prasanth m's List: Blogging

What is the 31 Day Project About?

To put it most simply - it’s a month long series of posts here at ProBlogger designed to walk you through 31 tasks that you can do to make your blog better. You can read more about how the project works and how to participate in my introduction to the project.

Have you ever wondered what readers of your blog do when they arrive at it? What do they look at? What links do they click on? What internal navigation do they use? What ads do they click? What positions on your blog do people gravitate towards?

It’s Day 18 in the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog Project and today your task is to develop a ‘Sneeze Page’ (or pages) for your blog.

One of the challenges that faces blogs that have been around for a while is that they end up with a wonderful collection of posts in their archives that are rarely read by readers.

Take some time out today to do a little analysis of your blog’s statistics. There is a wealth of information in them that can be incredibly useful.

Here’s a few metrics to dig into to start off

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

Perhaps one of the most common mistakes that I see bloggers making with the positioning of advertising is with regards to position. In fact this is not a unique thing for blogs or even just online advertising as effective advertising relies upon positioning in all of it’s forms. This is why ads at Prime Time on TV, in the front pages of magazines and on the big billboards at busy intersections are in high demand (and are at a premium price).

‘AdSense for bloggers sucks, the click-through rates are too low, the advertising is not relevant enough and readers of blogs are more accustomed to blocking-out the ads - all this results in a very low CPM rate.’

Today’s guest post comes from Chad Randall, the Director of Sales for b5media and the author of AdvertiseSpace. Chad has been working in the online advertising industry for over 6 years now, and has personally sold more than $5,000,000 in online ads. I figured he’d be a good person to ask about how to make your blog attractive to advertisers.

Today’s task in the 31 Day Project will appeal more to those who are looking to make money from their blogs. If that’s not you - there are plenty of other daily tasks in previous days of the project that you might like to repeat. This task might also be easier for more established blogs than new ones - although it’s not impossible for a new blog to land a sponsor so give it a go!

Alistair asks - ‘Having a niche blog means that I will never have the same amount of visitors as some of the larger technology/media blogs.

We’ve now looked at a number of popular affiliate programs for bloggers and today I’d like to finish off this series by giving a few tips that should help bloggers get the best results out of any affiliate program that they choose to run with.

John Chow today posted a post outlining why he’s not an Amazon Affiliate. It’s a good post in that it gives an insight into his approach to affiliate marketing. The best point John alludes to is that Amazon doesn’t ‘fit’ with his blog. He makes more from other better targeted affiliate programs than Amazon.

One key to affiliate programs succeeding is that you have enough traffic that actually sees your affiliate links. There is little point in actually deep linking to products on pages that no one actually visits. So how can you increase the chances of people seeing and potentially clicking your affiliate links?

At one point in every blogger’s career he or she has to make a choice between investing in a custom template or staying the course with a premade, downloadable template. There are important factors that you have to keep in mind with each ranging anywhere from funds to brandibility.

800×600… 1024×768… 1280×1024… There are dozens of different screen resolutions available, and what’s more is that not all users have their browsers at full size, making it even harder to choose a resolution to design for.

Design can add tremendous value to a blog. When it comes to making money with your blog, proper web design can make a huge impact on your bottom line.

After posting yesterday a basic Introduction to Blog networks I now want to turn my attention to some of the positives about joining a blog network as a blogger (the negatives will come in the next post in the series). Please note that I’m not writing about the benefits of starting or owning a blog network but looking at the positives of joining an existing one as a blogger. Of course the following factors will apply more to some networks than others (each network has it’s own configuration).

Having looked at some of the advantages of joining a blog network it’s only fair that we look at the flip side. Blog networks will not suit every blogger’s personality, style and goals and you should take into account the following before signing up for one:

This can be seen in many instances throughout history across many different types of movements (big and small) and is currently happening in blogging (I guess we could call it a movement) also.

The potential for StumbleUpon to send traffic is often under-estimated, particularly by new bloggers. Unlike digg and del.icio.us, an item doesn’t need to become popular before you see immediate results. One or two votes can bring a hundred or more readers — more than a new blog might see in a day.