David Pitlyuk

I run another blog which a friend and I use to share viral videos online with, it’s called VideoExperiment.com. In the past I’ve submitted many items to Digg, but haven’t had any luck getting it onto the front page. From what I’ve heard, 60% of the material that makes it to the front is submitted by the top 5% of users, so that makes it even harder to get content up there.

Jason found a hidden gem video in a forum, which we submitted to Digg, and it hit the front page. A video isn’t the same as an article, but it still brings a generous amount of traffic to the site. The video was about a car with 30″ wheels that went to the drag strip, the axle broke, and the wheel continued down the track without the car.

Being Dugg is a great way to get a kick start on your site. You’ve gotta get it in front eyeballs in order for people to keep coming back, right? So what happened with VE after being Dugg?

Traffic

We have to keep in mind we really don’t work on generating traffic, so we were getting an average of 20 unique visitors and 36 pageviews a day. The day we got Dugg we generated 7,818 uniques and 8,865 pageviews. From the day that we got Dugg (Tuesday) through Sunday we generated 15,345 uniques and 17,517 pageviews. We also got a good amount of comments on videos where we normally don’t get comments. The amount of traffic has drastically come down, but we hope to retain some visitors as a result of the Digging. We also generated a ton of new backlinks, which should help us out with SEO, an important part of building traffic on that blog. This also obviously generated more traffic than just Digg.

RSS Subscribers

The RSS subscribers jumped up from an average of around 7-11 to 123 the next day. It has since come down to around the 30 range, but still much better than before! We’ll continue to watch the numbers and see if things keep coming down or level off higher than they were previously.

Monetization

We are only using Google AdSense ads on the site, and were only making a couple dollars a month from those. Digg readers are notorious for not clicking ads, or even having some sort of ad blocker, so I wasn’t expecting much out of this. All-in-all the traffic brought in around $11, enough to almost cover the hosting expenses! Again, we’re not really concerned about the money stuff yet, it’s more about building some retained traffic.

Have you ever been Dugg? How have your experiences been? I’m more interested in seeing how things are a couple weeks, or even months afterwards.

In order to make money blogging, it’s important to diversify your revenue streams. Many bloggers make the mistake of putting 100% of their faith into just Google AdSense. I recently added Kontera in-text links for a new revenue source, and you can do the same. Just signing up and putting their default code isn’t enough to maximize your earnings though.

Kontera provides a few different things you can do to customize your advertising to help juice every penny into your revenue. This is what your default ad tag will look like:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var dc_UnitID = 14;
var dc_PublisherID = XXXXX;
var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘blue’;
var dc_adprod=’ADL’;
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://kona.kontera.com/javascript/lib/KonaLibInline.js”></script>

This just makes your links the default blue, which most sites with a real design shouldn’t have. On top of this, it can also make things like your sidebar and your headlines links. This is no good, and we need to do something about it.

Change The Kontera Link Color

To change the link color simply change this line:

var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘blue‘;

You can switch blue to any hex color code. For example this would make the links black:

var dc_AdLinkColor = ‘#000000‘;

Most people will normally make the color of the Kontera links the same color as their regular links. The main difference is that Kontera links are double underlined, but it’s still a little iffy in terms of users being tricked into clicking a link. I personally decided to make the links green when my links are blue.

Target A Specific Area

You can target a specific area of your page, for example if you just want a specific paragraph to get linked. Simply add a class=”KonaBody” to a section of your code, and everything in it can get linked by Kontera. For example:

<div class=”KonaBody”>This text can possible get linked by Kontera!</div>

Restrict Areas From Getting Linked

If you don’t want an area to get linked simply add a class=”KonaFilter” to a section of your code. For example if you don’t want the sidebar linked you can do something like:

<div id=”sidebar” class=”KonaFilter”>This code will note get linked by Kontera</div>

Easiest Thing To Do In Wordpress

All I did in Wordpress was add a class=”KonaBody” to the div=”content” section. This will cover all of the content you write, but filter out the side bar, footer, and header.

From time to time I will be linking to posts I find interesting from readers that comments on posts at my blog. Want to possibly get a link in a future post here? Consider posting more comments, and I may just find something of interest at your site/blog!

Knupnet - Do You Twitter? And Why? - I’ve heard about all the Twitter buzz, but I really can’t get into it. I would rather spend my time in other, more valuable ways. See what “Knup” thought.

OfZenAndComputing - Clean Your Keyboard in the Dishwasher, or in the Sink - I go through keyboards way too often…and mainly because they get pretty nasty, and I don’t want to deal with popping all the keys out and cleaning it all up. Check out this washable keyboard solution.

Financial Imbalance - How do I know if I am in a position to buy a new home? - If you’re thinking about buying a house, Thomas brings up some excellent questions to ask yourself before talking with the bank or mortgage broker.

Luke 16.10 - How to save money on groceries - Luke provides tips on how he saved 25% on his monthly grocery bill. With a family of 3, little savings here and there can make a drastic difference in the amount of total money that can be saved. Start with one that can add up to a lot.

Green Llama - Blogging Mistakes Group Project Results - If you are starting a blog, the best thing you can do is learn from other people’s mistakes first, so you don’t make them yourself. The all-mighty Green Llama has compiled a list of other peoples posts where they talked about the mistakes they made.

Community Spark - Improving your website - Martin speaks about the fact that just designing and launching your step is not the final step. He reiterates the importance that constant tweaking and changes are necessary to make your site the most optimal and efficient.

Rehuel punt kom - From fulltime webdesigner to fulltime blogger in 7 steps - Rehuel talks about how he is making the transition from a web designer to a full-time blogger. Find out what steps he is taking to make the transition.

HarpzOn - Predicting PageRank For New Blogs - Mitch came across a neat tool that predicts what your Google PageRank will be on their next update. Mitch just launched his blog in March and is already predicted to be a PR4, exciting stuff!

Buying something on the internet with a credit card? Don't get stuck with high interest rates! Use new Visa cards to keep your rate low and look at all of the low interest credit cards when choosing a credit card. The best credit card services are the ones that reward you for using them.'

Instead of checking your basic stats like Alexa, Technorati, backlinks, etc by going to each source individually, you can save time with popuri.us. You simply enter your URL, and the tool will list:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• Complete Rank
• Google, Yahoo, and Live backlinks
• Technorati Links
• Bloglines Subscribers

It’s a nice, easy to use interface, that shows all your stats in one place. If they continue to add more dynamic stats, it will get even better. I did notice that for some sites it doesn’t give you all of the stats, for example my blog didn’t show Technorati links (kept trying to load).

For anybody interested, it looks like the site is for sale.

Just a note to all of you folks running Wordpress.  There is a new update that mainly is a security patch.  The Wordpress people are being a lot more careful about the download files so there is no security issues as there was in the past.

Introduction

I officially launched this blog on March 9th, which gave it 22 days to show some results for the month. Overall it did fairly well for the amount of time I have to spend on it. This blog is not my very top priority as I have other businesses that I run, which do require a lot of my time. I’ll take you through the various parts of the blog to show how they did. You can learn from some of the things that I did, and compare to see how the results actually looked. We’ll start off with traffic:

Traffic

March generated 6,323 unique visitors, 10,1272 pageviews, averaging 1.61 pageviews per visitor.

One of the most important statistics you can look at is your new visitor vs. returning visitor report. This will show you if you are able to retain your readers or not. The only thing you need to make sure to account for is spikes in traffic on days where something may have been linked on a bunch of other sites. More than likely most of that traffic is new, and will bring down the monthly average. A good thing to do is look at a few days where your traffic is pretty stable. Your returning visitor rate should be more accurate in terms of average traffic flow.

Monetization

My purpose of this blog is not to subsidize any sort of income really, but anything extra is always nice. At this time, I’m more worried about generating traffic then actually making money. With traffic comes money, so worry about the first before worrying about the latter. During March I was running just Google AdSense. I did a few things to better optimize the ads, and still plan on doing some more obvious things in the near future. March brought in $5.28 on 15,360 impressions for just a $0.34 eCPM. There is much room for improvement on this, so it will be interesting to watch and see as this hopefully grows.

I have also added Kontera in-text links for April, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing how that does at the end of the month.

RSS Subscribers

My RSS subscriber count is averaging close to 50 by the end of the month. That’s not bad considering it was 0 less than a month ago. A huge help was the site of the month article John Chow had written about. Since many of his readers have similar interests, they seemed to show a liking over here as well. My goal for April is to have my RSS subscribers averaging over 100 by the end of the month.

The one trend that is noticeable, and will continue to be noticeable, is the drop in subscribers on Saturday and Sunday’s. I purposely try not to post content on these days, so there will obviously be a drop in traffic and subscriptions.

Search Engine Goodness

I was seeing search engine results very early on in this blog, so it’s interesting to see what people are searching for to get here. This can also drastically help with the direction that you can write your content to maximize the amount of traffic that comes in. Search engine traffic is very valuable because it’s targeted traffic. Readers searched for something specifically, and the hope is that they came to your site looking for just that. I had 176 visits from organic search engines (Google, MSN, search, and AOL). The top 10 keywords that were searched to get to my blog in March are as follows:

1. 2008 infiniti g37 coupe
2. 2008 g37 coupe
3. www.nevblog.com
4. david pitlyuk
5. 2008 infiniti g37
6. infiniti g37
7. powercast ipo
8. mercedes mansions
9. heli expo
10. www.davidpitlyuk.com

We can obviously see here that the keyword which brought the most traffic was in regards to my post about the new 2008 Infiniti G37 Coupe. I wrote this post early on when the car was just released and before many other sites had written about it. This gave me an advantage in the Google SERP, and put me on the top of results for some time before some of the bigger sites were able to get their content in. Just doing a preliminary look at April stats, I can see that not as much traffic is coming in from the same article, but I’m seeing a ton of traffic coming from my post on the next multi-BILLION dollar idea. In that post I talked about a company called Powercast, and how I would love to invest in them. While many other articles have been written about Powercast, not many have written about investing in it. This gave me a powerful advantage in search results, as it is a company which many people are seeing the potential for making some money on. In fact the top 5 keyword referrals in April so far all have to do with investing in Powercast. Just some food for thought.

Popular Pages/Content

It’s important to look at the most popular pages, as it can give you a few clues to make your blog better. It can tell you what articles people are most interested in reading and what articles are getting the most linkbacks. This way when you sit down and think about what you should write about, you should have a general direction to lead you in. This can also help you create a niche for your site if you do not already have one. Here’s a list of the top 10 most popular pages on this site for March:

1. Lamborghini As A Piece Of Art
2. Dodge Viper Coupe With Matching Helicopter
3. An Ugly Lamborghini?
4. The 45 Best Technology Sector Corporate Web Designs: A-G
5. David Pitlyuk (Homepage)
6. Mansion Hunting In Northern Virginia
7. How I Got Over 2,000 Visitors In The First Week With $0
8. The Next Multi-BILLION Dollar Idea
9. Who Is David Pitlyuk?
10. Cars (Category)

The top 3 posts were fairly popular on a few of the automotive forums that I am a part of, and therefore generated a good amount of traffic. Take a look at the top referrals analysis below to get more of an idea where my traffic came from.

I had 38 posts in the Month of March averaging 1.7 posts per day. According to my article on the number of optimal posts per day, I’m right in line! Keep in mind that I try not to post content on the weekends as I believe that’s time to try and do some relaxing.

Top Referrals

1. StumbleUpon
2. My350Z
3. Autoblog
4. G35Drive
5. JohnChow
6. Maxima.org
7. NissanClub
8. ViperClub
9. Digg
10. Google Reader

StumbleUpon brought 1,067 visitors that averaged 1.91 pages per visit. The majority of the traffic came from two articles that were “stumbled”. I didn’t learn about StumbleUpon until this month, but it’s a great concept…look for a post specifically about this in the near future. My350Z, G35Drive, Maxima.org, NissanClub, and ViperClub are all forum communities that I’m a part of. You can read more about generating traffic from forums in my post How I got over 2,000 visitors in the first week with $0.

If you don’t already know, in-text advertising are those links that display an ad when you hover over them with your mouse. I’m not a huge fan of this type of advertising, but I’d like to see how they perform on my blog. You will notice that my real links are blue, and sponsored links are green with a double underline.

Kontera used to only accept publishers that generated at least 500,000 pageviews a month. This blog is new, and not doing anywhere near that, but Kontera decided to let smaller sites into their network. Their main concern is accepting sites with quality content, which mine passed their test.

John Chow has Kontera implemented on his site and generated over $300 in 12 days. Keep in mind his blog generated 313,000 pageviews in the same month. I’ll recap how it does on here for the April review in early May. Stay tuned.

If you have been running Kontera, or even IntelliTXT, how has it worked out?

I was reading a post over at ProBlogger in regards to the debate between disabling comments or not on low traffic blogs. Should sites with low traffic disable their comments? There are two main arguments for each side.

Enable

You don’t want to promote the fact that your blog has low traffic. People will see “0 comments” on a lot of posts and think just this. This negative affect could keep people from coming back or from posting comments at all. It’s a known fact that discussion will likely cause more discussion.

Disable

If you disable comments you are obviously losing the ability for users to interact with you and readers through the site, plus you are losing valuable content. The main goal is to turn somebody who is just reading a post on your site into a dedicated reader, and comments definitely help do that.

I believe that there are two options to choose from in terms of the best thing to do:

1) You can turn your comments off completely until you are at the point where you are generating 100-200 unique visitors/day. By the time you are consistently generating this amount of traffic, it should be enough that people will naturally make comments in key posts.

2) This option ties into option 1, as you should do this as well. Rather than your comments link saying something like “0 comments” or “No comments”, change it to “Post a comment” when there are no comments. This method doesn’t advertise the fact that nobody has commented on your post. Another option (the route I chose) is to choose something like “Be the first to comment” which does advertise that you have no comments, but also entices your readers to be the first to add their thoughts.

How Do I Change The Text?

This method works for Wordpress.  Simply go to your theme editor, and edit your main index template.  Depending on the theme that you are using, there may be some variations…so feel free to post comments with questions, and I can help you out.  Search for the word comments, and you should be able to find the line of code that displays the output.  I changed mine to this:

<?php comments_popup_link(’Be the first to comment &#187;‘, ‘1 Comment &#187;’, ‘% Comments &#187;’); ?>

The first line there between the ‘   ‘ is what Wordpress will output when there are 0 comments.  Simply editing that text can make a powerful change on your blog.

Update: Part 2 has been posted where I look at companies that start with H-O. Part 3 has also been posted where I look at companies that start with P-Z. I have also compiled a best of the best list.

I spent the time to look through 414 websites of publicly traded companies in the technology sector starting with the letters A-G, and chose the 45 best designs. This is part 1 of 5, covering each range of letters, and then I plan on having the best of all designs to come up with a final list of best corporate designs in the tech sector. These companies obviously all have money and a budget to make a killer site, lets see what can be done. More site after the jump:

3COM

Activision

Actuate

Adobe

Akamai

Aladdin

Alcatel-Lucent

Apple

Applied Innovation Inc.

(more…)

There are some very interesting rumors going around in the ad serving technology market today. DoubleClick, which is the ad server for huge sites such as Yahoo! and AOL, may be bought out by Microsoft…or even Google.

The company was purchased by a private-equity firm for $1.2 billion, but it looks like they are interesting in selling the company, or even creating an IPO for an estimated $2.0 billion. Microsoft is said to be one of the top choices for picking up DoubleClick. What would this mean for competing publishers such as Yahoo! and AOL?

The most interesting part of the news is that there are rumors of Google developing its own ad server that would compete with the likes of DoubleClick’s system. The ad server system would be nothing like AdWords, but it would allow publishers to traffic any kind of ads, regardless of it being from Google or not. The questions to ask is:

• Will it cost money?
• If it’s free, how will Google monetize on it?
  • My guess is that publishers would be required to run at least a certain percentage of Google ad inventory
• Who will the customers be?
  • Is it mean for any site that needs an ad server? Or will it be for corporate companies such as AOL and Yahoo!? Or will it meet both markets?

Whatever happens, the next few months will definitely be interesting in the ad serving world.