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Commenting and linking on blogs that do not use the ‘nofollow’ attribute on comments will help your site because that link will pass a bit of the original page’s Google Pagerank back to you, slightly raising your own PR. External links from comments and trackbacks where originally blocked from leaking Pagerank by adding the Google “nofollow” tag on comment links to discourage spammers (did that ever work? Doubtful). All these bloggers removed the limitation on comment links to pass PR to encourage commenting, and reward comments with a bit of PR juice.

Courtney Tuttle’s D-list

I followed the list to get some PR juice on some other domains i own and noticed not all the sites still have comments intact, so make sure the site owner didn’t switch back to nofollow links after getting on the list. Overall, this is not the most direct way to get high PR links, buying links from already established domains will help your PR better. Separate posts generally have little pagerank to share, but as they build up and get older, the PR they will provide will make a difference.

Ever wonder how much it actually costs to advertise on a blog? This is how much some of the top bloggers charge for promotion on their sites, as well as some services you can use to market your products on blogs.

Tutorial Blog

300.000 unique visitors per month
Alexa Rank: 18699
PageRank: 5
6.000 RSS readers
Tutorial Blog runs two kinds of ads, 5 200×90 pixels images on the sidebar for $300 a month, and text ads below that for $100 a month. Source.

John Chow

200.000 unique visitors per month
Alexa: 2377
Pagerank: 5
Almost 10.000 RSS readers

John Chow sells multiple ads on his blog, spread between the main page, posts and rss.
468×60 pixels top banner sells for $1000 a month
300×250 Embedded Ads: In most recent posts on main page, RSS and all single posts for $500 a month.
125×125 Button Sponsorship x 8: $500 each
Product review posts: $400 a post.
Feature Site Sponsorship: $240 per month (two months minimum)
Post Level Text Ads via text link ads
RSS Text Ad Sponsorship: $200 USD.
Source

The Deck: (A list Apart, 37 signals, Veerle’s Blog, and many more)

Pagerank: Upwards to page rank 8 for some

The Deck is a partnership of many influential bloggers. Only a single ad is shown in every page on the network. 18 ad sports are sold each month, which translates to 5.55% of page views across the network to display your ad. 120×90 pixels and up to 75 characters of text for $5500 per month. Additionally, advertisers can buy a “day of impressions” at $3100 per day. Source

Shoemoney

200.000 unique visitors a month
Pagerank: 6
Alexa Rank: 2564
Over 11.000 RSS subscribers

Shoemoney has 5 advertising areas on his blog.
5 rotating 468×60px banners: $950 per month, per spot.
Exclusive Featured Sponsor static 120×600px: $3850 per month (featured sponsor)
Sidebar: $350-1500 per month per spot depending on size.
The Launcher spot: Rates for this spot start at $2950 per month
Source with image map of ad positions

Text Link Ads

Text-link-ads.com is a marketplace for bloggers to sell ad spots on their web sites. You choose to display ads on specific posts or site-wide and advertisers can buy these spots on a monthly basis. The TLA staff chooses the ad price for each spot based on backlinks, traffic, Google page rank and other values.

There are thousands of blogs available to advertise on, and prices start from $5.00 upwards thousands of dollars per month.

Review Me, Pay Per Post and similar services

Using these services advertisers can both place opportunities for bloggers to review their products, or view listings of bloggers willing to review products for a payment. These reviews have the benefit of being posted as normal posts on the blog chronology, not as ads, defeating banner blindness on most users.

What is bounce rate?
A bounce is basically a visitor that loads a single page on your web site and then leaves the site without clicking anywhere. This would describe most Digg and other social voting sites really. If your bounce rate is 70%, out of a hundred new visitors 70 loaded just one page on your site, then left for good.

Why i love StumbleUpon
Ten days ago i wrote an article that was stumbled by many users, sending a spike of traffic from StumbleUpon.com. The article was first linked by (i think) problogger.com and later spread to many other blogs. This led to the article getting ‘liked’ by about a dozen stumblers. Those dozen stumblers sent a spike of 300 unique visitors my way. I kept getting about 15 referrals a day from StumbleUpon until there was a second, smaller spike of stumbles a week later, sending an extra 200 readers to the entry.

After each spike of traffic from SU i checked the analytics referrer logs for Su traffic which reported a 39% bounce rate from stumbleupon visitors. So from the 600 readers, 400 viewed more than that one page that got stumbled and checked out more from my site. In comparison, traffic from shoemoney.com, my biggest referral traffic, bounced at a rate of 75%, and Google organic traffic at 68%.

Why does StumbleUpon traffic has such a low bounce rate? It’s all about boredom.
StumbleUpon has a huge advantage over digg traffic, the next cool site is always a link away. With Digg, you have to press the back button more than once to return from a visited link to the Digg main page. StumbleUpon has it’s own toolbar which is always available no matter the page you’re reading, so an SU visitor doesn’t have to worry about typing URLs or hunting down bookmarks to return to SU’s main page.

StumbleUpon traffic is highly targeted
Digg-type sites focus on one large mob of users with mostly random interests. True, Digg does have categories but most of the traffic will come from the Digg main page. Stumblers configure their profile and only see sites they are interested in. This explains the phenomenal bounce rate for SU traffic.

What i could have done better: Display popular posts
When the first wave of stumbles hit i was using a layout that did not display top or related posts at all, and i am certain having either would have reduced the bounce rate even more.

Add a “stumble this” button
I should have added a StumbleUpon graphic after the entry or even a line reading “If you enjoyed this please Stumble it” to remind people to thumbs-up the page.

I signed up for the Clickbank affiliate program today. I was looking for advertisements to add below the entries in the separate post pages and did not want to go with adsense or text-link-ads yet. Signing up with clickbank was mostly painless and within 5 minutes i was looking at the affiliate marketplace. I picked up a “Profit from blogging / SEO” (affiliate link) and added it between the entries and the comments on separate post pages.

Things i like about Clickbank:

Many affiliates to choose from.
Clickbank has hundreds of affiliates to promote on each category. You’d be hard pressed to find a niche you cannot cover.

You do not have to use their code or widget
Just link to a page to the Clickbank domain with your id in the url, and if the item sells, you get a percentage of the money. You can use your own text link, or create an image yourself. If you know a little bit about design you can create some decent banners for the products you’re promoting.

What i don’t like about Clickbank:

Way too many skyscraper sites
Most of the affiliates i checked just have a single page with horrible design and the classic by now “authentic satisfied customer” stories, but i guess you use whatever sells the best. These kind of pages always come with affiliate programs, but i would be more inclined to link to a page that looks at least decent.

Too many “Get rich quick” schemes
The top search results for “SEO” all reveal amazing opportunities to earn a million dollars a month by tricking adsense, or getting a top Google spot in a month.

Conclusions:
I found Clickbank adequate as far as affiliate programs go. You might have to look a little beyond the top spots to find a program you feel comfortable promoting but there are many decent deals for bloggers.

Twelve simple ways to promote your new blog.

1. Add an About Me/Contact page
2. Submit to Google, Yahoo and MSN
3. Replace the default template with something better
4. Register your feeds to as many rss directories as you can.
5. Install All in one SEO and Akismet spam filter
6. Sign up at technorati and claim your blog
7. Comment on five other blogs with subject similar to yours
8. Add the address to your forum signature and reply to 5 threads
8b. If you don’t frequent a forum with interests close to your subject, start now.
9. Stumble your main page on StumbleUpon
10. Submit an article to Digg & Reddit, and ask some friends to vote it up
11. Add your blog to a blog directory
12. Sign up for Google AdSense, even if you don’t plan to have ads right away

Something i keep seeing on blogging tip lists is this: Be passionate about your subject. It’s also an idea that’s completely ridiculous. You don’t need to be passionate about something to blog about it, you don’t even need to like it. All you need is enough knowledge on the subject to keep a regular posting schedule, and enough drive to go through the process of building a blog from zero.

When you’re monetizing a blog, treat the process like it’s work. All those hours spent promoting and optimizing for search engines might be better spent playing a game, but really, it wouldn’t be called work if it was fun to do.

Separating trackbacks from comments helps the readability of your comments section and keeps things clean. There is no way to do this using a plugin right now, but Michael from Problogdesign describes how to do this by editing the template files.

Many people choose to block trackbacks altogether for cramping up their comment section, i prefer to leave them on as a thank you to people that linked me and having them this way helps keep things tidy.

If you haven’t heard yet, Smashing Magazine, the blog that, uh, smashes web stuff into your screen has redesigned. The thing i noticed the second the page loaded was their navigation. They moved the menu on the very top of the page, even over the Smashing logo. The new design puts the focus on the current news and the popular posts sidebar which sports over 50 of the most popular posts (i stopped counting at 50). This is a great way to reduce bounce rate by providing a long list of past content and smashing magazine has a huge amount of great information in older posts.

The color scheme and style of the site remains pretty much the same, so it’s not going to surprise many of the old readers. For a blog, it’s a really big decision to move the navigation and topics on the very top of the page.

Northxeast.com also has an unusual design for the main page. The only news that appear on the main page are posts titles, and not a word from the article’s content. NorthxEast can do that because they already have a reputation for solid writing and informative articles and their visitors are sure to click on links if they like the title.

The Northxeast titles are some of the best entry titles i’ve seen on a blog, if you need some title inspiration for your entries, definitely take a look at the posts they publish.

Do you blog from work? Do you also blog from home, a net cafe and a friend’s house? Well, i do. On Friday afternoon i needed some files on a future article and i realized i had everything on my work pc, i wouldn’t be able to get to these files before Monday. This happens far too often and it’s become a permanent setback to always having to carry around a flash card or a cd. Not to mention i keep forgetting that damn things everywhere.

A man with a plan

During the next weeks i will be moving the bulk of my blogging and general office-type activities online. Productivity web apps are a dime a dozen these days, even Google is getting into the game with Google Docs. My first attempt to move my work online will be eyeOS, an open source web desktop solution.

My needs from an online desktop
There are two ways to move from the real desktop to an online one, either find a solution that handles all desktop applications under one roof, or combine different tools and services. Using a different tools is a more flexible solution, but managing an ever growing list on logins and passwords is not my idea of ‘web productivity’.

Consistency between applications is also important. Office apps must save documents that are compatible with everything (including ms office), image editors should save jpg, gif and png files with some sort of ’save for web’ function.

No fees

Everyone wants something for nothing. I’d be willing to pay for a web office solution some time in the future, but not now, and not before it’s become indispensable for my blogging.

Decent looking

Thats the designer in me speaking, but if i’m using something daily, i want it to look great.

What i plan to replace with web based software:
Basic image editing with Photoshop

You can’t beat photoshop for design work, but i want the ability to do some basic editing, adding text to an image and saving it for web use without it. I’ve used some of them in the past and found them as an ok tool for non designers, now i’ll have to find one for everyday use.

Text editing

I keep most of my blog writing on the wordpress dashboard, which i find lacking to say the least.

File storage

I need access to files from everywhere, with a decent file upload and download limit. For this, i could live with just having a simple ftp account on serverdome to upload and download files from.

RSS feeds

I use feedreader right now, which, while excellent software only runs on windows machines.

This post was written using the text editor of the eyeOS web desktop and the images edited and saved with with Pixenate.

Serverdome.org entries for this week:

4 must have free SEO tools for bloggers
Four essential tools to get you started on improving the SEO of your blog.

How the top bloggers display their ads - Percentages and numbers
If you’re going to read something on this blog, start with this. My pride and joy post about how the top bloggers allocate ad space on their blogs.

7 most annoying things bloggers have on their sites
Seven things i see on blogs that make me want to run far, far away. Surprisingly, only two are ad related.

Why i ditched Blogrush over MyBlogLog
Self explanatory title, really.

Promote your new blog with Social Bookmarking - Digg.com
How to start promoting your blog with Digg.com, along with some basic traffic percentages and concepts.

A month of better blogging

Links i enjoyed elsewhere

Case Study: Mystery blog - part 1 at www.patbdoyle.com
Interesting post about the process of monetizing an abandoned blog.

The Morning After Wordpress theme at themasterplan.in
Expertly made free Wordpress theme. I love this.

Mybloglog traffic at andybeard.eu
Mybloglog traffic stats over other similar blog widgets.