I just want to let you know that I´m currently working on my blog template. I felt that the current design isn´t the best and I must admit, I never really liked it. You can see my current progress on a testblog I created just for my work. I´ve done this because I can test out new features without changing my original layout, so I have kind of a backup if something goes wrong. I hope I´ll finish those changes within the next days and I´m sure you´ll see when the new blog design is online.

Regards,
Querblogger

If you want to become successful with your blog, you need people that do actually read all your posts (and sometimes you weird thoughts . In other words, you need to drive traffic to your blog, not only because that you want readers for it, but also because you can monetize your content better. Traffic is like the holy grail, especially if you want to make money online. Most adverts that show up on your blog rely on either page impressions or click through rates, the more visitors you have, the better those adverts perform and bring you money.

Because this blog is still very young, I don´t have the best traffic rates yet (I usually get around 30 to 40 unique visitors each day). Most of my visitors come from the free traffic exchange called Linkreferral, directly followed by Google Search and some backlinks from comments I posted on other blogs. Although I´m very happy with the actual traffic rates, I think there´s room for more. Therefore I searched for some new ways for giving my blog some more exposure in the online world.

Yesterday I found a nice free blog directory called BlogCatalog, which will hopefully help me in attracting some new readers. The basic principle of such a blog directory is simple, you submit your blog URL into a category that fits best with your content. You´ll get a backlink from the directory that points to your blog and therefore leads some visitors to it. The good thing about BlogCatalog is that there´s an active community behind it, meaning that everybody who´s a member there can rate your blog for example. If you have a good rating, you´ll be listed in a higher (and more “attractive”) ranking in your choosen category. You can also make friends there and join so called “neighborhoods” (groups of blogs that have related content).

I´ve joined BlogCatalog yesterday and I´ve just received some new visitors (not too many, but I hope it´ll grow). I´ve also implemented a badge in my blog that shows the recent viewers from Blogcatalog, you´ll find it at the bottom of the right sidebar. You can also rate my blog there (only high ratings allowed

This won´t be the last thing I´ll do for increasing my traffic rates, so stay tuned for more informations within my next posts.

Bye,
Querblogger

In my last post I mentioned that I mailed Google for giving me answers about why my Adsense account got deactivated. Today I received a response. And I must say, I´m not really happy with it. The answer was short and a bit “meaningless”, they said “…my account involves a risk to our Adwords customers…”. That´s all?! They didn´t gave me a single reason for the ban from their Adsense program.

I won´t go any deeper into the details here, I just want to point out that I´ll stay independent from Google Adsense anyway, because there are plenty of other blog monetizing services out there. But feel free to give me some comments, especially if you got banned too. I really would like to know if there were other people having the same “problems” with Google Adsense.

See you later!
Querblogger

Over one week ago I got banned from Google Adsense without knowing the real reasons for this. I assumed it was because of using the traffic exchange Linkreferral, but til today I´m not sure if this was really the cause for that ban. I´ve sent Google an email asking them what where the reasons for banning me, but til today I haven´t received a response (it´s no problem so far because for the moment I have other ways for monetizing my blog).

Yesterday I cleared my letter-box and found a really big envelope with 6 colored letters on it. It was from Google! So far I never got a mail from Google, so it kept me wondering what it would be. I opened the letter and found a coupon with following phrase on it: “Here is more traffic inside!”.

They actually sent me an Google Adwords coupon worth 50€ (around $73)! I immediately remembered the phrase “Here is more traffic inside!” and thought about the reasons for banning my Adsense account. Hehe, it seems I now know the real reasons for my banned account

For me it seems Google doesn´t like traffic exchanges, so they sent me this Adwords coupon for starting my own advertising campaign to drive traffic to my blog (in a “legal” way). Sure, it must be sheer coincidence, but it´s also kind of a strange thing what happened this weekend. All in all I now have around $73 that I can use for advertising my blog and I´m bery happy about it (Thank you Google team!). I only have to find the right keywords for promoting my blog, let´s see what will happen.

Bye bye!
Querblogger

As mentioned in the article about legal safety, I´ve just added my Terms Of Service and the Disclosure Policy. My contact informations (some info about me) will follow. You can find the links on the top right side of my blog (just under my full Feedburner feed)!

Regards,
Querblogger