Philoking.com

You have read all of the articles by bloggers who claim to be making tons of money. You have read all about the tips and tricks that will grow your blog from nothing to rock star in months. You have probably even seen a hundred companies online that promise to get you a massive readership and kick ass Google page rank. This blog post is a reality check for those of you with stars in your eyes thinking that you can make your way through this economic madness as a professional blogger.

Let’s start with a few things we can take as fact:

1. No matter how unique you think your subject is, there are at least a dozen blogs that already cover it.
2. Even before the economy started pulling back advertising dollars, online advertising was predicted to be only 1/10th of advertising revenue by 2011.

So what does that tell us? That you are going to be jumping in a big pool of already established bloggers that are all fighting for that same tiny slice of the pie.

There are also a few things that you should know about what is really required to run a successful blog:

1. Blogging is incredibly time consuming. Blogs that are successful have a steady stream of high quality content, build and communicate with a community of readers and are very active in the community with other sites that share their interests.
2. You need to be a good writer. If you don’t intelligently share your message, your readers won’t come back. If you can’t write with a compelling style while also using good form and grammar, you should probably reconsider.
3. Maintaining a blog requires a deep knowledge of web development. Sure you can pay someone to do the dirty work, but considering your blog is likely to make a quarter to a buck a day for quite some time, you are probably going to be your own developer.

The point here is it’s a lot of hard work and requires that you have personality, style, skill and knowledge. You can forget WordPress.com, Blogger, Live Spaces, etc. Running a successful professional blog means learning about hosting, blog engines, feeds, subscriptions, search engine optimization, online advertising strategies, writing, proof reading, editing, image manipulation, promoting and selling your blog. This isn’t a get rich quick scheme no matter what you might have read.

Let that sink in for a minute. Why would I be telling you not to start a blog? I am not saying it because I don’t want the competition. I make a buck or two on a good day, maybe $10 on a stellar day. I don’t do this for a living and the Google checks are infrequent enough where I usually don’t even notice when I get them.

I am setting some realistic expectations for all of my friends that have looked at the possibility of job loss and said, “maybe I should start blogging, then I could work from home.”

I am willing to go out on a limb here and say that less than 1% of blogs, not counting the personal blogs on the many services, but 1% of blogs intended to make money, make more than a fry cook at McDonalds.

Now let me add a disclaimer. If you have an awesome idea, great writing talent and the time and patience to get it started and grow it, blogging is a lot of fun and can really be rewarding even if it’s not financially successful. I have made friends all over the world blogging. I enjoy communicating with my readers and enjoy writing.

The important thing is to go into it with realistic expectations and not start blogging as a way to replace a career. Blogging is something you do parallel to another career and do professionally when you realize that your blog is successful enough to support you and your family.

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.

Are you a blogger based in Boise Idaho? If so I would love to talk to you. I have spent the greater part of the day scouring Google to the far ends of the search universe to try and find some great Boise based blogs and as it stands I have found less than half a dozen.

While that is definitely a start, I find it hard to believe that such a tech savvy city is so short on blogs! Of the half dozen most of them are political or religious topics. I don’t really care what your site topic is, or the popularity of your blog. The point here is to make contacts that can help everyone grow. My site is currently reaching over 20,000 unique visitors per month and I am only just getting started.

If you have a a blog, contact me right away! My idea is to start with some coffee shop meetups, possibly some lunch or dinner meets, do some shared podcasts to brainstorm ideas and then see where it goes. Let’s see who is interested!

Search engine algorithms are top secret. I would be willing to bet that only a very select few really understand how they work within their own companies. I have been fighting the good fight and have had incredible results with search engine optimization on Philoking.com, but only recently have I discovered a serious flaw in my personal branding, and it has brought to light some inconsistencies in the algorithms that provide results.

I could be way off base here, but at least in my opinion, Google, Yahoo and Live Search are the three most popular search engines. Recently I have began monitoring vanity searches on those services with the terms “Philoking” and “Jason Burns.”

Now this site is no gangbuster of traffic, sure I get tens of thousands of unique visitors a month and my Google Page Rank is 4 and growing, but it’s no monster site, that’s for sure. Never the less, I would hope that many cases would find it higher in relevant search results and especially in the case of Yahoo and Live, they do not.

I will disclose that I spend the majority of my time tailoring to Google, but I do submit sitemaps to the other two and would expect similar results. If you go to the top three and search “Philoking,” I am in the following places:

	Google	Yahoo	Live!
Rank	1	1	3

No big surprises here, on Live! I am bested by my own Flickr profile twice on Live! before my domain which matches the keyword 100% ironically, makes the cut.

My name is completely different though, look at these results.

	Google	Yahoo	Live!
Rank	3	12	7
Top Result	bbbburns.com	Myspace	Hoya burns

So recently I ran a question on Linkedin.com to get some suggestions for how to raise my branding on my own name and I got some great answers. I have implemented these suggestions and will see how they work. The top suggestion email came from Scott Allen from http://entrepreneurs.about.com/

#1 – Put your name in your site title, e.g., “Jason Burns’ Philoking.com”, etc. The title tag is the single most important piece of content on your site regarding search engines.
#2 – You don’t seem to have an “About me” page on your site. Create an About page and make the URL http://philoking.com/jason-burns (or /pages/jason-burns or whatever)
#3 – Modify your template so that Jason Burns in the “Posted by…” is a hyperlink to the About page you just created.
#4 – Write some articles (at least 10) and submit them to EzineArticles.com and maybe a couple of others. In your byline, make your name a hyperlink to the About page from step 2.
Do that and I can just about guarantee you you’ll be #1 for just your name within 30 days. And then you can buy me a chai latte.

Thank you very much for the tip and you can guarantee that if it works I’ll do more than buy you a tea!

I would love for this to become more of a live SEO discussion, please comment and tell me how you have helped brand your website.

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.