The other day I was setting up a WordPress sandbox to do some theme testing and I ran into a small snag. I wanted to populate the blog with data from smmguru.com and the WordPress export feature is a bit flawed. For many reasons (mainly security) I did not want the sandbox blog running off the same database so a backup/import was the way to go. Unless you can upload a 6mb export to your site (highly unlikely) then you cant import any data.

The first route I took was manually trying to split the file but I quickly realized it would take forever with that many lines of code. I took my problem to Google and found a nice little gem called “Shoes.” Its a WXR file splitter written in ruby by  mvManila. The program is very easy to use and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux and there’s also a command line version for the nerds. You can get the latest version here (just pick the latest version number for whichever platform you are running.) The program will then install itself and your ready to roll.

Select the local copy of your WXR file, then pick how small you would like each chunk to be. You can even append a name that will automatically be ordered in number. For example entering “backup-part-” will create WXR files labeled “backup-part-1″, “backup-part-2″, etc. Then all you have to do is import all the files through WordPress and your good to go.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone emails me with an advertising offer and then when I give them a fair quote they go and change everything up to try and push the limits. For instance, this particular advertiser was interested in purchasing an undisclosed number of text links ads within content. After giving them a quote, they came back with a totally different offer and tried to low ball me on the price. Not only is this annoying because it takes time to price everything out, but automatically I don’t even want to be bothered in sending them an updated quote because it tells me they are cheap asses and I am here to make money.

Their new offer consisted of paragraphs of text that would be inserted across Smmguru.com and contain no more than three links per paragraph. How we got from text links to paragraphs of links I don’t know but why they would think a text link and a paragraph should be the same price I do not know. Don’t get the nature of this post confused. I am simply saying that most likely the people who are going to email you offers will try to get as much as they possibly can for nothing. That’s why its important to know the value of your ad spaces, what you can get from other advertisers, and what affects the ads could potentially have on your site and its visitors.

Don’t be afraid to reject an offer, if you sell your self short you will be kicking yourself in the ass later when you realize that selling lifetime paragraphs of text for $10 a pop was not nearly worth it lol. My favorite technique for dealing with these situations is to reply with the highest amount I see fit and see how the advertiser reacts. Surprisingly they will often take the deal (within reason) or give you another offer slightly below what you requested. Its a tricky game but when played well you can easily get ten fold what you would have otherwise if you settled for the quick payment.

Also keep in mind that not every ad space you sell has to be a “lifetime link.” You will find that most offers that involve big bucks will come in monthly or quarterly packages. Personally when I see people asking to buy a lifetime link I want to respond with an “lol are you serious?” I find it funny that people think they can put a value on a “lifetime link” as the exact value will most likely change dramatically over the lifespan of your website or blog. Because of this I will give the following tip: Instead of jacking up the price for a lifetime offer, instead give them a fair monthly rate knowing that later on you can make changes. Not only will you make more coin, but you can adjust the price as your site grows.

Just a few things to think about while you are stuffing your faces for the next days. I bet if you took this coming weekend to re-evaluate all of your advertising relations you will see that you could easily start to fine tune prices and increase your ad income.

I was just on Google Analytics doing some late night stat checking (I’m addicted) and aside from noticing the slick new layout I noticed another thing that is now bugging me. I was checking out some of the top content here on smmguru.com for yesterday and noticed that a few of the top pages had been submitted to SocialBrowse. Any link that gets submitted to SocialBrowse basically becomes non visible because the layout gets messed up by the SocialBrowse icon next to the link.

If your lucky then you will still have part of the link to hover over or click to see what the URL is. Otherwise it may be hidden and you might want to pop open Firebug to check them out until there is a fix. I did some searching and didn’t find much on the topic so let it be known, the more people that know the faster SocialBrowse can fix this and the faster I can close Firebug. Thanks.

I was just screwing around on Twitter and noticed @shoemoney talking about his blog being DOSed by someone (most likely a botnet.) As far as I know I think he runs his blog on his own server with memcache and all kinds of tools to reduce page load and resource hogging. But this brings up an interesting view. Jeremy gets paid by a lot of private advertisers to run ads and making over $300K on month on them means they are paying a premium for space on his blog.

The blog has been down most of the day and he is working on a solution. But, if he can’t get it back online within a week or so I bet some advertisers are going to be a little miffed. If he doesn’t shell out credit I wonder if they will leave. If your blog went down due to a hacking or something for more than a week, would you be able to take the hit? I know a lot of people who fail to even backup their databases and what not. Having a new backup emailed to you every hour is very handy, and very easy with some of the backup plugins for WordPress. A word of caution to anyone who is developing a trafficked site as with success comes envy and some people like to play rough.

I know Jeremy has a strong background with security and linux enviroments so it should not be an issue for him to get back online. However he is away right now (good planning by the attacker…) so it may take some time before shoemoney.com is back to full operation.

I was playing with Google’s “2001 Web” search engine and found a few interesting keywords to type in. Many things that are exploding on the web right now where not even heard of seven years ago and some of them, like YouTube turns up nothing. YouTube has become a part of our culture and it turns up zero search results in 2001.

Social Media Marketing – 0 results. Had not even been coined yet.

Shoemoney – 4 results (although non of them are relevant or working)

YouTube – 0 results in 2001, now has over 1 billion.

Web 2.0 – The birth of web 2.01 in 2001, only 2,470 results compared to over 99 million today.

Ajax – No results for asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Now has over 118 million.

Barack Obama – Only 772 results in 2001, now has over 77 million.

iPod – 1,300 results, Apple is not even on the first page. Now has 419 million results.

problogger – 0 results in 2001. Now has over 1.2 million.

gas prices – 145,000 results in 2001, now over 33.6 million.

Another weird thing to do is type in other keywords to see what was big news back then. For instance, I typed in iTunes and saw a headline that iTunes had just topped 275,000 downloads. They probably do that on a daily basis now. Bill Gates even had his own website back in 01′ (first result).

Once again I find myself face to face with yet another Twitter related service and I have to say this one is pretty useless. Great… you can find out where you stand against the masses in terms of followers and profile completeness (wtf?) but does it really matter or help you in some way? I like to think of Twitter more as a tool than anything else. One that I try to keep myself using as it does reap small rewards (need to increase my followers ) but this service does not give you any real information.

I would say judge your Twitter account based on what you use it for, and what you need it to do. If you simply use it for communicating with a few co-workers, than the value of your account would be based on how vital communicating with them over Twitter really is. I see this as another attempt at a viral service that uses Twitter’s popularity to stimulate growth.

So I was on my way home (speeding… obviously) and wouldn’t you know it the day I don’t have my radar detector I get snagged by a state trooper. Like most people my age (yes cops do discriminate…. in case you didn’t know) the cops like to give us a hard time. Maby its my 5% tint windows in a state that only allows 70? Why it was necessary for officer Irland to walk up on me with his hand on his gun (holster undone) I don’t know… Last time I checked going 76 in a 55 was breaking the law, but not punishable by being shot on site.

Anyways back to main point. Just recently I guess the NYSDMV has made the move to online ticket processing. If this doesn’t say something about NY, you would have to live here to experience the joys of our massive police force. To make up for what the state is missing in taxes, they hit us with tickets for pretty much anything you can imagine and charge outrageous surcharge fees. They do all of this to pay for the necessities of course… The new 2008 model police interceptors, 2008 Chevy Tahoe’s and the 2008 Ford Explorers. Lets also not forget the importance of having numerous 2008 Mustangs, Dodge Chargers, and Corvettes. People are getting so many tickets in NY, that they had to make an online “transaction center” to pay and plead guilty online. Pretty sad when your police force is more worried about catching speeders than people killing each other.

If they where smart they would leave us alone and start going after the drug dealers. In NYS our officers are allowed to seize (keep) any money, cars, property, etc. when acting in a raid. They claim this money has strict regulations placed on it for how it should be used but I highly doubt it goes were they say it does.

The other day I was watching a TV program on USA networks and I remembered a pretty slick domain I had picked up but had forgotten about. I couldn’t even believe I had snagged it as it was one of USA’s top new shows. I had bought it last summer and apparently forgot about it to long because I lost it and it’s now in the redemptionPeroid.

redemptionPeriod is a 30 calendar day period were the original owner can make a request to get it back. I’m not really big on domaining but I did not know there was a hefty fee involved with this process.

My rep at NameCheap.com were I got the domain from told me it costs $9.29 to renew the domain, plus a $200.00 fee. These orders are specially processed by the management and they ensure the domain will get back to you. Don’t get me wrong, $210 beans ain’t shit if you lapsed on a fully developed domain but I had it pointed here to smmguru.com collecting dust. Hopefully ill be able to snag it when its out of redemption

I have been doing some commenting over on Shoemoney.com and today there was a post about getting users to your site. In in he mentioned some stuff about getting traffic from forums which is definitely some SMM stuff you should check out. More importantly however was a link to my site. It’s pretty cool to see a high profile site pull a relevant blog out of the comments and plug it.

Now if only I could finish this dam about me page…