1. There’s more than one way to get things done. Just as there’s more than one way to solve an angry birds puzzle, don’t just rely on a single source to guide you through your blogging experience. Most people are biased in favor of what they themselves have been successful with. Experiment and learn from it, and you may come up with a solution of your own.  There’s more than one way to write a successful blog. 

2. Don’t give up.  Some angry birds levels are incredibly difficult. They almost seem impossible to complete. You get the same feeling sometimes if your traffic plateaus, or you get a case of writer’s block. Just don’t give up because the next great idea is often around the corner.  Great blogs aren’t built overnight, and you need a consistent pace to get to where you want.

3. Timing is crucial. Some levels require you to interact with birds in flight. Here timing is always critical. Same goes with blogging. If you strike while the iron is hot, pick the right topics, you get more attention.  Pick up on hot news in your niche and give your own spin to it.  Writing about the topic of the hour will almost certainly get you more attention and reactions from your readers.

4. Pick a path and fine-tune accordingly. Perhaps the most important trait to have with Angry Birds is learning from your previous mistakes. Finetuning your writing and blogging strategy is just as important as finetuning your trajectory on Angry Birds.  Test different advertising placements, tweak your niche and test out new ways of writing which you haven’t done before.  Changes you make when you blog don’t need to be radical.  Once you find out what works best for your blog, just zero in and focus on it.

5. Have fun. In the end, just like putting birds in flight to combat pigs who steal eggs, blogging is meant to be fun. If it isn’t , or if things start to get you down, then take a step back, smell the roses and try again another day

James Yeang runs Friedbeef.com, and is hopelessly distracted by Angry Birds whenever he picks up his iPad.  Ironcally, he has also written about 12 geeky techniques to stop yourself from slacking off.

©2011 SheepTech

5 Things Angry Birds Can Teach You About Blogging

Who would have thought the same design would be cloned and made available publicly to all WordPress users for free? In 6 hours, Sahas of Skattertech had successfully replicated the design (along with most of its functionality, if not all) and released it as a WordPress theme under the name, Qawker.

You can compare this demo blog with that of any Gawker’s blog and have yourself amazed. The theme can be downloaded for free here.

©2011 SheepTech

Qawker: WordPress Theme Cloning Gawker’s Design

Money Made

AdSense: $857.23 (+$140.31)
Infolinks: $47.74 (+$3.82)
BlogAds: $40.40 (+$9.40)
ContextWeb: $10.62 (-$1.84)
SocialSpark: $25 (-$375)
Private ad: $58.33 (+$25)

Total: $1039.32 (-$198.31)

Other Statistics

Uptime: 99.94% (27 minutes downtime)
RSS subscribers: 675
Facebook Page fans: 200

Thank You SheepTech’s Sponsors

• Crucial – Is your computer running slow? Crucial can help. A memory upgrade is one of the most affordable, effective ways to boost performance!
• Tech Bargains – Help you figure out what is best to buy, why it’s best, and where to buy it at a good price.
• Disk Drill (article) – Recovers data from HFS/HFS+, FAT, NTFS & other file systems right from your Mac.
• YapTime (article) – A free private gathering place for the important groups in your life to have discussions, share photos, videos, and events.

©2011 SheepTech

SheepTech January11 Report Card

Traffic

For the past one year, SheepTech had receive more than half a million visitors, peaking in December with 64,598.


Revenue

*no data for revenue before March 2010

Revenue peaked in December too with a record breaking $1,237.63, a five fold increment comparing to that of March 2010.

Other Statistics

To be honest, SheepTech wasn’t launched at the best time. I was having a major exam in high school in 2008, and the year after, I got myself into a flying school. Not much time were spent on the blog, resulting in a very low number of published articles (216 articles in 3 years is laughable).

Fun Facts

SheepTech.com was first registered in 2004, according to archive.org. The archived page is just showing the host’s welcome page, probably nothing was ever built using this domain.

SheepTech once had a PageRank of 7 in June 2008. That was of course only temporary. SheepTech now has a PageRank of 4.

The username sheeptech was registered on YouTube by someone else in May 2008. That account was created for his music project, and apparently he uploaded a video featuring techno music with a brief appearance of a sheep.

SheepTech.com now uses the username SheepTechTV on YouTube. Lesson to be learned, register your brand name as soon as possible across all social sites before it’s too late.

©2011 SheepTech

SheepTech is Now 3 Year Old

As expected, there’s a sharp drop of traffic in Christmas and New Year Eve, but overall traffic for the month remains more or less the same as November. Alexa ranking broke the 100,000 mark, ranking at 97,152 at the time of writing.

Money Made

SheepTech had finally reached $1,000 revenue mark, thanks to the holiday season.

AdSense: $716.92 (+$5.40)
Infolinks: $43.92 (+$5.02)
BlogAds: $31 (+$2.30)
ContextWeb: $12.46 (+$6.55)
Social Spark: $400 (+$400)
Private ad: $33.33 (+$0)

Total: $1,237.63 (+$419.2)

Uptime, RSS subscribers

99.98% uptime with 9 minutes of downtime. RSS subscribers went up and down from 580-ish to >600.

Thank You SheepTech’s Sponsors

• Crucial – Is your computer running slow? Crucial can help. A memory upgrade is one of the most affordable, effective ways to boost performance!
• Tech Bargains – Help you figure out what is best to buy, why it’s best, and where to buy it at a good price.
• Happy Web Hosting – Get the most from your web host! Independent web hosting guide with reviews, news, tips, and deals.
• LG Optimus 7 (article) – The LG Optimus 7 is LG’s first Windows Phone 7 device featuring 3.8″ capacitive TFT LCD screen, DLNA, 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon among other features.
• TiVo Premiere (article) – TiVo Premiere is much more than a DVR. It’s a cable box, a movie box, a web box, and a music box. With Premiere, you’ll not only get the world’s best DVR, you’ll enjoy access to a vast universe of broadband entertainment.
• App Cat (article) – Create your own iPhone app in 7 minutes by email.

©2011 SheepTech

SheepTech December10 Report Card

The <!--INFOLINKS_OFF--> tag is supposed to get the job done easily, but it doesn’t on my blog, no matter where I insert the tag. The in-text ad is still appearing at inappropriate section, such as the sidebar and comment section.

The culprit? W3 Total Cache.

With the HTML minifying feature enabled, all html comment tags is being removed, including the <!--INFOLINKS_OFF--> tag.

The good news is you don’t have to sacrifice the minifying feature just for the Infolinks off tag to work. Just simply include the tag in W3 Total Cache’s ignore list and W3TC will leave it alone.

You can do that via Performance > Minify > HTML > Ignored comment stems. Enter “INFOLINKS_OFF” in the list.

The off tag will now work as intended. Insert it in sections you want to keep clean and Infolinks will no longer show up. If you are not using W3 Total Cache, you might want to check if you have other plugin with similar HTML minifying feature.

©2011 SheepTech

Infolinks Still Appearing In Areas With Off Tag

To pick the winner, I have used Random.org’s list randomizer. The list of people who liked SheepTech’s Facebook page is copied to Random.org, in the same order as shown on Facebook.

Upon clicking the “Randomize” button, the list will be shuffled, and the person who came on top of the new list will be the winner. I have made a video showing the drawing process:

Congratulations Affan Ruslan! Please check your Facebook message to redeem the prize.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone else. Thank you for participating.

©2011 SheepTech

Merry Christmas! And The Winner Is…

Google Analytics tracking was disrupted for four days in November while I was experimenting with CloudFlare, resulting in inaccurate traffic reporting. Data from SiteMeter will be used instead.

Visitors number experience very little change from October, at around 63,000. Alexa ranking continues to rise, from October’s 139,423 to 101,956.

Money Made

Revenue went down in spite of the relatively constant traffic. Quite puzzling as it should be the opposite since the holiday season is coming.

AdSense: $711.52 (-$72.09)
Infolinks: $38.9 (-$5.67)
BlogAds: $28.70 (+$0)
Contextweb: $5.91 (+$1.65)
Private ads: $33.33 (+$0)

Total: $818.36 (-$76.11)

Uptime, RSS subscribers

Uptime reporting was also disrupted. SheepTech’s uptime was not tracked directly, but was assumed to be the same as the other blog’s uptime which I track using Pingdom, hosted on the same server.

The blog faced some downtime due to heavy load, resulting in HostGator suspending it for several hours, and I have no other backup solution to track SheepTech’s exact uptime.

The mentioned blog’s uptime is at 99.31% for November, but SheepTech definitely have much higher uptime than that.

The number of RSS subscribers is slightly higher, 588 at the time of writing but have exceeded 600 for several times in the past week.

©2011 SheepTech

SheepTech November10 Report Card

To reach that target, I will be holding a contest giving away $10 to a lucky fan on Christmas.

How to win?
All you have to do is Like SheepTech’s Facebook page and you are in. As easy as that.

On 25th December, the winner will be selected randomly using Random.org, and will be announced here on SheepTech, Facebook, as well as Twitter.

Payment will be made via PayPal. Bank transfer is only possible if the winner holds a Malaysian bank account, the prize will be converted to RM30 regardless of the currency exchange rate.

©2011 SheepTech

Like SheepTech on Facebook & Win $10

So what’s the deal?

• 50% off everything from 12:00AM CST – 5AM CST (-6 UTC/GMT)
• 80% off everything from 5AM – 9AM CST while supplies last
• From 9AM – 11:59PM CST OR after 80% off accounts have sold out, 50% off everything will be resumed

Off everything meaning you will receive the same percentage of discount on just any plans (shared hosting, reseller, VPS, & dedicated server) and any duration. Obviously, the longer the term length you sign up, the more you will save.

If you’re signing up 3 years worth of shared hosting with 80% off, that would only come to $35.64. That’s obviously a steal, with you only paying less than a dollar a month ($0.99) while I’m paying $9.95 for the same thing.

Why I’d recommend HostGator

Uptime
SheepTech has been hosted by HostGator since February 2010. Out of these 10 months, the uptime was more than 99.9% for 7 months. With HostGator’s 99.9% uptime guarantee, I successfully requested for a refund for one month.

The second refund request was unsuccessful with HostGator claiming that their internal monitoring shows that I have more than 99.9% uptime for that month.

The third month (November) of non-99.9% uptime was due to inaccurate monitoring. I did not setup any uptime monitoring service for SheepTech, but on another blog of mine. HostGator temporarily suspended that blog of mine for excessive load, but put it online again after a few minor tweaks. The uptime reporting was ruined and I have no accurate data for November’s uptime. It might or might not be more than 99.9%.

cPanel, Migration
HostGator uses cPanel like many other host, meaning migrating is easier than ever. In fact, all my blogs were migrated to HostGator for free without any effort on my side. Everything works just as fine after the migration, without any reconfiguration.

Support
Support is professional too. When they take down my other blog for excessive load, they notify me by an automated international phone call all the way from US to Malaysia. They’ve also sent an email with explanation and a lengthy suggestions on how to fix that issue.

Without the suggestions, it would probably take much longer for me to troubleshoot and fix the culprit, resulting in further unnecessary downtime. You can contact the support team easily via live chat, email or even phone call for free (some hosts charge for phone call support).

Still not happy? Fine. Request your ticket to be assigned to Brent and you can talk to the founder and chairman of HostGator.

Automatic Weekly Off-Site Data Backups
There is a catch for this one. Accounts exceeding 100,000 inodes (1 million for VPS) will be excluded in the weekly backups. While the backup is free, requesting for your backup is not. It cost $15 for each backup request.

I think this is fair as you can have peace of mind knowingly your data would be backup, and more importantly, you can fix things with money when necessary.

— — — — —

Yes, I do receive commission if you sign up for HostGator’s hosting plans using my affiliate link, but all of the above feedback are from my real experience and not biased. I wouldn’t even bother to post any article for WPWebHost (SheepTech’s ex-host) even if they offer double of HG’s commission.

[HostGator]

©2011 SheepTech

HostGator Black Friday 2010: 80% Off Everything