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Fixing the “Error: Please fill the required fields (name, email).” WordPress Issue in Comments Reply

Fixing the “Error: Please fill the required fields (name, email).” WordPress Issue in Comments Reply

Just a quick tip for anyone that is suddenly experiencing the following error when you or people on your WordPress installation are getting this error when commenting or replying to a comment:

Error: Please fill the required fields (name, email).

Here’s a screenshot:

Assuming the fields are all filled out properly or you are logged in, this is 99% likely caused by a plugin and the majority of the time, it’s the Jetpack plugin. You will have to disable the plugin and you will no longer encounter the error when commenting or replying.

Once you’ve identified which plugin is causing the issue, completely delete the plugin and re-install it and that should resolve the issue.

Hope that helps!

Get FREE Online Courses at Ivy League Schools NOW During the Pandemic Lockdown!

Get FREE Online Courses at Ivy League Schools NOW During the Pandemic Lockdown!

Hello everyone, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a chance to write a new blog post on here – 3 years in fact! The Covid-19 pandemic has the entire world in lock down as I write this, so what better time to catch up on some writing and education! First off, I hope you are all staying healthy and safe and I wish you all the very best during this difficult time.

If you’re like me, you’re currently not working but you’re the kind of person that needs to stay active, keep busy and keep that business mind sharp and well oiled. This is a perfect opportunity to look in to free courses and I found a GREAT resource offering free MOOCs from Ivy league schools like Harvard and many other prestigious institutions such as Duke University and Johns Hopkins. There’s even a Dinosaur course! If you want to just jump right in to the goods, you can find a complete list of available courses WITH A CERTIFICATE being offered for free for a limited time at https://www.classcentral.com/report/coursera-free-certificate-covid-19/

Let me explain what these courses are and how they work.

Let’s get the obvious question out of the way: What the heck is a MOOC?

MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course and is simply an online course that anyone can enroll in from around the world, and it typically features reading material, videos, assignments, and tests. They are also typically interactive, with community forums and will have peer graded assignments with students and professors.

The MOOC curriculum also tends to be very flexible, with no particular start date and it’s broken down in to weekly segments lasting anywhere from a month or more.

If you would like more detailed information about what a MOOC is or how they started, check out the Wiki page HERE for more information.

The awesome folks at Coursera.org are offering 85 of these MOOCs including a certificate if you pass, for absolutely nothing.

I personally signed up for 4 different courses and don’t worry about that price tag you see when you first sign up. When you get to the checkout page, it will automatically discount the course of the price at the final step and you will at NO POINT need a credit card, Paypal or any other form of payment.

Sign up and “pay” for each course and you will immediately be able to login, view your courses and start the MOOC(s) you signed up for. I broke down my day in to 1 hour blocks for each course, each day of the week. The pacing is very easy with about 5 to 6 hours needed per week per course and you are reminded when assignments are due or end of week quizzes must be completed.

This is the perfect opportunity to hone your current skills or learn a new one and build up your personal development for the challenges ahead. Ready to learn? You can get the complete list of course and sign up by clicking HERE!

Take care folks, see you on the other side of these unprecedented times, which will be over soon enough.

Dan

What do to when thinking of buying a website – Basic Research to avoid getting ripped off.

What do to when thinking of buying a website – Basic Research to avoid getting ripped off.

This is my first article in a long time and to be honest I never really thought I would find the time or inspiration to write again, but recent events that impacted friends of mine online pushed me to write at least one more piece.  With websites being easier than ever to publish online (we’re talking MINUTES), it is getting easier for people with less than stellar business practices to create legitimate looking websites and then sell them to unsuspecting beginners that are looking in to buying their first website or e-commerce business.  In this article, I will give you tips on how to perform very basic research that can avoid thousands of dollars in losses, legal fees and hours upon hours of anxiety and heartache from being ripped off, or at the very least, completely misled.

It’s important to note that most online website purchases that go awry are not illegal or necessarily fraudulent.  It’s simply a case of the buyer not asking the right questions, or perhaps more precisely, not know what the right questions are in the first place.  You wouldn’t buy a house without performing an inspection would you?  Or a car without taking it for a test drive?  Even buying something as simple as a cantaloupe, you probably have a trick to tell if it’s ready such as thumping it, or pressing the end of it and smelling it, or maybe rolling it down the aisle to see if it rolls straight and true.  Whatever your fruit purchasing methods are, the point is you have a vast database of checklists or must-do procedures before you buy anything.  Same thing goes for buying a website.

When it comes to buying a website, I actually have 3 simple rules I follow and I recommend to anyone.

  1. If the seller is boasting “HUGE POTENTIAL” or similar wording as a main selling point, I run away.
  2. The numbers have to make sense.
  3. A fair price in the simplest terms in most cases is the average monthly income for the last 3 months x 12.

Everything else in this article is centered around these 3 rules and if you stick to them, you’ll greatly decrease your chances of getting burned.  Let’s go over them.

This site has HUGE Potential!

When it comes to web real estate, nothing is more plentiful or as worthless as potential.  One of my favorite expressions is that money talks and bullshit walks.  When folks are touting potential as a reason to buy a website, you need to keep walking.  Classic example:

potentialexample

Potential is very subjective and quite frankly is something being sold to you on an emotional level, a gut feeling or maybe the promise of something great to come.  Emotional decision making in website purchasing, or any business decision really, will lead to disaster.

When someone is selling a site and they are pushing that it has “high potential”, “untapped niche”, or “proven market” or some other buzzwords without any kind of actual sales information or traffic information, this is a giant red flag.  It usually means that the seller has created a templated whitelabel website of some kind in the last month, assigned it to a recently purchased domain name and is looking to dump it for a quick sale.  This means the site has no customer base, no SEO optimizations, no traffic and ZERO revenue.  Basically you bought a site that probably cost $50 to make and will take you months of work and probably hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of additional development to get going.  These types of sites sell for prices all over the map, from $150 to $5000 and beyond, it’s crazy.

You should also be wary of people mentioning that the product or service being sold has been mentioned in Times Magazine or some other sort of publication.  If it says something about it being recommended by Doctor Oz, don’t walk… RUN!

Revenue

Most of the time, these template sites will have next to no revenue, or conveniently enough, revenue in the last month or so since the sale became available for purchase.  Get proof of all revenue claims by either bank statements, deposit statements, shopping cart reports or affiliate payout screenshots.  NEVER just accept revenue claims at face value, get proof.  Understand that if the site has JUST started making revenue, no matter what the amount is, assume this is a new site that isn’t making a dollar and won’t without you making a considerable effort to monetize your site.

In the example of a site suddenly making money in the last month, it’s safe to assume that the seller is pumping adword campaigns to drive some initial sales up as fast as possible to get the best price for their site.  As soon as you take over, those campaigns will be cut and the site will go to $0 in daily revenue almost overnight.  The same goes for a site that relies on ad revenue such as Adsense.  It takes tens of thousands of daily visitors to make decent revenue from the online ad market as CPM and CPC rates are minuscule.  If the site is suddenly generating hundreds of dollars a month in ad revenue, the seller is likely driving traffic to increase value.

As a general rule for anyone looking for a site that has an established revenue stream, look for a site that has been generating consistent or increasing revenue month to month for the last 6 to 12 months minimum.  Get proof and details of all earning claims and if a seller isn’t willing to share that kind of information, move on.  Obviously don’t expect the seller to divulge the magic sauce that makes the site a financial success in all cases (it’s usually obvious) but they do need to back up all revenue claims.

Site Age

When you buy a car or a home, what’s the first thing you ask?  Hopefully it’s the same thing I ask… how old is it?  The same thing goes for purchasing a website, you absolutely need to know how old the site is.  And once again, don’t just take the seller’s word for it, find it for yourself.  There’s a number of ways to check and see how long a domain has been around, but also to verify how long that site has been running on it.  It’s easy to own a domain for 3 years, but only launch a site on it 2 weeks ago.

First off, find out how long the domain has been registered, and you can do that at http://www.whois.sc for free, it’s a great site I’ve used for my whois searching for many years.  If you run this search for my blog, you can see that danrichard.com has been registered since February 9th 2006.  Wow, 11 years already?!

whois

You’ve now established that the site has been registered for several years, but that could just mean that the person owned the domain for years and only recently decided to launch a site on the domain or perhaps they only recently purchased the domain from someone else.  So what’s the next step?  Find out how long the website has been operating on that domain, and I love to use the Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web/ to check that out.  This will show you just about every major change to that site running on that domain since the domain was registered.  You’ll see a lot of broken images but it still gives you a very good idea of what that site you are thinking of buying looked like a month ago, 5 months ago or 5 years ago.  If the seller is claiming the site has been running for 6 months but never monetized so it has “huge potential”, this is a good way to check out how long the site has actually been around in its present form.  Here’s how it looks when looking at my blog’s archive:

wayback01

Here’s how my site looked back in 2006 when we first started… awww!

wayback02

Traffic

Similar to revenue, traffic claims must all be proven, and again can be misleading.  First off, if a site is being sold claiming it has established traffic of any kind, do not accept any other source of proof other than Google Analytics.  Server logs can be tampered with and screenshots can be from anything, so the only acceptable proof should be GA.  Again, if the user gives a seemingly valid excuse for the site not running Google Analytics or it happens to be broken, big red flag.  A website seller with good intentions would make absolutely sure that GA was running properly on their site.  If you’re seriously considering purchasing a site, create a Gmail account and ask the owner to add your Google account as read only to the site’s Google Analytics profile.  You will then be able to access the GA account for that site for yourself to analyze the traffic.

Again much like the revenue, check and see if traffic has been steady or growing for the last 6 to 12 months.  If the site is brand new yet has traffic pumping in, the seller is probably purchasing traffic to boost the value of the site.  Again, if you purchase the site, those campaigns will stop and your traffic will plummet back to nearly zero.  Use GA to look at where the traffic is coming from, referrers and geographical breakdown.   If the bulk of the traffic is coming from just a few key sites (and they are probably irrelevant to the topic of the site being sold) or 70% of your traffic is from India, there’s a VERY good chance the traffic is purchased trash traffic.

Costs

DO NOT FORGET COSTS!  Websites cost money to run so along with those beautiful revenue reports and traffic reports, do not forget to get full cost breakdowns.  Hosting, ad costs, traffic buying, affiliate payouts, shipping or processing costs, vendor payouts, licensing costs, software licensing etc.  Make sure you account for every dollar!  $2000 in monthly revenue doesn’t looks as impressive when you realize it required $1500 in Adwords to get that.

Do the numbers make sense?

Don’t be so overwhelmed by the fact that this is a website that you forget some very common sense and logical business decision making.  Check and make sure the math adds up.

Is the seller claiming thousands in monthly revenue but selling the site for $1000 or some other low asking price that makes no sense?  Why sell a site that makes $5000 a month for $2000 when the seller could probably just leave it on autopilot or hire someone off-shore to run it and make a profit with next to no effort?  Red flags… red flags EVERYWHERE!

Generating online revenue and traffic takes effort and time, it is not overnight for a new site unless someone wants to flip a site as quickly as possible for the best possible price.  If a site is new, then expect it to take a long time to generate revenue and traffic, there are no shortcuts and the price should reflect that.  If a site that was established a month ago is bringing in 25,000 visitors a day and making $150 a day out the gate, that just doesn’t make sense.  The only exception to this would be if the site was launched by a company that has a massive network of other sites that were leveraged to pump traffic to the new property, and if that’s the case, what happens to that support after you buy it?  The most likely answer is you can kiss it goodbye.

Another expression I like… value perceived is value achieved.  If the seller can convince you the site is worth a fortune, you’ll pay a fortune, easy as that.  Be very wary of sellers temporarily launching heavy ad and/or traffic campaigns to boost up a site’s KPIs to get the biggest price possible.

For older sites, check out as much data as possible and look for seasonality and other factors that can influence revenue.  Run a trend report on the niche and see if it’s steady or in decline.  A good example would be phone cases… several years ago, you could make a fortune selling phone cases and accessories online and drop-shipping to customers.  Dollarama stores, the Wish app and Amazon cornered and killed that market and it’s almost non-existent for independents now.  How many bought those sites without knowing the decline and paid a fortune for a business that became worthless a year later.  Here’s a simple trend report from Google trends on cell phone cases:

cellphonetrend

Check the numbers and make sure everything makes sense.  If you’re not sure, either back out or get professional help from a qualified web analyst.

What is a fair price for a website?

It is really hard to give you a hard-coded recipe for the proper asking price for a website, but as a general acceptable rule, you want to start off with a price that is somewhere around the monthly average net revenue of the last 3 months, multiplied by 12.  Depending on cost of sales, some folks will also use gross revenue, but I would recommend being very careful if COS is more than 20% of gross revenue.

So if a site made $1500 in January, $1300 in February and $1600 in March, you would do the following:

((1500 + 1300 + 1600) / 3) * 12 = 17,600

So expect to be in the $17,600 range for this site.  Previous performance is mostly irrelevant so that’s why you want to stick to the last 3 months.  This works in favor for both the seller or the buyer… if the site is increasing in revenue month to month, then the seller is getting a better price whereas if the site is on a downward trend, you’re not buying the site based on performance that is no longer valid.  If the site has been steady for many years, check the seasonality for revenue and traffic to avoid getting jacked on the price.  For example, perhaps the site sales are very low in the spring but super high in during the holiday seasons and you’re buying in January.  If you use the 3 month rule mentioned above, you’ll be basing your numbers on a very high average.  You should normalize the revenue to account for seasonality and adjust accordingly, but remember you need a few years of steady revenue to know if you’re dealing with a growth or loss trend vs seasonality.  With a trend, the incline or decline will be consistent, whereas with seasonality you should see inclines and declines that repeat year over year.

I would also highly recommend you use an Escrow service for large transactions.  Personally I would go with Escrow for any website purchase over $5000 with 50% released at start of transition and the remaining balance after client sign-off on transition completion.

Final Thoughts

Remember that there are thousands of websites available for purchase every day so there is no need to rush.  Be patient and only buy when you’re 100% comfortable (and followed everything in this article) and you’ll virtually eliminate getting ripped off or purchasing a site that did not come even close to your expectations.

You should also consider WHAT you are purchasing in terms of functionality and addressing your business needs.  Ask yourself, does the site in question even work the way you want?  Is it easy to maintain?  Is it cost-effective?  Are you paying $5000 to inherit someone else’s problem when you could be spending that same amount for a site completely custom designed from the ground up to your exact specifications?

When in doubt, don’t be afraid to consult and hire a professional in the same fashion as hiring a house inspector when purchasing property.  Treat digital real estate the same way, know what you’re getting in to or hire an unbiased professional to give the web property a thorough inspection and provide you with a detailed breakdown to assist you to make an informed decision.

I hope this article will help you make smart business decisions and I invite you to contact me should you need additional advice or would like to me to audit a site for you.  You’re also welcomed to leave a comment below with your own feedback or suggestions for smart site shopping.

All the best!
Dan

Lighting Guide – Simple Guide for Mastering Portrait Lighting Setups in your Studio

Lighting Guide – Simple Guide for Mastering Portrait Lighting Setups in your Studio

Hey guys, sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted anything new, just been busy with projects and work but I do miss working on my blog and other personal online goodies I used to run.  Anyhow, I found this online the other day and thought I’d share it. Ever wish you had a simple guide that showed you how to setup specific types of portrait lighting?  Check out this super simple guide I found from www.digitalcameraworld.com, it really takes a ton of guesswork out of how to set up your lights for that perfect portrait look you want.

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Enjoy!
Dan

The Death of Tutorial Portals – A look at the Big 3 in 2013 and Suggested Counter-Measures for Webmasters.

The Death of Tutorial Portals – A look at the Big 3 in 2013 and Suggested Counter-Measures for Webmasters.

It was a matter of time I suppose, an inevitable evolution as web behavior continues to shift, morph and push technological boundaries at an alarming rate.  More precisely, the ADHD generation of web users combined with massive strides in search engine results accuracy and perhaps a dash of lack of interest has destroyed the tutorial search portal business model.  For my long-time readers, you don’t have to ask, but for those of you fairly new to the world of online tutorials you might of never heard of the tutorial giants – Good-Tutorials.com, Tutorialized.com and Pixel2life.com.  These 3 companies battled long and hard for top search engine placement, diehard fans, streamlined UIs and dominance of the tutorial aggregate site niche.  In the mid to late 2000s, these sites were huge and brought in tens of thousands of visitors every day and considered the gold standard of free tutorial listings.  But as 2010 rolled around, it appears the wheels started to break free from what appeared to be a rock-solid frame.

Today these sites have plummeted in traffic, rank and audience.  Tutorialized.com and Pixel2life.com were sold to new owners in 2010 – 2011 that converted one site in to an ad laden cesspool of affiliate offers and the other seemed to fall in to autopilot while the owners fell asleep at the helm.  For Good-Tutorials.com, they seemed to have turned off all development and just let it chug along like an old 1988 Dodge Aries that refuses to die but gets harder to drive up the hill every morning.  A quick look at Alexa paints a fairly nasty picture:

blog_alexa_gt

 

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You can see that all sites suffer from identical markers of a site dying a slow painful death.  It’s important to note that you can only see the Alexa ranks from 2012 to 2013 and there was already huge drops since 2010 to 2012 that you can’t see in the graph.  The other alarming number is the dominance of traffic from India rather than the USA, especially for GT and Tutorialized with GT at almost 30% traffic from India.  These sites were previously ALL 50% or higher USA traffic sources with Alexa US ranking way below 10k, but with the lack of social presence, development and user interest, the sites are now exposed to non-premium traffic, which destroys the ability of the site to run top paying advertisers and affiliate offers needed for the precious revenue to keep these sites worth running.  The bounce rates, time on site and page views are also unhealthy signs of sites that are on the way to a website graveyard.

The question at this point is what happened and how do you stop this from happening to YOUR website before it’s too late.  What you may find interesting is that while tutorial aggregate portals like the big 3 are petering off, original content tutorial sites catering to specific niches are still doing quite well, in fact probably better than ever.  It’s becoming easier for people to find these sites through long-tail keyword searches on search engines so they no longer have to even rely on these portals for traffic anymore.  With basic SEO and patience, it’s hard not to succeed at some small level.  With bigger investments (in terms of time and development) and smarter marketing, you can stand to make a nice little profit once you understand how the web works today.

So what happened to the big 3 exactly?  In the most basic terms, they were mismanaged at a time when Google started making huge strides in long-tail keyword search results making it MUCH easier to locate tutorials for exactly what you wanted right from Google instead of having to sift through results on an aggregate that suffered from ancient Boolean search logic with sometimes sketchy results and 404 links once you finally found what you needed.  It was the perfect storm and all 3 major sites sailed directly in to the teeth of the seething maw of web destruction.  Once the downpour ceased it’s pummeling drive, some seriously battered websites floated out of the haze and have been drifting ever since and even now the seams continue to widen and water is pouring in, dragging them under.  The sites also allowed clutter to build up and standards started to slip both in terms of tutorial quality and advertisers and the situation would only worsen as users continued to drop as they discovered much easier methods of finding tutorials for free.  The sites with forums were further mangled by out-of-control spam, rendering the forums virtually useless to any valid users looking to be part of the community.

The final straw that broke the e-camel’s back was the massive implosion of online ad pricing, which saw a massive drop virtually overnight on all major networks.  After several years of high CPC prices with AdSense and other small competitors and the absolute insane earnings from the short-lived Yahoo Ad Network beta phase (think nerds, hookers and blow) prices went from dollars per click to a penny per click or lower.  Many webmasters found themselves unable to pay basic living costs once the ad market crashed and some bailed for steady employment, others fought to get through it, and some simply moved in to their mother’s basement and continue to fight the good fight!  This was actually one of the major factors that led me to dump the tutorial portal side of P2L’s business (I still run the hosting) and focus on more productive revenue generation.  2008 was most definitely gone and would never be repeated.

Pixel2life daily traffic from better times – 30k visits a day!

I founded Pixel2life – it was my creation, my baby, my passion and my fulltime business for many years and when it changed so I could pursue new challenges, it was done so with the very best of intentions and was assured that my site was in good hands.  It pains me to see what has happened to my beloved P2L, the tutorial community and the sites I used to consider threats to my livelihood.  While I know there is nothing I can do for P2L at this point even if it handed back to me today on a silver platter, I will always value the MASSIVE amount of lessons learned in every aspect of web development and management that I carry with me today.

Another benefit from the demise of P2L is that I can impart some advise to you, my readers, to help you preserve your website and possibly your livelihood.  If you run or want to run a website and want it to thrive for years to come, here are 12 lessons from me to you:

  1.  Always try to gear your site to a particular focused niche and try to cater to a niche made up of a buying audience rather than an audience looking for something free.  P2L was geared towards people looking for free tutorials, so when it came to looking for ways of converting on that traffic, it was a nightmare.  Another site I ran that provided product reviews for a particular niche had 10 times LESS traffic than P2L, but actually generated about double the revenue. The people that used that website were looking to buy products and just wanted to find out of it was worth it… it’s not hard to convert on an audience that has one hand on the mouse and the other wrapped around their credit card.
  2. Know your niche like the back of your hand.  If you’re not an authority on your niche, your audience will know it and will look elsewhere.  Live and breath your niche and become the dominant name in that field – this was critical to both my tutorial company and my collectibles company.
  3. Write original content that has not been done to death.  Forget about aggregate sites in general – Facebook, Reddit and Google have killed most of those opportunities so focus on providing your own unique content that can’t be found anywhere else and you’ll find other likeminded people that want to digest it.
  4. Listen to your audience, they are telling you what your competitors are already working on simply by telling you what they want.  If you don’t do it, someone will – that’s actually why I started P2L to begin with.
  5. Learn everything you can about SEO, it’s really important.  There are simple factors in search engine optimization that can make a HUGE difference in how much traffic search engines send your way.  At the same time, there are fatal mistakes you can make on your site that can turn search engines away from you and could take months to recover even if you manage to fix them.
  6. Constantly question every aspect of your website to ensure you’re not instilling a sense of blind cruise control.  Don’t confuse this with indecision or questioning your business sense…  what you want to do is ensure that your site logically makes sense and your business model is relevant and effective.  Why does your site exist?  Does it make sense?  Why would users come here instead of a competitor?
  7. There’s no such thing as an auto-pilot site.  The second you take your foot off the gas and let the site run on auto-pilot is the second someone is taking advantage of your lack of interest to threaten your market share.
  8. Don’t be afraid of change and evolution of your site, the web and the audience.  As social media and user generated content continues to dominate the web, things like “I don’t need a twitter account” are emotion based statements founded on fear of change.  If you want to have a business online that thrives, you’d better know where people gather and then make yourself heard.
  9. Put yourself in the user’s shoes and pretend to search the web like a regular person who has never heard of your site before.  If you have a business called Joe’s Bowls in Sacramento with a niche site on decorative ceramic bowls, then no one is going to open up Google and type Joe’s Bowls if they’ve never heard of you.  Be realistic and search ‘ceramic bowl store Sacramento’.  Are you anywhere to be found in the search results?  Check out your social media channels and those of your competitor.  Who’s more engaging and why?  If you can afford it, hire some folks for a focus group and get honest opinions.  You would be shocked at what you find out.
  10. Manage your site like a project, with a clear charter, project scope, work breakdown structure with deadlines and milestones.  Have the capital required to hire a top notch developer if you want to do it right the first time and do not let ANYONE compromise your delivery dates.  The more your drag out and delay a project, the longer you delay building up your business and generating revenue.
  11. Easy or hard, your decisions should be based on numbers and logic, not emotions.  Don’t become so attached to something that you ignore the facts.  I have this as number 10, but it’s one of the most fatal mistakes a webmaster can make.  AB test everything, learn how to use Google Analytics and study conversion.  Your site is a business, and successful businesses have a proper business model, a P&L and management decisions are based of actual data.  If your site is on a downward trend, then you need to investigate and address it, not dig in and ride it out or stick your head in the sand.  Otherwise you could follow the big 3 in to obscurity.
  12. Love what you do.  If you’re going to run your own website and business for years to come, you had better love the subject matter.

Do you miss the good ol’ P2L days?  Have some thoughts on what I wrote?  Please share them by using the comment form below, I read everything you guys send me.

Thanks for reading!
Dan