Easy Money Zine

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The more I get to learn about Wordpress and the use of Plugins, the more I start loving and appreciate the ease of them. There are a few plugins that I use on a regular base because they make blogging life just so much easier, so I wanted to share them with you. Please keep in mind that most plugins mentioned below are WordPress plugins, sorry for that guys, I only talk about what I know!

If you are not familiar with plugins and how to get them to work, please read this short introduction: Putting Your Plugins to Work before you start dowloading them.

If you are already familiar with plugins, here goes my list of my top 15 plugins I use on different blogs and almost couldn´t live without in the blogsphere!

Plugins to Improve SEO of your blog

• All in One SEO Pack by Uberdose

This one automatically optimizes titles for search engines, generates Meta tags and avoids duplicate content found on wordpress blogs. If you are running wordpress 2.3 or up you don´t even have to look at the options, but you can of course override and title and set any meta description and keywords you want.

• Contextual Related Posts by Mark Ghosh

This plugin is really neat because it shows the last 5 contextually related posts after every single blog post, making it easier for visitors to find related material if they liked the one they just read, but it will also bring forward older posts, thus improving the deeplinking of your blog.

• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator by Dagon Design

This plugin generates a fully customizable sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator that is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Once installed and activated, all you need to do is go to the Settings page inside your WP control panel, click on the DD Sitemap and choose your preference. Once your preference are set, you create a new page and in the html you add the following code where you want the sitemap to show up:

<!– ddsitemapgen –>

Why is this plugin good for SEO? Apart from giving your visitor an easier way to navigate and find things on your site, you are again providing extra links to all your posts.
To see this plugin in action, visit my sitemap page.

• Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold

This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog that is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

• Top Posts By Category by M&M

I am using this plugin to easily show the posts that were most commented all together on one page, but you can also set it to show the most visited posts in your blog. This will again bring extra link attention to your most popular post plus it gives your visitor a short list of most interesting posts on your blog.

• WWW Redirect by Justin Shattuck

Redirects variations of identical domain requests to a consistent uri to ensure http://www.easymoneyzine.com and http://easymoneyzine.com are not regarded as two different domains by the search engines.

Important Plugins you really need to install

• WordPress Database Backup by Austin Matzko

After having had a problem with another blog, losing all content because of my own stupidity, I have this plugin installed to make sure I get a database backup emailed to me weekly so I won´t have to worry about that anymore.

• MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Save your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. Did you know that the new Wordpress version already is set to ping http://rpc.pingomatic.com/? (You can find which services you are pinging by going to Settings in your controlpanel and then choose Writing. You can modify the services you want to ping everytime a post comes out at the bottom of that page).

Did you also know that everytime you edit a published post, you are sending another ping to the pinging services and that this might get your blog banned because it is considered spamming if you ping too often for the same post? And another little known fact is that when dating your posts in order to have different posts going public in the future, you will loose the value of these pingservices, because as soon as you hit the publish button, they will start searching your post, and guess what, they won´t find it if you have set the date to the future!

The cool thing about this plugin is that you can actually date posts that you have written and only ping once they are published online. Plus, you can edit your post without the danger of continuously pinging every time you change something in an already existing post. After installing the plugin, just activate it and go to the Settings in your controlpanel to make sure you register the plugin in order for it to work and start avoiding spamming pingers and getting blocked from their services.

• Google Analytics Plugin

If you are looking for an easy way to be able to see how your website is doing, how much traffic you are receiving, where people are coming from, how long they stay and which keywords brought visitors to your blog you might want to open a Google Analytics account for free. Once you have your account you will have to implement some code in order for Google to track your traffic. Now, instead of starting to muddle in the code of your template (and then having to do that again whenever you change to another template) you can use this plugin to easily put in the code. Once installed, just activate it and go to the analytics plugin you can find in Settings, and add the code in order for the plugin to start doing it´s job.

Add some spice to your blog with the following Plugins

• Unique Article Wizard - Creating Unique content for your blog

I only recently found this plugin and have been using it with great pleasure so far. One of the most important things when running a blog (and probably one that will give you the biggest advantages when it comes to the success of your blog) is updating very regularly. But, since we are all human and sometime life get´s in the way, there are always moments that inspiration lacks or we just don´t have the time to add posts. This plugin will allow other people to post articles to your blog, much in the same way article directories receive their articles, without losing control over the content, since you can have them posted as draft versions and you just need to approve the article (or delete it if it does not represent what you agree with).

This Article Wizard is a monthly service to help with your article marketing strategies, sending your articles to all different article directories in a unique version, but separate from that, they offer a free plugin you can easily install in order to receive articles you can publish on your blog for (they support all different sorts of blog platforms, not just wordpress).

You can directly download the plugin here.

• Add Sig by Dagon Design

I am using this plugin at the moment to add some interesting products that I am using, to the bottom of all of my posts but there are of course other things you can do with this plugin without having to change things in the core code. It supports up to three different signature templates so you have an easier way of adding something to the end of all of your posts, whether it be a special message (like for example, “if you liked this post, please leave a comment or digg/stumble it”) or maybe some adsense code or affiliate link.

• Anti-Sociable by Andy Beard

Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites so make it easier to be bookmarked in case a post was really enjoyed. Whenever I use the Sociable plugin, I prefer using the hacked version called Antisocial, which prevents losing linkjuice to social bookmarking sites.

• Commentluv by Andy Bailey

This plugin shows a link to the last post from the commentator´s blog in their comment. Just activate and it´s ready. Currently parses with wordpress, blogspot, typepad and blogs that have a feed link in the head section of their page. I like this plugin a lot; it has already lead me to many interesting blogs I would not have found otherwise.

• Enhanced WP-ContactForm by Joost Valk

WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. In the message it sends to you it gives the page the user visited before the contact page, as well as the original outside referrer. It can be implemented on a page or a post. It currently works with WordPress 2.0+ and you can see it in action here. After activation of the plug, just go to Settings in your controlpanel and then to the enhanced wp contactform in order to configure your preference (like where you want the email to be sent to), once done, all you need to do is set up a new page and add the following code to the html wherever you want the contactform to appear:

<!–contact form–>

• Subscribe To Comments By Mark Jaquith

This plugin allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry, making it easier to keep track of certain comments and dialogues.

This post is going to be a short plugin dummie version for those of you who are not familiar with the use of plugins on a WordPress blog. It is only a short version, because most plugins will come with install directions and special specifications you need to know in order to have the plugin work properly.

Before you go ahead reading this post, make sure the template you are using on your wordpress blog is “widget-ready”, which is normally mentioned on the page you downloaded your template from. Some templates are not “widget-ready” which means you have to adapt it first, instructions for that can be found here.

A plug-in (plugin, addin, add-in, addon, add-on or snap-in) is a computer program that interacts with a host application (a web browser or an email client, for example) to provide a certain, usually very specific, function “on demand”. Applications support plugins for many reasons. Some of the main reasons include: enabling third-party developers to create capabilities to extend an application, to support features yet unforeseen, to reduce the size of an application, and to separate source code from an application because of incompatible software licenses. -Wikipedia- Read More

Best word of advice before starting of is: Read the Manual; there is almost always a readme.txt file added to the plugin once you have it unzipped onto your desktop, and it is there for a reason, not just decoration!

Having said that, let´s assume you have located a plugin you want to install (in a few days I will publish a list of 15 plugins you should definately consider using, so keep an eye on this blog) and you have gone ahead and downloaded it to your computer.

First thing you will need to do is unzip the file. You will then see a folder containing different files (including the above mentioned readme.txt in most cases). You will have to upload this complete folder to your server, either through ftp or using your controlpanel file manager. Don´t make the mistake of uploading all different files seperately, you will have to upload the complete folder. Some plugins consist of just one php file, in that case, you will only need to upload that specific php file.

So where does that plugin folder go?

Your plugin folder should go into the following path:

public_html/wp-content/plugins/ so if you are using a filemanager on a cpanel of your hosting company, open the public_html, then open wp-content and finally open plugins to upload the complete plugin folder.

One step down, only two more to go!

Next you will need to go to the control panel of your wordpress blog and find the “Plugins” tab on the upper right hand corner, in case you are using WP 2.5 and up. If you aren´t using the new version, don´t you think it is about time to upgrade?

You will now see a list of plugins that are uploaded to your wordpress platform and you will have to click “Activate” in order to be able to start using the plugin. WP 2.5 has this really neat option built in to upgrade plugins whenever new versions are available and it is in this section where you will see if your plugins has a newer version. Just click “upgrade automatically” and wordpress will do all the hard work for you!

Step two down, one more to go!

What you need to do now is go to the “Settings” tab on the upper right hand corner (this used to be called Options before version 2.5 came out) and when you have your settings open, you will see a number of tabs that automatically are installed with your wordpress (general, writing, reading, discussion, privacy, permalinks, miscellaneous) plus you will see the tabs you need to configure your plugins.

Choose the tab for whatever plugin you want to configure and press update in order to update those options.

Since all plugins are configured differently it is very hard to give a detailed guide, but most of the configurations are self explanatory anyways, so you should not have any problems there, just follow the instructions given on the page you downloaded the plugin from or again, read the readme-txt in the plugin folder if you are doubting about anything.

Step 3 three completed, Congratulations!

Pet yourself on the back, have a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy while your plugin is doing it´s (your) work!

If you are reading this post chances are you are very interested in making money online. Chances also are that so far your results haven’t been all that great, since only a few percent of people who get started with online marketing will actually reach the point of being able to give up their day job and get a full salary from their online ventures.

Like I have said in other posts already, it is possible to make money online and receive a good income doing internet marketing speaking from personal experience, it might take a while to figure out just what you need to do. Once you have seen the light though, Internet marketing is probably the most full filling job out there, and the one single job that can make your wildest dreams come true.

There are many possibilities and affiliate programs you can join in order to build your online empire, but recently I have come across one program in particular that really helps their affiliates getting on the right track.

I was looking for a new product to start promoting along with the numerous websites I am already running, and at first did not really pay a lot of attention to all that this particular program was offering, I was just interested in the huge commission pay-outs this affiliate program is offering.

However, after signing up and getting to know the website, I can only say to be very impressed with all that they are doing in order to get their affiliates bringing in large pay cheques.

Which affiliate program to choose

Most affiliate programs have a huge number of products listed to promote and at most they offer a few banners to their affiliates to use in their promotional campaign. Now, once you learn how to promote and what to do, these programs can make you a lot of money, but what happens if you are just starting out?

Without knowing what you really need to do, you will probably end up throwing in the towel sooner or later; because of the lack of knowledge and support you need in order to become a success. Is that the type of affiliate program you need?

The affiliate program I want to focus on today is quite the contrary. They are going way beyond any other program I have know so far, with their efforts and guides to make money.

A short list of what they are offering their affiliates:

• A total of $45 in bonuses you can start building up once signed up for the program for free, including a welcome bonus, bonus for participating in their excellent forum, a bonus for setting up your links correctly and a bonus for starting to send traffic. These bonuses are designed to make you participate and keep you motivated while still working on your first sale to be made, which is the only condition to be able to cash in.

• More importantly, they offer excellent guides for beginners on how to get started, how to set up a website, how to promote, how to improve SEO, basically all you need to know to start making money in your first month of signing up with them.

• Apart from that, they give you the tools you need to make a website, free templates, free images and banners and a lot of articles you can use to create unique content and grow your website and link building efforts.

• A very active member forum where you can ask for advice and website reviews, including a ton of information and support in order to become a success.

• Videos which offer quality information on how to improve your website and get started earning money, plus if you need to, you can always contact the product owners who participate in the forum as well with your questions and needs.

• Very high commission pay-outs of up to 40% or $175 for different products, plus extra incentives like competition bonuses for your website.

The most impressive of this whole affiliate program is probably the energy everybody is putting in to really get those sales going, but I have to warn you, the only one accountable for your success is you, so you will need to put in the elbow grease, dedicate time to setting up websites and promotional strategies.

Since this is not a get rich quick scheme, don’t bother signing up for it if you aren’t serious about Internet marketing. You will need to understand that it involves work and time to build your business, but using the excellent guides and promotional material, the affiliate program team has taken out all the guess work and you can follow their steps which have already proven to be successful.

At present you can promote health products, men’s health, casino sites and business-to-business products, but the team is working hard on adding more products to promote in the near future

Going back to the initial title of this post, if you sign up for this program I will personally be available to offer my help and advice and you can always contact me if there are things you are having a problem with, because if you sign up with me, I really want you to succeed and get those sales going.

Make a positive change in your life and

check out this affiliate program today!

If you have been struggling to make money online so far, you have come to the right place. Easy Money Zine has been set up with one goal in mind, helping others to make the money online like I have been doing for years.

This blog will teach you to set up an online business with a good foundation which will make you money over and over again, but you will need to be prepared to work for it.

You might have seen many ads already from companies that claim they offer the answer to your money problems, saying that they will make you money fast but when you have fallen for their claims and already dream of your new car and big mansion, all you end up with is making them richer and yourself poorer.

You probably have bought several e-books and found all they are about is making the writer richer and you don’t even get to finish reading them, again, spending your money when most information is readily available for free.

There are a few different ways to make money online, but this blog concentrates mainly on affiliate marketing without having to spend a lot of money to set it up. You will have to be prepared though to put in your time and effort to set up websites or blogs, write content and promote your site.

Playtime is over, you will need to be serious enough to work with focus and concentrate on what really matters, creating unique content and spend most of your time creating organic traffic through search engines.

If you really are serious about your online ventures, you must be willing to set up your strategy.

Many people starting in affiliate marketing get completely overwhelmed with all the information offered online and because they have been reading a lot of different things, they become paralyzed, wanting to do things 100% perfect. What happens though is that they end up discouraged, thinking they will never make it, without giving themselves a real chance of setting up a solid business.

So, you need a strategy and work with that for the first few months, without thinking too much about the details, the most important thing is to take action. There is always plenty of time to tweak and adapt, but you will have to get started today.

Pick your preferred stream of income

Set up a website with your preferred stream of income

Create (unique) content

Start promoting your website

Picking your preferred stream of income

The two main income sources online are using adsense or promoting affiliate products. It is really important to choose between either making money using adsense or promoting affiliate products, although many people new to making money online think it is just a matter of slapping different ads and products on their website and just sit back and wait for the money to roll in.

This obviously won’t work, you will have to focus and pre-sell in order for your visitors to either click on your ads or warm them up for your affiliate product before sending them off to the product website you are promoting.

Set up a website

Once you have chosen your income stream, it is important to set up a website or blog focussing on a specific product. Instead of trying to sell something on your own website, you must try to warm up your visitors, offering good information, reviews and personal testimonials, making them understand why it is that they should buy the product you are promoting, and offer them links to the official affiliate product website, already in a positive frame of mind.

Create Unique Content

Creating unique content is really important in order to get your site indexed by the bigger search engines. 20 pages really is the minimum you should set up before starting to promote your website, and once you have started your promotion strategies, you should think of adding more pages on a continuous base, search engines love fresh content and it will help you to get listed higher for more keywords.

Start promoting your website

Now this last step is probably the one where most people fail. After having set up your website, no matter how beautiful and informative, you will need to focus on getting organic traffic through search engines. Forget about buying “unique traffic packages”, these prove to be useless hits to your website so you are only throwing away your money without results.

Your main focus to get organic traffic should be:

• Directory submission: You should set a goal of submitting your site daily to 5-10 directories.
• Article submission: You should set a goal of submitting a new article to article directories daily.
• Link exchange: Try to achieve one link exchange weekly with a related website
• Social Bookmarking: Using social bookmarking sites are great to get your site indexed fas

I can’t stress the importance of creating organic traffic enough, building links should be your number one priority once you have your website set up, and there are many ways to make your link building strategy easier.

It was only after I fully understood the importance of building links on a daily base, that I started seeing my affiliate pay-checks coming in, but it is probably the most boring part any affiliate marketer has to deal with.

As a result of my struggles to continuously build links, I started checking out different pieces of software and services in order to speed up this process without setting off red flags with the search engines and after trial and testing I am now sticking to 4 different ways to building links daily:

1. Directory submission
2. Article submission
3. Social bookmarking
4. Blog commenting

If you are serious about your online business but are on a stretched budget, I would advice you to at least check out some of this software and buy it as soon as you can since it will help immensely to build your business.

If you had to choose between blogging for fame or blogging for money, which would it be?

I assume you are reading this blog because you are looking for ways to make money online, so I believe this is really a question you should think about.

Many people starting a blog with in the back of their head the idea of making money with it equal running a big blog with 1000 of readers with making money and when they see the big A-list bloggers with their enormous amount of readers, they try copying whatever they do, following all their advice and buying all the “must-have-tools” they talk about.

Now you might think, sure, that is the way to make money, but let’s face it, the MMO business is well saturated and the only people making real money on yet another MMO e-book, are the big A-list bloggers who get first shot at promoting yet another tool you can’t live without.

It almost looks like a group of sheep following their leader to the slaughter, not thinking about what they should really do to get to the nice green lush paddock.

Meanwhile, their so-called leader stays out on the pasture, creating an even better field for themselves.

Anyways, before I go off on a rant, let’s go back to the initial question. Is it fame you are after, having a pretty cool designed blog, spending hours, days or even weeks on tweaking and thinking about your next step or is it money you are after?

If it is the fame you want, please leave now, because you won’t find how to become famous in my blog.

If it is money you are after though, you might want to start thinking about what things are really important to do.

First and most important is to take real steps towards creating a business and treat it as such. Playtime is officially over for you. Fooling around online is too. Finished, finito, say bye bye to long hours online, reading blogs, communicating with others and playing nice, checking email and stats a zillion times a day and the list goes on.

First step:
Create Content for your website
Second step:
Create even more content for your website
Third step:
Create yet another bunch of content to submit to article directories, creating links
Fourth step:
Repeat step 1 to 3
Fifth step:
Submit to directories, creating links
Sixth step:
Submit to social book marking sites, creating links
Seventh step:
Go back to step 1 to 6

To sum it up so you won’t forget:
Create content and loads of it, than work on getting organic traffic.

You may get famous anyways someday, but focus on getting money in your pocket first!

When I first started writing this post, I had signed up for a lot of “Get Paid To” programs, thinking it would be the answer to my financial trouble. I mean, what would be easier than getting paid for giving my opinion, or write a simple review on some product, read some emails etc.

I had even prepared a nice little list for you guys of all the different options out there, giving my opinion on all the different companies that pay you to do a certain task, thinking that maybe I could get a few bucks out of the deal as well if I could persuade enough people to sign up for free.

I never finished the post, and even if I would have, I am sure I would have had it deleted by now, because I would not want to sucker you into trying something out that is a complete waste of time.

You have heard it right, I believe all those “Get Paid To” programs are a total and utter waste of time. Some of you might jump up now and say that I am crazy because they themselves are making a few bucks filling in surveys or reading emails, but let’s be honest here, do the math, calculate how much time you would spend to earn a few bucks and then think about whether your time really is that cheap.

Most programs are scams anyways, never allowing you to reach the minimum payout so you waste your time, and have others make money off of you, without ever seeing a dime.

If that does not sound bad enough already, there are two other more important reasons why I would never ever again sign up for a Get Paid To program and I would really want you to think about the following:

1. The whole reason I went into making money online, was to be able to start working less in the future, while my earnings would go up, instead of trading my time for money and therefore never achieve financial freedom, selling myself short and devaluating my time. I want to make sure I am actually creating a strong foundation I can keep improving and amplifying.
2. The whole Get Paid to Review deal is going to be detrimental to your website in the long run. Cool, you might be making a few bucks here and there, but what you are doing is selling links, or in other words, selling page rank, having to post several links to whomever is paying you to do a review. In the long run you will get penalized for doing so by the search engines, and thus breaking down the importance of your own website.

This last point can’t be stressed enough in my opinion, because many people just don’t seem to get it, until they actually get penalized. If you are running a blog with low PR you won´t land any big orders of writing reviews because the companies really aren’t after the quick buzz a review might give them, they are after high quality links, even dictating how they want to be linked to.

Now, you might want to argue with me on this point, saying there are blogs out there showing that they actually receive hundreds of dollars for a review, but I predict this amount will soon go down. The ones that have made big money doing paid reviews, have gotten in at the right time, before penalization became a big issue and they were slapped by google last year.

So, if you are thinking about making serious money with your website, you might want to reconsider just how you plan on doing it. Just make sure you don´t get paid to trade your time for money,  nor get paid to kill your own pagerank!