I have talked about reader interaction before on many occasions, and the importance of it. One of the features I mentioned was a Votting Poll. Voting polls can be used in many different ways, ranging from just random feedback to usable feedback.

I run a poll, located on the right of the website. This Poll is great, there are no popup windows, and it’s Ajax powered, which means that once you click to vote, the screen doesn’t refresh or anything. This feature is very important if you decide to choose to use a Poll on your website - there is nothing worse than clicking vote, and having things popup or having the whole website reload, it kills the user experience!

Anyway, the reason for my post it to ask that you use my poll please, I would like too see what articles everyone is enjoying, so I can concentrate on them. It’s really simple, choose your choice, click submit, the process takes 2seconds!

I hope to see many results

Thanks
The Webtrepreneur

The other day I was surfing around the Internet looking at peoples blogs, just doing my daily 30mins of blog spotting, when I came across an interesting blog. This blog, which I can’t for the love of me remember the URL, spoke quickly on a very interesting topic, which I will talk about below. If the author comes across this, please drop me a line and I will add the link.

People who author blogs which fall under the categories of Internet, making money online, advertising online, and the likes are supported by Internet friendly users, by the I mean - people who have a fairly good understanding of the Internet. This said, you will usually find that this market of people do not click adverts, as they know how to easily spot adverts and stay away from them, to avoid the steriotypical popups, etc.

Creating a blog with a topic which is very much an offline hobby/topic and deals with non Internet savvy people often leads to a greater click through. Let me give you an example: I have seen many websites, which have navigational menus down the left have side of the website. The link would be in red, and the brief explanation under the link would be in black, let’s say the background of the website is white. Now, inbetween or at the botton of these adverts, you could use Google Adsense for Content, Type: Link Unit. Again, you would format these adverts with red links, black content and white background, basically formatting them so they look like an extension of the navigational bar. Back to the topic at hand, I’m sure you can see now how this would benefit an author who writes about a more offline topic. There would be more change of his readers clicking those adverts, than someone who is Internet Savvy.

A great example of this, was a dog breeding website I saw many moons ago. There website was all about dogs, and different dog breeds. Now, there are plenty of Internet savvy people who know a lot about dogs, but there are tons of non-savvy people who know a lot about dogs, more so than a website about search engine optimization, and their readers knowledge, in contrast. This dog breeding website placed its adverts very carefully on the website, and after emailing them, and being absolutely amazing at their click through ratios, it made lots of sense to me with regards to blogging to offline readers. (offline readers I mean people who aren’t always online).

It’s an interesting concept, and one which I would love to explore. I, personally have always wanted to create a website about tropical fish, having sections with information on installing tanks, sections on fish breeds, sections on breeding fish, and so on. I have not looked into the market at all, I wonder whether Google Adsense have many adverts in that category?

Well, there’s something to think about - does your more offline idea have adverts which are targeted to it?

I came across these two great programs while actually trying to code my own little C# application to make postings easier than having to use wordpress wp-admin area posting system.

Windows Live Writer

This program is wonderful. Download it here, and once you have downloaded it, install it and get started, honestly, it’s that simple. What it does is, when you install it, it will ask you whether you use myspace or another webblog, in my case, I chose other because Webtrepreneur is powered by Wordpres. The following screen asked for my address, so I punched in ‘http://www.webtrepreneur.co.za’, and then the program asked for my login details (This is the username and password you use when you access wp-admin). It then makes a connection to your webblog. Once that is done, blogging couldn’t be easier! The program comes with a quick view mode changer, which allows you to move from standard view to html view to web preview view with the click of a button. There are quicky links to add images, tags and web links. WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors make things so easy. Take a peak at the image below:

Windows Live Writer Firefox Plugin

Another great piece of software. This is a Firefox Plugin, which means you downlod the file, install it, and it appears in your Firefox Browser. You get a couple of options with the plugin, the first one being: add a new blog entry.. this will basically load up Windows Live Writer. You simply type in the title for the post, and type your post out and click submit! The second feature is pretty handy - Let’s say you are currently reading a blog entry on someone elses website and it catches your eye and you want to write about the same topic, you simply choose the “Blog This” option, and Windows Live Writer will load with the a premade link to the article you were reading - damn handy!

Here are the links: Information | Download Windows Live Writer | Download the Firefox Plugin

Blogging couldn’t be easier! This post is posted using Windows Live Writer.

It’s extremely popular to display adverts at the bottom of posts on a blog. The reader reads the blog posting, arrives at the end of the post, and the first thing he/she sees is an advert. If you have optimized your website correctly, the chances are that your advert will suite the topic just blogged about, and this will increase your chances of receiving a click from the user. What happens if you would like to rotate the adverts, so that you are not just displaying Google Adsense, for example, at the bottom of every post?

This is tricky, and I have not seen too many solutions around, so I decided to code my own solution to this problem. Below I will paste some of my code, along with the best description I can put together. I use PHP in this example.

Alright, now that the code is there, I can start explaining. It looks rather odd and tricky, but really it isn’t, especially if you have any knowledge of PHP. This little code snippet handles two different affiliate programs, and displays them randomly under your blog posts. I hope my explanation above was helpful, it is not easy explaining code so that everyone will follow.

Copy and paste the above code into notepad, and save the file as randomad.php. Once you have done this, all that is left, is placing it on your website, which will be done with this code:

<?php include(’randomad.php’); ?>

If you are a wordpress user, here are the steps to place this code correctly, so random adverts appear under each post:

1. Login to WP-Admin
2. Click Presentation
3. Click Theme Editor
4. Click Main Index Template, on the right of the screen
5. This is where things get tricky, now you need to look for the end of your posts code. Normally you would see something about comments or links to technorati or permalinks, you would place the code under that. Each theme is different so it is hard for me to tell you exactly where it goes. A common occurance is this..

</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Which you should be able to find in the Main Index Template, if you see this then place the <?php include(’randomad.php’); ?> line of code right above the <.div>, like this..

<?php include(’randomad.php’);?>
</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

6. Save the changes by clicking “Update File”, and go back to your website and refresh, wallah.

If you have any questions about implementing this, please feel free to contact The Webtrepreneur! Best of luck!