It?s a Balancing Act as More Homeowners Face Foreclosure

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/guC8s)
The first months of 2010 proved to be tough times for homeowners facing foreclosure as a record number of houses were reclaimed by banks to payoff distressed real estate loans, according to this MSNBC article.

A new real estate report by a service that tracks foreclosure notices states that this is the highest number recorded in at least five year as one in every 138 U.S. housing units was subject to a foreclosure filing during the quarter of the year.

An official with the tracking service predicted that there would be 1 million bank repossessions this year if the tempo continues.

This follows last year’s pressure from the federal government to modify loans in an effort to keep borrowers in their homes which, along with other attempts by some states, seemed to slow the momentum. However, the trend now appears to be reversed as federal programs have only helped a small number of these homeowners so far, according to the story.

It’s not good news for those facing job losses, rising mortgage payments or an increasing lack of income. We can reach out to those in need of a positive charge and encourage them to keep working toward the goal of being financially self-sufficient and prosperous.

In times of desperation and potential loss of one of life’s most basic needs – shelter, Pre-Paid Legal offers a membership and an opportunity that can make the difference between good and bad times for homeowners and everyone else seeking to achieve balance in their lives.

To learn more about Pre-Paid Legal and to sign up today, just click the Pre-Paid Legal link above.



Own a blog, brand yourself, and increase income from home with it

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/6nKAJ)
Many of you who know me always hear the resounding nuances of my recommendations that if you don't already own your own blog, you should definitely get on this right away. To me it's a no brainer. If you haven't taken advantage of owning a practically free, easy to set up and learn blog yet, you are basically missing out on a very easy opportunity to not only brand yourself online, but you are also missing out on some free money.

I know money isn't everything to a lot of people, but if you could increase your income from home an extra $500.00 a month, do you think that might change your lifestyle a little bit? I don't know, for most people it would make paying the bills a whole lot easier.

$500.00 is nothing really. Can you build this kind of an increase in money right away? Of course not, but over time, like anything else you will eventually have a following online with an increase of income with no limits.

How do you get started?

Well, I already wrote a pretty useful post a while back on the best recommended blogging software to choose from.  Of course setting up a blog isn't always as easy as 1,2,3. So here is another helpful article on making sure your wordpress blog is set up properly for search engine and user friendly purposes after it has been installed.

Now, here is a web page that is all about ways to monetize and increase income from your blog. These are things like free affiliate networks to take advantage of and how to get paid for placing ads on your blog.

How will owning a blog allow me to brand myself?

Your blog will be your online presence. It will make you an authority online in whatever your specific niche is in. Whether it be flowers, music, making money, you name it. Your blog will be your central hub so to speak. What I mean is it will be the site that you link to whenever someone asks you for your website.

There is so much you can do with a blog. Plus a blog is so much better than a website. Why? Because it is updated dynamically unlike a website, which is usually static and hard to update.

Let's dream together for a little bit, shall we. Let's say you have a blog set up now after you read this post. Let's also say it has been 5 years down the road and you've averaged about 10 new blog post a month for the past 5 years. During this time you've also learned a whole lot about the blogging industry and now have quite a few connections online. 10 x 12 = 120 x 5 = 600 blog post. Google has probably indexed at least 300 of these post and tons of categories and tags along the way.

Also during this time you've built up a decent subscriber base of about 5,000 give or take a bit. Now you have leverage on something that took you a little bit of time to grow managing it little by little every day. This is also a nice online advertising resource to always take advantage of as well.

I'm just dreaming, but these are very conservative numbers and most blog owners get much more traffic than this.

We'll just have to wait and see what's in store for you.

Ryan Kisor at jam session playing All The Things You Are changes

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/U0JxC)
I love this Jazz clip of Ryan Kisor at a jam session in London. Notice that I mentioned jam session, I wonder if he's had a few drinks? Well anyway, Ryan Kisor, as always, sounds amazing on trumpet even if the quality of the video isn't up to par. He nails all the chord changes to All The Things You Are perfectly. I have to ask, was that Wynton Marsalis taking a ride before Ryan Kisor?

Retirement benefits of owning a home based business

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/v6oz8)
When most people think of retirement, they think of the investments they've built up over time. Well there are more ways than simply investing your money in the market, IRAs, 401ks, and commodities to build your retirement income over time. Don't get me wrong, you should always be an investor and investing regularly all the time.

Of course you know what I'm talking about based simply on the title of this blog post. A home based business is totally what I'm talking about just in case you haven't figured it out yet.

Did you, or did you not think owning a home based business was a way to help supplement your retirement income over time before you read this article?

I know you did, I'm just asking stupid questions. With all this being said, when is the best time to start a home based business? What do you think I'm going to say? NOW!!!! Of course. Just like with stock investing and other retirement investing there is a time benefit that comes with experience and being in the now absolutely right now.

I don't know where you are in life, meaning how old you are and how far into your career you are if you even have one at all. One thing I do know is that you should have a home based business that builds you something called residual income. This is income that you build up over time that continues to pay you whether you work or not. Unlike your job, where if you stop working today, that monthly paycheck will stop coming in. A home based business will continue to pay even after you stop building it.

You can think of each person that you bring into your multi-level marketing home based business as being an asset for you. Did I say multi-level marketing? Yes, I absolutely did. Are they pyramid schemes? Of course some will be, but the majority are not. Most multi-level marketing businesses get labeled pyramid schemes because certain negative people sign up and fail because it wasn't the right business for them. They will then turn around and blame the Company instead of themselves, go figure, right?

So, you find the right business for you, then refer as many people as you can. Over time, you will have a few strong downline members that will refer hundreds of others below you which are obviously smaller assets.

Have you figured out how a home based business can help fund your retirement yet?

I sure hope so. In fact, if you are successful at your home based business early on, you will probably be able to retire from working a job a whole lot earlier than you ever thought you could. One thing I like to do is build 3 home based businesses. Why would I do this? Well, with anything in life there is never a guarantee. It is mainly a way to protect myself from any sudden downturn of any one 3 of them. In other words, don't put all your eggs in one basket, got it?

I hope this info on adding an extra retirement asset was enlightening to you.

Blimpy Cash is a GPT site that may have some promise

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/JeF5o)
I ran into Blimpy Cash today while surfing through ads at Clixsense, go figure, right? Anyway, I noticed that they were offering a sign up bonus of $1.00 for joining and Blimpy Cash looked like they had some good things going for them.

Good referral contests and a decent looking site with promise I would have to say. I call it a GPT site because you can earn money by doing stuff. Basically you "get paid to" complete offers surveys, etc.. things like that.

Blimpy Cash also had plenty of referral banners to choose from including BBCode banners which I though was odd because you don't usually see that being offered by many affiliate programs.

One thing I did notice about the web design look of Blimpy Cash is that when you click on their forum, which I think it's great that they have one, you don't see any links back to their main site and it opens in a new window. This isn't a good sign, it shows a little bit of inexperience if you ask me.

Besides the forum, Blimpy Cash had a decent amount of nice user friendly affiliate features to make any member quasi satisfied which is good enough for me.

What do you think?

See more GPT sign up bonus sites and let me know what you think of them.

Properly set up your Wordpress blog for seo, speed, monetization, traffic, and the minimum required plugins and sites you?ll need to make it happen

(My Original Blog Post: http://mywebmastertips.com/properly-set-up-wordpress-blog-for-seo-speed-monetization-traffic-minimum-required-plugins-sites/)
Let’s face it, we all love Wordpress to death, right? But out of the box, it isn’t completely set up to its fullest yet because the standard settings aren’t the absolute best settings for your blog plus a few needed plugins are required in order to make sure your blog is search engine friendly.

Account settings to modify:

Let’s start off with some basic Wordpress account settings you are going to want to update first. Go to Settings in your Wordpress back office and click on General. Make sure you blog’s web URL doesn’t have a www before it. This is not needed, so if you have a new site, don’t use www.

Next, click on Reading under Settings and change blog pages show at most from 10 to 5 or less. This will dramatically speed up your blog.

Next, go to Privacy, make sure your blog is visible to everyone.

Finally, go to Permalinks and make sure to check Custom Structure and put in this:

/%postname%/

Doing so will make sure there are no unneeded dates in your blog post URLs as well as making your URLs look pretty.

Websites you should have an account with:

Let’s move on to websites you should have an account with. For Google sites use your gmail email address for all of them so you’ll be able to link your accounts together easily.

Google Analytics - Tracks visitors to your website, how long they were on your site, keywords they used to get to your sites, where they came from, etc… It’s an excellent free tool that comes with a Google Adwords account. Highly recommended and will help you immensely.

Google Adsense - This is the best way to monetize your blog to show relevant ads on your site and you’ll get paid per click.

Feedburner - This will replace your feed and you can link your Google Adsense and Feeburner accounts together to increase income and track your subscribers better. Make sure subscribes can subscribe via email in your settings.

Google Webmaster Tools - You will want a webmaster account to check stats and see how many pages of your website are indexed in Google. When submitting your site, make sure to give them website with no www and specify this in your site’s settings.

Yahoo Site Explorer - Yahoo’s webmaster center to see what pages are indexed with them.

Bing Webmaster Central - Bing’s webmaster center to see what pages are indexed.

Plugins you should be using:

So, let’s move on to needed plugins to make your blog search engine friendly and more profitable.

All in One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert - This allows you to give every page and blog post on your website a unique title, description, keywords, and canonical link. A must have for every wordpress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold - This awesome plugin automatically generates and updates your sitemap for search engines and pings out to the 3 major search engines every time you publish a new blog post.

General Header by David Gibbs - If you’re not programmer savvy, this plugin gives you the ability to add unique code to the header and footer of your site. You will want to put your Google Analytics code in the footer to track your visitors and length of time on your site. You can also add a unique favicon to your header, this is optional of course.

FD Feedburner Plugin by John Watson - The generic Wordpress feed you get with the standard installation doesn’t give you the ability to monetize your feed and allow email subscriptions. This plugin makes it easy to link your Feedburner account to replace the generic feed.

WP SpamFree by WP-SpamFree - You won’t need this right away, but once your blog starts getting out there, the spammers will come knocking at your door with tons of spam. So this plugin will block a majority of this for you to save you time.

WP Greet Box by Thaya Kareeson - This plugin will increase subscribers to your blog by recognizing where visitors came from before they went to your site and offering them to subscribe if they are new or not logged in.

Placing Google Adsense on your blog:

Yes, there are plugins that will do this for you, but in my experience off them stealing my clicks leads me to never want to use them again. So I will quickly show you how to manually add Google Adsense to your blog. You can only have 3 ads per page, don’t break those rules or your Adsense account could get deleted.

I would first go ahead and add a google ad to one or more of your sidebars. To do this, in your Wordpress back office simply go to Appearance, then Widgets. Make a new Text widget and simply copy  the Google ad code in and save it.

Now modify your template by going to Appearance, then Editor. This is the template files for your current theme. I would add one to single.php and page.php. If you only have an index.php, then I would add the Google code to this file, do so right after the:

<div id="content">

That’s what I did for this site. Just wrap the Google ad in a paragraph tag like so

<p align="center">Google Adsense code goes here</p>

Now you should have all the required tools to make your Wordpress blog a successful one. The final thing I would like to note is the titles of your blog posts are so important. Make sure they are descriptive as possible and use good keywords and link to those keywords whenever you can. It's also a good habit to make sure external links open in a new window and internal links open in the same window.

I know I didn't go into too much depth on each individual task, but it is pretty self explanatory and I know you'll be able to figure everything else out after getting introduced to these various products and services.

My ftp webserver got hacked with a malicious malware script and how to fix and prevent it

(My Original Blog Post: http://ping.fm/QSK62)
A couple days ago I was so happy  with the achievement of redesigning the look of my sign up bonus site. Now, only a couple days later, I know what it's like to be hacked. It's like being raped, almost all the files on my ftp server were compromised. This is 3 sites total including the one you're on right now. Looking at my websites now just doesn't feel the same.

What happened? A genius programming hacker figured out the password to my ftp server because the one I had wasn't strong enough. After that, a script was run on the main directory of my server that found any javascript, xml, and php file where the script could input a line of php code at the top of each file. On my server we're talking hundreds of files getting changed against my will.Luckily in my case only the php code was compromised for whatever reason I do not know. This also jacked up my site because certain areas wouldn't work properly on top of the spam ads.

What did the php code do? It made pop ups come up on pretty much every page of my site to visitors all over the world. Pop ups aren't usually a bad thing, but these were labeled attack sites with malicious malware that could potentially spread viruses to many individual computers or steal information.

How did I fix it? First thing I did was updated my poorly thought out password and made it very random with numbers, special characters, upper and lower case letters, etc.. Thanks to the hosting Company I have, GoDaddy, they automatically make back ups of previous day's file structures. All I had to to was go back one day before the incident and restore the non corrupted files in each main directory. This worked like magic, but was still time consuming taking about half a day to complete. Doing the restore this way also ensured I didn't miss any hidden files in sub directories.

I also checked to make sure there weren't any extra files after the individual directory restores. Then I double checked to make sure there were no other users on my server.

What did I learn in this whole crappy experience? Passwords are pretty damn important. Make sure to properly strengthen all your passwords because they could be compromised otherwise. Also, if you use 3rd party open source code, which I do, make sure it is updated to its latest version. This wasn't a problem for me, but it could be for someone else.