Below are the links to the screenshots that were submitted. Please review each one (I’d open them all in tabs so I could look back and forth while they are all large size, because the voting poll just uses thumbnails), then choose the one you think looks the best/is the most usable.

This poll was supposed to close at 8pm NY time on Tuesday (today), but we’re going to leave it open for an extra day. The voting poll will now be closed at 8pm NY time on Wednesday (that’s 2am Thursday, UTC). If you want to discuss the entries’ pros/cons, this thread would be a good place.

Current: The existing interface, for reference

KM: Current nav, header elements moved

AN: Current nav, file folder style header

KD: Current nav, modified header style

JJ: Swap blog title and favorites menu

DR1: Fluency style, dark

DR2: Fluency style, medium

DR3: Fluency style, light

IK: Nav layered over dark background

GB: Modified nav/header intersection

MT: Modified nav and header

Results will be posted the day after the polls close.

ACT I

Jane: It is a thorn in my side that the blog name header is above the “dashboard” nav section in the admin, since in MU installations and with plugins (like stats), things in the Dashboard section span multiple blogs. Makes more sense for the header to head only the per-blog content area.

Mark: I agree about the header. “This is the menu, this is the content.”

All: Yep.

Five minutes later…

Mark: What do you guys this of this quick mockup I just did, playing with the admin header?

Jane: I like it that the nav is not under the header. Might need some styling help. I was also thinking maybe the favorites menu should drop down into the white h2 area by screen options/help tabs.

Ryan: Menu color to the top with blog title pushed over and favorites next to screen options sounds quite nice.

Jane: I’ll ask Matt Thomas if he could style it [ed. note: Matt Thomas created the visual style for 2.7], and we can see what people think, maybe post on wpdevel for feedback.

Ryan: If it’s quick, maybe we could even get it into 2.8.

ACT II

Matt T: Here are some comps based on what you told me.

Jane: Cool, but where are Screen Options and Help tabs?

Matt T: Still working on that.

Jane: Hm. Wonder if there’s time to open this up to community designers? I know we’re in freeze, and it’s no notice, but you didn’t get any notice either when we dropped this styling request on your lap a few hours ago. That’s the way open software development works: sometimes the best ideas come at the last minute!

Matt T: I’m all for letting the community take a stab at it. Especially if they come up with something brilliant to do with the Screen Options and Help tabs.

Jane: I’ll ask Ryan about release date and see if there’s time. I know they wanted your style recommendations today.

Act III

Ryan: Tuesday is probably doable, no later than that for final delivery of style and any gradient graphics, etc.

Jane: Awesome! People will hate me for the short notice after the has-patch marathon, but since it’s a small project and over the weekend, and wasn’t even something anyone was planning until a few hours ago, I’m *really hoping* people will take this for what it is, an attempt to give more people input into an upcoming visual change in the interface, even if it’s not a huge one.

Ryan: Would have the benefit of warning people that header and menu will be changed a bit.

Jane: And we can have a vote. If I can get all the materials together and post in the morning, that would give 2 days of design time for submissions on Monday, and if we do a day of voting Tuesday, that’s 3 days notice for the vote. I’ll make sure to post to all the lists, etc.

Ryan: Will we announce with comps from Matt T as examples of what we’re thinking?

Jane: I’ll write up the UX reasons for considering the change, and Matt T can provide some style guidelines and his original comps so no one will have to waste time mocking up the basic screen layout.

Ryan: That would help set the scope. We just want tweaks here and there, given the timing.

Jane: Woot!

On Your Mark, Get Set…
Okay, so here’s the deal. Modifying the nav/header to be a little nicer is was a last-minute design idea, and if it can’t be worked out in the time we have left before 2.8 (which is very little), we’ll just wait until 2.9 to work on it. But! If someone comes up with something the community really likes and it doesn’t break any of the design guidelines for the rest of WordPress, we could sneak it in.

UX and design guidelines for this mini-project are posted here (so as not to clog up anyone’s feed reader with big graphics). Read through the UX stuff, check out the comps Matt Thomas mocked up last night (with absolutely no notice, for the record). Use the .psd as your base, and when it’s time to submit your ideas, make a .jpg or .png and post a link to it in the comments on this post. (Note: Only comments containing a link to a design submission using this format will be approved. For general discussion about this design challenge or any of the submissions, please head into the #wordpress-dev IRC channel.)

Submit the link to your comps by 1am Tuesday, April 28 UTC (7pm Monday, April 27, New York time). If you have questions or want early feedback, we’ll be in and out of the #wordpress-dev IRC channel between now and then.

Once we’ve received the submissions, we’ll post a voting survey (much simpler than the icon survey; this one will be more of poll, just choose the one you like best) as soon as possible, and will post the link to it here as soon as it’s online. We’ll only keep voting open for one day because of the 2.8 deadline, so put it on your calendar if you think you’ll forget. Voting will close at 2am Wednesday, April 29 UTC (8pm Tuesday, April 28, New York time). Results will be announced the following day.

Go!

* Chats above are a conglomeration of actual chats.

Reminder: Only comments containing a link to a design submission will be published here. All other comments will be deleted.

If you want to leave a public comment about this contest, the design, etc., I’ve created a thread in the forums that you can use. Please discuss these things there. If you leave a regular comment here on this blog, no one will be able to reply to you, because only actual links to design submissions will be posted in the comments here.

Developers, if you see these bright young things in the dev channel, please be your usual friendly, helpful selves. Everyone else, wish our students luck with their projects this summer, which promise to be challenging but awesome. Without further ado, I’m pleased to introduce the GSoC projects (in no particular order) and the students tackling them.

Justin Shreve, Extended WordPress Search Engine. Justin will be mentored by Andy Skelton. One of the complaints I hear over and over again is about the search engine, so this could have great benefit to WordPress core.

Rudolf Cheuk Sang Lai, Adding Photo Grouping by Album Functionality. This project will wind up being a piece of a larger media redux project for 2.9/3.0. Mark Jaquith is mentoring, and Noel Jackson will be a backup mentor.

Daryl Koopersmith, WYSIWYG theme editor/generator. This will allow users to create and edit themes without touching any code. Beau Lebens is the mentor on this project.

Michael Benedict Arul will be working on a similar project. Michael will be mentored by Andrew Ozz, since this project will be using jQuery. It’s our hope that having two students working on this idea separately will foster competition and allow us to compare approaches.

Daniel Larkin, Modified Preorder Tree Traversal (MPTT). Lead Developer Ryan Boren will be his mentor. This is Daniel’s second GSoC working on WordPress.

Diego Caro, a student from Chile, will also work on an MPTT project. Diego will be mentored by Thorsten Ott.

César Rodas, social and text processing algorithms for BuddyPress and MU as related to recommendation engines. Alex Shiels and Andy Peatling will co-mentor this project.

Anthony Cole, Event management with WordPress. Co-organizer of WordCamp Australia and New Zealand, Anthony will be working on a suite of plugins (or maybe just one or two out of a planned set, scope TBD) for event management/attendee networking that will be built on BuddyPress/MU/bbPress. We’ll use wordcamp.org as a test case, and release the final product to the community. Jake Spurlock will be mentoring, with Andy Peatling as backup.

Congratulations, guys*!

*Seriously, we didn’t get more than a couple of applications from female student developers. Where are all the geek girls?

Total number of patches committed to core: 44

Contributors whose old patches were committed: 9

Marathon contributors whose patches were committed: 13

Tickets closed: 102 (breakdown below)

• Fixed – 45
• Dupe – 16
• Wontfix – 10
• Invalid – 19
• Worksforme – 12

Tickets created: 20 [I guess not everyone got the memo that we were trying to close tickets. ]

Tickets reopened: 4

Number of testers who left comments in ticket threads: 10

Number of testing-specific comments: 18

These numbers are based on opening each ticket that registered activity during the marathon hours and counting the actual comments that indicated some testing of a patch. Contributions to philosophical discussions without a patch, while important, weren’t counted for this purpose. Nor were Trac notices that simply noted a ticket was being closed because it was a dupe, invalid, etc.

Top five contributors (committed patches): Denis-de-Bernardy, filosofo, nbachiyski, scohoust, simonwheatley

Top five testing feedback providers: shanef, Nicholas91, Denis-de-Bernardy, sivel, williamsba, mrmist (tie)

Given the short notice/last-minute nature of the marathon, I think we did pretty well. Granted, there were people who complained that two days wasn’t enough notice to clear their schedules, but let’s be honest, the 24-hour has-patch marathon was more of a rallying cry to help clean out Trac than a deadline based on anything specific. Patches are always welcome/encouraged, and now that the big features for 2.8 are mostly done, the lead devs will be able to spend more time reviewing Trac tickets and patches. Still, not too many people tested existing patches (or if they did, they failed to leave the requisite comment in the ticket threads). Testing patches is one of the easiest things you can do to help further development, since patches won’t be committed or rejected until they’ve been tested by several people.

As we get closer to the 2.8 release, jump into Trac any time and test a few patches (don’t forget to leave the feedback!) if you have time. If there’s a ticket you’re sick of seeing there, write a patch and ask your fellow contributors to test it and comment on the ticket thread. We’ll announce an official bug hunt soon (and yes, there will be more than two days’ notice), but the fact remains that addressing new bugs is easier if Trac isn’t clogged with old tickets. If you spot duplicate tickets, mark it a dupe, note the other ticket number in the comments and close the ticket. If you see one that is no longer relevant because the current code base fixes a problem reported several versions ago, mark it invalid, leave a comment and close the ticket. These simple housekeeping tasks may not seem like much, but they do help. Special props to Denis-de-Bernardy, who in addition to writing a couple of patches during the marathon and testing a few others, did a bunch of ticket maintenance like this, and cleared out a number of tickets.

Thank you to everyone who participated, and until the next marathon, happy patching and testing!

Grab yourself a copy of the nightly build to make sure you’re using the right version, then head over to Trac and start looking at the has-patch* tickets. Pick a ticket, download the diff, test it out on the browsers/platforms you have available, and write a comment about the results in the ticket’s comment thread. Move on to the next ticket. Do as many as you can over the next 24 hours.

And if you’ve got the mad skills to contribute bug fixes and code patches for enhancements and other tickets, now is also a great time to contribute a patch. Why wait? One of the complaints I hear in the IRC #wordpress-dev channel is that it can be frustrating to write patches because sometimes it takes a long time for them to be reviewed and committed. For those people (and everyone else), this is the perfect time to patch, because we’ll be looking at every has-patch ticket in Trac for 2.8 over the next 24 hours. If you have a patch that’s been submitted but it hasn’t been tested, consider doing a little PR for yourself. Hop in the dev channel, post on your blog, mention on Twitter that you need people to test your patch *today* so that it can move forward in the process. This will speed things along. You can also add the keyword needs-testing in addition to has-patch.

At the end of the 24-hour period, you don’t have to put your pencils down, but the core devs will be going to sleep and then returning to the regular dev cycle, so it’s worth it to contribute today. If you miss the deadline, it’s okay; you can contribute or test patches as usual, you just won’t get the more immediate gratification the marathon promises.

We’ll post the results of the marathon here on Monday, after everyone’s gotten some rest and we can go through the Trac logs to see how many people got involved. This is one reason it’s so important to leave a comment when testing patches…it’s how we’ll be counting the number of marathon testers. Top patch contributors and testers will be recognized in the results post, so if that sort of thing motivates you, let the link love lead the way.

Of note: we are now in feature freeze for 2.8!

* – For those who don’t know why I keep using the term has-patch… When someone submits a patch by uploading it to the Trac ticket, they add “has-patch” to the keywords field, so that the core devs will know there’s a patch attached. Not the most elegant system, true, and you’d think maybe Trac could just recognize that a certain file type had been uploaded, but there you have it.

2.8 currently has about 500 active tickets that need to be resolved. The core devs are largely working on the bigger feature additions, such as the embedded theme browser/installer, the new widgets management, improving performance, etc. so a lot of tickets that are of lesser priority are still just sitting there. Aren’t they calling to you, just like puppies at the pound? “Adopt me! Please!”

Before we have a bug hunt and see the addition of dozens of new tickets, we need to clear out some of these old ones. Not being the kind of shelter that euthanizes its bugs after a certain amount of time (seriously, there’s one ticket that goes all the way back to version 1.5), we are hoping people will step up and bring home a bug today.

To keep things moving, we’re announcing a new kind of event, related to bug hunts, but with a different slant. We need a sprint to clear out these tickets. Thursday is the day (and Friday for those over the date line). Core devs will spend 24 hours going through all the tickets tagged with has-patch, and committing those that have been tested and work. So how can you get in on the Super-Awesome WordPress 24-Hour Has-Patch Marathon?

Write a patch. There are dozens of tickets for discrete little pieces of correction (change … to actual ellipses in admin interface, change the ‘go back’ link to a ‘view page’ link, etc.), dozens that are browser-specific bugs, dozens that might be more challenging. Pick the one you want to work on, add a comment to the thread so other marathon contributors know someone is working on it, and get the patch submitted before the marathon ends. If you start coding now, your patch could be in by the weekend!

Test a patch. There are, as of right now, 177 tickets marked with has-patch. Patches can’t be committed until they’ve been thoroughly tested. If you’re already running the nightly build start testing out these patches in as many operating system/browser combinations as you have. Only have one? Hey, it’s probably more than has been tested already! If you’re not already running the nightly build, you can download it here to set up a test blog. Don’t forget to add what you found to the comment thread for each ticket. If it doesn’t work, be specific about what is not working so that others can jump in and fix it.

24 hours of patching, 24 hours of testing, 24 hours of committing. Don’t miss the excitement; get started now!

The Super-Awesome WordPress 24-Hour Has-Patch Marathon begins Thursday, April 16 at 8am Pacific time (that’s Thursday, 4pm UTC) and will end, as you might have guessed, 24 hours later. No reason to wait, though… start early and get patching/testing. The more patches that have been tested by Thursday morning, the more that will be committed during the marathon.

Go WordPress!

First and most immediate is the creation of a new “component” in Trac for graphic design. We’ll use this component label to create tickets for things like making graphic buttons, such as making a new version of the favorites menu graphic or WordPress mark that looks better with the blue admin theme. In some cases graphic design tasks will overlap with CSS tasks, so designers interested in contributing can search for open tickets with either component label. In cases where a base PSD file is needed as a starting point, we will attach it to the ticket.

In this vein, if you notice a graphic that needs fixing (like the aforementioned favorites menu button needing a blue version), please use the graphic design component label to report it in Trac. Please don’t create tickets for graphic you just don’t like… keep it to things that look broken or overlooked.

Graphic design tasks will follow the same protocol as development tasks in that volunteer work will be overseen/curated by the core team. Both Matt Thomas (who provided the art direction for 2.7) and I will work with the core development team to identify design tasks and review submissions (i.e., we’ll make sure things look awesome before they’re committed). We’ve been trying this process with an early volunteer, and it seems to be working well. In addition to creating individual Trac tickets, if a project arises that requires many graphic elements to be created, we will post about it here on the dev blog to give potential contributors a heads up.

The second opportunity for graphic design contributions will be less about discrete tasks and more about contributing to the evolving visual design of WordPress. When there are larger design tasks in the works, such as creating an admin theme or designing the new media upload process, there will be opportunities for screen design. In these situations, potential contributors will be given access to materials such as wireframes or specifications and will be able to submit comps of design approaches. In the event that we receive multiple good submissions for a screen design, we will use a community vote to influence the final selection, as we did with the icon design contest.

Since 2.8 is wrapping up currently, there aren’t many design tasks waiting to be completed right now, but when we roll into 2.9 development, there will be more opportunities for graphic designers to get involved.

Be like Billy.

Billy: Oh, I dunno. I’ll probably work on my blog or something.

Dad: You need more direction! That blog is just your generation’s answer to comic books.

Billy: On the contrary, Dad, working on my blog utilizes my skills in programming, design, writing, critical thinking, and all sorts of other liberal artsy things that you’re paying those professors to teach me.

Dad: If only there were a more practical application for those skills, one that could lead you to fame and fortune!

Billy: Where’ve you been living, Dad? My skills are totally in demand in today’s questionable economy. An awesome WordPress developer is worth his/her weight in gold. Lead, even.

Dad: What is this WordPress?

Billy: Only the greatest open source publishing platform ever created. It’s what runs my blog. I like to fiddle around with the code and come up with cool hacks that make mine better than the average College Joe’s.

Dad: I had no idea you were that capable.

Billy: Duh, Dad. I’ve been using WordPress for a couple of years now. I could practically teach a course on it, though there are definitely things I could learn from the lead devs. They are like kings.

Dad: Hm. That kind of ability ought to be worth something. Seems like there would be programs in place for kids like you to utilize your skills while being nurtured  by people like these lead kings.

Billy: Lead devs, Dad. Not lead kings.

Dad: Maybe you could apply for an internship or something, earn a little money this summer instead of just spending mine.

Billy: Well, there is this one thing like that.

Dad perks up.

Billy: The Google Summer of Code lets college students work with lead developers on a bunch of open source projects, you can get college credit for it, and if you do a good job, you can earn up to forty-five hundred bucks over the summer. And WordPress is one of the participating projects.

Dad: !!

Billy: But it’s pretty competitive. My friend Joe applied last year and didn’t make the cut. I can improve my skills just by fiddling around on my own this summer without the rejection, thanks.

Dad: Don’t be lame! You said yourself you’re awesome. And that you could learn from the kings. And that you could earn over FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS. Life is full of rejection, kid. Best way to get over that is to make yourself so awesome that no one wants to reject you. And know that even if they do reject you, there’s always next time.

Billy: I dunno, Dad.

Dad: Tell you what, if you apply, I’ll give you $500 toward that car you’ve been wanting, whether you’re accepted into the program or not. And if you get in and complete it successfully, I’ll match that $4500. I’d be so proud of you. And the bragging rights at work! My kid, a Google engineer!

Billy: I wouldn’t actually be a Google engineer, Dad.

Dad: Oh be quiet. Do you think Harold in shipping knows the difference?

Billy: Okay, Dad, I’ll do it!

Dad: That’s my boy.

…………………….

College students! Don’t wait for your parents to bribe you; apply to the Google Summer of Code program now! For the third year in a row, WordPress is participating, and this year we’ve got project suggestions ranging from core functionality to plugins and BuddyPress development. You name it, we want you to propose it. It’s true, competition is fierce, but hey, if you’re already hacking WordPress, you’re ahead of the pack as far as we’re concerned. Applications are being accepted as of today, and the deadline is on April 3, 2009. For more information, check out the WordPress Codex GSoC2009 page, where we suggest some projects and let you know who our kingly mentors will be this year. The GSoC FAQ is also a good place to get an overview of the program. To apply, head to the Google Summer of Code application site. Remember, we want *you* to work on WordPress this summer! And College Janes, this isn’t just for College Joes. Female applicants encouraged to apply!

This (long) weekend, many WordPress users and developers (including half the core team) will be in Austin, TX for South by Southwest. Matt Mullenweg, Ryan Boren, Mark Jaquith and I will all be there, so say hello if you’re there, too. In the spirit of all this WordPress community connecting, I’ll be posting here every day during after SxSW with information about the new contribution opportunities we’re creating. Each post will cover one or more of the following:

• Development (of course)
• QA
• Documentation
• Ideas and Opinions
• User Experience
• Graphic Design
• Accessibility
• Usability Testing
• WordPress.tv
• Community Organizing

Since the first thing people think of when they think of contributing to WordPress is PHP development, we’ll start there.

The code (which is poetry) is the meat of the application, so it makes sense that the most opportunities to contribute will continue to fall in this area. Trac is always filled with tickets that need patches, patches that need testing, and issues that need some creative developer thinking/collaboration to find the right solution to a problem that has us going in circles.

If you are proficient in PHP, consider looking through the tickets (especially the ones marked “bug,” since they should get higher priority) and writing a patch for one of them. If you’ve got more advanced skills, consider writing a patch for one of the more complex tickets, or offering corrections to a patch submitted by someone else (if needed). If you don’t trust your coding skills but know your way around the application files, look for tickets tagged has-patch and test the patches in as many browsers as you can, posting your results afterward in the ticket thread.

If you find a bug in the course of your daily use of WordPress, report it. First, check Trac to see if the issue already has a ticket. You could also scan the archives of the wp-testers list to see if people have been talking about the bug, or email the list yourself to see if anyone has any information on the problem. If these actions don’t bear fruit, start a new ticket in Trac (you’ll need to create a login to do this). Be as detailed as you can about the issue, and don’t forget to make the proper selections from the metadata dropdown menus. Just in case anyone is unsure of how to make these selections…

Use the severity field with caution. Most bugs will be of normal severity. Marking a bug as high severity will not necessarily speed up development, and if it turns out that you’ve marked a bug’s severity incorrectly it may even slow down development.

Priority will usually be normal. Leave it to the more senior developers to change the status to a higher priority, as they are familiar with all the tickets and Trac and will be better able to assess the priority in relation to other tickets.

Ticket type. This is one of most misused fields, with many people marking tickets as defects that should not be. To address this, here’s a reminder of the ticket types and their intended uses. Your choices are: defect (bug), enhancement, feature request, and task (blessed).

• Defect (bug). Something is broken. You know how the feature is supposed to work (if you’re unsure, check the Codex or ask in the dev channel), but something has gone awry that needs to be fixed.
• Enhancement. Something is awkward or slow and could be designed or coded better without overhauling the function or screen design. Please don’t mark something as a defect (bug) if it is really an enhancement.
• Feature request. If there’s something that could be improved that would require significant restructuring of code or screen design, it should be marked as feature request rather than enhancement. Please note: this is not really the place to request features that are not currently in WordPress. Please continue to use the Ideas forum to suggest new features. The core developers will add new feature requests to Trac as they review the Ideas forum with each release cycle.
• Task (blessed). This type indicates approval from the core development team. Only core developers should use this selection. If you mark something as Task (blessed) yourself, you will have bad karma.

Bug Hunts*! If you have checked the Codex page for bug hunts lately, you’ll notice it’s been awhile since there was one. No more! Official bug hunts, sprints for finding and fixing bugs, will be brought back on a regular basis. The first one will be announced soon, possibly next week, to try and tackle the bug tickets related to widgets. (No need to wait, though, there are hundreds of open tickets in the 2.8 milestone just waiting for a kind developer to pay them some attention.)

As always, contributing developers can communicate with each other and with the core team in the #wordpress-dev IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, on the wp-hackers list, and in the ticket threads on Trac. Regular developer chats in IRC will be returning to Wednesdays at noon (Pacific time) starting next week.

[* - I used to love the bug hunt challenge in Space Cadet 3D Pinball back in the days of Windows 95]

Basically, the contest is to create a plugin, widget, mash up, hack, or other variety of web application that helps people find and share opportunities to take action. The grand prize is 50 benjis, and the best WordPress plugin will also be featured in the Plugin Directory. But the real prize is spreading a little more love in the world.

Click here for all the details.

“Writing a Plugin” in the WordPress Codex is where I got started when I needed to get hooked in to WordPress. Others might like to grab one of the over 4,000 open source WordPress plugins and tweak the source. If in need of a little help, the Plugins and Hacks forum is full of friends to assist you wrap your head around the code or debug a problem. Social Actions also has provided some developer resources.

Let’s show them how we change the web the WordPress way!

No longer.  We’re now using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power search on the Plugins Directory both from the website and from within your blog’s admin (Plugins → Add New).

It works much better. There are a few oddities floating around (our fault not sphinx’s) that we’ll be cleaning up shortly, but we’re happy enough with it on the whole to start letting everyone else use it

Currently, the search only indexes the plugin’s title and description/installation/FAQ/etc. (from the plugin’s readme.txt file), but we’ll be adding things like authors and tags soon.

You may have noticed that we went much longer than usual to release this .1 update. We’re very proud of this fact because it’s a testament to the testing all of you contributed prior to the release of 2.7 which helped make it the most bug-free release we’ve had.

Consult the list of fixed tickets and the  full set of changes between 2.7 and 2.7.1 for details.

Finally partly due to the stability of the 2.7 we’ve decided to push back 2.8 a few more weeks so we can bring in a few more speed optimizations, taxonomy enhancements, and new theme features. We also need to figure out which jazz musician to name the release after.

I declare January 28th our official “Thank a Plugin Developer” day. To celebrate take a look at the plugins you use and love, visit the author’s site, find their contact form, and drop them a note thanking them. (Or Paypal!) Look for the links in the plugin directory to “author homepage” and also to donate directly if they’ve specified a Paypal address.

Thank you to everyone who has ever written a plugin for WordPress, and here’s to the next four thousand.

As more and more people are learning how to earn money online, it increases the amount of competitiveness in the online business. Thus, it is getting more and more difficult when trying to make money online. But does it mean that it becomes impossible to make some extra cash online?

The answer is depends. Choose to enter the MMO/blogging niche and I can tell you that the chances of monetizing the site are low. There is far too much competition in this niche and I can honestly tell you that the amount of effort and time I put into ABloggerBlog does not pay off in terms of cash.

But I choose to maintain it because my ultimate goal is to leverage on my expertise in the niche of blogging and set up a local centre to engage in blogging coaching. Apart from this, I don’t see any other reasons I should stay in this niche.

Just go to DigitalPoint and you will notice that most of the people are buying advertisement space on niches outside MMO/blogging/webmasters. This gives us a very good gauge that there has been overflowing of blogs in this niche. I am not persuading you to give up on your blog but instead work on another niche at the same time if you still believe that making money online is possible.

With this, I will introduce to you how you can make money via affiliate marketing. This isn’t something I am strong at but at least I have enough knowledge and experience on this to get you started.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a cooperative effort between the merchant’s site and an affiliate’s site in which the affiliates will drive traffic to the merchant’s site. The objective of referring visitors to the merchant’s site is to earn commission when the visitor purchases a product from the merchant via your affiliate links. This is a very powerful method which merchant leverage on and it is a win-win situation for both sides.

2 Major Setbacks In Affiliate Marketing

There are 2 major reasons as to why people fail to make any money from affiliate marketing.

1) Wrong attitude

Adapting the right attitude while learning new stuff is the long run solution to attaining success. We must always have the eagerness to learn and pick up the different methods that past marketers have used and succeeded in. Replicating the success of others is by far the most effective route. You can also spend time and money to come out with your own marketing model if you like to.

Adapting the right attitude includes being discipline as well. You must be willing to devote time and effort in doing the necessary steps and procedures to affiliate marketing. You can have all the premium tools in the world but without implementing them, the tools are as good as rubbish.

2) Overcrowded niche

When you are involved in an overcrowded niche like MMO, you are putting up against tons of other affiliate marketers which are fighting to grab a pie of the affiliate earnings. Take for example on the recent launch of Niche Blueprint where there are thousands of affiliate marketers fighting to promote the product. Instead of fighting over a slice of cake, why not try getting another one?

We are talking about the Return Of Investment (ROI) in which this case is time versus money. Take my advice and find another niche if the market is overly competitive. You will find it easier and more enjoyable while engaging in affiliate marketing that way.

Different Types Of Affiliate Marketing

1) Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC is one of the most common types of affiliate marketing and in my opinion is the easiest as well. Merchant will pay affiliates as long as a visitor click on their links, banners etc. It doesn’t matter if the visitors you refer purchase any products because merchant pays us as long as we refer unique visitors to their site.

2) Pay-Per-Performance (PPP)

PPP is more difficult to be executed and thus the payout is usually higher as compared to PPC. Merchant will pay affiliates when the referring visitor is converted into a lead/sale. Since there is a required action to be fulfilled by the visitor before the affiliates get paid, it is therefore more difficult but the payout is definitely more significant.

3) Multi-Tier affiliate marketing

This is usually offered in affiliate network like AmpedMedia, MarketLeverage, NeverBlueAds etc. This system works like the MLM which the top referral will get paid for the downline below him. I am sure most of you are familiar with this and this is in fact the most profitable way of earning money online.

These are just basics to affiliate marketing and I will branch in to go more indepth on the techniques. Meanwhile, join a few affiliate networks and get in contact with your affiliate manager. Feel free to join me in AmpedMedia and I will coach you on how you can earn via affiliate marketing.

Tasks For Lesson 24

1) Get your mentality and attitude right to prepare for the affiliate marketing journey.

2) Join affiliate network and contact your affiliate manager for the top converting offers.

3) Join the affiliate marketing route with me in AmpedMedia and I will guide you to your first affiliate payment.

Subscribe to my blog now to get updates for every of my coaching lesson. Next lesson will be on affiliate marketing (Part 2). Stay tuned for it.

Connect with me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/felixgoh

You can also check out the course outline on my previous lessons.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com

Latest Updates

WebProsperity has grown to become one of the hottest online business opportunities in 2009. It is currently free to sign up for the program as they are doing a pre-launch for it. They have currently over 62,000 people signing up for the pre-launch.

I keeping an eye on this to see how this program goes but you should do the same too. Sign up now for free before the end of pre-launch. You got nothing to lose for this. It could well become your next source of online income.

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ABloggerBlog Dot Com is launching an E-Course for newsletter subscribers on Email Marketing. I will teach you how you can use of an email list to earn money online. Again, this is free so why not do so? You can sign up for the newsletter by filling up the form at the top of the sidebar.

And also, ABloggerBlog Dot Com is now opened to advertisers. You can check out my advertise page and make the bookings in there.

_________________________________________________________________________

ABloggerBlog Dot Com has been featured on commentluv so do check out the juicy interview.

I will be launching the first ever contest in here and will be open for sponsorship. Contact me regarding the prizes that you would want to contribute to the contest. I expect the contest to be launch in February.

Goals For ABloggerBlog Dot Com In 2009

I am going to set a new set of goals for the new year to provide me with a clear direction on where to move on.

1) At least 1,000 double opt-in email subscribers

2) At least 1,000 RSS subscribers

3) At least 1,000 unique visitors per day

4) Make at least $50 per day

These are simple and targeted goals which I would want to achieve. It seems easy but there are many hidden process beneath the result. Do you think this is a reasonable goal for you as well?

Stay tune for my next post on affiliate marketing as I walk you through the basics of it.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com

Welcome to lesson 23 on blogging.

As we are approaching 2009, we have seen many blogs that have already set their goals on what they want to achieve. The most common goal that I came across was to increase their monthly earnings online. Some have bigger ambition while others are satisfied with earning $100-$200 per month.

Is that income satisfactory for you? To be honest, making $100 a month online isn’t difficult at all. You just need to know the technique and it can be done within 3 months. Today, I am going to introduce to you can build your online income with an opt-in mailing list

What Is An Opt-in Mailing List?

In layman terms, this means a list of email addresses where people choose to receive emails from you on a particular subject. Most of you should have heard of term “opt-in” but do you know what “double opt-in” is?

Another term for “double opt-in” is “confirmed opt-in” which means that an email address provided by a person is confirmed before adding into the mailing list. If you have sign up for my newsletter, you will notice that there will be a confirmation email send to you and you are required to verify before you are officially on my mailing list.

The required action for “double opt-in” confirms that the person is the owner of the email address and the email address is working. I am sure you do not wish to be known as a spammer by capturing the wrong email address since people can just type in their friends’ email addresses. Thus, I highly recommend you to use Aweber to automate the double opt-in process.

Why Should You Build An Opt-in Mailing List?

1) Effective marketing

Email marketing has become one of the most effective marketing and monetization methods because almost every individual uses email. If you asked around, I am sure 85% of your friends/readers will read their emails at least once every week. Comparing this to your blog, your friends/readers may not even visit your site every week. Therefore, email marketing becomes an area whereby we can leverage on.

2) Getting personal

As you send out newsletter to your mailing list every week/fortnight/month, you are building a closer relationship with your readers. They will slowly get to trust you because of your authority over the niche. The content of your newsletter has helped them to settle some of the doubts they might have and this is part of relationship building. You can even get them to ask you questions over the email or provide a discussion topic to share around with your newsletter subscribers.

3) It is profitable

Nothing beats this right? Of course this will only be true when you have at least 300-500 subscribers. You can sell your own products, do affiliate marketing or even approach advertisers to place their banners in your newsletter. These are some of the ways whereby you can monetize your mailing list. However, be ethical when you are doing affiliate marketing. Do ensure that the product you are selling is of good quality and relevant to your niche. Try promoting dogs’ E-Book on a blogging niche newsletter and the result will be tons of unsubscribed readers.

3 Steps To Build An Opt-in Mailing List

There are several channels in which you can build an opt-in list but I will only focus on using blogs as the platform.

1) Create an autoresponder account

As I mention earlier, it is best to have a “double opt-in” mailing list and this process can be automated by using an autoresponder. Of course this service does not come free but it will be well worth the money. I personally use Aweber which cost $19.95 per month and they have great deliverability. The other alternative which is worth trying is GetResponse which is slightly cheaper at $17.95 per month.

2) Set up a web form

The newsletter that you see on my sidebar is known as the web form. It allows readers to sign up for me newsletter. You can get a freelancer to code the form for you so that it fits into your custom theme. Keep your form as simple as possible. Avoid collecting too many data because the name and email address of the reader is more than sufficient.

3) Create a freebie

Create a freebie which could be an E-Book or software. You can compile your old articles into a series and package it into a report or you can come up with a unique one which can only be obtained by joining your mailing list. The latter is definitely better since the report is exclusively available only for your mailing list. The reason for the freebie is to create a stronger call to action for your readers to subscribe.

2 Easy Ways To Build A Profitable Opt-in Mailing List

1) Build up your authority

Launch your opt-in form only after 3-6 months of blogging. Give yourself sometime to churn out quality article and make your readers believe that you are an expert in the niche. You will be exposed easily should your articles be copied so don’t take the shortcut route.

Only when you have proven your worth, then you are ready to launch your opt-in form. Readers will only buy the products you recommended after they have certain amount of trust in you. It is not easy to get them to take out their hard earned money in exchange for your products if you are not credible to them.

2) Meet the demand

Research about the products available in the market and if learn more on those that caught your attention. Invest money in the product and come up with a detailed review for the product. Since you have the interest on the particular product, the chances of your subscribers buying the product is higher as they are in the same niche as you.

Earn Money Online With Your Mailing List

To end this lesson, I have come up with some of the ways you can earn money through your mailing list:

1) Sell your own products

2) Set up an email course

3) Affiliate marketing

4) Sell advertising spots on your newsletter

5) Doing CPA/PPC advertising

What are the other methods that you can think of to make money of your mailing list? Do share with me in the comments below.

Tasks For Lesson 23

1) Set up your autoresponder, web form and freebies.

2) Write a few articles to be send to your mailing list subscribers.

3) Try to make your first sale via email marketing.

Subscribe to my blog now to get updates for every of my coaching lesson. Next lesson will be introducing to you on affiliate marketing. Stay tuned for it.

Connect with me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/felixgoh

You can also check out the course outline on my previous lessons.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com

Welcome to lesson 21 to blogging.

Why do you think flea markets existed? Are they having any benefit out of it?

Flea market is actually a place whereby retailers get to showcase their products and sell to the public. Instead of individual promotional effort, all the retailers will be actively and eagerly involved in the promotion of the flea market before the launch as they want more people to drop by the place. To the consumers, flea market is attractive to them because there is a wide variety of products to choose from and they would be able to get everything they need in one location.

With that said, this links us to the topic that I am focusing on today – Blog carnival.

What Is A Blog Carnival?

Blog carnival is like an event whereby a group of bloggers submit their best article and is being hosted or consolidated at a blog. Each carnival is focused on a particular niche which gives blog visitors more information regarding the topic they are interested in.

Blog carnival isn’t stagnant at one site but instead moves from blog to blog with different blog owners hosting it. When there is a shift in carnival, it is the responsibility of the individual blog owner to write out the post and link it to the rest of the submitted articles.

What Is So Effective About Blog Carnival

1) Consolidated marketing effort

Those who participated in the carnival will definitely help to promote it because they want to get as much exposure as possible for their article. As a result, there will be a group of bloggers marketing a single blog carnival to drive traffic to the carnival site. Just imagine how much traffic you can generate from this.

2) Networking with bloggers

Blog carnivals are constantly moving from one blog to the other. As a result, you can network and build relationship with the rest of the bloggers since it involves a consolidated effort in marketing. You must not neglect on building relationship with the bloggers because it will benefit both parties in the long run.

3) Link building

The article you submitted will appear on different blogs which becomes a good way to build backlinks as well. Links are like currency in the world of blogosphere and is an important aspect for SEO.

4) Increase in traffic

This will be something all of you would like to achieve isn’t it? Although the traffic would not be as huge as social media, every single effort in driving traffic in the early days of blogging is essential.

4 Steps To A Successful Blog Carnival

1) Write an article

Be sure to have an article that fit the theme of the blog carnival. It doesn’t need to be a long article but instead you can write it in the form of a list. Be sure to craft the headline to arouse the curiosity and click through rate to your blog.

2) Look for active carnival

Check BlogCarnival.com for active carnivals. Make sure that there is a targeted date for the next carnival. You can easily find carnival that is within your niche by searching the huge list available in there.

3) Approach the host

Submit your article and offer to help the host in marketing the carnival. You can even ask to be given the chance as the next host for the carnival. Although I have never host a carnival before, I can visualize on the amount of effort needed for it but the leverage will certainly be greater.

4) Answer question

Visit the host everyday to check if there are any questions from the readers. You can provide your own opinion and advice for the readers should there by any. This is a very good time to build on your authority and you might gain a bunch of readers out from it.

Check out BlogCarnival.com and try it. You will be able to gain at least 1 backlink from submitting your article to carnival even if the result from it isn’t favorable. Always experiment it yourself before judging the outcome.

At the same time, check out one of my buddy’s Gonzo blog carnival and try hosting one for him. Like I said, you never know the results until you try.

Tasks For Lesson 21

1) Head on to BlogCarnival.com and find a host to submit your article.

2) Network with the rest of the carnival hosts. Be sure to offer help to them.

3) Continue marketing your contest and get ready to launch it the next week.

Subscribe to my blog now to get updates for every of my coaching lesson. Next lesson will be introducing to you on using EBooks to market your blog. Stay tuned for it.

Connect with me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/felixgoh

You can also check out the course outline on my previous lessons.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com

If you have been following me since the day I launch this coaching blog, you should be getting a substantial amount of traffic. That is of course if you have trusted my words and my capability to bring your blog to the next level. I would be surprised if you are using the marketing methods that I have thought in here and have yet to hit the 50 daily traffic region. The reason for this is because you are not doing it on a regular basis or using the wrong approach.

I will soon be releasing my first E-Book into the market as a form of penetration and exposing this blog to a larger crowd. If you want to get me as your personal mentor to guide you in blogging, all you have to do is to purchase the E-Book and I will provide you with a free hosting as well as a 60 hours coaching package. By all means, I am not any authority blogger that have built up their credibility over the years but I could become one if you gave me the opportunity to do so.

Now, how about having another marketing technique to add into your collection?

Let me introduce to you the method which could drive you tons of traffic, backlinks, increase RSS subscribers and to network with the rest of the bloggers – Blog contest.

What Is Blog Contest?

Whenever you take part in contests in the reality world, there are often some pre-requisites that you need to complete before you are eligible to participate in it. At the same time, you would have to compete with the rest of the contestants which would give you an opportunity to win fantastic prizes.

Same goes for blog contest. The most basic pre-requisite is to subscribe to the blog’s RSS. There will be a list of other things that contestants could do to increase their chances of winning the contest and most of the time it includes publishing the contest on their blog.

3 Biggest Mistakes In Blog Contest

These are the common mistakes in blog contest in which I want to highlight to you so that you would avoid committing it.

1) Wrong Timing

I always feel that you shouldn’t start a contest right at the start of a new blog unless you already have an established blog referring to this new blog of yours. There is no content to showcase and readers subscribe to your RSS merely because of the contest.

I committed this mistake before and I know that at the end of the contest, most of the subscribers are going to unsubscribe from your blog. This is especially true if your contest is held over a short period of time which gives you lesser time to showcase your content.

2) Not Lucrative Prizes

The prizes are a gauge to how successful your blog would be. Cash, custom WP theme, banner design or a free blogger service are some of the prizes that could reap better results compared to Entrecard credits. It is not easy getting sponsorship for the contest if your blog proves no benefit in doing so.

3) Failure to spread the words

A blog contest could easily get you at least 100 new RSS subscribers if you market it well. Email other bloggers about the contest or you could even post in forums to maximize exposure. Don’t keep the contest within your blog community only. Be more proactive and network with the rest of the bloggers as well. Another tip is to announce on your blog 1-2 weeks before the launch of the contest to pull in more sponsors and exposure.

How To Approach Sponsors?

This is the area many blogger have difficulty in and to be honest, I faced this problem when I hosted my first contest as well. I emailed many sponsors and they either reject sponsorship or ignored my email. In the end, I have no choice but to sponsor the entire contest through my own earnings.

There are a few things that you need to include in your email when looking for sponsors.

1) About yourself

Tell the sponsors about who you are and a brief description on the blog that you are asking sponsorship for. This is the time to sell your capability and don’t feel shy about it.

2) Reason for sponsorship

You need to explain on the purpose of the sponsorship. Let them know that you are organizing a contest to increase exposure of your blog and how the contest would be run.

3) Sell your blog

Make known to the advertisers why they should sponsor you. Tell them the benefits that they are going to get by sponsoring. Show them the potential of your blog and quote a few statistics like daily unique visitors. Let them know the estimated number of people the contest will be exposed to. Basically, this is to give them as much value as possible for sponsoring the contest.

4) How it is going to be market

List the various channels you are going to market the contest. That is where the other marketing technique which I have shared with you earlier on comes in handy. Remember, sponsors are always interested in how much they are going to gain from it. Therefore, by letting them know the channels of marketing, they would know or have a rough estimation the exposure they are going to get from it.

Experiment It Yourself

It is fun to host a contest and I recommend you to try it yourself. Don’t be afraid to host a smaller scale contest if you are not confident as yet to approach the sponsors. Let me know your experiment with hosting a contest if you have one.

Tasks For Lesson 20

1) Announce the intention of holding a contest on your blog and ask for sponsors on the post.

2) Send emails to sponsors related to your niche asking for sponsorship.

3) Start marketing your contest 1-2 weeks before the launch.

Subscribe to my blog now to get updates for every of my coaching lesson. Next lesson will be introducing to you on using blog carnivals to market your blog. Stay tuned for it.

Connect with me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/felixgoh

You can also check out the course outline on my previous lessons.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com

Is it possible to retire at the age of 21? How many could actually achieve the dream of retiring this early without worrying about their financial support?  

You may be skeptical about it but I can guarantee you that you will think otherwise after this article. Instead, you will be dreaming to join in the rank of those listed in RetireAt21.  

But what if I am older than 21 and have yet to retire? 

Fear not because the information and advice is more geared towards those that are interested in learning from the young entrepreneurs. Even if it you could retire a few years earlier due to the advice on RetireAt21, it is still well worth the time.

Brief Background Of Michael Dunlop

RetireAt21 is owned by a young entrepreneur, Michael Dunlop, who has already formulated his dreams at the age of 5. Unlike other kids who were still playing with toys, Michael was already aspiring to own a large superstore like Tesco (UK) or Walmart (America).

 EBay was the first step that Michael took to achieve his dreams. He was already making tens of thousands of pounds from eBay while his peers were still struggling with the 5 pounds per week odd job.  

At the aged of 16, Michael created a website of his own and that is when RetireAt21 was born. It has become a leading showcase for other young entrepreneurs to show their talents and share their stories of successes.

Overview Of RetireAt21

RetireAt21 has developed into a one stop station with many resources to help anyone who is interested in becoming an online entrepreneur. The resources include:

1) Forum

2) Interviews with successful entrepreneurs

3) Step by step guide to build your first website

4) Monetization sources

These are some of the resources available in there and I will leave it to you to explore the rest.

Forum

I always love to participate in forum because it has been a great channel to obtain information from. RetireAt21 has dedicated a niche forum on making money online and has a total of over 3,000 members at the moment. There is a new section on the forum whereby you could ask the interviewee questions and they will respond to it personally. I believed this is something unique which is not offered by any other forums and we should definitely make use of this chance to ask the interviewee on his/her success story.

Other topics such as web design, web promotion, web monetizing etc are being discussed daily on the forum. The forum becomes a very good resource to turn to should you faced any problems with regards to online business. 

Even if you have no problem, how about being able to network with the rest of the online entrepreneur sounds? You should use this opportunity to build relationship with like-minded entrepreneur and I can assure you that this will benefit you in the long run.

Interviews With Successful Entrepreneurs

It is always good to learn on the stories of the already successful entrepreneurs. They have gone through a lot of obstacles and it is where you can avoid the same mistake to get you faster to your goal. You will be motivated by the passion and dedication that these successful entrepreneurs have put in order to achieve these results.  

Interviews with the top on the blogosphere are also included into the collection. I am sure you will be inspired by how they came out with the niche idea and are currently making 6 digit figures yearly.

1) Darren Rowse of Problogger

2) Nate Whitehill of Unique Blog Designs

3) Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey

4) Tyler Cruz of TylerCruz.com

Step By Step Guide To Build Your First Website

Don’t worry if you know nuts about building a website because you can find a step by step guide at RetireAt21. This guide would be sufficient to bring you to the first step of retiring early or even at the age of 21.

I’m stuck at creating the web design for my site! Don’t worry because there is a web design tutorial set up specially to help you and me get through the difficult moments of getting a good design for your site. At the same time, check the blog of RetireAt21 for more information and tips.

What’s Up On Your Mind

Are you dreaming to get into the Top 50 Young Entrepreneurs Under 30 now? Don’t feel shy if you passed the age of 21 and have yet to retire because it is never too late to start dreaming now.  

Head straight on to RetireAt21 and tell me what you think about the site on the comments below.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog

Instead of going into monetization methods, I would like to extend a few more techniques on marketing which I have tested previously and was getting results from it. I am sure these methods could bring you even more traffic if you follow through this lesson.  

For this lesson, I am going to introduce to you on guest blogging and how you could leverage from it. This technique could result in something massive if you do it the right way.

So What Is Guest Blogging?

It basically means writing content and publishing it on another blog. You will be puzzled as to why should you write content for others. Aren’t you covering their job as a blogger then?  

Yes I agree with you that you are temporary covering their job as a blogger but you get a linkback on the guest post publish on his blog. Not only do you get a high PR linkback but also a free traffic source.

My Experience With Carlocab.com

A few months back, I run another blog and guest posted on Carlocab. Carl Ocab is a 15 year old blogger who has top the Google SERP on the keyword “make money online”. He has 7,000 subscribers the time when I guest posted on his blog but now he has almost 13,000 subscribers and this is something massive.  

I did a list post and was published on the site. Just that day alone, I have 500 over traffic from carlocab.com and increase my subscribers count by almost 70. That is the power of guest posting on a well-known blog like his and you can achieve this too.

3 Steps To Finding A Blog For Guest Blogging

1) Building relationship

If you remember earlier on, I mention to you to concentrate on a few blogs to do comment marketing on. This is to build relationship with the blogger and thus open the door for more other opportunities such as joint ventures, guest blogging etc.  

When you have build a relationship with the blogger, it is easier for you to request to guest blog as they would have know the quality of content you can deliver just by looking at your blog post. But if till now, you are not writing quality post which could arouse interest for people to drop comments on your post, I would suggest that you concentrate on writing quality content first.

2) Looking for related niche

Be sure to guest post on a blog that is related to your niche to achieve targeted traffic. Imagine you writing about blogging and posting on a health blog. People might click on the link to your blog but they will never stay long because this is not targeted traffic.

3) Look for leading blog in your niche

Results will not be great if you guest post on a smaller blog. I would aim for a blog with at least 1000 subscribers to maximize exposure. I am suggesting this because I know many bloggers have difficulty churning out fresh articles thus this will help you get the maximum results from a guest post.  

On the other hand, if you have no problem writing great content, you can target smaller blogs since they are easier to build a relationship with. But, your results will not be as good as when you guest post on a leading blog.

5 Tips To A Killer Guest Post

1) List or “How-to” articles

These are the 2 category of articles I recommend you to stick on. If it is the first time you are guest blogging on this blog, you need to attract attention and get readers to read your content.

2) Use of “killer” headline

Create the most compelling headline that you could think of that will capture the readers’ attention. Use the headline formulas that I have created for you previously and fine tune it to fit into your article.

3) Avoid putting in affiliate codes

The purpose of guest blogging is not to attract any sales but instead to open up another source of traffic. You will lose your credibility if your guest post is about getting the readers to buy a certain product. This is a very common mistake that I have seen in many guest posts which you should certainly avoid.

4) Write your best article

Do not hold back any tips or information that you know on the guest post. Throw in all the information that you know on that post. You need to show that you can write great quality. Therefore, holding back information as a mean to lure readers to your blog to complete the rest of the tips isn’t recommended.

5) Customize your guest blog

Write for the readers on the guest blog. Read on the previous posts of the guest blog which leads to a significant amount of comment and work on it for a continued series post. This is the type of information that the readers are interested in thus it will be a breeze getting them to read your guest post if you continue on the series.

Tasks For Lesson 19

1) Find a related niche blog and asked if they would accept you to guest blog for them. Be sure to apply the 5 tips to a killer guest post.

2) Study the trend of the guest blog that leads to a buzz and try to create a continued series from it.

3) Continue to perform comment marketing and build relationship with the bloggers.

Subscribe to my blog now to get updates for every of my coaching lesson. Next lesson will be introducing to you on using contest to market your blog. Stay tuned for it.

Connect with me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/felixgoh

You can also check out the course outline on my previous lessons.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com 

Do you know that branding is important for the growth of any sites? It raises the professionalism of your site and clients or visitors have the extra trust when looking at the information you have suggested. Branding can be as simple as a graphical representation of your site in terms of logo, custom template design etc. But often site owners are faced with 2 problems when branding their sites.

1) Lack of knowledge (in terms of web design)
2) Lack of budget

So the only solution to the problem would be to outsource but keeping the work within a limited budget.

Project4Hire Is The Solution

Project4Hire is a worldwide Freelance Marketplace that allows clients to post projects and contractors to bid to work on those projects. They have freelance programmers, programmers and writers from the United States, the UK, Canada, South America, India, Eastern Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Romania) and other parts of the world registered on this site to provide you with competitive services.

Other services such as copywriting, video editing, photography, brochure design and even hardware support can also be found through Project4Hire.

Mechanism Of Project4Hire

Clients can create a project, clearly stating their requirements and budget and post it onto a common board for contractors to bid on. Contractors can then bid for the project with their price and the date of delivery for the project. Bid price of the contractors are clearly stated on each project and it makes the entire bidding process more open. This is a unique feature not offered by other freelance market. Private messages can be sent to either party should there be any doubts in the projects.

How Much Do Project4Hire Charge?

Clients need not pay a single cent of posting the projects on Project4Hire. All you need to do is to create a free account and you can start posting your project. As for contractors, you will be charged a small percentage of your winning bid for the freelance jobs.

Check Them Out Now

For as low as $10, you can get a professionally designed logo in a day to build up on your branding. This would be a very good bargain in my opinion. I will certainly go onto Project4Hire should I need to get another custom theme.

Subscribe to my feed today for every updates in ABloggerBlog. Drop in your valuable comments below should you have any questions/contributions to the post.

Catch up with you again on the next post. Do follow me on Twitter if you want to track my movement.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog

Bad week for me because was having fever for the past few days. Got to apologize for the delay in delivering lesson 18 but I hope all of your queries have been answered. Do drop me a mail should you need any other assistance.  

Without even realizing it, I have been blogging on ABloggerBlog for 2 months. This was one of my best productions since I started blogging back in 2007. Quite surprised to see a lot of encouragement on the lessons I have produced which spur me to move on. I would like to use this opportunity to thank all the readers for giving me a great experience during these 2 months in ABloggerBlog. All right, enough of ramblings from me and I will start the lesson on Search Engine Optimizations (SEOs) proper now. 

This will be the last lesson on marketing a blog. Upon completion of this lesson, you will have a very good foundation on the various techniques that you could implement to grow your blog. However, SEOs is a must used technique because this is a great source of traffic in the long run. Imagine getting thousands of traffic per day from the search engines for your targeted keywords. This will be a group of quality traffic who is craving for more information. Thus, the chances of converting search engine traffics to subscribers are pretty high.

What Is SEOs?

SEOs is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines via organic search results for targeted keywords. Simply put, it means improving the position of your website on the Search Engine Results Page. (SERP)

What Is SERP?

SERP is a list of webpages shown on the search engines for a particular keyword search. The list of webpages usually contains title, a short description of the content and also a link to the page. Therefore, when I said ranking high on SERP, it means getting listed on the top few positions of the results page for a keyword search.

Why Is SEOs Important?

SEOs help a website to climb in the SERP for targeted keywords. The higher your page is on the SERP, the better the chances that people will visit your site. However, you still have to use the same method that I mention in lesson 2 to check if your targeted keywords are getting any searches every month. 

Most webmasters are concentrating on improving their SEOs since this is the best free source of traffic in the long run. It will take you 3-6 months to rank high on search engines for a keyword that has a decent amount of searches every month. SEOs are considered to be successful only when you hit the top 3 position on the search engines. Put yourself in the same shoes, you will always click on the link of the top 3 position first before even looking at the rest.  

Apart from SEOs, the other factor that affects your Google rankings is Google Pagerank. But I believe that if you are able to improve your SEOs, Google Pagerank will come naturally since it just involves building backlinks which is also part of the technique to improve SEOs. So stop worrying if you got Google Pagerank or not because just focusing on improving SEOs will eventually get you a PR. I guarantee this.

Black Hat Vs White Hat SEOs

Have you heard of the differences between these 2 approaches of SEOs? As the name suggests, black hat SEOs is not an accepted technique to use by search engines and will be penalized. On the other hand, white hat SEOs is the technique that I will be teaching you later on this article. But, I will briefly run through the various type of technique that is known as black hat. I am not encouraging you to use it but instead to let you know so that you would avoid implementing it on your blog. Below are the few commonly used black hat SEOs which you may or may not know, falls under the black hat category:

1) Mass blog networks

This is to set up 50-100 blogs targeting different keywords and linking to the main blog. For example, when you use Google Adwords keyword tool, you will find a list of similar keywords that people have search. Thus, instead of just targeting 1-2 keywords, people who uses black hat SEO create a network of blogs targeting the entire list of keywords provided by Google. They will then link it back to the main blog.

2) Overcrowding of keywords

Overcrowding the site with your targeted keywords are also considered black hat incase you don’t know about this. These sites basically have very little content and most of it is filled with keywords. Their purpose is to rank high on search engines and get individuals to buy their products.

3) Invisible text

This means placing white text on a white background which means that readers are unable to see it thus naming this as invisible text. The text usually contains keywords which are not wanted to be viewed by readers but will be seen by search engine spiders.

4) Redirecting

This is used when a site gets rank pretty high on the search engines. Therefore, instead of getting visitors to read their site, they redirect it to their affiliate sales copy. Although this method does not help in improving your SEOs, it makes use of the SERP rankings to redirect visitors to a sales page instead of its own website. Pretty unethical isn’t it?

2 Approaches To Improve White Hat SEOs

There only 2 approaches to improving SEOs – mainly on page SEOs and off page SEOs. On page SEOs means action in which you can take on your own website to improve on SEOs. This basically means the usage of titles, tags etc.

Off page SEOs means action you need to take outside of your own website which is building of backlinks.

How To Improve Off Page SEOs

The only way to improve your off page SEOs is by building backlinks. Build natural and quality backlinks overtime. Forum marketing, comment marketing and article marketing are all great ways to build 1 way link.  

Reciprocal links has lesser weightage compared to 1 way link because there are simply too many websites that try to engage in link exchanging as a way to improve SEOs. If you really want to do link exchanging, then I suggest you using triangular linking.

Triangular linking means Site A will link to Site B, Site B will link to Site C and Site C will link to Site A. Thus this creates a 1 way link to your site. Read the rest on how to build backlinks from my previous lesson.

7 Ways To Improve On Page SEOs

1) Title tags

Name each of the individual articles with the keywords you wish to target. It will look something like the image below.

This title tag is the link that will appear on search engine thus it is important to choose the right title. You can used SEO Title Tag plugin to edit your articles.

2) Tags

Using of proper tags for every of your post helps in SEO as well. If you remember, I have told you to use the tags on every of your published articles as it will be helpful in your SEOs.

3) Sitemaps

Wordpress makes it so simple for bloggers to create the sitemap with the aid of the Google sitemap generator plugin. Next submit to Google Webmasters and it makes the spiders crawled to the page that are deep into your root directory as well.

4) Internal linking

I mention earlier on lesson 8 that internal linking are good for building backlinks. This is also effective in improving your SEOs. Find those articles that have been neglected by search engines and pass some link love to it as well. Do not let your old articles go down the drain.

5) Use of proper permalinks

Avoid using long links such as http://abloggerblog.com/2008/11/lesson-16-comment-marketing/. Search engines often favor the page closest to the root directory. Simply put, your permalinks should be like this http://abloggerblog.com/lesson-16-comment-marketing/. For my case, I have a long URL which includes the year and month that I published my articles.  

I really regretted this but I couldn’t change right now because I will lose all the backlinks should the permalink be changed. Appreciate anyone who can help me in solving this problem. But don’t follow my footsteps if you are just starting out.

6) Use of robots.txt

Robot.txt is a file which gives instructions to tell search engines spiders which pages are to be ignored and not to be indexed. The purpose is to stop the pages from appearing in search engines to prevent any duplicate issue. Read ThouShallBlog’s guide on how to create your robots.txt should you have no idea how to do this.

7) You tell me

I would love to listen to your way of improving your on page SEOs. Share with me and the rest of the readers in ABloggerBlog. I will link back to your site if you mention other methods of performing on page SEOs. Hope to churn out a longer list for this. This will also be the first experiment I have on the activeness of the readers in here. Don’t let me down all right?

Additional SEO Methods From Commentators

1) There are theories stating that Google will look at the top third of a blog and the bottom 10% to 20%. – Contributed by Richard Mclaughlin.

2) Using relevant keywords in anchor text. For example, if I am targeting the keyword blog coaching, I would create a hyperlink to my blog address with blog coaching as the hyperlink text which will looks like this – blog coaching. – Contributed By Jerry.

3) Include your targeted keyword in your domain name. – Contributed By Jerry.

4) Using the all-in-one SEO plug-in for optimization. – Contributed by Jeff.

5) Use of alternative text for images. Alternative text becomes a replacement for an image whenever it cannot be viewed. – Contributed by Suzanne Franco.

6) Targeted keywords appearing within your permalinks. – Contributed by Tamal Anwar.

Tasks For Lesson 18

1) Complete all the on page SEOs and make sure you used the SEO title tag plugin.

2) Remove any form of black hat SEOs that you are using on your blog.

3) Build links, links and more links to improve on your SEOs, Technorati ranking as well as Google PR.

Subscribe to my blog now to get updates for every of my coaching lesson. Next lesson will be introducing to you on the first method to monetize your blog – Ads selling. Stay tuned for it.

Connect with me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/felixgoh

Check out my course outline on my previous lessons.

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com