Blog Republic

Creating Original Content Takes Real Effort

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It’s not hard to understand why people decide to “spam” the internet. They realize how tough the content creation process is, and they don’t want any part of it. If you’ve attempted to create unique and interesting content for any period of time, you realize it takes real effort. You need to hunker down and put forth a titanic effort to make a page that has is even slightly “worthy” of being read by the mass of online consumers.

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Creating And Distributing An RSS Feed Widget For Your Blog

There is no doubt that widgets will be huge in 2008. What’s not to like about distributed web applications, especially when they offer high levels of interoperability with the web’s most popular destination sites. Just how tough is it to get a widget launched? Not very. There are some easy to use tools out there that will have you up and running in no time.

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Posted in Internet Marketing | 2 Comments »

WidgetBucks Fiasco

WidgetBucks was doing okay, and then a major snag in updating their stats seems to have derailed the good faith the company was starting to build with bloggers.

They have not updated their stats for 8 days now, which makes anyone look shady, and they haven’t even commented in their blog with a “when” the problem will be resolved.

If this keeps up much faster, they’re goners. Once people pull the code, it’s highly doubtful they will ever install it again.

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10 Second WordPress Upgrade

This assumes you 1) have Linux 2) Have rsync installed and 3) have shell access. If you do, the steps towards upgrading wordpress are like so.

1) Get the newest version of Wordpress from Wordpress.
2) Gzip decompress and untar the file.
3) Type the following commands at the command line (minus the BRs)

<br /> gzip -d latest.tar.gz<br /> tar -xvf latest.tar<br /> rsync -r -v * -R /home/republic<br />

Pull up your Site Admin in Wordpress. See if there any steps to take to finish the upgrade. If not, you are done!

There is the 10 Second Wordpress Upgrade.

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WidgetBucks Pays

I’ve reviewed WidgetBucks in the past in detail, so I thought I would follow up now that I’ve received my first payment for WidgetBucks. It came via PayPal and was for November 2007. So far my experience with the company has been a pleasant one, and I feel they’re an easy way to make extra money for any website that has purchase oriented traffic.

An easy way to get up and running is to set your Widget to “Merchsense” in the WidgetBucks console, and place the widget code in a separate .PHP file which you call from an iFrame located in your sidebar. This will speed up the load time considerable, as explained here, and will also allow WidgetBucks to try and guess what ads would do best on your website.

If you haven’t already tried it, I suggest you do. They aren’t for everyone, because some types of traffic won’t convert. But I find they are a nice new reliable source of revenue, just like Chitika Lynx.

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Posted in Earn Money Blogging Series | 2 Comments »

61,789 People Clicked On Ads On My Blogs Last Year

The totals are in for 2007 and 61,789 people clicked on ads on my blogs last year. Yep. I feel like that is a decent total for a two man company with a zero dollar marketing budget. To me this is proof positive of how powerful of a money-making operation blogging really is, provided you know what the hell you’re doing and are true to the hustle.

2007 was the first complete year for the blog network and the number of blogs that are monetized stands at 8. 2007 was a five figure blogging year with rapid advancements in revenue generation in the last three months of the year.

What can I tell you? The sky is the limit for blogging. Most of the regular readers here are bloggers so I’m sure I am preaching to the choir about this news. All in all, blogging exceeded my expectations in 2007 and I have really high hopes for 2008.

Where you happy with your results last year and what goals do you have for blogging in 2008?

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Timeliness Is The Key To Blogging Success

For most bloggers, there’s one factor that is of utmost importance. You need to make sure your posts get indexed in the major search engines, and quickly. You also have to be positive that the issues you speak of are fresh and interesting. This is especially true of “news-driven” posts, which will have a short shelf-life by their very nature.

I’ve noticed that Google has really sped up the time they take to get your new pages listed. This is a huge bonus for blogs, because they’re the primary source of most new traffic anyway.

Certainly a lot of traffic like this will run its’ course in short order, but that shouldn’t stop anyone from trying to capture it. If you can get them to visit your website once, you can at least prompt them to come back. If they’ve never been there, it won’t happen! In other words, all traffic is basically good traffic.

Have you noticed an increase in the speed of indexing for your website lately?

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How To Speed Up Widgets On Your Website

If you install any widgets that pull data from a different server (for example, WidgetBucks), you might notice that it slows down the speed at which your pages load. This can be a problem, because slow load page times are usually bad news because they cause people to look for their answers anywhere but your web page.

There is a way to speed up widgets

Fret not, because there’s a very simple way to speed up widgets on your websites.

1) Make an HTML page that contains all of the code you want to display in your sidebar (widgets, etc), that pulls from other websites
2) Call the HTML you just made from an iframe.

Here’s the complete code to make an iFrame and speed up your widgets:

<iframe style="overflow:hidden;border-width:0;width:100%;height:320px;"<br /> src="http://blog.planet-cell-phone.com/widget.php" name="widget"<br /> width="100"><br /> </iframe>

You’ll notice, I used style commands to do the following:

1) Remove the scroll bars: overflow = hidden.
2) Set the border width to 0 to hide the borders.
3) Set the height and weight so the WidgetBucks widget would fit inside of the iFrame.

That’s all there is to it, and you’ll notice a quick increase in responsiveness of your pages! Don’t let slow-loading widgets ruin your day anymore.

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Posted in Blogging | 2 Comments »

Traffic Types For Blogs

Blogs can generate a lot of traffic, just like any website can. But blogs tend to attract specific and fresh traffic. One of the main benefits of a blog is how quickly you can get a reader for your articles. For example, if you mention most people’s name in your blog, you’ll generally seem them show up within hours! Let’s look at the different types of traffic that will show up at your website.

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Are You Blogging The Right Way? 7 Principles That Should Help

There is no exact “right way” to blog, but certain practices tend to make people more money than others. If you follow the basic principles that work for most, they probably will have the same effect when you give them a shot. Let’s take a look at some principles worth trying when it comes to building a successful blog.

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Posted in Blogging | 3 Comments »