Rudiawan-Lukman.com » Blog Ideas

The Unpredictable Google

Rudi — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 15:01:40 +0000

It is interesting to see what Google can do to your blog. One of my blogs had quite a stable visitors previously, around 150 number of visits per day until suddenly it was sinking down to 30 – 40 visits only. This is a PR1 blog, around 6 months old packed with 40 posts keywords stuffed. I didn’t write new posts there – basically this blog got a little bit neglected after I join Alex Jeffreys coaching program. Nothing changed and for two weeks I was really disappointed seeing the traffic never picked up again to its previous state.

And then something weird happened. The traffic started picking up again and it hit 1806 visits (!) on Sept 28. Google Analytics showed 50% of the visitors were sent by google.com referral and only 3.7% sent by Google organic search. Now the traffic is stable again at 1,000 to 1,200 visits per day and I’m just happy with it.

Here is the screen capture of my blog’s stats. Note that I switched hosting to Hostgator on the Sept 5, 2009 so before that date the number is zero.

This blog had no subscription forms before the rush so I was busy preparing 3 different forms last week. Now I managed to catch 10 people to join my list, all by means of free gifts.

My Adsense income also grows much faster now

I’m still investigating why Google is sending me the good numbers of visitors. Once I find it I can optimize my blog to keep the visitors number grows bigger, or at least stable at current position. I’ve never expected nor imagined I would have a thousand visitors a day so I’m really excited to see what will happen next.

Write Soon,

-Rudi

Make Favicon For Your WordPress Blog!

Rudi — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:17:09 +0000

Today I feel bored and kinda stuck writing so I decide to have some fun with Photoshop and make favicon for my blogs. But what is favicon by the way? Favicon is a little icon that appear next to the web address at the top of your browser. Here are some of them if you are not sure what I’m talking about.

Why should you make favicon for your blog? You don’t have to if you don’t like the idea but I like my blogs to be unique and easy to find especially when I’m working with multiple tabs on my Firefox browser. I can have more than 20 tabs running at the same time and this tiny icons help me quickly identify my blogs.

How to make a favicon for your blog? If you like to design your logo or icon from scratch using the Photoshop software you will need to download the ICO / Favicon plugin for Photoshop because the software doesn’t recognize this .ico format. Note that there are some versions available depending on what platform you are working with. For Windows users the plugin is called ICOFormat.8bi. After you extract the zipped file you have to move this
ICOFormat.8bi file into the “File Formats” folder inside your Photoshop Plugins folder. Quit and relaunch the Photoshop if it’s already running.

It is recommended to make favicon on bigger canvas because it will be easier for you to draw the details, however if you don’t like to mess around with the design there are some websites that can create the favicon for you, one of them is Dynamic Drive Favicon Generator. What you need to do is pick up your image (it could be your blog logo for example) from your hard drive and upload it. Careful though with your selection because this icon will be very small in size, it’s only 16 X 16 pixels so simple pictures or logos will look better when converted into favicon compared to the complicated ones.

Here is the real dimension of a favicon compared to the source’s dimension:

After your favicon.ico is ready you need to upload it to yourdomain.com/ and verify it by typing http://yourdomain.com/favicon.ico in the browser’s location.

Finally insert the following code in your HEADER.php file:

That’s all! Note that your favicon may take a few days to appear after you’ve completed the above steps. In fact in IE sometimes the favicon will disappear from time to time due to a browser bug.

- Rudi

My Internet Marketing Plans For This Month

Rudi — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 08:09:05 +0000

It’s been almost two months since I set up this blog and I realize that there are several areas on my internet marketing plans I need to improve or haven’t started yet like tweeting and video marketing. I also currently have nobody joined my list mostly because I think the blog visitors are other AJ students. I have made some screenshots to record the achievement I made since the first date I launched this blog on 16 Jul 2009 and I welcome everybody to comment on and recommend some tactics to boost up the traffic.

Total visitors to date: 283 (that’s including my visit as well), total page views 685. Not really impressive, I know.

my blog's visitors record as of today

You may notice that there were 5 days with zero visitors. It was due to my Google Analytics code I installed on this blog all of a sudden disappeared when I was modifying the theme colors and border setting. I use Flexibility 2 theme since the first day and I noticed that the GA code sometimes reset to blank after I modified some features, however I’m not really bothered by this issue because other than that problem I found this theme OK for me.

my blog's traffic sources as of today

I did no good with the search engines results. Google so far sent me 26 visitors only followed by 4 visitors from Bing and one from Yahoo!. This result is way below my expectation and I really have to dig up some real good keywords and put them into my internet marketing plans.

One of the most visited page on my blog is the About Me page. I believe people are looking for real person behind the blog and they landed on this page to find out.

While my search engines result is lame I’m quite pleased by how diigo.com sent visitors to my site. It so far sent me 52 visitors, almost doubled the search engines results combined together.

Other results I got so far:

Alexa Rank: 875,799

Google Page Rank: 0 (I hope it will change to 1 soon)

Backlinks: 385 (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and 356 (Iwebtool Backlink Checker)

My Internet Marketing Plans This Month:

- STAY FOCUS with what I’m doing now

- Working with my Twitter and video marketing

- Get some more Keywords to blend with my blog posts

- Re-watch Rich Schefren and Andrew Fox videos

- Commenting on some Do Follow blogs (I was pretty lazy doing this one)

- I have one PR1 tutorial blog (non-Internet Marketing related) that currently sends me roughly 50 visitors / day. I plan to build my list but I have nothing to offer. Instead of building my own product for the time being I will just contact two or three vendors at Clickbank and ask them whether they can provide me a 3-day or 7-day mini-course materials (of course with my Clickbank ID embedded there ). If works then I can start building my own list there while at the same time I can expect some sales …

I can’t put too many things on the list, frankly speaking I’m overwhelmed and I should have more time to relax….

Talk soon,

Rudiawan Lukman

Spammers Beware: My Spam Blacklist Plugin is On!

Rudi — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:21:27 +0000

One of my blogs has been consistently receiving spam messages selling craps like viagra and other products from one pathetic guy thinking he can do whatever he wants to do with others’ blogs. Actually I don’t mind receiving one or two spams from different people but this smart guy showed his persistence by sending me tens of different messages everyday using the same IP and e-mail addresses. All of his rubbish posts got caught by my Akismet plugin but still I had to clean up the mess he left. I can easily delete those spams at one click but sometimes Akismet caught real posts as well so I don’t really want to hit that delete-all-spam button.
Having sick of those spam posts I decided to install a spam blacklist plugin on my blog. I found two plugins that will allow me to get rid of them forever:

WP-Ban 1.50 Plugin

WP-Ban 1.50 plugin will ban the IP addresses of the spammers based on the IP addresses you input to that plugin. Note that this is powerful plugin you can even blacklist spammers by IP, IP Range, host name and referer url from visiting your WordPress’s blog. It will display a custom ban message when the banned IP, IP range, host name or referer url tries to visit you blog. You can also exclude certain IPs from being banned. There will be statistics recordered on how many times they attemp to visit your blog. It allows wildcard matching too.

A special warning is addressed by the plugin’s developer: Do NOT block your own IP address! I also think it’s not right to use wild cards to block a large number of IPs or domains carelessly or you could end up blocking thousands of your own readers and search engine bots. Only if particular IPs occur too frequently in your spam comments – like my case above – ban those IPs and see your spam reduce in minutes.

There are some pros and cons about using this plugin in your blog. The cons are mainly based on the facts that spammers don’t use IPs belong to them and you are wasting your time as they switch IPs and play a lot of games automatically while you have to do it manually. I however decided to give it a try because it will display a custom ban message when the spammers try to visit my blog, such a great pleasure to let them know that I’m the one in charge and they are not welcome to my blog.

KB Spam Blacklist

The other great plugin is KB Spam Blacklist. This is a regular-expression based spam blacklist plugin. And by blacklist, I mean blacklist. If a comment matches one of your regexes, it gets deleted immediately, not sent to moderation. In short, this plugin takes some of the load off of Akismet by looking for really obvious stuff. It’s easy to use. Just activate the plugin–that’s all. It comes with four regular expressions. You can add to, modify, or remove these if you want. I plan to install the KB spam blacklist plugin in this blog.

There is another way to block IPs address., you can do it from your .htaccess file but I guess plugins will help people who don’t know how to deal with the html code.

Some people rely on captchas but I personally don’t really like writing comments on blogs with captchas and I believe I’m not alone. That’s why you don’t find it installed here, I will just let Akismet and the spam blacklist plugins do their job. Akismet alone is a great plugin and in my opinion all WordPress blogger should have it activated unless they don’t mind receiving spams.

Rudi

No related posts.

Make Money Online Opportunity: Scams or Real?

Rudi — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:17:49 +0000

If you’re looking for a make money online opportunity, you’re definitely not alone. Economic times are tough these days and many people need to bring in extra income or replace lost income.

The problem is that there are many scams and opportunities that don’t pan out these days.

How to tell that you are being scammed? Below are some points to consider before you spend money on the “opportunity” things:

You are offered unrealistic promises

Does making a steady income of thousands of dollars within a week without work sound familiar to you? The internet world is flooded with rubbish information like this and if you have been in internet marketing even for only a short period you will realize that you can’t make thousands of dollars without work.If the words used in the post are full of hype, promises, and too much excitement they should trigger your alarm.

You are given misleading information

You receive e-mail offering free information but end up with a membership fee to receive the free stuff.

No answer given in response to your question

I had some experiences with sites owners who never replied my e-mails or if they replied it seemed they didn’t even read my e-mails because all they sent were just other promotional e-mails.

Questionable terms of use

How many times did you read the terms of use statement? Read this section before signing up or purchasing something. If you find it suspicious do not proceed.

The best method I found is to hear what other people said about a product or the person promoting the product. It saved me time and money by doing some Google search on them. Just type the product or the person’s name followed by review, scam or hype words. You will be amazed with what you see.

Make money online opportunity is as real as other business opportunities but to find a genuine one will take time, trial and efforts. Instead of trying things that don’t work, it’s a good idea to go with a proven method of making money from home that thousands of people have had success with.

In fact, the best opportunity to make money online is something you are probably familiar with! The answer? Blogging. Learn how to build a niche blog from a mentor who has the real pain and experience to make money by blogging. No, it won’t make you thousands of dollars from a single blog only but you can repeat and rinse the process once you know how to do it. Making the second, third, fourth blogs will be easier and when combined together they can generate a nice passive income. Building a list for each blog will only give more power to your blogs. You can get your free copy of list building from my mentor Alex Jeffreys and apply it to your blog to capture your visitors. Do search his reputation if you are in doubt before downloading the free report. You can also get a free trial of Niche Blogger if you have no idea about what niche blogging is. This link gives you a 3-day access to the first month of the tutorials.

- Rudi

Some Useful Links to Help You Design a Blog

Rudi — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:57:03 +0000

Do you like to do some experiments with your blog appearance? Maybe you want to re-design a blog with new color combination but you have no clue about it at all. Or you visit some other blogs and you really like the header color but you can’t pick the same color because you don’t know its code?

I found these free tools helpful and I thought you may like them too.

COLOR PICKER

ColorZilla is an extension for Mozilla Firefox. You can download it at colorzilla.com/firefox/
After installation you can find it at the bottom left corner of your Firefox browser. Just click the icon to activate it.

ColorZilla

The screenshot above was taken real time when I wrote this post. I pointed the cursor to show where to click the icon.

Here is the picture after I activated the ColorZilla icon:

ColorZilla - activated

I moved the cursor to the text box of my wordpress. The color it show is white or FFFFFF. Cool? Move the cursor anywhere you want to find out the color code of that particular area. This tool works great in solid color only. Gradated color will give different results depending on where you place the cursor.

Matching 6-COLOR palette for your blog

Sometimes when you design a blog you may already have your main color in mind but when comes to combine it with other colors you find the combination is irritating your eyes, dull or doesn’t match at all. Here is a quick solution for you. Go to colormatch5k.com. This page DOESN’T work on my Firefox but I can use it without problems with Internet Explorer.

ColorMatch

You have to adjust the slide bars to define your first color. After that it will automatically generate the 5 matching colors. All the six palette are clickable.

Browser COMPATIBILITY check

There are different web browsers available and you may find your blog isn’t compatible with one or more internet browsers. Minimize this problem by visiting browsershots.org. Just input your blog URL and this site will give you the screenshots from different web browsers.

I just added up a small icon for this blog. If you are using Firefox you can find it on the left side of my blog url. My IE did not show it to me but I will see if it appears tomorrow.

To Your Blogging Success

-Rudi

What is Blogging? Know Your Profit Pulling Machines

Rudi — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:32:56 +0000

What is blogging? How to create a blog for money? Initially people blog to share information or give opinions and record their visit to different websites. They would talk about the interesting things they found and link to the sites. Others see it as a perfect platform to write personal diary. As niche bloggers we however make blogs to serve one purpose only which is to make money online. While writing a personal blog can also generate some money I believe building a niche targeted blog will be more profitable.

Blogs are great because they create loyalty from the visitors. Once people start enjoying the things you are writing, the chances are good that they will come again and again to see what you have to say. Now if you can build a good one and at the same time focus it to a very specific niche you can pull in amazing part or full-time incomes! Think about this:You have loyal visitors looking for information and they come to your blog because your blog is themed with the information they are looking for. The more people come to your blog the bigger your chance to collect some money from their visit.

As you gain more followers and add more content you will most likely start to rank high in the search engines. If you carefully select and plan your posts you will see that you don’t need to wait too long to get your blogs ranked by Google. I don’t know how soon will this rudiawan-lukman.com blog get the PR1 but my previous two blogs took two and three months, with the post submission was set at 3 to 4 days interval. I plan to feed this blog every day to see whether it can get ranked faster.

To get your blogs indexed by Google and appear on the first page will require some works but definitely this is not a sky rocket science that everybody can’t do it. You have to carefully select your keywords by looking at how many visitors are looking for those keywords and how many competition there are for those keywords. “Internet marketing” keyword for example has 1,830,000 search volume in June 2009 which is a very good number but it also has around 45,000,000 pages listed on Google for phrase matched searching. This number is way too big to defeat and it will take years or even worse you will never see it on the first page of Google. Remember, most of the time people don’t like to search more than the first 2 or 3 pages of the search engines so if your blog is for example found on the 47th page the chance is you will get no organic traffic from the search engines because people normally don’t click too many pages. If they can’t find what they are looking for on the first 3 pages they will change the keywords instead of keep on clicking on the other pages.

Are you still with me? Don’t worry if you think you can’t do it. I started from scratch and knew nothing about niche blogging but now I’m confident enough that it -if done correctly- can generate a nice passive income you are looking for.

What is blogging? I believe all of us have different perception about it but if you are looking for online profit then you know what you should be aiming at.

To Your Online Success,

Rudi

Searching for Profitable Blog Ideas

Rudi — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 15:37:45 +0000

OK, once you have decided to become a niche blogger you might find it very intimidating to come up with blog ideas. There are so many niche topics out there that you are probably going back and forth trying to decide which one you should go with! Being a totally beginner I still found them to be very confusing and I sometimes got distracted easily. I started with one niche and ended up with other niches because they looked more promising.

What I really need was actually a solid plan for how to choose a niche and really get my blogs going — and how to make them as profitable as possible!

This is a common problem everybody is facing in this blogging world! There is no reason to feel like you are the only one who is having trouble getting started blogging. I have made some blogs before but still it’s very easy to get into a rut. Does this sound familiar to you?

These are such common problems that, unfortunately, causes some people to give up. In fact, it’s something that I struggled with for a long time. I always got very excited when I started my new niche blog. I could write every day and my head was full of blog ideas but as time goes by all of my ideas started fading away and all of sudden they completely dried up.

To overcome this problem sometimes I switched writing another articles for different niche. BTW I ran two niche blogs in parallel, one I set up in March 2009 and the younger one was set up in April 2009. In June 2009 uncle Google renew the page rank (was it? I believe so because before that period I saw my blogs position dancing before got back to their positions). Starting from that date both of my blogs have been PR1. This is not bad because actually my second blog was a bit left behind and it got its PR1 with only 16 posts. I wasn’t comfortable writing posts for this blog because I actually didn’t like the niche but I just pushed myself to do it. I wrote the post you are reading now after spending hours to write my 22nd post for the second blog. The good news I can share with you here is the blog that I don’t like to write is actually ranked better compared to the one I prefer to. It always appear on the first page of Google for its main keyword, broad searching with over 40 million competition. It’s current position for phrase keyword searching is #3 out of 22,700 competition.

If you like to write but found yourself very disorganized or if you are a ‘moody’ writer you’d better stick to a program that can guide you with a daily plan. I should have ranked better if I followed the original Amy’s plan that required me to write 60 posts in the first month (they are scheduled for 6 months publishing). I failed because I got distracted. But even when I got distracted I could see quite a good result….

Rudi

How to Create a Blog that Sells

Rudi — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 10:09:55 +0000

Learning how to create a blog was quite intimidating for me in the beginning because of some reasons I can share with you here. First of all I don’t like writing (well, that’s strange, I know what you think). Why are you blogging if you don’t like writing? Some people can easily write their personal blogs because they have the natural ability and passion but writing a personal blog is totally different from writing a niche blog. If you use your blog as a platform to broadcast your diary or daily activity you don’t have the urge to target some specific high paying keywords and you can write whatever you want to write. Now since I wanted to make some niche blogs that send money into my pocket I for sure had to take a different approach, every single post I wrote should attract both human and Google search engine attention which at the end generated some clicks to my Adsense or my affiliate links.

The second problem was I had no idea about finding the high targeting keywords. I really made mistakes in the past concentrating on high paying keywords that actually had too many competition. To made it even worse I knew nothing about them. Yes, I picked up credit card processing and other merchant services related keywords and my electronic engineering background didn’t help me at all…. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that you can’t write something you don’t know. What I try to share here is you will find it more difficult if you are not familiar with the stuff you are trying to promote. After this fiasco I wrote another 2 blogs, one of them related to my hobby and the other one was really new for me but this time I spent more effort and time on it so I didn’t repeat the first failure. My writing speed ratio for those blogs was 2:1. I was more productive on the hobby-related blog however I generated more money even with less Adsense clicks with the other blog.

Html codes, scripts, themes, plugins, compatibility, just name any terms commonly found in blogging. I have to admit that sometimes they really bugged me especially when I was experiencing problem with one of them. Luckily I learned all of them step by step after I join the Niche Blogger. I have to say here that Amy can teach you how to create a blog from a newbie’s perspective and she doesn’t positioned herself as a guru. Her free 3-Day Trial program is really worth trying and I recommend it especially if you haven’t seen any money generated from your blogs.

If now you ask me how to create a blog that sells I would say that niche blogging gives me a faster result and if you do it consistently you will see result in months. In my case the Adsense started to build some revenue two weeks after installation but results may vary depend on what niches you are working at. Just like any other real works (yes, my friends, to me niche blogging is a real job!) you will have to work hard especially in the first 6 months. This isn’t a getting rich scheme at all that some internet gurus out there always try to fool you.

To Your Online Success

-simply real experience-

My Blogging Journey

Rudi — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 16:06:12 +0000

I learn blogging only after realizing that people can make money faster if they use blog as their platform. The problem was actually I didn’t like writing much so during my initial days with WordPress I purchased some domains in November 2008 and powered them with a plugin that feeds my blogs automatically with free content from other sources such as YahooAnswers and other that I can’t remember.

People normally use this plugin to feed blogs which are not designed to be crawled by search engines but mostly to send links to their real money sites. Some may use this tactic to fool the search engines by manipulating their ‘loopholes’ (if any …). This tactic was said to work with MSN only and some people could rank quite well on the first page of MSN for very competitive keywords, however I didn’t have that privilege so far, maybe because as a newbie I picked up the wrong keywords. Now that MSN has launched Bing as their latest search engine interface I’m not sure if this method will still work, only time will prove it.

I finally realized that I could not expect much from my so called crappy blogs and decided to purchase an e-book from a blogging guru. He also offered me to watch him building a blog from scratch (you know what they called this, right? The famous ‘back end product’ ….). I agreed and received my first month video packages, however the second month packages never arrived and instead he tried to sell another product to me which I didn’t need at all. He forgot that I bought his product to learn how to build a niche blog, not to receive another e-mail promotion that had nothing to do with his own product. Enough said I was really disappointed and shouted to Clickbank to cancel my subscription and tried to get my refund for the second month but failed. Now does this story remind you of some famous gurus out there that keep on bombarding promo e-mails to your mail inbox every single day, even after you purchased their own products? Such a pathetic marketing style but obviously works well because almost everybody do the same thing.

In March 2009 I landed on the Niche Blogger site by mistake after making some attempts to find a good niche blogging e-book. The owner, Amy Bass, never called herself a guru but I decided to give her a try anyway because she gave me a three-day trial to read and even to download the materials for the first month. I downloaded and copied everything and purchased a new domain. After three days I paid my first month subscription fee because her methods were simply easier to follow. I already have 2 blogs running and the blog you are reading now is my third blog, all of them were built based on Amy’s blogging methods.

BTW I never received any other promotion from Amy. She didn’t misuse her list to get her student distracted. Such a pity some internet gurus don’t have this mentality …..

OK folks, in the next post I will write about my first two niche blogs. See ya later!