When blogging on CG I often get asked how do I find new products to write about, I won’t provide exact sources but I will share how I found the sources that I use.

In the gadget niche there are a hundreds (if not thousands) of sites reporting on all the latest and greatest gizmos. I subscribe to about 200 feeds and monitor them though out the day, especially the less popular ones which often pick-up on new stories that the big boys haven’t seen yet. If I see something that’s new and hasn’t be covered on a load of other sites yet I’ll write about and link to the source I first saw it on.

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My last bout of traffic analysis resulted in two posts here (long tail searches and one on optimising Adsense positioning) and a bit of extra cash (which is always nice). It was also successful in two other ways, one of which should bring me a bit more traffic and the other a bit of extra income.

Remonetize Popular Content
Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your pages are the most popular. I find you never really know which pages are going to become popular in the search engines but statistical analysis does sort of give you the benefit of hind sight. Once I see a page is bringing in a bit of traffic I’ll revisit it and see if there are any suitable affiliate programs I could promote. You know what people are searching for to find the page so if you can find them a suitable product everybody benefits.

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I’ve just received an email from my friend Patrick telling me about a new tool he’s written (well knowing Pat he probably got somebody else to write it) and it’s so cool I’ve had to break our one post a day tradition and share it straight away.

The tool is called Blog Storm and it tracks how many links your blog posts attract. That way you can see which of your posts are getting the most attention (or not). It produces a league table of your posts and a couple of pretty charts. You can see the stats of our recent posts over here, or the graph below.

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Having a high feed subscriber count is great from an ego and getting the word out point of view but not so much for your profit line. Feeds are notoriously hard to monetise well, whether that will change with Googles recent acquisition of Feedburner, time will tell. I find the best way to profit from feed subscribers is to get them to the site, which is what this post is about.

Links
Relevant internal linking is both helpful to your readers and will provide an easy route back to the site for your readers to follow. As well as linking to individual posts also link to categories e.g. “I came across this really cool traffic building tips“, this is also a great way to create keyword rich internal links that the search engines love.

An automated way to add relevant links is to install a “Related Posts” plugin, this will create links to related posts at the end of new ones. Most plug-ins only seem to this on the site and not on the feed so you might need to do a bit of manual tweaking.
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In the previous post we said how contests are a great way of encouraging interaction from your readers and gave a few samples. In this post I want to cover the basics, so to speak, of getting your readers to put fingers to keys.

Make it easy
Don’t make your readers jump through hoops to leave a comment as they probably won’t. Make it as simple as possible and clear, i.e. no mandatory registration and to a lesser extent captchas.
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When it comes to getting traffic to your blog (or most other sites to that matter), the most important thing you can get are plenty of inbound links. Inbound links will both send you traffic from the originating site and more importantly they serve as a vote for your site which will influence your site’s position in the search engines.

There are various ways to generate inbound links:

• Buy them - using services like Review Me or Text Link Ads or source direct in forums
• Exchange links - this is were you link to one site and in return they link to you. You can contact similiar themed and sized sites or again use a forum
• Organic links - these are when other sites link to you on their own accord and what this article is all about.

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I’m a bit of a stat head and enjoy trawling through log files and looking at pretty graphs. One statistic that I’m particularly interested in is the number of subscribers different sites have in different niches.

FeedBurner offer a great service for managing your sites feed and provide all sorts of interesting stats. You can also put one of their chicklets on your site to boast share with the world how many subscribers your site has.

I thought it would be both interesting and fun to create a top 100 (or so) of the sites with the highest feeds, so spent Saturday morning doing a big trawl around. (more…)

Many a website or blog are started with the sole purpose of making cash (and if you’re reading this blog I’m sure you know what I’m talking about), I know a lot of new and aspiring webmasters and questions I get asked a lot are:

• How can I make money from my 3 hour old blog?
• Are my ads blended enough?
• My brother and his pet dog have been banned from Adsense how else can I make money?
• How many ads should I put on my page?
• I haven’t got any subscribers yet so how should I monetize my feed?

I’m a pretty helpful guy (maybe a bit selfishly helpful due to my belief in karma) and the answer I almost always give is:

• Ask me again in 6 months

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When I first started out blogging I used to write all the content myself, it didn’t take me long to realise that this is exceedingly time consuming and puts limits on how much you can produce in any given day. I’m also somewhat dyslexic so I have to triple check everything that I write (spelling and grammar checkers are my friends) . Investing in paid writers makes it a lot easier to maintain regular updates to a site or blog and help it grow, but finding good paid writers can be difficult, in this post I’ll share where all the writers for CG came from. (more…)

I’m a firm believer in karma and the philosophy of doing to others as you want done to you and in the blogging world I find this rings particularly true.

One of the things I always do when reporting on a story I found on another site is link to them as the source. Other than just being plain polite (they did find the story first after all) it also offers various benefits:
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