7 Things

7. My favorite movie is ‘American Beauty’. Kevin Spacey shows us he’s the best actor alive, and the cinematography is reminiscent of great Kubrick films.

6. I was on the debate team in high school, and went to Harvard …for a competition. It forced me to get used to wearing suits at a relatively young age.

5. The only time I’ve been out of the country is to the Bahamas, this Christmas. I went on a cruise with my girlfriend Stephanie (pictured above).

4. I like to buy clothes on eBay. They’re cheap, and you can find just about anything. I like to buy expensive shirts, and then get them tailored, to feel like they’re not cheapo eBay shirts.

3. I was a Seminole fan all through high school and didn’t start to like the Gators until my freshman year at UF, and since the Gators are doing so well, it’s been quite the blessing.

2. My name is pronounced Wise, like the potato chip brand or owl. Growing up in Boca Raton, a lot of people typically pronounced it “weiss”.

1. I’m taken. I’ve been with Stephanie for 1 year and 7 months, and we’ve been living together for the past 9 months. We just went on our first cruise, and plan to go to China at some point.

Now, I’m supposed to call out 7 other bloggers to do the same type of post. Here goes:

1. Nathan Thompson – NathanBrooksThompson.com

2. Alexander Schek – MisterChips.org

3. Ronald Coleman – FeedTheBull.com

4. DevOracles.com

So I thought this might have been a custom-hack that somebody put together for WordPress, but then I stumbledupon the Referrer Detector WordPress Plugin.

WordPress Referrer Plugin

The plugin allows you complete control over which sites you have referral messages for. And you can even add in new sites, with custom messages. Everything is done in a WYSIWYG manner, making it extremely easy to manage.

By default, it comes with about 11 options, with all of the major providers covered: Digg, Reddit, Google, etc.

Installing the plugin is drop-dead simple, simply download it, put it in your /Plugins/ directory, activate it, and it’s ready to go.

From here, you can customize the text that is displayed and active/deactivate referral messages as you please.

Let me know if you need any help getting it setup.

Nearly 30% of online adults surveyed and said they will immediately leave a website they perceive as “cluttered with ads”, and 75% who stay on those sites say they pay less attention to the ads there.

So too many ads is bad for the publisher, the advertiser, and the visitor. So what is the right number of ads to run?

The Right Number of Ads

Though respondents accept that advertising will appear on websites, the majority (52.6%), say they have low tolerance for any more than two advertising units per page. Another 27.3% say they will tolerate only a single ad per web page, and slightly more than one-quarter (25.3%) will tolerate just two ads per page.

So looking at these numbers, you should be looking to run about 2 ads per page. Looking at this blog, we have a lot more than 2 ads running, and looking at TechCrunch, the #1 blog, they have about 20 ads at any given point.

Too Many Ads Decrease Overall Messaging

The survey also found that ad clutter has a negative impact on consumers’ perceptions of an advertiser’s products and services:

* One out of two (52.4%) respondents has a less favorable opinion of an advertiser when their advertising appears on a web page they perceive as cluttered.
* One-half (56.4%) of women claim clutter negatively impacts their opinion of an advertiser, versus 48.3% of men.
* Women also are more likely than men to abandon a site that appears cluttered (32.1% vs 27.5% of men).

Ad clutter’s negative impact on respondents’ opinions increases with age. Less than half (46.8%) of respondents 18-24 years were impacted negatively by clutter, but nearly two-thirds (63.2%) of respondents age 55+ were unfavorably impacted.

I have been using a number of free themes for a long time, and wanted to give back to the open source WordPress community, and am releasing this blog as a free, Premium theme: WiseTheme.

The actual theme is a HEAVILY modified version of Arthemia, a great free magazine theme. I took essentially the core framework of the theme, and created everything else from scratch.

Preview: View Demo
Download: Free Premium WiseTheme

Theme Features

The best way to learn all of the features is to download the theme and install it on your blog. It is designed to be a one-step installation.

• Adsense tags pre-configured into posts at the beginning and end of stories
• Custom Navbar, with mouse-over effect for a Professional appearance
• RSS subscribe icon prominently displayed next to the blog logo
• Multiple ad units available (12 Total) for maximum monetization
• Image previews on search and archive listings
• SEO-Optimized to the max, with H1, H2, and H3 headers
• Custom CSS stylesheets for IE optimization
• Floating column widths, to accommodate big and small monitors
• Note guides in the code to help you learn, and optimize the blog for your uses

Installation Guide

1. Download the theme, and install it in your WordPress directory: wp-content/themes/
2. Change the Adsense code in the Adsense_singlepost_top_square.php & Adsense_singlepost_bottom_square.php files. There are two pieces of Adsense that need to be changed, a 300×250 and a 728×90.
3. Sign up for an account at BuySellAds.com and replace the code in the sidebar_right_125x125.php, sidebar_left_125x125.php, and sidebar_top_300x250.php.
4. Replace the logo.gif (found in /images) file with your own graphic for your blog
5. Install the following plugins: All In One SEO, Disqus Comments System, Related Posts Plugin, FavIcon Head.
6. When writing a post, to ensure that the thumbnail generator works correctly, go to the custom fields area in the post-editor section. Create a new custom field name, called ‘Image’. For the value, you will use an image you have already uploaded to your blog (as in during a post). Copy down only the part of the URL that begins with wp-content/, ie ‘wp-content/uploads/2008/12/parking-boot.jpg’ Hit add custom field to complete. You should make sure the image is at least 125×125 and should be a jpg or gif.

Notes & Questions

I am happy to provide support for the theme, please send any emails to Andrew UFL at Gm@il d0t com.

This area will be updated as users pose questions, and for general troubleshooting. Enjoy!

Making Money In Your Spare Time

Everyday you have at least an hour of spare time, that you may spend watching TV or otherwise wasting time. What I suggest is you spent that wasted time and devote it to making money online. Getting started can definitely take more time, but it’s a learned skill, which over time your amount of commitment gradually decreases.

Lately I have been refining my blogging skills with this blog. This blog doesn’t actually make me as much money as I currently spend time contributing to it, here’s the breakdown:

• Hosting Costs: $20 Month
• Domain Costs: $1 Month

• Adsense Earnings: $50 Month
• Direct Ad Sales: $40 Month

So I’ve got about a net $75 per month or an extra $900 per year, which may not seem like much, but considering this was formerly wasted time, I’d consider this a net-gain. My suggestion is to get a blog hosted online for free from Blogger or WordPress, which is what I did, and start writing some posts. If you look back at my archives from March 2006, when I had my Blogger blog, it is pretty pitiful, but I’d say there are markedly good improvements as of late–

Additionally, I’ve started to work on Internet Marketing for local companies. What this means, is that I generate leads for businesses by companies by creating them an online presence. My main niche right now is florida home foreclosures and florida loan modifications. I create websites that talk about the latest news, tips, and headlines, and then generate leads from the interested parties. They can signup using my contact form or by calling my supplied numbers.

I take these leads, and sell them to mortgage companies, that pay upwards of $100 per lead, which is great money.

Making Money This Christmas Break

The biggest barrier most people have is that they don’t want to start something. These businesses take a couple hours a week, and can really help you to bolster your economy or possibly provide a job for you in the future, if you can get good enough.

Let me know if you’re planning any work on the side, and if you’ve been able to launch any blogs lately, I’d love to help promote and market your sites on this blog as well and help spread the wealth.

But one of the most fundamental elements of any SEO-ed blog is having your header tags organized and placed in the right position.

I having been working very hard to get my blog ranked highly for startup blog but I’ve been missing these crucial tags on my own site.

Check Your Blog For Header Tags

The first step in determining if your blog has the correct tags is to check your source code. To do this, go “view->view source” or hit control+U on your PC or command+U on your Mac.

This is going to bring up the HTML view of your webpage, and you don’t have to know what any of this really means, you’re only looking for the H1 H2 H3 information.

To do this, pull up find on the source code, and search for H1, and H2. If you find them, you’re on the right track, if not, you need to insert them in manually.

Where To Put H1, H2 Tags?

Now that you know where your site does or does not have H1 or H2 tags, you should look for the best place to insert them.

The H1 tag is meant to identify the main title of the page, so your site name or the title of your article should be inserted into the HTML code. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see where my H2 tags were inserted.

For the H2 tags, this is information that subordinate to the main content. For my main homepage, the H1 tags are on my “Headline” story and all of the featured stories have the H2 tags. Depending on your site structure, you may or may not to insert these manually.

If you look at this story in particular, you can see that I’ve used H2 tags while writing it, which will avoid me having to insert H2 tags on my own.

Be Careful of Abuse

Don’t think that inserting H1 and H2 tags all over the site will max out your Google search rankings. You have to me careful when placing them and only make sure they relate to the actual content of your site, because Google will penalize you or even ban you if there are too many of the H1 and H2 tags.

Just making sure they’re in the correct spot will go a long way to getting your blog optimized, and on the frontpage of Google.

Good luck!

Webmasters either make money via CPM (cost per thousand) advertising, CPC (cost per click) ads or some other combination of link-placement, CPA (cost per action) advertising networks.

So for the majority of webmasters, unless they’re on CPM networks, they’re not making much money from your visit. So for me, being a webmaster, I know the time and energy that goes into a site, so when I’m on their site, I make sure to subscribe to their feed and also check out their sponsors.

For the most part, you can find some quality advertisers, providing services that you may be interested in (you are, after all, reading the content on their site).

So the next time you’re on a site you like, will you courtesy click?

The more posts you make, the more content you deliver to people, and the more likely someone you write will catch someone’s attention.

The original article was taken from TechCrunch with the full recap.