Shaun Low

I’m a regular reader of Fred Wilson’s blog. Fred posted an article today that he is planning to clean house on his blog. He will remove many (if not most) of the widgets that adorn his site.

There was much rejoicing!

I can understand why Fred installed all these widgets in the first place. He’s got a natural curiosity and he’s a venture capitalist by trade — and invests in this stuff. There’s no better way to get to understand a technology or trend than to actually use it.

But, I’d argue that very few of his blog readers appreciate the widgets (except, perhaps the people that developed them).

Benefits Of Widget Removal And A Cleaner Blog

1. It focuses readers on the core content, which is (hopefully) why they’re there.

2. It makes pages load faster. Think of the bandwidth saved across the web!

3. Search engines like Google appreciate fast-loading sites (and possibly reward them with higher rankings).

4. It makes things simpler and more likely to load across a variety of browsers. (Yes, yes, I know things are supposed to work — but they often don’t)

So, if you’re a blogger, follow Fred’s lead and clean things up a bit. Your readership will thank you.

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About the author:
Dharmesh Shah is a serial software entrepreneur. He is the author of the
widely read startup blog OnStartups.com which focuses on advice and ideas
for startup founders and management teams. Dharmesh is also the co-founder
of HubSpot.com, a software company building applications that help small
businesses transform their website into a marketing machine.

I have a couple of blogs (using Blogger) that are monetized using Google. But, the ads that appear are often completely unrelated to the content - sometimes embarrassingly so. Is there any way of getting the ads to be more relevant? I do use tags, but that doesn’t seem to help. Sigh.

Dave’s Answer:

This is a great question, actually, because I see so many bloggers who don’t think about giving the AdSense engine clues about what’s on the page and have the same result of poorly targeted ads and, no surprise, very low revenue. Worse, and this is something to really think about, if the AdSense engine can’t figure out what you’re writing about, odds are very good that Google’s search engine spider can’t either, which means that you’re not going to get very good search engine results placement (aka “SERPs”) for your blogging efforts.

The most common reason for this is that you write about too broad and diverse a range of topics. Since many blog layouts have multiple entries on a page (especially the home page), if the topics are too diverse it’s impossible for any targeting to succeed.

This is why it’s hard to have a commercially successful blog when one entry is a review of your latest cellphone, the next is a complaint about seating in the local movie theater, and a third entry is an ode to your Mom for Mother’s Day.

Another common reason I see is that you just aren’t writing enough about the specific topic at hand for AdSense / Googlebot to figure out what’s important. Imagine this: if you just looked at the words on your Web page, ignoring all graphics, design and layout, how many words comprise your navigation and supplemental content versus how many words are you using for your actual blog entry? If your ratio is 80:20 with your widgets, sidebars, blogroll, navigation, copyright, etc., being the 80%, you have a serious problem, and every time you write a 2-3 line blog entry, you’re making it impossible for the system to figure out what’s really important on the page.

There’s a third thing that happens with blogging that can undermine your efforts too, and it’s a bit more subtle. Instead of using explicit nouns in your writing, most people succumb to more informal usage with “it” being quite common. Scan back through what I’ve written here about AdSense targeting and you’ll see I don’t do that: I explicitly use “AdSense” or “Google AdSense” or similar time and again. It’s a slight tweak to your writing style that helps search engines and automatic page analysis tools correctly identify the main theme and topic of the page.

Google also has a nifty little device you can use to help identify which portions of your page are intended to be fodder for the AdSense targeting engine: AdSense Section Targeting. You can learn more about it on my tutorial page: How to target your AdSense ads with AdSense Section Targeting.

Notice how many times I used the proper noun in the previous paragraph? It’s a tiny bit redundant, but if you can live with the slight change to your writing style, it really can pay significant dividends with both search engines and ad targeting engines.

I hope these suggestions help you make tweaks to your Blogger weblog so that your ads are better targeted to your content, and, dear reader, if you have additional ideas or suggestions, please add them below as a comment!

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About the author:
Dave Taylor has been involved with the Internet since 1980 and is
internationally known as an expert on both business and technology issues.
Holder of an MSEd and MBA, author of twenty books and founder of four
startups, he also runs a strategic marketing company and consults with firms
seeking the best approach to working with weblogs and social networks. Dave
is an award-winning speaker and frequent guest on radio and podcast
programs.

AskDaveTaylor.com
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/

If you’ve been following the developments on the WordPress blog, you’d know that the new official release of WordPress 2.5 is out.

Besides better image handling - the new version has a pretty comprehensive built-in gallery (WordPress head developer honcho Matt Mullenweg did a preview screencast of the new gallery), it also has features like an enhanced in-built tagging feature, integrated analytics (so you get a better idea of your traffic picture without having to go to Google Analytics), a redesign of the user interface that should allow for more intuitive posting.

What’s uncertain is if embedding videos and other code requires having to muck around with the blog settings, because WordPress hasn’t really “played nice” with PHP, javascript and flash files in it’s previous incarnations.

Also, there’s a big question mark about the compatibility with WordPress plugins (generally developed by third party and independent developers) designed for earlier versions of WordPress.

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So the $64,000 question (or perhaps in today’s context, the $1million question…) is as an Internet Marketer - either you promote other products as an affiliate or you have your own products - should you upgrade to WordPress 2.5 now?

Here’s my personal take…

If you started out with the later versions of WordPress 2.2.x or WordPress 2.3.x and your blog works ok now, you should not have too much difficulty with the upgrade. Maybe 1 or 2 plugins might stop working, but you might be able to get along without it.

If on the other hand, you started out with WordPress 2.0.x or 2.1.x and you use more than 20 different plugins, you can expect some pain during the upgrade process.

I know specifically if you’re using SEO-optimization type plugins and affiliate marketing plugins, and one of them breaks in the process (especially since WordPress has gone from a category-based data management system to a taxonomy-based one), you might want to hang on for a moment, and wait a couple of weeks before the dust settles.

From what I’ve seen from the notes, it doesn’t look like the ability to post video on the blog is a huge priority at the moment, so podcasters, video bloggers and lifecasters might experience some difficulty during the migration.

Whatever you choose to do, be sure to backup your MySQL database, and copy and paste important settings and information into a text file for reference later in case something goes awry.

There’s nothing more “fun” than doing a one-click upgrade of your blog, only to spend the next 24-48 hours trying to undo it.

If you have the ability to, you might even want to duplicate your existing blog on another domain or a sub-directory and upgrading that instance of your blog. The major bugbears may take a couple of days to show themselves though.

Whatever you do, tread carefully, especially if your blog brings in daily income!

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About the author:
Andrew Wee is an Asia-based Internet Marketer focused on blogging, social traffic generation and affiliate marketing. Previously rated as one of Asia’s top technology journalists, Andrew covers breaking news and industry developments at WhoIsAndrewWee.com