by Josh Auriemma on June 2, 2009
I’ve been running into something of a crisis lately. I have all this “social media pull” where I can drive thousands of users without a problem, and it turns out that this ability may only be minorly useful to any of my blogs. Why? Well, I run a few blogs and none of them really lend themselves well to exploiting social media. What I need is to get hits from people interested in SEO, SEM, or blogging.
I read an article on ProBlogger a few days ago recommending StumbleUpon as a cheap source of traffic. The cool thing about StumbleUpon is that users come right to your page, so you don’t have to worry about an advertisement or anything. They’re actually there! The bad thing about StumbleUpon is the keyword system. Being poor and cautious, I put $5 into my StumbleUpon ad account, and I signed one of my posts up for the SEO category. After 12 hours or so, I had 3 hits. Too slow, I thought to myself. Maybe I should sign the same post up for the “blog” category. After getting my campaign approved, it took around 2 minutes for me to think to myself, “Wait, maybe people in the blog category aren’t interested in the content of that post.” That was an epiphany that would have been slightly more useful a few minutes prior because by that point, the entirety of my $5 was used up with seemingly no payoff.
So the moral of the story is: advertising can be relatively cheap traffic, but make sure you’re marketing to the right audience. I think many of us newbies have a gut feeling to target the maximum number of people as possible when we should really be striving for relevance with respect to visitors. Apparently I should have stayed within the SEO category.
Live and learn.
by Josh Auriemma on June 1, 2009
Can you see the box above this text? If so, take note of it because it’s the subject matter of this post.
This is something of an advanced subject for this blog, but I had to get it out into the blog world since I’m kicking myself for not realizing it sooner.
So I run a blog read primarily by law students and it’s been difficult to figure out how to monetize it. What do law students need to buy? Highlighters, maybe. Maybe some textbooks, but I don’t know that I want to be a one-stop-shop for textbooks.
A while back I wrote a post that had little to do with the subject of the website and more to do with one of my hobbies. The post was linked by Kotaku and some other major gaming blogs, and that post soon became the #1 search result for several very popular Google searches relating to the game.
That was 6 months ago and while the blog traffic from Google and those other blogs isn’t what it used to be, I still pull in a good 500 hits per day just on those keywords. I had never taken advantage of the traffic until today when I had an epiphany.
Why Don’t I Sell Stuff Through WP Greet Box?
I wasn’t sure if WP Greet Box could be used in such a way, I actually just installed it last night, but I knew that the box got past adblock and was in a great place to greet my readers. After some tweaking, everyone coming to my website with the game’s name in the slug (including Google searches) was greeted with a personalized message asking them to buy the game’s expansion through my Amazon Affiliate link if they hadn’t yet purchased it. In 6 months, I never sold a single game through my affiliate banner on my sidebar, and tonight I’ve already sold 2 games.
I bet you want to get started, right? The first step is to install WP Greet Box on your WordPress blog. Now let’s say that you’re selling widgets, and you’ve already been linked from joshauriemma.com/check-out-this-widget-site, and you’re also starting to get some Google traffic about widgets. [click to continue . . .]
by Josh Auriemma on May 30, 2009
I promised that the other half of the blog would be a review of the prior week’s performance, and a discussion about why it performed well or not-so-well.
As you can see, blog traffic this week was up about 2677%. Can’t really complain about that. From now on I’ll be keeping logs in the sidebar for easy reference.
This isn’t necessarily a success story, unfortunately. The majority of this traffic came from digg.com during my Wednesday push at social media. I didn’t make the front page, but I did end up with a lot of views, and I don’t think many viewers were converted. I figure that if I do make the front page though, even if I only convert 1% of the viewers into subscribers, that’s a pretty substantial number, so I’ll make a stab again next Wednesday at hitting the front page of Digg / reddit.
PageRank also went from unlisted to 0, to 3 later on in the week. Interestingly, I’m not noticing any increase in people finding the page via Google. What I am noticing is that people are finding the page for the right keywords now as opposed to before when they were finding it for such keywords as “nazi suit.” I think the problem now is that I’m competing with a lot of very well-established webpages for the keywords that I’ve settled on, so it’s going to be an uphill battle unless I start to carve a niche within seo and blogging. I’ll have to ponder that for a while.
There are also two more techniques that I used this week to get this relatively large bump in traffic, but they’re the subject of two posts this week, so I don’t want to spoil it. Hopefully you’ll subscribe to my feed and check them out as soon as they’re posted so that you can consider using these (very helpful) techniques on your own blog.
by Josh Auriemma on May 29, 2009
[podcast]http://www.joshauriemma.com/podcasts/1-link-love.mp3[/podcast]
Podcast Notes
- Improving traffic: social media, improving your PageRank
- Avoid endorsing or giving PageRank away via links with the rel=”nofollow” tag.
- Example: <a href=”http://joshauriemma.com” rel=”nofollow”> means that you’re giving a link to me so that users can click it, but it tells Google not to give me an PageRank.
- free link exchange – find websites whose readers would enjoy your content and offer to give them a link if they’ll link you on their website.
- Avoid sounding spammy – be sincere.
- Taking my own advice by using WordPress plugins to implement nofollow tags.
- WordPress plugins
- Nofollow Blogroll SEO
- Does nothing to blogroll on the main page, but adds nofollow tags to the blogroll on all other sub-pages. That way you’re only sharing your PageRank from your main URL.
- Nofollow Reciprocity
- Lets you add links to your posts as usual, and will add nofollow tags to major websites who don’t need your PageRank.
Thanks for listening!
I’ve been running into something of a crisis lately. I have all this “social media pull” where I can drive thousands of users without a problem, and it turns out that this ability may only be minorly useful to any of my blogs. Why? Well, I run a few blogs and none of them really lend themselves well to exploiting social media. What I need is to get hits from people interested in SEO, SEM, or blogging.
