I can see how it might – if people see it, they might click it. But on the other hand, if they like your post, wouldn’t they share it anyway?

Sometimes I think people need a nudge to remind them that retweeting is one to share a post they enjoyed. I think it goes a bit beyond that when your blog has a crazy mess of widgets – how many people are likely to share your post on multiple networks?

Instead of trying to get traffic from absolutely anywhere, why not focus on one or two decent traffic sources and do them really well?

Let me know your thoughts by adding a comment.

Look what I found.

Yes, underneath the rank it does say “the page rank value is 3″ but the little hyphen did worry me a bit.

The really exciting bit (for me anyway) is that I’ve been hired as one of the writers for the new site.

For anyone who’s found my blog as a result of ReadWriteHack, thanks for stopping by. This is my not-so-serious blog where I write about the web, coding, testing, social media and a few other things that don’t quite fit into any of my categories.

For the faithful readers who have been here for a bit longer, this announcement is one of the two things I mentioned in last week’s non-announcement post. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for the other bit of news.

A silly and random thing about this writing role is that it’s given a tiny burst of traffic to an utterly pointless site I set up simply to try out social login functionality. If you check out my guide to JanRain Engage, you’ll find the link at the end of the post. For now, the site really doesn’t do anything except allowing you to sign in, but it’s a good place for me to try out new stuff so I might add a bit more to it in the future.

Hope to see you at ReadWriteHack, if you like that kind of thing!

How many times have you come across one of those silly Facebook groups: “Come on guys, let’s see if we can make this stale bit of cheese look more popular than this random celebrity whose music I don’t like anymore.”

Isn’t that a fun idea? Well, until you see how many other people have jumped on the bandwagon and set up groups with the exact same concept.

There’s a big problem with this, though. Spam.

Group owners can send mass messages to the members of a group. Who needs to go and buy a list of names and email addresses when you can just set up a group with a silly idea and get hundreds of thousands of people to join?

It might be wise to stop joining these groups unless you want to help marketers to spam you with junk.

Image credit

Exactly one year after I joined, I removed the widget and joined forces with Turnip and Stan to set up CMF Ads. They had already launched the service to a small group of bloggers – I was one of 20 in the initial group. Honestly, it was a bit daunting as I’d heard how much traffic the other members of the group were getting. I wasn’t getting very much at all, and didn’t really understand why. Now I do…

Widget advertising, taxes, and a near-perfect model

The widget-based model adopted by Entrecard had clearly influenced a few other sites, including Spottt, SiteHoppin and 125Exchange.

CMF Ads was also built with the widget at the centre of the economy, but with a few key differences. Firstly, we chose to display a random selection of ads, instead of one ad at a time. Secondly, we opted for a 30 day ad rather than a 1 day ad. Third, we eliminated all taxes except for a hefty (50%) cashout tax. This allowed members to exchange ads back and forth indefinitely, but was painful if you wanted to cash out.

In 2009, we believed we had a near-perfect model. A few members seemed to echo this. Unfortunately, most people wanted to make money, perhaps fuelled by the ability to make your money back (or more) over at Adgitize, probably one of our biggest competitors.

Criticism eventually pushed us to review the taxes in CMF Ads. Now, we are almost at the final stage – where ads will be taxed at 10%, and the cashout tax is a mere 10%. This will be the case from September 2010. Even with the large cashout tax, I still think we had a better setup when the ad tax was at zero. But as I said, too many people wanted to make money, so the cashout tax was more of a barrier than the ad tax.

Does widget advertising actually work?

That really depends what you’re advertising. Do you want to make money from your ads? Can you actually make money from someone visiting your blog and maybe clicking on one of your ads? Or are you relying on money from the widget ad itself?

I think that widget advertising works best with a decent image – actually, that’s true of most advertising. It’s just especially true of a widget ad. Your ad often has to stand out in a massive crowd of widgets and other ads. Too many blogs have too many widgets on their site, and no ad is going to perform too well in that situation.

Is it all about making a quick buck?

I really don’t understand bloggers who feel like they should be entitled to a rebate because they’re paying to advertise. A few people have wanted this in the past, and I know a few people won’t use CMF Ads because we don’t give them back everything that they put in. The reality is that if everyone made a profit on their ads, the ad networks wouldn’t be around for very long.

If people really want to make money, they should consider running a small widget for CMF Ads and one for Adgitize, and losing all the other sidebar junk. I’m sure the ads would perform a hell of a lot better.

Even with the possiblity of introducing larger banner ads somewhere down the line, the end result is likely to involve blogs that are already saturated with ads plastering the larger ads all over their site, in the hope that more ads = more money. It really doesn’t.

Who really wins from widget advertising?

The savvy folks. Anyone with a decent amount of traffic, and anyone with knowledge of how to create a truly awesome ad. An ad that is actually advertising something that will benefit the advertiser if people go to look at it.

If you’re thinking, well I’m not in it for the money, you’re not alone. However, that’s not the only view out there, as a lot of people are in it for the money. Ironically, some of the people who desperately want to make money from advertising are the ones who really need to spend a little more time working on their ads, and a little less time clicking.

And if you don’t have much to advertise, there’s another approach. Referral links can earn you quite a bit. CMF Ads just introduced them, for instance.

The walled garden approach

At CMF Ads, Spikes are a quick and affordable way to push your blog out to people. You’ll only get clicks from members of CMF. This may seem like it could cut out a lot of potential traffic, and I’m sure it does, but I think the traffic you do get is likely to be much more focused.

If you’re intrigued enough to register at CMF Ads and starting clicking on a few Spikes, I’d imagine you have some interest in the content of the blogs you click on. Furthermore, because you can find the blogs quickly and easily, I think you’ll use the system that much more.

It’s similar to Facebook games, and Facebook ads. Once you’re on the site, there’s a lot more that can be done than is possible within a 125×125 widget.

How blog advertising should be used

If you’ve been using solid keywords in your post titles – not to mention your domain name! – then you’ll probably start to get search engine traffic as time goes on. The blogs I’ve had online for years are getting more search engine traffic than any other type of traffic. I use blog advertising to supplement this traffic, similar to social media, by highlighting the blog when a new post goes up.

Endlessly promoting every post is pointless if you post a lot – it makes a lot more sense to only push the best posts via blog advertising, and let the others pick up search engine traffic as normal.

By combining your advertising efforts in this way, you’ll save time and money, and maybe earn a little more, too.

How do you advertise your blog? Do you use CMF Ads?

Mind you, I’ve still told a few friends and family. I just haven’t formally announced it yet.

And then, a second bit of news came along. Guess what – I can’t say anything about that one either.

It’s all good news, but for now, I can’t get into any of the details. So now you know, except you don’t know. Sorry for dragging you into this as well.

They say these things travel in threes. I wonder if a third thing will come along before I announce one of the other two? It had better hurry up, because it’s only going to be a couple of days until the first announcement…

Have you ever had some news you’re aching to share but you can’t? Tell me about it in the comments.

What that really means, though, is that it jumped from zero to nine pageviews in a 30 day period.

It’s not the busiest of blogs.

It probably didn’t help that I forgot to add the stats code to the blog. Still, it’s not like I’ve been actively promoting it… it’s one of the smaller blogs linked from my portfolio.

The moral of the story: Don’t always take a post headline at face value.

Sure, it’s not all about quantity.

But some of those posts were really good! Well, a few were. Some were a bit daft, but I did have fun writing them.

How many posts have you written in a month?

Edit: Wow, I did mess up the title of this post. I wrote a lot of posts in July. The post title said August. Oops.

Is it possible to make money online and also write great posts? Or are you just going to sell out? It all depends on your approach.

Writing for Adsense might bring in a few dollars, but how many people will stop by and actually enjoy your posts? I don’t understand people who appear to a write a lot of content and yet none of it is particularly original or insightful.

I think it’s mostly a poor show from the people who want to make money right now with no effort whatsoever. You can make money from Adsense if you write great content and you have a little patience. And if you don’t make money, at least you’ve put the effort into writing good posts that people will keep coming back to.

Well, that’s if they do come back, of course.

Do you see a lot of blogs that focus too much on appealing to search engines and not enough on appealing to people?

When I bookmark sites in my browser, I put them into folders. Email gets organised with labels. And blog posts have categories to aid navigation. It makes a lot of sense for anyone with more than a handful of things to organise.

If I could “fave” a tweet but also add it to some kind of group, label or category – such as “unpublished blog tips” – this would be a huge help for using my tweets in future blog posts. I often post tips on Twitter that I forget to publish on my blog.

It might help to be able to make a private “fave group”, similar to the way a private Twitter list works. That way, I can work with this stuff without revealing the details until I’m ready. Equally, a public “fave group” would be a really nice way to group certain tweets together, but without using something as fluid and open as a hashtag. Yes, hashtags work well but sometimes you want to limit the information – especially as a lot of comments get retweeted, some may be inaccurate, or not that useful.

I do wonder if this kind of functionality may be better as a third-party app though, if one doesn’t already exist.

What do you think?