Blog For Profit

Archive for the ‘Blogging For Profit’ Category

I was the one who set up a blog ready to make money in under an hour. It’s a Halloween themed blog which I could have added Adsense to, but instead I put up some ebooks in the Halloween Niche for sale to monetise the blog for me. So here’s my step by step account of how I setup a new blog in under an hour.

here’s where my big tip comes in. It’s in two parts which is going to help you save money while you make money. The first part is, those blogs cost money and although they are worth it there is a way to get some of them without paying the full price of $17 each, or $97 for 10. You can sign up to a membership club I belong to which has a monthly fee half of the cost of the 10 blog packs

I am a hoarder, if I can find something to collect I will. That goes for online marketing goodies too, like domain names, ebooks and anything else I can get my hands on. It was this hoarding which has lead to me having far too many domain names to keep track of, therefore some get left behind. One of those blogs was ArticlesAnd.info, recently found languishing with an out of date wordpress version and a dead front page due to an expired plugin.

I decided I quite liked the look as it had been made to be an article repository and for articles to be added by authors and used by others on their sites. It looked like an article directory due to the plugins and a great theme which was intended to do so. But it also looked dead, 9,000 + articles had been scraped up until the scraper plugin or the site it linked to went AWOL.  So the look was staying, but what else can you do with a site called Articles And Info?

Now I had to decide what I was going to do to try to monetize the blog, and keep it adding content. The first parts was discussed when I wrote about the uContext plugin I had discovered which monetises the blog with links to keywords going to Clickbank Products. The second part was key to keeping the search engines and hopefully people coming back for another look, how to add content regularly while remaining lazy.

The answer came in another handy plugin, the Smart Autoblogger currently available for just $7 as I write this post. This plug in will add posts it creates from a zip file you point it to which contains txt files. As I personally collect all sorts of stuff, I had tons of PLR articles (Private Label Rights) which means I have tons of content for lots of different subjects.

With that in mind I added the Smart Autoblogger plugin  to ArticlesAnd.info and looked at some of the empty categories. I searched for some articles on my hard drive and then found a little more work had to be done. The Smart Autoblogger plugin uses the txt file name to create a title, so I had to ensure they would look ok, a quick Google found a small program which will rename batches of files by removing numbers and hyphens from the filenames, and replace the hyphens with spaces. Perfect for renaming the articles to make good looking titles.

I rezipped the files and added them to the blog using the Smart Autoblogger plugin which then found the txt files, and automatically scheduled them according to some rules I set. I added several sets of txt files to be scheduled over a few weeks in various categories (did I mention autoblogger lets you choose categories for each set of articles?).

So with automated dripfed content, and automatic Clickbank product linking with a touch of Google Adsense added for good measure my scattergun blog will hopefully make a little money from its various categories. Even if that one doesn’t I can leave it alone and start another WordPress blog on another of my hoarded domains and automate it in a similar way. It doesn’t take long to setup and if they fail well it’s all a learning experience.

P.S. the links to Smart Autoblogger go directly to the sales page, I make nothing from any of the sales it might get, this link is to help you and only you dear readers.

I just discovered a plugin which is most useful for anybody blogging for profit. I was searching for a Clickbank plugin to automate adding some revenue streams at http://articlesand.info which is a site I have had for a long time and forgotten about. When I got there and updated it to get it working I started looking to automate it a little more. I already had automated article submissions going to it but needed to add relevant affiliate products.

Whilst adding a couple of links I started searching for a Clickbank plugin of some sort and found UContext, which turned out to be a contextual link plugin. Basically what uContext does is turn a selection of keywords on your blog into links to related Clickbank products automatically. You get to select how many links per page, and can set things like the minimum percentage of the sale you want the links to have available among other criteria.

You have to sign up at the uContext site  which is actually free, but there are paid options too. The free option will get you one of your blogs on the system, but upgrades can be had at a very reasonable cost to add more sites, or get more features. I know with some online sites they will get you with the freebie, but the addons are horrendously high priced that isn’t the case here even for a startup, this would be worth adding once you have tested uContext for free.

I’d recommend uContext to anyone with a blog they are trying to make money from, as all your keywords which have potential profits from Clickbank will be automatically linked to make you cash. The plugin is available on the site and also from the WordPress add plugins search, but you still need to sign up to get the API Key (a sequence of numbers you copy and paste into the plugins settings page). It’d be nice to hear from some users in the comments below.

When I saw WP Simplicity advertised, I was very sceptical. The claims being made make it seem like the answer to every marketers prayers. When something gets as much hype as WP Simplicity did I usually find its actual value is inversely proportional to the claims. I resisted buying it for a while until somebody I trusted put it in a more believable light.

When I had downloaded it, installing WP Simplicity was as easy as installing any other WordPress plugin, that is upload and activate. There are actually two plugins, the main one which helps set up blogs quickly, and the secondary plugin which makes adding content to almost any wordpress blog just a few clicks.

We’ll start with the main plugin, which contains a plugin selector for over 100 of the most useful WordPress plugins. Some didn’t work, but that was due to the plugins themselves rather than WP Simplicity. Select as many plugins as you want from the list and install them, ideal for setting up multiple niche blogs quickly. In addition, the WP Simplicity plugin can instantly install a “Privacy Policy” page, “About” page “Contact” page and a sitemap. The only problem I encountered with these was that the sitemap required a particular plugin, which was one of those which wouldn’t install automatically from the Simplicity menu. Manual install allowed the page to be created.

So having setup several plugins, and all the necessary pages for my blog in just a few minutes, it was time to see what else the WP Simplicity plugin can do. There is a section to add any plugins you use which Simplicity didn’t contain, but I found that the functionality I need in a blog all came from the plugins supplied. Next it was time to test the addition of content using WP Simplicity.

Being a smartarse, I never read instruction manuals, and that made WP Simplicity’s content add-in (WP Simplicity Add Post) seem more difficult than it actually is, more on this later. Some basic setup is required first, inputting Clickbank I.D. and a few other bits of information which you discover is actually making life easy later. When you go to write a post you are given an extra search bar, and some radio button choices, these all ow you to search for content in the form of articles, news, Clickbank or Amazon products by keyword. Use the radio button to search for an article, and this was where I complicated things when I clicked the link and then copied and pasted the article. No need, there is a preview article link which loads the article in the preview box, and gives the option to insert it immediately.

Having added an article as content, you can search for affiliate products in Ebay, Amazon or Clickbank to add to the article all at the click of a few buttons. Adding content never was this simple, and adding potential money pullers at the same time is icing on a delicious cake.

Now onto the drawbacks, of which there are few. Firstly as I pointed out earlier, some of the plugins don’t work and one of the non working plugins being one of those required to make something else work in the WP Simplicity plugin did take off a little of the sheen. There is also a long loading time for the list of all the plugins to load before you can select them, although this is minor irritation and maybe better on a different webhost. Additionally the amount of plugins can be daunting unless you know which ones you want already.

The verdict, WP Simplicity is a very useful tool for the affiliate, Adsense or online marketing blogger to set up WordPress blogs quickly with almost instant plugin installation of a lot of useful gadgets. The addition of the pages to make Privacy policies etc. instantly is a real timesaver. The addition of the Add post widget and its ease of use makes this a must have for me now. Once I’d installed it on one blog, I started installing it on all of them and looking at what other niche blogs I have products and links to produce using this swiss army knife of a blog tool.

I have spent a lot of time over many years looking for a simple to use plugin to sell products directly from WordPress blogs. Some are very complex and take a lot of setting up only to not do what I needed, others were easy to install, took moments to setup and then cost days of wasted time trying to figure out why they just didn’t work properly to automate the task of selling a digital product from a WordPress Blog.

Recently I tried again to find a solution to my blogging sales woes, and spent a couple of days on a promising WordPress plugin, and eventually several forms filled full of information to a helpful tech support girl. Eventually I gave it up as another bad job and was about to settle for making payment buttons through Paypal each time I added a product to a blog. It was then that I spotted a link to WPSalesAutomator in an email.

The site was actually using the software to sell the plugin itself and it wasn’t expensive for the basic sales module which covers selling products or ongoing memberships with regular payments. I bought it downloaded and installed it in a few minutes. Setup of the Plugin actually turned out to be as simple as they said and the instructions were in the main pretty clear although I would have liked to see some more detail in places. I had to do some small changes in my Paypal profile too, but mainly to change stuff from what other failed plugins had requested.

Before you can add the first product you have to setup thankyou and download pages with special tags in them which the plugin used to add codes to the Paypal payment links etc to make it all automated. Again following the instructions for the WordPress Sales Automator Plugin was easy and quick. Then you can start adding the products..

With the product all you have to do is pick a product to upload and put in the price and some information. Then copy and paste (or write up) your sales letter into a new post or page as normal and add the products short ID tag (copied from the products listing in the plugin dashboard) and you’re ready to test. In my case it worked flawlessly first time and made me want to tell everyone about it (which is why I’m typing this).

Looking at the WPSalesAutomator site I can see only one major problem which is that it doesn’t work with the latest (3.2 at this time) version of WordPress, but it is being addressed.

My verdict is that if you want to sell your own products from a WordPress blog using Paypal then WordPress Sales Automator is a good way to do it, it’s inexpensive and from my experience just worked straight out of the box…

Find out more and purchase WPSalesAutomator here now

So you’re making money with your blog and everything is looking good, what’s the worst that could happen?

Actually quite a bit can still go wrong, firstly hackers and scammers who take advantage of outdated blog software to exploit it. Often they can leave your blog intact, but use some space on the site to hide an extra page for a phishing scam. Then they spam the link to this bogus page everywhere to get unwitting people to divulge bank details. But guess who will end up getting taken off the server?
That’s right, your blog comes down, and your domain takes the rap for the spam and gets blacklisted on the spammer sites.

So rule number one is keep your blog software (and any other scripts for that matter) up to date so that any known security holes are plugged. Some updates may also add extra useful functionality, so it’s worth updating your software regularly for those reasons.

Even if your blog is up to date, things can go wrong, and often do. It’s not unheard of for a web hosting company to completely disappear, but more often is a hardware failure at the server. When this happens most decent web hosting companies will have backups, the cheaper ones won’t. Even the best web hosting companies may not have your most recent blog updates saved for you, so you’d better do it yourself.

It makes sense to keep backups of any templates, and modified files locally, and probably a complete backup of the whole site. The thing with blogs and any other non static sites is that they store the information, in the case of a blog all your posts, in a database separately from your main files which run the site. Luckily if you run a WordPress blog on your own hosted site you can use a plug-in to automatically back up your site as often as you like.

WordPress Database Backup ( http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup ) can be setup to email your database to you whenever you like. A quick tip I’d like to pass on is Gmail.com, a free Gmail account can be used as the destination for your database backups, and as you get huge amounts of space you can store a lot of backups there. Keep a backup locally on your hard drive, and one online at Gmail and you are fairly sure to have one should you need a database backup.

The worse that can happen is your blog goes down, and there are no backups. Be prepared and this kind of disaster may not be a big hit to your blogs profit. Remember back it up often, and in more than one place.

If you didn’t already know it, the best way to sell something to your blog readers is to sign them up to your own mailing list. Offer something of value related to your blog, and then ask the reader for their email address so you can send them emails to remind them about your site, or offer products they may need in the future.

I just found a quick and easy way to add a subscriber form to your blog with a new low cost plugin, which saves you time as you don’t need to play with widgets, or your blogs theme files.

For more information about Action Opt-in Click Here.

in easy pocket money blogging part one we discussed web hosting the blog, and setting it up. We also looked at the first few plugins used to make it an article directory and avoid spam from comment spammers. In part 2 we will look at how we get traffic to the new blog, and how we monetise it.

Firstly I will run through the basic plug ins I add to all my blogs for traffic generation from search engines. I set these up first as they will be helping every time a new article is added to the directory. My first suggestion is All in One SEO Pack as this helps to make your blog posts get ranked in search engines with the appropriate tags, and titles etc. This helps no end in getting traffic for free from search engines, and making sure your listing is right in the searches. Using the defaults in most of the settings works well enough for the lazy people like me too.

In addition to All in One SEO I always ensure my blogs use permalinks, and use the structure
” /%category%/%postname%/ ” in the “Custom Structure” field in permalink settings. These together help give the search engine rankings a boost and bring the traffic in. Once you have traffic you can start monetising your articles, oh yeah we haven’t got to the articles yet have we? Don’t worry it’s coming but lets get it all ready for making your pocket money on the blog first.

To monetise a blog, I use a widget with Adsense in on the right of the page, and also a plugin called Adsense Injection available at http://www.biggnuts.com which will place Adsense blocks in the article text automatically wrapping it in the text. You can also add Link-A-Dink plug in to turn some key words and phrases within articles to text links to affiliate products or your other sites. Of course how you monetise your blog is up to you, and you may do it even better than I do, this works for me and I’m too lazy to experiment.

On this blog I also addeed Role Manager, WP-PageNavi and  MaxBlogPress Favicon plugins. The last of these helps to get your blog noticed by adding one of those little icons to the title bar of the browser and also to the title when bookmarked, which helps it stand out a little and makes people come back again. You can add your choice of plugins too, if you have other things you like to see on your sites.

We now have a WordPress blog, which looks like an article directory and works like one. It also attracts traffic from search engines to the articles which we don’t have yet. This is where the best bit comes in, free content added automatically. The plug in for this is on the Unique Article Wizard Plugins  page UAW Plugins for Various Article Directories where you can download the unique articles plugins for various scripts including WordPress. Activate the plugin, and fill in the details in the settings, and you will start receiving articles to your new site almost immediately.
In my case I have had over 3000 articles in a few weeks, and the search engines have started sending enough traffic to earn me some extra Google Adsense cash this month.

You can setup an article directory or any niche themed website with WordPress, and start getting article submissions in minutes. As it grows, hopefully so will your pocket money. And if you’re one of those people who likes to test and tune, fiddle around with the settings, and you could probably be making a bit more than pocket money from a blog like the one outlined here. The choice is yours. But whatever you do, get started on your pocket money blog soon.

If I was prone to exageration I could claim that I am making thousands from one quick and simple blog. I could write a short e-book on it and then sell that book for silly money to people with a disclaimer that their earnings may not be the same as mine. I’m not prone to exageration, and am too lazy to write the e-book to cash in, so instead I’m going to outline a way to make a quick bit of extra pocket money from a simple blog.

The blog in question at http://www.articlesand.info could probably make a bit more profit with tweaking, probably will make a little more as it grows, but in reality was just a way to use up a domain I already had paid for.  It took next to no time to set up, takes a few minutes a week to keep it going and brings in a little pocket money. Now that’s a way to get started blogging for profit.

So how did this come about?

Firstly I had the domain http://www.articlesand.info sitting around awaiting a script for me to publish an articles directory (I have used a couple before but they were insecure). I also have a reseller hosting account for all my domains at Hostgator which is paid for by my other sites profits. If you are web hosting more than a couple of sites, Hostgator is a great place to put them. So I had everything I needed to put together a site except the script for the article directory.

That’s when I saw something about using WordPress as an article directory. I experimented on my own but it was a bit hit and miss. I googled for a WordPress article directory plug in and found there was one available at http://articlesss.com/article-directory-wordpress-plugin/ which also offers a nice article directory style theme to go with it. To get it up and running quickly, I used cpanel to install WordPress from Fantastico (all included in your hostgator hosted account) filled in a few fields on a form and WordPress was installed. I then installed the article directory plug in and theme. Now it was ready to take some articles from other authors.

Actually it wasn’t ready yet, if you have ever installed WordPress on your own domain, you will probably have encountered comment spam. So one of the first plugins I activate in WordPress blogs is the Akismet one which is usually installed with WP anyway. There are other comment spam filters, but Akismet does the job well enough. So this helps to keep my time spent on the blog to minimum as most comment spam is removed for me automatically.

part 2 to follow soon.