Over the past week, I’ve received at least 15 emails from SPI readers asking me whether or not the new Subscribers Magnet WordPress Plugin by MaxBlogPress (makers of the popular WordPress Plugin, Ninja Affiliate) would be something worth investing in. To be honest with you, I hadn’t even heard about the plugin until some of you emailed me about it.
I built my online businesses with WordPress sites and never once paid for a single plugin, so I was a bit skeptical because I only know a handful of plugins that are worth paying for, such as WP-Wishlist. With so many people wanting my opinion about it, I decided to see what the big deal was.
Before I go on, I just wanted to say this to you up front: I don’t normally do posts about products like this here on SPI. I usually only promote products that I’m hardcore familiar with (i.e. Market Samurai), but I did do my best to get as familiar with the plugin as possible so I could leave you an honest assessment. There was apparently a ton of buzz about this plugin (which I somehow missed until recently), so my goal here is to give all of you my first-hand, educated opinion about it so that you can make your own educated decision whether you like it or not.
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When I was in Architecture school at Berkeley (Go Bears!), my classmates and I suffered long, hard nights at the studio drawing massive plans, building detailed models and drinking lots and lots of caffeine.
Some of our semester long projects required over 60 hours of work per week, in addition to our actual class time for both Architecture and general education courses. It was nuts, and because we had segments of the semester long project due about every 2 weeks, I often found myself pulling all-nighters, crashing on a nearby couch, or in a sleeping bag under my desk.
Most of my classmates were right there with me, pencils in hand – however there were a few select students who just seemed to never be around until the last couple of days before each deadline.
My studio mates and I always thought, “There’s no way these people are going to finish in time. We’ve been here for almost 2 weeks straight, and they come in with 2 days left before the deadline with nothing.”
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This is something a little different…So far, I’ve published 20 monthly income reports, and 1 annual income report. However, I’ve never posted anything in detail about my expenses, until today.
I don’t know exactly why I have never included them in my reports. Maybe it’s because when I first started doing these reports there were virtually no expenses to take into account. That being said, I do know that many of you are curious to see what a typical month looks like, so here it is.
The following is my expense report for June of 2010.
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We all know that guest posting is one of the best ways to get highly targeted traffic to your website. Everyone makes it sound so easy too: write a killer post, deliver it to a fellow blogger in your niche, and then BAM…instant traffic, and some new subscribers to boot.
Although I wholeheartedly believe that guest posting is a tactic that delivers exactly the traffic that you need, and one that you should definitely attempt several times throughout the life of your growing site, the truth is that it’s not always as easy as it sounds.
Why?
Because the author of the blog you are targeting has the option to reject your guest post request. It could be for any number of reasons, many of which are beyond your control.
There is, however, a strategy that I’ve noticed being used on a number of blogs lately that is working wonders – driving large amount of traffic, earning tons of retweets and landing tons of new subscribers. It’s a strategy that I wish I knew when I was just starting out, and the best part is that it’s a post that you publish on your own blog, so there’s no need to worry about rejection.
The strategy?
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It’s here! The first session of The Smart Passive Income Podcast!
You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, I will be submitting the podcast feed to iTunes soon, so you can subscribe there as well – but I’ll let you know when it’s up and ready to go.
Since this is our first session together, I spend a little bit of time introducing myself and how I define passive income and utilize it for my businesses and lifestyle. Also, I go over the formalities of the show and what to expect from future sessions.
Future shows will have a structured format, and several will include special guests.
Special information about the episode such as items mentioned during the session and action items will usually appear below, along with a transcript.
Right click here to download the MP3
Items Mentioned in This Session:
Action Items:
- Once iTunes has approved the show, I’ll provide you with an iTunes feed for the podcast only. Additionally, you can also subscribe to the blog and get all of my material (blog posts and podcast) by clicking here.
Transcript:
This is a short post – yes, but a powerful one. It involves a little bit of participation, so please don’t be shy...
A couple of weeks ago, I shared this little exercise on my Facebook Page.
I asked my followers to share a link to their website and describe it using only three words.
Any words, but only three.
After over 100 responses, I found that this simple sounding task was actually quite hard for some people, and in fact it made some rethink the entire concept of their websites and why it exists.
So today, I invite you to do the same. In the comment section, please only respond with three words that describe your site. Do not include a link in the comment section, because my spam filter might block you. Instead, put the link in the URL field under where your name goes.
3 words only. No URLs. Oh, and no hyphens either…sneaky people!
I won’t leave you with any more instructions, but here’s something to think about:
What three words will you choose that make you stand out from everyone else?
This is your “abridged elevator pitch”, so make it good.
Oh, and there will be something nice in store for the few that stand out to me the most. Be sure to leave your correct email address in the required field so I can contact you.
Lastly, I hope you’ll join me in celebrating the launch of The Smart Passive Income Podcast this coming Monday. I’ve been working hard setting everything up, but it’s finally here!
Cheers!
This is a short tutorial about how to hide or remove a page from Google.
Well actually, we’re not “hiding” anything from Google, we’re just telling Google not to index certain pages on our site so they don’t show up in the search engines.
Why would you want to do this?
There are some instances where you actually do not want content on your site to show up in the search engines. Let’s say, for example, you have a newsletter and it comes with a free eBook or a report. If you create a special page that has links to download your eBook, it will get picked up by search engine robots, show up on the results page for certain keywords, and people can potentially bypass your opt-in form to get the eBook that you’re giving away.
How do I know this?
Because it happened to me.
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Last week, I posted a question asking all of you whether you prefer a full post or a partial post in your RSS feed.
The argument was that a full post is what most subscribers favor, but showing a full post keeps people off of your site. On the other hand, you could get more traffic coming to your site by showing a partial post or “teaser”, but then it would defeat the purpose of having an RSS feed in the first place.
The response was amazing. In fact, more than 60 individual people commented with their opinion – and almost all of them favored ‘full post’.
Although we can easily conclude that a full post is the way to go, I wanted to illustrate two principles that came about as a result of asking this simple question: social proof and putting your readers first.
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Recently, a number of people have been asking me for my opinion about how much of a post one should show in their RSS feed. On Feedburner (which I know has been on the fritz lately as far as numbers are concerned), you can choose to have either your entire post shown, or just a piece of it with a link to read more back on the site.
(To change your setting in Feedburner, login and click on the “Optimize” tab, and then click on “Summary Burner” at the bottom)
I have always shown the full post, but a number of people have made a good argument for only showing the beginning portion or a teaser.
On one hand, people subscribe to RSS feeds to conveniently read material off-site. So why would we want to make things inconvenient by having them come back to the blog to finish the post?
On the other hand, it’s evident that by showing the full RSS feed, we’re not maximizing the amount of traffic on our sites because the subscribers have all of the content they need off-site. Plus, don’t we want our readers to engage in the comment section and possibly click on other things on our site to stay on it as long as possible?
It’s a toss up, and I’m really interested in what you think.
Are you for a Full Post, or a Partial Post in the RSS feed? Which do you prefer, and why? Is there a “happy medium” you’d like to share?
No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
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