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As you probably know by now, I enjoy tools that help me figure out how I’m doing with different aspects of my blog. That’s why I love SEO Meter so much! Tracking and measuring your site’s crawl rate is important, but often times it’s something webmasters overlook or don’t pay attention to. This SEO tool can help you with determining your crawl rate, and it’s one you’re definitely going to want to try out and use often - plus, it’s free!

This free SEO tool monitors how frequently Google crawls your site or blog, and the information is presented in attractive and easy-to-read graphs and charts. Your crawl rate is extremely important because it has to do with the search engine viewing you as a trusted source. The more often your site or page is crawled, the more it’s trusted and the faster you’ll get indexed. By tracking your site’s statistics with SEO Meter, you can learn how to improve your crawl rate and overall improve your SEO as well.

Besides tracking your crawl rate, you can share it as well. A lot of bloggers like including badges and banners on their sites to let their readers know well they’re doing and what their statistics are, and when it comes to SEO Meter that feature isn’t lacking! The badges offered are easy to use, appealing to the eye, and are dynamically updated so you never have to do a thing after inserting the code into your site. After signing up with SEO Meter, you can view your site’s crawl rate graph page and at the bottom will be options for different badges to use. It couldn’t be simpler!

As seen above, you can not only track your own site’s crawl rate, but you can view the crawl rate of others and compare multiple sites. This can be a very helpful feature in checking out where your competition stands so you can learn how much you’ll have to improve to catch up, or even see if you’re beating them with a better crawl rate.

But maybe one of my favorite aspects about this online SEO tool is that it has Top 20 lists of the most crawled sites on the web, in every category. These charts display the most-crawled sites, their ranking on SEO Meter, and their specific crawl rate. This is a unique and interesting feature and it’s very useful to be able to tell which of the most popular sites is actually the most popular, with Google at least.

Just a couple of the categories included are the top 20 internet marketing sites and the top 20 gadgets and technologies sites. There is literally a Top 20 for every category that any blogger or webmaster in any niche will be interested in. Below you can check out part of the chart for some of the top internet marketing sites:

There are a good chunk of free tools out there that will measure your different statistics, but I’m sure you’re seeing that SEO Meter will give you important information about your site’s SEO, and that it’s one of the better tools despite how new it is. I can definitely see SEO Meter becoming one of the most valuable online statistics tools there are, so the sooner you get in on it, add your URL (for free), and start tracking your site or blog, the better! I’m already tracking my blog there, are you?

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In my latest Asking the Readers post, I wanted to know what your favorite social media site is. Social media is a huge part of blogging and one of the largest and most powerful ways to get new visitors and more traffic. Successful use of social media can result in thousands upon thousands of visitors. There are pros and cons to this traffic (such as the fact that it doesn’t convert to loyal readers well at all), but obviously, no blogger wants to miss out on the benefits.

And since social media is one of the most important parts of blogging, I had to ask what YOUR favorite site is to promote your blog - whether it be Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Twitter, Sphinn, Reddit, Mixx, Blogging Zoom, or something else - and for what reasons. We all have different results with different sites, so this was definitely an interesting project with many enlightening answers.

Speaking of those answers, let’s take a look at a few of them to get an idea and some new opinions on the social media sites we use (or don’t use but possibly should):

Heath Buckmaster said:

“I think StumbleUpon is an excellent site - far reaching in how you can use it to explore the known internet, and the unknown internet. I consider it to be social networking for my browser. I also think Facebook is an incredibly rich social media site - the extensibility of the applications creates new social networks in any direction you can think of. For example - Scrabulous links you to scrabble players around the world; goodreads books links you to authors and readers who might like the same genres as you or who might introduce you to new authors/genres; the games like vampires/werewolves/slayers/zombies allow you to have fun and attack your friends in a virtual competition. Facebook is leaps and bounds ahead of myspace in terms of useability for REAL social networking.”

Wayne Liew said:

“Add my vote onto StumbleUpon please. Apart from the wide range that it caters, the traffic that it brings along has been something really amazing. Maybe Digg front page can bring in more traffic, SU is a better platform for those who are trying very hard to get onto the front page of Digg.”

Bud Calabrese said:

“Right now I am in love with twitter. I love how I keep meeting new people and the comments and ideas that are posted. It has really helped in creating content because I keep getting new ideas.”

Stuff Guy said:

“Yeah, I’m a big fan of stumbleupon too. It’s helped get my site, which is still fairly new, some decent traffic. Not to mention there are some really good sites to be found via StumbleUpon, a lot of fun flash games and that sort of thing. I thought shoutwire was good too but they come down pretty hard on self-promotion. Has anyone tried Squidoo?”

Steven Snell said:

“I prefer StumbleUpon and delicious. StumbleUpon is so unique and delicious is great for keeping track of stuff and for marketing your own content.”

There are obviously a wide range of social media sites out there, but StumbleUpon takes the cake when it comes to favorites - and I do have to say, StumbleUpon is my favorite social media site as well! Like Steven Snell mentioned, it’s very unique. StumbleUpon has a great system and it’s so easy to send traffic, unlike Digg where you have to have plenty of powerful contacts and a ton of votes for each submission. Even one vote with StumbleUpon can get the traffic rolling. Not only is StumbleUpon great to promote content, but it’s awesome for finding fantastic articles, fun stuff, and entertaining games as well.

There are a lot of social media sites out there, however, and we shouldn’t limit ourselves to just one, or even two or three. I believe picking one or two “main” social sites and building up strong profiles on them is essential, but on the side you should also have the rest of the major social media sites to submit your best content to. There’s a social media site for every person in every niche, no matter your topic, and having several under your belt is important. If you’d like to learn of more social media sites, check out this extensive list over at Traffikd.com.

If you didn’t get a chance to answer and comment on the original question, you can go ahead and share your favorite social media sites with us here, let us know which ones you use, and the successes or results you’ve had with them all. If StumbleUpon is your favorite or even if you just use it, you can also share your results with it as well along with any advice you might have. If you like, provide links to your social media pages so we can add each other and build our networks to help promote our blogging content even further!

My social media profiles:

StumbleUpon
Twitter
Digg
Sphinn
Mixx
Blogging Zoom
Reddit

If you like, go ahead and share yours in the comments! Thanks for reading, and if you liked this article and don’t want to miss out on future Asking the Reader sessions and results, please subscribe to Super Blogging.

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There’s a lot going on lately in the blogosphere, including the latest Wordpress upgrade, 2.3.3. If you have registration enabled on your blog then a user is able to edit posts of another user, which can pose a serious problem. This is an urgent upgrade, so I wouldn’t put it off too long. But before you get to worrying, settle down and read this week’s collection of amazing articles.

Birthday Contest: MeAndMyDrum Turns One at MeAndMyDrum.

WordPress Upgrades - Fuss or Must? at Wayne Liew Dot Com.

10 Breeds of PC User Identified and Explained at Anywired.

7 Time-Saving and Organizational Blogging Tips at BlogStorm.

How To Talk To Bloggers at NorthxEast.

10 Important Facts of Blog Promotion at DailyBlogTips.

Are Subscribers Over-rated? at Skelliewag.

25 Beautifully Colorful Websites at Vandelay Design.

More on How to Build Anticipation on Your Blog at ProBlogger.

5 Ways to Fail With Social Media Marketing at Traffikd.

Sidebar Redesign: My Thought Process at ProBlogDesign.

“I’m an Internet Marketer” at Aurelius Tjin.

Have a fantastic weekend, and if you need more articles to read check out Super Blogging’s top posts, or subscribe to get them delivered to you via reader or in your email inbox. And as a little sneak peek, there are some exciting things coming up here soon, which I’ve been hinting at for a while. Stay tuned!

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Lately I’ve been using Sponsored Reviews to make money online. I know that before I have talked about cutting out the middle man - and for good reasons. By cutting out the middle man you have to have to follow another site’s rules on the reviews you write while they take a cut of your pay. So instead, you should also offer private advertising opportunities on your blog, and let people pay you directly via Paypal. That way your advertisers save some money and you get 100% of the profits, while setting your own rules and prices.

However, there’s one problem with that. You’re missing the marketplace. Most sites that manage paid reviews have a marketplace so advertisers can find you. By running the advertising privately, you don’t have that exposure. I can’t stress enough that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, so instead, run your own advertising and sign up on the paid review sites as well.

And in my opinion, Sponsored Reviews is the one to sign up for. They have a wonderful marketplace - the advertisers can find you and you can find potential advertisers as well. Sponsored Reviews has a great system to rate a site’s quality, and you choose your own price. Then you can bid on opportunities to write about.

Even though Sponsored Reviews takes 35% of the cut (which is better than ReviewMe’s 50% share), I still make more off reviews there than I could selling them privately here, even after Sponsored Reviews takes their chunk of the earnings. That’s all thanks to the marketplace, and the way they rank the sites in the system.

And if you manage to have your blog rank five stars - or checkmarks in this case - which is a very easy thing to do, then Ben at Blogging Experiment has shared his way of earning hundreds of extra dollars. It’s bold, but it’s a pretty easy thing to do and could actually turn out making your income rise through the roof without any extra work.

As an added bonus, you could even draw in plenty of traffic for your reviews. After reviewing Credit Karma, I was on the first page of Google for the term for a while, and got a lot of visitors that were trying to read up on their service. If you write an excellent review, it could do well in search engines and bring you tons of traffic in the long-term.

Out of all the paid review sites including PayPerPost, ReviewMe, Smorty, and others, Sponsored Reviews is my favorite. They’ve definitely proven to be the most profitable for me and it looks like my income from them will continue to only go up. I completely recommend them if your income needs a boost, because it’s incredibly easy to make more money than you would otherwise.

You can sign up now if you like, or go ahead and ask any questions you’d like in the comments. I would feel free to help you learn how to maximize your earnings from Sponsored Reviews, or just how to sign up or use the system in general.

So you don’t miss out on more money making tips in the future, subscribe to Super Blogging, because there’s much more to come!

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Photo credits: hundrednorth.

Audio ads have been storming through the blogosphere lately, and almost everyone has been talking about them. The main question people ask is if they are worth it, or if they work. There are pros and cons to everything, including audio ads - and if you should use them really depends on the kind of site you’re running.

Basically these ads are a 5-second audio clip that plays whenever someone visits your site. Because of this, you are paid for every single visitor, 100% of the time. This is very different from advertising networks such as Adsense, which are shown on your page but require someone to click on them for you to be paid. With audio ads, every visitor grows your income and helps you monetize your site - not just a select few.

However, if you’re running a professional site or one that’s never supposed to normally have audio, then this type of advertising might not be for you. If a visitor comes to your site and is startled by sound, even if for only five seconds, it might send them away for life. While it’s true that about 60% of people browse the web with their volume off, that still leaves 40% of your visitors that you might scare off.

Sites that might work with audio ads are sites that are very unprofessional and don’t require any reading. If your visitors will be reading articles or come for information, then audio will be inappropriate. However, an online game website or a site profile might be okay with audio ads. You just have to think of what your visitors want and need. Put yourself in their shoes and imagine what your first impression would be on your website if it had a 5-second audio clip that played. Would it bother you, or would it not make a difference?

Audio advertising can be a fantastic way to monetize your blog or site if implemented properly. It won’t be right for everyone, but if you run a site that can work with it, you’ll be paid for 100% of your site’s visitors, even if they have their volume turned on or not. If that number doesn’t impress you, then what will? If you have any questions about the benefits of audio ads, how they work, or if you want to know whether they’ll be good for your site or not, go ahead and drop a comment and ask - I’d be glad to answer. Click here to sign up for audio ads.

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