Blogging

Ideas for Blogging, including websites, information, and tips.

Ping Your Sitemap For Search Engines: The Manual Way

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If you are unfortunate enough to not have access to a tool or plugin to automatically ping your sitemaps on your site for you, you can still do this manually, and it’s pretty effective. A good example of this is a static site which doesn’t have the content update very often.  Simply prepare a simple page with these links:

  • <a href=”http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>Google</a>
  • <a href=”http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&amp;url=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>Yahoo</a>
  • <a href=”http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>MSN</a>
  • <a href=”http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>AsK</a>
  • <a href=”http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>Moreover</a>

Step 1: edit each link code with the url to your site’s sitemap.

Step 2: then copy the code for each line to a new page/post or html document.

Step 3: create the rest of the page.

Step 4: publish it. Each time you need to ping these sites, open this page and click on each link. It only takes a few seconds, and is ideally done as part of a checklist of things to do.

10 Sites That Generate Traffic: What works, what almost works and what is a waste of time!

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One of the great ways to generate interest in your blog is via one of the many traffic generating sites that are available. However, not all of them are very good. In fact, I’ve had little success with several so here’s my top list of traffic generators that work vs. those that don’t.

  1. BlogMad
  2. BlogSoldiers
  3. ClickPirate
  4. EntreCard
  5. Traffic Swarm
  6. AutoHits
  7. AussieEarners
  8. BlogExplosion
  9. BlogAdvance
  10. Google Ads

So here’s the truth. This is an non-scientific analysis of how traffic generators actually work, despite whatever statistics they provide in their system. The effective sites were counted as providing more than an average amount of time on the site, over 2 years that was approximately 02:12 minutes.

Of the ten sites that I surveyed, only one merits any real ad spending. And that’s the first one. Please note, though, I don’t use Google AdSense anywhere that it matters, so if you are using any of these sites, you may find that you are violating AdSense TOS.

Better than Average

1. ClickPirate – accounted for only 269 trips to my site but the traffic stayed much longer (11:26 minutes), viewed nearly 3 times as many pages and had a much lower bounce rate. I regularly purchase advertising through ClickPirate, and would recommend it. Grade: A++

Around Average

2. Autohits.dk – only generated 126 actual hits to my site, but the average time on site was a decent 3:38 minutes and a respectable bounce rate. I have purchased advertising on this site several times and been pleased. Grade: A+

3. AussieEarners – only recently added to the stable but in that short month generated about 195 actual hits with a decent 2:01 on the site. Its bounce rate wasn’t that hot, but at least the traffic seems reasonable quality. I haven’t purchased any advertising on this site yet. Grade: A-

Shorter than Average

4. EntreCard – accounted for over 640 visits in two years, but with an average of 43 seconds on the site, it was marginally better than BlogSoldiers. I gave up on EntreCard mostly because it failed to demonstrate any value, and the system kept changing. You might have better luck with them than I did. I stopped when they deleted two of my sites for alleged TOS violations despite the fact that they were quality sites. Pity they couldn’t remove the EC farms and the porn effectively. Worse, it wasn’t worth buying advertising on here because of the gross mismatch between EC prices and actual traffic. Grade: C+

5. BlogSoldiers – generated slightly more interest than BlogMad, but it’s average time on site was 29 seconds! I’m still using this site, as it does generate fairly decent traffic levels. I also purchased advertising for both banners and blogs through their service. I quite like the fact that you can create banners and text links and try them out over extended periods. I have purchased advertising here, and would probably do so again. Grade: B-

6. BlogMad – in two years BlogMad generated 575 visits for my blog, but with an average time on my site of just 7 seconds, it was largely ineffective. Worse, I tried to buy advertising but this company’s got a really ineffective ecommerce system that prevented me from buying any credits at all! Sorry but that is really shooting yourself in the foot, is it not? Grade: C-

Largely Useless

7. BlogAdvance – was a very dark horse in the race, and in only one respect did it manage a less worse than average result: time on site – 1:19 minutes. The site is currently non-functional, and fails to accept my sites. I couldn’t figure out why, and generally reckon that this site is now over. Grade: F

8. BlogExplosion – Really only created an average time of 4 seconds on site, and a little more than 1 page! With a high bounce rate, it’s not worth it. Worse, I had a problem on my account and it was never fixed. Grade: F

9. TrafficSwarm – generated no hits to my site at all. Complete waste of time.Oddly, though, my Google ads only attracted 51 viewers to my and they only stayed 19 seconds! 19! Wow! Grade: F

Unknown Potential

10. AdWords – But the biggest surprise was for me, AdWords. AdWords produced really poor quality traffic overall with 51 visitors and a time on site of just 19 seconds. Most likely this reflects the complexity of the AdWords system. I’m still not convinced AdWords is an appropriate tool for InvestorBlogger at this time. Grade: Unknown.

These stats are from over 57000 page views taken over 2 years. Not all sites were tested for 2 years. Nor were all sites tested continuously. But this reflects my own personal experience with these ten sites. Your own mileage may vary considerably from these statistics!

30 Tweaks for Setting Up WordPress For the First Time

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This is a short checklist of items that I created when I was setting up a friend’s new blog. It’s pretty much all the tweaks, I make to a standard install of Wordpress that I use.

Once you have created your admin user:

  • 1). Login and set the password to something you can remember!
  • 2). Update any pre-installed plugins that you need, remove any that you don’t.
  • 3). Set the title and Tagline in General Settings
  • 4). Check your WordPress address is correct
  • 5). Update your email address.
  • 6). Check the membership of the blog including the New User Role
  • 7). Don’t forget to check your timezone!
  • 8). Go to the writing tab, and check the size of the post box! I usually set mine to 15 lines.
  • 9). For remote publishing, I always check the XML-RPC box.
  • 10). Add any Update Services that you want to ping.

On the reading tab in Settings:

  • 11). Set your frontpage, to either blog style or have a static page.
  • 12). How many posts do you want per page? Five is a reasonable number
  • 13). Set your feed to show the ‘x’ most recent posts. I usually set that to 10 if I’m doing full feed or 25 if not.
  • 14). Set your feed to show the full text or summary. Most people recommend the full text for feeds.

On Discussion Settings:

  • 15). I always set “An administrator must always approve the comment” which is ideal for a new blog, and prevents unnecessary spam.

On the Privacy tab:

  • 16). I always set to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” but if you’re for a small or private audience, then check the other option.

On the Permalinks tab:

  • 17). Set the options for your permalinks. I usually use the /%postname% tag with something else, for example ../%postname%/

Plugins – There are two plugins that are pretty useful to get at the beginning:

  • 18.) Akismet for spam. You’ll need a Wordpress.com API key for this.
  • 19.) WP-Cache Manager. You’ll need to activate it, enable the manager and set the time (in seconds).

Users Tab – On the Users tab, click to find your admin profile:

  • 20.) Set the Nickname to something you like. Hit ’save’.
  • 21.) Set your “Display name publicly as” to the Nickname in 20.)
  • 22.) Check your basic details, Website, and any Bio. Info.
  • 23.) Go to the Design Tab.

If you have a good host, you’ll have a variety of themes pre-installed.

  • 23.) Find a good one, activate it.
  • 24.) Go to the Widgets and select the ones you need.
  • 25.) Go to the Theme Editor…
  • 25.) Add your Google Analytics code in the footer!
  • 26.) Add any other code that you might need to the footer.

General Tidying Up: Let’s set the links categories

  • 27.) You will need to decide what links categories you need.
  • 28.) Remove or add any particular links you need in the blogroll.
  • 29.) Set your initial categories for posts, too.
  • 30.) Remove the Hello World post and default links in the blogroll!

This has been honed over numerous installs of WordPress, but is by no means the only possible set. If there are any errors, please read the comments and submit one!