Vladimir's Blog

Epic Bread

Vladimir — Tue, 08 May 2012 11:50:15 +0000

After many trial and error attempts I finally did it. I created epic bread.

It is made out of three kinds of flour, with 4 kinds of seeds added for extra flavor and texture. Plus a secret ingredient. Click the image to enlarge.

It's best consumed like this. Wine optional. Guaranteed to make your day.

If you want to see a video of me making this, add your vote in the comments.

The Valley is focusing too much on 140 characters and not enough on flying cars

Vladimir — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 06:42:08 +0000

Peter Thiel says that the "the Valley is focusing too much on 140 characters and not enough on flying cars" and this message resonated really well with me.

There is so much money floating around and it's being invested to startups that really solve no problem. Even worse, some of them basically invent the problem and then try to convince us that we had it all along.

The recent and absurd $1bn purchase of Instagram by Facebook only adds the insult to the injury to the sad and painful state tech is in.

What happened to sending people to other planets, solving our fossil fuel dependency, and other grandiose projects? Is moving from LCD to LED really the best thing we can come up with these days?

How do you check how many visitors does any website have?

Vladimir — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 18:48:09 +0000

Whether you are spying on your competition or you just want to see how does your website stack up against similar, knowing the traffic information for any website can be useful.

Here are couple of tools I use. Note: none of the tools will give you the accurate information, but they will give you pretty good comparative data

Quantcast

Quantcast give you the estimated number of US visitors only. It also has a wealth of demographics information.

Link

Compete

Compete also shows US visitors only and does it through deals with ISPs in the US.

Link

Doubleclick Ad Planner by Google

This is the tool I usually use. It also provides a wealth of other data.

Link

Google Trends for Website

This free google service allows you to compare any websites for traffic. It also provides some other useful information. The site needs to be above certain threshold of visits to show up.

Link

SEMRush

This tool focuses on search engine traffic only and you'll get the expanded report.

Link

Bonus tip

If the site is using buysellads.com to display advertising you can find it's listing and get pretty accurate pageviews data.

All the tools described above are available with a click of the button from my SEO Doctor Firefox extension.

Are you spying on your competition?

Take a break, you need it

Vladimir — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:10:00 +0000

Oh boy do I like to work. I often have 14 or 16 hour work sprees. I am addicted to work. Work brings me satisfaction and expands my horizons.

But you know what? Best ideas that I ever had, happened during my time off work. Like when strolling down the shore line. Or driving.

Almost as if my brain refuses to come up with something really creative unless it's in idle mode. When I am forcing it to come up with a great solution to a problem - nothing. Nada. Zilch. It does not want to cooperate when I want it.

Let it go - and suddenly I am overwhelmed with a surge of ideas. And all good ones.

And guess what? It's the same with other things in life. As long you push something really hard it won't happen. You need to take a break, let it go and it will come to you.

SEO Friendly Images Premium released

Vladimir — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 18:31:42 +0000

I am very happy to announce my second premium WordPress plugin - SEO Friendly Images.

The premium plugin brings the completely rewritten code, wealth of new features and two license flavors at a popular price -$49 USD for Personal edition and $99 for Business edition.

To celebrate the launch, get SEO Friendly Images with a 30% off coupon code HAPPYAPRIL (valid this week only)

And if you missed to get SEO Smart Links by now, you can use the same coupon code to also get 30% off!

The strangest thing

Vladimir — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:22:48 +0000

Rich people never have time.

Poor people have nothing to lose but time.

Announcing the weekly list of Best new WordPress themes

Vladimir — Sat, 10 Mar 2012 22:28:41 +0000

I am happy to announce that I will be now following the most popular themes in the WordPress.org repository and create a weekly "best of" list. This is going to run very similar to my existing list of Best new WordPress plugins.

The list will update once a week on Mondays.

Click to check out the first version - Best new WordPress themes.

How I made $80,000 with a single WordPress plugin

Vladimir — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 10:52:00 +0000

The journey described here is meant to be a learning and motivational tool, hopefully opening horizons to what is possible.

SEO Smart Links is a WordPress SEO plugin that helps people enhance their interlinking structure without too much hassle. The idea behind it is since Google and other search engines heavily attribute internal links and the structure of the site, it made sense to attempt to automatize the process, especially if your site is already established and it would be very time consuming to go back to every post and add these links manually. Along the way I added many other features like support for affiliate links, custom keywords, caching etc.

It all begun in 2008 when I first released the free version of the plugin. The plugin proceeded to become very popular and over the course of next two years reached more than 200,000 downloads, with a large number of reviews over the Internet including those at premier SEO industry locations like Search Engine Journal and others.

With the increasing plugin popularity one thing was inevitable - increased number of support and feature requests. Mind you, this was just one out of around 20 free plugins I developed by then, so the amount of day-to-day work just to respond to user requests was ridiculously big, greatly exceeding the amount of my free time. The free plugin also had some bugs due to the poor architecture chosen in the beginning so I knew I had to completely rewrite it.

I decided I will do that, but this time I will offer it as a paid product, and together with that offer rock-solid support as well as money back guarantee. I really had no other plans at that moment nor did I base my future income on the success of this project.

I released the premium plugin in December 2010. I did not know how will I promote it back then, so I organized a Twitter competition for three licenses and announced the winners in a nice video recorded drawing.

This gave the launch some wings and the plugin sales started.

During this time I also tried couple of ways of paid promotion including buying banner ads, advertising on warrior forum, even a review by the famous John Chow. None of it worked, it was a waste of money. I think one of the reasons it failed is that users visiting these places were used to the cheap products that sold them dreams. Mine was not cheap and certainly did not make any promises it can not fulfill. I also did not have (and still don't have) a typical sales page to which users are accustomed and to which I grew allergic over the time.

I set the lowest price to be $79 for the Personal edition of the plugin which you can use on one website. Professional edition allows you to install it on all your websites and costs $149. The Business edition has the most features, and it also allows you to install it on your client's site. It costs $299. The relatively high price (compared to average price of premium WordPress plugins) was also the indication of the tremendous effort put into creating the plugin, not just development but also research and my own SEO consulting experience accumulated over the years in the industry.

To date it sold 508 copies (about one a day on average) and this was enough to earn me just over $82,000 USD.

What do you think where did the most money come from - Personal, Professional or Business version?

If you thought the cheapest you would be wrong.

Note: the difference in totals here is due to some people upgrading between versions

All versions sold about equal number of copies, and because the Business version was 4 times as expensive it yielded as much more revenue than the Personal edition. That was a surprising fact, one I would have never guessed beforehand.

So if traditional marketing channels didn't work - what did?

As you can see from the sales reports affiliates contributed to about 16% of all sales. Two or three biggest affiliates split between them $6,000 USD. Looking back I should have promoted the plugin's affiliate program more as it is a great way to gain sales and it's also great for affiliates as I gave them a very nice 40% commission on all sales.

However bulk of the sales came from links in my own plugins. Since I had so many popular WordPress plugins I decided that it would be a good idea to include the link with the information about SEO Smart Links Premium to the Settings page of these plugins. These links would then be seen by WordPress users who are presumably happily using my other plugins and would potentially be interested in owning a premium SEO plugin. That meant very targeted "advertising" which resulted in a steady stream of sales.

This also means that all these free plugins I gave the community were now working for me. I often hear plugin developers say that free plugins are a waste of time, but in my example they were exactly the channel that generated the most leads.

Over the time I played with the idea of releasing the premium version of two other plugins, namely Smart Youtube and SEO Friendly Images.

Smart Youtube is insanely popular WordPress plugin with over 1.2 million downloads to date. I created the PRO version which included large number of new features and additions which took several months to develop but then decided to keep it free. The benefit of course is that the plugin became even more popular, getting 200,000 new downloads in just few months.

I still plan to launch the premium version of SEO Friendly Images as I created some very useful features that automatically adhere to the latest Google Image posting guidelines. I reckon that with two premium plugins one could easily have a nice living with about $4,000-$8,000 USD monthly in revenue from plugin sales alone.

I guess the best thing about having this kind of business is that once the plugin is created, everything is running more or less on auto-pilot.

Today I am fortunate to be working on a much bigger project that both earns for my living, but does so for 15 more people too and in the process helps thousands of users save their precious time. I am talking about ManageWP and I will leave the story about it for some other time.

Comments and questions welcome.

Easy Way to Check Your Backlinks using Google Analytics

Vladimir — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:51:08 +0000

It sounds obvious but many people fail to realize that google analytics is able to provide them with a list of not only the backlinks to the site but also those best performing backlinks.

So next time you see in the reports Referring sites sent 5,882 visits via 680 sources expand those sources to find backlinks from places you did not even know existed.

There are several things to do from there.

Use filters (excludes/contains keyword) to find interesting sources
Check why they gave you a backlink and find a way to get more using the same principle
You can also check the incoming visits for conversions to see should you invest more in that source of traffic
At the very least you can check the incoming traffic for bounce rate and identify the sources that do very well for you. Send a thank you email to them

10 Online Services for Tracking Keyword Rankings in Search Engines

Vladimir — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:38:37 +0000

Here is the list of all online services that I know of which you can use to track your keyword ranking on Google.

If course there is also ManageWP (with Business package) which is one of the most affordable ones and comes with whole range of other goodies as well included in the price.

If we can’t do that, then we ought’a go broke

Vladimir — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:04:26 +0000

At the age of only 31, Steve Jobs has already been able to express his fascinating vision, luckily documented for all future generations in the series of videos now available on Youtube.

It's an amazing example of how to build the fanatical corporate culture through nothing more other then strong motivation of every individual involved.

At 13:30 watch and learn how to create a company. "World does not care about our internal struggles", Jobs said.

Meaningful Gamification

Vladimir — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 16:21:28 +0000

Gamification has been one of the hot Internet trends lately.

If you are not familiar with the term - Gamification is a process of taking game mechanics and bringing it to businesses that are otherwise boring.

There is a lot of talk about Gamification and it seems that every new service nowadays has some form of it implemented. This Ted Talk suggests that 50% of all innovation and 70% of top global 2000 apps will be gamified by 2015.

The guy is all excited about it, but I cringe in horror. Why?

Since Stack Overflow started using badges, and then companies relying their entire business on gamification (Foursquare) we can see others more and more trying to forcingly add the layer of "game" to their products which in more cases then not, fails miserably. Games are all about the joy of playing them and these companies and their expensive consultants think they can just use a template score/reward/badge system and slap it onto their product and then move onto the next feature request?

This makes me angry as I am an avid gamer, and I love all kind of games. I have played almost every good video game since 1985. I have a collection of around 50 board games. I've created and coded the first MUD (Multi User Dungeon - things people played before MMORPG's came) on our University, then proceeded to play this game tirelessly with my friends both night and day time.

I've recently came upon two Gamification views that I agree with. Scott Nicholson is the board games expert and knows a thing or two about games.

This guy is onto something too.

For the sake of all of us, but mostly for our children's sake, I hope that the games in the future will not be degraded to the level Zynga does in the present.

40 million minutes

Vladimir — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 15:33:20 +0000

This is, more or less, how much every one of us is expected to live.

More than a few times I can remember minutes lasting like an eternity. For example when holding my breath. Or when I was watching my daughter being born. So looking at the number from that perspective, it really seems a lot, with plenty of spare time to be bored even.

Yet when I remember that I lived almost 19 million of those minutes already, it does not seem that much. It would be cool if I had 19 million memories to associate with those minutes spent, but I don't.

I think everyone should know there is still long way to go but also be aware that they are getting closer there. It is never too late to start thinking about doing something good and leaving some kind of a legacy.

One of my favorite Pink Floyd songs is called "Time".

Things are good. Actually, great.

Vladimir — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 19:58:21 +0000

In case you are wondering why it took one month for this blog post, it's because things were doing really good. Great, actually.

Two days ago I became a dad to a beautiful baby girl, Petra. As my friend says, I am no longer the son, now I am the father. I have witnessed the birth and it's the kind of experience I would recommend to all future dads.

We started preparing for this about a month ago, buying all the things for the baby's room. Gosh there are so many things you need, and you have no clue about them.

At the same time I was approaching the high point of my professional career so far, with the launch of the ManageWP startup. 18 months of hard work, considerable investment in money and time and we finally pulled it off. The launch day is here, but I can be relaxed knowing that the team did a great job preparing for the event.

I want to be spending more time with my family, and knowing that everything is set up and running fine at work means a lot for the peace of mind. Becoming profitable after the pre-order month does help too.

In about a month from now I will be visiting my estate on the island of Brac to prune the olive trees. We got 18 trees, and this gives us about 50-60 liters of pure olive oil every year. I often think how lucky I am to have this. I know that no matter what happens I will always have this priceless sanctuary to go to when I get older.

All pieces started to fall into the right place at the right time.

What should we write about next – WordPress plugin

Vladimir — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 23:37:23 +0000

After a long time here is another plugin from our brewery. This one is really handy.

"What should we write about next" allows your users to quickly leave feedback at the end of your posts.

The idea behind this plugin is very simple - allow your visitors to leave a quick feedback about what would they want to read next on your site.

This improves interaction, gives you topic ideas and makes your visitors feel useful. It's a win-win plugin.

We originally used it on ManageWP blog but I decided to share it with WordPress community as well.

Click to visit What should we write about next plugin.

Funny how as soon as I've put it here I started getting suggestions like write about what sports you play. You can't be serious you want to read about that ? :)