I often talk about the different tools that you can use to complement the AdSense units you put on your site. Sure, AdSense is always going to be the most effective ad system on your pages. But you also want to earn for your impressions, and from affiliate links too.
A mixture of different revenue generations systems will help to increase the value you receive for your users.
But what about ways of complementing the website itself? Just as different types of ads can bring different types of income, so contributing to different kinds of sites can bring you additional traffic.
These sites are growing all the time, and I'm finding them a valuable way of increasing ad views, clicks and business opportunities.
Facebook, for example, lets me run groups, contribute to discussions about AdSense and stay in touch with the people I meet at conferences. I can build a core group of people interested in the sort of content I have on my websites and get to know them a little better. While it doesn't give me any income itself, being active on Facebook can increase the page views on my sites.
Squidoo does give me revenues from the ads on its pages -- which is nice -- but it does even more than that. It lets me offer links to a highly-targeted audience and perhaps most importantly, it shows people that I've got useful advice to offer and can help them get more from their websites. Squidoo is seen as a place where experts weigh in, and anyone can benefit from the halo that offers.
You could even use Flickr as a place to promote your site by uploading images related to your content. So if you blogged about your child's sports team for example, you could upload images of games to Flickr, and in addition to telling your readers where they can find the photos, submit them to Flickr's groups. That would let you show more images than you could fit on your own website, pleasing your regular readers, and bring in new readers too.
Those are just three sites that can provide extra services that your site would otherwise struggle to offer and which can bring real benefits too. There are plenty of others.
Whichever service you decide to use though, remember that the biggest benefits always come by following the rules and contributing to the community. Do that and there's a good chance that the community will contribute to you too.
Yes I have found this very helpful and increases the opportunity for
people to get to know you better.
Great blog on how to complement our web sites. Gives more meaning to the term social "networking" - bringing it all together and maximizing the individual resources. The Flikr idea is new one I'll be using. Thanks much for these great ideas.
Good tips! Sites like Flickr and Facebook will help build your brand, thus increasing your traffic! Not only will these sites give your blog more reach, but will also help to create a community online. Thanks for posting, Joel!
Joel. Great post. Good ideas for pulling different people onto your blog for different but perhaps equally useful reasons. I follow you here for some very good reasons and I am grateful to keep learning.
y not use orkut communities too
some have real followers and send massive traffic
I've been using Twitter now for a while and it is working well, bring more traffic to my site. Thanks :).