Due to the fact that Dragonblogger.com was still rated a PR of 0 and my personal and poetry blogs were recently related PR1 and PR2 respectively, I concluded I have too many outbound links on my primary technology and entertainment blog.  I have decided to more strictly enforce a NoFollow policy to try and keep some of my PR Juice from flowing out of my site and into other web sites in order to retain a better page rank, since traffic and user visits were not enough apparently.

So I have downloaded and installed the Wordpress NoFollow Links in Posts Plug-IN from the Wordpress archive, and it does work somewhat.  You can set posts in specific categories and they will automatically add “rel=nofollow” to the link’s after the specified # of days you enter.  There is a bug in the plug-in however, if you try to use the “all” instead of the categories individually, then every single link will have a rel=nofollow added even ones that are before the date.

The default is to not add no follow to anything, you must individually select your categories and then specify the # of days before automatically appending “nofollow”.  I have generally kept to a 30 day policy on all of my categories that link out, I will leave all links intact for 30 days with follow.  This way some blogging friends gain the benefit for a while, as well as paid posts which require follow tags will be satisfied and met for the duration of the paid post.

The -1 for “all” is misleading, and really means it will not add nofollow to all your posts, if you put 30, 60 or any number besides -1, then every link will have “nofollow” added and you won’t be able to get some paid posts approved (PayU2Blog and PayPerPost require DoFollow on links).

I was hoping to just set all posts to expire Follow after 30 days, and am hoping this feature gets fixed eventually.

(Click for larger image)

-Dragon Blogger

My online Identity known as Dragon Blogger is my brand and in 2009 I plan to build and extend Dragon Blogger in the online community so that more and more people recognize me and get to know the person as well as the content that I provide.  I have been blogging for 4 months as of December 23rd with this blog and already I have grown to over 12,000 unique visits per month averaging over 350 per day and hitting as many as almost 700 unique visits on some days (can’t figure out why the random spikes happen, but they seem to come from StumbleUpon a few days a month).

I continue to try and write reviews on products, software that my readers may use or want to use to help in their every day computer use.  I also will continue to provide honest and complete movie reviews as well as keep up with my NBC Heroes following.  And first and foremost to my fellow bloggers I plan on sharing everything I learn about blogging, from SEO to Income Generation with my readers so that everyone can model or at least pick some of my tactics to try and see what works for them.

So to summarize the last four months of blogging here is my primary methods for building my current success level:

Entrecard is still my #1 traffic generator consistantly, get the service and drop often.  Drop your inbox but go a day behind and drop further, don’t drop the same day droppers as they can’t drop you back the same day, always drop 1 day behind and you will see better traffic.  Also, do leave comments and feedback, don’t drop anonymously and move on, build a blog community and build blogging friends.

Twitter doesn’t generate enormous traffic but gets me out there and I enjoy connecting with people, I plan to leverage twitter more and more over the next year as just a means of getting to know people and for them to learn who I am and what I am doing.

SocialSpark I have worked hard to become the 3rd most # of friends on SocialSpark and I am hoping to take the 2nd slot in early next year just behind the CEO who automatically has everyone who joins on his friends network (cheater).  I have helped many people on SocialSpark, people will message me with random questions like “How do I get started?”, “How do I Link my blog”, “How do I add the ITK Tools”, and I am always more than happy to share anything I can with people, it comes from my tech support nature in my day job.

Blog Catalog, Zimbio, StumbleUpon, Digg are also helpful and I will be leveraging these more over the next year, particularly StumbleUpon and Blog Catalog which seem to work very well for some people.

For everyone looking to create a successful blog and build readership, and earn a little money on the side, keep this blog in mind as I will be sharing everything I have learned with you at some point as I learn it.  I am by no means making bank, but I have earned between $100 and $150 per month consistantly with my blog by its 2nd month and will be closer to $200 in January I predict.

Happy New Year

-Dragon Blogger

So I found out today that my Wanderer Thoughts poetry blog just got a Page Rank of 2, my personal blog Justin Germino received a Page Rank of 1, and this blog which is more prevalent and popular than both of those blogs is still a PR of 0.  I decided to compare a recent Page Rank comparison against my friend Damien Riley’s Postcards From The Funny Farm Blog.

(Click for larger Image, you can’t see the stats good with this tiny image)

From these stats listed above:
My Wanderer Thoughts blog is same Page Rank as PFTFF blog which should not be possible. The PFTFF has 25x more results on the web, 8x more yahoo backlinks, almost twice as good Alexa rank and yet has the same PR2. Meanwhile Dragonblogger has 5x More backlinks from Yahoo, better Alexa rank and more results on the web than Wanderer Thoughts and is still a PageRank of 0.

If Results from the web was hugely important, then there is no way Wanderer Thoughts would be a PR2. Then again my Rock Along Productions blog is a PageRank of 4, and it has less links, hits and alexa rank than all of these blogs.

The reason why my blogs are penalized is Paid Blogging hurts your PageRank, everyone knows it. Its a shame though because of the double edge sword, you need a high PR to score better opps, and doing paid opps hurts your PR. I continue to try and model my strategies to match Damien Riley’s but he has almost two year lead on blogging over me, so I wish I could tell my readers that I know how I achieved a Google PR and the best way to say this is:

Web Sites without paid content will automatically have higher PR than if you have a disclosure badge, or do PPP or PayU2Blog posts. This is why Rock Along Productions and Wanderer Thoughts which do no paid content or posts have a PR of 4 and 2 respectively yet have less than 30 unique visits per day in comparison to Dragonblogger.com which has over 300 unique visits per day.

The odd thing is my personal blog does do paid posts, SocialSpark and PayU2Blog and it still has a higher PR than my Dragonblogger, so this throws a wrench in the works. Dragonblogger is the only one that has done PayPerPost opps though, so does Google specifically penalize PayPerPost blogs?

Just some of my thoughts and comments.

-Dragon Blogger

I would like to take the time to thank my top EC Droppers for the past 30 days (Okay, some of November is included). My top 10 for the past 30 days have dropped 31 or 30 drops each, which is astounding and shows how dedicated these fellow bloggers are in returning Entrecard drops. I encourage my readers who are also EC droppers to give my top droppers some EC love, as you know they will return the favor. I also have added the top droppers to my Entrecard Generator, there is a top button specifically for the EC Top Droppers.

-Dragon Blogger

I have four blogs and all of them run several Google Adsense content ads.  I wanted to figure out how to track which blogs and which specific Adsense content was working better than others, so I found the best way to accomplish this was to leverage Adsense Channels.  These you can setup yourself on Google Adsense and you can create as many Channels as you want.

For my in Post Adsense Ads, I use the “All in One Adsense and YPN!” plug-in which allows you to directly specify your Google Adsense Channel you want to use:

I have channels setup for my Rock Along Productions Skyscraper, My Dragon Blogger In Post, My Dragon Blogger right skyscraper, My Wanderer Thoughts in Post and my Personal Blog (JustinGermino.com) In Post.

(click for larger image)

So now when I view my Adsense reports for December and factor in Channel reports, I can see which of my Channels brings in the most money:

(I encourage you to click this one for larger image, it is worth looking at in detail)

With this screenshot I can tell my dragonblogger.com draws in the most adsense for December $8 of my $11 dollars so far this month. The odd thing is my inpost header channel has a higher number of clicks, but my right skyscraper add brought in slightly more earnings on about 1/2 as many clicks, so therefore must have had more follow through. I also noticed how the ads were performing on my other blogs.

If I were to average over several months and see that certain ads and locations were performing well but others were drastically doing lousy, I would remove them altogether or reshape them and put them in a different location on my blog post. Using Channels you can eventually learn patterns on where to place your Google Adsense ads for maximum effectiveness on your blogs. You can then leverage this information and use that location to put other prime advertisements in theory as well.

-Dragon Blogger

I loved the Admin Management Xtended plug-in for Wordpress 2.6 which allowed me to easily update categories and some data for my posts without having to go into each and every post.  Wordpress 2.7 now features a built in feature called “Quick Edit” which allows you to perform similar work and pretty much nullifies the need for the Admin Management Xtended plug-in.

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Wordpress 2.7 Quick Edit allows you to very easily modify the Post Title, Slug, Post Date, Categories, Tags as well as you can disable comments and pings on posts if you prefer.  You can also set a post as sticky right from quickedit, which makes the post always appear at the top of your blog homepage.

I do find however that Quick Edit seems to have an issue with my podpress plug-in on all of my blogs, and the Sticky Flag will work, but you will get this error when you submit your changes:

Warning: Attempt to assign property of non-object in /mnt/local/home/germinoj/wandererthoughts.com/wp-content/plugins/podpress/podpress_admin_class.php on line 673

So if you remove the PodPress plug-in, you won’t have any issues at all.  Bluberry Powerpress is a better plug-in for podcasting anyway and doesn’t trigger any errors with the Quick Edit.

Note: Since you can set a sticky post directly from Quick Edit, You technically don’t need the WP-Sticky plug-in I posted about earlier, but that plug-in is still helpful for announcements and letting you know which post is a sticky post right from the main edit post screen.

So take advantage of the Quick Edit, you can sort filter all of your blog posts by a specific “Category” and then use quick edit to rapidly change categories, I often do this for all my accidental posts that are still uncategorized.

-Dragon Blogger

Today I downloaded and installed the Twitme wordpress plug-in which allows you to configure your wordpress blog to automatically send out a tweet notifying your followers of your latest blog post.  This is a valuable plug-in and prevents me from having to manually log into twitter and send updates when I update each of my 4 blogs.  This will do it automatically and save me at least 10-15 minutes per day in manually updating.  But I found the Twitme plug-in has other applications as well and should be customized a little for a better auto-tweeting experience.

This post will walk you through completely configuring the Twitme Wordpress Plugin for Wordpress 2.7

Step 1 - Download your Twitme Wordpress Plugin <- Click Link to download it

Step 2 - Copy the plugin via ftp or scp to your wordpress blog site (place in the <site>/wp-content/plug-ins) folder

Step 3 - Open your wordpress dashboard, click on plug-ins and activate the plug-in.

Now that the plugin is activated you will see a new sidebar module called “Twitme” that appears under your Settings module.

Step 4- Click on the Twitme Settings Link in the Twitme Module

Step 5 - Enter your Twitter ID and Password in the Twitme Settings

Step 6 - Customize your Twitter Message (I didn’t like the default, I like using the %POSTTITLE% reference so that the post title name displays instead of just %BLOGNAME% which is the default.

Step 7 - Make sure Enable Auto Post is selected (it should be by default)

Step 8 - Turn “Use Short urls” on, this way your URL’s will be shrunk via tinyURL so that your tweet doesn’t risk exceeding 140 characters

Step 9 - Turn off “Notify New Followers” this is one annoying feature and you should disable it, it is one of the top peeves by all twitter users and nobody wants to see dozens of auto thank you’s every day.

Step 10 - Click “Test Now” you should see that your credentials worked and see a success at the top of the page.

Step 11 - Write a Post and Publish It

Step 12 - Click on the Twitme module “Twitme” link

Step 13 - Confirm that you see the Post ID and date that it was submitted to twitter, you can also resend for re-tweeting at any time.  (Click to enlarge image below)

Note:  Don’t click Submit All, this will spam out all your recent posts and blast out many tweets which really annoys people.

That is pretty much it for how to setup and configure Twitme and confirm that your posts are being published on twitter.  Check twitter and confirm the verbiage is to your satisfaction and if you don’t like it, play around until you like what the auto tweet’s say.

Now some of the other features of the Twitme plug-in include being able to see all of your followers 100 at a time on the wordpress dashboard, you can also easily direct any one of them by clicking on the direct symbol.  Clicking on their logo will create an @reply to the user, and clicking on the trashcan symbol will delete the follower from your dashboard.

Now at the bottom section of this page you can post tweets, see your most recent followers tweets, check your inbox for direct messages, check your outbox for your recent outgoing direct tweets and reply to tweets and set favorites.  It is like a fully developed web twitter client inside your Wordpress dashboard and casual twitter users probably won’t ever have to go to twitter homepage again and can do all their twitter posting right from their wordpress dashboard.

So now that I have shared everything I know and have learned about this plug-in let me know if you find this post helpful and if you enjoy my technical manual type posts.  If you enjoy this post Stumble or Digg away.

-Dragon Blogger

A sticky post can be an essential part of your blog if you use your blog as a company or you want to post announcements that always stay at the top of your blog home page even when the announcement date is older than your most recent post dates.  The best thing I have found so far is the wp-sticky plug-in from the wordpress plug-in archive.  I am using this right now for my Music Company Blog Rock Along Productions and it works like a charm.

Here is how it works,

• First go to this resource and download the wp-sticky plug-in for Wordpress 2.7
• Download the zip file and copy it over to your wordpress folder, unzip it in the <home>/wp-content/plug-ins/ folder on your blog site.
• Then go to your plug-ins and activate the wp-sticky plug-in.
• Then all you have to do is either create a new post, or edit one of your older ones you want to make your announcement or sticky post.
• You will see a new section at bottom right called “Post Sticky Status”

• Click on Announcement to make the post become an announcement which will always display at the top of your blog home page even if your announcement post is older than your current posts.

When you go to your Edit Posts, you can identify which posts are announcement posts or Sticky Posts easily as there will be an announcement:<post name>
or sticky: <post name> for the posts title.
Example:

Now your announcement post should always appear at the top of your blog home page. You can see this in action by visiting my Rock Along Productions blog (link at top of this post). One thing I noticed is when I set the “Sticky” for an older blog post, it didn’t push it to the top of the blog page, but Announcement did. So I am confused as to what the purpose of Sticky Post is when I achieved what I wanted with the Announcement option.

-Dragon Blogger

I finished upgrading the remaining three of my blogs to Wordpress 2.7 so all four now are running the latest version of wordpress.  I am still finding out new stuff every day and the new interface takes some getting used to, but I am liking it very much.  Here are some tips I have learned right off the bat.

First, if you don’t care to see certain tabs on your dashboard you can remove them altogether, by clicking on the “Screen Options” button at top right and then unchecking the segments you don’t wish to see, here is an example of a few I have unchecked to make more room on my dashboard.

(click for larger image)

I liked dragging some of my important dashboard modules around so that my interface has everything I need right at my first glance, so far I don’t see much use for the quick posting as you can’t use your SEO Title Tags, Tags to Technorati, or other post related plug-ins with the quickedit. You also can’t easily categorize your quick edit posts on the fly, I think it is good if you are doing many posts a day and giving updates every few hours, but for posts that you want to enhance for SEO it isn’t that helpful and takes more time in the end to have to go back and update the post manually.

The other thing is I have a comment image plug-in which shows the user’s image called “Easy Gravitar’s”, It was great at showing a double image in the comment when you view the post, but now when you look at the comment in the dashboard, it skews the 2nd image so that it renders fairly ugly in the new Wordpress 2.7:

So I have decided to remove the Easy Gravitars plug-in just because the dashboard comment module doesn’t look good to me. I require things to be cosmetically pleasing when I look at them, or I get annoyed and frustrated at my own interface. One other thing I noticed while creating this post is when you insert images, I can’t tell if its one of my plug-ins but after the 1st image the image details are minimized and you have to open it up and then select “insert into post”, but it does seem to remember if you selected Full Size previously it defaults to that for second image as well.

Thats all I have to share so far, I will post more updates as I learn more and play around with Wordpress 2.7 more.

-Dragon Blogger

So I have decided to upgrade one of my blogs to Wordpress 2.7 and see what all the hype is about and test out some new features.  At first I was extremely disappointed with the new dashboard, I couldn’t find links to anything.  I then learned that some of my plug-ins “Lighter Menu’s” specifically actually prevents you from seeing the left column bar in Wordpress 2.7.

I troubleshoot this by deactivating all of my plug-ins and when the left column reappeared I added my plug-ins back one at a time until I figured out which plug-in was the culprit.  So now I can display the proper Wordpress 2.7 dashboard:

Click on Image to Enlarge:

I have only upgraded one of my four blogs at this point and may do the other three this weekend. One good thing about my hosting company is I have full SSH access to my servers so I can just tar up my existing directory and deploy the wordpress update, I have easy back out steps if necessary.

So far the plugin activation and deactivation is lighting quick compared to Wordpress 2.6.x even when you do bulk activates or deactivates. The homepage itself is more useful and streamlined, I also love the quickpost where you can just type and do some minor format changes and immediately post right from the wordpress home page. Though if you do complex tagging, or have SEO plug-ins you have to write the post the normal way.

One of the main features I am looking at implementing is a sticky post, kind of like a mini home page above your current posts, this feature will be very useful for getting across a message and will go along way to allow companies to use blogs as their primary site types in my opinion. I want to get a sticky post to work on the Rock Along Productions blog, since when people visit they don’t realize that there are new posts they just see the static page.

Note: Static page is a permanent static blog front page, but sticky post will only show 1 of your sticky posts on top of all the others, so you still see your current posts under your sticky post. This is why sticky post is valuable.

I will report more as I learn new features and functionality and see what new plug-ins take advantage of the new Wordpress 2.7 in the meantime check your plug-ins carefully, I already had 3 invalidate from the upgrade, so I am sure many plug-ins may have problems until they release updates.

-Dragon Blogger