Driftless Ramblings » Blogging

Somewhat Inconsistent

astoner — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 03:42:57 +0000

I know I’ve been somewhat inconsistent with my posts here, and I’m trying to do better, but I can’t guarantee I will be. I’m just working on so many different projects right now that this one is lower on the list.

Here’s a list of some of what I’m working:

- Niche site(s), got one up working on getting it ranked and need to get couple more going, this has been where my focus has been, but working on switching it over to the alpaca farm.

- The alpaca business is starting to head into the busy season so things are going to be real nuts. As a part of that I finally got a shop of alpaca products up and running that I’m happy with.

- I continue to slowly add some articles to InfoBarrel and others, largely based on getting backlinks to other sites.

- The photography stuff has really fallen off, but still do shoot with some of that in mind, just rarely get them submitted.

I feel that I’ve really been picking up on some of the SEO processes that I need to get some of my sites ranked higher. I was somewhat surprised to see that Driftless Ramblings comes up on the first page of google with a search term of “nikon 18 200 lens“. I guess it’s because of the age of the page, cause I sure don’t think I did much in the way of SEO on it. Now all I need to do is figure out how to capitalize on the position.

Allen

A review of 2009 for Driftless Ramblings

astoner — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:18:18 +0000

I didn’t do too much to advance the exposure of Driftless Ramblings. I did a little bit with adding to my microstock photography portfolios but not really consistently like I had hoped. My portfolios have been earning slowly but making payouts are still pretty elusive. I got two in 2009, one from Fotolia and one from Shutterstock. Like to get my portfolio built up to the point where I can be getting a payout about every month or so. All the different sites combined earn me about $10 per month, it’s just a matter of getting them to the payout threshhold.

My venture into writing for ehow.com has been going pretty good. I’ve been earning as much there as from my microstock sites. The ehow.com writing also gives me some backlinks to some various sites as I’m trying to get some affiliate marketing going. As a matter of fact I have just received my first payout from ehow.com, $12.27, not much but hopefully I can keep it growing.

Allen

Started writing for eHow

astoner — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:55:05 +0000

Besides my microstock portfolios I’m always experimenting with other options to make money on the Internet. A very likely candidate to assist in this writing for eHow. And they only have a $10 payout as opposed to the $50 – $100 for the microstock sites. My current goal is to get 30 articles up by the end of November. Hopefully that goes better than my previous Microstock goal.

How to Videos & Articles: eHow.com

Allen

Weekly Contest – Win $25

astoner — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 02:10:14 +0000

Things have been a little slow here lately on getting any blog posts written. I have been reading a bunch of different blogs on blog marketing and internet marketing, among other things, and came across this post, The Weekly Winner Contest on Mixed Market Arts. I figured I would go ahead and enter my first blog contest. Collin writes a blog about a lot of topics I am just getting started at learning:

Blog Marketing
Blog Marketing Blog
Increase Website Traffic
Link Building
Link Building Blog
Internet Marketing
Internet Marketing Blog

I wish I had started learning internet marketing and making money from the web years ago. I started using the internet before the web even existed, using command line ftp and thinking gopher was a great user interface.

To enter the contest all you have to do is write a 250 word blog post on your blog with a couple links back to his site. The real wild thing is, you only need to enter once and have chance to win the $25 weekly prize as long as the contest runs, you can win as often as possible as long as the contest runs, the only limit being once per month. He will give at least four weeks notice when he plans to end the contest.

He is giving away as much in a month in this contest that is as much as my current goal to be making from the internet. The link back could do lots for my traffic count as well.

Allen

Driftless Ramblings New Look

astoner — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:07:49 +0000

As much as I liked the previous theme I was using with the parchment look, I have decided to switch themes to the current one. The new theme is much cleaner looking as well as having Google Adsense already incorporated as well as an icon for the RSS feed subscription.

Allen

Update on permalink issues with WordPress and IIS

astoner — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 03:12:53 +0000

I think I did get it figured out, at least to an acceptable degree. I had initially selected ‘Custom’ and specified a format I wanted to use along with information in the previous post. But it wouldn’t work, I just got a blank page when I tried to bring up just the post page via the permalink. I even contacted my hosts tech support and after some research they said they didn’t support permalinks. Isn’t a permalink really just a URL? Maybe he was talking doing some of the redirection or something.

Just for the heck of it I tried ‘Date and Name based’. IT WORKED! Now I can go on to see if I can get an RSS feed setup.

—– Additional Info added 1/19/2008 —–

The wp-404-handler.php file from the link in this post is needed to get the pretty permalinks to work.

Pretty Permalinks on IIS

astoner — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:10:16 +0000

Here again I guess I should have done more research before leaping. My hosting system uses IIS and the pretty permalink stuff doesn’t work out of the box with IIS.

I’ve switched it back to the default and will have to do some more research. A quick search turned up this article that looks to be useful:

http://tech.einaregilsson.com/2007/07/30/pretty-wordpress-permalinks-on-iis/

I guess getting this change should be on my short list if I want to do before too many more posts.

Allen

Updating WordPress permalink structure

astoner — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:34:33 +0000

I just read Caroline Mibblebrook’s ebook about setting up a profitable niche site with WordPress. I sort of understood what a permalink was from some other research but she finally brought it home for me with it’s relation to SEO (search engine optimization) and just human read-ability.

I wish I would have read it BEFORE I setup my blog. Since I’m a tech guy myself I do have a bit of a tendency to dive in first, then go back and do more research when I have too. Not always the best way to do things. This change isn’t going to cause me too much difficulty. I think I only put out one or two trackbacks and a comment or two that links straight to an article.

The interesting thing is the links I put out there didn’t break, what broke is the permalink on the site. I don’t know the inner-workings of WordPress, but this seems a fair compromise. I’d rather have people coming in from the internet get to the post they expect to see. I guess the problem is any future links could be difficult.

Although I don’t think it was really meant to be, or at least not the primary goal, I think Caroline’s ebook also makes a nice intro to setting up a site/blog with WordPress. I’ve been planning to convert my alpaca farm site over to exactly what she’s talking about as a basic site with a blog. Shortly after I started working with WordPress I saw the potential for using it as a content management system, and not just a blog.

This was a very useful read with lots of good tips.

Allen

P.S. Now we’ll see how the permalink works with this first post after the change.