My topic area was on blogging and blog monetization.

As a followup to the call, here’re my notes for the participants.

Blogging at blogger.com and wordpress.com

It’s ok to test out the blogging waters when you’re starting out, however, do note that these services are targeted at hobbyists and recreational bloggers.

You’re subjected to their terms of service, which unsurprisingly prohibits promotion of adult, gaming, pharmaceutical-related niches among others.
Violation of their terms of service means they may forcibly take back the domain if you happen to violate their rules (inadvertedly or otherwise).

If you build up the Google PageRank or traffic to the domain, you don’t have the option of selling the domain (which could be value in the hundreds of thousand or millions for a high value, high traffic domain). The blog service provider owns the domain. Good luck trying to sell it!

My recommendation: Hosted WordPress

Having your own WordPress blog on your hosting account beats all options hands down in my option.

Here are the benefits in my opinion:

• You are free to develop any niche you desire (provided it doesn’t contravene homeland security or national interest restrictions).
• You can choose to sell your domain should you choose to exit the niche.
• You have stronger branding associated to your own domain (compared to having domainname.blogspot.com).

Having your own hosted domain is analogous to using a domain specific email, rather than a hotmail.com or yahoo.com for your business email!

If you don’t already have a web hosting provider, I’d recommend BlueHost.

And a blogging tool which has been very useful for me has been SecretBlogWeapon (SBW).

SBW runs thorugh the keyword research and blog setup process with lots of illustrations and graphics. In addition, it helps you optimize your blog to generate traffic and the basics of social traffic generation (which generates immediate traffic, compared to search engine traffic which can takes weeks to get your site indexed).

Killer WordPress Plugins Roundup

Once you have your blog set up, here’s some of the plugins which have helped me step up to a new level:

• Killer WordPress Plugins Part 1
• Popularity Contest WordPress plugin
• 10 Ways to a Killer Blog (a short series)

And if you’re like to do remote blog posting, w.bloggar is useful.

This isn’t pretty, but you can download some useful WordPress plugins.

Does Affiliate Blogging Work?

If you’re like to see the efforts of my affiliate blogging, here’re some screenshots from last year. (Yes, the results are only from blogging. I don’t use articles or press releases)
Several new bloggers who purchased the Auto Blog Income Generator have given me feedback that the instructional videos were very useful. (Site may occasionally be inacessible due to high traffic. Please try again later)

And don’t forget the free Robert Allen books when you join my list. (You will get a short blogging guide too).

PS: If you’re planning to do affiliate blogging, I’d strongly recommend removing Google Adsense from all your pages. A $20 affiliate commission is much more valuable than a $0.50 clickthrough!

If I left anything out, leave me a comment below.

Used correctly, you will rank highly on the blog directories and aggregators like Technorati and bloglines, and the results pages on the trinity of search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search or Live.com).

Here’re five of my favourite WordPress plugins:

Ready? Here goes:

• Subscribe to Comments: One of the easiest plugins to set up and configure, this plugin sends an email notification to a blog reader when there’s a response to their comment. Good for encouraging return traffic and promoting discussions. You might expect 1 or 2 additional visits, and perhaps more if there’s a healthy discussion.
• Related Posts: I had been looking for this plugin for some time before I located it. It does a search of your blog content and appends a list of posts which might have related content. Again a blog visitor would likely be interested in the related posts and read them. There’s another plugin Terong related which gives you manual control over selecting the related posts, but with 300+ posts, it’s quite a bugbear and I can live with the small margin of error Related Post comes up with sometimes.

Download audio file (audio-player-intro.mp3)

• Audio Player: One of the best plugins available. It allows you to play MP3 tracks. Very useful for podcasting, audio welcome messages, and I believe you can stream audio or music tracks from other websites too.
• DeUncategorize: If you’ve followed SecretBlogWeapon’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) routines for your blog, you’d know that optimally you’d assign one category for each blog post. This’ll be so that the search engines spiders will see: “www.WhoIsAndrewWee.com/blogging/” and pick up “blogging” as a keyword and categorize it accordingly. Assigning multiple categories to a post will take away from the SEO benefits. DeUncategorize helps you by “unticking” the “Uncategorized” category the moment you assign a category (eg. Blogging) to your post.

• Sociable: This inserts links to the social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, blinkbits.digg and others (they’re about 25). I don’t use this extensive, though it’s covered in some detail in SecretBlogWeapon. I’d keep it to a maximum of 5, although I’ve seen some go hog wild, displaying more than 20. It can be quite an eyesore.

Here’re some blogging packages to consider if you’re planning to get more (especially income) out of your blogging:

• AutoBlogIncomeGenerator: This is an auto blogging solution with revenue streams from both adsense publishing and affiliate marketing.
• SecretBlogWeapon.com: I’m top affiliate for 3 months running (August,September,October 2006) for this product which I feel is a steal considering it combines elements of a niche research, SEO guide, blog optimization and social bookmarking tool in one blogging package (It’s advisable you get Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon to round out the package).

But for the most part I was laughing at the foolishness of the person.

Around 352pm, a nameless blogger put up this page:

Of course, I was concerned that he listed the download link for Ewen Chia’s Auto Blog Income Generator.

I got some help translating it.

It says something to the effect that “a famous Internet Marketer was selling this and now it’s yours for free. You can go to the download page and get a copy.”

I don’t understand the logic of this individual, except that he’s not all there in the business sense.

I figured the intent of Internet Marketing was, and still is, to generate income from our online endeavors.

If giving away an income source floats your boat, then all the power to the blogger.

My idea of investing in Internet Marketing tools and software is that you’re acquiring the tools to catch your own fish.

I don’t see the point in giving away your fishing rod, your fishing line, your tackle to everyone who walks by.

Is there a point to this?

If the person was thinking they were ‘cheating the system’, they were only cheating themselves.

Because in the process they might’ve shortchanged me to some extent, but ultimately they’ve shortchanged themsef.

All this illustrates the naivete of many who enter Internet Marketing.

Sure all of us would like to be the next Google, Yahoo! or Amazon.

However, how many really cut it?

Can a giveaway model work?

They weren’t even building a list. Just using blogger to engage in questionable activities.

Here’s a first lesson for the wayward blogger.

A successful business model needs to be:

• Financially viable: You have to make profit at some point, even if you’re bleeding funds in the beginning.
• Sustainable: You need to have a model that works in the long term. Not just 1,000 Made-for-Adsense sites that are cataclymically affected every time Google changes its search algorithm.
• Scalable: It must expand as the business expands. Can it become a household product globally?

It’s only when you incoporate all three elements into your business planning process that you’d see results.

And with the results, impressive returns.

I happened to get up at 4am, wanting to check out the Web Advertising Secrets page.

Let me be among the first to let you know that it’s off the market.

And kudos to regular reader Chi Ang who got one of the last copies available.

You should get your blog up quickly, girl!

—

By the way, I was supposed to blog about this earlier.

What you see at this page: Auto Blog Income Generator

is supposed to be replaced by the Automated Blogging.

What’s the difference?

Automated Blogging has a nicer sales page, Auto Blog Income Generator has an ugly one.

Else the packages are exactly the same.

By the way, the resale rights licenses have just expired, so it’s a bargain for those who had got them earlier, but those coming in now can still look at adsense income.

The pricing is a little different too.

I’ve been given instructions to adjust Auto Blog Income Generator, so I’ll be doing that in the next 24 hours or so.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

It’s 5am. I’m going back to sleep.

Meanwhile, here’re the links:

–> Automated Blogging

–> Auto Blog Income Generator