Concrete information about website traffic, visitor numbers, and page views is also particularly interesting for agencies that search the Internet for advertising partners and targeted traffic.

Of course, there are also plenty of competing sites wishing to research (or to spy on) their competitors.

Lastly, there are the users of websites who maybe curious as to how popular their favourite websites actually are.

Determining how much Traffic a Website has

The first group – operators of websites – can find out their visitor numbers very easily. All it takes is a quick install of a statistical service such as Google Analytics to provide instantly ready and reliable data.

The other groups – advertisers, competitors, and readers – are left in the dark, and have limited tools at their disposal to obtain traffic information.

Unfortunately, it does not matter which evaluation tool you use (e.g. Alexa, Compete, QuantCast, etc.), the generated estimates are massively inaccurate.

Sometimes (but rarely) the results may be close, but on the whole there is no accurate data gathering method possible to correctly determine the site statistics of a third party website.

Therefore, advertisers, competitors and readers have only two options available to get reliable website traffic data.

Either they enquire directly from the website operator asking for visitor numbers and other site traffic stats they are interested in, or they can hope that the site owner publishes website traffic reports from time to time.

However, for a website owner this type of publication is very time consuming.

Of course, in deciding whether or not to publish ‘sensitive’ data about his website, the owner must also consider trading competition from other websites. After years of trial, error, and hard work, it is understandable that many website owners prefer to keep the statistics of their own success to themselves.

Nevertheless when running a website it is very important to have benchmarks for website traffic against which to compare your own efforts. Indeed, finding such information which has been freely published is the sign of a good website, confident with their own product.

Today therefore, after 2 years and 10 months of running Soccerwidow (English language version) in tandem with Fussballwitwe (German language version), here are our most up-to-date website traffic statistics.

Website Traffic Statistics – Soccerwidow / Fussballwitwe

Note: The published stats we refer to are always the combination of figures from both sites.

WordPress Site Stats Combined Page Views per month – Soccerwidow / Fussballwitwe – April 2011 to September 2013

The above screenshot is from WordPress.com Stats and shows the monthly page views.

Google Analytics also generates a similar graph and shown below are the weekly numbers of unique visitors for both sites combined:

Google Analytics Combined Visitor Overview – Soccerwidow / Fussballwitwe – 01.01.2011 to 19.10.2013

Interpretation

In September 2013, Soccerwidow’s and Fussballwitwe’s popularity was consistent at around 10,000 unique visitors per week, and both sites combined achieved a total of 124,200 page views in this one month.

Euro 2012 Blip

The peak in visitor numbers visible around June/July 2012 coincided with our decision to publish match previews in conjunction with the Euro 2012 football tournament articles we were contracted to write for the Betfair German language blog.

We translated our predictions for Euro 2012 into English and published them simultaneously in Soccerwidow.com.

The result was staggering as the match previews and value bet predictions were an instant hit with our readers but, the price of this success was the eventual failure of our server, which couldn’t cope with the huge influx in traffic.

The picks were enormously accurate and combined with the betting interest generated by Euro 2012, every match we previewed was called upon more than 2,000 times within a few hours of publication.

Thousands of enthusiastic punters were following our free tips, but personally speaking, we did not make a penny from this work, instead learning a very valuable lesson when our server reached its capacity limit and crashed.

As a result, we had to make a business decision and suspended the publication of free picks after the tournament finished. Of course, with no free picks and no major football tournament to fuel gambling interest, our site visitor numbers collapsed in a short space of time by the end of July 2012.

To reiterate, Soccerwidow is not a tipster service, and we have NO (!) intention of becoming one. We explain how to analyse data, what you need to know about betting, and how to calculate odds, recognise value and develop your own successful strategy.

Selecting your betting strategy and picking bets for each individual game is your job!

Google Adsense Algorithm: Abuse Protection

Google has a built-in algorithm which tries to optimise adverts on your site.

It also checks the behaviour of your clients who must demonstrate a click pattern showing a positive response to your adverts; clicking on or buying from the adverts themselves, or continuing their progress in the Net for answers to their keyword searches (i.e. the adverts appearing in your article were relevant to their original search).

Image: F.Schmidt (Shutterstock)

This algorithm is mainly designed to protect Adsense from abuse, such as click bombing: people who maliciously click on Google adverts appearing on a Web page with the sole aim of discrediting the affected site with Google.

This is not a joke and indeed there is murderous intent and severe competition of this nature on the Internet!

Of course, Google has an obligation to do everything possible to protect its advertisers. No advertiser wants to pay for clicks that are generated by abuse. Nobody likes receiving invoices for services which weren’t in fact rendered.

How exactly this algorithm works is a closely guarded secret at Google.

One observation is that Google records the time between the click on an advert and the return of the user to the original page.

It appears that clicks are not paid if the user returns within a ‘certain period of time’ to the Web site of origin. In other words, someone reads an article featuring an interesting advert, clicks on it, but does not remain on the advertiser’s Web site for long enough but returns to the original article/blog.

It is unknown how long the ‘certain period of time’ is.

Click-through Rate (CTR)

CTR expresses the number of clicked ads in relation to 1,000 page views.

Soccerwidow.com displays 2-3 Google ads per article and as at June 2012, daily visitor numbers are between 800-1200 meaning approximately 5,000 Google Adsense ads are being displayed daily.

This number of visitors is significant enough to evaluate experiments with variables such as ad positioning, ad size, colours, etc.

In various SEO forums a click-through rate (CTR) of 5 to 10% is discussed, meaning that there are Web sites in existence which definitely attain 50-100 paid clicks per 1,000 visitors.

Yesterday, 17.6.12, Soccerwidow.com counted over 1,000 visitors, and a 5-10% CTR would have meant 50-100 clicks. In reality, however, only 30 clicks were counted, and of these only 6 were paid (corresponding to a CTR of 0.6%).

We received readers who were clicking on more than one ad (on different articles, reasonable time intervals between clicks, and definitely no click bombing!), but many returned to the Soccerwidow site within a short time.

Aside from the fact that perhaps some of the clicks came from countries which have no monetary value for Google and their customers, a total of 24 from 30 clicks were not counted and therefore not paid. This is a considerable number.

Click farms are the winners!

The Google algorithm meant to protect against abuse, turns out in reality to curtail the progress of quality content sites and instead rewards Web sites with no real content.

Our impression is that profiteers of this algorithm are sites built with the sole purpose to lure readers via SEO optimisation and then present them with optimised sale content, persuading them to click on the ads. The user forgets the origin of their clicks, and will probably never visit this site again, but the site doesn’t care as there are plenty more fish in the ocean…

In fact, Google tries to distance themselves from these click farms, but it still seems to be the case that content-rich pages are disadvantaged against sites with no content.

The paradox of the situation

It is well accepted that advertising is a major source of revenue to websites. It is probably also indisputable that there is plenty of useless information to be found on the Internet, and readers are looking for unique and content-rich web sites.

However, the paradox of this situation is that one seems to exclude the other. Either the website has content, and then hardly any advertising revenue, or vice versa.

Google prohibits you from ‘persuading’ your readers to click on your ads. Your site may not, for example, have an arrow on screen pointing to an ad with a caption saying “Please click!“, or other similar methods of ‘pressure selling’ to readers. Adsense also prohibits themes and texts above or below ads such as, “Your click helps finance this site“.

We are wondering whether it is against Adsense policy to display a text saying, “If you click this ad, please do not under any circumstances return to this Web site!” ???

Have other Webmasters had similar experiences with Google Adsense? Any feedback would be very much appreciated…

Thanks for reading!

This blog is not only a bilingual German and English site, but most of the adverts on it also fit the article topics and display in the correct language. For example, if you press F5 and reload a page different adverts are displayed.

There are plenty of ‘Ad Targeting’ articles in the Net but there seems to be very little regarding ad targeting and positioning in multilingual Web sites, so we used our own initiative to work out the following solution. Once figured out it’s actually quite simple and can be used for any kind of ad targeting, not only for multilingual sites.

This blog is built around the WordPress ‘Forester’ theme and for management of the multilingual content we use the WordPress plugin WPML Multilingual CMS. The current combination of WordPress 3.3.2., Forester theme and WPML 2.4.3. seem to work seamlessly and harmoniously together.

For language separation, we use ‘domain name one’ (www.soccerwidow.com) for our English language content and ‘domain name two’ (www.fussballwitwe.com) as our German language version.

For advert administration we use AdRotate. This plugin is free of charge up to 5,000 page views a day, which is probably plenty for most Web sites. As soon as this threshold is crossed, AdRotate asks for a small monthly fee, which is entirely fair and acceptable considering the amount of time and effort that must go into producing such plugins.

Organising your Adverts in AdRotate

1. Advert Database

   Simply install the plugin in WordPress and begin uploading your adverts placing them into the database under ‘Manage Ads’.

   With numerous ads of different shapes and sizes a clear and self-explanatory heading is of vital importance in order not to get confused and overwhelmed if your database grows to hundreds of adverts over time. Our headings are structured as follows:

   Name of advertising company – size of advert – description of advert – language – account administration status

   Example: Betfair (300×250) – Direct Link to Sportsbook – English – Direct partner

   The account administration status is important since you will no doubt have a mixture of direct affiliate agreements with some companies and others via agencies as the administration of affiliate programs is often outsourced. However, you will perhaps never find an agency offering all the companies you would like to use on your site, especially if you are choosy and prefer to handpick adverts rather than taking any offer which comes along. If you prefer to be selective and in control, your portfolio may include as many as 10 different agents plus 30 or more individual companies, and we stress once again that good title management is essential to avoid a huge muddle in your dashboard.

2. Advert Groups

   Adrotate allows you to organise a set of adverts to randomly rotate wherever you place the ad group on the page. If you have, say, 10 different 300×250 ads in English, which you would like to display randomly on the English version of your Web site then organise them in a group as follows:

   Example: Home Page (300×250) – English – General

   Into this field, drop all of the ads with the same size (i.e. 300×250) that you wish to have displayed randomly on your home page. If you are running a multilingual site, you will need to organise your adverts into groups not only by size and content, but also by language.

   We have the following three groups:

   Sidebar (120×600), Home Page (300×250) and Post (468×60), in both German and English, making in this case a total of six groups.

   In addition, we have things such as Sidebar Amazon and Sidebar Tickets, again separated into English and German, which rotate both company’s current offers and displays different products on different pages.

   A logical structure is so important for the advert groups as this is probably the most significant advantage to have when thinking about ad management and targeting. It took us a while before we came up with a simple and logical structure for this Web site.

3. Advert Blocks

   If you wish to display more than one advert in the same place then you can put the groups into blocks. Groups only display one advert at a time, but blocks can combine 2, 3, 4 or more adverts and display them together.

   For example, we use blocks for 468×60 adverts placed in the posts. The 300×250 adverts and the sidebars are managed using groups, but this is an individual choice. Both functions work well and painlessly with AdRotate.

Having organised your adverts into groups, integrating them into the Web page is next.

PHP code for inserting Adrotate rotating adverts into your WordPress blog

The code, once worked out, is actually quite simple. Just copy and paste the following wherever you would like your ads to display:

<!-- Adrotate multilingual -->
<?php 
if ($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == 'www.domainnameone.com') {
	echo adrotate_group(4);
} else {
	echo adrotate_group(3);
}
?>

The code above means:

if ($_SERVER[‘SERVER_NAME’] queries the domain name from the server and if it’s TRUE then ad group number 4 will rotate (i.e. our adverts 300×250 in English). If the query is FALSE then adverts in group 3 are displayed instead, which in our case are the equivalent German language adverts.

This is really all you need to do to display your adverts by language.

The programming becomes a little more advanced if you need to display certain adverts in certain articles but not in others. For example, this article is about WordPress and Ad Targeting and therefore our preference might be to display adverts from IT companies but not betting sites.

To achieve this, a new AdRotate group needs to be created containing only those 300×250 adverts relevant to this article. After this group is set, we expand the if – elseif – else code as follows:

<!-- Adrotate -->
<div style="text-align: center;">
<?php
if(strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],'NAME OF THE ARTICLE in English’) !== false) {
echo adrotate_group(XX);
} elseif($_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] == 'www.domainnameone.com')
{
echo adrotate_group(4);
} elseif(strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], 'NAME OF THE ARTICLE in Deutsch') !== false) {
echo adrotate_group(YY);
} else {
echo adrotate_group(3);
} ?>
</div>

Above code “translated”:

The code checks the URL if it matches the string of this particular post in English. If correct, designated by (!), it then rotates adverts in group ‘XX’ (the name we gave to the ad set specifically for this post). However, Soccerwidow has many more posts and pages, not just this one. Therefore, if the code doesn’t identify the page as being the WordPress and Ad Targeting post, it proceeds to step two (elseif) and checks whether the URL is www.domainnameone.com. If it is, then group 4 rotates instead (i.e. the general adverts in English).

If the code doesn’t identify the page as the WordPress and Ad Targeting post in English, or identify it as being any other post in English (www.domainnameone.com), its next step is to check whether the page is the German version of the WordPress and Ad Targeting post (which uses the group number ‘YY’). If this is not a match, it will eventually display group 3 instead (i.e. the general adverts in German).

The code becomes longer and more complicated as greater numbers of individual posts are included. You can even include ‘tags’ in your code;

if (has_tag( array( 'courses', 'tutorials' )))

or target your adverts using categories. You can effectively target your selections on whatever aspect you like, not just languages. This is a really powerful tool for perfect positioning of your ads. However, you will need to judge for yourself how much ‘individualizing’ is actually necessary for your site and whether the whole effort is in fact worthwhile?

PHP Code in Sidebars

Inserting PHP code into sidebars is not normally possible. Sidebars work with widgets and the only suitable widget is the text widget, which only permits HTML and doesn’t work with PHP.

Therefore, you will need a PHP widget plugin for WordPress, which functions exactly like the textbox widget but allows you to execute PHP in the sidebar (WP PHP Widget). After you’ve got this plugin, simply go into the widget administration and pull the PHP widget into the desired sidebar to the required place and insert the appropriate PHP code (see above). You will of course have to select the AdRotate group with the appropriate format for your sidebar ads.

Adrotate Banners in Posts

The code for inserting adverts into posts is as follows:-

<div style="float:left;margin:8px;">[adrotate banner="AAA"]</div>

Place the code for your Adrotate adverts in the article where you would like to have the advert displayed. This can be a banner (single advert), or an advert group or block. Simply copy and paste the appropriate code from Adrotate.

This <div style=”float:left;margin:8px;”>The Adrotate CODE here</div> instruction gets your text floating around the ad (if you want it to). You can choose to float it on the left or the right or however you wish it to appear.

Alternatively place your advert in the post and just centre it if you wish with the following instruction:

<center>The Adrotate CODE here</center>

So, that’s it – C’est facile, n’est-ce pas? – It’s easy, isn’t it?

Image: Samuel Borges Photography (Shutterstock)

Congratulations!

You have now inserted targeted ads, showing your required content in the appropriate language!

At this stage, we urge the utmost caution especially to those of you who are not particularly experienced or confident with PHP programming.

A wrongly entered PHP code (even if just one symbol is omitted or entered in a wrong place) can lead to the crashing of your entire web site.

Therefore, before you start altering PHP code in your website, please first ensure you have access to your FTP server (and also know how to work it!). This will be vital in accessing files to correct and/or delete any wrong coding. An incorrect PHP code may also lead to WordPress breaking down and therefore disallowing any further administration. In the majority of cases, incorrect coding can only be restored using FTP.

We wish you success with placing, rotating and targeting (multilingual) adverts in your blog. If this article has helped you in some way, we would be very happy if one or two of you investigate some of the adverts on our blog, as this will help us to generate money with this site and continue offering free content.

When visitors to your Web site click on a faulty link a ‘404-error’ page will usually appear informing them that the link is broken. This is not only time-consuming and annoying for your customers, but it could also mean you are missing out on important revenue.

It is not too worrying if the broken link is one that points just to a site where you once found an interesting article and the intention is to share it with your readers. If the site with the great article has removed it or disappeared altogether this is just plain annoying and possibly only your reputation/reliability will suffer in the eyes of your readers. A real problem occurs when recurrent links, such as to your affiliate programmes, fail to work.

Affiliate partners, like any other Internet entity, have from time to time a habit of developing their Web sites and modifying their links. For example, they may change their domain and address or decide to outsource their affiliate programme. As an affiliate partner you will receive notification (hopefully in advance!) advising of the various changes and instructing which links in your site should be changed.

Another reason for needing to change external links may be that you decide to stop working with a particular affiliate partner. In this case, you would have to delete all links to them. However, perhaps you have dozens of articles all featuring links to that particular affiliated company, making it easy to miss one. A solution to this problem might be to redirect the outmoded links to your own homepage. A worse scenario might be that you are required to delete all affiliate links to that specific partner because they have terminated their agreement with you.

Alternatively, you may simply have changed your outlook. In the past, maybe you linked directly to the affiliate partner but now you have written a good and informative review on it for your readers and want them to visit this page first, rather than going straight to the affiliate.

Whatever the reasons for needing to change the link destinations in your blog, if you are not properly managing your links then you will have no option but to painfully go through every published page and change every single link, one by one. This is not only extremely time consuming, but carries no guarantee that you won’t miss amending some links.

We therefore recommend that from your very first day of blogging, you should organise and manage all affiliate and other recurring external links as a redirection. This is done via redirection scripts and if the linked address has to be changed these scripts facilitate the task as only one single record needs to be amended, not hundreds.

How do Redirection Scripts Work?

1. Create a php Redirection Page for each Link

   Every external link gets its own php page which is uploaded to your server, for example, using the following path:

   www.yourdomain.com/links/nameofthelink.php

   Here’s the code:

   <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive, noindex, nofollow, noodp, noydir" />
</head>
<?php
/* Redirect browser */
header("Location: THE ADDRESS TO BE LINKED TO");
/* Make sure that code below does not get executed when we redirect. */
die();
?>
<body>
</body>
</html>


2. Linking in the post

   The link in the post is set as usual. However, it is not directly targeting the external Web site, but the specially created php redirection file:

   <a href="http www.yourdomain.com/links/nameofthelink.php" title="nameogthelink" target="_blank" rel=”nofollow”>Nameofthelink</a>

   When readers click on this link, it takes them first to the internally created php file which redirects them promptly to the desired external link. The delay is only a few milliseconds for the reader, but for you, the Web site owner, it could save hundreds of hours’ work in the long run.

   If you later need to change the landing page then only the one php file needs to be amended, not every individual link you have placed on your site.

   You should include the “nofollow” attribute in the link deterring search engines following the link, especially if it is a redirect to an affiliate program.

3. Robot texts

   It is also advisable to insert the following code in the robots.txt:

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /links/
   Allow: /

   The reason for this is that some search engines do not like php redirects. To avoid penalties, it is recommended throughout the Net that you should prevent search engine access to your directory “links” via the robots.txt.

Which external links should be redirected?

Image: Leszek Glasner (Shutterstock)

This question is probably the biggest quandary, bigger than the technical solution of the re-directions themselves. It is sometimes quite difficult to decide which links need to be redirected. Affiliate links, there is no question. Any link to an affiliate program should go via redirection.

Linking to sites without having an affiliate programme in place has always been performed on a direct link basis for us so far. However, should we someday decide to write an article about a particular site and wish all of its links to land on this page first, then there will be a huge task ahead of us redirecting perhaps dozens of links in dozens of articles.

Another example is the WPML Multilingual CMS plugin. When we started this Web site, this plugin was free and we therefore just linked to the WordPress.org site where the plugin could be downloaded. Since August last year, this plugin is no longer free and has disappeared from the WordPress.org plugin page. This is a pain as we also applied an affiliate program link to it. The problem this has created is that this WPML link is placed on dozens of pages in various articles and it is causing a headache to locate all of these links in order to correct them.

Once you have set an external link, it can only be changed in the original text. A redirection of external links to anything other than the external destination is not possible.

It is therefore extremely important that you think every time before setting an external link, whether this is a link that which will appear on your blog only once or whether it is a recurring link. If it is a single link then any change required will be only once. However, if the link is recurring then you should always do it via the above described php script redirection.

Check, check, and check again!

Unfortunately, readers hardly ever report faulty and broken links to the Webmaster. Indeed, Soccerwidow have never received a single email notifying us of a broken link (despite more than 100,000 page views to date and thousands of clicks on links!).

As a serious blogger, you will need to schedule routine link checking in your calendar, ensuring that each link to an external source is still in working order. Your own internal ‘404 errors’ can be located with a script. But this topic is the subject of a future article…

Small bloggers usually only have access to Pay-per-sale programmes and others such as Pay-by-click or Pay-by-view are not even offered, with the exception of Google Adsense. Pay-by-click or Pay-by-view deals tend only to be offered to sites/blogs reaching 10,000 views per month and even then this number may be considered too small or not worth the effort, depending on the subject matter.

Pay-per-sale looks rather lucrative at first sight. For example, bookmakers offer a 25-35% share of their net revenue from any referrals. Other companies market their affiliate programmes by offering fixed rates which can vary between 25€ and 120€ per lead or sale. There are others, like Amazon, who only give 5% but assure you of a high conversion rate, in other words, that many of your readers will go on to transact a purchase via their site.

All of this sounds hugely promising and as adverts appear wherever you look on the Net, it is easy to imagine that it must be worthwhile doing. Armed with this sudden motivation for easy money, bloggers then start registering with various affiliate programmes and after working out the complicated php coding for proper display and positioning of adverts, it is time to sit back and watch the money rolling in. Or not.

The first week passes: zero income. Your first thought is that there must be something wrong. The blog is checked, the programming adjusted. One month passes: still nothing. Perhaps the problem is the blog’s small readership and that things will be brighter with time when more visitors arrive? A few more articles are written to drive traffic. Half a year passes, the visitor numbers have trebled, but the affiliate income is still zip.

In response, a Web search is made and every conceivable article on the subject devoured for the answers. The blog programming is checked again, the plugins and adverts are moved around, new affiliates are identified, friends are called, all in the hope of garnering every piece of advice available. Too much time is spent trying to make something work that promised so much at the outset. Sadly, enlightenment comes much later…

Pay-per-sale affiliate programs are empty promises and cash is only ever seen by the exploitative advertising companies!

Visitors, page views, clicks to affiliate programmes (CpV = click per view) & Sign-ups per click

Pay-per-sale affiliate programmes are extremely useful to the commercial companies who offer them as there are literally millions of bloggers who willingly display their adverts nice and free of charge hoping to receive some ‘commission’ income in return. Of course, the adverts are placed very purposefully as the blogger knows his audience and believes that well-targeted adverts will finally realise some income. Reaching such a precise target audience is otherwise difficult to achieve for advertisers anywhere else.

The affiliate departments of the commercial companies have the task of keeping the bloggers ‘sweet’. From time to time there are prize draws, or other encouraging incentives such as affiliate conferences with free food and entertainment laid on. In addition, there are numerous motivational emails received offering even juicier commissions, which to the blogger all look great on paper but never reap rewards.

At some stage, after months of trying and waiting, the penny drops and the blogger realises that huge numbers of clicks (referrals) are needed to generate any sales. Furthermore, he/she actually has no reliable way of checking if clients referred to the advertisers’ products actually go on to buy, and there is also no way of verifying whether the displayed commission amounts are in fact correct. It may also be likely that the referred customer already had a cookie on his/her computer and therefore another blog or Web site received the benefit of the sales, or more cynically, that the affiliate software of the commercial companies simply was never intended to register purchases to the affiliate’s account.

Image: GrandeDuc (Shutterstock)

Since March 2011, Soccerwidow received 40,559 unique visitors with 81,193 page views. On each single page there were at least three affiliate links displayed meaning that visitors were exposed to around 240,000 banners or other advertisements.

In these 13 months there were 3,245 clicks to affiliate programmes (click-through-rate: 4% of page views), which resulted in 55 sign-ups (1.7% of the clicks).

Furthermore, not all of these 55 people who used a Soccerwidow referral and registered themselves with a company actually transacted a purchase. Even worse, there is one bookmaker with a Soccerwidow referred client on his books who keeps winning his/her bets! (perhaps he/she follows Soccerwidow’s predictions? ).

This means a negative commission with this particular bookmaker and until this reverses back into profit, Soccerwidow will not receive a penny. Fortunately, the terms and conditions of this agreement do not mean that Soccerwidow has to contribute to the losses of the bookmaker!

In summary: Affiliate programmes are not worthwhile at all to any blogger, whether there is a 35%-50% commission offer granted or an agreed fixed amount per sale!

Perhaps Soccerwidow.com did not receive enough visitors? This was surely the case in the first few months, but in the meantime we have grown from just a dozen visitors per day to over 250, with an Alexa rank now healthily below 250,000. In March 2012 alone, the site absorbed over 14,000 page views.

Page views versus affiliate clicks - March 2012

If numbers are estimated for the future assuming similar continuous growth, Soccerwidow will reach 75,000 page views per month in around one year’s time (March 2013), or approximately 1,300 daily visitors. This number will produce around 3,000 clicks to affiliate programmes of which, on current experience, about 50 will sign-up with our partners.

Of course, there is always the outside chance that in this relatively small pool of clients there will be a big fish creating copious ‘commission’ income. In the meantime, affiliate links and banners will be displayed approximately 1.4 million times on the blog (for free, of course!) treating readers to the usual ‘eye candy’ of flashing pictures and multi-colours, without receiving any remuneration in return.

Nevertheless, pay-per-sale affiliate programmes are probably a good beginning in the world of internet marketing. By signing-up, the blogger gets access to professionally maintained Web sites and can learn which formats exist, which adverts perform best and how to build an advert inventory in the blog. But from our perspective, there is definitely not much more scope than this! You should not expect or budget for much income from pay-per-sale affiliate programmes unless you run a huge and popular blog with thousand of visitors a day but by then you’ve probably found other ways of making money from the traffic.

Soccerwidow’s click-through-rate is 4% and the conversion rate is 1.7% (We don’t know if this is good or bad but we would be glad to hear other people’s experiences). For one sign-up, 25 x 59 = 1,475 page views need to be generated. There are advertising partners in existence where payments can be negotiated per thousand views, but only after the blog has reached the magical 10,000 views per month: This topic will be discussed another time…

However, please bear in mind that the blog has been virtually dormant for the last three months due to our return to Europe following a two-year spell in Uganda. Despite this ‘time-out’, surprisingly the stream of visitors hasn’t completely dried up, as the following graphic shows:

Visitors January to June 2011 - Soccerwidow (Google Analytics)

Up until February, the blog’s popularity grew consistently and daily, and had by March reached an average of 54 visitors per day. Three months later with literally no new content added, there are still approximately 32 daily visitors to Soccerwidow. This 31% decrease in traffic may also be due to non-functioning WordPress plugins (some software updates have not been applied), and many folk must have been frustrated by constant ‘404 error’ messages.

An entire day was spent getting the many technical problems back in order. For example, WP Link Robot switched off, and there were problems with the navigation (PixoPoint Multi-level Navigation Plugin), some of which remain unfixed. Also the WMPL Plugin (multilingual pages) provided further headaches as the WPML gurus had changed the formerly free plugin to a commercial version and unfortunately, the old version is not 100% compatible with the WordPress updates; hence the multi-language categories were showing 404 errors.

However, no Soccerwidow readers queried any faults, which is a lesson learned: A blog owner must identify any broken links and check his/her Web site regularly for performance. Because there is so much choice available on the Internet, readers are more likely to vote with their feet if a site is or becomes unreliable.

Due to the aforementioned, Soccerwidow’s Alexa page rank naturally dropped:

Alexa Page Rank as at 01.07.2011

Comparison: In March the blog had an Alexa page rank of around 254,000.

Readers and most popular topics

The German articles were viewed 71,588 times, whilst English language articles attracted 131,195 page views. The most popular article was Calculation of Odds: Probability and Deviation, viewed 5,265 times since its publication on 11.3.2011; approximately 46 times per day.

Comparison: The German version of this article Kalkulation von Wettquoten: Wahrscheinlichkeit und Abweichung, was likewise the most popular in this language. It was published on 20.2.2011, three weeks before the English translation, and has since attracted 3,182 readers, an average of 24 per day.

These are surely small numbers compared to more successful blogs but nevertheless, I find the statistics worth mentioning, particularly since there seem to be very few articles in the Internet where one can compare one’s own blog performance and start-up experience with others.

It is interesting that the English article Self check: Do I have A Gambling problem? attracted 3,205 views, placing it at number 9 out of 44 published articles, whilst the German translation: Spielercheck: Habe ich ein Spielproblem?, achieved a ranking of 35 from 52 articles. Are English language readers more concerned about their gambling habits than German speakers?

On the other hand, the German article Über Mich is at position number 18, with 1,558 visitors. The English version About Me is not so popular with only 777 visitors ranking the article 43rd most popular out of 44. The Germans seem to be more interested in the author!

A further phenomenon is that the German speakers, although accounting for 32% less page views, provide substantially more comments on the articles. Likewise the article rating system (the six stars) seems to attract substantially more interaction with the German readership. The German readers therefore represent a more tangible audience than the English, who remain curiously anonymous. This is also borne out by the poll asking whether people make money from gambling, which attracted four times as many answers from German readers than from English ones:

Umfrage: Vedienen Sie Geld mit Wetten?

Survey: Are you making money from betting?

According to the survey 15% of the blog’s German readers are non-gamblers, compared to 0% non-gamblers amongst the English fraternity. 80% of the ‘English’ also answered that they lose more than they win, compared to just under 50% of ‘German’ readers.

Altogether in six months, the blog received 4,317 unique visitors from 102 different countries, with 71 different language groups. This equated to an average of 24 new visitors per day. Over 2,000 first visitors returned to the blog at least once, representing almost half of all first visitors.

Soccerwidow: Visitors by Country (Google Analytics)

The majority of readers are based in Germany: 2,202 unique visitors, more than 50% of the entire readership. If the other German speaking countries, Switzerland and Austria, are added then the total grows to 2,435 readers, or around 56% of the total readership.

The remaining 44% of readers are distributed across 99 other countries and speak 67 different languages, the majority being from countries where English is not the native language. This may go some way to explaining why English language comments on the blog are sparse:

Soccerwidow: Visitors by Language (Google Analytics)

Income via affiliate programs and advertising

Photo: Granata1111 (Shutterstock)

Today’s article finishes with the largest disappointment. Not a penny has been earned from affiliate programs or advertising in either language! After many hours spent registering with different affiliate programs, downloading their banners and inserting them into the Web site, still no income for Soccerwidow, but plenty of free advertising for them, especially as the articles have been viewed a total of 202,735 times.

Various SEO blogs in the Internet explain that one can expect between five and eight Euros per thousand views. This would mean that with approximately 202,000 views, with three to four different adverts on each page, Soccerwidow should have received by now around 700 times say five Euros, or 3,500 Euros income. Even half of this would have been an acceptable result but, Soccerwidow’s blog finishes its first half year with ZERO commercial income.

Herewith the income table (the listing is not complete; there are approximately twice as many affiliate partners but all show zero income!):

Affiliate Statistics - January to June 2011

…and 888Sports charges $25 for a bank transfer, hence the $13.85 sitting as credit in Soccerwidow’s affiliate account will probably remain an untapped source of income for some time to come! Soccerwidow would genuinely be interested in hearing from anyone in the Internet who actually makes money with affiliate programmes…

The only real income from the blog was through sales of the article Practical Guidance to Recognizing Value Bets, which sold 13 times for 5 Euros a piece, however only in the German version and not once in English!

Therefore, for the time being Soccerwidow will remain a hobby as we doubt it will ever provide enough financial support to take on as a full-time occupation.

To close, thank you to all our readers who remained loyal and patient despite the three month sabbatical. Life is now settling down again, which should allow time to analyse some football data and get everything ready for the new European seasons. Hopefully, we will again publish regular picks and plenty more articles explaining betting maths, if only to dispel the myths surrounding gambling!

Back to: The First Month in Figures – January 2011

Back to: The Second Month in Figures – February 2011

Image: W. Scott (Shutterstock)

The Internet contains a large amount of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) advice and articles recommending how to increase a blog’s popularity, however there isn’t much information available confirming whether it works in practice. More so, I was curious to find out how other blogs have developed from the start-up phase, but on this subject I found hardly anything, hence this update.

I would like to stress that I do not use any under-handed methods like buying back-links or traffic. The blog is growing organically through the publication of my own unique content and articles which are then listed by search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Leaving comments and back-links to Soccerwidow in other blogs is also helping, but finding relevant and appropriate places in which to do this is quite challenging and time-consuming, especially in the English speaking community.

Alternatively, there are plenty of forums ready-made to receive my views and opinions but already, I have been banned from two English blogs (shortly after registering), purely because my back-links contravened their terms and conditions relating to self-advertisement. I also received a warning from a German forum and have for the time being stopped leaving back-links in any forums (this is of course contrary to all the advice I found in the Internet recommending back-links in forums in order to drive traffic!).

I am seeing quite a fight for market share in the Internet and this is definitely something I hadn’t bargained for to such an extent. This month I also received a few dubious offers by email, which were all binned straight away.

The goals for February were:

• 600 back links –> not achieved: 416 back links
• At least 100 visitors per day –> not achieved: on average approximately 50 visitors per day
• An Alexa rank under 2 million –> over-achieved: 672,683
• To increase the number of visitors from Great Britain in relation to visitors from Germany (at least 50% of the visitors should come from GB) and also increase returning visits from GB (38% of German readers return but only 8% from GB visit again). –> not achieved: The number of visitors rose but, with an even higher proportion reading German language pages
• German visitors spend on average three minutes 30 seconds reading the blog but visitors from GB only one minute and 39 seconds. The time spent by guests on the site needs to be increased: –> partly achieved: German visitors now spend four minutes, 28 seconds on the site (+27%), but the number of visitors from English-speaking countries is growing only very slowly

Visitor Statistics

The number of visitors trebled, but the time spent reading the blog and the average number of pages visited both dropped:

Visitor Statistics: Google Analytics - January 2011

Visitors Statistics: Google Analytics - February 2011

The majority of visitors currently come from Germany and this has definitely caught me by surprise. When I started out two months ago, I was expecting the majority of visitors to come from English speaking countries:

Visitors by Countries: February 2011

The following is a screenshot of the number of returning visitors (Unique IP addresses); in other words, those who came back to the site more than once:

Returning Visitors: February 2011

Soccerwidow has 112 regular readers from Germany and only 43 from the rest of the world (encompassing 28 different countries). My husband surmises that the English version of the blog is not performing so well because it has so much competition from other football related sites in the English language.

Income from Affiliate Marketing

The income from affiliate marketing was ZERO in February, despite a very good Click-Through rate:

Click-Through Rate Affiliate Programme

The above table includes only three of Soccerwidow’s 63 active affiliate programs, all three of them showing similar good click-through figures, but with the same fat zero in the end column!

Google AdSense refused my application as Soccerwidow.com links to gambling sites which offends Google’s terms and conditions. So far, the alternative Betvertiser, highly praised in the Internet, has not generated any income either.

I will continue observing this for another month and if at the end of March there is still no positive development, I will think about removing all links to gambling sites and apply again with AdSense. However, as my site is definitely gambling related I hold out little hope of being accepted, but AdSense is the only provider paying per click, of which I have many.

Update, April 2012: Google AdSense have recently changed their T’s & C’s and Google adverts are now allowed if the Web site is not an online casino or wagering site and also, does not drive organic traffic to gambling sites. Blogs about gambling, including referral links or gambling adverts are okay.

Alternative Income Sources

Since affiliate marketing (banner advertisement) does not seem to function at so early a stage in my site’s development, I need to think about alternatives. The following are a few thoughts but, I am always very open-minded and welcoming of suggestions from my readers(!):

• Set-up a paid weekly picks service
• Publish tutorial downloads for fees
• Offer paid seminars (F2F – face to face)

At this moment in time, my favourite idea is the latter and I’m thinking of offering coaching seminars in the coming summer break and possibly organising a European tour. If this idea generates any interest from likely candidates, then any income earned would allow the blog to run for free.

Income from Betting

A further alternative would be making money from betting as my approach, based on probability calculation and statistics, seems to be quite successful:

Soccerwidow's Bank in February 2011

I started with a bank of 50 € and have achieved a profit of +153% after just three weekends. However, although I am always sure that my computations are correct, I am quite risk averse. This means that I will only feel comfortable putting larger sums of money on my picks once I have checked the consistency of my computations in greater detail over many weeks, to ensure there are no mistakes in reasoning and that the past profit has indeed been no coincidence.

“Eureka” Moments

I experienced a few “Eureka” moments in February, not necessarily all positive, either things I wasn’t expecting to happen, or myths I didn’t really believe existed:

1. With a blog one cannot immediately make fast, easy money, even if the visitor numbers rise exceptionally and those visitors click on many advertising banners. Affiliate programmes do not seem to be worthwhile at all, even if many of them offer generous commissions (some as high as 30-40%). Of course, if no-one registers with these affiliate partners after clicking on my links, even an offer of 100% commission would bring no income to Soccerwidow.
2. Sites are quick in suspending accounts as soon as they think you are self-advertising on their forums, and some blog owners are not interested in co-operation; they even lock their sites to your IP address when discovering that you may have a competing interest in their site. The market share struggle makes it a dog-eat-dog environment with not many potential business partners wishing to cooperate. The Internet community seems very ‘cold’ as a result.
3. The absolute majority of visitors are passive readers and despite many regular visitors (e.g. 112 from Germany), only a handful have ever communicated with me and most seem to prefer anonymity: They are happy to vote on the betting poll I have posted on the site but resist communication by comments or email.
4. I still find it amazing how fast my Alexa rank has risen in such a short space of time and I therefore must assume that most Web sites (over 90%) have less than 50 regular visitors per day.

Problems So Far…

The topic is huge, and luckily I have hundreds of article subjects and ideas in my mind. Unfortunately, in order to maintain the quality of articles I cannot populate the site as quickly as I would like.

WPML (the WordPress Plugin for multi-languages) is not compatible with the new WordPress 3.1 version and they have stopped providing upgrades for free. This means that one must now buy a license. In view of the very few visitors from non-German speaking countries combined with zero income from the site so far, I am hesitating with this purchase, which means the English version of my blog currently has an error when visitors try to navigate using categories.

Everything else is running smoothly (touch wood!), except that I’m bashing my head against a wall trying to come up with a feasible idea how to get paid for my hard work!

The goals for March

March will hopefully see my blogging and statistical analyses translated into money. I will probably publish only part of the weekly picks free of charge and ask for a small payment for the rest.

Looking ahead to June/July, as mentioned, I’m thinking of offering seminars in the form of a ‘Summer Academy’ and offering contents such as data evaluation, odds calculation, identification of ‘value’ bets, development and assessment of strategies; the duration of these seminars would probably be one week in different cities in Germany and Europe.

I have to assume that the number of visitors will continue to rise constantly and organically, and hope that my readers spread the word of Soccerwidow’s existence.

If all else fails and my effort to earn money via blogging comes to nothing, I still have the option of selling Soccerwidow.com in Ebay: The value of this blog (as at the end of February) is $3,714.19 USD, tendency rising: Sitetrail

Naturally, I hope I will not have to sell Soccerwidow, but instead as suggested in my opening salvo, Hello football widows and football widowers (article is in German!), will succeed in making a living from the thousands of professional soccer games played each month and in general from the worldwide enthusiasm for the sport.

The blog is still in its experimental phase and the primary goal is to make money from the site, ideally without having to bet myself. Paradoxically, however, it seems that betting myself might actually bring the most profit: Starting bank on 12.2.: 50 € – February: 126 € – Estimate for March: 360 € – Estimate for April: 800 €, and if my statistical approach continues to make a profit of 30% every week, at the end of the year, who knows?!

Many thanks to all my regular readers, but the largest “thank you” to those who have helped me with their comments and votes, those who keep me ‘on the ball’ and motivated. Play to the final whistle, as they say!

Back to: The First Month in Figures – January 2011

Forward to: The First Half Year in Figures – Jan-Jun 2011

In summary, I published a total of 24 articles, each in English and German, achieving an average of nearly one bilingual post per day.

However, I have to say it was fairly difficult, working solidly throughout the daylight hours. Thankfully, motivation was constantly at hand seeing the number of visitors rising slowly, but steadily:

Google Analytics Screenshot: Daily Visitors - January 2011

Altogether, the blog attracted 249 unique visitors, of which 49.85% left the site immediately they landed upon it (the bounce rate), but the remainder stayed for an average of five minutes and 16 seconds:

Google Analytics Screenshot: Site Statistics - January 2011

A closer view shows that 96 first-time visitors (39.8%) returned to the site to read more, staying for an average of 18 minutes and 22 seconds:

Google Analytics Screenshot: New vs. Returning Visitors - January 2011

In just one month, Soccerwidow achieved an Alexa page rank of 4,264,036 (not bad considering that there are approximately 255,000,000 websites worldwide); Google indexed 96 links and Yahoo 31, and by the end of January, there were also 285 back-links to Soccerwidow:

Site-Trail Statistics - as at 2011.01.31

Visitors googled various keywords and found Soccerwidow via the following words and phrases:

Google Search Engine Keywords - January 2011

Nevertheless, visitors did not click on as many adverts as hoped (literally zero income), which means I may take out the banners and leave only the text links. More lucrative income streams will have to be sought.

Affiliate Clicks - January 2011

Unfortunately, there were hardly any comments placed on the site by readers in January. This is regrettable as feedback is enormously important for me in order to adjust the content and type of articles to my readers’ tastes. It is also important for my own motivation as it is quite challenging to write ‘in the dark’ and then only see afterwards the growing numbers of visitors reading the articles, being the only measure of how successful each has been.

However, there was one enquiry by email whether I can deliver paid football tips and prognoses on the English Premier League. I will think about this and perhaps introduce a paid newsletter service?

Google Analytics: Visitors by Country - January 2011

The targets for February are:

• 600 back-links to Soccerwidow
• At least 100 visitors per day
• An Alexa rank of under 2 million
• To increase the number of visitors from Great Britain in relation to German visitors (at least 50% of visitors should come from GB?) and also increase returning visits from GB (38% of German readers come back again but only 8% from GB do so).
• German visitors spend on average three minutes and 30 seconds per visit, but British visitors only one minute 39 seconds. Altogether, the time spent by guests on the site needs to increase to make it worthwhile continuing with the blog.

The most popular articles in January were:

• Football Mania in Uganda
• HT/FT – Betting on equally matched teams – Evaluation
• Review and Tips: MarketFeeder Pro – Betfair Bot
• The Method of Matched Betting
• Guest Authors

The article about MarketFeeder was published only yesterday (31st January), and has already greeted 28 readers. Therefore, I will publish more reviews of betting ‘bots’ in February.

17 visitors (7% all visitors) were interested in the article Guest Authors, meaning there are probably good chances that people may perhaps write for the blog sometime in the future?

So, that’s it for this month. I think Soccerwidow has got off to quite a good start and it remains for me to hope that the trend continues. In the meantime, thank you all for your time and support!

If you are interested in Soccerwidow’s historical development, why not have a look at what happened next: Month Two – February 2011