Quite a few bloggers have been challenged to create a post called The 7 Links Challenge. I thought this might be fun for me to do and hopefully entice some of my readers to do the same thing on their own blogs.

1. Your First Post?

The first official post that I published on I Need Discipline was a really poor article back in 2007 called Earn Money Reading Emails

2. A Post You Enjoyed Writing The Most?

It is really difficult to decide which blog post I enjoyed writing the most. The one thing I know is that I enjoyed writing every single Monthly Blog Income Report so I think I’ll pick the entire category.

3. A Post Which Has Great Discussion?

The most commented on blog post that I ever wrote was easily the 19 Blog Review Networks which had a whopping 68 blog comments and is still rising even over two years after I published it.

4. A Post That You Wish You’d Written?

Pretty much anything that has ever been written on Problogger because each post gets so much traffic and promotion.

5. A Post With A Title You’re Proud Of?

This would have to be A Blog Advertising Store By Any Other Name because I really like the humorous way I came up with the title of the post.

6. A Post That You Wish More People Had Read?

This was another tough one for me as I have written several blog posts that I wish more people had read. But I am incredibly proud of the post I wrote about Adding Google Search Results To Your Blog .

7. Your Most Visited Post Ever?

This has to be the December 2009 Blog Income Report that I wrote last year, it was just as I was started blog commenting.

Why don’t you create a post like this on your own blog?

Post from: I Need Discipline

The 7 Links Challenge

The following is a paid review but the opinions contained in this post are my own views.

When you think about the term videosurveillance it normally conjures up images of those reality television shows where you are stuck in a house with strangers, or something out of a spy movie featuring Eastern European bad guys trying to destroy the Western world.

It doesn’t have to be that way though.

I recently invested some money in buying a top notch video surveillance security system for my home. I did this because I currently live in quite a rough neighbourhood and I am often away and my disabled father is left on his own.

Now I don’t have to worry about anything happening to him while I am away for any period of time.

Post from: I Need Discipline

Beefing Up Security Is A Good Thing

Blog security is something that pretty much every blogger should be concerned with. WordPress has a number of plugins that you can use to combat hacking attempts, one of the plugins is called Limited Login Attempt plugin.

The plugin is designed to place a limit on how many times someone can attempt to login before it springs into action and prevents any more login attempts.

Some of the features of the plugin include:

- Limit the number of attempts when logging in.
- Limit the number of attempts to log in using cookies.
- Informs user about remaining retries.
- Will log the failed attempts.
- Option to have email notification sent to you.

This is what the login page will look like.

Download Plugin From This Link

Post from: I Need Discipline

Limit How Many Times User Can Attempt To Login

Have you ever tried to offer a policy on Twitter where you will follow everybody who follows you? Sounds like a great deal ,and when you see all those followers it makes you happy. But this does all come at a cost.

You see not only do you now have thousands of followers but you are also following thousands of people and it makes reading your time line absolutely impossible.

Maybe this does not bother you? Maybe you are more bothered by the fact that people are taking advantage of your kind offer and have now unfollowed you believing that you will not find this out.

I have come across five programs that have been designed to go through your lists and will unfollow everybody who is not following you.

1. DoYouFollow

Not only does this tool unfollow people who are not following you but it also have a nice tool you can schedule tweets to be posted at regular times.

[LINK]

2. JustUnfollow

As you can tell form the name it is a very basic unfollow tool. It lists the people who are not following you and you go through them and delete the ons you want to. Bit time consuming though.

[LINK]

3. Twitter Karma

This is one of the most popular. Not only does it unfollow those who are not following you but it also shows you a list of people you are not following, but who are following you, so you can follow them back if you wish.

[LINK]

4. TwitSpinner

They may not be the most popular but they offer the most tools. Not only do they offer the unfollow tool but they also offer a host of tools that can help you auto clean out your spam Direct Messages, randomly change your profile and background design and many more.

[LINK]

5. Untwitted

Again this is another very basic application that does exactly what it says on the tin.

[LINK]

Do you use any that I have not listed here? Why not let us know what one you use by leaving a comment below.

Post from: I Need Discipline

5 Free Twitter Tools to Unfollow Non-Followers

Sponsored Tweets is without doubt the number one sponsored tweet network on the internet right now, and for those of you who are laughing and saying that Revtwt is bigger, you could not be more wrong if you tried.

The only thing that I disliked about Sponsored Tweets is that they had what I consider a rather high payout threshold of $50.00. Only the big guys would be able to request payout on a monthly basis and the smaller guys would only be able to request a payout once or twice a day.

I’m not too sure when it happened but they must have listened to the complaints because the payout threshold has been altered.

It still says $50 but you can now withdraw any amount under that now.

This sounds great but the downside is that they do now charge a $2 fee for any amount under $50. So my advice would be to wait until you have more than $20.00 before you decide whether to cash out of not.

Post from: I Need Discipline

Sponsored Tweets Reduce Payout Threshold

This is something that I have never attempted to do before, but something that I have always wanted to try my hand at. A weekly post where I just give various thoughts about random things that pop into my head that are related to the MMO industry.

Is Following Everyone Who Follows You On Twitter A Good Idea?

Back when I first decided to create an account to try and make money on Twitter (and use it to promote my blog) I thought that doing the “you follow me and I’ll follow you” approach would be a great way of gaining followers.

To be honest I think that it has worked because I now have over 2,900 followers and that amount is growing every single day without fail. And I am making a small amount of money with Twitter and gaining a ton of traffic from it. All for free.

The downside is that I now have over 3,000 people that I am following and I no longer try and read the public time line because there is just so many tweets to keep up with.

If I go through the following list and just delete ones that I’m not interested in reading I’d probably be left with about 10 people and would probably see my follower list tumble like a fat guy down a steep hill.

Make Sense When You Cold Call Email Me

I received an email on Thursday from a guy who basically wanted me to do some article exchanges with him. I’m guessing the premise of this was that he writes some unique articles for my blog and I do the same in return for his blog.

I say “guessing” because there was one major problem with the email – the entire thing was written in French. My blog is solely in English so I think it is safe to assume English is my main language.

Take this as a hint people. If you are going to email someone out of the blue make sure you know what language they speak.

Retweeting My Old Posts

I made a decision last week that I was going to install a plugin that would retweet my old posts randomly on Twitter. I wasn’t sure how often to have it retweet a random post, as I don’t want to irritate people.

I came to the conclusion to set it to one retweet every hour. I will keep it as this until the end of the month and then I will have a rethink about making it every two hours or every four hours.

I am really pleased that I did this though as I have seen some nice traffic from Twitter, more comments on the old posts and I have actually written some decent articles which are being given a bit more exposure.

Well that is about it for this week. Hopefully I’ll do a longer one next time.

Post from: I Need Discipline

Random Sunday Ramblings #1

I have spoken quite a lot recently, on this blog and on message boards, about how important commenting on other blogs can be in order to drive traffic to your own blog. For this post I wanted to tip it around 90 degrees and talk about attracting comments to your own blog.

When you first created your blog, and started writing content, did you do what I used to do and keep checking your admin panel to see if anyone had left you a comment on one of your posts? How often did you use to check? I would check probably about once an hour.

I don’t know about you but it used to drive me absolutely crazy.

It took me a good couple of months to go from watching my posts go without comments to thinking of ways to entice comments. I have listed five of those ways below.

1. Make Your Blog Do-Follow

This is something that I now do from day one with all my blogs. If you make your blog do-follow then it means when someone comments and they leave their web site URL then it will help them with their PR.

This encourages people to make comments better than anything else I have used.

2. Turn Off Your Spam Filter

If receiving tons of spam comments is not something you are concerned with then you could turn off any spam filter plugin you have running. I would not recommend this but then again I do receive thousands of spam comment posts a day.

3. Install Top Commentator Or CommentLuv Plugin

If setting your blog to do-follow is something that does not appeal to you then why not install a couple of plugins like top commentator and CommentLuv? What these two plugins do is reward commentators for commenting by publishing a do-follow link to their web site.

4. Run A Competition

This is something that I have tried and found partial success with. You run a contest and people enter by leaving a comment. It is as simple as that. You’ll be surprised how many people will comment when prizes are on the line.

The only drawback to this is that you will find lots of comments like “put my name down”, “I’m in” and “good luck everyone”.

5. Write A Very Controversial Post

This is something that not a lot of people will be able to pull off without coming across as an idiot. If you write a controversial post then you will make it almost impossible for the reader to leave without leaving his thoughts.

Be prepared to get some heated replies though and it isn’t something I’d recommend if you want to bond with your readers.

Have you found a way to attract comments that I have not listed? Why not leave a comment and let us know what they are?

Post from: I Need Discipline

5 Ways To Entice More Comments On Your Blog

I receive a few emails a week from people asking me if I can help them set up their new WordPress blog for them as they have no idea how to go about doing it. Sadly I am normally very busy and have to politely turn them down.

This evening I was sitting at my desk when I had the following thought:

“Would people be prepared to pay a small fee to have their WordPress blog set up for them?”

I’m not talking about a huge fee, maybe something like $5.00.

This would include the following:

- Initial set up of the latest WordPress version.
- Installation of up to 10 plugins of your choice (I’ll provide a list of ones I’ll install).
- Support for the first week.

Then I had another thought:

“What if I offer this service and then offer another option where I do it for free if they sign up for hosting from a company I recommend?”

What do you guys thinks about this?

Post from: I Need Discipline

Would You Pay To Have WordPress Installed For You?

The other day I wrote a post called 6 Ways To Kill Your Blog which documented six different ways that a blogger could kill off the traffic to their blog. I was really pleased with how the article went, and was received, so I decided to continue with this theme for at least another post.

Today I’m going to write about some ways that you can kill your blog by writing inappropriate post titles.

The title of your blog post is just as important as the content that will follow it. I am not alone here when I say that the title of your blog post will determine if I bother to read the actual content of the post, no matter how good the content may be.

1. Leave Keywords Out Of Title

While it is important not to cram in loads of keywords it is incredibly important that you insert at least one keyword into the title of your blog post. To be honest I think this is more for the ranking in search engines than anything else.

If you write a blog post about something like Adsense and don’t put the word ‘Adsense’ into your post title then it will not rank at all well in search engines and will not bring in as much traffic.

2. Titles That Have Nothing To Do With The Content

This is a mistake that so many people make believe it or not. Personally I look at the post title before I decide whether I want to read the blog post or not. And I know that I am not alone in doing this.

Ideally you should use the post title to pretty much explain what the blog post is about in as few words as possible.

3. Fake Post Title Designed To Trick People To Read

This is something that I have noticed gaining some speed in the Make Money Online industry and it is something that boils my blood so much. I saw it was rife on many professional wrestling web sites and sadly it is increasing in the MMO niche now as well.

The blog owner writes up a really great post title which draws in the reader who then finds out that the content is nothing about the title and the post title was written to trick people into reading the blog post.

Not only is this deceitful and underhanded but people will avoid your blog like the plague and will write about it in their own blogs and spread the word to others telling them to avoid your blog.

Do you know of anything else that could turn people away when blog owners write their post titles?

Post from: I Need Discipline

3 Ways To Kill Your Blog With Post Titles

am well aware that this post might not appeal to a lot of people but I do know that I attract quite a few newbie bloggers to this blog. So I thought I’d put out a post that was aimed mainly at them. More experienced bloggers might learn something as well.

When you first launch your blog you will find that Google is not very kind to you and you are receiving next to no traffic, apart from your friends and family members. There are many ways of increasing your traffic, you can use SEO, social media or advertising on PPC networks.

But these tend to cost money, or some considerable level of expertise, to really see the results. That is why the big bloggers like Dan Rowse, Jeremy Schoemaker and John Chow seem to get fantastic results from them because they can afford to hire experts to do them.

But what about people like me? People who don’t have lots of money to spend on outside help? People who used to think that the term SEO was just a fancy title given to an executive like a CEO.

Below you will find a small list of ways to help that will not cost you an arm and a leg and do no require a lot of expertise.

1. Link Exchange With Other Blogs

If you have the time then why not contact other people who have blogs and ask them to swap links with them? This is no secret and has been around for years. The only problem with this is that some blog owners might try and cheat you by removing your link so keep checking their site.

2. Buy Links From Popular Blogs

This is something that I have never done because I do not agree with doing it. You can approach blogs and offer to pay them to link to your blog. The more popular the blog, and the higher their PR, the more you will have to pay.

Google comes down hard if you are caught doing this so be careful.

3. Guest Post On Other Blogs

If you are good at writing then you can offer to write a guest post on another blog. The blog owner gets some fresh content and you get to put a link or two in that article promoting your blog.

4. Write Articles For Article Directories

This is something that I am just now starting to experiment with myself. If you have some spare time then cobble together a selection of articles that are about your chosen niche and submit them to article directories. Don’t forget to mention your blog in them.

5. Post Regularly On Forums

I bet you are a member of at least two message boards. The first thing I do when I join a message board is I place the link to my blog in my sig. Every time I make a thread or reply to one my link shows up in my sig. I get quite a nice bit of traffic and link love from this.

Of course it will help if the message board you are part of is a popular one and you do have to post quite regularly (I make a habit of posting at least ten times a day).

6. Blog Commenting

This is quite easily my favourite way of link building and driving traffic to my blog. Why is it my favourite? Because it is free and because nine times out of ten I will stumble across great ideas for me to create posts about on my own blog.

Never spam blogs though, always try and make sure you have something to say instead of “nice post”. And try and find out if the blog is do-follow, these are the ones you should concentrate on more.

Post from: I Need Discipline

6 Tips To Link Building For Beginners