Blogging

The Launch of iHype.com

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If you are a blog for pay blogger then I am sure you are familiar with getting paid to publish posts on your blog on things that you love writing about yet at the same time creating a buzz for advertisers.

Well, lately, I have been hearing about how the industry is drying up and how there are not enough opportunities to go around. I KNOW I have been one of those who whined [a little] too but I was told to wait till iHype.com launches.

Now, guess what? iHype.com has launched in Beta and this is a module that I am VERY familiar with. First of all, this site just launched so do not expect to just jump in and start making money.

Create a free publisher account, if you are a blogger, and add in your sites and blogs. When they are approved, you can start checking for opportunities, posting them and earn by blogging. I don’t know how many bloggers or advertisers already know of iHype.com but it could possibly be the industry’s best kept secret. I am supposed to be on the ball when it comes to blogging for pay, yet I did not know about it until iHype.com is launched!

I have already submitted my blogs, hopefully I can start earning through iHype.com soon.

*** This post was brought to you by iHype.com ***

WordPress Issues

Don’t Simply Install WordPress Plug-Ins

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Since last month, I noticed a sharp decline of my unique blog visitors and I thought that it was because of the weekend, and then I thought that it was because of the Memorial weekend holiday. After that, things still did not pick up and my traffic continued to decline. I thought that perhaps, my blog was being penalized and that it has been de-indexed from the major search engine.

I went searching for my posts in the search engine, especially long tail keywords that I am sure were ranked high and they were missing. I was, of course, dismayed because my traffic fell drastically. I thought it was because I have changed servers and that I did not redirect the spiders to crawl my blog in the new IP, but then it should not be the case since I am using the same domain and retained all my permalinks.

Then I went through Webmaster Central to check and realised that my Cache was gone, my post titles were all broken and of course, my SERP was wiped out.

I spent two days thinking that the problem occurred because I have changed the values between my title tags although the new one was supposed to be search engine optimized. I had to download a fresh copy of my WordPress template from the author’s site and copy the default value over.

Then I found that there was a problem with my robots.txt too. I had to upload a new copy to my root directory. I also resubmitted my Sitemap. I thought I would give the spiders a week to crawl my posts but then luckily I had the presence of mind to write to my web host showing him my problem and he found that it was caused by a plug-in that is incompatible with WordPress 2.5.1

In retrospect, I realise that this plug-in, which was emailed to me by a friend, and came highly recommended by her, never worked for me since the day I installed it, but I thought that I would give it some time to do what it was supposed to do.

As soon as I know that it was the cause, I removed it from my plug-in folder. I don’t even want to bother with adding manual codes to the plug-in file to make it compatible with WordPress version 2.5.1.

Now, I learnt that I will have to wait for at least two weeks for search engine spiders to come and crawl my whole blog again and a longer time for my SERP to be restored. Meanwhile, what I can do is to continue writing and writing and hope that all the activity will attract the spiders to come sooner.

What pisses me off is that my Cache is all gone, my post titles are all broken, my traffic fell so much that my RealRank is koyak as if working with a PR0 blog is not enough, and that I had to spend two days, wasted two days, looking for the problem and still not find it. It was my host who found it. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my SERP will be restored sooner than expected.

Computing & Internet

Shitty Stuffs That Prevent Us From Accessing Our Websites

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Running so many blogs and websites, I thought I already know about all the things that make us unable to access our sites. If the internet is down, bring out the back up line. If there’s no electricity, use the laptop, likewise if the computer is down. If the laptop is down, go back to desktop.

If the server is down all the time there’s nothing much we can do but to change servers, like what happened to me and in fact, I am still facing a problem of having my post-server migration blog posts crawled by the search engines and I don’t know what is wrong.

This morning, though, I got to know that there was a fire in the data centre of The Planet, a very popular web hosting company that caused a slew of major websites to go down. Off hand, I discovered EntreCard and StatCounter.

I use both services. No wonder I am not able to check my traffic statistics. And I thought that I would check if my traffic did increase after a little experiment. SIGH. There’s nothing we could do but sit it out.

Computing & Internet

Cashing In On International Web Users

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If you are a webmaster with a commercial website, then I am sure you will find it a little difficult to receive payment from internet users who would like to purchase your product. I was a little surprise to learn that there are still millions of people who do not own a credit card. Well, I thought that credit cards are a little too common already but I was wrong. Besides, not all credit card holders are comfortable sharing their credit card particulars over the internet.

If you have a product to sell, perhaps you would like to know about Password By Call. This is a service which allows you, the seller, to offer a feature to your customers to dial in for a password, which they can then use to access your password protected area of you website, perhaps to make a purchase or to use a service or feature that you are selling.

By offering Password By Call, I believe that your conversion rate with shoot up since it is convenient and secure for people all over the world to give you their business. Password By Call offers recorded passwords in 37 languages and I believe that they surely speak the native language of your customers!

Computing & Internet

Live Search Cashback

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The other day while web surfing, I chanced upon one which mentioned that Microsoft is planning to launch a cash back service where when we use their search engine to search for a product and when we make a purchase from there, we get cash back.

True enough, today, I received an email from Microsoft notifying that they have just launched their Live Search cash back service. Browsing though their site, they do have some of the largest and most reputable online merchants in their database, but I am not sure if these merchants are offering the best prices.

Of course, it is up to us to compare, but sometimes, shopping online, you get caught up in the hype and end up with something that is slightly more expensive than you would need to pay buying from a local neighborhood store.

This service, however, is only open to legal residents of the United States. And there are quite a long list of restrictions so if you are interested to purchase via Live Search to be eligible for cash back, which I could not find the quantum in their Frequently Asked Questions, do read their terms thoroughly.

Finances

Best Credit Card Offers Available

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My friend consulted me on the best credit card offers currently in the market. You may have read that he cancelled his card a long time ago as he could not control his spending habit. HHmm I do understand the temptation of swiping our card now and pay for our purchase later but that is not a responsible way to carry a credit card.

However, my friend believes that now that he is older, he will be more responsible with a credit card, that’s why he is contemplating applying for one again. He asked me because he knows that I recently applied for a credit card and am familiar with the current cards and their offers since I did a thorough research before applying for one.

Well, there are many kinds of offers, of course, but it all boils down to what offer appeals to him. There are cards with an annual fee waiver, with zero percent balance transfer, with cash back rewards and even cards with 0% APR on purchases.

I told him not to listen to me but to do his own research. The trick in successful application of a credit card is to shop and compare them. I was told that rejection of a credit card can hurt our credit score so apply wisely!

Blogging

Blogging Is More Than Just Writing

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Over the long Memorial weekend holiday, I haven’t blogged much if at all. Well, I don’t really have the mood to blog because my traffic for all my blogs which recently moved servers has dwindled drastically. Now I know that even if I moved servers and retained my old permalinks, I would still get a lot of broken links in the search engine.

When my traffic was exceptionally low, I checked with the major search engines found them littered with broken links for all affected blogs. No wonder I noticed a drastic drop in traffic numbers for the past two weeks. I expect this to improve in a month or two when cached pages on the search engines are updated.

Anyway, while I did not blog, it did not mean that I didn’t do anything related to blogging. What I spend the past three days doing was to tag my old posts on one of my blogs. There was a total of 95 posts, I tell you, one can go crazy doing that!

I also went searching for WordPress themes, implemented four of them and customised them to my liking. They are not perfect but they will have to do for the time being. I will have to “close one eye” until I have a clue on what to do with the CSS codes!

I also went clearing up all my spam comments and deleted all my blog subscribers. And then I closed registration for blog subscribers. This is to prevent my blogs from being spammed due to a vulnerability in the registration of WordPress.

I guess that was all that I did… eh, but I thought I was so busy though. When putting these in writing, it did not seem that accomplished too much over the long weekend holiday! GGggrrrrrr

Random Thoughts Off My Mind