A few days ago I emphasized the usefulness of excluding certain categories from your Wordpress blog. Today I would like to show you how you can easily remove some of your blog categories from your RSS feed and email subscription. This feature is quite useful, as it allows you to manipulate your feed and customize it for your different audiences.For example: You create two or more feeds for your blog: in one feed you can deliver Windows tricks and in the other Blogging tips.

The gist of it is quite simple. First, go to your Wordpress management tools and grb the ID of the categories you would like to remove from your feed. Then navigate to Feedburner and go to the your feed details. Edit your feed details and add the categories you would like to exclude from your feed. In the example below, I excluded categories 28 and 29 from my feed:

 I used the aforementioned method with Feedburner, which I use in order to manage my feed, although my understanding is that it works with other RSS feed management tools.

If you enjoy this post, you are welcome to subscribe to my feed.

Although your blog might focus on one or two content niches, you might want to write or publish Off-topic content aimed to generate lots of search engine traffic or just expand your blog’s reach to additional audiences.

You may want to keep off topic content away from your blog main page and your RSS feed. Failing to do so might annoy your regular readers , who visit your blog, make useful comments and subscribe to your RSS full feed. Obviously, that’s the last thing you want to do.

If your blog runs on Wordpress, excluding posts from your main page is a breeze. All you need to do is to create a new category that will host all your Off-topic posts. Note the ID of the category (from the Wordpress Control Panel Manage tab). Then you need to install a simple Wordpress plugin named Front Page Excluded Categories.

After installing the plugin you’ll need to configure it to exclude the Off-topic category from the first page. In order to do that just edit the plugin, and add the category id value(s)  that you wish to exclude to the $catstoexclude string.

Example:

$cats_to_exclude = ‘28, 29′;

This will exclude categories 28 and 29.

There are a few more plugins that might do the same job, after checking a few of them i found Wordpress Front Page Excluded Categories the simplest to use.

Enjoy!

Much have been said about the famous Alexa rank and its shortcomings. Love it or hate it, your Alexa rank is a key component in your blog’s price tag at the different popular sponsored review services. Therefore, if you run a blog you WANT to increase its Alexa rank as much as you possibly can.

Bloggers elaborated on the best ways that you can use in order to increase your Alexa rank. The most popular way to increase your rank was to install the Alexa toolbar at your browser. The only problem with that, was that until recently, Alexa didn’t offer a proprietary toolbar for Firefox, just one for IE ( Note: SearchStatus, a custom Firefox addon provides Alexa Rank display functionality).

Starting today, Alexa made available a toolbar for our beloved Firefox. Code named Sparky, the new toolbar offers the following features: 

• Related Links: Find sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting.
• Traffic Trend: A sparkline showing the traffic trend from the last four months.
• Reach Meter: A neat little indicator that shows the site’s Reach.
• Traffic Rank: Shows the current site’s Alexa Traffic Rank.

If you have a blog and use Firefox (like most of my readers), i recommend that you install Sparky. In that way you do not help to increase your blog’s rank, but also help increase the popularity of other blogs you periodically read.

via: Connected Internet

Last month i announced that on July 10th, i will reward one of my commentators with a 15$ prize (in Amazon gifts or a direct paypal transfer). People who commented no less than 5 times at AvirtualExit.com in the period between June 11th to July 10th were eligible to participate in the draw.

I was pleased to see that 16 individuals commented 5 times or more during the last month. These good people can be considered as “serial commentators” , and were therefore eligible to participate in the draw.

Although i promised to hire a super model to draw the lucky one, unfortunately she and her bodyguards couldn’t make it, as they missed their connection flight to Israel (where i live) LOL

So given the circumstances, i was forced to use a simpler draw method based on the RAND() function in Microsoft Excel. The winner that my Excel 2007 picked was commentator number 4 – Mr Shankar Ganesh.

So again, thanks for commenting and congratulations to Mr Shankar for winning this contest. Shankar, I will be in contact with you soon to arrange the transfer of the extra sweet 15$.

9 months after the release of the first beta version of Windows Live Writer (WLW), Microsoft announced on May 30th the release of the beta 2 version. I like WLW and i have been using it since i started to blog.

Many bloggers talked about the neat features of WLW beta 2, so i won’t bother you with that stuff. I would rather concentrate on the rather painful and undocumented upgrade process from beta 1 to beta 2 on Windows Vista. I expected the installation will be simple and straightforward, but unfortunately, i spent around 30 minutes gathering information until i finally tweaked it and made it work .

So for my readers’ benefit, i woudl like to outline the right installation/upgrade process for WLW beta 2:

1. If you have WLW beta 1 installed, ensure that all work is backed up. This can be done using WLW backup, a routine which i reviewed not long ago.

2. Using your Control Panel, remove Windows Live Writer beta 1.

3. Run the WLW removal utility located at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/3/0/23036331-516d-4c7e-b9ac-31554a2fec06/WL-Beta-remove.zip.
4. When prompted, click “Save” to save the ZIP file to your desktop.

5. Go to your desktop and open WL-Beta-remove.zip.
6. Extract all the files to your desktop (this should create a folder named WL-Beta-Remove on your desktop if not, skip to step 8).
7. Go to your desktop and open the folder named WL-Beta-remove (there should be a file named WL-Beta-Remove.cmd in the folder).
8. Double-click on the file named WL-Beta-Remove.cmd.

9. Go to http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas and install Writer beta 2.  NOTE: If you had Windows Live Mail or Windows Live Messenger installed you will also need to reinstall those applications:

Reinstall Windows Live Mail http://get.live.com/betas/mail_betas
Reinstall Windows Live Messenger http://get.live.com/betas/messenger_betas

11. Now delete WL-Beta-remove.zip and the folders named Log Files and WL-Beta-remove from your desktop.

Enjoy!

Source: WLW support forums

[tags] Windows Live Writer beta 2, Windows Live Writer beta 2 installation, Windows Live Writer [/tags]

Reader comments are important to every blogger, as they provide written feedback on the post content as well as provide different points of view on the subject. 

I have been thinking about how should i reward people that spend their precious time and write valuable comments in this blog. These nice people provide me with their insight on my content and keep me motivated on my mission to provide you the best Windows and Web 2.0 tips.

 So first of all, i offer a free link to each and everyone of my 12 top commentators. From today, i will be resetting that list every 10 days.

Secondly, the first 5 commentators in each period will be mentioned (and link loved ) in my Sunday Quick links.

Thirdly, on July 10th i will reward one of my commentators with a 15$ prize (in Amazon gifts or a direct paypal transfer). In order to be eligible to participate in the draw you should have commented no less than 5 times at AvirtualExit.com in the period between June 11th to July 10th. If you choose, i can donate the 15$ to any non-profit organization of your choice (in that case i will add another 5$ from AvirtualExit.com).

At this point, i would like to remind you to subscribe to my feed.

Thanks for being with me,

Gili

Answers.com is a very popular Wiki-like web site that many of us use use for getting questions answered. What many of us don’t know is that Answers.com can help us to actually drive traffic to our blog.

If you are a subject expert matter, and your blog is an authority in its field, you can add your blog to the Related Blogs list for a certain topic, and be able to receive a moderate amount of extra traffic from Answers.com.

How to do it?

1. Navigate to Answers.com
2. Search for your most relevant blog keyword.
3. Scroll down to the Blogs section.



4. Click the Add to blog link to submit your blog to the Answers.com directory.
5. Fill in the required information. Note that you can actually relate your blog to multiple Answers.com topics.
6. Submit the form. Your blog will be reviewed, and good chances are that will also be approved and displayed in the Blogs section for some of the topics you specified.

[tags] increase blog traffic, Answers.com, blog traffic, blog [/tags]

Very good news for webmasters and bloggers living in the USA and Canada who love to earn money online.

Microsoft, that has been recently claiming its share of the Affiliate marketing space, has recently launched a beta program for their affiliate network. The beta program is accessible by invitation only and it’s currently open for bloggers and webmasters from the USA and Canada.

From my understanding, the only product you can currently promote via Microsoft Affiliate Network is OneCare, Microsoft’s new PC security suite. 

If you are interested to join the network you can apply via their Microsoft Affiliate network website (requires a Live id – if you don’t have one, you can create one in a minute).

Although still in beta, this can turn into a nice extra moneymaker for computer related websites like this one. 

[tags] earn money online, Microsoft Affiliate Network, affiliate marketing [/tags]

I’ve just been tagged by my friend Brown Baron for the Favorite Unpopular Posts Meme. I think it’s a great idea as it lets you “revive” some good posts, that for miscellaneous reasons didn’t get that much attention.

So here’s my revival list:

• The Long tail keyword strategy
• Worpress.org vs. Wordpress.com

I would like to tag Ms Latina Renee (one of the Blogsphere most talented marketers), Vincent and  Garry. Guys, show us your hidden good stuff.

Lately, we have seen some attempts to calculate the net worth of some successfully blogging ventures. As I believe this is an interesting matter, I developed a more realistic and quantitative approach based on the well known Profit and Loss statement, that you can use in order to assess the real value of your blogging venture. I also built an online tool , named the Blog Valuation calculator, that you can use to actually implement my valuation model.

First and foremost, I would like to clarify that although this is an empirical model (as it was validated using actual traffic figures published by authoritative blogs, it doesn’t apply to all the Blogsphere. However, I have the feeling that my model is relevant to the big majority of the blogs. 

How blogs make you money?

For simplicity, I identified 7 possible revenue sources which can be leveraged by bloggers (I am sure that others exists, but these seem to apply to the mainstream):

• Contextual Advertising (Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network etc’)
• Inline Text Advertising (Vibrant, Kontera)
• Banner Ads (Burst, Tribal Fusion, BlogAds etc’)
• Affiliate Sales
• Feed Advertising

How blogs spend you money ?

Here the list of main expenditure items the blogging venture has:   

• Blogger salary
• Hosting and Domain
• Web Design/Programming
• Advertising
• Marketing, Promotions, giveaways
• Collection expenses (Paypal commissions etc’)
• Communication expenses (Internet Line, Phone)
• Administrative (incorporation, accounting etc’)

Assumptions

1. I believe that leveraging the Price / Earnings ratio applicable to SP 500 companies in order to valuate a blog is fundamentally wrong. The basic idea behind the P/E ratio is that in general, a high P/E suggests that investors expect higher earnings growth in the future compared to companies with a lower P/E. Most blogging ventures are “solo flights”, and have no patented intellectual property, therefore they have no much room to grow. Therefore I propose to use a modest P/E ratio of 3, in order to valuate blogs.
2. A blog revenue is primarily tied to three main factors:
   • The number of unique visitors it receives, and consequently the number of page views. The model assumes 2.1 page views per unique monthly visitor.
   • Its PageRank
   • Its average Contextual Advertising eCPM (Earnings per thousand page views).  
3. As far the other revenue sources, I made the following assumptions:
   • Affiliate Sales: Large blogs can make around 4$ per thousand views in Affiliate Sales.
   • Banner Advertising: Large blogs can expect to earn around $2.5 CPM from Banner ads. Blogs with less than 200K are seldom accepted to banner Ad networks.
4. As far as spending is concerned, I made the following assumptions:
   • Communication and administrative expenses (if you  operate in an official manner) will cost you around $70 (varies from country to country).
   • Blogs with more than 100K unique monthly visitors will need an upgraded  hosting package.
   • I assumed a $30/month  expense for Web design consulting services.

The Blog Valuation Calculator ™

I built the pretty basic Blog Valuation Calculator ™ in order to help you plan the expected profit from your blogging venture. You can also use it to assess the value of your blog. BTW -The tool is built using Zoho Sheets (hey, I didn’t forget we are a Web 2.0 blog ).

How to use the Blog Valuation Calculator ?

• Open the Blog Valuation Calculator
• Enter your blog’s monthly number of unique visitors your blog into cell B5
• Enter your blog’s PageRank into cell B6
• Enter your contextual advertising average eCPM into cell B7
• Cells B32 and C32 respectively will show your projected earnings
• Cell B34 will show your blog valuation

OK, I hope you’ll find my model useful. Will be looking forward to hear your thoughts.