I got the site up and running, updated some content, and then submitted my sitemap information to the Google Webmaster Tools. As usual, the next step is to wait and see how long it takes Google to start regularly indexing the site.

Instant Indexing

When I checked my site’s info in Webmaster Tools the next day, I found something strange – a page in the site was already cached in the index.

I had included a link to the site in the article here. This site has a decent reputation with Google. According to SEO Meter, this site gets crawled every 1 to 2 days.

Apparently, Google crawled the site, followed the link, and cached that page in the index. It has yet to sort through the new links and the sitemap, but the home page is accessible through a Google search.

Get Articles Listed Quickly

This leads me to a pretty useful bit of information. If you have a link on a trusted site to an page that is previously unknown to Google, it will quickly get stored in the index.

I’ve never found this type of quick response with directory listings or forum links. I suppose the difference here is that it’s a direct content to content link that carries some real weight.

If you already run a website – or if you write articles at Associated Content or a similar site – this seems like a pretty good strategy for jump-starting the crawling process. Choose some of your main landing pages and link to them immediately from other sites that you own and write for.

This will send Google your way, get your pages indexed, and start bringing in a modicum of search engine traffic. From there, you can wait for the rest of your link building strategy to help improve your SERP and Page Rank.

For now, let’s stick with the traffic component. Can a social bookmarking site direct significant traffic to your site, and is it worth your trouble to use them?

Case One: Digg

I’ve used a variety of social bookmarking sites while promoting this site – Digg being one of them. Although some people have had tremendous success with Digg, I haven’t. Most of the articles I Digg end up falling off the recently submitted page without too many Diggs.

In the past two months, I’ve had a dozen or so articles go up on Digg and I’ve only gotten 230 visits in return. Most of those articles fall off the page after I’ve gotten a handful of visits.

Two articles were moderately successful. One article I didn’t submit myself – a reader Dugg it and it promptly gained about 20 Diggs. Despite its relative popularity, it didn’t bring in a whole lot of traffic.

Many of my articles are designed to garnish search engine traffic, so that may be why they don’t appeal to users scanning a bookmark list. I did write another article that focused more on an attention grabbing topic and less on search engine juju, and it did ok on Digg (~100 visits).

For whatever reason, Digg hasn’t been tremendously helpful for me. I still leave it on the toolbar at the bottom – so that users can Digg an article they like – but I don’t actively submit many articles hoping for traffic.

Case Two: dZone

While browsing through social bookmarking sites to promote this site, I stumbled on dZone.

At first I was excited. It’s geared towards programmers and web developers, so my technically oriented articles should have done well. Not so much.

Perhaps I haven’t found the right approach to take. Some articles were probably too rudimentary for the savvy audience, while the more advanced articles didn’t have attention grabbing topics.

I’ve gotten a little bit of traffic from dZone – slightly less than from Digg – but it’s nothing to write home about. I continue to use it every now and again to gain some backlinks, but I don’t count on it for traffic either.

Case Three: Stumblupon

Unlike Digg and dZone, Stumble Upon has done a great job.

One day I looked at my Google Analytics data, and I thought the thing had broken. An average day at the time was about 2-300 visits – and this day showed as over 2,000 visits.

I went into the data and found out that one of articles was bringing in a ton of traffic from Stumble Upon. The same article that brought in about 100 visits on Digg brought in over 2000 visits from Stumble Upon.

I wish I knew why it did that well, and how I could repeat it, but it just kind of happened.

Within the last few days, I’ve also noticed another page bringing in a decent amount of Stumble traffic. For the past several days, it’s brought in 50+ visits each day. I’m wondering how long that’ll last before the page gets shuffled out of the index.

Bottom Line

In terms of traffic, social bookmarking sites can be effective but they seem to be out of your own control.

I haven’t had a lot of luck with Digg and dZone, but I have had some good luck with StumbleUpon.

The best performing articles were submitted by other people, though – not me. Maybe those people had fans that followed their bookmarks, leading more traffic to my site. Or maybe it’s just luck of the draw.

My advice would be to leave a selection of “Share This” icons at the end of your article to encourage users to submit it to their favorite bookmarking sites. However, don’t hold your breath and wait for a ton of traffic to come in.

In the meantime, consider the SEO benefits of social bookmarking sites. We’ll come back to that another time.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I was looking into using TNX as a text link ad network. This is basically a way to make money off of your sites link popularity and pagerank – regardless of click-through rates and traffic.

After some more research, I think I’ve got a better idea of the potential of TNX – and I’m liking it more. Let’s take a look at potential earnings on the site.

What Are TNX Points?

When you sell ads on TNX, you aren’t paid directly in cash. You’re paid in TNX points. These are the same points that the advertisers use (after buying in) to purchase ads.

Purchasing these points can cost about $1.50 to $0.75 per 1,000 – depending on the bulk in which you buy them. This also gives you an idea of what you can sell them for if you have a potential buyer.

If you don’t want to market the points to other companies yourself, you can arrange to have TNX buy them out. The current rate is $0.74 per 1,000 points, although you can get $0.78 per 1,000 points if you meet certain requirements in link placement.

The bottom line is – as you earn points, you’ll be able to cash them in for about $0.75 per 1,000 points.

The Real Question: How Many Points Do I Get?

In order to figure out how much you can earn, the real question is – how many points can I generate with my site?

To begin answering that question, we need to look at how TNX sets up its link pricing structure – which determines how many points you’ll get for those links. TNX uses two different methods to rate your site – Google Page Rank and Yahoo Backlinks.

If you have signed up for TNX, you can go to the “Create a Campaign” option to see the following information. Your site is ranked in one of five Yahoo Backlinks categories – 0 – 500, 500 – 5,000, 5,000 to 50,000, 50,000 to 250,000, and 250,000 and up. Your site is also ranked by Pagerank – 0 to 7.

When you look at the Pagerank chart, TNX advertises the “lowest” price of a link for one of those sites. At a Pagerank 0 site, a link will cost a base of 1 point. They also state that the price of an actual link can cost up to 20 times more than that base price. This extra cost comes from two places – the site’s category and the site’s Yahoo Backlinks.

Based on my own experience, I can do a little estimation of what a link is worth.

When I first signed up, my site was Pagerank 0 and in the 0 – 500 Yahoo Backlinks Category. My site’s topic category is “Web Development,” which has a price ranking of two dollar signs (out of a max of three dollar signs). At this point, my links were selling for 3 points.

Now, my site has jumped into the next Yahoo Backlinks category. The links now sell for 6 points.

This leads me to believe that TNX has a basic pricing structure set up like this:

Actual Point Price =
  Basic Price (Page Rank) * Category Price Modifier * Yahoo Backlinks Modifier

For a PR 0 site, the base price is 1. My site was selling links for 3 points, so I would assume that the “Category Price Modifier” for a two-dollar-sign category is 3 points. The Yahoo Backlinks Modifier seems to be just 1 – 5 – based on which category you’re in. Therefore the highest earning potential for my site – while it’s still Pagerank 0 – is 18 points per link.

What does that work out to? With 200 pages of content and one link per page, that’s about 3600 points per month… or $3.00. Doh.

Climbing the Pagerank Mountain

For a Pagerank 0 site, the earning potential seems pretty slim. Of course, this should be expected – since TNX is basically selling Pagerank.

As your Pagerank climbs, your potential earnings jump dramatically. A Pagerank 1 page has a base price of 50. That’s 50 times the base price of a Pagerank 0 site. That boosts your maximum potential earnings to $150.00 per month for a PR 1 site with 200 links.

A Pagerank 2 site has a base price of 100 points, and a Pagerank 3 site has a base price of 200 points. These are pretty reasonable Pageranks for a site that’s been operating for a few months. At that point, you’ve got some decent revenue potential with TNX.

A Reasonable Estimate for PR2 and 2,500 Backlinks

Let’s say you’ve built a new site. It went up a few months ago and Google finally did a Pagerank update. Your site has a Pagerank of 2 and a little over 2,500 Yahoo Backlinks. If you’ve been diligently adding content to your site, you should also have at least 300 pages (including category, index, and tag pages) to post links on.

Based on my estimates, the price for a link for this site would be 100 (Base) * 3 (Category) * 2 (Yahoo Backlinks) = 600. Let’s assume we place two links on each page – 2 (Links) * 300 (Pages) * 600 (Price) = 360,000 points. 360 * $0.75 (Cost per 1,000 point) = $270 per month.

This could be increased by adding up to 4 links per page, upping the Yahoo Backlinks to 5,000, or adding more content. Remember that this is just some conjecture and estimation – if you’re using TNX I’d be interested to hear about the link prices for your site so I can get some more accurate calculations.

I’d say that’s not bad for a couple of links on a page. Add that to a successful AdSense or other Ad Campaign, and you’re site should have a decent revenue stream.

Why? I was able to work in a few nice backlinks to my site and my articles. I’ll earn some cash if it gets traffic of its own.

How Does Squidoo Work?

Squidoo is another writing site online – with a bit of a twist.

Squidoo isn’t about articles… it’s about “lenses.” Each lens is a mini-website. It’s longer and more in depth than an article – but it’s only one page.

You add all the content you want about your topic – writing, pictures, polls, link lists, etc – and hope users come a knockin. If you do get traffic, you get a portion of the advertising revenue.

You can eke out a few extra bucks by including items for sale on your lens – like books at Amazon.com.

Why Did I Write a Lens at Squidoo?

I’m pretty sure my lens (XML Through PHP) isn’t going to make a ton of money. That’s no reason to scoff at the idea, though.

The lens I created was (as you might have guessed from the title) about XML and PHP. In the past week or so, I’ve written three articles here about working with XML. Do you see where I’m going with this?

The lens is an overview of working with XML. Three parts of the lens are hooks to get the reader to come read an article here about a particular application of XML in PHP.

In writing this lens, I accomplished a number of tasks. I created a useful online resource – it should be educational for someone that’s new to working with XML and PHP together. I created some advertisement for my site – any readers of the lens should be enticed to click on one or another of my links. I also improved the SEO of my site by including five targeted backlinks from the lens to content on my own site.

You Should Join Too!

I don’t see any reason not to join Squidoo and make a lens or two about your niche.

You can create optimized links to your site and also capture some extra search engine traffic and direct it back to your site. There’s a decent referral system in place – you get $5 if a referree makes $15. You can also diversify your online writing portfolio and make a little more loot every month.

So head on over to Squidoo, sign up, and write your own lens.