Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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How do you handle comment spam?

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I’m so sick of spam! I swear, most days, every second comment I get on all of my blogs is either spam or someone just commenting to get a dofollow link and using a SEO user name.

I have the spam bots pretty much under control between the Akismet, Bad Behavior and WP-Spamfree plugins I use, but comment spam from real people is a constant problem.

I’m seriously considering closing comments on my old posts. I don’t really want to do that because I get real comments on older posts all the time, but I also get comment spam on them too.

I mark comments that appear to be spam (don’t make sense or that really don’t add to the post “good post!”) as spam and put them in the Akismet bin quite often. Others that look like they’re from someone commenting just for a link and or using a tacky SEO user name are either marked spam or have their links removed. It all depends upon the comment, how many comments or the number of my blogs they hit that day and the mood I happen to be in when I find the comment.

How do you handle human comment spammers on your blog?





Spinning my wheels these days

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I’m so confused and disorganized these days and it’s just getting worse.

I have too much on my plate. Too many sites to manage and too many projects that I’m getting involved in. If I were making enough money I’d almost say that it’s time to hire someone to help me out, but that’s not an option at this point. Either that or quite everything to seriously consider one of those silly Jewelry sales manager jobs in Europe that I keep getting offered from job sites that I listed my resume on in the mid 90’s!

About a month ago I joined two membership sites that train you to market your websites and help you along the way. By this I mean they are set up with a variety of options to help you get traffic to your site as well as backlinks and even content. The sites are great, but most of their tutorial material is in video format and video’s don’t do well on my laptop – they keep cutting out. Not to mention that it’s difficult watching long videos when you have a puppy that constantly wants attention or a husband who wants to watch TV around. Plus, I find that if I’m given the choice of reading directions that would only take me five minutes to read or watching a 30 minute video I’d rather read a tutorial.

So I’m busy creating new blogging and website projects and trying to learn these two new systems at the same time and it’s just not working for me. I’m sure lack of sleep doesn’t help. I haven’t slept well in months so I’m living in a fog these days and if you’ve ever been seriously exhausted you probably know it’s very hard to learn something new or to get organized when you are practically brain dead.

I’m sure I’ll get my act together in the near future, but in the meantime I just feel like I’m spinning my wheels and not making much progress.

How many hours do you spend on the computer each day?

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OMG I just realized that I’ve been sitting working on that new store and a couple of other projects for hours and hours! Holy Smokes … if I did that every day I’d have to start taking some of those special fat burners to burn away the calories that I’m not using when I’m just sitting at the computer!

Isn’t it amazing how much time one can waste on the computer? I mean, I don’t think I’m wasting my time, I’m doing some things and working on some projects that should earn me money in the future, but still .. it adds up! Just going through my email and answering a portion of it takes up at least three hours of my day! Arghh!

How much time do you spend on the computer each day or each week?

Setting up my first StoreStacker store

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I spent part of this afternoon working on my first Storestacker store. I haven’t finished it yet because I’m watching the instruction videos as I install the software on my server and set up the site.

This is what I have so far … I made a store for my tech blogs – the blogs I haven’t been writing in very much lately, but plan to start adding posts to again soon. The store is simply called “The Tech Store” and it doesn’t have any products in it yet, but once I set up the categories I’ll be able to automatically fill it up with computer, gadget, software and tech related products. I have to figure out which store template I like best and tinker with it too. I’m not sure I like the default template all that much.

So far everything is going well. Once I’m ready the products that will fill up my store will be from Ebay, Amazon, Clickbank and probably RegNow. I’m hoping that I can use the Overstock plugin as well, but I think Overstock only allows US affiliates so i might not be able to add their products to my site.

If this store goes well and doesn’t use up too much of my servers resources I’ll set up a gardening store for my gardening blog, and maybe a more general store for this blog with home and garden, clothing and entertainment related items.

What I really like about the StoreStacker software so far is that not only will I be able to create niche stores, but I can add RSS feeds and videos that are related to the products I’m trying to sell as well as helpful on topic articles. Just those features alone should help draw some search engine traffic and will do it better than a plain store would.

I won my copy of Storestacker in a contest so I have nothing to lose by trying it. If you are interested in trying Storestacker you should visit their site soon as they just opened up for sales again this past Friday. They only sell a limited amount off store software when they open up so it’s still a fairly exclusive product that should give those using it an edge.

BTW I’m not an affiliate for Storestacker. I think they might have an affiliate program but I haven’t managed to find it yet! I’m just telling you how I’m using the software and if you have been interested in find a very easy way to set up a niche store you’ll probably like this program.

Update – my new store is doing great! I’ll be setting up other niche stores very soon. Oh and I do have an affiliate link for StoreStacker now so if you are thinking of buying this product I’d appreciate it if you’d visit the site through this StoreStacker link. Thanks!

I won a prize!

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Guess what? I won a fantastic prize!

Big Jason from the Big Marketing Online Blog started what he called “The largest blog contest ever” sometime in mid-July. I entered the contest at the end of the month by doing several of the requested tasks in order to build up my entries and earlier this week Jason informed me that I was a prize winner.

Not only did he write to tell me that I’d won a prize, but a few days later he wrote to me again to list my top five choices. So I kind of picked out my own prize from the huge assortment of goodies he was giving away.

I decided that I wanted StoreStacker. It’s a program that allows you to build multiple affiliate stores. What does that mean? Well … you can set up an online store in minutes that will sell products from Amazon, Ebay, Overstock and several other large companies. You can set up a store (or stores!) that sell a wide range of products, or if you have a niche site, like say my gardening blog, you can set up a store that sells products that cater to your sites niche.

I downloaded my prize and all of it’s components yesterday, but I haven’t had a chance to install it or set up a store yet. I’m dying to try it!

I’ve just been too busy. Chris is on holidays and that’s kind of taken me out of my routine, plus our dogs been so hyper lately! It’s crazy here. With Midnight jumping around on the furniture and up at us I just can’t get anything done. Even worse, she managed to make a little rip in our leather couch yesterday! Grrr. Well … maybe with the new stores that I’ll be setting up I’ll make enough affiliate income that I’ll be able to got to a home furniture and pick out a new couch? Nah .. the rips only tiny .. I’ll spend my earnings on other goodies or better yet pay the bills!

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