Archives: Blogging
Manage The Bacn In Your Inbox
More than likely, if you are hosting a website, an active blogger or internet user you probably have something called Bacn in your inbox. It’s not what you eat for breakfast, but a new silly name created for receiving legitimate notification emails. Usually they are considered very low priority to view and most of the times something you quickly dismiss into your trash.
An example, is all those messages you get from communities ranging from Twitter, PayPerPost, Stumble and Web 2.0 services sending a notice of an update, friend request or message waiting for you. It’s not exactly spam or bogus but is otherwise littering your inbox at ever increasingly speed, especially if you are subscribed to many services.
To address this rising issue, an Official Bacn website has been created to spread the awareness. Not too long ago, iJustine attended a PotCamp discussing its definition.
How to manage Bacn? I’ve signed up to many services on the internet that send email messages constantly throughout the week. Some days are worse than others. Do I enjoy getting them? Not really. But at the same time I like to have the emails to get an quick update on what’s going on ‘out there’.
A few ways to manage it?
- Opt Out of Receiving Update Emails (usually in account settings)
- Setup a Filter to catch those emails in a separate folder, therefore keeping your inbox clean
- If the service/community isn’t valuable anymore, delete your account
Bacn usually keeps me up-to-date in numerous areas and also reminds me to not forget about them. Which for my forgetful nature, can be beneficial at times…although that’s what I have spreadsheets for…..
To manage your time more wisely and stay focus on your websites, eliminating these types of distractions can increase production. I have a few email accounts and the Bacn received can make my inbox a bit overwhelming, even if it’s only a notification email (they add up!). I highly recommend setting up a filter for these emails, they prove to be highly efficient in having a productive week. Which for a handful of you, can be great if you manage multiple sites.
Posted in Blogging, Tools | 4 Comments »
Contests Galore
There appears to be an increase of contests held by bloggers. I can’t be too surprised, as contests are a becoming an increasingly popular way to obtain more traffic, readers, subscribers and elevate exposure within the blogging community. With so many competitors, who could blame them? It’s a popular marketing tactic used with many companies…Free 1 Liter Coke Anyone?
I thought it would be great to quickly list some of the ones I’ve come across recently.
1) Jet Train - Blogging The Movie by Cash For Comments: Win a Free 4-Hour Work Week Book and Appearance in Blogging The Movie.
2) Guess The Next Page Rank by Ryan Shamus: Win Google Stuff by guessig the date of the next Page Rank. It hasn’t happened yet surprisingly, but should happen fairly soon…
3) Win $500 and More by Steve from 1 Cool File: Win $500 or link packages. Check out this site for more details.
4) “How To” Group Writing Project by Blue Jar: Write an “How To” post about any topic. Winners get a cash prize and a bonus prize of a free banner placement.
5) Car Giveway by Blogging The Movie: A free car and unique advertising. A one of a kind contest.
6) $4000 Blog Anniversary Draw by David Airey: Fantastic prizes for blogging about the giveaway and subscribing to the site.
I’m sure there are many more contests being held. If you find any other contests that I’ve missed, feel welcome to leave a couple and I will make sure to add them.
An update:
For those looking for up-to-date contests, check out: Contest Blogger or MyBlogContest
Posted in Blogging, The Net | 9 Comments »
Re-directing Affiliate Links
Re-directing an affiliate link or ‘cloaking’ a link is an easy task and can be a great advantage to your site for good reason.
As I have done on this site, many other sites link to domain/name-of-product/ and redirect either using a PHP jump script (as do I) or manipulate the htaccess file.
What are the advantage of redirecting an Outbound Affiliate Link?
- Keeping others from stealing affiliate sales and making it harder for “newbies” to see how to access the affiliate program or view it is an affiliate link.
- Easily change the merchant offer by changing only one affiliate link within your php redirect file or .htaccess. It’s especially helpful when you’ve sent out an email, newsletter or posted a link on a forum and a merchant has changed the link. You can easily change the redirect on your end and keep the affiliate sale alive.
- Increase confidence of clicking on an affiliate link as many people are hesitant to click on links that look like: http://www.tkyrse.com/affiliateid?12345
- Protect your affiliate links as many will hover over an external link and manually type in the top level domain in the address bar of browser instead of clicking on the link. It seems pretty silly as the site’s owner has gone through the trouble of finding valuable information for free, as the actual click doesn’t cost the reader anything.
There are some instructions on the web to set up a redirect by using .htaccess/301 redirects or php scripts that may appear confusing or overwhelming to a handful of site owners. There are also many software products on the market that charge $20-$60 to assist in protecting your affiliate commissions. But…actually, hiding your affiliate links can be so easy.
Using PHP
Create a file in notepad and call it moneynow.php and enter this:
<?
header(”Location: http://www.susansuarez.com/ref=2424538″);
?>
Of course, change the URL to be your affiliate link and upload the file to your server and use moneynow.php as the new link. So in this case it would be: http://www.susansuarez.com/moneynow.php. Now anytime anyone clicks on this link they will be redirected to the actual affiliate. Very simple, huh?
You could even create a directory called “information” or “recommended” that may add more trust to the link and will appear like this: http://www.susansuarez.com/recommended/moneynow.php
But before hiding an affiliate link, review your affiliate’s TOS and make sure it doesn’t forbid cloaking.
Using .htaccess
.htaccess is located in the same folder as your index.html or .php files. Open it up and at the bottom of that file, type this (Example):
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^moneynow.php$ http://susansuarez.com?ref=2424538 [R]
“RewriteEngine on” turns on the rewrite program and the affiliate link will be redirected.
Additional Cloaking
There is a free tool and easy way to further cloak your links from those who hold a mouse over a link to view the destination. Check out ClickFire to automatically add the coding needed to hide the destination, even a .php link, if you want that hidden from experienced marketers aware of php cloaking techniques. Just make sure your links are a different color than your other text so people know that it’s a link to click. Blue is a good standard color to use.
Robots.txt
To keep search engines issues at bay with creating a cloaking page, it’s highly recommended to keep Google from indexing pages that have nothing on it and are used only as a redirect. Google doesn’t like these pages and you wouldn’t want Google to index the page anyways, since it won’t have any content.
Save all of your redirects within one directory and exclude that directory in your robots.txt. If you don’t have a robots.txt file, you can create one in notepad and upload it to the root directory of your web page. The robots.txt file gives spiders a direction as to which directories or files they can examine and retrieve information. To prevent them from accessing any part of the site (including redirects with no content), enter the following within the robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder-to-be-excluded/
The asterisk (*) indicates “all” spiders or agents. If for some reason, you want to disallow access to any directory, then use a forward slash “/” and not an asterisk for “Disallow: ” To read more on robots.txt, take a look at
Cloaking your affiliate links should increase conversions, for many reasons noted above. There is no need to lose out on money by not ‘hiding’ affiliate links!
Posted in Affiliates, Blogging, Tools | 12 Comments »
Habits That Interfere
We all have some type of addiction, big or small, but in some way they interfere or take away from what we should be doing or maybe it’s rather an addiction to procrastination. Rather lately, I’ve been experiencing a difficult time focusing on the things I SHOULD be doing…mostly because of other distractions. Reviewing what gets me distracted, I thought it would be fun to compile a short list of “addictions”, whether or not they actually interfere with anything but rather are just plan ‘addicting/distracting’.
- Netflix - I can’t seem to get enough of updating my queue, checking out new releases, and even watching free videos online (Law & Order is a winner). Recently Netflix has even won me over by reducing my monthly subscription cost by $2.00 and giving me a bonus movie. I’m guessing this all because of their competition with Blockbuster, which is starting to sound even more appealing versus Netflix.
- City of Heroes - I just renewed my account, since taking a break for 4-6 months. I’ve been playing for quite a while (I think I’m going on 4 years…) and haven’t gotten tired of the MMORPG. I’ve even tried playing World of Warcraft, but can’t seem to get into, while my husband has been addicted to it (he’s recently been able to pull away from it). Not too long ago I found a way to combine my blogging with the video game world by naming a character after one of my websites. It also sounds like Shaun Low was thinking along the same ideas, which he explained in one of his recent posts. My recommendation in doing this, is if a character is named after a site be careful to not make it appear too promotional or you’ll lose out from being involved in the ‘gaming community’ and the experience. A lot of gamers are keen to being marketed to and want to reserve game playing for what it is…fun game play online, disconnected from RL (real-life).
- Watching the Real Estate Market Pop - My husband and I quickly bought and sold few homes during the past 4 years and recently got out to watch the housing market fiasco. It looks like we played our cards right because the market is slipping and subprime market is experiencing doomsday. I can’t help but frequently check out Ziprealty which allows you to look up homes and see price declines for each home and how long they have been on the market. I also can’t get enough of Zillow, although my feeling is that most of the estimated values are inflated. There are a couple excellent sites that are tracking the real estate market, Housing Panic and ML-Implode, if any are interested.
- Tivo - All I gotta say is that Tivo is a GREAT. I don’t always get the chance to watch tv or catch the shows when they air, and Tivo saves the day with a quick click. Much easier than VCR programming back in the old days. Recently I’ve been hooked on recording all episodes of Law & Order.
- One True Media - I just found One True Media a week ago and just in time too. I’ve been using the video making site to create a video montage of pictures for my daughter’s first birthday in September. I was amazed as to how easy it was to use and how many pictures I had. Total movie time…10 minutes which took 8 hours for me to make perfect with music. I’ll probably be making more videos in the future…
- Internet - I think many of us can raise our hands up on this one. I read my news, work, talk to friends, watch tv shows, surf and much more online. If I have no access to the internet, I would feel strongly disconnected from the world. A life without internet, I think not? I need to check it daily!
- Web Stats - This is at least blogging related. I’m a known offender. I check stats regularly and I’m guessing a lot of you do too.
My husband could probably list a bunch of annoying things I do that may not be classified as addictions, but repeated behavior (like re-arrange furniture).
This is only a short list that interferes with time spent away from doing work on my sites. Do you have things that pull you away from your blogging?
Posted in Blogging, The Net | 16 Comments »
