First, the blogs.  I started three new blogs about 6 months ago.  I have performed only minimal promotional work on all of them, so the increases in traffic are largely organic.

Blog one is a current affairs and news blog.  In May, it received about 2300 unique visitors and the traffic growth since Wordpress was installed is shown in the graph below:

Blog two is a health related blog and it too has enjoyed substantial growth over the last few months. In May, it welcomed 850 unique viewers and the traffic growth is indicated in the graph below:

The third blog is about living overseas and likewise has continued to show good gains in traffic over the same period, show below.  In May, this blog received 1800 unique visitors. This blog has attracted a small community of regular readers and commenters. I replied to commenters on a largely quid pro quo basis. This reciprocal commenting comprises the extent of this blog’s promotional work, and has brought in additional traffic.

Inarguably, the key to the blogs’ traffic growth has been a strict regimen of daily posting of original material.  Although most bloggers will see this as a given, I am interested to see how long such linear traffic growth can be sustained on the basis of content only. Early indications are that June’s traffic should uphold the linear trend with an increase of between 5% to 15% on these blogs.

I started two forums 3 months ago and at this stage, they are seeing month-on-month traffic growth just through SE traffic.  I have yet to start promoting these forums in earnest.  This is very promising. One saw a 400% traffic growth from the first to second month, but traffic will prbably only grow by 30% for the month of April. The other saw similar increases. Typically, there will be greater traffic increases over the first few months of a site’s life.

Likewise, I started 2 blogs 6 months ago.  The first saw monthly traffic increases for the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th months respectively: 100%, 0%, 250%, 100%, 30%. During the third month, I made no posts to the blog which accounts for the inactivity during this month.  The second blog performed even better with 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th month traffic growth of: 0%, 30%, 200%, 50%, 20%.

Although the traffic growth is a little jumpy, it is nonetheless positive growth. In the past, I have noticed that traffic seems to plateau, or at least growth at an far lesser rate, after 6 to 9 months of growth. This has made me more determined to look for ways to seek sustained linear growth in the region of 20% month-on-month for thes new sites and I will report back to the blog at intervals with progress on how this is going.

It appears Google have again settled in to a rhythm of exporting visible PR data on a near quarterly basis, so we should be in for the next in early July.

As an internet/bum marketer this is especially good news as links within blogs (at least at the moment) are regarded as good links by Google.

Here is a list of Wordpress article directories that can be used for article marketing.  Please read the submission guidelines before submitting.

• http://www.plainhelp.com/
• http://articlefount.com/
• http://articlesupport.com/
• http://articleping.com/
• http://articlessubmiter.com/
• http://articles4all.net/
• http://ezinearticledirectory.com/
• http://www.articlecase.com/
• http://articlepit.com/
• http://newarticledirectory.com/
• http://articlerepo.com/
• http://bomzei.com/
• http://articlewarrior.com/
• http://articlepremiere.com/
• http://justfreecontentarticles.com/
• http://www.articlesexchange.com/
• http://www.articlesofdistinction.com/
• http://mundoarticles.com/
• http://best-articledirectory.com/
• http://littlearticledirectory.com/
• http://articlecart.com/

If you have others to add to this list, then feel free to add them in the comments section below.

Then I remembered a story I‘d read as a student about making money from stock market predictions – perhaps this is what our friends on the forum were considering?

Suppose we start out with 96 000 active email addresses (it could be any other large number, but for the sake of illustration here, 96 000 is conveniently divisible by 2). We send out a message to half of them saying “Glaxo stock will rise this week, don‘t miss out!”, and to the other half, “Glaxo stock will fall this week”.

To half our prediction will be correct, and we discard the half who got the wrong prediction. The following week, we send out the same message to half of our remaining 48 000.

Again, to half of them we will make a correct prediction, and those to whom our second prediction was incorrect, we discard.

The next week we repeat this, sending out predictions to the remaining 24 000 in a 50:50 ratio and so on.

Repeat until we’ve sent out 5 sets of email and are left with the email addresses of 3 000 individuals who’ve received an astounding 5 correct predictions from us.

The following week, send the 50:50 split of predictions and inform them that in order to continue to receive these and other amazing predictions they must subscribe to your newsletter at an annual rate of $19.99.

As I mentioned above, I neither recommend nor condone this and I am sure there is a law against it (if there isn’t there should be!)

Often forum admins are on the lookout for sign link spammers and deal with them mercilessly.  However, they might not be so keenly aware of the blog feed feature that many forums offer.

Searching Google for the phrase:

[your_niche] "Recent blog:" inurl:showthread

and replace [your_niche] with the niche you are looking to promote within.  So if you are promoting a cellphone based blog you’d use:

cellphone "Recent blog:" inurl:showthread

and get a selection of vBulletin forums that allow RSS feeds in posts.

However, many of these forums might have the rel=”nofollow” attribute set.  If you are looking for link weight from your promotional efforts (as opposed to a trickle of traffic) then you will need to locate forums that are “dofollow”. 

The DoFollow Forums Search Engine allows you to search within a data set of dofollow forums and significantly eases the hunt for dofollow links in the context of forums.  Simply enter your niche coupled with “Recent blog:” in the search field and you should get back a list of forums that are dofollow and allow you to pull in your most recent blog posts via RSS feeds.

As with all forum based promotion, refrain from practices that might get you labelled a spammer (and your account deleted.)  Participate in the forum before including your links.  Make a few original, valuable posts, even as many as 15 or 20 before including your links in either your signature or RSS feed.  It can make a lot of difference in the long run as to whether you pick up a broad selection of good inbound links from forums, or just waste your time as the forum admins catch up with you.

It is feasible to replace Akismet with WP-Hascash.  However, the way in which Hashcash works permits the two to work together.  With the initial checks performed by Hashcash;  if Hashcash suspects a bot sourced submission then place it in the Akismet queue for its perusal.

Many blog owners may wish to offer their commenters a reward for ongoing participation and commenting.  One such method is to use the Comment Luv plug-in. This plug in allows blog owners to offer a free no-follow link to commenters by pulling in thelatest post from the commenters RSS feed and appending a link to it to the comment.  Of course, moderation is still advised.

From a blog promoters perspective, it affords the opportunity to be specific about the type of blogs one comments on.  Obviously, commenting on Comment Luv enabled blogs will furnish more links with non-zero link juice.  So, how do we go about finding blogs that use the Comment Luv plug in?

Newer versions of the plug in prepend images to the “Enable CommentLuv” check box, making the hunt for CommentLuv enabled blogs a shade more involved.  There are many with the older version of the plug in installed in which case Google reveals these easily.   Simply enter the following string in to the Google search box:

“Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you” [your keyword]

replacing [your keyword] with a keyword (or phrase) relevant to your niche.  So if you are looking for blogs about English cricket you might enter the following in to Google:

“Enable CommentLuv which will try and get your last blog post, please be patient while it finds it for you” English cricket

First, let me say that I have owned laptops in the past.  Also, I’ve also worked with laptops as part of my job, so I consider myself fairly well versed with them, at least in their previous incarnations.  The reason I bought two recently is that I have quite a bit of travelling planned over the ensuing months and, as anyone in IT will tell you, laptops are indispensible under such circumstances. 

So, what did I buy?  The first was an HP machine.  Officially labelled an “Entertainment Notebook PC” (and part of the dv6800 series) it is equipped with some nice multimedia features, including a series of QuickPlay touch keys along the top of the keyboard.  The three overriding factors that made me choose this machine over its neighbours on the shop shelf were: the 3GB RAM, the size and clarity of the screen, and the X2 64-bit processors.  I thought all this for under $800 was a steal.  Other positives for this machine include a well contructed and highly usable pointing device (usually I have problems with laptop pointing devices, but I am getting along with this one very comfortably), built-in wireless support (which these days, I think I am right to say, is a given), and a surprisingly robust exterior (the machine looks rather delicate, with what appears to be only thin plastic in certain areas of the shell, but it is surprisingly strong thin plastic!)

On the flip side, I have the following criticisms of the HP machine.  The keyboard seems quite frail, particulary in comparison to the keyboards of other laptops I have used in the past.  The keys seems to be very thin.  Also, they appear to have a small area of contact with the underlying pads that connect them to the laptop.  As a result of this, I often find myself typo-ing (usually missing letters, although the SHIFT key is a particular culprit in this) more than previously having not struck the key in the middle, but slightly off centre and therefore not registered enough force to depress the underlying pad.  My second “issue” is not one with the machine, but with company policy regarding distribution media (which I understand might be dictated by Microsoft, and might not be confined to HP).  The first thing I wanted to do was to see how FreeBSD or Linux would run on this puppy instead of the standard distribution of Vista.  So, I immediately wiped out Vista and replaced it with FreeBSD.  After doing this, I thought what would happen should I wish to reload Vista in the future?  (Perhaps if I chose to sell the laptop to a Windows user).  The machine did not come with distribution CDs which I found to be very odd.  Anyhow, after talking to the HP support people they told me they no longer ship laptops with distribution CDs, but have a portion of the HDD configured to hold the distribution files from which the OS can be reloaded.  Of course, FreeBSD doesn’t know or care about these files so they were wiped.  To get the distribution CDs I had to pay an additional $16, and HP shipped them within a week.

These days, the majority of my computer work is done in either a remote shell, or a browser.  Occasionally I will use a graphics program (such as GIMP) and a few other small utilities.  But in terms of resource use, I would consider myself a light user.  So, for my daily regular tasks the 3GB RAM and increased processing power has made a significant increase in desktop speed and operation.  Has it made me more productive?  I would probably answer this affirmatively.