Traffic: Blog Gimmicks

As the internet world becomes more and more saturated with blogs, blogs are having to do more and more to differentiate themselves from their competition. Differentiation comes in a variety of different forms such as content quality, personality, quirks, gimmicks, etc. Today, I'll talk about the marketing tactic of gimmicks.

In the marketing world, a gimmick is a unique or quirky special feature that makes something "stand out" from its contemporaries. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimmick) These features could be anything from a money blog written by a 13 year old to a talking gecko spokesperson for an insurance company. When working with gimmicks, the more extreme, quirky, and memorable, the better it is.

And so you're probably wondering, why don't everyone use gimmicks with their work (and to an extent just about everyone uses a gimmick for their business, some just aren't as extreme as others)? But anyways, typically, when someone uses the gimmick tactic, they're promoting a nonserious product or service. For example, while you may see a car dealership advertising with a dancing man in a whale costume, you're not going to see a corporate lawfirm advertising with the same strategy. When considering to use gimmicks as a marketing strategy, you have keep in mind who your target demographic is. If your demographic are older, more serious people and you're selling an expensive luxury product, gimmicks probably aren't you're looking for.

And so, with this blog that you see here, I'm going to be experimenting with a variety of gimmicks and see how they work out for me (the main theme of the site, "An arduous experiment to see if you can actually succeed in making money online" is of course a gimmick). But I'll see if I can dive into a deeper level, drawing a clearer picture of what this site is and how it's different from the competition.

Traffic: Reasons Why I Hate Link Baiting

For those who are unaware of what link baiting is: link baiting is a tactic where a website or blog posts content, pictures, videos, etc., in the deliberate attempt to get other websites to link to their website. Oftentimes, that content can be very irrelevant, distasteful, controversial for the sake of being controversial, and sometimes even just plain mind-numbing spam.

Link baiting (as general tactic) is great for getting links to your personal blog or website to boost your site's rankings but I do also however think that it also hurts the Internet as a whole. Oftentimes, link baiting involves complex methods and tricks that usually include dare I say, cheating. A lot of SEO gurus suggest link baiting to such an extreme that it in-the-shower shanks the search engine ranks of legitimate websites with valid and sometimes much better content than the websites employing the link bait tactics.

Now again, I'm not suggesting link baiting as a bad tactic or something one shouldn't do, I'm just saying that a lot of methods in employing link baiting are unethical and are in poor taste. When a website gets a disproportionate amount of links to quality of content of the site ratio, you the reader, and Mr. and Mrs. Googler suffer. And so here are some reasons why I hate link baiting:

1. Unbalanced links to quality of content ratio. When a website has a lot of links it pushes it up in the search engine rankings. If that rank is bloated because of an links the people using the search engines has to wade through more garbage to find useful content for them.
2. Link baiting is a gateway drug. While inherently link baiting isn't harmful to the Internet, enough of it can bring unbalance. And once that website tastes success it may look into other tactics that are definitely what people would consider unethical or illegal to build more links. Sorry to burst your bubble guys, but owning multiple domains for the sole purpose of building links is unethical.
3. More garbage web content. I think just about anyone will agree there is a little bit too much garbage that you have to wade through now-a-days to get where you want to go. When I search a term, I want the most useful, relevant site for me at the top, not the most SEO savvy site there to make a buck.

While that's not the most intimidating list (by any means) it does put a little point across of what I don't like about link baiting. So if you're going to engage in this tactic of website promotion, please link bait responsibly.

Planning: Who is my Target Audience?

When you are creating a content rich website or blog, you will need to decide who your target audience is. If you do not know who is going to be reading your blog (or who you aim to be reading your blog) you could end up wasting many hours writing something that nobody will end up looking at. When you narrow down your website's focus to one particular group or demographic you will find that your viewership will increase drastically.

How do I choose a group to write to?

Well let's for a minute take a step back and think about the topic of your blog. Imagine you're in a mall and you are walking around and you see a store. In that store they're selling products that relate to your blog. Who is currently in the store? How old are they? What gender are they? Are they looking at the products with friends or are they by themselves? Do they have prior knowledge about the products already or do they need help from staff and salespeople?

For example, let's pretend I'm writing a blog about parakeets and at the mall there is a pet store that sells primarily parakeets. When I walk into the shop I currently see people ranging about 16 to 30 years of age. For the most part, most of the shoppers are in the store alone but there are one or two groups as well. The groups are families (with at least one adult and one child) that are buying a new pet and have little to no knowledge about parakeets and require a lot of information about pet care with their purchase. The people shopping individually already have a pet and are either buying food or products for care and maintenance. These single people usually know what they're doing but they're willing to hear about new foods and methods if it will help their pet or make taking care of their pet easier.

And so with my Parakeet blog I can take my imagination and break my audience into two groups :

• Families or first time pet owners. Typically they have little to no knowledge about pets and so require a lot of help in picking out care products, food, books about handling and training their pet, etc. This group (while sometimes have kids) is relatively young and mainly consists of 14 to early 30s years of age. No gender preferences. A blog directed at this group of people would want to be an easy read, informative, and fun. The blog would mostly have information that new or prospective pet owners would need and want to know.
  
• People that already own a pet. The pet-care experience of the people in this category range from beginners to expert. Usually these people have preferences to what food they purchase for their pet, how they train and handle their pet, etc. No gender preference for this group either. A blog directed at this group would contain helpful hints, tips, and guides for training their pet. While this group usually knows the basics, they usually would not mind hearing more about new foods, books, etc., if it could make things easier for them.

Once you've broken down who your potential audience is, it's much simpler to decide what to write about and what to put on your site. Now, like in the case of the example I gave, you just need to decide which audience appeals more to write to. Once you've made that choice, you're that much closer to creating a successful blog or website.

Setting Up my Blog for Analysis and Search Engines

Drawing upon my web design background, I realize that for my newly established blog to truly succeed I'm going to have to first: A) Set up visitor analysis so I can see who (and their demographics) is visiting my site and B) Set up my site for optimum search engine optimization (SEO for you acronym savvy people).

Visitor Analysis

For the people who haven't really ran a website (or in this case blog) before, I'll explain why visitor analysis is important. In the case of this blog, for true success I'm going to need both repeat and unique visitors coming to read my content. Analysis programs like Google Analytics help webmasters and blog owners see how many visitors view their site, how many of those visitors are unique, and also how long the site retains that visitor's attention before they get bored. Other important information can be gained from these analysis programs but for now that's all I'm concerned about.

Google Analytics

Now that I've explained the basics of visitor analysis I'm going to go with one that I'm most familiar with and that also many people will also argue is the best: Google Analytics. While I've seen quite a few blogs still utilizing the ancient linkback images of the 1990s (which I find tacky and way out of date), I find Analytics much better and cleaner method of visitor tracking. Setting up Analytics with Blogger is quite simple and literally took me less than two minutes to do.

Setting up Google Analytics for Blogger

1. Create or log into your account at the Google Analytics page.
2. Click "Add new profile".
   
3. Select "Add a Profile for a new domain" and enter in your web address and time zone. Select Finish when you're done.
4. On the next page, select and copy the code displayed for "ga.js" which will be what we will be using in our blog.
5. Now in Blogger, select the "Layouts" tab and then select "Page Elements".
6. Go to the Footer of your blog design (the Analytics tracker must be located here) and select "Add a Gadget".
7. Click the "HTML/JavaScript" Element.
8. The title will be left blank and the context box will be the code you copied early. Paste that code in the box and click "Save".
9. Click "Save" again on your "Page Elements" page and voila you're finished.

Once you've finished with inserting the code on your blog, within a few minutes Google should be analyzing your page. If it's having troubles locating the tracking code, delete the JavaScript code you inserted and follow the steps again. Otherwise, good job, and happy tracking!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Now that I've successfully finished setting up my analysis code it's now time to start getting search engines like Google or Yahoo! to start noticing my blog and start sending me visitors through their searches. Unfortunately, however, Blogger (even though it's owned and managed by Google) has inherently poor SEO out of the box and so I have to either create or use someone else's code to correct that. Luckily for me, someone has already done the hard work.

Basically when we add the code (Found here: webupd8) to our blog we will have the title of the post changed to reflect how search engines post links as well as add meta data and descriptions to our HTML code for search engines too. Basically, most search engines will only accept 80 characters for a title of a web page and so if any pages surpass that number it cuts off the extra characters. So, in the best interest of SEO, we're going to want to have the first part of our HTML title be the current "Blog Post Title" and then "Blog Site Title" which is achieved with the above code.

Putting the new code into your blog is even more simple than Google Analytics. So what you're going to do is:

1. Copy the code above to prepare to replace the old code currently on your Blogger page
2. Go to your Blogger dashboard. Select the "Layout" tab and then select "Edit HTML".
3. Find the line containing the title tags and replace it with your copied code from above.
4. And congratulations, you have added the basics of SEO to your blog.

Now that I've achieved this step of the money-making blog process, now I need to focus on adding relevant and quality information to this blog to drag in the visitors.

Rules of the Game

What is the Game?
The game, which is the point of this blog, is to experiment and see if anyone could actually start a free blog to make money and actually succeed.

What are the Rules?
To make this a little more fun I'm going to make a few rules for this blog to prove that truly anyone dedicated could make a blog and profit from it.

1. Absolutely no money outside from the revenues produced by ads from the blog itself can be used to fuel web hosting, web domain registration, or advertising. This rule is to prove that indeed anyone--including those without actual capital--can make a blog and make money from it.
2. Any networking with the blog has to be done outside my normal network. Any affiliates, link swaps, etc., must be done "cold."

Why I Have Rules
Besides giving myself a personal challenge, the rules also even the ground out to the same level of any average Joe deciding to create a blog. While yes, I do have some outside knowledge and some web savviness, I haven't really experimented with blogging and monetizing them and so I'm a bit out of my comfort zone doing this blog.

Game On
And so, without further ado, that's get into the fun.

Copy, Adapt, and Innovate

Copy, adapt, and innovate is a phrase that I use for my own personal progression in whatever I do. From playing games, to succeeding at my job, all the way to finding a date for Friday, this phrase can be applied to everything.

COPY

I believe that the best results can always be achieved by finding the best people/things/etc. around you and copying them. Why go through the trouble of discovering how to do things right through trial and error when you can find and copy someone that's already done the hard part for you? This strategy only works, however, if you're willing to analyze and figure out WHY they're doing what they're doing. Also take note other successful people around you and what they're doing to succeed.

ADAPT

Once you've successfully copied your model its time to adapt their methods to yourself and your environment. This is where some of the real fun begins because now you're making their methods yours. If their method conflicts with how you like to do things, adapt it to better suit your tastes.

INNOVATE

Once you've successfully adapted the best methods around you to yourself and start seeing positive results, now is the time to start innovating new strategies and methods. At this stage of the game you've probably seen a lot of good and bad results that different actions and methods have achieved. Hopefully you were paying attention to why each one produced their respected results so that you in turn won't make those mistakes with your innovations.

And while I know that this strategy isn't right for anyone, this is what I've been following for many years of my life and so far I've seen tremendous results through it. And so, as you follow this little experiment money-making blog, you'll see maybe a hint of why I do this or do that.