My New WordPress Blog

I don't have a lot of time to write an article since I spent almost all of my fall break either adding content to my blog on Instant Blog Subscribers or creating a new WordPress blog while ignorring a pile of homework for the German language course I am taking and classes start on Monday morning again.

Let me quickly explain how I got myself into this mess so that maybe you'll avoid making the same mistake I made, TWICE!  When I started blogging I had no idea how to create a WordPress blog that was hosted on its own domain so I originally created a blog on WordPress.com and after about a year of writing between three and five posts per week I was locked out of my account for a Terms of Service Violation, which means I had too many affiliate links on my blog.

I gave up blogging for awhile and started using Twitter rather heavily until I was offered three blogs hosted on a sub-domain for a decent monthly price.  I set a goal for myself to have at least 1000 blog posts within a year on just one of those blogs and I exceeded my goal by about 400 so you can only imagine how I felt when I was told the server hosting my blogs was being shut down.

As soon as I was told I was going to lose the blogs I started looking for a way to save all my work and got a domain that included my name and then I was told my blogs were going to be moved to a new server so I didn't follow through with moving the content...huge mistake!

Somehow the person who told me that my blogs were being moved failed to let the programmer know they needed to be moved and I ended up losing everything anyway.  Can we agree that was a painful lesson?  Trust me, it was, but I'm rather accustomed to adversity in my life and have learned that good things always follow the bad.

It is no different this time, because I had started playing around with a hosted WordPress blog that was more for fun than for profit and learned a ton of new things about using WordPress plugins and driving search engine traffic to my blog so I am incorporating some of the things I learned into my new blog.

So, that is how I ended up needing to create a new blog and while it still doesn't have all the plugins I intend to install yet, it is online and getting traffic. That brings me to an entirely new subject...

Are you aware that Google is kicking review blogs to the curb?  They are trying to police some of the practices used by the super-affiliates to get massive sales.  A lot of these super-affiliates work together and know in advance that a product is going to be launched on a certain date and even if they aren't working together there are a half dozen sites that publish upcoming launches so they are still ahead of the masses.

What happens is they buy a domain name with the name of the product in it so it ranks well on the search engines.  When people hear about the product the day it launches they end up reading a glowing review of the product, buy it and find out it is just another hyped up product that doesn't work as well as it said it would.  Sure, we can get refunds from ClickBank, but we end up losing time and we can't get a refund for our time.

Speaking of time, I've spent a lot of time looking at this whole method of online marketing and found a WordPress plugin that I will be installing on my blog that allows people to rate products using stars as well as leave comments.  I hope that after getting the plugin installed people we give real feedback about the products so that we are buying something that works as well as the sales page says it does and avoiding the hyped up products by working together.

Stan Smith Reviews