A couple of days ago I had the privilege of speaking to a group of writing students about the joys of blogging. Whilst many of them had never previously come across the concept of blogging and were intrigued by it, it didn’t take long for the question of online safety to come up. I must confess I was initially somewhat taken aback by their concerns, as I personally don’t worry much about getting virused, hacked, or falling victim to an online scam.
But as I pondered the question I realised that the reason I’m pretty relaxed about this stuff now is that over the years I’ve learned how to avoid most of the common pitfalls and recognise and deal with potentially threatening situations when they arise. Here are my top tips for staying safe online:
Continue reading ‘How to stay safe online’
Following on from my last post about translating your website, Dennis alerted me to the fact that there are WordPress plugins to do this too. Well, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that - I haven’t yet been able to think up a desirable bit of functionality that isn’t contained in a plugin - why should website translation be any different!
Sure enough, a quick search turned up several candidates. The Global Translator plugin looked the best, so I went right ahead and installed it - it’s those bunch of flags near the top of my sidebar.
Continue reading ‘WordPress Translation plugin’
For years the USA has been the powerbase of the internet, dominating both in production and consumption of websites. But while north America is still the region with the highest internet penetration (a measure of internet usage per capita) at around 80%, for raw numbers of internet users, you now have to look no further than Asia, and China in particular. Not only that, but because of its already high penetration, north America doesn’t have much room for growth, whereas Asia, currently at only around 15% penetration, has huge potential for growth (statistics courtesy of Internet World Stats).
Image courtesy of Hamed Saber
Continue reading ‘Translate your website’
Two and a half months ago my Alexa rank was around 7 million; today it’s a shade over 335k. Unless my maths is way off, that’s a two thousand percent gain! And the good news is it’s still rising - the “official” Alexa rank for a site is an indication of its average traffic over the past three months, but they also show a one week average - this site’s is a little under 200k.
So how did I do it? Extensive link building? Premium content? Long hours? Well, yes actually (I’ll leave you to be the judge of the content) - but that’s not what I attribute this rise to, at least not directly. In actual fact, it took all of about 10 minutes two and a half months ago to sow the seed that is now beginning to bear fruit - I’ll give you a little hint:
That’s right, I simply installed an Alexa traffic widget.
Continue reading ‘How I increased my Alexa Rank by 2k percent’
A common complaint about PerformancingAds is that the site navigation is very confusing, and the documentation isn’t much good either. The end result is that it’s quite hard to tell what the best way is to set up and manage your ads. So I thought I’d run through what I know in the hope that it’ll help a fellow blogger (and if I’ve got it all wrong, you all can correct me!).
Apart from paid advertisements, there are several other ways in which ads can be displayed on your site, which is kind of nice as it gives you the option of promoting your own or affiliate products in empty slots, or even on other sites in the network. But the trade-off is increased complexity, which is compounded by the confusing manner in which the PerformancingAds site is laid out.
Continue reading ‘PerformancingAds Pecking Order’
