I don’t get it. WordPress. Can someone please tell me what all the fuss is about with having a hosted wordpress blog? I really don’t see the point myself.

As I wrote in an earlier post, I tried to install it and had a few problems. Being somewhat pig-headed I gave it another go with another web-hosting company and, I got it up and running just fine. But what does it do that the freebie doesn’t ? You have to be able to use HTML to change anything and you don’t have aksimet (spam filter) built in. With the freebie version, it’s my old favourite, drag ‘n’ drop.

I guess they both have their plus and minus points but for me, I’m happy with what have for now.

I thought that from time to time I’d review some products and give you my honest opinion of them. So, here we go then;

I’m currently reading a book entitled ‘How to Make Money with Your Blog by Duane Forrester and Gavin Powell. The blurb on the back states “Whether you’re an experienced blogger or an absolute beginner, you can make money with your blog.” However, in my opinion, this book ain’t for beginners baby! There is no denying the content of the book is extremely useful and provides some very good advice but for a beginner it leaves an awful lot to be desired.

To me it seems to imply right from the off that the reader has a certain level of skill already in relation to the building, presentation and back-end operation of blogging. I would have liked to have seen a more clearly delineated explanation of some of the concepts contained within writtenso that the beginner could follow along more easily.

Verdict: For the beginner, nope. Intermediate to advanced? Yep! This is no doubt a very useful addition to your bookshelf. I’ll hang on to mine until I know a bit more about what’s going on.

I woke up this morning to find that my Google mail had delivered 56 messages to me overnight. It had also binned over 300 messages that it had recognised as spam.

I sat down with a cup of tea and began to go through the 56. Out of that lot, only five of them were of any use. Everything else was just trying to flog me something or other. Again, no problem with that really. It’s about selling after all and I suppose I must have signed up for some free report or other to get onto their list in the first place. Or did I?

You see, I found a few emails that I had not, did not and would not subscribe to. Period. So the only thing I can think of and strongly suspect is the case, is that someone has sold my details on. Now that’s bang out of order. I can’t prove this of course but I can’t see any other way of these people getting hold of my email address and it seems a tad too coincidental that shortly after I sign up for a ‘freebie’ report I get walloped with a load of crappy offers.

I guess I’ll just have to be a tad more careful when I sign up for anything in future.

I spent the best part of yesterday trying to set up a hosted blog on WordPress. For someone with no skills at all in relation to web hosting this was always going to be an uphill challenge.

I started off ok but things kind of slid away… I downloaded the WP files as you’re supposed to do and put them on my desktop. So far, so good. I then went into Wealthy Affiliate where my membership gives me ‘free’ hosting and tried to figure out what to do next.

I then had two bits of luck. On WA is a lady called Deb Williams who has produced a fantastic set of videos for WA members to use in relation to WordPress. As I started to watch she made mention of uploading my WP files to WA. I froze. Upload? How the hell do I do that? Fortunately Debbie explained everything perfectly. I needed a piece of software to FTP my WP files onto WA (who knew?).

I duly downloaded my free software CoreFTP Lite and followed the video making extensive use of the pause and play buttons to assist me (I have a short memory). It only worked! However, when I came to log-in and look at my site, I kept getting an error message telling me that there was a problem with the .php. It wasn’t installed apparantly.

Second bit of luck coming up. My son Richie is a serious whizz-kid with the internet and websites and co-incidentally he had only just emailed me a link to some software which allows him to take control of my desktop remotely. He knows I need a truckload of help. I installed it and let him play.

It was freaky to see him take over my WA dashboard and move around. He quickly found the problem. It seems that when I set up my account I needed to check a button that allows .php files. Now, I never knew that so a slap on the wrist for Kyle & Carson of WA for not mentioning this fact. I know they can’t make mention of everything but for us newbies, setting up servers and stuff is daunting. If it hadn’t of been for Richie, I’d have been in trouble right there and then.

Anyway, it got done and I had my WP blog duly set up. I then spent the rest of the afternoon getting to grips with the new controls and even managed to figure out how to install new templates. Again, thanks to Deb and her stonking video’s. But once I’d done that, I was stuffed. The templates I’d installed wouldn’t let me remove stuff from the sidebars- or anywhere! You had to be some kind of whizzo with HTML. I’m not. So after all that, I thought ‘bugger it’ (for now) and came back to this blog.

I know it’s not ideal and has it’s limitations, but the other one was too complex and time consuming for me at this stage. I need drag ‘n’ drop’ so I duly applied Occam’s razor to the problem.

Occam’s razor is often paraphrased as “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” That’ll do for me.

So, overall, perhaps a disappointing day? No, I don’t think so. I learned an awful lot of things I never knew about before and I feel a lot more confident in relation to hosting, FTP, nameservers and the like. Nothing’s ever wasted.

I missed out on posting yesterday due to be pretty damn ill. Don’t know if it was something I ate or just a bug but, wow! Not good.

Anyhow, I was thinking today about some of these guys that post up with their blogs and websites asking you to contact them if ever you want anything as they’re only too glad too help. Of course, you have to sign up first to their mailing list so they have your details in order to send you various affiliate links and programs of their own (perhaps) for sale.

Now I don’t have a problem with that. That’s the whole point of making a living out of marketing. What does annoy me though is, if you’re going to make an offer to answer questions, don’t bloody ignore me when I do.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve emailed a couple of so called top flight internet marketers who, in their ’sales’ emails have offered to help with any questions but they have not got back to me at all. I’ve asked dead simple questions that requires very little effort to answer but - nothing. I asked one guy which of his products would be best for me to buy as a newbie. My wallet was open and I was ready to buy there and then. Five days later and still no response.

Now surely if you’re in the business of selling you would take the time to answer a bog simple question that is guaranteed to make you an extra $97, wouldn’t you? Now I know you may be thinking ‘perhaps the guy never got it’ and I could understand that if I’d sent just the one email but I sent three.

So perhaps my $97 and potential backend sales isn’t good enough for him. Seems a dumb way to run a business if you ask me. I’ve unsuscribed from his ‘newsletter’ now and I’ll spend my money elsewhere.

However, where I did get my questions answered was over at Wealthy Affiliate. There’s all sorts here -people starting out and people making a daily fortune. I would seriously go have a look. It’s a membership site charging $29.99 per month but there’s no tie-in time so you can leave whenever you want.

Have to be honest though, I’ve learnt more form the forum posts and 8 week program than from any book so far.

I’m still sitting quite comfortably at No2 on Google with my Squidoo page on the Membernaire affiliate program. Interestingly, I haven’t made a penny!

I’ve been thinking about why I haven’t made a sale. In hindsight, it’s blindingly obvious. Jimmy Brown’s site is a membership site and limited to 1000 subscribers. It has been advertised by the world and his brother who probably made the bulk of the money within the first day or two of launch.

Not having the knowledge to play with the bigger boys, I probably got killed in the crush. Membership is now full, so sitting at No2 isn’t going to earn me penny one from now until the cows come home.

So, having accepted that I won’t make anything, that’s fine (for now). What is important is that I’ve learned how to get to No2 and I reckon if I’ve done it once, I can do it again but with a different and less ‘hyped’ product.

I’m going back over my notes to kind of map out my path to No2 and when I have it down I’ll post up here for all to see. I don’t suppose I’ve done anything too spectacular or radically different from anyone else with my campaign, but I do suspect that the WA forum played a large part in it’s position.

I was busy ‘digging’ about today when I came across this site ‘Twenty Five Days To Make A Difference’ and was absolutely blown away. It’s a blog by a little girl called Laura who, to honour the memory of her grandfather, set out to make the world a better place by making a difference everyday for 25 days.

This is an excerpt from her blog - “I challenged everyone who read my blog to TRY to do something every single day during the holiday season to make a SMALL difference in his or her world. I explained that whoever made the “most difference” in December would win a $25.00 donation to the charity of his or her choice on Christmas night. I SAVED ALL OF MY ALLOWANCE ($25) FOR THE MONTH OF DECEMBER, AND I WAS REALLY SURPRISED AND EXCITED WHEN SEVERAL PEOPLE GENEROUSLY OFFERED TO MATCH MY DONATION (OR MORE)! “

Christ, what an inspiration to us all! Here’s a child using the internet purely for the good of others and asking for nothing in return. I’m not a religious person but God bless you sweetie.

I stand humbled.

Things are looking good at Google. My Membernaire review page on Squidoo is doing pretty good. I’m at number four for the Squid page and number two for this blog. Can’t be bad. Now if I can just figure out why no bugger’s buying anything…

7Search have written to me again asking for my keywords and offering me a free $10 for doing so. Yeah right.

I’m going to keep tweaking away at the Membernaire site over the weekend but also going to start researching another niche to see if I can get similar results as I’ve been getting with Membernaire. I intend to follow the same model I’ve used with Squidoo and monitor the results the best I can.

I’m falling behind with my Wealthy Affiliate training. It’s find ing the time!

Things have been happening rapidly with my membernaire site in terms of Google rankings. I dropped off the front page the next day, went to the third page and last I looked was back on the second page. However, I am showing up on the second page twice. Once for my Squidoo site and once for the article I submitted. I’m ok with that. Just have to figure out why.

From what I read though, Google has a mind of it’s own so maybe I won’t know for a loooooong while yet.

I closed my account with 7Search yesterday. I wanted to set up an ad for Membernaire and, with it being a new product, submitted only nine keywords. As I moved through the menu’s it rejected seven of them as the words hadn’t been searched for in the last three months.

This is what I wrote to their ’support’ section … “I have just started a campaign for a new product onto the market called ‘Membernaire’. As it is so new there is little in the way of keywords associated with this product. I wanted to use the specific word ‘membernaire’ and several long tail’s that include this word.

However, your program will not let me use them at all because there have been no searches on these words within the last three months. There wouldn’t be. It was launched about a week ago. So how can I set up a viable campaign if I cannot use the keywords I want? Is there a way around this?

This what I got back… “Please check out our easy-to-use FAQ page for answers on many of your questions about 7Search.com!
http://7search.com/faq/”

I went bolo! 48 hours for that. 48 wasted hours and no answer. The FAQ section was rubbish. I emailed them again and got this…“Thank you for contacting 7search.com! We have received your recent inquiry to our client support department. Please reply stating specifically what keywords wish to add your account. We appreciate your time and patience in allowing us to respond to your inquiry. It is our desire to adequately address all concerns expressed within the original correspondence. Please visit the following page to rate your 7search.com experience. http://7search.com/support/survey.htm “

So I did. After 24 hours nothing. So sod ‘em. I shut my account down and will never even contemplate working with them again. This is not the first time I’ve had zilch response from this mob so it’s not just a case of me chucking my toys in the air. I think they’re customer service is the pits. maybe it’ll get better but I won’t hold my breath.

My rating: -0/10

And good riddance.

Much to my surprise I woke today to find myself on the first page of Google with my Squidoo affiliate lens regarding Membernaire . I’m not quite sure how this has happened so fast.

I have been struggling with a couple of other campaigns and have not ranked at all but this Membernaire one has taken off. My article has only today been accepted on ezinearticles.com so I doubt that has had any influence.

What I did do, was to edit the site and spent some time making more of the text bold, added in a YouTube video on the virtues of Membernaire and have taken part in a voting thread over on Wealthy Affiliate.

It’s difficult to know what tipped the scales. One of them or all of them. However, the guy that holds the number one slot for Membernaire has a small one-page site with virtually nothing on it all. Bizarre!

I’m going to have to keep an eye on things over the next few days to see if I can figure it out.

It’s been an interesting couple of days. The sun has come and gone, it’s still pretty cold and my missus has smacked the life out of the Visa card again (ouch). I feel like I’ve been stuck in front of the computer for ever and not achived a great deal, but looking back I suppose I’ve not done too badly all things being equal.

I signed up for a new affiliate program ‘Membernaire’ by Jimmy D. Brown and wrote an article on Squidoo which you can find here

In terms of construction this is the most comprehensive lens I have put together so far. I then went through the procedure of pinging etc and await the results. I submitted only one article this time and that was to www.ezinearticles.com. To be honest, I needed to spend some time sorting out a few other things, mostly this blog.

I then spent the rest of my time re-designing this blog. It took me a while but I eventually figured out how to get feeds down the side panel. Hey, no mean feat when you’re computer illiterate like wot I am. But, I cracked it and am chuffed to little mintballs for having done so.

Easy when you know how I suppose but it took me a few goes to get it looking right. The buttons down the side I got from this site

I also purchased a domain name for this site from www.GoDaddy.com. That was a doodle but the tricky bit for me now is figuring out how to get an email with the same name. I spent yonks going over their help pages and did all kinds of stuff it told me to do. I couln’t get it going though. So I’ve emailed them and await their timely response.

Whatever the outcome of my endeavours I am learning all the time and keeping the old grey matter active. Can’t be bad.