It always feels good when hard work pays off. In my case, I’ve been running this blog for almost five months now and today for the first time, Google’s second quarter PageRank (PR) update for 2008 finally brought PR3 to this blog. PageRank is Google’s view of how important the pages of my blog are and they somehow influence advertisers with their own Web standards.The PageRank gauge can be seen when you install Google Toolbar on your web browser.

Wikipedia defines PageRank (PR) as:

…a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

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The Web has expanded immensely – so much that advertisers clash with each other in getting good advertising spaces on high traffic websites to promote and gain exposure of their products and services.

Basically advertising involves costs as it does on television, radio and newspapers. Online advertising however, offers various ways to promote your products and services for free. Social media channels and online communities offer such opportunities in getting your products known beyond geographical borders.

Like other media channels, paid online advertising on high-traffic websites usually is a cost-efficient and timely marketing move. However, there are situations when such activities backfire especially when the advertisements are placed on irrelevant sites or placed in wrong advertising space.

This blog post sparks a series of discussions about online business promotion. Of course, this is aimed to help you bait real customers in the World Wide Web and making more money from them.

To have a head start, we will discuss the first and significant online business promotion channel: search engines. Continue Reading »

Bloggers commonly have two sources of significant income: money earned from the sponsored advertisements of affiliate programs, and the income coming from paid reviews. Signing up for an affiliate program is much easier to do than registering for programs that pays for every review post you make. Affiliate programs only require you to have a running website – that is why it’s the easiest thing to do if you want to monetize your new blog site.

Paid review programs usually require a certain reputation, PageRank (PR) level of a blog and number of existing blog posts, before an applicant is accepted to the program. Rumors about Google penalizing blog sites who participate in paid reviews, which in their view is a way of building links “artificially”, also discourages new bloggers to get involved to the said program. However, doing paid reviews still and yet the biggest income source of popular bloggers like John Chow.

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For quite some time, I’ve been using Google Analytics for my WordPress-powered blog as my primary tool in tracking and analyzing my website’s traffic. It’s a free service (like other Google features) for site statistics and help site owners in their decision-making, site planning, and marketing. It benefits even more those site owners who avail user Google Adwords to increase their marketing, since that service works in conjunction with Google Analytics.

Recently, I found another free statistical tool that works similarly like Google Analytics. However, unlike Analytics, it does not work only as an invisible web tracker, but it can be configured to act as a hit counter too. It is also much faster and responsive, quickly loading than the Google counterpart. It accurately reports site statistics in real-time. The reportage includes popular pages, entry and exit pages, referring sites, keyword analysis, search engines, visitor information, paths and length, visitor map, among others.

It only takes four steps to get started with StatCounter. First, you need to register an account at StatCounter website. Then, you create a project for web tracking: it could be the whole website or just the major pages you want to comprehensively analyze. Finally, StatCounter gives you the snippet code that you just “copy and paste” to web page before the closing tag of the body. If you already experienced Google Analytics, you will observe that the application process is almost the same.

Bloggers who own sites powered by WordPress platform (like me) can also take advantage of StatCounter’s plugin. Like other WordPress plugins, this web tracker plugin is easy to install and use. Once it’s activated, it begins to track visitors from any page and reports more in detail the web traffic than any other WordPress statistics plugins.

Question: Can I put two web trackers on my web page? Yes. That is what I do with my websites. This website, for instance, is being tracked by Google Analytics and StatCounter. Each web tracker has its own strengths and weaknesses, but the weaknesses of one are complemented by the other. For Adwords users, Google Analytics may help you better in your web marketing; otherwise StatCounter offers more detailed web traffic report. The only minor rant I have with StatCounter free account is that its logs are limited to 500 entries only – but still enough for small to medium-sized websites or blogs. If you think your site is large, you can consider upgrading to larger log quota in various denominations. The cheapest upgrade is US$9 per month for 1500 log quota. But then again, I believe you’ll get the worth of your pay with StatCounter.

Click here to visit StatCounter website.

We saw last year how intense the search engine battle was. Big companies like Microsoft, Yahoo and Google spent billions of dollars in efforts to gain market dominance in their online advertising business. At the end of the year, we saw that Google reigned supreme, with Yahoo, Microsoft, and other competitors closely trailing behind. Proofs were evident of Google’s victory: they acquired 17 innovating companies to call their own and with hopes to extend or penetrate further the online marketplace. If you don’t care, bloggers do – and they predict outright that Google’s glory will begin to fade in 2008.

Last year and until now, Google actively wipes out the PageRank (PR) of many blogs and websites they believed to have involved to link farms and other schemes designed to “artificially” inflate PageRank. PageRank is Google’s view on how important a web page is, thus favoring more important pages in their top Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Many observations reveal in totality that most penalized sites are those who joined networks offering paid reviews or links. For bloggers, PageRank is significant because many ad network companies (major source of blog revenues), begin to follow Google’s standards. Higher PRs somehow contribute to the continuous existence of most blog sites in the Internet.

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