Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



You are here: Home / Archives for Sales and Marketing

My blog wasn’t loading earlier thanks to a new plugin

by

If you tried to visit my site earlier today and had trouble it was probably due to a plugin that I just started using the other day.

I added the SezWho WP plugin to my site sometime last week. This plugin allows you to rate others comments and even see where else on the web they’ve been commenting lately. Likewise, the blog owner can be tracked on the web through their comment profile on SezWho as well.

I had been using the plugin on one of my other sites for a few months, but when EntreCard partnered with Sezwho last week I decided to add the plugin to two more blogs.

Unfortunately it seems that when you use the plugin your blog is connected to the Sezwho network and if Sezwho goes down or experiences server slow downs so does your blog.

After I got back from the beach I discovered that the sites using Sezwho weren’t loading properly and when I tried to access the Sezwho website I couldn’t reach it either. So I turned off the plugins. Problem solved.

SezWho appears to be up and running again now. Their blog says they had a Kernel crash this afternoon and that was the cause of the problems. Still I think I might just keep the plugins turned off for another day just to make sure they’ve corrected their server problem.

In other news … I’m still trying to find ways to supplement my at home income. Blogging and maintaining my websites brings in a fairly good income but I’m looking for other ways to earn a living from home. Anyone have any tips on good small business opportunitites – definitely not scammy ones please! I seem to be doing well with internet related opportunities so I guess I’m looking for something else to add to my internet earnings.





Our neighborhood and neighbors are changing fast!

by

My immediate neighborhood seems to be going through a lot of changes lately.

I think I mentioned a few times that my Karaoke neighbors on the other side of our semi-detached put their house up for sale something like last October. Well they finally sold their house in February and the new neighbors haven’t moved in yet but they’ve been doing renovations like tearing down the ugly fake stone wall and the popcorn ceiling and stuff like that. They expect to move in at the beginning of August.

Then there’s the house beside us where my stalker oops I mean elderly neighbor Sofie lived. She had a small stroke in February was hospitalized and then she moved in with her youngest son. So her house has been empty, but the family plans to either sell it in the fall or put it up for rent. I kind of hope they sell rather than rent. I can just imagine a series of really bad neighbors if they rent the house out. If that happens maybe Chris and I will look towards getting out of here. Hey I hear Wilmington real estate is pretty nice. Now that’s an idea.

Just a week ago one of the houses across the street and one down the street from us went up for sale so that will mean two more new sets of neighbors in a few months or so.

In general we have a very good neighborhood and most of us are fairly friendly with each other. Heck, at least three of my neighbors give us food when they are celebrating. Remember the Greek Easter feast that the neighbor behind us gave Chris and I in April? Yum!

Other neighbors come over to our house or backyard to party or we go to their house to party. I think our newest neighbors who are renovating right now will be like that. The man is in a band and plays guitar and as you probably know my husband also plays guitar so they already get along famously. The wife is really nice too and I think we’ll get along well.

I just hope that the houses going up for sale end up having really nice people buy them that fit into the neighborhood well. Hey people don’t have to mingle, but hopefully they are nice and say hello every now and then.

Tweaking my blog income a little at a time

by

I’ve been busy trying to think up ways to increase my income by blogging or through other websites I own. Once we got our puppy at the end of November I kind of slacked off on my efforts to increase my online income and it’s really put a big dent in my savings account. One of the reasons I slacked off was because our puppy turned out to be quite sick and also being a puppy she took up a heck of a lot of my time!

Now that’s she’s older and a tiny bit calmer (and almost 100% healthy) I’ve been trying to increase my blog earnings again. I made a few changes to my Adsense placements on the majority of my sites a month ago and amazingly I’ve more than doubled my total Adsense income. Now it’s nothing to jump up and down about just yet, but doubling my Adsense income pays half my mortgage so it’s a significant increase. I learned a few tricks by reading Adsense Secrets – you can see the link to the site in my sidebar if you’re interested.

I’ve also been trying out some affiliate programs. I told you last month that I was trying Chitika again after a more than year long break. Well so far so good. I think I’ll tweak my ad placements as I think that will help, but I’m happy with my earnings so far. Kontera is ok – not as good as it was when I first started with the program, but it’s still one of my top earners.

I added Widgetbucks to my site again last week (again) and if things don’t improve I’ll be removing the code at the end of the month along with the shopping.com ads. They are mostly just taking up space and slowing my site down.

I’d love to hear what programs work well for you, especially if you have a general – home and garden type blog or website. As I said at the beginning of this post I’m looking for more ways to earn money through my sites. There are so many things to try that it’s mind boggling at times isn’t it? Of course, what works well for one site doesn’t always work well for another either so that adds to the confusion! However if you guys have any tips as to what works for you I’d love to hear about it. I’ve got bills to pay! 😉

Promote your sites and articles on Quassi

by

I just joined a new site called Quassi.

It’s a new kind of site where you can promote not only your own sites but topics that you are knowledgeable about as well.

In addition to having yet another place to promote your sites you can also participate in revenue sharing at Quassi.

Here’s some information directly from the site:

At Qassia, you can add your websites for free, and without having to add reciprocal backlinks. You’ll get unlimited quality backlinks (as opposed to useless “no-follow” backlinks). You can also add intel. Short for “intelligence”, intel is a tidbit of information. Qassia rewards users who add intel in three ways.

1. Backlinks You get one backlink for every piece of intel you add. Every intel will carry a direct backlink to one of your sites. So the more intel you add, the more backlinks you get.

2. Credit When you add intel, you also get credit, in the form of Qassia dollars. Your net worth in Qassia dollars determines how well your websites rank in our directory.

3. Revenue When your intel is displayed, you get 100% of the advertising revenue generated by that page. That is not a typo, by the way: we give you ALL of the gross ad revenue.

This means that website owners have triple incentive to contribute intel. The contributed intel will allow Qassia to become a vast repository of intelligence, with unrivaled original content. And a vast amount of original content draws traffic like honey draws ants.

Right now Quassi is in closed beta so the only way to join is by getting an invite by someone who’s already a Quassi member. If you’re interested in joining just click on one of the Quassi links that I’ve added to this post and it should take you to my profile page where you should see a Sign Up button in the top left hand sidebar.

I just signed up so I can’t tell you how well Quassi does at promoting your site and bringing in traffic yet, but I’ll write an update post about a month from now and let you know how well Quassi has worked for me. In the meantime, sign up and list your sites and perhaps add some articles about topics you care about and start earning those quassi credits and sharing in the site revenue.

aLinks WordPress plugin creates automatic links within posts

by

A few days ago I downloaded a WordPress plugin called aLinks. This plugin has been around for a while, but I’d never thought to try it until now, even though Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger was singing it’s praises last September. I should have tried it earlier! This plugin has a ton of potential.

Bloggers link to lots of sites in their posts. They link to their blogging friends, they link to past posts, they link to great websites they’ve just discovered and some even add affiliate links to their posts. It’s just something we do. I’ll even go so far as to bet that most of the bloggers reading this post likely link to at least one site in just about every post they write.

Why not make linking easier?

The aLinks plugin has been designed so that you can set up a link within the plugins admin area and then never have to hyperlink to that phrase every again!

I haven’t set up the plugin on this blog yet as I wanted to try it on one of my smaller less trafficked blogs first while I test to see if it causes any CPU over use problems on my server. (remember last year I went through two web hosting companies because my sites were using too much of the shared servers memory!)

If you’d like to see what one of the links looks like once it’s set up check out this post on My World. I used the built in Amazon module to quickly create a link to an Amazon page that sells dog beds. Now whenever I write the words dog bed in a post on My World it will automatically link to that Amazon page for me. Not only that, but I set up the aLinks plugin so that it will find any of my past posts that have any of the keyword phrases that I created and it will add the links to them too.

I have a number of blogs and I make references to them occasionally so I spent a few minutes setting up automatic links for my various blogs. Now all I have to do is type in the name of one of my blogs and when I publish my post the link to whichever blog I mentioned will appear. Just that alone will save me some time.

Considering that I have so many blogs I also appreciate the export/ import feature. Once you create your list of keyword phrase links you can import them to another blog using the plugin. That’s going to come in handy once I’m done setting up the first blog I’m trying aLinks on!

This plugin has too many great features for me to describe in one post.

I’ll just finish by telling you that you can add modules to the plugin for a few affiliate programs such as eBay, Clickbank, Commission Junction, iTunes and several others, as well as one for Wikepedia. This means that along with the built in Amazon module you’ll be able to monetize your blog by scattering a few links to products you’re happy recommending. Link the word “book” to Amazons bestseller page and anytime you use the word book in a post you’ll automatically have a link that could earn you money.

The aLinks plugin has been updated recently to work with WordPress 2.5.1 so if you’re a WordPress Blogger consider giving this plugin a try.

Update – I don’t use this plugin anymore because it stopped working and there doesn’t seem to be anymore updates. In fact creators page no longer seems to exist. Sorry!

Meta

Search this site

Tags

blog blogs camera Canada Chris computer crohns dinner dog Family flower flowers Food friends funny garden Gardening Green Thumb Sunday Health and Fitness Health Fitness and Beauty holiday home Home and Lifestyle house husband IBD Inflammatory bowel disease Internet Music neighbors pain photo photos plants puppy Shopping sick sleep spring Toronto TV Video visit website Wordless Wednesday