Here in PA we are approaching the first long week end of summer. The temperature is going to be very summer like and not making me happy as 90 degrees F and 90% + humidity can make me irritable.

Time to get the air conditioner out of the back and into the window again. Knew this was coming and if I had been smart it would already be in place and ready but it isn’t so guess I have work to do today.

Logged in today to the back of the blog and see that WordPress has their seventh birthday today.

Now those little factoids don’t by themselves have a lot to do with blogging per se but then maybe they do.

Things change over time and weather is always a big one for most of us. WordPress continues to change and 3.0 should be here shortly. WordPress has changed drastically over the years and continues to evolve today.

Much as we would love to have things stay the same it is the changes that offer you opportunity.

Are you getting in front of the changes in your niche or are you reacting to the change like the majority of people?

If you are looking for more readers and followers they will find you when you are in front. Hard to be followed when you are lagging behind.

On another note I am still looking for a title for my new blog tour to take place in August this year along with blogs to visit. There will be a prize for the winning name and if I visit your blog for the week you will get 5 days of posts from me and any references to any of my products will be your affiliate links. I will be promoting the tour on Squidoo and my own blog network so your blog will get extra promotion from me.

I will write on any of the following topics…

• Blogging
• Blog SEO
• List building
• Affiliate marketing
• Traffic generation
• Private label rights
• Product creation

So if you have a blog on any of those topics contact me at the support desk with details. If you have a name for the blog tour leave it in the comments.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, blogs, followers, squidoo, traffic generation, weather, wordpress

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One of the best ways to generate back links and additional traffic for your blog is using major sites where you can control to an extent the content and most importantly the anchor link text.

Sites like Squidoo, Hub Pages, et al. This is often called parasite hosting. You can act like a parasite and use their reputation to help build authority to your own site.

These sites work best when you use them to build back links to your own site and sell from your site. Some are very particular about linking to affiliate sites.

Here is an example of how you can use these sites

Create a review of a product on you blog. Add content to these sites and link to that review using anchor text that benefits you. Now you have stayed within the terms of service of the sites and are driving traffic to your presell page.

This is just one way to take advantage of these sites.

A quick aside – You may have noticed that I have started hiding some of the content here and allowing access to it only those that have registered for this site. Make sure to take advantage of that extra content by registering as you never know what is hidden below which you are missing. I am testing something and members will be the ones to find out about it when the testing is done.

[ ** Sorry... This content is available exclusively for WPME Blog Members ONLY. Please Login or Register to access this MEMBERS ONLY content ** ]

For more information on using these types of sites check out “Taking Advantage Of Parasite Hosts.”

Technorati Tags: back-links, Huib Pages, parasite hosts, presells, squidoo, traffic

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I am continuing the series of answers to questions that were asked in my pre-Christmas post. You can ask your questions to be added to the series by commenting on this or any other post.

Today’s question:

Hi, I’m new to blogging. I want to set up my own blog through WordPress. It seems that having them host it (i.e. WordPress.com) is simpler, with less troubleshooting. However, I also would like to use plugins (i.e. WordPress.org) but beyond that, I have no technological aspirations as of now. My biggest obstacle is that the tech stuff scares me if I hosted it myself. Any advice? Thanks.

It is easy to set up a blog at WordPress.com as you create an account and pick your theme. There are some downsides to it though.

You do not control the blog as it belongs to WordPress.com and they have some restrictions on using their service for affiliate marketing. You cannot add any plugins only those that they have and finally you don’t own the blog.

If I create a blog on my own domain and build up the traffic I have a saleable asset. Does not happen when someone else owns the domain.

Creating a blog using WordPress has become much easier with the latest versions of WordPress and there are tutorials like my WordPress Made Easy that will walk you through exactly how to do it in a step by step fashion.

There are services like Alex Syseof’s Expert WordPress that allow you to automate the installation and save a lot of time.

Now that being said there are some skills that you should cultivate to install and maintain a WordPress blog on your own domain like FTP but these are skills that you really need to learn and understand as an online marketer whether or not you use them to install a blog or not.

Finally you can always outsource the installation. You can go to any of the outsource sites or use my team to install your blog for you.

With the ease of adding plugins and themes through the dashboard on the latest versions of WordPress the pluses outweigh the minuses for your money making sites to own the domain.

Now that does not mean that you cannot use both to create a network around you money making blog along with other sites like Hub Pages and Squidoo. But that is a post for another time.

As always your questions and comments are appreciated and solicited.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: affiliate marketing, blogging, hub pages, install WordPress, squidoo, wordpress, WordPress.com

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Generating links is one of the keys to improving your search engine rankings. Various Web 2.0 properties can be an excellent way to do this and there are a couple advantages to using them.

• They tend to be high PR pages
• You get to set the exact anchor text

Here are 3 that I like to use.

• Squidoo
• Hub Pages
• Google Knol

All of these are free sites that you can use and they allow you to add in the RSS feed from your blog. You need to add in direct links to your pages using anchor text for what the page is about.

You can use each of these to target one of your long tail keywords per page.

These are just a few of the linking strategies that will be covered in the WordPress SEO Call on Wednesday at 7 pm.

Sign up for the WordPress SEO Call here.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: anchor-text, Google Knol, Hub Page, squidoo, wordpress seo

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I did a session at the Affiliate Funnel seminar on goal setting and planning this past Saturday. It really is important for your business but one of the big takeaways from it is doing action items versus maintenance items.

This applies to your blog too.

Lets look at some of the things you probably overlook as action items for your blog. Adding some of these action items to your routine can be a big help in improving your blog.

First and foremost is always fresh content but most bloggers that are serious do that regularly.

The overlooked items though are just as important.

When is the last time you…

• submitted an article for back links
• bookmarked your posts
• commented on other blogs in your niche
• bookmarked the blog you commented on
• created a Web2.0 property that links to your blog (Squidoo, Hub Pages, WetPaint, etc.)

It is now a new year and adding some of those items to your regular to do list can make a huge difference in how well your blog performs.

Are you going to take action this year to improve your blog or just going to add your content occasionally?

How you answer that will go a long way towards the success of your blog.

Please take the time to add what you are going to do and the time frame in the comments. There are other action items you may be using so feel free to add them in the comments too.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blogs, hub pages, squidoo, take action, web2.0, WetPaint

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This is the last post in the blog traffic series this time through .

Quite often I see people not use the most powerful part of their blog – the feed.

Here are just a few places and sites that you may be using where you can add in your feed and give people a chance to find your blog from things you are already doing. (This is not an all inclusive list by any means.)

• Facebook Profile
• Friend feed
• Squidoo pages
• Hub Pages
• Wet Paint pages

In almost all of these you just need to add the url to your feed and they will start updating your listing on all of those pages each time you update your blog.

If you have not set up feed burner or done anything special with plugins the default feed url for your self hosted WordPress blog will be http://yourdomain.com/folder/feed.

Now if that is not your feed look for the feed link, right click and check properties and you can see exactly what your feed url is.

Adding your feed into all these places will give more people the chance to find your blog while just doing what you normally do anyhow.

Even better especially for the various sites like Squidoo, et al your lens is getting new content added each time you post to your blog. Gotta love things that allow you to automate updating and we all know how much Google loves fresh content when the spiders visit.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blog traffic, Facebook, FriendFeed, hub pages, rss, rss feed, squidoo, traffic

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You need to take advantage of the many free services to help get your blog started.

Caveat: The center of your hub should always a WordPress blog or a squeeze page on a domain that you control and own in my opinion.

Now that we have gotten rid of the caveat, lets look at some of the free tools that are available.

• Squidoo – my absolute favorite
• Hub Pages
• Blogger
• WordPress.com
• MSN Live

For the purposes of illustration we will pick a topic and use a bad word in my vocabulary ass/u/me that you have done the research and found to have profit potential about Turtles. (Turtles are my marketing topic of the day today bare with me here.)

You buy a domain, create your blog and start putting content there to draw traffic. You are posting at least daily to get started and more often if Turtles is a very competitive keyword. (Yes, I know I just picked that and have no idea if it is a competitive word. Boo hiss on me.)

Now go to Squidoo and create a lens on your topic. Add your RSS feed to your blog as one of the modules and make sure that use at least 20 tags. (You did keyword research before you entered this market didn’t you?) Add a short text article or two. Grab a You Tube module, a Flcikr module on your topic and add a guest book..

Go to Hub Pages, create a new Hub on your topic and add your RSS feed again. Make sure that you add tags here too. (For both of these you can do a quick re-write of your content to meet the content requirements . Do not use the same content on both sites or what you posted on the blog.)

Create a Blogger blog using your main keyword in the title you sign up with and create a short post about the great article you just found that links to a specific post on your blog with the keyword that post was focused on as your anchor text.

At WordPress.com and MSN Live you will be doing the same basic tasks except you will link to a different post on your blog with the corresponding anchor text for that keyword phrase.

Once a week you will want to add something to each of these sites. When you visit Squidoo you can add a module or just add a few more keywords and re-publish the lens plus the rss feed from your blog will be constantly updated.

Hub Pages will follow the same pattern as Squidoo. I usually add a new content module every other week.

Each week you will link to a new post from each of the free blog services with the anchor text for that post.

This allows you to take 5 minutes extra a day 5 days a week and keep a constant stream of links coming into your interior pages on a regular basis.

Want to take it up another level? Add a commenting and bookmarking strategy along with this you can easily increase the traffic and ranking to your blog quite quickly with very little extra effort. Add in article marketing and you may have to pay more for your server

There are many more of these types of sites that you can use to get even more links. If you have a favorite share with us and leave a comment below.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: blogger, hub pages, increase traffic, linking, seo, squidoo, wordpress

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Today’s question is:

I know you are a big wordpress fan but I believe you mentioned using blogger on occasion. On what occasion do you use blogger instead of wordpress? Also, are there any tutorials you can recommend on setting up and optimizing blogger?

I never use Blogger for a primary site. I want to own any primary site and the easiest way to do that is by having a WordPress blog on a domain I own. Blogger is not easy to optimize unless you are going to make major changes. I don’t bother for what I use it for which is primarily back linking.

Have not seen but then again I haven’t really looked for tutorials on optimizing Blogger. I am sure that there are some but personally would not put the effort into something I did not control.

When I was creating various niche Adsense sites it was easy to get your site spidered by Google by using a Blogger blog. Because Google owns Blogger they spider those sites quite regularly and a good link to a new site will get the spider to your site extremely quickly.

Likewise if you are looking to open an Adsense account the easiest way is to create a Blogger blog, make a couple posts and apply through Blogger.

I still use Blogger as part of a network of sites to rank for a keyword but don’t spend much time optimizing them just using them to push links with the anchor text for the keyword I am trying to rank for. You can use some other services the same way to create your network. Sites like MSN, Yahoo, MySpace and some others all have blog type platforms to create links going to your primary site with your anchor text.

Creating a series of these along with a lens or two at Squidoo, some Hub Pages on your topic can all help to drive traffic and help you rank for your keyword often times multiple times from the various platforms. That is how I use Blogger but would never depend on it for a primary site.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

 

 Using and optimizing Blogger [2:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, blogging, msn live, myspace, squidoo, wordpress

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You see lots of people talking about using Squidoo for there business, linking exppertise building and more.

You can use it for more than just that. Doing so can also help your business too.

Here is an example. My partner Paul Rushing just had the lens of the day. It is not a business related lens but a passion of his.

Check it out at Raising A Child With A Cleft Palate.

Now here is the thing – that lens is about a passion he has. (Not that circumstances haven’t created that passion.) He uses it to raise awareness and help raise funds for a charity that is near and dear to his heart.

That lens had a lot more traffic than usual yesterday because of being the lens of the day. I know that he has received quite a few ratings (40 last I checked) and favorites (22) because of that.

Now this wasn’t created to promote any of his business lenses. It was a passion to raise awareness for a topic that is dear to him.

That being said though there is and was a spillover to his other lenses. This will raise his profile in the community at Squidoo. It will help even with the business lenses.

What pasions do you have? Have you built a lens just for that topic?

Yes I know we tend to want to worry about the business but spending some time on your passions can have some beneficial effects and help people at the same time. Consider it.

Want to understand more about Squdoo? Check out there blog it has a great article from Seth Godin. You can also learn more form my good friend Bob Jenkins at Squidoo Secrets.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: bob jenkins, seth godin, squidoo, squidoo secrets

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