Site Building

Storebuilder Blog - Site Building

Up bright and early this morning and headed off to the gym for a 45 minute stairmaster workout. Another 500 calories in the bank and another sufferfest.

It seems odd but considering what a great workout the stairmaster is, there is only one machine in the gym. Whereas there are rows and rows of bikes and cross trainers, just one stairmaster.

This stairmaster has a fat burn program that ramps it up in the first fifteen minutes to get you really pumped up and then drops off to an easy pace to let you get yourself together before slowly going climbing up through the gears until at it's peak you are burning over 700 calories an hour. This is a great workout and I recommend it for anyone that needs to lose pounds. Especially if you have any history of back problems and the like, this is a very low impact workout but incredibly demanding  - when I finished this morning I looked like I'd just climbed out of the swimming pool. Drenched.

Fitness First is also great for anyone with attention deficit disorder.

Or the attention span of a gnat.

Whilst working out you can watch Sri Lanka destroying the Indians in the test match; some crappy Jeremy Kyle interview with baywatch babe Pamela Anderson; Someone trying to buy a house at auction in one of those endless awful property programs; get all the news headlines flashed in front of you every couple of minutes all the while whilst being bombarded with the latest MTV tunes broadcast over the entire studio watching all the videos you really want to see in muted silence on Kerrang.

Have to get myself some headphones I guess.

Had a nice sauna to finish off with, remembered my pound for a change and retrieved it from the locker and headed off to the office.

My inbox is flooded with requests for text advertising.

I don't know about you guys but I'm pretty loathe to start giving away traffic from my best sites to paid for advertisements. However as everything becomes more and more competitive and more surfers come to the party, so the rewards for success are becoming ever greater. Which means the top players are starting to offer a lot of money for placing text links on relevant sites.

Recently I've been offered anywhere between £75 to £200 per month to place an article on a site with a link from the homepage. That's it! All you have to do is place their articles on your site and start raking in the cash! This is evolvement from the textlinkads way of selling inventory.

Folks have realised that hyperlinks with anchor text surrounded by oodles of text is a lot more subtle and looks more realistic to search engine spiders than simply placing a link in the footer. So to get webmasters to co operate the advertisers are starting to offer enticing sums for placing articles.

Do you want to be somebodys link bitch though?

If you do that's great. If you are good at building sites you could make a comfortable living from selling text links in this way on your sites. It would take you about a year to build four sites. Four or five months for the first with subsequent sites coming online at a faster pace as you learn the ropes.

However the guidelines for advertisers is that they must be quality sites. For example the bingo operator gives a search engine company £100k to spend as advertising budget. The SEO then seeks out sites that they can get relevant backlinks from and start spending the budget.

Once the links are placed then they can be found by the operator in a search engine and if they see crappy sites being used to spend their advertising budget they'll not be happy campers.

If you are going to do this then my advice is to avoid wordpress as every man and his dog can build a wordpress site and any trawl of the bingo listings (for example) will show you that they are all built on very similar templates. So to stand out from the crowd you are going to have to go the extra mile. You need to be above average to make it work.

It all comes back to the same thing. Building quality sites gives you more opportunities to make revenue. Building mini sites just gives you a few pages on a domain with little traffic.

Building quality sites gives you all of the advantages that screwing around with puny little sites does not. You get to see proper google analytical data, you can spot where people are falling out of the sales funnel and fix it. You get affiliate opportunities, mail list building ideas, chances to try squeeze pages and if at the end of the day you can't make money out of any of the traditional methods you simply sell the advertising space.

But that was always the same with any business. Build quality and you always stand a chance. Build shit and it usually ends up in a small pile on the floor.

Storebuilder Blog - Site Building

I made it to the gym again. Four times this week. 450 calories burnt in 45 minutes on the stairmaster which beats my PB so this is looking good. When you are suffering on the treadmill that pint of Stella pro rata calories taken in looks less attractive second by second.

I've removed the headlining stuff as I'm working out that it's just distracting folks from what you want them to do.

And what do you want them to do?

Well obviously you want them to "do" stuff.

On this site I'm asking for nothing as I just play around with new joomla stuff and templates here. But on real sites?

Unless you have a super busy type information portal you need to keep it simple. Simple is best. In fact I've already noticed that the bingo site is becoming a pain to run because of the updates.

What we need is sites that we can build without having to do the manual updating stuff. Which I guess means RSS and all that stuff.

The problem is, that as affiliates, we are way ahead of the curve. When it comes to marketing we have a better idea of what works because we are constantly putting it into practice every day.

I'm taking a break for a couple of days. My wife railroaded me into buying the new COD game and whilst the kids are quiet I'm going to recharge.

Back on Monday.

Storebuilder Blog - Site Building

I was going to start looking at the Joomla SEF404 component for a combination of shorter URL's and also to get some decent IP banning in place to try and put a stop to all of the pesky .ru domains that keep finding ways around the anti spam filters.

Then Joomla released another upgrade and we are onto 1.5.15

The biggest fix for me in this release is the fix to stop showing the admin password in the configuration.php file which was always a car crash waiting to happen.

Keeping on top of the updates is a vital part of any webmasters tasks to do. If you don't do it you are asking for trouble.

Hands up all those that have out of date wordpress installations?

It's the same as backing up. If you don't back up your database sites then you risk losing all of your work. Don't rely on your webhost for backups.

Anyway, once you keep on top of the game you only have a 2MB patch file to apply and so it's not going to take all that long to do. It only becomes a pain when you have to start patching 7 or 8 MB files because you are way behind the development cycle.

By the way, it's not mentioned on the Joomla site but when you apply the patch you need to delete the existing .htaccess (copying any modifications you've made) and then rename the new one. Otherwise the fixes for rewriting the URL's won't work.

 

Storebuilder Blog - Site Building

Yesterday I fannied around for about three hours trying to make the eventlist module display properly and in the end I gave up when I found a really neat module that has loads of options for displaying the data and I used that.

And it looks pretty damn good. I've set up the games that I got in a newsletter from wink bingo and then repeated the events - once they are in they're in! No need to keep updating the data every day. All that's needed now is to add in some more games and it's all done.

The eventlist module works well and I'm happy with it. Originally I planned to use the Jevents component but then I discovered that you needed PHP5 to run it.

I thought about moving the site to another server that does support PHP5 but eventlist does the job OK. I had to remove the version checking from the nextevent module to make it compatible.

So now the bingo site is almost done. Unfortunately it's one of those sites that you have to keep updating with new promotions and offers but if it converts anywhere near what the other bingo sites do then it'll be worth the grief. I'm still not totally happy with the pink and yellow colours but it looks pretty good.

I was going to use a page peel banner on this site which would have looked really cool but when I tried it the code clashed with the mootools menu and I couldn't get the graphic to display properly so I gave up trying to make it work. It's a shame becuase it would have looked really good but time and all that so I canned it.

So a while back I was saying that I wanted to build a health site but I'm putting all development on hold for the moment whilst I take a look at sh404SEF and get it deployed across the existing sites. I've been meaning to get this done for ages but the development was split and forked up so I put it off. Now it's gone commercial it's worth doing.

Almost forgot - it's the start of a new month, let's see what rockettheme have put together for us.

I just couldn't resist it.

Once I saw what the guys at rockettheme had given us this month I just had to download it and have a play!

Really disappointed with last months template as it wasn't much good for an affiliate template but this months offering makes up for it and more. I'll have a go at a logo tomorrow.