Realhomeincomes.com

Twitter explained for a 1st Grader

May 7th, 2009

That title is really bad, because most 1st graders understand Twitter better then most of us 30+ year old’s. Therefore it should probably be the other way around… Twitter explained BY A first grader. The problem with being old is that you see something so simple and think there has to be more to it. You think about it on a business level and compare it to other forms of advertising that you have used for your business. You have to throw all that away and take twitter for what it is… It is many things to many people.

Non Business use:

Twitter is a place for people to start conversations. Since, 99% of us use it for something other then conversing with strangers around the world I will stop there.

Business professionals:

It doesn’t get much better then twitter. Twitter is one of the only websites where you can get FREE eyeballs to your products and services. All twitter is made of is people you follow and people that follow you. The people that follow you see all your tweets and you can send then direct messages (DM’s). Followers are free and the more the better. I’ve seen many people argue which is better, quality or quantity when it comes to Twitter followers… Of course it is quantity, there is no quality follower on twitter. When a FREE program comes along and offers FREE eyeballs to your products and services, YOU JUMP ON IT and ride it until it goes away.

Another way to help understand twitter is by looking at who is using it. Oprah, ESPN, and NBA have twitter accounts and have now started to promote their twitter accounts via the television. They do this because they can get their information in front of you for FREE. Oprah doesn’t do it YET, but eventually she will start promoting her products in her twitter feed, just wait and see.

In summary, take Twitter for what’s it’s worth. Get tons of followers so when you say “check out my awesome products” people will actaully hear it.

Hope that helps, but if you see Twitter as something different please tell me in the comment section.

Posted in Twitter | No Comments »

How the Wordpress AutoPoster Works

April 23rd, 2009

This blog post is for people that have purchased my Wordpress Autoposter. It is an explanation of all the setting and how it works.

You can download the Autoposter here

The autoposter grabs articles from articledashboard websites. Articledashboard.com lets anyone start their own e-zine site. Go to articledashboard and grab a website. This is a great way to earn some good adsense revenue by starting your own e-zone site. If you don’t want to start your own e-zine site you can grab articles from any articledashboard website.

First of all, it is a typical Wordpress plugin. You simply have to upload to your blog plugin directory and then activate the plugin. Once it is activated you can edit the settings in Settings > Article Poster.

Overview of the settings

Publish Settings: Set to either post immediately (live) or only make a draft.

Use Proxy: (deprecated) Godaddy used to make all CURL calls go through a proxy, but I think they do not use the proxy anymore. Therefore you should always leave this unchecked. If you cannot post an article manually, then you might need to use the proxy. I suggest you contact me first to see what the problem is.

Time Intervals: How often do you want to grab articles? This uses the wordpress cron, which is a fake cron. I have written an blog post about the wordpress cron, because it can be confusing. In order for the cron to work you need to have some website traffic.

Number of Articles: How many articles do you want to get? fairly self explanatory. I do recommend that if you are posting to Twitter, you should leave this at 1, or else you will spam Twitter. Also, some categories are more popular than others and will always have fresh articles while some article categories only get new content every couple weeks.

Yahoo Keywords: This will send get the article analyzed by Yahoo Content API and return all the keywords that yahoo sees. These keywords are then turned into tags which can be used in Wordpress tag clouds and used in meta-keyword tags. If you use the Wordpress All-in-one-seo plugin you can automatically make the meta-keywords from the tags.

Post to Twitter: You need to click on the checkbox and enter your Twitter username and password for this to work. I find that posting articles to Twitter is a great way to get traffic back to your website. Again, only post 1 at a time. I currently post 1 article to twitter every 2 hours.

Article Sources: Make sure you go to the RSS section of the articledashboard website. A typical link for the articles to grab will look like this: http://www.articledashboard.com/rss/Interior-Design/200. Note the “rss” in the middle. You can set which category of your blog you would like to post to. You can add more then one article source and each time the poster grabs the articles it will grab from all article sources. For example, if you grab 1 article every hours, but have 3 article sources, you will post 3 articles every hours. Below the list of active article links you will see the link “Click Here to Update Articles”. That will manually grab articles. It is a good way to see if the poster is working properly.

Article Scheduler: That is the date for the next article grab. Remember that the cron needs someone to load a page to get the cron to fire. You can delete the scheduler to stop using the poster, and then restart at anytime.

The plugin adds one datatable to your wordpress database. If you delete the datatable, next time you load the plugin it will rebuild it. This might cause duplicate content in your blog becuase the datatable keeps track of what articles have been gathered and posted.

Posted in Wordpress AutoPoster | No Comments »

Using the TinyUrl API to Shrink URL’s in your Applications

March 24th, 2009

Twitter has made TinyUrl very popular. TinyUrl has been around for years, but not a lot of people knew about it, until now. Now everyone knows what tinyurl is, not to mention the hundreds of URL shrinking clone sites. Since Twitter shrinks URL automagically when you write a tweet you don’t need to know this, but if you are making your own twitter application it is good to know how to use the tinyurl API to shrink URL’s on the fly.

The Tinyurl is really simple:

[sourcecode language='css']
$link = file_get_contents(”http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=”.$post->guid);
[/sourcecode]

Tags: tinyurl, Twitter
Posted in Twitter Friends, Uncategorized | No Comments »

The NEW way to DM on Twitter

March 19th, 2009

One of my more popular posts is how to give thanks to your twitter followers… Well times have changed and that post is now outdated, because DM’s have become soooo useless and filled with spam, we need to find a new way to DM other twitterers.

My DM section is filled with over 1,400 direct messages. Today was the first time I looked in there in months and see that about 90% are automatic DM’s thanking me for following them. About 9% of the “Thanks for the follow DM’s” are manually written by people that should use the automatic DM’s, and maybe 1% actual DM’s from people with questions. I say maybe because I’m going to go through and try to find them. If you sent me a DM questions, sorry, it’s gone and I’ll never respond.

So, my solution is simple, you want to DM me a private question go for it, but make sure you also send me an @reply. I check my replies constantly, and will see that you need to talk. It’s as simple as @rhimedia just sent DM. That’s all you need to get my attention. Therefore, Since I propose it, We should all do it

This brings me to another topic… Twitter Friends Plugin. As most of you know the development has stopped on that plugin. I still like it and happy I made it, but it just doesn’t seem to serve a purpose anymore, now that DM’s have become useless. If you are still interested in the code, feel free to download it. It does have the auto DM in it and it will give you a good start on the Twitter API.

Posted in Twitter | No Comments »

Great Little Wordpress Comment Plugin – Commentluv

March 19th, 2009

commentluv I’m not a big wordpress plugin blogger, but every now and then a see a plugin that I must have and must tell other people about.

I ran across commentluv wordpress plugin a few weeks ago on some blogs and immediately loved it. What this plugin does is allow the commenter to add one of there most recent blog posts to their comment. I know you are probably thinking, “This sounds like an opportunity to spam” but it really doesn’t allow that ability. Your comments still get moderated (if that feature is on), and it’s easy to see violators. In general it’s a really good way to get people to add their 2 cents to your blog posts.

In Summary:

As soon as you enter your website url in the comment fields, the plugin magically finds your feed and displays your most recent blog posts, in which you then get to choose which post to add to your comment.
Still uses the nofollow attribute, which makes for good SEO

If you looking for a good way to get more commentors on your blog, I highly recommend this plugin… Good Job to the developer!

Posted in Plugins | No Comments »

Wordpress Silo SEO – How to Remove the Category Base From Permalinks

March 18th, 2009

I’ve been doing some research on Silo, which stands for isolation, SEO strategy. It seemed easy enough to use Wordpress with this strategy but after some quick research I found it harder then I first thought. The theory behind SILO seo is to have a very well planned out blog structure.

silo

You will notice that the above layout is shows a well planned out content structure. Google really likes quality, and the above layout will help the Google spiders from getting confused by your content. One thing to note is that the sections Blogging, E-commerce, and Ebay do not link to each other. You will not find a link in the article about Turbo Lister linking to Blogging/Wordpress. I’m not going to much into SILO, I just want to help with a setting up Wordpress permalinks to remove the category base for better blog structure.

There are a few plugins floating around, but I found you don’t need them.

Go to the permalink section and update your permalinks like so:

permalinks

Make sure you set the custom permalink structure to %category%/%postname%.html (no trailing slash after postname)

and or category base, set it to “/.” (without quotes) The forward slash is an escape id, but I found that you don’t really need it. All you need is the period in the category base. If you leave category base empty, it will continue to use “/category/”.

Also, YOU MUST ADD .html to the end of your permalink structure, because if you don’t your child categories will not work. WP will think child categories are posts.

for example, myblog.com/parent/child/ will not work with out .html on the end of permalink structures.

This worked for me, let me know if it worked for you. Hopefully soon I’ll have some example websites using the wordpress SILO strategy.

Tags: blogging, categories, google, seo, SILO, wordpress
Posted in Example Code | No Comments »

Don’t fall for this scam, Feed-blast

March 17th, 2009

I recently bought a product from Ebay for a penny. The seller has tons of these auctions on Ebay for a penny. They are basically using the low price to get people to jump on and do 2 things. Read their ebook and become a reseller for a POS scam product called feed-blast. You hardly ever see a product like this end up on rip-off report, but this one has. Unfortunately for that guy, he spent $50 before realizing it is a scam.

The product promises to blast your advertising into millions of feeds. When I saw the Ebay listing, I was thinking that is impossible, unless the seller has set up many, many sites and has somehow programmed this tool to add your add into the feed. But even if he did that, the feeds would be so filled with spam nobody would read them.

Even though the auction was a penny, you still have to look to see if there are any hidden fees. Many sellers will sell for very little and then in send you an invoice for a much higher amount. This is a complete Ebay violation, and you are not required to pay, but it will cost you a lot of aggravation, and unfortunately many buyers will end up paying the fees becasue they don’t know better. Also, Ebay seems to not care about fee circumvention violations anyhow, if you report a listing that does this sort of thing, Ebay does nothing.

I won the auction for a penny and then a couple days later got the software… What a joke.

fb1

As you can see, all you do is make an advertisement to blast, and then find feeds to add you advertisement to. In find feeds, I did a search for “realhomeincomes”. It finds many of my blog posts, so it probably uses Google to find the feed. Then once you are done with finding feeds, you click on submit your ad. It then gives you a popup stating that submission is complete. But, like I said, you cannot stick your ads in feeds… Total crap and scam. I know this doesn’t do shit, because I disabled my internet connect and it still told me that my submission was complete, No Error message.

Frequently I receive emails from very angry people complaining about various “SEO tools” and “Money Making Software” delivered from the desk of Sebastian Foss (AdBlaster, Instant Booster, eZine blaster, Blog Blaster, Feed Blaster, Newsgroup Blaster, eBay Cash Machine, Doorway Page Generator, Google Cash Machine, and countless more scams), which got their sites banned or which just didn’t work as promised, asking for a refund and demanding compensation. I’m sick of replying to all these emails to set the records straight, so here is the guy’s address: Go here to see the address
Source: http://sebastians-pamphlets.com

Do a google search for feedblast scam and you will find tons of sites complaining about this product and the developer. Simply put, avoid this product

Tags: advertsing, blogging, ebay, scam
Posted in Internet, Yahoo AutoTag | No Comments »

How to make $2 Million from an Ebook

March 15th, 2009

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to do it, becuase I haven’t done it…YET. But here is a story about a entrepreneur that wrote a book called parrot secrets and he is raking in $400K per year. Yes, he wrote an Ebook about parrots and is making a killing…

Summary:

Sells 15-20 books a day @ $80
Uses word of mouth to sell… I’m not sure how? I did find his Google Adwords ad by searching for parrot secrets. According to Spyfu.com, the owner spends about $9/day on Adwords, with terms like “hahns macaw”, and “quaker parrot”. These search ads do not lead to the normal selling page, but to a sub section that is targeted for that type of bird.
Online since 2004, therefore = $2 Million in total sales.
Uses a fake identity to sell. The owner of the site lives in India, but the contact information for the book is in Florida.

Pretty incredible. He went after a very low competition market and dominated it… Basically older ladies that need help with pain in the ass parrots. Funny how old ladies don’t know how to search Google, because you can find so much free information on Parrot training and care. Also, older ladies are probably most susceptible to the type of sales page at parrotsecrets… Long ad copy, tons of testimonials, lots of small paragraphs that raise desire.

In times like these, there are many opportunities to cash in just like he did.

Tags: ebook, entrepreneur, google, word of mouth
Posted in Business Plans | No Comments »

How the Wordpress Cron Works

March 11th, 2009

By far the number one question I get from people that download the Wordpress Autoposter, is “I think it is broken, it will post manually but not automatically”. Therefore I should go into a little more detail to how you can automate wordpress.

Wordpress comes with a built in cron. It is not a real cron that works on time, but a fake cron that sets a time limit, but then needs some user interaction to fire. Basically in order for the wordpress cron to perform its scheduled activity, it needs someone to load the website in their browser.

Here is a list of Wordpress cron functions

The autoposter uses the schedule event function to set a time for an action to occur. Worpdress cron only offers 2 time settings, minute and hour. The Autoposter only uses the hourly cron schedule. When you activate the autoposter, it will set the cron time for you (current time +1 hour). You can delete the cron schedule to stop autoposting entirely. The autoposter lets you set the posting schedule anywhere from every hour to every 24 hours. This is where the confusion starts…

For example, if you set the autoposter to fire every 1 hour. It will not fire until someone hits the website after the hour is reached. if your website gets a lot of traffic, this isn’t a big deal, but if you don’t get traffic, it will not fire until you hit the website. so that could be hours later. Once the cron fires, it will reset the cron timer to +1 hour again.

Since Wordpress cron only operates by minute or hour, if you want to set the autoposter to fire every 2 hours, you have to hit the website twice. For example, the WP cron timer hits the first hour, and someone hits the site, so the cron fires. The script looks to see if it should run the poster or increase the hit flag. In this case it will increase the hit flag and set the timer +1 hour, because we do not want it to fire every hour. Then, the next time the cron timer hits the fire time, and someone hits the site, the script looks to see if there is a flag set. In this case there is so the script runs the autoposter.

So, again, if you don’t get a lot of traffic, you can set the timer to every 2 hours, but it might take 4 or 5, depending on when the website is getting hit.

Most hosts offer a “real cron job” that you can use to make sure the autoposter fires more reliably. Just set the cron to hit the website every hour.

I know this is confusing, and I hope you understand…If not, just add your question to the comment section. I’ll answer it there

Tags: autoposter, blogging, Plugins, wordpress
Posted in Wordpress AutoPoster | 3 Comments »