How Does Related Websites Plugin Works

The related articles function is easy enough to understand. It is similar to other related articles plugins but using a unique algorithm. All it does is show the most relevant articles within your own blog to create greater cross promotion opportunities.

On the other hand, the related websites portion is where things get interesting. It shows relevant articles from other blogs — as of April 18, 2009, there are more than 75,002 posts across 543 approved blogs. The articles shown are based on a super high relevancy proprietary algorithm. Here’s the description from the BTE web site.

The Blog Traffic Exchange is an cloud based service based on the SEO concepts behind various blog related posts plugins. Using proprietary chaos and relevancy algorithms in conjunction with the Sphinx open source full text index engine, the Blog Traffic Exchange exists to increase your blog traffic by exchanging readers with other members.

Additionally, here are a few things to note about the articles being shown on your site:

• The exact articles shown change with each page load
• Links are standard HTML do follow links

Key Benefits of Related Websites Plugin

The full potential of this plugin may not be apparent immediately, so I want to elaborate them here:

1. Get Highly Relevant Referral Traffic From Other Blogs

When you’re part of the exchange, your articles are show across the network. This gives your blog and articles a lot of exposure. Since your articles are shown on other relevant articles, you can be sure that any visitor you received will be interested in your content.

2. Expose Your Blog To New Readers

Most people tend to read a limited number of articles. Even prolific bloggers tend to stay within a confined circle. This plugin breaks that confinement. With BTE Related Websites, you are linking to and linked from quality blogs that you many have never heard of. This means that there are many opportunities to gain new readers.

3. Get More Search Visitors

Since links are standard do follow links, this plugin does help with your search engines ranking. Overall, I have seen about 20% improvements in my search traffic since I started using this plugin. However, you’ll also notice some fluctuations with your SERP positions because these links are not permanent.

4. Get Relevant Keyword-rich Supplementary Content

Since you have the option to show up to 50 words excerpt from related articles, you can use this to enhance your content. This additional content give search engine spiders more to chew on, and these titles and excerpts are usually packed with relevant keywords. Overall, this helps you improve your keyword density with little effort.

5. Other Benefits

There are also other benefits that you don’t get immediately, but you’ll grow to appreciate once you use the plugin for a while. Here are a few:

• You’ll learn how to write better titles that are attention grabbing and keyword rich.
• You’ll learn how to make the most of your first 50 words so that you can gain more readers and improve your articles relevancy.

What About Quality?

• Each blog is manually approved by BTE owner, Kevin.
• Articles with less than 50 words are filtered out of the exchange.
• Articles with blacklisted words (this list is not public) are filtered out of the exchange.
• You can send complaint to Kevin if you find a problem.
• Lastly, you can stop using the plugin at any time if you are not satisfied with it.

Definitely give Related Websites plugin a try if you haven’t already.

In the article Yoast, mentioned a new Wordpress plugin called Debug Queries and said that it’s design to help you find inefficient database queries — naturally, I was interested. I downloaded the plugin and installed it on my main blog. The result was very surprising. Debug Queries found that my home page was making 1,776 database queries per page load — yes, almost 2,000! Upon further inspection, I found the offending plugin to be Cross-Linker. After deactivation of Cross-Linker, the number of database queries dropped to 21.

This is unfortunate because I like the plugin. But fortunately, I found another linking plugin called KB Linker that works just as well, and impressively, the number of queries remained at 21.

So I just want to shout out to Joost de Valk, Frank Bültge, and Adam R. Brown.  Good job guys. Thank you for terrific blogs and plugins.

How To Find Web Pages With The Most Search Traffic

First let’s find your top performing web pages with the most search engines traffic. Here’s how you’ll find that information from your Google Analytics account:

• Click on Content
• Click on Top Content
• On the upper right, click Segment

• Uncheck All Visits and select Search Traffic
• Click Apply

You’ll see a screen similar to the one below — note that I filtered mine for privacy reason. Note that you now know your top performing web pages in term of search traffic, and can expand the list to see more results.

How To Find Top Performing Keywords For Your Web Page

Take note of these top search traffic articles and follow these steps to find top performing keywords:

• Click on the URL link under the “Page” column
• In the Analyze pull down, select Entrance Keywords
• In the Content pull down, search for and select your chosen article
  

You’ll see a screen similar to the one below that shows all of the keywords for that particular article with all the vital statistics.

How To Improve Search Traffic With Google Analytics Advanced Segment Data

This is a very powerful piece of information that you are looking at, and there are several things you could do to leverage it. Here are a few ideas you can use to improve your search engines ranking using the data provided.

1. Keywords Optimization

You can start by rewriting the article to emphasize these top keywords.  Make sure they appear in important places like the title, first paragraph, meta description, headings, etc. You also want them to appear a few times in your content so that you can achieve a 3-5% keywords density.

If you want to rank well for a particular key phrase, then make sure you optimize the key phrase verbatim as per the suggestion above. For example, if I want to rank well for “new frugal ideas”, then I should have that exact phrase “new frugal ideas” appears a few times and in the headings, first paragraph, etc.

2. Link To This Article From Other Articles Using Various Keywords

Another approach is to link to this article using the keywords you’d like to improve from existing articles within your site, or better yet, from other web sites. Of course, the former is easier, but the latter is much more powerful.

3. Write Follow Up Article

Another idea is to write a brand new article that target similar keywords — i.e., an update to the original article, or a different look at the same idea, etc. In this new article, you also want to link back to the original article using the most important keywords as the anchor text. However, limit the number of links to 1-2.

If you’re lucky enough, you may even get the valuable indented search listing.

Conclusion

These are just a few examples of how you can optimize your web page, and there are other optimization ideas that you can apply to leverage the information made available by Google Analytics Advanced Segments.

Another nice touch about Analytics is the ability to change your timeframe on the fly so that you can see if what you’re doing is actually helping or hurting your site search ranking. However, try to keep your timeframe long enough so that you’re not fooled by daily fluctuation.

• Design and Usability Report that includes personalized feedback about your blog overall appearance, branding power, consistency, readability, image usage, and article quality.
• Search Engine Optimization Report that includes key statistics and personalized feedback about your metadata, headings usage, sitemap, robots.txt, keywords analysis, and cross-linking practice.
• Monetization Report that includes personalized feedback about your revenue channels and ad placement.
• Code Validation Report.
• Personalized Improvement Checklist.

The report is normally $49.99, however, the first 10 customers to make a purchase will get a $10 discount (via partial refund). Please use coupon code TENOFF.

You can see a sample report here.

So hurry up, the supply is limited.

More Than Advertising?

All the above means that if you are a personal finance blogger who wants to extract more income from your site or brand than you can get from advertising, you need to develop paid content. To my mind, there’s nothing wrong with this. Think about the news. I can and do read the news online for free, but not all the content of my favourite newspaper (The Independent) is there. If I want everything I have to pay for it.

Some personal finance bloggers are starting to go down this route. Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar has written and published a book — what’s in the book is generally along the same lines as some posts in his blog but it isn’t a duplication of blog content. Trent has also collected together some of his blog post series as e-books and charges $2 for them to be downloaded. With the sort of traffic that he gets (approx 40k subs), that’s likely to be a nice little earner since $2 is fairly nominal for a visitor, but the work involved in setting it up is a one off cost.

Paid Content: A Case Study

Ramit Sethi is always looking for a way to do something different with his blog I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and preferably make a little money whilst doing so. His latest idea is a paid subscription to a money saving email. From the description it sounds like you pay $8 a month, and in return you get an email with detailed ideas that will save you large amounts of money. It’s worth stating that Ramit’s audience is typically young and high earning with a high disposable income — I’m sure that the cost of the subscription is pitched at the level that most of his readers wouldn’t even notice.

Ways to Make it Work

Personally, I think one of the key selling points of blogging is that it produces free content. Free content ranks highly in search engines, and is a great stand alone advertising technique. Writing free and focused content as part of your blog should be the core of your blogging strategy — if you’re trying to market content about widgets, people are going to be looking for blog posts about widgets, not blog posts about marketing widgets.

It’s also going to help to deliver your paid-for and free content separately, and differently if you can. This distinguishes the two offerings more easily, and means that you won’t be caught by having information similar to your paid content on other free blogs. Just something as simple as packaging it for easy reading on a kindle, or maybe podcasting, or producing content designed for emailing rather than web display can give your readers and visitors a reason to buy.

If you follow these bloggers, or if you get a notice from your advertisers, there are a few things that you should do.  In the case of other bloggers, I don’t generally go through these steps until the blog is completely dead; specifically, I’ll keep the links as long as the site is up.  Here are the steps that I go through:

• Clean Up Your Blogroll — First, if the blogger is in my blogroll, I’ll remove the blog.  It’s also a good idea to periodically go through your blogroll to see if you are linking to any dead sites.
• Clean Up Your Posts — Second, I search my posts for the dead blog.  In WordPress admin menu, click on Posts > Edit and do a search — i.e., “deadblog.com”.   Then I go in and either remove the link noting that it’s no longer around, or completely delete any reference to that blog.
• Clean Up Your Comments — Third, I do a similar search in the comment section, and remove the dead URL from comments.

This used to be tedious, but WordPress 2.7 made this easier with “Quick Edit” function.  Now you may ask if this is worth the effort.  Personally, I think it is.  First, it shows that you care about your blog and your are keeping it current.  Second, your user are not visiting parked domain, or worse, domains that have been turned into spam sites or Made for AdSense sites.  Third, if you are concerned about SEO, it will cut down the number of unnecessary outgoing links.

One of the free tool you can use to detect dead links on your site is Xenu’s Link Sleuth (TM).

Do you go through your blog to clean up dead links?  Do you think it’s worth it?

Text Links

You have a website which has outgoing links, other websites want to rank with search engines, and one of the main measures for page rank is the number and quality of incoming links. So, there is money to be made from selling links on your site, and the advertiser is generally not that bothered if nobody ever clicks on the link.

This can be a reasonable source of income both from aggregators and private sales, but it doesn’t scale that well — after a certain point, you can’t earn more money as your blog grows. The main downside is that it is not at all popular with search engines and you may find your own ranking in searches is lowered as a result.

Ad Networks

You have a website which has visitors who click on links on your website. Other websites are are willing to pay for visitors. There is money to be made from selling advertising space on your website, you either get paid when someone views an ad, or when they click on it.

Making money this way requires a reasonably sized audience, and search engine traffic is considered to click more on adverts than regular readers or subscribers. Ad network income generally scales very well, and it is possible to make this the cornerstone of a money making strategy reliant on a single blog in the right sort of niche. The downside is that unless your website is very large, you’re unlikely to make private sales and will be reliant on an ad aggregator (e.g. Adsense, ). In practice this means that you will give up a fair amount of control over which ads are shown, and there can be restrictive terms and conditions.

Affiliate Links

You have a website where you mention products and services. Other companies are willing to pay commission for leads, inquiries or sales. There is money to be made by linking to the product or service if your visitors are likely to click on the link and follow up with a purchase.

Affiliate links scale well, and there is the potential for using both aggregators and private arrangements. You generally have complete control over which affiliate links are shown on your blog, and existing readers and subscribers are more likely to click on affiliate links than straight advertising. The downside is that making money from affiliate links depends strongly on the niche you are working in. There needs to be an obvious relationship between the topics you write about, and some products or services. So, for example review blogs do very well from affiliate sales, as can blogs related to expensive hobbies, but if you rarely mention specific products or services then you will probably struggle.

Consulting and Sales

You have some skill or product that you wish to sell. Your blog is strongly related to this skill or products. Other people will pay money for your skill or products.

You need to have genuine skills or a product to sell that people are interested in. Your blog needs to be strongly positioned towards making sales, in fact becomes somewhat of a sideline. You need to research any legal issues thoroughly before offering consulting, and ensure that you have back office systems set up for dealing with clients or completing sales. This works very well with business to business internet sales (e.g. selling WordPress themes, or blog consulting services) and fairly well with anything that can be done remotely, it is much harder to do if your skill requires you to be actually present. The biggest downside is that this is not passive income — you’ll actually have to work for the money, as well as blog.

Issues to Consider

You need to have the right set up in order to make money. Some free blog networks like Wordpress.com don’t allow their bloggers to run advertising so check your terms and conditions. It is generally easiest to grow your blog’s income with self-hosted web hosting and your own domain name, but other approaches have worked for some people.

It’s possible to use a mix of approaches to making money, but be careful. If you are selling a product or skill then you might not want to use Adsense for example because the ads that come up are likely to be for competitors. As mentioned, selling text links can have a negative impact on your search engine visitors which are the primary source of income for most of the other forms of advertising.

Invariably, making money means paying taxes on the net income. Check out the regulations in your area, but you can usually make deductions for legitimate business expenses like hosting, domain names and Internet access. If you have a tax advisor or accountant already, you should contact them with your plans, often tax departments have phone lines you can call for advice on issues.

Finally, the standing of your blog is always dependent of having good content, and your credibility can be harmed by having a blog design with intrusive advertising. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by letting your desire to make money overcome your common sense.

Best of luck, and here’s to your first million (or at least hundred)!

Make More Money With AdSense, The Basics

Before I go into more detail about how I am planning to use the data, let’s cover the basics. In short, your AdSense income depends on three key factors:

1. Clickthrough Rate (CTR) – There are several things you could do to improve clickthrough rate.  This includes experimenting with:
   • Ad size (e.g., Skyscraper, Leaderboard, etc.)
   • Ad type (i.e., text versus image) — In general, I prefer text ads over image ads.
   • Ad placement (i.e., location or locations on the page) — Based on my experience ads below the Post Title perform very well.  Likewise, Skyscraper ad on the left also performs well.
   • Ad format (e.g., color, border, background, etc.) — My general preference is to have title link that matches the color of links on my site, no border, and matching background color.
2. $ per click (CPC) – This is mainly determined by the topic and keywords of your blog/posts.
3. Traffic – In general, the more the better.  However, different traffic type can have significant impact on the CTR.  For example, social bookmarking traffic tends to have very low CTR.  On the other hand, traffic via links from mainstream websites and traffic from organic searches tend to have much higher CTR.

Use Integration Data To Improve Your AdSense Income

Now that we have the basics covered, I want to go over two specific ideas on how to use the new data.

High CTR / High $ per click Pages

The first set of pages prime for optimization are the high CTR / high $ per click pages.  You want to drive more traffic to these pages because they are money makers that just need more traffic.  Here are a few ideas:

• Link to these pages from your sidebar or from your home page.  For example, you can call these “Featured Articles”.
• Link to these pages when you are writing new articles.
• Link to these pages from your high traffic pages.
• Buy ads that drive traffic to these pages.  This requires some tinkering since you have to figure out how to spend less on the ads than you are earning to keep some profit.

Low $ per click Pages

Another idea revolves around low $ per click pages; especially for pages with high traffic and high CTR.  For these pages there are several things you could try:

• Look at the ads that appear on these pages and try blocking them. Hopefully, this will bring up the $ per click.
• Tweak the keywords to attract higher paying keywords.
• Stop showing AdSense and experiment with other types of advertisement — e.g., relevant affiliate ads, CPM ads, etc.  For example, I am doing this with one of my page that has high traffic and high CTR but with $ per click that’s around 5 cents.
• Another idea is to replace AdSense with links to your other high CTR / high $ per click pages.

Anyway, this is a relatively new and you may not have statistically significant amount of data to work with. However, it’s worth exploring and sees what you could do to positively impact your earning.  Here’s a good article I found on this topic: 10 Ways To Analyze AdSense Analytics To Make More Money from RobMalon.com.

Set Up Your AdSense for Feed

First, log into your AdSense account and set up AdSense for Feed:

• Click on AdSense Setup
• Click on AdSense for Feeds
• This takes you to the main set up screen.
• Click on burn a new feed (look toward the bottom)
  

You’ll get a pop-up box.

• Enter your non-FeedBurner feed address — i.e., http://www.blogthority.com/feed

• Click on Next and you’ll see this pop-up box

• Click on Next again
• Click on Close

Now you are back on the main set up screen again.

• Click on Create new channel
• Enter a name — i.e., Blogthority.  You can make your feed targetable if you want.
• Click on Add
• Set up your ad placement and configuration
• Copy your AdSense for Feeds feed address – i.e., http://feedproxy.google.com/Blogthority
• Click on Save

You are done on AdSense side.

Redirect Your FeedBurner Feed To AdSense Feed

Now log in to your FeedBurner account.

• Click on your feed — i.e., Blogthority
• Click on Edit Feed Details…
• Change your original feed — i.e., http://www.blogthority.com/feed to AdSense Feed — i.e., http://feedproxy.google.com/Blogthority
• Click on Save Feed Details button

That’s it! You’re done.  You may or may not see the change immediately.  However, you’ll start to see ad Impressions and other statistics rolling in on your AdSense Report.

What Are Paid Reviews?

In the traditional sense, paid reviews are articles that you write because someone compensates you for writing them.  For example, someone engages you and offers $50 for you to write a review about his web site or products — that’s a paid review.  Other examples include:

• Someone gives you a product that you can keep in exchange for a review
• Working through paid review networks like Pay Per Post or ReviewMe

But for bloggers who monetize their blog, we make money on articles that we write — i.e., AdSense, CPM ads, Affiliates, etc.  This means that by traditional definition we are engaging in paid reviews in some shapes or forms.

Ethical Versus Unethical Paid Reviews

So what really makes good or bad?  In my opinion, there’s nothing wrong with making money from your blog or articles.  However, it’s unethical if you do it without honesty and integrity — note that I didn’t include disclosure as a requirement. Let me give you some examples:

Unethical Paid Reviews

• Write a favorable review because you got paid for it, or because you are hoping to make money on it.
• Saying that you are using something, when you’re clearly not.  A lot of bloggers — especially in the Make Money Online niche — are guilty of this one.
• Recommend something that you would not use yourself.
• Recommend something that you know is not in the best interest of your readers — i.e., recommend something when you know there’s a better alternative.

Ethical Paid Reviews

• Give an honest opinion about a product and service even if it’s a negative one.
• Don’t recommend something that you are not using, or would not use yourself.
• Don’t write to maximize your income, instead write you maximize value for your readers.

I think it’s perfectly fine to write paid reviews, as long as you do it with honesty and integrity.  Whether you disclose the fact to your readers is up to you.  I don’t think it’s necessary to disclose what you make or don’t make money on — in fact, I think it’s silly to do so.

Here’s what other bloggers are saying:

• More On Paid Posts: PayPerPost at Blog Tutorials
• Do you write positive paid reviews on your blog? at Blogging Tips
• Paid blogging at what price? at What makes u click?
  

Image by buggolo via Flickr

YAWASP – Yet Another WordPress Anti Spam Plugin

YAWASP is spam fighting plugin for WordPress developed by Sven Kubiak and Lukas Sadzik — thank you guys.  It does the job by replacing the comment form field names every 24 hours with random values preventing spambots from adapting to the comment form. Furthermore, it adds a hidden blank field that needs to be left empty. If a spambot fills this field, the comment will not be saved.

Ever since I installed YAWASP, which works along side Akismet and Simple Trackback Validation plugins, the number of spams caught by Akismet went down from almost a hundred per day to 4-5 a day.  This makes my task of fishing out false positives a lot easier than before.

If you are interested in the plugin, you can download it from the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Photo by Will Foster via Flickr

Seven Blog Exit Strategies

As I went through the process and considered what I could do if I ever got tired of blogging, here are some of the options:

1. Go Out Quietly

The first option is to simply take it offline.  Let the web hosting run its course and the blog will simply disappear into oblivion.  This is probably the most common fate for blogs.

2. Stay Online, But Stop Updating

If you have a profitable blog with decent amount of organic traffic, leaving it online without updating may be a sensible option.  All you have to do is minimal maintenance and enjoy the residual income from all the hard work you have done.  I believe the official term for this is mothballing your blog.

3. Stay Online, Update A Lot Less

A variation of the one above is to keep it online and only update it once in a while as a post idea emerges.  One of my favorite blogs, Skelliewag, is following this strategy — hopefully for a short time only.

4. Sell Your Blog

There are many marketplaces that you can buy and sell blogs — i.e., SitePoint Marketplace and DigitalPoint Forums.  Just like any other assets, a well developed blog could fetch decent amount of money.  Yaro wrote about high-profile blogs for sale that’s worth reading if you are exploring this option.

5. Sell Your Content

Even if you can’t sell your blog as a whole — i.e., the buyer don’t want your domain name and brand — your content is still valuable.  Depending on the niche and the quality of your content, you could sell your articles for decent amount of money.

6. Turn It Into A Group Blog

If you are simply tired of writing, but you still want to stay in the blogging business, you could do turn it into a multi-author blog.  Of course, this only works if there are proper incentive for the potential contributors — i.e., money, traffic, recognition, etc.

7. Buy And Republish Content

The reverse of “Sell The Content” strategy is to buy content and republish them to keep your blog active.  I am certain that this is not a good long-term solution, but definitely a viable short-term patch to help you through the exiting process.

Do you have a blog exit strategy?  If not, do you think you need one?

Other articles about blog exit strategy:

• 7 Steps to A Profitable Blog Exit Strategy at Performancing
• Blog Exit Strategy at OptiNiche

Photo by Kelly Asmodee via Flickr

A good web site should serves a purpose.  For instance, a commercial site’s purpose might be selling some sort of products.  Without a well designed site, catalog of products, easy-to-use navigation, and secure eCommerce system, there’s no point in promoting the site because all the effort will be for naught.  Likewise, your blog serves a purpose — may be you want it to tell your story, share your interest or your expertise.  The commonality is that all blogs need some kind of content; as such, you should have at least a few good posts on your blog before you even attempt to promote it. And don’t even worry about SEO until you have sizable number of posts.

In addition to content, you should also design the blog for usability.  In general, blogs are well designed out of the box, but there are a few things you could do to improve it further:

• Choose a professional looking theme
• Navigation is clear and consistent
• Feed subscription button is clearly visible, preferably above the fold
• Search box is available and easy to find
• Archive is easily accessible (I prefer a simple link in the navigation bar that links to a full archive page)
• There is no unfinished posts
• All links are working

By focusing on your content and usability first, you are giving your visitors good reasons to become readers, and hopefully, they’ll come back in the future.

This article was featured in:

• Carnival of Blogging: Twentieth Edition at ThatsBlog.com
  

The first part of a domain name is called the Top Level Domain (TLD). This is typically the last two or three letters that represent the geographical or section of the Internet.

Major domain suffixes are:

• .edu – Educational Institutions;
• .gov – US Government;
• .com – Commercial (business);
• .net – Network Infrastructure organizations;
• .org – Non-profit organizations;
• .mil – military organizations

and there are country codes such as .ca for Canada, .fr for France, and .jp for Japan.

The second part of a domain name is called the Low Level Domain (LLD). This is what people commonly refers to as site name or domain name. In our case, our domain name is “blogthority”.

The third part is an optional part of a domain calle the subdomain. Subdomain allows web site administrator to organize a larger web site into smaller logical unit, such as, “http://subdomain.yourdomain.com”. In this examples, “subdomain” is a subdomain of “yourdomain”.