Learn more about your Visitors with Google Analytics

You may remember a couple of months ago we took a look at Google Analytics and went through an overview of what it can do, as well as how to get it set up. For a refresher course on this please visit the original post here..Using Google Analytics to track and Analyze your Blogsite .

Once you have been tracking your site for a couple of months a range of very useful data is accumulated with all manner of information about your visitors, referrals, search terms etc. One section that I find very useful is the web design parameters section where by looking at a number of different areas of your visitors specs and hardware of their PC's you can make informed decisions about the design of your site.

Screen Resolution - Alot of sites these days are still optimized for 800 x 600 screen resolution (like this one!) however according to my statistics over the last couple of months you will see that the majority of this sites visitors have a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 and that not even 10 percent of the visitors to this site have the screen resolution that it is designed primarily for!

JavaScript - Many sites make the assumption that JavaScript is functional on the clients browser but how often is it not? Well according to my statistics 98.62% of my visitors are Java Enabled and this would tend to be an accurate assumption.

This is of course powerful information that allows you to confidently make informed and important decisions without the fear of uncertainty.

Over the next couple of days we will be preparing our post showing the growth of the exponential experiment that began at the beginning of October 2006. 5 Months have gone by (this counts all our online earnings not just from our million dollar experiment down under) and we will be doing a full report on the progress to date. Until then - take it easy.

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Add a Job Board to your site - plus we stumble upon NZ's No1 Blogger!

I have always wondered who is NZ's number 1 Blogger and I think that I have found him. His name is Richard MacManus and he has the popular site Read/WriteWeb. I came across this site surprisingly offline, after reading an article about him in the NZ Herald.

This is an excerpt from Richards site.

Read/WriteWeb was founded and is edited by Richard MacManus, from Wellington New Zealand. Richard spends most of his time working on Read/WriteWeb these days, but previously he did research, analysis and product development work for companies in Silicon Valley and beyond. Prior to that he worked for some of New Zealand's top organizations as a Web Manager.

Now it appears that he ditched his job in August 2005 and went hard out to make a full time career of it. He earns his income now from advertising on his very popular Blog. (Ranked 67 on Technorati when I checked it this am.)

Anyway while I was on his site having a look I noticed that he had a Job Board Widget set up, where people could post job vacancies onto his site. Knowing that there had to be a financial incentive behind this it raised my antenna, particularly because of my JobHunters websites which currently advertise people looking for work rather than vacancies.

Looking into this further I found a great setup, the site is called JobThread and basically you set a price on how much someone needs to pay to place a job vacancy on your job site (created on their domain or yours) which then displays on a nifty little widget which you can place on your site.

As I am always looking at ways to further monetize my JobHunters sites, I have placed the widget on the NZ JobHunters site and the Euro JobHunters site - you also have the opportunity to display job adverts from the general area and earn money from this.

I have mine set at $5 USD for a vacancy for 30 days, or you can pay $7 USD and get a feature advert! The revenue is split 50/50 with jobthread which is quite fair considering they are doing all the work.

There is also a referral scheme where if you refer someone to join one of their paid plans you will recieve $50. Now I am not sure if a job board would suit this Blog, however if you have a Blog about a Niche Topic, it would certainly be something worth looking at and a great way to further monetize your site.

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Ban Shoemoney - Ban us all

Have you heard the latest that Shoemoney has been banned from MyBlogLog for exposing some of the lame security that they had going?

Apparently according to comments on this article they banned him for posting user data online. Well I think that instead of banning one of the true Gurus of Blogging in the World today they should have probably taken the facts that data was so easy to get onboard and sorted out the many issues that they needed to work through.

I think its a bit like starting a Church and then banning the Pope because he managed to sneak in the side door!

Anyway in support of Shoemoney who I respect alot more than MyBlogLog, I have removed MyBlogLog code from this site, will no longer visit it and suggest you to do the same. Please let me know via a comment whether you think this is a good idea or if MyBlogLog are doing the right thing by banning the best blogger they had.

I look forward to hearing what you your thoughts are..

UPDATE 03/03/2007: You may have heard that Shoemoneys ban got lifted, and everyone is playing happy families again. I have replaced the widget on my site because damn, I couldn't see who had come a visiting any more!

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Ads that make you go Whaaatt???

I was on one of my Blogs today - it is one where I normally have Google AdSense Link units underneath the header however today they looked like this.....





Have you ever seen this before and why on earth would anyone want to??? Is this some kind of new AdSense search box? What the heck is up with that piddly little button?


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Credit and Personal Loans

If you have had ever had bad credit in your life then you will know how hard it is to get back on track and gain confidence in borrowing again.

CreditLoan.com offer services like the "Credit Repair Services" this is where you have had a bad experience in the past, however by getting a bad credit personal loan you can set about repairing the damage that has been done in the past.

There is hardly any person who has not once fallen into the clutches of bad credit. In America, a huge number of people are experiencing bad credit each year. Therefore, they are going for the bad credit personal loans and trying to give a proper shape to their damaged credit report.

Remember it is important that before you go for a bad credit personal loan, you really need to make sure that you would be able to comfortably cover the payment!

To summarize, Bad Credit Personal Loans are very useful for people who have bad credit. Remember though before you settle on a bad credit personal loan, you should search a reasonable amount to find out the proper lender and get the best deal. Once you get the loan, the rest will fall in place.

130 Day Summary of the Million Dollar Experiment Down Under

I can't believe that it is now 130 days since we embarked upon our mission. The mission being to simply intend one million dollars into our life, this of course being the record of the journey.

It has become some sort of an addiction now which I am not sure if this is a good or a bad thing, however its certainly taking up a lot of time!

I am still struggling finding something that earns from advertising on this site. Friendfinder has so far given me zero return, Amazon also zero return - I have removed them and will just stick with the only thing that has worked so far advertising wise - Google AdSense.

Its quite possible that I am not positioning them right, or not promoting them enough, however the facts are that this site is now getting a reasonable amount of traffic, and I need to see some results to justify any further effort on those money earning systems. Zero is not going to cut taking up that much space on the Blog!

Received a referral fee from Blogitive the other day of 5 dollars, thanks for whoever signed up and mentioned that I referred them!

Now the Summary - 130 Days (NZ Currency)
Beer tasting $30.00
Blogitive $117.65
Blogsvertise $22.06
GoogleAdsense $39.56
LoudLaunch $7.35
Money4Blogs $29.41
MYLOT $16.59
SportsGambling -$10.10
PayPerPost $33.10

Grand Total US$ 194.22 or NZ$ 285.62 Increase over the last summary (120 Day Summary) in NZ Dollars: $35.16

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Can't toss in the job yet!

The Z-list has morphed into a directory style list of Blogs called Z-list 2.0, along with descriptions! This is thanks to the Customers Rock! blog, Servant Of Chaos blog and the eSoup blog where it appears they took the time to visit every blog in the z-list and add comments about each one! Thanks heaps for the effort guys what a great idea.

The Z-list has been instrumental in giving this blog a rocket up the technorati ladder, we have cracked the top 25000, previously this blog was hanging around the 80,000 mark when the z-list first kicked into gear. Some people may say that this is an unfair ranking however we have tried to spend time visiting a lot of the blogs that have been kind enough to link through to us.

Tomorrow the 130 day summary will be released - due to a lack of recent results with some of the changes that were made advertising wise I have made the decision to remove the friendfinder adverts and amazon advertising from this particular Blog, as to put it bluntly they are performing very poorly.

I have calculated that if I happened to quit my job tomorrow, I should be able to earn an income of approximately 1100 NZ dollars a month online without to much problem. (this only works out at $22 US per day!). However unfortunately I need to earn at least 4 times this much to be able to survive and pay the bills!

At some stage later in the year I may try a one off week long "money making marathon" to see how much it is possible to earn in one week, with the income sources that are now available to me. That would be interesting however obviously very time consuming. A large part of this would have to be sponsored posts, and a lot of unsponsored posts would also need to be written to provide some real content.

It is obvious from the amount of issues raised on the previous post about Content scraping that this is becoming a major problem. One of the things that is concerning about this is that even if the scraper was reported to Google or any other entity that could help, how would they decide who the original publisher of the article or content was?

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Autoblogs - Getting a free ride, by using other Bloggers Content

I came across a comment on the Mike's Money Making Mission about a site that is republishing articles from blogs apparently without permission from the authors. A quick scan of the site shows a large number of articles seemingly scraped from Mikes Money Making Mission - so I thought that it was worth having a look into.

I don't want to give the guy a free link, so you will have to type this one if you want to have a look its.... make-easy dot com

The software used is software by Elliot Back - I don't think by looking at his site it was created with the idea of copying content from sites, basically it appears to publish from RSS feeds, so I guess this is how these sites are getting their content republished on a regular basis.

This could be a useful tool if say you had 3 or 4 blogs and wanted to collate all the material into one master blog - however has the potential to be abused if placed in the hands of an unethical autoblogger.

If someone said to you - hey do you mind me republishing all your articles and placing my adverts on them so that I can make some easy money with you doing all the work is that cool? - what would you say - my answer of course would be no, even though it creates links to your site, the fact is that someone else could be earning money from your hard work and they never asked.

This is different from quoting an excerpt or talking about a post that you liked and linking to it - I think so anyway.

What are your thoughts? How do you deal with this kind of issue?

If you found this site to be helpful or inspiring you are welcome to donate to Robs Experiment!

Google AdSense Link Units - hopefully adding to exponential growth!

After a suggestion from one of my fellow "like minded" bloggers LFC Fan I have decided to add some Google AdSense Link Units to this site, Link units are a bit different to the normal AdSense adverts in the way that they display a list of topics that are relevant to your page.

It is important that in staying in line with Googles TOS you only place one link unit per content page.

February is a short month, it was going to be hard to meet my required targets this month on passive income alone, hence the additional paid posts that you may have recently seen.

You may remember back in October we began our exponential growth experiment, the article was Exponential growth with your Website Profits and February is month 5 of this (Octobers online earnings were the beginning for us).

In this exponential growth experiment money from all of my online sources is being calculated and I am pleased to say that this month we are on target to more than double what was achieved in October. The majority of the income growth is also passive which is very pleasing and makes for very exciting times ahead.

I will post a full report of the figures of this at the end of February with a month by month breakdown of targets, achievements plus a look ahead at the next 5 months. Remember it is not to hard to increase your earnings by a mere 20% on what you did the previous month. Keep this up and you will soon be making very good money indeed. It actually creeps up on a you a bit and it is only when you look back that you see what great improvements have actually been made.

The attitude that I have about this is simply failure is not an option. I will do whatever it takes to make an extra 20 percent a month - if that means some months staying awake all night and writing sponsored posts to make up the difference then that is what has to be done. If it means creating more sites than what I already have then that's what I will do. I would prefer however to continue maximising the income from the sites that I already have - as time does become an issue. (especially with a young family, and a full time job!)

I am experimenting with Google AdWords on one of my sites at the moment and have found some interesting results happening with this - more details to come in a future post.

Comments on Comments

There seem to be a lot of ways that different Bloggers deal with the comments on their sites, some don’t have comments on at all, others are happy to let you leave a comment however don’t really participate in what can end up being quite an interesting conversation. Then there are the ones that provide active feedback for the comments left on their sites.

If your site is quite new, and you are not getting a lot of traffic to it, sometimes the best option is to leave comments turned off altogether, as that way when visitors come to the site - it is much harder for them to judge the popularity of the site by the amount (or lack ) of comments that are being left on a regular basis.

If you are on Blogger.com, it is a good idea to have anonymous comments allowed, otherwise you are limiting your comment leavers to people that have blogs on blogger, which is probably not even half of your potential readers. I see a lot of quite new blogs that are going to be lucky to get any comments at all - and don't have anonymous comments turned on. To enable anonymous comments navigate to your blogger settings, then click on comments and select anyone.

One of the best ways to get comments on your posts is to visit other sites and leave interesting comments. So go on, why don't you get over your shyness and go and leave a comment on someones Blog - you never know they might just end up visiting your site and could even become a regular visitor!