Tag Archives: plugin

digg IT

Posted on by
Comment

A new plugin being tested here.

Although I have my doubts about digg, I’ve always been curious about whether my posts have ever been “dugg.” I’ve often seen buttons with digg counts on other WordPress Web sites. I figured it was time to try installing one on this site.

digg what?

digg, in case you don’t know, is a social bookmarking site that’s pretty popular among blog enthusiasts. You sign up for a free membership, then “digg” blog posts you like. If the post has never been dugg, you can be the first to digg it. Otherwise, you can just add your digg to the count of existing diggs. You can also add comments about the post.

Posts with lots of diggs — generally more than 100 — get lots of visits, mostly from people who monitor popular posts on the digg site. So, for a blogger, being dugg could be a good thing.

I say could be because if you’ve got a lot of diggs, your post could become so popular that hits exceed your bandwidth. That happened with podiobooks.com, which I learned about today. A note on its site says:

We’ve been Dugg and Lifehacked in the last 24 hours, and the site is experiencing a little oddness from time to time. We’re working on getting things stabilized.

That’s when you can get the site. You’re just as likely to get a Server Error 500 when you attempt to access. Oops. Hopefully, things will calm down for them enough for their server to handle incoming requests.

The Plugin

Getting the digg button on a post is a matter of installing a plugin and modifying the WordPress theme’s template code to add a new function.

I needed to find the plugin, so I used by friend Google to search for digg wordpress plugin.

I first found Digg This, which was at the top of the list. I wasted no time downloading and installing it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work. And when I scrolled through the list of comments, I discovered that I wasn’t the only one.

I decided to keep looking.

I then found digg IT (which may have been called Digg This in a previous incarnation). I downloaded and installed it. It worked immediately, perfectly. If I’m still using it as you read this, you’ll see it at the top right of each post.

(I say if because I might not keep it. Although it works like a charm, seeing so many posts with 0 diggs is kind of depressing. I have a post that’s been read over 3,000 times and still has 0 diggs. [sigh] You can help cheer me up by occasionally digging my posts.)

The installation required a single line of code to be inserted in The Loop, right before the < ?php the_content(); ?> tag:

< ?php if(function_exists(digg_this)) { digg_this('', '', '', ''); } ?>

It’s a nice piece of code because it checks to make sure the function exists before actually calling it. So if the plugin fails or is not compatible with a future version of WordPress, your site visitors won’t see an error message. I like neat code like that.

Unfortunately, the documentation does have a tiny error. It tells you to insert the code in your index.php file. If the < ?php the_content(); ?> tag for your theme isn’t in that file, those instructions could confuse you. In my case, that tag is in my post.php file. So you do need to have a little knowledge about your theme’s template files to install it properly. Just open them all up until you find the < ?php the_content(); ?> tag and you can’t go wrong.

Anyway, if you’re posts are dugg or you want them dugg, you might want to give this plugin a try. You can’t beat it for ease of installation and use.

March 26 Update: I removed the digg count from my pages. The zeros were really getting to me. If the site ever starts getting diggs on a more regular basis, I’ll put it back. For now, the code is just commented out.

Link Bait?

Posted on by
1

Unintentional, perhaps, but very effective.

I’m getting ready to upgrade my blog-based Web sites to WordPress 2.1 from WordPress 2.0.4. It’s a big task for some sites and the biggest hurdle I have to jump is the plugin compatibility hurdle. This site and wickenburg-az.com rely on plugins for many of their features. If a plugin were to unexpectedly stop working, the sites could be brought down by PHP errors. This is not something I want to deal with, so I started thinking about the plugin situation. And, as I often do when I’m thinking of something that might benefit other people, I wrote an article about it and published it here.

Does that make the article “linkbait”? I suppose it does. But I’m willing to accept that label if it’s used in the context of “simply compelling content.”

It took me about an hour to write the article. (Those of you who know me and my work know that I can produce original material at often alarming rates.) It was all fresh, out-of-my-brain stuff, inspired by the WordPress upgrade instructions and compatible plugins list, which I linked to in the article. It was better organized that a lot of the posts here — especially the long, rambling ones about flying and the things that go on in my life — and it included headings and lists to make it easier to read.

It hit the site at 7:24 AM MST. Within two hours, it had been linked to by Weblog Tools Collection (thanks!) and the article with the link just happened to appear in the Dashboard for all WordPress users. That’s when all hell broke loose. Visitors swarmed over. The article collected 10 comments and pingbacks in a matter of hours. The pingbacks, in several languages, brought even more visitors. At one point, I had 29 visitors (including bots) online and 19 of them were reading that one article.

Now that might not seem like a big deal to many of you, but it’s a huge deal here. My daily visitor count, which averages about 250 per day, jumped to almost 900. And my page hit count soared to over 1250 from a daily average of 400-500. Whew! And the trend is carrying over to today; at 8 AM, I’ve already reached my daily average counts.

What’s So Special about This Article?

So the question remains: why has this one article been such a boon to the site?

In looking at the article and how it differs from other site content, I’ve come up with the following:

  • The article was 95% original. I based it on my own experience and knowledge rather than material I’d found elsewhere. This was new content — not something I read and regurgitated here. And given the 1/9/90 rule discussed earlier today, only 1% of what’s in blogs is original content.
  • The article was timely. WordPress 2.1 had been out for less than 3 days when I wrote it. (Oddly enough, two commenters said they wished I’d written the article sooner. Sadly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to work with software under development these days, especially when that software is based on a computer language I hardly know.)
  • The article provided valuable information. Anyone who jumps blindly into a major WordPress upgrade deserves all the grief he gets. To me (and apparently others), the plugin issue is serious business. My article explained why it was serious and listed things that should be done for a less troublesome upgrade.
  • The article was well organized and well written. Sure, it’s easy for me to say — I wrote it. But I can look at all of my work objectively and I can say without a doubt that among my blog posts, this article was one of my better efforts. In fact, if this post wasn’t so time-sensitive, I would have submitted it to Informit.com, which pays me to write for them. (If I had, however, it would not have reached the Web for at least a month. So yes, I gave up a few hundred bucks, but WordPress users need this information now and I didn’t want them to wait.)
  • The article was well presented. I’m talking here about readability, which I discussed in another blog post earlier this month. This post included headings and lists, which help break text into bite sized pieces and make it more scannable.

It’s gratifying that the article was found by a “WordPress authority” who found it worthy to link to. I wouldn’t be writing this post if I didn’t get the support of the folks who linked to it. They brought visitors to the article, pumping up my daily numbers accordingly.

Is it Linkbait?

Does that make the article “linkbait“? I suppose it does. But I’m willing to accept that label if it’s used in the context of “simply compelling content.” After all, I didn’t write it with the goal of getting lots of links and readers. I wrote it because it was on my mind, is a topic my readers claim they’re interested in (33% of those who took the poll said they’re interested in blogging), and is related to a topic I co-authored a book about. The article was forming in my brain — why would I keep it there if others might find it useful?

That said, I’m not one bit sorry that it has attracted all the attention it has. It’s given me a lot to think about — and more to write about here.

Earning Money with Your Blog

Posted on by
1

Without trashing it up.

Before I dive into this topic, I want to make it clear that I really hate the way some Web sites and blogs are so covered with advertising that it appears that the only reason the site/blog exists is to get visitors to click advertising links and earn money for the site/blog owner. You know what sites I’m talking about. It’s pretty obvious when advertisements take up more space in your browser window than the actual content you came to read.

(I’m actually involved with one of these sites. It’s a long story that’s still evolving. I’ll tell you more about it in a future article here. But my failure to provide the URL in this note should give you the idea that I’m not very proud of it.)

All that said, if you publish a Web site or blog and you’re not doing anything to monetize it, you’re leaving money on the table. And that point really hit home when I read that one of the bloggers I follow makes over $15,000 a month from Adsense revenue alone. Sheesh.

It seems that I need to walk a fine line between keeping my site free of advertisements (100% content per page, no revenue) and trashing it up with all the affiliate program and other advertisements I can get my hands on (25-50% content per page, some revenue).

After all, this site’s goal is not to make money. Sure, one goal is to promote my books and other work and support readers so they buy more books. And to attract new readers who buy books. There’s money there. But my other goals are to sound out about the things on my mind and take notes I can consult in the future about the things I do and see.

But can you imagine how much time I could spend doing, seeing, and blogging if my site brought in $15K/month?

(To be fair, you must consider the costs associated with maintaining such a site. If only 1% of a site’s visitors react to an advertisement by clicking on it — and that’s probably a high estimate — imagine how many visitors you need to crank up $15K of Adsense earnings. We’re talking thousands of page hits an hour. Those visitors eat up bandwidth at an alarming rate. Bandwidth costs money. So a bunch of that revenue is probably eaten up by hosting costs.)

One of the things that drives me is my own feeling towards advertising-heavy sites. I find them distasteful and I avoid them. That makes me think that if I filled my site with ads, people might use that as an excuse to stay away. Less visitors should mean less revenue, right?


Well, last week I started integrating Adsense ads into my sites. I’m trying to do it tastefully, with ads in various positions, depending on the site and the type of page. You may have noticed them. For the most part, they’re near the bottom of pages — which is not the recommended location to get clicks. wickenburg-az.com has a link unit across the top of the page, right beneath the header image. It’s color coordinated, so it fits in. There are text links at the bottom of single pages (that’s a page with a single article and all of its comments) on this site, and other text links in the sidebar for the Home and Category pages. wickenburg-az.com has a few image ads, which really concern me — some of them can be really tacky, with flashing graphics and obnoxious images. (I’m personally offended by some of the graphics in dating ads, like the ones you might see on Slate.com. They’re using women to sell sex.)

I also set up Adsense channels, which is another topic I need to write about here. They help me see where the revenue is coming from when I look at Adsense reports. Sure enough, my revenue stream took a big jump when I added the ads.

LinkShare Referral PrgToday, I set up LinkShare, an affiliate program that enables me to display all kinds of ads. Unlike Adsense, however, people have to buy something after clicking the link to earn me money. The percentages are higher, but what are the chances of someone actually clicking and buying?

With LinkShare, you choose the companies you want to represent and apply. I chose a bunch that I thought would interest my blog’s visitors. A bunch automatically accepted me. One declined me, but when I questioned them, they said it was an error and they approved me. Another declined me because I have no dedicated shopping areas on my site. In other words, they want sites with lots of ads. I’m waiting for a bunch of others.

Then I set up the WordPress Ad Rotator plugin to display a single 125×125 pixel “button” near the bottom of the Sidebar on all pages of this site. I had to manually copy and paste the code for every single ad I wanted to use. It took a long time and the task was boring and tedious. But it does display the clickable ads.

I could get fancy and set up the rotations based on categories, but I’m keeping it simple right now. I just want to see if this actually does earn revenue.

So that’s where I stand right now: ads from Adsense and LinkShare.

I’ll report on my progress when I start getting some reports from LinkShare. I’ll also put together that Adsense Channels article one of these days. I think it’s a great tool for seeing which pages and types of ads work best.