One website building program that I have been consistantly asked about by readers over the last 12 or more months is Site Build It. While not a blogging platform as such it is a way of building a website for money and as a result I guess readers feel I will have an opinion of it. Unfortunately I’ve not used it before so don’t have any personal experience to offer. When I mentioned this on Twitter recently Julie Bonner (one of b5media’s staff writers) told me that she’d used SBI successfully - I asked her if she’d be interested in writing a user review. She agreed and here it is.

I first heard of SBI (Site Build It) back in August of 2004. I had tried, unsuccessfully, to build a website on my own a few months before that. Needless to say, I was frustrated because of my sheer lack of knowledge of html, seo and all the other stuff involved. I knew I could write, I knew I loved to write and I knew there was money to be made on the Internet. What I needed was a program where I could just pump out good content and have all of the other stuff taken care of for me, while making money of course. That’s when SBI fell into my lap.

In July 2004 I purchased SBI and hit the ground running. In a span of about 3 years, I built a handful of websites and then turned around and flipped them for a profit. I wrote on everything from decorating kids’ bedrooms to on-line games for kids. While I was in the process of building the sites, I was making a fairly decent income off of Google Adsense and affiliate links. To say I am grateful to SBI and what it has taught me, would be an understatement.

Some of you may be asking what the benefits of purchasing SBI are. It’s not super expensive, but pricey enough to where you need to do your research and think about if this is something you are willing to open your wallet for. You also have to realize that every year there is a renewal fee. For me personally, my income from the site has covered that fee over and above, so it has never been an issue.

Here are some of the benefits of SBI:

I won’t go into great detail about the individual benefits, because SBI has a great site where they explain everything. You can read about the program or take their video tour.

What I will tell you, is that if you think you can go out and purchase SBI, throw up a few pages and watch the money start rolling in, then you might as well not waste your time or money. I was successful at building web sites and making money at it because I worked hard. SBI gives you the tools, but you have to provide the blood, sweat and tears. I spent many late nights writing and writing and writing and it payed off. I wrote for three months before I started seeing the money come in, but once it did, it just didn’t stop and continued to grow from there.

If you dig a little into the SBI site, you will see that this program has really changed people’s lives. I can tell you that it’s true. I have personally exchanged emails with people who are making a full time living off of their SBI sites, but like I said, it’s because they worked very hard in the beginning. They understood what they needed to do and they just did it.

SBI is what convinced me that making money on-line was truly possible. The thought of working from home and doing something that I loved became a reality for me and I have never looked back. It’s funny because SBI is one of the places where I first heard about this thing called blogging. They talked about it as a way to promote your web site and build traffic and encourage you to use the two together. Little did I know back then that blogging would take over my life.

My web site building days are currently on hold because, well, blogging is my new love. Will I pick it up again some day? Maybe. And if I do, I can guarantee you that Site Build It is where I will go back to. No doubt about that!

A Note from Darren - thanks to Julie for this review. While I’ve not use Site Build It at all and can only rely upon the advice of people I respect and trust (like Julie) I find myself reacting to the idea of SBI in a couple of ways.

Firstly, if I’m honest - when I hear of these programs I get a little skeptical. Why would you need to pay for this type of thing when you can set up your own blog or website using free tools?

Secondly, I really like the sound of some of the tools and features bundled up in this product. Some of the keyword tools, SEO that is built in, the community aspect etc. While the skeptical side of my brain tells me that you can get a lot of this for free - I guess I’m reminded of my first year online trying to build my first blogs where I quite literally had no idea what I was doing. I had to ask a fellow blogger how to make text bold - I didn’t know where to begin.

While some of us who have been around for a while might look down our noses at this type of tool I think that they can have a place - particularly for those starting out, who want to learn some basics and who don’t have the skills (or know someone with them) to get going. The idea of a service that bundles a lot of this stuff into a package and then charges for it will not appeal to everyone - some of us prefer to spend time researching, pulling together information from lots of sources etc - However for some, SBI sounds like a good ‘getting started’ tool.

I’d love to hear readers experiences of SBI. Have you used it? How did you find it? What did you like? What could they improve and do better?

Share This

Today blogger and MBA student Eric Rosenberg fromThe Israel Situation and Narrow Bridge Adventures talks us through some statistical analysis of the traffic to his blog.

As a hobby blogger trying to increase readers to my Israel blog, The Israel Situation, I have always been glued to my site traffic. What does a spike mean? How can I bring more readers? Is there anything I can do to help my blog grow?

I am currently an MBA student, and I took a statistics class this past quarter. For a class project, I tried to use statistics to prove what you can do to help your blog grow. I used a lot of technical tests including regression, chi-squared, and correlations to prove my theories. Darren gave me the opportunity to share my findings with all of you, and I have translated the findings into plain English to help you grow your blog readership.

I first tested to find a relationship between posts per day and site visitors. I started my blogging believing that the key to more visitors was more posts. Not true! A two sample test comparing site visitors to page loads proved that there is no association between the two. If you are working your tail off to post ten times a day, it might be better to focus your efforts on fewer, better quality posts.

Next up I tried to find a way to drive subscriber growth. I tested the relationship between page views and subscriber count. A two sample t-test (statistics talk for two variable relationship test) proved that again, there is no relationship. At this point, it seemed that no numbers could predict a successful blogger, but I continued my testing.

Next, I used a test called chi-squared to find if day of the week had any big impact in visitors. The test is designed to test if proportions are equal across periods. I did find a difference here. I found that there were constantly more visitors on Sunday and fewer on Friday and Saturday. This, I believe, is specific to my target audience. Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, is from Friday night to Saturday night. As a blog that focuses on Israel, many of my visitors are Jewish. This explains the difference. If you have a blog with a niche audience, you might find this variation as well. A business blog, for example, may have a spike in readers on Monday morning at the beginning of the week and less visits on the weekend.

My next test is the one that applies to virtually every blogger. I tested page views against time. I found that time since starting the blog does correlate to an increase in page views. At first I had trouble substantiating this data. I removed outliers, or non-regular data, and was able to then prove my hypothesis. As you can see from my chart, I was able to demonstrate that days since blog inception closely related to an increase in regular visits. My spikes in traffic, caused by Reddit and hosting the Haveil Havalim blog carnival, did not cause an increase in traffic. Just to reiterate, social bookmarking and other spikes in traffic did not cause a statistically significant increase in blog viewers. You can see the five dots that stick out in the chart below. Those are my big days of social bookmarking and blog carnival hosting.

To summarize what I found and apply it to you, the most important factor in growing your blog is persistence. Sticking with it will lead to a real increase in visits. If you write good content, it is inevitable that you will gain more readers. Traffic spikes, like the one I hope to get from guest posting here, are nice. However, most people that visit in a spike don?t really care about your blog, they care about the single post. If you can pick up a few regulars, great, but don?t expect a whole lot.

If you are still starting out, do not give up from a low reader count. I almost did a few times, but decided to stick with it because Israel is something I am passionate about. If you are writing about something you love, you will have a readership increase in time. Other than that, the statistics of blogging are fairly inconclusive.

Eric Rosenberg is the author of two blogs: The Israel Situation and Narrow Bridge Adventures. He has been blogging for about two years.

Share This

A couple of days ago I added the ability for those leaving comments on my TwiTip Twitter Tips blog to add their Twitter ID as well as their URL to comments. Since doing this I’ve been asked time and time again how we did it. In this guest post Sean Walberg (the guy who actually made it happen and who is my server admin on TwiTip) explains how he did it.

If you’ve been to Twitip.com in the past couple of days, you’ve probably noticed that commenters have Twitter IDs in their posts:

This was something Darren thought up while we were preparing to move his server, and asked me to put it in place. Twitip runs on WordPress, which is easily extended through plugins. Fortunately, someone wrote a plugin to take care of most of what’s needed to do this.

The steps we’ll follow here are:

The first thing you’ll need is the Extra Comment Fields plugin. I used Version 1.2 Beta if you want a direct download link.

There’s one PHP file in there that you’ll put in your wp-content/plugins/ directory. When you go back to your WordPress Admin page, you’ll see the Extra Comment Fields plugin in the Inactive Plugins section of your Plugins page (off to the right of your screen, between Settings and Users). Activate this plugin.

The Extra Comment Fields plugin is tricky in that there are several references to the field name, and they all have to match (including the case). I chose “twitter” which should be easy enough to remember.

From the WordPress Admin screen, navigate to Settings, then Extra Comment Fields. (If you don’t see Extra Comment Fields in the list of plugins, go back a step and make sure you activated it)

Type “twitter” into the text box and click “Add Field”. Your screen should look like this:

This step makes the necessary changes to the database to store the comment. Heed the warning you see, if you delete this field, it removes the column in the database.

Next, go into your theme directory, it’s in wp-content/themes/. Darren runs Thesis, so we’re looking at wp-content/themes/thesis. Open up comments.php. Find the spot where the comment form is displayed by looking for comment_author_url.

You’ll want to add a new comment field with the name of “twitter”. This will depend a lot on your theme, but cutting and pasting goes a long way here. The big change, though, is that WordPress doesn’t keep this value in your cookie, so you can’t pre-populate this in the value attribute (in simpler terms, people who have commented before will have their name, email, and URL filled in, but not the Twitter ID). In Thesis, you’ll have:

In the default theme, it’ll look like this:

At this point load your site in your browser to make sure everything looks OK.

The last step is to print the Twitter ID alongside the comments. This is also done in comments.php. The comments are printed out in a loop which varies from theme to theme. In Thesis, you’ll start right after:

(It’s entirely possible there’s an easier way to do this in Thesis)

In the default theme, you’ll see the following, and you’ll want to start right before it.

Wherever you end up starting, insert the following code:

The Extra Comment Fields plugin puts the data from the twitter field in a method of the $comment object called extra_twitter (and if you called your variable foo, it would be called extra_foo, and so forth). The above code checks to see if it’s been set (that is, someone submitted a Twitter ID), and if so, strips off any leading “@”. This allows people to enter their Twitter IDs both with and without the @. The code then calls the htmlentities function to strip out any funny stuff, and then print it out as a link. If you want to style the link with any CSS, change the HTML accordingly.

That’s it!

Sean Walberg is a network guy, freelance author, and systems administrator.

Share This

In this guest post Jeff Chandler reviews the TellaFriend Widget.

In the ever increasing socialness of the web, everything from news to photos to videos are being shared. Outside of  ShareThis, I’m not to familiar with other sites or services that are exclusively centered around sharing items across the web. During the past week, I was tipped off to a new service that has launched called Tell A Friend. Tell A Friend is a widget that is displayed on a page that enables visitors to essentially, tell a friend about a particular item.

Company Info:

Tell A Friend was created by SocialTwist. SocialTwist is a company that specializes in building widgets to the point where they almost become applications. Tell A Friend is the first widget application from the company with Widget Applications soon to be developed for internal corporate use. The company has two offices, one in the U.S. (Sunnyvale, CA) and India ( Begumpet Hyderabad, AP)

The Signup Process:

In order to use the widget, you’ll have to sign up first. The sign up process contains the typical email and password fields with an additional field to configure your Site URL and then confirm whether you operate a website or a blog. The difference between the two is that if you choose the blog option, you’ll be able to select from a list of popular blogging platforms to make installation of the widget easier. For this review, I selected blog and from the dropdown menu, I selected the WordPress Engine Plugin.

After signing up, you’ll be sent an activation email. Once you agree to their terms of service, you’ll be able to login to the site.

Using Tell A Friend:

Once logged in, you’ll gain access to your Widget Code which is the same thing as your account id number. Installation instructions for using the widget with TypePad, WordPress, Blogger, and Textpattern can also be found in this location.  If you’re using a self installed version of WordPress, download and install the Tell A Friend plugin. I can’t link to the plugin because it is dynamically generated with your user account ID number. Once the plugin is activated on your blog, the widget will automatically be placed at the end of your content. For example:

Configuring The Widget:

If you’re worried about the Widget not blending in with your blog design, don’t be. Tell A Friend provides options to change the widgets design. You can even configure the design of the button to be a large, small, or medium sized graphic. There is sure to be an option that looks good with your design.

When configuring the widget, you’ll come across something called Channels. These channels are labeled as email, IM, blog, and social. When a visitor hovers their mouse cursor over one of these particular channels on the widget, a row of services will popup enabling visitors to share a particular piece of content with their friends which of course is the basis behind the entire service. If you’re looking for even more customization, you can customize the message that is displayed when someone shares content through a particular channel.

Keeping tabs on who is using the widget is made simple since Tell A Friend provides a usage stats page that is tied to your account. The stats showcase channel usage, widget views, widget uses, and more.

Conclusion:

All in all, Tell A Friend enables exactly that. The ability for visitors to tell their friends about something cool they’ve found. However, it is difficult for me to recommend using this widget versus something like ShareThis which is established and performs exactly the same functions as Tell A Friend. However, competition is a good thing and if ShareThis doesn’t suit your fancy, Tell A Friend makes a nice alternative.

Share This

In the last 24 hours MediaWhiz (disclosure - they are sponsors of this site) have released a new advertising product for those interested in selling text links on their blogs) called InLinks.

InLinks is an ad network that allows advertisers to buy text links within the content of your posts. The links pass on Google Juice (ie they don’t have nofollow tags), they are approved by publishers before going live and they don’t have any kind of indication that they are ads on them (no popups like Kontera ads for example).

Lets be clear - these ads are against Google’s quality guidelines and if you’re caught selling them your blog is likely to be penalized. Also - not disclosing ads as ads is seen by many as unethical (and in some parts of the world is outside of the guidelines of bodies like the FTC - there is risk involved here.

Having said that - InLinks is banking on their ads being difficult for anyone to see as ads (including Google). I’m yet to see them in the wild but would bet that they are intended not to have a footprint that Google can see.

I personally would advise to proceed with caution. If you want to rank high in Google then this is probably not for you. If you don’t care whether your blog is in their index or not then it could be something to investigate.

If you want to be up front with your readers about what links in your content are paid ads and which are genuine and useful links - then this isn’t for you. If you’re not worried about disclosure and transparency with readers - you might consider this.

Our latest Poll here at ProBlogger indicates that 31% of readers of this blog currently sell text links - so I’m pretty sure that there is a market for InLinks - but I’m sure there’s going to be lots of debate on this on in coming months.

My personal stance is that I don’t sell text ads.

Further Reading on the InLinks story:

Share This

Yesterday we heard from Eric Hamm from Up-And-Coming-Blogger and “Motivate Thyself” and Sean Platt from Writer Dad who wrote about the power of finding a blogging buddy to work collaborate with in your blogging.

Finding that special blogging buddy (or buddies) isn?t anything you can place on Craig?s List. Like any relationship worth developing, only the proper combination of time and place will lead to conception. It is important to understand that part of the challenge lies in the patience it takes to wait for the right blogger to enter our lives. Of course, while being patient, it wouldn?t hurt to speed the process along by meeting a myriad of people.

Here are a few tips to help open doors, and invite the right bloggers to come inside.

A great example of the above information in action.

About a dozen fallen leaves into Sean?s third month blogging, he got a note in his inbox from a daily reader, regular commenter, and first time emailer. The reader loved his site and wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help make it better; the Blogopolis version of asking if he?d like to share a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The email was from Eric, and over the course of a weekend, he added the 40 to the WD, and scrubbed Writer Dad until it was all shiny. Only a couple of weeks, and the two of us were pooling ourselves on a project. Collaboration has been a constant since.

Having a blogging buddy is an excellent strategy, but one that cannot, and should not be forced. Being mindful of what surrounds you, and reading between the lines, is the best way to turn your budding blogging into blogging with buddies.

Share This

Brian Clark from CopyBlogger has done it again. He’s launched what looks to be an amazing new teaching resource to resource those looking to build successful online businesses. It’s called Partnering Profits - and it’s a simple teaching resource focussing (as the name suggests) on ‘praetorships’.

It is made up of two main components:

1. A 150 page manual that focuses upon topics like:

2. Four Expert Tele-classes with some very successful online entrepreneurs - Jeff Walker, Jon Morrow, Rich Schefren and Brian Clark (a great lineup with some great experiences between them - learn more about each on the Partnering Profits page). Brian’s also bringing in a few extra guests along the way - one of whom looks like being me.

Of course you also get transcripts of the calls and access to their recordings if you want to come back to them or can’t make the live calls.

As a topic I really think that Brian and his team are onto something with this one. Partnerships have been a core part of my own online blogging success. I myself have always ’stumbled’ into them (with a lot of luck) and so I am looking forward to some actual teaching on the topic.

Free Preview Call and Chapters from the eBook

Not sure if this is a course for you? That’s OK - Brian is offering a free one hour preview call to give you a taste. The call will include information on the course as well as actual teaching from Brian himself and John Morrow.

The call is tomorrow - so you do need to move quickly and register to get access to it.

You also will get some free sample chapters from the eBook and get on a Newsletter with free tips and techniques on ‘partnering’.

To get access to these free tasters you need to register with a first name and email address.

Having spent time with Brian on a number of occasions and having taken part in his last training resource (TeachingSells) I am confident that this new course will be of a high quality and hold a lot of practical and applicable information to those of us involved in online entrepreneurship.

I’ve already registered for the free call myself (and am already planning on doing the rest of the course) and am looking forward to listening in. I hope you’ll join me!

Get more information and signup for the free call at Partnering Profits.

Share This

WordPress 2.7 is already released in beta and will go live shortly for all. I was lucky enough to get a demo of it at BlogWorldExpo a couple of months back and I have to say that I’m quite excited by what I saw. It is very different to look at and will take some getting used to but having had the changes explained to me I think there’s a lot to like about WordPress 2.7 (particularly some of the configurable options of layout in the back end, comment moderation and plugin management).

If you’re going to be upgrading and want a little tour of the new features check out Aaron Brazell’s great post 10 Things You Need to Know about WordPress 2.7 which will run you through some of the new features, design and usability.

Share This

Working alone as a blogger can at times be lonely. In this guest post two bloggers, Eric Hamm from Up-And-Coming-Blogger and “Motivate Thyself” and Sean Platt from Writer Dad have together written a post outlining some of the advantages of collaborating as bloggers and finding a ‘blog buddy’. This is the first part in a 2 part series.

Granted, Leonardo Da Vinci probably didn’t want anyone messing around with his mojo, but there isn’t any doubt that for the majority of us, two minds are definitely better than one. It’s just simple math. We, instead of I, means more goals accomplished, and broader breath for every idea.

Saying the Internet’s big is a Rushmore of understatement. Our computers are planets, the Internet a galaxy. Viewed from afar, there are a billion points of light, but swimming in the middle of it all, it is easy to feel alone among the black. Finding a comfortable orbit isn’t immediate, but if you stick with blogging, it is an eventuality.

Blogopolis bursts with neighborhood upon neighborhood, brimming with amazing people. Some we meet while a guest at their blogs, while reading their words and observe perspective. Some we meet below the belt of our own blog, bantering among the comments. Others send us an email; a more private venue to foster a friendship.

Advantages to having a blogging buddy.

The main thing to remember is patience. As in life, true friendship cannot be forced. Be honest about who you are and what you offer, and the right buddy will find you.

Stay tuned to ProBlogger’s RSS feed because tomorrow Eric and Sean follow this post up with some tips on HOW to find a blogging buddy.

Share This

This morning I spent a little time doing some analysis (using Google Analytics) of the traffic coming into my main blog - Digital Photography School.

My analysis was stimulated by a question from a reader who in response to last week’s two posts examining the place of Digg and Social Bookmarkingin a bloggers priorities asked me:

What role does Social Bookmarking traffic play in your blog?

I decided to dig into the metrics on DPS and find out the answer… or at least that is what I started out doing…..

As I began to analyze the stats I realized that DPS has four main referrers of traffic - each are quite different from the others and yet each are very important. What follows in this post is me thinking out loud on each source of traffic and what it means to my blog.

Looking at the big picture

Lets start by looking at the big picture of the traffic coming into DPS. For the purpose of this post I’ll go back to the start of 2007 with my analysis (the time I started using Google Analytics) and I will only be looking at traffic coming into the DPS blog (ie this doesn’t include data on the forums).

Here’s a snapshot of all traffic coming into the DPS blog since 1 January 2007 (click to enlarge all images in this post).

You can see over the last 22 months that the DPS blog has had steady growth. There have been 11.5 million visitors, around 25 million page views and they stay on the site around two and a half minutes per visit.

At 1 January the average daily visitor numbers were around 4,000-5,000 visitors. At present they average around 23,000-25,000.

Looking specifically at the main sources of traffic to the blog - there are four that are responsible for a little under 70% of all of the above traffic:

The next highest referrers are significantly lower in how much traffic they bring in and include Yahoo, many other blogs (big and small) and Delicious.

As you can see - Google is a fairly important factor in my blog. Add other search traffic from Yahoo, MSN, AOL and search traffic is responsible for around 30% of the overall traffic.

If I was to categorize all of the social bookmarking traffic (Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit, Popurls etc it accounts for around 24% of overall traffic (a little higher than ‘direct’).

OK - so this information is mildly interesting (to me at least) but when I dig down a little further and do some analysis of each type of traffic I find it more illuminating.

Digg Traffic

Since last week we were talking about Digg, lets start with that.

Here’s how Digg traffic to the DPS blog has looked over the last 22 months.

Straight away we can see the nature of Digg traffic. It is either there or it isn’t. The spikes can be fairly significant (in most cases they range from 10,000 to 30,000 visitors) but between them the traffic from Digg rarely gets over 100 visitors a day.

Lets look at a few other stats on Digg visitors over this period:

So in comparison to overall averages Digg users are fairly fleeting (although note as fleeting as I hear some people saying).

One other thing worth saying about Digg visitors. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they don’t ‘convert’ to regular readers. So lets have a look at my newsletter signups for the latest ‘Digg Event’ on DPS (that last spike on the chart).

As you’ll see there was a definite increase in subscriber numbers on the day of my last Digg event (Nov 13th). Of course that day had 14,000 visitors from Digg to the site and subscriber numbers were only up around 150 subscribers - so Digg users don’t become loyal readers in huge numbers - but some of them do convert. I’d suspect that RSS subscribers would increase by a similar sort of rate after a Digg event.

I’ve noticed similar sorts of increases in subscriber numbers on other ‘Digg events’. They don’t convert massively but I always do pick up extra readers each time - the stats on the site tend to look like this chart taken from my post - How to Build a ‘Digg Culture’ on your Blog:

This is actually one of the biggest benefits of social bookmarking traffic for me. While the actual spike in traffic is nice - the real benefit comes from those readers you’re able to convert to regular readers. 100 extra readers adds up to thousands of page views over a year.

One more stat on ‘conversion to loyalty’:

Over the last few months I’ve had a test running on Google Analtyics that analyzes how many visitors ‘convert’ to subscribers. I’ve set up a ‘Goal’ on Google Analytics that is triggered as achieved when people reach the thank you page for my newsletter subscription (meaning when they convert to verified subscribers).

Digg Users get to this page 0.48% of the time. This is in comparison to an average of 2.24% for the overall site.

Do Digg Users Click Ads?

One of the great things about Google Analytics now is that you can track AdSense earnings if you link your AdSense and Analytics accounts (they’re still rolling this feature for some).

While AdSense TOS prohibits sharing of too much information on earnings I’ll share some vague stats with you on how different readers ‘convert’ with ads.

So the common perception that Digg users don’t click ads is backed up - to a point. Some of them do click and when you consider that you can get 30,000 of them visiting your site in a day this can add up.

Keep in mind that Digg traffic can be useful for monetizing a site in other ways - particularly when you’re making money on a CPM basis where you’re paid per page view.

StumbleUpon Traffic

StumbleUpon actually sends me more traffic than Digg does over time. Here’s how the traffic from SU looks over the last 22 months.

Here we see that the nature of Stumble Upon traffic is actually quite different from Digg. While both are ‘bookmarking’ sites they are really quite different. When a post gets popular on StumbleUpon the traffic it generates is spread out over days (and even weeks and months). There’s often no single day when you get masses of traffic but rather it’s more of a slow burner (I’ve written more about this in a post titled Why StumbleUpon Sends More Traffic than Digg).

You’ll see that StumbleUpon traffic has actually grown significantly over time. What I put this down to is that as I’ve written more and more posts on my blog there have been more entry points for SU traffic. While traffic grows and then falls off to particular posts on SU if you have multiple posts generating traffic you can actually see it build to significant numbers (like they were in the period of June/July this year where I had about 6-7 posts doing very well in SU simultaneously).

Lets look at a couple of other metrics on the SU traffic:

So StumbleUpon traffic is a little more sticky than Digg traffic. They view more pages and stick around longer.

Do StumbleUpon users signup for the newsletter and become loyal? My stats show that 0.51% of them have reached the thank you page on my newsletter subscription process. Slightly higher than Digg users but a lot lower than overall site averages.

Do StumbleUpon users click ads?

Interestingly StumbleUpon users seem to click on ads less than Digg users with the limited amount of stats that I have on this. The CPM that I’m seeing with SU users is very similar to that for Digg users but the CTR was about a third of Digg users (and about a tenth of overall site averages).

Search Engine Traffic

My number one traffic source on DPS is that from search engines. Google takes the lions share of this but I’ve added in the others into this analysis (interestingly Yahoo has been on the increase of late). Here’s how the search engine traffic has grown over the last 22 months.

Again - a very different shaped chart to the others. The two spikes in traffic are both to do with search traffic increasing for terms around ‘fireworks photography’ at around 4th July - but other than that it’s very steady growth with little weekly spikes and troughs in traffic but not much else to note.

This traffic has gone up over time for a couple of main reasons:

1. I’ve been adding content - the more pages you have the more entry points that search engines can send people to

2. The sites authority has grown over time - the longer you’re around the more links you have pointing at your blog and the more authoritative search engines begin to give you.

Lets look at a couple of other stats from Search Engine Traffic:

Interestingly Google readers view 2.51 pages and spend 3 minutes and 16 seconds while Yahoo readers view over 3 pages and spend over 4 minutes on the site.

In terms of ‘conversion’ via the newsletter - 2.72% of search engine visitors have made it to the thank you page (again it’s better for Yahoo than Google). This is better than the site average making search traffic more sticky than social media traffic.

Do Search Engine Readers Click Ads?

The common perception is that search engine referrals are more profitable when it comes to CPC advertising programs like AdSense. My stats back this up.

I’m seeing the CPM of my search traffic as about 10% higher than the site average and CTR up by about 10% also. Interestingly I’m seeing Yahoo traffic as about 30% higher than Google.

Direct Traffic

The last category of traffic that I want to analyze is what Google Analytics classifies as ‘direct’ traffic. This traffic includes those coming in from desktop RSS subscribers, newsletters, browser bookmarks, type in traffic etc. Here’s how this traffic has looked over the last 22 months.

Again we see a fairly steady growth in this area. The weekly spikes coincide with when I’ve sent out newsletters. The bigger spikes mainly coincide with when we’ve run competitions in our newsletters.

The reason for the growth in this traffic is largely that I’ve worked very hard on building a newsletter list for this blog (particularly over the last year).

Lets look at some more stats on this direct traffic:

Both of these stats are higher than the site average but lower than search engine traffic. However considering that many of these visitors come to the site on a weekly basis and view hundreds of pages a year these averages are pretty good.

In terms of ‘goal conversion’ (or getting these people to my thank you page of the newsletter signup - they convert at 2.08%. This is slightly under the site average but considering many of them have already signed up - it’s pretty good.

Do Direct Referrals Click Ads?

This one interested me because I suspected that these highly loyal readers would become pretty blind to AdSense ads over time. However they are bang on average for the site with both CTR and CPM performance almost exactly on the site average.

Concluding Thoughts

I know this post has been rather long and so I will keep my concluding thoughts brief (I considered posting this as a series of posts but hope it’s more helpful seeing everything side by side).

All traffic has its place and serves different purposes.

One of the main things that strikes me about this exercise is that while some people write off different types of traffic - that together they come together in fairly significant ways.

For example - Digg traffic may not be that sticky or profitable - however as I think back to the early days of DPS it was the early series of Digg spikes that helped to get the blog going.

Even going back before January 2007 (before the charts above) DPS was on the front page of Digg quite a few times. Each time this happened the site step ups in loyal readers to the blog. This helped it grow even though at the time the site wasn’t generating much search traffic.

Overtime search has been increasingly important to the site in finding new visitors. The Digg spikes are handy and still draw people in that have not seen us before but in many ways they’ve served their purpose for the site and now our Google and Yahoo authority has kicked in we’re starting to see more benefits from there.

As I look forward I see both ’search’ and ‘direct’ traffic as taking over even more from social bookmarking traffic. If things continue to grow as they are search and direct traffic will out number even the biggest spikes that the site might get from Digg.

This doesn’t mean I’ll not value the bookmarking traffic - but it’ll play less of a roll.

Social Bookmarking as an SEO tool

One last unproven idea that has been lingering in my mind lately is the importance of social bookmarking as an SEO strategy. I’m not sure how much of an impact it has had on the growth of search traffic on DPS but surely all of the links to DPS from Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit and other social bookmarking sites have had an impact upon the site’s search authority.

Even posts that don’t get to the front page of Digg that are bookmarked there must at least be getting some search engine juice from the bookmark.

More than that - getting on the front page of Digg or going popular on Delicious often has the flow on effect of being linked to by a lot of other blogs and websites that watch these pages. For example my last appearance on the popular page on Delicious stimulated at least 30 or so links from other blogs. Again - each link is adding to the search engine authority of the blog.

Share This

My name is James, I currently run iLoveMacApps and MacTricksAndTips. I am not a big time blogger by far and my income is quite small in comparison to some of the blogs on the web today. But I have found a service that has managed to triple my monthly income. It is called BuySellAds (BSA).

In a nutshell it is a direct banner selling serivce. As a result you can charge as much as you want for an ad slot and you can move away from the 2cent clicks on Adsense and start charging more. I am not affiliated with the service in any way before any one starts asking. I just like the service so much I thought it deserved more attention than it is currently getting.

Setting up BuySellAds

Using the BuySellAds system is really easy. The program is currently in beta so you may have to wait a couple of days before they accept you, but they accept most sites. Once as you are in, you have to enter your website details. The system works by adding your site and then adding advert zones to that website. Then you sell those ads for profit!

To set up a website you have to add your website URL and name. As well as this you also have to enter a description. Each site goes into a big pool where other people can find your site in the directory. As a result you may want to spend a small amount of time writing a good description. Include some statistics, what your site is about make it interesting for the advertiser. An advertiser will want a website where they are going to get good returns you want to try and fulfill that role so they keep coming back month after month. The final section of the website setup is to add some tags these are used when someone searches your site. Once as you have entered all of your details you are done and ready to add some ad zones.

Once as your site is submitted into BuySellAds, the service will automatically gather details about your Alexa and Compete rank, as well as Google Page and Technorati Rank, Del.Icio.us Bookmarks and Yahoo Inbound links. Theses are the type os statistic your would normally give an advertiser, BSA automatically pull all this information for you. One less thing you have to worry about.

Once as you have set up your site. You have to add a zone. This is an area on the page where the adverts will reside. Zones are customizable. You can have has many individual adverts in a zone as you want. In the zone section setup there is a couple of areas which you can customize. For example you add a description and a location. The most important area if the price. BSA take a 25% cut of what ever the advert price is. For example if you charge $100 an ad, BSA will take $25 and you will keep the rest. This cost covers hosting of the adverts, website and all the other bits and bobs associated with the service. You can set the number of banners in total and the number of banners show at one time. (E.G you can have 6 slots, but only show 1 on a page load). As a result you have to think quite closely how much you think advertisers are willing to spend.

If you have a high paying advert slot but an advertisers advert is only shown once in four page loads, this could put advertiser off. Picking a good price point can be a completely different post in itself. Once as a zone is setup data will be gathered from the Javascript you insert in your website, the most important factor is page views, on your listing page an up to date monthly view for that adblock is displayed. Most advertisers will want to see how many views there ads will get, as a result this is displayed for them and is very useful. The listings page can actually take over from a page you would normally create on your blog, it has that much useful information.

Once as you have set everything up you will end up with a listing page. Mine, for example, looks like this, you can search through the directory and see all of the available listing if you want more inspiration. It has information about my website at the top, and the advert units at the bottom. A buyer can now come along purchase an advert, as long as the Javascript code is on my page, the advert will appear immediately without having to ever speak to me. The money will be deposited into my account and everything will be good to go. You are slowly on your way to a big payout. I would also like to point out that adverts will also be set to renew, so advertisers can automatically get the same slot each month, giving you a nice stable income and removing the need for advertisers to keep having to setup and advert slot.

Payments are paid when ever you want, as long as you have earnt some money. Since this service is still in beta you have to email the support staff to send your check or PayPal, automatic payout is coming in an update. Although I usually get paid a couple of days after I have emailed them. You can have as many adverts as you want. If you have 3 or 4 ads at $50 you can easily earn $150, way more than I was with Adsense. As your site gets more popular you can charge more for a slot, giving you control of exactly how much you want to make a month.

Getting advertisers

The one problem with BSA, from a webmasters point of view, is that adverts will not automatically appear. Unlike Adsense, you have to go out and get advertisers directly. They don’t come from a big pool of people. This can be quite hard for anybody that doesn’t have a high traffic site, but it can be done. This is the method I used originally to build up a small base of advertisers.

The first step is to make sure that you have set up your adverts and they are being displayed on your website. They will appear as a grey “Advertise Here” box. This “Advertise Here” box has become quite iconic since I always know that it is from BSA. As it grows in popularity I expect these boxes to appear all over the web. You can,if you want, customize the placement and colour of these images with a bit of CSS to match the theme of my site.

The next step is to make sure the price of your ad is right. Too high and advertisers won’t pay. Too low and you may be giving yourself a cheap deal, as well as this an advertiser may not pay because the price point is too cheap and it won’t be a worthwhile investment (you can never win). I find it is best to start slightly lower than you are worth, get advertiser to bite and then increase the price over the months.

At this point, you have setup your site and have a well priced advert. You now need to write your sales letter. I find if you email a couple of potential advertisers that meet your niche you can get them to advertise although your results may different, just don’t spam everyone since this will really annoy people. Your email needs to be short, too long and people get switched off. It must clearly explain what your site is about, what you are offering and how to buy an advert. You can then link directly to your listing pages on BuySellAds. For example I would include an email along the following lines. Change it as you see fit, make it unique and interesting. Explain what you do and what BuySellAds is (since it is quite a new service that a lot of people may not know about).

“Dear X

My name is James and I run X. I am emailing you to see if you would be willing to advertise on my site. I offer X and I think this would be valuable to your product/service because of Y.

My site currently gets XYZ over a month

If you are interested and advert slot costs $XX and it runs for a month, this appears, here, here and here. If you are interested please visit my listing page on BuySellAds (URL), they offer the hosting for your advert. They handle everything and you can have your advertisement up in no time at all.

If you want more information just ask. Thanks

James”

The final step is to email your letter. You need to find companies and products that meet you niche. There is no point in emailing a dog center if you sell fish. I generally look at Adsense adverts, as well as advertiser on a similar niche to myself. Send them off the email and hope they are interested. Nearly all my advertisers I have found this way.

Conclusion

To conclude. BuySellAds is great in my opinion. You can set up an advert block which will automatically serve your adverts. It makes selling adverts much easiler. There is no need for them to email you. Its always a surprise when a new advertiser has bought advert in the night. It takes the hassle out of selling advert and enables you to write great content. Personally all the load of trying to manage when adverts are running and payment options is taken off my shoulders and given to someone else. I don’t mind spending 25% of my earnings. At my currently level its worth while, if you were earning thousands it may be a different story.

One last note this type of service is also great for would be advertisers. Although this post has been focused on selling adverts, buy ads is also really easy if you want to buy adverts. All of the payment processing and set up of the advert is done for you. You advert is automatically displayed and it automatically run. The pool of advertisers is also getting bigger meaning that there should be someone relating to your nice already on the service.

Like I say to my readers, try this program out. It doesn’t cost you anything to run. It does take a little time to get going, but once as you build a reputation and have a couple of advertisers on your site, your earnings can increase I have seen great results with this program and so may yourself.

Share This

In today’s guest post Trisha from Ideas for Women shares some lessons that she learned from the US Presidential Election.

I followed this year’s U.S. presidential election pretty closely on T.V. and also volunteered for one of the candidates. Over I time I began to notice some parallels between running a successful campaign and a successful blog.

I don’t plan to ever run for president - but I would like to have a more successful blog. I would also like to share what I learned and hope that it will be helpful to other bloggers.

Image by BohPhoto

1. You need a story

Both of the presidential candidates and their running mates had a story. John McCain was a P.O.W., Sarah Palin, a hockey mom. Joe Biden was from Scranton, Pennsylvania and stuttered as kid. Barack Obama’s story is that he is the “son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas”.

The details of the stories don’t really matter. What matters is how they /framed/ their story - their story had to be everyone else’s story - a story people could relate to.

John McCain was a guy who loved his country and was willing to do whatever it took to defend it - just like many Americans have done or would be willing to do. Sarah Palin, a mom with many of the same concerns of other American moms across the country. Joe Biden had many obstacles growing up - but overcame them and is still a down to earth guy that people could relate to. Obama?s story is a little more complicated - most of us don?t have fathers from another country, etc. But as he said - his story could only happen in America and that while ?we may have different stories we hold common hopes?.

He even had a flyer that said: ?His story is our story - an American story.?

It’s the same way with blogging. You need a story (I?m still working on this myself) - it has to be uniquely about you, but it still has to be something your readers and potential readers can relate to. It has to somehow be their story too.

An example is Wendy Piersall - her story is about “one little mom who wanted to start a blog as a hobby” and now has grown to 14 bloggers that are “willing to do what it takes to make a great living while also living a great a life.”

Many people can relate to her story - struggling with finding a successful career path and juggling that with raising kids.

Each of the candidates did a good job of telling their story and framing it so other people could understand and relate to it. That isn’t enough to win an election, just as it’s not enough by itself to make a blog successful. But it’s a good start for letting people know who you are so you can begin building relationships with them.

Once you share your story on your blog you give your readers a chance to share in a part of your life - your struggles and successes can be theirs too. And once you build those relationships, the resulting community that forms can share their struggles and successes with you also!

2. You need a community

Obama had a huge number of people volunteering for him - millions - literally millions across the country. The volunteers created a grassroots effort that helped to get the word out about him being a great candidate for president. They helped to recruit even more volunteers and convinced even more people to vote for him.

Together the paid workers, the volunteers and other supporters created a huge and powerful community. Huge communities of enthusiastic followers attract even more people.

He not only had an offline community ? but an online community as well.

His website had groups you could join based on geography, political issues and many different interests or hobbies. You could find groups in your own local area or based anywhere in the world. You could add people as friends or search for old friends. You could have a blog at his site. You could find out about offline events through his site. In short - his site brought people together to promote a common goal.

Communities are created by lots of individual relationships between many different people with similar interests. In Obama?s case, his community?s common interest was in him and in helping him win the election.

Blogs are similar. You need to create a community of readers.

One expert on building blogging communities is Liz Strauss who specializes in relationship blogging. She is great at creating a blogging environment that makes people feel welcome and encourages them to participate. As she says on her blog: “You’re only a stranger once”.

This is very vital to making a blog successful - identify a common interest of your readers, invite them in and let them participate in the conversation.

Another thing I noticed when I was volunteering - I was always welcomed by the other volunteers and paid people. They always appreciated any effort you made, so matter how small. Liz does this too - whenever you stop by her Tuesday Open Comments Night - you always feel appreciated.

Probably the most important thing to remember about blogging is this:

“… massively successful blogging is about establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships“

Establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships is a big part of why Obama won the election - and is also why the top bloggers are so successful!

3. Pay attention to the numbers, but don?t take them too seriously

It was difficult to keep from checking all the polls everyday for this election. Some days it looked good, but you could never feel too confident. The next day things could change. And you never know until the actual day of the election how it will turn out.

Obama even warned his supporters about getting too confident and that he still needed them working for him on Election Day - and every day leading up to it.

With blogging it’s easy to get caught up with checking your subscriber numbers, your Page Rank, Technorati rankings, etc. But in the end, those numbers don’t mean that much.

Subscribers can unsubscribe just as fast as or faster than they subscribed in the first place. And many subscribers don’t actually read all the blogs they subscribe to. Page Rank doesn’t contribute as much to the Google algorithm as it once did, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with checking these numbers and being aware of them (what blogger wouldn’t want to be able to display FeedBurner numbers like those of Darren Rowse: over 66,000 subscribers!) - but what really matters is real people - not numbers.

Who are your readers? What are they looking for? Are you meeting their needs?

To build the community I wrote about in Part II - ask yourself: “Am I making my visitors feel welcome? Have I created an environment that encourages them to participate?”

Always, always keep working to improve your blog. Don’t let yourself get too confident or complacent. Work on your content. Tweak your design. Reach out to and build relationships with other bloggers. Keep your current readers engaged. Always look for opportunities to attract new readers to your blog.

But do take a break now and then! I realized after a while that I needed to take a break from watching all the polls and election coverage on T.V. It’s too overwhelming after a while. It’s good to walk away a bit and get some perspective.

It’s the same with blogging. Sometimes you have to take a break for a little while. Do something else. Read a book or talk to people offline. It can help to get you recharged - before you completely burn out - and to come up with new and creative ideas to write about!

4. Everyone has an opinion

Everyone has an opinion and has the right to express it, in politics and in everything else in life. When I was out doing door to door canvassing I was quite often surprised by some of the responses I got. Some supportive, some not and some just way out there about issues you never would have thought about that would leave me scratching my head in disbelief.

Sometimes I would come up to a house and think I had a pretty good guess at which candidate they were supporting and be completely wrong. Sometimes I would guess right.

On a blog if you want to create a community you should let people express their opinions in your comments sections even when you don?t agree with them. Of course if the comment is threatening or filled with hate speech you should moderate it. But as long as the person is polite, differing opinions can be enlightening and stimulate more conversation and are sometimes quite entertaining!

If the conversation gets too negative - try to turn it around and make it into a positive. When people booed as Obama mentioned McCain at a rally he told people not to boo - just vote.

On the other side of things - you the blogger, are expressing your opinion whenever you write a post.

Both politicians and bloggers need to really believe in themselves and the ideas they are promoting. If not, people will see through what you are saying and it will be more difficult to be successful.

If fact if you aren’t getting much of a response with your blog it may be that you are not being opinionated enough. According to Kelly McCausey guest posting at Remarkablogger:

“All else being equal, if you’re not getting the traffic you want and the income you want … you’re probably not being opinionated enough.“

Some rules she included for being opinionated apply well to both politicians and bloggers:

Accept that you will alienate someone.

Step up and justify your opinions.

Expect and respect opposing opinions.

I’m pretty shy and am surprised at myself that I was brave enough to knock on the doors of total strangers and express my opinion in favor of Obama. Yes, some people were rude - but I kept knocking anyway. And yes, I had Obama signs stolen from my yard three times - but I kept putting more out there anyway. And yes some people will disagree with what you write on your blog - but keep writing anyway!

Some people will never agree with you - on politics or what you blog about, but that’s ok - don’t let it stop you or slow you down!

Share This

This article was written by Ruchir Chawdhry.

PS: Mac users can check out 14 Essential Mac OS X Applications for Bloggers that Darren wrote a while ago.

1. Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Firefox is the king of all browsers. Limitlessly extendable, fast, and lightweight. If you’re still using any other browser (even Google Chrome), then switch to Firefox immediately, it’ll boost your productivity ? guaranteed. There are many Firefox plugins, these two posts give the essential ones for bloggers:

2. MemoKeys

Stop wasting time typing the same thing repeatedly. MemoKeys saves you time by letting you call up commonly used text with keystroke combos. This is very handy is you get a lot of email, comment on blogs a lot, or have a default email/comment template.

3. Microsoft Office 2007

All you Microsoft haters might say otherwise, but you need Power Point, Excel, and Word if you want to make it big as a blogger. Office 2007 is easy to use and has beautiful default templates.

If you don’t want to pony up for Office 07 then the open-source OpenOffice is a nice alternative.

4. SnagIt

SnagIt is the best screen-capturing program out there. Using SnagIt, you can take screenshots of menus, windows, specific regions, and more. The more-than-capable editing program that comes with SnagIt is also a godsend for productivity seekers and Photoshop phobics like me.

5. WordWeb

WordWeb is a free powerful dictionary and thesaurus program. It’s mainly an offline dictionary tool with about 150,000 words in its database, although it also allows you to look into online reference sites such as Wikipedia. WordWeb’s a feature rich dictionary & thesaurus tool and a must have for bloggers who write their own content.digsby-logo

6. Digsby

Digsby is an all-in-one IM/social networking client. It supports most of the IM protocols out there, like Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, and AIM. It even supports Facebook chat! It features tabbed conversation window, allows you to manage your email, and stay up-to-date with everything that’s happening on your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn accounts. As its makers say: Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networking.

7. Link Popularity Check

Link Popularity Check checks how many links you have according to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and a bunch of others.

8. RoboForm

RoboForm is the tool to have for bloggers. It cuts out the time you spend filling various forms online, it remembers all your passwords, and it even features a random password generator for the security freaks among us. The price? Only $29.95. Use the discount code GOOG1 to get $6 off.

I’ve yet to come across another app that is better or on the same level as RoboForm. If you don’t have it, you don’t value your time.rss-bandit

9. RSS Bandit

RSS Bandit is a desktop RSS reader that syncs directly with Google Reader. The best feature is has is that it allows you to download your feeds (including images) for you to view offline. Very useful for travelers and those who hate web based RSS readers.

10. Camtasia Studio

Camtasia Studio is the ultimate screen-recording program for PCs. With the latest version, you can create HD quality professional-looking videos. It can produce your videos in many formats such as iPod, Flash, Quick Time, Windows Media, AVI etc.

11. Windows Live Writer

A full-featured desktop blogging application, Writer allows you to add images, videos, maps, tables, and much more. Overall, it’s a much better alternative to your blogging software’s inbuilt editor.

12. AdesClrPicker

This little known color picker has recently gone free. It’s fast to load, easy-to-use, and captures colors in HTML, RGB, C++, VB, and Delphi color codes. You can capture color codes anywhere on the screen. What more could you want?

13. Yahoo! Widgets

Yahoo! Widgets adds small widget apps to your desktop. Aside from being glitzy, it can be useful if you choose the right widgets. Here are a few widgets that bloggers should get:

14. Twhirl

Of course, how could I forget Twirl? A must-have app for twitterers to twitter their tweets.

15. PeaZip

PeaZip is a beautiful but fast archiving utility that supports most of the compression formats out there. It’s recommended for bloggers who download and sample a lot of files. Alternatives are WinRAR and 7Zip.

16. The Journal

Keeping a diary/journaling can help you improve as a blogger. Now, not many of us are so keen on opening a notebook every now and then to write in, so if you’re such a person then The Journal is for you. It supports separate volumes, inserting images, tables and the like, and you can even password-protect your diary.

For more on why you should keep a blog diary, check out Darren’s post:

What Do You Use?

I’m sure that I’m just scratching the surface here. I’d love to hear from other PC using bloggers ? what applications are you using?

You can catch Ruchir Chawdhry at TechVivo where he blogs about gadgets, software, online tools, windows tips & tricks etc that you can use to become more productive & better your life. Click here to subscribe to TechVivo.

Share This

“Why do bloggers put so much focus upon growing RSS subscriber numbers to their blog if most of them only ever read your content in Feed Readers and don’t visit your blog?”

This question (or variations of it) hit my inbox 3 times in 24 hours from different people so I thought I’d tackle it as a post instead of individual replies.

Let me start by saying that this problem can be frustrating. You see your RSS subscriber number growing by your actual visitor numbers remain steady - as do your comment numbers. It can actually feel like you’re wasting your time - I remember myself feeling kinda like this guy when I first noticed this happening to me:

Image by Sybren Stüvel

However all is not lost.

There are a number of points that I’d like to make in responding to this question about RSS subscribers not visiting a blog. I hope that they give those facing this problem a little hope, encouragement and also a few ways forward.

1. A subscriber that never visits is better than a one off visitor who never returns

I had one blogger recently tell me that he’d removed the option to subscribe to his blog via RSS from his blog because he didn’t want to ‘give away’ his content. He wanted people who read his content to ‘pay’ him by visiting his blog (and earning him money from his advertising) and he saw RSS subscribers as ‘freeloaders’.

My response to him was that I’d rather have a subscriber who rarely visits my actual blog than a one off visitors who never returns because they have no way of keeping in touch.

While a subscriber might not actually visit your blog they are a powerful connection to have. My reasons for this will hopefully become evident in the points that follow.

2. Every post you put in front of a subscriber is an opportunity to reinforce your brand.

RSS subscribers are opting in to receive your content. When they hit ’subscribe’ they are putting themselves inside your sphere of influence and are asking you to teach, inspire and communicate with them.

Each time you hit publish on a post and a subscriber sees something that you’ve written you have the potential to deepen the relationship, trust and influence that you have with your subscriber. While this might not have an immediate pay off in terms of advertising revenue - it can have a long term ‘pay off’.

3. RSS subscribers are Influencers

RSS is used by a smallish percentage of the population (around 11% at latest reports).

While the percentage may be smallish - I have a suspicion that they are a reasonably tech savvy and influential bunch of people. I’m guessing here - but I suspect that those who use RSS are also likely to have blogs themselves, they’re more likely to be into social networking, messaging and bookmarking tools.

This makes RSS readers a potentially very influential audience - capable of spreading news of your posts and blog throughout the web very quickly.

4. Making the Mind shift from Traffic to Influence

When I started blogging one of the main indicators that I looked at when measuring the success of my blog was traffic. If I had a day with lots of visitors I was happier than if I did not have anyone visit my blog.

While traffic is still important to me - I’ve noticed lately that I’m checking my visitor stats less than I used to. These days I’m increasingly interested in ‘influence’.

I don’t mind so much if someone reads my content on my blog, in an RSS reader or in some other tool - what matters to me is that people are reading it, that in doing so they interact with me, that they are drawn into some sort of ‘relationship’ or ‘community’ around the content.

My reason for this is that I’m finding that while traffic can be monetized directly - influence is actually a more powerful (and potentially profitable) thing. Let me explain more in my next point.

5. Influence can Lead to Profits

More and more bloggers are discovering that while direct income earners like advertising are great - that there’s also incredible potential for bloggers to earn an income through other more indirect income sources. Making money ‘because’ of a blog rather than directly ‘from’ a blog is possible in may ways including consulting, writing books, running training and workshops, selling products, landing other paid writing gigs, speaking at conferences etc.

The more people that you have some kind of influence with the increased chances of being able to monetize that influence in one of these indirect methods.

A subscriber might not be visiting your blog each day but if you provide great content on a daily basis to them you can bet that the day they decide that they need to hire a consultant on your topic that they’ll come knocking on your door.

6. Other Monetization Models for RSS

Indirect income is not the only possibility for RSS. There is also RSS advertising - this industry is still in its infancy and while isn’t hugely profitable using tools like AdSense I’m hearing bloggers reporting that it’s a growing income source for them.

The other great opportunity for income from RSS subscribers is affiliate programs. This taps into point #5 above - when you have ‘influence’ or trust established with readers an affiliate program can be very profitable.

7. The challenge of drawing subscribers into your blog

Just because someone subscribes to your blog does not mean that they’ll never visit it. In fact RSS subscribers can be among your most regular visitors to your blog if you draw them into actually visiting it.

I won’t go into a lot of techniques for this in this post but using techniques like asking questions, running polls, interlinking posts, writing ‘best of’ lists and more techniques can draw subscribers into visiting your blog on a daily basis.

Read more detailed tips on getting RSS readers visiting your blog.

Share This

Earlier in the week I published a post titled Skip Digg: Not All Traffic is Created Equal. In that post I mentioned that I’d follow up the post with some arguements FOR using Digg by a top Digg user. Today social media expert Muhammad Saleem tackles that very topic.

You will probably be surprised to read that I agree with a lot of what Josh said in his post earlier in the week. Josh’s points probably resonate with the experience that most of you have had. However, does that mean that Digg ( or other social news sites) is worthless as a marketing platform?

The answer to that depends on what your goals are.

The problem with most people is their approach to social news is shortsighted. Social news sites are a long-term investment not a day trade.

Josh is right, building a following requires time and patience, and why should a social news site be any different? You have to actively participate on the site and network with other users (b