TechnoCloud

Back in November, I started an experiment to improve the bounce rate on the blog through the related-posts plugin in Wordpress. As below, this typically displays three related posts based on tag, category, body and title.

I’ve been monitoring the changes in the bounce rate each month since the plugin was activated with encouraging results. This has seen the following improvement on a monthly basis over the initial level:

- November: improvement of 7%
- December: improvement of 10%
- January: improvement of 11%

Not huge, but a c.10% improvement in bounce rate for the addition of a simple free plugin is not to be sniffed at and shows the value of presenting contextual next steps to encourage users to delve more deeply into the content you have available.

In a sudden rush of originality and inspiration, I’m going to share surely the first ever list of 2008’s most popular posts!

10. Gearing up for something more useful
The awful pun in the title didn’t stop the traffic as this look back at Google Gears’ first year scraped into the top 10.

9. Google will see you now
One of my pet topics, visual search, made it into ninth as Google joined the innovators trying to unlock this most difficult and potentially lucrative of challenges in the search marketplace.

8. Adding Google Adsense on Wordpress.com
The painful move away from hosted Wordpress and then back again, did at least have some benefits. A list of handy advice for those contemplating similar folly and a coveted position in the top 10.

7. Google searches related to
Clearly I wasn’t the only one wondering where that appeared from…

6. Wii want cricket
Well, beach cricket did arrive only to disappoint, leaving one of the big questions unanswered for 2009 - when is the massive cricket diaspora going to get wii cricket?

5. Google plays the April fool
Always a ratings winner, this year’s April fools were mixed in terms of amusement value, but not in traffic value, cracking the top five.

4. BBC News video embed
It may be a post on a woefully out-of-date experiment, but with BBC iPlayer embedding still to appear the Google searches keep delivering the punters to this old post.

3. Build your own supermodel
Can there really be that many fans of Weird Science trying to build their own supermodel? It appears there are, as this old post continues to deliver.

2. Review of Chrome - the good, the bad and the too early
No surprise to see one of the stories of 2008 high up the list, as this not entirely postive review of Google’s Chrome browser made the top 2.

1. Lies, damn lies and social networking statistics
Everyone’s looking for them and Google keeps sending them to Technocloud to find them, helped no doubt by the catchy title. This post bemoaning the lack of decent social networking statistics, while offering up some of my own, pipped even Chrome to the top.

It’s been an interesting, challenging and exciting year. Best wishes to all for 2009.

In an attempt to improve the bounce rate on the blog, I’ve finally added a related posts plugin which exactly what it says on the tin. After some experimentation with the Wordpress plugins, I settled on the amusingly named ‘Yet another Related Posts Plugin‘ which is anything but yet another plugin.

With a simple install and a very handy options menu accessible via settings, it now displays up to five related posts at the bottom of individual posts (although unfortunately not by default on the category, monthly or homepage aggregation of posts).

It judges a related post by title, body, tag and category and you can even adjust the sensitivity through the ‘match threshold’ (I settled on 3).

If you can’t see it (see above brackets), then click on the post name. I’ll report back if the bounce rate improves.

As explained in the previous post, I was considering moving back from a hosted version of Wordpress to the free version. This blog is not-for-profit (ad trial is a technology test) and I’ve had more hassle resolving hosting issues, than benefits with the flexibility hosting your own blog brings.

There is surprisingly little information on how to move back from hosted to free Wordpress on Google, so hopefully this will provide some guidance for those of us who are less technical.

Having gone through the process, ads on Wordpress.com were just too obtrusive to continue, but hopefully the experience will serve others well considering the same path.

Pros summary

- It’s free
- Wordpress’ reliable hosting to manage traffic spikes (thorn in my side on a cheap hosting deal)
- Many of the more popular widgets are still available (many aren’t…)
- Widgets are easier to setup on certain themes. Just use the edit box and drag and drop.
- Less hassle, just focus on the content

Cons summary

- You can’t include advertising. In fact, Wordpress reserve the right to include ads on your own content. After switching back and then changing PCs and IP addresses I was able to see what the adds look like. Although Wordpress claim they are infrequent, they were horribly obtrusive Google Adwords both at the top and the bottom of the article. Given part of my reason for moving back was having no need for advertising apart from a nice-to-have ad trial, this was unacceptable.
- Reduced number of extensions for those of us who like to test. The default stats in particular are basic.
- Reduced number of themes
- Reduced control of code
- Wordpress have the final say over your blog

Moving back to Wordpress.com summary

- Register with Wordpress.com (if you didn’t originally)
- Check that you have a recent version of the Wordpress software. Older versions do not include an ‘export’ option under manage. Instructions on this are here. Make sure you backup properly!
- Follow the instructions at ‘Manage’; ‘Export’
- Log into Wordpress.com and follow instructions at ‘Manage’; ‘Import’.
- Go to ‘Upgrades’; ‘Domains’. Either purchase your domain or follow instructions to map it to Wordpress.
- One common problem is confusion over how you purchase credits for the domain mapping. That’s because you can’t purchase credits, UNTIL you’ve mapped your domain. You are then prompted to purchase the 10 credits. Could be explained much more clearly. I was presented with the option to purchase the credits almost immediately after mapping my domain.
- Wait for the domain to propagate.
- The only problem was that I had to re-upload images.

Summary

On balance, the Wordpress advertising was just not acceptable for me - for others the lack of hosting charge may outweight this. I would have considered paying a modest opt-out charge for avoiding ads on my blog, but Wordpress have yet to make this available. At least the whole experience has got me to upgrade to the latest and much improved version of Wordpress with working trackbacks and search…

Disclaimer: this is my personal experience and may not work for you. Do your research and always backup.

After several hosting hiccups in the last few months, I have been considering moving back to the free version of Wordpress available at Wordpress.com.

(The hosting service will remain nameless for now as they have been responsive in fixing the problems, if only they’d prevent them happening…).

As you’ll see on the sidebar, I have been carrying out an advertising experiment first using Pubmatic and now just with Google Adsense which means that for the first time this blog features a strip of (hopefully discreet) ads. I’d like to keep the experiment going on the free Wordpress.com service, but reading the Wordpress.com FAQs it seems that Google Adsense/Adwords are not permitted.

That’s not entirely true, as those using the VIP service are allowed to include ads. They do of course pay $500/month for the privilege and only if they are deemed famous enough to be accepted into the VIP club. Wordpress themselves do also occassionally use their own Google Adsense on your blog.

My advice would be to those looking to make money via Wordpress blogging is to build up your audience using the free Wordpress blog, while forking out the c.$15 a year for the domain and $10 a year for the domain mapping service. Once your blog reaches sufficient scale to justify using an Adsense or equivalent service, then upgrade to a hosting package. The cheaper hosting packages do run the risk of going down should your blog get Slashdotted or Dugg, so it pays to do your research into your bandwidth allocations.

As you may notice, I recently added a Flickr feed to the sidebar of TechnoCloud. In part this was to experiment further with Wordpress plugins on a hosted blog, but it was also to give a wider audience to some of my Flickr photos after the original burst of activity died down.

To get a simple feed of thumbnail images to appear on the blog, I experimented with several of the Flickr plugins available on the Wordpress Plugin Directory, but was frustrated that either my version of Wordpress was not compatible, the plugin resulted in a code error or it wasn’t the functionality that I wanted. I won’t name names of the plugins, but needless to say it was a very frustrating evening messing around with code…

Equally frustrating was not spotting the Flickr badge tool buried in the Flickr site nav. Setting it up through the simple wizard was quick and intuitive and mercifully it worked first time.

If only I’d read a blog post like this, I could have saved myself a considerable amount of time…