• What is a blog?
• What is a self hosted blog?
• What is WordPress?
• What are the advantages of Self hosted wordpress blog vs free blogging sites?
• How can i get a self hosted blog? How can i get started blogging?

So without further ado, here it goes.

What is a blog and who is it for?

In a few words, a blog is a website. However unlike traditional forms of coding & languages used on static websites such as HTML a blog is more dynamic & can be a combination of different coding languages. Even after that HTML is everywhere inside the codes of the blog, in most cases alongside PHP & JAVA. So if you know a little bit of HTML then you can pretty much modify your blog easily.

In more detail a blog is your gateway to express yourself. It a dynamic website that can be easily updated, manages & configured. Blogs or as they are traditionally known as web logs are for everyone. Yes i mean everyone, be it corporates or small business, full time blogger or a work at home mom. In the current scenario many people from around the world are using blogs, for almost any purpose you can imagine, be it a fan site for a celebrity, a personal diary, a way to earn a living, a log for development activities or a simple way to update the world about your life. If you want to share something, write something or make money online then blogging is for you.

What is a Self Hosted blog?

Now that you know what a blog is, its time to understand the difference between a self hosted blog versus a blogging service. You might have noticed many online services that help you create your blogs easily, some of the well known services are live journal, blogger.com, wordpress.com, type pad, etc. All these sites allow you to create a blog without going through the hassles involved in installing blogs, plugins, modifying the blog, getting web hosting, domains etc. Basically they provide you free blogs on their own site. But like everything else that is free, free blogs have their limitations. One of the biggest disadvantage of the using these services is that the blog you are running, is actually ‘NOT’ yours. I will explain this more in detail later.

On the other hand there are self hosted blogs, which are complete stand alone websites [blogs] that does not depend on any sort of 3rd party services whatsoever. Yes, self hosted blogs do need a backbone and that backbone is the platform they use. A self hosted blog platform is nothing but a blogging CMS (Content Management System). Examples of these systems include wordpress.org (notice it’s not the same as wordpress.com), type pad, b2 evolution, movable type, joomla, durpal, nucleus etc. In a few words, these platforms let you control your blog in any way you want. And if you think having a blogger.com blog with a .com domain name, then please let me tell you that your blog is still not a self hosted blog.

What that means is that you need to ‘host’ the website (blog) on your own server, with your own domain name using a blogging platform, CMS, Script whatever you wish to call it. That is what a self hosted blog actually means. Because your blog is not ‘hosted’ by a 3rd party like blogger.

What is WordPress?

By now you would have already got an idea about what wordpress really is. But in order to avoid any confusion i would like you to note that the wordpress platform ( wordpress.org) is actually the same platform which is used on wordpress.com, it is a self hosted version of wordpress, just like blogger. Now lets get back to wordpress CMS. WordPress blogging platform is first of all Free, it is the single most platform in the world that has a dedicated team which is continuously updating it & providing new features, along with hundreds of other individual developers that provide plugins, add on’s, themes, etc.

WordPress is advance in every sense & is feature filled. In fact self hosted wordpress have a huge advantage in terms of SEO and that is a tested & proved fact. On the other hand wordpress.com is just like blogger (or blogspot) which is yet another free blogging site. Now that you know what wordpress is, lets get to the part you’ve been waiting for.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Self Hosted WordPress blog vs Free Blogging Sites:

15+ Advantages of having a self hosted wordpress blog:

There are many advantages of having a self hosted blog rather then a 3rd party hosted blog. Here are the advantages of having a self hosted wordpress blog. (Note: These are also the disadvantages of not having a self hosted blog or using free blogging sites)

1. Quality Content: Having a self hosted blog means self hosted content. Your content have a better chance of being indexed & starting a self hosted blog shows your seriousness about the topic you are blogging for. This would be seen as a quality content blog by the search engines.
2. Advanced Communication: Self Hosted Blogs gives you the advantage to explore opportunities when it comes to communicating with your prospective clients or visitors. You can have your own email IDs admin@yourdomain.com which also builds trust and shows professionalism. This however would not be possible in free blog unless of course you were using a domain and email forwarders. You can also add modules that allows you to organize events, contests, engaging content for your visitors, etc. This again is not so possible with free blogging sites.
3. RSS Feeds: Self Hosted wordpress gives you an upper hands when it comes to content syndication with its built in RSS & ATOM features. Not all free blogging sites provide RSS features as extensive as wordpress. Self hosted blogs gives you the ability to provide email & RSS subscriptions as well as pull in your RSS feeds to your social sites such as twitter, linkdin, facebook, etc.
4. Total Control: With self hosted blogs you are in complete control, in contrast to free blogging platforms this could be a huge advantage if you are an avid blogger. You get total control as its your web hosting, your domain & your platform (since you are the admin). You also don’t have to worry about bandwidth limitations, hosting space, etc. Imagine if you were using free blogging sites and had built a complete blog with active visitors & lots of content & one day all of a sudden you realize your blog was shut down, closed, deleted. No matter what was the reason, you take this risk when you opt for free blogging sites.
5. Ease of Use: WordPress blogging platform is as easy as it gets. The navigation of wordpress dashboard is extremely user friendly & with so many resources available online regarding wordpress & everything related to wordpress you can easily get used to a self hosted wordpress blog. Well the most important part is, you don’t need any coding experience in order to update, modify or improve your blog. This might not be the case when it comes to free blogging platforms.
6. Community: Getting yourself a self hosted wordpress blog also means that you are joining a very large wordpress community. Even if you were to say free blogging sites also have communities, i would say their community is limited to the ‘site itself’, for example wordpress.com community is limited to wordpress.com since all the blogs are on that one single domain. But if you are using wordpress self hosted platform you a bigger community & that means more ways to grow your network & build reputation.
7. Clean Coding: WordPress & many other self hosted blog platforms are developed by professional developers and have valid & verified coding. This means that what ever site you run using these platforms you will always be on the safe side because you will never have a coding problem, you are also free to edit the codes to modify & suit your needs. This again is not the case when it comes to free blogging platforms.
8. Promotion & social media: You can easily promote a self hosted blog since its a separate web identity. You can add sharing tools, plugins and easily promote to twitter, facebook, digg, etc. Being independent is always better when it comes to credibility, branding & of course making money.
9. User Friendly Interface: Self hosted wordpress sites can easily be customized, giving you the option to make your site as user or visitor friendly as possible, without all the cluttering or bad navigation. In fact the recent wordpress updates gives you the ability to add new navigation menus easily without depending on your theme for it.
10. Plugins: WordPress has a huge collection of plugins contributed by the wordpress community developers. Most plugins are free & you can find a plugin for adding almost any functionality to your blog. There are also some paid or premium plugins that offer certain features but they are usually not listed on the wordpress plugin database.
11. Endless supply of Themes & Design Options: Design of a blog is very important and could give you the edge over other bloggers. Modifying designs of a blog or finding free themes for free blogging services can be hard, if not impossible. WordPress has a themes database where you can find free themes. There are also many individual theme developers providing paid themes, some of which are really elegant & amazing. Self Hosted WordPress also provides you the ability to change or Edit the CSS of the blog or almost anything you can imagine. You can also find some free premium wordpress themes.
12. Affordable:Self hosted blogs are free, but you still have to pay for domain names, web hosting, premium themes & plugins, etc. However self hosted blogs are always preferred over free blogging platforms due to the branding & professional factor. And to be honest wordpress hosted blogs are affordable to a small business or even to a stay at home mom because the hosting & domain charges are minimal compared to the advantages you get.
13. Secure & Easy to fix: If you ever encounter problems with a free blog then your blog is as close as dead, however with wordpress hosted blogs you have hundreds of hours of security feature coding, thousands of support articles & the ability to create complete back up of your sites & upload them any time via FTP!
14. Branding & Reputation: Having a unique domain name & look gives you the reputation and branding edge over free blogging sites. Self hosted blogs are easy to brand & build as a reputable blog. Free blogs are regarded as free and you can’t expect to build a company or a brand on a free blogging service, can you?
15. SEO: This by far is the biggest reason why wordpress is so popular. WordPress self hosted blogs due to the simple & clean coding, instant content updates and great features gives you a bigger advantage when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. Search Engines love dynamic & continuously updating content, wordpress is exactly built on those concept. Better SEO = more visitors, which is better any day when compared to a dead, traffic less free blog.
16. Making Money: Yes that is right, if you want to make money blogging then switch to wordpress self hosted blogs. You have the ability to monetize your site, put on advertising such as ad-sense, banner ads, pop up ads, sell your site for a profit or even rent it. You definitely cannot do that on free blogging sites. Why? because some of them force their ads on your blog, some will simply not allow you to put any sort of ads on your own blog! In fact you end up making money for these free blogging platforms when you use their services, so choose wisely.

Disadvantages of self hosted blogs:

There aren’t many disadvantages to self hosted blogs, and the few that are depends purely on your situation.

1. Complicated Set up: If you don’t know how to follow simple instructions or are completely new to the web and have no tech knowledge then setting up a self hosted blog can be a denting task. However there are guides that can make this easy, but obviously it will take time. Free blogging sites are easy to set up since they provide the same set of themes, plugins, etc. All you have to do is create an account and your ready to go.
2. Cost: If budget is your problem or you don’t even have $100 or so to pay for web hosting & domains for up to a year, then self hosted blogs are not for you. Yes, there are costs but they are really worth it compared to the advantages you get. And of course you are not limited to a blog when you have web hosting & domain, you can do anything you can imagine!
3. Updates: Some self hosting blog platforms are hard to update, however wordpress blogs can be updated with a click of a button. So this is quite not a disadvantage unless you are using other self hosted blog platforms. Its a lot more complicated if you don’t know what your doing.
4. Hosting Issues: Having a bad host can ruin it for you & your blog. Some free & paid hosting services have downtime issues or the type of content you post, etc.  But if you are paying good & sign up for a reputable hosting company like Hostgator then this shouldn’t be a problem.

How can i get a self hosted blog? How can i get started blogging?

Finally now that you are aware of the advantages of having a self hosted wordpress blog. It is time to get started on blogging. The answer is really simple & a 3 step process:

• Get Web Hosting: I recommend HostGator Personally, because i use them myself (even this blog) & have had no issues in past 2 years. They also have unlimited bandwidth & space along with various features, the most important one is being able to install wordpress with a few clicks. Check out HostGator & their prices here. If you do plan to go with them then take the hatchling package as that is the most cheapest one & good for start ups. I personally use the baby package since i have more then 1 sites hosted with them. (Use code : SJRECOMMENDS to get 25% off)
• Get Domain Name: A good domain is important. Registering a domain should be cheap as compared to web hosting, most domain names cost around 7-10$ per year (.com/org/net) while a .info can cost as low as 2$. I usually register my domains with GoDaddy, sometimes with name cheap. Check them out.
• Install WordPress, Themes & Plugins: Hostgator provides fantastico installer, which makes it easy to install wordpress on your site in a few clicks. You can do this directly from your hosting CPanel account. You can get free themes & plugins as mentioned previously. If however you want more advanced & great looking themes then i recommend elegant themes. I personally use one of their themes for this blog & their themes are really great & absolutely cheap, they have more then 40+ themes for as low as 50 cents a theme.

TIP: If you register at Hostgator, then use the coupon code 'SJRECOMMENDS'
to get 25% of your package. Along with that, feel free to get in touch with
me if you need any help with blogging, i will try my best to help you.

Of course there is more to blogging then the above mentioned 3 step process. However i think this post is already long enough so i will leave that for my next post.

Final words:

Switch over to self hosted wordpress or any self hosted blogs if you are serious about blogging. And if you found this article useful then please share it! I would really appreciate if you shared it anywhere you want as a way of repaying me for the information. Don’t forget to follow me on twitter @sameerjoad & subscribe to my feeds to keep receiving more informative articles form me.

Till then take care & wishing you great success,

SJ

Google Page rank has been a topic of discussion for a long time. It is believed that page rank directly or indirectly affects your search engine rankings. A few years back Google told most webmasters that page rank is in fact 1 of the 200 different elements of a site that they use to calculate the search engine rankings.

But unlike Google’s statement, most SEO experts and companies considers Google Page rank a important element of SEO. Almost every webmaster, big or small keeps an eye on their page ranks. In some cases page rank can be a deciding factor while selling advertisements or getting advertisers for the website.

Google to remove Page rank?

A few years ago back in 2007 google requested feedback from webmasters weather or not to remove pagerank from the webmaster tools. But at that time it was rejected by most webmasters. However recently Google with the introduction of Google Labs for webmaster tools and other changes, also removed the Pagerank Data from webmaster Tools. This change however went unnoticed by most of us, however it has surely started a endless discussion and line of questions. With the first one being, is Google going to remove pagerank?

Susan Moskwa from Google explained it like this:

"We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus
on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most
important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed
it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it,
but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

There is no doubt Google has been trying to tell webmasters for so long to improve the content and quality of their websites and not just concentrate on building their pagerank. We all know how most webmasters try to gain pagerank, which is by link building.

Does this means an end to link building?

Trying to gain pagerank not only encourages link farms or spam but loads of different problems. Perhaps which is why Google is having a hard time due to the ‘pagerank addicted webmasters’.

But  it does not end just here, Google’s move has left many of us startled. What should we do now? Just completely forget about pagerank? But how is that going to help many of us who depend on pagerank for selling advertising banners on our pages, seo services, link building services??

Is Google changing its algorithm for ‘serps’? Maybe or maybe not, but it surely gets you thinking. The google toolbar still shows pagerank. But its been removed from the webmaster tools. So pagerank is just for show, now? It kinda takes out the whole point of having pagerank in the first place.

Will it affect online business?

Lets not start speculating that Google is going to remove pagerank completely without any official announcements. [since they didn't announce removing them from webmaster tools we can't be sure] But telling webmasters not to concentrate on pagerank building is definitely going to affect business. Specially for those people who own directories, article directories, link sales, seo services, link building services, etc. The list is endless, i mean if Google tells you to forget about pagerank, why would you and thousands of other webmaster spend precious time and money trying to build links for a good PR?

It is going to have some minor effects on blogging community as well. Its going to kill the purpose of ‘dofollow’ blogs. For some blogs there will be loss of comments aswell, maybe link exchanges will also decline.

Are their any advantages?

There are many advantages, firstly there will be less spam. No more link farms and it will be a boost to some ‘real’ sites and blogs with unique content. Why?

Because if Google removes PR, it would mean all high PR sites and link spammers might drop and other sites will rank better depending on the quality of content, this is good news form a searchers point of view.

But will Google remove PR?

That is the question which everyone seems to be asking right now. Is google thinking to remove PR from its serp algorithm? If it does how is it going to affect us all?

The answer is not yet clear but from recent changes, we can see where Google seems to be heading. Keeping all assumptions on one side, it could simply mean Google is trying to deviate the attention of webmasters from the PR craze and wants them to start building content and quality? I think that would be the most safest way to understand Googles Intentions, but no one is sure what lays ahead in store for us.

What should i do?

There is nothing you need to worry much right now, but if you are thinking into starting directories or getting involved in link building business, directly or indirectly then i would recommend you to start finding a new path. Because many webmasters are now not worried about pagerank, this would mean less business for such services.

If  you are a pagerank addict, continuously trying to get a good PR. Specially by spending lots of money on link building services and good SEO services then its time to stop and just concentrate on your content quality along with ‘on page’ SEO. I also found many bloggers using blog & forum commenting as a method to build quality links, this will not work anymore so instead try providing quality to your readers and build a network. At Least your likely to save some time.

And if Google ever removes pagerank completely then it will have different affects on different businesses, try to avoid indulging in such business or services in which having a good PR is necessary.

*****

Until next time, have a good day and a great week ahead, let me know what you think of this move from Google?

SJ

well yes you read it correct. Till now people keep talking about alexa ranking, alexa traffic ranks, etc etc but no one ever told you that there is actually a way to get traffic from alexa.

But before i come to that let me tell you a bit about alexa. Alexa is a ‘site monitoring’ service that monitors your site statistics, such as traffic, geo-analysis, page views, age group of traffic and many more things. It then ranks your website among all others based on your traffic in a particular month. This is called a alexa rank.

What is the use of traffic rank?

Alexa traffic rank is of no direct use to you. Unless you are a web analytic of course. However it does effect your sites popularity and income indirectly. When advertisers look for websites to advertise on then they consider few factors, alexa traffic rank is one of those factors.

Alexa is very popular among all webmasters, there is absolutely no webmaster that don’t use alexa to monitor his site and improve his rankings.

Tell the secret already!

ok alright, there is no big secret. Its a very simple thing which the smart savvy people have noticed and are taking extensive advantage of it. While others might not even know of such a feature.

You must be wondering what this feature is which you can use to get traffic ‘from’ alexa? Well let me explain you in easy words. Alexa has a feature called ‘reviewing’. Everyday thousands if not millions of people look up on sites such as google, yahoo, msn, twitter, youtube, facebook, amazon….. the list is too big. But you know what i am talking about, the big guys with the traffic rank 1-100 get lots of views on there profile pages.

Won’t alexa care?

That is the sad part unfortunately. Alexa as a big reputed company should be more considerate about its own site. I find many people writing ‘useless’ reviews on sites with good traffic rank. Sites such as google, yahoo, etc. Not only does they write useless reviews, they actually SPAM the hell out of them.

Take a look at the screen shot below on reviews for yahoo.com or go directly to this link. Make sure you go to the ‘review’ section though.

You see how people simply just spam like that? But worse off, there are others who actually pay a visit to those links. This has been tested in fact, if you go and write a review with a reference to your product then you get lots of targeted visitors. But your product must be relevant to the site you write a review for. That works even better.

Now wait! I am NOT asking you guys to spam there. Now that you know of a way to do so. But i told about this basically for everyone to know more about the services they use. Informational purposes only. I didn’t try yet but i wonder what effect it will have on my site in terms of traffic.

I also noticed some people write reviews multiple times and some do this on daily basis to try and keep their reviews on first page. This is hilarious and am rather disappointed in alexa. I mean don’t they have any maintenance? How can they allow so much spam on their reputed site? If that wasn’t enough, but these reviews also hurt the image and reputation of the sites about which they are written. For someone who is new to facebook and if he reads such Spam reviews about it on alexa, do you think that person is going to join facebook? I highly doubt that.

Is there another way?

In fact there is. There are 2 ways you can get traffic ‘from’ alexa, legally and spam free traffic. But how?

1. You can use the above method ‘without’ spamming, meaning giving your honest reviews with a link to your blog or site under your name. Such reviews won’t be considered spam and would actually get you traffic and people won’t even call you a spammer. So review writing on alexa is a new traffic generation method on my list.

2. You could do it like how the others do. Make your site popular, gain higher rankings. No don’t worry, rankings in top 100 or even top 100k is very hard. But you can aim for higher traffic ranking in a particular country or on a particular topic. I mean there are 190+ countries in the world [not sure how many total, damn i am not good at geography] and each country has its own ranking sites.

Once again please don’t spam and i do HOPE someone from alexa reads this message and actually employees someone to remove off those Spam comments and reviews. I had the notion that they do have staff who does that, but i guess they get too much spam reviews daily. In that case how about ‘moderating’ the reviews before publishing them?  That won’t be hard to implement i guess. Folks at wordpress might be helpful too. It will certainly reduce the spam.

And sorry for the late post guys, i was busy with lots of work. Take care and don’t spam. good luck in this new adventure, do it legally though.

Till then have a great day,

SJ

Its almost the same thing as a artist without imagination, a road without cars or a job without payment. Many blog owners who are successful knows the power of these small little files known as plugins and usually those who fail at blogging are the ones that never experimented with plugins.

Which is why you must know about your possibilities and expansion into the blogging world. WordPress is a excellent open source platform and the best fact about it that their are endless possibilities for creating your ‘dream blog’ with wordpress and getting almost any feature you want working in a wordpress blog and all this is possible because of plugins and widgets.

So i prepared this list of 10 most useful and must have plugins for any wordpress blogger. Also i have included 5 bonus plugins which are not a ‘must’ but helps in enhancing your blogs!

[Please note that the list is arranged alphabetically and all plugins are equally important]

1 . Akismet

Akismet is from the creators of wordpress itself and it is already available to you by default, i can’t imagine surviving without akismet. Akismet blocks and stops Spam in your blog which is a necessity for any active blog!

Akismet is free to use and it requires a API key for it to work, you need to register at wordpress.com and get a account, this account also grants you a AIP key to use with akismet anywhere on a wordpress blog.

2. Add to Any : Share/Bookmark/Email Button

This is one of my favorite plugin, this plugin is has been powering my blog and spreading it viraly since the start. The best part about is that its not ‘visibly abusing’ to your visitors and just a small button on the end of each post which has resulted in so many sharing and caring for my posts. I recommend this plugin to any blogger because it is a viral one!

3. All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is the backbone of my blog, its the life of my works because this is the plugin that has been generating endless amount of organic Google friendly traffic for me every month.

AIOS pack enables you to easily add keywords, title, description and meta tags to your post making it very search engine friendly, this plugin is a MUST if you want to generate organic Search engine traffic.

Using this plugin i am ranking in top 10 on Google for many keywords and my search engine traffic is never less then 300 unique every month from Google for those keywords, which is a very big thing for me considering that this blog is only 2 months old.

4. Comment Luv

Spread the luv!

Comment luv is a plugin that enables you to give back to your readers, using this plugin the people who comment on your post has the ability to use a snippet of their own blogs feed, which means that they would love to comment on your blog! This plugin helps you get social – in few short words it will increase your comments count because their are people who loves comment luv blogs.

You need to register on the comment luv website to get it, but its free so welcome to the community!

5. Comment Relish

Ever wondered how to get loyal visitors? or increase the amount of your RSS subscribers? or better yet thank your visitors for participating on your site?

Well Comment Relish does just that! It will send a automated personalized message, just like a auto-responder from aweber or getresponse, the best thing about it is that it won’t spam your commentators, it only sends the message once per email. So that means you can thank them for commenting on your blog when they do it for the first time only!

I use comment relish to remind those readers of subscribing to my RSS feeds and to follow me on twitter, this is working like a charm and is really helping in the growth of my blog at the same time not spamming the commentators to death.This plugin is also free.

6. Contact Form 7

This is a must have plugin for every blog, specially for every new blog!

Contact form solves a very big issue among wordpress bloggers which is having a ‘contact form’ using which your visitors could contact you, it builds your own branded contact form which does the job very well, you can add and include custom fields and can have a form about anything you want, be it feedback forms, contact us form or selling advertising on your site. Plus its really easy to use and insert on your pages.

7. Google Analytic Plugin

If you don’t have this plugin in your blog then you rather stop blogging right now!

Google analytic plugin easily connects your Google analytic account and wordpress blog, this plugin is important because you want to know each and everything that is happening with your blog and the outside world. Tracking your visitors and then optimizing yourself to perform better is what every successful blogger does and this is the sole reason why you need to use Google analytic.

8. Google XML site maps

Since Search Engine traffic what matters most for any blogger, you need to provide the search engines with a ‘passage’ to each and every corner of your blog!

This is where this plugin comes into play, smartly designed this plugin creates XML site maps which tells the google bot of the whereabouts of your pages, posts and every single corner of your site, the more the bot crawls the more higher are your chances of SE traffic and higher rankings!

9. TweetMeMe Button

Twitter is perhaps the most viral social media till now and its really easy to take advantage of this!

Tweetmeme button makes it easy for your visitors to tweet/retweet your blog posts and spread the word, the one thing i noticed is that tweetmeme button gets more attention then any other share/save buttons which makes it viral and infectious! This is also used by industry giants such as mashable and tech crunch and it usually creates a twitter trend for them, so why not take advantage of this?

10. Digg this Button

Digg is very well known to everyone, which is why you need a ‘digg this’ button to get your articles and blog posts on the top!

The best use of digg this button is getting your posts indexed fast, believe it or not but search engines loves ‘social buzz’ and digg has helped me to get some of my posts indexed in less then 12 hours which is very good and welcoming news for us bloggers!

Bonus Plugins

These plugins are not a ‘must have’ but their use are really fantastic which is why they are making to this list!

1. DoFollow plugin

This plugin removes the evil ‘nofollow’ tags from your blog and thus increasing the amount of attention and comments you get on your blog, but be warned you need to use ‘akismet’ if you want to use this one because it will double the amount of spam comments you receive!

2. FeedBurner FeedSmith

Feeds are the heart of any blog and having subscribers to your feeds is important! This plugin detects all possible ways to access your feeds and redirects them to feed burner making it easy for you to track your subscribers.

3. Subscribe to Comments

This plugin gives the option to your visitors to subscribe to other comments on a blog, thus increasing the amount of comments and social interaction among your readers.

4. Top Commentators widget

More like a widget then a plugin but you need the plugin installed and activated in order for the widget to work, it enables you to show your top 5,10 or any number of commentators on your blog, this creates a competitive spirit among your readers and increases the amount of social interaction and comments on your blog. The widget can be displayed easily on your sidebar, footer or any widgetized space using the widget tools from your blog dashboard.

5. WP-Cumulus

Evey wordpress blog uses tags, but displaying those tags in your sidebars looks very ugly.This plugin makes your tags look more organized and cool, by displaying them in a flash embedded 3-d space.

That’s all for the top plugins but remember you need to add them to your plugin directory and adjust the settings of each individually, and respect the copyrights of the plugins.

Also many plugins might not go with your current themes so you will have to test them before that, and some themes requires certain plugins to be functional such as limit post plugins or page navigation plugins, these plugins are common which is why they are not included in the list, these plugins are supplied by the theme owner or designer.

P.S i don’t like spam and i don’t recommend you to abuse any of these plugins and spam!

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

Seriously! Not kidding i did!

and for those of you who have a hard time digesting this, then here’s the screen shot of my AdSense account, that’s 97k in just 1 month – I am now officially the king of AdSense !

Now that i have your attention, want to know my secret?

Unlike all other gurus i am not going to make a ebook about this and sell, instead of doing that i am going to share those secrets which made me solid $97k within a month, so hang on with me till the end – believe me you don’t want to miss this!

Did you Got Ripped off ?? Ad Sense treasure? Make money with AdSense?

Well i did got ripped off many times with AdSense product and ebooks, i never made a single BUCK until i discovered this extremely ‘Top Secret’ which all AdSense gurus DON’T want YOU to know about! But i am going to expose the ‘top secret’ of all those ‘AdSense gurus’ today so you can too be a AdSense Guru.

But Wait till you find out how these so-called gurus rip you off without you suspecting a single thing. Before that let me tell you something about one so called program called Adsense Treasure [LINK REMOVED]

A guy named Abid says he made $40k dollars with AdSense using his super AdSense site, now to come to think of it – when someone boasts so much about their products then of course people want proof to believe it and this guy shows you PROOF as well,[screen shots of his AdSense account - which looks very real - almost like mine!]

Take a look at some interesting facts of what most AdSense gurus will sell, tell and earn!

1. The main Adsense treasure site is actually not the one which i showed you here, but this guy made it viral by introducing a affiliate program so indirectly he is making 100 other people to use his product and scam other innocent people, the picture you see on that site are not even real,if you were smart and Google those pictures on Google images for ‘AdSense treasure’ you will find them hosted over 100 sites and the exact same copies of these ‘AdSense treasure sites’ are everywhere on the net take a look at this one here. Does that ring a bell?

2. Most AdSense Gurus will sell you ‘articles’ or ‘article sites’ with a promise of get-set-forget but the hard truth is these articles they provide you are being used by 100+ other sites on the net, so if you even trusted this you will end up having duplicate content on your site which means you won’t make anything via AdSense as Google is going to penalize you!

3. Almost All AdSense gurus will sell you junk that is a ‘rewritten’ version of some old product which you never knew!

4. AdSense Gurus never show you a ‘live’ working site of their own using which they earn so much as they promise you!

5. AdSense Gurus earn more money selling their ‘AdSense products’ and via affiliate programs then they earn with that AdSense Program!

6. No AdSense guru will actually provide you with a valid ‘thank you’ letter from Google, but the truth is any AdSense or ad word member who performs excellently well is being thanked by Google or they have appreciation letter right form Google!

7. AdSense won’t make you money without a website or via ‘revenue sharing’ unless you work extremely hard!

8. Most Gurus will ask you to advertise via AdWords and then monetize your ‘advertised’ page via AdSense to make money, now that is Dumb! but people fell for it too

9. 80% of AdSense products are useless and the only way you earn money via it is through click bank!

10. AdSense is Google property, if you think you can trick and make money with AdSense like the gurus tell you to then you scammed a Internet Giant! Get used to it their are no shortcuts to making money with AdSense or tricks to earn overnight – the only fact is these are methods the gurus use to promote their products.

How they hypnotize you into buying and make you believe their products?

Its basically because the sales letters of such sites are too good to be true, just a few months back their was a site that promised you ‘free Google AdWords ads’ and everyone fell for it, without doing any research or being a well informed buyer – people JUST buy them!

And the biggest reason for that is the proofs they provide, those screen shots which are definitely not photoshop are too hard to part with, but now comes the interesting part you all been waiting for!

True AdSense money makers are those who are good in analytic and SEO along with lots of traffic. But wait their is still 1 way to make $97k+ with AdSense and that’s my way!

My secret to $97k+ a month!

remember the screen shot i showed you above?  No its not photoshop its real!

But the truth is i never earned $97k+ this month, i wish i did tho lol,bottom line that screen shot is fake!I had you believing me for a second dint i?

Here is the secret i promised – I used a ‘AdSense screen shot Generator’ to generate this image, its as easy as 1, 2, 3! and now imagine all those people who fell  for these scams and worse of all all those affiliates who promote these scams!

You want to know about the generator also? go here its one of those fake generators [please don't use it to scam others]

well i don’t know your intentions but my intention for that screen shot was to inform you about how easy it is for anyone to ‘label’ themselves are ‘AdSense gurus’ and rip you off, just like this guy abid and many others are doing online, i learned the lesson the hard way but i don’t want the same to happen to you guys! So watch out for these pesky AdSense gurus!

If you think you got scammed just like i did then give this article a digg or tweet and help spread the word!

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

If that’s your worry, then have a look at what i discovered recently which i would like to share.

What if you could use the viral powers of toolbar? without having your visitors to download and install anything?? how amazing would that be!

Well you can do that with wibiya – a very interactive free toolbar from wibiya but wait not just any toolbar its loaded with features and i can bet its going to be the next big thing for every online marketers once the beta testing is over. They are free currently for their beta testers but they might not always be so and every week they release new amazing features so i am extremely lucky to be able to be a part of their beta tester team and if you own a website or blog [basically blogging platforms are much easy to use] then you can too get on this amazing opportunity!

Have a look at the dashboard below

But let me tell you that its currently invitational based only, my invitation was accepted in 2 days so i guess yours will too and their support staff is amazing – answers to your problems and questions within minutes.

The best part about wibiya is that users don’t have to download anything and they can have access to all your features like twitter, RSS, random posts[generates good page views], face book community, games[for blogs related to gaming niche], blog notifications [pop ups that don't annoy], flicker gallery and a whole lot more all in a single toolbar right below the browsers screen, just like the one on the blog. Its very customizable and easy to install as well specially for wordpress all you need is a plugin which is generated for you automatically from the dashboard!

I love the blog notifications feature, i can send a new blog notification everyday whenever someone visits the site and i can just interact directly with them!

And the toolbar can be minimized into a small tray without interfering with any other features of your blog or annoying the visitor or your readers or taking too much space on the browsers screen! this is good because it won’t mess your blog up and won’t give your visitors irritating feelings of running away from your site lol, in fact it does just the opposite.

As you can see you can easily customize it to go with your current blog, using your own logos and all you have to do is click a single button and the changes appear on your website.

Get in the boat if you want to take advantage of this next generation blogging technology! And a big thanks to the wibiya team for the active support and awesome features they provide for the community!

kudos to wibiya and the team

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

For me twitter is very time consuming and after twitter made few updates a while ago, we are no longer able to see the ‘mutual’ or those people who we follow that do not follow us back and worse of all you can no longer remove them directly via twitter in bulk.

This made it very hectic for me recently and i slowly started losing followers, because people tend to take advantage of this and remove the people they follow because they know we might not be able to find out about that for a while.

And to make it worse, its impossible to manage multiple accounts and to analyze my twitter status, trend and followers.

Out of all these painful issues the most annoying one is the amount of spam direct messages that i receive from twitter followers and friends, most are automated, but imagine getting 500+ DM every day because that’s the amount i get and then deleting them all one by one takes a lot of time.

Due to all these problems i started searching for solutions and since twitter is exploding and their a app or script for almost anything in twitter, just like their are for facebook and iphone, twitter apps are amazing and can enhance your usage of twitter. I found few of them and used them for a while, and out of those all, i found 5 of them most useful.These apps,bots,scripts and services helped me save tonnes of my time on twitter. And i felt like sharing those for all of you guys who have similar problems.

1. Huitter (no longer works)

Huitter.com provides some very good twitter apps and scripts, one of those called ‘Mutuality’ is my favorite

Using Mutuality you can automatically ‘unfollow’ all the people who you follow and who are not following you back, their is also an ‘exclude list’ where you can add people who are important to you and you don’t want to unfollow them.

All this within a click of a button so you don’t want to miss this.

2. Friend or Follow

Friend or follow is a quick service which shows you how many of your friends are not following you back and how many of your followers your not following, its a good tool to find out the mutuality when you need it. An excellent tool for those who have lots of followers and friends.

3. Splitweet

Splitweet is a amazing tool for those who have multiple accounts on twitter. Its the ultimate solution to managing multiple accounts with ease, its also good tool to monitor your brand.

You can use it to tweet on multiple accounts at the same time and follow the tweets of your friends from all your accounts at the same time, all at one place! Check them out.

4. Useqwitter

Twitter always send you a message to your inbox whenever someone starts following you or sends you a direct Message, but does it send you a email when someone stops following you?

Useqwitter is one such service, it will send you email updates when someone stops following you, its a good tool to monitor your twitter account, but if you lose lots of people daily then you will gets lots of messages in your inbox!

5. DM doctor

For those of you who get tonnes of Direct messages and waste lots of time trying to delete them and empty your inbox, this is the solution for you!

The DM Deleter is a script, you need to bookmark the script and go on your inbox and then select your options and click! And your messages will be deleted automatically. You can read more about it here.I deleted 1843 messages with it today, and it took me few minutes to do that and i wasted 30minutes + yesterday to delete around 200 messages manually :S wish i knew about it sooner.

Anyways hope these tools are useful and enhance your twitter experience, their are many more tools out their for twitter and i will be making a list of all of them very soon.

Don’t forget to share and Buy me a smile (see sidebar) and of course join me on twitter, my fan page & subscribe to the feeds to stay updated. Till then have a great day,

SJ

This is my personal review of Moola.com, a program that pays you to play games with a potential to win up to $10 million by risking it all – SJ

Get paid to play?

Is that really possible? well if it was any other gambling site then i won’t write about it, but ‘get paid to play’ is turning out to be a very hot concept currently with many sites turning up, inspired by the ‘get paid to industry’ i think you guessed it already you are basically getting paid to do something which you already do. The concept is a mix of casinos and get paid to, but unlike casinos you don’t have to risk money form your pockets in order to climb up the ladder to earn big.

Well yes, but with a twist, Moola is one such ‘get paid to play site’ with a twist, Moola gives you 1 penny when you first join it and it gives you the ability to bet that penny against other users of your level on a game, their are many games you can chose from, the winner doubles the amount since he gets to keep his own penny and the losers penny, while the loser starts all over again with 1 penny, but according to Moola if you win 30 consecutive times then the amount you make is $10,737,418.24!!

WoW, that’s what you must be thinking but i don’t think anyone has reached that goal their yet, even tho their are some members who have successfully cashed out, the lowest amount with which you can cash out is $10.

Moola is not a gambling site but it is very very close to being one, since you don’t risk any money from your pocket its fun playing on the site, currently it features 4 games and has many features including lots of exciting competitions and games, if you want to see an entire list of moola’s services then search for moola on wikipedia.

What else is new?

Moola along with its exciting features and service also has ‘paid to shop’ offers, where you get good amounts of discounts based on the merchants affiliated with moola.

Moola was invitational based only, means only current users could invite you to join moola but recently moola started sending invitations from the site itself so that everyone can join. Moola also has the ability to invite your facebook friends to play moola from facebook.

The best part about moola is that even if you don’t really make anything out their you will definitely have fun or pass your time, maybe that’s why it was featured as no.11 on pc-worlds ‘15 best websites to waste your time‘.

What the people are saying?

Moola is great but it is limited, mostly because moola is a Canadian based company allowing only American and Canadians to register on the site, so others from around the world cannot participate on moola.Why am i reviewing it? because of the feedback i got from my friends who have used moola so i think its worth a mention.

secondly moola will show you advertisements from anywhere between 10-30 seconds each time you play a game, this means that you will have to let the video finish in order to proceed, this gives the advertisers benefits of making sure their videos are seen but it gets very annoying at times.

So that’s it for moola, if your from the US or Canada make sure you check out moola! Moola can make your ‘make money online‘ dream come true.

Update: Moola now accepts international members? I haven’t checked this personally but read a review on another site. So try it if and do leave a comment or your own review.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

This is my personal review of Hunch.com, a recommendation engine that helps you make good & informed decisions – SJ

Can’t decide where you should go for summer holidays?

Or what jobs to apply for? Which new car would you buy? Where to invest that money you have been saving for awhile? What gift to buy for your relations? So many questions but hard to decide, right?

There are times when you are unable to decide what to do and those times are really stressful. Many people have a hard time making the right choices, some go for what they want to do while others chose to follow advices, but nonetheless when it comes to decision making we really wish that life could have been just a straight road but unfortunately its not, it has many turns, twists and surprises and ultimately we have to come to a decision. I consider making informed decisions as part of personal development.

Most of us are likely to follow advices or do the same as others around us do, but have you ever wondered if that’s the best suited choice for you? Need guidance?

Well look no further, introducing Hunch.

What president should i vote for?

Hunch is a very smart platform which helps you make the right choices regarding anything and everything, once you find your issue using the huge database, the hunch bot will start asking you questions related to your problem, these questions will have different answers attached to it and each answer has a different follow up question attached, so in a series of steps after you completed the questionnaires the hunch bot will search and match your results with the solutions database and it will give you the best options you should go for, in case you don’t like those it will always provide you with alternatives.

Based on your activities, the more you use hunch the better the hunch bot will get to know you and the better it will respond to your decision making. When you first visit the site, hunch will ask you few questions and those answers will be saved to your browser, the next time you visit hunch it will automatically detect you and it will get as close results as possible for you based on your location, personality, hobbies and more.

So if their is something you can’t decide about, make sure you check hunch.com their smart robot will definitely help you in your needs and best part about it is you don’t even have to sign up or create any accounts to use hunch system, even tho if you do create your account then hunch bot will perform a lot more better!

Go ahead and give it a try, Ask Hunch, enjoy your results and good luck decision making.

Update 2011: Hunch has grown incredibly and has helped thousands of people so far. They also have a goodies section & a very large community. You will now need to register at hunch for more.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ

WordPress just announced the release of v2.8 which they officially call as ‘baker’ named after chet baker, the new version if out and beta testing is over so you can download it now and upgrade your wordpress blog.

The new version has around 790 bug fixes!, themes and widgets have also been improved along with new features and improved speed!

One of the new features include the ability to browse the entire wordpress theme gallery from your blogs dashboard and install any theme or plugin with just a single click, their are also newer options on each page and the widget interface has also been redesigned.

If you want the complete list of the new features and fixes then head out to the wordpress codex pages. That’s one hell of a list!

and to read more about this new release head out to the wordpress blog make sure you watch that video.

but before you upgrade i would advise you to test it differently with your current theme and plugins as some people reported few plugin problems i am still using 2.7 and will wait a few more weeks before upgrading it, anyways enjoy this new release.

Keep up to date with wordpress on wordpress blog here and get all the information & help you need by going to wordpress codex site here.

Update: the latest version of wordpress currently as of may 2011 is v3.1.3 while the beta for wordpress v3.2 is also out. If you are blogging with wordpress then please update it to the latest version.

Don’t forget to share this post, subscribe to my RSS Feeds & follow me on twitter @sameerjoad till then have a good day,

SJ