You know you want it. But how?

There are many, many ways to get traffic on the internet.  But unless it’s targeted and relevant, it’s usually of little use.  Your blog, just as any website, needs targeted traffic.

The great thing about blogs is that they can, if properly structured and written, “self-target”.  Remembering the basics of blog traffic which we’ve written about before, we focus on the deeper and most important principles of this topic.

To Pay Or Not To Pay

There are a variety of ways you can pay to attract targeted visitors through a variety of services.  We pick up on some of these, below.

Like everything else, you need to consider your ROI (Return On Investment) carefully.  Whilst you may get the traffic, will it ‘convert’ and so is it useful.  It depends entirely what you want to achieve.  For example: are you interested in achieving sales or, perhaps, just interested in providing good, widely-read content.

Look at your endgame and work “backwards”.  It will quite quickly become apparent whether or not spending your budget on targeted traffic is worth it, even if it is viable.

Free Traffic

Well, there is such a thing as a free lunch on the internet  :)

No, we don’t mean the slick products which promise the earth and don’t deliver.  We mean focusing on properly optimizing your website and letting the search engines, particularly Google, deliver your targeted traffic.

Think back to all we’ve discussed before:  good quality, relevant information is what people want.  Or good quality, effective services which are relevant to their need.  Or good quality, relevant goods.  There’s a theme, here In many ways, the “new economy” on the ‘net is exactly the same as the old one: you deliver properly, well and on-time and you succeed.  You “over-deliver” (providing more than expected, perhaps before expected) and you produce repeat visitors/customers.

It’s not rocket science, but it’s missed time and time again and only a (very) small minority put this into practice.  If you don’t believe us, or you just don’t fully understand where we’re coming from, there are few better than Ken Evoy on this topic. And when it comes to building websites, and blogs, which get real, targeted, visitors, Ken talks about strategies he and his many associates employ to do just that. Whilst he does offer good quality tools to do it (don’t click on this link if you’re after ‘get rich quick’ – he doesn’t even go there, quite rightly), he also gives a really great lesson on targeted traffic and getting to the point.

Paid Traffic

Be careful.  There are a plethora of ‘wonder services’ out there which just don’t cut it.  They are often over-priced.  Worse, they can damage your rankings.

But there are some decent products and there is some good advice if you look and think carefully.  It takes time and experience to work through this – there is no immediate advice on offer.

Whatever happens, don’t risk your relationship with the search engines.  They are your lifeline for traffic: don’t let anyone tell you otherwise!

It is worth looking at directories and forums as a way of finding like-minded individuals who want a particular service or type of information.  Makes sense, doesn’t it.  And, generally, they don’t charge more than nominal fees.  We won’t provide particular recommendations, but take a look.

Speak soon.

What is Adsense and where did it come from?

Google advertising represents a massive slice of the Internet’s global revenue base; the AdSense Software contributes a large percentage to Google’s annual multi-billion dollar turnover.

There was real confusion in the early days of the internet as to how a search engine, or other business, would sensibly make money from (“monetize”) traffic and, particularly, allow third party advertisers of a range of sizes to get their ads onto the web and for others to make money from displaying them.  The real genius of AdSense was to link the advertisers and the advertising ‘hosts’ (websites displaying AdSense adverts), using its amazing Google search engine as the platform to pull both sides together.  Google advertising was born.

In one relatively simple (in hindsight!) step, Google completely revolutionized the ad market on the internet and gave substance to the “click-through” advertising market. It was bold and innovative. It was the start of a multi-billion dollar cash cow. A revolution

How Does it Work?

Users sign up their websites for affiliation with Google.  When approved, every site which displays AdSense ads is given special code to place targeted adverts on the website.  The adverts are specifically targeted to the CONTENT of the website.  Crucial to Google’s model of delivering relevance.

As well as delivering real relevance, the holy grail for every internet user, this approach saved Google from the hassle, web page space and administration associated with managing banner adverts.  Sweet, indeed.

In its absolute essence, AdSense is a software program by virtue of which Google will pay you for targeting/directing the users of your website to another website.  Advertising in its simplest, neatest, sense.

• A “click through” occurs when a visitor clicks on a hyperlink which links to an advert.
• The AdSense code used by Google now offers those who display AdSense code an assortment of methods of displaying ads: from text links to graphic links, banner ads to video ads (each having a hyperlink in-built automatically by the AdSense code).
• Those who display AdSense put these ‘boxes’ in appropriate places on their websites. They get clicked. Click = cash for the site owner displaying the relevant, useful ads.  Win, win.

But How Does This Link to AdWords?

What determines the amount paid by the AdWords advertiser is how much the AdWords advertiser is prepared to pay for each click.  The more you pay, the better placed the ads, the more often they’ll be displayed, the more clicks…you get it!  There’s real competition for ‘hot’ keywords.

There is a correlation between how much an AdWords advertiser has paid to display their ad and how much an AdSense click delivers.  AdWords advertisers can pay a few cents per click right up to $10 or more. You can see, therefore, that the displayer of AdSense can take a ’slice’ of an expensive ad or a relatively cheap one and the more traffic you receive will increase the possibility of a click and a click through fee into the AdSense account.

We’ll come back to this soon.  Enjoy experimenting.

It’s a question many ask, several find the answer to, only a very few do anything about: “How Do I Start A Business Blog”?

Don’t just dash into this. You need to cross a deep river. It’s a cold river. And it’s a fast-running river. But there really are amazing treasures in the jungle beyond: personal fulfillment, development and, yes, money. Lots of it, should you really wish (yes, we’ve been taking a couple of the literary excitement tablets! )

But money should never be the pure motivation for doing anything, in our view. It should be a by-product (yes, not a bad by-product, but one all the same) of a great business. Some make look upon this with scorn, but it’s a view we share with many successful businesses/business models.

Objectives

Business blogging may be there to promote an existing business; it may be there to be a business in itself. The biggest tip of all is to learn from the community of existing bloggers. There are literally millions of them out there, with hundreds of millions of hours of experience.  Learn from the community, not just the experts (by the way, often the every day community members are, by a long way, more ‘expert’ that some of the ‘experts’).

Is Blogging a “fad”?

No (I guess you’d expect us to say that, right?)  Seriously, though, no.  It may (and is) develop(ing), but those who said it was dead were/are wrong.  Just type ‘blog’ into Google and see the hits in many many different forms.  It’s as powerful as some of the best and most established forms of communication on the web.

And it’s growing. Just take a look at some recent stats to understand that growth… Technorati’s “State of the Blogosphere” is about the best out there.

Quoting from this publication:

“Blogs are Pervasive and Part of Our Daily Lives
There have been a number of studies aimed at understanding the size of the Blogosphere, yielding widely disparate estimates of both the number of blogs and blog readership. All studies agree, however, that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.

The numbers vary but agree that blogs are here to stay…”

Will you become a millionaire?

The stories about amazing riches from blogging are just that: stories. But there are, indeed, a few tried and very well tested methods which can make $000s of dollars a month for business bloggers. For every single one of those promised “thousands of dollars”, there’s a guide written by a guru. Well, there are gurus and gurus!

Some guides are genuinely worth the money. Others are not. Like everything in life, you pay your money and take your choice!  But give yourself the weapons for the fight and, even more importantly, understand the fight.

Even those who make money the ultimate goal and like their Ferraris (Rob Benwell, for example!!) understand the real guts of business and don’t lose sight of that.  Never lose sight of it either!

5 Top Tips On Information Guides (part of a life raft to help with that river!):

-1 Don’t believe anything you read until you’ve read it not once, not twice, but FIVE times. Preferably separated by healthy doses of coffee and broken by a walk to the park. Seriously.

-2 Even then, don’t take out the credit card until you’ve read it again. And then a couple more times.

-3 Research the author of the guide and know your topic inside out, upside down.  Look at independent recommendations.

-4 Give yourself the ‘cold towel treatment’: “is this really helpful”? Does it REALLY do what it says “on the tin”?

-5 Plan. Plan. Plan. Plan a little more.

There are no quick fixes in life: helpful assistance is great, and essential as stellar marketing/finance gurus like Alvin Phang do show.  However, you must do it for yourself.  And you must do it – no-one else can.  Be guided, but you’re at the steering wheel.

-6 (I said 5, right? well, it’s a good topic…)  ENJOY YOURSELF

Rob Benwell’s

Core Tips on Business Blogging

The Search Engines (see- capital S, capital E – true reverence )  know how to separate the good from the bad. Google is, frankly, the King of this with its relevance algorithms.

This is fundamental, as there is a lot of trash out there. Some try to beat the system. However, 90 or so percent of the time, Google will serve up the most relevant information requested in its search box.

Most of the general population have, in the last few years, missed that the Yellow Pages (and equivalents) are dead. Fact. Linked (heavily to this) is that Google redefined “search”.

Blogs  and  “new” information have taken over. Yes, you guessed it: business owners are, and really, really, should, use this to their  advantage.

This is the real, dynamic power  of blogs.  Providing personal, topic-focused or “whatever else” information. Google  is passionate about new, fresh information.  Without it, most websites are crawled and logged poorly by Google et al: they provide old, irrelevant and unhelpful information. Also, despite massive advances in technology, the Google spiders (robots) are relevant simple guys: they like to crawl fresh, plain, relevant text.  Flash, images, etc, etc, really screw up the party.  Really, really remember this (ok, yes, you can submit xml sitemaps, etc, nowadays but let’s get real).

We’re not advocating completely textual pages – we don’t have them.  But don’t go nuts with the video!
Generally, webmasters have to push people to websites.  Most website traffic, is usually  direct hits. Pushed  traffic. People who already know the name of your company and know what people have for lunch on Fridays.  The information these websites provide usually does not attract the search robots.

You can pull people  to a blog. It can attract readers organically. Most blog traffic usually comes in organically. Readers find  your blog, not the other way around.  That’s the KEY difference for us.  Period.

Look out for Part II, guys.

Well, we’ve had a few notes about this. Some of them, er, less than polite.

Some think it’s an attempt at world domination. But we think that’s been done already and it’s a handy portal.

Google Blog Search is Google’s attempt to collate worldwide blogs on various topics. You may have used it – it may have passed you by completely. It doesn’t matter, as here we take a look.

Did you say you’d missed it?  Well that’s bad, if you’re a serious blogger.  Way back now, it passed Technorati in visits.  That alone makes it a heavyweight, pretty much like all of Google’s body parts

Recently, the G boys and girls released a major blog search update (isn’t it great when we’re all grateful when THEY develop THEIR business?)  If you’re into your algorithms and chats with techie folks, take a look here.

Usefully (yes, really usefully), the Blog Search results contains results for their baby (Blogger) plus results for WordPress, Joomla and for a range of other platforms in a range of other languages. Yes, world domination! But, seriously, a good attempt at unification of blog knowledge.

Google Blog Search also reads links on web pages. But not “just” for indexation of pages, for assimilation of blog information. Clever, eh? So, if you wake up on a Monday and search for “pink tree blogs” (presumably a heavy night the night before?) then it will list all blogs pushing out content on that topic. ClubBlogger’s hoping there aren’t many

The Blog Search is worth getting to know. Well.  This is simply an introductory piece and we’ll come back to it.

As always, comments welcome!

The verdict is out: they’re guilty.

After a battle with the might of the media industry, Pirate Bay has suffered a major blow. But, interestingly, the Swedish Court which delivered the ruling earlier today has not said Pirate Bay must be closed-down.

Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde were each found guilty today of infringing copyright law and each of them has been sentenced to a year in jail, plus a multi-million (30m) Kronor fine will be shared between them.

ClubBlogger will return to this one, later. It could have massive implications for the future of media on the ‘net.

When ClubBlogger received an email from a member, recently, about “Automatic Blog Content”, we viewed it with great scepticism.

And, to be honest, we’re still sceptical.   The whole point about a good blog is that it provides good, original, content.  It’s just not possible to automate that – or is it?

No!  But it is possible to supplement good, well written content with a feed of good ‘automatic’ content.  What is meant by this?  Well, it’s kind of like an auto-pilot on an airplane not replacing the pilot – but assisting him/her.

We thought it was worth taking a look.

One product (of many) which has been brought onto our radar is “CaRP”.  No, this isn’t a fishing post  CaRP takes two of the most powerful elements on the internet, RSS and HTML, and melds them together. Sounds cute? Well, it just may be.

We all need to get real, here. Content is king – and that’s what readers want. Readers do NOT want nonsense generated by a computer. They want good content generated and tailored by a good author. So it is and so shall it be. But do users also want to see good content generated from a good RSS feed? It really feels that way and tests of CaRP have shown that. Yes, we took out a few of the ClubBlogger dollars!

RSS is powerful. No doubt (see the link, above, to a previous ClubBlogger post). It’s hardly news to those experienced ClubBloggers. But only some of you will have used it this way.

We thought it was worth a shot and will work further with it. With a ‘wet towel’ on the head to ensure you keep grounded and sensible (it’s easy to get carried away with this thing!) you may want to delve into the powerful world of RSS to HTML and try this. Or you may know a colleague or a friend who might.

There are several other tools worth looking at in this area. Scripts are reasonably readily available to buy and use.

Enjoy experimenting. But really, really, keep in mind that good content will drive this thing.

This is such a powerful example of the use of blogging that we had to run a short post on it.

On a variant of the ‘war reporter’, typically seen via CNN or the BBC, the phenomenon of war blogging has shown the ‘net in a whole new light.

This issue came to the fore during the recent Russia/Georgia crisis. Georgian Bloggers told the story, with a spectacular and powerful human element.

However, also seen was, according to some accounts, a ‘cyber lockdown’ of certain sites. Take a look and form your own views.

We are not here to propagate any political or otherwise angle on this one: simply to see how new media has put a whole new spin on reporting and communication in a time of crisis. And, also, how a time of crisis may and did energize a new movement in technology, and blogging in particular, in the territory affected by the crisis.

It is undoubtedly the case that blogging is increasingly exponentially in areas of the world which have trailed “the West” in implementation of technological advances. That, simply, makes it new and interesting.

In the scheme of things, the printing press wasn’t invented and used that long ago. The effect was huge, on that era and, consequentially, today. No-one then could have dreamed of a society where everyday people (whether in a war-worn environment or in Starbucks) communicate with the world. Such is the pure excitement of life and human development.

We all know the power of these things, and most of us enjoy them, but I spill coffee over myself every time I see the new set of stats. ClubBloggers over the world are doing the same. There are a lot of people covered in coffee (and an assortment of other beverages ) out there.

Yes it’s true: Digg is keeping trend with FaceBook. All from a site that Kevin Rose initially spent a few thousand dollars developing with a freelance coder. That’s why it’s even more stunning; he doesn’t even really have the ‘geek coding engine’ under his hood.

Use one of our favorite sites, here, to get into the real nitty gritty of this. Really great stuff and definitely worth 10 minutes, whether you’re in this industry professionally or are just blown away by it.

We all need a little inspiration. Or, if you’re like us, you just like to keep your finger firmly on the pulse… Take a look at the top blogs below… you won’t waste your time.

Buzz Machine

With a PageRank of 8 ( no, ClubBlogger’s not obsessed with PageRank ) this is a stormer.

What does it do? It stirs stuff up and provides great content. Really, take a look.

Scobeleizer

This one’s by Robert Scoble. Bob’s one of the apparently endless army of former Microsoft employees who often criticised the company.

Some back-criticize individuals like this for simply trying to obtain credibility for himself. Actually, they often end up logging a bank of credibility for their (usually former) employers on the way.

Great insights, though.

Jonathan’s Blog

You guessed it… by Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems.

Admittedly there’s a feeling of a resume about this one but leaders in industry are often magentic. Jonathan is and it’ a good read.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

This is funny… started as a parody.

Folk lore tells us that it was so good that the real Steve Jobs read it.

However, you’ll see that the author has had some techie (or other) issues and the whole thing has taken on a new slant into his life.

Really worth a look.

TechCrunch

If you’re not even slightly techie, maybe avoid it. But this one’s by Michael Arrington.

If the name doesn’t ring bells, you’ve probably not heard of the amazing IT phenomenon discussed here.

Boing Boing

We’ve looked at this one before in a similar article, here.

However, as apparently the world’s most linked-to blog, it deserves another mention. This thing carries a weight like no other: it’s a phenomenon.

Operating as a group blog, it focuses primarily on culture, technology and media.

It shows what a juggernaut blogging really is.

We’ve done a couple of pieces on the topic of stunning blogs.

Please do contribute your thoughts and any we’ve not covered to date. The feedback (mainly via direct email) on the last article was great – thanks all.

Linking is the lifeblood of blogging and, come to think of it, much else on the web.

Blogging is based on a dialogue, not a monologue. The community relies on hyperlinks to keep us all inter-connected and the conversations valuable and active.

One-way conversations are boring. In life and on the ‘net!

Those in the blog world who play by the rules and interact with others do and will benefit. Those who don’t, well: it’s unhelpful, to say the least.

By linking to another website you will, generally, help it (though there are increasingly complex elements within the Search Engines’ algorithms which mean that receiving a link from a ‘bad’ or off-topic page may be damaging to the recipient page’s Page Rank – more another time, though see other pages on ClubBlogger on the topic).

Linking to fellow bloggers actually helps you, because they will find that backlink (otherwise known as ego-searching) and probably visit your blog out of curiosity. Who knows — they might even bookmark you, or even better link back to you and become a regular reader. Always nice.

Fact: the blogosphere environment is absolutely no different than the community – in ‘real’ life or online. What you put in, you get out. Or at least, should.

On the topic of PageRank, according to Google:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence,Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”