Ever wondered what is list building and why would you want to have your own list of subscribers? Well for starters, your list provides you targeted customers. By subscribing to your list, these customers have already shown their interest in what you are offering, and selling your products to these customers is an easy task. Though it is rewarding to have your own list, building such a list takes up a lot of effort and your time.

There are a number of ways to get subscribers to your list. The easiest way to build your own list is to offer a free e-book or software on your website. The freebie that you offer should relate to your site and should be unique. You need to remember that offering an e-book or software that is valuable for your subscriber is the first step towards building trust with your prospective customers.

continue reading "List Building Made Easy"

There’s a lot of talk online these days about writing great content. And I’m totally 100% in agreement that if you’re not creating good content for your sites, person or business, stop wasting your time and move on to something else. Great content compels people to action and you need it on your site to grow and accomplish your goals.

But if no one sees all of your great content, does it really matter?

continue reading "5 Free and Easy Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website"

Has this happened to you?

You wake up, eager to spend some time on your blog and stumble bleary-eyed over to the computer to see what wonderous activities have happened on your blog during your well deserved but long over due slumber. Blinking the *sleepies* from your eyes you login to your email client and see 382 new messages from your blog announcing comments!

Excited to see the feedback to the amazing post you sweated over for 3 days, you quickly click into the comment moderation area of your blog, only to find all 382 are spam!

If this sounds like you, you are not alone. In fact, one reader sent this question in just yesterday. If one is asking then 10 are wondering, so let me take a couple of minutes and suggest a few things you can do.

Jim Feilen writes:

Anyway to reduce getting spam messages on my blog? I have it so I have to approve before it will post but I am getting more spam each day.

Jim

Welcome to 2008. We fight against spam in our inboxes, our blogs and our postal mail boxes (although less and less in the mailbox these days).

Spammer robots allow people with no conscience or understanding of karmic laws to automatically add comments to hundreds or even thousands of blogs every day. Getting yourself out of the line of fire is a topic worthy of several posts, but today I will just list the top 5 ways I have found to reduce or eliminate spam on your Wordpress blog.

If you know of others, I invite your comments so my readers can benefit from your insight, wisdom and hard earned *blogger-guru* status.

Akismet Wordpress Plugin

Akismet comes with Wordpress and is one of the first things you should try to reduce the amount of spam hitting your blog.

You do have to sign up for a Wordpress.com account in order to activate it (not sure why this is, it just is). I covered this in detail and provided screen shots and step by step instructions for this process over on my other blog. It’s an article titled "Akismet: Stopping The Spam Madness "

Comment Moderation and Comment Blacklist

Updating the Settings | Discussion options on your Wordpress blog to include some keywords in both the moderation and blacklist boxes for comments will also help.

Plan to add to this over time, but here are some that are in my list. Drug, pill, porn, anal, sex, gay, penis, viagra, insurance, lesbian, enlarge, brevibloc, celis, [url, xxx.

Notice I didn’t include all variations of the word for drugs. That’s because this feature will match the "inside words" as well. So, "drug" will match "drugs", "freedrug" and "sexdrug".

I should mention that I have nothing against old men who need or want viagra, gay’s or car insurance salesmen. I just don’t think my blog is the proper forum for that kind of message. I could be wrong.

Adding "nofollow" with a Wordpress tweak

One of the reason your blog will be targeted (aside from the missing karmic consciencious of the spammer of course), is that any "ranking" you receive from Google, can be passed on to people that link from your site to theirs.

You can reduce the "attractiveness" of your blog in this respect, by having all your comments contain a "nofollow" tag. This effectively tells the search engine not to follow any links from your comment area, back to where they point to.

There is a Wordpress plugin which I recommend that does this for you. In fact, it does a LOT for you. A a complete list is shown over on the post I did when reviewing this cool plugin , which you can read here. You can also go get a copy for yourself at the Wordpress Expert blog here.

Addon Plugins like Spam Karma (2.3) or Wordpress Comment Spam Stopper

Both of these Wordpress plugins are specially designed to reduce the crap in your comments. (Can I say crap?) As you will see from my notes above, I have an affinity for the Unknown Genius.

He and I think a lot alike when it comes to the spammers of the world. And although he doesn’t say it straight out, I will. Spammers should be dipped in honey, hung by their toes and ants turned loose beneath them.

Spam Karma 2.3

Spam Karma 2 (SK2) is an anti-spam plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. It is meant to stop all forms of automated Blog spam effortlessly, while remaining as unobtrusive as possible to regular commenters. Spam Karma 2 is the proud successor to Spam Karma, with whom it shares most of the development ideas, but absolutely none of the code

Wordpress Comment Spam Stopper Plugin

Spamming is a common problem, I was getting (at least) 1000 spam messages a week, and I was sick of it. I’m sure also having so many spam messages stored in the database (even if identified by askimet) must have a speed impact on your blog.

Therefore I have created a simple solution to stopping spam at the source: asking a simple question that bots are too stupid to know in the comment form. I know only get about 10 spams per week, rather than 1000!

So Jim, I hope this helps with your blogging spam problem. I appreciate the question.

If any of you know of others, I invite your comments so my readers can benefit from your insight, wisdom and hard earned *blogger-guru* status.

Well, this one has a couple of different answers, depending on exactly what you want to do. Want to see a video I created using method three? Just visit my Video site, and click on the Tech Stuff category, or just follow this quick link to How Do Affiliates Mask Their Links?

Method One

If it’s important to you that the visitor know he/she is being redirected, you can provide a command to the “browser” to refresh the page within X seconds, and upon completion, redirect the browser to another page.

< meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="3;URL=http://www.NewWebsiteToVisit.com" />

Include the line shown above in your HTML code for the web page between the HEAD tags. Notice the “content=”3;URL=http://www.NewWebsiteToVisit.com” part of the code. That tells the browser to wait 3 seconds, and then refresh the contents of the browser with the new web address. If you are waiting more than a split second (content=0.1), then you want to make sure you page displays something that let’s them know they are about to be redirected. This is a good method to use when you move a website from one place to another. You can use the original page to notify them they need to update bookmarks or call Aunt Sue and let her know as well.

Method Two

Exactly like method one, with one exception. Use a content=0.1 value, which will cause the browser to redirect the visitor immediately. One note though. You should make sure your title on the page that contains the redirect code matches the title on the page they are being taken to.

Method Three

I like this one the best. It’s called an IFrame Redirect. Basically, with the code shown below, you display the contents of a different web page, on yours! Your domain name, address and URL visible to the web visitor all stay the same, but the contents are read from another site. Possible applications for this type of redirect would be if you are marketing an affiliate product and want to display the capture page of the product, but you want to give out a professional domain name or web address. For example, let’s say you are promoting a product as an affiliate, and they give you a link to promote. The link (I made this up, do don’t try to go there) http://www.MyCoolSoftware.com/pr/e/go/?id=7732fg

Now, who in their right mind is gonna remember that, tell their friends or type all that in? If however, you purchased a domain name like www.HereYaGo.com and you are recommending (promoting) a product called CoolMusicPlayer, then you could create a directory called CoolMusicPlayer on the HereYaGo.com domain and send people to a link that looks like this (again, this is made up, don’t try it) http://www.HereYaGo.com/CoolMusicPlayer

Easier to remember, but it still displays the webpage for the product.

< !DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
< html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
< head>
< meta http-equiv="Refresh" content=".1;URL=http://www.MyCoolSoftware.com/pr/e/go/?id=7732fg" />
< body>
< /body>
< /html>

Please note: I had to put spaces after the angle brackets because the post keep trying to send a visitor to that page! Just remove the spaces.

Okay, as you can see from the code above, that ugly affiliate link is being used to display the actual content of the page. It’s just a short piece of code and it doesn’t help you much when it comes to Google loving your page. You need a title, some keywords, and a description and that can get a little tedious.

Like any good programmer when presented with a repetitive task, I automated it. I created a piece of software to let me enter the title, URL, keywords and description, and have it build my iFrame redirect PHP file. Once build, I just upload the new index.php file to the directory of my choice, and viola! Done.

Want that?

Here ya go. http://www.videos.bycenay.com/iFrameGen.htm — and click the download button. It’s all yours. Enjoy.

I get asked a lot…. “How do you do that?”

Emails, forum posts, MySpace messages and phone calls from other business entrepreneurs all asking the same thing, decided the matter for me. I simply don’t have enough time in the day to answer each question (especially when it’s the same question, over and over) for each person. It’s a matter of logistics now.

So, I decided to put together this blog, and answer each question with as much detail as necessary so that anyone, regardless of computer experience or “Internet Savvy” could understand and implement the “answer”.

I also decided to add an “Ask Me Anything” section to sorta “take requests”. I figure answering each question once — means I can answer more. So, if you can’t find what you are looking for, even after using the Site Search feature, feel free to send me the question.

I enabled comments on each post as well, and encourage you to let me know if you agree or not, found the “answer” to be complete (or not), or what would have helped you understand it better. Help me make this site a valuable resource for anyone, regardless of experience.

I look forward to hearing from YOU!