So I’ve been thinking a lot about this blog lately. About readership levels, RSS feeds, monetizing the place.
Depending on whose stats you believe (SiteMater or StatCounter) I average 125-150 unique visitors a day. At least a couple of those are me, obviously, despite blocking my cookies. According to StatCounter, I have had 4,500 unique visitors in the past 30 days, with 2,100 of those visitors being first time visitors. That may sound like a lot, but compared to other bloggers I’m sure my numbers are only in the mediocre range at best. Of those 2,100 first time visitors, I presume at least 75% are from search engine searches that direct people to my site. Those are the people I want to show monetized ads to. To that end, I have moved the AdSense banner ad from the main page and it is now only appearing on second pages when people click into the actual posts. My regular readers now do not have to see the ad, but those most likely to click – search engine visitors – will see them in all their glory.
I offer up RSS feeds, and only three people have taken me up on that offer. I’ve also adjusted my RSS feed so that anyone who is a regular reader via the feed does not see ANY of my posts that are a part of Pay Per Post. I did that as a service to them, but I only have 3 people signed up as feedreaders of this site, so I suppose that’s not a big deal.
PPP has been good for me so far. I have earned $490 and some change since my first post in early October, with $90 of it being paid out so far to my Paypal account. When Google changed their PageRank system last month my blog took a hit – going from a PR4 to a PR2, and thus hurt my ability to take some higher paying opportunities that also fit the site much better. That was a bummer but supposedly the PPP team is working on a new way to rank websites and the opportunities they can take. Hopefully once that plan is in place I’ll be able to go back to doing the higher paying opportunities that were formerly available as a PR4.
I guess this post is my public way of trying to figure out how to 1) increase readership, 2) improve the blog’s search engine rankings, and 3) encourage people to use the RSS feeds if they want to avoid the PPP posts so that I can 4) monetize the blog more effectively without ruining the “Cootiehog Experience” for the regular readers (I know that sounds terribly pompous, so I apologize).
I think the coolest part of being a blogger is finding out what works and what doesn’t. Have you tried networking?? That really gets your blog out there…if you really make an effort in getting your blog out there…it will pay off. Besides…I found my way here…
JC, I definitely network – I’ve been blogging for over five years, and I know the importance of getting out there. 75% of the blogs in my blogroll to the left are blogs that I actively comment at. And via BlogRush I’ve found a lot more blogs that I haven’t added to the blogroll but I do read and try to visit to comment. If by “networking” you mean joining various web groups who have blogs similar to mine, I was a member of a few rings for a while that were related to where I lived (NY/NJ area) that I quit once we moved to SC last summer.
You need to be active on the social networking sites like MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc. That will get your numbers up on your blog too. I’m not saying do it, but that is what all the cool kids are doing these days. And Corporate America too. They know a good thing when they see it and how to pervert it. LOL