Social Bookmarks

I've finally gotten around to posting this here for you guys even though I've been using it on other blogs for a while now. I used to use Social Bookmark links on my old Blogger Blogs (before the Beta became the new standard) but the old techniques didn't work because the token system is not the same as the new widget system.

I came across the new way to do this around April-ish would be my guess and it's been working fine since then. Here's the link to the wonderful site that provided the instructions and graphics, and I hope you all find this useful.

http://betabloggerfordummies.blogspot.com/2007/02/social-bookmarking-for-blogger.html

It's FINISHED! Profitable Blogging 1.1 is DONE!

After almost 2 months of experimenting with new tools and switching all my 42 other blogs over to Blogger's new platform, I'm happy to report that my flagship info product is almost ready for sale to the public.

I'm just waiting on ClickBank to approve my pages and it'll be good to go. In addition, I'll be doing another limited release WSO to let the last few folks who want it get it at the discounted rate.

It's got 2 new sections on Social Bookmarking and Pinging (which I haven't set up on this blog yet - shame on me) as well as links to a private discussion group and discount links to my other reports.

If you've already purchased, I'll be sending you an email with a link to where you can join the private discussion group, which is ready as well. You can download the updated version of the book from there as well.

Thanks to my first group of readers who gave great feedback and some lovely testimonials. I hope they'll help convince future customers that this stuff really does work.

Hope ClickBank works weekends! I'm excited to get this ball rolling!

Been a little while!

Hey everyone! It's been a little while but I've been pretty busy with changing my older blogs over to use the new version of Blogger and it's been somewhat of a struggle. I was having trouble with the blogs dropping out of the Google index after a while and with the new templating system, I didn't understand why.

I came across this today in my multifarious Alerts emails. Turns out the new prebuilt templates mess up the meta tags pretty bad and keep the blog from being spidered. I've tried the recommended fix, so we'll see if it has any measurable effect.

Read about it more here: http://www.searchengineposition.com/blog/default.asp?Display=44

Automatic product delivery via free email

Hello everyone and Happy New Year!

Hope you all had a swell time ringing in the new, and I hope you're all as committed to growing your successful blogs as I am.

One of the things I was experimenting with over the holiday was a way to solve a problem I had when I offered my e-book for sale via PayPal. Though I specified a "thank you" page destination where the download was immediately available, not everyone got to that page. I think maybe it has something to do with whether they pay with PayPal or a credit card. Anyway, I digress.

The solution I came up with (not like it's pioneering or anything, but it is tested and operational) is this. I set up a special email account in Gmail that only does order fulfillment. I set that account's vacation message to be the fulfillment email and have it set to auto-respond. Then, I forward the PayPal payments to THAT address.

At least, that was the initial solution, but it then occurred to me that all anyone would have to do is to try to send email to that address and they would get my product download link for free! We can't have that.

After some testing, I determined that I can use certain pieces of text that I know will be included in the PayPal receipt email as a filter. I set the "order fulfillment" email address to delete emails that do not contain those certain pieces of text. When I do this, only genuine receipt emails will get the autoresponse and everything else gets deleted. Sure, it's still hackable, but it would be very time consuming to do so, since the "hacker" will have no idea WHICH piece of text I'm looking for.

I hope to use this process as a stop-gap for the folks who don't make it to the thank-you page via PayPal.

Of course, before you implement something like this yourself, read all the TOC docs involved and make sure you're compliant.

Hope my little experiment here proves useful to some of you folks.

Talk again soon!