Happy… Monday?

It’s been a great week here at theNetFool.com, but everyone needs a break. Truth be told, I was out all day Sunday at a baseball game (Nationals versus Orioles) and decided to spend my normal blogging time compiling an eBook that you can all download 100% free of charge!

“Creating A Blog” is an extended/enhanced compilation of the series of posts I have written here at theNetFool.com to guide anyone through making a blog from start to finish, and doing it the right way. Blogging with success is largely dependent on knowing what you are doing, which takes time if you are new. If you read this guide, you’ll be on the right path from the very start… this is really valuable material!

As readers of theNetfool.com, you may download this extensive 55-page eBook in .pdf format absolutely free for life. You may even share this with friends on your websites for free so long as the links remain in place. A great gift, that looks very professional, at no cost to you. If you haven’t been reading the “Creating A Blog” series, you’ll definitely want to check this one out!

DOWNLOAD “Creating A Blog” HERE!

Before I get off track too much, I do want to run through some of my favorite posts for the week ending June 29th, 2008. It was a busy week, so lots of good posts may have snuck through the cracks. Let’s focus on what I feel are five must-read articles!

• Caroline Middlebrook – Stumble Bait – The Viral Power of StumbleUpon
• Chris Guthrie – 10 Ways to Improve Your Technorati Rank
• Zac Johnson – How much will that Zip/Email Offer Really Cost You?
• Timothy Sykes – Yes, 99% of Stocks Under $5 Are Scams and Frauds
• The Blog Entrepreneur – Fact Based Niche Site Building

These posts really help me get back into the groove of things. I absolutely HAD to recommend Tim Sykes’ penny stock scam post because I have already come out and said the exact same thing. It’s important to stray away from these types of things if you aren’t knowledgeable in what you are dealing with. Zac Johnson’s post ties in quite nicely with my Zip/Email submit post. The others are solid blogging tips to make you money online.

Stock Market
First things first, I absolutely crushed the three major indices this past week. It was one of the worst weeks ever in the stock market, but my largest holding is a gold company. Gold absolutely skyrocketed as the Federal Reserve removed some of the speculation that rates might be raised in the near future… citing more of a worry with the economic slowdown than with inflation. Gold is what you want in that environment, and I was actually up 2.5% on Friday alone when the market was down about a percent.

This week, I expect things to be up and down… not doing much in the end. Although many predicted a quiet week this past week, when we saw hell open its gates instead, I feel like this upcoming week will hold a few big moves in both directions with no real net change. There is a rising debate on whether things are oversold or just accurately priced due to weak economic trends, so it will be interesting to see what comes up.

Blogosphere
For a lazy summer, there seems to be a flurry of activity in the blogging world. It’s more of the good old fashioned (and productive!) fun this time around… so I am going to try to get involved as much as possible. Marc from OneMansGoal made an interesting discussion post that I am thinking of investigating further. Also, there is a new blogging contest called “Blogging Idol” that I am attempting to get a last minute entry into. With this, a field of about 75 bloggers are going to compete to see who can get the biggest increase in RSS subscriber numbers. I don’t know how it’ll play out for me, but I want to see how well I could do organically.

I know that a lot of you saw the Market Leverage posts this week and emailed me asking about the service. Apparently, a lot of you are having problems signing up… so I just wanted to extend my helping hand to all of you now. If you need assistance with Market Leverage, feel free to contact me and I’ll help you get set up. There is no denying their customer service any longer!

Other than that, I feel that things are improving overall as people have more time to write. Basically, time to write creates a lessened urge to make contests as a substitute for actual work. You all know that I have made the Creating A Blog ebook, so I am going to be one of the first to make that jump into useful content that comes to you for free.

This Week In Focus
This week, I am going to be a bit busy because I am taking my Life & Health licensing examination on Wednesday. After that, its fourth of July weekend where I will probably spend my time up in Connecticut’s lovely beach soaking up some sun. Not really sure how I am going to keep up with blogging through all of this… but I’ll do my best to put out some good content.

I think that I am going to use this as a good opportunity to dive into some money-making schemes for your benefit. Since I don’t rely on the use of social media to artificially boost my stats (haha), having this content out there alone should support some solid growth in numbers the week forward.

Stay tuned for June’s earnings call, and stay bullish on the net!
-Jimvesting

Welcome to the conclusion of the “Creating A Blog” series brought to you by theNetFool.com. We’ve come a long way since week one, and now have everything fully functioning on our blogs. Heck, you should even have a few posts published… and by now, you should be starting to see some traffic flow into your website. Let’s work on organizing your content, your RSS feed and forming that all important blogging routine.

Being an efficient blogger is one of the most important moves that you will make in your blogging career. There are so many writers that have great blogs, but fail to do things regularly. Readers like some measure of consistency, so it is important to have all of your RSS feeds and post titles just as predictable as your blogging routine. By the end of this chapter, you’ll have the game-plan in hand to succeed.

Organizing Your RSS Feeds
Chances are, if you are new to blogging, you just don’t understand where to begin with Really Simple Syndication (RSS). By default, the WordPress system will set you up with an RSS feed that is sloppily organized from the get-go into a few pages of content. We need to have this a lot more organized so that people can sign up to our feeds with ease. Remember, not everyone will want to sign up to receive your RSS in their email inboxes every morning, and not everyone will want things directed to an RSS reader. The key to getting the maximum amount of RSS subscribers, is giving them the most options.

Luckily for us, Google recently took over FeedBurner… meaning you get all of the most professional options completely free. If you haven’t already, get on over to FeedBurner and create an account. With this, you can add your blog’s feed to your account and have everything streamlined for you within minutes. You’ll get an easy to use “http://feeds.feedburner.com/Jimvesting” access URL that opens up to a ton of unique subscriber options. Everything is tracked for you, and you can publicly show your readers how many subscribers you have at any given point in time with the “FeedCount” plugin among others available to you for free.

Go ahead activate whatever option you want through FeedBurner, as most of them are quite valuable. About 95% of successful bloggers are using FeedBurner to organize all of their subscribers. You can make a unique email feed subscriber option, add advertisements to your RSS feed for added revenue or even customize the format of the text that appears in each RSS feed item.

Organizing Your Post URLs and Titles
For the purposes of search engine optimization (SEO) and uniformity, it’s important to have your blog posts structured in the most effective way possible. Now that you have everything on your blog SEO’d with All-In-One SEO Pack, you may be looking for a way to simplify the URL of your individual postings. We don’t want to see any numbers or dates in the web address, so use “Permalinks” to get things set up correctly.

Lots of bloggers fail to address Permalinks as a useful tool to organizing your content. However, having your posts appear as “yourblog.com/post-title-here/” is very neat and easy for search engines to pick up. To do this, simply navigate to the “Settings” section of your administrator section and select the “Permalinks” tab. We want to use a custom structure of “/%postname%/” after our domain name. Alternatives are fine, but I feel that simply having the title there in the URL is the easiest method to use.

Once you have Permalinks configured, you can adjust the words that appear in the URL on each individual post. Right underneath the title of your posts in the editing screen, there will be a new “permalink” line where you can manually edit what appears. I recommend using five words or less, and adjusting it to include a simple term that would naturally be well-searched in Google. Use your own discretion, but having the Permalink appear as a common phrase is usually great for search engine rankings.

Other than Permalinks, the title of your post itself is essential. Beyond having a nice looking url on each post, your titles should be unique and packed with keywords. Over time, you will see exactly what I mean by this as your blog starts to appear in search engines more often. Make sure that each post title is something dynamic that draws attention, while at the same time describing what the post is about. This should appear clean inside of your blog’s layout, meaning that you don’t want a title that is going to run off the page… and you don’t want a title that is too short to describe a post.

Tracking Your Stats
Now that you have everything working correctly, you’ll want to install a traffic-tracking script that will show you how many unique visitors you are getting every day (among other things). This is very important for advertising purposes and organization. You will want to know how well your blog is doing outside of subscribers alone, so it is important to see how many people are seeing your website each day, week and month so that you will know what you are doing right and wrong. Without a statistics measure, bloggers often miss out on potential traffic coming in because they simply don’t know what works and what doesn’t. Plus, advertisers like to see what kind of traffic you are getting for ordering ads from your website.

The best traffic tracker in my opinion is the new Google Analytics system. This is more reliable and has the most options possible for analyzing your traffic. Plus, you get an unlimited log size so you can see how you are doing over a long period of time… which is always nice. If you are looking for something simpler, check out a service like StatCounter or WordPress’ own FireStats to track your progress. As much as I hate to over-rely on statistics to gauge my success as a blogger, it’s important to at least check how you are performing on a statistical basis now and then.

Forming a Blogging Routine
The biggest pitfall in blogging is the failure to create a blogging routine. When you own a publicly viewed blog, you need to be posting as often as possible and doing everything possible to expand your reach. I don’t know too many people that own blogs as personal journals that they really don’t want to pick up lots of readers, so I am going off the assumption that we want as much traffic as possible.

My recommendation is to make a new post every day. I have experimented heavily with posting at different intervals, but there really isn’t a better way in the world to increase your readership than by posting regularly every day. If you simply don’t have the time to fit this formula, try to pump out a minimum of 3 posts every week. Blogs that publish content less than 3 times a week are generally forgotten about. As much as people want to read your material, you will lose interest at an alarming rate if people assume that you simply don’t care enough about your own content to post regularly.

In addition to posting often, you should be doing all the right things after you make a new post. Your personal “bloggers routine” can include anything and everything from commenting on other blogs in your niche to publishing to social media networks. I find that my routine often consists of:

1. Commenting on related blogs to get clicks back to your post
2. Submitting each post to submission services like BlogEngage and BlogsVine
3. Re-Writing good articles and submitting to free article services like EZineArticles
4. Posting 5-10 useful thread responses in forums like DigitalPoint and Bloggeries

If you keep a steady routine of posting on regular intervals and following up each post with a slew of marketing techniques to gradually increase the number of readers you receive… you will be well on your way to turning an undiscovered blog into a niche authority. Your routine should be unique to your particular needs as a blogger, and you should never try to overdo it as we all run out of time now and then.

Conclusion
I hope that you have enjoyed this series on creating your own blog. We’ve covered everything from finding a useful topic to base your website on, registering a domain name and even marketing your name to attract visitors. The length of this guide itself is a testament to how complex owning and operating a blog can be. It is important to know what you are in for before you start if you want to hit the ground running. If you have any further questions, feel free to ask me to work things out for you (jim@Jimvesting.com)… I’ll be happy to work with you to help you get your footing!

-Jimvesting

I wanted to hold off on this post until after the June Birthday Bash had come to a close. This week, I received my very own care package from the guys at Market Leverage as a belated-birthday present. The ML team has done a fantastic job showering bloggers in the ‘make money online’ niche with praise and gifts… showing once again, why it pays to be a blogger.

I wanted to shoot a nice video displaying everything that they gave me, as I was completely stunned. As mentioned in the clip, I have only made about $20 with Market Leverage thus far… so it is a bit amazing they felt the need to shower me with generosity this week. As unexpected as the package was altogether, I was most impressed by the hand-written card and the fact that they bought Penn State clothing and accessories. Clearly, they are reading up on the websites and projects of all of their clients. They know more about me than I do!

In the realm of affiliate marketing, the bottom line is that all of the companies competing do much the same thing. There really isn’t a whole lot of room to bend in terms of costs, so most websites use the exact same offers with the exact same payouts and the exact same system. Most of these companies like NeverBlueAds and ClickBooth do a pretty stellar job with customer service… but Market Leverage blows them away. To think that a blogger like myself could get such an appreciation for the little-to-no work I have done for the company to this day is almost laughable, and is reason enough to do business with them.

I’m sticking with Market Leverage as my primary and recommended affiliate network because they have high payouts, a low $25 cashout value and the most unbeatable & friendly support you will find. Best of all, everything in your account is 100% free, so you can start making money today just by signing up with them and trying out their services. Even if you don’t end up hitting pay-dirt, you’ll find your experience well worth the effort.

To go along with the video, I’ve gone ahead and taken some snapshots of the care package and what was inside. Here is an entire list of what was given to me:

• Flip Mino Camera w. carrying case and tripod
• 2GB USB flash drive pen
• Penn State (Nike) sweatshirt hoodie
• Nike duffle bag
• Nike professional golf shirt
• Market Leverage T-Shirt
• Market Leverage Hat
• Penn State Mousepad

With the new camera, I am going to be doing a lot more video blogging in the future. It’s definitely high-quality, and you’ve already heard me rave about the updated model on this blog. I hope to shoot you guys some weekly stock picks each week along with the Sunday Link Love as an added video bonus. I’m not sure how much of the standard video-posting I’ll be doing, but I will definitely be trying out some new ideas. Overall, it should be a pretty fun experience that will add a new dimension to Jimvesting dot com!

Bottom Line: MarketLeverage clearly beats the pants off of other affiliate networks when it comes to customer care, so why not give them a try? What do you have to lose? They were very generous to me, and I’m sure you’ll find your experience similar.

-Jimvesting

It’s been a great two-week competition here at theNetFool.com! I’m giving away a brand new Flip Video Mino camera as well as a $50 MarketLeverage Rewards Card this month, and the winners are finally in! A big thanks to the guys down at Market Leverage for donating the prizes. Here’s the official results video:

Congratulations to the winners! This contest was a big success for this blog, as our RSS subscribers have really grown over the past two weeks to pass the 300-level for the first time… continuing upwards toward the famed 500-subscriber RSS status.

Not a video-watching person? Don’t worry, we’ve got the winners of the Flip Mino and the $50 ML Rewards card listed below… just wanted to make sure that you guys had a little suspense.

Using Random.org’s number generator in combination with an Excel spreadsheet that I composed for the 713 entries in this contest, I was able to draw two completely random winners to make things fair and square for you all. Everyone had an equal opportunity to win, though some received more entries through submitting videos and blog posts among other things.

And without further ado, the winners:

$50 ML Rewards Card: ClickUserName (YouTube Submission)

Flip Mino: reid@********** (Email RSS Subscriber)

Congratulations to both of you! I want to thank everyone that entered this month’s contest brought to you exclusively by theNetFool.com and Market Leverage. Go ahead sign up for a free account to make some money online with Market Leverage. I am an active member, and absolutely love their services. You’ll see in tomorrows post just how much they care about individual clients!

Stay tuned for more contests coming up!
-Jimvesting

I’ve been around the block when it comes to affiliate marketing networks on the internet. Though I have seen ClickBooth’s name spread around popular blogs like ShoeMoney, I’ve never really taken a serious look into using their program. That is, of course, before they came to me and contacted me about a review… something I was more than happy to give them as I need to keep you guys in the loop. Let’s take a look at what ClickBooth can offer for publishers trying to make money online!

Initial Thoughts on ClickBooth
From the get-go, I couldn’t help but consider them to be your everyday run of the mill affiliate network. The further I dug, the more I discovered, and this is actually a company with quite a lot of history. I had heard of the supposed “shady business” involving ClickBooth, and I decided to check it out first because I would definitely never want to promote anything that is going to hurt you financially. What I found? Thousands of users love using the network, and these claims against the program were all made in poor taste that I think are mostly false in the first place.

I absolutely love the clean and professional look of the website. It’s made clear from first glance where you need to navigate in order to get where you want to be. With the website clearly divided into “advertisers,” “publishers” and “networks,” it’s easy to understand the ClickBooth interface… and the bright colors don’t hurt either! Signing up for an account is pretty easy, and although they claim that there is an extensive back-and-forth interview process required to be accepted… they seem to be well-trained in figuring out who is legitimate and who is joining with bad intentions.

The ClickBooth Publishers Control Panel
I’m going to say it from the start: the ClickBooth central account panel is the best I have seen on any affiliate network. I know that I am a sucker for looks over functionality, but this site’s got both! I feel like the tools on the sidebar could be a bit better organized, but this is more than made up for a colorful and functional center panel that clearly displays featured ads and the daily best performing offers.

The system as a whole really reminded me of all of the other networks like MarketLeverage and NeverBlueAds, as I think they are all running the same base script behind it all. Even with this in mind, it’s easy to figure out where to get offers and how to configure your campaigns to maximize your returns. With some cool tools that you can use including ad rotators and a campaign report processing tool, you should feel right at home using this network.

Why Use ClickBooth?
I am under the impression that different ad networks are good for different people. I use Market Leverage because of their outstanding customer service and friendly design. But Clickbooth has it’s pull as well. From what I have seen, they have more ads for publishers to use than any other network. I was stunned with the amount of zip/email submits they have available!

In addition to quantity alone, ClickBooth claims that their system allows for 40-50% higher backend conversions than your average network. This is quite a big claim, but I can see how it would be possible with the number of offers available. I know that they use to offer a guaranteed highest payout disclaimer on their services. While I couldn’t find this again on their website, I believe that the payouts are definitely solid.

Payment Information and More!
Let’s get into payouts, what we all want to know. You can get payouts with ClickBooth from either check or PayPal, and they send out payments once a month (or every 7 days if you make over $5k). The downside here is that you need to get all the way to $50 before you can get your money out, a premium compared to most competitors.

Last but not least, ClickBooth has a great referral network that will pay you 2% on the earnings of every referred member you bring along with you. This might be less than the 5% of Market Leverage, but you get $10 for every referral on top of this. As most referrals will earn $5 or less, you are going to love the automatic $10 that you receive for someone that signs up under you.

Bottom Line: I really enjoyed my experience with ClickBooth. I feel that their website is well-structured and will have you earning top-dollar from advertisers in no time. The main interface is the best I’ve seen, and it makes things a lot easier in the back-end. If you aren’t convinced, why not keep up with them through Twitter? ClickBooth is an impressive company, so definitely give them a visit!

-Jimvesting