As bloggers, our main concern is to write good content so we can drive some traffic to our blog, but also build backlinks. One thing you’ve probably noticed is how hard it is to get backlinks from articles. Unless you have a good users base or write an extremely unique and valuable article, people won’t talk about your posts. We all know it’s impossible to write everyday the best post ever and nobody starts a blog with an instant 20,000 readers. So, what can you do?

Think outside articles

If you can’t initially drive thousands of visitors with your posts, you have to think about an alternative way of doing it. Even if you have thousands of visitors, it’s always interesting to increase your traffic and alternatives to articles are still of interest for you.

I know you’re asking “what alternatives can we use?”. Well, there’s nothing specific I can say here but there are a couple of concepts you can learn from. Being a developper, I always think of tools/plugins I could develop to help the community. This can be a WP plugin, a Google gadget or whatever web-based tool. How can you drive traffic with that? Well, if you host the tool on the same domain as your website, people will visit your website and subscribe to it if they like what you do. Many bloggers are doing it and it’s usually working great.

How is that different from an article? Well, it’s really unique and it’s something people can’t copy so they have to link to you. Let’s say you develop a great Wordpress plugin, other bloggers will surely talk about it, use it and link to your website to actually download the plugin because it’s not available elsewhere.

One example I can give is a Google gadget I developed for one of my website. The website isn’t a blog, but the concept remains the same: not rely on Google ranking to get traffic. I’m a big fan of the well known Rubik’s Cube, so a couple of months ago I built an online Rubik’s cube timer with statistics so that people could record their best times. I had to find a way to be really different and not only rely on Google search to get some traffic, so I built a Google gadget people could put on their Google home page. I had to do this because at first, I wasn’t ranked very well for the keyword “Rubik’s Cube Timer” (Now I’m #2). While very useful, the gadget is a simple version of the timer and it’s lacking a lot of features so people still have to visit the website. The gadget is on Google directory, has a user base of 380+ users, help me drive additional traffic and is a free advertisement for my website on Google!

The gadget looks like that:

And see how it’s giving me free exposure on Google:

People searching for a timer or something similar for their Google home page ended up using my little timer. Whenever they needed additional features, they ended up on the main website. This was a great way at first to drive some important visitors and get people to talk about the website.

I’m not a developer

Ok, this was just an example to show you how can something you usually wouldn’t think about could drive traffic to your website. I’m a developer so that kind of tools is quite easy to do for me, but not everybody is a developer. There are a lot of other ways to drive traffic and backlinks to your website. Contests are particularly popular among bloggers. Having a contest on your blog will help you drive additional traffic and there are good chances other bloggers will talk about your contest if it’s any good. I’ve seen some contests like 25$ by Paypal for the top commentator of the month and stuff like that. Why not have t-shirts with your website logo and give that away once a week/month? Things like that work and you really just have to be creative.

I’m working on a couple of things outside articles only for SEO Horror and these should be live in the next couple of months. It’s OK if it takes time to develop or to get online because you’re not in short term blogging…Are you?

Be creative

I’ve said it a couple of times in this article: be creative. There aren’t any exact techniques but it’s just important to think about what else outside your articles you can use to drive traffic. One of the most successful blogger John Chow isn’t even ranked in Google for “John Chow” because of aggressive SEO techniques. How does he drives traffic then? Well, he has found numerous ways over the years to do so and he still has one of the most successful blog on the Internet with 27,000+ subscribers, whithout Google. You want to drive traffic from Google, but it’s just to show that Google isn’t everything, you can use alternative ways.

I’m a big fan of BlogCatalog and I actually much prefer it to MyBlogLog but I won’t go into details as to why I prefer it as it’s not the purpose of this post. I actually want to talk about sponsoring a category into BlogCatalog to get more exposure. I was interested in sponsoring a category to increase my visibility but I’m not sure it’s really worth it.

The price

The rates to sponsor a category are actually pretty good for a website like BlogCatalog which is receiving thousands of visitors everyday: it goes from 8$ to 25$. Prices depend on the category you want to sponsor. For example, a scrapbooking category will cost you 8$ while a Finance category will be 25$. It just goes with popularity.

What do you get?

Here’s what BlogCatalog gives you for sponsoring a category:

BlogCatalog’s Sponsored Category program is a way for you to get more visitors to your blog by taking advantage of BlogCatalog’s traffic of over 45 million annual visitors.

• A premium position in BlogCatalog’s Category specific directory
• Your blog will show up in one of the top 5 positions in the category you select
• Your sponsorship links to your BlogCatalog description page which links to your blog.

Worth it?

Well, with BlogCatalog, you can actually see the number of recent visitors on the website’s BlogCatalog profile and from what I’ve seen from other sponsors, I’m not convinced. The amount of recent visitors was similar to my profile’s recent visitors count and I wasn’t sponsoring any category which makes me think it’s not a big traffic source. These are only assumptions as I’m not sure how reliable the stats ar.

These are only assumptions, let’s try it!

Anyway, I don’t like to assume things so I decided to sponsor the SEO category on BlogCatalog for the next 30 days. So, if you search into the SEO category, you’ll see me appear in the first five listings:

So I say, if you were thinking about sponsoring a category to increase your exposure, just wait a week or two. I will provide some feedback in the next weeks as to wether it’s giving good traffic or not so this way you will be able to make a good decision and won’t throw away 10-25$. Let me do the dirty work!

Today, ShoeMoney published an interesting post about a recent “mistake” he made. That mistake was to remove his feedburner subscriber count from his website. He was actually annoyed of people reacting to the ups and downs of his subscribers count, so he decided to remove it and it’s understandable. Now, it seems that since he removed that feedburner count, his stats have completly plateaued at something like 16,500 readers.

We’re all sheep

I actually never bothered putting the feedburner count on any of my website/blog, I thought it was pretty useless for people to know the amount of people subscribed to my feed. Now that ShoeMoney published this article and that I think about it a little more, I feel like I made a mistake too by not bothering. Why? We are all a little like sheep: we like what’s popular and want to be part of it. When someone visit your site and sees something like 100, 300 or 1000 subscribers, it’s easy to say: “Wow, that many subscribers? This website must be great, let’s subscribe too!”. Now I feel it’s important to take advantage of the sheep in all of us.

Be careful

While it’s great to show your subscriber count if you are over 100, I don’t think it’s a good idea below 50 subscribers or even 100 readers. Why? Well, you will get the opposite reaction: “Only 22 readers, it must be an average/crappy blog”.

It’s your call

I will definitely try to put the subscribers count in the next couple of days because I really think this can have a positive impact on a website’s credibility. In the end, it’s your call wether or not you should show the counter. Like I said, you have to figure out when it’s time to show it so it can have the desired effect and not the opposite. I think 100 is a good number, but it’s up to you!

Do you strongly believe in the potential of your website? How does it compare to your competitors’ websites? Is your website the best thing in the world? We’ll try to go through the importance of believing that what you are doing is great.

John has something to say

There’s a quote from John Lennon I always think about and it’s still driving me to make quality stuff. John Lennon said in his 1980 Playboy interview: “When I was a Beatle, I thought we were the best fucking group in the god-damned world. And believing that is what made us what we were…”.

I think there’s a lot we can learn from that quote and it’s plain simple: believe in what you do. If yourself don’t think your website is great, who will? I’m not talking about design, graphic, logo or whatever, I’m talking about content. The design is something that can be easily changed or something you can pay for, but on the opposite, content is you. Especially if you run a blog, your readers have to feel your passion and also that your website is great. If you don’t believe your content is good, you won’t be able to talk positively about your website and if you can’t, probably no one will be able to.

Also, don’t let critics kill your passion. There will always be people to turn you down and tell you how much your website suck. There will always be people to tell you your vision isn’t good enough and you’re never going to make it. I think it’s Sergei from Google who once said he didn’t think Wikipedia would work and look what Wikipedia has become. Vision is something that can’t be shared with everyone. If you really believe in what you do, do it and you will probably make something out of it.

I know this sounds a lot like a ‘motivation’ post and not a real SEO/Internet Marketing article, but it is essential to be confident about your web projects. What’s the point of spending a couple of hours a day for something you don’t believe in and will abandon after a month? Your website visitors are just like you, they don’t like average stuff, they like good stuff. Do you subscribe to average blogs with average articles that don’t bring you anything? Would you link to an average article? I don’t think so.

Believing is not everything

Now comes the part where believing is not everything. Take the John Lennon example for instance: even if I strongly believe I’m the best singer/musician in the world, there’s no way I can achieve what John Lennon achieved. This is because I’m probably the worst singer in the world. So, falsely believing you’re the best won’t get you anywhere. There are a lot of people falsely believing they are great and it is really annoying so it’s important not to fall into that category. You have to believe what you do is great, but be sure it’s at least good from most people’s point of view!

It comes down to make good stuff

All in all, it comes down to make a quality website. With a quality website, you’ll have no problems telling others how good it is and others will feel the same way. Now, how to know if you’re making good stuff? It’s really simple: would you visit your own site? If your website/blog doesn’t fulfill a need or has no purpose, then why would someone visit it? If it’s a blog and you write 500 words posts in five minutes everyday thinking people will enjoy, you’re wrong. Are your writing skills OK? When you read your articles a couple of days later, are you surprised you actually wrote that stuff? Are you receiving more positive than bad comments? Do you offer something your competitors don’t offer? Basically, why would someone visit your website more than your competitors’ websites?

Always reconsider what you are doing. Are you falling into a routine? Are you posting articles or filling your website just because you have to do it? I personally always reconsider what I’m doing and I think it helps me a lot. For example, if you own a blog, always ask yourself: “Am I writing crap or it’s actually a good article?”, “Am I writing a filler post right now or I really have something interesting to write about?”, “Would it be interesting for someone to link to that article?”, “would it be interesting for someone to spread the word about this article?”. Always ask yourself that kind of questions, it will help you not to fall into a daily boring routine.

Can you?

Now, can you imagine yourself say: “I thought we had the best fucking website in the god-damned world. And believing that is what made us what we were…”?

On a more serious note, without saying you own the absolute best website in the world, would you feel condfident to say you run ONE of the best website in your niche? I’m not saying popular here because best and popular isn’t always equivalent.

A common thing to monetize your website is to flood it with AdSense ads. While AdSense ads are a great way to monetize a website, more ads doesn’t necessarely mean more money. Many people think that by flooding the website with AdSense, they increase their chances of receiving clicks and thus, maximize their profits. We’ll have a look here why it is not always the case.

Why?

Let’s start with the base principle of AdSense. Google actually “read” the content of your website to figure out what your page is about and deliver ads accordingly. For the particular subject your website is about, Google has a pool of potential campaigns to show. In these campaigns, certain have a high CPC (Cost per click), certain have an average CPC and others have a very low CPC. Google wants to make you and their advertisers happy, so that’s why they’ll try to provide you with ads having a good CPC, but if you offer enough ad spots on your site, they’ll definitely provide you with some crappy ads as well.

Now, let’s say you display 25 text links on your page from Adsense. For the particular subject your webpage is about, Google may only have something like 5 extremely good targeted ads with high CPC, 10 average ads and 10 crappy ads. If you display these 25 text links, there are good chances someone will click on one of them because there are so many, but there are 80% chances that the clicks you receive will have an average or very low CPC.

Now, let’s say you only put 5 text links. There are less chances for you to receive clicks, but the clicks will usually be worth more money! This is for the simple reason that google won’t display (Well, not every time) 5 crappy ads on a total of 5 possibilities.

So what’s the perfect balance?

You have to test a lot of different ad placements. For some websites, having more ads might bring more money and for some other sites, a single ad might do the job. On another website I worked on, I displayed only two ads and this was giving me more money than when I was displaying three or four. I received less clicks, but the clicks were actually giving me more money.

This trick won’t work if you don’t optimize your ad placement. Less ads will only be efficient if you know precisely where to place them to get clicks. I usually achieve this by “flooding” the page with ads and then analyzing the ones with the highest CTR (Click through rate). When you know the top spots on your page, it’s time to get rid of the poor performing ads. This way, your top spots will always receive the best ads and you’ll make more money out of the same traffic.

If a page full of ads does the trick for you, keep it this way. It depends a lot on the type of website you run and the type of traffic, so that’s why you have to test a lot of different scenarios. It is not science, but this technique works for me most of the time.

There are thousands of e-books about making money online and they all promise the same thing: make you rich. You can easily pay between 10$ and 100$ for an e-book, but the real question is: is it worth it?

Worth it?

I think it’s not worth investing in e-books for a couple of simple reasons. At least, it’s not worth investing in a lot of ebooks. The main reason is that making money online is not something you can learn in books: it’s a lot of hit and miss. You can surely learn techniques to maximize your chances of success and learning in e-books is one of the possibility. Basically, the most important thing is to know the basic traffic & SEO techniques and there are a lot of places where you can learn these techniques. The way to learn them is your choice, wether it’s e-book, blogs or forums. There are so many good resources out there that I tend to think e-books aren’t really worth it.

Where to buy

If you really want to buy one I’d say the best way to do it is the Digital Point forum. If you don’t know Digital Point, it’s a webmaster forum and there’s a market place on it. In the market place, there are a lot of people selling ebooks but wait for others to review them. Once you see good reviews, then I guess it’s ok to buy the e-book. Don’t buy too many, it’s a common mistake to buy a lot and then realize it was worthless.

You can’t learn everything in books

Remember that making money online is not something you can learn in books: you can only learn basic techniques. The internet is a lot of hit and miss and you might end up starting 10 different projects before finding one that’s working. Knowing the basic and advanced techniques might lower that to 2-3 projects, but it’s still hit and miss. Once you have a good project, it’s the same story: you have to figure out ways to monetize it and it’s a whole different story every time.

Don’t spend too much into stuff like e-books. Instead, why not take that 10-20$ and pay someone for 500 directory submissions? That would be a 10-20$ well invested and a concrete way to increase your traffic and future profits. You can learn most of what e-books teach you if you keep well informed by reading blogs (like this one!) and forums.

There are a couple of websites that offer free e-books if you subscribe to their newsletter or stuff like that. It’s a good way to get yourself some free e-books for nothing. Get them and read them. Read wathever free stuff you can get about making money online, but don’t spend too much money, it’s not always worth it.

Do you publish summaries of posts in your RSS feed? If you do so, I’m pretty sure the reason is to monetize your blog. RSS feeds are extremely hard to monetize and limiting the size of the posts to force the user to visit your website is a common thing. Unfortunately, it’s the opposite: in the long run, you will loose money.

The preview feed

I think most bloggers started this way with their feed. What’s the point of putting ads on your website and publishing your content in a different place? What’s the point of having 5,000 readers if they all can read my content ads-free? Well, I’m sure you all read other blogs and even yourself get frustrated when you can only read a preview of an article in your favorite news reader. You don’t feel like visiting the website just to read a single article, so what’s the point of subscribing if you still have to visit the damn website? My usual reaction is simply to unsubscribe.

If myself, as a reader, unsubscribe from “preview” feeds, I’m sure you do and I’m also pretty sure that’s what your readers do! That is one of the main reason some blogs aren’t able to increase their number of subscribers. You might gain 10 readers a day, but there’s a strong possibility you’re also loosing 10 readers every day.

So, what do I do?

You should publish your full articles into your feeds. You can also place some ads into your feed if you really want to maximize your profits: it’s something we’ll see more often in the coming years. I personally don’t like to put ads in RSS feeds but this really is a personal decision and I don’t think this would impact the number of subscribers a lot. The main reason why you want a full feed is to keep your subscribers. You might not get a buck from your RSS feed, but loyal readers will comment on your blog often and also talk about you on other websites. What you really want to do is getting loyal readers in order to make long-term gains.

Thinking short-term is usually killing a business. Long-term thinking gives you less money at first, but it’s definitely worth it in the long run. I personnaly think full and ads-free RSS feeds are the way to go. You just have to make sure you write good enough content so that people feel the need to comment or visit your website for whatever other reason.

Do you spend half of your day refreshing your stats? Are you going in between AdSense, StatCounter, Google Analytics and MyBlogLog all day long? It is important to be aware of your stats and also very important to analyze them but at what cost?

If you are that kind of person, you should really reconsider the amount of time you spend checking your stats. It is a common thing when trying to monetize your website to constantly refresh your AdSense account in the hope of seeing a couple of cents/bucks or refreshing your StatCounter account hoping for some visitors. It is absolutely ok as it’s part of the game, but it can become obsessive. Think about the time you spend online checking your stats for no reason and think about the time you could spend building backlinks or writing content.

What I’m trying to say here is don’t be too obsessed with your stats at first. Concentrate on building some good original traffic and save that stat analysis time for when it’s really going to be needed. Don’t take me wrong here, stats/traffic analysis is important, but it has to be part of a full strategy. If you refresh your AdSense account 100 times a day, you are loosing precious time you could spend elsewhere.

Unfortunately, when starting new projects, there are more bad days than good days in terms of traffic and money. Even in the long term, you can often feel like dropping some projects because they don’t generate the amount of traffic or money you initially thought.

I say keep trying. I worked on projects I thought wouldn’t work and just before dropping them, traffic suddenly exploded. Was that consistent traffic sufficient to drive the website everyday? No, it wasn’t. It often was a burst of traffic for a day or two, but it makes you realize your website actually has potential (of course I’m not talking about crappy StumbleUpon traffic). What do you need then to drive that kind of traffic everyday? Well, work on your SEO and backlinks. Build links, talk about your site and optimize it. We often say learn from your bad days, but I think it is more important to learn from your good days because you can get a lot of motivation out of them. Good days will give you a good reason to work on your website and make you realize your website has potential.

On the other hand, there are often more bad days and I know it’s hard to learn from good days when there aren’t any. But still, I’m sure you have better days than others and can get a little motivation from them. I say analyze your good days.

Analyze your good days

What’s the point of searching for days the reasons why your website doesn’t work when you can analyze why your website does work? What’s the cause of this sudden burst of traffic? Is it a keyword suddenly on fire? Is it because you bought some advertisement? Is it because one of your article is suddenly well ranked on Google? Determine that cause and use it, work on it. You might have had luck for a day, but what if you could convert that luck into consistent traffic/money?

You’re better to learn from your good moves than your bad moves, there’s a lot more to learn from.

A lot of webmasters look at their bounce rate, realize how crappy it is but aren’t really sure what to do with it and how to analyse it. First of all, let’s define the bounce rate with Wikipedia’s help:

It essentially represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

So let’s define bounce rate as the percentage of users who leave your site from the first page they visited. Not giving a damn about your bounce rate is a really good way to loose money and potential readers. Let’s say all your readers only visit one page (100% bounce rate) and you manage to get all these visitors to visit 2 pages instead, you double your page views but also double your advertisers exposure. What does this mean? More money. First, what’s a bad bounce rate? It all depends of the niche. For certain niche, a bad bounce rate might be 70% and on another niche it might be 40%. I’d say when you start going over 60%, there are some improvements you can make.

So how to fight that evil bounce rate?

To fight your bounce rate, you have to know your traffic. There are certain types of traffic that will kill your bounce rate (StumbleUpon) and you can’t do anything about it, it’s the type of traffic. For this article, let’s presume your traffic is mostly organic. What I usually do to improve my bounce rate is to put my girlfriend or a friend in front of the most popular page of my website and ask them why would you stay on my website and why would you leave? This is a terribly good technique because you can’t yourself evaluate objectively your website.

Get their comments and work on it!

Usually, the main comment is that there’s nothing catching their attention. Remember that someone leaving from the first page is someone who actually didn’t even read half of the first page. So, before concentrating on the second page, concentrate on the first page! Getting your readers’ attention is the first step and this will ensure they actually read the first page.

Right, but how do I get their attention?

Visitors are usually very attracted by colors and images. How painful is it to get on a colorless webpage filled with text? That leads me to one of the first solution: Your website design. Remember that for every single visitor coming to your website for the first time, your website is like any other. If on top of that your website’s template is a common template found on over a thousands blog, your website is really unattractive. No matter how good your content is, it still is a regular blog for any visitor. So why not work on your template a little bit? Change some colors, make yourself a little logo, etc. It doesn’t have to be terribly good, just a little bit different. If you are no web programmer/designer and you can afford a 50$-75$ template, do it! This will make your site a lot more distinctive and professional. My last experiment with getting a professional template improved my bounce rate of about 10%. Just because it looks more professional and unique!

Another solution I’ve used is to redirect your readers to some other related articles. Make yourself a section “Related Articles” or “You might also like” and place some related articles in there. If you use a CMS like Wordpress there are some good plugins to help you achieve that.

People also like to read what’s popular. Why not have a section in your sidebar or where ever on your site called “Top articles”, “Top pages”, “Most commented”, “Most popular” or anything like that?

Make sure these sections are visible to your visitors and it should really improve your bounce rate.

One other thing I like to use are ads referring to my own site. On certain important pages, I like to put my own little banner which is referencing another page on my website. If the banner is attractive, it works like magic.

So there you go, with these little tips you should be able to improve your bounce rate.