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

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

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

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

I have seen quite a few blogs recently publishing articles that talk about the top five referral web sites that are driving the most traffic to their blogs and I thought it would be a good idea to do the same on this blog.

Not only that but I thought it would be a good idea to see what web sites are doing well at driving traffic for my readers and visitors to their own personal blogs and web sites.

Being me I could not just have a top five list from the past month like the other blogs are doing, so I am going to list the top ten and again to push things I’m going to include data from the beginning of the year.

1. direct
2. google
3. forums.digitalpoint.com
4. affiliateblogonline.com
5. twitter.com
6. yahoo
7. intensedebate.com
8. forum.smorty.com
9. rajaietalks.com
10. problogger.net

The above is from January 1st 2010 to July 20th 2010.

So over to you guys. You do not have to produce ten if you don’t want to but I would be interested in reading your top five/ten list.

Post from: I Need Discipline

What Are Your Top 10 Referral Sites?

We are now living in an era where everyone is being urged, with gusto, to recycle and do your bit to help save this slowly decaying planet of ours. Personally I don’t know how washing out a couple of jam jars a week will help but that is for my personal blog.

I was sitting here this morning when I thought to myself:

“This blog is my whole world, why can’t I do some type of recycling thing to help her in the future.”

And then it suddenly dawned on me that I do have something that I can recycle, the content of the blog.

Now I know that a lot of you will be shouting that reusing your content is dangerous to my blog and could make the mighty Google overlords crash down upon me and take away my rankings in their search engine, but hear me out.

My plan isn’t to republish old content on this blog, far from it. My plan is to take old content, give it a bit of a clean up, and then submit them for publication on article directory web sites in a bid to drive more traffic to this blog.

Has anybody tried this kind of thing before? I’d welcome your comments on the subject.

Post from: I Need Discipline

Recycling Old Content

It is always sad when a company closes their doors, I have been part of quite a few of them over the past two years and I can safely say that pretty much all of them I have not really missed (apart from the ones that owed me money!).

That was until I found out today that TweetROI has closed down.

TweetROI were one of the many companies who offered to pay you money to post sponsored tweets on your Twitter account from advertisers. I personally did not earn a terrific amount from them but I found them to be a very friendly and somewhat efficient company.

Apparently the writing was on the wall for the company when Twitter threw their dummy out of the pram several months ago and tried to block people from posting sponsored tweets on their accounts.

A lot of the companies tried to find ways around this (some of them were successful and some were forced into resorting to manually inserting tweets) but for some reason TweetROI decided instead to just shut down the operation and walk away.

They have promised to payout to anyone who has met the $20 payout requirement. If, like me, you have not hit the payout requirement then I’m afraid to report that you will not see a penny of it. The owner even confesses this on the video on their home page.

It is sad to see because it is one less company in the market, which means less opportunities to earn money by posting sponsored tweets. But on the plus side maybe I’ll be able to attract some private advertisers to take advantage of my sponsored tweet advertising rates.

Post from: I Need Discipline

TweetROI Bites The Dust

I joined Sky CPM about two months ago and I must admit that when I first joined this network I was feeling very pleased at the kind of results I was getting. OK, they were not making huge sums of money for me but they were easily out performing Adsdaq, Smowtion and Underdog combined.

Sadly, as with many such networks, this did not last.

I soon noticed that my income was not going up at all, not even a cent.

I did not worry about it and continued to serve their ads but then I was checking one day and saw the following announcement on the control panel:

IMPORTANT: BANNERS ARE CURRENTLY NOT MAKING REVENUE DUE TO THE ADVERTISEMENT DELIVERY PROBLEMS. PLEASE REMOVE OUR ADVERTISEMENTS.
We are not sure, If SkyCPM will even return back, payments will be paid as soon as possible. We will try to solve the situation and choose the best way.

There was no email informing any members of this, which I found very unprofessional.

That message has been there for the past month or so and nobody’s income is going up so I think we can petty much come the conclusion that SkyCPM is dead and buried.

Their tag line is : SkyCPM.com – Welcome in CPM heaven.

The people who created this have no idea how fitting that tag line really would be.

Post from: I Need Discipline

SkyCPM Dead & Buried?

I was not even expecting it, but last night Google updated their Page Rank system. I was not expecting it because they only recently updated it about a month ago and they normally do it every four months or so.

Still, you will not hear me complaining because I received some very nice results.

Although there was no change in the page rank of this blog I did see the following changes:

bethnalgreenceltic.com = 2
deansaliba.com = 2
eastlondonhosting.co.uk = 2
footballreloaded.com = 1

I am very happy as they all went from zero to their current numbers in one jump.

Did you do better than me?

Post from: I Need Discipline

Google Updates PR & I Get Some Good News

I like to think that I am the kind of person who is willing to give just about anybody and any company the benefit of the doubt. I like to think that adopting this kind of attitude is imperative if you want to find ways of making money on the internet.

I’d heard of PTC web sites before but had never looked into them until about six months ago I joined one called RichPTC. They claimed to pay you $1 for looking at each advert, $10 for signing up to a site referred by them and would payout once you hit $1,000.

I knew that the $1 per ad was most likely a bit of an exaggeration, after all what company would pay over $1 to a company in exchange for one person viewing their web site?

Every day I put a couple of minutes aside to clicks the ads and within a couple of months I had built up the $1,000 minimum that I needed. I requested payout. I was slightly deflated to see it would take 60 working days.

It has now been about four months since I requested payment and not only have they not paid me but they ignore emails and a quick search on Google shows that sadly I am not alone. There are many tales of how they have scammed people.

They have a list on their site of people they have paid. None of them people have received their payment and searching on Google reveals them saying this. Some have never even joined the network in the first place!

I have given up on expecting them to pay me and I urge anyone thinking about joining them to steer well clear of them.

Post from: I Need Discipline

Keep Away From RichPTC