It was, until recently, one of the plugins that I listed on by top 5 plugins. However, after some playing with the plugin I am afraid that I am removing from my list. It just doesn’t live up to the promises that it makes.

Not on my installations anyway. Feel free to let me know though if you have it working!

First, it did not create the table that it needed during the installation process. This was easily remedied even if the plugin never told me that it was not recording failed login attempts.

And, once the table was created it did indeed lockout the wp-login.php page. But, by simply submitting the login request to the wp-admin page instead, I could still login!

This is obviously a huge failing. I would simulate the three failed logins, be logged out, go to the wp-admin page and then login quite happily. I tried the process again and the same happend. I even checked the table in case I was given a new IP address during the attempts, but the same IP address was recorded all 6 times.

Whether it stops anyone getting on with a script I am doubtful. Without writing a bulk login script to test it out I do not know for certain. But I am very dubious.

Sadly, it looks like I might be back to the dreaded security plugin that I have just removed that validates every IP address. There has to be something better for me to use!

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You might have noticed that there has not been a major PageRank update since the first weekend of April. This has broken the longest ever time that Google has gone before of not updating the PageRank toolbar by a couple of weeks and we’re still counting.

So, has Google given up updating PageRank and would it really matter to the internet if it had? Well, I think the answers are “No” and “Yes”.

No, Google has not updated for a long time, but there have been minor corrections. I redirected a site to a grey barred page only a couple of weeks ago and that page now shows the original page’s PageRank. So minor corrections are taking place, just not the major update that a lot of people are waiting for.

Would it matter? Well SEO experts will tell you that directly the answer is “No”. But then, how many of them are buying paid posts from PayPerPost, InPostLinks and so on? And you can bet they are willing to pay a lot more to a PR4 blog than a PR0 blog.

So to those buying & selling links, PageRank is a major factor. There are other factors we could use, such as the number of inbound links (from Google or Yahoo), the Alexa rating or general traffic stats, but these all report on the behaviour of the entire site.

It would be simple to create a quality website and then start to sell links on a blog that is a sub directory of the website and all measures apart from PageRank would reflect what is happening on the main area of the site. The blog could be virtually hidden from view or blocked in some way and the only measure of this is its PageRank.

So I do not think that Google has quite given up on PageRank, not just yet. There are too many small corrections. But I could foresee a future in which it might just happen and the world of sponsored blogs could be turned upside down for a short while.

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Login Lockdown Does Not Always Work!

I do not know quite what made me do it, but I went to the admin logon screen of one of my blogs that has login lockdown installed and purposely entered the wrong password.

After 10 attempts (with login lockdown set to block at 3), I tried the right password and it logged on. Not quite right!

So I started investigating what could be wrong with this great little plugin. In the end I was trawling through the code behind the plugin and I was looking through the installation function and there there is a routine to add a new table to the database. Yet, that table does not exist!

Quite a simple job then to manually create the table. But it is worth while testing the lockdown is working on your blog. But just do not test it just before you need to logon! Try it out at a time when you can leave it for a while, or reduce the logout time before you test it. Or just clear out your login_fails table to reset it.

Here’s the SQL you need to run to insert the table to your database. Just replace [prefix] with whatever prefix you have given in your config file when you installed WordPress. Once this table is added, it works. However, I am still testing to see if it works quite as well as it is supposed to…

CREATE TABLE [prefix]login_fails (
`login_attempt_ID` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`user_id` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
`login_attempt_date` datetime NOT NULL default ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′,
`login_attempt_IP` varchar(100) NOT NULL default ”,
PRIMARY KEY (`login_attempt_ID`) );

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Almost immediately after writing about the problems of paid posting systems in which the advertisers approve the posts, I was hit by a pair of perfect examples of why this is a problem.

First, the above example of a rejection from today. The advertiser paid for a 100 word post and I gave them about 120. That should have been more than enough, but they rejected the post and demanded at least 250 words.

The problem is that all of my readers have now seen that post (given that they have 3 days in which to tell me they aren’t happy, that’s most of the exposure) and if I want to get paid, I need to write far more than they have paid for.

However, I should probably count myself lucky as this advertiser currently is showing a 66% approval rating, so a third of the bloggers’ posts have been rejected, without even being given the opportunity to rewrite it. Add to that figure the rewrites and they are really taking the mickey!

The other example from today is an advertiser that paid for a link only post, in which they want a write-up about a particular home alarm system along with an image of the product. These guys have been doing this and getting away with it for ages – I’ve already seen their opportunity a few times – yet they keep getting away with under paying bloggers. Not fair on bloggers and not fair on other advertiser who are paying a fair price.

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Blogging With Estate Agency Software

I recently looked at building a website for a new Estate Agents opening locally. Unfortunately, the software she had bought did not allow her to integrate into third party websites.

That is a shame as although Estate Agency Software does the work for the core mechanisms, there are a lot of local promotional tricks that estate agents could and should use to promote their services, especially for a new small agency.

So look for software that allows good integration with a range of services, because (of course) you would want to integrate a blog into any new business to make sure that you are getting the best of the promotion available!

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The Problems With Paid Posting

There is one big problem with paid posting as far as I am concerned – and that is the approval process.

There are 2 ways to approve completed posts. You either pass it back to the advertiser to review or you have a team employed by the system review the posts. Neither is perfect and a combination of the 2 seems impossible.

With advertisers reviewing the posts, it is open to their interpretation. Take PayPerPost and their dreadful ‘link only’ opportunity. This means that the advertiser is paying just for a link, but there are often stories (and I have been on the receiving end of them) of advertisers rejecting outright these posts because the content is not satisfactory. That’s not the idea of a “link only”.

Likewise, I’ve had advertisers reject multiple posts because they were ‘plagiarised’, when each was written from scratch. And the problem is that there is no appeal. Why would the system in the middle want to upset advertisers by going against their wishes?

The other way is for the staff to approve posts, but this involves a lot of manpower to read and approve every post and this needs to be paid for, from the cut out of the payment for the post. However, at least this type of review is consistent and usually it is the more high quality end of the systems that use this technique. I know that with BlogDistributor any single spelling mistake is picked up on and has to be changed.

As I said, you can’t mix and match as that would go against the advertiser’s wants. What’s better then? Well, I suppose the long winded staff approval. It might cost more but it is fairer and even helps the advertiser. But it is probably something that needs a high degree of quality in all posts and the extreme bulk expert market places probably can’t enforce that degree of control because of the range of ability with the English language between bloggers.

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Different Paid Posting Schemes

With so many bloggers monetising their blogs and many new bloggers starting blogs just to create an income, I thought I would take a look at some of the different paid to post schemes and my personal experiences with each.

PayPerPost – probably one of the leaders in the field, PayPerPost accept absolutely any blog and give you a chance to earn some cash. It is a marketplace to bring together advertisers and bloggers, with the emphasis on control being between these two parties. Advertisers make offers to bloggers and then approve, reject or ask for changes. Bloggers set a price for the basic post plus an additional price per word based on their PageRank. So on a PR2 blog, you are recommended to charge $4.50 for a 50 word post and $6 for a 200 word post.

InPostLinks – as with PayPerPost InPostLinks is from the Izea family. Here your blog must have existed for at least 3 months and have a good ratio of content to paid posts. Advertisers create opportunities and segment on location, subject and PageRank, but that is when the fun begins. Advertisers also state the price they want to pay and then it is open to all eligible bloggers to grab a slot. When a decent opp arrives you may have seconds before all of the available slots are gone. So you need to be checking regularly for open offers to get a lot, and when you get them for your 200 word post you can be getting next to nothing. Up to $5.50 is sometimes offered for PR2 blogs, but mostly the offer price is $1.50 / $2 and sometimes the offers are less than a dollar.

SponsoredReviews – this is a system that I have tried to like, but not succeeded. It takes a lot of effort to get a few posts. You need to look through the list of available jobs and bid on those that are interesting. If you are lucky, an advertiser might accept your offer and you then have a week to do the work. Sometimes advertisers will make you a direct offer that you can accept or reject. It sounds good, but I’ve found the system slow. Next to no opportunities and then a few at once. Even with a few blogs registered this happens, with all my offers being to one blog for a few weeks, then rotating to the next one! Also, for a PR2 blog I get $10 offers, which sounds good but you only receive half of that. Given that sometimes the demand is for 400 words, $5 (or less sometimes) isn’t much considering the effort put in to get there in the first place.

BlogsVertise – in theory, quite a good system, but even with some PR2 and a PR3 blogs, the work has dried up. Just one offer of an advert for a bingo site (how’s that related to my sites?) in the last couple of months. Shame, the system worked well with the staff allocating work to bloggers. Typical tasks were 2 – 3 paragraphs of writing for $9 – $10 on a PR2 / PR3 blog. But approvals took an age and I had a few times rejects, usually because 2 weeks later the advertiser wanted the anchor text changing or something. The payment system was manual and paid out once the post was at least 30 days old. But being manual, sometimes they were forgotten for a while.

ReviewMe – I signed up, completed 1 review which I was paid for and that was the end of it. Just 1 of my popular blogs is listed, maybe a couple more might be more relevant?

BlogDistributor – the new kid on the block. At first I have to admit I did not like the way it works, but eventually I got used to it. You are allocated a task which you can accept (or reject) . You write the post, typically around 100 words, but the minimum varies (and is very strange, e.g. minimum 93 words!) and submit it for review. Their team review it, requesting any changes and then when they are happy they tell you what website to link to. I didn’t like this returning business at first (my login security being such a pain), but now that I am used to is and am seeing the annoyance of advertisers falsely rejecting on other systems, I am really getting to like it.

Out of these, PayPerPost and BlogDistributor are my favourites. PayPerPost just about wins as there is more work there, BlogDistributor is a bit too new and the tasks are repeating a lot, which is getting tiresome. Hopefully, with more bloggers on board to attract more advertisers, that system could become my favourite.

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My Five Must-Have WordPress Plugins

We all have different plugins that we cannot live without and I certainly have a collection of 5 very important WordPress plugins that I will share with you here. But, what makes them so important to me?

Whenever I install WordPress, either for myself or a customer, there are 5 plugins that I see as must-haves that every blog should use. These 5 are automatically uploaded when I load the rest of the files and then activated as part of my set-up of the new blog. And they are (in alphabetical order!).

Akismet – where would we be without Akismet? No longer is it an option, it is packaged with WordPress. But, you must sign up to WordPress and get yourself an API key. Without Akismet you are leaving your blog open to endless spam comments that you will need to delete.

Login Lockdown – if you have ever had someone attempt to hack your site or even succeed, you will understand my desire for more blog security. This clever little plugin just sits and watches failed login attempts. If too many happen in a short time from 1 IP address, further login attempts are stopped from that address. This prevents anyone using brute force to guess your admin password.

UPDATE: 9-10-10 – following further testing of this plugin, I have decided that Login Lockdown does not do what it says on the tin and am experimenting instead with Limit Login Attempts.

Revision Diet – how often do you write a post, publish it and then never look at it again? Do you save various drafts, publish it and make more amendments? Is your database clogging up with revisions? This plugin helps you there by clearing out all but the most recent revisions. It keeps the database space down and should help keep your page response time up. You choose how many recent versions you keep.

WordPress Database Backup – if the worst came to it, how would you recreate your blog? If it crashed, was deleted (or infected) by a hacker, you wanted to move it to a new server or you accidentally deleted your database tables, what do you do? Well that is where this plugin comes in. You give it an email address and tell it how often you want to receive a backup of the essential tables. All of my blogs email to the same email address, which every month I go onto, check the emails are arriving and delete the older versions of the backups. Simple and secure.

WP Captcha Free – Akismet does a good job, but it is not perfect. It misses some spam and falsely marks good comments. This means that you have to trawl through your spam folder and check all spam is spam. Well this simple plugin stops a lot of the spam at source, without affecting users. It encodes into the comment form a time stamp and checks that. The first time a spammer uses it they will get through, but after that they will keep using the same time stamp and the comment will be deleted. Real visitors get a new time stamp every time they see the comment form and their comments get through.

Five very simple WordPress plugins. But, when I create a new blog they must all be there. If you have any other favourites do leave a comment – I might just make it a list of 6 must-have plugins!

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Make Money With Adsense And A Blog

If you want to make some money online, then one of the easiest ways is through Adsense. And the easiest way to setup a website is your own blog. So, what is needed?

Setting up your blog is quite simple. There are free tools and free or paid hosting options. But, the main thing to consider is the subject of your blog.

There are advantages and disadvantages all around. Some topics are earning a lot more per click and have readers that are more prone to clicking on the adverts than other subjects. However, if your specialism is in one of these lower value blogs, you might be able to produce a lot more writing than if you aimed for a higher value blog.

This means that your first decision is what will you blog about? Find something that you can write about a lot – you will be posting a couple of times per week – but out of the list of choices you come up with, work out which is likely to be worth the most.

Now, create your blog. Choose a good looking theme and sign up to Adsense and drop in a few adverts. A lot of people recommend only using 2 advert positions, which prevents the blog looking too much like a commercial. But put the adverts in places where your readers will notice them. Within the block of the main text and main navigation links are good targets, over at the side and the very bottom are bad ideas. You want the adverts to be clear and tempting to encourage readers to see them and click.

Next, start writing and promoting your blog. Write 3 or 4 new posts per week to build a good amount of content and then start to share some of your writing with other sources, such as article directories. This will build the search engine ranking of your site and will be the main source of traffic for your blog.

It is then just a matter of repeating the writing of new posts and link building time and time again. But, a word of warning. Do not make the mistake of making the blog solely built for Adsense. Make sure that it is readable and encourages readers to browse the site.

Whilst this goes against the improving the click rate, because loyal visitors are less likely to click on adverts, it should help to increase general traffic levels. It looks like Google is using traffic statistics in its search engine ranking algorithm so that it sends traffic to only those sites that humans are interested in. So, if you follow the traditional built for Adsense route of get the person onto your site and then straight away clicking on a PPC advert, it is likely that Google will notice and then stop sending you so many visitors.

It seems back to front, but unless your search terms are very weak you need a good amount of traffic viewing a couple of pages each before Google sends you much traffic. So your articles have to be interesting and meaningful. No longer is the basic built for Adsense format working.

But write an interesting blog with plenty of unique content and you can make money with your blog and Adsense!

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Does Blogging Make Money?

Does blogging make money? Can you really set up a blog and expect to make an income? We have a look at what you can expect.

A lot of people start blogging with the expectation that very quickly they will be earning a lot of money. Sadly, that is certainly not usually the case.

Take, for example, a newly set up blog on a free blog system that is full of private label rights content. What does this offer for any advertisers? It is not going to have a loyal following of readers and it is too new to have any search engine ranking benefits whilst the duplicate content that many others are sharing will probably prevent the search engines ranking the site.

So, if you are offering the advertisers nothing, why would they want to pay you?

Therefore, we need to look at what you can offer to advertisers that will make them want to part with their cash in your direction.

In short, they want more visitors to their websites and that is either through exposure to your visitors or through optimising their website through getting a search engine benefit from your blog.

To get an increase in traffic to their website by exposure to your visitors, you need to have plenty of visitors on your blog that will read adverts that you are displaying and then click on them and visit the advertiser’s website. This can be direct adverts, affiliate links or even pay per click adverts. There are plenty of different ways of turning traffic into cash through adverts.

Getting your blog to this point of a good readership takes time and effort. You need to do your groundwork in establishing plenty of interesting content and then encouraging visitors to your blog. Easy enough if you know how and are experienced, not so easy for the beginner.

So, what about the search engine benefits of being listed on your blog? Again this takes time and effort to build in to your site plenty of incoming links. A lot of the value of your blog will be based on its PageRank. Build a good PageRank and the value goes up.

This means that a lot of the value of your blog is based on how much work you do on your own optimisation and how soon Google updates its PageRank information. If you have a high PageRank, you can demand good amounts per link. But with no PageRank there will be few advertisers and these will not be happy to spend a lot advertising on your blog.

So, for a brand new blog then blogging will probably not make much money. But if you can establish a quality blog with a lot of well written and interesting original content, build your own traffic levels and your blog’s own search engine rankings then there is indeed the opportunity to make a lot of money from that blog.

And, once you have done it once, you know what to do to do it again and again. It becomes a matter of how many blogs can you handle?

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