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Quick Blogging Tip #7: Save time by using a password management program.

Let’s face it, memorizing a dozen or more passwords is tough to do and it’s not very secure to use just one password for every website login. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to fill out the forgotten password form on a website because I couldn’t remember which one of the passwords I used or if I happened to use a brand new one. This is a process I hate doing and is the primary reason why I started searching for a password management program. Also, I certainly wasn’t about to switch to using just one password for everything because that would not be very secure.

My journey to find a good password management program has been in the works for a long time. In fact, I tried a program called KeePass a couple of weeks ago but after using the program for a while I found an unacceptable defect in the program. There were several websites that no matter how I set up the program it would not perform an automatic login. While it’s helpful to have a program that remembers all your passwords, it’s certainly not efficient to have to copy the password off of a password entry and paste it into your browser because the auto login feature doesn’t work.

After getting fed up with that program (I never really used it a whole lot because of the defect mentioned above), I set out on another quest to find a great password management program. This time I finally found something that works wonderfully, RoboForm. The program ties in with internet explorer or firefox and saves your login information every time you log into a new website. All passwords are then managed from a master password.

The amount of time I’m going to save in the future while at the same time keeping my websites more secure will be substantial (lol yes, I really do fill out way too many lost password forms). I highly recommend this program and while I’m only using the trial version for now, from various reviews I’ve read the trial version should work out well enough for me. Granted I am still in the trial period which offers me full program functionality and I may end up paying for the full version after this period ends. It may be worth it so long as I don’t have to ever click another link to reset my password, then click a link in an email to reset the password, then login with the random password and have to change it again only to repeat the process later on down the road. For such a simple concept I really am excited to be using this program and highly recommend it.

Here is a Direct download link or if you want to read more reviews on cnet first check out this link here.

While this week’s blogging tip isn’t entirely related to blogging it will help you save time that you can put towards blogging and not filling out forgotten password forms.

Do you use a password management program yet?

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When it comes to monetizing websites, you should never rely on just one source of income. The logic behind this is obvious and if you haven’t heard of this concept by now, you really should start looking at using multiple different publisher programs to earn more money from your websites - (Check out my recommendations here if you’re looking for a few ideas). If your main revenue source starts to decline and you aren’t using other revenue streams it can be disastoruous so if you aren’t doing this now take the first step and start to use more than one publisher program on your websites.

While utilizing multiple different publisher programs on your websites is important, I’d like to take it one step further. You should also always be consantly experimenting with various publisher programs that offer the same type of advertising solution. In this case, I’ll be offering up some numbers on two different in text advertising programs. After running Kontera’s Content Link on one of my forums for several months I decided to try another in text advertising option - Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt. After negotiaiting my way into Vibrant Media’s program, I finally got the ad code installed on my forum a little over one month ago. But before I get to the numbers from Vibrant Media, I’d like to show you how Kontera performed on Dec 10th to Jan 10th:

Not that great huh? For 17k impressions it made just over $5. However, it’s important to note that 7 days into the above time frame I set the ads to only display to guests because I felt they are too intrusive for members. Either way, you can see why I wanted to try out a different in text advertising option to see if there was anything else that could do better than $5 in a month time period even though it was only on 17k in impressions. Here are the results from Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt program:

(Thanks for the misspelling of my company name by the way)

Wow this one did even worse! I logged into my account after running the ads for three weeks and saw that there were 0 clicks! Are you kidding me? I actually emailed my account rep over at Vibrant Media to see if there was a problem with the ad code and he assured me that there wasn’t. He ended up changing the link colors from the blue that matched the color of the links on the site back to the standard green but this didn’t do much to change the outcome. I wasn’t generating a ton of impressions, but it’s funny that for displaying close to 60,000 impressions the ads were only clicked 3 times!

Now that I’ve finished running IntelliTxt for a month, I may try out AdBrite next. I’d really like to find an in text advertising option that performs better than Kontera or I may just remove in text advertising completely because it already only accounts for a very small portion of the chunk of the pie. What I’ll probably end up doing is keeping the if conditionals to only display the in text ads to guests anyway though. It’s also important to note that while Kontera’s Content Link made more money than Vibrant Media’s IntelliTxt on my forum it may be the opposite for you depending on your website’s niche, demographics etc. I can’t stress this enough, if you want to increase your online income than you must experiment with a wide variety of publisher programs!

Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don’t miss out on the next update to this ongoing case study of in text advertising when I display the results from AdBrite.

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Quick Blogging Tip #6: Simple steps to never suffer from writers block again

Two simple steps:

One of the ways I ensure that I never run out of topics to write about is because of the way I keep track of post ideas. The first thing you need to do to generate more post ideas is to keep blogging in your mind throughout the day. By making an effort to think about topics to write about throughout the day you’ll be able to generate a lot more ideas than if you just sit down at your computer with the intent to blog.

Now that you are thinking about topics and ideas to write about on your blog it’s important that you find a way to keep track of your ideas. Regardless of where I’m at during the day or what I happen to be doing, I will always take time to record a post idea. If you’re forgetful like me and don’t take the time that second to write down the idea you may forget about it.

How I generate most of my ideas:

When I’m walking from the bus stop to the building I work at, people are rarely around me and it allows me to take some time to really contemplate ideas for my blog. As soon as I think of an idea I open up my phone and record the post headline and idea into a voice memo.

Other times I’ll be at work and an idea for a post will pop into my head. I’ll write a quick email to myself with the post topic and one sentence on the idea and send it off.

If I don’t have computer access or my phone handy and an idea comes to me whether by something I’ve seen or simply a thought process that has come to mind I’ll find a piece of paper or constantly repeat or think about the idea non stop until I can get to a computer. Yes, I’m that forgetful

Final thoughts:

The point is that by thinking about your blog on a daily basis and recording ideas as they come to you it will be a lot easier to sit down and write your posts. At this time I have about 14 post titles sitting in my Wordpress control panel waiting to be written. I already have a general idea and direction from these posts and if I ever experience a lack of ideas I can rely on the post titles I’ve set out for myself. These post titles and ideas have all come while during my daily habit of making a concentrated effort to think about ideas to write on and never from just sitting down at the computer with the intent to blog.

How do you come up with topics to write about?

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I mentioned in an earlier post that I was selling one of my smaller forums AdobeChat.com and I’m happy to say that it sold for earlier this week for $600. I don’t think the sale price is too bad considering it wasn’t really an active community. The site was making about $30 a month though, so the sale pretty much ended up being for a little over 12 months of earnings (because I’m also transferring the vBulletin license over to him). While I was looking to get a little more for the site I’m still pleased with the result. I haven’t finished the transfer yet but it should be done by the end of the week.

My guest post went live on JohnCow.com where I wrote about why you should make sure you spend enough time to milk your cash cows before focusing your attention on new ventures. I believe that it’s really important to strike a balance between the time you spend managing your current portfolio of websites and the time you spend on launching new websites. I think it’s a good read (although I may be a little bias), but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

Lastly, on an unrelated note to what I usually write about I finally sold off a portion of my personal NES collection. I sold my rare Top Loader NES which was the second version of the Nintendo Entertainment System that was only produced for about one year until the Super Nintendo came out. The Top Loader was produced with a different type of metal connection so that you wouldn’t have to blow on your games to get them to work (Yah we all had to do it and it worked differently on everyone’s NES). For those of you that haven’t read my about me page, I got my start making money off of buying bulk lots of NES games and reselling them individually on eBay years ago. In the process I gradually kept specific games for my own collection and I finally decided to start getting rid of them. I feel like this is an end of an era, but alas I have a Wii now and will just download the ones I really want there.

Do you share your site sales experiences with your readers? Do you think I would have had better luck at SitePoint or do you think the site wasn’t worth enough to post it for sale there?

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I stumbed accross this website several months ago:

Explorer Destroyer (As of the time of this posting it’s currently down though)

The basic premise of the site is to get people to use Firefox while at the same time make you some money. Sounds good right? There are three different levels that you can use on your site only two of which can help you make money off of users downloading Firefox with the Google search bar:

Level 1: Gentle Encouragement Rating: $$
Visitors using IE see a message encouraging them to download Firefox (with a download link) running across the top of the page.
Level 1 Demo >> (the demo will pretend you are using IE)

Level 2: Semi-serious Rating: $$$$
Visitors using IE get a friendly splash page encouraging them to download Firefox. There’s a download link, and a link to continue on to your site.
Level 2 Demo >> (the demo will pretend you are using IE)
Update: Xavier sent us this modified version of level 2 that will only show the splash page occasionally. Download it here and see a live demo here.

Level 3: Dead serious
Level 3 will not allow people using IE past a splash page. This level is very useful for sites that are not IE6 compatible. And there’s never been a more important moment to switch people to Firefox. Can you handle it? (At least try it for a day to see how good it feels.) Unfortunately, level 3 is a little too intense for the Adsense policies, so for this level you’ll have to use a regular, non-Adsense link to download Firefox.
Level 3 Demo >> (the demo will pretend you are using IE)

Several months ago I decided to use Level 1 on one of my small sites:

Free Video Game Fonts.

If you’re using internet explorer you’ll see Level 1 and if you’re using FireFox you won’t. In any case, here are the results:

As you can see the Firefox referral has performed terribly. For displaying the ad close to 17,000 times and only resulting in a one dollar profit is pathetic. I think that perhaps one main reason why the referrals have preformed terribly is because of how long FireFox has been around. Lots of people have the program and many of those in the video games niche have it as well. I can estimate that of the 17,000 impressions I’m sure there is significant chunk that visited the site with internet explorer even though they have firefox on their computers.

I’ll be removing the explorer destroyer code from my websites soon so if you want to see it in action just check out GamingFonts.com. It is pretty laughable that this preformed so poorly, but then again perhaps it’s also humorous that I left the code on the site for that long. Either way, it’s always imporant to experiment with new ideas because you never know which ones will pay off.

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Quick Blogging Tip #5: What good is advice if you don’t take it?

This week’s quick blogging tip focuses on similiar concepts that I discussed in last weeks tip “Read less. Write more.” but I believe it’s important enough and different enough to warrant a seperate post. So here it goes:

On my way to and from work I spend some time reading other blogs or forums that focus on the web work I’m involved in. I will frequently see a wide range of great ideas from ways to improve traffic, increase RSS subscibers, make money online (lol. Such an over used term) and more. The problem is that for those of us that are still doing the 9-5 thing, it’s often hard to spend time blogging, marketing our websites etc. This could be due to a number of reasons, wether it’s lack of time, laziness or something else. So I’ve decided to really focus on taking notes on various things I need to get back to. As an example, if I read something that I know can be beneficial to my online business if I will write it down in my ongoing to do list.

Now that I have this to do list I’m able to keep track of all the great ideas I read about and can later go back set a time to execute them. With the to do list when I have some free time I’m now able to simply look at my list and see what stuff I want to work on first without having to try and come up with ideas without a clear record to act on. As an example, I’ll say to myself, “Ok, I’m going to work on my websites from 7:45 PM until 10:00 PM and then I can go watch American Gladiators on my DVR (lol I’m a Hulkamaniac).” Then I’ll open up my to do list and work on what’s I believe is the most important item first. Keeping a to do list is a terribly simple concept but I know that in the past if I didn’t take the time to write down what I needed to implement on my websites after reading about an idea it’d never get done.

Do you actively focus on implementing the advice you receive from others or are you just a passive reader?

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Applying for new publisher and affiliate programs can be a pain. You have to fill out the same information you did for the last publisher program you applied for and then often times you must send in a fax too. Often times they won’t even let you just email the W9 form because it must be faxed.

Now let’s be honest, fax machines suck. I’m just going to come right out and say that I hate them. My wife and I only have cell phones because we don’t see the need to pay an extra $20 a month for a home phone line when people can simply dial the person they want to speak with. Anyway, the last time I was required to fax in my W9 form for a publisher program was last month for Vibrant Media (intellitxt) and I didn’t want to stop at Kinko’s or my parents house to send a simple fax out. So being the lazy person that I found a website that allows you to send a fax for free and this was what I found:

FaxZero.com

The free fax comes with ads on the cover page but who cares as long as the fax reaches it’s destination? So what I did to sign my documents was simply open the pdf into photoshop and pull out the pencil tool and use my mouse. Using my mouse to write a signature doesn’t look that good and the date looks like it was written by a first grader but it doesn’t matter as long as I don’t have to go find a fax machine.

I have already verified that this site works and am about to fax off my W9 form to an affiliate program now.

Be honest, how many of you haven’t tried doing this before?

Side note: I wasn’t paid to write this review. I just thought this website would help you save some time.

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