Tuesday 20 February 2007

In pursuit of paid to blog

Now I think this blog looks right and is indexed I will need to drive some traffic to it. There are some link-exchange shemes which I could get involved in but if I do that, I will have to remove my Adsense adverts or jeopardize my whole adsense account (which is active on two other websites) and since I don't get any clicks to speak of at this blog, I think that might be the sensible solution, at least for the short-term.
I am a member of mybloglog.com, a community site which allows you to list your blogs and websites, I'm not really active there, but at least the sites are listed and there does seem to be some activity - these community sites do not adversly affect adsense and it makes sense for a blogger to get their sites publicised in this manner. I have a bit of a chicken and egg situation here in that I can't write about paid-to-blog until I have got a paid-to-blog organisation interested in this site, so the content cannot be built up until I can actually do some paid blogging... slight flaw in the cunning plan, but the project will go on....

Tuesday 13 February 2007

Website Indexed by Google

I note that my Google 'webmaster tools' now informs me that this blog has now been indexed by Google, though I note that the cache is not available as yet.
I judge that this has taken about two and a half weeks to complete since submission. A little more work and perhaps Blogitive will reconsider their decision not to use this blog??

Thursday 8 February 2007

Making your blog more interesting

Right now Google gadgets is my favourite source for stuff to make your blog look interesting. They offer calendars, maps, games... a whole host of little scripts to brighten up your day.
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?synd=open&source=asnd_pub1 I saved this in my favourites, and suggest you do the same. Tip: If you want to get people to mark your page as a favourite or even a home page, you will need to have stuff that makes your page look current and interesting. I use things like 'picture of the day' and 'joke of the day' on my other blog, that way it looks like you have updated your site content even when you have not touched it for a few days...
The gadgets can be configured a little to your requirements and then you are offered the script which you can paste into your own page.
One niggle though, I tried the mapping gadget and couldn't get it to distinguish between two relatively UK postcodes, I suspect that it doesn't recognise complete postcodes, just the initial part.
If you like games, have a go at the google gadget at the bottom of this page.....!

Wednesday 7 February 2007

Blogitive

OK, I tried submitting this site to Blogitive, but they said it wasn't popular enough yet. I can see their point, the blog has only recently been started and hasn't been indexed by Google yet. Once the indexing is done, I will try again.
They recommended submitting the site to feedburner, which appears to be a service which uses RSS feed to promote your site. I blindly went along with the suggestion and hope to learn a little more as we go on, so that I can report my findings here. I have submitted both of my blogs to feedburner and will log back into their website another day to see how my blogs are doing and whether I can find out a bit more about how it works, and why I should participate. I was concerned that it might not be approved of by adsense, but I Googled and found out that they have been approved by Adsense for actually inserting adsense into their feeds, so I guess you can consider their service 'Adsense friendly'. I am paranoid about offending Adsense since I discovered (via an email from Google) that using 'Autohits' contravened Adsense rules.

Tuesday 6 February 2007

Back on track

I have taken a few days away from this blog to complete some other work in other areas, but I am back on track now. The site has been submitted and is awaiting indexing with Google and other search engines. I will post here when it is finally indexed so readers will be able to judge how long this takes (it can be faster if you pay! but I like things for free..)
I have this site registered with Google Webmaster and Analytics so I can get an idea of how many visitors I am getting, and where they are coming from! All these tools are free, if you sign up once, you can just add extra websites to your account.
I shall be looking at 'blogitive' today and will report back my findings.