Why you should not increase the number of articles on your homepage
This is a long title for an article, my apologies for that but I was not able to squeeze it into fewer words. Wordpress lets the administrator select the amount of preview articles that appear on the homepage and on every other page. The default value is ten which means that every page (blogurl/page/number) will contain that amount of articles specified.
Google and other Search Engines index those pages and users can find them when searching for keywords. Now, if you increase the amount of articles shown on one page one side effect can hurt your status in Google. Lets say you have 100 articles and a default value of 10 articles per page.
You have decided to raise that amount to 20 articles per page. This means that the last five pages that have been indexed by Google and other Search Engines are not existing anymore. blogurl/page/6 leads to a 404 not found error as do all other pages after that.
Commission Junction Module for ALinks
September 13, 2007 by martin
Filed under afffiliate, make money
ALinks is a very useful plugin for Wordpress that allows the blog owner to define keywords and assign links to those keywords. The plugin then adds those links in realtime to the blog post which has several advantages. The first is that you do not have to edit several posts if a link to a website has changed. The same holds true if you want to change the advertisement.
Lets assume you promoted an iPod summer special which recently ran out. Instead of editing the links in your blog posts you simply change the url of the keyword once from within your Wordpress admin panel.
We all know that context related advertisement works much better than banners that are placed somewhere on the outside of the article. Let me give you another example to explain what Alinks really does.
The first step is to select a keyword which can be one word or a phrase and use one of the modules available to add a link. Modules are tiny forms that are used to create special links. There is one module for general links which would mean that you can enter a url and the keyword would automatically be converted to a link to that url.
Other possibilities are Clickbank, Linkshare and Amazon links that can be added as easily. One thing that was missing though was a module for Commission Junction links which I created and added to my list of modules.
Commission Junction uses a combination of links and images that have to be added to be valid and earn for you. My Alinks Commission Junction module lets you add the image url and the link url so that both are added when you add new keywords.
I’m using this Alinks module to create specific links to keyword phrases and it is working very fine. The only problem is that there is some whitespace after the link because of the image that is added afterwards. The image is only 1 pixel in size but the space is visible.
Read More:
Download Alinks Commission Junction Module
Download Alinks Plugin
Do small sites profit from Spotplex ?
March 14, 2007 by martin
Filed under drive traffic
Spotplex is a relative new service that indexes articles from websites that have a small javascript implemented. So what does it do ? It ranks articles based on their views on the writers website which puts websites with many visitors in a natural advantage and small sites at a natural disadvantage. Popular articles, that is articles with the most views are shown in prominent places on Spotplex while articles of smaller sites make it rarely to those places.
They can still be found by searching for tags but I suppose the effect on traffic is not that enormous. Does it make sense for small sites to implement the javascript code from Spotplex at all ? Let me answer it this way. I don’t think it would harm the site in any way which means: yes, do it. Even if you receive a few hits per day it is worth the implementation. It will grow more with your site growing and with Spotplex becoming more popular in the long run.
Vizu and Feedburner Ads not performing that well
March 12, 2007 by martin
Filed under make money
I’m using Vizu Answers and Feedburner Ads on my main website and both perform badly since I started using them. Vizu Answers adds a poll to your website and pays per impression while the Feedburner ads are added to your feed and are paid by impression as well. Vizu seems to lack advertisers at the moment - I rarely see a poll on my website. My site with 10000 visitors a day had only 38000 ad impressions which means that the poll was not displayed most of the time.
Feedburner on the other hand seems to geotarget traffic really well which means that their ads get only displayed in my feeds if the reader comes from a certain region of this world. It is mostly US-based from what I can see and only 30-40% of my feed readers come from the United States. The other readers do not see an ad at all.
My first paypal payment from Vizu
January 30, 2007 by martin
Filed under make money
A great way to add another revenue source to your website is by adding a paid poll from vizu to it. You configure the settings by yourself, add some keywords and categories to it and select the amount that you want to earn per 1000 impressions.
Vizu then tries to find advertisers that fit your description and adds automatic polls to your website. I had great success with a setting of $2 per 1000 impressions (vizus share is 50% of that number). I just wanted to let everyone know that they actually pay in time and can be recommended. They seem to have troubles finding enough advertisers for my website this month, only 1/3 of impressions have been served.
Sources of Inspiration
I’m writing articles for my websites for about two years now and encountered the so called writers block several times. Having to write articles every single day can put immense pressure on you if you do not know how to cope with this situation. I found several methods over the course of those two years that help me whenever I run out of ideas and I would like to introduce at least some of them to you.
Sometimes the simplest things help. Take a walk, watch a movie, talk to a friend, read a book. Everything that could flush your mind and distract you from the writers block. It is not a good idea to force something, let it flow and you will reach the point where the ideas come flooding back.
- Use the comments on your website. Comments are a valuable source of new ideas and suggestions to expand already written stories or write completely new ones. This has another advantage, you enter a dialog with your visitors. They see that you read their comments and react by writing a new article. State the source in a sentence that mentions the name of the guest. E-mails can be used in a similar way.
- Visit sites that write about similar topics and read their articles. Maybe you will find something that is worth writing or commenting about. This builds at the same time a connection between your site and the source which could result in traffic and friendship with the other site owner.
- Yahoo Answers is a great source for Inspiration. Select the category that your blog is about and start reading the questions of the users. If you find an interesting one write about it at your website and add that as the answer to the question as well. Leads to more traffic as a side effect.
- Blog at a different location. Visit an internet cafe or library and use one of their computers to update your blog. You could write about the different location in the introduction for instance. Visiting another location has some advantages, you have to travel there which means you have some time at hand to think about matters of interest without the computer in reach.
- Collect ideas and tips in advance. I do this by adding a new post with just the heading and a short text that could become a great article in the future. You could also buy a notebook and write down ideas immediately when they come to your mind. Use this repository if you don’t know what to write about.
- Ask your readers. A great way of finding out what your readers want is to ask them directly in an article. This works best if you have a certain number of daily visitors and comments enabled. Blogs that are just starting will probably get no reply at all.
- Write from a different perspective. Lets say you have a blog that opposes DRM (digital rights management). A different perspective would be to step into the shoes of someone that enforces DRM. Try to write about their arguments for DRM and let your readers pick em apart.
More inspiration and ideas can be found at Darren’s article “Battling Bloggers Block“.
A Real Example
I thought I start my daily posts with my own example - How I became someone who is making good money with blogs and websites. It all started by coincidence, really. A friend of mine created a software which he wanted to supply freely and I decided to create a blog for that software. I added adsense to the site without really knowing what I was doing. The same day my website made it to the front page of digg.com which happened to send thousands of users to my site at that day.
The result was a steady flow of visitors from digg and other websites that wrote a story about my blog and the program. I made more than $80 the first day with google adsense. The income decreased in the coming days but I was so motivated by this coincidence that I decided to read and learn more about money making. I probably would have quit some weeks later if my site would not have made it to the homepage of digg.
About Monetizr
I bet the first question that comes to your mind is why the hell does the world need another monetization blog if there already exist such great established blogs like problogger or entrepeneurs journey. Those two blogs are really great and I have them in my feed reader because their are actually essential. What they are missing though is something that I would like to add with my blog.
I try to write for guys like you, guys with dreams of making money online, with blogs that have no or only limited success until now. It is actually pretty easy to become a semi-problogger making money from your blog. And this is the main difference that I want to lay emphasize on. My audience is everyone who wants to reach a certain level and not the guys who are already on that level.