If you own a product related blog and isn’t satisfied with AdSense for Search, you could try to monetize your search result pages with Chitika eMiniMalls, TTZ Media or ShoppingAds (previously known as AuctionAds) and target them to the search query made on your WordPress blog. Here is how you do it:

For Chitika eMiniMalls

1. sign in to your Chitika account, click the eMiniMalls tab, and generate your eMiniMalls code

2. open your theme’s search file (mostly search.php) and find the following line

<h2>Search Results</h2>

3. paste your eMiniMalls code underneath the line

4. change the following lines in your eMiniMalls code

var ch_queries = new Array( );
var ch_selected=Math.floor((Math.random()*ch_queries.length));
if ( ch_selected < ch_queries.length ) {
ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];
}

to this

var ch_queries = new Array("<?php echo wp_specialchars($s); ?>");

Your search results will now have an eMiniMall targeted to the search query at the top of the page.

Continue reading ‘How To Target eMiniMalls and TTZ Media To A WordPress Search’

Matt Cutts recently wrote a post giving four good tips to protect a WordPress blog. Try these tips if you own a WordPress blog.

1. Secure your /wp-admin/ directory – lock down your wp-admin folder so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory
2. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file – it helps prevent people from finding out which plugins you use. If you use an outdated plugin, someone could hack your blog by exploiting a bug. To prevent people from viewing which plugins you have installed, just create a blank index.html file and upload it to your plugins folder.
3. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog – you could subscribe to the development blog to be alerted as soon as a new WordPress version is released. Upgrade your WordPress blog as soon as possible or it could be hacked. I haven’t subscribed as we already get notified of a new WordPress version from the dashboard.
4. Hide your WordPress version: by default, WordPress theme’s have a line in the header.php to display the current version of WordPress you use (can be found by viewing source). Since anyone can find your WordPress version this way, your blog is prone to hackers until you upgrade to the latest version. To prevent displaying your WordPress version, just open your theme’s header.php file and look for the following line<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> and replace it with <meta content="WordPress" name="generator" />

Just noticed that this blog has 5484 readers today! Now I know something has to be wrong as I had only 2944 readers yesterday. I checked a few other blogs to see if they had a similar increase in their feed count and found that Problogger.net has 100k readers today! Yesterday I think the blog had only around 44k readers.

I thought that it was caused by a bug in FeedBurner, but actually its a bug in FeedBlitz.

Some readers are reporting a spike in reported subscribers that don’t match the actual count in FeedBlitz. We’re trying to get to the bottom of the issue right now. It isn’t a spam attack or anything unpleasant like that, probably just a previously unknown defect (ok, a bug) somewhere in the code. Updates will follow as and when.

I guess the bug is now fixed and tomorrow we may see the actual feed count. Was your blog hit by the FeedBlitz bug?

If someone asked me when was the correct time to monetize a new blog, my answer would be to wait till the blog has at least 500-1000 daily unique traffic. But when I started my new hardware review blog, Digit Geek, I was tempted to try out ad programs like Chitika eMiniMalls, Chitika Linx, Chitika ShopLincs, TTZ Media and WidgetBucks that would perform better on a product related site like THR than on a site like this one.

Trying these ad programs would also help me to review them here and let you know if they were good or bad

THR had almost 500 unique traffic the day it was announced here and has currently around 200 daily unique traffic.

This is what I have done to gain traffic to my hardware review blog and monetize it.

Continue reading ‘Monetizing A Hardware Review Blog’

My favorite blogging and online money making tips that I wrote in 2007:

Blogging Tips

1. Simple tip to increase your Comment Feeds Subscribers
2. Create A Robots.txt File And Increase Your Search Engine Rankings
3. How To Increase Alexa Rank
4. Add Sitemaps Autodiscovery in Robots.txt File
5. Make Your WordPress Blog Search Engine Friendly
6. How To Get More Comments On Your Blog
7. Top 5 WordPress Plugins That Help Increase Comments
8. More WordPress Plugins To Increase Comments On Your Blog
9. Sell Reviews from your Blog using WordPress BankRoll Plugin
10. Clean your Blog’s sidebars
11. The importance of an About me page
12. Top 10 WordPress Plugins To Improve Readers Experience
13. Permalinks Migration WordPress Plugin
14. Things I Do Before Writing A Post
15. Optimize Your WordPress Blog With All In One SEO Pack
16. Use Photos In Your Blog Posts
17. How To Separate Comments and Trackbacks On A WordPress Blog
18. Choosing A Domain Name For Your Blog
19. 5 Ways To Increase The Loading Speed Of A WordPress Blog
20. Improve Your Typing Speed With TypeFaster
21. Get New Readers For Your Blog By Guest Blogging
22. Write A To-Post List For Your Blog
23. Increase Your Blog’s Subscribers By Offering Email Subscription
24. Use Images To Get Your Best Posts Noticed By Your Visitors
25. Another Way To Draw Attention To Your Best Posts
26. Use Images From Flickr For Your Blog
27. 12 Reasons Why I Like Windows Live Writer
28. 16 Things To Do After Starting A New WordPress Blog
29. Use A Desktop Blog Editor To Save Your Blog Post Ideas
30. How To Quickly Find Your Reader Emails
31. Write Posts In Advance
32. Increase Web Traffic using StumbleUpon

Continue reading ’50 Blogging and Online Money Making Tips of 2007′

I have been a bit more active on StumbleUpon this month and it has helped me to get to know a lot of other bloggers, increase comments, increase traffic and promote my new hardware review blog.

Send pages to your friends via SU toolbar

To increase your site or blog traffic using StumbleUpon, all you have to do is to find your friends and others having similar interests to that of yours and add them as friends in SU. Once you have enough mutual friends in StumbleUpon, you can easily increase your site’s traffic by sending the page to all your friends via the SU toolbar and kindly asking them to stumble it.

I currently have 147 mutual friends in StumbleUpon all of which are bloggers (SU has a 200 friend limit). I found some of them via the post I put up to exchange social media contacts and some had already added me as a friend. Having many mutual SU friends makes it easy to get many stumbles for any page or comments for a post.

Continue reading ‘Increase Web Traffic using StumbleUpon’

This blog was down for two days or more and DreamHost never bothered to reply or fix it. JohnTP.com was hosted on my friend Deep’s DreamHost account and it was blocked as my blog took a lot of resources.

Deep’s account hosted many other sites too and all were down because of this and another blog. I was on a visit to my Grandparents house at the time and never knew that my site was down until I visited it on my uncle’s PC. But I thought it was a temporary thing.

Later while traveling back home, Deep called to let me know about the mess created by DreamHost and that he has been contacting them for a long time with no luck.

After many hours, Dreamhost replied back and unblocked all sites except for this blog. I then created my own DreamHost account so that I can use VPS. Many more hours later of contacting DreamHost they moved my domain to the new account, but forgot to move the files and database!

Continue reading ‘DreamHost’s Support Sucks’

A week back I had held this blog’s first contest to reward 5 readers on Christmas by giving them free ad spots on this blog. The contest was over yesterday and today I have randomly selected the winners. They are:

1. 125×125 ad spots: Adam McKerlie and Lisa Sabin-Wilson
2. 468×60 ad just below the post: Jeremy
3. Ads in the JohnTP.com RSS feed: Keith Dsouza and Dan

Congratulations to the winners and thank you all for participating in the contest. Adam, Lisa and Jeremy can start advertising their sites as soon as they send me their banners. I will include Keith’s and Dan’s links in the RSS feed soon.

Continue reading ‘Winners of the Christmas Contest’

I have been working on this blog for many weeks and it finally looks ready to be mentioned here. Digit Geek will cover reviews of different hardware like Cell Phones, Digital Cameras, Laptops and MP3 Players.

The reviews aren’t written by me, but by different writers having good knowledge in hardware who will be updating the blog daily.

Continue reading ‘Introducing my new Blog: DigitGeek’

Skellie has written an excellent post over at Problogger on how to develop the habit of writing posts in advance which is a good thing to do as once we have developed the habit we will be able to keep our blog updated even on days when we have lack of time to write, face writers block or when we want to take a break from blogging.

I have tried writing posts in advance before, but often get tempted to publish the posts as soon as I write them.

Publishing posts on a particular time each day also lets your readers know when to expect a new post and so you increase blog traffic during that time.

If you would like to write posts in advance using WordPress or Windows Live Writer, here is how you do it:

Continue reading ‘Write Posts In Advance’