Decluttering My Inbox!

June 30th, 2011 Zander Posted in Business Essentials

I was away on business last week, and it amazed me how much e-mail I really get. At home, I have Outlook open 24/7, so I don’t really see the full magnitude of what’s going on. But on my iPhone, it became clear right away that I’ve got a serious e-mail problem.

Now, spam is just a way of life, and despite our best efforts, a ton of crap still gets through. But Outlook does a pretty good job of putting that stuff in the Junk Folder, so it’s not a huge deal.

It’s the other “junk” e-mail that was flooding my Inbox. Stuff I signed up for long ago, but no longer had any interest in. Internet Marketers that forced me to sign up for their mailing list, venues that put me on their mailing list after purchasing tickets to an event there, and other crap like that.

So today, I decided enough was enough. I have started unsubscribing to every piece of “junk” mail that no longer serves me any purpose, in the hopes of reducing my incoming mail by 30% or more. Thankfully, most legitimate e-mails have an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and it’s fairly easy to get removed from these lists. We’ll see how it goes.

Don’t be complacent, take control of your Inbox today!

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From 10K To 125K Visitors In Just One Month!

May 26th, 2011 Zander Posted in ZanderLand

As you’ve probably noticed, I haven’t done a good job keeping this blog up to date. I’ve been busy working on a new blog that we launched back in March, and the growth has been unreal!

We had 10K pageviews for the month of April. In May, we’re already at 125K pageviews! I’ve been blogging for 6+ years now, and I’ve never seen anything like this..

Here’s what I’ve taken away from this. You can tell other people what to do, but no one else will live up to your exacting standards. I’ll take an extra 10-20 minutes to structure a post properly, tag it properly, promote it properly, and use some clever methods to increase the time on site and number of click throughs.

These are all things I’ve mentioned to my writers before, but they tend not to listen. With a staff the size of ours, it’s hard to hold everyone’s hand, or micro-manage them. But when everything goes through me, it’s easy to make sure it’s done correctly the first time.

I’ve spent upwards of 90 minutes on a single post, and unfortunately not every one is a grand slam. But it’s that attention to detail and quality control that ultimately leads to sticky content and satisfied readers. The stats don’t lie!

And here’s a biggie: Write content that is timeless, and let the search engines bring you an endless supply of traffic. In our other business, we’re focused on current news. There’s no way to make that sticky, because what’s news today isn’t relevant a week or month from now.

But think outside of the box, and you’ll find a way to create something that generates buzz, and continued waves of traffic. I won’t spell it out for you, but think about it and see if you can come up with the answer. :)

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WordPress 3.1.3 Security Release

May 25th, 2011 Zander Posted in Wordpress

WordPress 3.1.3 was just released, and it’s a security update for all previous WordPress versions.

It contains the following security fixes and enhancements:

  • Various security hardening by Alexander Concha.
  • Taxonomy query hardening by John Lamansky.
  • Prevent sniffing out user names of non-authors by using canonical redirects. Props Verónica Valeros.
  • Media security fixes by Richard Lundeen of Microsoft, Jesse Ou of Microsoft, and Microsoft Vulnerability Research.
  • Improves file upload security on hosts with dangerous security settings.
  • Cleans up old WordPress import files if the import does not finish.
  • Introduce “clickjacking” protection in modern browsers on admin and login pages.

Be sure to upgrade to this new version as soon as possible!

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Big G Now Going After Link Sellers!

May 24th, 2011 Zander Posted in Google

The Panda update penalized sites that actively bought links for SEO/Page Rank benefits. But now Google appears to be going after the people who are selling links.

A buddy of mine logged into his Webmaster Central account, and saw the following message at the top of the screen:

Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links on [site name here]

There was a lengthy e-mail that followed, explaining that the site in question had been flagged for possible trickery, and to comply and then file a reinclusion request.

It took a few days, but he finally figured out that a paid blogroll link was to blame! It was not exactly topical, but for $50 he was willing to look the other way. It’s hard to believe that a 3-month old site with a single bad link could get the attention of Google. My guess is that the site he linked to was already flagged as a link buyer, and how G is going after everyone that sold them links.

It’s a scary situation, given that Google can essentially destroy your business if you fall out of line in any way. All he wanted to do was monetize his site, not maliciously deceive Google!

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More Safeguards For Your Blog..

May 3rd, 2011 Zander Posted in Wordpress

So my last post was about how to secure your blog after letting someone go. Today, I received a treat in my e-mail from that individual’s attorney. The dreaded subject line?

DMCA Copyright Claim

This guy had been writing on our blogs for over 3 years, but he decided to leave the site after a disagreement with management. He decided that everything he posted was his property, and that I was violating his copyright by keeping it up on the site. Now, reading through other cases on the web, this seems to be a pretty grey area.. But I don’t have the time to fight with lawyers while the rest of my other sites suffer.

I complied with the request, and deleted nearly 6000 posts. The SEO ramification are going to be a nightmare, but I look at old content as just that. OLD. It’s time for his replacement to come in and start churning out new content, and getting new visitors to the site. Not an ideal situation in the least, but it is what it is.

So how do you protect yourself if you have outside people contributing to your blog?

Get something in writing from the people contributing to your site! Whether it’s a Terms & Condition statement that spells out the copyright issue, or a “contract” that you have all new writers fill out, you just need something should things go South. We thought we’d be working with this guy until the bitter end, but it just goes to show you that’s not always the case.

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Securing Your WordPress Site After Firing Someone

April 22nd, 2011 Zander Posted in Wordpress

If you run a WordPress blog and you fire one of your writers, there are a few steps you should take to ensure that they don’t come back and cause damage to your site!

Generally, you don’t want to delete the user who left, because all of their posts will either be deleted, or attributed to another person. So what I suggest is the following:

  1. Change their user role to Contributor.
  2. Change their password to something else.
  3. Change their e-mail address, so they can’t retreive their password via e-mail.

Now, the user can’t log in and potentially trash your site. Even if the person only had Author status before, they could still go in and delete all of their posts (which is technically your property).

Food for thought.

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Have You Upgrade To WordPress 3.1.1?

April 8th, 2011 Zander Posted in Wordpress

The WordPress development team recently released WordPress 3.1.1, a maintenance and security update to WordPress 3.1 from late February. The update addresses nearly 30 issues in WordPress, including three security vulnerabilities. Now that the security holes have been made public, it’s even more important that you update to the latest version ASAP. I’ve been running it since it was released, and it’s a very stable release. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be upgrading your blog if you haven’t already!

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