We've recently launched Sustained Magazine, and have been using Google Sitemaps and Analytics to figure out ways to boost the traffic.

It's worked really well. We even have people as far away as Lamarsh visiting the site (see below). By my calculation, I'd say every resident of Lamarsh visited three times. Click image below for a clearer version which will open in a new window.

I have recently working with some new tools to work with Google's services, which ultimately should bring more traffic to my site and also earn me loads of money. Ideally, both simultaneously.

First, Google Adsense. I mentioned that I sussed it last week, for the most part, but also that I live in fear that ads that compete with my own site would appear on my site. For example, when I talk in a blog posting (like what you're reading now) or when I talk of web hosting or web design and build, will competitors' ads appear? Look around this page. You might see ads about free blogs, free web hosting or free web design and build. Great. I'm sure it's excellent value, but you know I'm better than all of them. I simply am not stupid enough nor rich enough to buy my own Adwords.

So, how much have I lost in this process? It's hard to tell specifically, but maybe not too hard. So far, one person out of the 120-180 visitors that appear each day over the past week has clicked on a Google ad. I really hope it wasn't for hosting or blogging or something like that, and that the person didn't subsequently find that they could get for free the services that I normally charge several tens of thousand of your earth pounds for.

The benefit that I've gained by the one click by the way, is about 47p or so. Don't tell the taxman.

Secondly, Google Sitemaps. Google has this great new way of getting you to supply them with pointers about what you'd like them to index on your site with some indication from you about how often the content changes. It's one of those win-win situations where the effort you make to help Google's bots to crawl your site, should help ensure you get listed in their pages appropriately. From Google:  read more »