blogging 102

This is not only Brad The BlogBoy’s one year aniversary this is the first day of our relaunch and I wanted to thank everyone who has contributed with comments and ideas over the last year.  I really wanted to take the time to tell you about what to expect over the next year.

1. I will promote one new theme a week here.  With any luck, I will be able to create one new theme a week to also hand out.
2. I want to do some in depth plugin analysis as well.  With any luck I will be able to get a few of the popular plugin authors, especially those I use a great deal to pimp their own wares to you.
3. Last but not least you are going to see a lot more of me here and over at Blogging For Noobs.

The purpose of this post is twofold in terms of blogging.  First I wanted to introduce to you two plugins you might not have ever seen.  Secondly I wanted to talk about professionalism for designers.

Plugin One is an affiliate publishers best friend.  Adrotate is every bit as good as Max Blog Press’s Ninja Affiliate.  Not only will the last several versions of this plugin provide you with quick affiliate masking slash redirect through your own site, it keeps track of your banner impressions and click throughs.  Version 2.4 even has a feature to block banners when they reach a certain number of impressions or clicks. Unlike Ninja Affiliate version 2.3.1 of AdRotate works quite well in WorPress Mu.  There are things to be aware of though.  If you use the banner wizard you can not later make the link an auto redirect link, you will have to stop rotating the banner and make a new entry.  Secondly in version 2.4 he automatically sticks a link back to his site in your meta information links, there doesn’t seem to be a way to stop this short of editing the code that I can see which is in direct violation of wordpress.org rules for plugins.

The second plugin I wanted to mention this week is Stumble for WordPress.  This is basically your very own blog version of Stumbleupon.  You can edit the settings to decide what percentage of stumbles are for pages on your site and which are for network wide.  I use this on most of my blogs and find different ratios better suit my purposes on different blogs.  I recommend using the defaulkt setting as traffic will start coming in from other sites the more that goes out from your site.  This is a fine plugin that will really help you build exposure from other sites.  I highly recommend it.  I also recommend that you leave the optional link back to the plugin site intact.  People who provide a great product deserve some credit.

Now on to the second part of this post, professionalism.  i wok up this morning with a ping from a website I didn’t reconize, Making The Web.  This is the Stumble for Wordpress designer’s site.  I was quite pleased that my site, Brad’s Tiny World had served up more network stumbles by a large margin over the next nearest site.  Brendon didn’t go out of his way to get backlinks or praise from me, he simply made a post and said thanks, good work, here are the leaders.  He makes fine plugins and doesn’t try and take over your blog with links and garbage proclaiming how great he is.  This is professionalism and not what you get from Arnan who makes AdRotate.

Arnan has a long history of not only being unprofessional when you question the quality of his plugins and showing some incompetence as a designer. Truth be told he is quite an asshole who seems to think if you don’t love his plugins or say anything bad about them, it is some sort of attack on him personally.  By extension if you read some of his rambling not directly related to his plugins but on the same site you will find he he also takes any lack of enthusiasm for Apple products as personal disrespect towards him as well.  I would like to say the behavior is typical of all mac fanatics, but he suffers from some additional megalomania, he also seems like the type who would preorder a Mac Book Wheel or voted for Scott MacIntyre on American Idol had he been listed as an iScott.

BTW if you choose to use AdRotate make sure you use the call on website for theme insertion.  If you use the call in the readme file which has been told is wrong repeatedly nothing will show up.  Use <?php echo adrotate_banner(‘1′); ?> not <?php adrotate_banner(‘1′); ?> which is what the readme file still says several releases after it quit working.  Now that he has been called out let’s see how long it takes hime to fix it.

There comes a time in every bloggers career they have to make a choice about monetizing their blogs. Monetizing isn’t the right thing for every blogger, surprisingly enough. There are plenty of vanity bloggers or those who blog to support a separate business venture. You can rest assured that when I finally get my novel in print there will be absolutely no ads other than products on the corresponding site/blog.

Just as not every blog is meant for monetizing, not every blog should be monetized in the same way.  Most people recommend starting off with adsense, which for sure is (was) the easiest program to get into.  As I understand it from a great many noobs plenty of sites are getting rejected these days and many more are getting their accounts cut within the first couple of days of going active with Google’s normal no explanation given email.  If this has happened to you, don’t get worried over it since it happens to a lot of bloggers with no rhyme or reason.  Also don’t get bent out of shape over it since there are alternatives to Adsense, which usually work a lot better for most bloggers. Read more »

Attracting Traffic with Banner Ads
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Nowshade_Kabir]Nowshade Kabir

Internet is an ever evolving business platform. Doing business on the Internet differs in a number of ways from every day brick and mortar business. Change here is more frequent, more dramatic
and may have greater impact than in a conventional business. Success in this climate can only come from quick response to the changes. Look at web advertisement! Just in a few short years, we have seen rise and fall of banner advertisement, email marketing, pop-ups, pop-unders and number of other marketing tools.
Read more »

By Jason Hulott

With more and more experts and search engine enthusiasts claiming the right way and the wrong way to handle link swapping, link exchanging or reciprocal linking!

You can tell something is important when there is more than one name for it! GRIN!

There are also two schools of thought on the reasons link swapping.

The first reason for link swapping has always been to carry favour with Search engine rankings. Have a good site with lots of links and this is seen as a good thing and therefore Search Engines will rank you higher.

Sadly, like all things in life, this system can be abused and taken to the extreme. Sites are buying in hundreds if not thousands of links trying to “boost” their ranking artificially. This is fine in the short term but we are starting to see a fundamental shift in Search Engine algorithms. Read more »