Get Free eBooks to Boost Your Online Success

Jun 01, 2009 | Antti Kokkonen | Topic: Blogging Guides | View Comments

I believe that there is thousands of dollars worth of free information out there, if you just know where to look.

There are plenty of blogs and websites with tons of pages you can browse through and LEARN EVERYTHING there is to learn about anything. For me at the moment, I want to learn everything about blogging, WordPress and Internet Marketing. And because I’m super passionate about things I like, I read tons of blogs. But I’m not here to tell you about blog reading, I’m here to REMIND YOU about the other free source of information out there, FREE EBOOKS!

I’m in the process of reading a lot of free ebooks these blogs and websites offer for their readers. I like how these authors have taken their best content (which might or might not be directly available on several pages on their blog), and formatted it into an ebook, which most of the time is a pdf file you can read on your computer or even print. Very convenient for readers, and useful for easy future reference as you can archive the pdf-files on your computer (or bookmark the free ebook page/blog and go re-download if you lost the document).

I’m amazed how much VALUABLE INFORMATION there is on these pdf-files people give out. It’s like free beer that never stops. And yes, there is “strings attached” to these free ebooks, but as everything hanging on those strings is OPTIONAL, free ebooks really are FREE AS IN FREE BEER.

Why people give out free ebooks on their blog or website?

Because the author and the blogger want to…

1. help their readers
2. build up their reputation
3. increase traffic to their blog
4. build up an email list (not always)
5. get indirect profit from affiliate links
6. get possible followup sales of the non-free information products

Most of the time the free ebook is delivered upfront, so it VERY EASY and FAST for you to get and read tons of these “online bibles of free information“.

Lime I mentioned, the author wants to accomplish something by giving out a free ebook. Still, there’s no reason to become suspicious and not get the free stuff that’s there to get.

What does this mean to you?

You get tons of free, very valuable information FOR FREE.

There is NO OBLIGATION to order anything the free ebook provider “sells” to you through the list or the free ebook. Of course IF YOU WANT to spend money, you have the OPTION to go for the products, services and non-free ebooks offered. But YOU DO NOT HAVE TO.

If you don’t want to stay on possible email list after getting the free ebook or report, you can unsubscribe at any time, but usually there’s tons of more free information flowing from those lists that you don’t want to miss, so consider carefully if you really want to unsubscribe. Just filter the messages (either automatically or through email filters) as they come in and your golden, but if a interesting message comes through the list, you are with the first ones to go and check it out.

How to get free ebooks?

  • You go to the blog or website offering the free ebook
  • If there is direct link to download the ebook, DOWNLOAD the free ebook through the download link.
  • If there is a opt-in box that asks for your name and email:
  1. Enter your name and email to subscribe to the email list
  2. Confirm your subscription by clicking the confirm link from the mail you get
  3. Download the free ebook or get it delivered by mail (depending on the ebook/list)

That’s it, you now have free ebook you can suck information for no cost.

Don’t worry too much about the author giving out your name and email address to anyone, if the author is out there with her own blog and face, she has credibility to protect and selling your email address would ruin everything the author tries to achieve with the free ebook.

And remember you can unsubscribe from the possible email list at any time, so you are in CONTROL.

Now, UTILIZE what you learn from that ebook and the other ebooks you downloaded and USE that information to ACHIEVE your goals in the online world!

What Free eBooks You Have Read Recently and Would Like to Recommend to Others?

Track Outgoing Links with Google Analytics

May 31, 2009 | Antti Kokkonen | Topic: WordPress | View Comments

Most blogs have outgoing links which the readers click to go to the resources you’ve recommended or linked for other reason. With Google Analytics you can track those outgoing links very easily.

With special attributes on your page and links, you not only get the normal Google Analytics data, you also get advanced data in a form of outgoing links and tracking those links.

Don’t worry, it’s very easy! This one is actually so easy to setup, anyone who can install a plugin to WordPress can do it! (just in case, all instructions you need are here on our previous article: Adding Google Analytics to Your WordPress Blog)

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Adding Google Analytics to Your WordPress Blog

May 31, 2009 | Antti Kokkonen | Topic: WordPress | View Comments

It is very important that you track how many visitors your blog has, what pages the readers view, how long they stay on your site, etc. All these statistics and a lot, lot more are yours with free tracking and statistics system called Google Analytics.

If you don’t have a Google Account already, go create one right now (you’ll get access to GMail, Google Docs and much more with it). If you have a Google Account, but you haven’t used Google Analytics yet, go set up Google Analytics account for yourself now.

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How To Add a XML Sitemap for Search Engines to Your Blog and Another Sitemap For Your Readers

May 29, 2009 | Antti Kokkonen | Topic: WordPress Tips | View Comments

You want two kind of sitemaps on your blog. One for search engines and another one for your readers. Both can be very easily implemented into the WordPress blog with plugins in matter of minutes.

The sitemap for search engines will help search engines to find and index your site/ blog and keep your listing and information up-to-date with your latest content and inform about the changes in your blog structure with zero effort. The sitemap for your readers is optional compared to the sitemap for the search engines, but that too takes only couple of minutes and can potentially help your readers navigate your site better.

In addition to explaining what a sitemap is, in the rest of this article I’ll show you:

  • How to setup and install a plugin on your WordPress that generates the XML sitemap for search engines for you
  • How to install another plugin that automatically generates a sitemap for your readers anywhere you want to display it on your blog.

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How To Add Category and Tag Based Advertising and Content to Your Blog

May 28, 2009 | Antti Kokkonen | Topic: Blog Advertising | View Comments

Want to display certain ads only on certain categories or tags? This quick guide will show you how to do that, for example show banner ads based on category.

If you have blog with different categories, you might consider customizing the advertising shown on posts in spesific category or categories or posts with certain tags. And it doesn’t have to be advertising, you can show different links on different categories and tags.

For example you can:

  • Show links to different themes and plugins on your “WordPress” tagged posts, and
  • Amazon.com Associates cookbook links on your “Cooking” category.
  • Or just display your best posts in the “Fishing” category.
  • etc.

The possibilites are endless, so you can do whatever you can show anything you want and need to show, based on the tags or categories of the posts.

I wanted to do this, because many of the readers who come in and check some of my World of Warcraft material, or EVE Online posts, are not necessary interested in the WordPress content. And if I write about advertising on a blog and how to utilize a plugin to do it, that gamer just wanting to know how to powerlevel mining on the new alt character, most likely does not want info on latest WordPress Premium Themes or such. So I wanted to customize the advertising, extra content and links I show on different posts.

First, I utilized the “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin” to show the related links, so that was easy and does superb job at providing the related post links.

But getting spesific advertising in those posts wasn’t hard either..

If you have the same kind of situation, and want to display advertising or special links based on the categories or tags of your posts, I’ll show you a quick way to achieve that. You do have to dig into your WordPress theme php-files, or find a plugin to insert the code, but it’s really simple…

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How To Manage Ads and Track Clickthroughs with AdRotate Plugin in Your WordPress Blog

May 28, 2009 | Antti Kokkonen | Topic: WordPress Plugins | View Comments

Managing your advertising, affiliate links and banners can be load of work if you do too much manually. You should set tracking of links, track the number of times the ads are displayed, test different banners, etc. Fortunately, there are many plugins to WordPress that do all this for you.

In this article, I present the one plugin, AdRotate, that I’m currently testing in this blog. I’ll tell you:

  • What the AdRotate plugin is
  • Examples on how you can use this plugin for many different purposes
  • Step-by-step tutorial to set up ads with AdRotate, AdRotate 101 if you will, with screenshots

AdRotate is free plugin under GPL license, so you don’t have to pay anything for it. And with this guide, you can set it up in matter of minutes + the time you use to set the ads up and set the placements for the ad groups you create. After that, you just have to watch and AdRotate displays your ads, at random if you configured it that way, and track clicks to boot – so you can focus on writing or whatever aspect of blogging you enjoy the most.

Like said, I’m test running the plugin at the monent and from what I’ve seen so far, I like it. I wanted to share these experiences with you, so if you want to find out more, read on…

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How To Get Google AdSense and Display Ads on Your WordPress Blog

May 27, 2009 | Antti Kokkonen | Topic: Blog Advertising | View Comments

Want to get advertising in your blog and make some money while at it? Great, I’ll show you how. At least how to set it up that is. Getting significant money might be another thing, but you only get $0 if you don’t try it, right?

Why Google AdSense?

It’s not the only way, but it is the EASY way.

If you want to get advertising to your blog, the most simple way to do it is to ad Google AdSense ads to your blog. Getting Google AdSense for your blog is quite simple, but here’s super simple how-to for getting those ads up on your WordPress blog.

In this post, you’ll find out:

  • How to get ad code from the AdSense control panel (easy)
  • How to insert the code in your WordPress blog theme (advanced / hard)
  • Learn how you can display the ad on top (or below) of each post, or in the blog footer or on each post on your front page, etc.
  • How to display the ad using Widget in your blog (very easy)
  • List of WordPress plugins you can use to automatically insert the ad code to your blog where you want the ads to be displayed  and manage your advertising and AdSence ads.
  • Learn to get ads to your BlogSpot blog
  • Learn why you should move to self-hosted WordPress, if you’re using WordPress.com
  • and much more, in a simple step-by-step tutorial with screenshots

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