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Every blogger knows that the best way to generate comments is to reply to comments. Smart bloggers know to reply to comments in their comment section, rather than via a private email. Not only does this encourage a repeat visit — particularly if you’ve installed a plug-in that lets users subscribe to comments — but it demonstrates to other potential commenters that you’re interested, interactive and engaged.

But let’s face it, sometimes those comments hit your InBox when you’re just too busy to reply. What then?

Then, my friends, you use Hit Me Later which acts like a snooze button for your InBox. All you have to do is forward the comment to X@hitmelater.com, replacing X with the number of hours — or the day of the week — when you want that comment sent back to you. Voila, it goes away and returns at a time of your choosing.

So let’s say you’re sitting at your computer at 1 o’clock in the afternoon but really prefer to start your mornings around 7 a.m. by replying to commenters while your creative juices awaken? Forward the day’s comments to 18@hitmelater.com and you’ll clean up your InBox for that afternoon while scheduling your replies to suit your morning mail routine. The service is free, there’s no registration required, and both your email address and the original senders remain private.

Gawd, I just lurves the internet.

We’ve all seen them: those anti-spam measures displaying garbled words we’re to type to verify we’re human. Known as Captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), they’re used around 100 million times per day across the internet.

Bloggers using Captchas swear by them as a means of thwarting spam comments, but readers often feel they’re more of a hassle than they’re worth.

Now, all that time and typing is being put to good use thanks to the Recaptcha project. Instead of random words, sites participating in the project are using Captchas featuring words from old manuscripts and scanned archives that were marked as unreadable by scanners. When those words are displayed to a human user, who then types them in, the responses are added to a database, much of which is reviewed by humans to ensure accuracy prior to modifying the scanned archive.

Currently around 40,000 sites have signed up to be Recaptcha partners with over 4 million word responses being logged every day. In the last year alone the project has helped decipher over 400 million words, including digitization of the NY Times archive from 1908.

Suddenly, those little screens don’t seem nearly as annoying, do they?

(Source)

Oh for crying out loud! I just twigged that I have not updated this since people stopped clapping and Tinkerbell died… You would not believe how much more of a drama I could make that. But I’m sorry you’ll just have to take my word for it.

I am distracted with cutting my toe nails, spending my husband’s money, and just generally being a nuisance to anyone unfortunate to cross my path. My day is passing in a blur from the moment my children manage to unlock my bedroom door and use me as a jumping castle to the point where I am begging my kid to go to sleep or so help me God that kid will be decorating my wall: “Duct Tape Still Life’. I am not complaining though. Life happens.

I won’t promise anything to you but I won’t blog until the next time booze prices go up and I have to get sober. Seriously! Don’t hold your breath though, you’re likely to turn blue.

(And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t write a single word of this entry. The Lazy Bloggers Post Generator, found via Void Where Prohibited, did it all for me. Now if I could only figure out a way to monetize this post.)

Recently, I’ve noticed that I don’t enjoy blogging on this site as much as I enjoy my other four.

Hence I’m putting this one on hiatus. I’m not saying that I won’t blog again at some point but, the way I see it, if I’m bored with it then readers must be, too. So find me over at Electric Venom or I Think Therefore I Blog or Chubby Mommy or Queen of Snark, or even at Pajamas Media, where the blogging’s infinitely more fun.

Update 08192008: I’m baaack.

One of the more common questions I’m asked is whether it’s necessary to switch from free hosting sites (like Blogger or WordPress.com) to make money blogging. The short answer is: absolutely. No one likes to hear that, though. Finding a reputable and affordable hosting company seems like a daunting task, and people don’t like the thought of sinking money into an endeavor without knowing for certain it’s going to pay off.

So let me put it this way: with many of the great companies I recommend (see the link at the top of the page), you’re 100% guaranteed not to make one thin dime if you’re using a free hosting site.

Why? Because you — the blogger — have absolutely no control over the content you put up there. Most free sites prohibit bloggers from using paid links, and there are plenty of stories on the internet about bloggers who’ve learned about this the hard way when their blogs were taken down. Worse yet, free hosts don’t even have to have a valid reason to delete your content: it’s been known to happen for no other reason than because a competitor or malicious person “flagged” a site as offensive. So if you’re serious about making money with your blog then you need your own host. Now.

How do you choose web hosting? There are a number of important factors to consider: including bandwidth, features, reliability, customer service and, of course, price.

1. Bandwidth - Since bandwidth reflects the amount of data transferred, so your needs depend largely on how much traffic your blog has and what kind of data you’re making available. New bloggers, who’ve yet to establish a large audience, obviously don’t need as much bandwidth as a site getting tens of thousands of hits per day. But even a new site can use a lot of bandwidth if it’s crammed with downloadable files, podcasts and bloated images. The general rule of thumb is to find a host that offers smaller bandwidth packages for lower monthly fees to begin with, then upgrade your hosting plan as needed.

2. Features - As the folks at WebHostingBluebook.org explain, it’s a good idea to list out your plans for your site before you start shopping for hosts. Do you intend to run numerous scripts? Will you need a large database? What about forums? Compile the list of your planned (or even hoped-for) features before you begin shopping around for a host to ensure you’ll find one that can meet your future needs, too.

3. Reliability - Anyone who’s been blogging for a while can tell you nightmares about finding their site’s not responding shortly after they’ve been linked by a high-profile blogger. Or having their data lost due to a massive server failure. (All too often bloggers learn the hard way why backing up one’s own data regularly is the most important blog-related task.) But don’t just take the company’s word about their up-time: do some research to find out what others have to say. One good place to start is the web hosting bluebook which rates and reviews in detail the top 10 hosting sites.

4. Customer Service - Although this is usually addressed in company reviews, your own experience is important, too. Any company which takes more than 24 hours to initiate a new account after you’ve signed up is almost guaranteed to take that long when you’re a paying customer having problems. So remember: until your data’s on their server it’s still an easy thing to find a different, more customer-oriented host.

5. Price - Even a quick glance at those hosting reviews shows that prices for basic monthly hosting are all over the board. I’ve seen bloggers moving from free hosting tend to make one of two mistakes. Some go for the company with the cheapest hosting prices only to find themselves dissatisfied a few weeks later when they discover the service isn’t reliable, the server’s speed is slow and their requests for help are never answered. Or they go top-dollar in the belief that their site is going to make it big right away. Personally, I’d recommend a more middle of the road approach: $5 to $6 per month is a fair price for a reliable hosting site with good customer service, plenty of bandwidth and a number of features.

Yes, making the move away from a free hosting company will cost you money in the beginning. But it’s also necessary if you plan to make money in the future. As the saying goes, you’ve got to spend money to make money… but when it comes to hosting fees you don’t necessarily need to spend a lot if you know what you’re looking for to begin with. Good luck!

I’ve been actively blogging for over 5 years now, and by “active” I mean that at one point I generated well over 20 blog entries per day. Original content, too. I was younger, then, and as anyone who’s crossed that magical 40th birthday line understands, I had a heck of a lot more energy in those days, too.

One thing I didn’t have back then: an income to show for my blogging. Naturally, this led to quite a few sighs from my husband when he heard things like “Oh, sorry I didn’t get dinner started yet. There was a breaking news story I wanted to blog about.” Likewise, my mother-in-law would cluck and grumble to herself that I was frittering away my time unproductively but, since she clucks disapprovingly over just about anything I do, I didn’t pay her much attention.

My friends’ incredulity would get to me, though. They simply couldn’t understand why I wanted to spend my time building up backlinks, establishing a solid and loyal readership, and constantly pursuing the day when I’d be able to pay some (if not all) of my bills with my blog(s). “Come lay out by the pool,” they’d urge me in summer. “Come skiing with us,” they’d beckon in colder months. But, although I did take them up on their offers now and again, I maintained a belief that I needed to put in a certain number of hours per day online.

Five years later, that’s paying off. My husband saw it when I announced — a year early — that we’d paid off his car. My mother-in-law sees it (though she pretends not to) now that we can afford to visit her almost half as often as she expects. My friends? Well, so many of them have lost their jobs to outsourcing, layoffs and business closings in the past year. Now they’re coming to realize how much more “secure” my hobby-turned-job is than theirs ever was, and that maybe I wasn’t so foolish for passing by those (expensive) days at the pool or on the slopes.

Which is not to say that any of them actually get the fact that if your name isn’t John Chow or Darren Rouse you aren’t going to be earning Big Bucks while on vacay. (Though, to be fair, both gentlemen put in their dues and sweat-equity, too. I’m just jealous.) If you’re a little guy, or a gal like me or a big (in internet-weight only) gal like Barbara Ling, you’ve still got to put in time at the keyboard. And despite seeing that such time translates into money, friends and family still don’t always get that fact.

This week, for instance, I’ve sold two articles to Pajamas Media, a half-dozen high-paying paid reviews written elsewhere, designed sites for three bloggers, monetized two others as part of my blog-consulting business and made my standard earnings from the paid blogging companies I work with, along with regular AdSense earnings, too. The result: I out-earned my husband. Twice over.

Does that mean he’s been any more understanding when, say, I’ve suggested I’d rather pick up Subway than spend an hour cooking dinner? Or that my son, who has a new basketball and hoop to occupy him while Mommy works on her laptop on the deck, gets it that I can’t stop what I’m doing to hear yet another knock-knock joke? Do friends (who want me to set them up a blog, then design their blog, then teach them how to blog and to monetize their blog… for free) understand when I decline an invitation to the movies or karaoke at the local bar?

No, no they do not.

Fortunately, I’ve worked up a short list of sure-fire ways to circumvent these problems now (well, with everyone but my son — and since I’ve managed to get the others off my back I actually have more time for him as a result).

»»Click to continue

If you’re struggling to handle comments left solely to help someone else’s SEO, the solution is one click away. Alex King, the author of so many indispensable WordPress plug-ins, has come up with another nifty one: De-Link Comment Author.

Although the plug-in isn’t officially supported, I’ve installed it on all of my blogs and have been quite pleased. The plug-in adds a new line to email notifications and to the comment-moderation screen. Both have worked fine in WP 2.5 and 2.5.1, although I don’t know about previous versions.

One advantage of using the plug-in: you can leave the comment body intact. With comment authors using paid links as their URLs as part of a money-making link-building campaign you can keep their supposedly “helpful” comments without worrying their links might be making your blog spammy.

If you’re one of the bloggers who’ve installed the “do_follow” plug-in (which passes PageRank to commenters URLs), you’ve probably seen a surge in the number of senseless comments left by people who obviously aren’t regular readers. Did you know those comments might actually be paid links?

That’s right: some people are making money via link-building services using blog comments, and they’re making anywhere from $1 to $15 per link. On your blog. The attraction is obvious: not only do the companies paying for such links get a “do_follow” link, but they get one that’s likely to be permanent.

The downside for bloggers is obvious, too: it might look to human readers like you have a popular blog thanks to the high number of comments your entries receive, but search engines may interpret those subsidized comments as paid entries and penalize you.

After trying several different email and calendar programs, including Google’s, I’ve yet to find one that I consider as functional as Outlook. The only problem is that cycling through umpteen running applications just so I can add an appointment to my calendar or a task to my To Do list is a real pain in the neck. So more often than not I promise myself that I’ll remember to add it later… and then, of course, I forget about it.

Today, though, I ran across Microsoft’s list of command-line switches for Outlook and realized I could easily create shortcuts in my Quick Launch bar to accomplish those things with just one click. If you’re using Outlook, too, you’ll find this a surprisingly easy yet helpful little trick.

Here’s how to do it:
»»Click to continue

Although I’m far from a tech head, I consider myself a pretty savvy internet user. My browser’s tricked out, I can execute keyboard shortcuts in my sleep, and now that I’ve switched to using dual monitors with my laptop (when I’m not blogging from my treadmill) I’ve become even more of a web-head than ever.

So I really didn’t expect to learn much from Mark Frauenfelder’s book Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet—Better, Faster, Easier. But here it is, just a week after I picked up a copy in the hope of providing my husband with a resource (other than me) to answer his never-ending “How do I…?” questions about using the internet.

Before giving it to him, I figured I’d sit down and browse through a few pages and maybe find one or two tips on things I didn’t know. Then one or two became one or two dozen, and soon I’d dog-eared the book so much that I realized I needed my own copy. So, I kept that one and bought a second one for my husband’s use.

Not long after that, we got a call from my mother-in-law which began with “I’m having problems with IE 7.0. How do I…?” and, while my husband walked her through the explanation, I hopped online and ordered her a copy, too.

Sure, there’s plenty of information that’s going to seem rudimentary to some folks: how to use eBay and Google, how to subscribe to RSS feeds, etc. But there’s also plenty of information that even long-time internet users don’t always know (or might have forgotten). Whether it’s personal productivity or system maintenance, finding new sources for news or safe places to download free software, Fraunfelder’s covered it in simple, straight-forward language that even my mother-in-law can understand.

Which means, if I’m very lucky, she might just stop calling here every two days at dinner time in search of free computer help. At $10.17 for her own copy of Rule the Web, I think that’s worth every penny.

When it comes to companies that pay bloggers to blog, it’s no secret that LinkWorth is by far my favorite. With the variety of ways bloggers can make money with them, they tend to be one of my largest sources of online income each month. Some of you have told me that you aren’t receiving as many opportunities, and you’ve been frustrated.

Well, I’ve got good news for you.

Last week LinkWorth introduced “LinkPost Jobs”, a way for bloggers to take paid posting opportunities without waiting for an advertiser to choose them. Simply log into your LinkWorth account and view the Alerts on the right-hand side of your screen. If there are opportunities available you can click through and take them right away.

Keep in mind that their company’s financial month runs a bit differently from most. Although reports are run on the first day of the month, payout is on the 11th. I’ve noticed that new opportunities tend to come after that date, too, perhaps a sign that advertisers renew their accounts once payments have been issued to bloggers?

Thanks to social boomarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us, it seems like there’s a formula for just about everything pertaining to blogging these days:

• How to write attention-getting headlines;

• How to craft descriptions and summaries to draw readers;

• How to write compelling excerpts.

Now there’s even advice on the best and worst times to post entries. (Found via ReadWriteWeb.)

After analyzing 10,000+ entries that became popular on various social bookmarking sites, the best times appear to be Tuesday through Friday between 10am - 2pm PST. The worst times? Late nights and weekends.

So, should you restrict yourself to posting your best efforts during those hours? Not really. Even the study author, Jake Luciani points out that range doesn’t account for the time it took for a post to get to the front page of various social bookmarking sites.

I’d point out, too, that it also depends on your frequency of posting. A good post written late at night and left as the top entry on your blog for an entire day will still catch that 10 am - 2 pm traffic, giving it pretty much the same odds of getting bookmarked… if you have readers who actually do such things.

That’s the ultimate determinant, if you ask me. There are plenty of blogs producing quality, useful content for readers who, for whatever reason, still don’t submit entries to social bookmarking sites. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s a trait I’ve noticed recently… just as I’ve noticed that some readerships bookmark every single entry at other sites, regardless of their general usefulness.

Which is why I’d be interested in study on what prompts people to social bookmark an entry: is it the general usefulness, the originality, the readers’ desire to look like they’ve “discovered” something, or veiled butt-kissing in the hope of getting a return bookmark?

How about you? What makes you Digg, Stumble or bookmark something? Share in the comments.

When it comes to first impressions, your blog has four seconds to load before the majority of new visitors decide not to bother reading it. That’s four seconds for full loading, by the way, and not merely part of your content filling the screen.

Speeding up a website takes work but it’s worth it. The hardest part, as Faulkner once said of good writing, is to “kill your darlings”. If you think that lagging javascript or cute little widget that makes your comment section take forever to load isn’t harming your blog, then perhaps you ought to think about all the comments you aren’t getting because of it. Ditto for any social networking widget that regularly causes slow page-load times. (Hint: watch your browser’s status bar to find the culprit easily.)

For a whole host of other ways to speed up your page load times check out this series from DailyBlogTips. It’s a long list — and one I’ll be working through myself — but it’s worth it.

In the three months since I first wrote about how to use Amazon’s Quick Links on your blog I’ve been pleased to see my affiliate income grow. No doubt part of the reason is that I’m linking Amazon products more often — using the quick link script just makes it so darned easy. Multiply that times 5 blogs and a email newsletter about cooking, house keeping and home organization and, well, it’s beginning to produce a nice revenue stream.

Some of my blog consultation clients aren’t having as much success, and a question from one recently prompted the realization that affiliate links within blog entries are best treated differently than, say, a link to someone else’s blog.

The context of your links should cue readers about what to expect. Whether we’re talking about a link to Joe’s blog or to a product listed on Amazon (or some other affiliate link), the copy of the anchor text gives readers a cue about whether clicking through is worth their time.

When it comes to promoting affiliate products, you want to motivate people to click without overselling them. Motivating affiliate click-throughs can be accomplished in a variety of ways, but first and foremost is candor.

Make the benefit of clicking obvious so readers know the link will take them to some new product, tool or site that will help them. As Katy explains, affiliate links should be obvious in the sense that people know a link is leading to a product, and not simply someone else’s site. Not only does this avoid readers feeling “hoodwinked” into landing on an attempt to sell them something, but it will bolster your credibility with your audience.

Then lather, rinse and repeat. The more often you use affiliate links the more people will see them, which means eventually someone will click through and make a purchase. When these links are combined with personal reviews, they can become powerful, regular revenue streams for both their immediate audience and those who find your site through search engines.

Is it just me, or is anyone else noticing Tool Bar PageRank changing today?

One of my sites (which had unexpectedly jumped to PR3 a couple of weeks ago) is back to a PR0. Not that I care — I’m planning on letting that one go soon.

This site, though, showed up as a PR3 earlier today. It’s showing as a PR0 for me now, but a friend says she sees a PR2.

Madness.