How To Optimize Your Blog As Part Of Your Internet Marketing Strategy

While you can certainly make money from home while blogging through pretty much advertising and good content alone, you’re also going to need to make sure that your website is optimized to get as many ads in front of visitors as possible. However, you don’t want to bombard them with so many ads that their user experience is degraded. Finding an optimal level for both you and your visitor is, as always, the main name of the game when trying to make money by blogging from home.

Tracking Your Visitors

Before you start the optimization process, you’re going to want to establish a way of tracking how many people are coming to your website, from where, and how long they are staying. Simply put, a page counter just isn’t enough anymore. You need to know exactly who is coming and going to your blog if you want it to be a successful element of your Internet marketing strategy.

The easiest and most popular way of tracking user data is with Google Analytics. Freely available from Google, Analytics allows you to track just about every aspect of where your visitors are coming from, how long they are staying, and when they are leaving. Installation is easy and requires only that you install a small piece of script on your home page.

Creating Many Layers

Because a great deal of advertising functions based on how often a new page is accessed or refreshed, it is important to develop a blog that gets as many ads in front of the viewer as possible. A quick way to do this and to make extra money at home from blogging is by utilizing a “cut” or “Read More” feature.

While explaining the coding behind this feature is outside the scope of this article, the basic idea is that you present a visitor with a small segment of a post, and then force them to click on a “Read More” link to finish reading the piece. If you have an advertisement on either side of the parent post on the main page, and then have another pair of ads on the main piece, then they will have seen a total of four ads.

This can be done in a variety of ways, whether through adding this type of functionality to comment threads, or even by utilizing a “Read More” feature on your About and Contact pages.

You should note, however, that by doing this too much can alienate visitors, so take care not to overdo it.