How To Make Money Online In Nigeria

On Sunday 11 July 2010, I made up my mind that it was time I started providing a service on my blog and thus I decided on the Blog Setup service. Having only a few ideas of mine with regards what a proper blog setup service should offer, I wrote for help with the post: Help! What Makes An Excellent Blog Setup Service?

Aaron of Blog Reaction commented that I should add SEO to the service and that got me nervous ’cause I wasn’t sure what a proper SEO service entailed.

On the night of Tuesday 13 July 2010, I decided that the best thing to do was to contact those who have been blogging long before I came on the scene and have also been successfully @ it i.e. the ProBloggers.

Of the 20 bloggers I contacted, only 11 of them have had the time/opportunity to leave a feedback and here are their opinions on what a good SEO service entails.

Hesham Zebida of Start A Business says:

In my opinion, if you would like to start a blog setup service and include SEO service to your package, then the first thing you should think of is how to introduce the new blog to major search engines by finding the right keywords, and write down a good title and description that has at least two different keywords, and suggest a few SEO plugins that can be used to enhance search engines optimization along with an explanation for each plug-in and how to use it.

Another important thing is working to get more external backlinks to a blog, and how to effectively link internally to increase time on site!

Some other important advices you can give is to add a special part on how to write a good title, description and a set of keywords for articles or posts that works for search engines without neglecting blog readers.

Actually there is a lot you can include to give a powerful SEO service!

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Apologies to everybody who tried to access my blog using Internet Explorer but got an error message. This was caused by the bookmarking plug-in to the left of this post. I wasn’t aware of the problem until I carried out one of my routine browsers tests yesternight.

From my end, everything seems to be working fine now across Opera 10.60, Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.6, Safari 4 and Google Chrome 4.0 .

Thanks to Mani Viswanathan, I discovered a plug-in that I’ve been searching for all my blogging life. Tweet Old Post is a wordpress plug-in that enables you promote your old posts on Twitter without ever lifting a finger. I personally have it configured to tweet my old posts once every hour. I’ll be monitoring to see if it does any good in increasing my twitter traffic .

I’ve been monitoring the reviews of the SEO Wordpress theme, Thesis and up until now I’ve seen nothing but glowing reviews. Cyrus leaves a honest review that reveals some cracks in the famous theme: Review of Thesis Theme.

FlippaChick shows us an interesting way of cloaking affiliate links without the need of a plug-in:  How to Mask or Cloak Your Affiliate Links. If you’re romancing the idea of making money online flipping websites, I suggest you read another of FlippaChick’s posts: Common Site Flipping Lies and How to Overcome Them. There she attacks the misconceptions surrounding this make money online niche.

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If you’ve finally made up your mind to take your offline business online or start a new business venture online, you’ll be needing a quality domain name and web hosting.

With so many web hosting offers out there, you’d be tempted to go for the cheap offers so as to minimize your business expenditure but this could backfire, if you fall into the wrong hands.

This is one of  Daniel Scocco’s Top 50 mistakes to avoid when building a website.

As it is with most of Daniel’s free reports, the info contained within is straight to the point and holds very true.

This 26 paged free report covers six important aspects which cannot be under-rated when making a blog or website that’s intended to leave a lasting impression on visitors looking for quality information.

These important aspects of building a solid website are:

1. Domain Name Mistakes
2. Web Hosting Mistakes
3. Web Design Mistakes
4. Usability Mistakes
5. Search Engine Optimization Mistakes
6. Monetization Mistakes

My biggest mistakes on this blog are Opening New Browser Windows and Not Changing Color of Visited Links.

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We all know that the best blogging platform existent @ the moment is Wordpress. It makes designing/optimizing a blog/site easy-breezy majorly due to it’s use of plug-ins unlike it’s fierce competitor, Blogger.

Most newbies to blogging with wordpress, do miss out when it comes to what they can achieve in little time, with the right wordpress plug-ins thus my compiling this list of top 15 wordpress plug-ins EVERY wordpress blog must have.

Thanks for Jason Acidre for serving as a catalyst in getting this post ready within a short time .

Without much preambles, let’s begin.

NOTE: For certain wordpress plug-ins to function without a hitch, all themes must have the tag <?php wp_head(); ?> in header.php before </head>.

Also the tag <?php wp_footer(); ?> must be present in footer.php before </body>. Please take note.

SECURING YOUR WORDPRESS INSTALLATION FROM HACKERS AND DATA LOSS

1. Limit Log-in Attempts: This plug-in when configured properly alerts you of any failed attempt to log into your admin area. While alerting you, it also prevents any further log-in attempts from that IP for a number of minutes which you can set as you please.

2. Secure Wordpress: Helps hide your wordpress version from hackers, prevents directory listing of your themes and plug-ins folders, deactivates tooltip and error message at login of WordPress and a lot more.

3. WP-DBManager, WordPress Database Backup and WP-Optimize: there will be times when you’ll probably need to restore your site for many reasons, hacking being one of them. A database backup saves you a lot of work and that’s basically what the first two plug-ins do. They help create a backup of your database. Wp-Optimize helps to keep your database fast, compacted and free of useless files. Check out my article @ QuickOnlineTip on How To Backup and Restore WordPress Database.

You might also want to check out these past posts on securing wordpress: How To Secure Wordpress Blogs Via Htaccess File and How To Secure Wordpress Blogs With Plug-ins.

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I need the help you of you my readers.

I’ve noticed that there is a surge of people interested in blogging but who don’t want anything to do with the setup process. They’d rather worry about publishing posts than configuring Wordpress thus I’ve decided to start a blog setup service.

Being a sucker for quality service, I’m @ loss with regards to what constitutes a great blog setup service. I need you to help me with things you feel I should include in my blog setup service when it finally goes live.

At the moment I’ve got the following locked down:

1. Web Hosting and Domain Name Setup
2. Wordpress Installation
3. Essential Wordpress Plug-ins and their respective configurations

I need more ideas. Your contributions are great appreciated. Thanks a million

It’s been a great week both @ work and online. I think I might finally be launching a paid service. I’m thinking of going the blog setup services and blogger to wordpress migration service path. At the moment, I’m helping my roommate setup his first site. I can’t wait to be done with the site so I can show it to the world and get your reactions .

As always, I shall be setting up his blog with a free theme as I’ve done with this blog

This week was almost ruined by the news that Hostgator was slyly adding links to their hosting service via the WP-Super Cache plug-in which is now included with each new Fantastico installation of wordpress: HostGator Automatically Adding Plugins to WordPress. It’s somewhat worrisome that they would succumb to such sneaky ways to make sales given that they have such an awesome reputation online.

I’ve always been aware of Hostgator’s monetization of my Error 404 pages but after reading this post HostGator Monetize with Default 404 Page, I decided to create my own Error Page which I’m loving by the way .

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As many already know I blog solely via Windows Live Writer ’cause it makes my blogging a lot more fun. For those of you who do use Windows Live Writer as well, you might have encountered errors such as the one below when trying to add a video that ain’t from YouTube to your posts ;-(.

Description:
  Windows Live Writer has encountered a problem: Value of ‘0′ is not valid for ‘index’. ‘index’ should be between 0 and -1.

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:    WindowsLiveWriter
  Problem Signature 01:    get_Item
  Problem Signature 02:    66
  Problem Signature 03:    System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException
  Problem Signature 04:    14.0.8089.726
  Problem Signature 05:    2.0.50727.3053
  Problem Signature 06:    Windows Live Writer
  OS Version:    6.0.6001.2.1.0.768.2
  Locale ID:    1033

Additional information about the problem:
  LCID:    1033

Read our privacy statement:
  http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=50163&clcid=0×0409

Well, here’s how to fix it without fuss

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For quite some time now, I’ve found checking my self hosted email tedious and it just suddenly occurred to me that I could use Gmail’s forwarding option to control all my emails including the self hosted one.

This tutorial shows how to to setup a self-hosted email account via Cpanel, forward it to your Gmail account and give Gmail TOTAL ACCESS to your self-hosted email to enable you send email from Gmail as though it were coming from your self-hosted email account.

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We finally step into the month of July and boy am I glad ’cause it means 7 months to go for NYSC . The only thing I ain’t so happy about is my traffic stats.

After being a few visitors close to 3,000 uniques in the month of May 2010, I was really hoping that June 2010 would mark my passing the 3,000 absolute unique visitors mark but alas I installed a Google Analytic plug-in for wordpress with a bad configuration and that saw me losing stats for like 4 days before it was detected.

Now I sit back awaiting Google’s Toolbar PR update and hoping that the month of July will see me accomplishing my current goal of 3,000 absolutely unique visitors

Being that I suffer a tinge of paranoia , I’ve many times envisioned my online enemies trying to ruin me blog via spammy links but after reading RandFish’s What if My Competitors Point Spammy Links to My Site?, I’m happy to say that I feel a lot less paranoid.

To monitor spammy links pointing to our sites, I highly recommend learning to setup Google Alerts which is one of Google’s top 10 products for bloggers.

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Joining the dofollow movement could backfire if you choose the wrong plug-in to get the job done.  You could end up with tons of spammy comments or angry commenters who are wondering why some of their links have suddenly gone nofollow again.

Here are my top dofollow plug-ins for avoiding spammy comments, trackbacks and dofollow links gone AWOL.

Jennifer Ray’s Link Love WordPress Plug-in

Link Love WordPress Plug-in: This is the plug-in I’m presently using. What I love about this plug-in is that it dofollows comment author links based on the author’s email address so that no matter what URL or anchor text the author uses, he/she gets his/her dofollow backlink

It’s simple to configure and you can set how many comments the author must have in other to be dofollowed and you can also blacklist email addresses of past commenters that have suddenly started spamming your blog

NOTE: To avoid getting penalized by Google, I advise you to visit every link posted on your blog to make sure it ain’t spammy or fishy in nature.

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