Those who are involved with Internet marketing for any length of time would have most probably heard of article marketing.   It is a marketing strategy that involved the process of creating and distributing articles to various sites on the Internet where they will in turn be distributed to a wide range of webmasters and publishers. Continue reading “Is Article Marketing Dead? – Find Out The Shocking Truth” »

One of the main reasons why there aren’t many successful blogger making good money online (consider the fact that there are millions of blogs in the world wide web!)  is because of the lack of ability to find good ideas to blog on. As the saying goes, content is king and rightfully so but did you know that a good article begins with a good title or topic that is interesting to the reader and it pulls traffic? Continue reading “Three Easy Way To Find Killer Blog Ideas” »

My computer was running slower and slower the past few weeks. I reckoned that one of the possible reasons for the slow performance (it used to boot up much faster) is that too many files are fragmented so one of the ways to optimize and speed it up is by defragmenting and optimizing the hard disk. Continue reading “Free Article Marketing Video Training” »

Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to drive free targeted traffic to your site.  It is a time tested and proven strategy use by many to attract more people to their e-commerce sites.  There is no doubt that submitting articles helps to to create incoming links which then boost your page ranking. Continue reading “One Leading Article Marketing Blunder You Should Avoid” »

Did you know that customer retention of 5% translate to something from 30% to 80% improvement in business profits? On the same token, it is said that it takes eight times as hard to convince a new prospect to buy your products versus a repeated customer. Continue reading “Misleading Blog Post Title – Why Am I Giving Away My Free Product” »

Content generation is one of your biggest investment in terms of time and efforts. Content is king so to speak so you must make every effort to update your site with regular fresh quality postings.  Unfortunately the Internet technology also makes it more easier for people to steal information. Continue reading “Three Simple Tips To Deal With Content Theft” »

Digital content theft is rampant in the World Wide Web.  Even well established Internet marketing Gurus are using it sporadically spice up some of their websites.  Google hates plagiarism but that will not stop people from going around ‘stealing’ content from others, legally so to speak.

Google can’t take action if  there is no clear violation on any of their terms and conditions as advertiser or publisher using their marketing network , for instance Google Adsense or Adwords.  People are getting smarter, they know apart from Mighty Google there are many other source  of revenue so they are are not afraid of duplicate content. There are many affiliate products or services which you can promote without having to worry about duplicate content.

Moreover, search engines such as Bing, Yahoo or even the mighty Chinese Baidu  are not known to  penalize sites with duplicate contents.  I have done some basic research and much to my surprise some sites that spin off syndicated contents (articles that are rewritten to avoid duplicate content detection) ranks higher than the source and originator website. Sounds crazy isn’t it?

The problem is further compounded by the fact that most sites support RSS  or Atom feed. Essentially you are pushing your content to those who subscribe to your feeds and some will use autoblogging system to extract the content and publish it on their sites but leaving out the link to the source of the information. (your website page link)

SOPA
There is a bill that’s been introduced by the US government to stop online piracy act, better known as SOPA.  There is controversy surrounding this law but I guess it’s another topic for discussion.  Here is some information on how SOPA bill might affect you if it is passed by the Senate and takes effect.

RSS Footer WordPress Plug-in
Anyway, there are some tips that you can use to discourage others from grabbing your painstakingly manually crafted contents.  The first one is by installing a WordPress plug-in called RSS Footer. There are many other similar plug-ins for instance RSS Add Footer.

Configure it to add your website address to either the beginning or the end of the article feeds. Your feed contents will include the link back to your blog so if people post your feeds to their sites they will need to work harder to develop scripts to filter off the link included in your feeds. It is possible to do that but its cumbersome so not many will not bother with it.

Disable Right Click Mouse Function
This is a more of a techie geek stuffs to prevent copy and paste habit. You will need to install some scripts or perhaps even modify your blogging software to disable the right mouse click function.  I don’t quite like this approach because it can be quite annoying for some who wish to copy selected text from your articles such as links just for reference only.

Again you are in luck if you use WordPress platform for blogging. There are many free plug-ins that you can try out to prevent copy and paste functions.  Here is one such, do check out WpCopyProtect. It might not work for newer WordPress versions but you may give it a try though.

In summary, there are many ways that you can go about to discourage plagiarism. None of the methods suggested are fool proof but I guess something is better than nothing. The goal of these stop gap measures are not to eradicate digital content theft (there is no way you can prevent it) but rather to make it more difficult for them to do so.

Protect one of your biggest investment, the time and effort you put into writing great unique contents for readership. Don’t let other ride on your hard work and infringe on your digital copyright materials. Do check out my previous post on tips  to combat online piracy.

One of HostSo server to which this blog website account of mine resides on underwent some sort of restoration work and as a result it was down for over a day and a half. I noticed the problem only when I wanted to update my blog the day before yesterday and connection timeout persists. I wrote to the their helpdesk and I got the following response:

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. The server on which your account is stored is under restoration. It will take 2 to 4 hours to complete the process. Once the process is completed then your site will be online.Meanwhile your patience and co-operation is highly appreciated.

We do apologizes for all the inconvenience caused to you, The server is going for resoration ( Re-imaging ) due to primary drive failure after 2 hours. This issue may take 7 to 8 hours. Once the restoration will get finish all the services from the server will get restore fine and you should able to access the site without any problem. We are re-imaging all the data from older drive to the new drive as it is, and due to bad shape of the primary drive its taking long to copy the data over new Disk. We request you to bear with us in this situation we can understand your frustration and your business but your patience is highly appreciated.

HostSo is the first web-hosting service provider that I signed up for as far as self hosting account is concern  and it is unimaginable that I actually just go ahead without doing much research about the company. My main concern during that time was then of affordability. The Elite package seems like a pretty good deal so I just go with it.

Downtime occurrences are high and sometime your sites just get blocked by the HostSo firewall for no apparent reason. When you write to them the support staff will respond with all sorts of excuses. Even though the Elite plan comes with “Unlimited Bandwidth” the funny thing is that they disabled my account a few times under pretext that my sites are consuming too much traffic bandwidth!

I checked the forum for complaints against this company and there are plenty of them.  Quite a high number of unhappy and frustrated customers accounts  were terminated for no obvious reasons. No warnings given whatsoever, so it seems to me that this company reputation is quite awful.

Web page loading time is very slow and to make matter worse, some adults sites are also hosted on this server. Some SEO analysis sites even reported that this blog has adult themes  for which I believed were due to sharing of the same shared server.

In summary, do your homework before you purchase hosting from any web hosting service provider. Cheaper doesn’t necessary translate to better service quality. Don’t believe the numbers and information  that you see on the company website. Take some time to research the company, check for complains, reviews and gather as much information as you can.

Choosing right best web hosting service provider for your online business is not trivial. You need to consider various aspects such as the amount of traffic that your site expect to generate, the type of software and the amount of processing power that the scripts will need, service of quality, downtime frequency and etc.

It’s  better to be safe then to be sorry later. Do check out my previous article on essential requirements for web-hosting service provider. There’s another good article that I’ve come across  on how to choose the right web-hosting service provider.  All your hard work and efforts to build a successful online business may go to naught if you are not careful with whom you signed up with.

Anyway I am glad my blog is now back online.   There are things that I will do, notably to back up all my files just in case something crops up again. One could never predict when HostSo.com server  is going to run into problem again or when they are going to terminate customer account.

Here’s the link to a free powerful lightweight WordPress autoblogging plugin. I have not tested it, but anyway if you are contemplating on whether to check out any autoblog software, this is a good one to start with. I know there are many other similar tools but most of them are just plain crappy

As the saying goes, content is king and this is certainly the case with business blogging.   People are attracted to blogs with fresh quality and interesting contents.  The challenge though is that sometimes it is hard to keep the momentum going, to prepare articles and news for posting. It takes time and effort to create good quality contents for blogging readership.

With recent Google Panda update, there are talks and discussions that autoblogging is dead and a thing of the past. Is that truly the case?  There is no doubt in my mind that manual article posting beats autoblogging anytime of the day but that does not imply you can’t or shouldn’t consider such automation .Opponents of autoblogging claimed that you risk getting your blogs penalize by mighty Google for duplicate contents.

Is Autoblogging Still Relevant?
The way I see it, pulling contents from other websites still has its use in today’s blogging world. You just need to work a little bit more smarter and use this strategy with caution.  don’t treat it as a means to free you from spending time to maintain your weblog. Instead of configuring it once to pull in feeds and RSS contents from other sites to post to  your blog directly, you should take some time choose which of the imported contents you wish to post at a later date and then mix it with your opinion or articles.

For instance, lets say you decided to pull in feeds content on ‘How to tame a Pitpull dog’ to post on your site. You schedule it to be published on say 5 days later. Take some time to read the content and then figure out if there are any questions that are worth asking. For instance, at the end of the imported content, you can add the statement ‘is it worth to rear a Pitbull dog anyway and what is the primary reason that you should consider one?

Citation And Reference
Contrary to what many assumed, any articles and information that you post in your site without any citation or links to relevant information from other authoritative sites  or any other sources (as quotes or reference) lacks credibility.  During my university days, we were taught to include citation and references to remarks or ideas that we expound in our thesis.

In the same way Google value any sites that provide rich content even if it is syndicated articles so long as you include the source of the information as well additional information of your own relevant to the topics under discussion. Well, don’t get me wrong that all your posts should have citation or links to other sites, the point I am trying to drive at is that duplicate content is fine so long as you do not infringe on copyrights and that your post add value to the readers.

You may also wonder what good does it bring if you have to manually edit the imported articles for after all the whole idea behind autoblogging is that it should free you from such tasks and that it should auto post contents indefinitely after it is setup. Well it depends on what your goals and intentions are.

Google Page Rank
If you just want to build up dozens of even hundreds of autoblogs to earn some Google Adsense income without regards for the Google page rank than by all means go ahead. If you are concern about page ranking factors than you should play by a different rule, implement some sort of hybrid posting of unique articles and imported contents.

In summary, autoblogging is still relevant today. Provide good quality contents and avoid posting of articles  that may be construed as digital content theft. Do not try to spin the imported articles because the search engines are getting smarter and most are able to detect it from a mile!.

Plagiarism is rampant in the Internet. Content theft is a serious problem. It takes time and efforts to produce original unique content but all it takes is mere seconds to steal someone else unique content to put on another site. (‘Stealing’ or plagiarizing in the sense that the source of the content such as the author bylines or link to the original content is intentionally left out)

Autoblog and scraper sites are the main culprits. Such sites are configured to scan through the Internet for contents based on specific keywords and phrases. The problem is further compounded if you have RSS feeds on your site. It allows others to easily access your feeds through RSS readers.

With the number of websites increasing daily, it takes a lot of time to locate sites that plagiarize your contents. Fret not; here are two powerful tips to help you easily patrol the World Wide Web for plagiarism to prevent content theft.

Google Alert is the mighty search engine toolbox that you can turn to become your round the clock twenty four hours duty policeman to search the Internet for plagiarism. This is how you can do it.

Go the http://www.google.com/alerts and type in the search query. I would suggest you put in keywords or phrases specific to the content that you are monitoring. For instance, you can include the title of your article as the search query.

I would also suggest you set the ‘How many’ field to “Only the best results” in order to match the closest results that is similar to your search query. Once you are done with that you can sit back and wait for the alert.

Visit the sites to confirm if it is truly plagiarism or not. Sometime those Autoblogs are configured to spin the contents imported from your site. Replacing of words and phrases with other similar words still constitute violation of copy right content.

You can get more information on how to use Google Alert for content monitoring. This is a great piece of utility which no other online tools able to match. You can use this service for other purposes such as to spy on your competitors, monitor trends and etc.

When in doubt, you can use a free service called plagiarism checker at http://www.plagiarismchecker.com/ to validate the contents. So you see, Google toolbox is very useful and you should make use of it.

Another method to make it difficult for those copycats to steal your content is by embedding your homepage link into the article itself. If doing so seems kind of awkward, you can always arrange your article in such ways to deep link to other pages. Try not to include your homepage or website link at the end of the article because it is easier for those scrapers and Autoblog to filter off such signature.