Random Thoughts

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I still like Entrecard and have found some regular readers that visit to drop a card and hopefully read my posts. What I’ve found is that in order to get decent traffic, I need to do some research on the individual blog or website before I purchase. I tend to buy Entrecards that cost around 100 EC’s and I usually advertise on 2 at a time.

When deciding on an Entrecard spot, I  will at minimum check the Alexa ranking of the blog and I may check for backlinks. This gives me an idea if they get a decent amount of traffic or not. Unfortunately even if you do all these things, there’s still no guarantee that this will work. I’ve paid well over 100 EC’s for a slot and ended up only getting 5 clicks.

Entrecard is still a valuable tool for a new blogger. Hopefully as my blog continues to grow in readership, I get regular readers that visit for the content, not just for the Entrecard drop.

There’s a great article posted over at DatMoney.com that will give a slightly different perspective on Entrecard.  You can check it out here:

http://www.datmoney.com/2008/03/if-you-didnt-have-entrecard-your-blog.html 

Recently I purchased a 125 x 125 ad spot on theblogentrepreneur.com as a way to generate more traffic. The cost was relatively low considering the fact that it has directed quite a few new visitors to my blog. After it has been up for one month, I will take a look at the total cost of the ad and compare it to the number of clicks received to calculate my Cost Per Click or CPC. Looking at Google Adwords, you would likely end up paying around 10 cents per click if you were to advertise your blog and not many blogger advertise with Adwords. Advertising on other blogs will hopefully prove to cost about 1/2 as much as Adwords and with the proper ad, will end up being almost all targeted traffic.

How Much Should You Pay for Advertising?

I believe that if you are purchasing an ad that will generate targeted traffic, you should pay as much as you can afford. If I had the money to spend, I would have purchased an ad on a blog that receives more traffic, but for now I’ll stick with lower cost advertising. I don’t like to spend more than $30 per month on one single ad. That’s just a personal preference given my financial situation. If I had $500 to spend I would go for it. If your site is monetized properly, you should earn that money back, especially if your CPC ends up being around 5 cents, and you have a high CTR.

From my initial results from advertising on other blogs, I would say that it’s well worth the money.  If you’re skeptical whether your ad will work, why not install Entrecard.  This may give you an indication of how much traffic you will receive if you were to purchase an ad on that site.  Actually, that’s how I found that buying an ad on TheBlogEntrepreneur.com would be beneficial to me.  One day I bought an Entrecard spot there and had  quite a few clicks, so I decided that it would be worth the money to advertise there.

You’re likely wondering when I’m going to share my traffic and earnings stats. Hopefully I will share them next week sometime. I have been trying out different statistics reporting programs and with the theme upgrade, I lost a day of traffic stats, but I will report them next week anyway.

I’m trying to figure out what statistics to actually use. I’m highly skeptical whether Google Analytics is even correct. My stats with Google Analytics are quite a bit different than my server stats. When I view my recent traffic from both Google Analytics and my server’s software package, the Google stats are missing a number of visits. I’m not sure exactly why this is happening, but I think I will report my server statistics because I’ve heard that they could be more accurate. Since Google uses javascript, some browsers have the ability to somehow stop the script from running, thus making it inaccurate.  Still, I like Google Analytics because it does go into great detail as to how a visitor got to your page.

Good news! I do have some earnings to report this month.  They’re quite low, but it’s a start. Sorry for the short post.  I’ll let you in on a little secret in a week or two.

I’ve been unemployed since moving to a new city 2 months ago and if the truth were told, I haven’t spent much time looking for work.  Why is that?  The reason is that I love blogging!  Blogging is something that I have a come to love and as I blog, I learn. What I’ve learned is that there’s huge potential to earn a full-time income online from a combination of Affiliate Marketing and Blogging.  My blog has finally started to earn a very small amount of money and all I need is an increase in traffic and the income will hopefully increase accordingly.  I would like to see 1000 unique visitors per day on a consistent basis.  I have had a few days where traffic came very close to 1000, but I haven’t crossed that line.

How Much Money Do I Need to Make?

That’s a very difficult question to answer.  In order to live, I need quite a bit of money, however I would learn to live on a lot less if I was doing something that I enjoyed.  The figure that I have in my mind as my first goal, is $1200 per month.  I know that’s a relatively lofty first goal, but that’s the number that works for me.  $1200 would cover the cost of renting our apartment, which would free up a few $$.  Obviously I don’t want to stay at $1200, but I’m hoping to be at $1200 per month within the next 3 months.  Is that possible?

I’ve only been blogging for 2 months, so I would have a total of 5 months in and be earning $1200.  I know that’s a rather lofty goal, but that’s the number I will stick with.  Keep checking back and I will let you know if I’m making any progress.

Of course there are other things to think about when deciding to go full-time on the internet.  First, going full-time means that I won’t have any benefits or pension.  Job security is also something that most people think about, however that’s not much of a concern to me.  In today’s economy, what does it actually mean to have a secure job?  Unless you’re highly skilled, jobs come and go and employers come and go.  20 years ago everyone felt that if you were able to get a job working for Ford, Chrysler or GM, you would have a good paying gig for life.  As we’ve seen in the past 3 years, this is no longer true.  Essentially, blogging appears to be one of the most secure of occupations because your success is largely dependent upon your effort.  Your own ability to market and write quality content will determine whether or not you get paid.

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I was reading my daily newspaper when I found a rather unusual job posting in the financial section of the paper. Sounds like a great job! You an click on the picture to make it larger.

I love Google Analytics! Any serious webmaster or blogger knows the true value of a good statistics package. Without it, how can you monitor your traffic properly and adjust your activities accordingly? Although I like Google Analytics, I don’t believe it’s very accurate (at least for counting unique visitors), but it still has great features to really dig down and analyze your traffic.

Something that always fascinates me is studying the search terms used to find my blog. Here’s one that I found recently that underscores just how important it is to use keywords in our blog posts. Recently someone searched Google for “great thoughts on success to earn money” and my blog showed up on the search results. I’m not exactly sure how or why my blog showed up, but I’m happy that my site is being found by Google on a fairly regular basis. I haven’t had much success with other search engines except Google.

Something that seemed to help with search engine traffic is using Google’s Webmaster Tools and the Google Sitemap Wordpress Plugin.

1. Download the plugin and create a sitemap.

2. Once the plugin has created the sitemap.

3. Go to Google’s Webmaster tools and upload the sitemap that was automatically created by the plugin.

This helps Google to properly index your page and you’ll notice that the Googlebot returns often and hopefully you’ll start seeing some search engine traffic.