Do you watch you blog stats? Do you know how long your visitors stay on your pages? For most of us, it’s not a pretty picture. Most visitors come and go before the page even finishes loading. This happens the most when the majority of your traffic comes from search engines.

One thing I would suggest is to watch your exit pages. Check if you have too many link outs. You want to make your visitors feel welcomed and you want to get them comfortable surfing through your pages. You don’t want to show them out if you can help it. Here’s a few things you can do:

1. Keep your blogroll only on your main page
   You do want to exchange links with other people to give yourself some connectivity and exposure, but you don’t have to link them from all your pages.
2. Link to local entries/posts
   When you write about something and you need to refer to another thing, search your archives first. If you have supporting articles in your own domain why link out?
3. Keep your sidebar clean
   Clean up your clutter. Yes some of those blog directory buttons are useless unless they drive you some sort of traffic in the first place. The idea is to keep your doors closed until your visitors are ready to go, then they can show themselves out.

Ok that wasn’t rocket science, but you want to work on visitor relationship. The more they read you the more they will get somewhat attached to your writing or content and that could bring them back another day.

Iichii yaa yaa readers!!!! In this installment I will talk about how to understand your web statistics to increase revenue to your blog. In my safari hunt in the internet jungle, I came upon a word I’ve seen many times but didn’t understand what it meant. That word is Webtrends. I found out it is an advanced log analyzer. A more precise definition is:

WebTrends is specifically designed for mid-sized organizations featuring revolutionary visualization capabilities that transform historically complex reports into easy-to-interpret analysis and new Dashboard and Excel integration technologies that seamlessly build web analytics into your daily workflow. From the most granular examination of campaigns and merchandising performance, to the most complete navigation, conversion and search engine marketing analysis, WebTrends provides mid-sized companies comprehensive insight for easier decisions, smarter marketing and optimum results.

Now you don’t have to run out and purchase this expensive software for your blog, but some tips I’ve seen on how to use the data it provides will enable you readers out there to understand your own web analytical software no matter how minimal the features. The good thing is, you can use Google’s free Web Analytics to play with the information I have provided to you! As provided by Extremelee’s blog post *Numa Numa Dances* *Ahem* This website has in-depth knowledge on how to use what are called “Key Metrics”:

Key Metrics are usually a ratio of something measuring an action to visits and visitors of a website. An example is finding a ratio of which visitors to your blog stayed 20 minutes or more, and which categories of your blog did they view the most? This can help in determining the type of category content to focus on, and maybe focus your entire blog to it to generate ample amounts of revenue. In addition it can help on which type of ads to display. For instance if you have a cooking blog, and most of your visitors stayed 20 minutes or more to read recipes on quick breakfasts, it would be important to focus ads on say toaster ovens, a brand of egg or something of that nature.

To read more on this exciting new realm of analyzing your site data and increasing revenue, please visit “Using Webtrends” over at Jimnovo! Blog on!!

Hellooo!! I’m new here to digitalSURGERY and I’d like to introduce you to the quirky, weird, yet intelligent man that I am, Blastafuzix!!!! Today we will be learning about, gasp… “The AdSense Million Dollar Man” Jason Calacanis! And his methods that boosted his revenue. This information was found from an interview he did over at JenSense.

One of the things Jason did was take the borders off his AdSense on all of his pages. The next step was making AdSense links the same color as those in his blogs. Clever move Jason! *High Fives*

Jason was asked why he placed his ad units the way he did, due to the fact it is not generally a high “Click Thru Rate” (CTR) position. His response was due to being sold out of leaderboards.

(A leaderboard is a popular type of banner advertisement. At standard dimensions of 780×90 pixels, a leaderboard is the width of the page and typically lies between the masthead (the title area at the top of a Web page) and content. Leaderboards are thought to offer advertisers a great deal of space in a prominent position without intruding on content.

Internet advertising borrows leaderboard from sports, where it refers to a sign board displaying the rankings of participants currently leading a competition.) on his big blogs, he figured he could slip the thin horizontal banner without it feeling like too much advertising.)

When asked on the best advice he has for a publisher brand new to AdSense, Jason states “I would run four ads per page, take off the borders, and make the links the same color as the links on the blog. I would also make channels

(Channels are a group of blogs focusing on distinct topics topics in a blog which is defined more in detail here

for each position and blog so I could track things better.” It seems to me theres a wealth of information here, pun intended! If your interested in more of this interview, continue on over to JenSense ASAP!!

What do you do when you build a niche blog and it just so happens that your niche isn’t so exclusive, like a thousand other blogs talk about it already? One, you can choose another niche with less competition. Two, you can give up. Three, you can keep going and find different marketing plan.

If you choose #3, consider word of mouth. This works best if you have a large network of friends and acquaintances. You can tell EVERYONE about your blog, and ask them to tell their friends, etc. However this won’t usually work UNLESS your niche is a popular niche, drawing a lot of interest from just about any individual out there. If you have a tech blog and you try to spread the word offline, good luck and have fun looking at people’s confused face, rejection, etc. But let’s say you have a fashion blog, and you’re a girl with lots of girlfriends who like shopping, you can tell all your girlfriends about your blog, and you can connect with local stores to offer discounts on your blog, etc. Word of mouth can and will work in this case.

One of the blogs in our network is urbanskaters.co.uk and this is a very good example where word of mouth can actually work in favor of online advertising. Our Chief Editor Lee talks about it all the time when he skates the streets of London and traffic is really picking up fast on that domain. We even got our first client lead through that blog.

So, what is your blog niche? If it’s popular to the offline world, try word of mouth, you’ll be surprised.

Firstly we’d like to personally apologize for that last article we posted. If you didn’t get a chance to read it before we removed it, that’s even better. We made a terrible mistake and someone reminded us the harsh way. We’re just glad that we got a chance to nip this at the bud before it caused anymore damage.

Now, the cause of the problem was our lack of time to manage things this week. We have been so overwhelmed with ongoing projects that we didn’t get a chance to write up quality articles for the blog as planned. So we resorted to posting a free article from articlecity.com. What we didn’t realize in our hurry is that the article wasn’t valid, and that it was outdated and even proven wrong. We risked having our readers following what the article suggests therefore misleading them (you). For this we sincerely apologize if you’re one of the few who read the article.

The biggest damage to us came from Nick from performancer.com when he publicized our mistake to the readers of his blog. This made us look very poor and unprofessional. We sincerely appreciated what Nick was trying to do, but we wish he could’ve done it in a more subtle way as not to hurt us.

On another note, Google hates duplicate content, and when you use free articles on your blog you’re doing exactly that. When Google indexes your blog it can mistake you as a splog.

The moral of this is, DO NOT USE FREE ARTICLES WHATSOEVER. If you like an article you read online, cross check its truth, and rewrite it in your own words. Do not fall into the mistake we just did. It can and it will damage you and your reputation. Stay away from free article repositories and stay away from duplicate content.

If you’re a blogger trying to make a side income from blogging, then you have to be familiar with niche blogs. They are blogs that focus on a specific topic, mastering that topic and only, and most of them generate the best revenues.

So why are niche blogs so important to generate income? First off, niche blogs have a lot of posts (articles) on a specific topic. Say you like basketball and you find a niche blog about basketball, it only talks about basketball and everything tied to basketball. It rarely runs off topic and it gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling reading the blog knowing that it’ll inform you and keep you up to date with the most recent going ons in the basketball world. The blog would sell basketball gears, signature jerseys, you name it. Now if this blog incorporates AdSense, this is where the word niche comes in play. With niche blogs, since there’s usually only one major topic covering the whole blog, AdSense would have no trouble finding relevant ads. People would look at these ads and they would be more likely to click since the ads would be about basketball as well. Imagine going to a fashion blog and reading ads like “Create cappucinno in ten seconds” wouldn’t that be a turn off?

dS is and is not a niche blog. We do try to keep things in perspective, “helping bloggers and webmasters build a better web” but our topics range from “quality content management services” to “how to get Google to index you” for example. We do get relevant ads but they aren’t always up to date since our content changes frequently and we have extremely different keywords in each post.

Our tip is, if you really want to make good money from your blog, pick a niche topic and stick with it. If you want to talk about something else, start a new blog. Be the source of information for certain popular topics and you’ll notice your visitors returning often, even bringing their friends and friends of their friends. Nothing beats word of mouth and nothing beats niche blogging.

I’m not saying you can’t mix topic, that can be fun too, only you won’t make as much money.

I had an interesting debate with Alex from soleredemption.com last night about how permalinks affect they way Google index blog pages. He argued that dynamic links are useless, that pages with links like this http://soleredemption.com/?p=20 aren’t being properly indexed by Google. I didn’t have much to say but I did read something about that ages ago, and I’ve always kept all my URLs with permalinks, or permanent links.

If you use WordPress, you can do this easily by chmod-ing your .htaccess file to 666, then from your WP control panel, go to Options - Permalinks and enable permalinks from there by copying-and-pasting the sample structure on that page into the provided field.

Google usually takes a few days if not weeks to come by and crawl your pages. So after you enable permalinks on your blog give it some time to sink and soon you’ll get that extra traffic from Google directly into your archive pages.

There has been reports flying around the Blogosphere that adding Chitika to your blog can in fact deduct from your AdSense earnings. The reason is simple. If people click on your Chitika ads then they won’t click on your AdSense ads. Chitika has more appeal at the first sight since it incorporates images in its ads. So most first time visitors would notice that more than your AdSense ads. Regular visitors, however would develop Chitika blindness over time, and this is when your AdSense earnings start to hike back up to its previous state.

A few bloggers don’t mind the AdSense dip so much. They claim that what they’re making with Chitika is far more generous than what they lose with AdSense. The balance they say is very well worth it.

However, in our very own experience, especially with a forum at http://soleredemption.com/forum/ we’ve noticed a 50% drop in AdSense earnings for the past week. More and more people are clicking on our Chitika ads. But the difference in loss is very substantial since Chitika isn’t giving us back what we lose, so we decided to take Chitika off that forum for the time being.

What are your experiences with Chitika? Please share with us in the comments below.

Users of WordPress who are considering signing up with Chitika’s eMiniMalls and existing eMiniMall clients may be interested in reading about the Chitika eMiniMalls Wordpress Plugin by X74.org:

The plugin is very straightforward. Put it in your wp-content/plugins directory, then go to your Plugins configuration page and click Activate. Once you activate the plugin, you will see a new button on your Quicktags toolbar. The new button is eMiniMall. Click it to insert the eMiniMall tag.

We haven’t got the plugin running on this site ourselves because our eMiniMall code was already in place before this review. But if you’ve got the plugin installed, or are about to give it a go and would like to give your feedback then use the comments link below.

In my last post ‘Tips for blogging and Google AdSense’ we talked about creating a blog optimised for Google AdSense. In this post we are going to discover the importance of keywords to help increase your search engine rankings and improve your success with Google AdSense.

Before we get started you should understand that this post is NOT about META KEYWORDS. They are totally useless in my opinion and considering that most search engines ignore them now anyway due to keyword abuse, you are better off not bothering with them at all. What search engines and Google AdSense are most interested in these days are keywords within the blog posts (the main content of your site), title headings of your posts and your html document title (web page title).

If you are writing a blog about blogging for example you will need to use keywords in your content relevant to your chosen subject of blogging. But you will also need to make sure you avoid overkill, use keywords this way and your posts will be uninteresting and people will stop visiting or you might find your site black-listed for being Splog (Blog Spam).

When linking to previous posts in your blog or someone else’s blog, try to be more creative with the links. Simply having click here or hyperlinking a single word wont do your rankings any good, try and use meaningful phrases that your visitors might do an internet search on instead. Take my example in the first paragraph of this post, notice how I use the full title of the post i’m referring to, that’s a great phrase and it contains good KEYWORDS. Search engines like this format and your sites will get better rankings if you keep doing it.

Your post titles should be descriptive and use good keywords. Try to imagine how someone might query a search engine for information your post discusses when constructing your post title. On the subject of titles, most blogging software will automatically add your post title to the html document title (displays in the blue title bar at the top of your browser), but if it doesn’t, either change your blogging software (try Wordpress for example) or try and edit the html document title tag directly.

So in short keywords are your Key to successful ranking and better results from your Google AdSense. Remember also that motivation and drive to keep posting those blog entries is also Key, don’t fall foul of Blogger Apathy.