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For those of you who keep up to date with my link building cookbook series, you have read my post about Squidoo, the website that lets you write articles and allows for backlinks to your sites.

Today’s link building post is about a similar site, one where you can register and write about anything and earn a share of the advertising revenue. The advertising share is 50% to the writers, 10% to the commentators, and 5% for all the referrals. The remaining 35% goes to the site owner(s). The website I am talking about is called ThisIsBy.us

While I know some people do write and optimize posts or traffic and revenue, I only use the site for backlink purposes. Whatever you decide to do, I recommend you at least try the website.

For link building purposes, you can register, login, and write an article about whatever you want, and have it be however long you want. If you are really lazy, you can write a one sentence article with a link to your site.

To get the most out of your link building campaign with ThisIsBy.us, you should include a bit of content and some optimized titles and keywords.

You can see my example article about real estate investments, as well as my one on free online dating.

The sky is the limit on how many links you can build, so start slamming those keyboards and enjoy the long term search engine traffic that my tips bring you!

This is part 31 of my series called the link building cookbook that aims to be the ultimate untapped link building resource on the web.

This guest blogging post was submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Piggy Bank Pie.

Who doesn’t like to get something for nothing? If you own a blog or website, the idea of free traffic is tremendously appealing, and many of us are willing to do whatever it takes to get a few more visitors to our websites. If it’s as easy as putting a widget on your blog, so much the better. It doesn’t take a lot of effort and you stand to gain a lot in return, or do you? I’ve tried a few of these widgets - TheGoodBlogs, BlogRush, Entrecard and others, and I’m beginning to wonder if they are really worth it.

The Good Blogs - Not So Good

One of my first experiences with traffic widgets was TheGoodBlogs. Like most other sites, you sign up, add your blog, select some tags that fit it and put a widget on your blog. The idea is that the widget shows posts related to your content, and your content in turn is shown on other blogs. One of the things that troubled me about the widget was that much of the content actually shown didn’t seem that relevant to my readers, and my stats showed that very few visitors actually came to my blog from that site. After a while, I gave up on it and removed the widget from my blog.

Blogrush? No Rush!

I was a lot more optimistic about Blogrush when it first started. Ok, the widget was ugly, but at least it had possibilities. The ten tier referral system meant that the more people you signed up, the more your blog would be seen. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The trouble is that it probably works best for those who don’t need the additional traffic. If you are an A-list blogger, you can sign up thousands of people, earning referral and traffic credits and getting your posts displayed in even more places. For the rest of us, the traffic you get is fleeting, if it comes at all. I got a trickle of traffic from Blogrush at a time when I published some of my best posts. It was time to move to the next big thing - Entrecard.

Entrecard

Entrecard held even more promise. When you sign up for Entrecard you get to customize a widget to put on your site. You earn credits for dropping your Entrecard (like an online business card) on other sites and when others drop their cards on you. You use these credits to buy 24 hours of advertising on the site of your choice. So how does it work? I have had a lot of traffic from Entrecard, but most of it is drop and run traffic, lasting 5 seconds or less. However, if I spend my ad credits wisely, and advertise on a related site, I get new visitors who stick around a while and may even subscribe to my feed.

The Verdict

So, what’s the verdict? These widgets don’t work well for me. My blog (piggybankpie.com) is in the freelance writing niche and it’s been around for a while. If you have a brand new blog, these widgets are a great way to start getting traffic. If you have blogs that cover blogging, technology, gadgets or any of the popular topics on Technorati, then you will probably get a lot from traffic widgets. They didn’t do much for me. I have removed all of those widgets from my blog and am concentrating on building a readership in other ways, through social media and networking sites. And even though I no longer have the widget, I am still spending my Entrecard credits to advertise on blogs in my niche. That’s the best way to use it, in my opinion.

Collin LaHay’s Verdict: I agree with Sharon, most of these traffic widgets are not sending me a whole lot of traffic, however I have so much extra room by having two sidebars instead of one that I am leaving them up until I find something useful to replace them with!  If you think they are there because they are bringing me tons and tons of visitors, you would be mistaken.  I will be getting rid of them in a few weeks.

The dofollow movement happened a long time ago where bloggers decided to make every comment on their blog search engine friendly to the person who left the comment. The idea was to increase comment participation by rewarding those who left comments. The idea has had both a lot of good and bad coverage. I personally do not use dofollow links because I get so many low quality comments that are made purely for promotional purposes and I believe comments should be made for participation of the blog posts. That is why I reward my top commentators with dofollow site-wide links on every page of my blog, rather than on every blog comment.

At any rate, there are still hundreds of blogs using dofollow comments, and my friend from the Link Building Bible blog has created his own dofollow search engine which he has dubbed the dofollow diver. The dofollow diver is a hand edited custom google search engine that allows you to search for a keyword you are trying to rank on, and it will find related blog posts that you can leave a comment on for an anchor text related backlink to your site.

The dofollow diver is clearly not the first search engine of its kind, considering I have even made a blog post about one back in November called commenthunt. The difference however, is that nearly all of the dofollow search engines take huge lists of blogs, create the search engine, and then market it. The problem with that is many of these blogs turn off dofollow later on and so the search engines are giving links to blogs that are not dofollow. The dofollow diver is a constantly updated list that purges blogs that are no longer dofollow.

Aside from just finding dofollow blogs, the dofollow diver goes above and beyond by also listing blogs that have top commentator status (like mine), as well as those running the comment luv plugin.

If you are looking for some free easy links that come from a related niche to you, the dofollow diver is the place to go!

This is part 30 of my series called the link building cookbook that aims to be the ultimate untapped link building resource on the web.

Every month I make a public blog post about my online earnings for that month. These income posts are never meant to be for bragging purposes. The true purpose of them is so that I can be completely transparent about what I make online, and so that years down the road I can show everyone my journey to wealth. Being completely transparent about what I earn online also allows me to show you my biggest mistakes, and what I have learned from the most. The more mistakes I have, the more I learn from, and the more I show you how to avoid. My monthly online income reports are a summary of where I made my money, and where I lost my money.

Blog Statistics
Numbers in parenthesis are stats from last month to show improvements or declines.

1. Google Pagerank 5 (2-4 because of a penalty)
2. Seomoz PageStrength 4 (3.5)
3. Alexa Rank 135,608 (53,549, the Alexa ranking system changed incredibly)
4. Technorati Rank 10,433 (10,523 - it received a penalty or a hand edit because it was under 10k a long time ago and it has only grown since)
5. Technorati Authority 493 (423)
6. Total Visitors 6,794 (5,746)
7. Total Pageviews 14,519 (13,543)
8. RSS Subscribers 542 (460)

Advertising

• Adsense $37.79 ($44.78)
• Adtoll - Removed
• Kontera - $7.38 (I have now removed it)
• Paid Reviews - $40 ($80, I had two but one $40 review was free)
• 125×125 Ads - $60 ($90)

Affiliate Marketing

1. NeverBlue Ads - $77 myself, $21.75 through my affiliates. (Sign up for Neverblue Ads)
2. Market Leverage - $5.25 (I have only done one offer so far, still trying to find time to expand).

Consulting Clients

• Link Building & Viral Marketing - $2400

Other Sales

• PR7 Blog Links - $100 (sold the last spots)

My Ventures

I have one site that has been coded already, but I am just waiting for the designer to finish and then I will launch it publicly on my blog. Stay Tuned!

Monthly Expenses

1. Google Adwords - $43.61 + $5 signup cost
2. MSN Adcenter - $0.30 + $5 signup cost (although I have $75 of free spending money now)

Total April Online Revenue - $2749.17

Total April Online Profit - $2695.26

Profit per day - $89.84

Conclusion

April was another very solid month for earnings, and a solid growth for the blog. I reached a pagerank 5 already, which was months ahead of my prediction as well. I have started getting my feet wet with affiliate marketing, and I will enjoy doing that and will continue to spend a lot of time learning it in May. I have referred 19 affiliates to neverblue ads, one of whom is making $200-500/day with it, netting me a nice amount of money through the 2% referral system. Congrats to whoever is utilizing neverblue ads from my post! The only thing that really went down this month was my technorati rank, but considering my technorati authority went up a ton I have to believe it was a manual edit because it happened hours after my post about how much technorati sucks… so I am not too worried about them. My future goals for a few months from now are to be making $100/day profit, and I believe I should be there in a couple of months easy.

How well did you do this month?