Firefox has a nice extention you can install called Firebug, by inspecting an element it gives you control of what drives the look/feel of a website such as the  CSS.  If, for example a logo or image is not where you want it, you can right click it and usually there is a menu item to inspect Element, you can then change parameters of that element such as positioning until you have something you like,  you can locate where in the CSS this is them controlled and go and make changes to the code of the site making the change permanent,  its almost like vitual exploratory surgery if a website.

I use these tools when working on WordPress sites to disect a theme and customise it to be more to what the customer wants when they come to us for a web design project.  Islandnet.com can be hired to make changes to your site.

I am actively looking for the next big thing for driving traffic my way.

http://robtinbc.bo.lt/2hedj#.TxznvZCYSSo

I have spoke about viglink before,  its my understanding that you dont have to use cloudflare (traffic washing and site optimization service that is free) to use viglink,  I do believe they have code widgets you can embed.

I regret not discovering viglink earlier as this posting was viral in November and December as well as a little into January and I would of seriously cashed in if I got it setup before Christmas but I am going to try and be more aware of product blogging in conjunction with holidays and whats trending in the world on things like Android Market, Google Trends and Twitter.

Looking at my Geeky gifts postings I could of improved allot on it, the link to the buy is the price but I could of made this more obvious and captured more click through traffic and improved some of the layout.

I’m enjoying my efforts,  its like playing the slots and Vegas,  its a little hit and miss but can be lucrative if your in the right place at the right time and its fun, or I think so.

Because my website traffic goes through cloudflare.com to my hosting company islandnet.com cloudflare is able to manipulate the data with my permission (see Cloudflare terms of use as they ad tracking information etc) and by enabling viglink.com’s service any product manufacturer or re-seller that is on viglink’s database automatically becomes a link through to the website of the re-seller/manufacturer and if someone purchases an item then I get a little kick back.

I have a posting for Geeky Gifts on my crazyasabagofhammers.com website and each gift links to a page where you can but it,  that posting went viral after being hit up on reddit.com and thanks to that person who posted it I got $24 in revenue.

Now if I was to do a website that specifically was product related like a review site then I could cash in I think.

/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/wpid-facebook_302985649.jpg

What I would like to do is capture these and redirect them to the page or post that the image is on as I probably am loosing ad revenue from people stumbling the image and then others directly loading it and I want to minimize that.

I suppose I could use htaccess and redirect any image request coming from stumbleupon.com to a page in my site but I want something that could cleanly redirect any request from any domain that is requesting an image linked in a post to open the post and not the image.

 Anyone?!

The importance of reddit.com

I had not considered the importance of reddit.com for driving traffic to my site until today I saw my visits in the Google Analytics realtime hit an all time high for my http://www.crazyasabagofhammers.com/ page.

Someone liked the geeky gifts post that already went viral before christmas and posted it on reddit and my site visits sky rocketed.  I will be researching reddit and looking to leverage it in the future.

Also, the attention span of people in a poll is 4 seconds so if your site is not up by then your toast… I tweaked http://www.crazyasabagofhammers.com simplifying the layout and removing some external loading RSS and badges from the widget area and my visitors and the staying rate in Google Analytics is higher and longer.

]]> http://www.robertjturner.com/site-speed-important/feed/ 1 http://www.robertjturner.com/funtimes/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=funtimes http://www.robertjturner.com/funtimes/#comments Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:45:05 +0000 robtinbc http://www.islandnet.com/~rtih//robtinbc/?p=1 I run a few websites which I promote using several web bases tools such as StumbleUpon.com, I had great success with my Ads from AdBrite on CrazyAsABagOfHammers.com when @jerilryan tweeted one of my posts causing high traffic volumes,  I knew this was the most likely cause thanks to using addthis.com and its stats information,  Google Analytics realtime stats which is in BETA but seems to work well allowed me to monitor traffic and at times I have 900 visitors,  This really illustrates the power of right place at the right time but with tools like Twitter Trending and Google Trends I am developing a model to help maintain good traffic and hopefully good ad revenue.

Pinterest.com is something that I think is going to be big if they can fix the 503 errors due to server loads which I have seem since I began using it but not in the past few weeks so fingers crossed.

As I work things out and discover new things I will document them herein for everyone else to use.

See Web Promotion Tools for more comprehensive article.