Learning Search Engine Optimization (SEO definition) is critical to your websites success. If you get naturally ranked in the Search Engines, you will have lots of traffic flow your way from the major engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.). If you would like to learn all of the basics of SEO, we would highly recommended that you pick up a copy of Aaron Wall’s SEO Book prior or in the early stages of your site. The book lays SEO out in simple terms, giving any reader the basics of SEO.
Traffic exchanges and traffic building tools have been around since the start of the Internet and are now popping back up in the form of nice looking “Web 2.0″ “Widgets.” If you understand how to navigate, these traffic exchange tools can help to bring users to your site. Today we will discuss two services that we are going to try on this blog and will update you as we gain more experience with them. As always your comments are appreciated either below, or contact us.
Both services publish your RSS feeds; one handles the syndication by mixing your feeds with other members feeds (and distributing via third party blogs) and the other is strictly your feed, but you are responsible for syndication. Both services are also trying to create a destination for Publishers on their own websites as a place to come to pick up free content.
The first service is called Blog Rush, which can be seen on the right hand side of Cwire.org. Blog Rush aggregates several participating publishers RSS feeds and displays them on publishers websites who have embedded the Blog Rush widget. Blog Rush’s easy to use back-end tracks how many times their widget is shown on a publishers site and gives publishers a credit in that amount of usage. Those credits are automatically applied towards the publishers own content appearing on other web pages. If a user clicks on a link on the widget, the user is brought to the publishers web page. Here is a link to a page that has a video on it that better explains it.
The Blog Rush service allows you to earn credits for both displaying the widget and getting other blog users to sign up. Some bloggers so far have only received a few clicks for every thousand displays of their widget. However, it is possible that these users are more valuable since they will be coming from targeted links on blogs similar to your own. We will provide an analysis of our results with Blog Rush in a later post.
The second service is called Spring Widgets, which allows you to syndicate your RSS feed (without having to share the space), but you are responsible for your own distribution. This service is great if you have a feed that you feel your users would want to display. Unlike Blog Rush, there is no aggregation model and no built in distribution.
On June 8, 2006, my site was listed on the popular blog BoingBoing, and I received 31,000 unique visitors in one day, giving me an Alexa rank for that day of 1,000, better than Coke or Playboy! Subsequent days also had very high traffic levels, brining between 4000-7000 uniques per day. BoingBoing found the link to my site because on June 7 my Highest Paying AdSense Keywords page was Dugg.
What was your best source of traffic ever? How did you find it, or how did they find you, how much traffic did you receive initially, and how long did it last?
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 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)
The news release which was originally scheduled to go public tomorrow has been postponed to Tuesday February 13 due to a conflict with vacation plans. I would like to ensure that I will be available for any calls or emails inquiring about the site. More details on the news release will follow shortly.
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.
Most site authors, and statistics packages out there are concerned with number of viewers, and number of page views, however they never really touch on one of the most important statistics: page views per user. How often do your visitors simply come and go, leaving your site as fast as a TV channel surfer? Are you encouraging your visitors to stay for a while and click through multiple pages? If you are able to take your average viewer from 1 page view per visit to two page views per visit, you are effectively doubling your page views. It’s all a numbers game — the more ads you serve up, the more you will earn — and you just doubled your potential.
So how can we increase our page views? Here are a few helpful tips that I have followed myself and you might want to try as well:
1. Use the “More” tag to split your posts
Using this feature will benefit your site in two ways: if you tend to write lengthy posts as I do, it will help to clean up your home page and allow your readers to view more than one article headline at a time. It will also greatly increase your page views by nearly a factor of two. In my log files, I can pinpoint to the exact day that I started using this feature, as my page views per user ratio increased by approximately 80%.
Well I have taken some time to review the results of my experiment and I’ve actually had a hard time determining if it was successful or not.
My goals from this experiment were to: 1) generate organic traffic to my site, and 2) make money. Breaking down my analysis into these two goals, we get the following:
Goal #1: Generate Organic Traffic
When I was initially planning this contest, I had thought that the offer of $50 for a simple link-back to my site would bring dozens of entrants. “What’s a 30-second link for a chance at 50 bucks?”, I was thinking.
I promoted this contest on Digg, del.icio.us, numerous forums I frequent, and on CyberWyre of course. In the end, I received only six entrants, from which a winner was selected.
There will be no increased organic traffic from only six link-backs. As such, the first goal to generate traffic through increased link-backs failed.
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