Newbies Should Join Clickable Networks

In order to be successful after you launch your website or blog, you need to get visitors. But how to do this is often a mystery to the novice on an extremely minimal budget.

You may believe that you are doing everything that is right, such as posting interesting articles, updating content frequently, telling friends, and concentrating on keywords. But, still you're only getting 1-5 visitors a day. How can you improve this?

How do you get more visitors?

By joining the "Clickable Networks".

These are the organizations who enroll members, require you to display a widget of sorts, and encourage you to visit other member sites by clicking on their widget.

From our experience, we have identified 5 Clickable Network providers and have listed them below in alphabetical order:

1. Adgitize (Websites & Blogs - must have RSS Capability)
2. CMF Ads (Blogs Only)
3. Entrecard (Blogs Only)
4. SlogBite (Websites & Blogs)
5. Spott (Websites & Blogs)

Of the 5, two insist that you must be a blog. The other three allow both websites and blogs to join.

In our upcoming posts, we will present an in-depth review of each of these networks. We will discuss both the advantages and drawbacks of each. In addition, we will inform you as to whether your membership will be rewarding or a waste of time.

Until then,

JL..........

PS: The above list is comprised of the networks we joined. If you know of others, please leave a comment and describe them.

Recent Yahoo Search Marketing Changes

Yahoo! Sponsored Search connects businesses and customers online. Sign up and get a $25 credit.


During the past few months, Yahoo has introduced significant improvements to their Yahoo! Search Marketing product.

Primarily, they added 3 important features:

• Demographic Bidding
• Geo-targeting, and
• Ad Scheduling

First, Demographic Bidding allows you to target your ads to different groups of people, and adjust your bids accordingly. You may set different advertising rates for varying age groups or sex.

Second, you can specify different regions of the U.S. or Canada to target using the Geo-targeting feature. Using this refinement, you can limit your ads to display in entire countries, or in specific Zip or Postal Codes only.

And third, Ad Scheduling allows you to display your ads at differing times of the day, rather than the old 24 hours per day.

In addition to these modifications, they are now filtering out many of the "parked sites" that click on your ads without ever producing any revenue.

If your blog or website offers particular products to sell, these new features can assist you in reaching the buying audience that you are looking for. Remember:

Yahoo! Sponsored Search lists your business on top sites like Yahoo!, AltaVista and CNN. Sign up and get a $25 credit.


So, if you aren't already advertising on Yahoo! Search Marketing, now is the time to give them a try.

When Google Analytics isn't Counting your Visits

We recently joined CMF Forums and read of one member's frustration with Google Analytics not working properly. They included an Analytics screen shot that says they only had 1 Visit with 0.0 time on the site and 100% bounce rate.

We visited their site for a couple of days so we know that there are more than 1 visitor. So, we decided to investigate a little deeper.

We went to their site again, and used our browser's option to look at their page's html source. We found their tracking code and believe that there may be 4 problems with it:

• First, the tracking code may be in the incorrect location. Google recommends that it be located at the very end of the HTML and just before the < /body > tag. Their's is in the middle of the page.
• Second, and perhaps most importantly, the code is missing the "try {} check {}" error block. That's not good.
  
• Third, you may have another script that prevents this from working. If so, place the tracking code at the top of your source code, just before the < /head > tag.
• Fourth, look at your account number. We don't know what it should be, but if you have multiple sites, you may be using the wrong one.

To correct the above, we recommend you remove the existing code, get new tracking code, and use the Google Utilities to check that it is working.

---

How do you go about doing the above?

Follow these Steps:

1. Log into your Google Account
2. Go to your "My Account" Page
3. Under the My Products Heading, Look for and click the Analytics Link
4. Click on the Edit links under Action. This will show your Profile settings. It will display your site name & profile ID, then a table of your website info.
5. Look to the top right of the 1st table and it will display the green check mark & Receiving Data label. If it doesn't, something is wrong.
6. Also in this area of the page is a (Check Status) link. You should press this!
7. And then see what the status is. (It should say Receiving Data, if not, something's still wrong)
   
8. Most Importantly, it will give you the Tracking Code you need to place on your site.
9. Copy the code and paste it in your site's HTML Code. (don't forget to remove the old stuff)
10. Save your new sites HTML page, and then repeat Step 6

Once added correctly, it will take around 24 hours before data flows correctly.

Good Luck & Happy Easter!

JL.......

Important AdSense Notices for April 2009

If you're a Google AdSense publisher, there are two important notices that you should address.

• Update your Privacy Policy (by April 8th)
• Remove Video Units (by April 30th)

First is their request for you to review and update your Privacy Policy in preparation for interest-based advertising. They provide you a link which describes what information you should include about Google and the DoubleClick DART cookie. Your work should be completed by April 8, 2009. You can read their official notice your account's main AdSense Reports page.

The second notice indicates that the AdSense Video Units product will be retired at the end of April 2009. This means that if you have installed video units on you website or blog, you should consider removing that content by the end of the month. Apparently, this product has not performed as expected.

As other important news is released, we will keep you informed.

JL.......

Our Focus, Our Topics

Long before the recent economic downturn hit, many people were lured into starting blogs and websites by people promising to either make you rich or learn the secrets of earning large yearly incomes. All we had to do was to buy a book or video, get a domain name, place some ads, join an affiliate marketing program, hire an SEO, and watch the revenues pour in.

To those of us with similar dreams, we learned the sad and harsh reality that this will probably never occur.

Creating a successful site requires a lot of time, hard work, trials & errors, internet searching, self doubt and wondering.

In our upcoming posts, we will share our experiences. We will let you know what worked for us, and what things were a waste of time. We will provide you a road map for establishing your online presence, inform you of important news, and tell you things you should be doing.

Our future posts will address topics such as :

• Boosting you Visitors Count
• Free Blogging Networks
• Paid Advertising
• Social Marketing
• Free Advertising Vehicles
• Affiliate Marketing
• Website Security
• Noteworthy Programming Tools
• Knowing Your Visitors
• Important News
• How-to's
• and more.

We plan to update our blog 3 times a week, usually on Monday, Tuesday and Friday.

We hope you will: Bookmark our site; Subscribe to our posts; Leave us your comments, Join our communities; and, Feel free to ask us questions.

And, in the end, perhaps one or more of us will realize our dreams and start to become wealthy (or at least pay for our expenses).

JL....

Resuming Service

We have decided to more actively resume "Ask the Blogster" postings and activity.

After more than a year of working on:

• hacker prevention and safeguarding of our website,
• building our core business blogs,
• increasing visitor traffic, and
• creating a social network presence,

we have concluded that it is now time to begin focusing on this blog.

Our original intention of this blog was to provide a vehicle by which we could share many of our programming, advertising, mistakes, and other technical learning experiences with you.

During this past year we have learned a lot and believe this credence remains worthwhile. So now, its time to begin dusting off this old blog and begin to move forward.

JL..........

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