I’ve been researching how to increase the amount of visits to my blogs – bearing in mind I now have 5 – and hopefully increasing the take up of the offers on the 4 shopping ones:

• www.freshwebz.co.uk/blog/
• www.cashbackshopper.co.uk/blog/
• www.loveyourpets.co.uk/blog/
• www.ukshoppingspree.com/blog/
• www.mytravelextras.co.uk/blog/

The first step I’ve taken is to create a profile at Technorati & “claim” all my blogs.

Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, we index more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content.

Any updates to the blogs will be updated on Technorati automatically, so this will hopefully increase potential readership, provided I have something interesting to say!!! There are a number of other steps I am currently investigating, so I will add them to this post as I go along.

I’ve now set up feeds with Feedburner which can be subscribed to for RSS updates via Feedburner (which is now part of Google) rather than just directly from the blog itself:

• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ CashbackShopperOffersBlog
• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ MyTravelExtrasBlog
• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ LoveYourPetsBlog
• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ UkShoppingSpreeOffersBlog
• http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ FreshwebzWebDesignAffiliateMarketingBlog

Feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into “widgets,” “gadgets,” mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere.

As Feedburner has been taken over by Google, it’s also possible to incorporate Adsense ads in the feeds – whether this is a good idea depends on what you ae advertising….having ads for your rivals in your own feed doesn’t seem like a good idea to me!

However, Feedburner states that it can help promote blogs in the following four ways:

1. Publicize your content and make it easy for people to subscribe.
2. Optimize distribution so that your content is properly formatted for all of the major directories and can be consumed by subscribers wherever they are.
3. Analyze your traffic to learn how many subscribers you have, where they’re coming from and what they like best.
4. Make Moneyitize by participating in the FeedBurner Ad Network. Why not reward yourself for your effort?

I’ll be returning to Feedburner to work on these four features once my blogs are “settled”.

I blogged previously about the failure of my short breaks white label site to make any sales, whilst it was integrated into the main My Travel Extras site.

As a result, I set up the site as a standalone short breaks mini-site & have just set a PPC campaign on Google, using only 3 or 4 (or even more), exact match keyphrases. I’ve created 4 different ad variations & limited my bids to £0.50 so that I’m not spending too much per click. With this budget, Google predicts at an average CPC of £0.37 – £0.49, these keywords could potentially generate 36 – 69 clicks per day (which would cost £20 – £40).

I think this is plenty for now, assuming a few sales come from these clicks(!), but I will be fine tuning the campaign as I go & see if these figures improve. If Superbreak make sales, then using an identical copy of their site & directing relevant traffic MUST generate sales, musn’t it?!!!!!

Time will tell!

Today I received this e-mail from Google announcing the closure of their Adsense referrals programme. Looks like Google is tightening the ship, minimising their spend & maximising their income!!

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals programme. We will be retiring the AdSense Referrals programme during the last week of August. After that time, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads.

We appreciate your patience during this transition. If you have additional questions, please visit http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882.
Thank you for your support of AdSense Referrals.