If you don’t have a way for readers to subscribe to your email list, you are losing a lot of repeat traffic. Think about it, how many blogs do you visit on a daily basis? There are too many blogs to keep up with - yes, even the good ones. Sometimes I visit a blog that I find interesting and I will check it frequently for a while until they start going off topic and I lose interest. However if I sign up for their email notification list and I get a “friendly email reminder” that a particularly interesting post has been written chances are I will go and visit that blog again.

Previously, I have written about capturing all your blog readers. Having an email subscription system is one of the ways to keep in touch with your readers. Of course, if you’re into social networking, there’s also Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. Pick your poison.

Sidenote: By the way, if you use Twitter, Tweetscan is a great search engine specifically for Twitter.

My favorite autoresponder is Aweber. With Aweber, they claim you’ll get great deliverability (how does one check?). But the features I like are the ability to set up different sub-lists and transfer subscribers from one list to another based on certain actions. Suppose you’re selling your own product and you collect a list of prospects.

Now if someone on the prospects list buys your product, you can have them automatically switched to your customer list. This saves a lot of manual work.

Another feature that I like is the ability to do a split test on your email list. If you have a list of 6000 people, you can create a 3 way split-test message and you can partition it evenly (2000/2000/2000) or in any proportion that you like. This is a good way to test message titles (think direct marketing) and also message styles.

For those of you who are crazy about tracking, the reporting options are fantastic. You can keep a tabs on the daily trends of new leads, unverified vs. verified leads, countries, states, area codes, follow up status, etc. This is particularly useful if you want to keep a tab on how many people subscribe to your blog after a post that really appeals to your audience.

At $19.95 a month (if you have less than 10,000 people on your list) Aweber is unbeatable value!

Technorati Tags: autoresponders, Aweber, email list, followup

Popularity: 90% [?]

Do you know how long your website or blog takes to load for users with different internet connection speeds? The reason this is important is because not everyone is using broadband although it is becoming increasingly widespread. If your site takes forever to load, the chances of the visitor clicking on the back button is higher and you’re going to lose a lot of traffic that way.

Fortunately, there are tools available online that lets you check how fast or slow your site loads. Most of these tools are free. One example of such a tool is from websiteoptimization.com.

It tells you how fast your site loads depending on what type of connection your visitor has. It also gives you suggestions on how you can improve your load time.

Try to keep the load time less than 3 seconds. The main culprit of slow load times is usually images. Try as to use images in JPG or PNG formats. These formats usually take up the smallest amount of memory. If you have Photoshop, you can save the images in different formats and compare the file sizes. You can also set the amount of compression to use.

If you’re using third party widgets on your blog, these could also slow down your load times. You might have noticed that I have removed the Blog Catalog widget from my sidebar because I found that it was taking a long time to load up.

Remember, the faster your site loads, the more visitors you’ll retain and more visitors mean more money!

Technorati Tags: website load time, compress images, image files

Popularity: 91% [?]

I’m going to show you some stats of this site from Entrecard. As you can see the number of drops are increasing as well as the number of ad clicks and organic clicks. Most of the clicks are from casual droppers who don’t stay on the site but judging from my Clicky stats, there are a few that stay for a few minutes to look through the site. These are the types of visitors that I would like to have!

With Entrecard, you can drop up to 300 cards per day. Now if you don’t want to drop 300 cards everyday, you can get lots of credits to start you off by buying them on Ebay. Take a look:

Currently, I have 1125 credits to burn up. At some point, this blog went over the hump and started moving up in the number of credits required to advertise on the blog. I have a constant stream of advertisers wanting to place their ad here and sometimes I have to reject those that are irrelevant to the topic here.

Regarding card drops, an easy way to reciprocate card drops (if you’re using FireFox) is to go to your drops inbox and while holding on the CTRL key, click on each card that’s there. This will open up a new tab for each site and you can drop your card and then do a CTRL+W to close the tab and move on to the next one.

This will help you get some credits when your site is new and you need to build up some credits.

Technorati Tags: Entrecard, credits for sale on eBay, Entrecard stats

Popularity: 44% [?]

After using the Crawl Rate Tracker plugin for a little over a week, here are the updated results:

As you can see, there is quite a bit of activity from GoogleBot and Yahoo Slurp, but MSNbot still doesn’t show much love for this site.

Technorati Tags: check spider crawls, crawl rate tracker

Popularity: 32% [?]

Has anyone tried this from Microsoft? It’s called Office Live Basics and you can get a free domain name and web hosting with 500MB storage.

I’m wondering how long the free webhosting deal lasts for. And is the domain name renewable for free year after year?

It’s intended for small businesses but it’s worth a look. If anyone has already gotten a free domain from them, let me know how you like the service.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft Office Live Basics, free domain name, free webhosting

Popularity: 16% [?]

Check out BlogRush which is a widget that you can place on your blog. How it works is that the widget will display titles of posts and snippets from other blogs in the category that you choose. You build up credits for the number of times the widgets shows on your blog and the more credits you have, the more often posts from your blog will get syndicated around the internet. It’s a viral way of building more traffic to your blog.

Registration is simple and free. I did it within a minute. All you have to do to get your widget is to enter the name of your blog, blog URL, feed URL and the category that best fits your blog. Then copy the code that is provided and place it on your blog.

If you use a WP blog template that is widget enabled, you can easily add the BlogRush widget to your sidebar. Under the presentation/theme editor window, drag a text widget to your sidebar and past the BlogRush code in there. Save it, and that’s it.

I’ve installed it on the sidebar of this blog so that you can see what it looks like. BlogRush is still in beta right now so I expect that there’ll be more features added on in the future, such as customization to fit your blog’s color scheme.

Technorati Tags: BlogRush, blog syndication, blog traffic

Popularity: 13% [?]

Text Link Ads (TLA) is another good way to monetize your site without taking up a lot of precious real estate on the screen. TLA is a link broker or a middleman who sells text links on your behalf. If you’re considering selling text links, you’ll have to register for an account and submit your site for consideration. I’ve submitted a few sites and I’ve noticed that those with low or no PR get rejected.

Background information

TLA was founded by Patrick Gavin who has given some interviews here and here. I also saw their booth at SearchEngineStrategies 2006 in NYC.

How to choose which category to advertise in?

Here’s a tip. If you choose a category that doesn’t already have a lot of sites advertising (less competition), your chances of selling your text links are much higher. You can scope out the competition by clicking on “Buy Links.”

You’ll see the categories on the left side of your screen.

Notice that some categories are further subdivided into smaller sections. Others like “Baby” and “Books” are just by themselves. I checked on the baby category and there are currently no sites listed. That means that if your site gets accepted, it’ll be the only one shown on the page. If there are many sites listed for the category, there is a chance that your site may be listed on the next page which decreases the likelihood that it’ll be seen by prospective advertisers.

How much can you make?

I’ve seen prices listed from $20 to $1000 per month, depending on the popularity of the sites and the number of pages the links will be placed on. Your share is 50% of the revenue. So if your link sells for $100 a piece, your share will be $50. You’re allowed to sell up to 8 links, so you could potentially have $400 in passive income every month as long as the advertisers keep their orders.

You can also recruit other webmasters or advertisers and get paid a flat fee of $25 per referral. They either have to get accepted into the publishers program or purchase a link (as an advertiser).

So the bottom line is, if you’ve got an inventory of websites and want to make some extra passive income, be sure to check out Text Link Ads.

Technorati Tags: text links, text link ads, selling links, link broker

Popularity: 39% [?]

If you’re looking for ways to further monetize your blog, take a look at Kontera. It’s a unique contextual advertising system that scans your website for keywords that match their ad inventory. The keywords on your page will appear as active links but these links look slightly different from regular links (they have a dotted line below the regular underline). When the mouse cursor is hovering over the Kontera links, the ad will show up on the page. It’s sorta like the Yahoo! Search box that pops up on the page when you view Yahoo News.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Want to know what’s hot and what’s not? What are the products that people are searching for? A good place to start your research is Google’s own shopping search tool called Froogle. It will show you in real time the searches that are being performed. For example, I just went to the site and right now it’s showing these searches:

sleeping bag
compact flash memory
diamond earrings
belgian chocolate
sapphire ring
lawn gnome
kodak easyshare
coffee table
iomega zip drive
diablo 2
red sox sweatshirt
patio heaters
jogging stroller
dominoes
rio mp3
chaise
radio scanner
glass coffee table
jukebox
gel pens
waffle iron
thank you cards
lanyard
king size mattress
rain gauge

If you click on the ‘Refresh’ button on your browser, the list will automatically update. If you want to find out more about one of the items, just click on it and you will see the results page that has pictures of the product. I just found out what a ‘chaise’ and a ‘lanyard’ are.

Popularity: 22% [?]

If you want to get more relevant links to your blog or website, you’ll either have to go out and look for link exchanges (usually emailing the webmaster of the site you wish to exchange links with) or have interested webmasters come to you requesting for links. You can simplify the process using Link Metro where you can sign up for free and manage all your link requests. The user interface is very easy to navigate and the website directory is neatly divided into different categories.

The main categories are:
Art and humanities
Business and industry
Computers
Health and fitness
Internet
News and media
Recreation
Society
Sports

Each category is also subdivided into smaller categories.

Popularity: 15% [?]