Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins

Written by Brandon on January 28, 2008 – 5:45 am -

I know you’ve heard this story before: “Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins”, but a few recently created plugins for Wordpress have really opened the floodgate for creating rapid, wealth generating blogging businesses. But before I get into the nuts and bolts of the business model, I would first like to introduce you to a website currently using this business model: Trendhunter.com.

photo by Joe Shlabotnik

The Trendhunter Business Model

Trendhunter.com is essentially a multi-user blog where thousands of users have contributed articles to the site. According to my recent check at Alexa.com, Trendhunter is the 9th most popular design website on the internet The main focus of revenue for the site comes simply from the sheer volume of contributions which number in the dozens each day that are posted to the front page, and the ability of the contributors to promote their posts. How does owner, Jeremy Gutsche, get so many contributors?

  • He shares ad revenue with his users.
  • He encourages bloggers to promote their own content by contributing to Trendhunter.com
  • He edits each post that makes it to the front page which, unlike Digg.com, means only the most interesting trends make it. This helps maintain strong content quality that is on topic.
  • He promotes and encourages contributors to promote the site using web 2.0 tools such as blog widgets and old-school viral tools like emailing friends.

I believe that sharing the ad revenue is the strongest incentive for making such a popular blog because Mr. Gutsche makes it so easy to make extra money. How does he make it so easy? By making the ad sharing easy. All you have to do to make money is have a Google Adsense Account. When you sign up for Trendhunter.com, you are prompted to enter your AdSense code. Now, every article that you write that appears on Trendhunter.com will show your adsense ads, and any ads that are clicked on generates revenue for you. For most articles, only a dollar or two revenue is generated, but it is possible to generate up to $50 for articles that are viral and extremely popular. And, of course, the more popular the site and the more articles you write means the more money you make. All of this along with the collective power of all the other people on the site wanting to make money means explosive expansion once the site has built some popularity.

Although Trendhunter.com has developed really strong growth and requires a very small staff which has developed a relatively low impact revenue stream, there are some areas which Trendhunter.com could improve. I want to focus exclusively on rapid content generation, though, which is essentially the heart of Trendhunter.com’s business. So, how do you add content currently to the site? You have to go through a fairly excruciating process that involves filling out a half-dozen text fields minimum and tab through 4 tabbed pages. At any given time during this process, if you accidentally click on the wrong link surrounding the entry form and you’ve lost your data.

Adding the Tumblr Method of Rapid Content Creation

Trendhunter.com’s content creation could be so much more fun and easy if there were some sort of bookmarklet that you could add to your toolbar, so whenever you’re at some website you want to write about you could push a button, write a few sentences, and boom! your post is done. Enter the Tumblr.com Bookmarklet. This bookmarklet lets you press a button, and all the images pop up on a new screen. Then, you can choose an image, write a couple of sentences, and hit “post”.

A quick comparison of the Tumblr.com content work flow versus the Trendhunter.com content work flow reveals that the same quality post can be created with the tumblr bookmarklet method in 25% of the time it takes to create a Trendhunter post. The work flow savings you get with tumblr.com are:

  • automatic uploading of images and videos
  • 10-20 less clicks needed per article, which saves your hands
  • more incentive to write an article because it only requires one click on the tool bar
  • quotes can be added by simply highlighting the desired text you want to quote.

Trendhunter.com would surely benefit from adopting this model, and the Trendhunter tool bar that already exists seems ripe for including this in their development schedule. But if you are as ambitious and motivated as Jeremy Gutsche, you may be able to beat him to the punch by creating an even more effective and simpler version of Trendhunter.com using Wordpress and a number of simple to implement plugins.

So, what are these plugins that can make Wordpress as popular and powerful as Trendhunter.com? We should start by analyzing what Wordpress is missing that Trendhunter has:

  • First, Trendhunter has a stronger user customization, so Wordpress needs a plugin that allows users to add a photo of themselves, add their Adsense information, and add whatever other information you care to follow. To fill this gap, I use the Cimy User Extra Fields plugin which allows you to add any number of extra fields to your users’ profiles. More importantly, you can also recall the information in these fields using the Cimy template tag. For instance, if a user provides his Adsense account number, then I can put this account number into any post that this person writes using a small amount of PHP code. This guarantees that the writer will get all ad credit for his posts.
  • Second, Trendhunter gives each contributer his own sort of miniblog within the overall site. This miniblog includes an image of the person, the contributor’s stats, as well as the person’s own URL which he can send to friends. Again, all of this can be created using the simple template tags provided by the Cimy plugin.
  • Third, Trendhunter is missing a way to create posts quickly and easily. A new Wordpress plugin that recently became available that has proven incredibly powerful is the Quickpost plugin provided by twelvehorses. This plugin allows you to create posts very quickly. You can also offer this to your contributors and they can add posts equally quickly. This is the major advantage you would have over Trendhunter using Wordpress.
  • Fourth, Trendhunter gives readers ways to spread posts virally to other sites. You can accomplish the same things that Trendhunter offers with a couple of useful plugins. One is the Social Bookmark plugin which allows you to bookmark an article to any number of dozens of social bookmarking sites. The other plugin of note is the WP-email which allows readers to email an article to friends.

There are some definite advantages of using these Wordpress plugins, however, there are also some hurdles that you should be very aware of:

  • First, it’s not completely clear if you are following the Google Adsense terms of service agreement if you exchange out user ad accounts . This is because when you have a generic Adsense code where you substitute other authors’ Adsense account numbers this may be seen as altering the code. The Terms of Service says you are not supposed to alter this code in any way, however, I personally do not consider this violating the TOS because the end javascript code really is not altered than the intended code. I highly suggest reading about this and using this at your own risk. However, judging Trendhunter.com as a test case, using this method is acceptable as long as you do not alter the code in any way and just the account has changed.
  • Second, the Quickpost Plugin has a bug where you have to sign in before the plugin works. I’ve informed the plugin writers, but you may have to hire some outside help if this plugin becomes an essential part of your business.
  • Third, the Quickpost Plugin posts direcly to the site no matter what your user status is. That means contributors posts go live immediately without being approved by an editor. This, again can be quickly fixed by a competent Wordpress developer and a couple hundred dollars. You don’t necessarily have to offer the quickpost plugin to users, but it is so handy it’s hard not to offer this option. My suggestion is to only allow posts on the home page in a category no one would ever choose. This might deter getting unwanted posts on the home page.
  • Finally, the Cimy Extra Fields plugin can be very powerful yet tricky to set up with Adsense. You will want to consider writing a very well thought out conditional statement in PHP that assures that you have received a valid Adsense code. This is not for the amateur to attempt.

Overall, if you’re willing to try to learn from Trendhunter’s great strengths and shortcomings you may find yourself with dozens of contributors and ten times the traffic. If you need any help fleshing this out or need further instruction on implementing this feel free to leave a comment or email me at bbaunach@yahoo.com.

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Posted in Adsense, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Experimental Techniques, Starting a Business | 1 Comment »

Blog Titles and Meta Data: What Benefit’s Do You Get from Optimization?

Written by Brandon on December 30, 2007 – 5:48 pm -

Back when I started my very first blog in 2004, I was not terribly happy with the amount of traffic I was getting from Google. I had set up my sitemap and done all of the things that I thought I should do. Then one day, I realized that I had never created meta data in the head of my blog template. After I changed this data to properly describe my site, I got double the amount of traffic from Google the very next day. Recently though, I’ve wondered how much optimizing meta data really matters on a site that is already popular. The answer I’ve come up with is it does not matter one bit. But before I tell you why it doesn’t matter, let’s get back to basics.

library card: An Early Form of Metadata

The Library Card: An Early Form of Metadata 

If you don’t know what meta data is, then read this awesome article on searchenginewatch.com to get an understanding. In its simplest form, meta data is just data that quickly describes what is on a particular web page. This meta data can describe a number of things on your site, but for the purposes of this article, let’s focus on three tags found within the head of every web page: <meta name=”keywords” content=”some,keywords,here” /> , <meta name=”description” content=”some description here” />, and <title>The title of the page</title>.

What each tag does is pretty self explanitory. Good Search Engine Optimization practice tell us that:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”some,keywords,here” /> = You would write about 20 keywords that best describes your web page.

<meta name=”description” content=”some description here” /> = You would write a small paragraph describing your site’s content using multiple keywords distinct to your site.

<title>The title of the page</title> = You would write a short title that might be the blog name and a less than one sentence description.

If you have small amounts of traffic, and you have not done what I’ve subscribed above, then you will double your traffic pretty quickly once you’ve done this.

Optimizing blog titles and meta data in Wordpress, for instance, becomes more tricky. You should consider getting one of the SEO plugins for wordpress that I list at the end of the article or visiting the Wordpress.org web page on SEO. Also, check out this link on Meta Tags in Wordpress. Remember that in a wordpress blog you have 4 types of pages that you have to optimize: the homepage, the archive, the single post, and the page. Rather than going on about this, let’s just say the end goal: Every page in your site should have different meta data tailored to that page. Most sites that have been lazy about meta data use the same meta data throughout the site and only change the titles. This is not what you want. You want to use Wordpress’ flexible Template Tags to build just the right data. (If you want more specifics, you’ll have to hire me).

If you remember at the beginning of the article, though, I said meta data does not matter one bit for very popular sites. Then why did I spend so much time on this subject? We’ll most sites aren’t really popular, so I think you’ll benefit from considering meta data on your site. But, how do I know that meta data isn’t all that important for popular sites? From an experiment I conducted in my blog sector. I write a design blog, so I took ten of the most popular design blogs as defined by Alexa, and I viewed their source to see what their meta data looked like. I thought I would find some meta data oracle that would show me the way to instant popularity, but I found the exact opposite. And, here is what I found:

  • None of the five blogs had any consistency with keywords or descriptions between them. They were all completely different even though the subject matter was quite similar.
  • A couple of the blogs did not have meta data at all. There was nothing to speak of to describe their data, and yet they remain amazingly popular.
  • Most of the blogs had no consistency between the home page meta data and the single post meta data.
  • One site even did not have meta data related to their subject and it seemed that it was a placeholder that was meant to be changed.

What should all this mean to you? There are other much more major areas where you should spend your time increasing traffic for your site. At the very least, you should definitely go to all the major search engines to see what your page results look like. If they quickly describe the results well, then you’re done. If they don’t describe what the page is about then go back to the boards immediately because either your title or your meta data needs work. Now, for a list of SEO Plugins:

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Posted in Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, SEO, wordpress | 1 Comment »

Essential Wordpress Plugins: Subscribe to Comments

Written by Brandon on November 3, 2007 – 3:56 am -

There are several essential items missing from Wordpress that you will want to add if you want to build a strong audience and revenue stream. Today, I want to discuss what’s missing with blog comments. Blog comments have no simple way for commentors to keep track of any responses to comments they’ve made. That’s where the Subscribe to Comments plugin comes in extremely handy. What this plugin provides is a simple check box below the comment form that allows commentors to receive email updates on any future comments. In a sense, this plugin creates a miniature forum where everyone in the conversation is updated.

From a business perspective, this plugin becomes a way to maintain a long lasting contact with readers that may not visit your site again.

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Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic, wordpress | 2 Comments »