WP-PostRatings is a fantastic free WordPress Plugin that allows you to easily input a rating system into your blog, and keep track of ratings made.

Along with the free download, there’s a plugin for showing results as a widget! Seriously, check out this plugin, as it is really worth a download. It’s in use over at my website KICKTOPIA.com and I love it!

According to them, the removal of the link is due to it’s poor performance and will soon be completely gone.

Personally I see this as a good move by them. I can’t imagine many people just clicking on that ad, signing up as an Adwords user and going from there. It’s the same as a person just clicking on ad to buy a new mobile phone (the ad was on a blog let’s say) and going through to buy it that moment. It’s very unlikely, and usually the clicker has to think about it, and then will by from the cheapest option. So that link probably didn’t get too many new Adwords sign-ups for Google.

Over at Adsense they’re really trying to revamp the system. Just lately they’ve even changed ads from being clickable all over, to only clickable on the title and URL. You might want to read this for more info on that change.

Google Adsense – It’s exactly the same as the Text widgets, but with (very) minor tweaks specifically for inserting Google Ads in the sidebars. It basically allows you to put javascript into the sidebars via widgets.

WP Super Cache – Everyone should have a copy of this plugin. It’s basically a very fast caching module for WordPress, and essential for when one of you’re posts gets made popular on Digg, or starts getting a lot of hits.

WP Polls – This plugin adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page, and it’s very customizable.

obsocialbookmarker – Adds user-submission links at the bottom of each post for various social bookmarking sites which allows your visitors to easily submit them in a number of social bookmarking sites. Includes: del.icio.us, reddit, slashdot it, digg, facebook, technorati, google, stumble, and a lot more.

Also, check out MtDewVirus for a collection of over 10 plugins that are small but quite handy.

The theme is called Grid Focus and it’s created by Derek Punsaslan. For this blog, I was looking for a very minimalist, but easy to customize theme, and Derek’s did the job perfectly.

After a few hours playing with the theme (still building the website though!) here’s the final result, or you can check it out live at GOSNEAKER.COM:

And the theme can be found at 5thirtyone here.

So recently I’ve started up a new website called Pinkoogle where it’s basically Google but your search results are displayed in a Pink theme. The intention of the website (no real profits yet) is to have all profit made from the Google Ads on the website, go to a breast cancer charity – the site was originally made for Pink October but was only finished on October 28.

On Facebook, I noticed the cause for Support the Campaign for Breast Cancer Research. In the discussion of that cause, I made a very brief post saying “www.pinkoogle.com – Searching for a better cause. It’s Google but for Breast Cancer. The traffic started rolling in and it was for a good cause. See, Facebook can be very helpful!

Below are some of the stats to further explain my point. Keep in mind that the website has only been up for 30 days, and NO PAYED ADVERTISING has been done. (over the jump)

1,114 different visitors over the first 30 days is pretty decent. When looking at the traffic sources though, about 55% is direct traffic (I didn’t think pinkoogle.com was such a good domain, shame on me), with 31% being due to that little post I made on a Facebook cause. A good 300 or so people visited the site, made a search, and left, all in under a month because of a small little link.

This is evidence, that Facebook can be a fantastic source of traffic! So if you see a group/cause/page on Facebook that relates to your blog, make a very brief post linking to your site (don’t make it sound spammy), and take advantage of the hits you can get.

But how to you protect yourself from being click-bombed (one of the main reasons that accounts are banned)? Well, there’s really only one easy solution. Monitor your account through Google Analytics (or another stat-keeper), and make sure that whenever the click-through-rate (CTR) seems too high, you CONTACT GOOGLE! through their site. This is crucial that you get in contact with them, and not just sit around hoping they won’t notice.

Don’t click on your ads. Don’t ask others to click on ads for you. And Contact Google when in despair. They may not reply, but they sure as hell have your message which is all you need to be safe.

Basically Blozanga’s another (small) about-blogging website, all about making money, quality posts, using blogging platforms, etc. (I use mainly WordPress so there’ll be a lot of info on that too.)

Blozanga will draw a lot of inspiration from sites like Problogger, Bloggingpro.com, and others. It’s just that when I get these ideas whilst blogging, I think “thats useless to me, I may aswell tell people about it”, but normally I can’t. Now I can.

Now that you know what the blog’s about, here’s a little info on me. I’m Bryce, I live in Australia, I run a few websites (itsALLmac.com, gosneaker, SoMuchCrap, and others), and I get lots and lots and lots of ideas – most useless, but ideas nonetheless.

So, that’s done. Enjoy the blog.