SimplyDunn.net

Popularity: 32%

1. Do not fall for the cheap price they offer. The cheapest you’ll get, the more you should be aware of. Don’t pay cheap, cause you get what you pay and then face a lot of down time. You will lose credibility and thus lose your readers.
2. Choose a host with less downtime, cause you want the maximum exposure to your site and avoid it being unavailable to your readers.
3. Find a host which provide the 24/7 customer support, cause if you have problems technically at any time, you know that you will always have support from your web hosting service.
4. Choose a host that provide Fantastico, an auto-installation for software scripts like Wordpress. With Fantastico, it only takes a few quick steps and your blog is installed.
5. You shouldn’t be charged for the set up fee. In fact, they should be happy to do it for you cause you had choose to do business with them.
6. Choose a host that offers FTP access which allows you to upload files to your site or updating your information. Cause you will need this when you have changes or addition to make.
7. It is very important to back up files and it’s good if you can find host that does this as well.

After reading some posts in Sueblimely, Gather Success, Blogging4Cash and some other more, I decided to have Hostgator as my hosting provider. This is my final decission since there are many bloggers recommended it, and has all the criteria that mentioned above as well.

With my knowledge about hosting that almost zero, their live support and their contact support by email had been very helpful for me until I could get this far. And so far, I haven’t experienced downtime, and hopefully never. And I choosed Baby Package, their favorite plan. This package allows me to host unlimited domains and with the disk space and bandwith provided, I could host more than one site. Who knows I want to start other site in the future?

Popularity: 30%

Here the list of plugins that I use for my comment section to make it more attractive and hopefully will get more comments.

Do Follow

Do Follow plugin lets you remove the nofollow attribute from your comments. Nofollow is not good for bloggers who are trying to increase their readership and develop their network. Cause it tells search engines not to ‘follow’ links to external sites so that they do not gain any advantages in the ranking process. Turn off ‘nofollow’. Show your commenters that you appreciate them and spread the link love.

Subscribe to Comments

Subscribe to Comments is a plugin that allows commenters on your blog to check a box before commenting and get e-mail notification of further comments. It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins out there for the simple reason that it helps foster a community around your blog by encouraging commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.

MyAvatars

MyAvatars is a plugin that shows the commentator’s MyBlogLog avatar behind the comment. This really makes people excited to comment by having their avatar there.

CommentLuv

CommentLuv is a plugin that will add a line at the end of a comment with a link to the commentator’s latest blog post. This way the commentator also gets a free backlink to his blog. This is an excellent way to promote comments from your readers and also will get you more commentators.

Comment Relish

Comment relish is a plugin that developed to send an e-mail message to users who comment on your website who have never commented before. It’s a great way to follow up your readers who commented on your post and invite them to join your feeds.

Popularity: 57%

If you’re using adverting network such as Adsense or Abrite, you might ever experienced the difficulty to find the color code for your ads to be blended into your theme. Optimizing the color in your ads very important cause it could affect an impact for your revenue. The readers has the tendency to ignore anything that’s separate from the main content of your site. That’s why it’s very recommended by Google Adsense to have the background, the text and the link colors have the same colors with your theme.

There is a Firefox add-on that’s very useful for this matter. ColorZilla is a Firefox extension that will assist you with color related task. With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. But this is only available for Firefox browser.

Popularity: 22%

I’m putting ads today. The ads that I’m using is Adsense and Adbrite. All this time, only this two that is a good source income for me comparing to others such as Bidvertiser or WidgetBucks. I’ve been paid one time from Adsense and expecting another payment now. And for Abrite, I had reached the minimum payout already. But the payment will be processed only 3 months after you reached the minimum. So I expecting payment from Adbrite around March.Their calculations are based on pay per click and pay per impression. But one different that I noticed. If you put 3 Adsense ads in your blog, the impressions for all of it will count only 1 impression for a visit. But for Adbrite, if you put 3 ads, they will count 3 impressions for 1 visit. So the more Adbrite ads you put, the more income for you.I had experienced this myself. After I put more Adbrite ads in my other blogs, my daily revenue for Adbrite is increased. You can even earning more by activating the Show full page ads feature. But remember, some of the readers don’t like this kind of ads. So you have to consider about loosing some readers if you continue using this feature.

Another features that available are BritePic and InVideo. You can earn more by putting advertisement in photos and videos that you upload to your site. But this features only available for the blog that self hosted. I’ve tried to use the InVideo feature before for My Interesting Files, but failed cause that site still hosted in Blogger.

Popularity: 22%

One thing that hold me back from starting this blog was domain name. It took me weeks until I decided to use SimplyDunn as my new blog. I had collected a few options for my domain and asked around for opinions. Sometimes when I found the right one, it’s not available anymore so I have to think about another one. It drove me up the wall at that time.

A domain name is the most important part of your blog. It represent you and your blog. That’s why I want it to be unique and short, so it’s easy to remember. And an article by Darren Barefoot is a good guide for me to find a domain. I also use name generator to get some idea, and Dislexicon and Nameboy were the tools that I used. I found many tools for this in Best Tool For The Job, but I recommend Nameboy for the better domain searching tool than the rest.

After everything was set up with the host, the domain name that appear was without www. I saw some blogs still keep it that way, and actually it gives the same result. Whatever you type, with or without www, you still end up in the same site. Only the apperance of the name that different in the address box. But I still prefer using www for my domain name. I was helped by my hosting provider support team for changing that for me, so I can’t post it here about it. But I found out that Kumo had posted about how to set your domain address either with or without www. So you can check out his blog for the tutorial.

Popularity: 17%

What is RSS? RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. It allows your readers to easily stay informed by retrieving the latest content from your site.

That means, if your reader likes your contents, they will likely subscribe to your RSS Feed cause they don’t want to miss any of your articles and they want more from you. So at the point when your readers want to subscribe, make sure they can find your feed button. So you don’t lose the opportunity of recruiting a new reader. That’s why if you starting with the new blog, the first thing you should set up is the RSS Feed.

The orange button has become the most recognized icon for RSS Feed. You also can find it in different colors, but I prefer the orange button cause it’s easier and faster to be recognized by the readers. The great place to put it is above the fold, cause people are more likely to see anything that you put above the fold. And don’t forget to put the option for email subscriptions as well, cause some readers would prefer to subscribe by email.

For the best results using FeedBurner with self-hosted WordPress site, I’m using the FeedBurner FeedSmith Plugin by Steve Smith. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well. And for that, all you have to do is download the plugin and then follow the instructions to begin forwarding all Wordpress feed traffic to your FeedBurner feed.

Popularity: 13%