7 Ways To Make Money With Your Blog (Free Video)
“Blogging for bucks” is becoming a very popular option to earn a 2nd income these days, so as part of the upcoming release of my Blogging Traffic Secrets (BTS) DVD, I decided it would make good sense including information on the different ways you can earn money from your blogging efforts in BTS.
It started out to be a short 10-15 min video tutorial or introduction to the subject, but eventually it finished at 66 minutes (!) so the topic was a little more fleshed out than I had originally anticipated. 
Anyway, I have decided to pre-release this video tutorial to you, before BTS hits the market, to get some feedback from the buying public. It’s not perfect (for example, the sound is a bit wierd the first 5-6 minutes, but then it clears up - but no worry, it’s still easy to listen to) and has not been through the final editing process, but it’s watchable and informative, so please enjoy and leave your feedback in the comments section of this post.
Free WordPress Video (66 mins)
Intern Program Answer Time
Well folks, 2 things to mention today:
1) Happy Birthday to my twin sister & myself! 42 today.
2) James Brausch answered my question about Interns as follows:
How do you actually get the RIGHT people to put their hands up to become an intern?
I don’t. I have no pre-qualification for level 1 interns. The more the merrier.
Fair call. And, his answer makes more sense if you go and actually read the rest of the post with his answers to the other questions about Intern programs. You can find the post here:
Intern Program Answer Time with James Brausch
And, he’s released a CD called “Intern Orientation“, which you can check out on his blog.
Lastly, congratulations to Jon Symons of the Art of Money blog, who won James $10,000 prize for his question about Intern Programs. I had a quick browse over his blog (it IS 10 mins to 1 am, so I think a quick browse is pretty good for this time of night! 
) and he has some good stuff on it. I will check it out some more when I get a bit more time.
Tag and Ping Disaster
Poor Sean Wu!
I wrote about him & his upcoming release of Tag and Ping the other day. I am guessing things went well, sales-wise, but the poor guy has been visited by Murphy (that famous Irish gentleman, whose law has been one universal constant in our world since day dot!) since then.
I just got home this evening, and found an email waiting for me from Sean…
Seems he had a major snafu with his autoresponder system:
Today I woke up to check my email - only to find
out in HORROR that my autoresponders from my
automation system has been sending me ALL of the
pre-programmed messages in the sequence
repeatedly… to MY inbox!At first I thought it was only doing this to me -
until I noticed that I’m getting a few complaints
from some people telling me that they’ve been receiving
up to 10 or more emails from my autoresponders,
in ONE day.Also, I’ve also noticed that some people are NOT
able to “opt out” of the sequence - even after
they’ve removed themselves from my autoresponder’s
database (I checked and their records have already
been removed - but the emails won’t stop for some
reason).*I’m also getting emails from ALL of my autoresponders
to MY inbox repeatedly too (and I can’t even “opt out”
of my OWN autoresponders!)
I hope the poor guy manages to sort this drama out! I’m sure its probably freaking him out a bit…
However, much more importantly AND significantly from my point of view is the latter part of this email, which says:
Third and finally - a BIG WARNING I want to give to
you:http://www.tagandping.com/warning.html
I’ve warned repeatedly, in EVERY teleseminar I did and
also on my Update Blog at http://www.tagandping.com/updates/,
as well as on the “Download Page” you are forwarded to
after purchasing the course…To NOT, in ANY circumstance, attempt to abuse or *spam*
the “authority sites” I mentioned in the course. I’ve
warned repeatedly that you should “go slow” AND add
valuable links & content… and NOT just links to your
own sites.The methods presented in the course are powerful -
BUT you MUST use it ethically.I’ve already seen some attempts to flood the authority
sites mentioned in the course with links to “page
generated” sites… and if you’re doing this - I ask
that you please stop.You should use these services the way that they’re
designed to be used - by adding valuable links that
other people will also find useful (in addition to
links to your own sites).DON’T overdo it!
Sean, you should have thought of the “possibility” of some morons using your techniques to spam and/or abuse these sites BEFORE you released this product…
Where I live, we have a saying for this - something along the lines of locking the barn door AFTER the horse has bolted!
This is why I often describe the Internet Marketing field as a shark infested pool…Along with all the nice fish, there are plenty of sharks who really don’t give a damn what they do to get traffic and sales on the net.
It’s not just the black hat crowd, it’s also the unethical, the ignorant, and the stupid that screw things up for the rest of us, who are happy to earn a living online without crossing the line into inappropriate tactics and techniques that just muck it up for everybody else.
Let this serve as a warning to those of you who think it’s OK to cut corners and not care about the consequences of your actions. If you’ve ever complained about all the trashy spam sites in the search engines now, then know that these unethical people are responsible for them. Makes Google and Co’s life hard, so in order to deliver the best deal possible to their REAL clients, they are now making legitimate internet marketers lives difficult, just to cope with the spam and dirty tricks brigade.
I truly hope Sean Wu won’t be looked upon (in 1-2 years) as the guy who started the downhill slide for tag and ping, and destroyed the value of this technique and these social bookmarketing sites, etc. I wonder if he thought about this properly before he decided to release this product?
I wonder…
Tag and Ping Launches…
Yes, it’s true. Tag and Ping has finally launched onto the market, and the hype surrounding this product from Sean Wu has got a large portion of the internet marketing world up in arms and semi-fighting between each other!
Wu, a 24 year old ‘kid‘ from Thailand claims to have cracked the ‘secret code To Instant, Unlimited Supply Of PageRank 5+ Backlinks From AUTHORITY SITES…‘. Further, he claims tag and ping is so effective that it puts the (in)famous blog and ping to shame!
Big claims for a young guy I’ve never heard of before (which means squat, ‘cos if he’s smart, he’s been under the radar for a few years making big bucks using Tag and Ping, before releasing it into the shark infested waters of the Internet Marketing fraternity).
Now, anything I say from here onwards is just opinion, since I haven’t seen a copy of Tag and Ping.
The short version to Tag and Ping, as I understand it, is that it involves getting links from Social Bookmarking sites such as Technorati, Del.icio.us and Furl (just to name a few). These links can generate web traffic back to your website IF they get a decent level of popularity from the net denizens who vote for them (this is the social bookmarking).
To give you an overview of Social Bookmarking, here’s what the folks at wikipedia have to say about it:
In a Social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. Often, these lists are publicly accessible, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some social bookmarking systems allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis.
They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags (see folksonomy). Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given “tags”, and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them. Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.
This system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. This provides for semantically classified tags, which are hard to find with present-day (2006) search engines.
Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will “rank” a resource based on its perceived utility. This is a more useful metric for end users than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.
The 3 obvious bonuses here are:
- You get traffic to your site to read your content if its popular (and this traffic is free), and
- If you are lucky, you’ll also get the link to your site on the front page of these high PR sites, which may just lead to it spidering your site quickly, and
- If your content is popular enough, you’ll also likely get links to it from other sites, which will improve your site’s link popularity (PR), which will also bring increased search engine traffic.
Now, ALL of these things are fantastic. I wouldn’t turn down any of them for a second…but here’s my biggest concern about this whole Tag and Ping thing…
It’s going to attract a bunch of black hat types (and the generally dumb) who will use and abuse this technique to get traffic to their sites (many of which will be little more than spam sites built to earn money from adsense with little real value to the internet - as if we deperately need 1 more spammy adsense site on mesothelioma cancer!!!).
If they use and abuse it too much, the whole benefit that these sorts of sites offer will be comprimised, and once again, they will spend a lot of their time and resources fighting the tag and ping equivalent of content spam!
So, while I believe that tag and ping (as a concept that has been freely available for some time now) is a valuable tool, and Sean Wu may well be a top bloke, I just hope that if you read this blog post, you might just take heed of what I say, and not go crazy with this whole tag/ping thing.
Please, do EVERYBODY a favor and be responsible in the use of it, and it will be there to benefit us all for years to come.
WordPress: A Quick And Easy Website Solution
Just a quick one today, and my apologies for the long time between posts. I have been busy with other projects and have just not had time to add to this blog.
So, my topic for today (well, tonight actually - its 1.40am!) is that of using WordPress as a quick and easy solution to building a functional website.
Just in case you have never heard of WordPress before, it’s a software application called a Blog.
WordPress is perhaps the most popular blog system on the market today, and best of all, it’s totally free for anyone to download it and use it.
To give you a slightly more exact description of a Blog, here’s what the good folks at WordPress have to say themselves:
“Blog” is an abbreviated version of “weblog,” which is a term used to describe web sites that maintain an ongoing chronicle of information. A blog is a frequently updated, personal website featuring diary-type commentary and links to articles or other Web sites. Blogs range from the personal to the political, and can focus on one narrow subject or a whole range of subjects.
Many blogs focus on a particular topic, such as web design, politics, sports, or mobile technology. Some are more eclectic, presenting links to all manner of other sites. And others are more like personal journals, presenting the author’s daily life and thoughts.
Generally speaking (though there are exceptions), blogs tend to have a few things in common:
- A main content area with articles listed chronologically, newest on top. Often, the articles are organized into categories.
- An archive of older articles.
- A way for people to leave comments about the articles.
- A list of links to other related sites, sometimes called a “blogroll”.
- One or more “feeds” like RSS, Atom or RDF files.
Some blogs may have additional features beyond these.
WordPress is simple to use (at its basic level - if you want to get fancy, it can be quite complex), so you barely need any html coding experience to use it. Perhaps just enough to understand how to form a hyperlink…
You can download HEAPS of great free plugins for WordPress, which enhance its functionality, and if you want it to look fancy as well, there are lots of free themes for it, to change the look of the site. My site (eranmalloch.com) uses a free 3rd party theme (The Semiologic theme, designed by Mesoconcepts), and there are plenty more out there.
If you need to whip up a neat looking website in a very short time frame, WordPress is perfect. You can download it for free from their website, install it in 5 minutes, add a sexy new theme in another 5 minutes, and you will be ready to begin publishing in 30 - 60 mins or less. The longest time required will be for browsing through the free themes on the net and choosing one you like.
Now, for those of you who want to do this even quicker, and who don’t yet even have a hosting service to put your site one, I recommend you take a look at the facility where I host my sites. Not only do they have great prices and you get lots of goodies for your money, but more importantly, they have a free scripting system included in the package called Fantastico (strange name, great product) which has the ability to install a fully operational WordPress blog into your host in less than 1 minute.
Truly WordPress for Dummies - you barely need to know anything to use it, and it’s heaps quicker and simpler than downloading and manually installing WordPress by yourself.
Check out my hosting service and when you register, take a look at the Fantastico tool inside the Cpanel (your control panel for managing your hosting account, domains, and email accounts, etc.). When you click on it, you will get a menu of different FREE applications that Fantastico can install for you. Just look for WordPress in the blogs section and click on the link.
From then on, it’s all pretty simple to do - just follow the instructions, and before you know it, your first WordPress blog will be live.
Oh, be sure and have a good look around inside Fantastico - it has HEAPS of fabulous free software applications that you can use for your website/s - stuff that you would normally expect to pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for. All free, and easy to install using Fantastico…