Profitable Productive Blogging

I have been noticing, in addtion to the never ending ping problem as of late, that my thumbnail on Technorati has not been updating like it was. A while back I wrote a very small post, Changing Your Site's Thumbnail Image In Technorati , that has garnered a lot of traffic. I had followed this method and updated my Alexa thumbnail several times in the last month which resulted in no changes to Technorati. I was beginning to wonder about Technorati. After the power outage last week and the increase in ping problems, I contacted Technorati concerning my thumbnail problem and my site ping problem. I was told that they were dropping the Alexa thumbnail system and would be changing to something better, but they could not give me any more information. I asked why they dropped Alexa weeks before they had another system in place and I was not given an answer other than that a new system would be in place shortly. Finally Technorati has released the new information on how to update your thu

Okay so the first part is a bit of a dramatization. The $20 part on the other hand isn't. Let me explain. You may have noticed that at the top of the site there is a leader board of contextual text based advertisements. For quite a long time, before I rearranged things here, I had at times experimented with various types of ads at the top of the page. I eventually settled on the rotating banner that has been in place for quite some time now. This was pretty successful, but there have been some comments as to the relationship between the ads and this site. The ads chosen for the banners were picked by me and the why is really for another time, but a partial explanation can be found in my article Boca Java, Rush Limbaugh And Affiliate Marketing . I have now replaced that banner as part of a little experiment in conjunction with a friend of mine. You my friend are the proverbial guinea pig. I am curious to see the click through stat comparison of the contextual text ads vs. the ad ban

Many of you may have read my original Hits4Pay Program Review article published towards the end of June as it seems to pretty popular internally and with google :). I wanted to give a big thanks to all of you who have joined Hits4Pay and give all of my readers an update and all of my affiliates some tips on maximizing your Hits4Pay income. Hits4Pay has been a very successful program for me to date earning me close to $400 in about 2 months. I don't state that to brag but to show you the potential that is there. In light of my recent article Blogs, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing , I don't want to just tell you how much I earned, tell you that you can do it to, give you a link, and leave it at that. I want to help you succeed, and maximize your earnings in the Hits4Pay program. In that spirit here are my 5 Steps. 5 Steps to Maximize Your Hits4Pay Earnings Step 1 One of the biggest mistakes I see when talking with my affiliates is the under utilization of the intere

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more; it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. William Shakespeare I have noticed as I've traveled the blogosphere that too many blogs talk about making money but I have found that too few actually show and tell. They are in my opinion - blogs, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing . Too many have lost their way. The have become a shell of the blog they were and could be. We the blogging community have become focused on simply building traffic numbers, giving away "stuff" to attract readers, talking about how, when, and what to post, and about our latest dollar amount. What we fail to do is connect with our readers. We need to give more substance and less sound, more instructions, more guidance and less fury. I am not so vain as to assume I am a blogging expert or an authority on making money online. There are literally

Well, I won't be giving it to you exactly, but I am going to show you how to get $2 in your paypal account for free. You really can't get much more profitable or productive than that. Well okay maybe.. Pedro Sardhina is giving away $2 via paypal to everyone that promotes his free ebook. Here is what you need to do. Head over to his article How To Instant Profit From Your Blog? Download his Free Ebook " The Ultimate Guide to Your Easylist " Write a review article about his ebook. Submit your article url and your paypal id to him in the comment section of the article How To Instant Profit From Your Blog? He will depost the $2 into your paypal account. I downloaded the ebook and it has some nice tips in it that might be of benefit to you. The ebook talks about building an "easy list" using several programs in combination to maximize your profitability. Check it out, write a quick post about, collect your $2 and be happy. later all and have a profitable and prod

Several days ago I told you how to achieve Feed Failure in 5 Easy Steps . I wrote that article after experiencing issues with a few feeds I had subscribed to as well as a few small glitches with my own. Well today folks it is a more positive note - Feed Success. Step 1 Post original relevent content. If you are only posting content the readers are getting elsewhere you will lose them. Readers typically subscribe to a fairly large number of feeds and trust me they will notice if you are simply redressing the content of others. Take some time on your articles and put some thought into what you want to say and how you want to say it. DON'T be afraid of saving drafts of articles and returning to them later. I know for me personally I usually am working on several posts at any given time. Original and relevant content will help avoid commoditization of your articles and go a long way to building a better relationship with your subscribers . Step 2 Make it easy to subscribe to your fee

1. Come on he's "the Chow" and all the girls blogs are dreaming of being his partner. 2. He really is on the People Magazine World's 100 Most Beautiful People list . But because People is playing favorites and deliberately keeping him off the official "published" list big magazines and newspapers won't write about him . So a whole new blog devoted to "the Chow" has risen. 3. This has to be one more way google is punishing him for his linking campaign, by making an obviously inferior little blog all about "the Chow" just to disgrace him and keep him from the #1 ranking. 4. Because he had me as a reader several weeks ago, when I was still a quite naive blogger. When I had dreams of blogging grandeur. Now those dreams are just clouds in my boca java coffee , clouds in my bova java coffee . In desperation I gave into my anger and have obviously crossed over to the dark side of the blogosphere and become his apprentice. "Cman - I

Are you tired of having a successful blog with a large readership? Is the pressure of having a large subscriber base getting you down. Do you want to end the headaches caused by the incessant hunger of subscribers for new food from your feed? Take five of these and comment in the morning. Step 1 Remove all Feed Subscription buttons from your site. If you want to know what some look like check the end of this post. If you see anything remotely like this or anything that says subscribe, bookmark, fave, or add this, REMOVE THEM IMMEDIATELY. You do not want people to be able to easily subscribe to your feed. By removing all of these buttons most people just won't bother. Step 2 Use one or two word non-descriptive titles for all of your posts. Headlines like Post 1 , Title , or Article are surefire ways to not grab a persons attention. With headlines like this your feed is sure to go unnoticed in the subscribers reader. Step 3 Post articles on your blog only once every month or so. Th

Sorry I couldn't resist the chance to put in a shameless plug for my recent article on contests full of sh-t . Okay so the above image really is a mountain of sh-t, but the picture discussed below is much more beautiful. Now on to why I'm writing this. Lori over at A Cowboy's Wife , who started blogging not too long after I did, and a good friend is having a contest. Isn't her site great by the way? She has some wonderful photography. And it is that photography that brings us back from a tangent and smack dab into the middle of the topic again. A Cowboy's Wife is a blog with a much smaller audience, though moving higher quite rapidly, than John Chow and is making him look cheap by giving away cold hard cash. She is giving away $10 for the reader that can guess what a mountain scene, not the one above, is portraying. You can view the contest mountain scene here. I feel a bit reluctant to give away my guess since I think I am first but oh well. Here it is. My first

I have to admit I participate in the occasional contest, and even write the "sell-out" type John Chow inspired "make money online" link to me posts. I didn't enter his SH-TTY contests though. The reason being of course that the contests were full of SH-T . More on that later. I do have to give you a reason to keep reading. I know the suspense is killing you. Hey there is nothing wrong with trying to win free stuff. There is even less wrong with it if the entry is free. TANGET Do you ever wonder why people "pay" to enter all of these contests that are going on all the time? Aren't all these contest free, well for the price of a stamp (don't get me started on the inefficiency of government), to enter. The whole "no purchase necessary" bit you hear. I've seen a guy buy a drink he doesn't like and spend more money than necessary, see price of stamp above, to "enter" a contest. I guess the promotion worked huh? You know y

A commodity is a product that is essentially undifferentiated. In other words, regardless of which company you buy from you get basically the same thing. It is an item usually traded on price alone and not on quality or features in that there is really no difference between producers or sellers. Blogs posts are a dime-a-dozen commodity, quality blog Articles on the other hand are not. Don't get me wrong I believe a mix of shorter commentary style blog posts are a necessary part of blogging, but a blog strictly of these types of posts will be hard pressed to build a successful blog with a large loyal readership. Jakob Nielsen Ph.D. " one of the world's foremost experts in Web usability ," according to Business Week, says Blog postings will always be commodity content: there’s a limit to the value you can provide with a short comment on somebody else’s work. Such postings are good for generating controversy and short-term traffic, and they’re definitely easy to write.

Some you may have noticed that I have a lot of coffee related ads. This is because I love great coffee. I kept hearing advertisements on various radio programs, like Rush Limbaugh , about Boca Java Coffee . I ordered some and found it to be arguably the best coffee I have ever tried and certainly the best coffee I have ever ordered from anywhere. I recommend it to all of my readers as a tool to be a more profitable productive blogger. Hey more coffee means you can stay awake and be more alert which gives you more time to devote to blogging. You were wondering at first I know. Besides I know many of you already use this as a productivity tool anyway. Now, as if I needed another reason to drink Boca Java Coffee , they are giving away a $200$ gift card . Also for all of my readers check out my post on what Affiliate Marketing, Rush Limbaugh, and Boca Java have in common. Here is a hint: Great Opportunity. Okay so the hint pretty much gave it away but read about Affiliate Marketing, Rush

If you are like me after about 2 weeks of John Chow and you had just about enough. Don't get me wrong I still check his feed and read some of his posts but i'm certainly not fawning over the site. Well anyway there is a new parody site that is actually much more fun to read and I'm actually over there quite a bit more than Chow's site. The site is John Cow dot Com. It is a site not about making money online but about making mooney online . Now I'm not real sure what mooney is, but it seems to be pretty profitable. The site has some hilarious posts and is a really fun read. I recommend my readers to check it out and enjoy the humorous side of making mooney online . later all and have a profitable and productive blogging day Get more profitable and productive information by subscribing to my newsletter! or clicking the links below to subscribe to my feed, bookmark my site, or add me to your favorites.

I ran across BloggingTips several weeks ago, liked the post I read, and subscribed to the site feed. Since that time it has become one of my favorite blogs and one I stop by quite often. Sunday I read a post talking about the new BloggingTips forum and decided to check it out. I really like the forum setup and have already found it to be an extremely helpful resource. Besides Kevin from BloggingTips being around to share his wisdom and experience, I have found the other folks at the forum knowledgeable and helpful. I would recommend to all of my readers to stop by and register with the forum to avail yourself of this great resource for profitable productive blogging. later all and have a profitable and productive blogging day Get more profitable and productive information by subscribing to my newsletter! or clicking the links below to subscribe to my feed, bookmark my site, or add me to your favorites.

Having a good relationship with your readers is very important for reader loyalty, linking, social bookmarking, and just overall blog success. Building a good relationship with your readers goes hand in hand with building traffic and reader loyalty. If readers feel a connection with your blog and other readers of your blog they are more likely to return and to also help you in your social bookmarking efforts. Here are a few tips on building a good relationship with your readers. 1. Content is still King Let me qualify the above statement and help you avoid a pitfall that I still and many new bloggers fall into. Quality of content not quantity of content. The latter will follow as your work on the former. I know that the “rule” around the blogosphere is “post every day!” This pressure to post every day drives poor quality content and will in turn eventually impact your relationship with your readers. Read a great article that goes into more detail on this over at the MyDailyFix blog on

When analyzing my traffic data I noticed that most of my posts were being read via their permalink page and that this percentage was steadily increasing. Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and the links I post, rss feed links, and internal links all refer to the permalink of a post. As these are an increasing percentage of traffic I decided to find a way of removing ads from my main page posts and have ads that only appear on the permalink of a post. This is a great way to remove advertisement clutter from your main page (something I'm still working on) and place ads where the reader is more actively engaged and likely to follow the advertising. Step 1 As always the first thing you should do before making any changes to your template is to make a complete backup. Step 2 Generate the ad code at whatever provider you decide to use and in the format you prefer, mine is a 468 x 60 banner. Now you will have to parse the code so that it can be placed into your template. If you don’t know how to

I sent the first edition of the newsletter out early saturday morning, only to realize today after some comments by people about the newsletter being late, that my e-mail database had been corrupted(I will be switching to constant contact next month which should help). I know there are many of you who did not receive the newsletter. I am working to correct the problem. Depending on my time constraints I should have the problem resolved and the newsletter out to everyone by Wednesday. Thank you all for being understanding. This is the first time I have done a newsletter and I'm still working out the logistics of it. later all and have a profitable and productive blogging day Do you like the site? Get more insider information by subscribing to my newsletter! or clicking the links below to subscribe to my feed, bookmark my site, or add me to your favorites.