Tricia's Musings

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



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Update on my use of Kontera

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Do you use Kontera to monetize your site? I’ve been using it since sometime in July on the majority of my sites and over all I’m quite happy with the results.

I have been in contact with my representative at Kontera though, because my impression stats (and resulting income) for all the blogs on my Feverishthoughts.com domain are a lot lower than I expected. I’m comparing my results to the amount of impressions I’m getting on my main website (not a blog) which probably has a few hundred less page views per day than all the sites on the feverishthoughts.com domain combined. You’d think that the Kontera link impression numbers would be about the same, but their not. I’m getting four to five times more impressions on my website than on my feverishthoughts blogs.

I’m using Lucias KonteraControl wordpress plugin to control when the Kontera links are allowed to appear on my blog posts. Naturally I don’t want them in the posts that I do for my advertisers – at least not for whatever amount of time is required by each companies TOS. I don’t think the plugin should be interfering in the amount of impressions that I get in the posts that I allow Kontera in, but something is causing there to be less impressions.

We’re trying to figure it out.

If you are using the KonteraControl plugin are you getting the amount of impressions that you think you should be? Say at least 3 to 5 links per post?





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 changed my do follow plugin to Lucia’s Linky Love

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Late last night I finally got around to changing my do follow plugin that gave everyone who left a comment a link that would be picked up by search engines to one that gives me a little more control over who gets a link that follows and who doesn’t.

I think I first became a do follow blogger in June of 2006 when I learned of the Comment Plugger plugin for wordpress. Then, this past April I added the standard do follow plugin to all of my sites. Unfortunately I forgot I was also using the comment plugger so I was actually giving those who left a comment two links! Dumb de dumb dum ..

Other than the mass outgoing linkage that I probably caused myself by doing that, I didn’t have any problem with being a do follow blogger until sometime in early June when I noticed a heavy increase in human generated comment spam. This is a different kind of spam than I was used to getting.

The human generated comment spam comes in the form of a person, perhaps someone who works for a SEO company or just an eager website owner, attempting to get multiple backlinks for the site that they are promoting quickly.

They started leaving links with SEO type names instead of leaving a real name in their comment link, and what’s even worse there were those that would place a number of unrelated links within their comments. Linking to words like “love” in their comment and placing a link to a dating site, or linking to words like “flower” and placing a link for a Canadian Flower company.

Do you guys think we are stupid?

I run the Do Follow Blogroll and between my husband and I we have nine blogs on the list. It became very easy to see who was going around leaving lame comments full of links because they’d hit all of our sites often on the same day. I’m sure they hit everybody on the list I run and anywhere else that do follow bloggers have been listed.

Enough of that! I have enough to do with blocking regular spam for pharmaceuticals or p0rn and so on. I needed a plugin that rewarded my loyal regular visitors. The people who I’d always wanted to reward with a back link to their sites in the first place.

Other bloggers who had become do follow bloggers had noticed a steady increase in this annoying new type of spam too. Some were bothered enough by it that they removed their dofollow plugins completely!

On July 18th I went looking for a new do follow plugin and I found one called the LinkyLove plugin. I made a post about it too, stating that I’d be changing my do follow comment policy shortly as I’d planned on changing over to the original linky love plugin.

Unfortunately around that time I was also having problems with my web host. They kept telling me that my sites were using too many of the CPU resources on the server that they were on. So I was hesitant to add a new plugin when I didn’t know how much CPU resources it used.

I think Lucia from Big Bucks Blogger heard this as a cry for help (she came to my rescue before with other dream plugins!) and she created Lucia’s Linky Love do follow plugin. It’s a fantastic plugin and I’ve just started using it on all our sites.

This new plugin has much more control than the original LL plugin. First and foremost for me, it doesn’t make as many calls to the database so it’s no where near the CPU resource hog that the original plugin was. Secondly, instead of just making a persons comments follow after they’ve left a certain amount of comments on a blog, this new plugin that I’ll call LLL has an administration panel where you can set a number of different options.

With the new LLL plugin a commenter must leave a minimum of 3 comments to get a link that follows. The blog administrator can set that number as high as 10 I believe. I’ve set this at different amounts on our blogs depending on how old the blogs are and how popular they are. Depending upon what happens with human generated comment spam over the next few weeks as a result of this new plugin I may lower or increase the number of comments one must leave for their links to follow on our various sites.

To get a link to follow a site visitors comment link must match author and domain. So someone leaving a number of different links to different domains or using different author names will never get do follow links. You can also set how many comments one must leave before the links that they add within their comment will follow.

I’ve set this last feature rather high on my sites that I do memes on because I’ve noticed that some people come by for Wordless Wednesday or Photo Hunter and rather than commenting on my lovely photo they just talk about their own post and leave a link to their post in the comment. That burns me every time! Perhaps if they said something about my own photographic effort before leaving a link to their post I might not find it as upsetting.

I wanted to let my readers know of this do follow plugin change because those of you who use FireFox’s extension “Search Status” might be looking to see if blog links follow or not. Well, on some of my posts or sites that do not have a number of regular visitors comments you might think that I’ve gone back to nofollow. I haven’t. My visitors just have to leave enough comments to qualify for a link that follows now.

This site has a fair amount of regular readers (thanks!) so I think you’ll be pleased to know that nothings changed for you. You still have all your links. Those that are new to reading this site will just have to leave a few more comments. 😉

Oh another feature that I like about Lucia’s Linky Love plugin is that is shows the commenter how many comments they’ve left on the blog. I think that some of my regular readers will be very happy to see how many times they’ve commented on my sites.

I might be changing my do follow policy slightly

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As many people who visit this site and many of my other sites knows all of my blogs are do follow. I realize that some of you still might not know what that means. Well, it means that I started using plugins that would remove the nofollow tags from comments way back in October of 2006.

I became a “do follow” blogger in order to reward my regular visitors with a proper link back to their site.

You see, most blogging platforms have nofollow tags built in to the comment area so when you leave a comment on most blogs the nofollow tag that is placed in the link that you left when you signed the comment tells search engines like Google not to follow and index the link.

To heck with that I said. I’ve had a fairly loyal following of readers for quite a while now. Why shouldn’t I give them a link for their loyalty and for leaving fantastic comments that make me think, laugh or inform me of things I hadn’t thought of yet?

In October I started my following experience by using the comment plugger plugin which gave my commenters a link right under the post. Once this post has some comments you’ll see a link to the various people that have left a comment right below the post.

Then, in April, I added the do follow plugin to my site and started the Do Follow Blogroll so that we’d all know what other blogs were also do follow blogs.

I should have actually taken out the comment plugger plugin at that time because I’m actually giving two links every time someone comments! Oops! I forgot about the comment plugger. Perhaps by the time you read this post I’ll have removed that feature.

I don’t think I’ve ever really lacked for comments, but lately, as a result of the do follow blogroll being copied on a number of sites – in some instances in order of a sites page rank! – I’ve been getting all kinds of comments from other bloggers, business owners, business websites and so on who seem only to be leaving a very basic comment in order to get a back link.

So have a number of people on the do follow blogroll. One person told me this morning that someone left a comment on her site recently praising her for being a do follow blogger and then they proceeded to leave a long list of links!

Hello! Do follow blogs are not link directories!

Wait a minute ….

Why did I become a do follow blogger? To reward my regular loyal visitors. I can’t do that properly with the do follow plugin that I’m currently using because everyone gets a link that has had the nofollow tags removed. If people are using sites just to get links well … that doesn’t work does it!

Yeah … so maybe that’s why I’ve been feeling a little used and abused lately.

Hmmmm “I wonder what other do follow type plugins are out there?” I thought to myself.

So I did a search for do follow plugins and one of the first search results was Andy Beards Ultimate list of Nofollow and Dofollow plugins. I’d seen this list in the past of course, but at that time I couldn’t think of a reason why someone would want to use a do follow plugin that didn’t necessarily make all comment links follow.

Well after my experiences of the last few weeks having the same people leaving comments on nine of my husband and I’s blogs – many of which appeared to be pretty much the same comment each time, I’ve learned my lesson and I think I’m going to go back to rewarding only those who are loyal visitors and commenters.

I’m thinking of using the LinkyLove plugin which allows you to set it up so that someone must comment a certain amount of times before their links will follow. Seems a safer bet to me.

The default amount of comments someone would have to leave is set to 10. I may or may not leave it at that if I use this plugin. I’m not going to say of course because those that want to play the system will then know what magic number they must reach.

If the do follow bloggers on my blogroll begin using this it will be a little harder for me to verify if their site follows when I’m checking their sites to add to the blogroll but in an effort to prevent abuse I think I’d better allow my members to use whichever plugin they wish to use.

If I begin using the LinkyLove plugin this will of course be the change to my do follow policy that I referred to in the title of this post.

The final straw the broke the camels back and prompted this upcoming change is due to the fact that someone has now created a search engine to help people find do follow blogs. I can see this being abused and making it even easier to abuse those who only want to be nice to their loyal readers.

The reason that I haven’t begun to use this plugin already is because I’m still having CPU resource problems with my web host. I need to make sure that this plugin isn’t constantly calling the databases and using up a lot of valuable resources on my server.

Does anyone know if this is a light of heavy CPU resource usage plugin?

Does anyone already use the LinkyLove plugin? If you do have you had any problems? Is your site still fairly fast or has it slowed?

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