In 2006 we saw an explosion of community-based websites; From self-submitted news sites like Digg.com, to Del.icio.us social-bookmarking, to Youtube.com videos, it is clear that the trend of user-submitted content is here to stay and will only grow larger in 2007. One way to boost traffic to your site is to create ways for your users to contribute their own content to your site. It will guarantee that there is always something fresh to read on your site, and take a whole load of work off your shoulders.
So how can you foster a community environment on your blog? There are a number of techniques you can use, some of which I’ve already tried on this site and I’ll overview the successes that I’ve had with them.
8 Steps to Fostering a Community in your Blog
1. Recognize top commentators
The main difference between a blog and a website is a blog offers the ability for its users to interact with the author and each other though comments. Comments are the primary reason why your users will return frequently to your site. I’ve recently installed the Show Top Commentators plugin into the sidebar of this site to recognize top commentators on CyberWyre. The plugin lists top commentators on the site, and links back to the homepage which they specify in the comment. This will provide a little incentive to your readers to interact more and post more comments on your site. Be careful though, as this may also encourage your readers to spam more often, or place homepage links to inappropriate sites.
Going forward, any comment posted on this site will be recorded, and top commentators will have links to their site from the homepage of CyberWyre.
I just logged into my Text Link Ads affiliate statistics and found that they have recently significantly improved their reporting for affiliates. This improved reporting has let me look into the past and see exactly where each referral came from, the date it was received and most importantly, lets me understand which affiliate links are converting well and which I should remove.
Below is a screen capture of this updated reporting.
For those TLA affiliates out there, check out these new stats and you might be surprised where you’ve been getting referrals from.
I have a link to check my Alexa ranking in my Firefox toolbar, and do so almost every day; Usually just after I check my internal server logs just to see how closely Alexa matches these statistics. Although some will dispute the validity of Alexa ratings, major advertising networks such as AdBrite and Text Link Ads use Alexa ratings regularly to price advertising on publisher websites — this means that you should care about your Alexa rating, and check it regularly!
Alexa ranks are determined in a similar manner to how Neilson TV ratings are generated — the browsing habits of a small portion of the population are monitored through a client-side installed browser toolbar and then multiplied by the estimated total Internet user population to determine total traffic to a particular website. Recently, Alexa updated the way which it displays the “Reach” statistic. Previously, this measure was a quite confusing number to understand; Now, it is given as a percentage of all Internet users. I find it quite interesting to know what percentage of Internet users visit my website — even the smallest percentage multiplied by 1,093,529,692 (World Internet Statistics) is quite a large volume of traffic. To put things in perspective, Alexa currently ranks Google as receiving 24.2% of global Internet traffic, whereas CyberWyre received a peak of approximately 0.05% of Internet traffic in June 2006 (which was so much traffic at the time that my server had connection issues)
That time of year has come again, and as much as you don’t want to, if you made over $600 from AdSense in 2006, you need to report your income to the IRS. Unfortunately, Google AdSense income is taxable income. Remember, Google takes income from clients who pay money for their ads to be run through AdSense. In order to reduce their overall income (and thus reduce their taxes) they will declare payouts to you as an expense. To Google, you are an independent contractor, being paid via 1099-MISC and this relationship will be reported to the IRS.
For more information on how Google will report your income, and how you should declare it, refer to my previous Google Adsense Tax article, posted last year.
A press release is an excellent way to bring media attention to your website or business. It has been nearly nine months since I last published a press release advertising this website to the media. In March 2006 I simultaneously published two identical news releases about this site and the response was enormous. CyberWyre was mentioned in Forbes, Red Herring, CBS MarketWatch Radio, and countless other news sources across the globe.
Over the coming weeks, I will be documenting my progress in preparing a second release, finding the best sites to submit it to, and the amount of media coverage received. For those who do not have much experience in preparing a press release, check out this tutorial I wrote: The Complete Overview of Writing & Distributing a Press Release.
I will be preparing this release over the next few days, and plan to have it released on Tuesday January 30.
It is important to keep a watchful eye on how well your site is performing in search engine (SE) results with respect to certain keywords. CyberWyre for example relies on the keywords “keyword”, “high paying”, and “adsense” to bring in most of its search engine traffic. When you have spent time, and possibly money on optimizing your site for certain keywords, it is important to know if your efforts were successful and how high you place in rankings given these keywords.
I have recently found a useful set of SEO tools which greatly eases this process. Jim at We Build Webpages has released a useful tool which allows you to submit your website URL, your search term, and it will generate a table of results summarizing your search engine placement given your search term. Given the URL http://www.cwire.org and the search term “high paying keyword”, Jim’s tool generated the following results:
Forget Thanksgiving — anyone who goes Christmas shopping in November is crazy as far as I’m concerned. The first of December marks the beginning of Christmas season for me — the tree goes up, the weather sharply cools down, and I start to plan my shopping. Like every year before it, this year will make new records for the amount of Christmas purchases which are made online. Like every year before it, this year is the best year to start selling online through affiliate programs and make a few extra bucks to pay for those “must-have” gifts that you’ll need to purchase for that special someone, or even yourself.
I’ve spent months reading about affiliate marketing, perusing forums and trying to learn from others who claim to be making upwards of $10,000/month from this stuff. I still haven’t quite figured it out but I’m getting closer, and I wanted to share some of this knowledge with you.
The Basics of Affiliate Marketing
Well, it really isn’t too complicated in theory. You refer someone to a product through a link, and if they make a purchase you receive a kickback. It might be a couple bucks, it might be a couple hundred bucks, it all depends on the terms of the referral program and the size of the purchase. The real work in affiliate marketing is actually marketing someone else’s product. This includes developing a nice brochure-ware website/blog, answering customer questions, and generating traffic to your site. From what I’ve learned, this is the basic process flow for succeeding in this line of business, and the direction I intend to take this holiday season with my own attempts.
Affiliate Marketing To-Do List
1) Find a product you want to market
2) Design a nice website / blog describing the product and provide something of value to the reader regarding this item. A good suggestion is to write a detailed, honest review of the product you are selling.
3) Promote your website on Google AdWords. Find inexpensive keywords to market your site which have a CPC is less than the average return you will see per visitor to your site. More on this later.
One feature which I recently discovered in WordPress was the ability to schedule an article to be posted at a predefined future date. As my time has been very limited lately, I do not know when I will have the chance to write an article for CyberWyre. When I do have a few hours free though, I will usually try to write as much as I can in the allotted time.
The ability to schedule an article to be posted at a future time has proven very useful to me (even with this article you are reading now — it was written nearly one week before I scheduled it to be posted). As my erratic writing schedule does not always allow me to write at a normal pace, sometimes having not written anything for weeks and then one day writing five or six articles, an automatic posting schedule lets me set when each article will be made public, allowing me to sit back and know that there will be fresh content on my site when I am busy with other things.
How to Configure Scheduled Posting in WordPress
So you’ve finally booked that two week vacation to the Caribbean and now you’re worried what will happen to your site while you’re gone — or will your readers even know that you left? Actually setting an article to be posted at a future date was simpler than I thought.
Our friends at Text Link Ads have recently announced a new service to help link potential advertisers with authors of successful blogs in a way which has not yet been done. The general theory is that as people become more and more accustomed to seeing advertisements on websites, they become more immune to them and naturally begin to block them out. But what if an entire blog entry was an advertisement in disguise?
Welcome to ReviewME, a new pay-to-review service which allows potential advertisers to browse the inventory of available blogs and select the one site which they would like to have their review featured on. The advertiser will then contact the blog author through the ReviewME website and request for a review to be written and arrange for payment.
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