Monetize Your Site

Many of my recent posts to this blog concern the Deep Link Engine. I am continuing my experiment with this plug-in, but I see a pattern forming, I think.

I did see a significant traffic boost when I first started using this plug-in. Of course, more than a couple of visitors a week is good for some of the blogs with which I am using the plug. It appears the the initial traffic boost falls off after a time. I can only see short term effects at this time, because I have not had the plug in service for a long enough period of time.

When the plug is first installed there is a bit of traffic. I suspect that most of this is blog owners checking on the pingbacks that they receive. This is validated by the traffic logs that I have followed. The surge of traffic on posting seems to have been dwindling as the age of the blog/plug increases. There is less immediate traffic to these blogs after posting.

My theory is that since the pings are tied to the keywords used, and since the blogs are concerned with one general topic, the same keywords reappear and the same blogs get pinged on a regular basis. These blog owners begin to recognize the source and either consider the pings as spam or approve without rechecking. Most of them probably consider the pings as spam since the blogs are not as well targeted as they could be. Some of the pingbacks do get approved sometimes. I do see the links showing up occasionally, and I do see occasional traffic reported in my analytics  from links that do get posted. The pingbacks are much more likely to result in a link if the blog is somewhat on topic.

Much of the traffic that I see in analytics comes from blogs that have a recent comments box on the main page. Of course these comments fall out of the recent category when a few new comments trickle in to the blog. This does point to the fact that the plug-in would be better suited to an auto-blogging context where there was a high volume of diverse material posted to the blog.

The real problem with the auto-blogging idea is that monetization will not be as effective without a lot of work. I have had amazing results with my posts. My affiliate links are collecting clicks at a rate that has approached 50%. There have been no conversions, but the affiliate cookies are persistent and there may be a payoff over the next few weeks (I would not suggest holding your breath.

The high click through rates are due to the presentation that I have been using on these blogs. I match a text link and a banner to the content of the post in the main posting box. The banners seem to be the source of most of the clicks. This demonstrates the value of truly targeted traffic and the potential that is available to the Internet marketer. The key, as always is to get truly targeted traffic to your blog or website.

If nothing else the experience gained through this exercise has been worth the time invested. I have had under a one percent click through rate in the past and have seen an average of over ten percent over the past couple of weeks. I had almost suspected that there was a problem with the reporting on my primary affiliate program site, but then I looked at some of the other numbers and realized that there is a clear trend. This trend is not entirely due to the Deep Link Engine. While having the semi-targeted traffic helps the real story here, as far as the click through rate is concerned, is with the layout and add placement.

I now understand my job better and may be able to pursue a more profitable course of action. If I can convert some of this traffic into sales it will be a beautiful thing.

In my last post I spoke of a new blog that I have started to develop. I am still working on that blog along with my many other blogs. I told of trying something different with the new blog. It seems likely to work and I have even committed the outline of the plan to a text file. If it proves to be of value I may write it up into a formal ebook and offer it for sale. Only time will tell.

I do think that the plan offers some potential and I am following the plan on my other blogs as well. It does take some time and if I see value I will tune the technics for best performance. I am doing a lot of things that are considered good practices and combining various elements to come up with an overall program that I hope will be workable. I will continue with this program, and add any tweaks that I think of along the way, for long enough to determine if the program will work. It would be nice to see some immediate results, but that is not reasonable to expect. The things that one hears over and over is that one must take action, and one must stick with a program for a period of time to see results. That will be the only way to evaluate this plan.

I will report on the progress at some point in the future. If there are significant results the report may be sooner, but I will give this program some time to get a good evaluation. Stay tuned for further comment on this plan.

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I have been working, and I do mean working, on a new blog. I am not writing the content, I am using article directory articles. I am adding relevant pictures to these posts and integrating some advertising with the articles.

This approach is a bit time consuming. Time will tell if it produces the desired results.

The blog has a theme and I am hand picking articles to support the theme. I do have the Deep Link Engine hooked up to the publish button so there are a few links back to the site building up on the web (while checking the traffic logs I have seen a few).

The new blog is the About Music blog. Take a look and tell me what you think!

Last evening I had an interesting experience. One of the blogs to which DLE had linked was frustrated that someone out of their area had linked to their blog. They left a comment complaining about the link! Now, most blog owners would be pleased to have a gratuitous backlink, but not this one.

Now comes the adventure in this adventure story. Since I had a complaint I decided to act and delete the link. I opened the post in the editor and found the code in the html view. I deleted the code and hit the republish button. I had read on another blog in a comment to an article on the Deep Link Engine that removed links were replaced on update, so I opened the page and checked. Sure enough, the offending link had been reinstated. I tried the same course of action a couple of more times with the same result. Finally I deactivated the plug, removed the link and updated the post. I checked that the link had been successfully removed. Then I reactivated the plug-in. (I should go check to make sure that it didn’t go back and check its work.)

I do see a stream of traffic (maybe more like a trickle) whenever I post to one of the blogs where the plug is active. I even had some search traffic or recent posts that may indicate that the external links are of value. It may be too soon on those posts to explain in any other way. I will continue with the program for a reasonable length of time in order to evaluate the result properly.

Also of interest, one of the visitors to this blog yesterday was looking for instructions to uninstall the plug-in. There is the activate/deactivate link within the plug-ins list that will disable the plug-in. I suspect that to uninstall you would need to either FTP into the plug-ins folder or use the hosting service cPanel file manager to navigate to the plug-ins folder and delete the ‘pingback’ folder. The plug-ins folder is found within the wp-content folder. Deleting the ‘pingback’ folder should completely remove the plug I would think, but it may be an adventure waiting to happen. I have not tried this course of action, at this point.

I had initially installed the plug on this blog, but when I found that I could not control the output I disabled it. I use the Deep Link Engine on several blogs where I do not write most of the content. On any of my blogs where I do write most of the content I either did not install or disabled the plug-in.

There is an available update to the plug-in. The update offers the option to automatically update all of your old posts with the click of a button. Posting does take some time because of the pings sent when you hit the publish button. There have been several times when my server, set for 30 seconds (a long time for a cpu that is running around 2 Ghz) has timed out. This would indicate that the DLE is not particularly kind to your server. You may end up with an unhappy host if you turned the automated function loose on a few blogs, particularly if the plug-in does not pace itself.

And so, the saga continues. Have you any experience to add to the discussion? Leave a comment. Thanks!

I have had the Deep Link Engine in operation on a few of my blogs for about a week. I considered writing up a report in the form of a PDF and offering it for download from the parent site, Selling on Your Website. I could have combined parts of the several posts about the Deep Link Engine along with my latest observations into a reasonable report. I am not sure that I have enough to add at this point to make that worth while, but I can offer some useful advice on using the Deep Link Engine.

The Deep Link Engine currently available bares little resemblance to what is stated about it on the download page. From the download page:

So what is “Deep Link Engine” for WordPress?

Simply it’s a WP plugin that automatically, and systematically get more links to each and every blog post you create. Either manually, or automatically.

It was designed to be used with stand-alone wordpress.org blogs. So you would need to have wordpress hosted on your server, or hosting account.
How it works…

For each post you create Deep Link Engine will analyze the content of your post, determine 5-10 keywords, then go out and find relevant blogs related to those keywords. Once it is done finding blogs, you select which blogs you would like to link to.

By linking to these other blogs we send a “pingback” notifying their blog’s software that we referrenced them on our website. Leading to deep relevant links to all our blog posts. Over time this will greatly enhance your ranking power for internal pages. The best part is easy.

Deep Link Engine for wordpress is really “push button” link building at it’s finest, and you get access to it absolutely free.

The text in red requires further comment. My guess is that the plug-in was originally designed in this way, but was changed to accommodate use with auto-blogging software. There appears to be little, if any manual control.

The plug conducts its final search when you hit the publish button. I thought that perhaps you could gain some control by adding to the automatically produced keyword list. Even this has proved to be a false hope. I produced a post that included a video with little supporting text. There were no keywords generated by the plug so I added several keywords and hit the publish function. When the post was published I glanced at the keyword box only to find that my added keywords had been lost for the most part.

My advice would be that if you choose to use the Deep Link Engine just install it and set it up in settings. Don’t bother trying to control anything in the way of output, for the most part it will be a waste of time.

Now for a little better news I will speak about results. I don’t consider that the time is adequate to fully evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy, but I can give some observations of early results. You will likely see a traffic spike when you first begin to use the plug-in. I suspect that most of this early traffic is from blog owners who have been pinged. They are not likely to be the targeted traffic that you would hope for, but they will improve your traffic count for the short term.

I have gone into my traffic log on the server and seen the activity there. I have also followed some of the referrer links in Google Analytics. I have seen several places where the trackbacks were listed to my blogs. Most of these are nofollow but a couple have been dofollow. Even as no follow other blog visitors can click on the link if they have the interest.

For the most part I am using this with an article distribution service provided by iSnare, an article directory. I will maintain the regimen for some time until I can give a more definitive opinion as to the value of the strategy.

If you have an opinion please share it in a comment. Thanks!

I have a few articles published on various article directory sites. When I am viewing my analytics I see a few referrals from these sites. I think that the most consistent traffic (subjective not objective) comes from the site Buzzle.com. This may be due to the content of the article there (I have only posted one article there). This is a library site, not a reprint site.

Ezine articles gives a very complete article analytics page to each author. This page tracks views, reprints, and comments among other things. The pattern that I see emerging for most of the articles that I have posted there is that one is likely to see several views by passers by while the article is on the first page of results for the category, but few will click through. Then, later in the article’s life, the targeted audience will come upon the article, probably through an article search. These viewers are much more likely to click through to the offer site.

This makes doing your keyword research even more important. You want your article to show up for your target audience when they do a search on the article site. Keywords need to be incorporated into the article title in a sensible manner. They also need to be worked into the article a few times. This will help to get your article in front of your target viewer.

My primary sources of clicks have been Buzzle and eZine. I have a few articles up on Go Articles with little direct result. I do see a trend toward more traffic to all the sites that I have supported with articles. My conclusion is that there is still value to article marketing. The best approach would  be through volume and consistency. I think that sticking with the higher quality sites is probably the best plan for direct visitors, but shear number of backlinks may improve the organic traffic more.

I have been using WordPress for my blogging software for some time. In addition to blogs WordPress is used extensively for the bed for other websites. This is a trend that I have observed to be on the rise.

There are some advantages to using the WordPress software for a site or a blog. WordPress has some automation that helps get the word out. Whenever there is a post to a WP site there is an automatic ping sent to an RSS aggregator. This is a flashing light telling the world that there is new content available. The various search bots are attracted to the flashing light and the new content can get indexed very rapidly (no promises on this, but I have seen it happen within hours). The sooner your content is indexed the sooner it can show up in search results.

Basic to the WordPress experience is the theme. A theme is a skin for your WP site. There are many, many options available. I use one called the untheme-two-column that is an adaptation of the default theme designed to be easily edited. I use this because I want to make my blogs match my simple sites of which they are a part. There are many free themes available as well as paid themes. There are also people who specialize in modding and producing themes. They can give you a truly unique theme for your WP site.

There is also a built in comment system with the package. Comments can add content to your site and make it a more interesting place to visit. There is also a blog comment spam industry, so I would recommend that you either moderate all comments or turn commenting off in your control panel. There is a good spam filter plug-in that comes with the package. Be sure to activate the plug-in if you leave commenting turned on. I do recommend that you leave commenting on in most cases, but be aware that you will need to check what is going on with your comments on a regular schedule.

WordPress can be hosted on your hosting space as long as you have file upload access, php, and a MySQL database available. Most paid hosting plans will include these basic requirements. Many paid hosts offer a one click install for WP through their cPanel. There may even be some free hosts that offer the required features. If you don’t have a one-click install option and don’t want to do the installation yourself there are people that would do the installation for you for a nominal charge.

As well as themes there are many plug-ins available for WordPress. These can extend the utility of the software for your particular purpose. Plug-in installation is usually straight forward and easy. There will probably be a plug-in available to do whatever you want to do. Some of the latest and most useful will be listed in a section of your control panel  dashboard along with other announcements by the WP team.

Some of the advantages to using WordPress are:

• Easy installation
• Changeable look through the Skin System
• Extensive Plug-in library
• Quick Indexing by the search engines
• Built in comment system
• Built in RSS feeds for posts and comments
• Email notifications of comments

These things combine to make a WordPress site a good choice for the bed for your site or blog.

The new blogs at the audioart musicplayer and webpickups sites are live. (That reminds me that I need to update navigation on both and add links on the blogs.) I installed the KeyWordLuv and DoFollow plug-ins on both of these new blogs. They both incorporate the Deep Link Engine and iSnare content distribution system.

The About Music Blog under the AudioArt MusicPlayer domain is signed up with the category of entertainment. I am also inviting guest bloggers to submit material for this blog. An interesting experience transpired when I updated the post. DLE found a post on my main business blog among the links returned as related to the post. I received a ping and approved the trackback.

The WebPickUps Blog incorporated into the WebPickUps site is due to receive articles in the humor and sexuality categories. This will draw the right traffic for that site if the linking scheme works. Overall it is an interesting experiment. I have seen traffic increases on all of the blogs where I have incorporated the system, but the jury is still out on the value of the effort.

At any rate, stop by the new blogs and say hello! Leave a comment and say that I sent you.  Thanks!

I have been fussing with the Deep Link Engine for about a week. It is not everything that I hoped that it would be, but it does collect links and add them to your posts.

I have all but quite fussing with the interface except in the rare instance that the generated keyword list is too short. I had tried deleting various keywords. It now appears that the only control left over the plug-in is to add some keywords to the list produced by DLE.

This software was developed as an introduction to a product, auto content cash, that the team has just launched. While the plug does gather links there is no manual control as was mentioned on the download page. I suspect that the intention when developing the plug was to give the manual control as stated. The plug-in needed to be fully automatic for use with the various auto-blogging packages including their new offering. This means that the meaningful search is done after the publish button is clicked. What is really needed is a manual/automatic switch in the options. This could default to automatic, but give us the option to manually select the blogs to which we wish to link.

In using the plug-in I have seen some immediate results. Most of the immediate results that you will see are the better blog operators visiting your blog to see who the heck linked to their blog. This is low quality traffic, but it is a traffic boost. I have seen the trackback on a few blogs and they have all been nofollow. Anyone interested can still click on the link, so there will be some incremental traffic produced. With enough of these scattered around there could be a long term traffic boost. How targeted that traffic is remains to be seen, but could be improved with the ability to hand pick the links. It is too bad that is not currently possible.

I discontinued using the plug on this blog and any of my blogs where I am producing most of the content. If I could hand pick the links I would use the plug-in here. I do have it installed on several blogs where I am populating a good bit of the content with iSnare articles. I have found that they have a good automated content distribution system, and most of the articles are of reasonably good quality. The resolution of the articles sent is not as good as it could be because of the limited number of categories, but they do not auto-post, so you do have control of what you print. This is the best distribution system that I have found to date, but I have not searched long and hard. If they could set it up with some keyword filters it could be significantly improved. I intend to set up two more blogs using this system this evening.

Do you know of other content distribution systems? Please tell us in a comment.

I am beginning to see articles trickle in to other sites on which I have installed the scripts. It does appear that this will work as I had hoped. When I saw that I was actually getting some articles I signed up two more blogs. I will keep you updated on the progress and results.

I expect that I will see some curiosity seeker traffic as I do have the Deep Link Engine active on all of these sites. There will be a percentage of those sites that are pinged that will check on the site sending the ping. I did see one trackback resulting from a ping by the DLE. It was set as nofollow, but the search engines don’t always follow that rule. I will be watching traffic and SERP to see if this strategy has value. To some extent more traffic means more clicks, but it is really targeted traffic that is needed to make money.