John Chow’s Latest Giveaway
Blogging and contests seem to go hand-in-hand and giveaways are an incredible way for bloggers to gain attention for themselves. John Chow is one of the giveaway kings and tends to offer products for free in return for back links.
Obviously, this method of promotion works. You are reading this post, it’s sole purpose is to draw your attention towards John’s giveaway of two copies of OIOPublisher Direct in return for five entries to his giveaway where I may have a chance of winning.
As well as exposure on other blogs for John, there is greatly increased exposure for OIOPublisher through this contest. I’m not aware whether they have paid John any extra for him hosting this contest I’m not sure, but for the price of two licenses ($94USD) they have already made their money back and more.
I had planned a post regarding OIOPublisher Direct for this blog; once the website had increased traffic numbers and then this plugin would become beneficial to advertisers and myself by by-passing third parties and automating the selling of advertising space. This contest has brought OIOPublisher to the front of my mind again and if I don’t win this contest, I will still be very likely to purchase the plugin in the future.
RSS Footer Links
Publishing an RSS feed from your blog can be very beneficial, both to yourself and your readers. For you, there is the reassurance that people are more likely to read your content once it has been published. For your readers there is the ability to keep informed of updates to their favorite websites, without having to remember to visit each and every day.
One problem that comes from publishing a RSS feed is that people will abuse this and republish your content to their own blogs/websites for their own benefit, not crediting you at all. One of the best ways to combat this is to add links to the footer of the RSS feed so that a link back to your website is included wherever this may be displayed.
Luckily for us users of WordPress there us a great plugin which adds content of your choice to the footer of your RSS feed automatically. You even have the choice to add HTML content to the content you add and it can be set to be displayed above your feed content rather than above.
Some people may also add paid links to the footer of their feed in order to generate an extra income stream. With my 13 current subscribers, adding a link will not be of much value – so I’m sticking with the following text at the bottom of my feed for the moment:
This post has originally been published on <a href=”http://www.darrensingleton.com“>Darren Singleton .com</a>. <b>Darren Singleton</b> is a <i>Blogger, Webmaster and Internet Entrepreneur</i> posting about his experiences of making money online on a daily basis.
I will see how this turns out with regards to my feed appearing on other websites and the possibility of selling adverts in this area in the future is always open.
WordPress Plugins : Cloaked Links
One of the easiest ways to earn money from a blog is by promoting affiliate products within your blog posts. The problem is that they can look rather unsightly and will possibly confuse the readers with the long URL containing a string of random characters.
If you take a look at the URL’s below, which one is nicer to look at?
http://www.woothemes.com/amember/go.php?r=5159&i=b0
http://www.darrensingleton.com/loves/woo/
To be fair, the examples above don’t show how unsightly a URL can become – but they do illustrate how much nicer they can look.
I currently use the WordPress Link Cloaking Plugin from W-Shadow which is available for free. As well as allowing you to cloak URL’s, it keeps track of the number of clicks each URL has received and you can also customize the text used to differentiate between site-wide links and your cloaked links. Above, you can see I have used the word ‘loves’ but others choose to use the more obvious ‘goTo’ or even ‘more’.
As well as cloaking individual links manually, you can choose to automatically cloak certain links – all managed from the administration panel within WordPress.
If you are going to be promoting affiliate links, I’d highly recommend the Link Cloaking Plugin, you should see an increase in clicks straight away.
I have posted previously about WordPress plugins that I recommend. You can read these posts by the links below:
WordPress Plugins : Akismet
WordPress Plugins : NoFollow Free
WordPress Plugins : Increase Sociability
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WordPress 2.8 – Have Your Say
The release of WordPress 2.7 received an overwhelming response, with significant changes to the Admin Dashboard and they way plugins are handled. There was also the possibility to customize the administration section with drag-and-drop panels and most importantly, automated upgrades.
Following 2.7, the next big step will be 2.8. What features do you feel should have been included in 2.7? What features do you feel are missing from WordPress in general? You can have your say on the prioritization of features being integrated into WordPress 2.8 and beyond via the survey here.
For me, the main features to work on would be the speed of the administration section along with the ability to perform a database backup rather than having to use a plugin. I believe the database backup should have been integrated a long time ago and would be a welcome addition for most WordPress users.
WordPress Plugins : NoFollow Free
Looking back through the posts on Darren Singleton, you may have noticed that there are quite a few comments on each post. I can attribute this increase in commenter’s to two plugins. The first is ‘NoFollow Free‘.
By default, WordPress tells the search engines to ignore external links when they are crawling Wordpress-powered blogs. By disabling the NoFollow attribute on links, search engines won’t be prevented from crawling links in your blogroll or links that commenter’s post.
As long as the comments posted are related to the post and haven’t been picked by Akismet as being spammy, I generally allow any comments to be displayed on this site. By disabling the NoFollow attribute you can also get yourself listed on DoFollow lists, which will drive traffic and possibly get you more readers than before.
This post has been the first of a variety I have planned regarding WordPress plugins that I make use of on a daily basis. If you would like to keep track of the posts, sign up for my RSS feed or alternatively enter your email address in the form to the right and get them delivered directly to your email inbox.
