wangarific

One of the great benefits of using WordPress is that it comes with so much free stuff. You can download a multitude plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress. You can download thousands of themes to change the look and feel of your site. WordPress itself gives you a window into that theme so you can customize every aspect of your design. All of this is possible without any background in software development and therein lies the beauty of open source software and the open source movement.

However, one problem that new bloggers often commit is that of overtinkering.

When you first start your blog, it’s often good enough to download a theme that pleases aesthetically. All too often, and I myself suffered from this, we feel that we should be tinkering with our theme so that it doesn’t look the same as every other blog that downloads that theme. What we don’t realize is that when you’re first starting out, the theme is less important than the content.

Themes are important, don’t get me wrong, but don’t over think it. People get their first impressions within seconds of viewing your site and as long as you have a professional looking theme that is easy to read, you will do fine. Wait until you have hundreds of visitors a day before you start playing with the theme. Wait until you have thousands before you start thinking about buying a theme.

You might be surprised to learn that all of my blogs use free themes. Most of your visitors will not know you have a common theme (you have to at least change it from the themes that come with the WordPress package, that’s too generic) and the ones that do won’t care.

If you’re curious what theme Bargaineering started out as… it was equiX, a free theme that is no longer available. Over the years, I tinkered with it (once it made sense to) to achieve certain goals and today it doesn’t look at all like equiX. Totally free.

Jeremy at GenXFinance.com has been dealing with a vexing problem lately. A series of random websites with the cz.cc TLDs have been using his Google Adsense javascript code to pump up his impressions and driving down his clickthrough rate. Over four days there were nearly 600,000 impressions and zero clicks.

While it may seem a bit harmless (no click, no revenue right?), this is actually something that is quite dangerous. First, Google is always on the lookout for abnormal behavior and this certainly qualifies. Second, there are CPM based ads and in that case the advertiser would’ve been charged, Jeremy would’ve made money, and almost certainly booted.

In Jeremy’s case, it was probably harmless but this is something that can be completely avoided. Google Adsense gives you the ability to block your Adsense publisher ID from being used on any other sites. You can control this by logging into your account, clicking Adsense Setup, and then Allowed Sites.

Here, you can add all the allowed URLs who can load up your code. You always want to do this because there is little benefit, and a lot of risk, for unauthorized sites to use your code. They can do this by looking at your source code and copying the javascript code.

Just remember to add new sites if you put the code on them!

Every year around this time all the blogs about blogs write about how you can add a little php code snippet to your footer so that you never again have to manually update the copyright year. Here’s the code snippet that displays the current year:

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> [Your Blog Name]

The date(‘Y’) part will display the current year.

While this is great advice, putting the copyright notice, with or without the year, is entirely unnecessary. I think most of us do it because everyone else does and because it doesn’t have any drawbacks. In the United States, and many other places, you are automatically granted a copyright to your work. You don’t need to register it. (you can do the poor man’s copyright, which is where you seal the work in a letter and send it to yourself – the postmark asks as the date)

How long does the copyright last? It lasts 70 years after your death (csusa.org).

So as you can see, putting dates at the bottom of your foot is really unnecessary.

Bargaineering gets hundreds of comments a day… and most of them are spam. Even this blog, Wangarific, with its small audience, gets about two dozen spam comments a day! Spam can be one of the biggest headaches for a blogger and dealing with it is both a waste of time and energy.

At one point, I even changed my comment form to post to wpcXXXXXX.php (changing the number ever so often), instead of the standard wp-comments-post.php. I did this because spambots would just post comments directly to wp-comments-post.php. By changing the filename, they would get a 404 whenever they tried this tactic (actually, I added a Redirect in my .htaccess to redirect them to google.com so my server wouldn’t waste resources processing the request).

Fortunately, I stumbled onto a series of plugins that has pretty much stopped all spam in its tracks. It requires no CAPTCHA and no extra work to implement. Simply active/install these two plugins:

• Akismet: This plugin is included with every WordPress install, so simply activate it. You may need to get an API key to get it to work but that’s fairly trivial.
• WP-SpamFree: This plugin absolutely crushes spam. It works like magic, takes two seconds to install, and it has stopped a ridiculous amount of spam. In fact, the spam doesn’t even appear in the spam folder anymore. You can download it here.

Finally, just to be sure, I auto-moderate each commenter’s first comment and any comment with a link in it. This will put it in the moderation queue so I can review it manually, this catches about two dozen comments each day.

Save yourself some gray hairs and install these plugins.

If you are running a WordPress blog, fire up your site and view the source. Search for “generator” and tell me if you see a line that looks like this:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.9" />

That code is automatically generated by WordPress in the general-template.php file (located in the wp-includes directory) and while it’s well intentioned, it does have some security drawbacks.

Why You Should Remove It

In general, it is safe to assume that sites will upgrade to the newest version of their blogging software because they want the newest features and any security fixes. However, if you fail to upgrade and thieves discover a security breach in an older version, leaving the generator meta tag in your header will make it easier for them to find your site. They can scour the web using spiders to find WordPress sites using an older and now vulnerable version. That tag just did the equivalent of telling them you left your house keys in the lock of the front door (please come in and help yourself to some milk, cookies, and all of our valuables).

How to Remove WP Version Generator

So as a precaution, you should remove this and the easiest way is to edit your theme’s functions.php file and add the following:
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

By editing the functions.php file, this change will persist even through WordPress upgrades. This removes the one created by WordPress but your theme may also print out its own version by default, so search through your header.php file for this meta generator line. Delete it.

You can confirm this has worked when you view your source and can no longer find that generator meta tag anywhere.

One of the cited “strengths” of blogs is that they offer readers the ability to comment. You could communicate with the author, they would reply, other readers could reply, and this small community could develop. It’s part of the reason why you see many news sites adopt commenting features to that people can “respond.”

While this is all still true, it doesn’t happen without some extra help. Out of the box, WordPress and other blog software packages do offer rich commenting features but there are definitely add ons that will make the experience much much better.

One such example is a “Subscribe to Comments plugin” type of plugin. The one I use is available for download here. It has some nice extra features that I appreciate, like rudimentary security, but the main purpose is to let popular posts take on a life of their own.

Posts Live Forever

The most commented post on Bargaineering is one about United First Financial Money Merge Accounts with over 850 comments. It was written in mid-2008 but the latest comment was 12/12/2009. Several of the comments have multiple replies because of a small group of dedicated readers (like JoeTaxpayer who has since started his own blog!) helping educate people on the perils of the program.

You probably won’t look back through all 850+ comments but if you did, you’d see that the comments appear in spurts. You have a visitor who comes via a search engine and leaves a comment. A subscriber to that post (there are currently 31) will see the comment and come back to respond (more often than not, it’s Joe and it’s great because he’s very smart and totally understands the faults of the system inside and out).

This cycle repeats a long long time. Another example is the Rent Forever, Don’t Buy A Home post. It has 31 subscribers and over 400 comments. It was written in early 2007 and the latest comment was 12/28/3009.

Don’t Auto-Subscribe Commenters

If you install this plugin, do not auto-subscribe commenters. It will spam them, create a horrible user experience, and if I find out I’ll reach through the interwebs and throttle you.

The goal isn’t to trick people who don’t want to participate into participating. The goal is to make it easier for those who do.

If you have success stories using similar subscribe to comment plugins, please share them!

One of the biggest pressures bloggers feel, and mostly it’s self-imposed, is the need to write every day. The logic is that people visiting each day want to see new content and if you disappoint them too many times, they won’t return. While this pressure is at times unfounded (with RSS, more of your fans are pulling your stories along with dozens or hundreds of others), I can understand the motivation to keep moving the chains.

You can reduce the pressure to write every day if you batch your work and schedule posts ahead of time. Right now on Bargaineering, I have posts scheduled until December 29th (two a day, with one interactive “Your Take” post on Friday). This frees me up to be more flexible with my writing. If there’s a topic that catches my interest, I can take the time to research it and put it next in the queue. If I want to focus on other aspects of blog promotion, I can without feeling like I’m sacrificing quality of content.

One obvious downside to this is that you lose some flexibility. Unless you adhere to a strict schedule of two posts a day, this is a downside you can overcome simply by posting whatever interests you whenever it interests you. There is no rule that says you can only publish one post a day, or two, or three.

One thing to remember is that people are only able to read so much in one day. If you write one meaty, educational post a day, you will do well on that schedule probably forever. If you write one meaty post and then a few entertaining or list-y type posts, your readers will be able to handle that too. It’s not required reading, so people are free to skip articles that don’t interest them.

I find it’s easy to schedule them using 8.5″x11″ calendars. I just use the Calendar template in Microsoft Word and print it out on some scrap paper. We had some pink paper lying around and I printed it on that, it makes the calendar very easy to find on my desk. Since my schedule is two a day, I write a B in the upper left when I have my morning post and a B in the lower left when I’ve scheduled the afternoon post. It’s as simple as that.

Give it a try, you’ll find it very liberating.

Everywhere you turn, whether it’s on the internet or in real life, there’s something known as “conventional wisdom.” Conventional wisdom can be a boon in real life but it can lead to mistakes online. This is because in the real world, there are very few unique situations where conventional wisdom fails. There are fewer variables, so the “don’t swim thirty minutes after eating” bit of advice is probably smart for anyone (unless you love cramps).

When it comes to the internet, there are so many different variables and factors that conventional wisdom is useless. Fortunately, you can test anything yourself, at almost no cost, and find the answer for yourself.

Google Adsense is one of the most popular and easiest ways to monetize your website. If you’re just starting out, I wouldn’t focus too much time on this because you should focus on producing more content. If you get to the point where you’re seeing a few thousand visitors a day, it’ll be worth spending a few minutes a week testing layouts and color palettes to maximize earnings.

So how do you test palettes? (this is the colors and fonts of the adsense block, not where they are placed)

Simple – use PHP’s rand() function to generate a random number (0 or 1) and then display an ad block. Presumably it’ll display each block 50% of the time. When you design the ad blocks, be sure to add channel tracking so you can look in the reports to see the performance of each.

<?php 
$test = rand(0, 1);
if ($test) { ?>
     // First adsense block
<?php } else { ?>
     // Second adsense block
<?php }
?>

If you want to test more than 2, you can just change the rand function to 0,2 (for three options) and add more if blocks. 0,3 for four options, etc.

Be sure to give it enough impressions to show a significant difference. That’s why I recommended doing this when you have a few thousand visitors a day (since you’re splitting them between the two blocks). If you have a typical CTR of 2%, that’s only 20 clicks on 1,000 impressions. Let it run a few days and then come back to see the results, you want a few thousand in each and a significant difference (that’s up to you to decide) to make a decision.

Also, play with a bunch of different palettes. The current Adsense palette on Bargaineering was the optimal palette out of about a dozen that I tested (including some ridiculously ugly ones just to see if the discord led to more clicks… it didn’t). Don’t test too many at once (my max was three at a time, changing very little about the colors) because you’ll just have to wait longer to find a result.

Test test test!

One of the most important decisions you can make before you start a site is what your site will be about. Some subjects are more profitable than others, but ultimately the choice comes down to your interests and your passions. That’s because the road to a revenue-generating blog is very long, sometimes lonely, and filled with paupers.

The money sucks. And it’ll suck for a looooong time, which is why so many blogs started for financial reasons are usually dead in six months. Without passion, you can’t write an article a day and expect a few ten cent clicks to pay the bills. It’s just not reasonable. In fact, the harder you try to make money from a blog, the harder it will be to actually make money. People want to learn what you know, not enrich you at their own expense.

To give you an idea of what the first year was like, Bargaineering earned $1,773.02 for all of 2005. For the first half of the year, it earned $543.59. Compared to your day job, it’s a pittance. Some lawyers make $543 in an hour, it took Bargaineering six months and a website is open twenty-four hours a day!

Look at all of your passions and pick one that seems like it would be profitable. The easiest way to find a profitable niche is to think about what companies spend a lot of money in advertising online. I happened onto personal finances by chance, it was the subject I was most passionate about at the time I started, and while I never did research, you can’t go anywhere without see an advertisement for a financial company. Banks, brokers, credit cards, etc. The list is extensive.

Remember, find something you’re passionate about and then see if there’s a market… not the other way around.