There are jobs you should
undertake at regular intervals to keep your site
running efficiently. The following tasks should be
carried out daily, as a matter of routine
"housekeeping".
Approve or Reject New
Ad Requests
These will appear in both
your advertising@yoursite.com mailbox, and in the
Advertising Manager page of Cash Crusader.
Before approving any
advertisement, you should check that the
advertiser has paid for the ads they have
requested, check that the paid link works (it
cannot be corrected once an e-mail has been sent
out), and check the wording of e-mails for
mistakes in spelling, grammar and punctuation.
Some advertisers appear to have lost the ability
to use capital letters at the beginning of
sentences, and some dispense with punctuation
altogether, so cleaning up their ad copy before
delivery is always a good idea. In all the time I
have been a webmaster, I have never received a
complaint from an advertiser after correcting
their mistakes!
If you need to reject an
ad for whatever reason, choose your words
carefully when sending an e-mail to the
advertiser. Explain precisely why the ad was
rejected, and if it was for technical reasons
(banner ad address incorrect, for example) ask
them to check their affiliate code, or ask for a
replacement advertisement.
If the ad was rejected
because it contravenes your Terms of Service,
tactfully inform the advertiser, and be consistent
in your response when others attempt to get
questionable ads uploaded.
Check for Payout
Requests
These will arrive by
e-mail only, so you can deal with these in one
payment run at the end of the day. You can use
Paypal Mass Pay if you are prepared to pay a fee
(this facility may not be available in all
currencies), and you can issue Amazon Gift
Certificates in batches if they all have the same
value. As I don't use Mass Pay, I tend to send out
payments as soon as the requests arrive - this
will make you popular with members, but can be
restricting if you do not want to be tied down to
the computer all day.
Approve New Members
If you have purchased the Member
Approval System plug-in, you will use it
daily (more often if you wish) to approve members
who meet all of the requirements of your terms and
conditions, and to delete the accounts of those
that don't.
An alternative, if less
effective method is to use the Autosuspender
plug-in, one section of which highlights members
who have joined from countries other than those
you specified in your terms. This means you need
to weed out the bad signups after the event, which
can lead to the occasional indignant e-mail, but
it does work well as a cheat detector.
You would be amazed at
some of the silly made up addresses overseas
fraudsters will use to get on to your site - it is
usually easy to detect them, because they often
enter impossible combinations of addresses, towns,
countries and zip (postal) codes, for example:
Mr.
Peter Cheater,
Apartment
102,
Peabody
Buildings,
Lowestoft,
Lanarkshire,
10076
ALGERIA
Sometimes, rogue
webmasters will recommend a fictitious address in
their blog (or even a "hijacked" genuine
address) for overseas fraudsters to sign up with,
so if you see several potential members with the
same address, don't approve their memberships.
Autosuspender displays
the country from which the signup was made, and
this helps a lot when making a decision whether or
not to expel an offending member.
Deal With Members'
Queries
If your site is to acquire
a good reputation, you should respond to queries
promptly, and be courteous and polite. Many
"Get Paid To"
site members are also members of discussion groups, or
are site owners themselves, so you should make sure
that any information you supply to them is
accurate. If you treat them with disrespect, or
fob them off with lame excuses, you could find
your site blacklisted, and anything you
divulge can become public knowledge in a matter of
minutes. On the other hand, don't let them bully
you. It is your site and you make the rules - so
if they don't like them, they can always cancel.
You will find that the same queries keep
cropping up again and again. To save yourself time
writing out the same response to each letter, you
can create a text file containing the answer to
the question in any word processor program, and
save it as a template. Then, when you receive a
relevant query, you can just select the
appropriate template, copy and paste into your
e-mail reply, put in the user's name at the top,
and send it off.
Bear in mind that most people will still
realize that you have sent a standard reply, so
personalize it a little to make it more
acceptable, e.g. you can add a comment about an
upcoming holiday such as "Have a Merry
Christmas!" if the season is nigh.
Backup Your Database
The need for a daily
backup of your MySQL database information cannot
be over-stressed. You can have the data sent to
your mailbox automatically each day, so there is
no excuse for not doing it.
To set up automatic
sending of MySQL data by e-mail, go to: Site
Settings: MySQL Backup Settings, and enter 24 hours
as the time delay between backup notices, enter
the e-mail address you want the data sent to, and
enter 24 hours as the time delay between
making backups.
No matter how many times
your hosting company backs up the data on its
servers during the day, you must ensure that you
keep your backups on a removable storage device,
such as a flash drive. There is no point in
downloading it to another drive that lives inside
your computer - what happens if it is totally
destroyed by fire, damaged by floods, or is
stolen?
One backup a day is the
minimum you should consider (some sites boast up
to three a day). It sounds a chore, but think how
you would feel if you lost everything -
advertisements, member accounts, Admin preferences
- so be smart, and make backing up your data part
of your daily routine.
Check Your Affiliate
Ad Stats
If running affiliate ads,
you should check their performance daily.
If a particular e-mail or
text ad is performing badly, try changing the
wording slightly. For example, a text ad for a
shoe sale might go like this:
Shoe
Sale, 30% Off
You might get a better response if you add a
little pizzazz, by altering it
to:
LOOK -
Christian Door shoes at 30% Discount!
Hurry,
offer
ends Saturday!
If it is a banner, try a
different one. If nothing you do will make it
generate revenue, drop it altogether, as the space
it occupies could be used by another campaign, or
a paying advertiser's ad.
Weed Out Old
Advertisements
After a while, the expired
e-mail, sign-up and click ads will start to pile
up in the database. You should remove expired ads
promptly, so that they do not clutter up the
members' Ad Stats. This has the benefit of
prompting members and advertisers to take out
further advertising, because they no longer see
anything on their stats page.
Don't delete them too
early, or advertisers will complain that they have
not been given enough time to view their
statistics. A week or two after the ad expires
should be soon enough.
Check the Site for
Broken Links
If you are linking to external sites, check that the links still
work, and if any banner ads show up as red X's,
check to see why they are not appearing. You may
find that their non-appearance is down to net
congestion or a temporary website fault, so wait a
couple of hours and try the links again before
deciding to delete anything.
Check That Your Ad
Campaigns are Still Active
Make sure that your
affiliate campaigns have not expired, because you
will not get paid for the clicks/leads/sales you
have generated since the expiry date.
Eavesdrop!
I
regularly check my Site Meter referral stats to
see where visitors are coming from, and you would
be surprised at how many people are sent from
blogs and discussion groups. If you click through
to the page that they arrived from, using Site
Meter's "Recent Visitors: by Referrals"
tracking facility, you can glean some fascinating
insights into what people are saying about your
site (assuming you reach a page which is not
password protected).
Once your site has been
online for a while, you will be able to check out
user reviews on such sites as Ciao. You will need a thick
skin, as some people do not hold back when
criticizing websites, but
don't be disheartened by any "bad press"
you receive - information like this is invaluable.
Nobody is going to tell you
to your face that your site is terrible, so you
should seriously consider the opinions of all the
"armchair critics" out there; you will
then have some idea of what needs
to be done to improve or expand the site.
