Well it looks like my little experiment with BuySellAds.com was a good one. Within a few hours I’ve secured my first advertiser.

The first ad spot goes to Adrian of Rubiqube. Not only am I grateful for his support, but his site rocks! The fact that BuySellAds is only running on an invite only system right now seems to have attracted a much better quality of advertiser. This is great for bloggers as personally I dislike advertising for products/websites that I don’t think are any good.

I’m just off to have another look at Adrian’s website but my first impressions are an awesome design, and some really well written content. His content seems especially relevant to my audience of bloggers/designers, so please go and check it out!

If you want to take advantage of my low introductory ad prices then please click on the ‘advertise here’ image in the sidebar. This really is the best time to purchase ad space as I’m planning on really growing the site over June.

I also couldn’t recommend BuySellAds enough. The whole service is entirely automated, meaning that instead of having to worry about getting advertisers I’ve just installed their lightweight script and that’s it! I just checked my inbox to find that I’d got my first advertiser and have been paid automatically.

More updates coming soon (after exams are done).

Hi guys,

I do have a few articles lined up for the blog, but I’ve been trying to finish off some important client work (gotta keep up with the deadlines). I’ve also been making some pretty huge behind the scenes changing to Push Standards. I want to have everything with the blog working perfectly and not requiring constant maintenance before I start posting regularly again.

So ‘what are the changes?’ you might ask. Well first of all I’ve finally got round to changing my web host. I won’t name who I was with before, but let’s just say that they’re a big name in the hosting industry. The bad news was, that they were CRAP. I mean really crap… I had constant downtime (with my other site more than this one), database crashes, webmail downtime, you name it… I even got hacked about 3 times! Anyway, I thought enough was enough, and searched around for a reliable new host. After trusting the big names for years now (and being disappointed) I opted for a new web host, one that looked more friendly and on a smaller scale. I didn’t really understand why I had this instinct to move away from the big companies, not until I found my new host.

They’re called This* (as in This* Web Host). Before I tell you about transferring hosts, I want to share a couple of things from their website that persuaded me to use them. This isn’t blindly promoting them, but I really learnt a lot about the nature of the hosting industry, and feel that this information is invaluable to anyone who owns a website. In their most recent blog post ‘Guide to Web Hosting - Part 1, The Oversell’ they highlight what most big hosting companies are guilty of:

“Ever seen an advert for a host offering perhaps 50GB, 100GB or even 200GB disk space? Ever wondered how they can offer that at sub-10$ prices? Quite simply they can’t. They can offer it to you, but you’ll never be able to use it. If you even come close to using it, they will (generally) terminate your account and claim that your site has grown far too busy, and that you’ll need to upgrade to a VPS, or dedicated server…”

“…There is NO SUCH THING as “UNLIMITED DISK SPACE”. It’s simply a physical improbability, and nothing more than a marketing term. “Unlimited” roughly translated means “We don’t want to advertise a fixed figure, but use too much and we’ll terminate your account”

Until reading this I looked at their packages offering considerable less diskspace/bandwidth than leading hosting companies and wondered why earth I would choose them. Then it all clicked. The downtime, the crashed databases, the weak explanations about certain users straining resources. My old host was simply overselling, and I was paying the price. So I looked at their packages again, and thought: ‘hey, I probably won’t even need all this space anyway, I’ll be paying the same amount for ample space and no downtime!’.

What really sold This* to me was the fact that they transfer your old sites across completely free of charge. This was a step that I was very hesitant to attempt myself. Their staff efficiently transferred both of my websites across in minimal time (we’re talking around an hour!), despite problems being caused by my old host (would you believe it). For once in my life things weren’t going wrong when it came to technology! Not only were my sites up and working in no time at all, but no files were lost or damaged. On top of this their staff had the initiative to delete a bunch of useless files (after my consent) that were taking up space in my forum for no reason at all.

After the transfer any minor issues that I required help with were responded to extremely quickly via their easy to use ticket system. It’s great to know that you’re talking to a real person who respects you as a customer, and with whom you can personal connect with on some level. I’m personally really sick of the faceless corporate Internet that we lay victim to.

So my advice to you, would be to choose your webhost wisely! If you are suffering at the hands of a poor webhost then don’t stand for it! You’re only becoming part of the population that contributes to their survival and customer exploitation. If exploitation seems like a strong word, I don’t think that it is. I mean, in what other industry could you lie so blatantly about something being ‘unlimited’ when it’s obviously not?

If you wish to sign up to This* Web Host, with my strong recommendation, then you can do so here. Be sure to use their promotional code ‘LAUNCH’ to receive 25% off!

My other piece of news concerning the blog is that I’ve FINALLY installed the Akismet anti-spam plugin. I have no idea why it took me so long to get this installed, but I’ve been senselessly deleting hundreds of spam comments each day for no reason! It’s been great so far, and it’s a real weight off my mind not to look at another terrible porn ad.

I’ll be making a couple of final changes to the blog and then you can expect a series of new posts very soon! I also have a couple of very exciting new websites to announce, so watch this space!

Ok, so it has been quite a while since my last blog post… There are several reasons for this, so I thought I’d quickly explain what’s been going on in my life and what’s happening with Push Standards. Bear with me as I’m not sure how long this post will turn out to be.

My Life:

So first of all, what’s been happening in my life? Well I arrived back at University exactly a week ago, and had all 4 of my final deadlines in within the space of 5 days. To put this in perspective one deadline per week gets pretty hectic, and all of my friends have their deadlines spaced over months. It’s not even like I could have worked on these for ages, I got the same preparation time as everyone else, but it just worked out that my deadline timetable was a lot more stressful. Anyway, I won’t go on about it but just say that I made it through (just about) and have had a chance to relax for a couple of days at last.

The good news is that now I’m the only person who doesn’t have any deadlines, and can concentrate on the blog at least until my final exams (about 4 weeks time). I’ll still have lectures as per normal, but it will be no where near as stressful. This is why I haven’t been updating, I’ve just not had a spare minute. For most of this week I was working every hour that I wasn’t sleeping (so about 18 hours per day!).

Designing:

Despite these important deadlines I couldn’t drop design work for my clients and so have some new works to show for it. Luckily I managed to keep to deadlines, and can now pour myself into my designing more fully. I’ll be uploading new designs to my portfolio over the next few weeks, but here is a design I did a couple of weeks ago for CarArticles.co.uk:

You can see the launched website here.

Online Projects:

Despite being so busy I can never seem to turn off when it comes to my online projects. I still have a couple that are in the process of being developed, although these may have to wait until after my exams to be launched. One that will be coming before that is a project that I’m doing with a good friend of mine. He’s studying at music college and for one of his modules chose the coursework option to create a music-related website. He came to me to see if I might be interested and after a little brainstorming we came up with an idea for a music blog. He has a knack for discovering amazing bands that nobody has ever heard of (it’s how I discovered some of my favorites) and so we thought that we would simply run a blog that publicized these bands. It will be a useful resource for music lovers and also give unsigned bands a little promotion. Obviously it’s not anything revolutionary but we feel like their definitely a gap in the market for this kind of thing. If we can consistently update with great artists and use his offline marketing potential (at his college) then we think we could get things rolling nicely.

Another project of mine that you may remember me announcing on the blog is CssGalleryList.com. I just wanted to post an update about how the site is doing. After spending just $30 getting the site online it’s now pulling $1-$2 per day. Not very impressive sounding, but when you consider that this already values the site at over 1500% of it’s startup costs it’s not too bad. Also the great thing about this site is that it’s very static, I’ve not touched it since launch. I’ve also not promoted it or anything of that sort, so that’s $1-2 per day via word of mouth - people who like the site’s concept. When I have a spare couple of days I’m planning on maybe putting 10-20 hours into promoting the site heavily and then sit back and see it grow to the next level. I would like to see the site pulling $100 per month and then perhaps sell it for $1000 in a few months.

What about this blog?

The good news is that I most definitely will NOT be giving up on Push Standards. With all these upcoming projects, and some spare time on my hands I will be updating far more regularly. As always I appreciate your continued readership and thank you for sticking by the blog. I hope that you will check back shortly for new articles and info about my coming-soon websites.

Oh and if I’ve been bad about getting back to your email this post should explain why. My priority for my inbox this week was my design clients, but now I’ve got the time to respond to absolutely everybody.

Cheers,

- Tom.

As you may or may not have been aware Push Standards has been offering advertising in it’s sidebar for the past couple of months. However, advertising really took a sideline to posting and working on the blog. I’m still completely dedicated to making this blog the best it can possibly be, but feel that it’s now grown enough for me to take advertising more seriously.

If you read my ‘End of 2nd Month Blogging’ post you would have seen that March’s traffic was over double that of February’s, breaking 22,000 unique visitors! This is some serious traffic, and so I’ve been working today on creating some affordable, yet very valuable advertising options.

First of all I had to fix some issues for advertisers…

Previously I was offering 100X100 ads so that I could fit two next to each other in my narrow sidebar. This was a pretty terrible idea as nobody uses this ad size. I’m now offering the standard 125X125 ad size.

Secondly, the ads were previously pushed quite far down the page (under recent posts), meaning that advertisers weren’t getting enough exposure. I’ve now moved the adverts up, to maximize exposure and traffic.

Thirdly, my advertising page wasn’t all that inspiring. I wrote it shortly after launching the blog and wasn’t displaying any of my achievements or high traffic levels. Big mistake. I’ve now posted the exact traffic details for March as well as advertising rates. I’ve decided on a very affordable rate of just $25 per month to start things rolling. This is extremely cheap considering my traffic levels.

All advertisers on this blog will also receive exposure in my subsequent blog post to their ad purchase. That is to say, I’ll include a snippet about new advertisers in my latest posts. I would like to introduce one of April’s advertisers:

Tish from BloggingGal won her ad spot almost a month ago, but of course it wouldn’t fit in my 100X100 size, hence I’ve only managed to upload her ad today. I would like to really apologize to Tish for this delay. She’s a blogging friend of mine and I never had any intention of forgetting about her ad. I strongly encourage you to check out her blog as she provides some awesome tips for blogging and monetization. I also recommend that you get a review done via her, as she really puts a lot of time and effort into writing some outstanding website reviews!

I don’t want to turn this announcement into a regular blog post. But I must stress that you need to make such things obvious and simple for your visitors. You can’t expect them to know how well or how badly you’re doing, and you can’t expect them to be searching around your blog or website looking for your advertising page. Make things simple for them and you’ll see better results.

On this note I’ll be making several more improvements to the blog over the next few weeks. I’ve honestly just been too busy with design work for clients and working on my upcoming online projects. However, I’m making the effort to put my all into improving this blog, and to hopefully see it continue to grow. I’ll be announcing further improvements as they arise. A minor bug fix was fixing the bullet point alignment in my sidebar, and adding bullets for all sidebar links (not just recent posts). A small change, but I feel that it adds more continuity to things.

If you would like to advertise on Push Standards please check out my Advertising Page today!