blog Archives - Monetization Magic

10 Steps to Optimize WordPress

Are you getting complaints that your website is slow or are you noticing that your bounce rate is increasing? Are you approaching the limits on your hosting contract? Your WordPress website might need to be optimized. Following these 10 steps will take you a long way toward improving your site performance:

Use Firebug and Yslow

You’ll need to strike a baseline to determine what the speed is before you begin to optimize so that you’ll be able to determine if what you’re doing is making things better or worse. Using Firebug in conjunction with YSlow will provide you detailed information on how long it takes to download your website as well as how much bandwidth it uses up. Use the Blog Workbook from the your 7-Day Blogging eCourse to record your bandwidth and disc space usage.

“Smush” the Pictures

When you take a digital picture a lot of information is stored with that picture such as type of camera, the lens that was used and lots of other information. You want to use the highest quality images you can with the smallest file size without losing quality. The best way to accomplish this is to save bandwidth and thus decrease your loading time by removing the unnecessary information from pictures. SmushIt is a WordPress plugin that automatically decreases the size of images, without losing any quality, anytime you upload an image to your blog which dramatically increases your blog speed.

Upgrade WordPress

Upgrading your WordPress version is just a good move because upgrades usually include several performance upgrades, security enhancements and fix issues which could slow down your server. WordPress is great about notifying you when there’s an upgrade available and you can set it to upgrade automatically for you.

Pick the Right Web-host

Your webhost is where your website lives. The equipment that the webhost uses will determine how fast your website is served up to your readers. I have had many compliments on how fast my websites are delivered to my readers. I offer webhosting at Monetization Magic for very modest prices. My hosting is built on the same type of backbone as HostGator. HostGator is the only other hosting service that I can reasonably recommend. Use Coupon Code “MonetizeMe” to receive a discount of $9.94 off the package price. Coupon codes will not apply to domain names or any service which is not a hosting account.

Reducing the Number of Plug-ins

Obviously this is an essential step to decrease the load time. Every WordPress blogger uses lots of plug-ins but are they all really needed? Just ask yourself whether a plug-in adds value to your blog. If it does than keep it running, otherwise get rid of it. Basically run a clean, well maintained machine for best performance.

Optimize your Database Every Week

Optimizing your database is important because it reduces the load time. You can either do this manually or just use a plugin, either way should work fine. If you want to use the plugin then download the Optimize DB plug-in, upload it to your blog and activate it. Then go to Tools ? Optimize DB and click on Optimize Now. If you want to do this manually then go and log into phpMyAdmin. Find your WordPress tables and select all of them by clicking on the check boxes. At the bottom of the page you should then be able to choose the Optimize Table and/or Repair Table option. This will reduce the database size.

Delete Blog Post Revisions

Blog post revisions are the snapshots of the blog post every time you publish. If you’re like me, you will create the initial post, review it, revise it and then republish again. Repeat until satisfied with the outcome. There have been times when I revise a blog post 30 or more times before I’m satisfied! All the earlier versions where I wasn’t satisfied with them simply aren’t necessary. They are just cluttering up the database. To remove them, login to your control panel and use phpAdmin to access the database. Then enter this query to delete post revisions:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = “revision”;

This command will delete all the revisions while keeping the actual current blog post intact.

Prevent Content Scrapers from Consuming your Bandwidth

There are a lot of content scrapers these days. What they usually do is to visit your website and simply copy some of your content. They then go ahead and paste this content onto their own site. The problem is that they usually also copy images which link back to your site. Every time a user takes a look at their copied content your server will have to serve the image which consumes bandwidth. This is also refer to as hotlinking. In order to prevent this add this code to the .htaccess file in the root directory and replace the blog and image URL:

RewriteEngine On

#Replace ?mysite.com/ with your blog url

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+.)?mysite.com/ [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

#Replace /images/nohotlink.jpg with your “don’t hotlink” image url

RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/nohotlink.jpg [L]

That should prevent content scrapers from hotlinking.

Use the Right Format when Saving Pictures

Some people make the mistake of using the wrong image formats when saving pictures. The three most popular image extensions are .png, .jpg and .gif. Each of these formats has different advantages. A picture image taken with a camera and without a lot of writing is best saved with the .jpg extension. Simple images with only a color background and some writing, without any fancy effects are best saved as .png or .gif. The best way to learn the correct format to use is to simply go ahead and save pictures in all three formats. Then take a look at the file size and the image quality. That way you will get a feel for when to use which image format.

Host Your Own Code and Images

Whenever you include a script, image or something similar from another website, the browser has to perform an additional DNS query for that website in order to find out its IP address. This additional query adds to the response time for your website. Note to Affiliate Marketers: Whenever you are deciding on promoting a product as an affiliate, don’t just copy and paste the code that is given to you on the affiliate page. Around 80% of these banners have a bigger file size then they should have. Be sure to download and optimize the pictures using Smush.it before uploading them to your blog. Sometimes also changing the image format helps to reduce the size of the banners.

5 Simple Ways to Create More Money Now

By SoftwareGirl

If you’ve been to the grocery store recently, it is no doubt that you have noticed the cost of groceries rising. In terms of your budget, you can either cut expenses or increase your income. This particular downturn in the economy has been around for quite a while. What can you do when you’ve already cut your budget to the bone and beyond?

Basically you need to create new income right now. A 2010 survey by the Conference Research Group revealed that as many as 55 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with their current jobs. You could go out and get another job you hate and try to weave your life around that or you could create something with what you already have to bring in additional money while keeping your sanity. If you’re going to expend the effort, you might as well create something that you love, right? Obviously, we can’t just print money like the government does, so what can you do? You have expertise and interests that are your gifts to mankind. It is your duty to share those gifts with your fellow man! You will be amazed at what happens and how enriched your life becomes when you share your gifts.

1. Start your own blog about your passion. Starting a blog about your passion is very easy to do. There are many resources out on the internet including a FREE 7-Day eCourse on this very website. If you are passionate about a subject, chances are you know a great deal about it. Because you know a great deal about it, you won’t be struggling to find content to write for your blog and the time you invest will be pleasurable. This is an activity that can be performed any where you have an internet connection. When you use Google Adsense and visitors to your blog click on your links, you make money! Just concentrate on providing great value to your readers and the money will come.

2. Teach a class about your passion. Sharing your information and expertise about your topic is great and it’s even better when you meet other people with similar interests. The best way to do this is to teach a class about your topic. You will not only meet folks with similar interests but you will meet those who are looking for solutions to problems that are related to your topic. Take the time to speak with your new students and find out about them. Find out why they attending your class and ask them how you can be of assistance to them. Provided that you are not selling anything at your initial class, you will find many restaurants with meeting rooms who are willing to provide you with meeting space free of charge.

3. Offer services that surround your passion. Once you have had the opportunity to mingle with your students, you will have a good idea of what their needs are surrounding your passion. You can then either create services to solve their problems or find someone who already provides that service and you can negotiate a deal to be paid for putting their service in front of your students. When the students pay for the service, you get paid. You’ve saved the service provider money on advertising and you’ve helped to solve your students problems. By doing this, you have created value for all the people involved including yourself!

4. Sell products affiliated with your passion. You can also either create products that your readers and students want or you can find them and make them aware of the products. Once again, you will want to create an affiliate relationship with the vendor prior to introducing the product to your reader/student so that you can be paid when they purchase the product.

5. Write an e-book pertaining to your passion. Because you are so passionate about your topic and you have created hungry readers with your blog, you can easily write an electronic book or e-book to further education your audience on your topic of choice. Once the eBook is written, you can sell it on your blog for another influx of money. You might even consider creating a workbook that could be used as a complementary part of your classes.

Hopefully, this gets your creative juices flowing about how to begin to create avenues of income surrounding your passion. Creating value for your readers is your number one priority! As the old adage says, build it and they will come. You can be paid handsomely for solving problems for other people. The first step begins with your 7-Day eCourse. It’s free so sign up today!

What’s the Difference Between Tags and Categories?

By SoftwareGirl

What are WordPress Tags? What do they do?

These little tags that you add to your blog posts are used by All in One SEO and the search engines as the keyword phrases of your post. They basically say what your post is about. They also help search engines to find your posts.

Does this mean the more tags I have the better?

No, you don’t want to put any irrelevant tags on your posts. In fact, Google will lower your rating if you put irrelevant tags on your posts. I would recommend about 5 targeted tags that have to do with that particular post.

You’ll want to include the obvious keywords that pertain to your post as a tag. Also include other keywords that people might use when looking for a post like the one you are writing. For instance, this post is about “tags” and “categories” and one might look for “keyword phrases” as well. Be sure to use synonyms for your tags as well. Using 5 tags for each post should be plenty.

Keep in mind who your target audience is. If it’s geographically specific, you could potentially corner the market in terms of having a top search result for that topic. For instance, “small business owners” or “small business owners in Las Vegas, NV” would attract a different set of readers.

How do I pick my categories?

Categories are the broad topics that you would use to classify your posts. Several posts should fit in each category. Find the highest searched related keywords to give you a start on your categories. You can see the highest searched keywords by looking at your Google Analytics reports.

Since the categories are broad topics, it is possible to have one post that fits in several categories. You don’t have to have a post for each category; however, you can have several categories for each post. It is acceptable to have only one post for a single category.

Your categories should be 2-3 words long at the most.

How many categories should I have on a blog?

I would recommend about 5 – 10 categories depending on how many sub-topics you can go into on your blog that still fit with your main blog phrase.

In general, tags can be specific and categories are designed to be general yet relevant to your post.

Here’s a tip: Since I use both tags and All In One SEO on my blog posts, I had to find an easier way to include my keywords without typing everything twice. The tag area likes to put an “X” between each entry. So I use Notepad ++ to do a search and replace to turn the X’s into commas and then copy and paste into All In One SEO. It’s just a small task but it does cut down on some time as I’m not always the best typist in the world. By the way, Notepad++ is a free application. I love free, don’t you?

Firefox Extension That Enhances Your Blog

By SoftwareGirl

Are you working smarter or harder? Well today I am going to show you how to blog smarter. What does this mean exactly? I have always found that being organized have having my tools close at hand has always increased my productivity.

I just started using a fantastic little FREE Firefox addon that automatically gives me related links, photos, articles and tags as I type my blog posts. I use it to enhance the quality content and tags in my blog.

No more searching for related information to add to my posts. It appears right on my wordpress admin post page. Let me show you…

How to I get this? Easy! Head on over to Zemanta.com and click on the Download Zemanta Firefox Extension button.

How I Use Zemanta

I do not use the “Links” they provide in my blog posts. Why? It creates “leakage” on my site. I prefer for my readers to stay on my blog and read me articles. I have no control over what someone else puts on their site. I do use them to find more information to write about.

Secondly, I only use photos that are either licensed as Public Domain or I create them myself. Why? Because if they are Public Domain I don’t have to post a link to the source like I would with the other images.

As far as articles go, it is great that they do research for you and give you different articles related to your blog post. I often visit them and read what others are saying about the topic. It’s a treasure trove of ideas for your own blog.

I LOVE that they give me tags for my blog posts. I just need to click on the related tags and it does the work for me. This is awesome! I’ve been using tags since the beginning; but I always felt like I was overlooking some tags…but which ones? Now I know and can include them with the clickety-click of my mouse!

The BEST Part

Let me tell you the BEST part of Zemanta. Above all, this is the main reason I use it… It leaves a little symbol at the bottom of your blog posts that looks something like this:

This little button gets me more backlinks than articles posted to an article directory! However, this only works if you have really high quality blog content.

How it works: Someone visits your blog and falls in love with your posts. He or she clicks on the REBLOG button and is presented with a choice of different quotes from your blog post that they can post on their blog in exchange for a backlink to your post. You get to contribute to someone else’s success and you receive a back link in return. That’s a win/win situation!

This does not mean they get to copy your post. They can only choose one paragraph to quote and you gain a backlink and some free publicity and advertising for your blog.

So if you don’t use Zemanta for any other purpose, use it as link bait! Get your backlinks and increase your search engine rankings.

What are Backlinks and Why are They Important?

Google and other search engines often base your rankings depending on how popular your blog is. The more backlinks you have the more important your blog looks. You want to gain as many HIGH QUALITY backlinks as you can.

10 Ways to Build Quality Links to Your Website

By SoftwareGirl

Write guest posts on blogs that are related to your field. Many bloggers will be glad to allow you to provide some fresh content for them in exchange for a link back to your site. Just contact the blogger and make an offer.
Answer questions on sites such as Answers.Yahoo.com, AllExperts.com and JustAnswer.com. By providing quality advice on subjects related to your site, you link to your pages as related information. Just understand that sites like this frown on website owners simply linking to their sites. You can link when it’s relevant, but you don’t need to say it’s your own site.
Offer testimonials for the sales pages of products you enjoy. Internet marketers love to get them, and most will gladly post an active link or at least a URL to your site in return.
Find other organizations that link to members’ websites to join. For best results, choose ones related to your niche.
Offer to write articles for a fellow blogger or news media organization. You’ll want to voluntarily send them a sample of your work ahead of time so that they get a taste of what you’re offering.
Join and participate in forums. Add links to your site to your signature.
Comment on blogs whose subject matter is related to your site. If you take the time to read the post and write a good, relevant comment, the blogger is unlikely to consider this spamming. Be respectful; keep your link in the space provided for your link.
Sponsor giveaways on blogs. You supply the product, and the blogger holds the giveaway. You’ll get a link from the blogger, and you could also request that entrants be required to link to your site. Make sure that the blog is in a related field and readers are interested in what you’re giving away!
Create profiles on popular social networking sites, and link to your site from them. Some of these will be “no follow” links, but when link building, don’t worry about this…just build good, quality links.
Make yourself available for interviews, not only online, but with offline media. Most media outlets have websites, and they often post transcripts of interviews there along with relevant links.

Do you have other ways that you have used that work well for building quality links? Please do share what you’ve done and how well it worked in the comment section below! Hint: This is a great example of a invitation for #7 above!

The Great Blog Checklist

By SoftwareGirl

We’ve all heard of blogs. There are free blogs. There are paid blogs. Blogs have been around for about 10 years. How are blogs judged? Are they judged by the number of unique visitors, amount of income they generate, amount of time a reader spends on the site, value they provide to readers? Are there different features that need to be included to achieve a given goal? What is it that makes a blog great? I’ve combined a list of basic elements that will launch your blog above the rest.

1. Create value for your reader! Your reader is usually looking for something in particular when they click upon your site. Determine what they are looking for by posting articles and watching to see what that does to your traffic and providing more if the traffic increases significantly. Provide the reader the ability to leave comments as they can provide valuable insight in this manner.

2. Use keywords to attract readers. Using Google Adwords, you can determine valuable keywords to include in your articles to drive traffic to your site.

3. Provide resources to your readers. What a valuable resource is to your reader will vary depending upon the niche chosen. Typically checklists, templates, diagrams, how to series are great resources.

4. Keep the blog active by posting articles every 2-3 days at a minimum. Blogging is not a set it and forget it method of making money. A lot of blogs are literal electronic ghost towns. It is very apparent to the reader when the date is not on the article and the information is outdated or they visit several times and nothing has changed in the last week or so. I’ve been guilty of this myself; however, a good way to work around this is to write several articles at once and schedule them to be released during your busy periods so that the site is still fresh and alive even though you may be basking on the beach in Maui.

5. Give something to your reader and provide an opt-in box. Provide the reader with valuable content and ask them to provide their name and e-mail so that you can open the communication channel to include e-mail as well as online communication.

6. Use Google Adsense. Google Adsense is a great way to earn a few pennies here and there to offset the cost of hosting. While you cannot click on your own Adsense ads, you can give others some “Google Love” by clicking on their ads. It only takes a moment and it helps the other guy out.

7. Use video. This is where blogs beat books hands down. Use video on your blog to further establish a connection with your reader. Video is a great way to convey your personality to your reader and I’ve seen statistics saying that it boosts readership by over 300%!

8. Know what sizes and colors to use when placing ads on your blog. In this particular case, size, placement and color do matter! Humans are sensitized to know what is an ad and typically will not click on it unless they are looking for that particular item. Ads within the body of the post should be 336×280 or 300×250 for best results. Ads at the bottom of the post should be 468×60 or 234×60 for best results. The leaderboard display panel which places advertising unit above your posts is best at 728×90 pixels. Colors of ads should blend into your theme, have no border (color FFFFFF) and the link needs to be blue because most humans are trained to believe that all links are blue.

9. Know who your competition is and what their keywords are. Use Google search to find some of your keywords. The blogs that show up in the top 5 results are your competition. Use SpyFu to determine not only what their keywords are but also for which AdWords they are currently paying. It’s a great tool!

10. Personalize the reader experience. Make the reader’s experience fun and valuable and you will create a great following. Create a contest to add some excitement. Recommend resources they may not be aware of. When writing speak to your reader as you would a friend at the coffee shop to create a closer connection. If you’re having fun chances are your readers are enjoying their experience as well!