That means, as of the next version of wp-quotes, anything below 2.0 in the wordpress series is unsupported. wp-quotes 1.3 support will end soon too, because I’m working on wp-quotes 2.0.

Sorry if this affects anyone, but since I don’t spend a lot of time on this, I feel like cut-and-run is the best idea. Besides, wp-quotes 2.0 will be so awesome that everyone will want it. I won’t try to break 1.5.x support, but no guarantees.

Yes, I should be on MySQL 5.0, but I don’t control this server, so I work with what I’m given. An option in the plugin will be available in the next version if you know your version of MySQL supports it. I’ll be starting a refactoring/redesign soon, and it will include proper wordpress 2.0 support, proper admin support (via the options panel instead of the manage panel), and probably a widget version. Thanks to everyone who uses the plugin!

1. Engines will know the proper context of what you’re searching for. If you say “Afghan,” they’ll know if you mean the dog, rug, or are referring to the people. Maybe because you tell them, or because they can divine it from your other search keywords.
2. Engines will reach a level where they’re nearly as good as a human-edited directory.
3. Being as nearly good as a human-edited directory, if all you do is sell goods or services, your site will not be in the organic search results. Why? It doesn’t provide any new or unique information, and you’re making money on it. By giving a link to your site for free, they make no money. They’ll demand a cut of your money for being your advertising agent. Given the choice between paying a nominal fee to be listed in the ads, or not be shown ever, you’ll pay the nominal fee.
4. The only way to reach customers via SERPs will be to buy advertising. Context-sensitive ads, adsense, banner ads, whatever. You will no longer get free advertising from search engines.
5. The job of SEO “Experts” will be to get your site classified as non-commercial, even if it makes money, so you show up in organic results
6. There will be a huge gray area surrounding mixed commercial/informational sources. For example, Amazon.com has extra product pictures, editorial reviews, track and chapter listings, exerpts, user reviews, etc. Why some sites like this get classified as informational and some as purely commercial will be a big point of contention.
7. It could happen that instead of forcing you to maintain an ad bank of thousands of keywords to index all your products, engines will charge commercial sites a listing fee — much like the way you pay to get in a phone book or direct mailer. They’ll guarantee your site shows up in the organic SERPs for a price, but not guarantee where it shows up. The price will be high enough that spammers can’t register en masse to flood the market and still make a profit, but low enough that it doesn’t prohibit startups. The price will depend on what products or services are being offered

What kind of features do you guys want in the future?

I know everyone’s clamoring for the latest release of wp-quotes. It’s coming soon. It’s going to be a mostly xhtml-related fix. I’m just swamped with a few things right now and can’t get the time to patch, test, package, and release, but it’ll be here by Friday!

• There’s a tag you can add to pages or posts that will spew all the quotes out onto one page. Check out the upper-right corner of this screen. See that little quotes link? Click on it to see what I’m talkin about. That’s all of them, right there.
• When you initialize the table by going to the management page, it will now add a few quotes so it’ll work right away
• Clearer (hopefully) installation instructions.

There are no database changes, so if you want to upgrade to 1.1 you can just overwrite the files with the latest version.

Go to the wp-quotes page


div.top
{
height: 350px;
}


This should fix your issues. Thanks, Marc, for letting me play on your setup!

1. Page Views (or Hits): The number of pages served up. Usually comes from your stats package (Webalyzer is very common, but there are others).
2. Visitors: The number of unique visitors served. If one person browses each of your pages 1000 times, it might count 200,000 page views, but only 1 visitor.
3. Pages Per Visitor (PPV): Calculated by the formula Page Views / Visitors. If this metric tells you that your visitors average 1 page per visit, your site isn’t keeping visitors around for very long. 20 page views is pretty good, showing that you have enough content to keep people around.
4. Revenue: The total monies earned in the time period you’re monitoring.
5. Clicks: The number of clicks on your ads by visitors.
6. Revenue per Click (RPC): Calculated by the formula Revenue / Clicks. Gives you an average of how much each click is worth to you.
7. Revenue per Visitor (RPV): Calculated by the formula Revenue / Visitors. Gives you a monetary amount that each visitor is worth to you. Shows you that more visitors = more money
8. Click-through Rate (CTR): Calculated by the formula Clicks / Visitors. This tells you how often people click on your display ads. Usually expressed as a percentage: 8% CTR, for example. Anything over 10% is really, really good. I think most people will be in the 2-3% range, but I’m really just pulling that out of thin air.
9. Conversion Rate (CR): Same as CTR when you’re dealing with advertising. If you’re running a business model where users have to sign up for something or purchase something to get you money, it’s usually called Conversion Rate. If it’s something users just click on to get you money, it’s considered CTR. But they’re basically the same thing.

These are all magic numbers, but here’s the magic formula:

Revenue = Visitors * CTR * RPC

That is, the revenue you earn is the number of visitors you have that click on ads, multiplied by the average revenue per click. Maybe it’s just that I studied a lot of math, but this is a pretty beautiful thing. This single formula describes everything you need to know to maximize earnings on your website. If you want more money, you have to increase the visitors, increase the conversion rate, or increase the revenue per click, or do more than one. You have to be careful not to increase your visitors while ignoring the conversion rate: you can make less money with more visitors if you’re not paying attention!

Each month, you will want to calculate these values, and store them somewhere. Maybe in an excel spreadsheet, where you can generate pretty graphs. Maintaining a historical record will be great for your website since you can track its progress over a long time frame.

I might write another article about this later, but you want to make sure to only test one thing at a time. Here’s the skeleton testing/implementation plan when you’re optimizing your site. Following this religiously will make sure you are able to see what works and what doesnt:

1. Measure your site for at least a full month to get a baseline on all the metrics above. That way, you have something to compare to.
2. Change a single thing on your website: change the font, change the link underlining, change the navigation options, etc. Changing multiple things may make some metrics drop, when some of the individual changes would have helped.
3. Run the test for at least a week, but hopefully a month. Maybe use traffic-splitting so you don’t lose all your revenue if you totally screw up your site.
4. Calculate the metrics based on your changes
5. If the changes were positive, make them permanent, and start over. If they weren’t positive, either ditch the effort, or try to figure out why it wasn’t successful, change it slightly and start over.

If you think there’s anything wrong or missing here, be sure to let me know!