Increasing Readers and Revenue to your Blog

Dear Morgan,

I’ve spent the last few days researching how to increase traffic to my two blogs, my general one and my photography one.  Blogging isn’t a get rich quick scheme, it’s a slow and laborious way to use up lots of time you don’t have in the hope that someone may click on an advertisement, or buy one of your images, or buy one of your books in the hope of making a small amount of money.

The surefire way of doing this is to increase traffic.  You need to write interesting or informative or hilarious copy.  In doing so you hope to connect with a reader who feels the same way, and with any luck will share your blog-post with their million facebook readers or twitterers.  Unfortunately that doesn’t happen very often.

The first thing you need to do is get traffic.  Fortunately my blogs are already getting that for a couple of reasons. The first is because I started them back in 2008, and I’ve kept them up to date.  The second is because I’ve registered them to a couple of blogrolls.  That is, when I post something in the blog, they go automatically into a blog-reader for several thousand people to read if they wish.  The problem with my blog readers is that they are ‘deaf’ orientated, and I’ve really stopped writing about deafness and am now concentrating on photography.

The other important thing about blogs is to have the right tags for the search engines to find you.  A good example of this is my blog about the Sculptor Ron Mueck and the accompanying photography.  I have a photo of his sculpture called Naked Pregnant Woman with it labeled as such inside the blog.  This is attracting a huge amount of pageviews from Google.  I’m getting between five and eight thousand pageviews a month from this.  Unfortunately, they’re not staying around to click on ads or buying any photography because they’re not getting what they’re really after!!   The only good thing about this is that the advertisers think I’m good and therefore I am getting good advertisements on the blog for people to view.

In the last two days to help increase readership and then revenue, I have…

• Added the privacy policy for Adsense which apparently will increase revenue somehow.
• Added share buttons from ShareThis on each of my posts in both my blogs.
• Joined Chime.In, a place where you can add a link to your blog each time you update to gain more readers.
• Joined Blogcatalog with my general blog to gain more readers.  It’s quite the social network as bloggers love reading other blogs too.
• Downloaded Hootsuite to manage social media.  I have yet to learn how to use it, but the whole idea is to do regular postings to drive readers to your blogs.

I have yet to research..

• Other advertisement (Adclick) programmes
• An affiliateship with perhaps Amazon or other advertiser
• Become a Guest Blogger or ask a Guest blogger to submit an article to my blog.
• Join a Blogcarnival

Several things i have learnt in the past month when researching all these processes…

• You can make a six figure income from blogging
• I know of a woman writing about homelife making $40k USD a year
• You need to diversify .. eg. Have more than one blog, offer different income streams from say books, photography, writing, but have links to theses in your blogs.
• You do need to spend time researching, commenting on other blogs, reading, and developing and planning what you are going to write yourself.
• Everything I’ve learnt here doesn’t just apply to blogs, but to any website you might want to increase traffic to.

I’ve enjoyed doing the research.  Even if this doesn’t work, the exercise has been entertaining, I’ve gained more knowledge, and I’ve met new online people within the blogosphere.  So all is not lost.

If I see any success with what I have done, then I’ll do the same on this blog as well.  If anything, it might buy us a cup of coffee from time to time!

Cheers

Robyn

Bubblings from Earth or How NOT to make Potato Soup!

Dear Morgan,

I just re read a comment of yours from ages ago on this blog.  You were wanting the recipe for my home science experiment potato soup.  So here it is.  Good luck and enjoy…

Once upon a time, about 25 years ago, in another life, I was newly married.  Being newly married and not having much experience in the kitchen, I proceeded to experiment with different foods to try and please my new husband as all brides mistakenly tend to do.

It was a cool day, and so I decided to make potato soup for lunch.  Nothing like a hot soup to warm you up from inside out.  I searched the recipe books, to no avail, not one recipe could be found.  This was in the days before  home computers, internet, and Google.  When one used grey matter to be innovative.  I thought long and hard.  Lightbulb moment!

Out came my hardly ever used juicer from the back of the cupboard.  I peeled the potatoes then put the potatoes through the juicer.  Surprisingly I needed only a few potatoes to get the required amount of juice to make soup for two. I remember thinking how clever I was being, and how easy this all was!  I then poured the juice into a pot, and placed this on the element to heat it up gently.

As I brought it to the boil, the liquid rose.  And rose.  And rose.  Turning the element down in heat did not stop it.  I put the pot over the sink quickly as it overflowed.  I tipped a bit out, added water and put it back on the heat.

No sooner than I did that, the liquid rose again.  And rose and rose and rose.  Once again I put it over the sink where it overflowed.  Once again, I tipped half out and replaced it with water.

Once again I replaced it on very low heat.  Once again the bloody thing rose and rose and rose, and once again it overflowed into the sink.  This time it kept overflowing.

I yelled for my new husband for help.  This time I tipped half of it out and replaced half with water, and put it on the element again for him to see what was happening.  Once again it rose and rose and rose, and once again I managed to get it to the sink in time for it to overflow.  I felt like I was in a middle of a science experiment going badly wrong, not cooking lunch!

There was only one thing for it.

New husband went outside and dug a hole in the garden.  (After several expletives)

He came back up and got the pot and tipped the contents into the hole.

He then filled the hole in.

We decided to go out for lunch.

As we were leaving, I noticed the potato soup rising and bubbling out of the warm earth.

I didn’t say anything.

Not for 25 years!

I’ve long since moved away.  I still scan the papers in Auckland to see if anyone is reporting weird substances bubbling out of the ground, of the emergence of giant earthworms in a certain local area.

25 years later, in all things kitchen – I no longer use my grey matter for innovation.  Google is my new best friend.

How To Stop Outlook 2010 Downloading Duplicate Emails

Slight deviation from our normal blog posts. This post is for anyone who’s just installed Outlook 2010 and is finding that they are getting duplicate downloads of emails. I installed Outlook 2010 myself a couple of days ago, upgrading from Outlook Express and since then have received duplicate emails. Here is one solution to this problem if you have alias email addresses set up. I’ll use my set up as an example:

I have 2 email addresses set up for my business like this:

1. morgan@my_business.co.nz
2. info@my_business.co.nz (this is an alias on the same my_business.co.nz domain. The messages are stored on the same mail server as my other address.)

During the upgrade from Outlook Express, Outlook 2010 recognized these are linked by the same domain and switched “Leave a copy of messages on server” on for both of them. The result of this when receiving emails is:

1. Outlook checks for mail from morgan@my_business.co.nz, downloads them and then leaves a copy on the mail server
2. It then checks for mail on info@my_business.co.nz and downloads the emails that have been left on the server again.

This problem is really easy to fix. If you have a similar set up follow the instructions below to eliminate duplicates:

1. In Outlook 2010 click on the [File] tab and select [Options] –> [Advanced] (note that these both appear in the left hand panel as opposed to the old style drop down menus)
2. Scroll down to the “Send and receive” section and click on the [Send/Receive…] button.
3. In the dialogue box that appears click to highlight “All Accounts” in the Group Name field and then [Edit…]
4. From the left hand side of the dialogue box click on the account to be edited then select [Account Properties]
5. Select the [Advanced] tab
6. In the “Delivery” section untick “Leave a copy of messages on the server”
7. [OK]
8. Repeat from Step 4 for additional aliases.

Good luck!

Morgan 🙂