Category Archives for "Blogging"

SlimStat: Stats Tracking For Your Self-Hosted WordPress Blog

Traffic Tracking

Knowing what your target audience is reading is another of the steps in the journey to web success with your online small business blog.

There are a lot of tracking tools and plugins out there, but I wanted to introduce you to one I found which really provides some amazing insights into your traffic. You can drill into a month, week or day. You can review everything that’s happened on a single URL.

Your referring websites are listed and the search terms used to find you are displayed. I think you will be impressed with the detail this small footprint *script* yields.

Redirection and 301 Via Plugin: Stop Leaking SEO and Visitors

SEO

Over time, your blog evolves (hopefully). This means category names change, posts are updated, files move or subdirectories are deleted. What happens when someone clicks a link to a post or file that is no longer there?

They get a 404 Error.

Even with a Custom 404 Error Page, you didn’t deliver the content they thought they were getting. So they might leave.

Customize Tag Cloud Appearance To Help Visitors Find Your Content

Wordpress

I know you thought you’d never hear me say this, but a plugin isn’t always the best way to handle a small change in your Wordpress Theme. Especially since each plugin adds it’s own load time to the overall page load time. Fast = visitors stay longer.

Come on, we are a generation of short-attention spanned humans, struggling to assimilate the thousands of bits of information that flow like a river into our awareness. The longer a page takes to load, the less inclined we are to look at other content on a site. One slow page, especially the main page, and most folks will pack up their little red wagon and move on.

Giant List Of Ping Servers ~ Fast Track Your Google Notifications

Traffic Techniques

If ping servers are a foreign concept to you, you probably won’t appreciate this list of ping servers. And since I value *appreciation*, let me explain exactly why you should care about ping services — first.

And no geeky-technical-only-your-IT-manager-will-understand-it jargon.

The term *ping* dates all the way back to the early days of computer networks – which pre-dates the Internet. It was a service on the computer that would allow network administrators to check to see if a connection was present.

Sort of like a bat sending out sonic sound waves, a computer would *ping* another, and record

Blog Traffic Techniques You Might Have Missed

Featured , SEO

As we all know, it doesn’t matter how bright and shiny and full of excellent advice your blog is, if no one is visiting. And while I won’t belabor the point on a few of these techniques, there are others you might not be aware can bring in steady streams of visitors. So, here are […]

Affiliate Theme In Review

Monetizing Your Blog

Converting An Existing Blog To Affiliate Theme

There are a lot of Wordpress Themes out there, but none that could make affiliate marketing easy. Until now.

I recently purchased Affiliate Theme by Unique BlogDesigns to give it a whirl. Before getting the Affiliate Theme, I had to find a Wordpress theme that somewhat matched my *market*, and then make extensive edits and upgrades to make it work. Getting the Affiliate Theme was like getting an *Easy Button* for affiliate marketing.

SEO Tips For Your Blog Success

SEO

We’ve been talking for a while now about search engine optimization techniques for your small business, but mine isn’t the only voice making this primal cry.

The blogosphere rings with the cry’s of other voices extolling the virtues optimizing your site and making sure each and every post contains your keywords, a well defined description and the important SEO elements.

A Custom 404 Page : An Opportunity To Impress* Your Visitors

Wordpress

(* By impress, I mean engage, wow and help your visitors)

When something goes wrong on your site, your visitors will land on a 404 page, or to their way of thinking, the Twilight Zone.

Most standard Wordpress blogs come handily equipped with a 404 Page. The problem is it is absolutely worthless for helping your visitor get back on track.

There could be a variety of reasons they landed there:

3 Ways To A Faster Page Load

Wordpress

Its true. Fancy blogs look good, but they take time to load on your visitors browser, and that can cost you. If it takes too long to load, that little voice in their head says “All the pages will take this long, do I really want to click the next link?”

At that point, you have lost them…many for good.

Although I have no hard numbers to back up this statement, I figure you have about 8 seconds. If they aren’t seeing real content delivered in 8 seconds, they are

Traffic Formula Interactive Webinar

Traffic Techniques

One of my mentors who is one of the Internet’s leading success stories (Mike Dillard) is hosting an Interactive Webinar Series much like the one he did three years ago. That one was called M.L.M Traffic Formula and went on to become the de facto standard in how to generate leads and cash for your business. Any business.

Well, three years has past and though the techniques are still working, technology changes and the newer social environment has prompted a lot of questions. He is breaking his silence this month.

I am offering you a chance to be a part of history in the making, learn the exact techniques that have created more M.L.M successes than any other method, and