blogvp

Darren and others discuss different ideas for the number of posts to have per day on your blog. I like all of the ideas, especially about being consistent and developing some kind of regular schedule.

One thing that I wanted to discuss was the idea of oversaturation, meaning not posting more than a certain number of posts per day or people will feel overloaded and might not want to or have the time to follow your blog.

On one of my blogs I am testing oversaturation. What I mean is why not overload the blog in the first stage, for like a month or so and then slowly decrease the frequency until getting to a normal pace of three to five posts per day.

The benefit to this is that it will have a bigger impact from the search engines, which is the most important source of traffic, while minimizing the amount of bad karma you get from readers because you probably won’t have too many rss subscribers at such an early stage.

I’ll expand on this later and keep up the updates and would like your comments.

Darren has a nice write up on how it is in the best interest of bloggers that want to earn all of their income from blogging to take the long view, and not be discouraged in the short run.

So if your goal is to grow a substantial online business - one of my main piece of advice is to take a long term view of it. While a very small percentage of successful online business people do seem to make it big overnight - the examples of this are increasingly becoming fewer and farer between.

Duncan has a long write up on ad sizes and their results.

Some quick takeaways if you don’t want to read it all:

1. General ad placement
   

   Inline ad spots, such as a Google Adsense ad placed within the text post for example is highly regarded by many

   Side bar spots have various levels of success, where as top banners (above the heading) or footer ad spots have the lowest level of clickthru.

2. Ad sizes
   

   Leaderboard (728×90)
   36.7%

   Wide Skyscraper (160×600)
   16.7%

   Half Banner (234×60)
   12.0%

   Button #1 (120×90)
   11.7%

   Full Banner (468×60)
   7.5%

3. Blog unique spots
   

   Google Adlinks bar, which I use in a 728×15 configeration on a number of blogs, and it works well. Its not my highest paying spot at the Blog Herald but it regularly ranks at no 2. On other blogs I’ve had no luck with it, and others its been beyond successful.

4. The Chitika factor
   

   One last different sort of ad spot that is getting a lot of raves across the blogosphere,

5. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
   

   Dont be afraid to experiment with your template as you would with any other aspect of your blog. First and foremost, its fun.

chitika, ads, adsense

Apparently it’s become an issue that some bloggers are not getting their PIN numbers in the mail. So Google is extending the recommended wait time to 3 weeks if you’re in the States and even longer if you’re international.

My suggestions is to just set up the direct deposit, so you don’t have to worry about waiting for PIN numbers or your checks to be sent to you, but get it electronically and be sure that you receive it.

google+adsense+payment

Go to your nearest brew house, get yourself a nice Americano, then take in the following:

When I worked for the banking industry, I found that the people that succeed, either at production or managerial levels are numbers freaks. The company literally tracked everything that had an impact on sales and production. No, I don’t mean like the number of calls you do, and how much you broght in at the end of the month for the company, but everything that could be quantified was tracked. And in real time, or updated every couple of hours.

I didn’t know what the numbers meant in the beginning and I hated keeping up with all of the numbers, it would be too confusing and I would become frustrated. But after about a month, once I learned how all of the numbers and stats worked, and no longer had to consiously thinking about what they meant, I began to use them to my advantage. I became obsessive about the numbers, they spoke to me.

The numbers told me what I need to work on, what to fix, what to focus on and they also told me where I was doing a great job, and when I should celebrate.

Moral of the story?

What is driving your blogging productivity?

So lately, with so much to do on my plate, I’ve thought about my productivity and am asking myself the following questions:

• What’s driving my blogging productivity? A system or random burst of feelings?
• If I’m to succeed, what do I need to produce? How many posts per day? Per month? per year?
• How many blogs should I have? and what is the reason for each blog?
• How do I divide my time so that I can maximize on results?
• What is the best method of planning and tracking my productivity?

I’ll be considing these questions and writing about them here, and it will do you a great deal also to answer these and related questions to increase your blogging productivity.

SIDENOTE: This might seem a bit off topic, but read the entire post and it’ll make sense.

There is a lot of talk aright now about Google Base (currently speculated as a classified/auction place) being the killer of eBay and doing a lot of damage do other companies. I personally know a lot of people who aren’t too happy with eBay, and then there are the ones that are eBay fanatics.

I personally think that if a company like Yahoo did buy eBay, it would make it a little user friendly and if Google did compete with eBay, then all of us would win.

But, you can profit from eBay, even now.

Here’s an example:

garagesalefodderblogger posted this on the ebay board:

I write a blog about buying things at garage sales and selling them on eBay for a profit. You can link to it from my About Me page. I make several thousand dollars a month doing this. Any other bloggers out there linking on their About Me page?

Here’s her/hisMy Page, and her/hisblog.

This is a good example of combining different web services to take blogging to even the next level.

Does anybody else have similar examples of combining a blog with other services/sites, leave a comment or email me and let me know.

ebay, google+base, yahoo

Chitika News and Updates:

- Linking buttons will be released soon
- No limits on how many ads you can have on a page
- Sample Keywords can be found here.
- US, Canada, Western Europe and Australia are supported
- Chitika Daily Keyword Rotator

Chitika+eMiniMalls, Chitika

To rotate different kind of ads depending on the day of the week use this code:

Put this above the regular Chitika code:

<script language="javascript">
var dow = new Array();

dow[’Sunday’] = " ‘ipod’ , ‘dell laptop’ , ‘powerbook’ ";
dow[’Monday’] = " ‘xbox’ , ‘playstation’ , ‘nintendo’ ";
dow[’Tuesday’] = " ‘couch’ , ‘bedroom furniture’ , ‘office furniture’ ";
dow[’Wednesday’] = " ‘popcorn maker’ , ‘blender’ , ‘toaster’ ";
dow[’Thursday’] = " ‘cod liver oil’ , ‘glucosamine’ , ‘arthritis’ ";
dow[’Friday’] = " ‘braun shaver’ , ‘norelco shaver’ , ‘rogaine’ ";
dow[’Saturday’] = " ‘LCD monitor’ , ‘hard drive’ , ‘headphones’ ";

var now = new Date();
var dayNames = new Array("Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday","Saturday");
</script>

Change the queries line in your Chitika code to:

var ch_queries = new Array(dow[dayNames[now.getDay()]]);

Thanks to chitikatips

chitika

Adrants writes: “that 29 percent of traffic to a site created as part of a recent Audi A3 campaign was generated by advertising on the BlogAds network. The kicker is that 29 percent was achieved with just one half of one percent of the overall media budget. Let’s say it again, advertising on weblogs deliver Audi 29 percent of all responding yet took just on half of one percent of the budget to do so.”

So, this little fact can be used when looking for sponsors.

blog+traffic

Darren posted “How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs” with summary of different options that are available for bloggers to earn income. Here’s a quick summary of his summary:

1- Advertising Programs
2- RSS Advertising
3- Sponsorship
4- Affiliate Programs
5- Digital Assets
6- Blog Network Writing Gigs
7- Business Blog Writing Gigs
8- Non Blogging Writing Gigs
9- Donations
10- Flipping Blogs
11- Merchandising
12- Consulting and Speaking

The idea that came to my mind is that we as bloggers need to start really thinking into the future, so we’re not constantly being dragged to change our models, but are leading the change.

I’m not talking technologies here, but more in the area of marketing and advertising.

multiplestreamsofincome

Linking is one of the cheapest and fastest way to produce content. There are many successful sites and blogs. But isn’t that’s what successful sites do already? It is, many of them run a simple sentence or two and a link, and that’s all it takes. Providing too many links in one post would lead to confusion.

How to produce linking content?

• The best way is to subscribe to many different feeds, and to some search feeds, and just get a feel for what your audience would be interested in, write a simple two or three sentence opinion or description and post it with the link.
• Another successful idea is to constantly search out the net for the newest/hottest/bleeding edge ideas and constantly link to the new, to the hot, to something that nobody else is covering. This tends to build a more cult like following in blogs

Benefits of Linking

• Trackbacks - the biggest benefit is when you link to other blogs is that many of them will have links back to you in the trackbacks at the bottom of the post, thus bringing traffic back to your blog
• Build a loyal readership - there are many information addicts out there, and if you constantly feed them with something new, exciting, stimulating, they’ll be coming back again and again.

content, blogcontent, generatingcontent

Brand Autopsy brought this to my attention, there’s is a new study that is out, which says:

Sex in print advertisements improves the ad effectiveness for men, including ad-like, product-like, and purchase intent, while it decreases ad effectiveness for women. For both men and women, sexual ads make it less likely that they will recall correctly which brand an ad was promoting.

I’m not sure how it’ll apply to us (bloggers), maybe I’ll write about emotional response some time, but you can see the study results here (PDF).

study, advertising

To summarize:

1. Place multiple ad units on a page to give users most relevant ads next to the content they are reading
2. Too few ads? “multiple ad unit system works best for pages with highly targeted ads and therefore may only display the first few units”
3. Advance tips:
   

   1) Create a channel (see AdSense Help for creating channels) for each ad placement. For example, if you have a leaderboard on the top of the page, a skyscraper on the right hand side, and another leaderboard on the bottom of the page, make sure you have a channel for all the top leaderboards, a second for the right skyscrapers, and a third for the bottom leaderboards.

   2) Test the channels for at least a week to compare which position has the greatest clickthrough rate.

   3) Make sure the the ad unit with the highest clickthrough rate is the first instance of the ad code that appears in the HTML. Since the first ad unit is always filled before the rest, you want to make sure that ad unit is located in the best placement on your page.

Per google

adsense, multipleads

Joel writes: “I predict that you’ll see a massive expulsion of smaller AdSense sites by Google, and it better happen soon, or AdSense will ruin Google’s reputation among advertisers, something which could be deadly.”

And I like the response by Toivo from AdMoolah: “Don’t worry, Joel, the sky is not falling. Do you thing Yahoo! and MSN would both be trying to join in on this game if it was a doomed business model?”

I’m sure that Google will come up with some solution to managing spam blogs on blogger, which will shut down most of the blog spam.

adsense, google

Google has quietly been running geo-targeted contextual ads in RSS feeds for several months, but many advertisers, agencies, and analysts contacted by ClickZ were surprised to learn about the placements. Per Clickz

Duhhh…. I knew this, and I think most of the regulars knew it also.

Google recently acquired Urchin…you guessed it a Site Analytics company. Could it be that they realize customers will start asking how paid search clicks convert, against organic search traffic and how this compares to clicks from online advertising campaigns, customer retention email, and partner promotions and so on? Watch out for what site analytics competitors such as Omniture, WebSide Story and Coremetrics will do in response to Google. Per Moneyweb, Per EC

Now, how about putting Urchin and Adsense together… and everybody say Amen!

urchin, webanalytics