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Are Free Blog Sites The Best Choice When Starting A Blog?

I remember when I first thought about this question.  It was about 3 years ago when I first started my first blog.  Back then wordpress was not as popular as it is today.  Nor, did I have the expertise to put even start and configure a wordpress blog.  So, I figured…  Sure, it is ok to start a blog with a free blog hosting site. 

For a while it went great.  The blog reached the top of the serps for my keywords and I was earning good money daily without much trouble.  So, I decided to start adding more free blogs.  Before you knew it I had about 7 to 10 blogs running at the same time. 

But little did I know my time was running out. Till, one day I logged into the admin site for these blogs and every one of the blogs were GONE.  I mean vanished, no more money coming in. 

Can any guess what service I was using..  You guessed it blogger.com.  Blogger does not like people to use their server primarly for generating money.  And they state that in their signup notice.  It just happens that I did not read the fine print.  So when they find out that someone is going contrary to their beliefs they cut them off.

So, I had these blogs running for approx a year and had put a lot of time and effort into the blogs and in one swift move all of the work was GONE!!!!!!!!!!  It was devistating..

So, to the question: Are Free Blog Sites The Best Choice When Starting A Blog And Why?  I can truly say a definite NOOOOOOOO….  Because you have no control over if you live or die with these services don’t start with them.  Blogs are so cheap to start it is just not worth it.  The blog software is free (wordpress)..  The domain name is a minimal cost $9.99 or less for a year.  And the hosting fee $5 - $9 dollars a month is nothing… 

Going this route you control your content and interaction with you website.  It is your own destiny…

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As an entrepreneur, it is important to have continuous growth in your business in order to be successful. One of the ways that can help your business grow is outsourcing.

Outsourcing is when you choose certain business activities that you currently handle and then deciding to use an outside business source to handle the activity instead. This simple definition can bring peace of mind to an overloaded entrepreneur.

Case in point, as a web designer, clients may expect you to have the ability to create or install everything that revolves around the Internet. However, your skill set may not include some of your client needs such as creating an online shopping cart. So it would be good to find a business associate that you trust and outsource the online shopping cart to them.

However, make sure when you choose an outsourcing business partner that you keep the following things in mind:

1. Choose someone that you can trust not to steal your clients away.
2. Choose someone who has the same business ethics as you.
3. Make sure that this person has the skills to complete specific tasks before outsourcing to them.
4. Ask for client samples and references so that you can get feedback from their clients regarding their work habits.
5. Make sure to have a contract that includes a non-compete clause in it.

The list above is just a running start on some of the things that you need to keep in mind when outsourcing. After you have determined whom you will outsource projects to, make sure to have a service level agreement (SLA) with them too.

The SLA should fully explain your expectation of the type of service they will provide to your clients along with time frames for completing the projects. The SLA should be put in place the same time as the outsourcing contract.

Finally, you should make sure that you have a process in place for handling your outsourcing project. For instance, you need to include the following in your outsourcing to do list.

1. Client name
2. Outsourcing project details
3. Time line
4. Special requirements

There are other things that you may need to add to this list but the list above are the basic items that need to be included in your outsourcing to do list.

Now that you have a template for outsourcing projects, you can start planning for adding more clients to your business. Do not be afraid of outsourcing but embrace it and learn how it will free you up to do more with your business to grow it.

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This post is an update to my previous post on How To Add Feedburner.com To Your Blog.  I looked at that fix and thought about it.  Doing all of that work could be a little complicated to most folks.  Most people just want to plugin to do all the work.  Well, I found a wordpress plugin that will do just that.  And it takes all the grunt work out of the equation that I spoke of in my last post.  Basically, the plugin leaves all of your theme code in tac, but it creates a mod redirect in the forground that will take your feed address (www.webaddress.com/feed) and redirect it to the feed address of your choosing (http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed).  It is preety slick.

The plugin is located here and it is managed by feedburner itself.  Istallation is as simple as a three step process.

1. Upload the plugin to your plugin directory (wp-content/plugins/)
2. Activate the plugin from your admin menu.
3. In the admin area, go to Options/feedburner
4. Follow the links to create your feedburner URL.
5. Enter the URL into the feedburner screen and save.

That is it.  The system will now re-direct your feed to your feedburner account.  Wow, isn’t that just a lot simplier than before.  I wish I knew about this in the beginning..  I also entered this into my favorite plugin list.

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Wow, I never thought blogging and updating websites could be a full time business.  Well, it has turned out to be one.  I have been so busy the last couple of weeks updating and writing new post that at some points I have forgotten to eat. 

Well, lets get away from that and get to the topic of this post.  I wanted to put together a little tutorial to show how easy it was to update feedburner into any website or blog.  Here is how it all started. 

I signed up for feedburner.com probably two years ago when I first started putting together websites and even though I signed up I never found a use for the service.  Quit frankly, I never spent the time needed to learn the service.  But lately I have been starting to blog more regularly and I wanted to know if anyone was reading any of my posts.  Are people subscribing to my feeds on any of my websites.  What kind of action am I getting.  Yes, I check my logs just about everyday to see were traffic is coming from and what the traffic is looking for (Just got a article idea from looking at the traffic logs).  But aside from that I wanted to see if there was any love for my content.  So, I decided to give feedburner another try.  So, I pulled out my old passwords ( I keep a log of all my passwords, If your just starting it is highly recommended) and started setting up feedburner once again.

Feedburning is pretty simple to set up to monitor rss feed subscriptions.  Here is a small tutorial on how to implement feedburner in your site.

1. Go to feedburner.com and register for the service.  Or start by entering your blog/feed web address in the edit box near the bottom of the page.
2. If you just entered the web address you will have to identify the feed source.  This is fairly easy.  If you just started your blog you probably have the default feed.  If your blogging with blogger.com I would pick the atom feed.  You can try it in your browser to see if it works.  Press enter..
3. Your feedburner feed is not created and waiting to be activated.  Feedburner will now ask you to log in if you already have an account or will ask you to create a account if you don’t.
4. Once logged in activate the feed and your feed is ready for use.

Now you will need to upgrade your blogs theme with this new feed.  This will require a little coding.  So, if you not confortable with your blogging platform or you don’t do your coding on your blogging platform I would pass the rest of the post. 

So, I guess that you are confortable with your blogging platform.  Well, lets continue.  Now, you have probably 3 more steps to have feedburning as your monitoring system.  So here are the steps to adding that feedburner feed. 

1. Get your feed address.  For this site it is http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarketAssociate.
2. Log into your blogging software and go to your header information.  That is were your meta tags are located.
3. Find your link tags.  Here is how mine looked before I changed them. <link rel=“alternate” type=“application/rss+xml” title=“RSS 2.0″ href=“<?php bloginfo(’rss2_url’); ?>” />
4. Replace <?php bloginfo(’rss2_url’); ?> with the feedburner address that you got in step one.  Do this to all the links that pretain to either rss or atoms.
5. Last but not least find all the feed images on your site and replace the link with the feed address in step one.

 That is it.  You now have a feedburner enabled website to monitor who is subscribing to your blog or website.

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by Grizzly Brears

I must have a hundred emails asking for help in setting up a money making enterprise online. Having talked with a few I have come to the conclusion that most beginners haven’t got a clue as to what to do.

I mean basic stuff like;

- do I need a website? - how do I set up a website - how do I find a Host? (what is a host?) - what do I do once I have a website? - what is affiliate marketing? - how does adsense and adwords work? - how do I make money with a website? - how do I get traffic? - how do I know what to sell? - what are niches? - how do I find a niche? - is there some way to do this without spending money? - what is the secret that successful money making online gurus know that I don’t and why won’t tell me? - etc…

Is this you?

If it is then read on and I will try and give a brief synopsis of the whole money making enterprise as it relates to online marketing. If you know the answers then skip this article.

The basic gist of online marketing.

There are several ways to make money online. The following are the most common approaches for doing this.

- Google adsense - Affiliate Marketing - Selling your own products like eBooks. (using affiliates)

I will address Google adsense in this article and get into the Affiliate business in my next post.

Google adsense

This is by far the most common method to make money on the net. You place ads supplied by Google on your sites and every time someone clicks an ad you get paid by Google. Google gets paid by adwords advertisers and shares a portion with you. No one knows the exact ratio used by Google but conventional wisdom estimates your share at about 50%.

This system obviously means you need a website to place the ads on. Before running off and setting up a site let me recommend that you use blogs first. Blogs cost you nothing - and you can learn a lot about html and how to cut and paste code so that you will have some knowledge when you get around to building a website. There are advantages that websites have over blogs but for adsense revenue a website is not necessary.

The trick

Listen up because this is the secret to making money with adsense. You want to make thousands and thousands of blogs. You are shaking your head and thinking that you don’t have the time or knowledge to make that many blogs. Nonsense - the big boys are doing it and they keep producing more blogs daily. Start small and grow, you won’t make much in the beginning and will probably quit. Too bad because its what happens over time that makes you money.

When I started out I spent weeks putting together a website. I found a niche that averaged about 17000 queries a month on Yahoo (Google doesn’t give this info but if Yahoo gets a query it is estimated that Google will get 3 to 4 times as many). My niche has about 1,000,000 competitors (other websites listed by Google for my keyword - my keyword is Betta Fish). 1 million is considered a relatively small amount of competitors. I put together a real site, Betta Fish paid for a hosting service, www.GoDaddy.com , uploaded all my pages and sat back and waited for the cash to roll in. The cash did not roll in - what was the problem? Traffic!

Traffic, Traffic and Traffic.

This is the single most important factor in any marketing - online or in the real world. No traffic = no sales. Period.

How do you get traffic? Welcome to every online marketers greatest challenge. This is the most time consuming part of making money online. Everything you do after setting up your site or blog is geared to getting people to your pages. It ain’t easy and all the hype out there for products that can do this for you effortlessly is just crap.

I will come back to traffic in a moment. First I want to get back to Blogs. After setting up my Betta Fish site I did a little research on ways to get visitors to your site. As it turns out the cheapest way is for Google to rank you high (1st page) for your Keyword when someone queries it. The idea being that if Yahoo gets 17,000 queries a month for Betta Fish then Google probably gets 70,000 queries. If 70,000 people see my site listed on the first page of their query I will probably get at least 10% of them to my site. 7000 people will produce a 5% click thru on my adsense ads and this will generate about $35.00 a month in revenue. Not much money - unfortunately Betta advertising doesn’t pay much - an average click of 10 cents. I had done all sorts of work only to find out that I had picked a lousy niche. Except for one thing. What if I had a hundred sites making $35.00 a month? Not bad money at all! The problem was that it would take forever to create a hundred websites and cost more money to host them.

The solution - Blogs!

The big boys use blogs. There is software available that will create thousands and thousands of blogs for you automatically. Then there is more software that will create thousands and thousands of pages of unique content to put on your blogs. If you link all these blogs together in the proper fashion you will get ranked higher by Google. A thousand blogs might only make 20 cents a day each in adsense revenue but that still makes you $200 a day combined - not a bad income for very little work (after you set it all up) and its income that keeps coming your way day after day.

I bought the software and began churning out blogs. The trick is to use article creation software that spews out original content that you can post to your blogs at preset intervals. There is software available to do the posting as well. Once you set up your system you can forget about it and spend your time creating even more blogs. This is called rinse and repeat.

You are asking what these blogs look like. The blogs look fine but read like crap, the articles are terrible but they are created with just the right keywords to get Google to send you traffic. (The articles are really all fluff - coherent but don’t really say anything - just a lot of generic phrases) The traffic sees your crappy blog and leaves - but this is the trick - if you present your adense ads in the right way, a lot of the traffic will leave your site by clicking on an ad hoping that it will lead them to what they were looking for in the first place. There is no honor in this system - you want traffic and you want clicks. Period.

Is this ethical - hell no, it’s called spam blogging but it works and whether you like it or not it is how all the big names are making money with adsense.

You can build a few good blogs and then build a bunch of crappy ones and you will quickly find out the crappy ones bring in just as much money as the good sites. The difference is that the good sites will take a lot of time to produce whereas the crappy sites take no time what so ever. (The good sites are still important though, you use them for affiliate marketing - selling products can produce additional revenue once you are up and running with adsense - more on this in a minute.) None of the gurus will come out and tell you this is how they make money with adsense - most are too embarrassed to admit to this technique. You learn this by following the trail of the latest high end software that comes online. Think about what the software does, and I’m not talking about get rich quick software. I’m talking about software “Tools” like Keyword Elite, SEO Elite, VooDoo Blogger, RSStoBlog, Website Content Wizard, Wordtracker, Tag Automator, HyperVRE, Guestbook Equalizer, Forum Equalizer and a host of others. This software is not cheap and is not available a lot of the time (too many people using the same software can limit it’s effectiveness) The very best software is used by by the big guns and they tend to keep the availability limited. This stuff is all designed for mass producing results - not, as it is marketed, for producing one-off websites.

What this software does.

Without Keyword tools you will not be able to find profitable niches (subjects that get a lot of traffic) or create a massive list of the RIGHT keywords. Using overture (Yahoo’s keyword tool) will not produce the amount of keywords needed and it doesn’t give you all the spy features of the real Tools like Keyword elite. The high end software allows you to spy on the sites that are on top of the Google search lists - and this allows you to copy them and achieve the same kind of results. Remember you don’t need to re-invent the wheel - just copy the successful people.

The Blogging software is essential to produce thousands of sites and to put relevant (for your keyword) content on those sites. You simply can not do this by hand. This is all about numbers. The more opportunities you present people with to click on an add the more clicks you will get. Good site or crappy site - it doesn’t matter.

At present I have 20 real sites (websites and Blogs) and they produce some revenue from adsense but mostly from product sales. I have several thousand crappy blogs that produce several hundred dollars a day and I spend zero time on them. I hate to admit it but the crappy sites are bringing in far more cash than the good sites.

If you are serious about making money with adsense then you will have to get past any ethical barriers you might have. You will also have to face the fact that this can not be done cheaply. You are going to have to invest in the software to make it all happen and this brings us to you. What do you bring to the table. If you are just a dreamer - you want to make money but really don’t want to do much work then quit now. The hype about making money while sipping margaritas by the pool is nonsense. This takes work and dedication. You will have to devote a few weeks just setting up your initial blogs and syncing all the software. The good news is that once you get your first batch up and running it gets easier with each successive batch. Before you do anything though… make up your mind - are you in this for real or not.

If you are sure you want to follow this path then follow this link to my site where I will be posting a series of articles outlining the step by step process for making money with blogs. Click here Make Money For Beginners

Also See:  Blogging to the Bank and Secrets to their success
About the Author:

The Author’s website Make Money For Beginners features articles and software designed to help beginners make money online.

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