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Replace Donate Button With A Wishlist

I don’t link to him often but Jeremy Schoemaker a.k.a. Shoemoney had an interesting topic today in that, perhaps you should replace the “Donate!” button on your site with an Amazon Wishlist! instead. His opinion is that, the donate button with a set amount or one of those buy me a coffee buttons which is practically the same thing doesn’t really allow for someone to give back. While it might feel great donating a couple bucks to someone, personally, I’d feel great if someone were to purchase a product for me that I either want, or need.

I’ve donated some cash here and there to WordPress plugin authors but I don’t do it very much. Have you? Would you rather see a list of items that the person needs or wants and simply buy one of those? How has the donate button performed on your own site?

Are You Blogging Through The Holidays?

The holidays are here, and most of us folks will most likely be taking some time off of blogging to spend a few precious moments with friends and family, whichever religion you belong to. For those of us who don’t necessarily observe the holidays out of faith, but out of some secular reason, then you would most probably be vacationing, too. Not in the holiday mood yet? Oh don’t be such a grinch. Go have some fun, or spend time with your loved ones.

But then what happens to your blogs during those times when you take a break?

You blog through the holidays. I’ll be on break these next couple of days, but I will most probably still be publishing a few blog posts in my free time, or while on the road visiting relatives. That’s the power of mobile computing, anyway. I can either use my mobile phone or my netbook (coupled with a 3G modem) to do this. Why? Because I can!

You have posts saved in advance, and to be published at pre-defined dates. A handful of people I know have the habit of future-posting, so they can take a few days off from their blogs without their readership missing them. Some would clearly tell readers that the posts were done in advance, in case some new developments in the online world override the information in that blog post. Some would not be as transparent.

Your blog takes a break, too. This might be frowned upon by folks who believe in consistent and regular updates. But for those of us who are very much concerned about quality and thoughtfulness of posts would rather not post at all, if these are to be done in a hurry while huddled over a miniaturized laptop with a slow, unreliable Internet connection, while waiting to board your plane/train/bus. Good blogging should be done with good timing, too, right?

Which of these three are you?

What Should Go On Your About Page

Just a few days ago, I put out the reminder to check over your about page to make sure all of the information is up to date. However, I noticed at least one person ask, “What should go on our about page”?

By no means is there a complete guide on what should absolutely be presented on the about page but keep this in mind. If a visitor comes across your blog and their first impression doesn’t tell them what the blog is about, they will head straight to the page that provides more information. Here is my non-concrete guide of suggestions to what I think should be on your about page.

Short And Sweet – Right at the top of the about page, you should be short and concise as to what the blog is about and the information that is covered. There is no need to provide a mile long description of why the site exists because you can provide that further down the page.

Personalize – Let me tell you, going to a blog conference and not being able to match your favorite blogger with a face is pretty weird. To keep that from happening, place a picture of yourself on the page. This gives the overall blog a human touch and also enables your fanbase to recognize you out in the real world.

Detailed Information – As far as detailed information is concerned, depending on the type of blog this is, you can add your real name, occupation, hometown, education, etc. As for myself, I treat my About Page as part of my resume and so, most of what you would see on a resume is published on my about page. This gives prospecting employers information that they would otherwise have to contact me for.

Contact Information – At some point within the page, you should either link to your contact page, publish your email address, or provide a means for contacting you. Having an about page or doing anything online is almost worthless if there is no means in getting in touch with you.

All About The Details – After providing pertinent information about yourself, now would be a good time to tell your audience just how the blog came to be. At this point, you can dive into the history surrounding the site to give your audience an overall look at the big picture.

Where To Follow You – Again, depending upon the type of blog you have, you can also list the places for which you have worked/written for on the web. I do this on my own page because it acts as my resume place holder. It also gives my audience a chance to follow me across the web as I move from place to place.

Conclusion:

In a nutshell, that is pretty much the basis of what should be in your about page. Of course, depending on what kind of site/blog it is will determine the type of information presented within. Keep in mind that a good way not to have anyone write about you or your blog when introducing it to their audience is to either have little to no information on the page or no about page at all. If you happen to be one of those bloggers with no about page, thanks for contributing to blogging frustration.

If you need more ideas on what to put into your about page, check out this post on Problogger from 2005 which interestingly enough, is still relevant today.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin For WordPress

I’m sad to report that my Related Posts plugin for WordPress which was created by W-A-S-A-B-I no longer fits the bill with WordPress 2.7. This means I had to replace an old favorite with a new plugin that provided related posts. Upon browsing through the plugin repository, I came across one that I’ve heard about throughout the community called YARPP or, Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I found YARPP easy to configure and was happy to know that it comes bundled with a widget that I can place in my sidebar. YARPP has two critical elements. The first being that it limits the amount of related posts to display and the second, displays posts based on a relatedness score that is configurable. The relatedness score is what is called a match threshold. With various options, you can configure how tight or how loose that threshold score is by editing titles, bodies, tags, and categories.

Last but not least, you can also configure the output of the plugin by adding bits of html to the before and after sections of the related posts. As a bonus, YARPP also has a new option to display related posts in the RSS feed. If you’re not using a FeedBurner FeedFlare to provide this functionality, this plugin makes a nice substitute.

All in all, I think I can qualify this plugin as my new recommendation to others who are looking for a way to display related posts on their WordPress blog. How about you? Which related posts technique or plugin are you using?

Time To Update That About Page

Well, it’s near the end of 2008 and I think now is a great time to remind everyone to check your About page on your blog and update it with current information. I think too many of us create the About Page when we initially launch a blog and then we never update the darn thing. Take this opportunity to mark down your achievements for prospecting employers to see, rethink your priorities for the blog and update your goals for the new year as they relate to the site. All in all, just make sure the information is current. Try to make it a habit to update that page at least once a month if necessary because I feel that it is the most sought after page that visitors look for, especially new visitors. Also, I can’t tell you how dumb I feel when I read a persons bio information on a podcast only to be told that the information is out of date and that they will need to update their about page.

So what do you say, will you help me spread the word?

Perfcast – Copyright And Plagiarism With Jonathan Bailey

I want to thank Steven Hodson, DaveAC, Patrick O’ Keefe and Mark E. for helping to co-host the show with me last night. Our special guest was Jonathan Bailey of PlagiarismToday.com. During the show, we discussed how you can stop Internet plagiarism, copyrights, enforcing your copyright, tips and tricks to help combat content theft and much more. Be sure to bookmark Jonathan’s site as it contains stock letters for sending out cease and desist letters, DMCA notices, and more.

Also, Jonathan keeps tabs on the Legal Issues section of the Performancing forums which will be included in the Performancing Reboot. If you have questions pertaining to copyright or content theft, ask them in the forum.

ANNOUNCEMENTS: This was our last episode of Perfcast for 2008. Our next episode is on January 1st, 2009.

LENGTH OF EPISODE – 1 Hour 50 Minutes

NEXT EPISODE – January 1st, 2008 at 7 P.M. EST

ITUNES – Click here to subscribe to the show via iTunes

DOWNLOAD THE SHOW: PerfcastEpisode17.mp3

LISTEN TO EPISODE 17 OF PERFCAST:

8 WordPress Database Tricks

Jean-Baptiste Jung has written a great little article for Smashing Magazine highlighting eight useful WordPress SQL Hacks. The article describes each hack, the code, and an explanation of what the code does. The most useful bit of information for me is the batch deletion of post revisions. Although post revisions are a nice thing to have, I’ve noticed I barely use them, if at all, and typically, writing a blog post in the editor can create upwards of 8 revisions. After mass deleting the revisions from my database, I noticed a sizable decrease in my overall database size.

Be wary of performing any of these hacks on a live website and please, back up all of your data before trying anything.

Monetization Makeover: Tom Keating’s VoIP Blog

Welcome to the second edition of Monetization Makeover. In this series, I review the monetization of different blogs, in terms of both strategy and ad placement, and make suggestions for improving profits.

Today’s lucky blog: Tom Keating’s VoIP and Gadget Blog. Optimized correctly, a blog like this can make bank.

In Monetization Makeover Part 1 I critiqued PSPFanboy’s ad implementation, copiously citing the Adsense heat map as justification for my recommendations. If you haven’t seen the Adsense heat map, I suggest you take a good look (and even if you have, I’d suggest reviewing it early and often). And now, to this week’s blog.

Tom Keating’s VoIP and Gadget Blog

Tom Keating’s VoIP and Gadget Blog is a very well read site in its area. The niche he’s in is one that pays very well with contextual advertising, since CPC bid prices for VoIP-related keywords are very high (trust me, I know). With this in mind, let’s analyze a “permalink” page. As a long-established blog with gobs of content, Tom Keating’s blog receives tons of traffic from search engines like Google. The traffic from search engines mostly flows to these permalink pages (blog software packages like WordPress and Movable Type handle these permalinks very well for search engine ranking purposes).

Transparent Visitors Pay Your Bills

Now, a bit of an aside on search engine visitors: they tend to be transparent, meaning they find your site in a search engine, click over to your site, either find what they’re looking for, or not– but either way, they usually exit by clicking on an outbound link on your site, or by clicking the back button on their browser.

This is a very important point in terms of its implications for monetization. Visitors from search engines are not going to subscribe to your XML feed at the rate visitors from links do. They’re going to come over for 40 seconds or so and leave, so you need to make the most of them in that quick timeframe.

Now, if you’ve read any of my posts before, you know how my mind works, and you already have figured out the conclusion: these transparent visitors are ripe for monetization. If they’re going to click off, I might as well get them to click off on an ad that pays me for each click. Further, you should note that the CTR on ads from transparent visitors tend to be higher than that of repeat visitors, as repeat visitors have seen your design before and often become “banner blind” to your ad placements.

To sum it up, I think a very good strategy is to maximize the CTR of your ads from transparent visitors without going too far and annoying your regular visitors.

Back to the example at hand. Tom has obviously tried to maximize the monetization of his site (there sure are a lot of ads on the page!)

I’m seeing 6 ads, actually count em. Great monetization, right? Not necessarily.

This is one example where less is more. The ad units that can make him the most money (namely, Adsense) are not featured prominently, nor are they optimized. Further, the page is cluttered with ads that probably pay a lot less than Adsense (Chitika, and, I’m guessing, the graphical units). Using those units has the effect of lowering the CTR (and eCPM) of the Adsense units, while probably not making up that lost revenue. And at the end of the day, it’s all about eCPM of the entire page.

Sometimes Less Is More

With that in mind, I’d probably do something like this:

  • Make the skyscraper part of a left column – Skyscrapers nearly always perform significantly better on the left.
  • Change the sky to 160 width (it was 120 before) – 160 sky’s perform a lot better than 120 sky’s. The human eye can read the wider text much more easily (and thus click more often).
  • Blend the skyscraper – The default Adsense color pattern (white background, blue border) performs terribly. Blending = good.
  • Put the graphical skyscraper below the Adsense skyscraper – This one comes with a caveat as I’m not sure what kind of deal, CPC or CPM they get from these. But chances are, they pay a lot less than Adsense for a topic like VoIP. So feature the Adsense.
  • Drop Chitika – For a theme like VoIP, Adsense is going to wildly outperform a program like Chitika (again, I know from experience).
  • *Not pictured* Change Adsense title text to a more clickable color – To get that ridiculously high CTR on Adsense units, all you have to do sometimes is use red, orange or a shade of blue as the title text. Experiment a bit, as this will vary from blog to blog, but it can make a pretty big difference. (I didn’t picture this one however since I thought it might detract from the design–everything is a tradeoff.)

That wraps up the second edition of Monetization Makeover. Remember, when in doubt, just ask yourself What Would Andy Hagans Do?

I welcome your thoughts.