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Social media websites can be a good traffic source for your website or blog. There are several WordPress plugins available that make it easier for your visitors to submit a page they like to their favorite social media site.

StumbleUpon is one of the sites that can bring a heap of new visitors to your site. I’ve seen 18,000 page views in a single day on one of my sites, all traffic from StumbleUpon. The number of visitors that came to my site from StumbleUpon decreased considerably over the next couple of days, but I was still getting over 1,000 visitors a day for about a month.

We all want traffic, right? Well, actually, most webmasters think it’s all about the number of visitors, but what they really want is to make some money from ads running on their site. If you are running AdSense ads on your site, StumbleUpon traffic, or rather social media traffic in general, is no money maker. If you want to get a good return on all that free traffic, you have to know who your visitors are!
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It’s probably every webmasters dream to have his or her site featured on the front page of Digg. A lot of website owners, however, still have nightmares about the day they got Dugg. The avalanche of visitors hitting your site can cause a number of bad things to happen.

Getting shut down by your hosting provider
The sudden increase of traffic can cause some alarm bells to go of at your hosting provider. Some server administrators will mistake the ridiculously high hits on your site for a DDoS attack and take your site offline.

You can prevent this from happening by letting your hosting provider know that a page from your site made the front page of Digg. This is, of course, providing you know you have been Dugg.

Another reason, your web hosting provider might have, to take your site offline, is that your account has used up it’s available traffic resources. A page with only a few images and scripts can easily add up to a few hundred kb of data being transferred on a single page load.

Looking at my website statistics, it seems that my average page size is about 35 KB. If I would be running on a hosting account with a 10 GB a month data limit, I would be able to serve about 285.000 pages a month. That is plenty for most sites, but being on the front page of Digg can drive crazy amounts of visitors to your site, which can chew up your 10 GB plan in no time.

But there is something that can be far worse than having your site taken offline for reaching the bandwidth limit: it’s having your site stay online after using up your monthly bandwidth and
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Most hosting providers and domain registrars hide stuff they don’t want you to know about in their “general terms and conditions”, “terms of service” or “acceptable use policy” you agree on those when you sign up for their service. It’s that 40 page long document you scroll thru to click the “I agree” checkbox at the bottom.

Some domain registrars have high fees to transfer your domain to another registrar. easyspace.com, for example, charges $22 to transfer your domain or $37 to change the owner! Their 45 page long Terms & Conditions includes:

You agree that you may not transfer a domain name registration to another domain name registrar during the first sixty (60) days from the effective date of the initial domain name registration with us. After that time, you may transfer your domain name registration to a third party domain name registrar of your choice, subject to our then-current policies and procedures incorporated herein by reference.

Note the marked part! Basically they can add whatever they want after you have agreed! Read more »

There was a minor problem in the Ad Buttons plugin I released. Ad views from bots where excluded from being counted, but actions from bots did count as clicks. This has now been corrected, so search engine bots are now excluded from both view- and click-counter. You can download the revised version from the WP Ad Plugin page.

To update your current installation, just unzip the files and override existing ones currently on your server.

Eric pointed out Adgetize to me today, so I thought I’d give it a try. This ad program seems to have the greatest potential so far. You are getting paid not only for ad views or ad clicks, but also for posting on your blog. This is not a paid posting service, you just go about blogging like you normally would. You post what you want and earn points with their system.

Another big difference with services like Xavier Media Banner Exchange is that your accumulated points will be converted into cash! So, if you are getting clicks and hits from traffic exchange programs, but really rather be paid for your blog, this is your chance to sign up with a brand new service.

Adgetize has only been around for a month, but people have already been paid for this program, so it seems to be legit. Looking at how their system works, I’m not entirely sure they will last long in the advertising market. People are currently signing up like crazy and displaying the Adgetize ads on their websites to earn cash. If the program fails to attract enough advertisers, this nice program could soon be gone.
If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for their service for free and start showing ads on your site within minutes. Just go to the Adgetize website and sign up now!

Thanks Eric for pointing out the program!

Looking into more ways to get free advertising and traffic, I found the Xavier Media Banner Exchange program. Programs like these are a great way for the starting bloggers to get some visitors to their blog, without having to put down any cash for advertising.

The program works with a 3:2 ration, which means that for every 3 ad clicks on your site, you will get 2 visitors send back to you. You will start with 1000 banner impression credits and you can get another free 5000 banner impression credits just for writing a review. Since I was going to write this review anyway, that’s 5000 totally free banner impression credits for me, yay!

What I really like about this banner exchange program is that you don’t have to do any clicking to earn points, your visitors can take care of that. This makes this program a lot better than Entrecard in my eyes.

You can put your own ad in several of 35 different categories, so the traffic you will be getting should be pretty targeted. As with any banner campaign, the number of clicks on your ad will depend on the design of your banner. Since you can have multiple ads running through this program, you can do some split testing and see which banner design performs best for you.

I’ll have to see how this works out in the long run, but my first impression of the Xavier Media Banner Exchange is very positive. You should give it a try! If it doesn’t work out for you, too bad, but at least you didn’t loose a dime trying it.

Looking at different methods to bring traffic to this very new blog, I decided to give Entrecard a try. I was very hesitant in using this method because it is very much like the numerous traffic-swap programs out there. Been there, done that, didn’t like it!

You basically put an ad button on your site and visitors who are also signed up with Entrecard can click it to earn points. I can in turn visit their sites and click to earn points for myself. The earned points can be spend on displaying your ad button on other peoples websites.

The great thing about this method of advertising is that it doesn’t cost you a dime, which is great for people just starting out blogging. The downside is that you’ll have to do a lot of clicking to earn enough points to put your ad up on other sites. Also, when not clicking, the other users of the system will not notice you and will not visit your site.

So, if you click a lot, you get a lot of visitors. Great, if you have the time to visit all these blogs to click the button. But be aware of the type of traffic you get in return: they are other Entrecard members, only visiting your site to click the button. Most of them probably don’t even read a single word on your blog. They are the click-n-run visitors.

You might wonder how Entrecard got so popular. I’ll tell you: it’s all in the marketing! With a few big names, like Darren Rowse and John Chow, promoting your service, things can start snowballing pretty fast. Shame on you, both of you! Although it looks like they are both not using the service anymore.

If I don’t like this method of getting traffic, why am I using it? First of all, I believe in trying out things for myself before writing a review about it. Sure, I could just browse the web to see what everyone is saying, but that wouldn’t make a very objective review. I also think that this service can potentially bring me some visitors that might decide to hang around or subscribe to my rss feed. Since they are all bloggers, it is very targeted traffic I’m getting for this blog. The only question that remains is whether or not they actually read my posts.

So, to summarize: if you measure your blogs success in visitor numbers only and have time to spare to visit 350 blogs a day, just to click the Entrecard button, go ahead! If you are more interested in growing your blogs community, I’d say there are better ways to spend your time.

Keeping your WordPress installation, or any other software installations for that matter, up to date should be high on your to-do list. No matter how well programs are planned, there will almost always be bugs and security holes that are only discovered after the software has been released. They are often patched by software updates as soon as the issue has been discovered and a fix has been created.

It’s these known, and fixed, software issues, that cause the most problems. There are a lot of wanna-be hackers around, that are too stupid to figure out how to hack websites by themselves. Instead they just exploit the known bugs to gain access and impress their wanna-be-hacker-friends with their l33t h4cker 5killz.

If you keep your software up to date, you will probably have a more than 99% less chance of getting your website hacked. Here’s what happened to one of my WordPress blogs, that I didn’t upgrade:

I have a blog that has been laying dormant for well over a year. At one time I just didn’t have the time to post updates and I never got back to writing on that blog again. It was still making some money from a few scattered AdSense clicks, nothing major, but enough to cover the years domain registration and hosting fees. I figured I’d keep the site and maybe one day start writing on it again.

Recently I started getting email from the hosting company, notifying me that the site was nearing its bandwidth limit. Checking the website statistics I found a sudden rise in traffic back in August. The number of visitors and page views has been steady, but the used bandwidth went up. Not just a little: in July 2008 the site used 68 MB of bandwidth, which is about the normal monthly usage for the website throughout the rest of the year, but in August the traffic jumped up to 994 MB, in September the bandwidth usage was over 5 GB and the highest peak was this past November with nearly 10 GB of traffic!

I had my email alerts for the site set to 10 GB. So, nearing this amount of traffic triggered the system to notify me on the site usage. Checking the stats, I noticed visitors finding my website through search terms that I’m not even going to mention here, just open up your average spam email and you know what terms I mean.

I went to look at the site and everything appeared to be normal, but the little icon in the top right hand corner of my browser, which indicates the page is being loaded, wouldn’t stop spinning, even though my screen showed the complete site already. Looking at the source code of the page, I found a lot of links at the bottom of the page. I didn’t count them, but there where literally thousands!

I requested a free sample from each site linked to, so I could make my friends envy me for the rest of my life. Well, actually, I just removed the links and went to bed. The next morning they where all there again! I must have forgotten to save the file after removing the links. I removed them again and double checked the site. All looked good, but a few hours later the links had been put right back into my source code files.

This WordPress installation had been installed in January 2006 and hadn’t been upgraded since, so I decided to install one of my favorite WordPress plugins: WordPress automatic upgrade. With my installation being almost 3 years out of date, I wasn’t expecting the plugin to work, but it worked perfectly, upgrading my WordPress installation to the latest and greatest release with just a few clicks (sorry Keith, I should have known better!)

The links didn’t come back, but I’m still worried about a Google penalty my site might have received for having all these links on there. I’m glad big G didn’t close my AdSense account that was displaying ads on the spammed pages.

Search engines have their bots roaming the internet, looking for new and changed website pages. There’s no telling when the bots will visit your site and indexing new pages on your site can take anywhere from minutes to days or even weeks.

If you’re running a blog and people have subscribed to your rss feed, you’ll want to let them know immediately when you have posted new content. The rss services, however, also rely on checking your site to see if new content has been posted. Checking every blog every minute of the day would be a big burden, both on their servers, as well as on the one hosting your blog.

This is where ping comes in: by pinging a service, you let it know that you have updated your site and it should come over to see what has changed. (not to be confused with the tcp/ip ping command, which tests the connection between two systems)

Within the WordPress admin panel you can find Update Services under Settings -> Writing. Here you can type in the URLs of the services to ping, whenever you post something new to your blog.

There are loads of ping services available, but be careful! Don’t just put every ping service you can find in there. Services like pingomatic will forward your ping to multiple other ping services. This will cause multiple pings, both from you and from pingomatic, to the same service. With multiple pings coming in for a single post, your blog could be marked as spam!

Here’s the list of ping services I’ve put into my WordPress installations:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

If you are blogging on a specific subject, you probably look at other blogs within your niche, and you should. Following other blogs is a good way of keeping up with industry specific news and it can give you ideas for new posts on your own blog. Keeping up with what others are writing can be a very time-consuming task though. You don’t know when other blogs post new content, so to really stay on top of things, you’d have to visit each site a couple of time a day to check.

There’s a better way though, say hello to our friend the rss feed. If you are blogging, there’s no doubt that you have seen this term before, about every blogging platform has rss feeds integrated into the software. Still many beginning bloggers don’t know what an rss feed is or how to use it. The rss feed is the best thing since sliced bread!

The rapid rise of blogs, and rss feeds, only a few years ago, might make you believe that rss is one of the hip inventions of the 21st century. Truth is, that the technique has been around since the 1960’s. Like most things computer related, rss’ roots lie at IBM. But let me not bore you with a history lesson, nor the technical details of the rss feed. Let’s just take it’s working for granted and see how we can make use of it.

Without getting into the technical details, let me quickly give you an idea of what an rss feed is. Simply put, the rss feed makes the content of a website available in a standard way. The key word here is content, the feed doesn’t contain the layout of the website or the ads you see when visiting the site, although ads can be integrated into rss feeds as well. An rss reader can read the contents of multiple rss feeds and display them to you. This way you can keep track of new posts on multiple blogs from within a single web page or application.

If you want to know which rss reader is best for you, I’m not the one to ask. There are many readers available, online applications as well as stand-alone programs. I use Google reader but similar services are available at other sites. I prefer the online rss reader because it enables me to access my feeds from any computer with an internet connection.

The Google reader serves my needs, so I have not tried other applications yet. If you want to see some other rss readers available, Life Hacker posted a list of their visitors favorite rss readers a while ago and Daren has also asked his visitors what they use.