One of the worries of site owners is whether duplicate contents will affect your site ranking on search engines, especially Google or will you get penalized by Google that brings negative impact to your site’s position in search results.

Fortunately, the recent comments by Google’s Matt Cutts says that scrapped content even has positive impact as scrapped site will normally have a link back to the original site or blog which will bring positive impact. And Google is good enough to identify which site has the original contents. Watch the video below.

But if you’ve been experiencing your site content is being scraped by many other sites or blogs, you’d have noticed some of them do NOT provide a link back to your original blog post or site. But you can have a little trick in your blog post to have these scraped sites to always have a backlink to your site by using one of the following two methods.

1. Always have internal link back to your older blog posts, category or tag When composing a new blog post, always have a few backlinks to your old blog posts, category or tag of blog posts that are relevant. Content scrappers will normally just copy everything, so once you have internal backlinks to your old blog posts, categories and tags, the backlinks will also appear on copied blog post on the scraped site.

2. Modify you RSS feed to always have the blog permanent URL stay at the bottom of each blog post If you use Wordpress, you can do this by modifying the file wp-includes/feed-rss2.php. Find where <content:encoded>…..<content:encoded> is and add in your site’s signature and also a hyperlink back to your original blog post such as follows:

After doing so, every new blog post will have the permanent link at the bottom on your RSS feed. And content scraper will normally extract your content from RSS feed and most of the time they will copy everything including the permanent link at the bottom of your blog post. But the downside is this method, a Wordpress upgrade will replace the wp-includes/feed-rss2.php, which you’ll need to edit the file again and put in the above. Feel free to let me know here if you have some other better ways of doing it.

Since Twitter is a super hot hot hot microblogging service, it’s no doubt that you can make more money from it than making money from a conventional blog. Now, JohnChow.com has shown you how you can register for a Sponsored Tweets (SponsoredTweets.com) account and what the basic requirements that you need to get advertisers to buy sponsored Tweets from you and let you make more money from the advertisers.

Sponsored Tweets in short is almost like PayPerPost or ReviewMe in the past which Advertisers paid Bloggers to write sponsored blog posts or reviews. Instead of Blog Post, Sponsored Tweets allows Advertisers to sponsor you to write micro-blog messages. Amazingly, a sponsored Tweeter can make around $300 to $7,500 an hour, which is really huge huge amount of money. And of course, you will need to meet a number of requirements in order to get more advertisers to buy Tweets from you. The basic things are lots of followers, and high influentiality, I hereby summarize the 10 points listed on JohnChow.com, which you need to get ready to be a successful Twitter money maker.

1. Experience, with a Twitter account at least 120 days old You must have an account at least 120 days old as advertisers will not order Tweets from accounts younger than that.

2. Have a complete Twitter profile With complete info on your Twitter profile telling who you’re. Best you have your photos uploaded.

3. Add Sponsored Tweets to your advertise page Have an advertise page and tells the advertisers that you accept Sponsored Tweets.

4. Show Tweets click stat Publish your tweet click stat, so advertisers know that your followers click on your Tweets. Hootsuite.com is the online tool allows you to measure Tweet clicks

5. Clickwatch Clickwatch is a feature in the Sponsored Tweets that allows advertisers to track the performance of Tweeters.

6. Monitor competition You have to monitor if your paid Tweet price is too high or too low and adjust accordingly.

7. Good followers to friends ratio. You must have a high Ratio number of followers to the people you follow. The higher number shows you have followers who’re simply wanna listen to you. (Some can use bots to follow others and in return to get back with their followings.)

8. Klout scoreSign up for Klout to measure Klout score, which is the measurement of how influential you’re in the Twittersphere.

9. Build real influence – You must work on your Twitter account, don’t simply use bot to follow and unfollow a big list. It must be genuine followers then only it’s worth for Advertisers to buy Tweets from you.

10. Apply for celebrity status Sponsored Tweets show the big stars or celebrities first when advertisers search for tweeters to advertise with!

Read more:10 tips to make more money from Sponsored Tweets

Bing is definitely a rising star, although it’s still far behind Google. But it’s catching up close to Yahoo. The most recent search figures released by Nielsen, Bing has managed to capture a total of 10.7% US searches in August 2009. This is a storing figure considering Bing is a new born, making Bing as one of the top 10 fastest growing search engines. Bing is almost ready to overtake Yahoo, which has dropped 4.2% to a total of only 16% of total US searches. Attached below show the full figures of the top 10 search engines. Google still stays at the top, capturing a total of 64.6%.

BTW, How to get your Blog or website into BING?

If you have lots of original and unique contents and consistently update your blog, it shall get on BING pretty soon. And it’s best to maintain a sitemap for your website or blog. If your blog runs Wordpress, then you just need to have the XML Sitemap Generator plugin, which it generates sitemap for any new contents or blog posts added and also includes BING/MSN in its notification/PING list once new contents added and a new sitemap is generated. And similarly, you can check out if your new blog posts have been included in Bing by typing “site:yourwebsite.com” on the Bing search box.

source

There are a number of reasons that why you wanna get your blog with more search engine traffic

1. Survey has shown that most visitors come from search engines have higher tendency to buy or commit a sale or service on your blog.

2. If your blog carries some advertisements such as Google Adsense and Chitika Premium, visitors come from search engines will also tend to click more on the ads on your blog than what the returned visitors, frequent readers or those coming from social networking sites will do.

3. If you tend to acquire new customers or their email addresses (which can then use as follow-up and send them your promotions and products.) Visitors come from search engines also have higher tendency to commit the registration and giving you their emails. As visitors search on search engines and then come to your blog are carrying a hope. And if your blog offers something such as newsletter that can provide what they want, of course they will register their emails.

Then, How To Get More Search Engine Visitors/Traffic?

Basically, there are simply only two ways to get more search engine visitors: 1) You pay search engine advertisement network, such as Google Adwords, which displays your ads at the right hand side of the Google searched results. And you pay at a per click cost, when someone clicks on the ads. Please note popular keywords could easily burn you $20 per click, if you wanna have hundred clicks per day that may convert only 10-20% (or even lower) into sales, it’ll burn your pocket of at least $2,000 per day.

2) Therefore, in order to get more visitors from search engines, you have to work on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your blog, and once you’ve done so, you must also continue to add more quality contents yo your blog. SEO ready is the first essential thing to get your blog more friendly, easily and quickly indexable by the search engines. If you’re on a Wordpress blog, you just need the two Wordpress plugins below and a simple setting that will get your blog more SEO ready.

The two Wordpress plugins are

1. All-In-One SEO pack – The All-in-1 seo pack can be downloaded here, which is a plugin that adds the appropriate page title (within the pair), meta tag description and keywords (i.e and respectively) that are loved by search engines including Google, Yahoo, Bing (MSN) and Ask.com etc.

2. Google XML SiteMap – The Google XML Sitemap plugin for Wordpress can be downloaded here, it lets your blog generate a new sitemap in XML format and also notifies the search engines’ crawlers for the pick-up of this new sitemap, whenever a new content is updated or added to your blog. If you wanna get indexed by Google as soon as possible, get this Google XML SiteMap plugin for your blog, and register for an account in Google Webmaster Tools, and submit your sitemap there. Your blog shall appear in Google index in a few days’ time. You can verify by typing site:yoursite.com in Google search box.

The one setting

The one setting that you need is to get the permanent URL of your blog post to be search-engine friendly. This can easily be done by going to your Blog’s Setting -> Permalinks -> Custom Settings – use custom, and lets the URL of your blog post is made up by the post title and a simple structure. e.g. /articles/%postname%/. Read more about it: SEO ready plugins for Wordpress blog

After you’ve got these three basic things done for your blog, you must then continue to add in quality contents to your blog then you will have more blog posts or pages indexed by the search engines, which will then bring you more you more traffic.

1. Shall I start with a self-hosted blog or (publically) hosted blog? – Okay if this is the first question in mind, you may have little knowledge about what self-hosted and publically-hosted blog are all about. Self-hosted blog means you sign-up or buy a hosting space for your blog, and you register your own domain for it. For example, you will have your blog URL as www.myfirstblog.com. A publically hosted blog is provided by blogging services, such as Google Blogspot (Blogger) or Wordpress.com, which you can sign up for a free account and start blogging there. The benefits of each will be detailed in the next two questions.

2. What is the benefit of a self-hosted blog? – Of course, if the little money that may cost about a few hundred in RM a year is not an issue for you, then you shall consider the self-hosted blog. Self-hosted blog gives you the flexibility of having your own domain, hosting space and the most important is you can easily access to any webpages, which allows you to highly customize your own web templates for future expansion. For example, if you intend to bring your blog to a stage which it’s able to start making money online, you shall consider to start with a self-hosted blog if the initial startup little investment and your own technical know-how is not an issue. As self-hosted blog gives you freedom of customizing your own blog template, which you can easily add in advertisements for making money online.

3. What is the benefit of a hosted blog? – Of course, it’s free, and you can start anytime without dealing with too much technical hassle. But of course, you’ll start with a sub-domain for a free account e.g ketyung.blogspot.com, myfirstblog.wordpress.com etc instead of on your own domain. But these days, services like Blogger and Wordpress.com also offer your own domain by charging you a fee. As mentioned a hosted blog, may give you some inflexibility for customizing your blog templates for adding advertisement or some other necessary expansions.

4. What blogging platform or software shall I use for my own self-hosted blog ? – Of course , the answer will be Wordpress, which can be downloaded from Wordpress.org. Why Wordpress? As it’s free and open source! Of course, if you have little budget then you could some others like MovableType etc. For Wordpress, the little downside is since it’s opensource, you’ll need to have some technical knowledge of handling PHP and MySQL database, and you’ll have to keep yourself following it for an update version, since it’s one of the most hackable software due to its openness and freely to use.

5. Where to find a good hosting for my blog? – Okay, if you decided to have a self-hosted blog, then you’ll surely need to find a hosting space for your blog. Nowadays, you can find shared hosting as low as USD $8 per month or about USD $100 a year, which is equivalent to RM350 per year. So, it’s just about RM30 a month which is very much cheaper than renting a shop locally to start selling goods.

So, the question is where to find a good hosting? Okay, I’ll definitely tell you to maintain the cost as low as possible, if your main point is to probably make some money online a couple of months later. For a start, I recommend to go for a shared hosting. Please do NOT be misled by others that you’d need a dedicated hosting which would cost you more than USD $150 a month. If you expect a pretty low traffic of less than 3,000 unique visitors a day for the initial few years, then a shared hosting shall do well. And I strongly recommend BlueHost.com. I’ve used Bluehost.com for a couple of years, they offer only shared hosting that costs only about USD$107 per year (if you sign up only for a year and pay yearly) and costs less about USD $90+ a year if you sign up for more than a year.

With only about $100 a year, you’ll get 300GB space, with MySQL databases, unlimited bandwidth and transfer, which is definitely suitable for a Wordpress-powered self-hosted blog. My Gadget Blog is being hosted on Bluehost.com for years, and I’m getting a unique daily visitor of 3,000+ and total pageview of 120,000 per month, has NO problem at all hosted on Bluehost.com. But of course, occasionally there are some little down times with the MySQL db with a site that has more than 3,000 daily unique visitors, but Bluehost provides live chat support, and once reported, it shall then be solved within minutes.

6. How do I get my blog on Google ? – After all the setup and you’ve got your blog up and running, then of course, you shall start writing your interesting blog post. And you want more traffic, visitors and visibility of your blog. Surely, you’ve heard of others saying that building organic traffic for your blog, or at least when people search on Google, it shall come out. In order to get on Google, you’ll have a couple of things that you need to do.

Google judges a website or blog visibility on the Google search engine by the pagerank of the website or the blog. But I won’t go into very detailed what the pagerank is, since you’re just a newbie, maybe the subsequent posts on SmartBorneo will cover more details about this. In short, Google values a website or a blog by looking at how many incoming links from other websites or blogs to your website or blog. If a website or blog has more incoming links, it shall be given a higher value or higher pagerank, which shall reflect a higher chance to appear on Google when others search for some particular keywords. But these days, building incoming links is not an easy task, which definitely deserves a dedicated blog post on SmartBorneo here to explain more about it later.

For a quick start to get incoming links, if you’re a good writer, you shall consider submitting various articles which have the hyperlink of your blog URL embedded in them, to those article directories. Or you shall link to other blogs, make friends with them, getting them to link back to you, if you continuously produce quality articles/blog posts. Yes, the basic of increasing visibility of your blog is you continuously write good and interesting blog posts for your blog, which shall attract more people to link to you. And of course, there will be some other elements, that you need to fine tune your Blogging software platform e.g Wordpress, mentioned above, to increase the advantages over some keyword searches on major search engines. But this topic shall be considered to be covered in more detailed in some other blog posts dedicated for Wordpress at SmartBorneo here.

Hope you enjoy this post, and get some useful tips to start blogging!

Bloggers shall be considered in making long-term income, or maybe one day you can drive your blog into some semi-passive incomes. Bloggers continuously write great contents for their blogs. Some write a couple of blog posts a day. But it really takes time for a blog to be successful, making lucrative or sufficient income to let a blogger to quit his or her job and become a full-time blogger.

It all depends how much you need that you can survive to be a full-time blogger. If you’re single, and you don’t have a family which you need to sustain and bear all the costs, then it shall be around USD$1.5K to USD$2K a month is enough to stay as a fulltime blogger. And it also depends where you stay. If you stayed at those expensive areas that you need more than that.

One thing you need to know it’s not easy to become a full-time blogger these days. Some blogs may take a few years to start making an okay income but it might not be sufficient to quit your day job or be a full-time blogger. And you need lots of traffic these days to make a good income from blog. I’ve blogged for two years on my tech and gadgets blog, only now I see about USD$2K per month from total ads income (I was only making a mere few hundred dollars from my gadget blog about a year ago) . But I haven’t quit my day time job yet. In fact, I don’t have to, as I’m also one of the bosses of my day-time job. It’s a company that I partner with a few for developing software applications. It’s quite a good business although some times you have to face with great pressure of facing fuzzy people for unreasonable requirements for the software they want.

So in short, bloggers shall be continuously writing good content, hoping to gain more organic traffic, and through out many years that you’ve blogged, you blog shall come to a stage that is able to generate a more or less consistent income for every month. And your continuous effort is to bring your blog to a further stage, hoping to make it to bring more incomes as more contents that you’re adding into it, shall mean more traffic.

How about an Internet marketer? Internet marketers don’t really blog. They use various tools such as email marketing, writing landing pages, driving sales lead, and they also make use of blogs to promote certain products. But they will NOT continuously update or write new contents for their blogs. As after they’ve achieved what they want, lets say having managed to create sales lead using their blogs, they may just leave the blogs aside without further updating anymore.

In short, Internet marketer doesn’t have to depend on huge traffic, maybe just a few hundred of them as long as they managed to create sales lead, such as they blast out emails, using pop-up ads, text link ads etc, which will usually be considered as spammers by bloggers.

But if you wanna be a fulltime blogger in short period of time, you may wanna combine Internet marketing skills into your blogging, i.e. promoting your blogs as you promote products to generate sales lead over the Internet. Use other possible means to drive traffic to your blogs. Or you can even write blog posts about products, become the affiliates of certain online stores, write blog posts for them, and drive traffic to these blog posts, direct the readers to what you want, lets say convert a blog post read by readers into sales. Doing so, you don’t only make money from ads, you also make money from affiliate sales as well as gaining more readers sooner than only writing contents for it. Eventually, you’ll become full-time blogger making 6 figure income a year. Post By SmartBorneo, inspired by Problogger

Please note Chitika Premium is different from Chitika miniMall Ad. It appears only when someone searches on a search engine (Google, Yahoo etc), and from the searched result that leads the searcher to your blog, then only the ad unit appears. If the visitor doesn’t come from search engine, the ad unit will NOT appear. And also Chitika Premium works great if your blog attracts lots of traffic from the United States.

One of my gadget blogs is able to make an average of USD $200 per month from Chitika Premium. The ad unit is placed at the bottom of each blog post, as the top is loaded with AdSense ad unit. As an additional income, although it manages to grab about only 15-16% of the income brought by Adsense on my tech blog, but it should be considered quite good in bringing in some money to a blog.

Remember that I place Chitika Premium Ad unit at the bottom of each blog post, leaving the top for adsense ad unit. If Chitika Premium Ad was placed at the top of each blog, it should be able to make more than $200 per month.

Comparing the CPC, Chitika Premium managed to clock at $0.10-$0.15 per click, which is far behind what Adsense offers. But I’ve heard that you will be able to negotiate with Chitika, if you managed to make USD $200 per month consistently for three months. Since my tech blog takes AdSense as tehe main revenue stream, and Chitika as the secondary stream, I’m quite happy with the current performance.

If for some unknown reasons, you can’t get an AdSense publisher account, you can consider Chitika Premium as the alternative if your blog has good search engine traffic. Use Google Analytics to trace the traffic source of your blog, if you could grab 1,000-2,000 from search engine a day, it shall let you make pretty lucrative income from Chitika Premium. If you haven’t had an account yet, click here to sign up now. By SmartBorneo.com

Meaning that doing so, they won’t have to host those images, and they’re stealing bandwidths from you. But you have a choice to control from being hot linked by others just to save some of your bandwidths. Or you’re simply pissed off as those original images that you’ve created by your own have simply been copied and pasted over. And they’ve even stolen the originality of your content.

To prevent from hot linking, you’ll just need to add some codes to your .htaccess, such as the following codes which I wanna prevent the four domains to hot link to my images.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?wordpress\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

The users will get redirected to my PHP page /images/sorrynothotlinking.php which I build using PHP function imagecreatefromjpeg() to output an image that shows the “No Hot Linking” messages. You’ll probably could make it to point to another image file with either a .gif or .jpg extension. But I’ve found somehow the redirection will keep looping as it seems to have confused the webserver. So, I’ve then made a PHP script to do so.

By the way, in the occasion you wanna block all others from hot linking to your images except with few domains that you wanna allow, (lets say mysite1.com and mysite2.com as follows), you can add the following codes to your .htaccess

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite1\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite2\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

Please note that if you only allow a few domains to be able to hot link to your images and block all the rest, will prevent those images to show up on email clients as well. As you’ll have lots of readers to subscribe your blog feed via FeedBlitz which delivers blog feed via emails. When they open up the feeds on the email clients they’ll see the “No Hot Link” images on each post and this is ugly.

The best way is to use method 1, just to block those sites or blogs or those you dislike which you’ve discovered that they hot link to you.