I had a problem for a few days with a site I moved to a new host. The home page wouldn’t load all the way. It would sort of stop and random spots and I couldn’t figure it out. I was almost going to move it to another host but instead persisted figuring that I might have the same problem at a new host.

I, of course, immediately was looking at the error logs but they weren’t telling me much at first. I then found a good post in the WordPress Support Forum about something similar and then I checked the error logs again. I found that memory was being maxed out and it said it was due to the Contextual Related Posts plugin. Deactivating it took care of the problem immediately. It was using up too much memory.

So I’m switching plugins from Contextual Related Posts (which I thought was great except for being such a memory hog) and am now going to be using one called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). It works fine and is not a memory hog. It has some caching functions.

Which brings up another point – cloud hosting.

I’m not that big of a fan of it. I’m getting charged up the wazoo for GPU usage, which is like CPU usage. It’s not a bargain at all unless you have a bunch of static websites. I hate moving sites around so much but I’m finally figuring it all out. I got an account with Hostgator and despite the fact that they use CPanel (blahh!), it’s alright. I just tell myself that I only have to use CPanel at the beginning to set things up and then I don’t see it very often.

The best hosting control panel, by far, is Plesk. Know it. Believe it.

Anyway, despite a mini slump last month, this month is looking pretty good so far. Keep writing articles, people!

UPDATE: Another plugin I’ve disabled since it was eating processing power was “Cookies for Comments” – sorry, Matt Cutts!

Something I’ve noticed over the years is that the worse the weather is, the better the Internet (Web) traffic is.

I’ve had a local site since 2001 and I’ve seen it time and time again. If it’s snowing or rainy out, there’s higher web traffic. It really never fails. People are inside, bored and then start surfing the Web. If it’s nice out, they’ll be outside.

I noticed this last Sunday as a big snowstorm was hitting the east coast. There was a lot more traffic on some national websites that I have.

It would seem that for cities with bad weather, they would do better. So maybe Seattle or northern states that get a lot of snow in the winter.

Just a thought.

I haven’t posted in a little while because I’ve been busy with a lot of things. I’ve come up with a new motto: “Shut up and write” which means I just need to stick to the plan and don’t stray from it.

So I get these emails pretty often about link trades. I’ve done a few of them but now I pretty much ignore them. I went through the work of setting up their link and replying to the email that they initiated and then find my link does not get added. I then have to take the links down. Yes, I save those emails and check to see if they give me links. The emails I’m talking about are the ones that have the same kind of canned message and then there’s a box around the HTML code that they want me to add. These are the ones that haven’t come through.

I changed how I trade links and now only do it in trusted circles. My biggest pet peeve is wasting my time. Do no waste my time. That’s disrespectful. I found some groups that are great about trading links and now those are the only people I’m trading links with (TKA people rock!). I can’t trust others to come through on their end of the deal. It’s too bad and it gives link trading in general a bad rep. A few bad apples spoil the whole bunch. So be careful… they’re out there!

-T

I think one of the things I’ve really learned so far is that it takes time. You don’t write up articles one day and then expect results the very next day. It does not work like that at all. Your website first has to be crawled, which could take a few days. Those results then need to wait to get into the index of search engines. Sure, it is possible to get a page listed in about 20 minutes. I’ve done it. It’s not very hard at all. But the lasting results are going to take some time.

I remember an article I think Court or Mark wrote where they said that how high school and college are set up is kind of wrong. You do your assignment or take a quiz and then either right away or the next day, you get your results to know how you did. Sure, that instant feedback is great for reinforcing learning but that’s not how it always works in the real world. So expectations need to change or you’ll drive yourself crazy.

So what do you do? Keep plugging away. It’s an endurance race.

I always have believed that you reap what you sow. If you research your content and post good content, you will get rewarded. I see all these people using article spinners that create thousands of “unique” articles and then you see their post about how they got sandboxed on Google. I do use UAW, which is a good tool because it’s still up to you how unique you want your articles to be. You could go the easy way and change just a few words or you can spend good time on it, change a lot and have really good unique content. So it still depends on how much time you put into it, which is why I like and suggest UAW. Other automatic article spinners don’t require your time and it’s cheating – although tempting sometimes.

The best results you will get is when you put your time into something. All these other things will fade away or their pitch pages will show all these results they got, which may have worked once for them. So they write up some offer explaining how they do it, where they’re trying to make money again by selling that to you. Don’t fall for it. I do check out some of those offers and buy them but I don’t go full force into them. I go in with the attitude that maybe there is something I can glean from what they’re saying that I can add into what I’m already doing with the Keyword Academy. I could spend my time going in all kinds of directions but it’s best to stay on one main path. That’s especially easy to do when you see people that are successful with it.

So remember that it takes time. Do check your AdSense account to see how you’re doing and see what is happening but don’t let it rule you. Don’t let it affect your mood or attitude. Know that it will work and stick to it. Keep going.

-Tony

I think that was one those tips I heard but didn’t pay much attention to. I think I got a little greedy again, too. It’s all about targeted traffic, people!

I had a site that was getting lots of traffic but it was completely unrelated to another site I had that was doing well. I put the link on the high traffic site. Then I noticed that I was still getting traffic on the site it was linking to but not as much AdSense revenue was coming in. Within a few days, I figure out one possible reason, then I removed that link. I think things are back to normal now and I learned an important lesson, so it was worth it.

This is true with sites not running AdSense as well. Just don’t post a link to your site on any old site. The page your link is on must relate to your website. It can be a category in a directory, that’s fine. The best links are from entire sites that relate to your website or else pages that do. So this is why article marketing works. The page that your link in the resource box is on has 400 words about your topic that relates to your website. So a link from that page is targeted traffic.

Get writing and get your articles out there.

BTW, the Keyword Academy now has like 50 sites that you can post short articles to. That alone is a good reason to join. You get to post as many articles as you like. It’s great.

-Tony