Have you heard/read about Pay-Per-View, Pay-Per-Click or Cost-Per-View? All of these terms define the technique of attracting traffic to our sites by paying for that traffic. The most common method is through Google AdWords, where we can create ads containing text based on carefully researched keywords.

Although our ads can come out in the first search results page solely because of a sound keyword research, everytime a viewer clicks on our ads we would be paying money. Hence we have to make the best use of those clicks we get on our ads. And we wouldn’t be doing so if we are sending them straight to our blogs…

Instead, we’d be better off by sending them to a squeeze page. The reason is simple: a squeeze page is a single-goal page where the probability of conversion is much higher than that of our blogs. In our blogs there will be a lot to see and read and visitors could forget or get distracted from what they came in for in the first place.

Even in the case that we’re using blog hopping, forum posting, or the above mentioned paid methods of advertising, we should direct traffic to our squeeze pages… and capture the leads!

Buying traffic is risking money, so if we get into it we have to be prepared to carefully track what keywords make us money and which ones don’t. That way we would be able to fine tune our efforts. As with everything else, the tracking can be done more effectively using the right tools. One that is most often recommended is StatsJunky.

Keyword research and tracking are two skills we would need to develop that we might have not been keenly aware of when we started blogging. There is more than just setting up a blog on WordPress or Blogger and wait for the visitors to come… and then just go.

I had been wondering for some time how to make a favicon. Favicons are the  little illustrations that appear to the left of site addresses or URL name in the the address bar:

The default is a blank white page and that is what I had on my blog. But I thought it would be cool to have a custom-made one.
After a quick search for  “how to make a favicon” and looking at the results, I liked the following icon generator: http://www.favicon.co.uk , which gives you a good summary of what favicons are and tells you how to make one, based on a pre-existing image you make or get somewhere. It is a neat tool. Not withstanding my lack of creativity, I was able to come up with this icon, which I am now using as part of my blog header illustration.

I also tried this other generator: http://www.favicon.cc. I found it real cool because of the animation. I think animation is a good resource to favicons because it can counterbalance the limitations imposed to them due to their small size. These two I made to try and improve the relation to the title of my blog (they look nicer when in their place, believe me):

Once you have generated the little icon you have to take it to the root directory of your blog (public html/yourblog.com) and then go into your themes files and look for the header.php file. In there you need to fiddle with the code editor, but it’s only a matter of locating the following line:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_url’); ?>/favicon.ico” type=”image/x-icon” />

where you will substitute the code in bold (including the arrow brackets) with the URL of your site, and ‘favicon.ico’ for the name you used for your own icon. Since the generators usually name the icon files just like that, you might not even have to change the icon name at all.

Update to post, 9/5/2010: If the line of code does not exist in your theme’s header file, copy and paste it in there, making sure that it is the first of the ‘link rel=’ lines in the file. And don’t forget the substitutions mentioned in the paragraph above.

Can free favicons be good? With tools like these they sure can, it is all up to one’s aptitudes, as with everything else.

An interesting challenge was thrown out to the community of students of the Alex Jeffreys coaching program. Gary Simpson tagged five people and asked them to list 25 things about themselves in the form of a post in their blogs; those five persons had in turn to tag five more each. The challenge got to me through Heidi Passey.

I told Heidi I’m taking the challenge but warned her that it might take me a while finding all 25 things in such a square character (I had a hard time before, when working on the About me page of this blog). But let’s get going:

1. Right now, I’m at the tender age of 49. Well, maybe more of age than tender!
2. I think I can say I’ve always been a quiet person. I was a dutiful student, not particularly bright, but very persistent. Yet that persistence came out of fear of failure, not of a love of knowledge, I’ve come to realize lately.
3. I didn’t start driving until I turned 21. I was just mentally blocked, I think…
4. It took me almost eight years to complete my college career, Civil Engineering, which normally goes for 9 semesters (4,5 years); oddly enough, my overall average was good, thanks to that same persistence.
5. Much more odd is the fact that after all that effort, I have never practiced CE (I took on a job in the auto industry, which I’ve kept until now).
6. I almost lost that job in 2007, when a big round of salaried cuts hit the Company; I was able to stay thanks to the intercession of my boss then, who has always been friendly to me.
7. My first date didn’t come until I was 34…
8. …and I didn’t marry until I was 39.  It was 1999, I barely cleared out the century!
9. We have three lovely boys; although they’re aged 18 months apart, everybody ask us if they’re triplets.
10. Our youngest kid, Pablo, had to stay for 26 in the intensive care unit due to a serious blood condition. He overcame it and now is a husky little guy apparently in the way to become a lawyer.
11. I like animals and always enjoy a visit to the local zoo with my kids. However, I don’t like to keep animals at home for pets, except for aquarium fish.
12. I used to be a pro football (soccer) fan but not anymore. It’s not that I don’t like to watch it every once in a while, as much as I don’t like the way this and all other sports are hyped.
13. I used to practice tennis for several years but I stopped playing after my first kid was born. I only played during the weekends and I thought I would be missing too much by not being with him, in exchange for chasing bright yellow balls.
14. I underwent surgery for both herniated groins three years ago. Very painful…
15. I like to think of myself as a practicing Catholic. I love my Church and I should get more involved in parochial activities.
16. I like languages yet I have only gotten somewhere with English. I’ve tried French also but with much lesser success, despite the similarities with Spanish.
17. Reading is my favorite hobby yet I have refrained from it lately, in part to be able to dedicate more time to IM.
18. Learning to play a musical instrument is in my wish list. If I only had had the good sense to do it in my younger years!
19. Swimming is also something I never learned to do and would like to. I am making sure my kids do learn early.
20. I once despised publicly playing the lottery. That was in my early years in the job, when my salary was still growing (and I was single too). Now I consider it a viable way to make money, to the extent that I play once, sometimes twice a month.
21. I love chocolate, whether in candy bars or ice cream! I also go nuts for nuts: peanuts, almonds, etc.
22. I wore contact lenses for many years until one day my right eye started hurting bad. I’ve been wearing eyeglasses for the last five years. They’re so annoying sometimes!
23. Speed of implementation has always been a problem to me. I mull over things way too much…
24. I also have a hard time handling more than one thing at once.
25. The doctor told me I need to exercise vigorously everyday in order to avoid problems with diabetes later on. I’m struggling to find enough time out to keep up with the routine I’m following…

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Phew! Getting to 25 was really a challenge. I started working on this list on Aug 30th and run out of gas around number 9 for the first time. But it was a good exercise, after all, except for the fact that it’s all self centered…

I’ll PM my tags now.

Here I go again:  I’m starting this blog for the fourth time!

Although the visitors had been scarce, I was learning the basics of setting a blogging site: I had done a little customization of the Flexibility2 theme, I had a short story in the ‘About me’ page, I had a few widgets on and I had Google Analytics set up. And above all, I had a handful of posts where I had recorded my accomplishments along with the comments of my fellow students from the Alex Jeffreys mentoring program.

Everything, however, went away in a wink. While I was working on a text widget, my blog content disappeared and the theme reverted to the default. I asked my host for help but since I did not have a backup, there was nothing that could be done…

Although I recognized an opportunity for starting the blog afresh, the total loss stunned me. And to compound the situation, I had a long-before planned family vacation –which I enjoyed– to complete before I could restart working on this blog again.

In light of what has happened, my first task will now be to establish a robust backing up procedure for this blog. I cannot afford a fifth try!