words, if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.

On that note, I'm very curious to see what John comes up with next!

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