Category: Wordpress

How to Setup your own Blog, The Easy way

Paul

Over the weekend I had a chance to talk to my sister who was interested in having setting up her own blog. She didn’t know a thing about setting up her own blog and asked me to walk her step by step. So I thought I would also walk my readers through this whole process and help you set up your own blog to.

This process will take approximately an hour to two hours, each step will be talked about in detail through a series of blog post. This shouldn’t not take long for anyone to do, depending on the speed of your internet. In fact if you follow my directions, it should be really quick and easy. No mess or fuss.

  • How to Setup your Own Blog, The Easy Way

  • Picking the Hosting Provider & Setting up your Domain

  • [intlink id=”4118″ type=”post”] Setting up WordPress[/intlink]

  • [intlink id=”4122″ type=”post”]Securing Wordpess[/intlink]

  • [intlink id=”4135″ type=”post”]Picking your Blog Theme[/intlink]

So now with that being said, I would like to talk about domain names. If you want to have your own domain you have to make it unique. It should be something personal and go with what your looking for. Do you know your domain is almost like a brand-name? Just like Nike, Adidas, and McDonald’s people who hear that come back with the knowing that no matter where you are in the world. This also goes for your Domain, before you start this think of a what you will be blogging about and make a list possible domains. This is always the first step into creating a blog. Now I must warn you this process may take long or it might be short. Some or All of those domain names you come up with may be taken or they may not. The Most common name extensions can be seen through Wikipedia.
Now with that said on my next post we will talk about Picking your hosting provider and Setting up your Domain.

Why website should Hide their Affiliate links

Paul2 Replies

Yes you heard me right, lately I’ve been trying to figure out why some of my click were not used in my links. So I went to Google to find the answer. I found the answer to some of this. According to some other websites 40% of affiliate links are stolen or switched with spammers and scammer who are trying to make money. You see the virus writers have been trying to make money with there Fake Antivirus software and they will do anything to earn money. I have also though about how people would boost they have made Millions from Affiliate links and that is where this stilling would happen.

How to make your Affiliate links look like they come from your site:

I decided the easiest way to prevent link theft is create a directory called “go” and then used the program Profit Protector to encrypt and hide my affiliate links.  Then all you have to do is upload the created html file to the “go” directory. for Example:

http://www.affiliatesite.com/product.html?affid=1234

changes to

http://www.mysite.com/go/affiliatesite.html

Now all you have to do is change all your links like the example above and you would use the “http://www.mysite.com/go/affiliatesite.html” for your active link.  This would help reduce programs from stealing your affiliate links with there own.

Has this help my affiliate links?

I would say a most definately yes.   I have been watching the click through rates through my affiliates menu and see a drastic change of people downloading or having a user session with my affiliate links.   I also think this will increase my commission pay out because now people can follow through and buy a product without knowing they have left my site.

Now I won’t argue the ethics of this system because I have worked hard at finding the right affiliates for my niche but in the end, I have no regrets.   I feel this is what I have to make sure my efforts pay off.   After all I’ve done the reviews and that is my payment for doing the reviews.   What do you think?  Is this something you have to do or have done?

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Misconceptions of Affiliate Marketing

Paul

Earlier today I was chatting with Mike Smith, from Miketechshow.com. Mike was saying how unreliable it is to have links being displayed on his site. He also talked about how he wasn’t making a lot from those links. He also talked about wanting a sponsor and not affiliates.  I say if he could affiliate market on his podcast he’d start earning money.   So I figured I would offer some great tips to get the Click through conversion rates that work for me:

  • Cater to Your Nich market — If you don’t know you audience how can you know what they are looking for.   Having a site for famous Gossip could cater to Clothes and Jewerly.  This is the first thing you ned to do to start making some kind of money from affiliate marketing.

  • Keep reminding your Audience about your Market — Like Me I keep reminding people about all those good [intlink id=”2205″ type=”page”]Anti-virus software[/intlink] that can be valuable.  To get people to click on your link you sometimes have to remind them that it is there.   This helps get a residue income from your niche audience.

  • Recommendations do create sales —  if you recommend a product that creates click through and creating a trust between the writer and the Readers.  This gives the readers a reason to come back and stay a while.   If they start trusting you that means they will may click on other recommendations.

  • Create a affiliate sneeze page —  This sounds nasty but having affiliate links on specials in your niche market helps drive traffic to your links.   Like I have a page for [intlink id=”2740″ type=”page”]Cricket Specials[/intlink], it helps keep people coming back and buying through you because it makes it easy to find what they want.

These are just a few that have worked for me there are vast number of websites talking about Affiliates and why they will not work or they talk about making millions.   There are truths in everything you read weather you read comments that affiliate don’t work but that is a misconception because those who say that are people who don’t really understand it or grasp it.    If you aren’t seeing the big picture or thinking a few years down the road then you will never make any substantial amount of money from Affiliate marketing.

There are a lot of techneaks that people use to get more affiliate sales or commision but it is something you have to do and consider the reprocutions of some of these actions.   I talk about email spam, although, 12 percent of people  have opened this is bad practice for affiliates because this create a bad taste in consumers mouth.  This also hurts other people who are trying to get clicks because of the bad taste that prevents those consumers from clicking and maybe create a negative public relations.

Do it right and you could create a great market place for your audience and also create income that keeps coming every month.

Morpheus comes a scanning!!

Paul

morpheusscan1I’ve been reading about this on other blogs about this user agent   I have been seeing this agent trying to access an area where I know WordPress doesn’t have anything there.  Some people suspect it is scanning for any Drupal Vulnerabilities.   I have to say if it is searching for Drupal, it is in the wrong place.

Now let’s get down to it.  I’ve seen a lot of comments that just blocking the User is not going to prevent this from happening.   You see they can always spoof the agent with out much trouble but I feel that if they are going to do use an agent that I can track.  It is never a bad idea to block that type of access.  If that was a true agent, I seriously doubt it would be a legitimate agent because of the name.  Others have suggested this is looking to find a PHP Vulnerability and exploit your system.

[ad]I don’t know if it is true.   I have been reading the comments on the blog and some of them are quite interesting.   One such comment that I like how this scanner has been around since 2006 and most PHP servers have been updated to prevent this type of exploit.   So either this scanner is an old system that has nothing better to do or they are just trying to see if they can get a response from my server.   In which case, they now will be give the Access denied.   I have modified my htaccess file to prevent this scanner from even coming to my website.  See blog post to find out how.

What makes this so interesting is it tries to go to “user/soapCaller.bs” expecting to find something, Oh well I am pretty much unconcerned due to the fact that I keep WordPress up to date and I am constantly looking for oddities like this in my log files.   Now we heard that they don’t always have to use the headers and can hide and not be blocked so I have thought about denying anything that doesn’t show IP or has no header?   I wanted to ask my users if that is a good ide or bad idea?   This would stop bots from being bad, I do wonder if this has to do with me talking about [intlink id=”3132″ type=”post”]Pifts.exe a couple months ago[/intlink].    I have read about this on the comments section about this being a Government funded data collection, I don’t know but it does intrique me on the subject.

Remember to help prevent exploits on your server you should keep it up to date as much as possible.  [intlink id=”3700″ type=”post”]If there is an update to WordPress[/intlink], you should always consider updating even when there are problems down the road.

MyGodaddy Review : Thumbs UP!

Paul

I have been using [ad#Godaddy Name]as my Hosting Company for quite some time and really love the service. As you know they clam to have 99% uptime and I haven’t seen them go down for anything since I started. So Let’s Talk about this even more:

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  • Hosting plans starting as low as $4.99 a Month. ([ad#Godaddy Hosting plans])

  • Domains starting as low as $1.99.  ([ad#Goddady Domain Sale])

  • Technical Support has been excellent.  Every time I call there hasn’t been nothing they would not do to help out.

  • WordPress, Simple Machine Forum, and even Wiki programs. You have a wide variety of programs to use to such as blog and have it up and running in no time.

  • You can become a Reseller for Godaddy if you want, and have a store if you want.   This is also makes it even easier for you to make and sell domains for cheap.

  • SSL Certificates — Keep your website secure and prevent people from getting information they shouldn’t.   This is good for businesses who have to sell using a credit card or registration for people information.

This is a good service for bloggers and podcasters who want to blog.   I have been using this service from [ad#Godaddy Name]and have been really impressed.  If you looking for a hosting this is the right place to go.   Although the support for [ad#Godaddy Name]is not the best, when I went through them for tech support.   They would tell me how to fix it and leave me do it myself but that is a good way to learn how to keep a website going.   I still recommend [ad#Godaddy Name]for people who want a dependable service.   Do you like or not like Godaddy?  I want to hear from you!  Leave a comment and let me know what you think!

All in All, I like the support and friendliness of [ad#Godaddy Name]to keep me going when something unexpected comes up. You will never know what is around the corner.