Pulling Your Flickr Feed with jQuery

Feeds are the easiest way to view updated content, whether it's through a feed reader or outputted onto a web site. There are many different types of feeds, such as RSS or Atom, and many different ways display them on your site, such as using MagpieRSS to parse an RSS feed in PHP. However, you can also display feeds on your site using JavaScript, so in this post I'm going to be talking about a feed format called JSON and how you can use JavaScript to parse it out and display it.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a data format that is easy to read and language-independent, meaning you can parse it using any programming language. Both Yahoo! and Google have been offering data from their sites in JSON format for the past couple years. A good example of this is Flickr. Anyone with a Flickr account can access a JSON feed of their photos.

Finding Your Feed

If we go to the Viget Inspire collection on Flickr, we can click on the feed (orange button, bottom of the page) and bring up a RSS 2.0 feed of all the images in our pool. Flickr's API has many other feed formats, so I suggest going to their site to read up on it because there are a lot of things you can do. If you want the JSON version of the feed, change "format=rss_200" at the end of the query string to "format=json" so that your URL looks like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool.gne? id=675729@N22&lang=en-us&format=json

Bringing It Into jQuery

So now that you have your JSON feed, lets put it to good use. My co-workers and I are big fans of the JavaScript framework jQuery. With version 1.2, jQuery added support for transferring JSON data across multiple domains (this is referred to as JSONP), so in this example we'll be using it to do all the JavaScript work for us. First off, make sure you've downloaded the latest version of jQuery and added it to your page. Next, add "jsoncallback=?" to the end of your query string (this is the callback name) and put the code inside <script> tags to get things running:

$.getJSON("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool .gne?id=675729@N22&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=?", function(data){
  $.each(data.items, function(i,item){
    $("<img/>").attr("src", item.media.m).appendTo("#images")
      .wrap("<a href='" + item.link + "'></a>");
  });
});

See how that function has appendTo("#images")? The JavaScript will be looking for a div with an id of "images" to pull in all the images coming in through the feed, and then wrapping them in a link to the images on Flickr. If you try it out you'll notice it just displays all the images in a row. Obviously this doesn't look very good, so you can use CSS and jQuery to display things nicely. I decided to use the jQuery cycle plugin which has numerous cool effects. Download the plugin and make sure you include a link to it in your page. So at this point your HTML should look something like this:

<div id="images"></div>  
<div class="flickrNav">
    <a id="prev" href="#">Prev</a><a id="next" href="#">Next</a>
</div>

and the CSS could be something like this:
#images { height: 185px; width: 240px; padding:0; margin:0; overflow: hidden;}
#images img { border:none;}

Then we'll add in the cycle plugin code inside our initial function that creates the images out of the JSON feed:

$.getJSON("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool .gne?id=675729@N22&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=?", function(data){
  $.each(data.items, function(i,item){
    $("<img/>").attr("src", item.media.m).appendTo("#images")
      .wrap("<a href='" + item.link + "'></a>");
  });
  $('#images').cycle({
    fx:     'fade',
    speed:    'fast',
    timeout:  0,
    next:   '#next',
    prev:   '#prev'
  });
});

Notice that I put some options in the cycle method for previous and next id's. As you can probably guess, these links will allow the user to navigate through the list of images.

Getting More Than Just Pretty Pictures

At this point images should be showing up, but that JSON feed has a lot of other information in it you can pull in. For any attribute you want to display you just need to write it in the format of $("div name you are targeting").html(name of JSON object you want to display). In our example, if we wanted to show the title of the photo pool, the description of the pool, and a link to the pool on Flickr we would write the following into our jQuery function:

$.getJSON("http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/groups_pool .gne?id=675729@N22&lang=en-us&format=json&jsoncallback=?", function(data){
  $.each(data.items, function(i,item){
    $("<img/>").attr("src", item.media.m).appendTo("#images")
      .wrap("<a href='" + item.link + "'></a>");
  });

  $("#title").html(data.title);
  $("#description").html(data.description);
  $("#link").html("<a href='"+data.link+"' target=\"_blank\">Visit the Viget Inspiration Pool!</a>");
    //Notice that the object here is "data" because that information sits outside of "items" in the JSON feed

  $('#images').cycle({
    fx:     'fade',
    speed:    'normal',
    timeout:  0,
    next:   '#next',
    prev:   '#prev'
  });
});

Notice that we have to call items based on where they are located in the JSON feed. For example, "item.link" will link to the image but "data.link" will link to the overall photo pool. You can look at the actual JSON feed and see how its organized. Next add the HTML so jQuery has something to update:

Now you've got yourself a nice feed of Flickr images and can all the CSS you want to make it look more stylish:

If you're reading this in an RSS reader, you won't be able to see the JavaScript effects I'm talking about. Click here to read.

Viget Inspiration group Pool

The design lab at Viget Labs putting together colors, sites, and anything else that visually inspires us. This group is just so the designers have something the site (www.viget.com/inspire) can pull from, so don't feel bad if you don't get added!

Visit the Viget Inspiration Pool!

Create a link without an underline in HTML

You want a link with no underline, or maybe a page full of non-underlined links? Well, let's see how to do it. The first thing to know is that you have to use a style sheet property to do this, so the trick only works in browsers that support style sheets. With that out of the way, let's take a look at how to create the non-underlined link.

For Individual Links

In order to create a non-underlined link, you need to add the style=" " attribute to your link tag. This is where the style sheet property comes in to play. The property we will use is called text-decoration, and we are going to set it so that the text has no decoration (the underline is a decoration). So, the style attribute will look like this:

style="text-decoration:none"

Now, we want to include this attribute in the link tag. So, tack it on after your URL with a space in between the two, like this:

<a href="http://www.pageresource.com" style="text-decoration:none">The Web Design Resource</a>

Now you will have a link without an underline, like the one below:

The Web Design Resource

For an Entire Page of Links

If you want every link on the page to be non-underlined, you can use a style sheet shortcut inside the '<head></head>' tags of your document. The code looks like this:

<style type="text/css">
a { text-decoration:none }
</style>

Place this code between your tags, and then code your links normally. The style sheet in the head section will make them all non-underlined (unless this is overridden by another style). So, if you have this:

<style type="text/css">
a { text-decoration:none }
</style>

<html>
<head>
<style type="text/css">
a { text-decoration:none }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>
<a href="http://www.pageresource.com">The Web Design Resource</a>
<p>
<a href="http://www.javascriptcity.com">JavaScript City</a>
<p>
<a href="http://www.pageresource.com/html/">HTML Pit Stop</a>
</body>
</html>

Wonderful, isn't it? Now you can have underline-free links anywhere you need them. However, non-underlined links may not be recognized as links by your viewers if they haven't seen this effect before. Then again, if the link color stands out or is the default blue, you will probably be O.K. So have fun, and link away! Oh no, did I just write a silly rhyme? Perhaps I'll write another one when I have more time! All right, I think I'd better get going now...

Well, that's all for now (and then some), see you when I write the next section!

Link Building Tip: Sneaky RSS Deep Links

I wrote a while ago how to use RSS to get links to your blog. If you’re a blogger you’ve no doubt noticed there’s quite a few blogs that scrape your RSS feed & republish the content.
We all know that Duplicate content is a bad thing, however I’ve never seen any negative effects from Scraper blogs republishing my original content. I’d normally get about 2-3 blogs trackbacking me everyday republishing my articles.
If you use Wordpress it’s very easy to take full advantage of these sites linking to you, all you need to do is create links back to your content within your feed .

Using RSS Feeds for Incoming Links

Getting Search Engine Spiders to your most recent content is always a priority for most webmasters. Sometimes even getting the spiders to update your new content at all can take time when you have a new website. Here’s a tip for newer sites that should get the spiders going crazy & eating your content up.
There are a number of sites that aggregate your RSS feed & turn it into a static HTML page. This means you can submit your feed & the spiders will be able to find & follow those links.
Advantages include:

The link has the anchor text of your title
You can have upwards of 10 links on some pages
Title of the page can be chosen, or can be the title of your blog

Here’s an example of what i’m talking about on Feedburner:
Earners Blog Feedburner

Because I show the 30 most recent posts in my feed I get 30 links back to Earners Blog. I’m pretty sure Feedburner redirects now but the spiders still follow.
Here’s a list of other sites that allow you to use a facility like this:

Most of these services will require a backlink to the page with the RSS feeds so they initally get indexed by Google. Usually I open up a del.icio.us account & import all the RSS feeds then ping them from there. You should notice a nice increase in backlinks & spider activity after using this technique. Enjoy.

Good Internal Linking Increases SE Rankings

Beyond the creation of a website a lot of the average “internet marketers” focus is links, links, links. More to the point, External Links.
Whilst no-one can doubt that external links are all well & good why do I consistently see people not making correct use of their own Internal Linking?
After all, using the right anchor text within your own site is bound to have some sort of effect?
This blog is a testament to that exact theory. I’ve been using various internal linking strategies since launch & I’ve had nothing but sucess in a number of different areas:

Increased Indexing (A post is now normally indexed within 24 hours)
Deepness of Spider Crawling
Picking up More & More long tail searches (by using varying anchor text in links)
Ranking on Competitive Keywords with not that many “External Links”
Maintaining a high proportion of indexed pages
Reducing Supplemental Results

There are 5 ways I use internal linking for maximum effect:
Have a static sitemap, this allows SE Spiders to find all your pages & also you’ve got some nice anchor text leading to each page. I use the Dagon Design sitemap for Wordpress.
Have a related posts section after every post, this means you’re automatically linking to another 5-10 posts on EVERY PAGE. This dramatically increases the crawlability of your site & also naturally boosts your rankings. I’ve found this to work quite well even for affiliate review sites.
Interlink your pages with keywords. I use SH Autolink for this. Normally when I write a post I try to think of the most appropriate Anchor Text for it. Then I link to that page with the chosen Anchor Text. Say for example I might choose Internal Linking Strategies for this page. Any time I type that word on any other post, it’ll automatically link to this post.
Refer to other posts as often as you can. This not only helps your readers explore your blogs much deeper but it also makes other posts more relevant for more & more search terms. I try to vary the anchor text I use up to 5 times to give pages the ability to rank for larger breadth of keyword terms.
Optimize your Template to include proper anchor text. For example in my template I decided to call “Home” “Earn Money” instead. This means for every post I write I’ve got a link to my home page with the anchor text “Earn Money” instead of it saying “Home.” You can do this right across the board for things like reviews, popular posts & interviews.
These are all things that you can apply to your blog quickly & easily without paying any money & without having to hunt down any external links. Write some good content & the battle is half won

Simple jQuery Solution To A Simple Problem

When building out the Viget Extend blog, I really wanted to give some special attention to the real meat of the content: the code blocks.
After looking at some other dev blogs, it seemed like there were two types: Big Ol' Blocks and Little Snippets. The big ones deserved the full treatment: Scrollbars, full colorization, line-numbering, all of it. We accomplished this with SyntaxHighlighter, a cool JS file that handles all this work. The developers just need to slap a name="code" on their pre tags, and SyntaxHighlighter formats and colors everything properly. (View an example of the treatment)
The shorter code snips were a little trickier. We didn't want them to linebreak automatically (like code here at Inspire does) for accuracy reasons, but we didn't want to apply scrollbars to something as simple as a single line of code. The solution was a quick jQuery idea: Expanding the code block on hover, so they grow to the full width of the page.

$("pre").hover(function() {
        $(this).animate({ width: "765px"}, 250);
    }, function() {
        $(this).animate({ width: "437px" }, 250);
});

This was all right for a while, but soon we began running into posts like this one, where one or more of the blocks just didn't need the expanding treatment. In these cases, the jQuery effect was just annoying.
For a while, I just let it be, but this morning the answer hit me: We could probably do something to get the width of the code block's contents, and trigger the effect based on whether not the content width exceeded the block's. The first part was just setting up a variable to get the widths of both the block and the block's contents:

var contentwidth = $(this).contents().width();
var blockwidth = $(this).width();

But this isn’t quite enough, because the ”contents” traversal method needs a definite element to grab, and the pre tags only contained plain text. We needed to add an inline element to wrap the text:

$("pre").wrapInner("<span></span>");

This wraps the inside of pre tags with spans, but adds a problem: Now we’ve got errant spans showing up in our bigger, SyntaxHighlighted blocks. So we need a quick selector fix:

$("pre:not([name='code'])").wrapInner("<span></span>");

All better. The last step is to put it all together, and add the if statement that’s going to test whether the block expands or not:

$("pre:not([name='code'])").wrapInner("<span></span>");

$("pre").hover(function() {
    var contentwidth = $(this).contents().width();
    var blockwidth = $(this).width();        
    if(contentwidth > blockwidth) {
        $(this).animate({ width: "765px"}, 250);
        }
    }, function() {
        $(this).animate({ width: "437px" }, 250);
});

For an example of the finished effect, and the width discrimination, see Testing For HTML Tags in Rails Plugins.

taken from www.viget.com

Delicioso the free Social Bookmark Submitter

Delicioso is a completely free program that will let you submit in mass to Social Bookmarking Networks. Pretty nifty program. This will allow the search engine spider to crawl your sites deeper & also help you remove any pages from the supplemental index.

Delicioso

Provided you have already registered with any of the following Social Bookmark networks you can just include your account details for bookmarking:

Tagtooga
Del.icio.us
Furl.net
Simpy.com
Blogmarks.net
Shadows.com
Spurl.net
Netvouz.com

This can easily take a lot of the legwork out of transferring your bookmark lists between Networks. Some additional features include bulk import of URL’s & a crawl mode that’ll crawl your website looking for all the URL’s it can find.

You can download Delicioso from the Tagtooga Website here

If you’re looking for a bookmarking application with more features you may also be interested in checking out Bookmarking Demon. This software automates account creation also

Styling Code Snippets with CSS

Although there are many useful plug-ins out there that dress up code snippets, I would like to share a technique playing with the background of the <pre> and <code> tag with CSS.

View Demo

Common Problem with FireFox

When trying to add some padding to the <pre> tag, FireFox creates a cross-browser bug where it interferes with the spaces created by the space or tab bar. See below for an example.
CSS FireFox Code Bug

Solution
We can go around this issue by nesting the <code> tag within the <pre> tag and specifying a margin in <code>.

HTML

Start out by placing your code snippet in between the <pre> and <code> tag. Note that anything inside of the <pre> tag is preserved (spaces and line breaks).

<pre><code>.classname {
    <span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">/*--Code Goes Here--*/</span>
    <span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">/*--Code Goes Here--*/</span>
    <span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">/*--Code Goes Here--*/</span>
    <span style="color: rgb(136, 136, 136);">/*--Code Goes Here--*/</span>
}
</code>

CSS

<code>pre {
font-size: 12px;
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
background: #f0f0f0;
border-left: 1px solid #ccc;
border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc;
line-height: 20px; /*--Height of each line of code--*/
background: url(pre_code_bg.gif) repeat-y left top; /*--Background of lined paper--*/
width: 600px;
overflow: auto; /*--If the Code exceeds the width, a scrolling is available--*/
overflow-Y: hidden;  /*--Hides vertical scroll created by IE--*/
}
pre code {
margin: 0 0 0 40px;  /*--Left Margin--*/
padding: 18px 0;
display: block;
}
</code>

Make <pre> Tags Print Friendly

To make <pre> tags print friendly and make the code wrap to the next line, Tyler at www.longren.org shared a great technique to tackle this issue. If you are new to print style sheets, check out my previous tutorial.

View Demo

Conclusion

If you haven’t dressed up your code snippets yet, now is a good time. Feel free to take the background images of my samples as well. If you have any questions or know of any other techniques, please share them!
taken from http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/styling-pre-tags-with-css-code-block/

Social Bookmarking List an Ultimate Dofollow Resource

Ultimate Dofollow Social & Link Building List

14. Feb 2009 | 48 Comments

Dofollow

Welcome to the one stop shop for link builders looking to utilise social networks & other forms of dofollow link building techniques. I aim to keep this list as an up do date resource that grows over time, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if:

There’s sites/resources I’m missing
One of the sites I have listed goes nofollow

Current Total: 95 Sites

Social Submission & Voting Sites

These sites are the bread & butter of social bookmarking. The idea is to submit your site/posts & let the community vote. Not only do you get the initial link from the social site, really sticky content has the ability to go viral & generate a much larger range of links from relevant blogs / forums & websites. Remember, submit your best content.

Social Bookmarking Management Sites

These sites allow you to keep a record of your favourite sites & organise them accordingly. Similar to how Bookmarks work in your browser, except you can now access them from anywhere at any time. Use these to bookmark the pages you want to increase rankings too.

Social Search Sites

Social Question & Review Sites

Social Content / Article Hosting Sites

These sites allow you to host articles. Use them to leverage links to your own network of sites, some sites allow unlimited links in the articles, some are limited to 2 or 3.

Social Image Sites

Social Networking Sites

Blog Hosting Networks

Create blogs around specific topics & use them to link to your network of sites.

Forums

Connotea

Wiki

CSS Galleries

Do you have a beautifully designed CSS site? Then there’s hundreds of dofollow links out there for the taking. Submit it to the sites below.

Social Bookmark Submission Software & Websites

If you’re looking to automate any of your submissions there are a few options:

Blog Management; Last Step to Be Beginner to Advance Blogger

Blog Management / Business Mangement

Step 6 is all about how to manage your ever growing blog empires. We also go through how I manage all commission, costs and marketing tasks as well.

There are certain tasks that I feel that are important to helping you manage your ever growing blog empire. If you do not do this, I feel that you will not be able to keep a track of what your sales are doing, and how profitable your blogs are. Throughout this short guide I have talked about the blog management spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is used when a new blog is added to the network. Every blog has their own tab in this spreadsheet as well.

I make sure when I am doing marketing submissions, I update the spreadsheet as I go, otherwise I do not remember when I have made certain submissions with certain tools. Having a tab for each blog allows me to keep a track of all the keywords I am targeting for each blogs. On each of the blog tabs, I also list as much information about each affiliate program as I can.. So I know when I am going to be paid, what my affiliate login details are etc..

* I also keep a track of all my revenue and costs from a single spreadsheet.
* I update this from one spreadsheet, that you can download in resources & downloads section.
* I update this spreadsheet on a weekly basis, and I update with the commissions that is earned from all the blogs that I am running.
* I also update it with the commission paid as well.
* The spreadsheet allows me to see in an overview what my business is doing, and how profitable each of my sites are.

The last thing I do to manage all my blogs, is to decide when to make more marketing submissions. I use a tool called Rank Checker from SEO Book. It is a free tool that allows you to save pre-sets of keywords, and allows you to check rankings from multiple search engines. I check rankings from my blogs every few days, to see how things are getting on. If I am not happy with how my blogs are ranking, I will perform a marketing submission only then.I hate work, and if I do not have to make a submission then I will not.

If you want to fast track your success with blogs, then outsourcing can be for you. Once you start to manage a large number of blogs, the tasks that you need to perform can be a little mundane. You can easily outsource the process, probably apart from niche research. Once you have been online for a while, your time become more valuable to work on other projects then to perform the routine tasks that are needed to be done to maintain your blogs rankings and to keep growing your income. The great thing is that you can hire a full time assistant for as little as $2 per hour.

There are few places there you can find staff.

* Digital Point – Buy Sell Section. You can advertise there.. or reply to one of the many threads about virtual assistants.
* Warrior Forum – Buy Sell Section. You can advertise there.. or reply to one of the many threads about virtual assistants.
* Elance.com – You can post a job for free, and freelancers will bid on your position.
* GetaFreelancer – The same as Elance, where you post what you want done, and freelancers bid on your job.
* Odesk.com – Another freelancing website where you can post what you are looking for and freelancers post on your job.

Outsourcing is a great way to free up your time to focus on other things, whilst you know that your blogs are being built, marketed and maintained. Do not rush into working with anyone, and start off small to see if the outsourcer is actually any good. There are too many dodgy operators online, but do not let this put you off. If you take your time and start slowly then you will find someone that is honest, reliable and will get the work done for you. I would suggest you learn the system yourself first before you outsource is, and the great thing about My Blogging Blueprint, you have the training material right there for your workers to be able to learn what they need to do.

Blog Flipping; Step 6 From Novice to Advance

Blog Flipping

Step 6 is all about flipping your blogs for insane profits. I will talk about why you should flip and where you should flip your blogs as well.

Flipping blogs is a great source of income when you are starting out with blogs. I used to flip blogs when I first started, but as your network grows and your sites become quite profitable, you might not flip that many sites. At least that is what has happened with me. I still flip blogs, but I only flip profitable blogs as they generate the most ROI and can generate decent pay days as well. Once your blogs are making money, their worth increases dramatically and each blog becomes an asset. I still like to flip blogs as it is a stable part of my income and I know what my sites are worth. I sell my sites at only one place Flippa.com

There are a ton of people here with money to spend on profitable sites. You could build profitable sites with this system, and sell them as your business model. You would not run out of buyers on Flippa.com if you sold profitable sites on there.If you want to sell one of your blogs, use the listing template that we provide in the downloads area of my blogging blueprint. It is the exact listing I use for all our sales, and it converts very quickly. I listed tweetadderdeal.com ( now sold ) with the listing template you can get your hands on. I sold that site for $3,500 and I spent about 8 hours total on it.. I also made about 2k in affiliate commissions from it as well. So it was a great ROI for me.

You want to provide as much information about the site as you can. We have broken down the listing into major selling points. ( refer to listing template ) We also provide proof of earnings & traffic. We throw in the twitter profile as a bonus, and all the bonuses that are given away with on the site as well. The more that you can provide in the sale, the higher the chance that the person who look to buy the site, will get excited and make the purchase.

I sold the above site for that amount because it was ranking for all its major keywords, it was converting and was very very profitable as well. If you want to sell sites, using our listing template will help more then you think. The longer you can hold onto your blogs, the more they will be worth. As I mentioned earlier, you will never run out of buyers if you are selling profitable sites.

Blog Promotion, a Comprehensive Approachment; Step 4 from Novice to Advance Blogger

Blog Promotion

Step 4 is all about marketing. I will show you the exact steps that I take when I market one of my blogs.

I am going to be doing some blog commenting in to start with. Blog commenting is a very good way to get backlinks to your blogs, and lots of them. I hate doing things manually, so I have found a tools that help me post comments on wordpress blogs ( and other platforms as well ) with the click of a button. To do this I use Scrapebox. It is the only tool that I have used that actually gets past akismet. The bottom line is that it works.

I am now going to take the seed review that was created earlier for the homepage of the blog, and use that piece of content and submit to a blog syndication network. My Article Network has over 10,000 blogs in its network, and you add articles that am then used by site owners for content. You upload a seed article, and every time a site owners publishes that content on their site, a different version is used. I post our backlinks in the content and I will get backlinks and traffic from this.

I open up SEnuke and get the article ready to be submitted to My Article Network. At the bottom of the review I add an extra paragraph that talks about the blog, and this where I am going to place my links. I make sure to use my keywords as the anchor text linking back to the home page of the blog. I add spinner syntax to the keywords used at the bottom of the article, so that every article that is published a different keyword is being used.

My Article Network uses different tags as its spinner syntax. Copy the review from SEnuke into a new .txt file. You then use the search / replace function and find | and then replace it with ~
You will be ready to go to submit the content to My Article Network. I also make spinner titles as Ill so that different titles am used on each submission as Ill. Because the seed review is so unique on each spin, according to My Article Network you can resubmit the same content multiple times. As long as its submitted into different categories and is over 100% unique. As you can see below the articles that I make am very unique. I normally submit the same article 5 times on each marketing run.

I am now going to talk a bit about SEnuke. SENuke is an automation suite that helps you do many tasks that would take you days to complete. SEnuke condenses days of manual work into only a few minutes of preparation.

SEnuke has many modules as you can see below.

* It creates and confirms accounts at some of the largest Ib 2.0 sites.
* It then submits content to article directories, social media sites, social bookmarking sites & rss feed directories as Ill all automatically as Ill.
* I am going to use the Ib 2.0 profile nuke to start with.
* Placing links on high page ranking sites using your keywords is a great way to gain authority and trust in the search engines.
* You can place links on profile pages to do this, and SEnuke has a module that helps you do this as Ill.

You then create accounts at 40 of these sites, and then confirm the accounts on the next screen. Once all your newly created accounts am created, it is time to post links to these profiles. I set up to post 5 links on each profile. I also spin all my keywords, so that it randomly posts keywords to each profile. This helps with a nice spread across all the keywords used. Once I have posted to all the sites that have accounts, I then keep a note of all the profile urls. I place them all in an open text file to use a bit later on.

There are more steps to this process... as I would be writing a small novel to go through each step... For a more comprehensive FREE Video Walkthrough on this step, that includes every single promotional step outlined in detail - MyBloggingBlueprint.com

I check my SERPS ( search engine rankings pages ) every few days to see where I am ranking. I then make a decision whether I should do another submission or not. You do not have to do a submission daily. You can go Ieks without any link building as the amount of links I have just built is like pulling out a sledgehammer.

Services / Tools Used In This Step...

ScrapeBox – This is the tool that I use to help me do blog commenting. Its automated and it works!
My Article Network – Is a blog content syndication network. There am over 10,000 blogs that you can get your content onto. This means traffic and links.
SEnuke – This program is the Ferrari of automation. It helps you save time and money. It help you gain higher rankings in the search engines.

Blog Setup Tips, a Semi Blackhat Approachment; Step 3 from Beginner to Advance Blogger

Blog Setup

Step 3 is a very large step. I will show you how to build exact same blogs as I do..

Login to your cpanel account and select either fantastico deluxe or simple scripts. Bluehost and most hosts would rather you use simple scripts as it is more stable then fantastico. Once you are in the simple scripts interface, you just need to select the wordpress icon. Once you have done that, you just need to select install. Select your domain from the drop down list and select complete.

Once you are done, all you need to do is add the blogs details to your blog management spreadsheet. ( take a look at the later step about blog management to see what I am talking about )

I are going to turn the plain blog that you installed into the same structure of my other blogs. I do this by setting up a master blog on our server that has all the modifications, layout set up and also all the themes & plugins that I are going to use for our blogs.

I then clone this master blog over using WP Cloner. This tool allows us to take a complete copy of one blog and put it on another blog with the click of a button. Once you have set up a master blog on your server. All you need to do is clone that blog over to your new fresh blog. Setting up a master blog is not as hard as you think. It just allows you to save a lot of time by not having to upload all the themes, plugins that you want to use. Plus you only set up the blog once for all the things that the search engines are looking for. Set it up once and never have to do it again... Easy as pie!

Below is how I have structured the layout for my master blog.

I have a custom logo and also our product review link & main keyword link in the category menu. I do this to help with SEO and linking back the home page of the blog.

I also have a product review & bonus give away on the home page of the blog as well. I use a static page as the home page of the blog, so when users visit your site they will see the product review straight away.

A custom footer is set up with all the pages that the SE's look for such as the privacy, terms, about and contact us pages. I also link back to our home page from the footer as well using the main keyword as anchor text.

There is also an optin form placed in the right hand column of the blog, this is placed above the fold and is very visible. You should also give away some other bonus to help encourage users to give you their names & email addresses. I use Aweber to handle all my autoresponder needs and subscriber management. I have take the html that Aweber has provided me and styled as you can see below. I have then added the code to my master blog. This means I only have to do this once per niche I decide to enter.

You should link to authority sites and also to your twitter profile in the sidebar. This helps for SEO and gaining trust from the search engines as well.

I use the following plugins for ALL my blogs.. I upload my plugins once to my master blog. Below is the list of the plugins that I use for ALL my blogs. Just click on the name to be taken to their sites and download the plugins. Please note some are paid plugins.

1.WP Robot – This is a content generation plugin that is very easy and fast to set up.
2.************ Translator – This helps the search engines index more pages of your blogs, and send you international traffic as well.
3.Google XML sitemaps - This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
4.Link Cloaking Plugin - Automatically cloaks outgoing links in your posts and pages. You can also add static cloaked links manually
5.Platinum SEO Pack - Complete SEO solution for your Wordpress blog.
6.SEO Smart Links - SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
7.Sociable - Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favourite social bookmarking sites.
8.WP-Postviews - Enables you to display how many times a post/page had been vieId.

I only use premium themes for all my niche blogs. You can upload all your themes to your master blog, and they will be cloned over when you clone your new blog. The great thing about this is that you only have to set up all your themes on your master blog the one time. Then you can choose any theme you would like to use when you have cloned the blog.

I only use premium themes as I do not want any of my blogs to look like any spam blogs that you might have come across online. When users visit your blogs, they are more likley to stay on the site if the site looks professional and well maintained. You can not achieve this by using free themes. Professional looking blogs increase conversions as well. I only use one company for all my premium theme needs, and that is WOO Themes. I feel they are best wordpress themes club online and I do not think I will ever use another theme club online. Their themes are easy to use and simple to customize.You can get 2 themes for the price of 1, but their club membership is very cheap compared to other theme clubs found online.

Once you have set up your master blog on your server. All you need to do with WP Cloner is add your new blog that you just created and press one button. It can't be any easier then that. After only a few clicks of your mouse, your new blog is ready to go and and it has only taken you about 2 or 3 minutes to do so. If you gong to upload all your plugins and themes, and then customize your theme manually, it would take 1 –2 hours to do everything. WP Cloner is a massive time saver.

I am going to create a custom logo for my new blog now. When I started online I put in the effort to learn a graphics package. I currently use fireworks for all my graphics and this program is all I need for online work. I do not use photoshop as I feel this program is overkill for what I need it for. You can use some free graphics packages like The Gimp & Coffee Cup as well. Try and make your logo similar to the merchants. This helps with conversions as well. I also use the same background color of the merchants site and my site as well. This is done to make sure that the user does not get too much of a surprise then they leave your site and head over to the merchants site. Once you have a logo, I normally create an images directory in the main site directory. I then just add the image path to the theme control panel. All woo themes have their own custom settings page. It helps with banner management and also logo management as well.

The background color is normally changed in the themes.css file. You can edit this in the theme editor in the admin area of your new blog. If you get stuck you just need to consult your themes set up guide to see how to change the background colours. If you do not know how to make logo's, and you just cant be bothered you can find designers that will be willing to make you logos for as low as $10

You can find them at.

1.Digitalpoint
2.Warrior forum

Just head to their Buy, Sell & Trade sections. You will find plenty of designers to help you out. You can also post a thread to get help as well.

You need to set up your affiliate link so that users do not know that the link is an affiliate link, plus the search engines do not like affiliate links. So it is advisable to set up a simple redirect via .htaccess. Once you login to your cpanel, click on filemanagerand then select your blogs directory in the drop down box. You need to right click the .htaccess file, and select code edit. Once that is open you need to add the the follow code at the bottom of the file redirect 301 /whateverdirectory/whatevername http://www.yourafflink.com. So when anyone tries to access /whateverdirectory/whatevername on my blog, they will be redirected via the affiliate link without them even knowing. So in essence you make up a page on your site that does not exist, and then the .htaccess will redirect your user by your affiliate link.

You then will want to set up the affiliate banners.. This is quite easy, all you need to do is login to your affiliate account and find where they keep their banners. Once you have found them, it is really easy to set them up if you are using a Woo themes wordpress theme. All you need to do is enter the image path and the redirect that you set up earlier, and you are all set. Just add the banners that the theme you are using has been set up to use.

I now need a review for the product I am promoting. The home page of your blog will be a product review. I get my reviews by doing a search in google – product name review. Then I copy and paste no more then 10 reviews into a txt file. I then use spinner tags { | } to mash those reviews together into one large seed article. So that it can be used as the main review on the blog, then also be used for marketing submissions as well.

Once you have mashed the article together, you then need to open up SEnuke and put the seed article in the article spinner ( Or any article spinner will do ). You then need to keep spinning this article until you see a review that you would like to use as your review on your blog.

You also want to add some anchor text on your home page as well, using the main keyword if you can and also some of the product specific keywords as well. This will help the search engines figure out what your site is about and what to rank your home page for as well. You do not need to add to many links, just 3 or 4 will be enough. Make sure to use the redirect link that you made earlier for your affiliate link.

Through the review you will also need to add a link, with a call to action that encourages the user to click through to the merchant site. Place these links in the centre of the page, and also place them at various points throughout the review page. You also want to add a screenshot of the merchants website, with a headline underneath talking about the review and also how they can get a massive bonus by purchasing through this site. You want to then add some user reviews / testimonials under your review so that users can see what others think of the product. The best place to get these reviews is from the merchant sites directly.

* One of the main ways that I try and increase conversions is by offering a bonus to users if they purchase through our site as well.
* One other way to increase conversions even further is to contact the merchant and ask for a discount code or coupon. Then the user can get a bonus ( usually ebooks or software ) and the discount off the purchase price as well.
* I get all my bonuses from Master Resale Rights. These guys have the largest collection of PLR & MRR ebooks, software, audio, video, templates etc... found anywhere online.
* I usually offer anywhere betIen 4 and 6 ebooks as a package. You should always put a monetary value on the package as well. This does not mean anything, but it helps put real value on the bonus.

Master Resale Rights have the largest and cheapest collection of PLR & MRR products online. You can create bonuses for just about any niche using this site.

I am also going to set up a twitter profile that is going to use your blogs rss feed as the content generation engine for your twitter feed. Twitter is a great resource for free targeted traffic. Try and use your main keyword if you can as your username, if you can't then try and find a username that is niche related. You are going to want to add a custom background image and profile picture as well to your twitter profile. Also editing the bio of your profile is a good thing as well.

Then head to Twitterfeed.com and create an account. Twitterfeed allows you to set up your blogs rss feed to update your twitter profile.
As you have already set up your blog to automatically post new posts on a daily basis, then your twitter account with be also updated with the same content.

I use a program called TweettAdder to manage all my blogs twitter profiles automatically. It is the best twitter profile management software going around at the moment The last thing you want to do is link to your newly created twitter profile from your blogs sidebar.

Services / Tools Used In This step...

1.WP Cloner – This tool helps you take any blog and clone it a newly installed fresh blog. This is a massive time saver.
2.Aweber – The only service to use to manage your subscribers and optin lists.
3.WP Robot – One of the content generation plugins..
4.WOO Themes – Premium wordpress themes that I use for ALL my blogs.
5.Master Resale Rights – Where I get my bonuses from.
6.Tweet Adder – Twitter profile software, 100% automated

Domains & Hosting Setup, Step-2 Beginner to Advance Blogging

Domains & Hosting Setup

In step two you will learn how to get your hands on the right domains for your blogs. You will also learn how to set up your hosting accounts the right way and who to use to get the best support for your growing blog network as well.

It is time to get yourself a domain name for the blog that you are going to build. Head to namecheap to start search for a domain name that will be best suit your blog. Namecheap are the most reliable and cheapest domain registrar that I know of.

* Try and use your main keyword in the domain as well. Having your main keyword in the domain does help with SEO.
* If the main keyword on its own has been taken, then add extra words on like. Guide, Review, Hub, Deals etc..
* If you cant find any domains that will fit your main keyword, do not worry. Start doing searches on your product then and find a domain using the same process above.
* Your domain is also important for increasing your CTR ( click through rate ) from the search results. You want to structure your domains to help users click your listing vs your competition.

Once you have registered your new domain name, it is time to addon the domain to your hosting account.. this is a very easy and simple process.

Before I talk about that, I wanted to talk about who I use to host all my niche blogs.

Bluehost.com I feel is one of the best shared hosting companies around at the moment, and I think this because I have been with them for about three years now. I have tried many hosts.. But Bluehost.com offer the best support that I have seen, and I have tried many hosts out there as well.

Once you have set up your hosting account is time to do add the domain to your new hosting account.

Login to your namecheap account and select your domain name. Modify the domain, and select change name servers to Ibhost. If you have selected Bluehost.com as your host. You should use the following nameservers. NS1.bluehost.com & NS2.bluehost.com

* Then you need to login to your cpanel account with bluehost.com
* Select addon domains, and enter your new domains details.
* If the nameservers are updated you will see a success message indicating that the nameservers are pointing to bluehost.
* Click add domain, and this will create a new sub directory for your newly added domain.
* In this directory you will be building your new blog in the next step.

Services Used In This step...

Namecheap – Cheap domain registration.
Bluehost – Cheap & reliable hosting for your blog networks.

Niche & Keyword Research, Step 1 Beginner to Advance

Niche & Keyword Research

In this step I am going to talk about all things keyword and niche research.

You will learn how to find the right keywords and products to promote. The keywords that I choose in this step are the keywords that are going to be used to optimize your blogs for.

This part of the process should not take that long, and I feel that people tend to let themselves become bogged down when they are looking for niches and keywords to target as well. This type of mindset is something that I want you to get out of, and as you will see in this step I approach keyword and niche research quite simply. Its time to talk about market research, how I conduct market research and how I evaluate niches to see if they are going to make me money.

There are a couple of resources online that I like to use to brainstorm niches to work in.

1)EzineArticles
You can find lots of ideas to start with, to take to the evaluation step that you will see later on this step.

Drill down on the categories and you will find many sub categories. You can then take a look at articles that are published. You will be surprised at the amount of niches and ideas you can get from doing this.

2)Flippa.com
I love flippa.com as you can see what sites are selling, and you can get great ideas from this site. There is no need to try and reinvent the wheel.

I have found many sites that I just copied the idea, and made it very very profitable.

3)Keyword research pro
keyword research pro allows you conduct searches based on products & also hot trends as well.

If you get stuck brainstorming ideas and niches, this tool is a great time saver and will help you find more niches then you will be able to work in as well.

Once you have brainstormed you should have up to 5 keywords in your list to run through keyword research pro.

Here is the breakdown of what you need to do in keyword research pro.

* Generate more keywords for each of your seed keywords.
* Take the top 5 keywords in each list and then analyse them for adwords data.
* Then take the results and put them into the filter tab in keyword research pro.
* You will need do to this for each of your keywords you have chosen to research further.

I will use the adwords data to help me make to figure out if a niche is worth pursuing.

The basic rule of thumb that I follow is this...

The more money advertisers are spending on adwords, then the higher chance that niche is profitable and will make you money. Keyword research pro is a great tool to quickly help you evaluate whether a niche is worth your time or not.

So once you have decided what keywords to go after by looking at the adwords data. Then you need to head to google and take a look at competition for the highest volume traffic keywords that you have in your filter tab in keyword research pro.

When you head to google you want to search with “ “ surrounding your keywords. This will give you the exact match competition for that keyword. If you get results under 1 milltion pages for the exact match, that is a good thing. The way I build links and promote these blogs means that I can target quite high competition keywords. I would suggest that you try and find your main keywords with competition under 1 million competing pages to start with, and then work your way up from there.

Once you have gone through this process you will have a good idea of what your main keyword will be for your first blog. When you decide what your main keyword your blog will target, it is then time to find a product to promote as well.

It is time to find a product that relates to your main keyword. I find products in the following ways.

* Search google using the main keyword, and see what merchants are coming up. If there are merchants see if they have an affiliate program.
* Search google using other keywords that you generate from your main keyword. You want to find other affiliates promoting the merchants you have found in during your last search. What you want to see if the same merchants being promoted by affiliates.
* Search through adwords results and find affiliates that are promoting merchants this way.
* If you can't find any merchants by doing the above steps, then you can head to clickbank, commission junction and search for merchants through there to work with.

You want to merchants that have professional looking sites and that you think will convert when you send users to their sites.

* Sign up to the affiliate program you have chosen, and add all details to the blog management spreadsheet ( this is talked about in later steps )
* Use keyword research pro and generate more product specific keywords based on the product name you are promoting.
* Once you have done that, you need to add those keywords to your blog management spreadsheet as well.

At the end of this process you will have a main keyword, and also product specific keywords that you are going to rank your blog for.

Tools Used In This step...

1.Keyword Research Pro - Cheap, Fast & reliable keyword research software.

To View This Guide in FREE Video format - MyBloggingBlueprint.com