Converting To New Blogger Page Element Templates

I plan to convert My Wealth Builder to the New Blogger Page Element Templates in April. I want the transition to be error free. Here are some items I will need to do:

• Reinstall meta tags for Google and Yahoo!
• Reinstall meta tags for Google Analytics.
• Reinstall ads for Google Adsense.
• Reinstall Feedburner HTML.
• Use new method to put Adsense ads within posts.
• Recreate blogroll.
• Recreate text link ads.

To note, I am, at best, a novice programmer. To ensure the I do all the changes correctly, I plan to create a mirror blog with all these elements before doing the conversion.

Get Indexed - Submit Your Blog to Search Engines

One way to help your blog get "found" is to submit its URL to Google and Yahoo! search indexes. I had forgotten that I had done this, until all my Google traffic disappeared in mid-February, 2007. Orginally, I had only submitted to the Google search index. This time I included Yahoo!

Here are the links to submit your URL:

Google - http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Yahoo! - http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

MSN.com - http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSUT

How Often Should I Submit My Website To Search Engines provides more information on having one's site indexed.

Sources of Information of Advanced Bloggers

Here are some sites for advanced users:

Beta Blogger for Dummies - Tips and techniques for modifiying New Blogger templates. I currently use the three column template provided by this site.

Blogcrowds Custom Templates - This sites provides three column modifications to the Blogger Templates for New Blogger.

iMESSENGER.com - Here's how to put the adsense code inside your post in New Blogger.

I plan to convert My Wealth Builder to the Blogcrowds three column template in the next couple months.

Blogging Tools That I Use

To help one build traffic there are lots of FREE tools available to help. I am amazed at what is provided for bloggers to use. Here are the tools I use.

Google Analytics - This provides the ability to find out how many readers are coming to your site, from where, how often they are coming and which articles there are reading. This is a great tool to find out who is your audience. Other services such as Sitemeter, Feedburner and Crazy Egg provide similar services. For perspective, I started with Google Analytics and have not used the other applications.

FeedBurner - This provide your readers an easy way to get feeds from your blog, via what ever feed reader they would like to use. I use Feedburner and highly recommend using this tool.

Technorati - This tool lets you know which blogs are linking to to yours. It helps you find who is interested in your content. It will also help you find out if a blog is copying your content. I have not registered in Technocrati yet.

Alexa - Helps you find out your traffic rank in the worldwide Internet. Not surprisingly Yahoo!, MSN and Google are the top 3. My Wealth Builder is currently 626,012 after 6 1/2 months, as of February 25, 2007.

Google Page Rank - This let's you find out how Google ranks your blog for search. Check Page Rank is the tool I use to track page rank. Page Rank ranges from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest). My Wealth Builder has a page rank of 3 as fo February 25, 2007.

These are the main tools I use for getting data on blog traffic. The best part is that they are currently available to everyone for free.

My Google Traffic Disappeared

Last week, traffic from Google on My Wealth Builder declined to virtually zero by mid-week. This was concerning since about 25% of My Wealth Builder's reader traffic was coming from Google search. And I believe almost all the the advertising revenue was coming from Google directed traffic. Therefore, this change was a major disappointment.

Had I done something in my blog to cause this change? The only new activity was introducing members of a new network and hosting the Cavalcade of Risk carnival. I thought that the multiple links to other blogs might be penalized by Google.

However, after checking with a few resources, I learned that traffic reduction from Google was a common occurrence as Google periodically updates their search algorithms. ProBlogger had these articles about the issue:

What to Do when Your Google Traffic Disappears?

What to do when your Google Rank Falls and you lose all your traffic?

Coincidentally, November, the month of both posts, is when My Wealth Builder's traffic began to increase. So My Wealth Builder likely benefited from the initial Google changes.

I plan to take this change in stride:

1. I have done more reading on the issue and reacquainted myself with submitting blogs to different search engines.
   
2. I have re-evaluated my post content and blog design. I had become overly concerned with posting every day to maintain my Google Page rank.
   
3. I have taken some time to reconnect with the personal finance blog community by increasing my reading an commenting on other's blogs.
   
4. I will invest less time in monitoring Adsense and Site Visit results. I was monitoring these statistics mulitiple times each day, almost an obsession:-)

Over time, I expect that Google search traffic will return, especially if the initial ratings were correct.

My Sources of Information on Getting Started in Blogging

As I was getting started, I checked out a few reference sites to understand more about blogging. For your use and enjoyment, here are the sites I found most useful.

ProBlogger - Darren Rowse's blog provides comprehensive, relevant and timely information about blogging and monetizing one's blog. I found A-Z of Professional Blogging to be one of the more useful posts. Also, the Adsense Tips for Bloggers series was helpful.

Steve-Olsen.com - How This Blog Attracted 100,000 Visitors in the First 30 Days is a great post on what Steve did and also provides a list of his references for more tips.

Steve Pavlina.com - How to Make Money From Your Blog provides a detailed guide on how to monetize your blog and grown your revenue.

SEO Elite - Creating Your Own Blog For Search Engine Optimizations provided a good set of tips on how to get started.

There, you have it. The four primary references I used when starting My Wealth Builder. I hope others find these four blogs as useful as I did.

Conversion to New Blogger

My January,2007 conversion to New Blogger went very well. Much better than I had expected based on issues others had shared.

In December, 2006, I was extremely worried. Right after I received the notice to change, I tested the My Wealth Builder template on New Blogger and it crashed, due to an XML error. Panic. I believed that my hacks, while acceptable on Blogger, were not sufficiently error free for New Blogger. I spent the next two evenings searching for solutions, ideas, and help. And I found them. First, after more experimentation, I found out that New Blogger allowed reverting to the "classic template," which would accept My Wealth Builder's current format. Now I was feeling better. Second, I found a blog, Beta Blogger for Dummies, that has excellent tips, techniques and hacks for New Blogger. These guys are good! Using their template, I was able to recreate my current three column template in New Blogger.

Success is where preparation meets opportunity. For the past month, I had been preparing for today. Based on migration recommendations by Beta Blogger for Dummies, I backed up the blog template, the blog posts, and created a test template in New Blogger. I even had plans to create a replica of My Wealth Builder if the migration crashed. As it turned out, I didn't need to do use any of the backup plans. So readers got uninterrupted service and will get a better My Wealth Builder in the future :-)

Monetize Through Advertising

From the start, I intended to make money with My Wealth Builder. Google Adsense offers a simple and efficient way to use advertising. Once one registers for and is approved for Google Adsense, contextual advertising will be directed to your blog site. Contextual advertsing is advertising that is customized to your site based on content.

Here are some brief guidelines to consider with Google Adsense:

Do not click on your own ads. Or have anyone you know click on your ads. This violates one's agreement with Google and amounts to click fraud. To note, I believe that Google can track which IP addresses click on an ad and it is easy for them to identify pattern which are not "normal." If one does this, Google will ban your blog from Adsense. And Adsense is currently the best contextual advertising medium. In fact, if someone you know is aware of your blog, tell them " Do not click on the ads."

Use the largest ad blocks and place them at the end of a post. Several blogs on optimizing Adsense results recommend using the 336 X 280 rectangle with blended colors for the best results. I have had good result with this layout. I also like to use the 160 X 600 skyscraper with complementary colors in the sidebar.

Eliminate spam ads. There are many spam sites that have unrelated ads to your site. The ads take up room for the ones that may be more related to your site. A service called AdBlacklist.com can help you screen out these unrelated sites using the Adsense ad filter.

Increase the traffic from search. Regular readers usually do not click on ads, unless the purpose of our site is to evaluate or sell products. People who are the most interested in ads are those that are searching for information or products which they may be interested in purchasing.

If You Blog It, Will Readers Come?

A common belief, I think, is that once a blog is up and running, lots of readers will flock to it. After all, why shouldn't they - a good topic, great content, and Google searcheable. Truth of the matter is that readership will grow slowly, and you can help it grow faster. I was getting about 2-3 readers a day on my own and needed to increase awareness.

My personal preference is to grow it organically, i.e. get readers who are interested in your blog content. Here is how I approached building readership:

Joined a blog aggregator. My first step was to join pfblogs.org an aggregrator for Personal Finance blogs. This enabled me to get 5 to 10 additional readers a day that weren't previously aware of my blog. Interestingly, my readership from pfblogs.org hasn't changed much. I was getting about 25 readers per week in September, 2006. In January, 2007 I am also getting about 25 readers per week, even though my total readership has increased 10 times.

Submited content to several Carnivals. Next I started submitting article so Carnivals. For those of you unfamiliar with the idea, Carnivals are aggregations of post submissions from bloggers on a certain topic.. These submissions are vetted by the Carnival host and the selected posts are included in the Carnival posting.

This increased my readership signifcantly. Through Carnivals, my daily readership went from 10 per day to 30 per day. There are 962 Carnivals (as of 1/21/07) from which to select at the Blog Carnival site.

Visited other blogs on my topic. Check out other blogs in your community. Comment on their topics and add perspective, confirmation or new data to their post. Most blog authors will respond and some will visit your site. Over time, My Wealth Builder has become part of a community of Personal Finance bloggers which frequently read each other's articles.

Posted content frequently. Besides regular readers, a blog gets readers who are searching for a specific topic. I believe that a blog gets positive search results if the blog has a high number of posts (over 100) and a high frequency of publishing. Publishing once per day is probably the minimum needed and more than once a day is likely better. For reference, in September, 2006, I was publishing about 4-5 times per week, with 30 total posts,and had 16 referrals from Google search. In December, 2006, I was publishing once per day, with 100 total posts, and had 603 referrals from Google search.

With higher posting frequency and more posts, it seems Google's search will give priority to one's site. For example, if you Google "Mortage Mistake," My Wealth Builder is the second site returned in the results (on a 1/21/07 search).

Some bloggers use Blog Exchange communities. I have not used these and do not plan to use these communities. In these systems, bloggers get "credits" for clicking on other's blogs which will lead to one' s blog promoted for clicks. While this gets traffic, I believe it is low quality traffic which may take a lot of effort to manage and may not be sustainable (for me).

New Blogger - A Good Hosted Service

If you want to get started quickly, I recommend using New Blogger. It's free, easy to use and hosted by Google.

Being new to blogging and not being very techie, I didn't want to spend time learning how to program. Luckily, I quickly found Blogger, now New Blogger, which had predesigned templates to use. After signing up for Blogger, I was able to quickly choose a design and start blogging on My Wealth Builder.

Since then I have learned, Blogger is called a hosted service. A hosted service or developer service provides the server, software and blog templates, requiring no software installation by the blogger. Wikipedia has a nice article with a list of developer services.

I did not do an evaluation of the different hosting services before choosing Blogger. I experimented first with Blogger and found it sufficient for my needs of no investment, simplicity and quick start. The additional benefits of Blogger are that it is associated with Google (which may make one's blog more easily searched), and there are a wide range of templates to use. The downside is that one has to learn some programming to customize the templates to get, for example, a three column blog format.

I think the other hosted services are also very good. I just haven't tried them and can't comment on them from personal experience.

My Reasons For Blogging

There are many good reasons to blog: to share information, to build a social network; to keep a journal on one's experiences, and to make money.

I started blogging because I wanted to learn about personal publishing and experiment with making money through it. I chose personal finance as the topic area because of my interest and experience in the field. (For reference, I am not, nor have I ever been, a professional in the area of personal finance.)

Blogging was one good way to learn if my personal finance knowledge and experiences were of value. Value to others would initially be measured by readership. Value to me would be first measured by readership and then by monetization. Readership would let me know if I had relevant useful content. Monetization would let me know I had valuable content.

Building readership would be done through:

1. Creating content with excellent quality and relevance.


2. Creating awareness by enabling people to easily find my blog.

Monetization would be done through advertising:

1. Google Adsense contextual advertising would my initial monetization approach. Contextual advertising uses algorithms that evaluate one's site and places relevant advertising on the site. Google is the major contextual advertiser and generates over $9 billion through advertising revenue.


2. Direct sponsorships would be solicited once the blog became established

I soon learned building readership and monetizing my blog would take more time than I had expected:-)

Welcome to My Blog Builder - Introduction

I blog under the name of Super Saver. My other blog is My Wealth Builder , a personal finance blog about my journey and experiences towards building our family’s wealth for a comfortable retirement.

As background, My Wealth Builder was created on August 13, 2006. I decided to start a blog, searched the internet for blogging software, read a few sites about blogging and jumped right into it. I was impressed with the templates provided by blogging support companies. I could create and host a professional looking site for free. I also believed, incorrectly, that I could immediately make reasonable amounts money through advertising. (More on advertising in future posts.)

I am writing My Blog Builder to document my personal journey of creating My Wealth Builder as an experiment to develop a business in personal publishing. It would have been great to start this blog concurrently with My Wealth Builder and write contemporaneously about my experiences. That will happen as I catch up, but the first four months will be based on memory, tracking software, and miscellaneous records.

In addition, My Blog Builder will be created under the New Blogger software. My Wealth Builder was created under Blogger and will be required to migrate to New Blogger in the near future. This will provide me some experience using New Blogger before making the transition.

At this point, I plan to post once a week on Mondays.