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Can you make money blogging? Yep

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How To Make Money Blogging

I’ve been using the internet since the time of Bulletin Boards and 286 Windows computers. Yeah – the early 90’s for those of you who have no idea what a Bulletin Board is. LOL. Basically that was the precursor to forums and even forums are starting to die down these days.

So I’ve established that I’ve been using the internet and computers for quite some time. I’ve also been a webmaster for quite a while too. My first website was started in 1995 and it’s still in existence. It’s even my most popular site – even today!

Now, when I started on the internet and started making my first website I really had no idea that one day I might make an income on the internet nor that I might even be able to make a living via the income that I earned on the internet, but over the last few years that has been the case. Through necessity I’ve been stuck at home and blogging became a way to earn money.

I don’t believe that there’s any easy or fast way to start making money on the internet or by blogging. It takes time and it takes quite a bit of hard work if you want to be successful.

Hey, I’m being honest. I could tell you to just start a blog and post five times a day and in a week or two you’ll start earning money but that’s not how it works. Not at all. No, I think you have to have a passion for what you are doing, what you are writing about and you do need to write regularly, perhaps not several times a day, but several times a week to eventually become successful.

These days most of the advertising companies that might eventually become interested in your blog will not let you sign up with their companies until your blog has been around for a while – say 6 months and has a fair amount of content on it.

For example, one of the best Ad programs that I’ve been involved with is Google Adsense – it pays it’s publishers well, but your blog has to be 6 months old before they will accept it into the program and it has to qualify. Do not even apply if your blog doesn’t qualify or you might lose your chance to get an account later on when your site really does qualify.

There are many ways to make money blogging. Another great program is Chitika. I’ve been using this program for quite a while on a number of my sites and it can be used in conjunction with Google Adsense.

Other programs that you might try on your blog – not all at once mind you – are Kontera, Text Link Ads, Adbrite, Infolinks, BidVertiser or many others.

Eventually as your blog becomes more popular you’ll be able to sell some privately sponsored advertising spaces as well. In fact you might not have to go out seeking advertisers at all, they might come seeking you – daily! When that begins to happen you’ll know you’ve reached a modicum of success although all of the offers coming in might not be real or might not be the best deal. Do your research and get paid before adding a banner to your site! Lesson learned here, I know what I’m talking about, believe me.

I have a number of blogs now and as I said at the beginning of this article I earn a decent income from what I do on the internet. I could always earn more but it’s not bad. My biggest tip is dedicated yourself to what you are doing and don’t spread yourself thin. Don’t start 50 blogs – start one and make it a good one, make it a really good one. That’s all it takes.

So … Have you started earning money from blogging?




What Is RSS?

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Do You Understand What RSS Is?

RSS can have more than one meaning behind it. Usually, RSS stands for “really simple syndication” but it can also mean “rich site summary” or “RDF site summary”.

The meaning behind, ’RDF’ is resource description framework. That should help explaining the meaning associated with RSS, now let’s look at what it can do.

Exactly what is RSS in the realm of really simple syndication? It is a tool that allows sites to give a quick summary of important links and descriptions in XML format. This essentially allows them to syndicate their content by allowing other blog owners and webmasters to use this summary as part of a list of summaries on a specific topic.

Webmasters and blogmasters will gather a number of these summaries using a feed aggregator or feed reader. Rather than asking, “what is RSS”, this tool will ask “where is RSS” and then find it.

The aggregator tool will locate RSS feeds and collect them from various sites such as, Yahoo and MSN, and will select smaller sites like a personal blog or a news sites.

The blogmasters and webmasters then take the script generated from the aggregator and insert it into their blogs. The RSS feed is then created in this way and will automatically start pulling news items and blog posts each time they come up. Whenever the blog or site page is refreshed, it will display the latest items.

Taking advantage of this tool is good for two reasons. By using your own RSS feed, you will be able to have your content distributed across the internet without having to pay each time you submit a press release, or contact other blog owners and webmasters.

If you have your own personal blog page, then by using an RSS feed you can add fresh content to it much easier and faster. This will allow you to constantly put new content links and summaries on your blog without spending the time to hunt around for related information. You just need to choose a feed aggregator to select the potential feeds you can use and these can be found on a list of news sites and authority blogs. Plus, you can create your own custom feeds by adding any of your own selections that you find.

Do you now understand the basics behind RSS? Simply put, using RSS is a very easy way to generate traffic to your blog and to display additional summaries you find on other blogs.

DTI Data offers hard drive recovery services and software

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I’ve you’ve never been unlucky enough to have gone through a hard drive crash and major loss of data I envy you. I might be luckier than some as I’ve only experienced complete hard drive failure once and that was due to a computer virus.

All I can say is that if you’ve never experienced this you’re lucky and whether you have or haven’t had a hard drive failure you should take some basic steps to prevent hard drive failure or to make recovering your data a fairly easy task.

Some obvious ways of protecting your computer and your data are:

1. Keep your software up to date by upgrading using the latest stable release.

2. Use an anti-virus program to protect your computer.

3. Never open a file that arrives in your email if it’s from someone that you don’t know, if you weren’t expecting the attachment or if it seems suspicious in any way.

4. Backup your data to another hard drive, server, external drive, CD or DVD regularly.

There are many reasons why your hard drive might fail. Power failure is another reason, as is visiting a website that infects your computer with malicious code. However, in my opinion, failing to do some or all of the above mentioned suggestions are probably the number one reasons that lead to hard drive failure.

I don’t know how many times I’ve talked to friends, relatives, coworkers or web friends and they’ve told me that their hard drive crashed or some of the programs that they rely on most won’t work anymore. When I ask them if they have a recent backup or if they use an anti virus program more often than not they say no.

Hard drive failure is bad enough for the home computer user, but if the hard drive failure occurs on a business computer or servers hard drive it could mean downtime, loss of income and loss of valuable company data.

For those who’s hard drives have failed and they are unfortunate enough not to have a backup of their data, or perhaps had a backup failure as well as a crashed hard drive there are companies such as DTI Data that specialize in hard drive recovery. Not only is DTI DATA the only manufacturer authorized data recovery company to provide flat rate pricing for hard drive recovery, but they also have a fantastic data guarantee:

If DTI DATA fails to recover your data you don’t pay!

That claim does come with an exception. If your hard drive was opened elsewhere the guarantee doesn’t apply.

DTI Data can perform hard drive repair on many types of hard drives and servers. For example they offer services for SCSI Hard Drive repair and recovery, Exchange Server Recovery, RAID Data Recovery, laptop hard drive recovery, Western Digital hard drive recovery and even adaptive logic hard drive recovery for those who sent their hard drive to another company for repair before trying DTI Data.

Data recovery and hard drive repair takes place in a class 100 clean room.

DTI Data also offers a number of Data Recovery Resources such as do it yourself recovery software that has been developed in house.

You’ll find software that can be purchased on their website that will help you recover all of the data on your hard drive, assist in recovering lost digital pictures, CD/CDRW DVD/DVDRW drive data recovery, fast file undelete, e-Recovery for Outlook Express and Outlook as well as other forms of data recovery software.

If you’ve been unfortunate enough to have a hard drive failure visit the site and fill out their online quote form or call their toll free number to talk with one of their hard drive recovery specialists.

Have you monetized your blog?

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Over the last year I’ve been experimenting with various ways to monetize my websites and blogs. Some affiliate programs have worked well and others have only netted me no more than a few cents! I’m sure you’ve had the same experiences and what works for one website owner might not work for another because it all depends upon our blog category and audience.

I’ve written about some of the programs I’ve tried on this site, WebStyle and of course my main blog Tricia’s Musings either as I’ve added them to one or many sites or after I’d been using them for a while.

I’ve been using Amazon on my main website for a number of years. I can’t remember exactly when Amazon started up it’s affiliate program but I’ve been using since the late 90’s I believe! In those early years I made quite a bit of money with Amazon and it was in fact the only way I monetized my website. These days I still make money with Amazon, but no where near as much as I used to due to changes in the program and I suppose a huge increase in the overall amount of affiliates!

I added the WP-Amazon WordPress plugin to my blogs a couple of months ago, but I’ve yet to really get going with using it. I think I’ve only created two affiliate links within my posts so far! Shame on me. Part of making money with affiliate programs is using them when appropriate. Of course I can still go over my old posts and add some Amazon links to them.

Text Link Ads has also been a very successful program for me. I joined a couple of years ago when I only had one HTML based website. I could never figure out how to get Text link ads to work on that site though! (if anyone can help me with this I’d really appreciate it! I know there’s a way to do it.) So I didn’t earn anything on my account until I got around to starting some blogs in 2006.

Google Adsense has worked out fairly well for me too. I don’t earn anywhere near as much as I think I could be making with the program, but I earn more than enough to get paid every month by Google. Again, I only had Google Adsense on my two websites for the longest time. Then sometime last year I put it on a couple of blogs but not my busiest ones. I’ve now rectified that mistake and I use Google Adsense and the utilize the Adsense Deluxe plugin on all of my blogs.

I only added Google Adsense to my busiest blogs about a month ago and I’ve already almost doubled my income. Hopefully once the Google Media bot fully indexes those sites I’ll really start to do well with Google Adsense. I’m still of course going over old posts and using the Adsense Deluxe plugin to add ad blocks to older posts. I don’t like to use them in my newest posts. Perhaps I’d earn more if I did, but I prefer not to irritate my regular readers with too many ads. Those coming in from search engines to the older posts will get the full extent of the advertising on my sites.

This actually brings up a good point.

When you monetize your sites do you consider how it might appear to your visitors? We’ve all seen sites with far too much advertising and for me it’s a total turn off. Links everywhere, advertising to the full extent, all kinds of different affiliate program banners and so on … I try not to do that. As I’ve just said I’ve been going back to older posts and adding in a bit more advertising, but I still try to keep it as tasteful as possible.

Everyone’s got to find their own balance between developing content, advertising and continuing to build traffic. Too much advertising can make people close your site and never return.

It’s fine to experiment with different affiliate programs. Even trying different badges and products to advertise on your site with each company. Just don’t try everything at once. If you overwhelm your visitors they won’t click on your ads. They’ll just click over to another persons website.

How do you monetize your sites? Do you think you’ve accomplished that fine balance that allows you to successfully monetize your site while keeping your visitors happy?

What programs do you use to monetize your site? I’ll discuss other programs that I’ve been using successfully in future posts.

How to remove nofollow tags in a Typepad blog

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Karen from a strange life was kind enough to write out instructions on how to remove the nofollow tags from a Typepad pro template.

Note that I do not, nor never have had a Typepad blog. These are the steps that Karen took when changing her blog over to a do follow blog and they worked for her.

Karen in her own words:

Converting a TypePad Blog Pro Level to a Do Follow Blog for a Total Neophyte Like Me

  1. Set up your blog with all the modules you plan to use, and no widgets, because the widgets won’t make the transition. Now you’re ready.
  2. Go to the ‘Weblogs’ Tab on the TypePad Page.
  3. Choose the ‘Design’ tab in the ‘Weblogs’ page.
  4. Go to ‘Saved Designs’ in the ‘Design’ page.
    1. WARNING: ONCE YOU CONVERT TO ADVANCED TEMPLATE (IF YOU ARE ME) THERE IS NO GOING BACK. NOTHING WILL EVER WORK RIGHT IN YOUR BASIC TEMPLATE AGAIN.
  5. Check the box next to your Current Design and click on the button ‘Convert to Advanced’. The program will clone your design and make one of them ‘Advanced’.
  6. Go to ‘Current Design’ and you will see a list of Advanced Templates in 3 boxes: Index Templates, Archive Templates, and Template Modules.
  7. Open a new window and in TypePad Help search for Advanced Templates: Individual Archives Template.
  8. Open the Advanced Templates: Individual Archives Template and scroll down to Individual Archives Modules.
    1. There are 3 boxes of code under this title:
    2. Individual Entry (Module Name: entry-individual),
    3. Comment Listing (Module Name: comment-list), and
    4. Comment Form (Module Name: comment-form).
  9. Now in Current Design click on ‘Create new template module’. Click the top box of the form that comes up to ‘Individual Archives’ then type in the exact module name from the Advanced Templates help page. Now, copy all the code in the help module’s box and paste it into the new module’s box. Click ‘Save’. Do this same sequence of actions for all three of the modules shown in the help boxes. So now, under Template Modules you should have:
    1. comment-form
    2. comment-list
    3. entry-individual
  10. Now the guy who did the REAL fix comes to the rescue!
  11. Mike from the ConverStations blog wrote a post about removing nofollow from Typepad comment sections.
    1. go to this website and copy the code he has in the ‘new comment-list module’ code box. Take it to your box in Template Modules labeled comment-list and, after removing the old code, paste it in.
    2. now go to the entry-individual Template Module and find the phrase he tells you to change, and change it.

If you are persistent and pigheaded as I am, you will eventually make this into a do-follow blog!

There you have it. Between Karen’s written instructions and Mikes comment code you should be able to get your typepad blog to become a do follow blog and reward your visitors with back links whenever they comment on a post.

I had to change web hosts!

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Well you probably noticed that my sites went down for a few days if you’ve become a regular visitor of The Web Files or any of my other sites.


I ended up changing web hosts after my former web host attempted to change my shared hosting account over to a TWO year Virtual Private Hosting account and charged me $642 in the process. A move and charge that I hadn’t authorized.

I’d been apparently having CPU resource issues on my former host – Lunarpages, and I worked for close to a month to resolve any CPU resource overuse issues by going over everything in my directories with a fine toothed comb, updating all of the programs that I use to run my various sites and any addons or plugins that I used with those sites and still they kept telling me that I had CPU resource over use issues.

They suspended my account on Saturday stating that my account had almost caused a server to crash so I reluctantly agreed to change my account over to VPS for one month. One single month. It took me almost 24 hours to communicate that desire to support since they are very slow to answer support email and do not have telephone support over the weekend.

Once they apparently understood that I was willing to switch over to VPS for one month they told me that it would cost $75 per hour to transfer my account, but if I wanted I could do it myself once the VPS account was set up. At that point I said No way to the $75 charge and in fact said no to the whole deal until they sent me more info about VPS, Plesk and how I might move my account on my own.

Instead of sending me information they went ahead and set up the VPS account and instead of creating a monthly account they charged me for two years of VPS service.

Right … for CPU resource issues that may or may not exist.

I say may or may not exist because after the stunt they pulled charging me for a two year VPS account I’m not all that certain that I ever had CPU resource issues.

So I spent early Monday morning creating a new hosting account at HostGator and worked on moving my domains and sites.

So far things are going well with HostGator and they’ve yet to mention a thing about CPU resource over use. Still – I think I’m going to continue going over my sites and try to lighten their load on the servers. Some of my sites are getting more and more popular so if my traffic is increasing so will my resource usage too.

Ever wondered how a computer virus spreads?

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If you’ve always wonder just how a computer virus works and or spreads you should take a look at this video.

Not surprisingly, computer virus work in a similar manner to that of human virus in that it just takes one virus to infect something and it spreads from there.

Check out this video from “How things Work”:

As the video says, if you don’t have anti-virus protection on your computer you are just asking for a big problem. I use Norton Anti-virus because it comes free with my ISP, but there are some very good free antivirus programs out there such as AVG.

CPU resource overuse problems continue! Any ideas?

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Well I’m still trying to figure out my web hosting CPU resource over usage problems. I’ve got a lot of great suggestions from people on forums and via comments on my sites.

One person asked if I’m using WP-Cache on my wordpress blogs and the answer is yes. I’ve been using it since last Friday and I’ve still been getting messages from my web host saying that my cpu resource usage is too high.

This is depressing!

If I ever figure out what caused the problem I’ll be sure to write about it on my sites so that others might be able to get themselves out of this mess a little quicker than I’ve managed.

Well, I’m not out of the mess yet.

I’ve finished updating everything I can think of including a joomla installation that runs one of my other sites. I think the Joomla CMS might be one of the causes of the problem. I guess I’ll find out later today when I hear from my web host. I hope that the resources are back to normal.

I wrote out more details of how I’m using the servers on my other tech blog WebStyle if you’d care to read that post. Perhaps those of you that have been through this before or know a little something about this kind of problem could read that post and offer a few suggestions? I’d really appreciate it if you would.

Also, just in case I do end up having to move to a Virtual Private Server … how difficult is that to work with? I’m pretty good about figuring out stuff but I’d like to know if I’m going to end up with a VPS headache before I make my decision to move off shared hosting.

Overuse of CPU on my web host – Help!

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I got a note yesterday evening from my webhost stating that my sites were using too much of their resources. Most of our sites are fairly well visited but I don’t believe they are so well visited that they would begin causing CPU problems on my web host just yet.


So, I’ve been going over all our sites for the last few hours turning off any plugins that aren’t vital and ones that I think might use CPU. For example I had viewcounter and postrater activated on two of our sites and since they store info in the database I thought that they might be using the hosts CPU so it was worth turning them off.

I’ve also downloaded a copy of WP-Cache that I’m going to be installing in a few minutes. This caches a page when it’s first viewed and then presents the cached copy the next time it’s viewed and doesn’t create a new cache copy of the page until data on the page changes or I think until a certain amount of time has passed. If this works properly it should cut down on the amount of resources that my sites are using.

I’m also going to update my Google Sitemaps plugin as the latest Beta version has been optimized to use fewer CPU resources.

I’m crossing my fingers that this works.

In the meantime my host has moved my sites to a different server on their network. I’m not sure the move went well because once I got to this blog I noticed that when I tried to click on the titles of the posts I got an error message. I hope they didn’t mess up my database!

That’s one reason why I’m writing a post now. I’m hoping the new post will update my database and fix whatever’s going on with the rest of the posts. I sure hope it does, and I also hope that this posts when I publish it!

If anyone has been put on notice by their webhost that their site is overusing CPU resources how did you resolve the problem? Any suggestions?

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