Tag Archives: blog

The rush for traffic

blogging,

There's a new service out there that aims to get bloggers more traffic. The service is BlogRush
and the concept is that you get traffic by displaying your posts in a widget on other blogs in your category.

Basically you just install a widget on your site where you display feeds from other blogs in your category and for each page view you get a credits for displaying your own posts in the widget on other similar blogs.

Exponential traffic growth from referrals

Now here's the nice part, you also get credits for the members you refer to BlogRush and for the members they refer and so on. There are 10 levels of referrals so you can see how this could make your traffic explode.

Watch this video for more details:
Are you convinced ?

Problems

Everything looks so good, in the video... so I went to sign up and I posted the widget in my sidebar.   The signup process is really easy, but then when I looked at the widget I see a lot of content that is unrelated to my blog content. A lot of apple, iphone, ringtones and other stuff that have nothing to do with what I write about. So I remembered that you can add filters, great ... only that they don't work or maybe I just don't know how to use them. It should be as simple as adding the keywords you want to bock and I did but they just don't work.

Another problem is that the help section on the site doesn't really explain how to add filters or anything else. It just contains a few videos about how to set this up on wordpress and some other blogging platforms.

No reports, yeah they are under development.

The idea is great but I think they rushed to release it 🙂 . I'll leave this up in my sidebar for a few days to see if I get other feeds in there or if I get some traffic from this and maybe they'll solve some of those problems.

Blog action day for environment

blogging, , , , ,

Let's see what happens if a lot of bloggers write about the same thing in one day? Would it matter ? Would you make a difference. Blog action day, on October 15'th will be the day when thousands of blogs will write about the one thing.

One day per year, one topic, thousands of bloggers contributing to making a better world. This year's topic is "Environment".

I have signed up my blog and hopefully I'll post something related to Unix, Linux, Patches and Hacks to help create a better environment.

Sidebar decluttering

blogging, , ,

A few days ago I came across a post at Problogger.net where Darren Rowse suggested bloggers should de clutter the sidebar of their blogs.

I looked at my sidebar and I saw what he meant by clutter. Darren could have used my sidebar as an example of a cluttered sidebar.

The sidebar was full of widgets that were not really useful to me or to my visitors. Here is what I had and removed:

  • Most popular Posts: I removed this because I didn't think it was really useful for my visitors. A lot of them come from a search engine and look for something specific. I don't think they are interested in what's popular on my blog, but I might be wrong about it and I might add it back in the future, maybe on the footer.
  • Tag cloud: this one was getting too big. I occupied too much space and the most popular tags were already the words in categories to it was kind of redundant. I might add this on a page of it's own
  • Top commentators: I removed this because it looks bad to see a list of top commentators where #1 has only 3 comments.
  • Technorati fave this blog: removed because I already have a technorati button at the bottom of each post
  • Google Referrals banners: The banners increased the load times and were not making money. I may add them back as links like this :
    because I see some potential in this but I'll have to get more traffic before I start using it again
  • Text link adds affiliate banner: In two months of using this I got about 80 clicks on it and no conversions. But the text link ads is reported to be one of the best affiliate program. They give you $25 for signing up an active publisher or advertiser
  • Reviewme banner: removed because I received no offer for a review since I started using it a few months ago. I guess no one wants me to review a patch 🙂
  • WordPress meta: does anyone care about this ?
  • DoFollow: This doesn't really have anything to do with the sidebar but I removed this plugin because it was pretty much useless. I don't think anyone that commented on my posts did it because of the dofollow plugin. The only ones that commented because of dofollow were those that commented on the post about dofollow. The idea to reward your commentators is good but if there isn't anyone ( or very few ) to reward the plugin is useless. Also I think the Top commentators plugin might be better for this.

Some thoughts about what I should do, but I'm not sure about this yet:

  • move archives and maybe categories in the footer
  • add most popular posts in the footer
  • remove google ads, I this I can afford losing about $2/month 🙂
  • remove kontera
  • create a top navigation bar and move the links to pages on that bar

What do you think I should do about the blog ? Any suggestions are welcome in the comments.