I guess my WordPress account and a few other WordPress installations that I run on this blog was hacked. How did I feel? Pretty mad both at myself and whoever took the courtesy to hack it:
x3-hichnow-emo-x3@hotmail.fr
Yeah, I’m not afraid to release that person’s email. 
I guess it’s time for a “how to restore a hacked WordPress account” time?
This is a guest post and is not written by Static. So general opinions on certain topics and writing style that have been long present in this blog most likely will not be present in this blog. However, accepting this article means that it is a quality article that ahnternet is fully behind.
If you are a blogger or related to blogging/Internet marketing in any way, then you might have faced the writer’s block. We all face it or at least I face it daily, that irritating feeling of sitting in front of the computer browsing various websites, thinking about what to write, what my readers would like, what would be helpful for them, and what is something that they don’t know about. Suddenly your mind goes blank. Do you feel the same way I do? If yes, then please continue reading as I am going to share some tips which are really useful and helped me a lot to avoid such situations.
Create a notepad file and list topics which you found while surfing on the web, chatting, reading the local newspaper etc. and feel that these topics could be of great interest for your readers. This list is very handy when you are facing a writer block and searching for some fresh ideas.
We all know about Digg and other social bookmarking sites. These sites are endless sources of fresh content and ideas. Go to any such website. I personally prefer Digg. Search the Digg stories relevant to your niche and analyze the taste of your target audience. See what kind of content is popular and write something on it.
Have you heard about Google Wonder Wheel? Google Wonder Wheel is a flash based interface which shows the searched query in the hub. Results would be shown as its branches. To use Wonder Wheel, click on the “Show options” as shown in the figure below.
Then select the “Wonder Wheel” to see results in Wheel Format. I am using the keyword, “internet marketing” in my example, but you can use any keyword depending on your niche.
You can click on any branch you want to search further to get new ideas for your content. For example, I want to see which keywords are related to internet marketing strategies.
Another good source of finding fresh ideas is Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is one of the biggest community driven Q&A website on the web. You can easily search for the questions which are related to your niche to find what your target audience is looking for lately.
Going to relevant blogs and reading new posts are a great way to find new ideas for your own blog, but it is time consuming. Hence I prefer Google Blog Search. Go to blog search, perform search for your keywords, and see the latest blog entries dealing with that keyword. Finally, simply read only those you find interesting to get new ideas for your blog.
So, these are some tips which I use and hopefully they can be useful for you too when you are facing a writer’s block. Also, if you have any more ideas on how to avoid writer’s block then feel free to share them in the comments.
Gagandeep Singh is working as a marketing executive for Invesp and helps E-commerce websites in creating killer landing pages and in making their conversion rate optimization campaigns successful.
I started writing this post without any idea on how long it will end up being. The title certainly is not a good indicator of the length of the post, so I decided to break it up into two parts for easier digestion.
Quite often, bloggers struggle to write. Regardless of the niche, sooner or later, they will hit some sort of a writer’s block where they simply cannot get out of. Breaking out of that block is not the question as time as proven again and again that people do break out eventually. However, the importance lies in how quickly you break out of it and what quality of posts you write during your break out. It is easy to start writing low quality posts, but as much as your blog is an image of yourself, you certainly don’t want to take that route.
I find myself mostly struggling to find time to blog. Unlike many, I rarely (actually don’t recall once, but I will say rarely to be safe) find myself out of ideas to post about. Why? I go through these five steps to find ideas, and I go through these unconsciously. However, you can start by practicing them consciously and maybe these might melt into your daily schedule without you intending them to be. Then, voila! You overflow with ideas!
Everyone nowadays will tell you this. Read blogs in your niche. I will say, “Read them, but don’t only read them.” This is because by reading other blogs related to your niche, you start to unconsciously develop a writing style that isn’t your own flavor, but one that imitates the blogs you are subscribed to. I always find new bloggers trying to imitate the bigger bloggers. If you read carefully into the bigger blogs, you will notice:
By imitating them, you are confined to only their share of knowledge and ideas. That limits your blog and it can only be, at the most, an “imitating” blog. You don’t want that happening.
To prevent that, you should read other blogs and writings. Newspapers, online news articles, and personal blogs are just a few to mention. Go for the global section that applies to everyone. The intention here is to read over multiple styles to start defining your own style. However, as the idea of this post is to give you ideas to talk about, I will also confidently state that by reading other subjects, you will also create an idea database in your mind. Some things will spark posts to write about and others won’t. In the long run though, you will be pulling stuff to implement into your posts from multiple sources here and there to create quality posts.
You may have brilliant ideas. However, if no one is interested in your ideas, although they may be brilliant, you are not going to get much recognition. So, you want to blog about topics that are on everyone’s minds. There are multiple ways to do this.
So, I guess I’m not that great of a planner, making this post initially go past a thousand words. Little doses of medicine are much better than chucking the entire thing down your throat, so I’ll let you guys munch on these thoughts for a while until I release the next three ways.
BloggersBB Blogger’s Forum is finally launching and to celebrate the launch, is giving away over $1000+ worth of prizes to all bloggers and webmasters! It is one of the bigger public projects that I will be spearheading this 2010, and I would honestly like all of you to be a part of it. It is an extremely exciting moment for me as after leaving the forum managing industry two years ago, I am finally going at it again to foster a community that can really give something back to the greater blogosphere. 
First, I would like to thank the sponsors who have been more than willing to help setup BloggersBB Launch Contest.
Blue Shore Host may be new in town, but the service and the support they provide questions their age. Are they really relatively new or are they actually an experienced and old crew? We think it is the latter just trying to act young and energetic! What better than to have an enthusiastic team that delivers top-notch hosting?
Hosshost is truly no joke. Their support is no joke either. It is a serious web host that strives to deliver and the configurations they deliver at the prices listed just surprises us.
SequenceHosting is an offshore hosting company (based in UK) that strives to provide quality and affordable hosting to clients all over the world. Not overpricing their services and keeping the resources just right for bloggers is really a plus!
SharkSpace is an established web hosting company that already has a reputation that most hosts can only dream of. Offers a true 24/7 support and has been an advertiser on ahnternet for nearly a year already. Quality hosting that you know you can depend on.
WPWebHost is a hosting company especially for WordPress users. It is an established brand among the WordPress community. Many of BloggersBB’s fellow bloggers use this service and rarely have we seen downtime in the blogs!
CustomTwitterBg can help you boost your appearance on Twitter. With Twitter becoming an integral asset in today’s online presence for an individual, you want CustomTwitterBG to help you design your Twitter to something that resembles you more. They even offer free backgrounds!
DesignFXpro has a stunning portfolio of mascots and logos. If originality is what you want, you really can’t go wrong with them. Honestly, check their portfolio out, because you will be amazed…
Logo Nerds offers mascots and different level logos to suit your budget and needs. Another designing company that just never fails to impress!
TwitArt helps you personalize your Twitter account even more! At the forefront of the industry, Twitart customizes both your background AND your avatar to make your Twitter account, really, you.
TwittGround can rejuvenate that dead and inactive Twitter account of yours into a fascinating Twitter account. If you are an active Twitter user, why not get your Twitter account a change and some popularity through a high-quality custom page? TwittGround does it for you.
The prizes we have to give out our quite fascinating too!
Winner
Whoever has the most points by the end of the contest wins:
- BloggersBB VIP Membership
- SharkSpace’s Hammerhead Hosting 1 Year ($107.40)
- ahnternet Complete Blog Solution or Blog Report ($47.00)
- Additional Prizes below!
Runner-Up
Whoever has the second most points by the end of the contest wins:
- BloggersBB Premium Membership x12 months
- WPWebHost’s Freedom Hosting 1 Year ($80.00)
- Additional Prizes below!
Oustanding 3-5
Whoever has the third, fourth, and fifth most points by the end of the contest wins:
- BloggersBB Premium Membership x6 months
- HossHost’s Hoss Hosting 1 Year ($84.00)
- Additional Prizes below!
Additional Prizes!
From first to fifth, winners may choose one of the following prizes in order.
- Custom Twitter Page from TwittGround ($150.00)
- Custom Twitter Background from TwitArt ($78.00)
- Custom Mascot from LogoNerds ($97.00)
- Custom Professional Business Logo from LogoNerds ($47)
- Custom Mascot from DesignFXpro ($100+)
Excellence Awards
This isn’t points based. This is about quality. How much substance did you contribute to BloggersBB? It really is all about quality here rather than quantity. If your one post is simply brilliant, you win!
- BloggersBB Premium Membership x3 months
- Blue Shore Host’s Personal Hosting 1 Year ($39.99)
Lucky Duo
We will pick two (2) random members who participated in the contest. They will win:
- BloggersBB Premium Membership x1 month
- SequenceHosting’s Starter Hosting 1 Year ($12.00)
- Custom Twitter Background from CustomTwitterBg ($59.00)
All winners get free blog installations/migrations and modifications.
Participating in the contest is fairly easy. All you have to do is become a member of BloggersBB, subscribe to this blog to receive your updates on fantastic internet marketing and blogging tips and of course, the winner announcement, and make a blog post about this contest and sending a trackback to this post. The trackback will be your real confirmation ticket into the contest, so you really want to make sure you get that in! This sets you up for the bare minimum and in running position for the “Lucky Duo” prize.
To win the contest that is bundled with premium accounts, awesome web hosting, Twitter backgrounds, and custom mascots and logos, actively participate in the forums! Posting, referring people, and simply participating in our smaller events will earn you points to win this.
For full contest details, check out the Official Contest Details page.
First, let me say:
Happy New Year!
I can’t believe it is 2010 already? I can still remember the time when I first decided to start building websites and create some sort of a web presence for myself. That was in mid-late 2002! Wow, time flies by!
It’s 2010, and I know this can sound a little funny, but let me ask you this. Think about 2011. How far does it feel? I don’t know about you, but to me, it feels like I’ve got quite some time until 2011 hits. However, re-read the paragraph above. Time flies! I know that 2010 is just going to go by quick and I’m sure you agree too.
We’ve got big things coming up this year. World Cup South Africa YEAH!! That’s going to be the highlight of the year! Vancouver Winter Olympics too! Sweet! The Hy-wire is supposed to be around the corner. I’m a little hyped up about the Burj Dubai too, being an engineer. Personally, we’ve all got big events for us that will make 2010 fantastic.
Online, I’ve got small plans and big plans. Let’s face it, my 2009–goal wise–was pretty bad. I didn’t exactly follow my goals and tried to tap into new and different markets, which made me lose focus. So, I’m looking to make the first year of this decade a little different and am planning on an approach that tackles the roots once again.
For Internet marketers, you can use all your tricks up your sleeve and utilize your cool custom tools and scripts. However, at the end of the day, nothing beats a hard work on just getting the fundamentals done. I hope to go back to it and try to stay away from the numerous distractions that the enjoyable Internet marketer’s world offers.
In regards to this blog, I hope to document my works a little better to help people out. I find it that when you know how to make money online and strive to perfect the impossible game of marketing, you kind of get bored from time to time and inspiration from fellow marketers just don’t cut it. However, inspiring new people and helping others start from the roots can be interesting and I personally think it will be a rewarding experience too. I’ve taught math and physics for college-bound kids. As much as I enjoy sharing knowledge on multivariable calculus and Gauss’s Law, I wouldn’t mind running something like AzoogleAds 101. So, look out for this blog to help you out a lot (hopefully).
This post or a list of goals will most likely change by the summer of this year. Why? Because I’m determined to overachieve. Although I’m still a student, who said you can’t do this all while double majoring and minoring?
2010, here I come!
On January 1, 2010, I’m launching a new community for the general bloggers and webmasters. BloggersBB. It is an exciting project for me because I have always wanted to setup my own community. I have attempted running a few many times over the last few years, but due to multiple reasons, I had to shut down the forums or sell it off.
I have a few sites which I really do hold on tightly. I also do have a lot (or maybe too many) of mini-sites optimized and monetized to grow money. I recently sold off my soccer site to re-launch it under a different name this coming summer. Hence, I don’t have a single website (aside from this blog) right now that I consider to be a “major” online project for me. I plan on making BloggersBB that one.
BloggersBB will be kicking off the new decade with a contest. More details regarding the contest will be released on this blog this blog on the 1st. However, I thought that I might as well share with you guys some of the plans I have specifically for BloggersBB this year. I feel that whenever I set goals for my websites, I can direct the site a little bit better. This is one of the reasons why I never set monetization goals aside from things like, “I’m going to reach $100/month for a certain site.” Anyways, to the goals.
Reach 1500+ Registered Members: I know that member counts don’t really mean much because members’ activity matters more. However, I would still like to set a target of 1500+ registered members for BloggersBB this coming year. That is a little over 4 registrations per day. This pace probably isn’t possible and easy at the beginning stages of the forums life, but I’m sure correct promotion will help pick up the registrations.
50,000 Posts: Past experience in running forums tells me that depending on the community’s topic of interest, posting rate will differ. 100 posts a day will equal 36,500 posts in a year. I hope to make BloggersBB have more talk going on and hence, set a goal of more than 100 posts per day. 50,000 posts equals out to be about 136 posts per day and I feel that this is perfectly possible as long as I stay active in the forums and continues to promote it.
Two Major Contests: Contests will be a big portion of BloggersBB and I will certainly work within my boundaries to run some sort of a contest every month. However, I plan to run at least two major contests/competitions this 2010. The first one will be the launch contest which the full details will be released on January 1, 2010. The second will most likely come sometime during the middle of the year or a little later on. If there is something special to celebrate, that probably will be when the contest/competition is run. If you are interested in sponsoring any sort of prizes for bloggers and webmasters, feel free to get in touch with me.
Black Label Development: Black Label is a special group status in BloggersBB which I plan on working on pretty hard this coming year. It will be the core of the “blogging course” or “academy” which I plan on developing. More details regarding this will follow. I hope to have at least 50 members in the forums by 2011 as Black Label members. Of course, these would have to be 50 happy members who are extremely proud of their Black Label status.
100% Reinvestment: This is more of a promise than a goal. Whatever I earn from/through BloggersBB, I intend to put everything back into the promotion and the development of BloggersBB. Developing a successful community doesn’t come for free. All funds earned will be saved and invested into areas such as promotion, custom modification development, script upgrade (or purchase, as I’m not liking vBulletin 4.0 right now), and server costs.
Hopefully, things will work out perfectly and I will overachieve what I have set today, a year from now. How can I achieve it? I need the help from you guys!
BloggersBB will have a launch contest this Friday, January 1, 2010. We will be giving out over $1000 worth of prizes. If you are a blogger or a wembaster, I would like to encourage you to join as there will be prizes for everyone.
So yesterday, I promised to write a post on how to move your WordPress blog or any site for that matter to a new host. I guess this post could be relevant at this time of the year, as one of my favorite things to do during this time is to introduce people to blogging and the easiest way is giving out hosting. Some have their own hosting, but choose to change ships and if you are one of those, this post will be relevant to you.
For this post, I’m going to focus specifically on migrating your WordPress blog over from one host to another host. I’ll cover the more general technique of transferring your blog over to another blog. Then, I’ll cover a really straightforward option possible in the case the control panel your web hosting company offers you is cPanel.
To move your blog over to another host, the two things that you want to backup are your wp-content and your MySQL database. To backup your wp-content folder, it is pretty straightforward. Just download the folder through your FTP client and you’re done.
Backing up your MySQL is a little more complicated. Login to your phpMyAdmin and select the database that has your WordPress installation. With the database selected:
Now, putting it back online.
If you have cPanel and your new host uses cPanel, simply click Backup and backup the Home directory and the MySQL database. Then, in your new hosting account, simply use the Restore wizard, click Browse, and select your backups. Done!
When I changed hosts, I utilized both methods. I can confidently say that both methods work very fine. If you do try one of the two methods and get stuck somewhere, feel free to contact me and I’ll try to help you out.
How do you successfully move your blogs over, as not all hosts are always perfect? Any migration episodes to share?
So I was nearing the end of the contract with my previous host. Well, my previous host’s servers weren’t all that amazing as it was some pretty old hardware. To make the blog and my sites run a little faster, I have decided to move onto a server with better and more recent hardware. You should see a significant increase in performance regarding the page load times.
Tomorrow, I’m planning on sharing with you all a tip for bloggers and general webmasters. A difficulty I had with this transfer was the transfer itself. I usually relied on webhosts to do the migration for me, but I decided to conduct the move myself this time. I used the steps for four of my blogs recently and all of them transferred over fine, so I’m assuming it is somewhat fail-proof.
Anyways, I’ll see you all then tomorrow.
It’s already that day, December 25th! Take a break from your online work and spend time with your family and friends. Although I always emphasize taking every opportunity to work, this day is one of the days in the year that you should ignore my advice.
Merry Christmas!
So I said that WordPress 2.9 is pretty slick with its new features. Well, it’s working fine for me right now, but I guess that isn’t the case for all.
Unfortunately (?), although I am on the Beta now, because I don’t have the issue with the curl, I can’t actively take part in this testing. If you do have a problem though, I suggest you jump on-board because the more people WordPress has testing, the quicker your issue will get fixed.
Static is a teen blogger who runs the blog, ahnternet, dedicated to random ramblings in the MMO and the online world. He also administers various websites and online projects, while making decent money. Also, he is currently attending a top U.S. college, majoring in Engineering. Nonetheless, his true passion lies in business, and thus, one of his dreams is attending the prestigious Wharton School for his MBA.
