It’s a pretty simple concept to implement into a personal project or smaller site, and according to the plugin writer, completely eliminated all spam.

People have often questioned what the affect of irregular updates on a site have on their traffic ranking. Blogs have been introduced to many websites in order to help keep them “fresh” and make sure that search engines come back often. This has a direct impact on advertising earnings as well as visitor loyalty.

We’ve been pretty inactive on this blog over the last couple of weeks and we’ve noticed a decrease in our stats across the board. A stats package such as Google Analytics can help track these trends and here’s some proof to the topic.

The first thing most people look at when tracking stats is pure traffic; how many visits did the site have over a period. This can often be a misleading statistic depending on the purpose of your blog. Do you want many people coming and not doing anything else but reading what they found on Google, or would you prefer a few less people but they are an active part of your site commenting on posts and starting conversations which in turn increase the user experience of your site?

Let’s have a look at the visits on this blog over 2 separate time periods.

The last time period of consistent updates on this site was from 01/2009 until 04/2009

01/2009 – 04/2009

These stats show a pretty consistent amount of traffic over the period with it having the usual of trend of spike dip spike where the first spike becomes your new average after the 2nd spike (we’ve noticed this trend across a number of our sites).

Now we look at the period 04/2009 – 05/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

The images speak for themselves.

Next we look at “visitor loyalty”. When it comes to blogging, visitors are more likely to come back to a blog that is regularly updated than a blog that seems to be dead and forgotten. This is a harsh rule and can apply rapidly. For example; if you have been running a blog for 2 months and have managed to make at least 1 original post per day, people start to see this and will come back every day to read what you have to say. But then, you go on a long weekend holiday and don’t have an update for a couple of days. Next thing you know your stats are showing a decrease in return visits and less traffic from search engines etc. The word “loyalty” in blogging can be thrown around loosely. To me it doesn’t carry the standard definition of “faithfulness or devotion to a cause or person”, but rather something along the lines of “I’ll keep you around while you’re of use to me”.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

This is the “loyalty” I mentioned before. Returning visits are down and there is a steep decline in the 2nd period’s graph. The other sharp decline can be seen in first time visits. A blog will never build up a base of returning users if users never get to the blog in the first place. Most of the blogs I frequent were found through Google – I was looking for something and came across an answer on a blog and enjoyed the content and as a result I know frequent that blog to see what else is going on. This is probably one of the most common scenarios in building up a returning user base.

Search engines enjoy new content. If a site is regularly updated it is seen as a good source of information and search engines will give it preference over “stale” blogs. Search engines can be just as cruel as visitors and will drop you in the blink of an eye.

01/2009 – 04/2009

04/2009 – 05/2009

You can see clearly from these graphs that when the blog was being kept up to date with regular posts, the amount of referrals from Google were on the rise. This doesn’t just relate to the new content i.e. the latest posts being the most searched for but also some of the older posts that have been crowed pleaser’s for a while. When your blog becomes less attractive to Google even your most popular posts will start drifting off to the 2nd page and even further down on the search engine result pages.

To put it quite simply, no matter how popular your blog is today it can be a baron island that no one can get to in a matter of days if you do not work on it.

If you’re a fan of the Twilight Series (the movies, the books, Alice..) like we are you’ll be interested in Twilight Series, a South African blog about everything related to the Twilight Saga.

Congratulations, and remember to keep the comments coming to win March!

Now in the beginning it did look like we had tripled our readership but honestly that was an overestimation, the truth is that its just over doubled readership.

When we posted the results after our first week the top 10 languages looked something like this:

1. en-us 3,306
2. en-gb 304
3. de 246
4. pl 169
5. cs 166
6. nl 156
7. en 144
8. fr 137
9. it 108
10. es 100

Which as you can see still has english as our primary language by a long shot – and that is still true but we are now sitting around 48% english and the rest are other languages. I’ve included a screenshot for you to see below of our analytics stats for the last month

As you can plainly see - it works! The stats have also rolled into our earnings – we’re making more on AdSense than we ever have before as it shows localised ads to those people!

This is why you’re fat. It’s a pretty harsh sentence, and an even harsher site name but hold onto your anger because this site is most definately a reason to be fat. A corn dog pizza? Nevermind the mile high Oreo, “This is why you’re fat” is a blog type site that posts pictures of the most fattening foods imaginable!

For a laugh (and to feel starving) check it out: http://thisiswhyyourefat.com/

WP-Optimize [plugin] is pretty simple but it may save you a lot of space, and speed things up a bit – especially if you are keeping stats in non-optimized tables.

We’ve been trying to work out the difference between a great day on AdGator and a terrible one to work out whether its worth our time at all, and stumbled across some peculiar stats.

Firstly, I still haven’t found anywhere on the site that actually says it doesn’t pay you for non-South African views or what defines what is a South African view but I’ve assumed that its true based on what IMod has said and that “ad impressions” seem to have no bearing what-so-ever on earnings.

So we’re comparing Febuary 2 and Febuary 4 because Feb 2 was a killer day and Feb 4 a terrible day. In order to determine the south african ad impressions I’ve included Google Analytics data about our visitors on those days (because Ad Gator doens’t tell you). I’m assuming their system for determining South African’s is as accurate (or should be) as whatever analytics uses (IP to Country is pretty easy and reliable, we’re not talking about cities).

Febuary 2
Analytics South Africa:    19 visitors     3.79 pages
Total South African page views: 72
Total ad impressions (adgator): 2050
Adgator earnings: R6.68

Febuary 4
Analytics South Africa:    22 visitors     1.27 pages
Total South African page views: 27.94
Total ad impressions (adgator): 2307
Adgator earnings: R0.45

The important information here (assuming it is south african only) is that we did a total of almost 28 views on Feb 4 compared with 72 views on Feb 2. Clearly, Feb 2 did more traffic but only about 2.5x more. Now if you compare the earnings you see the discrepancy – Feb 2 earned around 14.8 times more!

Anyone care to try and make sense of this? I know they don’t guarantee anything and I’m not expecting them to; but 2.5x more page views meaning 14.8x times more money has to mean there is something behind the scenes we aren’t seeing.

How long until we can get statistics on how many ads we actually showed? Why are these being hidden when they could even just be showed numerically? What use is ad impressions if it has no bearing on money earned? What’s really going on ?

From breaking the news some time ago on the Text Link Ads site design rip to being left in the dark I really don’t know how much work they are putting into this service which originally promised us thousands of rands a month after entering our page views into the calculator.

Now, naturally its important to have an epic one and that’s where a service like Mad Avatar comes in – with the following simple steps you can setup your own custom Gravatar.

Step 1

Go to Mad Avatar and get started. The first step is to go into the avatar lab and start creating your avatar. It will let you choose a background image, write your own text and choose the colour and position of it, as shown below.

Step 2

Now that you have created your avatar you can click Submit, Mad Avatar will then give you both the image (if you wanted to save it) and a link where you can get the image. Copy this link (as shown below):

Step 3

Signup or login to your Gravatar account and choose to add a new image. Then tell it to use an image on the internet (as shown below) and put in the link Mad Avatar gave you. It’ll then fetch it for you.

Step 4

Now it’ll ask you to crop the image, however, Mad Avatar will already have given your the perfect sized 100×100 avatar – so drag the crop box to cover the entire image and click Crop and Resize. That’s it! You now have a Mad Gravatar!

The criteria for the competition was

• Relevance to the topic
• Insight
• Adding to the discussion

Based on this, we’d like to award the prize to Denouncer of Xboxgaming.co.za for his input on the IEC website saga. We’ve added a link to xboxgaming.co.za on our blogroll.

We’ll be running the same competition from today until the end of February, so keep the comments coming!