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Archive for the ‘Adsense Challenge’ Category

With just 27 days left of the challenge I feel like I am in one of those dreams where you are running as fast as you can but moving really slowly. I am running out of time here to get to my $100 a day by March 31st and I need an adrenaline injection quick..

I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that I can get this blog up to $100 a day, it will get there for sure but I fear it may take a bit longer though. This isn’t me throwing in the towel by the way, this is just me being realistic and honest.

So back to the latest traffic stats..

As you can see, my visitor count is pretty constant at around 180 visitors, around 70% of them being unique visitors. Even though I am now indexed for most of my main target keywords, they are still very low in Googles index to actually get any traffic yet.

The best way to get this blog the adrenaline injection it needs is to just keep going with the backlinking from quality, authority sites in Google using my target keywords as anchor text.

Over the coming week I am going to write emails to as many authority webmasters in the cruise niche as possible and see if I can get some link exchanges and maybe if they are willing some one way links. I will also hopefully get the rest of my articles finished, published and a lot of them sent to article directories like Ezine for publishing. I will also look into getting a mini network of blogs on various free resources like blogger, google pages etc with articles including links back to the main European Cruise blog.

As for the performance of Adsense, well CPC is actually a bit more consistently higher than before, maybe advsertisers are starting to throw some money at this again. It could also be possible that my blog is getting some adwords placement targetting which could be the reason for the improvement. The end result is that I am around 12% of the way to my goal and yesterday it was nearer 20%.. A long way to go.

After just checking on my stats I noticed a few visitors arriving from google for a few of my main target keywords like “european cruises”. After getting a bit excited about this I checked on google and sure enough my blog has been indexed in google for my main keywords at last. Although it is indexed it is still very low in the rankings for those keywords but that is what usually happens.

I love it when stuff like this happens because it is almost like google finally agrees that your site is worthy of a place in it’s indexes for the prime keywords for that niche however low in the rankings that the site may be.

My job now is to keep going with the backlinking strategy of getting quality inbound links using my target keywords as anchor text. Traffic was up again yesterday and today looks like it is going to rise a bit more again. I won’t see real massive increases in traffic until I get onto page 1 of google for those keyword phrases I am targeting though..

So realistically to get to my $100 a day target from this blog by now I should be at least up to $50 a day and seeing around 1000 visitors a day also.. Unfortunately I am falling short of that by some margin, I could blame the recession, global warming or make a million other excuses but I won’t, this cruise market is a tough one to crack. I am not going to back down or bottle it or anything like that though, I am more determined than ever to get to my target!

Now the good news is that I have seen a slow increase in traffic over the past few days and this has been reflected in my adsense income. I am now hovering around 15% of my target income a day. It fluctuates wildly, some days its a lot more and some days a lot less but averages around 15%.

I am still waiting for the rest of my articles to get written and then I will post and promote like a madman over the next few weeks and then just hope that the mighty google see fit to rank me highly for all the big juicy keywords that I am targeting. They will do it eventually but whether they will do it before the end of this challenge, who knows?

Traffic is slowly getting better again after last weeks dip but I still need some massive improvements over the coming few weeks. Thankfully, I am starting to see some great CPC on some clicks and CTR has improved slightly which has boosted my income from the blog. I am still hovering between 5 and 15% of my target income.

Which begs the question, can I still reach my target income for the blog by March 31st? I am ever hopeful but I really am in the hands of the great google as to whether I get the rankings for my target keywords or not. currently I am not ranking for them and until I do, I won’t see the massive increases in traffic I need. Most of the search engine traffic is for long tail variations of my target keywords. Yahoo and MSN are also starting to send me more traffic as well now and I am also seeing a slight increase in traffic from ezine articles.

I am starting to post more articles now as I get them back from my freelance writer. The interesting thing now is that I have a much better idea from my stats of which articles are performing better so I tend to use those as ideas for new articles targeting similar keyword phrases in the hope that they will catch on as well.

Onward and upward and I really hope that I start to get some good traffic over the coming week from my main keyword targets..

Over the past few days I have been busy building up links to individual posts that are performing the best with regard to adsense. In other words, I checked my google analytics account to see which posts were visited the most and started a backlink campaign using my target keywords for those particular articles as the anchor text. I am careful not to use the same anchor text, I use a variety of keywords to avoid it looking unnatural.

So far I haven’t seen any more progress over the past week with regard to traffic and also my adsense income has dropped back a bit. This is not abnormal and under normal circumstances I would turn a blind eye as this is just a normal part of building a site. You got to take the ups with the downs.. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of time with this challenge which has left me feeling a bit frustrated. Oh well, I just got to ride this out and keep doing what I know works!

I am still waiting for my new batch of articles to be written and then I will get to work posting them for my massive blitz over the next month. Anyway here are my latest traffic stats.

Right so adsense has been running for just over a week now on my blog and I have spent that week testing various placements, colour schemes and ad formats. Max banner ads has helped with this immensley in conjunction with using adsense channels on each new adsense block I use. By rotating through the blocks in max banner ads I can give each ad block a fair crack of the whip.

After a week, I can finally reveal the results of which adsense blocks I will be using.

• A Wide Skyscraper (160 x 600) in the left hand sidebar.
• A Large Rectangle (336 x 280) above the first post.
• A search box in the right hand sidebar.
• A (160x90_4) Link Unit below the search box in the right hand sidebar.
• A Banner (468 x 60) at the bottom of the page.

The colour scheme I have chosen is a mixture of blending and contrast where the background blends with the background of my blog (same colour) and the text is the same colour as text on my page with no border. However, the headline text is red which is contrast to any other text on my blog.

The best peforming blocks are the large rectangle followed by the skyscraper which had almost double the CTR of any other block. I also noticed a big increase in CTR when I changed the headline text from dark blue to the red you see now. The least peforming ad is the banner ad at the bottom of the post. I am debating whether to keep it in or not. I have now reached the CTR I was hoping for but the CPC is a lot lower than I was initially hoping for, maybe advertizers in the cruise market are making cutbacks in the present economic climate.

Even though I was hoping for more income at this stage of the challenge, I am around 10% of the way to reaching my income goals for this blog but with the click costs a lot lower I am hoping they will either pick up or I can attract more traffic.

As for traffic, it is doing okay but I need to start seeing some huge increases over the coming weeks to get on target, in fact I would like to see 1000 visitors by the end of February. I saw a big upsurge in the middle of last week up to the weekend and then it fell back a bit again but the trend is still up.

To reach my targets, I need to step up the article posting and promotion. I am getting a whole load of articles written and I am starting to write more myself as well. I am also looking into adding RSS feeds for more fresh content and also introducing a reviews section for visitors to post their reviews on cruises they have taken. All this takes time to drum up a buzz for though and I fear I may not see the benfits of this before the end of the challenge.

Overall, I am happy that the blog is making an income at last, but the magnitude of the challenge is starting to hit me now. I really have to step this up now in both content and promotion. I have plenty of ideas for new articles, so I am not worried about running out of content ideas. Stay tuned, I will update soon.

Adsense is finally running on my blog and I have started experimenting with just 3 blocks and search block as well. I have 1 block in the left sidebar, 1 at the top of the 1st post and another at the bottom of the post. The search block is in the right hand sidebar near the top.

In compliance with googles Adsense TOS I can’t divulge actual figures about the adsense but I can say in these early days that I am seeing some reasonable income considering the amount of traffic and am on track with regard to CTR and CPC.

Over the coming days I will experiment with different types of adsense, placements and colour schemes and will continue to monitor using channels. My cash cow guides contain a lot more detail about how to use channels, testing and setting up adsense for maximum income if you are interested. My task is to try and squeeze as much income from my adsense placements as possible without resorting to silly gimmicks or making the site look ugly.

As for traffic, after seeing a dip in traffic over the past few days I saw a bit of a surge today as more posts are getting indexed and ranked higher.

I suspect over the coming days that I should see this trend in higher traffic increase more. I have also made a more accurate asessment based on my current income figures that I will now need approximately 400 articles to reach my $100 a day goal. All of this is perfectly doable and although it will be a lot of work, it will be worth it.

Well, after doing some tests using the fantastic “who sees ads” plugin for wordpress I can now continue with the original $100 challenge again.. For those who don’t know what the plugin does, it basically helps control when and who you show your ads to on your blog. It is reasonably simple to setup and I think it is just what I need for this challenge.

Yesterday my number of visitors for the day hit 120 and 54 of those were unique visitors. Every day I am seeing rises in traffic of around 5%, so still a long way to go but I have been adding more content and done more promoting over the past couple of days so I should see some benefit from that soon.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately but there never seem to be enough hours in the day sometimes. Anyway, back to the nitty gritty and as you may or may not know, the challenge has changed to getting to 2000 visitors a day by 31st March 2009. I have decided to do this because I totally underestimated the level of curiosity in the cruise blog. Unless I can somehow hide my adsense blocks from the unnatural traffic I will have to leave it off unfortunately.

I am however looking at various options which may mean that I can either put Adsense on the blog or some other form of monetization but for now its all about traffic, traffic, traffic. Here is my latest AWstats for the blog showing the amount of visitors arriving on a daily basis.

As you can see, the traffic is slowly rising apart from the last 2 days where it has tailed back a little. About 2% of this traffic is not what I would call “natural” traffic, so remove the 2% to give a better impression of actual figures.

I am fully expecting the results of some promotion to start kicking in soon and those numbers should begin to rise I hope soon. I am also getting another 100 articles written between myself and my ghostwriter. I am also looking at a lot of articles from the directories and deciding which ones would fit my blog.

As for promotion, I am busily looking for backlinks from various “authority” sites and have so far got a succes rate of around 5% for the emails I have been sending. Some have even given me one way links which is great.

Overall, it has been a strange week and one that has left me with a lot of decisions about the direction of my cruise blog. I am hoping next week should see things move on from strength to strength. 2000 visitors a day seems like a long way off but I know what needs to happen to get there. My next post will describe some more promotion methods using social bookmarking, RSS feed submissions and looking at just how powerful web 2.0 techniques really are.

Here is a little tip that is so effective at getting backlinks that I am suprised more people do not do it. It does involve a bit of work but trust me, it really is worth it if you take the time.

1. In Google, search for your main target keyword using Firefox and have the SEOquake addon.
2. For the top 20 results in google, open each site up in a new tab.
3. Look through each tab and close the tab if they don’t look like a competitor. (Find sites that you would like to aspire to)
4. Go through each tab with SEOquake on and look at the SEO toolbar, specifically the “LD:X” column.
5. Click on the LD:X column and go to the new tab that opens up.
6. In this you will see all the domains with backlinks to your competitors.
7. For now just make a note of each domain (or open in a new window or save as a bookmark)
8. Do this for every open tab until you have a long list of potential domains that will give you a backlink or link exchange.
9. Trawl through all your potential link partners and fire of some emails to them or fill in link exchange forms if they are available on their site.

With link exchanges you usually have to have a link to their site first, so create a new page in your blog for link partners and just create links on there to all your potential link partners first. Make a note of the URL to your link partners page and email your requests with this link in there so that you can show them you have already added a link to them. I have an example letter that has been used to good effect that you can see and edit accordingley in my Cash Cow Guide To Adsense Wealth guide if you own it.

If you have any questions then please start a thread in the 100buckschallenge forum.