Blog traffic, seo and ad observations
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The costs of advertising to a blog
How the top bloggers display their ads - Percentages and numbers
Lets say you have a big gaming site. And let’s say that you want the individual pages on your site to show up on the top spots on Google for some queries. Of course the obvious solution would be to register a bunch of crappy domains about the game, stick a video and some keyword links to your website (along with some neutral links to avoid getting marked) and hope you beat Gamespot and IGN that have some actualy content on their own pages. Nevermind that the actual crappy domains with one page of questionable content -still- do better than your own pages.
Bonus points: Put the wrong game name in the page titles.
Bonus points #2: Not even bother with original content and paste a few lines of text you got from another site, adding your own links.
Stay classy seo dudes.
So you took the big step and removed no-follow tags from your blog’s comments and/or trackbacks? Great choice but it’s not quite over yet. There’s quite a few smart (at least by their reasoning) people that will try to trick your willingness to reward comments and links by using your blog as a free linkback service for their blogs.
The first thing to look for is the name of the commenter itself. Proper commenters use their name or online alias, or at most the domain name of their site. Spammers instead use keywords to promote relevancy to the page they’re linking to. So for example, someone with a blog about making money online would use “Make money blogging” as his name, so he would get a link to his blog with relevant keywords.
Also the link url is always suspect. Beware of deep linking. I had a guy comment on my “7 most annoying things bloggers have on their sites” article with the name “Blogging tools” and the url pointing to his blogging tools category on his blog. Smart yes? Well.. not really. Nice try, but when i do decide to run a free link service, I’ll be sure to announce it.
Comments on old posts can be used for the same reason. An older, well linked post with PageRank is a good target for a spammer to get some links back to his page. Use this handy plug in to automatically close comments and trackbacks on older posts.
I also make it a habit to follow links from commenter to check out their site and will generally delete comments with links that point to made-for-AdSense sites and article scraper sites.
DoFollow spam is obnoxious and annoying. It provides little to no value to the discussion, most spammers will just try to stroke the poster’s ego and make it look like they are contributing.
NewestOnTheNet.com has a huge list of StumbleUpon articles, with my own StumbleUpon bounce rate post in there too. I haven’t had the time to go through every link yet, but a couple of the entries i enjoyed is The StumbleUpon experiment by Dan Grossman and How to write for StumbleUpon by Copyblogger.
I still have a lot of things to say about SU, a month after starting this blog the social service managed to bring over 6.000 unique visitors to serverdome. The amount of SU data and ideas on the list is quite a bit and needs some digesting if you haven’t bothered with SU before.
These services will all pay you to post reviews on your blog, along with a couple of more obscure services.
The mother of them all. PPP has the most advertisers available.
ReviewMe is catching up to PPP and also offers the option for advertisers to contact you directly.
Sponsored Reviews is the opposite of PPP and ReviewMe. Advertisers post opportunities and bloggers can bid on the assignments for the lowest price.
I posted my own review of Smorty a week ago. Seems to have more options for smaller blogs.
MyLot pays you to post on their own site, contribute to discussions and the such.
DayTipper
DayTipper pays you to post tips on their website.
Notice the ads on the sidebar? These are courtesy of tnx.net, a link selling service (somewhat) similar to TLA. TNX has the same process as most link brokers, you install a widget or piece of code into your website, and they sell that space on your site to advertisers as text link ads. TNX is different to other link brokers in a few ways, and one of the main reasons is the way the distribute the ads.
The best way to see how ads are placed on your site is to see it from the advertiser’s point of view: Advertisers buy ad spots in the form of “points”. One point equals one link in a PR0 page, with higher PR costing more points. This means that having many pages, and most of them having an actual PR (more than zero), the more points you earn. The ads are semi-randomly distributed across several websites, based on PR and backlink popularity filters the advertisers use.
Yes this is weird. The TNX “points” that advertisers buy are are “paid” to bloggers depending on the PR of the page the ads appears on. After you have enough points you exchange them for money (paid through PayPal). For example a PR3 link will learn you about $2.3, and you can sell a maximum of 4 links per page. Having many pages with PageRank 0 or no PR at all (new pages) doesn’t pay that well since you need about 50 PR 0 pages to match the earnings of a single PageRank 1 page.
It took about a week for ads to start appearing on this site, (3 days for approval and 4 days for the ads to roll in), and TNX has already sold ads about 1/3rd of the total ad spots i specified.
TNX seems like a decent alternative to TLA and similar services. The point system can take a while to get used to for people that want an install-and-forget solution, and their focus on PageRank will certainly keep some bloggers outside of their system. The way ads are randomly distributed through the network helps smaller publishers get into the link selling game. TNX also has an income calculator on their main page that you can use to get a rough number on how much links would sell for on your site.
Pixel real estate on blogs has become a hot commodity. If you’re going to sell ad space on your site directly to advertisers or through a link broker service, knowing how important each part of your site is to advertisers means that you can negotiate better prices and better deals.
Bellow is a basic website blueprint with the most important areas highlighted, and the options you can have for each website area.
RSS has emerged as an amazing technology to keep readers updated without having to check your site for updates. Subscribers are generaly less than viewers but RSS ads have the advantage of being highly targeted to their niche. Both TLA and Google (feedburner) are putting a lot of weight in RSS.
A combination of different tools as well as experience with ad placement. Text Link Ads has an automated calculator you can use to get some rough numbers on how much link ads on your blog will fetch based on position. Shoemoney has an ad placement blueprint with prices. Even Google has their say on the best spot for ad placement is.
If you’ve been living under a particularly large rock on the internet the last few days there’s a chance you might not have noticed a lot of the big name blogs getting hit by a visible (toolbar) PageRank penalty. Problogger went from PR6 to PR4, SearchEngineJournal went from PR7 to PR4 and the list goes on an on. Most people are still trying to figure out if Google decided to beat text link selling to oblivion, punish bloggers for extensive linking inside blog networks or some kind of PR normalization for blogs (probably a combination of all three).
If this is indeed a Google issue with bloggers selling links then most of the text link selling services are about to be hit by a big wave of advertisers pulling their campaigns from the sites. Most of these advertisers will substitute their marketing efforts another way, and most will eventually move to paid reviews services, which come in context of relevant text and keywords and will keep Google from penalizing blogs. This might not mean bigger paychecks for bloggers (at least not unless some other big names in the post reviews business show up), but there will most likely be a surge in review offers after the smoke clears on the PR penalties front.
There’s still a lot of ground to cover on this, and there’s no real conclusion to make unless either Google comes clean on the reasons for manually changing PR, or at least a new full Pagerank update starts.
Subscribe2 is a Wordpress plugin that you can use to keep users up-to-date on new posts by sending them email every time you publish a new post, weekly or monthly updated: as Chris pointed out there is no monthly notification option. Email subscription seems like cavemen technology against the glorious wonder that is RSS feeds, but still, many people just don’t like RSS enough to use it.
Subscribe2 was relatively easy to install and configure, although it does require editing a file after uploading to configure the page the subscription will appear on. Configuring how email is delivered is easy using the plugin’s options page and comes with several different tags you can use in your outgoing mails. The plugin also supports automatically subscribing users that post a comment based on the email they submitted, although i find that a rather sneaky way to get people’s address.
Overall the Subscribe2 plugin is a solid way to keep readers updated via email and works with minimum hassle. And for that matter, don’t forget to subscribe to the Serverdome.org mailing list to get updates via email, which is quite glorious really.
Subscribe2 Wordpress plugin
I love seeing bloggers eating their own dog food, so to speak. Burt of osworld.biz posted on Tuesday his idea for a one-product-a-month shop with incremental prices for each day of the month. Yesterday he formally announced the project, with an expected launch date of November 1st.
The incremental pricing plan seems like an interesting concept, I’d like to see how the project shapes up with the right promotion.
Site: 1month.co.uk