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If you’re an Internet marketer, one of the things that people say to do in order to get traffic to your site is to comment on other people’s blogs. The question I’m putting forth in this article, one that was recently asked at the Warrior Forum, is a simple one. Is blog commenting really worth the effort? If you’re not sure, you might want to read this article. It’s going to shed some light on this sometimes looked down upon practice.

First of all, let me start out by saying, I’m not talking about spam comments. I’m talking about physically going to a person’s blog, reading the article and actually making a relevant comment on it. I’m also talking about comments that aren’t just a few words. In fact, they could be considered close to articles themselves, though not quite as long.

Okay, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, is this practice worth it? Well, the first thing we have to look at is the blog itself. Are the links do follow or no follow? If they’re no follow and all you’re looking for are backlinks, then no…it’s not worth it. However, there is more to blog commenting than backlinks and that’s where a lot of people just don’t get it.

See, believe it or not, if you happen to land on a really hot topic, you’re going to find that many people comment and actually READ the comments of others. In these cases, you stand a very good chance of somebody reading YOUR comment and, if it’s really good and the link at the end entices them, going to YOUR site in the process. I have had quite a few visitors to my own blog coming from blogs where I made my comments.

Did I have to put a lot of time into those comments? Yes, almost as much as I put into writing this. But in the end, the time spent resulted in getting prospects to my blog…many turning into customers. To me, that is time well spent…even if the blog I commented on WAS no follow.

Ultimately, you have to look at your reasons for why you would comment on other blogs. If it’s just for backlinks, then you really have to be picky and you can’t write article length comments. It’s just counterproductive to your time. However, you still have to make RELEVANT comments or you’re going to end up getting them deleted as spam.

Blog commenting can be a very productive practice. But you have to understand the process and decide what it is you want to get out of it.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

CLICK HERE to discover how to put together an authority site that will ultimately bring you in a steady income for years and years to come with very little upkeep

Blogs are great. If you use Blogspot, they’re even free as there are no hosting costs. Well, in this article, I’m going to give you a nice little system to make some easy cash with blogs. It doesn’t take much brain power and it can be done in as little as an hour a day. Keep reading to find out more.

It’s no secret that the world of entertainment is big. You almost can’t turn on the TV without finding out something that somebody did. Maybe an actor or actress is in a new movie or TV show. Maybe a singer has just come out with a new CD. Whatever it is, it’s news…and people want to know about it. So what I’m going to have you do is simply capitalize on current events.

Go to Google Trends and see what celebrity is on the charts. There isn’t a day that goes by that there isn’t somebody who is being talked about. What you want to do, however, is only focus on the celebrities who have something major going on…even if it’s not directly related to their career. Yes, I’m talking about all that hot gossip too, like who’s dating who or who’s divorcing who. Like it or not…that’s news too.

Once you’ve found somebody who is really hot, set up a Blogger blog (it’s free) for that person. You’re then going to focus on two areas. The first area is the day to day news for the person. Whatever is going on, you’re going to write about it…regardless of what it is. Like I said, even gossip is news. The second area you’re going to concentrate on is the person’s accomplishments. If they’re a singer, you might want to list all their CDs and even review some of them. If they’re an actor or actress, you might want to list their movies or TV shows and review some of them. You should have no trouble finding something to write about.

Do this for about three or four weeks so that you’ve built up quite an authority blog on the person and then wait for the traffic to come in. To help this along, you might want to bookmark each article you write. You might also want to tweet about it at Twitter if you have an account. No matter who you interact with, very few people are not into entertainment. It’s a broad market.

After about a month, start monetizing the blog with AdSense and Amazon. CDs may not sell for much and at 4% commission you won’t make a fortune. But after a while, the sales add up. And with decent traffic, AdSense revenue can become quite substantial.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s easy to do and it won’t cost you a dime.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to make money TODAY without spending a DIME? Check out my site at http://www.hottrendsdaily.com/ and find out how.

WordPress or Blogger? That is the question. Okay, it’s no “to be or not to be” but it’ll do for the purpose of this article. Lot of people ask me which they should use. Does it matter? Some think that one is better than the other. Well, I figured that I’d give you the straight deal on these two blogging platforms and then let you decide for yourself which is better. I’m going to try to be as objective about this as I can.

Let’s start with what I feel is really the most important aspect of these two platforms…and it has nothing to do with the physical aspects of either. Truth is, with Blogger, you’re restricted to using it on THEIR domain. In other words, you don’t really own the blog. You’re just renting space. This can be a problem in two ways.

First, as it’s not your site (not really) Blogger can yank it out from under you at any time. So, if they don’t like what you’re promoting or think you’re running a spam blog, you can lose it faster than you can say “Bob’s your uncle.” Personally, I don’t like being at the mercy of somebody when it comes to my blogging platform.

Aside from that, you’re limited to the URLs you can choose for your blog. With Blogger, you’re on their domain and nothing is going to change that. With WordPress, you can get your own hosting and your own domain and place the blog on it…thus optimizing your domain keywords as much as possible. This is a big advantage of WordPress over Blogger.

But what about functionality? Well, to be honest, you CAN do a lot more with WordPress. The number of plugins are off the charts. However, for a simple blog, Blogger does a more than adequate job. So if you don’t want all the hassles of installation and plugin management, Blogger will be fine.

However, the question that people most often ask is this. “Which one ranks better?” This is where you are going to be in for quite a surprise. Truth is, I’ve seen Blogger blogs that end up as the number one search result over at Google. If you want to be technical about this, it really doesn’t matter which one you go with. How well you rank will depend more on the keywords you choose and the niche you’re in than the blogging platform itself.

So there you have it…WordPress versus Blogger. Personally, I’ll go with WordPress if I want a specific domain and really want to optimize the blog fully. But if I’m putting something together for quick traffic and don’t want any expenses, I’ll use Blogger.

In other words…it depends on what you’re using the blog for.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
CLICK HERE to discover how to put together an authority site that will ultimately bring you in a steady income for years and years to come with very little upkeep

One of these days, Internet marketers are going to learn to read the TOS of blog sites such as Blogger and WordPress. In this article, I’m going to focus on WordPress because that’s the one that can really get marketers into a ton of trouble. Most people don’t know this and ultimately, it ends up getting their WordPress blogs deleted. Yes…deleted. So, if you don’t want that to happen to YOUR blog, I strongly suggest that you read this article.

Okay, so what’s the big crisis? Well, if you take a look at the WordPress TOS for blogs hosted on THEIR domain (that’s the key) it specifically states that these blogs CANNOT be used for commercial purposes. In other words, you cannot make money with them…at all. That means no selling your own products or even products as an affiliate. These are supposed to be personal blogs…period. So what ultimately happens is that some marketer puts up one of these blogs, puts up a review of an affiliate product, slaps an affiliate link under it and after a while, the blog gets disabled. There is no warning. They just shut you down.

If you think it can’t happen to you, think again. I personally know people who have gone through this nightmare…and it’s NOT fun. Imagine you have a blog with 1,000 pages ranked near the top of the SERPs and suddenly it’s gone. Not fun. So do yourself a favor. If you’re thinking of putting up a WordPress blog, do it on your OWN domain. Spend the lousy $5 a month for hosting and the couple of bucks for a domain name. It will save you a ton of grief.

But what if you’ve already got a WordPress blog online hosted at their sites? What do you do? Do you just delete it and start all over? Do you copy and paste all the content and toss it on your own site? Actually, there are ways where you can actually transfer the blog from their domain to your own domain. It isn’t hard and will only take you about 30 minutes.

Whatever you decide, please understand that WordPress is very strict about their TOS. When they say that you cannot make money from their hosted blogs, they mean it. Blogger isn’t so strict. They will allow you to make money with their blogs. So if you don’t want to pay for a domain and hosting, at least go with Blogger. The chances of having your blog deleted are much less.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to know what the 7 Deadly Sins of Internet Marketing are? Get my free report at http://www.stevewagenheim.com/7deadlysins/7deadlysins.html and save your business from going down the tubes before it even has a chance.

I really feel sorry for marketers who have several hundred review blogs out there because the day of reckoning has come upon you guys and the work you have ahead of you is going to be mind blowing at best and near impossible at worst. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I suggest you read this article. It could very well save you some hefty fines that are likely to come your way.

In case you’ve been living in a cave and haven’t heard, the FTC has just come out with some new rulings that directly affect review blogs. In short, you can no longer make any claims on your product review without also stating what the average result is that a buyer of the product can expect. Since there is no way you can possibly know that, making any claims is totally out of the picture now. You can talk about what the product contains and what information it provides, but you can make no claims. So any claims you already have on your blog, they must be removed. That’s number one.

Number two is just as important. If you are an affiliate promoting any of these products that you’re reviewing or are in any way getting compensated for these reviews, you must clearly state that on the blog itself that you are being compensated. This is probably going to be the most time consuming thing for most bloggers. While not every blogger makes claims on their review blog, it is highly unlikely that any of them have disclosed that they are making money from any sales of the product or for the review itself. If you have hundreds of review blogs, have fun.

For those who think this is not serious, the fine for any infraction is $11,000. Now, for the big fish in the pond, this is small change. But for people like you and me, this can put a real hurt on our business. I personally can’t afford an $11,000 fine. If you can, you’re welcome to take your chances. Me? I’m going to make sure that all my blogs comply.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
CLICK HERE to discover how to put together an authority site that will ultimately bring you in a steady income for years and years to come with very little upkeep

And the debate goes on. Is a blog as good as or better than a static site? Are they interchangeable? Do you really NEED a blog at all? This article is going to cover a few of the pluses and minuses about using blogs instead of static sites.

Let’s start with functionality. The great thing about blogs, especially if you are using WordPress hosted on your own domain, is that they are quite versatile out of the box. With a static site, unless you’re either one whiz of a programmer or know somebody who is, you’re going to be limited by those programming abilities. Static HTML can only do so much and any change you want to make you have to either code yourself or have somebody do for you. Blogs have many built in things that you can install at the push of a button.

What about the look of the site? Well, again, with something like WordPress, there are so many third party developers making themes for WordPress that you can literally have a blog that looks nothing like anybody else’s. And you won’t have to write one line of code. Again, one click of a button and you’ll have your new look. And if you don’t like it, with another click, you can get that look changed…instantly.

It would seem that there are very few downsides to having a blog, especially a WordPress one. Well, the one downside is that, unless you ARE one of those programming whizzes, you ARE at the mercy of all these developers. In other words, whatever is available…that’s it. If you want something that isn’t floating around somewhere, you’re going to have to find somebody to put it together for you.

But the biggest downside is security. Because WordPress is open source software, everybody has access to the code…including hackers. And these hackers make life miserable for a lot of people. Thus, you have to constantly keep up with all the updates…more so than you would with a static site with custom code that somebody made for you.

Ultimately, there is no perfection and you have to go with what’s more important to you…ease of use or tighter security.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
CLICK HERE to discover how to put together an authority site that will ultimately bring you in a steady income for years and years to come with very little upkeep

There is nothing better than quick and easy money. And there is no quicker and easier money than putting up a certain kind of blog. This is a down and dirty, no muss, no fuss process. It’s not pretty and nobody is going to award you style points for it, but when you start to see the traffic coming in, you’ll thank me for sharing these killer tips. So let’s begin.

First thing you want to do is head on over to Google Trends. Every hour, they update with the latest hot searches. This is what people are looking for right now. For example, as I am writing this, everybody and their grandmother is looking up the Michael Vick press conference since he just signed with the Eagles for two years. Simply go to the site, find something hot that can be monetized in some way (with Vick you can always sell football related stuff) and then move on to the next step.

That next step is getting yourself a Blogspot blog. The reason you want a Blogspot blog is because you don’t have to wait for getting a domain propagated to your hosting. With Blogspot, it’s instantaneous. I can get a blog up and running literally within 10 minutes…and that’s with all that’s going to come next.

What comes next is the article you’re going to write for your blog. It should relate directly to the news event. In the case of Michael Vick, you might want to write a summary of the press conference. People searching for this phrase are going to want to know what went down. A good summary will attract a lot of traffic.

Finally, there is the actual monetization. There are two easy ways to monetize something like this. For starters, you can put some AdSense blocks on your blog. This is a great way to make some money without people having to buy anything. If you choose your keywords correctly, Google will display the relevant ads. In addition to AdSense, you can go to Amazon and get some links for football related merchandise. Just place them under your article and you’re bound to make a few sales from it once you get enough traffic.

That brings us to the final piece of the puzzle…getting traffic. You want to do this quickly, so the best quick ways are through social bookmarking and social networking. Go to places like Digg and Twitter and bookmark and tweet about your blog and you’ll have quite a few people going there. If you also have a relevant list to the niche, you can email them and let them know about your new blog.

Like I said, this is a very quick method that can, in many cases, bring you results in a matter of hours. So if you want to make money quickly, this is one great way to do it…with a free Blogspot blog.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to make money TODAY without spending a DIME? Check out my site at http://www.hottrendsdaily.com/ and find out how.

I love bloggers. They think that having a blog means you can put up any old nonsense and it’s fine. Well, actually, it is. I mean let’s face it, it’s YOUR blog and you can do anything you want with it. But if you expect to use it for marketing purposes and expect people to actually take what you say seriously, you better put some thought into what you post. I could probably leave this article at that, but then it wouldn’t be much of an article. So allow me to elaborate.

There is a big difference between nonsense and worthwhile content. However, there is a very fine line between worthwhile content and really valuable content. It’s this fine line that most people have a problem with. Sure, I think most marketers know enough not to fill up their blogs with rambling posts about their trip to lake Watchmacallit. But what about the posts that they make that are relevant to their business? Do they really think them through?

For example. Let’s say you’re making a blog post with 3 tips for writing an article and for the 3 tips you say, “Come up with a catchy title”, “Target keywords that people search for” and “Have a strong call to action in your resource box.” Okay, not bad. Certainly these are helpful tips but what if you didn’t really go into much detail on each one? How helpful would they really be?

Now, imagine you took that same blog post with those same tips and for the title part, maybe gave some examples of catchy titles. Maybe you classified titles into different categories or types. Heck. you could probably make a whole blog post just on this one thing alone. Now imagine you went into that much detail for ALL the items you wanted to discuss. Now THAT would be a blog post worth reading.

Point I’m trying to make is, there is a difference between good content and REALLY good content. Nobody is expecting you to write the great American novel, but if you’re going to put up a blog to establish yourself as an authority, it’s a pretty good idea to make sure that what you post is actually worth reading…a lot.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
CLICK HERE to discover how to put together an authority site that will ultimately bring you in a steady income for years and years to come with very little upkeep

Michel Fortin made an excellent blog post the other day about comment spam to which I offered my two cents on the subject. There is no question that it is a huge problem. In this article, I’m going to address the problem and offer some simple solutions to bloggers and those who post their meaningless comments. My apologies to those who I have no doubt I am going to offend.

First of all, the comment spam that Michel and I are talking about is not the obvious kind…you know, the folks who post their garbage about whatever medical miracle pill they’re promoting that day. No, we’re talking about the more devious kind. That’s the kind that looks innocent enough, but is spam nonetheless. For example, when somebody makes a comment to one of your blog posts, “Nice article. Thanks for sharing” and then puts their link under it. This is nothing more than a poor attempt to build backlinks to their site.

Okay, now that we know what kind of spam we’re talking about, what do we do about it? Well, there is no simple solution on the blogging end of it. Spam capture plugins for your blog can only do so much. If somebody posts what looks like a legit comment, the only way to get rid of it is to have comments moderated and manually delete the ones that don’t measure up. This can be a very time consuming process if you have a blog with a lot of traffic. The only other solution, the one I chose, is to not allow comments. I finally had no choice.

However, if we’re going to put a stop to this problem, the only real way is to put the burden on those who make these worthless comments in the first place. So here’s a novel concept. How about actually saying something that adds value to the blog post itself? This way, we can actually get into a meaningful discussion and maybe people reading the blog will actually learn something.

Yeah, I know…too much to ask. After all, it’s so much easier to just put down something like, “Nice post.”

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
CLICK HERE to discover how to put together an authority site that will ultimately bring you in a steady income for years and years to come with very little upkeep

Are blog review sites dead? Simple enough question. The answer, unfortunately, is not so simple. Depending on how you go about structuring and promoting your site, yes, it could very well be a dead duck. But that doesn’t mean it has to stay that way. This article is going to explore this issue and try to get to the bottom of the problem. And make no mistake about it…there are problems.

At the top of the list of problems is the FTC. Turns out, they’re cracking down on bogus review sites. These are sites that are clearly being paid for endorsing a product, usually in the form of an affiliate promotion at the end of it. Truth is, it’s hard to know what a legit review is and what a bogus one is. Therefore, the FTC is tightening the noose.

In response to this, Google, which is the largest search engine in the world, has had no choice but to do the same in order to protect their customers…the people using their search engine looking for legit results. So anybody using Google’s PPC advertising to promote a product is being hit very hard by their latest course of action, which was to lower the quality scores of sites who use this tactic. As a result, many Adwords users are getting hammered.

So the obvious answer would be that blog review sites were in fact dead. However, this is a simplistic approach to the problem. For one thing, a blog with a legit review isn’t likely to get flagged by the FTC. And even if Google is going to extremes, there are other ways of getting traffic to your review blog besides using PPC advertising. You could use article marketing, social networking, social bookmarking and many other tactics to get people to your blog. Google is not the only game in town…not to mention that there are other PPC engines as well.

Put up a legit review site and use methods of promotion that aren’t affected and there is no reason why your review blog can’t continue to be successful. Having said this, no doubt there will be more legislation coming down the road that we will have to adapt to. Those who adapt will succeed. Those who don’t will not.

Yes, it really IS that simple.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim
CLICK HERE to discover how to put together an authority site that will ultimately bring you in a steady income for years and years to come with very little upkeep