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I had a huge comment flamewar last month where I made 12$ in one day from AdSense clicks+traffic. I thought it was pretty cool.
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Nov 10, 2014 18:47
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KetTarma posted:I had a huge comment flamewar last month where I made 12$ in one day from AdSense clicks+traffic. I thought it was pretty cool. ... I'll be right back, I'm just creating an israel v palestine blog real quick
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Nov 10, 2014 18:55
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If you're going to use Wordpress comments I'd suggest using the Akismet plugin; it pretty much catches all spam comments on my blogs. It's free to use for personal blogs. https://wordpress.org/plugins/akismet/ I think leaving blog comments and receiving them is a good way to build some loyal readers. I don't know that 0 comments turns anyone off or not; often times I'll see posts that are shared a lot but don't necessarily have a lot of comments. It probably depends on the posts themselves and whether you're articles lead people to ask more questions or tell you their opinion on the matter. Royal Jeans fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Nov 10, 2014 |
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Nov 10, 2014 23:28
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Does anyone have any recommendations for sites to check out competitors rankings? I'm looking for general traffic stats/and or search ranking info. I've been on Alexa, Ahrefs, Moz, and Blogrank. I don't know if there's any other obvious sites I'm missing.
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Nov 14, 2014 00:42
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Royal Jeans posted:Does anyone have any recommendations for sites to check out competitors rankings? I'm looking for general traffic stats/and or search ranking info. I've been on Alexa, Ahrefs, Moz, and Blogrank. I don't know if there's any other obvious sites I'm missing. semrush, similarweb
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Nov 14, 2014 00:57
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Here's a question. I'm a web developer by trade and I recently started a freelance portfolio and a blog to go along with it. Most of the freelance work I get is through word of mouth. I'm writing in the blog more so for my own enjoyment. However, there's always the chance that someone could find me and contact me which brings me to my question! Normally I have no qualms about advertisements on blogs or anything but because there is a a small chance that someone could find me and hire me I'm curious as what your thoughts are about placing one tasteful ad on my blog posts even though the site is an online portfolio of sorts? Tacky? Go for it? Thoughts?
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Nov 14, 2014 15:20
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Checking in to share my new project. I picked up mostimportanttasks.com recently, thinking it would make a good side project (my day job is also blogging, at lawyerist.com, but that's on a much larger scale). I've only made a couple bucks on AdSense so far, and nothing but clicks on my Amazon affiliate links, but I haven't had much time to devote to it, either. I'm working on a white paper giveaway so I can build an email list, and I've got a series of blog posts planned. When there is a bit more substance to the site, I'll start doing some outreach to try to build some links. Suggestions welcome. Robot Arms fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 16:25
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Moniker posted:Here's a question. I'm a web developer by trade and I recently started a freelance portfolio and a blog to go along with it. I think it's tacky but that could just be me. Also, if I had a blog where I was selling myself I would want the attention on me and not divert to something for them to click to leave.
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Nov 14, 2014 16:27
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jabro posted:I think it's tacky but that could just be me. Also, if I had a blog where I was selling myself I would want the attention on me and not divert to something for them to click to leave. The blog is mostly code examples and tech thoughts of mine. Not like "Hey hire me!" there are just a few pages on the site that have to do with me, that's all. But you're probably right!
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Nov 14, 2014 18:08
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I'm not saying that it can't be done - It's just rare that I've ever seen ads placed tastefully into blog posts. Not that this is what you had in mind but I always giggle when I see an adsense ad right in the middle of a post. No explanation - just hanging out all by itself in the middle of some article.
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Nov 16, 2014 00:47
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Royal Jeans posted:I'm not saying that it can't be done - It's just rare that I've ever seen ads placed tastefully into blog posts. Not that this is what you had in mind but I always giggle when I see an adsense ad right in the middle of a post. No explanation - just hanging out all by itself in the middle of some article. The only "ad" that belongs inside of a post is either a paid one, or an amazon affiliate link if you're doing a review of whatever is linked. A reasonable question would be "well why is it okay for paid ads but not adsense/whatever?" (Caveat: Even then, try not to be tacky or ridiculous with it.) So with adsense, you pretty much need clickthroughs. Impressions *are* a thing, but the amount of money you're making off of that is negligible, and you run a chance of burning visitors from shoving ads everywhere. With a paid ad (i.e. "here's money, please advertise for us"), it's not necessarily about CTR's or whatever internet marketing metrics you want to track, but about brand recogntion, and that's a huge selling point for bloggers. If you go to a site that is considered a big dog in it's niche, and you constantly see ads for "Steve's XL widget", it lends validity to the product. It's a way of transferring the trust and authority that the user has in the site to whatever the product is. I know I'm guilty as poo poo of buying something just because I saw it on a site that I liked and subconsciously made a connection that the product was good. Even if it doesn't generate a sale, there's a good chance that it might come up in conversation or whatever, generating second-hand action. Another thing I've noticed is that if I see an ad and under it has something like "*sponsor*, these guys help us stay on the internet!", I automatically have a favorable impression of them, and it gets rid of the "ugh stop shoving ads in my face" response. Brand awareness is a stupidly powerful thing, use it to your advantage as much as possible - even outside of ad placement or whatever. Try to get your posts linked on other peoples sites, try to get other bloggers to retweet you, give you a shoutout, whatever. "Well poo poo, if Jon's milk carton collectible blog reads this guys blog, I should at least look at it." e:Self hosted ads also get around adblock, so there's something else to thing about. Can be super useful if you're in a tech niche where everyone runs adblock. Know your audience, build your audience, understand your audience, then use that to rake in the internet funbucks. @samglover: That's a pretty cool niche, and looks like there are quiet a few ways you can branch out with it socially. The only thing that really stands out to me at a quick glance is that it took me a minute to realize that what I got to was just a landing page, and that the real content was elsewhere. I also didn't see anywhere to sign up for an email list, or social media links to click on. And now I have a question: My theme doesn't have sidebars unless you're on a single post. I need to figure out a way to *cleanly* integrate an email subscribe + social media buttons. Thoughts/ideas? I guess I could do one of the floating-down-the-side-of-the-page things. e: This needs to go in the OP:  e2: I'm just gonna brain-dump a bunch of stuff since I was just talking to a dude trying to get a blog going... in no particular order 1."Controversial" post titles = traffic. Doesn't have to be like "Obama is the one true god of our nation" or whatever. Subtlety is good here. One of my most popular posts, by far, is one titled "I'm a terrible firefighter and an even worse leader". It's got some intrigue to it. The "who would post this about themselves?" thing makes it clickbait without being "THIS GUY MADE A MISTAKE ON THE SUBWAY - HIS REACTION AT 2:23 MADE THE POPE CRY". 2.I cannot stress enough the importance of social media engagement. Engagement is the key word. If people talk to you/about you, talk the gently caress back. Get involved. Ask bullshit questions on social media to get people talking to you. 2.5 ...especially with other bloggers/industry people/content creators/etc. Get people on your good side. You want their retweets, mentions, shares, and everything else because it helps expose you to an audience that's already interested in what you're doing. 3.Be personable in your posts. I've been to a million different blogs that have a really "businessy", sterile feel to them. People like people. Aim for building a cult of personality. 4.Again, get with other people doing the same thing you are. The way to get what you want from other people is to straight up ask them for it. "Hey dude, I love your site. Since we talk about the same stuff, I went ahead and put a link to your site up on mine, and would love it if you could throw a link to mine on your sidebar or something." 5.Ask the other people in your niche for help. The people that are doing better than you are have the roadmap on how to get there, and generally they'll be willing to talk to you about what they did/what they're doing, and mistakes they made on their way there. 6.Facebook ads have changed quite a bit apparently, but I've seen blogs go from ~10k likes to 100k+ by spending $200 on targeted ads. FB's ad platform is absolutely scary on how deeply you can target people. If you're willing to throw money at it, go for it. 7.If you can, product giveaways, when done correctly, can help grow your audience. 8.Quality over quantity, all day errday. 9.Show some love back. If another blogger gives you a shoutout, thank them, then return the favor. 10.Have fun with it. Very few people are making liveable wages off of blogs. It's not supposed to be a job-replacement, but a supplement. If you stop having fun, quality is gonna suffer, and people are gonna stop reading, and it's gonna spiral down real fast. 11.Look at your traffic stats and see where people are coming from, and what time your traffic peaks. Use that to help you figure out when to tweet/fb post about new articles or whatever. 12.With a few exceptions for micro-niche ad revenue sites (black friday or whatever), make sure you're blogging about something that you could talk about at length and enjoy. I'm sure I could start a blog about table design, but I don't give a poo poo about it, and that's gonna come through in my posts, and most importantly, in the amount of effort I put in. Here's your one shot at "having a job because you love it, not for the money." 13.Roll some of that money you're making back into ads/giveaways/whatever. 14.If your niche has a convention, try to make it there. Making real-life connections with other people, *especially* manufacturers, is a GREAT way to not only have connections for increasing profit, but if you meet a dude that runs a website geared towards whatever your into, you're probably gonna check it out. And then those people have a real connection, so there's a good chance they'll keep following you because they "know" you. 15.Email lists are the poo poo. I personally won't ever email subscribe to a blog, but people loving LOVE inbox updates on whatever you did last week for some reason. Make sure you're not just copy-pasting the article into the email though. Also try to add in some personal stuff, "and in other news, we're gearing up to do blah blah" 16.If you feel like it's the right time, doing some springtee shirts for your site is a killer way to make money and get your brand out there. 17.Do something different. There were a ton of firefighting sites out there, but not very many on /volunteer/ firefighting. 18.HAVE FUN AND ENJOY IT invision fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Nov 17, 2014 |
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Nov 16, 2014 11:06
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invision posted:
First off, great post! Second, I wrote a jQuery plugin that might be of assistance at least for the social media buttons! Basically it detects how far the page has scrolled and then shows a hidden container with content ("back to top", a hidden navigation bar, social media buttons, etc). You can see it in action here, and there's a link to Github to download it if you think it could work? jQuery Scroll Detection
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Nov 16, 2014 13:39
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Moniker posted:First off, great post! That's pretty awesome. Don't really have time to do it /right now/ but I'll definitely look at using that, it seems like the perfect solution to keeping the site clean looking, but still making the stuff noticeable.
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Nov 17, 2014 00:32
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invision posted:@samglover: Fair points. My thought on using a landing page instead of a blog on the front page was to deliver value right up front, instead of trying to force people to read further. I didn't give it a ton of thought, though. I'm working on a white paper for a giveaway. I haven't even decided what it will be yet, though, so I haven't added any kind of email signup. Definitely on my to-do list.
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Nov 17, 2014 00:55
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invision posted:That's pretty awesome. Don't really have time to do it /right now/ but I'll definitely look at using that, it seems like the perfect solution to keeping the site clean looking, but still making the stuff noticeable. In all honesty it can be pretty obnoxious to pop things in, etc. But if the site has a small 100px wide vertically stacked list of icons and it pops in then that really won't be too annoying. If you need a hand with it just send me a PM or contact me through my blog or Twitter as I'm much more active on those. But it's a pretty handy tool. I'm gonna implement it soon once I get some SVG icons to toss on the site!
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Nov 17, 2014 13:43
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In the good old days, companies like iBill and CCBill provided one-stop solutions for billing, running your own affiliate program, and even managing user databases. Who are the players in that space, now? Does anyone still do it all, or do I need to deal with authorize.net, and install my own affiliate-tracking software, and so on?
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Nov 18, 2014 05:30
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Moniker posted:First off, great post! Hey dude I sent you a PM.
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Nov 19, 2014 05:30
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invision posted:Hey dude I sent you a PM. Replied Also although I doubt it'll be a major hit, make sure your site is mobile friendly. I came across this article that says Google may begin taking mobile-friendliness into account. That said, I also came across this site which ranks your site based on a number of factors. Not definitive but still cool regardless. Also while on the topic of ranking and stuff I know a lot of people are running Wordpress and honestly depending on the plugins you're using and all of that jazz, you could be hurting yourself with page load time. Take time to:
If you're not too tech savvy that's fine but seriously consider looking into the guts of your blogging platform of choice. A few tweaks can go a long way between loading your site in 400ms and 1.8s.
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Nov 19, 2014 13:56
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Can anyone give me some advice regarding coupon affiliates? I've heard so many mixed reviews - Some bloggers says it's one of her biggest earners yet I read some articles like this (http://www.marketingadept.com/blog/2012/12/be-wary-of-coupon-affiliates-stealing-your-affiliate-marketing-commissions/) and start to question the practice. Being in the pet niche there's always a ton of deals going on. With all this talk about cookies, people searching for promo codes, and the affiliate having to pay commissions I'm a bit hesitant. Makes me think there's a reason I don't see more bloggers jumping on the coupon bandwagon. Is there any advantage to coupons versus regular affiliate marketing?
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Nov 19, 2014 18:14
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Eagerly awaiting to hear about your guys' Black Friday experiences this year. I tried to do a little promo in the pet niche but yeah - it's looking pretty dismal so far.
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Nov 28, 2014 16:00
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I didn't do as well as last year but it's because I started a bit late and couldn't get ranked high enough for a keyword I wanted. Still did good for about a days worth of real work. I'll post some numbers after the weekend.
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Nov 28, 2014 16:40
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FCKGW posted:I didn't do as well as last year but it's because I started a bit late and couldn't get ranked high enough for a keyword I wanted. Still did good for about a days worth of real work. This is always one of the best parts of this thread, seriously. I can't remember if we've talked about it, but do you use social media at all for your BF site(s)? So, I'm being talked into my next internet funbux adventure, and I'd like your guys feedback. A close friend of mine was in corporate sales for a long time, and retired pretty well into the 1%. He got bored and decided to start doing consulting gigs for ridiculous sums of money where people fly him around the country to talk. We were discussing my old site a few weeks ago, and he became super interested once I said how much money + free stuff I got from it. After talking about my whole social media strategy that I never shut up about in this thread, he wants me to start consulting as he does. Maybe less on the speaking side and more of as a "come in and fix SMM goofs and teach people how to do it". Does that sound like a viable thing? Is my advice good enough/obscure enough that there's a market for it? I know I could go to warriorforum and hawk a "SYSTEM FOR MAKING MONEY FROM HOME" or whatever, but that's lovely and hokey. Crush my dreams, goons.
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Nov 29, 2014 09:41
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Do it whats the worst that could happen? C level execs can be both crazy out of touch and ignorant of the talent they already have sitting around in the company and do will quite happily pay mega bucks for someone to come in and tell them how to do a thing they dont understand but feel is important. Just make sure you can sound like you know your poo poo. Also be able to talk about benefits to big business.
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Nov 29, 2014 09:49
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invision posted:This is always one of the best parts of this thread, seriously. I can't remember if we've talked about it, but do you use social media at all for your BF site(s)? I don't do any social media at all, no. I'm happy flying somewhat under the radar of the company my site is based around.
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Nov 29, 2014 16:56
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mcsuede posted:This video is great because it scared people off FB PPC and the CPC there remains a complete steal. The truth is the guy's methodology was nonsense and there's a ton of money to be made on FB ads if you know how to target. I just bought a few dollars of Facebook advertising for my page. I set it to US only and targeted people that were interested in various engineering topics. I got 8 likes. When I try to check on those 8 likes, I see that Facebook is saying I got X, Y, and 4 others liked my page on the day that my ad ran. When I try to see who the 4 others are, I only see one person. I checked the profiles of the X and Y and they have 2000+ Liked pages. At this point, I think that money was wasted. Did I do something wrong? How can I target the readers that I'm interested in? I don't mind buying a few dollars of ads per month if it helps me get readers but I don't want to waste my money. I've been posting articles every day for weeks but haven't gotten any new organic growth from that.
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Nov 30, 2014 23:38
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KetTarma posted:Did I do something wrong? It took me like two years before I started seeing organic traffic. Then again, I posted a ton for about 3-4 months and then stopped. Then I randomly started getting traffic from google. Who knows.
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Dec 1, 2014 00:17
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I'm getting about 50 hits a day, mostly from Google. However, I am not getting much of anything from social media.
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Dec 1, 2014 00:22
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As far as social media goes I saw a big increase after I joined triberr. Are you visiting other blogs in your niche and leaving comments? I get a lot of social media shares from some other bloggers in my niche - the ones I've made relationships with via blog comments, joining forum discussions, and sharing their content. I've had some decent success with paper.li & scoopit as well - but for me it all boiled down to sharing first to get others to notice you. A few months back I started interlinking my content better. I checked in google analytics to see which posts were getting the most hits and then make sure to link one or two of my other posts within it rather than just relying on my related posts plugin. Royal Jeans fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 04:27
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Royal Jeans - could you paste a link to your paper.li? I was just reading about it this morning and it looks really interesting and worth a go, I just wanted to see how someone here uses it. Cheers
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Dec 2, 2014 00:33
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Camo Guitar posted:Royal Jeans - could you paste a link to your paper.li? I was just reading about it this morning and it looks really interesting and worth a go, I just wanted to see how someone here uses it. Cheers It's ummm.. about dogs so yeah. https://paper.li/dogleak/1416356825 I don't spend too much time editing it; I have seen some really impressive ones.
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Dec 2, 2014 04:50
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Looking into getting a premium theme for my first wordpress blog, but I have no idea what factors I should consider in choosing one other than "ooooh looks pretty" and active support staff.
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Dec 3, 2014 03:37
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Mad Rancher posted:Looking into getting a premium theme for my first wordpress blog, but I have no idea what factors I should consider in choosing one other than "ooooh looks pretty" and active support staff. It really depends what you're looking to do with your blog. If you want something lightweight/ customizable/ good support I personally love Genesis. But there are a ton of great themes out there; the downfall of buying a framework like Genesis is that it's not the easiest to get used to as far as customizations, but once you do it's awesome. If you're not familiar with making customizations in CSS or PHP you might prefer a theme that has a great built in customizer. You'll also need to consider if you want to use the traditional blog layout or if you want something that looks like a magazine, etc. When I was doing some research into buying my first theme I found a lot of great info on Smashing Magazine http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/02/08/get-the-best-out-of-premium-wordpress-theme/
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Dec 3, 2014 04:11
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Consider carfully load times too. Both google and people dislike long loads and some themes take an age. Loads of ohhh fancy on a theme looks cool but can be murder on your site for something people generally really don't care about.
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Dec 3, 2014 07:38
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I'm probably looking in a genesis theme. My blog will be used to write articles on game design/strategy for my business entity and convert those into money through sales of games I produced (see my avatar). What theme do you all think would be best for that from these: http://my.studiopress.com/themes/
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Dec 3, 2014 20:21
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Mad Rancher posted:Looking into getting a premium theme for my first wordpress blog, but I have no idea what factors I should consider in choosing one other than "ooooh looks pretty" and active support staff. If you find something, try and find something built on the Genesis framework. They're reallllly easy to use, modify and stuff.
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Dec 3, 2014 23:20
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Mad Rancher posted:I'm probably looking in a genesis theme. My blog will be used to write articles on game design/strategy for my business entity and convert those into money through sales of games I produced (see my avatar). What theme do you all think would be best for that from these: http://my.studiopress.com/themes/ I think the most common blog ones used are eleven40, metro, lifestyle, magazine, news. Though if you want to showcase your products more you might want to look at the others. I think some of them have built in pricing tables and stuff. Just depends on what you really plan to do with your site. If you have a site that you love the look of you can run it thru http://whatwpthemeisthat.com/ to see which theme it's using (if it's wordpress) The great thing about Genesis is that they're so customizable you can just use the basic framework and come up with something awesome. I'd take a loot at their showcase http://www.studiopress.com/showcase or browse through wpsniffer to see which themes you like. And the best part with Genesis is that you can find great information on pretty much any customizations youd like to make. They've got a support forum thats filled with code questions & there are a ton of stand alone sites that are just genesis tutorials. Royal Jeans fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Dec 3, 2014 |
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Dec 3, 2014 23:25
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Cool. After looking at all the themes, I've narrowed it down to 4 possible ones. http://my.studiopress.com/themes/generate/ http://my.studiopress.com/themes/eleven40/ http://my.studiopress.com/themes/balance/ http://my.studiopress.com/themes/quattro/ Just to crowdsource an opinion, which one do you all like the best and why?
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Dec 3, 2014 23:57
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I have metro and like it. Of the four you posted I like Quatrro the most. Does having the email signup at the top (Generate & Balance themes) lead to a higher conversion rate? I don't like the way it looks, but could be useful if your main goal for the site is to build an email list. Genesis has been great. Great tutorials and plugins which add a lot of functionality.
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Dec 4, 2014 00:32
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Mad Rancher posted:Cool. I like the eleven40 one the best - but personally I would use a standard content/sidebar set up on it. Check out the amazing looking sites ran on it - http://www.studiopress.com/theme/eleven40 Really any of them are great. All genesis themes come with the enews widget which means you can customize how you want your email list to look if that happens to be a concern. And if you like the idea of having an email list widget that stands out I like the free version of Hello Bar if you want one on top. http://boostblogtraffic.com/email-list-plugins/ I'd read this article if you're looking for more information on email list conversions. Seriously with sites like http://wpsites.net/ & http://sridharkatakam.com/ it's pretty easy to mix & match certain genesis styles & functions of themes. And I'm also using Metro as mentioned above and I love it.
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Dec 4, 2014 03:12
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Yeah, I ended up going with eleven40. Thanks for the tutorial sites, Royal Jeans!
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Dec 4, 2014 06:21
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