The Lousypoet

So a free way to get some traffic to your site is to join webring.

Admittedly, it’s been a while since I was really all that involved with Webring. They changed the rules a while back, adding a paid level to their membership, and at the time I just wasn’t that interested in continuing. Besides, the site I had active on the rings was my Evangelion website, and since I had let that go, I wasn’t in much the mood to get overly involved again.

Well, as time goes by, you find yourself wanting to get some targeted traffic driven to your website. And, since the blogosphere is wide and vast, a little sense of community doesn’t hurt.

So, back to Webring I went. I’ve now registered the Lousy Poet in a number of rings, and I’m seeing at least a few unique visitors a day from it. Actually, it’s pretty cool. Webring now keeps stats on the total people who have visited your site via the rings, and how many people visited per day. There are more advanced stats available if you upgrade to the paid membership.

For now, I’m sticking with my free membership. It allows you to have up to five pending webring membership requests at a time, which I find is sufficient because most webring masters have you approved within a day or two. You can also create your own ring if you feel your particular niche is under served. I created one for Unpublished Original Poetry. We’ll see how many people join. Right now, it’s just the poor old Lousy Poet holding down the fort

Anyway, if you haven’t joined already, give it a try. Click on the image below to get started. And if your site has poetry that has not seen the glory of publication, maybe consider joining my little ring at http://v.webring.com/hub?ring=unpublishedorigi.

Thanks to Google and search engines in general, the web has become a wild place with people fighting for even the slightest improvement in their pagerank or seach engine placement.

Pagerank is something Google has put in place that assigns a numeric value to your site based on inbound links, content, and a whole slew of variables that I’m certain are well over my head. My site, which has been online since about 2004, has over 200 posts as well as a number of other sections had a pagerank of 1, and when I checked it this morning it had sunk to the lowest of the lows, 0. Now, my wife’s website, firewithinstudio.com, where she has a gallery and hasn’t posted a single blog entry, is a pagerank of 2! WTF??! I mean, I’m no expert, but shouldn’t the age of the site, the volume of content count for something? I don’t think my wife’s site has anymore links to it than the Poet, so what’s the deal? Maybe I’m being punished because I’m doing some paid blog entries, but I think it’s a pretty dirty shot at those of us who are scraping the bucket to survive to punish our websites for making us just enough money to pay for our hosting. It would be one thing if there was nothing here but affiliate links that were generated by a computer, but crap, I’m typing all this stuff myself!

And thanks to a low pagerank the opportunities for making some income from this blog have just been seriously reduced. I guess I understand a desire to filter those blogs that have been created solely for posting paid for posts, but really, shouldn’t there be some way to calculate the number of articles that are original content with no affiliate links and work off a percentage or something?

If anyone has some good advice, let me know. I’ve been trying to increases the traffic to this site, and in the process have swapped links with sites that might not match the content of this one, but so what? I’m a little miffed by this.

When you have kids with special needs, it’s hard for both parents to have carreers that take them out of the home. That’s why it’s been so important for us to find Ways of making money at home.

There are quite a few blogs out there that can provide some really great advice and guidance. I found Lisa’s blog and she’s got lots of different means of creating income streams and traffic for websites. What I also liked about her blog was that it’s also her personal blogging space, which helped make it feel a little more personal. All too often, blogs with advice on making money at home can seem cold or too much like a gimmick filled sales pitch. Finding a blog where there are some good pieces of advice but you can also read about how Lisa’s cats gave birth to kittens just makes it all so much more real. Check this one out!

So everywhere you go, sites want you to have an avatar. Shit, I even have space on this site for my avatars to be displayed. And all I’ve been using is my shitty character from my flopped web comic, The Lousy Poet. It’s boring, uninspiring, and frankly, I don’t want to use it. But I currently have no ideas what to use otherwise.

And it’s kind of important… On sites like Fuel My Blog, your avatar is the first thing people see of your site; actually, the ONLY thing they see of your site unless they decide to actually visit the blog. So what can you do to get people to check out the site?

Look, it’s no secret that I’m doing some things to try and make a few bucks with this blog. I mean, I figure if even I just make enought to renew the domains and hosting space, that’s money I didn’t have to pay out of my pocket, right? But in order to benefit to the max from the things I am doing, I need to drive traffic here that isn’t a bunch of frickin spammers! How the Flippity Poop do I do that??!! Like I said, I’ve joined a bunch of those blog social communities, which you can see all the little banners in the right column, but how do I get people to come check this site out if I can’t even come up with a half decent avatar?

Anyway, I suppose it will be one of those things that just kind of hits me all of a sudden, but till then, the anonymous icon on my nav bar of the site, and the shitty cartoony avatar I’ve used elsewhere is leaving me cold.