Foreign Perspectives

As ‘yall know, I’ve been one of the participants of the Technorati Favourites Exchange (TFX) over the last few weeks which had the aim of getting a whole bunch of people into the top 100 favourited blogs list on Technorati. It’s been very successful too with the composition of that top 100 changing entirely.

So far, I’ve not yet made it as the barrier seems to move up every time I think I’m about to get in at number 100 but I’m not really that bothered as I’ve learnt far more over the last couple of weeks about promoting FP than I would otherwise have done in months if not years. Anyway, I thought I’d share some of that with you here.

First off, it’s very clear that the way to go with the adsense ads is the big square block that you see on FP these days. That’s the one that all the big money making blogs use and when we talk big money, one clocked up $8500 in March.

Getting the traffic up is key to that $8500 of course and with that in mind I’m pleased to see that the link exchanges that are part and parcel of the TFX have moved me into the top 40k of blogs with well over 100 incoming links to date. If you get the chance, it’s definitely worthwhile participating in one of the many link trains around.

What’s also quite useful in increasing the income from the blog/website is to improve the ranking of Alexa and Google. Now, google is staffed with some smart cookies so it’s not too easy to outsmart them and, by and large, what you need to do is to bump up the number of incoming links over a period of time. Naturally that means that your Google ranking isn’t going to go from zero to seven in a couple of months and indeed it’s taken me about eight months to get to PR4 with FP and, all being well, it’ll be at PR5 or perhaps PR6 at the next review (due around July).

However, Alexa is a completely different story. What’s clear is that being in the top 100k sites in Alexa brings in significant cash benefits in that people are prepared to pay more for links from such a site, for you to write articles about them, etc. if you’re in that top 100k. The Alexa people seem to be a completely dumber bunch than those at Google (sorry guys, but it looks like that from here) though and it seems to sufficient merely to download the Alexa toolbar and just look at your own site. Doing that has knocked off 100k from my ranking in a matter of days and I’m not even milking it by just sitting and hitting refresh either. Will it be possible to get into the top 100k doing that though? I think it will as friends of ours with a broadly similar “real” readership are bouncing along at around 100k yet with the location of the readership obviously completely squewed by them accessing their own pages.

What’s also clear is that there’s a whole lot of people out there who think that throwing together a blog is a doddle as everything is totally automated. Well, not quite everything is automated and I’ve picked up loads of great ideas from looking at the various blogs participating in the TFX which I’m gradually incorporating into FP.

If anyone’s interested, I can do a little technical review of their site and point out the various things that they could usefully do to get the traffic up. All I’m asking for the moment is that you do a little article mentioning Foreign Perspectives on your own blog. I’ll consider reviewing non-blog sites too but that would be a chargeable thing.