Right now, adbuttons.net is still very limited, but functioning. I like to give people access to the system as early as possible, so I can extend the software based on feedback from the users. I’ve done the same with the Ad Buttons plugin and, based on your feedback, this seems to be a model that the users like.

Joining the Ad Buttons Ad Network is not mandatory, you can still use the plugin to manage your own ad inventory for your blog.

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There are a couple of issues I have noticed with the rss feed.

• The number of subscribers is below 10 still, but it fluctuates from day to day so I do wonder how accurate the information is.

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The fluctuating subscriber numbers in FeedBurner are easy to explain: the provided subscriber count is simply the number of people who have accessed your rss feed on any given day. This might come as a shock to some of you, but not everyone is on the internet every day. So, a rss feed subscriber count of ten, two days in a row, could mean you have 10 subscribers. But it is also quite possible that the ten people who accessed your rss feed on day one are not online the second day. Ten other people might have accessed your feed on the second day, bringing your total subscribers count to 20 people.

The problem with accurately tracking the subscriber count is the limited information available to the feed provider. The only things we can track are the software used to read the feed (although, as pretty much any information send over the internet, this can be faked) and the ip address of the computer accessing the feed. I don’t think there is something similar to the cookies used in browsers in use in feed reader software, and even if there is: this would still not guarantee a 100% reliable way of tracking subscribers. I think the service provided by FeedBurner is as close to reliable subscriber tracking as you can get.

But even if we know that the reported subscriber numbers aren’t very accurate, we can use the reporting available to look at the bigger picture. Over time, if you are doing it right, you should see a general upward trend in the reported subscriber numbers.

StumbleUpon is one of the sites that can bring a heap of new visitors to your site. I’ve seen 18,000 page views in a single day on one of my sites, all traffic from StumbleUpon. The number of visitors that came to my site from StumbleUpon decreased considerably over the next couple of days, but I was still getting over 1,000 visitors a day for about a month.

We all want traffic, right? Well, actually, most webmasters think it’s all about the number of visitors, but what they really want is to make some money from ads running on their site. If you are running AdSense ads on your site, StumbleUpon traffic, or rather social media traffic in general, is no money maker. If you want to get a good return on all that free traffic, you have to know who your visitors are!


So, who is stumbling? Your typical StumbleUpon user is not as easily described as the average Digg user. StumbleUpon has a much broader user base than Digg. You can find any kind of people on StumbleUpon, which of them get send to your website depends on the category that your site was submitted to.

One thing that can be said about StumbleUpon users is that they are bored, not boring, just bored. See, the whole point of StumbleUpon is to give bored people something to do on the web.

I know I’ve spend countless times staring at a search engine, trying to figure out what I wanted to search for. I didn’t have anything better to do, and just wanted to browse the ‘net, but I had no idea where to start.

Today, whenever I feel like just browsing the web, with no particular goal in mind, I just hit the Stumble! button in my browser and I will be taken to an interesting site. I’ve put the subjects I’m interested in into my profile page, so the system knows what I like and doesn’t send me to just any random website.

When you get visitors from StumbleUpon to your website, you know they are people that are interested in the topic of your site, you also know that they are bored and where not looking for your website in particular. Visitors from search engines came to your site by searching for something that is on your site, they will probably also click on your AdSense ads, because the ads show links to sites on a similar topic. StumbleUpon visitors will not click the ads on your site, when they are done reading, they click on the Stumble! button to be send to the next website.

A few might click an ad, bookmark your site or even subscribe to your rss feed, but most of them will not. The best thing they can do, is give your site a thumb-up, so it will be send to more StumbleUpon users. So, if you are enjoying this post, please give me a thumb up!

What about other ways to make money from the StumbleUpon traffic? Your best bet would probably be CPM ads, these are ads that pay for each time it is viewed, instead of requiring a click to make money. This depends on your websites topic however, I’m mostly writing for webmasters and they are generally more web-savvy than your average visitor on other sites. Most of my visitors use the Firefox browser and I’m pretty sure a lot of them have some ad-blocking extensions installed, so they will never see the CPM ads, and will not make me any money.

Getting shut down by your hosting provider
The sudden increase of traffic can cause some alarm bells to go of at your hosting provider. Some server administrators will mistake the ridiculously high hits on your site for a DDoS attack and take your site offline.

You can prevent this from happening by letting your hosting provider know that a page from your site made the front page of Digg. This is, of course, providing you know you have been Dugg.

Another reason, your web hosting provider might have, to take your site offline, is that your account has used up it’s available traffic resources. A page with only a few images and scripts can easily add up to a few hundred kb of data being transferred on a single page load.

Looking at my website statistics, it seems that my average page size is about 35 KB. If I would be running on a hosting account with a 10 GB a month data limit, I would be able to serve about 285.000 pages a month. That is plenty for most sites, but being on the front page of Digg can drive crazy amounts of visitors to your site, which can chew up your 10 GB plan in no time.

But there is something that can be far worse than having your site taken offline for reaching the bandwidth limit: it’s having your site stay online after using up your monthly bandwidth and

being presented with a bandwidth over usage bill.
Most hosting providers have ridiculous fees for any bandwidth you use on top of what’s included in your hosting plan. This happened to me last year. One of my dedicated servers used more than the plans bandwidth. The bill I was presented was quite high, but I managed to get the hosting provider to cancel the bill.

Having your site shut down or being billed extra can be easily avoided. In case the billing or shutdown would be caused by exceeding your hosting plans allowed amount of traffic, you can simply make your pages smaller. Avoid over usage of images, as they are the biggest items on any page, byte size wise. The images used on your page could be saved with a little higher compression ratio or you could offload the images to a different hosting account to share the bandwidth load. If you don’t have a second hosting account, you could host the images on a free image hosting site, there are plenty of free ones available to you.

It is also very common to have your hosting account disabled for using to much of the servers resources. This won’t happen on a dedicated server, but if you are on a shared hosting account, they can shut your site down for putting too much stress on the servers processor, which will affect other clients websites hosted on the same server. This too is easy to avoid. Have a look at your WordPress blog. Everything is stored in a database. The blog title, the tagline, the post title, the post text, the categories, the tags and much more.

When a page is requested for viewing, the software will read all the necessary information from the database. Compiling a single page involves running a lot of queries. Your web server is good at running queries and retrieving the needed information from the database at lightning speeds, but there are limits. With a few dozen page requests every second, the server will soon have trouble keeping up. Remember that there can easily be over a hundred other websites running on the same server.

Running all these queries to build a single page is not really necessary though, once the page has been created by the php code, it can be stored as a static html file. The next visitor can be presented with the html output directly, which probably uses at least 90% less processing power. Don’t worry if this sounds a bit too technical to you, there is an easy way to implement this method in your WordPress blog, its called caching and there is a nice plugin available: WP Super Cache by Donncha O Caoimh

Don’t wait implementing these until you hit the front page of Digg. Once you are on the page, there will not be much you can do. These measures should be in place before the traffic avalanche hits you. Even if it never happens, it’s better to be save than sorry. So, be prepared!

Eric pointed out Adgetize to me today, so I thought I’d give it a try. This ad program seems to have the greatest potential so far. You are getting paid not only for ad views or ad clicks, but also for posting on your blog. This is not a paid posting service, you just go about blogging like you normally would. You post what you want and earn points with their system.

Another big difference with services like Xavier Media Banner Exchange is that your accumulated points will be converted into cash! So, if you are getting clicks and hits from traffic exchange programs, but really rather be paid for your blog, this is your chance to sign up with a brand new service.

Adgetize has only been around for a month, but people have already been paid for this program, so it seems to be legit. Looking at how their system works, I’m not entirely sure they will last long in the advertising market. People are currently signing up like crazy and displaying the Adgetize ads on their websites to earn cash. If the program fails to attract enough advertisers, this nice program could soon be gone.
If you want to give it a try, you can sign up for their service for free and start showing ads on your site within minutes. Just go to the Adgetize website and sign up now!

Thanks Eric for pointing out the program!

The program works with a 3:2 ration, which means that for every 3 ad clicks on your site, you will get 2 visitors send back to you. You will start with 1000 banner impression credits and you can get another free 5000 banner impression credits just for writing a review. Since I was going to write this review anyway, that’s 5000 totally free banner impression credits for me, yay!

What I really like about this banner exchange program is that you don’t have to do any clicking to earn points, your visitors can take care of that. This makes this program a lot better than Entrecard in my eyes.

You can put your own ad in several of 35 different categories, so the traffic you will be getting should be pretty targeted. As with any banner campaign, the number of clicks on your ad will depend on the design of your banner. Since you can have multiple ads running through this program, you can do some split testing and see which banner design performs best for you.

I’ll have to see how this works out in the long run, but my first impression of the Xavier Media Banner Exchange is very positive. You should give it a try! If it doesn’t work out for you, too bad, but at least you didn’t loose a dime trying it.

You basically put an ad button on your site and visitors who are also signed up with Entrecard can click it to earn points. I can in turn visit their sites and click to earn points for myself. The earned points can be spend on displaying your ad button on other peoples websites.

The great thing about this method of advertising is that it doesn’t cost you a dime, which is great for people just starting out blogging. The downside is that you’ll have to do a lot of clicking to earn enough points to put your ad up on other sites. Also, when not clicking, the other users of the system will not notice you and will not visit your site.

So, if you click a lot, you get a lot of visitors. Great, if you have the time to visit all these blogs to click the button. But be aware of the type of traffic you get in return: they are other Entrecard members, only visiting your site to click the button. Most of them probably don’t even read a single word on your blog. They are the click-n-run visitors.

You might wonder how Entrecard got so popular. I’ll tell you: it’s all in the marketing! With a few big names, like Darren Rowse and John Chow, promoting your service, things can start snowballing pretty fast. Shame on you, both of you! Although it looks like they are both not using the service anymore.

If I don’t like this method of getting traffic, why am I using it? First of all, I believe in trying out things for myself before writing a review about it. Sure, I could just browse the web to see what everyone is saying, but that wouldn’t make a very objective review. I also think that this service can potentially bring me some visitors that might decide to hang around or subscribe to my rss feed. Since they are all bloggers, it is very targeted traffic I’m getting for this blog. The only question that remains is whether or not they actually read my posts.

So, to summarize: if you measure your blogs success in visitor numbers only and have time to spare to visit 350 blogs a day, just to click the Entrecard button, go ahead! If you are more interested in growing your blogs community, I’d say there are better ways to spend your time.