Just five links today, with a little more running commentary involved.

Carl Ocab has a guest poster who proposes a four-step formula for productive blogging. It’s pretty simple, but it’s safe most bloggers don’t have a plan when it comes to writing new posts or updating their blog. The end of the posts brings up something we’ve tried to bring up again and again…Consistency is the key! Just one post a week is better than a couple weeks every daily posts every couple months.

For bloggers who don’t want to miss out on any many, AdSense for Feeds is now available. You won’t be seeing it in the Blogging Addiction RSS feed anytime soon, though. Daily Blog Tips has doubts about it as well. It won’t be revolutionizing anything anytime soon.

It’s easy to appreciate Winning The Web’s analysis of their biggest traffic sources. StumbleUpon is their biggest referral, and ours as well. Winning The Web has bought several paid reviews and held contests, but nothing has brought in traffic like StumbleUpon.

We spent about $15.00 in hopes of starting a StumbleUpon snowball effect, with mediocre results. However, our recent post about the Mint statistics program took off on its own, having excellent results for free. It just goes to show that the best traffic is free traffic.

Is your blog stuck in a perpetual cycle of mediocrity? We’ve got solutions from two blogs:

Blog Tipz offers five ways to re-invigorate your blog. Hopefully you already place images in most of your posts, but it’s probably been a while since you’ve changed your layout.

If you want to take things to the next level, Blogging Tips has three ideas for you to try out. All three of the options take a lot of hard work, but each is a legitimate opportunity to strengthen your blog. Giving out original, free ebooks seems to be pretty popular in the MMO niche.

This upcoming week, we’ll answer another reader’s question about categorizing and setting his blog apart, as well as either another post in the traffic series or a new topic! You’ll have to wait and see.

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One of our readers left us a comment a few weeks ago, asking us for advice about naming her blog. The comment wasn’t particularly relevant to the post, so we’ve decided to write a whole post about it instead. Hopefully it was worth the wait!

Hello, I am thinking of blogging about my life struggling with depression and how it has affected my family. Our home is full of depressed people; my father is bipolar, so are both my sisters. My grandma is a schizophrenic with bipolar disorder. Can you suggest a good name for my blog?

- Jennifer A.

The idea behind her blog sounds like something she seems passionate about, and for better or for worse, she has insight that many other people don’t. I’m sure there are many people out there who could gain some valuable information and inspiration from the blog Jennifer has described.

Finding a perfect-fitting name for your blog can be a stressful process, but it’s an extremely critical part. If you want to set your blog apart from the others, come up with a name that you and your audience get excited about.

Unfortunately for Jennifer, this post isn’t going to give any specific potential names for her potential blog. Instead of using Jennifer’s comment as a specific case study, we’re going to go over a variety of techniques and tools that make the process easier.

The large majority of our readers already have at least one blog set up, but for the “real estate bloggers” looking to expand their collection, hopefully this post will provide you with some tips as well.

1. Make sure the domain name is available

This is arguably the most important tip there is. The name of your blog and its attached domain name are the cornerstones of a well-established brand. The ideal situation is for the blog name and domain name to be the same, and for the dot-com to be available.

Make sure the dot-com is available. While sometimes a .org or .net is a suitable second resort, there’s no need to settle for anything but the dot-com, even if you consider yourself to be an “organization”. Many people will automatically assume your blog is a dot-com, so you don’t want to be sending away potential readers. In fact, you may want to consider a different name if the dot-com is taken.

Instant Domain Search is my favorite site for checking domain availability. It’s nice to have the results instantly, and be able to check the availability of a list of names without starting over.

2. Find a relevant name that stands out

While some blog names seem to be complete rubbish altogether, most names are based off keywords from the blog’s topic. This is extremely useful because visitors should immediately have some suspicion of what the blog is about. Keyword-based names are the way to go, but sometimes difficult to come up with.

One of the useful tools out there is Nameboy. The site comes up with random domains based off the keywords you provide. There are several other sites similar to Nameboy, check them all out before your make a final decision.

If you are looking for a mundane name on the verge of nonsensical, there’s MakeWords.com and the Web 2.0 domain name generator. A few quick clicks at the Web 2.0 generator provides some brandable options: browsenation, brainster, thoughtwire, and topicpulse. A lot of the best names may not be available, but it gives some interesting options.

When choosing a relevant name, don’t just focus on the keywords themselves, but what they connote. Does the name sound professional, crude, humorous? A name that relates to your audience and their bias will help them better connect with the author.

3. Keep it simple, stupid

The name should be easy to remember. Even if you want to append a more descriptive motto or slogan, don’t include it in the “main name”. Two or three words would be the best option. It’s short enough to remember, but still has some description to it.

Speaking of description, a catchy name is important, but don’t be overly creative with your name. By “overly creative,” that means intentionally misspelling word, such as replacing an “s” with a “z” to try being cutesy or creative. The letter “s” is also a problem when placed next to each other in different words.

Don’t be overly scientific about it. Just remember that your visitors may in fact want to come back to your blog later. If that’s the case, make sure the name is easy to remember.

4. Get it right the first time

Hopefully once you get started on your blog, you’ll begin to develop some credibility. Find a name that you can stick with, so you don’t have to restart and lose what you’ve built. Even if you are able to transfer the content over to the new blog, refer your readers to the new site, and write under your same pen name, it’s still going to be a costly mistake if you have to start voer.

Once you start blogging, it’s recorded on a virtual “credit report,” which can be a double-edged sword. If you decide to scrap your old name, a lot of that success will disappear with it. Other web sites and blogs that link to your blog will no longer link to the correct place. Technorati, Alexa, and PageRank are all lost, for whatever it’s worth to you.

It’s worth the hassle

By now, hopefully you understand that selecting the best name available is worth the trouble. It can be an intimidating process, especially if this is your first blog, but take the time do it right. Even if it delays your initial launch for a few days, even possibly weeks, it’s important to start a blog off on the right foot. A poor choice of name can cripple a blog, just like a great choice enhances the blog itself.

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Hopefully you guys have enjoyed the first part of our series on traffic tools. There are a couple more traffic trackers still to be reviewed, so hang on if you’re a blogger still deciding which one to use.

We, the owners of Blogging Addiction, have several other blogs in non-related niches. Each site has its own unique formula for success. This much we can tell you, not all blogs are monetized equally. The Greatest Internet Salesman has a short post about the six best ways for making money with a blog. We can guarantee that at least one type will work you.

Our recent “Have A Mint” review drew a few hundred Stumbles on the day it was published. For those of you see flash floods of traffic from time to time, it’s important to know how to turn your visitors into readers. There really is a difference. Although we haven’t implemented it quite yet, “What Would Seth Godin Do?” is a nifty plugin for prompting new visitors to join your fan club.

Content is the king, but the layout is the kingdom. Blogsessive explores this often-used metaphor and asks, “Is Content Really The King?”

Directories aren’t nearly as valuable as you’d think. With the wide variety of link-building options out there, there are a lot better options. Not only do many directories require a link, but The Blog Entrepreneur points out that many directories are nofollow.

Do you accept negative comments left on your blog? It seems like a no-brainer to me — keep them on there! Even if they are extremely critical of your writing, it seems like your visitors readers deserve their freedom of speech.

That’s that for today. Keep Stumbling, it looks like Blogging Addiction is starting to pick up the pace!

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If the purpose of your blog is to make money, knowing who is reading your blog is one of your most important responsibilities. You can’t make money unless people are reading your blog, and you won’t be able to effectively market your blog to its target audience. Therefore, it’s important to know everything you can about your readers.

In part one of our series, we’ll take a look at Mint, a piece of software designed to tell you everything you want to know about your visitors. Mint is actually designed to provide web site analytics, but is so well designed that it is excellently suited to telling you about your blog as well.

The heart of Mint is the dashboard, which provides information about every aspect of your site. Mint is made up of “Peppers,” or little plugins that portray information in a particular way. Each Pepper appears in its own box on the Dashboard, and the Dashboard can contain as many Peppers as you want to install. Mint by itself won’t actually give you any statistical information, but the default Peppers that it comes with are more than enough to get an inside look at your visitors. If you want an even deeper look, there are many more custom Peppers available on the Mint Peppermill.

First of all, the default Pepper “Visits” is possibly the most important Pepper you’ll have. It gives a breakdown of the total amount of visitors to your site. The five tabs across the top allow you to view a graph of the information over the past day, week, month, or year, and you can always check the Overview tab for the straight numbers all in one place.

The Visits Pepper makes a point to clearly separate your total visitor count from your unique visitor count, too, so you’ll be able to see at a glance exactly how many people are actually checking out your blog at any given time. For example, this past Wednesday, Blogging Addiction had 22 unique visitors, but nearly twice as many visits total (you were one of them, weren’t you?).

The other default Peppers, while not quite as visual, are just as useful. The Pages Pepper will tell you everything you want to know about your site’s individual pages. You can see at a glance an ordered list of your all-time most popular pages (our home page is our most popular page, with 748 hits, while “Why the Blogosphere is Like the Music Industry” is second with 108). You can also see a real-time list of the most recent hits. I can see that 17 minutes ago, for example, someone coming from johncow.com clicked a link to our Weekly Fix #5. You can even get a list of your most popular entry pages.

The other two Peppers focus on telling you where your visitors are coming from, rather than what they’re doing once they’re here. The Referrers Pepper will list every outside website that sends a visitor your way. It also gives you a tab to see which sites are sending you the most traffic. Mint tells me that we get a large chunk of ours from StumbleUpon. This Pepper can be particularly useful for advertising campaigns, telling you which ads are working and which aren’t; then you can focus your efforts on only the useful ads, bringing you more traffic.

The fourth and final default Pepper is Searches, which tells you what keywords people are getting to your site with, and gives you a link to the search page itself. I’ve just discovered that a Google search for “set a blog apart” lists my post on branding as the number one result (that will give any blogger a good feeling). It’ll also tell you where they’re going, so you can see if your keyword-targeted posts are actually bringing in traffic, and then see how much.

Mint is a fantastic package for any blog. So much, in fact, that we use Mint as our primary statistics package for Blogging Addiction. Like anything, though, there are a couple of downsides. First, you must be able to install the software on your own server. If you’re using a hosted solution like WordPress.com or Blogger, you’re out of luck. Also, Mint is relatively expensive, at $30. No matter how good it is, $30 is still $30.

Overall, though, we feel that Mint is easily worth the price. If you are capable of running Mint, you should definitely pay the price to try it out at www.haveamint.com. Between its variety of additional, free Peppers and the fantastic, clear dashboard, Mint is one of the best ways to watch your visitors.

For the next part in our series, we’ll take a look at Google Analytics, Google’s free tool to watch the virtual door of your website.

What do you think? What do you use to keep track of your blog’s readers? Make yourself known in the comments.

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It’s that day of the week again. Today’s links were fairly easy to gather. There are a couple returning “featured” blogs, as well as a couple that we haven’t highlighted before.

Blogging Addiction has sponsored IndoContest’s first ever contest. We’re giving out 1337 entrecrards to Winner #4. There sure have a been a lot of contests going around lately. Although there will only be five winners over at IndoContest, the prizes for each winner are pretty significant.

If you’re looking to hold your own contest in the near future, we’ve got something hot off the press from John Cow. “John” is using his wife’s new blog as a case study to teach his readers how to run a successful contest. With the rampant number of contests out there (see above), you’ll want to learn out to set yours apart.

Who doesn’t need more traffic? Club Blogger has a couple excellent posts: Here are 10 Blog Traffic Tips and The Right Way to Get People Clamoring To Read Your Blog. Normally we only try to link to one post per blog each week, but both posts have some great information. Key point: write more flagship content.

With the 2008 Summer Olympics just around the corner, expect to see some period outbursts of ambush marketing. It’s safe to say that ambush marketing is one of the most humorous ways to do do viral marketing. Nobody sees it coming (if your ambush was stealthy).

Are you a link nazi? Hopefully that phrase doesn’t get us blacklisted, but Blogstorm points out that mainstream media is very strict about linking to externals sites online. There’s an interesting note that “that there is a strong correlation…between the number of times a site links out compared to the number of links it gets back in return.” I wonder if this applies to blogs as well?

That’s all of today’s link love. Just a fair warning: there should be a couple great posts this upcoming week. Do yourself a favor and subscribe to our RSS feed.

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July was our first complete month on the blogosphere.

Traffic: 809 visits

We know you’re out there. To say the least, the site hasn’t had particularly exponential growth — aside from a StumbleUpon wave — but our readers have left a decent number of comments, so we know you are out there.

There was a good deal of StumbleUpon traffic coming at the beginning of the month. About half was from “organic” stumbles, and we also spent about $15.00 on StumbleUpon traffic to see if we could generate a snowball effect. Results were mixed. StumbleUpon upon is our biggest referrer, followed by Entrecard.

We’re not dropping the 300-card limit, that’s for sure. But when I notice an Entrecard box on a related blog, I’m always looking to drop.

RSS readers: currently 11

Well, technically we’re down this month. Feel free to pity us and subscribe. Or just wait until we offer an incentive, whether that be some more frequent content or a download/contest for you.

Revenue: $0.92

We still have all of our 125×125 ads for sale, available for $10. The ads you currently see are from a couple “125×125 exchanges” to fill up the space until we find real suitors. If you are interested in purchasing a spot, leave a comment or drop us an e-mail.

Scratchback has been a complete loss so far. Then again, selling one link would make it our #1 source of revenue, so we’ll hang on to it for now.

We had a single moderately high AdSense click, resulting in our total $0.92 for the month. That’s correct; we’ve got one click to show for the month. Because the ads are only shown on the bottom of internal posts, we aren’t drawing particularly impressive numbers. Maybe we should cut the “making money online” topic out of our blog.

Heading into August

Of course, there’s a lot of room to improve in all aspects of the site. We’re actively looking for ways to do this, and there are a wide variety of ways to get involved. Ask us to sponsor your blog contest, send us (or ask for) a guest post, purchase an advertisement on the blog, sign up to the RSS feed, or just keep coming back!

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As promised a few days ago, it’s time for our review of RevResponse. Now is as good of a time as any, as RevResponse is offering a $50 bonus for mentioning their program. Take note that this offer is only good through July 31, 2008.

I’m not reviewing RevResponse as a provider of free content. This review is meant for bloggers looking to monetize their site in a unique way. That’s one of my favorite parts about RevResponse so far; you aren’t spamming your readers with ads or trying to sell a project. You get paid simply for giving recommendations about useful content.

One of the most interesting parts of RevReponse is their Ad Wizard. This feature generates code to promote products in a wide variety of ways: basic text links, widgets and banners, and even paragraphs written for blog posts. We tried it out for the “Internet” niche, and here’s the paragraph it came up with.

“Download Hundreds of Complimentary Industry Resources

Get hundreds of popular Industry magazines, white papers, webinars, podcasts, and more; all available at no cost to you. With more than 600 complimentary offers, you\’ll find plenty of titles to suit your professional interests and needs. Click Here and Sign up today!”

Not necessarily anything remarkable, but it brings up another possibility. Using the Ad Wizard, I’m sure it would be more than possible to create an entire website promoting these free products. Internet marketers may immediately recognize the scheme. To innocent visitors looking for some more information about finance or health care, though, the site would certainly be appealing.

There’s a $1.50 minimum payout for each download or subscription secured through RevResponse. However, few companies seem to be paying out the bare minimum. There’s a reasonable $50 minimum payout, and payments are sent monthly through Paypal or a check.

One drawback I see is that RevReponse has a moderate delay on payments through check. Though they pay monthly, payments are sent for money earned 45 days ago. Blogging Addiction hasn’t reached the payout threshould yet, so I don’t know if there’s a waiting period for earnings sent through Paypal.

RevResponse allows it affiliates to give away a variety of free content related to their audience. They’ve an extremely wide variety of topics, with many offers in the Internet marketing niche such as a free subscription to Website Magazine or a free copy of the 12 SEO Campaign Killers guide.

I haven’t played around with RevResponse as much as I’d like, but there are a couple things I think I’ll really like, in addition to the fact that it’s not as spammy as other methods of monetization. The most powerful thing about this program is that the content is completely free. It’s easy to find people willing to accept free, quality content. Does it get any better than getting paid to give away free stuff? I assume businesses offer these free giveaways in order to draw attention to their other commercial products.

Another benefit with RevResponse is the minimal work required to start earning money. A well-indexed page receiving a moderate amount of search engine traffic could earn commissions several months after the initial post was made.

RevResponse also offers an impressive affiliate program. Referrers are paid a commission equal to 20% of the new members’ earnings for the first six months. With that in mind, if you decide to join RevResponse, we’d love to have you join through one of the links in this post.

If you’ve also tried out RevResponse, let us know how you feel about there program, and make sure you cash in on their $50 promotion offer that ends tomorrow.

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