Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

Update

Week 4 results are in and I must say I am pleased with the progress. Midway through the week I basically stopped writing due to an issue I was having with WordPress. I spent all my time trying to figure out why permalinks made the next and previous links non-working. I got nowhere and a friend of mine fixed it in about 20 minutes. So it was a minor bump and now I am back updating this page once again.

Results from this past week are up partly because I joined a webring like the others I metnioned before called blogexplosion.com. My stats jumped considerably this week due to being involved in three exchange sites. It took me a while to get in with blogexplosion but once I did I noticed a large visitor increase. My Google referrals are also up, I am at about 70 for any given 10 day stretch. I have an average of 8 coming out of MSN while Yahoo and AOL are lower with only about 1 or 2 coming per time period. Netfirms reported that my unique visitors for the week were up to 816 which is a big jump from the 400-500 range that I was at. I am switching to a new counter so my numbers may be shifted slightly from this point on. I will try my best to stay accurate.

Ads or No Ads

Now for the real question, should I put ads, particularly Google ads, on my site? I have been mulling over this question since I started this blog and haven’t come up with a concrete answer. I left it at yes until I read a post by Yaro titled No More AdSense. Once again questions arose after reading this article. He made some valid arguments against having AdSense on his blog. Mainly he discussed the common thought that having AdSense ads all over the place makes your site look to commercially generic. This might deter some potential return readers from the start leaving before getting to the content.

I find this to be the main argument against all the Google ads that have littered sites lately. It may be valid but how can I know for sure? My content is constantly being updated so more and more visitors are likely to see my site with or without ads. A good example of high visitor volume and ad usage is Steve Pavlina’s Blog. Steve Pavlina hasn’t argued one way or the other per say. Rather, he just shows you it works. He has oodles of content and has increased page impressions for his site from 36K in January 2005 to 3.2 million in November 2005. He first went about 3 months without ads building both content and readership I would imagine. He then started placing ads everywhere he could. He has tons of ads on his site and claims to make over $4,000 a month just from advertising on his one blog. If that’s not a strong argument for ads I don’t know what is. But Yaro’s point is a good one and it seems as though Steve practiced this for a while. You must build readership by supplying useful content. I would like to take it a bit further by saying people will return to your site either way once they know you will help them in their endeavors, whatever they may be. But the bottom line is you have to present your content cleanly and have enough to reach a majority of web surfers.

With that said my new plan is to make the ads more discrete and less obtrusive than they currently are. I find Google ads to be helpful at certain times although I don’t tend to click and them often when I am on other blogs. I go for the articles not the click through. My goal with this weblog is to have many return readers who find my insights helpful. Therefore for the next couple of months I will keep the ads to a minimum. I may find that bringing them back is a good idea but only when readers find me helpful to read.

The other thing Yaro says in this particular article is that he hasn’t intended to get many visitors to his blog via Google search results. I am unsure if this is true or not but I am of the notion that getting people to your site comes mostly from search engines. He does mention that he is not looking for the one time visitors. He would rather have repeat regular readers to his site and gives a lot of tips at how to accomplish this. I think this is a great idea, but lets not forget how most of the traffic to sites is generated on the internet, content driven search results.

I will therefore continue to follow my Google referrals and keep it as part of the barometer I am using for how successful this website is. As for the ads I currently agree with Yaro. I won’t go ad free but I will definitely tame down the ads. Instead of having ads in the “prime real-estate” of my pages I will instead have ways to attract repeat visitors. Things like newsletter subscription, del.ic.ous me buttons, bookmark links, and rss feed add links. I will also promote the other categories of my site in a more obvious manner. Doing so can be particularly helpful. If someone visits your site from a search engine you may be able to get them coming back by showing them the other things you write about.

I don’t plan on abandoning advertisement completely but rather develop working methods on my other informative sites. I am currently working on 3 websites that I plan to advertise on as more of a service. The ad driven sites will be sites which I expect people to find mainly through search engines who are generally the click-through visitors. Click-through meaning once they find what they want from my site they will either go back to Google or click through on one of my ads or affiliate links. I may come back to a full onslaught of advertisement on this blog but intend to make it less distracting and offer more of a good read service to my visitors.

This approach also seem to match best with my goals. As I mentioned in my accountability posting I need/want fans to help me accomplish my goals. If you page through my categories you will see some of them are a bit lofty. I am at the point right now where a few extra comments and return visitors are worth a lot more than the pennies a day I average from my ads. I want to increase the readership of my blog at first which requires a decent layout and lots of content. I am not giving up on the advertising just shifting the ad income focus from this site to my other sites in progress.

Thanks to those of you making my page a regular read. Come back often and spread the word. Contact me if you would like to link exchange or if you have any other questions.

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