Some Knowledge

One way to generate traffic to your website is just to have lots of interesting, original content.  This is known as a method of passive traffic generation.  You are relying on the search engines to find your site and send people who are interested in what you post to you.  This is a fairly good method of generating traffic, and it only costs you the time and energy that it takes to generate content.

A completely useless way to get a lot of traffic is to run a bot.  Sure, you can have a program surf your site repeatedly, but what does this accomplish but to eat up bandwidth?  The robot is not going to read your articles.  The robot is not going to look at your funny pictures.  The bot is just going to download whatever you have and either save it or forget it.  Your traffic can be increased this way, but this is not actual people going to your site and perusing your offerings.

One way to get more traffic is to buy advertising.  You are essentially paying to promote your work to an audience that might not otherwise know about your site.  You can use Google Adwords or another outfit who will place your advertising link on the search results page of their home page or on third party websites that already get a lot of traffic.  The downside of this method is that it will cost you money.

You could always print out fliers and post them on bulletin boards around your neighborhood.  Stores often have free bulletin boards.  Schools and universities are full of the things.  There might be kiosks in your town where people post announcements for concerts or try to sell their items.  Good old paper and ink can get you a few visitors to your site.

The big time in any promotion is of course the news media.  If you can think of a reason your website is worthy of a news story, then go on and issue a press release to the editors of your local news.  You might try to get your site on TV if it is novel and interesting enough.  Maybe you are running some sort of a contest to attract attention.  If you have money to burn you can hire a PR firm to promote your site.

One way to generate links to your site is to leave comments on forums, blogs, and various reply sites you might find anywhere on the net.  This does not cost money, but it takes time to fill in forms and write a decent comment.  Chances are few people will check out your website this way, but the link will be there and will be available to whomever wants to follow it.

You can of course submit your site to search engines and directories.  Some of these places charge money for consideration.  As far as directories go, you should be able to categorize your site into one of the headings on their list.  If you have a site that is not targeted to some common specific category you will probably not end up in many directories.

Perhaps the best way to get a lot of web traffic is just to have a lot of information.  Popular sites like Wikipedia have millions of words of information on many different subjects.  The volume of information causes the search engine to rank these sites highly.  There are also many cross links in the Wiki that generates a high authority for the pages that are hosted there.  It takes time and effort to have a large site, and you will probably need to get material from outside sources if you hope to generate much traffic this way.

One method of generating web traffic that is not used a lot is to become famous for something.  You can record an album and get famous for your music.  You can make friends with a celebrity.  You might run for office on a major party ticket.  Even if you do something stupid like sell yourself to a politician you can still get some sort of fame that will cause people to seek out your website.  Be sure to have some kind of identifying information on your site that allows people to find it based on your name, or the name you are using when you become famous.

There are plenty of places that will attempt to sell you web traffic for your site.  They all have some gimick like redirects from popular sites or advertising or something that gets them people.  What you have to remember is that you’re trying to get a person’s attention and trying to give them something that is valuable to them.  People look for things that they think will be beneficial, not things that are a waste of time.

If you have a good website with a lot of interesting content you are bound to get some traffic.  If you have a boring site with nothing interesting and a lot of just wrong information, there is really nothing you can do to promote your site, because once people get there they will click away fast because there is nothing for them.  Concentrate on building something useful, and the search engines and people will find you.

I am noticing a downward spiral in my blog traffic.  It’s been a couple days since I wrote any posts.  Apparently, people find your writing based on when it was published.  I am still getting hits on a few older posts that I wrote about games, but aside from this, my overall traffic is down 80% from a week ago.

It might just be the vagaries of the web, but it seems like when I put up a lot of articles I get more people looking at my blog.  I guess this makes sense in that WordPress has a directory of recent posts that you can look through to find interesting stuff.  Less publicity, fewer people finding my blog.

I guess if I want a lot of traffic I should post something that a lot of people are interested in.  I don’t really care so much about what is popular.  I’m not the society page.  I’ve done experiments on stuff that has some popularity on the web, but none of this drew a lot of traffic to this site.  I’m going to stop caring so much about traffic.  I’m not selling anything here.  I have no advertisements up that make me money when random people click on them.

It does seem that when you post a lot of material more people find your site.  It’s just a question of looking at the numbers.  Even at the best this blog has done I got less than one view per page of content per day.  Some of my posts have not even been read once.  I care because?

If it’s just a question of numbers, I could start adding articles from other sources.  But then this will not be my own words anymore.  I’m thinking that’s not the best idea.  I want to have copyright to whatever I write.  Posting stuff on a blog is maybe not the best way to maintain rights to your material.  I’ve seen my stuff scraped and listed under fictional writers names on splogs and link sites.  So for now I’m just going to be a bit random and type whatever I happen to think about.  There may be no market for what I write, but if it’s up on the directory boards somebody will possibly look at it.

When you think about it, most writing is in some way about life.  Even if you are writing about rocks and stones, it is your own living observations that you are making about these inanimate objects.  Life has many facets and many angles and there is no limit to the different material you can use in any written piece.

Just about anything you do in your life can be the subject for writing.  Getting up in the morning, walking your dog, taking care of your family.  You don’t need anything earth-shattering to have a good piece of writing.  How you handle your material makes all the difference.  If you can draw people into your experience and make them see the world through your eyes, you have done your job as a writer.

When you are describing some event from life, you will want to include as many concrete details as you can without bogging down your story.  The color of flowers, the details of the river, the clothes people wear.  Work these details in to your narrative and you will have a more impressive work.

When writing about life it is impossible to separate the thoughts and feelings of the narrator from the world described in the work.  State your feelings clearly and be succinct.  Include reasons for your reactions such as past experience.  If you need to digress, lead into your alternate story smoothly.

Any event in your life can be worked up into a story.  Try not to embarrass or slander people in your work.  If you have to, change names.  We all experience little stories and dramas each day throughout our lives.  With a little time and effort we can mine this experience for material to write about.  If you work in fiction, you do not have to follow events as they actually happened.  Your story does have to make sense.  Pay attention to detail and anything you write will be worth reading.

The Internet is a vast sea of raw data to some people.  Data mining is the process of using a computer to sift through a lot of material and find what a person is looking for.  A screen scraper is a web application that collects data off the Internet for use by another person.  Both the process of data mining and the tools like bots and screen scrapers are being used more and more as the quantity of information online increases.

How does this affect anyone with a blog?  The answer is that your public posts can be seen as a source of raw data for persons looking to promote their own websites and businesses.  Something you write might be seen as good publicity for some product.  Your popular blog posts might be reposted on another site to attract traffic to another person’s operation.  Your email address might be lifted off a website and sold to spammers.  If you were to post personal information this could be used to spoof your identity to apply for fraudulent credit cards or other services.

The FBI and the CIA have been using data mining techniques for years to track criminals.  The identities of the 9-11 hijackers was supposedly found with data mining.  Any database that is accessible can be a source for information on people that may be of use to some organization.  Computers are very quick and precise at sorting out information.

With the wide open nature of the Internet, anyone can use commonly available software to find out just about anything they need to know.  If you have ever used a search engine you have mined data.  It is just not possible for a human being to sort through such a huge amount of information.  If there is anything to be concerned about in your own interaction with the net, it is probably to keep information you do not want publicized private.  If you post something somewhere there is probably an application that can find it faster than you can remember where you put it.  Collecting data on purchasing habits and web usage is big business.

Since I started this particular blog I have seen more of my writing exerpted and posted to other websites than I have ever seen before.   WordPress is being mined for content.  I’m sure there are companies out there that do nothing but steal text from the net to post on their own sites.  Finding these links is as simple as scrolling through your spam comments.  I guess if what you say is important enough to steal you might be happy.  You might as easily be annoyed at people posting duplicate content and bogus authorship to your work.  As long as there is open access to your writing this will be a problem.

I’ve been writing up blog entries for years.  This is the first blog I’ve ever had that people have been reading.  I’ve also noticed a lot of robots reading this blog.  I can tell they are robots, because they leave spam comments.  I have ten times as many spam comments as real ones.  Maybe this is not a bad ratio.  Still, it interests me that I am seeing links to my articles appearing on various sites that have my work listed with a fictitious author name.  The last one was really comical.  It had obviously been through a bad translation.  I know how robots write.

I’m pretty certain the robots will pick up on this article too.  Copyright infringement was originally called piracy.  I can see if somebody wants to leave a link to something I wrote that was interesting to them.  That’s totally cool.  Still, having somebody else’s name put on something I write is a bit disturbing.  Even if it is spambots doing the theft, some person is behind this.

It may take me a while to look into this phenomena.  I’m sure there must be some information somewhere about bot piracy.  I just read about a games anti-piracy bot in the UK Register.  Information from the search engines tells me this is a spam problem, but doesn’t give me any information on copyright violation.  I checked out the one really wonky comment that got caught, and the website it was submitted from had already been closed down by the host.

I’m wondering now if the authority that this blog seems to have on Technorati is just an artifact from all the spam links that have been posted on my various articles.  It’s nice to have readers, but I wonder how many of the page views I get come from actual humans.  Maybe I should write articles for spam robots.  I could maybe hook up something interactive like a chat bot application in the html of an entry so the bots can talk to each other.  I am almost considering setting my spider loose on some of these spam URLs and see if it finds out who the heck these people are.  The spider seems to be good at finding emails.

It has been said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  I would say that imitation is the sincerest form of laziness.  If these sites are going to troll blogs and gank content out of other people’s writing, why don’t they just write a bot that will compose decent text on its own?  Are people too dumb to write a writer bot?  It’s just persons looking to steal traffic for their own sites.  They even copied text off my blog entry yesterday about blog spam.  I thought this was a bit hilarious.  I know it will only take the spambots a couple minutes to find this post.  I just wonder who they will say wrote this.

Are you an angry journalist?  There’s a website where you can post what it is that’s got you ticked.  Apparently there are a lot of angry writers in the world.  This site already had 2927 complaints.

It’s mildly interesting to read other people’s complaints about the news industry.  Mostly they are just complaining about things that affect their jobs or their business, like the Internet.  It’s pretty funny reading some of the stuff posted here.  This seems to be a popular site.  I guess if you haven’t got any news to report you may as well post your complaints to a forum.

So, you have a blog and some people are reading it.  You decide you want to find some way to make money off your writing efforts.  What do you do?

Basically, the way to monetize a blog is to sell advertising.  Any search engine can lead you to thousands of programs that sell advertising on blogs and websites.  Google Adsense is perhaps the most famous of these advertising operations.  What you have to do is to get accepted for the program you want to run.  Then you need to put a bit of html code on your page that will display the advertisements.  Television has advertisements.  Radio has advertisements.  Newspapers and magazines all make money from advertising.  So why not your blog?

In the first place, to make money from advertising, you will need a lot of viewers.  The payout for an ad is small on a per customer basis.  You make money on volume.  It is called mass media for a reason, massive numbers of people consume it.  If you have ten or twenty or a hundred viewers a day for your site, you will not make a lot of money from advertising.  You will need thousands of people to not only look at your site, but who will click on ads.  It’s a numbers game, and bigger numbers mean bigger rewards.

Well, maybe you don’t want to pollute your blog with all kinds of advertisements that have nothing to do with what you are trying to say.  Another way you can make money is to put a donation button on your blog.  Maybe you have some medical condition that needs attention and you want to appeal to the kindness of strangers to help with your problems.  Maybe you just want to ask people for money.  If you do that in the street, you might get arrested.  But this is the Internet, and cyber-panhandling is a recognized way to get money from your website.  Politicians raise money from donations all the time.  Churches all rely on contributions to fund their operations.  There’s no reason a person can’t ask another person for some of their cash.  Some people have even used cyber-begging to pay off their overdrawn credit cards.  Who’s to say what will or will not work in generating an income.

Well, maybe you are too proud to beg.  Maybe you want to sell actual products.  Maybe an affiliate marketing business is what you are looking to set up.  Sales works the same way the world over.  Businesses will pay a commission on  a sale you make on your blog.  You direct people to the site where an object or service is being peddled and they cut you in for a piece of the action.  It’s as simple as posting a link with your referral ID.  You can really help people out who are looking for that perfect gift.  Your reader might not even know that they need that new lamp if they hadn’t seen it on your blog.

Alright, you don’t want to sell advertisements, you don’t want to beg, you don’t want to sell other people’s products.  Maybe you want to sell your own product.  Maybe you want to sell your paintings.  Maybe you want to sell custom tea cozy’s that you make in your spare time.  Take a picture and post it on your blog and start taking bids on your products.  Set up your own factory to make paper picture frames.  Sell all the old books you inherited from your Aunt Alice.  You will have to add shipping charges to the price of your items.  You may have to fill out customs forms to ship your stuff overseas.  You will be selling actual things you obtain for a low price for a higher price and will be making a profit.  Be sure to keep accurate records.

If you don’t want to sell something, you will not be able to make money on your blog.  You might sell the very words you type into your blog.  You might hook up with Pay Per Post and sell reviews of different products.  If you want money you will have to sell something, even if it is just your time.  Monetizing a blog is not something that is hard to understand.  All you need is a product and a customer to pay you for that product.  There are even software widgets you can get that will help you salt down your blog with all kinds of advertisements.  If you want to turn your blog into a job there are plenty of opportunities available.  All it takes is a little time and effort and you too can become a wealthy capitalist.

I just read some interesting articles on blog spam on the web.  Wikipedia has a good overview of this practice.  I have been noticing a lot of links being generated to my articles here and wondered what was going on.  At first I thought people were stealing my content.  This is apparently not far from the truth.  Certain unscrupulous websites, who seem to sell prescription drugs, have been flooding Akismet with all kinds of oddball comments.  These sites use blog comments to increase the page rank of the sites they run by leaving links on random blogs across the net.  Apparently, lots of robots have been reading my posts.

And all this time I thought I was writing for humans.  Silly me.  It’s just the bots trying to promote their sites.  This is pretty funny.  I have a few comments that made it through the filters.  A few people who seem to be humans have managed to find this site.  Still, I wonder why I don’t get this kind of robot traffic on my other blogs.  Maybe WordPress is just a more popular site with the spam bots.

One of these days I’m going to Google spambot and see if I can find a place to download my own.  I already have a cool spider that can hook graphics and other stuff off the web.  Here’s an interesting site about how to annoy spambots.   Apparently that site is about the more common email spambot.  Has an interesting article on how to write a random email address generator to flood a spambot with bogus addresses.  Akismet seems to work really well at keeping this crap out of my blog.  I was almost deceived by some of the supposed comments these robots leave.  After I read a post about some of the tricks spammers use I was glad I hadn’t de-spammed any of these comments.

I wonder if the drug companies who manufacture the products that so much of this spam advertises are behind the spambots.  I wouldn’t put it past a multi-billion dollar industry to use such nefarious means to sell their stuff.  This must be big business.  I noticed a lot of the blog spam is coming from .ru website addresses.  Maybe it’s the eastern block that is behind the evil spambots.

A quick search for “spambot download” returns lots of hits for anti-spambot products, but nothing for downloading an actual spambot.  Perhaps there is a purpose in releasing spambots on the net, which is to sell anti-spambot software.  I have to wonder sometimes about the virus and spybot scanners as well.  I know there are some spyware scanners that are actually spyware, like spysherrif and psguard.  It’s a jungle out there, and the monkeys are not the only creatures reading your blog.

I’ve just been reading some really convoluted web pages about keyword use in content and meta tags.  If search engine optimization is really so complicated how does anything ever get found?  It seems to me that any keywords you use on a page would be obvious.  It has to do with the subject of your page.

If you have a web page that sells dolls, “doll” would be the obvious keyword.  “Toy” and maybe “dollhouse” would also fit the category.  There is no point paying somebody to optimize your site with irrelevant keywords because you are just trying to sell your dolls, not cars, not airplanes, not movie tickets, just dolls.  Apparently multiple uses of the keyword on the page can cause people to be repulsed by your content.  Nobody wants to read something that is so repetitious that it is ridiculous.  Even search engines don’t like this kind of content.  I can recall visiting sites that were nothing but a long list of irrelevant keywords.  This kind of blackhat SEO will get you nowhere these days.   Search engines have gotten too smart.

So, how does a person go about optimizing a site for keyword content?  Might I suggest that you have a clear subject and state your purpose in clear and concise prose?   This might seem the obvious way to go about getting page views for your site or listings on the search engines.  For instance, the keyword for this page is going to be “keyword,” but it would be pointless to keep saying the same thing over and over again.  Still, there is the word “doll” all over this page, but this page has nothing at all to do with dolls.  A keyword analyzer would still see “doll” as a keyword for this page, unless it had enough AI to realize that this page was about keywords and not dolls.

It might be important for your rankings to get the proper keywords into your page header.  Still, this is something that should be obvious.  What is your page about?  That is your main keyword.  Does a good title affect how many people will view your page?  Sure.  Does having content that suits the title affect how long people stay on your page?  Yes.  Should you pay somebody to do the obvious and include common relevant keywords in your page?  Why would you?  This is something you should be doing yourself or your page designer should be doing when they make the page.  Just use common sense and make your content as useful and salient as possible and the keywords will automatically be optimized for your page.

A quick search of Google returned over 17 million hits on the terms “content creation.”  There are many companies starting up or that have been in business for a while that provide content creation services for websites.

One of these businesses, SEO Content Creation and Linkbait Services sells content for between $35 and $250 a page.   You can either specify topics for this place to generate copy on or leave them to create pages on their own.  The buyer gets copyright to whatever material they contract for.  Apparently, writers are being organized to sell material to online services.

Of course it was only a matter of time before writers started to cash in on the Internet.  There is so much material available online that nobody would have the time to read or catalog it all.  That’s why there are search engines.  Still, it’s interesting to realize that the pages you post to your blog could be sold as copy for a decent price.  If you are interested in writing material for a targeted market you can always go to Helium Marketplace and attempt to sell your work.   Then again, there is always the possibility of starting your own content creation business.  You would probably need to recruit writers, who could be found by trolling through the various blogging communities online.

With all the websites online it is not surprising that copywriting has gone digital.  You can even take online courses to learn the tricks and skills of copywriting.   If you are writing articles and content for your blog now there is the potential to get paid for the writing you are doing.  Of course there are also Pay Per Post operations that will pay you a fee to write reviews and advertisements for products on your blog.

The world is becoming swamped with the quantity of material that is available on the Internet.  You can now buy content for your websites right online.  Writing is an occupation that fits in well with the kind of instant communication that has made the net possible.  In future, I think more opportunities will become available for people who like to write.