Be sure to check out part 1 here.

Well, it worked for a while. Here are some lessons I learned from implementing part 1 of the experiment.

Lesson 1: Don’t Break Your Crossposter
I was using a crossposting plugin to re-post t-shirt’s blogs onto the myspace blog, but there was a nasty drug-interaction sort of situation between that plugin and another I’m using. After that, I had to start re-posting the blog notifications manually because I wasn’t particulularly interested in coming up with a fix. If you’re going to do this, lesson 1 is that you can’t break your crossposter, because it’s essential. Manual crossposting is a pain in the ass and impossible to maintain. I know that Jared Smith is using the same plugin without fail, so it’s definitely my fault and not the authors.

Lesson 2: Outsource
Outsource your spam monitoring and friend-adding to someone, either a hired hand or maybe just a gullible friend. The MySpace friend-adding process is incredibly clunky, and a terrible drain on time. It seriously wasn’t worth my time to send out those invitations.

Lesson 3: Don’t Bypass msplinks.com
I was also using a little code trick to bypass MySpace’s msplinks.com outgoing link redirect. Apparently that will get your account deleted. I say “apparently” because there was no warning, or even a notification email. I just noticed one day that the account didn’t exist any longer. This is the only thing I did that I could imagine would piss off the powers that be at MySpace.

I’ve since re-registered the name, but have not re-created the profile. If I’m going to pursue this again, I will need to apply some of the above lessons and approach it from a different angle. That being said though, there WAS a noticable traffic increase and some new RSS subscriptions, so I’m convinced that this can work well if your demographic matches the MySpace crowd. You just have to have the resources to commit to such a high maintenance site (at least to begin with).

Last year I thought I’d give Office Live a try because it integrated with the Microsoft Accounting 2007 package that I use. Office Live includes a free domain, but a woefully inadequate…well, everything else. After a quick Google search I came up with this article where I found what to ask Microsoft for before cancelling. If you’ve got an Office Live account, or if you want to create one just for the free domain, you can move your domain to your host of choice whenever you’d like.

Here’s how to move your domain step by step: (more…)

If you have a blog or website and aren’t using Google Analytics, you should check it out. There are equivalent services out there but there are a couple compelling reasons to try Analytics.

• Detailed
  There’s so much information available on your traffic patterns, it’s crazy. You can easily see where everyone’s coming from, where they went, the paths they took through the site, etc. It really gives you some great opportunities to increase value for your readers by adjusting the site to them.
• Interface
  With the amount of data that Analytics tracks, it’s amazing they’re able to keep the interface as clean and as organized as it is. The dashboard is very helpful for a quick overview, but it’s still easy to drill down and switch between sites.
• Adwords integration
  If you run adwords, you can set up conversion goals and traffic funnels to determine which pages need to be tweaked. I haven’t done any of this yet, but I can see how helpful it would be.
• Free
  Seriously, they could charge for this, it’s so useful.

All that being said though, I’ve had some problems with it. I’m currently tracking 3 domains and I’ve noticed some overlap. All of the top landing pages for this site are being identified as t-shirt pages. When I’m tracking tshirt all the data fits, but I can’t see which pages you’re all landing on when you visit bradleykelly.com.

I’ve triple-checked the tracking code I don’t know how many times, and I’ve tried using the legacy Urchin code instead of the Javascript. I’m starting to debate putting this domain on a separate Analytics account so it has a new ID. Any ideas?

Always practice what you preach, right? I was making a “simple” change to t-shirt live yesterday, just swapping out one ad block for another. I finished my change and notice the site was broken badly in IE, but not Firefox. “No big deal” I thought to myself. After undoing the change, the problem persisted. That’s when I started to worry a bit. Pulling out backup copies, turning on and off the relevant plugin, nothing seemed to work. I started to panick a bit and Jared was able to point out a few things I might have overlooked.

The problem ended up being a completely different plugin that I had installed a day earlier and had used sucessfully a few times. Turning that one off fixed everything. Apparently the two elements couldn’t play nice together. Finding problems like this ahead of time is a good reason to keep a Wordpress test environment. I suppose I was arrogant enough to think that this one change was simple enough that I could do it on the live site. Oops.

Today I created a MySpace profile for tshirtreviewblog.com. There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of traffic to be had with MySpace. Plenty of bands don’t even have actual websites anymore, relying solely on the incestual sort of traffic you find on MySpace.

I’ve had a personal profile forever since that’s where all my friends are, but I’ve long avoided doing something like this to drive traffic to a site.  I don’t have the mad skills to hack up a decent-enough page. I simply lack the CSS knowledge to bob and weave my way through the convoluted ass-backwards web of code that is MySpace. Thankfully, Mike Davidson (founder of Newsvine) has the skills that I lack. He shared them on his blog quite a while back, but I hadn’t looked until recently.

Why you want to use MySpace to drive traffic to your site

• Brand Awareness
  I see plenty of companies, especially those in youth-centric niches that have a website, but just maintain a MySpace (should I really capitalize it? I feel ridiculous. It’s myspace from now on.) profile just to keep their name out there. The pages are rarely updated, but there’s a steady flow of visitors there. Politicians do this too. Why else would they be on myspace? Seriously.
   
• Targeted Traffic
  Everyone that attempts to friend you (that isn’t a spammer) is already interested in what you’ve got to say (or they hope you’re interested in what they have to say). Think of them like an RSS subscriber. You can choose who you want to send a friend request to, of course. I started with people that were friends already with a number of tshirt companies. That showed they were already interested in the niche and they were looking for exactly what I serve up.
   
  Be careful having bands as friends. They will post “check out our new songs/album” every time they record something. They will want to post info on their next gig, even if they’re in Australia and you’re in Ireland. They’ll often use a large gaudy graphic too that will pollute your page and generally make you look like an idiot for adding them in the first place. That’s a perfect example of someone not targetting their traffic actually. An Australian band should only be inviting locals to a gig, but I digress.
   
• Bulletins and Status Changes
  Now you’ll understand why I drew a comparison between RSS subscribers and myspace friends. With a bulletin you can instantly put your message right in front of every one of your friends. Be careful not to abuse this (or do it too often) or you’ll come off as spammy and get yourself ignored and deleted. You can also change your status or mood anytime. That will put your short status message, your name and avatar at the top of your friends’ screens when they sign in. This is excellent for keeping yourself fresh in everyone’s mind.
   
• Blog Crossposting
  There’s an awesome little plugin out there that will automatically post a bulletin notifying all your myspace friends of new blog posts. Since the key is to get them off your myspace profile and onto your site, be sure to only post the notification to myspace and not the post itself. Keeping the juicy content off of myspace can help to serve as a catalyst for the user to visit your site.
   
• For Some People, MySpace IS the Internet
  If your target demographic consists primarily from teens and early 20-somethings, myspace is the place to be. Though I sometimes find it hard to fathom, I do have (real life) friends that think Google is just for doing research for papers and reports. They check their mail, they IM, they myspace. If you can do them a service, you really can get them to your site though.

I’m of course speaking in theory, I haven’t had this profile long enough to sucessfully prove myself that these items can be accomplished with a myspace profile. They are, however, the reasons I am doing this. I’ve also based these in things I’ve seen other profiles do. If you have a site or blog in a niche that might benefit from the myspace demographic, I encourage you to consider creating a myspace page to let some of that traffic filter through to your site or blog.

Check out part 2 of the experiment here.

Today feels like Friday to me, and not in a good way. More like a this-week-is-one-day-longer-than-it-should-be sort of way. Oh well. I was hoping to have the primary Brad Kelly Enterprises domain moved off of the old host and over to DreamHost by today, but I never really got around to it. The domain is current parked with Office Live, which is a great way to get a free domain, btw. When I do get it moved over, I’ll write about the process of obtaining the key and everything from Microsoft.

I’ve kept busy with changes to tshirtreviewblog.com this week, many of them under the hood. I’m particularly excited about the Project Wonderful ad box, just because it’s such a refreshing take on advertising and valuation. I’ll post about PW in the next day or two, after I’ve had a little more time to get a feel for how it’s working.

I’ve been enjoying a lot of reading lately on PPC affiliates. I’m fascinated on how calculating one has to be while still sort of “feeling” your way through it. Anything that’s an inexact science is pretty interesting to me.

I had another project I was hoping to launch tomorrow, but it’s sort of been back burner this week and will probably be delayed a bit.

I was actually surprised at how painless and quick this was. Over my lunch break, I searched for promo codes/coupons for Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter, and signed up for each. I created some keyword lists (need to be tweaked obviously) and an ad for each. I entered all my information and then paused my campaigns. Very easy setup. If you’re interested, here are the promotions I used.

Google AdWords: $50 in free clicks ($5 setup fee waived)
Microsoft AdCenter: offer code AFF0108V1 $50 in free clicks (plus $5 setup fee)
Yahoo Search Marketing: $100 in free clicks with ($30 minimum deposit)

This past weekend was the most unproductive I’ve been since the holidays. It’s not like I had nothing to do either, I just had a hard time staying focused. I did manage to experiment with a few different plugins though, one of which temporarily broke the Wordpress. I thought it’d be a good opportunity to recommend a test installation.

Basically, I keep a parallel instance of each site running privately so I can test things before rolling them out publicly. I just install wordpress to a domain subdirectory, and in setup I opt not to make it visible to search engines. Since I use DreamHost, and they have one-click installations, it literally takes me 5 minutes max to set it up. I copy the theme over to the test environment, and take the installation active.

Over the weekend, I was installing and testing the Adsense Deluxe plugin and placing adsense ads for tshirtreviewblog.com. By doing this in the test environment, I was able to try different ad sizes and locations without breaking or distorting the theme publicly. In fact, another plugin I was testing for managing 301 redirects broke the site pretty badly whenever a link was active. Again, this was thankfully done in the test environment and was invisible publicly.

This doesn’t just go for plugins of course, it’s great for trying new graphics or CSS tweaks. Once I know everything will work alright, I simply switch to the live installation and repeat. You could use one Wordpress test environment if you run substantially similar sites, but I have fairly unique plugin setups for both sites. If I clone T-Shirt Review Blog, which I may do in the future, I could continue to use the same test environment for multiple sites.

Update: Here’s a good personal example of how this setup can save your ass at some point.

With the explosion of new blogs online in the last few years, it’s been easy to overlook the pivotal role forums have played in the development of the web as we know it today. The evolution of the message board is a fascinating story in and of itself. I have experience in online communities, and it’s been exciting to see the evolution of the medium with the advent of social networking websites. People are finding more and more ways to network, communicate, and share ideas.

The management of these communities often ends up an overlooked and thankless job, but it’s crucial to the success of the community and can be a rewarding experience. The technical side of things has been covered countless times, but a community admin would be hard pressed to find some good advice from beginning to end, the how and the why. Managing a successful community is much more than installing some software and crafting a theme: you have to deal with people, promotion, direction, and trolls.

I don’t know anyone more experienced in this arena than Patrick O’Keefe. Though we haven’t always kept in touch, I’ve known Patrick for a number of years and have always kept an eye on iFroggy Network, his umbrella entity for nearly two dozen successful online communities and blogs. Patrick has poured himself onto the page and shared his knowlege of online community management in his new book, Managing Online Forums. You can check out the details at Amazon.

A discussion board can be an excellent addition to an existing website, or can be a standalone entity. I encourage you to learn from Patrick, whether you’re looking to create a new online community or take your existing community to the next level.

Patrick’s original post announcing his book is also an interesting read for anyone who isn’t familiar with the process of writing and publishing a book. I learned quite a bit about what is involved and how complex the publishing process really is. It’s a good read even if you’re not interested in the book’s topic.

Does anyone else find the post-dating feature of Wordpress especially useful? I regularly set posts to publish at a later time, and I think it’s a good way to exercise a greater level of control over the user experience and provide consistency to your readers.

On a standard Wordpress installation (I’m sure other CMS and publishing platforms support this too) the last item in your sidebar is “Post Timestamp.” By default, this is set to the time you opened the new post page. You can set it to whatever you’d like though. This is the time your post becomes active and visible to the outside world. You’re able to pick any time in the future or past. When you pick a time in the future, nobody can see it until it hits the time you specified. At that time, it appears as if you just wrote it. I rarely use this feature on this blog, but I use it quite a bit on tshirtreviewblog.com.

Here’s how I use post-dating to smooth out the experience for the end user.

Often times, when I’m browsing for new shirts to write about, I’ll come across two or three shirts that I’d like to mention, sometimes more. When I’m in that mode, and the creative juices are flowing, I find it best to knock out not just the first review (which can be posted immediately) but also the others. I could post three reviews in quick succession, but there are a few advantages to posting one a day for the next three days instead.

1. There’s a lesser chance that some articles may fall by the wayside
Content is the lifeblood of any site. It would make sense to milk every drop of audience out of each post. If I post reviews individually, with time in between, each one has its own moment in the sun. Posting a handful of reviews all at once can force them to share the podium so to speak, and compete for the readers attention. Since writing articles takes time, the farther you can go with the content you create, the more you’re able to stretch your time.

2. Erratic post schedules suck for readers
There’s nothing worse than going to a site that posts so much content one day I can barely wade through it all and then nothing for a couple days. I always feel like I’m missing the boat with sites like that.

3. The site can run itself for short periods of time
If I don’t feel like writing for a day or two, or if I’ve got a lot going on, it’s no big deal. Posts still can appear on a regular basis. You can also use this feature for planned time off or for vacations. It doesn’t work well for reactionary pieces or news sites of course, but for timeless content it’s doable.

4. It sets a rhythm for your readers
I write at all kinds of strange hours, but that doesn’t always line up with my readers schedules. If I see that a wave of readers tends to hit at 10 am, I’d like to make sure there’s some fresh meat waiting for them when they arrive. If the last chance I have to write is the evening before (I do work an 8 to 5) a non-timebomb post would sit overnight for the night owls to pick at, and becomes yesterday’s post. When the night owls get up the next day, there’s no content that’s new to them, and I have to write another post for that day.

Instead, it might be a good idea to knock out a small blurb (which takes a negligible amount of time) the night before, and timebomb your gem for 9 or so the next morning. That way, the post goes live with enough time for your readers’ RSS aggregators to update by the time the traffic wave hits.

Like most entries here, this arose out of something I encountered today. I was searching for some new shirts for tshirtreviewblog and came across several different sites I hadn’t seen before. By the time I realized what I was getting into, I’d found more than 10 shirts I was interesting in writing about. After setting aside a quick description and a URL for each, I got to work writing the actual reviews. I haven’t gotten through every one of them yet, but I plan to write the rest in a large block tomorrow. As an experiment, I will set them to time-release over the next week.

I don’t feel like writing all the time. Sometimes I have energy for writing, sometimes it’s for tweaking the code under the hood, sometimes for graphic design or site promotion. This timebomb feature saves me a lot of time, and keeps me interested and happy because I can always do what I’d like without feeling like writing is a chore.