Most webhosting accounts come installed with awstats which is a very nice traffic statistics program, but lately I’ve been using Google Analytics more. The only thing I didn’t like on the Google Analytics page was that the number of websites you could track was limited to 10 sites. Going over my website stats I just noticed that this limit is gone now! 
If you have a members website, people often sign up and then never return again. Even if they liked your site, they may not return, simply because they forget about your site.
You can get them to visit your site again by simply sending them a reminder, of the existence of your website, in the form of a newsletter. Be sure to make the mail you send out useful, don’t spam your users, they don’t like that. The newsletter could be a short overview of new things that have been added to the site, or other useful information on the same topic.
People are really noticing our Blogotition and 4 of the blogs in the competition are now listed as the top blogs on the web! All but Wineo’s blog are listed on the 43 Best Blogs website, which is a compilation of millions of votes. I guess Wineo is not in the list since he is bribing his readers to help him win the blogotition…
Well actually the 43 Best Blogs list is a list that can be edited by anyone, just visit the site and hit the ‘edit’ button to get yourself listed. While it is quite a cool concept, this is an open invitation to spammers to get their word out… Do us all a favor, if you get to the site and find it full of ring tone links, hit the history button to roll back that last change (and maybe add this blog while your on the edit page 
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So we all want high ranking websites, for this we need inbound links. Not just any old link will do, we need links from related websites. The best thing would be if we had full control over the page that contains the link to our site.
One place that offers this is Squidoo, they let you create your own page, called a lens, that you can fill with content and links. The system is kind of like MySpace, but for serious people. You don’t find the messed up pages with backgrounds that make the content impossible to read like on MySpace.
At Squidoo your basic page layout is set and you only control the content, making this place a much more pleasant place to visit. People really try to make their lens a place that people want to visit, this is encouraged by offering them ways to make a little money thru their lens.
I’ve created my own lens at Squidoo and it actually brings some visitors to my site. Even though it’s not a lot of traffic comming in this way I’m quite sure the lens is helping me getting a better placement in the search engines.
Scott Boulch has just released his ‘Life After AdSense’ report, the sequel to ‘The Death Of AdSense’ After telling us all about how a change made by Google has affected the income that can be generated with AdSense, in this report he shares his ideas on how to make a good pile of money with other programs. Like the first report, this one is also free of charge for everyone: download the report for free
Well my AdSense account has never realy been alive… I am making a few bucks with the ads but not nearly as much as some people claim they make.
Looking for some new AdSense tips to share here I found The Death Of AdSense, a report about why AdSense doesn’t work anymore and how to make money on the internet with other programs. The author writes about how he got from $500 a month to $50.000 a month, moving from AdSense to other programs. I have not had the time to read the full report yet but you can download the report for free and have a look.
After YouTube and Google Video we’ll soon have another place we can go to, to be amazed at how many weirdo’s this planet inhabits: MSN-Soapbox. Looks like uncle Bill wants a piece of the amateur video pie. The MSN Soapbox site has been launched but is currently ‘by invitation only’ (where did they come up with that idea…) The new video sharing will be integrated with the MSN messenger application so pritty soon we’ll have more to piss us off than those freakin’ animated smilies…
I was just browsing the code library at webdigity to get a little script to add to the blogotition website. While I was checking out if there where any other scripts that are usefull to me, I came accross a script for AdSense.
This simple little script stores some different AdSense ad color settings in an array and each time you show the AdSense ads on your webpage, one of the color settings will be used at random. Great idea! There is probably a color setting that will get the most clicks (= the most money) but what this setting is depends on your website. What works for one site doesn’t work for all sites.
We can change the script a bit to also store channels in the array. For this to work you’ll have to create a new channel for each color setting you want to use. You can create custom channels in your AdSense account. After running the ads like this for a while, you can see which colors get the most clicks on your website and stick with those. Thanks for sharing this code Olaf!
To get a good ranking in the search engines we are all looking for incoming links. This is one of the basic things that search engines use to rank websites in the result pages. The theory behind this is very simple: if a lot of sites link to a site, it must be a good site.
Too bad that this is not always true, people try to do whatever they can to trick the search engines into thinking that their site is important enough to show high up in the results. We all want to be up there, this is a never ending battle between the website owners.
There’s a lot of ways to get those inbound links. You can buy link-spots on other sites, trade links or add a link to your forum signature, but these are exactly the kind of links that mess up the search engines. How about getting incoming links the way they should be: one way incoming links from sites that thought you are worthy of a link from them. These kind of links are not easy to get, but once you do get them, you will notice these are worth a lot more than all the other kind of links.
So how do you get sites to link to yours? Only one thing: you will need to have high quality, unique content on your site. Until then, treat others like you want to be treated: link out to sites that you think are worthy of a link! If your page or post was inspired on some other website, or if more quality information on the subject can be found somewhere else: link there! This is what links are for. The owner of the site you link to will notice your incoming link and return the favor, if you’re worthy!
With AdSense you are paid for each time a visitor clicks on an ad that you are showing on your website. These kind of programs are know as PPC (pay-per-click) Some programs will just give you certain amount on each click. The AdSense clicks have different values and a single click can earn you anywhere between 1 cent and over $10. The trick here is to get those top-paying ads to show on your website.
So which ads are that? Like everything else Google will not tell you, but you can do some investigation. If you have signed up with Google AdWords, which is the advertisers end of AdSense, you can see what your ranking on the ad lists would be if you would pay a certain amount for your ads. Playing around a little in your AdWords account you can find the high-paying words.
You could also buy a list of top paying keywords, but the lists are expensive and often very old which makes them highly inaccurate. I think a better option is to get some software to find your high paying keywords. One such software package is Keyword Elite by Brad Callen. It’s amazing how easy this software makes finding the right keywords to target. You can also use the program to optimize your AdWords ads so you don’t spend more money on advertising then needed.