The Marketing Technology Blog

There’s been some talk on blogs about the average size of a Wordpress post. Some light has been shed that Search Engines will only weigh the impact of the first x number of characters, where x is currently unknown. As a result, anything after that is simply a waste of words.

Image from Wordle!

I’m rather garrulous with my blog posts so I’m going to do some additional analysis and see if the popularity of the post from search results has any correlation to the word count. I won’t get too scientific, but I do want to take a deeper look.

How can I query Wordpress for Word Count?

MySQL doesn’t have a built-in word count function for MySQL, but as with every other unanswered question, some smart guy on the blogosphere already answered how to use MySQL to get a Word Count.

Here’s the author’s word count query modified for a Wordpress database:

SELECT `ID`, `post_date`, `post_type`,
SUM( LENGTH(`post_content`) - LENGTH(REPLACE(`post_content`, ‘ ‘, ”))+1) AS ‘Wordcount’
FROM `wp_posts`
GROUP BY `ID`
HAVING `post_type` = ‘post’
ORDER BY `post_date` DESC
LIMIT 0, 100

I currently don’t subscribe to the ‘perfect post size’ since what really provides weight with a search engine isn’t simply the word count, but the number of links to that content. If you have a 2,000 word post that attracts a lot of link attention, then the right size of your post was 2,000 words.

Give me a few days on this and I’ll do a follow up!

For quite some time I ran affiliate marketing ads in my feed using the PostPost plugin I developed for Wordpress and Commission Junction advertisements. It wasn’t really a source of any significant revenue, though, perhaps a few dollars a month.

This week, I applied with Google Adsense to convert my feed from Feedburner to Google. The process to do this is still manual, but fear not, you won’t lose a single subscriber in the process. Both addresses continue to publish the feed, but putting the feed on Google has monetary benefits since it will provide you access to Google Adsense for feeds.

Simply login to your Adsense account and follow the directions to manually submit your feed for conversion. It took about a week for mine to get converted. Google is promising that this will be an automated process in the future.

It’s still not perfect, though! Take a look at the above ad from a radical political organization who paired up with my note about Joe Biden. The referenced article was actually a pretty scary look at Biden’s 40 year history of voting with big brother and leaving the little guy out to hang.

I don’t expect too much revenue from Adsense on the feed. Many folks are simply calling the program Webmaster Welfare.

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According the EPA’s poster, Lifecycle of a CD, 5.5 million CDs, their packaging and millions of other music CDs are tossed each year without recycling. CDs and DVDs are made from Aluminum, Gold, Dyes, various other materials - but most of all Polycarbonate and Lacquer. Polycarbonate and Lacquer are generated directly from crude oil.

The stats continue, every month 100,000 pounds of CDs and DVDs go obsolete as well. There’s no efficient means of recycling the materials either! According to the Oil Industry itself, about 1.1 gallons of every barrel (42 gallons) of oil goes to petrochemicals.

I suppose it goes without saying, then, that switching to cloud computing with virtualized servers and subscribing to Software as a Service applications can actually help the environment. I’m not sure what percentage of a barrel of oil goes into creating of compact discs, but surely we can be a lot more efficient by using USB drives and networks for file sharing instead of burning discs.

In addition to using the discs, I can’t help but think that there’s a lot of energy being unnecessarily used to manufacture and transport those discs. Surely swapping bandwidth for plastic will net a positive result for humanity, right? I realize there are many other things that play a larger role, but why doesn’t anyone talk about this unnecessary industry?

I wonder why using Software as a Service isn’t a key component of Going Green advise to businesses? Terabyte hard drives, USB drives, Online Backups… all of these are readily accessible for anyone to use. No one should be buying CDs and DVDs anymore. I don’t even rent movies anymore on DVD, I rent them on my AppleTV!

5 Ideas to Curb You of Your CD Addiction

1. Switch to Software as a Service. Examples: Dump Microsoft Office for Google Apps and Microsoft CRM for Salesforce. No installations, no backups, no hardware… just a browser!
2. Switch from renting DVDs and buying music CDs to downloading your Music purchases or Movie Rentals with iTunes, AppleTV and other premium services. iTunes may have to rethink their logo!
3. Switch from backing up and transporting data on CDs and DVDs to USB Drives. USB drives hold more data and are portable, faster, and don’t wear out. (Be careful though, not all USB drives are created equal!)Buy yourself a large portable drive for backing up your work and transporting it back and forth to work. I don’t go anywhere without my Western Digital Passport, it’s the best investment I’ve ever made!
4. Transfer large files to other companies through online SaaS vendors like DropSend, YouSendIt, SendThisFile, MailBigFile, and SendSpace.
5. Get rid of your CD and DVD drives. When you order your next laptop, don’t include one with the purchase. When you order them for your office, save some money and purchase USB drives instead of upgrading your DVD writer. By not having them accessible, you’ll be less likely to go and burn that next CD!

In fact, the only reason why I use CDs anymore is for books on CD or to burn music for my drive to and from work. I’ve been watching prices, though, and I can get a replacement car stereo that has a USB input as well as iPod controls for less than $200! Maybe it’s time for me to make the move!