by webbythoughts on December 1, 2009
I’ve been working on a personal project to standardize a bunch of things that I do on the dozen blogs that I occasionally write content on with the plan of starting to write more regularly across all of my sites.
As part of that cleanup, I once again realized that I have let category bloat creep across most of my blogs. I’ve let myself get in the habit of deciding that I want to write something, realizing that it doesn’t fit a category, and just creating a category for it.
I have a couple reasons for wanting to prevent this kind of category bloat.
- I want to move the categories section down to a fat footer at the bottom of my sites but that won’t work with 40 different categories for some sites.
- I want to stay focused so that I know what I want to talk about on each site.
Sometimes I try to think about what to write on sites and nothing comes to me. I think limiting the sites to something like 3-5 topics will help tighten the focus and actually make it easier to think about what to write about.
My plan is to have most of this infrastructure work (upgrades, code consolidations, banners, etc) by the end of the month so that I can start the new year all nice and organized. Part of that is going to be the horrible task of recategorizing several hundred posts on a couple of the sites. That will not be a fun project, but I’ll be happy when it is all finished.
Another perk of limiting the number of categories is that I’m considering doing some special CSS styling depending on the category. It might be as simple as a custom image somewhere in the post to something as extreme as a completely different look for certain categories but I only want to tackle THAT project if I only have a few categories on a site.
by webbythoughts on October 26, 2009
See that picture at the top of this post. I’ve been working on adding some pep to my blogs by adding similar pictures at the beginning of posts. I’m getting them from Flickr and searching for photos with Creative Commons licenses that allow the pictures to be edited and used.
I was originally dreading keeping track of what I was doing on each of my blogs until I came up with a simple plan.
I use Gimp to crop them into the wide and short format and then I resize them to 550 X 150 pixels.
I’m using a spreadsheet that I keep on my DropBox directory to keep track of the local filename that I give the files, the URL from Flickr where the original photo came from, and the URL of my post where I use the photo. I’m keeping track of all of that in case anybody contacts me to ask me to take down a photo or in case I want to try to see if that photographer has any new photos that might come in handy.
In one of the cells of the spreadsheet, I have a sample of the html code that I’m using to give credit to the photographer. I just cut and paste it into my post and change the Flickr URL, image title, and author’s name.
Just like that, I have easy access to tons of photos and a way to keep track of where I’m using them and where I got them from.
photo credit: striatic
by webbythoughts on May 7, 2009
Keyword reaserch is the key to making money in niche sites with AdSense. I have heard this over and over for years without really getting it.
As part of my summer affiliate marketing projects, I’m working on forcing myself to understand how to effectively do keyword research. Just one week into the projects, I can tell a big reason why I am not making more money with AdSense which is the main way that I make money on most of my sites. And even better, I’m starting to learn how to fix that.
Do Page Views and SERPS mean AdSense money
I rank well on some somewhat common search terms on each of my sites. I always thought that was pretty cool. I’m learning that these visits are pretty useless for making money with AdSense because advertisers are not advertising on those keywords.
A couple examples
I’m on the first page of Google for the search term “Getting married on a cruise.” This one post makes enough to pay for more than just the domain name each year with the little bit of traffic it gets. The Google Keyword Tool says that “getting married on a cruise” has an average CPC for the advertiser of $2.03
Another post from that same site ranks #1 for “things to do on first night of cruise” which the AdWords Keyword Tool says has an average CPC of nothing. I believe it. They get about the same amount of traffic but I don’t get any clicks on that one. It’s a perfectly fine post and is useful for getting people to my site but it does nothing for actually making any money.
Why?
Because nobody is using AdWords to advertise anything that has to do with “things to do on first night of cruise.”
Balance the reader and the advertisers
The key to making money with AdSense on a niche blog is to write content that connects readers with advertisers. Most people, myself included, tend to get lazy and just write content that makes themselves happy or content that tries to connect to a reader. But forgetting to consider the advertisers kills any potential for making money.
Enter Keyword Research
Spending 10-15 minutes doing research on a post can make the difference between a post that ranks well in Google for some keywords and one that ranks well and earns you money. Google’s own Keyword Tool is a great resource for finding out how competitive a term is, a ball park of what the CPC for the advertisers is, an estimate on what kind of traffic it could bring and optional keywords that might work bring more traffic and earn more AdSense revenue.
Before hitting publish on your next post, copy the content into the Keyword Tool. Choose the Website content radio button and then paste the text in the “Or, enter your own text in the box below” and then click Get keyword ideas.
Google will give you a list of keywords that your article could fit.
Make sure you choose the option to show the Advertiser Competition, Estimated Average CPC and Global Monthly Search Volume. If the competition is too high or if the CPC or search volume is too low, you might want to consider targeting some other keywords from the list.
If nothing from the list sounds like a good fit, choose the Descriptive words option and start experimenting with some alternate keywords until you find something you like.
Once you find your magic keyword phrase, make sure to do things like include the phrase in the title, early in the post and one or two more times in the rest of the post, in the anchor text of a link, and the alt attribute on an image, etc. But then make your post read like you are not focusing on the content you were planning on writing and not just on the keywords.
I am still working on effectively optimizing the keywords to make the readers, Google and the advertisers all happy. It is definitely a balancing act.
Here are a great resource for getting started with SEO in general and optimizing a post for a keyword.
by webbythoughts on May 5, 2009
I always like to take a little time over the summer to try a couple things online over the summer. This summer I am going to be working on learning more about niche affiliate marketing.
One thing I have always been lazy about is keyword research. I tend to write a lot of personal blogs and therefore do not worry about things like SEO and how many people will read the sites. I know keyword research is important to affiliate marketing so I better learn the basics.
Another topic that I’ve never really spent much time on is link building through article marketing. I read about it a lot and people seem to have very mixed opinions about how well it works these days but the best way to learn is to spend some time poking it to see what happens.
Very specifically, I have two definable projects that will help me work on one or both of those new affiliate marketing skills that I want to learn.
- Update my more niche sites – I have about 10 blogs. One of them I update regularly. This one here I update sporadically and the others generally lie dormant. I’m going to work on changing that this summer. My goal is to get one post a week up on each blog. If I can’t muster enough ambition to do that on a given site, I will be getting rid of it. For the others, I will start working on targeting some keywords and possibly affiliate programs if I find a good fit.
- One Week Marketing – I bought it recently and since I am really thinking about working with keywords and affiliate programs this summer, it seemed like a perfect project. I’m hoping to target 2 or 3 or the “weeks” and end up with 2 or 3 completed, well developed projects. I already have 3 targeted affiliate programs through Commission Junction that I am thinking about using for the One Week Marketing training.
I’m planning to post updates over the summer to highlight my successes, failures and what I learn.
by webbythoughts on April 22, 2009
I signed up for Google Webmaster Tools quite a while back and pretty much stopped keeping track of it. I’ve been working on getting my various blogs in sync (in regards to WP version, plugins and basic template) and as part of that realized that I had a handful that I never added to my Google Webmaster Tools account.
When I logged in, I noticed a bunch of error notifications on the dashboard telling me that I needed to verify my sites.
All I had to do was click the error message link (or choose one of the domains and click Tools -> Manage site verification) and tell it to go look for the html verification file. The files were already on the server from when I originally created the Google Webmaster Tools account but somewhere along the way Google lost track of them. I clicked on the link that sent Google to check for the verification file and everything was good again.
Anyway, if you have an account and haven’t checked it in a while, you should give it a glance and see if your site is still verified and make sure you don’t have any other errors being reported that you might need to address.
by webbythoughts on April 13, 2009
My wife’s WordPress blog was hacked a while back. I had been lazy and not upgraded in a while. It took me a while to even notice that it had been hacked because everything seemed to be working fine.
I noticed a strange file the other day when I was backing up her files before doing the long overdue upgrade. It looked mean when I opened it so I did some Googling and sure enough, she had been hacked.
Photo by: faeryboots
You can test to see if you are hacked by adding /wp-content/themes/remv.php to your normal URL. For example, testing this site you would look for http://www.webbythoughts.com/wp-content/themes/remv.php. If you get some kind of 404 error or something indicating that it couldn’t find the file, you are probably okay. If you get an Access Denied error, you have problems.
Another way to check would be to open up your FTP program and look in the wp-content/themes directory of your install and see if a remv.php file exists. If so, you need to take corrective action.
There are already tutorials out there that will walk you through what to do. I recommend Jason Cosper’s remv.php fix tutorial. It worked perfectly for me.
It looked like a lot of work when I first read the tutorial but it only ended up taking about 5-10 minutes longer than a normal WordPress upgrade would take. And if you are running an older version of WordPress you should really get your self upgraded anyway.
If you don’t want to deal with it and just want to hire somebody to fix it, feel free to send me an email and I can fix it for you.
by webbythoughts on April 9, 2009
The plugins are one of the greatest reasons to use WordPress. The plugin creators have something for everything. A lot of plugins work quietly in the background without needing any changes in your template. Others let you easily do neat things within the actual content of your posts.
Those plugins require a little special care. If the plugin is deactivated, they can cause the page to display errors instead of the content you are expecting.
There is an fairly easy way to handle these. In the section where you add the php code to call the function, you can wrap it with another php code that checks to see if the function exists before calling the function.
For example, to check for the Related Posts function, you can use something similar to this code:
<?php if ( function_exists(‘related_posts’) ) : ?>
<h2>Related posts</h2>
<?php related_posts(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
Then if the plugin is deactivated or deleted or something similarly horrible happened and WordPress can’t find the code it is trying to run, it will just skip the entire block of code. You will not have any errors on the page.
The only word of warning is that since there is no error displayed to the readers, there will be no error displayed to you either so pay attention to make sure everything looks the way you want it to whenever you make changes.
by webbythoughts on April 8, 2009
After several months of focusing on other things online and off, I’m going to be bringing this blog back to life. I have a lot or reasons for it. The top two are that I have been feeling the urge to write about these topics and that I have a couple side projects that would launch well from this blog and figure it would be smart to bring the blog back to life before undertaking those projects.
As part of relaunching this blog, I have a checklist of things that I am planning in the near future.
Consolidate categories
- Blogging
- Internet (miscellaneous internet related things)
- Making money online
- Social media and other online marketing
- WordPress (tweaks, code, and maintenace)
- Other (sometimes something just will not fit one of those topics)
Regular posting schedule
- Starting with two posts a week. Monday and Thursday.
- Focus on the topics that specifically fit the categories listed above
Switch to Thesis theme
- I use this on almost all of my other sites but never managed to put on this site. I prefer to have one generic theme that is common between all of my sites and then do minor tweaks to differentiate them.
Create bigger footer with lots of functionality
- Categories
- Links to my social media profiles
- Fuller about me info
- All of this will free me up to only use one sidebar and have more interesting and useful things there.
New banner
- I had a friend make a nice custom one a while back and when I never got around to migrating to the Thesis theme, I ended up not switching to the banner, too.
Build a queue of future posts
- This is probably the most important project for me. I am planning on opening up my Google Calendar and actually scheduling the writing of my Monday and Thursday posts. Then I’m going to create a bunch of starter drafts of posts in WordPress so that when I sit down, I have some topics to choose from instead of just flying by the seat of my pants. The goal would be to be able to tell somebody at the beginning of May what my posts are going to be about that month.
- If something time sensitive comes up, I can adjust all of the schedules or just do an extra post that week.
So that is my blueprint for bringing Webby Thoughts back to life. If you subscribed a while back, thanks for keeping me in your feed reader and I hope to see you in the comments.
by webbythoughts on April 8, 2009
I have been thinking about writing some fairly targetted eBooks on a few topics that I get a lot of response about on some of my websites. It has always seemed like a fun project for me and the possibility of making some money off of it would be an added bonus.
I was bouncing around the internet today and found a link to an eBook called $7 Secrets which is an eBook explaining how to make money writing and selling $7 eBooks. Not surprisingly, the eBook costs $7.
I had the money already burning a hole in my PayPal account, so I made the purchase.
$7 Secrets is a nice introduction into why selling lower cost eBooks can be a viable marketting plan. After all, people are probably more likely to buy a $4 hamburger at McDonalds than a premium $25 hamburger.
It also explains how to use affiliates and email lists as part of the big global plan.
The biggest perk of the $7 Secrets is that it provides a good kick in the pants to actually get started on writing our own eBooks. I already started jotting down a list of topics that I want to write about.
If you are interested in buying your own copy, visit the $7 Secrets website.
