WPTavern - Where The Drinks Are Always On The House

Just the other day, I mentioned that I had a decision to make regarding an opportunity for me to purchase a domain centered around WordPress and start up my own project. It’s funny because I didn’t think I would see such an amazing amount of support thrown my way but that is exactly what happened. After reading through the comments on that post, discussing the project with certain people via email and Skype, I have decided to bite the bullet and purchased the domain WPTavern.com as well as WordPressTavern.com from Kyle Eslick of WPHacks.com.

I love the sound of the domain as it’s centered around WordPress and it should be common knowledge that the word Tavern has a social nature to it. If any of you have read my About Page, you’ll know that there are two things that I want in life as it pertains to the web. To foster a community and to be successful. I think with my own project such as WPTavern, I can accomplish both of those goals at one time.

My initial thoughts on what WPTavern will be is a website that covers all things WordPress and related projects. I want WPTavern to be the gathering place for everyone in the WordPress community. I’ll be covering BuddyPress, WPMU, WordPress.com, Akismet, WordPress.org, BBPress, and anything else WordPress related. As for the forum, I’ve been thinking long and hard about which forum software to use and even though Vbulletin or PHPBB might be better for the job, since I’ll be writing about BBPress it would make sense for me to use BBPress. I won’t be opening up the site itself to user registrations, I’ll be keeping that tied to the forum.

As for the design. I want to mimic the Problogger look and feel. I want a front page which looks more like a portal for example, Problogger.net where each block has an excerpt, number of comments and permalink. Each block will be for a different category although I don’t want to place every category on this page as I want to leave room for advertising and recent comments. I also want my navigation at the top and one of the links should be ‘BLOG‘ which will take the visitor to the actual blog where I’ll be publishing full posts. If I could, I would just take everything Problogger has for a design and use that as my base. Just change things around to give it a unique look for WPTavern. If anyone can help me nail down a theme or figure out how to accomplish this look and feel, I’m all ears.

In terms of the type of content I’ll be producing for the site, it’ll be podcasts, special interviews, text based content, screencasts, breaking news if I got it, reviews, and anything else I can conjure up. In order for this to work, I’m going to have to bust my ass and produce every type of content imaginable. That ought to be fun! There is no telling how many posts I’ll be publishing a day. It could be one, it could be ten. The point is, I want to be the go to source for all sorts of news dealing with the world of WordPress.

Now I realize that perhaps there isn’t a need for another WordPress centric site/forum and that the news I publish on the site can be easily obtainable if you were to simply subscribe to the RSS feeds of each site. However, a small part of me thinks that people enjoy having all of that information filtered and presented for them in one place. Again, why bother when there is Planet WordPress or Ozh’s version of Planet WordPress? The only answer I can come up with is that, the text would contain my personality and the content would be created and established by me.

With all that said, I have the domain in my possession and I’ll be adding it to my hosting account in the next few hours. I now need to take things one step at a time and with each sign of progression, I’ll keep you updated.

The Day Zunes Stood Still

Paying attention to my Twitter feed, I noticed a story on Gizmodo which showcased a number of 30 GB hard drive Zunes were freezing for no reason. Upon looking at my own, I noticed that mine froze as well. Here is a video for proof!

I’m currently in the middle of trying to perform a hard reset but it is not working.

Making Money with Articles: Optimal Article Length

When choosing an article for your website, make sure that it is a length that is optimal for search engine optimization efforts. Articles that are as short as 200 words or as long as 500 words should fit into this category. Even if search engine optimization is not your goal, it is still a good idea to keep your articles at this length for your reader’s sake. They are likely to not finish your page if it is any longer. This could leave them Kith only half of the information you wanted them to have or leave them with the impression that your site is too “wordy”. Most Internet readers do not read a website page as they would a book, so the shorter the better. Even if this means splitting one long idea into 4 or 5 pages. Be sure to label them so that the reader can pick and choose which part they want to read or so they know what is coming up next to help them determine if they want to continue reading.

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Making Money with Articles: The Importance of Keywords

Keyword density and placement are important parts of optimizing your articles for search engines. Search engine spiders scan a page in a way that makes it important to place your keywords where they will be detected and recognized as a keyword, so that your article will come up when someone searches for that keyword.

What is a Keyword?

A keyword is a word that is going to be placed in your article several times, not just once as that would make every word a keyword. When a spider sees that you have a word placed several times in an article, it will determine that your page may be useful to users that search for such a keyword.

Over Optimizing Your Articles

It is important to note that there is also such a thing as over optimizing your articles for particular words, this is known as “keyword stuffing”. When you stuff keywords in an article a spider will detect that you are trying to trick it into placing your article high in the search engine results for that word, and will instead penalize your site and your page for doing such. This may even affect the rankings of your other pages or get your site blacklisted from a particular search engine if you are found keyword stuffing too many times.

What is Keyword Density?

Keyword density is how many times your keyword is placed in your article. Most use a percentage to determine how many times they will put a keyword in an article. For instance, if you have a 500 word article and want to achieve a keyword density of 5%, then you will need to have the keyword in your article exactly 25 times. You can find hundreds of resources and guides recommending one keyword density over another and the reasons behind the logic, however, in the end you will have to determine which density is more profitable for your articles. Each webmaster as their own density that they like to achieve based on past results. As long as you don’t over optimize and you are making sufficient profit from your rankings, then you can choose whatever keyword density you like.

The Right Density

No matter what exact density you choose, it is important to place keywords so that there are more at the beginning and end to produce an hour glass effect. Having the right keyword density in your article makes it more likely that you will make money off of that article because it will rise in the search engine results and be seen by more people.

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Making Money with Articles: Placing Banner Advertisements On Your Website

Placing banner advertisements on your website can increase your monthly revenue greatly. This option is better than being an affiliate for several companies because you will get one monthly fee no matter how many of your visitors go to the website or make a purchase. The main thing is for you to create an informative website filled with useful articles, so that you can generate a high amount of returning visitors. As your site rises on search engine rankings, the blank space on your site will begin to look more and more appealing to advertisers. Anyone can be an affiliate, but to have a banner placed in a good spot on a high-ranking website will bring in the most revenue for a company. Once you have established yourself as a site that can be profitable for them, you can rent out different spaces on your site for advertisers to place banner ads. Each month you will be paid the same fee, no matter how much they do or do not make off of you.

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Making Money with Articles: Niche Websites

Choosing a good niche subject to base your website around is one of the most important aspects of making money off of your articles. This will give you a foundation to build from and you can target one general audience with a pack of keywords that they are most likely to be searching for. You should take each one of these keywords and use it for the basis of one article on each page. This way, even though you are targeting one specific subject, you will be sure to interest a wide variety of people in that one niche. They may also find other pages that interest them, which will keep them returning to your site to learn new information about the niche subject.

The best way to find keywords for your niche subject is to use a keyword software program and type in the word that is the subject of your niche. This will generate a list of keywords or phrases that contain your niche and will also show you approximately how many people search for each word or phrase. Some software programs may also tell you how many sites are out there to compete with for each word or phrase (this will help you know if those sites are worth competing with for the number of searches out there). You then decide which of these would be most profitable by determining which have the least amount of competitors, so that you have a chance at making it to the first or second page of search engine results, but that also have a decent amount of people looking for that keyword or phrase each month. These will be the keywords or phrases that you will base the pages of your niche site on.

If there are a number of topics that you like, pick the one that you feel would be easiest to start with and then, once that site is built and generating some revenue, you can start another site. The most profitable website marketers, who use their talent of finding niches and combining that with good site content and a handful of affiliate links, have a good amount and variety of niche sites that they have started. You are never limited in what you can do with niche website marketing, unless you find out that you do not have the marketing skills or the needed funding to make it happen. Otherwise, the sky is the limit!

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I Have A Decision To Make

I’ve been thinking about something the past few days and I’m not sure if I am going to pull the trigger or not. I make a decent amount of income by producing content for others but it’s generally confined to writing about Blogging. Writing about Blogging and watching the space from a distance is fun at times but doing it all the time is not. My passion does not revolve around blogging, it revolves around WordPress. I can write about WordPress and related projects all day long, something I can’t do with other topics. The problem though is that, I can’t write purely about WordPress and make a decent level of income and it’s not fair if I write specifically about WordPress but across multiple sites.

There happens to be a pretty cool domain name that is available in WPTavern.com. I love the sound of that domain name. Taverns in the U.S. provide a somewhat social atmosphere and in this case, social about WordPress. I envision a forum being attached to the site as I write countless numbers of articles throughout the week on the domain. I seem to have a knack for reporting on WordPress and related items so I’m wondering, do I have what it takes to do things on my own. WPTavern would be my project, my chance to foster a community, and would allow me to pursue my passion in writing about WordPress all day long.

While it all sounds good to me on paper, I have to wonder if doing something like this would be smart for me to do at this current time. If I drop other sites I write for to put all of my concentration and effort into WPTavern, will I be able to develop a loyal fanbase/following in less than one year to the point where the site makes as much money as writing for others. Other things I have to consider is the existence of WPCandy, WPHacks, of course WeblogToolsCollection.com, would I be able to produce content that is on par with those and other WordPress centric sites? I have a competitive nature inside of me but one thing I have learned while writing for Performancing is to not view sites in the same niche as enemies but rather, collaborators. It’s better to link and build relationships with those who are in the same niche as you rather than burning bridges.

I also have to consider that I cut myself down from work to do weekends only as that provides more time for me to do freelancing. I figure that if I were to cut out 3 of my paid writing gigs, that would slice a good chunk of pay from my monthly income.

I have 7 days to make a decision on whether or not I will purchase the domain and go through with the project. I’m just sitting here wondering if I’ve made a deep enough impact to where I can do things on my own, if I have developed any sort of loyal following which would serve as a great base to start from, if I have what it takes to rise above the noise, if I can provide any points of difference regarding coverage of WordPress and related projects, or if I should just continue doing what I’m doing and let Lorelle handle everything as she is the GO TO person as it relates to anything WordPress.org or WordPress.com.

Hmm, and the clock starts ticking!

Making Money with Articles: Picking Articles for Your Niche Site

Pick the articles for your niche sites very carefully to ensure that you are able to successfully get traffic and gain profit from these sites. If you are going to try and utilize free website content articles, then it may be difficult for you to find ones that have your exact keywords, so you may have to either make revisions to the articles (which may not be allowed on some free articles) or base your keywords on the articles that you find (which could leave you with very competitive keywords that would take a lot of time or money to attain a high ranking for). If you are going to buy content, make sure that you let the writer know what your niche keywords are and what your specific your preferred keyword density and placement are. Remember, the wrong articles can leave you with little traffic and very low search engine rankings if they do not fit in properly with either your niche or with keywords that are easy to attain high rankings for.

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NewMediaPro.TV Live Page Updated

With a new year just around the corner, I felt it was time to do some updating to my Live Page at http://www.newmediapro.tv and bring it up to date.

Since I am using uStream for most of my live video streaming, I have chosen to make that the only video feed that shows up now. Also, I have removed a lot of the clutter, such as banner ads and the like to make for a cleaner looking page.

Checking the stats for this domain, I am getting quite a few hits here and so I want to make it a more pleasant experience for those visitors to this site.

I have also added the Talkshoe audio badge to this page for those who want to listen in on the audio only portion of the shows.

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Podango Might Fold Is Talkshoe Next?

PodcastingNews.com has has a report out regarding the recent announcement made my Podango regarding their future. Based on the announcement, things don’t look very good for the company:

We at Podango believe that you, our customers, are our most valuable asset. Given this belief, we have always done our best to be honest and forthright in our dealings with you. The current uncertainties of the financial market has affected many of us in this nation. As of this morning, Podango is no longer immune to it’s effects. Our ability to continue operations past the end of this year (2008) is in question. We do not want any of you, or any of your shows to be negatively affected by this uncertainty and so we are encouraging you to begin taking all necessary steps to secure your data or begin moving to another hosting provider. On Monday we will have a more definitive direction. As of today, the last day to move or secure your data is December 31st. RSS feeds will need to be redirected by this date as well. It is our hope that the events of the next few days will allow us to continue providing you a service based upon a subscription fee. Again, we will know more on Monday and you will be notified of any changes to the above plan as soon as we are made aware of them.

We will have a link in the My Podango section of the Podcasters login page by Monday which will allow you to redirect your RSS feed off of the Podango feed to a new feed. Instructions will accompany that tool. Also on Monday we will provide you with alternatives for show hosting.

Inactive accounts, those without recent uploads or downloads, may be already been deleted from the system. If you need to contact us, please use info@podango.com.

Again I personally apologize for this notice of caution. We truly appreciate your business.

With Podango possibly going down the tubes, I am now wondering how well Talkshoe.com is doing. I host two podcasts through Talkshoe.com, one called Perfcast which deals with all things blogging and the other, WordPress Weekly which is a WordPress centric podcast.

At this point, I pretty much have a vested interest in Talkshoe.com surviving. There are many things which can be improved upon within Talkshoe but overall, I’ve been very happy using the service for my podcasting needs. My worry is, Talkshoe.com does not offer any type of (PRO) account or package. In terms of monetizing, I know they have a few Google ads on the Talkshoe site and you can also pay to be featured on the front page but that is about it. I also know based on what a representative of Talkshoe told me, they make money whenever someone calls into the site.

I’d hate to see Talkshoe fall from the wayside and honestly, I’m willing to shell out some cash to continue using Talkshoe if the opportunity pops up. I hope that Dave Nelson who is the CEO of Talkshoe takes this opportunity depending on the final outcome of Podango to come out and make an announcement regarding the future of Talkshoe and put the minds of its users at ease. Hell, it would also be a nice time for Dave to capitalize on the fall of Podango to see if he can’t reel in some users from that service to Talkshoe.

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