Friday, March 25th, 2011 at
10:07 am
Comment Spam Is Pretty Much Handled
If you’ve been blogging with WordPress for any length of time, you already know how much comment spam Akismet has saved you from. It’s a really good system they have set up for bloggers where reports by one blogger help to update the database so that other bloggers don’t even need to see comments from a spammer. Not perfect but very effective. When you consider it’s standard on all new WordPress installations, it’s positively a no-brainer.
What About Contact Form Spam?
Contact form spam is kind of another animal. The same bots that can be trained to leave BS comments on your blog can be used to find the contact form and spam you there. Unlike comment spam, there’s no built-in solution that comes with every WordPress install. That’s the reason I’ve done some research and found two free WordPress plugins that will all but eliminate your contact form spam.
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Monday, March 21st, 2011 at
12:17 pm
Getting Back Into Adwords…I Thought!
Part of my 2011 goals had been to get back into Adwords for my niche sites that have shown promise. I had run some campaigns back in 2009 with some success. I just didn’t have the time or budget for a large scale investment in it at that time. This year, I pledged to get back into it a little bit at a time until I was running a fairly large group of Adwords groups.
I selected as my first site one that has been busting my goals since about six months into the project. A partnership I had set up for it had run into a roadblock due to the partner’s health. The partner was an expert at the niche the site was built on and I was counting on them for a good block of content and community engagement. With that temporarily on hold, I decided Adwords would be perfect to send more traffic to the site until it could be resolved. The site has a great foundational educational product that I had reviewed extensively so I thought that would be a great place to start.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
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Saturday, February 26th, 2011 at
2:38 pm
Posterous Support
As part of the Challenge, I set up a posterous account to tie together seven sites for posting articles relevant to a niche I had build a site around. It was easy to set up and worked marvelously. I could get content out to my network sites that contained a link to an article I was reviewing and just one link back to my main site. I set it up exactly as Ed Dale had recommended and it helped me get ranking for some long tail keywords fairly rapidly and retain them. I wasn’t using it for spam and I recognized that some of the sites were no-follow but I was willing to be able to post to seven sites at a time with unique, useful content.
Then, last month, it just stopped working.
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Wednesday, February 9th, 2011 at
1:10 pm
What’s So Damn Funny, Jeff?
I get something almost every day in my email that always puts a smile on my face. It’s an email by people I’m sure are imaginary at some supposed SEO Firm.
Why does this make me laugh so much?
OK. Let’s suppose for a moment that there really is a human that went to one of my sites who is a site promotion whiz. Let’s further say they actually filled out the contact form and didn’t have a bot search for “contact” on my site’s homepage and auto-fill the contact form fields. Why does this person think I would have ANY confidence in their site promotion abilities when their first point of contact with me is a form, spammy email to me?
I mean could they possibly show me more convincingly how much they DON’T get it if they tried?
Do you get these emails? Do you laugh at them like I do or do you just feel sorry for them?
Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011 at
10:58 am
Needed A New Look
I was looking for a header that combined the various tools I use to make money online. I used Photoshop which I am not a master of by any means. Still, I think it turned out pretty close to how I conceived it.
I use the Flexibility2 (now the Flexibility3) theme by Advantus Media which I think does an excellent job at putting the tools you need together when you’re building a site. Their support is also awesome. The only complication I had was that the header was broken down into a background and a logo section instead of just being able to make a full header and upload it. If I wanted to, I could have made a logo section only but that was more work than I wanted to do. So I just used my header image background and tweaked the title and tagline inside the Flexibility2 admin panel.
Let me know what you think and let me know if you have any experience with the Flexibility2 theme.
