As a welcoming gift to the brand spankin’ new layout for the Net Fool dot com, I’m going to go ahead and launch right into a contest that hopefully you guys will enjoy . We had a fantastic first day, as shown by the astonishing jump in readers from Monday to Tuesday. Okay, so I had the tracking bit offline, but it’s still good to see the bounce! Hopefully we can network to the point that we can see 100+ unique visitors a day on the regular, following of course, a good post or two. First things first, to get that subscriber number up… you need to subscribe!

Lets get right to it, from now till April 15th, I am going to be running a big-time contest for all of you faithful readers out there. The prizes consist of the following:

For First Place:

1. One Paid copy of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book ($79)
2. One Paid NameCheap.com Domain Name with privacy guard ($10)
3. Free Paid Text Link Ad for a month ($3)
4. Free review on Bloggeries.com (priceless)

For Second Place:

1. Paid NameCheap.com Domain Name with privacy guard ($10)
2. Free Paid Text Link Ad for a month ($3)
3. Free review on Bloggeries.com (priceless)

These are some great prizes totaling about $125 in monetary value. We will decide the winner in a random selection process once all of the entries are in. The more entries you have, the better your odds become! You can enter in the following ways:

• Subscribe to my RSS feed (3 entries)*
• Digg a post (1 entry)
• Stumble a post (1 entry)
• Blog about theNetFool.com (6 entries)
• Post a Comment on theNetFool (1 entry)

Best of luck to all of you. I am hoping to see some great interest for what I shall call theNetFool.com – Ultimate Website Package. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is going off shelves, and is world-renowned for being the leading authority on getting your websites ranked higher. We also want to give a major shoutout to Bloggeries.com, a fantastic blogging community that generously donated the free reviews for the contest… check them out!

Please note that in order to gain entries from Diggs and Stumbles, you need to be a subscriber already as a prerequisite. This offer will be over before you know it, so make sure you get subscribed for your chance to win one of these awesome prize packages for free. Thanks for your support, and good luck!

-Jimvesting

As you should have noticed by now, there is a new design in town . I have been developing this new website layout over the past two weeks, and it is finally ready to be released to the public!

This design has really come a long way. I hired a freelancer designer (“Pinky” from getafreelancer.com) to do the header work. He did this for $60, which was pretty fair. I basically cannot draw freehand to save my life, but I did all of the logo and the navigation bar myself, as well as all of the other graphics that you see on this website. $60 ain’t bad for the drawing alone, but hey… the amount of work I put in on top of that makes the monetary value a lot higher!

To go with this $60 drawing, I purchased a template made famous by John Cow (no, not Chow) and again… modified the heck out of it . Regardless, it was nice to have something solid to base my work off of. After affording this $100 sunk cost… I figured, hey, why not get me a nice sales program while I’m at it. So naturally, I sprung for the classy but thrifty OIO Publisher (which I will review later) which allows me to handle all the ads you see on this website automatically via PayPal! Ad spots are going fast and are still dirt cheap, so navigate over to our advertising tab to get your spot secured up now.

I have planned out a contest set to launch within 24 hours. More details on that later, but lets just say I have a few big prizes to give out totaling about $100 that will definitely help a lot of you out. This will be focused on gaining subscribers, as is the primary interest for the month of March. Stay tuned for more updates, and please leave me some good feedback in the form of comments if you like what you see.

-Jimvesting

In the wonderful world of WordPress, it is essential that bloggers stray away from the default settings in order to improve the design and capabilities of their blogs. But where to start? What can you do to improve your blog? There are plugins made, both free and paid, for just about everything imaginable.

I think that the three most basic needs are:

1. Monetization
2. Optimization
3. Navigation

With this in mind, lets try to cover all our bases and find the five best plugins to solve our three basic needs in any WordPress blog.

1. All In One SEO Pack
This plugin is my go-to SEO Optimization tool for WordPress. Other than the built-in “permalink” service, this is really a must have for your website to fare well in Google (and other) search rankings. With the All In One SEO Pack, they enable you to format the titles on every single page, which I see as the most important feature for getting ranked well in searches. Notice how each page on theNetFool.com displays “Article Info | Jimvesting”? You can format your blog like this with All In One!

This plugin goes far beyond merely changing around titles however, you can pretty much change around anything with the meta descriptions of your postings, your selected keywords that show up in search results, and even the ability to “nofollow” posts/pages of your choosing. In order to get your website search engine optimized, you need a tool like All In One SEO… and this one’s absolutely FREE

2. OIO Publisher
I recently discovered this amazing WordPress plugin that “ads” a whole new functionality to your WordPress blog. Of course, I am talking about OIO Publisher, which allows you to run your own ad service where people can purchase ad slots on your page, pay through PayPal, and see their ads appear automatically! This one will run you a $37 one-time fee, but it is well worth it. It’s been called the “ultimate sales platform” for your blog, and it is a lot cheaper than the alternatives which can cost over $100.

Gone are the days when you need to pay other services a percentage of your sales for allowing them to run your ad service. OIO Publisher is a winner in my eyes. The user interface is very easy to understand, and they have an entire marketplace set up that you gain access to once you pay for the plugin. This will allow you to run everything from inline ads and banner ads, to sponsored posts and text links. If you have a digital item to sell, you can use OIO to handle the processing as well. If you are serious about monetizing your blog, buy this plugin.

3. Akismet
There is a reason that this spam-assassin comes with every WordPress installation. Before I was using Akismet, I had by comment moderation setting so that I needed to approve everything that came my way. Gone are the days where this is needed. Akismet is free to use so long as you aren’t a major company, and is basically an entire spam network that builds on itself. Whenever spam is recognized on your comments, it is added to the Akismet database and will never bother you again. It has caught over 150 messages since I have started using it, and is a must-have for any serious blogger.

I had the unfortunate experience of being labeled as spam in the past. This definitely does not happen to more than 5% of commenters, but as soon as I sent an email to the moderators at Akismet, they cleared it up for me and I haven’t had any problems since . With this installed, you really don’t have to worry about your comments being out of line again!

4. Related Posts
There are several “related post” plugins available for free through WordPress. In my opinion, the best of which is the WASABI Related Entries plugin. This is really a must-have option for your blogs. Not only does it look great and encourage your readers to stay on your website, but it acts as a great SEO tool by linking together your website for easier indexing! Again, there are tons of clones claiming to be the original and the best. I don’t really know enough to say which was the first, but I think the WASABI-version is the most functional so I encourage you to check it out first!

Having a related posts option is definitely a nice addition to any blog site. If you don’t already have one up and running, I suggest getting on and sticking it either underneath your content (and above comments), or somewhere on your sidebar. This one’s a winner!

5. Subscribe Remind
Don’t fall for the over-hype’d paid plugins that claim to boost your subscriptions like crazy, all you really need is this hidden gem Subscribe Remind. You’ve probably seen this implemented on other popular blogs. What this does is attach a “If you like this post, subscribe to my RSS feed!” text link around all of your blog posts and above your comments. This may seem like a no-brainer, and really, it should be. This small and simple plugin is one of the best ways to increase the amount of subscribers on your blog site.

Following the tactic that is basically “I’m going to annoy the heck out of you until you subscribe,” Subscribe Remind really does work. With more and more people on the internet subscribing to RSS news feeds, it is important that you have an easily accessible option for readers to subscribe to your blog feed. Overall, I find it unobtrusive, and a top-notch method to increase your subscriber count !

Using these plugins all but guarantees a boost in traffic and subscribers to your blog. By installing and using All In One SEO Pack, OIO Publisher, Akismet, Related Posts, and Subscribe Remind, you will encourage users to subscribe, comment and purchase ads. Not only this, but you will even see better results from search engines! Sure, these tools aren’t an end-all cure for a terrible website, but as long as you are an active blogger with an interesting focus… you should be well on your way!

-Jimvesting