In Your Web

Blogging With Ants

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:33:00 +0000

I noticed this afternoon my desk had been invaded by ants, Argentine Ants.

When you eat as much as food at the same desk you do all your work on, I guess it's inevitable. I publish two food blogs, Junk Food Blog, and Best Beef Jerky. There's bound to be plenty of benefits for these little critters.

I thought about spraying them with Raid, but all that will do is make my desk and office smell like Raid. And then you have all those dead ants to clean off.

So I figured these buggers are doing me a favor, cleaning up all my scraps. Maybe I should take advantage of them, and just give them the whole day.

But why couldn't they have visited me tomorrow? Tomorrow I planned to ride my motorcycle all afternoon long with some friends. Coming here today just makes my work that much harder to do.

That photo shows a couple of them. On digital macro mode, it's really tough to get them to stay steady long enough to get a clear photo.

I remember watching that show on the Discovery Channel, where they featured the Army Ants of South America. You don't spray Raid on those guys. When they come into your house, you leave home, let them take what they want, and come back when they've left. They do you a favor by getting rid of the other bugs.

Beef Jerky Blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:31:00 +0000

I just wanted to make another comment today, check out my two beef jerky blogs...

Best Beef Jerky - where I write reviews of beef jerky

Beef Jerky Diet - where I talk about my quest to lose weight with beef jerky

I have to credit my Junk Food Blog for this idea. What I learned on JFB is that junk food manufacturers are willing to send me free samples of their food just to get some extra publicity. The power of blogging is well known to many of them.

But the problem I've noticed with JFB is that companies send me a lot of chocolate, potato chips, and candies, which I don't eat much of. I'd much rather get beef jerky, my snack food of choice. So I launched Best Beef Jerky as an attempt to get free beef jerky, and each package of beef jerky I get gives me material to blog about. Moreover, beef jerky has become pretty popular over the past few years with the low-carb diet craze.

And in fact, the low-carb diet craze is what inspired the second blog, Beef Jerky Diet. I'm trying to see if I can nudge my way into the weight-loss publishing and marketing world with this, and at the same time, use it to cross-promote my beef jerky review blog.

As far as my weight loss quest is concerned, I'm doing pretty well. I've lost about 20 pounds since starting it earlier this year.

Blogger FTP is Down Again

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:15:00 +0000

Blogger's FTP service seems to go down frequently. As often as it goes down, I don't know why they can't do something to shore it up.

Here's a rather long thread of disgruntled users, just from the recent downage that started yesterday...

http://groups.google.com/..../browse_frm/thread/9c93b0bfd9e66ad0

It's not until you get to the 91st response that you see someone from Blogger actually chiming in to that they're working on it.

This is what lead me to move several of my blogs over to Blogger's Custom Domains, at least that way I can still use Blogger and not have to deal with FTP problems. But Custom Domains is not without its challenges.

For one, it won't hold the template images. I have to store those files on another server, and have the template (or CSS) link to them. Second, all Blogger-hosted blogs have their content images hosted on Picasa, and Picasa limits me to 1024Mb of file storage. Normally that would be plenty for one blog, but I have lots of blogs, and I need more space. I guess I'll have to pay for the extra storage.

Another disadvantage to Custom Domains is that I can't add non-blog pages to the blog. I like to supplement a blog with several hard-coded HTML pages (non-blog pages), that are linked up from the blog template. I just feel that this adds some unique SEO value. It simply cannot be done, unless those pages are hosted on a subdomain, or an entirely different domain. But then again, that submarines the unique SEO value.

And the biggest problem with moving a blog over to Custom Domains is that it doesn't move the content images from the old server to the new. You either have to move them manually, and change all the image links, or create a map that tells Blogger where the old images are. Either way, it's a pain.

But then again, you don't have fuss with FTP problems.

Update on my Menifee Homes Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Tue, 27 May 2008 05:11:00 +0000

In the Fall of 2008 I launched my Menifee Homes blog, a real estate focused companion to my Menifee 24/7 blog. I was hoping to develop a blog that could attract more traffic from the Internet that was interested in buying and selling homes in Menifee, and in turn, introduce them to my Menifee 24/7 blog.

I recruited some local real estate agents to write the blog for me, and in return, give them links to their respective websites, and promote themselves on my blog.

It hasn't really worked. The real estate agents have not contributed enough content on a regular basis to get Google to bring in more traffic. While the Menifee Homes blog is moving up in Google for phrases like "menifee homes" and "menifee real estate", I need more content to generate more keyword variation on Google.

I managed to find another local real estate agent, Cynthia, who might work out for me. She's really turned on to the Internet, and seems determined to make it work for her. Hopefully, the blog will generate more traffic as a result, and build a larger audience-base for her.

Moved this Blog to Blogger's Custom Domains

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sun, 25 May 2008 05:34:00 +0000

I'm having frustrations with my web host provider, IX Webhosting.

Every so often, something happens over there causing FTP to fail. FTP will connect, but my FTP client is unable to "retrieve remote folder information". In other words, it can't read the files and folders on the FTP site.

This only happens with Passive Mode FTP turned on. And of course, Blogger uses passive mode with its FTP blogs.

I call up IX Webhosting, describe the problem, and they say they can't duplicate it. Of course, I have accounts with other web hosting providers, and I don't get this problem with them. So they tell me there's nothing they can do. Meanwhile, I can't blog on any of the sites hosted by them.

So, I decided to try out Blogger's custom domains.

I moved this domain, "In Your Web" to Blogger's server. I had to delete the CNAME records on my domain registrar, and create a new one that pointed to Blogger.

Everything works good, except that Blogger won't host any of the images associated with my blog template! In addition, it won't host the CSS file.

What I ended up doing is modifying my blog template to pull images and graphics off of the IX Webhosting account, by linking to the IP address. I did the same with the CSS file.

Everything looked good now.

Except however, Mozilla Firefox didn't want to display any images referenced in the CSS File. So, I tried embedding the CSS into the blog template, instead of having the template grab the CSS from a file. Now, it works in Firefox. Weird huh?

I don't like Blogger's blue navigation bar at the top. There's no way to get rid of it. It makes my blog look less professional. So, I'm thinking of redesigning this template in such a way to make the navigation bar display more seamlessly with the template.

So while I have overcome the problems with IX Webhosting, it turns out I still need them to host the blog template images.

Ok, I actually tried uploading the blog template images to Picasa, thinking I could modify the template to pull the images from there. But no! Picasa won't allow me to upload several of the images. Go figure!!

I know I could probably upload those images to Flickr, or Photobucket, but my sense is that even those photo-sites will eventually figure out that I'm abusing their bandwidth.

You can never achieve a perfect world.

I Blog Therefore I Am

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 18:06:00 +0000

I've become a lot more introspective as of late. I feel more interested in writing stuff that expresses my inner-thoughts than the "newsy" stuff I tend to blog about. As a result much of my popular blogs have been untouched for the past couple of weeks.

I wish I had the creativity that many others have in keeping their blogs funny and entertaining.

Perhaps what's happening is that I'm hitting an age (in my early 40s) where I keep asking myself there's got to be more to life than just sitting in front of a computer, posting article.

People say I'm pretty lucky to be my own boss, work out of my house, and be able to carry my business in a laptop. But I'm a guy who can't handle monotony. I need to tackle new things all the time. I like tackling new ideas.

I recently launched a new blog, "Motorcycle Philosophy" where I can do more of this "introspective" writing. No ads. But I do have links to some of my other blogs, to help give it some boost.

Maybe that's what I ought to do; build a bunch of these little blogs, each on a different topic, where I can spew out my analysis once a week, and give some more Page Rank to my bigger sites.

Combining CPM with CPC Ads

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:47:00 +0000

I think the best way to earn the most money from advertisements on your website, is to use a mixture of CPC and CPM based campaigns.

Specifically, I like to run AdSense for my CPC stuff, and a banner network for my CPM stuff. For banner networks, I'll look for a small network so that my site has a greater chance of getting targeted ads. There's lots of them on the Adify system. Otherwise, I'll default to using ValueClick.

The idea behind the CPC/CPM combo is that a smaller percentage of your visitors are willing to click on an ad. But the larger percentage is not, yet you can still monetize them through the CPM.

Also, as your audience increases, you'll discover that the click through rate decreases. This is because your audience has become more diverse. CPM ads are great way to resolve audience diversification.

Problems with the CPC/CPM Combo

You may find that the click through rate on your CPC ads will drop as a result of competition with your CPM ads. This is to be expected. However, the goal is to make up that difference, and exceed that difference, with CPM ads.

Therefore, you don't want your visitors clicking on CPM ads. It's imperative to keep monitoring your CPM ad statistics to see if any banners are attracting a large number of clicks. Turn off any specific CPM banner that's attracting clicks. Since CPM ads don't pay you for clicks, you're losing money.

That's part of the irony of CPM ads. Since advertisers are paying for impressions, they tend to design ads that attract a lot of clicks, like interactive ads, or ads that look like a Windows error message.

Final Results

The bottom line is that you want the combination of CPC and CPM ads to be higher than if you just ran CPC ads.

Junk Food Blog Redesign

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 06:06:00 +0000

In a previous article, I mentioned that "good blog templates are hard to find".

I referred to my Junk Food Blog, and my need to update the look of the blog. I wanted to bring in a more professional look, but found it difficult to do so while retaining the blog's header logo.

The header logo had a jovial look and feel, which was perfect for JFB, being it had an entertainment value: a look at the some of the newest junk food on the market. But I needed a design that would allow me to incorporate a leaderboard ad. I couldn't do it with the design of JFB, because the ad would sit on top of the header-logo, causing the logo disappear, and the ad to blend in with the logo's background.

So today I bit the bullet, and just eliminated the header-logo. I have a blog design that looks more fluid and streamlined, and portrays the leaderboard clearly with no obstructed view.

I had the wife look at it, and tell if she liked the new design or the old design. She thought the new design definitely had a more professional look, though a more "business" look as well. I don't want a business look, just a professional look. But, she said she really liked "piggy" logo at the top.

We'll try it out and see if I can continue building an audience on that blog.

Top image: old design, note the leaderboard ad doesn't integrate well with the header logo. But the header logo has a jovial look, and has become nearly synonymous with the blog.

Bottom image: new design, the leaderboard ad integrates much better with the header, but I had to confiscate the old header logo to make it work.

The Comma is Crawling!

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 07:22:00 +0000

I was staring at an e-mail that I was just about ready to send out. And I swear, one of the commas in the article started to crawl up from the word "Julian".

I had to look more carefully, to make sure it wasn't gnat, or an ant. But no, it was a comma.

Well, then it stopped moving, and it was back in its original place.

I think I've been sitting in front of my monitor for too long today.

I need to get more sleep.

Realtors Still Don't Use Websites

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 07:13:00 +0000

This evening, we held our third "Menifee Internet Professionals" meeting. This is a group I set up on Meetup.com, where folks living in my community, who earn a living on the Internet, get together for a social gathering. Read more about it here.

Only two people showed up, myself, and the gal hosting the meeting. I was really disappointed that no one else bothered to show. I'm not sure if that's a reflection on me, or if people are not taking this group seriously. I suspect it's the latter.

Cynthia, who hosted the meeting, is a Realtor who recently launched a new business called "Menifee4Rent", where she helps people find rental homes and apartments. She said many landlords and property management firms are willing to pay her finders fees. So during our meeting, we talked about how she uses the website to build up her clientele. She went on to tell me that most Realtors still don't have their own websites.

I was rather surprised to hear that. I thought that most, if not all, Realtors have them. It seemed like the real estate market is really sold on using the Internet as a marketing tool. But no, she said. There's even a lot of Realtors who do have websites, but don't know how to use them, or have barely put anything on them.

I guess that's kinda good news to me, because just last week I relaunched my real estate blog by providing tips to Realtors on how to improve their online marketing strategies.

For that matter, it's amazing to know how many local businesses in my community don't have websites. Most of these mom & pop shops don't have a web presence. They may be thinking that business has been pretty good just from people seeing their store from the street. But how much more business might they get if they had an interactive website? It's a question of how much business are you losing by not having a website?

Domino's Pizza is already well known for having created a pizza ordering system that you can access from their website. I understand that the mom & pop pizza shop can't afford anything that sophisticated, but it's not that difficult to have a website that displays their phone number.

Most Realtors seem to believe that their potential Internet audience is too small to convert into business. It's like they've made this a foregone conclusion. Even though Realtors use the Internet for their own personal use, they don't seem to understand what it might do for their business. Has any Realtor actually measured their potential Internet audience? I find it amusing that they've made a conclusion without even trying it.

The world only has a small percentage of people willing to try something new. The larger percentage is simply content to follow the mainstream.

Internet Advertising Bubble Bursting?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 15:43:00 +0000

There seems to be a lot of talk lately that the Internet advertising industry is experiencing a bubble that's about to burst.

The sentiment is that online advertisers are spending an awful lot of money buying ads through Google and Yahoo, and are about to make a shift. The idea is that Google is the 800 lbs gorilla in this market, and as Google goes, so goes everybody else with it.

That's a chilling thought for a guy like me, who relies on AdSense income.

I have to agree, that these are very precarious times for businesses who've put a lot of eggs into the contextual advertising basket. There seems to be a paradigm shift taking place, one that Google has just recently recognized.

It's social networking.

In order to understand the online advertising industry, you have to look at where people are congregating. Today, sites like MySpace and Facebook is where the all the people are gravitating to. It makes sense that this is where online advertisers are going to spend their money.

We also still live in a world where we access the Internet through a 17" monitor (or 19" like me), and a PC and a keyboard. This is going to change also, as technology makes devices that can access and present the Internet with as much ease and clarity as you do now.

Leading this change to alternate forms of access will be the social networking sites. Kids will demand that they access MySpace and Facebook through their mobile phones and PDAs, or other dedicated devices.

Don't count out MySpace and Facebook as just entertainment sites for kids. While they are indeed dominated by teens and twenty-somethings, the fact is that social networking is how they perceive the Internet. As they mature into their 30s and 40s, they'll continue with that paradigm.

The question is how are you preparing to change with the trends?

Good Blog Templates Are Hard to Find

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 05:21:00 +0000

I created a new blog template for this blog, which you're seeing now. I implemented this template to several other of my blogs too, using different color schemes.

This template has two particular advantages...

It has a more professional appearance than my previous designs

It accomodates three standard ad sizes (728x90, 160x600, and 300x250)

For those two reasons, it works well for this blog, and others I implemented it on.

But I have a couple of other blogs that it just won't work on "Strange New Products" and "Junk Food Blog". Those two are more "entertainment" and "comedy" related. I need a template that looks jovial and fun, but still accomodates the three ad sizes I mentioned above.

If you look at this blog's header, I have a tope-colored field with a leaderboard ad in the middle, and the blog's logo in the upper-left corner. The field needs to have a solid color, so that the leaderboard ad can be easily noticed. I can't put a photograph into this field, or else the ad loses its visbility.

That's part of the problem with these two other blogs, they each have highly detailed graphics as their headers. These graphics have become a recognizable "brand" of these blogs. So, I want to continue using them. But how I do I weave a leaderboard ad into those headers?

If you look at Junk Food Blog, you'll see that I placed the leaderboard underneath the header. It works, but it makes the header area quite large. I want to make the header area smaller.

I spent some time searching Google for "blog templates" to see some examples. But, almost all the examples don't take ad placements into consideration. Doesn't anyone design blog templates for ad placements? Or does everyone else think that blogs are only for personal use?

Real Estate Blog Refocus

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:48:00 +0000

Yesterday I said I redesigned my real estate blog.

Today, I refocused it.

That is, I'm going to stop blogging about real estate news, and focus on writing about Internet marketing and publishing, as it relates to real estate.

The reason is because I've failed in building up an audience for my real estate blog. There so much saturation in real estate websites, and real estate news. And since I'm not a real estate expert, it's pretty much impossible for me to gain any traction.

So, I'm focusing on content that no other real estate website has, my expertise in Internet marketing and publishing.

Real estate professionals are increasingly undertanding the marketing power of the Internet, and are seeking out help on designing their sites, writing their blogs, and marketing their properties. Since that's my forte, I figured why not try my hand at it.

It gives me the opportunity to still earn money from the lucrative real estate advertising business.

Real Estate Blog Redesigned

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:17:00 +0000

I redesigned my real estate blog.

After looking at the old design, I realized it looked cheesy, old. A real estate blog ought to look professional, clean, just as if it was designed by big-money designers.

I mean if I wanted to read some real estate news, I'd want to read a site that looked authoritative and business-like, not something amateurish.

Anyways, take a look at it...
http://www.realestatehow.com

It's basically the same format that I'm using on this blog you're reading. The difference is that I've made use of more gradients, and placed the leaderboard ad inside the header graphic.

So what do you think? Does it look great? Or is it just "good", or is still painfully amateurish?

Blog Comments as Content Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 00:15:00 +0000

A blogger's challenge is to keep publishing original content to his/her readers. You want quality content. Compelling content.

So how do you get it other than squeezing out more ideas from your brain?

Well, look for ways for people to give it to you.

That's what I decided to do with one of my blogs, "Orange County Memories" (OCThen.com).

OCThen publishes the memories of people who lived and worked in Orange County, CA. Before "The OC" was a trendy place, it was rural living for most people. And this was only as recently as 40 years ago.

Since I'm someone who spent 23 years living in Orange County, I had a lot of memories myself. I started by focusing on a particular memory, such as my visit to the old "Japanese Village and Deer Park" in Buena Park. At that point, visitors trickling into the new blog read the article, and posted their comments about the same park as well.

I continued doing this, writing a new post for each memory.

I also posted a "Submit A Memory" article, and linked it from the navigation bar. In this article, I asked readers to post a comment, to this article, on anything they remembered about living or working in Orange County.

It worked. I fielded tons of comments. I then republished each comment as a new blog post. In effect, I had created a perpetual content generator. All I had to do was copy each comment into a new blog post of its own. No more brain-squeezing. It was as easy as copy and paste.

Each time I republish a comment as a new blog post, I delete it from the "Submit A Memory" article to avoid content duplication, preventing search engine penalties.

Here's an example of a comment that was posted to the "Submit a Memory" article, which I then reposted as a new blog post, and then subsequently removed from the "Submit a Memory" article...

http://www.octhen.com/2007/10/tustin-in-1950s.htm

And the best part about this, is that each comment is ORIGINAL content, and FREE content. I'm not violating any copyright laws. As long as I keep posting these comments as new blog posts, I can keep building an audience.

It's all PR4 Now

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 21:42:00 +0000

It appears that Google has revised the PR value that displays in its toolbar. This is because all of my PR5 sites are now displaying as PR4.

My PR6 sites are now showing as PR5.

Google has been doing this for quite some time. They have to. Everyday, thousands of more websites make their way online. Hundreds of thousands new links are added. Considering the fact that the toolbar categorizes each site into one of eleven rankings (0-10), they have to recalibrate the rankings.

This doesn't mean our websites have lost ranking. Rather, it means that a PR5 rank now has the influence of what a PR6 had.

The ranking on the toolbar is not the same as the "true" ranking. Google assigns a very large number, several digits in length, as your real rank value. What appears in the toolbar is simply an abbreviation of that number.

So, your ranking hasn't really changed.

Who's Web Stats Can You Trust?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 17:24:00 +0000

The New York Times seems to be stirring up the pot on the issue of accurate website statistics.

You can read the whole thing here...
http://www.nytimes.com/....FYjFK7n0HeOL0o4osG95w&oref=slogin

I do have to dispute one of their paragraphs...

But the Internet has given publishers a new form of ammunition: raw server data with precise numbers of site visits and page views. This data does not correlate directly to the number of visitors, but it does give them ballpark figures that they say are far more accurate than the extrapolations drawn by ratings companies based on panel samplings.

Raw server data is grossly unreliable for tracking number of visitors. This is because we've reached the day and age where "hotlinking" has become socially acceptable. This is the practice of websites linking to images and video on other sites, instead of hosting them on their own servers. This often happens on web forums where less-than-savvy users search Google Images for a cool "avatar" or "sigpic", to hotlink to.

I remember trying to analyze my traffic data on Junk Food Blog and Political Dogs using raw server data, and couldn't do it. The data showed there were more unique visitors than there were page views. Read that again. The visitors outnumbered the page views, because so many other websites hotlinked to my images.

When an image is hotlinked to, and someone visits the webpage that is doing the hotlinking, the server hosting that image counts a unique IP visit. So imagine if you have a very popular webpage, getting hundreds of views per day, and is hotlinking to an image hosted elsewhere? That server is recording is hundreds of IP visits, making that webmaster believe he's getting hundreds of extra visitors.

Another problem with raw server data is that they cannot differentiate visitors surfing the Internet from a proxy server. This where thousands of people are tied to the same IP address. An ISP like AOL, for example, has thousands of servers providing internet access to its users. One server could have tens of thousands of users logged on, and they all have the same IP address.

That's why browser-based stats trackers are much better. This involves a piece of javascript embedded into a webpage. Anytime someone visits that webpage, the stats tracking server associated with it counts an IP visit. And just in case that IP address is associated with a proxy server, the stats tracking server can differentiate these people with a unique cookie.

Examples of browser-based stats trackers include StatCounter and Google Analytics.

QuantCast is also a browser-based stats tracker that mixes in panel samplings, but for the benefit of marketers who might want to advertise on your website. The fact that it's browser-based makes it more accurate than Alexa, CommScore, Neilsen NetRatings, etc. Try them out. You can view my network statistics on QuantCast here...
http://www.quantcast.com/p-c5vtEkWO5_vKI

Note, I don't have all my sites on QuantCast yet!

Keyword Variation and Keyword Volume

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:39:00 +0000

Website publishers often use the many keyword tools out there to determine what keywords and keyphrases are most often searched for. The reason for knowing what's most often searched for, is so that they can use the most popular words for titles and filenames. It's an SEO practice.

But there are alternate viewpoints on what exactly is a popular keyword or keyphrase.

Many people look at how often a particular keyword/phrase has been searched. Other people instead look at how many variations of keyword/phrase exists. Keywrod Variation, versus Keyword Volume.

For this article, I used Google's keyword tool, and wanted to know if I should use "Menifee Homes" versus "Menifee Real Estate" for my new blog.

According to Google, here are the results (volume)...

menifee real estate (average)
menifee ca real estate (low)

menifee homes (average)
homes in menifee (low)
menifee ca homes (low)
menifee homes for sale (low)
homes for sale in menifee (low)
homes for rent in menifee (low)
homes for sale in menifee ca (low)
homes in menifee ca (low)
homes in menifee california (low)
new homes in menifee (low)
new homes in menifee ca (low)
new homes menifee (low)
new homes menifee ca (low)

Both "menifee real estate" and "menifee homes" have similar volumes (average). However, "menifee real estate" has a higher advertiser competition, meaning greater AdSense earnings potential.

But notice that "menifee homes" has 13 variations compared to just 2 for "menifee real estate".

To me, "menifee homes" is the better keyword/phrase to use when building a website on real estate in Menifee, CA.

If you built such a site with 25-50 pages, each of those pages would contain content that optimizes on one or more of those 13 variations. Meaning, you'll actually attract more visitors from Google searches for the fact that you're covering a wider range of keywords and phrases.

Even though "menifee real estate" has greater earnings potential than "menifee homes", the latter will still earn you more income for the fact that it can fetch a larger audience.

Although if you play your cards right, you can find a way to weave both keywords into your website.

Local Real Estate Blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 18:57:00 +0000

About a couple of weeks ago, I launched a local real estate blog for my community, naming it "Menifee Homes".

Instead of putting it on its own domain name, I opted to host it on a subdomain of my Menifee news blog, Menifee 24/7. Since they're both focused on the same community, I figured it will help boost Menifee 24/7.

Here's my thinking for launching this new blog...

Menifee is one of those towns where a lot of families are looking at relocating to. It offers homes that are much cheaper than in SoCal's metropolitan areas, offers a much lower crime rate, and has that "small town" feel where a lot of people know each other.

Also, it appears that many of the AdSense ads appearing on my Menifee 24/7 site are real estate related. Even though much of the content is not necessarily about real estate, the word "menifee" seems to be associated with lots of real estate ads.

So, I created the new "Menifee Homes" blog in an attempt to capture a more focused audience, in hopes of cashing in on those Menifee real estate ads. While I welcome residents of Menifee to read the new blog, I'm focusing on capturing search engine traffic, hoping to find potential home buyers. I figure these are the people more likely to click on the ads.

I've recruited a few real estate bloggers to generate content for me.

I found a few Realtors and brokers who are working the Menifee market, and whom have some experience with blogging. What these people are getting in return is visibility. Assuming I can capture a good sized audience of potential Menifee home buyers, these Realtors and brokers will have the opportunity to "speak" to them, and hopefully earn some business. On top of that, their photos and contact info is prominently displayed on the blog, and they get to "sign" each article they post with their website address, giving them some extra page rank for their respective websites.

I'll post updates on this new blog is doing.

Biker News Online Traffic Soaring

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 05:52:00 +0000

My motorcycle blog, Biker News Online, continues to increase in traffic ever higher.

Yesterday, it hit an all time high in 6,449 page views and 4,024 unique visitors, based on tracking from StatCounter. You can also see its traffic on Quantcast, though Quantcast seems to report fewer uniques than StatCounter.

From January of this year, traffic has increased more than 4-fold from about 750 uniques per day, to averaging 3,300 per day. All traffic on Biker News Online is free traffic, I don't buy ads, keywords, or engage in any traffic generation gimmicks.

Earnings from AdSense have also increased, though not proportionately. While traffic is up about 4-5 times, AdSense earnings is up only about 2-3 times. See my article entitled, "CPM Drops When Impressions Increase" for a discussion. Income from other sources, namely affiliate programs on LinkShare, Share-A-Sale, CommissionJunction and BikerKiss, have remained the same, however.

In the graph, notice a third metric for "Returning Visitors" in the orange color. It's averaging about 200 per day. While it's much lower than the "Unique Visitors" metric, I'm not complaining. Returning visitors don't usually click on ads. What they do, however, is promote my blog, either by giving a link on their blogrolls, mentioning my blog in their blog posts or on biker forums. They also post comments on my blog. It's those first-time visitors that tend to click the links.

So what do I account the steady rise in traffic? Well for one, constant publishing of new content. And not just publishing plenty of new content, but focusing on content that tends to create buzz. Finding subjects that bikers find compelling, either as humor, or anger, or disgust, tends to attract more backlinks.

Another way to build traffic, particularly within the biker community, is to participate on biker forums. Bikers tend to congregate on forums, and there's tens of thousands of them on the Internet. When you create an account on a forum, set up a signature file containing an hyperlinked icon or banner for your website. Any message you post on the forum will have your blog's link.

One of the challenges for me as a blogger is that I tend to burn out. If I want traffic to keep rising, I have to keep blogging. Fortunately, there's always plenty of news to blog about in the motorcycle world; that's make things easier. The fact that traffic and earnings keep rising keeps my enthusiasm going.

Strange New Products Gets Dugg

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 03:02:00 +0000

Strange New Products, my quirky gadget blog, made it to the homepage of Digg.com today.

It was due to a new product I wrote about, "Anti-Ticket Donut"...
http://www.strangenewproducts.com/2007/09/anti-ticket-donut.html

It quickly grew popular on Digg as it picked up more "diggs" over the course of this afternoon. BTW, the Digg.com homepage is a PR8 on the Google Toolbar.

My page made it to the Digg.com homepage around 3:00pm PST, and by 4:00pm PST it referred 13,000 unique visitors to my site. JUST IN ONE HOUR! And those are visitors, not page views.

By 8:00pm PST, as of this writing, it had referred 31,000 unique visitors.

I sat worried my server would buckle under the load. But so far so good.

This surge of traffic did not translate into a surge of earnings on AdSense, however. Pretty much none of this traffic clicked on the AdSense ads on my site. I imagine many of them clicked through to the manufacturer's website (for the Anti-Ticket Donut). I hope to at least get some donuts out of this.

I was hoping that some of these people visiting via Digg.com were bloggers that would blog this product as well, and provide me with credit links. But Technorati says "no". A search of Technorati found several bloggers writing about this product, but very few actually crediting me as the first reporter.

I guess if anything, there were 31,000 more people in this world that became somewhat familiar with my blog, Strange New Products. Maybe that'll count for something.

Too Many Ads Loses Money

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:13:00 +0000

There's such a thing when you have so many ad units on a web page that you're losing money.

Instead of increasing your income, it's actually subtracting your income. Therefore, you need to find the right balance by finding the right number of ad units, their right placements, and the right mixture of payment types.

Here are some observations...

Your website has a fixed number of visitors per day. Within one day, there's a larger percentage of people who will not patronize any of the ads, and a smaller percentage that will. That smaller percentage is what you're focusing on.

Of all the ad units on your web page, there's one that earns more income than the others. This is the ad unit that should have the most prominent placement.

Identify the next two or three higher earning ad units, and place them further down the page, "below the scroll", so that they don't compete too severely against your primary ad unit.

I've found the best mixture of payment types is to have a "per click" based ad unit, such as AdSense, working with a "per impression" based ad unit like a CPM banner network. AdSense works hard to monetize those people who are willing to click ads, while the CPM banner works to monetize those people who don't.

If you find that your AdSense click through rate is falling, or is too low, try removing the other per-click based ad units. You're better off raising the CTR of one ad unit, instead of adding more ad units.

Each time you add another ad unit to your web page, you're reducing the effectiveness of the other ad units. Choose your ads wisely.

Adify Advertising Network

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:42:00 +0000

Adify is a name website publishers will be talking about in the months to come.

It's advertising platform that offers a couple of unique advantages over other advertising networks.

First, Adify itself is not really a traditional advertising network like DoubleClick or FastClick. Rather, it's an ad server, but which several niche advertising networks are hosted. There's currently over 30 highly-targeted advertising networks running on Adify. Adify is an advertising network platform, much like CommissionJunction is an affiliate marketing platform.

Why this is an advantage is because it allows for highly focused niche advertising networks to thrive. Since they can outsource their ad systems and transaction systems to Adify, they simply focus on the advertising business.

Adify has a list of advertising networks running on its system, including...

Top Dog Network - connecting pet advertisers with pet websites

Yardbarker Blogger - connecting sports advertisers with sports blogs

Goodhealth Advertising - connecting health advertisers with health sites

Gay Ad Network - connecting gay advertisers with gay websites

SustainLane- connecting green advertisers with green websites

Check out all of the networks running on Adify...
http://www.adify.com/featured_networks.htm

The second big advantage to Adify, is that a single piece of advertising code can be used by multiple advertising networks. That is, if both Top Dog Network and Yardbarker Blogger wanted to place ads into the same ad space on my site, they can do so; I don't have to place a separate set of code for each network. Imagine having 3 or 4 niche networks placing ads into the same 728x90 banner rotation?

The more advertising networks running on Adify, the greater the possibility of this happening.

My Experience with Adify

So far, I've been pretty pleased. I'm currently receiving CPM-based ads on two of my blogs, DoggieNews and Junk Food Blog. Right now, Top Dog Network is placing ads on DoggieNews, and Martha Stewart Living Online is placing ads on Junk Food Blog. Both networks are on Adify. The "Martha Stewart" network is not currently listed on Adify's list as it's still pretty new.

The CPM rates that I'm being paid are very high rates, and I suspect it's because the networks themselves are working with advertisers who want to reach highly targeted audiences. On a month-to-month basis, my earnings on each network seems to equal my monthly earnings on AdSense.

What that means is that I can run a 160x600 skyscraper from AdSense to get all the CPC-based income, while the 728x90 CPM leaderboards from Adify monetize those visitors who don't click. It makes for a pretty good 1-2 monetization punch.

Adify supports CPM, CPC, and sponsorship-based advertising. So far, most of what I'm seeing is CPM-based.

If an advertising network doesn't have enough impressions to fill my inventory, it defaults to showing "run of site" ads, which appears to be stuff from CommissionJunction.

Take a look at Adify's current offerings of networks, see if one of them applies to your site(s), and comment here on it works out.

Blog Comment Frequency Improves Pagerank

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:34:00 +0000

The number of comments posted on a blog article seems to improve the page rank and SEO of that article on Google.

I'm a believer that Google loves blog posts with lots of comments. The more comments on a single blog post, the more that URL will rank higher on Google's search results pages.

I don't believe, however, that comment frequency alone holds the major factor in page rank, but just one of them.

To test this idea, I did a study of all the posts on all of my blogs that received a ton of comments. I mean, I looked at only those where the number of comments measured in the double-digits, often 30+.

It appears that those articles rank between #1 through #5 on Google's search results pages, for the keyword/keyphrase found in the article's title. AND, they've remained in these positions over long periods of time, years.

Here are some examples of my blog posts...

Sentry Natural Defense - 50 comments - ranks #3 on Google

Gasoline Pill - 1,141 comments - ranks #3 on Google

Elvis Reeses Cup - 47 comments - ranks #3 on Google

Santa Ana Valley High School - 130 comments - ranks #1 on Google

I had several other articles with 30+ comments that did not rank in these positions, but it appeared that the URLs ranking above mine were from highly authoritative sites.

In addition, I looked at some of my older blog posts that receive zero comments, and these articles don't seem to show up much at all on Google.

Consider this, since Google uses popularity to determine authority, then it stands to reason that a blog article with an abundance of comments identifies popularity. Certainly, not just any kind of comment would do, but more than likely comments that repeat main keywords, comments from registered users versus anonymous.

Overall, blog comment frequency is just one of the factors towards ranking blog articles. It'll help if your blog has high page rank overall, and if your blog post repeats the most authoritative keywords, as well as keywords in the filename.

But it's certainly obvious that comment frequency is a factor.

So, think of ways to write your articles so as to entice your readers into posting comments.

Where I'm At With My Blogs

noreply@blogger.com (Steve) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 18:20:00 +0000

Biker News Online, my motorcycle website, is showing a lot of promise. There's a lot of motorcycle news material to write about, there's a lot of people wanting this kind of content, and there are lots of advertisers wanting to get in front of this audience.

And it's not just motorcycles, parts, and accessories that's getting advertised. As it turns out, it's love. There are several "biker dating" websites willing to pay out some big money for registrations, and there happens to be a very big biker community in the USA. The demographics also show that bikers tend to be in the upper-middle class, which translates into consumer spending.

The best thing going for Biker News Online right now is that traffic is still on the rise. Yesterday, it had its largest one-day audience ever at 3,100 unique visitors. I recently added Quantcast tracking and you can take a look here.

DoggieNews is another site that I'm committing to, though I haven't updated it much lately, but it's on my list of things to get going. Biker News Online taught me a lot about effective blog design and blog usability; I'm going to apply that knowledge to DoggieNews.

This blog, In Your Web, I'm also committed to, if not as a for-profit publication, at least as a journal of my experiences with website publishing.

Money With AdSense is my newest blog, and one that I don't know will be successful or not. There are SO many websites focusing on this topic. On the other hand, the potential advertising income is very lucrative if I can just get some good referrals from Google and Yahoo.

Menifee 24/7 I'm also committed to. But that's also still an experiment. It's focused on my local community, publishing news and announcements. I call it an experiment because my goal was to attract local advertisers, like some real estate agents, a pizza shop, or the neighborhood pet groomer. But it hasn't happened. As it turns out, AdSense is earning some pretty good money considering the very small audience. That provides me with a lot of hope.

Junk Food Blog is still up in the air. I think I'm going to commit another year to it. I'm going to redesign the blog template. I think I can triple the audience on that blog with a more usable template design, and just getting back into writing more content.

Another site I'm still committed to is Real Estate and How. The AdSense performance statistics are simply "out of this world". The amount of money being spent on AdWords in the real estate market is ridiculously high. That's why I can't give up on this site. My problem thus far is not enough traffic. If I can just get the traffic, I'm set.

Blogs I'm Not Committed To

I still get e-mails from people wanting to know why I haven't been updating Strange New Products. It's kinda of a bad idea, that's why. But I haven't taken the site down, because it still makes money by itself. It's a bad idea because it takes too much effort to find material to write about. I've been known to spend an entire day, morning to night, combing the Internet for strange new products to write about. The site just doesn't compensate me for that time, nor would it compensate anyone else if I hired them. I'm better off putting that time into other sites.

Slot Machine Blog died because the guy I was partnering with just doesn't respond very well. He's an actual slot machine technician, who has a lot of information that slot machine players would love to know. But I can't get him to provide me with a daily flow of information.

Erection News, despite its name, is not a porn site. It was meant to market all the erectile dysfuction drugs. I guess I can't answer why I haven't been updating this. I ought to. There's a lot of money in it.

Perfume Fancy is just a bad idea. There's plenty of content to write about. However, the advertising spend in this industry is not that great.

Bottle Watch is largely a bad idea also. While it does attract a large audience, I just can't monetize it. The handful of affiliate programs for this niche are not that great, and AdSense prohibits its creatives from appearing on alcohol-related sites.

OCThen.com is more of a hobby site. Since I spent 23 years living in Orange County, I have a lot of great memories, and this is the site where I like to write about them. It doesn't earn much income, though its small audience is very loyal. This is a site that I still update, though not often.