Why would somebody pay for commenting?
Normally, anyone would guess that more comments means more popularity and traffic for a blog and hence a blogger who pays for commenting wants to make his blog more popular. While this is perfectly true, there are ‘temporary’ blog content where posts written or rewritten and the associated comments are captured for the purpose of larger scale marketing later. In other words, the comments and posts you created and got paid for will later appear elsewhere resulting in article and comment marketing together. So comments here in this context are means to capture your opinion on something that can be used in a similar context later.

Where to find such assignments?
As I mentioned several times in the past, the Digital Point Forums Content Creation section is one of the places to get your assignments. I experimented with one of the blog comment contracts there and the result was pretty encouraging. I got paid at the rate of $0.50 per comment and a total of $26.50 for two comment batches of 21 and 32 each. All that it took me was about an hour’s time.

Steps involved (My particular case)

1. I visited Chat Life UK and signed up with them for a community login. (If you don’t get an approval mail on the same business day, you need to contact their support)

2. Once the account was approved, I had several ways of making money for creating content via their ‘Get Paid Manager‘. Article writing, rewriting, forum posting and comment posting are the main content creation jobs there. I opted to write comments which have to be of minimum 50 words long.

3. They mainly provide posts and articles for DataCalls UK and hence all articles (new as well as rewritten) present there, are on the VoIP topic. Since the articles are rewritten, even comments about them can be rewritten. You should keep track of the comments (and the post URL where the comment was posted) so that later you can claim money for the same.

4. Once I posted 21 comments on various posts, I requested a PayPal payment and I got paid the very next day. Again, I posted 32 comments and got paid the next week (Payment requests have to be made once a week).

This is the way it worked for me with the Chat Life UK Get-Paid-To comment site. There could be similar mechanisms for the other sites as well that you can find in the forum mentioned above.

Data Calls - Payment 1

Data Calls - Payment 2

While getting paid to create content on other blogs is not my main job, I just wanted to personally experiment it once so that I can write about the genuineness of such options and recommend the same to you. I am attaching a couple of payment proofs from Datacalls here.

Good luck with your content creation jobs!

Sign up Process
The sign up for publishers is extremely fast as you can get started as soon as you enroll. There is no major site requirement in order to become a publisher with CreditBurner and moreover their simple sign up form does not even ask for any site information where the ads might get displayed. As a publisher, you just need to provide your name, email address, snail mail address and PayPal/EGold information to get started. There is a signup credit of $0.35 for every publisher.

(The English version of their website - probably maintained by Non-English speaking people - is full of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes and that is the first thing one would notice.

Ad types supported and conversion rates
CreditBurner supports traditional banner ads, full-page ads, PopUnders and Link Ads. In addition there is something called a Treasure Ad that places a small treasure box on your website. I did not quite try this as I didn’t understand it much (It is more like playing a treasure-hunt game where you collect points, by opening up the treasure box, which in turn gets converted to money).

A publisher can place a combination of banner ads, link ads, PopUnders and treasure boxes. Only one banner ad is allowed per page though text ads can be more in number. A PopUnder along with banner will yield maximum CPM, according to them!

As per CreditBurner, the banner ads get a CPM rate as high as $1.10 for level 1 traffic and $0.75 for level 2. These levels are based on the country where the traffic is generated from (List of Level 1 and Level 2 countries are available on their website). The PopUnders claim to yield $1.20 to $2.40 CPM rates and the full-page ads $1.00 to $6.00. The CPC rates are also pretty promising for Link and Context ads. The CPM is
not based on page views but on Unique Visitors. From my 10 day trial I found that my effective CPM rates were between $0.18 and $0.20 for 1000 page views and around $0.40 for 1000 unique visitors for overall traffic in flow. I have about 40% of my traffic coming in from the US and 30% from India which are Level 1 countries in their eye. I found that the returns were much better than my other CPM ads (AdBrite etc) but probably not as good as many of the premium networks. But if you have a few referrals this can dramatically increase as you get 10% of the referred publishers’ earnings as well.

The CPC ads are a bit difficult to customize as there are no visual tools available. But I did not use these text ads yet as I am pretty happy with Bidvertiser on that front.

Payment Process
The payments are done every week either via PayPal or EGold. You can get a payment as soon as you earn a minimum of $2.50 which is quite convenient as you get paid earlier than most other networks.

What is not so good?
The first thing you notice (after the poor English on their website) is the quality of banners. The banners are not very elegant looking and looks as if they were done by amateurs. This is an issue probably associated with many other PTP networks as well. Also from my short experiments with various ad sizes, I found that the earnings don’t really differ between bigger ad blocks (such as a 160×600 skyscraper) and small banners. So it is ideal to place a 468×60 banner somewhere near the footer area as even the location of ad does not play any role in the earnings! Another thing I did not like about CreditBurner is the fact
that they will actually cancel your account if you are idle (not displaying ads) for more than a week or so.

Overall Recommendation
CreditBurner can give you very good returns if your site has a decent number of daily visitors. It is not a complete replacement for your CPM ads but rather complement them. There are premium CPM ad networks that pay higher but again many of them don’t even approve sites with medium traffic. Another plus point is the weekly payments!

If the above review sounds good, you may sign up with CreditBurner and start earning!

By default, Wordpress provides the update service provided by Ping-O-Matic which is a very reliable service. The option to alert the Ping-O-Matic service, is available via Settings->Writing->Update Services section in your Wordpress admin panel and this entry will by default have ‘http://rpc.pingomatic.com/‘ listed there. What Ping-O-Matic does is that, it in turn alerts a number of services to update your aggregated content on their sites.

In most cases the above set up is good enough. But as the number of social media and aggregator services are growing day by day and you may as well have subscribed to many of them. So instead of using a single service, you may need to use a number of them to directly ping the sites which need to be updated with your latest content. If you visit your MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog profile and see that your RSS feeds are not updated for a couple of days, you now have the reason behind the same.

The following are some of the ping services I use (updated via the settings option). I have seen some improvements in the area of udpating the feed after making this change.

Must have services
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.blogcatalog.com/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://api.feedster.com/ping

Other services
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.bitacoras.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Some of these links when added to your settings may accelerate the updating of your syndicated content at your favorite social media sites as well as major blog search directories. Please make sure that, everytime you sign up with a new directory or bookmarking service, their ping services are included in this list.

Feedburner PingShot
Feedburner has a bulk update service called PingShot under their Publicize tab. You must enable the PingShot service in your Feedburner account and also select all relevant update services there in.

Please keep in mind that if you have already selected a certain ping service in your Wordpress settings, you may not include the same in PingShot.

With the above changes, your content will be reaching millions must faster than you could imagine!

Phase 10. Post launch exercises
I would categorize the essential regular activities after launch into three:

• Improving social media presence
• Link building and improving ranks
• Regular update & monitoring

Creating social media presence
For any blog, it is essential to have a big presence in the new Web 2.0 echo system. The idea here is to build a community or neighborhood around the services that you are offering. The following are the leading social media sites that you could leverage in terms of improving your visibility:

MyBlogLog
Blog Catalog
BumpZee
SpicyPage

I recommend that you sign up with all of them and concentrate on one or two in terms of building the community. Make sure that you update your profile and also include your feed [] in the community profiles. This will improve the traffic as well as your RSS subscription.

Creating social bookmarks accounts & links
In addition, you need to sign up with leading social book marking services and a recommended list is given below:

Digg
Del.icio.us
Stumble Upon
Reddit
(You need to add Yahoo! Buzz to this list, once it is open for mass subscription)

Once you subscribe with these services, you need to include social bookmark links at the end of each post by modifying your theme files (singlepost.php). There are plugins available that can cover a number of book mark services in one inclusion of this plugin. Another important thing to do is to add these bookmarks to your RSS feed as well [] (I am yet to do this)

There are a number of other services in social media and book marking category. You may try them one by one and analyze your traffic using Google Analytics on a regular basis and stick on to those services that gives you more traffic. Also, keep a watch on your backlinks using Google Webmaster Tools to concentrate more on the social bookmark services that gives you maximum number of backlinks [].

Link building and improving ranks
For any webmaster or blogger, Link and Rank are the most important short words! Both indicate the popularity and selling-power of your blog in the eyes of readers, search engines and advertisers etc.

Traffic rank and other ranks
Your site’s traffic rank is essentially an index based on the number of visitors & page views that your site gets. At this point of time the Alexa ranking (a service by Amazon) is the sole ranking system that is widely accepted and recognized. So it is strongly advisable to include your blog in the Alexa ranking system. Fortunately you don’t need a sign up for this but you can invite the Alexa bot to crawl your site by submitting your site using this link [] and entering your site information there. Please note that it may take up to a couple of weeks before Alexa starts displaying your traffic ranks.

The other ranking system (for the blogs alone) is the Technorati blog ranking. To be successful as a blogger, probably more for monetization purposes later, you must submit your blog at Technorati.

Most advertiser and partners use your Alexa, Technorati and Google Page Ranks to assess your popularity. Lower the Alexa/Technorati number, the better and for the Google Page Rank it’s the other way (higher is better).

Link Building
Having a number of sites or external web pages pointing to your site is one good sign of your popularity. Hence improving the backlinks or link building is an important activity for your success. You may read the following posts to know how to build your backlinks easily using certain tools.

Comment Kahuna - Comment away to glory!
Fast Blog Finder Review

You may also read the articles posted under the Promote Your Site category!

Regular updates and monitoring
The most important thing for any blog’s success is to keep your content updated. This has to be followed by your constantly monitoring your backlinks, ranks, traffic, feed subscription count etc. One of the things I do on a regular basis is to check my backlinks using the Submit Express Link Popularity Checker.

The other important thing is to concentrate on your communities at various social media sites. You may also politely ask people to add you to their technorati favorites or subscribe to your RSS feed etc.

Patience is the key for the days to follow. It will take a while - even with good content - before you improve your various rankings and add more readers (I am still waiting since three months…). But you don’t need to loose your sleep over it, things will happen if you stick on to the basic agenda of providing good content! []. Also, do not forget to engage with your readers in terms of replying to their comments, queries etc.

I have covered most of our topics that I wanted to talk about in this series. I would probably dedicate the last post in this series to talk about Monetization aspects. Please provide your comments on this post, until then…

Phase 8. Pre-launch validation
Before you could make your blog really public, please make sure that the following checklist items are validated against the current state of your blog and its web presence.

Your blog launch checklist

• Make sure that your blog posts that appear on the first page are free of spelling errors or grammar mistakes
• Click and validate all links including pages, posts, category and tag links
• Adjust the timestamps of the last couple of posts to make sure that they are not too outdated
• Create a short launching today post [] that summarizes what has gone into the making of your new blog and what you intend to do
• Make sure that your RSS feed links are working and if you have not already done it, you may now sign up with the Feedburner feed distribution service, configure your feed and also use their ‘Publicize’ links to serve your feed by email. You need to paste this piece of code in your theme, ideally in the sidebar or banner area
• Google Analytics: Sign up with Google Analytics (GA) [] to get extensive information on the number of visitors to your blog, their geography, type of visit, how long did they use your blog, which are their favorite posts etc. After signing up with GA make sure that you paste the latest GA tracking code (not the old urchin version) in your blog theme’s footer area so that tracking starts immediately on the launch day itself. Do not use tools such as AW Stats or Webalizer but stick to GA.
• Backup once - Backup your theme folders, plugins, uploaded images and any other directories that you might have created using an FTP client or whatever tool is available with your hosting provider. Also back up the Wordpress database using your Wordpress database backup plugin

Phase 9. Launch your blog!
Now that we are through with our quality assurance check points, the blog is ready to fly! The following are the steps to make it public:

• Sitemap release: The sitemap that you were holding on until now has to be now released to the search engine spiders. If you used the Google XML Sitemap plugin as per a previous post in this series, all that you need to now is to enable all those checkboxes to make sure that further changes to your blog are indexed by leading search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask.com []. It will also modify the robot.txt file to tell search engines to recursively crawl.
• Google Webmaster Tools: Since you already have a Google account (used for GA sign up or otherwise), now it is time to sign up with Google Webmaster Tools. The webmaster tools is a bunch of utilities that provide extensive information on your crawling statistics, link reports, robot errors etc. It is a must have FREE tool for any (blog) webmaster [] and sign up there and submit your sitemap that is already created. Please note that the webmaster tools will take a couple of days or even a week to start producing reports. There’re also other webmaster tools such as the one offered by MSN, but it is better to stick with Google as you can manage all your services from a single account.
• Update Ping Services: Wordpress has a feature by which it automatically informs several blog aggregators on you posting or changing some content. Their spiders then will index your post to make it publicly available. By default you should have one ping service (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) listed under your settings->Writing->Update services option. But there are many other ping services that you can add as and when you sign up with different social media sites (I have as many as 28 ping agents listed there - will write about them in another post). At the moment your default ping service will do and make sure that the entry is present there. []
• Site Submission: You can now submit your site to popular search engines. I used a FREE service from Submit Express that submits your site to 60 plus search engines. They have a paid service as well that probably submits your pages to thousands of search engines and directories. When you use the free service make sure that you use an alternate or temporary email address [] as they are going to spam your email inbox otherwise. If you search Google, you can find more free website submission pages.
• Change your profiles: Now, it is time to update all your social media and social networking (Orkut, Facebook, LinkedIn…) or various other web portal accounts and profiles to reflect your new blog’s URL. This will soon attract some visitors to your new blog.
• Inform your friends and group members: You may now send out personal mails to your friends and private groups (Yahoo Groups etc) informing them about your newly launched blog. If you ask politely some of them may even subscribe to your RSS feeds.
• Free Press Release: There are a number of websites that provide you with FREE press release services. If you serach Google for the phrase ‘free press release’ you will find many. You could use one of those services to announce your professional blog’s release by creating a good quality write up and submitting the same there.

Voila! You have just launched your dream project!!

A few things to avoid

• No ads yet: Please note that launching a site with too many ads will not fetch you any good. It could instead have a negative impact as some of the initial visitors may never ever come back []
• Do not put site counters and feedburner feed counts yet []. However great is your blog and its contents, the general psychology of the visitors are to visit again those blogs that are popular i.e. those sites with their feedburner count displaying some ridiculously large numbers
• Do not spam news groups and forums with your site announcement. Also stay away from cheap tricks such as using hidden URLs or tiny URLs to mislead people into your site.

I guess, we have covered enough topics in this post though I was intending to provide some more information. Probably we can cover the same in our next post titled ‘Post launch exercises’. Until then, do not forget to bookmark this post and provide your valuable feedback.

• Registered the domain name (or free blog space) and the hosting space
• Set up domain email addresses and installed Wordpress, chose a theme and basic plugins
• Created pillar posts, categories, permalink and configured some plugins
• Did some internal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work using free tools and links

Having done a reasonably good work so far, now it’s time to get your blog reviewed by some experienced people - not necessarily experts - and also release it for preview to your friends and family people.

Phase 7. Get your blog previewed and reviewed
This is a very important phase because a number of things that you did not care about so far or postponed will be brought to your attention by those who see your blog for the first time. This is also the phase were you do the final touches to your blog, its theme and some content as well before it is released to public.

Review forums
There are professional website review services that charges heavily for doing a review of your website or blog. But we did not want to spend any money for this and hence go the forums way []. The Digital Point Forums and the V7 Network have dedicated website review sections (click the links to go there) where you can submit your site URL and, if asked politely, will get reviews from dozens of forum members. You will get to know 100s of things, that you would have missed out or not aware of, in the form of feedback from these forums. I used the DP forums extensively to shape up this blog to the state it is today.

When you ask for feedback from people ask them about specifics (such as the theme, banner, color combinations, fonts, content quality, positioning of widgets, site response etc). Also, once you post the thread at these forums, please make sure that you follow it up on a regular basis and thank and reply to those who provided feedback.

Preview to your friends
At the same time, you can also provide the blog URL to your friends who could help you in more than one ways. Of course, they can provide some feedback but what they can do more is to provide some comments on the initial posts. You might want to have a couple of comments before you launch your blog and you also can get your comment plugins and widgets tested in this process. It is ideal for any blog to have the commenting possibility for the readers without having to sign up []. If you are forcing your readers to sign up before commenting, they may not leave comments as much as they do otherwise. There could be some spam but that can be taken care of by powerful anti-spam plugins.

Incorporating changes and adding more plugins
Once you keep getting feedback, you need to start incorporating them as soon as possible. This could include theme changes, content restructuring, branding, logo changes, adding/removing plugins etc. This is the phase where your blog is getting ready for the grand release!

Things to avoid
At this point of time you may not still include blog statistics widgets, hit counters, feed counters etc. But you may activate and test your site feed by signing up with a feed aggregation service such as feedburner.

Incorporating the changes suggested by reviewers may take four to five days depending on the volume of feedback received. But it’s really worth spending this effort as you prepare your blog for launch. In the next post, we will talk about ‘Launching your blog‘ and the number of things you need to do pre-launch and post launch!

Phase 6: Make the content SEO friendly
In the last post, I mentioned that Wordpress is an amazingly powerful platform when it comes to creating search engine friendly content, in the context of tags, post slugs, categories etc. There are a lot more that Wordpress can do which we will talk about soon. At the same time, there are a number of things that you could do manually to make sure that your blog’s technical structure (theme code mainly) is optimized as well.

Keywords, description, meta tags etc.
The header part of your blog theme (or page HTML’s top portion) is the first candidate for optimization and this includes mainly the various meta tags and title. There is particular sequence in which these tags need to appear and there are guidelines on the length of the tag contents. Fortunately for our rescue, there are some FREE tools available to optimize them.

I used the following free tools to optimize my meta tags. Once these tools are run and some error reported you can correct them by editing your header.php file in your Wordpress theme (or relevant template design link if you use a free blog account). DO NOT FORGET to make a backup copy of this file before attempting any change and if you are not good at editing HTML please get some help. Most errors reported will be related to the number of keywords, their relevancy to the content, description text length, sequence of meta tags (ideal sequence should be Title, Description, Keywords) etc []. There could be also mention of your robot tag which should have ‘index,follow’ parameters set so that search engine spiders can crawl and index your pages successfully.

SEO Centro Meta Tags Analyzer
Submit Express Meta Tags Analyzer

Finding the right keywords
There are a number of ways to find the right keywords for you. You can use some FREE tools (or high-priced software if you have money) such as SEO Centro keyword suggestion tool and Keyword density tool []. These are really powerful tools to do self analysis of your keywords.

The other method is to visit your highly successful competitor blogs dealing with similar subjects and take a look at their keywords (by viewing the page source using your web browser application). You may get some cool keywords using this method. You can try them one by one and in parallel analyze using the above mentioned tools.

Another technic I used is to check with Google and Yahoo on their highly searched for keywords []. Probably there is no direct way to do this but we could do it a little bit differently. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are highly paid services to promote your blog - however, they don’t charge you unless you complete your order. You could sign up with them, and design your ads during which they will show you what kind of keywords or phrases are getting maximum searches. Some of these keywords will be useful for you and could use them in your meta keyword tag or even later in your post content. If you sign up (FREE) with MSN Live Webmaster tools, they have a search for page ranks feature as well.

Please note that having the right keywords alone won’t get you a lot of search based hits. You need to have a good search page rank and great (optimized) content as well to achieve that.

Optimize body elements
After working on the header, now you could concentrate on the body elements. The most important tag here is the ‘H1′ tag that MUST be present [] in your blog theme somewhere in the beginning itself. This is the single most important tag that will be looked up by search engines in the body part. Ideally your blog’s name should be represented by the H1 tag. If not the name, some major title could use this tag. Whatever be the case, you need to make sure that some of your ‘keywords’ should be present in this H1 tag. Unfortunately, in my case my H1 tag was lost during redesign of the theme as I opted to represent my banner header completely using an image!

After the H1 tag, the important elements are your anchor tags (your category links, tags, even content links) and image ‘alt’ tags. It is ideal that you use some strong keywords in those tags that will help to obtain visibility from humans as well as search spiders. Also, while writing the posts you should try to create internal/external links where keywords are present. It is also a good habit to make certain keywords bold while you post new content.

Code Compliance
There is a theory that making your website code XHTML compliant will make the search engines like your site more… There is no proof to support this argument yet, at least I haven’t seen any, nor did I do this for my blogs. However, if you would like to check your pages for XHTML compliance, you may use the FREE W3C Markup Validation Service []. You can see that the big daddy of search engines, Google itself is not XHTML compliant!

Robot.txt and sitemap.xml
We already talked about sitemap creation but we haven’t opted to submit it to search engines yet. Let it be that way for the time being as we don’t want to make our beta site visible to outside yet. However, we could change the robot.txt file - present in your domain’s root directory - a little bit to make sure that the search engine spiders will follow your site content and index it in the future. I don’t want to talk too much about robot.txt here but there is an excellent online tool that can help you to optimize your robot.txt file for various search engines. Please use this tool [] to find out how ideally your file should look like.

Further references
There are a couple of other things you have to do as well to optimize your site via content changes as well as Wordpress configuration and plugins. I will talk about the same at a later point of time, however, you could run through some of my old posts listed below to get to know some other promotional aspects.

Internal Links - The art and math
The Priced ‘Tag’

By this time you would have spent roughly 15 to 20 days with your new blog. In the next post of this series, we will talk about getting your blog reviewed before it can be actually released. Please do not hesitate to provide your feedback and/or bookmark this post, if found useful.