The Serge Is Working

On a previous post I commented on how to disable Google’s Buzz in gmail. I was very annoyed at how Google introduced this “feature” to gmail users (felt more like shoved it down gmail user throat’s) with so many privacy issues and horror stories coming out of this.

In a BBC article Google product manager in charge of Buzz admitted to mistakes and apologized to users. You can read all about how they bypassed normal procedure which is blaming the process instead of the real people who made the decision to bypass procedure. This was a major product release and was not a simple decision to bypass but rather a calculated decision by management. And they say that the algorithm picked people you converse with the most but I was automatically forced to follow people I had one or two correspondence with on a mailbox I’ve had since 2004.

The biggest gripe I have though is that they forced this feature on gmail users who may or may not be interested in it. I love gmail and use it as my primary email address mainly because it reduces spam and noise so much better than other email services. Here comes a tool to add on top of a great anti spam technology that adds a sort of “friend spamming” to gmail. I was definitely not interested in it and think it would have been better off if they just launched it as a different service. Apparently they thought of this too:

Another idea, said Mr Jackson, was to create a separate service that was not part of Gmail.
“We think that integration with Gmail was absolutely the right way to go - we wanted to make Buzz easily accessible to people,” he said.

That is very wrong Mr. Jackson, launching this within gmail was the absolute wrong thing to do which is why there’s so much backlash on this issue. If this were a service launched on it’s own that people would register for (like many of the other services google provides) then you would not be apologizing in a BBC article.

The only reason they would launch this within gmail would be to boost membership in the Buzz program as fast as possible. Which seems to have been their goal because of how deceptive their whole opt in process was. I had a message in my gmail header about the service, I thought I was clicking OK to just get rid of this annoying message because I didn’t really want to read it. Instead I had clicked to opt-in. Yes, it is my mistake for not reading the full message but it still stinks of deception because they know many people won’t read.

If google releases even a useless service, just the fact that they are releasing it generates enough interest in the media that they get publicity and hoards of users registering to try it out. They didn’t need to do this, or maybe they did. Typing “failure of goo” in google search brings up the most popular suggestion of “failure of google wave” as the search term, which itself returns 3,860,000 results. Maybe they were afraid of Buzz turning out to be another failure and forcing it on gmail users would be the best way to make it a success.

This is going to be a short one. I didn’t want to have google buzz enabled in my gmail account (at least not yet) but just by checking it out it was. My first instinct was to disable it in the setting menu but there was nothing. I eventually found it, hidden ALL the way at the bottom of the page as a link called “turn off buzz”. I guess they wanted to make it as hard as possible to find.

I’ve put the adsense experiment on hold for a while until a major release I’m working on is resolved. Things will be hectic in my schedule until Feb 11th when this release will happen. The success of the release is dependent on me right now because I started consulting with the company 3 months ago and my portion of the project was scheduled to be done and I would bow out. I finished that portion within 2 months but the company had a shakeup that concluded with 4 main developers and 1 top product designer leaving (all of which had been working at the same place for 7+ years). With them a lot of the “tribal” knowledge was gone and the only dev left is a consultant who has been there for only 3 months (me). Once the release is a success, I will be back blogging about the progress of the adsense experiment.

This took me quite some time to figure out. All I wanted to do is link my Adsense account to all my Analytics profiles. Now this is easy if it’s the first time you’re linking your accounts. All the google help docs talk about this case and all the help docs say to go to “Getting Started” link. My case was different because I had already set this up for one of my profiles, my linux to macbook blog. I just added adsense to this blog and another blog I started so I wanted to now link those new accounts.

I kept looking for ways to do this but every time I didn’t find a solution I would put this aside and try again later. Well today I found the answer. You can’t do this on the adsense side. Here’s what you need:

Log into your analytics account.
You should have a list of accounts (or one account), pick the account with the multiple profiles and click on it
You should now see a list of profiles (your domains under this account). On this page at the top you should see a link to “Edit Adsense Linking Settings”. Click that link. I’m attaching a screen shot here for clarity:


Changing Analytics Settings to Link Multiple Profiles to Adsense

Follow the wizard to add your new profiles

Hope this helps you avoid the stress I had to go through to figure out such a simple task.

Going over some analytics for my Adsense Experiment, I went to the profile of this blog and noticed a visitor came from google to my site using the search term “The Serge”. Running the search myself at http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=The+Serge I got the following result:

Maybe I should start having everyone call me “The Serge”.

After a fairly early success, traffic took a nose dive over the weekend. Why are weekends so bad for blogs? If you really think about it, when do you usually read blogs? You’re probably reading this while you’re at work right now. Most people read their blogs at work. Another big percentage of users want to be out, with friends and family during the weekends. So it’s no surprise that blogs will have a low traffic number on weekends. Couple that with the fact that the site still doesn’t have any pages indexed, you can see why my traffic dropped to 1 user on sunday (which was probably just me checking site operation).

Traffic has picked up again now that it’s a monday but so far no ad clicks. I need to be more clever about ads but I can work on that at any time. The first thing I will be focusing on is driving traffic. My lesson on pingbacks opened my eyes to the possibility of drawing more traffic in. I will couple that with cleaning up some of the posts (news feeds are not working very well) and maybe write some real content made by myself to drive higher traffic.

I didn’t expect there to be any traffic on day one other than myself checking to see how the site looks, changing a few things here and there. I went to check to see if adsense was recording at least the ad impressions, I noticed that I had made 63 cents.

I immediately checked analytics to see what was going on. I looked at the traffic sources and noticed I had 11 visitors that day who came from a referring site. How is that possible? No one knows about the site yet, how did someone have the time to pick it up and link to it already. I used the referring url from analytics to go to the site in question and there I found my answer. Side note: this is exactly why I recommend installing some method of analysing your web traffic. Without it I would not have come to the answer (at least without spending hours looking over apache logs).

Wordpress has this very nice feature called pingback. Basically, when you link to another wordpress blog, a message is sent to that blog’s server and set up as a comment to the blog post. You can see an example of this on my post about Wordpress sidebar being pushed to the bottom. A fellow blogger George Coghill had a similar issue and posted about it on his blog. He was gracious enough to link to my original article on his new blog post which brought up the “pingback” comment in the comments section of my blog post.

Pingbacks are a great tool to promote your blog. First you get to link out to the target blog and that blog also links to you, so both blogs get a boost in google’s tracking of backlinks. You also now get people clicking through and finding your blog which in turn may net you some ad clicks, like it did with my single ad click and generating me 63 cents on day one of the operation.

I will be looking more closely into this feature to see if I can grow my user base and keep this going.

Setting up everything to be up and running took about 2 hours. This included:

1. Finding and buying a domain:
The most difficult part here is finding a domain that is not registered yet. Since I’m on a linux machine, I just used the linux “whois” command to see if there are any available URLs that I can think of. Luckily this project doesn’t need to have a memorable URL, I’m going to depend more on links and SEO.

Next step was to register the domain and I used my GoDaddy account to register it.

Total cost =~ $25 (I used private registration on the URL).

2. Hosting:
Like all good software engineers, I have my own private hosted server somewhere out there in internet land and I just used that server to host my blog.

3. Picking a blogging platform:
This step was again easy for me. I chose to use wordpress because I have already installed, used and even modified the source code on some projects so I have a good working knowledge of the platform. I also like wordpress because it’s so popular you can pretty much find decent themes to modify the look and feel of your blog, and if you need some custom functionality chances are you’ll find an already existing plugin.

4. Some useful plugins:
Wordpress usually comes pre-installed with the Akismet plugin. I highly recommend activating this plugin or else you will soon be bombarded with tons of spam. Other plugins I had to download and install and they are:

• SI Captcah: Another layer of protection against spam registrations and comments.
• Feed To Post: Convert RSS and Atom feeds to automatic posts. This is my way of keeping the site refreshed while not writing every single day or even multiple times a day.

5. Track Usage with Analytics:
I highly recommend you have some way of tracking your site usage. The fastest way I do this is by simply registering for a Google Analytics account. It may not have as much detail as other, more advanced analytics software out there but it is extremely fast to set up and does a good job at figuring out trending. You can now link it to your adsense account.

6. Take control of your domain with the search engines (Webmaster Tools):
It’s extremely important to control how your site is indexed with at least the three major search engines. You should register and verify your site with them through their webmaster tools:

• Google: Webmaster Tools
• Yahoo: Site Explorer
• Bing (Microsoft): Webmaster Center

7. Adsense:
Finally you can’t make any money without placing ads. Make an adsense account, generate the ads and place them in your blog.

With all the above techniques, I’m not going into details as to how to do them because this is not a tutorial on setting up a blog, hopefully this will turn out to be a tutorial on how to make money off of your blog. There are tons of resources out there who explain how to set each one up, you might want to check those out if you are stuck at any point.

The Experiment:
The concept of the experiment is very simple and almost everyone out there is trying to do this:

Try and make as much money as possible online putting in as little work/time as possible

Sounds simple enough but goes with the old underpants gnomes model of making money:
1. Start a Blog.
2. ?????
3. Profit

Rules:
The rules are pretty simple.

• No porn
• No shady deals
• No questionable products like diet pills
• No sleazy SEO techniques like placing a keyword hundreds of times on a page in white font so spiders can see them but users can’t
• No breaking the rules that are set in adsense like getting a click farm hitting your site and using fraudulent clicks to pump up your numbers

The blog needs to have real content to drive good ROI to the advertisers on the site. It needs to have good keywords mapped in search engines to drive high organic traffic. I’m not going to put effort into SEM at first but I might consider it later on just to learn more about SEM and see how effective it is to drive higher revenue.

Objectives:
Short answer would be to create a blog that can generate the quite popular number of $10,000/month from adsense revenues.

Long answer is to use the years of knowledge from working on online applications, SEO, SEM and other projects to create a revenue generating site.

Worst case scenario is I fail to reach any significant revenue but I get to learn a lot about the latest blogging technologies out there, new SEO techniques (figure out what search engine spiders like and what they dispise) and finally how NOT to make a site which I will use in my future endeavors or apply to help my clients avoid the pitfalls I make.

I see this as a win-win experiment that shouldn’t take too much of my time. Maybe I can get a book deal out of it at the end! now I’m getting way ahead of myself. Time to start the experiment.

I looked at my adsense report today and was surprised to see that I had only made $13 over the course of one full year. That’s with 18k pageviews and only 40 clicks. I followed the commonly accepted rules:
1. Start a blog based on a subject that interests you.
2. Write as often as you can.
3. Write about recent buzzwords and include them in your posts.
4. Place adsense ads.
5. Profit?

OK, so I followed all the rules initially but eventually I slipped on #2 because my day job was taking up most of my time. Even with few updates and posts, my blog still averaged a decent 1200 uniques (unique visitors) a month. The blog was a tech blog mostly about problems I faced day to day and how I fixed them.

So what was the problem?
The blog was extremely useful and efficient but completely devoid of entertainment.
It was extremely useful because even I would search for posts on my blog when I came across the same problem I’ve already fixed and discussed. Another indication of how useful it is comes from analyzing the incoming organic traffic which were usually people searching on google for “how do I fix..” or “using … on …” or jus the error message itself.
It was very efficient because my blog would usually show up in the top three results on the google searches those users made and most of them landed on the page that is an exact match to their query and their answer is right there on the landing page.
It was devoid of any entertainment value because once the users found their answers, most never came back.

Being useful and efficient is not always good. People found what they were looking for and disappeared. Many didn’t stay on the blog for more than the time it took them to read the blog post. This class of user is on a mission to fix a problem. They are not there to browse and click on links. They are not there to make a purchase so even if they click on an advertiser, the ROI is probably horrible (not that you can really base any sort of long term ROI on 40 clicks and $13).

Thinking about all this over lunch made me think of a cool adsense experiment. I will explain the rules, objectives and progression of the experiment in future posts. This will hopefully teach my readers something about how to make money using adsense (or how not to make money, what to avoid when starting an online site). I’m hoping to also learn much more aobut SEO, SEM and new blogging trends.