Blogging also takes a lot of time. You will spend hours writing blog posts, editing images, responding to comments and making sure your blog is running smoothly. Or at least I hope you are doing that.

I talk about monitoring your website all the time. If you don’t know where your visitors are coming from, what they are doing on your website and why they are leaving, your blog will not grow. I recently worked on a website that was 2 years old. It averages 8 visits a day over the last month.

Wow, a 2 year old website getting 8 visitors a day. That is almost impossible to do. You really have to try to NOT get traffic over that period of time. The reason why this is impossible to do is because Google picks up on all your website content and from that day on, your pages are in the search engines and people will find them and visit your website… Or will they?

Have you heard the term “Real-time” lately? It’s a buzz word that describes the current state of the Internet. We want everything to be real-time. Our news, our blogs, our TV, everything. Twitter handles most of our real-time information but Google is not far behind. The  problem with “real-time” for content creators is that it affects search results much faster then before.

If you monitor your website traffic, you will know that a tweet will get the most traffic within 10 minutes. After 24hrs the tweet is all but a memory. You can every retweet something an hour after the first tweet and nobody will notice. The same is happening with your content in the search engines

The sad truth is, most of the content and blog posts you spend hours creating get no traffic a few days after your post them.

Below is an example of a recent blog post from my blog

As you can see, it’s not getting any traffic anymore… Most posts are like this

Here is an example of a post that gets hits regularly

That’s more like it… You want to these types of posts in your archive. Imagine a hundred pages like this providing traffic to your website. Unfortunately, only about 10% of your posts will continue to grab visitors, so do the math… That would be 1,000 blogs posts or so. that’s a lot of work!

Of course there are some ways to increase your odds for success.

1. Create content that is timeless. I think there are 2 strategies when blogging. Blog a lot about current “real-time” events or blog about things that will be searched for over and over.  If you blog about current news, you will get more hits right away, but in the long run your posts will fade away. On the other hand, you can create educational posts or personal posts that will get searched for often and for a long time. I personally think there is too much work to create real time content. You have to blog all day to maintain high traffic numbers. This why blogs like this are made of groups of bloggers.
2. If you plan to have posts in the search engines, make sure they have the proper keyword density. Make sure people will be able to find them. Don’t forget the images in the posts. Google image search is a wonderful tool to generate traffic.
3. Try to bring older posts back to life. Use WordPress plugins to show related content or most popular posts from months ago. Retweet your archive. Like I said before, even if you tweeted it a month ago, nobody will remember.
4. Repost it. First check your stats and if it is truly dead. If you think the information is timeless, dust it off, re-word it and re-post it. Again, nobody will know.
5. Use older posts that are dead on article marketing websites. One thing to remember is that even if the post is dead, it’s probably in the search engines. Most article website don’t want duplicate content. First reword it, then submit it. You can provide a link back to the original post too… That will make a nice backlink since all the content will be related.

Bottom line get creative. If you have writers block, look to your old content to see if you can refresh it and grow your website traffic without having to work harder then you have to.

Action Plan

Start with a blog audit. Go to Google analytics and find the posts that are dead. See what keywords were used to find the posts and then use one of the ideas above to get that content back to life.

So you have a strategy for archived content? Please share with our readers

For example, my newsletter is trying to get people interested in making WordPress minisites, but some of my visitors could care less about being a webmaster, so it would be better for me, and them, if I just display some Google Adsense

I’m also a big tweaker… Not that crystal meth kind of tweaker, the website tweaker… If you’re one of the 4 people that read my blog regularly, better known as “my immediate family”, you will have seen different signup forms for my newsletter.

Getting newsletter subscriptions in one of the top goals for my blog. It’s surprising how many bloggers don’t have goals for their blogs. I take that back… Most bloggers have the goal to blog more, or start blogging, or blog more regularly. This is fine, but as soon as you make you first blog post, you have reached your goal, congrats.

Real goals involve making a plan, and then monitoring that plan to see if it is really happening. Does this sound familar… Sounds like a business plan to me.

I’ll be blogging a lot more about optimizing websites in the next coming months.

Monitoring Newsletter signups

I wanted to use Google Optimization (GO) for this, but found it to be lacking in features. Since I want to monitor across my entire blog, GO would not be a good fit, since it is geared towards doing A/b testing on a single page. My newsletter signup form is on every page in my website so I need to first find out what pages/keywords/categories are the most popular.

Since I use mailchimp, I was able to make a hidden field in my signup form and them pass the url to that hidden field. Surprisingly, it was not that easy.

Mailchimp has a nice website form builder. You can add many different types of fields, but when you add a hidden field, it does not automatically get added to the form. So you can’t just cut and paste to your website. You have to manually add the hidden field to your form, and make sure you use the same TAGID that was used for the hidden field. Just follow their help section to figure it out.

Once I added the hidden input, I then added some PHP to make the value of the input equal the url

<input type="hidden" name="TAGID" value="<?= $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']?>/<?= $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']?>" />

Now, when I get a new subscriber I can see what page they subscribed on. I can break it down even further to see what category that page was in, or even what tags or keywords. If you want to get really crazy, add some cookies and see how many pageviews or return visits that visitor did before they signedup.

This works great for finding out what pages are creating the most subscribers but what about some good old A/B testing. If you’re not familiar with A/B testing, it is the art of displaying 2, or more, different ads to see which ad performs better. As you can see above I have 3 backgrounds that I want to test. Actually, one is already out of rotation because it was beaten by the other background. I really thought my cute little baby boy would get me subscribers!

One way to rotate the newsletter subscriber form is to use OpenX adserver. Make a custom banner for each form and let OpenX display each form with a 50/50 impression probability and then compare results.

You can also use OpenX to make targeting zones that will only display a certain type of form for certain pages. I often target keywords in the URL to display specific ads.

FYI, Mailchimp has a build in A/B test for email newsletters. You can create a small subsection of your list and send out a A/B test to that subsection, then mailchimp will automatically send the rest of the list the winner.

FeedSquares for Chrome provides a refreshing way to experience Google Reader on Chrome and read your favorite feeds in style. To begin using FQ, please first login to your Google Reader Account.
SOURCE: FQ Chrome

You can find FeedSquares in the Chrome extension website. It’s not hard to find since it’s a featured app. after a quick install, you’ll see the icon in your extension bar.

When you first load it up, you’ll see all your feeds as little squares. If you have a lot, like me, you’ll have to scroll left and right to see them all. This did drive my CPU crazy, averaging about 40% CPU Usage, but that happens a lot to my laptop. My CPU also spiked when I opened a post, or changed feeds. Again, I have a ton of feeds in my reader. this extension makes me want to go in and do some organizing.

The coolest thing about FeedSquares is that it is HTML5… It’s not flash, but looks just like a flash app. It’s definitely a site to check out for good HTML5 examples.

On a side note, I found another good HTML5 example at 9elements.com. Not only is their HTML example app groudbreaking, but their homepage is wonderful too…

Overall, if you’re into new HTML5 examples, you have to check out FeedSquares, even if you don’t plan to use it as your Google Reader replacement.

You can also get FeedSquares for your Android phone, but unfortunately I can’t really comment on it, because it’s not loading on my rooted G1 running Android 2.1. It’s hanging on the screen to authorize FeedSquares to access my Google Reader account.

What would make FeedSquares a killer app?

• More options for customization - Currently I think you can only adjust the background color from light to dark, and adjust the refresh time
• go real-time, Integrate pubsubhubbub to update feeds

I noticed it a few weeks ago, when I saw the same non-relevant ads being displays on any website. I recently visited a mortgage website and from that day on, everywhere I browsed I saw that mortgage company’s banner. I quickly found out why… It’s called Remarketing and it’s simply cookie tracking

It’s no big surprise that Google tracks everything you do online.

I can see how this is great for advertisers ROI, but I’m wondering how it affects Adsense clicks on the Google Adsense content network.

On one side, you can argue that it doesn’t matter what ads are being displayed, since remarketing works on the concept of multiple views. You just have to be the lucky one that has the right ad displayed at the right time.

For me, that just doesn’t cut it. I want to be in control of my marketing. I want to display relevant ads to my content. Google Adsense used to do that, but with remarketing, it causes problems with my website. All the more reason to use Openx and server my own ads.

For all the people that are using Google Adsense to make money with your website, what do you think about remarketing?

Since Brian said he would think about writing a guest post about Blockshopper, we will just leave it at that. The invitation will always be open.

Brian did respond with a little taste of why Blockshopper does what it does. Again, original email here. I will break it down now.

Matt– you clearly don’t know what we do or why we do it.

We collect and clean up public data and make it readable and useful.
And we write news stories about home transactions. Real people do
this– just like they’ve done at community newspapers for a century.

I’m interested what he means by “clean up.” I guess “clean up” means adding more information to it. Basically, they collect your name and address from public tax records, then clean it up by adding information to it that is found on social networks.

Real people don’t collect the public records. I’m sure you automate that part. Then you probably outsource people to then “Google” the names to find information.

Lastly, you’re not a community newspaper of a century ago. A century ago we didn’t have the technology to steal someones identity from a thousand miles away and never get caught.

This isn’t about keywords or some automated SEO trick; we have 3
million visitors because our content is useful and interesting.

I totally disagree!

People find Blockshopper be searching their names, schools, professions, etc… That’s why you do it. There are 300 million people in America, most of which will search for their name on the Internet. You’re just not going to get me to think otherwise. This is new media. It’s all about Google, SEO, keywords, and pageviews

My introduction to Blockshopper was from my wife’s pissed off client. He searched his name to find his personal information on Blockshopper, then wanted to know why my wife gave his information to blockshopper. My wife now has to stop helping all her other clients to ease his worries. She has to contact Blockshopper to get the information removed, at her clients request, and she gets stressed out. You don’t want to see my wife when she is stressed!

As for “I have no idea how profession or education of homeowners helps
the consumer with real estate,” you might ask one of those hapless
home buyers living in a half-filled or foreclosure ridden subdivision
if they wish they had been more interested in “who” was buying next
door.

This is ridiculous.

In your scenario, using Blockshopper, I can find out who just bought next door. Then what? I make a judgement about them based on their name, race, profession, education, religion?

Unfortunately, I can’t use Blockshopper to find out who is “going to” move in. They have to move in to get their name in the public records, then the “real” people at Blockshopper can mash their social profiles.

Continuing, I don’t like my new neighbor based on some factor I got from blockshopper, and I move? Is that how Blockshopper works? Are they trying to protect me from bad neighbors? Is that how they make online real estate better?

Seriously, to think that Blockshopper would have helped people navigate the “mortgage meltdown” is so beyond reality, it’s funny.

You refer to “who” is buying next door. I might be mistaken but I don’t think you post financial information on Blockshopper yet. So, to judge “who” is living next to me based on their Linkedin profile, whether it is good or bad,  is a bad thing to do.

Lastly, If I want to know anything about my neighbor, I’ll just go talk to them like a real community member does. Not Google them and judge them based on their Blockshopper info, behind their back.

In summary

Brian is right, I really don’t know what Blockshopper does or why they do it, but based on my experience with Blockshopper, I don’t like the website or the idea.

If you think I’m being biased, I’m not. I also don’t know anything about why tobacco companies do what they do, but since two of my family members have died from tobacco, I also dis-like hate tobacco companies.

I guess it’s all about judging companies and people. Blockshopper makes it easy to stereotype your neighbors.

I use OpenX adserver to manage ads. It a free and open source product that allows you to manage ads for multiple websites, multiple advertisers and multiple campaigns. Openx has a hosted version if you don’t want to install software on your server. But installation is a breeze. If you installed WordPress, you can install Openx, since it has a web install interface. Just provide a database and the rest is self explanatory.

Since Openx adserver is open source, you can tweak it to do many things, which is what I like to do to everything. It also comes with an API that allows you to easily set up hands free banner sales from your blog or website. Of course, it’s up to you if you want to allow people to place banners on your website unmoderated.

There are cons to managing your own adserver. There is a learning curve when managing multiple advertising accounts with multiple banners. There is a language that advertisers use when managing advertisers and campaigns. You’ll have to learn terms like remnants, contracts, channels, etc… Luckily we have Google, and the Openx forums.

I’ll be blogging a lot about Openx, but in general here is why I like it.

• You’re website will remain the same. Set up default campaigns (Google adsense) to be displayed until you get an advertiser to buy ad space.
• Target keywords. Allow advertisers to target keywords so they don’t waste impressions. Remember, keeping your advertisers happy and you’ll generate repeat business. You will also display more relevant ads to your readers.
• Multiple websites. I’m sure you have huge dreams of owning a network of profitable websites. Openx can manage all of them from a single location and provide hands free sales on each… more on that later.
• Great stats. Easily discover what is working and what doesn’t. Combine this with Google analytics and optimization and you will have a very high conversion rate.
• Adservers open you up to all kinds of new advertising models. Make your own banners for clickbank products, Ebay programs, Amazon products or sell local ads using geo-location ad serving.
• Stop giving half your revenue to affiliate networks. This is a no brainer. Of course you have more responsibilities and risks, your return will be much higher.
• Educational. You will learn a lot about selling ads. It’s good to start early and get a leg up before your websites get popular.

If this sounds like something that would help you make more money, then go download it, install it and set your personal blog up with it. It’s simple to install. If you are using a shared host, I recommend making a subdomain called adserver.yourdomainname.com.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me, I’m happy to help.

Actually its a simple DOM javascript hack that allows you to edit any website. You can’t save your edits, of course, but you can take a screenshot like this:

I used to think that when I saw suspicious images like this, the guys had to photoshop it. I thought it had to take forever to edit. You have to get the right fonts and colors, but with this simple javascript you can pretty much do it in about 3 minutes.

Only works with the FireFox Browser
Just paste the following JS code into the URL bar of FireFox when you are on the website you want to edit.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Pretty simple. I would say the only other time I can see this coming in handy is to edit your online bank statements, then use that image as your profile image on match.com, or some other dating site… I bet it will work

I originally saw this trick searching Youtube for “javascript”.

First of all, unless you just connected to the internet yesterday, Google has copied Bing and now allow people to upload their own background images. Many, many people hate this as proven by a huge backlash in the comment stream on  GOS and when Google “Forced” a background on their search page.

Their forced example was suppose to last for a day, but was removed in an hour.

Anyhow, I like it, and while Google does have some nice Google Wallpapers for their search page, I love large images of exotic cars. If I can’t find a nice car wallpaper, I’m a sucker for a puppy

I think this website (fast-autos) has some really cool car wallpapers that are really big. You will probably have to crop them to get the perfect fit as a Google Wallpaper.

My Current Background

Source for the above Audi R8 GT Google Wallpaper