On the other hand, when time passes and your blog starts to get extraordinary attention, you may want to learn tips and tricks on how to optimize your wordpress installation and how to minimize resources it uses. Here are tips and tricks about just that.

First and foremost, you must use caching. WP-Super Cache is the best option for that. WP Super Cache caches your posts and pages as beautiful pure html files so your server doesn’t use resources for php output. Other caching plugins don’t do that (at least I don’t know of any other). Others usually just caches the content and continues to use php cycles to deliver output.

The second important thing you have to keep in mind is that WordPress’ custom 404 (page not found thingie) handler uses too much cpu cycles. This isn’t unique to WordPress. Any other CMS like Drupal, TextPattern, etc. who uses custom 404 handling also uses more cpu cycles than any normal, usual 404 page. What to do about that? Use Google Site Maps plugin in order to inform Google faster when you have deleted a post. This plugin automatically generates a Google compliant site map and submits that to Google everytime you make a change in your content. Apart from that, there are also urls that are seeked by robots and they also can generate 404 error codes when not found. One example in my mind now is the favicon.ico file. Favicons are used by many web sites for bookmarking urls. You have to place one in your root directory because every robot I know looks at your root directory for that file. Moreover, not only robots look for favicon.ico but also many browsers look for it when users want to bookmark your blog. Many modern browsers also look for it because they display it in the tab. The best practice is, go create one and place it in your root folder. Favicon.cc is my favorite place for creating favicons and downloading them into my computer and then put them on my host. It’s very practical and free.

Same holds true for your feeds. Use Feedburner for distributing your feeds. Since your feeds will be distributed by feedburner and not by your server, you will have this load minimized too. Your domain.com/feed will be checked (almost) only by Feedburner and this is at most once or twice a day.

There may be other examples for would be 404 files that don’t come with your WordPress installation. You can make up your own examples too. Either way, you have to find a way to create them or handle them. So far, I don’t know of any plugin which handles that issue. Maybe it’s a good idea to build one. It should check for common known urls on your blog which may be requested often by robots, search engines, and like, and maybe creates them for you.

Third, comment spam also puts another weight on your WordPress installation and that eats your valuable CPU cycles too. Akismet is NOT a solution for this because a comment or a trackback or a pingback will hit your server and be recorded for evaluation anyway. WP Spam Free solves this problem by not allowing comments from agents which are not a browser. Since many bots who works for dropping spam comments and trackbacks to WordPress blogs do not recognize and use JavaScript, this plugin checks whether comment owner’s agent can recognize javascript. It’s a wise solution. It also informs normal users who turned javascript off so that they don’t get surprised when they are not able to post comments.

Those three factors are what I have experienced so far with my grid server. I think this can be the first post in a series because as time goes by I would experience new cpu cycle hungry factors and find solutions about them. So I’ll post them too. One thing I am not sure about is wp-cron.php and admin-ajax.php files. It looks weird but it seems like they eat more cpu cycles when you don’t post frequently. But this is just a guess. I’ll post about that too when I am sure of them. So, please subscribe to my RSS feed if you find this post useful, there are more to come.

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Well, those are the questions that remained unanswered. There has been a couple of weeks now that I host one or two blogs on blogspot and there is also adsense installed. As with the adsense share, I can clearly say that Blogger doesn’t have a share on your adsense income. You can see this in your adsense control panel too.

For any web site or blog, whether it is intended for making money or not, navigation is an utmost important issue. I can clearly say that blogspot is weak on navigation. Of course there may be third party templates for blogspot that provide a decent navigation but not everybody has the reach and technical knowledge to use them. The most ugly thing with any Blogger blog’s navigation regardless of which template it uses is the “older posts”, “newer posts” navigation. The url you get to when you click those navigation links are pretty ugly. They are neither user friendly nor search engine friendly.

On one hand, it is a fact that there are no use in such navigation in terms of search engine optimization because they are not time-less. Every second or third page of a blog is being changed constantly and there is no meaning in indexing them as page 2, page 3, etc. On the other hand, for the sake of usability, every url at this time should be readable by naked human eye. And this is a problem with blogspot.

Moreover, blogspot forbids to index labels for search engines by its robots.txt file. Look at any blog on *.blogspot.com/robots.txt and you’ll see that access is denied. What I told in the above paragraph is also valid for labels though.

Apart from those navigational issues, I can say that any blog on blogspot doesn’t have less chance than any blog hosted elsewhere. Blogspot itself is a competitive domain and so are blogs hosted on it. Fear not, you will be indexed quite normally when you blog on Blogspot.

As with the monetization part, it is extremely easy to put adsense on any blog on blogspot. However that doesn’t mean they are optimally placed. For instance, it is a huge trouble for an html/javascript illiterate person (who consists the majority of blog users) to place adsense within the blogpost, for instance under the title or under the post body. You have to use escape characters and there is a big chance that you end up with messing adsense code which is against the TOS.

Having said that, for people who can optimize adsense placements and are html/javascript literate, there is no reason not to suggest blogspot for a profitable money making blog on the web. At least it is a whole lot better than wordpress.com at this time where you cannot put ads on your blog in wordpress.com.

Hence, 6% percent of the Technorati top 100 blogs are on blogspot. Advantages are you are always ready to get dug, you are at the hands of Google.

Moreover, Blogger team is constantly making improvements in the overall quality of Blogger. You can see some of them in the Blogger Draft. On nice example of this is the comment box embedded below the post.

In the final analysis, there is no significant difference in terms of pro-blogging between blogspot and a blog hosted elsewhere.

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On the other hand, some may need to have their blog monetized instantly. This can be fast and bring you a relatively less income however this is a method anyway.

To achieve this, you have to mimic blogs like boing boing. This imeans, you will become a news blog. By news blog, I don’t necessarily mean a political one or a blog about finances, that’s not necessary. You have to have editorial skills and you have to pick posts and articles, images, videos, any interactive thing that may interest people and then post about them. By “about them” I mean that you will not copy and paste them. You will select a blog post, and blog about that post. You will select quotations from that post and use them in your own post and comment on them a little bit.

That’s what boing boing does and they are very successful. They are successful in their editorial skills. They choose wisely, they don’t choose randomly. And remember, there are around 30 posts on boing boing every day.

If you believe that you have this editorial skill and you can also make wise selections around the blogosphere and the web, you may quickly establish a user base and a little profit by doing that. I assume you have already made the optimization about where to put ads. I am not going to talk about this here because that’s another story.

By blogging about blogs, you are going to build backlinks and they will help you grow in your search engine visibility. It will be much better if you keep this meta-blogging in a vertical manner. For instance, you can only choose to blog about blog posts that are about parenting. Or only about cars or only about gadgets. Get it?

Since you are going to post about 30 times in a day, this would bring quick attention for search engines. Search engines love updates.

Other blogs that keep this strategy are: kottke.org, the blog of Matt Mullenweg (he is not doing this for monetization purposes but he is a good example for what I am trying to tell here anyway), and many other blogs about web 2.0, widgets, themes, etc.

There is one other advantage in this. Such meta-blogs do not exist for a variety of topics. There isn’t any famous one about recipes, flowers, art, etc. which means there are already niches out there.

A drawback of this strategy is that you have to put content everyday. Because what you do is not time-less. You will be about actuality. You cannot say after six months, “that much content is enough for me to post less from now on”. That’s not possible. You will see sudden drop in your traffic and thus in your advertising revenue.

I can’t suggest this strategy for myself but this doesn’t mean that it is not working. It does work, I have done it in the past and I was successful. However, for myself, I want to build an hotel now so that people come and go and pay their rent… endlessly.

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If you dream about having some extra dollars or finally go solo with the help of your website / blog then you have to know and understand a couple of things and you have to be patient. So what are those key points?

When it comes to programs like Google Adsense, blogs look like very successful and people usually think that they should have a blog to achieve the material success from such programs. That’s irrelevant. The success of blogs come from sustainability. Successful blogs keep themselves updated several times in a day and this brings search engine visibility. Why? Is it because they update regularly? Not only that. If you update any website regularly and add meaningful articles to it that doesn’t only mean that you are updated but also means that you are growing in quantity of articles. The more pages you have, the more search engine visibility you will gain. This is simple to understand. If I have one page on a certain topic and it is usually found from search engines with certain keywords than this means I can have a decent traffic. If I have a couple of good pages than I would have several decent traffic. If I have thousands of pages in my website, than it is near sure if not hundred percent, that I will have at least tens of pages which would get quite well amount of visitors from search engines.

However, I am not talking about a random success. I am just telling that you don’t know exactly what will attract your visitors and you have to be willing to track your successful pages about why they have attracted so many people. Is it the topic? Is it the advantage of low search engine competition in that area? Is it because you have used good keywords in an optimum level of quantity? You have to look and think about those factors.

And what about page rank? I have a blog post that is #1 in the search results among 4.810.000 results. The page rank of the blog is 3 and this single page’s page rank is 1. What about that? The moral of the story is, don’t get obsessed with page ranks. This is not the only example that I can give you. I have many single pages that rank within the top ten results on Google and most of them have a page rank of 1 and others do not have any page rank assigned at all.

Moreover, what do you imagine when you hear the word page-rank? There are tens of Google search pages in tens of different countries with domains accordingly. This is one factor, a variable. Another variable is that any web page can be found in search results via very different keywords. Example: you reach this page on Google while looking for successful blogging and you are in France, using Google.fr and somebody else is searching for page rank effect on contextual advertising income and finds this page and she is in China. Another reader does a search for “success” and don’t come up with this page because it will be the 18th million result.

So, can you get that? Imagine a web page with a page rank of ten and that doesn’t mean it will show up in search results in every search related with that page. Therefore, don’t get obsessed by page-rank.

Let’s go back to income / search results relation. The page that comes first among 4.810.000 results do not have any effect on my adsense income (I didn’t create a channel for this single page, maybe I should create and check but I know this because said blog is not very profitable either. This is because of the low traffic). Because there aren’t any related adwords client to evaluate this page. Thus, people come and go to the web page and they don’t really see a hundred percent related ad on the page. If they would see, they would most probably click on them.

So, success comes when:

1. You have a meaningful article on your page.
2. You can be found among search results and you are in a relatively decent position, let’s say your page comes up between #1 and #50.
3. The search terms are related with your topic of your article.
4. There are enough adwords clients that need to show their ads on such a page when it is found with such keywords.

The above scenario is the most profitable scenario for keyword advertising, in my humble opinion. Of course, you would also make money when a user comes to your page via some different way (that is not with the help of a search engine) and clicks on your ads. The more ads and the page are relevant in context the more you will earn.

Other scenarios would include that there are several web sites linking you properly on the subject of your page and people come from those links. At this time, it is also important how they link and what the linking page is about. If your page is about flowers and it is linked from a web page which is about bees then this would not be as profitable as a related search engine result.

Then how do I go about creating profitable pages on the web? Find something that would help people doing their job in hand. You can write how-to articles about anything you can be sure of yourself. If this helps people than you will gain visibility.

So, keep in mind that what I tell you here is not about being a famous blogger or web author or content creator. This is about being found via search engines and thus getting clicks on your ads because everything is in harmony: search terms, the subject of your article and the advertisers subject. So, being Robert Scoble is something else, it would create a benefit, an added value when somebody reads Scoble writing about a web conference and while reading he or she finds an advertising about what she needs and clicks on it. Because in this scenario, there is fame included. The advertiser know that quite a few people with a need and want to buy a geeky product would read Scoble. See that this is also something contextual but in that case, Scoble does not need search engine visibility. He can also gain page impressions via direct traffic (that is somebody opens her browser and types in his blog’s address). Also, be sure that Scoble made this fame by working hard about blogging. His blog is full of useful information if not knowledge.

These are some key factors that you have to understand if you feel like trying problogging.

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This is far from being original. This may sound naive to you but you are already original because each individual on this planet is unique enough to create unique, original content. However, there is this conformity surrounding us only to prevent us from creating the original content that in fact we can create easily.

Most people get stuck with blogging just because they are too busy with visual design, web standards, what other people are posting, etc. If you want to create original content and stay away from the crowd (which is a good thing because it’s a professional way and success is a higher probability) then you should pay less attention to what the blogosphere is mostly concentrated on.

If you take the time to have a different look, a different perspective on many famous blogs, you can see that they did not fall into the trap of conformity. Most of the time, they are very bold and audacious. Of course many corporate blogs do not fall into this category. I am talking about individual work. If you look at the blogs of weblogs inc, you cannot see this original content and approach because there is the anxiety of saving investments and this makes them far from being original and conform to norms that they have in mind.

Individual blogging is not bound with such norms. Take PostSecret as an example. It is a very original blog. Yet it doesn’t look like professional to many people because they are accustomed to see blogs like engadget and this is what they find and count as professional. So, originality doesn’t depend on professionalism. PostSecret is very famous, it gets many hits, many unique visitors. Because it is an original peace of work.

Moreover, PostSecret is on Blogspot, which is a fact many people with a naive realism would argue that this is not a professional look.

Well, if you want to create original content and think that you should have a blog similar to many famous blogs out there, think again.

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• Prologue

If you look at blogs in the Technorati top 100, you will find out that almost all of them are vertical in the sense of topic they are publishing posts about.

What are the reasons that vertical content is profitable than mixed good content? Well, primary reason is search engine optimization and the leads that search engines create.

When you look at websites or other resources that claim to provide high profit keywords, they often look like meaningless. They are usually not meaningful. If there is one keyword, of course there is nothing to talk about meaning. One word is meaningful, naturally. I am talking about phrases. There are phrases that sounds silly for the first look. However, they are not phrases for everyday life. They are simply search terms that users put in the search box.

At this moment, remember on some searches we made on the net brings results like one or two words are in a sentence and the third word we are looking for is in another sentence or another paragraph or sometimes even on another post or article at the same page.

Now this is where the vertical content plays a role. Since sincerely writing on a topic and nıt trying to stuffing keywords in your writings would result poor search engine results, search engines try to collect data not only in terms of a single post or article or a block on your web page. Instead, they try to understand your topic on a variety of measures.

So, when you feel very competent on a subject, then what you have to do is to write different aspects on that subject in a single web site.

You can choose the catch-all way and put a variety of subjects in one blog or website, but then search engines either put you in a wrong category in terms of a topic or they would not get your subject at all. This is also why blogs concentrated on a certain subject always have better search results. This is because of the structure of a blog. On any front or archive page in a blog, there are 10 posts on average. If they are almost on same subject then it is very easy for a search engine robot to identify and connotate your blog with that subject.

This is of course also very important when it comes to related text advertising. On any given day, if you have at least tens of posts in your blog on a certain subject and you suddenly post something entirely different or something very short, ads sontinue to display in the context of your subject in general.

As a conclusion, if you blog for fun then you don’t need to stick with a certain topic. If you are blogging for the purpose of making money out of text advertising then you should pay attention to create vertical content. You’ll be more profitable that way.

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