Sorry about the long delays in my post for the past couple months. I have been really busy with my offline work. Also, i have been spending more and more time developing my other websites and blogs. I can’t believe it but my freaking blog is over a year old. I set up this blog in July but didn’t do a thing until late October of 2007. I have since gone on to make quite a lot of money with this little blog. If i had to start all over again, i don’t think i would start a make money online blog. I would much rather spend my precious time writing about movies and hot babes. At any rate, i was able to turn this ghetto blog into a money maker. I wanted to share with you guy my one year anniversary and the income derived from my blog. Just like a romantic relationship, the passion dies out with time. When i first started, i wrote income updates and anniversaries every chance i got. But now that Bloggernoob is a year old, i do not do those childish things. The passion has died out. But i continue because i make some nice side cash. Not very inspiring but i gets paid! I made a total of $25,237.42 during my year of blogging.

Paid Plugs- This form of monetization will make you lose your PR, but it is the easiest way for a noob to make any money in this biz. You don’t need traffic and you don’t need readers. All you need is some PR on your blog.

Payperpost- $4402.59 + 169 referrals($15 each) $2535.00 = $6937.59

Smorty- $832.74 + 52 referrals($5 each) $260 = $1092.74

Sponsoredreviews- $3341.87 + 113 blog referrals($10 each) $1130 + 8 advertiser referrals($25 each) $200 = $4671.87

Blogitive- $10.00

Bloggingads- $20.00

Socialspark- $68.49

Loudlaunch- $1443.98

Blogtoprofit- $25.00

Bloggerwave- $120.00

blogsvertise- $35.00

Money4blogs- $35.00

Affiliates- Affiliate marketing is not as easy as most people make it out to be. If you are a noob, you will find it to be pretty hard to get these commissions. It requires a lot of SEO and keyword strategies. You also need to play around with different ad networks and programs. Setting up multiple sites is a must.

Commission Junction- $5,933.77

RevResponse- $550.00

PepperJamNetwork- $75.00

PPC/Signup Bonus/referrals/misc I haven’t freed up enough time to do this but i plan to increase my earning from this soon enough.

Adbrite- $22.38

Widgetbucks- $25.00

Project Wonderful- $14.17

Misc- $229.43

Text Link Ads- $25.00

BloggerNoob Ads- If you are new to the game, you might think that getting private ads is easy. I see a whole bunch of noobies trying to sell $5 125×125 ads without any success. The reality is that this type of income is very hard to come by. You will need a lot of traffic and rank well in search engines to get people to pay you directly for ads on your blog.

Private ads- 18 + 60 + 35 + 225 + 40 + 275 + 520 + 365 + 775 + 565 + 615 + 410 = $3903.00

TOTAL- $25,237.42

After a year of blogging, i must confess that this isn’t for everybody. I have set up a lot of blogs for clients and friends. Out of all those people that i helped out, only a few are still updating their blogs. I taught them out to make a few bucks with their blogs, but it just isn’t worth it for them to continue. A lot of you will fall into this category. But, some of you will get hooked and will keep on pressing on. You guys are the ones that have what it takes to make money online. “Never give up! Never surrender!” (Galaxy Quest)

FYI. For some of the paid plugging income, i have included posts from my other blogs as well. Also, a lot of the referral income has not been collected yet. I also made close to $18,000.00 with my collection of other websites and blogs. So add that to the total above and i made over $42,000.00 during my year online. I spent a few thousand dollars on marketing and i invested more then half of my earning into other types of web sites. The moral of the story is that if you keep on trucking, you’ll make some nice cash. Remember to balance your time wisely and if you don’t like to read or write, don’t start a blog about blogging or a make money online blog. There are plenty of other types of websites that can make some nice cash for you.

Source: Blogspreneur

Absensi: AbsensiWajah.com

One of the most common feedback I get when I ask people “Why don’t you start a company blog” is this: “I don’t know what to write.”

Yes, I’d admit, I’m very comfortable with writing everyday. Writing doesn’t scare me. But I didn’t start like that. I started where many of you are. Not knowing what to write.

Today, after blogging for 2 years, I still have days which I wake up and I stare at my computer screen, not knowing what to write. That’s normal. Everybody has this.

But instead of thinking “Argh, I’m not good at this.”, I think “How can I get good at this?”

… and I came up with a plan and took action on that plan.

Well, plans do not work well all the time, but having a plan is better than not having one.

Here’s my plan – what I do for Blogopreneur.com

First Step – Get more information. Specifically, information that I can use.

Here is what I did.

#1. Read frequently updated blogs thru RSS

Today, I don’t even remember how many blogs there are in my Google reader subscriptions, but it is to a point where always see more than 50 unread items when I log in every day.

Reading other blogs in your industry give you insights in that industry, and keeps you updated about the news. It also gives you more content ideas.

Now don’t go now and add every single blog you come across to your RSS reader. Select. Cherry pick. Choose the good ones – the ones which you think give quality content.

Its also important that you regularly prune you subscription. If you wake up in the morning and you find over 1000+ unread items in your reader, you just might be setting yourself up for information overload.

Its easier to motivate yourself to clear 50 items, than 1000+ items. And 50 should be enough for you to come across one good idea.

#2. Subscribe to Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a great service by Google. Basically, you specify your search terms and create an alert. When Google finds new pages and blogs and news about that search term, it drops you an email… or you can subscribe to your alerts using RSS.

Again, 4 to 5 search terms will give you enough content to read. Don’t overload yourself.

#3. Twitter

I’ve been very reluctant to use my Twitter account as part of my online marketing strategy, but after I did, I think its a great addition.

Follow some people you think provide good content. You’ll be amazed at what people share on Twitter. Great stuff.

… and if you’ve not followed me yet, come join me in my Twittering adventure.

Second Step – Jot down my post ideas.

I don’t know if this relates to you, but for me, my ideas seem to come everytime I am on the train. So instead of just thinking about it, I jot them down on my PDA. (If you don’t have a PDA, use a notebook!)

What you want to jot down might include:

* The idea
* A headline that might attract your readers to read.
* Outline of how you are going to present the idea.

And of course, as you read good content on the web, bookmark the items you find useful. Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of your bookmarks.

Not all that is jotted down needs to be used. So even if its just a thought which you don’t know how to expand on, jot it down anyway.

Third Step – Write.

When you write, look back at your ideas that you have jotted down. If you’ve been diligent enough to jot ideas everywhere you go, you’ll find a wealth of ideas which you can expand on.

How do you expand an idea into a blog post?

Here is one very useful way to do this. Just use the 1-2-3-4 approach.

Here’s how. Say you want to expand on the idea about “Travelling during the Christmas Holidays”

That’s your 1. With this, find 2 subtopics.

So for my example, I might think about “Where should I go this Christmas”, and “How to enjoy my trip”.

Then, for every subtopic, jot 3 points.

Again for my example, it’ll go like this. For “Where should I go this Christmas”, I might jot down “Hokkaido”, “Las Vegas”, and “Melbourne”. For “How to enjoy my trip.”, I will think of “Pack light”, “Be prepared for the environment”, “Plan your itinerary”.

Done. Now. You’ve got 6 points.

If that is enough for you to write about, stop here. But if you want to go further – work on every point and think of 3 to 4 subpoints.

So, my eventual writeup outline might go something like this:

“Travelling during the Christmas Holidays”

* Where should I go
o Japan, Hokkaido
+ Hokkaido regions
+ Go snowboarding
+ Eat nice sushi
+ Learn a bit of Japanese
o US, Las Vegas
+ Visit the casinos
+ Bring camera, take wonderful photos at night
+ Visit theme parks
o Australia, Melbourne
+ South, so it’ll be hot during Christmas
+ Go Phillip island see penguins
+ About Yarra river
+ Shopping – what to buy there
* How to enjoy my trip
o Pack light
+ Small bag, expandable
+ Must carry essentials
+ How to pack
+ Backpack or luggage bag?
o Prepare for environment
+ Check out temperature before going
+ Is food suitable
+ Christmas holidays – the different cultures
+ Where to get good travel clothes / winter wear
o Plan itinerary
+ How to plan your time well
+ What to look out for in Christmas
+ 3 websites to look for properly planned itinerary
+ Don’t pack attractions back to back if you want to relax

Well, this is just a quick brainstorm with my limited knowledge… and I’m sure if you are in the travel industry, you’d probably be able to think of a lot more.

But the point is – can you see how quickly one idea can be expanded into such a long outline using the 1-2-3-4 approach? If you’ve just written ONE sentence for each of the points, you would have come up with an outstanding article about travelling during Christmas.

Easy? Do it more often, it’ll get easier.

Action Items for this Issue

Step 1. Get yourself subscribed to at least 20 blogs in your industry, subscribe to 3 terms in Google Alerts, and start Twittering (and add me!)

Step 2. Prepare a piece of paper, PDA, notebook with you all the time, so you can jot down ideas as they come to mind.

Step 3. Think of one topic you might want to write today. Use the 1-2-3-4 approach and draft an outline now.

This list of things will probably take you just over an hour to do, but I’m sure after you have done this you will have a lot more confidence to write more and better!

Source: Blogspreneur

Absensi: AbsensiWajah.com

Hey there! Welcome to your 10th and final session of the Blogopreneur Blog Marketing eCourse!

To be frank, today’s session is just an excuse to talk to you again We’ve come a looooong way since the first part of the course where we explored blogging, right from the basics. We’ve been through terminology, planning, installing WordPress, writing content, optimization, marketing, monetizing, and tweaking for human visitors.

Its a whole lot of things – I’d personally took days (and sleepless nights) to get those out… and I really hope it helped.

I’ll just open up and discuss some random unsettled topics today, some of which are tips which I am yet to share with you.

First, lets talk about the long tail.

The Long Tail

Back in 2006, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine published a book called “The Long Tail“. In this book, he put forward a concept of the new marketplace with a phenomenon as depicted in the graph below.

In his blog, he mentions:

The Long Tail, in a nutshell

The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.

Blogs play a very major role in making the long tail work. Blogs are what Chris calls “the long tail producers”. Blogs are the current wave of user generated content, allowing anyone to become a publisher and content producer in 15 minutes!

Blogs are also “long tail filters” – they also help to filter information, bringing the best content to the reader, especially for those blogs with quality content – the bloggers obviously must have read at least 10 other posts or articles for each article they write.

So continue blogging – every quality blog is vital for the new economy. Your job as a blogger is to help your readers get the best content, to share with them the gist of what you know.

There is so much more about the concept of the Long Tail that only Chris would be able to share with you via the excellent book. You MUST get a copy.

Finding Your Personal Voice

As you start to post more entries to your blog, you will find that you will have a particular style of writing – everyone does. Don’t worry about it, even if you think that your style is “not professional enough”. Don’t force yourself to change your writing style. This blog is yours, and yours only – and ultimately, people want to see you as you are.

As you write more, you will write better. To start you don’t have to be good, but to be good, you have to start.

Creating New Blogs

I know, you have many topics you want to write about, and now that you know how to start a blog, you might want to set up 2, 5 or even 10 blogs, each targeting a different topic.

My advice for you would be to hold it – too many people get diversified too early in the show. Remember that maintaining a blog takes effort, and sometimes this effort can be substantial (especially during the startup period when you need to build up your blog quickly). Hold your horses in starting a new blog until you feel you are really ready to do so, when you are comfortable with your first one.

Then, as you create new blogs, create them one by one. Each successful blog is well planned and defines a good objective to achieve. Creating a blog with a vague objective is as good as not creating one at all.

Thank You!

Source: Blogspreneur

Absensi: AbsensiWajah.com

Hey there! Welcome to your 9th serving of the Blogopreneur Blog Marketing eCourse! We’ve covered a lot of ground over the past two weeks huh! Today, what I am going to show you are just some little tweaks that you can add to your blog so that you can go from “good” to “wonderful”!

Little things matter.

Let’s get started

What is today all about? What I want to address today is the more “human” aspect of blogging. You see, many of us “technology evangelists” get so caught up with all the optimizing and tweaking of the code in the back end, that we forgot that we are eventually writing for HUMANs to read!

Seriously.

As far as creating a website (or blog) is concerned, I think web usability and creating a good user experience is just as important as all the marketing and promotion. If you have a blog with a font size of 6 points, don’t expect your readers to come back!

So let’s talk a little about web usability.

Web Usability

Web usability is a very, and I mean VERY big topic. I remember back in school, I had a full semester where i studied 13 weeks on usability! So, to cover everything in this short course (and in 1 day!) is crazy.

So, what I will do is just to highlight to you just three important areas to pay attention to.

Here goes.

Font faces and sizes

When designing your blog, you must remember that while you may have a million different fonts in your computer, your visitor may not have the same set of fonts in their computer, and as far as the web is concerned, font files are NOT transferred with the web page!

So, if you specify your own special font and your website visitor does not have that font installed in their computer, what your visitor will see will be different from what you will see. That is not good.

How then do you make sure the experience is the same for the majority of users? I would recommend you to stick to these fonts – Arial, Verdana, Tahoma and Trebuchet! These four fonts are installed in the majority of the operating systems by default, so you can be almost sure that everybody has these fonts!

Verdana, in particular, is a font that is made for viewing on the screen, so it makes a very good font to use for the web.

Next, font sizes. Remember that different people have different monitor sizes. What looks like a good size on your screen may not look good on others. Remember to test your blog design on all resolutions and if possible, different sized monitors.

Colors

Have you every came across an ultimately sucky looking website – so bad that you want to puke? I have, and its terrible. Colors play a very big part of web design, and different colours mean different things.

I understand that not everybody is born with the a good colour sense. If you have problems choosing colours for your blog, one very good way to stay safe is to follow another website you find nice, or even better – follow the colour schemes of very popular websites like Financial Times, MSN, or CNet.

Another very good tool to use is the colour wizard on colors on the web.

Layout and headers

The third area to pay particular attention to is your blog layout and headers.

Some blogs have a single column layout, some have two columns, some have three, or even four. While there is no exact guideline to show which is better, the thing to note eventually is that when you have more than one column, you need to highlight to your readers which is the one you want your reader to read first. Which is your primary column?

When you have determined your primary column, put an image or a very prominent header right at the top of that column, to tell the user “hey, this is what my primary content is, read this first!”

Headers. Many of us use templates that we download from template sites – and the drawback about this is that you don’t really understand the heading levels in the style sheet.

HTML allows us to use the headers from H1 to H6, and you want to be able to use these headers to the max, to highlight to your reader (and search engines!) what is important in your blog site! Consider looking into the CSS file of the template, and allocate one header (I use H3) just for subheaders in your blog posts.

Remember, people don’t really READ on the web. They scan. You need to write for scannability, and the use of headers helps very well in this.

So much for usability! Let’s move on.

Some nifty Plug-ins for you

One of the very wonderful things about WordPress is that it allows users like you and I to extend on the functionality of the system using Plug-ins.

Here are some very useful Plug-ins that you can use to help you create a better user experience.

1. Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin – This helps to add a copyright message at the bottom of the every post in your feeds, so that sploggers will be wary when they try to rip your feeds!
2. Subscribe to Comments – Using this Plug-in, your commenters can choose to be informed whenever there is a new comment on your post.
3. WP-ContactForm – Add a contact form for people to contact you with just one line of code!
4. WP-Notable – Create social bookmarking icons for each of your blog posts, not only for your visitors to easily submit your post to the sites, but also for you to decorate your site!
5. Smart Update Pinger – This suppresses the default pinging function of WordPress, and is especially useful when you want make future posts.
6. Adsense-Deluxe – Use this to add your Google Adsense code to your posts easily.
7. Simple Recent Comments – Display your recent comments, so people will know where the conversation is!
8. Ultimate Tag Warrior – A very powerful Plug-in for you to create tags for your posts, and create pages for each of your tags, and even tag clouds!

Of course, there are still A LOT of very very nice and useful Plug-ins out there, but do get started with these.

Write an Author Bio

People read your blog because they want to know you! So, do your best to write at least a short paragraph about yourself and put it in the sidebar. If you are like me, and want to elaborate more about yourself, consider these four points to address:

1. Who are you?

The obvious first things that people want answered is “Who are you?”, “What is your name?”. In doing this, you can mention things like your name, which part of the world are you based at, and what you are doing professionally. You can also put up a photo of yourself!

2. What is your expertise?

The second thing to answer is “What is your expertise?”. This is a little different from the abovementioned part on what you are doing professionally. In this section, you answer in terms of “What this blog is about”.

For example, you may be working full time as an engineer, but on this blog, what you are blogging about is your adventures in teaching your parrot to talk – so in this case, your expertise is teaching parrots to talk.

3. How can you help me?

People have found your blog for a reason – they either have a problem which is bothering them, or they are looking for information on how they can improve on what they are doing. That is the reason why people read your blog articles!

So you need to give them the direct answer to “How can you help me?”.

If your expertise was about teaching parrots to talk, then you might want to say something like “My parrot talking blog provides tips and tricks on how you can teach your own parrot to talk, like how I have done so for my 20 parrots”

4. How can I contact you?

The last thing you absolutely must have on your author bio is a way for your readers to get in touch with you. Use a contact form if you do not want to publish your email address, let your readers know that they are welcome to drop you a mail. Let them know you are a real person!

Respond to your comments

The best blogs out there are the ones that are able to create conversations with every single post they create – and very often this is possible because the author of the blog responds well to their comments. People want to know that they are heard when they post comments to your blog. So do your best to respond to your comments, you will be surprised how well your readers will respond to it, and you bet they will come back again and again!

That’s it for today!

Okay, well, I am picking out the best stuff for you today – the topic on creating an ultimate user experience goes far beyond what is covered today, but much has to be learnt as you start blogging more and getting feedback from your readers. Just remember to pay attention to this – you are eventually writing for human readers, not only search engine spiders, so the look and feed of your blog is equally as important as your marketing.

Source: Blogspreneur

Absensi: AbsensiWajah.com

Hey there, and welcome to your 8th serving of the Blogopreneur Blog Marketing eCourse!

Wow! You’ve come a long way! We started with absolutely no knowledge of blogs and blog marketing, we talked about terminology, planning, setting up WordPress, promoting your blog, writing content… and today, is the day it all ties in – how are you going to make money from your blog?

We may argue that it is so much easier to update blogs compared to websites – we do not need to handle all the messy FTP stuff, or learn complex HTML editors.. but at the end of the day, I must admit blogging still does require effort. Even if it means it is half an hour a day, it will all add up to over 3 hours a week, or and 12 hours a month. We need to justify the time spent.

So. How do you make money from blogs?

Blogs are not great money makers

That is the truth. Blogs are NOT great money makers. Seriously. At least, not as great as those 20 page sales letter sites. People visit blogs with a mentality to read, not a mentality to buy. Blogs are great credibility builders.

But think of it this way. Building a blog is probably one of the best credibility and authority building tools out there online. First, blogs do very well for search optimization, because of the sheer amount of text you have on the blog – search engines loves blogs! In fact, I get at least half of my visitors every day direct from search engines. The more posts you have, the more doors of entry there can be. Because of the nature of blogs being frequently updates, search engines also love blogs to the core!

Secondly, the as we contribute to a blog everyday, we build the blog archives very gradually, but surely. If you post every single day, you can imagine that within one year – just one year! You will have 365 pages of content. That is 365 articles written on a particular subject! Granted, not all posts may be wonderful articles that get Digged, but what does that show for the author of the blog? To me, it shows really well that you know your stuff!

Taking blogs from this perspective, you can then relate it to your business. The most fundamental thing you must do before you can make a sale is to establish trust with your prospect, and trust is built so much more easily when you are known in that industry, or when you have a blog to show people “you know your stuff”.

So, I personally feel this is the best way to “make money from blogs”. Integrate it with your existing business, to make a competitive advantage.

Make money blogging programs

Alright, you see many adverts around the web saying you can make your fortune by blogging! So what is that all about? Is it true? Should you buy these products and spend time and money on these products?

Let me tell you in a nutshell, how these programs work.

Its easy to build a blog that makes money, its really easy to pull it off! Just get some content from some place, slap it on your blog, and push up some advertisements – you can easily make about $0.50 a day with that. Afterall, you don’t need to think of new content since your blog’s content is duplicate content.

This is exactly what many of these programs ask you to do. They use automated blog creation programs to create hundreds of blogs – and each earning $0.50 a day. Well, if you just do the math – one blog will make you $15 a month, and all you have to do is to create a hundred of these blogs and you will get $1500 a month.

Sounds nice?

Oh yes it does. Too nice.

But I personally think this strategy is so disgusting. Unless you are a cyborg (and I hope you are not!), I don’t think you can add valuable content to 100 blogs a day, right? So what these programs do is they use duplicated content, or they rip content off other blogs for their own use. Frankly, duplicated content is harmful not only for the web, but also for your blog rankings.

Let me explain. The job of search engines is to bring up the best article on a particular keyword whenever a user searches the system. When there is duplicated content in the web, obviously, one has to have been copied from another, right? What will happen eventually is that the search engine will do its best to choose the original article, and then really blacklist the rest of the entries.

You don’t want the domain you paid for, to be in that blacklisted database.

There is an increasing amount of junk on the Internet every single day – and it is unfortunate that many Internet newbies are getting started thinking that strategies are useful. The fact is that duplicated content kills the Internet.

Let me ask you this question. How much SPAM do you have in your email box today? Do you spend just ONE minute a day sieving though the spam?

One minute a day is six hours a year, mind you. Multiply that with the world’s Internet population.

What a waste of time. Spam wastes time. Spam litters the Internet. Spam clogs the Internet pipes with junk information.

And that is what is going to happen if people create blogs full of spammy and duplicated content. One day you will find that out of 10 blogs you read, 9 will be rubbish content. Would you like that, if not for yourself – for your next generation?

Not me. I don’t want to be part of that.

So, my advice – your blog must add value. You blog must be original content, critique and thoughts. That is what people are searching for. If you are getting pennies off your duplicated content blogs, please, please stop.

I have been working with computers since I was 6 years old. I know what I am talking about. Please.

So, how else can you make money from your blog?

So, you ask, is there hope for me? Can I make money from my blog, really?

The answer is Yes. But it takes time. The key to building a blog that makes you good money, is building credibility and targeted readership in a very tight niche – be a “big fish in a small pond”, and targeting non-tech savvy readers (readers that don’t really know that clicking on those little things make you money)

Always build you traffic first. When you have a regular flow of traffic to your blog, that is when you should think of monetizing your blog.

What I have for you today is a list of programs that you can sign up for, to make some money on your blog.

Remember that these are direct monetization techniques – what you actually put on your blog to make you money. Most of these are advertising programs, whether for products you know, or you don’t know, whether you promote them in your blog post contents, or in your sidebar.

Here goes:

#1 Google Adsense and other contextual advertising systems

Google Adsense is by far the most popular contextual advertising system out there, and is very popular amongst both bloggers and other webmasters. What do I mean by contextual advertising system? Contextual advertising means that the advertisements that appear in the allocated advertisement space will be related to whatever your blog is talking about. For example, if your blog is about cars, then the ads that appear in your blog will be about cars.

When you sign up for Google Adsense (or any contextual advertising system), they will let you know where you can log in and get a snippet of code to add to your blog. All you have to do is to add that code to your template and upload it… and wallah! The ads appear automagially Really, its as simple as that.

Other popular contextual advertising systems are:

* Kontera
* Adbrite
* Chitika eMiniMalls

#2 Affiliate Programs – Clickbank and Commission Junction

Affiliate programs are basically commission based programs. Someone else has a product to sell, and seeks out affiliates to sell his or her program for them. When you do so, you get a cut of the profit. Simple?

Two very popular marketplaces where you can find lots and lots of affiliate programs to join are Clickbank and Commission Junction.

What happens when you sign up for an affiliate program is that the product owner will give you an affiliate URL. This URL is normally encoded with an ID, like for example: http://www.myaffiliateurl.com/?id=yourname. So, with affiliate programs, you are free to determine the format you want to use for your ads… as long as you send your visitors to the unique affiliate URL given to you, you will get the commissions when your visitors buy the products.

As mentioned, Clickbank and Commission Junction are the two most popular affiliate marketing market places. However, don’t be restricted to just this two places – there are a lot of other products that do their own affiliate marketing, HostGator, or Aweber.

The next time you find something interesting online, check out if they have an affiliate program.

#3 Sell Advertisements from your blog

When you have built a good readership for your blog, chances are that the readers of your blog may match very well with another company’s target market. This is the value your blog has created.

One way to make money from your blog is to sell links from your blog, and one service that helps you manage this is Text Link Ads.

#4 Pay Per Post Systems

One of the more recently established models of advertising that companies can use now, and very specifically for blogs, are systems like Pay Per Post. These systems are really exactly as simple as their names are. You apply for an account and bid for a project, and then you are paid per post you make on you blog. Some of these jobs come as low as $5, and some go as high as $200.

Of course, the higher priced projects call for more effort.

When these kind of systems were new to the market, there was a lot going on about disclosure and questions regarding the ethicality of the systems. Some argue that blogs work hard to establish trust, and authenticity, and doing recommendations, for example, spoil the authenticity of blogs.

My advice is to disclose, and always be truthful, whatever you put on your blog. Bringing across the marketing message may make you your little income of $5, but lying to your reader will make you lose yourself… so use with care.

Some other systems similar to Pay Per Post are:

* Review Me
* Cream Aid
* Blogsvertise

#5 Feed/RSS Advertising

Many bloggers publish partial RSS feeds, worrying that their readers will not come to their blog site when they have the full content in the feeds – and hence not click an advertisements you put on the template. This, however, really irritates readers like myself. What I do, instead of clicking the link, is to move on and read other blogs. I want to stay in my feed reader.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this – and this is putting advertisements in your feeds.

With feed advertising programs like Feedvertising or Feedburner (by invitation only), you can put advertisements in your feeds, so you can safely publish full feeds and still expect to make some money from advertising.

#6 Other ways to make money

Of course, there are many other ways to make money. These systems make things simple for you on one hand, but on the other, sometimes also places restrictions on how you make money. For example, Google Adsense does not allow similar looking advertisements on the pages where you put the ads, and with affiliate programs, you are stuck with the sales page created by the product owner. This means that if the owners’ sales page suck, YOUR earnings get affected.

Think of blogs as regular websites. Once you get a consistent readership to your blog, that is where the value of the blog is. You can go ahead and source out a sponsor for your blog yourself, i.e. get a company to pay you for you to put an advertisement on your blog, or do some email marketing – give something (like this eCourse) for free, so that you can build a list of contacts (You can do this with GetResponse or Aweber), or even sell your own products, like what I do for my workshop.

The bottom line, is that a blog is just another website. It is a specialised website, so whatever you do on a regular website, you can do on your blog.

That’s it!

I hope that today’s session has helped to open some doors for you to make money online using your blog. While blogs are not great money makers per se, it doesn’t harm to make a few bucks to cover your web hosting, right?

Source: Blogspreneur

Absensi: AbsensiWajah.com

The essence of Blog Marketing

After you are done with optimizing your blog HTML and content, the next step to take is to get the word out and let the world know about your blog! This is what blog marketing is about, and the key to do this is really simple, and I can sum it in 4 words.

Get relevant incoming links.

Yeah, as simple as that.

So how do you go around getting relevant incoming links, you’d ask? This is what we are going to learn today. Here goes!

Blog Marketing Tip #1 – Submit Your Site to Google, Yahoo and MSN

Ultimately, you want your website to be in the directories of these search engines, so if you are starting up, you can get yourself indexed by these search engines in two ways.

1. Get an already indexed page to link to you
2. Submit yourself to the search engines

If you already have an existing site that is frequently updated and well indexed by the search engines, I would recommend you to go for the first method. Just point a link from your site to your new blog, and that will automatically open a doorway for the spiders to find your new blog.

However, if you do not have an existing site, what you can do is to manually submit your site to the search engines. Here are the URLs to do just that:

1. Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
2. Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
3. Live (MSN): http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

Yep! Just this big three search engines will do, for now, focus on the big three – don’t worry about the rest.

Blog Marketing Tip #2 – Submit sites to Online Directories

A second thing you could do to get incoming links is to submit to online directories – both blog directories as well as website directories. Online directories are just like the yellow pages, except that they list websites instead of businesses and residential addresses!

To get a list of blog and website directories you can submit to, check out my list here.

One important thing to note. Some of the sites listed there are not only blog directories, but also traffic exchanges – and some of these exchanges “guarantee” traffic to your blog. What happens when you participate in traffic exchange schemes is that you will required to first view the members pages, say, each page for 20 – 30 seconds, and for every 2 sites you view, they get someone to do the same to your site.

The problem with this kind of program is that while it does bring in traffic, ultimately, the traffic you bring in is not targeted. People are surfing your site for 30 seconds, just like you are doing to others. They are not interested in your content at all. What they are interested in are the credits they get when they surf your page! So, my personal recommendation is to go ahead and submit your blog to the directories, but stay away from traffic exchange programs.

Oh yes, before I leave this topic – one great way to find places where you can submit your site is to simply Google for “submit site”, “suggest a site”, “suggest a URL”, or “add URL”.

Blog Marketing Tip #3 – Article Submissions

The next thing you could do to market your blog and let it get known, is to submit articles to article directories. For a list of article directories you can submit to, check out my list.

Some of these article directories accept articles as low as 200 words, while some others require you to have a minimum of 250 or 300 words. My personal advice is to target for 350 – 400 words per article, so you will be safe for all, and you will have enough content for search engines to spider the page with your article.

When writing your article, be sure to also focus on only one or two keywords – and repeat it a maximum of 3 times in the copy.

When you are done, you can submit the articles to the directories.

How then do you get a link back to your blog in this case? Good question!

When you submit your article, you will be given an opportunity to write what is called an author resource box, where you are free talk about yourself and what you do. This is where you can put your link back to your blog. What I would recommend you do is to focus on writing good quality articles, and to put an irresistible offer in your author resource box! Prepare something to give away from your blog (like a free e-course, for example!), and use that to entice visitors to your website.

For example, in my article, I would put something like this:

Tan Kian Ann is a professional blogger and blog marketing trainer based in Singapore. Within four months of the date he started his blog at Blogopreneur.com, his Alexa ranking rose to just over 50K. Find out how he did it, and get his free 10 part blog marketing e-course at his blog!

Blog Marketing Tip #4 – Forums

Online forums are a great place where you can get to know people – people whom you would love to be like, and people who are yearning to be like you! Its a place where people go to share information.

How do you use a forum to market your blog then? The first and commonly used way is to include a link to your blog using a signature. However, some forums do not allow you to put links in the signature (at least until you pay them some money, or when you have posted enough to show that you are a real person interested to contribute to the forum).

The second way is to go ahead and read the forums, and try to spot questions that require a lengthy answer or a discussion. What you could do now, is to post your answer not in the forum but in your own blog, and then reply to the forum thread using the link to your post. This does not only help you get a link back to your blog, but also helps you add content to your blog! I personally love this, because I am more familiar with my blog environment (i.e. uploading of images, emphasising text, etc), and many of my posts that perform well are in this nature.

Remember, that forums do not unnecessarily be just those ones that are created with phpBB, SMF and vBulletin, but also online community forums like those from Yahoo Groups and Google Groups.

Blog Marketing Tip #5 – Press Releases

prwebPress releases are a great way for you to get your blog or website traffic shooting up the sky overnight! However, submitting a press release does require some funds (if you want that kind of effect!) One of the more famous press release websites is PRWeb.com.

In writing a press release, you need to write as if you are a journalist, and identify yourself from third person’s point of view. Press releases are also more formal in nature and typically contains quotes from someone. I personally think the best way to learn to write a press release is to go ahead and read a couple of them, and then model after them!

Depending on how much you want to pay the PR firm, they will allow active links in your text, organization information (like your resource box in articles), and even do a podcast about you! Its a great marketing strategy, if you have the money to spare.

Blog Marketing Tip #6 – Email Marketing

Another way you could go about getting people to come to your blog is to find a friend who has an email list to recommend your blog. For starters, it might not come easy… and as many Internet Marketers say, “The money is in the list”. If your blog does not bring good content to the email list, sending an email out might hurt the relationship between the owner of the list and his or her subscribers.

When you do find someone to get a list, however, do something on your blog to re-capture the list for yourself, so you don’t have to always rely on your friend to do the marketing for you… and of course, with further leads that you capture along the way, do return the favour to your friend by recommending his or her site to your own list of leads. That is what collaboration is all about, that is what marketing is about.

Two great systems to use in email marketing are AWeber (which is the one I use and prefer) and GetResponse. Both are great systems, but I just prefer AWeber.

Blog Marketing Tip #7 – The most important and powerful one. Participate in the blogosphere.

Seriously. Nothing beats getting traffic than participating in the blogosphere. Go, find related blog to your niche and contribute your two cents worth of comments. Send some trackbacks whenever you quote someone, contact the blog authors through Skype, or thought their emails – find out who they are! Send links to them, willingly!

Don’t worry too much about you “sending your visitors” to them, the fact is, the better recommendations you make, the more they will return to you! I’m serious!

One of the deepest mistake that a blogger can make is to be a miser in giving out links in his blog post. I personally do my best to have at least one link out for every blog post that I write, and it happens especially so when I quote someone else, to add my own comments.

Link link link! Give, and then you shall receive. Link out, and you shall get linked back!
That’s it!

Phew! Its been a day! 7 great strategies for you to go out today and start promoting your blog, and let the whole world know about your blog!

My recommendations? I would recommend you to start off with directory submissions, article submissions, and blog comments. You don’t have to do everything to succeed. At the point of writing this, I haven’t even wrote my press release yet! I just focused on blog comments and trackbacks, and directory submissions. Recently, I’ve been writing more articles and contributing to forums.

A word about automated software.

As you surf around for more ways to get traffic to your blog, you might be tempted to get an automated software to do the submissions for you. To be really frank, I personally do not use any of these software and I don’t know if they really work. I have heard both sides of the story – some that say the software works, and some that say that software basically ruins the whole marketing effort and the effort to come up with the content, because either it doesn’t do what it say, or it is overpowered and it practically spams the Internet with what you have to offer.

When I try a software, I’ll let you know my updating this space.

But one thing for sure – the manual way works… and it works very well.

Source: Blogspreneur

Absensi: AbsensiWajah.com

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Because of the sheer size of the archives of some blogs, and the amount of content in blogs, blogs do very well in getting visitors from search engines. In fact, I would dare to say that blogs are one of the best platforms for you to target and capture search engine traffic.

For my own blog here at Blogopreneur.com, I get more than 50% of my unique visitors from search engine traffic, and in a month, I am getting search traffic for thousands of different search terms.

I think it is also useful to realise that search engines bring in the most targeted traffic! Why? Because these people are already searching for information! If your site pops up in the first few results, it creates a perception that you know about that keyword or key phrase they are searching for.

Optimizing for Search Engines

Over the next few paragraphs, I’m going talk about how you can optimize your blog for search traffic. One point worth mentioning is that these points do well for you only when you have the content in your blog. Tweaking the HTML codes alone will not bring in tons of visitors. Compelling content brings in the visitors. Optimizing your blog helps in making it easier for the search engine spiders to come and find out about your blog – and when you make it very clear to the spiders what your site is about, you will find yourself listing better in the results.

Optimization Tip #1 – Let your titles tell the story

One of the most important thing about search optimizing a page – if you’d ask ANY SEO practitioner – is how you title your page. When I mean title, I mean what goes in between your http://www.weldamfm.com/blogspreneur-blog-marketing-ecourse-part-5/ http://www.weldamfm.com/blogspreneur-blog-marketing-ecourse-part-5/#comments Mon, 26 May 2008 18:30:11 +0000 weldamfm http://www.i-teachers.com/?p=20

Get started with your WordPress blog

In the previous session, we had a long day, and I showed you exactly how you can create your blog from scratch. We got the WordPress installation right from WordPress.org and then uploaded it into your server – no shortcuts, no wildly scripts to help you. You did it!

Now before we start blogging, there are some settings to get done with in WordPress.

Let me bring you through them.

1. Permalink Structure

The first thing you want to set is your permalink structure. What is a permalink structure? Let me explain.

As we have learnt previously, every post you do in your blog will eventually become a permanent page in your blog, called the permalink. The thing is, the default installation of WordPress comes with the URL of pages that goes something like this: http://www.bloggingessentials.com/?p=123, where “123? is your post id (a unique number for each post).

This URL, as you will notice, is not very friendly – there is no way for the search engine or a human visitor to find out what the content of the post is, based on the URL.

We are going to change it into something more descriptive, like http://www.bloggingessentials.com/2007/01/07/5-blogging-tips/. In this structure, the permalink is determined by the date of the post and the title of the post. In this example, one can probably make out that the post is about one that talks about five blogging tips.

This permalink structure would also have a good advantage in search engines, since your keywords will be in the URL.

So, how then do you change your permalink structure? Here’s how.

Log in to your WordPress admin console. The password can be found in the email that you have received when you installed WordPress. In the top navigation menus, click options->permalinks.

You will see that the default setting is the first option where it says http://www.bloggingessentials.com/?p=123. Simply click on the second option and click “Update permalink structure” and you are done!

(If you get a status message that says something like “You should update your .htaccess file now”, then you must have missed out the step on changing the permissions of your .htaccess file in the previous session.)

2. Akismet

Trust me, spam is a big issue. It might not seem so at the beginning, but when your blog gets more regular traffic, it will. You need to get yourself prepared for spam.

The good news is that WordPress comes shipped with a plugin called Akismet. Through my own experience, although Akismet still have some loopholes here and there, it does help you A LOT in filtering spam.

In order to activate Akismet, though, you need a API key, and to get an API key, you need to register a WordPress.com account. So open up a new browser tab or window and head on to WordPress.com and signup for a free account. If you want a blog on WordPress.com, you could also get one here, but remember it is always better to be promoting your own domain.

WordPress.com will give you an API key. It should be a long string of letters and numbers. When you’ve got that, just select the key and copy it to your clipboard (Ctrl-C).

Head on back to your blog. Click on Plugins at your navigation bar.

You will see the default three plugins for WordPress. Activate Akismet.

This status message will be shown.

Click on the link in the message, and it will bring you to a page where you can key in your API key. Now, remember you have your API key already copied in your clipboard, so all you have to do now is to select the textbox and press Ctrl-V to paste it in. Click “Update API Key”

Now, you’ve those shields up against those bloody spammers!

3. Categories

The third thing you want to change is the name of the default category. Before that, consider – what will you be writing about most in your blog? Is it about golf, parrots, books, cars or computers? What would be a good category name for these posts?

For example, I’m totally into blogging and blog marketing, so I’ve chosen “Blog Marketing Tips”.

Got a good category name? Good!

Now head over to Manage->Categories.

You will see that there is one category called “Uncategorized”. We are going to change that, so click Edit.

You will see the screen above. Update your category name, and leave your category slug blank. Remember it is very important to remove the “uncategorized” from the category slug when you update your category.

Why?

WordPress helps you to create category archives. So each category archive has a page, determined by your category slug. So for example, my blog marketing tips category archive is at http://www.blogopreneur.com/category/blog-marketing-tips/.

What you need to not is that this is not because my category name is “Blog Marketing Tips”, but because my category slug is “blog-marketing-tips”. Get it? If you have a category name “Blog Marketing Tips” and a category slug “uncategorized”, your category archive page would be http://www.blogopreneur.com/category/uncategorized/!

The good thing is that if you update your category name and leave your category slug blank, WordPress will create the category slug based on your category name for you.

It is very important – this category slug thing, and it is important to establish your category slugs well at first, and not change them after! Why? Because the search engines will pick up your category archive URLs, and these URLs will be what the search engine will direct the traffic to. If you change your category slugs, traffic coming in from search engines will find themselves lost in your blog! This is VERY VERY important to note!

Okay! Now you are ready to write your first post!

Writing your first post

Head on to “Write” in your navigation bar. You will get to a page which looks like this:

So go ahead and type your hearts out. For a start, you can just fill in the Title and Post boxes with your own welcome message, and hit publish. Your post will appear immediately on your blog!

Fiddling with WordPress

WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart GuideIt will take you some time to get used to the admin console behind WordPress, but the navigation bar and the labels for every item there is pretty descriptive, so in your spare time after this session today, be sure to click around and play with the settings. I’m not going to go into detail for each of the settings – that would take a course by itself, but if you are really interested knowing exactly what each item does, I would recommend this book called the WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide.

Here are some things I would recommend you do or explore first, though:

1. Change your WordPress admin password, and disable the visual rich editor (Users -> Your Profile)
2. Delete the default blogs from your blogroll, and add your friend’s, or related blogs (Links->Manage Links)
3. Delete the default comment (Manage->Comments)
4. Delete the default post (Manage->Posts)
5. Delete the default page (Manage->Pages)
6. Explore the different tabs in options – General, Writing, Reading, Discussion, Permalinks and Miscellaneous

Let’s move on. I still have a lot of things to say today! We are not done yet! I’m very naggy, you know.

Finding Content

One of the biggest challenges that bloggers – even professional bloggers – face everyday is… “Where the fish do I find so much stuff to write about everyday?”

Hah! Hit the nail right on the head? I’ll answer that in one sentence… or even in three words – Read a lot!

Come on, let’s face it, the Internet is FILLED with information. Granted, not all the information is useful… but there are people out there who publish great information. Most successful bloggers read a lot!

So the process is simple. Read-A-Lot -> Know-A-Lot -> Blog-A-Lot. No secrets.

I know I know, its tough. You don’t have the time, you are a busy person I know. Guess what? So am I! Nobody said maintaining a good blog was easy, right?

Come along, I’ll show you where you can get started, so you can save some time instead of bum around like I did when I first started.

Here are 8 great places where you can search and find great ideas for your content.

1. Blog Search Engines (Technorati / BlogPulse / Google Blog Search) – Search these engines for your topic everyday. These search engine list the hottest news in the blogosphere with the latest entry first, so you are sure to find different content for the same search everyday
2. Social Bookmarking Sites (Digg / Reddit / Stumble Upon) – Again, search these sites for top articles on the net to read.
3. The Big Three Search Engines (Google / Yahoo / MSN) – You may find the same websites almost everyday for the same keywords, but these websites will bring you to more sites that talk about your niche.
4. Article Directories (EzineArticles / ArticleCity / iSnare) – Article directories like this allow you to republish their articles for free, as long as you do not edit the articles and you publish the resource box with your post. However, my recommendation is please reword the whole article, and add in your comments and critique. I repeat, DO NOT publish the articles as is, because this will result in your post labelled at duplicated content. Reword it enough and make them your own articles. Hard work, I know. I guarantee you it is worthwhile.
5. Local Newspapers – Many of us think we must find content from the net to post on the net. Dead wrong. In fact, other readers will be raring to hear the interesting articles in your local news. These are articles they don’t have access to. Got it?
6. Alert Services like Google Alerts – Alert services are services that… well… uhmmm.. Alert you. Duh! Basically, this is how it works. You create an alert for your niche, like “Fathering” or “Fatherhood”. As Google finds new content that matches your alert phrase, they send you an email, with a link to that article. Neat hur!
7. Blogroll Surfing – First, find some blogs related to your niche from Technorati (Point number 1). Start from them. Find out who they quote, check their blogroll, check who comments on their blogs. You will never find an end to the line.
8. Everyday Experiences – Of course, unless you are doing your niche as a profession, it would be pretty tough to have everyday experiences. But since you have chosen the niche, you must be involved in it in some way or another right, write about it then!

The Secret

The secret is that there is no secret! Professional bloggers read a lot, and that is exactly why they can write a lot. What I would recommend you to do is to get started with a RSS reader like NewsGator or Google Reader or Bloglines (they are FREE by the way), and get subscribed to every blog you find interesting.

Like I said, not everybody will post an interesting article to read everyday, so you have to read a lot.
That’s it for Today!

Source: Blogspreneur

Absensi: AbsensiWajah.com

Hosting and Domain

First you have to get your hosting and domain!

There are a couple of them out there, and if you have one that you prefer, good. Make sure it is reliable though, because you don’t want to have your readers coming in expecting to find your blog but getting a server maintenance message! If not, you can go for HostGator – which is one of the more popular web hosting companies around.

How do you select your domain name, you’d ask?

From the SEO perspective, it would be best to select a keyword rich domain name. For example, if you are going to blog about teaching parrots to talk, then it would be wonderful to get the domain “TeachParrots.com” or something similar.

Unfortunately, with so many domain squatters around and so many websites already established, it is very difficult to find domain names that match your keywords. In this case, you may want to consider putting a filler word before or after your keywords. For example, if “ParrotTalk.com” is taken (which is, by the way), you might want to consider “MyParrotTalk.com” or “TheParrotTalk.com”.

Oh, unless you are going to post A LOT of videos or photos online, the smallest package (Hatchling – 50GB space) is good enough!

If you are using your own host, make sure it allows you to run PHP and make sure and you have at least one spare mySQL database. If you have a choice, it would be good if your host runs on CPanel administration too, because this is what I will be using to show you the installation process. HostGator runs on CPanel, and most others do too… but no worries if your is not.

I won’t be taking you though the step of getting hosting and domain… its pretty straightforward! Just follow the steps on HostGator. Go take some time to do it now! The gator is friendly, and I won’t run away, I promise!

Done? Great!

HostGator (or your webhost) should have given you a username and password to access the CPanel administration, right? If not, make sure you bug them until you have it!

By the way, it may take some time for the hosting to be set up – because some time is needed for the DNS servers to propagate (never mind if you don’t know what this means). Go get some coffee and call your long lost friend to chat, go take a nap, or even bookmark and come back to this page tomorrow. Just be patient.

WordPress

Okay, the next step is where you get your hands dirty with the ultimate blogging platform – WordPress! Why WordPress, you may ask? I chose WordPress for two reasons.

I did a Google trends search on the four blogging platforms, and guess what I see? Blogger is on top, Movable Type and Typepad are below and LOOK at WordPress! (the one in red!) Over the past two years it has gained so much popularity, and that only means there are more people working with WordPress… which means that there will be better support, more plugins and themes for YOU! See how considerate I am?

What? The second reason? Alright alright, I don’t have a lot of experience with the other systems … laugh all you want!!

So we are going for WordPress!

Setting up WordPress

Now there are a couple of methods to set up WordPress. Some hosts have a tool called Fantastico that allows you to set up WordPress in a couple of clicks, but I want to take you through the full version, no shortcuts… just in case your host does not have Fantastico.

Setting up WordPress manually will take you a couple of steps. Let me first list them down:

1. Download the source file and unzip
2. Set up mySQL database
3. Edit wp-config.php configuration and create .htaccess
4. Upload and change permissions
5. Install WordPress

Simple? Let’s do it one by one.

Step 1. Download the source file and unzip

The first step is to download the WordPress installation source file! How do you do this? Simple! Head on to http://wordpress.org/download/, and select “download .ZIP”

You will prompted to save a file something like “wordpress-2.0.5.zip” into your computer. Save it on your computer desktop.

Now when the download is done (depending on how fast your Internet connection is, it may take some time – its about 600KB in size), the next step is to unzip it. Using your favourite ZIP program (or the Windows XP version), just unzip the archive onto your desktop.

The unzipped file structure should look something like this:

Done? Great! Your are done with step 1!

Step 2: Set up mySQL database

Now the next step is to set up a mySQL database.

Let me explain. WordPress runs on a server-side-programming language called PHP, and the data for all the blog posts you are going to make, are all stored in a mySQL database. So now you know why I asked you to choose a host with PHP support and have at least one mySQL database?

That said, the files on your server can be taken away, but as long as you have a backup of your mySQL database, you can recreate your WordPress blog (with all your blog entries) on any other host and any other domain. (But you will lose your template files though)… so remember, your mySQL database file is VERY VERY important!

Let’s get down to doing it.

First thing you have to do is to log in to your CPanel web administration. As an example for this course, let’s just say the domain we get is “bloggingessentials.com” (which is taken up by the way… by me!), and your username is “blogessn” and password for is “handsomedude”.

Again here are the SAMPLE authentication credentials used for this example:

Domain: bloggingessentials.com
Username: blogessn
Password: handsomedude

Here’s what you do. Follow me closely. Substitute bloggingessentials.com, blogessn, and handsomedude with your own access credentials and domain.

Step 2.1: Head on to http://www.bloggingessentials.com/cpanel. A dialog box will pop up, asking you to key in your username and password, so go ahead and key it in. Mine’s “blogessn” and “handsomedude”.

Step 2.2: You will be presented with a control panel, something that looks like this. It may not be exactly the same, but it should look similar.

Step 2.3: Find the mySQL databases icon or link and click it… here is what it looks like.

Step 2.4: You will be presented with the MySQL Account Maintenance page, which looks like this.

Step 2.5: Under the section called Current Databases, type “wordpress” in the New Database text box, and hit the Create Database button.

Step 2.6: You will receive a message saying that your database is created. Click on the Go Back link. You will return to the mySQL account maintenance page, and you will see that there is a new entry, under Current Databases.

Step 2.7: Under the section called Current User, type in a desired username and password for your database. This does NOT have to be the same as the one you use for hosting. In my example, let say I use:

Username: kianann
Password: ishandsome

Okay, I’m desperately trying to be handsome, alright?

Step 2.8: Again, you will receive a message saying a user is created. Click Go Back. You will see that a new user account is created under Current Users.

Step 2.9: Next, you will need to assign the permissions of the user to the database. To do this, head down to Add Users To Your Databases. You should see your username on the left drop down list, and your mySQL database name on the right drop down list.

Note: Your mySQL username will take the form of cpanelUsername_mysqlUsername… like mine would be blogessn_kianann, and the same goes for the mySQL database name (mine is blogessn_wordpress). Its normal.

You will see a lot of checkboxes under the two dropdown lists. Make sure the one with All is selected, then click Add User to Database.

Step 2.10: You will get a message saying the user access is assigned, and then click Go Back once again. You will see, under Current Databases, something like this.

Phew! That’s it! Your mySQL database is done! Remember your mySQL database name, username and password! Mine is like this:

Database Name: blogessn_wordpress
Username: blogessn_kianann
Password: ishansome

That was pretty easy right? But you are only at step 2! Hold on! Three more steps to go!

Step 3: Edit wp-config.php configuration and create .htaccess

Alright! On to step 3! Step 3 is pretty easy.

You still have your WordPress installation files on your desktop, do you? Head into the root directory of the installation and find file by the name of wp-config-sample.php.

Make a copy of that file, and rename it to wp-config.php

Now, open notepad, and drag that file in notepad (or just open the file in notepad). You will see something like this. Notice the first few lines in the code which I circled.

Change the values of the lines:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘username’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

…to your mySQL settings. Mine would be like this:

// ** MySQL settings ** //
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘blogessn_wordpress’); // The name of the database
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘blogessn_kianann’); // Your MySQL username
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘ishandsome’); // …and password
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’); // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value

Got it? Right!

Save the file and close notepad.

Next, you are going to create a blank file called .htaccess in the root folder of WordPress. Yes, it is a file with no filename, and has an extension of 8 characters -> .htaccess

How do you do that? Fire up notepad again, and using the blank document, just save the file as .htaccess in your WordPress root folder (the same folder where you have your wp-config.php)

You are done with step 3! Told you it was fast!

Step 4:Upload and change permissions

For the next step, you will be connecting to your server though FTP and transferring the files to the server! For this, you will need an FTP program.

If you already have one that you are familiar with, great! If not, I would recommend you download and use FileZilla. Just click on the link, follow to the download page and download the software. Its free!

After you have downloaded FileZilla, go ahead and install it with the default options. C’mon! You don’t need me to bring you through that do you?

Done? You are such a genius!

Okay, now, fire up FileZilla. You will see this.

Click on File->Site Manager. A box will pop up and you will see this:

Click on New Site at the bottom, and specify your domain (mine’s bloggingessentials.com) for the site name.

Specify these settings on the right side!

Host: ftp.bloggingessentials.com
Port: 21
ServerType: FTP
Logon Type: Normal
Username: blogessn
Password: handsomedude

Leave the remaining setting as they are. Remember to use your OWN domain name instead of ftp.bloggingessentials.com, your own username instead of blogessn, and your own password instead of handsomedude! *hint* this should be the same ones given to you by your web host – the ones you used to log in to CPanel! You still remember them, don’t you?

Click on Connect!

The dialog box will disappear and in the main panel, you will see some commands running on the top… and after a while, your FileZilla title bar should read something like “FileZilla – Connected to BloggingEssentials.com (ftp.bloggingessentials.com)”

The handsomedude is connected!

Okay, now, on the left side of the FileZilla panel is the LOCAL view – these are files in your computer. The files on the right side of the FileZilla panel is the REMOTE view – these are files on the server. We need to transfer the WordPress installation files from your computer to the server!

On the left side, navigate to your desktop folder where your WordPress files are. It should be something like C:Documents and SettingsKian AnnDesktopwordpress (it would be a little different from yours, depending on what your Windows username is)

On the right side, navigate to the public_html folder. Only files in this folder can be accessed by the Internet browser.

Now, you have to decide where you want to install your WordPress blog. Do you want it installed right at the root folder like http://www.bloggingessentials.com, or would you want to install it under a subdirectory, like http://www.bloggingessentials.com/blog? If you want to create it in a subfolder, create the folder in the right panel. (Right click -> create directory)

In our case, we will install it on the root folder.

So this is what you do. Select all the files in the WordPress installation folder, and just drag it over into the public_html folder.

After you release your mouse, you will see that the files will be copied over to the remote location. There will be a queue at the bottom… and it will slowly get shorter and shorter (it may take some time though!)

When the queue is cleared you are done with uploading!

But, there are some permissions settings you need to change! Here’s what you do.

Over on the right, find a folder by the name of wp-content, right click it, and select “file attributes”

A box will pop up, in the numeric value textbox at the bottom, type “777? and hit okay.

After you are done with the wp-content directory, do the same for the .htaccess file!

Now you are done with FileZilla! Close the application!

Step 5: Install WordPress

Are you ready for the last lap? Tell me! ARE YOU READY?!???

Let’s go!

Fire up your browser, and surf on to your blog site! Mine’s http://www.bloggingessentials.com! You will see a message “It doesn’t look like you’ve installed WP yet. Try running install.php.”

Click on the “install.php” link! You will get this!

Read it if you want to… but note what it says wrongly at the bottom WordPress, personal publishing platform… it should be WordPress, ultimate publishing platform!! When you have time, do drop a mail to the developers to ask them to change that!

Click First Step.

You will see this screen. Key in your blog title (don’t tell me your have forgotten your niche! ) and email. You can change these later, but do key in a valid email because the installation is going to send you your password. You don’t want that ending up in somebody’s hands!

Click Go to second step!

Wallah! You are done! Read what is said there! You’ll have your username and password there!

So basically you can login now (follow the link on that page) with the username and password given on that page! And if you surf on to your blog homepage (in my case http://www.bloggingessentials.com), you will see the default blog installation for WordPress!

You will also receive an email with the same information. Keep that email for now.

Phew! You are completely done with the installation! Aren’t you PROUD of yourself? Are you just SMART or what?!

Okay okay, so that’s it!

Yeah, that’s it for today! There are a couple of things to change, but I’ll just leave you here. Its been a long session isn’t it?

Is there anything you found particularly hard to get pass, and you could do with a little more explanation? Please let me know! Drop me a comment below, drop me a mail, get on Skype, get in contact! I really want you to get WordPress installed by TODAY, so we can move forward together.

You’ve been wonderful to be able to read this super looooong page and follow it step by step! Well done! Give yourself a good rest now, go get some drinks and some chicks chips, catch a movie, play some golf, eat some pizza, and empty your bowels! We’ll get going again on the next session.

Source: Blogspreneur

Absensi: AbsensiWajah.com

The importance of planning

The importance of planning can never be emphasised more. Like going to war, you will need to strategize, you will need to know where your enemies’ weaker points are, you will need to know when to strike.

The Internet and the World Wide Web is a ferocious battlefield.

Let’s try this. Say you want to set up blog on golf. You are passionate about golf and you play golf 8 times a day and complete 18 holes in 10 minutes. So, eagerly, you set you your golf blog and you name your blog “Golf Blog”

Now. Search Google for “Golf Blog”.

You have 97 MILLION other competing sites!

Imagine there is a battlefield of 97 million tribes, and the top 10 tribes will share 80% of the food (approx 80% of searchers don’t go beyond the first page). Would you want to join that war and think you can win? I’m not saying you can’t… but even if you do, its going to cost you A LOT of effort.

So my advice is, for a start, compete in smaller battlefields first. Build your army, train your soldiers, gather your resources and ammunition, before you even consider stepping in the big battlefield.

So, how do you find smaller battlefields, you’d ask?

The answer is one word: Niche.

Selecting a niche topic for your blog

There are many ways to select niche topics. Many Internet marketers use keyword research tools like WordTracker or Overture Inventory.

However, my personal experience with these research tools is that while they are useful in spinning out ideas, some of the terms that are found can prove to be really hard to blog about.

Remember that blogging is very different from Internet marketing. Blogging requires you to have a constant flow of new entries. Internet marketers build websites that are by and large static in nature. As a result, you will want to target a broader niche that what the Internet marketers would target.

So for example, an Internet marketer may use WordTracker and come up with the niche of “Golf Putting for Tall People”. You might just want to target something like “Golf Putting Tips”

Comparatively, Googling “Golf Putting Tips” gives you over 1 million competitors. That is a good niche for a blog.

Remember that if you are serious about your blog (and I’m talking SERIOUS blogging), your blogs will eventually grow into a whole LOT bigger than a lot of the websites put together by Internet marketers, so it is easier too, to target a broader niche. As you build your blog and create new posts, the more powerful it becomes. It is like recruiting and training more soldiers for battle. Every single word is a new solider, every new post is new general ready to help you in your mission in conquest.

The more content on your site, the better it is (if you tweak your blog right!)… and you will find out a lot more about this in the blog promotion part of the course… later

For a blog, what is most important is that you need to be able to write content on the subject! Therefore, the main topic of your blog needs to be something you can really relate to. Go for a broad keyword if you need to. In fact, I would rather you post everyday on a “Golf Blog”, than to post once in two weeks in “Golf Putting Tips”.

Quality content is your ARMY!

Of course, you are the king … or queen. Haha!

The second step

The second step after you have elected your generals are is to buy your canons, guns, aeroplanes, B-52 bombers, rail guns, hand grenades…

Okay okay, enough of war talk. The second step is to identify your categories you want to start with.

Why is this important? Because we tend to stray off easily! Let’s go back to the golf putting tips example. Some categories you might want to think about are: Golf Clubs, Golf Putting Posture, Golf Putting Books, Training Aids… (I’m not too familiar with golf). You should have at least 5 to a maximum of 10 of these categories to start with.

These categories will help you to limit what you write. If not, it will be easy to stray off… one post might say you went to Scotland to golf, and then the next would be about all the castles, and then the next you will talk about the beautiful princess you saw there… and… you see how easily it flows out of hand?

Settling on your categories first help to keep your blog focused on the topic. I’m not saying that you will forever be writing on these topics – you can add more categories later, after you have built your initial categories.

The other concern about categories is that a reorganization of categories (when you realise your blog is in a mess) is crazy. I mean… you should NEVER ever end up in that state of having a messy blog!

Got it? Good. So you are now settled with the topic and scope of your blog.

What’s next?

The Blogging Platforms

The topic and scope is critical… because it affects the marketability aspect of your blog. However, apart from that, there is also one other thing you must think about.

That is – which blogging platform are you going to use?

There are are hundreds of different blogging platforms out there in the market – just to name a few, you have: Blogger. Wordpress. TypePad. pMachine. B2evolution. Movable Type. bBlog. MySpace. Live Journal. Dead Journal. Nucleus. Textpattern. Friendster. Multiply. Geeklog. Greymatter. Radio UserLand. Serendipity. SIPS. Xoops. Joomla. Drupal. ExpressionEngine. Xanga. Windows Live Spaces. Blogware. Diaryland.

Now, is that enough? NO! Its not! This is practically overload!

So what is the solution? My advice would be just to focus on three. Just three – and here are the three.

1. Blogger
2. WordPress
3. MovableType and TypePad

I’ll talk more about using each. Different platforms have their own advantages. But before that, note that there largely two types of blog platforms you can use. The first one type is the hosted type, and the other is the self-hosted version.

Hosted blogs means that webspace is provided for your blog. As a tradeoff, you normally do not get to use your own domain name. For example, a hosted blogger blog will end up with an address like http://myblogname.blogspot.com. Hosted blogs are normally easier to set up, and very often you can get going with a blog in less than 5 minutes.

On the other hand, self-hosted blogs may require a more complex installation. As a brilliant example , http://www.blogopreneur.com uses a non-hosted version of WordPress. That means I have went to WordPress.org, downloaded the software, uploaded and installed it on my server. In exchange, I get a very customizable blog, because I have full control over everything on my server.

Notice that I put MovableType / TypePad in my last entry. This is because they run on the same technology, and are both from the same company, SixApart. MovableType sounds like a self-hosted version of TypePad now, but as you will discover, they are different.

Blogger

Blogger is a blogging engine owned by Google. While Blogger would be by far the more popular platform to use for starters (I started from Blogger!), I feel that there is limited extendibility and customization options.

Blogger provides options for your blog to be either hosted by them, or self-hosted. If you choose for blogger to host the blog for you, your blog address will be something like http://yourblogname.blogspot.com. On the other hand, you can also specify your FTP details in Blogger’s blog administration panel, and Blogger will take care of populating your server with the blog and updating it whenever you post a new post.

WordPress

I have to first admit – I’m a WordPress fanatic and I love WordPress to the core! Ever since I switched from Blogger, I never looked back.

Anyway, WordPress also comes in two versions. The hosted version of WordPress can be found at WordPress.com, and the self-hosted version for half-geeks like me can be found at WordPress.org.

With a blog hosted on WordPress.com, you will get a blog address like http://yourblogname.wordpress.com. I personally feel (again) restricted by in ability to tweak the template (unless I pay a fee), and the webspace limit of 50MB. WordPress.com allows you to redirect your own domain to your WordPress.com blog (again, for a fee), solving a branding issue, but it still does not remove the restrictions.

Blogopreneur.com uses the version available at WordPress.org. The benefits of using a self-hosted WordPress blog is that you have full control over everything, and that includes the tweaking of the source code, adding plugins, and your webspace.

MovableType and TypePad

The MovableType and TypePad use the same core technology created by SixApart, both running on a server side programming language called Perl. MovableType is the self-hosted version, and TypePad provides a hosted version for a small fee.

TypePad is much like Blogger, except with more features – with a web administration panel, you can configure your blog layout and design, lists, and files without touching a single line of HTML code. TypePad currently provides 3 different pricing packages, ranging from $4.95 to $14.95, and the more advanced packages allow you to point your own domain to the blog hosted at TypePad.

MovableType is like a self-hosted version of TypePad, but essentially they are two different platforms altogether. With a single installation of MovableType, you can create multiple blogs. MovableType also allows you to work on the code behind your template, adding practically anything you want!

Which should you choose?

So, we’ve covered the different platforms. Which should you choose and why?

As far as professional blogging and blog marketing is concerned, I would strongly recommend that you host your blog under your own domain and webspace. There are many reasons for this, and here are just three which I find particularly significant.

The first reason for this is because of price. By using your own hosting and domain solutions, you are free to switch between web hosting companies, and not be tied to the pricing scheme provided by the blog provider. For example, the basic TypePad package is $4.95 a month with 100MB of space. If you host your blog with TypePad, there is practically nothing you can do if they ever decide to raise that to $20 a month! Of course, you might argue that this is not likely, but still it pays to be on the safe side.

The second concern is about branding. If you are going to spend time and effort marketing a particular URL, you wouldn’t want to be marketing someone else’s URL! Besides, it would be so much nicer and professional (and stylish!) to tell people that your blog is at “blogopreneur dot com” rather than “blogopreneur dot blogspot dot com”

Lastly, of course, is the concern about control. With your blog configured in your own host, you will be free to add any additional files you want, and tweak your templates as much as you want!

With that configuration in mind, you can either use:

1. Blogger.com with its advanced settings – to FTP to your site
2. WordPress.org
3. MovableType

For this course, we will focus on using the self-hosted version of WordPress, from WordPress.org. (Because I’m a WordPress fanatic! I told you didn’t I?)
Alright! That’s it for today!

That’s it for today – its been another looong session eh? In the next session we are going to dive right in and set up your WordPress blog!

Source: Blogspreneur

Absensi: AbsensiWajah.com