Taking the other important things that we can all learn from Julie Powell, here are five blogging lessons that we can learn from Julie Powell from the movie Julie and Julia.

Be Passionate About What You Are Writing

Julie adores and loves Julia Child. She was her hero, icon, semi-god. And like Julia, Julie loves cooking. At some point in the movie, when Julie was talking about blogging she asked her husband what she should write about. Somewhere in their discussion – the niche came out – Julie will cook all the recipes in Julia Powell’s cookbook and blog about it. So she did.

Involve Your Partner

If you are serious about getting into blogging, starting a blogging career or at least wants to start blogging and you are married – make sure to involve your partner. Good if they know what a blog is. If they don’t explain it to them. Evangelize about blogging. That way, they wouldn’t be indifferent with you when you are blogging. Blogging takes time, time away from your partner. So, it is a must that your partner understands what you are doing.

Post Consistently

Julie Powell wrote a blog post for 365 days. She never missed a blog post every single day. Well, that’s easy for her because she is blogging about her daily cooking. If you are not blogging about food and something else, make sure you plan ahead and try to come up with a blogging schedule for one week. That way, if you encounter a writer’s block – you’d have something to post for the day.

Don’t Get Too Personal with Your Post

There are two sides to this advice. One is that if you’re not maintaining a personal blog, don’t write about something too personal about your life. You can give anecdotes and cite personal experience but not to the extent that you’d divulge everything about you. Julie’s husband warned her about this when they had a fight and he left her temporarily. Luckily she did not write about it. The other side is having to do with getting too personal with blogging. Don’t make it the center of your life. Do other things. Divert from blogging once in awhile – to avoid blogging meltdowns or frustrations.

Don’t Even Think that Nobody Reads your Blog

Julie thought about that. But she was wrong. At first there was nobody reading her posts except her mom. But soon after several days of blogging, readers starting to comment. And later on, a New York Times reporter interviewed her and wrote an article about her. Before she knew it, she was an instant celebrity about to become a full-pledge writer. Lesson here – don’t be discouraged by the thought that nobody is reading your blog. The fact that it is online and out there in the internet, for sure one soul has read even just one of your post. And that’s enough to encourage you to continue blogging.

There you go, five blogging lessons that we can all learn from Julie Power of Julie and Julia. If you have the time, watch the movie. It is one movie that all of us in the blogging industry can easily relate to.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

If you’re looking for an effective solution to help get your blog noticed then the Contextual Partnership Plugin for WordPress bloggers could be well worth consideration. Perhaps the most attractive aspect is that there is no cost involved.

According to the developers the plugin is designed to;

Drive more targeted visitors to your blog (or blogs) by strategically linking your blog to and from other bloggers participating in the network. The exact method used to achieve this remains confidential but apparently it’s not a basic reciprocal link exchange – nor the more common 3 way linking arrangement often seen between bloggers.

Enhance the user experience for your blog visitors by providing them with links to other high quality blogs for further information on subjects of interest (and it can do this without you actually loosing the visitor which is a great feature).

Indirectly increase your search engine rankings by building highly relevant incoming links to your blog for keyword terms you define, related to your own niche market.

Not a bad indirect benefit at all.

To better understand how the network works, first you need to know what a “contextual link” actually is. A contextual link is simply a link “within content” of a blog post and “within context” of specific keyword terms in that post. For example the term “dog training” found within a blog post becomes a link out to another blog (related to “dog training”) within the network. Contextual Links are found all over the internet – bloggers interlink their own pages contextually, there are paid advertising programs that allow you to place contextual advertising links and earn per click, and bloggers naturally link out to other websites they find useful “contextually” as well.

This is the key to the “Contextual Partnership”. When you install and setup the WordPress Plugin, you’re asked to provide the URL’s you wish to advertise on other partners blogs, and the keyword terms you want those blogs to use to link back to your own. When a match is found within the network for the keyword terms you provide (and assuming it meets with the Contextual Partnership’s strategic linking methodology), a link back to your blog is assigned, and your account has a credit removed.
The amount of credits your account holds appears to be directly related to the number of links you’re providing to other partners in the network for the keyword terms they themselves are looking to use to advertise. Apparently for every link you provide for another partner, you earn 1 credit. That 1 credit is then “cashed in” to assign a link back to your own blog from other partners whenever a match is found for your own keyword terms. So if you already have 100 posts in your blog, and each of those pages finds a match to provide a link to another partner, then technically you could receive 100 incoming links to your blog as soon as you’ve been approved to participate in the partnership. You also continually earn more points and incoming links as you continue to blog and add more posts just like you usually do.

That’s the basic overview and you’ll find more specific information on the plugin website including details of many features not mentioned here (like the ability to select specifically which blog posts you want to include – or nor include in the network)…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Uptake by the blogger community seems to have been extremely good and this new service looks to become very popular. In the first two weeks of launch the partnership already had over 54,000 individual places to place links throughout the network, and within the first 4 weeks over 10,000 advertising links had been allocated between network partners. This is most likely a result to how easy it is to actually setup the plugin and participate – it literally takes 5 minutes to install and setup – although approval can take anywhere from 24-72 hours depending on the moderation queue as only high quality blogs are accepted to participate to keep out the splogs and spammers.
This seems to be one of those services worth giving a shot for a few months, and by the looks of things the developers have some exciting new features in the pipeline to make things even more effective for partners in the future.

You can find out full details and download the plugin below…

http://www.contextualpartnership.com

Or alternatively you can download the plugin directly from WordPress…
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contextual-partnership-link-exchange-plugin/

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

One of the first things I do when searching out a new web host is to see how many negative pages the company has built up under “company name sucks” and so when I was contacted to talk about Host Monster, I instantly performed my normal search.

Dreamhost has 69,300 search results
Host Gator has 68,200 search results
Host Monster only has 53,700 search results (or more than 14,000 less negative results)

I have used these hosts, and have to admit that I am surprised that so many people have dedicated themselves to making such pages against web hosting companies. Most of the issues I read about Host Monster had to do with people violating TOS and being upset that Host Monster had to turn off their site in response.

I understand that this might frustrate some people, but I also believe that this is for the greater good, and most reviewers leave out whether they were contacted before hand or not, so any negative reviews are very bias in nature and must always be taken with a grain of salt. The best way to find out if a host will fit your needs or not is to try them out. While moving sites might be difficult to decide which ones are good or bad before testing it out, much like a car.

On more than a few sites I visited, Host Monster was reviewed well, usually within the top ten web hosts listed on review sites, leading me to believe that they do well, also, I found more than one review where the customer was elated with the level and quality of customer service and support they received, including being able to call in and talk to knowledgeable staff.

One of the things that stands out to me when I look at Host Monster is the fact that they only have one consumer level hosting plan that is basically for anyone and everyone. Their plan includes unlimited space and bandwidth, as well as being able to add an unlimited number of domains to your plan. Usually such things would raise red flags for me, but they also take extra steps like offering a 99.9% Network Uptime Guarantee, $25 in Free Yahoo Credits and $50 Free Google Credits. The credits are, I assume, to be used to advertise on the search engines different advertising networks to draw in traffic to your site, which is always a confidence booster in my mind. How many hosts invest in the success of their users?

My only wish with Host Monster would be a stronger understanding of limitations. If they don’t limit bandwidth, nor hard drive space, what is to stop bad people from taking advantage of a good hosting company?

If you have a small site, or a very large site, you should try out Host Monster, and see if it is the right web host for you. They give a 30 day money back guarantee, so you don’t have anything to loose in that respect.

The Preceding Post was a Paid Post, but the opinions are my own

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

WP Review Site is one of those plugins that turns WordPress into something more powerful than it already is. Use WP Review Site to turn WordPress into a powerful review site engine. It allows you to easily create niche review sites about anything and everything you want, be it products, computers, gadgets, music, movies, services, websites, restaurants, hotels, credit cards or even beer.

WP Review Site combines has these features:

Add a star rating system to your comment forms – This enables visitors to your WP blog do more than just leave comments: they can write a review and rate it via mousing over star icons. You define the categories, and your visitors can rate between 1 to 5 stars. And WP Review Site is completely customizable to fit your blog’s design; you can display rankings as you see fit, whether you use tables or CSS.

And WP Review Site lets you sort reviews by weighted average rating: you can set it to display reviews by the highest/lowest-rated, and not in chronological order. You can even choose to not show the rating system in some parts of your site. WP Review Site even has various sidebar widgets for you to add a list of top rated items to your site’s sidebar, or a list of recent reviews with the average rating that user left.

And what makes WP Review Site even better for me is that it already comes with seven themes preconfigured to work with the plugin:

• WP Review Site
• WPRS: Aqua Featured
• WPRS: Award Winning Hosts
• WPRS: Bonus Black
• WPRS: Double Silver
• WPRS: Green Featured
• WPRS: Ocean

And even better, WP Review Site has already got its own affiliate link management system that will let you configure your links easier. Instead of inserting the URL for the same anchor text over and over, you can set your review blog to automatically insert affiliate links.

What I don’t care for, however, is the fact that the customization features of WP Review Site is spread over two options pages. I’d like to have everything in one configuration page.

For $97 dollars, you’d get free upgrades for life along with all the features mentioned above.

Pros:

• WP Review Site does the work of many different plugins to make WordPress work as a powerful affiliate review site.
• It comes with seven preconfigured themes
• Affiliate link management system is powerful

Cons:

• Too many separate options pages
• Switching themes would clear the sidebar of widgets

This review was written upon request by the creators of WP Review Site.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Jeremy and Robert were both amazing at keeping e-mail communication open. Robert even took time out of his day to talk to me over the phone in hopes of resolving this all as quickly as possible.

Robert was both knowledgeable and funny. I could hear him trying to do everything he could to figure out how he could optimize the site on his end so that I would have a better experience.

Even better, he explained some of the basic elements of their architecture, as well as opening up with minor issues that they had been experiencing, which showed to me that he was well-informed, and that they were attempting to not only be proactive, but not fall into the PEBKAC experience that I have received from other hosting companies. You know the ones, where you call in and it is all your fault. “Why did you install WordPress? Are you using plugins? Did you edit a file? Must be your fault!” I hate those types of hosting companies, and I have to admit, I was very defensive in e-mail communication because I didn’t want them to treat me with the same type of handholding that some of their customers might need.

I don’t think I can communicate in writing how absolutely impressed I am with Mosso right now. Their immediate communication with me, their brand awareness online, and their constant assistance in trying to quickly and easily resolve this problem for me immediately turns around any negative feelings I had about them, and makes me ten times more likely to recommend them in the future.

+1 to Mosso

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

The sessions I went to didn’t teach me anything new, and the whole conference seemed centered around the emotional side of podcasting rather than the business or technical side of podcasting. I think an equal mix of these three important facets should have been included.

I also felt like the conference was really geared towards a group of people that all know each other with newcomers feeling like outsiders.

Try as I did to get noticed, and use my connections with the few people I knew to meet more people, I felt getting inside the circle was a fight, rather than being a welcome addition.

The biggest issue is that the conference doesn’t pull in the outside world. Most of the sessions that did try to teach something seemed to be geared towards people just starting out, and there weren’t many people that fit that description. It was a weird event to be certain.

I do have to give a shout out to Tim Coyne and Dave Brodbeck for their sessions. While I didn’t learn anything new about podcasting from either of them, I think that they would be great at inspiring people to get into podcasting. After listening to them, and feeling their passion for the medium and its diversity, I wanted to record a podcast, right then!

I think that the Friday afternoon would be better spent with a Podcasters 101 style line-up which could hopefully bring in a larger group of people and get them interested in podcasting, or for those that are interested, help them understand how it all comes together. These conferences should be about expanding the community and teaching, not giving an update about what we did in the last year so we can get our pats on the back.

I was very sad to see that there were no sessions that covered tricks and tips to editing a good podcast from a technical side. What software should I be using? Should I put audio between topics to break things up or not? What is a good mic, and does anyone have tricks to make it sound even better? Where should I be hosting my podcast files? What’s the best way to make show notes? Where is Digg just for podcasters? There were so many very important things that weren’t brought up, and maybe because those in attendance already knew it all, but not covering the how’s and why’s made me not want to attend again next year.

I was also annoyed at how monetization was seen as a negative thing with the mention of it bringing on a massive wave of sighs and groans from the audience.

If it wasn’t for proper monetization, I wouldn’t have had the great jobs I have been able to have over the last three years. I really didn’t understand their apprehension, and I think they are all doing themselves a great disservice by not finding a way to build a business around their passion.

It was really great to see Bill Deys, John Wiseman, Chris Brogan, and Jeff Parks because otherwise the conference would have been a waste for me. Get it together Podcasters Across Borders as being an echo chamber is no way to build a community. What I experienced was a Podcasting Club, not a Podcasting Conference.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

Instead, I decided instead to give them the benefit of the doubt, and learn more about what Cyber BLOGGER can and can’t do. As with all reviews on this site, I will be giving the facts as well as my honest opinions.

Cyber BLOGGER bills itself as a powerful tool for obtaining free search traffic. Basically, the software allows you to quickly and easily set up an unlimited variety of blogs on Google’s Blogger blogging platform. Creating a blog on Blogger is free, and you don’t have to pay for bandwidth, allowing you to create as large of a blog as you’d like, and as it gets more and more popular, the traffic can all be converted to profit.

Once you’ve set up your blogs, you can then feed content into your blog from any RSS feed, allowing you to quickly build up a huge amount of content including hundreds, if not thousands of posts written by other people.

Surely by now, if you have been following this site, or blogging in general, you are asking yourself, why you would want to do this?

Google’s Blogger is well-liked by their own search engine, and as such content on Blogger appears in the Google search results fairly fast. Add to this the ability to monetize your blogs with Google AdSense, and you have a system that rewards people looking to make a quick buck, and so it is not hard to see the appeal of this software.

If you want to make some money using what people call the “long tail” effect on search engines, you can do it using Cyber BLOGGER.

I have seen time and again, people talking about how much money they made from similar systems, and while the software is amazing, what it does isn’t always the most ethical way to go about getting your content. I would suggest this software more for people looking to be a little more on the evil side of making money online.

One way I could see this being useful for someone in a non-evil way, would be to republish a certain category of their own blog on Blogger, leaving links back to their original blog intact. This could help drive traffic to your already established blog, without having to create new content.

As long as the duplicate content penalty was less than the incoming traffic from the Cyber BLOGGER run blog, you would be ahead of the game, and even better, you could be much more aggressive with your monetization techniques on the Blogger blog. That is just one example of where a blogger could use this software, without taking content that isn’t their own. I am sure there are many other uses for this software besides the nefarious purposes.

One feature that I wish they would remove is the ability for the software to remove links in the content. I think content scrapers should keep links in place, especially if the content that they are taking isn’t their own. I do like how the software can cut out images though, as they sometimes won’t work with the Blogger template you have chosen to show off the content.

Cyber BLOGGER isn’t a desktop application, and requires a real piece of hosting space that has at least Apache 1.3.x or above, PHP 4.3 or above, MySQL 4.1 or above and Zend Optimizer 2.8 or above. The regular price for this software is $95, but currently it is on sale for $65.95.

While I find it very tempting to go this route, and use other people’s content to make me money, I just can’t justify it to myself. That, however, doesn’t mean that this software isn’t well written, in fact, it seems to be a very strong product, and very good at what it does. I wish they would work on respecting the original content creators just a little more, but I think that is a flaw all republishing software currently has.

Also, it seems to me that the advantages of something like this will only continue until Google gets its act together and thwarts this type of abuse of their systems. So if you want to make more money online now, and you are interested in using software that allows you to create an unlimited amount of Blogger blogs, Cyber BLOGGER is it.

Design

There are so many little design mistakes that this site makes, that I could talk about what it needs to do all day. The site has been built in such a way that it doesn’t say “professional” despite the content being very professional in writing style and tone.

Header
While the woman in the header is attractive, easy to look at and captures the eye, it says nothing about the site. I think it is time for this site to bring a sense of professionalism by dropping the stock photograph and getting a logo done on Sitepoint for around $100.

The next thing that I noticed was that when clicking the header, I was brought to the Feedburner page for their RSS feed. This is counterintuitive to what I am used to, and as a normal reader, I wouldn’t be more likely to subscribe just because of this. I would rather it go to the home page after viewing a post. There are other ways to promote RSS readership.

The navigation looks out of place on my Camino web browser. While not all that different from the site, it just doesn’t fit properly. A decent coder could fix this up without much of an issue, again providing the site with a more unified appearance and a more professional looking end result.

Content
Why is the blog not the front page? Why isn’t the front page handled by WordPress? It looks so different from the rest of the site, and isn’t implemented well at all. I would say that the front page should be removed, and instead show me the blog right away.

The content of the blog is handled well though it could use some tweaking from someone with a great design eye. I believe that related posts should only be shown when a user is looking at at single post, rather than cluttering up your index page with that kind of information. It make me unable to go through multiple posts quickly.

Comments need better styling. They look horrible and could easily be improved. Creating an open line of communication is the key to any blog succeeding, but people aren’t going to read comments that don’t even look like they fit with the design. They are not padded correctly like the rest of the content, and look very unprofessional.

The Archives page needs to be fixed as the search is outside the borders of the page. Also, I would change it so the archives are done in a way that they show the last twenty or so posts, then the categories and then finally the archives by date, as pretty much no one looks for something by date.

Sidebar
While it is nice that they have decided to feature the Feedburner e-mail subscription service at the top of the sidebar of the site, I have found that very few people will take advantage of such a service, and so you are better off moving it down the sidebar and giving such featured importance to other subscription methods, like RSS, which is much more widely used.

The recommended posts are great, but it feels like every block of in site navigation is separated by either advertisements or nearly useless widgets. Do you really need to show close to one hundred of your recent MyBlogLog visitors? Do you really need those other banners and buttons below that MyBlogLog widget? Displaying your Alexa rank won’t help your rank improve. The people that run Alexa have said this numerous times.

Footer
In the world of ever increasing footer sizes, All Tips and Tricks went completely the other way, with almost no footer. This space can be effectively used to place elements from the sidebar, thus de-cluttering it, and creating a better use experience.

Kudos to you for not having a footer that goes on forever, but you can use this space to your design advantage if you so choose.

Basic SEO

All Tips and Tricks does automatically redirect non-www URL’s to their www counterpart, which will make sure Google knows that http://www.alltipsandtricks.com/blog/ is where they belong.

They have good meta-keywords and description. Keyword density is something that should be looked at as the words tips and tricks could be put into articles more often without making the articles look like they are spam. This would improve the blog’s ranking in those words, and help continue to grow the branding.

Growth

For a site that has been around a year, the growth just doesn’t seem there. Alexa, while not the most precise system in the world, shows a big jump at the start of the site’s life, and then a very slow upward trend that says that this site will have to be around forever before it really takes off. I think that it should be growing much faster for the type of content on this site.

Look at what your competitors are doing, and learn from them. While your content is great, they are growing much faster than you while talking about some of the same things.

Advertising

All Tips and Tricks employs the normal advertising you would expect on any current blog, including 125×125 pixel advertisement boxes, Google’s AdSense and PayPerPost.

The issue with each of these is how they are handled. The block advertising on the sidebar are not lined up correctly, and take away from the design of the site. Also, while four of the advertisements are the same size, two others don’t match up, which leads both to wasted space, and is distracting.

AdSense is optimized to make the site money, which means they will be able to make money off their work, but I find their use of AdSense on their single posts to be a bit distracting due to having it be a huge block above the content. I don’t think that users will come back and read full articles often if they are going to continue to see such breaks in the content with advertising filling up that spot.

The AdSense advertisements could use more blending in regards to colours, so that it matches the site, rather than standing out in what appears to be the default colour set.

The other major issue I see with the site is that there is almost no advertising program that they haven’t signed up for with articles including Chitika’s eMinimalls, and another widget based store front program. I think that it has a few too many ads, but even more so, the execution of the ads is so poorly done that they overshadow the content, and that is never a good way to run a site.

Content

Again, I want to make sure everyone knows that the content at All Tips and Tricks is great. I enjoyed more than a few articles during my review process.

There is so much that can be done with this blog, and it should continue to do well. I think now is the time for it to make itself look more professional, and blend advertisements better. Other than that, it just needs to continue to produce high quality content often.

Here are some great articles:

• 11 Free Photo Editors At Your Choice
• How to Learn Foreign Languages by Association
• Browsers shortcuts common to IE and Firefox

I feel that the site focuses too much on advertising, and making money, and not enough on producing more quality content, and trying to look good, and while that is a mistake many make, it is not a profitable long term strategy, as search engines will catch on and so will readers.