In the last few weeks I heard about YouSayToo.com and decided to join this blogging network because they offer AdSense and Amazon Affiliate Revenue sharing and I am always looking to test out new ways to potentially earn extra income from my blogs or online in general.

One thing about YouSayToo.com is I didn’t realize the site is as big as it is, having an Alexa ranking under 9k means it gets a decent amount of traffic and there must be thousands of bloggers already in the system. 

All you have to is sign up for YouSayToo, create your profile, set your Revenue Settings and then import your blog feeds.  You do need to put the YouSayToo badge on your site if you want to participate in the social network but this is hardly unusual as most blogging networks require a small banner or badge to include you in their system.

They do tell you to create a new AdSense URL Channel for www.yousaytoo.com so that you can separate track how much of your AdSense impressions and earnings are coming from your articles shared on YouSayToo.  This is a wise thing to do and I highly recommend it.

I unfortunately forgot to do this when I first set everything up two weeks ago, so I am still waiting for the next 20 days to report on how many impressions my articles get on YouSayToo and how much of my AdSense earnings come from this network.

Currently, I only listed my personal blog and poetry blog in YouSayToo.com I may add DragonBlogger.com later if I find the site to be particularly favorable.  I also added a Widget Exchange to my poetry blog only, this allows you to gain more traffic by showcasing other YouSayToo blogs in exchange for yours being showcased on other sites as well.  It is a mutual traffic exchange type of system and I am just testing it to see how much traffic comes in from YouSayToo.com to my Poetry blog.

One thing I like about the system is when you add "Interests" to your profile, you immediately see all other bloggers who added matching interests.  This  makes it easy to add them as friends and connect with others who share the same interests.  The system is also lightning fast for me, you can add people in seconds, pages and profiles load so quickly.  It is refreshing considering the slower speeds of many other blogging networks honestly.

Here is a breakdown of how your articles list on YouSayToo.com:

• The site does a good job of integrating AdSense blocks on the top and bottom of articles and these are the AdSense blocks you get a % of the revenue sharing for.

• YouSayToo does also use InfoLinks to make money from your articles but does not do sharing from Infolinks scattered on your post.

• YouSayToo.com does read in your blog RSS feed, so if you have your feed set to full feed then the entire blog article will be read in.  This means a user who reads your article on YouSayToo may not go back to original article on your site if they can read full article here.  If you do have full RSS Feeds, then at least use the RSS Footer WordPress plugin and brand your footer with copyright and ownership information.

In Summary

YouSayToo has brought in some traffic to my personal blog, but mostly I have seen quite a few votes and comments on my YouSayToo articles submitted to the site.  As it only imports your current articles going forward, I only have about 40 articles in the system (compared to 3000+ on all my blogs).  So as you have more content fed into the system, presumably you get more pageviews, more revenue and more traffic to your sites. 

I think even if there was no revenue sharing the more you can expose your content online the better, and the social networking aspect appears to be pretty good though the messaging system is kind of unusual in that you handle everything in a popup from your little top right profile area of the screen.  You deal with messages, friend requests all from this little dialog box that expands which took some getting used to.

It is too early to say what the revenue sharing looks like, but so far this looks like a blogging social network I will keep active on.

Feel free to connect with DragonBlogger on YouSayToo and I will be happy to add you to my network.

-Dragon Blogger

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I thought that these Decepticon USB Flash Drives were so clever and cool that I had to mention them.  The fact that this much effort was put into a USB flash drive is genius.  The only thing limited about them is the smaller 2GB size but the fact that they cost only $12 is a really good deal considering how specialized the item is.

I would have a few of these little things on display like toys and just put maybe some music, or media files on them for transport.  Maybe I would get one for my son when he is in school and old enough to save files/documents to disk for backup.  He would probably love to have one of these cool devices to backup all his files and document son.

-Dragon Blogger

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There are countless social networking sites online for bloggers and some of the mega sites like Blogcatalog, Networked Blogs and Technorati can be not only daunting to join, but it makes finding and actually communicating and networking with other bloggers all but hopeless.

Too many spammers are on these sites and just messaging asking for mutual clicks, links, "nice site"… useless waste of time stuff not worth displaying in your dashboards or shout boxes.

There are a handful of smaller blogging sites which I consider very valuable for bloggers who don’t yet have the "recognition" of Darren Rowse and are looking to make personal connections with other bloggers.  These sites are probably too small for the mega blogger who barely has time to have one on one time with other bloggers, but are for all the beginner to intermediate bloggers who want to actually have some decent networking with peers who all have the same goals.

BloggerLuv is one of those sites that I feel is worth mentioning.  The creation of John Sullivan aka. @jsinkeywest on Twitter and who runs Pot Politics.

BloggerLuv is a really small community right now and many of the bloggers listed are ones who have trickled over from BlogEngage and MMOSocialNetwork among others. 

But whereas BlogEngage and MMOSocialNetwork are more designed to be article submission sites solely, BloggerLuv is more about social networking.  It has a community where you submit articles, but this is a secondary part of the website, the primary part is a social network where you friend other bloggers and participate in groups and conversations.

It didn’t surprise me that some of the biggest up and coming bloggers are already part of the network, and my own participation will increase as SocialSpark 1.0 decomissions soon and all its Social Networking aspect will completely disappear.  Which is a shame because I worked so hard networking to build up over 8k followers on SocialSpark, which is more than my Twitter following.

BloggerLuv also offers something that may interest you and that is complete and total DoFollow on every message/page within the site.  You get DoFollow from the profile, and you get DoFollow from the conversations.  You can even include old fashioned html hyperlinks to get DoFollow links from your keywords, just don’t abuse the system and simply promote your content aimlessly. 

The only thing I don’t like is that the Community Site has a separate login/registration than the main portion.  The main portion can integrate with Twitter/Facebook but the community portion is truly independent and the two systems don’t appear to interface with each other very much.

Don’t take my word for it, read Ms. Ileane’s article on the Top 5 Reasons to Join BloggerLuv and become part of this blogging community.

-Dragon Blogger

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It has been a long and hard two years blogging but I have finally reach the 1,000 unique visits a day club.  I created this illusory goal for myself to reach my first major milestone for my flagship blog, this was to get to 1,000 unique visits a day and hold it consistently for several days in a row without "StumbleUpon" spikes being the driving factor.

I reached that milestone in the middle of August, and have held over 1,000 unique visits per day for 5 out of the last 7 days, with my other days being slightly under in the high 980+ range.

When blogging it is essential to set goals and create objectives and actions you plan to take to work toward those goals.  Creating items that you can measure will help you see progression and since visitors to your site are so easily tracked with Google Analytics or other alternative to Google Analytics, visitors are a metric I can measure and follow every day.

I know this traffic is small compared to many sites but it is a landmark compared to others who are still struggling with 50-100 unique visits per day.  I had gotten stuck in a rut a little over a year ago where my site had only 250 visits per day and wouldn’t go up for a few months.  I had another plateau in the very early part of 2010 where my site would be stuck at about 500 unique visitors per day without budging. 

I experimented with different articles, keywords, article submission sites and in the last two months I partnered with MGID.com traffic exchange program which helped and now accounts for about 5% of my site traffic, bringing me around 1100 visits per month or so.

Don’t be afraid to experiment and try new things, comment, guest post, promote like hell on Twitter, Facebook, Posterous and every other social media or article site you can submit to.  When blogging remember that you can never be spread too thin, the more you exist online (by showing up in various search engines) the more you will be found.

My blog gets over 60% of its traffic from Google Search engines, this is down from 75% because of experimenting with MGID and other referral networks to bring in more referral traffic.  Note, I actually haven’t reduce my number of visitors from Google Searches, the number is consistently higher, I just added more referral traffic sources as well.

Here are my top 10 traffic sources for DragonBlogger.com for the past 30 days:

You can clearly see that other than MGID, most of my referral traffic brings in less than 300 visits per month, but they all add up.  Having about 10-20 social media sites and article submission sites working together can add up to thousands of visits per month combined.

Bottom Line:

Never stop trying and experimenting with new social media sites, article submission directories and be sure to take the time to Optimize Blog SEO to ensure you maximize your traffic from organic searches.

-Dragon Blogger

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