Tastybuds

Yesterday I got my first day of 10 visits, so if I can sustain and grow that traffic, I will have completed my first goals.

A few factors have recently helped me to get this traffic. The articles I submitted just got approved, which has not only gotten me traffic, but has also helped out on SEO. Every article i write gives me an extra inbound link or two. The day after they were approved, the ranking on Google for “Danny Gabriner” jumped ahead of my Facebook and LinkedIn profiles to #1. I have noticed gains on other terms as well, and hope to soon have my tool available to automatically track my ranking progress.

I have also noticed that bots are beginning to find me, post spam comments, and steal my content. Not that this is necessarily a good thing, but at least it means I’m getting noticed, and I am getting some inbound links from it.

Jason Menayen also just wrote a post listing a few blogs, resources, and forums which deal with AdSense. I am happy to have been listed there, as it will drive traffic my way, is a solid inbound link, and gives me a bit of credibility. I am also very excited to learn about the other resources out there, and plan on exploring the areas he listed.

So it looks like I will need to be setting some new goals for myself. I will be thinking about these, but in the mean time I wiki continue to post, comment elsewhere, and submit my articles.

It has been 20 days since I started this blog, and although I am trying to build it up as quick as possible, it is a long process.

My initial goals were to get an average of 10 visitors per day, and 4 comments on my blog. The idea is that in addition to pure traffic, I am trying to build up a community of people interested in optimizing AdSense, and other analytics. In order to accomplish these goals, I set out to average a posts day, comment twice on 5 different blogs, and accumulate 20 posts.

I now have 35 posts, which is almost 2 posts per day. Commenting has been difficult for me; I commented 3 or 4 times on the YieldBuild blog, but I have not found any other blogs to heavily comment on. I think I have scattered a single comment on 6 other blogs, which brings my total to 10, but I still need to find blogs which I am deeply interested in.

How has this payed off? I am now averaging 3 visits per day, and have gotten my 4 comments. I still have a bit to go before I am at 10 visits per day, but feel I am beginning to get traction. What I am happiest about so far in terms of my progress is that I’ve managed to get a free lunch from one of my readers for blogging and commenting.

I also have begun to monitor my SEO process. Almost all my traffic so far has come from comments, but in the last day or two, more is coming from Google. My ranking for “optimizing adsense” has jumped from 89 to now 26. My next goal will be to get that into the top 10.

So what do need to do to finish off my first goals? Continuing to post at least once a day shouldn’t be a problem, but I need to really find more blogs that interest me and comment heavily. I will try to average at least one comment a day. I also have submitted a few articles to EzineArticles, and if those get approved, will submit more. My hope is to achieve my goals within th next 20 days.

There are many techniques to try and gain traffic, but it is important to always keep in mind the size of your site. Larger sites should focus on much different things than small sites, and every shade in between has it’s differences.

As a tiny site (less than 10 visits per day), most of my traffic is coming from comments and trackbacks on other blogs. But as I gain in size, search engines will begin to be much more important. Just by writing about my interests I have already gained quite a bit in my SEO rank, but it is time to make a more deliberate effort.

One of the first things you should do is figure out what your niches are, and focus on getting as much content on them as possible. Most people already have a general idea of their niche, but you need to find the keywords and phrases that will define your site. For me, some of my niche keywords are: “optimizing adsense”, “getting more traffic”, and “increase monetization”.

Most people already know what to do once they have these keywords: use them in your titles, tags, categories, and scatter them across your content. But the hard part is coming up with them. It is a delicate balance between using high traffic keywords while trying to stay in areas that are not so competitive.

To help you in this SEO battle, there are two major tooks you should be using, and not suprisingly, both come from Google. First, you should use the Google AdWords Tool to analyze your site, and come up with some high volume keywords. Then, you should use Google Search to see how many search results come up. Trying to use “SEO”, will get you nowhere as a small site, because you have to compete against millions of other sites.

Pick keywords that are appropriate for your website size. Get to the top 10 of a 1000 result keyword and you will pick up a tiny bit of traffic. Then move on to something in the 10,000 result range. For whatever range you are in for number of results (competitors), try and pick the keywords with the most searches. Of course, with all of this, you will have to make sure you know enough about the topic to write a lot of good content.

I am developing a tool that will allow you to feed in keywords and search volumes from Google’s AdWords Tool. It will scour Google Search for each keyword to find how many competitors you have. Then, after recommending which keywords to use, it will track your rank on an ongoing basis to see how you are doing. I will let you know when this tool is available for use.

I just got my first traffic from Google after more than 30 posts. All of my other traffic so far has been from comments or trackbacks from other blogs. But even though the majority of traffic isn’t currently coming from Google, I am guessing that that will change soon.

I should have started earlier, but I just began monitoring where my site ranks with various search terms. This is an extremely important excercise, as it correlates to how often people will find me. A search for “danny gabriner”, currently only ranks third, after my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. I should be the number one listing, considering that term is my domain, but because I never write it out, and those other two sites are massive, I could see why I am behind.

More imporant terms to monitor ate things like “optimizing adsense”, which is written on every single page, and I often write about. This is a highly competitive search term, and when I first checked, I was number 83 on the list. However, after only a few days, I have jumped to number 28. Once I get into the top 10, I expect quite a bit more traffic from this query.

A related term that gets far more searches is “optimize adsense”. I don’t write this term nearly as much as I should, and currently rank 133. As I become more concious of the important search queries that relate to my topics, I will focus on the SEO factor, and plan on tracking my progress in the Google rankings.

In addition to seeing where I rank on Google, I will be using Google’s AdWords Tool to find the keywords that are most imporant to me. Robert Scoble recently wrote a post on the lack of knowledge of this tool, and he is right that most people could gain heavily from it’s use.

My next steps are to compile my list of important keywords, and then I will start continually tracking and trying to improve my ranking on Google. There are so many SEO techniques that we all know to gain traffic, but this will actually give me a good idea of my progress.

One of the most critical aspects of a testing and optimization is choosing proper segments. You can lump everything together, and run one test for your entire site, but the gains will be far less than if you were to run 3 or 4 tests, one for each segment you are interested.

You can segment on just about anything. One of the most obvious variables is pagetype. For example, if you run a blog, the front page may be structured different from your article pages, which might be different from your links page. Each of these pages might be able to comfortably fit a different amount of ad units (for example, your homepage might get one below each article, while your article pages might only have one on the right side). Even if you do have the same initial layout on all your pages, you will find out that the same exact ad unit will perform different on each page.

Another variable you can segment on is whether a user is logged in. Regular visitors behave differently than casual ones, so you you should treat them as such. Often, the best style for one set of visitors will not perform as well for another set.

Time of day, or day of week, is another thing you can split on. If your site is business oriented, you might see different types of users during regular work hours than on weekends. Weekend users might be better optimized for multiple units, while business users for a single precise unit.

The point is that you have a ton of information about your users, and you should use that information segment. Each of these segments may perform different, and you should optimize accordingly. Other ideas dr segmentation include:
Time on site
Browser type
Country of origin
IP
Users from Google
Category or topic of page

Not all sites will be able to segment on all of these variables easily. Also, some of these variables might or might not have a huge impact. But the point is that you should be testing as much as you can, and when performing your tests, you should break things down as granular as you can.

I have always been a bit lost when it comes to Twitter. I started off using it by following a few people who had blogs I read, but because I was only following these few people, I was pretty much getting their blog posts recycled back to me.

A short while ago, twitter bought Summarize, and turned it into search.twitter.com. This tool is very useful for quite a few reasons. First of all, you can search for your niche topics (like optimizing AdSense), and find people who have either just posted, or who are interested in your topic. This is similar to searching on Google, but there are some added benefits.

First of all, the content is much fresher, as many of Google’s results will be years old (although some of those can be good too). Second, if people are asking questions or are having difficulty with something, you can respond to them directly and immediately. So not only are you finding good resources, but you are establishing yourself in a community of people interested in the same topics as yourself.

As you begin to find these people on Twitter who share your interests, you can refer them to your posts, and if you have good enough content, gain some dedicated readers.

It’s been about 10 days since I started this blog, and although I am starting to get used to it, and have learned a bit, I still am not getting the kind of traffic or participation that I would like. I think what it boils down to is that I have had quite a few superficial posts, and have still not wrote enough true articles.

I realized this lack of good content when I started reading and thinking about methods to get users to this site. One technique which I have read quite a bit about and believe in is submitting articles to other websites. Not only do those articles contribute inbound links, which helps with PageRank, and getting on the search engines, but it also is another outlet for your content, and it can drive interested readers your way.

So I went out hunting for article submission sites, and reading what people recommended in this arena. What it boiled down to is that there are a massive amount of article directories out there, many of which are complete spam, but also a good handful of sites that everyone seems to be recommending, such as www.ezinearticles.com. Some people recommended submitting to only the best, while others say to spread your content as far out as you can. I will probably try a mix of the methods, but there is still one problem: a lack of good content.

When I got to looking through my posts and deciding what I wanted to submit, I realized that I only had 1, maybe 2 articles that were informative and thoughtful enough to send out. This is out of my 25 or so posts that I currently have. So with that I decided that I really need to get back to what I have always heard, and get to writing tons of good content.

My hope is to get 5 or so good articles in the next few days that I can submit to 5 sites, and see where that takes me. Not only will I be playing the inbound link game, but I will also be building my own site into a place people will want to stay at.

When I first started this blog, I had two main categories I was interested in: optimizing AdSense, and cooking. So far I have written quite a bit about the first topic, mothing about the second topic, and various posts about a few other topics.

There are a few questions I have, but am not exactly sure what yw “best” approach is, or what by approach should be. Everyone who looks into the matter knows that getting your self into a tightly defined niche is one of the best ways to establish traffic and a community. But what about the question of closely related niches and extremely different niches? It makes sense for me to talk about SEO and getting traffic, because anyone interested in opitimizing AdSense should also be interested in these topics.

Some of these people might even me interested in cooking, or rockclimbing, or other of my passions, although that number probably won’t be large. The reverse is even more true: if I attract a following of cooks, most will not be interested in SEO or AdSense.

But can this problem be solved merely by categorizing an tagging my posts in a well organized matter? Or should I create a completely seperate blog for those other interests. I know people like Dave Winer (http://www.scriptingnews.com) often combine anything they are interested together on their blog, such as technology, politics, and communities.

I’m sure as I do more of this, I will get more comfortable writing whatever I want to be writing, but I also think that since this blog is for a community of people, I should occasionally (or constantly) reach out to find what others want.

I just got approved by Google for my AdSense accout, and will try to get it up and running soon. Normally I would not recommend using AdSense before you are getting at least 500 page views a day, if not way more. However, considering AdSense is a major topic of this blog, I figured I should start using it the way most of my audience does.

The funny thing is that I have never actually used the standard version of AdSense. We get to plug into an API at CNET, and the use is quite a bit different. This will definitely be a learning experience for me, and I hope I will be able to share some of what I learn.

Many of the tips and strategies that I am used to do not apply, such as changing the font size changing the number of listings per ad unit, or using different font families. Nevertheless, I will start to play around in this new environment, and find new strategies for increased monitozation.

It will start off with figuring out if I can use one of the several WordPress AdSense plugins, or if I want to directly insert code somewhere. I will let you know how it goes.

Just after posting about being excited about getting a minuscule amount of traffic, I have two more milestone I just passed.  I just got my first comment and my first signup into an RSS reader.  The person in question works and posts for YieldBuild, the blog I just got interested in.  I had commented on one of their articles, posted here that I liked their blog, and then added them on in my links section.

Not sure exactly how they landed here, but it just goes to show that involving yourself in the community is the best way to get more traffic and dedicated traffic.  It is definitely necessary to build up a strong library of good posts (both for content and SEO purposes), but I am more and more beginning to think that some of the most important aspects of blogging happen outside of your blog.  I am going to continue to try to find good blogs, comment on those blogs, and write about those blogs.  I only have so much time, so I will have to balance this with my other objective of building up enough quality posts, but I don’t see that as much of a problem.