www.youtube.com/watch?v=52m-7eMgrVo

This video taken during June when I was giving a talk about how to make money online to my dear classmates.  They were amazed that we can actually make money online by just spending around 2 hours per day.  What are they doing now is just surfing the internet, chatting on msn, chatting on Facebook, and posting something on their friends walls or simply watch some videos on YouTube.

Well, that’s a “good youth life” I told them.

However some of them indeed have a blog but they just blog for their own personal satisfaction and to connect to their friends and family.  They never know that blogging can generate them some income.

Feel free to comments about the video.

p/s: My English is not that good because it’s my second language. I am a Malaysian.

At first I plan to get a “ready made” portable hdd brand Transcend because my friend is using it and it works great, fast and reliable because it also come with a shock proof enclosure.

But then my “DIY urge” overcome my feeling to get the “ready made” portable hdd and I made up my mind buying the hdd and the enclosure separately.

I would like to get the cheapest and the highest capacity hdd available on the market now because I plan to use it as long as it working fine and never plan to upgrade into new hdd if the hdd still have empty space on its partition.

We have Seagate drive up to 2Tb.  But it’s a 3.5″ drive which later you have to buy a much more expensive enclosure.  The 3.5″ hdd enclosure is way much more expensive than the 2.5″ enclosure because they have to come with power supply because a 3.5″ drive is a desktop drive and the usb current cannot power this drive.

So it’s a no no no then.

I ask around and my friend recommends me to get a Western Digital drive.  I get the Western Digital Scorpio Blue with capacity of 500Gb.

Western Digital Scorpio Blue

It’s a 2.5″ drive mean for laptop but I will get an enclosure to change it into a portable hard drive because of its small size and “portability”.

Then I get myself an unknown model of enclosure which have the brand name SAMSUNG there but I bet that this is another infringement of brand names.  Never mind, as long as its working.

The enclosure working great and fast. (Its not related?)

But the built quality is very crappy than not come to one week I break the fire wire usb port connector!
The PCB build is very tiny and micro including the usb port, that’s why we easily break it.(I guess.)

*PCB is the hardware that convert and connected the hdd into a usb module before you connect it to your laptop/computer usb port.

So then I decide to get myself a much more reliable built hdd enclosure.

It’s an enclosure from eGear. I don’t know this brand name as well!

eGear ePA 2HE

eGear ePA 2HE For Sale

eGear ePA 2HE Green

I took the green color. It come along with the PCB of course and a white “Y” usb cable connector and also a fine built pouch which is fluffy enough to act as a shock proof or drop safe pouch! Nice!

But there some problems experience with this hdd. I always rip my DVD and then store them in the .mkv format and use VLC player to play it back.  There’s a reduce quality of playback when I play the video directly from this hdd now after switching to eGear enclosure and my hdd always freezed. I’m looking for solution at the internet and there’s some idea that my hdd might have been overloaded. But it have a lot of empty space if to say that it have been overload.

The speed transfer is very crappy even if both end of the “Y” cable is inserted into my laptop usb port.  But then I found something that makes the performance of this hdd better.

I change the port where I always plug it in and to my surprise it is indeed working way more faster than before and rarely frozen.  This port is a high speed port, I only plugging in one end of the “Y” cable and it works fine than before.  So I guess it’s not about the enclosure but the port where you plug it in.

But then if I want to compare with the fake SAMSUNG enclosure, that fake enclosure work much more faster.  Its just that the built quality is very bad!

For some blogger, a web browser is more than enough for them to work on their blog(s).  But sometimes, we need a little bit more than just a web browser.  For me myself, I need more than a just web browser to keep my blogs online and maintaining them.

So, today I want to share what softwares than I think will be useful for bloggers to install and use to be more efficient.

1.  Web Browsers

Yes, when I mentioned a “web browsers” it means more than just an Internet Explorer.  I personally use Google Chrome which I use most of the time, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera, and not forgetting our “best friend ever”. Internet Explorer.

The reason for me to have more than one browser is because I have more than one identity as a blogger.  For blogs where I reveal my true identity, I will just using a Google Chrome because it is light and fast.  For some other blogs where I appear as other pen name, I use those other browser because I want to keep the cookies for that blogs so that it was organized and you will not mistakenly login into wrong account and making your account being banned.  For example, Facebook, Youtube, and Ebay where I associate this money making blogs to.

2.  Softaculous

Well, this is not exactly a desktop software.  It is a web application installed on your cPanel if it is available on your web hosting.  Softaculous is a script installer far way better than Fantastico Deluxe.  Fantastico Deluxe installation is “dirty” and making a lot of mess and holes in security system of the installation.  For example, a WordPress blogs database will be automatically installed with name wrp_1, wrp_2 and so on if you have more than one WordPress blogs in your web hosting account.  Softaculous in the other hands have a clean install of the script(so far with WordPress).  I’ve been using this web software since the beginning of this year where I notice there is a new feature added in my cPanel.

3.  FileZilla

This software really do sound like “Godzilla” doesn’t it?

But this is actually a files transfer protocol client(ftp) client software.  This software is used to do bulk upload or download from your web server.  I know that there are not many blogger are using this software anyway because even me are rarely using this software anymore since WordPress have been improving their web based theme and plugin installer.  But we still cannot escape using this great software when we want to back up our blog.

4.  WinRAR

WinRAR is simply a compression software. I rather choose to compress my file in .rar format because it compress a lot more better and there’s so much other option better then conventional .zip format.

5.  Notepad

Yes.  I know you are laughing there.  But never underestimate notepad or this .txt file format.  Why I always save important keywords inside a notepad or a .txt file.  Beside that, there are many of keyword research softwares or tools only have the ability to import keywords from a .txt files.

6.  Keyword Research Tools

I don’t have any recommendation for desktop keyword research tools but I use a lot of web based Google Adword Keyword Tools.

7.  Bookmarking Service

Onlywire, I only use them.  They will forward or bookmark your post to other services up to 27 services at once.

I just found out that if you put wordpress caption inside a list, your post will not appear.

I mean like this.

<ol>
      <li>[ caption ....<img.... />[/ caption ]</li>
      <li>Some list.</li>
</ol>

I don’t know wheter it is a bugs or not… Just sharing…

I just realize that I have more than 10 blogs to manage.  They are all fully developed and what I have to do is just to post an article on them.  But that is too much strain for one man show blogger.  Don’t you think so?

Since the beginning of my blogging hobby, I numbered my blogs because I’m an organized person.  By numbering the blogs, I hope that I can update the blogs by their number orders.  No matter how long it takes, I make myself stick to that particular blogs before proceed to the next blog in order of the numbering that I’ve set before hand.

But…

I found out that this is not very flexible and not very productive because sometimes I don’t have any idea what to post to the blogs on the current order.  Following the discipline I make myself, which is to stick to this blog is indeed a waste of time.  So to overcome this problem I make a new rule for myself.  If I don’t have any idea at that very moment of the blog, I will just proceed to the next blog in the order.  But I only come back to that blog only after its turn again in the ordering number.  Well, this system actually is an ancient system used by the Emperor Of China to visits his wives.

But… there’s also another problem that I encounter throughout the days of being a blogger.

Sometimes, ideas come streaming down my brain just like the river flowing down the hill.  It’s good but I have discipline to update my blogs in an ordering order.

The problem sometimes happen when I’ve passes the blogs turn and the ideas coming down to my head.  But no!  I can’t break my own rule.  I must wait for that blog turn again before I get my hands on them.  I know what in your mind.  By the time I get back to the blog later, I forget about the idea later.

There are two ways to overcome this problem actually.

The conditional way is to wrote down that idea on a piece of paper or your note book.

My way which I always use is I go to that blog which the idea is for, I wrote a headlines, type some keywords and save as draft and then leave it.  When it is the time for I need to wrote something for that blog then I just can easily reminded.

Hyphened Domain Versus Other TLDs Domain (This link will open in new tab/window.)

But several days after that(today), I was having a casual conversation with my friend which is not an internet marketeer but more as ordinary internet end user.  We are talking about tastycakeever and then he show me a video that was posted on YouTube about our topic.  The video was interesting.  But that’s not the important thing I want to tell you in this post.

As you know YouTube have two column, one for the video and the other smaller column is for related video and sometimes they put an advertisement by Google there.

Yes, the important findings that I want to share to you guys is about the advertisement that I see there!

For your information, Google Adsense(the advertisement provider) is the most advance in contextual advertisement where they only show relevant advertisement for that particular individual web page.  So that’s mean the advertisement that I saw just now is VERY RELEVANT to tastycakeever!

Wow!

I yelled at the screen when I realize that.  The hobby that I never thought to monetize is possible to be my next income stream.

Em… I have to cut this into two part, if you want to read more, please do because I don’t want everything appears on my homepage. I will share what I do next. Please do read the rest of this post to find out what happen.

As a wise webmaster, or internet marketeer to be exact I won’t put Google Ads on that blog because the income per click from Google Ads are not that profitable nowadays.  There are better way.  For this time I am choosing to do an affiliate marketing.  Clickbank.

So I visit Clickbank website and logging in.  After that I go to market place and search for tastycakeever.  To make myself more surprise there were more than 600 pages search result returning from my search!  But that was only a raw search.  So I use the advance search feature and setting up some filter and then do the search again.  The result now are filtered and I should easily choose the best product according to my intuitive internet marketing heart.

But then I remember I was using the free Blogger blog services.

Ah~ Say No To Blogger For Serious Blog!

I said that to myself.  It seems that WordPress is still the best blogging platform when you are serious to make money from blog.  Because with WordPress self hosted, you own your content 100% and no one can take it from you.  For affiliate purpose, there are a lot of tools that exist in term of plugins(add on) for WordPress.  Comparing to Blogger, which is primitively for blog publishing there are still a lot to improve and wish list that have not yet come true in Blogger.

So I turn off the custom domain settings in my Blogger Dashboard and then go to NameCheap to point my DNS to my web hosting provider.

It is always good to wake up in the morning and then have a good breakfast after your body have been fasting from food.

So after having my breakfast, sitting in the office all alone without nothing to do I was surfing the internet.  Surfing about things that I like.  My hobby.  Newly discovered hobby.

Then while searching and reading about it in Wikipedia, something came cross my mind.

“Hey, why don’t I make a blog about my findings?”

So I was thinking and saying to myself.

“I always use a selfhosted WordPress to build my blogs, why don’t this time I try and use Blogger(blogspot) the free blog provider by Google.”

So I go to Blogger.com and create myself one blog.  Let’s say the hobby that I found out is about cake.  So I choose to have the domain name as “tastycakeever.blogspot.com” derived from “tasty cake ever” keywords.  This keyword I found out by researching using Adword Keyword Tool and Google Insights.

But…

“Wait!”

I found out that we can use our own domain name with blogger.

So I straightly go to NameCheap and find myself the domain name but I was disappointed that tastycakeever.com have been taken leaving only .net, .org, and other TLDs.

But I am saying to myself that I must have a .com domain.  So I search again a new domain name that is like this, tasty-cake-ever.com.  It was AVAILABLE!  Including all other TLDs.

But I was still in doubt on which domain to take.  I can buy both of them but I am on tight budget and I don’t want to waste my money buying an undeveloped domain later.

So I go and post my question at various forums.  Most of the answer is asking me to stay away from hyphened domain and only take that domain as a last resort.

And I would like to share that little information to you all here.

But there’s also another person, he suggest that I check the domain tastycakeever.com and see how it look like.  Try do a search in Google with keyword tasty cake ever and see where the domain tastycakeever.com rank.  If it does not rank, then I should just take tasty-cake-ever.com and outrank the tastycakeever.com.

However that was based on his experience and I think it would be good to share his idea here as well.

But for you guys, what say you?

Writing a blog is fun where you can express your feelings and thoughts through your writings.  You can say about almost anything, from your personal experience into an article which educate other people about doing something.  For example, you can write a blog about your daily life activities for your friends and family to read or you may also write a blog about your hobby.  Let say you have a hobby to go to jungle trekking every weekend.  You can blog about it and post and update about your activity every week.  Don’t forget this fun.

While growing your blog from personal interest, you might as well attracts a strangers to read your blog.  These strangers and then change and becoming your loyal readers.  They might as well tell their other friends about your blog.  Just like the example above.  These people might as well have a very high interest in doing jungle trekking and perhaps they are looking for a new place to go for a jungle trekking.  They found your blog.

When your blog have grow into this level, then maybe you think you can make this hobby into a money maker.

So you contacts your local hotel and offer them to put their banners on your blog.  Maybe around $100 per month.

There you make an income from your blog.

But from what I observed, too many new beginner in blogging have set their mind into “making money from blog” rather than developing the blog based on their personal interest.  This is not wrong at all.  But as times goes by, and there still no income coming from that particular blog, and you will get disappointed and getting tired to go on.  In the end, the blog die and when the time to renew the domain and the hosting, you just let it expire.

That’s why from the beginning of this series I was encouraging you to write a blog based on your passion.  So what if you cannot make money from it now?  It’s about fun and sharing to the world.

Below is the list for all articles in this series. Please enjoy reading it.

1. What is blog?
2. The Importance of Debit Card
3. Paypal – What is that?
4. Get Yourself a Domain Name
5. Get Yourself a Webhosting
6. Most Powerfull Blogging Platform : WordPress
7. Installing WordPress On Your Webhosting
8. Optimizing Settings for Your New Blog
9. Installing MUST HAVE Plugins
10. Change Theme
11. Submit Your Site To Google Webmaster
12. Submit Your Site To Yahoo! Site Explorer
13. Submit Your Site To MSN
14. Feed and Feedburner
15. Email Subscription
16. Last Words For Dear Bloggers

By the way, this blog only depends on search engine only. I don’t do any back link campaign yet.

So far I was only using WordPress.com and Blogger.com to syndicate my content at other places.  Oh, I forgot there’s also FeedBurner who is helping me out her.

Beside that I submit and verify this blog to Google, Yahoo, and Bing.  While I manage to get my blog to page to at Google SERP for my targetted keyword, I was surprise to see that I ranked first page at Yahoo SERP with potition #2.

Well, it seems that Yahoo love this blog more than other search engine yet.

Wish me good luck, all the best to you all too.

First I wrote this post and then just leave it and I plan to update it throughout the day.

Then I manage to upgrade my blog WordPress Theme Studio to WordPress version 3.0 and play with

Overall, I did not pay much attention to every updated version that WordPress released to public.  I just want to let my self to use the best and the latest version of WordPress so there will be no security issue for my blog.

But in WordPress version 3.0 I found out that they have change the default WordPress theme into a new theme.  Well, let’s say goodbye to kubrik then.  Kubrik have been the default theme since I use WordPress on version 1.8 and now WordPress have gone through a serious major improvement that it now reach version 3.0

The interface and the default colour scheme for the administration page is almost like you’re using MAC.  I’m not a big fan of MAC, in fact I never use MAC. I am a Windows fan boy and I program windows application, never for OSX.  But the interface is clean and “easy to eye”.  So congratulation to WordPress developer team for all the great works.

I will put their link on my blog roll since now.

WordPress 3.0

That project is progressing slow.

But at the same time, I am more focusing on making a new blog in my own national language, Bahasa Melayu.  It’s been a long time since I want to write in my national language.

This blog doesn’t aim for money but more to interest and personal satisfaction.

Bad news do come sometimes in not the best time.  Well, it’s a bad news, what do you expect anyway?

I stopped selling on ebay for awhile.  This is because I lost my passion on it and ebay is not something that we can set and forget.  We need to maintain it.  Maintain a good communication with buyers, so that they don’t open a dispute when you did not answer their questions.  Overall, it were a good experience managing an ebay store.  Beside, it did contribute to my second largest online income.  But money is not everything. I have something in mind which is more important to achieve as I want to concentrate more on my study now and only do the internet marketing part time.

A little bit about my study.

At first, I put my self to take the course for Bachelor of Science in Computer Science.  But then I encounter a friend who have been graduated for years in this course and keep on complaining that he don’t have a good life.  Everything is about work.  Everything is about programming.  Everything is about codes until he decide to quit for his job and now he is happy to work as just a tutor and also a bible teacher.

So I’m asking around what would be good? I end up changing from Computer Science to Civil and Construction Engineering.  I was lucky because I can ask for an exemption for certain subjects and I did not need to repeat the whole course.

I have finish setting up the old domain into an empty blog and then I do some keyword brain storming.  Yes, I brain storm the main keywords using my own brain while reading the sales page of the product that I want to promote.  This main keyword later will be used to generate more keywords that will be the “child keywords”.

Now I am on the step where I need to setup this old domain with all the main keywords and also setting up new identity that is not myself.  I don’t want this niche to be combined and being promoted using my real identity because I want to protect this niche from my competitors.

Here is my actions plan.

1. Optimized the basic settings. (Done)
2. Install theme. (Done)
3. Install plugins. (Done)
4. Feedburner. (Done)
5. Google Webmasters Tools (Done)
6. Yahoo! Site Explorer (Done)
7. Live Search Webmasters Tools (Done)
8. WordPress.com blog with the same subdomain name with my main domain.
9. Blogspot.com with the same subdomain name with my main domain.