Each theme is designed for a specific niche and comes with at least 25 PLR articles to get you posting right away. There is also at least one PLR product included with each theme that you can rebrand or sell as it is to immediately start monetizing your new blogs… Plus, so much more… Like premium plugins, instructional videos, etc.

I don’t want to give away all of the details, just yet, because we might be adding even more to the package.

In the next few days I will be releasing a theme package for free to those on my mailing list. This theme pack is in the IM niche and will give you an idea of what to expect in the other themes. If you are not on the mailing list and want this free theme pack, then just go to the top of the sidebar and sign-up and we will include you in the download.

Alternatively, you can leave a comment below telling me that you would like the preview package and I will contact you with the details. All that I ask is that you give me an honest review of what you think about the new theme pack.

All themes and plugins are compatible with WordPress 3.13 and beyond. You should be able to take the theme packs and get a new blog up and running in just a few minutes time. Plus, I’m going to give you resources to get your new blog indexed quickly and a couple of places to start building social bookmarks automatically for free!

The new WordPress theme on here is just an example of the great designs in the new them pack. If you like it, let me know. If you want to do a review and get a free theme package, leave a comment below and we will get you set up.

Talk soon…

Most of these domains end up for sale at auction. The ones with higher Page Rank (3 or better) tend to command a premium price. If the name is coupled with a high-ranking keyword… look out! It will be very expensive to acquire.

When dealing with Page Rank on an a domain name that you are interested in purchasing, you need to be sure that the PR is valid. Many times domain names are pointed at other domains and they inherit the Page Rank from the site they are pointed at. An easy way to check is at Rank Checker. Just enter in the domain name and click. In a few seconds, you will know if the rank is valid or not.

Many domain experts will tell you to steer clear of closeout domains. At times, a few of these domains may have had issues in the past and some of the links pointing at them may not be the type of traffic that you desire. Some may even have been blacklisted for spam or other nefarious schemes. I say… embrace the closeout domains. I have gotten many bargains (including a PR 5 site) through closeout auctions. It is easy to determine if a domain name has issues.

If you need to determine the type of backlinks pointing at the site use Yahoo Site Explorer. This will show you up to 1000 backlinks pointing to a domain. Clicking a few of the links will show you what type of traffic that you can expect from them.

Checking on the banned status of a domain name is fairly simple, as well. You can search the Spamhaus Project and Realtime URI Blacklist to see if a name is banned. Even if you happen to purchase a banned name, do not panic. The time limit for a ban is usually very short and the name will soon be usable, again.

Where to find aged domains for sale.

There are many places out there where you can purchase quality aged domain names. Do a Google search for “aged domains for sale” and you will come up with quite a list. I personally prefer using GoDaddy and eBay.

There aren’t too many aged domains listed in the auction section of eBay, but I have been able to find ones with age and Page Rank and pick them up quite reasonably. It may take some time to sift through the listings, but finding a great domain name at the right price is worth the time and effort.

GoDaddy auctions are huge! There are tons and tons of domain names added each day. With GoDaddy, you can refine your search for many variables such as: age, traffic, price,  type (.com, .net, .org… etc.). This makes sorting through the list much quicker. You can even search by keyword if you have a specific project in mind. The one downside to GoDaddy is they charge you to participate in their auctions (except for the closeout domains). The one-time fee is nominal if you plan on purchasing many domains over the next few months.

There are literally hundreds of tools to help you find quality aged domain names. A few are free and others are quite expensive. These tools can be a huge time saver if you are buying large quantities of domain names. If you are only buying a few domains per year, the investment in high-priced tools is probably not something you will need or be cost-effective.

Why not wait until the domain is dropped and register it without paying the auction price plus renewal fee? If a domain name is dropped back into circulation, you may not get it registered before someone else does. Also, when you register a domain name this way, the age of the domain (in the eyes of registrars and search engines) returns to zero, so you lose the age that has been built up by the previous owner(s). Aged domains tend to be indexed quicker and rank higher than new domains, so why piss away that clout to save a few bucks?

There have been a few products that have entered the market explaining some of those search strings, but very few people willing to share any of them for free.

Image via Wikipedia

But, before we get started with the search for quality sites, let’s look at a tool that will make your work easier.

This item is a plugin for Firefox, called Search Status… Still using IE? Dump it! Firefox is a much friendlier browser, with its many available plugins, for SEO work. I just downloaded Firefox 4.0, and this plugin still works… So you know its cool.

Some people will tell you to use SEO Quake, but I would advise against it for two reasons. First, they do not have an updated plugin for Firefox 4.0, yet. Secondly, some marketers have had problems with Google locking out their IP address temporarily from the search function when using site specific type search strings that target .edu, or .gov domains and using SEO Quake. Why? Ask Google…

Search Status will show you the Alexa, Compete, mozRank and Page Rank for each site that you are on. It will also highlight no-follow links, so you can easily identify blogs that are do-follow and give your backlink more juice in Google. Once we have this installed we can move on to finding quality sites to leave comments and gain backlinks from.

There are a couple of sites that shorten the learning curve for finding .edu, .gov and .mil backlinks. The first is SearchEdu. This site will allow you to search all three extensions, without having to know to add in site:.edu, site:.gov or site:.mil in the search string.

You will still need to add in a search string like:

• “powered by wordpress” “your keyword”
• “powered by phpbb” “your keyword”
• “leave a comment” “your keyword”

You get the idea… Anything that is a common phrase on sites that allow you to post a link, you can do a search for with your keyword and find high quality contextual places to post your link.

One of my favorite search strings is: “this site uses commentluv”. This will find blogs that use the Comment Luv plugin, which normally provides you with a nice do-follow link to your latest blog post. Unfortunately there aren’t too many .edu, .gov or .mil sites that use the plugin, but it can be used for normal .com, ,net, etc sites, too. Just look for sites that have a high Page Rank… I try to look for PR3 or better sites, but will comment on most anything to get a do-follow link.

The other site is Free EDU Blog Finder, which searches Google’s Blog Search for .edu blogs. You still need to add your keyword to get the most from your links in terms of context, although many marketers believe that any .edu, .gov or .mil backlink is good for Page rank regardless of the context and/or do-follow/no-follow status.

There you have a few ways to get quality backlinks to your site. These type of links will not only improve your SERP, but also play a major role in building your page rank. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and get you some backlinks!

Related articles

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Image via Wikipedia

Look at some of the biggest domain names out there: Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, etc. These are not keywords that would ordinarily rank well for their niches. But through branding, they have risen to the top of their fields. The names are easy to remember and when you hear them you immediately associate them with their niche. To me branding and not keyword packing your domain name makes far better sense if you are looking to build a long-term, high-ranking blog or website.

Google’s Matt Cutts recently put a video up on the Google Webmaster Help YouTube channel that covers this topic and the way Google may handle these types of domain names in the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAWFv43qubI

Many times these keyword packed domains are associated to the spammy sites that Google’s recent search engine algorithm shift looks to address. While a keyword rich domain may help you to rank in the short term, if you are not backing that name up with quality content then your blog will not continue to rank well.

BTW, if you are not subscribed to the Google Webmaster Help Channel, I would advise that you do. There is so much useful information there… Most of it done in a question/answer format.

For those of you who paid a couple of thousand bucks for a recent course and software designed to churn out autoblogs… OUCH!

On a better note… It has really helped some of my blogs, including this one. I have never done any real off-page SEO on this site, but after the update from Google my last post on here (3 months old) jumped to the #1 position for its keyword phrase. Do a search in Google for “steps to increase alexa ranking” (without the quotes) and you should see this:

Click the image for a better view…

The good news in the latest Google update is that if you are churning out original content for your blog, you are going to rank higher, in most cases, than nearly all of the autoblogs out there. And if your site already has good content, it can rank for some older articles even if you have not posted to the site in three months.

Don’t get me wrong… You can still make money with autoblogs. Its just that you are going to have to end up creating hundreds and hundreds more to make up for the lower SERPs.

Another issue coming from Google is the new personal block list built into their Chrome browser. People using Chrome can block sites on an individual basis from their browser. This, on the surface, looks good for the end user but there is more to it.

My understanding is that Google is collecting this personal block information and it will, at some time, be integrated into their ranking algorithm, which could set off blocking wars between websites trying to knock heir competition down a notch or two… Yep, always the pessimist.

The important lesson to remember from all of this is that Google and the other search engines are constantly tweaking and changing the way they rank sites and if you are not keeping up with the latest trends, your blog could be left behind in the rankings. If you look at things closer, this has always been Google’s plan for their search engine. They want the sites with original quality content, quality backlinks pointing back to their sites and plenty of activity.

Speaking of backlinks… I have some great info to pass onto you about getting .edu and .gov backlinks to your site in a few days, so be sure to check back in… You won’t want to miss it. Plus I am working on an article about buying domain names and how I picked up an 11 year old PR 5 domain for $5 last week! Talk soon.

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• NewsReach: One trillion pages and nothing to read: Google tweaks … (newsreach.co.uk)
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Many people (especially marketers) have the Alexa toolbar installed to their browser. This enables them to quickly get a view of how popular a site is. In the case of marketers, it helps them to determine how well established and popular a competing website in their niche is. An Alexa ranking below 100K shows great strength and popularity naking your site more appealing to some.

When I first launched this site back in March, the first Alexa ranking I saw for it was just over 12,000,000. Through SEO and list building I brought that ranking to below 400K in September and it was rapidly dropping… Then I got busy with other projects and had some other issues that kept me away from posting here and the sites numbers dropped off to just over 500K and has been holding steady there for the past month or so… Without doing anything to increase the ranking except having the Alexa toolbar installed on my own computer.

When I start posting more to the site and getting it indexed more often, that number should increase dramatically. After all, I’m not building from 12M this time.

There are some steps to increase the Alexa ranking of any blog quickly, but first we need to understand how Alexa works.

Alexa uses an algorithm to determine how many visitors that your site receives. This is based on the total number of estimated internet users and the number of people who have the Alexa toolbar installed. This is not an exact science, but is a pretty fair way of estimating the number of visitors to your site, but it can be a skewed number.

Let’s say, for arguments sake, that 5% of all internet users have the Alexa toolbar installed but 10% of the visitors to your site have the toolbar. Using Alexa’s method of determining the number of visitors would give your site a false number of roughly double the actual visitors. By the same measure, if only one percent of your visitors had the toolbar installed, your Alexa numbers would be much lower than the actual amount of visitors.

Now that we have an idea of how Alexa works, let’s see how we can make it work in our favor. Below are some fast and easy ways to increase your blog’s Alexa ranking.

1.  This one should be obvious, but just in case… Install the Alexa toolbar to your browser. Every time you visit your blog, whether it be to post an article, moderate comments or whatever, your browser notifies the Alexa ranking engine of a visit to the site.

****Note – If you are the only one visiting the site and you do it numerous times per day, some of your visits will be discounted as the system does track where the visits are coming from based on IP address.

2.  Ask your friends and family to install the Alexa toolbar to their browser as well. When they visit your site, they will help your rankings, too.

3.  Set your browsers home-page to your blog and get your friends and family members to do the same. If you all have the Alexa toolbar installed (Tips one and two) then this will send a visit reference to the Alexa ranking engine each time you load your browser.

If you work in an office with many computers, try to get as many of them set to your blog as their homepage, too. if you were the head of an IT department for a major corporation this could really accelerate your numbers… It could also get you fired, so be sure to ask permission first.

4.  Increase traffic to your blog. Alexa ranks sites on how much traffic that they receive. The more visitors you have to your site, the more that will have the toolbar installed and the higher your ranking will go.

This is just basic SEO and promotion stuff here. Get more readers and your ranking will get better!
5.  Add the Alexa widget to your blog. Many people swear by this method as it supposedly tracks every visitor to your site.

**** Note – The Alexa widget reports stats differently to the ranking engine than the toolbar does, so if you are sending many people with the toolbar to your site to help your ranking, this may actually not help and could potentially hurt your ranking.

6.  Add a blog roll to your site and encourage other bloggers and webmasters to leave a link for you to add. Most webmasters have the toolbar installed and if they are visiting your site to leave their link, then their visit is being reported to Alexa.

7.  Create a post asking your readers to install the Alexa toolbar. If your blog is marketing related this benefits you both. You are gaining an added boost to your Alexa ranking and the have a toolbar that they can use to check out how well their competition is doing.

If you frame your post in a way that shows the advantages that they will receive by having the toolbar installed, then many more of them will be likely to download and install it.

What if, like me, you have numerous blogs… You cannot set everyone to the homepage. I try to visit all of my blog sites at least once a day. (I did this before I ever installed the Alexa toolbar, anyway, for site maintenance) While this is not going to dramatically increase their ranking, it does let Alexa know that the site is getting visitors, if none of your other visitors have the toolbar installed.

There you have it. A few quick and easy tips that anyone can do to increase their blog’s Alexa ranking.

BTW… Due to an unforeseen illness, the launch of the new Quick and Easy blogging for Profit site has been re-scheduled. The latest pre-launch video should be added later today or early tomorrow. Thanks for your understanding.

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This Quick and Easy Blogging project came about when my brother asked if I could help his wife, who has Multiple Sclerosis and cannot hold a regular job, get started making some money online. I first was just going to pass on an ebook to her that I had giveaway and PLR rights to, but after going through it found it to be lacking in many areas and full of outdated information and links… So I sat down and wrote a completely new book for her… And the course just kind of grew from there.

Now that it is finished, the Quick and Easy Blogging course comprises six modules and four bonus modules, plus some other stuff that I’ll be throwing in there as well. There are manuals, videos and software to make the job of blogging quick, easy, painless and free.

Actual launch day is going to be on Monday, November 22nd. If you are looking for a way to start blogging or resurrecting an old blog and you don’t have a ton of money to spend, then Quick and Easy Blogging is for you. I will be doing an early-bird launch for those on my list at a special (you will not believe how cheap) price on Sunday evening. This price will only be good until Monday morning when the site officially launches, so be sure and watch your inbox…

As my regular readers know, I occasionally like to have a good rant about the scams that are going on out there. It looks like that I’m not the only one these days. Mark Dulisse added a post to his blog that really takes some of these so-called gurus to the woodshed and works them over. All I can say about it is: “Great Job, Mark!”

There are tons of products that are popping up with all similar sales copy which all lead to a similar membership site with a similar software that will generate you tons of cash. If you try to leave their sales page you get inundated with endless exit screens that try to wear you down until you buy their product or at least opt-in to their mailing list so they can fill your inbox with more useless offers.

I rarely promote any product for another marketer because of this. If I make a recommendation on this blog or to my mailing, its because I have either bought the product or been given an advanced copy to try and found it useful… Or its my own product (which you should know are always top-notch

A big problem with these guru launches is that many marketers do not take the time to check out the product they are promoting. Guru A supported Guru B’s last launch and made him a lot of money so Guru B automatically supports Guru A’s next launch.

Don’t get me wrong… I firmly believe in helping those who help me. But if their product is crap, I’m not going to try and sell it to my list. My help only extends to the point where the product may be useful to those who I am promoting it to. If its garbage, I’m not shy about telling someone what I think of it. If I don’t know… Hey! I’ll tell you that, too.

I am happy to know that there are others out there with ethics in this business. I think that they are getting to be few and far between, so when I find someone who tells it like it is,I do try to share that info. Read Mark’s post.

I have a great freebie coming to you late next week that will wrap up the Mobile Friendly Project… I had to take some time off from it recently due to an unforeseen problem, but am back again at 100% and getting the report ready for your enjoyment. Until then…

I’ve been blogging on the steps that I have been taking in the launch of the new Mobile Friendly blog but have failed to let you in on all of the activity in leading up to the actual site launch (i.e. promotion). In past articles I have touched on finding a keyword inclusive domain, the theme and plugins, monetization, and content. What I have failed to report to you is the list building activity going on behind the scenes.

Many of the links that I have created so far do not lead directly to the blog, but instead to a lead capture (squeeze) page where I am giving away a report “Why You Need Mobile Ready Websites”. As an added incentive to subscribe, I am also giving away a new iPod Touch around the middle of October to one of the lucky subscribers. Yes… You can register and be in the drawing.

Beside the links leading to the squeeze page, I have been using a couple of social sites and some free traffic sources like traffic exchanges, safelists, text ad exchanges and such to get a test of the squeeze page’s effectiveness. So far it has done fairly well, even with the largely untargeted traffic from some of these sites.

When the new subscriber confirms their email account, they are then sent a mobile web crash course over the next few days full of great content via my autoresponder service. This content is designed to get them opening my emails so that when I begin promoting the blog in earnest, they will open the email and click the link to one of my new, outstanding, blog articles. Giving away great content is always a win-win situation.

The autoresponder articles eventually lead into some of the monetization streams that I have set up for the site. The articles provide great content for the reader and make a low pressure sales pitch at the same time. If they buy one of the products, or later click one of the banners on the site, the chain of: Visitor, to Reader, to Subscriber, to Customer comes full circle. Hopefully the products that I have picked to promote will provide some great value and they will later become repeat customers.

Some may feel that building the list before officially launching the site is like putting the cart before the horse. Just like in launching a new product, having a list to mail to before the launch can be one of the most important factors in whether the site is a success or not. The marketing of products related to your niche, to your mailing list is just another way of monetizing the site and increasing your profits.

List building has always been an important part of my marketing strategy for both online and offline businesses. When you prepare to launch your new blog, be sure and build a list for your niche so that you can take advantage of the ready-made traffic that comes from having a mailing list.

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I have not done any real promotion for the site other than the article I wrote and the couple of backlinks that I mentioned in earlier installments of this blog development series. I have not listed the site in any directories, created a video to post on YouTube and other video sharing sites or done any big time article marketing. That will begin later in the week.

My main focus has been in creating content for the site that will engage the reader and create subscribers when I do begin marketing the site in earnest. I do have Twitter tools installed, so there is a small amount of promotion with the tweet that is sent when I publish the post, but that is about it for now.

If you begin sending too much traffic to a new site where there isn’t too much for them to read they will get turned off and develop a bad impression of your site from the outset. Having plenty of good content for them to read the first time they visit is a better way to entice them to return and read more at a later date or even subscribe to your feed or mailing list.

Now just because I have some good anchor content on the site does not mean I’m not going to continue to provide good content to the readers. I will still create new articles that gives value to those who subscribe.

One type of article not to include in your anchor content is a product review or promotional post (unless you are creating a review site). Building a blog readership is very similar to developing a relationship with a mailing list. Give them good content and they will come back for more. If you do happen to make an offer to them for a product, they are more likely to by from you than someone else if your relationship is good.

Content is king in the blog world. The more content that you have, the more pages that will be indexed in the search engines. The better your search engine presence, the more organic (targeted) traffic you will get. If the content is relevant and insightful, you will gain readers and subscribers from those visitors on a daily basis.

…In the next installment, I’ll cover the initial promotional push and how to attract readers fast.

BTW… the site is getting 500+ visitors each day without promotion…

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When you decide to launch a new blog site like Mobile Friendly, one of the first things that you are going to be confronted with is what theme and plugins to use. Your choice of a theme and the plugins for your site will make a huge difference in the way it looks and functions for your user. The better your site looks and the easier it is to use will greatly benefit you in converting visitors into subscribers and long-term readers.

I know what you are thinking… “What about great content, Gary?” Content is very important, and I will get to that in the next installment, but if your site turns the visitor off before he even reads one post then your great content is not doing you any good.

For the theme, as I mentioned in the previous article, I chose the Suffusion theme because of its flexibility and the fact that it is SEO ready so you do not need to add a plugin like the All in One SEO pack to it. It does take a bit of time to get the theme configured the way you want, but that is only because there are so many options available for you to choose from. There are several preconceived templates that you can choose from that will reduce the setup time dramatically, but I prefer the custom method myself.

After I installed the theme, I had to decide what plugins to use. The plugins added cover many areas including social networking, security, functionality, statistics, and additional SEO.

Security is always a major concern when you put a website online, so its a natural decision to look for ways to better secure it. WordPress is fairly secure straight out of the box but there are several vulnerabilities that can be exploited to get your site hacked.

One thing that all sites with an admin section face is a brute force break-in attack. With this type of attack, the login page is repeatedly bombarded with user name/password combinations until the site is broken into. This is easily preventable in WordPress by installing the Login Lockdown plugin to limit the number of attempts at the login page and then lockout the IP address of the attacker.

With social networking there are a couple of plugins that I always use. The TweetMeme button plugin is an industry staple and can be seen on nearly every blog out there. It is very effective in getting people to promote your blog to their Twitter followers.

The other social plugin that I like is AddThis. It allows your visitors to share your post with over 200 social networking and bookmarking sites. They can even share it with their friends and colleagues via email or print it out for sharing in a physical form.

There are many other plugins that I used in creating this site. Click here for a complete PDF list of them all and the reasons that I chose to use them.

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You may have noticed that I have been… maybe obsessing is too strong of a word… paying a lot of attention to mobile web developments lately. There is a good reason for this, plus its led me to build a new site… Which is good news for you. Here’s the story…

I was doing some research for a new article a few days back (August 30th to be precise) and was looking at keywords and what domains were available for them when I happened upon an excellent top level domain name for the mobile market. The keyword “mobile friendly” gets more than twice as many searches as “mobile ready” and the dot net name was available for it. Being a good marketer, I snatched it up and quickly put up a new site.

OK… This where it gets good for you.

Basically, I am going to outline from start to finish over the next thirty days the processes that I go through to make this site successful. You will be looking over my shoulder, so to speak, as I build this site into a money maker and receive step by step updates (and a bunch of other goodies) so that you can create your own.

So, let’s get started…

Why did I choose the mobile web niche?

It was a bit of luck, really. I know this niche is just starting to get hot, so I was already doing research and writing articles about it. When I discovered there was an excellent name with not much competition, I had to create the site. It was an AHA! moment… Plus the niche will be exploding in the next 12 months… guaranteed.

After registering the domain and adding it to one of my hosting accounts, I installed WordPress. To WordPress I added the Suffusion theme and an assortment of plugins including the WordPress Mobile Pack… Kind of pointless to have a blog about mobile friendly web sites and not being mobile friendly yourself.

I created a header and background image, it was the middle of the night and I wanted it done quickly so I did it myself instead of waiting for someone else to do it the next day. I then customized the Suffusion theme and added the header and background images.

I next added an article to the site and added my main keywords and meta description to the Suffusion theme. Another reason that I like this theme is that it is SEO friendly and doesn’t require you to add in a plugin for SEO purposes. A big plus there.

I did a little looking around on Clickbank and found some suitable items to promote through the banner ad zones that I had set up on the site earlier during my customization. I then went to a couple of my CPA networks and browsed for some additional items to promote. Affiliate monetization done.

Since that time I have added a few more articles and did some tweeking to make the site more productive. I’ve added in a special report as an enticement to join the sites mailing list, set up the autoresponder and created a few backlinks. I also added a product of my own to the monetization process for those 100% paychecks.

Today I added a couple of backlinks from a some of my Blogger blogs after adding a new article. I then created an article for a social networking site that includes backlinks to the Mobile Friendly site and to the sign-up page for the free report.

Tonight, I’m going to rest… Its been a long four days and I need to get busy on my next steps in building traffic for the Mobile Friendly site tomorrow. Also tomorrow, I will give you a link to a PDF file that shows all of the plugins that I am using on the site and what purpose each of them serves. Until then…  Just about forgot…

Check the new Mobile Friendly dot net site to see what I have done so far.

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In recent weeks I have been focused on having mobile-ready blogs because there is so much traffic coming to sites from mobile devices these days. Mobile devices, smart phones, internet ready tablets , etc. are all gaining in popularity for web browsing, so it makes sense to have a site that is viewable by those devices. If your site is not mobile compatible, you are losing a ton of potential blog readers and customers.

I’ve added the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin to all of my blogs which converts them to a format that is mobile friendly. It also supplies basic stats that show the percentage of mobile users that are viewing your site. To show proof of the traffic that you are missing if your blog is not mobile-ready, here is a list of statitistics from a few of my sites and the number of mobile hits that they are getting:

• 5% of your traffic is currently from mobile users. (this site first)

You’ve had 28941 desktop hits and 1780 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 10% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 10730 desktop hits and 1233 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 3% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 16185 desktop hits and 544 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 10% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 3267 desktop hits and 365 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 5% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 8045 desktop hits and 478 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

• 7% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 3922 desktop hits and 326 mobile hits in the last 9.3 days.

That is 4300 plus hits that I would have missed out on in just the past nine days alone!

Included in the WordPress Mobile Pack is the ability to link your mobile-ready blog to their Mpexo directory for mobile sites. Having your site listed in that directory helps, but all sites get mobile hits. Here are the stats for a new site that I am developing for a client and just put online a week ago:

• 1% of your traffic is currently from mobile users.

You’ve had 1680 desktop hits and 25 mobile hits in the last 7.1 days.

This site has very little content (4 posts and 2 pages) and has not been added to the mobile directory but it has received 25 mobile hits in a week without any promotion.

Many popular websites like Twitter and Facebook are mobile friendly and actually encourage their users to interact with mobile devices. With the number of people using these devices on sites that you are (or at least should be) marketing your blog on, does it not make sense to have a site that they can move directly to and view while still using their smart phone or other mobile device?

Now you probably want to know how to monetize this traffic… Admob is a contextual ad site just for mobile devices. How big is the mobile ad market? Google recently paid $750 million for Admob! The money from your mobile ads is probably not going to be as good as your regular site where you have more flexibility in your ad types, but it is a way to profit from that traffic with relative ease.

To close I just have one question: “Is your blog mobile-ready?”

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There are many people who profess to being blogging gurus out there. They have all of the answers to every question and supposedly make tons of money with their blogs each and every day. Do they really make all of this money from their blog or is the main source of their income the blogging products that they develop and feed you through Clickbank?

I get proposals to be a Joint Venture partner on many blog related products and most of them I turn down. I turn them down because I take a look at the product and see that its just a bunch of old re-hashed garbage that has been on the net for years or because I read the salesletter and they are showing all kinds of “proof” of income, but they never actually show you one of their blogs that is supposedly producing this income.

This so-called “proof” of income is usually just a shot of a Clickbank account. Did this money actually come from sales on their blog or is it from their last product launch. I guess they can “legally” get by with saying that they made that money in the blogging niche because the product they sold was blogging related. But what I want to see is proof from the blog itself.

Show me traffic figures, click-thru rates on your ads posted on the blog(s)… Something that shows you actually that you possibly could have derived that  income from your blog… Hell, just show me that you actually do blog and aren’t just out there searching the internet and publishing ebooks from that info that you want to sell to me for $37!

Don’t get me wrong, there are bloggers out there who make tons of money every day. People like John Chow, Perez Hilton and others. They have built their brand and have tons of readers who visit their site daily, click their ads and buy their products. They don’t need to force feed their readers anything, the money just comes naturally from their loyal readers. Building one of these types of blogs takes a lot of time and effort… It’s not going to happen over night.

There are other, faster ways to make money in blogging. If you seek out niches that haven’t been overly exploited or do not have much competition, you can quickly build a profitable blog site.

You can also enter into niches where people are looking for answers to specific problems like; acne, migraine headaches, garden pests, etc. If you build several of these niche blogs, you can make a pretty decent living from the income they provide and it doesn’t take long to get each of them making money.

Don’t expect to make six or seven figures immediately. It will take time to build enough of  these niche sites into an empire that will make you that kind of money.

I’m not trying to scare you off from blogging… Just know this… You can build a profitable blog in a very short time, but if you are looking to get rich blogging, it is going to take some time, whether you are building one super blog or an empire of niche sites. There are plenty of so-called gurus out there that may tell you the opposite, but until they show you the blog(s) that they used to do it… Don’t believe them. Anybody can show you a screenshot of a Clickbank or Paypal account…

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OK… I included a link to my own blog… I think its cool that Zemanta is picking up posts from my site and I haven’t even submitted it for review, yet… SEO does work.

There are so many different options for WordPress that learning every little thing about it and what it can do is nearly impossible. You may think you have everything mastered and then something comes along that is either new or you just have overlooked it in the past. Even though I have been blogging for six or so years and have been using the WordPress CMS engine for at least four of those, I still learn new things about it everyday.

Plugins is one of the areas where you can almost always learn something new. New plugins are constantly being created and updated for WordPress. Some are great, others so-so and some are just down right crap! These plugins make WordPress the most flexible, easy to use Content Management Solution out there.

Most WordPress plugins work nearly straight out of the box with a little bit of configuration to set your preferences. Some others take a bit more time and knowledge to set up. Either way, when you add a new plugin to your blog, you are doing so to improve the functionality of your site.

One of the perks of doing a blogging blog is that you tend to experiment with more plugins so that you can pass the knowledge that you gain in your trials on to your readers so that they may better their own sites. There are also times when you are recognized as a “blogging guru” (please don’t ever classify me this way I am the anti-guru), and developers send you their premium plugins to try out for free.

In addition to WP Syndicator, here are a couple more that I have been playing around with lately:

Zemanta is a cool free tool that analyzes your text and suggests images and other media sources to add into your post. While you are typing, they magically appear in a box to the right of your editor. You can scroll through them and pick the ones that are best suited for your article. If you are worried about copyright infringement, each source includes the type of license that is associated with it so that you can decide if it is usable for your purposes. Most of the media has some sort of GPL or Creative Commons license or may even be in the public domain.

In addition to the media hook-ups, Zemanta also picks sites related to your post to link back to. This makes linking to other blogs a breeze and generates good will from the sites you link to and probably a few reciprocal links back to your site. Its a win-win-win situation.

• Your readers get additional sources.
• Other blogs get links from your site.
• You get links back in the form of pingbacks from other blogs
• Plus, you get reciprocal links because of the good karma that you are putting out there.

If you register with Zemanta, you can also list your blog (or blogs) in their network of sites that other users of their plugin connect to. They will do a verification of your site to make sure that it is appropriate for their system, so you want to be sure and have a good content rich site ready before you submit it. But, if it is approved… Think of all of the backlinks that you are going to receive from the others using this plugin linking to your articles! Cool beans, huh!?!

The other free plugin that I have been experimenting with is Twitter Tools. Now this one is a bit more complicated and the documentation a bit on the lite side. But, if you can read between the lines a bit, you should have no problems in getting it set up…

The plugin integrates your blog with your Twitter account by you creating a Twitter application. Don’t worry… There is no programming involved. The application is built into the plugin, but to use it you have to register it with Twitter and get your app and OAuth keys. Its pretty simple to do, just be sure and read the directions very carefully.

What will it do? A lot… But here is a quick overview.

It allows you to send new blog posts to Twitter. I know, a lot of others do this. Here is the difference. Have you noticed the line under all tweets… “via the web”, via TweetDeck“, “via SocialOomph“, etc. Each of those lines are a backlink to that applications website. When you set up your app, you name the application (Your site name would be good) and enter the location of the app. This gives you a link to your new post, through the tweet you sent, plus a link to your main site though the “via your app” line.

Other stuff the Twitter Tools plugin does:

• You can also set it up to send your tweets to your blog as posts
• Send Tweets from your blogs dashboard
• Create daily or weekly digests of your post
• Adds a widget that you can use to display your latest tweets
• Has an API hook that developers can use to pass your tweets onto other apps or sites

This is why I blog with WordPress. The tools that are available for it are constantly being developed, tweaked and improved. The uses for it as a CMS are unlimited. Sure, there is a learning curve involved… But, that is why I am here… To help bring that curve down to as close to level as I possibly can for you. Enjoy!

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Yes, I am a JV partner on this launch and I will make a commission if you buy from my link… But that is not why I am creating this post. I love this plugin! There are tons of paid plugins out there, that I could pitch, but most of them have an equivalent that is free. There is nothing else like WP Syndicator that I have found for free.

Bottom line here… Even if you do not buy from my link, you should get WP Syndicator… It’s that good!

Before, I would go to my Clipmarks account and clip some of the information from a post and then add it to my free sites, taking me around 30 minutes to an hour for every new article. When you have multiple blog sites to maintain, that can take up a good part of your day. With WP Syndicator, as soon as I click on the publish button it starts sending excerpts from the post to these free sites, creating instant backlinks! This plugin is going to save me, at least, a couple of hours every day!

Besides the backlink, if someone happens upon one of these feeder sites, with WP Syndicator they will have to click over to the main blog if they want to continue reading the article. So not only are you increasing your ranking in the search engines, you are also picking up traffic from the visitors to your feeder sites… A win, win and win again situation!

I do not pitch too many paid products directly from my articles on here… Unless I feel that they are really good… And WP Syndicator is. This is the plugin that I would have developed to use with my Blog Launch Blueprint. It does the things that I show you about creating backlinks on autopilot!

The initial setup for WP Syndicator will take a bit of work, but once the feeder sites are set up and your info is entered into the plugins configuration, you never have to worry about it again. You set it up and everything is done automatically when you publish a new post.

Another good feature of WP Syndicator is that if you have some older posts that you have not syndicated to your feeder sites, you can go back and let the plugin do the work for you. If you had ten posts, you could create 150 backlinks with a press of a button.

I apologize if this seems like a sales pitch… but I am serious about how well this thing works! If you are serious about creating a profitable blog, then I highly recommend that you get WP Syndicator.

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Sometimes its just more convenient to post to your blog from your phone. You could be sitting at a football game and have a super idea and want to get it out before you forget it… If you can post to your blog by phone, you can quickly send your idea on to your readers. Same as if you are driving in your car or doing any number of other things. There are many places that you go where you have internet access via your smart phone, that you will not with your laptop.

Before all of this trouble, I was making my sites viewable by smart phone. I’ve taken this a few steps further and searched out some of the more highly rated WordPress plugins for added mobile functionality for your blog. Here are a few, in no specific order:

WordPress Mobile Admin

This plugin allows you to manage your WordPress blog via your phone. According the developer it works on every phone. Whether you have an iPhone, Blackberry or some other web-enabled phone, you can manage and update your WordPress site while you are on the go. You can:

• Post new articles by phone
• Post pictures from your phone and decide where they appear in the post
• Manage Posts, Pages, Categories and Tags
• Moderate comments
• Edit User profile pages
• Supports Gravatars
• Works in any language WordPress has been translated into

Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin

From the same developer as the plugin above, this plugin will have your blog mobile-ready in just a few minutes. It was the first plugin that I used on this site to make it mobile-ready and, truthfully, it scores better on the mobile test sites than the one I am currently using. I will probably return to this plugin on this site and maybe others at a later time… I’m still in testing mode right now.

From their description:

“Every single mobile device is detected and all aspects of your blog are tailored to the visiting handset. Sites aren’t dumbed down to the lowest common denominator but instead use the features and functionality that advanced phones offer.

“Devices are detected by using Wapple’s advanced web services instead of relying on inferior 3rd party tools. If you view your blog with a brand new, never before seen handset, it’ll still work perfectly!

“Any theme you’ve installed and have styled for web will be carried across to mobile giving you a consistent look and feel for each and every one of your visitors.”

BTW, Rich Gubby (the designer of the plugin) sent me an e-mail wanting to know the reason why I quit using it. If his support follows the same line, I’m sure that I will be using it more in the future.

Mobile version with Onbile Plugin for iphone, blackberry , smartphones, mobile theme.

With this plugin, users can visit your WordPress blog with theirs smart phones and visualize all of the content.

• Multiple Configurations
• Complete Customization
• Change color, text, icons, backgrounds, etc
• Visitors can comment
• Compatible with all smart phones

Mobile Content Sender

Adds a sidebar widget that enables you to send any kind of mobile content to United States and Canadian cellular phone including ringtones, images, wallpaper and video.

Features:

• Includes built-in widget
• Add your own header and bottom text
• Enables any of your blog visitors to upload content from their computer to their own cellular phones

WordPress Mobile Edition

WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device. Mobile browsers are automatically detected, the list of mobile browsers can be customized on the settings page.

Note: This plugin has not been updated since well before the release of WP 3.0, so it might be a good idea not to test it on your main site, first… Although; there have not been any reported problems at this writing.

WordPress Mobile Pack

This is the plugin that I currently have running on all of my sites. It does a very good job and is very easy to set up. I posted about it here if you want to read more.

There are many more paid plugins out there. I have just focused on the free ones that have a good rating and appear to work with the current version of WordPress. The bottom line is that mobile computing is rapidly expanding and we, as bloggers, need to keep on the cutting edge of technology to make sure that we are not losing that traffic to other sites.

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I could venture down to the public library, that is where this post is originating from, and do some work from there, but I am a power internet user and they don’t exactly smile when I walk through the door with my laptop.

I burn through tons of bandwith every day… Between updating my various websites, building new sites, watching videos and downloading ebooks, graphics, software, etc from various places… I burn up the internet for 8 to 20 hours per day. I’m kinda having withdrawls at the moment.

I should get back to a regular schedule sometime on Monday… Probably about 6:59pm, if AT&T has their way about things. In the meantime…

I am getting a ton of work done, offline. The redesign of my main site is just about complete and all but a couple of pages should be ready when my connection is restored. They would be ready, but I need to access the internet to set up the Paypal buttons for them, before they are ready to go.

In other news, I have moved my affiliate program from a self-hosted site to Payspree. They make it much easier to control everything and I don’t have to worry about someone trying to hack into my site. You can still access my affiliate products by viewing the affiliate page at garycalvert.com/jv. I only have a couple of products listed, right now, but should have several more ready shortly after my internet connection is restored.

Finally, this is Birthday Week! Some of you who know me, know that I normally take this week off and devote myself to a little hard-core partying… Not this year… There are just too many things that need to be done… But, since I have no internet connection… Guess not. But, there is always next year… Is 47 too old to be acting like your in college again?

In any online business, your list is your lifeline. A good marketing list and your relationship with the people on it will go a long way in determining whether your blog has longevity. Google and most other search engines are constantly changing and tweaking the way that they rank sites. A site that is on the first page today and receiving tons of organic traffic, could be delisted or moved far down the rankings and lose their natural SERP (search engine ranking position) traffic.

If you are taking the steps necessary to move your readers and visitors to your mailing list, then you will have far less to worry about when the search engines make their change. You can always receive instant traffic by mailing your list when you have something new on your blog.

Google’s recent change that seems to factor a sites activity into their ranking formula caught a lot of people by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. If you look at some of the busiest web sites on the net, they have a ton of user-generated content and/or social interaction between the users. If these are the most popular types of websites, it only makes sense that the search engines would do something to reward those sites and ones like them that foster interaction.

The good news for bloggers about this change is this is exactly the type of website that you are operating. The traffic to your site should be leaving comments and if you are doing your part and interacting with them, then your activity levels should increase and, according to the reported latest changes, increase your SERP.

But what if you are not generating a lot of activity? If you are a new blog with very few or no backlinks and very little content? How do you get traffic to your site and increase the activity on it? SEO can take time to even get your site indexed. Pinging the RSS aggregators will help a certain bit, but still it may take months for you to get ranked well enough to generate a steady flow of traffic and a decent amount of activity from the search engines. If you have a list started in your niche, then you can create that instant traffic regardless of what the search engines do.

How do you build that list from scratch, if your blog isn’t receiving much traffic?

Create a short report and give it away in exchange for people subscribing to your mailing list. Use free sources like classified ads, traffic exchanges and safelists to drive traffic to your squeeze page. If its in your budget, use PPC and banner advertising to bring people to your sign-up page. Participate in giveaway events as a contributor. Don’t just put your subscription form on your blog and expect people to subscribe… You may get a few, but remember… you’re not getting much traffic, yet.

Once you start building that list and receiving traffic from it to your blog, with good quality content, your activity will increase. All the while, you are posting new content, creating SEO friendly backlinks and continuing to build your list, so your site makes a natural gravitation up the search engine rankings. The increase in your SERP will naturally drive more traffic and continue to build your mailing list so that when Google makes another change to their ranking criteria (and they will), you will still be able to generate a steady flow of traffic to your blog while making the changes necessary to get your sites search engine rankings back up.

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More and more people are browsing the web with their cell phones and mobile devices these days. Is your blog mobile ready? If its not, you could be missing out on tons of readers and comments. There is a very handy plugin that will make your WordPress site mobile ready, automatically. Basically, you just load up the plugin from your admin dashboard or FTP program and configure it and your site is ready for mobile traffic.

The WordPress Mobile Pack is very easy to use. I installed and configured it to ten sites in under an hour… When installed, the plugin will automatically detect your users browser and customize your WordPress site for their mobile phone. If for some reason it doesn’t switch, there is a link where they can manually change it over.

The other cool thing about the developers of this plugin is that they are also creating a mobile-ready web directory. When you configure the plugin, you can also add your site to their mobile directory. Its still in the beta stage at this point, but it is still giving you backlinks to your site from another source! A couple of mouse clicks and you are automatically added to the directory.

How would you like to have a constant stream of backlinks from Facebook (PR 10, Alexa #2) and at the same time make it where more people are commenting on your posts? With the Facebook Comments for WordPress plugin, you can.

This handy little plugin allows your readers to comment on your blog without having to enter their email address. If they are signed into Facebook they can leave a comment and even post that comment to their page… complete with a link directly back to your article!

This one takes a bit more time to set up because you do have to register a Facebook app. Its free and easy to do, but it is one more step that you don’t normally have to go through for some other WordPress plugins. I believe its well worth it. Besides, after you have it registered, you can use it on any number of sites using the same App number assigned to you by Facebook.

The last plugin is by far the best free membership plugin out there. The S2Member plugin does many things that membership plugins costing $100 and up do and even more than some of the other paid plugins. To quote from their site:

S2Member is an extremely powerful ( and free ) membership management system for WordPress®. The s2Member Framework ( free ) integrates seamlessly with PayPal® ( very easy ), and fully supports recurring billing, with the ability to track affiliate commissions on a recurring basis. s2Member supports custom Pages for registration ( including Custom Registration Fields ), account access, and a whole lot more.

Besides being able to sell memberships, you can also use this to sell access to specific pages with “buy now” buttons. By doing this, you could make a virtual shopping cart with protected downloads. If you develop a product to sell, you could set up a sales page with a “buy now” button and when they paid they were given access to the download page. The page cannot be accessed any other way, so your download is secured from hackers and thieves.

You can also integrate the S2Member plugin to work with PayDotCom. Use PayDotCom’s affiliate program to generate sales to your memberships or for the products that you have set up using S2Member.

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