Google is slowly unleashing its new and freshly updated Google Analytic screens. These are a bit more organized, easy to navigate, contain lots of drop down and drop up menus, and also a few new tools.

One of my favorite new tools, which I’ve been playing around with on several websites, is the in-page analytics. This useful website tool let’s you see which links are being clicked on the most and the least. The tool breaks down the clicks into amounts based on percentage. This is helpful because if you can begin to optimize your site better by posting less of the content that people don’t like, and more of the content that people DO like.

You can also begin optimizing your website based on other aspects of your design, such as your search tool, contact link, navigation urls, and whatever other content is on your website such as your advertisements.

If you notice that one section of your site is receiving more onsite clicks then another section, and you’ve noticed that your ads aren’t performing well – then maybe you can move your advertising to a section of your site that receives more clicks. Hopefully this is something that will increase your onsite CTR (click through percentage).

There’s some other nice new features of the Google In-Page Analytics such as more detailed mobile tracking, information on statistics from TV ads, and site speed tools – all tools to help you optimize performance of ads, your website speed and internal traffic, and even your external traffic.

If you’re a webmaster with an active Google account, then login and check out the new interface for Google Analytics and let me know what you think!

Happy website optimizing and stat tracking!

TubeX Video Site Software is easy to use. Click here to buy it for $25!

There’s a million people out there who want to develop a million sites that get a million views by a million people and earn a million dollars from each of their million sites. These people want to be the next YouTube, but they can’t because they don’t have a YouTube clone script to do it for them. Or you want to make a tube site about some random topic, like all funny cat videos, but you can’t because you don’t know how. Well now you do and now you millions of people can make your millions of tube video sites thanks to JMBSoft’s Tube X script. I’ve tested this program on a few domains of my own and other peoples sites with larger amounts of traffic to ensure it can stand up to the thousands of users online at once thing.

The best parts about JMBSoft’s TubeX

1. TubeX can handle mass amounts of traffic, in the 50,000 and higher realm, without slowing down the website.
2. TubeX can import mass amounts of videos via RSS feeds from sources like YouTube and other video sites. Y9ou can also importthe embed code for these videos so that you keep the hosting bill down.
3. TubeX template system is easy to learn, easy to use, and is completely customizable.
4. TubeX also comes with four ready to use templates. Two of them have friendly url rewrites enabled for nice urls in the search engines.
5. TubeX has a built in advertising section in which you can have an ad for a specific sponsor displayed only on that sponsor’s videos. So let’s say you want AdSense to appear only on pages for Vimeo videos that you’ve imported – you can do that! What if you want automobile ads to appear only on pages with car videos? You can do that too! You can pretty much optimize your site so that your ads are in places that get clicked a lot, or are displayed with videos that are of relative content.
6. Built in search and tag feature for videos.
7. Usergroup membership settings – you can tell users what they can and cannot do with their membership.
8. Mailing list – since people can register for free on your site, you can then grow a mailing list to use for promotion of your site or important site announcements.
9. Categories are built in and you can have as many as you want. Each category will get its own category video page url.
10. Video documentation to show you, eyes on, how to navigate the admin panel.
11. You can use a custom video player so that you can place ads in your hosted videos. You can’t put ads in an embedded video from YouTube though, unless you monetize your video via Adsense, but that’s a whole other topic completely unrelated to this.
12. The price is only $25 per licenseand they have a forum for the users to chat with each other in regards to support.

The only bad parts about JMB Soft’s TubeX?

The owner needs to step aside for some time and is halting progress on all of his scripts. This was announced a while ago, but I haven’t needed support in years, because JMBSoft scripts work right out of the box and there’s really nothing difficult about them. Whatever problems you might have, someone else probably had them years ago and they’ve already been solved in the support forums. There will also be other people in the forums who know the script and can help you if you need it. I may even be able to help if it’s not a major coding bug, in which case JMBSoft said they will still fix bugs if they appear. They’re just not doing any future versions of their programs, but everything works great now and there hasn’t been an update in months anyway, so it’s not like you’re going to be missing out.

Jeremy, the owner and programmer of JMBSoft needed to step away from being a full time programmer for a while, probably because he went into another business that was more profitable. He did have a baby this year, so making moves for his family is completely understandable. He’s ran the company for well over ten years on his own, but as some of you may know, things change when a baby is involved, and babies aren’t cheap. I think he took his excellent developer skills to another company who offered him a payday he can’t possibly turn down – and to that, we say thank you and congratulations!

Would I still buy TubeX knowing that there will be no further releases as of yet? Hellz Yeah! You know why? Because TubeX is well documented, installation is easy, and learning it’s template system is a piece of cake.

TubeX works great and it’s only $25.

Buy TubeX NOW before they take it off the market or raise the price! The old price was $89-$269!!!

Google Friend Connect + PHP Fox = true love

As a license owner of PHP Fox, which powers the webmaster community of this site, I find it enjoyable to see what kind of Add-Ons people create in their spare time. The latest PHP Fox Add-on that’s grabbed my attention is a group of Add-ons targeting and utilizing Google’s Friend Connect, and completely integrating it with PHP Fox. Coded by Data66, of ScriptTechs.com, this is a great tool if you like posting nifty gadgets on your social network website. So let’s take a peek at what this tool actually does, then you can decide if it’s for you. The good thing about the Add-ons is that they’re separated, so you can use one, two, three, whatever you like. Let’s review a few of the particularly useful Add-ons.

1. Google Friend Connect Newsletter Subscribe Block – if you don’t know by now, then you better ask somebody! You should know by now how important it is to maintain a mailing list to update your subscribers on new content. This let’s you place a convenient block on your PHP Fox site to maintain subscribers.
2. Google Friend Connect Adsense Block – this let’s you ask questions to your members via a poll. Then the members answer and it helps Adsense display ads relevant to their answers. Talk about optimizing your website for Adsense! That’s like asking someone in a store – “what do you want” and they answer “blue oranges” and you (acting as if you’re Adsense) deliver them blue oranges and it results in a sale. Wether or not you can really find blue oranges, I have no idea. If you really want, you can buy a dozen oranges and paint them blue or any color you want. If this Add-on helps you become an Internet millionaire, then you can go buy an entire orange farm and paint them all blue. I could care less what you do as long as you’re smart enough to optimize your website for Adsense by using this Add-on!
3. Google Friend Connect Ratings and Reviews Block – this is a perfect Add-on for webmasters who run social networks in which reviews and ratings are important. We all know by now that everyone has an opinion, so why not let them voice their opinion via ratings and reviews. People don’t ever shut their mouth, so this should help them rate and review items on your site, and let their voices be heard! You want members of your social network to be interactive, and this Add-on helps provide a means of transportation for the snarky opinionated a$$holes people on the web. If you’ve been to YouTube, then you know people get carried away with comments, so at least you can provide them a place to do it with your new ratings and reviews block!

There’s a few other pieces to the Google Friend Connect API for PHP Fox, but I want you to go check them out on your own. If you use them, please provide a review for Data66, as she’s done a great job on them and offers them for free.

I’d like to personally thank Data66 for her assistance in helping me figure out a stifling headache of a problem yesterday. She’s the reason that I was able to get the webmaster community running after I moved it from another website. Her support and advice in the situation was great. She’s a friendly professional who offers excellent WordPress, Joomla, and PHP Fox tech support.

Visit Data66′s personal site at

Google searching for tips and tricks on how to make your slow loading WordPress blog load faster often yields results that tell you what 5-10 plugins to use. You’re going to need a few top WordPress plugins, sure, but there’s another tip that I haven’t found very often, and that’s the use of the .htaccess file. I discovered this fast loading trick by accident.

I had just finished moving a webmaster social network site to this site, to serve as a Members Only section, and I’ve been having trouble getting the urls to work. No matter what we try, the url’s come up as not found. Myself and a staff member of PHP Fox have been trying different things all day, but nothing seemed to work. In fact, if you’re reading this before I fixed it, IT STILL DOESN’T WORK!

But the bright side of all this experimenting is that I discovered how to speed up WordPress. What I did was take the htaccess.txt file from the PHP Fox script and copy/pasted it onto WordPress’s .htaccess file. I did this because I wanted to see if using the same rewrite code, in one main .htaccess file, would work for both WordPress and PHP Fox. To my surprise, ALL rewrites on both scripts worked perfectly. In fact, there’s some extra code in the PHP Fox htaccess.txt file that actually made my WordPress sites load FASTER.

I know this because I performed a Google Page Speed Online test and I went from 85 to 94. As you know, a high page speed score is one of those mythical concepts that people think help your search engine ranks, because no one likes a slow website.

You’ll notice in the code below, that my new .htaccess file has some compression items too, which is probably helping with the speed.

Here’s the code I am using in my .htaccess file:

# -FrontPage-
IndexIgnore *
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

# Header unset Pragma
# FileETag None
# Header unset ETag

# URL Rewrite
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On

#
#

]]> http://siterockers.com/182/make-wordpress-fast/feed 2 http://siterockers.com/173/how-to-make-money-with-your-rss-feeds http://siterockers.com/173/how-to-make-money-with-your-rss-feeds#comments Wed, 24 Aug 2011 20:24:15 +0000 admin http://www.siterockers.com/blog/?p=173

If you have a website, then you should have RSS feeds. If you don’t then you need them ASAP. If your website is built using WordPress, then your RSS feeds can be used to make extra money. The best part is that it’s seriously THAT EASY to make a few extra bucks. You don’t need to know how to code anything and you barely have to do any work at all.

Here’s how to make money with your RSS feeds.

1. Create an account at Feedburner. If you have a Google account, then you already have a Feedburner account and you just have to activate it.
2. Create an account at Google Adsense. Again, if you have a Google account, then you’re already a member.
3. Once your Adsense account is approved and your Feedburner account is active, then you login to Adsense and go to MY ADS.
4. Click on FEEDS, on the left, then click NEW FEED UNIT.
5. Pick the settings you want. I suggest displaying an ad unit after every couple of posts, if your feed is displaying excerpts, so that you don’t look spammy. If you’re displaying full posts in your RSS feeds, and they’re at least a few hundred words or a big picture long, then feel free to deploy ads after each post.
6. Next, scroll down a bit and click on BURN NEW FEED.
7. Then copy/paste your website’s RSS feed into the field that pops up.
8. Now replace your WordPress RSS feed with the new RSS feed that Google provides.

What about Feedburner? Well, now you can login to Feedburner.com and check out all the features they provide to spruce up your new RSS feed that will make you some money. You can publicize your feed, generate an email list, edit some of the title fields, display your feed subscriber count, display your feed as HTML on other websites. There’s a lot of cool web related things you can do with Feedburner, so login and check it out after you add your Adsense Ads.

By the way, if you’re using the Thesis theme for WordPress, then you can change your RSS feed url in the Thesis admin. See, even less work and you’re off to the bank cashing checks!

]]> http://siterockers.com/173/how-to-make-money-with-your-rss-feeds/feed 0 http://siterockers.com/27/php-fox-social-network-script-review http://siterockers.com/27/php-fox-social-network-script-review#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 15:51:00 +0000 admin http://www.siterockers.com/blog/?p=27

I own three licenses to Php Fox Community licenses and have spent thousands of dollars working on two of the websites using Php Fox. I think I have earned the right to give a legitimate review. But brace yourself, because this script simultaneously have you thinking “wow” and “wtf.”

You might ask yourself “why would you buy three licenses if you’re saying wtf half the time?” And the answer is simple. It’s still a good script and it’s better then its competitors. The script itself is well coded and a recent Google Page Speed Online ranked a clients site at 88/100 – not bad.

Let’s discuss the good points of the script:

1. Built in PayPal integration: now you can charge people to be on your site. I don’t care if you charge $1.00 or $1,000,000.00 – you can do it fresh out of the box.
2. Forums: PhpFox comes with a basic forum setup. It doesn’t do much but let people chat, which is fine, because if you’re not happy with that, then you can use the Vbulletin Integration too.
3. Social login ability: this let’s people login with Facebook or other social network credentials, thus making lazy people lazier and increasing your membership numbers.
4. Ad manager: you can manage your own ads and sell other ads directly to members via the PayPal integration. Set a time for the ad to begin/expire, count clicks, place ads on certain places in certain sections of your site. It’s a good setup, and I haven’t had an issue with it yet.
5. Marketplace – buy and sell ads from your site. It’s bare-bones but it does the job. Look, you’re not Craigslist or Ebay, and you’re not going to be.
6. Add-Ons – there’s a decent amount of useful add-ons (like Plugins for WordPress). My favorites are the VB Integration and the Abstract Store and Affiliate Program. VB Integration lets you use Vbulletin instead of the basic forum. Abstract’s Store and Affiliate Program provides a robust store front that is light years better then the marketplace. The affiliate program lets your members earn income based on sales that they generate for your site. Imagine this – all your members trying to get sales for you, and you pay them a small percentage of each sale. You get to set the amount they earn and how often to pay them. Net 60 is the default though, which means you pay them 60 days after they earn the income, just in case there’s any credit card charge-backs. That way, if someone gets a refund from the seller, you don’t pay the seller by accident and have to chase them down with a spiked bat to get your money back. Think of Jay and Silent Bob at the end of their movie when they’re visiting people who talked sh*t on the Internet.
7. Customizable Blocks on each template: if you want members and visitors to see something totally different, then you can do that. The block system is cool and works with the click of a button. It’s really that simple to enable/disable content once you’re familiar with the setup of the script.

What makes me say WTF:

1. SEO – it’s basically non existent with PhpFox. They’ve received loads of requests to fix the issue so that people’s websites perform better in the SERP’s, but PhpFox has virtually ignored the request. They release a new version this month and SEO isn’t even addressed. But don’t stress out – they’ve added the poke feature. The decision making isn’t looking at the important aspects and now I want to poke them in the eye with their darn poke feature. Please chime in and tell me what’s more important – SEO or POKES? No one even likes pokes and everyone thinks pokes are creepy.
2. The lack of developers and designers on the PhpFox forums. At least PhpFox has a forum, because some social network scripts don’t even offer that. It has a fair share of decent designers and developers, but it could use more variety.
3. Pricing: once your support or upgrade license expires, you’re screwed unless you cough up more cash that you already don’t have.The sad part about this is that PhpFox takes a long time to develop upgrades and new versions. By the time your upgrade license has expired, you still don’t get the new version, and then if you want it, you have to pay AGAIN. Updates on scripts should always be free unless it’s a massive overhaul of the product in which the company coded from scratch. The licenses are reasonably priced, but the associated fees for support or upgrades is out of hand, and possibly the reason that the forums are only somewhat active.

Overall – Phpfox beats their competitors and I think that sales will skyrocket once they SEO the program and drop the upgrade fees. I’ve been around long enough in this business that I know a good product when I see one, and I know potential when I see that too. This is a good product with potential to be better. The users just have to badger the boneheaded programmers and make them focus on SEO and important factors – not some silly POKE module. If you wanted to begin your own social network website, then PhpFox is the script you want to use.

I’ve already wasted countless hours testing other scripts, and there’s a reason I own three licenses to PhpFox – because it’s the better script.

Click here to buy Php Fox

]]> http://siterockers.com/27/php-fox-social-network-script-review/feed 0 http://siterockers.com/26/using-pingdom-and-google-page-speed-online http://siterockers.com/26/using-pingdom-and-google-page-speed-online#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 03:20:00 +0000 admin http://www.siterockers.com/blog/?p=26

Page speed is an important factor of everyone’s website.

]]> http://siterockers.com/26/using-pingdom-and-google-page-speed-online/feed 0 http://siterockers.com/25/affiliate-marketing http://siterockers.com/25/affiliate-marketing#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 00:06:00 +0000 admin http://www.siterockers.com/blog/?p=25

Starting your own home based business is exciting, but like any business, it has its ups and downs.

After working at home for about ten years, I’m fairly certain that I have come up with enough information to help you make an educated decision on whether working from home is right for you.

I also have some suggestions that may make your life working from home more enjoyable. In fact, my number one suggestion is NOT to work from home. More on that later.

Motivation
When working from home, make sure that you really enjoy the job you’re doing. If you’re an affiliate marketing agent, then make sure you’re promoting products that you actually like. If not, then you may get bored and lack the motivation required to be persistent. When you like the product you’re selling, then you’re often more interested in pushing your project to the next level. No interest = no motivation = no sales.

If you don’t care for the product you’re marketing, but the conversion rates are super high, and you really enjoy sales, then that’s ok too. You know darn well that checking your stats and seeing a high sales rate is extremely enjoyable, which offers as much motivational support as your genuine interest does.

Location and Setup
If you’re working at home, then have a premium setup. Don’t cramp yourself in a little tiny room just because that room is designated as “your office.” Forget that. You want to be comfortable. Put your desk in your living room, near a TV, so you can enjoy the best of both worlds. If you’re cramped in a small space all day, you will probably go nuts. I’ve placed my desk on the side of my living room, it’s not intrusive at all, and doesn’t look bad to guests, and I spend many days working while sports, tv shows, or movies play in the background. I don’t feel cramped, and I don’t feel like I’m stuck in a room with nothing but me and a PC.

My other suggestion is to NOT work at home. Can you share an office with someone? Is there anyone in your area who does affiliate marketing or runs a computer based home business? If so, then rent cheap office space with them. It will feel like you’re actually going to work and put you in the working mode. This is a good idea for people who can’t be around distractions at home. Then again, I would have the same setup in a shared office space.

Office space is also a great idea because you get to have physical interaction with real people. Now you can actually talk to a person IN PERSON. One thing I disliked about working from home was that there was no real interpersonal interaction with other people. It was me talking to clients all day via chat modules. Not that exciting! You can’t do many office pranks or host an office based fantasy football league with a cat at home…just saying.

Office space with like minded people is a great idea.

Scheduling
If you don’t have office space, then you may feel like I did when I focused strictly on working at home – I felt that when my workday was over that it was time to go out and do something. Although, not everyone was up for a night out during the week. They still had to get up early and be somewhere, whereas I could wake up and work whenever since I set my own schedule.

This drove me nuts because no one else shared the same schedule. My solution was to put myself on my friends schedule so that we were all on the same page. Instead of waking up at 2 or 3 pm and working till 7, I began waking up around 8 or 9 and working till the afternoon. It was actually refreshing to be up early, but I needed to find something to fill the rest of my day. At that point, I worked in more gym visits and also began new projects. It filled my day with work and exercise, then by 5pm my day was done, and if I wanted to grab dinner and a drink with a friend around that time, then it was more likely than doing it at 10pm.

Things to Think About
Do I like the project I’m working on enough that it will keep me motivated to strive for the next level?

Will I enjoy working from home, or will I be more successful if I share office space with some friends?

If I’m working at home, am I comfortable and able to manage the freedom to do as I please?

If I’m sharing office space, do the people I share space with work in the same field so that we can talk and trade tips, tricks, etc? Or do they work in a completely different field, so different that we barely speak to each other and it’s like working with a mute person?

Will I regulate my schedule so that it comfortably matches that of my friends and family, so that I am not the only one awake at 4am listening to 80s music and can still have an active social life?

]]> http://siterockers.com/25/affiliate-marketing/feed 0 http://siterockers.com/24/review-thesis-theme-wordpress http://siterockers.com/24/review-thesis-theme-wordpress#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 07:02:00 +0000 admin http://www.siterockers.com/blog/?p=24

The whole reason I even learned about Thesis theme was because I needed a fast loading, less bloated, better coded theme to assist with my page speed in hopes that my search engine ranks will increase. I did about an hour or so of research, reading reviews, looking at other people’s blogs, and comparing features with Thesis and other themes.

What stands out to me is the inclusion of SEO modules, use of custom-functions.php file, and the speed at which it loads. I also enjoy the fact that DIY has a bit of a fun attitude to them. Thesis has a save button titled BIG ASS SAVE BUTTON. I changed mine to “CLICK HERE TO KILL CATS” – just kidding. I didn’t change the text on my save button, but you can if you want to. DIY’s manual url also has a funny extension utilizing the acronym RTFM for “Read The F*cking Manual.”

Now back to the good stuff.

The custom-functions.php file works in a way that permits me to deactivate and delete numerous plugins. After reading the DIY forums for a bit, I found myself deactivating about ten plugins, including Google Analytics, WordPress SEO, and more. Cutting these plugins helped my site load faster, as there’s less php being executed, and everything that I cut out via plugins was either included in Thesis or added to the custom-functions file via a few lines of code due to the fact that Thesis works on Hooks.

So rather then having this beefy plugin, often from someone who may not be a great programmer, add numerous lines of extra unnecessary code to your site, you’re able to trim down. It’s like your site goes on a diet and can run faster now thanks to cutting out the fat.

Some other benefits of Thesis included the ability to structure your site on 1, 2, or 3 columns, lots of SEO and meta control for EACH blog post to help avoid having duplicate content, and great support via the forums. I’ve purchased other products that cost more then Thesis and have received worse traffic. It’s really a breath of fresh air to login to DIY forums and know that my problems will be solved. Not only do they tell you how to fix it, but they often show you the source of the fix so that you can learn as you go.

Thesis also has a settings import/export. Since this theme has so many of its own independent features to edit, it’s a great tool for when you want to push the same settings to another site instead of spending time configuring everything.

The only part I don’t like is that it has it’s own image URL space for each blog post in which you’re supposed to upload the image, then post the image URL in the appropriate space. That actually takes more time to do. I found a work around to it that utilizes WordPress’s built in Featured Image. All it took was a few lines of code into the custom-functions file and the Get Image plugin. You may not need that plugin, but I did because I imported my content from an old site, and when I deactivated it, my teaser thumbnails vanished. Weird. I know, but at least I save time when creating new posts.

Overall – I like Thesis. I gave you some good points and also my one complaint about the image issue, but found myself a way around that.

I will be using Thesis on my blogs as I paid for the Developer’s Option. Don’t get me wrong. The only coding I know is how to get myself 30 lives in Contra. Seriously…they should’ve called it the All You Can Blog option, because I am no developer at all!

If you’re interested, then you can check out Thesis for WordPress by clicking on that link.

ps: up up down down left right left right B A select start. And that’s for two players!

 

]]> http://siterockers.com/24/review-thesis-theme-wordpress/feed 0 http://siterockers.com/23/taxes-deductions-websites http://siterockers.com/23/taxes-deductions-websites#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 06:36:00 +0000 admin http://www.siterockers.com/blog/?p=23

Taxes. Yeah, I know, you’re shaking your head once you hear the word. Don’t run! It’s not that bad! I promise!

Affiliate programs will usually provide a 1099 form for your taxes. And pay your damn taxes, because if you don

]]> http://siterockers.com/23/taxes-deductions-websites/feed 0