Archive for March, 2008
A new powerful Category to my blog – Resources
Posted by: | CommentsI am going to start a new experiment to my blog by adding a Resources category to the blog. This is not going to be a typical category, let’s see why.
If you are somewhat experienced in blogging and reading the blogs, you must have seen that many topics like Google Adsense, Entrecard, Affiliate Marketing, Paid to Post etc. are found on almost all Make Money Online blogs. And only a very little information changes between such posts.
So, I am not going to publish posts about the topics that are already there in Blogosphere in massive amount. Rather, I would like to give you links to the posts on other blogs which should be useful to you. If necessary, I will make some notes on such Resources type of posts on my blog.
And yes, this experiment is going to be done due to two fair reasons: First – I can enrich my blog easily by accommodating more and more topics easily. Second – Readers’ time will be saved if they have already come across such topics before. Of course, any personal notes from me they can read quickly.
This doesn’t mean that I am stopping publishing my own posts. As soon as I find a topic which is not very popular but helpful enough, I will definitely post it. 
Now, let me begin. I would like to post a resource-post about Paid to Post opportunity for a blogger to make money online. And only one resource is enough for that. Look at below:
http://www.doshdosh.com/a-definitive-list-of-paid-blogging-websites/
Though this is an older post, it lists all popular Paid to Blog programs. You should not consider the popularity of these programs given in that link (due to age of post), but should try all of them.
Entrecard isn’t just another free advertising network. Unlike other free ad networks, you can spend your points for advertising of your blog or you can sell them also! And earning of points in Entrecard depends on you and your blog, which is another difference between Entrecard and other such networks.
Let me introduce its working in simple terms, because more details about its mechanism you can read on www.Entrecard.com itself.
So, there are two ways to earn ec (Entrecard) points (and so the money!). First way : You can let other bloggers to advertise on your blog and earn ec points on daily basis (minimum 2 ec/day). The advertising cost for your blog (which is 2ec/day at the start) can be increased if the rate of dropping of card on your blog increases. Don’t panic, the dropping of card is described below.
Dropping of card is the second way to earn ec points. If you are logged in to your Entrecard account, then you will find a “Drop” button on other blogs (which are joined in Entrecard program). Just hit that button and you have dropped your card into that blogger’s Entrecard-inbox. Each drop earns you 1 ec point and the maximum limit is 300 drops per day. Of course, you can drop only 1 card per blog per day. You can browse all blogs joined to Entrecard by going to Campaign page in Entrecard account. So if you have enough time, you can earn daily 300 ec points!
As this post is just an introduction to Entrecard, more posts related to it will be posted soon, which may include my success story in Entrecard!
Some essential Plugins for your Wordpress blog
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are using a Wordpress based blog, you have the power to customize your blog in your own way, to feel something unique. But in case of plugins, there are some general steps to follow to make your blog work better for you and your readers (so please follow them without being unique )
So, let me first list down the most important plugins for your Wordpress blog. Here is the list:
(1) All in One SEO Pack – This plugin helps you to make your blog easily indexed by major search engines. You can easily manage meta tags, a description of your blog, title format for your posts and many other things.
(2) Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin saves your time in generating a site-map for your blog. Again site-maps help your blog or site to be crawled by search engines easily. And if your are using Google Webmaster service (it’s free ), then you must have your site-map to find out detailed analysis of your blog or site.
(3) Akismet – This plugin is already installed in Wordpress. This plugin fights against spam comments. In their words-“Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.” To show off your Akismet stats just put <?php akismet_counter(); ?> in your template.”
(4) WordPress Database Backup – This plugin makes it easier to backup your data. If this data is lost by any means, your blog will lose all postings and comments. So it’s very important to backup your blog’s database. You can automate the backup process at certain time interval using this plugin.
(5) Subscribe Remind – Want your readers to subscribe your feeds? Then remind them by putting a reminder at the end of each post, which is the function of this plugin! You can edit the message shown at the end of each post. The message contains a link to your subscription page.
(6) FeedBurner FeedSmith – This is the plugin who use FeedBurner service for their blog’s feeds (who doesn’t use it?). In their words-“this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.”
This plugin also solves a problem related to Subscribe Remind plugin. If you don’t use FeedSmith, you will have problems concerning your Feed URL, because in the reminder message, your feed URL will be different than what is provided by FeedBurner and that will be ended up in a broken link. By using FeedSmith plugin, that problem vanishes.
(7) WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition – Be professional on your Contact me page. Don’t put just your email address, but put a contact form using this plugin. And yes, this also provides protection against spam as do the Askimet.
In addition to these, you should also use plugins related to Social Bookmarking. There are many plugins related to this topic, and so I don’t suggest one. You can choose anyone for that which matches your taste. Just Google for that
Hope this plugins will work for you and save your time. If you have time, you can go through a list of 101 Top Wordpress plugins here.
A Social Network for Bloggers: BlogCatalog
Posted by: | CommentsIn the process of submitting my blog to the blog directories, I came across www.blogcatalog.com which is not just a blog directory.
BlogCatalog is like a large social networking site specially created for bloggers. You can find many other blogs belonging to your niche and see their content. You can also contact any blogger there by sending him (or her) private message or a message in his shoutbox. So, you can request a blogger to have a look at your blog and can get some feedback about your blog’s design and content.
There are also many communities on BlogCatalog. Joining communities related to your blog’s niche or related to new bloggers can help you a lot. You can easily get backlinks by posting on such communities. But don’t spam there, let it be clean forever.
BlogCatalog has a search engine too, which really brings appropriate results. You can get another source of traffic from there. And yes, BlogCatalog gives a Rank to the submitted blogs, which is out of 100. Better blogs will have their rank towards 100, and low quality blogs will have it nearer to zero. There is no authority-like option as in Technorati. So, it prevents tricky link exchanges as found in the blogosphere due to Technorati rank.
The best part of BlogCatalog is its helpfulness to the new blogs. In Technorati, your new blog will have no authority and hence the worst rank. In contrast, BlogCatalog doesn’t give a zero rank to new blogs. One another thing is pinging. You don’t need to ping your blog for BlogCatalog. It automatically does it for us, without any errors as found in Technorati.
As you may know Technorati publishes a list of Top 100 blogs. This is really a killing thing for other new but useful blogs. People love to see most popular things and so, the most popular things become more and more popular. If you love to see only popular ones, you can’t get out of it! I am a big fan of Stumbleupon and now, you should be knowing why (and why I don’t like Digg much).
In conclusion, BlogCatalog seems to be more dedicated to bloggers and readers than Technorati. I would like to see your feeling, so comment on!
Setting up your blog on a domain name, it’s easy!
Posted by: | CommentsMany of the people choose blogger.com for their blog due to ease of using it and lack of little technical knowledge required for setting up a self-hosted blog. If you need to own your blog on a domain name (like www.yoursitename.com), you have to have some guidance for it, which I am providing in this post now. You need guidance for it just for saving your time, otherwise you can do it yourself, by try and error method (of course, you should try this method for a Free Hosting plan along with a free subdomain).
Firstly, let me mention three essential things you will need for a self-hosted blog.
(1) A domain name, which you can buy at only around 15$/year.
(2) A web hosting service, which will provide services to set up your blog online. The average fees for such services are almost 7 to 9$/month, varying based on monthly bandwidth limit of your blog, disk space etc.
(3) A blogging-platform, which is essentially the software that handles the behavior of your blog. The well-known example is Wordpress, which can be downloaded for free from www.wordpress.org (not www.wordpress.com).
Steps to be taken
In these steps, it is assumed that you are going to install Wordpress in your hosting account.
- Firstly, buy a web hosting account and a domain name of your choice.
- Once you have your domain name and web hosting account, you are ready to install blogging software (in this case, Wordpress) in it.
- There is a very simple method to install the blogging software on your web hosting account. In your Control Panel (or CPanel), look for menus, which provide installation of various scripts. An example of such option is “Elefante Free Scripts”. Using this (or similar one) tool, you can install Wordpress just by some clicks only.
- During installation, you may need to enter account information for the specific blogging software. That is, if you are going to install Wordpress, just create your free account on www.wordpress.com and then provide the account information during installation.
- Also, any blogging software needs to use a database like MySQL. So, if you haven’t created it (which is most likely the case), the installation will ask you to create one. Don’t panic, you have to just give a name to create MySQL database, that’s all!
- One important thing to note: During installation, you will be asked to give a path for installation (just like usual installation on your PC). If you want your site to be a blog only, then give the path like “www.yoursitename.com/”.
- That is all! You have created your self-hosted blog! To verify, open your site and you should see a blog there (of course, without your posts).
How to login to start posting
Now, after setting up your blog, you want to start posting. But where to go for it? For logging in to manage your blog, you have to have Admin URL for your blog. To see it, login to your web hosting account and look at your installed program list.
Wordpress will be there. Now, look at Admin URL for it and note it down for future reference. After opening that URL, you are on the Login Page of your blog. So, login to it and after doing so, there is your Dashboard of Wordpress. Have a look around it carefully to see what you can do with it.
After all, learning is the process of building yourself! And if you really need any further help related to Wordpress, go to the Help page or Help forum to have your question resolved.
Hope, this post will help you in setting up your self-hosted blog. Comments and questions are always welcome!