make nothing online

The Prolific Blogger Award

2010-05-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

English Wilderness was recently awarded the Prolific Blogger Award by Sandra at My Mother Thinks I'm a Good Writer. Thanks Sandra, it's great to hear I'm doing something right :-)

The award was orginally created by Hazra of Advance Bookings. The award is to recognise those prolific bloggers who blog tirelessly and have made the blogging community such a vibrant place.

Here are the rules:

Every winner of the Prolific Blogger Award has to pass on this award to at least seven other deserving prolific bloggers. Spread some love!
Each Prolific Blogger must link to the blog from which he/she has received the award.
Every Prolific Blogger must link back to This Post, which explains the origins and motivation for the award.
Every Prolific Blogger must visit this post and add his/her name in the Mr. Linky, so that we all can get to know the other winners.

Finally, here are my nominations:

North-Country Ramblings - Peter spends his time hiking and camping some of the U.K.'s most beautiful wild places. Amazing photos.
Little Sealed Packages - a photo blog I discovered recently, a fascinating blend of Derbyshire life, history and curiosities.
A Postcard a Day - Sheila takes us on a journey through some of the world's most interesting history and places with her postcard collection.
The Everyday Adventurer - Ratty explores his local reserves and nature trails, capturing some amazing photos of the wildlife he discovers.
Mostly Maths - I found Ruben's blog a few months ago and have been a regular ever since. An enticing mix of programming, gardening and book reviews.
Redcode: Random - An entertaining mix of algorithms, math and recreational programming are covered by Roy's blog.
The Reinvigorated Programmer - Mike started 3 months ago and has attracted 570,000 visitors! Covers programming and Doctor Who, intermingled with pictures of sushi!

Fixing Comments on Blogger

2010-04-22T02:28:00.000-07:00

A few people mentioned Blogger's embedded comment form is awkward to use on certain browsers. Here's a template tweak that makes it possible to offer the old pop-up comments as an alternative.

Here's the tweak:

Please try the <a
expr:href='&quot;https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?&quot; +
&quot;blogID=BLOG ID&amp;postID=&quot; +
data:post.id + &quot;&amp;isPopup=false&quot;'>alternative
comment form</a> if you&#39;re having trouble commenting.

The tweak can be installed as follows:

go to Layout then Edit HTML,
expand Widget Templates,
make a backup of your template just in case,
search for <data:blogCommentMessage/>,
paste the code for the tweak after <data:blogCommentMessage/>,
replace BLOG ID with the number at the end of the URL,
Finally save the template and double check it works as expected.

If you'd like to see the tweak in action, please take a look at my daily photo gallery. :-)

New WordPress Virus: Has Your Site Been Hacked?

2010-04-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

Several WordPress blogs I visited this morning tried to redirect me to either gescansecurity or a Bing search for freevirusscan.

Affected blogs load a script just before the </body> tag and can be identified by searching the source for kdjkfjskdfjlskdjf. After being redirected to Bing a cookie is set to prevent the user from being redirected for 20 days.

Please take a moment to check whether your blog has been compromised.

Finally a Template I'm Happy With (For Now)

2010-04-03T02:37:00.000-07:00

For a while I've been tweaking the template used by English Wilderness, gradually working towards something I'm happy with. Recently I decided to do a complete rebuild.

Visually I've tried to keep the template simple and familiar without any strong elements to distract from the pictures. Under the bonnet I've added a number of microformats and SEO tweaks. The blogroll is now tagged with XFN.

Does English Wilderness still look like an escapee from the 1990's? Is there anything you hate or anything you think I should change? Please let me know :-)

Anaglyphs: How to Make a 3D Photo Using Gimp

2010-03-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

When viewed through red and blue glasses an anaglyph images appears to be three-dimensional. Here's how to make a 3D anaglyph using Gimp.

You need two pictures of the same scene taken about 7cm apart. The shots should converge slightly towards the focal point of the image. Try not to use the camera's build in flash.

first open the two images as layers in Gimp. (file / open as layers)
select the left image (windows / dockable dialogs / layers)
apply a red tint to the left image (colors / colorify)
select the right image (windows / dockable dialogs / layers)
apply a cyan tint to the right image (colors / colorify)
select the top layer (windows / dockable dialogs / layers)
set the top layer's mode to addition
wear the 3D specs and if necessary adjust the layer's position
finally, flatter the image (image / flatten image)

There are some great examples of 3D photos in Wikipedia's entry for anaglyph images. Let me know if you give this a try; I'd love to see what you create. :-)

Entrecard Blackjack - a Serious Flaw

2010-03-17T01:28:00.000-07:00

Entrecard recently announced a new Blackjack game using the EntreCredits API. Players can gamble their credits, winning or losing on the turn of a card.

Not only is this a strange addition to a blog advertising network, it's also gambling. Credits can be purchased for cash and gambled freely. The network doesn't allow gambling ads so why promoting this? I noticed no age restriction or daily limits. Advertising networks should concentrate on what they do best - advertising blogs.

Individual bets are limited to 500ec (about $1.50). Unfortunately the game has a serious flaw making it easy to amass 50000 credits an hour. It would be irresponsible to publish a full description before the developers have fixed the problem, but it does highlight the importance of testing web apps before general release.

Blogger's New Template Designer

2010-03-12T07:30:00.000-08:00

This week Blogger added a new template designer to Blogger in Draft with a choice of 15 base templates, 350 background images, custom colour schemes, 1-3 column layouts and resizeable columns. There's even a section to add your own custom CSS.

The new designs on Retro Programming and Make Nothing Online both use the Simple Template. Retro Programming has a background image from the technology gallery while Make Nothing Online has an image from the abstract gallery. I also added a couple of custom CSS tweak for acronyms, abbreviations and code sections:

pre {margin: 1em;
padding: 8px;
border: 1px dashed #35de5c;
background: white;
}

acronym, abbr {border-bottom: 1px dashed silver;
cursor: help
}

Have you experimented with the new template designer yet? Let me know how you get on :-)

Sunshine Award / Beautiful Blogger Award

2010-02-26T16:31:00.000-08:00

My nature blog English Wilderness recently received a double award from Mom To The Power Of Three. The two awards are the Sunshine Award and the Beautiful Blogger Award.

As usual I've tried to trace both awards back to their origin. Unfortunately I reached a dead end on both counts. After following the links for the Sunshine Award I reached a dead end at Counting Coconuts in January 2010. I managed a little further for the Beautiful Blogger Award, finally reaching a post on Rose of Sharon in February 2008.

The Sunshine Award is awarded to bloggers whose positivity & creativity inspires others in the blogworld. The Beautiful Blogger Award is for creativity, originality, and overall contribution to the blogging community. Here are the rules for the awards:

Post the award on your blog.
Nominate 12 of your favourite blogs for the award.
Share 7 interesting things about yourself.

Here are my twelve nominees:

Now for 7 things about myself:

I'm obsessed with collecting things: retro computers, series of books, even photos of bugs! If I can find a list I love to tick everything off.
Apart from nature photography I'm interested exploring caves, computer programming, early British history, hiking and text adventure games.
I love reading gothic and dystopian novels. A few of my favourites include The Wanting Seed, The Lair of the White Worm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The scariest thing I remember is waking up in a cave one night and seeing something lurking in the shadows.
I feel sorry for ugly teddy bears and often end up buying them.
I started writing a children's book 19 years ago and I still haven't finished.
I'm hopeless at playing musical instruments but that doesn't stop me trying ;-)

Thanks again to Mom to the Power of Three for the award.

A New Photo Blog: 6 Week Review

2010-02-23T10:41:00.000-08:00

Six weeks ago I started the Daily Photo Gallery blog to share a few photos of the places I visit. The time has come to take a closer look at the stats. Has Daily Photo Gallery been a success?

For the first week I posted on a regular basis until I reached 5 posts. Then I started to promote using CMF Ads, Twitter and Stumbleupon. I also added a link to the blogroll on English Wilderness and regularly commented on other blogs. Here are the stats so far:

Pagerank: Unranked
Alexa: 589670
Visitors: 1622
Bounce Rate: 85%
Posts made: 22
Comments: 60
Adsense earnings: £1.58
CMF Earnings: $0.35
CMF Spent: $2.15
Followers: 16
Listed by Google: 29 Jan

I'm pretty happy with the visitors I've received and how well everyone has responded to the new blog. Lets take a look at where some of the visitors are coming from:

432 - CMF Ads
201 - Stumbleupon
141 - Google
90 - Along for the Ride
18 - Twitter

Here are the most popular posts by number of visitors:

From looking at the stats there are a couple of conclusions I can draw. First, the number of visitors received from CMF and Stumbleupon far outweighs the amount of time invested. Second, photos of the weird and wonderful seem to attract the most traffic.

What tips do you have for a new blog?

My Entrecard Inbox After Removing the Widget!

2010-02-09T00:10:00.000-08:00

Here's a screenshot of my Entrecard inbox showing the drops I received after removing the widget 5 days ago. It shouldn't be possible to appear in my inbox. How exactly did you drop on me?

This blog has never been very active in Entrecard. I wonder how many ghost drops an active blog receives?

Are any ghost droppers appearing in your inbox?

Entrecard Experiment - Who's Cheating the System?

2010-02-04T12:23:00.000-08:00

Entrecard is a controversial network for bloggers. Members place a widget on their blog and visit other blogs to click the drop box. Dropping leaves a calling card and earns credits to spend on advertising.

The benefits and disadvantages have been discussed elsewhere so I won't repeat them here. For this blog the benefit has been minimal, so I've removed Entrecard to make more space available for CMF Ads.

However I haven't deleted my account. I suspect certain Entrecard users are gaming the system by using a program to click the drop box without visiting blogs! Over the next couple of days I'll make a note of who's still leaving a calling card in my inbox and possibly cheating the system.

Update: After 7 days I've received 27 ghost drops despite removing the widget!

WARNING: Entrecard Chicklet Widget (Update: Problem Fixed)

2010-01-21T00:15:00.000-08:00

A few blogs in the Entrecard network are running the Chicklet Widget which shows the ad price and popularity. Unfortunately the domain hosting the widget has expired. Visitors to blogs displaying the widget are redirected to a holding page.

Please note this is not a problem with Entrecard. The problem is an independent widget called the Entrecard Chicklet. I've tried to contact the author of the widget without any success.

To avoid losing any more visitors I suggest removing the Chicklet Widget from your blog until the issue is resolved.

Update: I contacted the author this morning and he's resolved the issue. The widget is working again and hopefully bloggers won't lose any more visitors.

Best / Lovely Blog Award

2009-11-29T13:14:00.000-08:00

The Best Blog / Lovely Blog Award has recently been conferred on English Wilderness by three different bloggers! :-) This started life as two separate awards, later being combined into a single award.

Thanks to Lauren from The Ancient Digger, Sharkbytes from My Quality Day and Patsy from Patsy's Words of Wisdom for nominating English Wilderness.

The rules are as follows:

Accept the award, post it on your blog together with the name of the person who has granted the award and his or her blog link.
Pass the award to at least 5 of your favourite blogs. Remember to contact the bloggers to let them know they've been chosen.

Lauren, Sharkbytes and Patsy have chosen quite a few of my favourites between them, but fortunately I had no trouble selecting 10 outstanding blogs:

If you haven't discovered any of the above, they're well worth a visit and come highly recommended :-)

Entrecard Advertising Statistics

2009-11-08T01:05:00.000-08:00

After reading Sharkbyte's recent post about traffic from Entrecard, I wondered whether or not my Entrecard advertising is still effective. To investigate further I've taken a closer look at my Entrecard advertising for the last 10 days.

Entrecard is a system in which you earn credits (ec) by visiting other blogs in the network. The credits can be used to buy ads on other members' sites. Advertising prices range from 2-2048ec depending how popular the blog is.

Each day I try to buy 15 cheap ads (2-8ec), 10 medium price ads (16-64ec) and 2 more expensive ads (128ec+). Here's a summary showing the number of click returned by ads at each price point:

Ad Cost	0 clicks	1 clicks	2 clicks	3 clicks	4+ clicks
2	51	9	1
4	33	10	5	1	3
8	28	9	3	2	2
16	18	8	5	1	3
32	1	7	1	4	19
64			2	2	11
128			1	1	12
256					4
384					3
512					5

For example of the 61 ads I bought at 2ec, 51 received 0 clicks. To work out if one particular price gives better value I calculated the CPC for each:

Ad Cost	No of Ads	Total Clicks	CPC
2	61	11	11.1
4	52	36	5.8
8	44	34	10.4
16	35	46	12.2
32	32	182	5.6
64	15	148	6.5
128	14	203	8.8
256	4	93	11.0
384	3	98	11.8
512	5	204	12.5

Ads at 2ec normally are normally clicked once for every 11.1ec spent. Unless there's a statistical anomaly, ads at 4ec, 32ec and 64ec seem to represent good value.

To determine whether or not this is true I'm changing how I advertise. From now on I plan to only buy ads on blogs priced 4, 32 and 64ec. What's your Entrecard advertising strategy?

Blogger SEO: Optimizing Title Tags for Blogger

2009-10-19T11:58:00.000-07:00

There's plenty of SEO advice available for Blogger. There's some great advice to be found but unfortunately there's also information that's out of date, ineffective and even harmful.

I noticed recently a couple of friends are following some bad advice and this prompted me to apply my previous SEO experience to Blogger and share a few tips.

The page title is an important factor in ranking well in the search results. In fact Blogger's default titles aren't too bad. Here are examples from English Wilderness:

Homepage: English Wilderness
Post: English Wilderness: Red-Tailed Bumble Bee
Label: English Wilderness: Insect
Archive: English Wilderness: October 2009

However these can be improved. On the individual post page the name of the post should come before the blog name. On the label page the label name should come before the name of the blog. Finally on the homepage the blog's subheading could be included in the title.

Here's what I have in mind:

Homepage: Photos from the English Wilderness | Exploring the Wild Places
Post: Red-Tailed Bumble Bee | English Wilderness
Label: Insect Photo Gallery | English Wilderness
Archive: English Wilderness Photo Archive | October 2009

And here's how it's done.

In Blogger go to the Layout page and select Edit HTML. Make a backup of your template by hitting Download Full Template.

Next look down the template code for the <title> tag. It should look similar to the following:

<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

Remove everything from <title> to </title> inclusive and replace with the following, editing the sections highlighted in green as necessary:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<title>Photos from the English Wilderness | Exploring the Wild Places</title>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;archive&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.title/> Photo Archive | <data:blog.pageName/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> Photo Gallery | <data:blog.title/></title>
</b:if></b:if></b:if>

Finally Save Template and check the title tags for your homepage, posts, label pages and archive have changed as desired.

Photo Failures: Urban Fox

2009-10-09T00:36:00.000-07:00

Ratty at The Everyday Adventurer recently discussed something we all suffer from, photographic failures. There are two problems which ruin my pictures on a regular basis, blurry pictures and missing the moment.

I recently published some example of blurry photos taken from my kite. Normally I take about a dozen shots hoping one will turn out okay, but occasionally they're all blurry. :-(

Missing the moment is the most annoying. By the time I take the shot the moment has passed. If I'd been just a few seconds faster with the camera I would've caught this urban fox staring right at me. Instead he's walking away :-(

When was the last time you missed the moment with your camera?

Friends Widget

2009-10-04T08:05:00.000-07:00

The Friends Widget is a fantastic way to give something back to the sites you enjoy reading. It's a free tool for bloggers to display the 125×125px badge of their friends and favourite blogs.

Simply select the sites you'd like to include and paste the code as a new HTML widget on your blog. There's no external script, so the widget will never display anything unexpected and you retain 100% control.

I created the widget to replace Entrecard on most of my blogs, but you're welcome to use it. Please let me know if you have any problems, and feel free to ask if you'd like me to change anything :-)

Entrecard Sponsored Ads - An Alternative

2009-09-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

Entrecard have announced they're reserving 15% of members' ad space to run sponsored ads. With the paid ads debacle fresh in user's minds, this decision has been widely condemned.

Here's an alternative suggestion:

Don't take 15% of user's ad space on a daily basis. Instead, after six standard Entrecard ads are purchased on a blog, queue a sponsored ad in exactly the same way. A sponsored ad will then run every seventh day for 24 hours. (14.29%, close enough?)

Benefits:

Standard Entrecard advertisers won't lose 15% of their ad time.
Sponsored ads can be cancelled like a normal ad. Depending on how popular a blog is, the blogger will have up to 12 days to cancel an ad before it runs.
Bloggers get paid in credits for running sponsored ads.

Here's another suggestion to monetize Entrecard. Place sponsored ads on the Entrecard blog, dashboard, profile pages and forum. How can Entrecard expect users to run sponsored ads when they're not displaying ads on their own site?

What's your opinion on this latest move by Entrecard?

Declutter Your Blog

2009-09-22T10:31:00.000-07:00

Recently I took a close look at a selection of 50 blogs. The length of the sidebar varied from 2 to 16 pages, averaging 6. How much adds value and how much is unnecessary clutter?

Here's a summary of what I found in the sidebars:

Advertising:

CMF Ads (on 36 blogs)
Entrecard (34)
Adsense (20)
Adgitise (17)
ads for friends (15)
Project Wonderful (14)
affiliate links (13)
Amazon (7)
Kiva (6)

Advertising provides bloggers with a bit of pocket money, but do we really need to include every ad network going? The more ads you have, the lower the CTR and the worse the value for your advertisers. There's a point beyond which more ads won't increase your blog's income.

Try removing under-performing ads to see if the CTR increases on the more valuable ads.

Content Related:

post archive (39)
search (26)
about (23)
labels, categories (19)
recent posts (17)
Twitter updates (12)
important posts (10)
top commenters (9)
recent comments (9)
poll (8)
Flickr widget (6)

Most of the above add value for your readers, but it's worth considering each one for a moment. Do you really need a post archive as well as a list of recent posts? Do you need a search box in your sidebar if it's in the Blogger navbar? Do your Twitter updates simply mirror your blog posts?

If it's not adding value for you readers, get rid of it.

Community:

Blogroll (40)
badges (28)
Google Followers (25)
Feedjit widget (9)
Alexa widget (7)
BlogCatalog (6)
MyBlogLog (6)
Slogbites widget (5)

Does it make a statement about your personality or show who your friends are? Does it send any traffic to your blog? Does it add value for you, your readers or your advertisers? If not, you know what to do ;-)

If you decide to declutter your blog, I'd be interested to know what you get rid of. How much can you reduce your sidebar?

How Derren Brown Predicted the Lottery Results

2009-09-11T14:35:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday Derren Brown performed an illusion where he predicted the National Lottery results on live TV. Here's the secret of Derren's lottery prediction.

Derren had 6 balls with a photo-sensitive coating. The balls were always visible on screen. Immediately after the lottery was drawn, a laser was used to imprint the numbers on Derren's balls. Simple!

Photos From My Kite Camera at Witham Park, Mini DVR

2009-09-08T08:31:00.005-07:00

A few weeks ago I bought a MP10 Mini Digital Pocket Video Recorder for a couple of projects. The camera is tiny, approx 7x2x1cm and records a video at 640x480, 30fps to a MicroSD card.

The projects I'm planning are close up wildlife photos and aerial photography. For the wildlife photos I intend to leave the camera running next to wild fruit bushes in the hope of catching pictures of squirrels or birds.

Aerial photography will be by attaching the thumb camera to a stunt kite! I'm hoping to fly the camera above local historical sites, e.g. the ruins of Bolingbroke Castle. Today I had a test run above Witham Country Park.

I'm a little disappointed by the quality of the results. What do you think?

Making Money With Photos, August Update

2009-09-07T00:39:00.000-07:00

For the last year I've been trying to make money with photos on my wildlife photography blog. So far I haven't reached my goal of becoming a blogging millionaire!

Over the past few months I've continued to comment on 4-5 blogs and drop about 50 Entrecards on a daily basis. I've also reinvested the credits earned from CMF Ads into advertising and joined a number of new directories.

I've made one or two changes to the blog to get rid clutter, including the removal of the three Adsense link units.

Here are the statistics (earnings now in UK pounds):

Month	Visitors	Earnings
Feb 2009	3900	£1.92
Mar 2009	3200	£0.52
Apr 2009	2600	£1.69
May 2009	3500	£2.34
Jun 2009	7400	£5.98
Jul 2009	14400	£4.74
Aug 2009	10300	£2.01

It looks like I'm on target to be a blogging millionaire by December 27009! :-)

The Zombie Chicken Award: Origin and Nominations

2009-09-06T10:14:00.000-07:00

Karen at Outlandish Observations recently presented the Zombie Chicken Award to English Wilderness, my nature photography blog. Thanks for considering me for such a cool award.

Here's what the Zombie Chicken Award is all about:

The blogger who receives this award believes in the Tao of the zombie chicken - excellence, grace and persistence in all situations, even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. These amazing bloggers regularly produce content so remarkable that their readers would brave a raving pack of zombie chickens just to be able to read their words. As a recipient of this world-renowned award, you now have the task of passing it on to at least 5 other worthy bloggers. Do not risk the wrath of the zombie chickens by choosing unwisely or not choosing at all...

I don't want to incur the wrath of the zombie chickens, so here are the ~~five~~ six blogs English Wilderness is nominating for the Zombie Chicken Award:

The Everyday Adventurer: Ratty takes us on a daily ramble along nature trails and through wild places. One of the few blogs I read every day.
A Postcard a Day: Sheila takes her readers on a journey around the world in postcards. I love to see how places looked years ago in the old pictures.
TechTinkering: Lawrence specialises in retro computing, programming and classic games. Never fails to provide something interesting to think about.
Bill the Lizard: Bill's blog investigates programming and mathematical curiosities, challenging us to solve some intriguing puzzles along the way.
The Virtual Dime Museum: Lidian explores quirky, interesting scraps of history, specialising in the Victorian era. Always entertaining.
Beloved Eleanor: Alison posts a compelling mix of history, books and movies.

Origins of the Zombie Chicken Award

I thought it would be interesting to track back the Zombie Chicken Award to where it first began. I followed the links from blog to blog before reaching a dead end. On another blog I found a new lead, one which would eventually lead me to two blogs, Presenting Lenore and Alea's Pop Culture Junkie.

On 22 March, Alea presented the award to Lenore, and Lenore presented the award to Alea. Highly suspicious! Lenore later confirmed I'd discovered the origin of the zombie chicken and the artwork was created by her husband Daniel. The original artwork is on Daniel's Daily Drawings. Thanks guys for creating such a cool award. :-)

Be a Magpie: Account Terminated!

2009-08-15T04:30:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I decided to take a closer look at Magpie, an advertising service which allows you to include ads in your twitter stream. At the time Aldon of Orient Lodge warned Magpie ads are intrusive and annoying, but I wanted to investigate for myself.

Unfortunately most of the ads either looked spammy, or had been worded as though I endorsed the product. I didn't allow the ads through, instead hoping to earn a few dollars from affiliate sign-ups.

Then I discovered twitterfeed, a service which tweets your latest blog post. For some reason, Magpie hates twitterfeed and will suspend your account if your automatic tweets rise above 15%.

Over then next few weeks Magpie's bot automatically suspended then reinstated my account, prompting me to ask what gives them the right to dictate how I tweet and request my account to be deleted.

Magpie promptly ignored my request, but several weeks later I received notification my account has been terminated:

Dear John,

in accordance with our Terms and Conditions, we had to permanently terminate your Magpie account. Your remaining account balance has expired.

Reason: TERMINATED BY MAGPIE: Many of your tweets were posted in an automated manner, e.g. by aggregating RSS feeds.

Please refer to the following URL to learn about our T&C:

http://be-a-magpie.com/twitterer/terms

Thank you, best regards,

The Magpie Support Staff

Have you had any success with Magpie?

Introducing StumbleUpon's URL Shortener su.pr

2009-07-18T03:28:00.000-07:00

StumbleUpon recently announced their new URL shortener su.pr which adds an in-browser toolbar and can post to twitter and Facebook.

The toolbar includes some of the usual StumbleUpon buttons, Stumble, thumb-up and share. URLs can be posted directly to twitter / Facebook or scheduled to post at a later time. This can be up to two weeks later. Here's an example of a shortened URL, http://su.pr/1JKt8R.

By using su.pr to shorten URLs, the pages you tweet can potentially benefit from additional StumbleUpon traffic. su.pr includes a range of statistics for shortened URLs, including clicks, traffic from SU, referrers, etc.

StumbleUpon are planning to automate su.pr to post items from an RSS feed. Until then why not try combining twitterfeed with the Digg toolbar?

Entrecard Acquired by ZipRunner: What it Means for the Community

2009-07-16T12:23:00.000-07:00

Earlier today Entrecard.com Inc. announced it has been acquired by ZipRunner Inc. via an email to the members. Entrecard's founder, Graham Langdon, will be retained as an advisor.

Over recent months Entrecard has seen the membership decline after a number of unpopular changes to the service. Entrecard's traffic has dropped 31% after reaching a peak of 1.7 million page views in March 2009. Graham posted about the sale on his new blog, Ontrapranore, quoting conflict with the community among his motives.

It is unclear as yet what changes ZipRunner intend to make and what effect this will have on the community. Until ZipRunner's intentions are known I would advise the following:

don't spend too much time dropping cards until ZipRunner's intentions are clear
if you have excess credits consider using them before any changes are implemented

If you have any thoughts on the sale and it's effect on the community, please let me know.

Effective Commenting on Blogger Blogs

2009-07-09T00:01:00.000-07:00

When leaving a comment on a Blogger Blog, the default is to use your Google account which will leave a link to your Blogger profile. There are usually two more effective options.

Name/URL: allows you to choose any name and include a direct link to your blog. If you're commenting on a dofollow blog there's a SEO benefit, otherwise you'll just benefit from slightly more traffic clicking through.
OpenID: enter the URL to your Blogger blog and when asked, confirm it's okay to tell Blogger you own the blog. You'll receive the same benefits as Name/URL, but unfortunately it's not possible to choose any name.

DoFollow: How to remove NoFollow from Blogger Blogs

2009-07-06T01:41:00.000-07:00

Blogs hosted by Blogger automatically add rel="nofollow" to links in user generated content, for example comments. The nofollow attribute is intended to prevent these links having any influence on search engine rankings, so removing nofollow will be of benefit to your visitors.

Before you begin, back up your Blogger template just in case something goes wrong. Go to layout and select edit HTML. Then download full template.

To remove nofollow, the first step is to click on expand widget templates. This updates the template HTML to include the HTML for individual widgets.

Next, search your template for nofollow, you can search on most browsers with CTRL-F. Nofollow may be in several different places. What you're looking for is a section of HTML code which specifically mentions comments, similar to the below:

<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl' rel='nofollow'>

Simply remove the section of HTML which says rel="nofollow" and then save template.

<a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl'>

One final word of warning: if you remove nofollow, you must make sure comments with a link to dodgy sites are removed. If you allow too many to slip through, search engines may begin to consider your site dodgy by association!

Guest Posts and a Link Exchange

2009-06-11T03:13:00.000-07:00

Guest post: Here's a sneak preview of the new outdoor photography site I'm creating. Would you consider letting me write a guest post for you about one of my favorite places to help promote the new site?

Link exchange: I'm looking for a few nature / outdoor blogs to exchange links with. Can you help?

EC for links: 250ec to link to me using the code from the bottom left of any photo on my new site. With or without nofollow is fine.

If you're interested please either leave a comment here or send an email, letting me know how I can return the favor :-) digital.wilderness@googlemail.com.

SEO: Search Penalties from Hidden Text

2009-05-30T00:27:00.000-07:00

Recently I was wondering why a website I created a couple of years ago is still only PR0, when I stumbled across an interview with Google's Matt Cutts. In the interview, Matt briefly mentions a search penalty for text hidden with CSS, specifically pointing out right: 999px.

Unfortunately I've been using a similar technique, text/image replacement:

h1 {text-indent: -9999px; width: 400px; height: 100px;
background: url(logo.png)}

The purpose of this is to replace the page heading with a logo. It seems highly likely the Google algorithm flags this as suspicious and issues a search penalty. I think it's time for a redesign! :-)

Create a Today.com Blog for SEO

2009-04-26T02:06:00.000-07:00

Today.com is a free blogging platform which pays bloggers up to $2 per 1000 unique visitors. The minimum payout isn't too steep, at $50. It's not possible to place your own ads or affiliate links, as the ads are owned by Today.

The real benefit of starting a blog on Today is SEO. By creating a blog to support other sites in your niche, it's easy to build relevant, targeted backlinks. In my experience, blogs on Today are indexed by Google within a couple of days and often rank well in the search engine results.

Entrecard and the Community

2009-04-20T01:09:00.000-07:00

Entrecard and the Community have a boy / girlfriend relationship:

The Community has something called 'feelings' and expects Entrecard to consider them. Entrecard just doesn't get it.
Entrecard is indifferent when the Community gets angry. This just makes the Community angrier.
Entrecard thinks the Community is irrational. The Community accuses Entrecard of being thoughtless.
Every time Entrecard does something wrong, the Community drags up everything it ever did wrong in the past!

Sounds familiar? In the end, it's always easier to say you're sorry, kiss and make up :-)

Building Traffic with Sitehoppin: Is it Possible?

2009-03-31T04:10:00.000-07:00

Sitehoppin is a social network similar to Stumbleupon. Sitehoppin users can submit, rate and surf websites. Is it possible to use Sitehoppin to build traffic?

It's possible to earn credits on Sitehoppin by performing certain activities. These credits can then be used to automatically direct some of Sitehoppin's auto-surfing traffic to your webpage.

Here's the list of activities which earn credits:

submitting a webpage to Sitehoppin
rating a webpage
auto-surfing with Sitehoppin
sending visitors to Sitehoppin via the optional widget

I've used Sitehoppin on one of my websites for the last 18 months. Let's take a quick look at the stats:

total visitors: 628
visitors to page set for auto-surfing: 481 (bounce rate 81%)
visitors to approx 50 pages submitted: 147 (bounce rate 95%)

An average of 2 visitors per year to the pages submitted and 27 per month to the auto-surfed page.

Based on the figures, I wouldn't recommend using Sitehoppin to build traffic. If you decide to give it a try anyway, let me know how you get on ;-)

Making Money with a Picture Blog - Mid Feb Update

2009-02-16T02:49:00.000-08:00

Over the last few months I've tried to increase the traffic to my Yorkshire Dales Picture Blog and hopefully make some money in the process. Regulars here at Make Nothing Online will know so far I haven't had much success.

Here's a quick mid-month update. Since the last post, I've done the following:

continued to post every 3 days on average
commented on 2 or 3 blogs most days
dropped on 20-50 Entrecard blogs per day
used credits to purchase backlinks from Entrecard's new marketplace

Here are the statistics:

Month	Visitors	Earnings
Jul 2008	484	0.01
Aug 2008	517	0.42
Sep 2008	344	0.08
Oct 2008	639	0.35
Nov 2008	1430	0.78
Dec 2008	2500	1.25
Jan 2009	2429	2.42
*Feb 2009	2859	2.61

English Wilderness has seen a 45% increase in traffic, discounting the traffic from Entrecard which varies depending how actively I drop.

This month, I'm going to focus on building relevant backlinks to attract search engine traffic and also work my way through some of the suggestions left in previous comments.

Making Money Online with a Picture Blog?

2008-12-31T11:30:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of November I posted about how I'm failing to make money with a picture blog. I set myself the target of 5000 visitors in November. Two months on, it's time to check how much progress I've made.

Here's a summary of what I've done to increase traffic and backlinks:

added English Wilderness to approx 25 RSS directories
posted approx 80 comments on blogs with CommentLuv
used Entrecard credits to purchase backlinks
dropped on 15-20 Entrecard blogs per day
used Twitterfeed to tweet the latest posts

Unfortunately, I struggling to comment on blogs which use CommentLuv. My original intention was to comment on 5 per day. I only leave a comment if I find something interesting, but for every blog that inspired me to comment, there were 20 that didn't.

Here are the statistics:

Month	Visitors	Earnings
Jul 2008	484	0.01
Aug 2008	517	0.42
Sep 2008	344	0.08
Oct 2008	639	0.35
Nov 2008	1430	0.78
Dec 2008	2500	1.25

And the source of traffic:

%	Source
37%	Entrecard
21%	Direct Traffic
17%	Stumbleupon
13%	Reddit
4%	Google
3%	Comments
1%	Links

Although I've failed to meet the original target, there has been a reasonable improvement in traffic. Throughout January I'll continue to build backlinks and aim to reach 5000 visitors. If you have any ideas how to improve the traffic, please leave a comment below.

The Lazy Blogger's Guide to RSS Directories

2008-12-10T14:14:00.000-08:00

Submitting your blog to RSS directories will help build traffic and backlinks, but can be incredibly time consuming.

To help make the process as quick and painless as possible, I've built a list of directories which meet certain criteria - registration should not be required and the submission form should be as simple as possible.

When I tested these earlier today, all 25 worked and I spent just under 30 minutes submitting to the entire list. The links are direct to the submissions page.

Email Required

The following directories require your email address. I've listed them seperately so you can avoid them if you wish.

If there's anything I've missed, please let me know in the comments below.

Warning: Remove the Sitehoppin Widget from your Blog Now

2008-11-30T15:08:00.000-08:00

Update:

Sitehoppin is a social network similar to StumbleUpon which has experienced some issues over the past 12 hours. Due to a problem with the domain, visitors to websites with the Sitehoppin widget have been redirected to a holding domain. Participating websites have lost their traffic.

The problem has now been resolved and I'll be putting my widget back online. There's no longer any need to remove your widget, but I'm hoping Max will update the widget to prevent any problems in future.

Original Post:

Sitehoppin was a social networking site which cloned StumbleUpon, allowing visitors to submit links and surf to random sites. The site encouraged website owners to install their widget, offering credits and traffic in return.

Sitehoppin seems to have disappeared, and if you still have the widget on your site, you need to remove it right now. Because the original webpage no longer exists, the widget doesn't work as intended and is hijacking your traffic, redirecting it to a page of ads. If the widget is in your blog sidebar, you're losing every single visitor.

Please remove the widget and spread the word. If you have any further info, please leave a comment below.

Building Backlinks with Kwippy

2008-11-28T00:43:00.000-08:00

Kwippy is a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter, which offers a big bonus to anyone in the process of building backlinks - links posted are do-follow.

Kwippy integrates with Google Talk, Yahoo and Facebook, and has threaded conversations, something lacking in Twitter. Unlike Twitter, posts are not limited to 140 characters.

Kwippy has an Alexa rank of 60k and the public timeline has a pagerank of 3, so I'll be visiting occasionally and dropping a Kwip with a link or two.

To Be a Magpie - Make Money on Twitter

2008-11-18T23:01:00.000-08:00

For a while I ignored the buzz about Magpie on Twitter, but I started to become curious and decided to investigate further. Magpie is an Ad Network that allows Twitter users to make money with an occasional post to their account.

Signing up with Magpie is easy. You enter the details of your Twitter account and select the ratio of advert/tweets. Then sit back and let Magpie post the occasional ad until you've made enough money to receive a payment.

Magpie earnings can be used to either purchase your own ads, or you can receive a payment by PayPal when you reach €50 (currently $63 or £42).

Considering using Magpie doesn't require any extra effort on my part, I'm giving it a try for a couple of months. I'll let you know how well I get on. Have you had any experiences, good or bad, with Magpie?

Building Backlinks with CommentLuv

2008-11-12T12:34:00.000-08:00

I'm always looking for new ways to build backlinks and for the next few weeks I'll be commenting on blogs which use the CommentLuv plugin.

CommentLuv is a plugin for Wordpress blogs, which inserts a link to your latest blog post at the bottom of your comments. Here's an example:

Johns last blog post..How Much Money do I Need to Make Online?

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to make sure your keywords are in your post title, because with CommentLuv your post title becomes the anchor text of your backlink.

To get started simply use Google Blog Search to find blogs with the text Enable CommentLuv. To further narrow the search and potentially increase the SEO benefits, try adding one or more of your keywords to the blog search.

Finally, select a few posts to comment on, following good commenting etiquette:

make sure you read the post first to ensure your comment is relevant,
a good comment should be on topic and add value to the post,
'nice post' comments are only left by people who didn't bother to read the post,
don't use keywords for your name.

I'll be using this technique to build backlinks for 20 minutes a day until the end of November and anticipate making 5 comments per day.

At the beginning of December I'll attempt to measure how successful I've been. Any ideas how to measure the success would be greatly appreciated, otherwise I'll base the results on Technorati authority.

If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment below.

Failing to Make Money Online with a Picture Blog

2008-11-06T14:51:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year I started the English Wilderness picture blog to show off a few of my photos and hopefully make a little bit of money online in the process.

I've used a standard Blogger template and installed Entrecard. Blogger allows a future post date to be set and the post won't be published until the selected date.

I've used this facility to queue in up to 10 posts at a time, to be published every third day. Using this, I can sit down for about an hour and prepare a month's worth of updates.

Unfortunately, it's only received 2000 visitors and earned $0.86 in 4 months. This works out at $0.22 per hour, significantly less than I was hoping for. If English Wilderness was solely intended to make money online, I'd be tempted to abandon it and start a new project.

Here are the depressing statistics:

Month	Visitors	Earnings
Jul 2008	484	0.01
Aug 2008	517	0.42
Sep 2008	344	0.08
Oct 2008	639	0.35

The traffic is poor. The photos are not the kind to appeal to users on Digg, Stumbleupon, etc so I need to find another way to build traffic.

During November, I'm going to spend 15 minutes per day building backlinks and dropping / advertising on Entrecard. Hopefully I'll be able to build up a small number of regular readers and improve my placement in the search engine results. I've also added a post asking my regular readers to link to me.

My target is 5000 visitors in November! If you have any other ideas how I can achieve this, or how I can better monetize the blog, please let me know :-)

How I Almost Made Money Online with Funny Signs

2008-10-31T06:15:00.000-07:00

In March 2007 I started experimenting with StumbleUpon and came up with my first scheme to make money online.

Funny pictures seemed to be popular with Stumblers, so I set myself the task of making a simple website of funny signs.

After about 6 hours work I'd created an ugly 10 page site. Each page contained a funny sign, simple navigation, links to friends and 3 blocks of advertising.

I uploaded the site to a free host and submitted to StumbleUpon. The first few days it received a big hit of visitors, then died off.

I revisited the page for a couple of hours in August 2007 to add 5 more pictures and submitted to StumbleUpon. Another big hit of visitors followed and I haven't touched the site since. Here's the visitor stats:

Month	Visitors	Earnings
Mar 2007	12687	2.72
Apr 2007	967	0.14
May 2007	2211	0.32
Jun 2007	1054	0.72
Jul 2007	3660	0.59
Aug 2007	46322	14.86
Sep 2007	12959	5.56
Oct 2007	19008	5.50
Nov 2007	2766	1.00
Dec 2007	2997	0.84
Jan 2008	1884	0.23
Feb 2008	1292	0.25
Mar 2008	2970	0.66
Apr 2008	2630	2.49
May 2008	2279	0.45
Jun 2008	1879	0.53
Jul 2008	8860	3.67
Aug 2008	1873	0.77
Sep 2008	2669	0.36
Oct 2008	2128	0.26

Despite ignoring the page for over a year, it's still receiving 2000 visitors per month. Altogether it's made $42 - with $11.50 in the last year. 20% of the earnings are from the link unit on the left.

Although I value my time at more than $5.25 per hour, I still consider this a successful experiment. I can highly recommend it to anyone who wants to make almost no money online. :-)

I Need Your Support

2008-10-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

I need the help and support of my friends and visitors. Here are a few suggestions how you can contribute.

If I'm wrong, tell me I'm wrong. If I've missed something, tell me I've missed it.
Add me to your favorites and visit whenever you can.
Share my pages on social websites like Stumbleupon, Facebook, Delicious, Reddit, etc.
Take a look at the projects I'm working on and share those too.
Follow me on Twitter.
Add me as a friend on Stumbleupon.
If you have your own website or blog, it would be fantastic if you could link to me, either to Make Nothing Online or one of my other projects.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

How Much Money do I Need to Make Online?

2008-10-12T10:58:00.000-07:00

After making virtually no money online for the past few months, it's time to set myself a realistic target.

Recently I've been receiving an average of 450 visitors per day, earning approx $0.50 per 1000. At the current exchange rate, I need to earn $1300 per month to cover living expenses.

To make enough money to break even, I need around 2.6 million visitors per month, or 86000 per day. That's roughly a 99.5% increase in traffic and if I haven't achieved it by February, I'm going to run out of cash!

To reach this goal, I need to do the following:

better monetize existing content
build new content that will monetize well
increase traffic by building backlinks
increase traffic by social networking

Any suggestions how to achieve the above would be greatly appreaciated. Otherwise, it's going to take a lot of good old fashioned hard work! If you have any ideas, please leave a comment.

Privacy Policy

2008-10-07T04:04:00.000-07:00

Privacy

I respect your privacy. The following policy explains how information is collected on Make Nothing Online. Your personal information will never be sold or disclosed to a third party, except where required by law.

Statistics

I use Google Analytics to track aggregate statistics about visitors to Make Nothing Online. This information is not linked to personally identifiable information.

Cookies

Cookies are small data files stored by a website on a user's computer. Make Nothing Online does not uses cookies. However, some of my advertising partners use cookies. I have no access to cookies set by advertisers.

Advertisers

I use advertising partners to display ads on Make Nothing Online. These partners may use cookies. I work with Google Adsense and Entrecard. I receive a list of Entrecard members who use the 'drop' feature. Please check the advertising partners' websites for their privacy policies.

Contact Information

If you have any questions please contact John Metcalf at digital.wilderness@googlemail.com.

About this Blog

2008-10-06T00:40:00.000-07:00

I'm demonstrating the techniques I've successfully used to Make Nothing Online for the last 18 months.

With patience and plenty of trial and error, you too can match my success and develop an online income of $0 per month.

If I can start from scratch and create on online empire that makes me absolutely nothing, then so can you.

Ad Cost	0 clicks	1 clicks	2 clicks	3 clicks	4+ clicks
2	51	9	1
4	33	10	5	1	3
8	28	9	3	2	2
16	18	8	5	1	3
32	1	7	1	4	19
64			2	2	11
128			1	1	12
256					4
384					3
512					5

Ad Cost	0 clicks	1 clicks	2 clicks	3 clicks	4+ clicks
2	51	9	1
4	33	10	5	1	3
8	28	9	3	2	2
16	18	8	5	1	3
32	1	7	1	4	19
64			2	2	11
128			1	1	12
256					4
384					3
512					5

Ad Cost	0 clicks	1 clicks	2 clicks	3 clicks	4+ clicks
2	51	9	1
4	33	10	5	1	3
8	28	9	3	2	2
16	18	8	5	1	3
32	1	7	1	4	19
64			2	2	11
128			1	1	12
256					4
384					3
512					5