I’ve been kind of slow in posting my progress with the Cheap Electricity Options blog of late. The Week 4 progress report was posted a day or so ago but the blog itself is now 8 weeks old. So what I’ll do in this post is compress what I’ve been doing in the last month with the blog.

As I mentioned in the previous Progress Report, Week 5 saw ads being added to the site for the first time. So here’s what I did, in order, as best I can recollect over the last 4 weeks:
Read the rest of this entry »

If you read Progress Report 1, you’ll know that the blog I set up for this case study is Cheap Electricity Options.

To recap, Week 1 of the blog development involved keyword research and identifying if the niche wasn’t too competitive and that there were enough products for it to advertise. Week 1 closed with the installation of the blog, selecting a theme and adding a home page and article. The blog is set up to use a static home page.

Week 2 saw the preparation of some articles for the site that were scheduled to be posted over the next 2-3 weeks. I also created a report to entice visitors to sign up for the email series that is also being added, on an ongoing basis, to the site.

Week 3 was mostly about promoting the site and starting the backlinking process.

So now to week 4…:
Read the rest of this entry »

The question of how much (percentage-wise) Google pays webmasters for clicks on Adsense ads displayed on their websites has always been open to speculation. Google have never revealed what that figure is and speculation among webmasters put the figure at anywhere between 10% and 50% of revenue share.

Personally, I always figured it was around the 50% mark and I think the majority of opinion put it at between 40% and 50%.

Well, it was something of a surprise then when Google recently came out and announced exactly what the revenue share percentage is. The announcement was supposedly made “in the spirit of greater transparency”.

And the percentage?
Read the rest of this entry »

Every website stands or falls on the traffic it receives, regardless of the tool you use to build the site.

A first step is to submit your site’s sitemap to the search engines (SiteBuilder Elite does this for you) but it is only a first step. You can also submit sitemaps through Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The search engines love active sites (especially Google); that doesn’t just mean the number of new pages added to a site on a regular basis, but the number of inbound links to the site. If a site keeps getting new inbound links (links from other sites pointing to it), then it must be popular, and that’s reflected in the page rankings in the search engines. Higher page ranks mean higher positions in the search engines and more traffic coming to your sites through natural searches.

However, getting traffic isn’t enough. You need the right kind of traffic and you need to give that traffic some useful information. Basically, you should think of yourself and your sites as being in a service industry that provides information to people. The better the information, the more likely people will revisit and the greater the chance that they’ll buy products or click ads listed on your site.

So if submitting a sitemap is just a first step, what other methods are available for getting traffic?

In this post, I’ll look at the free options (the next post will look at paid options):

Read the rest of this entry »