Having been the CEO and founder of Weblogs, Inc. which produced blogs like Engadget, Autoblog, and Joystiq I can tell you that it's going to be a very hard to make money in 2009 with a blog.

First, you are in an absurdly competitive space--consumer electronics--at a time when consumers are not spending and as a result advertisers are pulling back.

The number one way for you to make money is control costs. You have to be a super light-weight organization with not office, no overhead and a flexable pay per piece work force to make the model work. 80% of every dollar you spend has to go into the product and 20% or less to admin.

In terms of driving traffic the most important thing is to consistently publishing great original content for as long as possible. The longer a domain is around and the more you publish the more traffic you will get. You're up against five year old blogs at this point--you won't beat them in search ranking often.

There are only three ways to really get traffic:

a) direct
b) referrer
c) search

To get search you have to get a tight niche. You're not niche at all right now, which means you are going up against much better blogs with huge audience--there is no reason to switch.

You need to carve your own niche... maybe it's mobile phones, tablets, or speakers. Own a niche and build out and you'll get a dedicated audience, build unique high-value content and some search traffic.

Also, your content is not deep. There isn't much value there. You have sites like Obsessable now that have really deep content (made by my old team at Weblogs, Inc no less!).

Blogging is not longer a "show up and it will work business." If you really want to compete in the gadget blog space you need three years, 10 people and a million bucks. Really. Even then its a dog fight.

Pick something more unique and underserviced. Something emerging that you think might get big.

The site doesn't look professional yet. You should work on the design more, create a better logo, create an identity for your site. What do you have that other sites don't have? Emphasize this. Categorize your content better. From there, you have the basics: create a digg account and digg those articles, if you have a personal blog advertise-it there, if you have a twitter account tweet about your articles. Put google ads at first, but try getting in touch with other people in the same field later on and work a better deal with them by putting their ads on your site. The most important thing is to connect a lot, post comments on others' sites and blogs while specifying your site's address and befriend those that deal with gadgetry.

Great question. It's not so much about an optimum number of posts per day, but the value of what you post.

If news posts and/or blog posts on your site give your readers value, they will share them using social media, driving extra traffic to your site.

It would be much better to publish two exceptional posts every day than 10 average or good posts per day.

If you have the resources to publish 10 exceptional posts every day, then that's even better.

Make sure your posts are optimised for social media. There should be a 'Share This' button at the bottom of each article for people to submit to StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Buzz, etc. People are much more likely to share your posts using social media if you encourage them to do so.

Of course your posts should be Search Engine Optimised (SEO'd) too. You do this in two ways. Firstly, you should decide on the keyword or phrase for each post. This word or phrase should account for 3-5% of the words in a post. For example, for a 200 word post on the Macworld keynote video, you would use the phrase 'Macworld keynote video' 6 times. Secondly, search engines love articles with links from other websites. The best way to get other sites to link to your posts is by providing value (see above) so that people choose to link to your articles because they love them. Also, you could link to other gadget bloggers in your posts - they're likely to return the favour when they like what you write.

You should also do you utmost to be cited as a source in Google News - this will give a huge boost to your traffic.

To recommend your site for Google News, visit: http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/request.py

For advice on becoming a Google News source, see:
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003934.html

For more on adding value to news posts, read:
http://www.skelliewag.org/how-to-value-add-everything-even-the-little-stuff-191.htm

Other good articles on value are:
http://www.skelliewag.org/why-value-rules-the-attention-economy-178.htm
http://www.skelliewag.org/how-to-avoid-fools-gold-and-create-value-packed-content-182.htm

Good luck driving extra traffic to your website!

As Jason says, you currently have virtually zero chance of making money with this blog as it stands. You need to answer several related questions that apply to pretty much any business.

1) What is your target market? One aspect of this is what people sometimes think of as the niche, i.e. what your site will be about. But equally, and more importantly, who exactly are the customers you are going after? And what needs or interests of theirs are you serving? Customers in this case is likely to mean both readers and advertisers.

2) How are you different from anyone else that is serving that market? Why would anyone choose to read you or buy from you over all the other companies doing similar things?

3) Whatever it is that will make you different and special - what is the source of it? Do you have a real capability that others don't, which will give you that edge, or is it just wishful thinking? It pays to look at this in reverse as well. What capabilities or knowledge do you have that others don't? What markets would value that special capability?

A quick look at your site suggests that there are only two ways that it's at all different from the oodles of gadget sites. First is that you are trying to do a light-hearted take on tech news. Second is that you seem to have a few things to help people that are moving over from PC to Mac. You might (but only might!) be able to make a viable site around one of those two things.

Whether it is actually viable depends on how big a demand there is for those things, how much competition there is, and whether you can actually deliver. e.g. Have you actually got hilarious writers? Do you really know about the trials and tribulations involved in switching to a Mac?

The best course may well be to cut your losses now, and go look for other business ideas.

Jason's answer was excellent on the "build traffic" side of your question. I would also agree that there are some negative elements in your site design that are likely driving away potential readers before they have a chance to get engaged with your content:

- Your font size is quite small (text at 10 point in my browser). Anything you want people to read should be 12 point or larger (notice Mahalo's text size).
- You have some HTML errors with images bleeding outside of your posts - this looks sloppy and will make people think your site is not "professional".
- Grab people's attention with an image in the banner that is TARGETED at the vertical segment you're covering. Once you've narrowed your market down, be sure people know they're "at the right place" with a very specific banner image.
- You have some low-contrast colors if your folder labels (light gray on light tan). These are not only difficult to read, but practically disappear when people are scanning your site.

As to revenue, you will make the most money if the people who arrive at your site are in a "buying" mood. If you build traffic for people looking for product reviews, for example. But be prepared for very low advertising rates. It is not uncommon to earn (sorry - US dollars here - from my experience) under $1 per thousand page views.

So, even if you begin reaching 1 million monthly visitors, and they visit an average of 2 pages per visit, you'll be making about $2,000 per month. Hence Jason's advice to keep your costs down if you want to be profitable! A site this size is more of a hobby than a stand-alone business (unless you have multiple of them).

The best way to make money is to sell ads or sponsorships directly. If you have a relationship with a product vendor, they may have enough faith in you to sponsor your site for a flat rate per month. When you are small, this will likely generate much more income than selling ads on a CPM or CPC basis.

Google AdSense is a very easy program to start using right away (you can get it on your site in under an hour). I'd recommend you do that immediately, so you can start getting real data on the revenue potential of your content.

By the way, I also don't see Google Analytics on your site - if you're not tracking your current users and understanding their behavior, you'll not be able to know if your future site changes are improvements or are hurting your site's performance. I would recommend adding (the FREE) Google Analytics tracking to your site immediately as well.

Checklist:

- Add Google Analytics to understand your traffic and user behavior.
- Add Google AdSense to get some data on revenue potential (effective CPM) for your content.
- Decide on a narrowed content niche ... and write great/original content(!)
- Fix your site design issues.
- Testing - sit a friend down in front of your site (who's not seen it before), and just watch them use it while they talk out load about what they're thinking. This will help you find more design problems.
- Encourage readers to opt-in to an email (as well as RSS) newsletter - a powerful way for people to "not forget" about your site.
- Publicize your site via your social networks, twitter, (appropriate) blog comments, email mailing lists.
- Work on building relationships to get site sponsors (local retailers, e.g.).

I would go so far as to say it's not necessarily all about the content. Content is the glue that makes traffic stick, and visit again, but new media marketing is necessary to actually drive the traffic to you.

In that analogy, the very top of your site is currently a bit like rubber. At least everything above the fold has to look professional to some extent, even though clearly the text below is well developed. A graphic banner at the top rather than pure text would help that a lot.

For Google hits, you need to get your site linked to from as many other sites as possible. This will increase its PageRank, which puts it further up in every single Google search it applies to. Good content and traffic will hopefully give you some links (the blogosphere is an echo chamber, after all), but you can make your own links by writing at other sites (I write at Mahalo and BlogCritics).

Anyway, yes the content is important, but if you want to write a blog, that's probably the easy part. I find the marketing aspect a bit less natural.

Hello!

I think you do it right so far. You count on content creation. There is nothing more powerful, than content creation. And the best way to drive traffic is to create more and more and more. But be aware, no one wants to read already discussed topics. Try to find new things to write about. You can check for new gadgets for example and trying to give the best review on them , before anyone else. There are plenty of RSS feeds and news that you can use.

I see the large button for RSS in your index. This is good , keep it there. When you have some innovative and interesting articles , the people will like to stay in touch with this great source (your site) and will subscribe.

Another way to make your site more popular is SEO of course. But not just directory submissions. First of all make sure your site is XHTML/CSS valid. Have the right titles, meta tags (not same for all pages) and friendly URLs.

www.domain.com/index.php?id=images&post=Y - this is not friendly URL
www.domain.com/Site_Name/Article_Name - this IS SEO friendly URL.

You can try make different prizes and gifts. Dont know how you can do this, but maybe you know ;)

And again , count on the cutting edge content. Be the first. Dont just follow the others articles.

Wish you best of luck!

First and foremost you have done some pretty cool things with your site mygadgetlife.co.uk congratulations. But as web deseloper,that's a compound word for a web designer c*m developer let me point out a few flaws that if corrected will help improve your site's rankings, visibility,traffic and conversion rate.

You need to make your site a web 2.0 website, "describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web". Here is a brief outlay of how you can do this thoroughly.

First of all lets start with the code side of your website. While checking out your code I noticed that the Meta Tags were incomplete in the sense that the metatags at the head section of your code lacked very crucial yet over looked meta tags that look like this.

These tags are still important to some search engines and what they do is to basically instruct the crawling robots or webbots like the googlebot ,yahoo-slurp or msnbot the frequency with which they should crawl and index the pages of your website. A very important factor in acquiring higher visibility in search results obtainable from search engines.
Additionally you need to have a robots.txt file,a robots.txt is a very simple text file that is placed on your root directory its purpose is to tell the search engine and other robots which areas of your site they are allowed to visit and index. So you need to confirm with your web designer whether he has placed such a file in your root folder.it looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow:
This one tells all robots (user agents) to go anywhere they want (disallow nothing) they are many other variations that you can see from the link robots txt dot org.

I did not see a sitemap of your website now a sitemap is important because it s an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling.

In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

All the above fall under Search Engine Optimization SEO and they act in tandem to make your site visible on the internet and thus potentially increasing your sites ranking on search engines.

Now away from the code and onto the layout and Web 2.0 functionality of mygadgetlife dot co dot uk. Make your website an active buzzing community this you can achieve by simply doing the following.

Use rich keyword anchor words in your articles that link to websites that have a relatively higher page rank on Alexa search i.e you should have many outward bound links to higher ranked websites to improve your ranking and drive traffic to your site as a consequence of which you will earn more ad revenue,this can be referred to as link building.

Get a web analytics tool like get clicky dot com which has a free version that has some limited capabilities but which you can upgrade by paying $5 per month or alternatively you can use the free Google analytics. The beauty of web analytics is that you get very precise and actionable data.This software will let you get accurate statistics of the number of visitors,their sources,cities,locales,IP Addresses,most visited pages e.t.c you can choose to use this information to accurately target your niche and thus drive more traffic to your website.

You should also make use of the services of Social bookmarking sites like delicious,digg,reddit,twitter to make it easier for the people following your blog be able to get updates on whichever device they have especially the hand held/mobile devices. On that same note make your site as interactive as possible by introducing polls,forums,guestbooks,embedding video's e,g YouTube,interactive slideshows and blogs to your site to increase user participation and thus retention.

After doing the basic steps outlined above monitor your ranking with Alexa and you should see a gradual improvement in traffic and rankings which equals higher ad revenue. And to answer your last question there is no optimum number of stories posted per day,the important thing is the consistency i,e if you decide its going to be ten ,then ten it must be to create predictability with your readers.

I have listed some additional sources for you, a good one being john chow dot com and an example of blog that has implemented Web 2.0 .But if you need more technical indepth details and sources for fixing/SEO/SEM optimizing your website don't hesitate to ask a direct question,I hope this overview was helpful,Good luck to MyGadgetLife Dot Com.

You should utilize http://www.hypick.com and participate within the topics. Done right, you could generate good visitors using affiliation programs. Plus the topics are really fun to read and participate in.