raymondloesch.com

Wow I cannot believe it has been three months since my last posting to this website. First I guess I should apologize, Getting caught up in the real world of making a living with my full time job has taken it’s toll on my online foray into earning a living online. Well I am back and re-energized so to speak. My best friend and I have started a new Country Music Website geared towards Country Music Fans. It’s called CountryFanNetwork.com, and it truly is a labor of love. I am a huge Country Music fan and wanted to get back to covering the country music scene. I used to publish a Country Music Magazine called New England Country Magazine back in the early nineties and really enjoyed doing it but as is usual for country music in the northeast country music gains in popularity in economic downturns and then loses steam. The magazine barely made enough money to cover costs in the third year of publication, so we had to stop publishing.

I figured that setting up a country music site on the web would be cheap enough to do and to maintain that I could keep doing it even if it makes nothing. So occasionally I will be posting about the set-up and design of the site, thinking maybe some of you can benefit from the information we have and will learn as this site continues to evolve.

The first decision after picking the domain name and setting up hosting was what content management system we were going to use. At first I thought that I would use Joomla, but after a lot of thought and research decide that WordPress would be suited for this paricular website. The hardest part for me was picking a theme to work with, I eventually decide to go with the Options Theme. The Options Theme is a great theme to work with, but I am thinking about changing it up a little. I will keep you posted here.

I think I have finally gone off the deep end. I cannot believe I have not posted in almost two weeks! I have been way to busy at my office and I need to make some changes. I am currently working on a video for a new widget that will be posted here in a couple of days, so look for that it should be very interesting. [Tag-Tec]Jack Humphrey[/Tag-Tec] came out with his 2008 version of the Authority Black Book and I have been immersing myself in the wealth of information he has given yet again for free. So what’s going on and what have I been up to? Let me fill you in a little and share my insights and new found information with you.

Entrecard

I have not been dropping cards for the last 4-5 days, I wanted to see how this effects the card drops on my blog. Card dropping on my blog has significantly dropped and my advertising rate plummeted. I have not decided yet which way I will go with this as Entrecard takes up a lot of time and I am still deciding if it is worth the effort. I will get back to you on this one.

Social Authority

I have not been contributing as much as I would like to in this community. I have been keeping up with the Diggs and the Stumbles if I like the posts and sites that I am visiting. This is a great community of people that are looking to help others like them that are trying to earn a living online. If you have not joined the network visit us here.

Authority Black Book

Another one from the mind of Jack Humphrey. The Authority Black Book is one of the must reads of 2008, it is a very in depth look at the workings of a successful social marketing blueprint. I have read through it three times and am looking forward to reading it again this time with my handy highlighter at the ready. Yes folks, it is that good. Best of all it is free, you can get it here.

Atomic Blogging

I have purchased Atomic Blogging and studying the accompanying information that I received from them. I want to change the look and feel of a couple of my blog sites and thought that Atomic Blogging would be a good fit. I will let you know the outcome after a couple of weeks of trial and error. Has anyone else used this system and do you like it?

Well that’s about it for now, life is crazy, you never know what is going to come your way. I am starting to learn to try to relax a little more and get a little more sleep as of right now I am currently getting about 5 hours a night and would like to try to get to at least 6 hours a night(at least on the weekends). I have decided to not even look at my computer on sundays until all of my family is tucked away into bed. I want to spend as much time with my children as I can as they are getting older fast and soon will probably not want to spend any time with me or my wife.

Do You remember as a kid, you would get a letter from a friend then you had to make 10 copies and send them to 10 friends. If you broke the chain you would have bad luck. Well I was reminded of this while reading an article in a magazine and thought would’nt that be fun to try on the internet using Blogs, but with a twist.

First the why, we all know the basics of internet marketing. Build the site, add quality content, get quality traffic. How do we get quality traffic? Writing and submitting articles to article directories, Commenting on other blogs, posting in forums, backlinks,one way links, traffic exchange just to name a few. What about a truly viral way to get some link love and have some fun doing it.

This is what I propose, all of us at one time or another has heard some hokey inspirational phrase, like “when the going get’s tough the tough get’s going”. How about if every one that reads this Blog and has a Blog of their own each add 1 line to this post with an inspirational phrase and a link to their Blog. Let’s see how far this ride can go. If you read this post and have a blog and do not follow the chain….Nah! nothing bad will happen, we only wish you the best. This can and should be pretty viral and bring lots of link love to your blog.

“People don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” – www.Raymondloesch.com

Remember, we all have a day or two when we just do not have the time or energy to post to our blog. On this day why not use this post as a way to add a little love for your fellow bloggers and give some inspiration to your readers. If you use this post please comment the blogger you got this post from so they can follow where they are getting the link love from. As usual all comments are welcome, so please feel free to leave one.

I have to thank Elliot from ejcross.com for the new CommentLuv plugin I just installed. With all the talk about [Tag-Tec]Google PageRank[/Tag-Tec], DoFollow, NoFollow and paid links, I think it’s a great idea to reward the people who take the time to comment on your blog. With that being said, after 2 months of really participating in the blog world I thought it would be a good idea to go over what [Tag-Tec]plugins[/Tag-Tec] I use. You should carefully consider what plugins you are going to use and always, always test them right away. A good example of not testing plugins right away, my own Blog. I decided to change the theme I was using for my blog raymondloesch.com, I was having a hard time with the old theme and wanted a cleaner fresh look. So I changed my theme and made sure all the plugins were still activated and let it be. This morning I got up and checked my [Tag-Tec]Google Analytics[/Tag-Tec] and had ZERO Visitors. Zero Visitors, that can’t be, I thought what the heck is happening here. Time for research…

I checked my account at Google to make sure everything was still setup correctly and from what I could tell everything looked great. So the next step is to check my plugins from within my wordpress admin area, they also looked okay. I then checked from within Google Analytics and found the code that is supposed to be placed on my pages, brought up my site and viewed the source, no code. What was happening is the plugin was looking for code in the index page that I forgot to place in there. I placed the code in my new index page and problem is fixed. So always keep notes of the plugins you use and what changes you had to make to your wordpress pages to make them work. I keep an excel file with all my plugins and what changes had to be made to make them work, hopefully this system will keep me from making the same mistake over again.

So what Wordpress Plugins do I use? Here is a list of them along with a short description, If you need any help in setting them up, drop me a line.

Commentluv – Great little plugin to reward people who take the time to comment on your post’s

Add Meta Tags – Adds the Description and Keywords XHTML META tags to your blog’s front page and to each one of the posts, static pages and category archives. (Great for SEO)

Adsense-Deluxe – Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts.(Monetize yourBlog)

Better “Alexa Redirect” -This plugin is designed to improve your Alexa Rating by tunneling all your blog’s links with an Alexa Redirect Link(not proven but thanks again to Elliott, I am giving it a shot)

Akismet – Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.(Stops Spam dead – Enough said)

FeedBurner FeedSmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Get Recent Comments – Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

Google Analytics – This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog and/or your BBPress forum.(A must have to know where your traffic is coming from)

Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Show Top Commentators – Encourage more feedback and discussion from readers, by rewarding them every time they post a comment! Readers with the most comments are displayed on your Wordpress blog, with their names (linked to their website if they provided one).

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

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Tagalize It – Create tagged text by enclosing the text to be tagged in one of the following. [TAG-Tec] [Tag-Ice] and [Tag-self] also alternate tags can be inserted into the [Tag-tec “new tag”]

What Would Seth Godin Do – Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors.(great for first time visitors)

I know there are ton’s of Wordpress Plugins out there, but these are the one’s recommended to me and I found to be useful. Do you use a great Wordpress Plugin that I do not have listed here? Please comment and let me know.

Just read about a new RSS promotion site on Johnchow.com called rssHugger.com . When I hear about a new service or Web 2.0 site I like to check it out and see who else is talking about this. The usual list of Web 2.0 marketing genius’s have talked about it including [Tag-Tec]John Chow[/Tag-Tec] and [Tag-Tec]Jack Humphrey[/Tag-Tec] and when they recommend, I usually listen to these two smart marketer’s.

So what is rssHugger ?

It is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that the readers are interested in. Through the power of the internet and viral marketing, rssHugger looks to bring blog writers and blog readers closer together.

The man behind rssHugger wanted to originally charge $20 for 10 years, which would come out to $2/year but John chow in his in depth review convinced him to do this for no charge as long as you write a post about this new site. For more information about [Tag-Tec]rssHugger[/Tag-Tec], check out John Chow’s great review on this new site here.