Desty Online -- Online and Offline Businesses, Online Marketing » Blogging — Technical

Use Feedburner for Your Adsense Placement

Desty — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 16:22:30 +0000

I’ve been working for several weeks now on my Adsense placement for my funny video site The Masked Dispatcher’s Video Collection. I’m still not happy with the placement, but today I was able to get one step closer to having things look the way I want it.

Adsense Placement is All About the Code

Putting your Adsense in the sidebar is simple, drop the code into one of the widget boxes. If you want to go beyond that, normally you either have to find an ad plugin or throw the Adsense code directly into the code of the main index or single page code.

I’ve worked with the Adsense Deluxe, but I’m telling you, whoever designed that plugin didn’t have the typical user in mind. As it stands, until today I’ve been working with the Wordpress Main Index and Single Page code sheets to directly insert my Adsense ad codes; I’ve had mixed success.

It’s easy to add the code before everything, but to increase possible clicks, and therefore revenue from Adsense placement, is to have the ads mesh into the page and it’s content. Putting the ad before everything, including the title of the post, doesn’t lend itself to that goal.

Feedburner’s Adsense Placement

A couple of months ago, Feedburner started giving the options to use their feedflare technology to insert Adsense codes directly into the content. Since I was happy with the way the small amount of Adsense looked on Desty Online, I didn’t give it much thought. Today I revisited the option for my video site, and gave it a shot with the single page top banner.

As you can see, it worked beautifully!

Limited Options for Adsense Placement

I thought that while I was in the neighborhood, I would try Feedburner’s other Adsense placement option, the 300×225 block. For some reason, even with only having two ad blocks on the page, the 300×225 block would not appear.

For the time being, Feedburner only offers those two ad block sizes, 468×60 and 300×225, but supposedly they’re working on other sizes. What I want to see is adding those ad blocks to the actual feed instead of just making changes to the site.

If you’re having trouble with your Adsense placement for your site, give feedburner a try and see what it can do for you.

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Get a Brutally Honest Review

Desty — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 19:22:43 +0000

Roaming around Bloggingzoom offers a great opportunity to get exposed to new sites and authors. While surfing around I found something that I’ve been looking for, but haven’t found until now: How to actually work your site and articles to get the best results from Google.
(more…)

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Putting Your Blog in Order

Desty — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 17:01:17 +0000

Everyone, without exception, starts their blog at the beginning. They must, it’s the beginning of their blog!

When the blog is created, the writer has a niche he or she wants to compete in. Their topic is selected, the blog theme is selected, categories are created, and content starts to flow.

Categories

As time progresses, and the writer starts to expand their topic into further categories, the actual category list gets longer and longer. One day, the writer is creating a new article, and discovers that they have to select from 17 different categories!

While this is a headache for the writer, imagine what the reader thinks. The category list was intended to help the read access topics of interest. Too many categories, the reader is overwhelmed.

Suggestion: As the writer, you know what your topics are. Set those topics as categories, and fit everything into those categories. Even if you have over 100 articles (like Desty Online does), you can always go back and edit every article to add to the new categories. Once older, unused categories are emptied, you can delete the old categories. This will also help target your internal keywords; not only will the search engines like you, so will your readers.

This is on my to-do list for the weekend.

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RSS Subscribers > Visitors & Video — RSS Explained

Desty — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 04:40:48 +0000

It’s strange. Looking at other blogs, for the most part, you hear how they have more visitors per day than RSS subscribers. For Desty Online, except in the early days, that has never been the case.

For the most part, our RSS subscribers count is close to doubling our average visitor numbers. The bad news is that we’re still not very visible. However bad that news is, the good news is oh SO much better…

Since our RSS numbers are higher than our visitors, that means those people who visit like what they read and subscribe to our feed!

And that, my friends, is the over all goal of our marketing strategy :) Now if we can just get more visitors in here…

I was reading this weekend that, for the most part, blog readers don’t understand what RSS is and how to take advantage of it. Here’s a video that describes what RSS really is and how to use it.

Source

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Have You Failed Your Business Plan?

Desty — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 06:01:01 +0000

I was reading my ever expanding RSS subscription articles and came across Why My Blog Get’s 1700+ Uniques/Day After 6 Weeks Online (Part 1) from Make Money Online with Snowboardjohn. I first discovered Snowboardjohn back when Blogrush first started; on the dashboard of your Blogrush account, there was a link to an excellent article about how to get the maximum return with Blogrush.

I read two or three more articles and was hooked. I subscribed to his RSS and also sent an email saying how much I liked his articles and that he had gained a subscriber. SBJ (as he likes to call himself) replied and thanked me for the email.

Today I’m going through his entire set of articles and I was stopped short by his article about traffic. SBJ goes through what works for him and how he promotes himself. For some reason, it got me to thinking about my business plan for Desty Online. So I went to pull the plan up and *POOF* it had disappeared! There was a software update last week, and suddenly, everything I had created past July 2nd 2007 was gone!

It was just as well. I hadn’t looked at it for at-least 2-3 months, so what was the point really? I had gotten so caught up in trying to write articles, I had lost sight on the reason why to write those articles. I have ZERO marketing for the last month or so, and my site traffic has suffered for it.

As you see, we had a nice peak on September 21, and then it went downhill from there. What happened after September 21? Well, looking in the archives, from September 22nd on, I wrote alot of “personal” articles, not really writing about interesting subjects, but rather my thoughts on what was going on with the blog and whatnot.

Not only was I not following my business plan but I had totally forgotten it. I was working without a written plan in place. What’s the big deal about having a written plan? A written plan allows you to see, in black and white, what the game plan is. Before doing anything, consult the business plan and determine if the new action / activity fits in that plan.

It’s time to get back on track, get my business plan rewritten, and follow the plan. I have several series unfinished, and it’s time to get them in gear.

Welcome to Desty Online 2.2!

blog, blogging, business plan,

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Validation! Precious Validation!!

Desty — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:20:18 +0000

As you may have noticed, my sidebar has gone on vacation. Yep, it’s gone south (below the content) for the winter!

In researching the Misty theme, it was suggested that I check out the W3C’s Validator. What this little beauty does is scan your page for errors in coding, and offer suggestions in fixing any found problems.

I tinker around with my code quite abit. I’ve always lived by the competition programmer’s creed, “if it works, that’s fine with me.”

After subjecting Desty Online to the Validator, 154 errors were found!!

I’ve got a long night ahead of me going through all this mess…

Source

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Project: I, Blogger Live on!

How to Make Money Online from Your Dorm Room — Blogging

Desty — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:01:59 +0000

Over the last year, creating a blog on how to make money online has been all the rage. The problem is that while these blogs start up with a bang, they quietly shrivel up and go away after three months or so. What happens is that these new writers read a blog about making money online (like John Chow, Problogger, or Shoemoney) and think to themselves, “Hmmm, this looks easy. I’ll start a blog and make thousands online.” What looks easy from the surface actually takes alot of long and hard work behind the scenes.

How to Start Making Money Online from College with a Blog

Starting a blog is actually very easy, just alittle piece of advice. Write about something you actually know something about. If you don’t know anything about making money online, don’t write about it. If you’re the master of playing World of Warcraft, blog about that. If you are the king of MySpace, write about MySpace. Get my drift? Go with what you know and are good at.

After determining your topic, now it’s time to choose a platform. Blogs far and wide will tell you to register your own domain and run wordpress. While that is excellent advice, that’s not the path I’m going to suggest for you. My suggestion is that you start with a simple blog using Google’s Blogger platform. I want you to determine if you can start and keep up with a blog before you start spending any cash on it, and hosting your own blog takes money. It doesn’t cost much money, but if your college days are anything like mine were, I was too busy trying to scrimp and save so I could afford cable, gas money, and the weekly pizza feast. If you’re iron-willed enough to use what little cash you have for hosting fees, go for it, I just remember money being in short supply. Dreamhostis the hosting provider I personally use; they have nice rates and a one click install of Wordpress. Anyway, back to Blogger.

Use your Google Account information as a sign-in. If you don’t have a Google Account, create one here. You’ll sign in, go through two more steps to create your blog, and now it’s time to start blogging.

When I first started blogging, before I got my own domain, I used Blogger:

At this point you want to start to optimize your theme. There’s not much you can do beyond putting widgets into your theme on the sidebars and switch themes. Use Google’s Adsense and other ad-services that allow interested readers to generate some ad revenue. I’m telling you right now, you won’t make much money at the start.

The best thing you can do at this early stage is to start routing your RSS Feed through Feedburner. This will allow you, in the future when you switch from Blogger to your own domain, to make a few clicks in Feedburner to have your old subscribers switched over to your new site, and they’ll never have to do anything themselves.

You need to focus on writing articles for three months. Visit other blogs; commenting on articles may direct some traffic your way if your comments are good and on topic.

After three months, you’ll have a good idea if blogging is for you. If so I suggest to sign-up with PayPerPost, take a few opportunities, and use the income from those articles to register a domain and setup hosting, and transfer your blog from Blogger to Wordpress.

You’re well on your way to making money online with your blog. It will be slow going, but reading the following blogs will give you further ideas on how to make money online through blogging:

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Back into the DoFollow Fold

Desty — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 11:39:44 +0000

I’ve turned the DoFollow plug-in for comments back on. This will be a shock to those of you who didn’t know I turned it off, heh, sorry about that.

Comment to your heart’s desire! Mind you, I have, and will, delete spammy comments.

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My Favorite WordPress Plugins

Desty — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 06:01:44 +0000

I totally endorse the following plugins! I either use them personally or have used them in the past.

Akismet– Akismet checks your comments against Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. Any comments flagged as spam show on the WordPress dashboard for your approval.
All in One SEO Pack – An out-of-the-box SEO for your Wordpress blog. Possibly the most useful plugin I use!
Dofollow – Disables the rel=nofollow attribute in comments. Currently disabled, but will make a return in the future.
Extended Comment Options – This plugin allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts.
Feedburner Feedsmith – This plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
Feed Footer– Add custom footers (copyright, notices, advertisements) to the bottom of your posts in your RSS feed. Tied for #1!
Google Sitemaps – This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.
MyAvatars – This plugin allows you to add MyBlogLog.com avatars to WordPress comments.
Nofollow From Home – This plugin adds rel=nofollow to all external links in the posts on the front/home page only.
Optimal Title – Mirrors the function of wp_title() exactly, but moves the position of the ’separator’ to after the title rather than before. Handy for search results on the search engines.
Permalink Redirect – Permalink Redirect ensures that pages and entries are always accessed via the permalink. Otherwise, a 301 redirect will be issued.
Related Posts – Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches.
ST Add Related Posts to Feed – Adds related posts to your full content feed. Ultimate Tag Warrior or Related Posts is required.
Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
Top Commentators Widget – Adds a sidebar widget to show the top commentators in your WP site.
Ultimate Google Analytics – Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.
WordPress Automatic Update – WordPress Automatic Update allows a user to automatically update the wordpress installation to the latest one provided by wordpress.org using the 5 steps provided in the wordpress upgrade instructions.
WP-ContactForm — WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
WWW Redirect – Redirects variations of identical domain requests to a consistent url (i.e. http://destyonline.com to http://www.destyonline.com)

Post your favorite plugins!

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Who Do You Trust?

Desty — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 17:07:20 +0000

I’ve been brainstorming over the past week as to how to bring Desty Online to the next level. The theme change was the first project I came up with; hopefully it will happen tonight. Once you start a theme change, you really need to keep the upgrade going until it looks decent.

My second project is to go back to upgrade my posts and add relevant images where I’m able. Images add so much to an article. Instead of writing about something, you can show your readers. Also, using an image means that you don’t have to use a link to an outside source. There have been two times when I’ve linked to Yahoo’s Finance pages to show stock price histories. If the reader doesn’t follow those links, then part of the story is missing.

Finally, I was on my way towards a meeting this morning for work and thinking about what else I can add to increase my readers’ experience. Then it came to me:

PODCASTING

I had an idea on how to use pod-casting to not only enhance the reader experience, but also as a marketing tool. As this giddy feeling of a great idea was washing over me, a wave of cold reality hit me square in the face.

I know nothing about how to create a podcast.
I haven’t seen it done anywhere, so who do I ask how to do it without giving away a great idea too early?

It may or may not be a good idea, but I want to be the one who does it first. If it were to catch on, then I’m the innovator, otherwise I’m just one in a line of followers.

One of the first rules of blogging is be unique. Offer something to your readers that no one else has. Being creative and coming up with new ideas is something every businessperson looking to expand needs to work towards. The problem occurs when your ideas outstrip your means or knowledge. Going to outside sources is the key to progressing, but when your source of experience is also possible competition, you have to rely on their discretion and honesty.

Back to me. I’m going to research more and see what I can do on my own before I start asking for help. I know something as simple as pod-casting makes me seem paranoid for thinking all this. It’s part of my business plan and could become not only a great marketing tool, but a nice revenue stream.

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