Big Foot Web Marketing

Took me a couple of seconds to figure this one out- after upgrading to latest version of Firefox the fist thing I noticed was I no longer had a back button for my browser. I use this HEAVILY and can’t believe I am the only one. Not sure why they would remove this function from the navigation toolbar. As is you can go back in FireFox by right clicking mouse and clicking back or do same by clicking Edit menu. What a drag!

Restoring you back button in Firefox is relatively easy and takes about 5 seconds. Go to View->Toolbars-Customize. You will see set of arrows ( back/forward) drag this button to your navigation toolbar and voila!

Tags: Free Tools and Utilities by Lisa Stewart
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Signs That Your Site Is Loading Too Slowly for Visitors

One of my sites- my most profitable blog, took a dive in revenue a couple of weeks ago. On closer inspection the click through rates in the Google Adsense dipped and bounce rate for visitors increased. Most time this says to me pages are not loading quickly enough.
This has happened in the past when I have put an image on the home page and forgot to compress.
I have a very fast connection and sometimes I can’t catch a slow loading page or site. Some warning signs that your web pages and site is loading slowly may be site stalls when you are visiting it include:
- Site lags when you post to your blog
- Your ad revenue nose dives for no reason. Your Adsense Ads are tanking, affiliate links collapse , visitors may be leaving before they have a chance to click.
- You look in your analytics and see a high bounce rate or unexpected bounce rate ( your visitors come to your site and leave quickly)

Reasons Why Your Site Is Slow

- Shared server. From my experience you have to have a pretty hefty traffic surge for this to make a huge difference but worth checking, Chances are if you have a few sites and only one of them is slow- it s not your server. If you suspect its your server load don’t freak out and move your site right away- try using a plug in like WP Super Cache that caches pages and decreases server load first and see if that makes a difference.

- Too many posts on your home page. This has happened to me. I had a blog set up to show 20 posts (!) on the main page. Then I had a slew of images/graphs or scripts in each post. You can avoid this by using the “more” tag in WordPress editor and reader has to click link off of main page to see entire post OR you can set your home page in WordPress setting to show less posts.

- Giant image files. Guilty! In haste I have posted 3 and 4 MB photos on my blog and crashed my blog. Oops. Check your image sizes. Your sites graphics should be TINY ( under 10 kb). Images and photos can be compress and published and web with very little image distortion. I like my images to be under 30 kb. Us a jpg compression feature and resolution set to web or 72 pixels.

- Too Many Scripts!
Find out what your resource hogs are. I just discovered that I can see how long a script or object is taking to load very easily using Google Chrome (the new Google browser) . Open Chrome browser a load your page, then right click and choose inspect element, click on resources button, then reload your page. You will get a nice timeline on what loads and how long it takes.

I was quite shocked. I found my culprit(s). Using a tool to test site load time at Web Page Analyzer I could see my site was taking 66 seconds to load on a 56k modem. This is WAY too long. The most glaring problem was a spam plugin I installed 2 weeks ago ( Akismet doesn’t seem to be capturing as much as it used to) . I really like WP-Spam Free but it had to go. Was grinding page load time to a halt.

The other problem was one of my favorite plugins- and this hurt to remove- Twitter Tools. I have left up a couple fo sites when it doesn’t seem to affect the site as much but I had to take down. When I removed my site load time was reduced by a full 20 seconds.
Removing just those two plugins reduced site load time – it went from 66 seconds on a 56 kbs modem to close to 30 seconds, This was more than half!
I also removed some affiliate ads that were slowing down site and not producing any results and shaved off a couple of seconds more.
Three days later and every back up to normal . I am kicking myself over lost revenue. I probably between 3-500 dollars in revenue in the last two weeks because of the slow site. I HATE when stuff like that happens.

You have to keep a close watch all the time for little niggly things that can make huge impact on your blog and your income streams. I hate to say it- but i probably spend 25% of my time creating content and the other 75% checking and analyzing how to improve or maintain. Bit maddening.

I have long been a proponent of more blogs being better but slowly thinking that the time to check and re-check and crunch numbers can mount up to too much time wasted looking at numbers and not enough “creating”.

Tags: Free Tools and Utilities by Lisa Stewart
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I didn’t realize how much I missed this plugin until I discovered the author has revamped it to work with later version of WordPress and I literally felt giddy! I can see at a glance what post have taken off. I can often see when there is a news story that has broken by how popular one of my posts is. I can also use the info to create posts on other blogs using different key words or with a different spin. It works in real time and this is a huge advantage to me over analytics programs.

I can’t ell you how excited I am! DailyTop10 plugin no longer break the dashboard in WordPress 2.6. It works the same way it used to.
I modify DailyTop10 to show my top 100 posts and wrote a post on how to do it, read Modify Daily Top 10 Posts Plugin for WordPress to Show more Than 10 Posts.

Tags: Free Tools and Utilities by Lisa Stewart
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I recently cleaned a friends laptop. Her browser was opening up to suspicious and “adult” sites . I thought I would run a couple of spyware program and that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. It was a really tough case.

She also had a problem that I had seen before; any kind of java script was hijacked and instead of a Google AdSense Ad or other there was a flashing obnoxious ad demanding a virus scan of some sort. Do you have malware or spyware of some kind on your computer?

Symptoms That You Have Malware ( Trojan, Spyware, etc)

- browser is opening up on its own.
- Strange looking Ads that blink or ask you to do a virus check NOW.
- Home page in browser has changed and/or you can’t change your home page-
- When doing a search in Google or browser new browser open up using related terms and to a suspicious site.
- Popups asking you to do a virus or spyware scan
- Getting popups to anti-virus site with odd names- like PantiVirus or MacAfffe ( similar to real program but with misspellings)
- General performance problems like slow Internet, sluggish program, hard to load applications.
Adsense does not run any animated ads so if your AdSense ads are blinking or flashing or animated then you most likely have some kind of trojan or malware that has hijacked you java script.
- weird messages when you try and open your spyware removal applications or they won’t open at all.
- New and “interesting” sites in your Bookmarks and Favorites.

Example of How Spyware Gets Installed

Below is what a typical window that will install spyware :

In any case I spent a lot time trying to get rid of her malware. Not only was she getting weird popups and her browser opening spontaneously, but the Internet connection slowed to a halt. You could surf for about 2 minutes and then problem would be back. I ran just about everything I could think of and still couldn’t get rind of the problem. I ran multiple virus scans, Lavasoft’sAdaware, Trend Micro, about 4 different Trojan removal software, etc. and nothing worked.

Finally…. Getting Rid of Hard to Clean Malware

I was very close to calling it a day and reformatting her hard drive. I did some more searches and found a step by step method of getting rid of these nasty malware programs, on Major Geeks Forum. It tools some time but in about an hour her laptop was clean.

The procedure for getting rid of all the malware- a nasty trojan, was done using entirely free tools and the instruction were superb .They also had download links to for everything you need.

I cannot recommend this thread highly enough.

The application that did the trick on this computer and several other’s was little known malware seek and destroy application Malwarebytes It is also free.

I was operating Windows Xp but they had methods for most operating systems.
View the Major Geeks Malware Removal Instructions here
A word of caution- don’t skip around and jump ahead – stick to their instrcutions.

Tags: Computer and Hardware, Free Tools and Utilities by Lisa Stewart
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