Monthly Archives: March 2009

I’m Not Irish

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No Irish in me, nor do I want any, but I do enjoy a brewsky and time spent with friends.  Unfortunately, unless I feel like binge drinking and staying out all night, it’s probably not going to happen.  So this year, it will be a quiet night in with my daughter, while my wife goes in to work the crappy retail hours.

As for the drinking, I have a brand new digital breathylzer sent to me for review on my automotive blog.  Once little Emma is in bed I may have to crack open a few and see how I register.  Should be interesting and the little gadget is so neat, its small enough to keep on a key chain.  Maybe these should have been given out to patrons on St Patricks day, so the idiots know when it’s safe to drive home.

ManageMyBox Comes Through Again

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Something weird happened to my dedicated server yesterday which resulted in all my mod rewrites being null and void.  This transformed my dynamic affiliate websites into steaming pieces of one landing page crap.  Any other link on the site resulted in a 404 error, which no telling what the Google bot thought.  I’m sure I’ll start feeling that whiplash here in the next few weeks.  But there is some good news to be found in this bad experience and it’s thanks to ManageMyBox.

Within 30 minutes of me contacting ManageMyBox, also known as ManageMyServices, my server was looked at and fixed.  I recieved the obligatory reply that they were looking into it within 10 mins of contact and then it was fixed within the next 20.  Furthermore they ran some tests and waited another 20 mins before notifying me that all was well again, even though I had been checking the whole time as well.  A true testament to the service they offer.

If you were considering going with a new Dedicated Host, or perhaps you think you are ready to have your first dedicated server, I would recommend ManageMyBox unconditionally.  Recently they also lowered the price on their Basic box price, which I use, to only $75 per month.  Yes, it’s worth every penny and comes with plenty of extras to keep dozens of affiliate websites running.

I’m open to questions about their service if you are considering them for a host.  But just wanted to say, thanks again MMB.

Affiliate Espionage Update

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One of the most useful plugins for FireFox that I’ve ever purchased, Affiliate Espionage, has been updated today.  There were some much needed bug fixes and an overall improvement to the plugin that allows you to spy on other peoples advertising campaigns.  Furthermore the update includes an increased ability to scan and tell if the landing page for an ad is indeed an affiliate website.

A list of Affiliate Espionage Updates:

1) Greatly improved the Landing Page Scanner to detect more
affiliate sites (it’s not 100% accurate) but it is A LOT
better than before.

2) Included over 50 affiliate networks under the “Ad
Network” tab in the control panel.  Simply pick and choose
the networks you want to scan for.

3) Fixed bug with “Successful Advertiser” feature that
displayed inaccurate calculations

4) Added improved support for international characters in
keyword lists

5) Fixed issue with Proxy Server option that conflicted
with Firefox’s proxy server settings

6) Fixed minor bug with license key registration not
verifying properly in some circumstances

7) Fixed bug with data not being overlaid on MSN and Yahoo
ads at the bottom of search results

WordPress 2.7.1 Dashboard Slow Load Fix

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As of late my blog’s dashboard has been bogging down and taking forever to load.  At first I tried removing some of my plugins, specifically my Word Press Stats plugin, but it didn’t work.  Then I started removing all of my front page load screen options, still slow as ever.

It wasn’t until I glanced at my number of comments under overview that I realized what the problem was.  According to WordPress I had over 5,000 comments awaiting moderation.  Of course most of these were spam, but I had not set my Akismet to automatically delete after 30 days.  So guess what, I had a huge ass back log of comments that were slowing my dashboard load down tremendously and some times even timing out.

A quick delete of all Spam comments fixed my slow loading WordPress 2.7.1 and all is back to normal.

Don’t Be Afraid

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I decided to write a quick post on not being afraid to take chances, make contacts, or try something new.  Within the past few months I scored 2 PR6 links to one of my sites, with nothing more than a short simple email.  But more on that later.

What’s keeping your site from suceeding?  You’ve done the leg work, you’ve followed the directions, it’s shake and bake damn’t and you helped.  Why aren’t you seeing results?  It’s because you are afraid.

Fear keeps us from truly branching out, searching and discovering that new angle.  It’s the constant barrage of negativity found on forums, blogs, and even the local newspaper that beats us into thinking that there is only one way to make a dollar.  I have news for you, until you break free from this grip of fear, the money will not flow.  It takes creativity that everyone has the capability of producing, if they can shed the fear.

I’m not talking about just spending money on campaigns, although it helps, I’m talking about dropping that email to the person you think won’t give you the time of day.  Shed insight into other peoples lives, even if you think they dont’ want it.  And damn’t quit listening to guru’s because they are all selling you shit that will keep you on the lower rung of the affiliate game.

This leads me into how I scored 2 PR6 links recently, all because I broke out and dropped a couple emails.  I sponsored a great wordpress theme awhile back and it spread really really well.  Simple, sweet, only my distributed by link in the footer, tha’ts it.  Well, a few PR3 – 4 websites started using it.  I tracked it, watched a handful, and noticed that specifically 2 sites dropped my link from the footer.  Not angry, just disappointed.

So I drop an email to the owners, or operators, or whatever asking for them to place add the link back.  Obviously stating that I had invested in the design and some credit somewhere would be appreciated.  Guess what, both returned their links to the footer and during the last update changed to PR6.  Bing bam score!

I could have let it slide, people still themes and my work all the time.  But I break out of the fear of rejection regularly and corner a few, get in their face, and demand success.  It may only be a small percentage of time that I actually get a positive reaction or any action, but it’s enough to put me in the black and finally drop down to a single income household.  Find that fear that’s holding you back and beat its ass.

Faster Load Times With Piwik Stats

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I’ve recently became very paranoid with using Google Analytics and allowing my largest visitor generator to see bounce rates, etc.  So, I’ve been looking into some alternatives and what I’ve found is a great open source statistics software called Piwik.

Piwik is installed directly on your server and allows the addition of any number of websites for stat tracking.  The initial install went seemless, less some activation of PDO and PDO mySQL services.  This was quickly fixed with a quick email to my hosting provider ManageMyBox.  Within minutes the installation was complete and I was on my way to self hosted stats.

On the outside Piwik seems comparable to Google Analytics, with visitor tracking, pageviews, and all the normal stat jargon.  It also has the capabilities of tracking campaigns, which Analytics prided itself on.  But the real difference came in the load time of my pages that were being tracked.

I noticed a substantial improvement in page load times which included the Piwik javascript tracking code.  So much that I’ve removed all of my Google Analytics tracking code.  I had thought that my server was the limiting factor on my mySQL database heavy applications, but apparently Google was to blame for a lot of slow downs.

Piwik also appears to be more accurate in tracking unique visitors than Google Analytics.  Also, it’s open source, so there is plenty of help when it’s needed and plugins are available to extend the stat software to fit your needs.  I’m currently looking for a plugin that will report individual IP’s, but have yet to find one.

Forward Thinking

I hope that as I add the rest of my sites it doesn’t start taxing my dedicated server too much.  As for now it doesn’t seem like a problem, tracking roughly 2,000 unique visitors per day across 3 websites.  We’ll see what happens.