As a blogger, running a blog about making money online, I need to prove myself, in order to achieve trust from my visitors and hopefully convert them into regulars, who believe in my articles. That is basically a short summary as to what any blogger aims to achieve - user loyalty!

There are a number of ways to achieve user loyalty; I shall just mention two ways below though:

• Proof of earnings - people want to see that I have earned money, ie. not all talk. If you see that someone is practicing what they are preaching, and turning results, then it’s obviously a good idea to read on, if not, what is the point? Take a look at my proof is in the pudding post, to see what I am talking about.
• Recognition - Being noticed and spoken about increase reader loyalty: "If others are interested, then so should I" - This ties up with many of my posts, where I talk about people being like sheep, and following the heard.

Bullet one above, is very much self explanatory, click the link, and see how I turned a 5 digit income in a month. Bullet two, however, is a lot harder to achieve, and often nearly impossible to show, but today I have a great example, which actually features this exactly..

About a week ago, I was interviewed by a fantastic journalist from the Campus Financial Mail. He found my website via one of the popular search engines, and at the time, he was writing an article about South African Web Entrepreneurs, who were making a success using the Internet as their tool. This morning, I logged into my mail account, and to my delight, I saw that the article had been published both on their website, and in the printed edition of the Campus Financial Mail. Above, is an extract from the brilliantly written article on South African Web Entrepreneurs. If you are not a subscriber, you can download the article, by clicking this link.

I cannot stress how important these two points are, if you can achieve these, you will see a huge increase in traffic, as well as an even bigger increase in recognition - basically a snow ball effect.

Thanks to everyone who visits this site, I do hope that you gain from reading my articles!

People who run blogs, and people who enjoy earning money online usually love statistics. I know, personally, that I check my keywords, traffic and revenue streams a couple times a day. I make sure that I know exactly which keywords and threads people are interested in, so that I can work my future posts around them. On top of this, people are like sheep, they follow what others do. If there is a post which has many comments on it, the chances are, other people will show interest to this thread rather than another thread.

Displaying the number of times a thread has been read, is a useful way to control the traffic coming to your website. This can be tied hand in hand with advert placement, and so much more.

In order to display the number of reads each of your articles has had is fairly straight forward, here is my example:

• Download this plugin. Upload and activate it as per usual.
• The next step is to create a table in your database, using the following code:

create table mostAccessed
(
postnumber int not null,
cntaccess int not null,
primary key(postnumber),
unique id(postnumber)
);

• Open your single.php file and search for this code:
  • <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
• Directly under this code, add the following code:
  • <?php if ($id > 0) { add_count($id); } ?>
• Now search for this code:
  • <?php the_title(); ?>
• Directly underneath, add the following code:
  • <?php if (!( is_home() || is_page() )) { ?>
    <?php show_post_count($post->ID,
    $before=”This post has been viewed “,
    $after=” times since “); ?>
    <?php } ?>

That’s it! Follow these steps carefully. It is vital that you place the <?php if ($id > 0) { add_count($id); } ?> code in the single.php file and not in your index file. If you place the code in your index.php file, each time the page is loaded, each post will increase the read count, which is definitely not what we want. The second code snippet you deal with, can however be placed in your index.php file - this will show the reads per post in your home page for each article.

Good luck!

Good Morning,

This post is a little off topic, but not completely. When I started the whole website and aimed for the status of web entrepreneur, I put a great deal of effort into my foundations, and one thing I worked hard on, was collecting a list of people who visited this site on a regular basis, and made contact with me with regards to their use of my site. From this point on, I followed their movements on their website, and watched as they grew.

One website which I have followed now for over 3 months is SA Property Loans, written by a South African Bond Organiser. This website is truly excellent, from a sleek and neat design to absolutely perfect content, if you are looking for a website to learn from, which applies the bloggers rule of "Content is key", then you are at the right place. I find myself getting into property these days, and having a website such as SA Property Loans to read and learn from, has made a lot of my worries vanish. The website does not just serve as an information base, but the authors contact details are very visible on the website, and so it is not only a blog, but also a powerful business tool.

Monetizing a website like this, in my opinion, would be extremely easy, content targeting adverts would fit in perfectly, and readers would click on relevant adverts without hesitation.

Thumbs to you SA Property Loans!

For those of you who use social communities and networks as a medium to link up to other people to create awareness of your website, the best place is most probably Facebook.com. The beauty of this website when it comes to social communities is the use of ‘groups’. With a few simple steps, you can create your own group, and start inviting friends to join the group. This group will give you a common ground to keep in touch with all your members/friends/fans. With a group, you have the ability to send all your members a message, advertise certain things, and a collection of other goodies. I have created a group for a couple of my websites, of which some of them are sitting on 200 members already - this is a far higher success rate than I have had with any other social networking medium.

On another note, I have two very useful websites for everyone to take a look at:

Freelance Talk
Facebook Toolbar

I am sorry my postings have decreased so much recently, I have a number of things I need to prioritize before I can get back into posting several items a day, but I will be back with many interesting topics for everyone!