Blog tips, images and ad revenue...

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I ended up on Seth Godin's blog again earlier today, and stumbled on two really great posts he has about blogging.

The first: a call for everyone to blog.
The second: tips on how to get people to come to your site.

I accidentally seem to have discovered one more: add pictures to your site. I had AdSense on this site from the the very beginning. In the first two months I made a grand total of about 40 cents. Then I started adding pictures to the site (just to keep the posts more interesting.) Two things happened

  • traffic almost tripled/quadrupled; most of the traffic to the site now comes from images.google.com, in other words people actually searching for images that I happen to have linked off my site.
  • AdSense revenue went up: I made all of 2 dollars last month. :) In other words even this seemingly unrelated, and theoretically uninterested, traffic does result in click-throughs and a potential revenue opportunity.
I've often heard people in the online marketing space say stuff like "Oh, we can always buy traffic to our website" and wondered if they were being a little cavalier. But apparently while quality of traffic (i.e. well-targeted ads/people who care about what you're saying/selling) is great, quantity doesn't do too badly either.

I may end up seeing which of Seth's suggestions I can implement though...Oh, another problem is that since most people now use RSS readers, its mildly more difficult to get an accurate sense of the numbers of readers. I might just take a page out of the LSVP blog and ask people to re-subscribe. I've had a feedburner feed from day one: just never publicized it.

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