Tips 4 Web

This is a guest post by Melvin Dichoso. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Since blogging emerged in the early 2000s, its growth has skyrocketed. All of a sudden, not just normal individuals use blogs. From small business owners to big companies and even celebrities are using them.

Now when people start blogging they usually do so because it will benefit them in someway. For most people and companies, we are talking about money. But I also believe that blogging has other benefits, and in this post I want to share five of them that aren’t emphasized normally.

1. Getting Invited To Big Time Conferences

I remember when I got first invited in a conference here in my country. I was really ecstatic. I don’t know about you, but for me attending a conference alone is a big opportunity. Why? Because you get good value out of the program and more importantly you get to personally hang out with prominent people you normally just talk to online. And being a frequent attender in a conference gives you the advantage of possibly becoming a speaker soon.

2. More Business Opportunities

As soon as you start gaining popularity in the blogosphere, you will certainly come across with some lucrative offers from companies out there. May it be a business proposal, joint venture or something else. One thing remains sure: You’re starting to build relationships with people and these relationships are going to be essential in the future.

3. Being Able to Land a Good Job

If you’re like me, who still plans to go out and try to work a normal job, then probably having a blog is a great advantage. Every time I get interviewed by some of the companies here in my country, they always reveal to me that I have an edge over others simply because I have a website and a blog. Being a blogger adds up to your portfolio and it gives you the opportunity to showcase who you are to these companies.

4. Getting Schwags

For those who don’t know, schwags are basically promotional products that companies send to a person for publicity. It ranges from a simple sticker/button to a shirt, even up to good gadgets like Flip Minos and iPods. It’s a misconception that you have to be a web celebrity to get qualified. I am an example, I’m virtually unknown to most of you, but I’m fortunate to receive stuffs like shirts, branded USB’s and even a Flip Mino just for being a blogger! I don’t want to call myself shallow but hey everything that’s free is awesome!

5. Could be Used as a Launch Pad

Famous bloggers like Darren Rowse, John Chow and Shoemoney all have the luxury of just throwing out something into the market and have it getting noticed immediately. That’s because of the huge following and subscriber base that they have. I mean it’s already a huge advantage that they have against traditional Internet marketers who usually start with nothing.

Bonus – Ego Booster

Each and everyone of us has their own ego (don’t tell me you don’t have it). Isn’t it a great feeling to have your own blog? How about getting read and seeing a respectable number of comments in your posts? The mere fact of having other people lending their attention to you, in this day and age, is very rewarding.

Making money from blogging is what we’re all trying to do whether directly, indirectly or passively. I’m sure we all find ways to maximize our own income whether by advertising, consultations, product launches and stuffs. But just don’t forget there are still a lot waiting outside of that box. What say you?

Melvin is a young internet marketer and blogger who blogs at MelvinBlog.com where he occassionally shares his good stuffs for his readers. You can follow him on twitter as well

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5 Rewards Of Blogging That Aren’t Greatly Emphasized

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This is a guest post by Kyle Judkins. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

I have been blogging for over a year now, and during this time, I came to a point where I wanted to expand my blog. The problem was that I just didn’t have enough time, as I have a full time job as a market researcher outside of my blog. This lack of time led me to the decision to hire writers for my blog. This wasn’t any easy decision, and it raised lots of questions. How would I pay them? Would it just add more work? Am I fit to manage other writers?

All of these questions were hard to answer, so I did what most people do. I just started blindly hiring writers with no roadmap in place. I was going with a straight trial by fire. It took some time and patience, but I now have a great system in place and am really glad I expanded to a multi-author blog. In this article, I’m going to tell you about the benefits and drawbacks of having a multi-author blog.

The Benefits

I figured it best to give you the good news first about have multiple authors on your blog, so you don’t just read the bad news and be scared off from attempting this drastic change.

1. More Articles and Content for Your Blog

I have never been a blazing fast writer, and I have a full time job. These things together make it near impossible for me to get more than 2 or 3 quality articles done a week. With only a limited number of articles per week, quick expansion of audience and article portfolio was out of the question.

Multiple authors have allowed me to ramp up the number of posts per week, and it allowed me to keep up posting consistency. If I went on vacation or took a break before, the blog sat stagnant. With extra authors, I always have a nice stock of articles just waiting to be published.

2. Expand the Topics Covered

Much to the dismay of many bloggers out there, I am a Windows guy. I have been my whole life and will continue to do so. I run a tech blog, so I would love to write about Mac software and hardware. However, I have no experience in that arena, so any articles I may have tried to write would have come off as uninformed and low quality.

In my search for authors, I made sure to find a few that used Macs in order to expand my blog’s coverage into that area. This helps round out my articles and gives me a little more variability and flexibility.

3. Increased Network

One thing that I didn’t think about at all when hiring writers, was how it was going to change my network. I never realized that you are not just hiring writers, you are hiring new marketers as well. I’ve had writers submit articles to social media sites and link me on their blog. This does nothing but attract more readers and get Google to like my blog that much more.

5. Become an Editor

My undergrad degree is in industrial engineering. That’s about as far away from journalism as you can get. Needless to say, I’ve never been the most swift writer, but I have polished my skills and been really impressed with my progress over the last year. However, I still don’t have amazing writing speed, so crafting a great article takes me some time.

Editing articles takes FAR less time for me. I am very open to all types of writing styles and articles, so skimming through someone else’s article and correcting grammar and formatting errors goes much faster. Becoming the editor has been great for me, as I still get to put my spin on things without having to spend so much time on research and writing.

5. Management Experience

Before have a multi-author blog, I had never been anyone’s boss. Being the boss has provided me with some great experience that will translate into the real world. I know that it isn’t exactly the same as face to face managing, but I still have to assign tasks, resolve conflict and communicate goals and objectives clearly. I firmly believe that these experiences will help me in my future career wherever it may take me.

The Drawbacks

Now that I’ve gotten you excited about expanding your blog, I’m going to give you the other side of the expansion story. The next five reasons are going to focus on the downsides of running a multi-author blog, because not everyone is going to find a solution to their blogging issues by changing to a multi-author blog. Let’s get right into the reasons of why you may not want a multi-author blog.

1. Loss of Control

In a multi-author blog you are still the final approver of content, and you can reject whatever you want. You could also demand all of your authors to write only about this topic or that topic, but I have a feeling that most people won’t like to be told exactly what to do or what to write about. If you don’t give your authors flexibility, someone else will.

Writers will write in a different tone or style than your own, and they will write about topics that may not have been your first pick. I was a little bit of a perfectionist before I hired authors, but I had to drop that mindset quickly and let go of my control over everything. If you want everything to be done a certain way, having multiple authors may prove to be a challenge.

2. Loss of Voice

This goes back to the fact that other authors have a different writing style than your own. This may help or hurt your blog, as you may have built up a strong audience with the way you write. You can still edit posts to make them sound more like you, but there is a fine line between just editing an article and rewriting it. It can be hard to keep the blog as just your own, because future readers will see many authors. This takes the focus off of you and could be a deal breaker for certain bloggers that want their blog to just be their own.

3. Become an Editor

This was one of the reasons to have a multi-author blog, but that was due to the fact that I am not a writer at heart. If you are a natural writer and really love crafting articles, becoming an editor could be something that provides you with little reward or excitement. Moving your time from the creative side to a more administrative role could be very hard and boring for many individuals and cause them to lose the passion they once had for their blog.

4. Become a Manger

This, again, was a positive in the previous list. The truth is that managing people can be challenging and down right frustrating at times. People have different personalities and ways of expressing their feelings. Dealing with people can be great, or it can be like babysitting.

Also, turnover tends to be fairly high, because you probably won’t have all the money in the world to pay your authors to keep them around. Training and constantly dealing with new people can get really old after a while.

5. Share the Wealth

If you hire authors, you have to pay them (well, most of the time). This starts to cut into that revenue you were building and were so proud of. Going from $100 a month back to almost nothing, because all of it is going to authors is a very hard thing to swallow. You may not see how the increased articles will yield increased revenue in the future. It is an investment, and some investments never pay out.
Conclusion

I am a big fan of running a multi-author blog and have gotten lots out of the change, but there are also many reasons to not take on this expansion, especially if your blog is very focused on your thoughts and opinions. Let us know what you think about multi-author blogs in the comments.

This is a guest post by Kyle Judkins, owner of LostInTechnology and the recently launched UpYourSocial.

Original Post: 5 Reasons For and Against Making Your Blog Multi-Author

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5 Reasons For and Against Making Your Blog Multi-Author

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This weekend and the past I spent organizing my backups and making sure to have a sound disaster recovery plan in place. Giving the importance of those things, I decided to write a post on the topic, to remind everyone else as well.

Truth be told the urge to get my backups in order came after reading a post from my friend Michael Gray. The post was titled How I Handle Backups and Disaster Recovery, and I recommend that you read that if you want some ideas about how to protect your data (especially if you want to use cloud computing for that).

Now here is my disaster recovery plan. The only two things that I care for are my websites and my work computer. I also have a laptop, but given that it does not contain any sensitive data and it is usually not connected to the web, I don’t worry about it.

For my websites I just finished implementing a 3-layer backup routine. The first layer is my hosting company, which backs up all my sites including site files and databases) hourly. The second layer is a eparate server (on a second physical location) that stores weekly backups from all the sites as well. The third layer is my own computer, where I keep monthly backups of all the sites. The first two layers are automated, while the third one is manual.

It is important to make sure that at least one copy of your backups is stored in a separate location from your server. Preferably in a different geographic region. Otherwise you could be vulnerable to natural disasters like an earth quake. The odds are quite small, but better safe than sorry.

For my work computer I am not as strict. Currently I am just performing one monthly backup. In the coming weeks I will try to buy an external hard disk and synchronize it to perform automated weekly backups.

What about you, do you have a disaster recovery plan? How do you manage your backups and sensitive data?

Do You Have a Disaster Recovery Plan?

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Do You Have a Disaster Recovery Plan?

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This is a guest post by Dan C.. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

If you have a blog, or own domain names, you should be worried regarding how secure they are. Who wants to wake up one day just to see their blog defaced, blacklisted or linked at http://www.zone-h.org/archive ? (yes, they have a full web site showing screenshots of hacked sites).

Or even worse, find out days after that someone managed to get access to your account at the registrar and modified the whois and DNS records from your site?

Attackers are getting smarter, so you need to protect yourself. There are multiple documents explaining how to improve the security of your servers or how the harden your wordpress installation. However, today I would like to talk about integrity monitoring.

Network Integrity Monitoring

Integrity monitoring is a very common practice on server security, generally done inside a file system, where it creates a cryptographic checksum of all your files and if something changes you get an alert. Useful, no? This is called FIM (file integrity monitoring).

What we don’t see often is this kind of integrity checking being done to your Internet assets. What if someone modifies your site in the middle of the night? Or changes the registration information of your domain? When will you find it out?

To be really caution, you can try to run every day a few commands to verify that all your information is accurate. For example, to check the ip addresses pointing to your domain, you can do a nslookup on the command prompt:

>nslookup domain.com

Or go online to sites like http://network-tools.com/ or http://dnsstuff.com to check that information.

However, repetitive tasks are better done by an application, so you don’t have to worry about it. That’s why I released a very neat and simple online tool that can automate this integrity checking for you. It has a very creative name, NBIM (Network-based integrity monitoring) and is available online for anyone to use (yes, free, no ads, no survey to fill, etc).

You go there, add your web site and domains to be monitored and when something changes, you will receive an alert via email (or twitter) showing when and what was altered. If you didn’t make the change yourself, you can rush to recover your site from the previous backup (you do one, right?) or call your domain provider to fix the issue, thus protecting your online presence.

How useful it is? A few months ago (real story), I got this alert via email:

Sucuri nbim: www.xx.com (whois) modified
Modifications:
16,19c16,17
< Status: clientDeleteProhibited
< Status: clientTransferProhibited
< Status: clientUpdateProhibited
< Updated Date: 26-feb-2007
—
> Status: ok
> Updated Date: 07-jan-2009

End of Notification

I was shocked! Someone removed the lock from my domain. I called immediately the registrar and found out that it has been unlocked by my account a day before from an IP address located in Korea. I changed my password immediately (it was kind a weak) and reported the issue to the ISP owner of that ip address.

Anyone is welcome to try it and see for yourself. It is very important that you verify in real time that your Internet presence is not being altered.

Dan C. is the founder of Sucuri.net, a site that provides several information security tools and services.

Network Integrity Monitoring

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Network Integrity Monitoring

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Recently, a friend’s Blog in the process of doing 301 redirect some of the difficulties encountered.

Probably is that the original name of the Blog does not intend to do, and in the new domain name on the resumption of the stove, began to write again, but the flow of the old Blog do not want to lose, so did a 301 redirect to a new domain name, but content is different from the original content of the Blog does not migrate to a new Blog.

Has done a 301 redirect in more than two weeks after a new domain name is still not included, the old Blog of the record still exists.
I have read about the use of this site’s HTTP Status Checker, can verify the situation Jump up Jump 5 can check.
Blog from the old has been included in the url of the situation is like this:

The old url >>301 new url>> 302 new url >>404 error page

Blog This is because the old url with the new and different, and rewrite the rules of the new Blog will be possible to use 302 redirect to the actual site, but the page does not exist yet, so there will be a final error page 404.

I think the biggest problem is 302, followed by 404, which linked the two issues could be even greater. This should be included in Google is not the largest possible causes.

Then, to help this friend, then 301 redirect to amend the rules, all point to the new blog’s home page.
Then see if he is the sitemap, looked at, but also some errors in it, to tell him the way one-to-use plug-sitemap.
I recommend the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, great work in WordPress. The most important thing is the correct format.
This is basically, I do not need to wait for 12 weeks, Google will be included in this Ah Q log.

Continue the above topics, or to discuss the 301 redirect then.
1) to avoid the 301 redirect, the new page, or return the final page is a 404 error code.
2) 301 redirect, and a new page before the page, the content of the best, and if not done so, to the extent possible, relevant to the content.
3) 301 redirect, url redirection is used, rather than used to redirect traffic, this should be very careful, and this is the basic spirit of 301 redirect.
4) Web site from a migration to a new domain name, with 301 redirect.
5) to give up a website, but also to rewrite a web site, it is necessary to move traffic, it is best not to use 301 redirect.
My suggestion is that the original site, in addition to Home, all give 404 errors, explain the situation on the page, and give a link to allow the user clicks to reach the new site.
6) Do not use 302 redirects, which makes Google think that the original page url is also effective

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310 Redirect Must Know

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