Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

As most of you know that have followed me over the years, I’ve gone off and on hiring writers to write on one ore many of my multiple blogs.  Over the year and a half however, I’ve basically done nothing on my blogs focusing most, if not all of my energy on my 9-5 (I’ll talk about what I’ve been up to in later posts).  But recently, I’ve been pulled, dragged, yanked, whatever, back into blogging.

I’ve hopped back in for several reasons. My blogs continue to get traffic, continue to get linked to, and continue to make money.  That and it was requested by one of the writers I hired a while ago to start my ideas back up and really give it a go.

This time however, I decided to be smarter than I had in the past. Previously I’ve payed generic writers to generate content for posts I’ve titled. This worked but produced kind of bland posts and didn’t last long. Next I hired bloggers, as freelancers, but had a hard time organizing and managing their writing. [Head over here to read about these and a few other ways to generate content for multiple blogs.

Other than having enough time to manage these writers, I spread their work and over multiple blogs about different subjects. None of the writers could feed off of what the other writer was doing and soon everyone became bored with the blog network.

So this time I needed a different strategy. I decided to put to use what I learned from doing things wrong and also what I learned from listening and reading what others had to say about the matter.

First, I decided I was going to focus on one blog. I wasn’t going to write on all my blogs and continue to spread my resources thin.  I live in Hawaii and was told by several people, once from Yaro Starak on a trip through Hawaii, that I should focus on this interesting niche. Done.

Next, I don’t have enough time to manage the site, build links, find advertisers, manage writers, edit, write, and develop a posting schedule. Instead I would need to bring on someone to take some of the day to day tasks off my list. It just so happened that I had someone looking and willing to do some of these task.  The person who wanted to get Aloha Update going again wanted to come on as an editor to manage writers, edit, write, and develop a posting schedule. Done.

Next, we would need to find writers interested in the topics and willing to help build a blog as freelance writers and not full-time bloggers. First task of my new editor, find writers. Over the course of a month she was able to find 10 writers wanting to write about the islands on a per post basis. Done.

While it’s only been a few weeks so I can’t say with certainty that this method will work down the road, we’ve been able to  generate at least two posts per day, keeping content fresh and building an audience.  Aloha Update now has regularly scheduled posts, writers comment on each others posts, and a genuine feel of community.

All this and I haven’t needed to make it a full-time job.

From time to time I’ve discussed on this blog managing multiple writers for my blog network, Blogtown Press. Mainly I’ve dealt with the odds and ends of finding, organizing, and paying bloggers to writer on one or many of my various blogs. Those articles are helpful but they haven’t really given tips on helping with the task of managing these writers through Wordpress.

Managing writers, even with wordpress can be a big task. While there are plugins that help you it’s always tough to sort through them all and find the plugins that help you the most. Well, I recently began to rekindle my interest with the internet, blogging, and building a business by paying freelance writers to build content and thought I’d begin to share some tips with my readers about how this process is going.

I’ll jump into the business side of things more a little later (recently I created an LLC for one of my blogs and hope to expand that blog into a full business with possible full-time employees.) But first let me pass along some information on a plugin I happened across. The plugin is Role Manager which allows you to set specific rules for the roles inherent in Wordpress and change how they act. While the codex for role management does a little bit to help you understand the roles capability, it doesn’t really give you full control over what these various roles can do. They’re predefined.

Well the Role Manager plugin lets you change that by providing an interface to manage the inherent roles. Also, which is probably the best part of the plugin, is that it allows you to create new roles and set options for them. For example, let’s say you have most of your writers setup as contributors but you want one of them to have the added ability to upload files, like images. You don’t want to give everyone the chance to upload files, because you might not trust everyone as much as this person to upload non-malicious files, so what do you do?

You can create a new role and set it to a contributor upload role, or whatever name you choose obviously. You can then have everything the same as the settings for a contributor but the new role will allow this special subset of contributors to upload files.

This is just one example but you can see how this wordpress plugin allows you to customize and better manage your writers and members of your wordpress site to be able to have more features than the defaults. This allows you, as an employer of freelance writers to give your writers more options without giving away all the accessibility of say, an Editor.

As some of you may know or have read, I’ve dabbled in custom php coding for wordpress. I’ve created scripts to populate tables, and custom code to help save your YPN account from being banned. That got reviews on problogger and entrepreneurs journey.

I’ve written a few ways to customize your adsense code for wordpress posts like adding adsense between multiple wordpress paragraphs and wrapping text around adsense or chitika ads in your wordpress posts. Although these were pretty simple coding tasks, they seemed to help a lot of people based on their comments and the amount of emails I received asking about better implementation. I also received a lot of people wondering if I could prepare a plugin to do some of these tasks easier for those who don’t want to hack up their templates. Should have been checking my comments these last few months.

I was finally able to put all that php hacking to good use by consulting for my brother in a project he’s working on for his company Paper Tree Design. The project was simple, write some code to allow user uploads of videos and integrate those videos into an easy to use wordpress plugin. OK, maybe that simple, but definitely a lot of fun!

The script integrates into a Wordpress blog that has a front end user administration panel and vPIP, a great video script with ever growing functionality. It was great to work with my brother and learn a few things about interacting with various plugins and their databases.

I’m sure I’ll elaborate on the functionality of the upload script but I thought I would give a little insight into where I ditched off to so quickly after getting back into things…

Since I started blogging I’ve gotten to know some great people involved with the online money making world. It all started when a co-worker pointed me towards Steve Pavlina’s Blog and all the money he makes from his pesonal development blog. This was shortly after I had started to play around with some web publishing of my own so the timing was great.

This co-worker then stopped working for the same company and became a freelance webdesigner along with creating other sites that employ writers, photographers, and bring him passive income. At least thats my guess since I haven’t been able to get a hold of him to find out how things are going ever since he decided to bike across America.

I also met some other great people around the blogosphere and had some great conversations and a dinner with a little more known internet entrepreneur, Yaro Starak. He was in Hawaii on his way back to Australia from Canada and I was able to have dinner at a local hot spot on the beach and discuss all things internet. He gave me some great advice, that, although he may not see me following it yet, I’m definitely working towards ideas raised in that conversation. Besides, who am I to go against a proven method that’s working for him.

Also in the mix is my brother. He’s started a clothing line, ASONE Clothing which has been doing well for small startup company. Also while doing that, he’s become somewhat of a wordpress guru. Couple that with his design abilities and he’s perfect for those wanting design work done. Right now his client list is pretty full and his ability to both code, not just CSS, full-on custom PHP and plugin integration as wel, is going to continue to bring him a lot of work. You can check out his budding portfolio over at PaperTree Design.

He also runs a few blogs on the side related to web design and creating buzz for product launches.

All in all, this online crowd is a great crowd to get into. I hope to develop my network more and more as I try and bring more information to the table. Some things I’m helping colleagues with are…

• Wordpress and PHP consulting, focused on custom wordpress applications and design
• SEO
• Starting and building blog networks
• Idea generation

I’ve been a way for a while, trying to regain some focus in my life and thought I would return to this blog by providing some tips while using Wordpress. My most recent jump into playing with php and Wordpress is how to add Adsense code within blog posts in between paragraphs on every post.

I searched around and only found some plugins here and there that limit where the Adsense code can go. So I decided to build my own little php code. This should allow you to deal with the “” tag as well.

For this I’ve just dealt with the single.php file but you can put this wherever you’d like. Just remember the limits you have on the number of adsense blocks you can put in.

OK, so it’s really simple. Where you see <?php the_content(); ?>. Just replace that with:

<?php
$content = apply_filters(’the_content’, $post->post_content);
$save = explode(”</p>”, $content);
$count = 1;
foreach ($save as $a){
if ($count == 3){
echo’
<div style=”margin: 5px 0px 5px 0px; text-align: center;”>

</div>’;
}
echo $a.”</p>”;
$count = $count + 1;
}
?>

It’s that simple! You can play around with the foreach and the if statements to insert your adsense between different paragraphs, multiple if statements allow for multiple inserts between multiple paragraphs. You can use if in_category to display ads a certain way if they’re in a certain wordpress category. The list is endless.

Now, for those of you who actually want to know how this works here goes:

The first line

$content = apply_filters(’the_content’, $post->post_content);

pulls your content into a string into the variable $content. This includes all code, html or otherwise. Don’t ask me why the apply_filters was needed. All I can tell you is that I wasn’t able to do it any other way.

Next we chop up the string into an array split up by </p> using the explode function.

$save = explode(”</p>”, $content);

As long as you are using paragraph tags in your posts (some people choose to take them out) then this will work. Each array value will be a separate paragraph.

Then we initialize a counter to keep track of how many paragraphs we echo (to come later),

$count = 1;

We then start our foreach loop to loop through each value in the array $save.

foreach ($save as $a){

Then we check to see what paragraph we’re on. Here is where you can play with it to echo your adsense code wherever you’d like. I have it displaying adsense after the third paragraph but you can display it wherever. Such as, if ( $count == 1 || $count == 3) would display before and after. You can use elseif to display different adsense layouts at different points in the post. Be creative. Notice that I’ve also decided to center my code using an inline style.

if ($count == 3){
echo’
<div style=”margin: 5px 0px 5px 0px; text-align: center;”>

</div>’;
}

We then print our array value $a remembering to add a </p> at the end because php explode, explodes the array but removes the value we told php to explode from.

echo $a.”</p>”;

Finish that off with an increment of the $count variable and you’re done!

$count = $count + 1;
}
?>

This should give you the bare bones to insert adsense code into anywhere you’d like that you are displaying content. I use it only in single.php on my wordpress blog. You can see an example at my Hawaii Blog in this popular article about Dog the Bounty Hunter headed to Jail in Mexico.

Hope it helps some people out. Spread the word if you know anyone who can benefit from this.

OK, the actual design of Aloha Update wasn’t automatic, but the way it’s setup creates quite a few automatic adjustments to the blog.

Wordpress Static Front Page
First off, I’ve decided to use Wordpress’ built in static front page to create a more news like, content in your face. It was tough at first because the addition is rather new to Wordpress and there isn’t much documentation out there.

If you are trying to add a static front page with a working inner page that shows all posts you need to remember that the page you setup as the “all posts” page needs to be run off the index.php file. If you don’t do this, wordpress pagination, ie /page/2/, will not work. At least it didn’t work for me. The other page, the static front page, can be created from a template page. Check out Aloha Update and our All Posts Page.

Adding a Drop-Down Horizontal Menu to Show Categories
The next sweet thing I did was add a drop-down menu using some javascript and a css/.js method I found over a A List Apart.

The menu drops down and reveals the sites categories which are organized based on the different islands of Hawaii. The cool thing is, the drop down menu is smart. It is able to recoginze which category you are in, be a single post or a category, or a sub category, of one of the main categories. This way, you don’t have to setup separate headers and nav bars for each category.

It took me a while to get it right and I’ll surely write a little wordpress tutorial for you all soon as in my searching I found a lot of people wanting to have this happen.

Added Tabbed Interactive Boxes
Next I added some tabbed interactive boxes as you can see on the front page where I list the images as well as on the inner pages where I list top things about Aloha Update.

I found everything I needed over at BarelyFitz Designs. This was probably the easiest to implement out of everything. All you have to do is cut and paste and FTP some files over and you’re done.

UPDATE:
Automatic Picture Formating
The last thing I did which is probably the most automatic thing and took a while is utilize the “read more” tag in wordpress, along with The Excerpt Reloaded plugin.

Basically what I do is within a post I first put a thumbnail image, then I put the more tag, then the noteaser tag, then the large image, and finish it off by adding an excerpt. This allows me to control what image shows up where.

On the front page I have the latest image show up as a sized version of the large image using the php “the_content(’ ‘, ‘TRUE’)”. Next within each sub tab of that same area I show the thumbnail image as a link to the page, then the title (also a link) and finally the excerpt as I wrote it in the post.

Next, in the image category I have it show the thumbnail image, and then when you go to individual pages you will have the full image and that full image will be link to the large image.

I’ll try and do tutorials of all these because I know from searching around that there are others out there that would like this help as well.

OK, so digging around it seems like this is still a problem for some people. About 8 months ago there was a bit of buzz surrounding the BETA release of the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN). Darren Rowse over at problogger.net posted a quote from an email some of the publishers being banned were recieving. It basically stated that publishers who had “too much” non-US traffic using their site and clicking through on their ads were kicked out from the YPN program.

I almost didn’t sign up when I got my invite because of this post. Why would I want to waste my time on something that people were saying was inferior to AdSense. However, I followed through with it, got my account, then got “the call” from a YPN rep asking me how I liked the program. I said hadn’t used it yet but was wondering if I could create some coding to display ads YPN ads to just US users while other ads would be displayed if the user wasn’t from the US.

I then contacted Google and asked them if this was ok and they said, “that doesn’t appear to violate the terms and conditions” blah blah blah. Great, so if you are still worried or having a problem here’s what I did!

PS this uses a wordpress plugin and some PHP, but you get the ID, you can also use some server commands that check the IP of the page viewer but I don’t think that works as well and frankly was making me mad when I first tried it out.

Anyway, the idea is this:

if (visitorIP = us){
  display YPN;
  }
else{
  display AdSense
  }

Outline

1. Get your Google AdSense and YPN account if you don’t have one.
2. Populate your database with the IP to Country data
3. Download the IP2Country Wordpress plugin
4. Update your code on your index.php, page.php, single.php, etc with an IF statement.

That’s it, really simple. I had a few problems here and there that I will try and address solutions to but hopefully you will go through the process problem free.

1. Get your Google AdSense and YPN account

Chances are if you are reading this you already have both an AdSense account and a YPN account. If you don’t though visit Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher to sign-up and get your accounts today.

Those who have the accounts should be familiar with ads and ad code so you can easily insert the code into the files mentioned below.

2. Populate your databasse with the IP to Country data

This was my most problematic part. You need to get the data from the IPtoCountry .csv file into your MySQL database. You can find the Database here and the plugin that I use for this ip2_country has a nice little tutorial about how to create the proper tables.

Create them first then upload your data search the web for how to do this or your mySQL database help file, or you can…

WARNING: I HAVEN’T HAD OTHERS TEST THIS UPLOAD SCRIPT SO PLEASE CHECK TO MAKE SURE THIS IS RIGHT, IT WORKED FOR ME BUT I DON’T WANT TO SCREW UP PEOPLE’S mySQL DATABASE. CHECK IT FIRST

If you need a .php script to do this for you, you can try out the one I used, just copy and past this into an editor, change the appropriate fields where it has

$hostname=yourhost;
$username=yourusername;
$password=”yourpassword”;
$dbid=databaseID;

save it as something.php, upload it and the .csv country list to the same folder at your site, and navigate to it via your browser and presto. You should be getting a long list of what it’s doing, it’s adding the proper info to the ip2country table you made.

3. Download and activate the IP2Country Plugin

Now download and activate the IP to Country Plugin. Should explain itself.

4. Now add code that looks like this

if (wp_ip2c_getCountryCode2(0) == us)
{
print’
Yahoo Publisher Code
‘;
}

else{
print ‘
Google AdSense Code
‘;
}
?>

Put that wherever you want your ads to appear.

As a test below you should see yahoo ads if your from the US and if you’re not you should see Google ads.

Sweet.

Let me know if anyone has any troubles and I can try and help you out or point you in the right direction.

Plugins are great! For those of you who don’t use Wordpress or another blog software that allows you to solve problems easily and quickly with plugins then I suggest switching to wordpress. If you don’t and want to switch to Wordpress check out Darren’s post about how to install wordpress. For those that want some new plugins here are the Wordpress plugins that I use.

Adesnse Deluxe - A great way to easily insert Google AdSense into your blog posts. You can use it for AdSense, Chitika, YPN, or any other code snippet type ads. I don’t use it as much now that I’ve gotten the hang of php but it’s still a great add in.

Do Follow - Help your commentors gain page rank by eliminating the wordpress no follow for comments code.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - Tough Plugin at times to get going but helps direct all of your feed traffic to your feedburner account. If you don’t have a feedburner account and want to learn more about it check out my using feedburner as a blog tool post.

Related Posts - Keep your readers on at your blog by giving them more pages to visit. Increase pageviews and increase earnings

Recent Comments - Promote commenting by promoting your commentors.

Image Browser - Came with the old Wordpress install and much better than the newest image browser available on Wordpress 2.0+.

I am working on ad rotator and Google Sitemaps plugins but I’m unable to really get the sitemaps plugin to work. I’d really like to get it going but am having some difficulties. If you have any hints let me know.

During the past week I have been working on developing the Wordpress template for my blog network and have tried to locate and install a few valuable Wordpress plug-ins. (Plug-ins are addons for Wordpress that perform some function valuable to the publisher) Below I have listed and linked the top 5 Wordpress plug-ins that I am using and a little bit about why I feel they are so useful.

1. E-Mail to a friend wp-email - word of mouth, in my opinion the best online advertisement method. This plug-in allows you to easily install an email this post link and form to any page. A very well developed plug-in, although I still had to figure a few things out, I think this is a must for everyone.

2. Related Posts or Entries - Don’t let your viewers leave your page, give them something else to click. This wordpress plug in uploads quick, and inserts quick, with basic and easy formatting options. Keep your visitors where you want them, surfing your blog.

3. Recent Comments - Another great Wordpress plug-in from semilogic, recent comments is useful for your front page to encourage viewers to read others comments and post responses. A great way to increase commentors on your site.

4. Contact Form - Could a form be easier than just posting your email address? I guess for those not wanting to post their email to the world this is a good plug-in. Also most of the big name sites use a contact form so there must be something to it. This Wordpress plug-in will quickly insert a form wherever you ask it to.

5. Feedburner Redirect Plug-in - Although I have been unable to get this plug-in to work on any site other than my root Wordpress blog install (no doubt issues with Netfirms, my structure, or both), this plug-in or Feedburner is a must for stat crazed bloggers. Feedburner allows you to track subscribers and have yet another traffic stat for yourself or published to your viewers. This plug-in redirects all of you feed traffic using a randomly generated feed.

Enjoy these plug-ins and let me know if you have any questions on them. There is pretty good support out there for all of them and as I said I have had my difficulties with them as well and worked through most all of the problems.

Are you trying to get more commentors on your blog? Sick of seeing all those other blogs with multiple comments on every post? You’re in luck. Cesar over a fleethecube.com has started a new site trying to promote the disabling of the nofollow tag.

The site is called yesfollow.org and explains how you can help the blogosphere and your own search engine ranking by disabling the nofollow tag associated with your comments. In both movabletype and wordpress blogs the default is to put a rel=”nofollow” tag on every comment. What this tells the search engine spiders is to not follow the links associated with the tag.

The blogosphere knows this and looks at comments on less established blogs as too much work for no reward. They would rather leave comments on blogs with a lot of traffic in the hopes that people would click-through. Now I’m not saying this is always the case, sure people leave comments to be helpful and to promote open discussion on a topic that may be dear to them. But a lot of comments are meant to attract people to click through to your blog.

In comes the dofollow plugin promoted by the yesfollow.org campaign. The idea is to make the standard in the blogosphere be dofollow and incentivise everyone to leave comments on others blogs, newbies and oldies alike. Bloggers will of course have to watch closely for spam but if you have control of your spam (and there are plugins that do this) you should want to use the dofollow plugin and help your fellow bloggers out.

So go join Cesar over at and download the plugin, activate it, and leave your feedback. It took me all of 5 minutes to do the whole thing, including leaving some length feedback at yesfollow.

Don’t forget to spread the word, it’ll help you SEO process.

Happy Commenting!