Some thought that those sites were only for people that would use them every day, others thought it was basically a passive experience, where only certain members could submit articles, while everyone else could only vote, and still others didn’t know what those sites were.

Making money online is mostly marketing. Content is important, but more than anything it comes down to how you market that content. Do you think e-books and whatnot do so well because their content is the best? No! People just spend more time on marketing e-books than the average blogger does on any single article they write.

If you don’t have accounts on as many promotional sites as possible, you could be missing out. While each site caters to a certain demographic, many sites have various sub-groups that are still powerful, and helpful.

Take the time to find out which social media site caters to the demographic you hope to capture with your site, and begin submitting your content from time to time. What have you got to loose other than a small time investment that could pay huge dividends?

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

While the design has been recognized by a few different sites, thanks to me taking some time to submit it around, I am still waiting for people to really recognize the content, but there aren’t really any “content” galleries.

There is still a huge amount of work to be done in building out the content and even more in building out the Gazette, the actual blog section of the site.

It is a little difficult to meet the expectations of others as this site requires much more research and organization than any site I have done previously, as I don’t have the same experience with the subject as I usually do when writing online.

I am always looking for new ways to promote the content, build it out faster, and increase the advertising revenue that it brings in so that I can continue to work on this site for years to come.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

I am not sure where Alexa is getting their new statistics and information that they are using to create their rankings, but it isn’t friendly to my niche.

I took a quick look at the top five blogs from the Top 50 list of Make Money Online Blogs I compiled, and all of them show huge drops in their Alexa rankings since the start of the year.

Darren works hard on Problogger, and I doubt over the last half a year that his blog could have dropped so far in rankings compared to other blogs. I would actually hazard a guess that his blog actually continues to grow in traffic, links, and other support, so why is his ranking dwindling away?

It is still fairly high compared to most sites, but the drop is very apparent.

Here are the other four top blogs in the top fifty list, and as you can plainly see, all of them have experienced a similar drop.

Not all of them seem to be effected in exactly the same way, but all of them have experienced a large drop. Some blogs have dropped faster, and harder than others, and I can’t really see any rhyme or reason for the drop. If they were all exactly the same, at the same time, then I could understand that it was just an overall shift in how Alexa compiles their rankings, but I have to conclude that their data sources are effecting their calculations in what almost appears to me an unfair way.

This blog is not safe from the drop either, as my Alexa rank has been sinking as well, despite my best efforts to find ways to attract unique visitors, and even more so, visitors that would be using the Alexa Toolbar, in hopes if it boosting my rank.

Why Does This Matter?

This wouldn’t normally be a concern for most bloggers, and I can see some people reading this post and putting on their hater pants. “Alexa is irrelevant, every idiot knows that,” they might say, but the fact of the matter is that certain sites use Alexa ranking to determine position, including PerformancingAds, where sites are listed in order of best to worst Alexa rank, and I have no doubt that those with higher visible rankings will secure more advertising than those that are lower down the page.

It is also taken into consideration when compiling things like my top 50 list of make money online blogs, as I compile the list from the 45n5.com/top100 list, which places sites based on Google PageRank, Technorati Ranking and Alexa Ranking.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

I wanted to get into the top one hundred, and then the top fifty, and then the top thirty. Today, I am sitting in the top twenty. I can’t see myself rising much higher, but I enjoyed having goals and a strange sense of competition.

I didn’t let the fact that I was competing really change the blog, but it lit a fire under me to get more done on this site than I might have otherwise been able to.

I worked on building vast amounts of content, pushed my networking skills as hard as possible to get inbound links, spent some money on having WordPress themes developed so I could release them for even more attention, and worked on building up my traffic so that I could continue to rise up the ranks.

I watched as my competitors blogs faded as they lost interest. I waited as Google re-assessed their PageRank system, assigning new higher ranks to me, and less high ranks to many of my competitors. I added the Alexa toolbar on my web browser to attempt to give me one more vote to push my rank just that little bit higher, and wrote about Alexa on a few occasions in hopes of drawing in their user base to increase my rank even more.

I worked hard on trying to build a community while also focusing on improving the ranks that would help me achieve my goals. I didn’t take any big short cuts, and my continued growth is in part because I continued on while others gave up.

Having a person to compete with can really help those of us that have problems with inspiration or issues sticking to a single task for a long period of time. You don’t have to be the best, but you should want to do better than a fair number of your peers and thus competitors.

Who are you competing with, and why? Or if you are a person that doesn’t enjoy competition, how do you inspire yourself to continue moving forward? Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for reading eXtra for Every Publisher – xfep.com.

This, to me, reinforces the fact that social media is a key component to a blogs success or failure as I was also getting many more advertisement requests on this site when my rankings were getting better and better, as advertisers no doubt assumed that they would continue to rise and as such they were getting an amazing deal.

I still believe there is great value in this site, its content, its archives, and its audience, but I have to admit that I am going to be gearing up for another social media push in hopes to getting this blog back on track with both Alexa and Technorati so that my rank on 45n5.com/top100 remains fairly high.

The story was Understanding Search Engine Penalties, and it has received over 300 votes.

The traffic was pretty great, didn’t really receive many links or anything, the comments on Digg, were less than nice, and even some of the ones I received here were pretty negative.

All in all, it worked out nicely in my favour, and brought in enough traffic that eXtra for Every Publisher has in ten days beaten the previous high traffic month, December 2007, by over 6,000 unique visitors.

My traffic so far this month stands at:
Unique Visitors – 29,693
Page Views – 83,933

I am very happy, and I can’t wait to see if there are any reasonably long term effects from getting on the front page of Digg, and for once, not getting buried. Blogs, especially like this one, rarely see the front page of Digg, and so that definitely made me feel a little special.

A huge thanks to all the people that voted the story up, and enjoyed the article and Celebrity Cowboy for being so great and letting me analyze their site.

If you haven’t taken a look at the advertising options on this site, January is a perfect time, as I have slashed advertising prices in half. Check out my previous advertising special post for pricing details. My most expensive advertising position this month is $30 US, a great bargain.

For those of you that have contributed to the insane growth I continue to see, I owe you all a huge debt of thanks, and I am happy that you are enjoying the posts I publish. If these last few days are any indication, I think 2008 might go against what I have previously said (Blogging in 2008: Time to Worry?), and knock my socks off.

Sure, it was the holiday season and all, but it isn’t like I didn’t have Internet access. Not only that, but I had plenty to post about, and now after checking my stats, I see that the lack of posting has created a sharp dip downwards, making me feel a little like I have put myself behind the eight ball, and should spend a fair bit of time producing content over the coming days.

For me, how I am doing with a blog helps spur me into action. I want to see continuous growth, even if that growth is only one more unique visitor in a month, for me, that is a success.

So, for some people, moving away from checking their stats has been said to improve productivity by freeing up more time to write, but for me, and probably many others, not checking your stats can decrease your drive to produce, so don’t forget to look at how you are doing every once and a while, and remember that even one more person over a previous month is growth.

The site, just recently started, and is already doing amazing. That is in part thanks to my marketing efforts, and in a big way thanks to all the great people on Reddit that gave an article submitted on there a thumbs up.

Currently, the site has received more traffic from Reddit than any other traffic source leading up to this day.

Who would have guessed that there were some science fiction geeks on Reddit? I couldn’t be happier, and for me it really continues to prove that different social promotion sites have very different audiences, and as such will promote or bury stories based on those likes and dislikes.

Anyone know of any science fiction related digg-like sites? And don’t forget to check out AltSciFi and let me know what you think.

If you visit the blog, you will be redirected to an image that says the blog has been hacked and that if the hacker doesn’t get $100 in the next twenty-four hours, the cow will be cooked to well done.

Some people find the “hack” funny, and others are not impressed as advertisers lose eyeballs during this time.

Also, if you are wondering whether or not John Cow has done this to his own site, the fact that the Paypal button on the “hacked” page submits $1 to cownapper@johncow.com kinda clinches the deal.

No doubt he is getting many links, and a fair bit of traffic from this whole thing. I have to admit, the owner of John Cow is a marketing genius.