- Dora the Explorer is singing about cocaine. Is that why my kids have so much energy? #
- RT @prosperousfool: Be the Friendly Financial “Stop” Sign http://bit.ly/67NZFH #
- RT @tferriss: Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ in a one-page cartoon: http://su.pr/2PAuup #
- RT @BSimple: Shallow men believe in Luck, Strong men believe in cause and effect. Ralph Waldo Emerson #
- 5am finally pays off. 800 word post finished. Reading to the kids has been more consistent,too. Not req’ing bedtime, just reading daily. #
- Titty Mouse and Tatty Mouse: morbid story from my childhood. Still enthralling. #
- RT @MoneyCrashers: Money Crashers 2010 New Year Giveaway Bash – $7,400 in Cash and Amazing Prizes http://bt.io/DDPy #
- [Read more…] about Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-16
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-19
- RT @ScottATaylor: Get a Daily Summary of Your Friends’ Twitter Activity [FREE INVITES] http://bit.ly/4v9o7b #
- Woo! Class is over and the girls are making me cookies. Life is good. #
- RT @susantiner: RT @LenPenzo Tip of the Day: Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night. #
- RT @ScottATaylor: Some of the United States’ most surprising statistics http://ff.im/-cPzMD #
- RT @glassyeyes: 39DollarGlasses extends/EXPANDS disc. to $20/pair for the REST OF THE YEAR! http://is.gd/5lvmLThis is big news! Please RT! #
- @LenPenzo @SusanTiner I couldn’t help it. That kicked over the giggle box. in reply to LenPenzo #
- RT @copyblogger: You’ll never get there, because “there” keeps moving. Appreciate where you’re at, right now. #
- Why am I expected to answer the phone, strictly because it’s ringing? #
- RT: @WellHeeledBlog: Carnival of Personal Finance #235: Cinderella Edition http://bit.ly/7p4GNe #
- 10 Things to do on a Cheap Vacation. https://liverealnow.net/aOEW #
- RT this for chance to win $250 @WiseBread http://bit.ly/4t0sDu #
- [Read more…] about Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-12-19
3 Things You Need to Know About Homeowner’s Insurance
If you are a homeowner, you need homeowner’s insurance. Period. Protecting what is mostly likely the biggest investment of your life with a relatively small monthly payment is so important, that, if you disagree, I’m afraid we are so fundamentally opposed on the most basic elements of personal finance that nothing I say will register with you.
If, however, you have homeowner’s insurance, or–through some innocent lapse–need homeowner’s insurance and you just want some more information, welcome!
The basic principle of insurance is simple. You bet against the insurance company that you or your property are going to get hurt. If you’re right, you win whatever your policy limit is. If you’re wrong, the insurance company cleans up with your monthly premium. Insurance is gambling that something bad will happen to you. If you lose, you win!
Now, there are some things about homeowner’s insurance that you may not realize.
1. Homeowner’s insurance will not protect you against a flood. For that you need flood insurance. The easiest way to tell which policy covers water damage is to see if the water touched the ground before your house. An overflowing river, or heavy rain that seeps through the ground and your foundation are both considered flooding. On the other hand, hail breaking your windows and allowing the rain in or a broken pipe are both generally covered by your homeowner’s policy.
Do you need flood insurance? I would say that, if you live on the coast below sea level, you should have flood insurance. If you’re on a flood plain, you need flood insurance. If you’re not sure, use the handy tool at http://www.floodsmart.gov to rate your risk and get an estimate on premium costs. My home is in moderate-to-low risk of flooding, so full coverage starts at $120.
2. You can negotiate an insurance claim. When you have an insurance adjuster inspecting your home after you file a claim, most of the time they will lowball you. Generous adjusters don’t get brought in for the next round of claims. If you know the replacement costs are higher than they are offering, or even if you aren’t sure, don’t sign! Once you sign, you are locked into a contract with the insurance company. Take your time and do your research. Get a contractor out to give you a damage estimate, if you can.
3. Your deductible is too low. If you’ve built up an emergency fund, you can safely boost your deductible to a sizable percentage of that fund and save yourself a bunch of money. When we got our emergency fund up to about $2000, we raised our deductible from $500 to $1000 and saved a couple of hundred dollars per year. That change pays for itself every 2 years we don’t have a claim. I absolutely wouldn’t recommend this if you don’t have the money to cover your deductible, but, if you do, it can be a great money-saver.
Bonus tip: If you get angry that your homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover flooding, even if you haven’t had to deal with a flood, and you cancel your insurance out of spite, and you subsequently have a ton of hail damage, your insurance company won’t cover the crap that happened during the window where you weren’t their customer.
Are you one of the misguided masses who prefer to trust their home to fate?
Do you have an insurance horror story?
Make Extra Money: A Niche Site Walkthrough
Make Extra Money Part 1: Introduction
Right now, I have 7 sites promoting specific products, or “niche” sites. When those products are bought through my sites, I get a commission, ranging from 40-75%. Of those sites, 5 make money, 1 is newly finished, and 1 is not quite complete. I’m not going to pretend I’m making retirement-level money on these sites, but I am making enough money to make it worthwhile.
Make Extra Money Part 2: Niche Selection
These three topics have been making people rich since the invention of rich. Knowing that isn’t enough. If you want to make some money in the health niche, are you going to help people lose weight, add muscle, relieve stress, or reduce the symptoms of some unpleasant medical condition? Those are called “sub-niches”.
Making Extra Money Part 3: Product Selection
My niches site are all product-promotion sites. I pick a product–generally an e-book or video course–and set up a site dedicated to it. Naturally, picking a good product is an important part of the equation.
Make Extra Money Part 4: Keyword Research
If you aren’t targeting search terms that people use, you are wasting your time. If you are targeting terms that everybody else is targeting, it will take forever to get to the top of the search results. Spend the extra time now to do proper keyword research. It will save you a ton of time and hassle later. This is time well-spent.
Make Extra Money, Part 5: Domains and Hosting
In this installment, I show you how to pick a domain name and a website host.
Make Extra Money, Part 6: Setting Up a Site
A niche site doesn’t amount to much without, well, a site. In this installment, I show you how I configure a site, from start to finish.
Make Extra Money, Part 6.5: Why I Do It The Way I Do It
Several people have asked me to explain why I use the plugins and settings I use. This explains the “Why” behind Part 6.
More to come….
Make Extra Money, Part 6.5: Why I Do It The Way I Do It
This is a follow-up to part 6 of the niche site walkthrough, Setting Up a Niche Site. If you haven’t read that post, this one won’t mean much. Go ahead. Read it. I’ll wait.
Several people have asked me to explain why I use the plugins and settings I use. In this installment of the Make Extra Money series, I’m going to explain every choice I recommended last time.
WordPress
WordPress is a site development dream. With the right themes and plugins, you can literally make a WordPress site look, feel, and behave in any way you wish. Even without digging too deep into plugins and premium themes like Headway, you can put together a niche site blog in very little time and know that it’s happening on a robust platform that is actively being improved.
Configuring WordPress
Updates
Keeping your site updated is the single most important thing you can do to avoid getting hacked. Since I haven’t yet figured out how to make hacking a terminal disease, I do the best I can to avoid letting them cause problems. Keeping your site updated is the condom of WordPress.
WWW
This is entirely a personal preference, but, after 20 years of reinforcing habits, most people type “www” by default. WordPress will automatically forward visitors correctly, so this isn’t actually a necessity.
The “Misc” Category
I don’t spend much time worrying about categories when I post, and sometimes I experiment with using external software to post from pools of articles, so I set up a default category. “Misc” is much nicer to see than “Uncategorized”, even if they mean the same thing.
Theme Selection
I like SimpleX because it is uncluttered and easy to navigate. It’s hardly the most powerful theme out there, but it doesn’t pretend to be. If I want more, I use Headway.
Plugins
Plugin Central
Plugin Central is just a plugin installer that lets you install and activate many plugins at once. Even knowing exactly what plugins you want, this easily saves half an hour of setup time.
All in One SEO Pack
SEO is important. In fact, it’s what I base my niche site traffic on. All in One SEO makes it easy to manage the SEO titles that search engines see and the meta descriptions that search engine’s display to visitors when they see your site after a search. Some themes do this themselves, but I still use this plugin.
Meta keywords are all but useless, but not entirely. Google and Bing don’t care, but some networking and sharing sites do.
I “noindex” the tag archives because I don’t want the search engines finding each page twice. Identical pages with different addresses will register as two pages with Google. How does it know which one I consider most important? It doesn’t, so I don’t give it the option of indexing my tag archives.
Contact Form 7
This is just a free and easy contact form. I haven’t found anything better for the price.
WordPress Database Backup
Backups are important. Always back up your data. Do you want to spend 3 weeks building a site, just to have your server crash, killing everything? 5 minutes now will save hours or days of headache later.
SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2
When someone comes to your site from a search engine, this plugin takes the term they searched for and appends it in a list at the end of the post the visitor found. This reinforces your site as a good result for that search term. It also provides a handy list of the most popular search terms people use to find your site.
Conditional CAPTCHA for WordPress
I hate spam. If Akismet finds a spam comment being posted, this plugin will give the user a change to enter a CAPTCHA code to post the comment. Even if I turn off comments on a site, I keep this installed in case I ever change my mind. Real comments are good for SEO, so I occasionally test allowing the comments. I won’t waste the time moderating comments on a niche site, so this is a good compromise.
Date Exclusion SEO
If someone comes to a site and sees the last post was two years ago, they’ll leave. I don’t want a post to look like it’s outdated, so I suppress the dates.
Pretty Link Lite
This plugin lets me mask a link and set it to nofollow. Nofollow tells the search engines to discount the value of the link, which removes a spam-site indicator from their algorithms. Masking the link turns a messy affiliate link into a link that looks internal, making it easier for a visitor to click and allowing you to see how often a link is clicked.
Google XML Sitemaps
Making it easy for Google to find your entire site is a good thing. This plugin helps with that.
WP Policies
This plugin provides a long list of site policies, formatted for a WordPress page. The most important one is the disclaimer announcing the fact that your are making money on your site.
WP Super Cache
Super Cache creates a pre-generated copy of your page so the site doesn’t have to hit the database to rebuild it dynamically every time someone visits. It’s all about speed, which affects your search rank.
JetPack
I like using the WordPress.com stats instead of Google Analytics for most of my niche site. I don’t see a need to announce to Google that these 12 sites are owned by me, so I don’t. WordPress.com included their stats plugin in JetPack, then discontinued the standalone plugin, so I use JetPack.
Backup
If I subscribe to my own feed, I get every post in Google Reader. That means I don’t need to make a daily backup of any of my sites. For the amount of changes I make to my niche sites, weekly might still be overkill, but that’s what I do. I get the backups by email so I have a copy somewhere other than the host. I don’t believe in letting anyone control my money but me.
Settings
Discussion
Most comments to niche sites are spam comments, so I hide them without actually turning them off. Sometimes I test letting the comments through, because some niches might have great people that want to post good comments. I haven’t had a lot of luck with that, on my niche sites.
Permalinks
The default permalink structure is absolutely not recommended for search engine purposes. It’s also harder for someone to mention. I don’t put dates in the link for the same reason I hide dates in the posts: I don’t want anything to look outdated.
Menus
I keep the navigation menu simple. It has three purposes:
- Link to the page that’s designed to make money.
- Link to the pages that show Google and readers it is an active site.
- Link to the disclaimer that keeps my butt away from federal fines.
Anything else is wasted space.
Widgets
On my niche sites, I use widgets to help with navigation and to point people to the pages that will make the most money. I haven’t addressed how I do the second part yet, because I haven’t created those pages yet.
Posts
Right now, http://www.masterweddingplanning.net/ has exactly one post, and it’s a duplicated post from eZineArticles. It has served its purpose. This site is fully indexed by Google.
When I get the rest of the content written, I’ll delete that post.
There you have it, the reasons behind every choice I make during site creation. Did I miss anything? Do you have any other questions?
Huh?
Am I the only one who just noticed that it’s Wednesday? The holiday week with the free day is completely screwing me up.
Just to make this a relevant post:
Spend less!
Save more!
Invest!
Wee!