Savvy Affiliate

Day 37 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

Setting the tone of your site early can be essential to long term success of your blog.  The atmosphere of your blog will help determine the nature of your readers.  And the nature of your readers will determine whether you build a viable supportive blog community or not.

Positive Posts

One thing you can do to improve your community is to set a positive tone on your blog.  If you write more content about opportunities and the better aspects of something it will induce a more positive tone in reader comments.  A post about “10 Great Google Secrets That Can Save You Time” will encourage your readers to include some tips of their own, benefiting everyone.   A post that says “10 Reasons Why Google Sucks” will do little more than inspire rants from your readers about their own bad Google experiences.  And no one wants to read that.

Stop The Spam Early

To build a positive community, you need to do a good job of policing your site.  Even a little spam or blatant self promotion from a couple readers can really turn off the rest of them.   How can you deal with it without spending all your time deleting from your Akisment que?   Well Chris over at Blog-Op recently posted about 4 Great Spam Stopping Tools.  After reading his post I implemented all of those tools and have seen my spam drop from 40 a day to 5 a week.

Ask For Input

People who comment on a blog are much more involved in it.  They often go back to see if there are any responses to their comments.  They may even subscribe to the comment threads in order to keep up with all the feedback.   So make sure you are getting the most out of each of your posts.  End your posts with a question or a sentence which invites discussion. This serves to retain new readers, and draw some of your RSS subscribers to your site.  Even 4 or 5 comments on a particular post is much better than zero.   As your readership grows, your comments will as well.

 Using Threaded Comments is a great way to encourage reader interaction with each other.  I know I enjoy it on the blogs I read, and will soon be implementing it on this site.

So how about yourself?  What do you do to build your community on your site?  Any tips for ensuring it is supportive and a good long term community?

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Day 36 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

If you started your website a couple of weeks ago, by now you probably have a fair amount of content going.  That content has value, and you have to be careful to protect it.   I have had sites crash before and hosts who lost all my data.  Luckily that occurred before I hosted a blog, and I had a static copy on my personal computer.  Those websites had an inherent backup, but your blog does not.  So you need to be extra careful with it.

Wordpress Plugin

The first line of defense that you should use for backups is, of course, a wordpress plugin.   Wordpress Database Backup is a great automated tool for backing up your site.  Set it up to automatically e-mail you your backups every day or every week, I don’t recommend less frequently, and you are well on your way to being secure.  But don’t e-mail your backup to your website email.   I.e. Backup@SavvyAffiliate.com would be bad for me.  If your site crashes your email might too.   Use a third party, like Yahoo, which now has unlimited storage.

Subscribe to Your Own Page

Need more protection?    Subscribe to your own feed in Google Reader or bloglines.   If you ever lose a recent post, you can just look it up there and resurrect it.

 This is a good idea in any even, as it is always good to check what your readers are actually seeing

Download locally

As a tertiary backup, take the time to download a local copy to your machine every now and then.   It may seem like overkill, but taking the time to make several different backups of your site, and storing them in separate places, is a good investment of time.   There is nothing like losing months or years or work to make you kick yourself for not taking a more proactive role in protecting your data.

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I have had good luck using Group writing projects.  I have found them to be an incredibly effective way of driving traffic to my site.  The days I participated in on Daily Blog Tips and Problogger have been some of the single highest traffic days I have had.

To share the wealth Savvy Affiliate is now hosting a group writing project.  And if this is successful, I will be hosting more in the future.  I’m sure it won’t trigger the same response as one on Problogger, but it is free, and you might gain some new readers out of it, especially if your site is relatively new.

The rules for this group writing project

Topic : What is the best time saving tip you recently started using?       Although I expect many of these to be blogging and internet themed, that is not a requirement.     The requirements are that it be a time saving tip other people can employ, and it has to be relatively new to you.   If you just learned a new Firefox trick, great.  If you’ve known it for a year, pick something else.     No specific time frame on “New”, just use your judgement

Notifying : Make sure I know about it by leaving a comment or a trackback to this specific blog post, or by sending an e-mail to SavvyAffiliate [at nospam] Gmail [Dot] com

Time Frame :  From now until July 1st, 2007 I’ll be accepting entries.  

Use Of Posts : I will just be linking to your post and including a blurb or an excerpt, you retain full ownership of anything you write.

Subject To My Judgement : Although I intend to include every person who participates, I will use my judgement to not include sites I deem inappropriate for me to be linking to (adult, pharmacy, etc).  But I have a fairly lax judgement of inappropriate, so as long as you don’t think you’re a spammer/scammer, I probably won’t either.

Interlinking :  I’ll be posting the links as they come on this page, and a summary page after it is all through.  I encourage you to check out any participants pages and link to them if you find them interesting.  Please write your own summaries though, no one wants duplicate content.

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Day 35 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

In the several months that I have been blogging, I have found that most of my hits, and the vast majority of my trackbacks have been the result of only a few posts.  3 posts in particular, out of approximately 275, are responsible for 30% of my traffic and 70% of my backlinks.  I got a large number of links with Top 5 Tools Every Blogger Should Use, part of Problogger’s group writing project, randomly scored a minor stumble hit (for me) with I Stumble Over My Mistakes Again, and have been getting a lot of backlinks (you can debate their value) with ViraLink

What’s Your Point?

My point is that, for bloggers, the vast majority of the traffic to your site can be driven by relatively few posts.  Given the nature of social networking, 1 Great Post is much much better than 10 Good posts.  Although the 10 Good posts are effective at keeping subscribers reading, and getting visitors to return, if you want a spike in new visitors you need a great post.

How Can I Write A Great Post?

Here are some tips on how you can change your post from Good to Great

1) Don’t Rush - A good post you can do on the fly.  Great posts take time.   Figure on writing a great post in 2 sittings minimum, 3 more likely.   You need one sitting to get your initial idea down.  You need another to edit your post and weed out the junk sentences and any ideas which don’t cut to the point, and finally you need a third to tidy everything up and make sure it is perfect.    Compare your posts to when you were doing a report in school.  Sure you did work at the last minute, and every one said “I work better under pressure”, but the reports that actually turned out the best were the ones where they were started in plenty of time, and given a thorough proofreading and revision.

You can’t write a great post if you are just trying to get out content.   In order to even have the time to write a great post, you need to be ahead on your content generation requirements.  If all you are trying to do is get out today’s blog post, you won’t take the time necessary to take it from good to great.   If you have an idea you think has greatness potential don’t work on it as part of the daily grind.  Set it aside and give it extra attention.

2) Don’t Copy - A great idea isn’t great if someone else has done it.   It can still be “Good”, you can still put a new spin on it, and impart new information, but if you really want to create the kind of buzz which can drive a lot of traffic, you need to be original.

Being original is difficult, which is why it is so rewarding.  If you really want to be original, look elsewhere for inspiration.  Look at resources other people aren’t using.  Don’t go to Problogger looking for new ideas, because if you see them everyone else has, check out your library.   You might be surprised at how few people take the time to look up information that isn’t on the internet.  But when you think about it, before the 1990’s there was virtually no information on the internet.  By looking for ideas in printed works you have decades of information at your hands that most of your audience may never have seen.

One example, go to your library and check out a couple of books on entrepreneurship or running a small business.  Any ideas in there you haven’t seen before?  Then chances are your readers haven’t either.  You just found yourself a fresh and relatively original post idea.

3) Don’t Doubt - One problem I have had is that when I have an epiphany and get a really good idea, I immediately assume that other people must have thought of the same thing.  I hurry up to try and get my idea out first, only to later realize I would be better served by taking my time.  If you have a great idea, don’t doubt yourself.  Chances are if it is a good original idea no one has done before, then no one will do it in the time it takes you do to it right.   Take your time to get all your ducks in a row when you have a great idea, they don’t come all that often, so you can’t afford to mess them up with self doubt.

Want some more info on writing great posts?  Daily Writing Tips is a new site by the makers of Daily Blog Tips, and has tons of great information.

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Day 34 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

What content you have on your site will determine for Google what keywords to associate with your page.  What keywords get associated with your page determines what Ads will get displayed, and how much they are worth.

To make a lot of money using AdSense, you need to be tagged with some profitable keywords.  Often their can be very little difference between keywords worth several dollars a click, and keywords worth several cents a click, so how do you separate the profitable keywords from the junk?

Use AdWords to Find Profitable AdSense

Google likes to help out its advertisers, much more so than the sites displaying the Ads.  Since AdSense and AdWords are two sides of the same coin, you can use AdWords to determine how profitable your AdSense keywords will be.

It only costs $5 to set up an AdWords account, and after that you can keep it forever.  This is a great investment which will pay off in the long run (actually even the short run).  So don’t hesitate to sign up.

Once you have signed up, what do you do?

Log in to AdWords and go to tools

After you are in Tools, click on the first link on the left, named “Keyword Tool”

Finally you need to enter some information about the kind of ads you are looking for.   Enter a keyword you would like to search on, click “Cost and Ad Position Estimates” as what you are looking for and finally put $100 as your max bid.  If you use a max bid that is too low, you could be missing out on the most profitable keywords, so don’t be afraid to go high.  But don’t worry, you aren’t actually bidding on keywords, so it won’t cost you anything.  Sort by “Estimated Average CPC” to see which keywords are profitable

This gives you a great idea of which are the most profitable keywords.  Although this is not what Google will actually pay you, (Expect about 25% of the amount you see) it does give a good idea of what keywords are profitable.   If I was targeting this page for specific keywords, I would want it to hit for “AdSense Help” or “AdSense FAQ” or “AdSense Info” to get the most profitable Ads possible.

Want to also see how much each keyword is being searched on so you can combine your SEO and your Advertising?   Keep the same sorting, but change “Cost and Ad Position Estimates” to “Keyword Popularity”

In this case, “AdSense Help” scores well for both high CPC and high Search volume.  It looks like a great keyword to target.

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Day 33 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

AdSense is a great way for new bloggers to make money.  In fact many new bloggers get most of their income during their first several months solely from AdSense.   As their site grows they tend to diversify and get approximately 30% of their income from AdSense, and the rest from other sources, but Google AdSense is still a great tool for making money online.

Other Resources

I have covered AdSense before with posts like

• 5 Quick AdSense Tips
• How Much You Can Make With Each AdSense Visitor
• Getting High Paying AdSense Ads

So this post will cover some slightly different topics that you will want to know in order to make the most money you can with AdSense

Putting Ads in the Upper Right Corner

The Ad location which I have found to work the best with my posts so far is in the upper right corner of the content.  It is a spot which your reader is sure to see, which makes it more likely that they will click.  But the nice part is, the upper right corner of your content is fairly unobtrusive to the reader.  If they don’t want to click on your ads they will just read around.  Hopefully the AdSense won’t disturb them too much.

How to do it?

The key CSS tag for putting AdSense Ads in the upper right corner of your blog is Float.   By using the float tag, you can place your Ads in your content, and the content will morph around the ads. An example of the float tag I put in my CSS is

float: right;

 Couple that with a margin tag to ad some space around the ad, setting it slightly apart draws more attention to it, and you get

.AdSense_Ads {
   float: right;
   margin: 40px 0 10px 10px;
}

Nothing to it.

I like to put the floating ads in my Wordpress php for the single page.   I place my AdSense block with the <Div class = “AdSense_Ads”> call out right before the <?php the_content>  Tag in my single page php.  I think putting all those ads on the main page is a little much, and prefer a different advertising strategy for my main blog page.

To see more about the float CSS tag, here is a tutorial

 I am still working  on how to best tab the Ad down, i.e. if I wanted to float it in the middle right of the content, instead of the upper right, without spacing everything over using margins, so if you know please drop a comment.

Monitoring which Ads Work Best

I found out that Ads in the upper right corner of my blog work best by careful monitoring of my AdSense.  (And by watching to see where Problogger and John Chow place their Ads)  By placing all my ads in a different AdSense channel, I was able to determine what was working, and stop using the things which didn’t work.

The AdSense channels are your friend.  Make sure you make use of the AdSense channels.  Try using a different channel for use Ad format or Ad location.  It might be smart to use a different channel for each content category.  This will let you know what type of Ad pays the best, and where the Ads with the best click through rates are located.  Optimizing your AdSense will ensure that you make the most money possible off of your site.

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Day 32 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

One essential part of running a successful blog is building strong relationships with other bloggers.  These relationships will be crucial to building traffic to your site, helping you get in on product launches and learn of things before the crowd, and for working together to create more value than any one blogger could do by themselves.

Building relationships isn’t necessarily easy

Unlike networking at a job or at school, most of the people you meet blogging you only know online.  It makes it harder to build a solid relationship with other bloggers when all you know of them is their name (or pseudonym) and what they write.  It is easier to network with people face to face.  The simple fact that blogging is virtual makes it more difficult.

But networking while blogging is just as important as at a job

In some jobs networking can be very important to your long term success.  A manager, salesman, politician, actor, can gain success as much by who they know as what they have done in their own right.  That isn’t to say that a person can’t break into any of those fields, but having connections does make it easier.

Blogging is no different.  Having friends with popular websites, or making friends with people who run popular websites, is one shortcut to success in your blog.  Speaking strictly in terms of traffic and search rankings, it is better to have one link from a really successful site (say PR 6-7) than a dozen links from relatively unknown sites (PR 3)

Blog networking can be similar to work networking

Although I would rather have a link from a highly trafficked site than a rarely visited one, you also need to think long term.  Just as at a workplace you try to meet everyone, and avoid offending anyone, because you never know who is going where, you never know what small Blog today will become tomorrow’s superstar.

It is not at all unusual for a blog to go from zero to huge in 18 months or less.  The lesson to be learned here is that it can oftentimes be more beneficial to focus your networking on less popular sites.  When the blossom, the rising tide will help lift all their outgoing links in value.  Additionally, it can often be much easier to get ahold of the proprietor of a smaller site.  And they will be more open to building a relationship.  Although someone like Problogger is very good at responding to e-mail, he must get dozens, if not hundreds, of e-mails every day.  People would like him to check out their site, people want a link, people are trying to build a relationship.  However someone like me gets very few blog related e-mails a day.  An e-mail to me asking for a site review, or offering a link exchange, or simply requesting that I check out your site and add it to my blogroll is much more likely to get attention than a similar one would to a John Chow.

Some Tips for Networking

1) Mind your manners - Being civil and courteous are just as important while blogging as in the real world.  If another blogger does you a favor, and links to you, or posts a guest blog, or gives you a review, make sure you take the time to thank them.  Although it isn’t always necessary to give them a return link (you can if you want to) a simple note saying you appreciated their effort is always appreciated

2) When pinging try to deep link - Deep links on your site are very important for ranking well in search engines and driving traffic.  Just as importantly, to you, deeplinking a blog is how you can get another bloggers attention.  I am currently getting 6 or 7 links a day to my blog, mostly due to Viralink.  But most of those links go to my Blog not a deep post.  As a result they don’t leave a trackback, and I don’t give them as much attention!    I always lookup my trackbacks, but most links to my main site I just assume to be a viralink and don’t necessarily follow.  I imagine other bloggers have similar experiences.  Do both them and you a favor and deeplink

3) Make use of new tools - Things like Mybloglog and Top commentator Plugin are great for finding out who is checking out your site.  Use these tools to find who frequents your site, these are your best bets in terms of networking.  It takes a lot less work to change someone from a visitor to acquaintance to friend, than to start with someone who doesn’t come to your site and has no idea who you are.

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Yesterday I wrote about How To Launch A Digg Assault   How well did it work?

Overall it worked about as well as I expected.  Got 9 Diggs, 2 negative comments and drove a couple hundred visitors, but never got picked up and was buried in fairly short order.  But it still gave some insight on what worked well and what didn’t.

What worked

1) Getting Friends

Getting some of my blogging friends to Digg the post worked very well.  Chris at Blog-Op, Rich at Rich Minx, RT at Untwisted Vortex, and Tobsy at Bloggers Journey all came through amazingly quickly with Diggs.   I would say that asking some blogging friends to Digg it was the most successful part of the experiment, but the one that you can use the least often.   I certainly wouldn’t feel comfortable e-mailing people to ask for Diggs with any frequency, but once in a rare while is no problem.   

Of course RT is an exception, since he does ask you to submit a site for Diggs.

Now I just need to make some more friends

2) Comments

My article created a little controversy.  (very little) and got a couple of comments.  I think that was a good thing traffic wise and helped drive a few extra people who otherwise would not have come.   The bottom line is that comments can attract attention, and that is always a good thing.

3) Digging it myself

Again, this is a once in a rare while thing.  Digging my own post allowed me to write the intro I wanted, time it like I wanted, and get some Diggs immediately.   If I had waited for a reader to Digg it, it may have happened soon, it may never have.

But self Digg too often and your account will start getting weaker and weaker.   Plus you’ll go blind.

What didn’t work

1) Writing about Digg

Let’s face it, Diggers don’t like anything about gaming Digg or SEO.  It is just not their style, and those kind of posts tend to get buried pretty quickly.   Being so transparent about begging for Diggs was a turnoff to many people I am sure

2) Making The Digg button obvious

Why I think this is good in theory, it didn’t really help in this case.   Most of the Diggers weren’t going to promote it no matter how obvious the button was (see 1) so it was something of a moot point

Hopefully you can use some of these tips to promote your own sites…. Which are hopefully not about getting Diggs.

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Day 31 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

This is day 31 of the 100 Days to Building A Great Website.  This has been going on for a month, so I thought I would look back at some of the changes I have implemented and give some results.

Writing a series

On Day 11 I wrote about Writing a Great Series of Posts.  This 100 part series of posts has been very beneficial to my site.  These articles are the single most viewed posts on my site, and writing the series is one of the things which motivates me to generate content more or less every day.   Since I started this series, my daily views are up 50% and my RSS subscribers are up 100%

 Targeting Keywords

On Day 25 I wrote about finding sought after keywords.   The article made me apply the advice to myself and change the title of the series I am writing.   It was originally titled “100 Days To Webpage Excellence”  but is newly titled “100 Days To Building A Great Website”   Why?  Because more people search for “Building A Website” or “Great Website” than they do for “Webpage Excellence”    If I consider this a 3 month exercise in SEO, I decided I needed to be smart about the keywords I was targeting.

Additionally I have had a month to find out how people are Googling me.   The most hits I have gotten are from

• good wordpress plugins
• “who is googling you”
• savvy affiliate
• AdSense per visitor
• “best time to post”

This gives me an idea of which keywords to target.   I might as well target some keywords which I am already getting hits for, and aim to climb to the top of those rankings.  Since I already rank for “Savvy Affiliate” and “Who is googling you” doesn’t seem very beneficial, it seems like it might be smart to tackle keywords such as

• Good, Great, Best, Top etc. Wordpress plugins
• AdSense profit per visitor or How much AdSense Profit
• Best Time To Post or When To Post

So expect in the future to see some posts along those lines, and to see my SEO warping towards those ends.

You can do the same thing for your blog.     The easiest keywords to rank for are the keywords you are already getting hits from.  Find some keywords you show up on the 2nd, 3rd, or even higher page for and target those.  Once you move up into page one, or even place #1 you can widen your scope.

Good Post Titles

On Day 22 I wrote about The Importance of Great Post Titles.  Although I’m still experimenting with what works best, I have found that since I have written my post titles with an eye towards attracting Google visitors, my search results have gone up.   It is just common sense that to attract people, you have to write something enticing.  It may be common sense, but I sometimes have trouble doing it, and I know other bloggers do as well.

So have you implemented any particular new strategies that you have benefited from recently?  Any good tips that you have read, here or anywhere else, that has helped your site?

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