Bloggers Journal

My previous blog post said about how I am going to openly discuss the development of my website – hopefully, in the long run, making it profitable.  My aim for the end of this year is to have 5,000 visitors, and hopefully have made some revenue.

I have taken a number of steps to attempt to monetise this website.  I had toyed with not placing any adverts until there was more content.  However, I was advised to place some adverts on the site so you readers become acustomed to it.  It makes sense I guess.  I’m being open and honest from the start.  At the end of the day, I’m paying money out of my pocket to 1and1 to host my website.

So heres a start on things to come.  In this blog I’ll discuss what I have done to boost my traffic a little, and show you some funky graphs!

Right now I have been reading a number of blogs (check my BlogRoll at the bottom for the main ones) and trying to get some guidance as to how to increase traffic to my site.

The general consensus from all sites is to engage in the blogging community.  For instance, comment on peoples posts – but make the comment relevant – if anything, add something to their post.  Other suggestions are to advertise your website at every opportunity.  There are many more, which I will discuss in a later article.

I have been following the advice, and posting on people’s blogs.  The ones I’ve been most active on are in my BlogRoll.  I have found that this has increased my traffic a little.  It hasn’t been massive, but it makes for nice reading of my analytics!

Here is a screen shot of my site visitors for the past month.

It’s quite a spikey graph, but the reason for that is simply because of advertising!  The two spikes in the middle came from placing my website URL in my email address signature alone.  More recently the steady increase in visitors has been from commenting on other people’s blogs.

Unfortunately, there is that low patch recently.  Hopefully I got some visitors.  However, I changed my website theme, and had manually placed the Google code in the template – OOPS!  Anyway, I added the “All in One Webmaster” plugin and everything is sorted!

You may also notice that I have placed a few banners around.  I have joined the Amazon affiliate scheme.  The rewards are by no means massive, but there are so many useful products on Amazon it made logical sense as a starting point for me.  Likewise, at the end of each post, I have included a banner advertising my hosting company.  I have never had a problem in the number of years I have been with 1and1, and so it makes sense to advertise their services!

So stay tuned, I will be adding more updates in the future.  Hopefully all will go well.

I would like to hear from anyone who wishes to share their early days with me!