The Link Medic - Free Blogging Resources

Affiliate Resurrection Review - No Scam Just Cool Tools

After getting access to the software myself I decided to make this review of Affiliate Resurrection.

At first I thought it was going to be one of those scammy things you see over and over but I was pleasantly surprised.

Richard Selby did us a favor and is releasing his software for everyone to get a chunk of the pie.

What's better is this software does it faster than probably anything I've come across and is actually pretty interesting.

What is Affiliate Resurrection?

What makes AR unique is the plug-in play software combined with the support of $1m dollar Clickbank
affiliates. They will teach you how to grow your internet marketing business while using the software.

What AR does is it creates top ranking money making websites, not just one website but a whole slew of
cash cows. You're recieving top notch support and turnkey solutions for every step of the way if you're
lost.

Check it out ==> Affiliate Resurrection

No matter the niche they have you covered with professional looking templates and video tutorials that will show you every aspect of the system.

I also liked the 24/7 support combined with content creation support. They will also show you how to
drive traffic to these sites. All the information about backlinks, SEO, page rank, monetizing, etc is all pretty
spot on too.

It's a great system for people looking to get into affiliate marketing, and that's why I'm recommending it.

Once you master it you can repeat it over and over which is what I do with a network of blogs to diversify
my revenue streams.

They do seem dedicated to your success in the marketing field so you're not just gonna be left in the dark, there will also be live webinars and a support center always online.

What's inside?

The Affiliate Resurrection members area looks pretty great, it's professionaly designed and easy to navigate. Inside you'll find website creation tools, viral marketing software, traffic generation tool (Auto Traffic X), 6 training modules which is comprised of 18 professionally developed training videos which are filled with some great affiliate advice.

Probably my favourite feature that I'll be using a LOT now is the niche and trends section. That's going to come in handy for me.

Get Affiliate Resurrection now!

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Best WordPress Themes for Videographers and Vloggers

My post last year 12 Free Video Blogging Wordpress Themes That Don't Suck had a lot of great video blogging WP templates.

Since new themes are always being created I figured it's time to give an update to some of the better WP themes that would be great for videographers or vloggers.

This time I added some premium themes to the list and some free ones for comparison.

onPlay Theme

Quommunication - New Kind of Design Solutions

Videozoom Theme

The TV Elements WordPress Theme Demo

Video WordPress Theme | Foxinni

Videographer Wordpress Theme. Start Your Own Video Blog | Zoomstart

Newbie Guide To Installing A Blogger Template

Everyone wants to be unique, especially with the staggering amount of blogs out there.

One of the first things you might want to do if you're new to Blogger is installing a new template.

The default ones you are offered are okay, but there are some incredible free themes that you can install in a matter of minutes and I will show you how step by step.

The hardest part will no doubt picking a template out you'll want to live with.

Some Useful Posts Before We Begin

How To Choose The Right Blogger Template
Posts labeled Blogger Templates

Step One: Find & Download A Template

There are thousands of outstanding free templates out there to choose from.

Here are a list of a few I like:

Find and download the template you would like and save it to a folder where you'll remember where to find it!

Step Two: Unzip It!

There's a 100% chance your template will be zipped, which means you'll need to unpack it. Use WinRar or a similar program for this.

For further help check out this tutorial
How do I extract or uncompress a compressed file?

Step Three: Install it!

Believe it or not you're almost done.

Login To Blogger and go to your Dashboard
Design > Edit Template

Click choose file then find your .xml template file that you unzipped and click open then upload.
Once you upload you will most likely be presented with the option of keeping or deleting your widgets. I'd just keep them for now.
You're done! View your blog and see what it looks like!

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Twitter Puts The Squeeze on Tiny.ly URL Shortener

Achtung! About a week or more ago Twitter blocked Tiny.ly the URL shortening service.

Much to my dismay seeing as it's the only shortener I've been using and I'm sure a lot of you guys have been using it as well.

I've switched over to goo.gl which seems to be a great alternive.

It features a nice bit of analytics too for all your links.

Also if you need it goo.gl goes a step further and even creates your very own QR barcode. Those are those weird looking alien barcodes you may of seen all over the place.

A little look at Goo.gl

If you're using any of the Google services it's probably a good idea to just start using goo.gl seeing as in the future I imagine your goo.gl link data will be integrated into all your other services such as Google Analytics.

If they do that it would take the URL shortening to the next level.

It has it's own API now so expect to see it in your favorite apps soon.

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How To Make A Blog Post Lead Image Using Photoshop

I'm not dead!

Hello everyone, sorry for the lack of posts lately. I have a bunch in the works but have been busy.

Here's a video you may have missed, I created it to quickly show how you can make a nice looking lead image for your blog posts.

You need Photoshop or something like it to accomplish what I'm doing in the video.

You'll also need access to some stock images:
stock.xchng - the leading free stock photography site

Let me know if you have any questions!

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The Definitive List of Must-Have WordPress Plugins

So you've just installed a fresh WordPress blog and want to get the most out of it.

There are some essential WordPress plugins you will want to at the very least check out.

Below in no particular order or some of the plugins that I highly recommend installing and setting up right off the bat.

If I've left any out please let me know any plugins you believe are worthy of a definitive list like this.

Essential WordPress Plugins

1. Google XML Site Maps

This plugin will generate a special XML site map which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it's much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

2. All In One SEO

Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

3. Auto Links & Related Posts

SEO Auto Links & Related Posts, is a combination of related posts and auto smart links plugin. The auto links feature will automatically convert post title, meta keywords, and post tags found inside the blog posts into an internal link.

4. SEO Slugs

The SEO Slugs WordPress plugin removes common words like 'a', 'the', 'in' from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.

For example, when you publish a post with a title like this:

"What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings",

WordPress automatically assigns a long filename to your post, called a post slug:

/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings

SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like "what", "you" or "can" out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plugin activated, the slug for our example blog post would look like this:

/immediately-higher-rankings

The slug is generated on saving a post (so you get a chance to look at it before publishing, and change it), or on publish. It won't overwrite an existing slug. You can force a new slug generation by deleting the existing one.

5. Akismet

Should already be installed just need to activate it, well worth it to fend off the spam comments.

6. Socialize This

Socialize This is a WordPress plugin that allows the user to easily generate Social Widgets (Icons) and spread to word about their blog posts. It works out-of-the-box with little to no configuration required.

7. Subscribe to Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!

8. Twitter for WordPress

Twitter for WordPress displays yours latest tweets in your WordPress blog.

9. WordPress Database Backups

Simple WordPress Backup allows you to back up your WordPress Database with just one click.

Creates a full dump of your WordPress MySQL Database.

ATTENTION: alpha Release use at your own risk! Test it before using in your productive environment.

10. WP PageNavi

Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress site.

11. W3 Total Cache

The most complete WordPress performance framework.

12. Affiliate Ninja

Using Ninja Affiliate, you can automatically convert any keyword in your blog to an affiliate link instantly. You can also cloak your affiliate links, track them and manage them right from your WordPress text editor. I use it on all my WP blogs.

13. Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 errors without requiring knowledge of Apache .htaccess files.

14. No Self Pings

Some people really like that WordPress sends pings from your own site to your own site when you write posts; it gives them a trail of related posts.

Some people do not like this behavior; it clutters up their comments.

15. Advertising Manager

Easily place Google Adsense and other ads on your WordPress blog. Simple to use, with powerful management and optimisation features.

16. ShareThis

Adds links at the bottom of posts to share via Email, StumbleUpon, Digg, Facebook, Twitter.

17. WP-PostRatings

Adds a complete post rating system to your blog.

New Blogger Template Releases For May 29th 2011

I monitor some of the best template designers around to keep on eye on the latest creations being released.

There are hundreds of new themes being pumped out every month, this will showcase only some of the best.

If you're on the market for a new Blogger template that's completely free and looks amazing check back for these posts or subscribe to our feed.

Posts labeled 'Blogger Templates'

Top 25 Most Stunning Blogger Templates of 2010

New Releases May 29 2011

If you like these type of posts and want more themes check out our sister site at TemplateStalker.com

There you can find the latest and greatest FREE WordPress & Blogger themes as they become available.

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45 Virtually Pointless Stock Photos

You've seen them while browsing for good stock photos for your blog's lead image.

The awkward, weird and just plain stupid ones that seem to absolutely make no sense.

Some of these I can barely see what concept they were trying to go for but ask yourself, what actual blog post could these be possibly be put in?

Keep in mind most of these I found on http://www.istockphoto.com/ which means they are not free, which begs the question -- Who's buying this stuff?

Profit Jackpot Review - The Truth About Autoblogging

Profit Jackpot is one of those flashy named bundles of internet marketing software designed by Anik Signal an internet marketing super star who's made more money than you could imagine by making websites.

I always check out what Anik is offering because basically the guy is talented and really brings ground breaking methods to the table.

Apart from this blog I have several others set up for the purpose of generating some extra cash, networking and traffic. I built them myself and it's taken a lot of time.

What Profit Jackpot does in a nutshell is allows virtually anyone to do what I did without spending as much time and granted effort.

7 Reasons You Should Use #Hashtags In Your Tweets

A hashtag is simply a keyword marked by the # symbol in front of it.

In some geekier circles it's known as an octothorp, which might be good to know if you're appearing on Jeopardy.

It is used to help categorize tweets and help you find similar ones using that topic's tag. This is done by clicking on the hashtag which will show all the tweets using that tag.

They are mainly used as an interactive search function and not for labeling idea they were originally invented for.

Example: Optimize your Blogger post titles for better PR in minutes with one code - http://ow.ly/391af - #blogger #SEO

I use mine on the end of the tweet but a tag could be any word in the tweet itself.

Many of you no doubt use these in every tweet but you may not know of its true potential, especially if you're not using them regularly.

Here's some reasons why #Hashtags are great!

1. One obvious reason to use them is it allows people to get a jist of what your tweet is about at a glance. Categorizing your own tweets is a good way for people to find other tweets in that topic. This is good especially if you have an ongoing series or do many follow-up posts.

2. There is always the possibility of your tag going viral and start trending on twitter, which would be too good to be true. Even if it would be a 15 minutes of fame kind of deal.

3. Paper.li is an online user-generated magazine put together largely from hashtags, it's amazing how many I've seen my posts on just because I've used the tag. I get a decent amount of hits from these user's e-zines and not only that you actually get back links while you're at it. 4. It makes your tweets easier to find and get picked up by social media tools such as Tweet Adder and Tweet Big which will lead to more hits and more followers ultimately. Clients like TweetDeck and HootSuite allow you to follow a tag, for example.

5. Takes boring plain text and adds a layer of interactivity which is what social media is all about. Not using them only stifles your tweeting prowess, tapping into the popularity of the hashtagging phenomena.

6. You can create your own hashtag of course! This is great for businesses if someone wants to follow your business by a category exclusively to your business or product. Take advantage of the #coupon craze perhaps?

7. Thanks to websites like hashtracking.com you can almost must a campaign of sorts and track the popularity, reach, and impressions to see how well a certain tagged tweet is doing.

20 Great Free PSDs For Blogging & Web Development - Vol 1

I've wrangled up some useful PSD files for web development and blogging here from around the web.

The highlight of the list is a great resource of free logos from Shaboopie, they're really well done and can easily be modified to make a new logo for just about anything.

There is also a random assortment of buttons, stickers and cool things you can use for footers.

Expect another post similar to this soon depending on it's response.

Free PSD Files for May 2011

Shaboopie features some downright awesome Free PSD logo templates ready to be edited. You can get some very pro looking logos pretty easily. In fact, I used one of these templates to create my own new logo a while back.

Empire Avenue: Social Media Never Sleeps

If you haven't heard about Empire Avenue yet it's a social media stock exchange game which allows you to invest Eeaves in brands and people and eventually make it to the top of the corporate ladder in your niche.

It launched back in July of 2010 but I've heard a lot of chatter about it lately and seems to be growing in popularity.

The goal of the game is to be successful buying and selling virtual stocks and at the same time connecting with other people and brands though the site's social media aspects such as Shout Outs, Mentions, Recommendations, Advertising, Status Updates and the various chat rooms and communities.

Proper Blog Post Format Feng Shui

Ok, not real Feng Shui but there are some established guidelines you can follow to help provide a nice environment for your readers.

Formatting a post so that it reads well should always be one of your goals when writing all of your content.

Just like a book, things need to be presented in a way that people won't get turned off at just the mere glance of your article.

There are tips to ensure this doesn't happen and it really starts with knowing some simple basics to start out with.

A typical post should be comprised a few different components, main text, images and headings.

Where and how they are implemented are important, great content can look terrible if presented in a jumbled mess.

The Formatting Arsenal of a Blogger

Images - All posts should at least have one image. There are several reasons for this, one being that it needs a functioning thumbnail of some sort. When someone goes to share your post on Facebook links with images will be clicked on more often than ones with out.

Most templates use some sort of related posts plugin with thumbnail support. If your posts never incorporate a picture then you'll be missing out in this area and be left with a blank default image.

Images should be properly floated to the right or left and have enough space for the text to wrap around them. It is also common to have one image placed at the very top of the post. These are known as your lead image and are always somewhere near the very top.

Images should never take over the post by clustering them every where. Exception being infographics and tutorial type posts.
Headings - The nice big and bold text where it says "The Formatting Arsenal..." is a heading. You use headings to break down the post into different main topics and provide space, you'll notice above my headings I have a little separator graphic, you can do this easy with CSS.

Headings are implemented with HTML using the <h2> tag but you can use the H3, H4, and so on down the line but I just prefer to stick to one. I'm not a big fan of the diminishing heading style, getting gradually smaller. In my opinion it's much better off to stick to one and use than throughout. Some will argue over this for SEO but I really don't think you need to go that far.
Bold - Using bold is a great way to grab the reader's attention if they're a scanner type of reader and just need to find the main aspects of a post. Especially if the visitor has come from a search engine chances are they're most likely trying to find what they need rather quickly. Thus having big blocks of text with no highlighted words is not a good idea.
You'll notice in my last post about submitting your blog to a service to get more traffic I put some bold text near the link as most people will be looking for that right off the bat.
Lists - You start to see where this is going don't ya? I'm already using all of these things to my advantage for this very post. People love lists and for good reason, they're a great way to keep your ideas organized. As you can see I'm using a list to show all the various tools one can use. Each one is in bold so you can quickly get the fundamental concepts at a glance then delve deeper if you wish.

Lists are sometimes clunky to put together in the Compose mode so to create a list using HTML follow this code here.
Basic List HTML code:

<ul>
<li>Number 1</li>
<li>Number 2</li>
</ul>
Spacing - One thing you do not want to over look is the space in-between all of these elements. I'm constantly using as much space as possible, not to cheat to make a longer post but it makes for a quicker read which is what most readers prefer.

Putting It All Together

Visitors will appreciate the use of a consistent format and come to expect it. If formatting hasn't been something you've paid much attention to developing your own style today and sticking to it will do wonders in the long run.

You may even notice your RSS Subscribers increase because poorly formatted blog posts are sometimes hard to read through RSS Readers.

So ask yourself do you follow a format every time you write?

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Gain Extra Traffic By Submitting Your Blog To Zemanta

Zemanta is a brilliant blogging tool made for Chrome and Firefox that allows bloggers to enhance their blog posts as they write.

It works on a number of blogging platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, Tumblr, LiveJournal and more.

A sidebar (shown left) is placed next to your compose window and users can see related articles so they can link to them or check them out for research etc.

Either way that means if your blog is in the Zemanta article pool you'll get some traffic.

The good kind of traffic too, in the form of related links placed on other blogs and no doubt the blogger will come to your site and discover something they're interested in as well.

To add your blog go here: How to get your feed into Zemanta? and make sure you read the guidelines before you submit your feed.

You shouldn't have anything to worry about if you have a normal blog with original content.

It is up to them though so make sure your blog is established before considering submitting it to them.

If accepted this is a great way to extend your reach and provides more dynamic traffic than blog directories and the like.

Is Tweet Big Safe To Use?

As a sort of follow up to my post Gain Thousands of Targeted Twitter Followers With TweetBig! I will address a question I think a considerable amount of people wonder about when it comes to Tweet Big and other Twitter tools in the same vein.

Is Tweet Big safe to use? - Short answer - Yes

As someone who has been using the service since its start and taking advantage of all it has to offer I can for certain say that Tweet Big is a great and powerful tool that is completely safe.

When it comes to follower tools out there this one is probably the most legit.

As with anything moderation is key, that's not to say you can't get several hundred new followers a day using it's highly targeted follow functions. You just set up an initial group of users similar to you and let it go to work. It's been rather worry free actually.

Just check out my stats here for yourself to see just how far my account has come.

How To Add Internal Links Automatically With Wordpress

We all know of the added benefit of placing internal links throughout your site but doing it manually can be a real pain.

That's where SEO Auto Links & Related Posts comes in handy.

Let's say you have a blog about flooring.

You're writing a post about how to install vinyl tile and you mention the different types of glue used.

You've already written an extensive article all about glue so you don't want to explain it in detail so you link to it.

With this plugin all you have to do is go to your settings and add the keyword 'glue' and the URL you want it to go to and then from now on every post you'll ever write will automatically create a link for that keyword.

On my template site you can see it in action with the keyword "admin options".

You can even go so far as to set them as dofollow or nofollow

How To Set Your Auto Links

Add all of your categories' names + links to get your new auto link archive rolling.

Setting a keyword link couldn't be any easier all you need is the word and the URL.

First you need to go into your plugins panel and find its configure link.

Enter your auto links in the box.

Type the word first then a comma and then add your URL.

You can also set the number of links it will do per keyword and change the title format. I suggest you keep it to a low number so it's not distracting, 1 or 2.

And lastly don't forget, this plugin also has a related posts function if you need it!

Linkwithin Before

Blah!

...and After

Pow!

Here's how it's done

Head on over to your Blogger Dashboard

Click on Design > Edit HTML - Download your template for safe measure.

Add this class:

.linkwithin_text {
color:#555555;
font-weight:bolder;
font:bold 16px "Droid Sans", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
text-decoration:none;
margin:0 0 10px;
padding:15px 0 0;
text-shadow: #bbbbbb 1px 1px 1px;
}

If you're unsure where to add the CSS code above find where the other classes are and you can add it anywhere by them. You should be able to recognize the other CSS by it's syntax.

For example you can add it by .menu or h2

For a better understanding check out: Learn About Class and ID Selectors | CSS For Bloggers: Part 2.

Preview & make sure everything is okay. If so click Save Template

Now it should look like mine, but that's probably not what you want. To learn how to style text check out Create Attractive CSS Text Effects | CSS For Bloggers: Part 5

How To Change What It Says

By default the widget says "You might also like:" and you just may not enjoy being like everyone else!

So let's change it to say whatever you would like.

Go back to your template HTML where you added the code above and press CTRL+F within the box to quickly find the <body> tag.

Directly after that place this code:

Preview & make sure everything is okay. If so click Save Template You're done!

What is Affiliate Resurrection?

What's inside?

Some Useful Posts Before We Begin

Step One: Find & Download A Template

Step Two: Unzip It!

Step Three: Install it!

A little look at Goo.gl

I'm not dead!

Essential WordPress Plugins

New Releases May 29 2011

Here's some reasons why #Hashtags are great!

Free PSD Files for May 2011

The Formatting Arsenal of a Blogger

Putting It All Together

How To Set Your Auto Links

Further Reading

Linkwithin Before

...and After

Here's how it's done

How To Change What It Says

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