Posted by Average Joe on February 19, 2009 under Advertising | 
If you have your own website or blog, then advertising is probably going to be an inevitable path that you decide to go down. It is a way to attempt to cover your costs and even potentially make some profit from your site.
One of the options that you can choose is to make use of Google Adsense, which offers a range of different advertising options to help you monetize your website. These can offer you some easy ways to integrate adds, or you can put in some time and test different integrations of the ads to try and maximise the return from the ads.
To go through all of the details in this one post, would be just a little to much so i will seperate out each of the different types of ad’s that you can create and discuss each one in it’s own article.
- For Content – Text based ads which are content driven
- For Search – Ads generated from search results through a search box on your website.
- Video Units – Add’s some content in the form of video’s and ads along with them.
- For Feeds – Incorporate ads into your feeds for your blogs.
At the moment each of the detailed articles is getting put together and i will update the links for each as soon as possible.
Posted by Average Joe on February 14, 2009 under Hosting |
When considering your web hosting options you need to consider what your actual needs over the long term are likely to be. If you are pretty sure you will be just sticking to a single website and not expanding your internet empire, then a single hosting account is pretty much all you are going to need.
However if at some point you are planning to expand and have multiple websites, then you are almost certainly better off looking for a good reseller hosting plan. What a reseller hosting plan offers you over a individual account is the ability to create multiple accounts yourself. When you purchase a reseller account, from most hosts you will get the ability to log into a Web application called Web Host Manager (WHM). Through WHM you are able to set up accounts with different limits on things like storage, bandwidth, as well as limit or leave unlimited things like email, databases, etc.
If you are planning to have more then about half a dozen websites, you will more then find a reseller account to be a benefit to you. The added benefit is that it is not a huge step further to actually start reselling hosting from your reseller account. All it takes is a little more learning and getting it all setup, which in fact many of the things that you need to make it work to resell are included and can be installed through things like Fantastico, the only extra thing may be a way to accept payment.
Posted by Average Joe on under Downloads |
Below you will find a range of different FTP Software, at this point this is purely an informative list. The list is split into two portions, which are Free Options and Paid options. At this time i have not had time to try all the progrms that are listed here, and as such cannot say if they will do all that you may need in an FTP Program.
FREE OPTIONS
FileZilla – The free FTP solution
FTP Surfer
PAID OPTIONS
SmartFTP
WS-FTP – Available in Home and Professional Editions.
Posted by Average Joe on under Hosting |
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, it has been for the most part the most common way to get files from your computer on to a web server. While it is still probably one of the preferred methods by many, and it is something that is available from pretty much all web hosts with your hosting.
What you need to use FTP is a FTP Program for your computer, which allows you to connect to your web host and then browse the directories just like the directories on your computer. While windows itself has the ability to connect and use FTP to some extent it is hardly as feature rich as you may want or need. Some FTP Program options can be found in the downloads section under FTP Programs.
However many hosting accounts also give other options now as well, for exmaple the FileManager in Cpanel (which you can even upload and extract zip files), offers many of the features that you may want from an FTP Program, and additionally for a faily decent range of scripts, Fantastico offers automatic installation on some many hosts. So while FTP has been very much a standard there are becoming more and more ways to avoid needing to use it.
Posted by Average Joe on February 9, 2009 under Uncategorized |
Making money with your blog is one thing that gets many people’s attention, the main question though is what options do you have for making money with your blog and at what point can you try to make money.
WHEN TO TRY AND MAKE MONEY
Answering the second question, (always a good start). Really i am approaching this question first, because the answer may affect which path you choose to go down. Really it is possible to start at any time to try and make money from your blog, 1 or 1000 visitors it does not matter. However what you need to keep in mind is that just because you are displaying ads on your blog does not mean that you will make money from them.
Firstly you do need a reasonable number of visitor’s, you are not going to make hundreds of dollars if your blog has just 20- 30 visitors a month. Even 1,000 visitor’s a month may not generate hundreds of dollars. While it does very much so depend upon the type of content and the ads that you display, it is not the easiest way to make a fortune. However the more visitor’s that you have the more chance you have of making reasonable money.
SOME OPTIONS FOR MAKING MONEY
PPC Ads – Displaying pay-per-click ads (PPC) is definitely one option to make some money, there are a number of different services out there with different requirements to join them. The most popular being Google Adsense. The payouts vary quite a lot from ad to ad, however for the most part the ads are selected based on the content on the page. This makes a lot of sense if the ads are inline with the content.
Affiliate Programs – Making use of affiliate programs can be a better option then PPC ad’s because there is usually more incentive involved. Additionally the incentive is usually directly related to the value of the sale, where as PPC ads are an arbitrary figure based on what the advertiser wants to pay for someone clicking to see their site. As long as you can integrate your affiliate programs well, they can lead to great revenue, fail to match the product to your topic though and you are likely to see no results hardly (Wedding affiliate on a wedding blog, good choice, Wedding affiliate on a car blog, not so great choice).
Paid posts – Later in your blog when you are generating a lot of visitor’s you may have the opportunities arise to be paid for posting about different products. These may not always pay great, but often you may gain free products, or little extra income from doing so. The only thing i would say here is do not recommend a product just for the money or because you got it free, recommend a product because you truly believe in it. You will generally gain more respect from your readers this way.
Take your time and you can really do well from your blog, however watch out for the pitfalls of overdoing it, while people are generally ok with seeing ads on your blog, and understand why you need to include them, they will often move on if there is an excessive amount of them all in the way.
Posted by Average Joe on February 8, 2009 under Blogs |
Sometimes getting an idea for a post is the easy part, getting the idea into a post of reasonable length can be somewhat more difficult. You need to be able to flesh out the idea, and come up with a number of points that you can easily integrate into the post itself.
Doing this becomes much easier by using mind maps, to work through your thought process in generating a post. If you have not seen or used min maps before what they basically are, is you start with a central idea. From that central idea you draw lines out to some related ideas you have about the central idea, and then from those other ideas again draw lines out. The idea isn’t really to expand the idea as far out as you possible can but to get a few points with a bit of extra info on each of the points.
To create mind maps you have a few options, you can go the old fashion but probably more free flowing method of pen and paper. The other option is using mind mapping software, which lets you creat your mind map on the screen, and add to it and remove as you feel you need to. Either way mind maps make it easier to visualize your idea, if not also help you to follow the idea through a logical pattern.
Recommended Software for Mind Maps is Free Mind – Download here or More information
Posted by Average Joe on under Blogs |
It is possibly one of the questions that stops many people actually taking the chance and starting a blog. That is what do you write about. Well the question is kind of a loaded question, because most people that ask it of themselves know what they want to write about but, cannot bring them selves to write it.
So the question still begs, what do you write about. Pretty much the answer is anything, a hobby, a sport you play, or just about what you are doing and what is happening for you. It can be a unstructured personal blog where you just write about what ever is on your mind at the time, or it could have a specific topic, like business, or football, or money.
Choosing a topic for your blog is really only something that you can decide, because you know what you are going to enjoy writing about and what will keep you interested. There is really no point asking your friends what you should write it about as it is potentially not going to be something of interest to you and that will lead to you being dissatisfied with your blog, and not wanting to write for it.
So go and write down your hobbies, look at the magazines that you buy, the movies and the music you buy, you are bound to come up with something that you can create a blog about or that you can write about on a blog it really is a lot easier then it seems.
Posted by Average Joe on under Blogs |
There are really four main types of blog that you can start, and which one is best for you is going to come down to your personal preference. The four types are Text Blog, Picture Blog, Audio Blog (Podcasting), Video Blog (Vlogging) and a combination of any of the four. Ok, ok so that is five, for the most part however the combination is the most common form.
TEXT BLOG – The easiest and quickest way to get started, you don’t even need actual blog software, because if you know a little bit of internet coding, you can do this on a basic website. Although it is often much easier and better looking for the visitors to your blog to use a service such as blogger, or to set up your own blog software on your web host.
PICTURE BLOG – Usually the next step over a text blog is either a picture blog alone, or a combination of text and pictures. Either are easy enough to set up with most blogging services or your own blog set up.
AUDIO BLOG (POD CASTING) – Some people find that they have trouble actually writing what they want to share and do so better using their voice. Pod casting can really land either side of a text blog, either it will lead into one, that compliments the pod casts, or will be derived as an add on to the text blog. Although some are purely that a audio blog or more commonly referred to as pod cast.
VIDEO BLOG (VLOG) – Well the name may not explain it all, but this is basically where you sit in front of a camera and talk about what ever you want to talk about. Youtube seems to have made this a lot easier to do, as well as a number of other similar sites.
A COMBINATION – Mixing it up and using one, two or even more variations of any of the above four is not uncommon, and in fact as long as it is interesting and what people want to see, hear or read then you would probably do better using a combination.
Anyway what it comes down to really is that if you want to start a blog you need to make a choice on one of these and just get out there and start one.
Posted by Average Joe on February 7, 2009 under Hosting |
An Email Auto Responder allows you to have an automatic reply sent to an email received to a certain email address. These can be useful if you want to be sure your emails are all acknowledged or if you are away on vacation. Another use can be to auto reply to a support email address with information when the email may be responded to or such.
Setting up an autoresponder is quite simple, you just need to set four options, including which address to automatically reply to, who the new email should be from, the subject and the message. The primary catch is that you need to either have a forwarder or an email account set up for the account that you are setting the auto responder up for otherwise the emails received will be automatically discarded after the automatic reply is sent. While in some cases, where it is purely a request for information this may be useful. Otherwise you will want to be sure that you set up the account or forwarder so that you can receive and respond to these emails.
Posted by Average Joe on under Hosting |
Email forwarders can be a useful option for some users. Basically what an email forward in Cpanel does is allows you to send a copy of an email that is sent to one account to other accounts as well. So for example if you had three accounts like managers@yourdomain.com, manager1@yourdomain.com and manager2@yourdomain.com, and both manager1 and manager2 need to receive the mail sent to managers@yourdomain.com, you can set up an email forward to send all messages received to managers to manager1 and manager2. While the messages will also be delivered to the managers@yourdomain.com account, it saves multiple people trying to collect the mail for one account without one missing out.
There are actually two options in the Cpanel email forwarders option. The first is to just forward a single address to another, while the second option is to forward all the email for a domain. While both do have their particular applications, the second where you can forward all the email for a domain, may be more useful if you are using sub domains or have multiple domains for an account, and needs to be used carefully as it does override the default catch all email address.