Flame Scorpion

Very often I find this question on forums: “Which is the best content management system ?”. Despite the WordPress popularity, first answers seem to feature Joomla as the best content management system. The posters usually have good arguments, despite they probably never used wordpress for comparision. If they use WordPress once, they will use it again and again for sure.

However, when wordpress responses are coming, the posters simply resume to say “definitely wordpress”, or “wordpress is the best”. They don’t have arguments ? or they don’t have to convince anyone. Maybe the reason why Joomla users are giving so much arguments is that they want to convince themselves that they made the right choice.  [Read the rest of this entry…]

I first published a website online in 2006. Since then, I am looking for ways to promote my website and ways to monetize it. During this journey I have build several established websites and I have tested many methods to generate revenue from the traffic I was receiving.

At the begining, contextual ads seemed to be the most secure way to generate some revenue. I tought that even if I have 20 visitors a day I can make some cents from Google Adsense. It wasn’t a good thinking because the ads were not adding any value to my website and it looked cheap and unprofessional. When the traffic grows, the few cents that I made turned into few dollars a day, but it was still much lower than what I expected.

Then, I moved into affiliate marketing and I started to endorse products. It was a good way to generate revenue because I only recommend products that I like. Every sale can generate a $50 comission on average. Sending some traffic to the offers enabled me to make more money than I ever made with display advertising. However, only a small part of my websites was generating that revenue, because the links appeared only on the posts where the products were endorsed.

To make all my content to pay, I had to come with a better idea. This is how Wp Auto Affiliate Links was created. It is a good way to display affiliate links in the whole content. This way I was generating much more money than I did before. I hope that the plugin will also help others to make more money from affiliate marketing.

When it comes to web hosting most webmasters are looking at the space that is give, the monthly bandwidth, number of mail accounts, etc. This is why hosting companies adapted and they are given unlimited everything for shared accounts too.

Well, this doesn’t mean that your site can consume all server resources. When you reach a certain level they will tell you to upgrade or leave. All hosting companies give you “same” resources for as low as they can, but there is a very important aspect that is overlooked by most webmasters: the location.

Why is location so important?

You can have a server with a great processor, that has an uptime of 100%, but it is located in United States, while the most of your visitors are located in UK or Germany. Even if it loaded in 0.1 seconds by a computer in US, this does not mean anything to you if your users are outside US. This means that your visitors from Europe can wait several seconds until the website is loaded, because it is very far. Even if you have a great connection speed, the long distance will increase the response time considerably and your website will be loaded slowly and some visitors can consider that it will probably never load.

Web Hosting Location effect in traffic.

It is well known that most google users check several websites from a search result. They go to the first one, se what’s there, then hit back, open another, etc. If it will take more than few seconds for the webpage to load, they press back and they visit another website. This behavior will also impact the google rankinks, since it is well known that if people often press back after they visited your site from search engine it is a sign that your content is irelevant to that search term, determining google to lower the ranking.

Web Hosting Location effect on Google rankings.

First of all, last year google improved the algorithm to math the site loading speed. If your page loads very slow then your google ranking will be negatively impacted. The website is actually loading fast, but only for us traffic, and you target is google.co.uk instead of google.us and google.com. So if the page is loading slow then you will get lower rankings.

Web hosting Location effect on sales.

If a page loads slow, then people will have a hard time getting trough the whole sales funnel, finally affecting your conversion rate. Also, if a website is loading slowly, then it is a sign of un-professionalism and they will think twice before buying the product. On the other hand, if the website loads lightning fast they will see this as a sign of high quality services. It is a known fact that people assume that if you are doing well in an area, then there is a great change that you are doing well in all areas.

I have few websites that receive a lot of traffic and consume a lot of resources. Shared hosting is not a solution for me, and should not be a solution for you if you want to ever succed online. Shared web hostings are slow. The speed is affecting your search engine rankinks, your visitor happiness and ultimately, your outcome.

Most new webmasters does not have the budget to go directly to a dedicated or cloud server, which are very expensive. However, there is a smart solution for everyone: VPS. You get your dedicated resources, but you buy only the resources that you need.  [Read the rest of this entry…]

Selling your WordPress skills online is a great way to make good money, money that you can save in a bank that offers high interest rates to grow your earnings and accrue interest. However, in order to market your WordPress skills on the web, there are certain things that you need to do. In the following article we look into three such things that you can do to making the most out of your skills in terms of money…

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Since 2012 has passed. it is good to make a nice recap of what was improved, added and removed from WordPress last year. Judging from outside the development area, there was not too much visible changes that affected the core WordPress users. However, during the last year, a lot of changes were made to the backend. Now, it is easier to make better wordpress themes and plugins. I will also make a detailed report of what was changed in the last year. [Read the rest of this entry…]

WordPress have a great API for plugin developers. You can practically do anything with wordpress data, but first, you need to understand how the filters and actions work. You also need to know some minimal things that you have to add in any plugin to make it work. I will first start describing how the actions and filter works and how you can make wordpress to execute your code. Then I will describe the minimal code needed to add a menu item in the administration panel for your plugin. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Past few weeks I have been testing Kontera and InfoLinks to see who provide better ads and who generate more money. As you may know, sites or blogs with a lot of content are having a hard time earning revenue by PPC display advertising, like Google Adsense.

I ran the tests on a blog with a lot of content, with about 300 unique visitors a month, in mobile/gadget industry. There is not much traffic, but it is enough to make an idea about the revenue generated by the networks. Before I tell you the results, I will tell you something about Google Adsense results on the same blog.  [Read the rest of this entry…]

After a long period of deveoping and testing, Wp Auto Affiliate Links PRO is finally here. The plugin will help any blog or website owner to generate more income trough affiliate links. It will automatically get affiliate links from Amazon, Clickbank, Shareasale or any other custom affiliate network and intelligently add them trough the content.

Main features of Wp Auto Affiliate Links PRO:

• Automatically get links from Amazon, Clickbank and Shareasale
• Upload links trough a csv file or one by one
• Links are automatically added trough all content
• Control over the linking frequency
• Dofollow or nofollow links
• Open links in new or same window

You can read more about the plugin on the official page.

Design is very important to any website. If your website design is not that good you can always re-do it, but it will cost you a lot of time and money. Probably you have seend websites with bad design but which are still looking good. This is because the images on the website that compensate.

Most websites these days are showing a gallery of images at the middle of the homepage. In a slider you can add pictures representin your product, or you can show featured posts on your website. If you run wordpress you can install a slider plugin, there are a lot but most of them have bad design or let you only to upload certain size of photos. Recently, I stumbled upon SlideDeck 2, which in my opinion is the best slider plugin for wordpress.  [Read the rest of this entry…]