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Yet another blogging widget thingie to experiment with. BlogRush promises to increase traffic to your blog by syndicating your post links across a network of other sites that also display the same widget. This way, blogs of similar subject matter exchange links of the latest content and exchage traffic. Sounds like a good idea, and it is free, so I thought I’d give it a try. I figure It’s all in the name of science, and also the deeper reason: why not?

Once you sign up your blog you will be given some javascript code to use on your site, just like Adsense, Kontera and many others. The best way to include this into your WordPress blog is to use a text widget. Add a new Text Widget into your sidebar and insert the BlogRush code into the box provided as shown below. Save the changes and you should be in business.

If everything worked out ok, your blog sidebar should now have a new widget that looks like the one here. Since this is new and “hot” at the moment, I forsee it spreading like wildfire at least for the immediate future. Many of the big names in blogging have been talking about this already with varying degrees of scepticism and/or hype, but at the end of the day, no one really knows how effective this thing will be BlogRush is a solid and viable idea for a above-board traffic exhange system. How it pans out over the coming months remains to be seen.

As far as I’m concerned, its a good enough concept to try out, so here it is on my blog. All in the name of science, of course. Try it out yourself see if the whole free website traffic claims work out for you. And, feel free to exchange notes about your results in the comments below.

Samir

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I applied for a Kontera ContentLink account for this blog about a week ago, and I was finally accepted. The whole idea with this site is for it to be a repository of my ideas about creative ideas, and also a test-bed and exploration of my various experiments into online enterprise. Like many other bloggers, I signed up for Google AdSense quite early in the game because it is the simplest advertising system to get into. Now that that has been running for a few months, I thought it was time to try out some other avenues of monetization, and so Kontera came into the picture. In case you don’t know what Kontera is, find a link in this post which has a double underline, and hover your mouse pointer over it.

Kontera has been around for a while, but it really started to increase in popularity when Google finally got rid of a restriction on using other contextual advertising systems with AdSense. Kontera was always an attractive option because it converts existing text into ad links without adding any more elements to the page. Now that you can use Kontera on the same page as AdSense, it’s a great additional ad network for diversifing your advertising space.

Since a lot of you wanting to implement Kontera ContentLink on your own sites are using WordPress, I though an article on the methods of setting up Kontera in a WordPress blog was required. Like AdSense, Kontera provides you with some unique Javascript code to insert into your pages. Unlike AdSense, you don’t need to insert the code multiple times. Kontera studies the entire page (or at least the selected parts of the page - see section targeting below) and automatically inserts the in-content links. The code for Kontera can be implemented into WordPress in two different ways:

1. Install the Plugin
2. Hack the Template

Both the methods work fine and each has its advantages, so you need to decide which method best suits your needs. Now on to the details of how to implement Kontera in your WordPress site.
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This is to announce the addition of the MyBlogLog widget to the sidebar. Woohoo! If you are a member of the MyBlogLog blog community site, your username and avatar should show up under the recent readers list in the sidebar when you visit this blog.

For those of you who don’t know, MyBlogLog is a blog community site like Technorati but with some additional tracking functions. There is also a very strong community building component, including the ability to see a public list of recent visitors to the blog as you can see at the bottom of the sidebar, and also a sort of private message board per author where other MyBlogLog members can leave comments and shoutouts. Check out the MyBlogLog page for Samir Bharadwaj dot Com.

I actually signed up for the MyBlogLog service quite some time ago, but I never got around to implementing the widget on the site. Since I was a member, I did show up on other people’s blogs when I visited, which was a plus. During this silent time, one person has already taken the trouble and done me the honour of joining the MyBlogLog community for this blog. Jon Anderson of SucessPart2.com has not only been kind enough to include many of my posts in various editions of his wonderful blog carnivals in the past, but now he has also set the ball rolling on my MyBlogLog community. For all that I am thankful, and for his efforts he wins a FREE toaster! … well, a “virtual” free toaster actually, in the form of the new and extremely prestigious Free Toaster Award! *applause*

Congratulations Jon, on winning the innaugural Free Toaster Award! Feel free to save it and do with it what you will — use it as a bumper sticker, a snazzy ID tag, a sexy tattoo, or whatever suits your fancy. If you want a print a large wall to wall poster of it you might need a better version, which I will be glad to supply.

All you other wonderful people out there, you know you want the Free Toaster Award, don’t you? Maybe I will make this a semi regular feature and give these out to some deserveing people once in a while. Meanwhile, if you enjoy reading this blog please join my MyBlogLog community and leave a comment or two on my author page. It will be good to know who my readers are. As far as you keeping track of me, you have already subscribed to my full feed RSS haven’t you?

Samir

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The story so far …
Debi (Mobile) Jones had a problem with her Adsense payment due to a changed address. Matt Cutts from Google stepped in and eventually the problem was solved. When she went into the bank to cash her cheque, however, she was told that there were not enough funds in the account. Needless to say when the account in question belongs to Google, this piece of news from the bank teller can lead to anything from utter outrage to rolling laughter on the part of the recipient. I am happy to say Debi saw the humour of the situation and her report on her banking experience makes for a very entertaining read. Her new problem hasn’t been solved yet at the time of this writing and she posted a follow up to say as much. I found out about all this through Problogger, and now the story will obviously be Dugg to death. People love being incensed.

Personally I think it is an unfortunate story, but it’s more a story of neglect rather than of malice, as some would like to paint it. Google isn’t really out to get you or anything that sinister. They’re just too big and monolithic to notice sometimes. Not that that is an excuse in anyway from our end-user point of view, but it is the sad truth of most large organisations.

I’m surprised by the fact that the main Google inbound number still leads to a simple recorded message system (as mentioned by Debi). I would have thought they would have moved on to a falsely personalised anonymous call-centre a few thousand miles away by now. The fact that they haven’t done that actually impresses me, because I’m not quite sure which is better, the non-communicative recorded message lady, or the below average intelligence and resourcefullness of a call centre employee.

On the original blog, there were actually concerns by readers about commenting on this topic for fear of it negatively affecting their Adsense accounts. That, I think is a much worse thing to be happening than the actual bounced cheque. If I was Google I would be much more worried by the fact that my publishers seem to be living in so much mortal fear of retribution, than one wrong cheque.

Google has changed the internet and has pretty much single-handedly started the revolution of the monetisation of personal sites and content. They are a company that does a lot of positive things, and I admire them for it. Projects like the Summer of Code are absolutely brilliant ideas which produce positive results for a large community of people and are truly praiseworthy. Like all large organisations, however, I think Google does need to re-boot and re-think their basics on a regular basis. Sure, a lot of people are always going to hate them for no particular reason, that comes with the territory. But to continue being the dominant and moving force that they have come to become, they need to make sure their position is one of respect and not of fear. Unlike what some people think, those are not the same thing.

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Blogs are all the rage today. There are millions of them in existence and hundreds of new ones appear every day. Blogs have been hailed as the democratisation of the internet, so people create more of them. They are said to be a search-engine’s favourite thing, so businesses maintain more of them. It’s getting to a point where the blog is becoming the default site structure in many people’s minds. What of the good old static website? Is that a thing of the past? Julie Anne Bonner asked this very question on her blog a while ago which resulted in an ongoing discussion.

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This site went live on the 4th of May, 2007. It is exactly a month old today, so I decided to do a little recap of the month that was. I plan to to make this a regular feature because it helps me keep track of my progress, and also allows me to link back to and thank some people who have helped me along the way.

Traffic

As you can see in the graph below, I had very little traffic to begin with. This was carried over from my static site that existed in this same space. That traffic was largely driven by links on sites I had designed for clients and also signature links from my participation in forums (mostly BlenderArtists). The traffic then was usually only a few hundred page-views a month. Almost non-existent in the larger scheme of things, but then my original site was really meant to be more of a showcase for clients who needed proof that I could do all those things they needed me to do for them. It was adequate for the purpose.

This month the growth above that original level of traffic was stratospheric, and it was all because of the Problogger Top 5 group writing project (discussed below). Traffic figures for SamirBharadwaj.com in May 2007 were:
Total Pages — 275100
Total Visits — 64736

That is quite literally a hundred times what I used to get on my old static site (which I never really marketed anyway). So all in all, I am extremely pleased with this initial boost during the first month of this site’s existence.

The Problogger Top 5 Group Writing Project

I have been an occasional visitor at Problogger.net for many months now, because the plan to create a more comprehensive site with a blog has been swimming around in my head for a long time, and Problogger is an excellent source of information and ideas about blogging. I came upon the group writing project on one of my random visits, a few days after starting this blog. It was already a day into the project and I didn’t have much time, but I did want to do something significant rather than some arbitrary listing. Keeping that in mind I came up with the idea of photography tips. Once again, I wanted to make the article special, so I decided to take some special shots to illustrate the piece. I managed to finish all this just in time for the deadline, and the result was Top 5 Tricks for Taking Professional Looking Photographs with your Digital Camera

My article was linked in the Day 4 listing and also in the final listing on Problogger and after a quiet day or two a flood of visitors arrived peaking at 28,000 page views on the 14th. After that there was a decline to more steady levels of traffic but still a healthy flow. Most of this came through people publishing the list of Top 5 posts on their own blogs, which resulted in some social bookmarking activity. I was lucky that some people singled out my post and decided to recommend it specifically. That lead to minor levels of Digg and Del.icio.us traffic and a flood of Stumbleupon traffic. Stumbleupon is still sending a steady stream of traffic to my site through this post.

So, a big Thank You to Darren Rowse of Problogger and all those kind people who linked to me for getting me started on this blog with a bang rather than a whimper.

Blog Carnivals

While I highly appreciated the sudden burst of traffic to my photography tricks post, I did know that I would have to do enough marketing to create some sustained traffic to this site. The major step in that direction during this first month was participating in Blog Carnivals. I submitted some of my more interesting posts to some carnivals and was actually included in a few. Here is a list below:

• As mentioned in my previous post on the Carnival of Cinema, I was included in Episode 31 and Episode 32 of the carnival for my review of Guru & Babel and for my post about The Best Action Movie Ever respectively. Thanks to Scott Nehring for that.
• Lessons in learning, language and literature was linked in the 1st edition of The Blog Party Carnival. The carnival is run by Jenny over at the so called me.
• Tyrannis Populi: Who are ‘the people’ anyway and who says they are always right? was included in the Carnival of Conflict #2 by Nathan Vogel.
• How to anti-crash a wedding in 5 easy steps - a case study was included in the May 27 edition of the Carnival of Observations on Life by Anja Merret. Anja has an eclectic blog that makes for some very interesting reading.
• How to anti-crash a wedding in 5 easy steps - a case study was also included in the 10th Edition of Carnival of The Storytellers organised by DigitalRich.

ToDo

That was the first month of SamirBharadwaj.com. Problogger has provided me with an initial surge of traffic, but that positive is also the weakness of this site at the moment. Almost all incoming traffic is for the Top Photo Tricks post at the moment. I need to diversify my traffic so that I can sustain it in the long term.

Also I still need to make many technical tweaks and changes to this blog to get it looking and working better in some areas.

A good start and plenty more to do. As always, I will keep you posted on my progress right here on this blog. You can also subscribe to my RSS feed to keep your fingers on the pulse here and for a lot more great content. Until the next post …

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Feedburner has become a ubiquitous part of every blogger’s arsenal. Over the past few months, before I actually got this blog up and running in May, I found Feedburner mentioned in every tips and tricks list on creating a successful blog. The Feedburner redirection plugin for Wordpress appeared in almost every list of most important plugins, and there were reams of material on when to and when not to show your Feedburner reader count on your blog. So the question is, if it’s so important, why look for an alternative? After all, everyone uses it.

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