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Problogging Ain’t Easy, So Forget What They Tell Ya

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There’s a lot of money made surrounding the idea that anyone can easily make five figures as a problogger. That’s a blatant myth. And it very well maybe one of the greatest v-Myths (virtual myths) ever sent ’round the Neterwebs.

If you’re considering the possibility of becoming a problogger and making a living for the rest of your life from the comfort of your own home, you need to take a long, hard, sobering look at yourself and ask whether you’ve got what it takes.

Oh, you haven’t heard about the hardships of making it as a problogger? Not sure what it takes?

Then check out this killer article called Con’s of Being a Problogger

Three Ways To Engineer Good Content

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Most new bloggers just take stabs in the dark. A new blogger knows her topic, and may even have a vague notion of keyword stuffing and pronoun removal.

But most new bloggers don’t know how to engineer good content. That’s why I’m writing this article. Because you can’t be a problogger until you know how to engineer good content.

Strategy 1: Reverse Engineer Search Logs

You probably already love stats. And even if you’ve just been stabbing in the dark with your blog writing, you probably have gotten some search results (out of billions of searches, Google is bound to send a few lost souls to your site…especially if you have an accidental phrase or two from one of your poems that goes something like “the freshly cut wood was supple, soft like the newborn skin of a naked child.” Ok. So you probably won’t want to reverse-engineer any searches that come into your logs on these phrases. Nonetheless, eventually you’ll find that Google has paired your blog’s pages with at least a few of billions of searches. Some of those are bound to be relevant to your site, we hope.

Your search logs are a gold mine. They tell you what people are looking for. And since you most probably maintain a blog with the intention of growing an audience, your search logs give you a priceless view of what your audience wants. Your task is to feed your audience what they want.

Let’s say that you’ve written an article on “Red Apples Grown in Oregon” but in the article, you’ve included the phrase “green apple orchards” and a few sentences later “green apples are primarily grown in Seattle Washington” – a few weeks after publishing this article, you notice that twenty visitors have come to your site on variations of the phrase “green apple orchards in Washington D.C.” – now you know that there are people looking for information on green apple orchards in Washington D.C. Google was sending these visitors to your site by mistake. Your task is to make sure the next time *is not* by mistake.

Spend at least twenty minutes each day analyzing your search logs for new and exciting topics that you hadn’t even dreamed of. Your search results allow you to reverse engineer the thoughts of your target audience.

Strategy 2: The Generic Drug Model: Re-engineer other people’s success

Take three successful blogs, two days monitoring the Digg/Reddit front pages, and call me in the morning. Seriously though, you just need to pay attention to what works and you’ll start to identify patterns. You’ll notice that bullet points fit nicely with human psychology… that numbered, how-to guides titillate the average online reader … that people like the number seven better than the number six and the number 10 better than the number nine … that people like strong opinions and believable controversy …

Got the point? Just start paying attention. That’s the key. Read the premier blogs and look at their headlines. 4-7 words tend to be ideal, unless you’ve just got to get the eighth to seal the deal. Notice that some of the best blogs post article series, keeping their readers attention for weeks on end and giving them something to look forward to.

Strategy 3: The “Duplicate Your Own Success” Model

Sooner or later, if you’re intentional about writing good content and creating linkbait, you’ll find success. Much of the time, you’ll also discover failure. Don’t let failure discourage you. Rather, focus on what works and don’t be afraid to try variations on a successful theme.

As you blog, you’ll discover your strengths and your weaknesses. Capitalize on your success by finding your voice and sticking to it. Did you land a front page Digg? Could you write the same basic article on a completely different topic? Then do it. Yesterday.

The important thing here is to not run away from you own success. There’s a temptation to feel like you’ve always got to do something new and original. Most of the great things in life are variations on pre-existing themes. There’s nothing wrong with sticking with what works.

Summary

So what’s the main theme of this article? Here it is in one sentence: First, discover what people want, respond to, and get excited by and then give it to them.

Don’t fall for the illusion of self-projection. Most of the world is dumber than you, and most of the world has different tastes. Give them what they want, not what you want. Then, as they say, you’re golden.

Optimal Meta Description Tag Code For WordPress

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When Andy Hagans says something, I listen. And Andy Hagans (following Aaron Wall) says that META descriptions are back and important, not for keyword stuffing, so much as page differentiation.

Did you know that the default for most WordPress themes is to NOT include a META description? While title tags remain, in my view, the single most important SEO factor, one of the biggest problems you’ll face with any new-ish site is getting each page indexed. Google evaluates each page to see if it is important enough and different enough to separately indexed. If not, then you’ll find many of your pages going supplemental.

So how does one go about differentiating her site? Well, title tags are a start. But they aren’t enough. The on-page content should be at least 100 words. But sometimes that’s not enough. So what else can you do to help GOOG differentiate your pages and see them as index worthy? Make sure that every page has a unique META description.

But as I said, most WordPress themes don’t have META description code built in. That’s where this post comes in. Below, I include the code for what I think of as two variations of an ideal WordPress META description.

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In the above code, you are basing the description completely on the title of the page. That’s a good start, and it may be the best option for complete differentiation, but in my view, a more complete solution would be something like the following addition

This page contains information about"/>

So what are your thoughts? What do you use to generate descriptions for your individual WordPress pages? If you’re not into an automated soluton via code, what are some of the plugins that you use?

Optimal Title Tag Code For WordPress

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HTML title tags are, arguably, the single most important SEO ranking factor. Nailing the title tag could be the most important thing you do all year in your blog’s SEO campaign. Yet the average blogger simply inherits her WordPress theme’s title tag, without shaping it into SEO perfection. In this article I’m giving you the code for what I think are the two most optimal WordPress title tags.

I’ve been using the “Cutline” title tag code for the longest time, assuming that it was the best out there (and in some cases, it very well may be). But the other day, I decided to question all my basic blogging assumptions and re-think some critical questions from scratch. Having done that, I’ve come up with the following SEO optimized title tag code to place in your header file:

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { wp_title('',true); } else bloginfo('name'); ?>

This is optimized for SEO, not necessarily for usability. For example, if branding is important to you, you might prefer the Cutline title code, a version of which I include here:

<?php if (is_single() || is_page() || is_archive()) { ?><?php wp_title('',true); ?> | <?php } bloginfo('name'); ?>

The main difference here is whether or not the name of your blog gets included in the title of every page. It is my view that by putting your blog title in the title tag of every post, you dilute the SEO value of your article’s title.

Tracking Historical Metric Trends With EatonWeb

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One cool feature of EatonWeb that I’ve been playing with a lot lately is the Advanced Account historical trending data. While this is a “pay” feature, I can’t help but love having historical trends in PageRank, Alexa, Technorati, Site Visibility, Linkage, etc. all in one place.

With EatonWeb’s Advanced Stats feature, you get historical trending data for your blog starting the day your blog is entered into the directory. I’ve setup a sample of this feature using data from my car blog RideLust, which you can see by clicking here.

For an idea of what the historical trending graphs look like I’ve included a screenshot below:

How To Use pMetrics to Analyze AdSense Anomalies

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The other day, I was having an abysmal (I mean horrid) day with AdSense on PopCrunch. I’d only gotten about $30 for the day and it was about 5:30pm.

As many of you know, a bad day of AdSense can put you in a bad mood unless you’re real careful. Well, I wasn’t very happy when I went to dinner. When I came back, only about 45 minutes later, AdSense revenue had shot up to about $74.

Reporting delay, I thought. So I went to play a little Nintendo Wii (right now I’m playing through the Rookie challenge in The Bigs).

Went back to my office about an hour later to check AdSense (I’m compulsive just like you). AdSense revenue had shot up to $124.

This ain’t no reporting delay, I thought to myself. Something’s going down. WTF?

So I rushed over to my pMetrics account for PopCrunch to analyze live traffic patterns. As usual, it was a number one slot on the Google SERPS for a hot celebrity topic. Loads of traffic poured in.

But loads of traffic pour in all the time, and I never see this kind of drastic AdSense rocketing.

By the time I got done analyzing pMetrics data and the on-page text for the hot article, I checked AdSense again. $185. Then I took a walk with my wife for about an hour (I was in a good mood at this point;-) When I got back, it was at $227.

Things started to slow down at this point, and I won’t give you the final numbers. But it is sufficient to point out that something weird was happening with CTR. It’s not as though I’d never seen traffic flow like this. There was either something distinct about the ads being served or the type of people visiting the site.

Well, without giving too much away, let’s just say that it turns out to have been related to the type of visitors that Google was sending to the site (people who are passionately searching for something specific tend to be good ad clickers).

So why did I tell this story? Well, for two reasons. First, because without pMetrics I wouldn’t have been able to solve the anomaly, pretty much in real-time. Second, because by solving the problem, I was able to quickly reinforce the hot content with supplemental articles and picked up more of the long-tail (in fact, it the long tail is still trickling in).

The next time you notice an AdSense anomaly, why not use pMetrics live stats to stay ahead of the curve, and capitalize? Because on the net, timing is everything and with pMetrics you get stats…live.

Analyzing the Digg Effect to Write Better Articles

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Last week, Performancing’s article entitled 10 Articles All Bloggers Should Read (at least once) got over 1,000 Diggs and made it onto the front page for almost an entire day. For those of you who happened to be around, a bunch of us had some geeky fun monitoring the Digg in real time.

But that’s not where the real value of a Digg lies. The real value lies in two effects: 1) Establishment of authority and 2) Backlinks.

I didn’t realize I was filling such a big need at the time of writing it, but my meta-article on blogging seems to have become an overnight, authoritative resource for new bloggers. From a preliminary investigation, the article is already getting linked to from the far ends of the blogosphere.

So what can we learn from this example of the Digg Effect? I see a clear lesson. The lesson is this: fill a real need and people will eat it up. Think about how many new bloggers are starting each day. Think about all the blog owners hiring new bloggers each day. Well, I did think about these things because it was starting to drag on my daily responsibilities. Having to constantly summarize the basics of blogging and provide tips for improving headlines was detracting from my more important work in SEO. So I put a list together for myself to fill a need. Then I realized that there are probably others with the same need. Turns out there were lots of them.

With all the junk information floating around the internet, many people have grown weary from the search for good information. Since Google doesn’t give people the information they really want anymore, one of the fundamental tasks for the blogger is to organize and serve good information. This makes you an authority.

Put together useful lists of resource articles for a broad audience and you’ll soon find that your site is becoming an authority. When people recognize it as an authority, you are going to acquire some killer backlinks.

So here’s what I learned from the Performancing Digg: not all Diggs are created equal. I’ve gotten on the front page before and only acquired 7 or 8 backlinks and no residual traffic. But if you make something that a large number of people really need, a timeless resource, it only takes a little nudging;-) and your article is an overnight authority (with lots of residual benefit).

July 2007 Performancing Experiment: A Statistical Analysis of Cost/Benefit for StumbleUpon Submissions

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Experiment: Submit every new Performancing article to StumbleUpon by at least 5 people during a 2 week period and evaluate the traffic benefit (will you help?).

You can track the experiment by monitoring pMetrics statistics for Performancing.

Having run Nudger.org in Alpha for a few months, it has become increasingly clear to me that human tendency is to pursue the simplest solution with the biggest perceived payoff. My goal here is to change your mind about the biggest perceived payoff in social voting, and to change your promotion behaviors (just like I’m starting to change my own).

When bloggers are choosing whether to submit to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon or Netscape, and they only have one choice, they almost universally go for Reddit.

I want to change this tendency because I am confident that it is the wrong approach. Normal Reddit traffic is borderline useless, except to artificially boost up your stats and maybe get an adrenaline rush. Reddit traffic doesn’t convert nearly as well as search traffic, and hardly any better than Digg (which is notorious for having poor ad conversion).

One hypothesis is that, all things being equal, there is a measurably better cost/benefit reward ratio for a steady dose of Stumble/Netscape then a steady dose of Reddit/Digg. Yet, I also believe that SEOs everywhere, including myself, are inclined to go with the Reddit/Digg combo or maybe just the Reddit solitaire. Why? Well, in the case of Digg it is so damn popular. In the case of Reddit, it is so damn easy (and I mean easy…)

The problem, as I see it, is that the simplicity of Reddit can become addictive and often provides no lasting effect. If you have an average blog you are probably getting somewhere between 75 and 400 visitors per day. Reddit can singlehandedly double or triple your traffic in any given day. But this traffic is largely junk traffic.

Netscape has the benefit of building strong, deep links over time. Some of my blogs have long-term PR 4 or 5 links straight from the Netscape domain. Many articles get short-term PR 6 and 7 link love. While you won’t drive much traffic from Netscape, you will help drive SERPs over the long haul. Netscape should be part of anybody’s long term link building strategy

Stumble traffic, in contrast to Reddit, is very focused and converts quite well. Sure, the initial submission is more time consuming, but then it’s all “thumbs-up” from there. Plus, I’ve found that a single Stumble can send thousands of visitors to your site. No need to get on the front page or anything. Just get a few people to “thumbs up” your article, and you’ll have sticky readers with an interest in your site topic flow right for high conversion rates.

So my hypothesis is this: Reddit has the least payoff of all the major social voting sites, but that it’s also the one solution that most people use. Instead of using Reddit, I think that a wiser use of your time is to go after topic-targeted traffic with StumbleUpon. It doesn’t hurt to do both, but avoid the temptation of using Reddit for all your social voting needs.