Archive for August, 2008
A forum for your wordpress blog
Posted by: | CommentsI recently integrated a forum into one of my Wordpress blog and it really is a great thing to add if you have a “hot topic” people are talking about a lot. I will talk about a forum platform that integrates very well with wordpress for a good reason: it was developed by Wordpress developers!
Tell me!
I’m actually surprised no one really talked about it because it deserve the spotlight. The web application I’m talking about is called bbPress. bbPress can be installed without a Wordpress blog, but for that we already have some good forum platforms like vBulleting and phpBB. The real cool thing about bbPress is that it integrates with your Wordpress blog’s database. You can share the same users and login so you don’t really have to manage two different things, it’s really an extension of your blog. It supports what made Wordpress a success: Templates, easy administration interface and plugins.
Full of features?
bbPress doesn’t have the look of traditional forums running phpBB or vBulletin, it looks a little bit lighter but it doesn’t mean less features. Users can have their own avatar or Gravatar, you can have users with different levels of security, they can also add signatures, smiles and all that good stuff you would expect from a forum. If it doesn’t have the feature you want, there’s probably a plugin doing it. It’s really like wordpress. When you look at wordpress without any plugins it’s a good platform, but nothing that impressive. It’s really when you start customizing your template and adding plugins that you understand its power. If you want to have a look at what a forum might look like, you can have a look here:
http://bbpress.org/about/examples/
In the examples you will find the wordpress.org support forums and also the technorati.com support forums. These are two pretty big and important forums so even if bbPress looks light at first sight, it’s packed with features and can scale to a very large forum very easily.
Here’s the official features list from bbPress.org:
-
Fast and light
We keep our code lean so that you get the best experience possible.
-
Simple interface
One of our biggest goals is to keep things simple and make things intuitive. Our dream is that you forget you’re even using the software.
-
Customizable templates
Not everybody likes the same pair of pants, so we allow you to dress up your forums however you like.
-
Highly extensible
bbPress can’t toast your bagels, but a plugin for it sure could!
-
Spam protection
A bundled Akismet plugin offers you an amazing weapon against spam.
-
RSS Feeds
You want feeds? We get ‘em; they’re everywhere.
-
Easy integration with your blog
WordPress and bbPress are siblings, and they get along together a lot better than you and your brother did when you were kids!
So there you go, you can now integrate a nice forum into your wordpress blog without too much pain! 
Do you give your posts the time to live?
Posted by: | CommentsIt’s hard to find a balance between posting 5 articles a day to fill your blog with content and post an extremely good article once in a while. Both ways will kill your blog/website, so it’s extremely important to keep that balance and give your posts the proper time to live!
The mad blogger
The mad blogger post 5-10 articles a day and while the website looks to be filled with content, that content is usually “filler posts” (Not so unique posts just to fill some space). Why is it bad to do that? Well, I’m not saying it’s totally bad because I guess it might work for some websites. Again, it’s a case of “it depends what your website is about”: if you have a news website, of course you should post 5,10,15 articles a day, it’s your job! But let’s say you own a ‘regular’ blog about a particular subject you have some good knowledge of and that your goal is to spread that knowledge and make some money while you’re doing it. If you write five articles a day about your subject, not only you will run out of ideas eventually, but you are not going to market any article. It’s good to spend 5 hours a day writing tons and tons of articles, but what’s the point if no one’s reading them? You have to spend some of that time marketing these articles. By publishing too much content and not having much traffic, you are killing your ideas.
What’s great about writing a blog is to know people read you and also comment on your blog because they like what you do. When you end up on a blog you don’t know, I’m sure you check the average number of comments on the blog just to estimate the website’s popularity. Popularity is extremely important to a lot of users, they like to be part of something, a community. Posting 5 to 10 articles per day on a website not getting a huge amount of traffic will split your comments into these 5-10 posts, making maybe 10 articles with one comment on each. While you have some readers commenting, it’s not that impressive for a new user.
The lazy blogger
The lazy blogger is the complete opposite. I won’t go into details as I’m sure you get the idea. The main thing to understand is that being lazy and not updating the content is not a better idea. While you may end up with a lot more comments on each of your posts, new users will see you don’t update your website too often and this is usually a turn off. We like fresh content don’t we?
The balance is hard to get
I try to stay on a one post a day routine to keep fresh content coming in but also to maximize the number of comments I get per article. I know sometimes it tends toward a 1 post every two days routine, but that’s simply because I don’t want to write crap: if I don’t have time or ideas to write, I simply don’t write and so far it’s never been a major problem in my blogging experience. I try to write quality, not quantity and I’ve talked about it in a previous post: Don’t write just to write something. I also try to let people know about my new blog posts and I give my them the time to live. This way, the articles get some exposure, you haven’t spent your precious time writing for nothing and you maximize your comments possibility.
I guess the way to go is to write the amount you are able to write every day without feeling like you don’t know what to write about. You also have to keep some time to market your new articles, otherwise you are writing for nothing! If you are filled with ideas and could write 20 articles, spare some ideas and you get yourself almost a month worth of ideas on a one post a day routine.
Bottom line is that the balance is extremely hard to get. The best way is to go with what feels natural for you.
New template: -10% bouce rate
Posted by: | CommentsOh that evil bounce rate, always fighting to improve it! Yesterday, I changed the template of my other blog for a much more professional template and I must say I’m impressed. I managed to improve my bounce rate by 10% and I like it. That improvement is certainly not due to returning visitors exploring the new website, because I get a lot more organic traffic coming from search engines than returning visitors. For that reason, I don’t think they have a huge impact, they get diluted in the organic traffic a lot. This is just a great example of how a template can change a lot of things for a blog.
What’s so special with the template?
Nothing, really. It’s just damn more professional and better looking! I got rid of all the non essential stuff and this new template gives a lot more place to what really matters: the content. It’s funny how I haven’t even tweaked the template to improve the bounce rate. Just by being clean, it does the job. I certainly included the related posts plugin which helps a lot I presume but there is still a lot that can be made to make it a lot more a ‘bounce rate killer’.
Should you change too?
Maybe. You know, a blog goes through a lot of different phases before becoming well established and an awesome template won’t help you be that blog if you don’t focus on the content. You see, the new theme I used is the third one for the blog I’m talking about and I can say the first theme was looking extremely average. One day, I noticed I was able to get a little 100-200 uniques a day with that crappy template so I decided to improve it. I just changed the colors, a little bit of the look and feel and also designed a custom logo. I was actually extremely satisfied at the time and that partially helped me reach the 200-500 uniques a day mark just because it was a little unique and more professional. So now, this is my third theme move and hoping to get to a constant 1000+ uniques a day. I reach it on lucky days, but I’d like to reach it on a consistent basis. So should you change? Well, it depends where you are in your blog life. If you have some spare time or money and feel like your blog is due for a change, then go for it, but if you still like your template the way it is and don’t feel that changing it will help you, then don’t do it.
In fact, I’d much ratter tweak a template to its limit before changing it. When you feel you have reached the absolute limit and there’s no way you can monetize any further, improve your bounce rate or get more traffic, then you are due for a change!
It’s just a matter of credibility
In the end, having a unique and professional blog design is only a matter of getting some credibility. People will tend to respect you more if your website looks elegant and that will surely help you to establish yourself as an authority in your niche. You know, life is all about credibility…
Put these old projects back on track
Posted by: | CommentsNew projects and ideas are so fun and if you’re like me, you often forget that you have existing and working projects running. We all love to run multiple websites at once and we all love starting new websites because that’s what’ really exiting. Now, do you really give your existing projects the attention they deserve?
What’s really making you money?
It’s nice to put time in your new websites and ideas, but it’s important to consider what website(s) is your main source of income? It’s OK to spend 100% of your time on new ideas if by doing that you are not loosing money on your old projects. I’m talking about that because it is something that recently happened to me. I was so focused on this blog and a new project for link building I’m working on that I completely forgot about my other websites for a while. It wasn’t a problem for the first week, but then I noticed an important drop in income over the next weeks. That made me realize that SEO Horror is not yet my main source of income! You know, I started this blog because I felt like I had some good information to share with you guys about SEO and Internet Marketing and not because I needed to monetize one more website. I’m building this thing slowly and it’s going pretty well so far, but it’s not my main source of income. So why did I put so much time in it? Because it’s damn fun!
Fun doesn’t equal money
I spent a lot of time working on this blog and other new ideas only because it was fun, not because it was generating good money. Fun eventually leads to money because you can’t run a website for a long time without enjoying what you are doing, but short term, it’s not going to make you rich. That being said, I worked a lot less on my other websites because it was more of a routine and I don’t like routine. That’s the downside of having a consistent amount of traffic coming from Google. My main source of traffic for my websites, except this one, is Google, so it’s easy to watch the traffic and money coming in without doing anything. For SEO Horror, it’s an extremely competitive niche and I mainly get the traffic from my social strategy, which means I really have to fight for it.
Break the routine
The reason why I didn’t spend much time on my older websites is because I felt like I was in a boring routine. You know, writing average stuff, watch the traffic coming in, approving some comments, etc. This bring my next point: break that boring routine! Find a way, whatever it is and it will help you to get back that initial passion you had. For example, I’m looking for some new themes now just to change the look and feel and make the blogs a lot more attractive. I’m spending a lot of time on that and it’s enough to drive me right now, so it’s good. I will have to find something else next month to break the routine again, but that’s another story…and challenge.
Don’t accept your decent income
Another thing that can kill your passion for your existing projects is to accept the decent income it is generating. When you are satisfied by the money, it’s a normal reaction to just relax a little bit and watch everything go. Unfortunately, it only works for a certain time and eventually the money will go down. So, instead of accepting your decent income, why don’t you just try to always make more?
Take some time now
Take some time now for these little existing projects and make them skyrocket!
Some 2,500 lines of code later
Posted by: | CommentsWow, I’ve been in “coding monkey” mode for the past couple of days. I was a little less active in the community but I want you to know it’s for a good reason. I’m currently working on a project that will help every single one of you by making your link building a lot easier. It will probably be the best thing since sliced bread…
I don’t want to say too much about it until it’s done for reasons I’m sure you understand. I would estimate the project being 50% done, but the hardest part is over. With “hardest part”, I mean the project is mostly 75% feature complete, now I just need to test everything, add some more features, make sure the application is secure and also work on the design. It’s a little easier but it will still take some time.
The past week was really quiet for me so I had plenty of time to work on this project, but it’ll be a different situation in the next weeks so unfortunately, I probably won’t be able to do as much. Anyway, that being said, I think I will be able to release this little gem by the end of August/beginning of September!
Sorry if I can’t tell you more, it’s my little top secret project for now. At least you know that if I’m not posting 3 articles per day it’s for a reason!
How to increase your Technorati authority
Posted by: | CommentsI will share a little trick with you guys today to increase your technorati authority simply by commenting on blogs. It’s simple and works like magic. I’m not bothering too much about Technorati for this blog so I haven’t put that technique to use with SEO Horror, but I did it with other blogs.
1. Technorati introduction
First of all, to understand how to increase your Technorati authority, you have to understand how the Technorati authority is calculated, right?
Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.
It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.
All right, so it’s all about getting backlinks again. Damn backlinks. The good news is that it’s easier to get real backlinks with Technorati than with Google. The reason is that technorati don’t care about a link being ‘no follow’ or ‘do follow’: a link is a link! The problem though is that Technorati only takes in consideration backlinks coming from blogs registered with Technorati, but most blogs are so it’s usually not a problem.
2. Comment
Commenting is the easiest way to get backlinks from Technorati, but not by commenting the usual way. A regular comment on a blog won’t give you a backlink from Technorati because when the owner of the blog actually “ping” Technorati to say “Hey, here’s my new post”, there are no comments on the article. So it doesn’t matter if you comment because Technorati won’t go back and check for new links. The question is, how can you get an increase in authority by commenting?
That is fairly simple and it’s called “Top commentator” or “Recent commentator” plugins. You will find these plugins on a lot of blogs and they simply are plugins showing the top commentators for the blog and also the 5-10 most recent comments. I use them on my blog and you can see the “Top commentators” in the footer. How to exploit these plugins? Well, by becoming a top commentator on a blog, you will appear on every single page of the blog. What does that mean? It means that everytime Technorati will visit a blog you are a top commentator on, it will see your link on the blog and that makes a +1 blog reaction for you!
3. Real life examples
Here are some real life examples:
We see that what was picked up by Technorati is the top commentators part of the blog and I was actually a top commentator at the time!
Now, we see that what Technorati picked up was the Recent Comments part of the blog and luckily, my comment was a recent comment at the time!
These two examples actually gave me an increase in authority just by commenting, which is something I do anyway!
Being a top commentator is dead easy
I know you are thinking you don’t have 15 hours a day to become a top commentator on all these blogs! The thing you have to know is that the top commentator plugin usually resets every month. That means everything starts fresh on the first of every month and you can be a top commentator with a single comment! On the first of each month, visit a couple of new blogs and comment as you would normally do. On the next blog post, if you are still a top commentator it means a +1 authority for you!
That’s it, it’s as simple as that. You guys might have other strategies to increase your Technorati authority and feel free to share that with us!
Got spammed by a crappy spammer
Posted by: | CommentsAright folks, let’s put aside the serious stuff and let’s have fun a little bit. You know, I like to teach you stuff or tell you what not to do and I might actually post a little something about that later today, but I have a funny thing today for you guys.
Part of blogging is to accept you’ll receive tons and tons of spam. Sometimes, spammers are actually good at writing general enough statements so you believe these are actually related to your post and approve the comment. I call them the Nostradamus of spam: write general enough statements so that even 500 years later, people can relate them to actual events. That’s what being a Nostradamus of spam is, even in 500 years, a blogger could question himself if he should or should not approve the comment! Now, Saturday I got spammed by the opposite of the Nostradamus of spam! Let’s have a look at the comment I received:
Saturday In searching for sites related to AdSense but more specifically to %KEYWORD, I found your site which has great content.
Man, this thing is funny! The dumb dude forgot to change the spam template and replace %KEYWORD% with his own keywords. That’s what I certainly call a failure.
When spamming like that, you know you’ll probably get 98% rejection, but this case is a case of 100% rejection rate. I just wanted to share that with you guys. You too might have some funny spam stories, so feel free to share them!
Alexa ranking is so inaccurate
Posted by: | CommentsI want to make a brief post about how Alexa ranking is inaccurate and might not be that good at getting a decent traffic estimate. I’m pretty sure everyone here is familiar with Alexa, but if you are new to SEO/Internet Marketing, you might wonder what I’m talking about so here’s a short description from Alexa’s website:
Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service. The process is relatively complex, but if you have a need to know, please read on.
The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources, and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.
So you see, Alexa analyze the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and that’s their main source for traffic analysis.
Why isn’t accurate?
I run a couple of websites and I obviously like to compare how they are doing against each other. They aren’t in the same niche, but i still like to have a look at the ranking in Alexa vs the traffic I get. The past few weeks confirmed what I thought: Alexa is not accurate. For example, let’s take one of my older website which actually receive 50x more visitors than SEO Horror. Yes, you read correctly, 50 times more visitors daily than SEO Horror, so it’s interesting to have look at the rankings!
here’s how seohorror.com looks in Alexa:
Wow that’s not bad for a website about a month old. We have to look at the 1 week average because the 3 months average isn’t really any good for me now as seohorror.com has only been live for a month or so. I’ve had a couple of days in the top 100 and now it looks like I’m mostly between 100,000 and 150,000 on a constant basis. I’m OK with that.
Now, let’s see how my other website with 50 times more traffic than SEO Horror compare:
What’s that? I’m ranked 556,812 this week! I mean, 50 times more traffic and I’m poorly ranked. You see how inaccurate it is!
Why does it look so inaccurate?
The reason it looks so inaccurate between my two websites is because they aren’t in the same niche. The visitors at SEO Horror are SEO/Web marketers and there are good chances you guys use the Alexa toolbar. If 50% of my readers use the Alexa Toolbar, it will certainly boost my rankings because a normal percentage could be something like 0.5% of the readers. Now, on my other blog, which is definitely not aimed at techies, nobody uses the Alexa toolbar and nobody has a single clue what this toolbar is all about. So even if I receive 50 times more traffic, because nobody use the toolbar, I get a poor ranking.
Is it any good then?
It’s good to compare with websites within your niche. For example, if I compare my blog with another SEO blog, then it makes a little more sense when I look at the numbers. If I take a look at a cooking recipe website, then it doesn’t make any sense to compare. Alexa is mainly used as a traffic estimate and to put a price on how much you’ll sell advertisement on your website. If your Alexa ranking is good, you can usually sell advertisement a little more, especially if you’re in the top 100. So, the bottom line is that it’s so much easier to get a good ranking in Alexa with a tech/SEO/internet marketing blog!
So, you can continue to use Alexa to check your website progression, but it’s definitely not everything as you just saw. 50 times more traffic does not mean 50 times better ranking….In fact it can be the complete opposite as you just saw!
Promote your website with Cafepress and 0$
Posted by: | CommentsI will share with you guys how I created a bunch of promotional items for seohorror.com with 0$ using Cafepress.com. Selling or simply wearing your own promotional items can be an extremely efficient way to promote your blog/website, but just thinking about having to distribute and manufacture them can be a total turn off. Luckily, a great website called Cafepress is there for all your promotional item needs without you having to invest a single dollar!
1. Sign up for a merchant account at cafepress.com
So first of all, head to the “Start selling” page of cafepress.com and press the “Start selling now” button:
Then, you just have to fill the form with your desired account details and that’s it, you have a cafepress.com account! As simple as that. Now, let’s create some promotional items.
2. Create your first promotional item
I can’t remember if Cafepress asks you to create a new shop during the sign up process but you’ll have to create one if it’s not already done or manage the shop you just created to add some items.
Then you go to Manage Sections & products:
And finally, we’ll be able to add a new product.
I decided to create a new white fitted T-Shirt so I chose it from the list of potential items and added it to the list of items to be added.
Great, we now have a new t-shirt in our little store, but the shirt is still in pending state.
Put your logo or whatever image on the item
Now it’s time to customize the shirt with our brand. To do that, you will need a program to edit images. I personally use Photoshop, but there are hundreds of alternative out there. We need to create an image that will fit correctly on the t-shirt. To make sure our image fits correctly, the background has to be transparent and the size of the image has to fit. Fortunately for us, Cafepress provides a chart with all the correct image sizes you have to use: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/images/help_templates. Since we created a white fitted t-shirt, the grid tells us our image has to be 10″ by 10″, so let’s do that!
So there we go, we create a 10″x10″ image with a transparent background. I created the image with 200 dpi as Cafepress recommends we supply images between 200 and 300 dpi. You can check out Cafepress’s images recommendations for more information.
Now you just have to design the t-shirt with the image you’d like to appear on it and save the image as a png. Why png? Well, png is a loss-less compressed format which mean you won’t lose quality and your item will look great!
Once you have that png image, click on “Edit button” of the “pending item” on Cafepress. This will lead you to the design area. In the design area, simply click on “Select image” to upload your png image and put it on the shirt:
You will also be prompted for an image on the back of the shirt if that’s what you’re designing and then you’re ready for the final step: the price!
So there you are, your own custom product is done and you can set your own price. For a fitted t-shirt, Cafepress has a base price of 15.99$. You set the price you’d like to sell it and Cafepress will pay you the difference between your price and the base price every time you sell a product.
Go promote your website!
You’re now ready to go ahead and promote your website with custom items using Cafepress!
Dealing with too many comments
Posted by: Ben Tremblay | Comments (16)Here’s a problem I know some people would like to have to handle, because having too many comments on a post also usually means your blog is popular. It’s nice to have a popular blog with popular articles and people commenting a lot, but trust me it can become a huge problem.
I recently had to face that situation:
It’s a huge load of comments to handle and while it’s fun to know people like what you write, it’s a pain for first time visitors. First time visitors comming from Google have to wait for the page to load and it’s a pain. Not only the visitors have to wait, but with a 1Mb page it hurts the bandwith a lot!
How to handle it?
The solution is the Wordpress paged comments plugin. This little plugin allows you to have paged comments on your blog instead of having a single page with hundreds of comments. You can decide how many comments you want per page, how to order the comments, etc. There’s even a CSS sheet included with the plugin that you can modify to fit your template. I decided to display only 25 comments per page and the article went from 1Mb to 80kb. Quite an interesting improvement for the bandwidth and also for the poor users!
So there you go, now you can handle the popularity of your blog. I hope you will face that problem!