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You have a free tool at your fingertips to track stats for your blog that you could never afford to buy. Google Analytics is an enterprise class application, meaning it would cost Fortune 100 companies tens of thousands of dollars to license if it were for sale. But it’s free for anyone to use, and just because Re/Max, Discount Tire, CK Restaurants (Carl’s Jr, Hardee’s) are using it doesn’t mean that the smallest personal blog can’t use it too!This is the first article a new series to help you work through your blogging mistakes called Tracking Your Blog’s Progress. Please subscribe via rss or email at the top right of any page so you don’t miss any of the future installments!

As I’m writing this today is Sunday. Sunday is a lazy day, and this is rare because I usually don’t write anything on Sundays. That’s cause I’m out late a lot of nights with my band, and Sunday afternoon is a good time to relax from the stresses of the week. Yesterday was especially hectic because my 16 year old daughter accidentally hit the gas instead of the brake when maneuvering out of the garage with the car. What happenned? She smashed into the door jamb ripping the mirror off the car and smashing the quarter panel, and also ripped part of the garage wall out and completely off the foundation. Now there’s a stressful day!

So if you need to relax too, here are 5 great ways to check your blogging progress using google analytics on a regular basis.

Check your Google Analytics Stats

If you’re not already using google analytics – you should be! If you need to add it to your blog – just visit my WordPress plugins used page and find the google analytics plugin I use so you can enable it in your blog. Everyone that checks their stats want to see more visitors and pageviews, but there are other things you should be looking for.

5 Key things to check in Google Analytics for blog progress:

1. Average pageviews: What’s the average number of pages a visitor sees before leaving your site? Over time this number should increase if you have quality content because you gain subscribers and repeat visitors. Also, people should be finding related content to read. If this number doesn’t increase over time you should either re-think the quality of your content or your blog layout. Are you showing related items, featuring posts, and providing breadcrumbs? What’s a good number? I feel under 2 needs improvement, 2-4 is acceptable, and 5+ is exceptional!
2. Time on site: The number of pageviews is of course tied to how much time they spend on your site. If they view an average of 2.5 pages and the average time is 35 seconds you have a problem. It means they are click, clicking away to find what they want – and not getting it. Every blog is different, but my general rule of thumb is that the time on site should be at least 60 seconds for every average pageview. Time on site should increase with average pageviews and as your blogging progress increases!
3. Bounce rate: The bounce rate is the amount of visitors that viewed a single page and left your site (which is an indicator your visitors didn’t find what they were looking for). You will always have a bounce rate, but the higher it is the poorer you are at retaining visitors. I think 90% and up is pretty bad, 60-90% is to be expected once you get 25+ quality posts, 40-60% is excellent, and under 40% is amazing! If you click on the bounce rate link on your analtics dashboard home, you get a breakdown page with the bounce rate by day. This is very interesting because you can see your bounce rate vary wildly throughout the week. With this information you can actually begin to figure out what people want to read more of on your blog. For instance, if your bounce rates are typically 70-80% but you had one day of 40% and one day of 50% figure out either what you posted on that day – or what people read that day. If it was say for instance about wordpress seo, those visitors probably found related posts about either wordpress or seo that caused them to view more than one page. Write more in these areas! Also pay attention to the days (and posts) with high bounce rates. Do you need more content in these areas – or was the bounce rate high because you were posting off-topic or in an area not highly enough targeted to your blog’s niche?
4. New visits: This is the percentage of people visiting your blog for the first time. Over time, if you’re making progress this number better be going down, because if you’re doing a good job you should be consistently increasing repeat visitors through rss subscriptions and bookmarks. If it isn’t think about re-tooling your blog layout to encourage bookmarks (both social and regular), and subscriptions via rss and email
5. Traffic Sources: It’s important to know where you traffic is coming from because all blogs start out with mostly search engine traffic. Over time if you are making progress the percentage of referring sites should growing and growing. It’s an indicator of blogging progress because quality content and posts will naturally draw links from referring sites. In addition, if you are spending time networking with bloggers in Entrecard, blogCatalog, myBlogLog, StumbleUpon, etc., your referring traffic will grown and grow. If you click to view the report for Top Traffic Sources you can drill down and get more key data, like what search engines you ARE getting traffic from and which ones you ARE NOT. Watch your keywords and continue to use the ones that are bring the highest number of visits now, and make plans to work on the lower ranked ones or keywords that want to start getting traffic from. Where your traffic is coming from and how it changes over time is a key indicator of your blogging progress.

Google Analytics Tricks

• First – common questions and help can be found in the Google Analytics Help Center.
• Schedule email reports daily, weekly, or monthly: At the top of every google analytics report is an “email” button. Click it to schedule emails weekly, daily, or monthly for reports you want to see. You can combine as many different reports as you want into one email, and choose to get a PDF file, or other formats like csv or xml for use in Excel or other reporting applications.
• 7 Advanced Google Analytics Tricks can be found on the Da Vinci Planet blog. These are very helpful advanced tricks like how to track downloads, flash, outbound links, affiliate links, adsense clicks, how to use link tracking, and how to identify additional search engines.
• Be sure to read Sticky Design Tricks to Keep Your Visitors from Bouncing
• To keep detailed track of your 404 errors, read this article on how to Create Custom Google Analytics Code to Place on 404 Error Pages. They even have a special section on a custom WordPress 404.php error page with specific googlebot and robots meta tags!
• If you find that you’re getting a lot traffic from Google Images, then you really need to read how to Track Google Images Search in Google Analytics.

Quality Google Analytics Resources

**Disclosure – These links to Amazon books are affiliate links. If you are interested in purchasing one as a google analytics reference or training guide, I would encourage you to buy it by clicking from this page. The small commission received from selling a book helps me to write more free articles and quality content for you!

The books displayed here represent the highest reviewed Google Analytics books on the market today:

Google Analytics 2.0

Web Analytics: An Hour a Day

Actionable Web Analytics: Using Data to Make Smart Business Decisions

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning

Do you have a question, or item to share that would make this article even better? Please, by all means – comment now!

Do you use WordPress Plugins? Where did you find the best ones? Probably from blogs that were using them! The best plugins I’ve found were being used on blogs I read. Sometimes it was easy to figure out what they were called and where to get them, and other times I had to wade through html code and comments to figure it out.

I’ve written about a lot of WordPress plugins, like the Automattic Stats plugin I use, or cForms for a WordPress Contact Form. I’ve written about plugins that make money through eBay and WordPress plugins that display ads – even ones that clean up formatting – like the plugin that escapes code in posts. But I don’t think I’ve ever written a post with every single WordPress plugin I use. That would be hard to keep updated anyway.

Rather than keep a list of the top 10 best WordPress plugins, the WordPress plugins that save the most time, or the most used WordPress plugins – I figure it would be easier to just show you a list of the WordPress plugin I enabled and running right now and use every day! How do I do this? You may find this funny – but I use a plugin to display my WP plugins, I use Lester Chan’s Display Plugins Used. I can’t say enough about Lester’s plugins – they all have worked flawlessly for me! ‘Display Plugins Used’ is a prime example, it shows all active (and inactive if you choose) plugins you have installed. Now I never have to keep an up to date list or constantly keep updating a post about my plugins – you can find them on my ‘Wordpress plugins used’ page here!

This doesn’t mean I won’t write, review, or explain plugins in posts again – it just means if you ever wonder how I’m doing something on this blog first view my WordPress plugins used page, and if that doesn’t answer your curiosity – just use my contact form to ask me!

Question or comment about my plugins? Want to talk about what plugins you use? Comment now!

*Update 01-25-2007* This has become quite the monumental post. I love posts that incite some debate – and make no bones about revisions to correct content, or even change my opinion based on new information. This post is no exception – sorry about having to make it look like the 5th draft of a term paper – but it seems to be “evolving” a bit more every day. If you have something to add – just post or reply to a comment below!

*Update 01-24-2007*When I blogged about this earlier today I sent a message through Entrecard to all the top 5 “Make Money Online” blogs on Entrecard telling them I wrote about them, inviting them to comment, and also to “continue the meme” with a post on their site. I sent one to John Chow, because he was in the top 5, and he wrote about it – AND he dropped his card on me. That was nice of him. John – as I stated in message to you, a link back to my article would have been nice…=) I understand why you didn’t link back to me, because you probably get requests like that all the time, but it would have been nice nonetheless!

Entrecard is the new “it” widget for blogs. If you’re new – is it worth your time to get involved in the Entrecard community – or is your time wasted? What do you “really” have to do to benefit? Are the contests and credits worth it? Is Entrecard a black hole time sucker with a fake economy? This is my review of Entrecard and the experiences I’ve had with it on my blog the last few months. Hopefully I’ll not only give you some things to think about, but after reading this you’ll want to comment and post your experiences as well.

There are tons and tons and tons of posts on Entrecard all over the Web detailing good and bad experiences (*see the links at the end of this post). Entrecard is the new blog golden child, and it’s spread like wildfire from the “A-list bloggers” on down. I’ve been using Entrecard since I heard about it on Shoemoney.com. He saw it at a tradeshow and had good things to say about it. Shoe also saw MC Hammer promoting a dance site – so take that with a grain of salt. Shoemoney wasn’t the only one trying Entrecard, soon John Chow and Problogger were too – and all bets were off. Everyone started adding it (kind of like the Blogrush phenom).

What is Entrecard?

The concept of Entrecard is simple. You create a 125×125 “card” – like your ‘business card on the web’. Really, it’s just an ad. And the 125×125 ads have kind of become the default blogging ad. You place the “widget” on your site and other Entrecard members can do two things. First they can click “drop card” and second they can advertise on your site (on that widget). Everytime someone “drops a card” you get 1 credit. When you drop a card on someone else’s site (with the widget) you get 1 credit.

*update*
Here’s a graphic from the Entrecard site about credits:

Your “level of activity” in the Entrecard community determines the current “ad rate”.

*update*
How much does it cost to advertise on someone’s widget?

From the Help Guide on the Entrecard site

To advertise your card on someone else’s widget, it costs the number of credits equal to twice the number of cards dropped on that widget each day. So if a widget receives an average of 50 cards dropped into it each day, advertising on that widget will cost 100 credits per day. This helps insure that for every two credits you pay, a unique user will see your ad and be clicking in the general vicinity. It also ensures the economy balances, because every time you drop your card, it creates two credits. That surplus mus be balanced via advertising costs.

When you start Entrecard your ad rate is just a few measly credits. Then (since you are new and your ad cost is very low) you will get a slew of sites wanting to advertise on your widget before your cost goes up. *update* There is however a balance to this, since you are new you ad rate is low, and everyone will want to advert with you at the low rate, which will cause many to drop cards and ask for ads, not only generating credits for you but driving your ad price up (from all the dropped cards). This should get you off to a good start as long as you keep networking within the Entrecard community.

Basically, a new Entrecard signup is listed in the “Most Recent” listings tab in “Campaign” – so those of us that have been on Entrecard awhile know where to look for fresh meat. All activity makes your ad rate go up. *update* See the previous paragraph regarding what determines your ad rate. People dropping their card on you, you dropping your card, approving and rejecting adverts for your site, leaving people recommendations and messages, responding to messages – these are all things that make your ad rate go up. *update*> All the activities within Entrecard, like leaving recommendations, messaging, approving and rejecting adverts – will cause people to drop their card on you making your ad rate go up. In other words – you determine your own “popularity” through your participation in the EC network. When you do things you earn credits, and you can use them to buy ads on other sites. It may not have the greatest algorithm (yet), but Entrecard was smart to tie your ad rate to your involvement in the community. (see last sentence). It forces you to be somewhat involved. Who would want to be on the bottom of a category and have your ad rate be single digit numbers?

Inflated Entrecard Stats?

The flip side of this is that there are some people who have nothing but time on their hands – and they “click, click, click” all day long dropping their card on everyone in sight making their ad rate unbelievably high *update* you can’t “click” your ad rate higher. But the more you increase your visibility (by dropping your card) the more your ad rate will go up because more people will drop their card on you. Thanks to Colin King (see comments below) for pointing this out to me again. I guess the limit of sites you can drop your card at is 300 in a day, and I’ve read about several that have reached that limit. But why, can you imagine dropping a card 300 times? That’s finding 300 sites on Entrecard, visiting 300 profiles, then clicking to 300 homepages, and dropping your card 300 times. That just seems insane to me. *update*:Just because it seems insane to be, doesn’t mean that others don’t see the benefit (read comments below). This post says “worth it or worthless” in the title because you determine what you get out Entrecard and what it’s worth to you.

I want you to take a look at the top spots in the “Make Money Online” category today. For a long time John Chow was #1, and now he’s #5. And #3 is Problogger. But if you are new to Entrecard you might be asking yourself – who in the heck are numbers 1, 2 and 4?? This is both the neat thing “and the flaw” of Entrecard (right now). A virtually unknown blogger can “click his way to the top“, and that part of the algorithm should probably be changed. Maybe limit the amount of sites you can drop a card on per day to something reasonable – like 50. But you can also have a very high ad price if you have a high level of activity on your account – from lots of card drops (from other sites), to lots of messages and recommendations (and you responding to them as well). So, if you’re having a contest or send out lots of messages – you can significantly boost your ad price.

*update*I want to revise the previous paragraph because it (again) says you can click you way to a high ad rate position, which (in comments and previously in this post) I pointed out already you can’t. You can drop your card 300 times a day to “increase your popularity and visibility” – and that will get droves of people to drop their card on you. Your ad rate is the number of card drops times 2, so to get an ad price of say 360, you just need 180 card drops per day. Now that I realize this it’s more impressive what the “unknown” bloggers have done (and ‘up-and-coming’ is probably a better word than ‘unknown’). Think about this – John Chow and Problogger have massive traffic, so (ask Colin King again points out below in comments) they probably get an unusually high rate of card drops from people hoping to get their attention. Colin, Teri, and Kumo have all become visible enough (in Entrecard’s community) to rank as high as the heaviest hitting bloggers around – all from their own efforts (not guaranteed daily traffic)! My final statement from that paragraph still stands:

“In other words, you are rewarded for your “participation in the community” of Entrecard.” Because participation = visibility, and visibility = popularity, and popularity = EC credits and higher ad price. Hopefully this all translates to more rss subscribers, more comments on your posts, and more visitor’s and readers to your blog.

Is Entrecard Worth Your Time

Tossing aside the ability of “clicking your way to the top” for the moment, Let’s look at the benefits of that participation. Going back to the top 5 spots in the “Make Money Online” category on Entrecard let’s talk about the (outside of Entrecard) unknown ‘up-and-coming’ bloggers in positions #1, #2, and #4. *Update* – I just want to stipulate that I’m using these 3 sites as an example only – they are currently ranked in the top 5 ad price spots for “make money online” in Entrecard, against arguably the top 2 “A-list” bloggers in the world. Those spots seem to change weekly, sometimes daily depending on amounts of activity the amount of card drops.

These would be:

#1 spot – A Geek’s Journey by Colin King
#2 spot – Toast Egg & Me by Kumo
#4 spot – Internet Dreamer by Toni Turner

The reason that I call all three of these sites “unknown bloggers up-and coming bloggers” is because they aren’t even listed in the Top 100 Sites about Making Money Online. **Disclaimer – Colin King points out in comments below that you have to ask to be on that list or carry their “widget”, something I didn’t know. Actually, that list goes a bit beyond the top 100, it goes up to #281, and Internet Dreamer is listed as #170, but the other two aren’t listed at all. The top money making sites list is scored by a combination of google pagerank, technorati score, and alexa ranking. So it’s a combination of google trust, blogosphere reputation, and amount of traffic – a pretty good unbiased combination if you ask me. I’ve worked very hard on this site – and I don’t even rank in the top 281 yet!

So the point of contention here is the ad price or amount of EC’s (entrecard credits) you need to spend to place an ad with one of these 3 sites. Colin King at #1 has an ad price of 378 credits for one day. Toast, Egg & Me at #2 is 334, and Toni Turner is 301 credits per day. Can you really justify spending that many credits on one of those sites? *update*: Again – I’d like to point out that my point here is to get you to decide if your perceived value of Entrecard makes it worth it, or not? If you buy in to my previous comments about what you get out of your EC participation you will agree with ad pricing, and if you don’t agree you won’t. Leave your comment at the end of this post…

Let’s talk about #4 – Internet Dreamer a second. Toni Turner’s site has only been live for 2 months and 25 days (as of today). She only has 115 RSS subscribers, a google pagerank of 2, 1,838 pages that link to her, and 88,136 Alexa ranking (it terms the site as “low traffic”). The value of a single text link is $15. Total estimated site value $940.

Now #2 – Toast Egg & Me. Kumo has been online 3 months and 20 days. There is no google pagerank yet, with 1,055 links. Alexa ranking is 146,702 (they say ‘just getting started’), and a text link is worth $10. Total estimated site value is only $640.

Last #1 – which is Colin King. He’s #1 in Making Money Online today (on Entrecard), and has been online 9 months, 25 days correction: Colin’s site has been online 3 months and 3 days with a google PR of 0 no pagerank yet – and 10,789 links (according to dnScoop) (how do you have that many backlinks with a zero PR unless you have a penalty Colin states in comments below I made an assumption of his site being penalized by google. With that many links (dnScoop lists 10,789, google says 199) and no pagerank – and there was a very recent pagerank update, you can usually smell penalty. Sure enough, if you google site:www.ageeksjourney.com you get no results, and even googling the domain gets only 2 pages. That IMHO is a big-time google penalty. *update*: He has links for http://ageeksjourney, maybe that’s the issue??), an Alexa ranking of 100,784. A text link is valued at only $10 – but this does have a supposed value of $8,549.

*Update*
I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I think these 3 blogs are either worthless or that no one visits them. I’m merely painting a picture for you, and to illustrate that point I’m going to include the other two blogger like I should have the first time around. The entire point I’m making here is – Look at these 3 ‘up-and-coming’ bloggers – they are actually competing head to head (in Entrecard) with 2 of the most well known juggernauts of the blogosphere!

#3 – Problogger (Darren Rowse), has a pagerank of 6, 829,841 links, Alexa rating of 3,040, text link value of $491, and a total estimated site value of $8,753,920.

#5 – John Chow, has a pagerank of 4, 286,052 links, Alexa rating of 3,572, text link value of $491, and a total estimated site value of $343,140.

Looking at those stats alone I would immediantly say there’s no way I could justify spending that many credits for an ad on any one of these three blogs (if you were wondering where I got all these figures – I just did a quick lookup on dnScoop.com for some quick stats – and aguably take these with a grain of salt). But you have to also think about the Entrecard community and what it’s intrinsic value is to you. The exposure you get within the Entrecard community alone may be well worth that spending that many entrecard credits. Toni Turner drops 300 cards per day every day – for sure. I get one in my box almost every day. But because of her persistence in my Entrecard Inbox – I know her name now, her site’s name, and I’ll not soon forget it. She’s build her own little brand within the Entrecard community. And because of all the card drops, people drop cards on her. People pay the high EC rate to advertise on her site because they figure with all activity people are going to see their advert quite a bit. So maybe it is worth saving up some credits. What little ‘A large percentage of’ traffic some of these sites are getting (like mine) is coming from Entrecard itself. Is that a bad thing? I guess it depends on your niche. I certainly wouldn’t spend enough time to drop 300 card per day myself. *Update*: However, you can see from the comments below that those dropping 300 cards a day say it can take less than an hour per day – and it’s well worth it to them!.

I blog about making money, and learning from blogging mistakes, and most of my posts are about blog tips, blog help, earning more money online, or WordPress hacks and what-not. If I get 30-40 visits a day from Entrecard card droppers I consider that valuable, and quite a few of those visitors have signed up for my RSS feed and commented on my posts. I have found at least a dozen new blogs through Entrecard, and even formed a new blogging network “Content Exchange” through my Entrecard contacts. I have greatly benefited from my Entrecard network of new-found blogging friends. Would a blog about “dog training” be able to the same? Why not – there are currently 23 other blogs in the “Pets” category on Entrecard they could network with.

The Bottom Line of Entrecard

I say that if you’re going to bother to sign up with Entrecard, you should at least become involved in the community enough to benefit. With just minimal effort (like 10-15 minutes or less per day) you can have an ad price of 20-40 entrecard credits. *update*: (you’ll have that ad price because when you raise your visibility from participation more people will drop their card on you, hence raise your ad price 2 credits for every card drop you receive). Why? Why not – you are also going to be “building a brand” by dropping your card on a half-dozen new sites per day. Place ads on other sites, and accepts ads on yours. You will not only raise your ad price – but also find great articles on others sites to help you make more money on your blog. After a few weeks, drop messages to the sites you like best – do a few “recommendations”. Participate in a few contests, maybe put on a contest of your own. You aren’t just becoming part of the Entrecard community – you are starting to build up your own little community around your blog. A good blog with dedicated readers isn’t just about good content. You also need to network, talk to people, help people, do some marketing, build some links – participate, collaborate, and communicate!! I have tried to advertise twice with my friend Marco Richter, and he hasn’t approved or rejected my ads – I don’t think he’s participating much right now with Entrecard. But he doesn’t seem to have posted at all in the last month (I hope he’s ok), and he’s still #101 on that top 100 making money online list of blogs!

Pay attention to your stats! After you advertise with some sites, click on the “more stats” link in the bottom right of the quick stats in your dashboard. At the very bottom of the page, pay attention to the “Widgets Shown on” section, because these are stats where you have paid to advertise. You get top 10 stats for “clicks”, meaning the sites you advertised on that got the most clicks back to you. The #1 site I advertised on got 33 clicks – I should probably advertise on them again. If all your sites are <10 clicks or very low, maybe you should rethink the types of sites you are advertising on – are they even in your niche?

Oh, and one last thing. The reason I included my EC dashboard stats from today was to also show you, your ad price can go way up and down. I had an ad price of 80 credits a week ago because I messaged a hundred or so blogs about my new Content Exchange. I’ve been soooooo busy since then I haven’t dropped more than a handful of cards in a week, but people dropping on me kept the rate high for 6 days. Now that’s starting to drop of so my price is back to normal. I stay active in Entrecard, but not to the point where I don’t get anything else done on my blogs and web sites. You can see that I only drop about 1/2 the amount of cards that are dropped on me. And I haven’t bought a lot of ads (or had a lot purchased) from me recently either. And yet my ad price is pretty good because of my participation. Did I mention that most of the people I get cards from also seem to belong to blogCatalog and myBlogLog too? Building a little “community of bloggers” within your site can go a long way!

I’m going to message a few of the blogs I like best on Entrecard and ask them to comment on this post with their EC experiences as well!! I wonder if others feel the same way about Entrecard that I do? What do you think? Comment now!

**FINAL UPDATE**:
My goal with this post was show you the perceived value of Entrecard can be what you yourself make of it. Much like a blog itself, you get out of EC what you put into it. So now that you’ve read my post, going back to my title – I ask you, in your experience – has Entrecard been “worth it” or “worthless” to you, and why do you think that is? Have you participated enough? Do you think it’s worth it? Have you been getting traffic from it, new comments and rss subs? Have you networked with and met new bloggers?

Other posts around the web about Entrecard:

Entrecard Sucks: post outlining the reasons they think EC sucks, but in the end the post is summarized with reasons that EC networking is good and they’re going to keep it for now.

Entrecard Sucks?: a linkbait title, but post about how EC can bring bursts of traffic. I don’t think he realizes that if he participated more, he’d have new (and sustainable) traffic.

Sir Jorge says Entrecard Sucks because his blog about videos has nothing to do with “making money online”. I don’t think he gets the fact that you can use Entrecard in any niche.

Dot Sauce says ‘Entrecard blog network delivers traffic’ blogs about being happy with the networking and traffic EC has provided.

Raymond blogs about his ‘Month Long Orgy with Entrecard’, and says it took him over 6 hours to drop 300 cards. He says EC has been a tremendous benefit to him.

Reward Rebel writes ‘Entrecard Rides Again’ and wonders why the stats aren’t more detailed, or we at least can’t get access to the raw data that’s collected.

If you were looking to get more out of Entrecard – here’s a great post from Technet News Entrecard Tips for Success!

Sam Freedom’s Internet Marketing blog has all kinds of quality posts on Entrecard.
Let’s start with: 10 Simple ways to squeeze the most out of Entrecard, but it doesn’t stop there. Sam has a massive amount of quality Entrecard posts, help, tips, contests and more. He is prolific about blogging his Entrecard experiences, be sure to check him out.

I’m writing this article specifically for people hosted on godaddy that have had the following .htaccess, mod_rewrite or addhandler problems on shared or premium hosting accounts for various open source applications, such as (but not limited to) WordPress, Drupal, BBPress, Moodle, Geeklog, PHPNuke, Postnuke, and more!

Short list of potential issues:

• problems with permalinks in WordPress
• problems with clean URL’s in Drupal
• problems with pretty url’s in BBPress
• problems with WordPress MU
• ANY mod_rewrite problems in a sub-directory, subdomain, sub-folder, mapped domain, i.e., a domain you setup in goDaddy’s Domain Management -> Assign Domain to Hosting Site feature

I have struggled with two issues time and time again on a goDaddy shared or premium account. If I go into “Domain management -> Assign Domain” and “map” a domain to a folder of the root URL, I have problems with any site that needs to use an .htaccess file for “rewrite” the URL’s using a feature called “mod_rewrite” – especially WordPress and Drupal.

I came across a fix today that made all those problems go away forever. To be able to do what I’m about to tell you, you must also be hosting your domain name with goDaddy.

In your godaddy control panel, go to “Settings -> Domain Management”.

Click on “Add New Record“

In the very first line note the IP address of your “@” host, as you’ll by typing this into the box that comes up when you click to add a new record. In the first field type an asterik (*). In the second field type the IP address of your “@” host. Leave the drop down at one hour. Click “ok” to save.

That’s it – you’re done! There should be no fiddling with your .htaccess files at all.

Once I applied that simple fix – everything worked again.

I’ve also had problems when I’ve attempted to get .html or .htm files to parse PHP code as if they were .php files on goDaddy, or with applications that had to use PHP5. That fix is also really, really easy. All you have to do is create an .htaccess file with the following 2 lines:

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php
AddHandler x-httpd-php .php .htm html

I’ve created a new free Blogging network called “Content Exchange! That’s right, and there’s no widgets, no “dropping cards”, no “poking”, no BS! Content Exchange is simply where you network with other bloggers to exchange content, or help, or code.

I had a blurb in my sidebar for 90 days asking for guest posters. I never got a single response. Now I realize that I was just sitting here waiting for people to find me. Through Content Exchange – you find other bloggers and request to exchange content with them! You write a post for their site, and they write one for yours. You could even request a specific topic, or even co-author a post with them. The possibilities are endless, but this is so much better than an Article Directory where you have no idea what kind of site (or how many sites) your post could end up on. You specifically choose a site to exchange with and you exchange original content to be posted only one time. You can write about a topic they choose, and use a byline – or write about your site and link back. Be creative!

If you do this on a regular basis you can build up a network of blogging friends to exchange with all the time! The entire idea here is to network and connect with new bloggers and build some community (and quality content) with other up and coming bloggers. Be your own b5 media and Performancing! You probably can’t beat John Chow on your own just yet – but maybe by partnering with a half dozen other bloggers you have a better shot!

I either belong to or have belonged to most of the famed blogging communities, like blogCatalog, bumpzee, myBlogLog, entreCard and the like. Sometimes they waste more of your blogging time than they do good. At Content Exchange there are no requirements – other than your participation. If you like, you can place a badge on your blog like the one above advertising to your visitors your willingness to exchange content. You can signup and complete your profile in 5 minutes, and simply post in the forum “I want to exchange content” or reply to someone asking to exchange. It’s that simple! I think you’d be surprised how much you will benefit from this. This blog has been online 8 months now – and one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made is not networking more with other bloggers!

If you like this idea as much as I do – Signup for Content Exchange, tell your friends, digg and stumble this post, post about it and review it in your blog, and tell your blogging friends as well! I built Content Exchange to help bloggers and be run by bloggers – it will only be successful with your participation!

Question about Content Exchange or something to add? Please – comment now!

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a very long time and just got around to it today. See the adsense ad (image) I pasted to the left as an example? See the little up and down arrows? Have you seen any of those on any of your sites? I think it’s something that adsense is test marketing because I see them randomly about 10% of the time.

If you catch them on a site, check them out. If you click up or down, it just dynamically shows you new ads (without reloading the page). As publisher I kinda think that’s pretty cool, since if someone bothers to check out more than one series of ads they are more likely to find one they like (and click it) – therefore increasing my chances to make money. However, many people are “ad blind” anyway, so how much will this really help?

Your thoughts?

Are Text-Link-Ads dead? I think they are. Back in August 2007 I wrote about the google text link ad penalty. It was pretty controversial then. Now it’s pretty much accepted that paid text links are bad and will get you banned from google. So I was on 45n5 today and was catching up on posts I missed and saw this post Text Link Ads is Black Hat SEO. That kind of cracked me up and he’s right you know. Like he says in the post, Wikipedia says that ‘Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception.’.

You’re not convinced Text Link Ads (or TLA) is deceptive? Well sir, I will point you to their home page which STILL egotistically claims “Improve your traffic and search engine rankings. Only TLA can deliver an ad that does both.” How in the hell can they still claim that? After all the fallout from google, their own web site doesn’t even rank for the phrase “text-link-ads” and that’s their brand – and they have a google pagerank of 7!!

You know what this reminds me of? Big tobacco.

Traditional “head-in-the-sand” marketing tactics:

“No, our products aren’t addictive. There’s no conclusive evidence. Cancer – what cancer? You can’t show me one verifiable case directly linked to our product(s).

Are they (TLA) stupid? I mean really stoooopid? Anyone savvy in business would have re-branded that company to adapt a new business model accomodating the new ways the Internet and it’s content is evolving. Change or die, ya know. Is it any surprise that the google search “I’m removing text link ads” yields more than 200,000 results? Out of the 20,000 publishers they still claim to have, I wonder how many have actively used their account in the last 6 months? It was no surprise that I found another post labeled Text-Link-Ads Blackhat in no time at all.

I remember back in October when google had the first smackdown on pagerank for text link ads and JohnTP talked about some high profile bloggers getting hit. It made me dig a little deeper and I came across this article by Jennifer Laycock written about the same time – which reminded me of the evolution and history of “nofollow” in the first place and it got me all red-eyed and Mel Gibson (conspiracy theory) like. Remember, nofollow was invented (by google) to combat “comment spam”. TLA was invented (essentially) to “buy pagerank”. TLA refuses to nofollow their ads, and kicks you out of the program if you add it to their ads on your blog.

First off – the battle for comment spam seems worse than even, look what Matt Mullenweg (inventor of WordPress) said:

In theory this should work perfectly, but in practice although all major blogging tools did this two years ago and comment and trackback spam is still 100 times worse now. In hindsight, I don’t think nofollow had much of an effect, though I’m still glad we tried it.

Secondly, as Jennifer points out nofollow has evolved into a way to kill illicit google juice by using a nofollow link condom! Jennifer say “Where does it end? Google doesn’t like paid text ads. Google doesn’t like paid graphic ads. Oh, Google doesn’t like sponsorship of blog themes either”? Now she’s wearing the Mel Gibson hat. Guess what. Matt Cutts AND Matt Mullenweg don’t like sponsored WordPress themes.

If all this isn’t making your head spin already – I go ahead and read Part 2 to the first Jennifer Laycock post, and as she points out – wtf is Yahoo! doing anyway? You can “pay” them for a “review” to be included in the Yahoo! directory – and if that’s not a “paid link” what is? Clearly if they nofollow’d that directory listing link nobody would ever want to buy one. But Yahoo! is big man on the block, much like the Wall Street Journal. Google would much rather piss off 100 bloggers with a pagerank slap than one of the largest companies or sites on the web.

I never liked TLA – I thought they were arrogant from the git-go. They should have adapted to a new model instead of acting like they were doing nothing and publicly ignoring paid text link concerns. But as Jennifer points out – where will it end? Will google hate banner links, affiliate links, all image links now? Will they begin to ban or penalize sites that use certain keywords in links? In Part 3 of that series Jennifer says that google (Matt Cutts) says that good anchor text (keywords in links) is “black hat SEO” (see article for context). WTF is that? Are we heading down a slippery slope? Will google kill us all in the end and give us a big manual telling us how to be naughty and how to be nice?

Comment now – I know you want to…..

The amount of money you earn blogging depends on the amount of time you invest. But your blogging “skill” level determines how much you can make from a block of time, and how much you need to learn before you can earn more in less time. Don’t you wish that 10 minutes blogging can be worth as much as an ounce of gold? It can, but not overnight.

Let me explain…I own a lot of web sites. Er…rather I have a lot of domains, and quite a few web sites online. But there is only so much time in the day I can devote to setting them up, creating content, and maintaining them. If I worked on only one site per day I’d be working 48 days (since I own 48 domains). I am an interpreneur, webpreneur, an online business man or marketer – if you will. I get ideas all the time and find myself buying domains with the intention of setting up these “future ideas”. The problem is I haven’t fully finished setting up all the ideas I already have – so new ideas just make it worse.

What do I do in the course of a day? As I said – I have many sites, and you can view them in the footer of any page on this site in “The Smorgasbord Network” block. I write for this site, I write about geeky gadget stuff, I write recipes and home cooking info, and about my Windows Vista laptop and it’s problems. I write about designer handbags, and funny top jokes. I even write about my guitar gear and my classic rock cover band T-Town Sound. These are the main web sites I work on every week. I have a few others that I only post to a few times per month. Let’s say I regularly work on a dozen web sites. I have enough trouble creating new content and posting to all these web sites and blogs as regularly as I should. Can you imagine what an effort it is to upgrade WordPress on all of them? I just wrote about stripe ad, and OIOpublisher – and I just love both plugins. So now I have to set both of those plugins up on a dozen web sites. Ouch!

When I said that I was the most successful blogger in the world, I said that my blogging plan for success would be 20% setup, 30% content, and 50% promotion. I still stick to that premise since if you have really good quality content you don’t have to post 10 times per day. You can get away with 3-5 good posts per week no problem. The problem I was having was that if I worked 10 hours and did 2 hours setup and 5 hours promotion – I wasn’t actually putting in the 3 hours content creation like I should have been. I just kept working on issues and problems or promotion. You can really get caught up in that. What you have to do is treat blogging more like a job – a real professional full time job (even if you are still working you day job).

I just had to explain this to a friend last night, so it’s fresh in my mind. I got a phone call and my friend had asked if my “course for online success” was worth the money or not. I said “What?!” After some prodding I found out he had visited this site (he’s not a blogger) and clicked on one of the Adsense ads (not understanding those were ads and not my articles), and he was reading some page about a guy who now vacations in the bahamas because he made millions blogging on the Internet. I had to explain to him that it was possible to make lots of money online, but it was like a business and would take a large investment of time. I also explained that he had a lot to learn about technology and marketing if he wanted to become successful.

That’s when I explained that the amount you could make for the time invested was directly relevant to your knowledge. I said 10 minutes of his time (blogging) was probably worth a lump of coal. 10 minutes of my time blogging is probably worth about $6.50. 10 minutes blogging for John Chow or Shoemoney is probably worth about $175. Lots of things factor into what a person’s time can be worth. I don’t think a lot of bloggers starting out realize all the different things becoming successful entails. I realize a lot of it as I go – which is why I setup this web site, so I could write about that process.

There are three main areas you can focus to increase the worth of your time blogging. I think that the first thing that denotes what your time is worth is your blogging skill level. This is something you can’t “buy” – you have to invest time and earn it (using the next two areas). A lot of things could make this sort of “ranking” more complete, but mainly I think it has to do with how successful you are in terms of readers and montly income. With readers and income, you must have strength in other areas – and with income you can pay other people to do things you aren’t strong at, or take time to lean the additional skills you need to become even more successful.

A mock blogging “skill level chart” might be like this…where do you think you rank?

Skill level (time on the job)
Student
Novice
Amateur
Intermediate
Semi-Pro
Professional

The second area is training. I call it OJT or “on the job training”, because that’s what it is. Blogging is learning as you go. You should constantly be reading, learning, trying new things, and becoming stronger in areas that you think you are weak in. Remember, blogging is a business and your site is your store front. You can become good at writing content, buy maybe you aren’t bringing in any new readers. Time to bone up on advertising and marketing. Maybe you don’t have very good search engine listings? Learn how to become better at SEO. Have your blog reviewed and see if maybe the layout needs an overhaul. Can you install your own plugins and customize your own theme? Do you know how Digg and StumbleUpon work? Do you know how many visitors per day you need to get to make money? Do you even know how many visitor a day you get, what they view, and how long they stay before leaving? You are running a business and you are the only employee (for now). You are President, chief cook, and bottle washer. Figure out what your strengths are, build on them, and start learning in all of your weak areas.

Here’s a short list of things you should be thinking about:

On the job training (learning as you go)
Adversiting and Marketing
SEO
HTML and Coding
Graphic Design
Web Based Tools
Communication Skills
Creative Writing
Accounting
Analytics

So now that you have some skill and a bit of training you should be accomplishing something – right? Keep track of those accomplishments and milstones because with each one you should be earning more money and building a greater montly income. Track your daily/monthly traffic and RSS subscribers you have now. As it rises so should your income. Does it? Set goals – and strive to reach them. Each week you post more content, you should be getting more search engine listings. Are they quality first and second page SERP’s? Improve your SEO skills until they are. Do you have complete profiles in all the right social media places? Like Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, google, Yahoo!, Facebook, myBlogLog, BlogCatalog, entreCard – the best ones that apply to you? Are you spending enough time in those networks to build connections with other sites? Are you building a “name recognition” and a “brand” so people know who you are? Basically accomplishments and milestones equals “reputation”. Are you building an online reputation? You should be, because that reputation make your time online worth more money.

Accomplishments and Milestones
Amount of daily Traffic
Number of RSS Subscribers
Quality Search Engine Listings
Number of articles
Profiles in Social Media
Networking with other Bloggers
Amount of Monthly Revenue

I hope this helps you in some small way and makes you realize that whatever your successes or failures in blogging, you are only at a particular phase in your journey to success. Using my 3 areas for blogging improvement find out what phase you’re in and where you need to improve to move forward. Only then will your time become worth an ounce of gold! If you don’t think it can be – think about this…when ProBlogger, or John Chow writes a quick review of a product they’re endorsing that includes an affiliate link, and 10,000+ RSS subscribers read that article – how valuable do you think their time is? Without foaming at the mouth, now think about how many thousands of hours it took them to get to the point of having 10,000+ RSS subscribers! There is a dramatic payoff – but are you willing to put in the same amount of time to be able to play at their level?

For questions, or comments regarding your success level please comment now!

There’s a great new free WordPress plugin by MaxBlogPress out called “Stipe Ad” that enables a small strip at the top of every page on your blog. You can place an endless list of rotating text links in that ad block from your WordPress dashboard. It’s great for Clickbank offers, promoting your own eBook, landing pages, PLR offers, you could even promote your own feed there.

Once you download the Plugin, just enable it in your Dashboard and go to “Options -> MBP Stripe Ad” to setup. This is the first part of the setup screen:

You can see that setup is very simple, just add in the text title and the URL for a link, whether you want it to open in a new window or not, and you have the option to assign a weight. The weight determines if want certain links to appear more often than others in the ‘rotation’. Once you add in some links you have a rotation queue that you control. You can disable links if you need to, delete them, change the weight, or change the URL or name once they are in the queue.

You have some additional settings for removing the “close” button, disabling stripe ads temporarily, or making the stripe “stick” to the top of the page (even when pages scroll). The advanced options are nice because you can completely control the layout of the stripe ad block. All the normal stylings like font, size, text color, background color, border, alignment, bold, italic, underline – are all available for update. I like the fact that you can change how the stripe is displayed and randomize it a bit if you prefer, every so many visits or days, all the time, after so many visits, etc.

You may have seen the clickbank ID at the bottom of this block. This is one of the few free WordPress plugins that you can make money from. The entire plugin I just showed you is completely free. There is a “pro” version coming out with additional features, like the ability to “sell” stripe ads, accept payment and automate placement, etc. In the free version there is a link to MaxBlogPress, which of course can be removed in the free version. If someone clicks that link and buys the pro version, or other plugins or products at MaxBlogPress you get an affiliate commission. Not bad!

I like the stripe ad because it’s non-intrusive and it’s using a space I hadn’t previously taken advantage of. I’m trying some clickbank offers there for now to see how well that works. In the future I may sell spots there. I see even John Chow is now using Stripe Ad! To download Stripe Ad for your WordPress blog Click Here! If you’re using this plugin now and have a question or want to tell about your experience with it – comment now!

If you want to fully monetize your WordPress or other blog by selling advertisement space, like 125×125 blocks, links, or paid posts you need a system to take ad submissions and payment, but also to automatically place and expire the ad placement on your blog or web site. OIOPublisher does all that and more – automatically, you just need to set it up.

First – let me be up front about this. OIOPublisher offers a WordPress plugin, but can (and does) also work with any other type of web site or blog, like Drupal, Xoops, Mambo, Geeklog, or even hosted blogging platforms like Blogger, Blogspot, MSN Spaces, whatever you have. OIOPublisher is NOT free – but you pay a ONE TIME FEE of $37, and that includes future upgrades. You may be put off to pay $37 for a WordPress plugin or any system like this. So was I, I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth and I won’t have to pay for future versions! I use WordPress – so I’m going to talk about the OIOPublisher plugin that am using. If you’re using another blog system or CMS OIOPublisher will work for you – but for my instructions your mileage may vary!

I noticed that most even semi-popular blogs have some 125×125 block ads in their sidebar, and they are selling spots to make money each month. I’ve thought about this for some time, but who wants to keep track of payments and ad placement and expiration? On the flip side of that – who wants to pay a service 50% of the ad revenue just for managing the ads? The other day I came across this post by Toast Egg & Me about selling Direct Ads with OIOPublisher. I went to the OIOPubisher web site and read about what they had to offer and it sounded really good. I would have liked to see some screenshots of the ads on a blog in action – so I kind of took a leap of faith when I signed up and paid my $37. I mean, they have a demo – but I only understand it now that I’ve setup the WordPress OIOPublisher ad plubin on my blog. I would rather have seen screenshots with annotations detailing the adspots and showing examples, etc. I’ve never paid for a WordPress plugin before, but what I’m about to show you should blow your mind! I’m going to take you through the process of OIOPublisher installation and how-to get it up and running as if you just purchased the WordPress plugin and were following an install and setup guide. This will give you a good idea of what’s possible and help you make the decision of you should spend $37 to get it for your site.

Installation of the WordPress OIOPublisher plugin is the same as any other. Extract and upload to your plugin directory and enable in your dashboard. Once you do this the setup process begins. The readme file in the docs folder was very basic – mostly installation stuff. I learned what I need to know for setup by fumbling around. Once the plugin is enabled, you go to the “Business” tab in your WP Dashboard. The first tab you see “Business -> Business” has a setup checklist at the bottom of the page you’ll need to view. In the ‘Overview’ the only thing you need to pay attention to (assuming your plugin works) is #4: your header has wp_head() and your footer file contains wp_footer() before continuing. In the ‘Purchase Module’ section – you need to do #1, #2 and #3 – enable your paypal email, set the prices, add the code (or widgets) to your sidebar. You’ll notice I skipped the step #5 in ‘Overview’ – the API key. You don’t need this to sell ads on your site, just to connect to the OIOPublisher Marketplace and list and sell your ads there. You can do that later – right now we’re just concerned with getting the ad system up and running.

In “Business -> Settings” you need to add in your paypal and payment info:

On the same page setup your advanced settings such as approving ads before payment is allowed, allowing the purchase of links after content, allowing people to ‘subscribe’ to the same ad spot (renew automatically), and whether to disclose paid posts (and what to say).

In “Business -> Settings -> Posts” (or Links, Inline ads, banner, or Custom) you’re going to set the pricing and options for the various types of ads you wish to sell. I want you to note that you can set not only the price and duration, but also the size if you want to go with something different other than the standard 125×125. You can also set how many you want and how many rows and columns. I choose the standard 4 block and standard size. You can rotate them, or keep the same for payment duration, use nofollow (or not), you even get to set the spacing and a default image. You have an incredible amount of options.

The other ads are very similar with great options. With link you can sell link right after content (per post), or in your sidebar (a paid blogroll), or even just a link on your homepage. You can even do paid reviews and paid posts. Bye-Bye Review Me, who needs you anymore? One really cool thing I’ve not seen before is the “custom ad” option. It’s great that you can create custom ads and sell them – maybe someone would want a “Peel” ad in the corner, or a special footer or header ad. But there’s a field I wasn’t expecting. Take a look at this image and see if you can find it.

Hopefully you saw the “download file” field at the bottom. How awesome is that! You can actually sell ad ad spot that has a zip file attached. So if someone wants to market their free ebook, you can take that advertisement as well AND have their link go directly to their ebook. This is pretty darn flexible!

Within the “Business -> Purchases” tab you will manage and approve ads when they come in. If you need to approve a purchase you’ll click on the appropriate option for the type of ad – link, banner, custom, etc. But I posted this images because I wanted you to see that you could “create a new purchase”. In other words, you can manually create an ad if you want at any time. This is handy if you give away an ad spot in a contest (like I did), but it’s especially useful if you need to place an ad where the person couldn’t pay you by paypal (or you maybe traded or bartered ads or services).

In the “Business -> E-mails” tab you’ll find that you have complete control over all the emails that are sent out to customers placing ads, from purchase, to payment and renewal (and more).

Before you setup your site to show the ads the last thing you need to do is enable the tracking and reports (if you’re going to use them). You’ll find this option under “Business -> Tracker”. You can leave most other options alone for a future date if all you need to do (initially) is get ads up and running on your site.

Now go back to the “Business -> Business” tab and on the ‘Setup Checklist’ on the bottom of the page choose a link in #3 to setup your ads either manually or using widgets. Once you do this you are ready to sell ads!

The system as it stands is fully capable of selling ads and more. Out of the box the only thing that I really didn’t care for was the fact that I didn’t have any obvious setup options to control my purchase pages. The basic information was there, but I couldn’t add in a header or footer, or pertinent information to give someone enough information to be able to make an informed decision about purchasing an ad. I posted in the forum and got a pretty quick response. Simon (the project owner) responded and gave me two options. The first was to modify the purchase pages themselves (which I did). I added a header graphic to each page, which is clickable to take people back to my blog home. His second option was to change the purchase URL in the plugin to point to a custom advertisement page. What I did was setup this Advertise with Us to fully explain all the types of adverts to everyone. It, in turn, points to the actual OIOpublisher purchase page. This involved modifying the includes/output.php file and changeing the purchase.php URL’s to point to my new Advertise With Us page. I would not attempt this unless you are proficient in both HTML and PHP.

Simon writes in his OIOpublisher blog that he realizes documentation is sparse, and creating robust docs and instruction to setup and use OIOpublisher are now a high priority. At $37 OIOpublisher is worth every penny only providing the ability to sell ads on your site. I haven’t even begun to scrape the features of the API and other abilities. You can advertise and sell your ads in the OIOpublisher marketplace, you can even post and reply to their jobs board (beta) and participate in ‘conversations’ via OIOpublisher groups. Both of these features aren’t used much quite yet. But it’s easy to see the potential. Imagine posting a “job” looking for people to write content for your site instead of begging for a guest poster? Imagine posting a ‘conversation’ from 10 blogs – ongoing – in your site dynamically without having to individually post on the meme over and over again manually? OIOpublisher will sell you ads, but if these current and future enhancements are what I think they are – it will finally connect bloggers in a way that mybloglog, blogcatalog, bumpzee, technorati, entrecard, text link ads, review me, and all the others only wish they could!

One last disclaimer…I found OIOpublisher through the post on Toast Egg & Me as mentioned earlier and I purchased it last night. I set it up and had default ads running and purchase pages in under two hours. If fact it’s taken me longer to write this massive post about OIOpublisher than it did to set it up. This is not a paid review, and all the details you just read about were my first impressions of the product since first setting it up. I’m sure you’ll read many future posts about it from me. I’m very curious to hear if you like it as much as I do – or if you are using something (to sell and manage ads) that you consider better (or worse). Please comment now!!

Oh -and if you read this far to the end of the post I’m going to reward you with one tidbit of incredible information. You can use OIOpublisher on an unlimited amount of web sites! That’s right. Pay $37 one time, get future upgrades, forum support, and you can use it on as many web sites or blogs as you want. This is great for me since I have an entire network of sites!

Click here to visit OIOpublisher

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