The Spam Comes Out At Night
Posted by Mitch on Aug 27, 2008
Oddly enough, I think this blog is starting to get more and more popular. Actually, the numbers from Google Analytics say that things are fairly steady, but I’m not buying it. After all, it seems the spam has grown by leaps and bounds.
Things were actually going along pretty well for me as it pertained to spam. I didn’t have much at all, maybe 4 or 5 a week, and life was looking pretty good. Then suddenly, I wrote that post on Compete Rank and the spam came out of the woodworks. It’s not the Russians anymore; it’s someone else, seemingly sending it all from one IP address on a consistent basis, and in large numbers; what the hey?
Initially, some of it was making it through the Askimet filter, and I thought that was odd. However, after deleting it a couple of time, Askimet got its act together and is sending it all to the moderation area, so I don’t have to deal with deleting it from my posts. Frankly, I find the relationship between the post, which was not positive, and the spam, interesting, and if I were a conspiracy theorist type of person, I might think I was being deliberately attacked; nah.
So, some “thing” is giving me attention. Reminds me of something my friend Sue said once about not wanting to attract the wrong kind of attention while still wanting to dress nice. I guess I’ll just have to deal with it, but at least I hope this blog is dressed nicely.
Why Don’t More People Comment On Blogs?
Posted by Mitch on Aug 17, 2008
Though this blog doesn’t get as many overall visitors as my business blog, at least for the moment, it’s ranked higher on Technorati, and, in general, some of the posts here get much higher readership that most of my posts there.
What is amazing to me is just how many posts get either no or very few comments. One would think that, with so many readers, you’d have a certain percentage who would make some kind of comment. But no, it just doesn’t happen.
For my business blog, every once in awhile I post something that I feel is an important topic that I want to share with a good number of my friends. So, I’ll send them the link to the blog, giving them a brief synopsis of what it’s about, hoping that they’ll add their opinion to it. I know many of them go to it because I always see the spike in visitors for those posts, but many times not one of them will post a comment on the blog. They will send me comments back through email, though, and when I ask them why they didn’t put it on the blog, they often say they’re too self conscious to put something out there for everyone to see.
That’s kind of an odd concept in the internet world of 2008, people not wanting someone else to possibly poke fun at something they wrote. Whereas I can understand why people wouldn’t ever want to be ridiculed, and understand that’s why many people never start blogs unless they can remain anonymous, truth be told, there are almost 90 million blogs out here, and I would bet that probably 88 million of them lie dormant, or will be dormant within a month or two, because people tend to start blogging, then either get self conscious or lose the motivation, and just leave their blogs to sit forever on the blogosphere.
Well, if people aren’t writing in their own blogs, then what makes us think they should write in ours? Because people still visit, that’s why. However, if you’ve been online for any period of time, and have done anything with social networking, you know that’s just how it is. I used to run my own group on Ryze some years ago, and I had almost 160 subscribers to the group. However, I may have had 4 people who consistently commented or wrote an original post, and probably 140 of those subscribers never said a word. I don’t even know if they came by to read everything either, but one can check statistics on a post to see how many reads it got, and sometimes a post got a good number of readers, but no one would comment on it. Strange.
Or is it? I subscribe to almost 160 blogs, and yesterday I spent a few hours catching up on all of them. And I posted on a good number of them, on topics I felt I had something to say, but at the end of the day I might have posted on 12 or 13 posts, though I perused or read well over 200 posts (I speed read, so I can tell pretty quickly whether I need to put more time into something or not). That’s not a high ratio, and of course it helps bump up the readership numbers on the blogs of those folks I visited, but since most of them didn’t get any feedback from me they don’t know it was me who visited, and therefore aren’t sure whether they gave me any value or not. And, for me, I can get value and not comment many times, so if it works that way for me, why wouldn’t it work that way for others?
I think that’s why many of us are amazed at bloggers like Problogger, because it seems he can pop in a throwaway post and get 75 people to write something; not that he does that, by the way, but if you take a look back at some of his posts, you see high numbers of commenters on most of his posts. I guess that’s how you become a millionaire by blogging, right?
Anyway, I don’t have any definitive answers, but I do know this. Hopefully I’ll continue writing content as good as I can make it, and entertaining as much as I can, and hopefully, on both blogs, people will start feeling more and more comfortable, and will share with me their thoughts and feelings. And, at least here, if you click on something every once in awhile, I won’t be mad at you. 
Centering Images in Wordpress 2.6
Posted by Mitch on Aug 12, 2008
This is going to be a relatively short post, for once. I’ve always had problems centering images on this blog, which has limited me to always having to have the banner ads below my posts, plus not allowed me to add any image ads to the side of my blog.
I went online to do lots of research, and learned that a lot of people were having problems centering anything on Wordpress 2.6, so I wasn’t alone. I read lots of tips, but none of them applied to my situation, and I realized pretty quickly that all these blog templates are pretty different because all the creators did something just slightly different than everyone else. And I realized that my problem was contained within the CSS file, which many people probably shouldn’t try to mess with.
But I’m not “many” people, so I went searching. I tried a few things here and there, always remembering what I did so I could take it back. Finally, I saw down near the bottom a tag that said “Images”, and saw that it was left justified. So, I changed that from “left” to “none”. Lo and behold, my image centered, and all life is grand once again.
Doesn’t mean I won’t continue posting banner ads, but now I have more choices of what I can do. This may not work for everyone, but if you decide to go looking and find something like this, it just might work for you. Good luck, but be safe and always remember what you did.
Dealing With The Russians
Posted by Mitch on Aug 4, 2008
Interesting title, eh? Well, over the last couple of weeks, I’m dealing with Russians of some sort, though I’m not sure if it’s one Russian or multiple Russians. He, or they, like this particular blog; is anyone else dealing with Russians lately?
It started with someone registering for my blog, a weird looking name with a Russian extension to the email address. I didn’t actually mind all that much, but I decided to make sure it was real so I tried sending an email. After four days it came back saying it couldn’t be delivered because it didn’t exist. So I deleted it. Within a couple of hours “it” had signed up again. Over the course of the next week, I kept deleting it and it kept coming back. Eventually it stopped registering, and I figured I was done with it.
Then the first post came, Russian characters and all, but the email address wasn’t the same one I’d deleted in the past, and the name was in Russian. I decided to at least run the message through an online translator to see if it made sense. It did, to a small degree, and even though it looked odd, I decided to let it stay.
Not sure if that was a mistake or not, because I started getting other, and they were commenting on topics that I knew had nothing to do with anything someone in another country would be interested in. I still ran the messages through the translator, and this time, none of them made any sense. They didn’t address the topic, and they were both one liners. So I’ve started to delete those messages, and most probably I’ll have to delete them for a week.
People talk about comment spam all the time, and a few posts ago, I talked about all the spam protection I have on my blogs, which is through Wordpress. But for some reason, it can’t pick up the Russian spam, probably because it’s not true spam. It’s not advertising anything, but what it’s probably doing is sending out posts with their link and hoping someone comes along and clicks on it. I have no idea what’s on the other side, but I’m not doing it, and if I have to protect my visitors from it, so be it.
In my mind, I’m not censoring someone who has a contrary point of view, because the posts really don’t have any point of view at all. Luckily, with online translators, we don’t always have to know up front what someone is saying. But when we do see what they’re saying, and it’s garbage, we should take appropriate steps to eliminate it.
Maybe they’re mad because the U.S. basketball team beat them by 21 the other night; hey, I wasn’t playing!
Working Towards 500 Visitors A Day
Posted by Mitch on Aug 2, 2008
Tonight I listened to an interview on Blogtalkradio.com that was conducted by Willie Crawford. He was interviewing a guy named Yaro Starak, who makes between $10,000 and $35,000 a month off his blog; something to yearn for, right?
Anyway, he was talking about how he’s been able to make money with his blog, and at one point he was talking about numbers of visitors. He said that when he first reached at least 500 visitors a day he started making $1,000 a month from his blog. And, of course, as his numbers have increased, so has his income. All this, and he basically averages working only 2 hours a day; wow.
Of course, he didn’t start out that way. The first link I put above should take you to the page where, if you’re so inclined, you can listen to the interview where he talks about how he got to the point where he first decided what kind of blog he wanted to write, then all the work he put into it. Thinking about what he wanted to write on; that sounds familiar.
I want to go back to that 500 visitors a day thing, if I may. One of the things most of us bloggers want are readers. The more readers we get, the more we want to write because we want to not only keep those readers, but increase the number of readers that visit. Right now I don’t make a lot of money off my blog, but truth be told I don’t get anywhere close to that many visitors either. I’ve only had one day ever where I went over 100 visitors, and I’m still trying to figure out how that happened. All I could come up with is timing of the topic; I’ll take that. On my business blog, the highest number of visitors I’ve ever had in one day was 93. Oddly enough, on this blog, it was my highest dollar figure ever made on one day from the blog, but I didn’t make a cent off my business blog; different crowd, I guess.
So, how does one go from under 100 visitors a day up to 500? I honestly don’t know. If I did, I’d already be there. I have seen many tips on how to get there, and I follow many of them. I’m still in debate about the article writing and posting to article repositories, mainly because I’d rather keep as much of my content close to the vest as possible. I have other sites of my own where I can post my articles. That, plus it’s even acknowledged by some of the blog “experts” that you really won’t get many visitors from posting articles, because most people post articles to try to drive traffic to their sites; not many people actually go to those sites to read the articles unless they’re looking for some specific information, and most of the time you can find specific information elsewhere.
Well, it’s something else to ponder upon, and I figure it’s probably why Text Link Ads haven’t shown up for me yet on this blog either. No matter; I have goals, and I have time to get to those goals, and as long as I keep writing, there’s always that opportunity to get there.
And, of course, with y’all commenting from time to time, showing me some love, it can’t do anything but succeed!
I Hate Logging In To Comment
Posted by Mitch on Aug 2, 2008
So there I was, reading another blog post and thinking I had something I wanted to share. So I go to the comments and get hit with it once again: “You must log in to comment on this post.”
And so it goes. I hate logging onto blogs to make posts, so I do it rarely. I know why people are doing it. They’re trying to keep comment spam out of their midsts, and think it’s the safest way to go. Instead, I’m betting they get very few comments on their blog and wonder why.
Those of us who blog like the idea of people commenting on our blogs; that is, unless you’re Seth Godin. Therefore, it’s imperative that we don’t make it hard for people to be able to comment on our blogs. At the same time, we have to protect ourselves from the spam, which can be voluminous. What I did was sign up for Askimet on this blog, which seems to protect me a great deal. Also, asking people for their name and email address when they sign in isn’t a bad thing, even though that’s more of a Wordpress thing that something for me. By adding the CommentLuv thing, it also gives people a chance to comment and highlight their own blog by showing their previous posts; that’s a good thing also. And I also give them link power by setting up my blog to be a Do Follow blog.
On my business blog, I added Bot Check, which makes people put in the number they see in a little box first before their post will show, along with another protection program called Bad Behavior, which helps protect against spam.
In essence, I have so many other ways to protect myself that the last thing I need anyone to do is actually have to log in. Now, they can still log in, but by not having it as a requirement for participation, I think it makes it easy for people to play along. I only wish everyone else who wants you to log in had it that easy. Oh well,…
Why Do You Write Your Blog?
Posted by Mitch on Jul 21, 2008
Why do I write this blog, or any other blog? Why do you write a blog? What are you hoping to achieve? Are you trying to inform? Are you trying to make money? Do you have something you need to get off your chest?
I ask this question after reading what can best be called a couple of rants by different guys. One guy, Merlin Mann, wrote a piece called Blog Pimping, and actually used a lot of the original rant, written by a guy named Jack Shedd, called Tacky. Both posts are pretty much against what they consider as the blatant marketing of blogs to make money by the professional bloggers, and what they perceive as what’s been created because of them, the professional commenters, whose only purpose is to try to hopefully drive traffic to their sites by commenting on these big time blogs.
Of course, one of these guys is marketing things in his own right off his blog, whereas the other guy, Jack, doesn’t seem to be marketing anything, so we can take each for what it’s worth. It still begs the question for most of us as to what our purposes are for writing our blogs, and whether we end up staying true to our souls more than our goals.
I don’t think I’ve hidden my goals for this blog; I want it to make money. So I write about topics that interest me, hoping they interest others enough to want to come back often to see what I might have to say. I like to think I’m not a one trick pony, though, as I slide from topic to topic and, occasionally, post something to entertain myself more than I’m probably entertaining someone else (remember the Yoda video?). This is a blog to make money, but it’s also a blog to have some fun with. I don’t see myself as one of those guys who’s ever going to make blogging a 24/7 job; could happen, but I doubt it. I have way too many interests for that sort of thing.
And of course there’s my other blog, the professional one whose purpose isn’t necessarily to make money (though I do have Adsense on it; I’m not a fool after all), but to inform and show people that I have some competence with my main career as a consultant. Maybe indirectly it’ll convince someone to request my services, and I may make money that way, but it’s intention isn’t to do it straight out.
Still, a good question to ask is why it seems to matter so much to someone else why a person is writing whatever it is they feel like writing, and why it’s disturbing them so much. Truthfully, I read a lot of blogs, but there’s many more that I’ve taken a look at and decided I don’t want to read for one reason or another. It’s just like television; if you don’t like the program, turn the channel and watch something else. Not that I don’t find a blog post every once in awhile that gets on my nerve, but to rant against someone because they happen to be successful sounds like the people who gripe against musicians who allow their music to be used in commercials; life was never that pure to begin with, and it’s certainly not going to be that pure now.
For the moment, I have another career, so I’m sorry if I can’t put together 1,500 word tomes on my blog just to pad the stats. But I’m near 600 words; that has to count for something. And people, if you want to comment on my blog to try to drive traffic to yours,… by all means!
Update Your Automatic Update Plugin First!
Posted by Mitch on Jul 19, 2008
A couple of days ago I wrote about updating my blog to Wordpress 2.6. It was, and still is great, but there’s something else that happened that I want to clue you in on.
If you use the automatic upgrade option, you’ll learn that there’s a new version of it that needs to be downloaded to be compatible with 2.6. You will probably have to download that first before trying to update any of your other plugins. It seems that, at least for me, you can’t use the automatic upgrade program to update itself. First it wouldn’t work, then any incoming links to my site were suddenly bad and corrupted, and it wouldn’t update any other programs either. So, I had to go to the site, download it, and install it the regular way. After that, it worked on the other plugin, which, in my case, was the All in One SEO pack, which also probably needs to be updated with 2.6.
Anyway, just so you know; happy blogging!
Why Are We Attracted To Twitter?
Posted by Mitch on Jul 18, 2008
As I write this, Twitter is down once again, and I’m irritated. I should have been wondering why I hadn’t been hearing the little sound I get every 5 minutes or so when another acknowledgement of a Twitter post from someone that I happen to be following, and now I know why. Actually, I wouldn’t have known then if I hadn’t tried to post something; I’m irked.
Actually, seems I said that same thing almost two months ago when I first wrote about Twitter getting on my nerves because of all the outages. And yet, here I am, still trying to get back on at some time, and it would seem I’m not alone.
There was a recent article which indicated that Twitter is actually growing in popularity, even as people are finding other micro blogging sites to visit such as Friendfeed. This even prompted Amazon creator and CEO Jeff Bezos to invest $15 million into the project.
So, what’s Twitter doing these days instead of taking care of its customers (which is kind of an interesting term, since they still haven’t figured out how to generate revenue)? Well, one thing they did was acquire a social search engine service known as Summize. It seems they’re also testing a new design, though, according to the story, not everyone has seen it yet.
So, Twitter isn’t just standing by doing nothing, but it still makes one wonder why they’re not taking better care of its present customer base, which happens to be us. As I said in the other article, I like the idea of the service; I only wish it was more stable. Of course, I bet if they started charging for the service it would work better, but I wonder how many people would stay? Do we want to pay to blog, let alone micro blog? Probably not, but my thought is that, until Twitter figures out how to capitalize on its membership, we’re going to be on the short end of the stick.
And I’m not happy about it one bit.
Wordpress 2.6 Update Now Available
Posted by Mitch on Jul 16, 2008
So there’s a new version of Wordpress, 2.6, but this time around it looks like they’ve added some pretty neat stuff. However, I read about it on my friend Sire’s site, so instead of totally rehashing it all here I think it’s better if I just post the link to his site to give him a little bit of love, as well as tell you that if you visit his site there’s a video that tells you all about the changes. This also means that if I need to read it again so I can hook up some of the newest stuff that I’ll know how to find it quickly. Yeah, sneaky, but why shouldn’t I benefit along with y’all, right?
In any case, it’s always recommended that you upgrade to the latest version of your blogging software if, for nothing else, to help prevent someone coming along and snagging it out from under you. And trust me, it happens all the time. By the way, I used the Wordpress automatic update plugin and I was done in just about two minutes. It’s the best plugin I’ve ever installed.
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