I’m currently trying out a service called Real Traffic Exchange. It puts text ads on your site with links to other sites. Your ad for your site, in turn, is shown on other sites in the Real Traffic system. These do not compete with Google Adsense, so you can have both on the same page without violating the Adsense terms of service.

To see how the ads will appear, scroll down and look below the tag cloud on the right-hand side of this page. Nice, eh? The ads can be customized to some extent, and I like them.

And there is no cost to join or use the service. You can buy extra ads if you want to. That could be a good way to launch a new blog.

I have not analyzed the results yet, and I’ll let you know when I do. Meanwhile, you may want to give Real Traffic a try for promoting your blogs and other websites.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I use Blog Design Journal as a sort of blog design laboratory. I constantly try out new widgets, plug-ins, ads and what-not.

So far, experimenting here has worked out well. It keeps me from piddling with my other blogs too much and annoying the readers any more than necessary.

Trying out Widgets

You really do need to try out widgets on your blogs. Great new ones come out all the time, while old ones quit working. Sadly some cool-sounding widgets just don’t work out. You can’t know for sure till you try them.

Page-Loading Slowed to a Crawl

Recently I joined a beta-testing group for Jonathan Leger’s new project, Real Traffic Exchange. I was thrilled.

Then I installed the widget on my blog, and it slowed to a crawl, maybe even a backstroke. Also, it seemed as though the scrollbars were not working right. I want to give Real Traffic Exchange a fair trial. I have great hopes for it! (As soon as I have the results, I’ll post them here.)

Removing Widgets

So I started removing other widgets, hoping that would speed up page loading. The first thing to go was my newest fun toy, The Gaping Void cartoon widget. It is, frankly, the hardest to justify of all the widgets. I just love it, that’s all.

Sometimes you have to give up widgets you enjoy, for various reasons. I removed the Digg widget, for example, because it was killing my productivity. It was just too tempting to click the links and then spend too much time reading news stories and the comments on them.

But removing The Gaping Void didn’t help. I was trying to figure out what else do part with, when it dawned on me that I had installed two or three toolbars in Firefox that were just taking up real estate. I never used them.

Firefox Toolbar Troubles

Then the real trouble started. Firefox slowed nearly to a stop and almost would not let me disable those toolbars. I turned of the Google bar, the StumbledUpon Bar, the Smart Toolbar (whatever that is), and low and behold, I can use Firefox again.

The Real Traffic Exchange widget was not the culprit. It was Firefox and those pesky toolbars.

Read the rest of this entry »

Do you want 2000 links to your blog for free? Yeah, I thought so.

In case you are new to blogging and/or search engine optimization, let me explain. A big part of how Google determines the Page Rank (PR) of your site is by how many backlinks (one-way links to your site from other sites) you have. The higher PR the sites that link to you have have, the more they help raise the ranking of your site. (That is search engine optimization (SEO) in a nutshell.)

Brad Callen offers a program called Directory Submitter that you can download from his site at no charge. It allows you to select which directories to submit to (for example, only PR 4 or above). Then it automates directory submission, saving you hours and hours—or days and days—or time.

All you do is provide your email address and register the program. It’s that simple. You can download Directory Submitter here.

.

Go, now! Sorry I didn’t mention it before.

By the way, Brad’s other programs are excellent, too. Not all of them are free, but they are great.

Are you a serial blogger? Do you have more than one blog?

Do you create blogs and often find that there are not enough people interested in your topic to make it worthwhile to post? Traffic is light? Few people comment? Do you gradually lose enthusiasm for posting, and move on to create yet another blog?

If so, maybe your blogs are not well enough targeted to a niche, a group of readers who are intensely interested in your topic. If you are blogging just for personal expression, that may be OK with you, but it can also be discouraging. You feel you are alone in the wilderness, talking to the trees.

Thousands of blogs are abandoned every day, because bloggers become discouraged when they have no audience. Sadly many people start a blog in hopes of making a little income from it and then are bitterly disappointed. There seems on reason to carry on if no one is reading.

If you hope to make an income from your blog, the best design in the world (see, there is a tie-in with the topic of this blog, sort of) will not make up for not having an audience.

The best blog design begins before you ever build your blog, before you ever select a design, before you even buy a domain name. The first step is research. Yes, that dirty word: research.

You may be writing a great blog that is focused on the wrong group of people. Maybe a slightly different target niche would reward you with lots of readers.

Read the rest of this entry »

I just reread the message that appears in the blog category area of the BlogRush dashboard. What they are saying seems to be that if they don’t think your post fits into the subcategory you selected, they move it to the General category.

That’s better than not displaying it in the widget at all, but it still leaves the problem of not having enough subcategories. And, of course, there is still the problem of some blogs either not fitting in any category or fitting a little bit in several but not well enough in any. How to choose?

And why won’t they allow us to just select a main category to begin with instead of making us choose from their few, often inappropriate subcategories?

Hopefully they will keep expanding and revising the blog category scheme till they get it right. Until then, what is your strategy if you have blogs that do not fit?

I eagerly awaited the promised new blog categories at BlogRush. Now I’m really disappointed! The new categories have really hurt some of my blogs. As bad a fit as some of the overly general categories used to be, some of my blogs no longer fit into the new BlogRush category scheme at all!

Why Should We Care About BlogRush Categories?

BlogRush now apparently filters your posts and decides whether or not to sydicate them. So if you categorize your blog as being about, say, Painting, and you make a post that is mainly about drawing (which of course is an important aspect of most paintings), your post may not be syndicated (listed in the BlogRush widget). As near as I can tell, it would now be considered to be off topic!

By getting too specific with categories (and get rid of general categories as an option), they are crippling the more general blogs and also the specialized blogs that do not fit into BlogRush’s new, very narrow specific categories. Following are examples from my own experience.

Read the rest of this entry »