Implementing Top Commentators plugin and changes

In the recent weeks, the traffic coming to this blog is increasing and SERPs has been doing well. However, there’s some minor tweaking that needs to be done to improve the blog. First of all, there’s no much interaction between me and the users. Reason may be due to that most of the visitors are not targeted to my specific niche. Currently, most of the blog visitors comes from google search and most them found this blog through my previous post like “watch lost online”, “hack myspace” etc. So traffic is not targeted and that’s not what i want. To solve this arising problem,  i guess i will have to make more webmaster-related post and more contest. Most importantly, i guess i will have to provide techniques or tips because most webmasters visit blog to learn something new or get something free.

Top Commentators Plugin (Do-Follow)

I have implemented this plugin to enable top commentators of my blog to have their link display on the sidebar. Purpose of this is to reward the frequents a free pr 3 link and to encourage more interaction. Previously, i have taken this plugin down because i do not want to affect the link juice in the site. However, if i can get interactions by sacrificing it, i think it will be worth it.

This commenting system will be reset to 0 every month and every month, the top commentator will win himself/herself a free review, a free pr 3 link and a 125 x 125 adspot here. All this is worth $50 USD if you were to buy them.

Guest Bloggers

As the blog is growing, i am looking for guest bloggers. Guest bloggers will be blogging here about webmaster-related things, making money online, web development and designing, photography, entrepreneurship. I guess that will brighten out things here in this blog alot.

Custom design theme?

As you noticed, i am using a free wordpress theme called blue weed. It’s a great theme. But someone told me that if i am really serious about blogging, it is mandatory for me to get a custom designed theme. I could have engage professionals service from those themes maker for about $250 for one, but i think that is not worth it. Mainly is because i am a web designer too, i could have just set aside or sacrifice some hours of work and entertainment time to do one out.

The last thing

Building targeted traffic will be what i will be doing next. Anyone have any great or better ideas, please drop me an email. It can be anything, banner exchange? or partnership with others blogs. D

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My experiment with auto blogging

I came through this term called autoblogging. It seems that alot of people are claiming that they make passive income from adsense just by setting one up. So, I thought maybe i should experiement with it and give it a try. I decided on the weightloss niche because it seems to be the buzzing keyword term in adwords and alot of people are looking for information about it. So i went to godaddy, research a while and got myself this domain called “Lookhealthy.org” It’s a pretty nice domain and i am glad that it’s not registered yet.

Then i set up an hosting account in my server and installed wordpress, upload a free theme and a plugin called Wp-omatic. What this plugin does is to display feeds content into your post and it will automatically fetch a number of new articles from the feed defined everyday. Then, i encountered the first problem, that is full rss feed or partial rss feeds. Alot of article directories and new publishing site like yahoo news or ezinearticles only enable partial rss feeds, so it means that the content of your post will not be completed. It will be all half completed. So, i will have to leave linkback to the source, if not the post will be meaningless.

Ok, so everything is set up now and i just have to leave the blog to update itself for a few days and see the results. Now here’s another problem that exists, google do not like duplicate content in websites, so i guess now i am facing the the problem of getting de-indexed in search engines. #$@#$@##$@

What i learn from this experiment?

1) Auto-blogging won’t works in long term. You may get short term results but it won’t last. It’s better to do things the traditional way, creating unique content etc. A visitor will not want to revisit a blog that mainly just fetch content from others.

2) Auto blogging for content blogs is a crap! Waste of time.

3) Auto blogging might works for video sites like in the porn niche. As in this niche, people are just trying to look for videos, who care where the sources are from?

What i pay to learn?

I pay $8 bucks to learn this lesson, but i think it won’t be a loss because i registered quite a premium domain.

My Plans for LookHealthy.org

I guess now that i have this free-lying domain in my account, i will have to develop it, if not it will really be a loss. So what i intend to do is as below:

1) Build a blog using the domain.
2) Buy a premium wordpress magazine theme to make it look good. I am looking at revolution theme at the moment.
3) Get some good unique content into it.
4) Get some directory submission to build up the metrics of the blog.
5) Get the auto blogging system to work only in one category called “articles”.

Ok, work piling up for me, i still have not finish the coding work(stopped for 2 weeks, lol) for the community i am starting. I still haven monetized the blog that i bought and now there’s a lookhealthy.org for me. There’s only 30 days left for me before i am serving the national service. Shit, it reminds me of the movie called 30 days of night.

If there’s anyone who is free and want to help me out with lookhealthy.org, please let me know.

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How i complete 3 hours of job in 10 minutes?

Ok, i am here to share how i completed 3 hours of data entry work in just 10 minutes. Yesterday, i was doing some database work with the new blog that i just bought. There’s some problem with the hyperlinks of images in each post and i needed to edit those code manually for each posts. And there was around 200+ post for me to edit.

Well, 200 posts is hell lot of work and instead of just wasting my time looking at each of the post for the hyperlinks and editing them, i decided to do out a simple php script that runs on the web server. So, when the script runs,  it will automatically change the hyperlinks in each post to what i wanted. And expectedly, this idea works out quite well.

So the first thing i do in the script is to connect to the database, then i do a for loop which will loop all the entries in the database. After that, i check for the specific column that i am looking at and use preg_replace. Preg-replace as defined in php.net, is to perform a regular expression search and replace. So in this case, it will replace the old image hyperlink with the new hyperlink i wanted. And that’s it, i completed a expected 3 hour task in just 10 minutes.

So the moral of this post is to emphasize on the importance of solving problems with different methods and maximising your time. I think that applies to working in the industry, blogging, and many other stuffs too. If you happened to be told by your boss or superior to do some data entry work, there’s not really only one way to do so (copying and pasting). Methods are being invented by human and i believe that there are many different ways to complete a similar task. Just like solving a maths question, there are many correct ways. Don’t just try one way, try many others and find the best path.

For example, you are told to enter records or edit records in an excel file which probably will take 8 hours to do so. Instead of just wasting the 8 hours on entering and editing the records, why not spent 1 hour to code out a simple script that will helps you to do the task? You save time and you have proven yourself to be effective and efficient infront of your boss.

Hope this post give you some insights.

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Blogging for money won’t succeed

Aftering seeing many case studies of successful bloggers like john chow, who blogs to tell people how much money he is making online, alot of similar money making blogs are created, and that’s how to industry works. Money making blogs are blogs that are created for the purpose of earning money online and to teach people how to make money online. This type of blogs are rising into popularity this recent years.

Despite having so many money making blogs, there are only small percentage of them successful and actually succeeded in making money from their blogs. The remaining percentage just consist of bloggers that give up in the first few months after failing to monetize their blog and achieve the results that they wanted. Instead of being a webmaster blog from the start, this blog is started with the sole purpose of learning how to make money online by blogging. In the first few months, i have been blogging with the mindset of trying to make money off blogging. This mistake that i have made, lead to me having to face difficulty in pondering about what should i write the day after for my blog post. Also, it lead to me neglecting the blog due to the fact that i am not making much from blogging, giving up and falling into the category of the majority percentage of bloggers.

After my 8 months experience with this blog, i found out that blogging for the purpose of money won’t make you any money from blogging. That is when that i decided to transform this blog into a personal & webmaster blog. As i am web developer and designer, i enjoyed writing articles about webmastering. So i started to blog about things that i like, things that i want to share, things that i have experienced on and till recently, i could see a steady increase of traffic and returning visitors. With a steady increase of traffic and visitors, it also mean increase in revenue as well.

This has enlightened me to realise that blogging for the sake of making money actually backfires. If you do so, your quality of blog post will not be good, and content is what visitors looks for when they visit blogs. In conclusion, Do not blog with the mindset of making money, just blog on things that you like or have experience in and traffic will start increasing as time goes on.

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