Skewster

Steve, a blog entrepreneur I’ve known for some time, has posted a very clever technique to improve your Google AdSense income. It revolves around using WP-Super-Cache (which is a performance optimising plugin for WordPress) to reduce the amount of adverts you’re serving.

What? Yes, it’s a well known fact that if you display a lot of adverts without them leading to conversions, Google reduces the value of the adverts. What Steve’s proposing is that search engine visitors are more likely to convert via AdSense ads. Therefore, if you find a way to ONLY serve to AdSense traffic, you’ll get better conversions and better revenue.

Because the income I make from Adsense ad clicks is directly related to the conversion rate of the people seeing the ads, it is to my benefit to only show these ads to interested parties. If too many ad impressions are shown but do not lead to conversions, Google will reduce the payout per click for my entire site. This phenomenon is know as “smart pricing”. In this case of MyWifeQuitHerJob.com, the best way for me to maximize conversions is to show Google Adsense ads only to search engine visitors and this is exactly what I do.

Maximise Adsense by only showing ads to search engine visitors at MyWifeQuitHerJob.

I’ve been researching how to make my WordPress themes more visual and magazine-styled. The best way to do this is to download some WordPress themes that give this functionality and dissect how they work, then replicate the features you like into a custom theme of your own. How is this achieved? Well, check out some WordPress galleries:

1. 11 Free Magazine Style WordPress themes
2. 23 Awesome Free Magazine Style Themes in 2009, and
3. Best Free Magazine WordPress Themes

There are some really good (and a few bad) examples of themes that remix the content from your blog posts and present it in a really sexy way, making your WordPress site look more professional and attractive.

Wow – I haven’t been following WordPress developments lately, just mostly keeping up with security updates. But the 2.9 release looks jam-packed with amazing new features. I can now see WordPress developing into a full-blown CMS with some of this stuff.

Gentlemen, start your engines! WordPress 2.9 is just around the corner. Unlike WordPress 2.8, which Mark Jaquith describes as the Snow Leopard of WordPress since most of the basis of the WordPress 2.8 upgrade was complete rewrites and optimization of the infrastructure that ran WordPress instead of providing lots of new features in the same way Apple’s new OS X release is a focus on improved performance instead of features, WordPress 2.9 brings major new “bling” to the table.

via 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9.

Themeing hooks for image thumbnails, automatic database repair and optimisation and so much more. Well done, WordPress – get the latest version from WordPress.org.

Smashing Magazine posit that the fixed-format blog post may give way to a more elaborate blogzine style of posting in which each post has its own unique stylesheet, making it look more like a magazine in concept than a blog.

I first saw this in effect when Jason Santa Maria redesigned his blog a while back. It’s an amazing concept, and visually stunning. The problem for 99% of web users, bloggers and whatnots is that they just don’t have the design skills to make something like this happen. Plus, for the majority of people, having to think so hard about the design of an article would be a disincentive to write at all!

For those designers who have the time, creativity and ability to make the blogzine format work, there may be a new niche in it for them to own.

Protecting your WordPress feeds: we’re getting a lot of spammy sites reusing items from our RSS feeds and automatically posting them on other WordPress blogs.

It’s horrible to discover this happening – you write up a large post and within five minutes, it appears on other sites exactly as you typed it. One way we’re combatting this is by making sure we add at least a couple of inward links within our posts – that helps us to detect the problem a bit quicker, but also generates some backlinks into the site at the same time.

However, we’d like to automate this to some degree. And that’s why I’m sharing Lorelle’s great resource post – WordPress Plugins for Feeds – to help anyone who’s investigating ways to protect their blog content.

Oh, another thing I do is religiously report any scraper sites to AdSense, although I have yet to see them cancel the accounts of these sites.

Kudos to Search Engine Journal for this list of 10 essential WordPress plugins – including this one: WP Security Scan, which I shall be running on my sites right away!

Just updated the P2 theme for WordPress – and it looks much more like the one from WordPress.com now. Much more customizable.