Tricia's Musings

Random Thoughts about life in general, living in the big city of Toronto



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Monetizing our sites – trying out new affiliate programs

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Some of you have probably noticed that I’ve been working on new ways to monetize my sites over the last few weeks.

I was lucky enough to have been invited into the Blogads program recently by a blogging friend. I’d been hankering to get into that program for some time so I’m quite pleased to have been included.

I’ve actually had quite a bit of luck with advertising companies lately. They’ve been seeking me out rather than the other way around. Perhaps they know something about my sites that I don’t know?

Emily from Kontera got in touch with me about a month ago inviting me to join the Kontera program. They worked with me to develop special codes for four of my domains. I’ve only just started adding them to some of my sites so I’ve yet to see how the program fairs against others like Adsense, but I can tell you that I’ve already made a bit of money and I’ve put the code only on the smaller less visited sites so far.

Lets see, what other companies contacted me directly?

Around the same time that Emily was writing to me from Kontera so was Jeff from Tumri. I finally got around to setting up my first Apod the other day. See the nice white box with various fashion products in it in the right sidebar? That’s a Tumri Apod. No one has clicked on an ad yet though. I’ll have to wait and see how Tumri does on my sites. I’ve only put the one Apod on this site. I’ll create new Apods that totally suit my other blogs topics and try them out on those blogs soon.

I was also invited to join the COPEAC program as well. Nina got me set up, but I still haven’t used any of their ads. COPEAC has ads from a variety of advertisers. You can pick and choose exactly which ads will go on your site. You can actually chose from a number of different advertisers or ads and then use the banner or optimized rotator code to show different ads when a page refreshes. It’s quite versatile. The link that I’ve added is an affiliate link. I’d appreciate it if you’d sign up through me if you are thinking of getting into COPEAC too.

NBCsearch also happened to contact me. I’ve signed up with their program, but have yet to try it out as well. I actually haven’t quite figured out what this is. I believe it allows you to add an xml feed to your site of the search results of your choosing. If anyone else is using this program maybe you can teach me something.

I signed up with BlogKits or OfferForge as it’s now called on my own. The ads from that site are in the middle of each sidebar to the left and right of this post. I’ve had a few clicks on those ads. No income yet. This is another one I’ll have to keep an eye on to see how it does.

There’s another site that invited me to partner with them using three of my blogs. I was introduced to them from my contact at The Glam Network. (Glam is another affiliation that’s been working out beautifully for me BTW). I’ll tell you more about that new partnership once we’re ready to set it up and introduce it on my sites. Hopefully I’ll be able to tell you about that deal within a week or so.

There’s also been some private advertisers that have contacted me as well. I’ve had requests from private advertisers for some time – for links but I don’t always take them up on their offers. Two recent offers caught my interest and I’m currently working with these two new advertisers with whom I’ve set up 6 month partnerships. I’ll tell you about each of them individually in future posts.

I’m pretty sure that I’ll be removing the Adbrite ads from all my sites. I only make a few cents each week with them. The only time I’ve made a significant amount of money was when one kind advertiser purchased an ad for a month. I think I’ve only made about $74 dollars in the year that I’ve worked with adbrite and I’ve yet to get an actual payment. I feel that I can do better with the other forms of advertising that I’ve already been using and the programs that I’ve just added.

I’ll keep you updated as to how these new programs are working out. Hopefully one or two if not all of them make me a little bit of extra money.

I might be changing my do follow policy slightly

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As many people who visit this site and many of my other sites knows all of my blogs are do follow. I realize that some of you still might not know what that means. Well, it means that I started using plugins that would remove the nofollow tags from comments way back in October of 2006.

I became a “do follow” blogger in order to reward my regular visitors with a proper link back to their site.

You see, most blogging platforms have nofollow tags built in to the comment area so when you leave a comment on most blogs the nofollow tag that is placed in the link that you left when you signed the comment tells search engines like Google not to follow and index the link.

To heck with that I said. I’ve had a fairly loyal following of readers for quite a while now. Why shouldn’t I give them a link for their loyalty and for leaving fantastic comments that make me think, laugh or inform me of things I hadn’t thought of yet?

In October I started my following experience by using the comment plugger plugin which gave my commenters a link right under the post. Once this post has some comments you’ll see a link to the various people that have left a comment right below the post.

Then, in April, I added the do follow plugin to my site and started the Do Follow Blogroll so that we’d all know what other blogs were also do follow blogs.

I should have actually taken out the comment plugger plugin at that time because I’m actually giving two links every time someone comments! Oops! I forgot about the comment plugger. Perhaps by the time you read this post I’ll have removed that feature.

I don’t think I’ve ever really lacked for comments, but lately, as a result of the do follow blogroll being copied on a number of sites – in some instances in order of a sites page rank! – I’ve been getting all kinds of comments from other bloggers, business owners, business websites and so on who seem only to be leaving a very basic comment in order to get a back link.

So have a number of people on the do follow blogroll. One person told me this morning that someone left a comment on her site recently praising her for being a do follow blogger and then they proceeded to leave a long list of links!

Hello! Do follow blogs are not link directories!

Wait a minute ….

Why did I become a do follow blogger? To reward my regular loyal visitors. I can’t do that properly with the do follow plugin that I’m currently using because everyone gets a link that has had the nofollow tags removed. If people are using sites just to get links well … that doesn’t work does it!

Yeah … so maybe that’s why I’ve been feeling a little used and abused lately.

Hmmmm “I wonder what other do follow type plugins are out there?” I thought to myself.

So I did a search for do follow plugins and one of the first search results was Andy Beards Ultimate list of Nofollow and Dofollow plugins. I’d seen this list in the past of course, but at that time I couldn’t think of a reason why someone would want to use a do follow plugin that didn’t necessarily make all comment links follow.

Well after my experiences of the last few weeks having the same people leaving comments on nine of my husband and I’s blogs – many of which appeared to be pretty much the same comment each time, I’ve learned my lesson and I think I’m going to go back to rewarding only those who are loyal visitors and commenters.

I’m thinking of using the LinkyLove plugin which allows you to set it up so that someone must comment a certain amount of times before their links will follow. Seems a safer bet to me.

The default amount of comments someone would have to leave is set to 10. I may or may not leave it at that if I use this plugin. I’m not going to say of course because those that want to play the system will then know what magic number they must reach.

If the do follow bloggers on my blogroll begin using this it will be a little harder for me to verify if their site follows when I’m checking their sites to add to the blogroll but in an effort to prevent abuse I think I’d better allow my members to use whichever plugin they wish to use.

If I begin using the LinkyLove plugin this will of course be the change to my do follow policy that I referred to in the title of this post.

The final straw the broke the camels back and prompted this upcoming change is due to the fact that someone has now created a search engine to help people find do follow blogs. I can see this being abused and making it even easier to abuse those who only want to be nice to their loyal readers.

The reason that I haven’t begun to use this plugin already is because I’m still having CPU resource problems with my web host. I need to make sure that this plugin isn’t constantly calling the databases and using up a lot of valuable resources on my server.

Does anyone know if this is a light of heavy CPU resource usage plugin?

Does anyone already use the LinkyLove plugin? If you do have you had any problems? Is your site still fairly fast or has it slowed?

Pet Peeves – comment spam and lack of blog navigation

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I’ve been getting a little frustrated with the comments that have been coming into our sites lately.

Don’t get me wrong. I love getting comments as much as the next person, but since I’ve got so many blogs it’s really easy to spot commenting patterns and dare I say it? Comment abuse.

I won’t rehash how I feel about this here since I just wrote a post about Comment Spam and Comment abuse over on one of my other blogs – The Web Files.

I hope that you’ll go and read the post and tell me what you’ve been experiencing, especially if you are a do follow blogger.

Over on WebStyle I wrote another post about blogging. Well blogs and their lack of navigation.

Considering that I run the do follow blogroll I spend a lot of time going over sites trying to find comments in order to see if they follow or don’t follow. Lately I’ve been discovering a lot of sites with very few comments in recent posts and I’ve had to search, in some cases, the whole site in order to find a comment to verify a sites do followness.

This doesn’t take much time if a site is easy to navigate but the sites that don’t have next page or older posts navigation links take up too much of my time. Go read some of my blog navigation suggestions if you think your blog might be one of the ones I’m talking about.

What are your blogging pet peeves?

Too much email!

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You know what I’ve been doing over the last two days? Trying to catch up on all my email. I get so much email coming in it’s ridiculous!

I run a few mailing lists so I get mail from the lists. Most of the time I don’t have to do anything for those emails other than read them and watch the lists for arguments or really bad advice.

I also get a lot of spam! Tons and tons of it each day.

Then there’s mail from forums I participate in, and affiliate companies discussing the latest deals or offers that I should place on my site.

Buried in all of the above are requests for the blogrolls that I run and advertising requests from private companies, email from family and friends, as well as comments from those who visit any one of our many sites.

The last four types of email are what I consider most important, however they easily get buried in the on slot of other email that I have coming in. I do filter my email to separate folders depending on what the topic of the email is, but I still have to go through all of it at some point.

I get over 1000 emails a day! At least half of that is spam but I still have to go through the spam because real mail gets caught in the spam filter all the time.

Between maintaining our sites, the lists and the blogrolls I’m almost ready to hire someone to go through my email and only give me the stuff I need to respond to!

So if you’ve written to me and there’s a delayed response don’t worry I almost always respond if you are asking a question, it just takes a while sometimes!

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