» Blogging

Six Reasons Why You’ll Love the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plug-In

Bill — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:47 +0000

This is a guest post by Emma Hamilton. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Organizing your blog post in advance is really a thing that most bloggers struggle with. Even I struggled a lot when I was new to the world of blogging.

Somehow, I felt I haven’t come across the perfect way of planning and scheduling blog posts.

There was no solution to this problem until WordPress came up with the WordPress Editorial Calendar plug-in.

I don’t know about other folks but I find it perfect for scheduling my blog posts. That’s why I’d like to share with you the features of this plug-in that I’ve come to love.

Let’s take a look at six reasons why every blog writer will love the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plug-In:

Planning Your Blog Posts Is Easier Now

With the editorial calendar you can not only view blog posts up to five weeks but also schedule any number of posts by clicking the month in the calendar. So you can have a record of the scheduled blog posts and also those that are saved and need to be finalized.

The Whole Calendar Can Be Viewed On One Screen

Instead of browsing through all the draft posts, the Editorial Calendar Plug-in helps you to view them on one single page. It is advantageous to those who have lots of blog posts lined up.

Rescheduling Blog Posts Have Also Become Easy

This WordPress plug-in is drag and drop. So if you have scheduled a blog for a day (say Tuesday the 21st) you can drag it to reschedule it for some other day (Tuesday the 28th).

Structure Your Blog Content

When you can view all the scheduled blog posts at a glance it becomes easy for you to find out whether you have missed out a specific topic or not. In the Editorial Calendar you will also have an option for quick edit as well as to change titles of blog posts, content and even publishing time if required.

Be More Creative With Editorial Calendar Plug-In

Organizing your blog posts, so far have taken quite a lot of your precious time. The Editorial Calendar saves your time that would have gone into scheduling or rescheduling your blog posts. So you can be more creative and devote more time in what you are best at, writing content.

The Visits to Your Blog Increases

Fresh and time-sensitive content keeps the readers engaged in your blog. The number of visitors increases as readers seek for timely posts. Even the search engines respond to regular and frequent posts and send more searches on your way.

Drawbacks of Editorial Calendar Plug-In

The Editorial Calendar Plug-In comes with a few limitations, though not many. One of the most annoying that I find is that the draft posts that have been created before the plug-in was installed don’t appear automatically in the editorial calendar. So once you have installed the plug-in it is best to use it for creating the draft posts.

Have you used the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plug-In? Let’s us know what you think about it in the comments below.

About the Author: Emma Hamilton is a freelance content writer and she writes articles and blogs on Time Warner Cable and others Web technologies.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Six Reasons Why You’ll Love the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plug-In

How To Create An Addon Domain

Bill — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 02:31:57 +0000

When you sign up for your own web hosting account you typically receive x number of free additional domains. This means you can host other websites (domains) on your one web hosting account. These are called Addon Domains or Sub Domains. We’ll be discussing Addon Domains for this post.

For example, with my HostGator account I pay for one site and get unlimited free additional sites (domains) that I can host on my one account.

So what does that mean? Well, let’s take for example a main website called www.mymainsite.com. When you install this site on your web hosting site, it can be located in the root folder which is /.

Control Panel (cpanel)

When you want to add another website to your hosting site, you would pick Addon Domain. I’m using HostGator and the management tool called cpanel or Control Panel as it’s called. Here is a screenshot of what the Addon Domain menu selection looks like.

After selecting Addon Domains you’ll be presented with the following screen.

After adding the my2ndsite.com to your main website, you’ll have a tree structure like this – /public_html/my2ndsite. This is where you can add WordPress if that’s what you’re wanting to do. So you have a WordPress installation in the root at / and one at /public_html/my2ndsite.

Fantastico

With cpanel under my HostGator account, I can use the Fantastico software tool to install another instance of WordPress.

Now that I’ve created an Addon Domain, when the WordPress install asks me what domain I want to install WordPress on, I can slect the my2ndsite.com domain. The install directory would be left blank after selecting the my2ndsite.com domain. This will install WordPress into the root of the Addon Domain my2ndsite.com.

The admin username and password asked for during the WordPress install is the username and password you will use when you want to administer WordPress on your my2ndsite.com/wp-admin.

The Site name is the blog title and the Description is the blog tag line that will show up under the blog title.

Name Servers

A Name Server is where you’re web hosting is located. Although there’s more to a name server than that, I’ll leave it at that since all you really need to know for this task is where your name servers should be pointing to.

Let’s say you used GoDaddy to register your new domain name my2ndsite.com. You need to go change the name servers from GoDaddy’s default name servers to your web hosting account name servers.

For example, let’s say the two default nameservers are nsx.godaddy.com where x is a number. You would edit the name servers and change them to your name servers that you get at your web hosting site, which could be for example nsxxx.hostgator.com.

Now you and the rest of the world can browse to your new website www.my2ndsite.com. Woo Hoo!!

Recap

You have a main site called www.mymainsite.com and you want to start another website using your current web hosting site because you can add unlimited domains.
You create an Addon Domain called my2ndsite.com.
You installed WordPress into my2ndsite.com.
You change your domain’s name server to point at your my2ndsite.com domain located at your web hosting site.

Capiche? I know, clear as a bell. Ask any questions if you need help in the comments or contact me using the contact form.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

How To Create An Addon Domain

Lijit – How To Channel Surf Your Own Content

Bill — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 11:11:31 +0000

While reading various blogs this past week I’ve noticed a new search mechanism with the text Lijit. Lijit is a way to search your blog’s content and more. In their own words:

Lijit is a service that searches your blog, bookmarks, blogroll and more, all from one little box. In return, we provide stats that help you better understand and serve your reader community.

Their front page claims:

Increase searches by 2.5 – 5x
Engage readers and raise pageviews 5% or more
Grab the 30% of your audience that you’re missing
Use search stats to improve content targeting and uncover reader intent

Well, you gotta love that.

What Lijit Does

What Lijit does is include a bunch of sites that you have content on in addition to your blog content when your readers search your blog. For example, if you have a Facebook account and you update your Facebook content, Lijit will also look at that content when a search is done on your blog using the Lijit search at your blog. Which is very cool.

When a reader at your site does a search, they’re presented with a floating window over the page they’re on. There are four possible tabs of search results – Blog, Content, Network, and Web. The Blog tab is the default and display the search results from your blog. The Content tab searches your content on any site. The Network tab searches all your content on any site as well as anyone in your network that you’ve designated in your settings at Lijit.com. The Web tab searches, well, the web – Google specifically.

Click image for larger view (800 x 600)

Here are some other features:

Add your Blogroll into your network – This will result in Network search results displaying relevant content from other blogs/websites in your network.
You can add a URL, RSS, or OPML feed so that content is included in your Network search results.
As well as del.icio.us, MyBlogLog and other Lijit users content will be searched in your Network if you want it to be.
A whole set of other sites you can add to your Content searches like Flickr, YouTube, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter, Tumblr, on and on.

There’s quite a bit of stuff there and this blog post only includes a sampling.

WordPress Plugin

There is a WordPress plugin for WordPress obviously and other blogging platforms like Blogger. The WordPress plugin allows you to set it up based on your preferences at Lijit.com. The code gets generated based on those preferences and you can either plug the code into your blog by hand or better yet, download their WordPress plugin which creates a sidebar widget that will display a Lijit search widget in your sidebar. There are configuration screens provided for the plugin.

A Wigged Out Dashboard

Lijit provides an excellent statistics page accessible from the WordPress Dashboard. There are some really excellent statistics Lijit provides. Here’s a sample list of what you can see on your WordPress Dashboard which is the exact same Stats page from your account on Lijit.com.

There are four tabs of information:

Summary – page views, top referrer, amount of searches, top search term, locations in the world where folks are searching from and a bunch of totals – searches last 7 days, all searches, per day averages and on and on.
Readers – a bar chart of page view per day, a pie chart of where readers came from, another locations world map, top posts by date, last page views (25), top searches that brought readers to your blog (excellent stat to know). You could tweak your future articles based on this information.
Searches – a bar chart with total searches per day, last 100 searches show on a world map, top searches, last 25 searches, last searches that returned no results. That last stat is another spring board that we can write articles on. In other words, whatever people don’t find you can provide in future articles.
Exposure – a pie chart showing type of search results readers click, top 25 search results clicked, top 25 last search results clicked and blog that include you in their blogroll. Does anyone use a blogroll anymore?

Channel Surfing

One cool feature that I like is the Surprise me! button that allows you to randomly search your content which includes your blog and your external sites. This is like a mini StumbleUpon that – stumbles upon random articles at your site. I love StumbleUpon and I use it for its intended purpose – randomly stumbling the web or channel surfing if you will. You can certainly play around with the Surprise me! button in my sidebar. When you first click on it you’ll see the button in the middle of the screen at the top with options to return to this blog. Pretty cool.

Lijit On This Blog

I’ve used different search functions on this blog. I’ve used the built in search mechanism for WordPress along with the plugin Psychic Search. Psychic Search gives you quite a bit of statistics that show up on your WordPress Dashboard. However, keep this article in mind when using Psychic Search. I have not investigated this article but be aware of it anyway. I’ve also configured and used Google Custom Search as well. But I’m giving Lijit a try and see if it holds up to the points brought up on its home page as mentioned above:

Increase searches by 2.5 – 5x
Engage readers and raise pageviews 5% or more
Grab the 30% of your audience that you’re missing
Use search stats to improve content targeting and uncover reader intent

You can read more about Lijit at their General page.

Best of all – it’s free. Check it out.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Lijit – How To Channel Surf Your Own Content

How To Drive Traffic To Your New Blog

Bill — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 21:52:37 +0000

For those of you who are new to blogging and trying to get traffic to your blog, consider heading over to Michael Martine’s blog Remarkablogger.

Michael is graciously allowing you to introduce your blog in the comments and everyone who does is encouraged to blog about it, subscribe to other bloggers or in some way share some blog love for the day by promoting others. Who knows, you just might find a blog that will evolve into a long term relationship for you.

Here’s an interesting way to get indexed in Google as well.

I learned this from Chris Lang at www.keywebdata.com. Chris commented in my article Google Reader and Google Alerts but I’ve reprinted the comment here for your convenience. Let me know if you’re interested in doing this.

You can now add friends to your friends list, share feed items, bookmark single blog posts from blogs that you read on the web and here’s the kicker, there is now a blog recommendation engine that recommends blogs you do not read by what your friends list is subscribed to in their Google Readers.

Then, everything you share and bookmark in Google Reader of course comes up on your Google shared items page linked to by your Google profile.

What really blew me away was the recommendation engine. If you add as many of your email list subscribers as you can to your Google Reader you can get a real good idea of what other blogs your subscribers are reading.

The links in your shared items are all HTML and fully followed so every time one of your RSS subscribers shares a blog post it is creating incoming links to your site.

Better yet, it uses the exact blog post title you wrote so now your links use your keyword phrases and bookmarkers can’t change your title tag.

After talking to my SEO top dog contacts, they were all floored and assured me this is the new SEO tactic that no one knows about.

http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=136

It is kind of hard to add friends, the easiest way is to send a chat invite from Gmail and then email your contact you want to friend and have them email you back. It seems Google wants a two way conversation before they will allow you to become mutual friends.

If you would like to friend me, add chrislang at gmail.com to your Google Gmail chat and send me an email letting me know so I can return an email to you, thereby creating a two way connection in Google.

Google is quietly rolling this out behind the scenes but it is a full blown social bookmarking application and the blog recommendation engine is the new blog marketing strategy.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

How To Drive Traffic To Your New Blog

This is a Must-Download Report

Bill — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 02:00:51 +0000

You may remember back in July I sent you to a video by Yaro Starak called “Conversion Blogging”, which outlined Yaro’s system of blogging and marketing with an email list to bring in over $100,000 per year.

Conversion Blogging Video

That video was a huge hit and many people who watched it went on to join Yaro’s coaching program.

However some people don’t like video or have such slow Internet that video doesn’t work. To help these people, Yaro has released a text transcript of the video, so you can read his advice.

The report is ready to go. It’s 15 pages long in PDF format and just like the video, it won’t cost you a cent.

You can get it on this page (look for the text link under the video) – Conversion Blogging Video

If you are thinking of doing anything business related with a blog or you just want to know how you can make a solid income by following Yaro’s proven system, you need to go read this report. This is information you won’t find anywhere else.

Here’s to your successful blog,

Bill

PS. I’ve been keeping my eye on the Aussie dollar and lately it’s dropped about 5 cents against the US. That means the price for Yaro’s coaching program is now 10% off if you are used to paying in US dollars because Yaro is still charging in Australian dollars.

That’s a good discount and it’s worth taking advantage of sooner rather than later. You can do so here – Blog Mastermind Coaching.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

This is a Must-Download Report

Google Reader: An Introduction

Bill — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 21:43:51 +0000

I use Google Reader as my RSS Reader to read blogs. I’ve used it for quite some time now and was recently talking to some folks who had no idea it existed or how to use it. These people read blogs by browsing to each one everyday to check out if there’s anything new to read. I introduced them to Google Reader and told them how they could read through their blogs a bit quicker using Google Reader.

1. Subscribe To The RSS Feed

Google Reader allows you to subscribe to various blogs that you like to read. If you visit a blog like this one, there might be an icon like the one I have in the upper right-hand corner of this blog or some link text that says something like Subscribe to my RSS Feed or some form of RSS subscription action.

Here’s mine:

After you click on the RSS feed icon, you’ll be presented with a page that allows you to pick your RSS reader. For the purpose of this article you would pick Google Reader.

If you don’t see an RSS feed icon at a blog or website that you’re interested in subscribing to, copy the home page URL – www.xyzcompany.com and click Add subscription in Google Reader. Paste the URL into the Add suscription box. If there is an RSS feed available for that blog or website then Google Reader will discover it.

2. Categorize Your Subscriptions

While you start adding RSS feeds into Google Reader your list of blogs will grow. If that list gets too big and you feel like it’s a bit unmanageable you might want to categorize them. I would start categorizing feeds right away from the very beginning when you start using Google Reader. You never know how fast your list will grow.

When you subscribe to a blog, that blog will end up at the bottom of the list on the left-side in Google Reader. The new blog should be the current one in your reader and displaying articles on the right-hand side reader pane.

To catorgorize this blog, click on the Feed settings… button on the top right-side of the page.

Select your category or click on New folder… at the bottom of the drop-down list. Your category will show up in the list on the left-side of Google Reader.

As you can see at the bottom of the list you can select Manage subscriptions and you’ll be taken to a page where you can manage various aspects of the blogs you’re subscribed to.

3. Reading Blogs in Google Reader

Now that you have your list of blogs and you have them all categorized, it’s time to start ripping through the blog posts you might like to read. I say “ripping” and “might like to read” because what we’ll actually be doing is quickly skimming through the blog posts to see what’s interesting by reading the title of the post and/or skimming the content of the post.

You can start from the top. On the left side of Google Reader you’ll see All Items. Click on All Items or any of the categorized folders you created earlier and the reading pane will fill up with blog posts.

Now you’re ready to read the blog posts or skim through the titles and contents of the posts to see if there is anything that interests you. You can press the Previous item and Next item buttons to read through your blog posts. As you use the Next item button the highlighted post that you’re reading will be marked as read.

For even a quicker view of all those blog posts switch to List view which is in the upper right-hand corner of the reading pane and use your scroll bar to scan the blog post titles. Scanning like this will not mark the blog posts as read. So when you finish ripping through all those blog post with the scroll bar, you might need to click on the mark all as read button located at the top-middle of the reading pane.

As you read the blog posts, the count of unread blog posts will go to zero assuming you read through everything or mark all as read. So the next time you use your Google Reader, you just have to look for the unread posts which makes it a quick way to read through or skim your favorite blogs.

Also, at the bottom of each blog post is an action bar that contains some actions as well. I won’t go into these now as this article is focusing on an introduction to Google Reader. You can certainly read more about these actions in the Google Reader Help Center or just start using and playing with them. Here is a screen shot of those actions.

What’s Left?

I did not cover everything about Google Reader and here’s a list of extra stuff you can check out while using Google Reader.

You can manage your categories.
You can share your feeds with other peoples. Check out this recent blog post by Google.
You can email a post to someone.
Experiment with using List view and Expanded view – List view is an even quicker way to zoom through your blog posts to see if there’s anything interesting that sticks out than the others.
Starred items
Tags – Allows you to tag a blog post for example you like as “favorites” without tagging the whole blog itself.
Trends
Notes
Auto-Discovery
and much more you can read about at the Google Reader Help Center.

There’s a lot to Google Reader as well as a lot you can do with it than just read blogs. I’ll be showing you other tricks you can do with Google Reader in future articles. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss a trick.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Google Reader: An Introduction

Kangaroos Can Save You Money

Bill — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 03:06:03 +0000

Yaro Starak just informed me that his Blog Mastermind coaching program charges in Australian dollars. Most online coaching programs charge in American dollars, and since the US dollar is anywhere from 5% to 10% stronger than the Aussie dollar as I write this, that’s a 5% to 10% price saving for you if you join Blog Mastermind.

Sign Up Now for Blog Mastermind!!

By now you probably know about Blog Mastermind. Thanks to the Conversion Blogging video, the Blog Profits Blueprint and the interview with a million dollar blogger, Yaro’s blog coaching program opening built up a lot of buzz last week.

If you haven’t seen any of the videos, or read the Blueprint or listened to the million dollar blogger interview, you can start right now (it won’t cost anything) by watching the Conversion Blogging Video.

Already over 300 people have joined and are busy studying the materials, interacting in the community forums and using the Social Traffic Club to drive traffic to their blogs.

Yaro explained to me that he wanted to charge in $USD, but his Australian bank would not accept the currency, and since it was so close to the opening of his program, he decided to just go with $AUD.

In case you don’t know, Yaro is from Australia, though he sounds a lot like a Canadian sometimes because of his parents. He did say that his bank would change in the near future, and as soon as $USD is accepted he would switch back.

If you want to lock in the discount by paying in Australian dollars, you should join Blog Mastermind as soon as you can. Here’s the order page – Blog Mastermind Coaching Program Order Page.

Not a Course You Do By Yourself

Blog Mastermind is not just a course where you are left on your own to go through the training by yourself. It’s a real community, led by mentors who are successful bloggers, including Yaro himself.

If you are still not sure, but because of the cheaper price you are interested, you should head to Google and type in “Blog Mastermind Reviews” and see what other people are saying about the program.

500 people have participated in the course since it’s first run back in 2007 (it was closed since December 07), so there is plenty of feedback online coming from completely impartial people who have already taken the course.

It’s a smart idea to do research before joining any program, and I think in this case you will find the general consensus is that Blog Mastermind is well worth the cost of admission, especially when it is in Australian dollars.

Here’s the link for more information (and make sure you watch the behind the scenes tour video Yaro presents at the start of the page) -Blog Mastermind Coaching Program Order Page.

Good luck with your blog!

Bill

PS. The US Dollar, as you probably realize, is not doing so well lately. There’s a possibility that the Australian dollar will get stronger, so the discount if you are used to paying in US dollars, will not be a discount any more – instead it will be more expensive.

I suggest if you have any inclination to join Yaro’s coaching program that you do so soon so you can lock in the discounted price thanks to the currency difference.

Blog Mastermind Coaching Program Order Page

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Kangaroos Can Save You Money

July 2008 Most Popular Articles

Bill — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 04:07:03 +0000

Below you will find the most popular articles of the past month. Check them out if you missed any.

Social Networks Will Make You Cool – Another context you can benefit from using the social networking sites is building traffic to your blog, promoting your blog posts and gaining subscribers.
How To Create StumbleUpon Content – For those of you that have never heard of StumbleUpon, it’s a website that allows you to randomly “Stumble Upon” websites.
Creating in Firefox – The title of this blog post could certainly be Working in Firefox. However, Creating fits much better since that’s what we want to feel like when we’re “working” and it has a more positive connotation than Working does for some people.
22 Terrific Tweets – In my previous post 21 Terrific Tweets, I noted how you can find some good stuff in twitter. This time, here are 22 terrific twitter tweets. I’m tellin’ ya’ – There’s gold in them there tweets.
WordPress Tags Explained – If you’ve been wondering about WordPress tags and how to use them, then browse over to Ninja Blog Setup where Jon Symons has a free ebook on What Every Blogger Ought to Know About Tags.

photo credit: tristrambrelstaff

Post from: The Spinning Donut

July 2008 Most Popular Articles

Viral Web Publishing with Ping.fm

Bill — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 12:28:00 +0000

Have you used Ping.fm to promote your blog posts? Ping.fm is a service that allows you to send a message to multiple social networking sites with one click. This is an efficient way to get any kind of message out to all your online communities that you belong to. However, it is not a replacement for hanging out at those sites and truly being involved with those sites.

One way to use Ping.fm is to send a message to your various social networking sites that you’ve posted a new blog article or web content. This could help drive traffic to your site. In this article I’ll show you a way that will help encourage your readers to promote your web content a bit more virally, if you will.

It All Started At Mashable

Recenly, I was reading some articles on Mashable when I noticed a Ping this! link at the bottom of each article. I thought Wow!! what a great way to get your blog post or web content promoted in a bigger kind of way. For example, if I have a Ping.fm account and I broadcast my messages to 3 or 4 services automatically from Ping.fm, and I click Ping this! on someone’s article, I broadcast that to a bunch of social groups for that blog writer. Possibly sending 3-4 times the traffic per reader who click Ping this!. That’s pretty darn cool.

So here’s how I’ll do that for the end of each post. I’ll use the WordPress single page post for this but you can use it like Mashable does for each post as well by placing it in the Main Index Template (index.php) file.

The Low Down

I’m using WordPress 2.6 for this. In WordPress, navigate to Design -> Theme Editor and select Single Post (single.php). Your single post might be called something else.

At the end of the my single.php file, right before the

is where I’d put this link, somewhere around my bookmarking button.

Ping this!

Try it:

Ping this!

Note: With this example I am not trying to trick you into promoting this article. However, if you find this article informative and worth promoting that would be wonderful.

The following screen is what your readers will see if they have an account on Ping.fm. This allows your readers to immediately promote your blog post.

Click the Ping this! button and your blog post or web content will be posted to all the various social sites you setup in Ping.fm.

Again, if your readers have Ping.fm accounts and have a few services setup to send messages to, they’ll be sending a message to those services about your blog post and that’s what makes this another way to get your blog posts to go viral.

For more options using Ping.fm and coding links for your website or blog, check their Ping this! help page.

A WordPress Plugin

On another note, there is a WordPress plugin called PingPress.fm by Sold Out Activist. This plugin will allow you to automatically send your blog post to all the social services that you’re signed up for through Ping.fm when you publish a blog post.

photo credit: Per Ola Wiberg (former ponanwi and Powi)

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Viral Web Publishing with Ping.fm

Win an iPod Shuffle or Nano and Learn How To Make Money Blogging

Bill — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:37:09 +0000

Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind is a course I took last year (2007) on blogging. I had just started a blog and was trying to help my wife start one as well. There were so many questions I had from reading other blogs that I knew I needed some direction as we discovered this thing called blogging.

I had heard you could get more people to check out your blog than a static website and I witnessed that first hand with my wife’s static website. When my wife first started her website it was getting about three visitors a day and when she first started a blog she was getting thirty visitors a day and we didn’t know anything about SEO (Search Engine Optimization). So I knew something was up with blogging and getting more eyes to your site.

Anyway, I don’t recall where I ran into Yaro’s website, probably through a Google search since I’m sure he ranks pretty high for blogging. But I do remember running into his freely available pdf called Blog Profits Blueprint. The pdf is a great foundation for blogging and I highly recommend it. It is a blogging resource that you will refer to over and over.

Here are 3 resources to convince you to take Yaro’s course:

The course costs $97.00/month for the 6 month course or $497.00 for the whole course and you save $85.00. BAM!!

* DOORS OPEN TOMORROW, TUESDAY, 7/29/08 *

I’m giving away 3 iPod Shuffles to 3 Blog Mastermind students who sign up through this blog post at the $97/month level. I’m giving away 1 iPod Nano to someone who signs up for the whole course at the $497.00 one-time payment level. If you order by clicking this link or any other Blog Mastermind link in this post and you’ll be in the running to win one of these iPods, your choice of color, of course.

Note: If I get more than 3 people who sign up at the $497.00 level, I will start giving away more iPod Nanos to those people. Probably one for every two that sign up.

So sign up for Yaro’s blogging course NOW and WIN an iPod!!

Also, whether you take the course or not, please subscribe to my blog via email or RSS Reader so you’ll be notified of other contests in the future where you’ll be able to win good stuff.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Win an iPod Shuffle or Nano and Learn How To Make Money Blogging

How To Create StumbleUpon Content

Bill — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:36:34 +0000

For those of you that have never heard of StumbleUpon, it’s a website that allows you to randomly “Stumble Upon” websites. You install a toolbar in your browser and click on a button that says, “Stumble!” and it will start to present you with websites.

There are categories that you can select so StumbleUpon will only present you with websites that contain the content that you’re interested in. It’s a very easy way to browse the web.

As website publishers and bloggers we can write content that will help drive StumbleUpon users to your site and vote for your site by clicking on a button with the “Thumbs Up” symbol. But users can also click on the “Thumbs Down” symbol as well, which is not good.

For web publishers, this article lays out the foundation for driving StumbleUpon traffic to your website or blog and getting “Thumbs Up” votes on your content. This will help drive traffic to your site and content for a long time as other StumbleUpon users “discover” your site.

Set The Foundation

Set the foundation for driving traffic to your blog by knowing what type of content will drive traffic to your blog. Content is King as they say and it applies to writing articles that get stumbled.

Here are 3 resources that will help you create the right content:

Blog Profits Blueprint by Yaro Starak
Killer Flagship Content by Chris Garrett
Cornerstone Content by Brian Clark

Immense yourself in the above information and you’ll be on your way to knowing and creating exactly what type of content will get stumbled.

The kind of content I am talking about is content that encourages people to subscribe to your blog and defines you as a blogger. It also gets linked to from other blogs, as well as votes from social media sites like StumbleUpon. This kind of content does not include short opinion posts, news snippets or weekly roundup links.

A useful exercise for any blogger is to look at the content you’ve created during the previous week or month and ask youself, “Did I write any outstanding content?” If not, continue to read the above three resources and implement content described by their examples.

Another useful exercise is to take one of the example articles from on of the resources above and place words in the article that pertain to your blog. Now, this exercise doesn’t work every time, but it’s worth the time to try so you can see what great content might begin to look like in the area you blog about.

Getting Votes

You need votes from other people to help drive traffic to your site. The more votes you get on your content the more traffic you receive. You need to get votes from different people over time. If the same people on StumbleUpon keep voting your articles, your SU traffic will diminish and could possibly stop all together.

However, it’s ok for the same people to continue to help you with your articles by voting for them. Encourage your voters to use StumbleUpon as it was intended, to “Stumble Upon” various types of Internet content. Subscribe to The Spinning Donut so you don’t miss any future articles that explain how to get different people to stumble your articles.

Also, your regular blog readers are not the same as StumbleUpon users.

Good Quality Content

This is content that people will enjoy. Whether your content is text, an image or a video, it must be good quality. Use common sense when it comes to good content. Whether you’re talking about content for StumbleUpon or not, common sense tells you that good content rules. Again, refer to the three resources above on creating good content.

Be a StumbleUpon User

Install the StumbleUpon toolbar. This will allow you to efficiently stumble websites that you find appealing. While you stumble various sites, notice what’s above “the fold”. The fold is the area you see on a website that is before you have to scroll down the page. Make sure you grab your readers attention above the fold so they don’t have to scroll down to figure out what they’re looking at. There is a higher chance you’ll lose StumbleUpon visitors if they have to scroll down to start reading your content.

Look at Your Statistics

Use the freely available Google Analytics to find out the following attributes of your visitors:

Which browsers are your readers using? Google Analytics will show you this. Install the most common browsers on your machine so you can test what your pages look like in each browser or test them using Browsershots.
What screen resolution are your visitors using? Design your blog around that and make sure they don’t have to scroll horizontally when they arrive. For instance, the majority of my readers come to my site using 1024 x 768 screen resolution. So I made sure my site visitors would not have to scroll horizontally. I also don’t have a humongous image that takes up “the fold”.
Look at the Internet connection speed your readers are using when they come to your site. If you have big images and your users have slower connection speeds, that will impact how fast your home page will download to their machine and whether they stick around or not.

With the above points in mind, re-work the layout of your site if necessary to make sure your readers don’t stumble on to other sites before stumbling yours.

Good Content and StumbleUpon

Timeless Content – Traffic will continue to arrive at content that is not time dependent. Content that StumbleUpon and other social media sites will drive traffic to your blog over a steady period of time and not just a rush of traffic for a short period of time.
Stand-Alone Content – Content that stands alone or could be one web page for instance. A StumbleUpon user should be able to make sense of your content that gets stumbled without knowing anything about your blog or previous articles. If the article that is stumbled is in a series, make sure you provide links to each article in the series. If you’re a WordPress user, the In Series plugin makes it simple.
Eye-Catching Content – Because StumbleUpon users click through sites quickly, make sure you’re site has some “visual-appeal” to it. The use of colors, a different theme or image can help you as long as it doesn’t push your content down further below “the fold”.
Attention Grabbing Headlines – Writing headlines that grab their attention and an opening paragraph will encourage them to keep reading.

Bad Content and StumbleUpon

Slow Loading Pages – Here are some ways to ensure people who come to your website will quickly move on to other sites and not stay at yours:

Large graphics that take forever to load
A bunch of widgets that are supposedly “cool” and provide lots of functionality but take time to load and do their thing
Playing music when someone lands on your website can slow it down as well as annoy the heck out of your readers and interrupt the music they might be already playing on their computer.

Perform a speed test on the pages you want stumbled with this free website performance tool and web page speed analysis – Web Page Analyzer. The faster the page loads the better. It will also depend on the connection speeds of your readers that you discovered with Google Analytics.

Web Page Errors – If you’re pages contain errors, fix them. If you know how to fix them yourself, great. If not, get help in forums or hire a technical person to fix them for you. If you’re a blogger and the technical side of things interest you, read Caroline Middlebrook’s Blog Validation: Do You Validate Your Blog?

You might try Elance or Guru.com if you want to hire someone to do all the work for you.

Too Many Ads – StumbleUpon users are ‘web-savvy’ folks. Like anyone visiting your website, most folks will tolerate some ads. But if you trick your site out with every possible ad that comes your way so you think you can make megabucks, you’ll have visitors going the other way – away from your site – quickly.

If you want to check out other ways to make money with your website read Make Money Blogging By ‘Selling’ Your Knowledge.

Social Media Voting – If you submit your articles to multiple social media sites, don’t submit the link from one social media site to another. In other words, DO submit the content page from your blog or website to a social media site, but don’t submit a link from Digg to StumbleUpon. This is considered greedy because you’re actually trying to stumble another social media link and not the link to you content.

Don’t Tie Their Hands (or Browsers) – Pop-ups or stuff that gets in the way of your content being read by StumbleUpon users is not good. Anything that takes your reader’s attention away from your content will cause irritation. Just say no.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

How To Create StumbleUpon Content

Storytelling with Ira Glass

Bill — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:01:27 +0000

Here are four videos by Ira Glass on YouTube about Storytelling.

Ira Glass on Storytelling #1

Building a story
Making listeners/readers want to keep listening/reading for some reason
Speak naturally

Ira Glass on Storytelling #2

Know when to abandon crap
Get rid of the boring parts
Failure is a big part of success
More failure brings a situation where you’ll be super lucky

Ira Glass on Storytelling #3

Going through the phase of making crap – keep going, don’t give up
Do a lot of work
Put yourself on deadlines
Be accountable to someone who you have to be accountable to for completing work

Ira Glass on Storytelling #4

In storytelling, be the teller and a listener

Recently for the 4th of July I visited my sister in Minnesota, USA, where, for a few nights, four families gathered around a campfire on a portion of 3 acres of land sprawled out over a hilly and tree-lined backyard. Neighbors separated by 2-3 acres of the same. Deer running through the yards once a day that stopped conversations and demanded everyone’s attention. Idyllic.

Kids under 10 years old, teenagers, boyfriends, girlfriends, adults. All circled around telling tales of present and past, embellishing every step of the way. Favorite stories repeated from uncles and aunts requested by the older kids, wanting to remember and hear it again from years past. Stories that brought new understanding because of time.

There was food and drink non-stop, making it difficult to stick to any kind of a low-fat diet. We played volleyball in the pool and imagined all those bad calories we consumed were going to fall off. Yea right.

The celebration ended with an extra night of fireworks and s’mores around the campfire. Great fun.

photo credit: iBjorn

Dosh Dosh has written an article on How to Say Nothing in 500 Words (A Lesson on Writing) which is an excellent read on Paul McHenry Roberts’s article HOW TO SAY NOTHING IN FIVE HUNDRED WORDS which provides guidance on how to and how not to write college compositions.

photo credit: mAt0s

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Storytelling with Ira Glass

Book Review: Problogger – Part 5

Bill — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:52:20 +0000

Table of contents for Problogger Book Review

Click image to purchase at Amazon.com

Chapter 5 – Blog Income and Earning Strategies

Chapter 5 is all about making money with your blog.

“There is no single right way or wrong way to earn money from blogging.”

“Cast your net wider,and you will be hard-pressed to fine two bloggers who make money identically.”

The assumption here is that you want to make money with your blog and Chapter 5 starts out with two questions and discussion on those questions. Do you start off with ads on your blog from day one or do you build an audience and then advertise?

Six types of advertising in general are outlined and discussed followed by ad payment type which include CPC – cost per click, CPM – cost per thousand, and CPA – cost per acquisition.

Banner advertising
Textual advertising
Product -based advertising
Text-link ads
RSS ads
Sonpsorships

Finding Advertisers

Chapter 5 continues with how to prepare your blog for finding advertisers who might want to advertise directly on your blog. A lengthy discussion explains not only how to find advertisers but also how to approach them, taking payments, how much to charge, ad formats, how many ads to display and optimizing your advertising.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs are another way to make money with your blog. You take a commission for selling or referring other products provided by others on your blog. Amazon Associates is probably one of the most familiar programs.

Chapter 5 continues with 5 tips for using affiliates on your blog, 4 other ways to make money on your blog and 8 indirect ways to make money with your blog.

So you can see by “casting your net wide”, there are many way to make money on your blog and with your blog. Chapter 5 does a thorough job of these topics by providing you with a feel for what monetizing methods you might want to take or consider.

Purchase at Amazon.com:

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Make sure you subscribe by RSS reader or by email to receive chapter by chapter reviews of this book.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Book Review: Problogger – Part 5

Previous in series

Book Review: Problogger – Part 4

Bill — Sat, 31 May 2008 21:26:47 +0000

Table of contents for Problogger Book Review

Click image to purchase at Amazon.com

Chapter 4 – Blog Writing

Chapter four is all about writing blog content. One of the hardest things to do in my opinion. Even when you’re passionate about a topic, it takes time to write, edit, edit again and again, and then publish. Only to want to edit and edit, again and again, the article you just published.

After defining good content, chapter four describes creating blog content that is useful and unique, researching your readers, following other blogs in your niche, and ways to distinguish yourself from all the other blogs out there in your niche.

Chapter four is excellent for beginning bloggers because it lists the different types of blog posts you might consider writing to attract readers to your blog. This includes making your content scannable by effectively using lists, space, pictures, formatting, and headlines in your blog posts.

Chapter four continues with a lengthy discussion on titles and how they should grab attention and be written with regards to SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Other considerations chapter four discusses when writing blog content include:

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?
How Often Should a Blogger Post?
20 Types of Blog Posts
10 Steps to Writing a Successful Series on Your Blog

Chapter four concludes with 9 points on blog comments and how to get them and interact with them.

With 8 exercises for you to do and the different types of blog posts discussed in chapter four, you’ll be on your way to answering the questions What should I write? and How should I write it?

Purchase at Amazon.com:

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Make sure you subscribe by RSS reader or by email to receive chapter by chapter reviews of this book.

There are 10 chapters to this book so I’ll probably end up putting 2-3 chapters in my next review. More to come…

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Book Review: Problogger – Part 4

Previous in series Next in series

Blog Mastermind Is Opening

Bill — Sat, 17 May 2008 08:05:28 +0000

I received an email form Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs Journey blog and his blog mentoring program Blog Mastermind. I am a former student of Blog Mastermind and I still review all the materials we received as well as his freely available Blog Profits Blueprint ebook.

When I look in my Blog Mastermind folder on my PC I immediately see over 30 mp3s from the course. I used to listen to them going to work and coming home as well as when I was working out and walking.

The ebook alone will last you a long time while you blog. Written using a blogging strategies metaphor and the tactics to execute those strategies, there’s a lot of information to help you strategically start and maintain a blog.

Below are some of the blogging lessons Yaro taught when I took the course, and I’m sure there will be even more information as well as richer information since he’s already taught it before I can only imagine it will get better and better.

Blogging MIndset

Topic Selection

Blog Content

Marketing Your Blog

Blog Monetization

Blogging and Social Media

more and more and more…

That’s just a few topics in the course I took. Yaro also provides mp3s of interviews he does with successful bloggers as well as extra mp3s on course topic.

On top of all that, Yaro has a forum with sections of the forum dedicated to Blog Mastermind students. This is where you’ll meet fellow bloggers ranging from beginning bloggers to experienced bloggers. There is definitely a feeling of community and support in the forums alone to want to belong to the Blog Mastermind course.

If you’re not sure about joining and you would like to check out Yaro’s information first hand, then check out these free videos on starting a blog at BecomeABlogger.com.

Post from: The Spinning Donut

Blog Mastermind Is Opening

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