DISQUS

Hey Vlad, I like the simple clean design you've got here now! :)

I'd like some examples of using this in blogging in a purely digital sense. Or is this limited to an offline technique?

Dane Morgan | Niche Bloggers last blog post..How about some demos?

I ignored social media for a loooooong time while my betters were telling me I really needed to get into this. As a blogger, I was doing fine with content, ping, listings and comments on other blogs. But on the web if you aren't moving forward, you are moving backward, and I feel it now.

I'm moving toward social media, but approaching it cautiously as I've seen folks burn them selves with it.

I'm also looking beyond the social web to the semantic web, because I don't want to catch the tail of the next wave.

As far as the competition data. Is the tool collecting it using any search operators like allintitle: or allinurl:. Or just using exact matching with quotes?

Not a bad set of mantras if you're going to adopt just a small set from the sea of otherwise ignored wisdom! I can't remember not knowing the second two, but the first "You cannot outperform a market if you adhere to its conventions" is new to me, and I thank you for sharing it!

RE#1 - I like using an outliner to allow me to categorize notes. match the categories to common blog cats, and project ideas. I use http://treepad.com for this.

RE#6 - Added bonus is that an incomplete thought can even lead to more comments and, ultimately, a better post as other share their ideas than a more complete original post would have!

RE#10 - Just be sure to make the break points logical steps for the series, and at the end (or before if you will keep it updated) add a page that links to each post in the series with a brief sentence or two about each post.

Nice checklist here, man. Stumbled it.

Well, I had been thinking Jason Potash, but he's in MI (I think), not TX, so now I'm completely lost on who the new John Cow is.

Dane Morgans last blog post..Are They Forgotten?

Isn't it one of the great mysteries about people that we tend to resent those who give us things?

Hey it was a cool competition with some great real world take aways. Actually nice to see the processes behind an ebook unfolding.

Kudos from me for whatever they might be worth.

Dane Morgans last blog post..Are They Forgotten?

"These problems plague only bloggers that have been around for a while; a young aspiring blogger won’t care about them because he doesn’t remember this bloggers’ age of innocence"

To some extent the new blogger still lives in this age of innocence as well. A new blogger with 10,20, 100 regular readers is like the local band having drinks with the fans between sets.

A big blogger who wants that feeling back could always start a new blog under a pen name. carefully not getting into the race to publish could even sustain that for him.

I loved that book, and Andy Williams' similar ebook on using the same principles on a single site.

I've done this myself, but on a limited scale, and I haven't 'gotten around' to doing the tracking I need to do to really get the information I need to make it better. I really need to get that done.

Dane Morgans last blog post..Are They Forgotten?

This would definite change the demographics of the users, but not necessarily lead to profitability.

And it depends on how you phrase the question. I wouldn't pay $10 a month for Twitter if I were there to see "what my friends were up too", but I wouldn't hesitate to pay for the service to keep tabs on what some people using it are up to, and more importantly, the casual and instant access it can provide to those people.

The atmosphere at twitter is such that some people can suddenly actually grab the attention of some people they never would have been able to otherwise.

Question:
When you say that you don't look at products under $15 commissions when doing research, can you clarify the scope of that statement? Did you specifically mean clickbank products? Do you set a different threshold for physical products since they typically have a lower affiliate payout?

Dane Morgans last blog post..Are They Forgotten?

I didn't used to be a John Cow fan at all. But times are changing smart people stay open to change. This is probably one of the best ebooks I've yet read on blogging for profit, and I've read a lot of them. And nearly every cent I've made online has been made from little niche blogs.

The release of this book was a little piece of synchronicity for me, because I've been working on changing the way I do things. I've realised some time ago that what I had on line was not a business, but an internet job of sorts, and when a hacker took down my network and replaced it with phishing sites, it took me out. There was nothing of value left without the pages, because I had never actualy created a business, just a transient income.

The John Cow team addresses a lot of stuff in this book that I've been puzzling out for myself over the past few months, and they make it crystal clear. What I like best is that they provide real life examples of the things they say.

A couple of the key takeaways for me is the niche research method described. I'm expirimenting with it now, but I have to say that as good as my method already was I think this is better. I had messed around with CB as a niche generating resource a few times, but never worked out just how to use it that way, this book cleared that up for me instantly, and while I may not follow the exact method the John Cow team does, I'll be incorporating their ideas into my method and it's going to be much improved because of that.

There are also a lot of little things that get the attention they need in this book. Things like turning off notifications while you prep a blog for publication. I've been doing that fopr a while, but I was very impressed to see it directly mentioned here. It's one of those details that most ebooks skip over, and a lot of new niche bloggers suffer for that oversight.

The two things that might have made this book even better would be more discussion of and resources for creating link bait and including a generous helping of bookmarks in the PDF file. Since I see myself reading certain sections several times as a working guide line, it would be nice to be able to just click to the section of the book I'm interested in at the moment.

But still, this is a blogging ebook that I can easily and happily recommend, and I already have to a number of online friends an in a couple of forums I frequent. Thanks John Cow.

Dane Morgans last blog post..Are They Forgotten?

I think a lot of people are missing the point. Steven didn't say free should go away, he said the sense of entitlement that surrounds it needs to go away. A company that offers free services and a paid upgrade service is not betraying it's free service users. They are receiving value, and providing value to the extent that their activities help add value to the site for those who are paying for the upgrade and thus also paying for the free users as well.

I was pretty firmly convinced that twitter was stupid for quite a while. I actually signed up over a year ago, made one tweet, read a few tweets and quit.

Sam Freedom and Andy Beard both indirectly convinced me to have a second look at it, and I made my second post a little more than a year after the first. I've found several great articles through tweets from people I'm following and found something to tweet just about every day since, and several tweets on a few days.

I don't think I'm following you, but I'll remedy that right after I post this and then look for when that alert comes in. ;)

I rather thought Google's customers were advertisers. Webmasters and searchers are the product.

Has this resulted in any effect on your SERPs or traffic, Andy?

I'm not sure how much value this will specifically bring to your security. Most attackers aren't going to bother checking to see if you have a compromised plugin installed. They simply amass domain listings of WP installs and use robots to launch the attack against each blog on the list.

That said, I can think of other good reasons to do this anyways, and not only in the plugins folder, but every folder that does not have an explicit index.php file already in it (root & admin).

Also as I like to say, site security is a lot like car alarms. Nothing you do that leaves your site usable can tottaly prevent someone who really wants in from getting in. But there are lots of little things you can do to make it easier to just hit someone else.

@ lucia. Back when I did porn I actually created fake Apach directory list pages. All of the listed images were of course links to rev share programs. ;)

I'm not sure how much value this will specifically bring to your security. Most attackers aren't going to bother checking to see if you have a compromised plugin installed. They simply amass domain listings of WP installs and use robots to launch the attack against each blog on the list.

That said, I can think of other good reasons to do this anyways, and not only in the plugins folder, but every folder that does not have an explicit index.php file already in it (root & admin).

Also as I like to say, site security is a lot like car alarms. Nothing you do that leaves your site usable can tottaly prevent someone who really wants in from getting in. But there are lots of little things you can do to make it easier to just hit someone else.

@ lucia. Back when I did porn I actually created fake Apach directory list pages. All of the listed images were of course links to rev share programs. ;)

Well, I've kind of put theme development on a back burner. I've got five or so nearly completed themes but haven't made the time to polish them. I've been working on my niche marketing membership blog mostly of late, trying to get the value I want into it without the workload it's turning into on me.

But I could probably whip something up for you if you gave me an idea what you were looking for.

It's really a shame that a theme ever "breaks". Template tags are deprecated for several versions before they are removed, so it isn't like it was a surprise to anyone that tags they were using were going away.


"yes you need an arsenal of plugins to get things the way you want them'

You know, I used to have loads and loads of plugins, but as time goes by, I'm selecting them with more critical thought. I'm using fewer and fewer of them. I've probably eliminated over 75% of the number of plugins I was using a year ago. When you consider how many more there are now, that's something. I really ask myself if a plugin will actually add traffic, conversion or user value to my blog before I even consider trying it these days. i'm getting really minimalist about it, and honestly, it's early days for some of the changes I'm making, but it seems to be making things better at the start.

Well, I've kind of put theme development on a back burner. I've got five or so nearly completed themes but haven't made the time to polish them. I've been working on my niche marketing membership blog mostly of late, trying to get the value I want into it without the workload it's turning into on me.

But I could probably whip something up for you if you gave me an idea what you were looking for.

It's really a shame that a theme ever "breaks". Template tags are deprecated for several versions before they are removed, so it isn't like it was a surprise to anyone that tags they were using were going away.


"yes you need an arsenal of plugins to get things the way you want them'

You know, I used to have loads and loads of plugins, but as time goes by, I'm selecting them with more critical thought. I'm using fewer and fewer of them. I've probably eliminated over 75% of the number of plugins I was using a year ago. When you consider how many more there are now, that's something. I really ask myself if a plugin will actually add traffic, conversion or user value to my blog before I even consider trying it these days. i'm getting really minimalist about it, and honestly, it's early days for some of the changes I'm making, but it seems to be making things better at the start.

I feel you pain. I was hacked earlier this year, and actually they got into several of my niche blogs and converted them into phishing sites. I lost a LOT of hard work and some significant income.

WordPress suffers from the same main security flaw as Internet Explorer. The flaw is market share dominance. Sure you could spend time writing code to compromise Safari or Opera, or TypePad or dBlogger, but there aren't that many people using them in comparison. The best bang for the buck, and them most likely you are to get a lot of blogs (or browsers) and to have a lot of them still using the insecure older versions after updates are left is to target the ones with the most market share.

That is why it's so important that you stay on top of upgrades. And not just to WP itself, but to plugins you are using. plugins can be compromised and if not updated, they leave security holes into your blog.

I feel you pain. I was hacked earlier this year, and actually they got into several of my niche blogs and converted them into phishing sites. I lost a LOT of hard work and some significant income.

WordPress suffers from the same main security flaw as Internet Explorer. The flaw is market share dominance. Sure you could spend time writing code to compromise Safari or Opera, or TypePad or dBlogger, but there aren't that many people using them in comparison. The best bang for the buck, and them most likely you are to get a lot of blogs (or browsers) and to have a lot of them still using the insecure older versions after updates are left is to target the ones with the most market share.

That is why it's so important that you stay on top of upgrades. And not just to WP itself, but to plugins you are using. plugins can be compromised and if not updated, they leave security holes into your blog.

"Don't Use Pingback / Trackback When Syndicating / Splogging My Content"

Spooky. I just ranted the same thing in a BlogCatalog thread on spamments. This really annoys me. My readers don't need a link to read the fist paragraph of the post they've just read.

What really struck me was the sense of an utter and complete disconnect from the realities of the web today. Simply stated if you run a program which offers to give you "credits" that can lead to "traffic" and the method you give people to "earn" these credits can be automated, it will be.

The email left me with the strong feeling that it never occurred to anyone working on this project that people would attempt to automate the generation of credits, reduce the possibility of any traffic loss and attempt to exploit and mathematic or programatic opportunities presented. Not that I think people should do this, just that I know they will, and was struck by the sense that John and Crew did not.