jpmblog.com

Somethings happened with Google, it’s almost stopped sending traffic to my Netbook-Experience.com blog.

The change happened on the 4th of June, where previously the majority of my traffic came from Google, suddenly Google started sending the site less then 10 hits a day.

Interesting referals from my old Blogspot netbook blog more then doubled, as if Google starting sending more traffic to that site, even though that site just has links through to the new Blog.

After a bit of research it looks if Google has altered it’s algorithms.  Some Bloggers have gained and some have lost out. That’s the problem of having a monopoly I guess – when it comes to Web Traffic google are out by themselves. I’m just watching to see if Traffic picks up again.

As discussed in these posts, I’ve been experimenting in using autoblogs, where blog content is generated by taking content from other sites.

I’ve decided to stop the experiment as to be honest non of the sites are doing particularly well. One site, Morning Digest, did initially show some promise ( 300 hits per day at peak) but google has now stopped sending it traffic.

I’m going to delete most of the sites now, although I’ll keep Morning Digest running as I find it useful as an information portal.

Content is king, and I’m convinced now that the only way to keep large amounts of traffic flowing to your site is to regularly create your own unique content.

In this post I described how I was performing an experiment to see how effective autoblogging can be.

Most of the blogs aren’t doing brilliantly, but one is doing better then I expected.

To date http://morning-digest.jpmblog.com/ has received 3000 visitors, which I find incredible.

Traffic is rising everyday so it will be interesting to see how high the daily traffic can arrive.

As mentioned in this post and this post, I’ve been investigating how to create auto blogs, where blog content is automatically created and posted without the need of human intervention.

I’ve been looking at 2 different methods of Auto Blogging to create a number of sites.

The following sites: Morning Digest, Gadget News, & Reality TV News are all created using the WP-o-Matic WordPress plug in, which takes RSS feeds and automatically turns them into Blog Posts.

The Following sites: ChinWag & Money Box have been created using the WP Article Fetch plug in, which pulls in articles from a centralised database by set topic and automatically publishes them on your Blog.

I’ve also created an Auto Blog based around an amazon store called TopBooks but I’ll come back to this site at a later date.

So hows it going?

So far I’ve been most impressed with the results from Morning Digest which between 9th and the 26th of May has received over a 1000 visits.

I’ve yet to be impressed by the WP Article Fetch created sites.

More to follow.

In this post I mentioned how I was using a WordPress plugin called WP-o-Matic to create an automatic blog.

I’ve come across another free tool called WP Article Fetch which also creates blog content, however rather then use RSS feeds to create posts, it pulls content from a database of articles.  You select the topics of the blog and it does the rest.

You can download WP Article Fetch by clicking here.

you can see my new blogs at:

http://chinwag.jpmblog.com/

http://moneybox.jpmblog.com/

Automated Blogging is a much frowned upon method of automatically creating content for a blog or website.

There are several tools available for Automated Blogging most of which convert RSS feeds into New Blog Posts. I was curious to see if Automated Blogging could be used to create a high quality, high traffic site, so using a free plugin called WP-o-Matic, I’ve created a news paper style blog which pulls content (with full credit given) from a number of top websites.

Every hour the RSS feeds are checked and updates are pulled into the site, even if the site doesn’t pull in traffic it’s created a nice portal with great content for me to use.

Check it out at: http://morning-digest.jpmblog.com/

Also have a look at http://gadgetnews.techplay-experience.com/ & http://realitytv.jpmblog.com/ or a book store at http://topbooks.jpmblog.com/

I’ve just come  across this good video on Youtube,which speaks a lot of sense, it speaks a lot of sense and covers some key basics.

It highlights the need for good content, above all else good content is what drives visitors to your site and also brings them back. Repeat visitors are important, the more a reader enjoys your blog the more likely they are to return to your site.

The video also discusses a few more technical tips for getting more blog traffic, it covers the use of social networking sites, technorati, feed burner and links from other sites.

It’s a good video to view if you are just starting out as a  Blogger and looking for guidance to get you started.

Check it out below.

It’s been well publicised recently that following a European court case, Microsoft have had to follow it’s European Windows users the option to download a new web browser,

Has this impacted on the percentage of users that use IE?

In this article I noted the percentages of which browsers visited my sites. Here are the figures for the last month and comparisons to Firefox:

JPMBlog.com: 17% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 56% use FireFox)

Netbook-experience.com: 16% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 58% use FireFox and 18% use Chrome)

Techplay-experience.com: 31% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 27% use FireFox)

The number of visitors to my sites using IE has definitely decreased  there’s no wonder Microsoft are investing lots of money in IE8 adverts.

In this post I discussed Google Insights but I thought I would see how it could be used.

Using the Google Insight Filter I searched for rising worldwide Internet searches over the last 7 days, and noticed that there was been a large increase in searches for the Eclipse Trailer, so lets see what happens if I write an article on it.

Watch this space

Google Insights is tool provided by Google for seeing popular searches and trends.

If offer powerful filters so that you can see results based on types of search (eg web, image etc), locality, topic and time frame.

One of the most useful tools is  that it allows you to see breakout search terms, thats search thats have suddenly gained a huge increase in popularity.

You can use Google Insights to see popular searches in your websites field, this could be an incredible tool for reaching more readers.

Some Blog Carnivals are run very well and some aren’t. This carnival is an example of one of the better ones:

Have a look at : http://bestblogreview.com/2010/02/family-health-wellness-carnival-2/.

The blog is well presented, contains good articles and the owner has emailed all the contributors to ask then to put a link to the carnival.

Check it out.

Following on from this article and this article I thought I would see which days are the busiest for Internet traffic to my sight.

Now that Netbook-Experience.com & Techplay-experience.com are becoming more established I thought I would see if there is any pattern appearing.

The results are shown below in a table showing an average on traffic on each day per site:

What the results show, other then Tech Play not doing as well as I would hope, is that Weekends continue to be the busiest days.

In this post I discussed a method of automatically re-posting old posts on Twitter.

I’ve implemented this system on Jpmblog.com, Netbook-experience.com & Techplay-experience.com along with a link that appears on the end of each post which provides the link for visitors to start following me on Twitter.

Has it been successful? I think so. I’ve picked up 15 extra followers on Twitter, so that’s 15 extra people that everyday see a link to an article from each of my Blogs, and in addition all 3 blogs are getting traffic back from Twitter.

The great thing is that as it’s an automated process it’s not taking any extra of my time.

With France and Germany both strongly advising its users not to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer due to security issues in some versions, I started wondering how many people still use the once dominant browser.

Using Google Analytics I performed a quick report on the percentage of IE users to 3 of my Blogs over the last month:

JPMBlog.com: 29% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 47% use FireFox)

Netbook-experience.com: 18% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 63% use FireFox)

Techplay-experience.com: 30% of visitors to the site used IE. (by comparison 27% use FireFox)

Microsoft certainly don’t have the market share it once did.

Twitter is a popular micro-blogging site that allows users to post short messages and message other members through the site.

I’ve found a way to automatically post links to your WordPress blog posts on twitter, so that your twitter followers may read your blog articles in full.

There is a plugin for WordPress called Tweet Old Post ( search for it through the add new plugins option ), which when installed will automatically post a link to a random post from your, it will even convert your post url to a short form URL.

You can set how often a post from your blog is posted on Twitter

Sponsored Blogging is a way of creating income from your blog or website.

By writing articles about specific topics including keywords from advertisers you can earn credit, and it can pay quite well.Even if you don’t have a very popular blog you can still make decent beer money from sites like pay per post and Social Spark.

However there are some rules that you should follow for all your hard work to pay off. Make sure you make regular non sponsored posts, each provider of opportunities will have different rules around how many non sponsored posts you are required to make in between sponsored, but importantly you also need to keep your readership happy with your own posts.

If you have your own domain name then you will get more opportunities, so this should be considered a must do.

Make sure you don’t put Ad’s, eg banner Ads ( Google Ads) or context sensitive pop ups in sponsored posts, as these will get your posts rejected.

Finally Make sure you follow any disclosure rules set by the provider, if you make sponsored posts you must let your readership know.

Following on from this article I thought I would see which days are the busiest for Internet traffic to my sight.

The general opinion across the Internet is that weekends are the quietest time for Web hits but my original investigation for Septembers traffic on Netbook-experience.com showed that Fridays were the quietest.

How that I have more data to examine, 3 months on Netbook-experience.com and 1 complete month for Techplay-experience.com I wondered if my results changed.

Here are the results:

As you can see Tuesdays and Thursdays are the quietest but Weekends continue to be amongst the busiest day.

PageRank is a Google metric that represents how important a webpage is on the web. Each time a webpage is linked to by another page Google considers the page to have become more important.

How important Google Pagerank is to webmasters, is the centre of many debates, to some (certainly to some sponsored post portals) it’s considered to be very important to others SEO techniques are considered to be significantly more important, it is at least a method to see how well your page or blog is doing on the web.

If you treat PageRank simply as a measure of how well linked your Webpage is then it can be a useful tool, personally I consider links to your page to be very important, as the more links your page has, then it follows that more people have the opportunity to visit your site.

Sites with a higher PR that link to your site will help increase your PageRank more then sites with a lower PageRank

This Blog has jumped from having a PR of 0 to a PR of 2, where as netbook-experience.com is still ranked as 0, so why the difference?

Well this site has been featured in more Blog Carnivals, and also featured on EzineArticles where I wrote an article and linked to this site in the footer. If I repeat this process for Netbook Experience I’ll see if it’s Page Rank increases.

Blog directories are huge online listing of Blogs that can point users to your Blog.

Think of it like an online Yellow Pages, but does it actually drive traffic to your Blog?

The answer is yes but I’m not sure in what scale yet.

Why do people join Blog directories?

Firstly people need to be able to find your Blog, readers go to Blog Directories to search for a specific type of blog, and they may find your site, there’s no guarantees but they certainly won’t find your site if it isn’t listed.

Secondly links are important and most Blog Directories have high Google Page Ranks, eg Blog Explosion has a PR of 5, so it may follow that using Blog Directories improves your own Page Rank. Although others hold the belief that Google ignores Blog Directories.

So have Blog Directories sent me any traffic….yes they have, I’ve registered this site and NetBook-Experience on Blog Explosion and:

Since October 4th Blog Explosion has sent 24 Visitors to Netbook-Experience.

Since October 4th Blog Explosion has send 25 visitors to JPMBLog

In this post I asked how long it would take before Google would start to send traffic to my brand new site Techplay- experience.

Last night I received  my first  traffic from a Google search, 8 days after the first post was made. I suspect this would have been quicker if I had been able to put more content on line at a quicker rate.

At least this proves that the process works.