The Fresh Monkey

Maybe this should be the blog of my wacky internet glitches and fixes? Anyway the latest weirdness involved a PC repair. Client had taken the laptop on vacation and while away, used some ganky non-me installed internet connection. Needless to say on returning home, the client couldn’t connect to their home wireless. Resetting up the wireless was a snap but I was stuck on the Yahoo homepage that would not go away. No images downloaded, clicked links either reloaded the yahoo page or went to yahoo 404 page not found page.

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Grrr… don’t you hate it when stuff don’t work as expected? About a month ago my CS# Dreamweaver AP Divs seemed to disappear. I’d draw and instead of the yellow hilighted outline box I’d get, what visually looked like a normal div inserted at the cursor point. Code view showed an ap div, design view, a big dotted box.

I googled for…like a month and it’s hard to find answers when your’e not sure how to word the question.

How to reset Dreamweaver tools

Enable AP Div

Highlight AP Div

Can’t Draw AP Div

AP Divs gone

Search exhausted, I decided it was time to suck it up and post to the adobe help forum (it’s not just men who refuse to ask direction!). Another round of searching yeilded on of those vague “Help! AP div problem” posts… wouldn’t you know it, there was my problem and more importantly, the solution!

View > Style Rendering > Display Styles

Hope that helps someone else.

A quick update on my vast internet empire building.

Well, I picked up a paying gig through Craigslist, which, while great for my bank account, did eat up time from site building. Sure I eeked out a bit of work here and there but not nearly as much as I wanted. Still, I’ve made decent progress with a few of the sites and even the tricklings of revenue~!

The Big Site: Pretty much kicked ass on my “keep adding new content” plan. I’m on track for another $100 + month here (Joomla + Adsense).  Much improved from my low point of $40 this summer, still way off from the $200/mo this site pulled in last winter. Slowly by…

I use Firefox as my primary browser but maintain IE6 for testing purposes (along with a copy of Safari and access to a Mac). Yesterday I was on a wild hard drive clean up spree which eventually led to an even wilder program clean up spree. One of the programs I removed, via XP’s control panel was the Yahoo Toolbar. This, it would turn out, was a mistake.

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Woot! I got my first commission! Granted it was a guided commission -as in, I picked up a web design job and had my client sign up for his services via my affiliate link, but a check is a check.

Also made a second sale on Amazon. Goal for this week is to post a solid inventory of items. The Amazon Seller account is a bit like the random lottery.

I’ve been working the Adsense and Amazon angles for a while but last month I tried a few new methods including  selling on Amazon, revamping the way I sell on eBay and adding affiliate links.

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Quick housekeeping note: I transfered all of my site rebuilding blog posts from www.greenteafrog.com to this domain. Why?

Well that’s the subject of today’s post.

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Progress is going well on the Big Site. At the end of the month I’ll post a summary of my stats and all, but informally I can see improvements. Basically I’ve spent the past few weeks rebuilding trust with my visitors -lots of regular updates (2, 3 times a week), answering emails quickly (I always answered the mail….maybe not as quickly as I should have) and checking-off mini projects on my mile long to-do list of site features I always meant to introduce.

Googlewise, I had a mini, premature celebration. I thought the site had moved up in the search results -turns out, Google adjusts my search results based on my browsing history (I am generally logged into Google services all the time). When I took a look at the unenhanced results, The Big Site is still in the same spot. S’ok. Adsense has seen an improvement. I’m still tweaking the formats and layouts. I discovered the link units work very well for me. I got a nice increase in click thrus when I switch a few of the text/image ads to link units -BUT- I lost a lot of clicks from my forum when I switched. Went back to the old layout but have yet to regain the performance I had before I messed with it.

Luckily, I’ve still increased my daily revenue 3 fold over August. Joomla updates, I was very high on that sh404SEF component last time I posted. Turns out I started having view permission errors on two of the three sites, in paticular the sites with heavy front-end content submission. I’m still using the SEF com on The Big Site because I’m the only updater, had to unpublish it on the other two. (NOTE: I could solve the errors by flushing and rebuilding the URLs, but who wants to do that manually every time someone repots a problem?).

The Smaller fansite- My actor is actually working again! Managed to update with some fresh content. Revised goal for this site is to keep adding content and shoot for a big push of links/rankings/viral promotion a month or so before his new film is released (Next Spring). With no work on my part though, I’ve managed $1 of adsense.

Finally, in my totally bassakwads method of tying to make money from the ‘net, I bought another new domain. This one I have a clear idea for content and a killer domain name -introducing The Gay Wedding Site. More discussion to come later on this. For now, I’ve got the design up, adsense, a good chunk of content to start and some feelers out on Commission Junction. Yayz!
Content Content Content

Holy smokes, The Big Site has moved up from #4 to #6 for it’s primary keywords. Now, I’ve dealt with the fickleness of Google long enough to know that the jump may not mean anything, but I was stoked. New rule; I should review my previous post before updating again -I’ll implement that next time.

This time skip over anything you may have read already. I finally came up with a more exact mission statement of sorts for what I’m doing with The Big Site and that is: reviving a stagnant site while optimizing it for increased revenue (Adsense and Amazon Associates). My mission for the other sites are all slightly different and I’ll work on verbalizing those as I get to those projects.

Now, I mentioned a few design changes to The Big Site in my last post. Today I’ll try touch on those. In my niche most of my competition builds on the cutenews platform. I tried cutenews once and totally didn’t get it. My site was originally straight up HTML files, then I got hep to CSS and iframes and thhhhen, I started working with the Joomla CMS. Whatever works, I say. Some people detest Joomla but I find it’s pretty flexible for what I need. The code is easy enough to manipulate and the online community of extensions, plugins and templates make it easy to find just about everything I need.

Joomla comes with two templates pre installed. I you’re reading this because you’re just getting started with Joomla, I highly recommend making your own changes to the rhuk solarflare template. CSS and sizing tweaks go a long way owards personalizing this popular theme. There are many nice free and commercial templates out there too. I used a free design from Joomlashack.com then tweaked it for The Big Site. The changes this week were minor. I added a background color to my main content header divs, to help them stand out better against the page and I got the added bonus of the site overall looking a bit slicker. I also adjusted my link color to better match my new divs.

The final changes involved moving a few modules around. All in all, about an hour of work that I think paid off in freshening up the look of the site. Adsense wise, that crappy image banner was back -hates! so i switched it to a link unit ad and am done with it (for now).

Continuing on with my site rebuild projects. I’m not sure if I said this in my last post but since I’m working with so many sites I decided to… not spread myself sill thin by trying to fix them all at once.

Priority wise “The Big Site” in the pass proved itself a decent adsense revenue maker. I’m convinced that was because:

1. My site was the ‘expert’ site in it’s niche

2. I updated the heck out of the site. Flash forward 5 years later, I don’t have as much time to update the heck out of it and the site still has a solid base of quality content.

My multi pronged attack:

Search Engine Optimize the site -Main page still ranks at #6 on Google. I’ve had the #1 spot before. Wiki may outmuscle me but I think I’ve got enough to reclaim the #2 spot.

Get back into a weekly update pattern. -The Big Site is entertainment based so updates involve writing content/producing graphical sets and the occasional flash or java game.

Get some links - I’m 90% search engine and direct traffic, my primary link exchange is with the other ‘expert’ sites in my narrow niche. Biggest link opportunities will come from high quality sites in the larger niche.

All that laid out, let me tell you about my SEO progress. I regenerated my sitemap last time using the Joomla Xmap extension (I’m using Joomla 1.0.15) and submitted to Google. Check! This week I installed sh404SEF I first tried this component this summer on an e-commerce site hosted on GoDaddy and ran into some issues that I’m 99.99% sure were GoDaddy server issues. Still It was all promising enough that I tried it again on The Big Site on a Bluehost account. Easy install and nearly perfect URLs.

Next up, giving my meta tags some attention. In the past I was very hit and miss on adding keywords and descriptions to my content. I didn’t have to start from scratch, that was good, but I had a lot of content needing tags. Enter another extension, iJoomla MetaTag Generator . The pros - easy to install and configure. con -I wasn’t blown away by the generated keywords. The descriptions were nice, keywords a bit wacky. I have a love/hate for joomla extensions that require too much tinkering under the hood by me, but at some point I’ll have to tinker with this (charset is my problem I think) to clear up the wacky keywords. That aside, The metatag generator was close enough, and more important, saved me from manually updating 1,000+ articles.

So after all that, I regenerated a fresh site map, checked it against google webmaster tools and called it a day. Well, a day on SEO work, still more work to do this week. Back to Adsense: I took a few minutes to clean up my channels lists. Had a lot of junk channels in there from my adsense start days. I id’d the channels that relate to The Big Site, renamed a few for future clarity and did some freshening up of my link units (new color, new placement on one). I switched back to text links and images. I’d noticed this summer one particularly tacky image link that kept showing up on my site. Switched to text only because of it. That image banner is still floating around but, in the interest of trying to optimize, I switched back. Also added adsense for search. This surprised me because I thought I’d already set it up for The Big Site but alas, no. I’m curious to see if I get a jump in search revenue. The last thing I did was tweak the layout. Some CSS changes, content position changes etc. That’s a post of it’s own.