Dealing With Distractions

Wow, I didn't realize it's been quite awhile since my last post here. Fittingly so, since I haven't been doing much with internet marketing. Seems like it's been one distraction after another lately. So be warned that now I've got a lot of writing to get out of my system - it might be a long one here today! :)

For starters, we got a new cat and then shortly after a new dog too. (Emmy and Pepe, respectively.) So that's certainly been an adventure at times - but a fun one! And I had all kinds of trouble with my laptop after my kids were playing Disney toddler games on it. I actually spent 3 evenings getting it right again. (Sounds like we need to supervise them more closely while they play computer games from now on, doesn't it?!) I've never seen the mouse pointer totally disappear before, with even the Windows setup disk unable to restore it...but I finally got it straightened out.

I also downloaded a couple of new ebooks, so I've been studying those. One was a book on using the wildly popular video hosting site, youtube.com, to promote your own websites with. It's one of those that's being offered with resale rights, and it already seems to be all over the place. Because of this I didn't really care about trying to resell it, so I bought it for only about $3.00 from a guy on eBay without the resale rights included. For $3.00 I think the information itself is much more valuable than just having another ebook that I could try to sell amidst all the others doing the same thing. (I've never been big on that kind of situation.)

Really, in this case, just using the techniques the book teaches seems more worthwhile than trying to sell the book itself. It's called "Tube Traffic", if your curious, and if I was you I'd do a search for it on eBay if you're interested in buying it. You don't need to pay the $37.00 to $47.00 that most people are trying to sell it for.

The other one I downloaded didn't even cost me anything. It's the new 2007 revised edition of Honest Riches by Holly Mann. And I've got to say, this lady means it when she says honest. I bought this from her about 5 or 6 months ago, and she just emailed me a link to download the revised version for no extra charge. I think that was a really nice gesture on her part, and one you don't usually see among the world of marketing gurus! Just another reason I so highly recommend her ebook. Now this isn't to say that she'll always give everyone free upgrades everytime she revises it in the future, but she did this time anyway. It was well worth the trouble too...it looks to be about twice as many pages as the last one, with lots of new step by step details, information and examples included.

As you probably know, I don't plug many things on this blog because I've always meant for this to be about stuff I've learned as I go along, but I really do HIGHLY recommend Honest Riches by Holly Mann. I hope if you do buy it that you'll buy it through my link right there, considering that I never steer you wrong on this blog, and I hope you appreciate that! :) I agree with Holly's honest policy, so everything I write here is what I've found to be true...not just stuff that I've decided to try to sell you.

So all distractions aside, now I'd better get back to work setting up some streams of internet income!

More Wordpress Discoveries

Trying to use WordPress, (is it Wordpress or WordPress anyway?) I've also noticed that it doesn't offer access to HTML control over the templates like Blogger does. So even though they have more templates to choose from, you don't have much control over their use. Not with the free version, anyway. And keeping in step with my usual strategy of using whatever free or inexpensive alternatives there are for whatever I'm trying to do, that would mean that's what I'm using.

So one of the problems this causes is that I can't install the code for the totally free web statistics program I've been using. (StatCounter.com) Wordpress does offer their own blog stats page, so maybe this isn't all that crucial, but I do miss not being able to use StatCounter. I've seen some techno-geek types who seem to know how to do everything saying there are ways to insert it as a text item on the page somewhere, but even then the referral information still can't be tracked - just total hits.

So even though many people seem to prefer Wordpress over Blogger, I can't say I do myself. My plan is to promote affiliate products and generate Google AdSense income, and WordPress seems to frown on using their blogs to do either. So there just doesn't seem to be any good reason for me to use it. The only possible one being the 3rd party plug-ins you can use with it to allow Google AdSense ads to be displayed. There's at least one I've read about that offers a "sandbox" feature that allows you to see the actual ads that will display in advance. I'd love to be able to do that! So that's probably the only reason I'm giving WordPress a try for at least one blog.

And one more thing I've find out...you can't really totally delete a WordPress blog once it's been created. You can delete your own work on it, but the name you choose can never be re-used again - it's permanently unavailable from then on. (Even to the one who created it.) Seems awfully final, doesn't it? I have enough trouble making decisions like what to name my blogs without knowing that it can NEVER be used again once it's used and deleted. I wonder if Blogger treats blog names the same way?

So maybe it would be worthwhile to go out and try to create every good blog name you can think of just to tie them up and possibly be able to sell/transfer them to others in the future? (I wonder if WordPress "allows" that?!)

John

Experimenting With Wordpress

I hear so much discussion about which blog site people like to use more, Blogger or Wordpress. I've been using Blogger so far, so I thought I'd try Wordpress for my next project since so many people seem to prefer it. I've got to say though, I don't know if it's because I started out with Blogger first or not, but I find Wordpress pretty hard to figure out. It's got some nice looking templates and maybe a few more features, but I definitely find it harder to figure out how to accomplish what I want to with it. And there's very little help along the way...you just have to grind through and figure out how to do what you need to do by trial and error until you figure it out. Plus, you can't insert Google AdSense ads without downloading some sort of a plug-in first, and I don't believe they even allow you to post affiliate links. So if you're totally new at blogging, in my own humble opinion, I would still recommend Blogger myself. Hopefully they'll get their own bugs worked out before long, too.

I did stick with using Wordpress long enough to create a little blog just to try it out, so I need to start promoting it and get some inbound links set up for it. I'd like to see if I can at least duplicate the modest success I had with the Baby Alive blog this past Christmas season. But I still need to figure out how to deal with that plug-in that's required just to get the AdSense ads posted to it.