Webmaster Tips & Tricks - The Webmaster’s Blog

I saw a post in a webmaster forum (and of course I replied) created by a user who claimed he hates seeing even a banner in a site and that he just stops reading the site and leaves. Oh really? I found this comment to be ignorant and mean and here is why.

Dear user who hates seeing ads on sites, I am sure you just started a site/forum and haven’t yet had the awesome chance to actually invest in it. Maybe you’re on a free host, “learning” to make a site, maybe you still believe that the sites need only to provide you with awesome information and not  make sure they do live the next day.

Why do us, mean people with ads, put them on the first place? Maybe we want to get rich or maybe we just like to annoy you. Or maybe we try to make sure this site lives till the next domain renewal. If you, who read this “rant”, think the same as our friend in that thread, let’s try to explain you, why we have some ads on our sites.

My network consists of 15-17 sites as we speak. 13 forums, directories, article collections. Many sites run on 2-3 scripts and provide thousands of informative posts. They do cost: 15 domains have to be renewed each year. Hosting is not free either. So that we can have as little downtimes and lags as possible we run the sites on 2 reseller accounts. Make that 30 USD a month.

The huge luck in my case was that I was able to create my own layouts. I don’t pay for the designs, but make them myself. Instead of paying thousands of dollars on the themes, I made them and saved this money.

We do have to pay for some promotion though from time to time and also for some content writing (not too much, but that comes to 40 USD a month at least).

And here we are … almost bankrupt.  For 5 years the network increased with new sites, new content and more visitors. For 5 years, the main admin (myself) has spent approximately 10 hours / day on the sites (weekends included). I stay up at night, I try to log in even at my normal job to write another article or post another support thread. Make the calculations and try to see how many dollars do all these thousands of work hours value? Are we talking thousands of dollars .. oh yeah.

But how much money do we make? Don’t be afraid, most of us don’t get rich over night. Most of us still pay from our own pocket for hosting/domains/promotion. Maybe we started earning a bit more, but all the money gets reinvested in the sites. As they grow we need to provide better support, more content and have better hosting plans.

As long as a site doesn’t overdo all the advertising, doesn’t flood you with popups, pop under ads, flash ads, referrals till you cannot see the real content anymore, don’t judge it too hard. Try to see the good content provided and understand that for this content someone loses nights, refuses to go out with friends, pays for a lot of things and is in a constant rush to offer you, the visitor/member even more good content.

If you found anything interesting in a site, stick to it and ignore the fact it displays a small banner. Don’t be afraid, that banner won’t put them alongside Bill Gates. That banner might get them 20 USD in a month or a bit more so that, when someone makes fun of the time and money they put into such a bad business, they can reply … “But I did earn some money”. Most of the time this money is so little we are far from recovering all expenses. But it makes us continue the journey and provide you with more useful content.

I recall being very angry on Wikipedia for instance for putting rel nofollow to the links people posted after submitting content to the mammoth project. I consider this to be a nasty trick to not let others also benefit from their hard work in the end. Placing a thoughtful comment or a good article is a promotion tactic indeed, but on the other hand people who submit they work in my sites also help me with the content.

This is something I really like. An entire movement towards regaining some of the good things the Internet used to have: cooperation, people who helped each others and didn’t just run for high PR forgetting to reward their content writers.

I was shocked tonight to realize my blog was with a nofollow tag attached by default. Wordpress seems to come with this bad setting and there’s no setting in it to remove the tag. Fortunately I was able to find a hack that would do this for me. From now on this blog is, as it should be, SEO friendly for you too, dear visitors.

Your opinions MATTER. Share your ideas and thoughts and “i follow” … As for the spam … I have akismet

I got my article writing groove back it seems. I didn’t create an article for some time and I just kept on thinking it’s hard and tedious to do this. Having too much work on the sites seems to make me not enjoy my administration job anymore in some days.

Still the idea came and the words wrote almost by themselves. As you know, I don’t re-publish articles from the web, I usually get my own ideas and put them down. Another unique article for you to enjoy:

3 wrong reasons to start a forum

Here are the reasons in a short list:

1. I chose a niche that has a high Adsense payment

2. Derived from the first reason: I chose to start a forum to get rich.

3. I chose to open a site as a revenge against another admin.

They all appear in the article with my comments. Enjoy

We have moved the article on our new blog.

This is maybe one of the most inspired things I did as a blogger while using WordPress. I activated Akismet and was safe from spam. I always wanted to have people comment on my blog posts, in the end I am not writing for myself in here. I got some nice comments from you, dear readers and also a lot of junk from the spammers who thought they can pass this protection system.

“Akismet has protected your site from 1,974 spam comments.” that’s what I see in my admin panel in here. Almost 2 thousand spam messages with links to all kinds of useless and illegal sites with owners who like to promote “wildly” wherever they can.

http://www.akismet.com - register there and activate the plug in.

Plase comments under moderation (so that you won’t have other surprises) and let Akismet deal with the garbage.

How many spam comments did your Akismet save your blog from?

We have moved the article on our new blog.

We all try to get some revenue from our hard worked sites. I never started a site to get rich (maybe I should think about this), but I could surely use some money from all my work. I have created sites for the last 5 years, I have written hundreds of articles in many topics and thousands of posts in  my 12 forums.

I have domains to renew and also hosting to pay. That’s what makes me think a bit more about getting few bucks for all these expenses and the time I could spend shopping or suntanning …

I tried Adsense with very small results. I didn’t yet give up on it, but the payment is so small I just stopped thinking about it as my best source of income from my sites.

I don’t even know how I got to use Text Link Ads … I saw a banner or something and visited the site. It does look OK and the system too. My main problem as a Romanian is to be able to cash the check (cannot get money through Paypal), so I made sure I also have this checked. It looks like other people from my country were able to use this with some success, so I created an account and started submitting my sites.

The system is simple: I am being paid for putting a link in a page or sitewide and that depends on my page PR. Yes, it’s for the first time in my life I care about this and you can understand now that I do try to make my PR higher. I can also be paid for RSS and even affiliate links. I have several sites that were accepted and little by little advertisers started buying links on my pages. Here is what I earned so far:
March 2007      $8.27
April 2007     $21.53
May 2007     $48.07
June 2007     $87.28

I already got the check for these payments (I set it to 100 USD + and I have 160 ~). The check arrived very soon, I didn’t even know what’s in the envelope since I thought that it would take more time to go from USA to Romania. Well .. it took 5 days.

I am waiting for my bank to confirm payment and I’ll get myself a nice IPB license for one of my martial arts forums.

I already earned 96 USD on this month and I hope I’ll be able to get a steady 100+ USD for the next period. I will work more on my PR and hope I’ll be able to submit more sites into the system. The only issue would be that I am paid 50% from what my links make, but that doesn’t bother me too much because:

1. they put a small list of links (I chose the number), where I WANT …

2. I don’t have to fear I will be kicked from the system for invalid clicks (they buy my PR, no one cares about clicks)

3. I can sell whatever advertising space I want and still get some small revenue from this (not that small at all right now)

4. the bigger the PR, the better my payment.

I can’t wait to see my next PR for the sites .. maybe we can earn even more

More than 1 year ago I have bought a domain: www.stampstobuy.com since I wanted to sell some of my stamps. Now don’t think I own a huge collection, but I have some of them that might be happier with other stamps in a bigger better collection. I started collecting stamps ages ago, but lost interest since a good collection requires money and that’s something I didn’t quite have.

Still after creating www.banivechi.com for my boy friend (a site with his numismatic collection) and taming oscommerce to work and look as I wanted, it was the time for me to create another site running on oscommerce. In a way a reason for me to create a new site. I know I HAVE A PROBLEM

After some weeks I placed the site online, put few stamps and realized I’ll never have too many of them and in the end I would better provide people with their own shop and not only my stamps. Oscommerce has a multi-shop hack, but I was reluctant to try it. Don’t know why .. my tests were’n too promising, so I was on the search for a multi-shop (mall) script or an auction type.

I hit hotscripts.com as usually and found some paid sollutions. The good thing was that I also found a free script (as it was once) called phpauction. I downloaded the old version from sourceforge and started playing with it. The good thing was that it had a decent template system (nothing awesome, but still I was able to implement my design on it) and it looked OK. Till I tried to put some test auctions and it had a problem: it would show them as ended, even if they weren’t even begun for 2 minutes.

As you can gues, I looked for a support forum. NONE. The site www.phpauction.net has no working forum. There is an unofficial forum though, with some interesting topics. I was able to find out that I should better buy the script (the cheapest version is 24 USD) and start from there.

I went back to the official site and created an account. Afterwards I contacted them since I am in Romania and sending money abroad is a tad tricky. I discussed with a woman on the email and in few days we were able to make the transaction. I paid something like 48 USD with all the bank fees and commisions in my country and the destination too. I was pleased to be able to finally have the script.

I was given the download link and started working on the site. The first errors started appearing. When I tried to click on a category I’d get a nasty “fatal error”. I got a response in few hours from a guy from the support and received a patch for the files. I overwrote the files and it was OK.

After some hours .. another thing … when I would go to a second level category the url would be weird … again .. ticket .. few hours .. response … rewrite the files .. working.

Then I wanted to send a message from a test user I made to my account so that I see the contact works .. oops .. SQL error … again .. you guessed … submit a ticket, get a patch … works again.

Now I have another issue with category list not collapsing in the admin panel. Yes, I’ll submit ANOTHER ticket and get the issue solved.

Why I would think again about getting this script?

• well, it’s buggy and without support I wouldn’t be able to make it work. I won’t purchase a “superior” package (200 USD) since this one has ALL the features I need. And if this won’t work, what gives me guarantees the other one will do? I cannot get a refund since they won’t offer this, so we need to make it work, even if someone will kill me at the support desk
• there’s no support community .. I cannot belive this. I have forums for all possible things .. why not create a forum to help us with the script? With some official patches too?
• the script is a mess .. I cannot believe I need to be given a patch each time I run into issues. Doesn’t anyone test this thing? I did only NORMAL things with it and it failed to function. Others had the same issue. Can’t anyone there make another release that WORKS?

Why am I still using it? Am I crazy?

• I am crazy .. that’s a good reason. Or .. I paid (even double) for something that NEEDS TO WORK. I cannot be refunded for my payment, nor for the time I worked on this stupid site to make it work. So .. I will keep on using it and then maybe monetize. Next step: get a script that’s more expensive and will work. So far I want to make some money out of this.
• The script is nice when working. It does have a lot of features and I like it. I was able to work on the template system quite nicely and even if it does have some issues with the css, it is a good script from my point of view. Leaving aside my problems with the errors mentioned, phpauction is not such a bad choice.
• Support: if the script is buggy at least something works there: the support. I was able to get answers for my problems in hours (I would like minutes, but it’s OK even so) and the support was … supportive

Let’s hope I will be able to make that script work. BTW .. do you have some stamps? Trade them for free on www.stampstobuy.com

I purchased a reseller account from www.qualityhostonline.com with 10 USD for a client of mine 2-3 months ago and we moved their sites there. It looked OK. 20 GB bandwidth and enough space for some sites. Since I wasn’t that pleased with the reseller account I got from Romania, I though .. 10 USD is not such a huge sum, I can aford this. So I bought another account.

I created the account and started moving some of my sites that would need a good place. The bad thing is that my bandwidth is split in 2: 10 GB I have for my main site (portfolio) www.dojodesign.ro and only 10 GB are to be resold. That’s something new for me since the previous hosting firm didn’t do this. I contacted and asked if I can manage the bandwidth in another way: let 1 GB for the portfolio (how much can a portfolio occupy?) and use the rest for the other sites. NO I cannot do that

The solution? I’ll put all my downloads in the portfolio site. This way I can use that bandwidth that’s been so wrogly allocated.

The second problem would be with some recurring SQL errors. ALL my forums have them and they didn’t have any before. I think it’s time for a support ticket … will keep you posted