Posted on December 31st, 2007 in Retards
First off, happy new years peeps. Party safe tonight.
Ok, last week’s moron monday was about getting your site quickly indexed by search engines to start bringing in a little traffic. So how do you keep track of your progress?
Recording and understanding statistics is very important for developing sites. Traffic = money and especially when you’re starting out, figuring out what methods of generating tracking are working best is key, because you will want to repeat those later for any new sites you make.
Here are a couple methods you can use to start tracking your traffic:
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics is probably the easiest way to track all your traffic stats. They give you pretty traffic graphs with a lot of useful statistics including bounce rate, traffic sources, etc. It’s pretty easy to install on your site (you just paste a piece of code into whatever template you’re using, or onto every html page if you’re not using a template type system). It has a few drawbacks, though. It only updates every 24 hours so you can’t see your stats in realtime. Also, for the paranoid, Google gets to see all your traffic data, so if you’re worried about that, you may want a different system.
- AWStats
AWStats is a free traffic log analyzer. Most hosting providers have awstats for free which you can access from CPanel. It updates in realtime and gives a lot of good data, but leaves something to be desired in the presentation department.
- eXTReMe Tracking
Ok, so at first, these guys seem like a complete joke. You put this annoying graphic on your page (or hide the image in a div or something), and you will get to track your web stats for free. It seems really ghetto and their site design is garbage, but the realtime tracking and stats presentation is actually not bad, especially for a newb.
That should be enough to get you started tracking your pages. Make sure to note where most of your traffic is coming from so you can repeat it later.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on December 27th, 2007 in Promotion
Nickycakes is still on vacation with the folks, so there won’t be many big posts until he returns. By the way, happy holidays and all that. Hopefully you got some QT with your family or at least some hot gifts.
Anyway, to keep you occupied, check out this Cakes interview on Bernard Griffiths blog. It actually goes over a lot of questions that Nickycakes gets asked on a regular basis, so hopefully it will cut down on the newb emails by answering them. Yeah right..
This guy’s blog isn’t that popular yet, but hes got a great idea going. He’s been asking popular boggers to do written interviews for his blog. How is this a good idea, you ask? First, it generates a ton of unique, relevant content for his blog. All the guy has to do is write 10 or so good questions and he gets back a couple pages of gold each time. It will be really hard for anyone to say no to the guy, because everyone loves free publicity and having their ego stroked. Then, after the interview gets posted, you KNOW that all the interviewees are going to at least mention it on their blogs and link back to it, generating more traffic.
But, if you’re anything like Nickycakes, and have been doing SEO for a little while, you start to immediately notice flaws in other people’s websites as soon as you arrive. Sometimes Cakes gets worried that he might have OCD or something. Anyway, the dude isn’t using seo urls, has no meta tags, is using H1 tags…for the title….which is an image.. Stuff like that. Cakes would recommend the dude grab All in One SEO Pack for wordpress at least. And FFS use feedburner for your rss dude =)
Nickycakes will be back at home on the 28th so expect some bigger stuff coming after that.
Published by nickycakes //
If you haven’t read last week’s Moron Monday about creating your first site, take a sec to do so. This week Nickycakes will talk about getting Google to index your website, and a little more.
Well, it’s Christmas eve, so this one is going to be a little short, simply because spending time with the family is more important than writing blog posts.
For a new blog, getting indexed by Google is key. Getting indexed means Google (or whatever search engine) sends a bot to your site to record your info, and adds your site to their index to be listed when people search for stuff. The visitors to your website from search engines is called Organic Traffic. The problem with getting a new site indexed is Google has no way of knowing about it, so you need to figure out ways to let them know you have a website that needs indexing.
Here are a few tips to getting your website indexed:
Submit a Sitemap to Google
For a wordpress blog, this is a two-part process. First, you need to download and install the Google Sitemap Generator for wordpress. Then you need to head over to Google Webmaster Tools and follow their instructions for verifying your site and submitting your new sitemap.
Submit Your Site to Directories
There are a ton of free web directories online. You can either pay someone to do this for you, or do it yourself for free. A google search for “free web directory” should bring up enough results to keep you occupied for a while. Some retards think it’s cute to charge you to be included in their directory. With the exception of maybe the yahoo business directory, you probably never want to pay to be included in one of these things.
Submit Your Site to Social Bookmarking Sites
Go to sites like Digg, backflip, and magnolia and submit a story about your site. This will create links to your site that google can follow to find it. Do this on a bunch of social bookmarking sites. You’ll want to have accounts on them for later when you want to generate backlinks (next week’s moron monday).
Put Your Site in Your Sig and Yap on Forums
Blow the dust off that digital point bookmark and go put your website in your sig. Then proceed to make a few worthless posts in a few popular topics. This entire process should only take about 10 minutes.
Ping Google Blogsearch
Under Options -> Writing in your wordpress admin console, there should be a box at the bottom called Update Services. Add http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 to the list so your blog automatically tells google blogsearch there is new content every time you make a post.
This should be enough to get google to start showing your page in the search engine result pages (SERPS) in a day or two.
Next week Cakes will talk about backlinks and getting your site ranked higher in the search engines.
Published by nickycakes //
Posted on December 22nd, 2007 in Automation, Coding
If you have not read Part 1, please take a moment to do so:
Scraping Websites for Fun and Profit Part 1
A few weeks ago, Nickycakes wrote about getting your feet wet with website scraping. If you’re interested in learning how to use php to grab content from other sites automatically, you should check out this book. It basically has everything you need to get started.
Anyway, the author of said book has published a set of library files for php that make scraping and parsing anything on the web fairly painless. You can download the entire set of library files here:
http://www.nickycakes.com/files/LIB_http.zip
There are a bunch of files inside, but you will probably only be using a couple of them for most tasks: LIB_http.php, LIB_parse.php. You can include the functions from these libraries by putting them in the same directory as your php script and, in your php script putting the line include (”LIB_http.php”); Inside each of the files is a description of the functions they include. LIB_http.php will have to be edited a little bit if you’re writing a scraper to make it look like your script is a browser and not a php script.
Here’s a description of the most useful functions in these files for scraping websites:
LIB_http.php
- http_get($target, $ref)
You give it $target (url you want to grab) and $ref (where you want the website to think you came from) and it will return an array with 3 variables, FILE, STATUS, and ERROR. $return_array[’FILE’] will have the contents of the webpage, $return_array[’STATUS’] will have the curl status of the transfer, and $return_array[’ERROR’] will have the curl error status. Example:
$target = “http://www.google.com”;
$ref = “http://www.yahoo.com”;
$google_frontpage = http_get($target, $ref);
echo($google_frontpage[’FILE’]);
Displays google frontpage.
- http_post_form($target, $ref, $data_array)
Submit a form with POST method. Same $target and $ref information as above. $data_array should include the information you’re submitting. Example:
$target = “https://login.facebook.com/login.php”;
$ref = “http://www.facebook.com”;
$data_array[’email’]=”your@email.com”;
$data_array[’pass’]=”password”;
$results = http_post_form($target,$ref,$data_array);
echo($results[’FILE’]);
Congrats…now you’re logged into facebook. (you may have to run the script twice initially as curl sets up your cookie file.)
- http_get_form($target,$ref,$data_array)
Works the same way as post, but does it with GET method.
LIB_parse.php
Ok, so it’s probably better for you to just open this one up and read the comments. There are a few simple functions in here that should let you easily parse any website without knowing how to use Regular Expressions. Regular Expression functions in php, in addition to being hard to learn for a newbie, are stupidly inefficient and will slow your programs down, so you don’t want to use them for parsing websites anyway.
If you are going to be scraping websites that require you submit form information, you will want to download and install Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox to help you figure out the form field information in a hurry without viewing the page source.
Hope this helps.
Published by nickycakes //
After much re-reading of old blogs and help from some other affiliate marketing peeps, the list has finally been completed. Nickycakes was tired of seeing all these top 10 lists of awesome stuff and decided to make a top 10 list of utter garbage. If your site is on this list, then get with the program, because you’re worthless.
Here we go:
#10 - Make Money Online With a 13 Year Old Kid
Ok, wow, great, you’re 13 and you have a website. You read every retarded thread on digital point, hacked up john chow’s theme, made it even more tacky with adsense, and added your own worthless e-book. WHO CARES. By the way, nice pic at the bottom of your page with you trying to look all serious like you actually matter. No idea how 700 odd retards actually got duped into subscribing to the RSS. Nickycakes literally tried for an hour to find a post with any useful information on this site. What did he come up with? Rehashed digital point threads. What a waste of time.
#9 - James Martell
This retard is the fat white version of john chow. Wow, how about you post some pics of cars in your header and a bunch of completely worthless words on your blog. You should be e-book ready in no time. I mean, can you seriously trust someone who’s head looks like a fat pineapple? There’s that retarded audio series you’re advertising on your blog, absolutely free of course if you subscribe to your spam list. Do you really think it’s worth it for some idiot to subscribe to your email list just so they can hear jabba the hut drone on for hours about backlink spamming?
#8 - $uper Affiliate Mindset
More like $uper Worthless Blog. Nice cafepress t-shirt. Thats probably what every dude wants for christmas. Your retarded website logo on their shirt. Just another douche who likes to post a bunch of (probably fake) affiliate marketing stats but no real info on making money online. Do you honestly think that if you wear a “I <3 Affiliate Marketing” t-shirt that you will ever have a chance of…you know…reproducing with a female? Seriously dude, if you ever expect to get a girlfriend (which, from the looks of things, may not be a priority for you), then you might want to reconsider your wardrobe choices.
#7 WhoIsAndrewWee
Who is Andrew Wee? Nickycakes will tell you who Andrew Wee is. He’s the author of the 7th worst online money making site currently on the internet. Dude, seriously, stop wasting so much time making worthless podcasts about nothing. Seriously, your last podcast was to answer the question of if it’s better to be “smart or rich” in internet marketing. Wow, could you pick a more retarded topic for a podcast? Could this stupidity possibly be topped? The answer is yes, you went on to actually elaborate on such a retarded topic, and in doing so, propelled yourself to the #7 spot on this list. Congratulations, moron.
#6 - Clickbooth
As far as scammy affiliate networks go, these guys take the cake. Nickycakes has never seen so many complaints about a network jacking publishers’ money. What these idiots generally do is let you earn a bunch of cash for the month, and then make up a bullshit excuse about how they think you’re sending them scam traffic, refuse to pay you, keep all the commissions for themselves, and then lie about it. This thread pretty much sums up the level of customer dissatisfaction. Anyway, there is one good thing that has come out of clickbooth this year: The most hilarious dramabomb Nickycakes has ever seen.
#5 - HaRRo’s makecash.org
The first thing that should clue anyone in about this guy’s credibility is the name. Honestly dude, what retard still does the lowercase vowels thing. It makes you look like a 13 year old wannabe HaX0R script kid from 1996. Nickycakes is kinda scared he’s going to get punted off aim now. So anyway, if you have a website called “Make Cash”, at least post some information about that instead of just putting a bunch of affiliate links and summarizing other people’s posts. The real reason this idiot made the top 10 is because earlier this year, he actually stole the public domain source code for the iPhone unlock, paid someone to reprogram it, and tried to market it as his own, even getting a mention in Forbes.
#4 - Warrior Forum
Warrior forum claims to be “The #1 Internet Marketing Forum Since 1997″. They’re certainly #1, but it’s not for good internet marketing information. This forum sells more worthless ebooks to more worthless morons than any site on the net. Nickycakes would be willing to bet that not a single person has gotten rich off the information presented on this forum. Well, with one exception: plenty of people have probably gotten rich after observing a site like this and realizing how many gullible idiots there are to market worthless products like expensive ebooks to.
#3 - Blogrush
Blogrush will go down in history as one of the biggest failures of an internet marketing idea that was promoted by so many people considered to be authorities in the industry. The idea was clearly stolen directly from AdGridwork (actually a good service). The reason it got promoted so heavy is because it was created by John Reese, some guy who think’s he’s a guru in the industry and has a ton of lackeys like john chow and shoemoney giving him bj’s all the time because they think he’s god or something. Basically the idea was, you put this obtrusive widget on your website and based on the number of impressions you get, your website shows up in the widget on other people’s site. Well everyone smart decided to game the system and iframe it, send it tons of fake impressions with proxys or whatever to get free traffic, and the entire system failed. Nobody clicks on the stupid thing and it’s pretty much the biggest waste of space ever. Anyone running the thing on their website pretty much loses 95% of their potential credibility right off the bat. Better luck next time.
2 - Digital Point Forums
Digital Point could be accurately described as the largest collection of internet marketing asshats on the net. Just go check the forums out for a good laugh. In the adsense section you’ll find pages and pages of threads with titles like “I JUST HAD MY FIRST $1 DAY WITH ADSENSE, DETAILS ON HOW I DID IT INSIDE.” And the people really aren’t joking. There will be tons of replies by other equally retarded people asking how they did it, what niche they were using, things like “AWESOME WORK DUDE NOW TRY FOR $2 A DAY LOL.” The marketplace forum is full of scammers and idiots. God, the entire thing is just a big joke.
#1 - John Chow
And the #1 most worthless site for making money online is JohnChow.com. Never in Nickycakes’ entire life has he seen such idiocy. Yes, his blog is packed full of nothing. It’s literally impossible to find ANYTHING helpful on the site about making money online (which is supposed to be the topic of the blog). All he does is ask people to pay him to review their websites, and has one of his lackeys write the review. The rest of the posts are pictures of whatever garbage he had for lunch, or stupid youtube videos, car pictures, or guest posts. Some of the guest posts are the only things that could possibly be mistaken for actual online moneymaking information, but upon closer inspection, they’re absolute rubbish. Take this post for example. Arbitrage from a non-arbitrageur. Seriously, have you ever seen so much worthless information packed into one post? This guy is actually suggesting that you will be getting 1 cent clicks from facebook ads (he later changed the post in embarrassment after Nickycakes flamed his ass.) But it’s not just that the information he posts has no value, it’s that he has so many idiots following his every word. Seriously John, if you’re reading this, your blog is garbage.
Published by nickycakes //
