This week I started testing out the Facebook flyers program. This new program shows facebook viewers your text and image ad (see below) at a Cost per Click below the Search and Application on the left hand side. One thing I like is that you can target your market very well from age and location if you want to test products on a specific market. What bugged me about the way the flyers are setup is you can not edit the Ad or target after they are added.

I have been testing it for 2 and half days and as you can see from the stats above that we have lots of views but very little click throughs.

So far none of the click-through’s have resulted in a sale. To be fair though I have not built a good landing page for the Facebook users which would convert those clicks to a sale. I will be working on that after testing this for one week w/o a landing page.

I think the click-through rate is really low.

Any suggestions on how you would change the ad to improve that?

Ah, the 404. Inevitably, visitors to your website will stumble across a 404 at some point, because of a broken link, a moved page, or a typo of some kind. Given that web users typically have very short attention spans, they’re probably not going to spend too much time finding the article that they hoped to find on your blog if they are presented with a 404 error page. Instead, they’ll just hop onto their favorite search engine to find a working page. Alternatively, they might just give up on looking altogether. In either case, you’ve lost a potential reader and that can’t be good.

In all WordPress themes, there is a page template wherein you can customize your 404 page. You can help to direct the visitor to what they’re looking for by telling them to use the search box on your blog or to tell them to sift through your archives. While this solution will help to retain some readers, not all of them are going to go through this effort. What’s more, wouldn’t it be better if your reader never saw that 404 error page in the first place? How can you tell what’s sending them astray?

That’s where the 404 Notifier plug-in by Alex King comes into play. It keeps track of all the visits to your site that resulted in a 404 error, telling you exactly where the person thought they were heading. It may be a broken link somewhere in your site that can easily be rectified. This certainly beats going through every post on your blog to find random typos! The report is then sent to you via email to let you know where the 404′s are coming from. Sounds pretty efficient to me.

Thanks Saman Sadeghi for the heads up!

I think we are getting closer and closer to the end of the Beta. Some of these features were requested and now in version 0.9 are…

• A working locally cached version that upates hourly.
• Alignment of your plugin (left, center or right).
• Choice between a static or dynamic image.

The static image can be used by those worried about Opera users. The dynamic image changes in various widths and heights so there is really no way to control it for those using Opera.

If you are running any prior version I urge you to upgrade. To upgrade be sure to Deactivate your plug-in, delete it and then upload the newest version.

To install the plug-in you need to…

1. Download the DealDotCom Plugin.
2. Unzip the file and upload to your wp-content/plugins folder.
3. Activate the plug-in in your WordPress admin.
4. Customize the Plug-in on the Options page.
5. Add a bit of code to your sidebar.php file or use the Widget.

Again this script is still in Beta so use at your own risk. If you find anything wrong or any suggestion feel free to post them.

I have also posted the full script here so you can view the plug-in.

Attention bloggers if you have manually installed WordPress then you should start the upgrade to 2.3. A few features have been added to 2.3 as posted by WordPress. 

The 2 major features are…

• Native tagging support
• Plugin update notifications

This blog was upgraded manually and it only took a few minutes to upgrade the software.

The plug-ins were a different story all together. They took around an hour to update. I did not realize the plug-ins were that outdated. If you are running old plug-ins they could be prone to security and other issues so I do suggest upgrading them.

One plugin caused a bug in the posting. If you are using the Google Site Map then disable it as it will crash your system. There was no update that fixed it yet.

The tag support is really fun to play with and as you can see in the right hand navigation near the bottom we have created a tag cloud.

For those who installed WordPress with Fantastico,  Netenberg usually has the upgrade released of a day or two later. We do post Fantastico updates on the blog so keep an eye open for that.

But it is worth everything. It used to be that if you wanted to start a successful business, you would need to raise a substantial amount of capital. Say you wanted to open a restaurant, for example. You’d have to buy a location, outfit it with furniture and equipment, and then hire a bunch of staff. It was all very expensive and not within the realm of the average person.

With the Internet, things have changed dramatically. When you look at some of the most successful blogs on the Internet, the only costs involved are domain registration and hosting. Depending on what package they get, this can run up a total annual expense of less than $100. With this very minor monetary investment, huge amounts of money can be made. John Chow, for example, made over $17,000 last month from his blog alone. And that doesn’t even include the cash he gets from TTZ Media and TheTechZone.

Even dot com moguls can be outdone, though, and by high school dropouts to boot. You may have heard the story of 17-year-old Ashley Qualls. She started Whateverlife three years ago, providing the people of the world with free MySpace layouts. These were particularly catered to teenagers. Like so many other websites before it, Whateverlife cost next to nothing to launch (and maintain), but Ashley pulls in up to $70,000 a month from that site. And this is at age 17. She has since dropped out of school.

It goes to show you that anyone can succeed online, regardless of how much funding they have backing them up. All you need is a great idea, perfect execution … and a little luck certainly doesn’t hurt either.

Today we took the time to adjust our US prices to the proper prices for all of our services on BlueFur. With the Canadian dollar being valued so high this should have been done awhile ago.

This will hopefully clear up one of the common questions I have been getting lately from potential customers asking why the price difference was so high.

Current customers do not need to worry about the price changes as their prices are fixed as long as they have their package with BlueFur. This will only affect future US customers.

I have heard a lot of discussion already that before the 2008 US Elections the Canadian dollar may even get higher.