That’s another wrap!

Coming soon Adsense changes without altering code from your control panel,

For instance, you can quickly change the borders of all your 300×250 medium rectangles from red to blue with just a few mouse clicks

via the Adsense Blog

Loren comments on how Google have had 1 million job applications a year.

Acorn add an auction area to their forum so feel free to pick up a bargain

The big SE story of the week is Google slapping a load of page rank penalties on numerous sites, including mine (PR6 down to PR3), Engadget (PR7 down to PR5) ProBlogger (PR6 to PR4), Andy Beard (PR5 to PR3) and the list goes on…

There’s lots of views and speculations on this latest update, check out Tech Crunch, Twenty Steps, Search Engine Land, Courtney Tuttle, Daily Blog Tips, the news even got into more mainstream media like The Guardian.

As far as I’m concerned as long as I’m still getting traffic I don’t give a shit about PR, which touch wood at the moment is certainly the case. So I’m a proud PR3 site owner .

If you’re fortunate enough to have site links (otherwise known as authority listings) in the SERPS you can now tell encourage Google with which ones to display via Webmaster Tools (found via webmaster central).

This weeks game was submitted by one of our readers, check out Gravitee, golf in space, thanks Steve.

Finding What to Write About on a Product Based Blog

When blogging on CG I often get asked how do I find new products to write about, I won’t provide exact sources but I will share how I found the sources that I use.

In the gadget niche there are a hundreds (if not thousands) of sites reporting on all the latest and greatest gizmos. I subscribe to about 200 feeds and monitor them though out the day, especially the less popular ones which often pick-up on new stories that the big boys haven’t seen yet. If I see something that’s new and hasn’t be covered on a load of other sites yet I’ll write about and link to the source I first saw it on.

Trade shows are a great excuse to get out and about and meet the people behind the products that you’re writing about. They also give you the opportunity to get your camera out and create 100% unique content. I went to CES in Vegas this year and will be doing so every year for the foreseeable future which is a great way of enjoying a bit of the revenue I make before the tax man sees it.

I also buy a load of newspaper and tech related magazines, again if the cover anything I’ve not seen much of else where I’ll write about. I find the Sunday papers are often a good source of material (through you do have to wade through a load of crud and celebrity gossip).

Next off are the many gadget shops on the Internet, some have RSS feeds so it’s easy to see when they have new products whilst with others you’ll need to check the “What’s New” page or if that don’t have one of those then they may show new products on the homepage.

Contacts, having contacts at relevant shops is great for getting press releases and early notification of new products. Once your blog is established you’ll find company reps contacting you about their products (a nice source of freebies and competition prizes).

Encourage readers to send links to new things they’ve found interesting, if it’s reader submitted there is a good chance other readers will also like it.

When I’m really stuck for inspiration, I’ll visit any one gadget blog follow a link from there to site with an interesting product and then browse that site for anything else that I think my readers would enjoy. Products don’t have to new to be cool they just have to be new to your readers.

This is how a find things to write about on a product based blog, an information based blog like this one is totally different and maybe a subject for another post.

I’m flying off on holiday this afternoon so comments as always are more than welcome but I may be a bit slow responding.

Getting your Subscribers to visit your Blog

Having a high feed subscriber count is great from an ego and getting the word out point of view but not so much for your profit line. Feeds are notoriously hard to monetise well, whether that will change with Googles recent acquisition of Feedburner, time will tell. I find the best way to profit from feed subscribers is to get them to the site, which is what this post is about.

Links
Relevant internal linking is both helpful to your readers and will provide an easy route back to the site for your readers to follow. As well as linking to individual posts also link to categories e.g. “I came across this really cool traffic building tips“, this is also a great way to create keyword rich internal links that the search engines love.

An automated way to add relevant links is to install a “Related Posts” plugin, this will create links to related posts at the end of new ones. Most plug-ins only seem to this on the site and not on the feed so you might need to do a bit of manual tweaking.

Videos
The majority of feedreaders don’t show embedded scripts, which is a great excuse for a “Can’t see the video, click here” link.

Feedback (again)
Make you site encourage interaction, feedback via comments or polls again, need a site visit.

Titles, titles and titles
A fair few feed readers and RSS portals (like personalised Google homepage) can be set-up to just display post titles which link back to your site and actual post, so making attention grabbing titles will maximise the chance of getting that extra visitor.

Summary Posts
Depending on your post frequency you could do this every day, week or month. It’s useful for your readers as they might of missed an earlier story and it gives your site an extra post with more SEF links for very little effort. I do this on CG with an thumbnail image gallery (plugin for WordPress over here).

Whilst writing this post I wondered about coding a plug-in that would automatically create links based on textual content. So in an admin screen you’d enter phrases and corresponding links and then when any page is rendered it would automatically create those links for you. If anybody is interested in this let me know (via a comment ) and that will be the push I need to do it.

Grow your traffic by over 300% for FREE within 3 months

If you build your traffic to say at least 200 visitors per day for example which is a very achievable target for any new website then the next step would be to watch that grow rapidly if you spend time implementing strategy to make your website sticky, yes you may have read that term many many times but taking the time out to analyse your website and look at your numbers tells you whether your doing it correctly or not.

Firstly check your new versus repeat visitor numbers, growing your repeat visitor numbers not only helps waterproof you from any sudden ranking drops by Google, it also lets you grow rapidly using your existing user base.

I would aim for somewhere in the high 20’s, even for a well monetised website if you do a good job you should be looking for at least 20% returning visitor percentage. For my tattoo website it is 22.25% and I noticed from Al’s post yesterday his is around 25% for his gadget site.

If you can make 20% of your visitors return then after a week of getting 200 visitors per day you could be looking at an extra 280 visitors in week 2 for FREE! Extrapolate that through 3 months and you could go from 200 visitors per day to 640 just using the same new 200 visitors per day that arrive to your site and retaining 40 of them.

At the start refraining from using adsense and instant monetisation is important as that very quickly takes your new visitor off site when you need to be building a good user base, most of the methods are very simple but can have a huge influence over your traffic numbers over a short period.

To demonstrate we are talking about retaining 40 visitors per day from 200 visitors being fresh traffic so basically adding 280 visitors per week to your current stats.
Week 1 1400
Week 2 1680
Week 3 1960
Week 4 2240
.
.
.
Week 12 = 4480 visitors - that’s going from 200 per day to 640 per day in 3 months!
Apply that to a larger website and it like going from 1000 visitors per day to 3400 per day, therefore probably one of the most important jobs to focus on and it is free for the most part.

Things that can make a difference in my experience

• Having an ‘Add to favourites’ link or button, make it prominent and have it throughout your website, traffic arrives into all your pages not just your homepage, have it in the navigation and at the end of ALL articles or pages, don’t make people look for it.
• Reduce monetisation like adsense while you build the userbase up
• Have a Favicon, quick and easy to add and lets the bookmark stand out in a browsers favourite list potentially alerting bored users to the bookmark and returning.
• Get user involvement, if visitors add comments, images, text or suggestions they are far more likely to return to see how other visitors feel, this can be rating images, voting, polls, comments, suggestions and competitions.
• Have a mailing list if applicable, a mailing list is a great way to alert previous users of new changes and additions thus surging returning users.
• Add a forum, again if you feel it will work a forum offers a great incentive for users to return.
• Empower your visitors, letting visitors decide in certain aspects of how your website works empowers them and offers a great incentive for them to enjoy your website and return so try and let them decide as much as possible how they experience your site, this may be allowing registered users the ability to affect ads, colour schemes, navigation etc
• RSS feeds allow visitors to subscribe to the latest content from your website but if you run a blog do not presume your readership will all be tech savy, guide your visitors through the process.
• Most importantly, give them what they are looking for! Trickery and misinformation is great maybe for short term gain but if your here for the long haul and want that one website to do well over a long period of time then give users what they are looking for, at the very least offer a certain amount for free and offer subscription paid services for more content & features.

Aside from forum based websites I think most website showing around 20%-30% repeat traffic numbers would be doing a good job of encouraging return visits and in turn building a safer future from the source of current traffic, any less than that and I’d consider it high on the todo list.

Buy for 2 years income and repay yourself in one year

Still bargains to be had
I bought a website with an old friend who wanted to invest money with me last month, he doesn’t work online, the most important point being that it was zero maintenance as it would be unfair for me to have to run a site and him profit so we bought a site advertised on Digital Point for 24 x monthly income which needed zero maintenance and cost us in total USD $7000. Making just under $10 per day the site would take a full 2 years to pay itself back which for an established low/zero maintenance site is about right in my opinion. (more…)

Learning the Hard Way - Check Your Affiliate Links

This is a fantastic time of year for Christmas product related sites and it’s where the work you’ve done throughout the year can really reap rewards. Over the last 2 weeks I’ve seen all income streams increase between 50 and 250%, which makes checking stats every morning a very exciting time. Each day I’m looking for and pushing new affiliate products to my existing visitors and feed subscribers and I’m checking stats for pages that are getting bit of traffic to see if there are any related products I can push there.

The Clickbank product I mentioned a couple of weeks ago has now generated just over $600 in commissions, which considering I just added an extra paragragh and affiliate link to an existing page is a pretty nice return IMO. However by my own daftness I’ve managed to lose in the region of $5,000 over the last 6 weeks or so by giving away my traffic.
(more…)