Internet Business Daily

I just finished this site’s redesign a few days ago, and figured now would be a good time to throw up a quick post about it. I had been looking for a new theme for IBD for a few weeks now, and I finally came across one that I liked. There were a few common elements that I wanted to keep from the old design, and some new elements which I really wanted for the new design.

• Header Image - One element from the previous design that I wanted to keep was the header image. I absolutely loved displaying a beautiful picture of Santa Cruz, Ca at the top of my blog, sort of as a goal for myself (and others) to want to live in a place like that through making money online. The new design allows for a header image, but I decided to use a different image I took a few years ago. The picture is still of Santa Cruz, but it is one of the beautiful valleys rather than the beach. Do you like the image?
• 125×125 Buttons - One of the main reasons for wanting to change my blog design was that I desperately wanted to accommodate for 125×125 ad buttons. You see these buttons on most business/money making blogs, and there’s a simple reason for that: they work! When someone clicks on one of my buttons and signs up, I get a referral commission. Now I get to display these buttons to everyone who comes to my site.
  

• Easier to Contact Me - Something I really appreciate when visiting other people’s blogs is the ability to easily find/contact the webmaster. With the new design it is now very easy (and obvious) where and how to contact me. I have used visuals to draw reader’s eyes towards that section, so hopefully more people will feel free to contact me. I listed Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and LinkedIn.
  

• RSS Readership - Another thing I wanted to improve with this blog is the RSS readership. On the old design I only had a small RSS button, that no one seemed to see. Now I have a great big RSS button that probably everyone will see:).
  

• Wider Margins - Lastly, I wanted my blog to have wider margins to allow for more content. I really think the new blog design looks much better, and is easier to use.

These are all very important features to me to have on my blog. Although it took me weeks to find a decent theme to hack up and make my own, it was definitely worth the wait. When you decide to redesign your own blog, you should make a list of features that are most important to you before you start looking for a theme. There are enough Wordpress themes out there where you don’t have to sacrifice any feature for another. If you need help finding the right theme for your needs, feel free to contact me.

There are a lot of ways to make money on the internet, but sometimes it’s not about the money. This is one of those cases. I have a new goal for my blog, to obtain the number 1 spot for the search term “Matthew Berman.” I am currently #7 for my own name! This is not right. You can see how I am doing here. This will not be an easy task because I have something like 3 .edu domains to be and a .org. These will be very hard to take over.

I will implement all of the same SEO tactics that I use for any other keyword I am trying to tackle. You can see some of my SEO tips here. I will update everyone on how I am doing on this in a few weeks, till then wish me luck! Anyone who can help me with my goal will be greatly appreciated!

What is Anchor Text?
In my opinion one of the most important factors in SEO is anchor text. A link from another site to yours is like a vote of confidence from them to you. Google sees this and gives your site more respect based on that vote. There are two things associated with a link: the URL and the anchor text. The URL is the address to which the link points and the anchor text is what the link says. For example: make money online. The URL of this link is internetbusinessdaily.net and the anchor text is “make money online.” When Google looks at this they associate that keyword with the URL it is pointing to. There are many other factors that go into the Google calculation of links but this is generally how it works.

Why Anchor Text is Important
So when doing link exchanges or link baiting, you really want the other sites to use your most popular keywords. This will give you better SERPS and therefore more traffic. The surround content is also important. If the entire site and article you are being linked from is about cooking but the anchor text is about search engine optimization, it will not mean nearly as much. A great example of the power of anchor text is John Chow’s site. He had a link baiting contest where many bloggers linked to him with the keyword make money online. Within 4 days he was #3 SERPS for that keyword. So, get those keywords in the links!

** EDIT: The rules have changed, it’s now MUCH easier to win.

So I was thinking of different ways I could increase the traffic to my blog and had a great idea: a blog contest! I am somewhat going to copy John Chow’s review my blog for a linkback idea, but put my own little twist on it. Instead of only giving a linkback (which unfortunately doesn’t mean too much right now), I am going to give away a great pair of Gucci sunglasses to one lucky winner, but everyone will get a linkback who enters. The original sale price of the glasses was $250, but they are an older model so are probably worth a bit less now.

How It Works
The requirement to be entered into the contest is as follows. Create a link to the homepage of this site with anchor text “make money online.” The link must be up for 4 weeks and then it’s up to you if you want to leave it up:). The link must also be on your homepage. For doing this you will automatically receive a linkback from my site.

How To Win
I will let the contest run for 4 weeks after 20 entires have been submitted. At the end of the four weeks, a winner will be drawn! It’s that easy. The winner will also receive another linkback and a review of their site in a short post by me.

How To Enter
After doing everything stated above, you will need to comment to this post with a link to the page on your site containing the link. That’s it! Good luck to all and i’m very excited to read the reviews.

Post Ratings
I just added a new feature to this blog. It is late at night, about 2am and I have nothing better to do than find cool Wordpress plugins. Anyways the new addition is called Post Ratings, which can be found here. As you can see it puts a little Ajax-style rating system at the bottom of each post. I think it looks great and adds even more of a community feeling to the site. I’m definitely giving this post a 5 star rating!

Download the Wordpress plugin here, and read the install guide here.

Users Online
The second plugin I installed was Users Online. It can be found on the same page as the link above. All it does is add a sidebar widget that displays the number of users currently browsing your site. Both of these plugins are very nice and do not make the site too cluttered.

Today is a very good day for some people, including John Chow. Many people who were previously banned from Digg are now allowed back! Of course everyone took advantage of this right away. The first to do so was JC (because he is EVIL). John had a story on the front page of Digg within 15 minutes of finding out he was unbanned. It is very funny to see how easy it is to play Digg’s system. All you need is a popular person (John Chow) to get many of his followers to digg his story and poof, front page story that easy.

Hopefully one day ill grow a following such as other people have done, and that way I can have my stories hit the front page any time I want as well. Digg still has a lot of work to do in terms of stopping things like this. They are far from a democratic system, it reminds me of high school elections where the most popular kid always wins. Come on Kevin, get with the program.

WordPress 2.1
There are a couple of things that I would like to point out that are new on this site. I finally got around to upgrading to WordPress 2.1. I thought there was going to be many errors and custom coding to get all my plugins to work, but luckily it was pretty painless. The only thing that did not work was Subscribe to Comments, but the creator came up with an upgrade: Subscribe to Comments 2.1 and now everything works great.

Wordpress 2.1 includes a whole bunch of upgrades, and some of them have really made my life easier. One of my favorite upgrades is an auto save feature when writing a post. It automatically stores a copy every minute of what you have written so far just in case the page accidentally closes. I remember when I first started writing this blog that a very long post that I had just written got deleted for this very reason, I’m glad they have addressed this issue. There are many other little changes that I have not gotten around to trying.

Site Changes
I have made a few changes to the website itself. The most obvious change is the header image. I decided I was a little tired of the one I had on before and photoshopped a photo I took a few months ago. The picture is of Westcliff, which is in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is where I went to college and I absolutely love the town, and for obvious reasons. It is one of the most beautiful places I have been to. I also thought this picture blends better with my site theme colors.

eBay! Button
I have just joined the ebay affiliate program, which is why I have the little eBay button on the right. When people click on that button and buy something from eBay, I get a portion of the commission. I have been told that some of the top bloggers make the most money not from Adsense, but from the eBay affiliate program. So I decided to try my hand at it.

So those are the little changes I have made to the site. I want to make sure I provide a quality experience for my readers so if anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to let me know. Stay tuned for updates on my business ventures!

I would like to take a moment to thank one of the best features of WordPress: Akismet. Without Akismet I would have to go through every single spam comment that comes my way, which is a whole lot. I get hundreds of these comment spams per day and it would take me hours to go through them all. Akismet checks the content of the messages against a database of known spammers and automatically filters them out of your comments inbox in WordPress. To give you an idea of how much spam I actually get, here is a screen shot of an Akismet message from within WordPress.

3,825 spam messages caught without me having to even look at it if I didn’t want to! I do scan them over before deleting just to make sure it did not filter a real comment, which has only actually happened twice. Since the time I first had Akismet, only about 5 or so spam messages have slipped through. I am very impressed with their service and would like to thank them.

UPDATE: download Akismet here.

I have added a little feature to my blog. I recently signed up for MyBlogLog and love it. I get to see and possibly chat with people who come and enjoy my blog. The avatars from MyBlogLog give my site much more of a community feeling. I then saw on John Chow’s blog that he had also signed up for MyBlogLog, but found an awesome little plugin for Wordpress to make MyBlogLog even more useful. MyAvatars is a Wordpress plugin that puts people’s MyBlogLog avatar in every comment they post to.

The myavatars.zip file is the first thing you need to download. Upload that file into your Wordpress plugins folder like usual, and then activate the plugin. You will then need to put this piece of code into your comments.php file:

<?php if(function_exists("MyAvatars")) MyAvatars(); ?>

Similar to John Chow, I put the code directly above <?php comment_text() ?> in my file. Something weird happened though, two different results came about from putting that piece of code there. For John Chow, the avatar appears to the right of the comments, which looks good. For mine however, it appears under the number and date when people comment, which also looks good. You can put that piece of code anywhere to make it look however you want. Here is what it should look like: