AboutBlogging.Info - Making Money Online

I put the phrase free page peel script (1,910,000 entries) into Google Suggest and aboutblogging.info came out number 1. This is thanks to my post about the peel away ads on Wednesday.

I then searched for you comment, I follow (172,000,000 entries) and came out number 5.

Then I searched for u comment, I follow (21,200,000) and I actually had to go to page two of the search results. I was number 11.

Not bad for the little guy with the new blog about how to make money blogging!

Download free peel away ads script

I didn’t intend to do it but as it turns out I have adopted different ways to promote my various blogs. I have mainly gotten the word out about this one by leaving comments on similar blogs. My main traffic source for the gardening blog was via Adwords. The gardening blog also receives search engine traffic but that has happened by itself. Since I started promoting my new Blogumnist.com blog at the weekend I have been using social media sites. For my personal diary blog, I have taken no special measures at all and have just let nature take its course.

My launch of Blogumnist.com at the weekend was my first use of social media web-sites in a serious way and now, after it, I see what all the fuss is about!  Submitting your articles to these sites is a great way to get noticed. My experience from the submission of my post about how I quit my day job to blog breaks down like this:

Stumbleupon brought the most amount of hits, but it did so in a very concentrated way. My submission to Stumbleupon brought me 83 unique visitors in 50 minutes and nothing after that. The next most valuable source after that was Reddit. My submission on Sunday is still bringing me traffic today. It’s a more prolonged and steady flow rather than the rush that comes with Stumbleupon. Next after Reddit was Sphinn.com. It too is bringing a slow, steady stream to my site rather than a surge. Apart from those three sites the rest of the social media sites, including Digg, where I submitted my posting only brought a handful of visits.

Of course it depends on the article too. Another I submitted yesterday from my personal blog, a humorous one about sheep was taken up well on Reddit but hardly received any notice at all from the other sites, including Stumbleupon. The flow of traffic from Reddit on that occasion was heavier; just over 100 in the space of four hours. I am still getting visits from Reddit today to that post but nothing from the other sites I submitted it to. Someone else took it the post and put it onto a discussion forum which has been bringing me more visitors today.

I came across a good script on Monday which is pasted below. Paste this code onto your page where-ever you want it to appear and it allows your visitors (or you) to submit your post to the major sites as well as many of the others. It is much simpler and less cluttered than pasting all of those social media icons to the bottom of your posts. It might be worthwhile having a couple of direct links to the most important ones and using this link for the rest, just in case:

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript” src=”http://ekstreme.com/socializer/socializer.js” mce_src=”http://ekstreme.com/socializer/socializer.js”> </script>

That first Stumbleupon rush is wonderfully addictive! I was able to track the progress of what happens when your page is stumbled for the first time today.

It wasn’t the first article I’d stumbled. I’ve stumbled other posts from my blogs before. I’ve even stumbled other peoples.

I stumbled an article on my personal blog a couple of weekends ago, but I had just changed the template and I intelligently forgot to include my Statcounter script in the new one! I was able to get a rough idea of what happened from the site stats but I didn’t get all the detail I get with Statcounter. From what I could see on the site stats I’d gotten about an extra 100 visitors for that day.

The article I stumbled this time was the first one on my new Blogumnist.com blog which is about my wildly optimistic decision to quit my day job to blog.

I stumbled it at 11am this (Sunday morning). Within a minute I had my first ever visitor to Blogumnist.com. Every time I refreshed the Statcounter statistics the hits kept going up. Within 20 minutes I had about 50 hits from just over 40 unique visitors. Then it suddenly stopped. For the next couple of minutes the hits stopped going up.

The next time I refreshed the Statcounter statistics, I could see that the flow of traffic was changing. Whereas for the first 20 minutes the hits were to Blogumnist.com what started to happen then was that people began to follow links from it to my other blogs. I then watched for a couple more minutes as the hits to Blogumnist.com remained static but those of my other sites started to go up. I won’t say climb, but there definitely was a noticeable effect.

Then after another five minutes the hits to Blogumnist.com started climbing again. And climbing. I was sitting at the computer eating my breakfast watching this. It was the most fascinating thing I’ve watched for a long time! For a moment I got a feeling of what it would be like to have a popular web-site. And how many potential readers there are out there. This was Sunday morning after all! Probably the quietest time of the week.

It all ended abruptly at 11.48. The total number of hits that my first post on Blogumnist.com got between 11.00 and 11.48 on this Sunday morning was 132 with 83 unique visitors. So far today there have been no more visitors. I would think that 83 visitors to my blog on the first day isn’t a bad start anyway!

The length of time that visitors spent on the site was encouraging. I have a blocking cookie to exclude my own visits so as not to distort the figure.

- 32.4% stayed for less than 5 seconds

- 28.2% stayed from 5 to 30 seconds

- 29.6% stayed from 30 seconds to 5 minutes

- 8.5% stayed from 5 to 20 minutes.

- 1.4% stayed from 20 minutes to one hour

I think those visit lengths are great. The fact that 32.4% stayed for less than 5 seconds isn’t bad. It’s doesn’t mean that 32.4% clicked on the site and then immediately clicked off, although it might. It just means that they only visited the front page of the blog and didn’t click on any internal links. Therefore Statcounter was unable to assign a visit length to them.

Even if 32.4% did stumble across my blog and immediately stumble away again isn’t discouraging. I have channel-surfed like that myself lots of times. I was encouraged that 67.6% stayed longer than 5 seconds. This means that they clicked on internal links on my blog so that Statcounter was able to record the visit length. Since I have only one post on the blog so far that is quite an achievement!

When you’re starting off blogging the best and most accessible way to get targeted visitors to your site is by visiting and commenting on other blogs. When placing a comment most blogs have a field for you to enter your url.Apart from the visitors, commenting is an easy thing to do and there are several advantages.

- Making coherent and relevant comments on posts helps you to increase your comprehension of what the post is about. This helps you to increase your knowledge and experience of your chosen niche.

- It helps to create a network. Over time you get to know other bloggers and they get to know you.

- While this commenting is done with selfish motives, ie you want to increase traffic to your blog, it also suits the blogger you’re commenting on. We like to have people commenting on our posts. Useful comments increase the value of our posts.

Personally I moderate comments but unless it is spam or shameless or lazy self-promotion I let them through. Since I consciously decided when I started off to remove the nofollow tag, a link from one of my blogs is recorded by search engines and helps to improve a sites standing.

I find it very annoying therefore when I visit and comment on other blogs that the nofollow tag is added to my link. This means that it doesn’t count for search engine ranking.

It is still worth commenting on a blog within your niche which uses nofollow because your link will be read by people who are interested in your topic and that brings you free and targeted advertising. But it is much more useful to comment on blogs who don’t use nofollow.

 I put the phrase ‘you comment I follow’ into Google tonight and came back with 188 million results. That’s a lot of potential links for you!

- Before going off and trying to comment on 188 million blogs it is better off focusing on sites within your niche. People who visit those sites will also be likely to visit yours if you give them a good enough reason.

- Make sure the comment you make is useful. This will give visitors to the site the reason they need to visit yours. It will also give the blog owner enough of a reason to keep your comment and your link intact.

- Finally, once you’ve carefully crafted your comment and placed it on a site which follows links, make sure you have a quality blog with useful content to link your comment to. It’s very annoying to click on a link from someones useful comment to find a page of addds by gooooooogle.

I’m still working on my quality site. Leave a comment and tell me how I’m doing! 

I got a warning from Google today for using traffic exchange programmes. This is from my little experiment with traffic exchange programmes last week.

Here is the e-mail I got from Google today, which I believe is just a standard form letter they send out when they detect visits via a traffic exchange site:

“Hello Sean **********,

“It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.

“Please bear in mind that if we continue to detect invalid clicks or impressions from these services on your ads, we may disable your account to protect our advertisers. In addition, we may adjust your future payments for any days during which invalid clicks occurred in order to properly credit advertisers for any invalid activity.

“We understand that you may wish to receive specific information regarding the invalid activity we observed on your account. However, due to the proprietary nature of our algorithm, we cannot disclose any details about how our monitoring technology works or what specifics we found on your account.

“As a reminder, any method of generating invalid clicks or impressions is strictly prohibited by our Terms and Conditions and program policies:

https://www.google.com/adsense/policies?hl=en_US

““For your reference, you can find tips and guidelines for keeping your account in good standing by visiting our

https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=23921&hl=en_US

“The Google AdSense Team”

My initial reactions to this are:

- I have already given up on traffic exchange programmes because the ‘visitors’ don’t stay long enough on my site to read the headline of my first post, let alone click on my ads! Maybe Google pay me something for impressions. If they do, it’s not worth talking about.

- I have already removed Adsense advertising because I was getting no clicks from it on my personal blog. My use of a traffic exchanger or not didn’t change the fact that I was earning nothing from the ads anyway!

- This e-mail tells me that Google are making a fortune from Adsense – they send out e-mails like this to protect their reputation with their advertisers — and they expect us to tremble in our shoes as they threaten to remove a pittance from us.

- Every time something new comes out – Blogrush or Widgetbucks being two recent ones – someone asks, is this compatible with Adsense? How many Adsense millionaires are there anyway? Most people only earn pocket money from it. If my boss at my real job spoke to me like this I’d throw a stapler at him, and he pays me real money!

Ok, I know they have a point. But still, how many cents did my little experiment with traffic exchange cost them anyway? I’m sure these e-mails are sent out automatically but I think they should have a setting at a little less than zero tolerance.