Kudos to Meg for putting this list together and maintaining it @Blogpond. Make sure that you wander around her site and check out the other cool articles that she has written while visiting the list

Go Go Mr.Gadget Team!

Last night I got a bit of shock when I discovered a strange URL in my WordPress header file (header.php). I cut and pasted into the URL field of my Firefox browser to find that it was some placeholder site that was selling domain names!?

I believe that this could be associated to a vulnerability if one of the older versions of WordPress that I had running.

Once I realised what was going on I immediately removed the offending link and did a scan of all the other main WordPress files (index.php, footer.php, comments.php) just in case.

I’ve found this forum thread on DigitalPoint where other WordPress users talk of similar hack problems especially with redirects from the wp-blog-header.php file.

How to Avoid These WordPress Hacks:

1. Keep up to date with latest versions of WordPress
2. Check your main WordPress files regularly
3. Check your web stats – normally a good sign of a security breach is a visible dip in web traffic
4. Change your password regularly (I know it’s a pain)
5. Visit the WordPress Blog for the latest news

Please feel free to share your stories and tips below.

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Having sold all advertising slots for the next 6 months, I thought it was an opportune time to take a closer look at Google Adsense revenue again since it was my the first advertising programme I signed up with. I installed it over 4 years ago with acceptable, not super, results.

Here’s my graph of earnings over 4 years (2004 – 2008):

As you can see, revenue has been up and down over the years never clearly breaking the $10 mark at any point. However, with a little over 2 hours worth of tweaking on the weekend, you’ll see that August 2008 improved remarkably; where we are hitting over $20 a day now.

How did I achieve the significant increase in Google Adsense revenue?

Let me explain it in 5 simple-to-follow tips below:

1. Embed an Adsense block within your posts: Even though it sounds obvious, the vast majority of blogs that incorporate Adsense ads implement them anywhere but within the content. Visitors come to your blog to read the content not the advertisements so it makes sense to position them as close together as possible.

In the past, I always strayed away from doing this type of thing as I thought it would make the site appear unprofessional and leave a bad impression on readers. However, “returning visitor” statistics show that the number of new or loyal readers has not changed that much at all.

The most effective block has been the 336 x 280 text block. If you have enough room, hang/float it to the left as this is the natural way we read documents and it’ll help grab the attention of the reader. If you don’t have enough room just put the block between heading and text. See my example from the Mr.Gadget website below:

2. Use transparent borders around your ads: By this I mean, Adsense ads work best when they look like they’re a natural part of your blog. One way you can disguise them is not to have the border appear around them. To do this, find the color of the background in your CSS (in most cases white #FFFFFF) and use this as the border color.

In the above picture, I only put the red border to show you where the Google Adsense ad was, not to go against my own advice

3. Use text blocks rather than images: Unfortunately there aren’t many advertisers in the world who know how to capture their target audiences through image creatives. That’s why the good ones get paid so much! I have had _some_ success with image ads but the lion share of Adsense revenue has come from text ads.

4. Track your different format Ads via Channels: Once you’ve finalised a Google Adsense ad, create a Channel with a name to associate with that ad. For example, for a large 336×280 text block you could call the channel “<websitename>MainInPostTextBlock”. You’ll then be able to quickly assess it’s performance compared to any other ads that you put up. I can’t believe that it took me 4 years to start doing this.

5. Format your ad to blend in with rest of your site: Like step #2, this step talks about integrating your ad with the rest of your site. Specifically, ensure the color of your ad title is same as your post title; link text same as your hyper links and text the same color as your post text.

Tweak your Google Adsense Today

Whether your blog gets 100 visitors a day or 10,000, I guarantee that you’ll see an improvement in your Google Adsense revenue by implementing the above. In my case, I doubled revenue with only a couple hours worth of work.

Monitor & Tweak your Google Adsense at least monthly

After seeing the amazing results of my last Google Adsense tweak, I’ll be reviewing and tweaking performance again in 30 days – no way, I’m going to let it run for another 4 years knowing that there’s always the chance to improve it!

*Note to self: Need to work on Google Search on site next…

Keen to hear if this helped you or of any other Google Adsense tips you may have!

References:

• What is Google Adsense?
• Google Adsense Website

Minutes later, domfosnz, an active Digger, submitted it to Digg. Through the magic of promotion and networking, it slowly garnered enough votes to make it popular enough for the front page. This took around 200 Diggs to get there. I’ll write more on methods to get website pages front-paged in the weeks to come as I have only been active on Digg for a month and still experimenting.

What is Digg?

For those who don’t know what Digg is, it is one of the world’s most popular social-bookmarking sites where users can ‘digg’ (positive vote), ‘bury’ (negative vote), comment and submit website pages. Logically, the website pages that attract many diggs in a short period of time are deemed as newsworthy and propelled to the front page (sometimes referred to as “fp”) of Digg.

How many users does Digg have?

Two sites estimate (listed in ref below) that Digg has over 2.5 millions users; you can imagine the amount of traffic a website would receive even if a small subset of the total Digg population visited a front page Digg story.

This is the Digg Effect : the massive wave of visitors rushing through the internet to check out a freshly front-paged website link, where most of the times, even the most robust servers crash. A website can receive between 20,000 – 100,000 visitors within a couple of hours. To many, having this amount of traffic is both a dream and a nightmare.

Yes, My Server Crashed

To be quite honest, I thought that my website was sturdy enough to handle the Digg Effect. I have a dedicated web server (my website is the only one on the server), dual quad-core Intel processors and 2GB of RAM and SCSI drives hosted by one of Australia’s premier web hosts. Yet, if you read halfway through the first set of Digg comments, you’ll see people complain that my website was pictureless and the Digg mirror site kicking in. This is the point where my server crashed.

Digg Effect statistics

As for the number of visitors I received via Digg, it ended up being close to 35k new visitors. Around 30k more than my usual daily traffic.

What I’ve Learned from the Digg Effect:

1. Diggers don’t click on ads as much as my usual traffic: I predominantly use Google Adsense ads on my site and normally pull in around $10 a day. On this particular day, I ended up with around $14. This shows that Diggers are usually more focussed on reading the content to which they were directed to rather than be distracted from ads.

2. Need to install some form of caching for WordPress: there are a couple out there but WP-Cache seems to be the one of choice. This makes static versions of pages which eases up the load on the servers which would normally have to perform queries to present blog pages which are database driven.

3. Be ready for a barrage of comments from Diggers: some are applicable however there are many that aren’t. This is the Internet and you’ll get passersby who don’t even read the post in it’s entirety and make random remarks. Most important thing to remember is don’t take it personal. Be happy that you received more traffic that will have good long term benefits such as more incoming links to your site and more exposure.

4. Always do spelling and grammar checks before publishing: I do this most of the time, but I forgot to do it for this one as I wrote it quite quickly in between meetings. Always, always do a spellcheck and get someone with superb editing skills have a readthrough. I deserved all the flack I received for the minor mistakes I made.

Surviving the Digg Effect

For those who think that they’ll experience the Digg Effect soon or want more ideas on how to better prepare for it, read Ivan’s excellent article entitled “Surviving the Digg Effect”.

Digg Effect References:

• How Many Users Does Digg Have? #1
• How Many Users Does Digg Have? #2
• What is Digg?
• About Digg
• What Digg Means for Servers

A new version of WordPress has just been released today. So whether you have an existing blog or commencing one, make sure you update/grab this version from the WordPress Website.

The main enhancements of WordPress 2.6 are:

1. Ability to use previous versions of draft posts/pages
2. Improved “Press This” button functionality: allows you blog on other web pages quickly and incorporate their images and text.
3. Inclusion of image captions
4. Preview themes before your audience does
5. Gears functionality: caches image and CSS files on your PC for faster performance when writing

Below is a video of the changes in WordPress 2.6:

WordPress is a great blogging foundation. We’ll write more on growing this blog and optimizing it for search engines in the upcoming posts.