Blog On Holidays And Weekends?

Mark raises an interesting question here: should you blog on holidays and weekends? He says yes, partly because most people don’t so you could get more attention than others. That’s a very good point.

I also think it boils down to when you’ve found are the best times to post on your site. For several of mine, Monday morning through sometime on Tuesday is when I get the most traffic each week, and that also seems to be when posts get linked the most. That means posts on the weekend may not get read until Monday morning, but at that time they have a better chance of getting me some inbounds than anything I post Wed-Fri.

So the days I tend to skip if I’m falling behind are Wednesday through Friday.

What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?

Aaron Wall has put together a really lengthy post (too long to be called a post, really) explaining how to figure out what a #1 ranking in Google for a particular search term will actually be worth in dollars and cents. Definitely one to bookmark and come back to a few times, at least.

The Single Most Important Ingredient in Your Internet Marketing Strategy

HubSpot discusses why there’s only so much you can outsource if you want SEO and site marketing done right, and then it’s all down to the time you put in. Only you know your site and your visitors. Only you can do the homework to make sure you know them. Only you can set up the site so both visitors and search engines will get out of it what they need.

Tips for protecting your blog

If you’re concerned about protecting a Wordpress blog from nasty people, this post has some pretty interesting ideas, like password protecting your admin directory and removing the line that broadcasts which version of WP you’re using.

Matt Jones has a pretty good definition of the mysterious Google Sandbox, or at least what I’ve noticed of it.

From my experience Google gives sites a ‘trial run’ where upon first indexing the blog is given unnaturally high rankings for a few weeks and if it doesn’t gain enough links/content during that trial period it is de-indexed (sandboxed). Or if it gains some links/content it is given given lower rankings which have to be built up from scratch the old fashioned way.

That’s what I’ve observed, too. There must be some magic number you have to hit in those first few weeks to avoid the sandbox. It’s a very strange idea, and I’ve never understood the purpose of the strange boost they give you at first. What is that? Why not just make it hard for all new sites until they prove they’re not just parked domains someone’s leaving to sit? It’s that boost that ensures black hat spam sites will always be near the top of the search results for at least a few weeks (and at the rate spammers build sites, there’s always a new one out).

I’ve never understood the logic, but I guess if you figure out how to avoid the sandbox, you can really launch new sites fast right out the gate.

WP e-Commerce, WordPress Plugin

The lite version of this plugin allows you to sell products via PayPal only. Whilst it’s called ‘lite’ it’s not that simple as such. You can have your products in categories, there’s a shopping basket and it uses the PayPal IPN for instant notification. I’ve not gone through the whole process but I would assume that if you’re selling a digital product it will also then provide a download link to the buyer to download the product, as I’ve had the option to set how many times the product can be downloaded by the buyer.

This sounds like a really interesting method for selling stuff from your website. Sarah gives several interesting details (click over) and then the developer comes along in the comments to say they’re adding even more awesome stuff.