You have probably noticed some changes to my blog this week. You’ve got it right, I have changed my advertising platform to an interactive slideshow which displays the hottest games to be released. It was my main project this week to improve Kiwipulse’s advertising platform. My first idea was to include video trailers of the soon to be released games from Youtube. I was then looking for a javascript or php script to easily manage all these data. But, I didn’t find anything that could fit with my idea. Then I came across a video (below) about Sprout Builder which got my attention and interest immediately! I signed up for an account with them which took one minute and I was ready to play with it.
What I like about Sprout Builder is that you have the capability to manage videos and pictures in the same frame, which will be displayed in Flash on your blog. After exploring the features and testing them on my blog, I discovered the video feature seem to have low image quality when displayed in Flash. Well they are still in Beta version so I will not ask for too much.
There are six pre-built templates which is perfect for blogs that are talking about sports, causes, personal topics, or politicians. As you know, my blog covers a variety of subjects. So I started building my Sprout from scratch which allows me to maximize my creativity and have the flexibility to customize the design and content. I can choose from over dozens of standard sizes or create my own size. Sprout comes with advanced components that you can add by simply dragging and dropping. You can add videos, pictures, slideshows, jukeboxes, RSS Feeds, PollDaddy, Google Graph, Ribbit, Chipin and more. Then when you are done building with your Sprout, you can easily publish it using the quick post feature to place on your blog or social networking profile. It is that simple! I love Sprout Builder!
One of the fastest ways to drive up traffic through your blog is to write about the topics that most searched on the Internet. Do you agree with me that just make perfect sense? Just imagine that the most searched is Jessica Alba, Britney Spear or Linsay Lohan. If you have written something about them on your blog, there is a big chance that people will hit your articles. The question now is how and where can you find out what topics are most searched or are ‘hot’ and what keywords have been used for those topics? Well, I would like to share with you the tools that I am using and answer this very question. It’s very easy to use and save me lots of time and effort.
First, I have been using this tool to find inspiration or topic ideas when I am running out of ideas for my articles. I never thought that I will use it frequently. There are good results with this tool. I’m talking of course of Google Trends, a tool from Google Labs which show you the most popular searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to now. The way Google search works is pretty simple. It will analyze a portion of the Google Search Engine to compute how many searches have been done for the selected terms. Then it will show you a graph with the results plotted on a linear scale. It also displays the top cities, regions and languages in which people searched for the selected keywords.
So, most of us bloggers would want to know what people are searching on Google today and what’s hot. Don’t worry, Google Labs have thought about it and they have released in May 2007 their Google Hot Trends tool. It’s the newest addition to Google Trends that will display on a daily basis the top 100 hot searches for the past hours. The Hot Trends list gets updated hourly and you will also find links to news, blogs and web results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Trends list today.
Now that you know exactly what to write about, you will need to find related keywords to your topics. I suggest you use this SEO Tools, Keyword Suggestions for Google, that will help you to choose relevant and popular terms related to your selected keywords. I hope you will find these tools useful when your head is running out of ideas or inspiration.
I am proud to announce that Kiwipulse has reached one of its 10 goals early this week. The objective was to reach the mark of the top 100,000 on Alexa Rank. Surprisingly, Kiwipulse did extremely well by passing the 100,000 mark with 92,418 in traffic rank this week! For your information Alexa is well known for its free powerful tool used to rank websites traffic. It is a subsidiary company of Amazon.com which was acquired in 1999 for about $250 million (in Amazon stocks that is).
The way Alexa works is really simple. It is based on the visits from the Alexa Toolbar users in which the toolbar is integrated with Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Netscape. In other words Alexa will analyze the web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and then the information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed. Finally they will release the new ranking of each website via their Alexa service. The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users.
Traffic rankings of 100,000+ is regarded as not reliable. Kiwipulse want to stay away from the ‘not reliable’ status, thus has worked effortlessly to reach the 100, 000 mark. Mission accomplished! The closer a website gets to #1, the more reliable its rank.
On a monthly basis Kiwipulse received on average over 30,000 of unique visitors and the numbers just keep increasing. But from time to time, the popular posts would increase the number of unique visitors to 15,000 on a daily basis. The main traffic driver for the popular posts was from StumbleUpon. Thanks to all who have stumbled Kiwipulse’s posts. If you have experienced the traffic from StumbleUpon you know that it’s a crazy way to increase the traffic for your blog.
Kiwipulse would like to thank all of you who have been following the website since the beginning. Without your support and participation, whether that’s by commenting, providing tips and feedback, or donating, Kiwipulse would probably not be here blogging the things that ROCK YOUR WORLD (mine as well…).
By the way, if you wish to promote your website with Kiwipulse.com, please follow this link to select an advertising spot.
First you need to know that this post is the introduction to the many SEO tutorials that I will publish. I decided to write about this topic because I recently received many emails from my fellow bloggers requesting to help them with their SEO. I was quite surprised that some of them don’t know what SEO stands for. In mastering any subjects, one can’t escape from taking the introductory course, in this case it’s SEO 101. In this first tutorial, I will cover the basics of SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It helps to increase the rank of your blog and gain popularity from the search engines such as Google and Yahoo. You probably use Google for researching or finding answers to many of your questions. There are billions of pages/articles/websites indexed on Google. If you don’t optimize your blog to be viewed on the search engines, your articles will probably be the last ranked of the millions/billions of articles in the results list.
For the past week, I have been focusing on promoting my blog through Entrecard. So far, I have spent over 3,000 credits on my advertising campaign with the expectation of receiving more visitors to my blog. But looking at my statistics it showed that I haven’t generated that much visitors by the advertising campaign (as you can see on the Advert Clicks chart below). The maximum clicks I received in one day this month is 66, which is not enough to buy me a beer. I wanted to cry after realizing that my 3k credits investment didn’t result in a successful advertising campaign! So I decided to analyze the stats in further detail and discovered that the advertising campaign is not the most effective way to increase visitors. Don’t waist your credits on advertising campaign!
Car Drops - This chart shows the number of cards that were dropped on your blog each day. A good number of drops improves your advertising price, and your position in the Campaign listings.
Advert Clicks -This chart shows the number of clicks through to your site from the adverts you have bought. More clicks indicate a more successful advertising campaign, and more visitors to your site.
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So I decided to analyze the stats in further detail and discovered that the advertising campaign is not the most effective way to increase visitors. Don’t waist your credits on advertising campaign!
WatchUOnline’s last blog post..brian...
