Advertise Your Site For Free
For most bloggers, one of the goals is to increase traffic, but how can you do this with fairly minimal effort. I wrote recently about using StumbleUpon to increase traffic. This has proved extremely effective for me. One story continues to generate thousands of users and page views 3 weeks after it was posted.
As usual, I have been thinking about ways to increase traffic, more specifically, increasing traffic to new sites and have even been contemplating developing something myself to aid this. While doing research for this, I came across another service that may help to gain readers.
Agridwork is a new service that you can use to advertise your site on other sites; what’s more, it is completely free.
Alexa Stats Massive Rise After Stumble
It has been one week since I posted the article Gold MacBook Pro - Bring Out Your Bling. This story brought in several thousand readers, and continues to do so. A few days later I posted Stumble Your Way From 10 To 4000 Readers, where I provided some stats for the effectiveness of the having a post Stumbled.
Today I thought it worth showing another benefit of a good Stumble, an increase in Alexa stats. Now I know all about how ineffective Alexa is as a true measure of a sites popularity, but it is still used by advertisers to gauge whether they want to advertise on a site or not, as well as how much they are willing to pay.
Anyway, with Webtrepreneur.net being a very new blog, the traffic rank is understandably not too flash. In fact, it is in the millions. It does not have a 3 month change, because it hasn’t even been in operation for two weeks yet. If I followed the normal path of just blogging away, the site would slowly increase in traffic, but it would take a lot more time. Take a look at the Alexa traffic for Webtrepreneur.net after one week of the Stumble.
As you can see, the 3 month average is 2,093,741. Without the Stumble, the 1 week average would have been pretty similar.
Gold iPhone and iPod - More Bling For Your Buck
Hot on the heals of my post on the Gold MacBook Pro comes these other wonderful toys. How does a gold iPhone grab you?
If a gold iPhone is not your thing, how about a gold iPod?
If you coupled this with a gold MacBook Pro, you’d be the Paris HIlton of your neighborhood for sure.
The gold iPhone and gold iPod are made by Goldstriker International, a company the specialises in making gold plated products.
Now if Katherine or Stuart are reading this, and would like to donate one of their products, I could write a complete review, hint, hint.
If bling is your thing, the Goldstriker Website is well worth checking out if you want to see what is possible. They have a large range of products, including some really cool diamond encrusted mobile phones that my daughter has taken a shine to.
Can You Make Money From A New Blog?
A few common questions about blogging and more particularly, starting a new blog that keep popping up are:
- Can you make money from blogging?
- How much money can you make blogging?
- How do you make money blogging?
This post will deal primarily with the first and second questions; future articles will cover the last one in the list in more detail. As the article is quite long, I have broken it into two separate posts, with this being the first installment. The second will come later, so check back for it, or subscribe to the RSS feed.
Stumble Your Way From 10 To 4000 Readers
Following on from my post the other day titled “Build Massive Traffic With StumbleUpon“, I thought I would give you an example of how effective it can be.
As I said in that post, this blog is very new, which means it can be very difficult to gain any descent amount of traffic. In that post, I mentioned how effective StumbleUpon can be to generate massive amounts of traffic, even on new blogs. Let me show you how effective it is.
First to put things in perspective, I have done no marketing for this site, no commenting on forums or other blogs in the niche; I was starting clean and naked so to speak. On Tuesday I had 10 visitors to the site.Pretty dismal really, but not unexpected. Late on Wednesday, I wrote this post, about a Gold MacBook Pro.
From 10 - 4000
At about 8PM I decided to Stumble the story. 8PM is not an ideal time to post to StumbleUpon, but I did it all the same. As you can see from the image below, with just a few hours left in the day, the 266 users coming in was not exceptional, but still better then the previous day. The next day however, saw a massive increase in users, topping out at 3,164 for the entire 24 hour period.
All up, this one post has brought in nearly 4,000 users, which is vastly more then the 10 I had on Tuesday.
What About The Actions
What was even more pleasing, was to see the actions of these users. As you can see in the image below, Tuesday the site received 57 actions. This jumped to 574 on Wednesday, and went up massively to 5,994 on Thursday when the Stumble had a full day of recording.
I think this reinforces my claim about StumbleUpon having the ability to drive massive amounts of traffic to your blog. Some points worth noting though, and which I mentioned in the previous post.
- Ads on the site received very few clicks
- Your users come in a massive spike, and drop off nearly as quickly after the spike
- I am still receiving a good level of traffic from this one post
- Your stats and ranking get a nice boost
40 Stumblers added the site as a favorite for this story, which is not too bad for a first up Stumble on a new site.
Stats For Bloggers
October 4, 2007 by Ross
Filed under Product Reviews
What’s the point in all this blogging if you can’t see how popular your content is. Sure the wealth and adulation is good, but what you really want is stats, damn stats…. 
An essential tool for any blogger is a good stats package. Without statistics and reporting, you are pretty much blogging blind.
I use various packages, depending on the type of information I am looking for. The good thing about many of the available packages is that there are free versions that provide a good amount of information. My host provides Awstats as the stats package that comes free with the hosting. It is pretty good for a detailed overview, but only updates once every 24 hours.
Google Analytics is a free and very complete package that provides an abundance of graphs and allows you to drill down through the traffic data.
This week I started using Performancing Metrics (pMetrics)and I have to say that I like what it offers. What I particularly like is the ability to see the stats data in real time, as the users are on the site. There is none of this having to wait for 24 hours to see how many visitors are on the site or what they are viewing.
The Dashboard
The Dashboard is where, at a glance, you can see a nice overview of your traffic data, including the number of visitors, their actions, and what content is popular. You also see the percentage variation of your traffic and the time spent on your site.
Gold MacBook Pro - Bring Out Your Bling
October 2, 2007 by Ross
Filed under Toys, Webtrepreneur
Have you made so much money from your blogging enterprise and have a burning desire to splash out on that extravagant new MacBook Pro, well this could be just what you have been looking for.
Computer Choppers have created a 24 karat gold plated MacBook Pro, obviously for the person that needs to stand out from the crowd. The plating costs between $1200-$1500 and includes paint matching the keyboard and track pad along with re-engraving the keys. If you still want more bling, you can even have the Apple logo replaced with your own logo in diamonds.
Make Money With WidgetBucks
October 2, 2007 by Ross
Filed under Income, Product Reviews
WidgetBucks has just launched a new widget based advertising network that displays shopping ads on your blog. From a blogger’s perspective, what looks pretty good about the service is that you get paid whenever a reader clicks on the widget and visits the advertiser. Yes, that’s right, with WidgetBucks PPC, you get paid when readers click on the ads; they do not have to make a purchase for you to earn money. WidgetBucks claims that earnings are better than $2 CPM, with their own tests showing returns of $3 to $6 CPM.
WidgetBucks is easy to install, and is ready for most blogging platforms, such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type.
Customization
It is only early days at the moment, and customization is limited to some degree, Widgets come in 117 colors and 5 sizes:
- Skyscraper 160 x 600
- Rectangle 300 x 250
- Leaderboard 728 x 90
- Full banner 468 x 60
- Custom 660 x 330
You can see 2 examples below.
You can choose to target the ads to one of 13 different categories, most of which have sub-categories. Alternatively, you can select ‘MerchSense’ which crawls your page and finds relevant products to include in the widget based upon your content.
$25 Signup Bonus
As an added bonus, if you sign up for WidgetBucks now, they will deposit $25 into your account. WidgetBox have set a payout threshold of $50, so just by signing up you are already half way there. If the CPM is as good as their tests indicate, it may well be a good source of extra income for your blog.
Build Massive Traffic With Stumbleupon
Webtrepreneur.net is a new blog. Whenever you create a new blog, the problem of getting traffic is always top of most people’s list.
It can be a little demoralizing, when, after creating a great article, you check your stats and see that only 3 people have read it. You have probably followed many of the standard tips for gaining traffic. You have written good quality content, used meaningful titles and created something you are proud of, but still you can’t seem to grab an audience; your blog simply isn’t being found.
You are not alone, this is pretty standard, even with all of the proper techniques, returns can be long term, rather then short term. For many people, this can cause them to lose interest after a few months. It doesn’t mean that the content they produced lacked quality, or was of little value, just that there was little return for the effort.
The fact that you are reading this post shows that you are interested in finding a quicker way of increasing traffic to your blog; but who isn’t right? At least you are doing something about it, you are looking for the edge to increase your readership. There are numerous techniques you can use to drive traffic to your blog, but the one I have been experimenting with for this blog is StumbleUpon.
