I’ve diversified, at least I think that’s the word. After publishing Mike’s Money Making Mission for 35 weeks I’ve now started another blog. This time it’s about celebrities – no, don’t groan! People like this sort of thing.

Celebrity Insider – Photos & News has been up and running for 9 days and yesterday I had 543Â visitors – genuine hits, none of this hit exchange nonsense. I did say that people like this sort of thing!

I’ve aimed the blog at what we in the UK call ‘Sun readers’. This is a tabloid newspaper, lots of big headlines, plenty of pretty girls, lots of celebrity talk – no doubt there is such a newspaper in most countries.

So far Celebrities I’ve written about include:

Galilea Montijo
Paul Sculfor
Charley Uchea
Maria Ozawa
Amanda Beard
and so on.

Who? You may well ask.

Well that’s my diversification – probably best viewed by the over 18’s.

Good luck,
Mike.

For a change instead of handing out my own hints and tips I’d thought I’d seek out some advice from the blog about your blog community.

I’ve just taken the next step for my blog and bought a new URL for it quityourdayjob.com.au – now the thing that I was wondering is how will this affect my technorati and other ratings sites? It’s not really a big deal I suppose since the old URL will continue on regardless but I’d rather hear about any pitfalls or problems from anyone out there who has done this themselves too.

Cheers in advance!

And It’s Free! (I know its a long title, but its worth it)

I’m not referring to actually buying a sponsored review, I just mean listing an opportunity.

Last month for example I received more traffic by just listing an opportunity, than I got actually paying bloggers to review us!

Free Traffic

Like I mentioned, it doesn’t cost anything. Sponsored Reviews is the only website I know where you don’t have to supply funds while listing an opportunity. If you don’t find any bloggers you like, you don’t have to accept anyones offer. Therefore you can list an opportunity, and not be required to buy a review.

Even More Free Stuff

With traffic comes exposure. By other bloggers finding our website they still chose to blog about us, or add us to their blogroll.

For example, Prarie Rose came to our blog and said they liked it so much it didn’t matter if they got the opp, they were going to link to us anyway.

Most bloggers will write about your website if they like you regardless if they are getting paid. If your topic fits their niche as well, they will be more inclined to do it for free.

An example of that is when Kumiko blogged about PPP direct. She could of accepted their 10$ opportunity, but since it had fit her niche, she had already done it for free. We’ve done the same thing here at BAYB, when regarding the Bloggers Choice Awards.

Getting More Links for Free

When listing an opportunity, you can then see all the blogs and bloggers who bid on you. I’ve visited dozens of blogs, and found they have dofollow or a top commenters list. By then participating in their blog, and leaving a few comments, I can also receive a free link, without paying for a review. With a page rank increase in sight, I’ve been very active with getting more links, and that’s perfect.

When are you going to list on Sponsored Reviews?

Please note that I listed on sponsored reviews to buy reviews and have purchased several, but I realized there is more to be achieved there then just buying reviews.

 Protecting your identity is very important. Most commonly people see various TV commercial for credit cards and identity theft. What is less common and seems to be becoming a mainstream practice among the dot com world,  is people registering the domain names of other’s personal names.  For instance, I have owned my personal name domain name for many years. However, about a 3  years ago, I got lazy and forgot to renew my domain name and someone snagged it and offered to sell it to me for over $1000 dollars. I was floored! Anyway, I kept patient about it, put a backorder on the domain… and as it turned out, the previous registrant forgot to renew the name (or didn’t care to) and I got my name back. Garry Conn dot Com, needless to say has been registered for many years… in fact, if you want even a shot at scoring my personal domain name, you will have to wait until year 2016 to even have a slim chance.

If you value your personal name, your children’s names, etc… register their domain name. It typically costs only $9.95 per year to maintain it under your ownership. Even if you’re not a blogger or the computer type… you should still register your personal name domain name to keep it safe from being subjected to registration from lesser choice people.

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!