Jamdo Marketing Blog

photo credit: racreationsJust thought I would quickly share a great little time saving plugin for Wordpress.

Photo Dropper save a LOT of time if you want to search and use images from Flickr.

It Even automatically puts in all the attribution and links that are required to use the photos legally (you are still restricted to using Creative Commons licenced photos for commercial blogs that stipulate it is fine to use them for commercial purposes.)

Anyway, it’s a great plugin and I will be using it a lot on some of my other sites.

Check it out.

Warning - as you can see above it will also put a link to the site that developed the plugin, though that doesn’t really bother me.

Share This

Losing an entire is not (touch wood) something I have yet had to endure.

The thought of it does make me break out in a cold sweat though - the postential of losing years of posts isn’t something I relish.

The problem for bloggers traditionally has been that “back up your database” to a non tech person sounds something remotely similar to Swahili. I mean how the hell do you do that? Blogging is supposed to be simple!

Luckily there are a couple of really simple solutions available to people who aren’t so tech savvy.

The first is the Wordpress Database Backup Plugin - this installs as like any normal plugin on your blog and is really intuitive to use. In fact, Tubetorial has a 5 minute video on installing and using this plugin that is well worth the time to watch. If you have a recent version of Wordpress installed, then it should already be in the plugins option - you just need to activate it. If not, then you can still download it from here.

The other option, which is great if you are totally technically illiterate is a site called Blog Backup Online which is really easy to sign up to and get your blog backed up. The only glitch I found is that one of my blogs only offered partial feeds and Blog Backup Online backs up using the XML feed, so only those excerpts were being backed up (rather than the full content), so make sure you change your settings from your Options>>Reading menu in your Wordpress Login to offer full feeds. Now, I still think the above plugin is  better option, but as I said, if you are a total technical incompetent then this is a great service.

So go backup everything and stay safe!

Share This

Just thought I would share a quick trick that I sometimes use when I need urgent help with some coding issue or geek problem.

Pretend to be a girl.

I am sure you have noticed how pathetic most geeks are. I mean, they just have no damn self respect.

This is nowhere more prevalent than in internet forums - especially ones to do with coding.

Now, when “Bob Jones” shows up in those forums asking for help with coding in PHP or whatever, he will most often be rudely met with a response of “Use the damn search function, noob” or some other geek witicism. (Of course, I would also suggest you use the search function of forums or Google too, but sometimes you just don’t even know what the wording or vocabulary of what you need so that’s also quite difficult.)

You will also notice that the exact same question when asked by “Mandy” and signed off with:

Kisses,
Mandy
XX

… seems miraculously to get some very helpful responses.

So what should Bob Jones do?

Easy!

Be Mandy.

It won’t work every time and you still won’t get away with askinng TOTALLY dumb questions, but you will get a lot more slack.

Technorati Tags: geeks, forums

Share This

Is there something a little inane about the “Buy Me a Beer” donation plugin that seems to be doing the rounds of most blogger’s plugin lists of late?

I mean, it’s a nice little idea for a plugin and all, but there’s something about pretending to buy someone a cyber-coffee that just bugs me.

Who in their right mind would go and buy a beer or a coffee with their paypal funds anyway?

So I though I would put a little honesty and humour back into that plugin by coming up with some more realistic scenarios.

1) If You Think This Post Makes Me Look Insane, Buy Me Prozac

2) If You Think I Make Flickr Cry, Donate to My Plastic Surgery Fund

3) Screw Beer - Buy Me Johnny Walker Blue Label

4) Ninjas Killed My Blog - Help Me Buy Kung Fu Lessons

5) Need More Advertising Space - Help Me Buy an Extra Collumn for My Blog

6) If You Think I Make Gilligan Look Like The Professor, Buy Me an Online Degree

7) PornoTube Made Me Blind - Buy Me an Optometrist Appointment

8 ) Tom Laughs at Me - Buy Me Friends

9) Adsense Shut My Account - Need Money to Assasinate Larry and Sergei

10) Need Directory Listing - Donate to My DMOZ Bribery Fund

That should do for starters!

Technorati Tags: blogs, plugins, wordpress

Share This

There are a lot of little jobs with blogging that seem to eat up your time. The thing is a lot of them are repetitive and don’t take a lot of brain power or effort… just time.

Unfortunately time is one of your greatest assets - you should be using it to create even more killer content for your blog. Here are a few things to consider farming out so you can free up that finite resource.

Directory Submissions - probably of more and more decreasing importance, but a link is still a link. You don’t want to get too many too quickly, but a steady build up of directory links can help establish a good, long-term linking profile for your blog or site. Luckily, there are plenty of cheap guys around who will do this job very well. Remember to use a few different titles (ie. anchor text) and spread the link building out over time (the guy I use does 3000 submissions over the course of a year for $200 which is hard to beat - contact me if you want his details).

MyBlogLog Friend and Community Adding - MyBlogLog is a great little way to build your blog’s profile and readership. Just by adding interesting new people to your contact list and joining new communities you will get people interested in the topic of your blog. Of course, taking the time to find interesting new people who are possibly interested in your niche and new communities in your niche to join can be a little time-consuming (even though there is a 15 per day limit on each). It can add up if you have a few different blogs with different accounts though. It’s a fairly easy job though, so why not outsource it?

Forum Posting - You don’t want to outsource the posting as such (unless you can find someone you trust with your brand absolutely), but there are plenty of regular posters in big forums who are more than happy to rent links in their signatures for as little as $5 per month. If the forum is right and the potential traffic is well targetted, then this can be a good investment.

Blog Comments - Be careful with this one, but there are plenty of cheap writers available who will visit other blogs to comment constructively and enter your website address as that of the commenter. You want to REALLY trust whoever you get to do this one, because your brand is in their hands, but it can still be had fairly cheaply. This will help you build traffic to your own blog.

Product Reviews - I have one or two blogs that have a category for product reviews in their niche. Each of the product reviews is in exactly the same format as the others and they are easy, but time consuming to write. Now, I wouldn’t trust a hired writer to write the main content of most of my blogs, but I would happily trust them to write these product reviews for me as the template is very straight forward and quite easy. My guy charges $6 per review which is fine with me and I am very happy with them (contact me if you want their details).

The main thing about outsourcing is that it is difficult to find someone who is up to the standards you expect. To be honest I have had a few bad experiences with outsourcing. But I have also found a couple of gems in a sea of coal and they make my life a lot easier.

Technorati Tags: outsourcing, blogging

Share This

An interesting problem for bloggers is that product blogs are largely monetised in a different fashion to content blogs.

A recent guest post by Wendy Pierall over at ProBlogger brought my attention to the fact that I had had a similar conundrum recently and tackled it in a quite different manner.

Her problem?

regular blog visitors came to my main site for content (and not to shop), it made sense to create a separate blog just for the products and services that they would be interested in.

Wendy made the realisation with the help of Jeremy Shoemaker, that she might like to seperate the content element of her blog from the product element. A “content post” is a post where you can wax lyrical about your niche and write
linkbait articles etc. A “product post” is where you write about a specific product with the intent of making an affiliate sale. Their solution to marry the two was to create an entirely new product blog at Shoestring Smarts quite seperate from the original content blog at eMoms At Home.

That solution is fine and I think she will be successful.

However, if you have a content blog and you don’t want to start another site, then I would like to propose another potential solution - one I used myself recently.

A few things first though - this is basically how I see some of the main differences between a content blog and a product blog:

Content Blogs

• primary goal is any type of monetisation
• Adsense can take prominence
• Kontera is a good monetisation option
• cpm is a good way to monetise
• mass traffic is the goal - the more visitors the better
• giving free links to other relevant sites and resources is good
• easy to write linkbait which is good for SEO

Product Blogs

• primary goal is to make an affiliate sale
• Adsense is not ideal
• cpm is a distraction
• Kontera is a distraction
• targetted traffic is the goal (ie. traffic looking for something specific)
• the fewer (non-affiliate) links on a post, the better
• difficult to use linkbait for SEO

Firstly, on my blog, I planned to have both content posts and product posts on the single blog installation - a quite different solution to that used by Wendy, who went for a whole new site.

So, I wanted to figure out a way whereby I could keep the single blog, but have adsense, CPM, MyBlogLog widgets, Flickr widgets etc on the content posts where having page link leakage was not such a problem, and for the product posts have no leakage such as adsense etc.

The monetisation strategy of the two types of posts is fundamentally different so I needed two distinct post templates all from within the one blog installation.

Basically what I came up with was this.

Firstly I made seperate categories for the products that I was going to write about. Then I installed the Wordpress Category Visibility Plugin. This allowed me to NOT display any product posts on the main page - they would be shown only on their category pages. That way I was able to not upset the regular readers with constant product posts (regular content blog readers want tips, how to articles, stories, pics etc - not product descriptions).

That sorted the first issue which was to take care of the regular readers and maintain the visage of a content blog.

Next, I installed the Post Templates by Category Plugin. This allowed me to alter the post template according to specific categories, thus allowing me to remove all of the link leakage from the product posts that appears on the home page and content posts. While the content posts are monetised and made richer with adsense, CPM, Kontera, MyBlogLog, Flickr etc, the product posts have none of that and can concentrate on directing the visitor through the affiliate links of the product, much like a good sales letter.

The main benefits of this solution as I see it are like this:

• product posts can have the advantage of the link profile of the content blog
• a content blog can continue to linkbait better than a product blog alone, and therefore increase overall site SEO
• I can be more confident in using PPC to direct paid traffic to the product posts without worrying about link leakage so much
• regular readers don’t have to be subjected to comparatively boring product pages
• product pages can do very well in search engines

Now, this was a little mucking around and it did take me a while to figure out how I wanted to do it, but in the end I managed to monetise the two different sections of the site with two different strategies.

If you have a content blog like eMoms At Home and you want a product blog like Shoestring Smarts, then I suggest that the way I laid out may even be a superior strategy to building a whole new site as it allows the product section of your site to have all of the SEO benefits of your content blog without upsetting your regular readers.

Share This