Here are a selection of DoFollow / I Follow logos to use on your blog. Just copy and paste code into your sidebar or text widget.
Don’t forget to add you blog to The DoFollow Directory.
Simply copy and paste html code into your blog sidebar, footer or wherever you want the dofollow directory logo to appear.
The term is bit vulgar – I apologize. This is a term I use when I take a very popular post on a blog and completely pimp it out to squeeze every once of money and value out of it.
There may be better or more effective ways to do it but this is how my mind works and how I get from point A to depositing a cheque in the bank.
To Pimp Out Your Blog Posts
You MUST ave a popular blog with good, solid traffic and lots of quality content. If your blog is new or you don’t have many posts or readers then you will piss people off. You are taking a popular post and totally prostituting it so you better have some quality stuff surrounding it if you want to maintain credibility.
If your blog is new and you dont have a lot of good content- stop reading now and come back in a few months,
Figure out What ARE your most Popular Posts.
These change day to day depending on news and season. I generally just use something like Daily Top 10 plugin for wordpress You can also see what’s going on using Mybloglog or any analytics program. You basically want posts with lots of traffic. This method will also work very well on “Best Blah Blah Lists”, for example “Best Christmas Albums for Jazz Lovers” I may set this up as a test on the site a report back on result despite it not being a popular post (yet).
-Product posts work very well. This is why “top” or “best” lists work very well. I may have a popular post on how to stop page rank bleeding but will not get me a great return on any products. This is why if you are going to create “make money blogging” type site forget about the making any money part 
.
Take a look at your existing popular posts and see if there is a way to include products on the post- software? electronic something? tool? equipment? Beef up the post if you can with mentions of tools or utilities you use. Don’t be obvious about it- only add the info if it enhances the post.
Throw every things you got at it -in an intelligent way.
What is the best Google ad size to use?
The BEST ad to use for Google Adsense HANDS DOWN no questions asked when you want a high click though rate is the 336×280 square. It is in your face but it does work. I wold not wrap your text if you to maximize. The first thing your reader should see when then land on your page is that ad- above the fold and preferably in the middle of the page.
- I use a slideshow. I use the biggest size that will fit on my blog. I select 5-16 related products. Using my ” Best Christmas Albums for Jazz Lovers” scenario I would have in my slideshow all the albums listed and then some.
Place this bedside or under your large Adsense rectangle. Don’t embed it in your post. You want these ads above or as close to above the fold as possible.
Amazon recently added a widget for users to to listen to mp3′s- for this kind of post I would ad at the end of post and use some sort of call to action that will get them to listen, Like-” this is my favourite cut off the album- listen to it and tell me what you think” etc.
For the truly aggressive you could offer a contest or promotion and have readers write a review, or a post on their blog about a favorite memory that one of song invokes.
Add product images. If a long-ish post add some product images. Breaking up paragraphs create visual interest. Do NOT go too big and by all means embed and wrap into post text.
Make sure you link your products to affiliates . I prefer Amazon for lots of reasons. I do a bit with Commission Junction for the really niche products . In a text link embedded in a post I rarely leave the anchor text untouched. I will edit to make it sound more natural and I almost always add nofollow tags.
You can also try linking to presell pages. Link to other posts on your site that review or describe the product in more detail and that pages links to affiliate.
Use your popular posts to encourage visitors to visit other related post that might be buried. A plugin like Related Posts is limited. With the ‘Best Christmas Jazz list” you could also mention in post that you have a list of “Best Fathers Day Gifts for Audiphiles” or whatever the season dictates.
Popular posts also are a good way to get readers to subscribe to your feed and newsletter- Make sure you are using call to action and not mamby pamby wording.
Don’t sacrifice integrity of your blog for some quick and easy money on a few pages. I do this to 10-20 pages on a blog where I have all ready established myself to my readers. My blogs are not littered with affiliate ads in sidebar and header. I will say this again you will PISS OFF readers if you do this to all your pages and lose all credibility .
Do not over sell a product or give too much information- This is directly opposite to the idea of linking to a pre-sell page where you go into greater detail about book/product/service. It is a bit fo trial and error.
If I use a popular post to links to pre-sell page then the person who follow the link is all ready pretty intersted and the pre-selll page can tip them over to buy the item. Sometimes.
Mentioning product in a post without giving away too much information may encourage reader to click on the affiliate link and a cookie is dropped and you will get cut of whatever they buy within a time period i.e Amazon is 24 hours and other affiliates can be as long as 30 days. There is no right answer on which is best- it is situational and you will have to test.
I will say during Christmas season getting a reader to click on affiliate link when buying trends are high is more effective then trying to “sell” one specific product.
You can really maximize a popular blog post and drive up its revenue by being aggressive with Google ads and affiliate links. It takes careful balance not to turn off your reader and should be handled with care.
If you want ideas for specific site then feel free to post site info in comments section.
Never has a term so badly been misused in SEO than the this concept of “bleeding page rank” People adding nofollows all over the place and to petrified to link out to anyone, ever. I have had many well meaning but ignorant web masters contact me when setting up client blogs to make sure I know about nofollows and to add nofollows to all the outbound links because of bleeding page rank.. GULP. Bleeding page rank is when you pass UNNECESSARY page rank
- you link out out to WordPress.com in your sidebar on every single page of your site.(and if you have not changed your sidebar or meta information in widget wordpress theme files then you probably do). Tricky but you should change meta information in widget.
- Payment information links and security links in footer. Most online shopping sites will have payment info in their sidebars- links going out to major credit cards, Paypal, hacker safe sites, etc. You maybe have 4 or 5 sites in your footer that linkout sitewide. Add nofollow tags to these or better yet have them link to a “payment option” type page in your site that list your payment types and those links can link out.
- Affiliate Marketing Ads in sidebar. This is great for affiliates not so great for the site owner. If you have plastered you sidebar with affiliate ads and links- take a close look. You might be linking back to all those sites and oozing your page rank needlessly. Add nofollows to these or consider cloaking your affiliate links.
The benefit of creating a great article and and a possible authority post will garner you lots of backlinks and far outweigh what little page rank you are passing on to linked out sites.
I gave out “best site” type awards award on one of my blogs and solicited nominations. The request for nomination themselves got me lots of links. Blog owners asking readers, etc for to nominate and vote for them
In the end I had a list if 25 sites related to my niche. All the sites are my competition. And HUNDREDS of other sites point to that page as the “definitive” “best list” The page makes my lots of money and gets me a crazy amount of traffic- not to mention cements my place on the top of the hill as the authority.
This my be an extreme example- but I want to pint out that you can’t sacrifice a well written informative post for fear of losing page rank or helping your competition. If it kill yo to link to your competition don’t use quality anchor text or add nofollow tags.
Understand that when you have lots of links on page related to a particular subject then it will help your ranking over all.
For example if I have a blog about MP3 players and I am linking out to Ipod, Microsoft zune, samsung and Creative labs the page is a more credible for keywords “mp3″ in terms of page rank or for contextual ads- it helps serarch engine theme your page content.
Sacrificing your credibility and health of your blog just for page rank is a bad idea.
Last year my top performing blog started reporting unusual numbers. Adsense click through rates (CTR) went down from about 6-8% to the 3-4% range. I normally do very well on the blog with affiliate marketing and those numbers seemed wonky as well. I chocked it up to slow winter until a few days later I was at another computer and had to make a change on the site.. When I typed in the URL to login I waited, and waited. and waited. I thought for second something was wrong with server and left it but it bothered me all day.
When I was home later that night and had some time I went to investigated more. I used one of many free an online tools to check site load time. BINGO.
My site was talking a long time to load- upwards of 8 seconds. That is an eternity on the Internet where people want it fast and want it now.
A few months earlier I had hard coded all my sidebars ( used static html for my pages and categories) . I had thought about then to install some kind of cache plugin but figured since I hard coded everything it wasn’t a big deal (!) and besides my speeds were fine.
I checked few things before I went into full blown panic. I had a ton of scripts running on the site and other plugins that were hard on sever- like Related Posts , AdSense , Daily Top 10 Posts, affiliate scripts and ads, etc and disabled those those to see if it helped. It did but only slightly. The site pages were stil taking 5-6 seconds to load. This was really bad.
I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try a plugin that cached pages on my site. This means that when a visitor comes to your site instead of the server database working at producing a “new” page every time it will store or caches it as a static html file for next visitors.
I installed the the popular WP-Cache for WordPress. It was simple to install and user friendly. By default it will “store” pages for 3600s or 60 minutes. This will be too long for some sites and you should change it. Also be aware that when you make changes to your site you may not see them because page is cached. You can go into WP-Options and clear cache or if you are making major changes disable the plugin in while you work.
You can also try WP Super Cache which works the same way; however it will not cache files for users who are logged in ( like you, the admin) and users who have left comments. I have not used it but keep meaning to switch over.
Yes, instantly. The load time went for 7 seconds to .1 second. A HUGE difference.
Load time is one of the top reasons visitors leave your site. How can they click on your ads follow affiliate links or read your posts if they leave?
I used to think that just hard coding pages would be enough but clearly I was wrong. I installed WP-Cache on all my sites that week. My CTRs went up across the board and affiliate links levelled out and went back to a “normal” range.
In hindsight I should have installed the caching plugin when my traffic started creeping up. The site went from about 1-2,000 visitors to 50,000 visitors that year and was not on a dedicated server. A link to the site as on CNN main web site on week and I had constant sever issues that week could have been avoided if I had wp-cache installed.
WP-Cache is now one of the first plugins I install on a new blog. Great posts and original content will not be read if visitors abandon the site before the page loads.
