Make Money Online - The CaymanHost

SezWho Blog Comment Plugin

After first encountering the SezWho comment plugin on Andy Beard's blog some time ago I finally got around to looking at it more closely.

It's a simple and clever idea that basically allows you to display the commenting activity of visitors and by hovering over a commenters avatar or a link that says "check me out" you can see what else they have been reading and discussing, thus making your blog's comments far more interactive and also rewarding participants with more than just a backlink. It also adds voting options to your comments.

The other great side effect, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that it weeds out comment spam too. Many people are now using software to track down DoFollow blogs and abuse the generosity of the blog owner by attempting to use commenting purely to gain free links. If it's done correctly there's nothing wrong with that, but blatant comment spammers now have a new enemy in SezWho.

I noticed a couple of old comments today that originally looked perfectly legit on face value, but checking out the SezWho links showed that the individuals in question were posting identical comments across a large range of other "do follow" blogs. BUSTED! These were immediately marked as spam for Akismet to chew on.

So, if you are thinking of spamming blog comments, don't think it's smart to get your commenting software to search for a keyword and then cut and paste the same comment to all the blog posts that it finds. It's not big and it's not clever - comment wisely, contribute something and avoid upsetting blog owners, because ultimately, you will only damage yourself.

I can't install the plugin on this blog - but if you're on Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type, Drupal or use BlogCatalog you can use the service. It's also available for PHPbb bulletin boards - recommended. And if any clever coder wants to develop a NucleusCMS version.......

TCH

Your Blog And The Law - Online Legal Requirements Explained

This post doesn't apply only to bloggers because anyone with an online presence of any kind really needs to be aware of some of the legal snares that can catch you out online.

I've made available a free copy of the Web Legal Kit for you to download which will help you with a host of legal issues covering things like:-

The CanSpam Act |Online Advertising |Copyright |Intellectual Property Rights | Disclaimers |Privacy Policies |Testimonials and more.

Because it's free I'm asking you to opt-in to one of my newsletters to get it, but I like to think it's a fair exchange. If you're already one of my subscribers, don't worry, I'll be sending out a download link in the near future. 

All you need to do to claim your copy is to click on the cover to the left, fill in your details and click on the link in the confirmation email  I send you.

As with any of my lists you won't be bombarded every day with ridiculous marketing launches but you will benefit from many free offers including tools and software that I use or have used myself.

You can opt-out at any time with one click on the link provided in every email I send out.

Enjoy the software, I hope you will find it beneficial and that it will help you to understand a bit more about online legalese.

TCH 

Blogging For Money and Profits

If you haven't read Andy Beard's recent posts discussing the effectiveness of blogs and whether or not blogs suck I recommend that all bloggers drop in on him and take a look. I was going to leave a comment but realized it would probably be a bit too long and decided to post about it instead.

Andy's post, prompted by the new sales blurb from Ken Evoy of SBI, has led to some interesting debate on the matter. (Andy links to the page in question).

Not long ago I had been in some discussions with Josh Spaulding regarding the same thing, and we concurred that a blog in the overcrowded internet marketing niche is not likely to be a very effective income generator - at least not directly.
A lot of the commenting over at Andy's blog supports this.

In relation to my own blog, it has been apparent to me that blogging is not the platform to use if you are seeking to make money online.

There, I've said it too, so let's qualify the statement.

This particular blog has been running for a little over a year and looked at solely in terms of revenue generated you would have to call it a dead loss. Shocking? Well, no, not to me at least. My blog is just another tool in a box filled with tools. Blogging can give you a leg up in search engine placement and is an effective way of getting some traffic and SERPS positions. Sure you might sell a little advertising, maybe make a few affiliate sales and a little Adsense revenue perhaps but it's very difficult to generate what could be considered a full time income.

It is Ken's claim that blog posts have the shelf life of a daily tabloid newspaper, and although that's maybe a bit of an exaggeration, the point he is trying to make is valid. Indexing of blog posts is very fast nowadays, particularly by Google, but maintaining a good position in the SERPS for older posts is not something you can automatically rely on.

Looking at his comparison charts regarding Wordpress and SBI the bias is obvious, but then it is a sales page. I would contest some of the points made and I've used Wordpress as a CMS rather than a blog and found it to be very flexible and effective. Some of the features Ken would have you believe are not available to WP users will depend on your hosting company for one thing, so there is a bit of generalization going on.

SBI has certainly made me more money than this blog though, just through the affiliate program and it's not something I've promoted much at all. It sells though, because it is a good service.

If the bulk of your visitors are bloggers themselves, particularly if they are bloggers hoping to make money online, they are usually too busy trying to build their own traffic and subscriber bases to be all that interested in yours. I made a comment once that if you actively comment on other's blogs, you will receive comments in return but let that aspect slide and those comments will dry up very quickly. This has always seemed rather pointless to me, a kind of "conscious driven" commenting.

It's the same mentality that drives a lot of people on social networking sites - getting swamped in an endless stream of applications purely because they feel that they might be perceived as a "misery" or "impolite" for not responding to each and every request. In the end, it overwhelms even the most dedicated MySpace or Facebook user. I can say that because I've made that mistake and let the benefits of Social Networking as a sales funnel slip away. It's something I intend to correct if I can..........

Let's be honest, commenting can become a chore, moderating comments can become a chore, and blogging can become a chore. Those who enter the blogging arena with high hopes of making good money from the venture, are invariably disappointed. That's when it really does become a chore and they drift away, disillusioned.

This is the crux of all the observations made by both Andy and Ken. Blogging does require a lot of work and if you measure it as a ROI, it usually doesn't stack up.

In my experience a lot of RSS subscribers are not avid readers and most are not reading blogs looking for products or services to buy. They are far more likely to be looking for information on how to grow their own subscriber base and how to improve their visitor numbers and revenue.

You will find it extremely tough to sell anything to such an audience. Indeed, even trying to persuade them that there are better ways to approach making money online than blogging and providing free services to get them started, meet with far less success than you would expect. Just to prove this to myself I'm including a link to a free minisite software application - just one way of diversifying and spreading your money making wings.

Josh gave a telling example a while back citing sales of a product derived from his successful EZ-MoneyOnline blog versus sales from his listbuilding tactics. I forget the specifics but it was around the ratio of blog: 2 sales. List: over 40 sales.

My own listbuilding ventures regularly net me signups and sales, but the blog really doesn't deliver. I've measured this in the past, and there really is no contest. To generate, for example, 100 signups to a free program over a seven day period through capture pages and opt-in emails is entirely possible. With a blog post I am lucky to see two or three over a much longer period.

Why is this? Both audiences are looking for ways to make money online after all. I can only conclude that bloggers see themselves as bloggers and not marketers and are reluctant to diversify. This, if you really want to earn money, is not good. Multiple streams of income should be something you work towards.

I think that as a blogger, you must avoid tunnel vision and understand that you need to do more than blog if you want to make money online. For me, the blog has not really even been that successful from an affiliate marketing standpoint - again, I'm talking directly. I still believe that a blog is an important part of any marketers arsenal, but if you try to view it purely as a money/time equation it just doesn't compute.

Even those with a good RSS subscriber count will tell you that conversions can be very disappointing, although I'm betting that the subject/niche you blog in does have some bearing on that. 

My advice is this: do not to blog solely for the purpose of making money.

If you want to turn blog readers into customers you will often have to find other ways of getting them into a sales funnel - through your list building or niche specific newsletter for example.

TCH

Hosting | Marketing & Autoresponders | Affiliates 

The Blogging Life and Blog Editors, Firefox Tools, Reseller Deals

Whilst I accept that my rate of posting has slowed down a little since the beginning of the year, it has been disappointing to see a big drop off in the commenting activity and also a reduction in my subscriber base.

This seems to correlate entirely with my own commenting inactivity and makes a blogger wonder whether commenting becomes a bit of a merry-go-round of futility - a kind of you stop, they stop. It's a shame because for the entrepreneurial souls who do read my blog, I think I've provided some pretty good information over the past few weeks and some lnks to some really useful free sites and tools. However, at the risk of sounding like a whiner, let's move swiftly on!

The major reason for my less hearty enjoining in my fellow blogger's cries to the wilderness was a meltdown of the tired old laptop (sob) and the subsequent removal to a less than happy desktop. Clearing the whole system of trojans, malware, spyware, adware and the like was a major task in itself. Then, the slow process of rebuilding a machine that I could work with. Everything was fortunately backed up (well, most of it), but re-installing so many tools is taking a fair while and I'm doing it on a "need to use basis".

One of the casualties was my RSS feeds and that's the next job on my list - amazing how i've come to rely on RSS so much for following blogs.

I was disappointed to see that Post2Blog is no longer being supported by the program owners and will doubtless die a slow death. It was my editor of choice for a long time as it actually worked with Nucleus. You can still download a copy, but, even the program owners recommend a move to Live Writer, which I'm now using for my Wordpress sites, and would recommend to any Wordpress blogger. Can't get it to talk to this blog however!

By way of consolation all the reuilding has led to discoveries of  other interesting and useful things like the Firefox MoneyQuake add on, now residing on my system and the excellent Rating Dominator plugin for Wordpress. Other new Firefox additions include SEOQuake, WordCount (great if you do a lot of writing) and Fireshot (lovely screen cap add on) which are all very worthy tools.

The article directory is growing at a reasonabe rate and still taking up a fair amount of time and sweat, but it's beginning to pay off. I've also been busy writing a few more articles of my own as it was something I had let slip in the latter part of 2007.  Yes, I'm still looking for authors so please drop by and contribute your prose - any subject you like as long as it's suitable for viewers of all ages.

I posted over at the main site regarding a free reseller hosting service which may or may not be of interest to readers of this blog. (original reseller article here).  

Despite my apparent lack of work on these pages, I've actually been busier than ever :-)

I must apoligise to Lin over at TellingItLikeItIs who tagged me for a Media Week Meme, and respectfully make it my first Unmeme (copyright RT) as I just don't have the time to participate this time around.

Nikki and I will shortly be moving to the other end of the island, and there is much else going on at a personal level which I may or may not share in due course ;-) 

TCH

Hosting | Marketing | Residual Income

What Sucks and What Doesn't This Week

This is just a good old fashioned "roundup" of worthy links and information to start off the week.

Smorty have been much blogged about recently since launching a referral program. I’d been meaning to investigate their service for some time so I headed on over to their website and complete their publisher sign up process. Foolishly, I didn’t thoroughly read the terms before doing so. The following day I received notice that my blog was declined, not just for being c**p, just that they have a policy of only accepting blogs installed in a root domain. Now, had I read their terms I could have avoided the trouble, but it’s a rule that will certainly exclude a lot of decent blogs. What’s stranger though, is that blogs installed on a subdomain are fine. The reasons for these policies? Your guess is as good as mine.

So, maybe their program works fine for some bloggers but they don’t fit the bill for me. (There is no apparent way to delete the declined blog or the account as a whole, and I was unable to edit the URL to remove the ’/blog’). I’m not sure the site installed in my root here at TCH is suitable for Smorty, so I’ve decided not to bother. A shame, as I think I could have pulled in some good referral numbers. I’ll not say it sucks, but it has some sucky rules. So, what else can be considered suckworthy this week....

Would You Buy a Phony Feed Count?

I hope your answer to that is no, and if it’s not you should read the recent post over at CashQuests about why paying to fake your RSS subscriber numbers is stupid.

I’d say that was pretty much common sense, but you can bet that some people will fall into the trap. Is that because their bad people? Misguided would be a kinder word, but the person who came up with this "service" is definitely more than a little misguided. As the article explains, faking a feed count is nothing new, but trying to charge people to do it takes the biscuit! If something can be gamed or cheated, someone will do it. Sometimes you have to grudgingly admire their inventiveness, but this isn’t one of those times.

Other than that, I don’t have much to add, but I thought the idea deserved as much negative publicity as possible. If you must do it, the advice at Internet Marketing Sucks is far more useful and keeps your dollars in your pocket!

Five Questions About The CaymanHost Online

Getting tagged for a meme is not always welcomed, but if it is initiated by a good online friend, it seems churlish to refuse and this is one I'm happy to participate in. Josh Spaulding recently asked me to participate in a meme entitled "5 Questions About The Online You" which was born over at a WAHM blog, Home With Heather.

Coming as it did over a weekend when I was preoccupied with promoting a weekend hosting sale at my primary online affiliate business, it’s taken me a day or two to figure out my response, but, for what it’s worth, here are my considered answers to the five questions:-

(That’s my mugshot if you haven’t already seen my redneck persona before, the face behind the blog. Real name is Maurice, though I’m usually referred to as just "Mo" plus a variation of other unprintable names :-) depending on who you’re talking to.

1) How Long Have You Been Blogging?

It seems like a very long time! My current blog has only been around since May of this year however. I started a personal blog several years ago when Blogspot was first launched and like so many of the same ilk, it slowly died and has long since drifted quietly off to blog heaven (or probably hell). Blogging became an on and off thing for me over the years, although with The Cayman Host I am far more serious about it.

2) What Inspired You To Start A Blog and Who Are Your Mentors?

I’m not sure inspired is the right word in relation to my first attempts at blogging. It was just free and something new to do online at the time. Before blogs existed, my first attempts at building a website were inspired by a long recuperation from an operation and sheer boredom. I had the time so I built my first website about Advanced Motorcyling, teaching myself HTML and writing it all in Notepad. Remembering it now makes me smile at the awfulness of the design, but I was proud of it nonetheless. The first blog I ever took seriously was inspired by my wife and her artist’s passion. I guess you could say she has been an inspiration to me in more areas of my life than I can count, but that’s a whole book by itself Since starting the current blog, she continues to be my biggest supporter and is ever encouraging and understanding of the time it takes out of our days.

3) Are You Trying To Make Money Online Or Just Doing It For Fun?

Both really! The blog was started as a way of promoting other online ventures, but by its very nature blogging becomes fun and addictive as well as sometimes being hugely frustrating. I don’t look at my blog as a primary source of revenue and it’s funded by money I make elsewhere really. It does produce a little money, but I know it could do a lot better. As a networking tool a blog is great, but I think a lot of people expect to slap up a few Adsense or other PPC blocks and start watching the money roll in. It doesn’t work that way 99% of the time. As the blog grows it is fun and hard work in equal measure. There are times I hate it, but blogging has become a part of everyday life too, and I do have fun most of the time and I love the interactivity of the blogging movement.

Interestingly, Josh doesn't consider himself successful yet (he does pretty good) and I certainly don't, but building income online is a slow process and I'm in it for the long haul. I know what's possible, and as each month goes by I'm managing to increase my earnings, so even though I couldn't yet live on what I make, the enouragement is always there for me. 

4) Tell Me Three Things You LOVE About Being Online

Love? Well, let’s see....

It’s a huge place and a resource for pretty much anything you care to name. Just being connected to the wider world that way is something we couldn’t have imagined a couple of decades ago. I love talking and debating with folks of different cultures and races, "meeting" people I never would have run across in my life if it were not for the web. Learning and teaching in equal measure, offering and accepting help.

I love knowing that people bother to read what I write. Being able to publish and inform can be immensely satisfying.

I love that I don’t have a regular job, no boss, and that I can work, as I’m doing now, on the front porch. That is a dream for so many, and although my online business doesn’t pay all the bills and hasn’t made me a rich man, it has enriched my life enormously. I love that I get to spend every day with the love of my life. As the song says......’Lord knows I’m a lucky man, God’s given me a pretty fair hand ,my old truck’s still runnin’ good, my ticker’s tickin’ like they say it should, got supper in the oven, a good woman’s lovin".......(Montgomery Gentry)

5) Tell Me Three Things You Struggle With In The Online World

Only three? Heck, I’m picking from a long list here!

Perseverance..........it’s so hard to not just go to the beach, fish and drink beer ’til I can’t see straight

Technical Stuff......that’s a sweeping statement, but I feel that even after all these years I know so little about programming, design and anything Geeky.

Lack of Honesty and Integrity online......this one is a HUGE frustration. Seeing people still trying to make money online with the most useless ideas, their inevitable failures and resulting mistrust of the internet as a whole, makes the job of persuading people that there are genuine "opportunities" out there far more difficult than it should be. Fleecing of the vulnerable is far too common and the internet makes it so much easier sadly.

OK, who to tag? I’m going to mix it up a bit here. Some of these bloggers are new to me but I’m a subscriber and think they all have worthwhile things to say. If anyone wants to UnMeme me or can’t be bothered, that’s fine too.

Pat B Doyle Blogging and Internet Business Blog

Beth at Ramblings Of An Undisturbed Mind

Frank at the Optempo Blog

Joyce at Joyce Babu.com

Lin at Telling It Like It Is

Blogger Blogs And Comment Policies

This is just a little tip for anyone blogging on the free Blogger platform. If you have the option for "no anonymous comments allowed" turned on, you might want to seriously reconsider. It’s a real annoyance for me and, no doubt, plenty of others.

Of all the blog readers and bloggers who might visit your blog, there are thousands who do not have a Google or Blogger account. If none of them can comment on your blog, you are depriving yourself of new readers and return visitors. You are suffocating your blog’s chance of success. So, unless you have a very good reason for only allowing Blogger users or to comment, you would be well advised to sign in and change your settings right away. This is particularly important if you are blogging about something that needs reader interaction to stimulate ideas and discussion, because you have effectively turned of commenting for a huge section of users, most of whom won’t bother to come back.

Technorati Tags: Blogger Blogs, Blogger Tips, Blogger Comments, Blogger Options, Anonymous Comments, Comment policy on Blogger