Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Social network sites take a chunk of my time each day

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Did you know that I spend perhaps as much as an hour a day going through all my “friend” invites and other messages that come in from social networks like Mybloglog, Blogcatalog, Facebook, and Bumpzee?

I haven’t actually kept track of how many friend requests come in each day or how long it really does take so my “hour” is an estimate, but I think it’s fairly accurate. When someone makes a friend request or joins my neighborhood I visit the social network site and then I often visit the person who’s just made me a “friend”‘s blog as well. So, yeah, it can take some time.

How much of your time do you think social networking takes you each day or week?





I think I need an new email program

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My email program is acting funny. I use Eudora, a program that is apparently not going to be updated anymore.

I’ve got the most recent installation on this computer, but every once in a while it freezes up. It will start working again after three to five minutes but it’ll freeze when I’m deleting an email or when I click on something within an email.

It’s only done this two or three times, most often after the laptop has been on for a long while and perhaps went into hibernation mode, but today for the first time it’s freezing up and I’ve only been using the laptop for two hours – with no breaks.

The only difference today is that there was a Java update. I guess I should reboot and see if that fixes my email program.
Weird.

Anyway, it looks like I might have to look for a new email program soon. I hate Outlook express. Any ideas? I’ve always loved Eudora … If I could find a new email program similar to Eudora I’d be happy.

The importance of search engine optimization

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I read a lot of forums, blogs and websites and one thing that strikes me time and time again is how little most people know about natural search engine optimization. The real shocker for me is that it’s not always those who are new to being a website owner that seem to not know what SEO is, but people who have been blogging or maintaining sites for years.

I believe that search engine optimization begins with the purchase of your domain name. If you are writing a site about bikes it’s important to have the word bike in your domain name. The search engines will like that and might give your site a higher standing on search engine results. After all the whole point of optimizing our sites for search engines is so that people doing searches can find us easily.

If your your site comes up on page 10 of a Google search results page it’s unlikely that you’ll have many visitors. However if you consistently pick appropriate keywords for your sites articles, article titles, page titles, site titles and even domain names you’ll have a good chance that your site will be found on the first page of search engine results.

My sites tend to do well in search engine rankings because I try to use keywords in my articles that describe the topic I’m writing about and I also try to use a descriptive title for my posts.

I shake my head when I visit a blog and see a great article about a specific topic yet the title is some off the wall line like “Yaba daba do what a day!”.

If you really aren’t sure how to optimize your site for search engines you might want to hire a search engine optimization company to help you. They can take a look at your site and do a consultation. Perhaps they’ll give you a price quote that contains a list of what they’d do to optimize your site.

Many search engine optimization services such as the one I’ve linked to above, submitawebsite.com, have information about SEO techniques that you can begin to use on your own to better your standings on search engines.

As I said earlier a SEO company will also offer a number of SEO services that you might want to use to promote your site just as text link ads, optimizing your site for search engine placement, pay per click services and management and many other services that could help your site reach number one on in the search engine results.

If you don’t have time to optimize your site for search engines on your own do look into the services of a SEO company. It’s worth it if you want to boost your traffic.

Monetize using Kontera and keep kontera out of your paid posts

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As I mentioned in one of my recent posts Kontera was interested in partnering with me. They contacted me a month and a half ago greatly interested in helping me monetize my sites using their program of content links.

I’d been interested in the program for a while, but considering that I write articles for companies I didn’t want to have Kontera bubble ads in those posts. In fact in many cases I’d be breaking my agreement or the Terms of Service with the companies that had provided the opportunity to write those articles. I also didn’t really want to have any ads in my recent posts because I’m not sure how my regular readers would react to that. I know that some people wouldn’t care, but others would just hate it.

Luckily, while I was taking my time deciding whether I’d use the Kontera ads on my sites my blogging friend Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger was listening to my concerns and the concerns of others, and she got busy creating two fantastic plugins that those who do pa1d p0sts and want to use Kontera will not be able to live without! Well if they are wordpress bloggers anyway.

Lucia has created the Kontera Control plugin which lets you control exactly where and when Kontera ads show up in your wordpress blog. I haven’t added Kontera to this site yet, but when I do ads will show up in comments after two days, and in new posts after 3 days. They will not show up in permanently compensated posts at all, and posts that only require a post to be permanent and unchanged for a specific period of time, most often 30 days, will possibly have kontera ads after 60 days. Complete instructions on how to set up the Kontera Control plugin have also been written by Lucia.

Now, to exclude Kontera from certain posts you need to put all of them in a particular category. You can name the category anything you want.

Here comes Lucia again with another fantastic plugin.

She’s created the Hide Sponsored Categories plugin. She made the plugin for those that do compensated postings, but anyone could use it to hide any category. Simply activated it and check off which categories you don’t want to show up in your tags, category list, and or archives. If you are like me you don’t just choose one category for a post so no post will every be completely hidden.

It took me a while to set it all up because I had to rework some categories, but I’m now using both of Lucia’s plugins on all of the blogs except the photoblog.

I’ve been using the plugins for about a week and a half and so far the plugins are working quite well.

I finally added Google Adsense to this site

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I was up late last night working on our sites. I had never added any Google Adsense to four of our sites. Why? Well, when we’d first started them I was using traffic engines like Bl)gexplosion and Bl0gMad to begin getting some new visitors to the sites. It worked, I believe that we managed to get a few regular readers and have retained some of the early connections that I made by being very active on the various traffic engine sites.

The problem is that you can’t have Google Adsense (not on the main page anyway) of a site that’s regularly being seen on a traffic engine site as they believe that is generating false impressions of the Google Adsense ads. So I didn’t have Google Adsense on those four sites.

I haven’t been using these sites at all this year, so I finally decided late last night to deactivate, put on pause or hold, all of the sites that I’d had listed on the traffic sites I’d been using in the past. Once I did that I started putting Adsense on this site, As the Garden Grows, Breath of Life and Odd Planet.

It was kind of stupid of me not to put Google Adsense on these sites earlier since these sites tend to have the most traffic of all of our sites – well other than my website. I tried to make the ads as non glaring as possible so as not to irritate our regular readers. Yeah, it might not be quite as effective that way, but for now that’s how I’ll try it on these sites.

All of the sites also have Kontera on them now too. I’ve set it up so that you shouldn’t see Kontera ads in new posts. I tend to post several times a day on a few of the sites so for the most part regular readers should have Kontera free posts. If you don’t visit as often and you scroll through the sites to see all the posts that you’ve missed since your last visit then yes, you’ll run into some Kontera ads here and there.

I’d love to hear if you like the way I’ve set things up. I’ve tried to monetize my sites in a way that should have very low impact on regular loyal readers.

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