Making a living from a website

Date: March 2012: Having done it myself,  I can confirm that someone totally new to website building can make a living in America (USA) from a single content website, working alone. How much do you have to earn to make living in the US? It depends what your demands are. You can live cheap and have no children or have five kids and send them to expensive schools etc.. Anyway, we are told that a living wage is about $4,000 per month. I am sure you can live off less.

Update June 2014. I earn less (about half) these days from my site because it is impossible to compete after 7 years or so. Also you run out of content. You exhaust the subject matter. You have to evolve as well which is hard. It takes money. I give away all the money earned these days or pay writers with it.

You can make $4,000 per month from a single website within about 2 years of starting from scratch without any prior knowledge of how to build a website or make money from it. As I said, I know because I did it. However, there are a number of big caveats...

It is not easy. Why should it be? In fact it is tricky and hard work. There is an element of luck as well. There are no set formulae for success either. It is no easier making money on the Internet than it is making it somewhere else. The advantages of Internet work are that you can do it whenever you like and wherever you like. And you are your own boss. A lot of people would like that.

I now earn less than $4,000 due to competition, copyright infringements, Google changing its algorithm etc.. That is the nature of the beast. I am endeavouring to come back though!

There are a lot of failures. Expectations should be realistic. It is getting harder for an individual to make money on the Internet working alone as competition grows. It has even changed substantially since I started about 4.5 years ago.

You have to continually build the site because that is what the search engines demand. I think the sort person who has a good chance of being successful making a living in America from a content site is:

• suited to website building work - meaning he or she likes building websites and likes researching information.
• reasonably intelligent;
• hard working;
• a stayer - has stamina;
• at least proficient in writing good English and is...
• committed and
• able to take some risks and be willing to learn by mistakes.

Note 1 : if you have commitment, stamina and an inquiring mind you can do without the rest because you can learn as you go.  Don't be put off by the list. But to summarize, it will not be an easy journey. Why should it be?

Note 2: A suitable person for making a living from a website is someone who likes and is good at:

1. science (html coding)
2. art (illustrations)
3. design (layout)
4. writing (text)

....these are ideals. The more of the above the better. Writing skills must be decent. I think that you have to be a good allrounder if you work alone and initially you almost certainly will work alone.

Note 3: There are other ways of making money on the internet. This article deals with building the classic content website. This is the way anyone can make money using advertising on the site such as Google AdSense.

I don't have the figures, but it is probable that about one in 100 attempts to make a living from the internet are successful (1%). However, there are some inspiring stories. One person comes to mind. She is the owner/creator of http://www.2createawebsite.com/. She is certainly one of the most successful individual internet entrepreneurs - meaning working on the site as an individual rather than a team effort. She says she developed RSI (repetitive strain injury) in her hands and now dictates some of her content. That gives a clue as to the amount of work that you need to put in. She earns big though (I often dictate my articles now too).

Website Hosting

I would recommend SiteSell, Wordpress and Google Blogger. SiteSell charge but they provide you with the chance to learn as you build so you can get off the ground quickly. This motivates as you can see results more quickly. It can be very demotivating if nothing happens for months and nothing will happen for months normally.

Important update: I now reject SiteSell. They kicked forced me to move my website. Here is the story. 


You can make good money using free Google Blogger without even having a custom domain name. However, Google might not like it. You can customise the domain with Google Blogger.

Revenue

AdSense, Casale Media, Infolinks, Custom advertising. These are the simple ways I make money. There are many other ways including selling products as an affiliate. You act as an agent by advertising your partner's products on your site and get a commission. I tend to avoid these because of the management needed to control the business. That is a personal choice.

Google Adsense Revenue Maximized

I'll tell you how I maximise Google Adsense for western sites reading left to right. Firstly though, you should know that I don't build my website to make money! I do it to keep myself occupied and to have a goal in life. You will understand, therefore, why I like to keep the process of making money from my website as simple as possible so that I can concentrate on achieving my goal; attracting visitors and having fun building the site. That is also a good starting point to make money.

On that basis, what I am going to say is simple and based on common sense assessments that are confirmed by Google Adsense specialist trainers whom I have met when attending Google run Adsense seminars.

The basic model for me in respect of Adsense is as follows:

(1) To let Google decide what adverts to present on my site. They are the experts. I can modify Google's choice and sometimes I feel inclined to do so. For example, I sense that adverts for charities such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are not the best earners but as I give some money to charity from the site I feel obliged to support charities. I therefore accept these adverts. Also, it may the case that the WWF have decided to place ads on my site. I don't want to disappoint them.

Placement

(2) To place the Adsense units in the most prominent places on each page. Where are these places? Commonsense dictates that the reader's eye starts at the top left of the page in the region of the title, and then soon afterward just below it. Most people on the Internet skim and speed read the first bit of text and then tail off. If they like what they see they stay around and read more and digest it. The adverts should reflect this behavior. The Adsense ads must be high up and, in your face, (above the fold as the experts call it).

When you create carefully produced copy it can be difficult to decide to "spoil it" with adverts right at the beginning. I would resist that obstacle and put it where the eye falls. Be commercial. Internet surfers are used to seeing ads on the page so aren't put off. When they are ready to move on, they might click on an Adsense advert. If they are ready soon after visiting, they will click on the top ads and if they have read the article, they might click on the Adsense at the base of the page. It is said that Adsense does not drive visitors off the site. It just gives them an option when they are ready to leave.

Here is a diagram showing the hotspots as I see it (four are listed but only three are allowed as you know):

The red=hot. The blue=cold. Often you see websites with a banner on top of the site. We are told that this is not a good place for Adsense. It is out of the eye-line for visitors who read the text of an article. Perhaps the website creators who place Adsense above the website are using it as a branding tool. Google ads look good and can actually improve a site's appearance.

Why are the Adsense adverts on this page where they are? Because Google automatically puts them there and the choices for change are limited. This site is a Google Blogger hosted subsomain. The Adsense units are both outside the area of text. I prefer adverts inside the text as it forces readers to see it. Note: the advert top left inside the text is a Casale Media advert in an iframe tag.

Text and Image

Text and image ads are best. Let Google present both from the same Adsense script.

Size

Use the largest size you can. I use a thin line of links immediately above the title. That is more or less the only place I use a thin line of links. The reason is because when I received one-to-one advice from a charming Google employee she recommended that I place this Adsense unit in this position. It has worked well and earns about £80 - £100 per month by itself.

Personalised

As each page or each website is different the above suggestions are generalizations.

Adsense colour etc.

I used to mess around with colours etc. I saw no difference. I prefer the standard Google format because people recognise these as adverts. I believe that is a positive thing. This leads to the question whether you should blend in ads and place them where the navigation bar is. To me this looks dishonest and it colors my assessment of the website negatively.

Revenue

I am a relatively small time player (Alexa 114k at 14th March 2012 - it used to be 50k). I earn about $2,000 (USD) per month from Adsense. The site used to make quite a bit more but Google's algorithm, copyright infringements and intense competition changed that. I also make some Adsense revenue from YouTube videos (about $400 per month).

Google My Maps to Improve Your Blog

I would strongly advise using Google My Maps to Improve your blog. I use this fantastic software to create maps to illustrate the geographic ranges of the wild cats. OK, that is pretty specific stuff. But the potential is awesome. You can also use third party software to embed your maps into you blog. I am guessing but I am pretty sure that Google will be doing this themselves soon.

At the moment you would normally produce your map using My Maps and then link to it. But having produced some maps of my own I found a means to embed them. Here is an example:



In the above map, the range of the African golden cat is illustrated in blue. Little is known about this wild cat so my idea is that if the map is public and anyone can upgrade it, this should in time result in a greater knowledge of this cat, which in turn should assist conservation efforts. The original map that feeds this embed is here: African golden cat range. This is serious but stuff but it can be fun too. You can see the page on the range of this wild cat here: African golden cat geographic range.

The kinds of things that can be done with Google My Maps are outlined in this Google video:



This next video you have probably seen! It is that good but it illustrates how you can let other people collaborate on your maps (if you allow it) and allow the map to be public or private:



Most people will use Google My Maps to, for example, plot routes to places which can then be published. A classic purpose might be to show people how to find your house if you are having a party or selling it. You can add photographs and videos to places that are identified by flags, which can be dragged into position very easily.

There are just so many possibilities for Google My Maps to improve your Blog. On the basis that you can embed the map and write notes, add photos and embed videos about the places marked on the map you can virtually build an entire page around a map. Of course, for SEO reasons you'll need to add some words to the article too!



From Google My Maps to Improve Your Blog to Home Page

SEO Blog Software

My blog gets up to 2,700 unique visitors daily (see below). Here is a review of a top listed (by Google) SEO Blog software website. I think that people search for this in order to find some sort of software that will search engine optimize their blog automatically. The whole tortuous thing done for you. That doesn’t sound right to me. People don’t and can’t do that. So although as far as I am concerned the truth is that there is no shortcut to getting your work listed by Google in search results at a position (first page) that makes it useful, I am reviewing Jeff Johnson Underground Training Lab, Free SEO Blog Software and Traffic-Getting Training Tutorials.

Traffic for Pictures-of-Cats.org Blog -- Statcounter. 20-5-09.

Jeff Johnson’s website gets lots of traffic; a vast amount. A testament to the number of people who want to get their blog noticed. When you go to the site he tells you why he gives stuff away and then asks you to sign up. You confirm by email and then an email is sent to you, which purportedly contains the magic SEO Blog Software and tutorials.

In the email, he says that “Your” free software download link is below (in the email). But where the hell is it?! I am still looking. I am writing this at the same time that I signed up; it’s in real time. After about 15 lines of email in which he asks that we watch out for future emails he says,

“Here are your Free SEO Blog Software download instructions: Very Important! My Free SEO Blog Software is being replaced by my new SEO tool called "Traffic Getting SEO Plugin" for Wordpress.”

It is starting to look odd, already. He calls this, “Traffic Getting SEO Plugin^(TM) for Wordpress”. Further down the email there is a link to a “review” of this software. I didn’t click on this because I already don’t trust this. It is probably OK but I don’t use Wordpress and I am not sure that my computer is going to be alright afterwards.

“Reviewing” the software is the first stage. You then have to login to get the download. Jeff says,

“Use this login information to access the download page:”

Then below that is a link above which are the words,

“Download the Traffic Getting SEO Plugin here:”

So, do we have to login for the Wordpress software or can we get it from the email? I am confused but I am not going to click on the link. That is it for me. I couldn’t find the SEO Blog software that I was looking for and expected from the language used. If he had simply provided a link to the product he said he would deliver, I would have continued.

Frankly, there is a lot of “white noise” out there on the internet. By white noise I mean distracting information and get rich quick type schemes (it is the guys who run the schemes who get rich, if at all, not us). They all prey on people who are struggling to make some money on the blasted internet. We used to have a dream that you could make real money on the internet more easily than you could elsewhere. That dream has died. It is as tough on the internet. But it suites a lot of people to make a living on the internet.

However, if you use Google Blogger as free blog hosting then you have made a good choice in my opinion because Google will tend to list Blogger blog posts after about 2 months and provided that you make more than a few of them! It is all about quality and quantity of content; posting regularly but not too speedily that the quality suffers.

I have made several posts about improving your chances of getting your blog noticed:

1. How To Publicize Your Blog
2. Google Image Search Builds Traffic
3. How To Get Traffic To Your Blog
4. Twitter Helps Blogger Traffic

By the way I make about $1,000 (USD) per month on the internet so it can be done the old fashioned way!

From SEO Blog Software to Home Page

Is Site Sell Site Buildit a Scam?

Update Nov 28th, 2021: Evoy kicked me out of SiteSell. He told me to go and take my site elsewhere because I dared to ask some tough questions on his forum as to why Alexa rankings were diving. The reason? SiteSell sites were over-optimised for SEO and Evoy was openly critical of Google. He made enemies of Google and Google killed him for a long time. My advice now? Don't use SiteSell. They were shits to me.

Is Site Sell Site Buildit a Scam? I am writing this in response to the video arguments and text arguments of Allyn Hane: Master Of My Own Domain (this is the page). He says that SBI or Site Sell is bullshit. What he means is that you cannot succeed on the internet by being spoon feed “how to” information, as SBI do, and succeed in the long term. The only way to succeed in the long term is to know coding and internet marketing, the whole kibosh, the lot. After all, you wouldn’t go into any business without knowing a good deal about it and having the skills to perform, would you?

Normally I would say, yes, and agree that the internet business is no different to normal business. This is what Allyn Hane is saying. The truth, though, is that the internet business is not quite like any other business. For example, html code is only in existence to provide us with the means to put stuff on the internet. We don’t need to know all about it.

Sure it helps to know about it but by far the most important thing is how to express knowledge not how the internet works. And to put things on the internet at a simple level is relatively easy. There are many successful yet simple sites. Dr. Evoy advocates simplicity. His site Sitesell.com is a good example (at one time it had Alexa 500). So you don’t need to be an internet guru to succeed on the ‘net. This then supports the SBI model. They do the coding for you until (and this is important) you have found your feet and are ready to jump out of the box and do your own thing.

I know this lady in the video above, not personally but as a person who has succeeded using SBI. She's smart. And yes you need to be smart to really succeed with SBI.....

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Note: Dr. Evoy, the founder of SiteSell.com would be dismayed to hear people calling his product a scam or, in this case, bullsh*t. He plays it very straight. There are scammers out there but he and SBI are not one of them, believe me. You have to work hard etc. and do your bit but with SBI supporting you it works.

 Note: If you found a bad review of SBI!, it was most likely part of a group of unscrupulous competitors who recently wrote and published a bunch of fake reviews about Site Build It! (Include link where you see fit).

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One of the great barriers to succeeding on the internet is to get off the ground. It is a complete mystery, still, to a vast number of people. And a good proportion of these people have lots to give. They just don’t have the means to do it and Site Sell or SBI gives them the launch pad, the means to get on the internet, progress and learn until they can stand on their own two feet. You cannot find this anywhere else, as far as I know.

I know that the founder and chief executive, Dr. Evoy, (now a consultant by the way) also founded one of the great affiliate schemes on the internet (5 Pillar Club) in which SBI people sell the SBI products on the websites that they build with the help of SBI (neat that) but few of them sell the product to any great extent, if one is honest.

It is a slightly clunky product when compared to Google Blogger for example - no doubt about it. It needs modernisation, I think (update: they have introduced new templates). But I am sure that the board of directors have decided that they must keep the $299 yearly subscription frozen under the barrage from Google Blogger and the other free website hosting businesses. The gorilla Google (I actually love Google) is hurting Sitesell and SBI. SBI sites are a little unsophisticated compared to Blogger sites. But, and this is one of the keys, it doesn’t matter if a site is a bit clunky (it may actually help if it is not too slick). The overriding factor is content, what you say and what images or videos you put up on the internet. Simplicity is all and Allyn Hane knows that because his site is simple and effective.

He succeeds on the back of what he says. One of Dr. Evoy’s mantras is to keep it simple and say what you know (on the basis that you know something worth passing on to the public) in your voice while leaving all the distracting bits and pieces, the mechanics and the "white noise" (distracting information on SEO) to him and Site Sell. This is very appealing to women stuck at home with a bit of time on their hands, for example. Yet, I agree that the selling and persuasive powers of Dr. Evoy are so good that the vast majority of new starters think that they can make a viable amount of money by following SBI tutorials and building 30+ pages.

This will never work. Most, almost all in my view, make an amount of money that is so small as to make it of no real consequence in their lives. But they live in hope. I am being brutally honest and some will disagree with that. But some go on and develop, using SBI’s great tutorials, to learn the basics and then to experiment and in effect they are learning on the job. That is invaluable. I am one of those people. When I started I knew next to nothing. I learned from SBI. I experimented and did my own thing and realized late in the day that it is better to stick to SBI methods and to keep it simple (I made mistakes, of course).

There is a mass of “white noise” out there, distracting information that pulls you off the straight and narrow SBI model. I am still learning. I have a long way to go. This site is a subdomain of my main site, www.pictures-of-cats.org. It is very easy to set up a subdomain using SBI tools. Another little advantage of SBI. There are numerous support tools and they all free us up to produce content. SBI would drive a computer geek to distraction because it is designed for people who know nothing about html and the internet but who have knowledge or a skill on other topics that are just as valuable. It allows them to express themselves on the internet. And you know, a lot of computer savvy people have very little to give the world other than their computer knowledge and even that knowledge they have difficulty in disseminating.

It is quite rare to find someone who knows the mechanics of html and another interesting and useful subject as well. SBI and Site Sell overcomes that obstacle. You only have to know one element of that double act. You can ignore the html bit and still succeed. This is very valuable for many people who are excluded from disseminating their knowledge on the internet. It opens doors to many people. A very important point that is often missed however is that not only does Site Sell SBI give people access to a world wide audience who would otherwise be excluded, it optimises the page for you.

And such are the SEO skills of Dr. Evoy and his team that the pages that a novice produces are search engine optimised to a very high degree. This is a hidden benefit but the most important part of the SBI process. This is what makes SBI sites more successful than other sites. I am sure that a novice building a web page with SBI in the most simplistic of ways (using what SBI calls, “blockbuilder”) is better optimised in a way that allows it to be found and listed by the search engines than many a page produced by computer and internet geeks. SBIers are, after all taping into the formidable SEO skills of one of the best in the business, Dr. Evoy.

There are many useful features but one, for me, stands out. Site Sell, SBI call it C2 (content version 2). It is a form that is designed for visitors to fill in to allow the site to be built in part them (see an example in action). The trouble is this; precious few use it. I have over 7,000 uniques daily, some days at the moment, and I only get 1 to 2 submissions daily. This is to be expected because few visitors are motivated to give you something. Most people are out to receive something; information etc. But so effective is this form that I use it myself and to great effect as pages automatically produced by it are routinely listed by Google on page one of a search and not infrequently in the top 5. And this applies to Google.com and Google.co.uk searches. This gives a clue as to the effectiveness of SiteSell's SEO abilities. So having achieved an Alexa rank currently of 103,000 (at June 2009 it is 94,000) after less than 2 years building the site and making about $1,000 (USD) a month I am pleased with SBI (the site is not yet optimised in terms of making money, by the way and I made $1,200+ in May of 2009) .

The annual SBI fee of $299 (2009) can be recovered in a fraction of a single month. The SEO facility alone makes the money well spent. I know there are aspects of SBI that are outdated and clunky as I said but at its core it is still highly effective and provides a service that is perhaps unique and especially attractive for people who are stuck at home and who want to work while caring for children as a good example.

I think that the kind of remarks made by Allyn Hane when he says that Site Sell and SBI are a scam and bullsh*t are from a person who has not (with respect to him) fully grasped the benefits of the process. He is falling into that trap of being obliged to write a webpage (to produce content) without having fully read about it or, better still, having experienced it. He won’t mind because all he is really doing is bringing in traffic to his site. He is being deliberately provocative but at another person's expense it should be said. Whether his post is accurate or not is secondary to provoking reaction in the public. And that is OK.

I can understand that. But SBI needs defending from these slightly misleading articles. Update late August: I am one of the people who has benefited from SBI. I would not have succeeded without the knowledge I gained through working with them. This site is a subdomain. The Alexa ranking is around 80,000 (at June 2010 the Alexa ranking is 55,000). I owe a lot of that to SBI Sitesell. I really do and I am not just selling SBI. The site makes about 2,000 USD per month undermonetized.

I am a 60 year man with no previous experience of website building and within 2 years I am in the top 80,000 sites in the world. There are hundreds of millions of sites. And a lot of sites that are doing worse than mine have a team of geeks working on the site. I work entirely alone! And being 60 it keeps me alive! I need to do something and be focused. My site and SBI give me that. One great thing about SBI is that you can walk away if it doesn't work out for you at no cost as far as I remember. And you can change the website domain once and restart without charge. I did that because my first two month attempt I decided would not work. SBI are very helpful but best of all is they teach you as you work how to get your site noticed by Google and the other search engines and that is so very important.

1. Some more information in a video.
2. From Is Site Sell Site Buildit a Scam to Home Page

How to Publicize Your Blog

How to publicize your blog. A comprehensive list of things to do. The Google Blogger help team tells you a lot of what you need to know to publicize your blog or promote it - call it what you like. There are a number of options that need to be considered and selected and we tend not to get involved in these because at first it is all a bit confusing or boring. Here is a list of things you should do to publicize your blog.

Note: this was written in 2009! A lot of it still holds true but things have moved on. The ultimate way of publicising your blog is to get good Google search result rankings and that means writing lots of excellent articles and at least one a day for ever!! (but see pink update below!) You have to persist and be disciplined. You might write more 💕. It helps to produce original thought which is hard. At 2024 this blog has been on the internet for 16 years. The average lifespan of a website is around 2.6 years!!

Further update Aug 2024: Google search is f**k*d. It is not just me saying this. Check out the internet. Sorry Google but you have to change and fast. They incorporate AI and Google has an agenda but remain resolutely opaque about what they are doing. It is horrible. Google has destroyed hundreds of thousands of websites as their traffic has declined by 90%. All you can do it write great articles well illustrated and pray that things change. But AI is a website killer. Right now I would not recommend starting a website. No way. Unless you have a brilliant and entirely novel idea. 😱😎😒

Firstly, on a fundamental level you have to be prepared to write a lot of good posts that are well focused and which are more than a weak duplication of what someone else has done. The posts have to be of reasonable length. Any post I have made bar one (out of over a 1000 posts) that was less than about 200 words did not show up on a Google search. My most successful posts have usually been the longer ones and the better prepared ones; the posts that have been prepared with some care and a little more than the normal amount of attention. 

But not all long ones are successful. In fact, Google say that the posts should be both “succinct” and put out “pertinent new information”. This is not an exact science; even Google admit that. The reason why I mention this is because the best way to publicize your blog is to get your posts listed in search results. A Google search listing on the first page, preferably in the top 5 is pretty much essential and if you can get top spot the traffic will increase noticeably overnight. Google is the best publicity tool that we all have.

On the basis that you are posting decent length quality posts and doing it reasonably frequently, it is also worth paying attention to “the rules” about keywords. The use of keywords in blogs will enhance the chances of the post being picked up. Read about keyword use: How To Get Traffic to Your Blog. With these basics out of the way what about the fiddly bits at the back of the blog, the settings etc.? In this regard I would just follow Blogger’s recommendations and common sense. I expand of them below.

Note: As at the date of this post the following are valid and effective but Google constantly upgrades Blogger so things change.

The first thing is to set your blog settings so that your blog sends “pings” (messages in my language). Doing this creates the possibility of your work being listed and shown in lists. For example, Blogger runs things such as Blogger Play and the “Next Blog” feature. You should participate in these. Every little thing helps. Blogger Play (update: this has changed to Reader Play or some such thing) is a webpage that receives feeds of pictures from the millions of Blogger blogs (and profile pages) and presents them as a slide show. While “Next Blog” is the Navbar feature that allows bloggers to click on and be taken randomly to the next blog. This can publicize your blog as it could be your blog that is picked by Blogger. In order to benefit from these features you will need to go to the “Settings” page and select “Basic”. If you scroll down you should see these options and the settings should be as indicated in this photo:

Note: these screenshots are out of date as the settings on Blogger have changed. I've decided to leave them nonetheless.



Another thing that Blogger suggests that you do is to activate the Navbar. This is not a Navbar as I know it but it is useful. It is the bar at the top of the page running across the page. It has a button, about in the middle that reads, “Next Blog”. Click this and you go to randomly selected blog (or is it random? - not sure as the better blogs may come up more frequently than the others). Many bloggers like to remove the Navbar as they want their blog to look completely different to a Blogger site, which is possible, but the Navbar is a very useful tool and why throw away a useful tool for appearance sake? Believe me content is far more important than appearance. Just look at the Google Blogger help pages. The colour of the Navbar can be changed, incidentally.

Next, it is advisable to ensure that each post that you create is stored as a separate page so that it can be found months and years later as your blog gets better known! You should turn on “Post Pages” by going to “Settings” and then selecting, “Archiving”. Scroll down to “Enable Post Pages?”. You will see the settings as indicated below:



Just going off track for a minute, the Blogger team select what they call a “Blog of Note” each month. Over 700 hundred blogs have been chosen and are now archived by month on this page – also see blogs of note(new window). If you have the time and inclination, it may reward you to have a look at the blogs and decide if there is a common thread. Blogs listed here can get a traffic boost.

Back to the boring but essential stuff. Oh, before I forget, pictures. I discuss the power of Google image search here: Google Image Search Builds Traffic. An article on how to publicize your blog mustn’t overlook how you use images as this is a powerful tool.

The next “back room” administrative tool is the email post link. You get to this by going to “Settings” and then “Basic” and scrolling down. This should be turned on to enable visitors who like the post to email it to other people. And if we are lucky it will then be forwarded on to other people by email and so on. Sounds great that. It isn’t quite like that but all these little factors should be incorporated. This is how the setting looks like when selected:



On the blog this facility shows up as an icon of an envelope at the base of the blog post.

Next, that mysterious thing RSS Feeds. This is a powerful tool and a must. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. (see Wikipedia explanation)(new window). This is perhaps the most important feature in how to publicize your blog other than preparing good content. It is simply a piece of software that picks up your blog post and presents the most recent post on blog feeds that people have subscribed to. For example, you can use feeds to present recent posts from your own blog or someone else's on your iGoogle desktop. And there is Google Reader (new window) and Google Alerts (new window) and many other feed services. Google Reader is Google’s version of the receiving end of RSS feeds. And with Google Alerts you can specify that Google picks up feeds about cat news, for example, (my area of interest). The information can be sent to you in an email. That is RSS from the customer end of the process. From the blog end it means that someone somewhere may be getting your blog post fed to their computer automatically all the time. This spreads the word and is a great way to publicize your blog.

Just make sure the facility is activated by going to “Settings” and then “Site Feed”. The setting should show like this (“Full”):



You can add a feed widget to your blog (a device which visitors can select to get your blog feeds) by clicking on, “Add a Gadget” and selecting, “Feed”:



Here are some more things to do to publicize your blog:

1. Embed YouTube videos and Flickr videos and photos - update: Google likes embedded Flickr videos in my opinion.  As at June 2011 video is increasingly important to the internet - consider doing something on video. I believe these increase the chances of your blog getting a better Page Rank (PR) and the better the PR the better the chance of being listed high up by the search engines. I believe this because YouTube is owned by Google and Google, although providing lots of free public services of great quality, is a business and it wants us to use its products. It, therefore, gives a reward - better page rank. Which in turn means the videos are seen more on pages that are found more frequently. This means YouTube becomes more used and powerful and so does Google. As to Flickr, the new algorithm appears to be favoring Flickr pages. I would use that to your advantage.
   
2. Link exchange; obtain an agreement from another blogger whose blog has a decent PR to exchange links with you. And leave links to your blog in the comments of other blogs where allowed and where appropriate. Inbound links improves PR (see above).
3. Try and get your blog listed in the directories. Some people do this for you but beware. This once again gives your blog inbound links improving PR and then Google will list you higher; the best kind of publicity. I have managed to get my website listed in the Yahoo directory. This cost an up front $299 with no guarantee of acceptance! But if accepted it definitely helps Google search rankings. The effect is almost immediate. The Yahoo directory has status because the listed sites are hand selected. Google knows that and rewards accordingly. You pay the $299 yearly too.
4. I have never done the next one but Google Blogger recommend it: put a link to your blog at the base of your emails, your email signature. This might help to spread the word.
5. As at the date of this post Twitter is all the rage. You can use Twitter to publicize your blog but I wouldn’t overdo it. See: Twitter Helps Blog Traffic. Update Jan 2011: Facebook and Twitter are good social networking sites to promote your blog. The question is, "do you have the time to write the blog daily and social network sufficiently to make these sites work for you?" YouTube is another site that can spread the word and make Adsense revenue but once again it takes time to create quality videos. I have a YouTube channel and am a YouTube partner: broadsurf. Regarding Facebook I have a contributor who spreads the word for me on Facebook. You can see from the upstream clickstream (see chart below) that some visitors come from Facebook.
6. One last point – the obvious really, word of mouth. It pays to get around and meet people on the ground. The old fashioned way. This is for serious bloggers. But if you are active, on the ground, in the sphere of the subject matter of your blog it will publicize the blog by word of mouth.

Facebook contributes.

How to publicize your blog? Of all the above the most powerful is persistently writing high quality content over a period of time. If everything that I have mentioned were ignored, yet the content was good and there was lots of it, your blog would succeed.

Update 29-10-09: I have a couple of great tips that no one uses to improve SERs (search engine rankings). They were discovered by both thought and trial and error. If someone wants to know them you'll have to give me something in return and that will be at least a 15-line contribution of decent quality on my website: Pictures of cats org. You can see all the input forms here. When you use the form leave an email and I'll tell you the tip of the decade!! Well not quite but very useful tip that I have not seen mentioned anywhere.

One last point: Please be patient and persistent. This is a slow grind

From How to Publicize Your Blog to Home Page

Delete Images with Caution

When amending or upgrading a page of your website delete images with caution. It takes a considerable amount of time for Google image search to favour your images; perhaps 18 months for an image to appear on page one of an image search results page.

If you are thinking of changing the image on the page that you are working on it is advisable to do a search in Google for images under the name of the html file of the page that you are working on.

For example, I am working on my “Cat Facts” page on which there are several images. On a Google images search for “cat facts” I noticed that three images from the current page are on the first 2 pages of results.

I will make sure that those images stay put and I intend to work around them, deleting text around the photo and rebuilding that way to preserve the hard earned success of the current situation.

From Delete Images with Caution to Home Page

Google Image Search builds Traffic

Google image search builds traffic. I run this Blogger site which is part of the main site: http://www.pictures-of-cats.org. Pictures of Cats.org (PoC) is about pictures of cats, for sure. But it is about much more than that. There is a ton of information on the site; lots of words. More words in fact than pictures. Yet most of my traffic to PoC comes from Google Image Search. This is such an important traffic builder but I sense that it is a somewhat forgotten, second string thing. Something that just works in the background to add an extra bit of traffic.

As the internet gets faster with improved broadband speeds (and in the long term it will get even faster) the old clichés about using small picture files to keep page load times quick are becoming redundant. We were advised to upload pictures not larger than 15,000 bytes. This is a small image. I use larger sizes, up to about 30,000 bytes. If there is only one image on the page I go up to 80,000 bytes. However, image file size needs to be considered every time to ensure decent load times.

Here is an image of the top 5 referrers to PoC (referrers means those sites and pages from which traffic to PoC arrives) for May 2009 (to day 5):

The important thing to note is that the No.1 referrer is Images.google with www.google a close second. In the top 20 referrers 8 are image searches. As said, Google image search builds traffic.

I don’t do anything special to get the images seen by Google. I simply ensure there is an “alt” tag. Even when there is no alt tag Google finds them. I find it is best to leave the pictures alone once on the page. Rotating pictures to freshen up the page is not a good idea as Google does take its time to find and list images. This is not because of something Google is doing but because of the enormous number of images on the internet. It is wiser to refresh with new text.

I tend also to make sure the image and alt tag chime with the subject matter of the post to ensure that the post or article is focused and coordinated. Please don’t forget that Google image search builds traffic. And when using Blogger it is best for SEO purposes to have a Picasa Web account and to upload the pictures using the compose mode image uploader. These images are saved on Google servers and listed in your Picasa Web album. Google image search lists Picasa Web album images so make them public if you can.

From Google image search builds traffic to Home Page

Technorati Tags: software applications,SEO,internet marketing

How to Get Traffic to Your Blog

How to get traffic to your blog. This is what most of us think about. There is no point, really, in writing a blog unless someone is reading it and the more the better if you are trying to make a bit of money at the same time. These are my points in getting traffic to your blog:

1. Content and patience are king. Keep writing genuinely useful content that people want to read and look at. Have patience to allow Google and the other search engines to list and find your blog. It will take months to get any real traffic. This is a kind of test for us. Google weeds out the people who do not have staying power. I am sure that part of the very complex Google Algorithm is a formula which asks if the blog has been around for “x” amount of time and whether new posts have been added over that time. Google is far bigger than the others so you’ll need to be found and listed by Google in a search. That is one reason why I use Google Blogger. Google understands it’s own products and I say it will tend to favour very slightly Blogger over, say, WordPress.
2. Keep post fairly snappy but content rich. The attention span of modern visitors is short!
3. Use Keywords (What are Keywords). These tell you what people are searching for and you can research supply and demand of keywords. Supply in this context means the number of websites that provide information on a particular subject and demand in this context means the number of people looking for information on a particular subject. You might try Wordtracker. I use SBI (Sitesell) Brainstorm It!
4. Although less important today, the title to the post should be a selected keyword that has high demand and low supply.
5. The keyword referred to at 4 above should be used in the post (but not over used) and as “alt” tags on photos.
6. The keyword should be used in the first line or two of the post.
7. The keyword should be in a link in the post.
8. You should get inbound links to your blog to improve Page Rank. This helps to get your blog listed higher by the search engines. This will come in time if the blog is good as people will want to link to it but initially it means pushing things along by (a) submitting to article sites (b) making comments on other blogs and leaving URLs to your blog (d) getting your blog listed in directories and (e) participating in link exchange agreements.
9. If you can get friends to link to your blog.
10. Join and participate in forums, where your blog is relevant. Include the URL of your blog when appropriate.
11. Search engines may index your blog using the site feed so make sure it is activated.
12. Submit your blog to the search engines, for indexing.
13. Make frequent posts, say one or two a day. As mentioned make the posts as good as possible. Take your time and think long term.

It is hardly ever possible to achieve success on the internet without patience, persistence and determination. Here is another post of the same subject: How to Publicise Your Blog.



From How to Get Traffic to Your Blog to Home Page

Twitter Helps Blogger Traffic

Twitter helps Blogger traffic? Yes, perhaps. It took me a week to figure out what Twitter actually did! Now I think I know. It is a kind of high speed mini blog/social network/rss feed type thingy...........Of course since writing that opening line Twitter has become very well known!

You probably know that with Twitter you make short posts of no more than 140 letters. This constitutes a "twitter". Definition of "twitter" = To speak rapidly and in a tremulous manner: twittering over office gossip.

The main point is this. After you have signed up, you search for people who have similar likes, ideas and tastes and follow their twitters (their short posts). Posts can contain links. The links are not, it seems, conventional in that they probably don't provide "inbound links" that Google recognises in terms of Page Rank.

The people you follow are told that you are following them and they may reciprocate (follow your twitters). If they do follow you, you build up a network of like minded people. Then as a Blogger blog person you add a TwitThis button on your blog (see one below the post). Next, after you make a Blogger post you click on your Twitter button and this automatically saves a twitter (plus link to the post just made) to your Twitter home page (***note: make sure you are on the post and not just homepage by clicking on the title to the blog post, which loads the post not the website***). The automatically produced mini Twitter post is picked up by your Twitter followers who then click on the link in the post, which takes them your Blogger blog post. Eazy peazy lemon squezzy........Kinda - in theory. (***note: when you click on the TwitterThis button you go to a new window where you sign in. Twitter then asks if you want to twitter the post and choose yes!). Of course the main objective is for Twitterers who are visitors to do the same thing in large numbers!

A similar model is the well established Yahoo Groups. Yahoo Groups works on Email though. It is a network of people connected by email. It looks a bit outdated compared to Twitter.

With Twitter helping your blog, the important point, as I see it, is to follow as many people as you can. This will please the people who own Twitter as it generates activity and will get more traffic to your blog. Twitter helps Blogger traffic provided you participate on Twitter to a high degree. One blogger has apparently 26,000 followers and he follows a similar number! You gotta do it big.

Update: 21-4-09: The 26,000 figure above is incorrect. It is meant to refer to John Cow's Twitter but I checked and although he has a high number of followers (and he follows a similar number) it is about one fifth of this figure at 4,000 + followers. That is very high and he has a Blog that is successful (Alexa 46,000). So he thinks that Twittering is useful, obviously. This must be a good recommendation.

Further update!: 23-4-09: There is a John Chow and a John Cow! The former has over 20,000 followers and makes big bucks by blogging and the latter has as stated about 4,000 followers and also makes big bucks! I got 'em mixed up.

On the RHS of this blog I have a Twitter updates widget, if you want to, have a look at Twitter.



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Showing Code on Your Webpage

Showing Code on Your Webpage

I am not a computer geek. I just learn by experience and trial and error and find stuff that works. Sometimes we want to show code on the page. If we just write this in the usual way it won't show because it is active. I have found two ways of presenting code on the page. The first is to change the symbols such as "<" or ">" (the beginning and end of the tags) with a replacement symbol. They are set out below.

What you want to show	What you replace it with
"	"
'	' (except IE)
&	&
<	&lt;
>	&gt;

For example, for the title tag <title> you type in &lt;title&gt;

The second way is easier - use Google Docs. Just prepare the Blogger post in Google Docs and ignore any problems with code. Type it as if it was ordinary text. Then publish the document to Blogger per these instructions. This page was prepared in Google Docs.

Here is some code that makes a simple table that I just dumped into this page:

<table style="text-align: left; width: 50%;"
border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

What happens is this. When the document is published from Google Docs to Google Blogger the active code is deactivated. In the compose window you will see all the symbols changed automatically for you! Man, this is cool as it saves so much time and is far more accurate. It is very fiddly substituting bits of code with odd meaningless letters and symbols.



P.S. Thanks to www.tutorialtastic.co.uk for the list of code subsitutions in the table on this page.

How Useful Are Keywords?

How Useful Are Keywords? Keywords used to be the be-all-and-end-all of website building as it gave the webmaster a tool to target customers and find the best words or phrases around which a web page could be built that was search engine optimized. It meant being seen by the search engines rather than being invisible and God there is no joy in being invisible. There is no point in doing it if we are invisible.

If you are not sure what keywords are, you might like to read this post: What are Keywords?

Things are changing or have changed, though. For example, this Blogger site tells us what we want to know as to whether keywords are useful or not. In Blogger you can totally ignore them and still get found by Google provided you have a decent site with decent content and inbound links. The last is very important and is a consequence of the first (i.e. good content). I have built nearly all my pages on keywords but it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Even the guys at Wordtracker said you can ignore them! (Wordtracker is the number one keyword search website).

So you don't have to knit keywords into articles with the same kind of earnestness as before. But they are still a great market research tool. Keywords tell us as surely as a market research company what people are interested in. That I guess is obvious. What people search for tells us what interests people. We should supply what is demanded. Currently one area that is demanded perhaps more than any other is information on internet marketing and by that, in this instance, I mean how to get your site to be effective and actually do something. Only a very tiny percentage of websites actually do something worthwhile.

If a site gets 30 visitors a day, what is the point except to have some fun building it? And as competition hardens day by day it get harder to be seen. So in response to "How Useful Are Keywords?", the answer is they are useful, indeed essential at least at the initial stages of building a site and particularly with a non Blogger site. Over time the old rules apply. If what you are selling is good, eventually people will buy it. In other words if your content is good in the end people will find it. It just takes longer if the pages are not SEOed well. And keywords form the backbone of SEO work.

I use keywords like this:

1. I have an idea for a topic.
2. I check the keywords for that topic. SBI provide that service or you can use Wordtracker for instance.
3. I pick a keyword that (a) has high demand and low supply (b) can be used in the article - some are simply unsuitable to be used in an article.
4. I use the keyword in the article (a) as a title (b) in the first line (c) a little more than average in the article (d) in a link (e) perhaps as an alt tag for a picture.

But as I said Google is more flexible particularly with Blogger sites so using keywords in a formulaic way is less important but still useful.



From to Home Page

Alexa Measures Page Views Inaccurately?

For this site there is a massive difference between the page view data provided by Alexa and the page view data provided by Google Analytics and those provided by SBI, the company who host the main Pictures-of-cats.org website. This site is a sub-domain of the http://www.pictures-of-cats.org. I say that Alexa measures page views inaccurately.

Here is a comparison between these three sets of data:


This shows the SBI data. There was a drop on the 11th April by a about 10% for visitors but page views went up (12,560). The figures are pretty stable, almost a straight line. These figures are for the www.pictures-of-cats.org site. This blogger site gets about 3,500 page views per day.


Sorry this image is hard to read. But importantly you can see that "yesterday" the page views figure is .000004% while for the 3 months it is .00005%. The daily figure, the first figure, is 8% of the average figure. So page views dropped by 92%!! That is clearly completely incorrect. Page views are very stable for this site and the figure large enough, surely, to be able to make them reasonably accurate.

People will say that you have to be in the top 100,000 of Alexa to be accurate but being just outside that mark should, I would have thought, allow Alexa to at least provide accuracy better than this. Particularly as it is so important to webmasters who want to progress and eventually get some good advertising.


This shows a 10% Easter drop in page views on Google Analytics. The actual figures are higher as a number of pages don't have the analytics urchin code on them so are not counted. The point is the drop is a tiny fraction of that measured by Alexa.

What is upsetting is that the Alexa figures are the ones that count! Don't get me wrong, I like and am addicted to Alexa! But isn't it possible for Alexa to work with other companies to make figures more accurate for those sites that on the margins of the 100,000 mark or worse? These are often very good sites with great content. After all to get to Alexa 118,000 (the ranking at present for this site) takes a hell of a lot of work. Don't people who work that hard deserve some degree of accuracy? The Alexa page view figures are ruining the Alexa ranking. Because of the inaccurate page view figures the Alexa rank for yesterday was 666,000 or so, a dramatic fall that will hurt the 3 month average (note: things have changed one month later. Alexa ranking is now under 100,000 and getting better for the time being, but what I say above did occur and it is indicative that something was wrong at least at that time).

If Alexa can't make things accurate people won't use them. OK the people who have benefited from the recent changes will love Alexa but the bottom line is that Alexa must be built on accuracy otherwise the whole thing lacks meaning. Is it just for the big boys, who represent a tiny fraction of one percent of the total number of internet users? That can't be correct surely?

Update: things have changed for the Pictures of Cats org website for the better! Not sure why but the Alexa ranking is climbing and page views are too. I have always had difficulty with Alexa but maybe things are improving. If so good on Alexa.



From Alexa Measures Page Views Inaccurately? to Home Page

Change the title tags for your blog

I just changed the title tags for this blog as described by Blogger Buster and it didn't work properly. It may have been me - not sure but the tag <title> was in the title as viewed by the browser! The idea is to improve SEO by presenting at the top of the page above the browser menu top left, right at the top of the page, the title to the article (the post) and only the title to the post and not the name of the blog as well. i.e at the top of the page and on the Google listed search result you get this:

• "Change the title tag for your blog" and not:
• "ABOUT CATS AND OTHER THINGS Change the title tag for your blog"

By the way, if you use custom search on your site, once you have made these changes the search results are easier to read because they only have the title and not the blogger website name before the title. Here is a picture of the Google listing for this post. You can see that the Blogs name is missing. Interestingly, Blogger buster has retained the website's name but I thought she said she had made these changes - not sure.

The process is easy, you just swap some code. With the new blogger templates this process isn't necessary, apparently, but for the older templates it is. Anyway you can check by following the first part of the following process. If the code searched for is there, then it can be changed. You go to edit html and use Ctrl F to bring up a search box (bottom left of the screen), into which you type or paste: <data:blog.pagetitle/>. That immediately brings up the code painted in green. This code is very near the top of the template code, by the way, just above the template author information and what I call definitions. You swap the code for this:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
<title><data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageName/></title>
</b:if>

As I said, I found that doing this left in the title tag: <title>. What I mean is this the actual title tag was showing at the top of the page and on the browser tab. So what I did was to swap not only the code: <data:blog.pagetitle/> with the new code but also the tags: <title> and </title> on either side of it. That worked fine.

Thanks Blogger Buster. I am not sure how effective it will all be though! Wait and see. One last thing. As the experts always say, save the template before starting. You can download it easily and then upload as easily. In this instance a preview does not allow you to check so you have to save the new code which makes saving the code beforehand more important.



From to Home Page

Alexa Algorithm has Changed

I am sure that the Alexa algorithm has been changed at the same time as the website was updated. There was a decision to upgrade everything, what you see and what you get. Some sites have benefited massively and some have fallen. This site has fallen. That is despite building a lot of content over the last 4 months or so.

The Google Analytic figures are more or less stable for this blogger site subdomain and the main site. There has been a small fall off in page view but the Analytics figure show a 0.03% drop over months so this is infinitesimal. Also my web hosting company shows very little change. But Alexa on one day showed that this site had a traffic ranking of 1.4million when for months and months it was at the 115K mark. That represents a drop by a factor of more than 10! Alexa is also rating my page views much lower and I say it is inaccurate. And I know the site has to be below 100,000 for accuracy but why? Surely that is a problem that Alexa needs to address. Also this site is ranked 118K close to 100k. But it is falling....! Traffic rank for Sunday was severely depressed:

Showing the downward trend.
This is not seasonal but sudden and at about the time the Alexa website changed

On the basis of stable traffic figures but a falling Alexa ranking (it is now around the 180k mark, a big drop) I conclude that the mathematical formula used by Alexa has been changed. And it seems that the change is in favor of tech sites, blogging and social networking sites as the buzz seems to be to be that these are more modern and useful to companies like Alexa.

This may be a reaction to the credit crunch, the financial crisis. It is seen as a symptom of the "old way", the bad way and we need to move forward and out of that world. We need new people to manage the banks and basically business. The Alexa people probably reflected on all this and decided that the future was young modern sites and the algorithm had to reflect that. That is my guess, of course. I am probably off the mark a bit or a lot but it feels that the changes are based on that kind of mentality.

Chart published under published under
Wikimedia® creative commons license license = Attribution-ShareAlike License
Author Kozuch

I also think it pays to stand back and look at the big picture to find answers to what the intentions of Alexa are (note: this is just me speculating). Alexa are owned by Amazon and Amazon are in the internet business. The more people in the world who can use the internet the more business they will do. Globally including developed and the developing world 22% of the people use the internet (see chart above). There is plenty of room for expansion. To achieve that Amazon need to encourage and facilitate internet use. This can be achieved by encouraging tech sites to flourish to educate people and social sites to spread the word. To achieve that, I argue, Alexa have changed the algorithm to rank more highly these sorts of sites and businesses including new social networking sites. Lets not forget a site can be ranked anywhere by Alexa. They control the rules and it is not just based on how many visitors the site gets. Google have become the world's most powerful business, I believe, on the back of encouraging internet use by providing free software and products. It is the classic "preselling" technique so talked about on internet marketing sites.

It seems most of the cat sites are affected negatively. i-love-cats is affected positively, however, why? Well it has been around a long time with lots of inbound links and it does have a forum. That might be a factor. I don't think anyone has actually figured out the underlying changes. But I think what I have said above are relevant.

Update: Well, there is no doubt that Alexa have made changes to their algorithm as there has been too much disturbance to the traffic rankings. The dust has been kicked up. I say this having checked a number of sites. Some tech site have improved their rankings by large numbers. However, the day after I reported the above the traffic ranking has, at least for one day, returned to normal for my site so right now all seems to be kinda OK.

One factor in benefiting would seem to be if your site has a lot of inbound links, a decent page rank basically. It seems this is more of a factor in their algorithm. For example, Blog Buster has improved dramatically while enviroman's Blogger tips and tricks has dropped because he basically screwed up. His site was hosted by Blogger but he wanted to go fancy and upmarket and have a "proper" URL so he bought a domain name and redirected his domain from Blogger to the other hosting company. The URL looks nicer but as his URL changed he lost his inbound links and his pagerank and now his Alexa ranking too all for a nice URL. Never do this! The URL is unimportant. The content is important. Also it would have made sense to talk about SEO on Blogger sites if you yourself use a Blogger site.

Further update 14-4-09: The downward trend stopped yesterday but that is probably due to the massive effort I have put in recently!

16-4-09: There have been a lot more sites mentioning this since I first made the post. I guess that confirms it. It's history already! In hindsight I don't think the changes to the algorithm have been big (you couldn't do that as it would undermine the whole thing) but there have been changes and when they were made there were initial glitches and now it is more settled.

27-4-09: Things have returned to normal. Traffic is up. But why? For me, there was strong evidence that the Alexa algorithm had changed because there was too much change in traffic rankings at the time this post was first made but maybe they changed it back in a panic when they saw the drastic change it had on traffic rankings. I can only speculate.

2-5-09: Yes, another update. Traffic is up for this site and the Alexa ranking is currently getting better. So, although changes certainly took place it is not clear what happened subsequently. I mentioned the website, i-love-cats.com that improved dramatically in Alexa rankings after the change. That site has no gone back to "normal". It almost seems that they made changes and then changed back but it is not clear.



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