This is my first post under the new theme regime, and I’d like to say, it is a cool new home. Well done to Matt and Lee for taking a big and positive step. Ironically, they probably won’t find much of interest in this post, preaching to the converted and all that! (And I hope this isn’t too long a post!!)

They say, if you stand still in business, you die. A bit demoralising to think that you have to keep pushing and can’t rest on your laurels. Not that natural-born entrepreneurs ever think of resting easy. You have that ache in your stomach to tweak what you already have, dump what isn’t working, and invent the next big thing. And natural born bloggers are the same too, I suspect.

If it ain’t broke…

What sets the good business/blogger mind apart from the average, however, is the ability to “see” what is going on. It is one thing to want to be dynamic, it is another to be able to analyse what elements truly are in need of attention - or should be left well alone. How many companies have fizzled in apathy, or fallen to earth after a CEO broke something that wasn’t broke!

I’m no CEO, but I have ruined a few good things in my time, due to inertia and an over zealous desire to “progress”. I am responsible for a blog now, which one day may be a business, so I want to do the right thing. The pressure is killing!!

Plus ca ne change pas! or thomesing like that.

As the lord and master/mistress of a blog, what to tweak, dump or invent, is one part of the equation, but starting from the beginning, what to keep the same while the rest of the mix evolves, that is the biggest question!

At the end of this month, staring wide-eyed at stats, one part of me is tempted to relax into the cosiness of traffic that has tripled over the past 30 days. Yeehah. But the niggly feeling takes over. Should I leave everything as is? Should I keep the formula the same - keep posting, keep talking, keep having fun on-line? More of the same means a step backward, doesn’t it?

Luckily, I am too young in blog years, to go changing too much. I have loads of work to do to be the best, but to be realistic, for better or for worse, I am happy to leave the core of the blog well alone for now. (Also, my guilty restless side willingly accepts that continuing the blog in its current format is excusable this month, so no major new decisions to make just yet.)

Tweaking a good thing - the devil is in the detail

Fortunately, instead of relaxing, a little devil kicks me in the shin and sets me to wondering how to keep peripheral parts of the Pisstakers blog moving on a bit more. But which parts could do with a re-vamp?

As a starting point, I am happy to see I got 28000 page views in April. That is almost 1000 per day, blimey, but is it quality traffic? Are people reading, or are they speed reading, or simply accumulating hits for gummi bears on MyBlogLog Sunday? Yes, to all of the above! So which part of the Pisstakers “brand” do I tweak, because there is no such thing as unexplained coincidences in my world and something has been attracting this extra attention.

I usually go on gut feelings, but that isn’t always a good premise. (Ask SEO expert Shyflower about my gut instincts before I implemented some new keyword tactics that actually worked, and I was way off base with my ideas on Polliwog Pond’s traffic generating prowess.) I cant read stats well enough yet, but I am sure that MyBlogLog Sunday is an intrinsic part of the recent popularity of The Pisstakers. However, I am ignoring my gut instincts to make a change to the rules, for now. I am just going to keep telling new folks about it, and hope that at least half of the 10 blogs featured for a mini review on Sundays are new blood. That would keep the idea fun for new blogs, fun for me and fun for my readers. And if a possible “Best of past reviews” that I have in mind doesn’t get a result… I can’t abide not doing anything new!

Irresistible new feature

I admit I am a mischievous person by nature, but under the guise of a proactive entrepreneur, to sate my creative side this month, I was talking with my man in Milan about a drool-worthy new feature. Bonsai Studios have obliged in kind, and are preparing a little something new, coming soon to a sidebar near you.

Features can even tweak themselves!

I have also seen that if you sit tight and let an untried idea run for a while, it may evolve a life of its own. Comments Friday here is hitting top gear nowadays with early commenters setting the topics without being guided by Matt.

And sometimes a feature can produce a new feature!!! I got a post from Mr MyBlogLog programmer extraordinaire, SEO Solo who kindly left a recipe for a top referrer widget for MyBlogLog members. And then you start thinking, should I look at packaging the MBL Sunday feature, syndicating it, getting it adopted, plus a multitude of other ideas. Who wants to jeopardise that sort of feedback and thinking with a tweak in the wrong direction?!

How long do you go between blog tweaks? Got any do’s and don’ts?

All advertising comes down to cost. If you are paying too much for an ad spot, chances are you won’t purchase it again. You want the most cost efficient advertisement possible. Obviously nothing is better than free, but what if you are paying money?

Recently I posted about using Linkreferral to get traffic. I also mentioned I am now purchasing the #1 spot, per month, on LinkReferral under the section Miscellaneous. The price for that spot comes out to be 35$ per month.

At 35$ per month, you want to be getting your money’s worth. In the month of April (according to their stats) Blog about your Blog has received 1300 hits.

To figure out how much I am paying for each visitor is quite easy. All you have to do is divide the 35$ per month into how many visitors you are getting. That figure comes out to be about 2 or 3 cents per visitor.

As I mentioned there are other factors that you can add, but can’t really put a price on. At Linkreferral your traffic, is somewhat targetted, but it still is basically a modern traffic exchange. Some visitors are quality, but definitely not all. We’ve had several people participate on this blog that found us on Linkreferral.

The other factor to add in is that at LinkReferral, you also get website reviews. How much value is that? It’s hard to put a price on it, but I think its valuable. You get great input on what people see, think, and feel when they first visit your blog. Of course there are those reviews that will be “nice site”, but others can really give you an idea of what they think about your website or blog.

Finding your Cost Per Visitor (CPV) can be very helpful if you are trying to decide whether your advertisements are worth keeping. I like to keep our Google Adwords CPV down as well. I want as many people to read this blog as possible. We aren’t big time yet, where we can really target traffic (and pay more).

Which advertisers work for you? Are you also using these methods to find your CPV? Or does CPV not impact your advertising decisions?

Comment Friday has really taken off like I had hoped. It seems like a new kind of ‘meme’. If you are interested in hosting a comment friday, please feel free to use it. Just make sure to give the idea my credit, and link back to us. In turn, I will link to your comment friday post from ours.

With that said, I have chosen Windy’s Food Corner for our Comment Friday Blog of the Week. Windy was the second to comment, and brought up the lovely topic of hangovers. It definitely seemed to catch on with many sharing their own hangover experiences, and remedies.

If you stop by Windy’s Food Corner, you should definitely take a look at the Lemon Chicken recipe, and then make me some!

I want to thank everyone for your continued support, and participation in comment friday. Remember if there is anything you’d like to see, something you like or dislike, make sure to use our contact form and let us know. I am currently talking to a few new bloggers to blog on our site, so look for them soon.

Comment friday is a fun and simple idea. Leave us a comment about anything you want. By leaving a comment, you will have your blog visited by me, and you may even get a link out of it. I will select a blog from the comment list to be linked to and have their link on our blogroll, until next friday.

We have many of the same commentors participating weekly, we are getting some great and fun discussions. Not only am I visiting blogs, but other people are checking you out as well.

Last week we achieved our goal and got 30 comments. I am pretty excited as to what we can do today comments wise.

Last week John Murphy won from Invest Journal with a great comment, about commenting. This week it could be anyone.

Get commenting, thanks for stopping by!

We have received our blog review competition 7th entry. This time it comes from Theanand and you can read their review here.

The review competition has been slow, and will probably be ending soon, however whenever I say that, we get another entry. We are still aiming for 10 entries, but we may only get to 7.

Thanks all for participating, when the contest concludes everyone will get another link, and more linkbacks on other blogs (page rank 3’s and 4’s)

I see Link Referral as a modern website-directory. You list your website or blog in the desired category, as well as enter in a description. After that is done, what’s next? You want your website to rank as high as you can right? The higher the rank, the more visible it is, which means, more traffic!
Being on Page 1 is a lot better than being on page 200.

To rank your website higher, there are a few ways to do so.

First, you can visit up to 30 linkreferral websites per day, but thats only part of it. You can also review up to 5 websites per day. Each review you give and each website you visit will move your own website or blog higher in the ranking. Be careful though, you want to give quality reviews, because the link referral staff does grade them.

By doing these two things daily, you can be on page 1 or 2 in your category, having people looking at your own website, as well as reviewing it. So not only is Linkreferral getting you traffic, but it also giving you valuable reviews on about your website for free. You can get peoples first impressions, suggestions, likes and dislikes, all for free.

Isn’t it just a traffic exchange?

Yes and no. You are somewhat exchanging traffic, but it is a lot more targetted than a regular traffic exchange. You pick which websites you want to visit, based on their description. There are also several categories to fit your interest.

When I was using LinkReferral to promote Fantasy Football N’ Stuff I was mostly surfing the sports category. By doing so I found some great sports forums to promote my blog and talk sports.

Visiting 30 Websites and 5 Reviews a day seems like a lot.

It is a lot, and after a while I couldn’t keep up. Instead I purchased the #1 spot in the Miscellaneous category for Blog about your Blog.

Tomorrow I will reveal exactly how many hits we’ve received, and how much it is costing, as well as cost per visitor.

Is buying traffic worth it on Linkreferral.com? We will soon find out.

If you’re like me then you have a couple of blogs up your sleeve… actually if you’re like me you forego sleep, life and sunshine to feed your addiction to blogging and should really cut back (lol that’s not going to happen).

Now those of you who know me know that I have a distaste for blog exchanges. They are fine when you are first starting out but in my mind quickly become a waste of time and give you false dreams of how many hits you are getting (that’s of course an argument for a different day). The only positive after you’ve gotten your site exposed to a few people who actually stick around is that you should be able to see new blogs but this doesn’t happen in reality with the same blogs coming up all the time and… oh that’s right another day.

So if you do have a couple of blogs how can you let people know about them? Well obviously you come to Blog About Your Blog and post here! Duh. But once you’ve done what’s another way to let people know about your newest posts - you can’t just keep mentioning them all the time in your posts (well you can but what would be the point of having two blogs).

A trick I’m using over at Quit Your Day Job to help promote Urban Cultivation is by using the RSS widget for Wordpress. The sidebar widget (a widget is a piece of code you can move around Wordpress easily, you can generally use the same or similar code in static sidebars) gives you the option of a title, how many entries you want displayed and the feed address.

Well this is great because you add your second blog’s feed and have it automatically tell people what the latest post is on your other blog. On mine I’ve changed the optional title to read ‘What’s happening over at Urban Cultivation’. The only thing is though I use a different plugin to the one installed automatically in wordpress mainly because the optional image url etc.

Any other innovative (mind you this probably isn’t ground breaking but it’s just something I do) uses for your RSS field out there?

There’s quite a lot of talk on blogs about PageRank, Alexa and Technorati ratings. Some bloggers even seem to be trying to find ways to manipulate the rankings in their favour.

I was thinking though today, does this mean that many bloggers are perhaps forgetting why they started their blogs and what they hoped to achieve when they started out? Or perhaps you may think that the various rankings and goals go hand in hand.

As an example, in my own case my blog is about making money with free blogs. Therefore should it really concern me as to what my various rankings are if I am making money. That is after all the purpose of the blog.

I was wondering what other readers opinions are. Should we be going all out to increase our rankings by whatever means? Or should we stay true to the things we hoped to achieve when we first dipped our toe into the blogosphere?

Good luck,
Mike.
Mike’s Money Making Mission