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Archives for January 2008

So, What Exactly is a Lot of Traffic?

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Day in and day out I check my stats on PMetrics. I admit, I’m addicted and it’s become a bad obsession. Sometimes I sit for hours (or at least minutes) watching visitors interact on the site via Spy. Not sure if I should commend the programmers or curse them.

Anyways, since I’ve had my site up, it has grown steadily and plateaued twice. The first plateau happened around 400-500 unique visitors a day. At that time, I was indexed well in Yahoo, but Google was refusing to list me. I struggled along at that level for months – may even have been close to a year — I didn’t really keep track and then one day — BOOM — I jumped up to 800 visitors a day. It was a happy day. I danced, I rejoiced. Google finally got around to listing me. Unfortunately that’s about where I’ve been ever since.

I have to admit, I rely heavily on search engine traffic for visitors. I have never gotten the hang of getting links from prominent sites in my niche, and feel really odd about begging for them — so I don’t. I get the feeling that is more about the level of tech know-how in my niche and not so much about whether my site deserves it. Of course, I’m a little biased there, but there are comments in forums all over the place that say I’m not doing a half bad job.

I see the tips about commenting on other blogs and developing relationships with other people in my niche. I’d love to, honest, but very few good blogs exist elsewhere on my subject where I can develop those relationships. I’ve looked. In the end, it means my strategic linking goals aren’t panning out very well. About 7-12% of my traffic comes from links other than search engines – so unfortunately if I ever lose my rankings, things are going to hurt.

I keep trying to increase traffic levels and I’ve seen excellent comments about my site in forums all over the place. It feels like I’m on the edge of another explosion and every day I check and see the same numbers. Sometimes it spikes above a thousand, but mostly it hits the same mark day by day. Maybe I’m overly optimistic and I’ve tapped out my current niche…

How do you determine the saturation point of your niche? That point where no matter what you do, you’re not going to get another increase. How do you know when you’ve tweaked everything as much as it can be tweaked and you are getting the most traffic you are ever going to get? I realize more content, means more search terms and possibly more visitors — and overall that’s basically all I do in hopes of increasing traffic. I look at my site and what my visitors are asking for in the forums and then give it to them. Hopefully in the end, that is the best strategy – although hope is not really a viable course of action when you are looking for success.

One thing I want to be careful about is diluting the overall theme of my site by branching off into other areas, but at some point it naturally has to happen, unless topics are absolutely endless in your niche. Either you branch out or you build another site.

Maybe that is the way to go? A few smaller sites that all together make up a larger number of people. So when do you decide that your site has peaked and it’s time to spend less time on it and more time on another venture? If this is your avenue of growth, I think you have to be very careful and ensure the community that you built around your current blog is self sustaining. If you don’t you go spend hours on another site that you were using to nurture your community and suddenly you take that away — can’t be good for business. In my case, I have built a large community of users. Unfortunately, not enough experts and a lot of beginners are frequent meaning if I spend less time on it, the community is going to suffer. I like to think I’m overly important I guess. Attracting tech savvy experts in my niche has not been an easy task.

So, What is a good level of traffic for a site? I realize in some niches it may be 300 visitors a day and others it may be 30000. There has to be an “average” consensus. What constitutes a decent traffic level? For example:

  • 0-100: Quit while you’re ahead
  • 101-500: There may be hope
  • 501-1500: Low, but getting there
  • 1501-5000: Medium – Should be making a decent income
  • 5001-????: High – enjoy life on the island.

I think if you devise some method to determine the maximum size of your niche, then you have some way to know when your site has met is maximum traffic potential. You will get the signal you need to stop putting anymore resources – time and sweat into it and add something else in order to continue your upwards income climb. It’s also the signal that you better have a site that takes care of itself (or you’re paying someone a portion of the profits to take care of it for you), so you can devote some time to something else.

How do you determine whether your hitting a decent traffic level in your niche?

Using Twitter as an idea streamer

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As a web publisher I get a lot of ideas for my sites, and sometimes I don’t take time to write them all down. So I’ve created a twitter account just for my sites. It’s call an Idea Streaming Account. It’s an organic place to place ideas that I want to reflect on and let incubate for awhile before I do anything with them. It’s a private place for ideas that I can reflect on and see if they are going to work for me. Some of the advantages of having limits on the length of your ideas include creative sandboxing. Creating limits for your ideas can box you in or it can allow you to have an automatic starting point.

I’ve created an account just for my poetic creations. Each poem starts out with only 140 characters. To me this is like creating a new form of poetry. Short sentence structure poems that are great starting places for future works. It’s a great place to store ideas for when I’m creatively challenged and need a shot of Performance Enhancing Ideas to launch my day of poetic creation.

The cool thing is I can do this with multiple sites, each site having a creative storage bin and an endless flow of ideas that can go on and on until I have no more ideas left to share with myself or other members of the team. I can add as many members of the sites to collaborate with me on the various projects and keep a natural flow of ideas trickling down the brook commonly known as work.

Thanks to Randa Clay

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My friend Randa Clay has a laser-sharp eye for graphic design. And she’s the one who gave the Performancing Awards their “gloss” and professionalism. When someone comes to me and says “Hey Ryan, I need a good graphic designer for project X” my reply is almost always -> go with Randa Clay.

She does beautiful design and her turnaround time is second to none.

Thanks Randa, you really made these awards shine.

What Are You Known For?

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What are you known for? What do you want to be known for?

It’s an important question. Especially if you want to be interviewed.

Consider the bloggers you follow. Can you name things they are known for? I can think of a few, who am I talking about here?:

  • Ideavirus
  • Six Figure Blogging
  • Copywriting
  • Tech startup news

I am sure you can think of better examples than my quick brainstorm. How can you be like the people who come to mind? How can you be known for something good and beneficial?

Today I posted at Blog Herald how there are two Chris Garrett’s known in blogging, both living in the UK, both with our own slice of one niche.

You can hear the “other” Chris Garrett’s opinion in this Xfep podcast. Just for equal time you had better listen to me also, just to prove we are two different people!

The thing is we get on quite happily because Chris Garrett and I are known for different things. He is a great designer, and I have carved out a little niche in blogging all my own.

When I launched my own professional blog in February, I wanted to show that I wasn’t just “Chris from Performancing” so I did a few things deliberately and differently. The first big part of the strategy was to release a free blogging ebook called How to Write Killer Flagship Content. Another was to define a blogging concept I named Authority Blogging. What do people ask me about when I am interviewed? You guessed it.

In the last few weeks I have been thinking how I can make my brand clearer, as I write for all sorts of blogs from a company that develops PDF to Excel converter software to a blog about freelancing, and of course here, but having thought long and hard I think that adds to my brand; I am that freelance blogging guy among other things, or I might get there eventually.

Getting known is hard work, getting known for something positive is even harder. Before others will know you for anything, you have to consciously decide to be known for something. Better decide now, before someone else decides for you.

Advertise @ Performancing

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Performancing is a top-tier community network that focuses on blogging, productivity, SEO, marketing, advertising, monetization and Internet applications . In addition, we provide free resources such as our pMetrics blog statistics package and our WordPress Themes site.

In total, the performancing.com domain receives over 25,000 pageviews per day and is consistently in the top 10,000 on Alexa’s traffic graph. In other words, we have a very strong reach in a very specific niche. If you have a product or website that you’d like to advertise to the greater blogging community, Performancing is the place to start.

To inquire about advertising, please send an email to [email protected] or use our contact form.

Please see our current advertising rates listed below.

Performancing Main Site

  • $1000/month for a sitewide sidebar banner image ad
  • $2000/month for a sitewide top-of-content banner image ad

pMetrics Blog Analytics

  • $500/month for a sitewide sidebar image ad (125px x 125px)
  • $1000/month for a sitewide top-of-content banner image ad (728w x 90h)

Combo pMetrics and Performancing

  • $1299/month for a sitewide sidebar image ad (125px x 125px)
  • $2499/month for a sitewide top-of-content banner image ad (728w x 90h)

To inquire about advertising, please send an email to [email protected] or use our contact form.

How To Make Your Boring Website Popular on Digg

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As social media marketers, one of the most common questions we get about linkbaiting and social media promotion is this:

My niche is boring and / or non-technical – how do I turn it into something popular and linkable?

Last week I stumbled across a Wikipedia article that was, despite its dry (and boring) subject matter, doing quite well on Digg.

The article in question is this introductory piece on Montessori. You might want to take a few minutes to go through the article and figure out any angle that would make it interesting to the average Digg user. My best idea (and this was after reading the Digg link) was about how the Montessori system was a cover for brainwashing little children and sapping their creativity.

Paranoid delusions apart, I strongly doubt that my spin would have done better than this take:

Monetessori Method, the educational system of Google founders.

It is, for lack of a better term, f’n brilliant.

Instead of forcefully making a boring topic appear interesting, this digg user took something that would guarantee attention (Google founders) and related it to a quite uninteresting topic. The result is a Digg headline that probably got enough *blind diggs* to make it popular and it ended up getting 562 diggs (as of writing this article).

I have to admit, when I saw this headline I was in a hurry as well and gave a blind digg before I had time to read the page itself.

The only problem with this linkbait (although to be fair it was just a test) was that it could have been done much better (in terms of optimizing the landing page and in attracting links, if the digger had set up a page on their own site instead).

If you want to do some linkbaiting for your website but are having trouble making your content *interesting*, stop forcing the issue. Instead, follow this simple 3 step process:

1. Find something interesting that appeals to the largest possible audience – it could be anything, Google, grave health risks, global warming, the war in iraq, etc.

For more in this, learn how to attract attention from mainstream media.

2. Find a common thread between the *interesting* and your *boring* content. The most important component is the title (see Michael Gray’s post on title bait) but you also need quality content to back it up.

3. Prep your linkbait for social media goodness. Make it easy for your readers (and especially readers from social media sites) to share your article, make it visually appealing (these two posts on formatting blog posts are good, standard advice for linkbait formatting as well).

Once you can master the art of making uninteresting content interesting using this process of association, the rest of the social promotion stuff is relatively easy to implement. Then, all you need are friends to digg your linkbait…

3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic

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Amongst the commercial blogosphere there is huge interest in the dark, and mysterious art of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. There shouldn’t be. Not because paying attention to Search traffic is bad, or that wanting to rank higher in Google is evil, simply because it’s not rocket science, and anyone can do it. Even you.

If you want get more traffic from Search engines, this post is for you. Read on….

The Big SEO Secret: It’s Easy

Before we get to the list, (I don’t mind if you scroll, but this next bit is important too…) let me explain what i mean by “it isn’t rocket science”: Manipulating Search engine rankings for sites that naturally find it difficult to get incoming links and attention, say affilate sites, many ecommerce type operations and much of the web1.0 shopping experience sites is very hard, and it takes a lot of skill and knowledge to achieve.

It’s become harder and harder over the last few years to game Google, and many SEO’s are now wondering if it’s time to give up trying to “manipulate” G results and simply start feeding Google more of what it wants — the unfortunate result of which is a huge increase in workload, namely copywriting and Linkbaiting.

That’s the thing most SEO’s won’t want to tell their clients. That there is no magic wand, mystical powers or Search engine hoo joo to be had anymore, it’s all down to 3 things:

  1. Copywriting
  2. Links and
  3. Networking

That’s not to say those tasks don’t require skill, but it really is that simple.

I’ll give you a full checklist in just a minute…

Avoid the Snake Oil Merchants

There are still die hard SEO’s out there that spend all their time trying to game the system, but most of them are pretty shit at it, only a very few have enough resources to manage it. There are also, a whole slew of con merchants masquerading as SEO’s, just as there are fake designers in the web design field, basing their credentials on the fact that they’ve read a few articles, or bought a keyword tracking tool.

These people are idiots, and should be avoided at all costs.

At the end of this article I’ll point you in the direction of a few quality resources for further reading.

3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic

Now you’ve patiently read though all of the above, or impatiently skimmed to the bottom, it’s time to get into this list.

1. Write Better, More Specific Copy and Linkbait

Good copywriting encompasses many things, titles, subject matter, the post and url’s to name the most important. It also goes hand in hand with The Art of Linkbaiting. Here’s a checklist for more search engine friendly copy:

Title’s are everything.

  • Titles should be short, snappy, and attention grabbing – think about how you skim through your RSS reader every day, and bear that in mind when writing titles.
  • Preferably, title’s should contain keywords related to your topic — that should come naturally, if you have to jam them in there, its either a bad title, bad copy, or you’re a lunatic.
  • If your blog software writes titles like this: My Blog Title | My Post Title, you need to change them to this: My Post Title – My Blog Title. Many people will tell you it’s even better to ditch the “My Blog Title” bit all together, in order to not dillute the important keywords in the title, but they’re forgetting the importance of branding, and with blogs, establishing some brand recognition goes a long way toward gaining links and attention.
  • Titles are akin to advertising, and the best ones make promises, and deliver

By far the best resource out there for blog titles is Brian Clark’s Magnetic Headlines series of posts on the excellent Copy Blogger site.

Body Copy
There’s been much written, both online and off about copywriting, and as a writer of small talent, it’s not for me to get into the in-depth details of it. I am good at linkbaiting though, and am constantly studying what kind of post are being linked on del.icio.us, Digg and other “link sites”.

It’s the much discussed art of linkbaiting that this post will focus on. Remember, we’re talking about getting search engine traffic right? Here’s a checklist for writing good linkbait (we’ll discuss why links are important a little further down).

  • Study the popular bookmarks on del.icio.us to get a feel for what people are linking to
  • Such things as HowTo’s and Lists are always good fodder for linkbait and you should be aiming to get onto those pages by writing appropriate copy. (you want to be there, because being there will gain you links, and links = traffic, more on that soon…).
  • Use html lists, headlines and other visual means of breaking up posts in order to make them easier to read and skim
  • Link out, link often and link generously — Really, forget any rubbish you may have heard about depleting page rank, or any concerns you have over sending away traffic, and work on providing links to great resources your readers will love — they’ll thank you for it, and link to you for it.
  • Fight bloggers block by getting inventive, and doing some research.

Some of the best blog specific resources for copy writing, and linkbaiting are:

2. Make it Easy for People to Link to You

All of the above tips on writing more attractive, useful and linkable copy are geared to two things:

  1. Providing what your readers want
  2. Gaining links

Links are the currency with which one trades on the web, the lingua franca of the internet and key to ranking, and traffic. Hint: They’re really, really important ok?

Essentially, you’re looking for this:

  • Links coming to your posts, from many different sources
  • Links preferably have relevant keywords in the text used to make the link and again preferably come from sites on a similar topic
  • Links from trusted, authoritative sites

Apart from writing great linkable copy, there are a few things you can do to make sure that your posts get linked, and hence ranked aswell as get more bang for your buck per link.

  • Encourage readers to submit your posts to Digg and del.icio.us, or more specific link sites depending on your subject matter. Those categories in del.icio.us for example, are exported by users to their own blogs (targeted, keyworded link text = good), and they often kick off a knock on effect [pdf] that can have wild implications for your Search traffic.
  • There are varios widgets for most blog software to do the above for you, just have a search through your blog softwares list of plugins.
  • Where possible, make sure your urls contain your keywords. Contrary to popular opinion, this is not because Search engines pay particularly more attention to urls with keywods, but because people often just paste urls into comments, blog posts and forums where they are automatically linked by the software. Those links, contain the keywords, and it’s keywords in links, from authoratitive, trusted sites, that are what we want.
  • Place a “link to this post” widget on your blogs templates
  • Ask other bloggers in your niche for links — but don’t make a pest of yourself, nobody likes to be hassled, and some people turn down link requests on general principle (me for example..). See Trisha’s thread in the Performancing forums on link exchanges for a lively discussion on the merits of the dreaded link exchange. — My personal advice is dont bother, do the other things listed here and all of it will fall into place.
  • Network like crazy, see below…

Although there are lots of posts out there on links, I couldn’t find much that would add value to what i’ve written above. If you have resources to share, please post them in the comments.

3. Networking, the Unsung Hero of Blog SEO

You read little about networking in this context. Many bloggers into SEO are facinated with the technicalities, despite it being a very simple thing to do and thus miss one of the biggest opportunities to gain links, readers, and traffic.

Done right, a well built network of contacts, friends and like-minded bloggers can seriously help you get the link love you need, both directly and indirectly. Here are a few tips and resources for working your network for better Search traffic:

  • Read Chris Garrett’s Networking for Blog Success
  • Comment and participate on blogs within your niche — Get to know the people around you
  • Email with them, LINK to them, they’ll reciprocate, trust me.
  • Expand outside of blogs — find forums, newsletters and groups in your topic
  • Use social bookmarking sites to discover related topics (see right hand side) and hence expand your groups, newsletters, forums and blogs search even further
  • Above all: Be generous. If you respect your network, and work hard to be part of the community surounding your topic, the rewards can really pay of — never abuse it, it tends ot backfire in all kinds of horrible ways.

4. Bonus Tip

There’s always a bonus tip, didn’t you know?

If you’re really set on learning more, more than my overview here — and if i really can’t dissuade you from getting caught up in what i consider a massive waste of time for the majority of bloggers (technical seo) then at least pay attention to the right people 🙂 Here’s a list of my favorite, and most authoratitive SEO blogs:

The Art of Linkbaiting

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Ever found it hard to get other bloggers to link to a new blog? Sure you have, it’s not easy sometimes. Even established blogs need to expand their traffic and influence on a regular basis, and linkbaiting is one way to do it. It’s not without potential perils, but the time honored tradition of being contrary, in order to get attention is well proved, and done right, it’s a killer way to break into a new area. There are also safer ways of linkbaitng, they’re just less fun 🙂

In order to bait a link, you need a hook. Hooks come in variety of flavors, some of the more popular would include:

  • News hook
  • Contrary Hook
  • Attack Hook
  • Resource Hook
  • Humour Hook

There are others, but you see the point. There are two main types of hook in there, the nice hook, and the nasty hook. I’d say in most cases you can get away with a contrarian viewpoint, but not an attack. No one likes an arsehole, so there’s no real benefit, as sure you may get a ton of links from outraged blog peers, but they’ll likely ignore anything else you write.

Saying that though, it’s a judgement call. I’ve often slammed someone on a blog, but you need to be able to judge it very well. Go just a little too far, and you’ll do more harm than good.

The easiest, and safest is the nice hook. And when i say easy, i mean it. Have a look at some examples of each type of hook i’ve listed:

Resource Hook

  • A comprehensive list of blogs in your niche – link out, and links will come in, i promise.
  • A practical/useful or even fun tool related to your niche
  • A How To based on your niche
  • A compilation of news stories on a theme. Sprinkle a little analysis in there, and you’re good to go.

News Hook

  • A genuine Scoop. Get to the news first
  • A compilation of news, as above, its a resource aswell as a news hook.
  • Expose a story for a fraud, or to be flawed. You really have to know your subject to do that, but links flow like water if you can debunk a popular meme

Contrary Hook

  • Be the only one in your niche to find something to not like about a story, or like about a story/product.
  • On the same theme, post “Why <insert prominent blogger name here> is WRONG about…”

Attack Hook

This works much the same as the contrary hook, you just get to be much, much ruder. It’s a tough one, because just posting about such a thing could land me in hot water. But then im not here to play nice, i’m here to talk about gaining traffic, and whilst an attack hook is 99/100 NOT the way to go, sometimes it’s absolutely killer, and can gain you credibility and reputation overnight.

Really though, careful with that one. It can just as easily go the wrong way.

Humor Hook

These kinds of hooks are just too easy.

  • Search flickr, or photoshop a bizzare pic of your subject
  • Post “10 thing i hate about…”
  • Post “You know you’re a <insert here> when…”

Funny thing is, those things always get links, it’s like people never seem to tire of them.

Give and thou wilt receive…

All of the above is utterly useless without being seen by your peers though. Link to them in your post, then click those links if you have absolutely no traffic. You need to get their initial attention.

Send emails, post to delicious, myweb2 etc – just make sure that at least one prominent blogger in your niche reads and links to you and the rest will follow.

Now, what i want to hear is this: What other types of link bait do you use?