SocialSpark Massive Update
Oct 27, 2008 Blog, Blogging, Blogging tips, Earning Blog, Make money in blogging, Money blog, Money making mission
Looks like SocialSpark is going through a big revamp from the visual part to money making ways for its users. Here’s the outline so far
Redesigned Homepage: SocialSpark site now looks much cleaner and loads faster on my Firefox 2. Ha yes I refuse to upgrade to Firefox 3, it’s much more memory intensive
More opportunities for affiliates: A new affiliate marketplace for bloggers. Cost Per Action (CPA) Opportunities where advertisers can control ROI while bloggers are paid for sales or signups
Premium Blogs: SocialSparks have segregation of blogs it seems. They want a mix of large, medium, low traffic blog to cater to all advertisers. Of course the popular blogs get all the better opportunity I reckon
Automated Reviews: A new project that will enhance the reviewing process. No other details released
Well if you want to get bitch slapped by Google, go ahead and signup with SocialSpark
Post from: Sha Money Maker
WordPress v2.6.3 - Security Fix
Oct 27, 2008 Blog, Blogging, Blogging tips, Earning Blog, Make money in blogging, Money blog, Money making mission
A small update in terms of security fix for v2.6 legacy. I reckon the last of it before v2.7 is rolled out in November. Get your v2.6.3 upgrade
A vulnerability in the Snoopy library was announced today. WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard. Although this seems to be a low risk vulnerability for WordPress users, we wanted to get an update out immediately. 2.6.3 is available for download right now. If you don’t want to download the whole release to get the security fix, you can download the following two files and copy them over your 2.6.2 installation.
1. wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
2. wp-includes/version.php
Post from: Sha Money Maker
WordPress v2.6.3 - Security Fix
NameCheap Coupon Codes
Oct 27, 2008 Blog, Blogging, Blogging tips, Earning Blog, Make money in blogging, Money blog, Money making mission
Coupon codes are webmasters best friend. I’ve saved over hundreds of dollar probably over the years by using online coupons alone. Well I’m a NameCheap member, so here’s the latest coupons they’ve send over to me
- OCTNEWS : Get $8.88 Renewals and Registrations
- OCTNEWS : Web hosting 25% of the regular price and any re-seller package for 30% off
- TRANSCHEAP : Transfer most domains for just $6.99
Post from: Sha Money Maker
WPDesigner Former Owner Refunds Member
Oct 27, 2008 Blog, Blogging, Blogging tips, Earning Blog, Make money in blogging, Money blog, Money making mission
To be a ’successful’ blogger online, you need blogging values. Yes there is such a thing.
Blogging values are very much evident from how a person write their entries, respond to comments and revert to feedback. It all boils down to each individual person right.
Remember WPDesigner which was sold for some US$65,000 back in March. The owner ‘Small Potato’ or Tung Do decides to sell his successful theme site after he wanted some time-off and just travel.
Well it just so happen he just opened a members only site where members can access to 12 premium themes for just $5 yearly just around the same time he was about to sell his site. There were only 4 themes only on offer, and its up to the new owner to continue the work right.
Fast forward 6 months later, the new owner left WPDesigner untouched for reason unknown, with the $400 monthly hosting fees still being paid regularly.
So now Small Potato is back, and did the right thing by refunding the members of the $5 fee.
Swell … that’s a nice thing to do, even if it isn’t his to do. WPDesigner new owner it seems has M.I.A.
via source
Post from: Sha Money Maker
WPDesigner Former Owner Refunds Member
Plugins You Need For Blogging
Oct 27, 2008 Blog, Blogging, Blogging tips, Earning Blog, Make money in blogging, Money blog, Money making mission
Over the years I’ve tried and tested many WordPress plugins. They come and go, but I’ve found out over the years that I used these plugins the most. I have them set aside for future use every time I set up a new blog. Makes my life much easier.
Of course you might differ on my choice of plugins and mention there’s much more better ones out there. If I’m missing any, just feedback to me
Without further ado, here’s my list of plugins
- Adsense Deluxe - Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts.
- Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
- All in One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog.
- Audio player - Highly configurable single track mp3 player.
- Bannage - Bans commentors by IP, username, email, or URI.
- Brian’s Threaded Comments - This gives you threaded comments and a ‘wandering’ comment form.
- Bunny’s Technorati Tags - Allows easy addition to a post of a space-separated list of tags which can be displayed with adequate Technorati links in the template.
- Customizable Post Listings - Display Recent Posts, Recently Commented Posts, Recently Modified Posts, Random Posts, and other post listings using the post information of your choosing in an easily customizable manner.
- Email Immunizer - Protect email addresses and mailto links on your blog from email harvesters.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith - Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
- Feed Count - Displays the number of subscriber to your Feedburner account (without that ugly feedburner chicklet).
- flickrRSS - Allows you to integrate the photos from a flickr rss feed into your site.
- Get Recent Comments - Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.
- Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
- Math Comment Spam Protection - Asks the visitor making the comment to answer a simple math question. This is intended to prove that the visitor is a human being and not a spam robot.
- Most Commented - Retrieves a list of the posts with the most comments. Modified for Last X days.
- MyAvatars - This plugin allows you to add MyBlogLog.com avatars to Wordpress comments.
- Organizer - Organizer is a simple plugin to view and manage your upload folder files.
- Pagebar2 - Adds an advanced page navigation to Wordpress.
- Page Peel - Adds page peel advertisement on your blog.
- Permalink Redirect - Permalink Redirect ensures that pages and entries are always accessed via the permalink. Otherwise, a 301 redirect will be issued.
- PJW Page Excerpt - Allows you to edit excerpts for Pages.
- Redirection - A redirection manager.
- Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.
- RSS Footer - Allows you to add a line of content to the end of your RSS feed articles.
- runPHP - Allows you to put PHP code into a post and have it eval()’d.
- Simple Trackback Validation - Eliminates spam trackbacks by (1) checking if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and (2) by retrieving the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checking if the page contains a link to your blog.
- SimpleTwitter - A plug-in to show the last twitter tweet for a user.
- Sociable - Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.
- SRG Clean Archives - This plugin is designed to display your archive listings in a clean and uniform fashion that’s Search Engine friendly on a dedicated page or in your sidebar.
- Subscribe To Comments - Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
- Top 10 posts, Views per post - Show Top 10 posts on your blog and count visits per post.
- WeatherIcon - Shows the current weather conditions by querying the NOAA website.
- Wordpress Download Monitor - Manage downloads on your site, view and show hits, and output in posts.
- Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure - Duplicate content cure is a very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing wordpress pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages.
- Wordpress Mobile - Makes your blog work well on mobile phones! Lets you post to your blog from your mobile! Makes you money with Google AdSense for Mobile and AdMob.
- WordPress Password - Requires any visitor to a Wordpress post/page to know the password to access the site.
- WP-ContactForm - WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
- WP-Polls - Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page.
- WP-Post-Banners - WP-Post-Banners is wordpress plugin that can mine your Wordpress and generate ‘featured’ section for your site using the found items.
- WP-PostRatings - Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
- WP-PostViews - Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been viewed.
- WP Super Cache - Very fast caching module for WordPress.
- WWW Redirect - Redirects variations of identical domain requests to a consistent uri (i.e. http://abc.com to http://www.abc.com)
Post from: Sha Money Maker
Sign Up With WidgetBucks And Get $25
Oct 27, 2008 Blogging, Blogging tips, Life of a blogger, Make money in blogging, Money making mission
As regular readers may know I haven’t really been one of WidgetBucks biggest fans but if this program does interest you now is the time to join.
Why?
Because it’s their first birthday and, if you sign up, you’ll get $25 - and free money is always nice!
Of course there are conditions. I’ll let them explain, this is what they say:
“To celebrate our first anniversary, we’re reinstating our sign-up bonus that we offered during the first three months for all new publishers: $25 bonus when your account reaches $50.”
But be quick as the bonus is only applicable, as I understand it, to new affiliates for the month of October.
Okay, let me give my honest opinion about Widget Bucks.
On the plus side I have received $172.21 from them and this was all paid on schedule, no problems in this direction. I’ve also got another $32.54 in the kitty - payments are made by PayPal once $50 is achieved.
So that’s okay.
What I did previously find though was that:
(1) Some of the widgets slowed down the loading of my blogs.
(2) The return on CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for international impressions i.e. non USA is very low. However, in saying this, some widgets are based on a pay per click basis and this, depending on the products, is much better.
You can see what I last wrote about WidgetBucks on my post Money Making Spring Clean. Also note the comment on this from Dean Jutilla of WidgetBucks.
I actually took all of the widgets off my blogs a while back but I’m trying them out again now. I have found that the ones I am using at the moment (see header ad on Celebrity Insider) are loading much quicker now.
There is also a bigger choice of widgets. As well as Shopping ones there are also now ‘Local’ and ‘Travel’ widgets. These come in a variety of sizes.
I’m actually trying out the Local version which, to quote them, gives, ‘relevant, real-time local content, such as weather, gas prices, top local businesses and restaurants.’
I’ll leave it at that but, if you are thinking about joining WidgetBucks, it’s probably a good time to join to get the $25.
Also, as I’m being honest, there is a referral program for introducing new members. It’s not over generous but these are the terms:
“… you will receive a 5 percent referral fee based on the commissions earned by the people you refer. You’ll receive this 5 percent for the full 12 months after the new member joins.”
In other words if you joined and earned $100 I as the referrer would get $5.
And that’s WidgetBucks!
Good luck,
Mike.
How myLot Are Sending Money Making Traffic To My Blog
Oct 27, 2008 Blogging, Blogging tips, Life of a blogger, Make money in blogging, Money making mission
Earlier this month I wrote a post myLot And How To get Traffic. I didn’t expect to write about this again. Today, however, I noticed on my stats that myLot are still sending me referrals even though I haven’t been to their site or joined in any discussions for ages and ages.
Okay, it’s not a massive amount of referrals - 241 this month so far - but I thought it may be of interest.
The referrals are because myLot members can now have their blogs listed on the myLot site. I entered my celebrity blog when I last paid a visit and haven’t really given it a thought since then. But now I’m getting referrals.
By coincidence I just went to myLot to have a look, clicked on the ‘blogs’ tag, and there was my blog listed on the front page, right at the top. It obviously won’t stay there but it does explain why I’m getting the referrals.
Anyway, thought the info may be of use. I’m not saying that it will definitely work for you but my basic premise has always been to list blogs wherever possible, even if it sometimes seems a waste of time. As in life … you never know …
Good luck,
Mike.
P.S. While on this traffic subject the following sites, I have mentioned before, are still sending me referrals. For reference, this month to date: Zimbio - 710; Buzzfeed - 294; Mahalo - 192.
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Make Money With Free Blogs: New Advice
Oct 27, 2008 Blogging, Blogging tips, Life of a blogger, Make money in blogging, Money making mission
It’s always easy and satisfying to write positive things about how my blogs are going. Today, however, I feel I have made a mistake, an error of judgement.
From the very start of my Mike’s Money Making Mission my whole idea was to make money using only free blogs and without any capital outlay. This was what I set out to do and have achieved this to my own satisfaction.
If I was starting out now, with what I have learnt, my mission would be slightly different. I would now set out to make money, still with free blogs but by using minimal capital.
What I would do is immediately purchase a .com address. This can cost as little as $10 but I now feel it is essential. It’s still very little money to ‘gamble’ or ‘invest’.
Why do I say this? Quite simply because someone else has now bought mikesmoneymakingmission.com and will no doubt benefit from my hard work. But it’s my own fault sticking to the blogspot URL.
I stayed with the blogspot address with very good motives. I wanted to show that anyone can make money with free blogs even if they are flat broke. In sticking to my principles, and to my exact mission, I probably haven’t done myself any long term favours.
So I say again. If you are starting a blog get yourself a .com address before someone else grabs it. If you are successful you can always sell this if you get fed up blogging.
I have bought one .com address and that was for my adult celebrity blog CelebTease.com (over 18’s only). I’m getting over 2000 visits per day on this and over 5000 page visits so it equates to quite a profitable blog.
As well as stopping others cashing in your work a .com URL also definitely looks and sounds more professional. It is more likely to impress advertisers and also review purchasers.
But, whatever you do, it is possible to make money with free blogs - proven!
Good luck,
Mike.
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Twitter - My Thoughts After 4 Months Of Use
Oct 27, 2008 Blog, Bloggers diary, Blogging, Blogging tips, Life of a blogger, Make money in blogging
For a long time I did not understand twitter. I thought it was pretty stupid. Then an opportunity came. The person who had the shoemoney account sent me a email and asked if I wanted it. I said I did and they just released the account to me. Pretty cool of them. I still did not do much with it until one day Michael Gray sat me down at SMX West last spring and showed me how he was using it (I had to sign a NDA or I would tell). I was pretty fascinated with it So last May I gave it a serious look.
The first couple months I used twitter it was down more then it was up. But I still had fun learning and now its pretty rock solid.
Starting To See The Light:
For the first month I was using the website only. I started to find other people I partied with met at conferences and followed them. Most of the people I hang out with at conferences I only talk to them during that time. The value of twitter was starting to become a little bit more clear to me. The best way I can do it is to compare it with other ways of communicating with people:
Traditional ways to keep in touch:
- Email - I honestly hate email. Between not getting email because of spam filters and people that fricking write a book it drives me nuts. I just do not have time to go back and fourth with emails 99% of the time even with friends. Just takes to much time and if the email is longer then a paragraph its probably lost me anyway. Twitter only allows 140 characters in a tweet. Its very easy for me to respond to pretty much 100% of the people who ask me a question and takes little time out of my day to do so. Also a lot of times with my answers to people it has a nice side effect of answering perhaps what other people were interested in also. Double win.
- Instant Messenger - Being most of our team works remote throughout the country we use Instant Messanger services as our key communication tool. I would say 90% of our communication even inter-office is done with Instant Messanger. I never accept anyone to my Instant Messanger unless there is a very good business need. Twitter is much less informal but still has that feel of an instant messenger client… only it does not bug you when you get a message if you are busy.
Ok so that’s what I realized after the first month. The just of the service IMO is that its a great way to contact people that is much more intimate and to the point then an email yet not nearly as invasive as a instant message.
Great way to find local people:
Being centrally located in what is not exactly a tech hub its been very hard to find developers. We have advertised in the local college papers, traditional papers, craigslist and other means but there has just not been one good source to find the people we are looking for…. until I started using twitter.
Twitter has been a great way to find people that fit well with us. For one if they use twitter they already get some social media stuff but lets go beyond that… Lets say I am looking for a developer who lives around me. I can simply search twitter like this.
Its also good to find local recommendations for restraunts, happy hour specials, and other local events.
Quality of traffic from twitter:
The quality of traffic from twitter is pretty awesome for a blogger. Check out these numbers for the last 2 months to shoemoney.com sorted by highest refer’s of traffic. (click on image to enlarge)
Lets break down these numbers a bit from twitter in the last 60 days I recieved almost 17,000 visitors. Of those 17,000 visitors over 40% had never been to shoemoney.com before. Once they were here though they viewed an average of 2.25 pages per visit and stayed on the site for an average of 2 minutes and 18 seconds. They had a 65% bounce rate.
Now if you compare that with Google traffic that was 95% for the search term “Shoemoney” (and should be the highest quality) that brought in double the amount of traffic but had less pages/vist, less time spent on page and higher bounce rate.
I now consider the #2 most important source of traffic in terms of value behind only stumbleupon which always delivers an amazing about of new visotors with the lowest bounce rates.
How do I get the traffic in the first place? Well I twitter everytime I have a post… so once a day. But the cool thing is other people retweet my posts probably 10x for each one I tweet… kind of a domino effect.
I know I hear the excusers saying it can’t happen to them cause they are not me but guess what its all relative.
The badass twitter reach:
Couple months ago we were really stuck in a rut. We were working on a new application and felt that a service amazon was offering called SImpleDB would make a massive impact on its performance. While simpleDB was open for anyone to appy for they only had about 200 people they let use it. I really wanted to try it out and so I twitted asking if anyone knew anyone at amazon that could get us into the SimpleDB program. Within 1 hour I had 2 different AWS people contact me asking what the application was and what SimpleDB was going to be used for. I replied and moments later got the email saying it was now added to our account.
There has been a ton of other times I have asked for tips, contacts, or whatever about a subject and got help within seconds. Twitter is an amazingly powerful tool.
So to those that don’t get twitter hopefully this makes a little sense. You dont have to have a blog or anything you just need to start connecting with friends. Through friends of friends you will develop an amazing reach.
For those already using twitter whats your tips?
This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog
Twitter - My Thoughts After 4 Months Of Use
Ride-Strong.com - Free Shirt Friday
Oct 27, 2008 Blog, Bloggers diary, Blogging, Blogging tips, Life of a blogger, Make money in blogging
Ride-Strong.com is a cycling blog that is run by Tyler Ford, which he started in 2007. This blog is really cool, and he has great content related to cycling.
Just a warning there is a really sic picture of a guy with a branch stuck through his leg from a biking accident on the front page. Might be a little too early in the morning to see something like that. 
So if you cycle or want to cycle or just want to read about cycling, check out Ride-Strong.com
Thanks for the shirt!
If you would like to see your website or company featured on Free Shirt Friday click here
This Post Is From ShoeMoney’s Internet Marketing Blog
Ride-Strong.com - Free Shirt Friday
