jpmblog.com

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.

In this post I asked how long it would take for Google to send traffic to my TechPlay Blog.

The blog was born on 21/10/09 and currently has 9 posts.

6 days later Google hasn’t sent a single visitor, but does this mean that anything is wrong – I’ve search Google for my blog’s domain and it is listed so I know that Google is crawling the blog, so why no visitors?

I suspect that the answer is content – when I launched Netbook-experience.com I had a library of posts that I could copy across quickly, more posts = more content = more Google traffic, but with Techplay-Experience I’m having to start from scratch.  So it is going to take a while  to build a good solid  selection of content for Google  to see.

Videos can be a useful addition to a blog or website, they add interest for your audience and drive repeat visitors to your site, videos can be a very useful form of sticky content.

There is also a way to make money from videos using Voxant Newsroom who provide a wide selection of individual video articles and also Video feeds. The videos carry advertising and some of the revenue generated gets passed back to you.

For every 1000 views of a video you get $3.50.

There is also an option to auto play videos where the videos automatically start to play when your site loads, these carry a lower rate of pay pf $0.50 for every 1000 views, but if you have high traffic this may work form a good source of income.

The video belows shows how the video can be integrated into your posts.

I’ve previously written about the difficulties I had in getting Google to send traffic to  My Netbook-Experience site. I eventually made a break through and managed to get Google to send me traffic by following these instructions.

With this is mind I thought I would investigate how long it would take for Google to crawl through my blog and send me traffic if I follow these instructions right from day1.

I’ll give it a go and report back here how it goes.

I thought it would be Interesting to see if any days generally bring more traffic then others. The general opinion around the Internet is that Weekends are generally bring less visitors then week days, so I thought I would see  if the traffic to my Netbook Experience Blog reflected this or not.

So using Google analytics I pulled of a report showing how many visitors visited Netbook Experience each day during September.

I’ll repeat this expercise for a month to get a better picture overall but the results for September are shown below, and show that Fridays are on average the Quietest days for my site and Sundays are the businest days.

The average number of vistitors every day in September: 

Fridays: 27.75 visitors on average
Thursdays: 30.75 visitors on average
Tuesdays: 33 visitors on average
Wednesdays: 33.4 visitors on average
Saturdays: 35.75 visitors on average
Mondays: 38 visitors on average
Sundays: 40.25 visitors on average

It’s now been nearly a week since I hosted my first Blog Carnival so I thought I would investigate how much extra traffic taking part in blog carnivals brings  to a site.

In total BlogCarnival.com has sent me 31 visitors since 18/09/09 which is when I started advertising my Carnival (13 days ago).

The highest daily numbers of visits was the day after the Carnival was published with 9 visits.

In addition I’ve submitted articles to a number of Carnivals and the domains of the hosts and the number of hits from those Domains are shown below:

• http://www.successpart2.com/ 0 hits
• http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/ 0 hits
• http://thatsblog.com 7 hits

So over all I’ve had 38 visitors from my Blog Carnival work, and as well as picking up a number of extra links hosting the carnival provides a regular source of content.

38 may not sound like a lot but I’ll keep working with Blog Carnivals to see how it goes, particularly with the Carnivals that send me traffic.

Here’s an update on my first big Word Press Project Netbook Experience.

Originally a Blogger hosted Blog, my Netbook Experience site aims at providing Hints and Tips for getting the best user experience out of the Acer Aspire One Netbook.

Since 03/08/09 :

• Netbook-experience.com has received 1,767 hits from 1106 different visitors.
• During that time 822 hits have come from my old blog - after google un-banned me, I put links from the old site to the new site.
• Google has sent me 470 visitors directly. (Google only started sending me traffic on the 29th of August)
• Aspireoneuser.com sent me 122 hits
• getsatisfaction.com have sent me 65 hits

You want a frequently read blog, with good sticky content and returning visitors who find your articles interesting, but how do you do it?I’ve been giving this some thought and here are my ideas.

I use this blog to record not only my blogging process but only to write about topics which genuinely interest me, for example my posts on Terry Wogan, and I’ve noticed that these posts and articles  bring in visitors from Google, that means not only does it interest you, but it interests other people.

These readers have visited your blog and found content which interests them, that means that there’s a possibility that they will return again, it would be very unusual for a topic to interest a blog author and nobody else out there on the Internet. The more content that you write on your blog, the more content there is for for Google to see and send visitors to you.

It is important not just to blog about anything for the sake of it, blogging should be an enjoyable experience and if your content doesn’t interest you then writing it is going to be tedious, and if it doesn’t interest you then why should it interest anyone else.

In this post I mentioned how I plan to utilize Blog Carnivals  to bring traffic to my blogs.

I’ve found a new Carnival called wordpress for beginners which aims to help new bloggers with the basics of WordPress.

I’ve entered 2 blog posts to this carnival:

http://jpmblog.com/2009/09/how-to-integrate-google-webmaster-tools-into-your-wordpress-blog/

&

http://jpmblog.com/2009/08/how-to-get-google-to-send-you-traffic/

The Carnival is published on the 28th of September. I’ll report back here how it goes.

Blog Carnivals provide a usefulway for bloggers to share their blog posts and articles on other blogs and sites.

Bloggers submit the URL of the desired article, along with a brief comment about the post to a related carnival host site, the end result is a blog post that contains links to several posts including yours.

Why are Blog Carnivals good:

• Bloggers can share knowledge, thoughts, good practice and stories about almost any topic and genre with like minded people.
• Bloggers have a resource where they can find information which interests them 
• Your site gets an extra link for each post that is accepted onto a carnival.
• Carnivals can drive new traffic and readers to your site.

I’ve posted an article on the following sites to see how much traffic it brings to my blog:

http://www.successpart2.com/a-make-money-blogging-carnival-september-18-2009/ (Published 18/09/09)

http://thatsblog.com/blog-carnival-blogging/blog-carnival-blogging-sixty-fifth-edition (Published 15/09/09)

http://blogging4good.blogspot.com/2009/09/blog-carnival-bringing-more-traffic-to.html (Published 18/09/09)

http://www.mynetbookworld.com/ (published 05/10/09)

I’ve also prepared to re-launch a blog carnival that I used to run a couple of years ago, and host it on this site.

The first eddition will be published next Friday, and I’ll post my findings here.

I thought I would give an update on my first big Word Press Project, Netbook Experience.

Originally a Blogger hosted Blog, my Netbook Experience site aims at providing Hints and Tips for getting the best user experience out of the Acer Aspire One Netbook.

The majority of the posts from the old site are now copied across to the new site, and traffic is now hitting the site (after some trouble shooting). So wheres my traffic coming from:

Since 03/08/09 :

• Netbook-experience.com has received 1,317 hits from 823 different visitors.
• During that time 681 hits have come from my old blog - after google un-banned me, I put links from the old site to the new site.
• Google has sent me 292 visitors directly. (Google only started sending me traffic on the 29th of August)
• And between them aspireoneuser.com and  getsatisfaction.com have sent me over 140 hits