Blog Income Life

Blogging for Money and Loving It!

Posts Tagged Wordpress

Blog Income Under Attack from Cyber Gremlins

Jan 28

Posted by Valentina in Miscellaneous | No Comments

What?  Was there a full moon or something?  It seems that the cyber gremlins have been  working over time this week and the best laid plans have gone awry.  So I am way behind on my blog income schedule for the week.

Today I am breathing easier but guess what?  This morning I read my Google subscribed email from Caroline Middlebrook – she’s a super cool gal out in the UK, smart as a whip and both IM and IT savvy, I mean she is developing her own software for crying out loud and her blog is drawing envious traffic in spite of having all but ignored it for almost a year.    Well, it seems she’s been doing battle with a weird WordPress error that just showed up out of nowhere. Now she’s no mean techie and it was days before she fixed the error which she “hopes sticks!”

Strangely enough that makes me feel a lot better (sorry Caroline).  If someone of Caroline’s stature has to occasionally get into the innards of WordPress and smack an offending HTML character and put it in its right place, well, then I’m at least in good company when it comes to untold hours of internet grief.

What was it that set my schedule behind?  Not a big thing, but as I previously mentioned my post on Golden Nuggets, little things do mean a lot.  The first thing was nothing more than an annoyance.  For some reason when I publish or edit and update a post, instead of the usual re-display of the posting/editing page in WordPress, I get a blank page with a torn page icon at the top left hand corner.  The actual publishing or updating happens, but if I want to do additional work in the admin area, I have to log in again.  So far, no solution found.  This hiccup set the tone for the week.

Annoying though it may be it was not this hiccup that led to the tearing of hair, gnashing of teeth and spewing of language even I didn’t know I knew!  I am taking an internet marketing course and we had to create a WordPress site, select a template and all the nice little things that everyone who has a WordPress site needs to do.  What is it about those who know the steps so well that they could walk them in their sleep that when teaching it they skip through the basic steps – perhaps they think we know more than we do.

Anyway, I’ve never had to do that – you see I use WordPress Direct which does all the setup for me.  Now that I’ve been using it since October I thought it wouldn’t hurt to learn more about the innards of the real world of WordPress.  Aaarrrgghhh!!!

Memory is a wonderful thing even if it takes time to kick in.  Two words:  Ewen Chia .  I have several of his courses.  One of them takes you through setting up your WordPress site/blog.  Videos.  Step by step.  Pause.  Execute.  Voila! Success at last!

I know exactly how Caroline felt when she had to deal with her WordPress gremlin.  Mine may not have had the hefty muscles of hers but it had the same effect.  Calmness has returned to both my inner and outer worlds and peace reigns once again in the land of Blog Income Life.

To Your Awesome Success!

Valentina


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Niche and keyword research for your blog

Jan 13

Posted by Mike Paetzold in Guests | 2 Comments

Mike Paetzold back again for day 3 of my visit here as part of The Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour.Today the discussion will be on finding your niche and gathering your keywords.

Unfortunately this is a step that gets skipped way too often. Have done it, own the t-shirt, coffee mug and more. Skipping this step always comes back to bite you unless you are using your blog strictly as a part of your email marketing.

So even though it is not fun at times doing your research first will pay off. Knowing who you are targeting and what they are interested in makes it much easier to supply that need.

So find your specific niche first and look to see if there is money being spent in that niche. If not maybe you need to choose a different topic. I am doing that thing I hate to do assuming that if you are creating a blog you are looking for it to generate income. If that is not true then you can ignore this part.

The second part of the equation is to find the keyword phrases that people are actually searching for AND that do not have a huge amount of competition. It is a tight line to walk.

Eventually you can rank for any term if you are willing to work hard enough for it. Low competition terms just make it much quicker and easier to get rankings and the traffic that comes with that.

Finally you need to build from the bottom up. It is usually easier to rank for a 4 word phrase than a 3 and a 2 word phrase is usually tougher.

Here is a picture of how I set up my niche sites after researching them.

keywordtree

The center is my main topic. Each of the categories will be related to that top keyword and will usually be more competitive than the keywords below it.

For example my topic is dog training. One of the categories would be dog training collars and the keywords could be electronic dog training collars, choker dog training collars, etc.

Start by doing a post on all of the lower level words like electronic dog training collars and you will build up to dog training collars because each of the 4 word phrases will have the 3 word phrase in it or a variation of it.

Getting this right can lead to traffic fairly quickly and eventually you can rank for all of them. For more on picking your niche and generating your keywords check out The Keyword Call. Tomorrow I will be back to discuss review posts.

About the author

align=left Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends.

You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy.

Follow Mike on Twitter

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The Old Bald Guy Blog Tour has arrived

Jan 12

Posted by Mike Paetzold in Guests | 1 Comment

Hi all. Let me introduce myself, my name is Mike Paetzold and this is the last week of my Old Bald Guy’s Blog Tour. I have been traveling from blog to blog across the internet and setting up my cyber tent to camp out for a week at a time. This is the last stop of the tour and it has been a fun time.

This week I will be talking about using a blog for affiliate marketing.

Now you can do this in any niche and it is probably easier to do in niches outside of the internet marketing area. Blogs work because Google has shown that they like blogs and the ease of use to add content helps you keep it current.

The topics that I will cover will be using your blog for…

  • List building
  • Finding a good niche
  • Review posts
  • Finding the right affiliate product

All of these things are important but the item that will help you the most is doing good research before you even start your blog. You need to find the right keywords to be able to rank and generate traffic from the search engines.

Finding the keywords that you can easily rank for and that are words searched for by buyers is the real key no matter what your business model. You can get more information on doing keyword research and finding a good niche check out the keyword research call.

Look forward to spending the week and look forward to your comments and questions.

About the author

align=left

Mike Paetzold has been online since 2000 and runs numerous blogs and you can find out what he is up to at Mike Paetzold Recommends.

You can also find out and keep current with WordPress at his blog WordPress Made Easy.

Follow Mike on Twitter

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13 Reasons Why I Chose to go With WordPress Direct

Oct 15

Posted by Valentina in Internet Marketing, Starting a Blog | 3 Comments

Elaine Babauta of SweetStacks writes:

“Hi Valentina,
I enjoy reading your newsletters as I learn something new each time! :-) I do have a question for you. Why did you switch from Blogger to WordPress Direct? What are the advantages that WordPress Directs provides over Blogger? I guess I’m out of the loop with blogging sites. I use Blogger to blog about SweetStacks.
Elaine Babauta
SweetStacks, Inc.
www.SweetStacks.com

The first point of consideration when deciding which platform to choose for your blog is to answer the question: what is the purpose of my blog?

If the purpose of your blog is to serve your main website as a promotional tool, to help drive traffic to your sales page, then the Blogger vs WordPress debate is not that critical, in fact, I almost always recommend that if you are completely new to the internet and techie type info gives you a nosebleed, Blogger is a good place to get started. I started all my first blogs on Blogger. It’s easy, you can plod along at your own pace, and as you begin to develop some net muscles you can even pretty it up a bit here and there.

Early on this year I began to notice that most of the internet marketing professionals were using WordPress. I looked into that and found it very confusing, my techie skills were not up to it at all. Notice, I said WordPress.

This is a little confusing. WordPress is not created equal in all its guises. I found two very good articles that you might be interested in:

WordPress, WordPress.com & WordPress.org
WordPress vs Blogger

Another interesting thing I began to notice was that it wasn’t just blogs, but what looked like websites were being powered by WordPress. I became intrigued that with WordPress you could have both static and organic pages in the same blog/site. It lent itself extremely well to both squeeze and long letter sales pages. My challenge at this point was still having to learn how to use FTP, and c.panel.

Enter WordPress Direct. I found out about WordPress Direct when going through the 30 Day Challenge this summer. Here was an answer writ in heaven: a system that offered the flexibility of WordPress and the user friendliness of Blogger, I started a fresh blog for the 30 day challenge and as I followed along, I found that it was a no-brainer to switch to this system. Yes there were differences that I had to get used to but they were not difficult to master.

The main reasons I chose to switch this blog from Blogger, and others from other platforms to WordPress Direct are:

1. Bigger selection of done for you templates. Over 150 templates The recommended ones come with tech support. For the tech advanced or gifted crowd only your imagination and level of ability limit the possibilities.
2. Done for you system. WordPress Direct templates come loaded with widgets that help you with Search Engine Optimization and other important gizmos that enhance your online marketing efforts.
3. Direct online tech support. This is a major difference between WordPress Direct and Blogger. It used to frustrate the living daylights out of me when I had to resort to the forum for responses to glitches that I was experiencing.
4. Point and click installation.
5. Easy to follow video tutorials guide you through the back end office – the admin area
6. Ownership of content. What you publish on your WordPress Direct site is yours. With Blogger, which is owned by Google, Blogger has the rights and ownership to your content.
7. Ease of customization.
8. Mix ‘em up static and organic pages. The importance of this is that you can feature your online product for sale on a static page, while the organic pages which is where you blog give continuous fresh content. This means that your “site” is constantly being crawled by the spiders, increasing the probability of moving up in search engine positioning and ultimately page rank.
9. Automatic fresh content pings increase traffic to your blog/site
10. Categories. Each blog post, in addition to a running dateline order can also reside within one or more categories, determined by you. Enhances keyword recognition by search engines and ease of navigation of your site by visitors according topic interest
11. Selection of themes that offer two or three columned templates.
12. Templates with pre-set ad space
13. Detailed statistics on your site – although I still use Google Analytics in addition for a different reason.

Interestingly, in the war for blog supremacy, even though Google owns Blogger, according to the tech experts, WordPress is favored by Google. This goes for all stripes of WordPress I gather. If there was one thing I wish could be improved on it would be to have automatic updates at the press of a button. WordPress’ open source status makes it a robust program. There are frequent updates, however they are not automatic for all areas that WordPress Direct manages.

WordPress Direct is a for fee service. You can get one free site but it is recommended that you get it hosted. I started with the entry paid version which gives me 10 sites/blogs for $19 a month and I chose Hostgator as my host at the baby level with unlimited hosting for $7.95 a month.

In conclusion my experience to date has been nothing short of excellent. In my opinion if your blog is set up to derive a blog income then it is worth the initial learning curve to start with WordPress Direct.

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Blogger or WordPress?

Jan 27

Posted by Valentina in Internet Marketing, Making Money, Plan Development, Starting a Blog | No Comments

OK. You are ready, able and willing to go.

“LET ME AT IT! Let me start on that blog already!” you say.

Not so fast my little chickadee. We’re almost there, patience. Success is an 80-20 rule and like Dan Lok says, the 80% is the work that goes in at the beginning, the preparation, the research. When all is done your chance of success goes up when you are ready to launch.

So let’s recap:
- niche topic: you’ve got one
- buyers/advertisers exist for this topic
- available affiliates
- keyword rich title picked for blog
- keyword domain availability checked
- decision made to purchase the keyword domain
- READY TO GO!

Not quite!

Your next step is to decide whether you want to use Blogger or WordPress as your host. Things to consider:

BLOGGER – www.blogger.com

What’s good about Blogger:
a) Easy to set up. Everything is done for you. You just open a Blogger account, register your blog, go through the tutorial, set up your specifications and you are ready to go. All this should take no more than two hours, I know some people who have done it in half an hour!
b) No need to know HTML (that’s a whole different internet language that webmasters are whiz bang kids at, but not you and certainly not me)
c) No need to worry whether you have a c-panel or an how to use FTP
d) No need to know when to upload and when to download — yes Virginia, there is a difference!!!
e) FREE! Unlimited number of blogs.

The downside of Blogger:
a) There is a limited selection of templates.
b) Tabulated pages are not an option
c) If you have a problem and need technical support, they expect you to rely on the forum for your answers – i.e., there does not appear to be a way to be able to connect with Google staff to help you with any technical problems you may be having.
d) Changes/additions you make sometimes don’t take. As an example if you look to the right hand side of this blog, you will notice that there are two gaps. Those gaps are supposed to be carrying Google ads, but for some reason I have not been successful in having them take.

WORDPRESS: www.wordpress.com

What’s good about WordPress:
a) looks more like a website
b) functions more like a website
c) many more templates available
d) many more options
e) professional bloggers’ choice

Downside of WordPress:
a) Not as much of a point and click system.
b) Offers two programs – one much more like the blogger, the other (the one with many more options) requires at least a familiarity for HTML, FTP and a c-panel
c) Up to three blogs free (after that it’s a for fee usage)

Most of my blogs are on Blogger. The few that I have with WordPress were set up for me. My recommendation is that if you are new to Internet Marketing and to blogging, then you cannot go wrong with Blogger. I would go so far as to suggest that your first few blogs are with Blogger. Look at these as your “starter” businesses. As you begin to build your IM muscles, then go further a field.

If you are an experienced Internet Marketer and have some knowledge with HTML, FTP and c-panel, then I would recommend WordPress … you know, as Mark Burnett says: Jump In! Even if You Don’t Know How to Swim!

There are other places where you can have your blogs hosted, but the above two seem to be the industry standards.

ACTION: Open an account with either Blogger or WordPress. Don’t go live yet.  Take the time to go over the tutorials

Quick links:
Dan Lok
Blogger

WordPress
Recommended Reading:
Jump In! Even If You Don’t Know How to Swim! Mike Burnett of Survivor Series

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