Im making a steady profit on one of my blogs and i want to invest some of the blog to hopefully make it more popular to get more traffic and revenue. What would you guys spend $40-50 per month on?
I would give http://buysellads.com/ a shot. You can get a load of ads for $50; such as, $2 campaigns on 25 websites. If you could use some one-way backlinks I would recommend http://www.automaticbacklinks.com/ as you can get 25 one-way PR2 backlinks, or 16 one-way PR3 backlinks, or 12 one-way PR4 backlinks for $50 a month. Or you could do a little of both... through there's nothing like trying one campaign at a time to see what works best for your website.
My first investment would be analysis. Figure out where you are making money, how you can make more money in those areas and how you can make more money in other areas. There's no point spending money unless you have a targeted strategy and know what you need to do to improve your site.
If You Have Some Budget to spend on your blog, these are the things You Should Do : 1. Get a Light Speed Server and make sure you wont face any Downtime, or Server issues so you blog will be 24*7*365 UP. 2. Get Some Writers incase if you cant manage it up all alone. 3. Try some backlinking services. 5.Swear that you will never Do Copy Pasting!! Thats it.. Do Nothing Else..!! ~ExP~
1 - not needed , my server issues are fine 2 - not needed , the blog is a music blog, i just post music, i dont need writers as there is nothing to write 3 - I will try this, i need to improve my SERP as some other blog beat me on most of my popular keywords 4 - ? can you count ? 5 - copy and pasting is exactly what i do, as i said i just post music on the blog So out of your tips, only 1 is useful, surely there is more i can do. Can anyone recommend any decent link building services?
Well analysis can be done for free if you know what you are doing. Google has some great free tools you can use for this: Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/ - This tracks your site visitors Google Website optimizer: www.google.com/websiteoptimizer - This lets you perform testing on pages to see which performs better. Webmaster Tools: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ - This lets you track backlinks, add sitemaps, diagnose crawl errors and more. Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - This helps with keyword research. Make sure you use exact match to check keyword searches. Broad match is (as it says) broad and is not useful for finding good keywords. The first thing is using some sort of web analytics to track your visitors. Google analytics is free and easy to setup. Once you have some substantial visitor data then you can start to figure out who your users are, where they are clicking on your pages (hence how you are making money) and then you can that data along with use the other tools to make some informed decisions on how to improve your site (ie, where to spend your 40-50$ per month). In terms of backlink building you can easily hire people to do this. Try odesk, freelancer or other freelance sites. Make sure you find someone who speaks good English and track their performance. Ensure you get good reports and check a sample of the backlinks they create. IMHO its better to pay a little more for a quality backlink builder than pay a pittance and get half of your backlinks deleted/rejected.
Thanks for the very useful tips and actual links to things i can read up on, i hate it when people just post things like 'do analysis' .... not very helpful i have quite a lot of data, the blog has been up for nearly 2 years now and i have AWStats data for each month, is this sufficient enough? I am verified on oDesk so i may give it a go, im just a bit worried whether they will do a good job and whether the links will stick I guess to track their performance i just need to visit the sites which are backlinking me and determine the quality myself right?
Invest the money in getting backlinks for your site. it will give your site more authority and thus more traffic/ profits. Your link building campaigns should look natural and a mix of various sources. Like dont buy only sidebar links or dont try to make only forum links. Keep a mix of article links, forums, blog comments, in-content links from other sites, sidebar links, profile links, social network links, etc. etc.
No problem... I really don't know anything about AWStats. I have never used it as Google analytics (GA) has always been sufficient for me. I would suggest you give GA a go. If you make money from adsense, you can link the accounts to track clicks and you can also link adwords if you do ppc campaign. But i assume that AWstats gives you data on your webpages and visitor demographics. Does it give you navigation pathways or click patterns? You can use this to try and figure out where your visitors are coming from, what your most popular content is etc. If AWStats doesn't do this, install GA. It's free and very powerful. This helps you generally figure out the sort of content your visitors like and the stuff they don't. Once you've done some demographic and navigation analysis, try Then try website optimizer to run an a/b test or multi variate. This tests 2 pages against each other, or various elements on a page. This helps you figure out where you can increase revenue through better design of placement. This is how to do it: http://www.google.com/support/websiteoptimizer/bin/answer.py?answer=61149 Yes, to track performance you need to check a sample of the posts your linkbuilder makes. If they are spam, grill them for it or fire them. You will often get spammers who write posts like "this article give me much to learn. thanks!" and other rubbish like that (in fact there are a few of those sort of posts in this thread ) so take your time to find someone good. There are many good ones around so you might have to try a few people to find the one that suits you.
Maybe diversify a bit, i.e. spend some of the cash on getting some articles written, some backlink building, some paid ads.. Then you can optimize as you see the conversion rates on the different channels.