1. There’s more than one way to get things done. Just as there’s more than one way to solve an angry birds puzzle, don’t just rely on a single source to guide you through your blogging experience. Most people are biased in favor of what they themselves have been successful with. Experiment and learn from it, and you may come up with a solution of your own.  There’s more than one way to write a successful blog. 

2. Don’t give up.  Some angry birds levels are incredibly difficult. They almost seem impossible to complete. You get the same feeling sometimes if your traffic plateaus, or you get a case of writer’s block. Just don’t give up because the next great idea is often around the corner.  Great blogs aren’t built overnight, and you need a consistent pace to get to where you want.

3. Timing is crucial. Some levels require you to interact with birds in flight. Here timing is always critical. Same goes with blogging. If you strike while the iron is hot, pick the right topics, you get more attention.  Pick up on hot news in your niche and give your own spin to it.  Writing about the topic of the hour will almost certainly get you more attention and reactions from your readers.

4. Pick a path and fine-tune accordingly. Perhaps the most important trait to have with Angry Birds is learning from your previous mistakes. Finetuning your writing and blogging strategy is just as important as finetuning your trajectory on Angry Birds.  Test different advertising placements, tweak your niche and test out new ways of writing which you haven’t done before.  Changes you make when you blog don’t need to be radical.  Once you find out what works best for your blog, just zero in and focus on it.

5. Have fun. In the end, just like putting birds in flight to combat pigs who steal eggs, blogging is meant to be fun. If it isn’t , or if things start to get you down, then take a step back, smell the roses and try again another day

James Yeang runs Friedbeef.com, and is hopelessly distracted by Angry Birds whenever he picks up his iPad.  Ironcally, he has also written about 12 geeky techniques to stop yourself from slacking off.

©2011 SheepTech

5 Things Angry Birds Can Teach You About Blogging

Who would have thought the same design would be cloned and made available publicly to all WordPress users for free? In 6 hours, Sahas of Skattertech had successfully replicated the design (along with most of its functionality, if not all) and released it as a WordPress theme under the name, Qawker.

You can compare this demo blog with that of any Gawker’s blog and have yourself amazed. The theme can be downloaded for free here.

©2011 SheepTech

Qawker: WordPress Theme Cloning Gawker’s Design

Money Made

AdSense: $857.23 (+$140.31)
Infolinks: $47.74 (+$3.82)
BlogAds: $40.40 (+$9.40)
ContextWeb: $10.62 (-$1.84)
SocialSpark: $25 (-$375)
Private ad: $58.33 (+$25)

Total: $1039.32 (-$198.31)

Other Statistics

Uptime: 99.94% (27 minutes downtime)
RSS subscribers: 675
Facebook Page fans: 200

Thank You SheepTech’s Sponsors

• Crucial – Is your computer running slow? Crucial can help. A memory upgrade is one of the most affordable, effective ways to boost performance!
• Tech Bargains – Help you figure out what is best to buy, why it’s best, and where to buy it at a good price.
• Disk Drill (article) – Recovers data from HFS/HFS+, FAT, NTFS & other file systems right from your Mac.
• YapTime (article) – A free private gathering place for the important groups in your life to have discussions, share photos, videos, and events.

©2011 SheepTech

SheepTech January11 Report Card

The <!--INFOLINKS_OFF--> tag is supposed to get the job done easily, but it doesn’t on my blog, no matter where I insert the tag. The in-text ad is still appearing at inappropriate section, such as the sidebar and comment section.

The culprit? W3 Total Cache.

With the HTML minifying feature enabled, all html comment tags is being removed, including the <!--INFOLINKS_OFF--> tag.

The good news is you don’t have to sacrifice the minifying feature just for the Infolinks off tag to work. Just simply include the tag in W3 Total Cache’s ignore list and W3TC will leave it alone.

You can do that via Performance > Minify > HTML > Ignored comment stems. Enter “INFOLINKS_OFF” in the list.

The off tag will now work as intended. Insert it in sections you want to keep clean and Infolinks will no longer show up. If you are not using W3 Total Cache, you might want to check if you have other plugin with similar HTML minifying feature.

©2011 SheepTech

Infolinks Still Appearing In Areas With Off Tag

There is no way to stop the public from viewing your blog posts unless you set a password for each of them. The privacy settings only allow you to block search engines, but not normal visitors.

But on WordPress, when something is lacking, there is always a plugin to compensate it. For this purpose, you can try using Registered Users Only.

Upon installing, all URLs to your blog will be redirected to the login page. Only registered users are able to log in and view your blog posts. That being said, if you wish to keep your blog posts only to yourself and no one else, you should disable user registration (General Settings > Membership) on your blog.

There are other similar plugins, but I have only tried this one and it works great.

©2011 SheepTech

Making WordPress Blog Private

If you’re a blogger, then you need to be able to create new content on a daily basis. When you are at home, it isn’t a big deal to run over to the computer every time inspiration strikes you. But what about when you are on the go? Here are a few essential mobile devices to help you become a better blogger.

1. Apple iPhone – The iPhone has many tools that can help you as a blogger. Probably the iPhone’s biggest strength is the vast size of the App Store. Whether you use WordPress or Blogger, you can manage your account right from your phone and quickly jot down important ideas.

2. Apple iPad – The iPad has all the benefits of an iPhone, but it is much easier to type on. You probably wouldn’t want to type more than a few sentences on your iPhone, but you can type out a full blog post on the iPad if you wish.

3. Netbook – A netbook can bring you all the benefits of a full computer in a smaller – and cheaper – package. The downside is that netbooks usually aren’t too capable of running graphic-intensive programs like games, but they are absolutely perfect for blogging. Netbooks are lightweight, so you can carry them everywhere and crack them open when you feel like writing.

4. Google Nexus One – If you aren’t a big fan of Apple products, the Nexus One is a great smart phone from Google that offers a lot of the same functionality. One of the best things about the Google phone is that you can use it on practically any phone carrier – unlike the iPhone, which requires you to use AT&T.

5. LG Android Phones – The Korean manufacturer has been coming out with some really nice Android-based phones recently. One of the best aspects about LG Android phones is that they normally include a slide-out QWERTY keyboard for text input. This can make typing quite a bit easier if you don’t like the new touchscreen devices.

6. Livescribe Pulse Pen – If you have a quick idea you want to remember, but don’t want to go through all the trouble of launching an application on your phone or netbook, the Pulse Pen can be a great solution. This device looks just like a regular pen, but it remembers everything you write with it. If an idea strikes you, just pull out the pen and scribble some invisible notes onto a table or a wall. When you plug the pen into your computer, you’ll be able to see everything you’ve written.

7. Kindle – As a blogger, you’ve got to read a lot, and that is what the Kindle was designed for. It may not have all the bells and whistles of the newer devices, but there are still a couple strong points in its favor. The battery life is superb, and it has an anywhere 3G connection to the Internet via Sprint’s cellular network – with zero monthly charge.

8. Noise Cancellation Microphone – You may be able to quickly record yourself or conduct interviews with the built-in microphone on your phone or netbook, but there is a good chance that the sound quality won’t be that great. For less than $20, you can usually find a good noise-cancelling microphone to hook up to your device. This will allow you to get crystal clear sound bites even in noisy places like coffee shops.

9. WiFi Keychain – The iPhone and Android devices have free apps checking for WiFi hot spots, but they require you to take out your phone, fire up the app, and continuously check for connectivity. Every blogger should have a keychain that will light up when you are in a free WiFi zone. You’ll always know if you’re in a place where you can blog. You can find these for less than $10.

Mobile blogging can be a great way to get more blogging done in less time. If you use some of these tools, you’ll be able to make your job much easier.

James Adams is a blogger who works for a UK based supplier of HP 351 ink and toner. He helps to run their Cartridgesave.co.uk where he posts about gadgets and design.

©2011 SheepTech

9 Mobile Devices That Are Great for Bloggers

Here’s an example.

Lifehacker’s partial RSS feed, note the “More” link:

Lifehacker’s full RSS feed, using WizardRSS:

There are two method to turn partial RSS feed to full RSS feed using WizardRSS.

On WizardRSS website: Go to WizardRSS, enter the blog’s URL or feed URL and hit the “Create Feed” button.

Without visiting WizardRSS: Simply add the feed URL of your target blog behind this URL: http://www.wizardrss.com/feed/blogrssfeedurl.com/feed.

For example, if you want to subscribe to SheepTech using WizardRSS, just enter this feed URL in your feed reader:

http://www.wizardrss.com/feed/www.sheeptech.com/feed

But then of course it’s definitely unnecessary, SheepTech offers full RSS

WizardRSS is totally free of charge. In return, they will insert two text linkback to their website at the end of every RSS item. No big deal.

©2011 SheepTech

Turn Partial RSS Feed to Full RSS Feed

• Increased clicks – your hidden affiliate link won’t scream “I’m making money out of you” as loud as the default affiliate link, increasing the likelihood of being clicked.
• No leaked commissions – visitors will not go to the product page directly by typing the product page address in their browser. This will ensure that you will get paid for every single customer you refer.
• Better SEO – too many naked affiliate links might result in less trust search engines are willing to place on your blog
• Less ugly – obviously, your custom affiliate link will definitely look less ugly than the default one provided

To hide affiliate links on WordPress, you can either do it manually by creating individual php files for every affiliate links, or use WordPress plugins. I opted for the latter for its convenience and the additional features they are offering. I am using two free WordPress plugins to achieve features similar to the WordPress Link Cloak plugin that cost $77.

Pretty Links – Hide Affiliate Links, and Track Them

What Pretty Links do:

• Create custom links using your domain name to redirect to any target URL. You can use this to hide your affiliate link. (e.g http://sheeptech.com/product > http://product.com/signup/signdown/up/down/affid=12345678)
• Track hits, uniques, clicker’s IP address, referral page, click time, browser, operating system for every single custom link you have created. It’s optional though.
• Group created custom links to organize them. Useful if you have countless of affiliate links on different niches.
• Bookmarklet that can be used to easily create an URL using your blog’s domain that will redirect to the page you are currently viewing. Think bit.ly’s bookmarklet.

With this Pretty Links, you can easily manage your affiliate links all in one place on your WordPress backend. To hide an affiliate link, you just have to do is enter the target URL, enter your preferred slug, and click create! Sounds much easier than creating a php file and uploading it via ftp. Not to mention you don’t get to track clicks that way.

Automatically Insert Affiliate Links to Keywords in Blog Posts

I use SEO Smart Links for this purpose. You won’t want to link relevant keywords in all your existing blog posts to your newly created cloaked affiliate link, one at a time. SEO Smart Links automate this process and all you have to do is let it know what keywords and where to link to.

Say you are an affiliate for HostGator, you can make the plugin to look for keywords like “hostgator, web hosting, blog hosting” in your existing blog posts and have all those keywords automatically link to your HostGator affiliate link.

Besides, SEO Smart Links can also interlink between your existing blog posts, which will boost the number of relevant internal links. I’m unsure how this works though, since I have never see it in action.

How do you hide your affiliate links?

©2011 SheepTech

Hide Affiliate Link: WordPress Plugin

Even Tweetmeme won’t do the trick, you can only track tweets that have your blog’s domain name in it with it.

BackTweets

BackTweets is able to track tweets with link to a specific domain name (all blogpost/pages within the domain name), whether they are masked by short URLs or not. Just simply enter your blog’s domain name and Backtweets will return you with a list of tweets that links to your blog.

As if it’s not providing enough value to fellow bloggers, which as far as I’m concerned, such tracking is unavailable anywhere else, Backtweets also make it possible for you to subscribe to email alerts when someone tweets your blog, for free. You can opt to receive email alerts once a week, once a day, or instantly everytime your blog link appears on Twitter.

Credits to Rarst for the awesome find.

©2011 SheepTech

How To Track Your Blog’s Presence on Twitter

The good news is you can actually use the FeedBurner powered “Email This” form not only in your feeds, but on your blog as well. In fact, the form can be used on just any websites, even those which are not using FeedBurner.

To implement this on your blog, just simply link to this URL with the appropriate parameter.

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=POST-TITLE&uri=POST-URL

Replace POST-TITLE with the title of your blog post. Replace POST-URL with the URL of your blog post. The link will fetch your visitor to the emailing form.

For WordPress users, just paste the following code to anywhere in your blog template you want the “Email This” link to appear:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=<?php the_title(); ?>&uri=<?php the_permalink() ?>”>Email This Post</a>

For Blogger/Blogspot users, use this one:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=<$BlogItemTitle$>&uri=<$ BlogItemPermalinkURL$>”>Email This Post</a>

It will automatically insert your blog post’s title and URL, so no need to worry of that. This way you can save the hassle of looking for a WordPress plugin and setting it up.

For a demo, just click on the envelope at the end of this post, under Related articles.

©2011 SheepTech

Add “Email This Post” Feature using FeedBurner