Got a note from Business Blogger via Bumpzee today.

They are giving away $500 Cash and a BFG NVIDIA Graphics Card. All you have to do to win is blog about the contest.

For their site launch and February promotion, Business+Directory will offer free reviews for all of February.

Entering this contest is real easy. All you have to do is give away links at their directory. You give away stuff to win stuff.

Follow these rules in order to qualify for the Prizes.

1. Link to this contest page so that others will know how to join.
2. Link to Business+Directory telling your readers about the February promotion.
3. Original post must come from your blog so that we know who to send the money to. It should be at least 250 words using your own unique writing style, don’t cut and paste from this post on the competition page.

One person will be chosen for the Grand Prize of $500 Cash (via PayPal) via randomizer software.

The runner up will receive a BFG NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT OC 512MB PCIe with ThermoIntelligence Graphics Card (shipped via USPS), again chosen via randomizer. This card allows you to connect two LCD displays and comes with a HDTV adapter and HDCP capability for high definition video.

The contest will last the entire month of February. Submissions will be calculated after the contest ends and prizes will be awarded during the month March.

There, thats my entry done, how about spending 5 minutes to do yours ?

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

A little while ago WordPress 2.3 came out, so I decided to attempt the Wordpress 2.3 upgrade on a few of my blogs.

There are a number of features I wanted to try out and we have a policy of always keeping to the latest version.

With this release there are also a number of new features that looked interesting including:

• Tagging support which allows tags as well as categories to be allocated to posts.
• Upgrade notification of plugin and Wordpress upgrades. Not so worried about WordPress as this is well publicised but getting notified about plugin upgrades is really useful
• URLs have been tweaked to make them cleaner for search engines
• WYSIWYG editor has more features.

The team at WordPress make a few suggestions about preparing for an upgrade. They are:

• Back up your blog. Here is the Codex page with a few different methods.
• Check for the latest versions of your plugins. Here’s a list of known compatible and incompatible plugins with 2.3, Google Sitemaps seems to be one causing a lot of issues. (Forum thread.) Upgrading might get you cool new features anyway. Don’t forget about the plugin directory.
• Read up on how to modify your theme to add tag support.
• Consider switching your install to use Subversion to make updating ultra-easy.

Having done a few upgrades now, the number one issue to be checked is plugin compatability.

If you don’t check your plugins and one isn’t compatable it will either shut down your site or more curious will shut-down admin access.

So, I’d suggest checking the plugins, then disabling them before upgrading.

Once the upgrade is done bring them back one at a time.

By bringing them back one at a time, if there is a problem you know which plugin caused it. Then you can just FTP into the /contents folder and delete the offender to get up and going again.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Its essential for every internet home business to keep finding ways of getting free blog traffic by adding more links and to increasing the distribution of RSS feeds.

One way to do this is to submit your blog to RSS directories. There is nothing new in this advice but most people don’t do it because either it takes far too long or they aren’t prepared to pay others to do the job.

The job of completing the RSS directory submissions is made much simpler by installing a free Firefox Add-on called Submitemnow.

This Add-on makes the job almost painless, by stepping you through a database of RSS directories and for each one, automatically filling in the submission form. All you need to do is fill in the gaps (if any), hit the submit button, then hit “next url” in your browser to go to the next directory in the database.

The database comes with approximately 100 directories. A few of them don’t exist any more and a few weren’t taking submissions. Given the price of the Add-on and the ease of use this is a relatively minor downside.

Using the Add-on is very simple:

• First download and install
• Second “Click Projects” then “New”
• Fill out the details for your blog – these are used to autofill the subscription forms on each directory
• Then hit “next url”. This brings up your first submission.
• Complete the form for the first submission and submit it.
• Then hit “next url”
• Repeat

When encountering a site which doesn’t exist, or has stopped accepting submissions, click the “database” tab, mark that site as skipped then move on. Same goes for sites which charge a fee and you don’t want to submit to.

The database keeps a track of all sites including showing those already submitted and those yet to be done.

If you have multiple blogs you can save the current project and just open a new one. This allows the tracking of submissions for each.

After submitting this blog to all the directories in the Add-on it occurred to me that this may also increase RSS readership numbers, a key metric used by advertisers and blog rating sites.

Thanks to Affiliate Watcher.Com for the heads up.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Here is another free Wordpress template site to at to your list.

Skinpress offers free wordpress blog themes as well as themes for  Phplink directory. Later on themes will be added for Joomla, Mambo, OsCommerce, PhpBB, Sitesift, Vbulletin and Zencart.

While the site and the service looks relatively new, there are about 40 wordpress themes available, some of them having been downloaded over 300 times.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Blog Mastermind is a new blog mentoring offering from Yaro Starak.

Yaro has been blogging for a few years and in that time has built up a site with a Page Rank of 6, Alexa ranking of about 14,000 and has over 4,000 RSS readers.

In March 2007 Yaros reported earnings were about $6,500. Given the low overheads of blogging, this is a good income from a home based business.

In short Yaro is a successful blogger who knows how to turn a dime.

I’m one of Yaro’s RSS subscribers and have always enjoyed reading his posts. He’s obviously a smart guy but has a down to earth style that makes it easy to understand what he is saying.

Just recently Yaro released his new blog mentoring program. The free introduction to the program is called Blog Profits Blueprint and is available in text, audio and video.

Blogs Profits Blueprint is about 55 pages and lays out in a clear concise manner the steps anyone can take to grow their blog to the point where a sustainable living can be made.

Here is a quick look at the chapters

• How To Make Money Blogging
• How I Discovered Blogging
• Blogging as a Business, Not a Job
• What’s Next?
• Who Is Yaro Starak?
• What Is A Blog And Why Are They So Popular?
• How Blogs Make Money
• Two Key Ingredients For Attracting Attention
• Why Do You Blog?
• How To Choose Your Blog Topic – Passions Vs. Profits
• Let’s Talk Tactics
• Content + Marketing = Traffic
• What Is A Pillar?
• How Do You Create A Pillar?
• How To Market Your Blog
• Time vs. Reward
• Most People Are Lazy
• Communication Channels
• The Power of Leverage
• Compound Effects
• Think Big Picture, Work Little Picture
• Traffic Tactics
• Peer Relationships
• Network Effects
• Start With Your Peers
• Bigger and Better Content Pillars
• It’s Time To Make Money
• Can Blogs Be A Stable Income Source?
• The Holy Grail of Blog Monetization – Recursive Affiliate Income
• The Next Best Option – Direct Advertisers
• The Problem with Google AdSense
• Other Monetization Options
• My Top Blog Monetization Methods
• Turn Your Blog Into A Business
• Why Most Bloggers Fail
• Do You Have Enough Information To Succeed?
• Congratulations! – Now Get To Work
• Advice For Beginners, The Lost And Confused
• Private Mentoring For Serious Bloggers
• Affiliate Opportunity

As you can see its pretty comprehensive and contains as much information for free as many paid publications of a similar size.

The notes about pillar articles and growing traffic by using blog comments has made a real difference to the traffic for this blog and the direction I need to take it in for the future.

Here are a few of the additional resources Yaro has provided to compliment his blog mentoring offering.

Sneak Peek into Blog Mastermind (video)

How I Make Money Blogging (video)

The Blogspot Case Study (video)

Blog Profits Blueprints (text, audio, and video options)

The purpose of this post is to let you know about Yaro’s offering. The free information, is well worth taking time to read and will be useful for the first time blogger and those with more experience.

Even if the mentoring program is not for you, I hope you download the free Blog Profits Blueprint. The information is first rate and I’m sure you will derive as much value from it as I have.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

WordPress works just fine straight out of the box. It has an impressive range of features. There are also modules which provide additional functionality. These are called plugins.

The following list of best WordPress plugins are those I have used (and in most cases still use) or have been highly recommended by others.

Comment SPAM

Akismet: Checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use this service. You can review the spam it catches under “Manage” and it automatically deletes old spam after 15 days.

SEO

Head META Description: Insert HTML META description tag: excerpt/content brief for post/Page, description for category, and blog tagline for everything else.

Jerome’s Keywords: Allows keywords to be associated with each post, which can be used as meta keywords and for creating a local tag system. Also adds Technorati Tags into the sitefeed.

Optimal Title: Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. When this is implemented the Meta title of the front page becomes “Blog Name” | “Blog Description”. The Page titles become “Post Title” | “Blog Name”. I have used a slightly modified version on this blog by firstly changing the “|” for a “-” (personal preference) and secondly removing the “Blog Description” on the front page.

Google Sitemaps: Automatically create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This is updated every time a page/post is added or edited.

Social Bookmarking

Sociable: Automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites.

Feeds

Smart Update Pinger: Replaces the built-in ping/notify functionality. Pings only when publishing new posts, not when editing. Significantly speeds up editing and helps prevent over pinging of feed services.

Feedburner Feed Replacement: Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents. Incredibly simple way of implementing Feedburner on your site.

Backup

WordPress Database Backup: On-demand backup of your WordPress database. This allows you to email your back-up file as part of the backup process. Many bloggers email their backups to their Google mailbox. A neat off-site backup option.

Change Your Theme Layout

Sidebar Widgets: Adds “Sidebar Widgets” panel under Presentation menu. This allows you to reposition elements in the sidebar by just dragging them to different positions. Saves a lot of time editing sidebars to change layouts.

Sidebar Widgets come with some standard widgets and there are a whole host of others here.

Ad Rotators

Ad Rotator: Rotates Ads randomly from a specified text file. Probably the most practical when you have one blog.

Not a WordPress Plugin, but for multiple blogs I recommend OpenAds. This program is easy to install (separate database), well documented and provides some serious ad rotation functionality.

Translation

Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro: Translates blog dynamically (from English) to eight languages – German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese. The translated pages can be bookmarked for future use. Note: It assumes the base language of the blog as English.

You can decide to skip translating one or more sections of page content by enclosing them between comments. This works in a post / page as well as within templates; in short anywhere. This is the only plugin I have paid for. Saw an increase in traffic after it was implemented.

I had a few problems getting it going which were all tracked to HTML errors on my site. Received incredibly fast an efficient service to help pinpoint the issues.

Other

Related Posts: Can be used to display related posts at the bottom of your post page. See below for an example.

After installing this plugin there was a 10% increase in page-views per visitor on this blog.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Over the last year we have focussed on SEO to grow the traffic to this blog. We are just starting to see good results with traffic and revenues lifting (Although it hasn’t been reflected in Alexa raking).

Now its time to look at other methods of increasing traffic.

The most common advice is to build an email list. Having tried this in the past we have decided not to pursue because:

• If your accused of spam, there is a risk your whole online business will be shut down
• Spam filters shut out a lot of legitimate traffic
• The size of your email list cannot be measured in any way by search engines so it doesn’t count towards SEO.

So we have decided to build our RSS feed readership.

In researching best way to achieve this we learned a lot about Feedburner & SEO.

Feedburner is a service which will take your feed, add some smarts then make it available for your readers. There are many options but some of the nicer features are:

• Information about how many subscribers you have (see left hand side of this page)
• Information about how much traffic you get from your feed as measured in clicks
• Ability to include customized information into the feed – could be used for advertising

What I especially like is the ability to measure the number of RSS subscribers. Just having that measure gives the ability to see the results of efforts to grow the subscribed base.

I will shortly include some ads to the feed to encourage traffic back to this site.

Since I have a WordPress blog, setting up the redirection from my existing feeds to the new Feedburner feed as a snap. Just install an automated plug in called Feedburner Feed Replacement

With the tools in place the next task is to find more subscribers. The first step was adding the large orange button at the top of this page so it was really obvious how to subscribe. For the next few months we will increase post frequency and look for every opportunity to grow the readership.

There has been some talk in forums that search engines will start to look at RSS readership as part of their SERP formula. I don’t know if this is the case but with Google introducing it’s Reader (Google Reader) then it is always that possibility for the future.

If you have some views on the above or have some RSS tip’s you would be prepared to share, please feel free to add a comment below.

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Hostgator is consistantly one of the top rated hosting companies, both for their customer service and hosting performance.

Their hosting plans are very competitive but you can get an even better deal using a combination of the Hostgator discount coupons and our offer below.

Here is the coupon codes for the shared hosting plans (Hatchling, Baby & Business) and the reseller plans. The coupon provides a 20% discount your next hosting plan or order with HostGator. It is:

Use the coupon code hgnews05

If you’d like a WordPress blog or PHP Link Directory setup for free, then after you have signed up leave a comment below. In your comment please note your domain name and the date/time your submitted your order.

When setting up your wordpress blog you can select the theme of your choice, and you will also get few of my favourite plugins to make your blog very SEO friendly as well.

Your PHP Link Directory installation can be either the free of the paid version. Installation of a custom theme is not included not is the purchase of the paid phpld license.

To take advantage of this offer you must use this link for shared plans and this link for the reseller plan

Latest Coupon code:  Save 20% on your next hosting plan or order with HostGator. Use the coupon code hgnews05

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

If you’ve been searching for ways to keep visitors coming back to your blog, then I found something which may help

Enter:

Google to the rescue – they recently released Version 4 of their toolbar and added some awesome new features:

* Search Suggestions – When you’re typing in a search, similar searches are automatically displayed for you to choose from (Kind of like an intelligent autocomplete)
* Server-Side Bookmarks – Now you can save bookmarks and access them from any computer that has the (free) Google Toolbar installed!
* Custom Buttons – This is what I’m the most excited about (so is Matt Cutts of Google, coincidently) – these custom buttons will allow your visitors to stay up to date with your blog the easy way – automatically.

That’s right – automatically. All they have to do is click a link on your blog and your custom button will be added to their google toolbar. Then they will be able to easily visit your site, see what’s new via your RSS feed, and even search your blog – right from the toolbar!

To find out more go here WP Goobar

©2010 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.