It’s about time I did another income report seeing as it’s been over six months since I did my last one. The blog is still consistently making money though affiliate sales and I see no signs of stopping. Look below.

July 2008
Commission Junction: $548.21
Adsense: $12.63

For a grand total of: $560.84!

As long as people keep following the free Start Blogging guide, I’ll continually pull plenty of income from the blog.

Blogging for money

Do you blog for money and post your income reports? If so, I want to feature it here. Leave a comment below with a link to your blog’s earning post and I’ll add it to the list.

The post Income Report: July 2008 first appeared on StartBlogging.net.

1. Indomagz – (Live Demo) – God I love magazine themes. Tons of features, all better than the feature before it. Make sure you take a look. If I didn’t have a theme picked out, I’d probably be configuring Indomagz right now.
2. Crush – (Live Demo) – Crush is the second magazine theme this week. It’s beautiful, minimal and clean. This is a bit more of a simpler design, bot good nonetheless.
3. Unwakeable – (Picture Demo) – Two columns. Not a magazine. Good mix of colors. It’s simple too.

Top 3 New WordPress Plugins of the Week

1. Header Image Rotator changes the header image based on different time variables throughout the day. A must-install plugin for those who want a much more dynamic design.
2. picasaView easily embeds your Picasaweb galleries into your blog. The gallery is slick looking and this plugin is incredibly useful for those running photo-blogs.
3. Statrix collects data about your blogs visitors and creates charts and lists of the full data history in real-time. You can browse, filter and export immediately after plugin activation. The plugin keeps the full visits history, so you can make reports about any period of time you want.

Have a new theme, plugin, or blog you’re working on? Contact me to have it featured for free.

The post Weekly Updates: 8/03/08 first appeared on StartBlogging.net.

Shut Down Your Distractions

Stop checking your email every seven minutes. Put up an away message on your instant messaging clients while you’re doing work. Physically remove your cellphone from the room. Do whatever it takes to remove yourself from things that will distract you. With no distractions, there’s nothing left to do but work.

Use LeechBlock

LeechBlock is a Firefox plugin that stops you from visiting certain sites at specific times of the day. If I didn’t have LeechBlock installed, I’d never get any work done. I have it set to block the sites below from 9AM to 6PM. Doing so allows me to work a full-time shift without interruption.

Sites I currently block:

• Digg, Reddit
• YouTube, Revver, Break
• Digital Point, 4815162342
• Twitter, Facebook
• Netvibes, Wikipedia

LeechBlock at Mozilla.org

Work in a Quiet Environment

How can you possibly work if you can’t think? Shut off the TV while you work. I don’t care if the Price is Right is on or Judge Judy is about to lay the smack-down; you don’t need to see it if you’re supposed to be doing work.

Also, try listening lyric-less music. Classical music has been shown to increase productivity and concentration. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra works surprisingly well for me. Try it and you’ll be surprised at the results.

Write the Post Out by Hand

This is one approach I hardly use, but it is, by far, the most effective method of completing a post without any distractions. Grab a few pieces of paper, a pen, and go outside. The novelty of getting away from the keyboard and writing on a pad never wears thin.

Reward Yourself

When I have a post that I really, really don’t want to write, I always resort to rewarding myself. I’ll work for an allotted amount of time or type a certain number of words before I can take a break. It works, but at the same time it feels like a punishment.

What methods do you use to finish work you just don’t want to do?

The post How to Finish a Post That You Keep Putting Off first appeared on StartBlogging.net.

1. Secondary – (Live Demo) – Secondary is two-column fluid unique design. There are quite a few features you don’t see everyday on a typical WordPress theme design. Check it out.
2. Vita – (Live Demo) – Vita makes good use of the header navigation. It’s a three-column fixed width theme with plenty of customization options.
3. Web 2.0 Blue – (Live Demo) – This is another simple and minimal theme. If you’re looking for something with no frills, this is the theme for you.

Top 3 New WordPress Plugins of the Week

1. Broken Links Remover checks your posts for broken links and removes them until you fix the link. Insanely useful and will keep your readers from clicking dead links and becoming aggravated.
2. Events Manager is a plugin to manage events such as music gigs, art expositions, or just job meetings. Events Manager inserts an Events page in the Manage menu of WordPress Administration, to let you insert, modify and delete events. You can describe events specifying their date and location, and also add a few notes.
3. Snazzy Archives takes your boring archives page and snazzes it up. No longer will your archive page just be hundreds of links. Snazzy Archives should be incorporated as a main feature of WordPress.

I’ve been slow on updating this week as I’ve been on vacation for quite a few days. I’ll be updating this week on how to keep a blog alive when you don’t have time to update.

Have a new theme, plugin, or blog you’re working on? Contact me to have it featured for free.

The post Weekly Updates: 7/27/08 first appeared on StartBlogging.net.

1. Trackback

Trackbacks are used to notify authors of other blogs that you’ve referenced them or wrote something similar in an article you authored. You don’t necessarily have to link to an article to send a trackback. You can find the option to send a trackback at the bottom of each new post. Just copy and paste the link to another article and you’ll send a trackback. Trackbacks are often overlooked as it is just easier to send a pingback than a trackback.

2. Pingback

Pingbacks occur when you link to an article on another blog. The author will receive an email notification that you published a post that links back to one of their own previously published works. Pingbacks are commonly seen in the comments section of an article. They link back to the newly published article. Pingbacks differ from trackbacks because you have to actually link to the article within your post to notify the author.

3. Timestamps

Timestamps allow you to write a post and have it publish at the time and date of your choosing. Timestams are best described with an example. As I type this line and finish this article, it is currently Sunday night at 11:21PM. Yet, the post wasn’t published until 8AM Tuesday Morning. And no, I didn’t have to wake up at 8 just to hit the publish button. I set the timestamp to 8AM, pressed publish, and let WordPress take control.

Timestamps are usually overlooked by new bloggers. However, with the launch of WordPress 2.5, timestamps have been renamed and made more prominent.

Look familiar? Selecting edit will allow you to choose the time and date that your article will be published.

4. Widgets

Widgets are different sections you can add in your WordPress blog’s sidebar without ever having to edit HTML or CSS. Within widget ready themes, you can drag and drop different sections on your blogs sidebar to rearrange how and where your content is displayed.

5. Revisions

Revisions are relatively new to the WordPress scene. They allow authors to view previously saved versions of their work. It’s incredibly useful for a post that you have been developing for awhile and have made numerous edits to. Revisions let you quickly recover accidentally deleted content with just a click of a button. Frankly, revisions are long overdue and if you’re not on WordPress 2.6 yet, it’s time you upgrade.

6. Guest Posts

Guest posts are posts authored by individuals outside a blog’s typical authors. Guest posts benefit both parties. The blog that received the guest post is given free material and the author of the guest post receives exposure. Guest posts are a great way to build relationships with other bloggers in the same niche.

Can you think of any other terms new bloggers should learn?

The post Trackbacks vs. Pingbacks and Other Weird Blogging Terms. first appeared on StartBlogging.net.

1. SuperFresh – (Live Demo) – Superfresh is a clean, green theme with two-columns and plenty of nifty extra features.
2. Sensate – (Live Demo) – Simple, free, blue. All strong qualities of a good blog design.
3. Dum-dum – (Live Demo) -This theme is another clean and simple design. It’s very candy-ish with pleasing colors.

Top 3 New WordPress Plugins of the Week

1. Fluency Admin is a plugin that changes the admin interface in WordPress version 2.5 and above. The changes made in 2.5 are favorable, but if you want a different look, Fluency Admin is definitely worth the install.
2. Internal Link Building offers Wiki-like functionality on certain keywords. This a great SEO plugin that automatically builds internal deep-links allowing search engine spiders and readers to follow your content.
3. Paginated Comments breaks down comments into multiple pages, thus limiting the file-size of articles with a large number of comments.

Have a new theme, plugin, or blog you’re working on? Contact me to have it featured for free.

The post Weekly Updates: 7/20/08 first appeared on StartBlogging.net.

Currently there are a whopping 10 themes available to download and it really is a mix and match of quality. I recommend checking out the Tarski, Dum-Dum, and Monotone themes. Hopefully WordPress.org can revive the once-thriving theme community it had. It may be hard considering a lot of theme developers have made the effort of establishing their own portfolios.

For now, you can submit your themes to be included in the directory (don’t forget we feature new themes once a week too). There are a few requirements, including no paid sponsor links, but they aren’t too stringent. All themes must pass a manual inspection however. This means thorough testing to ensure there are no exploits or flaws within the code.

Take a look and be sure to test out some new themes and leave comments and feedback for developers. Help the community grow.

The post WordPress.org Re-Opens Theme Directory first appeared on StartBlogging.net.

1.Akismet

Hands down, Akismet is the most useful plugin ever created. It automatically checks comments posted to your blog against their web service to determine whether or not the posted comment is spam. They claim to have eliminated over six billion spam comments.

Akismet automatically comes installed with every version of WordPress, but it is often not activated. If Akismet is currently sitting in your plugin folder unactivated, activate it! It can save you hours of reading and deleting spam comments on your blog.
Akismet Homepage

2.All-in-one-SEO Pack

All-in-one-SEO works wonders for those with little or no SEO experience. It assists you in adding proper titles, keywords, and descriptions to both your blog as a whole and individual posts as well. It is a very powerful tool that will greatly increase your search engine influence when used correctly.
All-in-one-SEO Pack Homepage

3.Cforms

Cforms automatically creates complex custom contact forms with ease. Select the type of input, add some text, and viola! You have a working form for your readers to get in touch with you. They are fully customizable and will save you hours of time. Also, you’ll want to take a look around the author’s site. It is beautifully designed and one of my favorite blogs to look at.
Cforms Homepage

4.Comment Relish

This plugin is a little less popular than the previous plugins, but it is extremely powerful when it comes to retaining readers. Comment Relish sends an automated ‘thank-you’ to new commenters on your blog. You can customize the thank you message to whatever you please. I usually encourage them to subscribe to my feed and tell them to email me if they run into an issues.
Comment Relish Homepage

5.Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin automatically creates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog and posts. The sitemap is used by major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Ask to assist them in indexing new and old content. This plugin spares the time and trouble it takes to create sitemaps manually.
Google XML Sitemaps Generator Homepage

6.WordPress Automatic Upgrade

Want to simplify the potentially deadly process of upgrading your WordPress installation? Well, this is the plugin for you. It automatically backs up your files and databases, allows you to save them, disables all plugins, downloads the latest version of WordPress, installs the latest WordPress, upgrades the database, and reenables all plugins. It does all of this in about 15 seconds. Not bad considering it usually takes 10-15 minutes to do it manually.
WordPress Automatic Upgrade Homepage

7.WP Easy Uploader

This is a relatively new plugin that I recently started recommending, but it is incredibly useful and now installed on all of my blogs. WP Easy Uploader makes the process of adding new plugins, themes, or files to your blog as easy as clicking a button. You no longer have to FTP in and manually upload the files.
WP Easy Uploader Homepage

The post 7 Plugins Every New Blog Needs to Have first appeared on StartBlogging.net.

Major Updates

1. Tracked changes. You can now view edits to current posts in a Wiki-style format. Gone are the old methods of saving and potentially losing lost content. You can track all changes from all authors.
2. Press This! You can now add a bookmark to your toolbar for each blog that when clicked, will launch a ‘Quick Post’ feature that will allow you to quickly update or save ideas for updates.
3. Theme Preview. This allows you to test out new themes before making them public. It’s extremely useful when developing new themes or making alterations that could potentially bring your site down.

Minor Updates

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Click here to download WordPress 2.6.
Click here for help upgrading.

The post WordPress 2.6 Released! first appeared on StartBlogging.net.

1. Typography – (Live Demo) – This two-column theme is sleek and clean, focused on typography. However, I do like my themes with a bit more color.
2. Hamasaki – (Live Demo) – This theme is a bit more conventional and professional. It has enough ad space for any aspiring blogger..
3. Personal Mag Theme – (Live Demo) – A more minimal theme focused on content rather than design. There is no set ad space. This means you’ll need to alter code on your own to incorporate ads into the design.

Looking for more themes? Be sure to check out 15 Free Fresh WordPress Themes.

Top 3 New WordPress Plugins of the Week

1. Email Commenters is a quick simple plugin that will allow you to get in contact with all of those who have a comment on a certain post.
2. Enhanced Recent Posts expands on WordPress built-in recent posts function. You can choose a number of options that gives you more control over the most recent posts displayed.
3. Tippy allows you to create pop-up custom tips when a user hovers over select links in your post. Useful for expanding an article without taking up more space.

Featured Blogs this Week

1. A Question of Perspective – From owner Elisa: A mishmash of things with a common goal: to get my brain fluid enough to finish the book I started. And to collect folks’ Google Chat Status updates.

Have a new theme, plugin, or blog you’re working on? Contact me to have it featured for free.

The post Weekly Updates: 7/13/08 first appeared on StartBlogging.net.