Traffic from Google Image search

I was going through my traffic source on Google Analytics (Your Traffic Source) and found something interesting. I get a lot of traffic from image search. I really do something to get this and today I would just give you some tips to get your images listed for relevant keywords for Google Image Search. I do a lot of posts related to the resorts in Maldives on my other blog. I do use lots of images on this blog as I always travel with a camera ( canon Tx 1 ) and the texts in my posts are very less compared to the Images and Videos. If you search of Kanuhura Resort on Google  Image search, my blog images are listed first and I get a lot of traffic from this. This is just an example, but how does Google know that this image is of Kanuhura resort?

Optimizing your blog for Image search

Let me come back to the answer to the question that I came up. You need to tell Google or any search engine that the image is of so and so or give the information about the image and you do this using the Alt tag.

I use windows live writer to do my blog posts and it has an excellent feature to insert the alt tags. As you side on the image on the left side, I just need to enter the alternate text in the text box provided. By default, the image file name is inserted, but you need to edit it insert the right keywords or description of the image.

Using Alternate text for your images will be really worth the time you spend as your images get listed in Image search results and this is again opening up your traffic and chances of more back links.

Contests Improves Growth In Loyal Visitors

Contests are one the methods to improve the growth of loyal visitors or readers of your blog. I see method used by most of the bloggers who have good amount of traffic and regular readers. Today I saw a post on John Chow blog announcing a contest.

How does contests improve your blog’s traffic or grow the number of loyal visitors?

When you announce a contest and the price, many would like to participate in it and many may even recommend their friends to check that out. Some who are bloggers or who participate in different discussions or forums may post about your content on these forums or in their blogs.

Getting a reward from your blog will even give more results as the winner will always try to post about this on other forums or his own blog about the contest. You get more backlinks, more traffic and more revenue. Traffic and revenue are always related, the more traffic you get, the chances of making more revenue is high.

Contests increases the interest in your visitors to come back and read your blog post, check if you have done any new posts and interact with you by posting comments or trackbacks.

Mostly I see that the bloggers don’t give away big prices, usually it will be like 10,000 entrecard credits or a free review about their blog.

Try announcing some contest on your blog and giveaway something which the participants should feel that, its worth. When you announce a contest, make sure you decide the price for the winner, the closing date of the contest, the terms and conditions and the judges for the contest.

I have never tried this, but very soon I will be announcing one. So stay tuned in

Google Adsense Vs Private sales of Ads

Revenue generation from your blog will be your ultimate aim if you are running a blog for money. I have discussed about earning through blogging in my previous posts and different sources of revenue for your blog. How much can you earn from a blog is a question which had different answer for different bloggers depending upon the traffic of the blog and kind of traffic you have.

Google Adsense is the most widely source of advertising tool by most of blogger. But when they start getting sufficient revenue from private sales of ads, they avoid Google Adsense for many reasons. I have noticed that blogger like Darren Rowse, John Chow do not use Google Adsense these days. They started their earning from Google Adsense but now they get very high income from their private sales of Ads and almost all the ad slots are over booked.

Which one should you choose?

I got an invitation for Google Ad manager recently and was just trying to do the settings. I have not yet started using it as I really do not need it. It is has good features, but its not helping me much. I use Google Adsense more on this blog not because I earn more from Google Adsense, but I do not have any private advertiser yet who pays me more than Google Adsense.

Bloggers like Amit Agrawal earns more than US$ 1000 from Google Adsense, so why should we think that earning potential in Google Adsense is less, but Amit’s blog has millions of page views every month, so we cannot expect a big revenue from Google Adsense. Another problem that can happen to your advertising revenue is if your Google Adsense account is banned, what will be your source of revenue if you solely depend on Google Adsense.

My Strategy

I use Google Adsense, and I am trying to get some private advertisers, not looking into the rates much for now. I can offer good discounted price and I have good number or Feed readers now. As my blog statistics improves, I may get good advertisers and good revenue from private sales of Ads.

Other possible revenue is from Affiliate programs and other advertising sites like CJ, Amazon, etc, but all needs conversion and you may not earn anything in the beginning. I also offer paid reviews complying with the Google Webmaster guidelines

So to conclude, Google Adsense can play an important role in your blog’s revenue, stick to it and as your blog traffic grows, you can try for private sales of ads

How much do bloggers earn from their blog?

Earning through blogging is something which I had discussed before and today I am going to tell you about how much some bloggers earn from their blog. There are Great Bloggers who earn something which will be surprising and this is done by them from a single blog by different ways to earn from a blog

John Chow – Is one of the great bloggers and he earns money by telling others, how much he earns from his blog. He earns more than US$ 30,000 per month

Darren Rowse – He is from Australia and has been into professional blogging since 2002 and he earns more than US$ 10,000 per month

Amit Agrawal – He is from India and he is known as the first professional Indian Blogger who earns more than US$ 25,000 per month

Steve Pavlina – Another blogger who started his blog in 2004 with an earning of less than US$ 5 per day and now he earns more than US$ 1000 per day. He has written an interesting article on the methods of earning from a blog which you should read.

Shoemoney – Earns great from his blog. I see a picture of an Adsense check with a value of US$ 132,994.97, that’s really unbelievable.

Earning from a blog is something which is possible, but how much do you earn is the question. Most of the bloggers have used Google Adsense for their beginning and mostly everybody switch over to private sales of ads which generates more income than Google Adsense. All these bloggers have been blogging for sometime and it takes time to reach this level. My advice to novice bloggers is to concentrate on creating good content and attract more traffic. The earn of income is Traffic and to gain traffic you need loyal visitors. Keep track of the performance of your blog using tools like Google Analytics, study the growth of your blog and work accordingly. You can never reach this income level overnight, you need to keep patience and work hard.

Get some traffic from Entrecard

Sorry that I could not do any posts last three days as I got held up with my project work. I had signed up for an Entrecard account which is something interesting and a source of traffic.

Entrecard is getting popular and I find more and more bloggers having this on their blog.

Concept - The concept is interesting, just sign-up for a free account and upload your card, which is a simple 125 x 125 px image or you can create one from the website itself. Entrecard is something like your internet business card. You can place your card on other blogs using your Entrecard point.

This program seems to be interesting and there are options to encash your Entrecard points. I have just started using it so I am not in a position to tell more about it now. I will surely post my Entrecard experience soon

How different bloggers earn money from their blog

You know what is a blog and there are many people earning good from their blog. How do they earn so much money and why can’t you earn as they earn. This may the question that might be moving around you. Well, we need to check how do they earn so much of money and can we adopt these techniques or tricks.

Let me give your some clear and common fact these bloggers follow

Time and Age of their blogs

This is something you need to think. How long have you been blogging sincerely? How much time do you spend for your blog. How much posts do you do everyday?

If you are blogging once in a while, forget about earning, If you are busy with your daily work or your full time job and you are not able to make blogging as a high priority task, then its difficult to earn. If you have just started blogging, then hold on and carry on, it takes some time to get good traffic, loyal visitors, improve your bounce rate, improve your search engine ranking, branding yourself, high Google pagerank, good number of subscribers, creating news letters, all these take its own time.

John Chow earns money tell people how much he earns, this is really interesting. He has good number of subscribers, had good pagerank, heavy back links, and he has good number of advertisers. Can you imagine, he charges US$ 500 to write a paid review. He made this happen after he was working hard for some time. His blog is now more than 2 year old.

Darren Rowse says he earned very less from Google Adsense, which was just US$ 400,000. Can you even imagine to earn this from your blog? Yes you can earn, but let me tell you Darren started blogging in 2002, its now about 6 years. So you need to wait to reach some heights. These are the people who made people realize that you can earn money through blogging and you do not need to sell anything.

Amit Agrawal the first Indian Professional blogger earns around US$ 1000 from Google Adsense and he knows how to maximize Google Adsense Revenue. He has a technology blog where he posts information which are really worth reading and you will find all his posts with great information. I read his blog every day. He has been blogging since 2004

All these bloggers generate revenue from different affiliate programs and advertising program. They get paid because they have loyal visitors, good traffic. Traffic is the power which really monetize your blog and for traffic you need good posts, and keep your blog fresh with new posts consistently

Traffic Source Distribution on my blog

Recently I was just checking the Quality of social networking site traffic. I had a few of my pages in this blog submitted to StumbleUpon and got some traffic from it. I was just going through the Google Analytics report and found something interesting that I thought of sharing with you

I use Google Adwords for this blog and get a lot of clicks from the campaigns. Please note that I do not spend more than US$ 10 for the Ads on Adwords, and I feel its worth. I get most of my traffic from Adwords as this blog is new and there is no pagerank right now. I need to wait until I get good search engine ranking for this blog and it takes time. I am not worried about that, all I need is to have good quality content. I am not buying any links or I am not planning to for the sake of increasing link popularity of to increase the number of backlinks

My second traffic source is direct traffic, which are from visitors, who type in the URL of this blog and come to my blog. So its a good sign. This traffic source of high value and its a good sign

The third one is from StumbleUpon, but I am not happy with the quality of this traffic.

Reasons - The Bounce rate is the highest of all 92.73%, the time spend on this site is an average of just 1.08 minutes which is again the lowest. Time spent by a visitor who came from Google Adwords is 02.24 minutes, bounce rate is 63.28%, time spent by a visitor who came directly to my is 4.54 minutes and the bounce rate is less than 50%.

I feel the best traffic is the traffic which come directly and in my case, the best are from my feed subscribers which has a bounce rate of just 35% and the average time spent is about 19.16 minutes which is very good.

To conclude I would like to say is don’t worry much about the traffic, just concentrate on writing good content, respond to the comments, and provide the best and latest information to your readers. Don’t just rely of traffic from social networking sites. I see many bloggers depending on these traffic. You can use the stats for getting good advertisers for your blog, that is something which is useful from these kind of traffic.

Studying your traffic source

Its very important to keep track of your blogs statistics, traffic source , analyse your blog growth and for this I would suggest your use Google Analytics, which is the best and free system available. I use this for all my websites and get all the information that I need to know and this helps me in improving my blog traffic. With Google analytics your can find the traffic source, like if its from a particular site or search engines or from your Google adwords campaign or any other sources. If its search engine, you can find the keywords that your page ranked for and the number of visits or pageviews that you got from that particular keyword. You can even find information like the Location of the visitor, bounce rate, the time that the visitor spent on your website, the pages that the visitor visited during that visit, the location of the visitor, returning visitor, loyalty of the visitor, operating system that the visitor is using, the browser used by the visitor and tons of other information. These things are very important information that you need to have about your blog so that you can tune your blog for improving your traffic.

I was just going through the reports at Google Analytics and wondering about my blog traffic at this blog and found that 79% of my visitors are from referring sites. Which means that some site has my links posted and the visitor has clicked that like and came to this blog. I have very less visitors from search engines, reason is that this is a new blog and to get listed in search engine and getting top ranking for popular keywords will take some time. This blog does not have a Pagerank yet as its just started last month. I am not worried about search engine traffic as I am well aware how much time it takes to get ranked in search engine, but I still get traffic from search engines which is really a good sign for me.

Now I would just like to compare the traffic information of one of my other blog which has about 51% of the traffic from search engines. This blog is a bit old blog as well and has a fairly good pagerank. 41% of the traffic is from referring site. In fact the statistics of this blog was very different 1 month back. I never used social networking sites like stumbleupon or digg, but some visitor did submit some of my pages to these social networking sites and the statistics of my blog started changing. Earlier 85% of my traffic was from search engines and the remaining from other sources. This shows that Social Networking sites can really change the statistics of your blog. But there are some issues using social networking sites for traffic and many experts say that Social networking traffic and just waste of bandwidth. The conversion rate from these sites are very low. I will come up with a post after a detailed study on this topic

Newsletters for your blog

Newsletters are one of the must have marketing tools for your blog. There are many advantages of having a newsletter for your blog

• Promoting your blog - You can promote your blog using the News letter. You can periodically sent latest information and changes about your blog, request feedbacks and keep in touch with them. There are cases where you would like to get some information from your subscribers.
• Monetizing your blog - When you have good number of subscribers to your news letter, you can get them to your blog and inform them about a new post. When you have more visitors to your blog, you get more advertisements and finally more revenue
• Special Announcement - There are cases when many subscribers do not visit your blog, you can send announcement about something interesting to them and bring them back to your blog
• Boosting your sale - Suppose you have a new product which you want to sell through your blog. You can send a news letter and increase your sales

News Letter Websites

I have used two newsletter service providers

Aweber and Getresponse - Both of them are paid services, but I feel its worth to have one, but you should use it periodically to send some announcements and information

Using Feedburner subscribe through email facility you can send your posts by email, but not special announcements.

Free Web directory lists

I just thought of highlighting one of the free web directory which I had been building for the past 2 years. This is called EmailMe Web Directory which is a 100% free web directory. There are about 30,000 submissions done and was done by the HomeJob Pro members.

Referring to my previous post related to increasing your blog visibility and some advantages of web directory submission by submitting your blog to different web directories. Again here there are some criteria to approve the sites, so submit only sites which are functional and being updated frequently.

One more web directory is the Indian Web Directory which is also free, but the site accepts only Indian sites. You can also submit your blog there.

If you know any other web directories, please add to it.

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