Staska.Net

One of the best things about having a personal blog is the discussion that you get involved in via comments.

But the comment implementation in WordPress really sucks. Even numerous plugins for the comments area do not help much. Believe me I tried.

I had a vision of how my perfect comment area should look like. Threaded comments, ability to edit them, spell checking, links opening in a new page/tab, preview option before posting, avatar next to the post, subscription option, etc;

I tried to make all of this work for more then a week and failed. I was able to implement less then 50% of my wishes.

But there’s a hope. Soon we’ll have a new service that will be focused on making your comment area into a real discussion forum.

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One of the most common pieces of advice for bloggers goes like this:

• Find Long Tail (rarely used, uncompetitive) keywords through which new readers get to your blog in search engines.
• Write more posts using these keywords, to improve your rankings and get more readers

I may be missing something, but I really don’t understand how this can work/help?

Long tail keywords are called that way for a cause. Almost nobody uses them. And if nobody searches for them, how will they bring new readers to my blog?

OK, you may say. Just use a lot of them, post a lot and if each LT keyword will bring a reader a week, soon you’ll be looking at a steady stream of new visitors from search engines.

But I already do that with every post. And you do that too. Every post on every blog is filled with the combinations of words that someone somewhere looking for something might use someday.

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Me too. And so does Darren Rowse, Shoemoney, Aaron Wall, Steve Pavlina and Eric Giguere. Think you can beat them? No? Think it’s too late to get into this game?

Then I have a secret for you. IT DOESN’T MATTER! It’s not about them and beating them. It’s about you and others like you and me.

Sure, the advice that the A Listers give us is great and there are tons of money making ideas there. But here’s the thing - the view from the top is very different then from the bottom.

They may think that they remember what’s it like at the start. And they may even remember many things correctly. But they also forgot a lot. The situation has changed strongly. And sometimes, the way they tell you about how they started and got there, can take you in the wrong direction. Don’t believe me?

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I have always been strongly against partial feeds on the blogs I read.

Actually one of the main reasons I unsubscribe from many blogs is because they do not offer full feed, so I have to click through to their site to read every post. What’s the point of feeds then?

And I made sure to offer full feed to the readers of staska.net from the beginning. Or so I thought

Yesterday I finally got to subscribing to my blog feed and saw that for the most of the posts on staska.net, only partial feed is available.

I always enable “Full Text” option in my blog administration panel. And it always was enough… Until Wordpress 2.1 came out.

Turns out that one nasty feature was introduced with the latest release of Wordpress. It now started truncating your feeds after the “more” tag. And since I often use this tag on my blog, all my longer posts were cut-off.

I know, WP 2.1 has a warning about this in their admin panel. But who reads these warnings after using software for more then a year?

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Every personal improvement expert will tell you that setting and achieving goals is a key to success. And if you are just getting in to blogging for money, or any other online money making venture, realistic and ambitious goal setting is a must.

But if you are just starting and haven’t done anything yet, how do you know what goals to set yourself? Saying that I want to be earning $10 a day, have 1000 daily visitors and 500 subscribers in a month is all good and well. But is it a goal or just a wish?

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It’s a bit later then some predicted but it’s here. Yesterday I have received an e-mail from Text Link Ads announcing their new program that will allow you to sell text links on your individual blog posts.

So far Text Link Ads have been great and reliable earner for me. And they are really good at selling my text links even on the blogs I did not update for more then 6 months. One such blog has had 2 links sold for $11 a month for the last 3 months (about $60 in profits by now). And it’s only PR4 site with 7 posts and 2-3 pageviews a day.

The only problem I had with Text Link Ads - my inventory on a best performing blog has sold out last month. And they do not give a lot of options to add additional inventory from the same site.

E.g. I have quite a few category pages with PR4 that might be interesting for advertisers. I have a few posts that have been Dugg and received tons of backlinks from lots of trusted sites, as a result. And I have a lot of posts that were linked by Engadget, Gizmodo and some other PR8 or PR7 sites.

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Ranking for important keywords in search engines is one of the best ways to get targeted traffic to your blog. And ranking for many of them, that are not too competitive, is not as hard as you think. It’s even easier then I thought.

I was just checking my rankings in Google for some phrases and was really surprised. I am in the top spot (No.1) in Google for “Chitika RPU” and “double blog income” (at least from where I’m checking it).

And I’m on the first page (No.9) for “Chitika“.

Granted, “Chitika RPU” is not a popular term yet, but “Chitika” brings over 2M results in Google and “double blog income” brings over 1 million.

So how did I get there with my brand new blog that should be sitting in “Google sandbox” and ranking for nothing at all?

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March 2007 was a great month for small online earners/publishers, if we are talking about blog monetization opportunities.

5 new blog monetization programs opened for them and they are not from some third tier ad networks offering to test some shady monetization schemes. All of them come from well known players in the industry and look really promising:

Chitika RPU ad units came out of limited beta and are now available to all Chitika publishers. I have been using Chitika RPU since January and it almost doubled my blog income overnight. If you look at my earnings results for Chitika this year, I would say that 70-80% of income was generated by just this one ad unit.

Auction ads is a program owned by ShoeMoney and MediaWhiz Holdings, the company behind Text Link Ads and ReviewMe. Auction ads is a CPA program that serves the ads for various eBay auctions to your blog. You enter the keywords for which you want to have auctions displayed, or even make ads contextual and get paid when someone registers for EBay service or completes an auction.

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Content monetization options for your blog keep getting better and better. Just yesterday John Chow opened Kontera Inline Content Ads for us and today I see an invitation to join Amazon Associates Context Links Beta.

Amazon Associates Context Links Beta is a program very similar to Kontera Inline Link Ads - it searches your pages for the relevant keywords and then transforms these keywords into product links. When user mouses over the link, a box with the relevant product ad appears:

When user clicks on the ad, he is taken to the Amazon Product Page. If he buys the product, you get affiliate commission.

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If you go to the bigger tech related sites you probably have noticed double underlined links in text there, when you mouseover them a little bubble pops-up with an ad in it:

That’s usually either Kontera or Intellitxt pay per click inline ads. And if you click on this ad, the site owner gets paid for each click.

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