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Well, I may be mad, but I’ve decided to upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress - version 2.5!  This seems to be a huge step forward from my current version, and I’d love to think everything will “just work”.  My biggest concern though, is with the Semiologic theme that I’ve been using.  It hasn’t been updated since 27th June 2007 and I have a horrible feeling that my whole design will come crashing round my feet when I try to restart the blog….!

I’m planning to tackle this before the end of the week, so if you visit my blog during this time and it’s down - please come back again!

For my Entrecard advertisers,  I’m intending to put up a holding/maintenance page (maybe even a duplicate site), but if I DO cause any significant downtime, I’ll reimburse the people affected with double the credits that they originally paid me for the ad space.  That’s fair, isn’t it?

Finally, I’ll post an update here when the upgrade’s in place.

Watch this space……

Back in December, I wrote a post about using ClickComments to give you an Internactive Blog Experience (click here for the original article) and I’ve been using them ever since.  I had noticed though, that my pages were taking a long time to display, but since there was so much being loaded, I figured it was just my slow Internet connection!

Yesterday though, I noticed that my page was stuck waiting for data from ‘www.postreach.com’ which surprised me, as I wasn’t aware that I was loading anything from there!  After a bit of digging, I discovered that this is the site which operates the ClickComments service, and the site itself was giving a “temporarily unavailable” message! 

After de-activating the Wordpress plugin, I was surprised by how much quicker my pages loaded!  It seems that this was the culprit all along and I should have removed it much sooner.

Moral: When you add something new, add only one thing at a time, and TEST IT THOROUGHLY!

I’m sure that you, like me, have been around the Internet for quite some time now. You’ve probably tried all the gimics promoted by the “gurus”, and found that the only people making money was the gurus who were selling the information!

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve spent way too much money on gimics and training/mentoring over the years, yet I still need to keep my day job to pay the bills!

Well, this time, I’m doing things properly! I’m working to build my rankings organically without spending any money. There are no Google AdWord campaigns promoting my sites - in fact there are no pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns at all!  You may have even picked up my EZ-Recommender product via a giveaway event of some description, but none of them cost me a single penny to join!

So how am I doing?

Well, it’s a slower way to build things, but I’m making progress. I have a Google PageRank of 1 on this, my main blog and am starting to see regular traffic to both this site and my EZ-Recommender promotion site:
(EZ-Recommender Promotion) .

Now, there are lots of things that you can do yourself in order to build traffic and ranking. The most basic though, is to start measuring your traffic! A business mentor of mine used to always tell me “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” and he was right! If you don’t already have some sort of traffic analysis software, I would strongly recommend that you look at Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/). It costs nothing to join and enables you to accurately measure what traffic is visiting your site, and where it came from. Once you have this information, you can really start optimizing your site to improve your stats and ultimately, to make more money!

Anyway, I hope you’ve found this article useful - I sent it out to my mailing list last week and I’m planning to try to send out something along similar lines roughly once a month, so I’d urge you to stay tuned - just in case I come up with a real gem!

In the meantime, if you want to learn more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), then I can highly recommend “The SEO Mindset” by Brad Callen, which you can get to directly through this link:
The SEO Mindset.

Finally, if you have any questions or topics that you’d like me to cover in future, please use the comments for this topic and I’ll endeavour to answer all questions in my next bulletin.

To your success!

OK, OK, so I finally caved in to the pressure and moved my Entrecard Widget!  I’ve been getting nagged for a while by people who just want to see it so that they can click on it, which to me, defeated the idea of the widget in the first place!  However, it occurred to me that I would prefer my OWN Entrecard to be seen on any site that I advertise on, and I felt that it’s only fair to move it up.

So there it is - up on the top left of the page!

Please use the comments on this entry to share your thoughts on this.  Was I right to move it, or is it better to have it lower down so that Entrecarders are forced to at least look at my blog before they can click???