Learn Success With Randy Brown

About two or three times per year I rotate through all of my advertising networks to see how they are performing.  I think it’s a good idea to test all your ad-networks every once in a while to make sure you aren’t missing out on any potential earnings - a network that performed poorly six-months ago might do much better today (not usually, but you never know).

These are my results, listed worst to best, for the year - with the last test finishing up just a day or so ago.  Note that due to the various TOS’s, I do not include any actual CTR, ePC, eCPM or earnings data:

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BidVertiser: very low CTR and even lower earnings.  A waste of my valuable page real-estate.

Adbrite: I put the most time and effort into testing Adbrite because I have read of many other publishers that were getting good results.  But for me, it just did not work out.  I tested both text-only and banner units and after ~100,000 impressions, earned only a few dollars.  It seems that most publishers generating good earnings with Adbrite are using their “full page” ads which to me seem to be the #1 way to piss-off/drive away potential visitors.  Adbrite also has “in text” ad-units, but I did not test them.

Chitika: Chitika’s new “Premium Units” performed fairly well.  These ad-units only display to search-engine traffic and target ads based on the keywords used when searching.  This type of keyword targeting results in very relevant ad-units and very good CTR.   You can configure the Chitika Premium Units to display another ad-network such as Adsense or YPn for display to non-search engine traffic - otherwise direct/non SE traffic will not be shown any ad-units.  Chitika also has an “in text” unit which when tested earlier this year performed well.  Some publishers do not like the “in text” type ads, but I don’t have an issue with them - although I only display them to anonymous vistors, not registered members.  With Chitika you also get a dedicated account manager for support which is a big plus.

Yahoo Publisher Network: YPn was a real surprise this time around (this is why I test a few times a year!).  I have done nothing but badmouth YPn over the last several months, but now I’ll eat my words and take it all back.  This time YPn gave well-targeted ads, fair CTR, and decent ePC.   YPn also has support!  When I had a question regarding the Yahoo Publisher Network TOS, my email was replied-to in less than 24 hours, and when I had a follow-up question a YPN representative called me by telephone to avoid more email confusion.  YPn also has a toll-free phone number for questions/support..  Yahoo Publisher Network gets my “comeback of the year” award!

Kontera: If I was comparing only the last 2-months of the year, Kontera would be the clear winner.  But since i’m comparing the overall performance of the entire year, Kontera comes up a strong #2.  Kontera’s in-text ad-unit performance started out slow this year generating about 50% of what Adsense generated on a daily basis.  But beginning around September/October Kontera was earning 80%-90% of what Adsense was doing, and by December, Kontera was generating approximately 200% of what Adsense was (that is more than double Adsense on most days!).  Kontera’s other strong-point is support.  With a dedicated account manager that you can contact any time by phone or email (and actually get a response) this puts them far ahead most of the other ad-networks.  Some publishers do not like the “in text” type ads, but I don’t have an issue with them - although I only display them to anonymous visitors, not registered members.  Many publishers have also complained that Kontera slows-down their page load times.  If you experience this, be sure that you have your code loading at the very bottom/last of your page right before the /BODY tag.  I have never experienced this issue, and I check/test almost daily.

Adsense:  Still king over the entire year, but if I was comparing only the last few months, it would fall to Kontera as #2.  Excellent ad-inventory and near-perfect targeting no matter what your niche/content makes Adsense hard to beat.  Combine that with (usually) good/high ePC and Adense is still #1.  The Adsense support team does well in answering support-requests (usually in 48 hours or less), but you don’t get a dedicated account manager unless you are in the “UPS club” (a really, really big, Premium publisher).

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Remember: Just because an advertising network performed good/bad for me does not mean you will get the same results.  Whenever anyone asks me, I recommend trying everything and sticking with what works (seems almost obvious, eh?)..  I also recommend trying different networks every several months as I do to make sure that you are using the best-performing network - you never know when you might be pleasantly surprised.

Affiliate Links: This post contains affiliate/referral links.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

Today as I was going through my daily duty of banning scraper IP’s that were systematically crawling pages or downloading my sitemap, I came across one IP that stood out. 

A quick WHOIS revealed this:
OrgName: eHarmony.com
OrgID: EHARM

NetRange: 204.16.72.0 - 204.16.75.255
CIDR: 204.16.72.0/22
OriginAS: AS23112, AS36793
NetName: EHARMONY-COM
NetHandle: NET-204-16-72-0-1
Parent: NET-204-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS1.EHARMONY.COM
NameServer: NS2.EHARMONY.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2005-10-21
Updated: 2008-07-08

Why would eHarmony be downloading sitemaps from other websites?  Last time I looked eHarmoney did not have it’s own web-search, so why?

I don’t know the answer, so if you know please post a comment.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

I’ve been fine-tuning my Mod_Security rules for the last several days and I think I’m just about finished.  I found all the rules at GotRoot and I noticed that the black-list rules were all static - meaning that they were probably out of date before they were even published.

According to the documentation for Mod_security2 there is support for Real Time Blacklists (RBL) but I did not have much luck finding how to configure RBL at GotRoot - and Google did not help much either.  I found a few sparse blog posts here and there - most of these RBL rules either slowed my server to a crawl or just crashed Apache.

Finally after hours of Googling and tinkering, I came up with a Mod_security2 rule that will check against an RBL:

SecRule REMOTE_ADDR "@rbl bl.spamcop.net" "chain,deny, log, id:350000,msg:'RBL: httpbl.spamcop.net',severity:'1'"

SecRule REMOTE_ADDR "!127.0.0.1"

It seems that this rule works pretty well using spamcop.net. You can replace the “httpbl.spamcop.net” with any RBL you choose, for example httpbl.abuse.ch also works, but is a bit slower (unless you’re in Switzerland I suppose) and I’ll be testing zen.spamhaus.org tomorrow. You can also multiple rules/RBLs at the same time, but expect a noticeable decrease in performance if you do.  Also be aware that this rule only works with Mod_security2, not the older (and now obsolete) mod_security 1.9.

I am brand-new to using mod_security so if you have any other tips, advice or wisdom please post them.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

One of the reasons I’ve done so many upgrades/updates recently is to improve the performance of the server/website(s).  Now that I’ve got those out of the way I’ve had some time to do a bit of research to find some easy ways to speed things up.  Remember that I’m UnixTarded, so anything I do must be on the easy side.

Based an my reading, one of the best ways to improve the performance of not only Drupal, but any PHP script (Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc) is to install a PHP accelerator/cache such as APC or eAccelerator.  There are many (manyyy) other things that can be done - but adding a PHP accelerator/cache seemed to be one of those one-time, relatively easy things that can reportedly increase (CMS) website performance by 2x - 10x.

After a little more reading it seems that APC (my first choice to try) is not compatible with the Zend extensions that I’m using, so I decided to install eAccelerator.  Installing eAccelrator via WHM/cPanel is easy, and I had it up and running in minutes, with zero issues.

After clearing my browser cache and reloading the site I noticed an immediate performance improvement, especially when doing things like creating new nodes (pages) or posting comments.  I also noticed an improvement on my Wordpress install while loading pages and posting comments.  Things that usually took 3-5 seconds were now happening in ~1 second and things that were previously taking 1 second were happening “instantly”.  I don’t have any before & after benchmarks, but I do have before & after CPU and memory usage:

• “Top” CPU usage now averages below 1% - down from 3%-5%
• RAM usage now averages 25% - down from ~50%
• Total daily CPU usage (i dont know how it’s calculated) is now ~20% for GrownUpGeek.com - before installing eAccelerator it never dropped below 60%.  It’s also lower for my other site hosted on my server.

If you run a PHP script/CMS on a VPS or dedicated server, adding a PHP op-code cache/accelerator is a great, easy way to noticeably increase the performance of your site.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

After recently reading several horror stories about websites and blogs being hacked simply because they were running outdated versions of their CMS or Wordpress, I decided to upgrade - EVERYTHING. The server, the blog, the website - even my “back burner” website.

Up until the last few weeks I’ve always taken the “if it aint broke, don’t fix it” attitude. Partially because I’m lazy, and partially because I’m paranoid that something will break if I try to upgrade it. But after weighing the options I decided that if something was going to break I would rather break it on my schedule and not some Turkish hacker or script-kiddie’s schedule.

I started a couple of months ago by upgrading the site to the Drupal 5.x. I then upgraded a few things on the server and added some additional security related items (sorry, no details), and I also upgraded my other site to Drupal 5. Finally, today I topp’d it all off by upgrading my Wordpress. Even though virtually all of these mini-projects were learning experiences for me they all went 99% smooth - even the scariest part, re-compiling Apache on my server. Seems that all this time I’ve been living dangerously for no real reason.

So I’ve turned-over a new leaf and will now try to keep everything current - maybe not to the newest version of everything (no Drupal 6 or 7 just yet), but at least to supported versions. I’ve even started using a nifty Drupal module called Update Status which notifies me any time a Drupal module has an update available.

If you’re like me (lazy or afraid to break things) you might want to consider doing a few upgrades - especially if there are known vulnerabilities in old versions that you’re using. Remember - would you rather break something yourself, or have someone break it for you?

What about you? Do you always upgrade to the latest and greatest, to the current “stable”/supported version - or do you just sit back and hope nothing bad happens?

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

Ok - longtime readers will recognize this as last year’s Blogger Smackdown - but because it was so popular and since my readership and traffic has increased since then I decided to share it again this year - you know, in case anyone missed it.

One of the questions posted over and over last year was “who are those people?”, so here are the credits:

• Starring: Jeremy Schoemaker
• Co Starring:  Darrin Rowse
• Best Supporting Actress: Jennifer Slegg
• Introducing: (the original) John Cow
• And the extra on the set that would not go away: John Chow

And now for your viewing and blogging pleasure, the original 2007 Violent Blogger SmackDown:

Try JibJab Sendables® eCards today!

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

$21 is not a lot of money, but I know that it’s more than many webmasters earn in a week - and since this method made me $21 EXTRA and it is so simple I thought I would share.  If someone had the time to do this all day (krap, i wish I had time to do it all day!) it could quickly add-up.

So I’m working yesterday and listening to the radio/CNN/Fox News (flipping around for background noise) and I keep hearing about “the virus that attacked the Pentagon computers” - They talked about it all day - every 15 to 30 minutes.  So remembering an idea from Garry Conn that I had experimented with a few times already, I decided to give it another go.

I did a few Google searches on the virus that had gotten into the Pentagon computers and quickly saw that there was only about 10,000 - 20,000 results - and knowing that our site already has a lot of virus-related content I was confident that I could rank very well for some of those searches if I put my mind to it.

I quickly made a simple post about the virus, gave it a URL and Title Tag with the keywords I was targeting, made it a bit keyword heavy (but didn’t go overboard), and ‘bolded’ the keywords a few times.  After I created the page/post it quickly received a few comments posted by members (mostly off topic which i have since deleted) but because I’m displaying the Drupal “recent comments” and “New Forum Topics”  blocks on virtually every page, I immediately had site-wide links across thousands of pages pointing to the new post.  I also added in an extra Adsense block (& custom channel) on the page, and I created a URL channel so I could track earnings on this new page from my site-wide Adsense block that is displayed at the top of every page.

Within less than an hour traffic started to pour in.  I did a quick check and I was delighted to see that the page ranked #1 for “Agent.btz pentagon” and ranked #3 for just the name of the virus, “agent.btz” - but mine was the only result that displayed anything about the Pentagon.

All evening I sat glued to my stats and I could see every time one of the news channels mentioned the story because a new wave of traffic came in.  This morning the Adsense channels added up to just under $21.  My Kontera stats haven’t come in yet, but I’m sure there will also be an extra few $ there also.

If you already have an established site, and do some basic on-page SEO, this kind of popular content building should be pretty easy to accomplish - every day there are dozens of “big stories”.   The difficult part is finding the day’s “big” story and keeping your pages/content on-topic with the rest of your site - and not be spammy about the whole thing.

$21 a few times per day or per week, or even $10 several times a day/week can add-up pretty quickly..  Certainly worth a few minutes a day.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

In my constant search to try new things and to add to the “social” or community “feel” of the site, I decided to install a photo-gallery for Premium Members.  I looked at several options available and decided to go with “Gallery“.

Gallery seemed to have the most choices and options, it looks great, and has good integration with Drupal.   There is even a plugin to integrate Gallery with Wordpress.

The Drupal module is not one of those “upload and go” type modules - it’s really just a wrapper module for the separate Gallery script which also has to be installed, so configuring it was a real pain - and it took the better part of the weekend and several visits to the Gallery Support Forums to get the module and script installed and configured (partially why this post is so short - because i’m still tired).  The new photo gallery now seems to be working perfect and several members have already added their own image albums.

Just one more simple way to add a bit of value for Premium Members and make the site more interesting and ’social’.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

Since the very first day that we opened the website for “membership”, getting new members to sign up for free accounts has been easy.  If I recall, the first day we added the log-in/sign up links we had 25 registered members within an hour or two.  This trend has continued and to date we’ve had over 45,000 members join.

Keeping those members, or getting them to come back has been a bit more difficult.  Out of those ~45,000 member signups, only about 15,000 have been active in the last 12 months.  Because this return/retention rate was so low I started look more closely at the habbits of new-siggner-uppers to see if there was anything I could to do to increase the retention rate.

Here is the breakdown of what’s been happening with new member sign-ups:

• They create an account then vanish (~5%)
• They create an account, browse a few more pages, then vanish (~85%)
• They create an account, post a comment, then vanish (>1%)
• They create an account, validate it, return, and become active members (~10%)
• They create an account, and purchase a premium membership (~0.1%)

My goal, contrary to what some may think makes more sense, is not to increase premium membership purchases, but is instead to increase return/active members.  I believe that in the long run, an active member making posts and helping other members will help to generate more traffic, word-of-mouth, etc, which translates into higher potential advertising income.  This long-term, content-building is far more valuable to me than a one-time purchase.  Of course if I had my choice I would prefer both - but since that is not realistic I am putting my focus on the long-term growth (active members) instead of a quick buck (paid members).

These are a few things we’ve been doing to encourage returns and member-activity:

• Remind members how to validate their account:  Using the LoginToboggin module we re-direct all new members to a “how to validate your account” page immedialty after sign-up.  This pages explains that they can’t really do much at the site if they dont validate their account via the email message we send, what to do if they ‘accidentally’ provided a fake email address, how to check their junk-mail folder if they do not receive their validation email message, and lastly how they can manually validate their account if all else fails.
• Follow-ups/reminders for those that never return after signing up:  At the time of signup the new member gets an automatic account-validation message emailed to them.  If they do not return and validate their account, we send several more reminders over the next few days to encourage them to return.  The Drupal Account Reminder module can do this automatically but if you use LoginToboggin to allow immediate logins, you will have to re-send the validation reminders manually.  Seeing what accounts have not yet been validated is simple by viewing the Drupal member-list, and re-sending the validation is easily done from the member’s account page (although a bit time consuming).
• Encourage introduction posts from new members:  We’re using the LoginToboggin module to re-direct members to our welcome/introductions forum immediatly after they validate their account.  New members that overcome their shyness and post an introduction are always very warmly welcomed by other members and usually become at least semi-active at the site.  Others may take a bit longer.
• Encourage more posts by ‘giving more’:  We’ve been giving members badges or “bling” based on points for making posts for about two years now, and the members really love it.  We recently increased the amount of “points” that new forum-posts and new blog entries receive and let all members know.  This gets them more badges more sooner.  We use the Drupal User_Badges module for this.

By doing just these few simple things new-user validations (and returns) has increased by nearly 50%, and new-member activity is also noticiably higher.  The big key is just to get them to come back.. Once they come back and validate their account, they are usually here to stay..

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

 

The Customer Is Always Right

   — Marshall Field

When I was about 9-years old I got a paper route.  I had fought long and hard to get that paper route and the night before I started my first day on the job, my father sat me down for a man-to-man talk about the business world of which I was about to step into.  That talk was probably no more than 15 minutes long but I remember that it seemed like forever - and was mostly a lot of blahh blahh blahh blahhh - you know, like the teachers in The Peanuts cartoons.  But the ONE thing that he emphasized, and the ONE thing that I remember from that talk was:  The customer is always right
I didn’t understand the concept at first, and I came up with all sorts of scenarios and arguments with my father in which the customer would clearly be wrong, but no matter what, his response to me was still “the customer is always right”.

I suppose that conversation had quite an impact on me because all throughout my adult life I have always lived by that rule - and now that I run a website I apply that “golden rule” of business when dealing with all of our members and particularly our paying, Premium members/customers.  Virtually every complaint or credit-card chargeback we’ve ever gotten were due to the customer not reading the instructions or somehow doing something wrong - not once can I recall a time that we made a mistake.  BUT, the customer is always right, and I’ve always bent-over-backwards to make it right - and most importantly, make the customer happy even if it meant money out of my pocket (and it has, many times).

The internet however, much like the real world, is full of idiots, thieves, and liars - and we have had our share of them at the website.  So how do I deal with the idiots that don’t read the premium membership agreement (and the part in BIG BOLD LETTERS)?  Or the liars that just flat-out lie and try to get a credit-card charge-back?  As my father taught me, I give them the benefit of the doubt, swallow my pride and give them their refund (or whatever it is they are asking for).  I’ve done this dozens, if not hundreds of times and it has made for many happy customers/members.

Until today..

Today we were visited by a very special kind of Idiot.. The kind of idiot that totally ignores the agreement that he agreed to when purchasing his membership.  The special sort of idiot that blames the website because he ignored the email notice that we sent him to let him know about a limited time offer/content that he was entitled to - then waited too long and missed out.  The certain breed of idiot that posts all over the forum that WE ripped him off because he needed that membership fee money - that he sent us, to pay his rent.. That lower-class of idiot that then proceeds to bash the website, cuss us all out, and call us thieves. (luckily I was online at the time and was able to delete most of his posts fast enough that nobody saw them..i think)

So it was with mixed emotions of both joy and sorrow that I finally decided that some customers just are NOT right, and with 32 years of pent-up customer induced frustration I finally said fuck you, you are WRONG!  Here’s you’re damn rent-money back, and by the way, you are too stupid to come back to our website so you’re banned - don’t come back!

Of course, I didn’t use those exact words because after all, I am still a professional - but I think he’ll get the point if he is actually smart enough to read the notice that I sent along with his refund.   Maybe I went a little overboard.. Maybe I just snapped.. But you know what?  It felt good in a dirty, shameful way..

So let this be another little pearl of wisdom from Randy Brown: “The customer is always right, unless he’s an idiot..” …

Dad.. I hope you don’t read my blog.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

• Do you know what pages are the most popular on your site?
• Do you know what keyword(s) bring you the most search engine traffic?
• Do you know what IP’s hit your site most often?
• Do you know how many visitors are at your site at any given moment?

 I do.. and a whole lot more - and this is probably one of those secrets to my success that so many people ask me about.  Since day-one, I have always obsessed on my traffic.  Where it was from, who it was, how/why they came, how long they stayed, what they did, etc - to this day, I still spend more time looking at and sifting through traffic stats than anything else.

In the early days I looked through my raw-logs and mostly paid attention only to the referral strings.  When raw logs got too tedious to fish through, I moved up to using the information that the Drupal Statistics Module provides.  The Drupal stats module is actually much easier to use than raw logs, and provides real-time info like top referrers, top visitors by IP, hits/referrers by page, and more.  Not long after that, I also started using Google Analytics which really lets me drill-down through my visitor data, but it also has a ~3 hour delay before I can see the information that it collects.

What I Do With All That Data

As with most things, I keep it pretty simple.

The metric I watch the most is what pages are moving up in the SERPS and starting to bring in traffic.  If I see that a particular page is beginning to rank well for a term I may “optimize” that page a bit by adding a bit more text with the high-ranking keywords in it, changing the keywords in the page to bold, or modifying the title to include the keywords, etc.  If the page starts to bring in a lot of traffic I might throw in an additional Adsense unit (with a channel so I can track it) or I might put an afilliate link on the page if appropriate.  I may also add more pages with similar content and keywords.

When I first started the website, and noticed traffic trickling in from a few specific keywords I did these things (above), particularly adding more related content - doing this made my traffic jump from a few hundred visitors per day to over 4,000/day in just a few weeks.  This was a huge accomplishment and the funny thing is that the keywords and content that we started to focus on (and get traffic for) had nothing to do with what we had in mind when we first created the website - but “following the traffic“  has helped to get us where we are today.

Another metric I like to watch is referrals (who’s sending me traffic).  I can easily view referrals in either the Drupal stats or Analytics, but I prefer Drupal’s ‘Top Referrers’  becuase it’s fast, simple, and always current (no delays).   There isn’t a lot I can do with this info, but it lets me know who’s linking to the site which tells me what other people find interesting or helpful.  I also use the Drupal stats to watch what IP’s are hitting the site most often.  This lets me see what members are the most active and also tips me off to scrapers that might need to be blocked from the site (they are the anyonmous IP’s that have 10x more page-views than anyone else, and tend to originate from other countries).

I also dive into Analytics to see things like browser type, country of origin, time of day/day of week trends and about a million other things, but none of these are as helpful to me as just knowing why people are coming to the site - and building on and capitalizing on what is already working.

Do YOU know what your most popular content is and more important - are you capitalizing on it?

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

It’s funny that I received this on Halloween, because when I first read the thing, it scared the shit out of me:

Subject: Inaccurate WHOIS Information [Incident: 69329]

Dear user,

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:54:57 +0300 we received a third party complaint of invalid domain contact information in the Whois database for this domain Whenever we receive a complaint, we are required by ICANN regulations to initiate an investigation as to whether the contact data displaying in the Whois database is valid data or not. If we find that there is invalid or missing data, we contact both the registrant and the account holder and inform them to update the information.

The contact information for the domain which displayed in the Whois database was indeed invalid. On Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:54:57 +0300 we sent a notice to you at the admin/tech contact email address and the account email address informing you of invalid data in breach of the domain registration agreement and advising you to update the information or risk cancellation of the domain. The contact information was not updated within the specified period of time and we canceled the domain. The domain has subsequently been purchased by another party. You will need to contact them for any further inquiries regarding the domain.

PLEASE VERIFY YOUR CONTACT INFORMATION - http://www.enom.com

If you find any invalid contact information for this domain, please respond to this email with evidence of the specific contact information you have found to be invalid on the Whois record for the domain name. Examples would be a bounced email or returned postal mail. If you have a bounced email, please attach or forward with your reply or in the case of returned postal mail, scan the returned letter and attach to your email reply or please send it to:

Attn: Domain Services 14455 N Hayden Rd Suite 219 Scottsdale, AZ 85260

LINK TO CHANGE INFORMATION - http://www.enom.com

Thank you,
Domain Services

They had me for a second but then I noticed that the links for “enom.com” go to a .BIZ domain instead of enom.com.   They also sent the notice to an email address that is in no-way connected with my domain registration.  And oh, i’ve never done business with eNom.com.  But it still had me worried for some strange reason and I nearly fell for it..

The people at the real eNom.com are aware of this phish attempt and have a big warning right on their homepage kudos to them.

Don’t go clicking links before you know where they go because you never know where those links have been.. Almost getting phished is scary.. Actually getting phished, and giving away your domain is even scarier..

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

The owner of Finance-Maker.com contacted me with a few questions:

I get roughly 30 unique’s a day from google. My question is how can I increase my traffic but before you answer this question I would like to say please don’t tell me to submit articles and link build and leave a footer on forums and do press releases and so on.

I can only tell you what’s worked for me, which was a combination of link building, SEO and a bit of creative forum-posting and blog-commenting.  When I first started GrownUpgeek.com I sent out hundreds of link-requests to webmasters of websites with content related to my site.  I sent these requests the ‘old fashioned’ way, with a personalized message including why I thought a link from that site would benefit his visitors.  I sent several of these requests each night for months - and the ‘hit rate’ was very low, but the links I did get were from quality sites with related content (which is important).

I didn’t know much about SEO back then, but I knew enough to know that I should cross-link the site heavily - which I did.  Virtually every page had links with my keyword anchor-text to two or three other pages on the site, and I also added one outgoing link to a very high PR website with content related to that particular page.

I also went on a comment and posting spree at blogs and forums.  I was always careful not to “spam”, but to only post comments on blogs or forums that were related to my site and the posts/comments were always genuinely helpful.  On most of these comments I left “deep links” into specific pages on the site, not just to the home page.  I also watched the “upcoming” stories on Digg.com looking for upcoming stories that were related to the content of my site - I went to every site, and if it was a blog that allowed commenting I left a comment with a link.  After dropping hundreds of comments on these blogs that had been submitted to Digg, ONE of those blogs hit the front page of Digg.com.  That very helpful comment that I left on the blog sent hundreds of visitors per day for months and I noticed very soon after that my Google ranking for searches related to the anchor text I left on that comment skyrocketed - maybe coincidence, but I doubt it.

Early-on I read that leaving signatures with links in forum-posts might be considered ’spammy’ by Google so I never did that with my site - and only recently started doing it with my blog, and only on ONE forum.  I would be careful about over-doing it with forum signatures.  As a matter of fact, for a new site I would recommend not doing it at all.

Article submission: Now with Article submission why would people come to “your” “my” site if your articles are posted on another site and ranked in the SERPS higher than you and then on top of that WHY wouldn’t google just punish “you” “me” for duplicate content.

I have never submitted an article - partially because I’m just not good enough of an article writer, and partially because I don’t see how it can be very helpful as you’ve pointed out.  I suppose that if you can write an awesome enough article to get it posted on a high-traffic, high-PR site and you are able to give just enough information in the article to get people’s interest, then give a link to your site it might work - but I am the king of lazy-webmasters and that just seemed like too much effort with too-little (guaranteed) return on my investment of time.

In general if you keep your content unique and update it often you will give people a reason to visit, and hopefully come back for more.  I also noticed that you had a finance forum, which is a great way to build some user-generated content.  I would suggest building your forum by seeding a few interesting posts, replying to other posts, etc.  You might also consider allowing anyone to post without having to register.  I have found that if someone has to take 30 seconds to register before they can make a post they just wont bother.  The first few months after creating our forums we left them open to anonymous users to create new topics and post comments, then slowly locked it down over time.  Opening the forums this way generated a lot of posts & comments (food for the Google bot), but it was also a lot of work to delete the spam which slowly began to crop up.  Do everything you can to make the forum look as busy as possible.  Increase the window of time that shows how many people are online, show a (big) number of members, be creative - make it look like a place that people want to be.

Good luck and I hope you don’t mind the free links I gave you.. Maybe a few of my readers will check out finance-maker.com and post a few additional comments/suggestions.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

Several weeks ago I received an email (sorry, I forgot your name) asking how we make affiliate sales even though GrownUpGeek.com is primarily a forum/social community, which historically do not do very well with affiliate sales.

The short answer is: Not very well 

But after I got to thinking about it, ~$500-$1,000/month  in affiliate sales isn’t too bad considering what I know about affiliate sales (virtually nothing), and I’m sure many new webmasters would be thrilled to generate that sort of income so I thought I would expand a bit more on how we do it.

Because GrownUpGeek.com started as “a website” we have a lot of older static pages/articles that began to rank very well for certain terms after about a year.  Out of roughly 100 static pages about 3 or 4 were about using security-type software and were perfect candidates for some affiliate links.   Up until just a few months ago this was our only source of affiliate income and most months it usually generated only a few hundred dollars.  More recently one of those pages started to rank very well for “how to make money on the internet” and other similar “make money on the internet” searches.  Last week, when that page climbed to #1 on Google for “how to make money on the internet” I realized I could probably monetize it better than I was.  I re-wrote the page a bit and in addition to my trusty PowWeb affiliate links I added a Web.com hosting affiliate link which has very high sale price to payout ratio.  Since I made those changes less than a week ago that page has already generated over $500.   I’m sure I could spam-it up more with a bunch of banners and more links, but I’m not sure all the extra spamination would generate any additional sales so I’ve choosen to keep the page low-key.

Several months ago we also added a “recommended software” page and linked to it from every page on the site.  This page is just a listing of free software that myself and other members recommend, along with affiliate links for a few products that many visitors come looking for.  This page was generating ~$100-$200/month - but we were able to drive more people to it and increase sales even more by creating word-filters for words related to products on the page.  This way, anytime someone makes a forum post or comment on a post with a key-word in it, that word or phrase would automatically link to our Recommended Software page.  More recently we’ve also created word-filters that create links directly to the affiliate offer.  Over time these links have built up and generate more and more sales.

We also make direct forum posts regarding affiliate products.  I don’t like to do this often because they can look spammy to members - and I usually only do them to experiment.  Recently after getting the idea from Garry Conn I made a quick post about a Internet Home Business product I had seen on TV .. In less than 24 hours I was ranking #1 for that product’s URL, so the people that typed the URL advertised on the TV commercial into Google (and geeze a lot of people do that!) got my forum-post listed at #1.  I found similar product on ClickBank, threw it into the post, and already that post has generated a few sales.

Finding affiliates to promote is easy.  I started with Comission Junction, and also now use Plimus and ClickBank.  Between the three of them I can almost always find a product that members or visitors might be interested in.

To make money with affiliate sales you don’t have to be an SEO god, Adwords guru or a marketing expert (although all that stuff might help but if you were any of those you probably would not be reading my blog).  With very little investment in time or effort we are able to generate a decent amount of sales & income by “working with what we have” and making the best of the traffic that we already get.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

• How many blogs do you read each day?
  
• Of those blogs, how many are jam-packed with Adsense or other advertisements?
  
• How many have more ads than content?
  
• Do you enjoy sifting through the ads to find something worth reading?
  
• Do you ever wonder how careful the blogger is being so he or she does not “offend” any of their advertisers?
• Do you ever wonder if he or she is being paid to post something?
• Do you feel like these bloggers are trying to take advantage of you?
  
• Do you trust these bloggers?

Over a year ago I removed all advertising from my blog making it 99.8% advertisement-free. It would be 100% but I do still post the occasional affiliate-link for products that I use or recommend - but I always make it clear that the post contains affiliate links, and never hide them or try to ‘trick’ anyone into using them.

Why I removed all advertisements from my blog:

I did it for three reasons:

1) YOU
If you read my blog on a regular basis I am guessing you are probably a webmaster/blogger or thinking of starting up a website or a blog of your own. I also assume that you are at least an above-average internet user and are familiar with how PPC and other advertising systems work. Finally, I assume that A) you don’t click on ads very often and B) you probably get annoyed with advertisements. I am going out on a limb and going on the theory that you might enjoy my blog and trust me just a tiny bit more without ads cluttering it up and without me trying to trick you into clicking on them or otherwise trying to sell you something.

2) The ADVERTISERS
Because most people coming to my blog are probably totally ad-blind, any money that an advertiser invested in my blog would probably just go to waste. And since we all know that some (not you, but other) webmasters/bloggers often click on PPC ads just to “support” other bloggers, I feel putting this kind of advertisements on my blog would not be fair to advertisers such as Adsense, Kontera or YPn.

3) ME
Now can can say whatever I want, however I want, whenever I want, without having to worry about breaking any policies or TOS’s - I can curse excessively if I want and I can talk-bad about products I don’t like. Heck, I can even post naked pictures of my next-door neighbor if I wanted to! Can your favorite blogger do THAT without getting a nasty-gram from the Adsense police?

How Can I Afford Not To Have Ads In My Blog?:
Earnings at GrownUpGeek.com are averaging over $7,000/month, so I can afford not to have ads here in the blog - and frankly I’m surprised that other “rich” bloggers don’t do the same. To me, being “owned” by the advertiser makes me trust these bloggers just a little-bit less - not to mention that it’s just damn annoying on some blogs.

Now don’t get me wrong - if some advertiser made me one of those offers that I could not refuse, AND if I thought that you the reader might also benefit from the ad - for example if it was for low-cost web hosting or something, I would probably jump on it - However, I’ve turned-down several direct-ads in the past, and I seriously doubt that any advertiser would be willing to pay me enough to sway my feelings on this subject. So for now and the medium-term future I shall remain 99.8% advertisement-free.

If you think that other bloggers, particularly ones that are already rich from other ventures should follow my lead, post a comment on their blog and ask why they aren’t Ad-Free like Randy Brown’s blog!

This post was orginally made in 2007.  It has been slightly updated and reposted for new readers to enjoy.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

This post is for readers that do not already have a website and are not expert/professional “webmasters”.  If you already have a website or are a seasoned professional, this post will probably not interest you.

Whenever I talk to a non-webmaster about creating a website or a blog - whether it’s for fun or to make money, they almost always respond with something like “..but I’m not a computer geek, I could never make a website..”  I try to explain that really all you need is a basic (normal) understanding of how to use  your computer, and I even remind them that when I created GrownUpGeek.com I knew nothing about Unix servers, PHP, or MySQL, and that knowing HTML is not even necessary.  And yet many still walk away with the idea stuck in their head that creating a website is just “too technical” or “too expensive”.. So this post is for those people (you know who you are) - and hopefully for others that might stumble their way here via Google.

Creating A Blog

If all you ever want to do is make simple posts, and maybe get some comments from readers, a blog is probably all that you need.  You can easily setup a free blog at Blogger.com or WordPress.com and be up and running literally in minutes.  If you plan on monetizing your blog with advertising such as Adsense, then stick with Blogger.com since Wordpress currently does not allow any form of advertising on their hosted blogs.  Remember though, if you want to do anything other than just making simple-posts such as selling items, creating a forum, or anything else beyond making simple posts you might be better-off creating a “real site”.  If you start off with a simple blog, then later decide you have out-grown it, migrating it to a ‘real’ site might be a real hassle.  So take a minute to think long-term (say, at least 1 year) and be sure that a simple blog will be enough.

Creating A Real Site

Creating a “real” website does not have to be difficult, and certainly does not have to be expensive.  I started GrownUpGeek.com on a shared hosting plan at  PowWeb.com for $7/month.  We stayed with PowWeb for nearly a year until traffic really started to take off and we could afford to move up to a faster dedicated server.  You will also need to choose a domain name for your site which you can easily do with PowWeb or just about any other hosting provider.  Between buying your domain name and signing up for your shared-hosting service you should be able to get out the door for $20-$30 and less than $10/month.  Most hosts will usually give you a big discount if you pay for 6-months or 1-year in advance making it even less.  I think I spent around $100 for my domain name and the first year of hosting we I first got started.

Most hosts offer some kind of one-click install or site-builder that will literally install a CMS like Drupal or Joomla with one mouse click.  Once your CMS is installed it is literally a matter of choosing options of how you want your website to look and function - everything is pre-programmed and nearly ready to use.  Setting up a CMS via your host’s one-click install is not as fast or easy as setting up a blog, but it is pretty easy and you can probably have your website up and online within an hour or two.

But Wait, There’s More!

Setting up a website or CMS with a one-click solution is fast and easy, but if something goes wrong (and oh, it will) there are a few other things you’ll need to know, but should not be afraid of:

FTP:

File Transfer Protocol ..  FTP is a method used to transfer files to your webserver.   So if your host tells you to “FTP” something to your server, they’re just saying you need to copy something to your server.  Unix web-heads will tell you that you have to “shell” into your server, then do GET commands and PUT commands - but phooey all that.  I don’t think I’ve ever done “command line” FTP (file copies) - I certainly did not the first several months after I started GrownUpGeek.com.  All you need to do is get a “GUI” or “Windows based” FTP program.  This will let you drag and drop files from your PC right to your webserver the way you’re probably already used to doing (note: if you don’t know how to copy files around on your PC,  you might want to stick with a free ‘blog’).  All you need is your FTP address and login info, which your host will provide you.   There are my Windows FTP programs you can use, most of which are free.  I have used WinSCP and SmartFTP, and on my Mac(s) I use CyberDuck.   These FTP programs will also allow you to easily change the file permissions on your Unix server which you may need to do from time to time.

MySQL:

MySQL is a database program that most ‘dynamic’ websites or CMS systems use.  Instead of storing every page as an .HTML file, your pages (and user’s info, photos, etc) are stored in the database.  If you use one of those one-click website installs, your MySQL database will probably be created for you, and you probably won’t ever have to think about MySQL again.  Some however require you to create the database, the “database user” and the database password.  All of these things are pretty easy if you use phpMyAdmin.

phpMyAdmin:

phpMyAdmin is a web-based program for managing MySQL databases and most hosts make it available in your “control panel”.  You can use phpMyAdmin to create your database (just give it a name) and create your database user/password, which is what your CMS or Dynamic website will use to connect to the database.  Using phpMyAdmin is so easy it’s almost self explanitory, but most web server hosts will have links with detailed instructions if you get stuck.

One little note: When creating your database user-name and password, don’t use your name, or an easy name like “joe”.  This user name and password will be used only by “the website” and it needs to be secure.  Use a long user name like: xQ&49@QGrL  and a password that is even longer and more confusing.. Be sure to store them in a safe place.

Editing Configuration Files:

Sometimes you might need to create or edit a ‘configuration file’.  For example in Drupal, you need to update the ’settings.php’ file with the name of your database and the database user-name & password (all of which you create in phpMyAdmin).  This might sound scary, but it really isnt.  Just use your FTP software to drag ‘n drop the file to your PC, open the file in Notepad or TextEdit for Mac, type in your changes, save the file, and use your FTP software to drag n’ drop it right back to the server - easy!

So there you go.. The (very) basics of easily and cheaply creating your own website for fun or profit.  Now here’s the BEST part.  If you have a question about creating a website before you dive in and create one yourself, post your question here and I will do my best to answer it or point you to someone/someplace smarter than I am to get it answered.

Affiliate links:  This post contains affiliate links for PowWeb.com.  I started Grownupgeek.com with PowWeb and have been very happy with them and I still use them for some of my domain name registrations.  If you hate affiliate links you can go to Powweb directly at www.powweb.com

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

Is your sitemap being used against you by scrapers to steal your content?  Mine was, until I started taking steps to protect it.

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap, simply stated, is a file that lists every page on your website making it easier for search engines to find and index your pages after you make it available to them.  A sitemap can be a simple flat text-file, but these days they are usually dynamically created and updated .XML files.

Contrary to popular misbelief, a sitemap will not increase your search engine rankings and it won’t get your site indexed any faster.   A sitemap will however, help to ensure that all of your pages get indexed by search engines.  This is particularity important for pages that have no links to them.  Ensuring that all of your pages are indexed is an important piece of an overall SEO strategy and although not 100% necessary, most SEO experts recommend submitting a sitemap to at least the Big-3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live).

Drupal has a great module to generate the XML sitemap for your site, and Wordpress has a few plugins also.  If you have a static website or if your CMS or blog does not have a plugin or module for creating a dynamic (always updated) sitemap you can use a site like XML-Sitemaps.com to generate a static sitemap for you.

Once you have your sitemap, submitting it to the Big-3 (or others) is usually pretty easy. Here are the URL’s for submitting your sitemaps to the search engines that you probably care about.  Some might require you to signup for an account, but all are free.  On most of them after you sign up they have diagnostic tools and other free services that can help with sitemap errors as well as reports and information about your index-status, search statistics, and more.  Each has a slightly different process for submitting a sitemap so be sure to read the instructions, but all are pretty easy:

• Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
• Yahoo: http://developer.yahoo.com/search/siteexplorer/V1/updateNotification.html
• Ask.com: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml (change domain & ’sitemap.xml’ to the name and path to your sitemap)
• MSN/Live: http://webmaster.live.com

You’ve submitted your sitemap, so what could go wrong?

One day while going through my logs, I saw an IP not beloging to any search engines had downloaded my sitemap.  I started watching my logs more closely, and I was seeing many non-search engine IP’s downloading my sitemap every day - oddly enough (not!), most of these IP’s were from countries like India, China, and Russia - but they were basically coming from everywhere.  After a little more investigation, I found these same IP’s reading hundreds and thousands of my pages - what I realized is that these “scrapers” had downloaded my sitemap, then used it to crawl through and copy every single page on the site.  These scrapers were not only stealing my content for use on some MFA website, but they were also sucking huge amounts of my (very expensive) bandwidth.  This is probably common sense/common knowledge to experienced webmasters, but for me it was one of those “ahh-haa!” moments when I realized what was happening.

There are a few things I do to try and stop these bandwidth-sucking scraper-leeches.  Back when we were still using Drupal 4.7, we used the GsiteMap module for Drupal.   The gsitemap module used a non-standard sitemap name instead of the standard domainname.com/sitemap.xml  path.  Just the fact that the sitemap name was non-standard apparently fooled many scrapers.  So if possible, changing your sitemap name to something other than sitemap.xml will thwart many scrapers.

Since we’ve upgraded to Drupal 5 and started using the newer XML Sitemap module we can’t (easily) change the name of the sitemap so we immediately saw a huge increase in sitemap downloads, and site-scraping.   To combat them, we keep an eye on the logs -  The XML Sitemap Module will record an entry each time the sitemap is downloaded along with the domain-name & IP that downloaded it.  If it wasn’t an IP that belongs to a search engine, I use the Drupal Troll module to block that IP.  For Wordpress you could use the Ban plugin, and for any site you could also block the IP in .HTACCESS manually or via cPanel/WHM if you have it.

With Drupal you can also easily see scraping behavior by viewing “Top Visitors” in admin/logs.  You can spot the scraper because it’s the IP that has 10,000 page views (or some other very large number) in the last xx hours.  I verify that these IP’s with unusually high page-reads do not belong to a legitimate search engine, then I ban that IP.  I don’t really worry about banning a real visitor because these scrapers usually have so many more page reads than a regular visitor, they really give themselves away and stand out like a sore-thumb.

I know that doing these things is a bit like spitting into the wind, or like trying to clean a beach one-grain of sand at a time, but it does help - and it makes me feel like I have a bit more control over MY content, MY site, and MY bandwidth.  YMMV ..

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

How To Find Keyword Phrases That Make Money Online?

Written by Garry Conn on Oct. 14th, 2008

Hello everyone. My name is Garry Conn. I am full time pro blogger who makes a living by writing and publishing content on the Internet that is monetized using Google AdSense. In order for me to be successful in this business, I have to be able to write about many different topics. Along with that, I also need to know what topics to write about that enable me to get the biggest bang from my monetized content.

In this article, I want to briefly explain a few of the tools that I use towards researching keywords phrases that make money online, but more so give you some advice on how to find these keywords. On my personal blog, I talk about this a lot. Many of my readers know about the tools that I use, most all of them are totally free by the way, and they use them too. The problem that most people have is they drawn a blank when it comes towards finding keywords to write about. It is one thing to research the keywords, but it’s a complete different ball game when you are sitting at your computer and not sure what to research.

Before we go into depth about how to find keyword phrases to write about, I want to share with you two tools that I use that enable me to do very effective keyword research. These two tools are free, Randy asked me to do a guest post here on his blog, so I am not going to pitch any products or anything like that. While I do indeed use software applications, they really aren’t needed until you have gained quite a bit of experience in keyword research.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

The first tool that I use is the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This tool is very easy to use and extremely simple to understand. Using the Google AdWords Keyword tool allow you to discover some very important things about the keywords you are researching. For one, you can determine an average monthly search count. Secondly, you can determine how much advertisers are willing to pay per click. Lastly, you can determine how much competition there is among publishers in the search results. Simply login to your Google AdWords Account and click TOOLS to access the keyword tool. Also, you can use an external version of this tool as well.

Aaron Wall’s Keyword Tool

The second tool which is very similar to Google AdWords Keyword Tool is Aaron Wall’s Keyword Tool. Aaron’s tool is totally free and taps into the WordTracker.com database. People can subscribe to WordTracker.com for a monthly fee; however, as I already mentioned, this isn’t needed until you have gained more experience with these wonderful free tools. With Aaron Wall’s Keyword Tool, you can expect to see many of the same attributes found in the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. This tool just gives you a second look at similar keywords. Between the two programs, you’ll notice that the results can vary from time to time. My advice to you would be not to worry yourself trying to figure out which program is more accurate. Both tools provide a very balanced report of data. Give Aaron Wall’s Keyword Tool a try for yourself and see which one you like best.

How To Find Keyword Phrases That Make Money Online

Once again, it is one thing to have the right tools at your disposal; however, it is another thing to have the tools in hand but have nothing to build. Finding keywords seems to be the challenge that many of my readers have. My advice with combating this issue is in looking for the obvious. For me, everything I see around me can become a blog post. At this moment as I am writing this article I see quite a few things that can easily be covered in a blog post that in return will make me a lot of money over time. For instance, in my office I have a brand new treadmill that I purchased a few weeks ago at Walmart.

Login to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool and look up the word treadmill. The results will shock you. You will be presented with an entire list of keyword phrases all related to the word treadmill. Secondly, you can instantly see how much money AdWords advertisers are paying for these keywords. Thirdly, you will see how much traffic and competition there is in the search results.

Finding keywords tends to stump many people in this business and my proven and most valuable advice to you is to look for the obvious items but seek out the commonly overlooked ones. There is a balance between the two. Rather than write a blog post about Dell, perhaps the better solution would be to write about the lesser competitive items such as the Dell Inspiron Model 1520. In my opinion, it is by far much better to rank on the top ten for a search term that receives only 1000 searches per month than to rank on page two of a search term that receives 10,000 searches per month.

Also too, having the ability to study a search result page in Google makes a huge difference between keyword targeting success and failure. This is a skill that will come to you over the course of time and with practice. I do have quite a bit of advice that I can share with you specifically on the analysis of a search result page on Google. Randy invited me over here to write this article for you folks, and perhaps if you leave some positive feedback, I very well may come back and publish another article that will show you some really killer tips on how to study the search result pages in Google towards making a determination on whether or not you can score the top ten position for the keywords your want to target.

With all that said, I want to express how fortunate you are to have found Randy’s blog. I know quite a few people in this business and Randy indeed is someone you can count on, and most importantly trust.

Best Regards,

Garry Conn

www.GarryConn.com

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

If you’ve been following my Twitter Tweets for the last few days you would know that for me and many other publishers Adsense earnings have been in the toilet for the last week or so.  It’s normal for Adsense earnings to fluctuate, but recently earnings and ePC have been at all-times lows, probably due to uncertainty in the economy these days.

How You Can Protect Yourself Against Adsense Fluctuations

I’ve seen it posted in the forums over and over -

“…You have no control over Adsense earnings…”

“…there is nothing you can do about low Adsense earnings…”

“…give up, get a real website…”

Although all these statements are technically true, there is one thing you can do to not only protect yourself from Adsense lows, but to also increase your overall earnings:  DIVERSIFY

At GrownUpGeek.com, we diversify our earnings by creating multiple income streams:

• Adsense
• Premium Membership sales
• Affiliate sales
• In-Text advertising

By spreading our earnings over these multiple sources of income we not only increase our overall earnings, but we also protect ourselves from the pain and discomfort of a low-income day if any one income source goes into the toilet *cough*adsense*cough*.

So what is right for your website?

At most websites selling premium memberships or premium content does not make sense, and affiliate sales can be difficult and take a lot of work & effort to be profitable (it hardly even works for us).  So for most websites (and lazy publishers like me) this leaves In-Text advertising, which is also the easiest to setup and start using.  In-text advertising such as Chitika Linx and Kontera are contextually based advertising systems that create those little underlines on certain words and phrases on your website.  When a visitor clicks on one of those links, you get paid.  And because In-Text advertising does not look like, and cannot be confused with Adsense ads, you can use them on the same site/pages as Adsense.  Another advantage of in-text advertising is that it does not take up any real-estate on your site, potentially leaving more room for other advertising systems or more content.

The two biggest players in the in-text or in-line advertising are Chitika and Kontera.   Both are free to use and both are very easy (as easy or easier than Adsense) to setup and use.

Chitika LINX tend to be more technology related, and may yield you a higher CTR because the links look more like ‘normal’ links.  Many publishers claim a very high ePC with Chitika.

Kontera has a larger advertiser inventory (based on what I’ve seen), but they have a slightly restrictive new-publisher approval process.

Kontera is the primary inText advertiser that we use at GrownUpGeek.com because it performed better for us in testing than Chitika did, however on my other lower-traffic site, Chitika does far better than Kontera because of the type of content of that site.  The only way to know how well these systems will work at your site is to try them.  Even though you can use both along side Adsense, you cannot use them together so I recommend at least 1-week (or longer) of testing both systems - you may find as I did, that one performs great on one site and the other sucks - but if you don’t try them both you will never know.

Don’t throw away potential earnings - Try Chitika LINX, Kontera, or other types of advertising at your site(s) and see what works for you.  For us, adding InText advertising increase our overall earnings by an average of 75% -  that means that even on a day that Adsense earnings are at an all-time low, overall earnings don’t suffer as much.  Diversifying your income with other advertising systems also protects you should something happen to your Adsense account.

Affiliate links: You can try Kontera at www.Kontera.com and Chitika LINX at chitika.com. Other links in the post may also contain affiliate links. If you hate aff-links, you can go direct to www.kontera.com or www.chitika.com.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown

We just finished applying the Drupal 5.11 update.  No new features in this update, it’s just a maintenance release that fixes some bugs and security holes.

In preparing to apply the update I realized a big mistake I made when we made the upgrade from 4.7 to 5.1 last month that I had to correct before applying the update.  In Drupal 4.7 all the modules, core and contributed are all located in the /modules  directory.  In Drupal 5.x only the core modules are stored in /modules, but the contributed modules are (or SHOULD BE) stored in /sites/all/modules.  This makes it easy to apply updates because you can simply delete/overwrite all your core modules in /modules, and not worry about the contrib modules stored over at /sites/all/modules.  Well it seems that in my excitement after the 4.7 to 5.x upgrade last month, I installed the first few contrib modules in the /modules directory (wrong place)..  So before I could do the 5.11 update I had to uninstall, move, and re-install those contrib modules into the right location.

After I moved the contributed modules into the right directories, the 5.11 update was fast and easy..  Backup’d up settings.php - actually, I did a full-file backup to my local PC earlier. Did a backup of the database, then just laid-down the new 5.11 files on top of the old 5.10 files.  I even saved myself 45 seconds or so by removing the robots.txt, .htaccess, and settings.php files from the (new) 5.11 source so I would not have to restore those files after doing the update.

Job well-done for me.. Now it’s back to watching TV.

© 2006 - 2008 Randy Brown