Don’t Click This

Right! I’ve just about set up my new project and it’s ready to go…

Basically, I’ve set up a new site called Text Ads Directory because I was having a hard time finding websites and blogs on which to advertise my own sites to a UK specific audience. There are some great text link advert services out there, unfortunately I always found the sites listed with these services seem to be predominately US sites. So, essentially it’s somewhere UK web publishers can find other UK websites on which to advertise their own sites to a targeted UK audience.

It’s completely 100% totally free (not even a reciprocal link is required) for everyone to use, plus it’s a one way link which the SEs love. If you have a UK based website/blog or a site with at least 60% UK traffic then please add your site or blog to the directory. Also, if you are just looking to exchange links with other UK sites I’ve added a section for that too.

That’s pretty much it! If anyone has any comments or suggestions please let me know, I’d love to have some feedback on what could be added or improved etc.

Submit your website here

Text Ads Directory

I’ve been working on a new project today, hopefully one that a lot of UK web publishers will find pretty useful. I’m not going to say much else but I should be ready to launch it either tomorrow or saturday methinks…so stay tuned!

MSN Traffic

After checking on MSN yesterday I noticed that my MTB site had got to the number one spot for the sites main keywords. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really produced that much of an increase in traffic to my site, but to be honest that’s to be expected with MSN. Still, it’s a good sign that the site is progressing and traffic overall is still going up slowly but surely. I’ve also been mucking about with my adsense placements to try and find the best CTR, which is still pretty shitty at the moment - it made me something like 11 cents yesterday. But I’m still determined to grow this site completely without any paid traffic!

Bla.st

Just a quick follow up from my post about bla.st; Chris has now reported that the $10 he spent to stay on the top spot of bla.st for two days resulted in 2284 views but only 27 clicks - a CTR of just 0.9%. It speaks for itself really…

Around this time last month, I set up a new mountain biking site and I’d hoped that by now I’d have made some money from it. I’ll admit now, I’ve been really bad about sticking to the targets that I set myself, plus the fact that at one point I didn’t have internet access for almost a week and I sort of got sidetracked by updating my student site.

So from now on I’ve decided if that I’m going to write my goals and targets on this blog so I’ll be more inclined to stick to them. Here are the stats for the first month of from my MTB site:

Visitors: 383

Pageviews: 1779

Earnings: $2.08

Hmmm. Not great is it. Anyway, instead of making lots of excuses I’m just gonna write down my targets for this site for the next month:

- Get at least 10 new inbound links (I know earlier on I said one a day but that just seems impossible!)

- Add a new article to the site every day (I’ve not added any content for about a week and a half)

- Spend an hour a day posting on MTB forums

- Earn at least $50 from the site by this time next month

So there you have it. I know that $50 isn’t that much but bear in mind I’m trying to get all my traffic organically (no paid advertising). Hopefully this time next month my stats will be a bit more impressive!!

I was reading a post over on the A4U Forum today about when the best time to launch a new site is. Perhaps the immediate answer that comes to mind is ‘when it’s ready’ but I don’t think it’s that simple.

Obviously, you want the search engines to index your site as quickly as possible but you also don’t want people visiting and being put off by incomplete content before it’s ready. Plus you don’t want to upload a site with a load of dead end links.

This is why I always try an adopt a ’stages stratergy’ when I’m uploading new sites. What I mean by this is that I’ll always split parts of the site up so that they can be published independantly of other sections, as this way you can get some inbound links and keep adding more content gradually.

Right. Finally got the internet connection sorted so I’m back!

I have been busy working though, I got a load of stuff done for my student site and the new design is nearly ready to go live now. Also, my MTB site has been ticking over, it’s getting around 20 uniques a day now which I know isn’t much but it’s steadily going up. To date it’s made me $1.77 which isn’t great but it’s something. I need to do some more linking for it and write some more articles as I’ve been focusing more on my student site.

Anywho, back to work…

I’ve had some serious issues with my ISP this week, I guess the main one would be that I haven’t been able to get on line at all! Luckily, I’ve been able to do a lot of work offline and upload it when I get the chance at a mates house.

Anyway, I’m waiting for them to sort the whole thing out, but in the mean time I’m now working in Starbucks using their hotspot thingy which is pretty expensive! Hopefully it’ll be sorted by next week and everything will be back to normal…

I’ve got so much going on at the moment, both with my sites and some offline stuff too that I’ve been strugling to find time to post to this blog, which is a shame because there’s a ton of stuff I wanted to write about. Anyway, hopefully next week stuff will have settled down a bit and I’ll be able to post more often.

Damn. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do over the next few days. I’m basically redesigning my entire student site, it’s currently in a table based layout (I know, I should be using CSS but it was my first site which I started before I knew anything about websites). Anyway I’ve decided to make it more blog like so this does obviously save me having to actually make the design itself - I’m going to use a pretty cool design I came across on Jon Waras’ blog.

I’m also in the process of switching hosting companies to 34sp.com (my host for my other sites) as I was paying £10 a month, which really isn’t great value for money considering the traffic levels the site currently receives. And I’m also still writing content and getting links for my MTB site too (Which has generated it’s first revenue by the way - something to the tune of about 30 cents I think!). So basically, I’m going to be pretty busy for a while…

My MTB site got indexed in Google yesterday, which was pretty quick I thought, as the site has only been up for a couple of weeks, but then someone over on A4U said they’d had sites indexed in 8 hours! Still doing lots of link building, I’ve also considered submitting some of my articles to other MTB sites but I’m not entirely sure if this will get my site penalized for duplicate content or not. I know using free articles is generally a no no but I’ve heard people talk about exchanging articles (with a link) and I’m wondering if this is purely for attracting visits via the link or if this does provide an advantage from an SEO perspective. Hmmm.