Blue Mushrooms Affiliate Marketing

Why I’m dumping AdBrite

Sapphire — Fri, 14 May 2010 19:58:07 +0000

Until recently, I had AdBrite running on a couple of my sites and was pleased with the results. Then I set up a new AdBrite slot on two of the sites – a leaderboard. I put the code into my website, and my website broke. Why? Because AdBrite sticks a 14px graphic at the end of the leaderboard that says “Your Ad Here.” This caused the main body of the ad to spill over onto the next line, extending the header by about 90 pixels.

I would’ve gotten screenshots if I’d imagined for one second it would turn out like this.

I emailed support and asked them how to fix the problem since it wasn’t actually a 728×90 ad, and naturally that’s what we all design sites for. Their response to a publisher of several years: I should redesign my whole freakin’ site around their funky-sized ads.

Mind you, that little addition to the banner ad was also creating a naked, followable link back to them. You know, the kind Google doesn’t like. It used to be you could opt out of displaying that link, back when Google didn’t give a hoot, but now you can’t. I don’t know if Google makes an exception for links to AdBrite, but why would they? Why would I want to risk it? I started looking for a replacement.

Then my visitors started reporting fake antivirus warnings from my sites. Are you kidding me? I removed all AdBrite ads, and guess what? They disappeared?

Forget that!

So I’ve dumped AdBrite from most of my sites (the ones that get any real traffic, anyway). I’ve found a great replacement that works on a couple of my sites: AdsDaq. Nice ads, and you can easily exclude categories like casinos, weight loss, teeth whitening, etc. No more having to screen each ad individually like I did on AdBrite. It’s saving me time and at least doubling my income compared to AdBrite.

Some of my sites need different solutions so I’m still looking for CPM networks for them. If you have any recommendations for really low-traffic sites, please let me know!

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on May 14, 2010 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Wordpress 2.9 “missed schedule” future posts error

Sapphire — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:37:03 +0000

As always, the new version of Wordpress works great on most servers, but not on some others. One common issue is scheduled posts failing to post. If you look in your Edit screen, they’ll say in orange “Missed Schedule.” You may be able to fix them on the fly by using Quick Edit (not regular edit – it doesn’t work!) and changing the status of the post to published. That solution worked for some people, but not for me. And even if it works, it destroys the whole point, which is not to have to sit there at exactly the minute you want the post published and click stuff to make that happen.

What worked for me was one very simple modification in the wp-includes/cron.php file:

Change

wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (‘ timeout’ => 0.01, ‘ blocking’ => false));

To 20 seconds:

wp_remote_post ($cron_url, Array (‘ timeout’ => 20, ‘ blocking’ => false));

This solution did not work for everyone. Some people found upgrading to the latest Yet Another Related Posts Plugin did the trick. Another option that worked for a number of users was the Scheduled MIAs plugin, which I opted not to use because you have to sign in to some service I’m not familiar with to get the plugin.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 27, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

How to merge blogs together

Sapphire — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:16:14 +0000

Maybe you will never, ever decide to merge the posts from one of your Wordpress blogs into another. But if you do, as I once did, you might find this list of instructions helpful. Terminology check: “merging” blog refers to the blog that’s going to have all its posts moved into another one, and the one that’s receiving those posts is called the “merged” blog.

Backup AT LEAST your databases. Nothing about this should affect the files on your server, but it’s very important that you’re able to reload an old version of your database just in case something goes wrong. Then you can start over when you’ve figured out what went wrong.
Compare the category and tag structure of your blogs. Before you merge anything, you want to make sure the categories and tags from the merging blog match the one they’re being merged into. Wordpress has several tools built in to help you with this (no plugins required!):
- Click Posts, then Edit (on the merging blog). Use the filters to select the posts whose categories you want to change. You can now select as many of those posts as you want, then select “Edit” from the Bulk Actions drop down (top left). That will open an Ajax window. Click the categories you want those posts to appear in – they all will have to be identical.
- Wordpress also has a “category to tag” converter on the Categories page – near the bottom. When you click that link, you find there are two buttons at the top: Categories to Tags and Tags to Categories. Using either of these, you can do just what they say: convert a category to a tag, or a tag to a category.
- Give this some thought. There are several ways to structure the merged posts. Make sure you’ve come up with an easy navigation system, and then use these tools to fit your posts into it.
Once you’ve done that, use Wordpress’ exporting feature (under Tools) in the merging blog. It’ll create a file on your hard drive.
Go to the merged blog and use Import under the Tools menu. It may ask questions, like whether you want all the merging posts attributed to a certain author. Just answer the questions, and it’ll do the rest.
Now look at the new site. The posts are in there. Does the menu make sense? Does anything need to be changed? Do you want to link to any of the new posts from old ones? Feature any of the new ones?
It’s pretty important to redirect people from your old post locations to the new ones, both so they can find them and so the search engines won’t penalize you for dupe content. How you set up redirects depends what you’re trying to achieve. If the old posts were on another domain, you can redirect your entire domain. If it was a subfolder of the main domain, you may need to write several different redirects to get everything forwarding.
If your blogs linked to one another and you want to correct the now inaccurate hyperlinks, use the Search and Replace plugin. It’s very powerful, and gives you lots of options to make sure you change the links exactly where you want to and never where you don’t.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 23, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

The market value of authenticity

Sapphire — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 15:26:39 +0000

I’ve been reading Seth Godin’s latest free PDF book, What Matters Now. It’s a very short read, but it makes you think. What it got me thinking about is authenticity, which is generally the last think you think of as having any place in the marketing world.

Marketing is about lies, right? It’s about convincing people your cheaply made crap (that you copied from some poor schmo) is worth tons more than it’s really worth, so they’ll buy it and make you rich. We all see these stories every day. We all buy some of the crap, at least until we learn how often we’re being lied to. Marketers target the young not because they spend more or have more to spend, but because they don’t have as good a bullshit radar as most of us develop as we mature. Marketing is a pile of cynical, greed-driven lies.

Except when it’s not. I think I got so proud of my bullshit radar that I stopped noticing the times something wasn’t bullshit. I started noticing again recently, and I’m seeing a shift toward “no bullshit” marketing. I see commercials that make fun of the claims you’d expect them to make about their products. I see ads that actually contain useful information. I see products that totally rock getting nothing but word of mouth advertising.

As we slide into a recession bad enough to make everyone cynical, what marketing campaigns are going to work? What does a family of four with uncertain employment spend its money on? Why would they spend it on you? In a market like this, the number of people who can afford to spend money on crap shrinks dramatically. Suddenly, the usual old pitches that worked on everybody from the middle class up start working on only that small fraction of the populace who are in denial or so wealthy they can’t be affected by a recession.

Now really is the time for authenticity. Keep marketing simple. Make promises you can keep. Tell people what you’ve got and what it will do for them without exaggeration. Get your credibility up there, and they will remember you.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 19, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Test your websites for accessibility

Sapphire — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:50:15 +0000

Andy Beal recently talked about making sure websites are accessible to people with vision or hearing difficulty, and gave a very important reason – beyond “it’s the right thing to do” – why webmasters should care:

That is 1 in 5 Americans cannot experience the web without the assistance of some form of accessibility enhancement. I had no idea.

It’s not just people who are legally blind or deaf. As we age, most of us will get cataracts, and for a few years, they’re not operable. During that time, glowing screens are not easy to read. These visitors need higher contrast between text and background colors than viewers without cataracts. Or they may prefer podcasts they can listen to over written text. But don’t forget there are varying degrees of hearing loss. Most websites don’t use audio, but if yours does, you need to make sure any spoken words are available in text format, too.

Before you think, “Oh, great, what a pain in the ass”, consider a few things:

People who are losing vision or hearing due to age are mostly currently Baby Boomers, who have money and like spending it. It’s not in your best interest to frustrate them away from your site.
Other people with disabilities or impairments frequently have money to spend, too. I’m not sure why the idea persists that all disabled people are poor, but this is just not true.
Since offline stores don’t trouble themselves much to accommodate blind and deaf customers, here’s your chance to give them an easy, satisfying shopping experience they’ll want to repeat.
The changes you make will often also enhance a bot’s view of your site, which can raise your SE rankings. It’s really a win-win.

You have three choices. Upgrade all your websites to make them at least reasonably accessible. Make sure all NEW sites and redesigns from here on out are accessible. Ignore all this, and lose money.

Accessibility is not that difficult

Webcredible has 10 tests for accessibility that not only tell you what to look for, but how to fix it. Most of the fixes are incredibly simple and quick, like making sure images have the optimal alt text. I think this post is a better option than the automated services that scan your website, because they don’t catch everything. By doing it manually, you assure the best results.

Most of my sites were already reasonably accessible – there wasn’t that much work to be done. If you put your site through Wave and only get 3-4 accessibility errors, and none of them actually prevent anyone from getting the full benefit of your site, you’re doing okay.

Changes in direction

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 15, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Automatically optimize Wordpress images with Smush It

Sapphire — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:36:32 +0000

One way to make your sites load faster is to reduce the size of your graphic files as much as you can without losing image quality. SmushIt is a Yahoo service that does this for you. WP-SmushIt is a Wordpress plugin that does this automatically for you. As you upload images to your posts, WP-SmushIt sends them to SmushIt for lossless compression – that means, they get compressed as small as possible without looking any different.

WP-SmushIt can also compress images in your theme. Under your “Appearance” sidebar, you’ll see a WP-SmushIt link. Press it, and it shows you a list of your themes. Click the one you’re using. You get a list of all the graphic files in that theme. Select them all, or individually if you prefer. At the bottom, click the “submit query” button. SmushIt compresses the files and tells you how much it saved on each one. That’s it. You don’t have to update anything.

Now, once in a while Yahoo’s service skips a beat and your images do not get compressed. This is fixable. Every now and then, go into your Media Library from the sidebar (click “media”, then underneath it, “library”). It will show all your uploaded photos from your articles, the post they’re connected with, and in the final column, the current state of Smushiness. For example:

“Reduced by X%” means you’ve already Smushed it. There’s a “re-smush it” link now, but every time I’ve clicked that, it gives me the message “No savings.” Which is cool, because that means you’re getting maximum smushage the first time around.
“Not Processed” means you’ve never tried to Smush-It. Go ahead and do it.
Sometimes you get “Smush.it error: Failed to create a temp dir.” This is the one that tells you Yahoo’s service borked – like I was talking about above. Just “re-smush” until the SmushIt servers get less overloaded, and you’ll get the “Reduced by X%” message.

This is also a way to Smush all the images you’ve already uploaded. Unfortunately there’s no way to do it in bulk, but you only have to do it once. Checking the media library for error messages like “Failed to create a temp dir” allows you to Smush any images that were uploaded while the SmushIt server was on the fritz.

This plugin has made a significant different for load times on several of my websites.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 11, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Robots.txt versus .htaccess

Sapphire — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:34:05 +0000

The robots.txt file seems so simple, but you can screw things up ever so slightly and end up not getting the results you want. The good news is, once you figure out the problem, the SEs generally pick it up pretty quickly. The .htaccess file is similar, except that it’s more powerful and therefore more confusing to a lot of people. I, and most webmasters, only really use .htaccess for redirecting.

What’s important is understanding how these two files work together, and can work against each other if you make a mistake.

Some basics about robots.txt

As you probably already know, robots.txt tells SE robots which parts of your site they should visit and which they should ignore. For example, it’s a good idea to block the administrative pages of your blog that visitors can’t get into without a password. What would be the point of having that show up in the SERPs? You may also want to block pages that you don’t want to pass pagerank onto. (“Sculpting pagerank”, as this practice is called, is controversial. Generally, I don’t think it’s that valuable, but some people do.) You may also want to block a private set of pages that’s only viewable to subscribers.

There are a few pages you never ever want to block via robots.txt: your privacy page, contact page and, of course, your homepage.

Blocking versus redirecting

Redirecting (usually by a 301) is done in .htaccess, and it sends a visitor’s browser from one URL to another. For example, I recently got rid of my old directory and decided to send its considerable number of visitors to my advertising page, so I set up a redirect in htaccess:

redirect 301 /sites/ http://bluemushrooms.com/advertise

At the time I did this, I had “/sites/” blocked in my robots.txt file. This meant the search engines couldn’t pick up on the fact that the “sites” folder was gone and they should now be indexing the “advertise” page instead. I had to remove the line blocking “sites” in robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sites/

This is important to understand if you really want the SEs to lose a page or subfolder of your domain. If you wanted to block the SEs without redirecting visitors anywhere, you would just add a block to robots.txt. If you just wanted to redirect visitors without blocking SE bots, you would just set up a redirect in .htaccess.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 7, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Improving a domain is not just about SEO

Sapphire — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:28:36 +0000

In recent weeks, I detailed the moves I’d made to improve this domain. Most of those moves had to do with SEO: setting up for better inbounds, setting up for better ranking keywords and recovering page rank – the last of which, of course, is strictly a Google thing. During the first couple of weeks I set out to do this, I saw some improvements in how Google was listing this domain in the SERPs. I increased the sales value of the domain from a handshake to several hundred dollars by the most conservative metric. The improvements in Bing and Yahoo stuck, but the ones in Google dwindled – somewhat. Not enough to complain, but enough to make me go “hmm.” Then I figured it out.

Content, content, content

For the first couple of weeks, I was writing new, link-worthy articles and posting them every four days. Some were about rehabilitating the domain, others were about dealing with sploggers, yet others identified sploggers I had found stealing my content so that any of you who have SEO blogs could check them out and make sure your content wasn’t being stolen as well.

While I was putting out that content, Google was ranking me a little better, even though Webmaster Tools still shows a lot of pages I removed about a month ago, and lots of html mistakes I fixed weeks ago. Despite Google not updating all that, it was ranking me better and sending me more traffic.

All of this suggests one thing: that while Bing and Yahoo liked the SEO improvements, Google was more impressed with the new content. Google takes a very long time to recognize SEO improvements, possibly because they can be so superficial. This also explains why some sites rank highly even though they’re violating Google’s webmaster rules: because they keep pumping out content.

It’ll be a long time before I have good new inbounds and better pagerank. In a lot of ways, rebuilding a domain is harder than just starting over with a new domain. But the value of rehabilitating domains rather than just buying new ones is the age of the domain, which still gives you an advantage over competitors, all other things being equal.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on December 3, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Plugins to protect Wordpress blogs from sploggers

Sapphire — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 18:35:26 +0000

I’ve tried out a few plugins recently to stop sploggers from stealing my content. My favorite was ©Feed, but unfortunately it causes errors if you use it alongside any Feedburner redirecting plugin.That plugin does everything I want, otherwise – maybe someday it will work.

Now I’m using Anti-Feed Scraper Message, which is a simple plugin that allows you to insert any paragraph you want at the bottom of your post, as viewed by a feedreader. The message – like the one in ©Feed – is visible to all your readers, so remember this when you’re composing the message. I inserted a copyright notice and a digital fingerprint into mine. So far, this seems to be making sploggers want to stop using my content – the one splogged post I found since then was removed rather quickly once the blogger had a look at what his automated sploggy software had picked up.

I’m also using Anti-Leech, which I’ve recommended before. Today, for the first time, I found a stolen post from one of my other websites that had the AntiLeech graphic and everything. D’oh! I added an identifiable part of the URL to my list of user-agents who need to receive fake content, so any future splogging from the site should be amusing.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on November 24, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.

Writing for traffic

Sapphire — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:25:31 +0000

If there’s a trick to getting schmillions of visitors without a huge marketing budget, I don’t know it. But I have found that posting worthwhile stuff regularly leads to a steady increase in traffic.

By “worthwhile” I mean articles that are worth reading now and will be worth reading a few years from now. You can’t always predict that, but there are certain posts I’ve found just aren’t worth it:

What I’m Up To Now. In 6 months, no one will care. Translate these posts into some kind of lesson for the ages, or find another topic.
Here Are Some Cool Links. Your readers of the moment might like these posts, might they’ll never get into the SERPs. If you say something worthwhile about webpages you’re linking to, that’s different.
This, That And The Other. Each page or article on your site needs to stick to one topic. If you’re a blogger, don’t bother talking about several topics in one post because they’re all stuff you’ve been reading about lately. Write a post about each subject, and you’ve got several articles for the SERPs or other linkers to like. If you’re clustering topics because you don’t have enough to say about each one, find enough to say about each one.

There just aren’t any shortcuts that I’ve found. Every one you try, the search engine’s catch on eventually.

[This] article originally appeared on BlueMushrooms.com on November 20, 2009 and is copyrighted. If you are reading it this notice anywhere but in your feedreader, it has been stolen by a splogger. Digital Fingerprint: 4a918e5e547a9aae171ee15c51e9e595.