Most of the people who contact me don’t treat me like a human being. They treat me like a stupid machine.
These people send me messages as if they think I’m a stupid algorithm, and that some (if->then) switch will go off when I see the words “this is a great deal for you” or “this will be a perfect business partnership for you.”
Fact is, I’m not a machine. The sad thing is that the people sending me these messages act is if they are.
Can you relate? Do you market to human beings or machines?
This article is for informational purposes only. Being eaten by the GOOG monster is not something that you want to try at home. Please leave the handling of the GOOG monster to trained experts.
The GOOG Monster is a voracious beast that likes to prey on both the guilty and the innocent. The key to getting eaten by the GOOG monster is to give off the appropriate scent…the scent of website decay. If you really want to give this a shot (disregarding our disclaimer), you’ll need to know the appropriate smells to manufacture.
Here are 6 ways to attract the untamed wrath of the GOOG monster:
1. Syndicate your feed
The GOOG monster likes to eat tiny websites that syndicate their feed to bigger websites. So if you’re just starting out, syndicate your feed and make sure it gets picked up by an established feed syndicator. An alternative method is to attract the attention of dozens of splogs.
2. Change URL structure and help your users with a 301 redirect
The GOOG monster sniffs out 301 redirects from a mile away. A 301 is really just a temporary snack for the GOOG monster, and might be a good entry point for the uninitiated if you’re willing to be nibbled on for a while. The GOOG monster likes to nibble on sites with complete URL overhauls for a good 1-3 months. If you’re lucky, the GOOG monster will be satisfied and let you go after this time.
3. Get a new site design
Just as humans smell chemicals, the GOOG monster smells HTML code. When you get a new site design, you might notice how it looks much nicer, but the GOOG monster doesn’t care about looks. Nope. He notices that your code has undergone a radical change. The GOOG monster loves to devour change. A new site design often results in changes to 1) the location of your content in the code, 2) the structure of your title tag 3) the ratio of code to content 4) whether you have a META description 5) sitewide navigation links. All of these changes will bring out the GOOG monster for a feast.
There are really only 2 ways to beat the GOOG monster here. Either, trick the GOOG monster by mimicking your old code (keeping elements in their same locations) or build up enough stronghold defenses (i.e. become an authority) before hand to minimize the ability of the GOOG monster to take a bite out of your site.
4. Give editorial links to paid partners
The GOOG monster has seen a recent increase in his appetite for paid links. The GOOG Monster wants all paid links to himself. So be careful. He has sent out a brigade of sniffers whose sole task is to horde the paid editorial links of others for himself. The GOOG Monster wants to get fat, and his current strategy for plumping up the coffers centers around keeping all the paid links to himself.
5. Link out to your friends
Do you have friends with websites that are unrelated to your own? Do you link to your friends’ websites from your blogroll? The GOOG monster can smell this…but to the GOOG monster, it smells the same as a paid editorial link. And the GOOG monster’s favorite food are varieties of paid editorial links. So if you have a site about bowling and your sister has a site about girls & gadgets, think twice before linking to your sister’s website.
6. Link to a list of other sites from every page of your site
Haven’t heard of the is_home() function in WordPress? Well, the GOOG monster is glad, especially if your theme designer didn’t incorporate the function into your WordPress theme. The GOOG monster loves to snack on run-of-site links to external sites.
Ok. That’s my list. Can you help me make the list longer by offering more suggestions for feeding a hungry GOOG monster?
Keyword research is very important in the SEO game. Two of the most important search ranking factors are title tags and anchor text. However, these factors are useless unless you have relevant keywords. Relevant keywords should be in your title tags and anchor text so that you can rank highly and get more search traffic.
One benefit that I’ve noticed recently about keyword research is how it can make your blog more comprehensive. Oftentimes I find bloggers including myself getting into rut with about blog topics. We write about the same stuff without delving into other areas in our niche.
If I don’t do market research (which is what keyword research is), I find myself writing about what I like instead of what my market is searching for. It’s okay to write about our favorite topics. However, we should balance our blogs by also writing about the things our niche audience is thinking about. By doing this, we become a valuable resource and our monetization opportunities increase.
The key to good marketing is giving your audience what they want. Through keyword research, we can find out topics of interest within our niche that we’ve neglected.
Quick Example
Let’s look an example of this phenomenon. Let’s pretend I’ve started an SEO firm.
I’ve set up my website. I believe blogging is a great way to converse with my target audience, so I blog. I’ve written blog posts about keyword research, link building, and social media because in my mind, those are currently the most important aspects of SEO. Also, I like writing about those topics. However, if that’s all I blogged about, I would be missing out on profits and traffic.
So, I did some keyword research using Google’s Keyword Tool.
I typed in seo, made sure the “Use synonyms” box was checked, and then clicked “Get Keyword Ideas”.
The keyword tool spit out a bunch of keywords. I clicked “Avg Search Volume” to organize the keywords by search volume.
After glancing at the top keywords, I quickly came up with new SEO topics.
One of the keywords was search engine marketing. This phrase isn’t used as much as search engine optimization in the SEO blogosphere. However, the keyword tool said both keywords got the same amount of search volume. Therefore, I’ll write a couple blog posts about how SEO can get a valuable tactic in any business’ marketing plan. Also, I’ll talk about the relationship between marketing and SEO.
Here are two other keywords that I would not have thought about unless I did keyword research: search engine placement and search engine positioning. You don’t hear search marketers use the words placement or positioning. I’ll start using those two words in my blog posts. Also, I write articles based on those keywords. For example, I’ll write an article about reasons why the top SEO firms don’t guarantee search engine placements.
Surprisingly, search engine submission was a highly searched term. Search experts agree that search engine submissions are not needed anymore. I need to write posts about this subject to educate my audience.
As you can see, based on my keyword research, I’ve learned more about my target audience. I can speak at their level better because I know what they are searching for. My SEO blog will be more comprehensive because instead of just writing posts about topics I like, I’ll also be posting about what my audience is interested in.
Your Turn
Try out my exercise. Go to Google’s Keyword Tool. Type in a broad keyword that relates with your niche and see if you can find topics that you have neglected. Realize that people are actually searching for these keywords. By writing posts about them, you’ll be filling a need in your niche.
If you do this exercise, I’d like to hear your comments on how it worked out for you.
I’m more fortunate than many bloggers in that I was able to cultivate a very successful blog. Granted, I’m not earning thousands each month with it, but it’s enough for me to hire someone to help out and also put something aside to create other blogs. With a couple of thousand visitors each day, I do much better than most who blog about freelance writing.
I’m often asked how I built up my traffic, what methods worked for me. I always attribute my success to social networking. When I first began, I spread the word through various writing forums and traffic started to slowly trickle in. From there I began leaving thoughtful comments at other blogs. I didn’t drop links or get spammy, but I did enter my details into the signature line. Even more visitors stopped by. I began linking to other bloggers and they showed their love by linking to me in return. Soon I had 100 visitors, a couple of months later, 500. After about a year about 1000 people were visiting Freelance Writing Jobs and I was even starting to earn a bit from Adsense.
When I first began this blog, there wasn’t any Digging. Even then, my lists of job leads weren’t really Diggable anyway. My traffic mostly came by participating in forums and blogs for writers, work at home moms, freelancers and bloggers. The word spread because others began to consider FWJ an important resource for writers.
Nowadays I still visit the same forums and even more blogs. I also encourage others to network on my blog. I offer contests, such as the one going on now for the top commenter, and post a discussion topic every day. I made my blog a place for freelance writers to network. Now others come to my blog to socially network and drop their own links in the signature. As a result, I found some more cool places to go and share the link love. Many writers and bloggers now link to my discussion topics and it can get rather viral.
More than two years later I’m of the impression social networking is the single most important thing you can do to build traffic and create a buzz about your blog. Of course there are social media tools such as Digg and Stumble Upon to help you out, but many times they provide a one time spike in traffic. I’m of the impression that if you visit others, they’ll always return the favor, and if you provide useful input in forums, people will visit you often to see what else you have to say.
Following Seth Godin’s lead, Dee Barizo suggests that the most effective promotion is the promotion of others. He then proceeds to suggest three ingredients that will get others to promote you: great content, networking and time.
Personally, I think he nailed the trifecta. But it’s one thing to talk about these three things, it’s a completely different ballgame to execute strategies. So I thought it would be good to brainstorm some ideas in the comment section.
What do you think? What are some of the most effective ways to let others get your name/business/services out there?
How to track the blogosphere?
How will the PR industry react on those new challenges?
The classical gatekeeper role model must die!
Public Relations is still centered around the old gatekeeper role model because classic media works as a so called ‘relevance filter’ and like every filter can be manipulated in many ways. Offer free travel, transportation, invitations, etc. and you will most likely get friendly news coverage.
The blogosphere works totally different because of the viral character of hyperlinking information.
Let’s see why the gatekeeping theory is old media news only…
Definition: Gatekeeper role model
In human communication, in particular, in journalism, gatekeeping is the process through which ideas and information are filtered for publication. The internal decision making process of relaying or withholding information from the media to the masses. The theory was first instituted by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in 1947 and is still one of the most important theories studied by students of mass communication and journalism. Gatekeeping occurs at all levels of the media structure – from a reporter deciding which sources are chosen to include in a story to editors deciding which stories are printed, or even covered.
Source: Wikipedia Gatekeeping (communication)
Pito Salas from the BlogBridge team posted a Blog article and points out what are the three most relevant questions in the PR industry regarding the blogosphere.
It’s been quite interesting to hear how the ‘blogosphere’ is posing new challenges to Public Relations and Corporate Communications executives. Many of the tried and true ways of delivering a valuable service to clients don’t seem to be working anymore. In fact there are those out there that say that ‘traditional PR is dying”.
He is saying that there are three main fears inside the PR industry:
Read the full article. The trembling uncertainty within the PR industry is postulated here: Tracking the blogosphere (I shamelessly stole his great sub-title for my article title – Kudos)
- Blogs and/or the Internet have no gatekeeper function!
- A blog with 10 readers can go viral with bad news in minutes and receive 1,000s of hits just because somebody complained about a product and the story hits a viral nerve.
- Is reputation management still a PR task?
A really good PR representative must know when to start/stop to react in public or how to find a behind the scenes solution.
Setting up a working blog monitoring environment is time consuming and an art if you include a reputation management workflow.
Don’t ask for ‘the relevance of a blog’! Monitor the search sources instead.
From my comment
Offering a blog monitoring service is a nice business model now!
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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:
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?