Stop being so serious: entertain me!

Games

By "game" I mean any form of entertaining, responsive interaction. It doesn't have to be complex. It doesn't have to be your own. It doesn't have to be everywhere — just throw it on a separate page and link to it from your sidebar. Check out Google Gadgets to find some games.

Somewhere to talk

Comments are a bit of a problem. Have you ever left an informal comment? No. To leave a comment, it has got to be relevant, fairly serious and written in good English. But, that's no fun.

Why not give your readers somewhere to talk — about anything, to anyone and without constraints of a topic. Geesee looks like a good plugin to try out.

I'm currently trying something similar on my blog. If you scroll down to the footer, you can see that users can shout whatever they want. (If this goes well, I plan to create a Wordpress plugin so you can have something similar.)

Did I win?

People love to win things — and they love trying to win things. If you have a web-development blog, why not give away some free hosting; shopping, some free vouchers or gift cards (cool, never knew this existed); films, a free DVD rental subscription; etc. Contests, competitions or simple give-aways are great ways to increase reader happiness-levels and blog interaction.

Giving prizes to the top commentators of the month is a great because it means readers have won and been thanked at the same time!

Share your life

No matter how many subscribers you have, some readers will see you as an authority figure — one of their blogging celebrities. People are nosy: they want to know you, not what you know*. Have you done something interesting recently? Tell your readers about it. It won't make front-page Digg, but your every-day readers are kept entertained.

It is the same reason people read celebrity magazines.

* to some extent

A Bonus: Do something funny / share something embarrassing

Find a video of you which is funny, stupid or embarrassing, upload it to YouTube and embed it. This kind of stuff is entertaining and can be viral.

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Like most bloggers, I will freely allow [more-or-less] everyone to copy, blog about and give to others any of my published content, provided a small gesture is made in return — a link back to the original post being a minimum. It is a great way to get people talking about your content and blog, and puts that essential social factor into blogging.

However, when you see your content published on somebody else's blog with no link-back or recognition of the original content — part of you dies. And when you realise that that article is more popular than the original, and that they are probably making more revenue than the original did for you — a greater part of you dies.*

*Okay, that is a slight exaggeration. My emotions are not that dark; I'm just annoyed!

Day 1, 20:30: Checking Google Analytics

Occasionally, I will check up on what has been happening with my blog — have a quick look at AdSense, FeedBurner and Analytics. Well, this is where it started…

It is always great to see a new referrer to your blog — it fills you with such happiness. So, I click through to have a look…

(View Entire Page - Large File)

…Yep, sure is my content. I am still happy at this moment — after all, there is traffic going to my site; there has got to be a link, right!?

I read past the article and still can not find the link, so I start reading the comments — and there:

Then I realise — my content has been plagiarised! Thanks to Trey Philips and jws at Hacker News, and that social factor of blogging, I was alerted to the issue, coincidentally, within just 2 days.

Within those 2 days, the post received about 9,500 views; 49% of what the originals at Making the Web ([1] and [2]) received — since 2 years ago!

Day 1, 20:40: The Email

At this point, I am quite annoyed. So, I sniff around for a contact form and send a message:

Hi,

I am contacting you with regard to a blog hosted within your control, http://blog.tuvinh.com/ and the post at http://blog.tuvinh.com/one-minute-with-php6/.

I am the original author of the published content which you have plagiarised in this post. I would ask that you:

(a) Given credit and link back to http://www.making-the-web.com/2007/12/09/unofficial-php-6-changelog/ with the title "From Unofficial PHP 6 Changelog" BEFORE the article appears on your website.
-OR-
(b) Remove the content with immediate effect.

-AND-

(c) Commit any revenue made from visitor interaction or otherwise, directly or indirectly resulting from the publication of this material from the point it is published to the point at which conditions (a) and [this should have be"or"] (b) are met in entirety.
The page has received 9,771 hits at time of checking [02 March 2009; 20:38]. Assuming a click-through rate of 0.75% and revenue of $0.20 per click, a payment of $14.65 will be expected, unless you are able to provide proof that revenue resulting from publication is less than this value.

Please update your blog according to match conditions (a) and [or] (b) and send payment, constrained by request (c), as soon as possible. You are able to make payment to my PayPal account: [myemail@host.com]. To arrange an alternative payment method, please email me.

Thank you,
Brendon.

Quite a good email I thought — let us hope he doesn't plagiarise that. To be honest, I did consider out leaving part (c) — but from seeing the number of hits the post received, he has obviously made some revenue from it; I may as well try…

Day 2, 07:15:

By the next morning, Trey Philips' comment had magically disappeared from the post. However, the author still has not put up a link to the original content and there is no response to my email. By this time, the article has received 10,000 hits.

Day 2, 21:30:

So, over a day since asking the blog author to remove my comment, he has not done anything. I think it is time to leave a more public comment:

Now from here, I suspect one of three things will happen:

1. He will delete my comment and forget about it (most likely); or,
2. He will finally link-back to the original content (or deletes the content); or,
3. Same as 2, and pays me any revenue he has made due to plagiarising the content (least likely).

Day 3, 17:30: Email to Host

As you can imagine, I am quite annoyed at this point — it only takes a few minutes to delete a post; much less time than it took to source, merge and publish my content. I decide my next move will be to send an email to his host, to request that they ask him to remove or they forcibly remove the content:

Hi,

A website, which I believe to be hosted within your control, has infringed copyright.

The website, available via http://blog.tuvinh.com/, hosts the content available at: http://blog.tuvinh.com/one-minute-with-php6/.

This is a copy of original, copyright-protected content available for access, but not licensed redistribution or publishing, at http://www.making-the-web.com/2007/12/09/unofficial-php-6-changelog/ and http://www.making-the-web.com/2007/09/21/becoming-php-6-compatible/.

I have already contacted the author, but he has neither responded nor acted upon my requests. As the copyright holder, I would ask that you contact you client asking them to remove this content or remove this content forcibly otherwise.

Thank you for any assistance you can provide,

Brendon.

Day 4, 17:15: Still Nothing…

So, we are on the 4th day and nothing has happened. It is crazy that people can think that they can do this — they somehow think that the Internet isn't governed by any laws, or that they are in someway above the law.

If I wanted somebody to copy my content without referencing the source, I would have licensed it as such. There is a copyright notice in my footer, although it isn't even required; it means "you can not copy my content unless I let you!". You can not do on the Internet what you can not do offline!

I hope this article will go someway to raise awareness of this issue. Have you ever had your content plagiarised? It would be great to hear about it, particularly the methods you used to (or try to) resolve the issue.

-Brendon.

Updates:

Day 5, 17:15: As predicted, my comment on his post was deleted, and he took has still taken no action.

Day 6, 10:45: I have just had a reply from tuvinh.com's host. The email has been forwarded to the abuse admin so hopefully (hope is the only thing I have left!) some action will soon be taken.

Day 6, 12:50: Hosting Suspended

It looks like my email to the host worked. Just as I went to check the content, I was redirected to a suspended account page:

Hopefully, this will be a wake-up call for the author. Just so long as he doesn't get his hosting back and re-publishes my content, I am happy. Cancel all of that. I just checked again (17:15), and the website is back up :(.

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In the previous, beta versions of S! for WP, there was support for stumbling through random and related posts. Version 1.0 takes the plug-in a step further, by offering the ability to stumble through other blogs as well!

The opt-in S! for WP Network will send a portion of your reader's stumbles to external blogs, which have also opted in. Similarly, those blogs will send a portion of their stumbles to your articles!

This network will allow you to reach interested visitors, who may become some of your readers.

To take advantage of this feature, just check "Join Network" on your Stumble! for WordPress options page - that's all!

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It seems Google has decided to start placing the number of posts and last update, with other information, alongside forum thread results. (Or, at least for a selection of threads).

This information may be useful to some people, and it may represent a thread's popularity and freshness - leading to more "informed" clicks.

However, I think this meta information just breaks the "flow" and rhythm of the result's page, and is more a distraction than a useful assistant. If they placed this information in line with the title (as they do for blog post times/dates), it would be much nicer.

Here are some articles and pages I found which you may be interested in:

• Google include forum information in mainstream SERPS
• Google Enhancing Search Results for Forums?

What do you think about these "extra info" lines that Google seems to be throwing everywhere?

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“Excellence is in the details. Give attention to the details and excellence will come.”

-Perry Paxton

Blogging is an extremely difficult habit to get into, and once you do, your blog will not be very popular for a long time. However, there is hope! If you follow these 9 easy habits (Alright, fine, some are characteristics,) your blogs popularity will boost up much quicker, and your readers will be way more loyal to you.

1. Frequency
Frequently posting in your blog will not only help boost up your blogs popularity– it will make your writing skill much better. This is the toughest part of blogging, as well. If you want your blog to succeed, you need to make a posting schedule, and almost religiously keep it. If you miss a day, be sure to make up for it by putting up a special feature, or something along that line.

2. Patience
Blogging requires a helluva lot of patience, which is never easy. Blogs can take months, if not years, to establish a solid online presence and a solid readership base. Because of that, at the beginning your blog will feel lonely; almost as if you are writing for nobody to read.

3. Usefulness
If you plan on gaining any readers at all, you need to write valuable and useful posts. If your posts are completely useless, and have no point at all, then not only will your blogs popularity will be hurt, so will your online presence. A good rule of thumb to use here is that if you didn't learn anything writing your post, then it isn't very important.

4. Proofreading
The best way to look extremely unprofessional is to write a blog post with typographical and grammar errors everywhere. Due to that fact, it is extremely important that you always use a spellchecker on your post, and read through it at least once, checking for missing periods, commas, capitals, etc.

5. Honesty
I'm not even going to bother going into details about this, but I will say that whenever I read "I made $60k today just by writing this post!" it doesn't actually get me to read the rest of the post.

6. Aesthetics
It's been said many times before that content is just as important as design. That said, don't be afraid to use stuff like italics, headings, bolds, and new paragraphs. If you have your posts looking half-decent, you will be amazed how much your readership loyalty will boost.

7. Linking
It's impossible to fit all the information related to one subject in a single blog post, series of blog posts, or blog. You can try if you really want to, but it isn't going to work. Because of that, you don't need to be afraid of linking to other peoples blogs! You won't lose any traffic for it, and if you give the other blog enough visitors, the owner may just be kind enough to fire a link back.

8. Commenting
Visitors love it when the blogger communicates with them, especially in the comments section. Nothing quite beats the feeling of your comment not being a one-way conversation, going in one ear and out the other. It is a hard habit to get into of responding to comments, but it is a great habit. A great technique is to put a question into your responses, to encourage further communication.

9. Reading Other Blogs
Like any writing tutor you will ever get says, you need to read other peoples writing to be a good writing yourself. Not only will it help you learn more techniques, but it will inspire. There is plenty of blogs out there, related to just about every good (and bad,) subject you can think of. Don't be afraid of straying into their territory.
If you enjoy the other blogs you read, you can also get into communication with the blog owners, and start up link exchanges and the works.

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MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia) has a similar feature called Random Article. Visitors can click this link and be taken to a totally random page, which means they will spend more time on a wiki.

I have taken this concept and made a basic implementation in WordPress. Just click the "Random Article" link on the navigation bar, above, and try for yourself.

More efficient, feature-packed plugin now available! Download Now!

How I did it…

In all, it took me about 10 minutes to go from idea to actual functionality, in 3 simple steps. Here's what I did…

Step 1: Create a Page Template
Firstly, navigate to your theme's files (under wp-content/themes/THEME_NAME). Create a new, empty PHP file called random.php.

Now, just write/copy this code into the file:

<?php

/*

Template Name: Random Article

*/

query_posts('orderby=rand&showposts=1');

the_post();

header('Location: '.get_permalink());

?>

This small PHP script does two things. Firstly, it gets a random article using query_posts and loads the post information. And then, it redirects the user to the location of the article. I have used the permalink URL to redirect the user to the article.

The "Template Name: Random Article" allows us to create a new page using this template.

2: Create a New Page

In WordPress, go to Write, and then click Page. In title, write "Random Article". This will create a URL (permalink) which we can use to execute our script. For this blog, it is http://making-the-web.com/random-article/.

You do not need to enter anything in the content box.

(Press Save, if you haven't done so already)

3: Place Your Link
You can now place a link to the random article page anywhere in your template files. If you show a list of pages, the Random Posts page will show up there. And, it's that simple.

Note: If you do not want to have the page show up in the list, append this code to your theme's functions.php file:

function __random_list_pages_excludes($exc) {
global $wpdb;

$pageIdQ = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT id FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_name = 'random-article'");

array_push($exc, $pageIdQ);
return $exc;
}

add_filter('wp_list_pages_excludes', '__random_list_pages_excludes');

I hope to release a plugin soon which will add this function, rather than having to modify theme files. Please let me know how you got on with this…

Update: I have created the BETA version of this plugin. More information.

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In this article, I'll be discussing ways to increase the number of readers for your blog…

Is your writing engaging?

Express your opinion. Ask questions. Be critical.

Your blog should be full of your opinion. If you have an opinion about a topic, write about it, and make it clear! Most of the time, readers will come back because they like you, more than they like your content.

Do readers have an opinion, too? Yes, they do — and that's why you should ask questions. Questions, direct or indirect, will get readers thinking and they become more engaged in your article. Who knows, they might even leave a comment!

Talk to your readers

When a reader leaves a comment, comment back and maybe send them an email directly. That personal touch is what gives you that little bit extra. For a reader, there's nothing more frustrating than thinking: "Did he hear me? Is he going to write back? Does he even like me?"

Look at an article on Inside AdSense. So many comments and questions, but not one response. You'd think a company as big as Google could go to the expense of at least one comment. The only reason we subscribe is because it serves us with useful information, not because we like the writers.

Show off your work…

…and take the criticism.

Whatever you do, there will be at least one person who doesn't like it. Don't ignore this person. This person is significant: they are telling you there's room for improvement. 1 comment may represent the views of 100 other readers.

We can never satisfy the needs and wants of 100% of everybody, but we can try our best to approach this figure. Listen to the critics, and improve your writing and your blog to satisfy them (within reason, of course).

A little bonus

This one isn't really as significant as the others, but can help in a little way. If you use WordPress (which you probably do), you can use one of my plugins, Thank Me Later, to send a "thank you" email to readers when they comment. This has the benefit of "pulling back" one-time readers, and will prompt readers to engage further.

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Planning

You might remember all those years ago at school, that planning was essential for any essay or piece of writing. Well, a blog article is also a piece of writing, and don't forget it! It is greatly beneficial to jot down all your notes about an article, and link them together, organise them, splice them, or even remove them.

Using this method may seem useless to some people, but it does work. Primarily, plans are not there to record information, but rather get you thinking about it. And, the more you think about articles, the better they will become.

Language

Language is a very complex concept. Just like any other writers, bloggers are judged on their ability to use and manipulate language. Your writing should be interesting and engaging, as well as informative. Read through your articles with an open-minded view to judge quality. Getting a second opinion is great, as it removes the possibility for "quality blindness" from the writer.

Getting the balance between informal and formal language is important. For most blogs, writing should have a sense of informality to make the writing more personal and "chatty". This should not, however, inhibit the article's ability to be useful and informative.

Strongly expressing your own opinion in articles is essential. It gives argument to the writing, and therefore engages readers and leads to discussion and debate.

Punctuation is a powerful part of language, and can completely change meaning in a piece of writing. If you don't get punctuation 100% right, your sentences will be ambiguous and reading becomes very difficult. If you feel you don't use the semi-colon, colon, dash, or even simpler marks as often or as correctly as you should, you should learn now. A reader recommended Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a fantastic book on punctuation.

(Oh, and using a spelling and grammar checker can identify many mistakes.)

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It seems they have "copied" Feedburner to feedburner.google.com (this happened some time ago, which I didn't know), and made some improvements. You can now "manage" your feeds from AdSense (in the manage tab), so you can change your feed ads using the same-old interface (for better or for worse). The improvement I like is the graphs similar to Analytics, rather than the plain-old vertical bars:

So it looks like we FeedBurner users will soon be switching to "Google's" Feedburner.

I've checked out the AdSense for Feeds feature, and it is quite customizable: You can change the frequency of the ads (every 2nd post for example), position (top/bottom) and only show ads on posts which are longer than 50, 100, 250 or 500 words.

Although I will probably never use them, I think it's good that Google have integrated feed advertising directly with AdSense.

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Although PageRank is updated every 3-4 months, or so, Google pretty much uses day-by-day statistics to generate "internal PageRank." This can not be seen by anyone, but does impact result page placement for specific keywords. I have noticed some improvement with these techniques, and expect to see more in the long term.

Backlinks

One of the main factors in determining your PageRank is to look at the PageRank for your backlinks. There are three general rules for estimating PageRank:

• 4 PRx backlinks will give you a PageRank of (x-1)
• 19 PRx backlinks will give you a PageRank of x
• 101 PRx backlinks will give you a PageRank of (x+1)

So, for example, 4 PR5 backlinks should theoretically give us a PageRank of 4. Of course, this is just a rough figure, and we'll never be able to tell how Google truly calculates PageRank.

Step 1: Get Natural Backlinks

Natural backlinks tend to have PageRank ranging between 0-4. This generally allows many pages, commonly blog posts, to achieve PR3 or PR4, with the homepage PR4-5. To get higher ranking backlinks, your content has to be of high quality and you site must be quite popular.

Pages which naturally get huge numbers of backlinks are called linkbait. To be linkbait, an article or content should be written by a unique point of view and be valuable information. This isn't really the time or place for a guide on how to write linkbait, so I'll leave that to someone else.

Step 2: Trade Links

One method of getting backlinks is to trade links with other webmasters. This is where you ask a webmaster to link to your webpage, if you link to theirs. The best thing is the fact that it is free, and all you have to do is ask. In the past, I've been "afraid" of asking for link exchanges, despite many websites being happy for such a scheme. Generally it is a win-win situation, but having too many exchanged links may have negative effects.

If you are thinking about asking, or have been asked, to trade links, then you have got to judge whether you will benefit. Their page should have a decent PageRank which is not extreme to your PageRank. For example, if your page was PR6 and theirs PR3, it would not be beneficial to exchange.

Trading links can also bring some good quality traffic to a page, so it is best to negotiate a good link positioning and only trade with sites on the same topic, and with a similar point of view and similar content.

Step 3: Buy Links

Another way of getting backlinks, which Google doesn't like, is to buy links from services such as TNX (aff) and Text Link Ads (aff). Although many people express their concerns about these services, they are pretty much safe in my point of view. Your link that is sold through TNX or Text Link Ads will have absolutely no associated with the two companies, meaning Google should never find out. So, in my view, it is worth the extremely minimal risk (if you have the money).

On the other hand, buying links might not give you the return you wanted. Some links can be expensive and offer little advantage to you. Traffic is a by-product of buying links for PR, so be sure you link has good placement. I would only buy links as a last resort, so be careful and do make rash decisions.

Step 4: Make your own luck

Many websites present the opportunity to link back to your site, often passively. The best examples are blogs and forums, where you can usually provide your website address.

Many blogs allow you to link your name to your website in comments, and you may occasionally have an excuse to place a link in the actual comment itself. These links often have impact on your PageRank and can bring a little traffic.

With forums, you can link to your site from your profile and in your signature. I believe this is less effective than blog comments, but it can still contribute to your PageRank.

These links may contribute to your PageRank. They will not affect PR if they are no-follow, so it is worthwhile to make sure they do follow before using any of your effort. SearchStatus for Firefox will tell you straight away whether links follow or not.

Step 5: Get Links from .gov and .edu Sites

PageRank is a measure of importance, so it makes sense to weigh official links when generating PageRank. .gov and .edu pages are highly regarded by Google because they are associated to the government, and education.

HMRC.gov.uk has a PageRank of 7, apparently with 64 inlinks. ProBlogger, a non-official website, has PR 6, with nearly 40,000 inlinks.

It is very difficult to get natural links from these official websites, as many of us have little association with the government. However, a lot of blogs, particularly from universities, exist with these extensions. Leaving comments, linking back to your site/page*, on these blogs can be very useful. Try searching with these queries for blogs, forums and guesbooks:

• site:edu inurl:blog computer security - replace "computer security" with a relevant topic.
• site:edu "powered by wordpress"
• site:edu inurl:forum
• site:edu guestbook

Replace edu with other extensions, such as gov, gov.uk and other international variants.

* By "linking back", I do not mean spamming. Just have your name link in comments, or reference and link to your page when relevant to the content.

See my notes in step 4 about no-follow links.

Let's get started

Thank you for reading. Lukily, Making the Web doesn't use no-follow links, so you can start with step 4 and leave a comment. Have you got any other ideas or suggestions? I'd like to hear them…

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Placement

For me, this is the most important factor for optimising your ads.

1. Place Ads Beneath/Near Navigation
Adverts provide visitors with links to small number of relevant websites and pages. So does the navigation section. When a visitor wants to find out more information, they generally and naturally look for the navigation section or an alternative form of navigation. It therefore makes sense for ads to be placed in this area.

468×15 and 728×15 link units generally look good and perform well when placed in this area.

Also, try placing ads where users expect to see a navigation bar. I found a great example at Ad Links:

Above, I have converted the screenshot to greyscale and blurred it. This allows us to look at the site without reading any text, as a visitor will do when they first come to your site. The greyscale image allows us to see how elements contrast. If I was asked to identify the navigation bar in the second image, I'd say it was beneath the banner image - but, this is, in fact, the adverts. This is the section most visitors will subconsciously identify.

2. Place Ads at the Beginning of Text or an Article
You have probably heard this tip a thousand times, and here we go again. For blogs, using a medium rectangle (maybe a large - I think they look too big, though) at the start of an article is an old trick and visitors will immediately see it when reading. Today, it is quite rare to see a blog using AdSense and not the rectangle.

Oh, and get the text to wrap around the advert (with some padding). I hate it when blogs give an AdSense rectangle a whole paragraph of its own. Find out more about CSS's float property. You don't want the ads to be too distinct from the content.

3. Place Ads to the Left or Right of Content
When we read content, our eyes are moving from left-to-right. It therefore makes sense to place ads to the left or right of text, usually in a sidebar. I find placing advertisements to the right is more successful as most text is left-aligned and visitors know where the text begins; they don't, however, know exactly where it ends until they get to it - so they'll be slightly more open to elements around the text.

Style

Adverts need to be noticed, and AdSense is flexible enough to allow you to change colours, borders and backgrounds to make the ads noticeable, while not distracting.

1. Contrasting and Blending
For adverts to be successful, they should attract attention. This doesn't necessarily mean they should stand out though! Blending can be just as successful as contrasting.

Google has a useful table for determining whether you should use contrasting or blending techniques.

If you decide that having your ads contrast is best, try squinting your eyes and see if your adverts contrast enough to compete with the text and other elements. Too much contrast, though, may just become a distraction so balance is the key. Converting a image to greyscale in your favourite image editing application can also show how much elements contrast.

It may also be useful to blend adverts with the background when used within the content. Content is the primary reason visitors visit a website, so it is what they look for. If your advert looks like content (in part, usually), visitors will have a look.

Complement is just like contrast, but it uses background and border colours from schemes already existing on the site. I prefer this to contrast because the ads seem more integrated.

For Making the Web, we could use these colours for contrasting, complementing and blending ads:

2. Borders
Removing the border from an advert is extremely effective as it allows the advert to blend in with the site. I believe it is very important and profitable to make adverts look integrated in a website, rather than looking misplaced.

It is beneficial to remove borders from advertisements that are in the content. When using the medium rectangle in blog posts, you should have no border. If you do want a border, define your own using CSS and use a light colour and maybe a dashed border rather than a solid one.

3. Colour Scheme Rotation
Use custom channels to run different colour schemes. Determine which ones work best, and then rotate them for an advert. Rotation is useful because regular visitors become accustomed to your adverts and will avoid them. Using different colours keeps them fresh and attracts more attention.

Other Tips

There are also some other things you can do to increase revenue:

1. Use Link Units
I've visited many sites which use the ad units only. Link units are great because they are small and can occupy spare space on a website. In accordance with the programme policies, you can insert three link units in addition to any content ads, search boxes and video ads.

I generally find that link units have a significantly less CTR than other ads, but they still capture revenue you would otherwise not have. Link units are great at the bottom or top of blog articles as they provide links relevant to the article.

2. Don't use image ads
You maybe tempted to change your ads to image only ads. Although we may believe that image ads are more likely to get a click, in reality they aren't. On most websites, text ads will perform better than image ones.

In any case, I recommend you leave the setting to "Text and image ads" and Google will decide what is more effective.

3. Tell Google Where Your Content is
I only recently found out about this myself. Google AdSense allows you to place two HTML comment tags on your page - <!– google_ad_section_start –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –>. These tells AdSense's spider the content you want your ads targeted to.

In blog posts, you should place these comment tags before and after your article, respectively. Otherwise, Google may crawl article's comments and other information, resulting in less relevant ads.

To explicitly exclude a section, use <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –> rather than the normal start tag.

Read more about this.

Don't follow my tips!

Now, this is the most important tip of all. I don't really want you to follow my tips. Instead, I want you to consider some of them, change some of them and ignore some of them.

Every website is different, and (unfortunately) there is not one solution to "fit all". You have got to experiment and work out what is best for your website. Think, Try, Repeat.

Please share the tips that have worked for you…

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In this article, I aim to discuss and help you improve your current sidebar.

Navigation

The most common and most important use of the sidebar is for navigating a blog. The ideal sidebar should provide the right amount of tools and information to navigate to common places easily - neither too few nor too many.

A totally-new visitor to your blog should be able to use your sidebar as they can on any other blog. For this reason, it's important to stick with what is generally accepted and be as universally-uniform as possible.

A useful item to have on your sidebar is a list of the most popular posts or the most recent. Generally, I provide the most recent posts, because the popular posts don't change that often - regular readers will prefer to see fresh content, rather than the same articles all of the time.

Subscription

At the top of most sidebars is a section about RSS-subscription. Although this doesn't help the visitor with navigation, it does remind them that they can subscribe if they want to - every time the reader wants to use the sidebar, they will immediately see the subscription options.

I would recommend making subscription opportunities a clear and major section of your sidebar. WordPress, by default, will have some RSS-links under Meta in the sidebar - these are hard to see. For maximum exposure, you should try to use the RSS icon somewhere and possibly provide more information about subscription.

Look how ProBlogger's RSS subscription information is distinguished from the rest of the sidebar, and makes use of colour:

Advertising

Many bloggers like to earn some money from their blog via advertising. Commonly, bloggers will place adverts, from a service like Google Adsense, into their sidebar.

There are a two main advantages to placing adverts in to the sidebar:

1. The adverts will be noticed whenever the visitor wanted to use the sidebar, increasing exposure; and
2. The adverts will not interfere with the other content, or other elements of the blog, making it appear ideal.

To get a good click-through rate, adverts ideally will be placed somewhere high in the sidebar - usually above the fold. But, there is a disadvantage to this: some navigational elements of the sidebar are pushed further down - below the fold.

When you advertise in your sidebar, you should try to keep the navigational elements as prominent as possible, and towards the top of the sidebar. The navigational elements shouldn't be broken up by advertisements, as this would disrupt the visitors' ability to navigate your blog.

You may want to consider adding another sidebar for advertisements and less-important elements, while keeping the important navigational elements together. See The Benefits of Having Two Sidebars.

A Good Sidebar = A Good Blog?

Hopefully, you've read this article and made some decisions about the future of your sidebar. Obviously, there are more factors to consider, and I will enjoy hearing about what you think is most important.

If you do implement the suggested changes, I hope it will improve you're readers' ability to use your blog.

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The easiest way to publicize your blog is through paid-advertising via services such as Google AdWords. But, paid-advertising has two disadvantages:

1. You have to pay for it (pretty obvious), and
2. It's usually not as effective as it seems or is said to be.

When you think, an advert can cost something like $0.05 per click - that's $50 for 1,000 clicks. If that seems like a decent deal to you, then go for it!

But in my opinion, it is not! You can get nearly 10 times that from just StumbleUpon for free! (in a month) And that, in addition with all the traffic from other referrers (and of course direct traffic), is quite a lot…

StumbleUpon

In my opinion, StumbleUpon is the best referrer ever! If you're not using the service already, you should be. StumbleUpon has a section for advertisers where you pay $0.05 per visitor they send to your site. But never mind that! You can do the same thing for free…

After signing up to StumbleUpon, and downloading the toolbar, just click "I like it!" on the toolbar to stumble a few of your best articles. Instantly, more targeted users are sent to your article - if enough users click "I like it!", the page becomes viral and thousands of visitors come flooding.

It's important that you submit your best articles because if you submit the "not-so-good" ones, and they are rated badly, your entire blog will be tarnished. This means when another article is submitted, it will have less chance of going viral.

Another important aspect, also on the point of reputation, is your "rating" within the StumbleUpon community. Ideally, you should use StumbleUpon for personal use, comment on a few pages, and become "fans" of a few people. Within no time, you will be getting fans, and become more influential when adding your articles.

Digg

I also find Digg a useful service, but it is hard to get as much traffic as StumbleUpon. To get a decent amount of traffic from this service, you need to get a few hundred diggs - which is quite hard to do. I do find that many visitors from Digg will also stumble your site as well, so there is an indirect benefit: one "digg-er" could potentially cause hundreds of stumblers to come to your page.

Again, being active within the community may help the exposure of you and your digged pages.

DZone

Now, DZone is one of my favourites. I would have placed it second, but unfortunately it only targets a very specific niche: developers. If you're blog isn't targeted towards developers, then submitting to this service will not work for you.

If you do have a software-developer targeted blog, then you are quite lucky - this service will bring you some serious traffic for high-quality content. Again, being community-active is always a bonus.

Reddit

Like Digg, Reddit gives users a list of what's popular on the internet. Reddit will bring a reasonable amount of traffic to your blog, and currently ranks as #7 in my list of referrers. It is much easier to get on Reddit than Digg, especially if your blog doesn't get lots of traffic at the moment.

Whereas Digg mainly works on numbers of up-voters, Reddit uses down-voters as well to create a points system. This does have an advantage though - look at this scenario:

• Blog A and Blog B has the same-quality article.
• Blog B gets 500% more traffic than blog A.
• Blog B gets 500 diggs; Blog A gets 100.
• Because there would be more diggs on blog B, blog A's article would be rank less than blog B, despite it being the same article.
• With Reddit, on blog B there would be 500 up-votes, and 200 down-votes - ratio is 5:2; blog A would have 100 up-votes and 40 down-votes - ratio is 5:2.

del.icio.us

To be honest, I've never really liked del.icio.us, and never use it. But, it does bring some quality traffic to my blog - so they must be doing something right!

The more people that save an article, the more popular it becomes and the more users it becomes exposed to. What is great about this service is that is doesn't require any participation from me - all I have done is placed a link "Save to del.icio.us" at the bottom of articles, and it seems to fuel itself.

Comparison

Here's an image I created to represent the proportions of traffic from each of the referrers above:

I'm interested in hearing you success with these services…

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How many times have you seen this icon? If you're a frequent reader of blogs, my guess is hundreds, if not thousands, of times. How many times have you seen a blogger post his/her Google Adsense or Text Link Ads revenue? Probably fewer times, but you have seen it, right (?)

Well, if you're a blogger, you may be asking yourself this question: "Should I publish information about revenue and subscribers on my blog?". And, hopefully, this article will help you answer that question.

So, why do people publish information on their blogs? Well, the main reason is quite simple: they want to be open with their readers - to make the experience seem almost personal. Another reason is to show the popularity of the blog - if you see a blog with over 10,000 subscribers, something must be going right.

On the other hand, if you're blog's statistics are not all that good - say, if you've just started blogging and got near-zero subscribers - then you may want to conceal this information.

Overall, as a blogger and blog reader, I am for displaying the number of subscribers that a blog has. I believe it helps me justify the importance of a blog, and, more importantly, gives me a feeling of the blog being a close-community where information is shared freely.

Information about advertising revenue is a different matter, though. Generally, you will see this disclosed less often than subscriber numbers; but, should it be disclosed? For this question, I can't really give my own opinion - I have mixed views.

Some people believe it is O.K. to disclose revenue information. Again, it gives a feeling of being open, and a community-based person. In some cases, bloggers can become idolised by their readers - if they're earning lots, of course. I accept publishing revenue information now and then, every few months or so. But, I wouldn't like to see the information any more often than that.

There are those who think revenue statistics should be kept a closely-guarded secret. Many bloggers may feel like this - if they disclose the information, readers may see him/her as less of a community person, and just someone out to get money. Some bloggers may prefer to keep the business- and blog-side of things separate.

As a blogger, I probably won't be publishing my earnings any time soon - but that's my choice. As a reader, though, I don't mind seeing how much other bloggers earn - I quite enjoy it! For this one, you'll have to make up your own mind.

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Because I, like many bloggers, wanted to earn a decent amount of revenue from blogging, I placed advertisements (from Google AdSense) on to my blog. I placed these advertisements onto the sidebar, mainly because they would not interfere with the content (articles), and because they would be noticed.

But, to get a good click-through rate, I started moving the advertisements towards the top. The thing I did not think about then was how it affects the ability to navigate the site. And, it does affect it quite a lot. The whole navigation section is pushed down, and many important links pushed below the fold.

To overcome this problem, I was thinking about ways I could improve the ease of navigation, while, at the same time, getting a decent click-through rate from the adverts. My final solution was to add another sidebar…

…By adding another sidebar, I was able to place the most important navigational elements on to one of the sidebars, where they would not be broken up by adverts, were above the fold, and could be easily identified as a collection of navigational elements.

And, on the second sidebar, I put adverts and sponsored links, which also had the benefit of being higher on the page, which would probably increase the click-through rate.

So the two benefits are:

• The user can more easily navigate the site, because the navigational elements are collected together; and
• The advertisements are more noticeable, increasing the click-through rate, and increasing the advertising revenue.

If, on your site, you can not easily differentiate between the navigation section, the advertisements and sponsored links, and the other content, maybe you should consider implementing similar changes. I found this useful article on the internet which describes how to set up two sidebars in WordPress.

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Here are my tips for publishers:

Send clicks to advertisers' links
No, I'm not talking about clicking them yourself. But, you should take measures to ensure that the links on your site are somewhere where they'll be noticed. It is important to keep current advertisers, as it is easier than attracting new ones.

Use Keywords
When your submitting a page (or editing one), make sure you put in lots of keywords, which may be typed in by advertisers. Some people just put 7-10 keywords in, but it is worth putting as many as you can.

Useful Descriptions
Don't just put what you're site is about, such as: "A blog about website development." Instead, make sure it is descriptive and highlights the positive points of your site, such as: "Popular website development blog, about PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, etc. ~300 visits per day on average, mainly from United States. Occassional bursts of traffic reaching 2,000 visits per day." Advertisers are much more likely to consider your site if they know what they are getting - just alexa rank and link popularity doesn't really tell them much.

Single Page Ads vs. Site Wide Ads
Single Page ads are favoured over Site Wide Ads. Advertisers prefer single page ads because it doesn't look suspicious to the search engines, and because they have more choice on where their links appear.

Trial and Error
Not everything works for everyone. That's why you should use trial and error with your links and pages to determine what is best for you ads.

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So, here are my top tips for making easy money with your blog:

Add advertising
The first thing you can do to earn money is to place adverts onto your site. Most advertising companys allow you to do this for free, and you can start earning straight away. You might want to check out Google AdSense.

Affiliate Programmes
Affiliate programmes tend to pay out less often than advertising programmes - but, payment tends to be higher. Check out Commission Junction, and Affiliate Window. You might also want to sign-up to Text Link Ads.

Sell Links You can sell text links on your website through services such as Text Link Ads.

Ask for Dontations
Now, I've never tried this, and I would have thought it's not very effective. But, if you do, you can go to somewhere such as PayPal and place a donate button on your site.

Write Useful Aricles and Drive Traffic to your site
If you don't have much traffic to your site, how are people going to click on your ads? And, if you articles are not very useful, your visitors are not going to stick around.

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So, here's my list of top tips:

Submit some articles to StumbleUpon
Submitting my site to StumbleUpon was probably the best thing I've ever done. In the past month, StumbleUpon have sent my site 8,417 visits, and is by far my site's biggest refferer.

Write Useful and Relevant Articles
Now, this is the obvious one, but, some people forget that the more relevant and useful their articles are, the more people are likely to recommend it. In one 3 day period, I had one blog refer 136 visits to one of my articles.

Submit to Digg, and add the Digg button to your articles
Digg is a service which allows you to recommend blog articles and websites on the internet. While Digg doesn't refer as much traffic as StumbleUpon, it still refers quite a bit. I'd also recommend adding the Digg button to your articles, as readers can Digg your article more easily.

Get into the search engines
If your site is new, it might take a while for it to appear in search results. If your blogging software allows, I recommend you ping search engines and blog listing sites to let them know when you update your content. If you want a list of services you can ping, go to http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/11/21/a-list-of-rpc-and-rpc2-to-ping/

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