Blogging Along

If you would like to change the height of your message box area using the WordPress plug in “Contact form 7” it’s simple. The line in bold below has 2 numbers at the end of the code inside a closed square bracket 31/3. 31 is the width and the 3 is the height.

Change these amounts to reflect what width and height you’d like your message section of form to be. This also works for other fields if required.

On the same plug-in adding a “*” after text in the name section makes it a required field and can be added to any field to implement.

<p>Your Name (required)<br />
[text* your-name] </p>

<p>Your Email (required)<br />
[email* your-email] </p>

<p>Subject<br />
[text* your-subject] </p>

<p>Your Message<br />

[textarea your-message 40x10]

</p>

<p>[submit “Send”]</p>

Would it be an ideal situation if you could work away in a warm climate laid on a sun lounger next to the pool without a care in the world?

Well hell yeah !! of course it would be.

It’s all down to game plans in business and what type of business you are in. Affiliation is a bit of a roller coaster for many if you have all your eggs in one basket (sector or website) but can bring wealth and fortune for many if done right. I am talking 10s if not 100s of thousands a month too with some people.

So the ideal setup for working in the sun, next to the pool drinking beer. You grow a portfolio of sites in many sectors, such as private health, insurance, retail items shoes, presents, hotels, breaks and mobiles or electronics. Optimise these websites in a niche for each, so for insurance pick “Life Insurance” maybe. Build in a content management system called WordPress and besides all the standard tweaking to make the site SEO friendly post to the site every day looking at daily news feeds for article ideas.

A good tip for getting good traffic is to mention some of the main companies in the industries. Healthcare mention BUPA or AXA, Mobiles mention all the networks like Vodafone, Orange and Three.

This won’t be an over night process and will nicely age like a good wine.

A lot of affiliates who push services and products that make a small fortune use Adwords to drive traffic towards their websites in hope of an increase in sales. This is a fine art and I almost class it as gambling as it can make or break a lot of profit.

I had a website in the private Health sector that ranked and still does for really good phrases and made a nice amount each month from Adsense. I sold the domain to a friend who started using it for affiliation and instead of Adsense used a form for lead generation and made £25 per lead. This turned my effort of Adsense into a nice win fall by making 10 fold what I was from natural search results. He is also running an Adwords campaign that spiraled the amount to 100 fold again :-/ and as you can understand, a little bit sickening for me.

If he wanted and didn’t have commitments of a mortgage, a wife who’s a school teacher, and others he could and 100% would be working abroad in a warm climate, laid on a sun lounger, next to the pool without a care in the world!

If you do need any help with going down this road please do contact me.

Looking at ways to always make extra pennies from mini sites I was surprised to see £4-5 from a broadband site I’d set up a few years back. Looking into this a little more broadband clicks pay quite well from £1 to £5+ which does make it worth while.

Broadband in general and even mobile broadband isn’t really a niche no more and so >Geo<broadband.co.uk sites do well as they haven’t been tapped into that much as your Talk Talk’s BT’s and Virgins cover the whole UK.

proving that it does pay well and works I bought 3 domains of cities over 100’000 in population and setup 3 mini sites with a simple html template.

• LutonBroadband.co.uk
• BradfordBroadband.co.uk
• BrightonBroadband.co.uk

Once they show up in Search Engines and have a bit of age I’ll add the to a WordPress install and make regular posts to them about the pit falls and tips of broadband etc.  I’ve lost my login for Affiliate window and so need to send an email so that I can also add affiliate links which do pay more money but they have to sign up to get the commissions

Luton, Bradford and Brighton been fairly large towns should prove a popular search group with people online and if proven a winner easily cloned  ( not the content the idea ;o) )

Need to rant so here’s 1

-start rant-

Why do people think just because the phone isn’t agaist their ear its ok to DRIVE and use a mobile by having it on speaker phone and holding it infront of them AGGGHhhhhh.

-end of rant-

If you have installed Word Press and get the message “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.” because you have created a link for a subscriber to login. If a subscriber tries and login again using the link they will get the error mesage “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page.”

Look at the file menu.php in the folder /wp-admin/ and edit one of the last lines in the file

wp_die( __(‘You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page..’) );

Replace the text and maybe add a link to help the user back to the main part they subscribed to the below.

wp_die( __(‘You are already logged in, please visit the <a href=”http://website-address.co.uk/members-area/” title=”members area” >Members Area</a> to see the content.’) );

Hope this helps and is a quick fix to a simple problem!

I have an ever growing list of Geo / Product or Service domains (mainly Hull) and setting them up using WordPress takes time, uses MySql databases and limits how many I can setup in 1 day.

This has forced me to start using a simple  html template to speed the process of getting them LIVE, INDEXED and EARNING!

Hopefully they will perform as well as the ones running on the WordPress installs, but the main reason is to just get them LIVE. I have 100’s of them covering many cities but mainly Hull, I have a few other areas including Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford, Belfast, and Edinburgh.

Latest ones I’m trying to perform as well as the WP sites using html are:

• Hull-Airconditioning.co.uk
• Hull-Hotels.org.uk
• Hull-Kitchens.co.uk
• HullCasino.co.uk
• HullClinics.co.uk

A side step one not a Geo one CommercialPhotographers.org.uk

With having so many domains you do need to get them start paying at least their own reg fee as I noticed 2 years does come round rather quick and before you know it no site is on a domain. Working from a spreadsheet marking down which are live, using html or WP and when was the last time I posted on them helps get things done too.

Looking at what Scott Jones has done with his ideas and efforts it makes me want to see the light at the end of the tunnel for my efforts. But time will tell and do hope within 4-6 months my daily revenue is up from £8-£10 a day to the very ideal £60.

I have even looked at possibly renting domains out but will need to think how best to go forward with that before jumping in with both size 9’s.

I have a growing network (as mentioned before) of Hull domains mainly plus a few other cities and have a solid £9 – £10 a day coming in from a select few with affiliation advertising.

In fact I must have 350+ of Hull domains or similar like ManchesterPrint co uk and know for a fact 90% are NOT live or haven’t been optimised at all for SEO or revenue.

So I do think if all 350 rose to a level where each was getting even a few uniques a day it would add up to over £100 a day. I have noticed with the sites that do earn, very rarely go over just 10 uniques a day to get a click or have a CTR (click through rate) is mainly 10% or more.

But as many of you know 350 + mini sites all take time to build, add content, and maintain. If all sites together earn’t £100 a day, it would be worth the effort/cost to action that .

On a flip side, I think if all the Geo domains (350+) was indexed in search engines and had a fair number of uniques a day I could demand a starting sale price of £500  for the sale of each to local businesses in the relevant area.

You all can add that up to £175k which is a very nice sum (if all were sold) and would only go through with the sales if every domain was sold and not just cherry picked.

So I just need to get people on them and set some time aside to blast them all live!

I’ve been using WordPress for quite a while now and upgrading seems second nature TBH. I’m quite lucky all my upgrades have gone swimming well. WordPress is a nice CMS to setup, upgrade and keep tip top but agreed your first time can be a bit “now what”.

Just recently I’ve been getting an upgrade error in WordPress on one of my budget Blue Host servers used for mini sites when attempting to auto upgrade with WordPress’s built-in upgrade option. To version 2.8.5

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2354671 bytes) in /home6/main-domain/public_html/domain-name-co/wp-includes/http.php on line 1331

Basically I think the server is throttled and WordPress kicks off because of it.

Few ways to get round it.

1. Deactivate all plug-ins and retry the built-in WordPress upgrade.
2. Download this plug-in “WordPress Automatic Upgrade” and try this method. With the upgrade happening in small bites the server isn’t using as much memory I guess.

Hope one of them works for you but a few other plugins I’d suggest to install to safe guard your WordPress install are

1. WordPress Database Backup run before an upgrade and schedule to run every day.
2. Limit Login Attempts which blocks out people who are persistant in trying to guess your login details and mess things up for you.

Keep backed up, updated, be careful of rouge theme’s with dodgy coding and all should be fine!