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Omits-Bagels posted:Well, I decided to change my theme on my travel advice site. I haven't gotten all the kinks out yet and I need to change a few things but I am pretty happy with the change overall. I'm finally going to write some more content as I haven't touched the site in a long time. Let me know what you all think or if there is anything I should change. I would switch your comment system over to Disqus if possible, I've seen it increase responses on comments on some of my sites because you readers and respond with disqus/facebook/google/twitter logins. It will import all existing comments for you as well. Your mobile theme looks good too.
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Mar 22, 2013 19:54
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Omits-Bagels posted:Well, I decided to change my theme on my travel advice site. I haven't gotten all the kinks out yet and I need to change a few things but I am pretty happy with the change overall. I'm finally going to write some more content as I haven't touched the site in a long time. Let me know what you all think or if there is anything I should change. Really impressive start. Since '07 my main sideline has been consulting with travel bloggers and you're already ahead of the curve. It's Friday at 4:30 so it's crunch time before the weekend but I'll give you some more detailed feedback next chance I get. edit: Ran a quick audit, read my advice on Page 17 to Verskans about image optimization. Your images are about 90% heavier than they could be if lossless compressed. More detailed feedback later, might not be until Monday. mcsuede fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Mar 22, 2013 |
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Mar 22, 2013 22:28
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I graduated college and I'm leaving to backpack the world for awhile and decided to make a blog. It's mostly for me, but it would be cool if it made money or got a following so I could get sponsored trips. Any feedback appreciated. https://www.whereswil.com
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Mar 23, 2013 01:03
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RTB posted:I'm a big fan of the site in general. Lots of good info since I'm hoping to spend 6-8 months backpacking in the next year or two. Good idea about the speed of the slider. I'll look into slowing it. I don't have a mailing list. What is the benefit of a mailing list and how would it make me money? Thanks for the tips!
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Mar 23, 2013 01:37
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FCKGW posted:I would switch your comment system over to Disqus if possible, I've seen it increase responses on comments on some of my sites because you readers and respond with disqus/facebook/google/twitter logins. It will import all existing comments for you as well. I had Disqus but I think it was slowing my site down. I'll have to give it a shot again.
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Mar 23, 2013 01:39
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mcsuede posted:Really impressive start. Since '07 my main sideline has been consulting with travel bloggers and you're already ahead of the curve. It's Friday at 4:30 so it's crunch time before the weekend but I'll give you some more detailed feedback next chance I get. Well, the site has been around since 2010 so it isn't exactly new but it has been dormant for about 2 years. But I would love any feedback. And about the image optimization... I had the smush.it plugin but for some reason it recently stopped working. Not sure why. EDIT: They updated smush.it today and now it works. Omits-Bagels fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Mar 23, 2013 |
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Mar 23, 2013 02:02
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smush.it breaks all the time because Yahoo is terrible (MARISSA PLZFIXKTHX). CW Image Optimizer or Smushykid are better solutions but require root (or convincing the server admin to install littleutils / smushykid). Mailing lists are essential. The strength of your list is basically the strength of you earnings potential, very few people online get anywhere without really solid email marketing.
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Mar 23, 2013 20:36
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Omits-Bagels posted:I don't have a mailing list. What is the benefit of a mailing list and how would it make me money? mcsuede posted:Mailing lists are essential. The strength of your list is basically the strength of you earnings potential, very few people online get anywhere without really solid email marketing. mcsuede summed it up nicely More specifically: 1 - You can email your list every time a new post comes out. This helps you in two ways. First it brings more people to your site every month. Second, it makes you less vulnerable to the whims of Google. If you lose all of your search rankings tomorrow, you would still be getting traffic from your list. 2 - You can build a long term rapport with people. Show them repeatedly that you can provide them value and they will be more likely to refer their friends and/or buy affiliate offers you recommend. Want to write an e-book some day? Wouldn't it be nice to have a bunch of people who already love your content that you can sell it to? 3 - If you ever decide to sell the site, a double opt-in list (Mailchimp or Aweber) is a valuable asset and increases your sale price.
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Mar 24, 2013 01:28
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Anyone interested in taking up writing about learning music? I'm listed in the OP for my blog but now I'm on the other side and looking for affiliates. A conversion will pay you $75-150 in a niche that gets 300,000 searches and $1.10 CPC. PM me!
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Mar 24, 2013 07:50
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RTB posted:mcsuede summed it up nicely It's also by nature a much more intimate medium and has much higher conversion rates for basically any action, as long as you target. There are so many sophisticated segmenting email services now. GetResponse.com and GetVero.com are the two I've been playing with lately.
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Mar 25, 2013 14:21
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RTB posted:mcsuede summed it up nicely I think I never considered a mailing list because I always envisioned my site as a travel resource and not a blog. I don't post new content much but I'm thinking about changing that. Thanks for the tip.
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Mar 25, 2013 16:31
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Speaking of mailing lists, does anyone have any suggestions for pay-as-you-go list providers? I have a blog that has just under Mailchimp's 2000 susbscriber limit for free accounts. The only issue is that this is a blog for Black Friday only, meaning I send probably 4-5 emails for one week out of the year. Moving to a monthly paid plan seems pointless and Mailchimp's Pay-as-you-go plan seems a bit much at $60 per send at that level.
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Mar 25, 2013 18:09
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Omits-Bagels: A bit more feedback, took another quick look while watching a progress bar. 1) Add a Read More link instead of the elipsis after excerpts. Why this isn't standard on every theme I have no idea. 2) You need to rel=nofollow and mask your affiliate links ASAP. You also need to have a page with a disclaimer about affiliate links and a privacy policy. Not only does Google look for this information, the FCC requires it by law. 3) Try to lower the number of sitewide links you have in the sidebar in the "article archive" section. Or, at the very least, rel=nofollow all of the links in that section. Personally I'd eliminate that section and move all of that content into the top menu, using child menu items where appropriate. 4) Add more text content above category archives like http://thesavvybackpacker.com/category/travel-tips/. Turn "Money Saving Tips, How To Avoid Scams, Solo Traveler Info & Tons Of Great Advice" into 250-500 words. Every category archive, especially how you use them, is an opportunity to feed Google more contextual information. Co-citation is super important now. 5) Strip /category/ from your URLs in WordPress SEO. There's no reason for it--you're not trying to rank for the phrase category and having /category/ in the URL doesn't provide anything useful to a human. While you're at it Follow, Noindex your Tags, Author, Format taxonomies if you haven't already. 6) Increase the number of excerpts shown on the front page to 15. The default 10 you're showing now means you're running out of post content being shown before you run out of sidebar. That's unattractive and people aren't afraid to scroll. This is in the general WordPress settings under Reading. 7) Add additional calls to action in your footer. Like on Facebook, Click Here for Our Great Content in your Email (list submission form), etc. When people hit the bottom that's another chance to convert them. Right now it's just...empty. 8) After your post content you have doubled up calls for social shares. Ditch one or the other. I recommend using Digg Digg and enabling both the floating bar and buttons after content, ditching whatever you're using now. Async all the buttons in Digg Digg and reduce down to only the networks you want to be active with. For travel, I suggest Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest. You should be posting all content to a G+ Page (to get it indexed super fast) but whether or not you include the +1 button in your social share options is up to you. The goal is not to overwhelm with choice. ...and said progress bar is almost done, that's all the free advice for this moment. mcsuede fucked around with this message at 04:31 on Mar 26, 2013 |
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Mar 26, 2013 04:23
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So I realize that I have almost totally ignored SEO up until this date, choosing to focus on referral traffic, social and content development alone. I recently went through and added structured data to all 600 of my back posts (recipes) and the results have been pretty dramatic. I have essentially tripled my search traffic and the growth hasn’t leveled off yet. Historically 70-75% of my traffic has been referral based but that has been declining recently and I would like to start filling the gap with some active SEO management. Outside of meta tags I really don’t know understand what is going on. And honestly even within the meta tag sphere I am pretty clueless. I used to subscribe to ScribeSEO when it was $30 and I saw a demonstrable uptick in my search traffic. It also trained me to think about my posts a little differently, I especially enjoyed the keyword suggestions and the SEO score. Since unsubscribing I feel like I have lost a lot of my ability and I need something to fill the gap, specifically with keyword analysis and seo review. But outside of that I don’t have a strategy and I don’t know where to begin, I am sitting on a huge amount of content that I could optimize but I feel like that is really only working one angle. I don’t know anything about backlinks or other factors that really affect SEO. All I know is that I am looking at this graph and I want more:  So I guess I am looking for a few things. First and foremost I would like your opinion on wordpress integrated SEO tools that focus on keyword suggestion and post optimization. Then I would like to know what I should read up on next, I would love to read through a few good primers. Finally I was hoping I could get your input on what strategies seem to be effective and what tools you have found useful, paid or otherwise.
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Mar 26, 2013 15:49
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Mcsuede do you do seo as sideline work? Can we get in touch off the forum or pm? MasterControl fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Mar 27, 2013 |
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Mar 27, 2013 00:04
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mcsuede posted:Omits-Bagels: Wow. Thanks a ton. I've started implementing many of your suggestions. So far I've done 3,5,7 and 8. I've started working on #4. I want to write more content but I'm not really sure that else to write about. Any ideas? On a side note: My bounce rate when from about 3% to 50% with my new theme. Hopefully this is just a temporary thing.
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Mar 27, 2013 03:04
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Hey everyone  I blog for bucks in slightly different ways - I'm blogging to try to promote sales of my books rather than googleads etc, but a lot of the issues I face are the same: keywords, getting SEO right, using social media, and just finding the right kind of exposure / my audience. I'm mostly here with a question of StumbleUpon. I get a /lot/ of traffic from there (it's my second highest referer) but they spend a lot less time on my site (only 43 seconds compared to 3m 3s). They also have a higher bound rage, and take fewer actions. Will this hurt how I rank to sites? Is it worth it to keep stumbling the pages if it's going to keep upping my bounce rate and lowering my average time per visit? It's hard to tell what type of effects its had on sales.
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Mar 29, 2013 23:37
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So I should put a privacy policy page if I have affiliate links? Good to know. I just throw them up like no one's business.
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Mar 30, 2013 00:45
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therealjon_ posted:So I should put a privacy policy page if I have affiliate links? Good to know. No, you need a affiliate disclaimer, big difference. Tons of examples below, http://www.marketinginsidersecrets.com/affiliate-disclaimer/ http://www.andyjenkinsblog.com/affiliate-disclaimer/ http://www.lenagott.com/affiliate-disclaimer/ http://www.ihostinghq.com/page/affiliatedisclaimer http://www.praxisnow.com/legal/affiliate-disclaimer
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Mar 30, 2013 04:18
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I'm using prettylink now to mask my affiliat links, do I want to use 307 (Temporary) or 301 (Permanent) redirection? I'm not sure what the advantage of either is? Thanks!
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Mar 30, 2013 20:55
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MasterControl posted:Mcsuede do you do seo as sideline work? Can we get in touch off the forum or pm? Yes I do, sent you a PM. Anjasa posted:Hey everyone Bounce and time per visit are both extremely unreliable and more importantly, not very important. What's important is revenue. Do you have goal tracking set up in GA so you can segment and calculate what the average value of a stumble is? Beyond that, it's probable that your landing pages aren't designed for converting a stumble well. You should be trying to capture emails from that traffic for list building purposes (and sales down the road). Offer a carrot in exchange for the email, you're a writer so give away the first chapter or write a short ebook of some sort. Social media visits of any kind should be focused on converting that visitor into a more tangible asset (your list). mcsuede fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Apr 1, 2013 |
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Apr 1, 2013 03:53
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So I got an unsolicited pitch from a content placement person.quote:Hi, I see two possibilities here: 1. They're hoping to sucker me into handing over the keys to the kingdom so they can turn an aged domain into a viagra shop. 2. They're looking to create backlinks for their own affiliate products. Assuming it's possibility 2, this could actually be in my interest. My site is sinking without fresh content, and I don't mind giving free placements for affiliate links in exchange for traffic (I have a very steady ad CTR), Facebook likes (which I'm already generating with a dead site), and the potential to step up to email marketing or ebook sales. Anyone had experiences with such a shop? On a scale of 1 to disreputable, what am I looking at?
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Apr 2, 2013 12:01
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Usually when I get these they are paying between $125 - $300 for the year along with providing an article, I usually scrap the article they give me and just throw their link into one of mine. As long as they aren't accessing your site I don't see why not though.
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Apr 2, 2013 12:06
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snagger posted:So I got an unsolicited pitch from a content placement person. It's definitely #2, they're using sponsored posting as part of a backlink strategy. They don't care about the traffic, only the link and your site authority leaking through to theirs. It's not unusual at all. If you go ahead with it, I would recommend that you set up a different User to post that guest post as so that you don't screw up your Authorship. EDIT: YOU MUST DISCLOSE IF YOU'RE PAID.* I would also make sure the backlink goes to a site that isn't super shady and that the content of the post aligns, at least somewhat, with your niche. Usually the firms that do this type of outreach have already written the content to fit, but it's worth mentioning. If anyone is wanting to dabble in guest blogging, on either end of it, I suggest you check out MyBlogGuest, which is run by Ann Smarty. *Google has updated their standards on guest vs sponsored posts, if you're getting paid for a post Google requires a disclosure that the post is sponsored and "prefers" that any outgoing links are no-followed. This doesn't apply to guest posts, as guest posts are unpaid. The FCC's new disclosure rules may also apply here. mcsuede fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Apr 4, 2013 |
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Apr 2, 2013 16:59
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e: Eh, nevermind.
Accretionist fucked around with this message at 03:03 on Apr 8, 2013 |
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Apr 4, 2013 23:56
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mcsuede posted:*Google has updated their standards on guest vs sponsored posts, if you're getting paid for a post Google requires a disclosure that the post is sponsored and "prefers" that any outgoing links are no-followed. This doesn't apply to guest posts, as guest posts are unpaid. The FCC's new disclosure rules may also apply here. Awesome edit (and awesome post in the first place). Thank you!
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Apr 5, 2013 15:18
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Can someone point me towards - or provide - a very, very basic walkthrough on switching from a wordpress.com free hosted blog, to paying someone for web hosting and using wordpress so I can monetize the blog and have my own domain name?
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Apr 8, 2013 02:36
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wordpress.com posted:If you are moving to a self-hosted blog using the WordPress.org software, you first need to obtain appropriate web hosting and have your WordPress.org blog/site up and running before transferring your content. Don't go crazy with hosting cost. Shared hosting works fine and you can always switch later if you get a lot of traffic.
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Apr 8, 2013 03:36
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FYI http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/12/hackers-point-large-botnet-at-wordpress-sites-to-steal-admin-passwords-and-gain-server-access/quote:According to reports from HostGator and CloudFlare, there is currently a significant attack being launched at WordPress blogs across the Internet. For the most part, this is a brute-force dictionary-based attack that aim to find the password for the ‘admin’ account that every WordPress site sets up by default.
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Apr 12, 2013 21:46
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Yikes, thanks for sharing.
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Apr 12, 2013 21:50
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Is it necessary to add a disclaimer about affiliate revenue even if you aren't a US citizen? Does it make a difference in rankings or is it just a legal issue for US-based marketers?
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Apr 13, 2013 01:43
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Sleepstupid posted:FYI http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/12/hackers-point-large-botnet-at-wordpress-sites-to-steal-admin-passwords-and-gain-server-access/ Yeah, I've been getting hit hard with this for the past week or so. I installed a wordpress plugin that limits log-in attempts. I just set it to two attempts and then it bans the IP address for one week. Hopefully that stops them.
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Apr 13, 2013 18:00
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Omits-Bagels posted:Yeah, I've been getting hit hard with this for the past week or so. I installed a wordpress plugin that limits log-in attempts. I just set it to two attempts and then it bans the IP address for one week. Hopefully that stops them. It will not, it's massively distributed so you have hundreds of thousands of IPs trying to log in. It appears to just be using "admin" or "sitename" accounts, so if you change the admin account and move the login page from the default that will stop the automated attacks. Better WP Security can do both of those things for you.
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Apr 13, 2013 21:01
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FCKGW posted:It will not, it's massively distributed so you have hundreds of thousands of IPs trying to log in. Thanks for the tip. I just installed it.
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Apr 16, 2013 03:02
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I have a duplicate content question. A majority of my visitors are from the US but about 40% come from the UK, Canada and Australia. I have one page with a lot of affiliate links but they all go to the US amazon site — so I'm sure I'm missing out on a bunch of sales from non-US visitors. I'd like to recreate that page about three times and change the affiliate links for each of those three countries. I'd hate to rewrite all the content for each page but I also don't want to get penalized by google. Any ideas?
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Apr 21, 2013 23:36
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Hey, I've been working on a multiplayer online game for the past few weeks more as a hobby than anything else. However it has taken off somewhat, and in about a week I have a good 400 active players (nearly a thousand have signed up) and have had almost 100,000 page views without any real attempts at publicity or the game even being near completion yet. They're mostly from return players and each player is going through a lot of pages (average is 16). Here's the game if anyone wants to check it out: http://www.bloc.name/bloc/ If I put up a couple of google cpm ads would I even be able to make some extra beer money? It's costing me 10 bucks a month to host, hopefully I can at least cover that. a bad enough dude fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Apr 22, 2013 |
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Apr 22, 2013 09:03
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Omits-Bagels posted:I have a duplicate content question. Download the Amazon Links plugin and register for each separate country's amazon affiliate site (yes it is a ball ache and no, amazon have no plans to change it), the plugin will check the geolocation of each visitor and display the relevant country's amazon affiliate link - woo!
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Apr 22, 2013 11:02
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the mattness posted:Download the Amazon Links plugin and register for each separate country's amazon affiliate site (yes it is a ball ache and no, amazon have no plans to change it), the plugin will check the geolocation of each visitor and display the relevant country's amazon affiliate link - woo! Yeah, I looked into that. The problem I'm facing is that some Canadians prefer to order from the US site because the prices are sometimes less than the canadian site. And Amazon doesn't operate in Australia so I'd like to tailor those links to an Australian retailer.
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Apr 22, 2013 17:10
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a bad enough dude posted:Hey, I've been working on a multiplayer online game... and in about a week I have a good 400 active players (nearly a thousand have signed up) and have had almost 100,000 page views without any real attempts at publicity or the game even being near completion yet. They're mostly from return players and each player is going through a lot of pages (average is 16)... If I put up a couple of google cpm ads would I even be able to make some extra beer money? It's costing me 10 bucks a month to host, hopefully I can at least cover that. Short answer: yes, you can probably make up the cost of hosting and maybe even some extra beer money. Let's say you convert at a pretty standard rate of 1%. Based on your 400 visitors, you'd make $4/month. Place your ads correctly, without overwhelming/offending your regular users, and then as you build traffic that amount should continue to scale. If you were serious about increasing exposure to your game and thus your ads, you should start looking into generating article content (e.g. a blog for your game). However with your primary audience being gamers, and from what I can tell by your homepage, they aren't "casual" gamers, you're probably going to convert at a lost less than the standard rate. You should consider asking for donations or charging money for advanced features (freemium). My suggestion: be honest and direct with your users; tell them you need monetary support and ask them if they'd rather donate/pay for features/see ads. Use a survey widget in your app or send a SurveyMonkey link via email.
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Apr 23, 2013 14:36
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Thanks! I'm going to eventually give donors some cosmetic perks (custom flags and leader portraits, no ads) I think, without doing micro-transactions or whatever that actually affects the game-play. I suspected this was wrong as according to it I could have made more than a hundred bucks just in the last week because I am getting a ton of page views relative to actual visitors. I assume the ad service would just recognize their CPM is going to waste on the same couple of hundred or so people?
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Apr 23, 2013 20:27
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