Blogging Questions & Answers 1

\"bloggingquestionsandanswers.png\"

\n

Welcome to the first edition of the “Blogging Questions & Answers.” I will kick it with 10 questions every Wednesday, so if your question was not answered today it will be next week. If the volume of questions increase I might change it to 20 questions answered each week.

\n

You can ask your question either by leaving a comment on this post or via the contact form. Here we go!

\n

Patrix asks:

\n

Should we be worried about supplemental results? Mine seem to oscillate wildly and at times, remedial measures produce the opposite effects.

\n

You should be worried if a huge part of your content is in the supplemental index. Pages in the supplemental index get spidered less often, and they only appear in search results for very narrow search queries. If a large part of your content is in supplemental index you should run a check-up on your blog to ensure that it is not coming from duplicate content penalties or other problems that Google might find while indexing your blog.

\n

You mentioned that remedial measures might produce the opposite effect. My advice would be to eliminate duplicate content, to improve the internal linking structure and and to keep working on quality backlinks.

\n

Webd360 asks:

\n

Was there a specific blog or person that inspired you to start blogging, or did you just find out about it and decided to give it a try?

\n

Late in 2005 I already had a small blog running. I had my own domain, and it was using the Blogger platform. Basically I was posting articles that I used on my economics degree, and the traffic was minimal.

\n

After a couple of months I came across an article titled “How to Make Money from Your Blog,” written by Steve Pavlina. After reading this article I said to myself, “Damn, I think I can do it.” That is how I started blogging seriously.

\n

Aseem Kishore asks:

\n

\nDid you feel your web site had the sandbox effect? Are there certain times after which your traffic suddenly increases (certain number of months, etc)?

\n

Although I am pretty sure I passed through a “sandbox” period, I did not notice it. Mainly because I was not anticipating organic traffic in the initial months, so it felt pretty natural.

\n

I guess the only case where the sandbox effect would be noticeable is for a website that used some “shady” techniques and was held in the sandbox for a longer period. Should this website fix the problems it would suddenly receive a burst of organic traffic.

\n

Health asks:

\n

\nCan my site be sandboxed or punished in any way by search engines if it gets like 500 links in 1 day?

\n

It depends on how old your site is, and on how many quality backlinks it already has. Getting 500 links in 1 day would not be a problem for an established or popular website. It could raise suspicion, however, if a site that got indexed yesterday by Googled suddenly receive these 500 links.

\n

Overall I would not recommend mass buying links or directory submissions. If you still want to do it, however, do it gradually.

\n

Fred asks:

\n

How many daily visitors do you think you need to get in order to make decent money with Adsense?

\n

It depends on three factors: what is the niche of the site, where the visitors are coming from, and what you think about to be decent.

\n

The niche will affect how many cents or dollars you get per click. If your website is inside niche that pays well (college education, gambling, and so on) and your keywords are optimized, you could be getting as much as two or three dollars per click. That means that you would need less visitors to make a decent revenue from Adsense.

\n

Where the visitors are coming from will influence the click-through rate (CTR), which is how often an average visitor clicks on the Adsense unit. Sites that get a big percentage of their traffic from search engines tend to perform better than sites that get mostly repeat visitors (because they become blind to the ads). The more organic (from search engines) traffic you have, the fewer visitors you will need to make a decent money with Adsense.

\n

Finally, it depends on what you call decent. If you are aiming for $1,000 monthly from Adsense I think you would need around 3000 one-of-a-kind visitors daily (considering an average paying niche, average organic traffic and a not too aggressive ad positioning).

\n

Costa Fong asks:

\n

I see you have good sponsors to your blog. When will be a good time for a blog to get sponsors and how do you approach them?

\n

Before approaching direct sponsors you need to make sure that you have some things in place, like a clean and professional looking design, a popular website, and a focused audience. There are no definite numbers here, but as a rule thumb I would state that you need at least a couple thousand daily visitors or RSS subscribers in order to offer a good exposure to the sponsors.

\n

Once you have that in place you can start working on finding the advertisers. The first place is your blog itself. Write about the fact that you are offering sponsorships, and create an “Advertise Here” page with an overall description of the advertising options.

\n

Initially it is probable that you will need to find the sponsors and not the other way around. Make a list of companies that have products related to your niche. Check companies that are already spending money with Google AdWords or other forms of on the web advertising. After that just contact them directly offering the sponsorship.

\n

I’ve written a pretty detailed article on this topic titled “How to Find Advertisers for Your Website: The Ultimate Guide,” check it out for more information.

\n

Warrior Blog asks:

\n

It is more important to get just lots of traffic to your website or to get more comments on your website?

\n

It depends on your objectives. If you are trying to build a community, for example, the number of comments would be important. People often use communities to test ideas, to exchange favors and to develop projects collaboratively.

\n

If you are trying to build a popular website or to make money on the web, however, traffic is more important. Take a look at some very popular tech blogs like Engadget or Gizmodo. The have a very few readers commenting. Yet you probably know how much money they make…

\n

engtech asks:

\n

I’d love to see a getting started guide for blog monetization for people who have been running in “stealth” mode and already built up traffic, backlinks, search engine ranking, and a community.

\n

This is topic for a whole article! A short advice would be to integrate the ads slowly and test the reactions from the readers (you probably knew that). Secondly, I would also focus the PPC ads towards older posts, so that your organic traffic is targeted and not your loyal readers.

\n

Max asks:

\n

How Long did it take till you had a good number of very special visit

ors per day?

\n

If I remember correctly the traffic was slow for the first two months, and then it started picking up. Around the third month I was receiving 1,000 one-of-a-kind visitors daily, and that is a good number for me (at least it gave me motivation to keep working on the blog).

\n

Ben asks:

\n

Have there been any studies to find out which blogging platform is the ideal or is it all subjective? In other words, is WordPress superior than movable type, blogger and the rest. Any place that has an objective list of the pros and cons of each? Does it really matter which platform you use?

\n

Yes, there are many reviews and comparisons of the two platforms. Here are two examples:
\nhttp://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=167839
\nhttp://www.webmaster-source.com/2007/07/03/wordpress-vs-movable-type/

\n

The platform is somewhat important. Even though there are some very popular blogs using Movable type, WordPress is becoming the de fact standard platform. That means that more people use it, more people create plugins and extensions for it, and more people offer support and help with it.

\n

I would not think twice before choosing WordPress over Movable Type.\n

\n


© Daily Blog Tips – visit the site for more blog tips!

\n \n
Comments are closed.