Savvy Affiliate

Day 15 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

There is quite a lot that a successful blogger has to do.  He has to write content, network with other bloggers, build up backlinks, monetize his site, moderate his comments etc.  And if you are just starting a site, chances are that you have a full time job as well.  How can you possibly to all that in the time you have available?

The trick is to focus on constantly improving your productivity.  You need to always be looking for ways to get more done in the time that you have available.  To do this, you need to track what you spend your time on, and how effective it is.

It is especially important to track what kind of link building is effective.  It can be very difficult to track how effective content you write it.  Likewise, how can you tell if you are monetizing your site with the best use of your time?  That is extremely hard.   But building up backlinks and getting traffic lends itself well to increased efficiency.  What might a new blogger do in order to attract attention to his site?  He might have a link signature in forums and comments, he might e-mail some bigger name bloggers with some of his top content hoping for a link, he might guest blog at a popular site, he might use Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, and other social networking sites to drive traffic.  But what works best?

 What will work best at driving traffic to a new site is different for every page and every blogger.  Jane May recommended using Myspace as a marketing tool, and every day adding 50 friends that you choose out of groups related to your site.   That may work for her, but I don’t think it would be a good use of time for my page.  I know that because it will take upwards of 30 minutes every day to manage myspace.  She thinks it will yield a several hundred hits a day in the long term.  I know from my tracking that there are other things I can do that are a better use of my time!

In order to track, you need to do 2 things. 

• You need to keep a list of how you market your blog, and how much time you spend doing it.   - Without this list, everything else is going to be a guess
• You need to use a tool such as analytics to keep track of how people are finding your page.

When you have those two pieces of information, experiment.  Try posting on different blogs or different forums, which drives traffic to your site?  Try spending less time Digging your posts, and more time stumbling them.  What it effective?   This is all information that you need to know.

As you get more experienced you will learn what works well and what doesn’t just from repetition.  But if you want to improve your site as fast as possible, you need numbers.  Taking the time to track how you use your time can be very beneficial.  Give it a try and I think that you’ll find yourself becoming much more productive.

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Sometimes you will read posts telling you to use blog relative links instead of absolute links, this is a very bad idea

Relative links are links to another post in relation to the current page.  so if I wanted to link to another page in the same directory I would link like <a href=”file”>   if I wanted to go out a directory I would use <a href=”../file”>   But you should never use relative links in your blog!   The reason for this is that many feeds don’t interpret relative links correctly.  Although some feed readers are smart enough to process them, by no means do all the feed readers get it right.

If you use relative links, your subscribers will get an error when they try to click in.  The solution of course is to use absolute links whenever you link to another post, (i.e. <a href = “http:www.yoursite.com/yourpost”> )   But absolute links can present another problem, they can cause you to put pingbacks on your own site.

So how can you use absolute links and avoid self pingbacks?  Well, like everything having to do with wordpress, the answer is a plugin.    And what is that plugin called?  Yes, you guessed it, No Self Pings.  Upload it and your self pinging days are over, which is a huge boon if you write series of posts, as often self pings can start to overwhelm the legitimate ones.

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Some Bloggers Are Outsourcing for Success, Are You?

With the recent release of the 4 hour workweek by Tim Ferriss, the blogosphere has been buzzing with the idea of outsourcing work. 

Tim Says

“Outsourcing is no longer just for Fortune 500 companies.  Small and mid-sized firms, as well as busy professionals, can outsource their work to increase their productivity and free time for more important commitments. It’s time for the world to take advantage of this revolution.”

And if that doesn’t describe most bloggers in a nutshell then nothing will.

I am tempted to order Tim’s book and see all that he has to say about outsourcing.  However just reading reviews of his book has made me think of things that I would like to outsource on this blog, letting me free up time to expand

1) Blog Design - I have no desire to learn how to create a Wordpress Theme and take the hours or dozens of hours necessary to design a perfect blog page.  That is why this theme is a old Daily Blog Tips theme which they were giving away.  However sooner or later I will want to move this blog into a theme that is recognizably, and brandable, Savvy Affiliate.  When it is time to do that, what is a better use of my time?  Learning to create a theme in order to do it once?  Or hiring another blogger to create a theme for me?  Clearly the most productive thing I can do is outsource, spend some money to save a lot of time

2) Trouble Shooting - Every site runs into technical trouble every now and then.  Some things I can handle, most things I can figure out after a Google search or two.  However these bugs can cost a lot of time. Once this site grows and is starting to make some money, it will be well worth it to me to pay some college student to trouble shoot my blog whenever it has technical bugs, instead of taking the hour or more necessary to figure out the bug and rectify it myself.

3) Comment Moderation - Although this site is still growing, I can easily see comment moderation becoming an onerous burden.  Even with Akismet installed, I still need to go through and verify that the spam comments are spam.  (I’m told http:Bl, project honeypot can help with this, I haven’t tried it yet) When the site gets larger I’ll need to take the time to make sure verified users aren’t abusing the comments.  I like responding to my readers at present, but  if the site grows too large I may forgo that in order to free up time to write content.  In that case outsourcing the comment moderation would be a great thing to do.

4) Content Writing - I would love to get contributing bloggers writing on this site.  Although I would still continue writing, it would be nice to have other people generating content.  This would greatly increase the total number of pages indexed in the search engines, driving up the search traffic.  Additionally it would put another point of view on the site, broadening Savvy Affiliate’s personality and potentially making it more interesting.

5) Social Bookmarking - I currently spend a fair amount of time now Digging and Stumble-ing posts, both mine and other bloggers.  I do it for mine in order to make my post more visible, and self promote.  I do it for other bloggers both because I enjoyed that particular post and would like to share it as well as the hope that they would reciprocate for my site.  I wouldn’t mind hiring someone to do some promotion work on my blog and kick start it much more than I have been able to.  Of course, by the time Savvy Affiliate is generating enough cash flow to make that worthwhile, there is a good chance my readers would be bookmarking posts themselves.

6) Finding Plugins / Upgrades - Which plugins are the best?  Which give the most competitive edge and make you the most productive?  Although every site has a list of the best plugins, there are new ones being released all the time.  It would be nice to have a side by side analysis of all the plugins with similar functions, much as I shop for gadgets or airfare.   However this might not be something best outsourced, it might just be a good idea of a webpage another webmaster could create.  I would frequent it, and I know others would as well.

So what sort of thing would you be tempted to outsource?  What tasks tie up your time without being very productive?

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Here are some recent posts that you may have missed, but that you probably want to check out

• How To Prevent Running Out Of Steam - by Lifehack  If you are blogger you have probably experience bloggers block.  All of a sudden you lose interest in running your site or lose new ideas on what to post.  Lifehacker has solutions to these common problems
• Branding Your Blog - By Lifehack  Developing your blog into a brand is essential for long term success.  You need people to think, I can’t miss a single post from this blog.  Here are some tips on how to identify your brand, and to build it
• 101 Essential Blogging Resources - By Blogtrepreneur.  If it was alphabetical, it would be an A-Z list, and then some.  As it is it is a great categorized research of all things blogs.
• Get Traffic From Digg Comments - By SEOmoz.  Instead of trying to get your own stories to the front page of Digg, you can try looking up upcoming stories and commenting on them, tagging a link to your site in the comments.
• Can Your URL Structure Hurt Your Search Engine Rankings? - By Art of Money.  An analysis on whether using a very common Wordpress file structure can actually hurt your search engine rankings.

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Problogger Is No Longer The #1 Blogging Blog, It Yields To John Chow

It is widely thought that Problogger is the most widely viewed blogging blog.  While that used to be true, not so anymore.  John Chow has overtaken him as the leader, at least according to Alexa.

Problogger = Blue         John Chow = Red (an evil color if there ever was one)

Smoothing the Alexa rankings graph out all the way, you can see that although John has been flirting with Problogger in the rankings, it is only recently that John has had a recent surge in traffic and moved into first place.  Problogger has an advantage over John by being first to the scene.  Problogger got his site started in the beginning of 2005, while John started in the beginning of 2006.  It seems that John has been working hard to make up his year disadvantage and surge into the lead in terms of reach. 

Although this surge could be short term, it could also be a sign of John’s superior SEO techniques.   John Chow has been unabashedly aggressive in pursuing backlinks to his site.  He daily gets 10 blogs to review his in exchange for a backlink.   He has so many sites linking to him in fact that he is a week backlogged in posted his link exchanges.

In truth, the actual fact as to who is the most viewed blogging blogger is completely insignificant.  I suspect that if you asked Problogger or John Chow they would just not care.   Still, it does show what aggressive seo tactics can do for you.  Passive SEO through quality content creation is a very effective technique.  However quality content combined with a relentless drive to increase backlinks from all comers has proven to be effective for John.  You might want to pursue similar strategies for your own site.

Just for fun, tossing up 2 of the other “A List” bloggers, Steve Pavlina ( Teal ) and Shoe Money (Yellow)

Although neither Shoe Money nor Steve Pavlina are blogging blogs per-se, they both deserve kudos in different ways.  The first is for Shoe, who is clearly pulling out of a recent slump in traffic and is going gangbusters again.

Secondly, Kudos to Steve Pavlina, who by every measure is behind some of the other sites in terms of traffic and rankings, but is still kicking butt and taking names in terms of income. (40K/month)

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How Many Blogs Can You Handle? Dosh Dosh Thinks 8

Dosh Dosh recently posted that he is starting an experiment where he creates 1 new blog a day for 7 days!  Adding in his existing blog, this means that he will be running at least 8 sites!  Now that is impressive.  Many bloggers, myself included, sometimes find it hard to come up with enough quality to keep 1 site running.  I asked my readers how many sites they ran, stating that it is often better to have one high quality site than 10 smaller sites.   It seems that Dosh Dosh has come back with an answer, one is not enough for him.

Why is Dosh Dosh doing it?  I don’t think that even Dosh Dosh is crazy enough to think that he can keep 8 sites going at once.  However he is doing it for a specific purpose.  He doesn’t intend to manage all his sites himself in the long term.  Rather, he is using his newly created sites as a case study.  He is creating each site in a different niche and attempting to monetize quickly.  He will then be able to summarize which niche he found the easiest to make money in, and he will know what to tackle for his next project.

This is a brilliant concept - Dosh Dosh has hit the nail on the head with his idea of experimenting with different blogs.  He stated in the follow up comments that he will be eventually outsourcing most of the sustaining work of creating new content and managing the blog to other bloggers.  This is how a person should work on his business!  Rather than in his business.

Dosh Dosh is outsourcing for success - Dosh Dosh has a business plan which will eventually allow him to expand his profit outside that range that a normal blogger can manage.  Instead of trying to limit himself to how much he can create, he is going to be recruiting other bloggers to help him.  Dosh Dosh is attempting to become a publisher rather than a write.   And that is how to make money online.

So are you tempted to try to start up a new blog?  How long until you think you’re ready to try to expand out of your current web pages?

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Scott over at self made minds asks the question, is it better to run on large site, or many small ones?

Scott came to the conclusion that it is better to have one site that you can focus on, than many of them which you have to split your time between.   I happen to agree with that idea.  There is a huge jump in earning potential available as you move up the rankings in a blogs quality.  It is generally more profitable for a single person to run one page, or at most a couple, than to try to split their time between many different sites.

A Single Website with 10,000 visitors a day is more valuable than 10 websites with 1,000 visitors a day.   A single large website has much more income potential than many smaller pages.   Although theoretically the revenue from programs such as Adsense should be the same between the two, after all 10,000 hits is 10,000 hits, the revenue from other programs will be much different.   Programs such as ReviewMe and Text-Link-Ads don’t monetize your site on a linear scale.  

A large site will get significantly more for a review than a small site, but the reviews take the same amount of work!  One reason to get a large page is that you can monetize it with less work.  Instead of trying to write 10 reviews for 10 different products, you can write a single review which pays 10 times as much.   A similar thing occurs with Text-Link-Ads.  Since they pay based on the page rank of a site, larger sites have an advantage.  If you have 1 blog where you post 10 posts a day, vs 10 blogs where you post 1 page a day, the chances are all of your posts on the larger blog will rank highly in Google.  This means that you will be able to monetize all the pages with T-L-A.   However for the 10 different blogs, there is a good chance that only a couple of them will get enough backlinks that you can try to monetize them.

This does not apply to mini-sites!! The above logic does not apply to mini-sites because they require no upkeep!  A mini-site is a single page that you can create, put some ads on, and forget about it.  You can make as many of them as you want without increasing your workload for the long term.   So if you are really feeling constrained by running a single site, try throwing up a few mini-pages and see if they can make some money for you, and if you can handle the extra workload.

So what do you think?  Do you run more than one site?  Are you able to spread quality throughout all of them? 

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Looking for a way that you can make some money and get some attention for your site at the same time?  Well over at Daily Blog Tips you can Get Paid To Blog

Although he hasn’t posted what his criteria are for accepting writers, or how much he is planning to pay, it may still be something worth following up on for you.

The best thing you will get out of this is access to all his readers.   Daily blog tips says that they have over 10,000 daily page views and 3000 RSS subscribers.  If you are posting regularly on that blog you will have a great opportunity to highlight some of the content on your own site.   Although working on your own page can be much more valuable than selling your posts, when you can do both at the same time you should jump at it.

So would you ever blog for someone else?  How much would you need to be paid to post 4 times a week on some one else’s blog?

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New Technology Will Enable Bloggers To Make Blogs Posts By Talking On Their Cell Phone

 It has been reported that Six Apart, the company which owns live journal, is about to release a service that will allow users to make posts simply by calling in and speaking.  The software will automatically transcribe the content, and post it on your blog.  This is a leap above recording your post with a digital voice recorder and transcribing it yourself.  Although I haven’t used the service yet, it is supposed to be quite robust.  Reports say that it is very good at picking up what people are speaking, and if it can’t understand a word it will flag it to allow the user to edit.  And hey, even if it gets the grammar wrong 1 time in 5, that’s still twice as good as I do when typing myself.

Although this is currently only available on live journal, once one company does it everyone will jump on.    I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google release a similar service soon with blogger.  And if they can’t code the software themselves, they could very well just outright buy Six Apart, as part of their spree to organize the world’s information.

This is nice, but what would be really great is  a wordpress plugin which allows you to upload audio recordings and have them automatically converted into posts.  If there was such a plugin available I would go out and buy a digital voice recorder and utilize it immediately.   When would be a good time to use it?

• Commutes - This would be great for making use of some of the time I currently spend stuck in traffic, granted of course that I was willing to have the occasional string of four letter words injected into my blog posts, followed by another string when I realized that I just swore into my recording.
• Business Travel - I am blogging from my desk on my home computer and am without a laptop.  If business on Savvy Affiliate ever goes gang busters I might invest in one, but that is not in the sights at the moment.  Although I’m not willing to lay down 1K for a decent laptop, and thus my blogging suffers when I have trips, I would be more than willing to pay $50 for a voice recorder and get a backlog of posts that I can upload on my return.
• Exercising - This might let me make my exercising time more productive as I could push out content while working out on a stationary machine.  Note of course that if you do this in a crowded public gym, the least thing that will happen is you will get some weird looks.

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