Philoking.com

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.

It’s 6:41 PM on Friday night. I am flying home from San Francisco and I still have quite a few thoughts about Google spinning in my head. An interesting thing occurred to me and I thought it would be a great idea for an article and a good time to explain what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about my web site.

Philoking.com is a technology blog. I write about everything and anything that pertains to technology and that’s pretty much it. Now to let you in on a little secret about me, in the end of 2003 I resigned from my position with KFC after beginning something totally different as a side project. With nothing more than some knowledge from a prior life and a lot of initiative, I started a newspaper from scratch. The paper was called Operation: Dinner Out, shortly just Dinner Out, (big credit if you can tell me the origin of the name!) and it was one of the weekly society like papers you are used to seeing in most towns. It was about 30 pages or so a week, ad supported, and was in all ways but financially a great success. Turns out that geeks are terrible salesmen, but that’s a story for another article.

The point to this rambling is that only today did I realize that I am just as much a publisher now as I was then. I am much more the owner of my content as I was then seeing that I now do not syndicate any content. With a few exceptions, every article you read on this web site was researched and written by yours truly. So with that something magical occurred to me. I have to publicize this just as I did my paper then. I have to hit the virtual pavement and tell the world how great it is to be in and around my content. There is no one else that is going to magically link me all over the place without some prodding.

Of course I have to continue to create compelling content, and I think that I have accomplished the basics of that with an average of 20,000 readers per month, but the next step, the one that takes me from a few dollars a day to being exceptional, is simply me. Meeting with Google this week was an eye opener on how to advance my web site in popularity and profitability and I am more than excited to put my new thoughts and ideas into motion.

So today I write to you as Jason Burns, editor of Philoking.com, a division of Adspigot Media, my now resurrected Media Company. Adspigot Media is the holder of Philoking.com, TakeMyTech.com and soon to be re launched gaming site focused towards women gamers, Dawngrrl.com.

I am very excited to be doing all of this right now as many parts of my life are becoming more exciting professionally, but this web site has been a real joy to run for the last year plus. With nearly 500 articles in the last year, thousands of comments and almost a million viewers in that time, it’s the time to grow.

My focus for the rest of the year and the coming new year are page views per user, my bounce rate and feed subscriptions. I thank you all for your continued readership and hope you are with me as I begin to solicit new and interesting writers to help expand the content more and more.

If you are interested in writing for this site, including full credit for your work and links back to your own sites, contact me directly.

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.