Early this afternoon, I received the following request from Srini looking for some help on a blog titled ‘About Everything . . .’

HI Bret…I received your mail and thanks a lot for letting me know about the work that you do…Ur doing a great job by helping us guys in getting more money writing for the products…Thanks a lot for that…i started a blog some months ago and i had submitted it for approval it has a PR3 but still the site was rejected by Payperpost staff..can u help me with this? i will be really happy and thankfull…MY blog url is http://united.co.cc thnx and waitn4 ur reply

Currently this site is not old enough, but in about 2 weeks it will be ready.  It also needs a couple more blog articles to meet the minimum requirements of 20 articles.  To prove that it is old enough and that it has enough articles it also needs a archives section in the sidebar, easy to do with a WordPress Widget.

A more prickly situation revolves around Playboy.  The site links to a couple places that offer free downloads of Playboy content.  Not only is that a potential legal liability (ergo you could get sued by Playboy Enterprises!), but the type of content and the fact that it is 3rd party content could trigger a rejection.

My advice is to get rid of the download links (its ok to talk about the magazine or even an issue in your own words), but be careful with adult pictures if you want to be accepted into the Social Spark or PayPerPost market place.

Finally, I’d recommend to general things.  Write some more!  The site is a little verbage lite and could use some more content in the forms of words.  Playboy aside, you are doing good including images in your articles.

I’d also recommend using a more unique WordPress theme.  You can download and legally use many free themes, or you can even design your own theme without needing any programming experience these days.  I’d also suggest considering a domain that you own entirely and hosting it yourself.  co.cc sites are definitely good to get your feet wet and learn how things work without spending much, but just a little more money, time and effort with your own self hosted domain name on your server account  will generate much better results.

I recently tried out an add on for WindowsLiveWriter called XPollenate.  It was tremendous.  It is designed to make it easy to cross post an article across many blogs that you have access.  Think of it as a localized press release tool.

Here’s how it works:

1. Publish an article to the source site or blog
2. Leave your WLW window with that original article open, then click the button for xpollenate in your sidebar or in your menu (depends on how you configure WLW).
3. Select by check box option, which blogs you want to then cross post to(the cross post can include a linkback to the source article if you choose.
4. Hit OK, when you are done and watch the status bar fill up as your article is cross posted to many many many sites!

Advanced Tips

• If you want the original article to be published in Blockquotes in the additional sites, just put a <blockquote> tag in the header box option(last thing in this box) and a close </blockquote> tag in the footer box option (first thing in this box).
• If you do not want to re-publish the entire article, there is an option for setting a summary and limiting that summary to x number of words.
• If you want to re-stimulate buzz, don’t re-publish to all sites at the same time, just open that original article and hit the button, then cross pollenate the post to a couple blogs one day and maybe a couple more blogs the next until you have hit everything you want to hit!

If You Delete Them, Redirect them! (Or else you are just shooting Your Visitors in the Foot)

One of the things that I have learned as an advertiser at Izea, is that bloggers like to delete their articles when those articles are sponsored.  Not all bloggers, but somewhere in the 20 – 30 percent range of sponsored articles are deleted.

Personally, I don’t hardly ever delete anything.  If it gets indexed, it is a source of potential traffic for my site.  That’s advertising baby, and once the work is done why destroy it??? 

Anyway, I noticed that a lot of bloggers that do delete their hard earned content, don’t use any redirection techniques.  They are basically dropping their poor unsuspecting Google Search traffic visitors on some nasty looking 404 pages or worse.

There is a simple tool to fix this if you run a WordPress site. Its called the Redirection Plugin kudos to the author of the Redirection Plugin! 

Sorry Blogger bloggers, Your visitors are just hosed if you delete your content.  I HIGHLY recommend you bail from blogger for your financial success and more importantly for the benefit of your visitors!

Here are some examples

The fancy way to drop a visitor on their head . . .

um. not sure what this is all about, but definitely not good for your readers. 

In the Thanks that’s not helpful category . . .

This one is for those visitors that couldn’t figure this out already, ergo when the blank page doesn’t give it away

Then there is the skanky chick 404 images.  What’s this about?  Teasing your visitors for not finding what they were looking for, or trying to suggest they’d rather be looking for 404 porn?

Nothing says you don’t care like a default theme and a 404~!

My Favorite 404 place

In case you need to translate 404 into a different language

maybe its better or maybe its wasting everyone’s time

Even more problematic if your actual 404.php script is broken

maybe if it was in black . . .

I have worked for almost 3 years now as a blogger, and close to two and a half of those years as a professional blogger, deriving the majority of my income from blog related ventures and my own writing.

Today, I have grown my ventures to the point where I manage over 50 different sites powered with WordPress.  Some of those sites are blogs, some are corporate sites and some are a mix of the two.

I rarely have to log in to WordPress other than to manage comments and respond or upgrade a plugin or something. (Auto upgrade of plugins is coming in a future version of WordPress).

I simply write the article using the free WindowsLiveWriter software and hit the publish button and it gets sent into my site.  It also enables me to publish and manipulate pictures very very easily. I can simply copy (right click) a picture from a folder and paste it right into the text of my blog article and then format its placement and much more from WLW.  Then I publish it and the picture is automatically uploaded to my blog.

This software is created by Microsoft and amazingly THEY GENERATE VALID HTML THESE DAYS!

As a web designer I do recall the days when it was like pulling teeth to get Microsoft to offer software that created good code, which is essential to good SEO practices. 

The software also makes it very easy to get a word count of your articles while you write and before you publish.

All in all if you are a serious blogger you should be using WindowsLiveWriter with a self hosted domain running WordPress.  These are the three main requirements that any blogger needs to be successful!

Audio Version of this Article

Here are a few things, that will negatively ‘brand’ a pacific rim blogger, regardless of how good, bad or otherwise they actually are.  Follow these rules and it will help you to be more successful as a blogger.

1. Avoide any use of the words mummy, mummsy, daddy, mommy above the fold, and possibly on the front page at all.  I realize a number of bloggers from this area are ‘Mommy Bloggers’ but ‘Mommy Bloggers’ get an unfair bad reputation as it is and this unfortunately (do to the low quality of many many blogs from the area) goes triple for ‘Mommy Bloggers in the Pacific Rim. 
2. Get rid of The orange blogger ‘B’ in the icon of a FireFox tab
3. Using a default blogger template of any variety is BAD.  (there are free custom blogger templates out there, go get them!)
4. Avoid any hint of writing about the United States when the writer has not been to the actual location.  Don’t get me wrong, TV and movies and culture in general can definitely minimize the lack of knowledge, but it doesn’t bridge the gap when you write 20+ articles per week.  I certainly could not write effectively about life in Manila or Hong Kong or Seoul myself, and I’ve studied business, language and culture there for years.  I’ve never been there, and so I basically don’t know what I’m talking about. 
5. Here’s a tough one and one I violate myself on my personal blog (but my personal blog makes very little money, so take that into consideration too!) Don’t include more than one picture of your kids on your front page at any time.  My kids are flat out beautiful.  I’m biased they are my kids.  They are just your typical cookie cutter, run of the mill muttly kids to everyone else’s eyes.  Unless you are a great children’s photographer, try and keep this at a minimum on sites where you want to make money.  (this really goes for all bloggers, not just pacific rim, and note it goes for me too!)
6. Name Your Site with English Words – If you want to pick up English speaking ad dollars, consider the benefits ($$$) of naming your site with an English word.  Its a cultural bias thing, but until China actually overtakes the world economy in total, you want the good paying stuff, you have to go with the advertiser language of choice.  (one exception to this rule, I think Wuching.com does a good job, but the site looks great and the articles (absent the url) are written in very good English))
7. DO NOT dominate the above fold section of your website with massive Adsense ads (like a 300 x 250) and a Google search box too, sitting right above the first article,so that the reader & the advertiser have to scroll down, just to read the title.
8. When your Readers Comments Brand You Negatively – If your readers leave lots of comments and tend to unknowingly do things that would also go against these rules, (like using the words mummsy, mummy, daddy, etc. in an excessive fashion in their comments) or speak in very broken English, don’t put a comment widget in your sidebar, and if you absolutely must, don’t put it above the fold.
9. If you screw up and write an article that breaks these rules, go back and fix it! Someone will find it and it will make a bad impression now, as opposed to whenever you wrote it as things might have been more forgiving back then.  Today, competition is getting tougher as times get tougher so put your best face forward.
10. Write some top X lists more often. If you are a Pacific Rim blogger, and you want to earn more, but are running out of topics (based on the recommendations above), use what you have available.  You obviously have internet access, do some research and put together some great lists.  These are often times one type of linkbait.  They can be a top 10 list like this, but I’d recommend building up a longer list than just 10.  Shoot for 20 and don’t stop if you can make it to 100.  These are great for bringing in Google search traffic, but more importantly, it can help keep your English writing focused and help you build up better and better skills so that you can eventually blog in a more free form fashion in ways that will be undecipherable from bloggers in the US, Canada, or the UK.

Bonus Advanced Tip!

If you are the best writer in the Pacific Rim, but you want to do well with a generic US audience, consider hiring a US Voice Actor to read your articles as a podcast.  The cost is not as high as you might think, and might just help you become hugely successful.  I’m a ghost writer myself, and its not easy giving someone else my words and thoughts, but it does pay the bills!

Inspired by this Conversation in the Boards at Izea.