Use free educational tools
As I'm writing this I'm watching a webinar on how to improve your adsense revenue. This is provided by Google itself so lets you know exactly the best practices (remember they are your partners).
To get the adsense support go here. Note you need to first register with adsense to get there.
Another free educational website I love is the w3schools organization site. Here you can learn everything you would ever need about web programming from HTML, PHP, MYSQL, RSS, CSS, XML and much, much more. Now, even if you never wish to program your web site I do recommend you learn a little HTML coding. Chances are there will be times you'll have to alter a page or two if only to change your the name of a PLR (private label rights) product to yours. So you do need to know a little HTML at the absolute minimum.
This has nothing to do with Internet marketing. However, it is good to know that some university courses are available online. MIT open courseware comes to mind. I know there are many other free classes and tutorials available online. Just do a search for them.
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P.S. I have mentioned that multitasking makes you less efficient. In this case as it happens I know the topic well and am listening to the webinar just in case I would learn something new. The point is that I learned what I'm relearning for free from Google by paying for an adsense improvement program with videos and pdfs and as I'm doing this project of free tools I discover that I could have got the same information without cost.
If you have already paid for it it is free
Most Internet marketers - and if you own even a single website and you monetize it in any way you are an Internet marketer - own many tools that they may have paid for or accumulated over the years.
If it is on your disc drive and you have permission to use it (perhaps it's PLR, software or something you got for joining a list) then it's free and it would behoove you to slowly use it.
Just use it once as a test - so long as the learning curve is not too long. The important point is no to waste money buying something new similar to what you already have.
Of course if you have had it for a while you may find the equivalent for free at sourceforge.net.
There is though another issue of the learning curve. I typically use a ten year old sound editing software even though the latest open source software (audacity) is way better. It is just that I'm used to the old software (acid loops) and it does everything I need. I have version 3.0 and the latest is 9.0 and I'm not paying to upgrade because it does all I need.
This is another important aspect of software use. If whatever you use is doing all you need, so not pay for a later version.
Do one thing to completion – success mind set
Mind set is more important than knowledge as far as your Internet marketing success is concerned.
We live in a world where we jump from one task to the next all the time - we multitask. Is that the best way to be successful in Internet marketing.
Successful managers take their time before deciding. They do their research and once they have decided they do not change their minds too quickly. However, once they are convinced that what they started is not working they cut off their loses decisively.
In fact the last word is the sing of success. To decide means to cut off all other possibilities.
So how does this apply to Internet marketing and article marketing?
Learn one thing at a time - say how to setup WordPress blogs. Work at it. Learn which plugins are useful for you and how you can best do WordPress SEO (search engine optimization). Learn the best way to write articles and so on.
Once you have done that you get to the most important thing you need to learn and that is simple monetization using Adsense, Commission junction, clickbank or something similar.
Only after doing that you can go to the next thing.
I wish the author (me to be precise) would listen to his own advice. I suppose that's why I'm writing this post. I keep jumping from one project to another and that is a major failing that I have.
And that's why success mind set is so important. You may know exactly what to do and how to do it. However if you don't take correct action you don't have the right mind set and chances are you'll be way less successful than you should be.
Free rope and waste of time
I have spent about ten hours with a program I paid $99 for a few years ago. My motivation is that there is a free version that I was going to write about here.
However, the program keeps crashing. Perhaps it has in issue with 64 bit Windows seven. I have emailed the software developers asking to move the software to this computer (Windows XP SP3).
You remember your mother saying, "If you had a free rope would you hang yourself."
I'm old enough to remember, "Let's declare victory and go home." For young people it's what we said about Vietnam war...
The point is not to throw good money (time) after bad (a software you have paid for). And also since persistence is a great precursor to success it is important not to give up and change direction too early.
I do not have a clear clean answer but I just want to pose this as part of success mind set in every field. Actually your attitude may be much more important than your knowledge as far as any endeavor is concerned.
In fact we should always remember Einstein's statement:
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
We need to remember that when writing articles, doing SEO (search engine optimization) and or any other kind of Internet marketing.
Duplicate content backlinks
The bulk of this article was originally posted on a WordPress blog on another free hosting service - I'm testing different free tools as part of the rfesearch I'm doing for this site. However, after a couple of days the other hosting company is having problems and I have lost my posts on it except for this one:
A question within Internet marketing circles is:
Can a backlink have a negative effect?
So suppose you have a crappy site full of duplicate content and you use black hat SEO techniques to produce thousands of pages that Google does not like and you even get desisted by Google. Now imagine you give yourself backlinks from every single page on this “evil” site?
How will Google deal with these incoming links?
If it counts these as negative backlink weight then you could sabotage your competitors by producing such evil site and linking to your competitor.
So logic alone says that at worse Google will totally discount a backlink but will never penalize you because a site that is spammy, full of duplicate content or is otherwise evil has linked to you.
Now that is only logic. The way to know whether this is true is to test the theory.
This is best done with free sites like this. That way you have nothing (other than the time spent to setup the site to lose).
Note: not all free hosting services are identical - this article was originally on another website with a different free hosting service. It was working for a couple of days but now the database is having a problem. I get the following error message:
Error establishing a database connection
It tok me a few minutes to setup the WordPress blog on that free host but my time is wasted. To a great deal you have to be even more careful with a free hosting service than with a paid one.That is why I recommended this free hosting service.
Good reason to use free resources for Internet Marketing Test
The first test I tried was a test of duplicate content penalty. I made a free site and posted (so far) about twenty five posts on it in two days or so. I wrote about five totally fresh new posts on this WordPress blog, five slightly altered PLR (private label rights) article and the rest were mostly unchanged so they would have a high duplicate content score.
I'm trying to test three things:
- Does the duplicate content penalty apply to the whole web site or just to the offending pages.
- Does the penalty apply to outgoing links - logic says it should be neutral - thus a link may not count as positive but should not ever count as negative as we have no control over who gives us backlinks. If you could make another website look spammy because a spammy site linked to a good site, you could damage the backlink power of a competing web site.
- How much change will produce a new post as far as Google is concerned.
Anyway, I'm testing this idea and the free hosting services knocked me off (at least temporarily) to manually review the site for malicious content. That is perfectly fair. I'm producing a crappy site on purpose. I'm testing Internet marketing theories. The point is that by doing the test on a good free hosting service if the hosting service does not like my content I just lose that site. If I did the test on a commercial hosting service and they did not like what I was doing I could potentially have my service disconnected and have to move ten twenty sites in a very short time to another hosting company.
Write all your passwords
Just because it's free it does not mean you are not spending lots of time with it.
As part of the research I'm doing on Internet marketing using free tools I'm examining other free hosting companies. So I got a new hosting company and another free blog but somehow I did not write down all my user id and passwords and so on.
So I can get into the blog itself, but I cannot get into the upanel which has the ftp MySQL, phpmyadmin and other tools I need to update the WordPress blog to the latest version. So back to the drawing board.
Also, something went wrong with this computer (I have many that I use simultaneously to work on different projects - if only I had eight eyes and eight hands - so much for multitasking) and I have lost all my passwords and other information saved on my Firefox on this computer.
However, this is not important since I have saved everything I need about this site in a text document. I need to forward this to another email account or otherwise transfer it to at least one backup place (usb disc comes to mind).
Anyway, the point is always write everything down and back it up.
Why duplicate a site
I just completed adding the various plugins to this site. It has taken many hours to set the site the way I like it. Now, the next site I wish to build will basically be very similar to this one.
I wish to have more or less all the same plugins activated and setup the way those here are. If I wanted to do that manually it would take me a few hours to upload all the plugins, activate them and set them up the way I like.
When I started using WordPress as my blogging tool I decided that being able to duplicate empty blogs would be a very good idea. I tried using various macro recorders which recorded my keystrokes and played them back. This would partially work, and then would stop as the macro recorders that I used (from free to one which would have cost $900 - I tested it for 30 days - but it did not do what I needed).
Then a series of minor disasters ended that I discovered how to use phpmyadmin to download and upload the MySQL databases and edit them. This allows me to duplicate an empty WordPress site by downloading the database and uploading it into an empty MySQL data base. This can be on the same host or a totally different host.
In fact the method can be used to move a WordPress blog from one host to another.
Once you upload the database you also upload the WordPress core files as well as the themes and plugins and most importantly you edit the wp-config file to point to the new database, user, host (warning it is usually but not always localhost).
You need also edit the blog title and a few other details.
So now you have an identical blog with same users (admin and so on) and password. In fact it takes less than ten minutes of your time. The FTP may take much longer but is done automatically. In fact as I am writing this post I'm duplicating this site. In this case once the duplication is over I'll delete all the posts and save the MySQL database as the prototype of an empty site. I may actually ad my contact and privacy statement as these are needed by Google as part of their Adsense agreement.
I have not added them to this site as I don't know if I'll add adsense to this site. The point is to make your prototype site as near to your ideal site before saving the database. Once duplicated you can individualize the site by changing some themes, plugins, widget and so on. But the poin is that the basic site you have up and running in a very short time.
How to have multiple WordPress blogs with a single MySQL database
Why should you want to have multiple WordPress blogs with a single MySQL database?
Some hosting companies allow more subdomains and addon domains than they have MySQL resources. For example the hosting company that this blog is hosted on only allows a single MySQL database on its free hosting service. It does allow five addon domains or subdomains.
Other hosting companies may allow unlimited domains added on but only 100 MySQL databases. In reality this is not a limitation as typically most hosting services will allow a maximum of 50,000 ilinks per account. For those who do not know the UNIX file system all you have to know is that file produces at least one ilink.
In effect this means you should not host more than fifteen WordPress blogs on a single paid hosting account. But this is not a real limitation as if you are monetizing your sites well, you should make so much that your hosting costs should be trivial relative to your income.
Now to answer the question:
How to have multiple WordPress blogs with a single MySQL database
The trick is in the wp-config.php file. In it there is a section:
/**
* WordPress Database Table prefix.
*
* You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique
* prefix. Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
*/
$table_prefix = 'wp_';
To have multiple WordPress blogs using a single database copy all the appropriate files (WordPress system and all the themes, widgets and plugins you are interested in) in the directory of the addon domain, subdomain, or just a directory bellow your root directory.
Now keep the identical wp-config.php file and edit the line $table_prefix = 'wp_'; to something like $table_prefix = 'wp1_'; I typically change it to something that relates to the topic of the blog. So suppose your new blog was about cat health, I would change the line to $table_prefix = 'cathealth_';
There you have it a simple way of having multiple WordPress blogs on a single MySQL database.
Get a blogger blog
Earlier I mentioned that the best way to learn to use Worpress is to get a Worpress.com blog and learn the system before getting self hosted version of the system.
Another free blogging system is blogger.com which belongs to Google. This has the great advantage allowing you to log in with your gmail account user ID and password. It is easier to monetize because it belongs to Google and Adsense and other Google products fit in naturally and also Google allows you to monetize by becoming their partner, while WordPress.com is a non-profit and the blogs are more difficult to monetize.
However, I recommend everyone who is at all serious in Internet marketing and SEO to use both systems as well other free sites like Squidoo and Hub pages that I'll write about later.
For now:
Get a blogger blog
- Go to the blogger web site.
- If you already have a gmail account you can log in using that - otherwise you have to register and get a log in id password.
- Select your first blog title and url. The url is going to be like an addon domain:
Youselectedname.blogger.com
If the url you desire has already been taken, blogger will suggest other url or you can try something else. - Select a template.
- Add any gadgets (equivalent to widgets in WordPress) you desire.
- Start writing your first post.
It is that easy. I added the RSS (really simple syndication) feed from this blog to begin with. I'll later add adsense. I have to see if I wish to use my current account or create a new account.
Anyway here is my first blogger post.
