Make Money from Blogs » Site Visits

Getting some quick information on your site – Analytics

ashish — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:54:23 +0000

When you run a site, getting accurate information and statistics about your sites viewers is very important, and people use a combination of measures such as installing the Google Analytics Program, or using a conter program such as Sitemeter.com. Such information helps them to find out where people are visiting their site from (their users geographic location), which section of the sites are more popular, what are the top referrers that people use to find their site (through search engines, through links on other sites, and so on). I regularly use these programs to ferret out such information and have learned much. As an example:
- I discovered that Google Search is absolutely essential in order to get viewers to your site
- A number of referrers to my sites have been through email programs, which essentially means that people are forwarding the subscription mails they receive when a new post is made, and encourages me to get effective subscription tools in place
- I often get surprised about which posts are most popular, and this helps determine that users think differently from what we expect, and also reinforces the belief that using such analytics tools is a necessary part of running a site

Apart from these tools, I also use another tool for generating information about how popular the site is on several parameters:
- How has the performance of the site been in getting number of users over the last few months (have more people started visiting, vs. have a lower number of people started visiting)
- How many sites link to this site (important for generating a better result in search engine results)
- Identifying keywords (very important in terms of defining which keywords should be emphaized in posts)

So, which is this tool that I use ? It is a site, called siteinfo on Alexa, at the following link : http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo. Suppose you have a site about Indian politics called Indiapoliticalblog.com, and you wanted to find out its result on Alexa, you just need to add the site URL (without the http: //), so that you end up with the following URL: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/indiapoliticalblog.com

Who Sees Ads Plugin – selective display of Ads on WordPress

ashish — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 16:31:32 +0000

Ever wondered about who comes to your blog, and how do you earn money from them ? If you have not thought of this, then it is time you did so. There is a lot of research which claims that ads work on one type of viewer, while there is another set of viewers who get offended when they see ads on a blog (with many of them avoiding particular blogs if they see too many ads). On the other hand, there is a balance in the sense that most viewers understand that blog authors also need to make some money on the side, that nothing is free nowadays (you should not however overdo it with too many ads).
So, who should you target ? You should target users who are first time viewers to your blog, those who come to your blog from search engines, and others of a similar nature. However, if your viewer is a person who is more of a social viewer, or one who visits your blog on a regular basis, then they are likely to totally ignore ads (in fact, if an ad is located in a particularly prominent position, then they are likely to cluck in annoyance). However, you do not want to piss off these users; after all, for your blog to become popular, you would want many of these regular readers to continue to visit your blog on a regular basis; in addition, if they like something on your blog, they will spread the word.
What you need is a way to target ads depending on your users; this may seem difficult, but there is actually a WordPress plugin that actually does that, available on this site (planetozh.com)
From the site, here is a list of rules:

By default, you can pick or mix any of the following rules :

If Visitor comes from a search engine, display / don’t display
If Visitor is a regular reader, display / don’t display
If Post is older than XX days, display / don’t display
If Visitor is logged in, display / don’t display
If Date is between specified date interval, display / don’t display
If Ad has been showed less than XX times, display / don’t display
If This visitor has viewed this ad less than XX times, display / don’t display
If All previous conditions fail, try another context
If Any condition, display / don’t display

The ad behavior will be eventually decided by the first rule which is matched. For instance, if you want to display an ad only for search engine visitors, you’ll pick the following :

If Visitor comes from a search engine, display
If Any condition, don’t display
If no rule is matched, nothing displays, so the second rule in the above example is actually optional.

Finding Blogs that link to your blog

ashish — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 18:26:31 +0000

Part of the currency of the internet is the concept of linking. The mighty Google PageRank is a very high indicator of the popularity of your blog, and also an indicator of how easily you can find it using Google Search (if your blog comes often in the first page of Google Search, then you can consider yourself to have achieved a major milestone, something that will drive a huge amount of traffic to your blog). Now, from the time that PageRank was a concept in the minds of the founders of Google, it is used as a very important factor in the popularity of your blog. The higher the page rank of your site, the better it is for you.
One of the most important constituent of PageRank is the concept of Page Linking. The more the number of people who link to your blog, the better it is for you with the following caveats;
1. If the people who link to you have a higher PageRank, even better. If you get a link from a site that has a PageRank of more than 5 (and your PageRank is much lower, then you should expect a boost in some time in your own PageRank).
2. If you get people linking to you who are not exactly desirable (people running Warez sites, porn sites, gambling sites, etc), then do not gloat. Links from such sites can be treated negatively, or at the most, treated as without any value.
3. Getting links from link farms is being seen as much more negative and detrimental to placement in search engines, so you should actively reconsider such steps if you are planning to do so.
Now that some broad rules for the linking of other sites to your sites is known, how do you find out other sites that link to your site ? There are 2 common online sites that will help you do this:
1. http://www.google.com – Suppose you are running a site for photography tips such as http://5phototips.com/, then just type the following in the Google search box: link:http://5phototips.com/. This search will find all the blogs that link to your blog
2. Technorati Search. Technorati is a very famous portal that fetches information about blogs. If you want to find out all the blogs that link to your blog, then go to the following page, Advanced Search on Technorati, and go to the URL seach option in the middle of the displayed page. Type in the Blog URL without the http://, so, as in the previous example, type in 5phototips.com and click on Search.
There are other tools that help you find blogs that link to your site, but I have found both of them to be the most useful, hence decided to write this post with these 2.

Google sitemap ? What are the benefits ?

ashish — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:23:42 +0000

A strange term if you have not heard of them before. What are Google sitemaps, and why should you be concerned about them ? Well, here goes:
The Google Sitemaps application is a part of the Google Webmasters tool available at this link.
In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.
Some advantages of the sitemaps:
* By adding a sitemap to your site, you can ensure that Google indexes your pages much faster
* Changes to your site structure (that is, moving files from one location to another) can be much faster updated in the Google index if the sitemap remains updated
* Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.
* Since MSN, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protocol, having a sitemap lets the four biggest search engines have the updated page information.
* Web Pages are Categorized and Prioritized exactly How You Want
* The Google Sitemaps service is Free
* If your site has dynamic content, then Google Sitemaps are the best method
* If your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash, then use Sitemaps

For users as well, there is another benefit: Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can’t reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface. (Generally, this is when users are unable to reach certain pages or regions of a site by following links). For example, any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap and submitting it to search engines.

Google Analytics – Why adopt it ?

ashish — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 16:46:54 +0000

For those of you who have not heard of Google Analytics, you really should. Here’s the link (http://www.google.com/analytics/). Google Analytics is a free service by Google that allows you to get some great free statistics on your visitors. From the site, here are some of the benefits:
1. Keyword and Campaign Comparison: Track and compare all your ads, email newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, paid links, and keywords on Google and other search engines.
2. Custom Dashboards: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom Dashboard that you can email to others
3. AdWords Integration: Buy keywords on Google AdWords and use Google Analytics to learn which keywords are most profitable to your business
4. Benchmarking: Find out whether your site usage metrics underperform or outperform those of your industry vertical. Opt-in benchmarking compares your key metrics against aggregate performance metrics while preserving the confidentiality of your data
5. GeoTargeting: Find out where your visitors come from and identify your most lucrative geographic markets
6. Easy to use: Google Analytics is easy to use for novice marketers, while delivering all of the capabilities that experienced web analytics professionals expect
7. Scalable for any size site: Google Analytics is a hosted service that runs on the same servers that power Google. From large, high-traffic corporate sites to small sites, Google Analytics delivers consistent service
8. Free: The service is totally free.
9. Able to find out how your visitors locate your website. You can learn which are the keywords your users are using to find your site
10. Google Analytics helps the website administrator determine the location in the workflow where visitors tend to drop out of the check out and sign up process in the site. With this information, optimizations can be done to the sign up process and make it more user friendly
11. You can track multiple websites with one login