What’s your blog or website worth? The short answer is: it depends who you ask. And of course, no matter what anyone says, it’s only really worth what someone is prepared to pay for it. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting question in these days of the Credit Crunch.
Believe it or not, there are plenty of blog value calculators out there, offering to give you the crucial figure. So, just for fun, I plugged in my url to see what they have to say about the old hippo:
Continue reading ‘How much is your blog worth?’
Courtesy of 3nhanced.comYou may or may not have realised there are two different flavours of WordPress, denoted by the TLD extension. WordPress.com is where you can sign up to a free blog, hosted for you courtesy of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. WordPress.org is where you can download the software for use on your own web server - a so-called self-hosted installation.
So why two versions, and what are their different strengths and weaknesses? Essentially it’s a trade-off between flexibility and ease of use. For more detail, check out this WordPress support page that lists some of the main differences between the two.
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I’ve recently been invited by the Centre for Lifelong Learning in Newcastle upon Tyne to teach a 10 week blogging course. Over the 10 weeks I’ll be taking the group through the fundamentals of blogging with WordPress, including
- choosing a topic
- registering a domain
- setting up a self-hosted WordPress installation
- generating content
- building web traffic
- monetization
and more.
Continue reading ‘Blogging course - Newcastle upon Tyne’
Having recently doled out some advice on staying safe online I guess it was kind of inevitable that a “security situation” would come my way - one of our computers was infected a few days ago. But in case you’re wondering, the False Prophet I’m referring to is not me!
No, it’s a particularly insidious piece of malware which purports to be looking out for your best interests, in order to con you into installing it. I’m referring to a trojan called “Antivirus 2009″ (also known as AV 2009) which appears to propagate by infecting legitimate websites. Here’s what Google Safe Browsing has to say about it.
Continue reading ‘Beware the False Prophet!’
I always recommend using self-hosted WordPress instead of the free version, as you end up having much more control over your site. However, one area in which I’ve always felt a bit cheated with WordPress.org sites is the lack of built-in stats monitoring. I guess this is why most bloggers end up using sites like Google Analytics to keep track of things - myself included.
There are also third-party WordPress plugins available which provide some of this functionality - I wrote about one such statistics plugin a few months back. But a couple of days ago I stumbled across another plugin - that provides the bona fide WordPress.com stats within a WordPress.org blog! Now, this is not a new plugin - it’s been around for a couple of years already by the looks of it - but it’s the first I’d heard of it.
Continue reading ‘WordPress.com statistics plugin’
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.
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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
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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’
