Archive for January, 2009

Free Stuff (or not) with Subscription Services

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

I have 2 goals when it comes to running this website:-

Produce a website which includes special offers, freebies and services which appeal to my visitors
Make a little money from it.

Of the offers and freebies that are available on Lots Of Freebies there are some that I earn a small commission from and there are others where I don’t earn anything from… but while I was looking over a new offer to put up I had to think which of the 2 goals above I valued more.

This was while I was considering promoting the 24-7 SMS Club and after a short while I came to the conclusion I would prefer to have a site with content my visitors found useful rather than earn a quick buck here and there!

Read the full blog…

Posted in Free Stuff | 1 Comment »

Top 5 Essential WordPress Plugins

Monday, January 12th, 2009

WordPress is definately my favourite new toy at the moment and I can not for the life of me understand why I did not start using it long before now. In the past I have always opted to develop my own software from scratch, often simply to see if I could manage it but more and more I am finding myself opting for an existing piece of software and just adding a few customisations to meet my requirements, as in the case with WordPress.

Now that I have had a chance to play around with it properly and have a look to see what other people like and dislike about it I have compiled a list of what I consider to be the Top 5 Essential WordPress Plugins. Each of these are listed below and keeping with the spirit of Lots Of Freebies you will find that each of the plugins are absolutely free:-

Read the full blog…

Tags: word press, wordpress
Posted in Website Improvements | 5 Comments »

Site Update – Articles Replaced By Blogs

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

After recently installing WordPress and quickly getting to grips with the easy to use interface I quickly came to realise that the Articles section of the Lots of Freebies would be dropped in favour of blog entries. For that reason I have converted all the articles to blog entries to ensure they still add valuable content and advice to the websites and I have now removed the articles section.

Please remember and add our Blog RSS Feed to your favourite feed reader to ensure you are kept up to date the latest blogs entries as they are posted!

Tags: site improvements
Posted in Website Improvements | No Comments »

Send Me Free Stuff (and I’ll Blog About You)!

Sunday, January 4th, 2009

I have just come across a blog entry by John Lamerton titled Send Me Free Stuff which has shown me yet another way, that I would never have thought of on my own, of using your website or blog to your advantage. The basic idea behind this was to make a blind request for free stuff to anyone who would be willing to send it to him in return for him writing a blog entry about the product they he received.

Why would anyone send him free stuff? Every company that has their own website is competing against everyone else for search engine rankings… the higher the rankings the more traffic, more sales, more comissions etc but one factor in gaining a better search engine ranking is obtaining backlinks. The company could make their money back many times over if they send out a freebie to someone who then writes about it on a busy blog.

I’m not sure if this would still work now or not… would a high profile blogger be happy with including product advertisements within their blog just for the sake of a few freebies or would they prefer to just stick to their topic of choice?

Tags: Free Stuff, freebies
Posted in Free Stuff, SEO | No Comments »

More WordPress Modifications – Meta Description

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009

I’ve been quite lucky with my this new Lots of Freebies blog as within a week Google had indexed a few of the blog pages I had created but I knew that was too easy. Unfortunately the summary that appears below the page title didn’t appear to be appropriate and resembled more about the layout than the content as it basically listed the links within the top navigation bar of the site. As you can imagine this is not very helpful and it certainly does not make the content look like it has any relevance to the page.

On further investigation I found that WordPress does not include the meta keywords or meta description in the page header… so it appears that I’ve come across another part of WordPress that I need to tweak. I can actually understand the reasoning behind removing these tags which is that:-

WordPress can not read your mind so it cannot create dynamic keyword and descriptions for each page, or at least it cannot with any great focus on the topic.
Some search engines no longer use these as they are subject to abuse and those of us who are dishonest often add completely irrelevant keywords in order to obtain a better ranking and exposure.

Read the full blog…

Tags: word press, word press modifications, word press updates
Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »