Building relationships within the blogsphere is important for any blogger. This network can really be a savor when it comes to information sharing, back-linking, advertising, discovering a blog post for a social network, and making new friends.

It’s ideal to keep your network within your niche as this can leverage your site based on core knowledge about advertising, increasing web traffic, internet tools, etc. Information sharing is why I blog, and I am sure I don’t have to tell anyone how important this is. We share information with other readers and hope to build a fan base.

My blog is mainly about technology. This is a broad category that covers web development, internet tools, computers, internet marketing, etc. My focus is to read blogs based on my niche to expand on my knowledge and to leverage that knowledge to make my blog site a meaningful and successful site.

What is the expectation of the network?

- Build relationships
- Assist with campaigns or contests
- Discover new blog posts with social networks
- Increase back-links
- Share information

I would like to get feedback from other technology based blog sites on how we can really add value to this network and build on it.

We have come a long way with technology. The internet technology has matured in leaps and bounds with all the new levels of coding, imaging and bandwidth. It’s amazing that these once dot com start ups are now internet giants.

A look back at some of the most popular internet companies.

AOL 1996 (I remember AOL back than and the launch of AIM)

Radio Shack 1996 (A company that was a leader in home electronics)

Google 1998 (If you noticed there’s not drastic change)

Sprint 1998 (They have come along way with there web site and company)

ESPN 1998 (The leader in sports has really advanced as a sports portal)

Yahoo 1996 (Notice the image quality or the lack of)

It’s amazing to see how these internet giants have transitioned into state of the art web portals. Thank god we have the bandwidth today that allows us to advance in web design, imaging, scripting, and streaming video.

Were you on the internet back in 1996?

Are you only playing in one advert? You like your comfort zone don’t you?

Big, big mistake. You should never put all your eggs in one basket! The concept of staying with an advert that works is all well and good, but this is making up a very high percentage of your referrals. Why not spread the cheer around. Let’s take a look at some charts, people like charts.

Source: Google Analytics 

Chart Analysis:

Notice a high percentage of referring sites. This web traffic is coming from other advertising web sites such as Entrecard, Social Bookmarks, Project Wonderful, Google, etc. Though the percentage of referring sites is high, I am using 4 different campaigns from different advertising sources.

Social Bookmarks referring web traffic percentage = 35.76%

Entrecard referring web traffic percentage = 26.87%

Direct Traffic = 13.57% (This could be better, but it has improved each week)

StumbleUpon Advertising Budget $4/day = 8.1%

Project Wonderful = 4.8%

Search Engines = .76% (This percentage has doubled in 7 days)

There’s more than 60+ referring sites, but the percentages are not worth mentioning here. You get the point. I have my advertising campaigns spread out using more than one advert. Direct traffic is important as this indicates visitors who are into your niche and return daily to see what new information they can review.

My #1 priority is to increase my Search Engine referral percentage. This will improve my page rank and the value of my web site.

The lesson here is to spread your campaigns all around. It’s important to test as many advertising web sites as possible. I have tested 6 adverts so far and ran each test for 14 days. I am going to share with you my grading and comments for the adverts tested.

Adverts Tested:

Testing based on credit consumption, credit allocation, CTR (Click Through Ratio)

Test time on each advert = 2 weeks or 14 days.

Entrecard: (B) Entrecard has been a reliable source for web traffic (26.87%). The problem with this advert is stability with the web site. They need to improve uptime and prepare for scalability. I am still an active member.

Project Wonderful: (C+) PW has paid me more than Google Adsense in the last 2 weeks. However, I think PW needs to increase their own web traffic outside the Entrecard user base. I am still an active member.

StumbleUpon Advertising: (C) Traffic burst is fast and furious. They need to serve up impressions throughout the day and not in 5 minutes. I am still an active member.

Bidvertiser: (C-) As for a publisher to make money from advertising ads on your site, this advert falls short. I mentioned in another blog that it could be a good service if your looking to advertise your web site. No longer use this service.

Trafficera: (D) Earn time credits by browsing through ads that refresh every 10 seconds. By far one of the worst. I have better things to do with my time than sit and earn credits based on time. No longer use this service.

TrafficSwarm: (F) Another time consuming effort to gain credits, but what’s worse is credit allocation. It takes forever for your credits to be used to advertise your site. In fact, out of 450+ credits I earned, the credit allocation has taken more than 4 days. No longer use this service.

Testing in progress:

AdsFlip (Will provide my results in 11 days)