So as you can see I am giving Spottt a try… Spottt is the new way to advertise for free on the internet.

The way it works is you place the HTML code for the 125x125 ad on your site. This spot displays other advertisements. The more page impressions the advertiser gets the more credits you earn. These credits are automatically used by Spottt to display your add on other sites. I say sites because it is not only for blogs but all kinds of websites including MySpace profiles as well. Anyhow, as I said, every time your webpage/blog features another user ad you gain one credit. It takes two credits show your spot on other members sites so I guess Spottt keeps 1 impression to make available for others?... to sell? I am not quite sure where that impression goes. Nevertheless they take 50% of your impressions.

The whole system works like a cross between Entrecard and Blogrush. There is the Entrecard 125x125 idea and the random display of ads that Blogrush was based on. You can see how it looks, it is the little box on the left side of my blog. The Spottt has just over 2000 members and growing. According to TechCrunch, spot was created by adbrite with the assistance of some guy the cofounder of Linkexchange. I don’t understand why someone would need assistance to create something like this…all they made is a hybrid of two other existing services out there. Anyhow, there are some benefits associated with using Spottt, especially for websites that get a lot of traffic. As the amount of traffic you get increases so will the amount for times your spot, your 125x125, will be displayed on other sites. However, most people that will be using Spottt have smaller blogs and websites so it kind of defeats the purpose no? If I have a booming website and join Spott, my 125x125 will be displayed the most times and since the amount of total members is fixed, I will be doing much better than any other site/blog member of the network. So if you have a small blog with only a little traffic, why waiste your time and potentially useful adspace just for a few cliks a month? Old Blogrush users might be able to relate to this better… I tried Blogrush for a month and I think I got a whopping total of 3 unique visitors. Mind you that my blog was getting 6 times less traffic then so my links where displayed 6 times less. So perhaps know, I have a better chance, we will see…

Just to be fair, aside from how Spottt could be beneficial for some established sites it does have one more interesting feature. A feature that I appreciate the most. It is called the `set it and forget it feature`. All you need to do is join Spottt, copy and paste the HTML code above the fold of your site and you are good to go. In theory traffic should start rolling in.

The bottom Line

I joined I few days ago but placed the ad on my blog earlier today. There where ads displayed on the widget right away. Some time had to pass before my ad got displayed on other sites but by looking at the stats now, at the end of the day, I noticed this:

In words…my ad was shown 190 times on other sites and I got 0 clicks! Not good at all. On a good day I can get anywhere between 1000 or 2000 page impressions, that would translate 500-1000 displays of my ad on other sites. I am curious about how many clicks I will get then. What I will do is let Spottt run for a total of 5,000 impressions. I don’t know how long that would take it depends on you, the visitors and readers, it might take a week or a day...

One more thing I don’t like is that I do not have any control of what is being displayed in the widget. In other words on certain occasions I could have an ad for some persons Myspace profile. I really don’t like that at all.

You can also try it out yourself and see if it works for you. Or, if you want to learn more, you can read the relative post on the Entrecard blog where there is a comprehensive comparison between Spottt and Entrecard.

Number 1 on Google!

A couple of days ago I wrote an article on how to make money with Entrecard. One or two days later I used Google to search for those keywords and voila:

Result number 1, on page 1.

I was impressed. My post was the number one result! Then a few days later, my post is nowhere to be found. I clicked through a few pages of results, 1,2,3,4….nothing, it had disappeared. I can’t explain the reasons why this happened but it might be because Google penalized me for something. No sweat!

The point I am trying to make is that even if your post or blog does not necessarily show up on the first page of the results for a particular keyword, there are a few ways to get it out there. To at least get some visitors to your particular article through search engines without it, the article, showing up.

The way to do so is by submitting your article in databases and having your articles with your links show up.

When you submit and article in one of these databases you can embed your links. These articles will be stored in the database, usually ranking high because they are trusted sites by Google. In addition to that there are tons of webmasters out there that are constantly searching for new content to publish. If your article is well written and they take it and post it on their site, you will get an awesome extra backlink. Just think about it, if you write and publish 5 good articles and they get picked-up by 2 webmasters each that is a total of:

5 backlinks from the article database

10 more from the publishers, for a total of 15!

Some databases take time to publish an article, up to two weeks, so don’t expect immediate results. It could take a bit of time. I don’t care; I see it as investing some time for the future of this blog.

If you focus your efforts in writing articles around a particular set of keywords pointing back to a particular relative post of yours then that post will rank higher and higher. There is no rocket science here; just posting….You can get automated software to do this, but I prefer the good old painful and free way.

Article Databases

There are tons of content/article databases out there. Take a post of yours, change it around a bit and submit it. What do you have to gain? Well backlinks that will down the line result in higher rankings. To get a better idea on how the process works you can read more on the topic by checking out an older post of mine on Keywords and Backlinks.

You can start doing so right away. Fit it in your weekle blogging routine. Save copies of your post in a word file, once a week take every post, enhance it with your links and keywords, make it a bit shorter and submit it. Cutting it up a bit is a good way to go because you don’t want to give out all the information in the article you want to submit, adda link to your blog or particular post and submit it.

Some of the databases allow 1 link, some allow more. Depends. For some you will need some basic knowledge of HTML. It is not that hard, just see how I do it, I have and example written out at the same older post, keywords and backlinks.

Once you have your articles ready then you’re off to submit.

Here are some databases I submit articles to:

goarticles.com

ezinearticles.com

articlecity.com

amazines.com

webarticles.com

article-directory.net

articledashboard.com

In most of the above you will need to create an account. It is advised to have all your info handy…your e-mail, a name, your website address as well as information regarding your article (keywords, title, categories). Visit the first one and create an account. You will get the idea. Write everything on a text file so you can just copy paste for the next one.

Hub Pages

From the hubpages about page:

“HubPages is the leading online publishing ecosystem with easy-to-use publishing tools, a vibrant author community and underlying revenue-maximizing infrastructure. Hubbers (HubPages authors) earn money by publishing their Hubs (content-rich Internet pages) on topics they know and love, and earn recognition among fellow Hubbers through the community-wide HubScore ranking system. The HubPages ecosystem provides a search-friendly infrastructure which drives traffic to Hubs from search engines such as Google and Yahoo, and enables Hubbers to earn revenue from industry-standard advertising vehicles such as Google AdSense, Commission Junction and the Amazon Affiliates program.”

To learn more just check out my two articles on Hubpages:

Make Money with Entrecard

Your own domain

Yes I have published articles that point back to my blog. They are teaser articles for the bigger versions that ‘reside’ here. These rank high in search results,(not the first one, it was published today….it takes some time), and potentially can get you a steady stream of traffic. Hubpages is a search engine favourite so any sites you create, any articles you post (called Hubs) are quickly crawled by search engines. There is no limit on how many Hubs you can create. Don’t miss out on Hubpages because, as you probably read from the quote they can be monetized! If you start getting into article submission, you should start submitting articles through hubpages, because it is easy and it will help you get a better idea of how things work. Hubpages is an article submission database that gives incentives to the writers. The only downside is that for every article you publish you will only get one backlink because they can’t be republished.

Don’t forget to check out my hubs.

Make Money with Entrecard

Your own domain

In addition to Hubpages there is BloggingZoom…

BloggingZoom

BloggingZoom not a mainstream content publishing medium. It is geared primarily towards bloggers. Bloggingzoom publishes content on its first page. In order for something to get on the first page it has to collect enough votes from other bloggers. For an article of yours to get on the first page and be “showcased to the masses” as the about page specifies, it has to collect votes. So other blogger decide if your post is worthy of being showcased and the extra traffic. The feature I like the most about Bloggingzoom is that you don’t have to rewrite your post, write an article or anything like that. Once you become a member you can just bookmark your existing post on your blog and it automatically gets featured. All you need to do is write a short description, tag it and you are ready to go. Once submitted your post will sit in the upcoming section. Personally, I haven enjoyed much traffic from bloggingzoom. Mind you I haven’t submitted may posts. What I enjoy most about this service however is the fact that every submitted article/post gets ranked well on Google and I get some indirect search engine traffic which I can’t complain about.

If you are still concerned about getting visitors to yoru blog, or even which kind of traffic is better, social media or search engine traffic you might find my other post helpful. The one that raises the question:

Money Making Traffic.

So there you go…

If you found this post helpful, then dubscribe to this blog and receive instant updates every time there is a new post.

StumbleUpon is an excellent way to increase traffic to your blog.

It is a social bookmarking site that allows you and other users to “Stumble Upon” sites, blogs, articles or anything else… bookmark them and share them with other fellow StumbleUpon users. The way it works is fairly straight forward. You find a site, you ‘stumble’ it, and once it is included in the system other users will be directed to it every now and then. When the page you included gets stumbled by someone else traffic increases. The more likes/ reviews a page gets the more traffic will be directed to it. The more votes of confidence a site gets, the more traffic it will get. Reminds you of something?

Although, I registered with stumble upon a couple of months ago to increase traffic to my blog, I never really gave it a shot. I think I downloaded the tool bar for my Internet explorer but because I mostly use Firefox it was never used.

The reason why, all of a sudden, I decided to write a post about stumble upon is this:

The ‘spike’!

Which is not necessarily a spike in the particular case, it is a steady flow of StumpleUpon users, Stumblers who have been visiting and stumbling posts of this make money blogging blog. The following photo shows my traffic sources for the day this blog had 492 visitors. Usually, and before stumble upon, this ‘how to make money’ blog was getting about 150-200 visitors a day. Then one day, one of my posts got stumbled. That is the smaller spike a few dayw before the big one. Anyhow, I was intrigued by this as you can imagine, and started looking in to the ‘stumble thing a bit more’. A stumbled some sites, photos blogs, things of interest…added some friends through the Entrecard community and then a few days later I published a fairly interesting post about how to make money with Entrecard. Then, the same night traffic exploded. Exploded for my standards…

As you can see there where 354 visits form StumbleUpon. That day there where 1,200 page views, at a rate of 2.3 pages/visit with less than a 40% bounce rate…see for your self:

So, all the above photos and blabbering are to describe my second and more intense StumbleUpon traffic spike. Why? Because I want to

1. Demonstrate that Stumble upon works.

2. To lead up to an outline of how one should go upon and reap the benefits of this exceptional social bookmarking service.

StumbleUpon provides members with something that resembles a guide to the internet. Downloading the Firefox and Internet Explorer integrated toolbars; StumbleUpon brings relevant content directly to every user. You choose what your likes are and every time you surf with their toolbar you can find content that better suits your interests.

After you sign up, create a profile, you can start submitting sites that you like. It is recommended to download the toolbar so you can add websites photos blogs on your favourites directly and faster. The way it works is: you submit your website or your post, it gets listed in your favourites on your profile page and other StumbleUpon users see it and they visit your blog.

The toolbar looks something like this:

It appears in your browser and as you can see in the photo it has a series of functions:

The Stumble! button

When pressing this button your browser automatically takes you to a random StumbleUpon page, a website which has already been stumbled by other users. You can calibrate the options and only see relevant pages or of your interest. You can do that by selecting a particular channel next to the channel button. So you pick a category and you start stumbling. That’s great. You can press the stumble button over and over to take you from webpage to webpage. Content delivered to people is targeted to their personal interests and demographic profile.

The I like it! Button

When you come across a page you like, then you can click the corresponding button, the I like it! button, to add the particular page to your liked pages. If you are the first one to discover a page, you will be asked to write a short description or review for that page and place some tags. Writing up reviews and tags are essential when stumbling. Think of the description as a ‘teaser’ for other stumbleupon users that might be interested in the post/page. The tags are also important because they are used to classify your post in the specific category.

The more popular a site, video, photo, etc, the more people will see it the more traffic it will get. Using the StumbleUpon toolbar, members rate content "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down". The more people who vote "thumbs-up", the quicker it will spread. Well designed and targeted content often starts to spread virally through StumbleUpon. The more people who see it, the more they pass it on to their friends.

If you are new to this service it is highly recommended that you start stumbling sites and make friends. Making friends is important because it provides more exposure for the sites/blogs/posts/photos you stumble. So the more exposure you get on your StumbleUpon profile page the more traffic your stumbled sites will get.

As your profile page gets more exposure:

1. More people will add you to their friends list-more traffic for your stumbles

2. Your favourites, the pages you have reviewed, will get more exposure and traffic

StumbleUpon Goals

The best way to get massive-explosive traffic from StumbleUpon is to make it to the buzz page http://buzz.stumbleupon.com/. The buzz page gets tons of traffic because every member can access it directly from their profile page. There are a few things you can do so that eventually you can get on the buzz page.

Stumble good Content

Don’t stumble crap. When stumbling your stuff, stumble the good posts, the ones that you think will get the most traffic. Make sure you review and tag properly.

Get a ton of Thumbs Up/stumbles, reviews.

Ranking higher in the StumbleUpon pages and potentially on the buzz page it is essential to get stumbled by popular users, who have stumbled, discovered a lot of pages.

To have this high StumbleUpon magic power, one should have reviewer a large number of pages, discovered a large number o pages and be part of the system of a while.

StumbleUpon is effective because it does not disclose the algorithm used to rank users within the system.

Get on the ‘What’s New’ page.

You can acces this page from your profile, every profile page has a tab like this. There you can find the latest stumbled websites by your friends, so even if you couldn’t make it to the buzz page you still have a chance to get some traffic through this page, at least in the first 24 hours of being stumbled.

Get Searched

There is a search box in StumbleUpon that could be used in your advantage to drive a fair amount of traffic to you so, make sure you tag all your submitted posts well, using the proper tags.

Make More Friends

The more people you have on your friends lists, the better the chances of your stumbled pages to be seen.

It is highly recommended that you Stumble new and interesting things. Pages or posts that have not been stumbled before….yes your new post! This works to your advantage for the following reasons:

1. You are providing new content
2. Because you discovered the content your profile picture and link will be seen when people add comments, for ever….
3. You will eventually become a credible and popular Stumbler, get more review and move up in ranking. (Your stumbles have more weight)
4. People will also add you to their friend list
5. If your Stumble becomes a top pick your profile will be seen by a lot more people.

If you have some money to spare you can also pay for a campaign on stumbleupon, I believe it is 0.05 for every visit.

The down side

There is one thing I am sceptical about. The tool bar idea. I am not a big fan of toolbars to begin with. I guess StumbleUpon must make money somehow.

So there you have it. Hope you found these tips helpful. If you did feel free to add me as your StumbleUpon friend, the URL for my profile page is: http://ksc7.stumbleupon.com.

You can also subscribe to this blog. Subscribe to this blog and receive instant updates every time there is a new post.

This post is about Entrecard and its potential use as a source of income.

(If you have no clue about what I am saying check out this introductory post on Entrecard.)

Entrecard is a great way to increase traffic to your blog. If you are reading this post right now there is a good chance you came from Entrecard so I won’t really get into the whole thing, if you would like to read more check out Entrecard Tips.

Aren’t my Photoshop skills impressive…lol

Entrecard Credits and Real Currency

The basis of the ‘Entrecard system’ is the Entrecard credit or e.c’s. The value of advertising on your blog, on any blog for that matter, is represented by an amount of credits. These credits are the Entrecard currency. The amount of credits required to advertise on ones blog is a direct outcome of the amount of Entrecard traffic/drops that blog is getting. In other words, Entrecard credits are directly analogous to traffic. The more traffic you get the more credits you make. The more visits and drops you make the more credits are added to your account. The more traffic/drops a blog gets the more credits it costs to advertise on that blog just because more people visit and drop on it. It’s pretty straight forward…

Entrecard is great because it gives the opportunity to bloggers with less or no traffic and income to advertise and get more visitors for free. In general however, advertising costs money. Sometimes, a lot of money…. Within Entrecard, credits are the equivalent of money. They are advertising dollars, and they are used by the at least 4,000 members to buy and sell advertising. Since Entrecard credits are used for advertising and advertising costs money, it is pretty easy to make the correlation between Entrecard credits and real money….dollars.

Making More Credits/Dollars with Entrecard

What are the ways for making more credits and eventually more money with Entrecard? Well, the answer is pretty straight forward. First you need to answer one question. Ask yourself, what am I selling?

You are selling traffic. When someone buys an ad on your blog they pay with the intent to get more visits. So you as a seller must be able to give your advertisers, your Entrecard ‘clients’ the best value for their advertising dollars. When someone places an ad on your widget for 100 and got 10 visits then they paid 10 credits per visitor. The more visits someone gets when they advertise on you the higher the possibility for them to advertise again; which would mean more credits for you. To make more credits and get more for traffic for your advertisers you need to be active in the community. You need to drop a lot and try and get other Entrecard members to your blog. Being active in the forums is a good way of doing so. The more time you spend on the community the more visitors you will get. Eventually you will learn ways to decrease that time spent, and as you get better in attracting people to your blog the time you spend doing so will decrease.

The best way to accumulate more credits is to remain active. As you use the system credits will rack up.

Drop a lot and drop smart. Drop to get a drop back.

Drop a lot.

Pretty straight forward advice…Visit as many blogs and drop on as many widgets as you can. Ideally, you should reach the daily drop limit of 300 every day.

Receive drops.

Drop on people who reciprocate drops. Keep track of your inbox on Entrecard and drop back on them. Some will appreciate that and always drop back. Get organized, get the RSS feed of your inbox, check it daily. Add blogs that reciprocate drops to your favourites, drop on them daily. Weed out the ones that don’t return drops and keep doing what works best. Also when you get more drops the price to advertise on your blog increases….

Receiving drops is very important in accumulating credits. Just think about it. If you drop 300 cards a day on people who will all reciprocate drops, you will be accumulating 600 credits a day. 600 day x 7, that 4,200 a week, x 52 that’s 218,400 credits a year. Since there is no limit on the drop one can receive, and there are 4,000 possible daily droppers out there, you could be getting way more than just 300 drops on you per day.

Don’t get excited, this is all hypothetical. Even if you drop 300 a day the chances of having those 300 bloggers reciprocate are pretty slim. You can fine tune your dropping over time or rank higher in your category buy advertising and get more people dropping.

Ok, so you drop a lot and you get drops back. That’s great but you are still not maximizing your Entrecard earning potential. Doing so involves selling things for credits in the shop.

The Entrecard shop

There is a shop and you can actually use it. Anyone can. You can sell advertising for more than one day, sell custom logos, capitalize on your writing skills, anything that might have a monetary value, and that could interest a buyer, could be sold. There are several other sellers in the shop that might be selling similar things with you. Don’t be discouraged, be competitive. Sell for less, give more value and you can always count on making a sale.

How much is an Entrecard Credit worth?

Well, how much do you value a visitor? How much would you pay for 100, 200, 300, or even 1,000 visitors? How much would you pay for just over 200 visits? There is no ‘Entrecard Standard’ maybe there should be maybe there shouldn’t be. I don’t know… however, it all boils down to how much you value a visit. Would you pay 500 credits for 500 visits? I know I would. Having 500 visitors in one day can be great. So what if most of them will come here just to drop. Even if I get 20 out of the 500 stick around I and read and two of them actually join an affiliate program or make a purchase through my blog, I could make that 500 credits back ten fold! How about 1000 credits for a thousand visitors? You could get those visitors for less than $10.

I’ll sell you 1,000 credits for $8. Just visit my profile and send me a message.

The way I see it you can use Entrecard to make money in two ways: Directly and Indirectly.

Profit from Entrecard Directly

Make more credits.

More credits mean more advertising for you or for others who are willing to buy the credits from you. People buy and sell Entrecard credits every day. I have bought and sold credits as well. All you need is a paypal account and some cash or credits depending on whether you are buying or selling. The rates fluctuate on a day to day or even a shop to shop basis. Meaning, some days you will find credits for less and some days for more. Supply and demand, I guess… I have bought and sold chunks of 1000 credits for $10, $9 and $8. Depends on the day, the buyer and the seller. If you are serious about getting visitors and potentially readers, spending a few bucks is a good idea. If you don’t want to spend any money from your pocket you can even use your Project Wonderful earnings to buy these credits.

If someone is interested in buying Entrecard credits he/she can post in the Entrecard forums in the promotions and wait for a reply. Once, I sold 1000 credits in less than a minute. Another time I posted and never got any replies, it depends. You can also do so through ebay and wait around for a few days. You might get a good price you might not. It’s up to you. There are people out there that do it on a daily basis. They trade the Entrecard credit. Entrecash and Entrecredits are two good examples. They are in the business of buying and selling credits. They buy low and sell high. When I sell I don’t sell as high as they do but I still get my credits worth.

Profit from Entrecard Indirectly

Get more readers

Entrecard works great in increasing traffic. Small or large old or new, all kinds of blogs can benefit. Ok, most of the visitors that get here drop and move on but there are some that actually read and stick around for a while. If you are interested in making money blogging then you should read about the kinds of traffic and especially about the money making kind of traffic.

So, as I was saying….entrecard works great in getting visitors and potentially readers. If you came from Entrecard and read up till this point just proved that some traffic is of the good kind. If you write a comment, then not only you will get a precious backlink, but you will have proven that not all Entrecard traffic is bad, there is community participation and that the system actually works well. Some of the visitors will turn into readers, some into helpful friends, and some will possibly try out one of your blogs suggestions or links and make you a few cents. More visitors and traffic could mean more backlinks for you, a higher Alexa ranking, a page rank eventually and perhaps when you decide to start writing posts for money you can ask for more.

Aside from all of the positive things of this make credits make money argument there is down side; a counter argument. As more and more people accumulate credits and make them available for sale their price will decrease. Will it decease to the point where it is not worth selling them anymore? Will they decrease to the point where it is not worth using Entrecard? Will it be way to hard to make credits to advertise on the blogs that are expensive, the ones that will bring in the most traffic? I don’t know… For the point being I know that Entrecard credits do have a value, a tangible value. I know for a fact that x amount of credits can get me x amount of visitors. Sometimes a little more and other times a little less. I believe that over time, and if the community keeps growing at the same pace credit value will, to some extent, stabilize.

If you enjoyed to this post, writte a comment or even subscribe to my feed

Stay tuned for more great ways to make money blogging

Other resources

Entrecard

Tips for success

Tips and Tricks

Entrecard Blog

Monetizing your blog can be difficult; especially if you are just starting out.

There are many ways to monetize ones blog but finding the right one could be difficult. It all depends on which direction you would like to take. If you are here for the long run then you should always think twice before you jump on an income generating advertising or affiliate program. Take your time and examine the pros and cons because all of them differ in one way or another. You should pick the ones that suit your needs. Some pay commissions based on clicks, some pay per sale… others for referrals.

In my few months blogging I have developed a liking to the ones that require the least effort/worry and generate steady passive income. I like the ones that you don’t need to overwhelmingly ‘study’ and figure out to comprehend the myriads of details and conditions.

I enjoy simplicity and straightforwardness. That’s why I enjoy being a part of Project Wonderful. Although I registered with the project about a month ago, I got approved the last few days of January.

Project Wonderful, allows you to allocate a desired area of your blog for direct advertising available to blogs and sites. You can divide that space, according to the size of ads you want to hold and set a minimum price for each of them.

It’s up to you to decide if you want to place boxes that hold small buttons, 125x125 squares, half banners or full banners and you decide how many of these to display in the box.

Interested advertisers bid for the spots and the cost to advertise fluctuates based on demand. You don’t have to worry much. Every ad box has a few settings you might want to tweak, but autopilot works fine. Just set it and forget it.

So I set it two weeks ago, I forgot about it, did nothing and at the end of the day it generated a few bucks. Project wonderful made me $5.77 as you can see in the screenshot from my account page.

Initially I created a box with two spots and set the minimum bid to 1 cent. Some day’s people paid 1 cent, other days the price went up to $2. The high bidder gets the spot.

As you can see the current box fits 4 ads and the minimum bid is set at 0.05.

By clicking on the blue letters on the top “Your ad here, right now” you will be able to see the traffic and price details for the particular box, number of impressions as well as price history. Since it was placed a few hours ago there is not much to see, but in a few days from now, everything will be recorder and displayed to potential advertisers.

As a publisher you will get the highest rate for your ad since the highest bidder gets the ad slot.

You can create your own ad and buy advertising space on other Project wonderful blogs and sites. You can put funds in your account through pay pal or just use the money that your ad boxes have generated for you.

Instead of setting fixed prices for ads Project Wonderful uses a “Infinite Auction” model, kinda like ebay but with no set end date.

If the publisher has not set a minimum price for his slot, you will pay $0 for your ad. I am actually running a couple of free ones right now. Not a lot of traffic, but no complains.

Your ad is displayed only if you are the high bidder and if you get outbid, you only get charged for the amount corresponding to the time your add was actually being displayed. No nonsense….

Note that Project Wonderful keeps a 25% commission from every ad, but they also pay for the all the transaction fees when you get paid. You can withdraw money directly to your paypal account.

Stay tuned for more great ways to make money blogging

This is the first post with a photo on this blog. I took this photo when I was in France…I think it is quite funny, to say the least. The reason why I am posting this photo, is that I am arriving at a cross road, a “blogging cross road” to be exact.

The reason for all this blabbering is the dilemma I am facing; a “traffic effectiveness dilemma”. The number of visits has been increasing, the number of clicks have been increasing, the income has been increasing (I am still in same tax bracket unfortunately…) but it is still not enough, should I keep doing what I am doing or should I change my course of action?

To some extent I am happy with the traffic this blog is getting, 100-150 daily unique visitors is not that bad. Ideally, I would like traffic to increase. I shouldn’t say traffic but readers, i.e. visitors that actually read my content, people who actually find these posts helpful. Even when it comes to the visitors that read this blog, they are not all the same. By that I mean, that some visitors keep coming back, they write comments, participate, link to my posts, point out their posts so I can link to them and so on. Then, there is the other kind of visitors, people who are new to blogging. When they visit they read and possibly learn from what I have done, what I do, how I do it and possibly their blogging endeavours their firsts steps in making money blogging are made a bit easier.

The main source of traffic for this blog has been, and is, Social Networking and Bookmarking sites. Although, my main source of traffic at this moment is social networking and bookmarking sites, eventually I would like that to change. My goal is to get more and more search engine traffic. Think about it…Entrecard for example, is where most of the visitors come from. I get 50 to 100 visits a day from Entrecard, at least. Some stay a second, some 2 and some spend more time, up to 15 minutes reading my posts. Overall, the average time spent on this blog is less than a minute, around 45 seconds. The bounce rate is over 85%. Which means easy come easy go. That’s fine…I am not complaining about Entrecard traffic. Traffic is traffic, Entrecard brings in visitors, but it does not bring that many readers, search engines do.

Search engine visitors came here because they where actually looking, searching for the information offered. Although the number of visits have been considerably lower, these visitors are readers. They spend over 10 minutes here, they view at least 2-3 pages and they don’t bounce that much. Search engine traffic bounces at a rate of 25%. And when they do, they don’t bounce to the next Entrecard blog….They click on other things. Do you see what I mean?

If I was the only person in the world that wrote about making money online, or making money blogging, I wouldn’t have a problem. I would write what I had to write; slap on a few ads, optimized the site for search engine traffic, sit back and watch the visitors and the pennies roll in.

Sadly, this is not the case. There are countless ‘make money blogs’ out there. I bet you have one too!

So how can I, how can you get a bigger piece of the pie?

Think about it….I can easily get 100 hits a day just from Entrecard. I can climb the ranks of the Make Money Online blogs with just 30 minutes of “work” a day at the most. If I can do it, you can do it, anyone can. I have written an Entrecard tips post in the past. Climbing the ranks, means more credits which translates in more advertising, and results in even more Entrecard traffic. Ok that’s fine. But what are we achieving here? There are 4,000 blogs on Entrecard, that’s great. At most 4,000 members, which I doubt because some people have a few blogs, but still… that’s only 4,000 potential visitors. Even if you are one of the top 10 blogs, what cut of the 4,000 members/visitors or readers would you be getting? Don’t get me wrong I like Entrecard, what I am trying to say is that there are thousands more if not millions of bloggers out there, who are not part of Entrecard or other social networking sites that could be visiting your ‘make money online’ or any other kind of blog and are not.

I am not dropping Entrecard, and I am not suggesting that either. My conclusion and suggestion is not to focus all your efforts in getting traffic from Entrecard or other similar sites. Keep writing, optimize your content and always have in mind that even all of the social networking sites combined will help you approach a tiny fraction of the number of possible readers out there.

Since my last posts about search engines and keywords, the position of this blog has moved slightly upward and it is now floating between page 8 and 9 when searching for Make Money Blogging on Google. It was on 8 then 9 and perhaps 10 by now. It is at page 10 or 11 for Yahoo. Either way, it has moved up quite a few pages, from page 21 a few weeks ago. Make money blogging is a pretty tough keyword to rank high in, so I shouldn’t complain. Eventually I would like this blog to be at least on the 5^th page for ‘make money blogging’ searches. Then I will proceed to optimize for the next one, the next key word. Moving up in search result pages should be pursued with as much effort, if not more, as getting known in any other social networking sites/communities. Because as days and weeks go by, the number of search result pages poor saps looking for advice on how to make money blogging keeps decreasing the number of new readers will keep increasing. Till then I will try and maintain a balance in my efforts. I will keep being active in the blogging communities, but at the same time keep writing and optimizing.

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In the past month this blog has received approximately 4% of its total visits from search engines. I am not complaining, this is my first blogging attempt….

Nevertheless, I am not satisfied, at all.

Ideally, I want search engines to bring in the most traffic. The higher it’s ranked in search engine searches and as it moves up in the searches, the easier it will be for potential visitors, readers to get to this blog. Although I haven’t been focused on moving up in the search results, I must be doing something right…

When I started, (two months ago) this blog did not appear in search engine searches. I added my URL to Google’s list, Goggle crawled my pages and I started turning up in searches. Initially, I tried searching for keywords in my posts and titles, but this blog was nowhere to be found. The only way to find it by searching was to search for my URL: www.ideasandmoney.info.

About a month into my blogging experience, I noticed that out of nowhere this blog started turning up in searches. Searched for certain keywords that I believe are relevant, keywords that I think people who might find my posts interesting might search for. Two weeks ago I searched for Make Money Blogging in Google. This blog was at page 21. This means that in order for someone to get to this blog, they had to go through 210 websites/blogs that are about making money blogging. That is not that bad considering that there are far more websites and blogs out there about making money blogging. In Entrecard alone there are over 300.

A week later, last week I searched for “make money blogging” again. This time my blog was just barely on page 15. It was the last entry in that page. In the last few days it has moved up a few spots and is the third one on page 15. You can check for yourself:

Make money blogging

A day later I was at page 14.

Today it is at page 13. Click here

Ideally I would like to be on page one.

In the following post I will outline what I have done and what I will continue to do to move up and closer to the top. Over the past few months I have been taking a few baby steps here, and a few there. The next post will have sound advice, a list of things I have done and things I will continue to do to get on page 1 of Google’s results for Make Money Blogging.

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Is Entrecard the small blog heaven?

Entrecard is my major source of traffic. I would prefer search engine traffic, but traffic is traffic. There are a few things that could go wrong with Entrecard. There is a debate going on, about how being a member of Entrecard could actually take a toll on your search engine ranking, but I didn’t have any ranking in the first place so I am not able to see the effects of something like this; maybe down the line.

The amount required to advertise on my blog has gone up a lot recently. The amount of credits required to advertise on ones blog fluctuates daily, and is related to the amount of drops one receives. To receive a card, for someone to drop a card on you, they must visit your blog. So as the number of visitors Entrecard sends to you increases, so does the cost to advertise on your blog. In total, I have received about 1400 visits to my blog in the past three weeks from Entrecard. I dropped 1361 cards and had about 1069 cards dropped on me.

When you drop a card or someone drops a card on you, you receive a credit. You can use these credits to advertise your card on other blogs. The more credits you have the more advertisements you can place on other people’s widgets. Entrecard also has a marketplace. You can use your credits like a currency to purchase custom design logos, long term advertising, reviews, custom articles etc. You can also make your services available for pay.

To get the most out of Entrecard you must be active; u must drop cards and advertise regularly.

What I do is:

-Advertise on blogs that have a higher Alexa ranking than mine, more readers than mine and many RSS subscribers.

If an ad works, I buy it again even if I have to pay more the second or third time.

-Advertise on new Blogs. When a blog enters the system it only costs 2 credits to place ads on them; so I try and buy as many cheaper ads as I can. Cheap does not necessarily mean low value.

I divide my credits and advertise on new and older blogs. If I can afford it and there is space for advertising on their blog, I try and return the favour and buy an ad from the blogs that advertise on mine.

What I will start doing is writing recommendations for other Blogs, and perhaps get some for mine.

You can also read the firts post I wrotte about entrecard a couple of months ago:

Increase Traffic with Entrecard

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I just searched using Google. I wrote the title of one of my articles and it was listed on number one, number two and number 3.

In order to achieve this you must post articles in different databases with your back link. It is not that hard and if you fit it in your daily routine you are guaranteed long term results. As the number of links to your blog increases, down the line visits will increase.

Hub Pages

There are many benefits to joining Hubpages.
Hubpages is a search engine favorite so any sites you create, any articles you post (called Hubs) are quickly crawled by search engines. There is no limit on how many Hubs you can create. You can even link back to your blog for increased traffic ;).
Aside from the hub rankings and the social networking features on Hubpages there is also some money to be made. You receive a % of all ads shown on your Hubpages. They use 3 Affiliate programs. Adsense, Ebay and Amazon. If your not an affiliate of any of these programs you can sign up right through Hubpages. If you create several hubs, post several articles, traffic and revenue can start to add up.

I posted an article on Search Engine Submission on Hubpages.

Submit Articles on Databases

Another thing you can do is to submit your articles on databases. Enhancing a post of yours, adding more words, optimizing the keywords, adding a link to your blog and then submitting it to databases regularly can and will increase visits to your blog. The more links that are out there pointing to your blog the better your search engine rankings will be. Also, submitting articles makes them available to other bloggers to post on their blogs increasing your back links.

Here are some databases I submitted articles to:

goarticles.com
ezinearticles.com
articlecity.com
amazines.com
webarticles.com
article-directory.net
articledashboard.com

In most of the above you will need to create an account. So have all your info handy and the information regarding your article (keywords, title, categories). Once you submit you will have to wait until it gets approved.

To read up on what other things I have done to increase traffic to this blog click here.

Let me keep you posted! Feel free to subscribe to my feed.

Submitting your blog to different search engines can, in the long run, get your site featured in searches for particular keywords in your text. Optimizing your blog for better results is a science in itself and is not a topic that I know a lot about. So at this point, I will just post about which search engines I have submitted this blog at.

Although manual submission can be a grueling task, not having to pay anything in the end, makes doing it a bit more pleasant.

Before proceeding on submitting I would suggest you write down all the information relating to your blog, i.e. URL, Title, Description, Keywords and just copy paste accordingly. Some ask for them and some don’t. Some require you create an account, and some need your e-mail.

Aside from the big boys Yahoo and Google I have submitted this blog to a few other smaller search engines:

icerocket.com
Aaspaas.com
Abacho.at
Abacho.ch
Abacho.co.uk
Abacho.com
Abacho.de
Abacho.es
Abacho.fr
Abacho.it
Accoona.com
Accoona.eu
Amfibi.com
Amidalla.com
Anoox.com
ATSearch.at
Eudip.com
Exalead.com
FreshLinks.net
HotLaunch.com
MixCat.com
JDGO.com
Megaglobe.com
InfoTiger.com
IntelSeek.com
Jayde.com

There are tools out there that will submit your URL for free. You can use those services to submit your blog at no cost.

For submitting in blog-specific directories you might want to read up on my previous post:

Let the world you have a blog

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Increase Traffic to your blog- Community building- Link Exchange and Surf for Traffic

A list of things the new blogger can do to increase traffic.

There are many ways to increase traffic to your blog.

Although there is an argument to be made about the distinction between good and bad traffic; for the purpose of this article I will assume that all traffic is good traffic.

Blogrush is an easy way to attract viewers and thus increase readership. The Blogrush widget displays relevant posts from other blogs on your page. The titles of your new posts appear on the Blogrush widget carried by other blogs that deal with similar topics. Consequently readers can find your posts easier. By clicking here you can become part of my blogrush network it is my referral link.

LinkReferral is a surf-for-traffic program that encourages community building amongst, not only bloggers, but publishers of all kind of internet sites. To increase traffic to your blog, you have to keep surfing, reviewing other sites and post comments in the forums. If you intend to use linkreferral make sure you have all your internet security features and set to max. The only reason I say this is because you might have to visit many sites of questionable integrity.

Here is my referral link Click Here. By joining through my referral link you will help increase my traffic. It won’t make me any money. For it to do so, users are encouraged to upgrade their account by paying a fee.

Link2Blogs is a free text link exchange program

After signing up you place the Link2blogs box on your blog. Every reader that clicks on blogs listed in your Link2blogs box will earn you get 1 credit. The credits you earn become new visitors for your blog. Your ad will be shown in other blogs of Link2blogs network, in the categories you chose.

Blogmad is another ‘earn credits-earn traffic program’. Credits can be earned in three ways:

Visit other blogs
You must stay for about 30 seconds on each one then enter a number code in the ‘Blogmad surf bar’ that signifies that you are actually there. Earn credits and move on to the next one. No download is required for use of the bar.

Banner ads
Placing banner ads is one more way to generate credits with Blogmad. You can also show other blog ads on your blog. For every 270 page views you will earn a credit.

Text Link Ad
Blogmad is registered with textlink ads. You can place the textlink add banner on your blog. When someone clicks on it you get a commission in the form of credits. It’s not a bad idea to do so especially if your traffic is relatively low and you can’t get a direct textlink banner in the first place.

Play Games
Simple flash games that will pay you credits to play.

Hope you find this list of services available helpful

There are many more things about there that can help increase traffic to your blog. Feel free to subscribe to my feed for updates.




blog
increase traffic
Link Exchange
Surf for Traffic

Increase Traffic to your blog

Community Building-Social Bookmarking and Networking

There are a few things that you can do to increase traffic to your blog.

To achieve high volumes of visitors, readers and subscribers does take time, it won’t happen over night, but it’s not impossible. Even if you have great content you can’t expect readers to flock on your pages. Having good content is one thing however there is much more to it than just posting articles.

Even if you have the best product in the world, best value, good price etc. how can you expect that people will find out about it? You need to let people know about your blog, join or create a community around the topic of your blog before you increase you traffic.

To increase traffic information must flow freely.
To inform, educate, compel and attract readers you must increase the chances of being located.

Getting your blog listed in directories is one way;

Other great ways of increasing traffic are:

1. Social Networking, and

2. Social Bookmarking

1. Social networking

Myspace and Facebook (I think Facebook reached over 60 million users the other day), work fine in letting people know you have a blog and presenting them with the option of visiting. However, there are a few more services that I came across and seem to be friendlier towards the blogging crowd.

MyBlogLog

I have found that MyBlogLog is an excellent way for someone to start building, or become part of communities. There are countless communities on thousands of topics and it is really well set up. It has excellent real time features that allow you to find people interested in exactly the same things you are. You can keep track of all your statistics and communicate with other readers and bloggers.

Entrecard

Entrecard is the new advertising phenomenon that is geared entirely for bloggers. You place the card on your blog and other Entrecard members click on it to “drop their card”, and you as well as they, gain advertising credits. Once enough credits are collected you can use them towards advertising on other members’ blogs. As more visitors drop their entry card on your blog, the cost for advertising on your page increases and so do your visits. There is an argument to be made about the quality of the hits you get, but in the end the more people visit your page the more chances you will have to get a few good repeat visitors.

HubPages

HubPages is another interesting and well set up community based information portal. It diffe