I have been on a Vacation,  back in the UK, visiting friends and family before I move to Cairo in August. Sadly my plan to keep the blog going whilst travelling around has been much harder than I anticipated.

Basically I now have a good plan in my head of how to approach keeping the blog alive next time I go away and am likely to have limited internet access. My Mum often used to say to me “Do as I Say, Not as I do”. As I messed up on the blog planning front but am about to give you advice…. I guess I am kind of using that phrase here too .

First off, I think a blog only needs around two high quality posts a week. Anymore and your readers may get behind on the reading. Be honest, how many of you read every post from blogs that post daily?

So if you are going away for 3 weeks you need to pre-schedule 6 posts and you can go away safe in the knowledge that your blog will keep working whilst you lounge around on the beach.

If you take the time to mail your list or privately mail some blogging friends then you can easily make half of those posts guest posts, reducing your need to come up with quality content all in one go.

Next up…. I think it would be a great idea to add a little foot note to each of your holiday posts letting readers know you are away and that you will be answering all comments on your return. If you put it in italics and bold then hopefully even skim readers will pick up on it. Something like this may work:

I will be on vacation visiting my friends and family until around August 10th and will be answering all comments on my return. If I get a chance before, I will pop online and answer them sooner. Thanks a million,

Forest.

When You return it will be a 5 minute job to go through the posts and remove the foot note.

Another important thing is to make sure that you contact your advertisers and make sure they are aware that you will be away so that you can set up any due renewals or anything whilst you are away…. Obviously it’s also a good idea to set up an auto response on your blogging email too.

It’s as simple as that. I don’t think you have to do much more but if you think I have missed anything I would love to hear your thoughts.

Also just before I head off and just incase you don’t know…. Here is how you schedule a post in Wordpress.

1. Log into Wordpress.
2. Click on Posts > Add Post.
3. Write your post as normal.
4. On the top right in the Publish box click Edit, next to Publish immediately. This will let you set a date and time for the post
5. Hit the Schedule button.

Take care,

Forest.

I read a lot of blogs all over the internet, mainly about blogging and
making money online, and I’m always seeing posts that seem to give tips on
how to improve your blog – I know I’ve done a few articles on the subject
on my blogs! This guest post is basically going to go down the opposite
avenue and look at ways to KILL your blog and lose
readers.

So, let’s get straight in to it…

Lack of posting

One of the things that’s critical to a successful blog is content – no one
is disputing that, and anyone that tells you otherwise is WRONG.
By hardly ever posting, you’re bound to lose plenty of recurring traffic
and also subscribers.

Ignoring your readers

Somewhere along the line people are bound to leave a comment or two on
your posts. The people who comment are kings (or queens)!
Every comment that is left on your blog increases the value of it and
makes it generally more appealing, so don’t just leave them by themselves…
reply to their comments! Answer their questions, thank them for the
comment, do anything! Just make them feel like they should leave more
comments. If you don’t do that, you’re unlikely to get any decent amount
of comments, which is basically death for blogs.

If your stuck for ideas, a great way of getting recurring comments is
to leave a comment on their blog. Once they see they can build their own
comment count, they’re very likely to come back for more!

Stop looking forward

The world of blogging changes routinely; the design trends, the new
marketing tools, everything! Keeping up with those can really make a blog,
but just using the same old tactics will really hold your blog back from
growing. Also, by thinking your blog is ‘alright as it is’ is another big
mistake and will kill your blog, as your readers are likely to get bored
and leave. The best solution is to just keep changing the little
things, as this will keep your blog fresh!

Inconsistency

When running a successful blog, a lot of it comes down to being
consistent. Not only am I talking about posting (as I mentioned
before), but also your link building and advertising in general. Keep
it consistent and your blog will grow. Have no routine, and it’ll all fall
apart.

That’ll do for now!

In my opinion those are the biggest four blog-killers, but I’m sure you
can think of loads more, so feel free to make some suggestions by leaving
a comment below! Thanks for reading!

I ended up without net connection for longer than I thought so have not been able to get any posts out.

Last Saturday my journey in Williston, Vermont (USA) started and it ended on Monday where I arrived in New Brighton, near to Liverpool in England…. I’m just over the jet lag now, I hope!

So not much to talk about and not sure what I will have time to get out so if anyone fancies a guest post feel free to mail me (forest.parks@gmail.com). I have an awesome guest post named “4 Different Ways To Destroy Your Blog” written by Simon from Teenius.com.

If you are wondering why this post has a random bird sculpture image then I better tell you what it is. That is a Liver bird, the fictional bird that symbolises Liverpool. Two of these large statues sit on top of the famous water side Liver Building.

Today’s song is an English classic and I thought it would be appropriate since I am off to Egypt in early August….. Enjoy and let me know how you are:

I’m still utterly blown away by my Adsense Spike last week… If you missed my post then read about it here: My $250 Adsense Day.

This week I hope to get some positive results from the case study and hopefully get a post out about fixing your blog for Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Let me know how you are and what you are up to…. Enjoy some Pixies.

I logged into my Google Adsense Account at around 11 in the morning and to my suprise it was sitting at around $40.

My first reaction was that I was getting spam clicks, but on further investigation I could see that visitors were pouring in from all over the United States. This all happened on a Frugal Living site of mine.

All 10,000 odd visitors came from Yahoo for one keyword. The only explanation I can give is that Yahoo featured a link to the search page somewhere on their website.

So after spending a lot of the day refreshing the Adsense page my final Adsense earnings were a whopping $256.90. Around $245 of that from one site, one article and one keyword.

Here is my Adsense screen shot:

So what does all this mean?

This amazing spike only lasted a day but gave me a nice taste of what I am aiming for and shows that it isn’t an unachievable dream.

The article was an old one written almost a year ago and although it has been doing consistantly well in the search engines, nothing prepared me for this onslaught.

My site even went down half way through the day and I had to get support to get it back online. Turns out I had some permissions settings messed up!

My lesson…. Keep writing quality articles for my niche sites. Each time you plan, research and write an article you are adding to your online real estate. You never know who or what trend may pick up your content and send you on such a ride.

….. Now I need to power onwards and make this consistent.

$5 A Day Adsense Site: Case Study – Part 1

$5 A Day Adsense Site: Case Study – Part 2

This case study is based on the absolutely excellent $5 Mini Site Formula by Josh Spaulding and the $5 Formula Video adaptation by Mark Mason.

Adding The Articles To The Site

I actually did this just over a week ago but have been struggling to get time to write this post. Simply I took the 6 articles that I asked the writer to write for the blog and posted them to the site with no images. I put them in some basic categories but did not add any tags, although can’t see a problem with adding a few.

Luckily in the last week Google has indexed my articles and even with no link building or anything I got my first click today… It was just under the $1 that we was aiming for (I hope this isn’t against Adsense T&C’s saying that!).

The blog is ranking on the 2nd page of Google for the main keyword “Effective Acne Treatment” so I am confident that after the articles are ranking that I can rank on page 1.

Submitting Articles to The Main Directories

The formula suggests that you submit half of your 20 articles to Josh’s top 3 directories. This may change in the future but right now Josh suggests: EzineArticles.com, ArticleDashboard.com, Amazines.com. In my experience Ezine is the brings the most traffic and the highest rankings.

Each article also needs an abstract that I quickly write. For example for the first article “Getting Rid Of Acne Scars, My Tips” the abstract is:

I had pretty bad acne as a teenager and this puts me in the position to give some great tips for getting rid of acne scars.

So read on and see how this article can help you…

Also probably the MOST important part is getting a decent signature. This appears at the bottom of the article and allows readers to click through and hopefully click on useful Adsense ads. Here is an example.

Get More Effective Acne Treatment advice including information on Acne Sulfur Treatment and much more.

I will probably keep this mostly the same for all articles sometimes changing the 2nd link to get link backs to all posts on the blog.

Submitting Articles to The Other Directories

After you have submitted your 20 articles to the top 3, The formula suggest that you take 10 of those articles and submit them to another 20-40 lesser directories. This is part of the formula that I have never strictly followed due to work load. However I bit the bullet and purchased an absolutely awesome product called Automatic Article Submitter by an Italin programmer named Milan.

I have set up roughly 50 directories using Automatic Article Submitter in a group. I chose them randomly from a list of hundreds taking directories with a PR of 3-5. I started with 50 as I think some directories may not accept the articles or work properly,,, no fault of the software.

Using the software I was able to set up accounts in about an hour and also it has a bulit in function to confirm all the emails that come through in one click. This feature is something I have seen no where else!

The software cuts down the time dramatically and makes the task easy.

I have only submitted 2 articles at time of publishing this article but over the next day or so I will get all 20 submitted and then we should start seeing results in a few days.

Link Building

The article submitting should take care of most of the links we need but I will also just add a few links to the blog from some of my sites and link swaps. The formula does not say to do this but it can’t hurt and it’s just common sense.

That’s about it for today. The formula is pretty much complete so just waiting for the results now….

I just came back from a weekend in beautiful Burke Mountain, Vermont. I got pretty drunk, had a great time and now it’s time to work again. We went there because a man we are staying with was racing in the Hill Climb. Basically he drove his Subaru Impreza 95mph up a mountain road and came in 3rd place overall. He came 2nd in his class by 700th of a second.

One thing that is great is he has been hill climbing for over 20 years and is now 61 years old. This season he has been beating his previous records and on Saturday he took his old race car, a 20 year old Peugeot, for a run and raced the car 5 seconds faster than he ever had before. It just goes to show that experience overrides age any day…. So we have to keep learning and plugging away to reach our goals.

This week I’m still loaded with client work but ready to get the case study wrapped up and will start being able to report some results very very soon.

So let’s get on with the week, make some friends, make some money and learn as much as we can.

This week’s song…. Cactus, an absolutely awesome song from the Pixies but covered by David Bowie…. What could be better? And on Bowie…. he is another example of experience out beating age. This cover and performance is awesome….

Gathering an email list is pretty important if you are taking your blog and readers seriously. By creating a nice, clean and easy to recognize way for your readers to sign up you will definitely increase your opt-ins.

Getting your sign up code:

The first thing you need is an autoresponder so that you can capture leads and build your list. I have only ever used Aweber and greatly recommend it. However some people also say that GetResponse is very good too. There are some free options available but as I said, I have never used them.

Once you have your autoresponder you should be able to create a handy little piece of code that includes the web form for capturing the name and email of your visitors. You can see mine below, I have included the graphic that shows my subscriber numbers.

The Code Next you need to put your code inside a box and position it so that you can create a graphic that fits. I find the easiest way to do this is using <div> tags to contain the code and apply styles to certain elements. Now if that sounds like jargon… I’ll try and break it down. First create your bounding box.

<div class="aweberbox">
</div><!--aweberbox ends-->

and then style it by adding some styles to your wordpress “style.css file. This will style the class that you applied to the <div>:

.aweberbox {
width: 250px;
height: 350px;
background: green;
}

This creates the box below:

Next step, we need to insert the another <div> to hold the Aweber code, then we need to insert the Aweber code and use css code again to position it.

<div class="aweberbox">
<div class="aweberform">
<script src="http://forms.aweber.com/form/11/586476211.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</div><!--aweberform ends-->
</div><!--aweberbox ends-->

and the css to change the font color and position the form…

.aweberform {
color: black;
width: 200px;
margin: 0px auto;
padding: 180px 0;
}

All this and you now have this box below (getting there!):

One last thing to do before we go and create the graphic is to make sure that the background of the outer div will pick up our image. Then we can just create it and put it in. We just need to change one line in the css for the .aweberbox.

 background: green;

becomes,

background:#fff url(images/aweberbox-bg.jpg) no-repeat

Here we have pre determined where the image will go and what it will be called. This means there is just one more simple step… We just have to create an image to fit out box.

The Background Image

All the fiddly code is done now so I just need a nice image.
I defined the size of the box as 250px wide by 350px height. So I just need to create an image that size. To allow me to style to fit the form I took a screen shot of the div that we created and used that as a base.

The image below shows a few steps along the way to creating my final image.

Now I just save the image as the name specified in the css and upload to the ‘images’ folder of my theme.

Voila! Here is the completed sign up box.

Not my best piece of design work, but hopefully good enough to show you what is going on.

I hope you found this tutorial useful.

Any question, suggestions or anything at all please leave a comment or contact me and I will help you get your sign up box just how you need it.

Take care,

Forest.

I only have 3 weeks of my initial 7 left in Vermont and I must say I am quite shocked at how fast things are moving… UK here I come.

Also client work is busy as ever and I have all the articles back for the case study that is in progress. So things are going good…

One important thing I did this past week was sit down and take a look at my online business. I was getting stressed and worried about my organization and where I was headed. I really need and want to push my niche marketing and residual income to the next level but also need to maintain my client work. It was then it dawned on me that I already have a lot of great things going for me and that I just need to work with the solid foundation that I have already built.

So my solution was simple and I now feel cleansed. Right now I don’t need to learn any new techniques until I capitalize on the ones I already know.

First thing, I cut all memberships to paid forums. I will likely be back, once I get this part of my goal sorted but for now they were becoming distracted. The only forum I kept was Coaching With Josh, as it’s an awesome place and I have a free membership for making over 500 posts.

Next I am looking at my existing sites, working out what can be done with the design, existing content and also doing new keyword research. This is important as the sites already rank and will make new income faster than new sites.

So expect the case study to continue this week and hopefully a post about creating a pretty Aweber sign up box.

Let me know how you are….

Today’s music woke me up at 7 this morning and is just stuck in my head…

I just had an awesome trip from Vermont, USA to Pennsylvania and Washington DC…. It truly was awesome and I recommend DC to anyone who can make it. I’m in a great mood.

I’m still bogged down with client work, which is good and am waiting for my writer to get articles back to me to carry on the $5 A Day Adsense Site Case Study. If you have not been reading then I suggest you have a read:

5 A Day Adsense Site Case Study Part 1

5 A Day Adsense Site Case Study Part 2

Now other things that are going on… I hope to get a post or two out this week non $5 formula related and also I want to tell you about an awesome, awesome limited offer that is on today.

$1 Wealthy Affiliate Trial

I just joined Wealthy Affiliate using the special $1 WA trial offer which is limited to the first 1000 people. Basically $1 gets you 7 days look at the forum and you can see if you really wanna hang around, risk free.

If you choose to stay they will also give you a FREE ebook worth around :$60-$80. I picked one about list building.

Wealthy Affiliate will teach you all about niche marketing, affiliate marketing, PPC and more. It’s highly respected and has an awesome extremely active community.

I like what I see so far and I suggest you come and let me know what you think too…. After all what’s $1 for answering your curiosity?

Here the link again:

$1 Wealthy Affiliate Trial

So for the music this week I wanted something bouncy that reminded me of home so opted for some Libertines.

Let me know how you are and what you think…. Have fun.

Forest.