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1.) Stop posting for weeks at a time, then only post to say that you haven’t been posting much.

2.) Stick to a stable diet of paid posts and sponsored reviews.

3.) Stick enough ads to your RSS feed to drive away even the most dedicated visitors. Then fill your site with ads to drive away even new visitors.

4.) Never, ever reply to a comment.

5.) Stick to personal posts, possibly about your pet, or even lolcats.

6.) Never use a spam blacklist or moderate comments.

7.) Expect traffic to stay the same, or even rise, during your two month vacation.

8.) After a long absence do a list post, much like this one.

This is why Google relevancy is and will be the metric for monetization for a long time. I did a quick search for the term “make money blogging” on both search engines. Google managed 100% of the returned links to be relevant. How well did Yahoo manage? All the results where on the spot, but out of the top ten results, 3 are (useless) links to social services (2 technorati links, one Netscape Propeller almost-empty category) with the rest being real resource sites.

You could argue that technorati is relevant, but it really isn’t. Yahoo feels that the top two spots both belong to technorati listings, while Google thinks that StevePavlina.com and ProBlogger.net deserver the top two spots. As far as I’m concerned (and anyone who would be looking for actual ways to make money blogging), Google’s results are correct, while Yahoo’s aren’t.

This is why, unless Google decides to scrap it or completely remove it’s public display, PageRank is here to stay. It might not be the metric that bloggers use to judge a page, but it is the metric that advertisers will use to value your site. It’s easily comparable, comes from the 800 pound gorilla of the internet, and in the end, that is what matters.

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.

65 Must Read StumbleUpon Articles

In case you haven’t been checking my site’s source regularly (who doesn’t really), i removed the NoFollow tag from all comment and trackback links on this blog during the weekend, and went through about 100 comments checking each link for validity. Even with my awesome moderating skills i still uncovered a bunch of trackbacks from article scrapers to remove.

I was hoping to use a plugin that would remove NoFollow on a case by case basis after i moderate each comment but the closest i could find was Lucia’s Linky Love Plugin that will only remove NoFollow from regular commentator links. Since i wanted to reward all commenters (and encourage more people to say their mind), i just removed NoFollow completely from both comments and trackbacks.

List of blogs that remove the NoFollow tag from links.

Why remove NoFollow?

There are many reasons to remove NoFollow from your blog. You might want to encourage commenting, or reward people that actually comment. I’ve even noticed some people removing NoFollow for a while just to get on the DoFollow lists and get a PR boost, then take it off (sneaky yes?). In my experience, removing NoFolow will not hurt your PR as long as you always check comments for links that point to bad neighborhoods, which you should be doing anyway. Google PR for internal and external links is a different thing, you won’t lose any PR juice on your pages if you link to other sites.

Update
Riceblogger has a nifty list of blogs that removed the nofollow tag sorted by PageRank, from PR2 up to PR7.

Getting a domain with an existing Google Pagerank and several backlinks might be better than building up PR yourself, it takes considerable time and effort to get a domain from zero to a respectable point. With these tools you can see listings of expired and soon-to-expire domains, and place a backorder to grab the domain as soon as it expires.

Network Solutions expiring domain names
Alphabetical lists and a search engine for domains under the Network Solutions hosting company.

Inet411.com’s Expired domain with PR list.
This tool will also display Pagerank for each domain and allow you to place a backorder on the domain. There are several PR6 and PR5 domains on the list.

Domain Broadcasting expiring domains search tool
Allows advanced search and listing for registered users only, only shows results for the first 6 pages if you are not registered for a pay account. Use the other tools first.

If you are planning on getting an expiring domain you should check for a fake Pagerank with this tool.

Why advertise on a blog?

Besides that its the hip “web 2″ thing to do, advertising on a blog has other posssiblities. Bloggers have relationships with their readers that no banner ad will ever manage and the buzz that a well done review will raise is better than all the banner ads in the world. Most bloggers will be gracious enough to get an ad deal that will be more receptive to write a positive review for you.

Will i be penalized by Google for advertising on blogs?

It depends. There was a lot of talk lately about Google penalizing paid link ads. A link for “premium flower arranging services” on a make money blogging site will stand out as a paid link for Google’s crawlers. Make the linking organic, not just a bunch of links on different niche sites on one day. Reviews have practicly zero chance of being penalized.

What to do with $100 USD a month

PR - search positioning: Buy permanent links from decent PR blogs directly from the bloggers themselves. Just look at some of the less prominent bloggers in your niche (not the ones charging thousands of dollars a month for ads), the guys with decent, but not top pagerank and traffic, and contact them directly to buy a text link on their web site. After a couple of months move to ‘review my service’ type of links. For one month, spend 80% of your budget on one, relatively high cost review with keyword links to your site. Since you will not be getting so many links, always watch your keywords for the best combinations.

Traffic: Target the same high rank/less than prominent bloggers again, but this time buy reviews of your product/service. A few months later see who drove the most traffic to your site and buy sidebar/banner ads from him. Devote a month’s budget to a StumbleUpon campaign, but not the first month. Backlinks will benefit you for more than the month they are posted, while SU is a one-off traffic surge with very little backlinking. You’re looking at generating talk about you and your products, not direct traffic.

What to do with $300 USD a month or more

PR - search positioning: Buy more permanent links from similar pages. Spread these links between each month, some from blog main pages, some links from specific posts. Make them look as organic as possible to avoid being penalized by Google. Don’t just buy 10 links on the first day, then sit back and do nothing for the rest of the month. After you have some permanent main page links move to ‘in context’ links with the best possible keywords.

Traffic: Buy more reviews at blogs with higher visibility. Search for sites with high number of comments per post. On the first couple of months, spend $100 or more on a Stumbleupon campaign and focus on keeping that SU traffic as returning visitors.

Pros to advertising your service or product on a blog:

It’s better than banner ads and traditional web advertising
It’s cheaper than web and print ads
It’s more engaging that traditional advertising techniques

Cons to advertising on a blog

It might backfire if your product is bad.
You can’t control the output. If a blogger decides to bash your product, you can’t stop him.

Some final thoughts:

Never stop adjusting.
Like everything else, there’s no golden rule that will always work with everyone. Keep moving ads around and getting reviews from different bloggers.

Contact bloggers directly. Or don’t
People are strange when you’re a stranger. If you have a small business or service you want to promote it might be better to contact bloggers directly to find out what they think about what you’re selling. Big corporations are better off keeping it formal and sticking with TLA and similar services.

Haggle for position
If you’re buying a banner ad, haggle for position of the ad. Just ask the blogger to move the ad on a more prominent place on the page. If buying a review, haggle about how much the review will stay on the main page of the blog.

Focus on people, not sales
When advertising on a blog, keep in mind that it’s the blogger that is pushing your product and his readers that are listening. It’s a world of difference away from a newspaper ad or a banner on a website. You will have very little control on what the blogger says and what is audience will listen. If what you are selling is a bad product, even if the review is positive the readers -will- make sure that it is heard when they did not like it.

Resources for advertisers

ReviewMe.com - Browse a marketplace of bloggers willing to review services and products
Text Links Ads - Buy links on blogs or specific blog posts
SponsoredReviews.com
Text Link Brokers

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.

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.

Blogrush managed to make some waves in the blogosphere lately with their traffic widget. A lot of people are reporting success with it, but most of them have a few thousand readers a day and the possibility to get more out of the widget from their refferal network. Others report downright deceptive reports. So how did it work out for me? Well, it didn’t really. I had the widget on the sidebar for 9 days, and Blogrush detected 800 impressions during that time. For those 800 impressions i received a total of 6 visitors from the blogrush network, which amounts to 0,0075 visits per impression. You might think that 6 visits is better than nothing, but considering the screen space the widget occupies, it doesn’t seem that good of a deal.

I replaced Blogrush with MyBlogLog for now, but i have not given up on it yet. Blogrush emailed bloggers that they will be fixing some of the more glaring problems of the service soon, like improved categories and a manual reviewing process for new blogs, but we’ll have to wait and see for that.

MyBlogLog was aquired by yahoo lately and has the possibility for some huge growth. It is not made for generating traffic, instead it focuses on the community aspect of blogs.

Digg.com is the mothership of all the web 2.0 social bookmarking sites and can be a way to reach a huge number of people. In fact, digg is so popular that a story on the main page can get you more than 50.000 visitors in less than 24 hours. From all the social bookmarking/link sharing sites that appeared with web 2.0, Digg has the possibility to direct the most traffic in the shortest amount of time. In fact, traffic can so much that sites crash and go off line shortly after appearing on the main page, coining the term “The Digg effect” when this happens. If you’d like an overview of what happens to your site when you get on the first page of digg i reccomend these two sites: The Digg Effect: A Deconstruction, and The digg effect - a visual analysis.

How it works

Digg users submit stories that appear on the “upcoming” part of Digg. Registered users can vote, or digg, a story if they like it. Stories with many diggs show up on the main page of each category, and the top stories from each category on the site’s main page.

One of the advantages of having a story appear on the main page besides the obvious digg effect is the indirect traffic from blog than link to digg stories and widgets that display the latest stories from the site.

My own experience

During the last week i have been submitting stories to Digg. None of my stories made the first page, in fact none managed more than 5 diggs, but i still received a decent amount of traffic from the search and upcoming pages. Digg accounted for about 15% of my total referral visitors these ten days. Strangely enough, much of the incoming traffic came from their search engine and generally had a lower bounce rate than other pages. This chart shows digg traffic in green compared to traffic from other sites.

Some numbers

September 15 to September 24 traffic from external sources: Referring sites sent a total of 502 visitors via 30 sources
Digg traffic: 77 visitors (15.16% of total refferal traffic)

Keep in mind that this during a ten day period, with minimal work except for submitting the article. It is not a huge boost to overall visits, but submitting to digg is a great way to get your site out there and getting it noticed, even if it never goes anywhere beyond a handful of diggs.

Downsides to Digg traffic
Most people point out that digg traffic is usually single page views, users click on the digg links, quickly scan the page then press the back button to get back to digg. Despite that, the sheer volume of traffic one can get from even a couple of hours on the digg front page is staggering and more than makes up for it.

Using Digg
Signing up for a Digg.com account is instant and allows you to submit your own stories to digg or vote for stories already on the site. Stories you dugg and submitted appear on your profile page. When you are logged in you can use the “Submit New” button to submit a story. Digg automatically checks submitted stories for duplicates before displaying them on the site.

Get your friends to digg your stories
Digg will not penalize you for having your friends sign up and digg your entries, in fact it promotes networks of friends digging up stories. Stories submitted and voted on by your site friends appear on the “Friends’ Activity” after you log in.

Use digg!
Even if you don’t have the time to be an active contributor, the ten seconds it takes to submit a story can help you get traffic for your new blog, even if it never goes anywhere beyond the upcoming stories page. Aiming for hitting the main page on Digg is a noble (and rewarding) goal, but the upcoming pages will also help increase your readership and provide new readers.