Savvy Affiliate

Conventional wisdom states that A blog Is built through work and slowly building up readers, conventional wisdom may be wrong.

Actually that is not entirely true.  Conventional wisdom is correct that it takes daily work to create a great blog.  It is correct that it takes time to build a decent readership.  But what you don’t hear often, is that once you have established your readership base, you can break out, and your visitors can increase dramatically practically overnight.

As an example we’ll look at how four of the “A List” bloggers got started, Problogger Darren Rowse, John Chow, Steve Pavlina, and Shoemoney’s Jeremy Schoemaker.

Looking up the Alexa stats on each of them, and panning back in time to where they got started gives a great demonstration of where they broke out.

Alexa Rankings for Problogger

Problogger started out strong, and within the first 6 month had an Alexa traffic reach of .02.  (For comparison Savvy Affiliate has a current reach, May 2007, of .002 )  However for the next 6 months, the end of 2005 through the beginning of 2006, Problogger’s traffic reach went stagnant.   Then he had his breakout.  Overnight his daily reach more than doubled, took a bit of a dip, and then surged ahead.   We can see this pattern repeat time and again with the other bloggers

Alexa Ranks for John Chow

John’s surge in traffic may be the most dramatic of any I examined.  He was hovering around .005, not too different than your average PR 4 blog, and his traffic shot up overnight.  I’m told that this was due through judicious use of an AdWords campaign on sites such as Problogger, but am saving investigating causes of breakouts for my next article.

Looking at ShoeMoney, you can see a more gradual surge, but still a clear breakout pattern

Shoe spent 6 months hovering at a daily reach of .01, and then in the span of the next 6 months increased his traffic by a factor of 10.  Although that has dropped off slightly, Shoemoney is still a strong force in the blogging community.

Finally Steve Pavlina has a blog which might be the most profitable of any yet listed  (He reports 40K/month earnings).    Did he get there through a steady increase in readership?  Nope, once again he plateaued and managed to break out in a surge

Although the exact reasons behind each surge will be examined later, there are several conclusions one can draw from looking at these charts

1) The right content / marketing can drive a surge of visitors - Clearly all of these bloggers benefited from either viral content of some kind, or smart, aggressive marketing.  I personally read each blog and know that they are all well written, spawn lots of content, and have interesting/unique personalities.  However without the idea / marketing that they did to generate their surge of visitors they may not be considered “A List” bloggers today.  (Although I would argue if they had missed one opportunity, they would create another for themselves)

2) Sites need a base traffic level before they can surge - In each of these cases, all four sites had moderately strong traffic ( ~.01 Daily Reach) before they surged.  They each seemed to reach their initial traffic levels through sustained growth.  The fact that they had a base traffic enabled their surge.  The moderate daily reach would be essential to get traffic due to viral blog links.  If their initial traffic was too low, no matter how exciting a blog post they wrote, not enough bloggers would see it to drive a surge.  The bottom line, if your site is still very low on the traffic scale ( < 200 uniques per day ) you should focus on growing your site through common SEO and content generation techniques, rather than trying to break out.

3) A surge needs to be sustained - In each case, after the initial spike in traffic, there a downswing in visitors.  However the reason that you know each blogger know, the reason that they are “A List” bloggers, is that they were able to sustain their visitors and keep them coming back.  It would do a site no good to have only 1 good article.  Readers would come, perhaps even subscribe, but would stop coming back when no more gold was forthcoming.  After you get a surge in visitors is the most important time to write quality content!  If you ever see a spike in readership, that is when you need to put out your best work.  Spend extra time writing more articles and making each interesting.  Take time away from your SEO tasks and your site design to sustain your visitors.  Once you have gotten each hooked on the site you can go back to a more normal routine.  Until then, you must treat each as valuable and work hard to retain them.

Any thoughts on how you might attempt to kick your blog out of a rut?  Would a viral article or an intelligent, aggressive marketing campaign work better?

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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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Since my first Review of John Chow didn’t quite seem to take (I’m still waiting for my backlink, and although i know he’s backlinked, I don’t think that he is 12 posts backlogged) I’ll give it a go with another shot.

The reason for this post is that if you do a review of John Chow with the anchor text Make Money Online pointing at his homepage, he will give you a link back to your site.  Not too shabby when you consider he is a PR 6 page.

So without further ado, here goes

John Chow is the most widely read blogging blogger on the internet.  He has recently moved past Problogger to snatch the title.  If for no other reason this should make you check out his site, so that you know what is going on in the blogosphere.

But there are many reasons you should read his site.  In fact his site is popular because you should read it, not the other way around.

1) He is very clever - He has some evil ways of getting links and making money on his site that I would never have thought of.  Once he suggests them it is obvious how valuable those tactics are.  Read his page for a while and you will find yourself thinking of strategies that you would have never thought of before

2) He started out just like you - John started his site just over 18 months ago.  Since then it has taken off.  Take note of what he does and you could very well figure out how to make your own site rocket to the top

3) He is super aggressive at pursuing SEO - It is refreshing to read a blogger who is so openly aggressive about making money and improving his traffic.  Some bloggers seem very blase about that.   They are more interested in their message than their money.  This may be true, and more power to them if it is, but it is still nice to read a blogger who doesn’t mind being labeled Evil from time to time.

If you would like your site reviewed by Savvy Affiliate, contact me at  SavvyAffiliate [at no spam] gmail [dot] com.   Popular sites like John’s I will review for a backlink.  Less popular sites I would be interested in doing a review trade with.   If you are a porn site or some kind of scammer, no need to apply.

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Day 11 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

Writing a post on your blog every day is important in order to keep the traffic up and attract new visitors.  However it can be extremely difficult to come up with a new idea to write about every day, especially if you want that idea to be a good one.  Instead of trying to think up something new everyday, take one great idea and expand it into a series of posts.  A series of posts can be great for you as a blogger, since they can be much easier to write than many disparate posts, and they can be good for readers as the readers know what they will be seeing the next day.

So what makes a good series of posts, and how can you write one?   A good topic for a series of posts should be several things, interesting, have many areas to cover, and in demand.  Clearly you need to pick a topic which your visitors want to read about, and one that will keep them interested.  A topic you can write about in detail is essential if you expect to actually be able to create a series.

What are some tips on creating a good series?  Although writing a blog series is as simple as writing several posts and linking them together, writing a great series requires a little more work.  Here are some things you should work on as you write your series.

1) Write the series in one sitting - By writing all the articles of your blog series at one time, and then spreading them out using the Wordpress timestamp features, you can ensure that they all get written.  Although having a series can be great for attracting readers, stopping your series halfway can anger people, and having a post hanging over your head every night can be a lot of pressure.  By writing your series all at once, and then posting, you can ensure that you don’t start until all the posts are written.  Additionally, by writing the series at one time you can make sure that you don’t lose your train of thought during the posts.  It can be awful to start a series and sit down the next day and not understand what you were going to write about, or why you thought it was interesting.

2) Interlink the series - Chances are you will have new visitors who aren’t reading your site daily.  They will stumble onto one post in your series and find it interesting.  If you don’t link to any of the other posts in the series, they won’t even know those posts exist, and may very well leave your site.  By linking up your series you can turn a on off visitor into a multipage reader, and perhaps even a subscriber.

3) Make the progression natural- A good series should flow from one post to the next.  For instance if you were writing about how to win a poker tournament, a good series might be How to play when you first sit down, How to play on the second day, how to play at the final table, and how to win a heads up battle.  Each naturally ties into the other, and leads your visitors to follow your series in order, and to read them all.   If you post series doesn’t tie together neatly, your visitor might not feel obligated to read them all, costing you page views.

4) Spend time on the title - Although it is very important to write a great title for regular blog posts, it is even more important to do so for series.  The title of your series will span all of your posts, and a crappy one can doom the series to failure before you even begin.  Spend some time in order to make sure that the title accurately describes what the series is about, as well as intrigues your visitors into reading your series.

5) Invite comments - When you introduce your series, ask your readers if there is anything they would like you to cover.  It could make a great addition to tag onto the end of your series, or it could inspire you go to back and improve one of the posts that are in the series already.

So do you tend to write single posts or posts in a series?  Which one has generated a better response from your readers?

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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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One Thing which seems to spawn across the internet from time to time is Link Chains.  I first saw this with Dofollow link train.  Basically what a link train is is that one blogger posts a list of some sort or another with their link in it.  The next blogger picks up the list and inserts their own link.  On it goes with the list growing larger and larger and the bloggers at the front of the line getting a lot of backlinks.  (Kind of like a pyramid scheme where no one loses money)

There are various thoughts on link trains, some people like them, others hate them.   I’ve never tried one so I thought I’d give it a shot and report back the results on how well it worked.

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions below this line———

Below is a matrix of 120 stars, I have already added a link to my blog onto one of the stars, all you need to do is copy and paste the grid into your blog and add your own link to one of the other spare stars, and tell others to do the same!

Viralink

********************
********************
********************
********************
********************
********************

When you ping me with this Viralink, I will add you to my matrix. 

Rules
No Porn Sites
Only 1 link per person (i.e don’t hog the viralink!)
Please don’t tamper with other peoples url’s
Enjoy!

———copy and paste the Viralink and instructions above this line———

If you’ve never done a link train, why don’t you give this one a whirl, see how it works for you, and post here if you got positive results.

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Day 10 of The 100 Days To Webpage Excellence Guide

By far the biggest reason that new blogs fail is that the bloggers lose interest in their creation.  Many people have the ability to make a successful webpage, and to make money online.   However a lot of people have a hard time sticking with their blog through the rough patches and emerging on the other side.  By setting goals for your Blog you can help keep yourself focused, and not give up before you get your payday.

As with most things in life, setting goals for your blog are important.  However setting the right goals are even more important.  If you set unachievable goals for yourself, you are more likely to become discouraged than if you have no goals at all.  So without further ado, here are some thinks you might want to set goals on, and what realistic goals are

1) Site Traffic - New blogs always struggle to get a sustained traffic going.  Unless you have another established site or two and can feed the new site, traffic may be hit or miss for a little while.  However you can still work to ensure that your traffic improves month to month.  After your first month blogging, it is not unrealistic to assume you can grow traffic 30%/month, or more, for the next 6-8 month.  30% is a good number to aim for.  If you keep that up, then a year later you will have 3 1/2 times as many visitors as you do now.  Keep it up for two years and your number of visitors will have increased by an order of magnitude.  Many sites can do better than this, so if you want to set your sights higher, go ahead, but 30% is an achievable number.

2) Number of Posts - In order to grow your site, you need to keep generating content.  The more quality content you make the better.  Setting a goal to create a certain number of posts a week can help make sure that you keep up with the necessary work.  For this blog, I have a goal for myself of 5 posts / day and have been relatively successful at doing that.  That rate has allowed me to post over 200 pages in a little over a month.  Such a count would have taken me over almost a year at 1/day.  However setting a goal of 1 post per day is a good rate for a new blog.  It is a rate which will allow you to create a steady stream of content, keep your visitors happy, but not overwhelm you too much.  1 post/day is very much a happy medium.

3) Networking - You should set a goal of how many other bloggers you would consider your friends each month.  Try and meet new bloggers whose sites you enjoy, and who also likes you sites.  You can send traffic back and forth to each other and give each other ideas.  Obviously it would be great to make friends with John Chow, but as that is unlikely to happen, try creating relationships with other new bloggers.  As their site expands the links they give you will become more and more valuable.  Creating 1 blogging friendship / month is a good goal.  Try and read several new blogs each month and see if there are any which really catch your eye.  If they do, there is a good chance you will get along with their writer as well.

4) Search Engine Rankings - Your blog will start out at a Google Page Rank of 0.  Your goal should be to get a page rank of 3 after the next Google PR update.  (External updates occur every 3 months or so.)  You can use a tool such as PR Predict to gauge your interim progress.  Making headway on PageRank is important for 2 reasons.  The first is you want to climb the search results as quickly as possible.  Searchers are the most valuable people to come to your page, they are the most likely to click on your ads, so you want as many of them as possible.  Secondly Page Rank is one of the quick things which every one uses to judge a page.  If people want to tell if a site is worthwhile or not, a quick look at Page Rank is commonly used to see what others think about it.  PR 3 is the minimum to actually be taken seriously.  PR 4 is a very common ranking for newish / less well known blogs.  PR 5 is starting to become very well established in the blogging community.  PR 6 is usually very popular blogs.  Blogs tend to cluster at PR 6, very few of them tend to make it to 7 or 8 unless they have other features going for them besides the blog.

If you set those goals for yourself and track them, you will stay much more interested in your site.  If you are a new blogger and are considering using any of these goals, let me know if you can meet/exceed them, and if they helped you at all.

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Sooner or later all bloggers reach the point where they decide it is time to start trying to make money.  I’ve gone on growing long enough, now for the rewards.   And of course there are several ways to monetize your site.  The one this post covers is ReviewMe

As you are probably aware, reviewme is a marketplace where bloggers can sell blog posts to advertisers for a price they name.  ReviewMe takes have the proceeds, the blogger gets the other half.  Some people like the revenue that this brings in, some people think that it is whoring out your blog.

I personally don’t have a problem with paid reviews.  But if I’m going to whore my blog, I better get a decent amount for it.  So in order to decide when I should post on the marketplace, I need to decide what the minimum dollar amount I will accept is, and if I can get that.

I think that in order to be worth the research and writing time I would need to put into a review, as well as the potentially negative effect monetizing my site can have on traffic and future growth, I would need to receive $50 from the review.  As ReviewMe takes half the earnings, this means that my reviews would go for $100.

Will I be able to charge $100 for a review?  Will people pay it?  In order to figure that out I need to scope out some of the blogs on the site which are charging similar amounts, and see if SavvyAffiliate can compete with them.

In order to do that I go to ReviewMe and look up my category, blogging, and pick several sites at Random.  ReviewMe grades a site on 3 categories, Alexa Ranking, Technorati Ranking, and RSS.  Since it will be hard to get the stats for their feeds, I will just compare Alexa Ranking and Technorati.  So how do my stats compare up?

 The Stats for Savvy Affiliate

                                 Alexa Ranking            Technorati Ranking      

Savvy Affiliate -    347,000                           59,000                     

Lets see how some other sample sites stack up

Deadprogrammer’s Cafe  -964,492             66,334

Jarkolicious            226,000                          6,564

Stephen Fung        80,500                             10,000

MaxPower             26,700                              8,300

ShandyKing           66,890                             22,020

Friday Traffic Report - 25,633                   25,847

Business Blog Wire     - 145,611                 6,199

Average                        219403                20,752

Clearly Savvy Affiliate isn’t quite popular enough yet to merit charging $100 for a review.  In fact further analysis seems to indicate that I would be quite competitive at the $40 price range, but that is not my threshold.

What does this mean to you?  This is just an example of the kind of analysis you can do with your site to find out if you are maximizing your profit from it.  If my analysis had indicated that my site was too strong for $100, I would have kicked it up a notch to charge all the traffic would bear.

Additionally it means that you, as a reader of Savvy Affiliate, can enjoy a while more of interruption free blogging tips.

Do you use ReviewMe?  Has it become a solid source of income for you, or merely an also-ran?

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