Posts Tagged ‘blog’
If you’re going to start a new WordPress blog, using the famous 5-minute install, there are several things you need to keep in mind in order to get the most out of your blog after installation. Below there are 10 tips for you, they are not necessary but will help keeping your blog safe and sound for visitors. Use this list as a check-up for future installations.
1. Change the Admin Username/Password and Manage Your Authors
When you installed WordPress, and are at the last step, it gives you some random password you will never remember. The username will always be the same, which is “Admin”, so that’s no problem. However you still need to change it since it gives hackers 1 less thing to worry about when they are looking for your login information. At the end of this post you can find some answers giving by my Twitter followers.
2. Edit Permalinks
example.com/?p=320
Will your url’s look like after a fresh install. This is probarly the worst SEO friendly url WordPress can offer you.
There are several options you can choose from, and to have an effective url you should either go for “Day and Name” or make a custom structure yourself. You can find this option in Settings -> Permalinks.
There are several command lines you fill in in the custom structure, such as %category% - %day% - %monthnum% - %year% - %author% - %tag% , to name a few. Read more about using Permalinks here.
3. Upload Your (New) Theme and Activate It
The provided default themes by WordPress are in my opinion old looking and outdated. There are some really good themes on the WordPress.org site, I suggest getting a free one from there untill you aren’t satisfied with the theme anymore and you outgrown it. But those are really good starter themes.
4. Add Your Categories and Change the Default
Notice the default category “uncategorized”, this category is automatically added so all posts not categorized into something will end up here. You can change this in: Posts -> Categories, and click “uncategorized” to edit it. Name it something you use alot, like a main category for your blog.
5. Activate Akismet
If you host your blog yourself and not on wordpress.com, you will need to create an account there to get your code to activate Akismet. The API code given is different for each account, but is not related to a blog, so you can use the code on any blog hosted somewhere else if you like. If you are uncertain about on how to get a API key, then click the “what is this?” link.
6. Install Google XML Sitemaps (plugin)
A short summerization for this plugin: Google XML Sitemaps generates a sitemap for your site, allowing major Search Engines to easily index your site. Every time you edit or add a post, the sitemap will modify itself correctly.
Firstly, download the plugin. After you installed it, head over to Google Webmaster Tools and there you will need to verify your site that it uses a sitemap. Once that’s done, you can then click the “Add Sitemap” link from the first page and put in the URL to your sitemap, which will be in our case: http://www.duoblogger.com/sitemap.xml
7. Install WordPress Database Backup (plugin)
If anything should happen to your blog, be it hacking or just deleted something you wish you didn’t. One plugin can save you from this and it is WordPress Database Backup. You can even set it so that it will backup your blog every hour/day/week and e-mail it to you!
8. Test Your Blog With Dummy Content
To completely show your blog and it’s capabilities, it is handy to get some sample posts with all the visual things, blockquotes – lists – comments – tags – parent categories and sub.
Download the sample content from WPcandy. Upload it in: Tools -> Import -> WordPress.
9. Add your RSS feed to Feedburner
First edit your RSS settings. Settings > Reading and you can edit how many posts you want to show in your RSS feed and whether they should show the full post or not.
Now you want to burn your feed with Feedburner. Feedburner will provide you with stats on your feeds and automatically ping services so your new content is updated immediately along with a whole host of other services.
Once you have signed up to Feedburner, change your feed subscription link in your theme. Place the following code between the head tags.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Feed Title" href="YOUR FEEDBURNER URL" />
10. Add/Activate your Analytics
Keep track of your visitors and traffic sources. I recommend Google Analytics. For a more detailed Google Analytics Guide I would like you to read this too on Duoblogger.
What did other Twitterers say?
@abledragon from Wealthydragon.com said: ”Install my list of plugins, set up and customise my theme then sit back and stare in wonder at my handiwork..! :)”
@fahad1991 from Techonodorm.com said: “Actually, changing permalink structure is the very first thing along with installing plugins.”
Today I was contacted by Kiraly Zoltan – he asked for some tips to improve the Click-Through Rate of his Adsense ads on his website. I opened the website and noticed 2 major mistakes in the layout of his adsense units.
Bad Adsense layout
Do you notice what he is doing wrong? If not then make sure to read my post about the best Adsense colors and the hot-spot ad positons.
The first problem is that he is using a 728*90 banner. Banners are Web 1.0 – nobody clicks them anymore. They suffer from the problem known as “banner-blindness”. We got used to normal horizontal banners and do not click them anymore. Leaderboard and banner ads are out! Don’t even think about using them if you have alternatives.
If you want to get a decent CTR and not one click per year then you must work with the large rectangles. They attract a lot more attention and look less like banners as long as they are not showing an image. Replace them on your website and I am almost 100 percent certain that your CTR will improve by 1-2 percent. I have been using the banners before as well and no, they did not work for me neither!
So how do you place two large rectangles next to each other? The answer is simple, use html to create a table for your Adsense units. The code to do so is:
<table>
<tr>
<td>Code 1</td>
<td>Code 2</td>
</tr>
</table>
That will place your Ads next to each other drawing more of the visitors attention and as a result improve your CTR. Really, whenever you make a website – this code will get you a decent amount of clicks!
The next problem with his Ads is the color. He is using #FEA20F as the link and URL color. What kind of color is that? Have you ever seen someone using it before? Don’t invent new Adsense improvement strategies! Use that what works! Blending Ads with bright URL color has never worked for me and won’t do for you as well. Choose a dark blue as link color. #000080 is definately my favorite and most successful one. The reason for choosing the blue is simple: people are used to blue hyperlinks and will consequently click them more often. #0000FF is the color almost all websites use for ad-links – that’s also a problem, people got used to it and do not click ad-units in that color that often anymore! Take a darker blue as link color!
You also don’t want the readers to have a look at the URL – you want them to look on the link and click that one right away. If they look too long on the URL they will notice that it is an advertisement and probably not click which means that you do not get any money at all. Make the link color a grey like #cccccc or the same color as the text in your advertisements. So if your text is black, then make the URL black, or grey.
2 Large Rectangles
That’s what gets you the highest CTR with Adsense in my opinion. Let’s have a look what Kiraly changed. He implemented my suggestions and is now using a #021588 as link color which is almost the same as the navy-blue #000080. But what the heck? Why is he using a #21588E as URL color? That’s not the best solution if you ask me. You should make it the same color as the text-color of your Adsense unit. In his case the text-color of his Adsense unit is #424242 which means that he should make the URL look the same. That way the people tend to look and click the Link of your ad more often.
One last thing which I would suggest in case of his website is to place the Adsense units not in the middle, but more to the left. People look at the top-left corner of a website when loading the website. That is in fact the best position for advertisements. Try to allocate your Ads more to the left by adding a <div align=”left”>(your table with the adsense ads)</div> around your table. That will move them right into the so called “hot-zone” and result in a higher CTR, too.
Embed all those changes and I am more than sure that you will experience a CTR-boom. I did the same on all of my websites and believe me – my click through rate is way better now. It is like in your local shopping-center. The people arrange their products psychologically to make you buy products more often. Same applies to the Adsense ads – you want to magically make users click them! Let me know if you need assistance with the placement and look of your ads.
If you know something about advertising already then you should also know about the limits of advertising programs. I am running a relatively large website about computer games and quickly noticed that Adsense alone is not the way to get most money. The best alternative is getting advertisers to directly advertise on your website.
The good thing about Adsense is that it displays related ads. There is undoubtedly no advertising program that can display as related ads as Adsense. But, the support of Adsense is terrible. I have been banned twice and did not even get an email. I was generating at least 30$ per day – I would at least let my partners know that they made a mistake… No, Adsense does not, they just cancel your account. Getting about what happened when you email them can take 2 weeks. Really – should we really let us treat so badly?
How CPC advertising works
The answer is yes, in most cases bloggers have only few alternatives. I thought the same, but being smart priced by Adsense for 3 months I got really pissed…. Before I was getting 15 cent per click, but from then on only 5 cent? That’s just ridiculous and simply unfair. Just because they can we should not support that. There are in fact other advertisement programs that might pay-out relatively good, but in my experience none of them was able to pay out as good as Adsense.
This graphic shows quite well what limits the earnings of Adsense. Google takes in 25% comission (?) when placing advertisements. If you are able to find advertisers that want to advertise on your site directly you could in theory increase your earnings by 25 percent. However, in practice, those advertisers are not willing to pay as much, but still in some cases more than google would pay you.
The problem is that you somehow need to find the advertisers. You will need to write emails and a lot of them. Remember, whenever there is traffic, there are also people interested in advertising.
Direct advertising works well when:
- Your website is a niche website and no general one. Advertisers do in most cases only sell one product. One example: you have a website about fishing and computer games. It is difficult to find an advertiser who is interested at the same time about both subjects. Because of the fact that companies are usually specialized they are also mainly interested in advertising on related websites. If your website’s visitors are 14 year old kids then life-insurance ads are not the right way to go. Instead you need to find a company related to your website.
- Your eCPM is very low and you earned way more some weeks/days ago. So, when you got smart priced, direct advertisers should be considered.
- When you got contacted by advertisers – really, this is an opportunity, try to work out a deal. There is more money in this than you thought.
I did the same on my Gaming site. I now found advertisers that are paying me a fixed amount of money per month. That way I am getting around the double of my current Adsense income. Plus, I don’t really need to be afraid of getting banned or anything. The way to find advertisers that want to pay is relatively easy. Just have a look at your google ads (don’t click them!) write down the URL and use your browser to get on their websites. They usually have a contact us page which you can check out. Calling them is actually the best way. I think that they will take you more serious if you call them. In most cases they will just give you an email address anyways.
You can also google your keyword and you will probably find ads next to your search. Click them and you will find companies that are interested in advertising as well. I used the last method – I contacted almost 15 of them and received several emails. One of them was interested and willing to pay to me the money I was looking for. I am currently sorting out the issue with him. He even offered me to work for his company in the future hehe. Need to finish my year at school first, planning to go to university after :-), then why not? I love working with webistes – there is so much interesting stuff to learn – plus you get in contact with a lot of people.
Make sure to attach some traffic reports in your first email. You can use google analytics to generate them. Use the integrated export to .pdf function and you can then attach a report to the email. Good luck with upping your revenue :-).
Some bloggers are relatively unsatisfied with Google Adsense or other advertisement networks. You must know that there are other, still good networks. The market grows fast and still has open space for new advertising companies. I have been using several advertisement programs now and would like to give you some tips which advertisement programs are good.
You gotta decide between PPC (also known as CPC, stands for Pay per click), PPA (also known as CPA, stands for pay per affiliate and CPM (PPM, pay per impression). Some blogs tend to work better with CPA programs, others with CPC programs and others with CPM programs.
I made the experience that CPC programs run best when you have a niche blog. Your blog should not be about different topics, only about one. That way the CPC-programs can easily put related advertisements on your website which then tend to be clicked by your visitors more often. One very good advertising program is Google Adsense (you probably know it, if not you must be a newby lol). Because of the intense amout of advertisers Google is able to put extremely relative ads on your websites. As said before, the advertisements are appealing to the visitors and will consequently get clicks. To make it a little easier to understand: Let’s say your blog is about lawyers in a district of New York – there is an advertiser interested in putting advertisements on websites about exactly that topic. The ads are shown the user and they click on them because they were looking for a lawyer. Always keep in mind that the success to Google Adsense is the niche relevancy and the amount of clicks. The more clicks, the more money. The relevanter the better earnings per click (general sites suffer from smart pricing). I have mainly worked with Google as CPC program, but alternatives are Yahoo, Bidvertiser and some others of which I currently forgot the names.
The next category of advertisement are CPM ads. Those advertisements will get you money per impression. Sounds great because it is independent on clicks, however, those advertisement programs usually tend to pay out less. They do not have as targeted ads as the CPC programs, therefore do not have a large ROI (return on investment) for the advertiser. For me they pay out around 50% of what google-adsense pays. Usually you are forced to use those programs simply because you either got banned on adsense, or notice that your money per click gets lowered drastically. I worked togehter with some of them and made best experiences with: Adsdaq and Tribalfusion. If you need wellpaying pop-unders then Valueclick is the network to go. Their pop-unders pay out like on no other network. Cpxinteractive is good if you want income without really doing something. Just place their code and you can expect medium-earnings. The prior networks pay out well if you dedicate some time to play around a little. I will be writing a post about ad tiering for more money soon (helps to get more money out of CPM ads).
An alternative might be CPA advertisements for you. There some niches that are known to payout very well with affiliate advertisements. The dog niche for example will make you rich with CPA ads… You probably ask yourself why – in fact I did so too… It is fairly easy to understand – look at the audience of people that are interested in dogs. Most of them are 30+ and already have an income. Those people have money and usually (at least in Western-countries) do everything possible for the health and good of their pet. Those people are eager to buy products, the conversion rate is extremely high. An example: A dog is suffering from a disease – the person owning the dog searches for help on the internet and then finds your website. The person sees an advertisement related directly to her problem. The chance is high that she will click it and perhaps buy the product. So if the product costs around 500$ (some people pay that for the good of their dog) – then you get around 15% – what is 75$. Some friends told me that their sites where extremely well converting with a conversion rate of almost 5%! Wish I had such a blog and could run CPA advertisements hehe. Popular ones are the Ebay Commission Junction, Amazon-ads or Google Adsense. I have once been trying Zanox – but they scammed me around 200$. I am still waiting for a payout. Would love to know if you made better experiences with them.
CPA advertisements really depend on the niche – for example on my main website (it is about computer games – D3scene.com) – I would not be able to make any profit from Affiliate advertisements. The audience is maily around 15 years old. Most of the users do not even have a credit-card or paypal account. The chance that they really buy the product is very low. And the money behind a computer-game is not higher than 50$ – making it unattractive for gaming niches to run CPA ads.
Another possibility if your blog is about a specific software would be to use Pay-Per-Install advertisements. Those advertisements get you money whenever someone installs software. However, you will need to merge the software’s .exe with some kind of sponsor program .exe – which will make the audience of your blog never come back. Trust me, if a website tries to install crap on my computer I will NEVER even open them again. Zangocasg is the most popular one.
All in all you need to experiment – there is no 100% perfect advertising solution for your blog. The advertising niche changes every year and has new products which might increase your money. I recommend you to try out different advertisement programs and to see which one performs best for your blog. Not that I know everything, but I already know a decent amount – still – there is so much that influences your advertisements and I can not tell you the perfect solution. As stated above – experiment.
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Hendrik
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| Phone: | +1-818-322-0251 +49-40-7880-0986 |
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| Twitter: | @Hendricius |
| Skype: | Hendricius |
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Mark
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Top commentators blog
As you might have noticed I have now installed a top-commentators plugin on my wordpress blog. The plugin shows the people that commented most as a widget. What might sound like a SEO-horror for old time SEO experts is a nice way of getting visitors on your blog.
The top commentator plugin rocks – if there is anyone telling you the opposite – take out a fish and slap him twice. But why do people find your blog just because of this plugin?
It’s very easy, the key to all SEO these days is getting links to your blog. Bloggers are always searching for dofollow blogs where they can comment (dofollow means there is no nofollow attribute on hyperlinks). Nofollow is a SEO killer – your backlinks do not get credited if it they have the nofollow attribute. Consequently you will be in the need of dofollow links. The top commentator plugin provides such links.
So, to sum it up – Bloggers are searching for dofollow blogs where they can comment to get more links to their website. But, you are not mainly targeting those (you will need a nofollow-free plugin for wordpress to do so) you are targeting the ones that are searching for “top commentators” + blog (not sure about the exact code, if you know it, please let me know, thanks). Those people will find your blog there and are eager to write comments. The reason for that is simple – the top commentators are hyperlinked without a nofollow attribute. That means, if your blog is relatively popular they are getting an authority link! That’s exactly what people are looking for – free dofollow high page rank links. Nonetheless, don’t search for high page rank links – page rank does not matter. It only indicates the time that is required for your site to get indexed by google.
So, using this addon will attract new people to your blog. Make sure you reset the statistics every month, because that way they are forced to comment every month. They will come back and every page impression means money for you.
So, let’s get started – download the top commentators plugin. Unzip it, open your FTP application and place the content of the .zip in your /wp-content/plugins folder. Go into your “WordPress settings”, go to “plugins” and enable the top commentator extension. Next step is to go into the “Design”, “Widgets” and then drag the plugin onto your sidebar. Voila, you got it installed and working.
My top commentator settings
The next step is the correct configuration of the plugin. Use the settings I used. You can find them in the picture on the left, and yes,I think they are best. Reading my article you should by now agree on that.
You could perhaps set the time until the counter gets reseted a little longer, but that depends on you. I like my visitors to return every month, nonetheless it might be a little unfair for your old fan-readers who are subscribed and commented for months. Decide yourself which value you want to place there. Make sure to make the links nofollow-free. Again, the bloggers are searching for your blog to get top dofollow links – no nofollow links.
Some of you are probably rolling their eyes and say: “OMG NOES – MY PR WILL GET LOWER!!11!”. Yes, the Page Rank of your forum posts will not be as high anymore. Nonetheless – Page Rank does not matter, so don’t even bother about it. Quality back links do and you will get more of them with more people reading your blog. I will tell you something: Google is known to check the incoming links to webpages, whenever they do so they also occasionally send Robots to those sites. That means, linking to other pages will get all of your pages indexed better and faster. Outgoing links do as well matter for SEO, that’s for sure. Google loves blogs and user generated content, that’s why they also love the top commentators. Trust me – it is a good strategy. See this blog and you will notice that high-pr sites have the plugin installed as well. If you have some time I can only recommend you to do some commenting on those blogs. Most of them are old, valuable blogs – especially valuable in terms of link juice.
I found out about the next method on Hugo Santos blog. At the end of the month he is writing a post which contains the names of the users who commented most in the last month. It as well contains a link to their websites. That’s very fair – the users are getting a permanent one way link from your blog and also get a well-deserved thanks.
In a nutshell, I don’t see anything bad in the top commentators plugin for your blog. I only see benefits, it is a very good way of getting organic traffic and readers to your blog.