These days, with more and more people getting on line to sell and promote blogs, businesses and products, there is a greater need to have a well established money management platform to cater to transactions on line.

If you intend to make money online, you need to start with a few basics:
- credit card
- Paypal account
- reliable and trusted internet banking service

I cannot help you with the third one as it depends on the country you are residing in. But make sure, you are able to access to your banking statements and accounts on- line wherever you are. Some banks appear to be quite sophisticated in their services but in reality the staff is not trained to handle requests with regard to internet banking.

To test whether the staff or banking personnels are equipped with the knowledge of doing such banking transactions, you can simply ask an officer to explain the mechanics of how you may get to view and make transactions on-line. This may take you between 15-30 minutes but it is very important. When you travel, you do not want to get caught in a banking system that cannot serve you on demand. If the staff just hand out a brochure and expects you to read and understand, walk out and leave. Do not try a new bank just for the sake of it. Your money is not a laundry item, you need to get it right the first time.

One of the tools used by banking on line is the one time login password which is given to you to your mobile phone. This is better than the dongle which some banks give you and chargeable when you lose it. I have tried both, and certainly the bank that gives you a one time password through sms on your phone is still the best.

When you have a credit card, only then can you set up a Paypal account that can be linked your account to your credit card. The benefits of the paypal account is that you only need to give merchants your paypal account link and therefore other information will be kept confidential

Agreed: “An extremely powerful anti-spam plugin for WordPress that eliminates comment spam, including trackback and pingback spam. It works invisibly without CAPTCHA’s, or other inconvenience to site visitors. The plugin includes spam-free contact form feature as well. Finally, you can enjoy a spam-free WordPress blog!”

In particular, I give wp-spamfree the thumbs up because as soon as it is installed, I was botfree and spamfree. Go download them now.

It is one thing to have good traffic, it is quite another when these traffic are just bots or robots that seems to find their way into your comment posts and drop in links that are repetitive and annoyingly irrelevant. These spammers, as they are called, will take a lot of your time and energy off productive work online.

p.s. I did try using comment policy but it did not keep the bots or robots from creeping in on the comment posts. It turns out not effective in keeping those spammers at bay.

A recent comment on my last post on  Comment Policy Plugin For Wordpress was written in Russian: По-моему, у Вас украли эту статью и поместили на другом сайте. Я её уже видела. Since I do not read Russian, I have to translate it and it actually says, “I think you stole this article and placed on another site. I had already seen.”

I certainly do not need to clarify why I posted the article as this is my homepage. Yet, comments like these bug me because it makes me wonder if readers can ’smell’ if posts have been plagarised, stolen or re-edited? I am feeling quite glad actually that you have made that comment. Otherwise I would not have been able to update this site this week for many reasons; I’ve not been online browsing for a few days. Now I have.

Here is a screenshot from subscribing to Gobala Krishnan’s website since 2008, click to see the bigger picture:

Topics on sales and marketing excite me less than website building tools. You can tell that I have only read two letters that do not have anything to do with sales and purchases.

Here’s the letter I received regarding his comment policy for wordpress:

Wordpress plugins are great to work with as long as you understand their uses and how to set them right. There are enough make money online blogs and sharing another one online just does not cut out for me. This letter however, is more of a teaching tool, no coupons attached.  If you have read the post correctly, credit to the creator of this plugin is given at the end of the post.

How do you know if a post has been plagarised, copied and re-edited? In other words, how is this not stolen?

1. You give credit (link) to the source of the article.
2. You do not give the reader option to download the plugin , software or script from your own website. (very importantly not to try this without prior permission to redistribute from your local domain.)
3. You use the explanation given by the source site and then always make reference back the source file in a hyperlink.

It is easy for me to understand this because every now and then, my own original post are linked word for word without any literature whatsoever to mention that it has come from my website,  except for two words “read more…..” Naughty naughty. That is pure cut and paste, lazy way of giving credit to the blogger who wrote.

Some people look for the about page to read about the author’s profile. I have not created my about page yet because I simply want to use this blog to focus on my journey online and not on myself. Maria Montessori is the only page I have got so far and that is because of my Montessori training background. You can read “How This Domain Is Inspired?”

Linking back to the source url is very important if you have indeed written something about or from another url. It shows your networking presence online and certainly open doors for readers who are interested in the topic to go right to the source with one click.

If you notice, headline news websites are great culprits for posting news word for word from the source without linking back to the source. Just type in Michael Jackson’s news and you can see for yourself. Read at least 5 news on the latest and you can certainly find the same form of writing and layout.

Yet another trick bloggers used to cut and past original text without linking back to the source url is by writing only the first 160 characters in his own words because in search engine optimisation (SEO) practice, only the first 160 and last few of the post will be crawled or spidered completely when a reader enter his keywords. I have read many myself and their google page rank is so high, you won’t believe it until you study the rest of the post.

Another more concrete way to determine if the blogger is genuine, you can look for this banner on his blog:

You can grab a banner for your website here Copyscape If you decide to use the banner, just make sure you follow some the rules of ‘white hat blogging’ code of conduct.

Having said that, the banner will be posted on this site from now onwards if that makes you happy.

Whilst it is good to receive regular comments, it is even better if the readers come forward to show themselves using real names and engaging comments. Yet, ‘legitimate comments’ can be stuffed with keywords in the Name column for their website (some smart SEO guru told them that’s how it’s done). Others may drop their signature link (s) in the comment itself. This makes it difficult for you to moderate, and previously you just had to live with it.

So Gobala Krishnan has come up with a neat wordpress plugin that allows you to display your comment policy that helps your readers self-moderate their own comments.

This is a great tool. And if you have a wordpress blog, you would know that AKISMET just will not work anymore in terms of capturing SPAM messages. There are people out there who have learned the trick of the “backlink” trade. Nowadays, the disguise is so cleverly written, you don’t even think you need to delete that comment until you discover the names are different, the emails stay the same but the url has not changed.

Recently, I sent an email to a reader whose comment I have approved. It was a ‘gmail’ account; google sent back a message saying suspended. Whoa!

You can read about how to activate and set the comment policy plugin or download at wordpress.og.

As you can see, it provides options for you to choose which pages should include these adsense ads. No more running back and forth from your glossary of adsense codes to your sites to get these ads up. Go to developers of this plugin, thaludasina to download now. The best thing is, it is all free.

This feature is available only to wordpress users who have their own domain name (self-hosted wordpress users) at wordpress.org. Wordpress.com, however, is a free hosting platform. You need not have to concern yourself with the changes. For new bloggers, who intend to use wordpress as the site building platform, it may be a better idea to create a psuedo blog on wordpress.com because two things:

1. Community support:
instantly you have a group of people your can invite to view your posts without going out to promote at other social sites.

2. Server support: not worrying about breakdowns, bad service from domain providers etc. I have been there. My main site had crashed twice and I had lost all my data once. Had to pick myself all over again. So lesson is, unless you are ready to take a fall, try out the blogging platform available.

If you run your own website, you are practically working on it alone. lf there’s a bug or you installed a plugin that ends up spoiling your dashboard, you have to seek help at the wordpress forum and sometimes, you won’t even know how to begin describing what the problem is! There is a lot of jargons you have to learn. Wordpress.com provides exactly the same dashboard or admin features as those on self-hosted wordpress sites. You may wish to migrate to write on a self-hosted platform in future.

If you have downloaded or used wordpress themes and plugins, you are aware that they do come free of charge and take no time to plug and play. Look here!

Over 6.5 million downloads and 918 themes, that is approximately 7,284 downloads per theme! It still doesn’t explain the frequency of downloads. Yet, I am not sure if wordpress is trying to keep up with the designers or the users.

Whatever the case maybe, I am not going to upgrade just yet as I am still cruising through the brand new suite of Wordpress 2.8.2. For others who are into keeping up with the newest and latest, WordPress 2.8.3 is available! Please update now. Well will you?

You can do this by keeping a log on your comments. This site called Backtype allows you to keep track of your presence on the blogosphere. It is free to register.

I am in the process of submitting this blog or website to Technorati, and to do that I have to make claim by placing a code they have given me. Remember this is totally free, so you do not have to worry about being charged for anything. Technorati was one stage in the history of the blogosphere and internet, that will gather all kinds of urls and website addresses, and monitor their performance and rank them in terms of popularity or visibility. It is an intricate process but it gives you authority to say to other bloggers that you know how to make yourself visible in the blogosphere.

So I have copied the following code, bjv7msqeux, and will now publish it in the post of this blog. Technorati will then be able to find the claim in my blog feed (RSS or Atom). It would take about 1 hour for the search engine to crawl and discover this website. Once done, I will notified of a successful claim and I’ll see Edit, Ping and Widget buttons next to my blog listings. I will then  write a description for my blog, specifying the default language, and entering blog tags.

If you are blogging and have not submitted your website to Technorati, you can do so by following this link. Sign up for free.

Let’s now come to your website. I have been blogging for more than a year. I treat my website like my home: spring clean (making sure the links work), organize common areas (I love widgets – the best invention ever), write down thoughts (blog posts) and even bring home some goodies to share with others who may visit (links and social bookmarks). The most important part about any website for me is your content;

“Content Is King” is not cliché and it is also not fact, it is the way of blogging life. Without content, your blog is lifeless. With content, your blog comes to life.

That brings me to an aspect of blog posts, the layout. I am assuming that you already know some basic .html commands for the following. By that I mean formatting the posts. Here are my rules:

top to bottom;

left to right

If you have pictures, make sure you have space in between.

What about alignment?

Spacing and font size are important. Use the visual format if you do not know how to use .html.

The visual format is best because of this thing called WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get.)

To understand how it looks like with .html, view the source code. (learn it if you enjoy programming, if not stick to the basic visual setting, content is more important.)

How to drive traffic?

You should post as often as your mind encourages you to work. The good thing about teacher’s blog is that you do not have to depend on SEO (search engine optimization) to boost readership or traffic. Your target readers are educators and students, and offline you may already have plenty. If you are online full-time, then we are talking about a different ball game. You do have to apply SEO or Social Bookmarking Techniques to drive traffic to your website.

How long should a post be?

No less than 400 words with the beginning 50 words and last 20 or so to include the keywords in the title of your post. (Hint) There is simple way to check if you have configure your texts and phrases properly to meet optimum meta and search engine placement. Download Traffic Check Now.

I have had my share of joy and pain. In the end, content wins, always.