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Learn Blogging & Affiliate Marketing with Rosalind Gardner

Another Good Reason to Write Your Blog Posts Offline

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In the Super Affiliate Handbook I talk about using a text or HTML editor (as opposed to an online interface) to write your blog posts to avoid losing your hard work should you lose the connection.

Well, here's another reason.

I'd spent about 20 minutes researching and writing a post about carbon offsets for the Roamsters blog yesterday when I suddenly saw what is in the image above… i.e. NOTHING.

Hoping that the draft hadn't yet been auto-saved, I quickly closed and then re-opened the browser window.

No luck, still NOTHING there.

Obviously, I somehow managed to delete all the content I'd written and the sad thing about it is… unlike an HTML or text editor, there's no UN-do button or CTRL-Z function!

Argh.

Maybe one of these days I'll take my own advice. 🙂

Looking for a good, inexpensive HTML editor? CoffeeCup offers their HTML Editor as a free trial download.

Blogging is a “Massive Mistake”… HUH?

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My jaw dropped as I saw the subject line of an email sent out by Ken Evoy last week which read:

Why Blogging Is A Massive Mistake!

HUH?

At one point Ken states “Blogging has reached lemming status. Without even thinking, many small businesses equate blogging with having a Web site“.

Sure, call me and the 112.8 million other bloggers out there ‘lemmings', but at least we know that a blog IS a web site. Moreover, a blog is a web site that is built to find and deliver search engine traffic… immediately.

Ping – ping – PING!

For those who haven't started blogging yet – a WordPress blog is a site-building platform and content management system with an online publishing interface. And because WordPress is distributed under an open source license called the GNU General Public License, it's distributed free of charge.

Better yet, easy-to-install (or auto-install) widgets and plugins are regularly developed for WordPress by legions of progammer/user/contributors who see ways to enhance the software's already stellar functionality.

By the way, those widgets are also free of charge.

Ken also wrote that blogging is:

…obviously wrong for small businesses with something to sell” and is “also the wrong choice for infopreneurs (ex., those who earn affiliate and AdSense income, without selling anything directly to customers).

Say WHAT? [Read more…]

Blog Classroom: Nearly 3,000 Free Unique Visitors…

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Here's a quick update on the FREE Blog Classroom training if you haven't already joined in…

We now have a total of close to 350 comments, over 200 blogs submitted, many of which are BRAND-NEW — installed after watching our videos!

There are already 3 homework assignments posted, but you can still participate, watch the videos and get your blog up and running… today.

Videos currently on the blog include:

  1. How to Install Your Blog in 3 Easy Steps
  2. Setting-up For SEO
  3. The Power of the Long-Tail Keywords (Tons of Free Traffic)

And we still have a way to go! 5 more free videos, 2 LIVE webinars and a secret interview with one of the top bloggers in the world…

For more information on how to access your free blogging instructional videos, listen to Anik's personal message for you at BlogClassroom.com.

Clickbank Starts a Blog

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On March 27th, Clickbank joined the 21st century – in terms of communications – and started a blog. The first post, written by their Marketing Communications Manager, Kristen M., outlines their reasons for launching the blog and sets forth a few points about how communication on the blog will be conducted.

One of those points includes:

We do not allow URLs in comments in order to avoid having the blog serve as a means of advertising for any one participant. So please don’t include them. If you do, your comment either won’t be posted or the URL will be edited out.

Knowing affiliate marketers' penchant for driving traffic through links on blog comments, it therefore surprised me to see 62 comments made on that first post. Then again, how many MORE comments might they have received had links been allowed? Hmmmmm.

Despite disallowing links on comments, open exchange between Clickbank's network reps, merchants and affiliates is a truly welcome improvement and a good indicator of their commitment to ‘expand our communication with our clients‘.

Well done, Clickbank! Check out the Clickbank blog….

What is RSS and How Will it Help Me?

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RSS, RSS, RSS… you hear the constant chant, but do you really know what the heck it means?

RSS stands for ‘Real Simple Sydication‘ and is a way for webmasters to publish (or ‘feed') new information posted on their site to feed subscribers. A single item will typically include a headline, a snippet of content and a link to the website.

Benefits of Using RSS

The benefit to feed subscribers is that it allows them to stay informed of rapidly changing content on a multitude of sites without having to sign up for individual newsletters or having to visit each site separately.

Most webmasters make it easy to sign up for their feeds, with easily recognizable icons and links such as:

There are many RSS feed readers, also known as ‘aggregators‘, to choose from. I started off with ‘FeedReader‘, which is a freeware application for Windows, and now use Google's reader.

The primary benefit for webmasters who syndicate their content with RSS feeds is that feed subscribers are automatically notified as new items are published. Making RSS feeds available to readers typically increases readership and site traffic.

Have You Updated Your ShareThis Plugin?

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Back in late February MySpace released a new posting API and shortly afterwards, ShareThis included a MySpace posting choice on their social web tab (shown left) that uses the new API, and gives you an easy way to post anything to your MySpace page.

ShareThis also advises that soon you'll be able to “Post anything on the web to your Blogger, TypePad, Twitter, LiveJournal, and Orkut” and have the ability “to put ShareThis buttons on flash players”.

ShareThis currently supports the following sites:

  1. blinkList
  2. del.icio.us
  3. digg
  4. Facebook
  5. Google Bookmarks
  6. Mixx
  7. My WebWindows Live
  8. MySpace
  9. newsvine
  10. Propeller
  11. reddit
  12. StumbleUpon
  13. Technorati
  14. Yahoo!

You can pick up the ShareThis plugin here.

Polling Plugin for WordPress Blogs

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Back in January, I added Polls to this site and have since tried a few different platforms.

For the first poll, “What is Your Biggest Internet Marketing Challenge?“, I used a third-party service called Vizu. Because I chose the free poll option, the polls shows a ‘Powered by Vizu‘ link at the bottom of the poll. As the poll is hosted on their server, that's a fair deal. However, because I don't like sending traffic off-site if I don't have to and have a mountain of bandwidth with which to play on my server, I kept looking for a self-hosted polling plugin for WordPress.

I came across the Democracy plugin, which was really easy to set up and deploy for my “How Many Web Sites Do You Operate?” poll. IP addresses can be logged to stop multiple voting and you can store an archive of polls. What you cannot do with the Democracy plugin however is run more than one poll at a time, so I kept on looking for a self-hosted polling option that allows multiple polls.

By the time I wrote the 3rd poll – How Often Do You Post to Your Blog? – I had found Lester Chan's WP-Polls plugin, which along with his WP-Polls Widget, adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog that lets you run multiple polls.

WP-Polls lets you customize the look and feel of your polls using templates and there are number of other options from which to choose. The software allows users to select more than one answer and you can assign a maximum number of answers. You may also assign a start and end date for your poll, so if you get really ambitious, you can write a number of different polls to be queued up and published later to your blog.

The only additional feature that I would like to see in this plugin is a fill-in-the-blank option for those instances where the answer hasn't been provided and readers would like to add more information. Other than that, WP-Polls is pretty much the perfect poll option.

Are you using WP-Polls or other polling software on your blog that you especially like (or dislike) and would like to mention? Please leave a comment and let others know!

[tags]polling, polls, plugin, WordPress, blog[/tags]

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