Design, development and dollars from Tim Spangler

April Fools! The joke is that I’m actually posting. I got you guys good. :p
As long as we’re all here again, it’s time to go old-school. (not a rickroll, I promise)

At least he’s honest…

If you’re involved in PPC marketing - especially as a little-guy affiliate - you need a landing page to send your offer to. You must suck it up and create at least one, at the bare minimum; super affiliates like Amit Mehta make dozens for a single offer and continually split-test them. Without a landing page, your quality score will be in the pits, your conversions will be next to zero and you will be pissing away money like the frathouse bro who loaded up on Keystone.

I have seen far too many lazy affiliates trying to take the easy way out of learning the psychology behind landing pages. These lazy affiliates that think they can get away with clever shenanigans like PHP redirects and direct linking to the offer forever. Some affiliates even run their ads only on the content network, forgetting completely about quality scores and keyword relevance - the great, uncharted land of other people’s sites and other people’s AdSense banners where you have absolutely no idea what state of mind a clicker is in when he hits your ad.

Rarely do these techniques work for anyone, but even if you manage to get away with them for a while, you’re still missing out on not only the trial-and-error learning experience that is internet marketing, but the most important reason for having a landing page in the first place - increasing your conversions by using your marketing talent to sell the product!

Sure, adding a landing page ‘complicates’ the buying procedure by putting one more click in the way of a potential customer, but it’s important to see that factor as an advantage and not a disadvantage. Creating and controlling your own landing page gives you the opportunity to really sell the prospective buyer on what you’re offering. No one except the extraordinarily gullible or very rich is going to buy immediately after being sent to an unknown merchant’s site (especially if you send them to the homepage!) It’s important to build trust - in your site, in your offer and in their brand. This is the true purpose of a landing page, and why you always need one for every offer you run.

If you’re too lazy to invest a few hours to potentially make thousands, then you’re too lazy for Internet marketing. You might as well stick to pyramid schemes and Yuwie because it takes a lot of effort to get a campaign up, running and profitable.

A new WordPress installation allows readers to leave comments containing certain HTML tags by default, including a, abbr, b and i. Unfortunately, using <b> for bold and <i> for italics is deprecated, unsemantic, and very un-Web 2.0. So how do you force your readers to use the proper markup - <strong> for bold and <em> for italics - in their comments?

The fix lies in kses.php, which lives in the wp-includes directory in the root of a WordPress install. In the latest version (2.3.2 at post time), simply jump to line 186 and edit the members of the $allowedtags array, commenting out nasty, unsemantic tags:

Removing the deprecated <b> tag from WordPress’ list of allowed comment tags.

You can even add new tags that don’t come enabled by default. This is particularly useful for enabling the <img> tag to allow visitors to post images in their comments.

One final reminder - unless your blog is in the web development niche, most readers aren’t going to know <strong> and <em>. You might want to add a blurb to comments.php (in your themes directory) explaining why these tags are better than their old-school counterparts.

Technorati Tags: design, development, standards compliance, wordpress, xhtml

This is a pretty common sense tip but I imagine that many webmasters forget it when they’re settings things up, so…

A lot of webmasters use Google Analytics to track traffic and analyze visitor patterns to their sites. The tool itself is great, with tons of metrics available for comparison. The only issue is that many site owners are skewing their stats by including their own visits in their reports.

The solution is simple: block yourself! Here’s the step-by-step for Urchin/Google Analytics.

1. Log in to your Analytics account and find the link to the Filter Manager. It’s under the list of your sites.
2. Click “Add Filter” to create a new filter.
3. Give your new filter a name and set the type to Exclude all traffic from an IP address.
4. In a new tab, open WhatIsMyIP.com and copy your IP address.
5. Paste your IP into the IP address field. You don’t need to worry about adding slashes like in the example.
6. Select all of your sites that you want the change to affect under “Available Website Profiles” and click “Add.”
7. Click “Finish” to confirm the changes and enjoy your Google Analytics reports unskewed by your own traffic.

You’ll notice a small drop (dependent on how much testing you do on your sites) after you activate this change. But the benefit is that your metrics reports will be much more accurate. Remember that if you are on dialup, your IP address changes every time you dial your provider, so this solution won’t work for you.

It’s a sad, sad fact that the various versions of Internet Explorer still command a 57% marketshare in the browser world. Yes, supporting that craptastic pile of kludged-together code, with its hundreds of security holes and complete disregard for web standards, is a complete nightmare that has added hours upon hours to the development of this very page. Debugging pages in IE is almost enough to make me question why I want to do web development for a living. But there’s a way to whittle away at IE’s marketshare and (as I’ll mention later), make a bit of money in the process.

Making use of conditional comments

Conditional comments keep web developers sane. They’re only interpreted by IE and allow developers to section off IE-only code, allowing them to keep a page standards-compliant while still intentionally breaking their code so Internet Explorer’s completely b0rked engine will render it correctly. You can even choose which version or versions of IE to target!Conditional comments look a lot like standard HTML comments, with a bit of simple code added. For example, say you want to use a JavaScript hack to fix IE6’s handling of transparent PNG files. Clearly you should only burden the IE6 user with having to download this extra code, so use a conditional comment like this:

<!--[if IE 6]>
    <script defer type="text/javascript" src="js/png_fix.js"></script>
<![endif]-->

That’s it: IE6 will parse the comment and will go on to download png_fix.js. Using defer when referencing the script will cause the browser to wait until the page is done rendering before executing it, avoiding some funky-looking effects when applying this particular hack.

Caveats

There’s only one catch to conditional comments: if you’re running multiple versions of IE on the same machine, the comment wil be evaluated as the highest version you have installed, no matter which one you’re testing from. To get around this, you can use a Windows XP virtual machine with IE6 installed, which is graciously provided by Microsoft themselves. After subjecting the world to their sub-par browser, it’s the least they can do.

Making money with conditional comments

Yes, it’s possible to make money off something as nerdy as this. Google AdSense publishers have long enjoyed a hybrid CPA system called “Referrals,” which is like Google’s answer to Commission Junction. One of the offers in the AdSense CPA program pays $1 for getting people to switch to Firefox. Using a conditional comment at the top of your page to display a banner for this offer only to IE users gives you 100% targeted traffic, many of whom have likely heard of the benefits of Firefox before and were waiting for the “right moment” to switch. It won’t make you rich, but it’s a nice little tip for doing your part to chip away at the market dominance of a bottom-tier browser.