Sometimes you have to challenge yourself to do better.

This month, I’ve challenged myself to blog each and every day to my dating site at 101Date.com. The ‘challenge’ is due to the fact that I’m no longer too keen on the subject and have therefore been very remiss in posting to that blog.

Ya, I know… that’s how I made my first million — BUT, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m still inspired by the topic.

Too, Valentine’s Day is a HUGE profit generator so getting traffic to the site through content will ultimately be worthwhile.

So, I’m using a few ‘tricks of the trade’ to succeed at this months challenge.

1. Re-posting old articles.
2. Working to finish posts that were drafted long ago.
3. Researching trade industry news.
4. Buying PLR.
5. Checking out some content spinners (yes, I know that’s against everything I’ve ever taught you, but if I can auto-spin an article and then do a little work to make it sound human – hey, why not? Besides, the 7-day trial is only $4.97.

Anyway, that’s MY challenge for February… the SHORTEST month of the year.

Anybody willing to join me?

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Here’s a heads up about what happens to your Akismet plugin once you install WordPress 3.3

First, ALL comments posted to my blogs were going into spam after I installed WordPress 3.3. Ergo, I wasn’t getting email messages about comments being held in moderation. Thought no one was enjoying my latests posts until I found nearly 100 ‘good’ comments in the Spam box.

Then the BBPress Forum on Affiliate Blogger PRO stopped working. I got a message from one of our members that they couldn’t post to the forum. I checked and it seemed to work, so I asked him to try again and never heard anything back. I received an email about the same problem from another member this morning and discovered that new posts to the forum were automatically being deleted.

Suddenly something in my tiny cranium clicked that the problem must have something to do with Akismet.

Sure enough, when you install WordPress 3.3 and do the Akismet upgrade, things go awry.

The fix?

Easy enough. Go into the Akismet configuration panel on your WordPress blog and you’ll discover that the API key is no longer there.

Once you re-enter and save it… all is well once more.

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

This might be the world’s longest checklist for bloggers and affiliate marketers.

Don’t let that stop you from becoming a blogger, as many items on the checklist need only be done once (i.e. install your blog), while a number of others are tongue-in-cheek, i.e. eat and sleep.

Most items on the checklist are linked to blog posts on this site where you’ll find more information about the topic.

Important list items WITHOUT links (i.e. choose your niche, assess affiliate programs, create an autoresponder series, etc.) are covered in detail in both my book and multi-media course.

I hope this helps and Happy Blogging!

1. Determine whether you really want to be a blogger
2. Learn and understand industry terminology, i.e. do NOT say ‘affiliate’ when you mean merchant!
3. Ask LOTS of questions!
4. Consider your interests (food, going green…)
5. Assess / research markets for profit potential
6. Confirm that there are products to sell in your niche
7. Consider the state of the economy
8. Choose your niche (be happy, stay out of BizOp)
9. Decide whether to use your real name or a pseudonym
10. Think up a good name for your business / blog

     

11. Protect your computer against spam and viruses
12. Arrange computer backups – backup power unit or at Carbonite (or both)
13. Register your domain name
14. Arrange web hosting
15. Familiarize yourself with host’s operating system, i.e. cPanel
16. Learn and exercise patience
17. Confused? Evaluate educational opportunities
18. Be careful to avoid scam artist ‘teachers’
19. Setup email forwarding addresses, i.e. me @ mydomain.com
20. Install WordPress
21. Install Akismet for blog spam protection
22. Install WP Firewall Plugin
23. Install Login Lockdown plugin

 

24. Install a professional WordPress theme
25. Design or hire a professional to create a logo
26. Install multiple web browsers to review blog design
27. Configure your blog backup schedule
28. Setup comment moderation preferences
29. Write a Comments Policy
30. Add a ping list
31. Setup user registration preferences, subscriber vs. author, etc.
32. Get a Gravatar

     

33. Write your Author bio
34. Setup a PayPal account for commission payments
35. Get a Google account
36. Set up a Google Feedburner feed
37. Sign up for Google Adsense
38. Set up an autoresponder account to build your list
39. Create an autoresponder series
40. Install autoresponder code on blog
41. Setup Blog Broadcast functionality with Feedburner feed info
42. Setup a Facebook Profile (here’s mine)

     

43. Setup a Facebook Page
44. Install Facebook code on blog
45. Register at LinkedIn
46. Setup Twitter account
47. Install Sexy Bookmarks to allow readers to share your posts
48. Install the Contact Form 7 plugin
49. Create a Contact page
50. Create an AboutUs page
51. Add Disclaimer page
52. Add Disclosure page (to keep FTC happy)

     

53. Create blog categories
54. Write blog category descriptions
55. Get a text or HTML editor to write your posts offline
56. Write a series of ‘starter’ posts
57. Install multiple browsers to see how your blog appears in each
58. Tag posts with relevant keywords
59. Buy graphics / images to enhance posts
60. Use your own images with a Flickr account
61. Add Google Adsense code
62. Join Amazon affiliate program (if able)

     

63. Join Clickbank
64. Join other affiliate networks, e.g. CJ, ShareaSale
65. Supply networks with direct depost information
66. Apply to affiliate programs
67. Appeal to merchants directly if declined
68. Evaluate and compare affiliate offers
69. Choose best offers and products to promote
70. Organize your affiliate information
71. Learn how to cloak your affiliate links
72. Write product reviews

     

73. Get affiliate code from merchant
74. Install affiliate links in product reviews
75. Monitor sales statistics
76. Confirm commission checks and bank deposits are accurate
77. Set a goal to double earnings each and every month
78. Assess why commissions may not be as high as expected
79. Tweak posts to increase conversion rates
80. Review sales statistics again
81. Monitor list for unsubscribes after publishing posts
82. Assess best ratio of promotional to informational posts

     

83. Create a publishing plan to follow
84. Continue writing informative articles
85. Create a swipe file to prevent writer’s block
86. Buy and use PLR content when writing bores you
87. Respond to blog reader comments (good and bad)
88. Use reader comments to get ideas for content **
89. Build relationships – respond to Facebook friend comments
90. Setup a polling plugin
91. Create polls to get reader feedback
92. Send out a press release with poll results

     

93. Create an Android or iPhone app for your blog
94. Build trust – respond to email submitted via Contact form
95. Write standardized responses to frequently asked questions
96. Create a F.A.Q.
97. Check email regularly for new affiliate offers
98. Monitor website traffic with Google Analytics
99. Use Google Reader to stay abreast of industry news
100. Comment on relevant blogs to build traffic through backlinks
101. Comment on relevant forums for backlinks
102. Set up a Yahoo! account

      

103. Make video product reviews (you’ll Flip for this)
104. Upload videos to YouTube and post to blog
105. Connect your YouTube and Facebook accounts
106. Monitor and respond to YouTube user comments
107. Add monetization to YouTube videos
108. Assess popularity of blog posts
109. Create a list of popular blog posts
110. Create a list of your best blog posts in a single category
111. Sign up for Klout to check your ‘influence’
112. Check your ‘bounce rate’

      

113. Write additional articles for placement on article directories
114. Re-invest earnings in software and hardware upgrades
115. Buy PPC advertising on Google Adwords
116. Perform WordPress and plugin updates (but not TOO quickly)
117. Figure out which plugin is causing blog bloat
118. Fret over database errors and other traumas
119. Prepare for possible server outages
120. Clone your blog
121. Check site for broken links
122. Look for links that still work but do not go where intended

      

123. Link posts together with relevant keyword phrases for better SEO
124. Hold a contest to encourage reader feedback and additional traffic
125. Invite guest bloggers to write articles
126. Guest post on other peoples’ blogs
127. Write stellar responses to questions on Yahoo! Answers
128. Find out how much Klout you have
129. Take a course or buy software to improve your copywriting and writing skills
130. Tackle and take down copyright thieves
131. Attend an industry conference
132. Implement lessons learned at conference

      

133. Turn your blog into a membership site … I did
134. Translate your site
135. Get success tips to stay inspired, focused and motivated
136. Learn how to manage your money
137. Subscribe to industry trade magazines
138. File your taxes
139. Sign up for an affiliate marketing / blogging course
140. Celebrate and monetize the holidays
141. Eat
142. Sleep

      

143. Get some exercise
144. Have some fun
145. Make time for your family
146. Give to others
147. Enjoy your disposable income
148. Wash, rinse, repeat

Have I missed anything? Comments, questions or suggestions? PLEASE let me know by leaving a comment below!

Cheers,

WordPress 3.3, released on December 12th, is nicknamed Sonny, for jazz saxophonist, Sonny Stitt.

Honestly, I wasn’t too jazzed about Sonny when I immediately got a “Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_rtl()” message after the upgrade. Couldn’t even log into the Admin Panel. Grrr.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the only blogger who experienced this, so it was easy to find a solution to the WordPress 3.3 Fatal error installation problem.

After getting back into the Administration Panel and reading about the upgrades, I think the most beneficial change is the use of liquid layouts that will scale output to fit any screen size. In the age of increasing mobile media usage — this is a huge benefit.

Too, as someone who uploads a lot of pictures to my sites, I will also appreciate the drag-and-drop media uploader… once I figure out how it works. When I tried it, it opened up a new browser window to the location of the picture on my computer. Thought I’d lost my new post. That wasn’t the case but Hmmm…

The good folks at WordPress describe this iteration as having “significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports.” There is a short video about Sonny on the WordPress site that summarizes the things they think you’ll find are the cat’s pajamas.

See the WordPress 3.3 release notes for a complete list of changes and new features.

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

Although there are millions of ways to promote and tweak your blog in technical ways to ensure higher search ratings and better conversion rates, sometimes it helps to step back a bit and think of more general things you can do to give your blog a makeover.

If you’ve had a blog for awhile and feel as though you need to spice it up, here are some suggestions:

1. Give it a brand new look by refiguring the design and layout.

The easiest way to change something is to change an aspect of your appearance. Ever went to the salon to get a radically new haircut? Remember how great it felt those first few months when you almost actually felt like a different person? It works the same way with rearranging the furniture. And blogs are no different. If you feel as though your blog needs that new “something” consider radically redoing its look. If your current blog is littered with lots of “stuff”, try going the minimalist route. Work with the color scheme to make it easier on the eyes and more stylish. Change the font to something more fun or more readable.

2. Accept and actively recruit guest posters if you haven’t yet done so.

In my experience blogging, taking on guest post writers was one of the best decisions I ever made. While we’d like to think that we can come up with fresh new material on a regular basis, the truth is that you’ll eventually find yourself in a creative rut. And sometimes the only way to get out of it is to get a little help from your friends out in the blogosphere. Who knows? Maybe you’ll publish a few guest posts that will inspire to come up with something equally new and fresh.

3. Write blog posts that are specifically suited to having a discussion among your readers.

One big reason that I fell into a rut with my blog was that I was getting bored by the lack of discussion among my readers. Even though my blog got quite a few hits, the comments sections were mostly empty. One day I realized that this was all my fault. In order to get reader feedback, it is absolutely essential that you write conversational pieces that ask lots of questions and frame something current or controversial. You’d be surprised by what a difference doing this makes.

4. Ask your biggest fans what they would like to see next.

The people that you, as a blogger, should be most grateful to are your regular readers–the readers who check your blog every day as they go about their business, or the ones who always leave a comment no matter what. Your “biggest fans” also happen to be a great resource for honest feedback. If you know the email addresses of people who post regularly on your blog, send them a very personal email in which you ask them what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. Ask them for an honest assessment of where your blog should go next.

These are just a few general considerations if you feel as though your blog needs to be “flipped.”  It’s always good to be open to new things, and, especially on the Internet—a climate in which rapid change is the only way to keep up and stay popular—if you don’t sniff out the “next thing” on a regular basis, you’ll surely be left behind.

Of course, one of the BEST makeovers you can give your blog is a brand-new theme from StudioPress!!

Long gone are the days when I would log into statistics interfaces every hour (and more) to see how many visitors my sites had and how much money I’d made by result.

And I’d be lying if I told you that I check them faithfully even once a week nowadays.

I didn’t realize how complacent I’d become in that regard until a friend mentioned that her traffic had suddenly tanked from one day to the next and that she suspected it had something to do with it being an affiliate site.

After our chat, I decided to check Google Analytics and look at the statistics from my own affiliate sites.

I was stunned by what I saw on the Google Analytics homepage… one of the sites had a very large numeral circled in red with a descending arrow in front of it… -54.59%.

My heart dropped when I saw this graph on the Dashboard for that site.

ZERO visitors for over a week?

Now I could have rushed to some very bad assumptions about the immediate future – thinking that this traffic wipeout was going to be a big hurt in financial terms, or about all the work I’d have to do to bring it back to life, or worse, trying to negotiate with the folks at Google to re-instate the site and its rankings.

But the numbers just didn’t make any sense.

I knew the site must have had some traffic because comments were being placed on the posts on a daily basis.

And although Analytics indicated the site’s status as Receiving Data, it just didn’t seem right.

What had I done? What changes had I made? And then it occurred to me that I’d upgraded the theme to StudioPress Genesis little over a week before.

Sure enough, when I checked the theme settings (and Genesis Hooks), I saw that I hadn’t placed the Google Analytics code in the new header. (Google indicated that the status was OK, because it was reading the code from some old HTML pages that are still on the server.)

So, quick as a bunny installed the code and by the next day I saw that the traffic statistics were indicating normally.

Actually, they were better than before, because instead of ignoring the site, I published a couple of posts in the meantime and saw about a 25% spike in my average daily traffic.

Moral of the story?

Don’t get all stressed out by what seems to be a catastrophic event… in most cases the problem has an easier solution than what you might expect.

I’m finally getting around to upgrading my last few blogs to the Genesis Framework from StudioPress and have decided to spare my readers the ugliness that usually accompanies such a change.

In this video I discuss how to use a plugin that allows you to test drive a new WordPress theme in the background, so that you won’t miss a single click, commission or subscriber signup from your blog’s readers.

Comments, questions or suggestions? Please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

With my latest WordPress upgrade, I once again ran into problems with my Max Banner ads program not functioning properly.

Folks would click the ad and see a page full of “set_magic_quotes_runtime is deprecated” text.

UGH!!

This isn’t an MBA problem, but rather a WordPress problem and easy to fix.

Watch the video below to learn how to fix “set_magic_quotes_runtime is deprecated” errors.

I like placing tag clouds on my blogs’ sidebars or footers.

Displaying your blog’s tags in cloud format is an easy way to point your visitors to your most popular topics.

The WordPress default tag cloud appearance leaves a little to be desired however, so this article explains how to format prettier tag clouds.

In the screenshot below, the default tag cloud widget is shown under #1. You can see that it takes up a lot of space and that the large fonts are VERY large. Unfortunately, the only items your can configure with this widget are the widget’s title and the taxonomy… whether you wish to display tags or categories.

Making improvements to the tag cloud appearance is easy when you use a plugin. The Configurable Tag Cloud plugin and the Super Tags plugin are shown in positions #2 and #3, repectively.

These plugins give you the option to increase or decrease the number of tags that you display, change the font sizes, change the sort order and so much more. The options for both of these widgets is shown below.

Configurable Tag Cloud Widget

• Title - Title shown in sidebar.
• Number of Tags to Display - Controls the total number of tags in your cloud.
• Min. Number of Posts - Tags with less than this number of posts will not be displayed.
• Max. Number of Posts - Tags with more than this number of posts will not be displayed.
• Font Display Unit - What unit to use for font sizes.
• Smallest Font Size - Tags will be displayed no smaller than this value.
• Largest Font Size - Tags will be displayed no larger that this value.
• Min. Tag Color - Beginning color for tag gradient. Please include the #.
• Max. Tag Color - Ending color for tag gradient. Please include the #.
• Cloud Format - How to display the cloud.
• Show Tags - Display tags in cloud.
• Show Categories - Display categories in cloud.
• Show Empty - Display empty categories in cloud.
• Display Post Count? - Show number of posts for each tag.
• Sort By - What field to sort by.
• Sort Order - Direction of sort.

Super Tags Widget

• Title:
• Smallest Font Size ( optional / in pixels ):
• Largest Font Size ( optional / in pixels ):
• Max Tags To Display ( optional / number > 1 ):
• Format ( optional / flat or list ):
• Orderby ( optional / name or count ):
• Order ( optional / ASC, DESC, or RAND ):
• Exclude ( optional / comma separated term IDs ):
• Include ( optional / comma separated term IDs ):
• Taxonomy ( optional / post_tag, category, or link_category ):

Both plugins are available for download via your wordpress blog. Either search for their names under Plugins > Add New or visit Configurable Tag Cloud and Super Tags Widget on WordPress.

Although not as robust as the Configurable Tag Cloud Widget, I have chosen to use the Super Tags widget on this blog.

NOTE: If you prefer to hard code the default WordPress tag cloud, please read the documentation for the wp_tag_cloud() function on the WordPress Codex.

So… do you use tag clouds on your blog? Do you pretty them up with a widget or are you using the default WordPress plugin? Do tell!

WordPress Version 3.1 was released to the public on February 23, 2011.

Highlights include:

• Internal Linking – click a button for an internal link and it allows you to search for a post or browse a list of existing content and select it for inclusion.
• Streamlined Writing Interface – new users of WordPress will find the write screen much less cluttered than before, as more of the options are hidden by default. You can click on Screen Options in the top right to bring them back.
• Post Formats – meta information that can be used by themes to customize presentation of a post. Read more in the article Post Formats.
• Network Admin – move Super Admin menus and related pages out of the regular admin and into a new Network Admin screen.
• List-type Admin Screens – sortable columns for list-type screens and better pagination.
• Exporter/Importer Overhaul – many under the hood changes including adding author information, better handling for taxonomies and terms, and proper support for navigation menus.
• Custom Content Type Improvements – allows developers to generate archive pages, and have better menu and capability controls. Read more in the article Post Types.
• Advanced Queries – allows developers to query multiple taxonomies and custom fields.
• Refreshed Blue Admin Color Scheme – puts the focus more squarely on your content.

My personal favorite change is the new Admin bar which contains various links to useful admin screens. By default, the admin bar is displayed when a user is logged in and visiting the site and is not displayed in admin screens for single blog installs.

Here’s a screenshot of how the Admin bar displays for this site when I’m logged into the site and viewing any of the posts or pages.

For more information on this enhancement and bug release, read the WordPress Blog.