Matthew Watts

Ever wanted to get a list of information such as URLs, Articles, tabular data, or whatever else that you know is on one website or across multiple websites, then manipulate it to reuse elsewhere? Stop wondering, because we are about to get down to business! There’re many ways to scrape / mine data, but I’ve found that the easiest and most efficient way is to use a combination of cURL and XPATH. cURL is neat because it will easily let you use proxies, manipulate browser information, catch errors, etc. XPATH is great because you don’t need to write a bunch of regular expressions or other functions to manage the data [...]

Anyone who’s been around the Internet for more than 5 minutes has stumbled across some pretty nasty landing pages. Do any of these look like stuff you’ve done? 5,000+ characters of sales copy with little to no whitespace No call to action immediately visible without scrolling Or Worse – No conversion form immediately visible If you cringed at those points and nodded, then that’s good! Admittance is the first step to recovery. 3 Things You Should Be Doing To Convert Whitespace Is Your Friend Whitespace: the portions of a page intentionally left unmarked by text or graphics. Too many people try and either cram too much into a small area [...]

For some reason or another, more and more people seem to be posting on WickedFire that have ethical dilemmas with affiliate marketing. Another one of these threads popped up just before my class last Thursday. Is affiliate marketing ethical? This is the big question these people have. At its core, affiliate marketing is just helping one company get extra business and you getting a percentage of its profits. There are no shades of gray. Like any business model, there are many ways to go about it; not all of them are ethical. Products for the ethically conscious This brings us to the subject of the post. There was a guest [...]

Have you been on a website where the color scheme or text size were so annoying that it made you frustrated to be on it? I have recently. A SERP tracker I am beta testing for swapped layouts for the 3rd time and used a 6px font-size on a white background. That was painful, especially since I was having a migraine at the time and just logged in for a second to check my rankings before taking a nap. Website accessibility isn’t just about building websites for people with physical disabilities – it’s about improving the user experience for everyone. That simple change in font size severely impaired my use [...]

Have a website that just isn’t pulling in the conversions you know it can? How about its SERP rankings? If you’ve done all you can to increase them but just can’t, then chances are you aren’t optimizing your website effectively. Several days ago, someone posted on a WickedFire case study about how of little importance on-site optimization is. In my reply I was discussing how it should be high on your priority list because it not only compounds the effectiveness of your off-site optimization results, but increases your conversion rates if done right. After I posted my reply, I got to thinking about one of my last comments in the [...]