Alexa have announced they have altered their ranking system. The change made everyone’s Alexa rankings tumble. This blog went from 110,000 to 150,000. I noticed my neighbour DotSauce went from 50,000 to 149,000. More popular blogs like ShoeMoney were also affected.

In the past, the Alexa ranking was calculated by counting users that visited your page that happened to have the Alexa toolbar installed. Since not many general users use the Alexa toolbar, the Alexa statistic was usually criticized for not reflecting real site statistics.

The new Alexa system tries to provide a proper traffic indicator. They now get their data from a number of sources - they don’t indicate what those sources are, but they say the new system reflects proper internet traffic.

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.

I for one welcome this change. If we can now reliably use Alexa ranking as a website traffic indicator, it can only be good for business.

Wordpress 2.5 came out a few weeks back and my WP 2.3.3 installation kept asking me to upgrade with that yellow warning bar just under the main admin menu. I kept putting it off until I had nothing else to do today so I went about preparing to do the upgrade.

Having done this before I had no real fear, I know that in general there is nothing to it if you follow the rules. Even if you run into problems, worldpress is such a wonderful software with such an amazing community that there is every chance someone else had the same problem - fixing it is as easy as googling the issue.

The things to do before you start upgrading
I always make sure I take all the precautions before I allow myself to start doing any major reconstruction of my blog.

So, the first things I do when I decide to do the wordpress upgrade are:

1. Deactivate all my plugins except the Wordpress Database Backup plugin since I will need it in step 2.

2. Using the Wordpress Database Backup plugin ( which I had installed on my blog ), I back up my wordpress database. If you don’t have it installed yet, you really should as it’s a lifesaver and it literally takes like 1 minute to install.

3. Using ftp I go to my wordpress directory and download the wp-content directory, the wp-config.php file and .htaccess file. The wp-config.php file contains all your database connection settings (username, password, server etc ), the .htaccess contains all your custom rewrite rules while the wp-content directory contains your themes and your plugins and you don’t want to lose any of those.

4. I download the latest wordpress version from wordpress.org.

So, having backed up my files and my database, I am ready to upgrade.

Upgrading to 2.5

There are various ways to do this. I choese a way that allows me to test and make sure my upgrade works before I commit to it.

1. Since my wordpress installation is in folder wp, I ftp-ed the new wordpress files to a folder called wordpress. ( This allows me to access the blog on here and test things without affecting my live blog )

2. I create a new database and restore my database backup ( the one on my desktop ) to this new database.

3. I upload my backed up wp-config.php, .htaccess and wp-content to this new wordpress folder making sure that the wp-config.php points to the new database I created.

So, my live site remains untouched on dnxpert.com/wp, while a test upgrade version now sits at dnxpert.com/wordpress connected to a restored version of the live database.

4. I then navigate to /wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php and of course I am prompted to upgrade my database.
Note: I ran into a problem here. Whenever I hit the upgrade button the upgrade process would indicate that the upgrade was successful only for wordpress to ask me to upgrade again. It kind of went into a wordpress upgrade loop. I finally figured out what was wrong ( for anyone that may have the same problem ). I have WP Security Scan installed and it was inadvertently wiping out the wordpress version and confusing the upgrade process. I removed all traces of this plugin and lo and behold the upgrade process worked.

5. Now that my test upgraded version of wordpress exists with the upgrade database, I click through and make sure everything is functional. I upgrade any plugins that need upgrading, I click around and check whether all the plugins work properly and once I am fully satisfied I proceed to delete the old wp directory, and to rename the wordpress directory to wp and finally the blog is ready to go.

That’s the Wordpress upgrade to version 2.5.

Easy isn’t it? Oh and in case you missed it, here is my list of Essential Wordpress Plugins.

There is an interesting post over at Shoemoney pointing to the auction of Andrew Baron’s Twitter account on ebay. The auction has currently reached a pretty high $1,125 considering the fact there are 1,400 twitter followers to the Baron account - and most of those followers could pretty much leave at any time.

Baron’s twitter account has grown in following since people started talking about the auction and I can’t help but suspect that this is a nice way to linkbait as he can pull the auction from ebay at any time.

The mere fact big timers like Shoemoney are linking to him has meant he has increased his following by almost 200 people since he made the ebay listing.

This is just another example of thinking outside the box when it comes to putting together some nice linkbait.

Have you ever visited the blog of The King Of Blogging, Shoemoney.com, and thought to yourself - Damnnn I wish I could afford to advertise here. The guy is a top blogger, with an Alexa rank of 2,485! Imagine the traffic your ad could you get from his blog.

Well, there are two possibilities. There is the certainty, which is buying an ad at Shoemoney.com. And then there is what I will reveal to you now.

A new player in the game of advertising and blogging traffic was exposed to the blogging world at the last blogging expo. This new player is simply called Entrecard.com.

A little extract from their faq:

What is an Entrecard? Entrecard is your business card 2.0. It’s a 125×125 image which represents you and your blog. Its part advertisement, part business card. It comes with a widget you place on your blog, so that others can leave their Entrecard for you. You can also use Entrecard to promote your blog and launch free advertising campaigns.

So how does it work?

Simple. You sign up at their site and you login. Once logged in, you can drop off your entrecard at any blog which features the Entrecard widget ( which you can see at the top of my right side bar ). You drop off your entre card by click on the bottom where it says Drop Card. For every card you drop off, you earn one credit. By earning enough credits, you get the privilege to purchase ad spots on other blogs that use the Entrecard widget.

Worried about google punishing you? Don’t be, it’s all managed by javascript.

So what does this have with Shoemoney???

Everything!

I signed up 15 minutes ago, then went along and dropped off my card on every blog I found. You can find blogs to drop off your Entrecard at by using the Campaign feature once logged into Entrecard. It took me less then 15 minutes to get the required 54 credits and drop my purchase off to The King Of Blogging himself, Shoemoney.com

Now, all I have to hope for is that he will be a sport and accept my payment.

This being a domain news blog, I seldom talk about Internet marketing. However, Internet marketing should  never be disregarded. I often cruise the net looking for blogs and sites that can give me ideas on how I can better promote my blog and improve my chances of earning from ad revenue.

Dnxpert.com, just like any other online presence, requires money for hosting, domain registration and other online expenses, and hence I have to work on revenue sources to cover those costs.

I recently ran into the Online Marketing & Exponential Business Ideas blog while searching for such advisory information resources. What struck me immediatelly was the instant availability of information stripped of all the fluff some of these marketing blogs try to feed their readers.

Dave posts solid informative posts to help his readers improve their blog conversion rates. His posts are to the point and gave me some ideas on how I can improve my blog.

He also offers a marketing coaching course where he guides the lucky few who manage to get in the course step by step to earning solid money from their online ventures.

His blog also highlights the importance of writing quality content and provides his readers with an opportunity to get advice on improving their own online content skills.

I would definitely recommend Dave’s blog to anyone that is seriously about converting their online presence into a revenue earning goldmine.