Any excuse to travel…

Both Wanda and I love to travel so whenever we see a blog or internet marketing related conference anywhere in the world, we are invariably on the phone to each other deciding on whether we should attend or not. For us, it is more about the travel than the conference…the event is just the excuse to go.

We have attended conferences both here in Australia and in Asia and the US. One of our favorite places is Las Vegas. The last time both of us were there we spent about three weeks flying into and out of it whenever we saw a good package deal to another city. It’s actually a great place to base yourself if you visit the US as accommodation can be dirt cheap at times and airfares deals into and out of the city are some of the best in the country.

So since we have traveled quite extensively we have learnt a thing or two about not only ensuring our blog posts go up regularly but also what equipment we need to travel with to continue to blog successfully.

Before You Leave…

The firt thing you need to consider before you leave is to decide on one of the following:

• Whether you want to stop blogging completely while you are away – This is the easiest option but probably not the best for your blog. If  you are going away for a week you could probably get away without posting anything but any more than that and you really need to consider the impact it could have on your blog.
• Whether you want to schedule blog posts to go up automatically while you are away – If you are using WordPress you can easily schedule posts to go up when you want them simply by changing the post date. This method requires you to calculate the numbe for posts you would normally post during the time you will be away and writing them before you leave. It can mean a lot of work before you go but leaves you time to completely relax while you are away.
• Whether you want to continue to blog while you are away – This has the advantage that you can blog about current events but means you will have to drag along the right equipment with you.

We tend to do a combination of the three depending on how long we are away. In most cases, we will generally schedule a number of posts but will still blog while we are away. It’s not practical for us to schedule months worth of posts and when it comes down to it, this isn’t really work to us so we are happy to keep blogging while we are away.

Guest Bloggers

Another way to keep your blog running smoothly while you are away is to find bloggers who are willing to write for you. This can be one blogger or multiple bloggers. If you have a regular readership you can ask one or more of your readers if they would like to contribute. Most would be willing to do so for the extra exposure and it is easy to give them their own access to your blog so that they can upload their own posts.

If you don’t want to go to the extreme of giving them access, then you could always put out a call for guest bloggers prior to leaving and schedule the posts to go up before you go.

What Do You Need to Take With You?

We’ve used all sorts of different computers on our trips…some have been good, others haven’t. Here is a list and our thoughts for each of them:

Pocket PC’s

A few years ago, we each purchased an O2 XDAII while we were in Hong Kong…a brilliant Pocket PC device that I still have to this day, although Wanda has moved on to a HTC Touch phone. She only uses her O2 XDA now to play a game called Dots. If you ever see her sitting in a doctors office or an airport waiting for a plane to take off, she will invariably have her O2 in her hand playing Dots….just don’t tell her I wrote this.

The Pocket PC phone would have to be one of the best things ever invented. It’s pretty much a computer that sits in the palm of your hand. It may not have all the bells and whistles of a desktop computer but it does the job intended. Depending on the device, you can add blog posts, log on to Twitter and Facebook and pretty much access everything on the net that you could on your desktop PC.

The only drawback with a Pocket PC is that the screen is quite small and so is the keyboard and that assumes that the particular Pocket PC you purchase has a keyboard at all. Some have a slide out keyboard whilst others only have a keyboard on the screen itself.

So writing long blog posts can be a bit of a chore with this sort of equipment. Okay for short trips but not if you are going to be away for more than a week or so.

Laptop Computers

For our last trip to the US we decided we would take a laptop computer with us as we were going to be away for a couple of months. We thought that one laptop would be enough between the two of us and purchased one in Hawaii as we had a 3 day stopover there on our way to Los Angeles. 

The laptop was an Acer and did a great job however it was just too heavy to carry around. When you already have your own luggage and then a laptop bag full of cables and cords plus the laptop itself, it really starts to weigh you down when traveling from city to city.

Plus, we really should have purchased  a laptop for each of us. Considering this is our business and we need to be on the net to run it effectively, sharing a computer was not the ideal.

Mini Laptops

A mini laptop is probably what we will be traveling with on our next trip. These really are the ideal – they are small and lightweight enough to carry around and they have a standard keyboard and large enough screen to ensure that it is easy to type up blog posts and work on the net effectively.

Plus, they are more likely to fit into those small hotel safes.

iPhone – iPod Touch

Both Wanda and I recently purchased an iPod Touch.  It’s my latest toy and I love it.  It makes working on the net simple and easy while you are away from home plus it has the ability to zoom in on screens so the text can be made larger or smaller. It’s so much better than my Pocket PC to work with,  however it does have some limitations. Firstly, the iPod Touch is wifi only which means you need to be near a wifi connection to be able to content to the Internet. The iPhone on the other hand works anywhere that you can get a cell phone connection.

Also, both the iPhone and iPod Touch have a small screen and keyboard area compared to a regular or mini laptop. Keying a blog post will take longer so you will need a bit of patience.

Other things to consider

• Just remember that with electronic equipment comes the cables and cords to keep it charged and these can take up a bit of room and add extra weight.
• A USB thumbdrive always comes in handy so throw one into your laptop bag.
• If you have purchased a new laptop for your trip, then think about what types of programs you will need to install onto it – we generally load up Frontpage, Filezilla, Affiliate Organizer, Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.
• Think about whether you want to take an external mouse with you if using a laptop.
• Let your readers know that you will be away.

Just Enjoy Yourself…

The most important thing to remember when you are traveling, even if it is for business purposes, is to enjoy yourself. So don’t get too stressed out if you miss writing up a blog post. The world isn’t going to end and your readers will understand. Just relax and enjoy!

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Twitter has definitely become the place to be for anyone wanting to create a presence on the web. So with this in mind, we have put together 30 links to great Twitter tutorials, useful tips, hints and tools from around the web.

There are so many sites now that provide excellent information and advice for using Twitter effectively so it was actually difficult to choose what to include. But we think we have found some of the best to help both those new to Twitter and those that have been around for some time.

If you have any others you think could be added then leave a comment below and we’ll take a look.

The Basics

1. The Twitter Tutorial – if you have no idea what Twitter is or if you do you’re still not sure what it all really means then this is the tutorial for you. It should only take you about 5 minutes to go through this slideshow. I would have to say that this is one of the best little tutorials I have seen on the subject. Highly recommended.

2. How to Set Up a Twitter Account – another useful piece of information for those that are new to Twitter. This one includes both a video and written instructions.

3. How to Set Up Multiple Twitter Accounts with One Email Address – We have a number of Twitter accounts all using different email addresses we set up in Gmail and Yahoo. I wish I had found this post before setting them up – it would have saved a heap of time.

4. Twitter in Plain English – A quick video to give you the basics of Twitter.

How to Get More Followers

5. 5 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Presence - Another Problogger post

6. How to Grow Your Follower Numbers to Over 10,000 In a Week – See how Sitepoint gathered 10,000 followers in a week.

7. 7 Ways to Be Worth Following on Twitter - A few basics to get yourself in a good position to start attracting followers.

8. 6 Tips for Using Your Twitter Profile to Get New Followers – Tips for customizing your profile in order to attract more followers.

How to Be a Success on Twitter

9. 10 Traits of Effective Twitter Users - An analysis of successful Twitter users. 

10. 8 Sure Fire Ways to Tick off The Twitterverse - How not to be a success on Twitter.

Twitter Feeds

11. How to Automatically Add Your Blog Posts to Twitter Using Twitter Feed – This is one I wrote.

Tips and Hints

12. 50 Great Twitter Tips and Secrets – A good comprehensive list of Twitter tips and hints.

13. 35 Twitter Tips from 35 Twitter Users – An old post by Problogger but still highly relevant.

14. Top 10 Twitter Tips for Beginners – Some of these are not just for beginners.

15. 8 Tips for Building a Strong Presence on Twitter – Some interesing tips here.

16. 55 Twitter Tips – Another comprehensive list of tips and hints.

17. 9 Advanced Twitter Tips - Some excellent tips here – worth reading. 

18. 100 Serious Twitter Tips for Academics - Tips for instructors and students…and worth reading even if you aren’t an academic.

19. 137 Small Business Twitter Tips – You’ll need to click on the link to a pdf to view them…it’s worth it.

Twitter Applications

20. Is the Tweetie 2 Application Worth Buying? – Tweetie 2 is an application for the iPhone/iPod Touch. This is my review of the application.

21. What Twitter Application is Right for You – A great post about the variety of different applications available for Twitter including desktop applications and iPhone/iPod Touch, Blackberry and other mobile applications

Twitter Themes and Backgrounds

22. Twitter Background Gallery – Has over 1500 Twitter backgrounds as I write this post.

23. 10 Beautiful Customizable Photoshop Twitter Background Templates – I put together a list of customizable Photoshop templates. You obviously need Photoshop for these but it is worth the effort as you will have your own (almost unique) Twitter background.

24. TwitRounds – New backgrounds added daily.

25. 40 Free Artistic Twitter Backgrounds – A beautiful list of Twitter backgrounds.

26. Twitter How-To Design and Best Practice – If you are thinking of creating your own Twitter background this is a great place to start.

27. Create a Custom Twitter Background the Right Way – Another post that provides some tips on creating a Twitter background the right way.

Twitter Plugins, Tools and Widgets

28. 35 Awesome Twitter Plugins for WordPress – An excellent list to start with by W3Mag.

29. 10 Best Twitter Tools, Plugins, Widgets for WordPress - A nice list if you are using WordPress.

30. Must Have Twitter Plugins for Twitter Fans – Another list of plugins for WordPress.

31. Tweet Adder – I know we have reached 30 but there is always going to be one more to add. Tweet Adder allows you to run Twitter on autopilot or at least reduce some of the regular tasks you might want to perform. It’s not free but well worth the money.

If you have any others, please let us know in the comments below.

You may have noticed on our sidebar that we have included some large social networking icons – one for Twitter, one for Facebook and one for our RSS feed. We had seen this done on quite a few blogs but always thought it was just part of their WordPress theme. It was only when I stumbled upon some free social networking icons that I realized I could do this myself quite easily and you can too.

 Here’s what you need to do…

1. The first thing you need to do is find some icons to use on your site. There are literally hundreds of sites now that give away free icon sets. There’s just one rule with this and that is to ensure that you find images that match. If you find a Twitter icon that looks good but it doesn’t match your Facebook icon or RSS feed icon then it really won’t look that good on your blog.

Here’s a few sites to get you started: 

• 30 Amazingly Creative Social Bookmark Icon Sets
• Icon Archive
• 40 Great Social Networking Icon Sets
• 55 Cool and Free Social Media Network Icons

2. Once you have found the right icons for your site, save them to your computer and adjust the size if needed to ensure the icons will fit in your sidebar.

3. Now upload the photos to WordPress. Hopefully you already know how to do this… ie if you are using WordPress 2.8 you simply need to click on Media–>Add New from the Dashboard menu.

 4. Now head over to your Widgets page and drag a Text widget over to your sidebar. Now add the code below to that text widget. You will need to replace the urls in that code with the urls of the images you just saved to WordPress and the urls of your Facebook, Twitter and RSS feed pages.

<p><img src="the url of the Twitter image should go here" border="0" alt="" />&amp;nbsp; <img src="the url of the Facebook image should go here" border="0" alt="" />&amp;nbsp; <img src="the url of the RSS feed icon should go here" border="0" alt="" /></p>
<p> <br class="spacer_" />

And there you have it. If you do try this out on your site let us know with a comment below and a link to your blog so we can all take a look.

For some reason, we have always been a bit reluctant to add advertisements to our blogs…and when I say ‘advertisements’ I mean the square 125×125 ads that you normally see in the sidebar of most blogs.  But since we have just recently signed up with Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind and as he recommends it, we thought it was about time to do so.

I see it as another way of diversifying our income. We tend to make most of our money on affiliate links. It’s worked well for us but we’re kind of putting all our eggs in the one basket by doing this. So it’s time to start making money from a few more sources.

So Where Did We Start?

The first thing we needed to do was find a plugin that does all the work of receiving payments. In the Blog Mastermind course Yaro recommends using a free piece of software called OpenX. I had a quick look at it on their website and it looked okay but it wasn’t quite what we were looking for and in fact it looked like it required a bit of work to maintain. We wanted something that did everything from start to finish so all we really needed to do was approve the payment.

In the meantime Wanda had found a product called OIO Publisher. This wasn’t free but  as I was to find out later it was an absolute bargain. The piece of software has an enormous number of features and can be used on both blogs and regular websites. 

I loaded it up on this blog and you can see it to the right in the sidebar. It just loads as a plugin if you are using it on a blog or if you have a website then OIO has an automatic installer to make it real easy to upload.

Once installed it was simply a matter of editing the settings in the admin area and then dragging the widgets over to the sidebar.

Here are just some of the features:

• it allows you to use a nofollow tag on all your ads (or remove it if you prefer)
• the ability to add both banner and text links PLUS inline ads ie. ads within blog posts
• you can charge more for ads with the nofollow tag removed
• you can choose the size of your ads
• you can choose how many ads to display
• payment test mode option – to test if it is all working correctly without making a payment
• an inbuilt affiliate program which you can opt into in order to make money from referring people to OIO Publisher
• the ability to change the currency code for payments
• subscription payment option
• the ability to allow image uploads by the person buying the ad space
• the ability to redirect buyers to another page rather than the standard payment form
• you can choose to include your own banners and text links – this is a good way of filling up ad spaces that are empty
• a space to add purchase instructions for buyers
• a variety of payment methods – you can use one or more of the following Paypal, Google Checkout, EntreCard, Offline Payments, Authorize.net, 2Checkout
• you can change the email templates that are sent out automatically when a purchase submitted, approved or rejected. 
• there are 3 options to change the theme for the actual payment page and if you can also make your own custom changes to the theme if you like
• you can set your own ad prices and the number of days the ads will run for that price AND you can set multiple prices for different lengths of time
• you can choose to rotate ads ie. in the same ad spot you can have two ads rotating
• purchasers can reserve ad spots in advance
• you can set up ads to display in certain categories (WordPress only)
• you can create a link exchange text links which will display a persons link as long as they are linking back to you
• you can choose the amount of spacing between ads
• you can choose to show ads in your RSS feed
• I also just noticed a Posts tab – this is supposed to enable you to sell posts or paid reviews directly through your website – I haven’t looked into that yet so can’t comment at this point in time but I like the idea
• lastly it has a Custom section which allows you to sell whatever you like – this is great if you have an ebook

I just love this piece of software! CLICK HERE to read more…

So How Do You Go About Getting Advertisers

Well you could just sit back and wait for them to come to you. This can work well if you have a high-traffic blog but if your traffic is limited then your next step is to go actively searching for advertisers. This is what we will be doing over the coming weeks to fill up our ad slots not only for this blog but some of our other niche blogs and websites.

One of the best ways of doing this is to find blogs that already have paid advertisers and email those advertisers to see if they want to advertise on your blog. If they are already putting their ads up on websites around the net then they are more open to the concept and therefore more likely to accept your offer.

Another way is to do a search in Google for your keyword. Then take a look at the Google ads that show up on the page. These advertisers obviously have some sort of advertising budget so would be in the right frame of mind to receive an email from you asking if they would like to advertise on your blog.

You can also just type a related keyword into Google and just trawl through the businesses that come up in your niche.

How Much Should I Charge for Ad Spaces?

Good question and one that is hard to answer. The reason being is that there are so many factors involved that can affect the price including:

• your blog/website topic
• how much traffic your site receives
• your sites pagerank
• your Alexa rank
• the size of the ad
• whether the ad is a text link, banner ad, inline ad
• whether the links are nofollow or not

For this blog we are going to start with $30 for a 125×125 ad for 30 days. That may be too much or it may be too little. We won’t really know until we get any bites. If nobody is interested in that sort of rate then we will reduce it. If instead we get a lot of interest then we may increase it.

For one of our other blogs which has very high traffic and good pagerank we are going to start at $80 for a 125×125 ad for 30 days. Again, we will see how it goes before adjusting the price if needed.

For some of the blogs that are getting low traffic volumes we might stick with around $10 a month.

So there you have it. Adding advertisements to your site is not difficult especially if you use the right software that does everything for you.

Do you advertise on your blog? Let us know in the comments below…