Brian Vaughan

New Way to Manage Adsense

Posted by Brian

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A few days ago Google released a teaser of a feature that would enable you to not have to change your Adsense code everytime you made a change to the appearance of the code. This feature is not started to roll out to every publisher, and today it was enabled for my account.

I have just finished setting it up for one ad unit of mine, the 300×250 ad spot here on this blog. There seems to be a little delay before changes show up (and before the ad will initially start showing up for new ad units). All in all I have to say so far so good.

To find out whether or not it has been enabled on your blog yet. Log into Adsense then click on the Adsense Setup tab. If you see a link called “Manage Ads” it means your account has this new feature enabled.

While setting up new ads, they have added one step at the end, where you name and submit your new ad unit. It will be best to use very descriptive wordage for new ads so you know exactly where they are. That way when you need to change the appearance of ads you will be able to find which one to edit more easily.

Once you have ads setup and ready you can use the Manage Ads link to well manage your ads. This screen will list all the ads you have created with links to edit the ad, preview what it will look like, as well to get the code for the ad.

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Finally Back with a Smoking New Machine

Posted by Brian

It has been just over a month since the world has heard from me here at BrianVaughan.com. You may be wondering what exactly happened to me, might of thought I just fell off the face of the world, well it sure did seem like I did.

As I have stated in previous posts of mine, my computer was on the verge of really crapping out on me, and it finally did. For a while I was using an old back up machine running on a 600mhz processor or something crazy like that. It just didn’t cut it for me and was just making me madder and madder everything that I had to use it. But all of that is over now. I am running on a brand new custom built beast of a machine.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
Cooler Master Centurion 5 Case
Cooler Master Extreme 500 Watt Power Supply
Asus Nvidia 590i SLI Mother Board
Nvidia 8600 graphics card
A-Data 2 Gigs of Ram (2x 1024 sticks)

I was able to canabolize my other machine and use the hard drive and dvd-writer from it. After Christmas I hope to upgrade at least the hard drive to a nice new SATA drive so I can get the most performance out of my new machine.

So now that I am back up and running what can you expect from me in the coming days and weeks? Well I want to get this blog rolling again, it had built up a bit of steam and was doing really well (at least in my opinion) had a small (but dedicated) group of readers. I want to get them back and bring in more of those types of readers. I might refocus the target audience of the blog, or at least expand into other things that I think my readers will enjoy reading about. Before my machine went down I had the 2nd part in my Adsense for Beginners series done, I need to get that rewritten and posted up for all to see.

I want to also get a custom theme done up the site, to make it stand out from all the rest of the blogs out there. While I was on the hiatus I did also find out this theme is slightly broken in at least IE7, so that is something I will want to address soon, it was still readable, but I feel like it should look better for those users. I’m hoping this blog will get rolling again really soon. So stay tuned in, I have a lot of catching up to do in the blogosphere once I finish reading the hundreds of posts I need to catch up on, expect a lot of posts to be rolling your way over the next week and month.

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7 Must Have Plugins

Posted by Brian

Lots of people blog, and lots of people use plugins for Wordpress. In fact I’m willing to bet everyone uses at least one. There are some we just could not live without. There are some that make the process so much easier, and more enjoyable. No one likes sifting through hundreds (if not thousands) of spam comments that is why we have Akismet. There are so many plugins out there, and so many that do similar things that it is hard to pick which plugins are right for you the blogger.

Having too many plugins isn’t a good thing, having too many can slow down the speed of your site. You don’t want that, if your readers have to wait for your site to load, odds are they will just close the window and go on the the next blog. So how do you choose which ones to use on your blog? First you need to figure out what you want to do with your blog. If you want to make money with your blog with ads, you will probably want to have a plugin that makes inserting ads on your blog easier. Plugins when used correctly will make your life as a blogger easier and faster.

Recently a few people have asked me what plug-ins I use and would recommend to them. Well here is my list of the 7 plugins that every Wordpress blog should have in my opinion.

1. Akismet - it gets rid of that pesky spam
2. All in One SEO Pack - Just genious. Lets you customize the meta tags, titles, descriptions, keywords, everything that will help you rank better in the search engines
3. Adsense-Deluxe - Want to easily show your Adsense ads on your blog? in your posts? Then this is the plug in for you, so much freedom.
4. FeedBurner Feedsmith - Easy way to display and keep track of all your RSS readers. Displays so much information about your readers, click through rates what reader they are using, just a great plug in
5. Dagon Design Form Mailer - Every site should have a way for users to contact you, this makes it seamless
6. WWSGD - This plugin display a short message to new visitors of your blog urging them to subscribe to your RSS feed.
7. and bringing up the rear Dofollow - Let the Google juice flow. This plug urges your readers to comment more on your blog because it will help then get better rankings in Google.

Those are the basic plugins I use on all of my Wordpress sites. What plugins do you use? Got one you want to share I would love to hear what it is.

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Shut Down MTF

Posted by Brian

Some of you may have visited a site of mine MTF. It was a forum devoted to well movies. I had, and still do have, big plans for the site.

I just took it down so I can work on restructuring it to make it more useful and to find a way to integrate the database with another forum I will be started with it tvtalkfest. I want to have a similar setup to IMDB in the way it has a database of all the actors and the movies they play too. I want it were if you click a link for them on one site, you will get results from both about shows and movies they have been in and then linked to threads about those shows or actors. It might simply be too much that I am wanting out of the sites. Hopefully it won’t be offline for long.

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Two Great New Programs

Posted by Brian

Lots of hype has been going on about the websites DealDotCom and BlogRush. Both of these sites have exploded into the blogosphere over the past week. I almost feel like I’ve missed my opportunity to really promote these two fantastic resources for bloggers, because by now most people that will be interested in joining those two programs that read this site have already joined through someone else.

DealDotCom is a website similar to Woot in that it offers one product per day until it sells out. Once that happens you will have to wait until the next day to get another product. So far the site has been a relative huge success with two great products for the first days. One great feature is, if you have a product you want to sell, you can try and get it listed on the site for sale. That is a great way to get your product out there to the masses. Now of course DealDotCom takes a cut of the profits from the sale but having them sale the product for you means your not having to put a lot of money into advertising yourself which is always good. They offer a great affiliate program for both tier 1 and tier 2 at 35% and 15% respectfully, just keep in mind what you get is based on the profit that DealDotCom makes not what the item is actually selling for.

The second program is BlogRush, which aims to “rushing” your blog with new visitors. Yes I know excuse the pun, but that is in fact what BlogRush is intended to do. In short, you earn impressions on other blogs by showing the BlogRush widget on your own site. For every impression you give, you earn one impression on the network. 1:1 ratio very nice, most exchanges like this are 2:1 or even 3:1, 1:1 is very nice indeed. I will admit I have been running it for awhile now, and haven’t really had great success with it, I have recieved one new visitor from BlogRush. One new person to my site for just sticking some code on my sidebar? Seems pretty good to me. One thing I have noticed is a lot of people have been complaining about poor performance with the network. Your headlines mean a lot with BlogRush, you have to have eye catching titles to entice people to click on them. So while writing your posts make sure you have good titles so people will notice them.

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