That being said, money and art have to mix at some point. You need your money to support your art, whatever it may be, and that is equally true for bloggers and other authors online.

So how do you make money from your WordPress blog without selling your soul? There are many different ways you do that, but it’s important to find the right model that works for you, your niche and your site.

1. Advertising and Sponsorships

For many, advertising is a foul word. However, it doesn’t have to be if done well.  Advertising that isn’t intrusive and doesn’t get mixed in with the content can be a very simple and safe way to earn money from your site. However, this means keeping your ads away from your editorial content physically and figuratively, ensuring a total separation of the paid message from your creative one.

This can be tricky if you find yourself writing about the companies that advertise on your site (it might be wise to favor sponsorships as you can control who advertises better), but with proper disclosure this doesn’t have to be a major problem.

All in all, if you don’t intrude on your readers needlessly and don’t let your advertisers influence your work, you can host ads on your site without worrying sacrificing your integrity.(...)
Read the rest of How to Monetize Your Blog Without Selling Your Soul (741 words)

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As a result, I’ve spent some time talking to fellow bloggers and getting input on some more comfortable furniture for doing my blogging.  I’ve tried a couple of different things ranging from laptop stands, to chairs/couches or other pieces of furniture, but hadn’t really found anything I could highly recommend to others….until recently.

This past week I had the opportunity to try out a product that isn’t completely new, but that I only recently discovered, called the Sumo Gigantor bag from Sumo Lounge.  My research showed that it had been featured in all sorts of magazines and received tons of great reviews from trusted websites, so I decided to give Sumo Lounge a try.

The closest comparison I’ve seen to the Sumo Lounge chairs is probably the Love Sac, which you may have seen for sale in most malls, however Sumo Lounge actually cuts out the middleman allowing them to make their similar bags available at a much more affordable price.  These well constructed bean couches aren’t built like the beanbags I grew up with, which was a pleasant surprise.  I quickly discovered that the great thing about the Sumo Lounge line of beanbags is that this allows me to comfortably do my blogging in front of my entertainment center or pretty much any room within the house (assuming their is adequate room available).

If you are interested in one for your blogging setup, here are some of the features that the sumo line of chairs boasts:

• Bean bag chairs range from 42″ x 42″ x 34″ to 86″ x 60″ x 40″.
• Includes a removable microsuede cover made with machine washable 100% polyester fiber.
• Each page includes several popular color choices.
• Stays fluffy and full over time (won’t ever go flat!).
• All bags include free shipping and a 100% satisfaction guarantee.

In addition to blogging I’ve also spent some time looking for other ways to enjoy my new piece of furniture.  The logical choice to me seemed to be to put it to the test playing video games.  I enjoy online gaming as much as anyone and decided to spend a few hours playing Call of Duty online with my friends.  Even though it may not have been reflected in my kill-to-death (KTD) ratio, it didn’t take long for me to appreciate the improved experience I was getting by sitting closer to the television.  As a result, I think I can also recommend these Sumo Lounge bags as an excellent gaming chair.  Lastly, I’ve also found that I often have to fight my wife for the Sumo Lounge chair as she often wants to use it for movies/Netflix, and then kids have been begging me to let them sleep in it pretty much every night since it arrived.

Overall I have to admit I’m very happy with my new Sumo Gigantor and can confidently recommend the Sumo Lounge line of bean bag chairs to friends and fellow bloggers.  I know we have hundreds of professional bloggers who read this site so I’d like to hear about your blogging setups.  Let us know in the comments below!!

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I’ve been coding with WordPress for a long time now. All the way back to when there was a my-hacks.php file. Shortly thereafter WordPress introduced plugins and widgets. Over all these years I find myself going back to a few key WordPress concepts that make blogs really functional.

1. Popularity of Posts – The plugin I use, and hack often, is Alex King’s popularity plugin. If you download it from wordpress.org, it works great, but if you really want to make some cool features, you are going to have to hack it.The popularity plugin displays the most popular posts based on time frame, or category in a list (<li>)by default. I’ve hacked it to get the the raw posts, so I can do my own formatting. You can see an example in my “hot list”.
2. Related Content – Notice how I didn’t say related posts. Finding related content goes much deeper then posts or pages.Related content is a must to build loyal readers (repeat visitors). You have to guide your readers and help them find content THEY are interested in. Remember, most people will find your content from Google, so feed them some related content and grow your user base. Related posts are easy to get, you simple have to a fulltext index to your database. You can then match terms to keywords.
3. Categories – WordPress is nothing more then a way to organize your content, hence the term CMS (Content Management System). 80% of my traffic from Google comes from a relation to WordPress categories. Either trying to display top level categories without children, or trying to build a top menu/submenu navigation menu.Working with categories in WordPress can be pretty frustrating. I wish there was better information. Luckily there are a lot of help from the WordPress Community.
4. Images – Magazine themes are the most popular style of theme on the Internet. It’s all about the cool graphics and images to get reader to click on posts. Content sliders and featured content sections with large graphics can be a pain to manually update, which is why you need to learn how to manipulate the images from your posts.

There you have it. If you want to be a WordPress hacker and make killer websites, you gotta have a good working knowledge of those four topics.  Thanks for reading my post, and as always, don’t be scared to ask me for help.

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Here’s a scenario: your post gets popular on Delicious. You get a ton of comments from “SEO BLOG TIPS”  saying “thanks for great post”. Comments like that add no value whatsoever to your blog post. Heck, they devalue it. So here’s the question: do you allow the comment or delete it?

Personally, I consider comments like that spam, but on the other hand, it does get the comment count up. So there it is. A short post, but there’s a reason for it; it’s meant to spark debate, so go on. What would you do?

(poll embedded)

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Yesterday on my blog, WPShout I published ‘10 Awesome Things to Do With WordPress’ Custom Fields‘. This morning I awoke to find not a single comment on the post. I was disappointed as the post had taken ages, but I didn’t think much more of it. Until this evening. I wanted to email a friend a link to the post, so I loaded up WPShout, only to find the post wasn’t there! In the admin was only my draft from a couple of days ago. Odd, I thought. I copied and pasted the post from Google Reader and republished the post. And then I realized that a heck of a lot of comments I’d spent yesterday evening replying to had gone, and so had my replies. In other words, my database had reverted to a version a couple of days old. Why? I don’t know (if anyone does have any idea, could you drop me an email?!) at this point.

Of course, at this point you’re (probably not) screaming at your monitor

“just restore the backup you’ve got!… you, you do have a backup, right?!”

Yes. Of course I did. Or so I thought. I’d set up the WordPress Database Backup plugin to email me a backup of the database every 24 hours, and that email automatically got archived. Which meant I didn’t see it hadn’t been sent for a couple of weeks because when moving domains I’d forgotten to reinstall the plugin. Which meant I didn’t have a backup.

Where this post is going is simple – don’t be an idiot like me and only realize your backup doesn’t exist when you actually need it, spend five minutes now installing the plugin I mention above and set it up to email you every day. Just don’t archive the email automatically. WordPress Hacks Top Tip: don’t be an idiot….always have a backup.

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I was excited to see our friend Jean-Baptiste Jung make the list, showing he is finally getting the recognition his hard work deserves.   There are also a number of other people included in the list that are worth following, so Twitter users will want to make sure to check Theme Playground’s post.

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While working on our server issues, I had a little spare time that normally would have gone towards blogging.   Here is what I did with my time:

1. Taxes – Having a business requires some changes to how you do your taxes, whether you are an LLC or a sole proprietorship.   As a result, I’ve had to spend some additional time working on the taxes for Apricot Media.  After going through this, I’ve found quite a few ways to improve my processes.  If anyone is interested in learning more about this, I’m planning to write a post about this over the coming weeks on my affiliate marketing blog, Slick Affiliate.
2. Spring Cleaning – Once a year (at least), I’ve always felt it is good to go through your computer and clean up.   This can involve reformatting your computer(s), optimizing databases, backing up files, and cleaning out email and pictures.  We currently have over 120 websites, so this took quite a bit longer this year than in the past.   I also will typically use this time to go through my pictures and music files and make sure everything is backed up on an external drive.

What do you guys do for your computer’s yearly spring cleaning?  Share your tips in the comments!

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Back when Twitter was originally launched, I setup an account just like many of you, but I can’t say I use the service as often as a lot of people do.  Maybe it is because I don’t find my own musings as interesting as I find others, or maybe it is the timesink that Twitter can be (just like Facebook), but I just don’t use it as much as I should.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded my phone to the new Blackberry Storm (which I could write a four page review of how incredible this phone is) and grabbed the TwitterBerry application.   I’ve found that this application has really helped motivate me to use the service a lot more often now that I can easily keep up with things while I’m away from my computer.  

Because I don’t believe I’ve ever mentioned my profile here on WordPress Hacks, I figured now was as good of time as any.  If anyone is interested in following me on Twitter, you can follow me here.

I’m also sure many of you have Twitter accounts and I’d love to keep up with what our readers are doing.   If you’d like me to follow you, leave your profile link in the comments.

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Is this a good thing?  I suppose there are some advantages to having your feeds on your Google account.   So far the only problem I’ve run into since making the switch to Google’s Feedburner is the Feedcount WordPress plugin I was using, which no longer works with the new setup.  I went in and hacked the plugin code a bit to try to get it work, but it still wasn’t working with the new setup.

Anyone else having any problems since switching your Feedburner account to Google?

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