Tag: website

On Site Advertising: Affiliates
This is related to a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

So what about those affiliates?

Affiliates are simply links to other sites that earn you money because, after clicking on your link, they buy something. And in my experience, they are never going to be the big money earners.

I’ve used the following, in no particular order:
- Amazon
- StudioPress.com (themes)
- Easy Digital Downloads (ecommerce solution)
- Sucuri (site security)
- Liquidweb (web hosting)
- Namecheap (domains)
- Utility Pro (theme)
All those links are affiliate links, by the way.

Unless I’m making a post that has a direct link to them, like I’m discussing them specifically, they don’t get a lot of traffic. The problem is, like ads, where do you put affiliate links for the best traction?

In a weird way, links like those are why spammers spam links. They trust people will click on the random links and buy a product. If you turn your affiliate links into banner ads, then you can be more successful, but now you just have more and more cluttering up your site.

This is pretty much why I suck at them, though. I don’t enjoy marketing. I hate the push of sales. The way I buy things is I look around, I ask around, and I test. I know what features I want and, if I don’t, I actually do ask people for help understanding them.

I’ve read multiple essays on how to effectively be an affiliate, and the advice boils down to what CopyBlogger says about being honest and authentic.

But I do reviews rarely, which means affiliate links are just these links that sit around and look link ‘powered by’ links, which they really are. I will say that I don’t have an affiliate link for anything I don’t use.
7 September, 2015
On Site Advertising: WordAds
This is part of a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

My experience with WordAds has been a little spotty. In terms of revenue, it’s far superior to ProjectWonderful. That said ProjectWonderful (and Google Adsense) have some aspects that make WordAds less than attractive.

I used WordAds for about 13 months, and while I loved the plugin they made, and I loved the support, the problems I have are with the system and the quality of ads. I want to stress that this is a ‘review’ of their beta product. I knew what I was getting into with a beta, but there were issues with the system that went beyond what I’d normally accept for a beta.

A beta is expected to be functional and usable if buggy. WordAds was functional, but I had no control and no information, which made it unusable.

I had no control over ad placement, which normally I would say is the ‘fault’ of the plugin, but in reality it’s clearly the decision of the service. It provides two ads: one below the first post on an archive page and one below the post content itself on a single post. The ads are exactly the same shape. Most of the time this is fine. On some of my sites, which use ‘non traditional’ layouts, it made them very, very janky.

Additionally I have no control over what ads show. The default ads tended to lean towards ClickBait. I don’t like that, but it’s pretty minor since default ads always kinda suck no matter what system you use. Still, I couldn’t pick and close ads I found offensive. The winner for this service is Project Wonderful. For WordAds I had to right click, get the information of what had loaded, and send that in to get it blocked. Given that most users just say “Did you know you had a Rand Paul ad on your site?” this was impossible to manage for me.

When I combine this with the lack of information … Here’s the ultimate reason I called it quits. There’s no dashboard. There is no way for a user to see analytics. I had no way see what ads are doing well and where which means I could never evaluate the impact of them on my layout. Like many professionals, I review SEO impact and ad displays. I couldn’t do that at all on WordAds to the point that they had to email me a report of my earnings.

I was told the manual emailing of revenue was a temporary stop-gap while the new system was put in place. Six months later, not only was I still getting emails, but I actually didn’t get one for a month and had to politely ask someone on staff. They were, as always, totally awesome about it, but I felt the underlying current was they too were feeling the strain of a lack of automation. It felt like there was no managerial and resource investment in what should be a killer product.

Having earnings be a black box is a crappy user experience. Having analytics be a ‘just trust us…’ world is useless if I want to improve my site quality and revenue. I’m all for set-it-and-forget-it (which is ironically why I love the plugin), but the user experience for the service itself was disheartening.

Review
- Ease of Registration: 4/5
- Ease of use (on WordPress): 5/5
- Ease of use (non WordPress): 0/5
- Customizable: 0/5
- Control: 1/5
- Analytics: 0/5
- Revenue: 3/5
When they get out of beta, I may check them out again, but right now I don’t feel comfortable having my eggs in an invisible basket.
2 September, 2015
On Site Advertising: Google Adsense
This is part of a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

Google Adsense is the grand daddy of ad systems, and if you can use it, it’s got the highest rewards. In the last 3 years, they’ve streamlined and upgraded and made the system incredibly nice to work with.

I stopped using Adsense for the 3 years prior to this experience because I was frustrated with the lack of control. That’s far less the case today. You can now allow and block ads far more granularly than before. You can blacklist specific domains or specific types of ads. While it’s a little derpy to get the URLs, I was able to blacklist some anti-gay sites right away.

Even though I still wish they’d just blacklist those people from making money in the first place (not Rand Paul, the hate sites), Google’s doing a much better job than they used to, and I feel morally better about it.

Of course, while there are a bajillion WordPress plugins for it, there’s no official Google Plugin and because of that, I don’t use any plugin. The same code I wrote up for Project Wonderful is easily applied to how I want to use Google Adsense.

Also Adsense remains the highest earner of any revenue stream I’ve used. Their current system even includes a scorecard, updating regularly, that explains how your site is doing:

That ‘Site Health’ score being a 4 is due to WordPress putting ‘render blocking javascript‘ in the header. I’ll live. Everything else is fine.

The interesting thing about Adsense is that Google’s rolling out something new. Google Contributor. And if you have adsense then it’s already on:

I’m not entirely sure how it works, and I kind of want to see it be such that people can pick a site to sponsor, but the idea is a game changer I’m excited for. This alone was why I went back to Adsense.

Review:
- Ease of Registration: 4/5
- Ease of use (on WordPress): 3/5
- Ease of use (non WordPress): 3/5
- Customizable: 5/5
- Control: 3/5
- Analytics: 5/5
- Revenue: 4/5
Adsense is old, but it’s aged well and Google’s treating it with love. It makes money, they appreciate that, and it shows.
31 August, 2015
On Site Advertising: Project Wonderful
This is part of a series of reviewing on-site advertising I have used: Project Wonderful, Google Adsense, WordAds.

I found Project Wonderful by accident. It was linked to on some comic book and fan sites I visit. For the most part, Project Wonderful is Project Pretty Good. It’s goofy, it’s silly, and most of the ads you get are for webcomics or ebooks.

Revenue from it is also chancy at best. I average pennies a day, but I have a lot of control and I like that which is part of why my revenue was so low. I set it up so I have to approve every single ad and ad change, which is exceptionally time consuming. This also causes lower revenue, but the primary reason I like it is that control.

I can block users, I can report them for scams or bait-and-switch, and I have a very wonderful rapport with the staff there. They’ve told me before that they appreciate my reports. If I change my mind about an ad, it’s a little tricky but I can go and find it and reject it after the fact.

There’s no plugin for this ad network. You have two bits of code to put on your site, the basic Project Wonderful JS that loads their commands and then the code for each ad-block. It’s pretty trivial to make a plugin for it, and in fact I made a shortcode that allows me to run [pwads id=name], where name is the name of the adbox. It’s a very basic switch check and sanitize and it works fine for me.

This code is also accessible outside of WordPress because the shortcode is calling a separate file (like /secret/ads/projectwonderful.php ) which I can then use with sneaky includes. But that’s another post. What must be known here is that I have it working in and out of WordPress with the same code base.

The biggest problem with Project Wonderful is that it feels like 1999. The site is old and dated. The interface is clunky and has a crappy UX if you’re on a tablet. Don’t bother with a phone.

The welcome page is pretty nice:

You have links to all your ads, you can click on them for more ads:

It’s not bad, it’s just dated. Also they have downtime a little more than I’d like to see. It used to be bad but now it’s once in a while. The real problem with the downtime is it makes my site slow.

Review
- Ease of Registration: 4/5
- Ease of use (on WordPress): 3/5
- Ease of use (non WordPress): 3/5
- Customizable: 5/5
- Control: 5/5
- Analytics: 3/5
- Modernity: 2/5
- Revenue: 1/5
I’m still using Project Wonderful, but the revenue certainly is something hard to accept. I stick with it, mostly, because it’s ethically pleasing.
26 August, 2015
On Site Advertising
I made a passing reference to having ethics when it came to advertising a few days ago, and scared a friend of mine. This was probably because I was using his ad network. I’m not anymore, but that has nothing to do with ethics.

The ethics comment stemmed from why the link to DreamHost on my site is not an affiliate link. Could it be? Probably, but I get free hosting by working here.

In the last decade, I’ve used three main sources for ad revenue on sites. Originally I used Google Adsense because, like everyone else, I used Google. At a certain point, I got upset because I couldn’t remove ads I didn’t like without having my revenue bottom out. I don’t like having ads for things I find to be distasteful on my site. This is actually a pretty big deal to me. I don’t like not being able to say “Rand Paul is evil, get him off my site.” At that point I moved to Project Wonderful, and then in the last year I was able to opt in to the Beta project for WordAds on self-hosted WordPress sites.

I’m going to ‘review’ all three on a scale of zero to five, where zero is ‘not at all’ and five is ‘the winner.’
- Ease of Registration: How easy it is to sign up and get added to the system?
- Ease of use (on WordPress): Getting it added to WordPress. Is there a plugin? Is
- Ease of use (non WordPress): What about outside of WordPress? Is this available for any CMS?
- Customizable: Can I decide what ads show when and where?
- Control: Can I reject specific ads and block certain advertisers?
- Analytics: What does the tracking look like? Can I see how my ads are performing?
- Modernity: How do the ads and the interface feel? Do they keep up with mobile and design trends?
- Revenue: How profitable is it?
Those are the items that are important to me, in no real order.

If you want to know what I’m using, it’s currently a mix of Project Wonderful and Google Adsense. This is not a full measure of the worth of any of these products. I’m using them in a non-WordPress only world, which colors things differently than one might think.

In additional to advertising networks, I’ve used a number of affiliate programs from StudioPress to Amazon, and had interesting results with those.

By no means is this an exhaustive set of reviews. It’s just my experiences with them.
24 August, 2015
If You Know What To Do

I tweeted this a few days ago.

If you keep letting people make bad choices, they will KEEP MAKING BAD CHOICES!!!
Developers, please stop letting your clients do things that you know are wrong! Change the web with your power!

A few people joked about Nokia phones. I joked about sliders and auto-play videos.

But the real issue, the crux of this, was marked when the following reply hit my stream:

this is tougher when there’s a buffer of account execs, project managers, c-levels, stakeholders in the way 🙁

Yes. It is. So what was I really talking about and what does this mean?

If You Know What To Do…

You’re an expert. You’re an expert designer, developer, programmer, writer, whatever it is you know you’re great at. You are. Let’s put the imposter syndrome issue on the shelf and accept our greatness for what it is.

You know what’s right and what’s wrong. You know that keyword stuffing is bad. You know that not putting in alt/title tags for your images is bad. You know that auto-playing music will make us all want to kill you. You know that no one actually enjoys sliders. You know that mobile-first is the future. You know that CAPTCHA is inaccessible to many people. You know that China blocks WordPress.com.

You know a lot of things. You’re an expert. And you’ve been hired to be that expert.

… And You Don’t Do It …

We’ve all been there when someone on your project team says that ‘sliders improve conversation rates.’ And most of us have replied with a link to http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/. We’ve told them how they suck. We’ve pointed out the security issues with them. We’ve shouted about how putting an ad in the middle stops people from clicking to the end. We’ve brought up mobile issues and lamented their speed issues.

And then there are the times you don’t. There are times, more often than not, where you just go along with the flow. You hear “We need a slider.” and you do it. You just do it. It’s okay. We all did.

While there are reasons to go along with your committee, there are reasons not to. Is a slider worth getting into a fight with people about? Probably not. But what about keyword stuffing? What about the slider that you know has security issues? What about those things you know will kill SEO? Do you say no? Do you stand up and say “This is bad and here’s why.”?

… There You Bloody Well Are, Aren’t You?

Those things you hate on the web? They’re our fault. Nor yours, ours. We don’t fight back when we know things are bad ideas. When we don’t stand up and say “This is not safe” then we are breaking the web. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

It’s hard. It’s very hard to do this. You will fight tooth and nail over stupid small things. You will struggle with people telling you that you don’t know anything. And you will feel that nagging doubt of imposter syndrome.

You’ll also lose sometimes. And that’s okay. The point is not to win all the time, the point is to educate. The point is to stand up and work to make the web better and not fall to the status quo of what you know is wrong. If you do that, if you keep teaching them and educating and explaining, you will chip away at the wrong and make it right.

But if you’re not willing to do any of that, then you’re making everything worse.

What was I actually talking about?

I was complaining about a theme that didn’t allow you to edit the footer. You had to make a child theme to edit the footer, which is fine in and of itself, but it’s not very friendly. It’s a theme with a bazillion bells and whistles to add CSS and change colors, and yet it failed on the most basic of all things. You cannot edit the footer unless you understand the nature of child themes.

There is a developer out there who’s trying to make a plugin that does all this for the user. His code is a nightmare not because he is a bad coder but because he’s working with a piece of shit theme that throws errors with WP_DEBUG and I haven’t even tried Theme Check on it. I’m afraid to.

But he’s out there, trying to make things better for people and I think he needs to stop. He’s working with a theme that isn’t worth it. He’s trying so damn hard to make the web better, but he’s failing because he’s starting from a place where everything is broken to begin with.

Simply put, he’s working to try and shine shit.

Don’t help people use things that are broken. Fix them the right way. Fix the theme or, if they won’t fix it, stop using it and stop recommending it. It’s not worth your effort if they know what’s right and they won’t do it.

There they bloody well are. Aren’t they?

8 June, 2015