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Posts Tagged ‘blogging’

8 Rules for Creating an Effective Blog Contest

Written by Brandon on February 13, 2008 – 6:41 am -

I have recently experimented with a number of Blog Contests for my site DesignCrack.com, and I’ve come away with a mixed experience on the effectiveness of blog contests. By the way, I think contests work really, really well to the point of being essential for building blog traffic. But, building an effective blog contest will first have to pass through a few questions.

Why would you want to run a blog contest?

The Wrong Answer: To get a massive quick traffic burst.
The Right Answer: To get a sustainable stream of people continually checking your site. Quick traffic bursts are like Britney Spears whereas a sustainable stream of people is more like the Beatles. That is to say, the sustainable stream actually has meaning and substance that affect their lives and keep them coming back for more where a quick traffic burst is fluff that becomes easily forgetable.

The Wrong Answer: To get more people signed up on the email newsletter. Although this is a nice bonus, it is not as helpful to your site as the right answer.
The Right Answer: To get more people actively participating in your site. I think a lot of bloggers are really looking at the short term goal getting people signed up. The signing up will come, but I suggest focusing on the end goal which should be to create something of strong value for the user by making their participation conclude with something for them.

by thomas_sly

How would you want to run a blog contest? Using the two tenets that I’ve set up above, I’ve developed a list of rules to follow when creating a contest that always refer back to the tenets.

• First, Find what it is that you are passionate about that a broad group of people are also extremely passionate about. For instance, I’ve made street art for years such as stickers and stencils. It turns out that there is a vast worldwide network of sticker enthusiasts who are passionate about what they do. I run a product design website, though. People are passionate about product design, but the barrier of entry for product design is high, so the number of people who are passionate and would participate in a design contest is far smaller than the number of people who are street art enthusiasts. So, I’ve tweaked my contest to incorporate this larger audience without completely losing focus on design.
• Second, make sure the contest is about something with substance. If you do a contest where you randomly select a winner of a prize for signing up for your newsletter, say, this won’t really drive people to tell other people about your site. If you run a contest where you ask people to submit their art works, people will respond and they will tell their friends to enter, first because people respond better to challenges rather than bribes, second because competing with people you know seems to be a human trait. Also, making a contest with substance drives people to create items of value for themselves even if they don’t win the contest. So, if you were to create a piece of art for a contest you now have another item for your portfolio. If you win the contest, you have something for your resume.
• Third, unless you are a well known authority, don’t make the barrier of participation too high. That is, make it relatively easy for people to enter and feel good about what they’ve contributed. For instance, if you were to run a design competition, you may want people to design a T-shirt instead of designing a piece of complex architecture. Nobody is going to spend the time designing a whole building unless you are a major publication like Architectural Record.
• Fourth, really think about who the audience for the contest is and pursue them vigorously where they congregate. Back to the art contest as an example. It turns out that there are tens of thousands of people who are members of street art groups on Flickr. In these groups, they share photos of their work and others work. So, if you were to only send out the contest announcement to your email newsletter alone, you might end up with zero entries. If you create a Flickr group for the contest, and then announce the contest to every art group and major contributors to those groups then you will be well on your way to creating a phenomenon. My current Fickr contest, for instance, has received 50 entries in 24 hours and will surely see exponential growth over the next few days because Flickr is the place to be for this contest and my site is not. However, you can easily link back to your site from the contest site.
• Fifth, never pay for a prize. This is something you will never ever have to do. You want to cross promote your blog and partner with someone. So, let’s say a PR person wants you to write a review of their art book for your blog. Ask for two copies. One to review and one to give away as a contest prize. Run a contest related to the book’s subject. This will make the PR person happy because they will get great exposure without a lot of work, and you get to offer cool free stuff in exchange for interacting with your site. If you don’t get that kind of offer, then approach the PR person first. They will often oblige with lots of free stuff.
• Sixth, consider having the audience be the judge of the contest. Having the audience judge can create a firestorm of activity for your site because when a person enters the contest, they will surely notify all of their friends to vote for their work. Yes, this degrades the contest to be based on popularity, but that’s why you might have a people’s choice award as well as a judge’s award. This will maintain the impartiality the participants crave and still allow for a popularity contest to exist on the side.
• Seventh, give props to as many participants as you can. Let’s say you have 100 entries and only one prize to give away. Then I would suggest making 19 “verbal prizes” as well as one grand prize. The verbal prizes are where you call out a person’s design for a particularly wonderful trait without actually giving them the prize. Even the acknowledgement of a job well done will keep people coming back for future contests.
• Eighth, thank everyone profusely for participating and bait them with the next competition. Anyone that’s going to spend the time to enter your contest needs some sort of recognition even if it’s thanking everyone. Don’t forget to do this.

Next week, I will cover specific techniques and technology you can use to build a strong blog contest.

Tags: blogging, contests, flickr, groups
Posted in Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic | No Comments »

Building Blog Traffic: Optimizing for Google Image Search

Written by Brandon on January 4, 2008 – 5:15 am -

Here is something I noticed a year ago that completely blew me away: blogs that have lots of images get half or more of their search traffic from their images. This means if your images are not indexing on your image rich site, then you may be potentially missing an opportunity to double your search traffic. But, getting your images indexed by Google is a complete mystery even to the most seasoned webmasters as the forum chatter suggests. So, in the next few paragraphs I will help you figure out if your images are indexing on Google, and if they are not indexing then how you might get them indexed on Google, so you too can be well on your way to doubling your search traffic.

The geekiest Halloween costume ever: A Google Image Search (photo by Jacob Lodwick)

First, be aware that Google has a separate image crawler that crawls your site for images. You cannot include an image site map on your site telling Google when and where to find new images like you can for the written content. The image crawler just comes buy whenever it can which is not very often. Images are much more data intensive than text, so Google really takes its time getting around to your site. Also, if your site is slow, then the Google image crawler will skip over your site completely and not come back for a long, long time.

But before we get in too deep, let’s see if your images are indexing. It’s as simple as going to images.google.com and typing in “site:http://yoursite.com” ( replace yoursite.com with your blog’s own URL) . If no images come up then you’ve got a problem.

There are a few things you will need to do to make sure your images are indexing.

• First, you should make sure that there is no meta tag in the head of your web page that tells the web crawlers to exclude images from being indexed. If there is, then get rid of the tag.
• Next, you should make sure that there is no line in your robots.txt file telling web crawlers to exclude images from being indexed. If there is, then get rid of the line that excludes images. For more about robots.txt check out the links I’ve included.
• Then, you will need to make sure each image has a very descriptive title attribute in the <img> tag. The title want to be very descriptive in 10 words or less.

If you have done all of this, and you’ve waited a few weeks for Google’s extremely slow crawler, then you have a much more difficult problem to troubleshoot. But, there is still hope! Chances are that your site is too slow for Google to efficiently crawl. I know it may seem OK to you, but to Google it is just too slow. What you are going to have to do next is speed up the delivery of the site to Google. I’ve found that the simplest and most effective technique is to cache the web pages. Caching pages is essentially a technique where your blog software creates a temporary copy of a web page that does not change too much so that the blog does not have to go back and forth to the database. Caching can dramatically speed up your site, and if your use a Wordpress blog, a there is a great caching plugin called WP-Cache that is a must for your site. After I installed the caching plugin for Wordpress on one of my own sites I very soon got major traffic from Google Images. I also tried turning it off and on for a few days at a time and found that there was a definite correlation with caching and the Google image crawler indexing my site.

If none of this works, then it may be time to start from scratch on another blog software that will guarantee image indexing. I’m afraid I’m out of ideas.

Finally, I want to point out an interesting way using Google Image Search to find out where you stand in blog domination. I run an interior design blog which is somewhat popular but no where close to the most popular design blogs such as mocoloco.com. I decided to see how I stood up to the big guys by doing a simple test to see how many images of chairs each of us had indexed. So I put in “site:designcrack.com/v2 chairs” and “site:mocoloco.com chairs” . What I had found is that I had a total of 120 different chair images which I thought was a very respectable amount of chair posts for little old me. But, mocoloco.com had a total of nearly 13,000 chair images to choose from. This immediately said to me that I will not be playing with the big blogs unless I make a full time commitment to my blogging craft. A couple of posts per day simply cannot compare.

Tags: blogging, google image search, image crawler, mocoloco.com, robot.txt
Posted in Analysis, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, SEO | 2 Comments »

Blog Interviews: A Surprisingly Traditional Way to Build Massive Blog Traffic

Written by Brandon on December 22, 2007 – 10:36 pm -

Probably one of the biggest boosts that you can create for your blog is by conducting interviews with people in your field. You are probably thinking, “That’s so traditional, how could this such a successful method to build traffic?” In the next few paragraphs I hope to prove to you that interviews may potentially be the best way to build traffic. (Just as a quick example, interviews I’ve done in the past have usually grown my audience by a bump of fifty sustained visitors to the blog which adds up over the course of twenty interviews.) And after I’ve convinced you of its benefits I hope to give you a road map of how to conduct and leverage your interview into a continuous moneymaker. But now, for why this method is so powerful:

photo by laffy4k

People want to read about real world case studies because it inspires them.

I know when I hear an interview with an entrepreneur in my field that has made a successful and established business of what he or she created I am listening intently. This information is gold not only because the interview can give me new tips and ideas, but also because I learn what the interview subject went through emotionally to get where he or she got.

Your interviewee will enjoy the PR boost that they get from your interview, and in turn, let all of their friends, customers and potential customers know about.

In basic terms, doing interviews is also about trading audiences. You give the interviewee your audience, and the interview subject gives you her audience when she sends out an email to all of her contacts telling her audience to listen to or read the interview. It’s really a beautiful marriage.

An interview creates a more intimate relationship which you may be able to leverage in the future.

Speaking of beautiful marriage, if the interview is well received and generates business for the both of you, then you will feel like you’ve both given and received something valuable which is a great way to establish a strong relationship. This relationship may in the future lead to sponsorship of the blog or other favors.

An interview is a solid piece of data that you can incorporate and repackage into several forms.

Interviews can be used to make a podcast and a blog post, but of utmost importance is it can make multiple podcasts and blog posts. Interviews can often be extended into four or five parts with each new part gaining greater and greater anticipation by the audience. Give the audience a taste with the first podcast, and keep them wanting more by telling them what they’ll miss in the next podcast. Beyond this, interviews are great material for case studies in books or ebooks.

An interview helps create a legitimate brand.

If your brand is not established, an interview with someone whose brand is established will start to legitimize your blog. For instance, if I ran a small political blog, and I somehow landed an audio interview with Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House in the U.S., then I would surely be on my way to creating a legitimate brand, and seen as someone who has access to important people. If your niche is very narrow like sock knitting, then legitimizing your brand would include interviews with famous yarn manufacturers whose brands your audience would be familiar with.

photo by Matt Forsythe

Now you know why you’d want to do an interview, what about how to perform an interview? I’ve create a list of five short points that will get you on the road to making an interview with an eye for creating maximum traffic for your site. I don’t tell you how to improve your interview skills or how to record an interview, but at the end of the article I will list a number of resources to help improve your interviewing skills and techniques.

• First, identify your interviewee. You should speak with her at least once to evaluate her a two main criteria: authority and personality. You want to evaluate does she know what she’s talking about and can answer in an engaging manner. Now, Let’s say you’ve identified your first interview and she has agreed to the interview. What next?
• Second, prepare a list of questions. These questions should, in my opinion, be biased towards the subject, focused on the interviewee’s area of expertise, and be framed from the perspective of your audiences interests. I would start with a list of ten questions, but if you’re familiar with the interviewee then you can develop more detailed questions as well. Definitely email these questions well in advance of your interview to give the interviewee time to prepare. As well, I suggest you ask the subject to create any of her own questions that she might find pertinent to the conversation. Make sure, as well, that the subject know who your audience is and that she should frame her answers specifically for your audience.
• Third, conduct the interview. There are two styles of interviews I like and only two: The recorded interview and the email interview. I do not prefer the face to face interview where I take notes because of the amount of work and the accuracy which I can record. The recorded interview is the best type of interview because you can distribute this content in several media types, and it’s really the simplest method for the interviewee to participate in. All they have to do is show up and talk. The email interview, however, takes much more writing commitment on the part of the subject, but it is much less work for you. This is a great type of interview, though, if you just want a quick, short bit of information. I list a bunch of resources at the end of the post.
• Fourth (this is crucial), urge your interview subject to email all of her contacts to be sure that they read your interview. You may even want to craft a letter for them as a go by. Also, ask the interviewee to please do a press release announcing their interview as well as publishing it on their own company newsletter. What you are aiming for is to get maximum exposure to an audience that is completely familiar with the interview subject but may have never heard of your blog or podcast.
• Fifth, keep in contact with the interview subject. I would ask her if you could put her on your email mailing list. If you maintain the relationship then you may want even ask her to become a sponsor of the blog at some point. At this level in your relationship, the interview subject may even be a booster for your website and could be much more easily convinced to become your sponsor.

If you are able to follow these five steps, then I think you will really be able to maximize the interview to its fullest revenue potential. To recap, I’ve broadly covered why interviews are important and how to maximize interviews for your podcast or blog, the next step would be to look at some of the skills needed to create a good interview. The resources listed below should be a great start:

• General Guidelines for Conducting Interviews
  
• How To Conduct A Successful Phone Interview
• Get the great book: The Art of the Interview
• About.com’s Guide to Conducting a Podcast Interview
• Podcasting Made Simple

Tags: advice, blog, blogging, Blogs, internet, interviews, podcasting, questions, search engine marketing, sem, SEO, tips
Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, Podcasts, SEO | 11 Comments »

Building Blog Traffic: Using Flickr

Written by Brandon on December 16, 2007 – 4:48 am -

Flickr is an online photo sharing website that also has a strong social element to browsing photos. Like most social websites, Flickr has strong social tools such as Flickr’s Contacts, Blogging Capabilities, Groups, and Tags. Using these capabilities to their fullest extent is paramount to gaining traffic to your site from Flickr. I can say that if the content and posts are well done, then you may be able to drive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site in no time. I will explain exactly how to drive traffic to your site, but first I wanted to give you a scenario: Let’s say your site is on the subject of architecture and you use Wordpress. Also in this scenario, it’s crucial to use a plugin called FeedWordPress which is a tool that lets you post RSS feeds as individual posts on your blog. I’ll explain why a tool like this is important in a moment. Now that we have a premise, let’s use Flickr to the Max!

• Before you start blogging, I suggest you put up a bunch of photos on Flickr that is of your blog subject. Then join as many groups as you can find when searching for your subject. Keep in mind that your subject may fit within literally dozens of groups and will be seen by thousands of people. I also like to start making everyone in groups I like a contact of mine. When these people are contacts, it means your photos will show up on their page and they will check out your stuff. So, in the end, you may have thousands of contacts.
• Then: Uploading a picture and writing out the tags. I’m going to assume you already have an account on Flickr and that you’ve already managed to figure out how to upload pictures. During the upload phase is probably the most important phase of this exercise. When you upload a picture you are given two forms: tags and description. (HINT) In the tags form, I like to write as many tags to describe a photograph as possible. This will make it much easier for people to find your photograph, which they will. You are allowed up to 75 tags and if you can use them all then do that. You might not want to write all these tags out every time, so I use a text file to keep all my most used comma separated tags. Finally, don’t forget to add one tag with your website’s name. You’ll know why you add this in a moment.
• Next, there is the description form. This description will eventually become the text of your blog post. I tend to write a description that is maybe a couple of hundred words long with many keywords to describe the photo. At the End of the description I write “you can find more photos like this at www.mysitename.com” which will show up as a link in the description.
• Now that the photo is uploaded, tagged, and described, you will want to add the photo to the appropriate groups on Flickr. Let’s say you have an architecture blog, for instance, there are possibly dozens of groups you could add your photo to. Add this photo to as many groups as possible.
• If you would like to go one step further, you could even add a location to your photo which will make your data that much more easy to find. I personally don’t tend to see much benefit from this.
• Now, you’ve possibly created a great deal of buzz for your photo or at least exposed the photo to potentially thousands of viewers. Next, you want to get the photo on your blog as a post. I do this by using Flickr’s awesome and very flexible RSS feeds. With Flickr, you can literally choose an RSS feed for one of your tags. Here’s an example of a feed for my “baby” tag. So, all photos for your website should have a tag with the name of your website. Then, you can create an RSS feed just for the photos for the website.
• Using the plug-in mentioned before called FeedWordPress, I can import each feed item as an individual post on my website. What happens is that the website just updates itself. Pretty Spiffy!

FeedWordPress Screenshot: Adding a feed to your blog

To recap, I’ve shown you how to:

1. build an audience on Flickr for your photograph
2. link that photograph back to your website
3. turn the photograph and description into an automatic post using Wordpress

I also wanted to point out that you can track your photo’s popularity because Flickr tells you how many times your phot was viewed. So, you can kind of figure out a photo’s click through rate by checking your referrals from Flickr in your stats compared to Flickrs “times viewed” stat. Some more great resources include:

• DoshDosh’s Flickr Tutorial
• SEO Roundtable’s Flickr Experiment

Tags: blogging, building traffic, flickr, web traffic
Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic | No Comments »

Starting a For-Profit Blog Part 1: Research Your Niche

Written by Brandon on December 14, 2007 – 3:52 pm -

As I mentioned in a previous article, there are a number of online businesses that you can build your wealth from. I’ve listed the businesses from least risky to most risky, and today I’m starting with the least risky which I will call the media company. Media Companies would be composed of such businesses as blogs, podcasts, video blogs, news agregators, and even things like how-to sites and fan sites. Their primary money making opportunities include:

• Advertising
• E-book Sales
• Premium Content
• Fan Sales
• Affiliate Sales

Let’s take the most common business as the very beginning starting point: the blog. How do you start a business? I will give you broad steps at first, and then cover specifics in later articles.

Phase One: research your niche topic

Before even starting the blog you should choose a handful of niche topics that you are interested in. Let’s say you’ve chosen bicycling. Now, you will want to start to search for bicycling in Google’s Blog Search or at Technorati to find out what bicycle blogs are popular. Next, you will want to write down a number of blogs on your topic.

I then like to go to Alexa and compare blogs in my niche to blogs in very popular niches to see how they stack up. So, for instance, here is a link to two very popular design blogs and Engadget which is arguably the most popular blog in the world. What this might start telling you after doing a bunch of searches is that tech gadgets are more popular or that Engadget has some features that could be better done in your niche. There is a lot to infer which I can help with in future posts.

Also, I highly suggest using Google Trends to start to see if your niche is a heavily searched topic compared to other topics. A simple starting point is to check the trend on “cycling” versus a random topic like maybe “jewelry” and a topic you know must be popular like “ipod”. What you find is that iPod is, in-fact, a much more popular search term, and surprisingly, jewelry is much more popular than cycling. This might give you more insight as to what topic you want to blog about based on its overall popularity. Maybe jewelry is better than cycling. This might also clue you in on topics that people often search for, but no good media outlet has developed for that topic.

Regardless of what your searches begin to tell you, do something you like. Again, this is just scratching the surface of how you might prepare for your blog, but I will cover more in the near future. AT least this gives you a simple base for how you might choose your topic.

Tags: blogging, Blogs, business, entrepreneurship
Posted in Blogs, Creating Wealth, Fundamentals, Starting a Business | No Comments »