Category Archives: Blog Promotion

Blog Re-design Underway

Blog Promotion,
Under Construction
photo by Daniel Morris

Initially my plan was to get off the ground as quickly as possible, but as with many new blogs I put little thought into the direction I was taking. In many ways I jumped in with my eyes shut. So learning to blog effectively has been a steep learning curve, but worth it.

Now I have decided to try and push this blog to the next level by modifying a ‘off the shelf’ theme to personalise it, make it unique and most importantly give a professional look to this blog.

But most importantly I am trying to differentiate this blog from the thousands of ‘Make Money Online’ blogs that have appeared over the last 5 years or so, hence this market has become so overcrowd with blogs that regurgitate the same material week in, week out.

For me this is still an exciting experiment and testing ground for future projects, but one thing I have learnt is you are not going to become rich overnight. You also need to put a lot of hard work in to get anywhere / get noticed.

So what’s changing?

  • Martyn’s Blog will become Money Making Student, nothing wrong with ‘Martyn’s Blog’ but it sounds to much like a personal blog about life in general. Money Making Student is more concise and to the point.
  • Theme is personalised and more professionally looking, although not finalised, I plan to tinker with it over the next couple of weeks, bear with me it could get messy. If you have any suggestions or criticism please let me know!
  • Personalised domain name, the current address is clumsy and was only planned as a stop gap. The gap seemed to have got very big!
  • More adverts, hopefully I don’t end up giving the impression of a free ads newspaper, but by placing the ‘useful’ stuff on the left and ads on the right, I won’t confuse or mislead anyone intentionally!

Any feedback is most welcome, I discuss the changes in more depth once I have completed them and visitors and me are happy with the result!

Cheers,

Martyn.

BlogRush Gets the Boot, Hello Entrecard!

Blog Promotion, Traffic Generation, , , ,
Entrecard, the internets answer to business cards
photo by robertgaal

Some may have noticed a little change. ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’, but if it is, hoping things will get better won’t solve the problem. So I have decided to remove BlogRush, the concept was good, but as I explained previously, the results were poor and have continued to be poor. But rather than remove a valuable connection to other similar blogs, I have decided to replace it with another blog network.

Entrecard

The basics, well think of it like a virtual business card. As in real life you can hand your business cards around to other businesses/blog owners who have the Entrecard widget. For this you earn credits, 1 for you and 1 to the person you give your card to. This is done by clicking on ‘Drop yours’ at the bottom of the widget. Feel free to do it on mine, but first you must create your Entrecard. You don’t need to be creative as there is a ‘card creator’ using some simple templates. The usual option of uploading your own is available to you also.

But also you can use your business card as an advert, you can place it on different blogs, this costs you credits. The amount depends on the popularity of that blog. Sadly it is not all that simple because thankfully the blog owner gets to review your card, before it gets displayed. Therefore cutting out spam and we should be pleased with that!

The reverse is also true, other bloggers can advertise on your site earning credits for you to spend!

Whether it will gain me valuable traffic, I will wait and see. Unlike BlogRush it is going to be more labour intensive, but that may be key to its success as it will be more of a ‘network’ of bloggers interacting.

Fingers crossed for Entrecard!

Martyn.

The BlogRush Effect

Blog Promotion, Traffic Generation, , , , ,

Clicks from BlogRushToday I’m going to look at BlogRush, is it worth the space it takes on my blog?

Firstly, before I discuss BlogRush, apologies for the lack of posts in the last week, university work takes priority at moment. This has been holding me back a little of late, but not to worry my desk is slowly becoming more visible, after hiding under pages of half finished practical write ups!

Well then BlogRush has been causing a bit of a stir over the last few months! For those of you who haven’t heard of BlogRush here’s what it is and how it works:-

It’s aim according to the website,

“BlogRush is a free service that was created to help bloggers solve their #1 need:
More Readers For Their Blog.”

This is done by hosting a widget, as seen in the top right of this page, on your blog (a simple piece of code). This widget then shows the latest blog post titles, that may be of interest to your readers. For showing the widget you get credit for each time the widget is displayed in front of one of your readers. This then leads to your blog post titles being shown on other blogs in your niche, equal to as many credits you have ‘earned’. Also low traffic blogs get bonus credits to try and help them along!

But does it work, lets take one of my recent posts as an example. “Easy Money, No Hassle, How?” this post has been shown, according to BlogRush, 3875 times from which I got 2 readers. This may sound pretty poor, but looking at my server stats, these visitors were unique, spent longer and looked at more pages than the average visitor. The downside is other posts have been shown on a couple of thousand blogs, but I have gained no readers from them.

So ultimately is it good or bad? Well to gain anything you have to write post titles that grab peoples attention or make them curious. Otherwise it is likely to fail, I suggest you read Brian Clark’s post over at copyblogger –

“10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work”

But the traffic you will gain will be high quality, but, small quantity. If you are trying to make money this may not be what you are after. If on the other hand your blog is just for personal enjoyment on a niche subject I don’t see why you shouldn’t try it. For me, it will stay another month or two. I don’t believe in quitting early, because you just don’t know what is around the next corner. But if it’s performance doesn’t improve I might have to review BlogRush’s placement on this blog.

A little patience is needed, me thinks!

Martyn.

image: www.freeimages.co.uk