That Web Man

I’d received some copy text and some photographs from a friend who’s asked me to do his business a web site. He’s a hands-on guy and marketing brochures aren’t his forté so there wasn’t a great deal to work with.

So I sorted out some crops, re-sizes and thumbnails, decided to use WordPress just because, added a few tweaks like a “lightbox”, put together a formmail page (with a “thanks” redirect) and Bob’s your uncle: one classy web site in just a few hours.

I am involved with a local school on a personal basis. Yesterday, we were asked to come in for a training session to go through our own log-in for committee notes and our school e-mail which we can access via a webmail interface from our “desktops”.

I logged in, changed the default password, changed the theme of the desktop and then sent myself an e-mail as they use quite an involved address. I set up some notifications for the committees and asked the IT head if it would be possible to have my school e-mails forwarded to my own e-mail address. It wasn’t.

When I got in, I downloaded the e-mail and looked in great detail at the message headers, worked out which server was the most likely candidate and then set up my mail client to poll the school e-mail server to get my e-mails that way. Not hacking though, I hasten to add.

One of my long-term clients was kind enough to send me a cheque this week for two small invoices, so that it arrived within the payment terms … which is nice.

I didn’t get a chance to pay it in yesterday, so I was planning to nip out to the bank today. Fortunately Mrs Web Man spotted that the cheque hadn’t been signed … doh!

The client has now agreed to pay by BACS this time and hopefully they’ll continue doing so in future to save time and effort. We’ll see.

Well I added some more affiliate links as I mentioned earlier and one of them has already produced a $50 referral fee, so that’s paid for the domain name a few times over.

It’s probably still early days yet in terms of search engine positioning, but the site is already producing a number of clicks if not too many actual conversions.

So this evening, I registered two new domain names pointing at the same site: sexynylonwomen.com and women-in-nylon.com. I am hoping this will eventually drive more traffic that way and I am after all only re-investing some of the affiliate income into the site.

What I wanted to do was have both new domains mirror the existing site, but I have set my WordPress installation up to serve pages as the main domain name so they actually end up being effectively redirected. This is a pity as I really wanted the content to be available (and hence listed) as being from three sites – which is a tad naughty in terms of some search engine rules. Never mind though: at least it makes them ‘legal’ in terms of those guidelines.

The alternative was to set up two new WordPress installations and syndicate the main site to the two new sites, but this would have meant syndicating syndicated feeds which could then have its own repercussions. And of course it would mean two additional sites to update when there are new WordPress software releases.

Can I apologise to everyone else who uses WordPress: it’s my fault they’ve just released a security update – I was just thinking it had been two months since the last release and lo and behold a security release is … er … released.

In my case that means updating 14 web sites running WordPress. Eek!

Fortunately that only involved manually updating three sites (i.e. downloading the updated version, uploading it over the three installations and running the upgrade script).

The other 11 sites are all hosted at DreamHost* which boasts one-click installations and upgrades, so for these sites the upgrades required a theme back-up for each of the sites just in case and then clicking the upgrade link in the DreamHost web control panel, waiting a few minutes and then clicking the link in the confirmation e-mail. Once done, a quick upload of the customised themes and all done.

* Don’t forget to enter the promo code THATWEBMAN to get your $50 discount.

So that post about adult affiliate marketing and more particularly, the affiliate programs’ links and banners got me thinking: why not go for a full-on site featuring both affiliate advertising, free affilate-provided sample pages and even free content by way of RSS feeds?

And that’s exactly what I did, adding in some regular posts as well as some free YouTube content provided again by their tagged RSS feeds.

As usual, DreamHost got me set up in an evening and I put some banners in place and syndicated some RSS feeds. One of them, though, is refusing to release its formatting so I’ve had to ruin the design by giving the posts a white background so that the formatted black text can be read. Pain in the arse, but the support bods at Traffic Cash Gold are trying to help out now. Affilate links are coming from TCG as well as Adult Pay Master and the Lady Sonia franchise.

Anyhow, fill yer boots with pr0n at Glamorous Matures.

This site amused me a lot: Make My Logo Bigger Cream

Now this blog may be pretty ‘busy’, but I’m a big fan of white space and the “less is more” approach to design without being too heavy (or should that be ‘light’) on the minimalism.

I have two clients who were presented with clean and attractive web site designs that they slowly chipped away at demanding bigger, bolder fonts, in-your-face images and more “stuff” until they ended up with sites that frankly I’d rather I wasn’t featuring on my client portfolio.

Maybe they should buy some of these products

I followed a link to another site and from there to this guy’s site – another WordPress lover like me.

He’s set out his Top 53 Blog Designs of 2007 and there are some fab ones to look at and to get some inspiration from.

On the subject of advertising, two of the main earners on the Internet are gambling sites and adult sites.

Google’s AdSense program, however, does not allow their use on sites featuring “pornography, adult or mature content” as well as other prohibited sites. So the alternatives to such ‘legitmate’ advertising programs are adult affiliate advertising programs, but which to use?

Well if you follow that link, you’ll come across a very interesting blog entry from Matt Peskett in February 2007. He mentioned just how professional Traffic Cash Gold is.

Now at this point, I should confess that I operate a web site featuring adult content. And why not? It’s not pornography: it simply combines my creative side by way of web design and photography, my business side by way of seeking to make some money doing what I enjoy doing and my personal side by allowing me to indulge in what else I enjoy…

The earnings from running the site aren’t exactly massive at a little over $500 since I started it up late last year, but then again it isn’t a full-on, XXX site either so the membership fees are a very modest $13.95 a month for those that continue past the initial $9.95/21 days taster. Modelling fees and location costs have actually more than used up the revenues (let alone the domain names and hosting on top of that), but then again it is a great way to spend a day so I’m not complaining!

So anyway, last week I signed up with TCG and placed three small banner ads. in the sidebar of the samples page on my site so as not to make the rest of the site look too tacky. And I already have one $35 referral fee! So it’s a start and another $35 to go towards the next modelling fee…

The main source of traffic to my site is a channel on YouTube which I started in February 2007 and to which I post a video from the main web site every few weeks (I currently have 11 videos showing there). As of today, it  has 908 subscribers, the channel has been viewed 81,073 times and the videos themselves have been viewed a total of 832,193 times. If only I had been paid a buck or even less per view!

You’ll perhaps have noticed that over there in the sidebar are some adverts provided by Google’s AdSense program: they are based upon the content in the page where they are shown and if a visitor clicks through one of them, I get paid a few cents depending upon what the advertiser is willing to pay Google through their corresponding AdWords program. I run AdSense ads. on all my personal blogs and personal sites and I also serve some on one page of one of my businesses’ sites.

I’ll never get rich from displaying Google Ads – I reckon to average less than a dollar a day but hey, $300 a year is better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick – but I had noticed that revenues had been falling.

Now the positioning of the ads. over there in this particular sidebar isn’t that good from a layout perspective as most of them are “below the fold”, i.e. you have to scroll down to see them.

Google helpfully provide a useful guide on positioning their ads for maximum exposure/benefit in their AdSense Help Center. There’s a dedicated page for positioning for blogs too.

So as something of an experiment, I changed the positioning and added another set of ads to two of my sites: one a business listing site and the other a blog-based site for a community project I am involved with.

The results have been surprising with both sites performing significantly better since taking into account Google’s suggestions. My advice? Give it a go if you’re serving the ads.

Not signed up to earn money through AdSense? Click on the AdSense button in the sidebar.