May 24, 2012

I’ve missed you

I’ve been neglecting this blog as of late and I need to work on that. The main reason that I have not been spending much time here is because its not really one of my money maker sites and my time has been limited lately. Well it looks like my time is coming back from the day job and I will be able to put a little time in here. Lately I’ve only had a few hours a week to spend on my sites so I’ve been putting that time in on other niches that have historically provided better results. for you long term readers its no secret that I market to females. The main reason I market to females is I can get a better CTR from females audiences than males. I don’t really know why this is, but I have noticed the trend.

Perhaps the differences come from women are just more inquisitive than males and more likely to investigate links or whether they hate my writing and need to click anything available to get away. What ever the reason this is what my testing has shown my to be effective. For this reason I tend to spend more time on my sites that target a female audience. Part of building a decent online business is the ability to listen to your visitors and give them what they want. Any marketing book you pick up will tell you the same thing or imply this fact. If you find a hungry crowd who is seeking a particular piece of information or service, then you can derive success from filling that need. This is true whether your product is information such as a blog or whether its some tangible good such as a Golf Club that allows someone to hit the ball longer and straighter.

This will be a short post today, but there will be more coming. I need to get back in the zone for writing for this blog. I’ve got some ideas for topics, I just need to flush out the details.

Building Technorati Blog Rank

Building your technorati rank can do a lot to build your blog’s visibility. for this reason alone you should work to get your rank and authority as high as possible. Now some people may say you should not work to increase this number and you should let it grow naturally. While I understand the argument behind that argument, I’m also doing this to earn a little money. The higher ranks you have with the various services around the net, the more you can charge for advertising and the more traffic you will receive. So in my opinion you should work as hard as possible to build up all your ranking, not only with Technorati, but with RSS subscriber count, page rank, Alexa or what ever other metrics you want to build. Now a lot of people say this things can be gamed and they are correct, but that does not mean you should not work to build it. Whether people call it gaming or not, the numbers are still there and they will help your blog or website’s visibility, which it turn will bring more traffic.

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed the Big Bang Meme I participated in  a few days ago. Participating in Memes is a great way to build up your technorati rank. I don’t really like them as they do not ad any value to the reader, but they definitely can help a blog’s visibility. Within a couple of hours of posting the Big Bang, I knew I have made a good decision. When I posted it, this blog had a Technorati Authority of a little over 100 and a rank of 80K. Well after just a few days, the authority is over 200 and the rank has went down to 27K. This jump is directly related to the big bang meme and the number of sites that are participating. I’ve spot checked several other sites that are part of the meme and I see similar results for those blogs. Now some people will say this is a link farm and its going to kill me. Who care what other people say. My rank is improving and for every link I have going out I have just as many coming back in. I don’t expect to receive any traffic from the links on those various blogs, but the increase in technorati and the increase in number of backlinks should help me with my SE rankings in the coming months. Is this gaming a system, absolutely, but I don’t see anything wrong and if it helps this blog or helps one of my readers improve their rankings then its something good for me to do. I have a much more intensive post on improving rankings on a variety of systems that has been inspired by the recent controversy on Entrecard about utilizing RSS subscriber count as a metric for determining Entrecard ad price, but I’ll save that one for later as I need to do a little research to prove my point.

Project Wonderful Update

For the regular readers of this blog, you may have noticed the Project Wonderful ads in the sidebar. Of course now they are gone and and this post is why. I ran Project Wonderful for a couple of weeks. During that time my ad prices fluctuated between .05 and .20 cents per day. For the people who had the advertising spots this was a pretty good deal, but for me the ads where too intrusive and I did not see where they added any value to this blog, so I killed them.

I never posted the ads to earn any money from them, but more as a way to reward people who visit this blog regularly, but that is not really what happened.I had a lot of requests and while some of the advertiser requests where valid and something I would not  mind advertising on this blog, there was also a lot of requests for affiliate programs. Of course those where declined, but it did not stop the requests.

Project Wonderful is probably a decent place to advertise your blog and to build your brand, I’m not sure the ROI will be acceptable. I ran over 400 ads on various blogs the past couple of weeks and really only saw a few actual visitors to my site from those ads. So to me its not really worth it and I won’t be using them for this blog in the future.

Now back to the Affiliate programs, that’s not really a bad idea. If people will approve those types of ads and you did it properly then you could probably post quite a few links which could earn you a little money for a cheap advertising place. If you chose your keywords for a campaign properly and kept the costs down to a penny or couple of cents then you could post affiliate ads out to hundreds of websites for only a little bit of money per day. putting your ad on 400 websites for 4 bucks a day is a pretty good deal and if you made the graphic catchy enough then you may could earn some commissions from your efforts.