I found an old post I had done last year (when I was in a particularly silly mood), called Men’s Health, which never really caused as much of a commotion as I had hoped, so I had forgotten about it.

Tip of the Week

As most of my Twitter followers know, I actually put 2 original posts up a day, during the week, one which is brand new content and typically posted fairly early in the morning. Around lunch time I make another post which is an OBG (Oldie But Goodie) post, where I attempt to get more readership and site walk-thru by Tweeting older content (given I have over 1000 posts, it is not hard to find 7 posts a week for this). Sometimes I attempt to mine really old posts, and have to clean them up a great deal (edit out parts, add viable tags, etc.,), and this helps clean up my site in general, so it is a very worthwhile exercise, in my opinion.

This week I went searching for Christmas related old(er) posts and tripped across my Men’s Health post again, and decided it would be an excellent candidate for Re-Tweeting, since I loved the humor in it, and I enjoy reading some of my sillier posts, so it was Tweet’ed on Monday.

As part of this content resurrection program, I ask for some of my blog helpers to retweet the content and such, however, most of them have left this post alone, and did not reTweet it, due to my copious use of Double Entendres, and the topic itself being about Erectile Dysfunction.

I had one friend post it to StumbleUpon, however they then said if they got banned for posting Adult content, I was in deep trouble! Digg did not seem to take the initial post either (although I note now it does have a Digg vote). None of my associates Dugg or did anything else to the post, so there it sits, un-Pushed, even though I think it is a fun post.

I guess the moral of the story is you can get a little too controversial, even when you think you are just being silly!

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SEO Bible from Amazon

SEO Bible by Jerri L. Ledford

(ISBN: 978-0-470-17500-2) As usual I have not purchased this book, I have, however, borrowed it from the Ottawa Public Library.

This is an excellent book for those who are beginners in the “Mug’s Game” of Search Engine Optimization.(SEO) It explains what the basic concepts of SEO are, and why they are important if you are trying to make money on the web.

The book starts sensibly talking about how you need a plan for how you are going to use SEO on your site (know what you want to achieve so you know whether you have succeeded or not). A good point made is that if you are going to do this, you should use Google Analytics to collect data (again, you need data to know whether you are succeeding or not).

The book then dives into different SEO techniques like the use of META tags on your site to get Search Engine Robots to find your site and be able to classify it, correctly. If you do a “View Page Source” on this page you’ll see which meta tags I have set up for this site too. The key to SEO is the use of Keywords, and the rest of the book outlines well how to get Search Engines to associate Keywords with your web site, and how to get your rank for that Keyword up the list (appearing on Page 10 on Google isn’t your goal).

Very good learning points about Keyword densities (don’t use them too little OR too much), and what techniques you should be using in a Pay Per Click (PPC) environment as well. Their explanation of PPC is useful for “newbies” as well, I learned 1 or 2 things I didn’t know as well. I skipped the section on Advertising keywords, since I was not very interested in that section (yet), but it seems quite detailed on tactics in that area as well.

Content is king, is my credo and the book outlines the importance of not simply putting out a bunch of retread information or some hack-kneed old information, you need to be interesting and fresh to attract and KEEP readers (don’t just do book reviews, as an example, unless your site is a book review site).

The books sections on Links and Robots is again very illustrative and important to understand if you want to play the SEO game. This site for example has very incoming links and whereas my financial site have hundreds of links in which helps it keep it’s popularity. How to deal with Robots is also quite important and the explanations in the book are very helpful. The author’s warnings about SEO SPAM should be heeded, unless you want to be a Black Hat SEO person (i.e. a bad guy).

Analysis of the data after you have implemented your plan is your final goal and deciding whether you have succeeded (and how you might change your plan to create more success), concludes the books content.

Rating:

I always feel that if I get three new ideas from any content it is of value, and I view this book as a useful resource and a good read. I will not be buying it, as I have already noted from it what I want to use, but I would recommend this book if you are starting out in the SEO game.

Good read!

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Simply use a 301 redirect with some devilishly ingenious code from TechCounter:

301 Permanent Redirect from Blogger Beta to WordPress

11. May 2007, 10:51 By Ryan Ferone

Most Bloggers start out with free blog hosting with the most popular of the free services being Google’s blogger where you get a yoursite.blogspot.com address. Now you want to move from Blogger to your own domain. One of the best publishing software is provided by WordPress and the best part is it is free. Importing to WordPress from Blogger used to be a breeze using WordPress’s import posts feature. However when Google moved from Blogger to the new Blogger or Blogger Beta, it became impossible to use WordPress’s import utility.

However, you can now do so with the steps outlined here about Importing Blogger Beta Posts to WordPress

Many users were able to implement this method successfully. Now, we move to the next step. Lets deal with some questions I had so far …

1. What happens to my old blogger blog? Should I just delete it after importing to WordPress?

2. I heard Google penalizes duplicate content. I now have my posts at both my old blogger blog and my new WordPress blog hosted on my domain. What should I do?

3. You mentioned using the 301 permanent redirect from blogger to wordpress. Can i do it?

Okay … lets deal with these questions first.

1. No, you should not delete your Blogger blog. I am sure you worked hard at it. You might have many subscribers to that blog. The search engines have content indexed to that blog. What happens if you delete your blogger blog is simple … you end up LOSING ALL YOUR TRAFFIC, all your loyal subscribers and visitors simply because they dont know your new address.

2. Yes, Google penalizes duplicate content. How do you deal with this.. well read on

3. When people move from their old website to a new one they use a 301 permanent redirect method without being penalized by the search engines. However, you cannot do this straight up with Blogger because you do not have access to your .htaccess file. So its not a simple plug and play unfortunately because of this.

How to redirect your old Blogger posts to your New wordpress blog posts using a permanent redirect

I wanted to thank Owen Barder for his excellent code to redirect your individual posts from blogger to wordpress. Also, thanks to Tom Sherman. I will try to stick to what these two guys have to tell.

Using the method outlined here, you will be able to

1. Redirect your visitors from your old Blogger blog to your WordPress Blog on your domain

2. Redirect your old posts to new posts on your wordpress blog instead of redirecting them just to your home page of your wordpress blog

3. Do all this in such a way that Google does not penalize you. You also get to transfer your Google Page Rank too. How about that ….. !

Step # 1: Import from Blogger Beta to your WordPress domain

I am assuming that you backed up your blog and Imported to your WordPress domain from the new Blogger or Blogger Beta. If you didn’t do, check out my article on Import from Blogger Beta to WordPress

Step # 2: Modify your Blogger Template to include redirects

Log into your Blogger account. Go to Template and then Edit HTML. Paste the code shown below where you replace http://www.yoursite.com with the root URL of your WordPress Blog

a. Add the code below after <Blogger> in your template

<MainOrArchivePage>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
var blog_root=http://www.yoursite.com/;
document.location.href=blog_root;
//–></script>
</MainOrArchivePage>

<ItemPage>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
var process_page=”http://www.yoursite.com/bloggerposts.php”;
var newpage=process_page;
var oldlink=”<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>”;

newpage+=”?p=”+oldlink;
newpage=newpage.toLowerCase();
document.location.href=newpage;
//–></script>
</ItemPage>

b. Add the line shown here somewhere in between the <head> ..</head> tags of your blog

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.yoursite.com/” />

Notice the space between /” and the />

somewhere in between the <head></head> tags like this:

<head>
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0;url=http://www.yoursite.com”>
</head>

Step # 3: Prepare your WordPress blog for Redirects

a. Open Notepad. Copy and paste the code given below. Save it as bloggerposts.php or anything else you want and put it in the root location of your wordpress blog. By root, I mean not in any wp-admin or any other folder, but in the root and the link should be something like http://www.yoursite.com/bloggerposts.php

<?php

require($_SERVER[’DOCUMENT_ROOT’].’/blog/wp-blog-header.php’);
$search_link = $_GET[’p'];
$vars = explode(’/’, $search_link);
$num = count($vars) – 1;
$filename = $vars[$num];
$slug = str_replace(”.html”, “”, $filename);

$SQL = “SELECT posts.* FROM $wpdb->posts AS posts WHERE posts.post_name = ‘$slug’ LIMIT 1″;
$posts = $wpdb->get_results(”$SQL”);

if ($posts) {
foreach ($posts as $post) {
$found_link = get_permalink($post->ID);
}
}
else
{
$found_link = “http://www.yoursite.com/”;
}

?>

<html>
<head>
<title>Redirecting…</title>
<script language=”javascript”><!–
document.location.href=”<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”;
//–></script>

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;url=<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”>

</head>
<body>
<h1>Redirecting…</h1>
<p>You can also proceed immediately to <a href=”<?php echo ($found_link); ?>”><?php echo ($found_link); ?></a>.</p>
<p>The main blog URL is <a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/” mce_href=”http://www.yoursite.com/”>www.yoursite.com</a>.</p>
</body>
</html>

All you need to do in the above code is wherever you see http://www.yoursite.com , change it to the root location of your WordPress blog. What this code is doing is taking the URL from Step # 2 and redirect the user to the corresponding entry in your wordpress blog. In case it does not find the corresponding entry, it redirects to the homepage of your blog.

Related Blogs

• Related Blogs on WordPress
• Brian Gardner Launches Revolution Two Open-Source WordPress Theme
• WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2.7 Soon, Security Upgrade …

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Tried out a poll from the new Polldaddy plug in on my site on my post: Rates Are Down by 1/4% but haven’t had much interest in the poll.  Figured I would see if anyone is actually interested in that kind of interaction with the web site, it seems so far the answer is “No”, but maybe the question was not interesting enough. May be a more controversial or interesting question might evoke more interest.

Added the Blog to Wikinvest as well.  Saw it on Michael James on Money, and thought it couldn’t hurt adding content that might also cause my content to get pointed at as well. So far so good, haven’t noticed much impact but it is very early days yet.

I attempted to volunteer at DMOZ.org to see if I could become an editor, but was given a polite “No” message. Too bad, I was hoping that might get me added to their directory, oh well, might try again later too.

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On Canadian Personal Finance Opinions yesterday I posted an article posted Posting Number 1000 which effectively was the Favorites page from my web site. What actually happened was I started with the Favorites web page, saw that it was woefully lacking in content, so I expanded it with my favorite Pillar Posts and then posted it as a normal article.  This one article caused my hits to hit it’s highest level since I have moved the web site from blogspot but not giving my biggest income day, but that will come with readership is my guess.  I keep wondering what I can do about these 1000 posts I have and how I can make them all try to make money for me in some fashion or another, because right now, they seem to be hidden behind the Wall that is my front page, how do I get my readers to “drill down” and find more of my content? Need to look into this further.

Pingcrawl

Yesterday I found a Beta plug in that I have tried, but it is not quite working correctly called Pingcrawl. I am trying it again today and we shall see what it does:

Every time you make a post on your blog it grabs similar posts from other blogs that allow pingbacks using the post tags. It then links to them at the bottom of the post as similar posts. It then executes the pingback on all the posts. You can specify how many posts to do per tag and that many will be done for each tag you use in your posts. Typically it has about an 80% success rate with each pingback and they are legit so the ones that fall into moderation tend to get approved. This creates quite a few deep links for each blog post you make and through time really helps with your link building. Especially for new blogs.

It hasn’t worked for me yet, but I am still trying.

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After attempting to expand this site and working on a few things, I decided to see if I could maybe add to the monetization by adding this fine site to ReviewMe (since ReviewMe has already accepted Canadian Financial Opinions as a valid site). To my surprise I was replied with the following statement from the ReviewMe software robot:

We are sorry but the website you have suggested http://nothowtdoit.com has been declined at this time. The main reasons a website is declined are:

- The website is a suspected fake.
- The website does not have enough link popularity.
- The website does not have enough traffic.

Fake? Moi? How is this fake? What makes this seem so fake? Hmmm… You put up original content and you get told you are a suspected fake? I guess that is ironic, but not like rain on your wedding day, I guess.

As a rule, I have made very little money from ReviewMe so I am not heartbroken, however, it is a little upsetting to be told your original work appears to be fake!

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Not Mine But Very Funny

I guess I WAS a six figure blogger!

Harold is a Robot #3 – How to Earn a Six Figure Income From Blogging in Two Easy Steps

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Friday I will be publishing a Carnival of Catastrophic financial advice, where I asked fellow financial bloggers to send me in their worst financial advice story, the stories are interesting, but no one bares their souls as I did a few weeks back in Worst Financial Advice Given Ever .

I guess that might be a way to draw more traffic is to create a real Carnival and then use that to draw more traffic to the web site? Another thing on the TO DO list for the web page.

Friday or Monday I will publish my monthly income statement, such as it is.

Still no fixes for this theme or the UBD advert rotator.

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Got this book out of the Ottawa Public Library just to see what I might learn from it, in terms of making money with my sites.

“Make easy money with Google : using the AdSense advertising program” by Eric Giguere (the link is to the Ottawa Public Library) is a good book if you are just getting started in the business of trying to make money on the web.

Eric Giguere, walks the reader through how to start and gives a good initial description of Adsense. He also spends time pointing out to the reader that Content is King, and if you want to make any money, you had better write about stuff that someone gives a darn about (a continuing theme on this blog as well). His Design section runs through the importance of a good Web Page design and gives some examples using NVU.  Finally he gets down to brass tacks and outlines how to use Adsense to design eye catching ads and how to put them into your web site.

I got this book just to see if there was anything that I have missed in my years of attempting to make a buck on the Web, and I was pleasantly surprised to see confirmation that I was doing some of the right things and there was a good section where the Author explains how to submit your web site to the major search engines (and then I realized I hadn’t submitted this site to MSN search, so that was a good thing).

Lots of affirmation of the important points for making money the old fashioned way (earning it):

• Good content should bring traffic if you advertise it correctly
• Adsense needs to be tuned no matter what you are doing
• Write about something you care about, it will show

Interesting way of writing with a “conversation” going on through the entire book between folks who are trying to make money on line, and asking Eric questions.

Overall Rating: Good book for a beginner, worth a glance for others, just to fill in some blanks

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The fine folks over at Unique Blog Designs (the designers of the basic version of the WordPress Theme you are looking at, and the producers of a really nifty WordPress Advertisement Rotor plug in as well), sent me a newsletter about how to increase traffic to my web sites. I found the newsletter informative, but I had read most of the tips before, but they used a term I hadn’t heard before.

What is a Pillar Post?

To quote our friends at Unique blog design:

Write at least five major “pillar” articles. A pillar article is a tutorial style article aimed to teach your audience something. Generally they are longer than 500 words and have lots of very practical tips or advice. This article you are currently reading could be considered a pillar article since it is very practical and a good “how-to” lesson. This style of article has long term appeal, stays current (it isn’t news or time dependent) and offers real value and insight. The more pillars you have on your blog the better.

On Canadian Financial Opinions I have written a bunch of “Pillar” articles, and I have submitted many of them to different carnivals and such, but I keep forgetting they are there. Here are a few chestnuts that I really like from the Financial Side of things:

1. Einstein: The Rule of 72
   Understanding what a doubling period is, and how the rule of 72 can help you with this concept is important to the start of your investment plan.
2. Don’t Pass it to the Other Team
   How does the Carleton basketball coach have anything to do with finances? Read and you’ll see a long stretch.
3. Worst Financial Advice Ever Given
   Where I tell a good friend about something I’d never dream he’d do, with disastrous consequences.

Most of these posts I resurrect over time and will replay, but I really need to send them out and post them on various Carnivals to  use them to draw more readers to my sites, and bring in more links.

Is this post a Pillar Article? Maybe not, but I think my previous posts on How to Post Amazon Ads on a WordPress Blog, might well be.

Thanks Unique Blog Designs, good information!

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