5 Interactive Ways To Monetize Your Blog & Increase Traffic

Blogs are popular and it seems that everyone has one. But most people don’t produce enough traffic to make big bucks through AdSense or selling banner space.

Nevertheless, there are are ways to make a little income on the side, while keeping it simple and entertaining for everyone involved.

1. Fancy-Schmancy Tip Jar from ScratchBack

The idea of the site is to sell spots in a list, much like a blogroll.

In return for a small tip, the tipper receives the opportunity to place a short text and a link on your Topspots list. Per default, links will scroll down and disappear as more spots are sold. Alternatively, you can make your list wipe all spots every 24 hours, once a week or month, which means that for each period only a limited amount of spots will be available.

Joining the site is free. Once you have logged in you’ll want to create a new widget, i.e. Topspots list. You can make the list 5, 10, 15 or 20 spots long. The minimum price for a spot is $5, but you can set a higher price, there is no limit to the top.

Currently the site is in beta and while that is so, ScratchBack is taking only 10% off of your tip. Once the site leaves beta, the share they are taking may increase. Please mind that also PayPal is deducting a fee from your income.

2. Enhance and Protect Images with BritePic

BritePic is a way to “bring life to your images” as they say and earn money through AdBrite at the same time. When signing up with BritePic, you automatically sign up for AdBrite. But adding ads to your images remains optional. Besides, you will only have ads and earn cash when ads are offered to you.

In the meantime you get the full benefit of the animated image, giving site visitors the opportunity to easily zoom into your photos or share them, depending on what you allow them to do with it. Using BritePic also provides a way to protect your images by adding a watermark to each image and making it harder to copy them if you so choose.

3. Sell Products with CafePress

Does your blog have a cool logo or slogan? Or is your blog about photography, drawing, painting or any other printable art? Then this one may be for you!

On CafePress you can create custom products, such as T-Shirts, mugs, caps and much more and sell them through a free shop on the CafePress website. CafePress will handle all payment transactions, ship products worldwide, manage returns or exchanges and provide customer service. For this service, CafePress will keep a reasonable base price for each item. You will receive anything above the base price and it’s up to you to set the final price for each of your items.

Now you simply have to advertise your CafePress shop on your blog.

4. Free Text Link Exchange through AdGridwork

AdGridwork provides a way to advertise your website within their network for displaying their ads at the same time. It’s free, it’s as simple as can be and it will drive traffic to your blog.

After adding your site to the network, you’ll integrate the code to display targeted ads at your site, earn credits as you do and receive exposure among sites within the AdGridwork network in return.

5. Ad Greeting Cards with 123 Greetings

This service was thoroughly reviewed by Wendy just a couple of days ago.

Briefly, you sign up with 123 Greetings, insert the HTML that will link back to them into your website, and customize your eMail text and card page. If you like, you can add your own images, files and quotations to be used on greeting cards initiated through your website.

Monitor Several Google Analytics Accounts with TrakkBoard

As part of the online career that I’ve built over the past half decade, I am now responsible for tracking and analyzing Google Analytics data for multiple clients as well as for my own blogs and websites. Once you have four or five Google Analytics accounts that you want to keep an eye on and monitor every day, things can get a little bit difficult to manage. Multiple passwords aside, it can be a real hassle to log into each account and dig through the Google Analytics navigation menus to view one statistical graph at a time.

When you want to do some analytical research that’s a bit more complicated, like comparing keyword trends to daily traffic, or top landing pages to popular keywords, things aren’t intuitive. You need to view a single graph and then switch over to the next graph, and if you’re trying to compare multiple blogs that you own all at once, you can forget about it.

This is why I was overwhelmingly pleased to discover Trakkboard, an amazing new application that plugs into and helps you with tracking Google Analytics accounts at once and provides you with a powerful dashboard where you can view as many statistics as you want all in one place.

Trakkboard – A High Level Overview Of Important Analytics Data

Trakkboard is a desktop AIR Google Analytics tracking application that runs in Windows, Mac or Linux. The owner of Trakkboard is Trakken Web Services GmbH of Germany, a company founded by two former Google employees, Timo Aden and Lennart Paulsen, in 2008. The company’s mission is to help businesses improve site optimization (whether that’s web traffic, conversions or both). Trakkboard is provided by a consultancy focusing on web analysis and conversion optimization.

Before getting into the Trakkboard Google Analytics tracking application, I’d like to quickly take a look at the standard Google Analytics display and point out what areas are lacking. Then, we’ll dig into Trakkboard and I’ll show you why simply using a more effective tool can significantly improve your optimization efforts.

In Google Analytics, you use the dropdown and select the account that you want to review. Given, the analytics screen provides an amazing collection of possible data…but as you can see that data is available for display one website and one account at a time.

With all of this extremely useful data available in Google Analytics, it’s difficult to imagine any other tool that could give you as much insight about your optimization efforts. However, Trakken taps into your Analytics data using the Google Analytics API. Additionally, Trakken can simultaneously log into your multiple Google Accounts and display all of them to you (as well as all of the data available via the API) in one central place – the ideal tool for Google Analytics data tracking.

As you can see, I’ve laid out a dashboard of the traffic for my websites. I have a row along the top with the hard traffic numbers, and then a row along the bottom that provides a realtime feed from Twitter with keyword usage. I do this so that when I see major spikes on Twitter, I have an indicator that a major event related to my blog content may be taking place. This is only one of the many ways that you can use this powerful Analytics Dashboard software to analyze your data in whatever manner you see fit.

When you add a new account, which could include one or more websites, the account name gets added as a new tab at the top of the dashbaord. You can quickly flip through all of your accounts with the click of the mouse (no need to log in and out of Google Analytics).

At the upper left corner of the window, you have the area where you can add new widgets to your dashboard. Right now, the widgets are focused on Google Analytics and all of the data you can pull out of it. However, as you can see the creators of this software have already integrated Twitter feed data into the analytics tools. Currently “More” only has a “Notes” widget that you can use to keep notes in your dashboard, but you can be sure that the developers are very likely working on some cool new widgets that you can incorporate into your optimization analysis and planning.

All of the data that you can retrieve from your Google Analytics account is available in the form of a dashboard widget. This includes pages/visits, top keywords and even any goals that you’ve created from within your Analytics account. For example, one of my favorite widgets is the one below that lets you break down your traffic sources in a line diagram that lets you see where your most significant incoming traffic is coming from in a graphical way. This is useful when there are major changes, because it’s much easier to notice a graphical change than it is to catch a numerical anomaly.

The power and usefulness of this tool is limited only by your own imagination and whether you can find a way to make good use of the data comparisons that are available there.

I love the Twitter widget. The ability to keep an eye on Twitter keywords in direct comparison to your site traffic and other stats provides you with some insight as to how well you’re catching traffic from social network buzz. It also gives you an alert mechanism when a major Internet meme flashes across the web.

If you’re interested in giving Trakkboard a try, go to the start page and submit your email address. Within a short time, you’ll receive a “Key” and a weblink you can use to download the application. So, why not give TrakkenBoard a try and start monitoring all of your Analytics data in real-time from one convenient desktop application? Once you do, come back and share your own feedback about the software in the comments section below.

How To View Adsense Performance In Google Analytics & Why You’d Want To

One of the things that I love about Google’s assortment of webmaster tools, like Analytics and Adsense, is that they give you better insight into your site’s performance than just about any other app that you can find. And there are some easy ways you can use those statistics, like Tim’s article on the Analytics WordPress plugin, or the desktop app called TrakkBoard where you can monitor multiple Analytics accounts at once.

Today, I’d like to cover a change that took place over the past year or so where Google integrated Adsense information into Google Analytics. You use Adsense in your websites and your feeds, so wouldn’t it be nice to get a glimpse of what sort of performance your Google Ads are doing each time you monitor your Google Analytics account? If you didn’t know that you could do this, I’m going to show you how to integrate Adsense with Analytics, and what some of those reports look like.

How To Integrate Adsense Into Analytics

Before you can take a look at your Google Ad performance alongside your traffic data, you need to enable the feed between Adsense and Analytics. You can do so with a single click. When you’re logged into Adsense and viewing your report overview, just click the link to integrate Adsense with your Analytics account.

The next step is to tell Adsense which data you’d like to “marry” into Analytics. If you’ve only used one Adsense account for all of your websites, this is easy because there won’t be any choice. However, if you’ve organized your Adsense into “channels” for each domain, as I’ve done, this is where you can tell Adsense to only integrate the Adsense numbers for one channel into the Analytics account that you have set up for that domain.

In this example, I’m telling Adsense to use the ad information for RyanDube.com and feed it into my Analytics account set up for ryandube.com. Once you go through this simple 3 step “wizard,” you’re good to go. It may take a little while for the data feed to start flowing, but you’ll see the Adsense option in your Google Analytics account immediately.

Adsense Data You Can View In Google Analytics

Once you’ve enabled this feature, the information you can use to compare to your overall site traffic is pretty cool. You can see Adsense data within Analytics when you click on the Content section. The menu option shows up simply as “AdSense.”

Once you dropdown the Adsense item, you can see how much information your account feeds into Analytics.

Now that you know where to view Adsense information within Analytics, let’s take a look at what that information means to you. The first overview will show you your overall Adsense income for the domain. You can see your daily revenue over time – which offers some pretty cool insight into how certain events affected your income on that day.

Did you do certain work on a certain day? Did you cover a particular topic or publish a very popular article on that day? You can monitor your daily revenue to keep track of how your ad income was affected by those events. If a certain topic consistently seems to draw better clickthrough rates for your ads and generates higher income, doesn’t it make sense to focus more of your efforts on that topic? It will sure affect your bottom line if you do.

While the graphical display shows you the trend, if you click on “Top Adsense Content” you can actual see the details – exactly which of your pages are producing the most income for you?

You can see not only revenue, but how many ads were clicked, click-through rates and more. If you really want to beef up the monetization of your website through Google Ads, this is the place where you can get the best optimization data.

This information doesn’t stop with articles, you can also click on Top AdSense Referrers to see which incoming links you receive that seems to generate a better ad clickthrough rate.

Obviously, it would make sense to establish stronger ties with those partner websites that are sending you traffic which results in your strongest ad revenue. Often this simply represents the “type” of visitor that site is sending you. Folks coming in from Google may not be the type of visitors that are as likely to click on your particular ads as people coming from StumbleUpon. If you want to improve your bottom line, focus on those things that are revealed by the AdSense data as working for you.

Finally, another very cool piece of information is when you click on AdSense Trending. This display shows you how much specific Adsense variables have changed on a particular day.

For example, it will show you that on Saturday, your AdSense revenue increased by 3.74 percent. Or, you can change the variable to AdSense CTR and learn that on Monday your clickthrough rate shot through the roof. This is a great way to test certain changes to your site and then review how that change affected your user behaviors. I saw this just recently on one of my websites, where changing my entire site them increased clickthrough rates by almost 50%.

Since Google added this feature, have you been using it? Share what you like or dislike about the AdSense integration with Analytics in the comments section below.

Track Your Google Adsense Accounts From Your Desktop With SysSense [Windows]

Since it takes so much work to create fresh, new content for several websites that you may own, there is very little time left over to keep an eye on how your ad revenue is doing. Most small to medium sized bloggers and webmasters typically make use of Google Adsense, as it’s currently the most popular revenue generating ad service on the Internet. Well, if you are like me and you don’t have a whole lot of extra time left over to go digging into your Google Adsense accounts to check your latest balances, then you’ll love SysSense.

MUO previously covered WhyDoWork, an Adsense monitoring plugin for Firefox, but SysSense is a freeware desktop application (Windows 2000 through 7) created by Mike Singer of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. SysSense is an unobtrusive application that runs in your taskbar and provides you with quick and convenient one-touch access to all of your Google Adsense accounts.

How to Set Up SysSense

After you download and install SysSense from Mike’s website, the software will initially take you to the screen where you can configure your Adsense accounts as well as set up the application properties. The General tab is where you can configure the software to immediately start every time you boot up Windows. This is also where you can set the exchange rate for your country so you can get an accurate representation of your balances.

Of course, the Adsense tab is where you submit your Adsense credentials so that the application can poll your account information.

On the Auto Update tab, you can configure SysSense to check your account details every so often. For smaller sites where you don’t have a lot of activity, frequent updates aren’t really necessary. However, for large sites where things change fast, you may do well to shorten the update interval.

You can change the update interval from every minute all the way up to every five hours. Under the Tray Icon and Tray Tooltip tabs, you can configure how the tool tray icon appears and also how it behaves when you click on it.

You can set it up to go directly to your Adsense account in a browser window any time you left click on it, and you can also set up the icon to pop up an icon balloon on a particular event, like when your earnings change or when your number of clicks changes. While these are nice features, the real meat of the application is in the Tray Tooltip section.

This is where you can configure what data you want the see in the ToolTip text window. I really like how much information this app can extract from Adsense – I’ve seen apps before that wouldn’t let you upload monthly data without a subscription, but with SysSense, it’s all free.

Once you have your accounts configured and your primary account set up (the one that will display in the ToolTip), you’re ready to start using the software. One thing you’ll notice is that every time the app refreshes data upon the interval you requested, it’ll pop up with a tooltip that displays all of your account details at a glance.

It’s nice to see this data without having to log into Google Adsense and dig through the site for the reports. SysSense puts the information together the way you want it and displays it with absolutely no effort on your part. If you want the app to refresh the data in between interval updates, just right-click and select “Refresh Now.”

When you do, the tooltip will pop up again with the latest data from your primary Adsense account. If you want to see more detailed reports of the data from your account, click on the “Reports” option and you’ll discover an excellent reporting tool.

In this window, you can choose from any of the accounts you’ve configured, and you can choose from a list of 21 reports, including not only earnings but CTR, eCPM and clicks for referrals, ad performance and search performance. The graphica report display will immediately show you certain patterns. For example, through this tool I discovered that my highest day of earnings is almost always on Friday!

SysSense is one of the fastest and easiest tools for instant access to your Adsense account details without any effort on your part. Give it a try and let us know what you think. Or share any other useful Adsense tools that you know about in the comments section below.

How To Setup A Self-hosted WordPress Blog for Free

A blog is a layman-friendly variation of a website, and having a blog is one of the many ways to state your presence in the virtual world. While there are many hassle-free blog services out there that will take care of everything except automatically blog for you – like Blogger and WordPress, nothing can beat a self-hosted blog in the terms of customization and self pride.

The problem is, the process of building your own self-hosted blog is (almost always) not free and is considered complicated. So most newbies will choose the easier path and never give themselves a chance to experiment.

I personally believe that experience is the best teacher (and that you should never consider yourself a cool person if you’ve never tried to “build” a blog).

So, if you are in an adventurous mood right now and willing to take up the challenge, I’ll show you how to easily set up a free WordPress blog site.

Some of you might ask, “Why WordPress?” I could go on and explain how cool it is, how it has grown from a simple blogging platform into an advanced CMS (Content Management System) and still stay simple and free, how you can expand it into virtually everything by adding plugins and themes; but to save you the time, I’ll just go with “Why not?”

Getting your own domain name

The first step in our little project is obtaining a domain name. But with zero budget, you shouldn’t expect to be able to snatch a dot com – or any other popular dots like org, net, name or tv. For this experimental purposes, we’ll go with a less popular but free alternative.

The free service that I always use for quick and free domain names is www.co.cc. This service will provide you with 2 free domain names (with .co.cc suffixes) for personal use. (But that doesn’t mean that you can’t register for more with different email addresses. Wink!)

Visit the site and search for the availability of your chosen domain name(s). I’ve registered buildablog.co.cc for this article so you can’t claim that one.

If your chosen name is available, please check whether it’s available for free because there are names which are not free. Then continue with the registration.

If you’ve been here before, you can log in with your account. Newcomers click “Create an account now“.

After completing the registration process, you need to set up your domain. This step should be done within 48 hours or they will delete the domain. So click the set up button now.

Finding yourself a host

To be able to set up the domain, you need a webhost. So, we’ll postpone the domain set up process for a while and find ourselves a webhost first. I stumbled on a service which provides free webhosting without ads called 000webhost. You won’t get premium features, but 1.5GB of disk space and 100GB of data traffic per month should be sufficient for our project.

Sign up for free hosting with your registered domain name from the previous step, and you’ll get the DNS addresses needed for the domain set up – both in the confirmation email and in the website. Armed with that information, we are ready to go back to our postponed task.

Please note that the host set up process could take a long time (up to 24 hours). So be patient here and refresh the page often.

Setting up the domain

Back at the “Manage Domain” page, choose the number one: “Name Server” option and write down these values:

- Name server 1: ns01.000webhost.com
- Name server 2: ns02.000webhost.com

Then click “Set Up“, and you’ll go into another waiting game.

Installing WordPress

After the host and the DNS settings are active, we can log in to the cPanel to install WordPress. You can log in using your email address and password.

Find the Software section inside the cPanel and choose Fantastico, then select WordPress and provide the admin name with the chosen password. The Fantastico installation script will make the WordPress installation easier by automatically building and linking the database for you.

You have to decide where you want to install WordPress. If you leave the sub-folder blank, then WordPress will be installed in the root folder: your domain name and you can access it using –> http://www.your-domain.co.cc. But if you put name in the sub-folder, then WordPress would be installed in that folder and accessible via http://www.your-domain.co.cc/foldername

Customization and final notes

You can customize your WordPress installation using plugins and themes and upgrade it to the latest build via FTP. The details of the FTP is available in the welcome email and in the cPanel. I won’t go into detail here because discussing that topic would require another one or two more articles.

With all that said and done, I have to emphasize that the free domain name and free hosting service will only go that far: as an experiment tool. If you want to do this seriously, you have to go with the paid service as they will provide you with more necessary bells and whistles.

But let me share one last trick here: you don’t have to settle with the price that web hosting company offer you. You can get a far cheaper price by applying for a web host re-seller account. Normally, this kind of account is not opened to the general public and also not free. But I found one which is free for everybody to join called Resellers Panel. (The link will put me as your referrer, but you can go directly to their website if you want)

By applying to become a reseller, not only you can get the cheapest price for domain names and hosting but you could also start your own business by reselling the service with the market price.

Do you use WordPress? Have you tried to install one on the web server? Share your experience using the comment below.

5 Best Blog Sites Other Than WordPress and Blogger

The two major players in the personal blogging space are WordPress and Blogger (Google). Although these two well established names have been around the longest and have the largest user base for personal blog sites, there are plenty of alternatives if their style is not for you, each with their own differences and reasons why you may or may not wish to use them.

The blog of today is quite different from the blog of just a few years ago. Many are into ‘casual blogging’ where a blog post is not just (long) text written out but perhaps just an image or sound clip.

Interested in which of the best blog sites offer alternatives to the big players? Let’s go over some WordPress and Blogger alternatives that you might want to check out.

Tumblr

Tumblr (also known as a Tumble log) is a widely known blogging service which we have covered here on MakeUseOf before. Tumblr really excels in two areas: so-called “photo blogging” and its sense of community.

Tumblr’s community is centered around the follow, like and the reblog. If you ‘like’ a post – similar to Facebook – it will show at the bottom of the post. Reblogging is much the same but in addition it will post the item back to your Tumblr as well.

You can import blog site posts from a number of other services including Twitter, RSS feeds, or even AOL Instant Messenger.

Posterous

Posterous is another “microblogging” service like Tumblr. You are able to post images, text, video and audio. Like Tumblr, you can change your theme easily but unlike Tumblr there is no “reblog.”

Posts can be imported from any number of sources and will also be “sent out” to Facebook and Twitter. One of the simplest ways to submit a post – and in fact to start your Posterous account, is to send an email to post@posterous.com. After doing so you will automatically be set up for an account and your blog created.

Twitter

Not usually considered a “blogging” service, Twitter is actually a microblog by definition. If you are able to write your thoughts in 140 characters or less Twitter is actually a great way to communicate with others.

One of the reasons Twitter has been so successful is that you do not have a lot of time investment to get started and to keep updated. If you leave your profile on public anyone can read your posts just like a regular blog site.

Xanga

Another popular blogging service is Xanga. One of the older blogging sites, it is definitely more for personal use.

Although Xanga used to be very popular it has waned somewhat recently with the rise of other sites, but is still popular especially with the younger crowd.

Weebly

Weebly is a hosted website and blogging service. Your account is free and ad-free, and if you want to upgrade to a domain and for certain other features there is a professional account available for a fee.

The one thing that I like about Weebly is how customizable the pages are. However, I think that is the same exact reason that more people do not use it. It is more complicated (than sending an email, as with Posterous) so for casual blogging it is more of a time commitment.

Which blogging service is for you?

As with many things in life, it depends on your personal tastes. Check out each site to see how it meshes with your personal style and how frequently you want to blog. For ease of use, I think Posterous or Tumblr win. For short messages, Twitter is great.

Let us know if you use any other hosted blogging service that you thing should be on the list of best blog sites, and what you like about it!

5 Legitimate Work-From-Home Jobs

We live in tough times. Those who are not unemployed are under-employed. Many people agonize between taking a second job and family time. My goal is to share with you some legitimate work-from-home jobs that will allow you to earn extra income for your family from the comfort of your own home on your schedule.

Many of these examples I have personally used to add extra income to my household when needed. I am not going to focus on starting an online business in this post (although, for the diligent there is money to be made in blogging, Adsense, creating your own products, selling on Ebay, and affiliate sales.) Instead, I want to introduce to you a few reputable work-from-home companies that will pay you for your work. All of these will send 1099’s for tax purposes.

5 legit opportunities to work from home

1. Demand Studios

They have many different employment opportunities that range from Writers, Editors, Title Editors, Filmmakers, and more. They are usually hiring for certain positions at certain times so you have to keep your eyes peeled. I have made several thousand dollars in article writing and title editing. I even got my wife into doing title editing and earning extra spending money. As a writer you can make between $7.50-$20.00 per 150-500 word article. I usually write about two articles an hour (that’s $30.00 an hour at $15.00 an article). You do not have to be a prolific writer or have a background in writing to get accepted. Most articles are in a “How to” format. So, if you are the type that enjoys learning something new and then explaining it to someone else then this could be a fun work for you. Most of their content goes on eHow.com or LiveStrong.com.

Let’s say you have a trip you want to take in a month. Just decide how many articles you would have to write a day to reach your goal. They pay by Paypal every Wednesday and Friday. There is no payment threshold that you have to meet either. If you have money in your account, you will get paid. They currently have thousands of titles to choose from in the system and you can reserve up to ten at a time.

2. Live Work

This is mostly like a running projects board for a company called LiveOps (which I will discuss later on). Live Work has many different projects that you can bid on. Many are data entry and task-oriented. You work as much as you want. I once worked on a Dictonary.com project and was paid for every definition and source that I put in the system. There really is a wide-variety of work available there.

3. Leapforce

They are a vendor for Google. Once you are accepted in the program you log-in to the Google interface and rate websites. Google wants their searches to be relevant. They use human raters to rate whether the content is worthy or spam. At the time of this writing, they pay $11.50 an hour.

4. Textbroker

This is a great place to earn extra income if you want to write on simple projects. They pay is much less, but the projects are easy to write on. I once wrote several 150 word articles for someone that was creating an Extreme Sports website. The work was fun. I simply wrote a short bio about different professional athletes.

5. Liveops

If you want more human interaction, then you might want to consider LiveOps. LiveOps is an at home call service that you dial into while in the comfort of your own home. You will have to make a weekly schedule, but you will never have to commute anywhere. All calls are inbound from people responding to infomercials and you basically take their ordering information while being logged into the LiveOps system. They pay is around $9.50 but you do earn commission for different products sold.

Wrapping it up

Hopefully, this list will get you started thinking about ways to supplement your income. This resource is also good for Stay-at-home moms that are looking for ways to earn so money without being on a tight schedule. There are many more work-from-home companies out there, but these are all ones I have had personal interaction with and can recommend that they are legitimate.