Recently in SEO and Traffic Category
I don't claim to know a whole lot about PPC and other banner ad campaigns. There are several different companies on the Internet that offer that kind of stuff to publishers and advertisers. The biggest of course being Google Ads. I have tried several different companies on my web sites including Google, AdBrite and several others. I had have had several Google ads on my sites for a couple of years now. Last year I might have made $200 from them and so far this year that's up to about $300. Nothing really major and since I don't run any really heavily trafficked sites it's hard to make any money with them. My busiest site is Shadowscope and I probably average about 2,000 hits a day there. All the rest combined might get 100 a day.
Recently I joined Six Apart Media as a publisher and so far I am really pleased. I only have their ads set up on one site. I have had them there for about a week now and tripled the amount of income that I normally get with Google. I am extremely impressed with them so far.
It doesn't mean I am going to dump Google or any of the other ones I am using but they have the best spots over at Shadowscope and I am going to continue to see how their ads perform over the next few months.
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Now if I could just do this every day...
Yesterday afternoon I wrote a long drawn out entry about Meredith Emerson, the missing hiker in North Georgia. Drawing for several different sources I tried to present as complete a picture as possible. Although it doesn't look as if it's going to happen (remember, this ain't TV we are talking about) I would like nothing more for her to be returned to her family. Alas, she is most likely dead and her family will have had to live through this tragedy and then deal with her death on top of it.
Anyhow, I have garnered around 3000 hits on that one story alone in the last 18 hours. If I could just do that everyday, I would be set. Part of it is because of some reason unknown to me, I am number two on Google for Meredith Emerson. Go Google it and see. I wish I knew exactly what it is that makes Google consider one site aqn important source versus another one not being as important.
Heck, if I knew that I would bottle it and sell it.
For someone who might be interested in promoting their online business and web site you want to make sure that the person or company that is going to handle your search engine optimization or SEO needs is at least somewhat familiar with the technology or line of business that you are in. For instance, If I run a company that sells Jam I wouldn't want someone trying to market my web site or company that wasn't familiar with my product and didn't know anything about it.
Sure, there are plenty of SEO experts out there and some of them go a great, fantastic job but for someone running a real estate web site such as quite a few of the ones that I link to, I would want to make sure that the company behind my marketing knows something about the terminology and technology used in my product. I wouldn't want a company that specializes in SEO for technology products, for instance, to help me out with my mortgage search engine optimization. While they will probably do a good job I need an expert.
That's where SEM Worldwide comes in. SEM Worldwide is a fairly new company that specializes in SEO for Real Estate, Mortgages and Lawyer SEO. They provide a complete line of SEO products and solutions for businesses all over the world and through many years of working with PayPerClick marketing and SEO have developed a complete understanding of how the SEO industry works and how to fully utilize keywords and advertising for a successful SEO solution. It's all about traffic and return traffic when you are trying to make money online and you need the best to make the most. Real Estate SEO is a burgeoning field and when you want people to find your site, don't you want the best in the business serving your needs?
I have done a bit of thinking and have decided that maybe the jury is still out on the Google thing. It may be that they are still going through some changes in their algorithms or whatever and the page ranks that have been bestowed on us recently aren't permanent.
Either way, while I won't remove my AdSense stuff for a while, I WON'T be changing to nofollow in my links the way that they want and I have gone back to using Yahoo! as my default search engine of choice, considering that they are sending me more traffic than Google is nowadays.
Time will tell I suppose.
I finally found why my sitemeters were not recording most of my visits. Stupid mistake and it possibly will cost me some money. I added Sitemeter in to a sidebar widget but then forgot to put it in the sidebar of my internal pages, the ones that most get returned by search engines (duh). I have fixed that mistake and added it into the footer at Shadowscope. It's on every page here but I had forgotten there and that is my busiest site.
I also added in Google Analytics a couple of days ago and thus far I am impressed with the depth of information. Aside from AWStats I was able to get more information presented in an understandable report than any other stat tracking package I have found. The main reason I set up Analytics in the first place is that I am beta testing another tracking software and needed to add it in to get a comparison.
Now that I have seen it in action I can certainly understand why so many people us it.
What with two of my sites basically being down for the better part of two weeks my hits took a drastic downturn. Judging from the numbers I am seeing at the Adsense page today they are just now starting to get back to normal. Part of the problem was that neither this site nor Shadowscope was creating a sitemap for a week, so I lost quite a bit of search traffic which means that my adsense hits also took a nose dive by something like 95%. That's a pretty big chunk of traffic to lose.
Listasaurus.com is the first classifieds website that pays you for listing ads. They have recently added the ability to include videos with your classifieds, and you can check out an example at their site. With the fact that more and more people are turning away from print for their news and advertising it only makes sense for the classifieds to move to the Internet as well. Listasaurus is and affordable and easy to use web site that will let you do just that.
One of the really cool things I found while I was browsing the site is that they donate a portion of the proceeds that they make to Pet Rescue Miami and Farm Sanctuary in an effort to give back to their local community.
With the Pay Per Listing program that Listasaurus has there are certain ad categories that are eligible for cash rewards. You can also make money through an affiliate program by referring your friends to join the site. If you are interested, go check out Listasaurus and see what you think. Any kind of ad that is submitted to a paying category requires approval before it is listed, which helps out by keeping spam and bogus advertisments off of the site and only brings you real classifieds. Leave the junk in the newspaper and check out the real stuff online.
I am in the process of adding the Payu2Blog blogroll to my site, this is the static entry that I will be keeping it in. If you are on the main page it's in the extended entry...
I will also be posting this at my other three sites to get the word out. The Prize blog is sponsoring a contest that's extremely easy to enter. All you have to do is write an entry and link to the contest and the Prize Blog itself. Can't get much easier than that.
The grand prize is a logo custom designed by the SOS Factory for their blog and one runner up gets $20 payable via paypal.
