In the olden days, when dinosaurs walked the Internet, starting a web log was a monumental undertaking. By the time Peter Merholz coined the term “blog,” the situation had improved considerably. In fact, there is a whole subset of hosting called blog hosting. A blogger no longer needs an advanced skill set in order to start a blog. However, he/she still has to decide upon blog platform.

WordPress is probably the best blog platform solution for most people. It is new-user tweaked with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to free plug-ins, themes, widgets and apps. Because of its ease of set-up and broad platform functionality, WordPress is also the choice of the top hosting companies. For this purpose, we’ll focus on WordPress hosting.

To choose top web hosting, there are a few questions the blogger needs to ask himself. Can you set-up your own script? Do you know how to customize it to run correctly? Do you know where to locate quality plug-ins to improve your blog performance? Do you know how to activate the plug-ins? Every wise choice you make now is a future headache you will be spared.

There are chiefly two choices when it comes to blog hosting.

1) You may opt for a “free WordPress host.”
“Free blog hosting” offers to the blogger a few pool themes that are provided to all the free blog host users. Most free blog hosts offer very few WordPress plug-ins and/or widgets. Most free hosts require “upgrades” for any advanced options. These upgrades quickly amount to a bigger bill than a paid blog host would have charged you in the first place. The paid host would also have given you better hosting. The “free host” rarely offers the degree of functionality that paid blog hosting will. A paid blog host typically has to have a better grasp of the script itself.

2) You may decide upon paid blog hosting.
There are nearly 10,000 WordPress plugins, from basic statistics counters to highly complicated multi-use ones. A paid blog host will allow you to use most, if not all, of them and thus extend the WordPress platform to its full strength. In a competitive blog situation, these plug-ins can be vital to search engine optimization. Plug-ins make easier the once-complicated task of running a successful blog.

A paid web host will often have an easy set-up requiring little technical expertise. If you’re a technically sophisticated netizen, you can also find a paid blog host that offers all the bells and whistles you might prefer. Is your blog the start of a business or a part of an existing enterprise? Is it a personal blog? Will you be embedding video? What widgets and/or apps will you require? The great thing about WordPress is you’ll have those questions easily addressed. You will also have a remarkably straightforward set-up, no matter how complicated your blog.

Other pertinent hosting questions are the obvious ones. What size account will you need? Most quality web hosts have scalable options for every blog level. Under almost all circumstances, the openly marketed account options will be enough. However, all professional hosts can assist you in scaling up from there.

Does your web host tech know his stuff in terms of security? In as solid a platform as WordPress, that is not as critical an issue. The blog software itself does most of the sentinel stuff for the blogger.

In fact, all you have to do is blog!
-Jimvesting Dot Com

Jimvesting.com’s got a brand new feature just for you:
GET THE STANDOUT COMMENTS PLUGIN – FOR FREE!

Two weeks ago, we saw the launch of a brand new blogging tool from John Chow, Alex Shalman and Jeff Rose. Their product called “Standout Comments” is a WordPress plugin that integrates all of the useful features of a comment section into one — in order to help you drive traffic to your newsletters, RSS feeds and marketing lists.

What’s new about this product you ask? NOTHING! And that’s the beauty of it (?). For a limited time… you can own this fantastic repackaging of plugins that already exist for a lower price… for only $67!!!

RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME DEAL ALERT!
Not only is this a killer deal, a few bloggers have upped the ante!

• If you sign up through John Chow’s link you will have a 1-in-10,000 shot at winning an Apple iPad that he doesn’t want!
• If you sign up through ZK of Web Traffic ROI, you get a truckload of eBooks he says are worth a combined $447 on the open market!
• And if you hit up Dan Scocco of Daily Blog Tips you can get his obsolete domain advice eBook for FREE!

But I’ve got ‘em all beat — No… I am not going to provide an illegal download

How to Get “Standout Comments” by John Chow for Free

When I told John Chow that I thought $67 was way overpriced for everyone, he responded: “Then don’t buy it and all day searching for the 2 to 3 free plugins. For others, time is money.” What John didn’t factor in is that I’m not concerned about me not buying it… I’m concerned about people getting taken for a ride because they think they need it. You can get every single feature of Standout Comments for free, and you can do it in less than an hour. Better yet — you can do it in under 15 minutes because I am going to provide you every single component of Standout Comments in a package I call “Jimvesting’s Comment Miracle.”

If your time is worth $268/hour, please disregard this post and buy it.

The Features of Standout Comments

• Subscription Options
• Sharing Options
• Advertising Banner
• Admin Panel
• Aesthetics
• Tweetback URLs
• Money Back Guarantee

Subscription Options
The main component of Standout Comments is that it offers you a way to provide a link to your newsletter at the end of your comment entry section so that any time anyone posts a comment, you are offered a chance to subscribe to a newsletter as well. This can be perfectly replicated by a lot of premium plugins, including: Opt-In Comments ($57), Action Comments ($17) and WP Optin ($27).

I’ve found our free solution (after a LOT of digging, this thing was totally buried!) in “Aweber WordPress Plugin” by Guru Consulting Services. This plugin puts a checkmark in your comments (AND on user registration if you want) to automatically add anyone who comments to our Aweber opt-in list. Bravo! That’s the same thing Standout Comments does!

The second thing that Standout Comments accomplishes is that it adds a checkbox for users to be “subscribed” to the comments, so that whenever anything new is posted they get an email. There are literally dozens of these plugins available for free, my favorites are: 1) Subscribe to Comments and 2) Enroll Comments. Bingo bango… we’re done here!

Sharing Options
Sharing options is something that we discussed a week ago: Linking Your Blog to Your Social Profile. To recap, there are quite a few social plugins that will accomplish exactly what Standout Comments is doing, and my favorites (for the purposes of looking like Standout Comments) are: 1) SexyBookmarks; 2) Socialize This; 3) Sociable.

Advertising Banner
This is another easy one, as everyone and their grandma has thought of doing this. Personally, I’m not a fan of putting an advertising banner by the comment section. However, if you really want to, my favorites for this purpose are: 1) Banner Garden; Max Banner Ads; Ad Minister; Advertisement Management.

Admin Panel
All of our plugins can be edited in seconds through the WordPress admin panel.

Aesthetics
I was kind of surprised that they brought this up “plays nice with your theme, and integrates seamlessly.” Well, so does ours, as all we are doing is adding a few links, boxes and banners. Aesthetics couldn’t be sexier… check!

Tweetback URLs
Plenty of Twitter plugins to go around… I’ve searched for and found a few. For simplicity, I am using Tweetbacks by Yoast.com which allows all of the tweets that mention my posts to be listed as a new kind of trackback (a “tweetback”). Also, I’m going to combine this for maximum effect with the simple added form field for twitter usernames in my comment section with WP Twitip ID.

Money Back Guarantee
They offer a 100% money back guarantee for 30 days… I’ll offer you a 200% money back guarantee for 60 days! In all seriousness, pretty much every marketable product has a return policy, but don’t believe for a second that it means the product is priced effectively.

Introducing: Jimvesting’s Comment MIRACLE!

I’ve compiled my entire guide and all of the plugins in one place, and have made it available for you to download for free! I spent a few hours going through all this and testing to make sure it works… but yes indeed, it has every last feature of “Standout Comments” but you will save yourself the $67 price tag.

In case you didn’t pick up on it, this post is extremely sarcastic and I am only trying to poke fun at John Chow (a good friend of mine) & other bloggers who promoted it for him. While I am upset he didn’t gift me a free copy like those other lucky guys, Standout Comments is actually a damn good release. While I don’t agree with the price tag, it was the first plugin on the market to put everything in one spot for you — easy to install, use and implement. But yes, the Jimvesting Comment Miracle actually is 100% compatibility, real, free and devious!

Where’s the Proof!?
Below is a screenshot of the Jimvesting Comment Miracle plugin working on my test server, which you can access here. I’m not trying to hide anything, and every plugin that I have gathered is indeed 100% free and customizable… making MY package more flexible than Standout Comments if you know your way around.

Download Jimvesting’s Comment Miracle (JCM)
Like What You See? It is darn near identical to the actual plugin.

Download Jimvesting’s Comment Miracle
Jimvesting’s Comment Miracle (Version 1.0): DOWNLOAD HERE!

Promote The JCM Plugin Package
First of all, I’m not exactly sure why you WOULDN’T want to promote this! If you are in the blogging camp that believes these kinds of plugins should be free, than why not show your support by writing a blog article, tweeting about it, or trying to blow up Digg/SU/Facebook with spam for my new plugin. Anyone who helps me to promote this (use my banner if you’d like, link back to this blog post) can shoot me an email and get a free copy of my eBook “Thirty Day Blog.” Sweet!

I hope you enjoyed this feature (I know I did). I’ll be sure to update this post as improvements get added to the world of WordPress plugins (happens on a weekly basis). I’d use this myself if I hadn’t grabbed Optin Comments when it was free. Drop a comment if you use it and let me know what you think.

Stay Bullish on the Net!
-Jimvesting Dot Com

After a one-month break that I used to work on a few blogs as a part of the first round of Blogger Stimulus, I’m now back in action and ready to ease more “liquidity” into the system. But I do believe that I completely botched the first round of stimulus by completely ignoring the money-multiplier effect of stimulus packages!

What I did WRONG in the first blogging stimulus package on Jimvesting dot com

The purpose of a truly economic “stimulus package” is to have money flow through the system in as many ways as possible. My first blogging stimulus promised a great new blog with a premium theme to anyone who wanted to sign up for a new web hosting account. The logic here was that if you wanted a blog… you’d need hosting regardless. By signing up under my affiliate link with HostGator, we created a profitable scenario for both of us…. but this wasn’t much of a stimulus because it stopped multiplying through the system right there! Read the rest of this entry »

The following is a sponsored review of the Bloggers Base network, and my opinion on it has not been swayed by virtue of payment in any way.

One of the most asked questions that I get surround the concept of marketing your blog. As the old adage would go, running a successful blog is very much a sense of how much traffic you can get there… and we would want to apply the old 80/20 rule to marketing: 80% marketing, 20% content. As tough as this might be, the marketing side is what really drums up popularity behind a blog… and good writing alone will work more against than for you if you aren’t actively looking for readers.

Understanding that marketing is key can be a great step forward in your plan to dominate the blogosphere… but then the question becomes HOW exactly should you market? Sure, you could pony up and start an advertising campaign to get the word out… but unless your content is also good, you will find yourself in a ditch sooner rather than later. Instead, I would recommend starting to network across other niche blogs that are similar in focus to the one you are trying to run. Reach out to the bigger names and start making as many friends as possible. Before long, you will start to see traffic feeding in left and right.

How do I find similar blogs in my niche?

I have been asked the question “how do I find similar blogs” literally dozens of times more than I would like to have it asked, and the question is usually to use Google or another search tool to organically dig up the best names. However, it has recently come to my attention that there is a better option out there… Bloggers Base!

That’s right, my good friend Dan has come up with what I think is a top-notch idea… and it comes in the form of a new social media network devoted to bloggers. Sure, there are your classic communities like Twitter, Digg and StumbleUpon that have captured a lot of market share… but if you are a bit newer to blogging and DON’T have a network already lined up, it is very very difficult to gain any traction when you start so far down the food chain.

The Problem With Big Networks

When I think about marketing via social media, it usually links back to the classic one-day rally where you will get 1,000s of page views on one “hot” piece of writing… but then never hear from these people again. However, with Bloggers Base you actually get the chance to form a network with other people interested in your content space. Think of this like “LinkedIn” for bloggers!

When Dan first approached me with the possibility of running a review, I realized what a great opportunity this truly is. While it is still in the beta stage, Bloggers Base offers what the “big networks” can’t… and that is a level playing field. When you register for Digg… you are almost forced to make a ploy for the old timers that have a reputation built up in the community if you want to have any degree of success. However, with Bloggers Base, those that write the most will get noticed. Alternatively, even if you don’t wind up with a cash incentive (yes, they give out prizes), you get a new network of friends to leverage later on.

Where the revenue really comes from in blogging…

So, it all get’s back to making money from your blog… right? I am going to assume that most of you are in this because cash is always a nice incentive on the side of getting your name out there. When people ask how to make money from blogging… the answer isn’t to sell ad space or to write a bunch of sponsored posts every month, it is leveraging your network of users for profits over time.

Truth be told, bloggers without a dedicated crew of readers that legitimately care about what you have to say will never be successful. One one hand, Bloggers Base offers you the ability to get massive amounts of traffic to the posts that you write. However, when you really step back and think about it, if you are a top contributor to Bloggers Base you will get much more than the $500 a week that they currently offer to their best authors… you will be getting friends. If there is one thing I have learned, it is that friends lead to more friends.

Once you start the networking cycle, and assuming you continue to put out excellent content on your blog, it is only a matter of time before your blog begins to churn out more and more RSS subscribers every day… sometimes even at alarming rates! Using social media seems to be the next big fad across the internet, so why not hop on the bandwagon before there is no room left to sit down?

Bottom Line: I highly recommend that you all sign up to, or at least check out, BloggersBase.com. It is a tremendous opportunity, and completely FREE! At the very least, creating a profile and making an account will get you another social media network to gain a little bit of backlink-juice to your blog and/or website. Check it out!

-Jimvesting

It’s official!

While you were away, Google brought webmasters their own Christmas present in the form of the Fourth Quarter 2008 PageRank Update! Many bloggers, marketers and web geeks alike wait for Google PageRank (“PR”) updates religiously, and for good reason. A high PR can send your blog to the top of search engine rankings, get you much more easily indexed, and help you rake in a lot more dough from advertisers who like to see high numbers. Don’t let anyone tell you that PageRank ain’t important, because it can really drive your website’s success.

So what happened to me? This round of Google PageRank updates was pretty solid overall. Jimvesting.com got upgraded from a PR 3 to a PR 4… though I already had a PR 4 back in May of 2008, before getting downgraded to a PR 3 in the fall. At any rate, that is solid news. On related websites, BullishBankers.com (my stock market community) received the bump up from a PR 3 to a PR 4… not bad for a website that’s only been around for 6 months. During the Q2 PageRank Updates, I reviewed the new ratings and how I felt they were relative to what I felt these blogs deserved. Today, we redo this process with 100 of the top MMO blogs on the internet.

Jimvesting’s Top 100 MMO “Fair Value” Rankings

Because of the constant ranting on how “unfair” Google’s Pagerank service is, I decided to pull from the top 100 “Make Money Online” websites on the internet (according to the leading Top 100 list), and put the new PR rankings to the test. Below, you will find a list of these blogs, their new Pagerank as of December 31st 2008, and their Jimvesting “Fair Value” ranking. You can call this a little “surprise” for Google… just thanking them for the PR upgrade by throwing 100+ links around!

Q4 2008 Jimvesting’s “Fair Value” Pagerank Analysis

Whew! That’s one heck of a list, eh? Again, if your site is listed here as “overvalued” it doesn’t mean that I don’t like you… it’s simply an indication that I feel you got a nicer pagerank than I feel your site has shown. This is, actually, quite a compliment for your ability to break past Google’s defenses!

The Results

It seems that in the 4th Quarter PageRank update, Google came out with a literal “gift” to many bloggers. I have found that the update was overall “soft” in that some less-than-stellar blogs were given extraordinarily high PRs to play with. Unfortunately, many of the solid blogs that I felt deserved higher marks were ripped off by the system this time around. This is confirmed in the numbers from this test sample:

• Appropriately Valued: 48%
• OVERvalued: 31%
• UNDERvalued: 21%

The Verdict

In all, we have much fewer blogs undervalued now in Q4 than in the Q2 update, when over 35% of blogs were undervalued. Accordingly, as essentially half of the blogs were again accuratly pageranked, we had a large amount of blogs that were overvalued (31%) compared to the measily 12.5% overvalued from the second quarter. Looking objectively at this, and assuming that I judged “fairness” in the same way, it looks like many bloggers got one heck of a gift this quarter!

Bottom Line: Google seemed to have once again done a fair job in pageranking the websites across the blogosphere. When you have around 50% of blogs appropriately valued, even subjectively speaking, twice in a row… you know that you have a pretty good system all things considered. There were many exceptions to the rule, but in general it seems like PageRank is actually a decent option to be objective.

-Jimvesting