Sunday, May 31, 2009

Spam can damage your credibility

If you want to promote your blog or website, spamming isn't going to work. People do not like spam. Using the blog forums when you have new posts is fine, to an extent. If you use the forum several times a day, every single day to announce a blog post, you will just end up being blocked. One time, maybe two times a day is usually fine, but sometimes you get the ones who abuse it.

What I will never understand are the ones that private message you with the same message over and over again every few days. Who has gotten the Hello my friend do you shop online, then go to, then they give you the URL to their blog. After the third time, I blocked him, and am probably not the first to do this. Now how far could he have gotten if he did not do that in the first place.

Twitter also, if you setup your ping.fm or hellotext to message twitter every hour, you can possibly lose quite a few followers. I did this by accident, and had it setup so it kept going in the round about circle. Every fifteen minutes it kept sending a message to my twitter (oops).

The fix for that is to just go to TwitterFeed and have it send one of the auto sites, ping.fm or hellotext the posts, but not both at the same time. One of the sites will get it to the other, and it will eventually get to your twitter account in a timely manner. For each of my blogs, I have it send to ping.fm in three hour increments. So every three hours, only one post from one blog sends to twitter, that is two posts per blog daily, one with the url, one without.

The visit response is much better, and my hits have gone up a bit more. I'm not coming across as spammy. You hate spam, I hate spam, they hate spam, so just take into account how you feel about it, and give the same respect, which goes a long way later on.

There is a post on my blog, Why Is Spam Useless? It's from a few weeks ago, but I remember stating how spammers do not ever prosper. For example, how many times do they need to send me an email about cleaning my colon, and how much blockage do they think is going on there. Nothing a big helping of spinash can't fix a few times a week.

As for twitter, the best people I have found to follow are people, pretty much in the same line of work I am. Some of my new visitors are people using traffic exchange sites, pay to click and pay to read email for promoting. One day a piece of my post floated past them, and they checked it out. Every few days a search for words is FaceBook, Twitter and a few others for terms like, PTC, Pay to Click etc... goes a long way.

PS. Good posts, something catchy, like the one I did yesterday in my hot topics blog. Gave my hot topics blog a good response because funny works :)

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Why PTC and Traffic Exchange is harmful to your Adsense

Previously I mentioned about Traffic Exchange being good to drive to your website and blog, but not knowing at the time how harmful it can be to your adsense.

Over the past few weeks, my adsense revenue has been going up, but the more hits that I received, the less the clicks were worth. Then to my discovery, it had to do with the amount of traffic I was receiving, and the number of clicks.

From what it looks like, for every few hundred visitors you get to your site, the worth of the ads goes down if nobody is clicking on ads. So lets say you check your adsense at 3:00am Eastern Standard time and you have already received five hits to your site. You will notice that the eCPM might be pretty high, and if somebody clicks, you will get a nice amount, maybe a few dollars. After a few hours pass, you go back to check your adwense statics, and you notice that you received another seventy visitors, but now your CPM has gone down considerably, and nobody has clicked. That is the answer right there, and that is why using PTC and Traffic Exchange to drive traffic to your sites can be harmful.

Most Traffic Exchange site users do not pay attention to what they are surfing, because it is so repetitive. They are mostly only using the traffic exchange to try to earn a few pennies, and earn a few referrals to their own program. When you look in your analytics, you will notice that the bounce rate is considerably high, this is calculated on the time that the person is on your site, so a fifteen second visitor is actually quite useless, while a thirty minute visitor is profitable..

One day I managed to earn close five hundred visitors to my site after using the traffic exchange. With an earning of nearly ten thousand points, this looked to me as if I was going to get that many visitors to my site, but instead it was much less then that. After spending six hours at this, I earned a penny from Google adsense. Not a pretty picture, and quite embarrassing.

This past Saturday somebody left me a message telling me I had a nice blog, and was my first follower. After checking out his blog, I noticed the WidgetBox business widget and grabbed it. After using that for a few hours and viewing other blogs listed on it, I discovered MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. Immediately I signed up for the two sites and started viewing blogs and just started grabbing anything that looked like it might be more helpful to earn good traffic to my own sites.

This past Sunday after deciding to ditch the traffic exchange, I did a search for blog exchange and blog listing sites, and came across (see small banner links in top left) two blogs that gave the best sites to have your blogs noticed for free.

Today I am happy to say, I have already received one hundred banner impressions, and one click, and the first click of the day is always worth the most.

So the moral to the stroy is, you want people to read your blogs, visit your blogs, comment on your blogs. You do not want somebody sitting at their desk with five or six browser tabs opened at once, and just clicking cheat protections one after another to earn pennies and referrals.

You are just wasting your own time if your trying to do the same thing. As stated before, traffic exchange and PTC might get you plenty of visitors to your sites, and it might even help your eCPM worth go up, but what good is the worth if nobody is actually there for a reason.

Notice as well the neat little rating at the bottom of my posts linking to other blogs, this is courtesy to outbrain, another way to get noticed. Just a simple little gadget that you add, and you are linking back and forth with other blogs.