Do you know how long your website or blog takes to load for users with different internet connection speeds? The reason this is important is because not everyone is using broadband although it is becoming increasingly widespread. If your site takes forever to load, the chances of the visitor clicking on the back button is higher and you’re going to lose a lot of traffic that way.

Fortunately, there are tools available online that lets you check how fast or slow your site loads. Most of these tools are free. One example of such a tool is from websiteoptimization.com.

It tells you how fast your site loads depending on what type of connection your visitor has. It also gives you suggestions on how you can improve your load time.

Try to keep the load time less than 3 seconds. The main culprit of slow load times is usually images. Try as to use images in JPG or PNG formats. These formats usually take up the smallest amount of memory. If you have Photoshop, you can save the images in different formats and compare the file sizes. You can also set the amount of compression to use.

If you’re using third party widgets on your blog, these could also slow down your load times. You might have noticed that I have removed the Blog Catalog widget from my sidebar because I found that it was taking a long time to load up.

Remember, the faster your site loads, the more visitors you’ll retain and more visitors mean more money!

Technorati Tags: website load time, compress images, image files

Popularity: 93% [?]

I received 9 comments from the little contest I ran to help send me to SOBCON 2008. What I did was to send a message to blog owners on EC that I thought would be interested to win 500 EC credits easily.

Moral of the story - not everyone checks their EC inbox for messages or they just don’t care enough to win some easy credits.

Anyway, there were 9 entries so I used random.org to generate a random number between 1 and 9.

And the winner is …. (drumroll, please)

Congratulations, to http://mywebmarketing.info/.

You’ll wake up to 500 more EC credits.

To everyone who participated, thank you!

Technorati Tags: SOBCON 2008, contest winner, Entrecard credits

Popularity: 100% [?]

I had a chance recently to interview Fabien, an aspiring teen blogger who owns SmallFishBigMoney.com.

Here’s what we talked about:

First of all, you grew up in the Seychelles, right? What was it like there?

Fabien: Seychelles is a very great place to live in, I have very fond memories of family and friends from when I was there and I go back there frequently for holiday. Most of my family are currently still there so that’s just another reason for me to go back often, but the country is not doing too well economically and it recently experienced a devaluation in currency, I left there 4 years ago to come to Australia as a result of the economy not looking very promising and as a result of escalating levels of political tension in the country.

When did you get started blogging? What got you to start?

Fabien: I started blogging in October 2007; it was a combination of things which got me started. I had wanted to immerse myself in a web venture for a while, but I was unsure of how to do so at the time, so I decided to check out how I can begin a business venture online.

I started searching for terms relating to making money online and I eventually discovered popular sites like ProBlogger, DoshDosh and John Chow. These sites obviously had a great impact and influence on me, that’s when I decided to start a blog – Small Fish Big Money Dot Com (http://smallfishbigmoney.com). My blog focuses on business, entrepreneurship, better writing skills and the elements of web design. I also blog about about technology, software and personal development.

You’re still in school right? How do you balance your time between school, friends, activities, family and blogging?

Fabien: Finding the right balance in life is always important, as I pointed out in this article Finding And Maintaining The Right Balance In Life, it is very important to prioritise important tasks, complete them and ensure that they are done properly, but efficiently. People sometimes spend three days doing one thing, when they could have accomplished their goal in the space of 2 or 3 hours.

My motto is prioritising and completing tasks in a given space of time. By doing this you allow yourself the time to go and participate in school activities, have more socialising time and live your life as opposed to sitting in front of a computer for half of it. I sometimes talk about “Relaxing And Taking Breaks Often” and in another post I asked, “When Do You Write Your Best Posts?”, because blogging at various times of the day definitely impacts on the success of a blog post, whether it will be linked to or not, etc.

A lot of bloggers sometimes run out of ideas for creative posts. What’s your advice for them?

Fabien: If you are in a niche that is too narrow, you won’t have enough content to give your opinion about, similarly if you are in a niche that is too crowded, your content may be the same as 50 other blogs out there. The key to continually getting ideas for posts is to ensure your blog is about quite a wide range of topics, in addition to this you should not restrict yourself to blogging about four or five topics … if something interests you, talk about it, the thing is, if you are interested in it, your readers may very well be too.

Do you use Social media to help you get more traffic? If so, which ones?

Fabien: In the blogosphere, social media is very popular. Do I use it to help me get more traffic? Of course! If you have this outlet that puts you in touch with literally millions of people worldwide…use it! If you Stumble an average article, you can get 200 hits to your blog by the very next day … if you Digg a great article, your server could go down, you could pick up 100 extra RSS subscribers (for your blog … the possibilities are endless.

Social media is very powerful, it cannot be underestimated under any circumstances and I believe it will be sticking around for quite some time. My advice to bloggers out there is, get acquainted with it. Go and sign up for popular sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit to name a few.

At the moment I am not using as many social media sites as I would like to be using. I use services like MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Mixx, StumbleUpon and Sphinn. It is without a doubt that this list will be expanding in 2008 to add to an always expanding blog readership.

What are some of your goals for the blog?

Fabien: In 2008 I know that Small Fish Big Money will experience massive growth. It has already proved it’s worth as a valuable site for information. But we will be expanding the site to provide our readers with even more information about online business development, branding, entrepreneurship, marketing and so many more topics.

My goals for 2008 are clear, solid and fundamentally sound. Build a strong RSS readership, skyrocket my Technorati authority and get into the Alexa 100,000. These goals are very bold, but they will not be completed without the hard work, commitment and dedication I put into my blog to share knowledge with my readers. I am always dishing out valuable tips, so I highly recommend subscribing via RSS.

Thanks for the interview, Fabien!

(Note: If you’re a blogger who is interested in being featured in an interview here, please drop me a line at hock AT moneymakingblogs DOT com)

Technorati Tags: SmallFishBigMoney, Fabien, teen blogger, blogger interview

Popularity: 58% [?]

How can you help send me to SOBCON 2008? Simple.

Click HERE.

If you decide to support me, please comment on this post and I will choose a random commenter to win 500 Entrecard credits.

This contest ends on March 15th and the winner will be picked randomly after that.

Technorati Tags: SOBCON 2008, win Entrecard credits

Popularity: 55% [?]

I figured out this little quirk about placing PayPal code on your blog. For instance, if you want to include a “Donate Now” button or a “Buy Now” button on one of your posts or pages, you’ll sometimes get the error that says:

“…unable to decrypt the certificate id.”

I got this today and I went back over the process of setting up the Buy Now button and copying and pasting the code on to my page to no avail.

Finally, I found out why it didn’t work.

Go back and edit your post/page and look for the end of the code you pasted in…

The last part should be on the same line like this:

Another thing is to make sure that you place the PayPal code between “code” tags.

Technorati Tags: PayPal in Wordpress, Buy Now buttons on your blog, get PayPal code to work on your blog

Popularity: 52% [?]

I’m going to show you some stats of this site from Entrecard. As you can see the number of drops are increasing as well as the number of ad clicks and organic clicks. Most of the clicks are from casual droppers who don’t stay on the site but judging from my Clicky stats, there are a few that stay for a few minutes to look through the site. These are the types of visitors that I would like to have!

With Entrecard, you can drop up to 300 cards per day. Now if you don’t want to drop 300 cards everyday, you can get lots of credits to start you off by buying them on Ebay. Take a look:

Currently, I have 1125 credits to burn up. At some point, this blog went over the hump and started moving up in the number of credits required to advertise on the blog. I have a constant stream of advertisers wanting to place their ad here and sometimes I have to reject those that are irrelevant to the topic here.

Regarding card drops, an easy way to reciprocate card drops (if you’re using FireFox) is to go to your drops inbox and while holding on the CTRL key, click on each card that’s there. This will open up a new tab for each site and you can drop your card and then do a CTRL+W to close the tab and move on to the next one.

This will help you get some credits when your site is new and you need to build up some credits.

Technorati Tags: Entrecard, credits for sale on eBay, Entrecard stats

Popularity: 39% [?]

After using the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin for a little over a week, here are the updated results:

As you can see, there is quite a bit of activity from GoogleBot and Yahoo Slurp, but MSNbot still doesn’t show much love for this site.

Technorati Tags: check spider crawls, crawl rate tracker

Popularity: 29% [?]

If you ever run out of ideas for blog posts, check out Lorelle’s list of resources to help you spark some ideas. Bookmark it and keep it for your reference.

One of the best things to keep your blog fresh is to post about top news stories. These get lots of searches and if you can offer a unique viewpoint or a critique of the story, you will draw a captive audience. If your blog is crawled often, you’ll see your posts being indexed within a day or two and as a result, you’ll start seeing search traffic related to the news story.

What are some of the ways you generate ideas for your posts? I keep a tab on other blogs using Google Reader and browse through the feeds for interesting items. You can also keep a notebook and jot down ideas that occur to your during the course of the day that might be worth posting about. Keep a long list and you’ll be able to draw from it in the future.

Technorati Tags: blog post ideas, where to get ideas for blogs

Popularity: 30% [?]

Hostgator is running a special this month until April 1st. Use the coupon code “LUCKY” to get 20% off the first month’s hosting fees.

I have always been happy with their uptime, support and pricing. If you’re looking for a reliable webhost, I suggest giving them a try. They also have a blog with some interesting posts.

If you’re interested, you can read my full review of Hostgator as well.

Technorati Tags: Hostgator, coupon code

Popularity: 29% [?]

I just installed a plugin called Crawl Rate Tracker which monitors the search engine spider visits to your blog. It has a nice graphing capability to let you see in a glance how many visits you are getting from the spiders and compare the trends over time. The bots being tracked are GoogleBot, YahooSlurp and MSNBot.

(update: here is a screenshot I took a couple of hours after installing this plugin)

This nifty tool will let you see how fast and how often your individual blog pages get crawled right on your WP admin dashboard. Saves you time from having to go into Cpanel to check Awstats data.

If you’re like me and like to analyze data, this tool is going to be quite addictive!

If you like the plugin, drop in at BlogStorm and say thanks to Patrick.

Technorati Tags: crawl rate tracker, WP plugin

Popularity: 32% [?]