So the whole “Blogging” concept is a great thing. You write articles and then hopefully, if the reader gains something from it, you most likely have a return visitor/subscriber.

But when’s the right time to start introducing advertising? A personal tip that I have learned is that it really doesn’t look good when you have around 3 subscibers in your Feedburner Feedcount with the average hits of 10 per day. Then comes the factor of how much you actually make off of the 10 people… Probably less than a pack of gum’s worth.

Quite honestly, I have tried not to show advertising on this blog because I really want to provide minimal distractions from the content that I so vigorously write :). So the point of the post is to make you question when the right time to start the P.P.C. machine/private sales on your blog. Will you wait for 1000hits/day? or will 100hits/day be “enough” for you.

Thanks for visiting my blog! You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed so you will be able to get these daily blog tips for free!

Posting content to satisfy your readers is a lot different than posting a blog post. Let this diagram explain:

Not every post is going to shine on your blog, that is something that can only be learned with experience. However, by taking simple steps in order to make sure that the posts aren’t a blunder on our blogs, we can ultimately make it look better to anybody that decides to pay a visit.

I have finally been able to bring out the second part of my series which is putting prizes in your contest that are worth joining /blogging about. Since we already know how to create one that is easy to read and join, we can now start to brainstorm some of these prizes that will definitely draw attention.

There are three different types of prizes that a blogger can put inside of their contest. Low budget, Mid-budget and you guessed it, High Budget. Many different situations arise when obtaining prizes as some bloggers have been in the business longer, making money along the way. They can then use this to fund a contest which could present a problem for a newbie blogger that has just started out.

So in order to balance all three “classes” of contests, there will be a list for each. Without further adieu, here is prize ideas for any type of contest.

Lower Budget Prize Ideas

• Sidebar or banner advertising on your blog (Cost-Free).
• Blog/Website Reviews (Cost-Free).
• The “Overused” contest prize (Even we are guilty on that one) - Entrecard Credits (Cost-Free).
• Project Wonderful Accounts - You’d be surprised at what $5 can buy worth of advertising on that website ($1-15).
• Asking around fellow bloggers for prize donations: Reviews, Advertising, Cash? (Cost-Free).
• Life-Time Subscriptions to the $5 Theme Club @ Wpdesigner.com.

Mid-Budget Prize Ideas

• Cash Prizes ($10-100).
• Subscription To Seomoz.org - All about SEO which could be useful for bloggers.
• Magazine Subscriptions: PCWorld? Electronic Gaming Monthly? Or let the winner chose (Cost Varies).
• 1 Year Domain Name and/or Hosting (Varies By Host).
• Premium Blog Templates - Free of links to the creator and sponsors (Premium Theme “Revolution” - $99 for single use license, Cost Varies).
• Problogger’s Guide to Blogging “6 Figure Income” E-book (Cost: $29.95).

High Budget Prize Ideas

• 100-1000 Manual Directory Submissions (Varies by provider - Rough Estimate $99).
• Marketing Campaign guaranteeing the winner 500 ads on various websites and blogs for 1+ month(s).
• Yahoo Writeup & Director

About 2 weeks ago, I started the Technorati “Give And Go” link exchange. Trying to decide what to blog about, I loaded technorati up to see what is “WTF (Wheres the Fire)”. Oddly enough, I searched my own blog into the search function and found out that technorati updated my authority. Doing a quick calculation here, it increased by 5 times what it was when we started.

I started with a technorati authority of around 15. Within two weeks of starting the contest, I am at 78 as of today. So as you can tell, I’m really impressed by how much this has helped me and everyone in the list.

Here is one person that updated us with their statistics:

DanAndMarsh: Hey Brad, just a post to let you know my authority has jumped from 47 to 86 since I joined this train!! Looks to be more to come! Great idea this was!! Thanks

So, like before, If you haven’t joined this Technorati Train, You’re missing out severely! The list is still being updated every time someone adds it to their website.

During the next couple of days, we will tell you how to make an awesome contest that could seriously boost your publicity and popularity. Creating your own blog contest is a great way to:

• Gain subscribers and readers for your content
• Gain links to your website which help with your website’s pagerank and search engine result(s).
• Gain comments on your posts from the resulting readers that have joined because of the contest.
• Gain Money - From selling advertising space on your “Now Much More Popular Because Of A Contest” blog

But what determines the success of a contest campaign? How can obtain the results that you desire?

Today, we will look at a contest from the view of a visitor. When you load a page to see details about a contest that you wish to join, a large part of the conversions (people that actually go through with the contest and enter) has to do with the Layout.

If a visitor needs to read your directions three times before they realize what they have to do, chances are they will just leave and search for an alternative. An exception to this is when the prizes are worth over $1000 and then perhaps people will pay a little more attention to what they need to do

Here is the way to make your directions something that people want to read:

Thanks for taking the time to enter my blog’s contest. There are three ways to enter:

1. Subscribe to my RSS Feed (By Email). - 10 Entries
2. Write a blog post about the blog or the contest - 10 Entries
3. Comment On This Post - 1 Entry

Now, Have you noticed how simple the instructions are? They outline what the visitor needs to do, as well as how much each of them are worth in the contest. A strategy that was also used in the example was one to increase email R.S.S Subscriptions. From a visitor’s viewpoint, whats easier?

• Subscribing Their Email ( Mozilla@MozillaFirefoxBrowserSoftware.com )
• Writing a 100 (example) word long post

They are both worth the same amount of entries, so you can count on people subscribing rather than writing posts.

The next post will highlight some prizes that will definitely make some people want to participate. Tune in tomorrow or just subscribe via R.S.S. to make your life easier.

This will not be a long post, as it is merely just a question.

Considering how many people like to take a break from their weekly routines, will you bother to write content for your blog on the weekends.. considering how some of your readers go away on vacation/family visits?

My Answer: If there is one person that is going to read the content on the weekend, why not give them something to read? Obviously it won’t be as long as the posts during the week as thats when the most people will see it, but it never hurts to throw in odd little rants and raves about different things happening on the blogosphere.

Our blog has been staying steadily at 180k - 185k for an Alexa Traffic Ranking and now has increased to 195k. The thing that struck us the most is that our blog traffic had increased exponentially since we started our techonrati exchange and aiming for different keywords for S.E.R.P.S.

“Alexa toolbar users’ interests and surfing habits could differ from those of the general population in a number of ways, and we described some of those possible differences on our website. While the vast majority of sites’ rankings were unaffected by such differences, we’ve worked hard on our new ranking system to adjust for situations in which they could matter.

The new rankings should better reflect the interests and surfing habits of the broader population of Web users.”

Looking at that statement they made on their “Official” announcement, We could help but think to ourselves that they were referring to blogs as that is what more and more people each day are reading/creating. So that could explain why numerous blogs got slapped by Alexa when they started implementing their new algorithm.

We have noticed the change on our blog, has anything happened on your blog? (Good or Bad)