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!

This week over at my blog, That Says It All, I’m talking about things that piss me off, starting with the controversial prostitution issue. Why am I pissed off? Because I think a deal between two consenting adults should not be the governments business. I’ll also tell you why social security and insurance piss me off. And if you’re pissed off about anything, I’d like to hear from you.

Also stop by my other blogs, My Quest to Make a Living as an Artist and Mike’s Money Making Rants & Raves

Hello, my name is Garry Conn. I run a personal blog site titled, Garry Conn dot Com. I help thousands of readers by delivering successful blogging tips. I am a full time blogger and maintain a ton of dot Com blogs and websites. I enjoy helping others and that is one of the main reasons why I write and share my thoughts and ideas here on BAYB. I want to invite you to view my BAYB profile page to quickly find references to all the articles I have written here.

Running a blog can be a challenge as well as a huge learning experience. Making money online using your blog can be an even larger challenge. One of the most common mistakes people make is that they forget that they are presenting their sites to real people. Sometimes people forget this simple fact and then wonder, “Why doesn’t my site make money online?”. It is common for a frustrated blogger to feel, “Hey! I am participating in Google Adsense, I have got my ReviewMe.com Badge up and running… so what’s the problem? Why can’t I make money online!!!” The problem is simple. When people visit most monitized sites, they feel like you are treating them like objects and not individuals.

Consider how you feel when someone rings your doorbell, stops you in the mall, or calls you on the phone. There are some many people out there who are interested in only one thing, your money! And when you run a blog that gives people this perception, you are not going to succeed. In my last post titled, “It’s Not Always About Traffic“, I explained how it is not as important to focus on getting tons of traffic to your site as it is important to discover ways to keep the traffic you do get and convert them into regular readers.

A second aspect to converting traffic into regular readers is to NOT make them feel like cattle being shipped to the slaughter. If you show people how sincere you are as a person and illustrate your passion for your blog topic, then that is what will win people over. Trust and Respect is the key… and readers find sites that have an unbalanced ratio of sponsored or third party ads to actual content, then that creates ill perceptions. Your site should have a 9/1 ratio of actual unique content to stuff that can make you money online. Secondly, when you do participate in certain programs that make money online… support them and speak highly of them. You can’t expect to make money online just by slapping up some HTML code on your site… just like a car salesman, you need to work the deal… you need to give people reasons why they should click the ads, buy the product, etc…

Good luck with making money online. I would love to hear your comments, questions and suggestions. Please drop me a comment below.

Blog about your Blog is growing at a nice rate, I’m happy to share we received over 10,000 unique visitors last month! The early month surge of traffic had to do with Lee’s Spiderman 3 Venom post that received over 3,000 hits in a few short days.

Another of Lee’s post has been receiving a lot of traffic, and is easy our most popular post. Ever ask Why People Send Spam Still? Last our two other popular topics of course are our comment fridays, and Jennifer’s awesome post of Increasing Blog Traffic by Using HTML in Comments.

Thursdays still seem to be our popular day of the week. Stumbleupon is our biggest traffic earner,and world oneness day was a popular search term for us this month.

For the first time I’d also like to disclose our earnings for this blog.

Google Adsense: 8.34$
Text Link Ads: 7.45$
Review Me: 23$
Pay Per Post: 35$ (counted as posts done in the month)

Sponsored Reviews: 32.50$

Auction Ads: 7.55$
Donations: 20$
Direct Ad’s on Site Feed: 6$

Grand Total: 139.84$

If you subtract the fee’s I’ve spent promoting I probably break even. We aren’t making a lot of money… yet, but we will. I will also be paying 5$ to Stefanie from Random Encounters of We for her Post Level Ad on Text Link Ads that was sold!

May was a great month traffic wise, and we’ve got a few new authors contributing that is making this blog even better.

According to a phone survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, spam is on the rise, but fewer Americans are bothered by it. Specifically, the frustration users have with spam has dropped to 18 percent from just three and a half years ago. The reason for this decrease in being bothered is that email users have become more adept at handling these “gnats of the Internet”.

Another reason is that there has been a change in the type of spam being delivered to a user’s email inbox. For example, the report cites that pornographic spam is not as prevalent as it used to be. Over the past three years, spam of this type has gone from 71 percent to 52 percent today.

One highlight I found interesting in the report is that Web users over the age of 50 are less likely to find spam as annoying as younger users. I don’t know if that’s because the older generation doesn’t use email as much as their younger counterparts or what, but I suppose they’ve left the worrying to those “whipper-snappers”. 😉

The survey shows promise, too. People are smarter about spam than they were a few years ago:

• Users are making more use of the spam filters that are provided by their employers or they use filters of their own (up to 71 percent of users do this). So even though spam continues to rise, less of it is actually reaching the user’s eyes.
• Being able to recognize spam has increased.
• About 44 percent of Web users are better about not leaving spammers an easy way to get their email addresses.
• And less than 25 percent of users avoid the temptation of clicking on links in spam messages.

If you’d like to know more about how to see less spam in your inbox, I wrote an article that you’ll find beneficial: 4 Ways to Protect Your Email Inbox

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