Most people that start a blog would like it to turn profitable at some point, but how does it happen? WebProNews recently spoke with blogging legend Darren Rowse of ProBlogger about what bloggers can do to make money.

First of all, bloggers need to look at their blog long-term.  So often, people think that they can make money instantly, but it could actually take years.

Having a profitable blog also involves finding the right niche.  It needs to be something that you are interested in and have a passion about. In addition, Rowse suggests that you determine how monetizable your niche is. To do this, you could search for your topic in Google and see if it is something advertisers would consider.

To keep visitors coming back to your blog, you must also choose a niche that will keep you writing for a long time. How often should you write? While it depends upon your area of content, Rowse does point out that, “every post you write is a doorway into your site.” For some bloggers, this could mean 365 opportunities if they write a post everyday. However, bloggers should not post for the mere reason of having new content every day. He says the content should always be useful.

On another note, how effective are blogs due to the recent Twitter craze? Although some blogs have shifted to shorter formats, Rowse says there is also a shift that is moving back toward longer content on blogs since people want more than 140 characters.  Emphasizing that blogs and Twitter are valuable tools for each other, he says specifically, “It’s an ideal world for a blogger… people want more and you’re able to give it to them through a viral communication like Twitter.”

espinda.com provides a turn-key blog plan at only $3.5 a month.

New Updates are:

- b2evolution: 3.3.1-stable -> 3.3.3-stable

- Crafty Syntax Live Help: 2.16.3 -> 2.16.8

- Drupal: 6.14 -> 6.15

- LimeSurvey: 1.85+ -> 1.87+

- Moodle: 1.9.6 -> 1.9.7

- Nucleus: 3.50 -> 3.51

- phpBB: 3.0.5 -> 3.0.6

- SMF: 1.1.10 -> 1.1.11

- TikiWiki CMS/Groupware: 3.3 -> 4.1

- WordPress: 2.8.6 -> 2.9.2

New Updates are:

- Crafty Syntax Live Help: 2.15.0 -> 2.16.3

- Joomla 1.5: 1.5.14 -> 1.5.15

- Moodle: 1.9.4 -> 1.9.6

- Open-Realty: 2.5.7 -> 2.5.8

- TikiWiki: 3.2 -> 3.3

- TYPO3: 4.2.8 -> 4.2.10

- WordPress: 2.8.4 -> 2.8.5

New Updates are:

- 4Images Gallery: 1.7.6 -> 1.7.7

- b2evolution: 2.4.5 -> 3.3.1-stable

- Drupal: 6.13 -> 6.14

- Nucleus: 3.32 -> 3.50

- phpBB: 3.0.4 -> 3.0.5

- phpCOIN: 1.4.4 -> 1.6.4

- phpESP: 1.8.2 -> 2.1.1

- phpWCMS: 1.4.2 r327 -> 1.4.2 r345

- phpWebSite: 0.10.2 -> 1.6.3

- TikiWiki: 3.1 -> 3.2

- Xoops: 2.3.1 -> 2.3.3b

New Updates are:

- Joomla 1.5: 1.5.13 -> 1.5.14

- WordPress: 2.8.2 -> 2.8.4

New Updates are:

- Joomla 1.5: 1.5.12 -> 1.5.13

- Open-Realty: 2.5.6 -> 2.5.7

- SMF: 1.1.9 -> 1.1.10

- TYPO3: 4.2.1 -> 4.2.8

- WordPress: 2.8 -> 2.8.2

New Updates are:

- Coppermine Photo Gallery: 1.4.20 -> 1.4.25

- Drupal: 6.10 -> 6.13

- Joomla 1.5: 1.5.11 -> 1.5.12

- LimeSurvey: 1.82+ -> 1.85+

- OpenX: 2.0.11-pr1 -> 2.8.1

- osTicket: 1.3.1 -> 1.6 RC5

- PHPlist: 2.10.9 -> 2.10.10

- phpWCMS: 1.1-RC4 Rev. A -> 1.4.2 r327

- TikiWiki: 3.0 -> 3.1

- Zen Cart: 1.3.8a -> 1.3.8a

- Zikula: 0.764 -> 1.1.1

Manage E-mail accounts

Not only can user create email accounts but manage them and prevent SPAM with Spam Assassin, access email though several webmail interfaces and several more functions to complete the user’s email experience.

Access Files with web based FTP

Devoted to the security and importance of website files cPanel offer a backup function with a wizard to help safely copy and store files in case they are lost or destroyed. Furthermore user has a direct connection to files with a FTP function allowing the user to manage, upload or download files directly from the web browser.

Limited Stats

With over 8 statistical applications such as Webalizer, Bandwidth monitoring, Latest Visitors and Analog Stats and Error Log the user can monitor all aspects of the website. Statistics graphics are quite simple reporting according to basic values like monthly hits, files and hits they fill the need of the common user. cPanel logs section is thus a bit limited in giving information about the website.

Your website on Your terms

cPanel user has a variety of secure settings to choose between. Offering secure file transfer and remote logins with SSH, IP Blocking, Password Protection, message encryption and decryption using private key with GnuPG Keys.

Control, add and redirect domains

Park, redirect, add or create subdomains with just a few easy steps. Video tutorials are available to all functions enabling user to understand the process completely before attempting to use desired functions.

MySQL and PHPMyAdmin Databases

User can access, add, remove and manage databases in MySQL both directly through cPanel but also by using the Remote MySQL function. phpMyAdmin is also available.

Easy Blog and CMS installation

One of the most valuable functions are found under Software/Services, add-ons offering pre-installed CGI Scripts allowing users to display anything from a counter, clock, countdown timer, formMail to a search engine and banners. Probably the most known service is Fantastico available to help the user install blogs (WordPress, Nucleus, b2evolution), content managagement (Joomla, PHP-Nuke, Drupal etc.), forums, ecommerce, image galleries and much more. PHP configuration is also available.

Video tutorials and Wizards

To make sure that the user find everything and is 100% pleased with the cPanel interface the user have complete access to the control panel preferences and know-how. Video tutorials and wizard to get started and editable style, language and profile settings to give user full control, you can view detailed and step-by-step video tutorials of cPanel provided by espinda here:

for RV skin: http://www.espinda.com/clients/knowledgebase/10/CPanel-RVskin

for X3 skin: http://www.espinda.com/clients/knowledgebase/9/CPanel-X-skin 

Futhermore the user can choose to customize control panel and website further. Personal error pages can be created, image display can be managed and command and scripts can be set to activate and deactivate at specific times.

What’s a static HTML page?
The classic static web page is generated from an actual page ‘physically’ located on the server: so if you had a page named static-page.html somewhere on your server you could find and download this page (it exists, you could grab it via FTP).

The very first websites all used static HTML pages and so the first search engines cut their teeth on static web pages.

What’s a dynamically generated web page?
As the web developed a new way to generate websites arrived, dynamically generated web pages. They differ from static pages in that there is no ‘physical’ equivalent to the page you may be viewing on the server (so you can’t directly download it via FTP).

Dynamically generated pages in it’s simplest form is a single template page that’s used to generate an entire website (could be 1,000,000 page site). Since dynamic pages use scripting languages like PHP and ASP the template will be named after that language for example dynamic-page.php.

This one template page can then be used to create a theoretical unlimited number of unique (unique content) pages each with a unique dynamically generated URL. A simple example would be a 100 page site with each page generated with the format below-

dynamic-page.php?page=1
dynamic-page.php?page=2
dynamic-page.php?page=3
dynamic-page.php?page=4
dynamic-page.php?page=5
…
…
dynamic-page.php?page=100

None of the pages above exist ‘physical’, they are all generated from the single dynamic-page.php page using server-side scripting (PHP in this example). The content from each page could come from a MySQL database, updating the database also updates the website content. Editing the dynamic-page.php changes the entire site.

Many new to web sites looking to go dynamic become confused when they can’t find a page like dynamic-page.php?page=4 on their server (FTP) to edit and post to forums asking how to find them

Why use dynamically generated content?
There are many benefits to dynamically generated websites, this site for example uses the WordPress CMS (Content Management System) which creates dynamically generated pages with a very easy to use back-end for adding and editing content on the fly (any fool can create a site using WordPress and many do!).

A user of WordPress types/pastes content into a text editor like web page (similar to Word), gives it a relevant title etc… clicks a publish button and within seconds the page is available on the website with links from any relevant sections automatically created. Add a new section to the site and the CMS automatically creates a link from the menu, so visitors to the site have immediate access to the new section.

This is just the tip of the ice berg of what’s possible with dynamically generated content, this site uses a WordPress plugin that automatically links phrases to a relevant page (the phrase “Text Links” automatically links to a relevant page and “SEO Consultant” to another page).

To do this with static HTML pages could involve hours of manual editing, though there are ways to simplify the process for example using server-side includes so the menu code (the menu links) are held in a separate file (edit one file, whole site updated). But even with includes and similar techniques static HTML sites (especially large sites) are far more time consuming to maintain than a well thought out dynamically generated site.

Now you know why smart webmasters use dynamically generated sites now we’ll deal with how the search engines, especially Google handle dynamic sites.

Search Engines and Dynamic Sites
In the early days Google etc… could only handle simple URLs like static-page.html and choked on URLs like dynamic-page.php?page=1.

As more and more websites went dynamic the major search engines played catch up, first being able to deal with simple constructs like dynamic-page.php?page=1 and later the more complex dynamic URLs like-

dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&page=1
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&page=2
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&page=3

In the example above we now have 2 variables, a section and a page.

Search engines like Google at first could only handle a small number of variables, wasn’t that long ago when Google would choke on 4 or more variables in a dynamic URL-

dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&sub=Spiders&Bot=Googlebot&page=1
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&sub=Spiders&Bot=Googlebot&page=2
dynamic-page.php?section=SEO&sub=Spiders&Bot=Googlebot&page=3

And so it was advisable to limit the number of variables passed.

Right now Google and the other major search engines can handle multiple variable URLs, not unusual to find 4+ variables in an indexed page and so there is no SEO reason NOT to use dynamic URLs since they can and will be fully spidered and indexed just like any static HTML page.

That said there’s two reasons for avoiding dynamic URLs, the first isn’t a big deal, so I’ll deal with it first.

Dynamic Sites are Spidered Slower than Static Sites
Google in particular has made it clear dynamic sites are spidered slower than static sites. The reason for Google to do this are webmaster friendly, dynamically generated sites can potentially have unlimited pages and so Google assumes a dynamic looking site (a site with URLs like dynamic-page.php?page=1) is big and slows the crawl speed. It does this to limit server load because if a dynamic site (any site) has millions of pages, Googlebot and the other spiders could cause the server to crash if they spidered too many pages at one time.

The above has happened to my server, I use many dynamically generated sites, one script in particular uses Amazon’s XML feed to generate an Amazon affiliate store with millions of Amazon products. I have quite a lot of these stores, so potentially tens of millions of pages spidered by Google etc…

I use something called mod_rewrite to convert dynamic URLs to appear static (an SEO technique) in a web browser or search engine spider, so to Google on my server it finds tens of millions of static looking pages which it spiders at full speed!

This has brought my server to it’s knees at times and I’ve had to take measures to slow Googlebot and other spiders!

For an average user though the slower spidering won’t impact SERPs to a great degree, your new pages may take a day or two longer to be indexed, but they’ll get there eventually and when indexed will gain what ever SERPs they deserve.

For this reason if you have a dynamically generated site that’s regularly indexed by Google etc… it’s wise to keep things as they are.

SEO Pros and Cons of Dynamic vs Static HTML
If you are starting a new site and want the most traffic out of Google etc… then filenames are important and static HTML pages are very easy to name for maximum SEO effect.

You create a new page and give it a filename like-

best-seo-filename-in-the-world.html

An equiveleint dynamic URL might look like-

index.php?page=best+seo+filename+in+the+world

or even-

index.php?page=1

To Google all are spiderable/indexed, but the first one is the best because Google takes all words it recognises from a URL and uses that in the rankings algorithm.

Google treats hyphens (-), plus (+), equal (=) and dot (.) as a word separator so it reads the URLs above as-

1. best seo filename in the world html

2. index php? page best seo filename in the world

3. index php? page 1

The first has 7 recognisable words and one (html) is wasted (and you don’t have to use html).

The second has 9 recognisable words and three (index php? page) are wasted.

The third has 4 recognisable words and all four (index php? page 1) are wasted.

Wasted meaning not part of the keyphrase this page is targeting.

As you can see the HTML version is the best because it is so easy to manipulate and the dynamic URLs can range from terrible to not too bad.

An SEO consultant wants the most out of each and every page, so when I create a site I try to make all filenames SEO friendly, but I also like to use dynamic sites because they save so much time in managing content and this is where mod_rewrite rears it’s ugly little head!

Mod_rewrite an SEO Consultants Nightmare
The hours I’ve spent converting dynamic URLs into static looking URLs through mod_rewrite is my own little hell, one tiny mistake and nothing works! But get it right and you can convert ugly SEO unfriendly dynamic URLs into SEO friendly static like filenames that Google etc… loves.

Not going to try to explain in this article how to use mod_rewrite, so open up Google type in mod_rewrite and have fun

If you find mod_rewrite is beyond your skill set, take a look at WordPress CMS, designed as a blogging platform, but very easy to convert to a general CMS (the SEO Consultant Services site uses WordPress, just remove the monthly archive from the menu). Out the box WordPress creates dynamic looking URLs, but with a few clicks of a mouse they can be converted (easily) to the URLs you see with this site.

Note: mod_rewrite is for Apache servers only, espinda provides web hosting on Apache-driven servers.