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Adsense WordPress Themes Fast Enough?

Fletch — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:15:11 +0000

Anybody who has some Adsense monetised virtual real estate should be aware by now of the importance of website delivery speed.

Google has publicly stated that the load speed of a site is a factor in its ranking algorithm and so you should be making an effort to decrease the time it takes to deliver your pages to the users browser.

Unfortunately as some of you may know, WordPress, the marketers platform of choice can be a tad on the slow side unless you make some cuts here and there.

WordPress has gained such a strong foothold because of the ease of use it gives to the average marketer and therein lies the problem.

Plug-ins, because we can, we do. How many plug-ins do you use on your site? Do you know the time cost of each one?

It’s all well and good sticking various bells and whistles on your MFA sites but at the end of the day do you really need them?

Personally I use just two or three, the obvious All-In-One-SEO and Google Sitemaps with the occasional internal link builder if I am using some auto-blogger software.

However I still go through each theme and strip out all the unnecessary php that I can and replace it with static urls. This can make a huge difference in load speed and I suggest you do it too.

The choice of theme is important especially for Adsense sites, nothing too fancy and a minimum of calls to the database. If it can provide some ad management then all the better.

I am in the process of switching over to the Adsense WordPress theme from CTR Themes as these are specialist themes designed from the ground up to produce the best possible click through ratio, hence the name, get it?

I am hoping to save myself a bucket of time by not having to butcher wordpress themes for every site now and the ad management facility will hopefully do its job and produce an extra kick to the CTR.

So, think about speed and whether you really need that plug-in.

Do a site speed check

Free WordPress Plug-Ins

Fletch — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:08:32 +0000

I think every affiliate marketer knows the value of WordPress. It is a very simple way to get a highly polished website up and running in the shortest time possible and by using any of thousands of free wordpress plug-ins you can make it do pretty much anything you like without having to learn coding skills or any of that boring stuff.

By using free wordpress plug-ins you can make the functionality and the user experience so much better and as they are easy to install and regularly updated to keep pace with wordpress itself the few minutes it takes to install them can be worth thousands of hours during the lifetime of your blog.

Here are a few free wordpress plug-ins that I am using at the moment on the various websites that I maintain, they are all free and are products from the MaxBlog Press stable. I have found that the free wordpress plug-ins that they give away are very efficient, easy to use and they work as you want them to without a lot of messing around.

Anyways up, heres my top three free wordpress plug-ins form MaxBlogPress:

Max Blog Ping Optimizer: I have written about this one before and have it installed on pretty much every blog I have. It can save you from the curse of the default pinging feature of WordPress and stop you from getting banned by the ping sevices.

Duplicate Post Checker: You are going to write about a post but you are in doubt about whether you have already created a similar post. If you write a new post which is very much similar to the post you have written previously then this will certainly annoy your blog readers.

What you can do is you can use this plugin to check other similar posts you have already written to make sure that you can write entirely original content on the same topic without making it look like a duplicate of another post already published.

MaxBlogPress DealDotCom Widget: Each day DealDotCom have only one product for sale. It gets sold at insanely low price and there are limited numbers of copies available. That product will only be available until it sells out or until the midnight after that it will be pulled off and start selling a new product.

Can you see the selling psychology here? They offer a killer deal as well as they make it extremely time sensitive too. There is a huge fear of losing that deal forever. This one depends a great deal on the site you have but it can be a money spinner on the right page.

Stripe Ads: You can see one at the top of this page. Pop ups are extremely annoying to a lot of visitors and as they try to get rid of it many will actually close the page or press the back button, a lost visitor. With a stripe ad you can have a subtle message at the top of the page that doesn’t get in the way of the content and it can be configured to rotate ads, stop and start and quite a few other things as well.

Oh well that is actually four but I am sure at least one will be of use to you .

Learn WordPress Fast

Fletch — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:23:19 +0000

If you are new to affiliate marketing you are well advised to make learning how to use WordPress a priority.

WordPress is the platform of choice for most affiliate marketers today because of its simplicity and adaptability. You can spend hours searching for free information but to learn WordPress fast you should invest some time and money.

Affiliate marketers like myself who do not possess the skills required to build HTML websites from scratch can pump out a website in literally minutes with WordPress, the sheer number of free templates and plug-ins mean that you can easily achieve professional websites without spending months learning how to code.

But, and there is always a but, you do need to learn how to use this platform properly and maximise the benefits it can bring. As I have said before I have no interest in learning how to write code or how to design templates, it’s just not my thing but I still need to have a website that is functional and attractive. I needed to learn wordpress fast because I do not have the patience to dig through pages and pages of free tutorials that never quite told me what I wanted to know.

WordPress is hugely powerful and a massive time saver and so it pays to invest some time into learning how to make the most of it. Most of it is very simple but what you don’t know, you don’t know and even the easiest thing can be an obstacle in your way to making more money online.

WordPress Wizard will make that learning process easier and more importantly faster, having over 40 videos to guide you through the simple steps that will increase your knowledge and hopefully, earnings. WordPress Wizard is currentl on special offer at $30 off. I would say take a look as it could be money well spent.

This is a brief over view of whats included:

hosting wordpress
creating wordpress blog
wordpress tutorial
wordpress video tutorial
wordpress mastery
Installing wordpress plugins
Installing WordPress
making money online with blog
how to install wordpress
how to use wordpress widget
make money with blog
blogging for money
cash for blogging
easy website building
building your own website
hosting for blogs
make easy money from blog
blogging for dummies
blogging for profit

Learn WordPress fast and make more money quicker.

Get Website Traffic And Keep It

Fletch — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 11:33:07 +0000

How much effort do you put into getting more visitors to your website?

If you serious about making money with affiliate programs or just want more people to read your words of wisdom then you will already know how frustrating it can be to see visitors come to your site and leave never to return again.

One way to help your visitor numbers is to provide an easy way for them to keep you in mind.

Using the RSS feed that WordPress provides is one way but for everyone who is not web savvy or an affiliate marketer it is not the best solution, it took me forever to work out what exactly was occuring when I signed up to an RSS feed on some site or other.

If your theme doesn’t provide a button or icon to your RSS feed it is usually at http://www.mydomain.com/feed/

A much simpler and easier to understand is to provide an email subscription with Feedburner. This is a free service from Google which allows the visitor to enter their email address and then automatically recieve an email with your new content.

How To Set Up A Feedburner Subscription

Go to Feedburner set up an account.

Burn a feed: Enter your Rss URL and press next.

Go to the Analyse tab–> Configure stats–Check Item Links

Go to the Optimise tab–>Enable BrowserFriendly, SmartFeed and FeedFlare.

Go to Publicize tab–> Enable Buzzboost,Email Subscriptions,Pingshot,Creative Commons,

On this tab go to NoIndex and make sure both boxes are unchecked, you want your content indexed!

At each save click the “save” button

Now go to the Email Subscription link on the Publicize tab and scroll down to a box of code. Highlight it and click copy, make sure you have all the code!

Now go to your WordPress dashboard and click “Widgets”

Place a text widget into your side bar, mine’s at the top and paste the code your copied into it. Give it a catchy title and you are good to go.

Help Your Website Visitors

Fletch — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 10:49:15 +0000

A quick and simple way to improve your visitor experience and drastically reduce your bounce rate is to provide better navigation around your website.

A further advantage is that it may help the bots to better spider your site and therefore improve the indexing of your pages.

Yoast has produced the free Breadcrumb plug in that gives a clear indication to the visitor of where they are on the site and how they can move around and find other relevant information.

The plug-in is straightforward to use, just download it here and then upload it to your wordpress site with the upload feature. Activate it when prompted and that part is done.

You do have to put a piece of code into your template to call the feature and even though I am a coding idiot I managed to place it it the bottom of my header template to get the result you see above. The part where it says “You are here: Home » wordpress » Help Your Website Visitors” just below the header.

The way I did it was to open the template editor from the WP dashboard and inserted this code at the bottom of the Header.php

yoast_breadcrumb(‘
’,'
’);
} ?>

There are more things you can do but this was enough for me, simple.

Get the plug-in here

Affiliate Marketing Plan

Fletch — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 12:31:51 +0000

If you wish to succeed at affiliate marketing you need a plan. As the maxim goes,”If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

If you are new to affiliate marketing it is incredibly difficult to know what you need to do to get a plan. There are a million and one schemes, secret codes or ‘recipes for success and the problem for newbies is which one works.

Unfortunately the answer is very few. Affiliate marketing is not a get rich quick method of making money online as many of the above make it out to be. It takes work, a fair few failures and lots of frustration but make no mistake you can earn lots of money on the internet.

Trillions of dollars change hands every year online and you only have to get a minute piece of that pie to make serious money.

How many of us have produced affiliate websites only to have them disappear into cyber space not to be seen again?
I have websites that even I have forgotten about let alone any prospective customers.

I have found that by getting a plan into place my earnings have increased significantly and whats more important is that I know what is working for me and what I can forget about. I have a plan!

I now follow two different plans depending on what particular niche I have found. The first is Brian Johnsons Commission Ritual which I use when I have identified a micro-niche. This is a super easy way of affiliate marketing which can produce profits in a fairly short space of time.

As I have a very short concentration time on some subjects it allows me to hop from niche to niche without worrying too much about backlinking, article writing etc. Commission Ritual is perfect for this method. It is based on wordpress which I love and which makes the whole process quick and simple.

The second plan I follow is the N1Way, this method is for larger sites that I build around subjects for which I have a genuine interest. I find it so much easier to put in bucketfuls of time when there is a passion for the niche and the N1Way gives me focus and makes the process much quicker and more straightforward. The N1Way was originally designed for Build A Niche Store owners but it contains methods for wordpress sites (which I use) but the concept is easily adapted for any type of website you may wish to build.

I would recommend either or both of these affiliate marketing plans to anyone and further say that until you have taken them to heart don’t bother with anything else. Get an affiliate marketing plan!

photo credit: Eric Fischer

MaxBlogPress | Are You Killing Your Blog?

Fletch — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:29:10 +0000

I think all affiliate marketers accept that WordPress is a fantastic tool. It does seem that the major search engines appear to like it as a CMS but it does have a small flaw that can seriously affect your success.

Blog pinging!

WordPress readily gets attention from the SE’s because unlike a static site, whenever you publish some new content in your posts WordPress doesn’t sit quietly in the corner like the class weed just hoping someone will pay attention, no, it stands up and shouts “I’ve got something new to say! Look at this!”

This is the ping feature of WordPress and you will see it in the writing section of your dashboard under the Update Services.

Now this is a great feature and can draw in many visitors and get your posts in the SE index quickly but if you are a tinkerer like me, you will have posts that are just not qite right and you may go into the editor several times changing this little bit or that.

This is when your problem may arise, every time you press the update button WordPress will ping the update service. If you do this a 2 or 3 times in a short period the service will ban you as a spammer. Your posts will no longer be scattered around the internet, losing you ranking chances and possibly customers who will no longer see your posts.

Do yourself a favour and get the free plugin for wordpress which takes over the ping feature and stops all the repeat pings. MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer will only ping when a post is first published so you won’t get a ban because you are only ever pinging new content.

Another feature of MaxBlogPress is that it won’t ping scheduled posts until they actually go live. If you have been clever and scheduled 20 posts to go out through the month WordPress will ping them. The update service gets 20 pings to posts that are not actully there, whoops!

Fix these problems with MaxBlogPress

Free WordPress Plug-Ins