Transition Expert Blog

I have been doing an experiment with blogging and pinging, one of the ways which supposedly gets your site listed and ranked higher quicker.

Firstly I’ll explain what blogging and pinging is. Blog and ping is a technique you can use to get your site listed in search engines. The idea is that search engines like blogs because of the ever updating content, so they keep going back. By writing a blog and placing some site links in the posts, the search engines will spider the links, and pages shortly after you blog.

Pinging is when you send a “ping” to let the directories, which keep lists of blogs, and when those blogs are updated, know that you have added content to your blog. These are allegedly closely watched by the search engine spiders, so they can spider any new content and add it to the search engine which controls them.

Anyway, back to my experiment, does blogging and pinging really get your site noticed?

Well my results have been encouraging. I have tested by only using a blog as the front page of a new information site I started. http://www.informationpagesonline.com has only been advertised by way of the blog to announce new content, and then pinged through http://www.pingoat.com which distributes the blog entries to several large ping sites.

Following a week of adding content, and then posting an announcement of the new content to the blog on the front page and pinging with pingoat, the site seems to be getting visitors to most of the sections, which I can see from the log files. I can also see some of the traffic is coming from search engines, and also a lot of spider activity can be seen on the site, where the search engines are crawling the content.

So I have to conclude that blogging and pinging  is a way of getting listed on search engines, or at least of getting noticed by them quickly.

Should you be blogging and pinging?

Of course that’s up to you, but for the time it takes, it maybe worth trying blog and ping for yourself and tracking the results. A quick blog post (use http://www.blogger.com if you don’t already have a blog) and then ping with pingoat takes only a few minutes, and may help a site into all the search engines quickly.

If you’re looking at Google’s AdSense program to make money with your blog you’re surely asking yourself how much you could make from such a program. You probably think you can’t make as much as you can from traditional advertising schemes.

Google, of course, keeps a great deal of secrecy regarding how much AdWords advertisers pay per each click directed to their site and the same applies for how much AdSense banner holders make from their websites and blogs

While there’s nothing official, rumors circulate around the Internet concerning the amount of cash a blogger can earn by using AdSense. And many people (illegally) disclose how much they have been making with AdSense. There are stories of people raising over one thousand dollars per month using AdSense, some as much as $1000 a day just through blogging.

There are also stories of people exceeding $100,000.00 per month but it’s a bit hard to believe such stories. The truth to the matter is that if you have a small blog and you just want it to support itself with a little extra income, and you don’t wish to reach your pocket for its maintenance costs you can easily do this with AdSense.

AdSense is also very good for people who host a lot of pages or very large community blogs. Even if the said pages or blogs don’t generate a lot of traffic individually, every click counts and you can earn up with a lot of money by doing this. And that just goes to prove that sometimes quantity matters nearly as much as quality.

There’s no telling how much money you’re going to make by using Google’s AdSense program on your blog but you can sort of tell for yourself, before actually starting, by taking a few things into consideration.

First, is the amount of visits your blog may now get every day. While there’s no way to estimate precisely on this, you can generally make a safe assumption that if you have a lot of clicks per day you’ll be making good money.

Also, this depends on what exactly your blog is about. If your site is about anything popular (music, sex, whatever) you’re bound to get a lot of banner clicks. These have a coefficient associated with them, called the CTR (click through ratio).

Basically, what it translates to is that if a large proportion of your site’s visitors click the ads you’ll be making more money. And the best way to do this is to have some popular content in your site, ensuring the links direct users towards popular items as well.

Then of course, there’s the position and number of ads on your blog. While you don’t want to overdo it, having many ads will undoubtedly generate more income for you as a webmaster. Do not however believe, that if you just add a lot of ads in an important portion of your site, visitors could always just skip them (and be assured that many do just that).

There’s something between an art and a science to positioning your ads. People generally look in certain places and never look in others, and knowing this a website author and/or webmaster can do a great deal of things to increase his earnings with AdSense.

All in all, the amount of money you make with AdSense depends on many factors. But if you have a site with interesting contents and/or many pages, and if you see a constantly large amount of traffic every day, you can bet you’ll be making a lot of money with AdSense.

Even if you aren’t in the above categories, AdSense is still worth using on your blog because there’s very little hassle in setting it up, and many times it can help financially support the site, whilst being a nice bonus to get through the mail at the end of the month.

Tracking your visitors is critical to your Blogger blogs success. You need to know how people are finding your blog, how many people are viewing each post, how many of your readers convert into customers (or ad clicks,) and how to use this gathered information to improve your traffic and conversion rates.

Google has a free tool called Google Analytics that will allow you to track almost anything that your readers and visitors do while on your Google Blogger blog. This free tool from Google is the industry standard when it comes to tracking. Don’t bother with the simple traffic counters as they will not give you all the information you need. Here are some of the things you will want to keep track of:

1) Total Traffic To Your Blog

You want to keep track of how many visitors you have and what they are viewing. By keeping track of the total visits to your blog you will be able to gauge what is working and what is not. This is very important to those that are advertising or collecting names, as you already know each visitor has a value.

2) Track Conversion Rates

With Google Analytics you can keep track of specific goals. For example your blog may be setup to collect names and email addresses. Google Analytics will allow you to track what percentage of your readers give you their name and email address. You will also be able to track how your visitors found your blog (keyword, search engine, referring site or advertisement,) what page they landed on and then pinpoint the specific page that convinced them to give you their name and email (aka: a conversion.)

With this information you will be able to improve your sign-up rates in several ways. If you discover that a specific keyword sending traffic to your website has a 90% conversion rate you can work on improving your search engine rankings for that keyword. If you notice that 50% of your potential registrations leave while reading your “Terms of Service” page, you can modify that page to decrease the loss of registrations. If you see that 30% of the visitors you get from YouTube decide to convert you can focus more effort on your video marketing campaigns. There are literally hundreds of other metrics you can use to improve your conversion rates as well, but without tracking your visitors you would never discover them!

3) Track The Physical Location Of Your Visitors

If you advertise online (specifically with Google Ads) Google Analytics will be immensely valuable to you. Google can log where your visitors are physically located. First by country then drilled down from there. You may discover that 90% of your traffic is for some reason coming from a specific city in California. Based on this metric you could create a targeted advertisements for that specific location. Not only would you save money on your ad campaigns, your ads would be far more targeted to the location. On top of that, if you ever plan on hosting an event, you will know which cities will be easiest to market to.

Data is collected over time. Even if you don’t know how to read it, make sense of it or improve your website from it, it is absolutely critical that you start tracking your sites visitors immediately. You will eventually need to access this priceless data.