Subscribers to the feed on my personal blog got a surprise message in their email — a business message I did not intend for them to receive and a message they probably did not care to receive.

And you know what THAT means… LOST subscribers.

So, what did I do wrong (THIS time)?

Well, I failed to set up my Feedburner feed to exclude posts from a particular category. When I posted to that category, the list on my Aweber account that uses the Blog Broadcast service, emailed that post to all the subscribers on the list.

Here’s an example.

If I don’t want NPT newsletter subscribers to receive posts that I make to my XOX (personal) category, that category must be removed from the Feedburner feed.

Here are the steps to take:

1. Sign into WordPress
2. Go to “Categories”
3. Mouse over the name of the category you want to exclude and take note of the ID in the status bar as shown below. In this case, the ID is “381“.

   

4. Now log into your Google Feedburner account and click on “Edit Feed Details” for your feed.
5. Under “Original Feed Details” add ?cat=-318 (or whatever your cat ID happens to be) to your feed URL.

   

6. Now test your Feedburner Feed and you will that posts from the ‘offensive’ category no longer appear.

If you would like to remove 2 or more categories from a feed, simply add an ampersand before each category number ( @amp; ), i.e. http://netprofitstoday.com/blog?cat=-381@-642

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

Cheers,

I’m terrible about checking my Google Adsense earnings. I occasionally login to confirm that the amount on the check equals the amount reported in the Google Adsense interface… occasionally.

So, when I logged in this morning to review the reports, I was surprised (and delighted) to notice that this month’s earnings are more than triple what my average Adsense earnings have been over the past year and more.

Granted, the checks were markedly larger in both June and July — but I likely put that down as a ‘fluke’, endorsed them and took them to the bank.

As it’s unlikely to get 3 times ‘lucky’, and traffic to the site has actually decreased slightly over the summer, today I determined the cause for the substantially larger checks…

Google Adsense for Feeds

If you visit my feed for this site, you will notice that Google Adsense ads are displayed after every post summary. (Note: if that’s not what you see – keep reading to learn the reason that’s changed.)

What is most apparent is that my clickthrough rate on Adsense for Feeds (across all channels) is considerably higher (2.87%) than the CTR on AdSense for Content (0.39%).

Too, the Page eCPM on Adsense for Feeds is likewise higher at an average of $16.48 (across all channels) than the eCPM on Adsense for Content which sits at an average of 2.36.

On some channels the eCPM ratio between feeds and content is 20:1.

So placing Google Adsense after every feed item is a great tactic if you want to increase your Google Adsense earnings.

But before you rush off to do so, ask yourself the following questions first — especially if you promote goods and services as an affiliate on your site.

• Is earning an extra $100, $200 or $1000 per month (as the case may be) from Google Adsense really worth the cost of diverting traffic away from my site?
• How much more could I earn if those ‘clicks away’ became site visitors who bought the products I promote.
• In other words, am I really willing to trade potential subscribers / buyers for pennies on the dollar?

How you answer those questions really depends on what stage your affiliate site is at.

If you are just starting out as an affiliate and haven’t yet joined too many affiliate programs, then monetizing with Adsense is a great choice.

However, if your site is fully developed — promotes a number of products, services and builds a subscriber list — then you might actually lose revenues with so many Google Adsense placements in your feeds.

On the other hand, even with a fully-developed site, placing Adsense after each post summary may amount to an increase in overall revenue.

Only you can determine what works best for your site, by checking your stats much more often than I do!

Do you place Adsense units in your feeds? Any comments on how frequency of placement has affected your revenue? Please share, we’d love to know!

Want to learn more about how to increase your Adsense earnings?

Check out Stephen Crooks’ Cash Cow Guide which includes his $100 a Day Adsense Challenge Report as a bonus. This was Stephen’s challenge to make $100 a day from adsense within 3 months from a brand new blog.

If you are a visual learner, you might prefer Michael Cheney’s Adsense Videos that show how he completely EXPLODED his Adsense earnings.

Here’s a traffic generation question / comment from Kenny that was spot on!

Rosalind, it is inconceivable that you have time to utilize all the techniques in your ebook.

So, in an effort to follow your lead, so to speak, if you were to narrow down the five most consistently effective marketing / promotion / advertising processes that you use primarily, what would you say those were?

In advance, thanks.

Kenny Love

GREAT question, Kenny!

You’re absolutely right – I’d go bonkers if I tried to do ALL of the marketing techniques ALL of the time.

So, here are the 5 traffic generation or marketing methods that I use most consistently:

1. Blogging for Search Engine Placement
2. List / Email Marketing
3. Social Media Marketing & Community Activity
4. Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)
5. Article Distribution & Marketing

Blogging for Search Engine Placement

Essentially, my first priority is to publish fresh content to my blogs on a regular basis (some of which are more regular than others). Although I don’t engage in keyword stuffing, (which makes for horrible reading), the content of each blog post has to be tightly focused on one subject so that keywords and keyword phrases in the article are closely aligned and thus the post is more likely to get picked up and listed by the search engines, resulting in free traffic.

List / Email Marketing

The post is then distributed by email to the relevant subscriber list either through a blog broadcast (using Aweber / Feedburner combined) or through a link in a weekly newsletter.

Social Media Marketing & Community Activity

Engaging the audience personally through either blog commenting, forum posting or social media marketing comes next. I will respond to comments and answer any questions posted by my own blog readers and subscribers, which enhances information contained in the article and adds still more ‘fodder’ for the search engines to notice. My social media marketing efforts are fairly scant – using applications like TwitterFeed to broadcast the post’s title and link to Twitter for some more free traffic. From time to time, I’ll post a comment to a high-profile blog or forum in response to a topic relevant to my original article, along with a link to that article.

Pay Per Click Marketing (PPC)

Depending on the response from blog readers and subscribers, I may incorporate PPC marketing at that point. If the conversion rate is better than average for the audience, I’ll do the math to assess whether it’s worth driving traffic to that particular post or page with PPC, starting with Google Adwords and/or Yahoo! Search Marketing depending on the demographic. If the response is just ‘good’, PPC may still be worth the effort if enough of that traffic joins the list.

Article Distribution & Marketing

Article marketing comes in 5th and last, because I don’t post the same articles to my site as I would distribute to article directories so they require some re-writing, which takes time. Furthermore, the traffic isn’t as targeted as it is with your own list or with PPC marketing… but it’s traffic none-the-less and every click counts for something… eventually.

After that’s all said and done, it’s probably time to write another post — or more likely, take another vacation.

Have you ever wanted to stop the feeds on your blog?

For example, if you wanted to import a number of static HTML articles that you had elsewhere on your site and post them into your blog without sending an email to all of your Feedburner email subscribers each time you posted one of those articles – you might want to stop the feed… temporarily of course.

One way to do that is to remove the following files from your WordPress installation.

• wp-atom.php
• wp-comments2rss.php
• wp-feed.php
• wp-links-opml.php
• wp-rdf.php
• wp-rss.php
• wp-rss2.php
• feed-rss2-comments.php

The other way – apparently – is to us the No Feed plugin by Jason.

Let’s see if it works…

Follow up… Well, sure enough the No Feed broke the feed and gave an error message when I clicked my Feedburner link.

On the other hand, when I deactivated the plugin, this post showed up immediately under Current Feed Content at Feedburner, so it remains to be seen whether Feedburner will send that email out… but I suspect they will.

Any other ideas?

Give your WordPress blog a professional look…

You can get free skins or themes for your WordPress blog, but truth be told, only a few of the free WordPress themes that I see are all that pretty, and none of them have any SEO components built into them.

So, I’ve resorted to buying themes for each of my WordPress blogs. Listed below are the design services where I’ve bought themes and templates.

1. StudioPress (Brian Gardner)
2. WooThemes
3. WP Remix
4. BoxedArt

Brian Gardner’s Themes

I use Brian Gardner’s themes here on Net Profits Today, Roamsters.com, 101Date.com and MyEnergyPal (screenshot shown below). I started using his themes when he came out with Revolution News — which is currently in use on NetProfitsToday, albeit highly modified now. You can read about how my average visitor duration increased after I started using his themes.

Brian’s themes come with uniquely-styled homepages, archives, section and post pages. I particularly like the ‘newspaper’ look and feel of the Lifestyle Theme homepage, on which you can display recent posts from categories of your choice, in any order you like, which is infinitely preferable to the endless 10-post homepage scroll on most blogs. The primary and secondary top navigation bars allow you to highlight pages and categories that you particularly want your visitors to see and visit.

I love Brian’s themes – primarily because his designs are fresh and fabulous and better yet, they encourage visitors to poke around the site longer.

Or, you can visit Brian’s WordPress theme site and check them out at the source.

WooThemes

WooThemes was formerly Premium News Themes by Adii. Pictured below is the Fresh News Theme which was designed and coded by Magnus Jepson. You’ll notice some similiarities between this and Adii’s other themes as it was built on the framework of previous Premium News themes.

I use the Premium News theme on RosalindGardner.com (ignore the wonky search button – I was playing around with the CSS and haven’t gotten around to fixing it yet) and what I especially appreciate about these themes is that features such as Flickr, Feedburner and banner ad management are fully integrated.

WooThemes offers WordPress themes in the following categories:

• Business
• CMS
• Magazine / News
• Personal Blog
• Portfolio

To see the themes themselves and everything that is included with these themes, visit WooThemes.

WP Remix

Flexibility and ease-of-use are what struck me first about the WP Remix theme for WordPress – especially regarding the ability to choose and change page and sidebar designs directly from the WYSIWYG editor.

Trust me, after doing the work to create my own category pages and related sidebars, this feature alone sets WP Remix apart from other WordPress themes.

Visit WP Remix | Read my Review

BoxedArt

The design on Sage-Hearts.com used to be a beautiful template from BoxedArt and some elements of that template still exist. However, when I installed the WordPress blog, I morphed the rest of the design to look more like the blog.

Boxed Art offers the world’s largest collection of Original Web Templates, Flash Templates, Print Templates, Graphic Elements and WordPress templates.

Most of these templates are absolutely beautiful – however – complete beginners or anyone unfamiliar with HTML may want to check out the simpler template offerings available at the sites listed above.

Visit BoxedArt.com

Those are just 3 sources for professional WordPress themes. Keep checking back as I add more when I find them.

Today is the deadline to have all your FeedBurner accounts moved over to your Google account.

Although I’ve heard various opinions on whether the old Feedburner subscriptions will continue to work – with some bloggers reporting that subscriptions should work indefinitely and others already reporting glitches with the old addresses – I’d trust the Feedburner to Google FAQ which reads:

“It is our intent to keep backward compatibility with your feed address as long as this service exists.”

I updated my accounts last week and haven’t yet changed all the feed addresses, but the old one’s are redirecting just fine.

The real issue is in updating your accounts. According to the FAQ, if you don’t update your account:

“…you will no longer be able to access your account at http://www.feedburner.com, and your feeds will either begin returning a “404 Not Found” response or a “301 Moved” response back to your source feed.”

Learn more on the Feedburner to Google FAQ

Have you checked recently to see whether your blog’s feed is valid?

No?

Well, consider this a cautionary tale.

I stopped by Feedburner and was shocked to see that one of my blog feeds was showing exactly the same number of subscribers as it had when I last checked – a few months earlier.

How could that possibly be? I wondered. The feed had been averaging about 10 new subscribers a day until that time and according to AWSTATS, the number of site visitors had been steadily increasing since then.

So, I went straight to the Troubleshootize button and quickly scanned the list for the most likely suspect.

It wasn’t problem #1. “Your FeedBurner feed isn’t up-to-date with your Original Feed. The fix: Try pinging FeedBurner using our Ping page. This action tells FeedBurner to go check your feed for updates immediately.”

The next option “Invalid characters or XML markup in content items, often introduced by composing your posts in Microsoft Word or embedding JavaScript code in a post” didn’t seem likely as I don’t use Word to compose my posts and the only embedded javascript was the ShareThis plugin.

However, I still decided to check both the feeds for validity problems.

The Original Feed Validator confirmed that the feed was invalid by reason of a CDATA error. After poking around for a while to try and figure out what that meant, I went back to the blog and started opening up the posts, starting with the one around the time the subscriptions stopped.

Sure enough, right at the top of the post was a little rectangular character that certainly didn’t need to be in the message. I stripped it out, saved the post and went back to the validator.

This time the news was better. “Congratulations! This is a valid RSS feed” was the result.

Woohoo!

Fortunately, because this error occured on a personal blog to which I barely post or monetize, the fact that the feed wasn’t valid didn’t affect my income.

However, it probably upset a few of those who were unable to subscribe, and that ultimately is bad for business.

To avoid losing subscribers and revenue due to invalid feeds, check them often. If you use Feedburner, the Original Feed Validator and Feedburner Feed Validator links in the Troubleshootize section will automatically input the URL at FeedValidator and run the check. Otherwise, visit FeedValidator.org and run the check directly from there.

Validate your feeds today!

Have you ever noticed how sites that syndicate content from other people’s blogs and newsfeeds seem to get high search engine rankings?

Do you want to integrate RSS newsfeeds from one of your own sites (or those published on other websites) into your blog but can’t figure out how it’s done?

Well, I had the same problem, did some research and you’ll be glad to know that the solution is really quite simple.

The Free Feed Integration Problem

I was using Feedburner BuzzBoost to publish recent post titles from this site to RosalindGardner.com, but got tired of the ‘Powered by Feedburner’ link that went straight to Feedburner, (outlined in red in the 1st screen capture below). Granted, you expect to show advertising in exchange for using a free service, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it… and as an affiliate marketer, I still don’t like non-paying links that go off my site.

CaRP Evolution: The RSS to HTML Solution

So, I started looking for a reasonably-priced RSS to HTML script that could be customized and found CaRP, a PHP script that runs on your website. It converts the content from RSS and Atom newsfeeds into HTML and displays it in your webpages.

Seeing Shawn Collins’ (Affiliate Summit co-founder) testimonial on the homepage definitely compelled me to look more thoroughly at the program. This is what he said:

“CaRP, which converts RSS to HTML for SEO benefits, is one of my favorite tools. It enables me to feature my blog content on other sites of mine, exposing my blog posts to more people.”

The script is highly customizable and the following data can be displayed:

The output can be further customized with custom mapping and plugins.

Benefit to Affiliate Marketers

Better yet, with the paid version of CaRP, you can build customized Amazon affiliate links based on your search terms.

I was convinced, bought the CaRP Evolution software and now the feed display looks like this:

Easy Installation

The installation and setup was easy. You just upload the software to your server / host (preferably to the root directory) and run the setup file from your browser.

To display the feed, you just place a snippet of code where you want the content to show up, and customization is easy when you follow the instructions in the ReadMe file provided.

CaRP Options

Carp offers 3 levels of software – free, single use licence and a single server licence. they also offer a subscription service, but I opted for the single use licence which also includes:

• 14 free bonus plugins
• A “brandable” eBook about making money with RSS that I can earn commissions by giving away
• An MP3 audio recording of the eBook
• “Podcasting for Fun and Profit”
• “Podcast Teleprompter”
• Free updates

CaRP Evolution.

As the economy worsens and the price of basic goods continues to skyrocket, an increasing number of people are asking whether it is feasible to do business as an Internet marketer with a poor or bad credit rating.

The short answer is a big fat “YES!”

Sure, building an online business with bad credit or without a credit card is going to be somewhat more of a challenge than if you had unlimited resources and a Platinum Business Credit Card from American Express, but it IS possible.

Internet marketing is actually an excellent choice for those with little or no credit.

Most of the tools and services that you need to run an online business are either free or very inexpensive – and some services will accept checks and money orders for payment.

Provided you have access to a computer with an Internet connection, the most basic tools of the trade are a web site and a way to build your subscriber list, both of which can be obtained through free services such as Blogger and Feedburner.

You can make your site look attractive using free templates, graphic and photographic images which are widely available online. Simple software such as file transfer utilities as well as text, HTML and graphics editors are available for free through download sites such as Tucows.com.

Basic market research and writing your own content costs only time. Partnering with online merchants as an affiliate is also free. Lastly, there are numerous ways to get traffic to your site for free, including article marketing and social media marketing strategies such as blog commenting.

An important caveat about using free domains and hosting.

Using free hosting services is a bad plan for the simple reason that after building a profitable business your site may be taken offline without warning. I share a story in my book about having that happen to one of my sites.

Furthermore, many merchants do NOT accept affiliates who don’t have their own top-level domains, i.e. mydomain.com. The programs that you can join with a free site generally need tons of traffic to produce even modest earnings. Such programs include Google Adsense which pays for people to click away from your site; and Amazon, which offers relatively low commissions on low-priced products such as books and videos.

Another huge drawback to free hosting services is that when you do decide to move to your own domain (and you will), you’ll lose most of your feed subscribers. Because the list you build and the relationships you establish with your site visitors will become your most valuable business asset, it is therefore absolutely essential that you establish a solid foundation for your business from the outset – which means having your own domain.

The largest cost you’ll have for starting a business as an Internet or affiliate marketer is for domain registration and web hosting.

Fortunately, you don’t need a credit card for either service, as BlueHost – which has my highest recommendation – accepts PayPal, checks (U.S. Only) and money orders.

Furthermore, Bluehost will cover your domain registration fees when you purchase either a 12 or 24 month subscription. Respectively, pricing for those subscriptions is currently set at $7.95 and $6.95 per month, or $95.40 and $166.80 due at signup.

Having said all that, your first objective should be to repair, build and re-establish your good credit rating.

You can do that by scrambling together whatever money you can muster and getting either a prepaid debit card or a secured credit card, both of which are specifically for people with poor or no credit.

Both types of cards require that you deposit cash into an account that then becomes the credit line for that account. For example, if you put $300 in the account; you can use your secured credit card to charge up to $300 in purchases.

As you use the secured credit card, your credit rating will improve over time to the point that you may no longer be required to make advance deposits, and become qualified to hold an unsecured credit card.

As the saying goes, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going“, so don’t let a bad credit rating discourage you from starting your own online business. Use the situation to drive your determination to succeed in such a big way that you’ll never have to worry about a bad credit rating again.

Credit Cards for People with Bad or No Credit

As the U,S, economy sinks to new lows and the prices of oil and food rise to new heights, more and more ordinary working people are having a hard time covering the cost of basics such as food, housing and transportation.

After defaulting on a payment or two, many find that their credit rating has plummeted to the point where they are considered a credit risk and have difficulty obtaining credit.

How frustrating that just when you need credit, it becomes harder to get it!!! It’s especially frustrating if you want to start a business to earn more money and can’t get a credit card.

Fortunately, you may be able to get a secured credit card or prepaid debit card even if you have poor or bad credit.

A secured credit card or prepaid debit card requires the user to deposit money into the credit card account before the card can be used.

Once money is deposited into the account, the secured credit card can be used to purchase items. The prepaid debit card or secured credit card will not allow you to exceed the amount of money you deposited into the account.

Check out this prepaid credit card for folks with poor credit.

In summary, don’t accept a poor credit rating as a reason NOT to start your own Internet business. Use the system effectively to rebuild and re-establish your credit rating.

Greetings from just outside beautiful Huntsville, Ontario.

And no, that’s not me working hard at my laptop down at the town dock – but I did appreciate the girl’s spirit to have biked to such a beautiful spot to do her work.

I’ve been ‘busy’ this past week checking out various Muskoka chairs, and all the while my blog has been busy delivering all the messages I queued up for you prior to my departure.

Just in case you’ve been checking out lounge chairs too, the following posts have been made since the last newsletter went out on the 20th:

• Getting People to Accept Your Facebook Friend Requests
• BeBiz: How Much Does it Cost?
• WordPress Plugins: Author Exposed
• Ros Tells All in PepperJam Interview
• Spam: SOMEONE YOU CALL YOUR FRIEND, WANTS YOU DEAD
• Where’d You Get that Graphic?
• How to Get Free Pics from Professional Photographers
• Feedburner FeedCount: Be Patient

‘Til next time, Blog and Prosper!

Cheers,
Ros