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Blog Development: Content, Metrics, and Quality Traffic

Oct 9th, 2009
by blogmyblog.
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Are you considering having a blog to complement your existing website? Do you need help to get started with the whole blogging thing? If so, then this paper outlines the basic idea in section 1; the steps to implementing the program in section 2; and Notes, Disclaimers and Payment Details in section 3.

1. A BLOG: A natural traffic magnet

I think the best way to attract traffic to your website would be to use a blog as a blog has a natural advantage over a static site. In fact, a blog can attract traffic with quality posting as long as you have something to say of interest to people. Additionally, having a blog allows you to build traffic through RSS Feeds, comments, trackbacks and a whole host of online aggregators and web 2.0 media.

This would be the fastest approach to gaining traffic, though when I say fast it would be some months to build up a following. The blog would need an identifiable persona that can play off the notion of credit cards and build some fun into the whole process of searching, applying for and using credit cards. It is also a way to bring people BACK to the website… otherwise you may see traffic apply for cards and NEVER come back because they can’t find or don’t remember the website.

2. Steps to Implementation

  1. First, Setting Up A Blog. I’d establish a blog (WordPress 2.3.2) with a bunch of themes, and a selection of plugins in a subdirectory of your main website. I’d set up a blog as integral part of your site, linked from an obvious place in the top of the bar and in a very similar ‘theme’ to the website. The blog of course would have links to the rest of the site as well.
  2. Second, Metrics. I’d establish some metrics as a base from which to start. The metrics would help establish tracking and even help target customers to the offers in the other part of the site.
  3. Third, Regular Posting. I’d start a regular posting schedule (You can buy content from any number of places or I can provide it). With some initial content, say 20 posts that are quality and not too long, I’d begin the next step.
  4. Fourth, Publicity. I’d have the blog join all sorts of Web2.0 communities to gain friends/traffic, such as Technorati, and several other blog services. This would certainly help but it would require some weeks or even months of work. There are a number of other tips and tricks that can help to establish a blog that can drive traffic to your website.
  5. Fifth, Capitalize on the Traffic. This is where your efforts on the website would pay off by capitalizing on the resultant traffic.

3. Developing your Property

I’d be happy to advise and help with each of the stages of the plan, but I can’t promise we will succeed. I do believe, having seen quite a few of these credit card sites, that developing an active and relevant blog will help to set apart your credit card application site, create traffic, and (I hope) conversions. I think we could measure success initially by measuring Alexa, RealRank, PageRank (that would be a challenge), and Technorati rankings.

Disclaimers and Strengths

I should let you know though that I’m not an expert in many areas. I know very little about SEO, though I’d be a willing learner; I don’t know much about American credit card for consumers, simply because I don’t have access to that information yet, though I will learn that knowledge; and I’m not really a programmer/coder. I can help point you in the right direction for plugins, themes, CSS, etc. but these are NOT my specialities. My expertise comes in the writing part and the management part of blogging as you can see from InvestorBlogger dot com, which has been active since 2004 in various guises.

Payment and Cancellation

The other issue is payment: I think the best way would be to charge you on an hourly basis of $50.00 per hour for work undertaken. Each time I work on the site, I’d complete a log with time and task details on Google Docs and share that document with you so you can check what’s going on. We could set a minimum/maximum number of hours of work each month. Payment would be made for the minimum at the beginning of the month, with any excess hours paid at the beginning of the second month, in addition to the minimum amount.

Example: Payment scheme

March – Minimum 5 hours @ $50.00 = $250.00 but I actually work 7 hours.

April – Minimum 5 hours + excess hours for March (2 hours) or $350.00.

Then I work 10 hours in April.

May – We cancel the agreement, so you would only pay the excess five hours
from April or $250.00.

We could simply negotiate a contract from month to month. In the event that you cancel the contract for a subsequent month (preferably before the last day in the preceding month), then payment would be for the remaining excess hours.

Conclusion

Obviously you have to decide if this is a route you want to take, whether it is worth spending so much money on your website, and what metrics you will need to use to evaluate success or failure. I do believe it’s viable to do this, but it might not be successful.

Posted in: PanopticonAsia.

Lost Posts: Five Values for Blogging: Learning, Voice, Authority, Integrity and Audience

May 20th, 2009
by blogmyblog.
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Lost Post Series: Posts that have otherwise been forgotten, accidentally deleted or blogged elsewhere are reposted here. Enjoy!

This is a repost from Blogging Charlatans: I re-read the original post and felt the content of this stood better as a single post than attached to that.

Five Values for Blogging: Learning, Voice, Authority, Integrity and Audience

So what should the budding blogger do to save their blog? Actually, it’s quite simple: I think there are five qualities that will ensure you do get back links, traffic, money, and whatever your definition of success is.

1. Learn to Write.

Sounds simple enough. But it’s amazing how many bloggers fail at this first hurdle. Learning to write is a skill that takes time, effort and practice to develop properly. Of course, your average Blog Your Way To Success PDF will not tell you how much of each you will need. It will take you much longer than you first suspect, certainly longer than you hope, and likely will end up being far longer before, as an accomplished blogger, you actually dare to call yourself a ‘good’ writer. I’m somewhere in the second stage right now, most likely nearer the beginning than the end. Where are you?

2. Find your voice.

That’s been the hard step for me. But finding a voice in the hundreds of millions of blogs out there with many blogging on similar themes as I do. How do I define my blog in relation to all the others? By finding my voice. A voice can be defined in so many ways, none of which are exclusive. Your voice could be your blog’s niche, or your blog’s choice of topics. It could be the way you treat your topic. Or it could even be the way you write about dull subjects and inject personality, enthusiasm, and a sense of humor. It could even be as simple as your posting schedule or mix of posts through the week. Have you found your voice yet?

3. Build your authority.

No, I really don’t mean anything to do with another of the web’s charlatan’s: Technorati’s Authority Measure. I don’t even mean ‘pagerank’. Neither of these is a measure of your authority, rather it’s a measure of their decision making vis-a-vis your blog and its readership. As such, it’s subject to arbitrary adjustments up, down and sideways. Your authority is your ability to be thought of as someone who has understanding, insight, learning or skill and which achieves a greater degree of respect from your readership. That is your authority: do people approach you for advice (as readers or as emailers) or help when they come across issues that you have faced?

4. Keep your integrity.

With many companies out their encouraging bloggers to blog for dollars, it’s easy to sacrifice all of these qualities that you need for a few dollars in your PayPal account. Very easy. There have been times when I have sacrificed my own integrity for a few dollars. I regret it now. Now, I don’t tailor reviews to advertisers’ whims and unspecified needs, I try to tell the story as I see it, I try to keep readers informed of my conflict of interests, I try to keep my words honest and pure. I still do reviews, I still do buzzes but I will not write something that is dishonest or shortsells my readers. Do you feel you sold your integrity?

5. Connect with your audience.

That’s always the hard part. Blogging, for me and many readers, started out as an expression of personal and private writing that somehow managed to garner a small audience. If I’m always caught up in my own little bubble, and it’s pretty easy for me living where I live, doing what I do and seeing things from an “Asian” or “European” perspective, I will fail to connect with my readers and their interests. I’m trying to remind myself that I should be striving to connect more with my readers, wherever they are. How do you connect with your readers?

While I can’t guarantee that these alone will lead you to success in blogging, I feel strongly that success in blogging without these values will be fleeting.

Posted in: Blogging.

Ping Your Sitemap For Search Engines: The Manual Way

Nov 28th, 2008
by blogmyblog.
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If you are unfortunate enough to not have access to a tool or plugin to automatically ping your sitemaps on your site for you, you can still do this manually, and it’s pretty effective. A good example of this is a static site which doesn’t have the content update very often.  Simply prepare a simple page with these links:

  • <a href=”http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>Google</a>
  • <a href=”http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&amp;url=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>Yahoo</a>
  • <a href=”http://webmaster.live.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>MSN</a>
  • <a href=”http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>AsK</a>
  • <a href=”http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://your-domain.com/sitemap-url”>Moreover</a>

Step 1: edit each link code with the url to your site’s sitemap.

Step 2: then copy the code for each line to a new page/post or html document.

Step 3: create the rest of the page.

Step 4: publish it. Each time you need to ping these sites, open this page and click on each link. It only takes a few seconds, and is ideally done as part of a checklist of things to do.

Posted in: Blogging.

10 Sites That Generate Traffic: What works, what almost works and what is a waste of time!

Nov 25th, 2008
by blogmyblog.
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One of the great ways to generate interest in your blog is via one of the many traffic generating sites that are available. However, not all of them are very good. In fact, I’ve had little success with several so here’s my top list of traffic generators that work vs. those that don’t.

  1. BlogMad
  2. BlogSoldiers
  3. ClickPirate
  4. EntreCard
  5. Traffic Swarm
  6. AutoHits
  7. AussieEarners
  8. BlogExplosion
  9. BlogAdvance
  10. Google Ads

So here’s the truth. This is an non-scientific analysis of how traffic generators actually work, despite whatever statistics they provide in their system. The effective sites were counted as providing more than an average amount of time on the site, over 2 years that was approximately 02:12 minutes.

Of the ten sites that I surveyed, only one merits any real ad spending. And that’s the first one. Please note, though, I don’t use Google AdSense anywhere that it matters, so if you are using any of these sites, you may find that you are violating AdSense TOS.

Better than Average

1. ClickPirate – accounted for only 269 trips to my site but the traffic stayed much longer (11:26 minutes), viewed nearly 3 times as many pages and had a much lower bounce rate. I regularly purchase advertising through ClickPirate, and would recommend it. Grade: A++

Around Average

2. Autohits.dk – only generated 126 actual hits to my site, but the average time on site was a decent 3:38 minutes and a respectable bounce rate. I have purchased advertising on this site several times and been pleased. Grade: A+

3. AussieEarners – only recently added to the stable but in that short month generated about 195 actual hits with a decent 2:01 on the site. Its bounce rate wasn’t that hot, but at least the traffic seems reasonable quality. I haven’t purchased any advertising on this site yet. Grade: A-

Shorter than Average

4. EntreCard – accounted for over 640 visits in two years, but with an average of 43 seconds on the site, it was marginally better than BlogSoldiers. I gave up on EntreCard mostly because it failed to demonstrate any value, and the system kept changing. You might have better luck with them than I did. I stopped when they deleted two of my sites for alleged TOS violations despite the fact that they were quality sites. Pity they couldn’t remove the EC farms and the porn effectively. Worse, it wasn’t worth buying advertising on here because of the gross mismatch between EC prices and actual traffic. Grade: C+

5. BlogSoldiers – generated slightly more interest than BlogMad, but it’s average time on site was 29 seconds! I’m still using this site, as it does generate fairly decent traffic levels. I also purchased advertising for both banners and blogs through their service. I quite like the fact that you can create banners and text links and try them out over extended periods. I have purchased advertising here, and would probably do so again. Grade: B-

6. BlogMad – in two years BlogMad generated 575 visits for my blog, but with an average time on my site of just 7 seconds, it was largely ineffective. Worse, I tried to buy advertising but this company’s got a really ineffective ecommerce system that prevented me from buying any credits at all! Sorry but that is really shooting yourself in the foot, is it not? Grade: C-

Largely Useless

7. BlogAdvance – was a very dark horse in the race, and in only one respect did it manage a less worse than average result: time on site – 1:19 minutes. The site is currently non-functional, and fails to accept my sites. I couldn’t figure out why, and generally reckon that this site is now over. Grade: F

8. BlogExplosion – Really only created an average time of 4 seconds on site, and a little more than 1 page! With a high bounce rate, it’s not worth it. Worse, I had a problem on my account and it was never fixed. Grade: F

9. TrafficSwarm – generated no hits to my site at all. Complete waste of time.Oddly, though, my Google ads only attracted 51 viewers to my and they only stayed 19 seconds! 19! Wow! Grade: F

Unknown Potential

10. AdWords – But the biggest surprise was for me, AdWords. AdWords produced really poor quality traffic overall with 51 visitors and a time on site of just 19 seconds. Most likely this reflects the complexity of the AdWords system. I’m still not convinced AdWords is an appropriate tool for InvestorBlogger at this time. Grade: Unknown.

These stats are from over 57000 page views taken over 2 years. Not all sites were tested for 2 years. Nor were all sites tested continuously. But this reflects my own personal experience with these ten sites. Your own mileage may vary considerably from these statistics!

Posted in: Blogging.

30 Tweaks for Setting Up WordPress For the First Time

Nov 25th, 2008
by blogmyblog.
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This is a short checklist of items that I created when I was setting up a friend’s new blog. It’s pretty much all the tweaks, I make to a standard install of WordPress that I use.

Once you have created your admin user:

  • 1). Login and set the password to something you can remember!
  • 2). Update any pre-installed plugins that you need, remove any that you don’t.
  • 3). Set the title and Tagline in General Settings
  • 4). Check your WordPress address is correct
  • 5). Update your email address.
  • 6). Check the membership of the blog including the New User Role
  • 7). Don’t forget to check your timezone!
  • 8). Go to the writing tab, and check the size of the post box! I usually set mine to 15 lines.
  • 9). For remote publishing, I always check the XML-RPC box.
  • 10). Add any Update Services that you want to ping.

On the reading tab in Settings:

  • 11). Set your frontpage, to either blog style or have a static page.
  • 12). How many posts do you want per page? Five is a reasonable number
  • 13). Set your feed to show the ‘x’ most recent posts. I usually set that to 10 if I’m doing full feed or 25 if not.
  • 14). Set your feed to show the full text or summary. Most people recommend the full text for feeds.

On Discussion Settings:

  • 15). I always set “An administrator must always approve the comment” which is ideal for a new blog, and prevents unnecessary spam.

On the Privacy tab:

  • 16). I always set to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers” but if you’re for a small or private audience, then check the other option.

On the Permalinks tab:

  • 17). Set the options for your permalinks. I usually use the /%postname% tag with something else, for example ../archives/%postname%/

Plugins – There are two plugins that are pretty useful to get at the beginning:

  • 18.) Akismet for spam. You’ll need a WordPress.com API key for this.
  • 19.) WP-Cache Manager. You’ll need to activate it, enable the manager and set the time (in seconds).

Users Tab – On the Users tab, click to find your admin profile:

  • 20.) Set the Nickname to something you like. Hit ’save’.
  • 21.) Set your “Display name publicly as” to the Nickname in 20.)
  • 22.) Check your basic details, Website, and any Bio. Info.
  • 23.) Go to the Design Tab.

If you have a good host, you’ll have a variety of themes pre-installed.

  • 23.) Find a good one, activate it.
  • 24.) Go to the Widgets and select the ones you need.
  • 25.) Go to the Theme Editor…
  • 25.) Add your Google Analytics code in the footer!
  • 26.) Add any other code that you might need to the footer.

General Tidying Up: Let’s set the links categories

  • 27.) You will need to decide what links categories you need.
  • 28.) Remove or add any particular links you need in the blogroll.
  • 29.) Set your initial categories for posts, too.
  • 30.) Remove the Hello World post and default links in the blogroll!

This has been honed over numerous installs of WordPress, but is by no means the only possible set. If there are any errors, please read the comments and submit one!

Posted in: Wordpress & WP Classes.
Tagged: · ·

PayPerPost’s Best Practices: Best for Bloggers?

Sep 11th, 2007
by blogmyblog.
2 comments

Payperpost recently celebrated its first full year as a company, and in that time things have changed a lot for them, for their bloggers and their advertisers. One recent innovation has been the introduction of lots of tools for bloggers, including the Marketplace, PPP Direct, a referral program and so on.

Best Practices: Best for Bloggers?
They’ve just added their own best practices guidelines , too, with lots of useful suggestions for PPP bloggers and non-PPP bloggers. Naturally, this is a good thing in general as there has been quite a problem with splogs and spamblogs created by bloggers for the sole purpose of making money from PPP. With a lively community in Payperpost Boards, extensive tools, and good support in place, it’s looking like Payperpost could be the best online to do sponsored postings.

Synopsis of the Practices
However, if you read the guidelines carefully , there are quite a few places where the guidelines are really telling you WHAT and HOW to post on your blog. Let’s look at a few examples:

  • You HAVE to maintain a balance of posts/sponsored posts, no matter what the source of your sponsored posts or how your posts have been sponsored.
  • Archives… well, obviously archives are a good idea for most blog types. They provide backlinks and lots of fodder for new readers. But what if your blog doesn’t archive posts…
  • Link placement: It may be obvious to place links inside the text, but there are huge exceptions to this, including graphics, emphasis, ..
  • Relevance: Another obvious one. If you write a tech and investing blog like this one, but you suddenly blog on women’s hats, or underwear for pets, or whatever. But what if you’re blogging on the underlying companies that provide these prodcuts…? Well, that’s relevant. But what if you’re a general blogger?…
  • Word count: While this is obvious, the last comment is less so: “Also, stay on topic. If a car rental site is requesting 200 words, 200+ words should be about car rentals.”
  • Choosing Opportunities: Choosing carefully and personalizing your postings. But we can’t go overboard or be inventive or *cough* creative *cough* regarding our ‘personal’ experiences…
  • Titles & Categories: We can’t use “PPP” in the title of the post, nor a special category for such posts (why not?)
  • Money: We can’t talk about how much we were paid (why not?) nor can we talk excessively about money or post it near a PPP posting.
  • Look and Feel: We have to follow guidelines for blogs, fonts, colors, pictures, pop up links, etc….
  • Content link ads: We can use content link ads like Contera in our posts.
  • There are further ‘suggestions’ on search, finding friends, TOS, and FAQs. Not to mention Customer Love (how 1984?).

The Big Picture?
Well, individually taken, many, if not most, of these are great suggestions. Taken together, bloggers are beginning to see the influence of advertising money on not just the WHAT we blog (the opportunities or advertisements, whether they are ‘buzzes’ ‘opinions’ or ‘reviews’ or whatever) but also the HOW of blogging, that goes for both form (the blog’s appearance – archives, links, look and feel) and the content (balance, linking, word count, relevance,…).

Other Discussions
Given many of these requirements are already rules (balance, categories, titles, content links, etc.), one has to wonder how many of the rest will be formalized sooner or later. There’s quite a discussion going at Payperpost’s Community Boards (which are an excellent insight to the whole PPP game) with one British blogger summarizing their feelings quite appropriately: “I can definitely live without the £3 a day (if I am lucky lol) if it means NOT feeling like PPP own my soul “.

On the otherside, scorpy01 noted: “This Best Practices suggestion isn’t about being deceptive, it’s about giving the advertiser the best exposure possible.” This is a sentiment I also understand, as a businessperson. The challenge going forward for PayperPost is going to be the same as always: providing a valuable marketplace of bloggers for advertisers, while balancing the needs of bloggers especially the more popular bloggers who can go it alone, to be independent. Ted Murphy has created an amazing company, but the balancing act could so easily fail, if the company rules become excessively strict ( there are increasingly long TOS, FAQs, Practices, etc.) that are sapping some of the freedom and joy of the basic motif ‘Be paid to blog about the things you love’.

My Own Thoughts
I think my own personal feelings run more like BSN’s who noted:

‘…it’s another case of someone trying to control how I organize my blog. As I said earlier, this isn’t about disclosure to me, because I use other methods to disclose. And since I respect the advertisers wishes by not taking those opps that say ‘no sponsored post category’, it’s really my business how I organize/categorize my blog. I understand there might be some opportunity cost associated with how I organize my blog and I can live with it. My blog, my decision . (my emphasis).

My own opinion is clearly reflected in my own postings from PayPerPost. Increasingly, I’m finding that I am less and less willing to go through all the hoops: minimum words, disclosure, relevance, links, images, image links, PR ranking, segmentation, checking and double checking, queries, errors, and so on just to get $5. I’m afraid that “My blog, my decision” may become my motto for many things related to PPP. (An afterthought: I wonder how long it is before we are expressly told not to talk about the TOS publicly or mention how much we make…? You think I’m joking: look what happened to Google’s TOS!)

Effects on my Blogging
This has resulted in my blogging a lot less for Payperpost over the last year. In fact, I haven’t posted anything in September. Here you can see what I mean…

  • Sept 12
  • Oct 5
  • Nov 14
  • December 27
  • Jan 25
  • Feb 15
  • March 11
  • April 12
  • May 11
  • June 7
  • July 3
  • August 8
  • September 0

Great for Newbies!
I wouldn’t discourage new bloggers from getting involved with PayPerPost at all, quite the contrary. It’s a great way to start blogging regularly, make a *little* money, meet great people, and find some good reading! All of these are great pluses in the system. But if you are a little seasoned, with 50K bloggers now in the system, it’s difficult to make any real money, posting rates have declined somewhat for individual bloggers, esp. those with rankings above PR4, though there are many more opps now; and I no longer login and refresh as much as I used to. I’d rather get on with my ‘work’.

Perhaps, the new Argus system will make things better for us more established bloggers, perhaps not. The Marketplace hasn’t brought me any new offers at all. In fact, I’ve had more luck finding my own clients than using them or even Sponsored Reviews or ReviewME. My blog tends to get lost amongst all the others… That’s something I need to work on, I guess…

Disclaimer: this Blogger has posted extensively for PayPerPost over the past year, and this post contains affiliate type links, but it is NOT sponsored.

Posted in: Blogging.