Just wanted to pass this along, in case you haven’t seen it already but Rapidminer has released the Web Mining extension for version 5.0. All you need to do to install it is to go to the pull down menu HELP > Update Rapidminer. It should find all the new extensions and let you select them.
March was my biggest month for web traffic ever! This probably has nothing to do with my sense of wit or writing style, but rather due to my Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorials and a faster template. The change in my blog template to a simplified version helped immensely with the load and response time. I noticed an immediate bump in keeping first time visitors on my site the very next day!
March was my worst month for web income because I cut out all advertisements on this blog (for now). With the exception of text link ads, which netted me about $36 for the last month, I had no other income.
On an interesting side note, I was able to max out my free Dropbox space from 2GB to almost 10 GB through the generosity of my readers. All they did was signup for their own Dropbox account using my referral link and I ended getting nearly 8GB's of additional space. Now I can move my large data around with ease.Thanks!
For the month of March 2010 I had the following blog statistics:
I have a feeling that these numbers will drop after I post my last Rapidminer video and go on break.
I decided to tweak out this blog's web income in January and posted my first income report this year as a starting metric. Below is February's income report, which is showing a pattern of growth, mostly due to my new Rapidminer 5.0 Video Tutorials. All i'm doing now is collecting data to feed into a Rapidminer model later and using typical white hat SEO tricks right now.
Google Adsense: $19.88 ( +78%)
Text Link Ads: $36.62 (+24.5%)
Adify: $0.00 (discontinued)
Affiliates: $0.00
Total: $56.50
This blog had 2,949 visits, 7,418 page views, avg 2.52 pages/view, and an avg time on site of 3:31 minutes.
One of the video tutorials I'm working on is how to build and use a direct mail marketing model using a Decision Tree learner. Rapidminer can be used for small, medium, and larger marketers as a data discovery tool that helps them understand the buying habits of their customers, and where to target their efforts. A Decision Tree model helps segment your market and identify the "sweet spot" in your customer base.
Check back over the next two weeks for this video tutorial. I'll show you how to mine your data and start being a more effective marketer in under 10 minutes.
In January of this year, I decided to ramp up my posting frequency again for Neural Market Trends. Part of the reason is to data mine blog traffic data for the express purpose of learning more about SEO and Internet Marketing. I started this doing this after I had a few beers with the Market Doctor and we discussed the long tail statistics of Internet Marketing and how some blogs just make money hand over fist.
So I'm going to do a little experiment and see if I can use neural nets to maximize SEO and Internet Marketing. January 2010 will serve as my starting metric, let's see if I can break $1000 a month by December 2010.
Channel Report:
The blog had 2,772 visits and 6,744 page views in January. Average time on site was 4:29 minutes.
I started fooling around more with Rapidminer’s web mining abilities and managed to crawl my site and some other popular trading blogs. I’m still a long way from fully integrating this plugin into my data mining activities, but its been fun nonetheless.
Playing with this software renewed my interest in understanding web connections, so I visited a neat web applet I found a few years ago while surfing. This applet lets you see the web connections for a URL and can be found on the “websites as a graph” website. I typed in TraderMike’s web address and from the results, it looks like he’s pretty well connected! Note: The black dot is his root URL.
As an effort to help search engines index my site better, I installed a robots.txt file. The reason why I did this will become clear in a minute. When you run a blog, search engines will parse your site and index it with a lot of duplicate data and posts. Duplicate data and posts can have a negative effect whereas the spider might think that your blog is a spam blog (splog). In the long run this can cause lower rankings.
Why the spiders think that way is pretty logically, at least how I think they work! If you write a blog post, and its current, it will be on your main index page (1 copy). At least two more copies will reside in your category and archive sections. Essentially you’ll have three copies of the same post if the spider parses your site that day!
As soon as your post drops off the front page it will end up in your category and archive sections; you’ll still have two copies of the same post! The best solution is to tell the spider NOT to index one of those sections! It’s that simple!
I found a version of an optimized WordPress robots.txt file and discussion here. I then modified it to my needs and installed it in the root directory. So far it seems to be working but only time will tell how effective it will be. From what I’ve read, using a robots.txt file is a long running experiment and you have to tweak it over time to maximize its effectiveness.
Ever since I analyzed my blog’s traffic using data mining and neural nets and began implementing a lot of the SEO tips and tricks I’ve read, I started to see a steady rise in my Alexa Rankings. I was tickled pink to see that my weekly average broke through their 100,000 barrier this weekend! I suspect this is because of the niche nature of my blog and my tutorials on building an AI financial model.
Thanks to all my readers and those your have subscribed to my feed! If you haven’t subscribed to my feed, now is a great time!
I posted about the power of Data Mining when analyzing your blog’s traffic and how to maximize your Google Adword advertising relative to your Adsense earnings, but I forgot to mention one critical thing! Search Engine Optimization (SEO)!
SEO is just a process to organize your blog, or website, in such a way that you’ll end up at the top when ever an Internet user searches for something that is relative to your site. If you advertise your blog using a Pay Per Click method, like Google Adwords, then being ranked at the top of searches is really important as Ms. Danielle points out!
It won’t come as a shock to readers of this blog that Data Mining can really help with your SEO! Techniques like associative analysis and cluster data mining are great ways to discover who’s clicking what on your site. Associative analysis is used to estimate the probability of whether a person will purchase a product given that they own a particular product or group of products.
Cluster data mining, on the other hand, can identify the profile or group of customers that are associated with a particular type of Web site [via Data Mining and Business Productivity, by Stephan Kudyba]. These two techniques are critical if you want to maximize any e-business!
Now here’s the caveat, before you can start data mining your site, you spend a few months gathering website statistics and data. However, this doesn’t preclude your ability to start optimizing your website for better web searching. Here are a 5 tips that I’ve been using that have had a great traffic impact in my blog’s short life.
5 SEO Tips:
Hat tip to Ms. Danielle for the photo!
[tags]Blogging, Tips, Howto, SEO, PPC, Adwords, Adsense[/tags]
If you’ve read my Build Your Blog Traffic Using Excel & Data Mining post, then you should be able to figure out what your busiest day is, what your most popular category is, and your optimal posts per day by now. If you haven’t read it, I highly suggest that you do because what you learn here today builds on that information.
In this post I want to talk about how to maximize your Adsense earnings and at the same time minimize your marketing costs in the event you use Adwords or a similar web advertising vehicle using Data Mining. Data mining let’s you find that perfect relationship between your marketing dollars spent and your revenues collected.
Finding out this relationship is as simple as adding two more columns to your spreadsheet from our previous post, just create a Marketing and Revenue column and paste in your marketing costs and your Adsense earnings. Re-run the model when your done and view the results!
To highlight this simple but powerful data modeling, I did a quick analysis of this blog’s current Adword marketing costs and Adsense earnings and found out that certain type of posts yield more Adsense earnings. Interestingly enough, the second category example would benefit from more marketing dollars spent.
Our first example is a category 5 post, which are posts related to Quantitative topics such as Data Mining, Yale, and Excel. From the chart on the left, I should spend no more than $2 a day to max out my Adsense earnings.
Conversely, for any topics related to Mutual Funds (category 8), I could spend anywhere in excess of $3.50 per day to maximize my Adsense earnings!
From these two examples I can fine tune my marketing costs, build a stronger reader base, and make some money to boot! As always, if you have any questions on how to do this, please feel free to leave me a comment.
[tags]Adsense, Earnings, Monetize, Blogging, Adwords, Costs, Revenues, Marketing, Advertisement, DataMining[/tags]
This past Saturday, I posted about using data mining to look for patterns in your blog traffic. I wrote that you can use something called an Excel Pivot Chart report to get a better feel for how your readers are interacting with your site. What I should’ve written was that you can use an Excel Pivot Table report, the chart is optional. So why should you build an Excel Pivot Table?
Building a report is a great way to see trends in your readership and its easy to do. Once you see things happening on your site you can start asking questions like, “what type of content drives the most traffic and on what days?” The Excel Pivot Table report won’t be able to answer that question but it can answer the question, “what’s my busiest day“, or “what’s my optimal post per day quantity“, and “what’s my most popular category.”
Interested? Here’s how you do it in 5 easy steps.
Step 1 – Gather Data
If you use Google Adwords, or another site statisitc monitor, download your visitor data. You can choose what ever time frame you like, a good rule of thumb is about 2 months worth of data. You’ll need to get the number of hits and the date of the hits. Next, add this information to an Excel spreadsheet and add the following columns: Weekday, Number of Posts, and Category.
Step 2 – Transform the Data
Go back between the dates of your data download and fill in the columns for Weekday, make sure to match the date with the right weekday. Next, fill in the Number of Posts column with, you guessed it, the number of posts you did that day.
Step 3 – Create a Category
When you get to the step of data mining your traffic, you’ll want to know what content drives your traffic and on what days. Adding a key of categories will help you accomplish that. I entered the number “1″ if the post that day was about Forex, “2″ if it was for stocks, etc. You get the point. If you posted more than one post on any given day and it was about more than one topic, you can add a second or third category column. You get as detailed as you want, its really up to you.
Step 4 – Build the Excel Pivot Table
Once you have all your information, you can build the table. Go to Data > Pivot Table and follow the instructions. You can place the table in your existing worksheet or a new one (I usually go for a new worksheet). Select your data range to include the Weekday, # of Visitors, Posts Per Day, and Category.
Once you did that you’ll see your new worksheet with a little floating menu system. You can drag and drop the fields into your new table. Drag the # of Visitors into the Drop Data Items area, drag the Weekday field into the Drop Column Fields area, drag Posts per Day to the Drop Row Fields area, and lastly drag the Category field to the Drop Page Fields area.
Step 5 – Format the Table
Use Excel’s auto format function in the Pivot Table wizard to select the style of table you’d like to see. When your all done, your spreadsheet should look something like this Blog Data example.
The first step before Data Mining your blog traffic is done! You can easily see what your busiest day of the week is, what’s a good # of posts per day (this is great from an efficiency standpoint), and what’s your most popular category. Just doing this simple Excel exercise can help you identify the ways to build more traffic to your website, which could yield financial benefits if you’re using Adsense or some other monetizing method.
As always, if you have a question please leave me a comment.
[tags]Adsense, Google, Adwords, Datamining, Trends, NeuralNets, Marketing, Excel, PivotTable[/tags]
Yes, you read correctly. You can data mine your blog’s traffic using a simple web statistics data collector like Google Adwords. I’m doing it right now for Neural Market Trends and I’m finding out some very interesting information.
I found out that:
A lot of the above information I gleaned from a Google Adwords data dump that I put into an Excel Pivot Chart report. There’s no neural net magic behind that and you could do this quite easily yourself. Its when I built a neural net and mined the data that I discovered some unique relationships. These relationships should help me tweak my content to better serve my readers.
One of the things I learned from this little exercise is that I have a selective group of readers on Saturdays. Welcome! :)
[tags]BlogTraffic, Analaysis, SEO, Google, Adwords, Adsense, Howto, NeuralNets, AI, Datamining, Revenue, Maximization[/tags]
