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I am sorry, I have had to remove the comments facility from this site until I can work out a way to protect it from automated registrations. These are carried out by hackers, who then proceed to upload spam links or, even worse, malicious software, on to the site. I only discovered this today and since then I have been through a fast learning curve to fnd out what ‘Badware’ means. As I was browsing through my site stats this morning I noticed several searches for specific pages and categories within my site. For example, one search showed
“http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Abrilliant4biz.com%20pr”
That search brought up a post from last October, plus a warning from Google that “visiting this web site may harm your computer”! I was horrified, to say the least. I was a victim of spam links a few months ago when spammers managed to load up reams of porn links on to some html pages, but I thought my Wordpress posts and pages were reasonably secure. Only one blog post was hacked, but the category and monthly archive containing that post are also carrying a Google Health warning at the moment. Now I will have to search around for a suitable plugin to allow legitimate comments to be posted without giving the spammers and hackers a way in.
That was not the case - strange new users were registering them on the site and although I deleted them as soon as I saw them, they still had time to do their worst. The reason for this dilemma is that Wordpress only allows two options in its settings - either “anyone can register themselves” or “users must be registered and logged in to comment”

These are the actions I have taken to restore my website to its former good standing:

1. I visited Google Webmaster Tools, where the site is registered, and followed their guide to checking for malware on my site. The good news is that Google had NOT found any harmful software on its last two visits. I then put in a request for the site to be reconsidered.

2. I checked out the guides at the stop badware site - which really was not very helpful for the average webmaster - prbably very easy for hackers to understand, but the content did not tell me how to identify Trojans or malicious software on my site

3. I visited badneighborhood.com, which has a very useful free tool to scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas. All you do is type in the URL of the home page and the results appear within 90 seconds. These will flag up any sites that could possibly be involved in search engine spamming. You may not be aware of these sites: for example, you could link to a respectable site but they may have links with a site involved in the adult or pharmaceutical fields, and thus harm your website’s position. I am pleased to say my site got a clean bill of health at Bad Neighborhood to day.
In the meantime if you are one of the regular commenters please email me (comments@brilliant4biz.com) and I will send you a user name and password.

I have been doing a lot of blogging this weekend to get a new domain established, I usually manage to get a new site indexed in Google within ten days. The new domain was registered on Thursday and I started uploading new posts on the same day.  So if it appears in the index by next weekend I will be happy. Then I will start to get some good traffic from the search engines and I should be able to use the domain to start blogging for money very soon. I ’stumbled’ one of the posts at StumbleUpon! and that produced more than fifty visitors in an hour. But I find that most Stumblers do not stay on the site very long as they are not really targeted to the niche of every page that they stumble. So traffic from Stumbleupon is not always quality traffic. Read more »

If you are using Wordpress on your own server or your web host’s server, then you have probably upgraded recently to Wordpress Version 2.5. I am generally pleased with this upgrade so far, and it appears to work well with my existing plugins - except the Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin. When I reviewed this Plugin for Wordpress last Autumn I was happy with its performance but then there were several mini upgrades of Wordpress software that were incompatible with this plugin. The author of the Plugin offered some extra code on her website but when I tried to use this my sudebar content disappeared with a ‘parse error’ message. Unfortunately Lucia, the writer of the plugin, has not updated her blog for several months now and the Plugin no longer serves to Hide Sponsored Categories. So there appears to be no ongoing support for the plugin. For the moment I have deactivated it until I find another. When I searched for more plugins to serve this purpose, one of the top results was a link to my own blog post - I must be doing something right, then!

Just to remind you of the reason for using this plugin: many bloggers - like me - use lots of different categories for their blog posts, as a kind of filing system. Readers of the blog really want to see the most interesting categories and this plugin promised the facility of keeping outdated or less interesting categories out of teh sidebar list.

Update - 15 June.  The Hide Sponsored Categories Plugin is no longer being supported and is not compatible with the most recent Wordpress software updates so I have removed it from my Wordpress Dashboard.

This article is not intended to give you the newbies course about hosting, installing a blog on your domain and etc. It will give you some serious advice on your blog business. Bad blogging habits are easy to get into, and one of the worst is to leave your ‘About’ page unchanged. You know the page: it is provided by Wordpress as standard and a whole host of bloggers leave it unchanged. Why they do this is known only to them, because this is the first page that a large number of first-time visitors to a blog check out, and the reason why many of them leave without looking further. Read more »

I have two blogs that feature content where the readers are likely to want to buy items from eBay. One is a guide to Designer Handbags, and the other gives help for iPod users who have lost their iTunes. I have seen plenty of sites and blogs displaying live eBay auction listings so I decided to do the same: after all, it should be easy, I thought. I then spent hours going round in circles through Commission Junction and the eBay Developers’ site. Every options seemed to require programming knowledge that was way beyond my experience. I decided I had to ask for help. The developers’ forum was pretty good, and several people offered helpful ideas for installing eBay listings simply on my blogs. As a result I have now downloaded and installed the phpBayLite plugin which adds eBay Auction listings to any php enabled site - like a Wordpress Blog - with just a few lines of code.

Once the plugin is installed you get a new new button that shows on the button panel as “pBL”, and you need to click on that for each post then insert the relevant keywords. This is simpler than installing convoluted code: it is displaying well, although so far it is only showing one item at a time.

I noticed the latest Wordpress upgrade was available on my server this weekend, it is really easy to get the latest version at Hostgator, my web host, with single click installation. So I installed version 2.3.1 of Wordpress on all my sites and carried on blogging. But I started to run into some problems - every time I wrote a new blog post or saved a post I got an error message:

(WordPress database error: [Table 'xxxxxx_wrdp5.wp_post2cat' doesn't exist]
SELECT cat_ID AS ID, MAX(post_modified) AS last_mod FROM `wp_posts` p LEFT JOIN `wp_post2cat` pc ON p.ID = pc.post_id LEFT JOIN `wp_categories` c ON pc.category_id = c.cat_ID WHERE post_status = ‘publish’ GROUP BY cat_ID

Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxxx/public_html/budget-travel/wp-includes/wp-db.php:160) in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/budget-travel/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 391)

My posts were still being saved but this error message meant that I had to click on the ‘back’ key to check, and this slowed me down when writing or editing blog posts. Up till now I had not had any trouble using or installing the updates of Wordpress, so I decided to find out if anyone else was having the same problems. Sure enough I found a thread on the subject of Wordpress 2.3.1 error messages at the Wordpress.org forum. Apparently the problem can be caused by plugins that are incompatible with the latest Wordpress upgrade.

I was using the following plugins on my Wordpress Blogs to improve search engine optimisation and site visibility:

• Adsense Injection
• Akismet - this is auto installed on my dashboard
• AllinOneSEO Pack 1.3.9
• FeedBurner FeedSmith 2.2
• Google XML Sitemaps 3.0.2.1
• Text Link Ads 3.0.6
• Ultimate Tag Warrior 1.3

Finding out which plugin was causing the trouble was really a process of elimination. The contributors to the forum discussion were not all using the same plugins as me, so this is how I decided to check: I just deactivated each plugin in turn to narrow down the list. I found two of the plugins were incompatible at the time - Allinone SEO Pack Plugin and the Google XML Sitemaps GeneratorPlugin. I visited the download sites of the plugin developers, and soon found they had developed updates that I could download and install. Problem sorted: I am still having problems with the TextLink Ads plugin, though, but that is another blog post.

If you have decided to move your blog from Blogger to Wordpress, congratulations - using Wordpress blogging software for a blog hosted on your own domain is the top choice for anyone who is serious about making money from blogging. This does not mean a wordpress.com blog, please understand that there is a big difference. If you set up a blog at Wordpress.com the situation is really very similar to Blogger - you get free use of a space on THEIR domains and they can shut you down if you break the rules. One of the main rules at Wordpress.com is that you cannot publish sponsored blog posts, so a blogger who wants to make money from writing paid reviews on their blog needs to use Wordpress blog publishing system on your web host control panel. The good news is that major web hosting companies include the latest version of Wordpress in your hosting package at no extra cost.

If you have spent a lot of time and effort writing posts on your existing Blogger Blogspot blog, then you will probably want to take them with you and it is fairly simple to do this.

Go to your Wordpress dashboard and click on to ‘manage’ - you will then see six different options, and one of these is ‘import’. Click on this and you will see the following information:

“If you have posts or comments in another system, WordPress can import those into this blog. To get started, choose a system to import from below:”

The first name on the list is ‘Blogger’. Click on this and you will see the following:

“Howdy! This importer allows you to import posts and comments from your Blogger account into your WordPress blog.

To use this importer, you must have a Google account, an upgraded (New, was Beta) blog, and it must be on blogspot or a custom domain”

Then you will be asked to authorise access to your blogger account and your Wordpress blog publisher will bring all your existing blog posts across to your new domain.

Note: once you are happy with the published posts on your new blog it is a good idea to delete the existing posts from the old blog or you could be penalised for duplicate content. If you are no longer using the old Blogspot blog you can insert a redirect code to send visitors to your new domain. This is pretty easy to do, simply place the following code on your exisiting Blogger template -

“<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV=”refresh” content=”3;URL=http://www.yourdomain.com”>
<TITLE>This Blog has moved!</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P>This Blog has moved! You will be re-directed to our new site in 3 Seconds</p>
<P>If your browser does not redirect you, click <A href=”http://www.yourdomain.com”>here</A> to go to the new Blog</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>”

I got this tip from from Tay at superbloggingtips, it is a simple plugin for your Wordpress blog that does all the search engine optimization (SEO) work for your blog in a couple of simple steps, and will help you make more money blogging. If you do not know much about SEO, no need to worry: the plugin asks you a few simple questions and you include your information in boxes on the ‘options’ page once the plugin is installed. If you are a complete newbie to SEO then you can download this excellent free ebook, SEO Made Easy, that will give you a good understanding of search engine optimization. Maybe you think that SEO sounds a bit geeky? Well there is nothing geeky in getting lots of free traffic from the search engines and Making Money From Your Blog!

The plugin sets up all the key on-page ranking factors. For me the cleverest part is the way it deals with titles. The SEO plugin for Wordpress changes all page or post titles from the Wordpress default style, which is not search engine friendly as it starts with the main blog title. So every page has the same initial title. The plugin puts your post or page title first when seen through a browser bar. This is a handy tool - I spent ages changing the Wordpress code manually to do this, and now I find it is available in a simple plugin. Remember, when you download this plugin: it can seriously improve the money you make from blogging.

I found a useful plugin for hosted Wordpress Blogs today, developed by Lucia over at Big Bucks Blogger. The plugin enables you to hide any or all of your post categories, in-post, in the sidebar list or in the blog archives. This plugin is easy to install - just upload to the wp-content folder, ‘plugins’ on your web host control panel. Then log in to your Wordpress blog to activate the plugin in one click of the mouse. Then under ‘options’ you can choose which categories your blog visitors will see. This plugin is also useful to prevent your sidebar becoming clogged up with hundreds of categories that do not help your visitors find the posts they want to read. Read more »