LinkMoney.org

Do you get sick of the hype about all the free traffic generators to use for Twitter? Well here is another one, only catch is this one won’t cost you any money! Did you ever notice how Linkmoney, (link and money) seem to go so well together? (Andy Rooney)

The usual thing to do with a Twitter account is to write catchy little twips that will grab the reader’s attention so that they will click on your link right? OK, so if your are a genius with a razor sharp wit you can keep the energy level high and generate new stuff every few minutes and each one of your posts just might grab a new visitor to your Blog or to purchase your giddy gadget-du-jour.

What happens after the scroll? Your pin point sales pitch is gone, as in gone, gone, gone. Sure it might have grabbed a couple of people but once it has scrolled off the radar range you have to dream up some new piece of wisdom and wit to do it all over again, right?

Well no longer boys and girls. Here is a way to rejuvenate your Blog, drive new traffic to your website and it is as easy as 123. You already have your tweet posts right at your fingertips! You are a blogger, right?

You already created some wonderful short clip words of wisdom for your Blog post titles, right? Here is what you do.

Open a text editor and go to your Blog. Click on each Blog post title then take your little mousey and highlight the title, copy, and paste it over to the text editor. Then make a tinyURL for the Blog post URL and copy and paste that over to the text editor. Voila! You now have a tweet that is ready to post.

If you do not have a tinyURL tool of choice, go get one. Google will show you where. I prefer to use the tool at XR.com because it is one of the shortest ones out there. Bit.ly is another, it does not matter which URL shortener you use the object is to get the link to be as short as possible to save some of your 140 character Twitter post.

So now go through your whole Blog and create a title and a link to each of the posts. I know you all created catchy titles when you wrote the Blog posts so these will be sure to be winners on Twitter as well.

Now when you fill that text file with dozens of tweet posts you will have plenty of ammunition to use when ever you want to give a tweet! That is the manual way of course but see what’s next for the Piece-de-resistance!

Here is the free tool that will post these messages for you on a scheduled time program that you define. Use http://feedmytwitter.com. You just log in using your Twitter user name and Twitter password and it is very easy to set up.

My Account: (meaning your account)
Current Status: (running or stopped – you select)
Post Random Tweets: (you select the schedule anywhere from two minutes to hours, day, week, month or whatever.)

Message: (empty text box where you copy and paste each of your tweets that you created on your text editor. Yes you have to do them one at a time, but this is the last time you will have to do it.)

Once they are all pasted in, go down to the bottom and hit “SAVE” – Go back up to the top and hit the “START” button and walk away whistling Dixie!

You are now keeping your brand on Twitter 24/7 and with enough titles that get published randomly your followers will not get upset with you because each of your tweets has a purpose and meaning.

Besides all of that you are now freed up to just occasionally use some of your witty barbs that you are so fond of doing. More is better and it will surely just add to your mystique and your followers will marvel in how intelligent you are.

Oh, and by the way, there is no cost for using Feed My Twitter, honest. Now just watch your social traffic pick up and your followers will increase also.

Do you know of any tools like this that you can recommend to get your message out to millions of people?

Leave your comment or suggestion below.

Oh, and Follow me on Twitter: linkmoneydotorg

Author: Nicole Munoz

Oh, the price you’ll pay when your boss finds out you had to fire yet another project manager for not meeting a deadline! What can you do differently next time? Outsource! The benefits of outsourcing are endless because they allow a company to hire out a specially-skilled employee with no strings attached. This means that a full-time staffer doesn’t need to be hired for each function of the business. The overhead is dramatically reduced and a business can still get superior quality work at a fraction of the cost!

There are many companies that offer outsourcing services including startrankingnow, odesk and rentacoder. The goal of these companies, and others like them, is to provide an array of specialized services. Some offer software programming, web development, content writing, customer service, and even marketing folks. All you have to do is decide what services you need, find the right person for the job, and they’ll get the job done. It makes hiring a team of experts one of the easiest and most profitable actions you can take to benefit your business!

There are several great tips for helping an outsourced project go according to plan and to get the results you’re looking for. First, make a 1 page project summary for the team (or individual) and let your expectations be known. This will outline exactly what goals you want accomplished and what you need from them during the project’s lifespan. Next, be sure to set a clear budget and include a timeline of dates for when your project’s mini-goals should be completed. Finally, provide clear and measurable goals, sometimes referred to as check points, to help determine if the project was completed to your expectations or if it has fallen short.

Even better than written documents that outline your goals and expectations, why not create a detailed step-by-step PDF, Power Point presentation, or Camtasia video to explain the precise steps and procedures to get the project done? These programs are powerful tools that can illustrate the benefits of your product or service and can serve to clarify your project expectations, can give direction to the tasks, and will specify how you want your message to be told. Pictures tell a thousand words and with these 3 programs you can do just that by really driving home your budget, timeline, goals, and what you anticipate the end result to be.

The bottom line is that outsourcing provides you with any type of team member you need. It gets you right to the source of the expert help you need without the expense of hiring another full-time staffer. Simply hire a well-qualified service provider that has already had years of experience. Remember to clearly and concisely outline projects and goals for your virtual team so they have clear direction and can meet your expectations. If it doesn’t work out, there are plenty of other freelance prospects to turn to. With these tips in mind, you’ll avoid that “walk of shame” to your boss’s office to report that another person had to be fired for letting a client down.

About the author: Nicole Munoz is the owner of Start Ranking Now, an SEO outsourcing company that provides articles, blogs and SEO ranking expertise. She also conducts SEO training in San Diego and is a Social Media Expert.

You all know that “Content is King” right?

Here is an absolutely FREE (as in, no charge,) place to get, or give, Free Content for your Blog or eBook.  This project was one of the best ideas that was ever dreamed up by “The Idea Lady”, Cathy Stucker.

The site is called: Blogger LinkUp and the byline is “Get Content – Get Links.”  I found Cathy on Twitter where she is known as @CathyStucker.    You will want to read her Blog post on her personal website about how she prefers to use Twitter, and after reading her explanation you should not be upset if she does not follow each and every one of you.

So here is the way Blogger LinkUp works.  Sign up with name and email, get a user name and that’s it!  Then usually once a business day you will find an email in your inbox from Cathy that is simple and straight to the point.  She lists people that are willing to write free content for your own use, with the subject matters defined, and whether or not it is totally new content or if it has been published previously.

Then there also is a list of requests for content wanted, where you can post your own needs and wishes for a guest post authored article and subject.  I have received two very well written articles for two of my Blogs and now I am in the process of  posting my willingness to write for someone else in return of the favor.

So what is the benefit you ask?  Well it is quite simple, sometimes you get in a rut with your Blog writing style and a little injection of new blood from another author might be just the shot in the arm that you need to spice up your readership.  Someone new that is writing about your favorite subject will be sure to have a different slant of view than you do and your site will benefit from it.

What does the writer gain in return you also ask?  Well they get to feel good about helping someone out and they get to give their opinion on the given subject and best of all they get a free backlink that is inserted in the published article.  It’s a win win and remember “Content IS King”!

So go on over to Blogger LinkUp and register for a user name.  It is non-fattening and good for the digestion.

Rich

We had a freak weather situation here yesterday.  I almost never have the TV on and for some reason I turned it on during a light slow drizzle of a nice rain storm.  All of a sudden TORNADO WARNINGS and we were exactly in the center of the path.  From 4 to 6 pm it got really weird around here with storm dark howling noises, driving winds and rain varying from a roar to extremely silent and then back to thunder boomers and howling again.

I know now what I hold most sacred because without thinking I gathered up my last 4 notebooks, my smallest laptop, did a quick backup of my main system on to my external hard drive, a digital camera, threw them all in a duffle bag to take with me, and made a nest in the smallest bedroom for me and the 3 dogs and cat.

It did howl like crazy nearby but we were untouched and I have not seen the news yet this morning but I bet it did hit nearby. We almost never have anything like that around here in this part of Upstate New York.  Once I was driving across country and was going from Nebraska up to Pierre, SD to visit people and the car radio was warning of tornado possibilities near Pierre, and I actually saw two different funnels ahead of me, one on the left and one on the right at the same time.  Very scary and they do a lot of damage.

It was funny after the fact what I decided were the most precious possessions and what was the most important to save.  There are lots of very valuable family heirloom antiques around here and I did not think about one of them.  What would you decide was the most precious things to take with you and are you ready?

Update: The tornado did hit just over the next mountain only a couple of miles away and destroyed a house and some barns and some horses were lost on a nearby Amish farm.  I knew I could hear it nearby but could not see it.  Our neighbors will pitch in and help them rebuild I am sure.  Be prepared!

Technorati Profile

Get Targeted Quality Followers on Twitter

In case you have just awaken from your Rip Van Winkle 20 year nap and have not heard of Twitter, you are missing out on one of the best social linking tools and traffic builders out there.

I have had a Twitter account for almost two years but until about two weeks ago I never tried to use it to its full advantage. When you sign up there are about 20 followers that you can get immediately just by clicking the accept button, and you can also let Twitter into your email address book to find others that are on Twitter, which I refuse to do, and then you start adding followers to your account by writing lots of good posts.

Hold on, you say. “Who will see my posts if I don’t have any followers?” Well you must eat your meat or you can’t have any pudding! Its the old chicken or the egg problem isn’t it?

Targeted Twitter Followers with #hashtags

Here is one way that I started to use recently to find birds of a feather.  At the bottom of the Twitter page is a “search” tab.  Use that to search for keywords that you want to use to find like minded Twitterers, Tweets, Tweeties, Twotes, Twats..  If you really want to zero in on some users that are “In the know,” use the hash tag symbol (otherwise known as the pound sign or “#”).  So lets say you want to find articles about “Make Money Online” or “MMO”.  The hash tag search would be #makemoneyonline or #mmo.  This will return all articles that use those specific hash tags.  These tweets will also be more apt to be from tweeters that are advanced and may have many followers themselves.

Then here is what I did to get followers.  When I find a tweet that I like, first I “follow” the writer, then I select, copy and paste the article into the “What are you doing” box and use the “retweet” feature with a reply notice to the writer.  To make a reply notification you include the @ sign in front of their name like @linkmoneydotorg.  Then you put the retweet symbol which is the two letters RT and then the copied message.  Now you have accomplished two things.  You have notified the writer that you are following him or her, and you also thought enough of one of their posts to retweet it.  Nothing gets attention better than retweets because that is what everyone is hoping for all the time and what helps to make certain messages go viral.  This person will no doubt follow you and they might even return the favor some time and retweet some of your posts.

Alltop for Targeted Twitter Followers

Now here is an even better way to find high quality tweeters that are in your niche.  go to Alltop.com and select a category of interest.  Alltop calls themselves a magazine of the Internet but I look at them as one of the very best sources of Blogs that are in high standing.  Not everyone’s Blog is accepted into Alltop and if they are there then you have no fear of ever being scammed or spammed by any of them because Alltop actually vets every single applicant before they are approved.

Now for instance if you select Green, or mmo, or cars, or whatever, as your category of interest you will find dozens or hundreds or thousands of Blogs listed that are in your niche.  Click on some of them that interest you and read their Blog posts and if they are in your groove, then look for their Twitter name and go to Twitter and subscribe to their Twitter posts, then follow, then retweet, then rinse and repeat.

Now you can make money with Twitter, Big Time! Click Here!

You will start building a very high quality list of followers that are in your niche.  By the way, take a look at the followers of your new found friends because they are probably interested in what you have to say also.

Don’t forget to add links to your own Blog posts or your website of interest or affiliate product landing page, or whatever you want to promote.  In the last two weeks I have added about 700 new followers using these methods and you can too.

Click Here! for the Twitter Blueprint to Success.

A good photo of you, a pretty face, or even your company logo or brand will help you get targeted quality followers on Twitter.

Follow me on Twitter (@linkmoneydotorg).  Change your password often.

Related articles

• Diary of a Day Hiker was Accepted at Alltop (diaryofadayhiker.wordpress.com)
• Twitter Me This
• The Power of Using Twitter Advanced Search

What do you do when you told to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress?

A couple of days ago the newest release of WordPress wp2.7.1 came out and I was curious to see how it was going to work with the built in WordPress Automatic Upgrade feature.

I have a lot of Blogs and websites to upgrade so I started with some of the most popular sites and it was quite reassuring to see the auto feature just step though the procedure one by one and soon it was complete!  Very nice.

That is very nice until I hit two sites in a row that gave me the old dreaded “Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction() (previously declared in /home”… blah, blah, blah.  Huh? What to do now?

So I went to WordPress.org upgrade troubleshooting and looked for the same error message.  I did not find what I wanted, but I did see one message about deleting the old WP-auto-upgrade plugin that I have been using on all of my sites.  The person said “delete it, don’t just deactivate it.”

Well that made sense because we just would not need it anymore.  Besides it was clunky and not very automatic as I have written about before. Read previous post about problems with WordPress automatic upgrade.

Then I took it one step further and made sure I backed up everything and sent a copy of the backup to my email and then I deactivated all of the remaining plugins, and then ran the auto upgrade.  It works perfectly and fast too.  No more interaction is needed like the old auto-backup plugin required.

So below is a standard procedure that I will be following from now on with all of the sites I have to upgrade.
1) – First and most important, BACKUP all files.
2) – Delete the old WP-Auto Upgrade plugin.  Don’t need it any more.
3) – De-activate all remaining plugins.
4) – Use built-in auto upgrade.
5) – re-activate all plugins.

This is the standard message list that you will see as the auto backup utility does it’s job.
Upgrade WordPress
Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip
Unpacking the core update
Verifying the unpacked files
Installing the latest version
Upgrading database
WordPress upgraded successfully

Nice improvement WordPress!

Hope this helps some of you readers.

Rich

UPDATE: 01/15/10

As of this date I can no longer recommend the second product shown below either.  Use any of these types of  automated backlink programs at your own risk.  Google knows who you are and where you live.

UPDATE: 05/24/09

At the time I wrote this article I was quite enthralled with the NextGen product discussed, however since then I have had second thoughts and ultimately did unsubscribe.  There is nothing wrong with the advertised offer of this product and it does do what they make claims of, however they go about it in a way that i am not too keen on so decided to retire it.  The biggest objection to it that I had is that the outgoing links that get inserted on your website end up being kind of klunky looking box ads on the bottom of your website and they appear to break outside of the WordPress theme.

I did give it a pretty good run for a few months but I never really saw any backlinks being indexed by you know who and suspect that they might not have any weight but am not sure of that.

In any event I have switched over to another product to do the same thing but they do it in a much more valuable method and you can read about it in this link:  One Way Links

This new product actually posts articles that you write just like any standard article and you may put up to 3 html links with anchor text in each article and that article can get sent out to hundreds of websites.  Read the full instructions here at:  One Way Links

————————————————

Previous article:

This is an unabashed glowing testimonial for a new way of creating backlinks.  I will qualify this by telling you that I am an affiliate advertiser for this product, but that is definitely not the reason for this testimonial.  The product is called NextGen Links, the way linking ought to be,

We get bombarded by scammers quite often trying to extort a little money out of our pockets for the service of providing us with wonderful backlinks to our website du jour.  If you recall I wrote about one such case where I experimented with one of these fabulous deals for 100 backlinks to my site for only $14.00.  These were to be links to the homepage of whatever site I chose, and they would be from “appropriate” websites.

I paid the money for one website, and over about a month I did receive notices that “my” links had been approved by this site or that.  Most all of the sites were in India and Asia, and some were nothing more than blatant link farms, and a few were from Adult sites.  So much for appropriate.  Too late, the damage was done.

Within two months my site was delisted by the Big G.  If you search on the domain name it does show up in the search index, but there is absolutely no data following the domain name.  You can never locate it in the serps by any of the article titles or article keywords.

You may read the previous article about this here:
It is Not Nice to Fool Mother Google

So I must admit, when I first heard about this new product I took a quick glance with trepidation as I had no intention of purchasing it.  Then I dug a little deeper and listened to the audio interview between Willie Crawford and Charles Kassotis, the top dog at NGL, about this new automated backlink generating system and I thought hmmm.

Well it was being promoted by Willie Crawford, a legend in Internet Marketing success, and he unabashedly recommended it with no reservations.  That fact alone made me feel much better.  So I drilled down another level and looked at the demonstration videos provided by NextGen Links and when you see how it works it makes real good sense to give it a go.

I hate these sales funnels where you have to go down, down, down to find out what the Hell the price is, so I’ll tell you right up front.  The entry level is $37.00 monthly and that is for up to ten of your domains with 500 unique url’s each.  There are various other packages at higher prices that go all the way up to an Enterprise level for SEO specialists that sell linking services as part of their SEO marketing package.

What is different about NextGen Links is that the system is automated.  You may select to trust the system to provide backlinks to each and every one of your internal unique urls, or you may elect to use the monitored process, which is what I do, to stay aware of what links that I send out and to what websites are sending backlinks in to my deep pages.

The way it works is that you receive a small piece of invisible code that you insert in your website, on WordPress Blogs I put it in the footer, just as you would Analytics code, and then you “Spider” your own site with either a downloadable tool, or use the online version from NextGen Links.  The graphical spider is a little creepy, but you can turn that off.  You can minimize the window and go about your business while the crawling is being done.

If you have a lengthy website it might take quite a long time for the spider to crawl your Blog, some were done in a few minutes and one site took 2.5 hours, and when it is complete the spider has now created a csv file which you upload to NextGen Links.  All of this might sound like it is complicated, but it is not.

I just checked the dashboard stats and in the first three full days of operation I have sent out 54 individual unique links that have been accepted and I have received in 11 of them from other websites to be included in my posts.  There is a quid pro quo of course, but all of the links that I approved are from good valid websites and the subject matter does relate to the post on my site, so I think they are a plus to the article.  If you are a niche marketer that does not want your readers to be able to link out to anyplace other than your own sales page you might be missing a golden opportunity.  Look at how many millions of more eyes will see links to your pages.

I have installed this tool on five of my niche sites and not on my major content Blogs yet.  I always like to test things before I go whole hog on anything, but I have a feeling that I am going to be adding this most excellent feature on hundreds of websites.  Oh, I almost forgot, you get to approve the websites that are accepting your links also.

Here is something pretty strange that I discovered.  On two of my sites that I had just recently updated to WordPres 2.7, the spider would not crawl.  After checking all the plugins and sitemap and internal SEO features of my Blog I discovered that for some reason the “Privacy” tab had defaulted to private.  None of the search engines have been able to crawl through those sites since I upgraded.  I have no idea how that happened but I’ll tell you this.  I did NOT set that tab to private.  Now I am checking all of my hundred plus other Blogs for that privacy setting.  Actually I would have never known it without installing the NextGen Links system.

The dashboard on the backend is totally awesome!  It is so intuitive and easy to use, that you will get the hang of it the very first time you use it.  You are allowed to approve only eight outgoing links per day per website.  The reason for this is so you will not receive a penalty for link cramming.  The search engine Gods like to see normal, gradual, relative and “appropriate” links developing over time.  This system fills that requirement nicely.

What you receive is totally context relevant links in that you can select where you want to display them, and all links are to individual internal posts.  These links do not just point to your homepage.  They are all deep links.

There is a forum attached to your account where others have posted questions and comments and the tech support responds very quickly, (almost immediately in my two cases,) with answers to any of your questions.  You will also become registered automatically with an affiliate sales account for this product as soon as you become a member.

Let’s cut to the chase.  I wholeheartedly endorse this system.  The price of $37 to get thousands of links to every single deep page of your websites, that come from other websites in your niche or that closely resembles your niche, is just a fabulous deal!

Oh by the way, the first two weeks are FREE!

Check it out and watch the training videos.  Try it, you’ll like it…

Click Here for Automated Backlinks

Actually do click here for One Way Links

If you have read this far, please read the very top of this article for the latest update.  Rich Hill – 01/15/10.

Have you ever built a website, or considered building a website using Joomla! ?

Seeing as how I have become a WordPress butt boy and have built a couple of hundred or more sites using WordPress I normally do not look outside my little WP box for other possibilities.

My website publishing started close to a dozen years ago and up until a little over a year ago I gave all my talent away for free.  The first site I created was on freewebs.com and it was about genealogy.  One does not have to be a genius to fill in the boxes that freewebs gives you and then hit “publish.”

About seven or eight years ago I took my now famous genealogy site and hired a professional web design company to convert it over to a full blown very impressive looking site with tons of interactive features and they used Joomla! That was the first I had ever heard of that website design system.

The code looked like a plate of rotten spaghetti to me and there was no way I would EVER learn any of that crud.  I am NOT  a programmer. Well the company that built my site did take me by the hand and teach me how to make minor changes and how to add content and all of the day to day necessities of running a popular website.

It still was confusing and I had to call on them to pull me out of the ditch several times.  Then a little over a year ago I was introduced to WordPress and have learned just enough now to be dangerous.  I can build a Blog site or even a static website using WP in no time at all.  They are excellent sites too I might add.

That said, there are times that I think one might want to consider using Joomla! To build a site that requires some heavy duty data base activity, inventory control, point of sale, etc.  Sure there is probably a WordPress plugin for some of these features but maybe Joomla! would be a better choice.

So I went to http://Joomla.org and started to look around to see what they had to offer.  This is a pretty impressive system and they have an enormous following.  The forum has 1,503,625 posts, 331,882 topics, and 249,947 members as of this morning.

Some of the topics and categories on the Joomla! forum are:
Installation
Migrating and Upgrading
Security
Administration
Extensions
Templates
SEO
Language
Performance
And many, many more…

From the website under What is Joomla?
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

Then there is a good description of Content Management Systems (CMS)
Some examples of what Joomla! can do.
Who uses Joomla?
And again, many more…

It appears as though as with all Open Source programs, there is a hoard of engineers, programmers, designers and users that stand ready to lend a hand to anyone that wants to give it a go.

I think I will set up a test site and just start learning this myself.  It can’t hurt and just might come in handy with the bigger clients that I have been having sign up for my website development services.

Besides, I still have my friends that built my original Joomla! site that I do J-V projects with quite often, and if my ox gets stuck in the ditch, I’m sure they’ll be there to pull me out.

Holy Bat Dung, Batman, this really, really, really blew my mind!

Quoting Randfish, in part, on the SEOmoz Blog today in his excellent report about one of their new SEO utilities called Linkscape.  “The Internet is really, really, really Big…” and “if your [website] page has 100 [or more] external links to it, you are in the top 1/10th of one percent of all of the pages on the web”, and “On the entire web, the vast majority of websites never get 100 links pointing to them!”

Here is what I gained out of this morning’s RSS feed from the SEOmoz Blog,

Linkscape goes out with its own bots or spiders and they crawl the web indexing everything that they possibly can, and then you are allowed to use this compiled data for your own SEO purposes.  Since they created this tool and started crawling and collecting data for the 4th quarter of 2008 they have had two major updates.

You will want to read this full report by Rand because his numbers are staggering.  I see that they have crawled over 36 Billion url’s and he also states that their database may only be from 1/3 to ½ of what some of the bigger companies, (like you know who,) have compiled.

That is 36 Billion, with a “B” folks.

I’m also presuming that at this size there are probably some millions of new websites being built every day, and each and every one of them are trying to get a little bit of that fish food that is in front of you in this humongous aquarium called the Internet.

You must go and read the report yourself.  I have printed it out and hung it over my monitor.  I’ve really, really, really got to work harder.

Gotta go get some links.

Rich Hill

Update: 5/25/09 – Speaking of really big, I had to go to New York City recently on business and I was not sure where I was going to stay.  So I found this website that I want to share with you for booking your hotel or motel room in the Big Apple.  The site is: New York Motels and there are free descriptions of rooms and amenities of all the best hotels and motels in Mahattan as well as reviews of the really cheap hotels as well.  We recommend that you go to this site to check prices and availability and you may also make your room reservation right from the New York Motels website.

Almost every day on various message boards or Blogs you will see a common question, “How can Blogging make money?” Many people get in to Blogging because it is a convenient way to write about subjects that they know about or want to promote.  After a while once the Blog has taken on a certain character and established a direction, then it becomes a pretty normal thing to want to earn a little income for your efforts.

There is nothing wrong with that.  Do not think that if you start to advertise products on your website or Blog that you will lose readership.  That does not happen.  As a matter of fact, most people expect some sort of advertising.  You are certainly allowed to reap a little benefit for your efforts.

So once you have decided to run some ads then what to do?  Well there are various ways that you may want to try.  I say try because this business of Internet Marketing is a constant effort of testing, testing, testing.

One easy way is to insert some ad blocks of Google Adsense text ads.  You will need a Google account, then use the simple set up procedure to select the size and type of text block ads and Adsense will generate the html code that includes your advertiser account number and you copy that block of code over to a text box section on your Blog.  You will want to experiment with different size ads that will match your Blog layout and you may also select different color schemes.

Now as your Blog is published Google analyzes the information on your website and decides what the theme or subject matter is of your Blog and will automatically generate ads for products that their computer determines would be a good fit for your Blog.  Some times the fit is not appropriate and there are ways to block certain advertisers but generally speaking the ads do match what you are writing about.

These Adsense ads are Pay Per Click ads in that if someone reading your Blog sees an ad of interest and clicks on it you make a little money.  You must NEVER click on your own ads, or have any of your friends or family members click on any of your own ads.  Google wants it to be a natural thing and they do have ways of knowing who clicked, and if it was out of real interest or a case of click fraud.  Do NOT under any circumstances do this, take my word for it.  If you do click your own ads you will be banned, your funds will be seized and there is no negotiation.

Another method to answer the question of how can blogging make money, is to use Affiliate Advertising.   We will cover this in another Blog post here on LinkMoney.org.

You no doubt know the power of Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and several other Social Networking Websites online.

This writer has made many nice connections in the past year through the use of these social networking websites.  Probably my all time favorite is Twitter because it causes you to think and react in short bursts of creativity.  Sometimes just a simple little bit of humor, one liners, so to speak, are enough to bring people to your profile and then that creates traffic to your website.

When I write a post for one of my Blogs that I feel is worthy of some attention, I just post a tiny description of the post on Twitter with a link to the site and traffic builds.  The more traffic you get and if you have good content, the visitors will subscribe to either your email or rss feed and you have a potential customer.

Twitter is very easy to use, just get an account and start reading some of the tweets, and “Follow” some of the fellow posters that you are interested in and then maybe they will follow you back.  Soon you will have a hundred followers and then more keep coming.  Try to make your 140 character posts of interest or exciting and you will soon find many new friends.

I must admit that of all the social networking sites online I probably spend more time on Twitter then all the others put together.  I read in a recent report that Twitter’s subscriber rate more than doubled last year.  So if you are not a fellow tweet, then hurry on over and join the other rare birds.  They say that birds of a feather flock together.

You will want to get yourself a handle that is easily recognized and in some way will represent you at a glance.  Mine is linkmoneydotorg for obvious reasons, and my image is actually a favorite photo of my Dad when he finished digging the cellar for our house with a pick, a shovel and a wheelbarrow.  Dad would get a kick out of knowing that his picture is scattered all over the world.

If you have a website and you want to put a cute graphical link on it, then you can go to http://www.twitterbuttons.com/ and just put in your Twitter name and select from many of the nice designs available.

One really handy site that will help you keep up on the messages that your friends are posting as well as your @replies and direct messages is to use TweetDeck.  The normal Twitter page scrolls by quickly when you have many followers and people you are following.  TweetDeck handles this problem nicely.  http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/

Our next post is going to tell you about a place where you can go and see a list of social networking sites and also see if your handle of choice is available on all of them at one time.

Twitter is one of the most popular of all of the social networking websites, but in the next few posts we will be explaining what some of the others are and give our opinion of what the benefits of each are.

Come follow me on Twitter @linkmoneydotorg and I will follow you back.

Please feel free to comment here on this Blog about this Twitter post.

For once this post is not about me.  Go figure.

I want to call your attention to a really cool website that hit the ground running because it was dreamed up by our friend Garry Conn.  The site is http://www.BloggingQuestions.com and it is in a regular WordPress Blog format but works quite like a forum.

Here questions are posed by the readers and answered by the readers.  No matter what you want to learn about in the fields of Blogging, Hosting, Domaining, Internet Marketing, Social Networking, and the Search Engines.   This is a great venue to use to broaden your knowledge.

When you read down through the questions it is very easy to hit the comment reply box and put in your own two cents.  The site has been up a couple of months or so and is getting major traffic already, but the more the merrier.  Check it out.  This is one big happy family and I have seen none of the usual caustic replies that you get on some forums.  There seem to be No Spammers and No Scammers.

Here are some of the recent questions:
Do You Use The Google Keyword Tool To Create Post Titles?
Do You Include External Links In Your Content?
How Often Do You Use Images In Your Posts?
What Is The Best Hosting For a Blog?
Please Vote for Your Favorite Hosting Company for Tech Support
How do I upgrade from WP 2.6 to 2.7?
What to do with your empty domains to turn them into money makers
How Do I Find A Blog Writing Job Online?
Why Do Most People Fail At Making Money Online?
How To Get Traffic From MySpace.com
How Much Traffic Does The Average Blog Get?
What is better? Domain name prefix or suffix?
Unable to Register Another Blog Account in WLW
How Do I Add My Avatar To My Blog Comments?
What do you think the Google Page Rank will be for BloggingQuestions ?
How Do I Make My Blog Search Engine Friendly?
What Is The Best SEO Blog?
What is the best Social Bookmarking Badge or Toolbar?
What’s Happening To The Blog Commenting Community?
Do you submit the pages that you comment on to social networks?

That is only a partial list.  There are lots more.

You can sign up as a user and get access to the Blog dashboard and post your own questions.  The answers come from all over and are very informative and helpful.

Hope to see soon you over at Blogging Questions

Wishing you all the best for the Holiday Season.

Thank you all for reading LinkMoney dot org.

Rich

Update ***
A Very Merry Christmas update:

I wrote this post earlier today without knowing anything at all about the following.  But they say great minds run in the same gutter channel so I must have had a premonition.  Garry is giving away some excellent prizes and if you read this quick go follow his instructions to win.

Garry Conn wrote a post on his blog titled, A Surprise Christmas Bonus With Over $1500 In Free Gifts and I thought that you would like to check it out.

The recent spate of domain thefts that has occurred and some of which was reported here on LinkMoney (dot org,) has caused me to revisit my Gmail account and analyze whether or not I want to make any changes in my email security settings or in the use of Gmail for secure information.

When you are thinking about setting up a web based email account and you start thinking about things like “google mail com” you will obviously come to the “Gmail Register” page.  I have to admit, I Love Gmail. I was an early adopter and really loved the convenience of using Gmail accounts for all of my various and sundry Internet forays.  It is very easy to set up.  Once you obtain a Gmail address it is used throughout all of the Google domains, such as Adsense, Analytics, Calendar, Search, and on and on…

In other words, you open your complete identification and every single move to the Google bots.  No problem as long as you don’t care about what information a giant all encompassing humongous network of computers, all controlled by one company, collects data on you, like forever…

I live a pretty clean legal lifestyle and don’t really have anything to hide.  But, do I really want all of this stuff out there in the cloud completely columnarized and searchable by any one that has access to the data?  I think not, but alas it is already too late for me.

That said, there are SOME things that I think might be better deleted from my Google history.  I decided to start with the situation that made me delve into this train of thought to begin with.  That is my association with GoDaddy.

In each of the recent cases of domain theft that was storied a plenty, like HERE:  I Can Steal Your Website and HERE:  Stolen Website Returned and dozens of other places, it was reported that in all cases that  the  GoDaddy account holders that had been compromised also had been using Gmail addresses.

Hmmm.  Could it be a Gmail problem?  Matt Cutts from Google said that their security division was looking into it, and a few days ago on one of the mail lists that I subscribe to there was an announcement purported to be from Google that there was no security flaw in Gmail.

Well I am going to tell you about one very scary flaw that I discovered this morning on my own machine, but first I want to continue with my first train of thought.  So I decided that just in case, maybe it would be better to tighten things up a bit.

First, I changed my Gmail password, which hadn’t been changed in over a dozen or so years, maybe longer, ever since I had an account.   Now that doesn’t sound too difficult but it is a pain in the butt for every time you login from a new source or an offsite computer, or check your account setting, or sign into Adsense or sign into Analytics, etc., you have to go through the whole procedure over and over.  No problem, small price to pay if it makes you more secure right?

Second I went to GoDaddy and changed the password of my account there. Good, felt better.  Don’t get too complacent yet.

Then I got to thinking, why not go through all of my old Gmail messages and filter all of the GoDaddy messages, then archive them somewhere, and then delete them all from my Gmail account?

Guess what?  You can’t do that.  There is no method that I have been able to find that allows you to bulk forward, or save to your hard disk, any archived messages.  I checked in my control panel, online Google help, Gmail forums and anywhere else I could think of.  As a matter of fact in one of the Gmail FAQs they specifically say that you can not do that.  Bummer.  That is not exactly a great feature Google.  Duh.

So here is what I did for the past three hours.  I created a Gmail filter for all mail that came from GoDaddy and created a command that will forward ALL FUTURE messages from GD to my https secure email address that came with my ISP hosting account.  The operative word here is “future.”   There is no way to bulk forward all of the previous messages.

Not wanting to be beat by this, I went through each and every previous message from GD and manually forwarded them to my ISP email account, and after I heard the reassuring little blunk sound from Outlook Express that a new email had been received I then manually deleted that Gmail version.

Now there were three pages of messages from GD so this took a while.  I did not bother with the customer satisfaction surveys and the junk mail that GoDaddy constantly sends out, but all of the registration information, account names, passwords, etc., all went to my secure account.  Then I deleted them from Gmail.

Now here is the flaw that I discovered when I started digging into this in the wee hours of this morning. I have many Gmail accounts.  I have a couple of main ones that I use depending upon which hat I am wearing, but then there are many that were set up when I started a new website and wanted to have differing addresses for.  Owning or administering over a hundred websites, this can become a quagmire.

Lo and behold as I was going down through the list of names of my Gmail accounts that I had set up, I saw one that I did not remember setting up, though it had a slight twinge of memory associated with it.  Here is what I discovered.  Someone that called them self Tamara Underwood with a Sierratel.com email address WAS IN MY LIST OF PERSONAL GMAIL ACCOUNTS! What the Hell!

How could that be? I started digging in to finding out more about this name and the email account shown and found out that she/he had been in my Gmail account list SINCE 2001 !  Then the vague memory that I mentioned above kicked in and I do sort of remember this name and that at the time I also had all kinds of computer grief.

At about that time my main computer and my laptop both got infected with multiple viruses that eventually caused me to give up, reformat and reload Windows, because all of the tools at hand were not able to remove the problems.  I never tied the name Tamara to this problem, but it must have been so.

Through searching on Google I found where the same person had posted crappy nonsense comments on dozens of Blogs and message boards during 2001-2002.  In each case the comment would tell the reader to contact them at that email address.  So probably I did so, even though I know better now and never answer anything like that, I might have back then, and that is no doubt how the viruses got on my machines.

But it still does not answer how the heck that person could have gotten their email address in my Gmail forward to mail list?  Do you think that they have been receiving copies of all of my emails for these many years?  That does not seem likely or my life would be in a much bigger mess than it is.  It seems more likely that they somehow might have access to my computer and use that account to send out spam messages.  But still it is scary.  How could it happen?

I would say that this is a security flaw Google. Someone else with a California ISP address being in my Gmail list should NOT be allowed.  I’m sure you could put the blame on me after so many years.  I just vaguely remember the situation, but I am ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE that I NEVER knowingly inserted that email address into my own account.

So what about you readers?  Do you think this is an email security problem? Did you go to the Gmail Register page?  Check your accounts.  A little housekeeping might be in order.  Our readers would love to hear from any of you that have had similar problems with email security, or if you have any questions or comments on this specific article.  Leave a Comment.

Now I have to go through and do all of the above for each of my other five domain registrars and website hosting companies.

See you in the spring.
Rich

You all know that in SEO that there is a right way (white hat,) a wrong way (black hat,) and a sort of in-between way (grey hat,) method of obtaining a good Google rank for your keyword of choice. I am not going to tell you any specific methods of white or grey ways because they are discussed ad nauseum throughout the whole Inter-webs and beyond.

I do want to tell you about a case in point of a wrong way that I can speak from experience on, and you are welcome to make comments or ask questions regarding same.

Here is the scenario. About six months ago I purchased a dropped domain name that is an absolute killer, very common three word phrase, that is a marketers dream for a domain name. These words fall into the class of Top 10 best, Best Deals Online, etc. They are three words that always would be used with a specific target product of any type, and not likely that anyone would ever use just those three words alone, and by the way it is a dot com and no hyphens. Oh and it came with a GPR of 3/10.

I had great hopes for this domain and commenced writing articles humping various affiliate products. All was going real well, traffic was starting to build and then one late night offer was too good to resist. You know the type, “100 links from high quality websites, spaced out over a month, guaranteed quality links, only $14.00,” blah, blah, blah…

What the heck, it’s worth a shot right? Wrong.

The company in India did exactly what they said they would do and starting in about two weeks I started to get notices of various websites that would send me an email saying that my link had been accepted for their website and when ever I checked them they were indeed applied. By the end of the month the 100 guaranteed quality links were posted and I started to get tons of offers to increase my fabulous deal. No thanks. Oh yeah, some of the quality sites were X rated.

This excellent domain name still ranks number one for the three word domain name, but that is all that it does. There is absolutely no data shown in the serps for this site, just the domain name, nothing cached, no article titles, no article excerpts, nothing, zip, nada. It’s great to be in first place, but remember no one would ever use just those three words without a product or item included as well. So I reign supreme over everyone with this site, but you will never know it. The site now has a GPR 0/10.

You no doubt have heard that Google uses a sandbox to stick brand new websites in so that they don’t just pop up over night ranking for a keyword over all of their good paying customers. There is a lot of discussion from many people that are all very experienced and most all of them have differing opinions as to whether or not there is such a thing.

I did a little searching on the subject and found some older posts from a few years back where this was talked about, and a couple of them are as follows:

webmasterworld.com

The existence of a new-site “sandbox” (which delays the site being ranked well for months) has been a topic of debate among SEOs.

From a forum that I did not record the url for:

In reply to a question, Matt Cutts of Google said that there wasn’t a sandbox, but the algorithm might affect some sites, under some circumstances, in a way that a webmaster would perceive as being sandboxed.

Mark Mason told me in a recent message that there was no such thing as a sandbox, but call it what you will, this little treasure chest of a domain name is in limbo somewhere. Not one article comes up in G search anywhere.

What am I going to do about it? Not much. I will still write articles for it and not lean on any affiliate deals, just put up articles discussing marketing in general. I will still do some article submissions and link to it, but I will not ask anyone to link to this site, not ever. I will strive to put up quality content and hope that at some time in the future it will have the dark cloud lifted.

I suppose I could go back and try to have some of those 100 links removed but that is a huge pain in the ass. This one site out of over a hundred niche sites and a few primary Blogs is not going to kill me. I learned a huge lesson that I will never forget. The site cost fifteen bucks and some man hours. I’ll move on.

Was I trying to game the system, you bet. Did I know better, you bet. Did I think I would ever get caught, no way. Please take my word for it, don’t try anything like this.

In case you think, well there is no way I would get caught, just think of some of the things that we all do without even thinking. Most of the people I know in Internet Marketing are using WordPress Blogs. If you do, you no doubt use Akismet as a spam blocker right? Well every time you activate Akismet you must include your unique WordPress API key right? Do you think that Mother G does not know each and every site that you own or operate?

If you use Adsense, and most marketers do, then your Google ID is known. If you use Google Analytics, then your G-ID is known. So it doesn’t matter if you spread your websites out over several different hosting companies, there is no place to hide.

Remember, it is not nice to fool Mother Google.

My how the times have changed!

The popular Internet social/micro message blogging platform, Twitter.com, gives you 140 characters to get the job done.  This creeps some long winded (a-hem) people out, and to others it is the all saving grace.

Make your point in 140 key strokes or die.

So along comes TinyURL.com a neat service that takes any length url line that you can type into it, or copy and paste into it, and then reduces it to just a few characters, say about 10 to 14 or so.  This is a really nice feature. It is free, and there is an add-on for most browsers, and it allows you to include a link in your Twitter message that is much shorter that the original and then you can type more BS in your message box.

Now along comes a new company, XR.com.  That is their real url, XR.com.  See where we are going here?

This company XR is already a leg up on the competition because their name is shorter, XR = 2, TinyURL = 7.

XR wins the “Mine is Shorter Than Yours Contest” ! -  (I bet you never thought you would see the day…)

What it boils down to is if a shorter url encrypted line is needed, then you should try XR.com.

Thanks to JohnChow.com for this great news, and John is running a contest right now, until Christmas that is sponsored by XR and you can win SIX THOUSAND BUCKS!  American Moolah!  Casherino!

The lucky winner, (wouldn’t it be nice if it was moi?) will receive $5,000 to go to their favorite charity, (like The Salvation Army,) and $1,000 US dollars to use for themselves in any way they want to.

Now that’s what I call a contest!

Here is a link to the contest post: http://xr.com/7vz

I’m Rich