I just wrote a quick tutorial on newmedias.co.uk about using our newest free plugin to help monetize old posts but thought paymentblogger readers would also be interested. While the date hiding aspect of the post will I suspect be of limited interest, the ability to increase the number of adverts shown on a post/page after a certain date I suspect will interest a lot of people and involves just one line of code (you can also use other advertising plugins such as openx or oio publisher wrapped with our code to make it truly expandable.

So without further ado go read about and then download

Make Money From Old Blog Posts

Just a quick thought for those who perhaps just want to monetize posts rather then pages you can do so by wrapping the is_post_old() function first around

if(is_single() && !is_page()) {

}

This will show it then only on blog posts and not pages as well.

Its Dreamhosts birthday and they have two rather tempting offers both which result in free unlimited bandwidth and disk space.

The First offer is for only new users and only for a limited period of time, but if you sign up right now you can get their normal package without limits. The second offer is for everyone (including new signups) because Dreamhost are in the process of upgrading their server system they are offering anyone willing to “volunteer” unlimited bandwidth and diskspace forever.

Now there are downsides apart from the obvious “volunteering part” such as being on a shared host system. But if you need somewhere to store a large quantity of files (videos perhaps) or were looking for a good testing area this might be right up your street.

Indeed one of the major things I like about dreamhost is the fact I can host subdomains with them, allowing me access to their goodies like streaming servers, svn repositories etc. But keep my main sites on separate hosts.

To claim your Free unlimited bandwidth and diskspace:

If you are already there customers then simply log into your control panel and then accounts and click the upgrade link.

If your thinking either of these sound like an enticing offers then hop over to Dreamhost and sign up for their free, if you use the code NEWMEDIAS you also get a free domain.

note: Both offers were available at time of publishing

So some people might have been wondering what was with yesterdays out of the blue post regarding Theme Forest, sure it was news but it’s not really our style. Well today was going to be the day where I introduced one really simple easy tip via a case study but it didn’t go according to plan.

Breaking news

Being the first news source while great is not normally very profitable if your small, chances are the big sites just simply will not link to you. Even if your well known in the industry people are far more likely to read a news portal such as Techcrunch. These sites tend to have a massive readership but most of those readers use them more as a central location for information following the links (trackbacks) to other sites for their review and commentary. If your going to break a story or write a story its worth looking to either initially link to one or more of these portals or if you broke the story before them link to them via an update (you need to be quick) if you are in the first couple of links on a story from a major portal you can expect a level of traffic similar to many social networking sites. What’s more this traffic is highly targeted.

Cashing in

Well if you targeting news stories that are press releases for products (such as theme stores) simple referral links work well. It’s free traffic and unlikely to convert to long term readers unless you have spent time working on some good commentary (which in turn means with breaking stories you are likely to have missed the boat)

Obviously to take advantage you need a method of generating trackbacks blogging software does this automatically and CMS like Drupal have specific plugins.

Theme Forest - Case Study (how it went wrong)

So this was the point I was going to show you how with Theme Forest I got a few hundred visitors most of whom clicked through using my affiliate link and while sure the vast majority won’t be paying out I could look forward to a meal out for my ten minute effort….

Wrong.
Instead I had 0 visitors from Techcrunch, so what went wrong? Simple Nick runs another couple of sites on this server one of which is a proxy, which means we tend to have problems with Akismet and Typepad spam protection system. Unbeknown to me at the time all trackbacks are being thrown into Akismet hell from this server consequently the case study brought 0 visitors from Techcrunch though a few bemused passers buy did click the link probably wondering why I had suddenly gone uber spammy. That said it has worked in the past, even on a Saturday story being the second or third trackback has resulted in a couple of hundred visitors with direct referrals to the product nearly all those arriving on the site via Techcrunch and a couple of other sites have gone on to click through to the product mentioned in the article. Every time barring Theme Forest a meal out has been paid for (sometimes it might have been a local Kebab shop )

Is it right, is it spam?

The big news sites rarely are a good source for news they tend to present bite size chunks and not some in depth commentary that add to a discussion for many the only reason for linking to them is for the reciprocal link (though some nice minded souls at least give credit if the site was their source). The problem comes if your using them as a source of traffic you need to be quick, to be quick your not always adding commentary yourself. One tactic I like to use is “Live Blogging” this can get terribly messy but you start out with a skeleton post link through to your source then expand the post over the next few hours taking in more commentary and views. Depending on the type of site you are using your community might find this style of blogging confusing and frustrating though it can work well with the community supporting it.

Combining live blogging with Microblogging

Let’s take the idea of live blogging and mix in Microblogging (services like Twitter) if we generate a post with a brief article about what it is about, along with commentary being pulled in from a microblogging source the page can quickly fill with content. Rather then just pulling general comments from everywhere it is easy to setup a system where 2 or 3 “Authors” provide the commentary from their own microblogging accounts responding to each other to form the conversation, while if other people join in their own thoughts are vetted before going live. Combine with normal blog comments and not only do you have a non spam legit conversation going, but one people may wish to join in. Suddenly breaking news can create a new community.

Theme Forest Officially Open for your business

Theme Forest has opened (officially according to Techcrunch though it has been operating in a beta for some time now)to provide low cost high quality themes for a range of Content Management Systems including Wordpress, movable type, Drupal, Joomla. It’s nearest competitor has to be template monster. However they are not known for their high quality themes. One of the great new features is anyone can join and contribute making it a real market place.

What you waiting for check out Theme Forest for your next project!

If your wondering why the look and feel is familiar they brought you Audio Jungle and Flash Den both we have promoted in the past.

What have they got?

Their themes range from static HTML templates to blog, newspaper designs, Forum templates (PHPBB and VBulletin) Joomla and Drupal templates. Indeed every major CMS is catered for barring Plone and who uses Plone these days!

Make Money with Theme Forest

All of Envato sites use the same code, you only have to sign up to one to be a member of all, once a member you can start promoting content through standard referal codes.

Update: Ok so there was a reason behind this strange and slightly spammy post… find out what case study this was for!

Well Nick is in the army still doing his year long stint as a potato scraper extraordinare! While I have been engaged on a top secret project that only, myself and half the world have known about, but what is this top secret project well I can tell you this have you ever wanted a Wordpress Membership Site plugin that actually works?

Of course you do which is why you will run out and purchase Your Members in about 10 minutes time!

In the mean time I have managed to log back into PaymentBlogger so normal if somewhat erratic service will resume soon!

Cheers for the support and the emails asking about us, I can tell you as far as I know Nick is fine if a little bored thankfully the Greek Army is about as active as a sloth.

Before I forget Join the Cambridge New Media Affiliates scheme let me know you done so and I will let you in on some cool new ideas that will blow your minds.