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I know who you are. You’re one of those ‘Make Money Online’ people. You read this blog, and others like it, every day, hoping to pick up some useful little tidbit of information so you can start your own ‘make money online’ blog. Even though you’ve never made more than a few pennies through Adsense, you’ll join the sweaty, teeming masses that comprise the ‘make money online’ niche. I know what you’ll write about too: The same damn thing as everybody else. Entrecard. Adsense. SEO. You’ll “get your inspiration” from the big boys, and while you won’t commit outright plagiarism, it’ll be close enough. I have a phrase I like to use for people like you: “Emulate, duplicate, regurgitate.”

Hi, I’m Geoff, and I’m the author of the one blog out there that exists to counter-balance the thousands of ‘make money online’ blogs: Can’t Get Rich. That’s right, I’ve accepted the fact and you should too. You can’t get rich online. You know why? All of the good ideas are taken. In other words, you can’t bring anything new to the table. You’re old news, taking up space. Not interesting. Get what I’m saying?

Of course, I’m sure that you’ll take that as a challenge. “I’ll show that mean old Geoff.” Well, first of all, I’m not old, I’m only 21. Maybe a little jaded, but that’s beside the point. Second of all, no, I’m not kidding. Don’t try to make a ‘make money online’ blog, you’re just wasting your time.

You’re still interested? Psh, people sure are stubborn. If you insist on going through with it, please, please follow a few basic rules so you’ll stand out from the herd:

• Pick a good theme - Don’t use the default Wordpress theme, but don’t pick an incredibly flashy one either. Don’t even bother picking one with ad space, as you won’t be needing it for a long time (if ever).
• Speaking of ads - Don’t put any up! You heard me. Get off of adsense and just think for a moment: When people visit a website, what do they want to see? No, not ads, content. You should be focusing on writing quality content and attracting new readers, not making a quick and shameless buck. My readers occasionally ask me when I’m going to start monetizing my site. I always tell them the same thing: When I hit 1,000 readers per day. Until then, I’m going to focus on attracting and keeping readers.
• The Feedburner widget - For heaven’s sake, don’t put it up until you have a good number of RSS readers! Congratulations, you finally broke into the double digits and now have 11 RSS subscribers. Big deal. That’s laughable. Don’t even bother putting the widget up until you have at least 50.
• Adsense blocks - You know what? Don’t use them. Ever. They’re ugly, they’re tacky, and they’ll drive off your readers. If you’re going to advertise (and you’d better have a good number of readers), find some other ad network. I don’t really care who. Go ask Cow or Chow.
• Be original - Starting a blog in the most crowded niche probably wasn’t a good idea to begin with, but since you’re here, you might as well do something. Don’t just rehash things you’ve read on this site or Digital Point forums. Tell your readers (assuming you have any) about what you’re doing and what you’re learning. If I wanted to read about something the Cow said, I’d visit his site.
• Hold a contest - A good way to attract first-time readers is by holding a contest. Get your hands on a $100 Apple store gift certificate and start promoting. A word of advice though: Make it clear that you won’t accept entries from tiny contest blogs. You know the ones I’m talking about: Those blogspot blogs that have 2 RSS readers and nothing but entries to other blog contests. Seriously, they’re worthless. The whole point of a blog contest is to attract readers, and a 15 year-old’s blogspot blog isn’t going to do that for you.

So you’ve got a blog in one of the most saturated niches on the Internet. Congratulations, you stubborn fool. I bet you’re just aching to prove me wrong. Well, let me know about your site. I offer a little service I like to call ReviewU (see what I did there?). Basically, it’s just like ReviewMe, except it’s free and I don’t have to review your blog if I don’t want to. Typically, I like to ignore blogs that are perfectly fine and really dig into the ones that are awful. So, if you’d like to risk a potentially scathing review of your ugly little blog, go ahead and contact me.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

66 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Most of us here are bloggers. Many of us write for multiple blogs, which is a great way to explore a number of niches. But where do you store your blogs? No, not online, offline?

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have a folder deeply buried on your hard disk called “blogs” or “sites” or whatever “blogs” or “sites” is in your directory. What mine contains is a copy of wordpress that the site is currently running (very important, as you if you switch servers you save time from finding the version of wordpress that’s compatible with your database), and the blog’s theme.

Each of my blogs has this, but there’s one more folder - plugins. This contains a copy of the essential plugins I use for my blog. Why do I do that? Well, three reasons stand out:

Saves Time: Instead of constantly directory hopping, I simply upload the wp-plugins folder to the wp-content subfolder on my server.

Handles Legacy Plugins: Suppose a site with the plugin you want on goes down? I’ve still got a backup, and - more importantly - I know exactly where it is.

Familiarisation - Before, I had 3 different plugins on 3 different blogs that did the same thing. Now, on any new blogs I create, I will only have one.

So, if you want to speed up the process of making a blog, spending more time blogging and promoting, why not create your own Plugin Depot on your hard drive? It’ll make your life a lot easier.

Of course, in an ideal world, all your blogs will use the same plugin depot online, but I’ll leave wordpress plugin writers to come up with a nifty way of doing that ;).

This post is written by Rhys Wynne - a five year blogger who knows the joys associated with multiple blogs. He writes at The Gospel According To Rhys, and has recently launched My Brand New Brand - a tool to help affiliate marketers find brandable domain names.

17 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Blogging can be hard work and having a lot of visitors to your blog is one of the best ways to feel rewarded for your hard work. Sometimes, though, getting a good number of loyal readers can feel like an up hill battle. Sometimes, just writing good articles is not enough. Here are a few things you can do to increase your readership quickly and without breaking your budget.

Have a contest
If you’re a blogger on a budget, you may think that you can’t pull off a great contest to promote your blog, but it’s easier than you may think. To offer a great contest that will get people participating you need to follow some rules of thumb:

- Work out all the details before announcing your contest.
- Only offer what you are ready to provide to your winner.
- Make entering as easy as possible.
- Offer various ways to enter.

The most important things to focus on are the prizes and the ways to enter. Prizes can be tricky if you don’t have a big budget, but if you get creative, you’ll find that you have a lot to offer. Try offering ad space on your blog, a 200 word review, or a spot in your blog roll. Offer all three to make it interesting. If you have a valuable skill other than writing, offer it up. Graphic designers can offer logo or theme creation services. Web developers can offer development services. You get the idea. What else can you offer? Better still, think about what an company might offer that you can give away for them? I suggested this very recently to a fellow blogger who managed to land some product promotions for his upcoming contest. The more creative you are, the less you will have to empty your own pockets for your contest.

Don’t make your contest impossible to enter. As amazing as your prizes may be, people are busy and don’t want to spend a long time entering your contest. Let your reader earn entries for actions as simple as posting a comment or writing a post on their own blog about your contest. The number of entries you give your reader for an action should be relative to both the time and effort involved and the value that action hold for you. One thing that will help convince people to write about your contest is to do most of the work for them. In one of my current contests, I created a text file that included the contest image code, the rules, and additional links needed. This made it very easy for people to post about the contest and a lot of people have.

Fill a need and get some links
Keep your ear to the web and look for any way you can fill a need. There’s almost always something that the growing population of bloggers will feel a need for. Develop something new or improve something that already exists to fill a need and take advantage when people notice. Recently, IZEA announced the launch of their new site ranking system called IZEA Real Rank. When it launched, it did so with a basic API and no existing widget to display the live rank of a site. As a developer, that screamed opportunity to me and I quickly created the first live IZEA Real Rank badge. I put that badge on my own blogs, announced it to my network of bloggers on MyBlogLog.com and then emailed IZEA about it. Within a day, a bunch of people were using the badge and IZEA mentioned it in their blog (while answering with their own badge). This benefits me because the badge code includes a link back to my site and a comment asking the blog owner to please include my link with the badge. The result was some very nice compliments combined with a lot of links back to my own blog, and all for only an hour of my time. If you’re not a developer, figure out what service you can offer and then figure out how to use it as a promotional tool. Alternatively, you can hire a developer to build something for you.

Develop a marketing tool that markets you
Would you waste time playing slots? What if I said it was free? What if I said prizes included text links to wherever you want? After Jason Boom handed me the great idea for Entrecard Slots, in which you visit a virtual slot machine for a chance to win credits to use in Entrecard, I decided to expand on it to create what I’m calling Free Ad Slots. The variation simply allows visitors to win text advertising links. For both versions, I created a simple widget and then found that I needed some kind of incentive for bloggers to add this widget to their own blogs. The incentive I decided upon was to match any jackpot a visitor hit to the site that sent them. This addition to my blog took about three hours to create both versions and after only a couple days, both have been used significantly, and many people have included the widget in their own blogs. Think of something you can offer your readers that is fun or entertaining, gives back to them, and offers some form of incentive for them to help you promote it.

Thinking outside the box has doubled my traffic and readership, gained me about 60 inbound links, and increased my brand recognition all in the space of a month. Creative promotions have far outweighed paid campaigns that I have tried in the past and have kept my wallet just a little fatter at the same time. Get creative and get more readers.

32 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

Each of us is a fan of music, but the way in which we, as consumers, get our music is constantly changing. From 78s, 45s and 33s to cassettes, CDs and beyond, our love for music hasn’t changed, but the format we listen to it on has.

With the advent of music downloads, P2P filesharing and digital music, consumers are forced to make ethical choices based on how they get their music. So, be honest now, are you a clean music fan or do you ever use filesharing services like Limewire or Ares? As the cliché goes: You wouldn’t steal a CD, so why would you do it online?

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is forever on the rampage against people who indulge in filesharing and illegal music downloads. Jammie Thomas, the world’s most infamous and dumbest advocate of filesharing, was sued for $220,000 by the RIAA for using the filesharing service Kazaa. The landmark ruling last year sent ripples through the filesharing community.

CD sales are declining. While the record industry would like for legal music downloads to pick up the slack, this has not been the case thus far.

According to IFPI figures released recently, the growth of the digital-music industry slowed in 2007, increasing just 40% after doubling in 2006. According to IFPI CEO John Kennedy, for every one legal music download bought, 20 more are procured illegally.

The RIAA has consistently targeted American students for filesharing violations. Pre-litigation letters are sent out to universities based on the IP address of suspected filesharers.

The letters are then passed onto the students, who are given a choice: pay an out-of-court settlement of several thousand dollars or be sued and, more often than not, lose.

Illegal music downloads cannot be stopped; filesharing is a part of modern life. Technically, it is theft, but the music industry was so late in dealing with it that it is now an entity that is out of control. Furthermore, how many of those people standing against filesharing have, at one time, copied casettes or burned CDs?

Targeting students and suing people for hundreds of thousands of dollars will not solve the problem. The vast majority of people who use filesharing programs do not do so for profit, but for personal use.

When Radiohead released In Rainbows in October last year, it was a slap in the face to the music industry. The band asked fans to choose what they wanted to pay for a digital download of the album, thus underlining the fact that music is changing. However, when the CD was released at the turn of the New Year and went to the top of the album charts in the US and the UK, it proved that people do still want CDs and that, perhaps, record labels still have a role to play. There must be a middle ground.

The music industry is at a loss now. At least one positive step is the news that Last.FM will launch a service allowing users to stream the entire library of tracks from the world’s four biggest record labels. Users will be able to stream tracks for free up to three times before having to pay for them.

There was further hope with the news that QTrax was to relaunch and offer legal, free music downloads with the support of the “the big four” record labels. Sadly, the launch has been all but scuppered as three of the four have come forward to deny any involvement with QTrax. The relaunch looks set to fall flat on its face.

What is needed for the music industry to survive are not attempts to eradicate filesharing, but improved ways of capitalizing on changing consumer trends.

I’d like to open this up to the barn here because it makes for a healthy debate.

Is filesharing morally wrong and what, if anything, should be done about it?

Angel is a decent sort of bloke who took a hiatus from his pro-blogging dream to write for music-download blogs like officilares.com and filesharing blogs like iownmymusic.org.

8 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post

It seems that every time I visit a blog, I see features that I didn’t see on the previous blog. With so many different developers and designers out there, I often wonder what kinds of plugins and which ideas really are best for a website. The list below will summarize a few of my favorite plugins. These are the plugins that help me to optimize, and monetize my blog most efficiently.

• Optimizing
  • Akismet Spam Blocker: This is an absolute must! Blocking comment SPAM can be a constant challenge without this plugin. All you have to do is get the free API and click “activate”. I think that some people are hesitant or just plain lazy and end up not getting the needed API for this plugin. It’s free, it reduces your workload automatically, and it works!
  • All-In-One SEO Pack: This plugin is really a must for any blogger or website developer. “This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO”. The All-In-One SEO pack helps you to effectivey raise your search engine ranking on a page-by-page level by adding tags, descriptions and titles more efficiently.
  • CForms II: Every blog needs a contact page. Although much more than just a contact page form builder,CFormsII is a full-featured, AJAXian plugin that makes it easy for you to create forms and add them to your pages. Including SPAM protection like CAPTCHA imges is a snap. Although the interface may seem a bit complex, this plugin is really the Cadillac of forms for Wordpress.
  • Google XML Sitemaps: Submitting your sitemap to Google manually can be a time consuming task. Lucky for us, there is this free plugin that does it automatically after every post. Not only does it keep Google abreast of your updates, it also helps to increase your findability on web searches.
  • ShareThis: Social Bookmarking is a great way to gain site visitors. Accounting for a large chunk of traffic and exposure, adding links to sites like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon is now really easy to do and takes just one mouse click.
  • Viper’s Video Quicktags: Adding video content to blog posts can be a real pain. You can’t really do it in the visual editor and sometimes the code just doesn’t work properly with Wordpress. Viper’s video quicktags helps to ease the process and makes adding video to your posts a snap.
• Monetizing
  • AdSense Manager: Do you have Google AdSense? Then you know that sometimes adding the code to your site is not as straightforward as you’d like. With this plugin, you can automatically generate AdSense code and position the ads via widgets.
  • FeedBurner FeedSmith: I’m not really sure if this belongs in this category or if it belongs in the “optimization” category. FeebBurner FeedSmith helps you to easily make available and visible your FeedBurner feed. The reason I have this here is that I monetize my RSS Feed, so if you don’t have or use FeedBurner to manage your RSS, you really should!
  • PayPal Donate: If you want to have an easy way for your readers to send you money, than this is it! Adding a quickly recognizable PayPal button to your posts or pages, this plugin makes it easy for you to receive money through PayPal.
  • RSS Footer: Tying in with the above mentioned FeedBurner plugin, RSS footer is the “how” you monetize your RSS feed. Adding affiliate links or paid advertising is a snap and you can be as creative as you want to be in how to monetize the feed.
  • Triggit: I’ve been using Triggit now for about a week. It’s so easy to add links to Amazon, Commission Junction, Shopping.com, and others, this plugin makes monetizing your blog really easy.
  • WP-Amazon: Amazon.com is one of the world’s biggest online retailers. Now adding contextually relevant links to your posts is a snap!

I hope this list has given you some sense of how easy it is to manage your blog. The links above are free plugins that help me to optimize and monetize my blog, and I hope you find them useful. What plugins would you add to this list and what kind of plugins do you wished existed for Wordpress?

Nick is a 20-something full time grad student and full time IT guy. Specializing in Information Architecture, he often dabbles in online projects. His latest project, a blog at http://www.learnhow2earn.com, is a blog that details his online money making experiences. Like what he has to say? Check him out and drop a comment!

40 Moos » ~ ~ Random Post