Over at DigitGeek we recently started an ‘Ask us‘ section where people could ask us hardware related questions and get it answered by us. So far we have been continuously getting questions and answering them as soon as possible in a new post. Answering questions helped us get more readers, comments and make the site more active.

In the beginning I was afraid whether anyone would ask questions on a new blog, so to get things started I asked my brother and some friends to leave a question. I also wrote about the ‘Ask us’ section on this blog and let a few StumbleUpon friends know about it which brought in some traffic to the page (the page is now daily getting some traffic to it from StumbleUpon after the stumbles it got from a few users).

Continue reading ‘Get Your Blog More Readers By Answering Questions’

Over at DigitGeek, we started a page where the readers can submit their hardware related problems and get it solved.

No matter whether you are looking for suggestion on which laptop to buy or on how to fix your Monitor or on anything else, just ask us and we will gladly help.

All you have to do is to submit them via this page and we will answer them in a post soon. Also make sure to subscribe via RSS or Email to get notified when we answer them. Don’t be shy, ask us now!

Chitika’s Related Product Unit (RPU) which when targeted to the post title can be used to display a list of related products matching the page content. You can also customize the RPU to match the exact look and feel of your website and make it look less like an ad. 

Chitika RPU was earlier available only to select number of publishers for testing purposes but is now open to all.

I tried it on my hardware blog and it more than doubled my earnings! If you own a product related blog, make sure to try it out. Also remember that it works best when placed right at the end of your blog post.

To get the RPU code, just login if you are a Chitika publisher and you will see a “RPU Code” tab. Here you can choose your RPU unit size, colors, product category and set channel tracking.

Here’s an example of how it looks like:

If you are not a Chitika publisher, you can apply here.

By default, Kontera links have double underline so that they won’t not be confused by visitors for real links. I found a few sites recently having single underline for their Kontera links instead of the default double underline and checked the page source to find the code they used.

I also contacted Kontera to know if its ok to use this code and they replied:

We do not recommend using single underlines for Kontera ContentLinks.  Users viewing a web page will not know which link is a Ad and which is a real link to an article.  We do not want to confuse your viewers.

I haven’t made my Kontera links single underline yet, but if you would like to try it here’s the code that you should add to your Kontera code:

var dc_single_line = 'yes';

Making your Kontera links single underline may help you get more clicks on your Kontera ads but will also confuse your site visitors, so try it at your own risk.

I have written earlier on how to improve affiliate earnings, now lets see how we can make even more money by hiding the affiliate links. Hiding the affiliate links not only helps you make more money, but is also good for SEO.

It also helps to increase the clicks on the affiliate links as visitors won’t be able to type the URL on their browser without your affiliate code and therefor will help you make more money with affiliate programs.

Another advantage is that you will only need to change your affiliate codes at one place if they ever change (Text link Ads changed their codes two times).

Continue reading ‘Make More Money With Affiliate Programs By Hiding Links’

I have wrote in the past on how you can use images to get your best posts noticed by your blog visitors and also implemented that idea on my blogs. But I also wanted to rotate the images so that more posts could be noticed.

I tried out a few rotation WordPress plugins but they did not work well. So I contacted Shrihari, the guy who made the useful GotBanners plugin, and asked if he could make a plugin for this.

He contacted me some days later letting me know about his new site called Rotatee, which is a remotely hosted banner rotation service. You can use it to rotate ad banners on your website.

Continue reading ‘Rotatee: Easy Banner Rotation’

I have wrote about many WordPress plugins in the past. Here is one that could help increase your blog’s subscribers. What would Seth Godin do plugin displays a message for first time visitors asking them to subscribe to your blog’s feed (uses cookies).

By default the message shown is "If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!" and disappears after three visits.

I have been using this plugin for the past few days on my hardware review blog. Here’s a screenshot of it in action:

Installation is easy. All you have to do is upload the what_would_seth_godin_do.php file to your plugins folder and activate it. The plugin also allows you to customize the message, its lifespan, and its location.

Download the What would Seth Godin do plugin from here.

If you own a product related blog and isn’t satisfied with AdSense for Search, you could try to monetize your search result pages with Chitika eMiniMalls, TTZ Media or ShoppingAds (previously known as AuctionAds) and target them to the search query made on your WordPress blog. Here is how you do it:

For Chitika eMiniMalls

1. sign in to your Chitika account, click the eMiniMalls tab, and generate your eMiniMalls code

2. open your theme’s search file (mostly search.php) and find the following line

<h2>Search Results</h2>

3. paste your eMiniMalls code underneath the line

4. change the following lines in your eMiniMalls code

var ch_queries = new Array( );
var ch_selected=Math.floor((Math.random()*ch_queries.length));
if ( ch_selected < ch_queries.length ) {
ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];
}

to this

var ch_queries = new Array("<?php echo wp_specialchars($s); ?>");

Your search results will now have an eMiniMall targeted to the search query at the top of the page.

Continue reading ‘How To Target eMiniMalls and TTZ Media To A WordPress Search’

Matt Cutts recently wrote a post giving four good tips to protect a WordPress blog. Try these tips if you own a WordPress blog.

1. Secure your /wp-admin/ directory - lock down your wp-admin folder so that only certain IP addresses can access that directory
2. Make an empty wp-content/plugins/index.html file - it helps prevent people from finding out which plugins you use. If you use an outdated plugin, someone could hack your blog by exploiting a bug. To prevent people from viewing which plugins you have installed, just create a blank index.html file and upload it to your plugins folder.
3. Subscribe to the WordPress Development blog - you could subscribe to the development blog to be alerted as soon as a new WordPress version is released. Upgrade your WordPress blog as soon as possible or it could be hacked. I haven’t subscribed as we already get notified of a new WordPress version from the dashboard.
4. Hide your WordPress version: by default, WordPress theme’s have a line in the header.php to display the current version of WordPress you use (can be found by viewing source). Since anyone can find your WordPress version this way, your blog is prone to hackers until you upgrade to the latest version. To prevent displaying your WordPress version, just open your theme’s header.php file and look for the following line<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress <?php bloginfo(’version’); ?>” /> and replace it with <meta content="WordPress" name="generator" />

Just noticed that this blog has 5484 readers today! Now I know something has to be wrong as I had only 2944 readers yesterday. I checked a few other blogs to see if they had a similar increase in their feed count and found that Problogger.net has 100k readers today! Yesterday I think the blog had only around 44k readers.

I thought that it was caused by a bug in FeedBurner, but actually its a bug in FeedBlitz.

Some readers are reporting a spike in reported subscribers that don’t match the actual count in FeedBlitz. We’re trying to get to the bottom of the issue right now. It isn’t a spam attack or anything unpleasant like that, probably just a previously unknown defect (ok, a bug) somewhere in the code. Updates will follow as and when.

I guess the bug is now fixed and tomorrow we may see the actual feed count. Was your blog hit by the FeedBlitz bug?