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WordPress.com Now Offering No-Ads Upgrade

Over the past few years, Automattic has experimented with displaying advertisements on select tag and post pages on WordPress.com. According to Automattic, that experiment has evolved into a nice balance between barely seeing ads, and making revenue on the ads that have been displayed. Personally, I have never seen an ad on a WordPress.com powered blog but that might be because I am using the Ad Block Plus Firefox extension. At any rate, the ads have allowed Automattic to provide free features instead of more premium, paid for based upgrades.

However, despite the fact that ads are rarely seen, some people may not want to ever display ads on their WordPress.com powered site. Today, Automattic has announced that users can now purchase a premium upgrade that would allow no one, whether they’re logged in or not, to ever seen an ad on your WordPress.com blog.

The No-Ads upgrade costs 30 credits per year ($30.00) or, ($0.08) per day. You can purchase the upgrade through the Upgrades tab in your blog’s dashboard.

When The Big Post Turns Into A Big Flop

Back on episode 3 of Perfcast, we went over our blogging challenge entries for the week. The previous weeks blogging challenge had been to create linkbait. I was successful with my challenge entry however, David was in the process of putting his entry together for the launch of CollegeCrunch.org. We had an idea as to what the linkbait was going to be about and from the sounds of it, the post had an excellent chance of being successful.

Fast forward to today and it looks like Davids linkbait post didn’t do so well. (Before Posting: Think Like A Common Person) The result of his linkbait post is interesting to me because I had brought the issue up during the show. There are times when you can spend hours on a blog post and think it is going to be a hot ticket item right out of the gate, only to publish the article and see it fall flat on its face. How depressing these times of blogging can be.

However, David has done a good job in his post reflecting back on why the post was a failure. He states that he didn’t review the post from a common place perspective. That is, readers couldn’t emphasize with the article. David gives us three things we should think about before publishing what you believe to be a pillar article, but you’ll have to visit his blog to read those tips.

What I would like to know from you is, have you ever worked really hard on an article only to see it go nowhere? What have you learned from such experiences? Share your experiences and your knowledge in the comments.

Image taken by Melissa Segal under Creative Commons.

40 Awesome Icon Sets

I’ve published articles relating to icon packs on my own blog for quite awhile now and those posts have served me well in terms of search engine traffic. Also, people seem to love collecting as many icons as they can. With that said, Noupe has gathered up 40 different icon sets which have been hand picked from deviantART. This collection contains icons of donuts, applications, creatures, and much more.

Click here to check out this fantastic icon pack collection.

Let me know in the comments if you would like to see more or less posts highlighting icon packs which are available for free.

The Old & Crusty Method To Building Links

My friend Dee Barizo gave me a great suggestion the other day. See, I have this problem. I have a 3 year old website that is stagnating, despite some truly great, cream of the crop content in it’s niche (I don’t say this lightly: I’ve hired an expert who’s creating a killer resource).

So I went to Dee because he’s got an amazing eye for how to effectively build links that actually affect search engine results. What was his suggestion to my problem? Well, he said that in many niches, it doesn’t work to do traditional link baiting. Not because the content doesn’t match, but because people in that niche rarely link out. In other words, within each niche there tends to be a link culture.

Get to know the link culture within your niche!

Dee pointed out that in this particular niche that I’m looking at, the search engine results are dominated by the old and crusty sites. You know, the ones that were built in the 1990s and are still running on html rather than some modern CMS. The problem is that these old and crusty sites tend to have a few things in common:

1) They do not have blogs, and thus are not actively in the business of linking
2) They either do not have link pages or they haven’t updated their link pages in years (or maybe even decades)

The Solution

If your niche is dominated by old and crusty sites, your best bet is to email them asking whether they take guest articles. Then, take some of your best content, rework it a bit, and send it off with a few links back to your site.

Take note: many of the old & crusty sites are run by actual experts, so you’ll need to make sure that you are offering them something that is truly valuable.

Weekly Link Dump Three

Thank goodness the cold I had is finally gone. This threw me out of whack last week and I am still trying to get back in the groove of things. Until then, check out some of these links to good reading I found within my feedreader.

13 Ways to Promote Your Next Blog Post

Helping in the WordPress Forums is an Education

Where I Get Story Ideas

Are You A Writer?

41 Internet Marketing Tactics – Take the Poll

Is removing the nofollow tag from comments a good idea?

Using Customer’s Sales Objections to Sell More

Blogging The Inc

After you’re done reading, come on back and lets talk about one or more of the articles listed above. I think the topic of removing nofollow from comments may be a good place to start.

Exclusive: Is b5 Media about to face a mass exodus of bloggers?

Performancing has verified reports with multiple sources that there is rapidly increasing tension between b5 media’s management and its bloggers. As more details emerge, we will bring them to you here.

Two months ago b5 cut over 80 blogs from its networks citing poor performance. Now there appears to be dissension among the ranks as people in the know are reporting the likelihood of a major pay cut coming for almost all b5 bloggers.

As this news spreads, we’re hearing reports of a planned mass exodus coming up among b5Media editors and bloggers which will only get worse once news goes fully public.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more. Pretty ironic when you consider b5’s very public plea to save KnowMoreMedia a couple of months back. The real question: Who will save b5?

A Note of Clarification: My primary motivation in posting this news was to protect blogger interests. In my world, the two most important things are human beings and the truth. If bloggers are going to get shafted, then I wanted to do what I can to affect change. However, it has come to my attention that the new payment model coming out of b5 Media is designed to more accurately reward performance. If this is the case, and if it is a fair model, then I would heartily endorse the new system. I have always believed that there needs to be a delicate balance between sustainable business policies and worker interests. b5 should be able to modify their business model so that it rewards good workers. My only remaining concern is this: the new system should enable the best bloggers to make more money rather than exclusively rewarding management with the high-life.

Full Disclosure for the interest of Jeremy Wright of b5 Media

Since Jeremy pointed it out, I’ll make the supposed conflict of interest very clear: b5 sells advertising on one of my sites, PopCrunch.

Big freakin’ deal. It has absolutely nothing to do with the news I reported. A classic case of obfuscation.

Take The WordPress 2.7 Usability Survey

I’ve been using WordPress since 2.3 and I’ve yet to participate in any survey such as this one. The WordPress team currently has a survey open to the public which will allow you to vote on the specifics regarding the navigational menus. The goal for this survey is to figure out which navigational menus should be displayed, what those menus should be called, which items should be within those parent navigational items and more.

During the survey, users are presented with screenshots showcasing different navigational structures. The first question is multiple choice with three different layouts to choose from. After answering the first question, you are presented with ample opportunity to voice your opinions on why you chose your answer. After that, you get the chance to add your thoughts and opinions as to which labels the team should use for the navigational menu items. For example, I don’t like the way they are substituting themes for design. I’d rather they keep it the way it is. I guess this means you know what I answered for the labels section!

The last part of the survey asks you questions that are specific to each individual. Not sure how the responses to the last few questions will play into the answers they receive, but at least the team will have some meta data along with the survey results.

I applaud the team for giving end users the chance to respond openly towards the project, even more so with this survey. I for one would love to see more surveys like this in the future. This move also serves as more proof that WordPress 2.7 should be one hell of a release once November arrives.

Let me know if you took the survey and also share your thoughts on this approach from the WordPress team in the comments.