If you have been to my blog in the past, you would have noticed that my last post was way back in March 08!  And in this information technology era, that will be zilliion years ago.  I have lost a fair bit of the initial enthusiasm coupled with the fact that my day time pursuit has taken priority at this moment.

In any case there is always a new beginning.  The worst thing that happen to a person is when he thinks is done with and stops there where he is.  My new beginning happens recently when I went for a preview on internet marketing seminar prompted by a good friend.  Derric Chew, the speaker proved to be worth the time spent.  In fact, although I didn’t sign up to his 3 day seminar, I encouraged a good friend of mine, Din to attend.  Din was tempted but realized he would be committed in his career at the duration of the seminar between 24th to 26th Oct 08.  I promised then to teach him after the seminar.  So here I am again, a new beginning, a new journey.  Hopefully, this time it is a journey to internet riches.

WP Auction is a wordpress plugin that allows the blog owners to start his own auction in his own blog and keep all the profits to himself.

Many of us are familiar with e-bay or at least know of its existence. Some of us have even tried list our products on e-bay portal and make some profits before. Of course, there are some who are scammed by defaulters while others may even have a close encounter with an international scam.

There is now a new way to list your products in your own blog with a number of advantages:

• There is no listing fee and no re-listing fee;
• There is no need to pay a final sale fee;
• There is no need to pay any gallery images fee;
• You can keep all the profit;
• There is no fee at ALL!

WP Auction, a wordpress plugin let you run your own auction with a customized widget. The whole auction can be set up by a few clicks.

Brian Clark called it Cornerstone Content and Chris Garrett called it Flagship Content. In his article, he also use the analogy of an Anchor Tenant in a mall with the Flagship Content of a blog. Some may choose to use the synonymous term of Keystone Content or Pillar Articles to mean the same thing, but I would like to called mine Anchor Posts. Whatever term you may call it, your blog must be known to the blogosphere with remarkable anchor posts that well define the uniqueness of your blog immediately. This post is then an endeavour in this learning curve to find my remarkable anchor posts. One wordpress plugin, in-series, would be used for linking all the related Anchor Posts in a series for easy reading.

There are number of blogs that can be term professional in discussion and description of this concept of writing Anchor Posts. My choice of references will be:

• Chris Garrett’s Flagship Content e-book;
• Brian Clark’s definition of Cornerstone Content;
• Tom Johnson’s Twenty Usability Tips For Your Blog - One of the best written posts of tips for writing Anchor Posts;
• Jonathan Bailey’s Protecting Your Cornerstone Content - Though not exactly on writing of Anchor Posts, it is good reading material for securing your hard work after you have written your Anchor Posts.
• Maki’s Four Reasons to Write Extraordinary Articles - An excellent well-written post underlining why it is important to write Anchor Posts or as he called it Pillar Posts as these anchor posts will immediately separate the wheat from the chaff, defining your blogs as some form of authority in your field of expertise.
• Problogger’s 10 Steps To Writing A Successful Series On Your Blog - A must read for anyone who endeavours to start writing Anchor Posts.

The email from Chris Garrett was an awakening. Maybe it is time for me to start defining my blog. From today onward, I will continue this journey of writing my Anchor Posts…

Now, this post is NOT written to promote his system.  and it is NOT written as a paid post.  No, no..  This post is written just because I am feeling emotional about it.  Perhaps because this is still the first month of the New Year and Chinese New Year has not passed yet, maybe it is the feeling of that New-Year-Must-Make-New-Resolutions, whatever.  I am hoping that this year 2008 will be my most profitable year ever!  Hopefully this positive vibe and energy will pass on to you.  May this be my journey as well as yours.

That really arouse my curiosity.  After I bought the e-book and read the 27 pages, I believe that the author has the right to make his claim.  Prior to this, I have never heard of Hubpages.com.  Here I would like to tout about Hubpages and their credibility.  The Hubpages team consist of three guys out of Microsoft that were part of the successful startup of MongoMusic.  The team consists of Paul Edmundson, Jay Reitz and Paul Deeds.  The exciting thing about hubpages is that their share revenues with the content providers (that is us, the publishers).  And that’s not the main exciting thing.  Hubpages are now considered authority by google search engine!  Not only that, Yahoo and MSN are the other 2 gaint search engines treating hubpages are relevant and given authority status.  Moving into web 2.0 technology, hubpages should be the portal or platform we, as bloggers need to look into, with the important result being able to bring traffics to our blogs through their links.

See an example of a hub page appearing in the first page of google search here.  And if you like to get started on creating your hubpage, this is the link.

Money - Is your blog filled with loud audio, distracting animations and effect, with that loud-crying advertisement pointing at your readers’ face? If your readers feel that about your blog, then it is high time to look into your monetizing strategy. Your blog is suppose to provide some form of solutions to readers when they click in. Maybe it is high time to gently show how your readers can benefit themselves by your solutions, suggestions.

Ego - As a writer we have the tendency to be egoistic, or ego-centric. We have the control over what we want to write and therefore we may forget what the readers need, want or enjoy to hear. It is high time to give them what they want, write with them in your mind.

Promotion - There is no doubt that we need to promote our blog. However, I have come across some gurus advocating “spicy headlines” that invoke readers to click their posts or blogs. Some others employ sexy avatar pictures, women in scantly clad clothings as header images to entice subscribers and spike in traffic. I believe in the traditional way of promoting through ezine articles submission, pinging, exchanging of links, proper and sincere commenting on others’ blogs. These type of promotions maybe slow, but the effect will last if our take care of our contents, writing for the needs of our readers.

Widget - widgets are helpful but should never be too distracting. A clean blog is always a better blog than one crowded with too many widgets, too many animations and/or ads.

I write to remind myself. I write to allow my readers to critique my blog. I write to give my readers a happy reading and learning experience. Cheers to all my readers.

A young blogger’s choice:

Content plagiarizers or blog scrapers as  Chris Garrett coined them, are becoming somewhat nuisance and annoying.  Chris even called them scrapers scum, to quote what he says:

A popular gripe of bloggers is the scraper scum. You know, the people who copy your content then slap ads around it or use it as search engine fodder so they can pimp their spam. It might be apparent that these gits annoy me too.

Chris’ recommendation is to install this plugin  WP_RssSticky  which works by adding copyright and download links into your RSS feeds and posts.  To quote what Chris says:

Why is this important? Well now when scrapers steal your content at least they will be linking back to you. The more they promote their copied and pasted spam, the more weight those backlinks will provide you. I’m hoping also it might hint to Google and co that your post is the original.

Maybe it is a blessing in disguise, I have two weighted back links to my blog!

“We’ve been consistently making money with Adsense and Affiliate Marketing for over 4 years and we’ve never stopped testing new techniques. We are going to spill the beans and give you the exact niche sites and resources we use every day.”

These are some of the great features in the program:

SEO Keyword Article Management System
SEO Friendly RSS Feeds
Affiliate Product Placement
Easy Push-Button Updates
Add New Rotating Content With Ease
Edit and add articles in the admin interface
Keyword Article Management System

I can’t possibly list all the excellent features that this program has. Here is the link for you to take a good look at this program closely to see for yourself what I mean. In the mean time you can see my websites using this Exclusive Niche Sites Program.

25 Exclusive Adsense Ready Niche Sites

Hey, life is good man, now that I have google adsense ready sites.

You will see that I have at least 20 emails, that contain all kind of advices, good programs, e-books, affiliate programs and too-good-to-be-true-sure-to-make-money-tips and what not!

The point is I think one internet guru was right when he wrote in his resolution this year.  Concentrate on one program, one project at one time.  If you have e-books that you have downloaded in the past years, read them first. Probably you can find those gems that you miss.  Don’t go and sign up another program or e-books that you will end up not reading any way.  Solid advice I am following.  So, this is what I am doing now.  Concentrate on building blogs and websites with adsense ready. adsense maximized templates.  For those of you who are seriously in earning google adsense, be sure to look at HyperVRE, Wordpress Adsense System and Instant Adsense Templates.

Have a fruitful prosperous year ahead.

p/s  My information-packed adsense ready sites can be found at this link.  Did I just contradict myself? eh, you go and figure.

This is a snapshot of my google adsense ready sites, which I have placed at my other domain. This is where I place some of the 25 google adsense ready sites. Take a look of how well these sites were created. It is definitely well worth the US$47.00 paid to get them. Here is the link to get these 25 google adsense ready sites.

Is Wordpress better than Blogger? The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

Here’s the comparison scale:

1. Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2. Customization And Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can be a pain in the ass. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating. With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform. The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS.

3. Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content. Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

4. Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic. As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

5. Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

About the Author

Gobala Krishnan is the author of Wordpress Adsense System, the unique beginner’s guide to building content-rich Adsense websites with Wordpress. You can download two free chapters of his book at this link.

This post was written with the permission from Gobala Krishnan, the Malaysian guru who created the Wordpress Adsense System that quarantee you make your first adsense dollar in 7 days!

1. Mark Zuckerberg | Facebook | 23 years old | $700M
2. Andrew Gower | Runescape | 28 years old | $650M
3. Blake Ross and David Hyatt | Mozilla | 22 years old | $120M
4. Chad Hurley | Youtube | 30 years old | $85M
5. Angelo Sotira | Deviant ART | 26 years old | $75M
6. John Vechey | PopCap Games | 28 years old | $60M
7. Alexander Levin | WordPress | 23 years old | $57M
8. Jake Nickell | Threadless | 28 years old | $50M
9. Sean Belnick | Biz Chair | 20 years old | $42M
10. Kevin Rose | Digg | 30 years old | $31M
11. Ryan Block | Engadget | 25 years old | $20M
12. Aodhan Cullen | Stat Counter | 24 years old | $18M
13. Tom Fulp | Newgrounds | 29 years old | $15M
14. Rishi Kacker and Matt Pauker | Voltage | 24 years old | $12M
15. Markus Frind | Plenty of Fish | 29 years old | $10M
16. Catherine and David Cook | My Year Book | 17 & 19 years old | $10M
17. Fredrik Neij | The Pirate Bay | 28 years old | $10M
18. David Hauser & Siamak Taghaddos | GotvMail | 24 years old | $8M
19. Jermaine Griggs | Hear and Play | 23 years old | $5M
20. Jay Westerdal | Domain Tools | 29 years old | $5M
21. Ashley Qualls | What Ever Life | 17 years old | $3M
22. Mario Lavandeira | Perez Hilton | 29 years old | $3M
23. Ben Way | Rain Makers | 27 years old | $2.2M
24. Alex Tew | Million Dollar Homepage | 22 years old | $1.6M
25. Rob Benwell | Blogging to the Bank | 23 years old | $1.2M
26. Matt Wegrzyn | Bodis | 19 years old | $1M

Sometime I wish our youngsters will see this and be inspired to follow th example set by these young rich internet entrepreneurs

I can still remember vividly the day I finally resigned from full time employment with a company.  The year was 1990.  I was 35 then, young (well not quite that, that young) and strong headed, and thought that I could conquer the world.  I remembered the resignation letter to my boss, amongst other things I wrote to him, I  told him that I was 35 years old, and before my “youthful” energy ran out and while I still had 20 loooooong years before retirement, I would like to move on to have a taste of self-employment! 

Here I am, 18 years later.  I am no wiser nor richer.  Retirement, if we use the traditional 55 years old as the yardstick,  I would be 3 years from there.  In retrospect, retirement is faster than I thought, too eminent for my comfort. :-(  The lesson for all is this, do not think that retirement is still far away.  For young bloggers, you are on the right step.  Keep on this blogging journey, keep on exploring and learning how to make money online.  The future business is found in the internet.

Life ends when we stop dreaming;

Hope ends when we stop believing;

Love ends when we stop caring.

Dreaming - I would like this year for me to be extra-ordinary. I would like to earn some serious money online, not the meagre few US dollars from google adsense. My dream is to be able to follow the examples of online millionaires like Joel Comm, Eric Holmlund, John Reeve to mention a few. These are the gurus who have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from google adsense. Life will go on.

Believing - The journey of becoming online millionaire is often filled with doubts and uncertainties. “Some days are diamond and some days are stone”, a song sung by the late John Denver echoed my thoughts at this moment. There are days I doubt whether this online millionaire thingy is an illusion or a reality. I must believe and forge on. Luckily, there are others around me to tell me gently that this is the correct path to go on. Hopes will fly high.

Caring - To all bloggers, cheers to all of you. We know that many of you do care. I know I have some friends around me who care and will always nudge me on. Love perseveres on.

This is the new beginning. It should begin with a BIG BANG!

Let me make a wild guess.  Most of you are out there celebrating with friends, family members.  A sumptuous dinner followed by wine and dance till the wee hours of the night, waiting for that 12 o’clock chime to start off the nostalgic song “Should Auld Lang Syne….”.  Here I am in front of the computer typing away the last post of the year 2007, after a simple dinner with family members.  I am never the celebrating guy, also prefer to enjoy a quiet evening at home.  

In retrospect, my journey as a blogger started sometime in late August this year.  Five months have passed and I am still the crawling caterpillar, ever eager to learn and digest everything and anything in its path.  My friend has stumbled upon a PR6 domain and has quickly registered it just the last few months.  Now he has more than 1,000 page views per day, a feat he never fails to update me, making me ever envious of his achievement. Bravo my friend. 

I know that this coming year will be an eventful one,  it should be the year the next online millionaire continue his journey.  When the “Auld Lang Syne” dies down after the clock strikes 12, he will sing “I am the next millionaire online”

Two days ago, a good friend of mine sought my help to set up his wordpress in his main domain after failing to do so for a while. Being a little more techie savvy, I took up the challenge.  After trying a few time to set up his wordpress by smartftp to his hostingbay without success, I resort to use the fantastico wizard provided by the hostingbay to do so.  And hooray, it was done!  I was feeling proud of myself for being “techie savvy”.   But my euphoria was short-lived!  Somehow in the process I must have acidentally deleted some database which belongs to his addon domain, www.alistairlihai.com belonging to his son.  This is an upcoming young blogger, currently already acquired some followers.  His posts are usually read and commented by no less than 20 readers.  So you can imagined our shock and despair when we could not load his main page!  For a couple of hours into the wee hour of the Friday night, I tried all my resources to restore to no avail.  The last resort was to appeal to the hostingbay to retrieve the lost database, and the wallet thinner by AUD75.00.  Fortunately, after they sent me the backup files, I was able to help restore the database at the server.  Now everything is back to normal. 

That was some good hours spent trying to restore the blog.  If only I have done a backup for him to begin with, I would have been able to get it running in a short time, and the AUD75 will be still intact in the wallet.  So the question to all of you now is, when was the last time you did your back up of your precious blog or blogs?  Stop reading this post and start your backup if you have not done so, a friendly reminder from a fellow blogger.

DO YOU HANDLE STRESS WELL?

I am not sure exactly how it works, but this is amazingly accurate.
Read the full description before looking at the picture.

The picture below has 2 identical dolphins in it.
It was used in a case study on stress levels at The Mater Hospital.

Look at both dolphins jumping out of the water.
The dolphins are identical.

A closely monitored, scientific study revealed that,
in spite of the fact that the dolphins are identical,

a person under stress would find differences in the two dolphins.
The more differences a person finds between the dolphins,
the more stressful that person is experiencing.

Look at the photograph and if you find more than one or two differences,

you may want to take a vacation.

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No Need to Reply,

I’ll be on Vacation

Never take life seriously.

Nobody gets out alive anyway.

Now if you will browse over to his site later, you will see that he has come up with a contest with three attractive prize.  First prize is US$1,000 payable to your paypal account, second prize is a Copy of Joel Comm’s Secret Classroom DVD Set worth US$497 and the third prize is a 22? Wide screen Acer LCD Computer Display worth US$300.   US$1,000 is too much to pass up.  I am definitely going to get in as many entries as poosible.  There are many different ways of getting entries, writing posts about the contest, link him in your blogroll, add John Chow, Gary Conn, Douglas Karr in your blogroll, blog about this in your other blogs, post your comments in other posts in his blogs, comments in forums and so on.  I think it wise for you to get there to read for yourselves.  For this tips, don’t forget to mention in your post that you heard from me.

In fact, this “future trend” is here NOW.  While traditionally TV broadcasting used to dominate our society in the 80s and 90s, more and more people are migrating to internet online browsing.  There are advertising revenues online.   One company actually capitalize on this is Pay-Per-Play.  Every time your visitors come to your website they will hear a 5 second advertisement played.  It is played only once while the visitor stays on your web site.  They will only hear it again should that reload your page or hop to other pages within your web.   Owner of the blog will be paid 25% of what the advertisers spent to have their ad on your website.  No click, no link, no visible squares or other popup windows, just some plain audio in the background.  That is.  Here is your link to get in early, as the service will be in full swing come February 2008.  Jump in the wagon now.

1. HyperVRE - created by Matt Callen.
2. Instant Adsense Templates - Created by Joel Comm.
3. Wordpress Adsense System - Created by Gobala Krishnan
4. Xsitepro - Created by Paul Smithson
5. EZGenerator - Created by the team behind the company Image Line Software

Probably there are dozen more in the market.   The concept behind creating a massive amount of websites and blogs is to be able to have google adsense advertisements all over your websites and blogs.  As of now, I will concentrate using HyperVRE and Wordpress Adsense System as I have just bought them to continue my caterpillar journey.

It is for you to play judge and comment.  I am here however to talk about some other form of shopping cart.  I am absolutely sure that such incident above will not happen at all in any store who use their  easy-to-use, quality and customizable shopping cart.

Ashop Commerce, a Sydney-based Australian company has been in the industry of providing shopping cart software to online businesses all over Australia, US and UK.  Thousands of satisfied and successful merchants prove that they have truly an award-winning software that is far more superior, of high quality and easy customizable for all sorts of online business.  They provide full technical supports with extra services in the form of Search Engine Optimization, Site Health Check, Professional yet Beautiful Graphic Web Site Design and others.  You can test drive their shopping cart software for 15 days 100% money back guarantee.   You can be assure that no such incident as above will ever occur in your online shopping mall!

Now this is the time for you to win your gift.  Hurry up and go to Gobala Site here: http://www.easywordpress.com/labs/christmas-gifts-contest There are some uniques and crazy Christmas to give away from him.  The trick is to win the contest by writing a post on their contest.  You will stand to win one or more of the five unique crazy christmas gifts.  They have Yoda Plush Backpack that acts a fashion or a backpack for your laptops, books and what not,  a Sonic Boom Alarm Clock With Bed Shaker that sure to wake up any sleeping beauty, a Marshmallow Shooter that  spiced up some Christmas party fun, Spaceman Moppel LED light for Sci-Fi guys and USB Memory Watch with a 2Gb storage to make sure you always back up your data. 

You can even win a Wi-Fi eStarling Photo Frame that can help you send photos via email or RSS feeds within the vicinity of Wireless connection.  So hurry there to join in the contest, which last only between 12th to 24th December 2007.  So why are you still reading my post?

Until something drastically happen, insurance is only just a promissory note, so to speak.   However, Malaysians are getting to know the importance of insurance.  They will definitely insure their 3 most important assets, namely house, car and their own lives, unfortunately not in the proper priority.  Most if not all will definitely have car insurance policies.  Some will have some forms of home insurance policies in terms of a fire policy.  Not too many will have life insurance policies much less a medical health insurance. 

With online insurance, one can even compare car insurance with different companies.  I am sure, pretty soon, even life insurance can be bought off the internet as well.  By then there will be no excuse for not looking into getting a life insurance policy.