Money School

Webmasters that don´t care about others, scrapes websites for content and publish on their on site. And if you are unlucky the copycat post may show higher up, then your post, in the search result. This really sucks. It´s hard to do anything about. You can try to go to court but that will be difficult to have any success with. You can and should take advantage of the post stealers. Make sure that you link to your own post in the post. So that atleast you get some boost from it or maybe it´s easier to file a lawsuit against them.

If you refer somebody to google and and they make 5 $ in 180 days you get 5$, if the make 100 $  in the same span of days you get 250$. If you refer 25 people who make 100$ you get a bonus of 2000. But all that is going to change to that if your refer somebody who make 100$ you get 100$. And worst of all only webmasters from Latin America, North America or Japan can from now on participate in the referal program. So google is closing it down for the rest of the world. The really sucks for webmaster that refers a lot of people, you got have sympathy.

A new platform for publisher and andvertisers is brought to the to internet scene by Aductions. In traditional advertising networks like google adwords/adsense and yahoo ads you don´t know how much you get paid per click and you don´t know what ads that will show, as a publisher. The is changed with Aductions since advertisers and publisher communicate with each other.

As a publisher you let advertisers know what ad space you have and what kind of ads(text,pictures…) you are interested in then actually you set a price on that ad space. And if you don´t know what price to charge you can always check what your competitors are charging because that information is available at Aductions.

Then it´s up to the advertisers to find you through an attribute search of what kind of ad they want and want kind of site they want to be part of. So that means even if you don´t have massive traffic advertiser still might want you because you have a nisch blog of their interest.

One of the best part of being an publisher, I think, is that you can withdraw you earned from an ad.

A more in depth analysis is made by John Chow

I have now been blogging for a couple of days and Im actually starting to see some traffic. Not much but yet traffic. Since I have google analytics set up with my GAga plugin I can monitor where it comes from. And I can see that it´s traffic from sites where I have commented posts. Like I said I would, Im reading blogs and and makes comments where ever I feel that I have something to say.

Just to make sure that I comment enough I have made a spreadsheet for tracking where and when I comment. I write down blog and date so I can make sure that I have done my commenting for the day. The upside with commenting to get traffic, is that you force your self to read a lot of posts and thats gives you knowledge and ideas of things to write about. And of course ways to make money.

One of the most basic and important SEO stuff you can do with your blog/site is to make sure that these html tags are present.

<meta name=”description” content=”" />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”" />
<title></title>

These tags helps the search engines to know what the post is about. Description is a short description of your the post and keywords is obviously words that describes your post. Title is the string the will end up in the browser windows left corner but is also used by search engines. The title is most of the time the string that shows as a link in the search results.

Keywords and descriptions don´t get generated by default in wordpress. So you got to use a plugin to make it happen in your html code. There are a lot of SEO plugins out there but I finally decided to downloaded all-in-one-seo-pack. As usual you unzip the plugin and upload it to your server and make sure that path looks like this /wp-content/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack. Acitvate it in Plugins. Then go to Options>All in One SEO.

I actually only changed 3 out several options and the was about title, description and keywords of the the first page of the blog.

The rest of the option you should leave untuched. Now this plug in will create meta description from the first 160 letters in your post and create. It will also ad a meta keywords from your tags that you wrote with your post. You can also manually decide title, description and keywords you in the extra fields that the plugin provide on the page where you write/update your posts.

If you use don´t want the keywords to be shown as tags on your post you just fill the Keywords field in at the SEO Pack section (see image above). Make sure that you always have meta keywords in all posts.

Like I wrote yesterday you have to believe in your self don´t let anybody bring you down. I commented a post on Joost De Valk´s blog and then I got an automatic mail that just confirmed that I had left a comment. In the mail it said that you could reply to it, so I did. Part of the email I sent looked like this:

Im an internet freak and programmer that recently decided that I want blog
and make money. I have my own company and I have built a Content management
system that is SEO friendly right away. So with this in mind I decided to
blog about my way to start to make money. So people can learn when I learn.

When I was deciding what I would use to track my visitor on my blog I did a
plug in for google analytics, their new script ga.js.

The reason I contacted you is that I was thinking if you had any advice when
it comes to writing wordpress plugins.

I actually didn´t think I was going to get any reply but I did and this is parts of the reply:

> Im an internet freak and programmer that recently decided that I
> want blog and make money. I have my own company and I have built a
> Content management system that is SEO friendly right away. So with
> this in mind I decided to blog about my way to start to make money.
> So people can learn when I learn.
>
you’re only number 2000 to do so

This comment is true and he probably didn´t mean any harm with it. But I can get to, I felt a sudden rush of bad feelings but then it went away. Because the just makes me more determined to succed. I will show him and will reach my goals.

This was my answer to that mail:

> you’re only number 2000 to do so
Well that just encourage me more, thank you.

That felt really good to mail him that answer. But as I write this post I got an answer from him on that mail:

That’s the spirit!!

Good luck, and let me know if you have any cool stuff.

Best,
Joost

He seems to be a nice guy. But I want to say to you all don´t peoples comments bring you down. Believe in you self

To spread you the word about new posts in your blog you can ping different servers. The server then generates a list of blogs that have new posts and then blog readers gets information from different blog search engines.Wordpress has a great pinging service, under Options->writing at the bottom of the page you find a textarea that default only contains one ping server. There you can add several servers to ping.

I found a list here wich I copied and added to the above mentioned list. So now every time when I write a new post och updates one the list of servers gets a ping and then the visitors will come pooring in

By doing this I have actually completed one of the points in my plan to become a succesful blogger and believe in myself more. I feel really good about my self.

To became succeful, rich, achieving your goals or what ever you wanna accomplish, you got to believe in your self. You have to set your mind in a thinking pattern that everything is possible. Nobody should be able to bring you down. But most of the time it´s you that bring your self down. To talk from my own experience I have moments when I think everything is possible but then moments later I suddenly don´t believe it any more.

To take an practical exemple, this blog. In my best moments I know I will get a lot of visitors here and that is going to lead to money from adsense, affiliate commision and sponsors. In those moments I don´t feel that there are any big obstacles. I now it´s hard work with writing good posts that people actually are interested in reading and then to get people to visit my blog. I know I don´t know everything I need to know to succed with this blog, but no worries I will find out along the way, all the information is out there. Everyting it´s doable, in reach so to say.

But then comes the bad moments when my mind seems to only see the obstacles like a big wall. How Im I going the get visitor, I can´t write anything that people will find interesting. Im just a small person from Grondal in in little Sweden. And I don´t enough about affiliating, pay-per-post and so on. Why would anybody appreciate my thoughts and knowledge.

I think most of us have these thoughts even the most succesful persons. You have to make the good thoughts became longer and the bad thoughts shorter. Well that easier said then done. How can you do it. It´s habbits. You live with your thoughts 24/7 and the mind gets used to things the occupies it. So if you think you can´t do things your actually going the be better at thinking you can´t to things. It doesn´t have to be an actual thought it can be a feeling. A feeling of discomfort and it makes you disbelieve in your self. Same thing goes here, the more you feel that feeling to better you are going to be at feeling that feeling. We need a way to turn that I around.

A plan
You need a plan to be better of thinking positive and of feeling good feelings, they of course go hand in hand. It don´t have to be a big plan just a small thing that you will do from times to times, preferable on daily bases. One easy example can be to make a plan that you will walk 10 minutes 3 times a week after work. Write it down and put the note some were where you can see it every day. Decide wich days you will do it. I promise you if you stick to that plan, after a couple of weeks your going feel more positive about your self because you decided something and you did it. Positive feedback. Then make a another plan and just do it.

I have I plan with this blog and with my self. I read a post on Neil Patels blog www.quicksprout.com on, it was about confidence, wich is just same topic as in this post. He wrote about how you can change things in your life to be more confident. I really believe thats another good way of believe in your self. Wich leads me into to the first part of my plan to become a succesful blogger and also to believe in myself more.

• I will change my habbit of being anonymous on internet. Every time a post or write something I will sign it with my name. Thats a way for myself to show myself, here Im am. I believe that things I write can be interesting for other people.
• As I wrote in my first post ever I will read a lot of blogs and comment one of them every day. One thing that I happen to notice was that some blogs have post comments the you can reply to. So if you are not among the first to comment the post just comment another persons comment. That is as early as possible in the comment list. I will alos use my scraping application the be notified quickly if a new post is up on a good blog.
• Sign up for technorati.com and found out exactly how that works. Of course I know that some basic stuff about it.
• Find out more about pay-per-post and see how dangerous it is. Because for what I know it is a good way of making money.
• Write at least one post every day.
• Found out as many sites as possible to ping about a new post.
• Make this blog subscribeable with feedburner.com
• Write a full about page about my self.

I know this is a grand list. Will I make it happen? Well it all comes down to the simple fact of do I believe I can do it. Two of the eight parts is about habbits, writing posts and commenting other blogposts. The others are things that I just need digg into.

Will a believe in myself more if I do these things? Definitely.

Google webmaster central blog did a post on the past year. One very interested thing I think is that they now have more readers that uses firefox (47 %) then explorer (45%). They also show their top searches from www.google.com.

The most popular post in 2007 was the one on meta tags an web search. If you are not familiar with meta tags and want to be a serious blogger you better read that post. The phrase sitelinks was the most popular search query the get to the blog.

It´s very import to monitor your site traffic otherwise you don´t have a clue how many visitors you have. Then it´s hard to convince sponsors to pay for a link on your blog if can´t show any stats. First I was thinking of getting a wordpress plugin for statistics but then I decided to go for google analytics because I haven´t tried that yet. So Im going to sign up for an google account an on the same time comment it here.

Step 1 Browse to the google analytics sign up page and from there go to sign up if don´t already have an account. Write your information there. I always uncheck the option the have google save all my searches. I don´t want them to. But I guess they are doing it anyway.

Step 2 Verify the sign up process in the mail sent to you. When you activate your account you can click the link manage your account. Click on the service Analytics.

Step 3 Now there is another sign up process a short one it says. Click on the sign up button. Now you enter your website, what you like to called the account and country I from Sweden som I pick that. I wonder why that matter. I will probably find out. In the next step name and phonenumber. Agree to the terms.

Step 4 Now comes a tricky question for a first timer, you can choose either urchin.js or ga.js I recognized urchin.js but not ga.js. I googled and I found an answer on the google analytic blog. urchin is the old one an ga is the new one wich will be updated with new stuff along the way.

“We are also rolling out the new ga.js page tag which we recommend you use for all new accounts and new profiles for new domains.”

Wich helped my to make a decision. So ga.js it will be.

Step 5 Now we need to put the code in all the pages that we want to monitor. If I had just static html pages on my website I would have had to put the code in every page. But luckily wordpress store all the posts in a database and uses a template page make html out of it. So lets find out where to put it the wordpress code. There is one thing we need to have in mind and that is that we don´t want google count page views if it is the authors/administrators that views the blog. We need a way to code wize know if somebody is logged in. I found a wordpress google analytics plug-in, wich will easily help you set it up. (5min later). That plug in could not use ga.js wich where the one I wanted to use. Well I can´t find any that uses ga.js. So I will write my own first wordpress plug-in. Lets call it GAga.

(2 hours later)

Step 6 Well this was fun.

I have now created a plug-in that enables you to use Google Analytics with ga.js without writing a single line of code. Just download GAga v1.0 here. I will make an tutorial how install GAga but I do a short version here. It´s very easy. Just unzip the GAga_v1_0.zip in you plug-in folder on your webserver. Now just activate GAga thru the Plugins meny where it should be shown if you have put it in /wp-content/plugins folder on your web server. Now take your Google Analytics id should be something like UA-1234567-1 and go to Options->GAga and write your id in the field (see picture). Decide if you want track logged in authors (I will not) and finally check the enable box and hit Submit.

Step 7 Now go to your Google Analytics page again and on the first page click on Reports in the middle of the screen. That will take you to main stats view. And thats it, now you can monitor you blog with Google Analytics.