This post was written by Aditya Mahesh of BlogOnExpo, a free digital conference for bloggers that will feature sessions about blogging and interviews with Darren Rowse from ProBlogger, RandFishkin of SEOmoz, and others. The conference kicks off on December 3rd, 2007.

For the purpose of this post, transparency will be defined as being upfront and honest with your readers. That being said, if you are a blogger and are not transparent with your readers you will fail. Not being transparent not only means lying, it means not revealing any special interests you have with a specific post.

For example, if you are being paid to write a review, say that you are being paid to write the review. If you include an affiliate link in a post, create a �Disclosure Page� that says you may occasionally include affiliate links in posts and link to that page from the sidebar.

Continue reading ‘Transparency – Why Bloggers Without It Will Fail’

Have you ever wanted to remove ads on posts belonging to certain categories only? Or wanted to remove ads on all your sponsored review posts?

Here’s the code to do it in WordPress:

<?php
if ( !in_category(15) && !in_category(23) && !in_category(14) && !in_category(20)) {
?>
Your ad code here
<?php } ?>

In the above code 15, 23, 14 and 20 are category IDs, replace them with the IDs of the categories you don’t want ads in.

I am currently using this code to remove AdSense and Kontera ads from my Blogging, Make Money Online, WordPress and WordPress Plugin categories. Thanks to Keith for the code.

Most blogs have their comments and trackbacks mixed, which in my opinion makes the comment area look ugly and also breaks up the flow of reader comments.

Some readers have asked me in the past how I had separated the comments from trackbacks on this blog and frankly I did not know then as the K2 theme (this blog’s theme was based on K2) had this done by default.

But after the recent redesign of this blog, I had to find out how to do this manually as I did not want to base my theme on K2 anymore.  After a quick search I landed on hackwordpress.com which had a step by step explanation on how to separate comments and trackbacks on a WordPress blog.

Now go ahead and make your blog look neater by separating the comments and trackbacks on your blog too. You may also want to style your comments to stand out from your reader’s comments.

This is a guest post by Maneesh from UnNeglectable. If you are interested in writing a guest post too, let me know

Of the numerous make money blogs and pro-bloggers that we read time and again, a constant suggestion for better results from blogging is to have one’s own domain name and hosting the same outside of Blogger, Typepad and the likes.

With domain names the prices are pretty much the same all around and most often do not require any sort of support after the purchase. However when it comes to hosting your content on the web you find the need to choose the correct service provider paramount. A review of BloggingTips right here on JohnTP.com shows that they had an awful time with their host to begin with (look for Kevin Muldoon’s comment).

The kind of system your web host offers you will decide the scale and scope your blog will be able to attain. Yet I find very few posts talking about this first step into blogging. In this post we will look at some basic yet important things to keep in mind while deciding on your web host.

Continue reading ‘Choosing The Right Web Host For Your Blog’

This is a guest post by Nelson from Help Desk Geek. If you are interested in writing a guest post too, let me know.

Hard-core Photoshoppers might claim there is no alternative to the mighty adobe image application, But while Photoshop is not about to be dethroned, be prepared to be blown away by Fauxto. This site hosts an online app that can open JPEG,PNG,GIF,BMP,and TIFF images. From there you can add multiple layers, adjustments, movable marquees, including text layers, there are even a number of common effect filters.

Continue reading ‘Online Photoshop Alternative – Fauxto’

This is a guest post by Shankar Ganesh from Technology Blog who writes about Web and Software Tools. Don’t forget to subscribe to his feeds to get updates.

With Windows Media Player 11 installed, searching your entire music library just got better. Windows Media Player 11’s capable search modifiers can help you search your music effectively. For example, you can just narrow down to tracks from a particular artist by using the ‘Artist’ Search Modifier.

For example, Artist: Akon will search and list only the songs by Akon. Similarly, you can use the ‘Album’ operator to search for songs from a particular Album.

Continue reading ‘Windows Media Player 11 Search Tips’

Remember how publishers used to place images next to AdSense ads to increase its CTR? It worked as the images used to help capture the visitor’s attention.

You can apply the same technique to get visitors to read your posts too. Placing photos related to your posts not only makes your posts more attractive to your readers but will also clearly explain to them on what the post is about and also makes your blog stand out from the other blogs.

I know I don’t read each and every post of the blogs I read, but when there’s an image it makes me want to read the post.

Now that you know how photos can help your blog, you may be wondering where you can get free photos for your blog.

Continue reading ‘Use Photos In Your Blog Posts’

One year back I had listed out the best plugins to optimize a WordPress blog for Search Engines, but now I would like to replace three plugins in the list with one new plugin as it does all that they do and much more.

The plugin I would like to recommend is All in One SEO Pack. This plugin optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines by letting you

• define your home page title, description and keywords
• define your post, page, category, archive, tag and search title formats
• use categories for META keywords
• avoid indexing of duplicate content (prevents indexing of category, archive and tag archive pages)
• autogenerate descriptions

Continue reading ‘Optimize Your WordPress Blog With All In One SEO Pack’

This post is to reward regular commenters of this blog by linking good posts from their blogs and sending them some traffic. If you would like to get rewarded too, all you have to do is join my MyBlogLog Community and start commenting regularly on this blog.

I hope you enjoy reading these blog posts -

• Top Ten Firefox Addons to Annoy Advertisers – David Bradley
• Ultimate Guide to time saving for Bloggers – Shankar Ganesh
• How to get your Paypal account verified without a Credit Card -Nuts & Milk
• Lock Folders without using any Software – Madhur Kapoor
• 5 Ways to Attract More Comments – Blogging Experiment
• How I Improved my AdSense CTR by 51% by using AuctionAds – Ashwin
• 7 Blogging Tips for Beginners – Nirmal T V
• Tips and Tricks to Get More out of Your Laptop Battery – Shivaranjan
• WordPress Plugin: Better Comments Manager – Keith Dsouza

Those of you who missed the good news, WordPress 2.3 was released a few hours ago with lots of exciting new features including tagging, plugin update notification, URL handling improvements and much more.

What I liked the most of this version is the new feature to notify users of WordPress and plugin updates, but I wish the plugin update notification could be shown on the dashboard instead since I don’t often check the plugin page.

Though this new version supports tagging, I stopped using tags today and uninstalled Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin as I find that visitors rarely visit my tag pages – all that the tag pages do is create duplicate content!

Continue reading ‘WordPress 2.3 Released’