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The term Sliding Average has the same meaning as Rolling Average and Moving Average, or MA for short. I've talked about MAs and MMAs (Multiple Moving Averages) at length over many posts. I like to use MMAs as a reverse crystal ball to find patterns in my web traffic and ad revenue, as well as a means to making an educated guess at future trends. A moving average is essentially an average value based on a window, usually of time in days, weeks, months, or years. For my blog traffic analysis, I use windows of 28 days (4 exact calendar weeks). The longer the window period, the smoother the trend graph is. However, because I only have less than a year's worth of blog statistics, I'm using 28 days. The window has to be fixed. You can't use 28, 30, 31 days in rotation, depending on the calendar month. You could use a window of 7d, but I feel that this is too small and obscures the real trends. As you've likely read, professional blogging requires a long-term strategy. Hence the reason why I use a 28 d window. That said, I also use several other windows of 56 d, 84 d, etc., increasing by 28 d each time. These multiple windows give me Multiple Moving Averages (MMAs), and show me both short- and long-term trends simultaneously. If you've ever followed a stock's performance, you may have seen these trend charts. However, they are typically daily charts, with large fluctuations, which obscure long-term performance. All this may sound scary to those of you that are math-fearing, but it really is pretty easy. For whatever value you are tracking trends for, say daily pageviews, you decide on a window, say 28d, and add up that many consecutive values. So, if your first day of data starts on Oct 1, 2005, your first average is calculated by adding up all your pageviews for Oct 1-28, then dividing by the window size, 28d. This is your first average for your 28d MA. Now repeat for Oct 2-29, etc., until you no longer have 28 days to sum up. Plot the resulting averages over time, against the daily values. Repeat the process for a larger window, say 56 d. Keep repeating for further larger windows, and you will have an MMA graph. The largest window will show the smoothest curve because the fluctuations have been averaged out. Ideally, your longer-term MA graphs will start to resemble an exponentially increasing curve. I made promise to post a spreadsheet in which you can plugin in your data, and I haven't forgotten. I'll still do it, hopefully after I've converted this blog over to WordPress. Or Drupal. I haven't decided. (c) Copyright, 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, web analytics, moving average, sliding average, rolling average, web metrics
A few visitors to this blog were looking for "tips to increase pagerank". The problem with any advice for this result is that it's mostly conjecture. Why? Because unless you work on a search engine team, you probably don't know all the necessary factors. I was once a search engine webmaster, but this was over a decade ago, when ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) could be bought. You heard me, bought. The rules have change drastically, and they keep changing, mostly for the better. Some of the factors that go into the making of pagerank, at least for the Google engine, are as follows: - A domain name that is at least older than a year, or registered for 2 years or longer.
- Topic focus. If your blog talks about food and politics about equally, it's unlikely you'll rank high for either subject. On the other hand, if you talk about the food tastes of famous politicians, and if there's an interest such information via the search engines, that may make a difference.
- A large body of articles focus on related topics, and with some age on at least some of them. In other words, if you've been writing for a couple of years about, say, health-related matters, you'll likely have lots of articles and rank higher than the website of someone who just started writing about health. However, the body of articles has to be built organically. That is, you can't suddenly post 50 articles on cancer in just a few days. That's not humanly possible, not organic.
- Maintaining your popularity. Once you start ranking high in the SERPs, you maintain and even increase your ranking by having your pages clicked on more often than others ranking nearby for the same terms and phrases.
- Backlinks, organically grown. The more sites with related content that link to you, the better. Again, you cannot suddenly have dozens of backlinks appear overnight with the same link text. Even if you suddenly have a popular article with a short title, some of the backlink will differ.
- This is conjecture, but some people think that if you have the Google toolbar installed for either the Microsoft IE or Firefox browsers, that Google tracks pages being bookmarked and assigns extra fractions of pagerank if your pages are relatively popular.
These are only some of the "organic" pagerank criteria I've gleaned from a variety of blogs (sorry, no specific page links) over the past 6 months: ProBlogger, SEOBook, Jim Boykin, ThreadWatch, Search Engine Journal, and others. There are other factors, but many of them are considered "inorganic" and thus bad. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, writing, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogging, pagerank, web traffic
With more and more people blogging on a daily basis, many bloggers are looking to differentiate themselves. One way that bloggers have been doing that is to podcast and vodcast media content from their blog. Podcasting and vodcasting specifically refer to including media files in your RSS or Atom web content syndication feeds (web feeds). However, the terms are also used to refer to including media files in your web (blog) pages alone. Over on my RSS Cases blog, I have a post today called Podcast Your Audio Content From Your Journal, which has some details about setting up a podcast for your blog. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, rss audio, podcasting, vodcasting
Hot on the heels of my previous milestone, I reached an AdSense milestone of the highest number of clicks in a given day, since I started publishing AdSense ads. Google's TOS (terms of service) do not allow me to tell you the number of clicks, but it is one click more than my October 2005 high. As for pageviews, while I almost reached the 300 pv/d (pageviews/day) level again yesterday, I missed it by a few dozen. I have, however, been able to maintain a higher frequency of posting across several blogs. If I'm not mistaken, I exceeded a total of 12 posts without even realizing that I'd once again hit my daily high. What's more, I feel as if I managed to maintain some writing quality despite the high frequency. I also managed to convert some of my blogs and set up the initial versions of several more sites. Part of this new-found productivity comes from a positive mindshift and from being supercharged with a new objective on my latest blog - which is actually just a newer version of one of my zomblogs. It's a very personal site, and focuses on self-healing mind and body, and is inspired by Steve Pavlina's site, which I've blogged about several times in the last few days. Steve's site is that important. It's a rare site, with much inspirational, life-changing, honest and accessible advice. There's quite a bit of advice applicable to bloggers, and I highly recommend you check the site out. The productivity increase also comes from turning off the TV for much longer periods of time, getting more sleep than I've previously allowed myself to, and eating better. You wouldn't think that such changes in blogging practice make a difference, but they do. Blogging is a creative activity, and the more I do it, the more I consciously understand why my own novel and short-story writing suffered during certain periods in the past. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, writing, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, blogging practices, blogging goals
Now that I'm getting more traffic, and more regularly, I can see a correlation that I suspected existed. That is, there appears to be a relationship, but I haven't proven it yet. What my web metrics for my blogs and websites are showing is that on the days that I post less entries, my traffic is lower. So is the traffic for the next day, which sometimes sets off a chain reaction: disappointed in my traffic, I blog less, finding some excuse to distract me. Until I can get on the ball again and start posting. I've also found that, for the time zone I live in, if I post between 11:00 pm and 1:00 am, I manage to get my blog posts indexed early enough that I get some morning traffic, as well as evening traffic, the next day. If instead I wait until the next morning, I seem to lose out. But I do start capturing traffic again later in the evening, next day. Still, in the long run, this may not matter. If you are targeting search engine-referred traffic, people will eventually come, provided you are writing about of some interest. But if you are targeting regular readers, infrequent posting means you may lose them. As I've said many times, I am guilty of this on several of my blogs. Hence, those blogs tend to have very few regular readers, and thus a much larger percentage of traffic comes from search engines. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, writing, web traffic, web content
One of the debates currently ongoing in the blogosphere are questions relating to posting frequency. Should you post lots of short entries per day, or fewer longer entries. Should you focus all of your writing to a single blog, or branch out into several topics? These are important questions that you have to ask yourself. Your answer may be different than another bloggers. For me, I enjoy freelance writing. I've been doing it for over 20 years, some of it professionally - including designing and co-authoring one book - and some of it in local weekly magazines, or in my own magazine. Transitioning to blogs and online articles has not been a giant leap for me. On a good day, I can write 10-15 quality, medium-length blog entries, or 5-8 longer articles. I have no doubt I could regularly write 20 short posts daily. However, I doubt I could do all of this for a single blog or single topic. I am very much influenced by my muse, even for non-fiction writing. So on a good day, I'll write entries for 5-6 unrelated blogs. Offline, in a good word processing program, I could probably write an additional 5-10 web programming tutorials daily because of my experience in computer programming. However, this type of writing requires testing of source code, special formatting of source code. Some blogging platforms require specal handling of said code. This reduces my productivity enormously. That said, despite having numerous blogs, most of them have been dormant for a while, while I struggle to come to a decision about which advanced blogging platform I'd like to move to from Blogger.com: WordPress (easy install and configuration), Drupal (very rich feature set), or a custom solution (all the features I'll ever want). Blogger.com is fine for some of my blogs, but woefully lacking for others. Much of my focus lately has been on a small handful of blogs (some of which belong to other people). However, in any given month, I may tend to a dozen blogs and a few websites. Now, if I'm not writing regularly to some of these blogs, should they even be set up as blogs? That's a difficult question to answer. Darren Rowse talks about the importance of regular posting (links below). Steve Pavlina talks about how important good content is for building a high-traffic website (or blog). These guys are masters of quality content and high traffic. I agree with their advice. It's always been my intent to write several quality, lengthy articles on a daily basis. That's the ideal situation, of course. But intent doesn't always translate to reality. And I've neither posted frequently nor tried to find contributors, thinking that I have nothing to offer them but revenue share. Personally, I see nothing wrong with maintaining some weekly journals, instead of daily. But when you don't post at least once weekly, then your blog tends towards becoming a zomblog (zombie blog), and should probably only be a regular website. So, that means asking myself some questions: - Can I leave things as they are, posting only when I'm able to? If I can post at least weekly, this may be a reasonable temporary "solution".
- Can I increase posting frequency on each blog to at least 2-3 times weekly? To do this, however, there would probably have to be 48 hours in each day.
- Are my niche blogs too fragmented? If so, I could combine them into a single blog with categories. For example, I've already combined my four cooking blogs into a single website and blog, with categories. I am also in the process of taking my 8 or so web programming-related blogs and incorporating them into a single blog with categories. The result is that if I write 3-4 entries per day for one blog, it's probably going to draw more visitors in total than posting 1 entry per day for each of 4 blogs. Which hopefully is the right answer for the second question.
- Can I get rid of my zomblogs altogether? I could tranfer the content elsewhere (website) into some archives.
If you are trying to juggle numerous blogs, and feeling that their quality is slipping, determine which of the four options above might be the best course, or come up with some other choices. Your answer, of course, will depend upon your own goals and intents. Links/ Sources: Steve Pavlina - How to Build a High-Trafic Site; Darren Rowse - How to Make Your Millions Through Blogging???(c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, content, writing
February is continuing January's role as a milestone-reaching month. After 3:00 am my time zone (12 midnight in Google's home), my total pageviews across all channels squeaked just past 300 for yesterday. That's after I subtracted my own page impressions, which I needed for testing. Now, granted that some of these 300 pageviews had a bit to do with a couple of higher-traffic blogs linking to one or more of my pages, it's still a milestone. It may be another week or two before I get to this level or above consistently. But viewing my long-term MMA (Multiple Moving Average) charts, it's still showing signs of going exponential. So it may not be too long before I'm well above the 300 pv/d mark regularly. My intentional strategies and unintentional actions have both contributed to this milestone. As have backlinks to some of my blogs. To review what I've mentioned previously: I've been submitting both edited versions of older posts (from two blogs), as well as new articles, to EzineArticles.com. This has only produce a few visits to my sites and blogs, but I've only just begun my article marketing campaign. As well, for yesterday at least, I posted several entries to 2 or 3 blogs instead of just one entry each, like I've been doing for a while. I didn't keep track like I should have, but I believe I posted a total of 7 entries. That's a bit away from my high of 10-12 per day late last summer, but it's a start. Actually, posting frequency is something I want to address, which I'll do in my next post. Should you post more pages per day to the same post, or spread out your efforts over more blogs? (I'll put an inline link in this paragraph when the next post is up.) (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, web traffic
A scan of my Google Analytics reports shows the title question in the logs. Both the Google and Yahoo search engines have a PR (PageRank) designation. It's possible MSN does as well, but I honestly don't know. So does PageRank increase traffic? The short answer is: not necessarily. The more detailed answer is as follows. What a high PR does do is give those pages higher visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). If many people are searching for a term that your page(s) has, your PR will likely increase. But if that term ceases to be popular, a high PR won't make a difference. In fact, it's been stated under such a scenario, your high PR will drop. Let's take a concrete example. One of my articles at EzineArticles.com has a Google PR of 6. After only about 2 weeks on that site, a Google search for the non-exact phrase high-protein vegetarian places the article in 5th place out of 1,480,000 results. But this article is a slight revision of an older blog post. The original page has the same title and a Google PR of 0. The blog's main page has a PR of 3. I didn't track this page since it's first publication, but I'm making an educated guess that it has had very little traffic in comparison to the EzineArticles.com version. What's more telling is that my four cooking blogs, whose main pages have a Google PR of between 3-5, get more traffic each than my newer CurryElvis.com, which still has a PR of 0, at the time of writing. Similarly, my older BlogSpinner blog (PR 5) still gets more traffic than this newer version (PR 0), even though they both have about the same number of articles, and even though the older blog has not had any new posts in quite some time. So to answer the title question: I'm pretty sure that a high PR has a positive effect on traffic. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, pagerank, web traffic
Upon scanning my Google Analytics report recently for this blog, I found a few people searching for instructions on setting up a blog on a regular website. The short answer to this question is that it really isn't much different than if you were to set up the blog's homepage as also being your website's homepage. You need to create a subdirectory under the root directory of your domain. In this subdirectory, you will install your blogging platform. Then, on either just your home page, or possibly on all of your non-blog web pages, you should have a link to the blog's main page. A simple example of this at my Curry Elvis website. The main page is the only non-journal (non-blog) page on the site. It links to a the main page (index.html) of the sub-directory "wordpress". On my Chameleon Integration hubsite, I use the subdirectory name "blogs" as the parent to several more subdirectories. Each of these subdirectories has a short-form name of the blog it represents. For example, my older Vegetarian Fusion cooking blog has the URI of /blogs/vegfusion/. The sub-directory name is really up to you. Common names are "blog", "journal", "diary", "words", "letters". Also in use are the names of blogging platforms, or the year. It all depends on what you need for a particular website. If you want a bit more detail on setting up a blog on your own domain, you may want to read my article Introduction To Blogging - Part 3b: Setting Up A Blog On A Private Domain, at EzineArticles.com. It does not have technical details, and assumes you don't yet have a domain name, but it may be helpful. If you want specific instructions, I'd recommend those that come with your blogging platform. Most of the popular platforms provide the necessary documentation. If you're really stuck and don't know what to do, drop me an email at rdash001-at-yahoo-dot-ca. I may be able to help, but I can't necessarily respond immediately. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, blog platform
As with my previous web metrics posts, this one uses Google Analytics as an example, but you can use any web analytics package. Under the Marketing Optimization section is a subsection called Visitor Segment Performance. Under this subsection is a report called Referring Source. This an extremely valuable report, and a potential source of ideas for future blog posts. Once you've clicked on this report, you'll see a chart of the top ten referring domains to your selected site (or blog). Depending on your traffic source your number one referring source is either a search engine or "(direct)". The latter simply counts those visits by people who typed in one of your domain's URLs directly into their browser (or had it bookmarked). That is, they didn't click a link from another page (your website or another one) to get to your site. To the left of each referring source listed is a circle with a double up-arrow. Click the double-arrow beside the highest-ranking search engine source, say Google, Yahoo, or MSN. You'll see a drop-down box of three items. The last item, Cross Segment Performance, has a right-pointing arrow at the far left. Click the arrow to get a longer drop-down box. Near the top of the new list is "Keyword". Click on this to get a top-ten list of keywords or phrases that people used from the referring search engine that you selected. For example, for this blog, over a period of a couple months, I've had a total of 229 referrals from Google's search engine. Some words and phrases were used multiple times. These are the search terms that you want to focus on. That is, focus mostly on the top ten, unless you've already blogged about them. (You could always write more on the same topics.) For example, the top search term for this blog is "wordpress textpattern". This is too nebulous to determine what the visitors were really looking for, but you can guess that maybe they wanted to find a comparison of these two blogging platforms (WordPress and TextPattern). In fact, just a bit further down my top-ten list is the term "wordpress textpattern comparison". Hence, I may want to check my archive to see if I've written such a comparison. If not, this goes into my to-do list. Similarly, don't ignore those terms with only a few referrals. Many will be very similar. If you group together very similar search terms, the total referral may be quite significant. Don't forget that you are probably getting search traffic from several engines and directories. So add up referral counts for similar search terms from all of these sources. If you can decipher what visitors are really searching for, you have a motherlode of ideas for your future blog posts and articles. Even if you've already blogged about your most popular search terms, in a few weeks or a few months, you may have something new to say. While you don't need to check your web metrics every day, I recommend using a "wind-down" day such as Saturdays or Sundays to check your weekly statistics. Try to blog soon after on the topics searched for in the past week. When you have time, you can back in your analytics reports to see if any older search terms may be worth talking about as well. So try checking both the most recent weekly report as well as a "since earliest date" report. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, writing, web metrics, web analytics, google analytics, statistics
If you're using the Blogger.com blogging platform (or something like it), like I am for this blog, you might be frustrated by the fact that your home page displays each article in its entirety, instead of excerpting like most other blogging platforms do. There are actually several ways that you can excerpt in Blogger.com so that each post displays a portion of the text, then has a "read more" type of link. (Some of these methods apply to other free platforms as well.) - Blogger.com's own documentation says that you can excerpt posts using two methods. I tried one, which uses HTML "class" attributes in a <div> or <span> tag, and is supported by CSS stylesheets. It worked. For all of a few minutes. In some browsers. Then it stopped working in all of them. I've never figured out why, because I didn't change any code before it stopped working. Theoretically, this is a very simple way of doing it, which should work.
- Manual edit of home page. Provided that you are using Blogger.com to manage your blog on your own domain rather than a free blogspot.com domain, you can use this method. First, make sure you have "post pages" enabled. This means that every entry you post to your blog will have its own .html page, as well as appear on the home page. Now change your main page to some name other than index.html, say blogger.html. Download index.html to your computer, edit each post into excerpt mode, and a "read more" link to the appropriate page. This, of course, is a nuisance, and has to be done every time you add a new post. (You probably rarely delete a post, but depending on how recent it is, you'd have to follow suit.)
- Manually create abstracts on your home page. An abstract is different than an excerpt. For an abstract, you write a short summary of the post, which is handy if you're prone to writing longer posts like myself. (This is an informational site, so by nature my posts are longer.) The abstracting method is great if you're running a hubsite as well as a one or more blogs. So on your website's home page, you display an abstract of the latest 2-5 articles, with "read more" links to the permanent/ post pages. This method is completely manual. Every time you post to your blog, you'll have to update the list of abstracts.
- Massage your RSS/ Atom web feed from XML into HTML using a service like Feedburner or Feed2JS, and insert the resulting HTML into your home page, a web page, or another blog's sidebar. This is the method I use on the homepage of my hubsite, Chameleon Integration.
Of course, you could always move your blog to a new platform, if you feel you've outgrown Blogger. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, blog platform, blogger, blog excerpts
I've been working for myself for so long that I habitually assess my potential for the new year each January, with revisions in Februrary. This is something I need to do early in the year so that I can set my targets and work towards my goals. In the last post, I talked about some blogging revenue and traffic goals. I revisited my goals earlier today, realizing that I'd neglected some potential sources of income. Here's another (long) look. Much of my calculations below are based on my own experiences, as well as some data that Christopher Knight, owner of EzineArticles.com, has supplied in several of his articles. You will not necessarily have the same results, so you'll need to adjust the calculations suitably. First, let's revisit some of the possible sources of income for your posts and articles. Let's clarify here. For simplicity, by "posts" I mean entries in your blogs, as well as any articles on your non-blog websites. By "articles" I mean those articles that you have published on a "free articles" site such as EzineArticles.com. Here are sources of traffic to your site or blog: - Search engine referrals.
- Blog or site directory referrals.
- Awards site referrals (obviously, you must have won an award).
- Backlinks from articles, links (navigation bars), or blogrolls.
- Author resource link from the bottom of your articles on free-article sites.
- The same link at the end of your article when it's republished either on another site or in an ezine.
- Purchased traffic. I ignore this, as I'm trying to show you how to bootstrap your success without a budget.
Here's how this traffic can earn you revenue: - Your posts earn per-impression ad revenue. Not all of your topics will generate this kind of revenue. They have to be popular, and sometimes timey. This type of revenue is typically referred to online as eCPM, and derives from the old CPM - Cost Per M - rates for print magazines and newspapers. The M is the Roman numeral for 1000. With print magazines, the CPM dropped for higher circulation magazines. For very popular magazines with a million copies per monthly or weekly edition, the CPM might be as low as $5-7. For niche magazines with a targeted readership and lower circulation, CPM could be anywhere from $30-150 or more. But online, eCPM may only be a few cents to a few dollars. It depends on many factors including how topical your blogs/ sites are. Depending on your traffic and/or niche, eCPM is sometimes pro-rated. So if you only received, say, 345 legitimate pageviews on a given day, for a given blog, you would earn 0.345 x eCPM for that blog. Keep in mind that the eCPM that Google calculates for each of your blogs is a weighted mixture of rates from several advertisers. I don't have any further details about this.
- Your posts earn per-click revenue. Google refers to the weighted average as eCPC (cost per click). This value real isn't of much use if you have a low-volume site. That is, you'll earn whatever you earn based on ad clicks; you can't use the eCPC to predict what you'll earn later in the day.
- Your articles draws a percentage of some readers to your blog or site via a live link at the bottom of each article.
- You earn per-impression ad revenue from article readers who visit.
- You earn per-click ad revenue from article readers who visit and also click an ad.
- Your articles get republished in various ezines. A percentage of ezine subscribers click on your site/ blog link(s) and visit.
- You earn per-impression ad revenue from ezine subscribers who visit.
- You earn per-click ad revenue from ezine subscribers who visit and also click an ad.
- Of the people who visit your site from any traffic source, some of them may buy any of the following from your site:
- Ebooks or reports.
- Services, products, or subscriptions.
- Merchandise with your logo(s).
The last item could be paydirt for you. The people that visit you by way of your articles either on the free-articles site or in ezines will be very targeted customers, compared to those who just stumble across your site. Think about how many times they've clicked their mouse to get from a copy of your article to your site or blog. They're determined to find the information they want. So if you write a niche blog or website, put in the effort to compile and edit your older posts, add some new material, and tie them all together. You've then got yourself an e-book. It has to provide some sort of value for potential buyers, and you have to let them know what that might be. Consider giving away an excerpt of the e-book, in case someone isn't quite ready to buy right then and there. If they like what they read, when they come back, they'll probably buy. Without these e-books and reports, you'd better be selling something else on your blogs or sites, otherwise all the effort you put into your articles for the free-articles site will be wasted. You might be selling software, t-shirts, or actual products or services. Whatever it is, your article-marketing campaign will funnel targeted buyers. Now let's do some sample calcuations. These are all made up numbers. (Most ad networks have a terms of service clause that you cannot publicly discuss actual eCPM or eCPC, etc.) Suppose you have an archive of 500 blog posts. Suppose also that you set out to average 10 article submissions to a free-article site per day, 5 days per week, for 5 months straight. That means you'll produce 10 a/d x 5 d/wk x 4 wk/m x 5 m = 1000 articles. That may sound like a lot, but keep in mind that some of these articles can be repurposed blog posts. And they don't all have to be long posts. In fact, short 250-500 word articles tend to get republished more often than longer articles, unless they're very topical. In addition to these 1000 articles on free-article sites with a high Google PR (PageRank), you will also be writing at least 5 new blog posts per day, 5 days per week, for 5 months. That's 5 p/d x 5 d/wk x 4 wk/m x 5 m = 500 posts. Each post can eventually be edited to become a free-article submission. (I say "edited" a fair bit because what you write for your blog might not be usable on a free-article site as is.) This is a very aggressive article-marketing strategy, but absolutely necessary if you want to build your web traffic in a much shorter time. Now given these numbers, how do you determine how much you could earn? Here are some pointers. - Income from your regular blog traffic. Consider this: When you reach some unknown critical mass of Google PR and a quantity of blog posts, and after a certain amount of time has passed, each one of your posts will draw in about 2-4 search engine referrals per day. (Initially, you may only get this per post per week or even per month.) In our example, we have 500 posts archived, and we'll be adding another 500 over 5 months. This may not be enough to reach critical mass, but let's pretend it is. That means that when 5 months have passed, you could be getting 2000+ pageviews per day. (Remember, this is more likely to happen if you have a niche blog, and if all of these posts are part of one blog rather than spread out over several blogs.) Those 2000+ daily pageviews may earn you some per-impression ad revenue, depending on your topics. Also, depending on your long-term average daily CTR (click-through rate) on contextual or other ads, you'll earn varying amounts of revenue as well. For example, if your long-term (6 months or longer) CTR is, say, 5%, that means you may get 2000 pv/d x 5% clicks = 100 clicks per day. In addition, if your long-term average eCPC per click is, say, $0.15, then those 100 clicks earn you $15/d, or about $450/m. The per-impression earnings will likely be much lower than this.
- from free-article site traffic. Christopher Knight says that of each person that views your article on his EzineArticles.com site, approximately 3.30% will click on your website/ blog link at the end of your article. After you've submitted a few dozen articles, you'll be able to determine some average pageviews per article, with which you can guess at how much traffic that will produce to your blog. Let's just pick a number, say 5 pageviews per day per article. (Depending on your topic, this average my grow or shrink.) At the end of 5 months, after you've submitted 1000 articles, you might be getting 5000 daily pageviews in total, but at the free-article site. Of these 5000, 3.30% may turn into clicks to your blog. That means about 165 additional daily pageviews. This amount will taper off, but it's hard to know when.
- Income from traffic coming from ezines and other websites that republish your articles. It's really very hard to say what kind of income this traffic will translate to. If you write hundreds of topical, well-written articles, many ezine and website publishers will republish your articles. Subscriber bases probably range from a few hundred people to many thousands. The conversion rate for your articles is anyone's guess. I use an excessively conservative rate of 0.5-1.0%. For topical, informative articles, the rate may be much higher. These number are made up, but if you have 1000 articles, each of which gets republished by 5 ezine publishers with at least 2000 subscribers, that's possibly 1000 x 5 x 2000 = 10,000,000 emails containing a link to your blog or site (assuming only one article gets republished per ezine issue). If only 0.5% of those ezine emails turn into a visit to your blog, that's an extra 50,000 pageviews at your blog. However, the timeframe is anyone's guess. I'm using "1 year" for my own calculations, after the 5-month article-marketing campaign. Those 50,000 pageviews may generate some per-impression ad revenue. And at the 5% example CTR we mentioned in item #1 above, this translates into 2500 clicks. We used an example earnings value of $0.15/click, which results in $375. That's not a lot, but that's extra income. Again, this is not daily, repeating income. It might be more, it might be less, and it might take 1 year, 2 years, or just 6 months.
- Income from sales of services, products, subscriptions, merchandise, etc. Use historical sales conversion rates for your blog or site to determine what the extra traffic resulting from your article-marketing campaign will generate. Any traffic from ezines and from the free-articles sites will be more targeted than those coming from a search engine referral.
When you make your rough calculations (for that's about all you can do), keep in mind that when you conduct an article-marketing campaign, some of the high Google PR from the free-article sites you submit to will eventually rub off somewhat on your blog or site. This will likely increase the number of daily referrals that your homepage gets from the Google search engine. There may be no gain from other search engines. For example, I submitted an article yesterday morning. It was accepted by evening, and it immediately received a Google PR of 6, because of the way the free-articles site is set up. This will eventually produce gains for those of my sites/ blogs that I link to from the article. Even if you get an increase in just Google traffic, that'll will make a difference in the ad revenue and sales your blog or site could make. This is primarily because Google supplies the bulk of search engine referrals in general. (Note: on one of my old cooking blogs, the bulk of traffic comes from MSN. On another cooking blog, the bulk comes from Google.) So if you do decide to conduct an article marketing campaign, make sure what it is that you want to sell on your blog or site, besides free information. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/ Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, writing, ad revenue, blog revenue, web traffic
I've mentioned in recent posts that I have a number of New Year's resolutions for blogging, including reaching certain traffic levels, as well as reaching ad and article revenue goals. One of these goals is to hit the $100/m mark in Google AdSense ad revenue sometime this year, preferably by summer. Another is to get 1000 unique visitors daily across all my sites/ blogs before the end of the year. I've come across other bloggers setting these goals and mentioning them, but never really explaining how they planned to do so. Here's my attempt to explain, with a bit of preamble about goal-setting. I've lately been inspired by Steve Pavlina's very well-written website about personal development and goal-setting. While I was a teaching assistant in college, I coached several friends, colleagues and students set and achieve goals. Some took a few months to achieve goals, others took several years. I've been in a career and financial rut for four years, having had to change careers several times because of the economy and lack of jobs. It's been a struggle, demoralizing and frustrating. Blogging has helped me have goals and motivation again. But until I sat down and read Steve's inspirational writing, I'd forgotten about the proper approaches to goal setting. Now I don't plan to get too philosophical here, but I do want you to keep some things in mind when you set your own goals: - When you first set your blogging goals, they may seem unachievable. This is normal. Go ahead and set some goals anyway. But don't force yourself into a time frame if you're uncomfortable with it.
- Make your goals realistic. Break them down into easier intermediate milestones.
- As you achieve smaller milestone goals along the way, you will gain confidence and the bigger goals will seem more and more achievable. In fact, your mind will tune itself to recognize opportunities when the appear. I've lived in this frame of mind before, and it's a very heady feeling. But humans live in cyclic fashion, and things change. When they do, you must start your goal-defining and setting again.
- Unless you already have a popular website or blog, or are a celebrity in a certain medium (TV, print, movies, radio), your initial traffic will be mostly from Search Engine referrals. That's normal. To get
subscribers, you have to earn them. You have to be able to offer something in your writing that appeals to a lot of people. Then you have to make sure your target market finds you. This takes time and effort. The question is how much effort do you want to put in? (Darren Rowse has said (link below) that early on, when he was only blogging 2 days per week, he sometimes posted entries to his multiple blogs as much as 50 times in a 12-hour period.)
- Keep in mind that humans live in creative cycles. We'll have peak creative periods, as well as valleys. Your goals may suffer some months more than others. (I've been writing for a long time, so I know my cycles well. For me, January is a high period, Feburary a low, then things pick up until mid-November and slow down until early the next January.)
The rest of this article focuses on points #2 and #4. For example, in yesterday's post about reaching another AdSense revenue milestone, I mentioned that I passed the US$40/m mark for January. Since my goal is to reach $100/m, say for the end of June, I have 5 months to move from $40/m to $100/m. The only way I'm going to reach this goal, in my mind, is to break it down. ( My end-of-year goal is larger, but I tend to psyche myself out if I burden myself with too many goals.) Since the revenue increase that I need to achieve during these 5 months is 100-40 = $60, that means I have to increase by 60/5 = $12/m, each month. On a regular basis, between 5-15 of my blogs make any money at all. ( I'll go ahead and state it outright: none of my blogs make a lot of money yet. As I've mentioned previously, it's because I have not posted regularly to any of them in particular. If I were to pick just 5 blogs to focus on, I'd probably make a lot more, a lot sooner. But I have a publishing agenda that I need to follow, for consulting reasons, and in hopes of picking up contracts.) So if I can increase my AdSense earnings by an average of between $0.80-$3.00 per blog per month, for 5 months straight, I'll reach my goal of $100/m. This translates to a steady, continual increase of about $0.03-0.10 per blog per day for 5 months. When put in this form, the goal seems achievable. If you can increase targeted traffic to niche blogs, you might just be able to earn this from pay-per-impression ads. I've noticed, for example, that my very technical blogs regularly show this kind of potential revenue. I don't have the traffic yet, but when I do, the goal of, say, a $0.10/day increase per blog for 5 blogs for five months won't be that difficult. How do I get the traffic? I could buy it, but it probably wouldn't be targeted. I could advertise, but I don't have the budget. That leaves writing and posting more entries in a shorter period of time. Let's do some easy math. These are made up numbers, and are very conservative. Let's say that you can rely on every focused entry you post initially bringing you at least 2 search engine referrals per week. Let's further assume each visitor only views one page. So in this case, one page view equals one unique visitor. It takes time, but when your archive of blog posts reaches a critical mass (different for each search engine), each article may bring you 2-4 search engine referrals per day rather than just per week. That means that for every 100 posts you have, you will likely get 200-400 visits per day or more (after reaching critical mass). If you post 3 entries per day, 5 days per week, that's 150 posts per month. In a year, that's 1800 posts, and thus potentially worth 3600-7200 pageviews per day. The problem is that these numbers depend on a lot of factors, some of which are: - The popularity of the topics you write about. For example, some of the topics I write about just don't generate that much traffic yet. In my opinion, people don't know that they will be interested. But once I reach my target market with certain blogs, and put together several e-books for sale, these topics will pay off. I'm investing my effort for a return in 2-3 years, and for several years afterwards.
- The quantity of posts you have per topic. Let's face it. If you want targeted traffic, you need lots of focused, topical content. Revenue-wise, you cannot expect advertisers to want to fund your site if you cannot provided them with the market they are targeting for their products. It really isn't that different than for print magazines.
- How spread out these posts are over your blogs. That is, if you write 1800 posts per year for a single blog, they will very likely be more valuable in terms of daily traffic than if those 1800 are split up over numerous blogs. (Hence one of the reasons my blogs have not yet reached a critical mass.)
- Your daily posting frequency. Okay, you have to give yourself time off from blogging each week. But if it takes you 2 years to write those 1800 blog posts rather than 1 year, it'll take you that much longer to reach a critical mass.
Of course, you could help things on their way by article marketing. That is, writing and publishing articles on "free article" sites. Christoper Knight, owner of EzineArticles.com, has written a number of articles on the subject. While there are no guarantees of traffic, a site like his has a very high Google PageRank (8 for the main URL), and this will rub off onto my sites (the ones linked to from my articles.) My 8 articles at the time of this writing, submitted between late December 2005 and late last week, all have a Google PR of 6. None of my blogs or sites - all of which have been around for 3-8 months, have more than PR 5. Some still have a PR 0, even after 3 months and many dozens of posts. They've generated a total of around 460 pageviews so far, an average of 57 pageviews per article in approximately 40 days. If this rate continues for at least one year, that's over 4,000 pageviews for just those 8. Christopher says that about 3.3% of his visitors click on an author's resource box, which contains 1-3 live links to the author's sites. That's only 140 or so extra visitors to my site, on average, over 12 months. But if I continue writing and submitting at least 5 articles per week, week in and week out, that'll start producing steady traffic to my sites, by slow degrees. (Keep in mind that you can polish up your older blog posts and submit those, provide they are focused and are of high quality.) Add to that any traffic that arrives from ezines or websites that have republished your article(s), and you could be enjoying a fair bit of traffic. Ramp up your daily submissions, and being able to reach your traffic goals will become a lot easier. Something to seriously consider. Links: Steve Pavlina - Personal Development for Smart People; Darren Rowse - Becoming a ProBlogger - A Story in Many Parts; Christopher Knight - How To Earn $10,000 USD or More From Article Marketing. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, writing, ad revenue, blog revenue, goal setting, adsense, web traffic
One of the struggles I've been going through for two months is in choosing the most appropriate blogging platform for several new blogs (mine, friends, family) that I'm trying to set up. There are a number of features that are absolutely crucial for the selected platform to have: - Online community-building features:
- Forums
- Personal blogs
- Contribution tracking
- Ad revenue sharing (at least Google AdSense)
- Easy-to-use for site contributors
- Easy redesign of page templates. I have at least 4 templates to set up, and each one is going to take at least 4-8 hours per template.
- Multiple-site managment on a single install, or failing that, minimal effort for configuration. (I don't have time to waste each time I install the software. I have far too many sites to manage, and that list is growing.)
- No internet host provider-related problems. (I.e., should work on all hosts offering PHP scripting and mySQL databases.)
- Be OpenSource, so that I can either find free/ inexpensive plugins easily, or write my own.
- Have supportive user community. (By "user", in this case I mean publishers that use the platform.)
Now, there are many platforms that can offer some of these features. As I've mentioned in previous posts, Drupal and WordPress offer most of the above, but not all features simultaneous. Drupal gives database errors on my domains. WordPress doesn't have an ad revenue sharing plugin that I could find. So what do I, other than tear my hair out in frustration? Choose one and pray it's the most optimal? Which one is that? I need ALL of the above features simultaneously. Well, for my particular situation, it means selecting WordPress (1.5.2 - I'm not ready to tackle the new 2.0.1) and slowly tweaking the code, maybe even writing my own plugin. This beats having to write my own custom blog platform. Despite all the praise I heaped on Drupal recently (I still like it better), the database problems are too big for me to tackle. I'd have to either change my host provider (which I'm not doing), or entirely rewrite the way the database management is run. As I've said before, choose your blog platform wisely, with the intent of using it long-term, or at least for a few years. (c) Copyright: 2006-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://blogspinner.countwordula.com/Technorati Tags: blogspinner, blogging, pro blogging, multi blogs, blog platforms, blog design, wordpress, drupal
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Blogspinner V2.0
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This site is intended as a how-to guide to blogging for new/recent bloggers. Topics covered include writing, blogging platforms and client software, generating ad revenue, analyzing blog statistics +managing multi-blogs. Note: If you are absolutely new to blogging, please read this series of webpages first: Intro to Blogging
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About Me
I'm a geek/ philosopher/ composer/ artist/ cook/ photographer/ web programmer/ blah-blah-blah who is also a published writer and author. The need to write runs through my veins and this blog documents my experiences with my other blogs.
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