WiseBlogging.com

Will the Current Global Economic Crisis Affect Making Money Blogging?

Chris — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:21:10 +0000

With the present worldwide financial and economic turmoil still unrelenting, most of us can only rely on President Obama’s strategies while we come up with our own to cope. Thousands have already either lost their jobs or lost a chunk of their income due to salary cuts. More and more households’ budgets get stricter and stricter as people struggle to find new jobs or sources of extra income. Undoubtedly, many harbor fears and apprehensions for their current line of work, thinking how their trade or industry is holding up against the global tempest of recession. Some industries would of course suffer more than others, while some industries dependent on the continuation of other industries perhaps have twofold the apprehension.

It’s quite obvious how and why the current fracas would affect banking and similar industries, but what about industries run on the Internet – like blogging, for instance? Blogging has become not only the outlet of choice on the Internet for writers and non-writers alike, but also a good source of income. Some writers have even taken up blogging full time, securing a revenue stream from their writings. Can we still continue making money blogging? Or should we continue making money blogging online at this time of economic boom? How does the current unsettling economic climate affect this industry dependent on the World Wide Web, its users, and its trends?

Thinking about it, if many people are cutting back on expenses, won’t many decide to cease their Internet subscriptions or even stow away their PCs to save on the bills? This may be a terse, shallow analysis, but it rings true. On the contrary though, a modern age has dictated that a PC with an Internet connection is a necessary subterfuge in everyday life, much like a television set. People also use the Internet to search for job opportunities and businesses, and of course, for leisure. It is unlikely people would pack their PCs away or even sever their Internet connectivity in response to the ongoing crisis. This provides an answer to a point in question: even in the global economic slump, there won’t be a lack of Internet users, thus there won’t be a lack in potential readers, potential income for bloggers.

So the crisis won’t have much of a negative effect on people trying to make money blogging. Actually, with the way things are going with people losing jobs left and right and forced to look for other sources of income, the Internet and its numerous work-at-home and make-money-online opportunities has turned into one of their bastions of hope. And blogging, with its rather simple scheme and relatively not-too-difficult responsibilities easily becomes an appealing prospect. Indeed, since the onset of the crisis, an increasing number of people have put their hopes on trying to make money blogging online.

Since the birth of the Web log or blog, its trade has been growing in a steady trend. There hasn’t been a lack of openings or opportunities for paid blogging since it first appeared neither. Even if the worldwide crisis hadn’t come along, a single Google search would still yield an outcome of a ton of results for opportunities to make money blogging. But while undergoing the financial and economic tempest, the openings multiplied tenfold, since the demand for such openings tenfold as well. Job seekers aren’t the only ones looking for opportunities. Employers are also bound to look for opportunities and take advantage of any they find, making the most out of the fracas we’re all going through. A lot of companies and groups would’ve taken notice of the eventual trend of people turning to the Internet for hope, and thus would’ve acted upon the opportunity.

The cliché says that every dark cloud has a silver lining, and this is especially true for blogging—in a drought of income, it’s like an oasis of opportunities. Let’s continue making money blogging.

20+ Beautiful Social Bookmarking Buttons for Your Blog

Chris — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 11:50:46 +0000

Social bookmarking sites allow saving and sharing interesting pages online. A social bookmarking button, appending links of most social bookmarking sites to your posts, makes it easy for your readers to bookmark and share your content with others. Adding the social bookmarking button helps promote your blog and increase your potential audience and link popularity.

There is a plethora of such social bookmarking buttons available online that you can use for free, and here’s a list of some of the most beautiful social bookmarking buttons that you should consider putting up on your blog.

I Love Social Bookmarking

A very simple yet nice plugin that uses minimal of your system resources. It reveals a drop-down list when cursor is moved over the button.

OnlyWire

Requires you to register an account with them before the button becomes functional. While the free account displays advertisement inside of the button, a paid account can turn it off.

AddtoThis

Automatically adds the bookmarking options after your post content. It allows your readers to submit your post to the 4 major social bookmark sites ie Digg, del.icio.us, Technorati and StumbleUpon.

Badged

Simply select your preferred social bookmarking sites and copy and paste the html code into where you want the ‘badges’ to appear.

Sociable

One of the favorites of many bloggers, allows you to select up to 99 social bookmarking sites. When you hover over a particular icon, it turns from blur to vivid colours.

Slashdigglicious

Automatically adds a line of beautiful icons to the end of each of your blog posts.

AddThis

User-submission links display when you hover over the button. Do sign up a free account with AddThis.com to keep track of valuable statistics about how your readers are bookmarking and sharing your post content.

BookmarkButton

Only one step to add the button – copy and paste the code, that’s it!

SocialBookmark

3 different simple yet professional designs to choose from.
Design 1

Design 2

Design 3

Socialist

A social bookmarking plugin that can only be used with a Wordpress blog.

LetsGetSocial

There are 4 remarkably beautiful designs to choose from.
Design 1

Design 2

Design 3

Design 4

Social Dropdown

It displays a dropdown with user-submission links, you can opt to turn off the dropdown too.

17Fav

One of the social bookmarking button widgets that displays social bookmarking links in Chinese characters.

Free Tell a Friend

You can choose to use your own image to design a unique social bookmarking button for your blog.

AddtoAny

Clean and user-friendly, the one I’m using in this blog.

Social Bookmark Links

Another social bookmarking button that can be used in Wordpress blogs only. You can either select the ‘List’ or ‘Drop Down Menu’ style.

Bookmark Me

Displays a line of social bookmarking sites in icons. It also supports other International non-english social bookmarking sites.

Social Bookmarks

By clicking on the button, it will magically reveal lines of social bookmarking icons of your choice.

SocioFluid

When you hover over the icons, they grow!

SociBook

It’s one of my favorites, as it’s the only one that automatically adds the social bookmarking icons to the post info of your blog posts.

Bookmarkify

Two standard formats to choose from.

iBegin Share

A dropdown menu with large social bookmarking icons is displayed when you hover over the button.

Tell-a-Friend

A new social bookmarking widget that provides several nasty yet professional looking buttons. JohnChow is using it on his blog.

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How to Change or Redirect Wordpress Permalinks Safely

Chris — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:19:58 +0000

There are times when you decide to change your link structure for the sake of SEO optimization or you simply need a change. For example:

Old permalinks:
http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/01/10/your-post-title/ (too long, irrelevant)
New permalinks:
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/your-post-title/ (short, highly relevant)

However, changing your link structure is going to affect your site traffic as the old links are already indexed by search engines and bookmarked or linked by your readers. You can’t afford to bear the loss as the links were built up over times. The only solution to the problem is redirect them permanently to new links, which is known as 301 Redirect or Permanent Redirect. There are many ways to perform the redirection, however, Deanlee creates a wordpress plugin that makes permalinks redirection a breeze.

It is said that by performing the permalinks redirection, search engines will update their indexes quickly and your pagerank will be passed on to the new links too.

How to do it:

Download the Permalinks Migration Plugin
Upload it to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the plugin from your admin dashboard
Go to Settings > PermalinksMigration. Update your old link structure in the field
Go to Settings > Permalinks > Common Settings > Custom Structure. Update your new link structure (for eg. /%category%/%postname%/ or /%postname%/ )
Go to any of your old posts and test if the redirection works correctly. Or simply go to Google, and enter site:yourdomain.com, select one of your posts with old permalinks and you should be redirected to the exact same post with NEW working permalinks.
DONE!

Little drawback:

The plugin works perfectly redirecting the old post permalinks to the new ones, however, it doesn’t redirect comment permalinks, for eg:

Comment permalinks:
http://www.yourdomain.com/2009/01/10/your-post-title/comment-page-1/

I’m looking forward to Deanlee to come up with a fix to this, and if you can live with this little imperfection, go ahead and use the plugin, it’s by far the best wordpress permalinks redirection plugin.

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FIX: Can’t Login To Wordpress After Upgrade?

Chris — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 10:42:02 +0000

I recently upgraded one of my new blogs to Wordpress version 2.6.3. As usual, I used the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin to do the upgrading work as it’s the easiest and time-saving way to perform a Wordpress upgrade in just few clicks. Now, one problem occured. I couldn’t login to the blog after the upgrade. It kept saying my user/password was incorrect. I reset the password and tried logging in using the new password, this time it just redirected me to the same login screen without flashing any error message. Nothing seemed to work after few attempts. I thought it was due to some confusion between the new and old cookie, so I cleared the cookie, and tried logging in again, but still it didn’t work. It kept redirecting me to the same login page although I knew the user credentials were correct.

I thought everything was screwed up and I might need to install the whole thing all over again. Installation is easy, but uploading files is going to eat up a hell lot of time. I googled and I tried all suggestions to no avail. It wasn’t a pleasant moment googling for the fixes and trying them all like a chump, until I came across bookchiq’s fix. This is the only fix that seems to work, so those of you who are facing the same login issue, look nowhere, use the fix below:

The Fix

1. Login to your web hosting account, or simply use your FTP program, and go to your ‘/wp-content/plugins‘ directory.
2. Rename the ‘plugins‘ folder to a different name, for eg. plugins-old
3. Clear your browser cookies and login to your blog again as usual
4. You will be prompted to upgrade your Wordpress database, go ahead and upgrade it
5. Rename the ‘plugins-old‘ folder back to ‘plugins‘
6. Login to your blog again

That’s it, you are now able to login to your blog again.

What’s the cause?

So, why did the login problem occur? What happened was, when I was performing the upgrade, some of the plugins were not deactivated properly. It interrupted the upgrade process and did not prompt to upgrade my Wordpress database. By renaming the ‘plugins’ folder, it helps to disable all the plugins and that’s when you can upgrade the Wordpress database with success and sort out the login issue.

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RankSense SEO Software Review

Chris — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 09:07:03 +0000

This is not a sponsored review requested by the software owner. The reason why I’m putting up this review is because it entitles me to a lucky draw that gives out $14,404 worth of prizes. Gyutae Park from WinningTheWeb and Hamlet Batista from RankSense have launched another insane contest in conjunction with the new release of SEO software – RankSense 2.0. Anyone is eligible to enter the random draw and win big prizes like PlayStation 3, Apple MacBook Air, Apple iPod Touch etc. as long as you complete the tasks given. And, the craziest prize of all is the Grand Prize that flies you and your partner to Casa de Campo, La Romana in Dominican Republic for 7 days with all expenses paid, that alone is worth $10,000.

To find out more about the contest, visit here, but you’ve gotta hurry up, cause all entries must be received before the random draw on November 3rd, 2008. Especially those who missed the last crazy contest held by Gyutae Park and Tyler Cruz, you shouldn’t give up such opportunity again to win yourself a dream machine like Apple MacBook Air this time.

Now, here’s my review of the RankSense SEO software:

Introduction
I do not usually encourage relying the whole SEO work on SEO tools, but some aspects of SEO can be automated and that’s when tools can become useful as it saves you hours or even days (if you have a big site) of gathering and processing information. RankSense is an effective all-in-one Search Engine Optimization (SEO) software designed to make your life easier. Let’s take a look at some of the key features offered by RankSense:

Some Key Features
Discover Rankings
Find out which keywords bring organic search engine traffic to your blog

Detect Problem Pages
You can detect, follow and check all links in your blog to make sure no errors are preventing your blog from being indexed by search engines.

Sitemap builder
A handy sitemap builder to create a sitemap of your blog for search engines to discover.

Competitive Intelligence
Your competitors in the same niche as you are not going to like this tool, because this tool is going to help you discover your top competitors for each keyword.

Besides, RankSense has 8 other supercharged tools, such as link structure analysis, link building tool etc. that make optimizing your blog or website a breeze.

What I like about RankSense
For each tool you use, RankSense provides thorough step-by-step instructions to walk you through the whole process (see the screenshot below). RankSense is designed and developed in such a way that even average Joes and Janes can operate it with ease.

What I don’t like about RankSense
Well, not every software is perfect. I found RankSense kind of slow while processing tasks, and it kind of slows down my computer periodically. I believe it is due to the exhaustive step-by-step analysis that eats up the memory. And, there’s no “Select all” function to my surprise (see the screenshot below), I had to select over 200 keywords one by one, and it’s not that user-friendly as it claims, unlike SEO Elite. I hope Hamlet Batista is going to gear it up in the next version of RankSense.

Conclusion
RankSense is a great tool to help make yourself aware of where your blog/site stands and what aspects to focus on, and have all analysis and tracking done in one place. If you are looking to improve your search engine rankings and boost organic search engine traffic, you should try out RankSense and see if you like it. RankSense is offering a 30-day free trial that requires a credit card for registration, but you won’t be charged for 30 days. If you don’t like it, simply cancel the free trial before the first 30 days.

17 Best Sites to Get FREE Images For Your Blog

Chris — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 10:21:45 +0000

Using images in blog posts not only complements your content, it also makes your readers stay longer on your blog. An image speaks for itself so your readers will be more inclined to read the posts. Even if an image isn’t going to complement your text, it will still pretty much enhance the visual appeal of your blog significantly.

Where to get FREE images for your blog? Finding quality images for your posts is already a challenge in itself. Imagine how frustrating it can become when you can’t find ones that you can use without having to pay for royalties or subscriptions. Therefore, to make your life easier, I’ve compiled a list of my favorites that I normally use whenever I need a free royalty-free image. These are the sites from where you can get any high-quality images of your choice at no cost – 100% FREE. However, remember to always check the licensing terms of any image you plan to use, crop, edit and photoshop. And, always credit the image owner. Here you go,

17 Best Sites to Get FREE Images For Your Blog:

Image Hosting and Sharing Sites
1. Flickr
The most popular photo repository and sharing application widely used by bloggers. Hosting over 2 billion (and increasing) images, you can find the most categories on Flickr. Also, you can have Flickr photos embedded on your blog to automatically rotate as a slideshow.

2. Photobucket
Another well-known image storage and sharing website where you can access to a huge user-generated content and create slideshow feature for your blog. It is the No.1 image site in the US at the time of this writing.

Image Search Engines
3. Creative Commons Search
Creative Commons Search allows you to easily find free-to-share or Creative Commons licensed images at Google, Yahoo! and Flickr. This tool has also been built into Firefox web browser for easy searches.

4. Every Stock Photo
Every Stock Photo is another image search engine that aggregates Creative Commons licensed images from other sites like Flickr, Stock.XCHNG etc. and present them in an integrated search.

5. Google Image Search
The most comprehensive image search service created by search engine giant, Google. With billions of images indexed, it allows users to search the whole World Wide Web for image content.

6. Yahoo! Image Search
The most visited website in the world, Yahoo! (according to Alexa), also provides a search service that crawls the web for billions of images, on top of that, it also added at least 2 billions (and increasing) images from Flickr into its image database.

7. Ask.com Image Search
Ask.com, formerly known as Ask Jeeves, initially rode on Picsearch database for its image searching, launched its own image search service in early 2006. Ask.com Image Search is said to be the 2nd best image search engine, after Google.

8. Live Image Search
Live Search, formerly known as Windows Live Search and MSN Search, is Microsoft’s attempt to compete with the two search engine giants. Live Image Search allows quick image searching and browsing with its Smart Scroll, which gets rid of pagination. One of the most notable functions is its Scratch Pad that you can add images for later viewing.

9. Picsearch
Picsearch is another useful image search engine that crawls and indexes the web for images. They have reportedly indexed more than 2 billion images.

Stock Photography Sites
10. Stock.XCHNG
Stock.XCHNG is a free stock photo site providing hundreds of thousands of quality stock photos and royalty-free images for personal use with the restricstions specified by the image owner. Their image content is provided by more than 30,000 amateur and professional photographers.

11. Free Digital Photos
If you don’t want to go through the hassles of checking licensing terms of images, Free Digital Photos is for you. All the images in Free Digital Photos are free for commercial and personal use. Every image is free, and you have an option to buy high resolution versions.

12. Stockvault
Stockvault have won several awards for having the best stock photos in database. You can download all stock photos and high resolution images but only for personal and non-commercial use.

13. Dreamstime
This Romanian based company is one of the top 3 stock photo sites in the world. They have been in the business since 2000.

14. Free Range Stock
At Free Range Stock, you can rest assured of high-resolution or high-quality images available for FREE downloads. They also provide a plugin that you can place into your Internet browser for easy image searching.

15. Unprofound
You can access to the stock photos for personal and commercial use. However, Unprofound do not allow you to redistribute/resale the images to any individual.

16. Photogen
Another great site to download free images for personal and commercial use, again no resale/redistribution. Every image submitted to Photogen is checked for quality before going live.

17. Pixel Perfect Digital
Although Pixel Perfect Digital is currently not accepting new image uploads till 2009 (due to some abuse), you can still download high-quality images for use in your blog or commercial design project. Strictly no resale or redistribution.

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Tyler Cruz vs Gyutae Park

Chris — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 09:22:04 +0000

Finally another blogger-vs-blogger contest going on two months after the Shoemoney vs JohnChow competition (if you could recall). This time it is between two young Internet entrepreneurs Tyler Cruz of TylerCruz.com and Gyutae Park of WinningTheWeb.com who come head to head to see who gets the most votes from the readers. The loser will pay 3 lucky voters who voted for the winner $100 each (that’s $300 of cold hard cash in total).

I thought it’s gonna be the same old boring contest whereby you’d be required to subscribe to their RSS feed, find clues or enter the contest daily etc, but this time you are only required to write a 300 words blog post about this nasty contest and link to them, and you will stand a chance to win $100 via Paypal and total of 3 winners will be selected. Now, if you think that you’re not gonna be able to win the $100, read on.

On top of $100, you get guaranteed freebies too
For every voter who enters the contest, you will get some freebies from the gunners too:

Tyler Cruz: Anyone who votes for Tyler Cruz will receive 150 Entrecard credits and a link back to your blog from TylerCruz.com.

Gyutae Park: 100 Entrecard credits will be given to 10 voters only and first 50 voters will also get a complimentary Winning The Web t-shirt.

Now if you don’t have an excuse not to take part in the contest, do you? Get the freebies as a belated Christmas gift, will ya?

How to enter
Follow the simple 3 steps mentioned here if you vote for Tyler Cruz, or here for Gyutae Park. However, you will have to act quick, as you only have until Monday, January 14 2008, 9PM ET to submit your vote.

Who I vote for
So, here’s my entry. Who do I vote for? Errr… you can probably tell from the nasty piece of graphic that I photoshopped, yes, my vote goes to Mr.Tyler Cruz.

Why I am Voting for Tyler Cruz
1. The main reason is because, Tyler Cruz is losing at the time of this writing, Gyutae Park is leading with 30 votes while Tyler Cruz stands at 14 votes. I prefer helping someone behind rather than someone ahead. The satisfactory feeling is magnificent when you make a successful strike back, and I wanna be part of the victory.

2. Look at the freebies each of them offering, which one attracts you the most? Of course, Tyler Cruz’s. I wouldn’t know if I’d be guaranteed the 100 Entrecard credits and the complimentary t-shirt offered by Gyutae Park as it’s number limited.

3. Both of them teach you how to make money online from the comfort of your home, without having to wear a business jacket (but Gyutae Park wears one) and pay attention to your posture and gesture. I’m truly inspired by TylerCruz’s cartoon mascot, it clearly delivers a message that you can still enjoy playing your favorite games (although I do not encourage gambling), drinking the finest beverage of your choice, sitting comfortably in whatever position you like while making piles of money online, unlike Gyutae Park. Well, I’ve had enough of 9-5 rat race, I’d very much prefer t-shirt and jeans, no more business wear please, making money online is supposed to be fun and relaxing.

and the list goes on….. other lame excuses that I could think of:
4. I don’t know how to pronouce ‘Gyutae’, but ‘Tyler Cruz’ is so much easier. (DUH!)

5. Tyler Cruz’s feed readers (1129 readers) outnumbers Gyutae Park’s (315 readers). If both side of the feed readers were engaged in a gang fight, Tyler Cruz gang would definitely be able to win the fight. (too much of Facebook fights.. PEACE)

6. WinningTheWeb.com looks like another John Chow dot com. (one or two is enough)

7. Gyutae Park is wearing a business jacket but he’s only giving away t-shirts. ( I want that Gioxxxx Armxxx suit too)

So, guys and girls, let’s vote for Tyler Cruz, that’s it. I’m waiting for the 100 dollars green note. Tyler Cruz, declare me as one of the winners please. I need that $100 to buy the Winning The Web t-shirts please. =p

Sorry for the asskicking graphic and harsh words, no offense, Mr.Gyutae Park.

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RankSense SEO Software Review

Another Google PR update

Chris — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 18:54:07 +0000

Looks like Google is giving an early toolbar PageRank update of the year 2008. In fact, I noticed the data center was reset to zero while I was doing a random check yesterday. I thought it was a system glitch or something, so I didn’t pay much attention to it until I realised today that one of my blogs read a PR of 5 (from PR4) on the Google PageRank extension in my Firefox. I’m not sure if the toolbar PageRank update is confirmed, but there are certainly several reports across webmaster forums about the update.

I then did a PR check on all my blogs, and very much to my surprise that WiseBlogging was also updated to PR4 from PR3, although not much of linking work was done. Whereas, the other two blogs of mine remained at PR4. In conclusion, I’m now having a blog with a more respectable PR5 and 3 blogs with PR4, not a bad start for the year 2008. This early PR update allows me to reorganise my editorial calendar and restrategize to maximize the earning of my blogs.

Remember during the last PR update when many websites had their Google PageRank reduced due to paid links and cloaking, Google also booted them from the index. I’m expecting to see more sites being ripped off their PageRank value in this update. If yours was penalized, I’m sorry to hear that, but PageRank drops doesn’t really mean anything. Who cares what Google thinks about your site quality. It might negatively affect your ad revenue, but hey, who says you can’t make money without Google? Always explore other monetization options that do not require an outdated quality indicator like PageRank. Frankly speaking, most advertisers do not even look at PageRank value of your site, and some of them do not even know what a PageRank is. =p

Has your PageRank been updated? What does it mean to you? Share with us.

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Procrastination vs Taking Action

Chris — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 09:42:17 +0000

I started this blog with a very simple intention of sharing my experience, knowledge and tips with all my beloved family members and dear friends who are interested in making money online by blogging but don’t know where and how to kick off. I was very aggressive and active in updating this blog initially, hoping that they would come visit, read and learn. However, it’s rather disappointing that most of them just visited once or twice ever since the blog was established in June 2007. I had to email/message and beg them to ask me any questions/difficulties they might have, but nobody asked me a single question, nobody seemed to appreciate that. I’m wondering why this is happening. Is this the procrastination that’s hindering them? Or was I being too aggressive in pushing them to blog? I don’t know. Hey, I’m not selling you anything, am I?

However, when I introduced this to another two friends of mine, JY and Jeepang, during our recent casual conversation, both of them created their blogs the very next day. If you look at their blogs, you can see that both of them put in a lot of effort in building the blogs. Take JY for an instance, on the day he created his blog, Phone Lover, he spent hours on msn with me asking questions, tricks and tips about blogging. He took the initiative to explore the Blogger platform, compare with other blogs, learn from other blogs and most importantly he asked questions. JY is a young teenager who is a very talented fast learner, he is willing to learn and experience. He managed to catch up what I taught and put it into practice. JY updates his blog regularly (as advised by me), and he’s targeting to write at least a post a day. He’s already having 20 posts in just 23 days, at the time of this writing. Man, he is going to be a very successful blogger in the near future, that’s one thing for sure.

Now let’s talk about the other friend, Jeepang. I had lunch with him recently, and he asked me a lot of questions before creating his blog, Malaysian Antiques. Jeepang, in his 40s, is not as young as JY, and he has limited knowledge in computer and internet, therefore, it might seem a little difficult for him to understand and absorb what I tried to teach. But hey, he managed to create a wonderful blog. I was surprised that he could come up with such niche blog, although it’s not the first of its kind, it is definitely very rare of its kind. I’m happy for him.

So, for those who are in love with procrastination, or most probably you’re rather busy with your daily work and family, I think I shouldn’t have forced you to blog. I know not everyone enjoys writing. However, to JY and Jeepang, you two earn my respect, and I’m giving you two a linkback in this blogpost, and also a sitewide link to your blogs. I’m also going to give you more linkbacks from my other blogs and it should be sufficient for you to gain a nice PageRank in the next PR update. Kudos to both of you.

Lastly, my advice to you all, blog wisely, not hately. Do not make blogging a burden to you, make it a hobby that you really like and enjoy doing, only then it will become a habit to you, a habit that rewards you with long-term income and success, see you at the top!

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Will the Current Global Economic Crisis Affect Making Money Blogging?

3 tips to being a different blogger

Chris — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 08:32:58 +0000

The company that I’m working for often sends its employees to training programs, both internally and externally. I personally think that it’s a good long-term investment in the employees as well-trained employees are able to improve or at least maintain the company’s readiness to respond to the market. I was recently asked to attend a 2-day external training on “Handling Customer Complaints”. The trainer, Dr Allen, was indeed an experienced speaker and the content was very informative. I learned something new and during the whole course I was trying to relate it to blogging, hoping that it could add value to what I’m currently doing. To my surprise, the findings were of satisfactory and here are some points that I think you can apply to your blogging model.

1. Do what people don’t do
You probably remember Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart which generated $245 billion in sales last year. He was once asked what his secrets to building the multi-billion retail empire were, and one of the rule of thumbs that he shared was “What people do, you don’t do; What people don’t do, you do“. In today’s blogging world, it’s getting difficult to make money from it as it has become more competitive. What other bloggers are already doing is no longer as worthy because it doesn’t deliver the uniqueness of your blog. Therefore, if you wanna stand out of the crowd, then do something that other bloggers don’t do, this way you will most probably be the first to capture the major market stake. A very good example would be John Chow, he was the first blogger who gave away prizes while converting visitors into RSS feed subscribers, and it created amazing results in his feed count leading to an increasing income. So, start thinking something that the rest are not doing and be the first to do it. I’m yet to experiment this golden secret, let’s try it and let me know if it creates opportunities and increases your online income by any chance.

2. Help others help yourself
“When you help others achieve what they want, they will help you achieve what you want“. This is yet another important factor that should be added to your blogging model. It is extremely true that when you help others solve their problems by providing tips, how-to’s in your blog, they are inclined to like your blog, they bookmark your blog and they begin to visit your blog more regularly, thus, you gain the readership and automatically the money rolls in. Maki from DoshDosh is the best example in this aspect, it is not difficult to notice that most of his making-money-online blog posts are always full of unique information, tips, how-to’s that you hardly see elsewhere. Maki constantly does a thorough research on the topic that he’s writing about, and that’s why he gains the reliability, popularity and readability from his audience. In simpler words, do not hide what you know or are capable of, help yourself by helping the rest SINCERELY.

3. Be relational
Dr Allen also raised an essential point that we should really take note of. He thinks that today’s business models are moving towards a transactional mode. Take fast food outlets for an example, you go to the counter, the girl at the counter takes your order, you pay the ticket, leave with your food and the relationship ends right there while the girl at the counter yells “NEXT”. They are no longer serving customers, in fact they are “processing” customers, and they forget that a good service delivery is what keeps customers coming back. How does it relate to your blogging model? Don’t just write, post and hope to earn a fortune from your blog. You might get a few dimes from some random clicks, but your audience is not going to return for more. In fact, you should personalise your blog, your blog is not a robot. Care about your readers, reply their comments, ask what they want, appreciate their visit, they are your friends, they aren’t your competitors. According to a statistics done by Dr Allen, only 5% of the people who purchase your product or service would give you feedbacks, compliments and complaints, while the remaining 95% would be indifferent. Therefore, if you want to find out what you have done right or wrong, what you need for improvement, what you can do to gain more readers, how you can add value to your blog etc, you should also conduct surveys on a regular basis, ask your readers and get more feedbacks out of the remaining 95%. Be relational, not transactional.

These 3 tips may not earn you your first million, but they are of essential importance to building a different and popular blog. Tell me what you think and do let me know what you’ve achieved after applying these strategies to your blogging model.

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ShoeMoney vs JohnChow effect

Chris — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:15:59 +0000

You have probably already heard of ShoeMoney.com and JohnChow.com, or you may not have heard of them, but they are undeniably one of the most influential money bloggers that give valuable tips and complete guides to making money online. “ShoeMoney vs JohnChow” has become the hottest topic in the blogging world. They were having a breathtaking RSS feed competition recently to see who recruited the most new RSS feed subscribers in the month of October 2007. Winner would then be granted bragging rights and a link on the other person’s blog.

In order to win the once-in-a-life-time competition, both of them came up with a win-win marketing scheme. They gave away a ton of prizes, including cash prizes, to new feed subscribers. Who doesn’t like free stuff? Who doesn’t like prizes? Therefore, I entered the competition too, and of course I subscribed to both of them, meaning I had greater chances of winning those crazy prizes, even a small prize as a consolation would surely mean a lot to me (I hardly win something). To my surprise, on only the second day of entering JohnChow’s RSS feed, I won a prize! LOL I won a free wiki page worth $100 on Million Euro Wiki. Check out my name in the winner list here, look for “admin-reviewcolumn”, that’s me. Glamour! I’m currently still in the midst of updating the wiki page that I won, you can check it out here.

And it seems like my luck didn’t just stop there, it came and stayed. I later won a prize from ShoeMoney’s too. Now you can call it SPLENDID! ShoeMoney gave me a $650 worth of full SEO analysis from Seonext.com, check out my big name in the winner list here.

The competition ended at the end of October 31, 2007 (US or Canada time). Who was the winner? Both of them were the winners, as they claimed. In fact, ShoeMoney’s RSS feed count was 18,003 with 7,170 recruited during the competition, while JohnChow managed to pull in 4,691 new readers giving him 13,276 in total subscribers. During the competition of the century, JohnChow was once in the lead and ShoeMoney almost gave in, but ShoeMoney managed to gain 4,403 readers on the last day making him the winner. However, both ShoeMoney and JohnChow agreed that both of them were the big winners as the whole point of the competition was to gain their RSS feed readership, and now that their purpose have been fulfilled, no one really lost in the match.

I personally think that it is a good marketing strategy to gain more readership by giving away prizes, I might consider this in the near future. Meanwhile, ShoeMoney and JohnChow haven’t announced the winners of their grand prizes. I’m just hoping that I will win the grand prize from either one of them. Please give me one of those, finger crossed.

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PageRank update, October 2007

Chris — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 06:20:57 +0000

Google has finally decided to update the long-waited PageRank after some rumors about Google’s possible move to abandon PageRank mechanism. The last update was back in Apr’2007, and it took Google almost 6 months to update this time. I wondered why, but I really don’t care much about PageRank anymore. I’m already sick and tired of PageRank update, after months of fruitless waiting and checking.

This latest update has, in fact, stunned many of us as hundreds of established blogs like Problogger.net and JohnChow.com have been penalised for selling text links on their sites. Their PageRank have significantly been reduced from PR6 to a mere PR4. What a pity! However, PageRank isn’t really that important after all, if you know how to monetise your blogs. There are many other monetisation methods that don’t really even look at PageRank.

This blog has finally gone from PR0 to PR3 in this latest update, which is of no surprise. Several of my other blogs have jumped up to PR4 from PR0. I’ve checked the PageRank for some of my “newbie” friends, and it still stood at PR0. No worries, friends, as I said, don’t care about PageRank, it’s really not that important. Just keep up writing and blogging, I’m here to show you how you can earn a substantial amount out of your blogs. Stay tuned.

If you wanna find out at where your PageRank currently stands, use the great PageRank checker tool from SmartPageRank.com

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