Just a quick note to let you know this blog is under­go­ing some ren­o­va­tions. I’ve just installed Dis­qus (pro­nounced “dis­cuss”) com­ment sys­tem, which will replace the native Word­Press com­ment­ing system.

It takes a while for the sys­tem to import all the com­ments from Word­Press — it’s about 70% done, now — and it should be all back to nor­mal soon. Fin­gers crossed.

Why am I doing this?

I’ve been inves­ti­gat­ing sev­eral com­ment­ing sys­tems, includ­ing Word­Press’ own, Intense Debate. And Dis­qus appears to be the win­ner in many of the reviews I’ve read. I’ve tested it on some of my non-​​public blogs and it works quite well.

This sys­tem allows you to track com­ments, con­verse using threaded replies, rate com­ments, add links to com­men­ta­tor pro­files, and com­ment by log­ging into Twit­ter, Face­book, or Dis­qus Con­nect, or sim­ply as a guest.

Com­ments are still mod­er­ated as before, so your com­ment won’t show up auto­mat­i­cally. If you notice any­thing “wiggy,” please com­ment here. The com­plete tran­si­tion, Dis­qus advises me, should be com­pleted by day’s end. Thanks for bear­ing with me.

Sci­en­tific Adver­tis­ing by Claude C. Hop­kins is a time­less clas­sic writ­ten many years ago but a book whose pow­er­ful prin­ci­ples still ring true to this day.

It con­tains 21 chap­ters of time­less strate­gies you don’t want to ignore in your adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing efforts.

In fact, David Ogilvy once said: “Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have any­thing to do with adver­tis­ing until he has read this book seven times.”

I highly rec­om­mend that your read this book, which is brought to you free, before you spend any money on other copy­writ­ing books.

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Since we’re get­ting ready to fly to Vegas to speak this week­end, I didn’t want to leave with­out mak­ing a quick post. But with no time to write an arti­cle myself, I decided to spread some link love.

Any­way, here are five of them…

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First off, this post is in no way com­pre­hen­sive. There are many dif­fer­ent ways to mon­e­tize your blog.

Of course, there’s sell­ing ad space on your blog, such as through the use of pay-​​per-​​click net­works like Google AdSense — which is the most popular.

But offer­ing will­ing adver­tis­ers to directly spon­sor your blog by buy­ing a post, an ad, or a link is one area that’s becom­ing increas­ingly popular.

Sites like ReviewMe​.com, PayPer​Post​.com, and Text​-Link​-Ads​.com are effec­tive in allow­ing blog­gers to get paid for sell­ing con­tent or links on their blogs. Basi­cally, these net­works bring both blog­gers and adver­tis­ers together.

Granted, this has been the sub­ject of a lot of con­tro­versy lately, par­tic­u­larly about dis­clo­sure. (And yes, all the links above are my affil­i­ate links.)

But what if you want to make money directly? What if you want more con­trol over how you mon­e­tize your blog? What if you want to make money based on sales (like an affil­i­ate com­mis­sion) and not just ad clicks or views?

Well, here are a few cool Word­Press plu­g­ins I found.

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I’ve done a cou­ple of things to my blog, mostly “behind the scenes,” that I want to share with you.

Some well-​​known mar­keters have closed their com­ments on their blogs. The pri­mary and most impor­tant rea­son is to deal with the plethora of com­ment spam. If you wanted to com­ment on any of their posts, you’d have to do it on your own blog by post­ing an arti­cle and link­ing back to it.

Since most blogs sup­port it, your link will auto­mat­i­cally cre­ate a track­back on the post, which will be listed in the com­ments area. But the won­der­ful byprod­uct of this is that it increases back­links (i.e., link pop­u­lar­ity) to their blogs.

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Can­cer.

I’ve talked a lot about it on this blog of late, being breast can­cer aware­ness month and all, and given my wife’s cur­rent bat­tle. But this time, the kind of can­cer I’m refer­ring to is dif­fer­ent. And it’s shak­ing up the blo­gos­phere at its foundations.

I’m all for the small guy mak­ing it big. But when the com­pe­ti­tion, a “big guy” (owned by a For­tune 500 com­pany) starts call­ing you a can­cer on his per­sonal blog, you know that some­thing has cer­tainly gone amok.

It’s pretty con­tro­ver­sial, too. Large play­ers in the blo­gos­phere have their knick­ers in a twist about this — and I couldn’t resist talk­ing about it, and shar­ing my views.

Let’s enter the play­ground, kid­dies. Shall we?

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I was in the process of updat­ing the side­bar links, but was a lit­tle con­fused as to what exactly would peo­ple pre­fer, and what would make them nav­i­gate this site more effec­tively to help them find con­tent they seek. Then I got thinking…

Why not ask you, my dear read­ers, directly? So I cre­ated a poll (see the top of this post) that asks the ques­tion, “What links would you like to see on the side­bar?” Please choose your answer.

To view the entire poll, just hover your mouse over the arrows. If your answer is “other,” could you please spec­ify by reply­ing and post­ing a com­ment, below? Thanks.