Many people start blogs with the idea that they must join the blogging revolution in order to build a social media presence and create online rapport with their customers and prospects. Well, it’s a great, low cost way of doing this. A blog (whether self-hosted or provided by WordPress.com, Blogger.com or similar) is a user-friendly way of generating interest in your business. It offers you an inexpensive way to explore and learn about ‘search engine optimisation’ yourself – without paying expensive consultants.

Blogging can be quick, easy and remarkably powerful for a newcomer. It can also be a minefield for the unwary. Blogging will put your content into Google and sometimes right up there in the search engine results, no problem. But if you put the wrong stuff out there, you’re stuck with it – and before long, that’s what everyone will find when they go looking for your name, your products or your business. Some people seem to lose sight of this fact, choosing to rant and rave on their blog with views that come back to haunt them later on as prospects start doing their ‘due diligence’.

There are many ways to shoot yourself in the foot when you rush to join the social media revolution and get your business blogging. One of the most painful is let your blog fill up with comment spam. These are comments that pretend to be about your content but which, in reality, are just attempts to link from your site to their viagra / porn / fake watches site.

Typical comment spam looks like a vague attempt to massage the writer’s ego:

“Great blog, man. You really got to the heart of this issue in a way that few people do. I’m going to bookmark your site and recommend it to my friends” is a typical comment – designed to stroke your ego without actually saying anything about the post – because, of course, they’ve not actually read it.

More damaging, perhaps, than letting the occasional bit of spam through is the tendency of many new business bloggers to completely miss the ‘moderate comments before publishing’ option in their blog settings. When this is unchecked, the piles of porn / medication spam will build up on your site, and pretty soon it will look like the urine-soaked, rubbish strewn doorway of a shop in the high street that’s gone out of business. You get the picture.

There’s nothing that says “jumped on the social media bandwagon to broadcast my stuff but can’t actually be bothered to engage with it” better than missing that single, tiny check-box. Don’t make that mistake – set comment moderation ON from the start.

The web is a funny beast. Last night I noticed two things: that this site appeared to be broked and that my visitor stats seemed to drop out of the sky in a ball of flame. I spent some time switching to a temporary template when it became clear that my expensive ‘ModThemes’ theme ‘Venture’ had suddenly decided not to work. I also upgraded WordPress (figuring what the hell, if I lose it all, it might as well be now).

WordPress upgraded ok and the temporary theme looks delicious in that green tone. Mmmm. The stats still say ’0′ visitors which is interesting since my posts are still clearly visible in Google.

Whenever this kind of thin happens it makes me realised that I’m sort of attached to this piece of web ‘real estate’. It has history. I has me at the top of Google for ‘online reputation management UK’ – which brings me occasional quirky and very interesting (if not profitable) enquiries from the weird and wonderful who have done baaaaad things and now don’t know what to do.

So I want to keep the site – not least because of how much reassurance it offers for victims of various scams. I’m also really busy and it leaves me wondering just how much time and energy I’ve got to re-build it. I guess that’s the problem with any piece of real estate: needs maintaining or it falls into disrepair.

It’s been a busy Sunday as we’ve been doing the site ‘spring clean’ that we’ve been thinking of for a little while and setting up a new theme – ‘Venture’ by ModThemes.

I’m one of those people who thinks that the worst part of WordPress is the soul-destroying search for themes. It’s great that there are so many themes to choose from but if you’re not careful, you can find yourself just looking…and looking some more.. in a never-ending search for that elusive ‘perfect theme’.

A while back I realised that life was for living, not for endlessly browsing the web for themes.  The trick, I’ve learned, is to find a theme that a) you can tell will pretty much do the thing you want b) is flexible enough to modify and fine tune and c) has support behind it if you need to do something especially tricky with it.

At some point, the desire to have a support forum available rules out the free themes option.  Beyond that point, the ‘premium themes’ world is surprisingly small.  However you search, you find yourself looing at same small pool of designers – and before long, you’re really looking at about 5 or 6 ‘theme houses’ that you’re going to end up choosing from.

Previously, I’ve paid for a theme by Brian Gardner (‘Chrome’ by StudioPress).  It was ok – but in my experience, came with too many things missing that you’d think would be pre-requisite functions.

This time I settled on ‘Venture’ by ModThemes – $70.  The reason for the choice was simple: firstly, it wasn’t so great a jump from the previous theme this site ran on (Brian Gardner’s free ‘Silhouette’) that returning visitors wouldn’t know where they were and secondly, it came with an ideal ’3 product’ front-page showcase that I could see I could use right away.

10 hours later, I’m certain it was a good choice. Everything I’ve needed the theme to do, it’s done and we’re back on the air.  And I even bought the image for the home page from iStockPhoto – a first. There still plenty to do over the week, but I’m pleased at where we’ve got today.  I’m also happy to recommend ModThemes if you’re a WordPress designer looking for a fast changeover

Look, before we go any further, I’ll tell you the truth about how much I’ve earned so far.

Are you ready?  £15. Yes! £15 that could just as easily be yours!!!  That (as far as I’m concerned, friend) makes me a pro.  Which, in turn, qualifies me to tell YOU how do it, right?  And think yourself lucky I’m not trying to sell you my eBook ‘How to make more than £14 with my £15-Google-system‘ for $47!

Joking aside, it’s fun to see my grand earnings total rising inexorably day on day. And I’m not even trying, really I’m not.

So here’s the ‘mu:kaumedia guide to making easy money like what I do:

1) Set up a WordPress blog

2) Blog regularly about an area you’re interested in and (most importantly) that will interest other people

3) Make sure your basic post SEO is good (keywords in titles, headers and content)

4) Anticipate what people will be searching for in your area of interest and blog about it before they start searching

5) Sign up to Google adsense and splash a small block of ads on your site in a non-intrusive position

So how exactly did I make my Google fortune?

Way back in Jan 2009, someone invited me to the new, ‘invitation-only’ music streaming service Spotify.  It didn’t take a genius to work out that something as groundbreaking as Spotify + invitation-only membership was going to lead to a pile of people looking for invitations.

I then wrote a couple of quick blog posts with titles like, er.. “How do I get a Spotify invitation?” and some useful links (plus offer to give away the invites I got when I signed up).

Result?  Lots of visitors to give those invites to.  Followed by Spotify dumping about 600 more invitations on me to give away for them.  Followed by lots more people looking… followed by people placing links to my post in various forums and sites.

Eventually, I ran out of posts but that didn’t stop the people coming.  In the end, I posted a link to a page that, oddly enough, by-passes Spotify’s invite page altogether (I still can’t work out why they left it open??).  And still the people come at the rate of 1000+ a day.  And most of them go away happy.

After 8 months of traffic, I decided to sell my soul to Satan and put some ads on my site.  Result?  Vast sums of Adsense revenue.

So if I can do it, so can you.  Why, if I had me 10 blogs running… and I was actually doing it seriously, who knows how much money could be made each month?  £150? More, if I had no qualms about the nature or quality of my content or affiliate marketing scheme…or…or.. the mind boggles.  The only thing I didn’t do was put the ads on earlier. Heck, I might be blogging this from my yacht in the Caribbean if I hadn’t wasted those 8 months of traffic.

I went to add a comment on a Blogger blog.  I got a box to type my comment which I stupidly spent 5 minutes writing.

I filled out the ‘Captcha’ box to prove I wasn’t a spamming auto-bot. No problem there.

Then it asked me for one of two ways to sign in – either using my ‘Google ID’ or ‘WordPress.com’ ID.  Hmmm.

Why ‘Hmmm’?  Well because I just don’t feel happy signing into Blogger (yes, even though it’s Google-owned) with the er, username and password that controls all my adwords, analytics etc. Why not? Because Blogger is chockablock with spam content and spammers for starters.  Not exactly confidence inspiring.

And nor do I want to sign in with my ‘wordpress.com’ ID because it automatically links the reader to all my WordPress.com accounts (whether connected to blogs or not).  That’s a step to far for my liking.

What happened to being able to comment as a private individual so long as I left my IP address (in case of being a nasty terrorist or inciting racial hatred or the like) and made sure I wasn’t a machine by filling in the ‘captcha’ correctly?

Well, sorry Blogger but I’m not going to bother commenting on Blogger blogs if those are the only options available.  I’m not willing to add to that subtle but somewhat sinister ‘interconnection’ of personal information you’re trying to build up.

I spent $30 on this plugin.  Actually, $60 because I also bought it for a client. From the beginning, it was a complex nightmare to get working but I stuck with it.  It came with one basic newsletter template and no user-friendly means to edit or change it.  On top of that, the plugin maker found it easier to piss off his customers rather than provide an after-sales service.  Shame.

It also failed to move with the times (read incessant WordPress upgrades).  Within a few months, it began sending random test emails – hopefully just to my address.  Then it lost all its graphic editor controls.  For the last couple of issues of my newsletter, I’ve had to copy and change HTML code.  It’s been a pain in the arse, frankly.

And this morning, my iPhone suddenly informed me that I had 102 new emails in the space of a minute or so.  Great.  Straight into WordPress plugins and deactivate.

So long, ShiftThis WP newsletter.  Like I said, you almost made it – the Holy Grail of blogging; the working, workable blogger newsletter.  But you blew it.

So we had 11 beautiful months together.  And then it had to end.

Why?  You had the technical skills – that was clear from the start.  What you didn’t have was the social skills to make the most of social media.  From the very beginning, you treated your customers like an annoyance you could do without.

..but you’ll only have found out the hard way.  Like I did. Probably the first time you came to drag-and-drop widgets after upgrading (reluctantly if you’re anything like me) to WordPress 2.8.

I’ve ranted about the enslavement to upgrades that you’re forced into when you start blogging (or making sites) with WordPress.  No sooner than you get used to one version, some unknown entity decides its time to upgrade.  If you don’t things gradually stop working on your site.  Or your clients’ sites.  But even if you do, things inevitably and suddenly don’t work too.  Why? Because the people who make the free plugins you’re so dependent on haven’t caught up with the WordPress upgrade.  They either haven’t had time, or worse, can’t be bothered since no-one’s paying them to keep up.

With WordPress, things go down like a line of dominoes.   Just now, I noticed that the widget that comes with the WP AudioBoo plugin wasn’t showing on my homepage.  So I replaced that plugin with a more recent one.  Then I went to the widgets dashboard and tried to drag and drop the AudioBoo widget into my sidebar only to find I couldn’t.  Further exploration revealed I couldn’t drag or drop anything.  Ah. New problem.

Next step, Google and search for ‘can’t drag and drop widgets in WP’.  That led me to a number of threads in the WordPress Codex where people had upgraded to WP 2.8 only to find themselves unable to drag and drop widgets.  10 minutes later, I had worked out that it was the Ecommerce plugin from Instinct Entertainment (!) that was messing up the drag-and-drop function in WP 2.8.

A few people offered crude, temporary work-arounds.  None of them solved the problem and all of them required a level of php expertise that would kill off all but the code-obsessed developer.

My solution? Lose the WP Shopping Cart plugin since I’m not really using it.

And where does that leave me? Stranded between WP Shopping Cart 2.5 and 3.7 and WP 2.8 and 2.8.2 with no real confidence that anything will ever work properly and a growing sense of the stupidity of the whole, idiotic endeavour.

I’ve really, really had enough running just to stay still.  It’s insane – a modern madness that I want no further part of.  There. I’ve said it.

Note: The image (above) is not my work.  I copied and pasted if from the Virginia Quarterly Review without their permission.  Bad? Maybe.  But at least there’s no risk of you thinking it’s my own work.

Has Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of ‘The Long Tail’ plagiarised Wikipedia (and other sources) in the writing of his new book?  What if he has?  Who the hell cares anyway? In this era of cut-and-paste mashup where everybody lifts everything and nobody owns nothing…

These people seem to care.

And actually, I do too.  A lot.

For some people the issue of plagiarism is some old-fashioned educational nonsense from the good old, bad old days of dull, authoritarian education.  You know, those musty pre-internet days when children were made to read, write and spell properly if they were to stand any chance of growing up to be well-adjusted adults capable of going to war with each other and despoiling the planet.

By the time I quit lecturing in 2004 at a well-respected University in the West of England, students were not only committing plagiarism for their ‘written’ work (‘pasted’ would be a more accurate term) but they were doing it for their practical graphic design work too.  Yes.  Their practical work.  I remember one revealing after receiving a high 2.1 degree that he had simply borrowed his final year practical work.  His contempt for the system that couldn’t – or wouldn’t – detect his plagiarism was equalled only by the contempt he had for his own lack of motivation and effort.

Judging by his comments in today’s thread and on his own blog, Anderson seems determined to play down the accusations of plagiarism and in so doing, I personally think he further damages his credibility.  Why?  Because this isn’t a failure to properly cite sources.  It isn’t an accidentally-dropped pair of quotation marks either.  It is a conscious act of copying, pasting and editing text into a document and formatting it so that it ends up reading as his own words.

I for one am glad the issue is out in the open and thank Chris Anderson for – unintentionally – raising it.  But is this really an issue of intellectual property and copyright in the digital age?  Could it instead be about plagiarism as a symptom of the decline of critical thinking in our culture?

The Ecademy wars seem to be rolling on.  How do I know this?  Because despite categorically switching OFF notifications I’m still getting an email every time someone else posts in the latest argument thread. So that option doesn’t work.

And it’s day 4 in my quest to quit Ecademy.  At the weekend, I used the Ecademy ‘support’ option to request detailed information how I could close my account, since there are no options anywhere on the site allowing me to do this.

Guess what?  No response.  No ‘Your Support Request has been acknowledged’.  Nothing.

I really don’t want to go back in there and have to commit Ecademy suicide.  It could be messy.  Hey! Maybe that’s what all those childish, small-minded egos in there are actually trying to do!  Now I understand.

If you’re a blogger, you might like WPTouch, the plugin for WordPress that once activated, outputs a version of your blog in a format designed for iPhone users.

It’s brilliant! But how come I didn’t know about it before?

Well, I can think of st least two reasons, depressingly common in online media. First of all, there’s the dire and counter-intuitive interface of the WordPress ‘Extend’ plugin repository. Try finding something there to solve a problem you might have. No chance unless you already know the name of the thing you need to solve the problem…in which case, you wouldn’t be bloody well looking for it, would you?

Then there’s a peculiar tendency of developers to give their plugins names that give no hint of what they might do in case they might help you solve your problem without sufficient frustration and suffering. I mean, ‘WPTouch’? Why not ‘ConvertWPtoiPhone’ for God’s sake?

If a friend hadn’t told me about it, I doubt if I would have found it at all. Mad – particularly since it opens your blog up to the entire world of iPhone users, especially via Twitter.

Its worth remembering that this mobile internet stuff is really still in its infancy. It’s taken me over 30 frustrating minutes to write this on my iPhone and I haven’t got the energy to try to work out how to copy and paste a link URL, but miracle of miracles, I’m doing it on train travelling at 125mph.

Mustn’t grumble, eh?