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BlogMastermind Blog Coaching - 6 Student Reviews Posted: 12 Aug 2008 12:01 PM PDT It has been two weeks since the launch of the BlogMastermind blog mentoring program and today I thought I’d ask some of those that I referred to the program to review it for me. While I think it’s a great resource I wanted to give actual participants in the program the opportunity to have their say. Last week I emailed all of those that I’ve referred to BM and invited them to submit a short review. What follows is the mini-reviews of those that responded. All have links, except one who preferred to remain anonymous. I’ve not edited or left out any responses and they’re in the order I received them - so I hope it gives some good insight. Don’t forget my bonus offer As I mentioned in my previous post about BlogMastermind - I’m offering anyone who signs up for the full six month access before the end of August the opportunity to spend an hour of time with me. Read more details of this offer in this post. Participant Reviews of BlogMastermind “I thought that I knew something about blogging. Joining Blogmastermind has shown me I did know something . . . but little of it was useful. Blogmastermind is fantastic and I believe it will be worth every dollar—many times over.” - Mike Davenport ==== “The Blog Mastermind coaching course is a jewel. Yaro Starak has managed to couple solid content with a simple and masterful teaching style in an information packed course that’s moving me step-by-step in a strategic fashion toward my goals as a blogger. The content alone would’ve made me happy. The icing on the cake is that Yaro’s sincere desire for students to succeed bleeds through in his presentations and business systems. He’s built a sustainable, highly profitable business, and most importantly, is teaching me to do the same. I’m elated with the program–my success is assured.” - Valerie Love ==== “The first lesson received was on “Let’s Get Blogging” in which it contains a lot of blogging fundamentals. I get to know more on choosing a domain name all the way to setting up a blog. BlogMastermind provides very good video resources on how to optimize your blog’s setup such as the positioning of elements like opt in form. Audios on “Mastering your mindset” let me have a clearer goal in mind and fine tune my mindset with regards to blogging. BlogMastermind Forum is another channel in which I gain a lot of knowledge in both content and technical aspects.” - Wei Liang ==== “I’ve just recently signed up for Yaro’s Blog Mastermind course and have already gotten a lot of value from it. I’m a financial advisor and personal finance blogger in Atlanta, GA, USA, and I was interested in getting some help/mentoring about how to be a more effective writer while building my audience. A couple of immediate things I’ve gotten from the course is the need to have a multi-pronged approach — for marketing, monetizing, etc. All too often, I see bloggers who have Google Adsense plastered all over their blog, but don’t have any other monetization strategies working for them. Similarly, I see many bloggers in the personal finance niche constantly commenting on each other’s blogs which in my opinion just creates a big echo chamber. And I’ve been guilty of this myself. While I don’t plan to attempt to monetize my blog at this time, I do want to build my audience and build a large email list. At Yaro’s suggestion, I’ve begun using AWeber for my email and continue to use Feedburner for RSS. Also, I’m beginning to look outside the Personal Finance blogosphere for other interesting sites (like yours) where I can network and build relationships. Yes, it’s very early in Yaro’s course, but I’ve already received tremendous value and am eager to get more and more info from Yaro in the coming days and weeks.” - Russ Thornton ===== “I was tempted to join Blog Mastermind the first time it was offered but I procrastinated while reading the Blog Profits Blueprint. I realized after reading it there was lot’s I could learn and I saw Yaro was very truthful and helpful in his teachings. He never claimed to know everything but was willing to share what he had learned. He relied on others such as yourself, to add value to this course. I’m excited as I begin the lessons and I look forward to learning how to promote my blog and help others as I learn from Blog Mastermind.” - Patsy Stewart ===== “My first impressions are positive. I already have a Wordpress.org blog up and running - but my site is ripe for improvement and I get the impression that as the lessons roll onwards, it’s going to be a steep learning curve. The members-only forum is filled with relevant FAQs and helpful fellow members, and I am already drawing upon this useful resource.” - anonymous I hope you’ve found these mini-reviews of the course helpful. Read more about BlogMastermind here. Share This

5 Methods to Enhancing Page Load Posted: 12 Aug 2008 07:02 AM PDT ‘How do I make my page load faster?’ - it’s a question I get a bit so I thought I’d ask Aaron Brazell from Technosailor to tackle the question and offer some suggestions around enhancing page load times. “The internet is dying.” This phrase, though probably a bit sensationalist, is also not far from the truth. As we all now understand, thanks to U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, the internet is a series of tubes and the more stuff you put into the tubes, the more it gets clogged. Trust me, the Senator from Alaska was probably more dead on than most give him credit for. Everyday, internet servers and bandwidth pushes new highs, and even though there are political solutions to such global economic problems, the reality is that bloggers, and really, website owners as a whole, are affected the most. This site is loading so slow. I can’t get to the site. Down for everyone or just me? 1. Avoid images Everyone likes an aesthetically pleasing site. Many blogs, particularly out on the long tail, tend to get very artsy in their designs. Colorful headers made from pictures of serene prairies, busy metropolitan night scenes taken with a Nikon D3 set at 100 ISO, 61 second shutter speed and a 1.2 Aperture (Oh, sorry. Wrong site). You get the point, though. Lots of images can increase your site load time. In the event that images are necessary, either in posts or as the site structural elements, consider that images should be optimized for 72 DPI and never be “resized” in the HTML itself. If the image is bigger than the spot you want to put it in, then resize the image itself as opposed to letting the HTML do the work for you. 2. Avoid Third Party Javascript I realize I’m talking to an audience that is keen on advertising on their blogs, so I may step on some toes. Third party javascript might be the worst culprit when it comes to page load. The problem is not the javascript itself, though there is certainly that possibility on occasion. More than likely, third part javascript is invoking content, whether advertisements or widgets, from another server that could be running slow at any given time. It’s generally easy to spot slow loading javascript. Because a page loads, usually, from top down in the order that the HTML is written, when the browser encounters slow loading javascript the page will stop rendering for a period of time. Usually, you can identify the specific part of the page that is loading slowly, and refer to your widgets or source HTML to figure out who exactly is the culprit. 3. Flash Video I’m fighting a losing battle, it would seem, on Flash but if my observations are correct, Flash has an ongoing memory leak that is most manifest when it comes to online video. Almost all video players are written in Flash and, in most cases, after running a significant amount of video you might notice your browser crash or everything slow to a place where you have to forcibly quit the browser. These symptoms manifest themselves, for me, in Safari 3.x/Mac and Firefox 2 and 3 on Mac. I cannot speak to the lesser browser on the lesser operating system. The problem exists when many Flash invocations occur. Flash seems to not give up the memory that a player uses - or at least not all of it. So the more videos viewed, the more videos embedded on a site, the higher the likely for slow browser experiences for readers. 4. 80/20 Rule The Yahoo UI team released an interesting set of findings a few years ago that brought the concept of 80/20 rules back to the forefront. In geek speak, the 80/20 rules states that 80% of a sites symptoms (slowness) come from 20% of the site features. I will let you determine how geeky you want to get with your site, but I have found profiling my site useful in determining bottlenecks and best fixes. Firebug may be the easiest profiling tool for average users. It is free, but requires Firefox as it is a Firefox extension. In order to use Firebug, you must have the “Net” panel option enabled in Firebug. 5. Cache, cache, cache Any site that has some degree of traffic should have basic caching in place, and the larger, more high-trafficked sites should consider multiple levels of caching. For WordPress users, plugins like WP Super Cache do wonders for load. In essence, WordPress writes pages to the filesystem for quick access by WordPress. Once an hour (or other interval if changed), those cached pages expire and a new version is fetched from the database. By end-rounding the need for repeated trips to the database on every page load, load time is drastically increased. More aggressive caching can be used in larger contexts, or when multiple servers are in play. For instance, at b5media, we implemented Memcached, which is supported by WordPress as well as core memcache support by Movable Type. Other alternatives include proxy caching with Squid. MySQL has a query cache that can be explored as well. Share This

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