Welcome to Smuggle Me

Today I was reading over some information about using Google Apps with your own domain and I just happened to see a post about highlighting authors comments in Wordpress. I’ve seen it all the time in Techcrunch and I really like that they do that. I’ve just always been too lazy to change my template to search for how it was done. Turns out that it’s really easy. In fact, the link I sent above makes it sound harder than it really is.

I basically added an If the comment author email equals the admin’s email account, then list a style. Otherwise, don’t change the style of the comments. How do you like that pseudocode? Anyway, it was really easy to do if you know php and css. As I did it, I realized that my css still needs a lot of work. However, I think it turned out pretty good. I think the comments look much nicer with a little color.

I was just looking through my long list of draft posts and I found this post that I never published. It’s a little dated, but still a good read.

I recently posted about making it to #1 on Wordpress.com. At first I made it only to the top of English blogs, but I eventually made it to top of all 480 thousand blogs.

Well, it turns out that being at the top of Wordpress.com brings even more traffic to your website. I always wondered how much extra traffic Scoble was receiving from being the top of Wordpress.com. Now I know and so I’m going to share it with everybody.

First you have to understand that there are a number of ways that Wordpress.com sends your blog traffic. The two methods I’m talking about in this post is Wordpress.com and Blogs of the Day. Tags is another method, but that’s a topic for another day.

Referrals from Wordpress.com to So You Think You Can Dance blog:
11-13 36 Referrals
11-14 40 Referrals
11-15 127 Referrals
11-16 396 Referrals (Hit #1 English Blog)
11-17 487 Referrals (Hit #1 Blog)
11-18 52 Referrals

Referrals from Blogs of the Day to So You Think You Can Dance blog:
11-13 3 Referrals
11-14 3 Referrals
11-15 11 Referrals
11-16 22 Referrals (Hit #1 English Blog)
11-17 29 Referrals (Hit #1 Blog)
11-18 12 Referrals

The best part of getting all this new traffic is that you are finding new readers that will often post a link to your blog on their blog. I should also acknowledge that the name of the blog will affect the numbers above. I guess Wordpress.com is much more important than the Wordpress Blogs of the Day.

It was still fun to think that my blog was the most visited that day out of 480 thousand blogs.

I’ve been with PayPerPost for pretty much as long as anyone else. After all, I am Postie #61. Well, it’s been a great ride. I’ve made a chunk of cash. Learned from watching Ted the marketing genius. Made a lot of interesting friends.

However, there are a number of things that just get my panty hose all bunch up. All you ladies out there know how much fun that is. It’s not. So, here’s my list of Top PayPerPost pains. I decided to not specify a number. Instead I’d just spell it out.

1. 2 emails every time I get paid - this is a minor annoyance, but one would be better
2. Filling out a captcha when commenting on their blog - If they had used Wordpress akismet would have stopped spam and saved me the heartache
3. Opportunity Sort is by Date Entered - The first thing I do when looking at opportunities is to sort it by $$. I’ve been doing this for a year and a half and I wish it was the default (or at least my default)
4. I have 2 bans that should be benches, but it was before benches existed
5. My pile of payperpost referrals hasn’t paid me squat. I keep hoping that one will pull through and make me some cash, but it might be hopeless. I guess that program wasn’t as good as I thought it would be.
6. It doesn’t remember my username on the login screen.
7. Brit won’t hook us up to her Tropicana model pictures
8. My PR 5 blog dropped to a PR 4 blog and Google’s PR update is taking forever. Ok, that’s not PPP’s fault, but I’m blaming them because my other PR 5 blog is so niched focused I’ve only been able to do one opp. Therefore, it shows me a long list of high paying opps which I can’t do, because my PR 5 blog is so niche focused. That’s like the proverbial dangling the carrot. I wish I could “delist” my PR 5 blog so I didn’t have this problem.
9. Ted use to dangle weekly marketing ploys, announcements, etc that were entertaining and interesting. The celestial ARGUS will be essentially 5 months of anticipation. 5 months pretty much translates to a disappointing release in November. I expect it to be like moving a computer from 2-4 gigs of RAM. The 4 gigs of RAM is sexy, but doesn’t really add much value to my experience.

Of course, I hope I’m wrong about number 9, but 5 months of dreaming is hard to fulfill. I guess we’ll see if Argus is more like iPhone or Vista.

I’ve been checking my Wordpress.com stats which is now a stats plugin for blogs outside of Wordpress.com too. Well, it seems like something broke the stats on Wordpress.com.

Ok, so it’s not completely broken. It’s just parsing the files wrong. None of the searches are being parsed into search keywords. They are all being included in the Referrers category instead of search terms. It doesn’t seem to have affected the number of visitors to my site, but it does make it hard to know how people found me.

I better submit a ticket to Wordpress to see what’s going on. I can’t live without ALL my stats. It’s my cocaine.

Automattic (the makers of Wordpress) have put out their Wordpress stats plugin that’s been on Wordpress dot com forever. I must admit that there are still a lot of things about BAStats that I will always love, but for a stats junkie like myself it’s nice to have two different views of my blog stats.

I still have a little work to make the Wordpress stats function work properly for me. It’s not capturing the title of my blog posts for some reason. I’m not exactly sure why. However, it’s the totals and referral pages that I really care about.

One last word of caution. The Automattic Wordpress stats plugin does require you to have a Wordpress.com account and the worst part is that you have to go to Wordpress.com to see the stats page. Luckily I figured out how to give permission to my various Wordpress.com accounts so I don’t have to log in and out. That would have definitely been a deal clincher.

I love talking with people that don’t know much about blogging and tell them that I get paid to blog. Their jaws drop and then ask how I’m able to do that. If they were honest they would ask me what they were really thinking: who pays you to blog? It’s pretty simple if you know something about blogs. Blogs are very powerful and offer a lot of advantages over other forms of online advertising.

It turns out that a lot of people understand this principle, because I’ve gotten a number of requests for me to do paid blog posts. It was pretty nice to do that, but there was quite a few logistical costs that weren’t so fun to manage. For this reason, I’m glad that PayPerPost is leading the industry in blog advertising and has recently started PayPerPost Direct.

I’ve been meaning to add it to my blog for a while, but I’m finally getting around to it. There are actually a number of other options similar to this in the marketplace like ReviewMe. I’ve heard ReviewMe keeps up to half of your money on posts. That makes me wonder why I should even try with ReviewMe. Maybe others have experiences that would teach me otherwise, but for now I think I’ll stick with PPP direct, because they only charge 10%. I’m interested to see if PPP can continue to do it with those margins since I know how much PayPal charges per transaction.

Once again I wish I had Dan Rua’s seat and could enjoy watching PayPerPost’s statistics on clicks, conversions, margins, etc. Maybe once I finish my Masters degree next year I can convince Ted to hire me. I’ll be their resident jack of all traits that can cover for anyone that is gone. Well, I can always dream.

By the way, here’s a link where you can hire me to blog about you, your company or your mamma.

I must admit that I never thought I’d be saying this, but the instant upgrade plugin for wordpress is great. I’m a little nervous with the file permissions you have to set on the server. I think that if you do it wrong, then you could be opening yourself up to some problems. I suggest installing the InstantUpgrade plugin and run it. Then, it will walk you through which files and folder you need to give 777 permissions to. Don’t read their documentation. The program is designed to tell you exactly what you need to change.

Despite the permissions issue, the InstantUpgrade plugin worked like a charm. This blog had a problem with it install (probably due to my lack of upgrading) and so I just ran instant upgrade and it made my comments start working again and made the plugins page in my admin utility work again. The plugins page would just go blank before the update.

Sure, I know I could have done this manually, but that would have taken a while. InstantUpgrade did it in no time flat. In fact, I remember sitting back in my chair after hitting the upgrade. Then, I saw there was something on the screen already to read. As I read it I realized the upgrade was already complete.

I’m sure this sounds like an infomercial, but I just really liked using the InstantUpgrade plugin.

I also love the latest version of Wordpress. Finally some of the great features I’ve been enjoying on Wordpress.com on my other blogs.

Life has been so busy. Plus, it’s just going to get worse. That doesn’t mean I don’t love this blog. It just means that maybe I need a break. My work has been absolutely insane, because I’m not going to be around for 2 and a half weeks. That’s never a good thing for a blog or a job. At least not where I’m going.

Oh well, I’m still here and you can know that I’ll be back in full force as soon as things calm down a bit. I have too much to say and as I’m driving around in my car I often dream writing a blog post. I guess I just need to get Gabcast and a cell phone that I can use to post things to my blog. I love gabcast, but I still think they’re missing their killer feature: voice recognition that will translate essentially a podcast into text so that it can be searchable.

I think I’m finally convinced that I need to start working on Joomla. I’ve seen too many Web 2.0 websites that have been very successful using Joomla. Plus, an open source content management system is the future of creating cool websites where the content needs to be easily updated. I have one website that I’ve created called Spoil My Spouse which was coded by hand. That’s great and all, but I really think that was a mistake. I’m really considering taking Spoil My Spouse and converting it to Joomla so that it is much easier to expand. The key will be taking the current design and creating Joomla Templates to match the look and feel. Luckily there are lots of nice resources online like the 5 Easy Steps to Make a Joomla Template or the 100k registered users in the Joomla Forum.

The next problem after Joomla templates is trying to figure out which Joomla extensions are useful. There are way too many and I don’t know how you start to figure out which ones are good and which ones you need. Regardless, as a web designer it’s so much nicer to be able to let someone else code something nicely and then I just need to integrate it. That’s perfect for the hack of a web designer that I am.

Oh yea, and Joomla can integrate Wordpress. Always a good thing if it involves Wordpress.

This post Sponsored by Club TVK.

Today I found out that PayPerPost will be announcing tomorrow their purchase of Performancing. Here are some of the key details of the acquisition.

Included in the purchase:
Performancing’s network of 28,000 professionals (mostly bloggers)
Performancing Metrics
Performancing Exchange

Not included in the purchase:
Performancing for Firefox blog editor
Performancing Partners Ad technology

I’ve personally run across a number of Performancing blog posts that I found useful as a blogger. However, I don’t see how PayPerPost is going to keep this type of great blogger content going. That’s the sad part for bloggers. PayPerPost is offering performancing metrics users an opportunity to get paid to review performancing metrics and exchange platforms.

While it’s a good thing for PayPerPost to have 28,000 more bloggers that could start doing PayPerPost, I wish that PayPerPost were getting more advertisers. Maybe advertisers don’t want to come to PayPerPost because they don’t have enough bloggers or at least a diverse enough set of bloggers. Although, it’s always been my philosophy that PayPerPost will be most successful if they can attract as many advertisers as possible. I can guarantee you that bloggers will swarm to PayPerPost if enough advertisers are putting money on the table.

The real question is whether PayPerPost is going to take all these new bloggers and provide targeted ad placement for their advertisers. This type of targeted blog advertising will make PayPerPost significantly more valuable to advertisers.