So a big question a lot of people face when they first start blogging is how to set up their blog. Should it be self hosted on your own domain or can you get away with just having a .wordpress.com domain?

What’s the difference?

A WordPress.com blog a is a free blog that you set up. Its all hosted by wordpress themselves. To have a blog on your own domain you need to buy the domain (about $10), get it hosted (from about $7/month) and then upload the wordpress platform (most hosts will do this automatically for you). WordPress.com blogs are a limited version of the self hosted wordpress available at wordpress.org and give you a domain name like yourblog.wordpress.com

So which do you choose?

WordPress.com

Pros:
Free!

Quick and easy to set up

Requires almost no technical knowledge

Posibility to gain traffic through WordPress “Blogs of the Day” or Blogger search bar (very limited traffic in my experience).

WordPress handles backups

Cons:
Cant upload plugins (this is a major).

Limited to the standard themes (70+ themes and growing… slowly)

Can’t run adsense => can’t make money with adsense

Can’t edit your theme or any other part of the blog.

Your Own Domain (wordpress.org)

Pros:
Can upload plugins

Thousands of themes to choose from online (free and paid)

Complete control of your theme.

Can run adsense and profit from your blog

More professional on your own theme.

Can add it to your existing website (eg yourwebsite.com/blog)

Great community

Cons
Costs

More technical to set up

You need to handle backups yourself

Traffic spikes might cause your hosting to crash (5 Things You Should Know About Making The Digg Front Page)

My 10 Cents

I used a free platform for a grand total of 1 week before I realised I couldn’t make any changes to my theme or add plugins so I made the switch. I think owning your own domain has value and looks less amateur than the free blogs plus I wanted to run adsense. To be honest it took me a while to learn how to set up my blog an get it working as I like (heck I am still changing things) but I think there’s good value in having your own domain.

If your not very technical and you want your own domain I recommend you either ask a friend to help or pay someone to set it up for you. However if you like learning and want to have a go it’s not too tricky to figure it out and a good learning experience.

Stay tuned and I’ll put together a guide that covers the whole process See below for a free guide to get you through the whole process, you may want to download it now and save it for later.

What do you think.

Are free blogs a good place to start and then move on?

Should you set up your own domain from day one?

Or can your survive on a free blog forever?

Leave a comment with your thoughts.

Edit: Here’s the guide I talked about.

Enter your details below and I’ll send through the guide: Setting Up WordPress On Your OWN Domain
Name:
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“At Least Ya’ll Feel Something”

Whether it’s “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”, storming out of awards ceremonies or this latest stunt with Swift, it seems like he has a way of making you feel something, a way of pulling on your heart strings and getting a response.. from the masses.

Here’s the three step strategy to going viral like Kanye West

1. Be Bold

Talk about the thing that everyone is thinking. Don’t let the crowd sit there and think.. “hmm I thought Beyonce was better.. oh we’ll we can talk about that at the after party.. *clap and smile*”. Say something, pick a side and put it out there. The closer to the moment the more people who will talk about you, (also the more likely you are to offend someone).

Imagine if Kanye had waited till the end of the show to make his “announcement”, what about at the after show to reporters? How about On the Jay Leno 2 days later (would there have even been a Jay Leno?), what about if 6 months down the track he mentions it on his blog.

Be the first, be bold, risk it all.

2. Shoot First, Apologise Later

He has a way of apologising which almost helps him recover, if not to the world, at least his loyal, album buying, supporters. Kanye’s next album launch is going to be more high profile because of this event, built on a reputation as someone who just speaks his mind, (sometimes when he shouldn’t). If every statement needed to be okayed by a publicist he would never be such a spectacle.

Don’t censor yourself (too much), and apologise once you realise you’ve stepped over the line.

3. Release An Album

Even better, release it on a loaded date.. (sept 11) people will talk and people will buy. The story of Kanye VS 50 Cent spread like peanut butter and “Graduation” (Kanye’s 3rd album) sold just shy of 1 million copies in it’s first week.

Once everyone knows who you are, sell something, sell a lot of something.

Outro

In the song “Bring Me Down” from his second album “Late Registration” (2.5 million sales..) there’s a line that goes “Everybody feels a way about K but at least y’all feel something” which seems to be at the heart of Kanye’s controversy. He’s attracted to making bold statements about things that will make us feel something, good or bad.

Keep an eye out for the uncertain topics of your niche, make a bold statement, even if its lame, just make them feel something.

Was Kanye right?

Can being offensive help your blog? Or is it a poor long term strategy?

What’s your approach?

Leave your comments below

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My Mum

(That’s “Mom” for you Americans)

A while ago my Mum tells me she is reading this great book but she can’t tell me what it is, she thinks it’d be a bad idea if I read it. Naturally this made me want to read it, but I don’t even know what it’s called, and she wont tell. For almost 2 weeks I badger her, but all I get is snippets of the book, about how this guy outsources his work, travels the world, wins the Chinese Kickboxing National Championships and and works just 4 hours a week (clue) but she wont tell me the name.

After 2 weeks I eventually break her, the reason she won’t tell me is because she thinks it sounds like me.. and thinks it might be dangerous if I read it.. I tell her a book can’t tarnish my impeccable character and work ethic (lies) and she tells me the name, yuss!  The book was called The 4-Hour Work Week (originally titled “Selling Drugs For Fun And Profit” but was vetoed down by the publishers), but she insists on telling me that I shouldn’t do what he says and she doesn’t agree with it all “but it has some good ideas”..

I finally read the book, and it changed my life, or rather confirmed everything I had ever believed, while totally corrupting me.. sorry mum. I recommend it to all entrepreneurs I meet and that includes you. The book comes with a warning “DO NOT READ THIS BOOK UNLESS YOU WANT TO QUIT YOUR JOB”… I’ll let your curiosity do the rest.

The book is available at amazon for $13.57 here - The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich (affiliate) or have a look at his “Experiments in Lifestyle Design“ blog. The book has been a #1 Wall Street Journal and New York Times best-seller and and the blog frequents the Digg front page, go check them out now, if you haven’t already.

How To Blog Without Killing Yourself

Anyway the inspiration for this post came from seeing a great video titled “How to Blog Without Killing Yourself” by Tim Ferriss. Has some great tips related to blogging, getting traffic, streamlining the process etc.. but make sure you catch the question near the end “How do I Tim Ferriss my love life?”… awesome!

Let me know, Have your read The 4-Hour Workweek?

What do you think?

Share your thoughts below.

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So there’s a lot of great stuff in the video but the bit that really got me thinking was about being remarkable. In the video Seth explains that the word remarkable doesn’t just mean amazing or inspirational but actually that it means “worth making a remark about”. Online we would call this viral marketing. If something is worth sharing or making a remark about, it quickly spreads and thousands of people see it with no advertising spend at all.

Viral marketing is such a great way to grow traffic to your blog, but getting your head around how to make stuff that will go viral is hard to do at the best of times. But here is a great way to test whether whatever you’re working on will go viral. Ask yourself this, “Is it remarkable?“. And not just is it remarkable to you, but would other people find this so interesting or useful that they would make a remark about it to others.

As bloggers this is essential to our growth, especially with twitter, digg and so many other social mediums that make it so much easier for people to make a remark about what you’re doing and have hundreds or thousands of people respond within minutes.

So have a look at what you are doing and find ways to make it remarkable.

Anyway the video is below, and here’s a link to check out a post from Seth’s blog How to be remarkable. Hope you enjoy!

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If you are looking to promote your website or blog using social media then your at the right place!

To get started all you need is a computer, something to promote and a few friends.

Friends

Friends are powerful in small business and start ups but since we can amplify anyone’s voice online, friends are more influential than ever before. The only challenges is giving people who are willing to support you sufficient leverage for their “small” voices.

Viral traffic from a base of 200 friends can be crazy.

Clout

Those with clout are the ones who influence. Finding people with clout within your niche is an essential step in formulating your social media plan, because ultimately you want to influence them to spread your message. If you can influence the influentials your job will be much easier.

How To Find Your Clout:

Find popular blogs within your niche.

• Found the most influential blogs using blogcatalog, Alltop, Delicious, Technorati and Ask. More on this in a post to be written.

Find twitterers with large followings within your niche.

• Use wefollow to search for tweeters within you niche, rank them by “Most Influential”.
• Use Twitter Karma to arrange you followers by follow count (weed out some spammers while your at it..). The ones with high follower counts (and lower following counts) are likely to have clout.

With Them Over

It is essential you win these guys over. A long term strategy is far better than pestering them and becoming another spammer.

The key is to get noticed by them first. An easy example online is to do them a favour. For example if they are a blogger, comment on their posts, if they are a tweeter, ReTweet their messages (especially links to their own content/self promotion) etc,

Then approach them about your product. But be prepared.

What To Prepare

• You need your freebie/giveaway (high perceived value).
• An easy to tell story/point of interest or discussion.
• A system that will leverage each person’s voice.

Freebies

You need to find a freebie or something to give away that actually has high perceived value for the customer. This can be relatively low cost (or even free) for you.

Ideas:

• Give your product away – This is the best as it means customers actually get to interact with what you’re selling, it wins them over and they are more likely to spread the word. This wouldn’t be an effective strategy if you were selling houses..
• Free eBook – Overdone but still effective if well targeted/of interest to your niche
• Webinar – Same as eBook must have valuable content
• Invites – To your new service website, early access to the 2.0 release etc. Very effective for getting people to pass on and spread the word. Invite your influentials and give them another 10 to give to their readers. Much like the Google Wave release.
• Money – Will always draw a crowd, but gets expensive.. and it’s a pretty “cheap” marketing strategy.
• Your Time – If people value it as much as you do this can be a winner
• Physical Stuff – A “Limited Edition” branded t-shirt, pen.. It might cost more than an email, but someone with clout wearing your shirt is priceless.

A Great Story

If your story is hard to tell or boring it wont spread. Having a story that will stick is powerful in getting your story to spread. And ideally your story will make you look good.

For more on what makes ideas stick have a read of this excerpt from “Made To Stick” by Chip and Dan Heath.

You want to have a memorable story, or point of interest about your product/business before you approach those with clout.

Leverage Their Voice

Initially our voice would only go as far as it was audible, then came cave drawings, anyone who came into that cave would benefit from our work. Next was twitter, ok so there was a few developments in the middle.. but with Twitter we can send one 140 character message, @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher) can ReTweet us and 4million people benefit. Technology has changed how loud one man’s voice can be. And when marketing online we can selectively amplify our positive customer feedback.

Find Your Customers

Find out where the customers are online and what they are looking for. Focus especially on social networks, what will they be reading socially online, what will they share? Will it be YouTube. Develop your campaign that around these social mediums.

Interact with your customers and leverage their voices (the ones that like you). Set up a blog and share their stories, tweet their exploits, do a video on them/promote their videos on your site, use testimonials etc the list goes on. But the key thing is to get them interacting with you.

Competitions are a great place to start.

A Great Competition

Get creative. A competition should be related to your niche in some way, empower people to take part and reward everyone for their involvement.

Launch the competition through your existing friend networks, with databases of existing customers and with your newly acquired influential friends.

Essentials:

• Have a good prize (the better the more response)
• Have more than one prize. People don’t like entering if there’s only a 1 in a million chance. The more people you can reward the better. Can you reward everyone? An eBook, an invite, the VIP section?
• Get everyone participating, not just entrants. Getting people to vote is one way to increase involvement from readers.
• Get everyone promotiong. Give entrants all the “vote for me” tools they need. Prewritten tweets, Facebook updates, Emdedable banners/buttons, and emails are all good.
• Make it fun, and then promote the winner

Close well

Lots of competitions are big and exciting but once the hype of the competition is over, it’s forgotten. Think of a way to extend the life of you competition beyond prizegiving. Think about “The Best Job In The World” competition, where Ben has been blogging about his experiences as the winner.

The End

Phew! Longest post ever. So much to say and yet still so much unsaid!

This is  far from complete guide, but it is one that works.

If you have any pointers or ideas leave a comment. Would love to hear your approach.

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So you have a blog, you are starting to get your traffic up or maybe you don’t even have any traffic yet, but you want to know what to do once you have some traffic. Affiliate marketing is a great way to draw some cash out of your blog while also helping others at the same time. I have bought some great products which I may have never known existed if another affiliate marketer hadn’t pointed them out to me.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Basically it’s selling someone elses stuff. You promote their products on your blog and if you generate sales you get a commission from everyone you send their way. Some rates are better than others. For example some will pay you 50% per sale while others will only pay 5%. Some will pay you only when you make the sale, others will pay you a commission for the life of that customer. So every time they make a purchase or a pay a monthly membership you get a percentage.

How Does It Work?

You simply sign up to the affiliate program of choice and they will give you a unique link. The link will redirect to the actual site and place a tracking cookie on the persons computer. The cookie will remember that user for the next 60 days or so depending on the affiliate site and will attribute any sales to you. This means that even if a person doesn’t buy straight away you will still get the sale if they return later.

Once the sale goes through the affiliate program will credit your account to the value of your commission and you usually get paid monthly.

Why Are Blogs Good For Affiliate Marketing?

You know when someone comes to your door and tries to sell you something, lets say restaurant vouchers. They always end up trying to sell to you based on how much money you’ll “save”, because you can’t trust them when they say the food is great. However if a friend recommended the same restaurant, and told you the good was great you’d instantly add it to your mental list of restaurants to try. Blogs are kinda the same when it comes to affiliate marketing.

To some degree you have a relationship with your readers, and if you are constantly sharing good information and promoting valuable products people will trust your suggestions. Even better if you actually use the product yourself. When you tell them about a product you found useful they might just go and buy it too.

Stay Tuned

As mentioned at the top this is an introduction post to a mini series on affiliate marketing. Make sure you subscribe and check out the posts as the are published:

Choosing Affiliate Products
How to choose the right affiliate networks and products to get the best results.

How To Write A Successful Affiliate Post
Covers the ins and outs of writing a post about an affiliate product. What annoys people and what makes people trust you.

Sell Affiliate Products Without Destroying Your Reputation
Having a good reputation is powerful online and too many damage it with their attempts at affiliate marketing.

Add Value And Increase Affiliate Sales
If you can add extra value to your readers they WILL be more likely to buy from you.

Using CPC To Drive Affiliate Sales
Using CPC can be an easy way to drive quality leads to your affiliate post, but make sure you do the math.

How To Get The Scoop On New Affiliate Products
Selling new products is much easier than selling products that everyone already has.

How To Write Titles That Don’t Sell
Why people don’t like clicking on links that look like a sales pitch and how you can use this to your advantage.

Any More Topics That Come Up Along The Way
I am more than open to write extra posts to cover any questions people have. Add me on twitter and send me a tweet with any q’s!

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The Digg Bar

If you’ve used digg you will be familiar with the digg bar. It appears at the top of any page you click through to from Digg.com and scrolls with the page. The great thing about the bar is that users can instantly vote for your page without needing to find a digg badge or copying the URL.

Digg users are familiar with the bar and new users will notice the bar and may even consider joining digg. This is good for you because now more of your followers will be on digg and you will get more diggs the next time you tweet a link.

Shortening With Digg

Using the digg shortener is easy. Simply add the Digg Bar Bookmarklet and you will be able to shorten with digg. Once you have shortened it you can click the twitter icon in the digg bar and submit to twitter. From here you can either tweet the link or copy it and schedule a tweet for later.

When your followers click your link they will now see the digg bar placed prominently at the top of your page.

Other Social Sites

There are many other social bookmarking sites and this trick works on them all. The best option is to choose a site that your posts will get popular on and that your followers are using. No point posting digg links to a bunch of reddit users.

If your chosen site doesn’t have a URL shortener just use another service and shrink the link to your page on that site. Also remember that if the other site doesn’t have a bar, the reader will need to click again to get to your site (may not be a big deal, but you might find you’re getting less click-throughs to your actual page).

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Here is a walkthrough for setting up a FeedBurner account right through to adding cool RSS buttons to your blog.

Set Up FeedBurner

FeedBurner is owned by google and will track your RSS statistics for free. Tracking your RSS is just another way of finding out how many people are following your blog and what they find interesting. Go to FeedBurner and set up a FeedBurner feed now.

If you are on wordpress (you should be) you can install the FeedSmith plugin to your blog which will direct all of your existing feeds to your new FeedBurner feed. Once you have your feed then go to Settings>FeedBurner and insert your new FeedBurner feed.

Optimise Feed

Before you click the optimise tab make sure you have checked the item views and item link clicks (and podcasts if you are doing them) at analyse>configure stats options.

Then go to the optimise tab and select Feed Flare and add any social media options your readers might want to use. This will help your posts get more exposure should your readers decide to bookmark/share them (don’t forget to activate once your done).

Use the Publicise feed and set up the Headline Animator and Pingshot.

Subscribe Icons

Now that you have set up a FeedBurner feed you need to set up your subscription buttons for your readers. You can use standard ones or you can download some more unique designs. Check out Design Bliss and SpeckyBoy for some free unique RSS buttons.

Having a RSS button that stands out will increase the number of subscribers your blog will get.

Add RSS Icons

Once you have chosen your subscribe icon, upload it to an images folder. In wordpress you can use the text widget (WP Admin>Appearance>Widgets>Text) to add your RSS button as a widget in your sidebar. Simply add the widget and paste in the following code:

While your doing it you should also think about adding a Twitter button. Simply add the following code to add a twitter badge:

Once you have your RSS and Twitter buttons showing your can play with the  margin-right/left to get the right placement within your sidebar.

(If you find that the widget makes your blog layout go weird you might need to add </div> at the end of the text file to clear it up).

Email

You can use FeedBurner to handle your email subscriptions as well. Simply activate Email Subscriptions in the Publicise tab then add the code to your subscribe widget.

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Here are 5 points you may want to know before doing it yourself:

Hosting

The post was only on the front page for less than 30 minutes as far as I can tell. Here’s what a majority of viewers saw when they clicked the Digg link to my site:

In the space of those 30 minutes google analytics tells me that the site had nearly 2,000 views. I am unsure of the number who couldn’t get through because of hosting problems. After researching others is seems that you can expect between 5000 and 150,000 visitors depending on how long it stays on the front page and whether it makes the top 10 stories of the day (always displayed on the right hand side of the page).

If you don’t have the hosting to support making it to the digg front page you will miss out on a lot of traffic and it will very quickly get your page buried (as mine experienced). Even if you get buried you will still get an influx from many different sources on the web.

Quality

There are ways to get more exposure to your page by working with your friends to help get the diggs up. And while I recommend this to get the initial momentum, if you aren’t submitting quality work it won’t take long to get a bad reputation. Also make sure you do a good job of spell checking and editing your post before it gets submitted.

Putting time into creating a masterpiece for submission can be a great idea when aiming to get traffic from digg. Once you establish yourself as a producer of great content the digg the community will happily embrace your future work and you will find it easier (so they say) to get to the front page.

Links

Once a page gets popular on digg not only will it generate significant traffic to your site but it also gets the attention of other resources on the web. As a direct result you will see an influx in traffic from other social bookmarking sites. The following day I had about 400 visitors from Reddit (from the same buried article).

As linkbait it’s great. I did a google search to see how many times my post had turned up. After just one day there were 118 backlinks recognised by google. Great stuff for a buried post.

Adsense

As a rule the more experienced an internet user is the more banner blindness they have. Generally I have been getting a CTR on my adsense of about 1-2% but for the digg traffic I had a CTR of just 0.27%. So if you are trying to get a build adsense revenues by getting digg traffic don’t bother. Either think of a smarter way to monetize traffic or start working on a longer term strategy.

RSS Subscriptions

Of the 2000 visitors there were only 25 new subscribers. So most of the traffic was fleeting. An interesting post to check out is probloggers How to Build a ‘Digg Culture’ on your Blog which covers a few ideas of how to benefit from digg traffic. He also talks about the bump his subscriptions get from digg traffic.

Although most of the digg traffic is short lived, there are many benefits from getting to the front page. Keep working to get there and you will eventually reap the rewards.

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On the other hand if you don’t have an idea for your next post you can use this technique:

Keyword Topic Generating!

Here is how you do it.

First of all you should have decided on your blog topic.

Now go to Google Keyword Tool and type in your general blog topic. Change the Match Type to “Exact” and show the “Estimated Avg CPC”. Now you can see a list of high paying keywords (for your adsense) and the search count (for your google traffic). Once you find a few keywords with a high CPC and good search traffic try searching them in google to get an idea of the competition.

Spend a bit of time trying different topics and searching for more specific terms. For example if I type in “blog” (CPC – $4.82, 2.9 billion results in google) it shows the related keywords “blog hosting” (CPC – $9.35 and only 5.6 million results in google). If you search “blog hosting” in the keyword tool you will find “web blog hosting” (CPC – $22.58 and 444,000 results in google).

Targeting the longer keyword phrase, although it is searched less frequently will actually get you more traffic due to your higher search ranking (be careful that you are targeting keywords that are actually being searched! No point getting $50 for a keyword every 5 years).

When your website is new 444,000 is still quite a large number of competitor pages. Try for terms with fewer than 30,000 search results and easy competition. Check out How To Dial In Your Keywords for more on checking out the competition.

Get a list of 10 different keywords and use them to write your next 10 posts.

For more check out How You Can Effectively Target Keywords (For Newbies).

Let us know how it goes!

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