iMarketing

I am sure at some point you were tempted by an offer of opening a blog or website that was free. Yes, no fees for hosting or bandwidth.

Yeah, I was one of those people, who opened a blog on a free website. It was, fortunately, a personal blog where I just wanted to document small details of my life. This was a great choice since I did not want to have any fixed costs and this platform allowed me almost full access to the code so I could even insert ads of my own if I wanted.

Guess what? While I never expected anyone other than my friends and fans to read it, this blog caught fire. The number of daily visitors ranges from 3,000 to 4,000 even though many of my posts are simply one line with a link to something interesting that I might find.

Then I realized the downsides. As the traffic grew, I blogged more and then I realized that somewhere in the fine print there was a limit on the number of images I could store. Now, it is a big hassle for me to first find a place to host my pictures and then write the blog post. The website is sometimes down and I can do nothing about it. In other words, I get thousands of visitors that I can often get from there to my other blogs but a problem at the website means that I lose them.

So free or paid?

If you are even a little bit serious about blogging, get a domain name and pay for hosting. Free services are not reliable, companies can go out of business, and you may not be able to transfer your blog to another service (the process if often cumbersome, you can lose your pages in the search engine index and their ranking, and sometimes you lose almost all your traffic when your URL changes).

Tags: bandwidth, blogging, web hosting

I bought a blog from a blogger but then realized that it was not working for me. I thought that with great content and a link-building campaign I will be able to put some life into it and increase the traffic. That didn’t happen. The links were there, the added content was awesome, and search engines indexed the posts within minutes, but the organic traffic (I don’t believe in advertising simply because I don’t have the budget) never materialized.

That is when I decided to pull the plug but I wanted my content. The best way to deal with it was to move it to another successful domain. The best way to do is to use the export feature of Wordpress to create a XML file and then import it into the new blog using the import feature along with all the attachments.

Since I had never done it before, I was somewhat nervous, not knowing what to expect, but surprisingly, everything went really smooth. All the posts and the attachments (mostly pictures) imported very well and the formatting was maintained. I saw only some minor problems with quotation marks and hyphens. Now remember that if you have put any links to your internal pages within a post, they will get completely screwed up. The best way to handle that is to visit each post individually and correct the links.

I also suggest that you delete the posts on the old blog so that you do not get penalized for duplicate content.

Tags: blogging, duplicate content, export posts, import posts, wordpress

A brand is a name we remember and associate with certain attributes. Brands can be powerful if they stick in peoples’ minds; this is called positioning.

If you think headache, what comes to your mind? Tylenol, ibuprofen, etc. If you think soda, Pepsi or Coke? If you think search engines, Google or Yahoo? The brands that pop up in your mind are the ones that are strongly positioned in it.

People remember brands and associate them with attributes. Also attributes help to make the brand. There are many books on how to make a brand, because it is very important. If a product is not a brand it is a commodity competing on price, if it competes at all.

Something similar happens on your website or blog. It has to have defined attributes such as the way you write, the topics you write about, the template and the design you are using. If you keep changing the design of your site, people will have a hard time remembering you and figuring out what you are about.

If you write about everything then your writing style and the style of your publication has to identify you. Something has to be consistent in order to create a brand out of your name.

Brands need publicity. You can pay for it or you can network. The network is to get links from friends, other bloggers or website writers. Exchange posts, comment on posts etc. But before you do this you need a great product.

If you bring people and you do not have an appealing site in content as well as appearance, you may be wasting an opportunity. First get your product really ready then start to “advertise it.”

Do you need professional design?

It will be a great investment, but most blogs and websites do not make money for this reason I do not advise spending a lot of money right away. You can get a reasonable template for free and pay someone in Elance or Guru.com to personalize it for your site. This will cost very little money. Just decide on the colors you would like and the logo you will want, because if you need to change your design tomorrow it is better to keep the same colors to preserve the brand.

Ideally you should have a logo, image and website since the beginning.

Consistency

This is the key to position your site in the mind of your readers. You want your reader to associate your site with something: great and practical financial advice, excellent recipes, easy beauty tips, bargains, sharing your life, how to information on something important, etc. You can talk about other topics, but most of your articles should be about the main topic and keep your writing style consistent.

Tags: advertising, branding, design, link exchange

While I am a big fan of developing blogs from bottoms up, I also understand that in some cases it makes perfect sense to buy an established blog. However, as I have learned the hard way after purchasing several blogs, there can be some issues with a transaction going smoothly and all sides being happy.

Depending on whatever your definition of “large” is, my advice would be to include your attorneys and bankers.

For a “small” transaction, in which the fees of attorneys and bankers may not be justifiable, I strongly suggest that you do not pay the total amount upfront. I did that mistake since that reduced the amount of paperwork for me, but the transaction did not go through smoothly as .nu domains cannot be transferred. When I tried to reverse the transaction, the money never came back to me.

Now should I sue this person? I can but my time is worth some money and I invest it wisely. Definitely I do not invest in losers who may drag their feet even if I bring them to court.

The best thing is to pay a small advance payment, and then make the second payment when the domain transfer is complete. The final payment should be made when the blog is live on your own server. To satisfy the seller, you can also put the money in an escrow account.

Tags: acquisition, blogging, domain transfer, escrow account, merger

Obviously you can register a new domain, start a link campaign, create great content, and you have a new blog or website. Another alternative is to buy a website or blog and for the price that you will pay you will be able to buy something that has some content and many links pointing to it.

Well, nothing is every easy. I bought this blog from one of those PayPerPost bloggers that saw their business disappear with the Google punishment for selling links. I thought that with all the links pointing to this domain and a few thousand indexed pages, I could clean it up and get a reasonable return on investment.

I have done fairly well with this domain but despite trying to clean up the domain by eliminating bad links, this morning I saw that there were all these links and keywords that were showing up in Google search but I could not see anything when I visited the page. Then I looked into the code and saw hundreds of links pointing to those websites that promise to sell all kinds of prescription drugs. I checked the links list in the Wordpress dashboard and could not find them. Guess what? These were hidden links that are not visible to humans but can be read by robots. A clear violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. It took me a little while to figure out that they were in the header file of the Wordpress installation and I cleaned them right away. I am hoping that Google will treat this as a step in the right direction.

So when you want to buy a blog, due diligence is critical. Don’t just look for the obvious but also for the hidden. I would like to say that the previous owner of this blog inserted those hidden links and was probably being paid for these even though the domain has been under my control for a few months now. There is a lot of fraud these days in the world of online publishing and if you want to buy a new blog, you have to be extremely careful.

Tags: google, hidden links, link exchange, search engine optimization

First of all, if you have a functioning brain, please do not use Yahoo web hosting. It may seem easy but it is neither cheap nor easy to use, particularly if you want to use Wordpress to blog. There are so many other hosting companies that are so much better.

Now if you are one of those that are stuck with Yahoo (like me who purchased this blog and could not transfer to another host because Yahoo just makes it nearly impossible), try not to upgrade your Wordpress program. For reasons only the smartypants at Yahoo know, they choose to run outdated versions of Wordpress that not only deprives its customers of new functionalities offered by Wordpress but also exposes them to security flaws.

Upgrading Wordpress on your own can cause a major disaster because some of the software used by Yahoo is incompatible with latest versions of Wordpress causing major disruptions.

Now if you do want to upgrade (or as in my case, who upgraded and then realized that the permalinks were no longer directing properly because most likely you are using Yahoo customizable permalink plugin), go ahead and do it, but then try this, as wonderfully explained here.
1. Download this plugin.
2. Upload it to your plugin folder and then activate.

Hopefully everything should work great.

Tags: plugins, web hosting, wordpress, yahoo

Believe it or not but I am supposed to manage 20 wordpress blogs apart from b2evolution, blogger, joomla, gallery2, and phpbb. Trust me it can take a lot of time just keeping all these programs up to date.

Now I did install some of them using fantastico (it is standard with cpanel) but not all of them. So if you are installing some of these for the first time and can use fantastico, it is strongly recommended. Installations and updates are just a few clicks.

If you did not do so, like me, Keith Dsouza has a clever plugin called wordpress automatic upgrade. Once it is activated, you can literally update your wordpress software within minutes with just a few clicks. It saves time and for non-technical people like us it also prevents us from screwing something up.

Tags: blogging, software, wordpress

An entrepreneur writes to me, “What do you think about the travel, hotel bookings, and airline tickets reservations related topics for a new website? I want to make portal to run it long term with Google AdSense ads and affiliate programs. Please also tell me any other good niche.”

I like travel — it attracts everyone. I mean, who doesn’t want to travel? The other good news is that people are always curious to know about deals and places even if they have no money to spend. For example, I might not have the budget for it right now but I am thinking of going to Brazil sometime. So if I see a travel related ad for Brazil I want to click on it to see if I can go.

The other great niche is health, because people have health problems all the time and the Internet is the first place to go.

Tags: adsense, advertising, airlines, hotels, portal, travel, website

I don’t know how many times I get asked about growing your traffic, specifically in Google. What many people do not realize that Google is a very smart company and there is no way you can rank higher than you should. In fact, if you try to manipulate the search rankings (that is exactly what the so-called search engine optimization firms do), you will be penalized by Google and your rankings may either tank or your website might even be blacklisted by Google.

Having said that it does not mean that you should not use standard optimization practices (Google actually encourages you to do that) so that search engines will know better what your page is about and your readers will also appreciate.

Google did an excellent post on their blog about how to rank high in organic search. Here is a summary:

Avoid any techniques that optimize your ranking very quickly or radically.

To increase your site’s popularity, check if other sites that discuss similar topics or have a similar reader base are aware your site exists. In other words, get good websites to link to yours.

Don’t participate in link schemes or buy/sell links that pass PageRank.

Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links. We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google’s Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which queries visitors used to reach your site.

Use