When many bloggers start out in blogging, they do so with very little in the way of funds to promote and improve their blog. Thanks to some hard work, they can get their blogs up and running, with traffic slowly filtering in as well as a steady stream of income. The income may not be huge but it is a start, you then have two options, the first being to pocket the money and buy yourself something nice. This option is appealing to many as they blog with a view to earning money to make their life more comfortable.

The second option is to reinvest the income back into your blog to enable you to raise the earning potential of your blog in the future. This is the most sensible option as $100 this month could be $200 next month and $400 the month after that. Of course there is the option to combine both approaches you could say that you will take 50% of the blogs earnings and the other 50% can be reinvested.

I will show you several ways in which you can reinvest money into your blog.

• Buy Advertising For Your Blog – Advertising spaces can be bought on blogs in most niches. Many blogs offer a 125x125px advertising system in their sidebars which can be bought at a reasonable price. By buying advertising on a site in your niche that receives a good level of traffic, you can improve the traffic to your blog as well as building your brand.

• Get Your Blog Re-Designed – This can help to give your blog a more professional look, this can make your blog look more creadible and reliable. You can also optimize your advertising which can lead to higher earnings in the future. If you can’t afford a full blog redesign, why not invest in some new logo’s or features that can benefit your blog. Unique Blog Designs have redesigned many of the top blogs.

• Buy Yourself A Second Blog – You put in the effort for your first blog and you have it earning money, you can just repeat the process with a 2nd blog. This is useful if you have a good knowledge in more than one niche. This is actually my second blog, my first was in the field of Fantasy Football (Soccer) ‘Fantasy Football Guru‘. My advice would be to only take this step if you have knowledge in a second niche, don’t make a blog in a niche in which you have little interest as you will lose your motivation on that blog very quickly.

• Buy Reviews – Buying a review on a top blog in your niche is a great way of bringing targeted traffic to your blog. It is a great way of increasing the readership on your blog.

• Buy Blog Authors – This is somewhat linked to my point of buying a second blog, you can buy authors for your second blog if you don’t have time to write on it yourself. Or you can buy authors for your current blog to increase the amount of content and to bring a fresh approach to your blog.

• Buy Products To Review – In some niches you can buy products that are big talking points and then review them on your blog. This is a great way of buying something nice related to your niche and using it to add extra depth to your blog.

The point to remember is that no matter how small your earnings, there is always a way to reinvest it into your blog, even if it is just adding it to an AdWords campaign to drive a few visitors to your site.

If you reinvest money back into your blog what approach do you take? How do you reinvest your blog earnings?

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Split Testing or A/B Testing is the process of testing 2 Ad units at the same time on a website or blog to see which one performs the best. It works by rotating the ads on around a 50/50 basis so that one visitor might see one Ad and the next visitor could see another. When run over a reasonable period of time you can judge which Ad unit performs best on your blog.

Everyone would like to know what their best performing Ad units are and this is how you can find out. When testing Ad units you want the test to run with all things being as close to equal as possible, that is why the Ads need to be used at the same time, if you did one test one week, then another the next there could be a big difference in traffic and content, which could affect earnings, so by keeping things as close to equal as possible your AdSense Split Testing will be more accurate.

Now we need to look at how you can do Split Testing on your blog. The easiest way is to use this small piece of PHP code that I use to run my Google AdSense Split Testing:

[sourcecode language='php']
srand((double)microtime()*1000000);

if (rand(1,2)==1)
{
Ad Unit 1 Goes Here
}
else
{
Ad Unit 2 Goes Here
};
?>
[/sourcecode]

The code works out a random number then depending on the number shows Ad Unit 1 or Ad Unit 2. This should produce results of around 50/50 as it is just like flipping a coin.

The technique of split testing is used by many big blogs and websites including some of my own. If you refresh this page the Ad Unit below may change, as it is currently using the above script:

It is recommended that you use the same size AdSense units, but change colors, borders and corners, to see which has the most positive effect. Once you have found the most profitable Ad colors, you can try using a different Ad Unit size and seeing if that performs better or worse.

My advice is to test as many colors and size on your blog until you find the most profitable, then leave that unit running for a few months, then start testing again, as trends change, and you need to keep on top to keep your blog earning well.

Let us know of your experiences with Google AdSense Split Testing.

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On one of my latest posts ‘15 Ways To Increase Traffic To Your Blog‘ I introduced the idea of answering questions on Yahoo Answers as a way of increasing traffic to your blog. The post received some comments from people who had not tried using Yahoo Answers and others were not sure how it worked.

Some comments received can be seen below:

Indeed those are really helpful, I want to read more..
anyway about the yahoo answer, how can I put my links on it, without putting it on the resource box of my answer?

by Keira

I haven’t tried Yahoo Answers yet, hadn’t even thought of that route, but it’s a good idea

by Muscle Post

The one that caught my attention was Yahoo answers.

by Gerri

For those of you who are not familiar with Yahoo Answers it is a website where users can ask questions relating to many preset categories, people can then answer the questions, with the user that originally posted the question then choosing the best answer from the ones supplied. Yahoo Answers covers a number of niches, so it is a viable option for many bloggers.

There are a few ways you can use Yahoo Answers, the first being, directly answering questions which you have covered in your blog, you can then answer the the question and link back to your blog post, this has worked well for me on posts such as my ‘PHP Login Script Tutorial‘ where I answer the users question then sent them to my blog for more info. You can add a link by simply copying the URL into the answer box. This tactic can work effectively, you will also find that the same questions get asked alot so you can generate alot of links. This tactic helps to improve traffic to your blog.

The second way you can use Yahoo Answers is to look for trends in the questions being asked, as these can be used as ideas for future blog posts. I found the idea for my ‘PHP: Be Notified When Google Crawls Your Site‘ post when I noticed alot of people where asking ‘How do I know when Google crawls my website?’. These are questions that people are looking to be answered, so chances are there are many others looking for the answer to these questions, but can’t find the information online already.

A few words of advice that I would give are:

1. Stick To Your Niche – Dont go off answering questions and linking back to your site/blog if it is not relevant.
2. Dont spam – Dont just answer question with a load of links.
3. Give accurate and informative answers – If you stick to your niche and give accurate and informative answers then you can gain a reputation in that niche that can help draw traffic to your blog.

The main advantage of Yahoo Answers is that the traffic you receive is targeted traffic and as people have asked questions over at Yahoo Answers, there is a good chance that they could comment on your blog as well.

I want to know about your experiences with Yahoo Answers? Keep us all updated on how you get on by commenting below.

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I have compiled a list of 10 easy and quick ways to improve your blog. Each one should take no more than 20 minutes and could help to improve or optimize your blog.

Check for old links – As mentioned in ‘Give Your Site an SEO Service‘, removing old links is handy for spiders as well as your blogs visitors.

Subscribe To Other Blogs In Your Niche – This allows you to keep up to date with events in your niche and also helps to breed new ideas for your blog.

Make Your Feed Accessible – Make it easy for your sites visitors to subscribe to your blog by making logos stand out, and by linking to your feed whenever you get the chance. Subscribe To My Feed

Optimize Your Permalinks – Dont stick with the standard WordPress link structure as this is not good for SEO, instead change the links from this: http://www.yourblog.com/p?=89 to something more focused to your posts title: http://www.yourblog.com/killer-blog-post-title. This will help a little with your SERP rankings.

Stay Clear Of Unnecessary Widgets – Sure you may think adding lots of cool widgets to your blogs makes it look alot better, but what is the benefit to your blogs visitors. My advice would be to keep to simple widgets that are useful and relevant.

Link To Other Blogs In Your Niche – Your blog might not be able to offer everything your visitors are looking for, but you may know a blog that has information that is useful, my advice would be to link to that blog. Sure you may feel like you are sending visitors away from your blog, but the visitor will remember that you provided them with good extra material. The owner of the other blog may even link back to some of your content.

Install The Related Post Plugin – This is something that I have covered on my blog, it makes a big difference to your blogs page views per visit. ‘Related Post Plugin Can Boost Page Views‘.

Create A Contact Us Page – Make yourself available to your blogs readers, don’t shut yourself away, open up for questions, it could even lead to great post ideas, or links with other blogs. Contact Me, if you would like to ask any questions.

Reply To Comments On Your Blog - This is a really simple way to help grow your blog. Your visitors will be more likely to comment if they think that you will reply, and it can also help to build a community on your blog. I would also recommend the ‘Top Commentators Plugin’.

Optimize Your 404 Page – I did a guest post over at bloggingtips.com about this very item. Stop people hitting the back button when they arrive at a 404 error page, make them read your blog instead. Here is my post over at bloggingtips.com: ‘Improve Bounce Rate by Optimizing 404 Pages‘.

You now have 10 great ways to improve your blog, that are simple and quick to perform. Do you have a quick and easy tip that can help improve your blog? Post them below.

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Has been a few days since my last post. I am currently working on a new WordPress Plug-in that should be available in the coming weeks. In the meantime I have a tip to help you promote your RSS feed. You can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years. Here is a quote from rsshugger.com:

rssHugger is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that the readers are interested in. Through the power of the internet and viral marketing, rssHugger looks to bring blog writers and blog readers closer together. If you own a blog, you can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years for giving an honest review of the site on your blog. If you want to join rssHugger but do not want to review our site, you can pay a one time review fee of $20. rssHugger will be the first ever quality, spam free, and viral rss directory strictly for bloggers.

It provides you with a chance to spread the word about your blog and attract new visitors. It is free, even if it only brings a few new subscribers to your blog it was worth it. They also promote the top 100 RSS Feeds, which is updated regularly.

Have you tried rssHugger? Did it make a difference to your blog? Let us know your thoughts.

RSS Group Writing Project

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In a previous post I listed the Related Post plugin as one of the 5 Must Have WordPress Plugins. I have done some research to show why your blog needs the related post plugin, and the effect it has on your blogs page views.

The related post plugin displays a list of posts related to the current post, as seen at the bottom of this post. It gives your visitors an easy way to navigate through content that may interest them.

I had a feeling that when I added the plugin for the first time my sites page views made a big jump upwards, but had no proof, so I decided that I would remove the Related Post plugin for 7 days, measure my stats and then add the Related Post plugin and after 7 days measure the stats, to see the effect of the plugin.

I have now finished the experiment and can bring you the results.

When I removed the Related Post plugin the page views per visit on my site dropped by an average of around 28% over the 7 day period. This meant that visitors on my site were viewing less pages for every visit. This is not good as I am aiming for my visitors to view around 4-5 pages per visit.

After the 7 days without the plugin I added it back into my site, 7 days later my page views per visit stat was up by 39% on the previous week. This is a massive gain in page views.

My most viewed post is currently my PHP Login Script Tutorial, this is also the page that gets landed on the most from search engines, at the bottom of the post and throughout the post there are links to my other pages, giving the visitor more in-depth knowledge. The related post plugin at the bottom of the post links to my other PHP tutorials which helps to increase my page views.

The related post plugin is a must for blogs, as it helps to keep visitors on your site, and increases your blogs page views. If you are getting 100 page views a day you could increase this to around 139, but if you are getting 100,00 you could increase it by 39,000 page views.

For more information see: Increase Page Views On Your Blog

As you may have noticed I am very big on stats, alot of my previous posts have been about increasing my sites stats, such as how to increase RSS Subscribers to your blog. If you are having problems with an area of your site, that you want to improve, in terms of stats, maybe bounce rate or avg time on site, then let me know below and I will try to help you out.

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Many people ask about how they can increase the traffic to their blog. Your blogs traffic is a direct indicator of its success, so everyone should be looking to increase the traffic to their blog. I have compiled a list of 15 ways I believe you can increase traffic on your blog.

1. Put a Link in the signature area of any forums you use. This will help to increase traffic because if people like what you are talking about in the forum, they may head over to your blog to check out the rest of your work. It also helps with building links to your site.
2. Leave comments on other blogs in your niche with a link back to your site. My tip here would be to not link to your homepage but to a post on your blog that is related to the post in which you are commenting on. This can increase traffic in two ways, the first is that people may read your comment, like your ideas and then check out your blog. The second way it could increase traffic is by the blog owner seeing your comments on his/her blog, then linking to your site in future posts.
3. Responding to questions on Yahoo Answers. There are thousands of questions asked on Yahoo Answers everyday, if you can answer them, with a link back to your site then the person who asked the question could visit your site for more information, but more importantly, when the question gets indexed in search engines, anyone else asking that question will find a link to your blog.
4. Write articles and submit them to article directories. This is an old but still effective method of bringing traffic to your blog. Write some interesting articles, make sure you inclide links back to your blog in the article. Submit the articles to article directories, you should see some traffic from these articles if they are good.
5. Use Pay-Per-Click programs such as Google AdWords. Simple enough really, buy the top spots on Google to receive higher traffic to your blog.
6. Optimize page titles for increased search engine traffic. Include keywords in your page titles so that they correspond with what people are searching for.
7. Purchase Ads on other blogs. Many blogs have 125×125 Banners in their sidebars which can be purchased, look to buy 1-2 from blogs in your niche, this should help to bring targeted traffic to your blog.
8. Give something away for free. Everyone loves a freebie, is a good way of getting traffic, as well as links to your site, as bloggers love linking to free stuff.
9. Hand out business cards when you go events related to your niche. Put your blogs URL on business cards and hand them to prospective visitors.
10. Contact other blog owners in your niche, make yourself and your blog known to them, then ask for links to your blogs content in their future posts, as well as asking if you can do a guest post (See Below)
11. Write a guest post on another blog in your niche. This allows you to make yourself known to another blogs audience, if they liked to blog you are guest posting on then they should like your blog. Make sure you link back to your blog at some point in the post.
12. Tell everyone you know about your blog. Tell your friends, Family and Pets about your blog, you never know when they might mentioned it to someone they know, and your word-of-mouth advertising can begin.
13. Put a link to your blog in your Email Signature. Now every email you send will be a small advert for your blog.
14. Conduct some research into a topic related to your niche and publish your results. Then contact the blog owners in your niche that you know and tell them all about your research, they might even find it useful and link back to your blog.
15. Link to other blogs in your niche. This is a good way of making your blog known to other blog owners in your niche, but also, most blogs show track backs, which means that when you link to another blogs posts, a link is created back to your blog from it.

I hope you find these tips useful. Feel free to add your tips below and give your feedback on the 15 tips mentioned above.

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Last month I brought you my WidgetBucks Review, this month I write about Chitika. I will let you into my experiences with Chitika as well as ways to optimize it to work for your site.

Chitika is an alternative to Google AdSense and WidgetBucks’ Contextual Pay-Per-Click Advertising. I run Chitika on several of my blogs, including this one. It performs best on product related blogs, but can achieve good results on blogs such as this on also. You can see what the Ads look like by looking at the ‘Related Products’ section below my blog posts.

Here is an extract from the Chitika Publishers website that contains two stats that show Chitika is a respected Ads Publisher:

Fact 1: Chitika has over 70+ power-packed revenue earning ad units, the largest collection of revenue-generating solutions catering to publishers of all sizes.

Fact 2: More than 17000 bloggers and publishers are already using Chitika’s ads to earn revenue.

One of the coolest things about Chitika is that you are allowed to use them on the same page as Google AdSense so you can maximize the earning potential of your blog. Chitika tends to have a higher CPC than Google AdSense in alot of the areas I have used it in.

As Chitika is still new to me, I have only been running it for around a month, I cannot give a full review, but this is what I can tell you, It is currently outperforming Google AdSense and WidgetBucks.

In order to help you earn to your full potential with Chitika I have provided you with some links that helped me to get started:

1. How To Improve Your Chitika Ad Performance at ProBlogger.net
2. More Chitika Ad Optimizing Tips at ProBlogger.net
3. How To Make Money from Internal Search Traffic with Chitika at ProBlogger.net
4. Chitika eMiniMalls Review at CyberWyre

What you waiting for, Try Chitika Now!

Let us know your views or experiences with Chitika and how it has performed for you.

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I have been doing alot of reading/research lately which is why the posts have dried up for a few days, have also done a few guest posts, so if you have come to my site via one of my guest posts then welcome. I thought I would give a small selection of posts that I have read that I think you will find interesting.

I have been doing a lot of research lately which is related to some posts I have got coming, which you do not want to miss, so I suggest you sign up to our RSS feeds now to be sure not to miss them.

Here are five posts that I have found interesting this week:

1. 9 Ways To Make Money NOT Blogging at The Blog Entrepreneur
2. 10 Essential Legal Points For Bloggers at Daily Blog Tips
3. 7 Tips For Prioritizing Your Work at Blogtrepreneur
4. Understanding the Value of ‘Friends’ in Social Media Websites at Dosh Dosh
5. It Takes a Gathering To Build a Crowd at ProBlogger

Hope you enjoy those posts. Have you written a great post recently? Share it below!

One I would like to share is my guest post over at BloggingTips.com which was Improve Bounce Rate by Optimizing 404 Pages

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I have mentioned it before several times on my blog, but today is RSS Awareness Day. So I could not let the day pass without doing a post about RSS Feeds. I am going to give you an insight into the RSS Feeds that I read.

So first of all what is RSS? Here is a quote from RSSDay.org:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a format used to deliver information from websites and pages that get updated regularly. An RSS document (which is called feed) contains either a summary or the full content from a website.

RSS allows you to stay up-to-date with all the latest development from your latest blogs without having to visit each one individually to see if it has been updated.

I have been asked many times before about which feeds I read, to keep up-to-date with all the latest news. What better day than today to reveal the blogs that are currently on my feed reader (Google Homepage). I am currently following 7 feeds:

• Daily Blog Tips – Introduced RSS Awareness Day, also a great blog to keep you up to date with blogging tips as well as ways to promote your blog.
• JohnTP.com – A new addition to my Feed Reader, John provides blogging tips and guides to making money online.
• Dosh Dosh – Dosh Dosh is a blog offering internet marketing and blogging tips, alongside social media strategies.
• Nate Whitehill – Great blog for information on Internet Marketing.
• ShoeMoney - I think most people have heard of ShoeMoney, some good posts on making money online.
• ProBlogger - Run by Darren Rowse, this is one of my favourite blogs. Tips for bloggers.
• SEOmoz - Get all the latest SEO information.

There you have it, the blogs that are currently in my feed reader. Check them out see if you find them as useful as I do. If you enjoy them, subscribe to their RSS FEED.

Does your RSS Feed suffer from a lack of subscribers? – Check out, How To Increase Your RSS Subscriber Count.

Dont forget to advertise RSS AWARENESS DAY on your blog:

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