Warning: Remove the Sitehoppin Widget from your Blog Now

Update:

Sitehoppin is a social network similar to StumbleUpon which has experienced some issues over the past 12 hours. Due to a problem with the domain, visitors to websites with the Sitehoppin widget have been redirected to a holding domain. Participating websites have lost their traffic.

The problem has now been resolved and I'll be putting my widget back online.  There's no longer any need to remove your widget, but I'm hoping Max will update the widget to prevent any problems in future.

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Original Post:

Sitehoppin was a social networking site which cloned StumbleUpon, allowing visitors to submit links and surf to random sites.  The site encouraged website owners to install their widget, offering credits and traffic in return.

Sitehoppin seems to have disappeared, and if you still have the widget on your site, you need to remove it right now. Because the original webpage no longer exists, the widget doesn't work as intended and is hijacking your traffic, redirecting it to a page of ads.  If the widget is in your blog sidebar, you're losing every single visitor.

Please remove the widget and spread the word.  If you have any further info, please leave a comment below.

Building Backlinks with Kwippy

Kwippy is a micro-blogging service similar to Twitter, which offers a big bonus to anyone in the process of building backlinks - links posted are do-follow.

Kwippy integrates with Google Talk, Yahoo and Facebook, and has threaded conversations, something lacking in Twitter.  Unlike Twitter, posts are not limited to 140 characters.

Kwippy has an Alexa rank of 60k and the public timeline has a pagerank of 3, so I'll be visiting occasionally and dropping a Kwip with a link or two.

To Be a Magpie - Make Money on Twitter

For a while I ignored the buzz about Magpie on Twitter, but I started to become curious and decided to investigate further. Magpie is an Ad Network that allows Twitter users to make money with an occasional post to their account.

Signing up with Magpie is easy.  You enter the details of your Twitter account and select the ratio of advert/tweets.  Then sit back and let Magpie post the occasional ad until you've made enough money to receive a payment.

Magpie earnings can be used to either purchase your own ads, or you can receive a payment by PayPal when you reach €50 (currently $63 or £42).

Considering using Magpie doesn't require any extra effort on my part, I'm giving it a try for a couple of months.  I'll let you know how well I get on.  Have you had any experiences, good or bad, with Magpie?

Building Backlinks with CommentLuv

I'm always looking for new ways to build backlinks and for the next few weeks I'll be commenting on blogs which use the CommentLuv plugin.

CommentLuv is a plugin for Wordpress blogs, which inserts a link to your latest blog post at the bottom of your comments. Here's an example:

Johns last blog post..How Much Money do I Need to Make Online?

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to make sure your keywords are in your post title, because with CommentLuv your post title becomes the anchor text of your backlink.

To get started simply use Google Blog Search to find blogs with the text Enable CommentLuv. To further narrow the search and potentially increase the SEO benefits, try adding one or more of your keywords to the blog search.

Finally, select a few posts to comment on, following good commenting etiquette:

• make sure you read the post first to ensure your comment is relevant,
• a good comment should be on topic and add value to the post,
• 'nice post' comments are only left by people who didn't bother to read the post,
• don't use keywords for your name.

I'll be using this technique to build backlinks for 20 minutes a day until the end of November and anticipate making 5 comments per day.

At the beginning of December I'll attempt to measure how successful I've been. Any ideas how to measure the success would be greatly appreciated, otherwise I'll base the results on Technorati authority.

If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment below.

Failing to Make Money Online with a Picture Blog

Earlier this year I started the English Wilderness picture blog to show off a few of my photos and hopefully make a little bit of money online in the process.

I've used a standard Blogger template and installed Entrecard. Blogger allows a future post date to be set and the post won't be published until the selected date.

I've used this facility to queue in up to 10 posts at a time, to be published every third day. Using this, I can sit down for about an hour and prepare a month's worth of updates.

Unfortunately, it's only received 2000 visitors and earned $0.86 in 4 months. This works out at $0.22 per hour, significantly less than I was hoping for. If English Wilderness was solely intended to make money online, I'd be tempted to abandon it and start a new project.

Here are the depressing statistics:

Month	Visitors	Earnings
Jul 2008	484	0.01
Aug 2008	517	0.42
Sep 2008	344	0.08
Oct 2008	639	0.35

The traffic is poor.  The photos are not the kind to appeal to users on Digg, Stumbleupon, etc so I need to find another way to build traffic.

During November, I'm going to spend 15 minutes per day building backlinks and dropping / advertising on Entrecard.  Hopefully I'll be able to build up a small number of regular readers and improve my placement in the search engine results. I've also added a post asking my regular readers to link to me.

My target is 5000 visitors in November! If you have any other ideas how I can achieve this, or how I can better monetize the blog, please let me know :-)