أرشيف شهر سبتمبر, 2007

Free WordPress Theme: Crystal 1.0

سبتمبر 29, 2007 في 2:56 م · Filed under WordPress

I have decided to release a WordPress theme that I bought, and haven’t used for anything else out into the public, in hopes that it can be used by people in need of a nice, simple, effective, dark, two column WordPress theme.

Crystal WordPress Theme

Crystal is a two column, widget ready, WordPress 2.3 compatible theme that I am releasing under GPL, and so you are free to do with it as you please.

I have set it up to work well with the WP-PageNavi plugin, a plugin I highly recommend.

If you find any bugs and are able to fix them, please let me know, as increasing the quality of this, and any further themes I release, is always greatly appreciated. Also, please let me know if you decide to use Crystal, as I would love to highlight some of the blogs putting this design to good use.

Download Now | Demo

WordPress Theme Crystal Comments Area

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Problogger Tax Deductions

سبتمبر 29, 2007 في 10:47 ص · Filed under Quick Notes

Kelly Phillips Erb, from Tax Girl, recently did a post about tax deductions on Problogger.net. And while it is true that tax information on the net doesn’t ever fit every situation, there are some great items on the list that I never even thought to deduct for my business.

Things like web hosting fees, web advertising, and prizes for contest giveaways. I am not sure if all this information is valid for Canada, which is where I live, but it is still a very interesting list.

Here is a snippet from her post:

The most popular question in response to my guest post on Problogger last time was invariably some form of “Can I deduct…?” It makes sense. Figuring out what constitutes income in the blogging world is pretty easy. But what constitutes a proper deduction is another story – and bloggers usually err on the side of not deducting enough (and not the other way around).

I know that I did a fair amount of deductions last year, as I really tried to get my business going. This year, I really scaled back on how much money I put into my business, but with tips and advice such as this, I might just have as many deductions as last year.

Heck, I could have saved myself more money last year had I known about all these. Definitely a post worth checking out on Problogger.net.

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MyBlogLog.com: Increases Your AdSense Earnings

سبتمبر 29, 2007 في 10:30 ص · Filed under Quick Notes

Over on AdesBlog, he writes about how you can use the MyBlogLog service to increase your AdSense revenue. He does this by using the statistics that the service provides to better target and position his advertising.

That is – some pages appear every day among the most viewed top 10 pages. In my case, 7 out of 10 are the same pages that appear as the most viewed pages every day.

What does that mean?

That means, MyBlogLog is begging you to make some changes to those pages. It’s asking you to optimize them for AdSense (or any other publisher program that you use). It’s saying “these pages have the highest traffic, but you are not making use of it”.

An interesting tip for those out there using the service, and something I might try on a variety of blogs, though at the same time, if you put too much advertising on your best pages, you might notice them getting shunned by the community at large, so please remember to balance your need to make money with the usability your users crave.

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PageRank Update in Progress?

سبتمبر 28, 2007 في 8:25 م · Filed under Google

Well, it seems that some people are seeing a Google PageRank shuffle, and this always gets people overly excited. The conversation has been going on for a while now and some people are already fed up about the whole thing. There have already been two false “starts” with no result.

Are we actually getting a PageRank update? The next few days will tell. If Google does update, and you don’t get a rank this time around, it is never too late to start planning for the next update. Create content worth linking to, and create it often, and three to five months from now, you could see your PageRank take off.

Yaro is the one who tipped me off to this shuffle, and he says:

Like many webmasters, I always look at the PageRank of sites and it definitely impacts my opinion of them. I don’t think it’s an accurate measure, but it gets attention, and in today’s ad driven world wide web – that matters.

Watch, wait and listen everyone. If it is an update, are you excited or disappointed? I know for a fact, some of my sites might drop a bit since I haven’t been giving them the attention they deserve. I continually thought I would get back to them and make them great before this update, but as sometimes happens, life got in the way. Cross your fingers everyone…

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Top Bloggers Above The Fold Ad Display

سبتمبر 28, 2007 في 8:18 م · Filed under Quick Notes

Over on Serverdome.org there is a very interesting post looking at around half a dozen blogs and what percentage of their above the fold space is filled with advertising.

Blogging for money has become a million dollar business, top bloggers make thousands of dollars each month for paid reviews and displaying ads on their sites. I took screenshots of the visible portion of some of the top blogs and counted how much of that was paid space. The screenshots below are taken from a maximized Firefox window with three toolbars, at a resolution of 1280×1024.

Not surprisingly John Chow has the most advertising with more than a quarter of his screen real estate being advertising in one form or another, while Copyblogger, one of my favourite sites, comes in with the least in the list at just over ten percent. The other blogs listed in the project include, Problogger, Daily Blog Tips, Steve Pavlina, and ShoeMoney.

Two pieces of information that would make this project say so much more would be if they had both unique visitors and revenue information. Then they could correlate all the information and say once and for all if more advertising above the fold means more money per unique visitor.

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Direct Advertising

سبتمبر 28, 2007 في 8:07 م · Filed under Advertising

One of the things I have tried to do here that is counter to the advice that I give out to others is in regards to advertising. My placement of Google’s AdSense is pretty bad, and I am not using an alternate means to rake in the bucks, as I work towards selling advertising space directly rather than through the numerous systems that are out there.

Why Direct Advertising

When I started this blog, I really wanted to make sure that I was helping others, and making sure I focused on the content more than the advertising was key. You would think that doing direct advertising would take more time, but just like going through a program, it can become quite passive.

I am not actively looking for advertisers, contacting people, and whatnot. This means I will probably get less advertisers on this blog, but the ones that do contact me, are serious about being shown here.

Direct advertising gives me control over which ads I run, so you’ll never see something I don’t approve of, unless its an AdSense advertising block (which I’d love to replace as well).

Direct advertising allows me to set my own rate. I can make my advertising space cost as much or as little as I want and also allows me to make special deals. I have traded advertising space for graphic design services and for coding, and to me, that was worth more than a few dollars in my pocket.

Direct advertising means not having to have a percentage taken off by another company. When you outsource your advertisements to pretty much any company, they will want some of the money they are bringing in for you. The upswing of this is that their cut amounts to more money when they bring you more money for your advertising space, but had you done it on your own, you wouldn’t be giving upwards of half your advertising dollars away.

Conclusion

There are so many advantages and disadvantages to direct advertising, but in the end it is up to you to decide what is best for you.

Some people don’t like handing payments, dealing with subscriptions, or even just dealing with potential advertisers. Personally, I love connecting with new people.

If you sell advertising directly from your site, have you done well, or horribly? Let me know in the comments below. And if you are interested in purchasing advertising on eXtra for Every Publisher, please check out the advertising page, and then contact me.

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Commenter Appreciation: September 2007

سبتمبر 27, 2007 في 9:27 م · Filed under Appreciation

I meant to do this post sooner, but I have been so busy, that it got to be on the back burner. I want to start by apologizing to everyone for the delay.

If you want to know more about my Commenter Appreciation Project, please check out my previous post explaining the idea.

The first two commenters I want to mention are W. Thomas Leroux of leroux.ca and Mark of 45n5.com.

WTL

WTL

WTL, as he is known in the comments on this site, is a Canadian, so that alone gives him some bonus points in my book, and is one of the only people to comment on this site that I have actually met in real life. He is a web developer in Ottawa, Ontario and was one of the founding members of the Blogger Meetup when I lived there. He is a great guy, and even better for having found the time to come to this blog and comment on three separate occasions in less than a week.

You can find some great technology posts, social observations, and personal life updates at his blog leroux.ca. I find the design a little odd and a bit old fashioned looking, but I can’t really comment, Xfep doesn’t have the most visually interesting design. His blog has been going for over four years now. Definitely, worth checking out.

45n5

45n5

45n5, or if you prefer his real name is Mark, has been commenting around here lately, and has been adding to the conversation, which to me, is the real power of a commenter. And unlike most other people, he is also generous with his linking, and has become a real leader in promoting other bloggers in this niche. Check out the Top 100 list, as well as MoneyLinks.

He also takes time out of his busy day to contribute to the comments here at Xfep, from simple bits of feedback “Dude, the podcast rocks! Hope to hear more. Subscribed” to a full on conversation, as we had surrounding Episode 1 of my podcast.

His blog, 45n5, has information about making money online, but Mark has added many personal touches to his content as well as being a thought leader. Recently, he removed all advertising, replacing it with advertisements that brought readers to other pages or areas of his own site. The design is more advanced than the one here at Xfep, but at the same time it stays on the simple side, focusing more on the content than anything else.

A great blog to read and subscribe to.

Wrap-up

Great blogs, great bloggers, and I appreciate their comments. A big thanks from me, and again, I recommend you all check out every appreciated comment on this blog, as all the best people comment on eXtra for Every Publisher.

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Mistake in Not Following My Advice: Always Prepare for the Worst

سبتمبر 27, 2007 في 7:43 م · Filed under Blogging

I have been really under the weather the last two days, and continue to be sick today. Right now, I am kicking myself because I didn’t make sure to have extra content that was timeless and ready to go in case of circumstances making me not able to write content for this site.

In newer blogs like this one, you have to be timely with your content or you will see huge drops in traffic. Yesterday, my traffic was down over thirty percent, and even today, with the great guest post from Steve, traffic is still down by almost half of what it usually is.

It doesn’t take much time for your readers to move on and many only visit when they see a blog has been regularly updated with interesting content. So please, whatever you do, put together a few posts that you can hold in reserve for a rainy day, and, even better, make sure to find a friend or two that can cover for you, as it will keep your blog moving forward.

As soon as I am one hundred percent back to my old self, you can bet that I will be creating a few posts to keep in draft until the next time I feel like this.

Also, a big thank you to everyone wishing me well.

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BlogRush – Is It Too Late?

سبتمبر 27, 2007 في 1:32 م · Filed under Web 2.0

I’ve been patiently waiting for the last three days to access my statistics on BlogRush. I’ve been interested in the service since I first heard about it, and I like the look of the widget.

Sure, the concept sounds a little like a pyramid scheme – but if no one is investing money (which I’m certainly not), then I don’t see how you can call it that.

Having said that, my patience is running thin. Three days of Internet time roughly the equivalent of waiting 4 to 6 weeks in the real world, and I’m about ready to pull the widget off the one blog I’ve been experimenting with it on. Before my stats page became “temporarily unavailable” I hadn’t received one single click for all the credits that I’d earned, and I’m beginning to doubt the ability of the team behind the project.

I understand that they were blindsided by popularity and scammers – but COME ON – can you really put something like this together and NOT expect scammers?

They’ve got to the end of the week to get my Dashboard up and running…after that, I’m taking the widget off the site, and I won’t be back. I love the concept and idea behind BlogRush, but I have yet to see any evidence of it actually working for a guy with smaller blogs like myself.

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World Problogger List – Update 1

سبتمبر 25, 2007 في 5:11 م · Filed under Problogging

World Problogger List

If you don’t know what the World Problogger List is, please check out my previous post announcing its creation.

There has to be more than twenty-two probloggers out there in the world, but the fact that in less than a week, so many great people have added themselves to the list is a testament to how great the blogosphere is.

If you want to look at the current names on the list, check out the Million Dollar Wiki Problogger page as this is where the main copy of the World Problogger List will be hosted.

My goal is to at least get over one hundred people added to the list, with me being super happy if 1,000 names are listed, so please, let me know if you would like to be added to the World Problogger List.

The requirements are a minimum $100 in blogging related revenue every month. To get yourself added, I need your name, your main blog URL, and your location in the world.

Feel free to comment on this post, or contact me through the contact form with your details.

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