Speed Linking: 29-Aug-07 (WordPress Plugins)

Some useful WordPress Plugins for the day:

• Have control over your AdSense advertisements on your posts by using the Shylock AdSense Plugin. It is the best of its kind. Online Presence is going to get a makeover quite soon and this plugin will be in action on this site then.
• Generate click heat maps for your site by using the WordPress Click Tracking Plugin. Its simple to install and use.
• Mashable has a huge list of 300+ WordPress tools. Now that’s really a comprehensive list!!
• If you are a statistics freak and want to know what’s going on in your blog at real time, use the Live Plugin. You can watch as people are visiting your pages, leaving comments, and grabbing your feeds.
• Handle affiliate links and 301 redirects with ease by using Urban Giraffe’s, Redirection Plugin. There will be no need to modify the .htaccess file anymore if you use this plugin.

Popularity: 21% [?]

AuctionAds get a makeover

AuctionAds has been given a makeover. The AuctionAds blog post by Peter Galvin mentions the following:

• New “Web 2.0? Ad Creative’s:  Login to your account and go to the “Get Code” page. You will notice a sleek new ad design with multiple color schemes to choose from that we think will increase click-through rates to your ads (which will result in you earning more money).
• Optimized Ad Images:  Our ad code is now optimized so that the auction images are no longer stretched or distorted.  This makes for a cleaner ad appearance and should also improve clicks.
• Better Ad Network Performance:  We have doubled the size of our hardware infrastructure and optimized it to ensure near 100% uptime of ad serving (and to make sure your ads are served lighting fast).
• AuctionAds.com has a Brand New Look!

The site design has been given a slight uplift even though its basically the same. The part that interested me was the new Ad layouts and the improved server infrastructure.

Lets hope this brings some ray of hope to publishers using AuctionAds.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Analytics for your Blog

Web Analytics as defined at Wikipedia is the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.

Data collected almost always includes web traffic reports. It may also include e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information, user performance data such as click heat mapping, or other custom metrics as needed. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign’s audience response.

The simplest way to analyze the traffic patterns is by looking at your web server logs. This can be a fairly tedious task though. There are various tools available that can simplify this task. Most of them require you to embed a small piece of JavaScript code on your pages. Given below are some of the popular analytics tools available currently. This is not a comprehensive list by any means.

Google Analytics
Google purchased a company called Urchin in 2005 and this went on to become Google Analytics. GA is available for free and provides an extensive toolkit to analyze your web traffic. I personally use GA on this blog and many other sites that I run. The power comes from its ease of use and the power to drill down to the details that you are interested in.

Read more

Popularity: 45% [?]

The importance of upgrades

We all find it painful and time consuming to upgrade our server software every few weeks. After all, we want to spend time writing articles rather than upgrading the software.

I fell prey to an SQL injection hack yesterday on my YPOPs! website which runs on a combination of PostNuke and PNphpBB. My hosting provider, ICDSoft, was quick to detect this and shut down the site for a few hours to prevent further attacks. I spent a good 4 hours yesterday upgrading to the latest releases and applying all the security patches released after that.

I’ve learnt a few good lessons from this now:

• Subscribe to new release alerts for the software you’re using on your server.
• Ensure you upgrade your server software for each and every security patch/upgrade that is released. After all, having your site up and running is more valuable to you and your business than it being shut down for a few hours after an attack.

Popularity: 12% [?]

My Top 5 WordPress Plugins

This is a post taking off from where David left off on his blog titled Top 5 essential WordPress plugins. Before I list my Top 5 plugins, let me thank David for introducing me to a wonderful plugin called cforms for creating contact forms in your blog. cforms does not find a mention on my list since I’ve just started using it. If I do this post again in a few months from now, it would surely be on the list!

Here goes my Top 5 WordPress Plugins in no particular order:

#1 Popularity Contest

This is the easiest way to determine Your “Top 10 Posts” to add to the sidebar! Its highly customizable and easy to use. Use it along with the sidebar widget for it.

#2 WordPress Automatic Upgrade

It doesn’t get any easier than this to upgrade your blog to the latest version of WordPress. A couple of clicks and you’re done! The Online Presence Blog is running on WordPress 2.2.2 and the upgrade was done using this plugin. It takes backups for your data to ensure that if in the event something goes wrong, you don’t have to pull your hair out!! Err…I don’t have any to do that in any case ;-)

#3 Sitemap Generator

I use two sitemap generators on this site. One of them is for Google XML Sitemaps and the other is called Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. The XML sitemap is submitted to Google & Yahoo to help index this blog better. The other one helps me in generating a sitemap for my readers to browse.

#4 aLinks

This helps in automatically converting words to links. For instance, if I would like the word PayPerPost, to automatically get converted into an affiliate link, this is the tool to use. I don’t need to remember the affiliate link. I just enter it once into the plugin and it takes care of converting the words to links.

#5 Aizatto’s Related Posts

This is a wonderful plugin that adds a list of related posts to the end of your post and into your RSS feeds as well. It couldn’t get easier to have your old posts come back to life by getting mentioned on a newer post thanks to this plugin.

What’s your list of Top 5 WordPress Plugins?

Popularity: 23% [?]

Online Marketing Monthly Magazine

Online Marketing Monthly Magazine is a recently launched magazine which is giving out its first issue for free!

Annual subscription within USA costs only $47 and for International subscribers its $147. It seems a bargain price.

In any case, go ahead and download their first issue for free to get a feel for the magazine.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Speed Linking: 09-Aug-07

Useful links for the day:

• Pronet Advertising has an interesting idea of capitalizing on user errors. Basically an interesting concept of customizing your 404 error page.
• Do you want to have your posts submitted to 16 social bookmarking sites automatically? Try out the OnlyWire plugin for WordPress.
• Do you need free/stock images for your site? Sandra has an article which consolidates a large list of stock image sites.

Enjoy!

Popularity: 15% [?]

Guide to Social Bookmarking

I came across a very good video on social bookmarking at CommonCraft which I thought of sharing with all of you. The video focuses only on del.icio.us but can be used for other similar bookmarking sites as well.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Advertise @ Online Presence

After receiving a few emails on this topic, I’ve finally decided to open up direct advertising options on Online Presence.

To start off with I will only have text advertisements available on the sidebar. Banner advertisements options will be made available soon.

If you are interested in advertising here, do visit the Advertising @ Online Presence page and submit the form. The submission process is straight forward and won’t take too much off your time.

Popularity: 13% [?]

Improving popularity of your blog

So you’ve started a blog. You’re writing good content…But it does not seem like anyone is reading it besides you!!

How do you get traffic to your site? How do you improve its popularity? There are several ways to do so…

1. Good Layout: You might be writing good content, but you also need to ensure that you’ve got a good site layout which is uncluttered and easy to navigate. This will ensure that your readers find the relevant content quickly. Also, if you do intend on using a free theme, do customize it a bit so that it stands out from the crowd.

2. SEO Friendly: Ensure you have your site optimized for search engines. Getting your posts indexed periodically by search engines like Google and Yahoo! is absolutely essential. Ensure you add a sitemap to your site. If you’re using a self-hosted blog running on WordPress there is a plugin available which automates the entire task. All you need to do is to submit it once to Google and your posts will be indexed faster than usual after that.

3. Feeds: Make your posts available via an RSS/Atom Feed. Most blogs support this already, but ensure you’ve got the RSS subscription badges visible on the site for people to locate it. Many surveys seem to suggest that full text feeds are better in the long run. Use sites like FeedBurner to manage your feeds. They provide a host of additional features over what WordPress provides. One of the things that you can use is FeedBurner MyBrand which serves feeds for your site directly from your site without redirecting to FeedBurner.

4. Social Bookmarking: Have plugins like addThis or Sociable (there are many others!) installed on your site so that its convenient for readers to bookmark your articles. Do not clutter it with too many bookmarking sites though! Also, don’t forget to join sites like Technorati, BumpZee, BlogCatalog, and MyBlogLog. These sites can help you get a lot of traffic and they are good sites for socializing.

5. Socialize: Its essential that you visit other sites in your niche area and comment on articles they post. Ensure its constructive and relevant comments. This is a way for readers from other sites to get to know you. You also get noticed within that niche area and might get opportunities to guest blog.

6. Trade Links: I am not sure if this is so useful now, with Google clamping down heavily. A good example is what happened with John Chow where he got bumped down badly in the rankings at Google. In my personal opinion writing good content is better off in the long run in building traffic than participating in link train posts!

7. Trade Advertisements: If you don’t want to pay for advertising your blog, you could try out adgridwork. You will need to add a small advertisement widget to your site to show advertisements. For every ad impression shown on your site, your own advertisement (for your blog) will be shown on sites participating in their network. All this for free!

8. Trade Reviews: We have sites like ReviewBack where you can write a review for another site in exchange for that site writing a review for you. All this for free. If you can selectively choose good blogs to trade reviews with, it could help in building back links and traffic to your site. Be choosy though and don’t review sites which are not related to your blog’s focus area.

If you can think of any additional areas to focus on, please do drop in a comment.

Popularity: 56% [?]

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