Wordpress Blogging Mastery Malaysia

Whenever I provide information about Google Adsense in my Wordpress Blogging seminars, many of the attendees draws a blank when I ask them how much they know about Google Adsense program policies.

So I took some time off to write a short Summary on Google Adsense policies here for the benefit of my students and attendees.

Google Adsense starts off the first paragraph with this - If you fail to comply with these policies, we may disable ad serving to your site and/or disable your AdSense account.

Invalid Clicks and Impressions

• Google reserve the right to disable any account at any time.
• If your account is disabled, you will not be eligible for further participation in the AdSense program.
• Please note that we may change our policies at any time, and pursuant to our Terms and Conditions, it is your responsibility to keep up to date with and adhere to the policies posted here.

Encouraging Clicks

• Clicks on Google ads must result from genuine user interest.
• Please note that clicking on your own ads for any reason is prohibited.
• May not encourage users to click the Google ads by using phrases such as “click the ads,” “support us,” “visit these links,” or other similar language.
• May not place misleading labels above Google ad units - for instance, ads may be labeled “Sponsored Links” but not “Favorite Sites”.

Site and Ad Behavior

• Sites showing Google ads may not contain pop-ups or pop-unders that interfere with site navigation, change user preferences, or initiate downloads.
• Any AdSense code must be pasted directly into webpages without modification.

Ad Placement

• Up to three ad units may be displayed on each page.
• A maximum of two Google AdSense for search boxes may be placed on a page.
• Up to three link units may also be placed on each page.

Another Make Money to monetize from your blog content.

Join Kontera in the month of July 2008 and you stand to share 100% revenue with them.

For veteran bloggers, you know what this means, don’t you. We get to keep 100% of the advertising revenue generated this month.

For newsbies, Kontera is an in-text online advertising solution for advertisers as well as publishers like myself, bloggers and webmasters. You get to monetize your content from in-text links without sacrificing your valuable webpage real estate.

They use the Pay Per Click model to pay publishers.

To join Kontera, read more from this article.

Have you logged in to check your Google Adsense accounts yet?

I have got the latest news from Google. They are retiring from Google Referral Program.

If you have not downlaoded your Referral reports of your accounts yet, do so before the last week of August 2008.

This week, I took some time off to attend Stuart Tan’s Internet Marketing gathering at his Adam Khoo Learning Centre in Taman Tun Dr Ismail, Kuala Lumpur.

Stuart Tan gathered his first group of subscribers from Malaysia to attend this last minute meet. He was accompanied by Malaysian Edmund Loh, Vince Tan and Simon Leung from USA. They drove down from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to make this meet up happen.

As soon as I got Stuart’s email about this event, I replied to say I would be there. I was there to get some Internet Marketing tip from experienced marketers on topics I wanted covered.

They were Google Adwords, Social Media, Pay per Click campaign, Private Label Rights and a host of other topics.

We ended up having a late night snack at a nearby restaurant, as everyone was tired by then. And opportunities to network with the “IM Guys”.

I went to Borders last week to get the last copy of the current batch of Problogger “Secrets for Blogging Your way to a Six-Figure Income” book written by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. It costs around RM75.85 in Malaysia.

The first chapter, Blogging for Money discusses the basics like What a Blog is, the difference between Blogs and Websites, how blogs can be a Money machine, is it right for you, how Blog Advertising can work for you, Blogging strategies and Search Engine Optimization for blogs.

The next chapter talks about Niche Blogging, how to choose a profitable niche topic and Niche Analysis. I particularly like Niche Analysis. It would help newbies to find the niche they want to get into and how to research related keywords for the topic.

Setting up your Blog in Chapter 3 covers the basics of setting up a free blog like Blogger. It also covers differences between hosted and self-hosted blogs, choosing a Domain name, customizing your Wordpress blog template.

Subsequent chapters coverered topics like Blog Writing, What is good content, 20 types of Blog posts, How to Comment on blogs, when and how to Make Money from Blog Income Earning Strategies, how you can buy, sell or flip blogs, the pros and cons of joining Blog Networks, how to build readership with Blog Promotion and Marketing your blog via Social Media and Linking strategies.

The last 2 chapters covered Secrets of Succesful Blog and talking about creating something worthwhile with your ideas.

Overall rating I would give for this book is 8 out of 10. I feel that this book should spend more time elaborating on the use of Social Media and its impact on driving and promoting traffic to blogs rather than touching the surface of the topic in only 4 pages inclusive of diagram. I do not find many bloggers sharing social media strategies on the internet, and I wonder why that is.

What is your opinion of this book? Have you read Problogger book yet? If you have, share with me your comments below.

Have you downloaded the latest browser yet? Mozilla has just been launched in the updated version a week ago.

I noticed the new look in the Firefox Search box browser that looks like the above. In the previous version of Firefox 2, the Search box browser only displayed the website’s URL.

The new Firefox 3 Search box browser displays both the website’s URL and the Title too. Some find this rather annoying and took up too much space. However, you can revert back to the old look with an extension.

On the same note, you can Bookmark (marked by ’star’ button) any site you visit on the new browser straight away. You do not need to go and open up Google Bookmarks to add a bookmark in the future.

The other interesting features are the Go back one page in Green button, Go forward one page in Grey button and Home page with a house icon button.

Do you know where does your blog traffic comes from?

Have you thought about Which country sent you the most traffic in the month of January 2007?

Have you asked the question “Who comes and visit my blog?”

How often does your blog visitors come back to your blog?

I have just read about Bloggers Biggest Blog Traffic where Darren shared his findings from his blog readers and fella bloggers as well.

Their biggest source of blog traffic came from Google. In fact, 46% traffic came from Google while 15% of traffic came from Social Media sites.

Let me share my Google Analytics statistics of this blog with you for the year 2008.

This blog gets its 51.8% traffic from Google, 25% came from Referring sites and 23.2% came from Direct traffic, those who knew about this blog from my newspaper advertisement offline.

You can see this chart in detail here.

So have you been tracking your blog statistics? Use the free tracking tool from Google Analytics. Just go there to sign up with an email account and start tracking your blog traffic.

Do not forget to share your blog traffic statistics with me here by leaving your comments below.

How do you track your blog traffic?

This is part of the series of Submit Your Questions About Wordpress or Blogging.

One of the questions I received is How to install PayPal payment gateway on a WordPress blog to receive online payments into PayPal merchant account that one has.

Unless you are selling or promoting a product or service, you would not normally have PayPal installed on your Wordpress blog.

However, there were exceptional cases where a prominent blogger like Raja Petra of Malaysia-Today would use PayPal to collect Donations to fund Bloggers Defence. I heard so far they have collect over RM40,000+ in aid of this donation from all over the world.

Here is what Raja Petra’s PayPal logo and icon looked like on his news portal.

Bloggers Defence Fund Donate logo

And after you click on the above logo, the next page looks like this. This is the page where you will enter in the Amount you wish to donate to the fund.

So let me share with you how can you can install the PayPal payment gateway logo on to your Wordpress blog.

Just sign up with PayPal and open up an account with them.

PayPal may request you to pay a small amount by charging into your valid credit card. This is to verify that the PayPal account is linked to a valid credit card holder. You may received your Verification Code from your credit card statement. Also all Malaysians can now withdraw from PayPal into your Malaysian bank account.

In PayPal, just go under Merchant Services and get a Buy Now button. You will be asked to create your own Buy Now button by filling in all the required information on the page. Thereafter, copy the encrypted HTML code for your websites.

You can add and insert the PayPal Buy Now button anywhere on your website or blog with the generated HTML code.

Do you have a PayPal account yet?

Why wait now. Just sign up with PayPal here or click below.

I have been asked the following questions from the submission of questions to me last week, by a Wordpress Blogging Seminar attendee last week. This is part of the series of Submit in your Questions about Wordpress or Blogging.

What is the capacity in terms of space and bandwidth that we should look at, for a regular blogger?

For HostGator, how frequent have they revised their subscription rates when such revisions had also been imposed on their existing subscribers?

For HostGator’s Baby Package, does the “unlimited Addon or Parked Domains” mean that we can put up several different blogs on different topics (so we don’t have to pay to subscribe to different hosting for each blog)

To answer the first question about the required bandwidth and space, Hostgator provides more than adequate bandwidth and space for a new blogger, to start with.

The basic package for a new Blogger would be Hatchling. They provide 350Gb of the disk space and 3,000Gb of bandwidth.

Now, for a new blogger, you would usually use text to write your blog posts and perhaps include image as well as videos. These would generally not take up alot of space nor bandwidth.

Bandwidth will affect you if you are expecting to launch a new product or service of your own, and expects a huge surge of online traffic within the new launch period.

Hostgator does not revise their Subscription rates annually, as far as I have observed. They revise their subscription rates only now and then. And usually the revision subscription rate would be about a dollar or two more, on the monthly subscription.

Lastly, to answer the last question here. Under the Baby package in Hostgator, what they meant by Unlimited Domains Allowed is you can Host as many number of your own Domains into one Account. These Domains can be in different types of niches.

You are the owner of your own registered Domains and they can be about any types of niches you choose. And you can Host all of your Domain names in one Hostgator account for the price of US$7.95 per month (RM25.00 monthly @ Exchange rate of 3.1), at 600Gb of disk space and 6,000Gb of bandwidth and UNLIMITED Domain names, with cPanel and Fantastico.

A plus point here is, this is a USA based web hosting provider. If you are a Malaysian, this is an added advantage if you are blogging about “sensitive” issues, I have been told.

Let me know if I am wrong on some of the facts here.

Do you have any of your own views here that you can add on?