If you’re like me then you’ll have a mixture of images on your site including stuff found on google, royalty free graphics and original stuff done by yourself. The main thing though is that ALL of these images are held on my server. I’m not a bandwidth thief, unlike many out there.

The other day whilst going through my server logs I noticed I was getting a number of hits from a particular page so I thought I’d duck over and have a look and add to their hits.

Reading through the site I discovered that they haven’t actually linked to me, in fact they were hot linking to one of my pictures. Arg what? Do people really still do this? I felt really violated by this theft of my bandwidth without any credit at all!

What was the best way to get back at this thief (whom after exploring their site realized that they appear to be a high school site or something) ? Well straight away I activated the anti hot linking software on my server (see your server administrator). Some people choose the most disgusting and shocking image they could possibly find to teach these guys a lesson, but I thought why not get a little credit after all. This is the image I’ll be using:

Granted it’s still using my bandwidth but at least it’s promoting my site! There are also image plugins that you can get for wordpress that will put a watermark on all of your images.

Kevin from Blogging Tips runs a great blog. He has a whole arsenal of bloggers to write the latest news and their opinions on the blogosphere.

.

Great Domain Name

Obviously, first off this is a great domain for a blog. At blogging tips Kevin wants to you to “take your blog to the next level!” using his tips, tricks, help and advice. I do think he should definitely work the domain name though. I googled “blogging tips” and “blog tips” and he’s not on the first page for either one.

He did things right!

I mentioned I found Kevin’s blog from other reviews. He bought two reviews, from two powerful and influential bloggers. I subscribed to Blogging Tips after Kumikos Review, and made sure to keep it after John’s Review.

He waited to order these reviews after he had some good content and information to read on his blog. That skyrocketed his subscriber level to over 300, and gave him a good Alexa Ranking to work with. Definitely a great move, and another from getting a review from us.

Now That He Has the Visitors…

Competitions! Blogging Tips has held some great competitions, last month it was a “Win a Mascot” competition.

This month there are several competitions. I mentioned one on Comment Friday, where you can win 1 year of free hosting and a free domain name. The person ranked #1 for his keyword term on google will win the prize.

The second competition prize is a new blog called Zune Zag. ‘Focusing on the Microsoft Zune mp3 player”. This contest is pretty straightforward, just guess how many unique visitors he will receive on June 20th, in the comment section of his June Competition post.

The last competition is for 100$ cash! I could definitely use that as could most bloggers trying to earn a decent income via blogging. To win the cash, all you need to do is register to the Blogging Tips Forum and guess how many page views and posts he will receive.

What I didn’t like about this is it actually took me a while to realize it was three different competitions, and not 1 competition with 3 prizes. I would definitely recommend breaking up the competitions into different posts and dates. Then you could run a competition a week or something to that extent.

At First Blogging Tips Didn’t Hold My Attention

I wasn’t as active reading blogging tips after I first expressed interest in becoming a guest poster due to several reasons.

• After receiving an okay to become a guest blogger, I never received another email. I was actually excited because Kevin had heard of me, but I hadn’t read his blog much yet. After the ego boost, I didn’t hear back.

• The stream of posts and guest posters weren’t as interesting to me. There would be several posts in a day, not made by Kevin. I don’t blame him for this as many bloggers were on his hype due to the reviews he’d purchased and the content he provided.

• Lastly, his blogging tips weren’t the tips I was looking for. He started blogging about scripts and other things I wasn’t really interested in. I can barely install a plugin! He also noticed the drop in RSS feed readers after his subjects changed.

Now That He Has My Attention…

When reviewing a blog or website, I want to give my full effort, and research the blog. So now that he has my attention I found some great articles.

Robots.txt Basics
With all the talk about the robot file on your domain and supplemented pages indexed in google, bloggers may find this post useful.

Blogging Should Be Easy
I’ve personally been racking my brain for posts and ideas, but I don’t think I need a break. Blogging should never feel like hard work, do you agree?

Doing Sponsored Reviews the right way
A break down of the most popular sponsored post websites. I currently use all of them.

That concludes the review, I tried to cover everything. Head on over to Kevin’s Blog and let me know what you think. If you are a feed reader, make sure to subscribe to his full RSS feed.

Giving out some quick link love…

I just put my other blogspot blogs, on their own domain. Basically have to start all over with alexa, page rank, and technorati but thats okay.

Fantasy Football N’ Stuff has NFL news, updates and injuries as well as fantasy football news and advice. I expect a great upcoming season, football is just around the corner. Our fantasy football leagues will be starting soon.

Blogging Addiction is my other blog that I post a lot of BAYB information and do a lot of reviews. A lot of my sponsored posts end up there if I can qualify. I am currently going to start more blog reviews in the upcoming weeks and give out some link love. If you have a promotion or contest of some sort, I’d love to post about it there.

I’m just finishing up a Review Me review, and it will be posted shortly!

Comment Friday was a little down with comments this week only receiving 20, but thats okay. With summer coming up hopefully some of our younger bloggers will be hanging out more.

This week I have chosen Derek Semmler as our winner! He didn’t cave under the pressure of first comment and got a real discussion started with movie topics. His comment was so good, people forgot to answer the question I posed in the post!

I’ve been pretty active on Derek’s site for some time now, and even was a top commenter last month. Right now his top commenter list is pretty small, so go leave him a few comments and you can get a free link out of it! If your interested in making money with blogs, I suggest you start at his monthly earnings post.

Ok, here is a checklist of things you need to do once you have a fresh install of wordpress.

1. Change the Theme – Forget using the default WordPress theme. It is used by the majority of Spam Blogs. By uploading a new theme (a process which takes all of 2 minutes) will give your blog instant credibility. Smashing Magazine has compiled a list of 83 great looking themes.
2. Create a Blogroll – WordPress comes with a number of blogroll links. Change these on the Blogroll menu. I like to add all the blogs I currently write for and also a few of my favorite blogs. You never know, they may give you a link in return.
3. Claim your blog at Technorati – Technorati is a blog search engine which could send lots of traffic to your blog. It also tracks which other blogs are linking to you which is really useful. Claiming a wordpress blog just takes seconds.
4. Edit Your About Page – WordPress has automatically created an about page with nothing really much in it. Create an about page which describes your blog and yourself.
5. Delete That First Post – Instead of editing the first post Hello World! delete it so it also removes the random comment by Mr WordPress – Try and create a killer first post that describes your blog, what you plan to write about and even a little bit about you. Look back on your first post in a year and you probably will laugh at what you have written.
6. Burn Your Feed – Feedburner is a must have tool for bloggers. It will track how many people are using your feed and what they are doing with it. Also grab there WordPress plugin which will automatically direct your visitors to the new Feedburner Feed.
7. Get Posting – There is nothing worse than a blog with just a couple of posts. To give your blog a kick start, think about writing 10 or so posts in succession to give your blog some body.
8. Forget About Ads – Dont even think about putting Adsense on your blog yet. I recommend giving it at least 2-3 weeks before even thinking about it.

I have got a new blog over at BloggingDosh.com. It is full of more handy tips like this as well as free downloads with resale rights. Check it out!

After a solid Comment Friday last week, I am hoping we get 30 comments this time around!

If this is your first comment friday, it is a fun and simple idea. Just leave us a comment about anything you want, and we can get our own little discussion going.

Each week we will chose one lucky commenter to be featured as our Blog of the Week and that blogger will get a link to their blog, and a spot on our blog roll for the week.

This week I would love some feedback on the website. What would you like to see more of? What is too much? I’d like to hear what you are blogging about yourself. What areas are you trying to target and why?

Here is a little extra, especially for those bloggers trying to get off of blogspot. Win a year’s worth of hosting at BloggingTips.com. If I win I will donate it to a lucky BAYB reader, I have hosting for two years already paid for.

MuffinMumblings!

Gally from Muffin Mumblings is our Mini Fridge winner!!

I taped the drawing and uploaded it to YouTube. I will include the video on this post. It is very funny, at least I thought so. As we were filming my son woke up from his nap. When he is getting off the bed he was going to knock over drinks I had on the floor so I pull him and he screams. He does that a lot now. We got cut off at the end, when the battery dies and the phone rings! haha. Enjoy it!

You will also see we decided to give away a 5$ reward to another lucky winner. That winner is Wendy from Mommyspace.

Our two winners have about 48hours to claim their prizes. If they don’t another winner will be chosen! Thank you to all who mentioned our contest, and especially our RSS Feed Subscribers. That number is now up to 181!

Enjoy our video. My beautiful girlfriend is the camera operator. You will see a nice shot of her fingers.

Congrats again to our winners!