Dead blog?

Posted by Building Observer as Site Building, Traffic

I wouldn’t say that this is a dead blog. I have just really been working on Mouse Clone lately.

I wanted to share somethings that I have been trying to do over there and how my results have been.

First up: I have started dropping Entrecards. This is a time consuming task. It took me about 30 minutes to get all 300 dropped. This means that I didn’t read any content on anyone’s blog and just dropped cards. I didn’t much care for the process of getting it done, but it was done and I got 300 ec for it.

Second: I have been advertising with Entrecards as well. This is good. I have gotten a few hits from doing this and I’m trying to see what blogs are giving me the most return. I’m checking the Alexa ranking and other starts that I can find to determine if visits have anything to do with click thoughs. I’m sure that it will some, but I’m not sure to what degree.

Third: I have been trying to read other blogs and make comments on them. If I have a brief 5 minutes in the day I find a blog read a post and make a comment. This has increased the traffic some. There are a few blogs that I have started reading on a daily basis or every other day, but they are few. This as also increase traffic and has generated some comments on my site from other bloggers.

These are all things that I have read about doing. There are many blogs out there that update many more times than I do on this one. I just really would like you to know that some of these are working. I will judge my own return on these time investments. This will allow to either continue them or drop them because the return is small enough to not waist my time on them.

How have your returns been on different things that you have done?

Post post and more post

Posted by Building Observer as Site Building, Traffic

I have been trying to pick up the traffic over at Mouse Clone. Traffic at my personal blog has dropped too about half of what it used to be. It is more than likely a period of time that I was getting lazy with posting.

I tend to have great ideas to write about though out the day. I currently have no way of getting those thoughts uploaded to my blog when I’m driving down the road, or any where else. This makes taking the time to blog cumbersome.

This, not blogging, has a “grave effect” on your blog. It will cause your blog to go 6 feet under in no time. It is really hard to keep up with traffic stats and to make sure that you keep building traffic. you also really just do not want to put post up like you are twittering.

So if you get a chance, and you would like to read my personal blog, head over to Mouse Clone and take in some reading. That is about all for now.

Sitehoppin - Good or Bad?

Posted by Building Observer as Traffic

There is a website out there called Sitehoppin. This site allows you to brows site that are in its index with a click of the button. From the looks of the site and going though some of the content. It would appear that this site was started and intended for the builder of the site. then EntreCard came along and BAM! Everyone on EntreCard is seeing a lot more traffic from them.

The real question is: does this site cause you to have inflated or bad web stats. All of the incoming traffic from this site is in an iframe format. This means that the traffic that you see will only be from the one site or server that is pulling your page.

The reason why Sitehoppin is a good idea is so that you can cover a lot more sites quicker and you may find some interesting sites that you may not have other wise located. I mean come on there are a lot of sites out there already.

Here is the bad news about Sitehoppin. Because it is done in an iframe format, all of your traffic stats from them will show up from them. You will not be able to get demographic information about the person visiting your website. This could lead to advertising about Atlanta businesses when in fact the visitor is in Denver.

Something that we all must face is that visitors will bounce from site to site and some just will never say a very long time. They are just dropping EntreCards, or they just couldn’t find the information they were looking for fast enough. Sitehoppin will inflate these stats a little more than normal, a lot more the more people use it.

What I would like to see from a service like Sitehoppin is a browser plugin for Firefox or IE. This would give you the ability to still site hop and will still give the sites that you may be hopping to and from some real stats about their visitors. Even if it is a redirect. This way your stats could show where the traffic was coming from as well as stats about the visitor.

What are your opinions about Sitehoppin? Do you think that it has good to it? or is it all bad?

What did you make off of your blog?

Posted by Building Observer as Monthly Money

I really can’t say that I made very much at all off of my blogs last year. I made more than $300.00 from PayPerPost. That I can’t say is a bad thing, I think that I’m around $0.27 from Google ads.

What does this mean to me? Not really much. I just wanted to let everyone know that there is some money to be made. As I have not found the goldmine like John Chow or any of the other blogs out there, I will keep searching the net for something to write about.

I would be really careful of payperpost, more so if you care about your Google rank. Other than that I will try and get back here with more updates.

Monetized

Posted by Building Observer as Advertising

A while back I wrote about “What is the best way to monetize your website?“. I decided to do some monetizing of my personal blog. I shouldn’t write about it if I am not going to do it, right? Right!

So if you will take a moment to take a look at Mouse Clone you will see what I’m talking about. I just have 6 125×125 buttons for advertising space. I didn’t really want to over do it. I am even thinking about taking down the WidgetBucks banner ad. I really think that it sticks out like a sore thumb.

What do you think about the buttons on Mouse Clone? For that matter, what do you think about the advertisements on this site? Are they to much? to little? You are the readers, please let me know what you think.

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As for the advertisement contest on this blog. I will be working on getting up all of the entries and drawing a winner. I might just draw up more than one winner. I will announce them at the end of this week.

It is a Shame

Posted by Building Observer as Uncategorized

You know it is a shame when the only major response about giving this blog away with the domain is that someone wants my EC credits.

I have not given very much thought to this blog. I really don’t know what else to do with it. I think that I have killed the last contest with out a moments thought and just decided to toss this blog to the wind. I still may do that but I really don’t think that I’m going to give up my EC that way, I do have another blog you know.

I don’t really have anything to say about SEO today. I don’t think that much has changed in the way SEO works right now. I may get back in to reporting about it and doing some other things.

For right now this blog is still up for grabs if someone wants it, domain and all. I tried to get people to give a slight donation to atlanix.org and didn’t have any takers. Not sure what else to do. Give me a little bit of time to get some other things straightened out in RL, that is real life, and I will get back to this if I don’t have anyone really wanting it.

I’m done with this site.

Posted by Building Observer as Uncategorized

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I’m happy and sorry to say that I am done with this site. The contest for free add space is canceled. Why? well you can read my post on http://mouselcone.com as to why here.

This site will be given way to anyone that wishes to help me in my journey. I will even still host the site as long as you keep it warez and porn free. I don’t need to loose my account because of someone being stupid.

so make a donation on http://atlanix.org and drop me a line here and leave the date and amount of donation. this is not a hoax. i’m truly done with this site and do not feel the need to put any more of my energy toward it. it just doesn’t align with me.

Thank you everyone.

What is the best way to monetize your website?

Posted by Building Observer as Advertising, Site Building

What is the best way to monetize your website? This question is often asked when someone is looking at hosting ads on their website. Along with these questions come: How much should I charge? Where should I place the ads? What size should the ads be? How long should I run the ads?

There are multiple answers to these questions. The choice is really up to you and how you would like your site to look with ads. I don’t feel the need to have large ads on the site. This very well could be a short coming on how much money I make on the site. If you will take a look at John Chow’s and John Cow’s website you will see that ads have been plastered all over the page (images are below in respective order).

John Chow

John Cow

These 2 sites talk about how much money they make off of talking about how much money they make. It is really strange. John Cow copied John Chow’s website just to see if that was the difference. They both make money at their sites. They bot have the same feel to them. They both have more advertising that I would like to put on this site. They also both have tons of traffic.

Now lets really look at the traffic that we can measure. John Chow’s Alexa Ranking is 3498 and John Cow’s Alexa Ranking is 13824. that is a considerable difference. I’m sure that John Chow is making more money the John Cow, and that is just based off of traffic.

I also would like you to notice that both sites have ads with in there post. A lot like the ads on this site, just my ads do not take up 50% of the area of the post. I didn’t see a need. After all, are you coming here to click on the ads on my site or are you coming here for the content. This doesn’t mean that I couldn’t offer larger ad space if I wanted to, I just feel that it will take away from what is important, the content.

With that much area taken up by ads, you are bound to click on one and not mean to. If you use the click scrolling like I do, and you middle click on a link it will open in a new tab with Firefox and IE7. This is what people do to generate a lot of click. They get paid off of you not paying attention to what is happening with your mouse. A click is a click when you are getting paid based off of the number of clicks.

So to make the most of your advertising you will want large ad spaces for those people that click to scroll down the page. This will generate more revenue for you and your site. This, to me, is not only repulsing to have these large ads over the site. It doesn’t make the site look clean at all. These sites to me look cluttered.

Notice one other thing about John Chow’s site. You will see the Yellow bar at the top of the page. This was put into place for installing missing plug-ins for web browsers. You may think that this is a great form of advertising. Any time you trick a user into clicking on something that they shouldn’t have to is wrong. This form of advertising could lead to many bad things.

Would you rather click on an ad because you want to click on an ad, or would you rather be tricked into clicking on ads and making someone else money. If you are on the making money side of it, sure you want people clicking on your ads. The question is in ethics. This could be a lost art, but I still find ethics to play a major roll in what I do. Would I want to visit a site that is plastered with 70% ads and I have to sift though the ads to get the content, or would I rather have content than ads.

Money Made In Dec.

Posted by Building Observer as Monthly Money

I figured that I would post how much money this blog has made in Dec. Well the answer to that Question is about 16 cents. Haha! No, really, it has made about 16 cents. All from Google Ads.

Why is this?

Traffic. I don’t have the traffic that would cause the blog to make even more money. Also I have slacked off with post in the past couple of days. I have just been working on another project and this one has suffered because of it. I’m hoping that I will continue to post on this blog and keep it going.

So with my 16 cents I’m going to just reinvest it. This sounds like the better of choices. I will get some more content related to traffic and other such SEO things up later today.

A Contest

Posted by Building Observer as Advertising, Site Building, Traffic

The last contest that ran was a bomb. I’m not sure why, but it really doesn’t matter. Maybe the restrictions were to great. So this contest will be easier.

1. Make a comment to this post or any post though the month of January. For each comment that you post you will receive one entry into the contest.

2. Make a post on your blog and link back to this post and to the main site, http://buildingobserver.com, and you will receive two entries into the contest.

It is that simple.

What will you win? you will win a 125×125 rotating add spot in the front page post for one month. So get to commenting and get to posting. If you have more than one blog and you post back links then you will get that number of entries from each blog.