Monthly Archives: November 2004

Day 3 – Up & At’em

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Today’s chore (besides my ‘real’ work) – get advertising going.

You’ll notice I have a banner along the top, and Google AdSense along the side. The top banners are mine and my customers (yes, I sell space – email me for details). It’s managed from one of my other sites using phpAdsNew – an excellent free/Open Source Ad Management system that I’ve been using for several months (and yes, I also offer an installation service if you’d rather not tinker with php).

Now that something is ‘up’, my next goal is to increase the AdSense displayed – current rules make it possible to place up to three sections of advertising on a site, and I plan to make it count…

If you have traffic, AdSense is a nice way to make money – it also has the benefit of bringing your site to Google’s attention. Since Google needs to scan your site to figure out what ads will works best, you’ve gotten their attention – and I believe you’re that much closer to getting listed in their search engine.

There is a downside of course – if your site sells something, AdSense comes across as a bit needy (ie ‘please help me make money – nothing else is working!’). I wouldn’t combine it with a site that is supposed to turn a profit. In this blog’s case, I’m experimenting, and so quite happy to have Google grab eyeballs.

So if you’ve got a site (or two), I do recommend joining AdSense. It’s free, and it might make you money. At the very least, it improves your chances of being recognized as a serious player on the Internet – in my opinion, at least.

The Saga Continues

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I know, I know – the phrase has been done to death (likewise the phrase ‘done to death’), but it does make for shorthand – less explaining to get people up to speed (assuming of course no more explanations like this).

Day two of my blog: WordPress is running nicely; I’ve even been ‘noticed’ – by spammers. With 30 advertising ‘comments’ overnight, I knew I’d arrived in blogstown for real.

Handling them is easy – check both boxes under the setting ‘Options/Discussion/Before a comment appears’ – you can filter before posting, so they don’t get onto the page first.

Of course, there’s still the problem of handling 30+ spams a day, and I’m investigating that – stay tuned.

One more thing – if you use WordPress, be careful where you delete – what I thought was the first spam entry was actually the main article – so I had to retype the whole thing from memory (the extra writing and editing only enhanced it, but I may be biased). A ‘are you sure you want to ruin your day by deleting this’ button would’ve been nice.

Numero Uno

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Welcome to entry #001 of this blog. My purpose? Right now, to create the kind of small business content I wish I’d had access to a few years back.

And of course, with the incredible numbers of readers soon to be hanging on my every word, comes riches and fame few can even imagine…

Or Not.

First order of business – for setup I used my own cheap/reliable web site (SuperbHosting) and WordPress. Why do it myself? Partly because I wanted greater control, and partly to save money. WordPress is high quality, yet low cost (free) and Open Source, which meant I could tinker at a low level, since I had the code (I want to include advertising later on, for instance).

I cheated on setup – I actually had this running on my other site HomeBusinessInsight.com for about a month, trying different things, so moving it here took less than an hour. Aside from copying, setting up a MySQL database (easy), and tinkering with the setting and look after up and running, there’s not much else to do.

Now of course, the real fun begins – running and adding daily content…