How To Promote Your Website For Free

This method is easy and straightforward, all you need to do is to design a simple mechanism to give some sort of virtual points to your online visitors. Let's take a look at Poged.

Poged is a gaming portal website which displays lots of online games information including MMO, MMORPG, medieval, role-playing, fantasy, sport, sci-fi, strategy and adventure games. So if you are looking for new games to play or searching for game information updates, Poged is the place to go.

What interests me most is the way they try to promote their website - they have something called Poged dollar. There are several ways to make Poged dollars, e.g.

- Visit their website every day and earn 40 dollars
- Leave a comment and get 100 dollars, only once per day
- Complete your member profile, and get 150 dollars
- "Like" them on Facebook, give them a "plus" on Google, or "Follow" them on Twitter, you get 120 dollars
- Invite a friend to sign up, you earn 250 dollars

And what do you do with those dollars? With Poged dollars, you can redeem those virtual dollars for free stuff like game gold, game items, game time cards, beta keys and etc.

Now, if you can implement a similar system with your website, what can you offer to your visitors? Free blog mentions? Free service trial? Free consulting? Free product sample?

5 Recommended Offshore Web Hosting Providers

Usually US based web hosting is a popular choice for most website owners. Most of the US providers offer a good variety of hosting plans with a decent service and reasonable price. However, sometimes, for some obvious reasons, people would prefer to host their websites with an offshore web hosting company.

Here are a few service providers I used in the past few months. In general, those which offer shared web hosting, also provide VPS hosting, but not the other way round.

If you need more offshore web hosts, check out my other post Best Reliable Offshore Web Hosting. If you want more privacy and are looking for web hosting companies that accept Bitcoin payment, check out another of my post 10 Offshore Web Hosting Companies That Accept Bitcoin.

Offshore Shared Web Hosting

Root.lu (Luxembourg) - €2/month, 250 MB Storage, Unlimited Bandwidth, 1 Domain

KnownSRV (Netherlands, Luxemburg, Romania) - $2.95/month, 5 GB Storage, 30 GB Bandwidth, Unlimited Domains

Shine Servers (Netherlands) - $3.34/month, 5GB Storage, 1 TB Bandwidth, 3 Domains

WRZHost (Netherlands, Hong Kong) - $2/month, 1 GB Storage, 50 GB Bandwidth, 1 Domain

Offshore VPS Hosting

Ecatel (Netherlands) - €29/month, 80GB Storage, 2GB RAM, 10TB on 100 mbit unshared

Search Engine Not Indexing Your Posts?

First of all, I assume that you are using the most popular webmaster tools developed by the most popular search engine, well, you know which one. In "Index Status", you noticed that you only have very few URLs being indexed, e.g. around 1~3. And you remember that you already submitted a sitemap for your blog. According to the section "Crawl", "Sitemaps", you have over 100 pages submitted, and over 100 pages indexed. So, how come you only have 2 URLs being indexed?

Why is search engine not indexing your posts correctly? A possible reason is that when you set up your profile in webmaster tools, you add your site name incorrectly. For example, if your domain name is some--domain--name.com, some--domain--name.com is very different from www.some--domain--name.com in the eyes of search engine. If you add www.some--domain--name.com as your site name in the profile, and try to update the search engine by "Crawl", "Fetch as", you will get a redirect error message. If you add some--domain--name.com as your site name in the profile and "Fetch", you will get a message saying "Status: Complete, URL and linked pages submitted to index..."

I have a WordPress website which only has 30+ blog pages, and the total number of URLs indexed is well over 100, probably some URLs including those tags and etc. So, if you have an extremely low number of URLs indexed, check if you are naming your website incorrectly. In the user interface, I don't see a place where you can change / edit your website name, I guess you have to start a new profile.

Sentinel Theme Setup

This post is a reminder of how I set up my Sentinel theme. I bought the theme in Jan, and didn't bother to update the theme since then. Yesterday, I decided to update the theme, and here are a few things that I did.

The error “The image could not be loaded.” and post text wrapping image problem - I suppose there are many ways to solve this problem, but I just remove line 686-801 in global.js in folder js, and the problem goes away.

Add an Adsense 468x60 banner ad at the top right corner - Edit header-1.php in folder templates/header, comment out line 36-37, add the Adsense code after line 35. To make the ad looking better, I put the ad code inside a <div style='float:right; margin-top:14px;'> </div>

Remove the orange message "Navigation Menu can be added in Appearances -> Menu" at the bottom right corner - If you don't use a menu at that location, an error message will appear. Edit footer-bottom.php in folder templates/footer, comment out line 19-28.

Remove comments number, likes number, and author box in blog post - Edit blog-single-1.php in folder templates/blog, comment out line 28-29, and 43. Edit htmlPrinterPost.php in folder printers, comment out line 104-112.

Remove comments number in the front page - Edit recentPosts.php in folder visualComposer, comment out line 87.

That's about it for now. Obviously, you can do a lot of modifications to set it up the way you like it. Overall, the theme is getting better and better, e.g. the front page sidebar and visualComposer are working now.

$20 for Lots of Themes / Graphics / Goodies

The latest Digital Trends Bundle from Envato is quite tempting. You get more than 40 files with value over $500 for just $20. To be exact, this digital bundle consists of 16 GraphicRiver items, 4 ThemeForest items, 8 PhotoDune items, 5 AudioJungle items, 9 VideoHive items, and 1 CodeCanyon.

The items that most interested me are the 2 WordPress theme items - Presso, clean & modern magazine theme and Ubergrid, responsive grid wordpress theme, and the CodeCanyon item - Digital Paybox. Presso and Ubergrid are listed as two of the popular themes recently, you can't go wrong with them! And Digital Paybox seems to be quite useful as a payment processing tool for any WordPress sites, it works with a number of payment gateways including PayPal, Payza / Alertpay, krill / Moneybookers, Authorize.Net, InterKassa, EgoPay, Perfect Money, Credit / Debit Cards (via Stripe), Bitcoins (via BitPay).

Everything sounds good, I was about to order it, but then I noticed the bold sentence in the bundle description, "Due to the exclusive nature of the Digital Trends Bundle, the Bundle items are purchased ‘as-is’, meaning no Bundle files are eligible for item support or updates." So, that's the catch eh? It's a bit scary to buy a theme which does not provide supports and updates. Maybe this package should be renamed as "Trial Bundle", then prospective customers could expect that they would need to pay later to get supports and updates. But of course, if you find other items (those that most likely don't need updates) useful, $20 is still a good deal for this trial bundle.

How to add a sidebar to Sentinel WordPress Theme frontpage

A friend of mine also bought a copy of Sentinel theme and wondered how to add a right sidebar to the frontpage. Indeed, many people would like to have such an option so to display a pretty AdSense 300x600 vertical ad or other stuff on the sidebar. The latest update has not yet solved this problem. So here is some more detail.

You might have tried all the options in the page editor or theme settings page, but the sidebar just never show up. Take a look at the source code, and you will notice that there is a comment "<!-- No sidebar -->".

Open page-1.php in templates/home, and page-1-sb-right.php in templates/page.

Replace line 15 "<div class="grid">" of page-1.php with line 17 "<div class="grid sidebar_right">" of page-1-sb-right.php

and

replace line 30 "<!-- No sidebar -->" of page-1.php with line 36 "<?php get_sidebar(); ?>" of page-1-sb-right.php.

Of course, you can modify, add or delete other items for your frontpage as well.

Just received an update notification from the plugin Visual Composer, hopefully the coming Sentinel update will include a working Visual Composer as well. That's about it for now.