BlogDoofus

One of the most, if not the most, important things about monetizing a blog is generating lots of traffic. If you don’t have the traffic then you’ll never get the clicks on any of whatever kind of advertising systems that you use.

I’ve already covered a little bit about how to generate traffic and because of it’s importance I’m going to devote a series of entries to the topic of generating traffic… especially generating enough traffic so that the small percentage of people who click on your advertising links will be a large enough number to represent a significant income.

so far, I’ve talked a little bit about Techorati and Stumbleupon and made a brief mention of MyBlogLog. I think perhaps that the post about stumbleupon was a reasonable introduction to it, however The others are going to need to be expanded on.

Then there are actually a LOT of “social Bookmarking” sites, each of which can be a significant source of traffic if you use them right. They’ve each got their own rules and their own audience of people that use them and follow stories posted there. Part of knowing how to use them is knowing which one’s not to use for a given type of entry.

For example a blog entry about something that was related to computers / internet or possibly even security might be a candidate for posting on slashdot but on the other hand an article about growing a particular variety of rose would fall flat.

So, over the coming days / weeks / whatever, I’m going to be talking about the ones of these that I personally have used and then I’m going to explore the others, looking at them from the point of view of a new user (which is what I’ll be in most cases)

I’m expecting to learn a bunch about finding ways to drive traffic to a blog.,

One of the basic things about monetizing a blog (or any website) is the fact that no matter how good your SEO is or how great your content is, if you don’t get traffic to the site nobody is ever going to see it. And of course, if nobody sees the site, then nobody will be there to click on your advertising and thus the whole venture will be doomed to failure.

So, once you have a site and some content on it, even if it’s not optimized or 100% the way you want it, you need people coming to the site. One of the biggest tools for generating traffic these days is StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon is a different type of social networking site. Once you install their toolbar on Firefox, you can use the “Stumble” button to be served random pages within the categories that you choose when you set up your account.

You can also use the “I Like It” button to add new pages to StumbleUpon. If you hit the “I Like It” button and you don’t get the add a site dialog then that means it’s already been added to the system and you’re giving it a thumbs up .. a positive rating. The more people that do this for a particular page, the more likely that page will be shown to people that are doing random Stumbles.

This means that StumbleUpon can be a great way to introduce your content to lots of people and if its actually something they like, they’ll give it a thumbs up and increase the potential traffic you will get from StumbleUpon.

The key here comes back to a basic rule of any website promotion campaign. Content is king. If what you write (or the pictures / video that you post) is something that people will like, find useful or funny. You could even create a game in flash or javascript. As long as your content is created for the visitors to either serve some need or entertain, you will get some visitors that like the site which means there’s a shot that they’ll bookmark it and return. There’s also a shot that they’ll share the site with others.

Good content + StumbleUpon = traffic + return visitors + advertising clickthroughs

… and I know that’s not good for a blog, especially a new one that’s totally starved for traffic. So now its time to start doing something about bringing traffic here. One of the many things that you can do is to join online communities such as MyBlogLog. It’s another point of exposure and thus another place where traffic can come from. I started this process a while back but then I got distracted because of a bunch of stuff going on IRL and I’m only now getting to the part where I post the verification code so that MBL will accept that I actually own this blog.

So here it is:

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification

Now the widget in the sidebar should start working.

Well, Super Tuesday is over and I suppose sometime in the next few days all of the news media people and the political experts will get everything figured out as to who won what and who is going to continue their bid for the presidency and who’s going to end up dropping out.

On the democrat side it’s going to be a fight between clinton and obama all the way to the convention. The republican side is still anyone’s guess. Far as I know, nobody’s considering pulling out if they don’t do well, so that means they too will go all the way to the convention.

I’m certainly hoping that either Huckabee or McCain wins it for the republican side because the democrats aren’t going to have an acceptable candidate this year at all and romney…. he’s no better in my opinion.

It’s once again time for the super bowl as super bowl XXLII (that’s 42 for those of us that don’t read roman numbers!) and everybody’s getting ready for what is expected to be a really good game.

On the one side, you’ve got Eli Manning and the Giants. They’ve not had a shot at a super bowl kickoff in better than seven years. This means that they’re hungry for it and they’re going in knowing that they’ve got something to prove.. something that I guess from tv interviews that I’ve seen recently that they’re pretty much used to.

On the other side of the field is Tom Brady and the Patriots. They’re three time super bowl champions and so far this year they’ve had a perfect season with a record of 18 wins and 0 losses. winning this year’s super bowl will put them at 19 and 0 which if I’m not mistaken will be something of a record breaker in and of itself. It’ll beat the 16 and 0 record that the Miami Dolphins had back in the seventies and might even be the first 19 - 0 season by a pro football team. Of course, I haven’t actually looked that up yet so I don’t really know, I’m just saying what I think and could easily be wrong.

I have looked up a few things though, such as the details for the super bowl start time, an all important factor if you’ve got any ideas of watching the game. It’s scheduled to start at 6pm Eastern Time on the Fox network. The game will be played at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona so the weather ought to be pretty good.

In any event, regardless of who wins (Go PATS!) it ought to be a really good game if only because both teams have got lots of reason to want that victory.

I’ve noticed something already. It seems that in posts with less text in them the advertising isn’t nearly as “targeted” as it is on the longer posts. Apparently adsense needs some minimum amount of text from which to draw conclusions concerning the topic being discussed. For example, this post is rather short (70 words or so), Hit the permalink and see how relevant all of the ads are.

One of the things that need to be done for any new blog is to start getting its url out there where it can be found. You can’t get any traffic if people can’t find links to your blog. One of the many ways to do this is to claim your blog on Technorati.

I’m in the process of claiming this one now. Normally I would just put up the claim post and then delete it when it’s no longer needed but this time I’m going to leave it in as a link to my Technorati Profile.

The movie “Hackers” is one of my all time favorite titles. It features Jonny Lee Miller playing the role of Dade Murphy. Dade is a young hacker using the alias “Zero Cool” who writes a computer virus that crashes 1507 computer systems in one day. His punishment includes being forbidden to use a computer or a touch tone telephone until he’s 18 years old.

When he turns 18 He’s moving with his mother to New York where he gets a computer and takes on the new alias of “Crash Override”. He has an interesting, even funny conflict with another hacker “Acid Burn”, played by Angelina Jolie.

In the course of their conflict Crash and his new friends discover a plot by an evil computer genius Eugene Belford (Fisher Stevens) who is also known by the alias “The Plague” to use a malicious computer virus to cover up his use of a “worm” program to steal millions of dollars.

In order to stop Belford, Crash and company have to not only outwit the evil hacker who has access to superior computer technology but they also have to avoid being arrested by the Secret Service long enough to expose the plot and stop the virus.

One of the things that I’m learning about how to do things with Adsense is that the whole thing is context driven. The Adsense system parses the text on the page it’s installed on and returns advertisements that match keywords contained in the text. The whole idea is that it’s supposed to sorta understand what’s written and match the advertising to the content.

By using this system, there’s a better than average chance that the advertising will get clicks because it’s related at least a little bit to the text content. As an example, on the permalink page (hint for the un-initiated, if there’s other entries on the page, click the title of this one) for this entry, I’m fairly sure that the Adsense is going to be showing stuff that’s related to finding keywords and optimizing pages for Adsense. There’ll probably also be ads for assorted other Adsense related software and tools.

My next entry is going to be an experiment with an article about some topic that’s not related to Adsense and I expect the Adsense blocks to contain ads related to whatever it is.

This blog is going to be something of an experiment. In every aspect of it I’m going to be experimenting with Adsense and learning how to optimize the theme and the content that I write in order to get the best possible results out of Adsense generated income. I’ve had an Adsense account for a long time but have never made squat with it. If all goes well, the things I learn here will result in a major change.

The first thing I need to do is come up with a Wordpress theme that at least a little bit reflects the name “BlogDoofus”. Something with a bit of silliness. The other requirement is that it needs to be something that will make SEO reasonably easy and have the best possible look for when the Adsense modules are included.