Enjoy the Bad News!

Am I a bad person because I sometimes enjoy watching "bad news"?
I don't think I am, but I let you decide...

Trend forecaster Gerald Celente shares his views on the global economic crisis. He predicts a global Katrina... an economical disaster that could be worse than the great depression...

I am forcing myself to believe that I won't be affected by all this. But even if I'm not, I can't imagine myself living "happily" in a world full of extreme violence, hunger and poverty. Maybe that lack of imagination is the reason why I enjoy these types of reports...

Are You guilty of this as well?

Get a Hug and Make Money

Getting a hug and making money at the same time? On the internet you actually can. Here's how it works...

When someone makes you a too-good-to-be-true offer, what do you usually do? Right, you neglect the offer.

In the internet marketing world, things work differently!

Typical "make-money-now" offers are usually backed up by an army of affiliates. Some promote the program on their blogs and websites, others recommend it to their email list.

Why? Because affiliate marketing makes them money.

Type just about any product name into Google and you immediately see what I mean: when the product is promoted through an affiliate network, all you get is an avalanche of recommendations.

As a result, that "too-good-to-be-true" offer suddenly becomes a very credible one.

My advice: Don't fall for it!

If you wanna make money on the internet, don't just promote anything that makes you a quick buck. Be very selective, try out the products you purchased and see if they deserve a recommendation. Your list of followers will hug you for that!

When Marketers Keep Their Silence…

So you wanna make money on the internet but you don't know how?

Here's a simple trick, so listen carefully...

It's not about how much traffic you get. It's certainly not about how irresistible a certain offer is. It's all about the connection between your credit-card-in-hand traffic and the products you recommend.

In other words, what you need is "targeted" traffic, and there's a very easy way to get it.

Just recently, I saw a brilliant question on a big marketing forum. The moment I saw that question I knew it wasn't going to get many responses. The ones who did speak out didn't actually understand the question. The ones who didn't deliberately kept their silence.

I keep an eye on that thread and will eventually share what no one wants to share.

It's not a secret. It's better than that.

To be continued!

7 Must Have WordPress Plugins

In one of my previous posts, I mentioned 2 wordpress plugins to disable some annoying auto-features. In this post however, I will show you seven plugins that add value to your overall wordpress experience, especially if you want to use WordPress as a business platform.

At the time of writing, I have these plugins installed...

• All in One SEO Pack
  Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog.
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
  Generates a fully customizable oldfashioned sitemap. Google loves sitemaps (have a look at the bottom of this site where it says "sitemap")
• Easy Contact
  An easy contact form you can use to set up a contact page (have a look at my contact page)
• Link Cloaking Plugin
  Excellent plugin to cloak outgoing links in your posts, pages, sidebar, etc... (see my woothemes goto-links in the sidebar)
• WassUp
  Excellent plugin to analyze your visitors traffic in real time with stats, charts and a lot of chronological informations.
• WordPress Database Backup
  Cheap hosting providers usually don't backup things for you, so here's your chance to have a backup feature for free.
• WP Super Cache
  A traffic surge might come to your site one day. Be prepared. Here's a very fast caching module for WordPress, ideal to handle heavy traffic. (You can activate this plugin in "off mode", and switch it on and off again whenever you need it)

Oh, BTW, I missed the Thank a Plugin Developer Day some days ago... Mister Matt Mullenweg declared Jan 28th as the official "Thank a Plugin Developer" day. Hope this post makes it up. Thanks everybody!

Twitter Badge Widget For WordPress

What is a twitter badge and how to install it on your wordpress blog. Well, have a look at my wordpress sidebar and you get the idea. It's a cool twitter gadget and it displays your latest twitter updates on your website.

Important! (update feb 1 2009)
You need a self hosted wordpress blog for this. If you don't, there's another way to display your tweets on your wordpress.com blog (no badge though).

How to Install the Twitter Badge...
When you go to the official twitter badge download page, you will see that there isn't a "twitter badge for wordpress" option, so wordpress users are stuck with the "other" option.

When you click on that option, you need to decide which version you would like to install on your wordpress blog. (I picked the flash version.)

Click "continue"... Then pick either the interactive widget (the one I am using on my website right now) or the display-only widget. Click "continue" again, select a color style (smooth, velvetica or revo) and a widget size (narrow, wide or full). I chose smooth and narrow.

Copy the produced html code.

Now go to your wordpress dashboard, find "Appearance" and click on "Widgets".

Please note that your wordpress theme must be widget-ready. If it isn't, consider to switch to a widgetable theme. You can find some nice wordpress themes at woothemes.

Select "show all widgets", scroll down below, find "Text" and click on "Add". A Text widget appears to your right... Open it (click on edit) and paste the copied twitter code in there.

Now before you click "Done", inspect the code because you MUST adjust the twitter code manually to adjust the width of the twitter badge...

Now pay attention!
In that code you will find width="290"... not once but twice. Change both values to the desireable width (you can do the same thing with the height-values of course).

Now, click "Done", position the Text-widget where you wanna have it (I put mine on top) and click "Save Changes".

Reload your wordpress powered webpage and ... Voila. There it is. Your Twitter flash badge for wordpress.

Now the only thing I don't like about the twitter badge is that it leaves an empty hole while it is loading. This can take up to a few seconds. For this reasons, I added a background to the widget. In case you wanna know how to add a background to your flashy twitter badge for wordpress, let me know.

Also, in case you're worried about the W3C validation of your wordpress code (XHTML strict flags the embed method), there's a good workaround for that as well.

Talk to you later.

Twitter is a Winner

Twitter is unlike any social network out there. When I first heard of its success, I couldn't imagine why it was so popular. After all, who's possibly interested in very short "tweets" that are up to 140 characters in length?

Just recently, I gave it a shot to see what the buzz is all about. And you know what. It's great. You'll meet all types of people there: doctors, pilots, single moms, web designers, marketers, you name it...

Twitter has a very simple interface. Each post or "tweet" may contain a link or URL, so you can actually share your favorite pages with your followers. Now that's powerful stuff.

Free Traffic...
I less than 2 days, I already have over 60 followers. The easiest way to get followers is to follow other people. In return, they will check your bio box or web page to see if you're worth following too. You can expect a couple of hundred followers in no time.

Ready to write some tweets yourself? Then follow me and sign up now. Twitter is a free service. I think you'll like it.

Getting Traffic from Social Bookmarking

According to Wikipedia, social bookmarking is a method for internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages.

Many internet users take social bookmarking to another level. Some call it social spamming, others call it just being smart, but pretty much everybody who makes money online does it: "dropping" bookmarks of personal web pages in the social networks to get traffic from that exposure.

Now, I deliberately used the word exposure because exposure alone doesn't give you any traffic. It is the way you write your bookmarks that does the trick. The more enticing your bookmark is , the more traffic you will get. (Doing some basic keyword research is pretty important as well, but I will get into that in a later post)

Social bookmarking can be a time consuming process, so you better get things right straight away: make sure the title and description of your bookmark catches everyone's attention - like a normal ad would do - but avoid a blatant style. Just make it interesting.

Your next step is to "share" your "discovery" (ahum). Most social bookmarking sites require you to sign up. It's a quick process but you have to use a real working email address to confirm your subscription.

A social bookmarking service like SocialMarker is a great starting point and is designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark blogs and websites. It's a free service and once you're subscribed to all the bookmarking sites SocialMarker supports (+/- 50), you can easily share your bookmark in less than 10 minutes.

Some people prefer to use more advanced tools for this. One of the best social bookmarking tools out there (in fact it is THE best) is called bookmarking demon.
Edwin Brian just released a new version of this brilliant software package. It's not cheap ($147) but it's worth every penny. You'll save tons of time and effort with it. If you can afford it, then go get it now!

Ping for Website Traffic

I am not too worried about the amount of website traffic I get at this time. Cashtrix dot com is a brand-new marketing site and like all new sites, it's a bit of a waiting game in the beginning.

Now, unless your main concern is getting people to click on your adsense ads (*), you can't go wrong with writing good content.

(*)Adsense is Google's revenue sharing program. Each time someone clicks an Adsense ad, Google gives a percentage to the owner of the site on which the ad was served.

Since I decided not to place adsense ads on my website - there's really no point to do that right now - I will focus my attention on writing good content. It might capture someone's attention...

Write, publish and ping
Each time you publish a new post, your wordpress installation automatically notifies a couple of blog directories by means of a pinging service.

I prefer to disable that feature because I wish to keep control over the amount of times I send out a ping (hint: once a day) so that blog directories don't think I am spamming them.
To disable, go to your dashboard, click "settings", click "writing", remove the listed update services and click on "save changes".

Now that you disabled it, you must do it manually. I try Ping-o-Matic first, and if that one stalls, I switch to autopinger or pingates.

It's really easy to do, and it gives your site some exposure and back-links. But don't expect a traffic explosion because you're headed for a big disappointment. Just do it because every little bit (and ping) helps. It really does.

Next time, I will talk about social bookmarking. Till then!

Two Essential WordPress Plugins

As I told you earlier, I am impressed with WordPress 2.7. This is one of the best publishing platforms out there and it's 100% free. In case you wanna try it out yourself, you can download it at the official wordpress site.

However, to be honest with you, there are a couple of things that I don't like about wordpress. But the beauty of it is that you can use wordpress' excellent flexibility to "change" what you don't like. "Yes WordPress can!"

So what is it that I don't like and how did I fix it?

One thing that I definitely don't like about wordpress is that it automatically replaces "straight quotes" with curly quotes (amongst other things). WordPress texturizes special characters for easier reading, but the result doesn't look good when you look at the source code (think search engine wise), and it's a pain in the butt if you try to share some programming code or if you try to paste some copied texturized text.

The solution?
A simple and free plugin written by Jason Litka called disable wptexturize. Download it and upload it via FTP to your plugin-folder:
your domain » wp-content » plugins.
Then activate the plugin via your wordpress dashboard. Click on plugins and find "disable wptexturize". Voila!

Now let's move on to the second wordpress feature I don't like: revisions and autosave. Each time you change something in your post, wordpress automatically saves a copy of the previous post version so that you can easily undo the changes you made (a revision).

Now this gets really annoying after a while, especially when you use the google toolbar as your primary spell checker. Google underlines the words it doesn't recognize and wordpress sees the underlining as a change, so it makes a copy, etc...

You can easily disable revisions and autosave by installing and activating a free plugin called... disable revisions and autosave. It was written by Exper Giovanni Rubaltelli and it works flawlessly.

How to Modify your WP Theme

In my previous post, I showed you how a premium theme can contribute to the monetization of your wordpress blog.

There is however another reason why I think you're better of with a premium theme: they are easier to to modify.

I modify wordpress themes for 2 main reasons:

If the (x)html code generated by a theme isn't W3C compliant, then I try to fix it. I check the validity of the produced source code at the W3C Markup Validation Service. I'm very picky about that because I believe that perfect codes are better indexed by the search engines.
In case you find an error and you can't fix the code yourself, ask the company or person who designed your premium theme. I am sure they'll do this for free, as it is in their best interest to deliver perfect codes.

The other reason why I like to modify a theme is to make the theme a bit more personal. Small changes are usually enough to make a difference.

At the time of writing...
The WP theme I am using right now, as any other premium theme designed by Woothemes, is very easy to modify. In case you also installed a Woo Theme go to your WP dashboard, and click on your theme's options menu (at the lower left-hand side of your wordpress 2.7 dashboard). There you can add your custom logo, your tracking codes, your banners, etc...

Also, Woothemes are fully widgetized, which makes it a breeze to add widgets to your blog's sidebar.

Well, there you have it. Next time I will talk about some essential plugins you need to install. Talk to you later!

Premium WP Themes? Yes! Here is why…

Should you pick a free theme or a premium theme for your wordpress blog or site? Well, that depends on what your intentions are.

If you like making money (like I do), then I believe it's better to pick a premium theme. Here's why...

At the bottom of your wordpress site, you usually find a copyright notice and a link to the company or individual who designed your wordpress theme. Now that's where the money is.

When you pick a nice premium theme, some of your fellow bloggers/visitors who aren't familiar with your theme might check out that link...

When you replace the original link with your affiliate link (*) you're in for some extra cash: each time someone purchases a premium theme through your affiliate link, you get a percentage. It's a nice way to monetize each page of your wordpress blog.

Good luck!

(*) To get your unique affiliate link, you need to sign up for the theme developer's affiliate program. All it takes is a valid email address and a couple of clicks.

How To Install a WP Theme

I just installed WordPress 2.7 and I am very impressed with the new layout of the dashboard. It's completely different from previous wordpress versions. The navigation buttons are on the left-hand side of the screen now, and although it took me some time to get used to it, I like it.

WordPress always comes with the default theme, so the first thing I did was getting a nicer wordpress theme. A wordpress theme is like a template and it gives shape to the looks and feels of your WordPress site.

Where to get WordPress Themes?
There are many excellent themes out there and many are completely free. Some theme builders sell their themes. Themes that are for sale are called "premium themes". You can download some of the best free and/or premium WordPress Themes at these places:

• Top WP Themes (Free)
• 100 Excellent WordPress Themes (Free)
• Woo Themes (Free and Premium)
• iThemes (Premium)
• Revolution Two (Premium)

How to install a theme?
To install a theme, unzip the one you downloaded and upload the complete folder to your wordpress themes directory. You have access to that directory via FTP under: your domain » wp-content » themes

Now log in to your wordpress admin area (dashboard), click on "Appearance" and click on the theme you want to preview. To install your selected theme, click "activate" (upper right corner).

Voila!

P.S. Did you know you can earn some good cash with premium themes? Watch the upcoming posts!

How To Install WordPress

Installing WordPress is very easy via your Control Panel or Cpanel. That's the login page you get from your hosting provider to manage your main domain. Usually you get in there by going straight to www.domain.tld/cpanel (change "domain.tld" with your main domain).

If you don't have a hosting provider yet, I recommend the baby croc web hosting package from Host Gator. That package allows you to install an unlimited amount of domains (and blogs, and websites, and ... ) on one hosting account which is great!
Hostgator offers great support and service too! Now, let's move on with the wordpress installation...

How to install WordPress
For those who have a hostgator account, log in to your control panel and scroll down to Software and Services. There you'll find the Fantastico De Luxe icon. Clicking on that icon brings up a new window. On the left hand side of that window, you'll find a menu. In that menu, find blogs, click "WordPress", then click on "new installation". Select your domain and follow the instructions to install WordPress.

That's it! You're ready to publish your posts and pages.

In the very near future, I will show you how to make some good money with your wordpress blog.