I came across this problem recently and I didn’t actually manage to find a solution online for a change so I thought I had better post about it. All of a sudden the word count in my WordPress site was showing zero on every post. Continue reading Word Count Not Working in WordPress
I think a lot of people live in a world where they know the chances of their computer crashing are significant and yet they still put off backing up their data. I think in most cases this is due to their lack of knowledge of how easy it can be to back up your data. I know people who occasionally add the files in their documents folder onto a CD or thumb drive but it is not very frequent and chances are if their laptop or PC were to fail they would lose data for sure.
I myself have had no less than 1 PC and 2 Laptops die on me completely, without a hope of recovery, in the last 3 years. The first laptop died due to someone else trying to fix something by removing the operating system and not being able to replace it. I stupidly had not backed up my data before allowing them to do this, my bad. The 2nd one, the PC, died a few months later, it was a few years old and I had started slowly copying the data over but had not finished backing up before it went. Lucky for me I had a friend who, with a lot of effort, managed to rescue the data from both machines. So if you are wondering how do I back up my computer then I’ll tell you the easy way that I do it (although there are other ways but for someone who doesn’t want to delve into lots of settings this one is simple),
And so it came that said friend decided that I needed an easy back up facility and bought me a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Drive with I think 500 Gb of space. Now I am sure that there are other easy plug and go back up drives available but as I have used this one I wanted to share my experience with it. Basically it has software installed that you can just run and once you have that installed, every time you plug the drive in afterwards it will automatically detect and new or changed files and back them up to the drive.
That is as simple as it is – plug it in and it will back up for you. For someone like me, who never quite gets round to doing a manual backup, it is a godsend. And that was shown to be the case when my 3rd computer, a laptop that was only about 18 months old, also died. Lucky for me that just the day before I had plugged in the backup (I had actually plugged it in to look for a file from one of my old computers that was stored on it but of course as I did that it backed up too).
So really, for less than 100 dollars (on Amazon anyway) you can have a very easy back up system that is suitable for any technophobe to use and really is the simplest back up out there as far as I am concerned. Don’t leave it until it is too late – it is not always possible to recover data from dead computers or can be expensive so save yourself the worry and trouble by getting a back up now.
You can check out the GoFlex drive on Amazon US and the equivalent in the UK below:
There are so many fake facebook pages out there trying to get us to click the like and share buttons with competitions and giveaways. So many of these facebook competitions are actually fake sadly.
There are a number of reasons why someone would set up a fake facebook page and competition even though sometimes they seem a bit unfathomable! But mostly they want us to like and share stuff so that more people like their page and maybe they can get hold of all our details and that of our friends to spam us with stuff or do even worse. Continue reading How Can You Tell a Facebook Competition is Fake?
The question does niche affect CPC was one that I asked myself after some comments I got from potential buyers on a site I was selling on Flippa.
To summarise, CPC is cost per click from advertising like Google adwords which is the amount you get each time an end user clicks one of your ads.
A couple of potential buyers of my site had said to me that they had analysed the CPC for the niche that my site related to, and that the CPC was very low – about $0.02.
So I got a bit despondent and thought that may be why, although the site had tons of traffic, maybe that was why I was not earning as much ad revenue as I thought I should. So I went to the site and had a look around and came to a different conclusion. All of the ads that I saw referred to stuff that I personally was interested in or had searched for recently. None of the ads related to the topic of the website.
I also went back over the time I had had the site (nearly 4 years) and checked out the CPC. It was way higher than the $0.02 that the buyers had told me was the going rate for that niche.
One question I don’t know the answer for is – do the advertisers bid a particular rate for their ad showing in a particular niche? – and if that is the case then the niche might well be relevant to the CPC. But if the answer is No then surely the niche does not have much effect on the CPC at all.
The key to the CPC rate therefore must surely be the type of ads that are shown to the viewers of the website and what kind of things they are interested in. So to that extent the niche may have a bit of influence on the CPC because let’s say your website is about high end finance, then your end users may well be interested in stuff that would generate a high CPC. But if your website could appeal to anyone (which mine would, albeit mostly women) then the ads could surely be from any niche?
I went in search of info about how to increase CPC and to be honest I got a lot of rubbish. Some of the advice firstly was to select a high end niche to base your blog/website on – well that’s not much good for those who already have a website to start with. But I wasn’t impressed with much of the rest of the stuff I read. More useful were some posts saying not to worry too much about CPC, but to instead concentrate on ad look and placement to increase CTR. This seemed like good advice to me, especially after I went back and checked the CTR and I found it to be pretty low. I made some changes to the site style and ad location, as well as the colour scheme of the ads and hey presto, an increase in CTR almost immediately!
So, does niche affect CPC? I would say only to a limited extent, depending on who you are targeting with your niche, but it is not eh be all and end all of increasing ad revenue on your website.
Of course the normal way to create a favicon in WordPress would be to upload your file to the correct location via FTP. But for some looking for a simpler way (or one that may seem simpler anyway), another option is to install a favicon plugin and upload your icon file through that. There are a few favicon plugins around but we found that the All in One Favicon plugin was very simple to use and worked perfectly well.
Once you have added the plugin you can upload your file (favicon files are usually 32×32 or 16×16 pixels) using the settings page and voila, it will be there! You can also use a png or gif file for your icon using this plugin.
If you want a simple way to create a favicon then go to favicon.co.uk and they will create it quickly for you from an existing image that you may have. It’s a good idea to use a square image obviously. All very simple and done in a minute.
