Tricia's Musings

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



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Monetize using Kontera and keep kontera out of your paid posts

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As I mentioned in one of my recent posts Kontera was interested in partnering with me. They contacted me a month and a half ago greatly interested in helping me monetize my sites using their program of content links.

I’d been interested in the program for a while, but considering that I write articles for companies I didn’t want to have Kontera bubble ads in those posts. In fact in many cases I’d be breaking my agreement or the Terms of Service with the companies that had provided the opportunity to write those articles. I also didn’t really want to have any ads in my recent posts because I’m not sure how my regular readers would react to that. I know that some people wouldn’t care, but others would just hate it.

Luckily, while I was taking my time deciding whether I’d use the Kontera ads on my sites my blogging friend Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger was listening to my concerns and the concerns of others, and she got busy creating two fantastic plugins that those who do pa1d p0sts and want to use Kontera will not be able to live without! Well if they are wordpress bloggers anyway.

Lucia has created the Kontera Control plugin which lets you control exactly where and when Kontera ads show up in your wordpress blog. I haven’t added Kontera to this site yet, but when I do ads will show up in comments after two days, and in new posts after 3 days. They will not show up in permanently compensated posts at all, and posts that only require a post to be permanent and unchanged for a specific period of time, most often 30 days, will possibly have kontera ads after 60 days. Complete instructions on how to set up the Kontera Control plugin have also been written by Lucia.

Now, to exclude Kontera from certain posts you need to put all of them in a particular category. You can name the category anything you want.

Here comes Lucia again with another fantastic plugin.

She’s created the Hide Sponsored Categories plugin. She made the plugin for those that do compensated postings, but anyone could use it to hide any category. Simply activated it and check off which categories you don’t want to show up in your tags, category list, and or archives. If you are like me you don’t just choose one category for a post so no post will every be completely hidden.

It took me a while to set it all up because I had to rework some categories, but I’m now using both of Lucia’s plugins on all of the blogs except the photoblog.

I’ve been using the plugins for about a week and a half and so far the plugins are working quite well.





I changed my do follow plugin to Lucia’s Linky Love

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Late last night I finally got around to changing my do follow plugin that gave everyone who left a comment a link that would be picked up by search engines to one that gives me a little more control over who gets a link that follows and who doesn’t.

I think I first became a do follow blogger in June of 2006 when I learned of the Comment Plugger plugin for wordpress. Then, this past April I added the standard do follow plugin to all of my sites. Unfortunately I forgot I was also using the comment plugger so I was actually giving those who left a comment two links! Dumb de dumb dum ..

Other than the mass outgoing linkage that I probably caused myself by doing that, I didn’t have any problem with being a do follow blogger until sometime in early June when I noticed a heavy increase in human generated comment spam. This is a different kind of spam than I was used to getting.

The human generated comment spam comes in the form of a person, perhaps someone who works for a SEO company or just an eager website owner, attempting to get multiple backlinks for the site that they are promoting quickly.

They started leaving links with SEO type names instead of leaving a real name in their comment link, and what’s even worse there were those that would place a number of unrelated links within their comments. Linking to words like “love” in their comment and placing a link to a dating site, or linking to words like “flower” and placing a link for a Canadian Flower company.

Do you guys think we are stupid?

I run the Do Follow Blogroll and between my husband and I we have nine blogs on the list. It became very easy to see who was going around leaving lame comments full of links because they’d hit all of our sites often on the same day. I’m sure they hit everybody on the list I run and anywhere else that do follow bloggers have been listed.

Enough of that! I have enough to do with blocking regular spam for pharmaceuticals or p0rn and so on. I needed a plugin that rewarded my loyal regular visitors. The people who I’d always wanted to reward with a back link to their sites in the first place.

Other bloggers who had become do follow bloggers had noticed a steady increase in this annoying new type of spam too. Some were bothered enough by it that they removed their dofollow plugins completely!

On July 18th I went looking for a new do follow plugin and I found one called the LinkyLove plugin. I made a post about it too, stating that I’d be changing my do follow comment policy shortly as I’d planned on changing over to the original linky love plugin.

Unfortunately around that time I was also having problems with my web host. They kept telling me that my sites were using too many of the CPU resources on the server that they were on. So I was hesitant to add a new plugin when I didn’t know how much CPU resources it used.

I think Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger heard this as a cry for help (she came to my rescue before with other dream plugins!) and she created Lucia’s Linky Love do follow plugin. It’s a fantastic plugin and I’ve just started using it on all our sites.

This new plugin has much more control than the original LL plugin. First and foremost for me, it doesn’t make as many calls to the database so it’s no where near the CPU resource hog that the original plugin was. Secondly, instead of just making a persons comments follow after they’ve left a certain amount of comments on a blog, this new plugin that I’ll call LLL has an administration panel where you can set a number of different options.

With the new LLL plugin a commenter must leave a minimum of 3 comments to get a link that follows. The blog administrator can set that number as high as 10 I believe. I’ve set this at different amounts on our blogs depending on how old the blogs are and how popular they are. Depending upon what happens with human generated comment spam over the next few weeks as a result of this new plugin I may lower or increase the number of comments one must leave for their links to follow on our various sites.

To get a link to follow a site visitors comment link must match author and domain. So someone leaving a number of different links to different domains or using different author names will never get do follow links. You can also set how many comments one must leave before the links that they add within their comment will follow.

I’ve set this last feature rather high on my sites that I do memes on because I’ve noticed that some people come by for Wordless Wednesday or Photo Hunter and rather than commenting on my lovely photo they just talk about their own post and leave a link to their post in the comment. That burns me every time! Perhaps if they said something about my own photographic effort before leaving a link to their post I might not find it as upsetting.

I wanted to let my readers know of this do follow plugin change because those of you who use FireFox’s extension “Search Status” might be looking to see if blog links follow or not. Well, on some of my posts or sites that do not have a number of regular visitors comments you might think that I’ve gone back to nofollow. I haven’t. My visitors just have to leave enough comments to qualify for a link that follows now.

This site has a fair amount of regular readers (thanks!) so I think you’ll be pleased to know that nothings changed for you. You still have all your links. Those that are new to reading this site will just have to leave a few more comments. 😉

Oh another feature that I like about Lucia’s Linky Love plugin is that is shows the commenter how many comments they’ve left on the blog. I think that some of my regular readers will be very happy to see how many times they’ve commented on my sites.

I finally added Google Adsense to this site

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I was up late last night working on our sites. I had never added any Google Adsense to four of our sites. Why? Well, when we’d first started them I was using traffic engines like Bl)gexplosion and Bl0gMad to begin getting some new visitors to the sites. It worked, I believe that we managed to get a few regular readers and have retained some of the early connections that I made by being very active on the various traffic engine sites.

The problem is that you can’t have Google Adsense (not on the main page anyway) of a site that’s regularly being seen on a traffic engine site as they believe that is generating false impressions of the Google Adsense ads. So I didn’t have Google Adsense on those four sites.

I haven’t been using these sites at all this year, so I finally decided late last night to deactivate, put on pause or hold, all of the sites that I’d had listed on the traffic sites I’d been using in the past. Once I did that I started putting Adsense on this site, As the Garden Grows, Breath of Life and Odd Planet.

It was kind of stupid of me not to put Google Adsense on these sites earlier since these sites tend to have the most traffic of all of our sites – well other than my website. I tried to make the ads as non glaring as possible so as not to irritate our regular readers. Yeah, it might not be quite as effective that way, but for now that’s how I’ll try it on these sites.

All of the sites also have Kontera on them now too. I’ve set it up so that you shouldn’t see Kontera ads in new posts. I tend to post several times a day on a few of the sites so for the most part regular readers should have Kontera free posts. If you don’t visit as often and you scroll through the sites to see all the posts that you’ve missed since your last visit then yes, you’ll run into some Kontera ads here and there.

I’d love to hear if you like the way I’ve set things up. I’ve tried to monetize my sites in a way that should have very low impact on regular loyal readers.

Re-invent and Improve your blog

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There was a bit of heated discussion last week on the blog of one of the companies with whom I do some pa1d bl0gging work. They used to allow people to do three pa1d p0sts per day, but they’ve dropped down to two per day late last week.

They did that in the past for a few months and it actually allowed more people to get opportunities. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with what they’ve done. True they could have notified us in advance, but it’s there prerogative to do this.

Use this time to re-invent your blogs.

Stand back and take a good look at your site with fresh eyes. Believe me, you might not like what you see.

I’m not saying that I haven’t made a few mistakes with my sites. I have. But every once in a while I sit back and take stalk of what I’m doing and I keep trying to improve how I do things.

I’m stuck at home with a chronic illness. The money I make in various ways via the internet is the ONLY money I have coming in. I must pay the bills.

If the opportunities were truly there in the first place moving from three ops a day to two would hurt all of us financially, but the ops aren’t there. Hopefully now some of us that haven’t been getting any decent ops that FIT our sites will get some.

I do have several blogs on that particular companies system but as of the end of last week I’d only done 12 ops this month. TWELVE. That ain’t much. I do believe that most of the ops that I chose to take for my sites did fit their topic/niche.

Those that have been getting their 3 a day quota per blog … were all those ops really on topic for your site? Really?

Think about it this way. If every second post on your site, or in some cases large chunks of posts in a row are pa1d p0sts (some companies allow this!) do you really think your readers are going to stick around?

Are advertisers going to seek your blog out if it’s full of ads?

Is your sites PR going to go up? – Maybe maybe not. It depends on the quality of your posts, if you’ve been taking opportunities that fit your blogs topics, and most importantly if your readers are sticking around and occasionally linking to your site or your posts.

Now that we can only take two ops per day on this one site that many of us do work for try to find posting opportunities that truly fit your site.

If you write about things that suite your blogs topics it will only enhance your blog. Don’t kill your site by taking everything and anything just for the sake of money – no matter how much you need it.

I must be doing ok with my choices.

My readership has gone up each week. Many of my visitors interact with me via the comment section of my posts. I must be doing well in selecting things to write about that interest not only me but my readers as well.

Not only has my readership gone up, but so has advertiser interest. I’m getting offers for all kinds of things from free samples to sidebar links to posting and affiliate opportunities on a daily basis. See my post about Monetizing our Sites to learn what’s been happening here lately.

Vedis gave me a very nice compliment regarding my passion for blogging and how it shows in my posts – both pa1d and unpa1d.

I’m very thankful for that comment because it gives me some feedback as to what I’ve been doing, how I’m doing and what other bloggers are thinking.

All I can really say is that I try.

I try to write about things that interest me and hopefully my readers. Whatever I’m writing about I try to make it personal by adding my own experiences and thoughts into the post. I think that’s the key factor in any post. It’s the key factor in my posts.
These are mostly personal blogs that we are working on – make it personal. Write something that touches your readers.

You can’t do that if you are writing about things that you have no experience with or that you haven’t taken the time to research well.

I want everyone to have success which is why I take a moment to share what I’m doing every once in a while.

I know people are upset about the paid blogging company that has reduced the amount of jobs that one can do on a blog per day, but really use this time wisely.

Use this time to make your blog better. If you do you’ll probably end up raising your sites page rank and then you’ll also end up increasing the amount that you can earn through your blog in a variety of ways.

I’m tired of human created comment spam

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A couple of days ago I wrote a post about comment spam. I find it really funny that every time I write a post lately about buying a home or real estate or travel that someone comes along and promotes – literally promotes – their own website in the comments.

They try to disguise it by tucking their link to whatever they are talking about but since comments from first timers are moderated here it doesn’t get by me.

Watch, I’m just going to place this link for Denver CO real estate and see what happens. My bet is that within 24 hours I’ll have at least five people come along trying to leave a real estate based comment. Well … maybe that won’t happen since I’m calling them out in this post, but that’s what has been happening. It’s ridiculous!

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