Blogging for Dollars Blog

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When I first became aware of Twitter, I thought it was a waste of precious time for bloggers - the time you spend creating a dinky 140 character post was better spent writing a REAL post.

Oddly enough, I’ve become a confirmed Twitter user. I’ve got lots of blogs, and I post links to blog updates to Twitter, when I remember to do it.

Here’s a great article 10 Cool Uses of Twitter | Geekpreneur on making Twitter work for you.

This tip is especially useful:

“5. TwitterLinkr
TwitterLinkr can be very useful if you are looking for a link you once saw in a tweet. The service parses tweets looking for links, and once it finds one, it collects the message, reverses Tinyurls into readable links, and adds it to its feed displayed on TwitterLinkr’s front page. It also collects stats from popular tags and lists most active users.”

Blogging makes a great home business

Many bloggers blog full time in their blogging home business, and earn a great income - much more than they could earn at a job.

Discover how you can make money blogging, with Angela Booth’s blogging bestseller, Blogging for Dollars - blogging is fun, and profitable.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, Twitter

Starting a personal blog? If so, WordPress.com may become your blogging platform of choice.

Interesting news in Free Space to Three Gigabytes « WordPress.com; Matt Mullenweg says:

“Today, one of those developments comes to fruition — everyone’s free upload space has been increased 60x from 50mb to 3,000mb. To get the same amount of space at our nearest competitor, Typepad, you’d pay at least $300 a year. Blogger only gives you 1GB. We’re doing the same thing for free.

Our hope is that much in the same way Gmail transformed the way people think about email, we’ll give people the freedom to blog rich media without having to worry about how many kilobytes are left in their upload space.”

I’ve just read the Terms of Service again, and this is a concern:

Termination. Automattic may terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. If you wish to terminate this Agreement or your WordPress.com account (if you have one), you may simply discontinue using the Website.

The TOS no longer seems to specifically prohibit commercial blogs on WordPress.com, however the “termination” clause packs a lot of punch, and makes your WordPress.com blogs vulnerable.

My advice? Get your own domain name and hosting; it’s safer.

Freelance Blogging: Fun, Easy and VERY Profitable

Want a new career? Become a freelance blogger.

I’ve been blogging since 2001, and for the past 12 months I’ve been swamped with offers of blogging gigs, and so have other freelancers who are highly visible on the Web. Blogging has huge returns on investment for businesses, so they’re hiring bloggers to update their blogs each day – often several times a day.

My new ebook, “Blogging for Dollars: How to become a career blogger — in your PJs, if you want”, teaches you how to blog for money.

Technorati Tags: platform, blogging, WordPress.com

For various reasons, I took the big step of moving several of my blogs last week. I’d been meaning to do it for a while, but put it off, as you do with things you suspect will be an unpleasant hassle.

Well - I was wrong. The move went smoothly - so smoothly that I’m still pinching myself and waiting for the other shoe to drop. I heard so many stories before the move that I kept expecting things to go wrong. But everything’s fine.

How to move your blog to a new host - the easy way

I’m not a tech wiz, so I had no intention of moving a clutch of WordPress blogs myself. I got in touch with Host Gator, which hosts many of my sites, and asked them whether they could do the move for me.

(Host Gator has live chat, so you can contact someone at any time, whenever you have concerns. Every time I’ve used live chat, my problem has been smartly solved.)

They could, and they did, within a very short time indeed, less than three days, including the time it takes for the DNS to propagate.

I’ve got one hosting package with Host gator, and it’s getting rather full, so I opted for a new hosting package for the moved blogs. Host Gator will move 20 sites/ blogs for you completely free of charge.

Here’s how the process went:

1. Buy a new hosting package at Host Gator;

2. Set up accounts for the blogs to be moved;

3. Send HG my login information for the old accounts, including the names of the MySQL databases;

4. Once I received notification that everything had been moved, check that everything was working fine on the new host;

5. Transfer the DNS and wait for it to propagate across the Web;

6. All done!

I can’t commend Host Gator enough. They did everything for me, all I had to do was ask.

The only regret I have now is that I didn’t move the blogs sooner.

So if you want to move a blog, and the idea makes you queasy, take your courage in both hands. Once you’ve moved, you’ll wonder what took you so long.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, hosting