Outsource Your Blogging to The Philippines

A lot things you do for your blog is nothing but a waste of your time. Some of these things, while necessary, certainly does not generate more income for you. The solution: outsource!

While you can outsource to just about anyone, the trend today is to outsource to the Philippines. Why the Philippines and not India or some other country?

According to Replace Yourself, an outsourcing guide by John Jonas, here’s why:

1. Philippinos speak and write good English, are are easy to instruct
2. It’s relatively cheaper to outsource to Philippines compared to most other English-speaking countries
3. They value foreign employers and are happy to work for a Caucasian boss

I think the selling point is that it’s easy to tell them what you want and with a little training, get them up to speed with your working style and work rate. Plus, communication is key and generally speaking it’s easier to understand Philippinos than a lot of other people.

John Jonas, the anti-guru, set-up Replace Myself to help marketers and bloggers outsource their work to the Philippines. Starting on Day 1 of your subscription, you’ll receive:

1. Private Vault Videos: Detailed videos giving you the inside track on exactly how John’s company trains overseas workers to be the best marketers possible

1. Effective Training Tools: Exclusive access to the actual training tools we use to create our elite assistants

1. How to Hire Guidebook: A step-by-step audio guidebook that shows you how to quickly hire your own outsourced employee

Even if you think you never ever want anyone to touch the content part of your blog, there’s still a whole lot of stuff you can outsource, such as:

• Researching topics and compiling a list of sites
• Installing WordPress, themes and plugins
• Keyword research and compilation
• Leaving related comments of other blogs
• Social bookmarking and blog submissions
• Search Engine Optimization or SEO

If you can show someone else exactly how it’s done, you can outsource it. John’s idea is to “replace” yourself as soon as possible, and working not more than 17 hours a week on your online business.

Recommended: Get 14-day trial to Replace Myself or listen to the outsourcing audio.

Rest in Peace, BlogRush

BlogRush service has officially shut down and if you’re still showing the BlogRush widget on your blog, it’s time to take them down.

A powerful statement by John Reese, the founder of BlogRush:

Last but not least I want to say that I hope the failure of this service doesn’t in any way discourage other entrepreneurs from coming up with crazy ideas at 4AM (like I did with this one) and from "going for it" to just try and see if something will work. Without trying there can be no success. And as we all know, ideas are worthless without action. The Web wouldn’t be what it is today without entrepreneurs trying all sorts of crazy ideas.

Even though I stopped displaying the BlogRush widget on my blogs some time ago, I did hope one day the service would be improved. But I guess this is the end of the road for BlogRush, perhaps we will see other good traffic systems in the near future.

Top Photography Blogs

When we talk about photography, then it’s more than just having a sound knowledge of the technicalities that involve aperture, shutter and focus. There is a lot more action underneath! The snapshot is actually like a canvas where you develop your imagination with the help of paints, brushes or say the technical arsenal that you’ve. “Every picture has its story”, a story that is developed by the photographer’s thought process or say his own perspective to carve out the virtual world in the real frame of reference.

The lines which aptly describe the intensity of the mere word ‘click’ could be:

The camera doesn’t rape or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and, at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate- all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment.”

[Sontag Susan ,1977]

Wow! In alternate words, a photography blog is actually created by those who derive fun and share a common interest about photography. They talk about various aspects related with this creative task. Be it sharing information behind the snapshot or surprise posts on innovation. It can be pitched as a web archive and RSS feed for better proficiency.

Enough of my waffle, let us now see few top photography blogs that we’ve on the Internet. But again in no order of ranks! One can compare them between the snapshots for the ranking but not the ideas behind it, as they’re individualistic.

Shuttersisters - Innovation

Katasakos - A picture a day

Gatley - Nature talk

10Pastmidnight - Contemporary images

Read more

WordPress Review Site Plugin And Themes

WP Review Site is a plugin and theme package developed by Dan Grossman that adds Amazon-style user ratings to the WordPress blogging software. Using the plugin and themes, you can convert your WordPress blog into a powerful product review blog and easily make money from affiliate programs, CPA offers and more.

What I love about WP Review Site:

1. Detailed Reviews – You can specify the criteria for your review, so your users can rate each criteria instead of just giving it a general rating. For example you can allow users to rate by Quality, Performance, Customer Support, Design, or any other criteria that is specific to different type of products.
2. Automatic Ranking Front Page – Yes, the front page will automatically display products according to ranking, not the date / time it was written. According to the website, they use an advanced “weighted average” formula to calculate the highest rated products.
3. Assign to Category – You can choose to assign the rating bars and rating displays only to a certain category. This is useful if you only want to use the review function on a category called “Review” or something similar
4. Plug-n-Play – It comes with two simple but adequate WordPress themes that already have all the required code built in. All you need to do is activate the plugin, set your rating requirements, and you’re ready to go.

Here’s how the comments / review section looks like once you’ve activated the plugin:

Here are examples of the two WordPress themes included in WP Review Site; one plain white theme and another black “web 2.0” type of theme. Both display rating differently but you can easily edit that if you know what you’re doing.

To make the best out of the WP Review Site system, this is what you need to do:

1. Do your keyword research first to find niches where people are looking for product reviews
2. See if there are good affiliate programs you can join in that niche, as this blog will rely mostly on affiliate marketing
3. Register a new domain name and hosting account specially for this site
4. Install the WP Review Site plugin and included themes
5. Get a list of the 20-40 most popular products in that niche, write a short post about each explaining the features of the product – remember that you should not write a review as that’s the job of your readers!
6. If you find writing too hard, you can use Instant Article Wizard to crank out some decent 200-word articles easily.
7. Then submit your blog to 3 Way Links for automatic link building – this will get the search engines to index your site.
8. Submit an article or two using Article Marketing Automation and other good article distribution services
9. Submit your new blog to a few related web directories – find good ones that seem active, ignore the spammy ones
10. Leave some related comments (not spam) on other people’s blogs – this will get you some traffic and attention as well
11. Consider getting some PPC traffic to your blog – bid on related keywords, product names (beware trademarks) and long tail keywords
12. Do all the above and you should have a highly profitable product review blog

Understand though that you will not be writing the regular “blogging” type of content on these type of review site. Yes you can add related articles for more search engine traffic, but generally speaking once the initial 20-40 posts are done there’s not much you need to add to the content. Just focus on getting traffic.

Get the system here: WP Review Site plugin and WordPress themes

FLV Plugin For WordPress Blogs

When producing and blogging with full-motion videos, the FLV format is probably the best to use. But unlike embedding a YouTube video, embedding a FLV video in your WordPress blogs is a little bit more difficult.

FLV Plugin for WordPress makes it a whole lot easier, plus it gives you 17 great-looking FLV video layers to display your video professionally. Once installed, you should see a link to “FLV Plugin” when writing a new post or page.

Just enter the exact URL of the FLV video and everything else is done automatically.  You can also upload the video directly but I recommend you use a proper FTP program, especially if your video is large.

Below are the 17 video players included, which you can simply select from the Settings page in your WordPress dashboard.

This FLV plugin can be used for all FLV-format videos, but in case you’re having trouble converting your videos into FLV you may want to consider getting FLV Producer.

FLV Producer: Converting and Playing FLV Videos

While there are tons of other software you can use, both free and paid, I strongly recommend you get FLV Producer by Tracy Childers to convert your videos from WMV / AVI to FLV.

Although you can easily use Camtasia Studio for screen capture videos, FLV Producer works much better for full-length or motion videos. In other words, if your video involves a human face, a lot of movement, and other non-screen objects, FLV Producer will convert videos faster, smoother with better compression and production levels.

All you do is select the video on your PC, define the output location and file name. Then edit your video conversion settings ( you can use the predefined ones), as well as the quality of the audio / video. Click on “Start Encoding” and FLV Producer will easily convert your videos to FLV.

Here’s the difference between videos played using the players provided with FLV Producer:

• The first frame makes the preview image – You don’t have to display a blank player like you do with a lot of other video players. Neither do you have to create a separate “preview image”. The video just takes the first frame and enhances it to make the preview, therefore when you play the video it transitions smoothly to the rest of the video.
• You can choose to preload the movie – great for shorter movies but sucks up bandwidth pretty quickly if the video is long – after all not everyone will click the play button so why load the whole movie unless you have a specific objective?
• URL redirect after movie – Yes, you can bring users to a specified website once the movie ends. A great way to make money from affiliate marketing – just do a video of the product you’re promoting and once the movie is over bring the user to the product page with your affiliate link!

FLV Producer costs $97, so I understand if you need to think twice before getting it. However let me assure you, I’ve searched everywhere for VLF converters and players that are specialized for Internet marketers and affiliate marketers, and most can’t compare to FLV Producer. An investment here is more than worthwhile, especially if you plan to do more video blogging in the future.

You should also take a look at FLV Plugin, which makes it even easier for you to display FLV videos on your WordPress blog. It was developed to be used with FLV Producer but you can use it to display any FLV video on your blog.

If it’s not for you - and you don’t mind the technical difficulties and lack of features – there are of course other choices. We’ll cover more in the “Blogging With Video” series.

Tag and Ping Still Works

Tag and ping is one of the earliest blogging tactics to be exploited to the point of worthlessness. The highpoint of this is when Sean Wu released his Tag and Ping course in June 2006 and claimed that he’s making truckloads of cash with this tiny but powerful tactic. The world was sold.

According to the experts, all you need to do is to write new blog post, and your blogging software (WordPress mostly) will notify "ping sites" like PingOMatic to come and index your blog post. Since ping sites are actively visited by search engine spiders from Google / Yahoo / MSN, the theory is that your content will be found, indexed and ranked highly in search engines in as little as 48 hours.

How much of this is true and how much of it is nothing but marketing BS?

For a lot of marketers, the hype was enough to set them on fire. Soon, people stared dreaming of becoming Internet millionaires with little or no effort. For most of us however, tang and ping was presumed to be "dead" sometime around late 2006 - way before we started our first blogs. So does it even work today?

Since I have a lot of blogs scattered all over the place, I had the opportunity to test just tag and ping alone on a blog and see what happens. Here’s the verdict based on my traffic after 3 months:

• Tag and ping works - Yes it does, but to expect it to work like how it did almost 3 years ago is pushing it too far. There hundreds of thousands more blogs today than there was in 2006. The concept works, but the competition has increased.
• Indexed and ranked - Yes you can get indexed and ranked pretty well in Google with no other promotion for your blog, but it only works mostly for 3-word search phrases. My test blog showed over 68 pages indexed in Google with over 500 new visitors the first month from Google alone.
• Get rich quick - Unfortunately this is all hype. Tag and ping traffic and search engine ranking does not seem to last very long, so you need to put in much more effort to get links to your site if you want long-term search engine traffic.
• Any niche market? - No it will not work just as well in competitive niche markets where everyone and their grandma has a blog. In less tech-savvy markets where there are less bloggers to compete with, it works like a charm.

 

For one of my niche blogs, I got over 500 unique visitors with just tag and ping. That means all I did was write new posts (about 20 the entire month) and WordPress notified all my ping sites. Google indexed my site and started ranking it rather quickly for some long-tail keywords.

(Yeah I know Awstats isn’t entirely reliable, but Google Analytics shows stats above 500 too, so the traffic is real.)

Even if you never consciously did it, you’re already tagging and pinging your blog content. For example, in any WordPress installation (manual or via Cpanel), PingOMatic is already listed as your default ping site. Plus,tag sites like Technorati or Real8r can pick up your tags and link to your blog content without you every having to submit anything to them. All you need is WordPress and a good theme that displays your tags properly.

So you can say "tang and ping" doesn’t work but the truth is you are already benefiting from it. Just check your web stats and you’ll see what I mean.

Free Tell A Friend Script For Your Blog

If you’re looking for a free “Tell a Friend” script for your website or blog, read this post to discover how to use FreeTellAFriend.com to create the buzz / viral effect for your blog. First let me clarify – YES it’s completely free, and YES you can use it for blogs AND static websites.

I came across the FreeTellAFriend.com service when I was looking for a WordPress plugin for social bookmarking, but found something much more useful. Using this service, you can do all the following at the same time:

1. Put a basic “Tell-a-friend” form on your website where names and email addresses are entered manually
2. Allow users to import addresses from their email accounts (Gmail / Yahoo etc), which has a more “viral” effect
3. Allow users to bookmarks your blog / site with social bookmarking services like Delicious (and about 20 others)
4. Allow users to bookmark directly to their PC using their browser

You can just go to the site and get the script, copy and paste it to your blog. Then when someone clicks on the image or text link, they see a window like this:

 

But you may want to consider creating your own account, which is also free. This allows you to change the setting of the form, and the default email subject, and the actual default message sent using the Tell-a-friend system.

More importantly though, you can then check your stats and see how many users have emailed their friends about your site, saved your pages to social bookmarking services, or bookmarked it on their PC. This is powerful as without this you never know if the Tell-a-friend is working at all on your website.

Ideally, you would want to create your own images that match your blog or website. This makes it look pretty integrated – you could also do away with images and just use a text link.

To test it out, click on the image at the bottom of this post to start the form and click around to see how it works. Also, while you’re at it maybe you could do us a favor and save this site to your social bookmarks, Facebook, Stumble it, or recommend it to your friends who have a website

Website: FreeTellAFriend.com or get the WordPress Plugin

PPC Classroom Review – Affiliate Marketing With Pay Per Click

A few days back I had the chance to really go through my copy of PPC Classroom, and the first thing that caught my eye is the wide range of PPC and keyword research tools available to members. Besides that the course looks great, and it was developed from the collective knowledge of Anik Singal and Amit Mehta, who generated over 2.4 million in affiliate commissions last year from PPC marketing.

One thing I noticed about PPC Classroom is that it’s not an “ebook” – all the content is presented via web pages protected by the members area. This way they integrate the text / audio / video parts very well. Once there, you can select the different modules via a drop down menu or go through them one by one.

• Forward: Hitting the Tipping Point to Super Affiliate Success
• Module 1 - Market Research
• Module 2 - Keyword Research and Building a Killer Profit Pulling Keyword List
• Module 3 - Direct Linking, Landing Pages, and Your Own Affiliate Site
• Module 4 - How to Set Up Your AdWords Campaign Properly
• Module 5 - How to Design a High-Converting Landing Page
• Module 6 - Understanding the Google Quality Score
• Module 7 - Launching Your Campaign… Do You Have a Dud, or a Winner?
• Module 8 - The Importance of Split Testing and How to Do it Correctly
• Module 9 - Bid Optimization Strategies

You can also take the PPC Classroom quiz after c going through the modules, and view your scores. If you pass a certain score you’ll receive certification from PPC Classroom – this is the incentive they give their members to not abandon the modules.

I’ve dabbled with Google AdWords since 2003 when there were very few advertisers, clicks were cheap and the program itself was very straightforward. But ever since, AdWords has become ever so more complicated with the introduction on Landing Page Quality Score and other metrics that makes PPC though, and risky, for the absolute beginner.

However the allure of being able to set-up an ad, pay for some clicks, and make money before you go back home from work is what makes PPC so darn attractive. PPC is definitely something you wouldn’t want to learn from “trial and error” as every mistake you make costs you money. If you have no idea what to do, when to do it and how to do it, you’re going to lose more than just pocket money.

If you’re thinking of getting PPC traffic to your blog, as I mentioned in Super Affiliate Blogger, I highly recommend you get at least the basic PPC Classroom course. They also have additional videos and “Behind the Scenes Bootcamp” which you may want to get if you’re truly serious about PPC.

Overall, the way PPC Classroom is done gives me inspiration to revamp the way I sell and design my own information products. Great stuff.

WordPress Membership Site Plugin and Guide

If you’ve ever wanted to take advantage of the CMS potential of WordPress, I’ve just finished uploading a few videos and a modified plugin that enables you to create a membership site with WordPress, creating up to two membership levels and accepting payments with Paypal.

Before you ask me, let me tell you.

This will only create simple membership sites, not advanced ones. I know a lot of users want their membership site do all kinds of things, host a thousand products and have all the advanced tools for their affiliates. If that’s what you’re looking for I strongly recommend you try the WordPress and Amember integration service provided by David Moskowitz of Membership Academy.

Here are some of the benefits of using WordPress to build a membership site:

• It’s completely free – WordPress is free and so are the plugins you’ll need to transform it into a membership site. Plus, you can start as many membership sites as you want with no licensing limitations. There may be other systems and plugins out there you need to pay for, but it all depends on what you want.
• Easy content publishing – You know WordPress is a great publishing tool, and now all you have to do is determine which content is for paid members only, and which content is for everyone else.
• Smaller learning curve – I understand perfectly that when you’re already familiar with a particular web platform, you want to use it to create different type of sites instead of having to learn something totally new. That’s why I say “smaller” – because you need to learn a few new tricks but it’s still better than trying to master a whole new software.

That being said, you don’t HAVE TO use WordPress to create your membership site. Keep in mind that the ultimate objective of any membership site is to deliver content to paid customers, either monthly / regular content or a one-time payment to access all content. Either way, sometimes a simple HTML website with a password protected folder is all you need. If you need something more advanced, a static site with Amember should do it.

So think: “What am I trying to achieve with my membership site?”

There’s no harm giving it a try though, because at the moment you can download everything at no cost. I’m doing some further testing and basically waiting for WordPress 2.7 to be released to see if I want to charge anything for it. For now, it’s completely free.

Get it here: WordPress Membership Site Guide