The image isn’t my traffic.

See, a lot of people already know how to get spikes of traffic, most people submit to StumbleUpon or try to get on the frontpage of Digg or some other equivalent social media/bookmarking site. But if you notice, the traffic and everything is nice (except if it crashes your server) but you never really see a drastic increase in your earnings to really care for it.

I’ve been doing this online stuff for a couple years now and I tend to the some of the same things that continue to make me money. For instance, someone asked me if I still do what methods in the $100/Day from Adsense post and the simple answer is “yes.”

I may do it less but I still do it when I have a chance. Of course, it’s nice to have another source of income when doing that.

But I tend to check my stats (earnings and traffic) regularly and so should all of you guys. The reason why is the fact that you always need to analyze these stats, improve on different aspects, etc. Some of the stats may even surprise you and work in your benefits.

The reason why I bring analyzing stats up (and this post) is because I noticed a drastic jump in my traffic and earnings for one of my sites. And get this, I haven’t even touched the site for the last 5-6 months.

Without giving away the site, keywords, etc, let’s say its something that people would search for regularly, especially when a specific event or something happens.

I’ll give you guys an example. Say you have a website based on the show American Idol, well, that show takes place every year so you know whenever the show is on, you should expect extra spikes in traffic as well as increased earnings.

And yes, even if it’s not the latest information on that year’s show. You should still see the spikes.

I know that’s not the best example especially compared to my site in which I don’t even have to do anything to the site from now on. But let’s say if you happened to blog about something that happens monthly, annually, whatever, then whenever that “thing” happens, well, you should see spikes.

So, you guys could do this in a few different ways. You could simply build sites based on something you know will happen regularly and just let it sit there and watch spikes happen throughout the year or just continue to blog and eventually it’ll come.

I wish I could give you guys a better example of what I’m talking about, but I hope you guys get the point. If I can think of another one, I’ll try to add it on here.

Hope that helps!

So, I’m sure you guys should know what Twitter is by now. Well, I decided to start a brand new Twitter account strictly for DatMoney and I’m going to let you guys follow how to get more Twitter followers quickly with me.

I had my own account previously but I barely used it. Matter of fact, I’ve only been using it lately to enter random Twitter contests. I decided that I would start one to try to brand DatMoney a little more. Unfortunately for me, when I signed up for Twitter (again), the username “DatMoney” was taken by some random loser who wanted to sign up for it, leave 3-4 updates and never go back to it.

What a waste of branding for me!

Now I’m officially @DatMoneyDotCom for those of you guys that want to follow.

This is a test and since I just created this new account about 5-10 minutes ago, you guys will see I have absolutely no followers when this post becomes live. But that’s a good thing, I’m going to show you guys how to get more Twitter followers quickly and easily. I don’t know how quickly it will be but I’m guessing if these methods work, I should probably have a few hundred within the next week or so.

But just a heads up, there are a few techniques I will be trying out and supposedly all of them work just fine.

One of the methods I’m going to use is the basic promotion - letting people know the Twitter account for DatMoney actually exists, hold a contest, follow others, leave comments, etc. But since you guys already know that basic stuff, I won’t get into that unless someone requests that I do. (A lot of people still have no idea what Twitter is and how it can benefit them in a lot of different ways).

Now the other method I will be trying is somewhat automated and a lot of people may consider it unethical. But I’m the type to test things out just to see how it works. Although, I probably won’t do it for the long run.

Again, I’ll be doing it just for testing purposes to see how it works and if it actually does. There are various Twitter tools that can help in the process as well. But in the meantime, I’ll just sum it up and write a more detailed post sometime in the future when and if I see a large increase in followers.

The quick summary would be:

1. Sign up for Twitter
2. Sign up for the free Twitter tools (I’ll post the details later)
3. Do a search on Twitter for your targeted audience (for instance, make money online)
4. Let the Twitter tools get the followers for you

That sounds pretty easy, right? I’m sure a lot of you guys already know this method, if not, you can follow me @DatMoneyDotCom and see if this works and if it does, you can do the very same thing!

More to come on how to get more Twitter followers… stay tuned!

Just the other day I was checking out some of my Google Analytics stats and one of my blogs was getting tons of visitors and pageviews from Zimbio. I had completely forgot about Zimbio and how I used it to promote blog content and increase pageviews automatically.

I figured I would address it here because I’m going to start implementing these tactics for my other sites, particularly new ones, and you guys should too.

How to Use Zimbio to Promote Blog Content Automatically

Well, if you guys don’t know about Zimbio, they are a search engine friendly social networking site that let’s you use interactive Wikizines to promote your content. And it’s pretty damn easy setting yourself up for it as well.

First, simply go to Zimbio.com and create a new account (if you haven’t already done so) and towards the end of your registration, they will ask if you want to submit your blog (and or blog RSS Feeds).

Of course, you definitely want to.

Now, you can submit your articles to various Wikizines if you want manually but there is also an “auto-import” option which finds a Wikizine related to your post and submits it for you.

Personally, on particular blogs of mine, I just chose “auto-import” simply because I don’t want to constantly check back to manually import select articles.

If you wanted to submit it manually, they will take all your articles from your feeds and import it and you can search and select whatever Wikizine that fits your topic. And if you can’t find one, you can always just create a brand new one as well.

In addition, if you have images, videos and whatever else within the post, they will import those for you in their images and videos sections so you can additional visitors as well.

The Pros and Cons

The good part is your articles, keywords, images, etc will be highly ranked in search engines, plus, you’ll get the luxury of Zimbio users visiting your site as well.

It’s also extremely easy to do and automated for the lazy people (like me).

The downfall is the fact that if you chose “auto-import” it may submit to a Wikizine that you may not exactly have wanted. For instance, if you wrote a post on basketball or the Boston Celtics, it may put your article under a specific person on the Celtics like Kevin Garnett or something. That might not be what the article is about but he does play for that team.

My Opinions and Thoughts

I really like Zimbio because of the automated system they have and since it’s less work on my behalf, then that’s even better. And for those you guys that are worried about duplicate content, you’ll only get penalized if the duplicate content is within your own site. (I’ll write a future post on that).

Also, I haven’t implemented DatMoney with Zimbio because I feel it probably works best for blogs related to entertainment, sports, movies, music, etc. I may consider adding this blog to it as well just for a test but I don’t think the outcome will be that great.

But who knows until we actually test it out, right?

Well, let me know what you think and if you have tried about Zimbio.

For everyone that is a Wordpress user, I’m sure you are well aware of Akismet, the plugin that filters out spam comments. You may think the best part of it is the fact that it prevents spam comments from getting in, well, I’d say it’s probably the beautiful keywords those spam comments deliver right to your doorsteps!

I used to overlook this all the time because who really likes spam? But since I’m a loser I care deeply for my visitors and commentators, I take extra time to go through my spam comments because typically there are a few real comments in there.

In my conquest to find those legit comments, I always see spam, spam, spam and I used to get blinded by that because it was annoying… until one day I just looked at some of the keywords and just did a quick check and they are some pretty good ones.

Besides all the porn type ones (there are some good keywords there too if you’re into that stuff), I found quite a few keywords that have some low competition and are searched for.

Let me give you an example.

I should have took a screenshot while it was in my Akismet filter but I accidentally deleted it. But one of the spam comments were just like 10-20 links with anchor texts. I saw random ones that would’ve been good but in the example I’m giving, a keyword I saw was “Rihanna haircut.”

Since Rihanna, the R+B singer, is pretty popular (especially since she’s all over the gossip and entertainment news currently for getting beat up by R+B singer Chris Brown), I figured this would be a good keyword to just look at.

What I did was just a typical Google search for “Rihanna haircut” and on my search engine it showed 585,000 search results so if I were to use it, I would probably have a good chance on making it to the first page.

(You can check out the screenshot below - click on the image to see it in full screen)

So now that we know that the competition isn’t too bad, let’s check if it’s actually being searched for.

In this example, I just did a quick check so all I did was go to Google Trends and typed in the keyword and if a chart appears, then at some point in time people were searching for it. If there is no chart, then that means there wasn’t enough information which also probably means not enough people were searching for it.

Based on the screenshot, people were and are still in fact searching for it.

Now you can take it a step further and check it in WordTracker or SEO Book keywords tool to find that specific keyword brings in about 60 searches daily. Of course, if you include the long-tail keywords then you’re probably looking at 100 searches daily.

So, now I have a decent enough keyword to potentially post about if I had an entertainment blog. You can also use this keyword for anything else but now you at least have it in your hands.

As I was going through all my spam comments, I noticed there was a lot of long tail keywords which if you looked it up based on what I mentioned above, you might not have the same results (with the graph and stuff).

Though, long tail keywords may often bring in more traffic so it may benefit you a little more to at least attempt to use it.

I’d just like to say Akismet is a lot more beneficial than just filtering out your spam comments. :D  Feel free to check it out!

A little while ago I decided to start a contest blog with a friend of mine and it’s been going okay, nothing too special. Our agreement was that if we won a prize then we would split it. And if we couldn’t split it, we would try to sell the prize and split the money. But this post isn’t about that, it’s more about why you should comment on every contest post you run across.

Since I partnered up and started this contest blog, we weren’t aiming to make money from it or get tons of traffic. Honestly, we just wanted to test it out to see how many prizes from contests we could actually win. So far we won about 4 different prizes or prize packs but nothing to brag about.

We are hoping to see if we can win a big prize like a Playstation 3, TV, lots of money, etc. But also, we’re not really holding our breath especially since we’re not even taking the site too serious. We’re basing the entire site on luck so it’s like playing the lottery… but you do have to play to win!

The only promotion we have done is simply commenting on people’s contest posts and somewhere within the comment we simply post the URL of where we blogged about their contest.

Simple enough, right? I mean, we’re entering their contest because most of them ask for their contestants to blog about it with backlinks to their site and post, so that’s exactly what we did. Plus, we get to post a free URL link in the comments without it being deleted or marked as spam.

Since then, our blog is now a PR3, we’ve got some more subscribers and our traffic has been steady especially from search engines. Nothing really special especially since the site has only been up for about 3 months and it has less than 50 total posts to it.

Though, I know some of you guys live and die by Google Pagerank, in addition, a lot of you guys need to build links to your sites, I’ll explain how this will benefit you all.

Since contests are very popular, a lot of people will do anything to enter them which include posting and linking to that contest post. Since there are so many one-way backlinks to that contest post, it also means the URL is given LOTS of backlink juices.

I understand most people have “no-follow” attributes to their commenting section but in reality, even if they do, you would still get some backlink juice to your site.

Have you ever noticed how so many individual contest pages or posts have their own Pagerank? For instance, their homepage may be a PR5 but their contest post is a PR4. You may not get as much backlink juice simply because it is “no-follow” but you do still get some.

I had this discussion with someone a while ago and they gave me a post URL that was ranked as a PR7. I went to the page and it was “no-follow” and I told him that there was no point. He told me that I would still get some backlink juices for commenting on that PR7 “no-follow” post and I would probably get more juice than a regular “do-follow” blog that has no rank.

Of course, I think his theory is actually right. I mean, how else is my blog is PR3 out of nowhere? And how is my blog getting so much search engine traffic without a lot of linking or any promotion besides commenting?

Exactly!

So, whenever you see a contest you should at the very least comment on it even if you don’t feel like entering to win their prize. It might help you more than you know in the long run!