Work continues to create more readership with THE Canadian Personal Finance Site, but as with all things that are hard to get, it isn’t easy.

Learning a great deal from Yakezie forums and such, but also have learned a few things that I may not have mentioned before, so here are a few important points that I have learned from some more experienced bloggers:

• Paid Text Link Ads (not the company, just links for advertising) can get you thrown into the Google penalty box. If your main income stream is Adsense, think twice about accepting paid text link advertising on your site. The penalty box is a Page Rank of ZERO (this one happened to the Canadian Capitalist).
• Never “like” or post your own StumbleUpon posts, that will get you thrown in their penalty box as well (I have heard that one from a few folks).
• DO talk to other bloggers about what they have learned. If you want you can “buy” some information in some of the E-books floating around, but I got a lot more useful information from direct contact with other bloggers.
• If you want to keep writing, choose a subject you like or care about. I write about Personal Finance, because my personal finance life is always interesting, and thus I have now been at this for over 5 years, and rarely run out of topics to write about. This site is a little harder to keep up to date, but I will try to post at least once a week about things that I have learned that week.
• Don’t over expose yourself on Social Media sites (sounds naughty eh), in other words choose a couple of posts that you think are good and push those with your Blogging Groups, don’t shotgun every post or you’ll end up not getting much attention.

Those are the points I can think of that I have used this week.

For my Yakezie friends, I have been adding you to my Google Reader sites, and have been adding you to my Twitter feed as well, but it is hard to keep up with everything (and hold down a full time job). I will also be diligently checking the YPROMOGROUP tag to help out there as well.

Guest posts? If there are Yakezie friends who want to send me a guest post, drop me a line and we can talk about it, I don’t mind guest posts, but so far I have got some pretty bad stuff from unsolicited folks, but my guess is that Yakezie members might write a bit better content.

I am also experimenting with the All in One SEO Pack for WordPress, but I will try it out here first before I add it to my main site. I am still in search of a better theme for my main site as well.

Hope my American friends enjoyed their Thanksgiving as well.

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So I have started looking at the Yakezie challenge a lot closer and there does seem to be some merits in participating in that group, as well as the other group I have of fellow bloggers.

The numbers seem to be doing OK, although my number of RSS readers has stalled and actually seems to be dropping. My Alexa ranking is now well below 200K which was the initial goal, however, my Compete numbers continue to stink and don’t look to be getting any better any time in the near future.

A few interesting tid bits I have learned or seen this week:

• You shouldn’t post your own content to StumbleUpon, or you might end up being banned. I hadn’t known that and was merrily posting everything there, so I have stopped doing that.
• Sub.Diggerplus.com is an interesting idea, but there seems to be a lot of bugs in retrieving articles from Digg, and you end up with empty articles you are allegedly reviewing.
• I have created a Facebook ID Theo B. CajunMan, since they wouldn’t let me go with TheBig Cajunman, oh well, I am running a lot of content through there, and luckily HootSuite has an ability to post in a timed fashion on FaceBook as well.
• The biggest post of the week was That is One Big Mortgage about the fact that Canadian now owe more than a Trillion Dollars in Mortgage debt. Written as an afterthought, but lots of folks picked it up, so it has been stuffed into many different Carnivals as well.
• Found an AutoTwitterLetter creation engine, so it pukes one out for me every day around 8:00 PM, not even sure what criteria it uses, and it doesn’t make me any money, so is it worth it?
• Found an interesting way to promote the site on Twitter, every Sunday I put out a list of links to my articles for the week, and it increases my ReTweet numbers too (yes that’s a little stinky, but all is fair).

Slowing down a little in the Social Media Blitz, but attempting to make more specific work directly with other bloggers attempting to create Buzz in different ways. Might look into my HubPages page too and see if it is worth keeping up or not.

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So this week I had a sudden spike in the number of reads for THE Canadian Financial Blog (basically a quadrupling of my regular readers) for about 2 days, and it took me a while to figure out where the traffic was coming from. Two weeks ago I wrote a piece about Sunday Banking, that I didn’t think much of, but it was an opinion post and I feel sometimes I need to get things like that off my chest. It did include a good catch phrase, I thought, with Impulse Banking, but the only reaction I got was a tirade from 1 commenter and a bunch of folks on Reddit commenting about what a Neo-Fascist I was trying to impinge on their rights to bank on Sundays, OK, fine, I never understand why some people like some of my writing and then other things cause visceral reactions.

Fast forward to this week and my sudden explosion in readership. I finally was able to track down that the spike was caused by a post by Rob Carrick, Whatever Happened to Banker’s Hours, which mentions me at the beginning, and doesn’t say much more, but holy cow, I was getting hit counts during the day that I don’t see ever.  I was getting hits from iPhones and Androids all over the place, but unfortunately this kind of spike rarely causes a big increase in RSS readership or the like, I need to work to make sure if this happens again, I try to hold onto the readership a little more.

My continued work on Social Media, has caused me to create another Facebook account (I have one for my normal persona), but I have created Theo B. Cajunman, as a place to post stories to Facebook, we shall see where this might lead, as I have set up Hootsuite to post there as well. I still can’t see where Facebook would help with readership, but I am willing to listen as well.

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So my experiment in Social Media for THE Canadian Personal Finance Site continues, and it seems to be showing some promise in expanding my readership.

Stumbleupon continues to be the site that is bringing the most traffic to my site, but to run down the sites that I am currently regularly using are:

• Twitter, which is an obvious choice, and I use HootSuite to cue up older posts so that they are reintroduced to my Twitter readership. I also use the TweetMeMe on each post in case folks want to repost the Twitter entry. Remember I am BigCajunMan there.
• The new Digg seems to be working better than the old one, and I am getting some traffic as bigcajunman on there as well.
• Stumbleupon seems to drive the most traffic to my site. It is also useful to find new interesting posts.
• I use Yahoo Buzz and Google Buzz as well, and my hope is that those help with the respective search engines for each firm. I am BigCajunMan there as well.
• I also use deli.ci.ous as well, a useful book marking site, but not a lot of traffic.
• To make sure my readers have access to these sites easily I use the DiggDigg plug in for WordPress.

I seem to be getting listed on some “best of ” lists as well and have a rank in Technorati, which helps out. More submissions to Carnivals help out, and I will be hosting a few Carnivals in the near future as well.

More readership is the key to more income from my site, I need to figure out now how to get my RSS numbers up .

The experiment seems to be working somewhat, but it is also a lot of work, not sure I am getting bang for the work I am doing, if I could automate things more that might help.

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This is quite funny because now both my sites have this page rank, including this site. I am astounded to see that somehow this simple little “on line notebook” is actually ranked at 2/10, while my Canadian Personal Finance Blog which has thousands of links and such is also 2/10 (but then again, so is the Canadian Capitalist, and he is a much higher ranked blogger than I am).  What’s funny is our friend over at Canadian Money Review is ranked 3/10 yet he hasn’t posted anything in months (busy with new baby and such). 

I think I am getting my ranks back because I have turned off the “Bots” on my left over sites over at Blogspot. At the end of the year, I am going to delete the Financial One, since it still seems to be creating “echos” throughout the Web, and the redirection from Blogspot does not seem to work that well these days either. 

Given I am using Chrome much more these days, I haven’t really been looking at my page rankings (haven’t got a chrome add in for this), so I only noticed that this site seems to have a page rank of 2/10 on Friday. I am not getting deluged with advertising opportunities here yet, and somehow I doubt that will happen, but then again, you never know either.

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This morning while attempting to clean up the 90 still broken links on Canadian Personal Finance, I ended up having an interesting epipheny. In my early days I took pictures from all over the web to help push forward my points (not realizing that many times sites move pictures, or turn off access to them). This morning I found a post I had done about pay day loans places called Pay Day Loans: No, No, No!! and in it, I had a picture of a great white shark to show what I thought of the pay day loan industry (they are all blood thirsty sharks (worse than loan sharks)).

Pay Day Loans Just Like the Great White, A Perfect Eating Machine

My Broken Links plug in told me that this picture had disappeared, and I was looking around for a new picture of a shark, when it dawned on me that a very nice picture that shows what Pay Day Loan places are like is on the cover of Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws, so I decided to replace the picture, with an Amazon Associates picture ad for the novel Jaws, and if someone buys the novel I make money! I also get across the point about how I loath the Pay Day Loan industry (even though the advertise on my web site as well!).

Think I’ll do that a few more times now, see if I can get some love from Amazon.

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That I think is my next goal is to have my RSS subscribers increase by 10x and the number of readers a day to get to 10x what they currently are. How can I do this? I think more pushing my content out to carnivals is helping, but there needs to be a “step” up and I am not sure how that one works. My guess is this could happen if:

1. An article I write gets into DIGG and gets a big uptake (much like John Chow’s infamous underground urinal posting worked).
2. Get mentioned in the regular “print” media or electronic media which could make things better as well.

My opinion is that this may happen “by accident” somewhere along the way, but I am more curious to find someone who knows how to really make this one happen. Any readers?

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This is the question your readers and potential readers have every time they come to your site. If the content of your site is boring, or doesn’t catch the readers eye or fancy, then you are going to lose readers, and potential income.

Now if your site is a simple set of links with a bunch of Adsense ads on it, then this article doesn’t pertain to you, because you don’t care, you just want folks to stumble over your site.

You need to figure out how to make your posting interesting. A picture is always interesting, a video is even more interesting for a lot of folks, I really like this clip, of my daughter sinking a 3 pointer, which I then wrote an article around:

Ask yourself the question, “Would I want to read this”, every time you write and you won’t go wrong!

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Yes, that is another way to get folks to notice you on the Internet, is by sending articles to one of the many Carnivals that are posted on a regular basis on many different sites.

The first thing is to make sure you have some good content on your blog, that you figure might be carnival worthy. Then you go to this site, or one of the many other sites where lists of carnivals are kept. Using the simple on line forms submit your article and hopefully the editor of the carnival for the week will put you in.

This has worked quite nicely for me on my finance site to build up a readership of folks who seem to enjoy my odd viewpoint on finances in general. The next big step is to actually volunteer to host a Carnival. That will drive up your readership a TON, at least for that week and will also increase your in-link and out-link count, which will in turn help your Google Pagerank as well (as well as your Technorati and Alexa.com rank as well).

Links are really important (incoming more so, but outgoing is pretty important too). We’ll talk more about that soon.

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