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And it's not just something that will work in blogs
I was reading an interesting post about increasing sales on a mainstream blog today and it got me thinking that the idea this guy put forward just might work on an adult blog too.

His mainstream blog was confined to a very narrow niche and dealt with photographic lighting. Obviously he's used advertising on his blog before but it's been just the usual Adsense ads and probably a few banners and sales were about average. But since he introduced this idea his sales have been growing every month.

So what is his secret? He spent a little time looking at his Amazon sales and then set aside a small portion of his side bar for ‘Most Popular Books'. There he listed the most popular books that people had bought via his site. Every month he changes the listings and now his sales continue to grow.

Another blogger I know uses a very similar idea but instead of taking the list from his sales data he takes the list direct from Amazon and displays a list of what they say are the most popular books.

So if it works in mainstream why wouldn't it work here in adult? Of course we aren't going to be able to use Amazon on an adult site but there are a huge number of alternatives we could use. In fact just about every sponsor out there could be used in a similar way.

We don't necessarily have to call it something like “Most Popular” and if you're blog has a real personal slant to it using the term ‘Most Popular' might not work at all. Instead, something like ‘My Favorites' would have the potential to work much more effectively because it's more personal.

I suppose it might be effective if you simply displayed a thumbnail or two under the heading but it would be even more effective if you could add a few words to say why the site impressed you. There is nothing like a personal recommendation to encourage people to buy a product.

It might even be possible to take this to another level - especially if the site you want to recommend is the same site for quite some time. Instead of telling people why the site looked good to you talk about the most recent update and tell them what's special, unique or appealing about that particular update.

If you're pushing a movie site think about including a very short review of one of their movies along with a thumbnail. I think I would be looking at as little as 50 words to get the message across.

Use SSI
Of course this idea isn't just for blogs. If you have a traffic pump or two that sees regular traffic there is no reason why you can't incorporate this idea on those link lists, hubs or TGPs that you run as well. But don't think that this is something that is going to take a lot of time.

You could write one brief review, find a suitable thumbnail and have the code, saved as a text file, up on your site in as little as 15 minutes. Then, if you're into the idea of working smarter rather than harder, you could use SSI to have that 15 minutes worth of work appear across all your sites with no extra work.

When you want to change it next week, in a fortnight's time or in a month's time all you have to do is edit the text file with the new information and there's your update instantly added to all the sites.

Hmmm ... now to find time to add that to some of our sites.

Feed Buttons
While we're talking about blogs ... and by extension ... RSS feeds; are you including the subscription buttons that the various readers such as Google, Bloglines, My MSN etc. provide?

If you aren't displaying those buttons on your blog then you're potentially missing out on a lot of return traffic. Of course there is the single RSS button that supposedly helps subscribers no matter what reader they are using but ... well ... people are dumb and may not know how to use that single button. By adding the individual buttons you are making things much clearer and easier for people who want to subscribe to you blog.

And at least one very serious and very widely read mainstream blogger will tell you that the Yahoo sends the most traffic to his blog so be sure to include the My Yahoo button on your blog.

And now, seeing that it's Friday, I hope you all have a great weekend and I'll be back on Monday.