Following straight on from the last post Hacked Again, which looked at the problems faced by bloggers who are the victims of hackers, here I want to take another look at the whole idea of community spirit and how it can only be beneficial to what wedo online in order to make money to fund our pleasurable pastime of writing in our blogs.

Well there are plenty of social sites out there for bloggers to get together and share their stuff and I’m quite sure that most bloggers who have an inkling of what they do and why they do it know all the major social community sites that are available to make the best use of.

So what do these social sites actually give bloggers? Especially those that for one reason or another are trying to make money from their pastime. Well, the answer to that is two-fold.

Firstly, most bloggers don’t make any money blogging. They might want to, they might even need to but as long as they keep believing what they’re told by certain A-list bloggers they will remain in cyber-poverty probably until they give up in disgust. That would be after they had probably spent a small fortune buying every eBook and bought into multi-level marketing scam there is and are probably worse than broke. Their credit cards have probably taken a hammering too, so now they’re in debt.

Secondly, the rest of the bloggers who are not doing it for money are the ones that have got the right idea. They blog because they simply enjoy writing for the people that come to their blogs and read what they’ve written. For them, the social blogging sites are perfect to meet new friends, swap ideas, photos and music and generally enjot the great online social system that blogging has brought about.

So as for the larger and better known social sites that we all know and love, there need be no introduction here. However, there are plenty of newer, not so well known social sites that are cropping up that all offer many benefits to bloggers who are keen to take full advantage of the social reach and facilities that are available. One such social site, 3gb.biz is well worth having a look at if you are in the market and want to join 3gb community 3gb.biz, is perfect for joining groups, swapping information and photos as well as getting to know a lot more people online.

So where does that leave the bloggers who are struggling to make a few dollars here and there from their adsense ads that no one seems to want to click? Or all those flashy banners littering their sidebars or footers? Why aren’t all these visitors that they’re attracting from stumble or digg clicking their ads and making them a fortune just like all those nice, friendly, well written, honest, benevolent A-listers want them to believe?

Well, if you are one of those A-listers, then you are probably sitting pretty with a nice income from selling affiliate eBooks and services to all your readers, so where’s the problem? Its a numbers game after all, so if your getting a thousand noobs show up on your blogs every day, then it stands to reason that if you slingenough mud, some of it will stick.

If, however, you are not one of the chosen few, then you’re not getting anything like that amount of convertable visitors to your blog. You might be getting a few hundred visits a day, but those visitors will have already spent their money on the A-lister’s sites and will not be interested in pruchasing an eBook from your sidebar - they probably already have it and realized it was another worthless piece of junk. Just like all the rehashed regurgitated garbage that teh A-listers sell, that hundreds of their blind followers also try to sell in the mistaken belief that they’ll make a fortune just like their heroes do.

Its sad really, when you think about it. People are so easily taken in.

They want to believe that there is a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow and no matter how many rainbows they follow that end up with nothing but a rock or a clump of trees, they still keep right on chasing more rainbows.

Why?

Because they see one person who writes a blog make a lot of money from it and they think they can too. No matter how many visitors they get to their blogs that don’t buy anything, they still sit there waiting for those sales to come flooding in. Because if Mr Chow, or any of his contemporaries says there’s money to be made from promoting this or that, then it must be true. After all, they’re doing it, aren’t they?

Well, aren’t they?

Terry Didcott
Make Money

Following my last post Just the Ticket, where I expanded on the use of up and coming events to boost the popularity of your own blog I hit a bit of a stumbling block with this blog.

Some nice person hacked into it and left a load of malware on some of the posts.

Well, it cost me a couple hours sorting it all out and cleaning all the bad code from the database - I’m not happy about it because Google slapped a warning over the front of the blog meaning no one could read it until it was clear. Not exactly the message I want to be sending out to my readers that this blog is full of malware that some nasty little hacker has posted into it for whatever reason these irksome subhumans justify their very existance for.

What goes around comes around and I hope that the swine who did this get’s their just desert.

So that will lead on to what to do when you find that your sitehas been compromised?

Well, at first you need to get in and assess the damage. Usually the hacker will have left malware code in some of your blog’s posts and it will be hidden in the html code, so you won’t necessarily see it just by looking at the blog homepage.

So you’ll need to get into your blog’s admin panels and check the html not just of your posts (all of them) but also the files - sometimes the hacker will have added a few lines of code in your header or main index.php page. Also check your sidebar especially if you have ads in there. It is likely the hacker will have changed the affiliate links in your ads to someone else’s.

Next is to get access to your server and check all the files in your blog folder. The hacker may well have gained access to your server and added some files or editied some existing ones and added malware code, javascript or cgi programs. Delete any files you know don’t belong there. They are usually easy to spot as their last updated dates will be recent and different from the other files in the folders.

Once everything is clean again, you should be able to carry as normal. It would be worth changing your passwords for your server’s ftp access and cPanel. Also check the permissions for your main folders. They may be set as 777, which is way too easy to access, so you should alter the main public_html folder to 755 which will make it more secure.

If in doubt, contact your host provider and they should be able to help you.

Terry Didcott
Make Money

Here’s a post about traffic and to make it stand out with a bit of prominence, I’m going to use a pretty neat example. Did you know that you can obtain Cher tickets for Caesars Palace in Las Vegas from certain ticket sales outlets? No, I’m not off my head! There is, as always a madness in my method, so read on…

If you wanted to get a lot of people to come and read your blog, you could always use high search, low competition keywords to feature high in the search engines for a short while. It is a legitimate way of promoting a site and also to make money fast then let the site drop off again. In this example, I might use some long tail keyword phrases that are currently big news stories. The reason for that is that topical subjects tend to rush up to the front really fast, then drop off after a few days. The trick is to catch it just at the right time, then hit it hard, taking a good slice of organic search traffic with you and making money off it from PPC ads or affiliate ads, or whatever you promote.

Ok, what is my example? Well, lets take an up and coming event that is going to be in the news very soon. You can do that when a big star is about to embark on either a tour, or open a new show. Guess what? Cher, the well known singer and actress is about to do just that with a show opening soon in Las Vegas, to coincide with a new album release. So lets take a good keyword that will attract people to the site, like Cher tickets for Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Ah yes, I mentioned that in my opening paragraph, didn’t I?

Well what do we know about Cher?

Plenty. The famous singer has been at the top of her field for several decades and doesn’t look like slowing down any time soon. Cher commands big audiences wherever she goes and her shows are often sell-outs within hours of her tickets going on sale. So if you wanted to get your hands on some Cher tickets for Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which is opening very soon at the beginning of May this year, you should get in contact with a good ticket sales company, like for instance the one in the link above!

So I’ve already mentioned the fact that you can get Cher tickets for Caesars Palace in Las Vegas from good ticket sellers and I just mentioned it again, because I want this post to be ranked for the term Cher tickets for Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, of course. That way, this post will climb up the search engines quickly for that search term and get a lot more exposure. Its all about how to make money online, after all and getting good exposure in the SERPs is the bottom line. That’s what this blog is really all about, after all.

But you may say that this blog, being all about how to make money ways, should be concentrating on ranking for the term make money, or make money online, surely?

Well, that would be nice but not very practical in order to make money, because the very niche that purports to be all about how to make money online, doesn’t actually make its markers very much money, which is rather ironic, wouldn’t you say?

That’s why once a blog like this one has gained some antiquity and authority for its main keywords, its good to go forth and start ranking for some other keywords that will make money for it.

Which is what we want!

This is brought to you by Team One Tickets

Terry Didcott
Make Money