WM ROI

Sometimes think you dident expect anything from, end up making you re-think a few things and projects. I have had two of those experiances this week. For almost 10 days I had to stay in bed for health reasons, and needless to say, my mind was racing during that time. Every project was revisited and evaluated. The prioritylist have been changed a little for some of the upcomming sites.

First of all - all those Penis enlargement programs out there - move the FU** over, and let FastSize through, because they are way ahead of any of you out there. I placed a banner on a parked domain, and bought textlink bannerspace on a few hightraffic sites leading them to the parked domain ( www.blivstor.dk ). I did this because I was bored and just wanted to test the CTR - I did Honestly NOT expect any sales from a 2 day textbanner spot - But I was wront. 3 sales, and a total of $375 income from a $20 dollar investment and a ration just below 1:200.

Second surprice was not as big a surprice, but more of a plesant confirmation of a theory I have always had. To sum it up: If you dont have the time to do a site right the first time, then make a halfarsed attempt, place one related banner, and one banner from somthing completely different on the site - and then just let it sit there and let the 20-100 daily SE-hits make it profitable. I did that to a iPhone domain I had, and it was in the Top5 on Google for 3 days this week, but is gone again now. But I had 18k+ hits in those few days, and a 3%+ CTR.

So - what I’m trying to say is, waste your time on other things than building your websites, because if you are lucky - you might make a few thousands in a week anyway. Flexing your E-penis on webmasterforums could be a good thing to waster you time with. But if you dont belive in luck, there is alays the oldfashion “hard work” approach to sucess, and it still works.

PS. I did not check this post for spelling errors - I dont have time :)

I have been using phpBB for some time now, but since I’m not a programmer, I usually forget the optimization tricks I did on the last board. There are many other things you can do, but I kept this short for two reasons:

• I don’t give away knowledge for free.
• This is the kind of tricks most people would be able to preform.

Title tag
Default your topic and forums title looks terrible both for the users and on the Search Engines because it include useless title elements like "SITENAME :: View topic - topic text here". To fix this follow this simple checklist

1 - Open overall_header.tpl
Replace line…
<title>{SITENAME} :: {PAGE_TITLE}</title>
with line…
<title>{PAGE_TITLE}</title>

2 - Open viewforum.php in the forum root folder
Find the line that looks a little like this…
page_header($user->lang['VIEW_FORUM'] . ' - ' . $forum_data['forum_name']);
and edit it to look like this…
page_header($forum_data['forum_name']);

3 - Do the same thing with the file called viewtopic.php

Create a robots.txt
The Search Engine bots will try and index all pages, and that is usually good, but It’s not really that great to have it index the members profiles and other useless stuff, because it don’t look good on the search engine (and the users might like the keep the details off the search engines). To fix that problem you create a file called robots.txt and place it in the root folder of the forum. Paste this in to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /db/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /common.php
Disallow: /config.php
Disallow: /faq.php
Disallow: /groupcp.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /memberlist.php
Disallow: /modcp.php
Disallow: /posting.php
Disallow: /privmsg.php
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /viewonline.php

Keep in mind this is on a phpBB v3. If you use phpBB v2 page_header is called something else, but I think you will be able to identify it yourself when you look through the code.

I was about to write a small guide to optimizing a phpBB v3 script, and ran in to a problem where the <code></code> tag didn’t work. I got a blank space instead, and my temper went through the roof as usual. I know some of you will say “read the f’ing manual” - In your dreams kid!

Call me naive, but I thought the “code” button in Wordpress, was meant to work as it does in phpBB. But it seems it DONT, just like many other things in WP.

Thanks to Google I found a Wordpress Plugin called wp-codeshield that fixed the problem. Check this link, and you might end up being as happy and joyful as I am right now.

hello mtfing dumarse world

That was all for now, I will be back to bitch about Wordpress and the codemonkeys that did it later. It’s not like there is a shortage of things to complain about when it comes to Wordpress, and if it should happen, I will just start talking about the Wordpress themes that aren’t valid HTML/XHTML.

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), everyone think they are experts, and they will spend hours telling you how fundamentally wrong your approach is to marketing your sites, and how much money you will make if you did it their way. Most of those people have their bills payed by their wife, while they sit all day in front of the PC claiming the most ridiculous results and profits on their favorite forums.

To sum it all up - for everyone involved with building websites. This one rule apply to all. SEO, SEM, Link Trades, Design - you name it. Read this rule and repeat it a few times to yourself:

Don’t educate your competition

Yes - its really that simple. Don’t waste your time giving away free tips to your competition. They will not return the favor. There are many other rules in SEO, but I honestly don’t hope you have success, because they could mean less money for me. This means you should go ahead and write invisible keywords on the footer of each page, add your site to 40000 automated link dirs, and pay for back-links from cloaked portals.

Looking back at 2008 as a Microsoft-based IT Infrastructure consultant, and focusing on some of the small problems I wish there were a fix for - a few stands out from the rest, and those topics I want to share with you in a brief and superficial way in this last IT Blog post of the year.

I will only do this as a kind of rough draft or public brainstorm, because It’s meant to be the start of a new category on our blog called “Future Tech”, where we will keep throwing new ideas at each other. Most of them are brain-farts, but they will mostly be born out of a actual problem that need to be fixed ro worked around.

The main topics will be Open Standard for software installs, and Open Standard for software updates. I was going to include future security, but I decided to keep our finding and ideas out of public view, since it could be a security issue for both your and our own customers.

Installing a new application at a customer always make you think; “exactly what does this software REALLY slip in, what sys files does it change, and how will it behave when its finally installed”. Some programs today are borderline Malware the way they hijack your client PC’s interface and resources.

Have you installed Adobe Acrobat Reader lately? 18mb code to create a vector graphic reader? give me a break. Then you double-click a .PDF on your file server and then everything stops. If you have a audio stream the music stops - that is how intrusive Adobe PDF reader have become. And before the program starts, it calls back to its home-servers two times. First it checks for updates (you better not be more than two versions behind) - and then it checks if its a valid copy. And there are no legal way to stop that.

If you use IE as your primary browser, you might have installed the Google Toolbar. Have you check how much the Google toolbar calls home? On every new IE instance, executes GoogleUpdaterService.exe to check for new versions. GoogleUpdaterService.exe shuts down when its done, but then you still have GoogleToolbarNotifier.exe running as long as you have a open IE Browser window. Dear Google - could you for the love of GOD stop stealing my client resources and time?

IF I want to know about a new version, I will check your website myself - you don’t need to do it for me against my will and command every time I open a new instance of IE.

Yeah-Yeah, back on topic… Our new category “Future Tech” will be for brain-farts, tools, tests and experiences with these problems. We go for “fixes” rather than “workarounds”. Don’t expect deadlines, because we are in a area where what we want haven’t been developed or published yet - these things takes time.

StuartD (TyCam Technologies) have produced a really great plug-in for FireFox. It works as a filter or ignore-list for Vbulletin, but unlike the built in ignore-list, it’s like the people on your ignore-list don’t exist any more.

Top Features
- Ignore users (threads, posts and even quotes), threads, keywords and prefix (in vb 3.7)

- Highlight the threads/posts of users you value above average.

- Ignore threads. If someone you don’t want to ignore, makes a thread that you do want to ignore (ie, contest threads), you can ignore that thread itself so that you don’t see it on the forum anymore.

This FireFox Plug-in will save you a lot of time and help you get rid of all the forum-trolls that waste your time. A plug-in like this raises the value of a forum, because you can remove the content that was pulling the community down. I would recommend you donate a few $$ to StuartD through his website TyCam Technologies at www.tycamtech.com

One of they ways you can save money, is by eliminating the middleman when buying advertisement space. Before you do it, you need to make sure you know the value of traffic to your site. How much money do you make on each surfer on average, is something you need to do a exact calculation on, to make sure you don’t pay to much for your advertisement space.

The place you decide to buy advertisement space from, will tell you a estimate on how many impressions (banner views) and what CTR (Click-through rate) they usually get. It’s your job to calculate those numbers in to your budget, and see if it creates a good ROI. If it don’t create a profit - simply don’t touch it, and move along to a different seller.

Australian advertisement space
My Australian friend from Kaos Media specialise in Automotive sites, and have a large network of Automotive sites targeting a number of different niches. Kaos Media sell advertisement space on both a local and global scale.

When buying traffic from Auto forums, you need to keep in mind that the banners will get a high about of impressions and a low CTR, because of the nature of a forum. Forum users view many pages and the banners are rarely positioned very well, because the default design wont allow it. The forum users get many banners shown each time they visit, and over a period of time they will end up getting “blinds spots”. A “blind spot” is a area where the user have learned the banners are positioned, and the eyes will subconsciously ignore that area.

I’m a Microsoft fan - don’t get me wrong. I love Microsoft server and XP, but there is still some Microsoft products I recommend my customers to stay away from. One of them is Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office have since Office2003 developed into a joke of clutter and bloated addons that do nothing but confuse the average users. Microsoft need to wake the F*** up and realize that 90% of people using word, aren’t high tech users. They are ordinary hardworking people who just need a fast writer, spreadsheet or e-mail client.

So - what are people to do? Right now there are some good alternatives:
- IBM Lotus Symphony. Great, but no e-mail client.
- StarOffice. Complete office suite. Price is around $35 for home users
- OpenOffice. A lighter but 100% free office suite - but no e-mail client.
- Thunderbird. Best free e-mail client.

This article is about OpenOffice, because I see that as the best alternative for the webmaster/consultant and even average home user as well. You get all the tools you need; Writer, Spreadsheet, Database and Presentation. And its 100% free no matter if you are a private or corporate user.

Reasons to use OpenOffice:
- It’s free. Save $ by NOT having to pay for Microsoft Office.
- Faster. Less bloated and loads faster.
- Intuitive. The layout and functions make more sense to average users.

Download OpenOffice v3 at www.openoffice.org

It’s 2008 - almost 2009, and the toolbars are still taking up 30px of navigation space on my screen. It’s 2008 - almost 2009, and the toolbars do the same they have done for the last 4 years. Search, popupblock, add to favorit, check PR - and sniff you internet habits.

The need is there for something more, something more then a free browser toolbar. A framework for a new set of application suits is needed. Something that crosses over from being just a Browser toolbar, to being a OS-wide tool.

I want something like:

- A spellchecker that work outside the browser. If im working in dreamweaver or excel, I want to be able to select the text no matter where, and check the spelling in place. I dont want to copy it to another tool, I want it to do it right there

- A search function where I dont need to open the browser and paste the text. Granted - Google toolbar does that now (but that hijacks my copy-paste function, so its 100% USELESS - when did Google stop understand users). MS IE8 and the new accelerate function is said to do this as well, but I want to see work before I give it credit.

- A framework/structure where I can add new tools and functions, without having to load a new program. Microsoft have made the .net framework, why cant people just use that and design those programs as plugins. Have Microsoft build a site for the plugins where they validate and sign the plugins, so people can trust them. security must be looked at, but its fairly easy to fix if you start to use 2009 technology (wont go in to details about that here for obvious reasons).

A toll that work the same way on both the local application and in your browser. It could even be remotely hosted, and you only use the cached version when you are offline. Microsoft have most of the tools ready for that through Presentation Virtualization with Terminal Services. The knowledge is there, we just need people to connect the dots

And they need to do this - and more - without having to sign in to a account like Google and MS ask you to now. It needs to be free, because its something that should be a part of the OS to begin with, instead of 300 different flashing and sliding menus.

I am part of the Alexa community to try and motivate them in to adding tools like that to a OS toolbar, instead of a Browser toolbar like they have now. I have failed at making them listen, or at least the wont reply - I dont know.

Now its out there and I hope some of you maybe will pick up on it, and either try and develop it or make sure the developers know a set of tools like that is needed.

The guys from MojoHost.com broke a milestone the other day. After 6.5+ years in the hosting business, they hit support ticket #20,000. Brad Mitchell could not let a customer get that number, so he made a support-ticket out of it himself.

I remember the first time Corey took a vacation and that was when we started using the ticket system, with our first part time employee.

We had some fun with this around the office.. I happen to read all of the tickets as they come in and was sitting there thinking, I’ll be damned if I give 20k to someone else! So, I posted a support ticket and all of the techs have been posting to it ever since… What a bunch of geeks we are

Grats to the guys at MojoHost, I know the customers think very highly of your service and competent staff.