Well it’s  Day 2 of the “Making Money From Blogging” Duel between Steve Watson and myself.

And a bit of a torrid day it was on Day One due to the fact that my computer died at 1.30am on Friday, just before Day One, while I was watching “House” in bed.  I’d been to London for a workshop and as usual, I found it impossible to wind down and sleep so I had typed up my Day One post, and scheduled it, so I could luxuriate in “House” and then have a lie in.

My laptop has been missing a bit of plastic for a while now, the bit where you plug your power cable in.  Dave in Adur Computer Repairs said that, because my Sony Vaio was so new, Sony hadn’t released any parts from it yet, apart from the screen, so I would just have to wait.  However, I tripped over the power cable in the workshop and unbeknownst to me, had loosened one of the two cables that joined the power in pluggy bit to the laptop.

Now, Steve could have seized his advantage here, but no, a perfect gentleman, he drove over with what he described as a “clockwork desktop” and set it up for me.  I then drove to see to Dave at Adur Computer Centre and threw myself on his mercy, checking in the casualty laptop and  purchasing a wireless network card for the ancient desktop.  (I did ring PC World but they told me it was £230 for ANY repair to any laptop, minimum!!)

The wireless network card didn’t work first time of course, so the heroic Steve drove back over and fixed it which took a while and involved some jiggery pokery with the Services.msc or some such.  Upshot was that he didn’t get to do any of the things on his to-do list.  A true friend.  Or, as one of my mentors always says ” a friend in need, is a pest indeed”.

Every thing but my documents is stored in the “cloud” now, but I do keep a lot of login info in my Outlook, so I expect to be a bit frustrated here and there, except I have Roboform installed and sync that with Roboform Online so I expect to be ok there.  My iPhone syncs with my Outlook for appts, so I’ve still got those, and now I’m going to be trying to work out how to sync with Google Calender too, so I have a version of my appointments online.  I want to get fully independent of any computer now – and if I’d had time to back up my documents with DropBox I’d be fine.  Apart from my software like Sony Vegas and SoundStudio which is a bit essential, I think you can nearly go 100% in the cloud now.

Back to the Making Money From Blogging Duel!

Steve sent over the rules which go like this:

Hi Nicola

Here are some ground rules for our duel

1.       Follow the routine exactly how Michael has planned it
2.       No extra traffic generation
3.       No extra SEO
4.       Duel competition metrics to determine the winner are Traffic & Sales totals after 45 days

I have attached a spreadsheet to explain why I don’t think your 30 blogs in 30 days idea is achievable, let me know what you think.

Many thanks
Steve Watson

steve@stevewatsononline.com
http://stevewatsononline.com
5 Essentials For Professional List Building!

I’m not sure what he means by no extra SEO or traffic generation – must check.

(UPDATE: He means that we do nothing apart from what Michael recommends but we have agreed that we can add extra stuff (like one of my favourite plugins MaxBlogPress Ping Optimiser – see below for explanation – if we declare any deviations from MD’s plan on the blogs so that we can keep up with each other is doing).

The “30 Blogs In 30 Days” there, is in reference to my assertion that I might attempt to start a new blog (or revive an old one) every day for the next 30 days, as I haven’t much on in December.  Actually I’ve done a spreadsheet that shows you could do “30 Blogs in 90 Days” if you start one every second or third day.

Day 2 | Making Money From Blogging Challenge

Michael Dunlop’s instructions for Day Two on his blog say to install your theme and customise your preferences.

I always try and encourage my internet marketing mentoring clients to get some content on their blog before they start mucking about with the theme or design, but Steve was very strict and said we must follow Michaels plan exactly, so I’m going to go and install my theme today.

Update: Just discovered that Michael doesn’t actually tell folks when to start adding content specifically, so Steve and I have agreed we can start adding content straight away.  Michael obviously doesn’t imagine that anyone would think that you could be successful in blogging without adding content!

Not quite sure how that will work (I’ve only ever used my chosen theme in a subdirectory of an existing blog with Frugal already installed, like this blog and The Money Gym but I’ll puzzle it out or worst case scenario, resort to reading the instructions *grin*.

I’m going to use OptimizePress as I want to get really familiar with using it – I really love it so far, that’s for sure.  Another theme I like (and it’s free if you are just getting started) is Voidy – clean, white and minimalist.  I’ve also regularly used Frugal which is totally customisable,  and I hear WooThemes and Thesis are both very good indeed.

OptimizePress is only $97 and it allows you to create amazing looking squeeze and sales pages along with the whole “product launch formula” type pages with videos etc.  If you register your sites at the OptimizePress customers area, you can use it as many times as you like on your own sites, or buy a developers license if you are going to use it on client sites.  You can see an example of where I’m using OptimizePress here at my Spartan Marketing pages.

Now, OptimizePress doesn’t have a blog function yet, although they are planning to add it any day now, so I got around that by installing OP in the root directory, and then installing a second WP blog in the subdirectory called blog (done from within my Funky Domain Names Hosting Panel).  Then I installed the free Voidy theme in the second blog (it looks a bit like the OP pages) and went back to the OP installation and created a page called blog.  Using the “redirect” template and the redirect box at the very bottom of that page, I inserted the URL of the second blog and voila, instant link up.

I’m also going to set my Permalinks to the name of the post only and set the nested comments at 10 deep.

Are you following along?

Why not comment on your favourite wordpress themes and let me know how you are getting on and if you are having any issues so far?

<<< Day 1 :  Choosing Your Domain Name & Setting Up Your Hosting