Conversion Matters

Whilst I agree that wordpress is a fantastic piece of software I think it’s important to realise that it has it’s place and that place is not everywhere.

I used to think that I’d probably end up using wordpress for every site ever unless there was a really obvious reason not to use it. I’ve now realised that kind of philosophy is wrong.

Think, for example, about a mini niche site - I’m talking < 10 pages kind of site - would you really want to use wordpress for this? Sure there are benefits, like being able to create content really easily with the editor but I think for a mini site the cons outweigh the pros.

For wordpress to be really good you have to download, unzip, upload, and activate at least a few plugins. That’s not the end of the world I know but couple that with creating databases, modifying name servers and you begin to realise that wordpress isn’t quite as simple as you initially thought.

And then the major drawback security risks. Wordpress itself is not an inherently insecure piece of software. However, not keeping up to date with the updates and patches is very risky business. From experience it’s enough effort keeping one or two blogs up to date. Imagine trying to keep 100 wordpress sites up to date?

Right now I’m in the process of creating, well, as many mini niche sites as I can, and I am not using wordpress. One day I’d love to create myself a centralised dashboard for upgrading and managing all my wordpress installs but at the moment that is not an option.

Fortunately with the tiniest bit of PHP knowledge you can still have some relatively easy to create websites. Head on over to the OSWD and find a template you like. Then simply split it up into header / footer etc and with a simple <?php include('header.php') ?> you have a nice easy to use template and don’t have to worry about security (so much).

I might release the template I’ve been using at some point when I’m done making my sites but it’s not difficult, anyone can do it really.

I’m an advocate of the more tag for a number of reasons - some people don’t like it but I use it where I feel it is appropriate.

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Unsurprisingly it takes a lot of time to blog properly. For the first few months of this blog I didn’t invest much time and consequently it didn’t really take off at all.

In September I had a month where I had finished work and hadn’t quite started university and managed to blog quite a lot and Conversion Matters was just starting to take of a little, however now I’ve started university and it’s quite hard to find the time to blog as much as I’d like.

Many people naively think you could spend half an hour a day blogging and that would be enough. It’s just not true!

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This is a topic that ChrisG has touched upon before (and probably others) but I believe it is an important one that deserves revisiting.

As a blogger you have to realise that people will consume your content in different ways. You will have organic search traffic, RSS subscribers, and referrals from other bloggers and social media sites.

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Out of 304 impressions I got 2 clicks. Woofuckinghoo. 0.66% click through rate. I guess it could be worse… perhaps?

It would actually be pretty cool if you were able to filter out some of your content for syndication because I don’t know how it chooses what to display but some of my content is certainly not my best and I’d rather only syndicate what I think is most likely going to grab others attention.

Eitherway, I have about 300 ‘credits’ left so I’ll probably leave it until they run out and then delete it unless I think of a compelling reason to keep it.

Some people have had more success with it, surprise surprise. It clearly works hugely in favour of big name bloggers who already receive loads of traffic.

A new service has been launched called blogrush. It’s a system aimed to increase blog exposure and traffic for bloggers. You can see it in action in my sidebar over there ->.

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I recently came across a blog about making money online by a guy named Angel.

I’d came across a post discussing the recent slapping Google seem to have given directories and I left a comment with my thoughts, I also said I wasn’t so keen on his navbar or post titles and here is why.

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No nofollow / do-follow is a movement with the aim of eradicating no-follow on blog comments. Their motto is:

“Fight spam. Not blogs.”

It is important for new bloggers to join this movement in order to encourage reader participation.

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There are three separate areas of optimisation every blogger should focus on after they’ve optimally setup their blog. These are as follows, usability optimisation - the process of optimising the layout, navigation, content etc. of the blog. Performance optimisation - helping to make sure that if your blog is dugg or receives a spike in traffic it can cope and doesn’t keel over. And finally search engine optimisation - to ensure maximum exposure in the SERPs (search engine results pages).

Now I don’t claim to be the definitive authority in any of these fields but I will share with you what I’ve learnt so you can take away the parts you feel are relevant and apply them to your own blogs.

This will for the most part be focused on wordpress powered blogs but some points may be relevant to all blogging platforms.

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