Life$trikes.Com » Blogging

How to Insert Adsense in bbPress Forum

Raghu — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:55:41 +0000

BBpress is light weight forum created by makers of Wordpress. It’s easy to install and has the same interface as Wordpress. Displaying Adsense ad within bbpress takes about 2 minutes.

Follow the steps to display adsense ad just above and below the Page Navigation

Sample Adsense in bbPress

Steps to Insert Adsense Code in bbPress

Instructions below is for the default theme kakumei.

FTP into directory where bbpress forum is installed.
Navigate to /example.com/bb-templates/kakumei
Open the File topic.php
Find the following line of code that contains php_topic_pages (array…… )
Insert the Adsense code just below that line
This will display the ad above the forum topic, before posts starts
To insert the ad after the posts (before navigation page)
Insert the adsense coede below the line that contains “class=rss line…..php topic_rss_link”
Refresh the Topic in the fourm and you should see the ads.

There are 2 plugins that will allow to insert adsense code in bbpress. If you want to insert the code between posts then use adsense for bbpress plugin.

25% Increase in Average Time on Site

Raghu — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:25:44 +0000

Average Time Spent by visitors on the site depends on type of sites ( Blogs, Forums, Shopping Site, …). But, over period of time one can recognize the pattern establish a pattern and data will speak for itself.

In one of my blog, Average Time on site was around 3 Minutes, but I started testing Adsense Link Units in various places and found a placement ( color and size) where visitors tend to click the links many times.

After testing the link unit at new placements for 2 months, Average Time on Site decreased from 3 Minutes to 2 Minutes and 50 Seconds. It was interesting to see that single Link Unit can lower the Average Time on Site by 30 seconds.

Last 5 days, after removing the link unit, Average Time on Site increased to 3 Minutes and 15 Seconds. That has impact on revenue, but increase of 45 seconds is huge.

For now, 45 seconds is much more valuable than revenue generated from the adsense link unit.

Next – I’m going to explore ow to maintain/increase Average Time on Site with link units ( or other ad units) present.

Wordpress Database – Backup and Restore

Raghu — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:27:07 +0000

List of Wordpress Database related articles

Wordpress Database Backup and Restore – Quick Online Tips
Daily Wordpress Database Backup Quick Online Tips
Blog Backup Strategy David Risley
Manual wordpress Database Backup

Wordpress Email/Comments Notification Not Working – Fixed

Raghu — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 01:49:07 +0000

After updating Wordpress to 2.8.4 version, Comments and Contact form email notification was not working. I’m using Contact Form 7 for Contact Page.

Problem –

Looks like php mail function is not working properly after wordpress update or it could be because of your hosting provider disabled PHP Mail functionality.

Fix -

Configure Wordpress to use SMTP instead of PHP Mail function. This can be easily done by installing the following Wordpress Mail SMTP Plugin. Install the plugin and follow the instructions.

Change in Google Search Results Layout?

Raghu — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 04:30:31 +0000

I was searching in Google and noticed change in Google Search results page layout. They have moved the Sponsored Links on right end of the search results page towards the search results. Is this going to be permanent change or just me seeing some test version? Can we expect new search features soon?

Or it’s just me who is seeing the added padding on right side, which was already there?

10 Daily Wordpress Blog Health Checks

Raghu — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:13:21 +0000

If you are a blogger, then every morning it’s required to run a quick health check on the blog. I do the following checks as soon I jump out of the bed

Check the Home Page and open the latest posted article
Check page views ( it’s easy to know the page views that should have registered at particular time of the day)
If there is spike in traffic, check the source.
Check the RSS Count
Check WP- Super Cache pages
Read and respond to comments
Check Email and label the email’s that have to be take care ASAP
Check your earnings ( Adsense, Affiliate and others sources)
Post new article if any important event happened while at sleep in your niche ( Google Alerts and RSS Reader)
Check resource utilized in last 8 hours ( if you are using private servers)

What is your daily blog health check routine?

Top 10 Search Terms – July 2009

Raghu — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:38:20 +0000

Top 10 search terms for Week ending 08/01/2009.

facebook 1.03%
myspace 0.99%
craigslist 0.66%
youtube 0.59%
facebook login 0.39%
myspace.com 0.35%
ebay 0.34%
facebook.com 0.23%
yahoo 0.20%
mapquest 0.18%

More Stats and Data at Hitwise.

30 Top Social Media Marketing Sites

Create Landing Page in Wordpress Blog in 2 Minutes

Raghu — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 12:33:22 +0000

Landing page is also referred to as Squeeze Page. Sometimes Sales Page will also serve as Landing Page. Landing page in wordpress can be created by two ways, depending on design of landing page.

Landing Page in Wordpress

Landing Page Blends with Wordpress Theme
Typical Unique Landing Page (lengthy sales page)

What is Landing Page

A landing page serves as a tool to give an introduction to the new visitors
A way to promote your products
A way to promote your contents
A way to convert visitors to subscribers
A welcome page for visitors quest for exploring your blog.
It draws the visitors in and and leads them into the depth of your blog content.
Can act as sales funnel

Landing Page Design for Increased Conversion

Landing page must NOT distract visitors, they should not be given any options,to navigate to other pages. Providing links ( or distractions) in the landing page will lower the conversion rates.

If you create a landing page that blends with your blog post, it will have lots of distractions like navigation menu, side bar links, that could drive visitors away from landing page. So, try to avoid creating a landing page that looks like wordpress blog post or pages.

If you like to have same feel of blog template, have the page template customized. Remove sidebar and header with navigation bars. Wordpress 2.7+ allows call to different header for each page. Create a new page template, call a new header file and remove sidebar. This will create a full width page with your message.

Implementing Custom Landing Page wordpress

I will show how to create a typical sales page ( lengthy and boring usually) using wordpress. Follow few simple steps below to create custom landing page for wordpress hosted blog or any other website

Download Sample Landing Page Template ( 1 HTML File)
Unzip landing-page-template-1.zip and you will have landing-page-template-1.html file
Upload landing-page-template-1.html to the root directory, where the blog is installed.
Access the landing page using www.yoursite.com/landing-page-template-1.html ( www.lifestrikes.com/landing-page-template-1.html )
There you go. You have your customized landing page up and running is less than 2 minutes.
Edit the html file using Textpad or HTML editor according to your need.

Google Website Optimizer for Wordpress – Test Results 2

Raghu — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:34:20 +0000

I had posted about configuring Googler Website Optimizer for Wordpress self hosted blogs and I have completed two landing page tests. In the first landing page optimization test – Variant 1 was clear winner. In second test, Variant 1 from Test 1 was tested against and new landing page.

Google Website Optimization For Wordpress – Test 1

New Landing Page

Variant 1 from first test had just the sign-up form and 3 point list explaining the benefits of joining the newsletter in bold font.
New Landing Page had the same details + image of the front page of the e-book. Surprisingly Variant 1 from the first test was the winner again.

Landing Page Optimization - Google Website Optimizer - Wordpress

In the above screenshot Combination 1 – Variation 1 corresponds to the Variant 1 from Landing Page Test and it has 99.9% better chance to outperform the landing page with image of front cover of the ebook.

That is an interesting result. I expected the landing page with image would perform better. In next test, I’m going to try adding an image of a person ( smiling face looking directly at the visitors).

Overall Google Website Optimizer is wonderful tool and it will just take 30 minutes or less to configure. It will help you to dramatically increase the conversion for the products you sell or for newsletter signup.

Google Website Optimizer – Landing Page Optimization in Wordpress Results

Raghu — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:45:19 +0000

Few weeks back, I configured Google Website Optimizer for Wordpress to test landing page conversion rate with new wordpress page. After setting up Variant 1 page and installing scripts, I waited for the results.

Original Page

Landing page should have following features

Bold Call to Action
Less distraction ( menu, articles, ..)
Provide what you promised to deliver
Bribe content (free ebooks, tutorials, ..) to make readers sign-up

Original page under test had just the option 4 form above. 1 to 3 were missing big time. It had lots of distractions ( menu, articles, sidebar, ads, ..).

Variant Page 1

Optimized landing page had following arrtibutes that oroginal landing page didnt have

Full width page in wordpress without widgets ( sidebar)
Link to home page ONLY in the header
Sign-up form ( Name and Email)
Two bullet points that explained why they want to sign up
No images ( just plan text within sign up form)
Call to Action words used – Sign & Receive

Experiment Result

After running the experiment for few days, following results was obverved (click on the image to view larger version)

Wordpress Landing Page Optimization with Google Optimizer

It was very evident with just 26 conversions, Variant 1 was doing much better than original version. It resulted in improvement of 17% in conversion rate. For a landing page, 17% improvement in the conversion rate is awesome.

So, if you are using Ad Words campaign or have sign up page for simple Email News Letter, you should definitely test different versions of landing page.With wordpress, it just took less than 10 minutes to install the plugin, scripts and have experiment running. It might take additional time to create a new landing page, but overall for 1 hour time spent, resulted in over 17% improvement in conversion rate.

Experiment 2

To further optimize the landing page, I created another variant of new landing page ( with image) and ran the test for few more days. Results were bit disappointing. I will post the results in next article.