I received an email recently with regards to an error in the Quick Menu plugin for WordPress which forced users to PayPal when the Save button was clicked. I can assure you, this wasn’t the intent and I’m sorry for any frustration this may have caused.
I’ve had several people submit donations from this plugin since it’s release and will be sending each of you emails in the coming days to correct the donations.
Christopher
Before I begin writing this article, I have to brag just a little. My website here at thisismyurl.com has a Google PageRank of 5, as does my website at getawaygraphics.com but Chris’s website (which I reviewed yestaurday) has a Google PageRank of 6 … that completely destroyed my ego. He’s killing me, it’s like that scene where Annie totally destroys Obi Wan, it simple shouldn’t have happened. So why did it?
Simple, his kungfu was better than mine.
Actually it’s a lot more complicated than that but not by much. First, to truly understand why bavotasan.com is a higher ranking, we should first understand some of the mechanics. Google PageRank (as we’ve talked about before) is just one measure of a web site’s success but it’s a critical one. It measures how much Google believes your website is worth and in the process, how much value they give to it. A high PR value means a better placement in the results, so getting a high PR is the first step to getting a great SEO value.
Getting a PR of 0 is easy, everybody starts with one. Getting a one is still fairly simple, a two is what most should aim for, a three means Google has faith in you, four means you’re pretty impressive, five … you’re on fire and six? Now six is something you should envy. It means that you’re heads and tails above the rest, so how do you get a PageRank of six?
Step one … have a website people care to read. I’m always impressed with how great the content on Chris’s website is. It’s not just good, it’s great. He takes the time to research his posts, he puts a lot of effort into it and in the end he works hard. That’s the first step, make sure the content you write is worth writing.
Step two … get people to link to you. On this step, Chris is a master. My website has ~216 people linking to it (you can always see it here) but bavotasan.com …. 5,370 people link to his website! That’s right … Chris has over 5,000 more people linking to his website than I do, so it’s no wonder that he’s kicking my butt with a PageRank of 6 vs. my PageRank of 5.
So, the secret to successful online marketing?
1) Write things people want to read
2) Get people to link to your great content
3) … there’s got to be more right?
Well … as for #3, I want to hear from you so here’s my idea …
Win a Free iPodChris’s website (http://www.bavotasan.com) is one that I truly love, it’s a great site with a lot of useful information but that’s not why he’s kicking my butt so here’s my challenge to all of you.
Write a post on your blog and tell me why Chris’s website is kicking my PageRank ass and I’ll enter your name to win an iPod, it doesn’t even have to be purple. I’ll order a brand new iPod Nano from Apple’s website and ship it anywhere in the US or Canada for one lucky winner.
Include a link to this article as well as at least one article on Chris’s website and leave me a comment below with a link to your submission. Posts must be submitted prior to October 31st and will be tallied between the 1st and 15th of November, you can enter multiple times from different domains but there’s only one iPod to give away. If you’d prefer to email me your link, feel free.
There’s a giant pink elephant in the WordPress forum that nobody seems to be talking about and it’s been staring at my peanuts for the past few weeks, so let’s take a moment to ask ourselves how safe the platform really is.
WordPress, for those who don’t know is a blogging platform turned website manager which makes it fantastically easy to build, deploy and manage websites. It’s the best platform on the market for doing this, and it’s free. That’s a pretty powerful endorsement right? Well, it’s true … except … it the past few months the people who run WordPress and are responsible for it have been getting sloppy. Let’s take a look at some of the recent security holes.
The 2.8.4 release this weekend was due to a newly discovered hole in WordPress. In fact, the whole (which seems to have appeared in 2.8) was so big, it allows anybody with even a basic understanding of web technology to reset your admin password whenever they want. When 2.8.3 was released on the 3rd of August, it was to fix security flaws overlooked in the 2.8.2 release from July 20th. In fact, every release since 2.8 has been to fix major security flaws in the core WordPress application. Here’s how WordPress describes their 2.8.1 upgrade:
WordPress 2.8.1 fixes many bugs and tightens security for plugin administration pages. Core Security Technologies notified us that admin pages added by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users, resulting in information being leaked [emphasis added]. Not all plugins are vulnerable to this problem, but we advise upgrading to 2.8.1 to be safe.
If you think I’m being tough on the people at WordPress, take a moment and read the release reports on WordPress.org, it shows nearly three months of security blunders by the world’s most popular package and if you think that you’re immune, think again. In March, Ashley Morgan who runs Upstart Blogger was the victim of a cyber attack, in June my website was hacked and trashed by somebody promoting links to flu vaccines and earlier that month we suffered hacks on both Tinker Priest Media and my partner’s website BavotaSan.
Ashley’s advice is strong, make sure you update your backups daily and always download the latest security updates from WordPress, especially when they’re released on weekends. Take my friend Chris’s advice and remove reference to your WordPress version, install some basic security on your WordPress blog and always remember that there are people out there who want to hack your site.
Look, let’s face it … not everything is sellable. If you’re attracting a thousand people a day your website and nobody buys? Maybe your product simply isn’t something people want. One way to check if this is the case, use Google Analytics to see where people abandon your process.
Remember you’re competing against thousands of stores selling similar products, are you competitive? Did you remember to account for shipping costs? Apple’s made a fortune selling stuff online for just 99 cents. Take a look at great applications like The Moron Test which just keeps selling.
Take an honest look at your website, how many clicks does it take to get from the first page to the final sales confirmation page? Is it easy or do people have to think about the process? When I built the new Great Chefs website, we added a lot of great free recipes and daily cooking videos but the real power of the site is a fast, easy to understand sales process using Google Checkout.
OK, saying that you have a great product that people can easily buy and it’s priced right then there’s only one reason left why people don’t buy from you (assuming you have people coming to your website) … that don’t trust you.
Fresh Post at thingsidoformoney.com: What do people really buy?
Before I design a website for somebody, especially if I’m sitting down with a restaurant to talk about design a website for a restaurant or hotel, there’s something pretty basic that I try to figure out about my potential partner (building a website is more like a partnership to me), do they have the slightest clue what people really buy? Most of the time, they simply don’t.Read More
We all make mistakes but when it comes to our online web businesses, it’s important that we fix our mistakes before they become crippling.
A keyword (or Tag in WordPress lingo) is a word or phrase intended to help support the content that you’re reading on a specific page, not the entire website. People often overload pages with keywords which have no relevancy to the page they’re designing with the hopes that Google will fall for the trick. Google will not fall for it. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to show that Google will punish you for using unrelated keywords, which is mistake #1 on most websites.
Content matters, it’s a silly reality but you have to stop thinking about your visitors as a funny little line in an analytics program and begin caring about them as people. Every person who comes to your website should feel they are better off after reading your content. If they don’t you’re wasting their time and they will not come back, so write better content and watch your website traffic increase dramatically.
The old days of building a website and assuming people will find it are over (if they ever existed at all), website owners need to tell people about their website and promote it everywhere. Make sure your site address is on your business cards, marketing materials, the side of your building, company vehicles, all of your online profiles and in prominent newsletters, magazines etc. Remember, if you don’t tell people about your website they won’t know it’s there.
Writing for websites is easy, make sure you have a catchy title that will help people determine if they want to read your piece and then make sure it’s been properly placed in your HTML code. A great title needs to be in two places on a website, first it has to be in the <title></title> tags of your page but it should also be reflected in your <h1></h1> tags in the body of your content. This helps search engines know that your page is about your title by labeling the document but also by placing the title in an easy to read and powerful tag within your text.
Web pages are a lot like books, they need structure for people to be able to read them. In this case, you want computer software such as FireFox, Safari and IE to read your pages as well as Google, MSN and Yahoo right? Well then, you’d better make sure your page is coded to their standards! Luckily, the W3C has a wonderful tool to help you ensure your page can be properly read.
If you’ve follow my advice, you know that your visitors are people not mindless data points on a graph so you have to respect that they simple won’t come back to your website if you don’t take the time to post anything new there. Work out a schedule that you can keep and write a blog posting at least once each week (more if you can) to provide your audience with fresh content.
While it’s acceptable and even encouraged to buy ads on services such as Google be careful that you’re building your client base through organic methods, not paid advertising. Google looks very poorly on paid link placement and has a reputation for punishing people excessively for buying links. If you really want to build your websites online reputation, do it honestly and take a little more time, in the end it’ll get you where you need to be.
The web is a very big place and people have a lot of choice when it comes to content, so try to be original and write content people want to read. Ask yourself why you read specific websites and learn to improve your content to ensure people have a reason to come back. Once you have unique, original content others will start linking to your content because you’re an authority.
Would you rather optimize your store for the local newspaper or for your customer? Stop looking to optimize your content for search engines, they’re irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong you have to make sure your content can be read by them and that your website is compatible with Google but stop treating your website content like it needs to be written to appeal to the big search engines and instead, write your content to appeal to people like your mother, your father, your kids and your neighbors. After all, they’re the ones who are reading your content … not a robot.
The biggest mistake people make? Failing to ask other website owners to link to them. Search engines rankings work on a system called PageRank, the way PageRank works is by counting the number of links from other websites to your website, the more links you have coming into your website … the higher you rank on Google. If you want to be successful on the web, ask your friends and family as well as other related businesses to link to you.
Ann Smarty put together an awesome article called Getting SEO Value from Follow-up Posts that’ll help you rediscover how your old content can help you keep readers interested as well as increase your SEO skills. Susan has ten quick tips that we all tend to forget, but can make all the difference in the world. Musa talks about SEO and customer service, there’s a neat piece on PHP Nuke and social media rather than SEO that’s really worth taking a look at as it helps define the line between people vs. machines in content. Speaking of an evolving form of SEO, organic marketing is big and today had a great guide to organic marketing.
If you’re pegging any hopes on the new Microsoft engine, there’s a great story here as well as the source link here.
Are you looking for work as a WordPress developer? Automattic, the makers of WordPress put together a neat little post that’s showing WordPress is now an in demand skill on Elance, the popular freelance marketplace website. It’s also worth noting however that WordPress runs it’s own cool little employment board over at http://jobs.wordpress.net/ where prospective blog owners try to meet up with WP gurus. There’s another wonderful, secret mailing list … OK it’s not a secret but most people don’t know about it called WP Pro where a dozen or so job requests a week come across your email box.
Here’s a wonderful piece that combines my love of gaming with my love of WordPress, Peter’s done a great job of making the process of setting up an online gaming community clear and easy. If you’re running Windows Vista and you’re struggling to get WP to work, there’s a neat piece here.
Darren put together a nice new theme for writers, but more importantly it’s worth checking out his site simply to see what every WordPress website should look like. Back to work now, I’m using WordPress to build a new website for the Great Chefs television program, so be sure to check it out in a few days!
I think the Internet is awesome. There, I said it. The Internet is one of those amazing online places where anybody can make a great living and earn money while working from home. The web doesn’t make you go to work, it lets you stay home with your kids, work part time or even just earn cash after you’ve retired but the trick is that you need to know how to do it and I’m pretty easy going about telling people how to do it here on my site.
Get a website
The first step to making money on the Internet is to get a website. For those of you who think getting a website is hard work, you’re insane. Building a website is hard work but having one? It’s as easy as clicking a button and watching a few videos so step one to making money at home, sign up for a great hosting company like Bluehost and everything you need to get started.
Once you’ve signed up, installing an easy to manage website tool like WordPress is free and easy.
Get some advertising
What’s the biggest hurdle to making money on the Internet? The money dummy. Luckily Google makes it incredibly easy by offering a program called AdSense. How it works is pretty simple, you publish a website and they supply advertisers that what to put ads on websites about your subject matter. The more people visit your website, the more people see your ads and the more money you make.
Write some content
So now you have a website and you have the ads setup so the next trick is to write content that people really want to read. Write often and write well, otherwise there is only one trick … write about something that people care to read about.
Watching a Google AdSense Webinar is a little like studying for a physics exam that’s being marked by Einstein, there’s a lot to catch and also a lot that you can miss so it’s wonderful that they post the video to YouTube as well so that we can rewatch it.
There’s an interesting article I was liked to over technews.com about Google AdSense publishers and their privacy settings, spoiler alert … most people have not updated their privacy policies. Here’s a hint to everybody … privacy policies are mandatory for all AdSense websites and Google can refuse to issue payments ( or terminate publishers for not updating) if you’re not meeting your TOS’s. (I’d better go check mine …)
Speaking of AdSense, I gotta say that I absolutely loved reading Do You Want To Increase Your Google Adsense Revenue? today. There’s a lot of content on the web dedicated to how to make money using the AdSense etc. but this is a pretty simple little piece, well written and easy to follow for people who are either just starting out or maybe need a refresher. You might also want to give Adsense Good or Bad?, Do You Want To Increase Your Google Adsense Revenue? and 6 Easy Ways to Increase your Adsense Revenue a read while you’re at it.
Today’s been a pretty busy day, so I haven’t been able to read as much as I’d have liked but if you’re looking for more help with AdSense, check out the AdSense Optimization Webinar.
On many of my websites (which I almost always power with WordPress) I like to give people incentives to signup for my RSS feeds. This let’s me keep in touch with them and helps keep people connected to my website but it also offers me a great advantage in that I know that my audience is building.
One of the things that I do is offer content for those users in the form of a contest or promotion which only appears in my RSS feeds or often appears in my RSS feed days (or weeks) before it appears on the main site. This allow allows me to test content, get feedback from regulars etc. before it’s live.
Now there are a few plugins and tutorials on how to do this (Creating Posts That Appear Only In RSS) but I prefer to do it in a much easier way.
That’s it .. very simple really.
For example, on my archives.php page I simply add the code ‘exclude=X’ (where X is my category ID) from the results, which ensures that any article found exclusively in my RSS feed is not published anywhere else.
The only problem is … this method forces me to add and remove items from the list in a method similar to how we used to have to place sticky posts in WordPress.
What do you guys think? Is there an easier way for me to do it?
May
2009
10 simple ways to say thanks to a blogger you enjoy reading
When I was working at Yorkville University I met a fellow IT manager named Glen who shared a theory about technology people. If I remember this correctly, his former manager once told him that IT people needed money, toys or interesting projects to keep them motivated. Most of the time people assumed it was money but to people in the technology field, money wasn’t the most important thing.
I feel that way about making money online here at thisismyurl.com, which is why I don’t believe asking for donations is the right way to go when it comes from receiving support from people who read my blog. In fact, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think most bloggers feel that way. So how can you say thanks to somebody for a blog post you’ve really enjoyed? Here’s a few ways that I can think of off the top of my head:
Support their sponsors
One of the easiest ways to say thanks for a job well done is to simply take a couple seconds and look at who’s buying ads on your favorite blogs and if there’s something being marketing which interests you, click through to check it out. The act of clicking an affiliate link doesn’t put money in your bloggers pocket but it does reinforce with the affiliate company that the blog has pushed traffic to their website and this act alone is valuable to both the blogger and the advertiser.
Support their commenters
One of my favorite ways to support a blog is to read their comments and click through to supportive, helpful commentators. Again, this doesn’t make the blog owner any money but what it does do is prove to the person who left the comment that the time they spent leaving a comment was well received. I get to learn a lot from a lot of great bloggers this way but it also helps encourage people to leave helpful comments which is the best way to support a blog.
Tweet about them
People blog for a number of reasons but regardless of why a blogger takes the time to write posts on the web, telling your followers on Twitter is a great way to help encourage them to continue writing great comments. You can also Digg them or list them on Stumble Upon if you’ve really enjoyed their content.
By ads on their website
A lot of bloggers sell ads on the side of their sites, why not help them out by promoting your own products and services?
Post a link to their story on another website
If you enjoy reading something on one blog and think it could help support and article on another, why not take a few minutes and share the link there? I often post supportive, helpful links in the comments of a blog to help the owner know about other great blogs. It helps both blogs become stronger, better and more co-operative!
Send money
If there’s no other way for you to say thanks, sending the blogger a couple dollars to help keep them infused with coffee is always nice.
Support their plugins and themes
If your favorite blogger writes plugins or themes for something like WordPress, take a few minutes and download it, comment on it or rate it on the public directories. A lot of bloggers get significant portions of their traffic directly from these directories and your supporting their plugins helps build visitors to their websites.
Leave comments
I can never stress enough how much a great comment encourages a blog owner. If you’ve taken the time to read a blog post and found it helpful, spending just a couple seconds to leave a thank you note and encourage the blogger to continue writing is a great way to say thanks. If you can add to the conversation, correct a glitch or improve the bloggers understanding of the subject matter … all the better!
Post a link to their blog
The holy grail of compliments to a blogger? Posting a link to their content! If you run a website of your own and find something a blogger has written to be helpful, post a link and tell your visitors why you liked what you read. It’s amazing how much this helps a blogger build a bigger audience and how easy it is to do.
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