Everyone has heard of Adsense. It is one of the “oldest” and most recognized forms of website advertising on the internet. Created by Google and used by most websites, many people just sign up for Adsense and install the code without thinking about it. If you have decided to sell some space on your website to advertisers, you might want to take a moment and ask yourself: Is Adsense Good for Me?

Adsense is easy to use and easy to understand and that is one of the reasons it is popular. You put the code on your website and Google gives you a percentage of the money they make when people click on the ads that you display. Simple right? Yes and no. Adsense has a bunch of very strict rules and it is very easy to get banned from the program. In fact, some of the basic methods of website promotions (traffic exchange programs, etc) will get you banned from the program for click fraud!

Website advertising is becoming more and more accepted and there are plenty of advertising alternatives to Adsense if you aren’t thrilled with the idea of that program. Yahoo and Amazon both have advertising programs. If you are putting advertising on a blog, BlogAds, Text Link Ads, and BlogHer all offer reliable advertising services.

You can also sell advertising as an independent agent, that way you won’t have to split the revenue with anyone!

Before you sign up for Adsense, ask yourself what you want to accomplish with your advertising. Do you want to pay for your hosting? Do you want control over the ads? Do you want advertising to be your sole source of income? Make sure you have answers to these questions before you decide whether or not Adsense is good for you!

6 days and no post here.. I don’t know how these 6 days elapsed.. I am very lazy lately and I am wasting too much time on other fun activities. Recently I was asked for some Blogger themes by some friends of mine so I decided to make a list and post it here for everyone. So here it is :

Wordpress themes :

• WpThemesFree
• Wordpress.Org
• Weblog Tools Connection
• Alex King
• Free Wordpress Themes
• FreeWpThemes
• Top Wordpress Themes
• WpThemespot

Blogger themes :

• Btemplates
• Blog Flux
• Blogger Templates
• Blogger Themes
• Free Templates
• Final Sense

That’s all. Enjoy!

I know you saw the banners on the sidebar. Yes, I am trying to make some money from this blog to pay for contests and other expenses of this blog. Our main advertiser is Instant Coding a XHTML/CSS coding service that coded this theme too and they are very good and I really recommend them and this not because they are paying for advertising on my blog.

I am offering two advertising options , 125×125 banners on the sidebar and paid reviews. The prices are very good in my opinion and the people that advertised here were very satisfied. For more informations you can check advertising page.

Also I am interested in getting some guest blogging posts so if you are interested contact me. Lately I was pretty busy so this is why I stopped posting one post each day anyway I’ll try to post more.

Tomorrow I will post a new Good Blog – Bad Blog serial so stay tuned!

When it comes to building a blog or any site, most people start with the domain name and go from there. The better way to approach the choosing of your domain name is to decide what your website should be about and then work on a domain name that matches the subject matter.

Of course, more often than not, the perfect domain name will already be taken!

Here are a few tips to help you choose that perfect domain name for your website without having to compromise (much):

1. Consider buying a .net or a .org domain name. Often .net and .org are cheaper than .com but just as respectable.

2. Spell things correctly whenever you can. While a site named MiOpinyonz might be okay for a teenager’s website, it is not okay for a person trying to set up a serious political site. In fact, the use of the letter “z” in place of “s” is generally seen as unprofessional unless you are putting together a site for a much younger audience.

3. Get out that Thesaurus and find some synonyms. “GoodCats” might be taken but “GreatFelines” still works for the cause and means the same thing (though, admittedly it sounds a little more porny than “goodcats”).

4. Keep your audience in mind. Going with the cat theme from tip 3, a site about cats might not fare well when named “Pretty Kitties” or “the Cat House.” Beware of the unintentional innuendo.

5. Keep it short whenever possible. While “thisismyperfectdomainname.com” is certainly easy to remember, “perfectname.com” is easier to type.

6. (and most important) Never ever forget what your website is about! Would you name a site about politics “windowshades.org”? No. Would you name a site about crafts “househunting.com”? No. You want to make sure your domain name reflects what your site is about!

Good luck!

First I’ll talk about april contest. This new contest I am starting will have more prizes. In cash I will start with 25 USD for first place and 20 USD for the second. First place will also get a 125×125 banner on this blog. I will get more prizes from more people, I’ll try to find more sponsors. If anyone is interested in offering something for this contest please contact me.

The rules :

• The contest started on 1st of April and will end on 1st of May

• Prizes will be updated until the end of the contest

• Each week the best comment will get a prize of 10$

• You must comment only this month’s posts

• Commentators must be subscribed to Perfect Blogging Rss Feed

Later edited: I added a new rule (the last one) when I woke up at 4:11 PM because I couldn’t sleep. I will also add few more rules soon.. you can come with suggestions too. That’s all. I will get back to sleep (at least try).

Good luck eveyone and keep commenting!

It’s 00:17 here.. I’m very tired and very sleepy after working the whole day so I decided to end the contest. The winners are :

1st place – Hafiz Dhanani

2nd place – Andrew Pavelski

Congratulations to the winners! To get your money contact me with your paypal email. The comments will be restarted soon and the April contest will start. I will post tomorrow the new prizes and the new rules. Because there will be new rules.

Congratulations again to the winners and enjoy!

While it is possible to create quite a name for yourself by blogging, the truth is this: it can take a lot of time for that name to be created. It is very rare that a blog becomes an overnight sensation. This is why so many bloggers probably pack it in after a month. 

Creating a blog takes seconds. A good blog design can take a little bit longer. Creating a single post takes…well, that takes as long as it takes. Building a reputation, however, can take months or even years. This is what many people do not count on when they start a blog. The blog world is becoming saturated with “one hit wonders,” or people who want to put together a page in hopes of bringing in scads of passive income. What they do not realize is that nobody is going to visit these pages unless they put some work into them.

Other bloggers quit because they think that blogging is easy. While blogging can certainly be fun, and that enjoyment can take a lot of the irritation out of doing it—blogging is hard work; especially if you have chosen a blog topic that does not see a lot of action. The truth is that while you might be very passionate about tree frogs, and while there is research being done on tree frogs, up to date and new information might become hard to find. 

Finally, one of the biggest reasons that most bloggers give up after a month is this: time. Building a successful blog and keeping it running can take up quite a bit of your time. If you are blogging simply as a hobby, you might begin to resent the amount of time it takes to create a successful blog. Many people give up because they weren’t ready for the time commitment to running a successful blog. 

If you are thinking about starting a blog, make sure that you are ready to commit to it. This makes blogging sound like something huge and serious which, in many cases, it isn’t. If you want to be successful, however, and create a site whose readership extends beyond your family members, you have to be ready for the commitment…and be sure that you are blogging for the right reasons. There is nothing wrong with blogging for fun, in fact, we highly recommend it. If you want to blog professionally, however, make sure you understand what you are getting yourself into.

An important part of creating any business or website (or blog, which is what I am specifically going to be talking about) is establishing a brand behind it.

What is a brand? It is a combination of things which resemble your site/business/blog. This brand should be unique so that people can recognize your blog easily. In this day, with literally millions of blogs out there, it is very important to stand out so that you don’t get “lost in the crowds.” Along with helping your blog stand out, creating a good brand will help visitors remember your site and it will be more likely for them to return.

There are several factors which play into creating a successful brand. From picking a catchy name, to making slogans and logos, to choosing color themes, it really can be overwhelming at times. That is why I have decided to dedicate a few posts (which should be appearing over the next few days) to help you start and promote your brand, one step at a time.

For those non-bloggers reading this: Although I will be writing specifically towards bloggers this information may still be useful to you if you have a business or a website; you may just have to apply and twist things a little bit to fit your situation, so you may still want to stay tuned.

Still doubting the power of brands? Just look at these pictures and if you can tell what any/most of them are then that is thanks to successful branding.

What do you think?

What am I talking about when I say “set them to achieve them”? I am talking about goals. Goals are another very important part of achieving success, whether it be in blogging or in anything else. Without goals you have nothing to look forward to, nothing to work for. If you have nothing to work for, then why work at all? As I wrote about in my post keys to success, motivation is needed to achieve success. Goals can be a great form of motivation because they push you towards something. They are perhaps the greatest of motivators because they should be based on your desires and achieving your desires should be important to you.

Deciding to create goals is only the first step in achieving success. Once you have decided that you want to have goals it is time to actually set some. When setting goals there are a couple of things to remember. First, remember to aim for something that you want (and are willing to work at). Don’t pick something that you don’t really care about because chances are you won’t achieve the goal. Also, don’t aim too low or be afraid to fail. There is no harm in failing because in reality all successful people have failed at some time. By setting your goals too low, you are just demeaning your abilities by not giving them a chance to show what they can do. Don’t be afraid to challenge yourself because what have you got to lose if you don’t achieve your goal in time? Nothing, absolutely nothing because no one else has to know your goals if you don’t want them to. Also, if you do challenge yourself, you are more likely to work harder to achieve the goal and if you do accomplish it, it will be much more rewarding compared to accomplishing a goal which you absolutely knew you could do.

Notice that in the last paragraph I asked a question about achieving your goal in time. With this I lead you to my next point in setting goals: make sure you set a deadline. Deadlines further push you to work with more rigor. Without deadlines you may get lazy and stop working at your goal by thinking something like “I have plenty of time, I’ll work on it later”. And when “later” comes your may think the same thing again until it turns into an endless loop of doing nothing and achieving nothing.

I constantly try to set goals and achieve them. Some goals are long term while others are over a shorter period of time. You should have both and hopefully your short term goals will help you achieve your long term ones.

Hopefully this helped you and you will use some of the advice I offered (or maybe you already do). Either way, remember the importance of goals and also remember that failing to achieve your goals is no need to get discouraged. Just get back up and try again and I am sure you will achieve them someday.

I have had these two plugins for a couple of weeks now and they are both ways to help fight the dreaded duplicate content penalties. For those of you who don’t know, search
engines (particularly Google, which people tend to worry about the most) don’t like duplicate content (meaning similar or same content) on multiple web pages. In fact, they often penalize sites and their rankings could suffer because of duplicate content penalties (which is why it is not a good idea to just copy wikipedia pages into your site).

Duplicate content can especially be a problem with blogs because of category pages, archive pages, and similar pages which have the same posts on them. Even slight variations in your url can lead to duplicate content penalties because search engines see each url as separate.

For example, http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com are viewed seperately and they may be indexed by a search engine separately. Of course you don’t want this either because it will lead to duplicate content penalties. Search engines may not realize that it is just a different way to sort the same information (or write the url) and they may penalize your site in their rankings. Its horrible, I know, but don’t worry there are ways to fight it.

This is where the two plugins come into play. The first plugin is called the “enforce www plugin”. What it does is pretty straight forward, you can probably already guess it from just hearing the name. It allows you to choose whether you want the www to show or not and it redirects links to your preference. This way only your preference will get indexed,
which means no duplicate content penalties! It also strips off the index.php from the end of urls (which is just another variation in your url that may cause problems). It is very simple to install and use and I recommend it to everyone.

The second plugin I have tells search engines not to index certain pages (such as archive and category pages) that have the same content as other pages which you do want indexed. It is called the “Duplicate Content Cure for Wordpress”. If you do want your category pages indexed, you can also turn it on (instructions on how to do this are on the
download page, located below).

So check them out, they are both easy to install so don’t worry about
that. You can grab them here: enforce www and wordpress duplicate content