New Blog
I have been busy starting a new blog, Yes! Islanders for my favorite hockey team. I’ll be back soon here with a post regarding this sites first month in existence! It will be loaded with current stats from different providers and goals for the next month.
Social Bookmarking
I have been amazed recently by the amount of traffic that can be brought in by submitting your pages to Social Networks and bookmarking sites. Here is a list of all of the sites I have begun to submit to:
Digg.com, Propeller.com, Reddit.com, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon.com, Socialogs.com, Indianpad.com, Google.com/Bookmarks, Technorati.com, Furl.net, Diigo.com
Of course, some are better than others. I’ll find out more soon. There are others that I haven’t even started with yet. I wanted to take a sampling of what people think are the better ones first. So far, Stumbleupon is leading the way and driving hundreds of people to the posts I add. You can look at the Firestats in the sidebar of this site and see that instead of my usual 24 people within the last 24 hours it has boosted up to over 100 (and is growing). My other sites had as much as 300 new viewers in a very short amount of time. One thing I have noticed though is that many people only stop by for the page bookmarked and don’t venture around much. I hope that will change, but I guess any traffic is good traffic.
How can you do this? It is easy. Sign up for whichever social bookmarking service you want, and then submit your information to it. There are ways to simplify the process as well. Ask me in a comment and I’ll let you know how 
Showoff Rankings Problem
I added the widget showoff rankings before because it seemed like a nice way to be transparent to all of my readers. I have found however that it doesn’t always work properly. I will look into changing it or getting rid of it altogether and finding a different way of presenting my Google PR, Compete, Alexa, and Technorati statistics.
Email Subscriptions
If you look in the sidebar of this site, you’ll see an email subscriptions option for this site. You can get this through your feedburner account. If people sign up, and you make posts on a day, at the end of that day, they will be sent an email with the content of the rss feed for those posts. So basically, they don’t need to keep checking your site for updates. The updates will be “hand” delivered to them.
How do you do this?
1) Log into your feedburner account
2) Click onto the site you wish to add subscribe via email
3) Look on the bar on the left. You will see an option for email subscriptions. Click it.
4) Follow the rest of the steps on their site.
5) Get the code, copy and paste it into a text widget and place it where you’d like it
Now you should have an email subscriptions box on your site!
New Spam Comment Technique
I have been occasionally dropping funny or strange or good comment spams for all to see. Here is a spam technique that is quite amusing, but potentially dangerous for people that trust others. If you were to give them your email, they will undoubtedly take it and add it to a list that gets spammed and sold all around the world. Never give out any information that you don’t have to, and never trust a spammer. Here is the spam comment I received:
Alexftx | alexfk@gmail.com | google.com | IP: 165.228.132.11
If you want do delete your site from our spam bases – just email us with domain of your site:
abuse-here@inbox.ru
thank you!
Language Translator Plugin
I am experimenting with the WordPress Widget Language Translator now. I had used a different language translator before that worked well, but it wasn’t happy after I changed my permalink structure so I had to drop it. There were a few plugin choices, but to be honest, I always choose the free ones. Sure, you may have to wait an eternity for support or figure it out on your own, buit I usually feel better about it if it is free. Perhaps that will change the day I start making some money from some of the multitude of ideas that swim in my head daily. This plugin works on my sites now, but I wonder if it will eventually cause problems related Google mistaking your site as a troublemaker and not translating any more pages after X amount per day. That could leave you in a bind if you have a steadily growing site, and their are options involving setting up a cache that could work. I am gonna keep it simple at this point and install this translator widget and hope for the best. One added benefit is your site should be picked up in foreign search engines and thereby becoming available
to way more people (I hope it will, meaning I am getting more readers to my blog). So, what do you do for this?
1) Download the WordPress Plugin Language Translator
2) Re upload it to your plugins folder on your server.
3) Activate it in the plugins tab within your WordPress.
4) If you want to drop it somewhere not in your blog’s widgetized areas, you can add it to a post or to your page or single.php files by adding this <?php ltranslate(); ?> wherever you’d like.
5) Double check and make sure it works.
Now you should be done. Enjoy the translations and hopefully get a nice boost in foreign traffic to your blog.
Do Follow
The Do Follow WordPress plugin is a nice way to reward your visitors for commenting on your blog. Most people don’t know or care what “no follow” or “do follow” means, so this is for the small percentage of computer geek web heads out there that are trying to get their website/blog to the next level and build up their backlinks. If you didn’t know it, WordPress puts an automatic “nofollow” tag on every comment. I can see their logic for 2 reasons. First, it theoretically would stop spammers form trying to get their links in the comments section of a WordPress blog and second, It would encourage people to post a comment that is valuable, and not just say something like, “I agree” or ,”Nice post” etc…
That amounts to the same thing as comment spam in my mind. Ultimately though, Spam filters like Aksimet and Spam Karma 2 do a good enough job preventing the garbage from being posted that i think it is my duty to change the comments to “do follow”. I don’t have much of a following in my first 3 weeks here, but as things progress it is my hope that little things like this will help to create a better community.
Download the “Do Follow” plugin here, re-upload it to your plugin folder on your server, and activate in the plugins tab of your WordPress and you are good to go.
WordPress Landing Sites Plugin With Google Adsense
Adding Adsense to the Landing Sites WordPress plugin seems like a natural choice for anyone wishing to monetize their sites. The plugin offers the user related choices from your site, so why not use some related choices form Google Adsense as well. Here is how to do it. You may want to read up on my previous post about the Landing Sites plugin.
Here is the code for adding Landing Sites to your single.php and page.php files with the Google Adsense code:
<?php if (function_exists('ls_getinfo')) : ?>
<?php if (ls_getinfo('isref')) { ?>
<div class="landingsites">
<h2><?php ls_getinfo('terms'); ?></h2>
<p>You came here from <?php ls_getinfo(referrer); ?> searching for <i><?php ls_getinfo(terms); ?></i>. These posts might be of interest:</p>
<ul>
<?php ls_related(5, 10, '<li>', '</li>', '', '', false, false); ?>
</ul>
<script type="text/javascript"><!–
google_ad_client = "pub-********add yours here********";
google_ad_width = 200;
google_ad_height = 200;
google_ad_format = "200x200_as";
google_ad_type = "text";
//2007-09-08: single page search
google_ad_channel = "3663202440";
google_color_border = "000000";
google_color_bg = "000000";
google_color_link = "ff9933";
google_color_text = "232323";
google_color_url = "232323";
//–>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</div>
You will want to change the colors and maybe even the size of the Google Adsense advertisement to fit your theme. This will only show up on your site when someone is referred by a search engine search. Make sure to add your Adsense Client ID number.
Landing Sites Problem and My Fix
The Landing Sites WordPress plugin is very cool. It will show what people were searching for in their search engine on your site, and then bring up a set amount of related entries to the search. Here is an example of a search for Tainan Restaurant:
tainan restaurant
You came here from www.google.com searching for tainan restaurant. These posts might be of interest:
* The Hangout
* Hari Om Indian Restaurant Tainan
* The Corner Restaurant Tainan
* BOSA Egyptian Restaurant ?????? Tainan
* Turkish House Restaurant Turkish Cuisine Tainan
So, basically the first thing people will see on your site is a list of related entries based on the keyword(s) they were looking for. This is a nice way to reduce the bounce rate of a site and increase your page views as well.
This is a plugin that caused me a lot of grief however. It just wouldn’t work on The Real Taiwan, and I ended up going down an ugly path where I kept digging my hole deeper and deeper until finally, I nuked my theme so badly that I didn’t want to fix it. It was also time to upgrade to WordPress 2.2 and use a widget theme though, so I took the opportunity to start again with a new theme and use WordPress 2.2.
If you are asking if I got the landing sites plugin to work, the answer is yes, and it works beautifully. How did I do it? I ended up downloading the German version, changed some words to English, and then added a CSS div for it and now it is wonderful, everything I could ask of it. Here is a little tutorial on how to add the proper CSS and get the plugin working on your site if you had problems with it like I did.
1) Download the landing sites plugin here
2) Re-upload it to the plugins folder on your server
3) Activate the plugin within the plugin tab in your WordPress.
4) Add this code to your single.php file in the proper spot (and page.php file if you want to include the landing sites plugin to your pages as well as posts):
<?php if (function_exists('ls_getinfo')) : ?>
<?php if (ls_getinfo('isref')) { ?>
<div class="landingsites">
<h2><?php ls_getinfo('terms'); ?></h2>
<p>You came here from <?php ls_getinfo(referrer); ?> searching for <i><?php ls_getinfo(terms); ?></i>. These posts might be of interest:</p>
<ul>
<?php ls_related(5, 10, '<li>', '</li>', '', '', false, false); ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php } ?>
<?php endif; ?>
5) If you want some guidance, here it is. Find this code: <?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> and drop the code from step 4 in the line after it.
6) Add this code to your Style.css file. Drop it in at the very end. Also, you will want to change the colors and width to suit your theme. Do it.
.landingsites{
line-height: 15px;
border: 1px #ff9933;
border-style: double;
width: 350px;
margin: 12px 12px 12px 12px;
padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;
}
You should be good to go now after all that. Now do a search that you know will score a high ranking for your site. Click on your site and then see how the landing sites plugin works for you! I love it myself.
If You Liked That
If You Liked That is a super easy and useful WordPress plugin that adds a predefined amount of related posts from your site to the end of each post. Download the plugin from the If You Liked That website, re-upload it to your plugin folder, and then activate it in your plugin panel. You can adjust a few settings like the amount of links and order of display via the If You Liked That tab in your WordPress, under the options tab. It is so easy! It is also a good strategy to increase page views and lower your bounce rate, and it is easy to do so there are no excuses not to.
Page Views
Page views is a stat that all stat counters give you so you can see which posts or pages are the most popular. It is indexed, and all of your pages may be ranked or have different PageRank accordingly. So, what do you do to create more pageviews.
1) Create an aesthetically pleasing site that won’t scare away your visitors in a millisecond.
2) SEO your site in a nice way, so that Google (and the others) actually indexes your site properly and displays what the user was actually looking to find. This to me is one of the biggest things. Random sentences in posts showing up in the description from Google . What a waste of everyones time.
3) Have a clear navigational tool for people to easily click around your site and find things.
4) Have a search bar for your site
5) Use a plugin that shows related posts
6) Use a plugin that shows recent posts
7) Use a plugin that shows recent comments
Page views is an important stat that can really show how useful you site is. Some sites will always have low page views and that may be ok too. If people find what they need in 5 seconds and leave, the site has still done a good job in my mind. I always try to have more useful things to offer (but make sure not to tempt people with crap, ie a misleading post title) for my visitors because I want to have more of a community and I want people to come back.
WordPress Plugin Random Flickr Favorites 2 With Google Adsense
You can use your new Random Flickr Photo div to add some Adsense advertisements to. Here is the code for you to do that. Make sure to abide by Google’s Terms of Service and don’t put too many adverts into your site (more than 3 sets). Also, make sure to add your client ID and change whatever you need to as far as the colors go.
You can put whatever you want in there, for example your text-link-ads affiliate code in your effort to make some more money.
This site is meant to be more of an example of how to, and as such, I don’t want it to seem like it is designed solely for trying to garner ad revenue. I don’t like those sites so much myself, but at the same time, I want to show what the possibilities are too. One thing that can happen as well is you serve up a lot of Adsense ads, and it allows more lower tiered ads to go in, thereby increasing your chances that any advert that is clicked is going to pay less. SO choose wisely how many ads you want ot present so you don’t alienate your readership and you don’t get more clicks yet less revenue!
<div class="flickrphoto">
<?php if (function_exists('RandomFlickrFav')) {
RandomFlickrFav();
}?>
<center>
<script type="text/javascript"><!–
google_ad_client = "pub-*****Add ID Here*****;
google_ad_width = 180;
google_ad_height = 150;
google_ad_format = "180x150_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_ad_channel = "";
google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
google_color_link = "3366CC";
google_color_text = "40454B";
google_color_url = "40454B";
//–>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</center>
</div>
Random Flickr Favorites 2
The Random Flickr Favorites 2 plugin allows you to access photos you like without having to purchase them. How does this work? Well, you download the plugin, re-upload it to your plugins folder, and then activate it within your plugins tab in your WordPress. Now, if you haven’t already, get an account with Flickr. You can add as many photos as you like to your favorites. Do it. Kepeep within a theme that you like. I have chosen all computers and computer workspaces as my theme. I saved around 70 photos in my favorites.
In your WordPress, hit the tab for options and then Random Flickr Favorites. You will need to enter the URL for your favorites (or someone else’s if you’d like). It looks like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7248262@N07/favorites/
I chose the medium image size and added this:
<center><p><img src="%%image_url" width="190" alt="%%artist"/></center>
<p>I did not take this photo. <a href="%%image_page_url" rel="nofollow" alt="%%artist">"%%artist"</a> did. It is displayed using the<a href="http://clearcutblogging.com/wordpress-plugins/random-flickr-favorites-2/67"> Random Flickr Photo 2 Plugin</a> for WordPress </p>
into the template area. You can change that as you see fit. If you noticed, I added a nofollow to the tag. Maybe that is not nice, but I am anticipating making a lot of link worthy friends and I don’t want to have too many “follow” outgoing links later as the result of a plugin that makes lots of links that I forgot about. One thing you should always do is leave the link to the source of the picture.
Now, you have to put this code: <?php if (function_exists('RandomFlickrFav')) { RandomFlickrFav(); }?> into a php executable widget, or somewhere in your theme. I chose to put it in my posts. And I made a CSS div for it, so it can stand apart from the post a bit. I will still work on this.
Issues:
A: If the post is very short, the photo, blurb, and Google Adsense advertisement (that is covered in the next post) are still long. They will stretch until they hit the comment box in my theme.
B: If their is long string of letters connected together, like a URL for example, it will push that to the bottom and continue from there (causing a blank area form the last sentence before the long line of letters to the actual letters that have been pushed down).
So you are asking… Where do I put the code? ok. Your single.php file is where the content that shows up when someone clicks on a post comes from (the format anyway). Open it up in a text editor, and find these lines (or something like them for the content of the post and the div):
<div class="PostContent">
<?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry »'); ?>
Between the two, insert these:
<div class="flickrphoto">
<?php if (function_exists('RandomFlickrFav')) {
RandomFlickrFav();
}?>
</div>
Now, in your style.css file, open it in your text editor and add this:
.flickrphoto{
border: 1px solid black;
background: white;
width: 190px;
float: right;
margin: 8px 8px 8px 8px;
padding: 5px 5px 5px 5px;
}
Of course, you will probably want to adjust the width, the background color, and the border color to suit your theme. After you get it all set up, you should see a nice random picture from your Flickr favorites displaying into your posts.
To see this in action, click any post on this site. You will notice it isn’t on the homepage. I just don’t want it there. If you do, add the same code to your index.php in the corresponding place.
Download the Random Flickr Favorites 2 plugin here
About 2 Weeks
This is my about 2 week anniversary, and I have noticed 3 subscribers to my RSS Feed. My goal is to have about 100 readers in 3 months. So, if you like this site, then add it to your aggregator! Check the sidebar for all the different formats available. I also added some pictures via Flickr from my favorites to the bottom of each post (not page) and I’ll be talking more about that later.
Cheers!
John
Alexa Ranking
Basically, Alexa is a tool to see how your website ranks compared with other sites. How do they get this data? People download the Alexa Toolbar. and then when they visit a site, it gets tracked and then all of the site and pagehits by users of the Alexa Toolbar are added up and poof, you have your Alexa rankings. Hmm… you say, but that doesn’t sound like a good way to rank sites… What about all of the people without Alexa Toolbars, or people that cheat and have like 10 computers with monkeys clicking on their sites daily to artificially inflate the ranking?
Those are good questions partner, but in the Internet world, usually where there are good ideas, there are sketchy ways to exploit them. I don’t put much stock into ALexa, but it is used in Text Link Ads for part of their rankings so it does hold some relevance for sites that want to monetize and impress their visitors.
I use them to check out my sites and other sites to get an idea of how they are doing. I don’t believe the stats very much though. I know of someone who told me how he basically cheats the system and gets into the top 100,000 Alexa sites, then uses it to sell advertisements to restaurants and pubs that think he has great rankings! Yeah, scammer!
I don’t have a toolbar installed, for no other reason that I think it is invasive. Besides, if they had a record of all the, ahemm… exotic photo sites on the Internet I have been to I think it would overload their database.
Here is my ranking after my nearly 2 week beginning. How can my one week total be so good? Dang, something must be wrong. But anyway, a site like this will most definitely attract a crowd that is inclined to use the Alexa Toolbar.
A good way to learn more is to go straight to the source
Showoff Rankings
I found a cool widget that displays rank for Alexa, Compete, Google PR (which you manually add) and Technorati from my hopefully new friend at Average Joe Blogger. Go to the Showoff Rankings Site, add your site, check the format you’d like, then copy some code into your header.php, and then copy some code into a text widget and you are good to go. You can see it currently at the top of my sidebar. It may not stay there for long as I always move things around. This widget saves me some space as I had several things, like an individual PageRank and individual Alexa stats widgets on the site already. In the future, there will be some competition for the more valuable areas of this site (Yeah baby!) so It is important to not have too much clutter in the sidebar.
Average Joe Blogger
There is a boom in pro blogging websites, so naturally, anyone walking this path will encounter many sites of interest, and hopefully, most of us can be friends rather than competing enemies. Clear Cut Blogging aims to be a valuable resource for the WordPress community, so naturally I will be checking out many other blogging and WordPress related sites A, to keep up to date, and B, to see what is successful about them and try to do something similar. I am speaking more about the technical side of things, like if they have a cool or useful widget or something like that, not about copying their content or their style.
It is easy to backwards engineer things with the tools available. I saw a widget on Average Joe Blogger’s sidebar that lists site information from Alexa, Technorati, Compete, and Google Page Rank. I wanted it, so I looked at the page source code and saw it is from a site Called Showoff rankings.
Now, he will likely come to see this site and see why I linked to him. So here is a personal message from me to Average Joe!
Hey man, I checked out your site and see that we have similar goals. I like your site, and will be visiting often to see where you are at. You have a few months advantage over me in this race, and I will likely be using your success as a benchmark for my own. This is a race that can have many winners so I wish you good luck, and hope that we can work together, as in support each other in our quest to be Pro Bloggers. In fact, if you want to get in touch and talk shop ever, you can email me at therealtaiwan [at] gmail dot com.
Best regards,
John
~
Clearcutblogging.com
The Spam Issue
I sent another email to the comment spammers of this site and my other site, and I sent them this email:
I just received another spam of yours on a different blog of mine. I’ll be saving them so it will be easy to make my case.
and they sent me this:
Ok… I don’t know how this is happening. I’ve looked into it but without an idea.
Regards.
Do they really think I am going to buy this? One funny thing is they even spammed the post about me calling them out on spamming me. Hahahah.
Here is their latest spam!:
Emily M. | ektue@yahoo.com | aacircle.com.au | IP: 72.52.145.58
Hi there, I came across your blog posting after searching for tefl course and your post on at Comment Spamming makes an interesting read. Thanks for sharing. I will search online more next Friday when I have the day off.
So they really found my post about them comment spamming while searching for TEFL through Google? I did see that through Firestats. Some kind of bogus hit. It is amusing, but this kind of practice is such a pain in the butt and is a constant source of headaches. Maybe I will see about really trying to get them…
Spammers!
I received an email back form the comment spamming site I referred to in the article spam her i dont even know her. I just received my fifth spam comment on this site, and it was from the same people spamming my other site! Here is the email they replied to me with:
Sorry, I don’t know what you are talking about. We only rely on organic links from other sites that the general community do because they like our site.
Regards,
XXXXXXXXX
This guy is obviously BS-ing. Here is the latest spam…
Hi, Nice writeup about at Comment Spamming. I would have to agree with you on this one. I am going to look more into tefl online. This Friday I have time.
Same email, same name, and same URL. Do you think he is lying? I want to get this guy now even more than before, but it will take a lot of learning to do it, as I never have taken on a site for black hat practices.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate from Google Analytics lets you know who has come to your site and left before viewing any other pages of your site. So they came, didn’t find what they were looking for (or maybe did so quickly) and took off. Maybe they left via your Adsense ads (ideally for those that want to cash in a bit) and that would also account for a higher bounce rate.
This site probably will probably have a high bounce rate. If someone finds what they are looking for, then they hit the link in the post, then they will be gone. Clear Cut Blogging is a way for people to create a well rounded site, and it is my fear that many people won’t read enough to find the true benefit of it.
I am distressed a bit by this however. I have a website problem and I will be looking into fixing it. Search Engines will index things in my sidebars (like Firestats for example) and then combine those words with something from a post and then dish that result up to people. When people come searching, they quickly realize that wasn’t what they wanted (nor what I wanted to serve). I wish Google would index the posts and pages only by default. I have those portions of my selected on my sitemap too, but it hasn’t worked so well, as people still come rolling in for things that won’t be there or easy to find. I know, you can use meta tags, and robots.txt, and the sitemap. I will find out and post more about it some other time.
I have one way of combating high bounce rate, and so far it has shaved off about 10% of the rate for The Real Taiwan. This site is my guinnea pig for this new plugin that I had to fight with. The plugin is called landing sites.
In fact, trying to install this plugin lead me to destroying my old theme, spend hours redoing and messing up my site, and finally downloading the German version of the plugin, adding some css code, and then miraculously it worked. It is however the inspiration for this Clear Cut Blogging site, as it put everything in perspective for me, and allowed me to think about what I would do to make the perfect WordPress site. Now, I have already made some mistakes, or minor errors just from the fact that I am lazy a bit. That is just me being honest. I have done a lot of things well, and I am positive this site will continue to roll, then one day it will snowball into being one of the top WordPress sites available.
