Well, I’ve been working on my wife’s resume, some other web properties, some Advertising deals, and we had my wife’s parents over for a few days. She is middle school teacher and is just finishing up her permanent technology certificate, so she’s going to look toward getting a permanent position now that she’s done with school.

We built some new stairs on to my deck this week as well as chained my Grill to the deck so that it won’t be whisked away by a storm again. Big thanks to my father-in-law for doing that! He’s quite handy with a drill, whereas I’m quite handy with a keyboard. He comes over and builds things, I help them with their laptop. Tis what family is for.

I think that I will likely continue the HTML A-Z series tomorrow and go from there. I also hope to have my first Ad Network interview up as soon as possible. Just waiting for a few responses at the moment so that I can move forward with posting the first in my new interview series.

HTML

I have started to go over HTML code elements and as I do so I will be adding them to the Wiki. I hope to have this fleshed out nicely within a few months and then begin adding tutorials and examples in order to compliment the element guide.

Community Forums

I probably shouldn’t have started the site with Community Forums. It was sort of “shooting for the moon” in a way, and the lack of posts makes the site look “dead”, when it is far from it. Comments on Blog posts have been gaining activity, but the Forums are being left out. Due to this, I will likely be closing the forums for now, probably de-integrating them with the Wiki.

Guides

Expect more server administration guides! I have gotten some good traffic from some of these guides, and there have been quite a few people who have found them helpful. As these guides have been answering questions for people in search of answers, I will most certainly be writing more. I’m very pleased to be able to give a helping hand to others who administer their own servers. While I will be making guides for various server configurations, my main focus will be on CPanel.

Ad Network Interviews

The coding and deisgn aspect of the site is an important one, and the server administration aspect is equally important. However, another important facet I plan to soon focus on is knowing which Ad Networks to go with and how the industry is doing. One way to do this is to interview representatives of different Ad Networks. The first of many will be coming soon so make certain to keep an eye out for it!

So what can a smaller blog do to increase their comment traffic through the use of SezWho?

Rate, Rate, Rate!

Rate your comments! Make a pledge to your readers that you will rate their comments whether they are good or bad. Don’t promise good ratings, just promise ratings based on how insightful or engaged their comment might be.

The Webmaster’s Edge Promises To Rate Your Commnets

I hereby pledge to read the comments posted on this blog and make certain to rate them. This means that if you make valuable and engaged comments on The Edge, you can earn EXTRA Entrecard credits if you are using SezWho! While I will not be going back and rating old comments, from this moment forward, I will do my best to rate all of the comments on the blog. This is my chance to engage my users in conversation and this is your chance to earn Entrecard credits for becoming involved in these discussions!

• Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
• Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
• Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging
• Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

For more information here is a handy video:

For even more information visit:
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/07/wordpress-26-tyner/

• Linux Tutorials : Tar-ing and un-tar-ing tarballs, gz, and bz2 archives
• Web Hosting Tutorials : CPanel Server: Receiving ERROR 2002 (HY000) after a MySQL upgrade
• Web Hosting Tutorials : CPanel Server: How to fix Modsecparse.pl errors after a MySQL upgrade.

It appears someone has viewed them (not necessarily clicked on the link though) about 500 times. Most certainly not a bad way to generate some additional traffic. I will likely be submitting more tutorials in the future. I highly recommend this type of exposure to anyone who’s websites features tutorials of any kind.

What I find most interesting about this particular network though is their MLTV “Affiliate News” show. It can be found at http://www.marketleveragenews.com/ and I honestly don’t know of any other Ad Networks currently doing something like this. While many Ad Networks are now using Company Blogs and other methods of keeping in touch with their userbase, this is a very unique method and I have to applaud MarketLeverage for this idea.

Not only are they providing their Publishers with great information about their current promotions, but they are providing this information to Publishers who have not yet signed up with them! This is also quite unique as they are discussing price points which is almost completely unheard of in the Ad industry!

While I’ve only heard about them in the past few months, making it sound like they could be a “new kid on the block”, they are offer features which appear to be completely unique to their Network. I’m impressed with what I have seen from them thus far and definately will have to do a full review and interview with them sometime in the near future. For now, I think I am going to give them a whirl and see what they have to offer.

You can do so as well by signing up at:

• Click Here To Sign Up For MarketLeverage

Why not give it a go? You’ve got nothing to lose.

Katie (of the WoollyMom, not my wife ) contacted me yesterday about the menu changes. She didn’t like where the menu items were and said that something felt off. After pondering this for a while I agreed, so I made some changes today. I switched her 468×60 ad with her menu item options. My only debate now is whether or not to keep the menu items where they are, or to move them into the upper right of the header. Your thoughts?

Of course, none of these forms are worth much of anythign if you don’t have good traffic and to get good traffic you need good content. Really, that is the key to any successful website. I am not saying it is the only way to make money on the Internet, but certainly the easiest and most reputable way.

Statistics

Visits: 884 (a 425% increase)
Absolute Unique Visitors: 529 (a 670% increase)
Pageviews: 2014 (a decrease, but this is more realistic due to the bloated nature of the pageviews the site had while I was building it)
The average visitor spends 4 minutes and 06 seconds on The Webmaster’s Edge.

Monetization

Google AdSense: $6.52
Chitika: $0.03
Kontera: $0.02
Total: $6.57 (a 338% increase)

In June I added Chitika Ads and Kontera. While they have not yet had a strong showing, they still need some time and increased traffic to fully blossom. While I did not make a huge gain in my first full month of blogging on The Edge, I made huge increases considering I started from pretty much nothing. If I can continue these increases, The Edge has a bright future indeed.

Sign up for Chitika.
Sign up for Kontera.

All in all, I am very satisfied with how everything is unfolding. It will be interesting to see the state of the website at the end of July.

I will also be making tutorials to distribute through their service and will be encouraging users of The Edge and my other sites to utilize their video tutorial creation system in order to grow this library of knowledge. Videos are a great way to syndicate content and promote your site, as well as being a valuable resource for your site’s users. While written tutorials are great in their own respect, video tutorials add a bit extra for someone who is just starting out and needs a visual aid to help them on their way.

The Webmaster’s Edge is meant to help Webmasters of all skill levels. These video tutorials will be a great supplement especially for the novice Webmaster.