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.

Related Posts

• How To Add Meta Tags To Your WordPress Blog
• Should You Write Blog Posts On The Weekend?
• Using Social Media To Promote – A Beginners Guide
• How To Choose Affiliate Products That Will Actually Sell
• Make Your URLs SEO Friendly!

Tweeting great content is an underrated asset of many tweeters. For more check out 11 reasons why good tweets are important.

How to send good tweets:

Now theres the obvious, like don’t take the “What are you doing?” question literally. But apart from common sense your best chance of improving is by recognising that tweeting other peoples content actually gives you cred. With that in mind here’s how to find good stuff to tweet:

What to tweet?

Tweeting what has already been socially tested is a great way to have success. Here are a few sources I go to find information that is usually pretty ‘hot’.

Alltop.com

Alltop, aka “all the top stories” is a great place to find content relevant to your niche. Once you navigate to your topic they show you top 5 lists for the webs top sources. Skim through and find titles that catch your eye.

If you discover a good source it may be worth your while adding it to your RSS reader.

Stuff To Tweet

Stuff to tweet is similar to alltop but is just one page. These are all sources that are known to be popular on twitter and saves you going to the different sites to find what’s hot. Stuff to tweet also includes videos and pictures.

The downside is that if you are targeting a niche you are unlikely to find relevant content.

Google Alerts

Google alerts isn’t socially tested like the other sources but google vets out most of the smaller stories.

You can enter multiple search terms, just separate them with a comma. Set the type as comprehensive and daily if you are getting it delivered to your email (as-it-happens will blow up your inbox). Or else you can subscribe with your RSS reader.

Digg Search

Digg provides tonnes of socially tested content but to really make the most of it you can use the search. By targeting the right words you can get great content for any niche. You can use the options on the left to show only popular articles. Simply arrange by “Most Dugg”, then show only submissions with more than 100 Diggs.

The best part about the Digg search is that you can subscribe to the results by RSS.

Tweeters

If you find a twitter friend who is always sharing good stuff you can actually subscribe to their tweets as well. If you want to you can add it to your RSS reader or else you can follow their tweets from within your Twitter client. For example I have a column set up in Tweet Deck for influential people/ great tweeters and I always keep an eye out for things to RT.

RSS Feeds

Get yourself an RSS reader and subscribe to the feeds you can. The sources above are great but no doubt you will know of other great sources for your niche. If you subscribe to the influential blogs and news breakers, you’ll have a wealth of great content to tweet. Simply scan your reader in the morning, find the content, then log in to a servie like Tweet Later and schedule your tweets for the rest of the day.

Where do you find good stuff to tweet?

Related Posts

• How to Tweet For Diggs
• 11 Reasons Why Good Tweets Are Important
• 5 Things You Should Know About Making The Digg Front Page
• How To Write Headlines For Google Vs Twitter Vs Digg
• How To Add The Top Social Bookmarking Badges To Your Blog

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!

Other Popular Posts

• Your Own Domain VS .Wordpress.com?
• Should You Write Blog Posts On The Weekend?
• Increase Your Twitter Followers – 7 Ways To Get And 3 Ways To Keep
• 5 Ways To Stop Your Blog From Going Viral
• Why YOU Should Start A Blog – The Top 10 Reasons And 26 More

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.

Other Popular Posts

• Your Own Domain VS .Wordpress.com?
• Should You Write Blog Posts On The Weekend?
• Increase Your Twitter Followers – 7 Ways To Get And 3 Ways To Keep
• 5 Ways To Stop Your Blog From Going Viral
• Why YOU Should Start A Blog – The Top 10 Reasons And 26 More

Anyone can put an affiliate link on their blog, anyone can promote them, but only a few actually make money.

One of the keys for making money selling affiliate products is promoting the right stuff. Here are 5 things you should take into consideration before choosing an affiliate product to market on your site.

1. Relevance

You should be promoting products that are either strongly related to your website content or your visitors. The affiliate products may be quite different to your site content as long as they are relevant to the reader. For example, a blog about healthy food should be able to sell fitness programs as well as healthy food affiliate products.

Don’t limit yourself to your niche, but think about what your readers would buy.

2. Quality

There are so many affiliate products out there that you shouldn’t need to settle for a poor product. Also pick products with good advertising material. Having great banners and an excellent landing page will go a long way in generating more sales.

Check out the stats on your affiliate to see whether it is performing well for other affiliate marketers.

3. Would You Buy It

A great way to find products to promote is look at the ones you have already bought, or the ones you were tempted too! Buy the product (or at least test it) before you promote it. Not only will your personal testimony boost your sales but you can also share some useful insights to the product and maybe even some tips for use (note: good tips make people buy).

If you are really proactive you can even create a product to go with the affiliate product you are selling. Then you can give this away to make sure people buy through your affiliate link. More on this in another post :)

4. Hot Products

Selling products that are 5 years old is stupid, no matter how good they are. 70% of your audience either has it, or has decided they don’t want it. You need to focus on new prodects that are hot right now.

A product with a good buzz is easier to sell but bear in mind it will also have more competition!

5. Commision

You want to aim for products that pay a commission of 25% or greater (ideally 50%), and make at least $25 per sale.

Lifetime commission is another atractive option. When you sign a a customer up and all future purchases give you a commission. For example, hosting providers often pay a lifetime commission for affiliate sales. Lifetime commission usually pay monthly, and you can build up quite a significant constant cash flow with enough lifetime customers.

Often signing up other affiliate marketers to a product will give you a lifetime commission based on a percentage of their sales.

Related Posts

• How To Make Money From Your Blog Today – The Absolute Beginners Guide
• Your Own Domain VS .Wordpress.com?
• Should You Write Blog Posts On The Weekend?
• Using Social Media To Promote – A Beginners Guide
• Use Twitter To Jump Start Your Traffic In 5 Easy Steps

Google Your Email

You should already know not to post your email in any comment, on any forum, or have it as a part of any contact page. If you really need to submit your email in a public place you should set up a disposable account that can be discarded once overloaded with spam. See Fake Address – Why Everyone Should Have At Least One.

If you can find your email on google so can spammers. So google your email and find the places yours is exposed then remove them. It may take a few days or weeks for google to pick up the changes but once its done you’ll be in the clear.

Don’t Tweet Your Email

If you want to share your email with someone make sure it’s via DM not @ messages. Spammers have caught on that they can use search.twitter.com to find emails. Although twitter has taken a step in the right direction by blocking email results from searches such as “@gmail.com” it’s still easy to find thousands of emails with twitter search. Have a look at this search to see how many people are tweeting their emails every few minutes.

Here’s to a clean inbox.

Related Posts

• How To Write Headlines For Google Vs Twitter Vs Digg
• Fake Address – Why Everyone Should Have At Least One
• “Is It Something I Said?” The Real Reason You May Have Lost Followers
• How $55 Bought Me 10,000 Followers And How You Could Do It For Free
• How To Opt Out Of Annoying Twitter Auto DMs

I know your auto DMs are probably great but there are many who didn’t get the memo. It doesn’t take long to get sick of auto DMs. I want my direct messages to actually be messages rather than needing to trawl through dozens of “friendly” sales messages. No, I wont buy into your MLM scam!

Good news! Although there are many services that will provide you with and Auto DM there are two that make up nearly 90% of DMs sent, and you can opt-out of them both! This means your twitter account will never receive Auto DMs from these two services.

Tweet Later

TweetLater is great service but too many muppets have caught on. If you want a service that can schedule your tweets and gives you better control I recommend you check it out. However if you want to opt out of the DM’s that get sent from tweetlater, here’s how:

1) Follow @OptMeOut on twitter, they’ll follow back within the hour.

2) Once they follow you back, send them a DM (with anything in it).

3) You’ll will receive an opt-out confirmation DM.

4) You have opted out! You can now unfollow OptMeOut.

If you ever change your mind about opting out just send a message to the Help Desk asking to be removed from the opt-out list.

Social Too

Social Too is a tool for Auto DMs, follows and unfollows. Like Tweetlater they also give you the opportunity to opt out of their auto DMs. 2 simple steps:

1) Sign up for Social Too

2) Tick the box below in the Preferences tab.

Done.

Congrats, you have now opted out! Expect to receive at least 90% less Auto DMs.

Related Posts

• Someone Followed You, Don’t Blow It With A Lame AR.
• How $55 Bought Me 10,000 Followers And How You Could Do It For Free
• Google Yourself And Don’t Tweet Your Email!
• How to Tweet For Diggs
• How To Set Up And Optimise A Really Cool RSS Feed

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.

Related Posts

• How $55 Bought Me 10,000 Followers And How You Could Do It For Free
• Google Yourself And Don’t Tweet Your Email!
• How To Opt Out Of Annoying Twitter Auto DMs
• How to Tweet For Diggs
• Use Twitter To Jump Start Your Traffic In 5 Easy Steps

A lot of people are asking the question how to get more traffic to your blog. And a lot of people are giving the same answers, “build up all traffic streams” “target keywords” “comment on blogs” etc. This works well for the established blogger but it’s a long and painful road for the new guy. Good thing the game is changing. There are now easier ways to compete with the big players.

The Shortcut

Normally traffic is built up by compounding returns. Each traffic source adds on the previous. Once you target enough keywords and have enough backlinks your site will build up significant traffic. The only problem is it all takes work, and the more competitive your topic the harder it is to get traffic. This means that for weeks or even months you may not get beyond 30 hits a day. I have one site that is nearly 2 months old and is only getting 10-20 visitors a day outside of Twitter. Including Twitter it gets around 400 a day.

How Does It Work

Social sites give the small guy a mouth. No longer does it depend on your SEO experience or your established domain names, now you can get quality traffic just by producing quality content. With social sites once you write a quality post (with a catchy title, see How To Write Article Titles For Traffic) you will naturally generate traffic even if it’s your first post ever.

There are many social sites you can use to build social traffic but I’m going to focus on Twitter.

How To Leverage Twitter

Using Twitter to get jump start your traffic still requires a little bit of effort but you will see quick results even if you are in a competitive industry. Here’s how:

1) Set up a Twitter account (best if the name is related to your blog).

2) Add followers who are interested in your niche.

Either find them through search.twitter.com or follow those who follow of other tweeters in your niche. Read 3 Ways To Get Target Followers (For Free) or use Twitter Snipe to do it automatically.

3) Add followers who are on other social sites (digg, stumble upon, reddit etc). Find them with search.twitter.com.

4) Tweet about your new posts.

5) After a few days tweet to remind people and ask them to retweet and submit to social sites.

You will get visitors to your site straight away (the more targeted Twitter followers the better). The traffic from the following retweets/bookmarks is also very powerful. For example I made the Digg front page a few weeks ago and had nearly 2000 views in about 15 minutes (resulting in server crash.. make sure your hosting is prepared). For more on social bookmarking see Social Bookmarking 101 and Getting Popular on Social Bookmarking Sites.

Long Term

By following this strategy and building your Twitter following you will see a constant growth in your traffic. As a bonus you will be improving your search engine ranking as your site naturally builds up backlinks. Remember to target keywords along the way as eventually you’ll have substantial search engine traffic to support your social traffic.

All the best!

Related Posts

• Social Bookmarking 101 – Where To Start
• Should You Write Blog Posts On The Weekend?
• Using Social Media To Promote – A Beginners Guide
• How to Tweet For Diggs
• Are You Posting At The Best Time Of Day?

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.

Related Posts

• Your Own Domain VS .Wordpress.com?
• Top 5 Places To Find Great Stuff To Tweet
• Should You Write Blog Posts On The Weekend?
• Using Social Media To Promote – A Beginners Guide
• How to Tweet For Diggs