Philoking.com

If you are like me, you watch your blog stats like a hawk. You probably have several sources that you use for gathering your information and you contemplate and toil over the results and calculations endlessly.

Well my friend, if you run a blog, let me simplify things for you quite a bit. The sheer page hits will come. While they are important, it’s time you stop thinking about quantity and start thinking about quality.

Source Matters
So today you’re hottest article on widgets made the front page of Digg. You had 20,000 page views in a matter of hours. You pour yourself a cold beer and log into Google Analytics to see what’s up. You see your huge spike in your traffic and take a big chug of that beer. Now do me a favor, look at your bounce rate. I bet it’s in the 90s right? Digg readers are, in my experience, on your page for about 30 seconds, they comment on Digg instead of your site, and they rarely ever view another page on your website. Let’s call Diggers the “Channel Flippers” of the Internet. Now if you were about to bank your new product on a TV commercial, would you put it on a show that people watch to the end, including commercials…or the show that they watch between commercials? That’s many of the social bookmarking sites in a nutshell.

You are going to get a bunch of traffic from search engines. That’s good traffic and you want it, but those guys are usually as attention deficit as the social guys. The traffic you want comes in two categories. The people you want are:

• The people who subscribe to your website
• The people who comment on your website

These people are most likely to come from sources they already know. This means it’s important to make yourself known, and considered an authority on your topic, on websites that serve similar content.

The more comments you leave, the more you will get, I guarantee it.

Communication is Key
I email other bloggers all the time. I could have a dozen reasons: an idea for collaboration, complimenting their site, asking a quality question and introducing myself. I will take a moment to say that it’s a good idea to understand your level, and communicate with your peers until you are further along. If you started your blog two weeks ago, don’t email Leo Laporte and ask him to guest post. If you see a site online with a similar page rank, content type and general traffic and comments, by all means email them and start a dialog. It doesn’t matter if it’s a text link exchange, a guest post, an article republish or just an icebreaker, make that connection. You will find even the upper echelon of bloggers to be uniquely approachable.

Be Your Own Publicist
If you aren’t out telling people how awesome your blog is, it’s likely no one else will either. Don’t be a jerk about it, but when you write a great article, don’t be afraid to send it to an expert on the subject and ask them for an opinion. More often than not they will leave a great comment on your site that’s totally on topic.

Respect The Community
The last one is common sense. The blogosphere is as approachable as it is because there is a general attitude among all but the most elitist of the group. The main concept is that links are king. If you have valuable content that I think people are going to read, I want you to link to me. In turn I will find a way to link to you when it’s appropriate. Don’t expect a one for one every time. Don’t link someone while expecting an immediate link back. A content provider is only as good as his integrity. Blindly linking anyone for anything will piss off your readers and eventually toss your reputation with the search engines.

Final Thoughts
I am sure if you made it this far you are thinking, “Jason, this is all common sense stuff, I knew it already!” Well, yes, I bet you do. I forget it all the time. Sometimes when I am toiling away trying to grow this monster I call Philoking.com, I get distracted from the main reason I do this and think things like, “If I had 100,000 hits a day I could make hundreds of bucks a month!” The important thing to think about is this. Very few professional bloggers set out to be professional bloggers. I started this site because I love to communicate with like minded people. The conversations and friends I have made through this website have been priceless to me. Sure it would be awesome to pay a mortgage with Adsense revenue, but I always remind myself that I would be doing this if it didn’t make a penny.

I will leave you with a cartoon and quote from Avinash Kaushik from Occam’s Razor:

Remarkable as in being noticed, being worth of a remark, as in “let’s give ‘em something to talk about“, being the first, the best, the really trying hard and then waking up in the morning and trying some more.

Being remarkable will make you a X…..

and the rest of us will be Y’s.

100 million plus blogs. Be you. Be remarkable. x is will be the outcome.

Good luck, may the force be with you!

Well said….and good luck to all.

If you want to collaborate, don’t be afraid to email me. I answer all of them.

MyBlogLog is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it gives you fantastic up to the minute site usage information for a economical $3 per month fee, and a curse because it causes you to always second guess what you are doing, what you are writing about, and how other services are accounting against your site traffic.

I have previously written about the disparity between Google Adsense‘s accounting of ad clicks vs. MyBlogLog’s outgoing click counts. But with that aside, (and today it’s a 18-3 deficit!) MyBlogLog’s accounting of search terms can easily, and in my case does, leave a content writer and website owner quite confused about what to write to maintain a connection with his or her most popular readers.

Today alone I have over 250 unique incoming searches from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live and the like. I say unique because many of them have 2-3 searches on exact like search terms. When you consider each search has an average of 3 keywords, that’s 750 non-unique terms to sift through to determine what is most popular on my website today. That leaves me to judge the content that was viewed and determine how I can possibly alter or re-write more relevant content keep those readers on my site longer.

This week I listened to Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, talk about the long tail, and how to purchase Adwords to convert those viewers to customers. In the blog world viewers are customers as well, but in my case, a conversion is getting those readers to read more of my site, and potentially click a relevant ad. So how do we do this? By using a lesser considered side of SEO, (Search Engine Optimization) tailoring articles prior to posting to capitalize on organic search results from major search engines.

The first thing to do is to take a look your articles. In this case we will investigate the top 10 articles on my website today that have had less than 20 page views each.

• 2007/ 05/ 22/ world- of- warcraft- on- vista- tips- 2
• 2007/ 06/ 25/ tversity- ps3- perfect- streaming- media- player
• 2007/ 10/ 27/ os- x- leopard- time- machine- seems- unstable
• 2007/ 11/ 07/ get- dvds- onto- your- ipod- touch- for- free
• 2007/ 10/ 10/ iphone- ipod- touch- games- and- apps- no- hacking
• 2007/ 10/ 30/ mac- os- x- leopard- after- a- week- spaces- is- the- killer- app
• 2007/ 10/ 29/ ipod- touch- and- iphone- dont- play- nice- with- apple- wifi- sharing
• 2007/ 01/ 28/ missing- dvd- rw- bug- in- windows- vista
• 2007/ 10/ 29/ the- dark- side- jailbreaking- the- ipod- touch
• 2006/ 11/ 08/ amazing- 3d- icons- huge- gallery- for- web- and- application- developers

So let’s point out a few things about these articles and how we can capitalize on their existing popularity, and make them not only grow in popularity themselves, but also grow popularity of other existing articles and new articles on similar topics.

I am using a related posts plug in for WordPress that does a decent job, but it’s not bullet proof. In doing some simple analytics on these articles I can find some interesting trends. Despite being nearly 6 months old World of Warcraft on Vista is still a hot topic. Perhaps instead of writing more on this topic, or simply modifying my existing article with more current information, links to other relevant information and editing the copy to be more aware of the keywords I have seen in my analytics data would better capitalize on this articles existing "Google Juice," and provide more kick than writing a new article from scratch. Sure blog articles are date stamped, but who said they have to be static, right?

All of us bang out quick blogs, but if you look at a blog as more of a rough draft, consider that you can and should be your own editor and try to maintain the utmost quality on your blog posts instead of writing and forgetting.

Notice that of these articles, four of them are in reference to the iPod Touch. I see, if I view these articles quickly, that my related posts plug in does a decent job of finding these articles, but that’s not enough. Consider editing your copy to include relevant and timely internal links to these articles. Don’t spam your own articles, but make sure that in appropriate places, you mention the topic and how it’s related to the current topic. In this case it would create three alternate places your reader can go within your own site in case the reader closes the browser after scrolling to the bottom of the article and no further.

Of course there are instances where writing a new article is prudent and even necessary, but do not consider your articles to be dead upon posting. Let them take on a life of their own and be sure to pay attention to them after they have had their initial life expectancy on Digg, Stumble or the like.

The last case I want to mention is the final article in my top 10. Web and Application Developer icons. This article is over a year old. It’s still getting quite a few page views so what do I do? My idea in this case is to write a "Top 10" or "Hot Places" to download icons and be sure that I have created a h1 or h2 sized link to this article at the very beginning of this article. In this case I don’t want to be subtle, I have gotten this reader’s attention initially, now I want to show them that I have understood what they are looking for and gathered a more valuable collection of information for them since this article was written.

Of course it will take me days to put these ideas into effect. But if you want to really see how it works, consider trying some of Google Analytics nifty Conversion Goals to see how it really does work. In the case of the Icons article, I could create a goal to see how many people initially came for the old article, and ended up on the new one.

All of these ideas truly are common sense, but if you put them into practice religiously, you will find that you can turn your less common readers into your most popular.

This was a very interesting last two days for me. Wednesday I flew down to San Francisco and was driven over to meet some of the folks at Google, Inc.

I know that for me even, Google had a very interesting reputation as a place to work. While Non-disclosure agreements make some things impossible to disclose, I can tell you that as a geeky guy, this place was a lot of fun to be at.

There are so many things to tell that I will try to summarize and get to the main points of some of the coolest things and not dwell on heated toilet seats….yes, heated toilet seats.

Google is a quite sprawling campus. For most of the time we were on the side with the Analytics and Consumer Packaged Goods teams so we were only at the main campus for a short time but that was enough to see why people would want to work there. It’s enough time to make you wonder why people would ever leave. It’s a very college like atmosphere and at a different time in my life I would have already sent in an application and never left!

Google has some interesting principles about work load and creativity. The entire place is meant to make you as comfortable and by that as productive as possible. Food everywhere, snacks, drinks, entertainment, you name it.

I met around a dozen team members and while everyone was very nice, several of the engineers and one guest speaker really were impressive to me. Our lunchtime speaker was Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik. I had never heard of him before, but I left there in search of his book. Be sure to check out his blog for more information, he is a really smart guy with some very succinct thoughts on optimizing and marketing your site.

Dennis Domingo had some really interesting things to show related to Google Earth and Maps, and Brett Goffin really showed me Google’s commitment to being a true advertising powerhouse, not a search engine specialist.

I wish I could tell more about what’s going on, but secrecy is what it is, on to some cool things.

• Employees are always within 100′ of free food and drinks
• Free on site laundry facilities
• Google employees get 20% of their work time to work on personal projects
• Did I mention heated toilet seats? lol
• Macbook Pro and Thinkpad power adapters built into the conference tables
• Free WiFi (obviously)
• Concerts on campus
• Play centers with everything from pool to legos.

That’s by no means an exhaustive list, but gives you an idea of the working environment. The thing that I have to mention is, the people.

If the environment is what breeds the people, it’s working. Every employee I met was bright, articulate, friendly, and simply brilliant. I have not had a more enjoyable time visiting a company that I can remember.

I am sure I will continue to communicate with a few of the people I met there and I really appreciate the experience.