The Serge Is Working

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.

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.