RSS feeds are great for getting more readers, but they can also be the source of the theft of your posts. What can you do to limit the problem and give yourself the best chance of a quick fix if it does happen?
By Keith Lunt, © HowToStartMyBlog.com

Some bloggers are so lazy that they do not bother to write for themselves, but instead use plugins to gather content from RSS feeds on other websites. They do some work so that their blog ranks well and then effectively steal not just the content, but also traffic, from other blogs. How do you prevent this?

RSS Feed – Summary Or Full Text?
Just giving a summary in your RSS feed will almost certainly protect you from such theft, but your readers might also not find it as useful and might leave. So, it is not an option.

Copyright Your Blog
Just put somewhere on the header, footer or sidebar of your blog that the content is copyright of you. It won’t stop any theft, but it is a requirement of getting copied content removed.

Name Drop In Your Posts
If you write an introductory paragraph in your posts, then just include a simple copyright after it, for example By Keith Lunt, © HowToStartMyBlog.com. If you don’t then just find somewhere else to include it within the content. Given that it will be appearing on their blog and they are claiming the posts as their work, this might be enough to put some fraudsters off copying your work.

Include Some Stock Photos
A bit of a nasty trick this one, but join a stock photo library and download some photographs or images that are suitable for including in your posts. It’s better if you can buy some that are exclusive to that library.

Then include these in your posts. If the post is copied they will copy the image. Then just email the library and tell them that you are aware that they are displaying unlicensed photos that have been copied from your site. It won’t protect your blog, but if you are having trouble getting content removed then there is someone else on your side.

Include A Related Posts Plugin In Your RSS Feed
You should be using a related posts plugin already in your blog, but is it active in your RSS feed? If not, it should be. That way anyone copying your posts also copies the related posts links and then gives you some links back to your website. Even if they “nofollow” the links, you will get some of their traffic visiting your website (and that’s how I first discovered the theft of my own posts!). And these extra links off their site might persuade them to copy from elsewhere.

If you are starting a voucher code website then getting visitors to it is vital. Without visitors, you will have no traffic and no commissions. What are you going to do?

Provide something unique
At first, this idea might seem pointless. But it is well worth you spending a little bit of time in hunting down internet based shops that are reasonably well known, that do not have affiliate schemes. Then sign up to their newsletters and add details of their latest offers to your website. Why? Keep reading -we come to that in a minute!

Search Engine Optimisation
There are two ways here – the right way and the wrong way. The wrong way is to try to optimise your website for the same merchants as every other one of the hundreds of affiliates that are promoting that merchant. So the right way is the first use of those non affiliate merchants. Because they are not running schemes there will not be a lot of competition and you can quickly build up a good ranking for these merchants. Yes, they might not earn you commissions, but they are the initial draw for your visitors.

Get social
Create a Facebook page and a Twitter account and get social marketing. Post onto each details of some of your latest discounts each day and start following other people and trying to get people to follow you. Make sure that you include a reasonable number every day and again those non affiliate merchants are vital. These are what will get you noticed and draw people over to your website. Too many people are promoting the same group of affiliate merchants, so you can stand out from the crowd and get noticed by being different. There is no reason not to also go social on those that you are earning a commission for, just make sure you are getting the important merchants noticed!

Create some adverts
It doesn’t take too long to look around and find some free vouchers of your own for Pay Per Click advertising and similar schemes (after all, you are running a voucher code website!). So, sign up to some of these and get hold of some free Pay Per Click advertising that can be used to draw in a few visitors. It doesn’t take many to make it worth your while!

Join forums
Take part in some money saving forums and post details of those discounts that are not related to affiliates. There is a big reason here for doing this – you aren’t promoting something that you have a financial interest in. When you sign up, leave a big clue in your username as to your website address and this should generate traffic!

Provide an interest
This is another part of those non affiliate merchants. By listing them clearly around the website when visitors arrive on your website and see these merchants they might recognise them as something different, something that they are interested in. Whilst this may not draw in new visitors, it will give those that are arriving more reason to bookmark your website or subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feed. Building repeat visitors is far more efficient than building new visitors!

If you want to protect your blog from the endless comment spam then you might be depending on tools such as Akismet. But, that is not enough. With a little extra preparation you can make your life a lot easier.

Akismet is a great little tool. When I started blogging it was an extra that you downloaded if you wanted to, but it now comes packaged with WordPress and that is a tribute to how well it does its job. However, it is not perfect.

Akismet works quite simply by looking at your comments and comparing them to its rules and patterns. It is trying to calculate from experience which comments are good and which are spam. They are then left either in the queue for you to approve, or filed in the spam folder where they stay for 3 weeks. In this time you should review them all as there will be times when good comments are moved into the spam folder by mistake.

And this is my greatest problem with Akismet. Although it detects spam, it can get false positives – where it marks good comments as spam. So there has to be a manual confirmation in place if you do not want to risk offending those leaving good comments. And if your blog is being plagued by spam then checking and deleting that spam can get very monotonous. In the end, you will probably slip on this task and could be missing good comments.

What is comment spam?
Usually it is an automated process. The people leaving the spam do not actually visit your website, instead, they use computer programs to crawl through blogs, find the comment forms and submit nonsense comments in order to gain some slight search engine optimisation advantage.

So, what’s the answer?
Well you need to stop the comment spam at source. It is no good allowing the comments into your blog and then having to deal with them, it is better if you can prevent them from being submitted in the first place.

For many people that means various forms of captcha fields – that annoying little graphic that you have to retype. From intentionally difficult to read characters to hand written words and mathematical problems. These captcha fields come in a wide variety of formats and they all do their job of preventing automated spam.

An improved solution
But what a lot of these automated comment bots do is to pick up on the comment form when they first visit the website and then storing that information and continually submitting it time after time. This means that there is another ‘invisible’ way of protecting your blog. I use WP Captcha Free for this purpose, which timestamps the submission form when it is first read. This means that the automated bots are always using the same timestamp in the future and the plugin can detect the submission is out of date and delete the form.

It is great and on my blogs most hit with spam, it has gone from a problem of several spam comments every day to maybe one or two per week, which means the real comments are easier to separate out of the spam.

Finding merchants for your discount code website may sound an easy task at first, but get going and it is more involved than you might realise. Here is why.

Finding merchants that you will promote through your discount code website is actually very easy in a way. All that you need to do is to go to a few large affiliate program directories, sign up to as many merchants as interest you and that is really it.

These merchants will then start to send you regular emails of their latest discounts and offers. There will be emails that you can copy or retype onto your website and XML feeds that you can import in bulk if you are technically competent. So, where is the big problem?

This ease of access is a big problem
Well the problem is this. Every affiliate operating a discount code website in your country will be using the same basic set of merchants and promoting the same discount codes as they become available. Visitors looking around your website will see that it is full of the same offers that they have seen elsewhere and decide that they might as well just stick with what they know. Worse, if the site they are already with is doing the job properly, then you will have less offers and that certainly will not encourage them to come over to your service.

So you need to expand your offering outside of the immediate affiliate programs. And I know from experience that not only does this satisfy visitors, but because you are listing discounts and offers that are not on other websites there is a good chance that people will be finding you more easily on the search engines.

Find some non affiliate merchants
What you need to do is to start thinking of big name merchants (they do not have to be the leading names, just national names) and working out whether they offer affiliate schemes. You are looking those that don’t. Also, you can use keyword research tools to see what merchants people are searching for discount information on and check which of these do not run affiliate programs. It doesn’t matter so much if they have just an in house affiliate program, it is mainly the big network affiliate programs you are steering clear of.

Now quite simply look around the websites if all of these merchants and find their newsletters and sign up for them. Most will make this very easy to do and then all you have to do is to wait for the newsletter to arrive and upload those details.

The vital extra offering
And this second step is actually more critical than the mass joining of affiliate programs. By displaying discount codes that are more difficult to find and interesting to your visitors they are more likely to follow your site and sign up to your newsletter. It is also some great search engine bait.

So use some imagination when you are finding merchants for your discount code website!

Too much advertising on your blog can look spammy and tacky. It can scare off visitors and lose you credibility. But not advertising can mean no income. What is the answer?

It is quite reasonable to expect there to be some form of advertising on blogs. After all, the bloggers are paying for domain names, hosting and possibly other bills to provide a service for free. So if there is a chance of a small income, why not?

However, filling a blog full of advertising can look dreadful and gives the impression that it is the value of your readers that matter to the blogger, not the readers themselves. There is a fine balance between sufficient and too much.

If you read Google’s Adsense guide they recommend displaying three adsense units per page as the optimal way to earn money from them. And with their range of small to huge advert banners, you can certainly fill your site with advertising.

But, where do you place the adverts for best effect? In the content, in the navigation, above and below the post or one or more of a lot more options open to you?

As a rule, ignore Google’s insistence that 3 advert blocks (plus their search and other advertising units) makes the most money. Yes, it gives plenty of chance to build revenue, but even three blocks is too much. Instead, just two advert blocks around the page.

This does not always need to translate to two Google blocks (or two affiliate links). It just means keep to two advertising positions on the page that look subtle, but are visible to visitors. You can put a couple of similar sized Google blocks and affiliate links together to form an advertising block if you want to, just make sure that they look good together and look as though they are meant to go together.

So, where to put them? Well you have to balance places on the website that people will look with not being too ‘in your face’. Add some advertising to your main navigation in a similar style to your navigation and it will blend in well. Maybe put a wide block across the top of the screen, or a second block further down the navigation, whichever works best for your blog.

Some people worry that this means that there is no advertising at the end of the post, but this is what you want.

Those people most likely to click on adverts are those that have just arrived. Therefore, put the adverts where they can be seen when the page is opened. However, those that have read your post in full and reached the bottom of the post are liable to be able to be encouraged into becoming regular readers, so give them more to read, not adverts.

I’ve used quite a few different paid to post systems over this year in the hope of earning a good income. Yet, out of all of the systems that I have tried, only two have really fulfilled the promise. Why?

PayPerPost
I have to say that although it has gone quiet for me the last few months (I was earning $600 – $700 per month at peak, now down to $250 – $300) this is one of the two that I still check daily. Easy to use, a good support forum and generally fair prices. Well worth it.

BlogDistributor
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I didn’t like this system when I first tried it, but it grew on me. Well worth having a go, but your blog has to be perfectly written else you won’t be accepted! Write your post and submit it for approval. Once approved you then link to the advertiser. No approval = no free link, which is great and they pay well. The problem is lack of variation in tasks, but that should grow as they build. This is the second site that I still like to use.

SponsoredReviews
This is the first system that I “dumped”. First I got fed up of bidding on tasks that I hardly ever got to do. Then I got fed up of the tasks that came through the marketplace. You see, a 100 word and a 300 word article are paid the same amount, which is crazy, and the amount was next to nothing. No communication from them when they had a problem with a post and when I asked for help, no emails either. I just had to logon and see if there was a support reply.

InPostLinks
I do, sort of, keep running with this one but only because I don’t like to let things go! The problem here is that you have to keep logging and and looking for work. Then, when you find it, to get $2 for a 200 word post is a good payment on a PR3 blog. Maybe if the blog is a lot higher ranking and US based (I’m UK based) then some of those tempting better paying offers become available. But, one for the future, maybe.

SocialSpark
I’ve not really given up here, just I don’t see how to get a good volume of work through and I have no idea what their ‘points’ payment system equates to. A good idea in that you submit the post to them for review, but I’ve been waiting now for my last post to be reviewed for 12 days. Again, maybe shelved for the future for when my blog traffic has increased even more, although the ops I have had from them have not been aimed at my highest traffic blog.

BlogsVertise
I think this could be a good system, but as with BlogDistributor there just isn’t the work. At first there were plenty of jobs coming through, but with a range of PR2 & PR3 blogs there is almost nothing about. Prices vary widely, without any reason. I think if they spelled out what they were looking for in blogs it would help, but I have no idea. I thought at first maybe they were too new, but there is less work now than months ago.

Ebuzzing
This is a site that I want to use a lot, but as with others, there just is not the work available. There are plenty of video campaigns and especially recently I’ve been asked to take part in a lot of these, but given they are paid per view and completely off the topic of my blog, where would be the point? Shame. When there is an article it pays well, there just needs to be more opportunities to write articles for them!

ReviewMe
I have done maybe one or two posts for this site and never heard from them since, although they did pay out. Again, it is not clear what you need to do to get plenty of work. It seems that most of the work goes to the bloggers with the best reviews on their posts. But, as a newbie to the system, how do you get good reviews?

Sponzai
Another that I’ve not given up on, rather it has given up with me! Although there is a balance that I can withdraw. This is all about being paid to include guest posts. However, it is a sister site to PayPerPost and some of the interface is well behind the development there, so it looks like it is not being maintained (also their Twitter account has not been updated for 10 months). Good idea, in a way, but just not the demand maybe?

Disclaimer!
Obviously all of the above are just my opinions, based on my experiences with these systems. My blogging started a year ago and my venture into paid blogging started earlier this year. That means that most of my blogs have ‘low’ PageRanks™ (PR2 / PR3) because Google hasn’t updated the information in 8 months and they are all experiments in blogging so traffic across them can be low.

Maybe if your blog is higher ranking and higher traffic you know the secrets of working these systems. If so, do let me know by leaving a comment!

If you want to have a go at affiliate marketing then a voucher code website is an excellent idea. But, how do you do this cheaply? Well a blog can be cheap, even free, and yet it will work brilliantly. Here are a few pointers to get you going!

To start off your own voucher code website you can simply build your website using any available blogging software. Many bloggers use Blogger for this purpose, or you can purchase some hosting and install WordPress or any other blogging tool onto the hosting.

My Preference Is For WordPress
For my purposes, I always use WordPress. Yes, you need to pay for the hosting space, but there are tons of free themes available to use and a wealth of excellent plugins that can extend the reach of the blog. So I usually talk in WordPress terms, although the instructions are fairly similar for any blogging tool you want to try out.

Customise Your Look
So install, or create, your blog. Then look for some free themes and try out a couple. It is always useful to experiment with a few themes as quite often what looks good at first glance doesn’t look so good when you install it. It doesn’t matter too much if the style is not perfect, you can change it easily enough in the future.

Add Some Plugins
With a voucher code website you want to be displaying the latest available vouchers, which is great as most themes do that automatically. But, if you also install plugins such as related posts, then these plugins can detect similar content. This could provide readers with similar voucher codes that they might be interested in.

Categorise Your Blog
A blog can be a very well categorised website, when used properly, and this is an important feature in a voucher code website. Start to create categories for all of the merchants that you will be dealing with. If your search engine optimisation is worked on for these category pages, then people finding your website will see the list of all current posts relating to that merchant.

Use Tags Cleverly
One problem with a discount code website is that you should remove expired codes, or at least mark the expired codes as such. But keeping a track of this can be a nightmare, if not done properly. So leave yourself a clue.

All that you need to do is to use the tags to mark against each post an indicator as to when the offer expires. This could be an exact date or grouped together within a week. But by tidying up the expired codes, your visitors will find your site more useful.

Click To Reveal, Or Plain Text?
This can be a big debate. Some affiliates worry about losing sales if the codes are freely displayed and they do not force the important cookie onto the visitor’s machine, but click to reveal is also hated by many. I say be open, make life easy for yourself and just show the codes in plain text.

Are you looking at all of the voucher code websites that are on the internet and wondering how do they make money? Are you wondering if you could jump in too and earn some money? Well, it is very simple, when you know how.

In short, there are two types of voucher codes. There are those that you make money for directly and those that you don’t. This seems a stupid way to start off a discussion on how to make money through a voucher code website, but actually both types of codes have a vital role in your website and you have to know the difference.

Affiliate selling
So how do you make money from some of these voucher codes? Well you use something called affiliate selling. Here, you send your readers over to another person’s website, where they can make purchases of the goods that you are in some way recommending.

In return for sending your visitors over to their website, if the visitor goes on to make a purchase then you are paid a commission on that sale in return. Obviously, there is a lot of trust concerned with such a set-up in that the affiliate (who is sending the traffic) has to trust the merchant to correctly and fully track the visitors and pay the full commissions that are earned. But on the other side of this, it is in the merchant’s interests to pay the commissions fully to incentivise its affiliates to work harder and send more traffic.

Affiliate Directories
To make all of this system a lot easier to work with, most affiliate programs are controlled through large systems. You can sign up to two or three of these and get access to a whole load of merchants. And to add confidence to the set-up, the affiliate tracking is controlled by the system, not the merchant.

So what voucher code websites do is to provide a range of affiliate links to different merchants through major affiliate schemes. As they display relevant voucher codes the visitor then clicks the affiliate link and if they then make a purchase (possibly using the voucher code) then a commission is earned.

The Click To Reveal Question
The problem can be making sure that visitors do click on the affiliate link. A lot of people do not do this because they do not see why someone else should make a commission from them, even though they are happy to get the benefits of using the voucher code. This is the reason why some people prefer to use the click to reveal technique to make sure the link is used, but this is very unpopular in many circles.

Non Affiliate Vouchers
And what about those voucher codes that don’t make you money? Well these add to the mix and make sure that your site is different to other people’s websites. They give your visitors a reason to be there and although they don’t give you a direct income, they do give you better traffic stats.

Is it easy to set up a voucher code website or is it something that only the very technical can cope with? Can you make some money from it, or are you wasting your time?

Is it difficult to set up and more importantly, to make some money, from a voucher code website? To answer this question, we will look at the various elements an just how complicated (or not) each each and what is involved. So, to set up a voucher code website you need to complete the following steps.

1) Create a simple website
2) Find some affiliate merchants who supply vouchers
3) Display these vouchers on your website
4) Find some visitors to use the code

How difficult are each of these steps?

1) Create a website
This can be as hard or as easy as you want it to be. At the very basic level, go to wordpress.com or blogger and set up a free blog and use that. There are plenty of voucher code affiliates doing just that. There is no technical know-how and your site can be up and running in 5 minutes.

If you are happy to get more involved, try the self hosted version of WordPress or even write your own custom site if you really want to. This step can be as complicated as you want it to be.

2) Find some affiliate merchants who supply vouchers
Very easy. Just look for an affiliate scheme forum that covers your country and look for recommendations for good affiliate directories. Join one or more of these and then sign up to merchants within the directory. Very easily to do, it just takes a little bit of research. Once you are signed up, many of the merchants will be emailing you with all of the new voucher details as they become available.

3) Display these vouchers on your website
How complicated this is will depend on how you have created your website. If you have used a blog, then it is as simple as creating a new post. Use your categories and tags to group together merchants to make it easier to navigate and use your website.

The only complicated part of this is getting the affiliate tracking code clicked. Some people use ‘Click to reveal’ methods, in which you have to click a button, which not only displays the code to use but also opens the merchant’s website as a link. However, although this makes sure any sales are tracked, it is technically very difficult and also not liked in many quarters. To make it easy to operate, just display the code and provide an affiliate link and maybe remind readers that if they use the link for purchases your website can keep on running.

4) Find some visitors to use the code
This is the hardest part of the process. From running Facebook groups, Tweeting latest codes, article writing, Search Engine Optimisation or just good old advertising. It is up to you how you create traffic to your website, but give some thought to it as it is the most complicated part of running such a website!

A lot of people coming to this site are interested in the possibility of setting up a voucher code website, I know that from looking at the search terms people are using and the pages that they are looking at.

So, starting next Monday, there will be a new series on doing just that, but in more detail than I’ve gone into before. It will tell you how to create that first website to display the voucher codes – for free if you want to – where to get them from and ways of starting to promote the website.

All very simple and easy to do and great fun if you are interested in making a small affiliate commission. So do remember to bookmark the site or subscribe to the RSS Feed and come back next week to see what is involved in setting up a voucher code site.