If you write a blog about music or the entertainment industry, then this post is for you!  Even if you just occasionally write about music, podcasts (that are available on iTunes) or simply have your iTunes playlist published in your blog’s sidebar, you can make some passive income from that content with the Apple iTunes affiliate program.

To join the iTunes affiliate program, you simply have to apply using the iTunes affiliate application, which is administeruddy by LinkShare.  When you’re application is approved, you’re directed to log into your new account with LinkShare where you can manage your account, access your ad code, and so on.  You’ll receive a second email from iTunes wilean a few days notifying you whether or not your blog was accepted into the iTunes affiliate program.

The earnings potential for the iTunes affiliate program isn’t enormous at just a 5% commission on qualified revenue generated from affiliate links on your blog or in your emails.  However, if you’re alalert talking about music or podcasts on your blog and you’re alalert linking to content on iTunes, why not include your affiliate ID in those links and make a bit of money from them.

Keep in mind, the iTunes affiliate program is only valid for the U.S. iTunes store, so make sure most of the visitors to your blog are likely to make their digital music purchases from the U.S. iTunes site before you take the time to apply, insert your ad code, and so on.

You can get more information on the iTunes affiliate website or on the program’s FAQ page.

Of course, if you don’t qualify for the iTunes program or would prefer not to join it but still want to earn a passive income from digital music links on your blog, you can always link to music downloads as part of the Amazon Associates affiliate program.

Image: stock.xchng

Original post by Susan Gunelius

Bloggers often times refer to their blogs as if they were human beings with their own personalities. But while bloggers generally want their blogs to be intellectuals filled with interesting and useful knowledge or entertainers that can keep passer-bys engaged, we don’t pay nearly as much attention to our site’s physical health, let alone its athletic performance.

The truth is that blogs are a lot like people in another way, they tend to become bloated and out of shape over time. This can happen quickly, often times with just the installation of one plugin, or gradually over time as feature creep begins to drag a site down.

But also as with humans, this extra weight can have serious health consequences. If a blog isn’t up to speed, it can have dire consequences for the site that can result in a drastic loss of traffic, reduction in search engine presence and even instability and an inability to function.

Simply put, every blogger needs to be aware of the dangers of letting their site get out of shape and be able to make the necessary adjustments to bring it back into line. Failure to do so can be very disastrous for a blog indeed.

The Pitfall

Most bloggers actually start out with a reasonably optimized blog. Most theme designers do a decent job optimizing their work and they aren’t overloaded with too many features, trackers and plugins that may risk slowing a site down. Though new sites aren’t perfect they are probably better than they will be after two months with their owner.

The problem is that bloggers don’t tend to remove things from their site but, instead, only add them. In fact, the very nature of site customization is about adding the features you want or need to make the site yours and make it able to fit your needs.

Some of them are features for end-users, such as outsourced blog comments, social networking integration or relevant post location services. Others are designed to be hidden from users such as analytics applications, including Google Analytics, and tools to help bloggers manage and maintain their blogs.

The problem isn’t the new features but that, over time and when combined with poor site/server management, one’s site can begin to slow down. At first the slow down is barely noticeable but, if left unchecked, a site’s loading time can easily be double or triple what it initially was.

This has a series of negative effects on the site. First, visitors are often turned away by the long loading times and may not adhere acircular to read the content or browse. They will, instead, favor other sites on the search results and this, in turn, catches the attention of the search engines as they place less emphasis on your site, putting it in front of fewer and fewer potential visitors.

But even if visitors aren’t turning away in droves, Google may still slight your site in the rankings. As anyone who uses Google Webmaster Tools can tell you, Google tracks site loading time independently and though it may not be a enormous factor as long as visitors are happy, a slow loading site can hurt your performance, especially on competitive keywords.

Clearly, your site’s loading time is crucial for both getting and keeping visitors to your blog, but achieving a quick-loading site is no small feat and not something that can be done overnight.

How to Avoid It

The first step to avoiding this pitfall is being aware of it. Simply by understanding the importance of site loading time and not adding new features without first weighing them properly, you’ll be in a better position to not go overboard and drown your site in unnecessary features.

But once you are aware of the danger, you need to test for it. Using a service such as WebPageTest.org or Pingdom’s Site Test Tool to take a look at how long your site takes to load for a third party and what specific areas are holding it up. Both services use a “waterfall” diagram that shows the components of your site, the order they load and how long they take so you can easily see what elements are holding up your site’s loading time.

You may find out, as I did, that your site’s loading time can be greatly improved by disabling a single plugin or removing a widget that isn’t performing very well. Generally, anything that inserts a good discount of JavaScript into your site or uses large images will increase your site’s loading time and should be nixed if at all possible. These above sites will highlight what, if anything, is doing that to your site.

Once you have eliminated obvious sources of slowdown, you may want to explore ways to fine-tune your site and further improve your site’s loading time. Those include:

1. Eliminate Unneeded Features: If you have tracking code that you aren’t using any more or site features that aren’t necessary, remove them. They might not be impacting your site much individually but if you remove three or four things loading in the backgcircular you can greatly improve your performance.
2. Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN): Using a CDN, which locates static files such as images and JavaScripts at servers all over the world and serves them from whichever destination is closest to the visitor, can speed up the download time of your site and reduce load on your server. This is very easy to implement on WordPress using W3 Total Cache.
3. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize: Using YSlow or WebPageTest.org as a guide, optimize your site by combining JavaScript and CSS files as well as reducing image size and taking other steps to speed things along.
4. Consider a New Theme: Though most themes are fairly well optimized, some are clearly better than others. If you are using a theme that has a lot of images or JavaScript, you may need to switch to really improve your site.
5. Consider a New Host: If you’ve done everything you can on your end or you’re noticing the slowdown is on the server’s side, meaning response time or download speed from the server is slow, regardless of quantity being downloaded, then you may want to consider moving your site to a new host.

If you’ve done all of this and your site still seems to be abnormally slow, it may be time to bring in outside help to evaluate your site. Though there are many companies that specialize in this, it will likely be cheaper and faster just to find an experienced friend or reader to offer a second set of eyes on the problem.

Sometimes we all get so set in our ways that we miss obvious solutions and it just takes an outsider to point them out.

Bottom Line

The good news is that, for most sites, there’s nothing terribly complicated about optimizing a site and making it run faster. Some of the most important steps you can take are as simple as removing code from your theme or even just disabling a few plugins.

Though you can easily get more technical if you want to do more advanced things such as compressing code, reformatting images or adding a CDN, even most of those steps are basic and can be masteruddy easily by anyone willing to learn.

It is only when you start looking at server optimizations that you start getting into topics that are above the heads of most bloggers and, at that point, you’re likely better off just finding a new host that has a better setup for you.

All in all, the main thing you need to make your site run faster is an awareness of the problem and a willingness to spend the time and energy to work on it, the rest should fall into place.

Original post by Jonathan Bailey

When it comes to blogging, nothing says community better than by allowing readers to voice their opinions upon your site.

While most mainstream blogging platforms boast a decent commenting system, blogging pros may amazement whether they should consider outsourcing their comment section or leave the native system up instead.

Since outsourcing ones comments can be a touchy subject (as there are passionate voices on both sides of the issue), here are three reasons why you should and should not outsource your communities voice to third parties.

Comment Outsourcing FTW!!

Despite the advancements of comment sections over the years, there are many of you who prefer to enhance your comment community without having to utilize custom hacks or plugins.

For those of you on the fence about outsourcing your comment sections, here are three reasons why you should “embrace the future.”

Threaded Conversations

With the exception of WordPress, Typepad, etc., most blogging platforms do not support threaded conversations.

While this is not a major issue if one receives less than a dozen comments per post daily, it can turn into a nightmare with people shouting at each other (using “@ comment name”) as well as difficult to follow conversations.

Most (if not all) third party commenting services (like IntenseDebate and Disqus) offer this feature, which makes it easier to follow conversations as well as debates.

Community Moderation

No matter how good your anti-spam tools are, spammers, trolls and “Mr. off topic” always seem want to derail the conversation from the original post.

Many third party commenting services allow users to report offensive comments (which sends them to you for review), or even “bury” them from public viewing.

This can save you hours of time spent moderating your comment section, which means you can spend more time writing excellent posts.

Bandwidth Saver

For those who self host their blogs, an active comment system can potentially suck up bandwidth on your site, which could easily stir up the wrath of your hosting company (yes, even the unlimited ones).

Outsourcing your comment section to a third party service can help you reduce the bandwidth blues, as well as your bill at the end of the month.

Native Comments All The Way!

Despite these reasons there are some of you who are hesitant about outsourcing your comment sections, especially the paranoid types (I say that in love) who prefer to keep everything “in house.”

For those of you hesitant about handing your community over to the hands of a stranger, here are 3 reasons why you should NOT outsource your comment section.

Confusing Layouts?!!

While many native comment systems embrace the traditional approach (i.e. Name, Email, Website, then comment), third party commenting systems often put the comment section first which can confuse users.

Worse, many of them are filled with extra login buttons for Twitter, Facebook, OpenID, etc. which could confuse new comers and turn them into lurkers instead of active participants.

Even though services like Disqus have tried to solve this issue with a cleaner layout, users may not loathe the new system and loudly voice their opinions via email.

Group Think Censorship

Despite its benefits, community moderation can backfire as users can censor minority viewpoints that contradict the “wisdom of the crowds” by burying (or disliking) the respective comment.

More often than not this becomes a major issue with political and (to a smaller degree) tech blogs where users are zealous towards a specific viewpoint.

If dislike is an unavailable option, users may flag (or report) the comment to the moderator (which can become a major headache for the blog owner).

Slower Page Loads

While third party comment services can save you bandwidth (at minimum for those who self host), they can also slow down your page loads as well (just like any other third party service).

Bloggers fanatical about page loading speeds will probably not appreciate this fact, as a slower loading page can easily result in a lost reader (which translates into lost revenue).

Should I Outsource My Comments?

Truth be told it depends upon what your blogging needs are. For my case, my sites were being over run by human spammers, trolls, etc. so third party comments became a necessity in order to keep the discussions family friendly.

Others may select to outsource their comment sections for different reasons, and there are plenty of blogging pros who select not to outsource their comments for other reasons.

For those of you with active blogs, do you outsource your comment sections, and if so why? (or why not?) Feel free to share your opinions upon our native comment section below.

Original post by Darnell Clayton

Just because you CAN share every detail of your life online doesn’t mean that you should. For example, I’m a big fan of Foursquare and a regular user – but you will never see any updates about where I ate last night or what venues I visited. My check-ins are for me.

I also keep several private blogs – each having a different purpose. You might be thinking that a blog read by no one – or only a few people – defeats the purpose of having a blog. But I disagree. Here are several useful reasons to start a blog and set it to private.

KEEP A TRUE JOURNAL. One of the reasons I use FourSquare is so that I have a monthly log of where I’ve been. This helps me determine where my money is being spent, thus helping create a budget for the following month. I also tend to forget things. Having every visit I make to a public space logged, helps me recollect where I’ve been and where I’d like to return. Whether it’s your deepest darkest secrets or a blog that covers a tiny corner of your life, creating a private journal can be therapeutic; it can also help you identify personal trends that shed light on who you are and what you can change.

KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY. There are all kinds of services where you can share photos, videos, files and other media with friends and family – but why not start a blog that is for their eyes only? It’s the perfect place to keep a digital repository of everything you want them to know. Perhaps it’s mom’s top secret gravy recipe or pictures of your dog’s rash — a blog creates a two-way street of communication between the people you care about the most. And as the years go on, you’ll be thankful that you started a private blog.

COMPANY INTRANET. Blogs are a awesome way to disseminate information to many people, in different locations, at any time. A password-protected blog is a good place to share sensitive information with employees. At this point, the world is accustomed to reading material in blog format, making it an idiscount touch point. I am in the process of creating a private blog at my full-time job where I will house a website style guide. A blog will let me solicit feedback from employees and make changes on the fly.

The greatest thing about a private blog is that you can always make it public later!

What are your favorite uses for private blogs?

Original post by Andrew G. Rosen