Welcome to

If you want to join the podcasting wave but either don’t like recording your own voice, or simply don’t have the time, Odiogo now has a Wordpress plugin that generates a podcast from your RSS feed.

The voice quality is still a bit robotic but better than I was expecting. They incorporate ads into the podcast (surprise, surprise) so run your own test before installing the addon.

I’m not sure this is going to be a sustainable business model for them but we shall see.

I’m currently experimenting with a couple of SEO plugins for Wordpress. The first is All in One SEO Pack from Uberdose.

Click for full size image.

This nifty addition adds meta tags to each post. I know all the SEO experts will tell you that meta tags are long dead and buried but we aren’t using them here to gain ranking, but to give the search engines a nice user-friendly title and description.

The second plugin is Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

I had a very bad experience with XML sitemaps when they were first introduced. It wasn’t that Google ignored my sitemap. Quite the contrary. It came calling hard and fast. Only trouble was I had built one of those grey-hat sites (dark grey) with about 800,000 pages. It was a long time ago when bandwidth was measured in megabytes and it got very expensive very quickly. Since then I’ve been shy of generating them, although I’m a reformed character now and only use purely white hat techniques. Honest.

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live Search. As well as generating the sitemap it calculates a priority for each post based on the number of comments and notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and Yahoo via ping.

Obviously you can also submit the sitemap via Google webmaster console to monitor its progress.

According to this report in the Wall Street Journal it’s pretty easy for a blogger to pull in the big bucks. It does show that just about any niche can earn you a decent living. No need to build those mesitholemiamathoma (or however you spell it) blogs after all.

Via Money making Blogs

Or maybe you just want to become a famous blogger?

Maybe, according to these posts.

I’m not convinced Google is making us dumber, but it’s certainly making us less patient.

Remember going to the library to look up something? Not anymore. Just Google it. If their spam algorithms are working this month, the information is right there. If they aren’t, it’s on page six.

Out attention span decreases with every dose of instant gratification. We get frustrated if we can’t find the information NOW.

Think I’m going to turn off the computer and read a book.

The social marketing directory is a master resource list with three categories of social (web 2.0) sites that you can use to create your very own streams of highly targeted traffic/subscribers/sales for your websites in 2008 and beyond!

This resource guide contains:

Over 100 Social Networking Sites (i.e. MySpace, Squidoo, etc..)
Over 150 Social Bookmarking Sites(i.e. StumbleUpon, Digg, etc..)
And Over 180 Video Sharing Sites (i.e. YouTube, AOL, etc..)

ONLY $9.95!

At least that’s what it says on the sales page.

It’s actually a decent list of Web 2.0 resources. But, being a Nice Guy and all, I got the resale rights so you can get it here for free.

As you know, I’m fairly scathing about all the over-hyped IM eBooks out there. Most of them are very basic newbie guides telling you how to set up an Adwords account and send the traffic to Clickbank. In practice, this is a good way to get-poor quick rather than get-rich quick.

One of the products that was getting seriously over-hyped pre-launch was DayJobKiller.

It was with some guilt therefore that I purchased a copy last night.

It’s really Affiliate Project X Part II in that it expands on some of the techniques used and introduces some new techniques. There’s really nothing earth-shattering in there although I did have some aha moments when I realized I could boost the income on some of the PPC campaigns I have running.

Does it work and is it worth the $77?

It’s expensive at $1.12 a page for the 69 pages, although it’s all content and no fluff.  It will be more expensive if he raises the priced as promised.

I guess the value of any make-money ebook can be judged as to whether it makes you any extra cash. I implemented one of the techniques in an existing Adwords campaign and also created a new campaign based on a different technique in the guide. It took me about 2 hours to read the book and set everything up. In the 14 hours the campaigns have been running, I’ve made an extra $18, just under a quarter of the cost of the book. On that basis I guess I have to say it was a success. There’s no reason why these two changes won’t continue to make me money for weeks and months to come. There’s another technique in the book that I will try over the next few days that I’m pretty excited about as well.

It’s not a book for PPC newbies, but if you can create an Adwords campaign and open an affiliate account on your own without bursting into tears, you should find something of value.

If you want to try it yourself, here’s my shameless affiliate link.

Let me know what you think.