How many times have you been at work just mingling with your fellow co-workers in the break room for a cup of coffee or joe as some like to call it

Do you have any idea how valuable your time is? If you spend on average 15 minutes per day in the break room you basically have wasted 91.25 hours of your life with meaningless chit-chat that could be avoided by simply not going in the break room.

What would happen to your blogging if you took your break room time and simply used to to write a blog-post? Connect with like-minded people on twitter and facebook or actually did your job during that time?

You would be much more productive and you essentially will be making money! Don’t get lost on the fast track of the break room like your piers! Stand out and stand up! BLOG AWAY!

Today is a very exciting day for me, I have finally reached the 1,000 rss readers mark and I am so happy to share this moment with all of you my loyal readers!

I thought since I have been somewhat successful and reached this goal I would share what I have done to achieve this and how you can duplicate my success on your own blogs! Without further adieu lets get started my blogging peeps!

Newsletter List – This is probably the one single thing that has helped the most, basically I use Aweber which I highly recommended since its the best newsletter mailing system available. Be sure to signup and if you need any help signing up or getting it working on your site just send me over an email

A Great Blog Design – This one is a little tricky, you can hire someone to build you one or you can take an already elite theme and just tweak it to your likes, make it unique and keep your personal touch on everything. Remember this is your blog and people need to see you in every aspect of it including how you present your blog to your readers!

Video Blogging – Although my videos are not the greatest or the funniest content out there they do help drive traffic to my blog. I have noticed the visitors coming from YouTube are more willing to signup to my newsletter (little tip for you all).

Write kick butt content others talk about – I have written a ton of posts on this blog but the best ones of been mentioned on other blogs around the blogosphere and those posts drove traffic which was converted into subscribers! Word of mouth is a powerful tool guys, use it!

Keep your blog up – I use hostgator to host almost all of my websites and for the simple fact that they are the best I have never been down in over 2 years time of my sites being hosted on there servers.

With all of those tips it really just comes down to time and commitment from you to continue posting and moving forward even when you don’t see growth. Remember blogging takes time so just sit back, blog and enjoy your journey, thats what its all about anyways! Have fun!

Now I am sure you all know that I am one for originality and stealing content is never a good idea anyways because of duplicate content issues, however who ever said you couldn’t use someones idea an make it better? No one!

So here is what I am proposing…. I don’t see a problem with you going to other bloggers in your niche (whatever it may be) and going through there archives. Find some topics at least 6+ months old and simply grab post ideas from them.

Write an even more detailed post then they did, make it longer and make yours better then they did. You can’t get accused of using someones idea and making it better (otherwise there would be only 1 manufacture for every product out there).

I highly suggest not copying any exact words and avoid re-writing the same concept but the overall idea can be expanded upon.

I hope this new post idea helps you (and yes you can steal my idea for this post if you want).

With that said one main principal is that bloggers like to tweak things, we like to see how something may work better if we do this or that and that’s the topic of today’s post. Today I want to discuss 5 main areas of your blog that you may not have thought about tweaking to help improve click-throughs and signups to your newsletter. Lets get started sha’ll we? Right after a video…

Sooooooo…

Newsletter Opt-in List / Pop Hover Box – This is one of my favorite things to tweak for better results, since tweaking mine I have gained extra newsletter signups and some more business in general to my blog. Its nice to know aweber has my back!

Blog Design / Layout – One of the most profitable things you can tweak is your design and layout, mainly the placement of ads. But also your content to make it more seen! It really is sad that not many bloggers tweak this like they could.

So question of the day, what do you tweak on your blog and why! Post your creative comments and ideas below!

I’m not saying Goals are wrong in fact I have written multiple posts on the subject and how valuable they are, but this post is kind of a rant because i’m getting tired of these newb bloggers who don’t really blog just to blog.

What I mean by the question of this post is simple, what makes someone a real blogger, is it success, making money, having subscribers? What is it?

None of the above, what makes a real blogger is the pure fact that someone will write and putup kick butt content just because whether they make a dime or not. I will admit when I first started my blogging career I was into the hype to. However a year and a half later after making money having lots of subscribers and such blogging is really just something I want to do and I am currently doing it without pay simply because I love it that much.

Its one way to de-stress but it also allows me to post and write when I feel like it, not when I have people breathing down my neck for more content constantly.

I run more then just this blog to and I look at them all the same, if they make me money AWESOME but if they don’t I will continue to post when I feel like it.

That’s all I wanted to say today but I will be posting a real content post soon so stay tuned guys oh and BTW COMMENTS make me want to post more just an FYI!

That question actually sparked this post, because although that one plugin does a fantastic job it takes more then 1 to tango! Today I will be listing some basic spam prevention techniques for comment spam!

The Plugins

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam This is the plugin that puts the nice Captcha code on my comment section that MUST be filled out in order for a comment to get into my system. It works great and has eliminated about 90% of spam comments that I was getting! I highly recommend it! You can download the SI Captcha Anti-Spam plugin free of use!

Good Ol Akismet This is the old standard for WordPress blogs but it works wonders, already blocked over 4,000 spam comments for me! You can read all about it and get install instructions from this website.

AVH First Defense Against Spam Plugin This was an extra little plugin I installed just because it has proven to work for me and some friends since it came out. This plugin basically checks ips of spammers from the past and blocks them from commenting all on the fly. Worth installing! Checkout the download site and install it right away!

As with almost all the wordpress plugins out there, you can now install plugins on the fly from your wordpress admin panel. Read this post here that I wrote for a basic overview on doing that! Its under the “New Comment Protection (& Cleaned up Spam)” section of that post.

I will end this post with a video!

I hope you enjoyed learning how to prevent spam from getting onto your blog. Return the favor by signing up to my newsletter and be sure to tell your friends as well!

The problem is most bloggers don’t follow a simple blogging plan with each post, nothing is formatted or in a easy to checkoff list. Your visitors want what they can get not what they can give you (stop thinking they do).

Here are my 4 ways to improve internal traffic of your blog!

1. Link to older posts in each new post you create. This one can be tough at times I know, however its really vital to get people clicking deeper within your blog. When I link to other posts it really helps my traffic and stay time go up but it also helps improve internal seo rank and power giving lots of pages in my blog link juice! I made a post about internal linking before for page rank bleed down that you can read if you want to know more about this.

2. Add a search bar to your sidebar. I know this may sound silly but you wouldn’t believe how many blogs I see that don’t offer at least the stock wordpress search widget you can place on your sidebar. Not only does it allow your users to find more content they may be interested in but it also allows you as the blogger to search to relative post topics that you can link to like in step 1 above.

3. Write great opening text. The first paragraph of text for each new post you write should entice visitors to your blog, this will hopefully draw there attention to stay on the post and read the whole thing!

4. Add images, video and graphs to your posts when possible. By adding more interactive / visual stimulants into your posts readers will naturally look at them out of curiosity (video is getting bigger and bigger read how to start video blogging a post I did awhile back).

So apply these strategies to your blog and be sure to comment below if you already have or if you have more ideas to help others improve internal traffic! Don’t forget to signup to my newsletter and receive my eBook that guarantees you can make money today!

The problem is a blog can take 4+ years to truly ground itself as a valuable resource on the net. It can be done quicker and in a lot of new big idea cases it takes very few months to get a site big.

So after we are bored with a blog we tend to not put in the daily maintenance to the comments section, we stop posting, stop responding to emails and although advertisers may continue to pay for even several months after your activity drops off eventually they stop paying as well.

This is bad because we want to make income from our blogs even when we aren’t working them with our nose to the grind stone. Its tough to stick with one blog project for more then a year making several posts per month and hopefully making money by the end of that year.

This happened to me this last year right here on this very blog, this is actually the first post in a few months.

I figured since I was learning to do this myself anyways I could shed some light on what I am doing to rejuvenate this blog and get it popping again (I didn’t lose any rss or newsletter subs “actually gained some while I was gone” however comment activity dropped off as did all my advertisers (why wouldn’t they after all).

So your probably saying to yourself (Stop wasting my time and tell me how to rejuvenate my blog foooooool)….

Haha, ok, ok well here is what I have done so far in no specific order:

New Blog Design (No Advertisements now) – This one is kind of up to you, however if your rejuvenating a blog its activity has probably dropped off and I don’t see that advertisers will want to pickup where you left off last time. They will want to see the blog growing and thriving again. However I decided not to list any advertisements on my new design, I went with a more standard blogging / news look that I got for free off wordpress.com. It is of-course your choice, if you do go the no adverts route like I have be sure to change your advertisement page to reflect whatever changes have happened. You can read up on how to make a good advertisement page so you can get back into the swing of making the money.

New Comment Protection (& Cleaned up Spam) – This is kind of a big one, more then likely you have let your blog go and its admin panel is filled with thousands of spam comments (some good ones to hopefully) but who has time to search through them all and approve or dis-approve them? My suggestion is you just scrap all those spam / held comments, instead of wasting your time to go through them all and find the good ones just start fresh from here (comments don’t make or break a blog) so don’t be OVERLY concerned with that one. When you are rejuvenating your comments section and how your blog will handle comments from here on out one of the biggest tips I can offer you is re-Capatcha comment spam protection. I will assume on this rejuvenated blog you are using wordpress 3.0+ and if you are under the plugins section of your admin panel you can now search, locate and install tons of awesome working plugins all on the fly! Simply do a search for “comments” in the plugin section and it will bring up lots of options for capatcha and even threaded comments plugins! Try them out by installing them all on the fly! WORDPRESS I LOVE YOU.

Re-organized my Categories – Since the blog kind of has a new direction some categories are no longer necessary. Others need name changes and some need to be moved for more of a spring cleaning effect which I have written seems like dozens of posts on before. Checkout my haircut for your blog post that although a little unorthodox title does provide great info on doing just that (cutting the hair of your blog that continues to grow).

Re-did my page (About, Contact) – After not being in the blogging world for a few months I have changed my contact info, my life has changed, I have a new direction on things etc.. I needed to update my about page to reflect those new things and I needed to update my contact email so everyone can still get a hold of me (be sure to read my post about not losing your contacts because its a goldmine when rejuvenating a blog!

And that’s about it, this took me all about 3 hours or so to do here on InfectedByBugs and its still not perfect but its a start to getting this blog back to where it should be.

Here is a vlog about my current statuts!

Be sure to subscribe to my newsletter for updates and awesome make money online tips!

Man its been awhile since Ive posted I apologize but I am happy to see people are still commenting (new people to) as well as my faithful subscribers (which count is going up some by the looks of it).

I love you all and I hope you still find use out of these posts

OK so today I want to talk about all the connections Ive made in the blogging sphere. I know so many people but when I went blog a-wall there for awhile I lost contact. That doesn’t mean anyone forgot me (in fact quite the opposite) but it can happen.

I did however lose contact in the sense that I lost there email addresses and info about what we were discussing at that time.

My main point is to encourage you to save and backup all this info “right now” so this doesn’t happen to you.

Its a simple point but a vital one you will thank me for, seriously you never know when you may need a guest post, sell an advert etc… If you keep all those email contact info’s you can do so pretty easily

Enjoy and have a great day!

So today I want to get back to a little old school post type, I used to make list posts like all the time and you seemed to like them. I really need to post more here on IBB but I’m so busy these days with other things I can’t seem to find the time!

However today I am going to list off 5 must have tools of our blogging trade. Its up to you all to get in on the goods and start making money of your own! Not all these tools are money makers but they are worth having and doing regularly!

1. Twitter – Believe it or not a ton of bloggers have never heard of twitter or they have simply not found the time to fill out the 25 second form to get there twitter account. Granted twitter is time consuming and aggravating at times it really is a great tool that over time you can use and build up into a great advertising tool as well as a money maker! Be sure and follow me @shblogger today!

2. Facebook - Believe it or not but facebook is now for more then just your friends and family to connect! As a blogger you can use it to your advantage and create an account or page for your blog on facebook that people can become a fan of! Its easy to setup and well worth the few minutes of time, just be sure to update it every now and then so it doesn’t look dead!

3. Aweber – I have said it before and I will say it again, aweber is the best email marketing tool out there. Its easy to setup and use, not only that but I have seen significant growth since starting to use the hover pop up that it comes with! It seriously is worth the $20/mo and I suggest everyone get in on the goods!

4.  WordPress - Really do I even need to list this? If your not using wordpress for your blog then your either Stupid or completely have no idea what your doing…. Seriously use wordpress people!

5.  Flip Mino HD, Mac & iMovie - If you ever want to get your name out there on sites like YouTube or Vidler then you need a flip vid cam, a mac and imovie for video editing and of course a little spunk to get noticed! I have made lots of posts on video blogging that you can checkout