Staska.Net

One of the best things about having a personal blog is the discussion that you get involved in via comments.

But the comment implementation in WordPress really sucks. Even numerous plugins for the comments area do not help much. Believe me I tried.

I had a vision of how my perfect comment area should look like. Threaded comments, ability to edit them, spell checking, links opening in a new page/tab, preview option before posting, avatar next to the post, subscription option, etc;

I tried to make all of this work for more then a week and failed. I was able to implement less then 50% of my wishes.

But there’s a hope. Soon we’ll have a new service that will be focused on making your comment area into a real discussion forum.

Read the rest of this entry »

I am pretty unhappy (to put it mildly) with the results from the last Google Page Rank update. While getting PR3 for Staska.net was a nice thing for a blog that was barely a month old, my other sites did not fare that well.

The thing that really pissed me off, was the reduction of the toolbar pagerank for my main cellphone blog. I’ve got PR5 for it last July and it has been steadily there until April 2007 update.

Since this January, when I resumed my blogging activities, I at least doubled (maybe even tripled) the number of incoming links to this blog. And a lot of the links were from PR7-8 sites like Engadget, Gizmodo or CrunchGear.

So when I saw my PR start to fluctuate on various Google datacenters in the beginning of April, I was pretty sure that I’m getting a bump to PR6 for the cellphone blog. Only to find it brought down to PR4!

Read the rest of this entry »

I am a bit late to report my online earnings for April 2007, mainly because I wanted to have a more detailed look of how each of my blogs was doing.

To do that, I had to make a breakdown of all earnings per blog and check the traffic each blog was generating from the begining of this year. I have all the figures now, so the results tracking exercise should be much easier from now on.

Here are my online earnings results for April 2007:

Combined April traffic for my blogs was 137 605 page views from 110 201 unique visitors, which gets me something like $10 eCPM overall.

Read the rest of this entry »

April 23 was one month since I relaunched Staska.Net. It’s a good time to follow my own advice, sit back, look at the results and decide of how to proceed further.

On March 23, before my “Happy birthday John Chow dot Com” post, Staska.Net had 1 post, did not have any visitors, inbound links, Technorati or Alexa ranks.

Last 30 days results:

• No. of Posts: 24
• No. Comments (including trackbacks): 228
• No. of RSS subscribers: 52
• No. of unique visitors: 25 101
• No. Pageviews: 30 625
• daily visitors: ~200
• Alexa rank: 257 484
• Technorati rank: 17 383 (304 links from 220 blogs)
• Google Webmaster Central incoming links: 17 780
• Yahoo Site Explorer inlinks: 5172
• Income: $18.20

Read the rest of this entry »

Wow. Mitch from HarpzOn.com just called it quits and is selling off his domain.

Mitch was one of the more interesting new entrants into (pro) blogging advice club with a novel and interesting idea of how to get to the top.

In addition to relying on good content, word of mouth and traditional promotion tactics, he decided to throw a pile of money at the problem, targeting top bloggers in his market segment for paid review of his blog.

Well, unlike many of us, Mitch is already successful online entrepreneur, so he could afford it. And his tactics appeared to be working. He had good content. He’s got a quite a few links from a number of highly respected bloggers.

All of which helped Mitch attract a bunch of subscribers to his feed and mailing list and get to the level of about 1000 visitors per day, in a few weeks. And his became one of more interesting daily feeds in my feedreader.

So it’s a pity to see Mitch go. If he is really going, that is.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most common pieces of advice for bloggers goes like this:

• Find Long Tail (rarely used, uncompetitive) keywords through which new readers get to your blog in search engines.
• Write more posts using these keywords, to improve your rankings and get more readers

I may be missing something, but I really don’t understand how this can work/help?

Long tail keywords are called that way for a cause. Almost nobody uses them. And if nobody searches for them, how will they bring new readers to my blog?

OK, you may say. Just use a lot of them, post a lot and if each LT keyword will bring a reader a week, soon you’ll be looking at a steady stream of new visitors from search engines.

But I already do that with every post. And you do that too. Every post on every blog is filled with the combinations of words that someone somewhere looking for something might use someday.

Read the rest of this entry »

There were 5 monkeys in the cage. The researcher have hung a bunch of bananas on the ceiling and placed a ladder underneath.

One of the monkeys saw the banana and started getting up the ladder to get it. The researcher turned on the fire hose and knocked him down from the ladder, hosing all other monkeys with cold water as well.

After a while, another monkey decided to get the banana. He started getting up the ladder and was knocked off it again. All other monkeys got their share of cold water from the fire hose.

After a number of such unsuccessful attempts and cold showers, the monkeys stopped trying to get the bananas.

Then one monkey was replaced with a new one.

Read the rest of this entry »

Me too. And so does Darren Rowse, Shoemoney, Aaron Wall, Steve Pavlina and Eric Giguere. Think you can beat them? No? Think it’s too late to get into this game?

Then I have a secret for you. IT DOESN’T MATTER! It’s not about them and beating them. It’s about you and others like you and me.

Sure, the advice that the A Listers give us is great and there are tons of money making ideas there. But here’s the thing - the view from the top is very different then from the bottom.

They may think that they remember what’s it like at the start. And they may even remember many things correctly. But they also forgot a lot. The situation has changed strongly. And sometimes, the way they tell you about how they started and got there, can take you in the wrong direction. Don’t believe me?

Read the rest of this entry »

I have always been strongly against partial feeds on the blogs I read.

Actually one of the main reasons I unsubscribe from many blogs is because they do not offer full feed, so I have to click through to their site to read every post. What’s the point of feeds then?

And I made sure to offer full feed to the readers of staska.net from the beginning. Or so I thought

Yesterday I finally got to subscribing to my blog feed and saw that for the most of the posts on staska.net, only partial feed is available.

I always enable “Full Text” option in my blog administration panel. And it always was enough… Until Wordpress 2.1 came out.

Turns out that one nasty feature was introduced with the latest release of Wordpress. It now started truncating your feeds after the “more” tag. And since I often use this tag on my blog, all my longer posts were cut-off.

I know, WP 2.1 has a warning about this in their admin panel. But who reads these warnings after using software for more then a year?

Read the rest of this entry »

Every personal improvement expert will tell you that setting and achieving goals is a key to success. And if you are just getting in to blogging for money, or any other online money making venture, realistic and ambitious goal setting is a must.

But if you are just starting and haven’t done anything yet, how do you know what goals to set yourself? Saying that I want to be earning $10 a day, have 1000 daily visitors and 500 subscribers in a month is all good and well. But is it a goal or just a wish?

Read the rest of this entry »