Earn money with Adgetize

Posted on December 8, 2008 by Nico

Eric pointed out Adgetize to me today, so I thought I’d give it a try. This ad program seems to have the greatest potential so far. You are getting paid not only for ad views or ad clicks, but also for posting on your blog. This is not a paid posting service, you just go about blogging like you normally would. You post what you want and earn points with their system.

Another big difference with services like Xavier Media Banner Exchange is that your accumulated points will be converted into cash! So, if you are getting clicks and hits from traffic exchange programs, but really rather be paid for your blog, this is your chance to sign up with a brand new service.

Adgetize has only been around for a month, but people have already been paid for this program, so it seems to be legit. Looking at how their system works, I’m not entirely sure they will last long in the advertising market. People are currently signing up like crazy and displaying the Adgetize ads on their websites to earn cash. If the program fails to attract enough advertisers, this nice program could soon be gone.
If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for their service for free and start showing ads on your site within minutes. Just go to the Adgetize website and sign up now!

Thanks Eric for pointing out the program!

Posted in blogging tools, make money, traffic | Tagged | 8 Comments

Xavier Media Banner Exchange

Posted on December 8, 2008 by Nico

Looking into more ways to get free advertising and traffic, I found the Xavier Media Banner Exchange program. Programs like these are a great way for the starting bloggers to get some visitors to their blog, without having to put down any cash for advertising.

The program works with a 3:2 ration, which means that for every 3 ad clicks on your site, you will get 2 visitors send back to you. You will start with 1000 banner impression credits and you can get another free 5000 banner impression credits just for writing a review. Since I was going to write this review anyway, that’s 5000 totally free banner impression credits for me, yay!

What I really like about this banner exchange program is that you don’t have to do any clicking to earn points, your visitors can take care of that. This makes this program a lot better than Entrecard in my eyes.

You can put your own ad in several of 35 different categories, so the traffic you will be getting should be pretty targeted. As with any banner campaign, the number of clicks on your ad will depend on the design of your banner. Since you can have multiple ads running through this program, you can do some split testing and see which banner design performs best for you.

I’ll have to see how this works out in the long run, but my first impression of the Xavier Media Banner Exchange is very positive. You should give it a try! If it doesn’t work out for you, too bad, but at least you didn’t loose a dime trying it.

Posted in blogging tools, Start Blogging, traffic | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Entrecard, a waste of my time

Posted on December 7, 2008 by Nico

Looking at different methods to bring traffic to this very new blog, I decided to give Entrecard a try. I was very hesitant in using this method because it is very much like the numerous traffic-swap programs out there. Been there, done that, didn’t like it!

You basically put an ad button on your site and visitors who are also signed up with Entrecard can click it to earn points. I can in turn visit their sites and click to earn points for myself. The earned points can be spend on displaying your ad button on other peoples websites.

The great thing about this method of advertising is that it doesn’t cost you a dime, which is great for people just starting out blogging. The downside is that you’ll have to do a lot of clicking to earn enough points to put your ad up on other sites. Also, when not clicking, the other users of the system will not notice you and will not visit your site.

So, if you click a lot, you get a lot of visitors. Great, if you have the time to visit all these blogs to click the button. But be aware of the type of traffic you get in return: they are other Entrecard members, only visiting your site to click the button. Most of them probably don’t even read a single word on your blog. They are the click-n-run visitors.

You might wonder how Entrecard got so popular. I’ll tell you: it’s all in the marketing! With a few big names, like Darren Rowse and John Chow, promoting your service, things can start snowballing pretty fast. Shame on you, both of you! Although it looks like they are both not using the service anymore.


If I don’t like this method of getting traffic, why am I using it? First of all, I believe in trying out things for myself before writing a review about it. Sure, I could just browse the web to see what everyone is saying, but that wouldn’t make a very objective review. I also think that this service can potentially bring me some visitors that might decide to hang around or subscribe to my rss feed. Since they are all bloggers, it is very targeted traffic I’m getting for this blog. The only question that remains is whether or not they actually read my posts.

So, to summarize: if you measure your blogs success in visitor numbers only and have time to spare to visit 350 blogs a day, just to click the Entrecard button, go ahead! If you are more interested in growing your blogs community, I’d say there are better ways to spend your time.

Posted in blogging tools, Start Blogging, traffic | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Keep your software updated

Posted on December 6, 2008 by Nico

Keeping your WordPress installation, or any other software installations for that matter, up to date should be high on your to-do list. No matter how well programs are planned, there will almost always be bugs and security holes that are only discovered after the software has been released. They are often patched by software updates as soon as the issue has been discovered and a fix has been created.

It’s these known, and fixed, software issues, that cause the most problems. There are a lot of wanna-be hackers around, that are too stupid to figure out how to hack websites by themselves. Instead they just exploit the known bugs to gain access and impress their wanna-be-hacker-friends with their l33t h4cker 5killz.

If you keep your software up to date, you will probably have a more than 99% less chance of getting your website hacked. Here’s what happened to one of my WordPress blogs, that I didn’t upgrade:

I have a blog that has been laying dormant for well over a year. At one time I just didn’t have the time to post updates and I never got back to writing on that blog again. It was still making some money from a few scattered AdSense clicks, nothing major, but enough to cover the years domain registration and hosting fees. I figured I’d keep the site and maybe one day start writing on it again.

Recently I started getting email from the hosting company, notifying me that the site was nearing its bandwidth limit. Checking the website statistics I found a sudden rise in traffic back in August. The number of visitors and page views has been steady, but the used bandwidth went up. Not just a little: in July 2008 the site used 68 MB of bandwidth, which is about the normal monthly usage for the website throughout the rest of the year, but in August the traffic jumped up to 994 MB, in September the bandwidth usage was over 5 GB and the highest peak was this past November with nearly 10 GB of traffic!

I had my email alerts for the site set to 10 GB. So, nearing this amount of traffic triggered the system to notify me on the site usage. Checking the stats, I noticed visitors finding my website through search terms that I’m not even going to mention here, just open up your average spam email and you know what terms I mean.

I went to look at the site and everything appeared to be normal, but the little icon in the top right hand corner of my browser, which indicates the page is being loaded, wouldn’t stop spinning, even though my screen showed the complete site already. Looking at the source code of the page, I found a lot of links at the bottom of the page. I didn’t count them, but there where literally thousands!

I requested a free sample from each site linked to, so I could make my friends envy me for the rest of my life. Well, actually, I just removed the links and went to bed. The next morning they where all there again! I must have forgotten to save the file after removing the links. I removed them again and double checked the site. All looked good, but a few hours later the links had been put right back into my source code files.

This WordPress installation had been installed in January 2006 and hadn’t been upgraded since, so I decided to install one of my favorite WordPress plugins: WordPress automatic upgrade. With my installation being almost 3 years out of date, I wasn’t expecting the plugin to work, but it worked perfectly, upgrading my WordPress installation to the latest and greatest release with just a few clicks (sorry Keith, I should have known better!)

The links didn’t come back, but I’m still worried about a Google penalty my site might have received for having all these links on there. I’m glad big G didn’t close my AdSense account that was displaying ads on the spammed pages.

Posted in plugins, Start Blogging, WordPress settings | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Embrace the power of pings

Posted on December 4, 2008 by Nico

Search engines have their bots roaming the internet, looking for new and changed website pages. There’s no telling when the bots will visit your site and indexing new pages on your site can take anywhere from minutes to days or even weeks.

If you’re running a blog and people have subscribed to your rss feed, you’ll want to let them know immediately when you have posted new content. The rss services, however, also rely on checking your site to see if new content has been posted. Checking every blog every minute of the day would be a big burden, both on their servers, as well as on the one hosting your blog.

This is where ping comes in: by pinging a service, you let it know that you have updated your site and it should come over to see what has changed. (not to be confused with the tcp/ip ping command, which tests the connection between two systems)

Within the WordPress admin panel you can find Update Services under Settings -> Writing. Here you can type in the URLs of the services to ping, whenever you post something new to your blog.

There are loads of ping services available, but be careful! Don’t just put every ping service you can find in there. Services like pingomatic will forward your ping to multiple other ping services. This will cause multiple pings, both from you and from pingomatic, to the same service. With multiple pings coming in for a single post, your blog could be marked as spam!

Here’s the list of ping services I’ve put into my WordPress installations:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

Posted in Start Blogging, WordPress settings, Writing | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Stay on top of things with rss

Posted on December 3, 2008 by Nico

If you are blogging on a specific subject, you probably look at other blogs within your niche, and you should. Following other blogs is a good way of keeping up with industry specific news and it can give you ideas for new posts on your own blog. Keeping up with what others are writing can be a very time-consuming task though. You don’t know when other blogs post new content, so to really stay on top of things, you’d have to visit each site a couple of time a day to check.

There’s a better way though, say hello to our friend the rss feed. If you are blogging, there’s no doubt that you have seen this term before, about every blogging platform has rss feeds integrated into the software. Still many beginning bloggers don’t know what an rss feed is or how to use it. The rss feed is the best thing since sliced bread!

The rapid rise of blogs, and rss feeds, only a few years ago, might make you believe that rss is one of the hip inventions of the 21st century. Truth is, that the technique has been around since the 1960′s. Like most things computer related, rss’ roots lie at IBM. But let me not bore you with a history lesson, nor the technical details of the rss feed. Let’s just take it’s working for granted and see how we can make use of it.

Without getting into the technical details, let me quickly give you an idea of what an rss feed is. Simply put, the rss feed makes the content of a website available in a standard way. The key word here is content, the feed doesn’t contain the layout of the website or the ads you see when visiting the site, although ads can be integrated into rss feeds as well. An rss reader can read the contents of multiple rss feeds and display them to you. This way you can keep track of new posts on multiple blogs from within a single web page or application.

If you want to know which rss reader is best for you, I’m not the one to ask. There are many readers available, online applications as well as stand-alone programs. I use Google reader but similar services are available at other sites. I prefer the online rss reader because it enables me to access my feeds from any computer with an internet connection.

The Google reader serves my needs, so I have not tried other applications yet. If you want to see some other rss readers available, Life Hacker posted a list of their visitors favorite rss readers a while ago and Daren has also asked his visitors what they use.

Posted in blogging tools | Tagged | 3 Comments

How to come up with ideas for your blog posts

Posted on November 29, 2008 by Nico

When writing a personal blog it’s usually quite easy to find subjects to write about. Things you’ve done that day or places you’ve been to are frequently encountered in personal blog posts. When writing for a niche blog, however, there’s a lot less to choose from, topic wise. Still, you have to come up with new posts frequently or your blog will quickly lose it’s subscribers. When just starting a blog you can probably think of tons of topics to write about, but as your blog grows, your pool of ideas shrinks.

Here are a few ideas to come up with new ideas for your blog posts.

Make a mind map
A mind map is a great tool to plot down your ideas. Start with a clean piece of paper and write the topic of your blog in the middle of it. Don’t write down a whole paragraph of text, pick the single most important word that describes the topic of your blog. Now think about subjects that relate to your blog, this would probably be the post categories already on your blog. Draw lines to connect each topic to the word in the center. Next you start splitting up each category into sub-categories. Each one could be the topic of a new blog post or be further split into new topics. You’ll be amazed at how fast you fill up the whole sheet of paper with ideas.

Look what others are writing
There are probably other blogs in the same niche. Have a look around and steal borrow ideas from them. An easy way to keep a tap on what other bloggers are writing is build right into every blog: rss feeds! Just add the rss feeds of every blog you can find in your niche, to your rss reader and you will always be up to date on what they are writing about. This also keeps you updated on industry news from your niche, that you might have missed otherwise.

Get away from it
Sometimes you just have to let it all go and do something completely different to get your creative juices flowing again. Get out, take your dog for a walk in the park, go for a bike ride, a subway ride to some random destination or whatever other activity you can think of, that does not require you to be near a computer screen. You can even take a piece of paper with you to work on that mind map.

Posted in Writing | Tagged , | 9 Comments

10 must-have WordPress plugins

Posted on November 27, 2008 by Nico

WordPress is a great software package. One of its greatest features is the plugin engine that enables programmers to easily add new functionalities or change existing ones. Many people have created great plugins, so you don’t have to. Currently there are over 3400 plugins listed in the WordPress plugin directory and many more plugins are available on the authors websites.

Here are some of my favorite plugins:

Akismet
The ultimate comment-spam buster! If I could only use a single plugin, this would be the one. Akismet protects your blog from comment spammers that put links to all sorts of nasty websites in your post comments. Without Akismet you will be spending a lot of time digging thru the spam comments. All you need to do to activate the Akismet plugin is get a free API key from the WordPress site. The plugin itself doesn’t need installing as it comes bundled with the WordPress installation.

All in one SEO pack
WordPress is not fully optimized for the search engines, but that changes after installing the all in one SEO pack. This plugin gives you full control over page titles, meta tags and keywords.

Broken link checker
Whenever you put links into your posts, there is a chance that you will have broken links on your site in the future. This plugin checks all your outgoing links and lets you know if any of them are not working any more.

do-follow
Get rid of the no-follow attribute, because it doesn’t help.

feedburner feedsmith
If you want to be able to track your rss subscriber numbers, I suggest you sign up for a free account at feedburner. Once you have your feedburner account, you’ll need to change your rss feed links to point to the feedburner feed. “Where are the rss feed links located that need changing?” you might ask. That’s where this plugin comes in: install, activate and put your feedburner feed URL in the config screen.

no self pings
This plugin prevents pingbacks from showing when linking back to your own posts.

share this
A nice little button to enable visitors to submit your blog post to various social bookmarking sites or send an e-mail to friends.

top commentators
Say “thank you” to your top commentators by giving them a side wide link.

wordpress automatic upgrade
Upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest release from within the admin panel. Upgrading this way saves a lot of worries and time.

wp-cumulus
A beautiful flash tag-cloud to spice up your blog. This is probably not helping with SEO, but it looks awesome!

There are many more great WordPress plugins available, but these are some that I really like. Oh hold on, I almost forgot to mention the best plugin of them all: my very own ad buttons plugin! Actually, it’s not that great yet, as it is still a work in progress, but feel free to download it and give it a try.

I don’t think I, or anybody else, has the time to give the thousands of plugins available on the WordPress site all a try. Do you know of some particularly good plugins, please let me know!

Posted in plugins, Start Blogging | Tagged , , , , , , | 38 Comments

Step 4: WordPress installation

Posted on November 25, 2008 by Nico

With your domain registered and hosting taken care of, it’s time to install your blog software. There are different software packages available for blogging, some free, some paid. The only one I have ever tried is WordPress and I didn’t ever bother to look at others, that’s how much I like it.

Being a programmer myself, I know a good piece of software when I see it. WordPress is one of the software packages that I’ve liked from day one and it is getting better with each new release. The feature I like most has got to be their plugin engine. Once you figure out how it works, it’s very easy to write your own plugins for WordPress that add functionality or change existing functionalities of the software. If you are not a programmer, there are free WordPress plugins available for most tasks you can think of and installing them only requires uploading the plugin files.

I’m wandering off, this post should be about installing WordPress, but it’s turning into a WordPress promotion, I’ll save the rest for a later post. Truth is, there’s not much to write when talking about installing the software. After downloading the latest stable release from the WordPress download page, all you have to do is edit the configuration file, so the software can access your database. Detailed installation instructions can be found on the WordPress site.

Posted in Start Blogging | Tagged | 2 Comments

Step three: hosting

Posted on November 24, 2008 by Nico

Once you have your domain name registered, you will need to sign up for a hosting account. Hosting accounts come in many forms and sizes. Think about what you want to put on your website, so you can get a hosting account that can handle the task. My preferred blog software is WordPress, which needs php and MySQL running on the server, other software packages might require a windows server and asp. Make sure you know exactly what type of hosting you need before signing up for one.

A server running on Linux is usually cheaper, because it doesn’t require an expensive software license like Windows servers. Php and MySQL are also free to run unlike Microsoft’s SQL server.

Another option would be to host your website at home, but I would not recommend it, even if you have the knowledge to run your own server. No matter how well you manage your server, there are tons of things that can go wrong and bring your website down. When things go wrong it is usually when you are not there to fix it, preferably when you just left for a long weekend away. When you sign up for a hosting account, the hosting provider will look after the server and make sure your website is accessible day and night.

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