Then it’s finally time for what we’ve all been waiting for.. Alright, that’s not entirely true but it’s a fun way of presenting something. What an anticlimax.

My first book review since I started this read a book a week challenge will be The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need, written by Daniel H. Pink.

Thanks to Ericsson and Volvo in Sweden we’ve been told since we were kids to go through school, get a good education and then start working on either one of our big companies. Now time has changed and this is what Daniel H. Pink tries to tell us with Johnny Bunko in fun manga.

Summary

Johnny Bunko is new to the Boggs Corp. and he stumbles through his early months as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to rethink his approach. Step by step he builds a career, illustrating as he does the six core lessons of finding, keeping, and flourishing in satisfying work.

A groundbreaking guide to surviving and flourishing in any career, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is smart, engaging and insightful, and offers practical advice for anyone looking for a life of rewarding work.

6 lessons to learn

This book teaches Johnny Bunko, and you, six lessons on how to get satisfying, productive careers thanks to Diana, a magical adviser.

1. There is no plan.
2. Think strengths, not weaknesses.
3. It’s not about you.
4. Persistence trumps talent.
5. Make excellent mistakes.
6. Leave an imprint.

My thoughts

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is a fun, inspiring book that you will manage to read through within just an hour. It’s actually more of an extremely educational comic book. More of those for our kids!

If you have a friend on his, or her, way to graduate high school this book will make an excellent graduation gift. Today many people isn’t to fond of reading books and therefore this is an excellent format for them.

Visit Amazon

When I wrote my post a few days ago about how to make money with Twitter Lee asked me how much experience I have on using Twitter. I told him the truth, as I always do, that I’ve only been using the Swedish version named Bloggy, Cuzo for you.

Yesterday I decided to change this and I registered an account on Twitter. Not because I want to make money there, but because I want to get to know my readers, that’s you,  on a more personal level. Which is a bit difficult through traditional blog comments.

Why use Twitter

A lot of my friends use Facebook to keep in touch with their friends and even though they most probably have heard about Twitter they’ve never thought about joining. For me, I’m going the other way around.

Twitter is perfect for networking and finding people with the same interests as you. It’s also possible to stay in touch and learn more about the people you are following on a daily basis.

Add me

Instead of spending time trying to track down my visitors, meaning you again, I thought that you could drop by and either add me or post a comment with your username on Twitter.

If you want me to follow you, please also think about subscribing for my posts here on my blog as well.

A few days ago a good friend and I discussed books and he asked me how many books I usually read each year. I got a bit ashamed and thought about my posts on why you should read books and how to surround yourself with exceptional people. I’ve almost been a hypocrite on both these.

Books often consists of great high quality content since people are expected to pay for them. Why would you spend your time writing a book with low quality which no one would buy?

Reasons to read a book a week

Reading one book every week may sound trivial and you may be asking yourself what you will gain of it. Well, think of it in long term. By reading one book each week you will have read over 500 books within 10 years. That’s a lot of knowledge you will gain.

According to Brian Tracy this habit will make you an international expert in your chosen field within 7 years. Imagine you work with photography.  If you read 52 books on photography each year, will that make a difference in how good photos you’re taking? No doubt.

Book reviews

Since I will be spending my time reading about personal development, how to make money online, overcoming procrastination, social skills, leadership, etc. I thought it may interest you as well. Therefore I will be publishing a short, or sometimes long, review about most of the books I’m reading.

In the sidebar over at your left you’ll find the term book reviews. There I’ll be publishing links to all of my reviews, a list on books I’m going to read and a list on books I’m going to buy.

If you have any suggestions for books, just leave me a comment and I’ll have a look at it.

Follow me

This is a great commitment since it’s an ongoing project that I’ll be spending a lot of time with, although, I would like to see more of you doing the same thing. Start by deciding to read one book a month. You will manage that without any problems what so ever.

Recently I started to comment more than usual on English blogs and one thing I noticed is that Comment Luv is more common internationally than it’s in Sweden were I’ve been working so far. This plugin is actually great since it will give you a static deeplink to your latest entry, which may be difficult to get from other sources.

Unfortunately I also see a lot of people getting links to Feedburner in their Comment Luv instead of getting a link directly to their site.

Feedburner offers a lot of extra features for your RSS-feed, including support for RSS via mail, and therefore there’s a lot of people using it. I encourage everyone to do so, but you need to change settings so Feedburner doesn’t get credit for your backlinks from Comment Luv instead of you!

How to redirect Feedburner to your site

It’s actually real simple and you can do the whole process within a minute.

1. Login to your Feedburner account
2. Press Analyze
3. Press Configure Stats, in your bottom left hand corner
4. Uncheck all of the checkboxes and save

Now all the links will go directly to you instead of Feedburner.

Spread the word

If you visit a regular blog with about 30 comments on a post you’ll se that several of them still give their linkpower to Feedburner instead of taking advantage of it for themselves.

Therefore I would appreciate if you helped me spreading the word about it.

Two weeks ago a good friend of mine called me. Due to some personal issues he were in need of three weeks vacation from his work as a delivery man. Unfortunately there were no one who could substitute for him and therefore he was wondering if I could fill in for him for three weeks.

Since I’m working from home I’ve got 52 weeks of vacation every year and therefore I could as well give him three of mine. Double salary while meeting people and helping a friend didn’t sound so terrible.

One week of unsatisfying work

It felt like my first week ran away and every evening I was wondering – What did I do today? The problem was that even though you had all the time in the world while driving, you couldn’t do anything in the car. Just listening on radio when they were talking about nonsense.

Even though the work itself wasn’t boring, it felt unsatisfying.

My first attempt

I decided to turn of my radio and started to philosophize about my future and all of my current projects. The problem was that even though I came up with some great ideas I forgot all of them within a few minutes.

Next day I brought a notebook and pencil with me. You can probably imagine how difficult it is to philosophize, looking at the road, maintaining control over my vehicle while taking notes. Big failure!

The solution

I thought about Dictaphones, software to my computer, etc. when it finally came to me. It’s possible to record audio with my cellphone! At the end of the day I had recorded 12 new ideas for blogentries, with several bullet points for each entry.

Even though I can’t physically make money while driving I can record blogentries and then simply publish them when I come home.

Another great thing with driving long distances is that you can make it your personal time. Before this job I could easily spend half an hour in the shower, thinking about new projects and doing math on the wall. Now I can do this in the car, for several hours each day.

Your thoughts

I’m sure this method isn’t the best and therefore I would be interesting to hear about your thoughts. How can / do you make money while driving?

I still got one week left, so who knows what I will come up with.

For about 7 months ago I created a new site to show people that anyone can create fantastic stats from Google AdSense within seconds. The site was a massive success and I got several thousands of visitors each day from all over the world.

After one month Google decided that I took advantage of their trademark and I was no longer allowed to use Google AdSense on it. A few months later my server, which a friend of mine hosted, died with all of my source code.

Now Google AdSense Generator is back with four different languages. English, German, Spanish and Swedish.

The purpose of Google AdSense Generator

Last couple of years more and more people have tried to scam visitors by selling fantastic products which, according to the author, will make them become millionaires within just a few days.

The proof is more often than not, just a simple screenshots. Therefore I decided to show people from all over the world how easy it is to create a screenshot and why they shouldn’t trust them.

The future of Google AdSense Generator

At the moment I have four different languages and two of them is translated with Google Translator. My goal is to add a couple of more languages with the help of my visitors. For now I’m looking forward to Russian and Hindi.

If you are interested to have Google AdSense Generator in your language, just send me a screenshot and translation.

Visit Google AdSense Generator!

There a basically hundreds of great plugins for Wordpress depending on what you are looking for when it comes down to customizing your site. These plugins will change depending on if you are creating a niche site, personal blog, portfolio, photo blog, etc.

Here you find all plugins I recommend on a fresh install.

Akismet

With Akismet you’ll be almost entirely free from spam. I can’t recall any time when Akismet failed to delete an spam comment. Unfortunately it will sometimes block legitimate comments.

Broken Link Checker

After a few entries there will be sites closing down, entries removed and other things influencing your links. Since Google isn’t a fan of broken links I’m using Broken Link Checker to receive errors every time links are broken.

Cforms II

Cforms is a powerful and feature rich form plugin for Wordpress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.

Google XML Sitemaps

To be sure that Google will find and index all of your entries you should create a sitemap, which can easily be done with Google XML Sitemaps.

No Self Pings

Avoid getting trackbacks from yourself with No Self Pings. It doesn’t look very good to have a bunch of trackbacks for an post leading back to you.

Subscribe To Comments

Make it possible for your visitors to Subscribe To Comments and get new comments directly to their inbox.

WP Greet Box

Greet your visitors and convince them to subscribe for your posts with this plugin named WP Greet Box. Show different messages depending on if your visitors came from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

WP Super Cache

Reduce loading time with WP Super Cache. This plugin is not only for big sites with several thousands of visitors each day, but also great to reduce loading time on small niche sites.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Show related posts with YARPP and allow your visitor to find more interesting content on your site.

This sums up to 9 different plugins I think everyone should use. How many and which plugins do you use?

My last post about how to make money with Twitter raised a few questions about Twitters future thanks to automatic following systems. Some of you pointed out, with all right, that Twitter will lose some of its quality because of spam, resulting in Twitters death.

I think it’s important to point out that I don’t encourage spam and therefore you should see my last post as educational information instead of an advice.

Why spam don’t work on Twitter

There’s a reason why spam never will kill Twitter and that’s because you can’t spam people without first getting them to approve you.

Automatic following systems do work because people auto follow all their followers. As soon as you stop doing this and also remove notifications when someone decides to follow you, you will never be bothered about it.

Unfortunately we all love stats and with several thousands of auto followers, almost all stats about followers will become useless.

Twitter is working constantly to defeat spam

The team behind Twitter is working every day with new methods to defeat spam and make Twitter a better site.

I think Twitter could lower the amount of auto followers drastically if they had a limit for how many users you can follow each day. You will never get the time to follow over 1000 people and therefore I would like this limit to be around 100 users each day. Sure it may take 2-3 days before you are following everyone you want to follow with a brand new account, but do we have such a rush?

Will spam be the death of Twitter?

Twitter is getting more users every day and since Barack Obama used Twitter for his campaign it has spread all over the world. Twitter is still relative new and therefore a goldmine for us who tries to make money online.

Method to make money on Twitter

If you think about it I’m sure you’ll figure out several methods to make money on Twitter but personally I recommend affiliate programs.

1. Find affiliate programs with high revenue
2. Join Twitter
3. Post tweets with news within your niche
4. Download/Buy an auto-follower program
5. Post tweets with affiliate URL:s
6. Schedule tweets with FutureTweets

Depending on how many followers and your niche, it may sometimes be better to earn money for every visitor, and sometimes when they buy something.

What is an auto-follower program

An auto-follower program is a software which automatically begin following new accounts and if they don’t follow you back, this software will unfollow them.

By using this method you can get several thousands of new followers each day without having to lift a finger. Sure, some of them will also be a software, but with several thousands followers I can assure you that some of them are real.

Unfortunately they now have a limit so you can only follow 1000 new accounts each day, but if everyone decides to follow you, you will get 365 000 followers in a year.

Disadvantage of this method

People truly hate spam and if they figure it out they will stop following today. Therefore you need to act natural and post other tweets than just your affiliate links.

Twitter will eventually have to deal with this because otherwise people will begin leaving the site. To much spam is never a good thing.Until then, you can try to earn as much money as possible.

Making money online is real simple, but it takes time and some hard work before you’ll see the cash on your account. Yesterday I wrote an article about quality Vs quantity and explained that quality is actually not that important. At the same time you can save a tremendous amount of work if you just write about topics with a lot of money.

The advantage of searching for a topic

Instead of creating a niche site about any random topic you can filter out niches where advertisers pay high amounts of money.

If your visitors clicks on your advertising 50 times each day and you have a PPC of $1 you’ll receive $50. If you instead write about something that gives you a PPC of $2, the same number of clicks will earn you $100 each day.

How to find a monetizing topic

First you need to find a niche with a lot of advertisers. Go to Google Traffic Estimator and search for a couple of niches you enjoy writing about. Use quotation marks to find a specific niche. For an example, we have the term “make money online” with a PPC of 2 to 3 dollar.

When you have found a niche you need to find a specific topic to write about. Head over to Google Keyword Tool and search for your niche. Make sure synonyms is marked. If “Ferrari” is your niche, you’ll find a bunch of different models, Ferrari video, Ferrari history, and a lot more.

Just by simple changing your keywords you can change your revenue for several dollars per click.

I’ve always enjoyed great advertising and since I started working on my own ecommerce site I’ve been spending more time looking on advertising. On this blog I will not only lighten your mood with advertising but also show you the difference between great and not so great advertising.

Today I found this poster about domestic violence on Copyranter. It’s actually not that great but thanks to its clever design and motion detector you will look twice.

How it works

When the camera detects someone looking directly at the poster it will show a happy couple, but as soon as you turn your head the man will start abusing her.

Disadvantage with it

As many pointed out on Copyranter, domestic abuse does not consist only of men hitting woman and this ad will continue to build on this assumption. At the same time it does stand for most percentage of domestic violence and maybe they would miss their targeted audience if they showed a woman abusing a man.

What do you think? Does it send the right signals?

If you ask 100 popular bloggers if quality is important I’m sure 99 of them would say yes. If you on the other hand know how Google works you are aware that quality is not that important if you have quantity.

I’ve tried several different methods on my sites and my conclusion is that if you have a high number of posts, you will overcome the need of high quality content. Sure, if you want a confidence-inspiring blog like I’m working on here you will need high quality. But if you only want to make money, quantity is actually a good way around.

Advantages of high quality

If you deliver high quality content you will most certainly increase your chances of getting other people to write about you and link to your site.

You will also get a higher number of returning visitors since they found your site helpful. It’s also possible that they will tell their friends about your site. Word of mouth is actually still one of the best methods to get new visitors.

Advantages of high quantity

With a high number of posts you will get more titles to attract the visitors on Google. For an example, instead of writing one post titled Ferrari, you can write one post about Ferrari F430, one about Ferrari 360, etc. By doing this you will attract visitors with different searches.

Another great thing with high quantity is that Google rewards active sites, meaning you will rank higher than if you only post twice a year.

Try to combine them

Now you’ve heard good things about both quality and quantity. As a final word I must say that everyone is better off if you post high quality content. Think about that every time you publish a new post.

The best method to get a popular blog is of course to create new interesting content and share your own knowledge. If you maintain several hundreds of niche sites or write several entries each day it will eventually be difficult to create new content.

When you reach this point it’s a good idea to simple rewrite other people’s information into your own language. For an example, if you maintain a niche site about cars from Ferrari you can simple subscribe to blogs about Ferrari in English and then rewrite their information into your own language.

Remember that’s it not about copying other people’s information but to recreate it. You should not try to create a blog with other people’s entries, but it’s a good method to rewrite their information and post it into a small niche site with different language.

How to find good content

You can find great information on blogs, Wikipedia, books, Amazon, magazines, etc. By simple making a search on Google for your niche + blog, you will most certainly find hundreds of blogs with information about your niche.

When you’ve found a good blog, simple subscribe to it with Google Reader and daily get suggestions for great topics to write about.

How to rewrite other people’s content

When you’ve decided for a specific blog entry or articles you need to read the text twice. Write down main points into a piece of paper or notepad. The close the article and try to never look at it again.

Now you have several good main points which you can search more information about or simple try to write a article based solely on them.

You should never try to translate sentence after sentence since this will make your text look weird and “translated”.

Today anyone can create a blog and get visitors within minutes. This results in people creating sites every day, writing a few entries and then abandon the site. Therefore it’s important to write about something you enjoy.

One simple method to generate more content for your site is simple to rewrite others information into your own language (more about this later). Eventually you will get bored by doing this and that’s another reason why bloggers abandon their site.

Therefore it’s important to not only write about a niche you like, but also create new interesting information by simple sharing your own knowledge about the topic. I recall telling you that I’ve spent hours and hours reading about making money online and therefore I can write endlessly about it.

By simple reading books and experience new things you will never run out of content to write about and therefore never get bored.

Share your knowledge today!

If you have spent time searching for different methods of making money online you may have heard about Garry Conn. I’ve been a long time subscriber of GarryConn.com and even if I don’t comment very often I think there was a time when he had something interesting to say.

Creating a dictatorship

Lately Garry decided to stop accepting comments on his blog. Advice #1 popular bloggers will give you is to have a close connection with your readers and create interesting discussions on your articles. By placing duck tape on his visitors Garry is actually saying that he is right, and you are wrong.

Changing his design

Mistake number two was taken when he, at the same time, decided to change his design for something awful with only one purpose. The purpose of getting more clicks and earn more money.

I’m the first person to admit that I’m not very good at design and therefore my blog isn’t a masterpiece. But according to me it’s easy to read my articles and that’s all that matters.

I’ve done it as well

Actually I’m not saying that he’s not allowed to do it or that it will be a big mistake. I’m just saying that he will lose his regular visitors and may hurt his brand image.

Almost one year ago I did the same thing on one of my old blogs about file sharing. I lost all my regular visitors, lost most of the links to me and no one speaks about it anymore. At the same time I make enough money to eat once a day with just one single site.

If you don’t care about your visitors it’s a great method to earn more money, but if you do care, you can’t use an awful design that hurts your eyes when you try to read.

Update: I’m not sure why, but now Garry decided to remove all of his entries about this matter. And therefore there’s no link to his post.

Inspired by Patrick Curl.

All sites need a simple search engine and thanks to Google it’s now possible to create a great search engine for your site and make money within a few minutes.

First you need to register to Google AdSense, when that’s done you can simple follow my step by step tutorial.

1. Login to Google AdSense
2. Press AdSense-settings
3. Press AdSense for Search
4. Enter the information about your site and continue
5. Copy your HTML-code

By now you have set up a simple search engine with Google Custom Search and you are ready to add it on your site. By now you can simple paste your code into your theme or layout.

However, if you are using Wordpress there is actually an even simpler method.

Add Google Custom Search to Wordpress

Login to your Wordpress control panel and then under Appearance->Widgets, click to add a new text-widget.Change the title to Search or something relevant and then just add your code Google gave you.

Click “Done” and then “Save Changes”. Now you have a fully functional search engine that gives you some extra bucks.

I would without doubt place the domain on a top 10 of important things when it comes to creating a new site. You may have a bunch of good keywords, but the question you may ask yourself is, what is a good domain?

It’s actually more difficult to answer than you first think. Here I will list some of the rules I try to follow when ordering a new domain, but every rule has exceptions.

Your domain should be simple

What is simple?  Well, in lack of better words you can almost make this as a thumb rule. Your domain should be simple to spell, simple to remember, simple to pronounce, simple to share with your friends, etc.

You should simple make your domain simple!

Use keywords

Another important rule is to use good keywords for terms you would like to rank good at. For an example, if you would like to rank good at the term “free meat” it would be a good idea to buy the domain freemeat.com.

At the same time, you should not stack to many keywords. For the term, “travel to Los Angeles with train” you should not use traveltolosangeleswithtrain.com instead try using LAtravel.com.

Keep your domain short

This is actually a rule I skipped with googleadsensegenerator.com because it’s very easy to see what it consists of. If you have heard about making money online, I’m sure you’ve heard about Google AdSense. And who have not heard about a generator?

Anyhow, try to avoid long names like makemoneywithstefannilsson.com.

Invent new names

It may be difficult to find a domain with your specific keyword. Therefore it’s more and more common to invent a new name when it’s time to register your domain.

Here we have examples as Flickr and Pixlr.

Just remember to choose a simple domain which everyone can spell. It’s not such a good idea to loose half your visitors because they didn’t catch the spelling when their friends told them about the site.

Check if a domain is occupied

Since it will take some tries before you succeed to find a free domain, I suggest that you use my free tool to see if a domain is free.

The tool is free to use and I can’t see any search results.

As I wrote the other day, it’s important to surround yourself with exceptional people, which you can do with books. But there is actually a whole bunch of other reasons on why you should read books.

My reading

I loved reading books in my youth and I could spend hours each week reading interesting stories. Just laying in my bed, reading a couple of pages until i fell asleep. When i grew older I bought a TV and stopped reading.

A few years ago I began reading again and it has given me so much. Instead of reading about fiction as I did in my youth I started to read biographies from successful people who shared their knowledge and experiences with me.

Some great reasons

I’m sure you have heard the old saying that you need to learn from your mistakes. I think this is one of the most important lessons you can learn and without mistakes you will never develop. But why make the mistakes that several other people already have made? By reading books you will learn from their mistakes and get experience without having to throw away money.

Another great reason to read books is that they should light a fire inside of you. If you get a bit depressed and doubt your abilities you can read about other success stories and get inspired.

Choose your books carefully

Reading books takes time. Therefore I suggest that you start reading books based on recommendations from people you trust. I suggest that you take a look in the navigation for my library where I review interesting books that I like and recommend.

If you read an interesting book, please send me the title and I will read it.

According to studies you will become a combination of your three closest friends. Meaning if your closest friends spend their day in front of their television being lazy you will also become lazy.

I know this is something few of us think about and therefore we may spend most of our time with friends from our childhood. I’m first to agree on having a long friendships could be something fantastic, but you should have it with moderation. Instead of spending all your time with your friends who have settled down, spend just a few hours each week and try to find some friends that still tries to develop.

Move if you can

I encourage almost everyone I come in contact with to move away from their childhood place, to seek new opportunities and learn something new.

For about 200 years ago people grew up and shared their whole lives together with their parents at the same place. Today it’s possible to travel the whole world and still be able to speak with your parents every day.

Just by trying to manage everything by yourself you’ll se how easy it really is and as a result you will gain a fantastic confidence.

Connect through internet

It can be difficult to move for several reasons. You may still be to young, you may have two kids and a wife to support, etc. Thanks to the internet it’s now possible to come in contact and become friends with other people just like you, from your own home.

You can come in contact with exceptional people on Twitter, their blogs, Jaiku, etc. Just remember that they don’t have to be famous to be good for you.

Which people do you want?

Write down a list on five to ten things you would like to be. If you want to be optimistic, find someone who is optimistic. If you would like to be more creative, find someone who is creative. It’s easy to find the right people when you know what you want.

This is actually a great tip you can use later on when it’s time to find topics to write about on your blog or site. When it’s time to create more niche sites it will become more and more difficult to find new topics to create sites about. Therefore I recommend you to find a couple of big boards where you can read through some of the most popular topics in your niche and create sites about them.

Big boards are easy to find, but if you would like some tips you could always use big-boards.com. Another good method to find topics later on are to search for “forum + your niche” on Google.

Search for your main niche

If your main niche is travel, you should visit travel forums to get more information about popular cities, etc. Then you could easily create a site for each city.