Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land takes an in depth look at urs shortening services. It takes a look around 20 url shortening services and presents the comparison in a nice graph. Since almost everyone uses url shortening these days you may want to check out if you are using the correct service.

The next post is from Shoemoney where he talks about how to avoid obvious failure as an affiliate. He takes a look at three types of affiliates and shows reasons why they fail and teaches you how to succeed as well.

Zac Johnson takes a look at what will happen to your business if someting ungainly happens to you. Not everyone can understand how a Internet business works and nobody knows all the passwords of your different accounts as well. He takes a look at few things that you can do to avoid such a situation.

John Chow has a great guest post about how to stay focused when doing your work. When your working with the Internet there are lots of things that can distract you so using check lists can be a great way to stay focused.

I hope you will enjoy these articles as I enjoyed them .

• Read - reading other blogs is one of the best ways to come up with blog post ideas. Subscribe to the RSS feeds of the top players in your niche and read there posts regularly. Then you will be updated about the latest services and events in your niche so you can blog about them in a timely manner. I'm not saying you should copy there posts but give your own opinion of a new service or something like that. Take a while to read the comments in blog posts as well , this is usually the place where visitors ask questions and look for clarification , which you can use for your next post. With the emergence of RSS now it has become even more easy to read blogs. With a service like Google reader you can check out post titles of many blogs easily and form new great blog post ideas.
• Forums , Yahoo Answers - Forums and Yahoo answers are a great place to get new post ideas. There are always people searching for how to do this , how to add this etc so it could be a great idea to write a how to kind of posts. These posts tend to do well in social media and rank well in search engines as well. Most of my how to posts ideas came from Yahoo answers and comments I have read on other blogs. The most commented blog post in this blog is how to add a favicon in blogger/blogspot which still gets a decent amount of traffic and I wrote it after seeing a comment in forum.
• Ask the readers - Your blog is not worth much without readers so you must do everything possible to satisfy there needs. Encourage readers to ask questions in the comments section and if you see that your getting the same question very often then that is a great idea to write a blog post because chances are more people will want to know the answer to that question. I wrote about how to receive money through PayPal for send only accounts because that is one of the most common questions I get from my Sri Lankan readers. You can even use a service like skirbit which helps your readers ask questions and let other vote on them so you can easily decide what people want to know most. Services like that are not very useful unless you have a considerable following.

I hope these tips will help you get over the dreaded writers block easily and if you have another method of forming great blog post ideas share them in the comments section

If you want to highlight a certain section you can use the following tags.

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
content to highlight
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

If you want the Google bot to ignore certain section you can add (weight=ignore) to the tag

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
content to ignore
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

Keep in mind that this method should be used to highlight important sections of your blog and it shouldn't be used to get ads for high paying key words. Also you need to add a considerable amount of content in the targeted section for this to work properly. Insufficient content may lead to you getting irrelevant ads. This is what Adsense support has to say about section targeting.

In order to properly implement this feature, you'll need to include a significant amount of content within the section targeting tags. Including insufficient content may result in less relevant ads or PSAs. In addition, please keep in mind that this feature should only be used to emphasize significant sections of your site's relevant content. It is against our program policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages.

If you want to make money online you need traffic and this video by Yaro about how to use Youtube to get traffic will surely help you in that regard. It has 7 great tips about how to use videos to drive traffic.

Although not directly related to making money online this article about Facebook privacy settings was really great. I was amazed at the number of options available to control what you see. Might come in handy to save you from those embarrassing moments.

Andy Beard takes a look at different ways you can approach link building and the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. Has some interesting comments as well.

Next is not a post but a blogging test to test your knowledge about blogging. You need to have a very good knowledge of blogging and things realted to make money from blogging to get a decent score from the test. So why don't you take the pro blogging test .

Since all my social media activities are displayed in FriendFeed someone might subscribe to my feed because they like my stumbles or tweets. So a FriendFeed subscriber doen't mean he really likes my blog posts or he is subscribed to my blog. In blogging and especially in making money online number do count and gives you credibility. So there is no harm in increasing your FriendFeed subscribers.I have being using FriendFeed for a while and its a great source to find great post to feed your Twitter account or to stumble .

"A giant ship engine failed. The ship's owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine.

Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship's owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!

A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.

"What?!" the owners exclaimed. "He hardly did anything!"

So they wrote the old man a note saying, "Please send us an itemized bill."

The man sent a bill that read: 

Tapping with a hammer...... ......... ....... $ 2.00
Knowing where to tap.......... ......... ...... $ 9, 998.00"

lesson to be learnt is , "Effort is important , but where you made the effort that makes the difference"

Lets see how this applies to making money online. I wasn't much of a surfer until I turned 18 or thereabouts. Then I was interested in blogging and making money online. And the first thing I did to make money online was reading commercial e-mails . I used to join many paid to read sites and start earning money. And I used to be very happy when I earned around 50 cents a day. Then I started experimenting with blogging. I added Adsense and in the first month I made 3$ . I almost gave up blogging and making money online because I did put some effort to maintainthe blog. Glad I didn't because this blog is generating close to 500$ a month now from affiliate sales , Adsense , reviews etc. Then I was introduced to Forex trading. In a good week and when I'm lucky I sometimes make 300$ a week from Forex trading. So now I'm making an effort to learn more about Forex trading and affiliate marketing. Although it took a while, now I have a fairly good idea on where to put the effort .

So if you are working hard and not reaching the success levels you want take a while to think about where you are putting the effort. If you are still reading commercial e-mails then now is a good time to move on and look for better sources of revenue. If you are dropping 3oo entrecards a day to grow your traffic now is a good time to focus on building back links and look for long term traffic that is interested in your content. It took me a while to learn these lessons and quicker you learn the better

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question. Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page). More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

As you can see this is going to be a big problem for bloggers , especially for blogs that gets lots of comments. Even though you add nofollow to the links they are still leaking page rank. A possible solution is to have a third party comment system like DISQUS , Intense Debate which are based on iframe or java script. In one of my previous posts I blogged about the benefits of using DISQUS. Andy beard gives a much deeper look into DISQUS comment system and why a comment system like DISQUS is a good solution to the page rank leakage.

Twitter Snipe 2.0 aims to remove that problem by providing in house hosting support for a minimal fee. Although this is a good thing for the average user people with own hosting might find this a bit of a problem. The monthly payment for providing hosting is not mentioned but hopefully it will be a very minimal amount that any user can handle. There customer support system is good and the developers are providing updates according to customer feedback which is why I love this product. So check out Twitter Snipe and automatically grow your Twitter following.

The next post is from Andy Beard and he shows why blogspot blogs are not that good for SEO. Although this blog is powered by Wordpress I do have several blogspot blogs so I found this very useful. If you are an owner of an blogspot blog this is a worthy read.

The next post is by Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips. He has a great post about the recent changes announced by Google about how it handles nofollow in web pages. Make sure to visit the links given in the post to learn more about page rank sculpting and why you should use iframe of javascript based comment system. Even without the new way of handling nofollow I think DISQUS is a great way to handle your comments.

Finally I'll point you to an interview I did with Toan of Clickkt dot com. There I answer some questions about internet marketing and blogging. He has some nice series of interviews going on at the moment. Reading others experiences is a great way to learn so you might be interested in visiting his blog and reading the interviews.

I found this posts very useful and I hope you will find the useful as well.