New site: paid-internships.net uses auto-blogging
Three ad slots on paid-internships.net
Yesterday I relaunched paid-internships.net as a standalone blog site; it uses Wp-O-Matic to pull the paid internships RSS feed from my Internweb.com site. Previously, this blog was just a subset of the main Internweb site. I am hoping that the fact that it is now standalone will help in search engine rankings and traffic. I highly recommend Wp-O-Matic, as it makes the concept of auto-blogging incredibly easy. First you have to have an RSS feed or feeds that you will be using for your content. Then you set up the amount of stories you want it to post, and the frequency for it to run. The scheduling via CRON job is customizable so you can have it pull once an hour, once a day, or somewhere in between. Then you just sit back and let it go. The only thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to get relevant tags for each post. You can set it up to use the same tags each time, but I don’t think that will help much with SEO.
As you can see from the screenshot, I added three ad slots to the blog, using a WordPress theme that makes it really easy to implement the ad code. I have the standard 468×60 banner at the top (which I think most people will ignore), a bigger 728×90 ad right above the blog content, and a 336×280 ad in the right sidebar. I’ve found that with Adsense, if you set up an ad slot to be text ads only, you will get a better click-through ratio, so that’s what I did with the banner and header ads. Since the site will be primarily text, I chose to have the sidebar ad be a mix of text and image ads to liven things up a bit. I’m not really sure that I like the color scheme of the theme though so I will explore changing that.
When I set up a new site or blog, I always do the following to help with Google rankings:
- Google Webmaster Tools: add the site and get it verified (requires uploading a small blank HTML file)
- Google Webmaster Tools: Create an XML sitemap (using this) and tell Google where it is
- Google Analytics: get a new tracking code for the site and add it via code or a WP plugin such as Google Analyticator
- Submit the site to Google
Given that paid-internships.net is linked from Internweb (which has a good PageRank), it is getting traffic right off the bat. For the first day, the blog already got 9 clicks and generated revenue of 98 cents. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a great start with a click-through ratio of 4.5%!
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[...] but my revenues from other sources dropped. The best part was the performance of my new autoblogging site Paid-Internships.net, which produced $40.96 all by itself, on low traffic but high [...]