Get Your Very Own Hosted WordPress Blog

and Grow Your Business

How much would you spend every month for a new loyal customer? Would you spend $10.00 for a customer that is going to buy an average of $40.00? Then have the opportunity to sell to them again in the future or offer affiliate products to compliment their original sale?

How about $1.00? Would you spend a dollar?

I use my blog to brand myself, a content management system, spread the word of my other businesses, connect with new people and to send huge amounts traffic to my own sites, affiliate sites, special offers, leverage social media etc. etc.

As far as I am concerned their is no excuse to not get your our own professional looking and cash generating blog.

Small Business owners think they “have been there, done that” when they created their static website and paid a web designer hundreds of dollars, pay monthly hosting bills and still have not seen regular returns on their investment.

It just sits in cyber world and fills the URL space on their business card. They haven’t had the time or education on how the internet is changing and allowing the non-technical business owner to build their traffic both online & offline with their website, connect with customers, get ideas for new products and grow their business.

In fact, you may have read my earlier post “Watch Out, I’m Teaching My Mom To Blog” and the kick it gave to her business to switch from a static site to a hosted WordPress blog.

Or maybe getting your own blog set-up has been on your “to do” list for months or even years but you just haven’t gotten to it?

Well with my help that’s about to change. If you are not paying attention to all the top businesses out there have their own blog which they update frequently and use various Web 2.0 and social media marketing.

Just check out your favorite brands and companies in Google and you will see who is blogging and Twittering. Why because they see the benefits of connecting with their customers in as many ways as possible using the internet and it goes beyond SEO to get your website in the top rankings.

They know that creating a relationship with their customers will help build trust and loyalty and bring those same customers back. They know they will be the first one to hear the likes and dislikes of customers and be able to addresses the hot spots and retain those customers.

The problem remains….

Many small business owners struggle to get their blog set-up and working right with all the right plugins and widgets. They think they don’t have time for “blogging” or that they aren’t technical enough to do it and don’t want to pay someone to maintain it again.

“Getting A Blog Set-Up Properly Is Hard!! Tell Me, Does Any Of This Blogging Jargon Confuse You…?”

WordPress, Plugins, SQL, PHP, Widgets, Blog SEO, Link Formatting, Proper Version, BlogRoll, Themes, Trackbacks, Option Configuration, Custom Fields, RSS, Comments

*You register your own domain name & Hosting

I’ll take care of the rest!

*A complete install of the most popular blogging platform WordPress!

*Your choice of over WordPress Themes

*Installation of the recommended WordPress Plugins (This is especially important for search engine optimization and proper blog functionality)

*Monetization advice on what programs to use to make money with your blog

*Social bookmarking optimization

*Free email support for 30 days to answer any blogging questions

I am doing everything for you AND showing you how you can use this tool 10 minutes a day to build your business!

OK, so what’s the catch? There really isn’t a “catch”, the only requirement to get all of the above is that you purchase your web hosting through my link.

CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR BLUEHOST.COM

Once you place your order for your monthly hosting then email me your receipt with your login information and I will have your blog set up and ready to start adding your content right away.

I just removed all your “I’m not a techy” objections – this is how strong I feel about every business needing a blog

Take Action Today!

Spots for this FREE Offer are limited- so save yourself the $50.00 and time of going through bids from elance and jump on this opportunity.

CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR BLUEHOST.COM

WHY Bluehost?

1. I personally use Bluehost and love it
2. Every Customer Service experience I’ve had with them has been great
3. It’s affordable
4. You get a FREE domain registration ($10.00 value)
5. They offer unlimited space
6. You can add on multiple domains for other income streams or tracking with a click of the mouse
7. They have cpanel so even the most non-technical person can get tasks accomplished themselves
8. You can create ftp access to upload and manage your files
9. Honestly, I’ve helped so many people try to navigate the limitations in their hosting providers- most can’t access ftp permissions, they don’t have cpanel or they are have to send in a support ticket for every little change they want to make that it’s frustrating to see people spend their time and money on un-necessary steps. My hope is this offer will help people that are on the edge of the pool to jump in and start focusing on their money making strategies and not time wasting activities. And yes.. that is my affiliate link so it’s a win-win for everyone.
10. umm.. 10…you get unlimited email addresses?

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Free Blog Installation and Setup Offer

I just got done reviewing Charles Kirkland WordPress Codebreaker, a new product that just hit the market so I thought while the thoughts are fresh and my notes are not shuffled to the bottom of my to do list, I would post my initial reactions here.

I apologize that this is not going to be a full “formal” review but I think I have a couple important thoughts that I wanted to capture.

First, I’ll point out that this product is all video based and perfect for the beginner wanna be blogger- I mean really perfect, and the price? For under $40.00 someone will be given the step by step blueprint to how to set up a blog, one video at a time… you can’t pay a virtual assistant that cheap to do it for you.

Like I said, I’ll go into more depth later on but here are what I consider a couple of my biggest take aways after watching all the videos:

• This really is soup to nuts on how to set up a blog start to finish
• The videos are all screen captures so you don’t miss anything
• The common steps that are taken for granted like how to ftp, how to set up feedburner, how to do SEO on your blog, even how to find content and actually make your blog posts!
• How to upgrade your WordPress from one version to another in a series of about 8 videos. Very helpful especially since I “heard” that the WP automatic upgrade plugin will not work on future versions of WordPress….(I have not investigated the truth of that)
• ADSENSE! These videos go into the best Adsense tips to get the most out of your blog if you are using that as your $$ strategy.
• How to make more money with your blogroll- brilliant strategy that I will try out myself!

Who would I recommend this product for? Anyone that is new to blogging and wants to learn how to do everything from start to finish from changing themes to installing MyBlogLog. You can check out my thoughts on MyBlogLog in my earlier post here.

This would also be great for anyone that isn’t a techy geek but is interested in adding an additional revenue stream or just making money flipping blogs, this is a very small investment that would pay for itself.  Blog flipping is a simple business model and you could easily make $100.00 or more in 24 hours with all free tools and not having any additional skills then what is shown in these videos.
So there you have it, my totally off the cuff, first thoughts after watching all the videos in the WordPress Codebreaker. Even after I have set up many, many blogs myself I still learned some golden nuggets in these videos. I highly suggest you check it out!

Still not sure? Get your FREE WordPress videos now… Click here!

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Charles Kirkland WordPress Codebreaker Review

Well, I just found the bookmark and thought I would post it here, after all it’s free, if you can install it and use it, I hope you will.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gocodes/

It’s called GoCodes. The theory is simple- it’s like Tinyurl or my favorite budurl.com (allows you track all your shortened urls at budurl.com) but gocodes resides right in your WordPress dashboard, you create your links with a few clicks and you can actually insert them easily while you are writing your blog post.

Here is the key benefit- we all know that once you write a blog post it lives in the virtual world, forever.. yes, this is how people earn residual income… those links are live and you never know where they will show up.

So think now about a couple scenarios:

• 1. You are sending good traffic to that link but the affiliate program isn’t converting
• 2. You find the same product or similar product that pays a higher commission
• 3. The product is no longer available and you want to replace it.

If you are like me, you posted those links everywhere, your blogs, websites, social networks, article directories, squidoo…you get the point.. you now need to go back and trace all those links if you can and replace them one by one.

Here is the BIG benefit- if you use the GoCodes plugin you create the shortened URL then you can replace it anytime with a new destination URL.

For example, just a few week ago, I was telling everyone to come join me at Perry’s new Video Intensive Course and I created the url to use to promote it

http://moms-business-coach.com/recommends/askmrvideo

Well, that class is now over, but I still highly recommend people look at all the other video resources Perry offers so I just went into my dashboard, removed the URL of his Video Intensive sales page and replaced it with his home page that offers both his membership option and a ton of free video articles.

Boom, one change and I’m done- I don’t need to go track and change 35 links around the web, it’s done automatically!

Remember, it also tracks the clicks! You can see where people are clicking what links and for what tools, resources or products get the most interest!

So there you have it, one quick and easy change you can add to your blog for free to get more for your efforts!

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Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Cool Tool of the Week

Here is my find of the day folks: a Free Ebay WordPress Plugin that looks super cool!

I know there are hundreds of Ebay WordPress Plugins out there, but this one is free, easy to install and since I’m adding a new ebay component to one of my websites I thought I would try it out.

What can you do with the Affomatic Ebay Plugin?

• Create ebay listings in your posts based on the keyword you choose.
• Input your own affiliate id so you keep 100% of the profit.
• Choose the country to show ebay listings from.
• Choose the category to narrow down your results or choose “all” categories.
• Limit the ebay results shown or show as many as possible.
• Change the way the ebay results are ordered. (I prefer Price: highest first )

I hope this will be a fast, free and easy tool that will help some of you make a few extra bucks with your blog postings!

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Free Ebay WordPress Plugin

Of course, the problem has been I only have some many hours in the day so this week I’ve also made some monumental business decisions that I will share with you soon.

Well, wait until you see what is coming down the pipeline!

I’ve done as I said and put a few of the tactics from my Website Traffic and Sales Ebook into action and I’m going to put them into place in the next couple days, this is one of the only good reasons my blogging has gone down so my website traffic numbers have too. This means I’ll be in a better position to see what sort of results I will get from the specific actions.

This blog post is off-the-cuff, here’s what’s going on, heads up posting. But I’ve decided to make up for the lost week of blogging and now that I have some other tasks completed and out of the way, I’m going to start my first official “blog-a-thon” on Moms Business Coach.

This means I am going to blog everyday at least once, including product reviews, business strategies, hot seats, tips, tricks and secrets- nothing is going to be held back for the next 30 days.  Don’t miss it, subscribe today to the RSS feed because I’m going to leak some reallllly meaty (money making) strategies that I have learned recently that will show you how to make more money from what you are doing already!

Woo I’m so excited I can’t wait!

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

It’s The Start of a Blog-a-thon, Come Join!

“..part of SEO is to attract the spiders.  I know that making changes on your site attracts them to come back and check out the changes.  To what extent do changes need to be made?  In other words, does that mean that full paragraphs of text need to be changed frequently on each page of your site, or is it more behind the scenes, like with titles, keywords, etc?  Common sense is telling me it is the visible text that ‘customers’ may see, but I can’t understand how to continually change all the text on my site.
To sum up…my question is really how much needs to be continually changed in order to attract the google-bots and other spiders?”

Answer:

As with any SEO question you can get as technical as you want, but I like to keep it short and practical, so in a nutshell;  It’s more then just changing text it’s adding content.

Go back to your keyword list and pull out your long tail keywords and add a page of information, like an article, for each of your keywords. Just think of how your site will grow if you add one article a week to your site focused on your keyword or topic. That’s an extra 52 pages that you can have “floating” around the internet and showing up in search engines that people can use as a front door to find you.

Of course, I’m not saying never change your base content, you should always keep testing and tracking and tweaking the content on your base pages for conversion purposes.

However, writing an article that is 400-600 words long should only take you 1/2 hour of work and less then that once you get used to the format.

Add linking to your other pages within the article to help the spiders effectively move around all your pages. An easy swipe line for doing is adding a line such as “As I stated in my earlier article, 5 Tips for SEO, print out your list of keywords and use those for your content base”

Let’s pause for a moment and look at this tactic:

1. I referenced you to an earlier article I wrote- keeping you on my site longer
2. I created an anchor text link that spiders will be attracted to with my keyword in it
3. I created a gateway for spiders to move from one page to another since they will follow the url
4. I added more value to you as a reader by giving you more information you were looking for, understanding SEO.

Blogging As A Free Marketing Tool

Installing a WordPress blog (remember that’s free too) on your host account, attracts spiders to your site because it’s always giving fresh content. Spiders don’t see free WordPress.com or Blogger blogs as adding to YOUR site, but to WORDPRESS.com. Even if you have a link to the free blog site from your website, they live on different IP addresses so the most it will do is follow the URL. For more information on free blogs vs self-hosted blogs you can check out, 5 Reasons You Should Host Your Blog.

The extra benefit of using a self-hosted blog, is the fact you can schedule your post. This cuts your time by allowing you to spend a few hours with your keyword list, create your articles and load them and have them scheduled to go out on certain days automatically. You can do it once a month and not think about it again.

Back to the nutshell, there is your 2 choices, add an article page to your site every week or install the free WordPress.org on your host and post every week and use this tool for passive income in addition to fresh content made easy.

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Quick Question Tuesday- SEO, Spiders, Content

Spam has become the biggest downside to blogging for me. Although, I know that a blog is getting some decent traffic when all of a sudden I’m getting a fair amount of un-wanted messages it still takes up time and energy to delete.

WordPress blogs come with Akismet pre-installed but you do need to activate it.  Since I just completed reading and reviewing the step by step guide to blogging, Atomic Blogging, I thought I would share one of the tutorials.

What you see above are the number of Spam messages I get so far on my blog! It’s HUGE! Aren’t they annoying? To avoid and prevent all this spam you must use Akismet – A Free Plugin to avoid spam for your blog.

Before I start, Akismet is a free open source spam program online to help fight spam for wordpress owners.

Just follow the following steps to get started to prevent Spam on your blog.

To install & setup Akismet for your blog first you need to go to your Plugin panel in your Control Panel in wordpress found at http://www.(yourdomain).com/wp-admin/

Follow the steps above to activate Akismet.

After you have activated all the Plugins you should see the above message just click on the link enter your WordPress.com API Key.

To get your API Key, all you need to do is go to www.wordpress.com and sign up for a free account, the API Key will be email to you when you sign up a free account.

When you have sign up for a wordpress.com account you can find the API key when you click on My Profile. Example how a API Key looks like is fbd655933fa6. Please use your own API Key and don’t ever share your API it is like a password for you =)

So once you got the API Key from WordPress.com, just key in the Key in the box and click on Update Options in your own blog!

You will know you have successfully installed Akismet when the green word appear as above. And you are done! NO MORE SPAM for your blog!

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

How To Use Akismet

Online Marketing for your home based business can be a time consuming process and trying to complete with millions of other online businesses can become disheartening.

However, there are ways to simplify your online marketing or “get more bang for your buck” with your efforts.

I have had a MyBlogLog account since March ’08 and have seen a fair amount of website traffic stats from people finding my site from the network. So, I decided to put a little more effort into learning how to use this free resource and here is what I found. Please note this is an introduction to MyBlogLog. Like all tools and resources you can get into heavy details but this is high level, beginner application stuff.

What is MyBlogLog?

Easy way to define MyBlogLog is by the Wiki:

MyBlogLog is a social network for the blogger community that is based in part on interactions facilitated by a popular web widget that many members install on their blog.[1] Bloggers sign up for free accounts on MyBlogLog and can initiate a blog community for one or more blogs they author. Other registered members can subscribe to these communities, effectively bookmarking them for future reading and sharing them with their own contacts. Bloggers can then display widgets on their sites which show MyBlogLog online community members who have recently visited their page. These widgets also contain links to visiting members’ community pages, and are one way in which users connect with one another. All members can see certain basic information about how many people visit their blog, what links they clicked and where they come from. Members may also view more extensive information about traffic on their site for a small monthly fee.

One more side note: Yahoo has acquired MyBlogLog and I think that offers good insight not only into the uses of the site but as an indicator of how Yahoo views social networking potential.

How do you use MyBlogLog?

When I originally joined MyBlogLog I thought it was only a way to see who visited your site in a nifty little widget in my sidebar.  However, I have recently learned about the various other “powers” of this tool when used the right way.

Visit MyBlogLog and when you select the “Join/SignUp” button you will be given the below screen.

That’s right! You are seeing it right, you can simply sign in with your Yahoo ID since they are owned by them it does make sense.

The benefit of using your Yahoo ID is you will find when you hop from one blog to another it automatically recognizes you, as long as you are signed in to your account.  I’m sure you have seen a blog that has the MyBlogLog widget on the sidebar that shows the latest visitors and once you have your own MyBlogLog account, Voila! You will show up there too!  It’s an easy and fun way to see who is actually visiting your website.

Adding MyBlogLog Recent Visitor Widget to Your Blog

If you have a blog, and a MyBlogLog account you can create the above widget and customize the colors and options to fit your own theme, well, as long as it fits one of their seven color options.

For the Self Hosted WordPress Blog, this is sooo easy by simply adding the WordPress MyBlogLog Recent Visitor Plug-in.

If you don’t have a Self Hosted WordPress Blog you can follow the instructions that will fit your blog set up by following the instructions on MyBlogLog.

As you may have noticed by now, I am a big fan of conversational marketing. So, how can you use this as an effective, community building tool?

Now that you can see WHO is visiting your blog and it’s not just an IP address in your web stat counter you have a couple options to take it a step further.

If the person leaves a comment, return the favor and visit their site if they leave a site url in the comments as most do.

Or as Pixelhead suggests: “If the person does not leave a comment, but shows up on your widget, click on their avatar and either: leave them a message on Mybloglog or visit their site and leave a comment. Mybloglog requires you to add them as a contact before you can leave them a message on their profile page. In the message thank them for visiting your site and I would suggest making a comment about their site after you have visited it of course.”

Your MyBlogLog Profile

When you login to your MyBlogLog profile you will need to add your blog under “My Sites and Services”

VERY IMPORTANT:  You also have the option to add your RSS Feed- take the opportunity and add your Feed both your original feed and your feedburner feed!

Once you have your blog settings created and the system works on your screen capture move along and click on the “ADD SERVICE” option.  This is where you can add all your other social networking and make your own mini-powerhouse!

Add as many of your accounts as you can, and if you don’t have an account with one of the options, make one.

Connect with Cyber Friends

If you are interested in using social networking to create a group of followers and grow your network you can use this site to help you connect the pieces. You can find your fellow cyber friends with these easy steps:

1. As I stated above add your profiles. They make it easy for you by even making the list and providing the initial part of the url for you, all you need to do is enter your personal username for that account. So go pull up that spreadsheet I told you to make earlier and just copy and paste. It took me about 10 minutes to populate all the fields.

If you took my other piece of advice on trying to keep your usernames the same or similiar then MyBlogLog even has a button that you can click that will search all the sites for you using your common username and populate the fields for you.

Privacy Note: At the bottom of the screen you will see that they state “Account information you share on this page will be used to retrieve your publicly-available updates from those sites for re-distribution across MyBlogLog.com and Yahoo!. Public updates are also available to third parties via an RSS feed of your profile as well as the MyBlogLog AP”

2. At the bottom of your profile page you will see the link for the “friender”

You will have a few options under different tabs. The image above shows the “connector” tab. This tab shows all the services that I added to my profile and what other friends interact on what service with simple Green X’s. This means that they also have an account with that service.

If you want to connect with that person on that service simply click the Green X.  You will then get a blue check mark in that square to show that you have connected there as well.

For anyone that has created multiple social networking profiles you will see how powerful this is. Instead of wandering aimlessly and searching and adding one here one there, boom, you can create a very solid network very quickly.

Now, in addition to the “connector” tab you have the “friender” tab. Click on the “Find my Friends” tab and you will see all the cyber friends that you can simply click a button and add to your network.

The downfall of this tool, as all tools and resources have potential downfalls, is the ability to have those people that don’t really care about you or your blog or your business and just want to make as many contacts as possible and get a really big number in their profile or worse use it for spam or porn. I can’t make them stop but I think the advantage of easily connecting with like minded people outweighs this potential issue.

One more important feature: I BELIEVE, I saw a post somewhere, and now I can’t find it (don’t you hate when that happens?) that when anyone you connected with updates any of their services you are notified automatically.  I’m going to experiment with this one a little bit because obviousely, if that is true, then that has a great potential- like if you have 300 connections and you make a blog post and it updates your Facebook and MySpace page and notifies all 300 of your connections that you made a new blog post.. all automatically… are you catching my drift on the potential here?? So if you know about this feature or see another post about it, please leave a comment.

Blog Traffic

Depending on your blog you may have little traffic or a few thousand visitors a month, that’s the honest truth about blog traffic. While you can do your best to stimulate and promote your blog, you never know if readers will catch on or not. However, using MBL can help by performing a couple easy and fast steps.

Utilize the Search Box

• Enter your keyword or blog topic and see what other blogs are closely related to yours.
• Click on the profile avatars of members that show up and add them as contacts after you visit their sites and determine they are a good match to network.
• Click on the communities that show up for the search term, and join the communities.
• Visit the sites and join in the conversation on these blogs by making meaningful comments. This will result in visits to your blog from both the site owner and visitors to the site that may like your comments.

RSS Feeds

Take the work out of tracking your MyBlogLog account by subscribing to your own RSS feed in your reader or adding the RSS feed of those in your community you like. RSS has so many great opportunities that many people haven’t even started to use. But, for more traffic and backlink potential you can add your MBL RSS feed to RSS directories. And by the way, you can add the RSS feeds to your community members as well because they are all in one place in your profile.

Tools

If you are a serious blogger with multiple blogs then finding your real community and connecting with your readers has big potential.  Here is a great option for you, and I’ll be honest I just found this but can’t believe the potential it offers. MyBlogLog Tools by SoloSEO. This company has created tools that specialize in MBL that allow you to:

• Compare your visitors
• Compare your communities
• Compare your communities between contacts

I mean really, talk about getting to know who your contacts are!  Why keep spending hours and months on what I call “hopeful marketing” when you can have the people that actually have the same interest and you already know like you delivered to your inbox?

Analyzing

Back in your profile, under your sites you will see the option for “statistics”.

They will provide you with a piece of code for you to copy and paste into your blog template.  Once you have it in place and it can start tracking your site details.

In the future that link will bring you to a page showing you some great details and insights into who is visiting.

The FREE option will only give you the top 10 results but you will see each tab with it’s own tab and they provide you with the link details of where your readers came from, what they viewed and where they clicked. They also provide a summary of how many readers and pageviews you had.

Upgrade to MyBlogLog Pro for $3.00 a month via PayPal and you will have access to real time stats and longer lists. I find the stats in the free version fine for my needs.

Summary

Like I stated in the beginning, this is a general overview of MyBlogLog to further your home based business reach and kick around the idea of conversational marketing, but I hope it now helps you see the potential for using this site is much greater then you expected.

Using this as a way to build your community and further your online home based business reach can be cheaper and faster then more conventional methods of marketing.

If I missed an important beginner point, please feel free to leave a comment.

Additional MyBlogLog Resources:

MyBlogLog Blog

TopRankBlog Interview with MyBlogLog CEO

MyBlogLog on Social Media Marketing Explained

home based business

Post from: Online Business Marketing For Home Based Businesses

Your Personal Guide to MyBlogLog