I came across an interesting post on Darren Barefoot’s blog and I thought it would be worth sharing with the BlueFur community. By and large, readers of this blog are above average when it comes to tech-savviness, so we have a pretty good idea about things like affiliate marketing and Google AdSense.

When it comes to online marketing, there are tools available that can help you track the effectiveness of your advertising budget. If you choose to partake in a Google AdWords campaign, for example, you can know exactly how much you paid, how many impressions you received, and how many clicks went through to your website. The same can be said about running a CPA campaign through any number of affiliate networks. You have a lot of raw data at your disposal.

Offline marketing is a different matter altogether. When you buy ad space in a local newspaper, how can you know how many people actually saw the ad, how many people spent the time to read your message, and how many of these readers went on to perform the desired action (like visiting your website or buying your product). This is a much more difficult proposition, so it is important that you configure you offline marketing efforts in such a way that they can be tracked in some way.

For example, if you are going to have a sale on a particular product, the newspaper ad (or billboard, brochure, or whatever other offline media you use) should make mention of a specific coupon code for example. This way, when someone completes a purchase using that coupon code, you will know that it had to come from that specific marketing effort. You can then know how many sales were generated by your advertising campaign, computing an effective rate of return.

The data will not be quite as exact and precise as online marketing, but offline campaigns should still be tracked so that you can know if they are worth your marketing dollar.

Last year we posted our blog goals and from our report card you an see we got pretty close.

As we add more and more content I would like to have the following statistics before the end of 2009.

2000 posts total
1000 RSS subscribers
3,500 comments
200,000 unique visitors
3,000,000 pages views

What topics would you like to see added to our blog?

WordPress plugins consist of one or more PHP files, which reside in the user’s wp-content/plugins directory. In these PHP files is where you will utilize the WordPress Plugin API.

A WordPress plugin must start with some “header” information. This is to tell WordPress the name, description and author of the plugin. Without this information, your plugin will not show up on the user’s plugin page and will not be able to be activated. This header information looks like this (this should go right after your opening <?php statement):

[code='php']/*
Plugin Name: Comment Approval Notification
Plugin URI: http://mattsblog.ca/plugins/comment-approval-notification/
Description: Sample Description.
Version: 1.1.1
Author: Matt Freedman
Author URI: http://mattsblog.ca/
*/[/code]

This example is taken straight from one of my plugins, Comment Approval Notification. This header information is simply a multi-line PHP comment, formatted in a special way. Here’s a breakdown:

Plugin Name – This is where you put the name of your plugin that you would like to have show on the Plugins page.

Plugin URI – This is where you can add a URL where more information can be found about your plugin. This parameter is optional.

Description – This is where you add a short description of what your plugin does. Keep it brief, you can always explain more in-depth on your plugin’s URL.

Version – This is the version of your plugin. Whenever you make changes to your plugin, and release them to the public, you should increment your version. Most plugin developers use the “standard” major.minor.bugfix version scheme, but you can use any versioning scheme you’d like.

Author – This should contain the names of the developer(s) who worked on this plugin.

Author URI – This is where you can add your site’s URL. This parameter is optional.

Note: If you have multiple authors and want to have links to their separate sites on the Plugins page, you can omit the Author URI parameter and format the Author parameter using HTML to link to each author, like this:

Author: Matt Freedman and Gary Jones

In Closing

I know this wasn’t a very exciting post, but the header information is an integral part of any plugin.

A blog is a dynamic entity that is constantly changing and evolving. Over time, you may find that you want to change the theme, alter the header image, adjust the overall layout, place new ads, and do all sorts of other things that adjust the look and feel of your blog. This is perfectly understandable and it’s almost expected given the quickly evolving pace of the blogosphere.

As you blog continues to mature, you may find yourself blogging more and more about a particular topic that may not already be a part of your categories list. You may place the first few articles in another category, thinking that the topic may not warrant a new category on its own, but as more of these related posts come up, the need for a new category becomes more and more pressing. After choosing to add this new category, it can be a pain to go through your entire archive to find all of the old posts that may belong in this new category. You’d have to edit them one at a time, right?

There is a WordPress plug-in that can greatly ease this process and it is called Batch Categories. In essence, it allows you to “assign multiple posts to a category or delete multiple posts from a category in one fell swoop.” The plug-in also works with the integrated “tag” system in WordPress, adding and untagging multiple posts at once.

Installation is a breeze. Download the plugin, upload it to your WordPress directory, and activate it. You can access the administration panel for Batch Categories through the “Manage” section in your WordPress dashboard. For more information on this plugin, check out robm.me.uk.

As we close the books on another successful year we want to share some of our own numbers. I know most hosts keep these numbers a secret but as we grow we think that it does not hurt to know where we are at.

New Sign-ups 2008
3,459

Total Customers
9,681

Total Domains Hosted
227,658

Revenue Percent Increase 2008 Over 2007
103%

New Servers 2008
158

Website Visitors
160,878

Referral Rate
85%

We are looking forward to another successful year in 2009. If you have any suggestions or ideas to help us improve let us know.

At the beginning of 2008 we set out goals for our blog to have accomplished by the end of year. If yo do not set goals for your blogs then you probably won’t achieve them. We will be posting our 2009 goals this month as I suggest you do.

Here is how we did…

624 posts to be made…
We made 664 posts in 2008.

200 RSS subscribers to be achieved…
We had 522 subscribers in 2008.

3,000 comments to be reached…
We reached 2991 comments in 2008.

120,000 unique visitors to be reached…
We reached 109097 unique visitors in 2008.

2,500,000 pages views to be reached…
We reached 1,742,088 page views in 2008.

I would say we did very well and got very close to our goals. If I were to give us a grade for achieving our blog goals it would be an A-.

What grade would you give?