Don’t Click This

This is my first review with SponsoredReviews.com, but as I said before I want to be very careful about which products or services I review so as not to alienate any of my readers. This review is about Bloggst, which according to their website is an “online community and resource center created exclusively for bloggers”. At first glance, it looks like a forum. On further investigation, you’ll see that it actually is a forum! Anyway, Bloggst is looking to become an authority resource for bloggers to discover and discuss better ways to blog.

At this point, you could be thinking ‘Yeh, but there’s already tons of blogs about blogging that have loads of information like this’ and you’d be right, but there is definitely still something to be said for a forum over a blog. For one thing, forums are still much better for discussion than blogs. For example a forum topic is a collective discussion including various ideas from different people, whereas a blog post is generally a specific idea, which is then commented on. Plus, you’ll be much more likely to get a decent response to a particular question on a forum then you are at a blog.

Bloggst is still a pretty new website and they are currently running a promotion whereby you can get a link to your blog on the front page by writing an article about them, although I don’t know if this counts if you’re writing a sponsored review! Although they do already have a few decent articles, they have a long way to go if they want to become an authority site. That said, they definitely have the right idea and I’m sure that as more members sign up it will become a goldmine of information for new and seasoned bloggers alike.

I came across this domain name extension site via StumbleUpon (I think), it’s basically a list of all the different possible domain name extensions and where you can go to register them. I thought this would be particularly useful if you’re looking to create a website brand (eg del.ico.us, bla.st etc) and I expect there are probably still plenty of single keywords available in this format, although some of them say ‘xx’ but it’s actually .com.xx. Still, I thought it was worth posting about!

I know I haven’t posted for a while - been working hard on my websites - but here are a few things that I’m currently trying/will be trying in terms of website promotion, besides the normal link exchanges:

Forums: Great way to get traffic to your website, not just via a sig link (which I normally wait until I’ve made 10-20 posts before adding - don’t want to be banned for spamming) but also in response to other peoples requests. For example I often deep link to specific articles on my MTB site in response to peoples questions on bike forums.

Give Away Free Stuff/Competitions: Obviously, this has the potential to become quite costly but it can also bring a ton of backlinks too - for example if you’re giving away a novelty pen when someone subscribes to your feed/newsletter or whatever, you can submit the offer to freebie sites which will probably list it, then you get lots of one way links to your site.

Myspace: Bit of a grey area this, but depending on your website it can be good for targetting specific demographics eg for my student site I can find students at specific universities, add them as a friend, they check out my profile and see a link to my site. It is a good idea to create a profile of a person though as opposed to a site, more likely to get a response that way. It’s preferable to make the profile with a picture of an attractive female too, dunno why that works so well…ahem!

Stumble Upon: I’ve yet to test this out but I’ve heard it can get a lot of traffic to your site. Basically you just add your website to Stumble Upon and people, um, stumble upon it and can rate it, discuss it etc.

Blogroll: I’ve found this one to be particularly good; creating a blogroll on your website for your specific niche and then finding related blogs and adding them. Once you’ve done that, send a bit of traffic thier way and then tell them how good their blog is - usually can get a link back. I’ve actually managed to get a couple of blog posts dedicated to sites this way - bonus!

So there you have it. If anyone has any other interesting, non-conventional traffic methods, leave a comment and if they’re good I’ll add em to the list.

Ok, I cheated a little bit with my rule about not paying for traffic for my MTB site. I was reading about AdEngage the other day and decided to try it out as I had $8 in a paypal account and it was hardly worth cashing it out. So, I bought 2 text links on two sites, just for a week, for $1 each. And I’m glad I did. By the end of the first day I had already made my back my $2 investment! I’ve recieved nearly 150 clicks from my text links in a couple of days - by the end my weeks advert I’ll have paid less than half a cent for each click if that continues!

Unfortunately though, the money earned will more than likely all be from adsense as I’m running affiliate links for a UK bike shop and as the traffic was from US sites it’s unlikely I’ll make any sales from them. This is actually one of the reasons I started up Text Ads Directory to find UK only websites to advertise on.

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 came across Blogarate the other day, which is a cool widget that lets readers give your blog posts a star rating out of 5. It isn’t just a rating system though, it also sends blog posts back to the Blogarate website, along with the post star rating, and displays it Digg style.

Obivously, it’s advantage over sites like Digg is that you’re actually giving a post or article a rating, which could be good or bad, as opposed to just voting for decent posts, which is much more useful for the author.

Although this is a pretty good widget, I think it’s more suited to business or news type blogs than personal blogs. I reckon it would be especially good for content or article sites/blogs that are using wordpress as a cms, as it’s a good way to get feedback on your content from your users and probably get some extra traffic from the Blogarate site too.

It’s good to see that the Yahoo/Overture search tool is now working again. For a while I was using the Wordtracker service but it now seems that it isn’t all that accurate (in my experience) after all. I was testing out about half a dozen keywords which I know for fact get at least a couple of thousand searches a month and it was showing less than 10 searches a day for most of them. This could just be a few isolated inaccuracies but I’m glad the Yahoo tool seems to be back (touch wood!) and I think I’ll be sticking with it for the time being.

This is brilliant! Plus it’s much quicker than the Yahoo/Overture tool. I know wordtracker is the paid choice for a lot of affiliates so I think it’s safe to assume that this service should be pretty accurate too.

Free Keyword Suggestion Tool

Source: Final Tag

I knew something was up with it, it hasn’t worked at all for at least a week. I normally use this keyword tool which incorporates the overture tool and gives an estimate for other search engines, but even they agree that something is up:

This really sucks, looks like I may actually have to start paying for this kind of service. Bummer.

Just a quick post, I’ve now got my first subscribers, which is cool. The Feedburner widget is currently showing 4 so thank you to whoever you are! Also, I’ve come across several blogs displaying this tool which values your blog. Mine is currently at $3,951.78 - Not bad for a week and half!

A while back I also came across this valuation tool which values websites domains, the tool used to come up with some interesting results; Youtube.com was apparantly worth under $1,000 and myspace.com was so bad that the owner should have paid someone to take it from them! I think they’ve improved their algo now though!