Month 11 Income Report – Record Traffic but also Failures

It was another record traffic month! But my nothing but good news story had to stop at some point and here it is a post where I don’t get to report record income numbers for my case study website.

Also in this post I go into why I am planning on killing an email list that is getting a 50% opt in rate! I am curious if you think I am making a bad decision.

Although I am still very happy with the site and progress throughout my business, July was a month of a couple failed projects. I will dig into those in a lot of detail in this month’s post and what I have learned from them.

First… I am trying to keep consistent about getting these income reports out within the first week but all my focus was on creating the monster expired domain tutorial…my apologies. In my Aug income report (hopefuly published in the first week of September) I will talk more about the impact of that 8000 word, 6 video and custom tool post.

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How to customize the Metro Genesis Child Theme

UPDATE: The changes in this article will not work for Genesis Metro Pro, as it uses a completely new style sheet and HTML layout.

As I mentioned in my article Genesis child themes – My top three, the Metro child theme is my favorite.  Metro looks great “out of the box”.  Metro has great typography, support for two menus, and a good amount of white space and lots of widget areas.  The theme is clean, and I like a good clean theme.  Best of all, Metro is fully responsive.

I’ve found myself using Metro a lot lately as I’ve built out new niche sites for myself but also for building out new sites for clients.   I just finished up a new crafting website this weekend for a client that integrated with her Etsy shops.   The site was built on Metro (affiliate link).

As I’ve built out more and more Metro based sites, I’ve found myself doing the same types of customizations to it over and over again, and thought it might be beneficial to share a few of those with you.

Changing the Metro Header Image size

One of the first things I do for new Metro based sites is install a graphical header.   The good news is that Metro supports graphical headers “out of the box”, and you can find the menu option do that under Appearance >> Header from your WordPress administrative console.   By default, Metro wants a header image that is 1080 pixels wide by 87 pixels high.   In most cases, 87 pixels just isn’t tall enough for me and I often have to modify this to support a taller header image.

I typically use header images that are around 150px tall.  If you try to upload a header image that is 1080px x 150px, Metro will force you to crop it to 87px tall.

Metro can support taller images, with a few minor changes.

First, you’ll need to edit the functions.php file found in /wp-content/themes/metro.  One line #31, you’ll see the following code:

// Add support for custom header
add_theme_support( 'genesis-custom-header', array(
'flex-height' => true,
'height' => 87,
'width' => 1080
) );

Note the 87 value. That is what we’ll want to change. Assuming your are using a header image that is 1080px X 150px, you’ll want to edit the 87 to be 150, so this section of code looks like this:

// Add support for custom header
add_theme_support( 'genesis-custom-header', array(
'flex-height' => true,
'height' => 150,
'width' => 1080
) );

Be sure to save your changes. In order for the image to show correctly, we’ll need to make two more changes, but this time in the style.css file.

Open up the style.css file located in /wp-content/themes/metro, and navigate to line #156 where you’ll see the following code:

.header-image #title,
.header-image #title a,
.header-image #title-area {
	display: block;
	float: left;
	min-height: 87px;
	overflow: hidden;
	text-indent: -9999px;
}

Note that line #561 has “min-height: 87px;”. You’ll want to change that 87px to be the height of your new header, in the case of the example here, we’ll change it to 150px, so it looks as follows:

.header-image #title,
.header-image #title a,
.header-image #title-area {
	display: block;
	float: left;
	min-height: 150px;
	overflow: hidden;
	text-indent: -9999px;
}

Save your changes. If you visit your site, you’ll note that the graphic header still isn’t showing, and most likely you’ll see a big colored square instead. To fix this, you’ll need to decide which Metro color theme you’re going to use. If you don’t like any of the colors, I’ll tell you how to change them below, so just pick color for now, and we’ll modify it later.

For this example, we’ll just use blue. The style sheet for metro contains all of the common styles first, then has specific color styles towards the bottom. The blue color starts at line #1573 and the blue specific color styles are defined here. You’ll note they all start with “.metro-blue”.

For this example, we’re using “Metro blue”, and you’ll want to remove all of line #1620 except the { and also remove the comma at the end of line #1619, so that the section of CSS looks like this when you’re done:

.metro-blue a.social-buttons:hover,
.metro-blue button:hover,
.metro-blue input:hover[type="button"],
.metro-blue input:hover[type="submit"],
.metro-blue .btn:hover,
.metro-blue .genesis-nav-menu .current-menu-item a,
.metro-blue .genesis-nav-menu li a:hover,
.metro-blue .genesis-nav-menu li:hover a,
.metro-blue .navigation li a:hover,
.metro-blue .navigation li.active a,
.metro-blue .post-comments a,
.metro-blue .sidebar .enews-widget input[type="submit"] {
	background-color: #5bb1f9;
}

Save your changes. Now when you preview the site, you should see your header image. If you still don’t, double check your changes. If you still can’t get it to work, re-install metro and walk through the changes again.

Clean up the unused color styles

Once I select the color I’ll be using, I remove all of the unneeded color specific styling.  For example, if I plan to use the blue color, I remove all of the other metro color specific styles like “metro-green”, “metro-pink”, etc.  You can just delete these from your CSS file.

While not a large amount of CSS, I prefer to keep my CSS files as small as possible to optimize the site loading time.

Changing Metro Colors

To be honest, one of the things I don’t like about Metro is it’s colors.   The blue isn’t too bad, but all of the prebuilt colors are just a little too bright for me.  I prefer to only use bright colors for highlighting, not for primary colors.

Also, for all color themes, the menus are a black background.  While this works for many sites, I often change the menu color as well to make the site unique looking.

Changing both of these colors is easy.  First off, get the HTML color you want to use as the primary color.  You’ll want the # color value.  For example, white is #FFFFFF.   You can find these on a site like Color Combos.  Once you have the color you want to use, open up your style.css file.

We’re going to modify the blue color to be what we want.  The blue color code that Metro uses is: #5bb1f9.  To change the color, just find all the instances of #5bb1f9 and replace them with the color you want.   These will be in the style area specifically for blue, and all styles will be preceded by “.metro-blue”.

The black used by Metro is #333, and replacing all instances of #333 with a color will replace the black used in the menus, footer and other metro widgets.  I typically make this a highlight color, something a little brighter than the primary site color.

Wrapping Up

There you have it, your own custom version of Metro.   I love this strategy as it allows you to build off all the hard work done by the StudioPress team, yet customize the site so that it looks unique and unlike every other version of the Metro theme.

If you don’t have Metro yet, I would highly recommend you buy it (affiliate link).  Metro is a very nice looking and easy to customize theme, that comes with some powerful pre-built widget areas.  Best of all, Metro is fully responsive, meaning it will adjust to any resolution and/or device, including your iPhone or iPad.

Metro is definitely well worth the money paid, and I’m not one to purchase things very often.  Yes, I did include a few affiliate links in this article, and I will get a commission if you use the links to buy Metro.   There is not additional cost to you, and I only use affiliate links for products I personally use and trust.

If for any reason you get stuck, or the changes as written in this article don’t work, just drop me a line and I’ll help you out.

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Google+ vs Facebook – A lesson in target audience

I’ve always been one to read or hear something, understand it, but never really grasp the true meaning until I’ve personally experienced it.   I’ve been wired that way for as long as I can remember.   I’ve read about the importance of understanding your target audience and being where your audience is many many times.  The whole concept made complete sense, but apparently I just didn’t fully grasp the concept…

Until recently that is.

Google+ vs Facebook

Facebook Failure

I’ll admit, for the past 6 months or so, I’ve been a Google+ bigot.  I was overly joyful at predicting Facebook’s demise and laughed at the types of posts that where popular there.   I think I did this mostly because I was bitter.  I was angry because I saw many  bloggers having tons of success on Facebook, while I had none.  I do still think Google+ is a better platform, but some recent insights I’ve gained about Facebook has me respecting and understanding it a whole lot more.

In July of 2010, I created a Facebook Page for Side Income Blogging.  I published my posts on it, tried to stir up some conversation and worked to engage my readers.  I shared the Facebook page in articles, told my friends about it, and did everything I knew to do to grow that page.   As of today, 3 years later, it has 156 likes.  Only, 156.

Needless to say, comparing myself to other sites on Facebook that have 20,000+ likes, I felt completely defeated.   I had no idea what I was doing wrong, I felt like a complete Facebook failure.   Of course the silver lining in this is that it caused me to look at other options, Google+ being one of those.

Google+ Success

I was an early adopter of Google+, joining in July of 2011, shortly after Google+ was announced.  I played around with it for a bit, but made the mistake that many others made, and decided it was a Ghost Town.   I went back to focusing on my Facebook page.  Fortunately, in January of 2013, Google+ announced Google+ Communities.  Communities intrigued me, so I decided to give Google+ another shot, and I’m glad I did.

I noticed something about Google+ almost right away once I started actively engaging – The type of discussion and people where different than Facebook, way different.   Many of the people on Google+ where technology people that ran their own blogs and websites.   The people on Google+ seemed to be much like me.   I wondered if Side Income Blogging could be more successful on Google+ than on Facebook.   I created a Side Income Blogging page, and started working towards establishing myself as a blogging authority.  This decision paid off.

Eight months later, I now have more than 2,500 followers on Google+, and my Side Income Blogging page has more than 500 +1s and 279 people have the Side Income Blogging page in their circles.   Far more successful wouldn’t you say?  I feel very strongly that Google+ is critical for blogging success going forward.

Facebook round two: Success!

My wife and I had been tossing around the idea of starting a “Life” blog for some time.  Last Sunday, we decided to pull the trigger.   We created a blog called Blue Ridge Mountain Life that shares stories, photos, recipes, reviews, and news items about our life in the NC Mountains.  Given the success I had seen a few other “Life” blogs have on Facebook, and in particular my friend Charles Keys with his Back Roads Living site and Facebook page, I decided to give Facebook another try.   I expected similar results, but figured in couldn’t hurt.

A week later, and the Blue Ridge Mountain Life Facebook page has over 500 Likes and has reached more than 72,000 people!   I was shocked and thrilled.  Our new site and Facebook page has been a huge success so far.  I’m also seeing that the click through rate to our blog is pretty high, and Facebook users even click on ads.   Blue Ridge Mountain Life is already earning income in it’s first week.  I’ve never had a blog do that before.

This had me thinking though: Why the big difference in success from Side Income Blogging and Blue Ridge Mountain Life?  Why was one so much more popular than the other on Facebook?

The answer lies in the audience and their usage…

Be where your audience is

I remembered the articles I had read and frankly the advice I had given others: be where your audience is.

My audience for Side Income Blogging wasn’t on Facebook.  Facebook users didn’t seem to want to learn about the gory technical details of creating a blog.  Facebook users primarily want to be entertained.  They want funny images, beautiful pictures, cute sayings, recipes, decor ideas and well … cats …

grumpy-cat-facebook-no

Now granted, I’m over generalizing a bit, but the essence of what I’m saying is true.  People visit Facebook to catch up with their friends and family and be entertained.  As much as I would like it to be, Side Income Blogging just isn’t entertaining (even with grumpy cat images).

The audience on Google+ is there to share knowledge and gain knowledge.  While entertainment is a factor, I don’t see it as the primary factor.  People on Google+ want to learn, they are there to expand their minds, their circles of knowledge and engage with like minded people.

As a result, Side Income Blogging was far more successful on Google+.

The type of people that want to see and read Carolina Mountain Life content are primarily on Facebook.  The type of people that want to read Side Income Blogging content are on Google+.

This whole concept is SO profoundly simple, that I’m still kicking myself for not seeing it sooner.  I failed to go where my audience was, even thought I knew better.  Once I did, I found success.

An important social media planning lesson

Through all of this, beyond just learning how critical it is to be where your audience is, I also learned how important it is to understand your audience.  In order to know where your audience is, you first have to understand them.   You must think through:

  • The type and style of content you’ll provide on your blog.
  • What type of people will be interested in that topic?
  • What type of content will those readers get the most benefit from?
  • What type of content will those readers enjoy the most?
  • What social media platform those readers reside on.

I would strongly advise that you do this before you start your blog, or at the very least very soon after you’ve started it.  Failing to do so can result in a great deal of wasted time.  Trust me, I know this fist hand.  I spent so much time trying to make Side Income Blogging successful on Facebook.  In hindsight, I should have targeted Twitter and Google+ instead.

Fortunately, I got it right with Blue Ridge Mountain Life, and while I’m sure BRML can be successful on Twitter and Google+, I think the large majority of CML content consumers (my audience) are on Facebook and thus that is where I will focus my BRML efforts.  For this blog, I’ll continue to focus on Google+.

I’m going where my audience is.

How about you?  Where is your audience?  What insights do you have about Facebook and Google+ ?

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Traffic Diversion Technique

Today I am going to share a foundational technique I use for all my new websites and the websites I am continuing to promote. This technique results in some highly relevant, very timely but lower quality backlinks going to my sites but more importantly FREE TRAFFIC!!

I call this my Traffic Diversion Technique and below I will share exactly how I do it and how it can be easily outsourced.

The Traffic Diversion Technique – Easily find and get involved in the conversations already happening online about your topic, ADD VALUE and a backlink diverting some traffic back to your site

The site I will use as an example is not my student loan or insurance site but a “hobby” site I created to document my recovery from my 2nd (damn knees) ACL Surgery. http://www.aclsurgeryrecovery.net

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