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Do you need a little help:

Adding a Gravatar to your WordPress Blog

For the last few weeks I’ve been taking part in the 100 Blog Comment Challenge, which is showing signs of being a huge success for everyone involved. We now have 102 contributors on board so phase one is complete, phase two is to get them all to comment and bookmark each others blog post. I have been following the comments and replies of quite a few blogs and can plainly see that a lot of people are really benefiting from the interaction with other bloggers.

One thing I noticed during the challenge was that quite a few people were having problems Installing Gravatars on their blogs, with some having installed it only to find it was conflicting with another plugin and showing two images.

Being the helpful kind of guy I am I decided to make a video and show you how I have it set up on my blog, so that you can simply follow my settings and resolve the issue on yours.

Hello and thanks for visiting my blog.

This post is going to be slightly different to my normal posts, in fact what I’ll be doing here I have never done before……more on that in a moment.

I sell information products, both on eBay and from my websites and I have recently found a jewel that I just have to bring to your attention, especially if you also sell (or are thinking of selling) information products.

Whether you are an established eBook writer or a newbie with an idea to create an eBook something you are going to need are

eBook Graphics

I personally have only ever used Planet Divinity, No that is NOT an affiliate link, my earning money is not the point of this post….

I could go on and tell you about the Cheap Prices, the Quality of Work Produced or the Speed at which it is delivered, but that’s not the point of this post….

I could go on even further and tell you that Planet Divinity ask a series of simple questions and from your answer they will produce a first class cover, but that’s not the point of this post either….

Need A little help with your

Blog Writing

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed many people trying to get blog owners posting to their blogs a bit more frequently. In fact that is why I wrote my last blog post, to give the new bloggers a little nudge of encouragement.

Since then Steve King and Jacinta Dean and have thrown down the gauntlet and started the “100 Blog Comment Challenge” AKA #100comments. Basically those that take up the challenge have to write a blog post and try to generate 100 comments for that post.

Personally I think this is a fantastic opportunity for every blog owner to get in the mix and get to know each other. This is exactly how you build relationships, with like minded people, that can become beneficial to us all for the long term success. How many times have you heard the saying “I don’t, but I know a man (or woman) that does”?

A little encouragement for struggling

Masterclass Students

As many of you know I started this blog as part of the Masterclass course that John Thornhill runs, and since starting the course I have been visiting my fellow students blogs, leaving comments and building relationships with them, (as most of us have).

The other day I read a few posts which really got me thinking.

One was from Mandy Allen entitled “Who have you inspired?” Where Mandy talks about linking up with some old friends and how a comment she made years ago inspired one of them to change their career.

The second post that got me thinking was by Bill Murney entitled “Blogging”. Where Bill talks about some of the Masterclass students’ lack of blogging, and asks what could be causing it?

The third post was by a new member of the Masterclass course, and one to watch out for, Terry Conti entitled “The Tough Get Going and The Weak Give Up” where Terry mentions, amongst other things, the lack of blogging.

After reading the posts I thought about them for a while and decided I would write this in the hope of helping these new bloggers overcome the problems they may be facing.

Hi everyone, thanks for visiting my blog.

Today I would like to cover keywords and keyword spamming. Keywords are used all over the internet to increase search results, but today I would like to concentrate on eBay.

As you know the use of keywords plays a large part in being a successful seller on eBay. By placing the relevant keywords in your titles and descriptions your items have a much better chance of being discovered in the search results.

More views = more sales.

Because keywords play such an important part of our listings and their success some people are keyword spamming to try and increase their sales. This is a major No No on eBay and, when caught out, will get your listings removed.

So what is keyword spamming?

Basically keyword spamming is when people enter keywords into their titles and descriptions that have nothing to do with their product but could influence the search results.

For example:

Some people selling non branded goods try adding a few brand names to their listings so as to get the item found in more search results, remember More views = more sales.

Hi all and thanks for visiting my blog.

Is This The Age of Disposable Computers?

No of course not, but let me explain this little tale and you’ll see how I got that title….

About 18 months ago I upgraded my PC and gave my daughter my old one for her college work.

Shortly after this I had a bit of a scare regarding my eBook website which made me sit up and think about backing up my system, sites, files, folders and everything else that I have sat on my computers.

I bought myself an external hard drive with a huge amount of storage on it and backed everything up. I then went to my laptop and old PC and moved all of my files and folders onto the external HD, so that all of my work is in one place and safe.

I then went to Acronis and tried their free 30 day trial, so as to back up on a regular basis. I was so impressed that after the free trial I bought the software.

Anyway on with my tale…..

Hello and thanks for visiting my blog.

We are all aware that eBay are forever changing things on their site.

Over recent years the changes to their feedback system and policies have seen some sellers throw the towel in and give up.

Some of those changers were:

• Restricting the sale of digital download items, music, eBooks, images etc as they believed these sales could lead to feedback manipulation.

• Removing the ability of a seller to leave Negative feedback for a buyer. Which for many sellers was their protection from buyers being over excited and leaving negative feedback. Or if negative feedback was left some buyers would use threats of returning the negative feedback unless the buyer removed it from seller.

• Adding the DSR (Detailed Seller Rating) feature, where a buyer will rate the seller on 4 key areas: Item description, Communication, Dispatch Time and P&P charges. Scoring from one to five, with five being Top Marks. The sellers DSR is then calculated and their fixed price listings are then placed on the eBay pages according to how good their DSR is. Which basically means if you have a good DSR your items will be well placed, but if you have a poor DSR your listings will be lower in the listings.

Hello and thanks for visiting my blog.

In the last video we dealt with uploading your website and testing that everything worked as it should do. If you suffered any problems or are stuck in any way please let me know and I’ll help you through it.

If on the other hand you have completed the uploading process then Congratulations you are now online and ready to go, pat yourself on the back: You’ve got your website online for the world to see….

…..Now that your website is online and ready to make sales we need to start generating traffic to it.

Now, I’m not an expert in traffic generation but I know a man that is. As I said in the last video, I have had to get special permission to create this video as I’m showing you the members only area of Total Web Traffic.

Before we get to the video I would like to thank Dave Nicholson for allowing me to create the video and for making a special offer available to my readers, more on that below the video.

The Importance Of Comments and Replies: + Plugins To Help With Each

Hello everyone, thanks for visiting my blog.

I was hoping to have the next video of the Newbies Guide created and online by now but last week I had so many things go wrong that I just didn’t have the time to create it.

I had optimized the sales page for Ease The Squeeze With Auctions and when I uploaded it the whole page turned Chinese. There had been an error in the loading code and no matter how many times I uploaded it I couldn’t correct it. So I deleted the page and started all over again, that was 3 days taken out of my schedule, but it’s done now.

Onto the blog post:

Regular visitors, that leave a comment, would have noticed that things have changed slightly.

I’ve added a few plugins to enhance my blog for the search engines. You see every time a comment is left the search engines view it as fresh content and the search engine spiders are all over it. The more comments, and replies, the better results you’ll get from the search engines.

As a result of the world wide recession many people have turned to eBay to try and make money from home. Some have found success and some have found that it can be very frustrating to list items over and over on eBay without making sales. Most of us have been there and many of us have, at some point, found the eBay fees catch up and sometimes overtake our profit, which only adds to the squeeze being put on our finances.

Many people have then become disheartened and have left eBay without trying to research their market. There are various ways of researching your market on eBay to help you find items that are selling successfully. But what if I told that there is an area of eBay where people are actually queuing up for items, and telling us what those desired items are?

Want it now: Is an area of eBay where people who cannot find what they are looking for, or cannot be bothered to look, list details of the items that they want to buy. There are literally thousands of listings there but what you are looking for in this area is either high value items or repeated listings. Repeated listings mean that many people are looking for the same items. If you can source those items you will obviously make lots of sales, and if you can find them at the right price your profit will increase dramatically.