I Got My Ass Spanked By Porn
I think one of the things that has contributed to the popularity of GrownUpGeek.com is how we’ve always (well, usually) given members what they want - either by following their suggestions or adding more content for what we were seeing searches on, etc. By doing this the website has taken on a life and personality of it’s own, resulting in a website that’s 99% different from what I envisioned when I created it just over two years ago.
Now that premium membership subscriptions are (by far) generating more income than advertising ($4,700 in Dec 07, $3,700 in Jan 08, and over $2,500 in the first 15 days of Feb. 08) I’ve been trying to maintain/increase premium membership the same way, by giving (premium) members what they want. The goal is to have more new subscribing members each day than members that cancel their paid-subscription. Bearing in mind that not only do members cancel for whatever reason, but we also get several automatic cancellations each day due to problems with PayPal accounts, credit-cards, etc - keeping a positive-member flow is a difficult job, and if members don’t get value for their money, they wont stick around.
So this weekend in an attempt to add-value for our premium members we created a few new “premium” forum areas based on member-suggestions. One of those new sections was an “adult” content area. The idea is that it would be an area with no rules where premium members could discuss ‘adult’ topics that might not be appropriate in any existing areas. It seemed like such good idea in theory.
Within minutes of creating the new Adult Geek forum section, there were posts ranging from “women that squirt” to “fishys“. Not that these aren’t great topics, but since part of my SEO strategy is to heavily interlink all pages with “recent comments” and “new topics”, anyone with a premium membership could click on one of these recent comments or new-topics links and be taken to a page that might surprise them.
Within an hour my inbox was filled with scathing, thought-provoking complaints from members that had no interest in seeing this type of content.. Even though many members loved it, just as many hated it - with a passion. I guess with over 1,000 premium members this is to be expected. I quickly made the forum section “Opt-In” by adding a new Drupal role for “adult content”, and assigning the proper category permissions. This allows only members that have opted-in to see the adult content to view the forum section or any recent comment links and new topic links to content posted in that area. I should have done this from the start, and looking back, this is probably one of the biggest screw-ups at the website I’ve made so far.
It’s been two days since I made this tremendous fuc&-up and I’m still seeing the repercussions in the form of complaints, members or moderators calling-out other members as hypocrites for requesting (or not requesting) access, the list goes on and on… Since I try as hard as I can to keep everyone happy, it’s been a loong weekend. Although the fact that Monday is a holiday making the weekend three-days long might have something to do with that..
I’ve decided that I’m not going to keep the new “grown up” area, because too many members have complained - man, porn really spanked my ass!
Track Down Those Dirty Content Leeches
Nothing infuriates me more than finding my hard-earned content stolen and posted on some worthless MFA website by a webmaster that’s too lazy, stupid or crooked to bother spending the time to write or generate his or her own stuff. These webmasters usually fall into the category trying to “get rich quick” without doing any real work themselves and oddly, the majority of these webmasters (or at least their suck-ass content-leech websites) seem to be hosted in the same two or three countries. I won’t name those countries - but you know what they are.
I use GoogleAlerts, which notifies me any time it finds my content somewhere on the web. It doesn’t find everything, but if you spend the time and effort configuring enough alerts, it can find a lot of your stolen content. Once I find one of those shitty, worthless websites with my content hidden amongst the plastering of Adsense ads, I usually send a nice email or post a comment kindly asking that they remove my stolen content or at least give credit to my site where it was stolen from. 99% of the time the request goes ignored, so after about a week I report the site to Google by clicking that little “Ads by Google” spot on one of the ads, then scroll to the bottom and click “Send Google Your thoughts”, then click “Also report a violation”. I’ve also reported stolen content on sites that use Kontera to my Kontera account manager. Both have resulted in those websites no longer having the privilege of using Adsense or Kontera.
I also stop content leeches at the source. By enabling the Statistics module in Drupal, I can view the top page-viewing IP’s at the site in the last x hours. Among the familiar IP’s such as the Google Bot and other search bot IP’s, I see new unfamiliar IP’s at the top of the list on almost a daily basis. Any IP that has viewed over 500 or so pages in the last few hours gets a quick WHOIS lookup to see where they’re from. Usually these IP’s are from one of the same few countries or internet providers known for breeding or harboring content thieves and I block them from the site.
I could just throw these content-stealing leech’s IP’s into my HTACCESS file, but that would give them the obvious “403 forbidden” error.. Then they would know I’d banned them and they might get pissed-off (we don’t want a world full of unhappy content-stealing piece-of-shit webmasters do we?) So instead I use the Drupal Troll Module to block them from the site, and give them a custom message. As much as I’m tempted to give them a message that says something like “phuck off you leech”, I instead like to give them something a little more cryptic. Something that looks like the site is down:
Warning: mysql_query() [function.mysql-query]: error:Too Many Connections for variable ‘ODBC’@'localhost’ (using password: NO) in PATH%\www\content\includes\php-dbi.php on line 225 Warning: mysql_query() [function.mysql-query]: A link to the server could not be established in PATH% \www\content\includes\php-dbi.php on line 365
Error mysql_query() for ‘@’localhost’ failed SELECT u.uid FROM sessions w, users u WHERE s.sid = ‘i06os2kqgkqbna1d1za8km0i0′ AND s.uid=u.uid
MYSQL CONNECTION FAILURE - PLEASE TRY AGAIN IN A FEW DAYS
Using the Troll Module to block IP’s and display whatever custom message you want is faster and easier (for me) than adding it into the HTACCESS file. But, since the Troll Module logs every blocked IP that tries to access the site, I do end up putting the worst offenders into HTACCESS.
I know it’s a bit like clearing the beach one grain of sand at a time, but I like to think it helps.
50 Adsense Questions Answered
A few weeks ago a post was made at the Digital Point forums that asked 50 Adsense questions. I thought I would give my answers to these questions here in my blog so they could live in infamy, instead of floating to the bottom of the Digital Point forum-post pile.
All answers are my opinion, based on what I’ve learned in the last 20 months, so take them with a bag of salt..
1.) What’s the best adsense revenue profiting process…
A.) Creating a blog empire from blogger.com (Writing articles per day)
B.) Creating major websites, promoting it in full free advertisements
C.) Creating basic websites with articles
Answer: B - I think that creating ONE quality website and investing all your time and effort into it is more likely to result in long-term success. That is how I did it.
2.) If i were to choose A, what’s the best option???
A.) Creating 1 blog a day (with adsense in it) with an very-optimized, original article
B.) Creating 20 or multiple blogs a day (with adsense in each of it) from copied articles in the internet. - still i will put a source and author’s name
Answer: Neither -”A” is a bad choice
3.) If i were to choose B, what’s the best option???
A.) Creating 1 optimized-major website in a year
B.) Creating 3 major websites in a year
C.) Creating 5 major websites in a year
Answer: A - In my experience, focusing your (limited) time, energy and creativity on one quality site is the best formula for success.
4.) If i were to choose C, what’s the best option???
A.) Build basic, original article websites once a month
B.) Build basic, original article websites once a week (but no that good)
Answer: I already told you, C is a bad option
5.) Is copying articles from wikipedia ok to put into your
bunch of blogs??
Answer: No - Although the Wikipeida license may allow it, it’s still a bad idea. Copying and pasting (aka stealing) content from somewhere is not what Google considers original content.
6.) Does copying articles from ezine.com and goarticles.com is ok
to put into your bunch of blogs??? (I will just put the author’s name)
Answer: NO - see #5 .. Seems you have a lot to learn about original content
7.) Is having a copied article with a bunch of ads an MFA???
Answer: Maybe.. Probably. It depends on how you define MFA. In general I think most people (and Google) consider a piece of shit website with nothing but Adsense and a bunch of copied-and-pasted content MFA.
8.) If a user clicks ALL the google ads in my site, is it foul? Read more
eBook Series: User Generated Content
I let my visitors create the content for me:
That’s right – why should I bust my butt writing ‘stuff’ when other people can do it for me? The reason for wanting as much content as possible on your site is because Google and other search-engines love it. The more new, unique ‘stuff’ you have on your site, the more Google will favor your site in search results – resulting in more visitors, and popularity.
HOW I LET USERS GENERATE CONTENT:
I enabled the comments feature of Drupal. Drupal has a feature that allows users to post comments on pages. Activating this feature and inviting visitors to comment or ask questions is like giving food to the Google-bot that indexes your website into it’s search engine – Each time Google visits your site it will see more ‘stuff’ (Google likes that) – Also, having more ‘stuff’ increases the chances that people doing Google searches will hit on something on one of your pages. For the first several months I allowed anonymous users to post comments/questions. I had to watch every post very carefully to watch for trolls, spammers, bad language, etc, and I had to delete many ‘bad’ posts.
On some pages I got the commenting started by making ‘anonymous’ posts:
At first, when I wasn’t getting many visitors to the site, I would make my own anonymous posts to get things started. Eventually other people started posting comments and I didn’t need to do this anymore and was able to delete all those posts. There are also websites and services that will allow you to ‘buy’ posts or exchange posts to help get things started.
I created a forum within my site:
Another feature of Drupal is integrated ‘forums’. A forum is another great way to get visitors to write content for you. In Drupal, each time someone makes a new forum post, it looks like a new page to Google’s search engine spiders & bots. I waited a few months, until I was getting a lot of traffic before I activated the forum. Activating the forum, which was one of the smartest thing’s I did, was not a calculated move; I was simply following the direction that visitors were taking the website. There came a point when the number of page ‘comments’ per day made it obvious that the site was turning more into a forum than a static site.
I used the PathAuto module for Drupal:
The “Pathauto” add-on module for Drupal will automatically create URLs based on the title of the forum topics that users post. This makes for better search results from Google and other search-engines. This ‘on-page SEO’ is important for long-term traffic from search engines. When configuring PathAuto, be sure to specify using “-” (dashes) between words, and not “_” (underscores). Google will see words with dashes between them as individual, search-able words. Words separated by underscores will be treated as one, long word (more about this in a later chapter).
Also, by activating The Path (different from PathAuto above) module I can easily modify URLs so that they match popular search terms.
For example:
By default when using PathAuto a forum post with the title “Help, my computer isn’t working” will have a url of “http://grownupgeek.com/help-my-computer-isnt-working”
I will often change the URL to something like:
“http://grownupgeek.com/how-to-recover-windows-xp”
Changing the URL to a popular search phrase related to the post greatly increases the Google ranking for that particular phrase. You can only change the URL’s if you have activated the Drupal Path module.
After some time, when I had run out of things to write about, comments and forum posts by visitors allowed the website to continue to grow. There came a point that I could just sit-back and let it run – for me this took about 8 months. This does not mean I was “done”, it just means that my content creation was now on auto-pilot.
I use newsletters to keep members and non-members coming back:
After the website began getting popular, I started restricting posts to members only – requiring visitors to register (and give their email) to make posts. I then used Drupal’s simple-news module to send out a newsletter to all members each week. The newsletter mentions what’s been going on at the website, and keeps members coming back. I also use the newsletter to point-out pages with Commission Junction links – pointing out how wonderful those products are. Now that the site is older and has more members I only send out newsletters about once per month. I have found that members and subscribers don’t like the be overloaded with too much email.
