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Archives for May 2007

Liberating Yourself From The Google Monopoly – The Times, They Are A Changin’

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There’s something big happening on the neterwebs. Don’t know if you’ve noticed.

For whatever reason, Google has been taking a serious gut check. Lately, they’ve been cracking down hard on AdSense publishers from a number of angles (spammyness, mature content, etc).

Well, not “for whatever reason” – I’m sure its because they’re feeling pressure from some corner of the woods. I’m sure they feel dollars and cents and shareholders breathing down their necks.

I’m sure they notice things like the recent Real Simple article my wife showed me entitled “the digital doc” which outlines 5 rules to find good medical information online. What was Rule No. 1? Skip Google.

Ouch. I bet that hurt. The “don’t do evil” company let status quo evil reign for too long, while money poured into their bank accounts, and their search results got all facked up with spam. Now even the common person doubts Google. That’s sad.

Think about it. Google originally succeeded through grassroots word of mouth. Now their empire is on the downturn for the very same reason. I mean, thing’s can’t be good when the “Google isn’t a reliable source of information” meme gets into the mainstream. Larry and Sergey must be furious about negative PR like this.

In an effort to clean up its act, Google is taking down AdSense publishers left and right. Some of those publishers are at least mostly legit. They are trying to kill the beast they created.

The good news is that if Google executes this properly, it could ultimately help the web along with white hat publishers. I say that with multiple meanings. On the one hand, more room in the search space will hopefully open up for good content. But on the other hand, hopefully those of us who got stung by Google’s recent crack down will start to diversify out of the Google AdSense monopoly. Hopefully Yahoo will make its move into the market soon. Hopefully alongside Microsoft. Stung by Google, hopefully publishers will try out companies like AdBrite, AuctionAds, ContextLinks, Azoogle and more.

It’s in all of our best interests to stop the dependency on a single company that so many people have developed. If your livelihood depends on Google, do you have a backup plan? Have you tried out other ad systems?

Here’s a recommendation. Put a backup plan in place. Try out other ad systems. While you may not see the immediate results of AdSense, you may come to discover that with a good combination of partnerships, you can make as much or more than with AdSense.

I’m glad that my most profitable site was booted from AdSense. It forced my hand to try out other systems, and in the process to discover that my site’s were undermonetizing. Dependence on the ease of G can create artificial plateau’s on your profit.

So here’s to the collapse of the Google empire and to the success of the web. Let’s hope it happens quickly, smoothly and productively.

Exploring Blog Content Alternatives: Video

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If you’re interested in adding some visual content to your blog, such as a music video channel, Mark, aka Thetafferboy83, a member at Digital Point Forums, has posted a very detailed, informative thread about making money with a video blog. It’s most definitely one of the best how-to posts I’ve come across, period. Maki at Dosh Dosh offers a bit of summary of Mark’s post, along with a bit of commentary. Both are must-read articles, if you’re planning to get into video blogs.

Sourcing Videos

Video is hot, and it can be a great way to induce editorial backlinks, if you put in some thought as to the presentation, or how you organize the videos. Apparently, you don’t even have to come up with original videos. You can just source great ones:

  1. YouTube.
  2. Google Videos.
  3. DailyMotion.
  4. Dovetail.
  5. VideoJug.
  6. HowTo.tv.

and many, many more sites. That’s hardly a complete list, what with all the new video sites popping up, but it’s a starting point for you. Warning: there are NSFW (Not Safe for Work) videos on some of these sites, so source content with some discrimination, or post a notice on your site.

Promoting Your Video Blog

As current editor at Tubetorial (started by Chris Pearson and Brian Clark), I’ve seen how such sites can draw traffic. However, I’m not sure if I agree that everyone can reach the 25% ad CTR (clickthrough rate) that Mark says you can easily get. To do that, I think that you’ll need to promote your site on social sites, to get enough traffic:

  1. StumbleUpon.
  2. Reddit.
  3. Digg.
  4. Del.icio.us.
  5. Netscape.
  6. etc., as appropriate.

Do it yourself or get a friend. [Although note that Digg is banning users that vote on stories without apparently spending enough time. And Reddit keeps dropping my account after a couple of weeks, if I haven’t used it.]

Standing Out

Still, while you may not reach 25% ad CTR, if you’re clever, innovative, and/or unique, you will likely do well. You’ll do even better if you post original content – that’s my feeling. Or at least be innovative in how you present videos from YouTube, etc. Theme them, maybe in the form of a directory.

Depending what player(s) you are using, there may be something innovative about them (such the aggregating player SplashCast, which allows you to present numerous videos in a single player, as part of a show, with multiple shows per channel, if you like. It’s still free, though there are signs a pro package may be rolled out soon, for a small yearly fee. You can see an example of multi-show SplashCasts at NewMediaJones (NMJ) and a larger version of the same content at my personal blog. (Others can subscribe to your shows, if you allow it.)

What I’ve done at NMJ is create music video playlists, then use SplashCast to grab each video from YouTube and build a real playlist. I also publish the playlist at NMJ, so you can browse and determine whether to listen. If you need some help to quickly find related songs/ artists, there’s always Pandora – but for the present, only if you’re in the US. I’m not, so I use the very cool MusicMesh web app. Try it, and you’ll know what I mean. It helps me build a text playlist fairly quickly, and I can then use SplashCast to build the actual music video “show”. [If there’s enough demand for it, I could create a Tubetorial for how to use MusicMesh, SplashCast, and YouTube as a followup to creating your own MTV music video channel. Be your own Net VJ.]

Finding Videocasting Tools

Aside from the applications and tools mentioned above, I use a few others for creating original screencast content, where I record actions I take while using a particular piece of software. If you’re good at using some software and can explain to others how to use it, screencasting is the perfect vehicle. Record your software in use, then record voice narration over it. Many of the tutorials at Tubetorial are created this way.

For simple videos with no panning, zooming, or other special effects required, try the free CamStudio, which is similar to TechSmith’s Camtasia ($299), but not as full-featured. I use both. Camstudio is quick, and I can upload to YouTube and SplashCast in AVI format. Camstudio gives loads of video format options and special effects, but takes a bit more work. However, take note that SplashCast has become so popular in the past few weeks that I’ve have a very, very hard time getting my files to load. For some reason I’ve yet to discover, I’ve never been able to upload Camtasia-generated files to SplashCast, and I think the support staff is either pissed at me or overwhelmed or both, as they don’t answer my emails anymore. I’m also now unable to load CamStudio AVI files at certain times of day. I’m on cable Internet, whose access speed is affected by the number of currently active users in the neighborhood. So I’ve been forced to use Camtasia to generate Flash files and have to self-host them.

Assessing Bandwidth Costs

Of course, self-hosting video files can bankrupt you. Say that you build up a video blog with self-hosted video files. For simplicity of example, say that each is exactly 10Mb. (AVI and WMV equivalents can be much larger, and CamStudio isn’t always efficient in the AVIs it generates.) If you have 100 visitors per day and each only views one video, that’s 10 Mb/video x 100 visitors/ day x 1 view/vis = 1Gb/day, or about 30 Gb/month. Most cheap hosting plans probably cover that amount. But what happens if you get a sudden surge of visitors? Someone Diggs one of your videos, or the site, and you get 1,000 people in a single day. That’s 100 GB in only one day – well over your limit, and asking to have your account suspended.

Well, there are hosts that’ll give you unlimited bandwidth for a reasonable price. Though I’ve yet to find any. The closest I’ve come is Site5 (non-affiliate link), who have a special US$5/month shared hosting plan that gives you 5TB/month of bandwidth. Yes, only $5. I bought a plan on the weekend, and plan to get a couple more, as well as one of their multi-site hosting plans. There are a couple of catches/ caveats about Site5 that I should point out:

  1. Their promo text is a bit confusing. The US$5/m plan is actually $50/m or so, unless you pay for 24 months up front. In this case, it’s $5/m, or $120. This is far, far better than the $3.95 – $14.95/m that I pay for three different types of GoDaddy accounts (or anywhere else I’ve tried.) That is, if you don’t mind paying for two years. There’s also an $8/m version, if you want to pay for fewer months upfront.
  2. They don’t accept PayPal for payment, only a select group of credit cards.
  3. You can only put one domain on a single account, unless you get one of their multi-site hosting plans or use domain pointers. (Both are beyond the scope of this dicussion.) So where I can create one customer account at, say, GoDaddy, and register loads of domains and/or hosting accounts, for convenience of access from a single control panel, I have to sign up over and over at Site5.

For me, these are minor issues. If it’s not for you, there are many other option video hosting options, including TechSmith’s Screencast.com, for Camtasia video file hosting. There’s a free trial, but the fact is, if your video blog gets popular, and you’re self-hosting, you need a plan like Site5 or something even better – such as unlimited bandwidth. (Screencast can be costly if you go over your limit, but they won’t cancel your account, I don’t think.) If you find an unlimited plan, please tell everyone here, by dropping a comment. Have fun creating your video blog.

Blog Reboot #3: Web Dev Logs

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Site: Web Dev Logs
Owner: Mgccl (or M)

In this blog reboot I’m going to try something different. Instead of trying to cram everything in one short hour / post, I’ll be tackling broader themes and while I’ll still be giving specific recommendations, there’ll be more ‘general info’ than before so people reading this can take something away from it as well.

For webdevlogs.com, I’m looking at three main things:

1) How to maximise site revenue – M stated that he wanted to increase rev from the site).
2) Rearrange site elements (there were several things here that would improve usability IMO)
3) Linkbait potential (M’s niche – web development – is perfect for linkbait)

Before we start though, a little bit of good and bad on webdevlogs.com.

The Good – Passion

From what I can gather from his blog posts, M enjoys writing on his blog, and he enjoys programming as well. It’s the one thing you can’t pay authors to fake, and this is also the one thing that pushes you on to improve the site when you’re stuck in a rut or hit a plateau in its development.

Passion, with focus, can lead to an excellent blog.

The Bad – Lack of focus

It’s a web dev blog. Yawn. The focus of the site is internal (directed towards the author) instead of external (directed towards readers). There’s no harm with a ‘personal’ blog, but if you want success (measured here in terms of revenue, traffic numbers and readership), you want to focus on your audience.

I’d encourage you to think about what your blog talks about, and how that relates to your readers. If you’re writing about PHP development, figure out whether you’re targeting newbies or experts. Tailor your blog content accordingly, and write on those topics that your audience wants to read about.

Finding these topics is not difficult – I’ve discussed this towards the end of the reboot.

Now let’s work on the three angles I discussed at the start – site revenue, site elements and linkbait.

1. Maximise site revenue in 3 simple steps

Before I present the 3 steps, I wanted to talk about two things – ad placement and ad objectives.

Your ad placement is mostly ‘below the fold’ – as you mentioned yourself in this post, ad placement is key to ad revenue, and putting them above the fold will definitely increase your site revenues.

Different types of ads have different objectives. AdSense ads work best if your site is designed to get clicks, and for them you need as much of search engine traffic as possible (regular readers get ad blindness). Affiliate ads work by getting the audience to read your posts and then make buying decisions based on what you’ve written. A direct contrast with adsense ads because you want them to read everything instead of just click on the ads.

CPM-based ads or text link ads often work on the basis of overall site traffic and link value passed by the site (as well as the audience of that site). Established blogs with a heavy dose of regular readership ‘outside’ that of SE traffic will use (and benefit) from direct ads more.

At your current level I’d make these 3 recommendations:

Step #1: Optimize your posts for AdSense – sabahan.com (as you’ve mentioned on your own blog) has a decent template to follow – a horizontal ad links bar on the top (below the header) and a large rectangle right (or left) floated within each post. I’d suggest that you use a plugin that only shows those ads within the post and not on the main page (being a php programmer you can hack it to make it work, I suppose) because personally ads on the main page are annoying to regular readers (hint to Perf as well there).

Two adblocks are fine – if the reader skips the ad and gets down to the end of your post, he’s probably read it (or skimmed it). At this point, take a punt that he’ll want to comment / subscribe to the site more than click on ads, and add subscribe info there. That bit is personal opinion, but I believe I’m right 🙂

Step #2: For affilate ads (hosting, books, etc), for each product you should a write a detailed review discussing pros and cons and promote the product at the end. Then, you can link all ads on your site (probably in the sidebar) to that review (good internal linking will help rankings as well). A straight ad link doesn’t earn you as many affiliate commissions as honest reviews do – and I’ve done enough of both to know.

Step #3: From the TLA calculator, your site can earn around $100 per month minimum using TLA ads. It’s worth a shot, so use that option and put the ads on the top of the left sidebar (copy sabahan.com’s placement) or the top of the right sidebar. As far as site revenue goes it’ll take some time to fill the ad slots up and TLA isn’t always a massive earner but it WILL earn you some stable income.

Personally, I’d focus on the affiliate side of things with adsense at #2 (if the SE traffic is good). Otherwise, you can also ‘rotate’ your own ads in the adsense block (inside the post) linking to internal product reviews of stuff you’re promoting as an affiliate.

2. Increase Site Usability

Just a few basic ideas here:

  1. My first question was – where are the feeds? They’re stuck in the right sidebar right above the ads. I’d shift the feeds module to the left sidebar, below the search tab (the TLA ads can come below them).

  2. If this is not a multi-blogger site and you don’t require registration for comments, why do you have the login panel featured so prominently in the left sidebar? That’s valuable space – can be used for ads or to promote key areas of your site. I’d put the recent posts / recent comments panels there, and take this login panel out altogether (or shunt it to the bottom of the sidebar).

  3. You can save space by putting the ‘contact’ panel on a separate page and linking to that page from the topside navigation.

  4. You can also push the personal blog panel on the right further down and put the recent posts / comments panels there (with the ‘tracker’ link at the top). It’s all about site focus as I discussed earlier and also of making the best use of the space above the fold.

    Stuff like recent posts, comments, topics, feeds, sponsors / ads – they’re all below the fold when they should be above it.

The theme is fine, good even although you could spruce it up with a nice logo in the header (to give the site more personality). I didn’t like the over-use of the head-banging emoticons but you could use one of them for the logo, maybe? Just a thought, don’t blame me if that backfires 🙂

I’d also have a panel that lists affiliate products / product reviews – good for internal linking and gives regular readers (more likely to scroll down and more likely to read the sidebars below the fold) more to read.

3. Linkbait Tips

When we’re talking about linkbait and the linkerati, it’s good to know (in your case) that a signficant portion (not a majority by any means, mind you) of the linkerati are from the web dev niche. These are the people most likely to be at the forefront of technological developments, and if you’re targeting the early adopters through one of their prefered topics (web development), you’ve got a very good chance of tapping the power of link baiting.

As an exercise in link bait, I’m going to ask readers to suggest topics here, but for M’s reference, here are a couple of resources.

Linkbait reference

The Art of Linkbaiting This is probably Perf’s most linked-to article, and one of the best articles on link baiting ever written. Nick Wilson may be a prick at times but when he’s right (and he’s right a lot of the times), he’s spot on.

The SEOmoz series of linkbaiting articles Worth reading for going through the whole process of understanding link baiting on a basic level, on making your site linkbait-friendly and targeting the right audience, in the right terms.

And before you think that linkbaiting is all about links, read this quote by Seth Godin:

“The challenge is to either deliver a message that causes change or to have a business model that scales after the initial flurry of interest moves on.”

Idea watch

If you’re looking for ideas for linkbait topics AND if you want to get a feel of what type of topics (or more accurately, what type of angles) get linked to and are popular, here’s a quick list:

Digg (programming section)
Reddit (programming subreddit)
Slashdot (developers section)
Del.icio.us – head over there and browse tags relevant to your site’s topics.

4. Wrapping it up

This was the third blog reboot, and I hope this series is helping other Perf readers as well as the site owners. The big challenge here is to make it valuable enough so that the site owner can actually implement the suggestions without being overwhelmed by an excess of information as well as fostering a discussion and getting other readers to help with the reboot (more eyes are always helpful).

So…

1) Let me know what you guys think is beind done right in the reboot, and what can be improved.

2) Suggest linkbait topics for webdevlogs.com – a few will do.

3) If there’s something you think I missed out on for webdevlogs, tell us in the comments.

Sponsor Performancing’s pMetrics

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Performancing now allows you to support and sponsor pMetrics with either a site-wide text link ad or an image ad.

Get seen by thousands of pMetrics users as they check their stats on a daily basis. pMetrics users are blog users, seo hounds, and stat junkies. If you want to target these demographics, please consider a pMetrics sponsorship.

Sponsorships are only shown to non-paying members of pMetrics, but this makes up about 99% of our users, and includes the Google Bot;-) Sponsorships are available at discounts to paying pMetrics users.

Current pricing is set at a discount level to encourage early adoption. You can expect pricing to change as our user base continues to grow at an exponential rate (people seem to love pMetrics!)

Early Adoption Text Link Sponsorship Pricing:

  • $25/month text link for paying premium members
  • $29/month text link for other members
  • $49/month text link for third parties

Early Adoption Image Sponsorship Pricing:

  • $99/month image ad for paying premium members
  • $129/month image ad for other members
  • $199/month image ad for third parties

These are great prices for what you can expect to be a PR 6 link on an uber-trusted domain with thousands of daily, scratch that, hourly, eyeballs.

Integrating Plugins With Your WordPress Themes Using functions.php

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Have you ever been browsing through the theme viewer or checking out the daily theme release announcements over at WeblogToolsCollection.com, and noticed that a certain theme requires a plugin to function correctly (or at least has a feature that requires a plugin to work)? I certainly have, and although I have never required a plugin for any themes I’ve released, I can see why one would want to include the functionality of a plugin to make that theme even more awesomely cool (and perhaps get more downloads).

But it is generally frowned upon to require the user to download and install a plugin in order for your theme to work properly. So what is a designer to do? Of course, he could just try to figure out what the plugin does by examining the code, but most designers don’t have a working knowledge of PHP/MySQL. Another option is to just remove the feature from your theme, but that means you lose that super-cool feature that might have set your theme apart from the others.

Thankfully, there is a solution that is actually quite simple.

A while back, I was working on a custom design for a client, and he requested a very long list of features that were beyond what I could do with a vanilla WordPress install. So naturally, I hit google up for any plugins that would give me the functionality he was looking for. But again, I wanted to deliver a fully functional theme to this client, without having to instruct him to install a list of plugins to get the theme working properly.

After thinking for a while, it hit me: just copy the code from the plugin into the functions.php file of the WordPress theme. I did so, and it worked like a charm! Absolutely no plugins were activated, and I was able to deliver a theme that worked perfectly right out of the box.

A few possible limitations to this method.

I’m not sure about this, but some plugins do add new rows/columns/tables to your database. There is a possibility that a plugin will do this upon activation, and may not work as an integrated function in the functions.php file. Again, I’m not sure about this.

Also, plugins with multiple files, especially plugins that require you place files/folders in multiple locations, probably won’t be easily integrated into your theme. Plugins that only require a single file upload are best.

A few extra tips

  1. Be sure to keep the plugin information in tact when copying the content of a plugin file over to your functions.php file. This way you can keep track of which plugins are installed, and where one ends and another begins.
  2. Be sure to copy the entire contents of the plugin file to your functions.php file. If you’re missing an opening or closing tag anywhere, it could break your theme.
  3. Use obvious separators when integrating multiple plugins. This is sort of like point 1, but you’ll definitely want to use a consistent and obvious marker for when a plugin begins and ends.
  4. Test, Test, TEST!!! Do not just slap the code in last minute and expect it to work. Test it extensively and make sure that your theme doesn’t break. Plugins are buggy sometimes, so you need to make sure it’s working properly before you release it or make it live.

One Final Tip

If you are comfortable enough with PHP, it should be noted that you can put the plugin files in a folder within your theme folder, and simply use your functions.php file to include those plugin files. I like to keep the php calls to a minimum, but you’re certainly welcome to go that route if you are more comfortable with it.

Anyway, I thought that was a cool little tip, and hopefully so will you.

Happy Coding!

Community Reboot: Monetize Performancing

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Ok. Let’s keep this simple. Over the next month, I’m going to be heading up an effort to monetize Performancing. I’d love your help, especially if you can think of creative ways that both Performancing *and* our community members can jointly profit without crapping the site up with junky ads.

While you brainstorm in the comments section, keep in mind our 2 main services right now, pMetrics and WordPress Themes. There may be ways to monetize them *in addition to* the main Performancing site.

So without further ramblings:

If you ran Performancing, how would you monetize it?

I’m Lazy, Do I Need To Give My Links A Title?

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Here’s a question for all you linkbuilders.

The fact is that I don’t see much benefit to throwing in the title attribute to a link tag:
[a href=”http://performancing.com” title=”blogging, on the rocks”]Performancing, we chill bloggers off[/a]

What benefit is there to introducing the link title and why the hell is there a title for links anyway? Someone care to explain? Because I’m lazy, and I hate putting titles in my links.

On the other hand, I completely understand why you’d want to put alt attributes into your img tags. That makes a lot of sense. You’re basically tagging your images, telling the search engines what the image is about. But with links, isn’t your anchor text supposed to do that anyway?

Reboot Your Own Blog

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Performancing offers a blog rebooting service, and its always great to see what Ahmed has to say. I always find a take home lesson to apply to my own blogs.

But this post isn’t about having someone else reboot your blog. Rather, I’d like to suggest that you do your own annual portfolio reboot.

If you own multiple blogs, or even if you just own one blog, consider how much you learn over the course of a year. If you’re a full time blog operator, then you learn little tricks throughout the year that can make your blog more successful. Why not spend one or two days each year applying and optimizing all the new things you’ve learned?

In my last article on WordPress plugins, you’ll notice that my #4 plugin suggestion was for “related posts” – after I wrote that, I went around and looked at all my blogs and realized that the majority of them did not have a related posts plugin. In fact, it looks like the only blogs that had the plugin were ones I was trying to resurrect.

So how have I responded? Well, by trying to think about all the little tricks I’ve learned over the last year, writing them down in list format, and then applying them, one by one, to each of my blogs.

It’s absolutely amazing to go back and do a little maintenance on some of your older blogs. If you’re like me, you’ll be embarrassed and surprised by the stupid mistakes you made, the dumb decisions, the things that everyone was raving about but didn’t work, etc. You’ll probably even notice a few things that did work.

But I guarantee that if you haven’t done any “under the roof” maintenance, save for a WordPress upgrade or two, there’s plenty of improvement to be had.

Here’s a list of things I’ve discovered so far:

1. Missing related posts plugin
2. Using old-school [hr] tags to accentuate AdSense instead of pretty little CSS div tags
3. Missing internal navigation between posts (can you believe it?)
4. Missing search box
5. Bad placement of ads
6. Lots of ads that make no money
7. Ads without any tracking (no channels, etc.)
8. No link back to the home page (except on the header image, which isn’t intuitive for everyone)
9. Nondescript categories that serve no purpose but to crowd the sidebar
10. Full posts listed on front page rather than excerpts

The list doesn’t end there. But that’s plenty of evidence that we could all use an annual blog reboot or two. So plan on it and set the time aside. It’s worth it.