Category Archives: Better Blog

Day 10 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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Before we get into Day 10 – A quick recap.

I continue on my quest to grow RoundValleyFishing.com to 100,000+ monthly pageviews with the goal of becoming the best fishing blog on the internet.

I started a meetup.com group – Round Valley Fishing Meetup Group and have scheduled the first event for August 6th. I’m excited about the offline opportunity here and even seen a little bump in traffic from the promo. (I’ve been tweeting the group and upcoming event on facebook, twitter, the website and meetup.com promotes it for me whenever someone in the are is looking for fishing.) The cost of the service is $79 for 6 months so I’ll need to defray my costs with a sale of something or take it out of my monthly Google adsense revenue.

Although I’m on day 10 now i technically started on July 1st so 22 days have elapsed. Here are my GA stats for July 1st to 22nd VS the same time period prior:

google analytics report showing pre 31 day campaign

As you can see everything expcept visits is up, but i’m not worried about that because the green blip you see is from an awesome fishing article that went viral on reddit and brought in lots of new readers.

My organic traffic and referral traffic continues to grow. As does my monthly eNewsletter list which grown by 10% in the last few weeks.
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Day 10 – ok, day 10 is all about setting up alerts to monitor what’s happening in your niche and then using that info to react. I’ve been using google alerts to do this for a few years now so nothing new here. I will say that this is a MUST for any serious blogger or corporate communications officer. You’d be amazed at what google can fined.

How I use Google Alerts:

  • Breaking News
  • as inspiration for articles if they are really suited for that
  • if it’s just a one-off story I’ll just mention it in my news section and link to it.
  • if round valley is mentioned in a news article or forum I’ll be sure to go in and leave a comment and link back to my site OR more likely a link back to my site in my profile page (less spammy, less likely to get banned.)

That’s it, see you next time.

Day 9 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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Day 9 is about joining a forum related to your niche and participating over a long period of time with goal being 1.adding value to your readers 2. piquing the interest of the forum readers enough to drive them back to your blog (by learning more about you in your forum profile.)

Directly joining a fishing forum and attempting to drive traffic away from it to your own blog seems a little shady. I know I would not want it done to me. (I did join a few newspaper sites and link back to roundvalleyfishing.com though)

Instead I have google alerts set up for every possible scenario concerning my niche and depending on the story i either link to it, comment in it or blog about it. I do leave comments in my local paper comments sections too but i really don’t see any value in it as far as the analytics data shows. I do join facebook groups and participate there, so this is the new “forum” for 2011.

I do have my own forum but it sees little activity. Facebook has killed the forum model for newer publications.

I believe this day 9 suggestion was more relevant pre facebook and google+ where sharing and filters were harder.

Day 8 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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Day 8 is all about interlinking your blog posts to boost pageviews and provide more value to your readers. I’m already running the YARPP plugin which auto-suggests related articles at the end of a post, but interlinking puts the actual links back into the body of your posts. It is a manual, time-consuming process.

For the biggest bang for my buck, I looked through my Google Analytics account to see which posts are most popular and decided to ad interlinks to the top ten.

Day 7 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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Day 7 is about linking to other blogs. The idea here is that you are giving your readers value by sharing more info than just your own. Nowadays we often link using twitter and facebook, not so much in the actual blog posts themselves and remember that you will bleed pagerank to lower pagerank blogs so use rel=”nofollow” in your anchor tag when linking to lesser domains.

Darren also suggest using google alerts to monitor your niche for content ideas. This I agree with and have been using for quite some time.

So i’m going to write a link post. I think i’ll do, 11 Best Fishing Stories Of All Time. Then submit to Reddit, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and a few others and hope it takes off.

Cheers.

Day 6 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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Day 6 is about learning from the pro bloggers, top marketing people like Seth Godin (do yourself a favor and read everything he’s ever published), and SEO experts like Rand Fishkin.

I particularly like reading Seth Godin’s Build Traffic To Your Blog article. It is still relevant today.

As a sidenote, I’m sure Rand would freak out if he saw Seth’s url structure sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/06/how_to_get_traf.html ie. how_to_get_traf that’s terrible for search engines 1. it’s incomplete and 2. it uses underscores instead of hyphens – see webmaster topic:
“Google has traditionally considered the underscore as a true character and not a separator. They did this so people can directly search on technical keywords that contain the underscore character, such as _borders or mod_rewrite. ”

But once you are as big as Seth Godin or even Webmaster World, pretty urls are less meaningful because your audience will be linking to you, giving you all the link juice you need.

One of the best takeaways is from ChrisBrogan.com
“Never write the me-too blog. Look to be ahead of the wave and feeding backwards, not behind the wave and eating someone’s wake.”

Day 5 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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Day 5 is about community building through reader interaction. Darren suggests emailing readers or responding to comments in the comment field of an article.

I do chat up my readers, but increasingly it is through Facebook or Reddit. The number of readers leaving comments on my blog post comment box is about 1 out of every 1000 visits (roughly 1 out of 10 if I’m giving something away). But on Facebook those same articles are discussed almost daily. I also wind up emailing or getting emails from readers through Facebook several times per month.

While a rough industry standard for comment to reader ratio is 1 to 100 I believe my lower comment ratio is a reflection of my market segment. Fisherman are loathe to give up any info and indeed it is the reason i started roundvalleyfishing.com to begin with – to spread good information.

Day 4 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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Day 4 is about analyzing a top blog in your niche, with the goals being to either emulate some facet of blogging they do that you are currently not and / or becoming inspired to do something better. Top blogs are doing well for a reason, find out what that reason is.

I consider njfishing.com to be my biggest local competitor and fieldandstream.com/fishing to be my biggest national target.

NJfishing:

  • A large / vibrant community that has been built up over several years.
  • Their main focus is on saltwater fishing, but that doesn’t stop fisherman from fishing and posting about their freshwater exploits.
  • They publish almost no articles. The forums are the main focus of the site.
  • They appear to make most of their money from local advertising though they do have google adsense running as well.
  • As of this writing Compete lists them as having roughly 8k monthly uniques/month

Fieldandstream:

  • Decades old print publication.
  • Full staff of writers, editors, photographers and freelancers
  • Contests, Giveaways, Photo Submissions

    • fieldandstream

  • Sensational stories / TMZ style reporting. See above
  • As of this writing Compete lists them as having roughly 400k monthly uniques/month
  • They appear to make most of their money from national advertising though through doubleclick.
  • Their photo galleries are short on text and each picture loads a new page… sneaky way to build up pageviews.

Takeaways:
Not much going on at njfishing that i can beat over night. It took them a while to build up their numbers to the forums and it seems everyone knows everyone on there. Its another old boys club.

I can learn a lot from field and stream. They have deeper full blown feature articles, but I like their content – light photo articles for building up pageviews. will be brainstorming on that.

Day 3 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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Day 3 is about promoting a blog post. The ideas is to get other people linking to your content. Darren suggests using social networks like Delicious and Digg. Well, Digg is dead so I won’t be using that and delicious has been sold to the founders of YouTube. When the heck was this written? I just bought it!

The important takeaway is to leverage the prevailing social media channels right now to promote your blog post.

I have been submitting relevant articles to Reddit.com/r/fishing and that has been working out great. It is by far the best source of social media traffic. Check out the screenshot below of my latest 30 day analytics for roundvalleyfishing.com

referring sites

you see reddit is crushing everything else and notice twitter… wait where is twitter? It seems twitter is not used by my target audience, no problem, I just pay more attention to Reddit and Facebook.

I also belong to a few linkedin groups and post articles there every once in a while but only if it’s appropriate. You can really upset that crowd easily.

I have an opt-in eNewsletter through MailChimp where once a month a I mail out my top posts on the site. It’s a completely automated process once I set it up, it just pulls articles from my RSS feed. Very Easy and FREE. I always get a little bump in traffic when these go out. Again, I only do it once a month because i don’t want to be spammy.

Another place to promote is through a WordPress plugin and service called BlogGlue. It’s free under a certain usage. Add partners to cross promote content among your network of blogs. Pretty sweet setup. I’ve seen my visits and pageviews rise since installing this plugin.

I did have one actionable takeaway from day 3. I added my blog to Technorati. Don’t know if anyone still uses Technorati, but roundvalleyfishing is now there too and it’s an RSS feed so I really don’t have to do anything. EDIT: looks like Technorati is not indexing my blog… does it matter, pretty sure no one uses Technorati for anything.

Adios day 3.
Read day 1-2

Day 1 and 2 – 31 Days to an Even Better Blog

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I went and bought Darren Rowse’s ebook http://www.problogger.net/31dbbb-workbook/

“31 Days to Build a Better Blog is a downloadable e-book designed to help you revitalize your blog by giving you 31 tasks that will all help to turn it into the page view powerhouse you’ve always dreamed of. ”

My goal is to speed up the growth of my fishing blog RoundValleyFishing.com which gets roughly 11,000 pageviews per month. I want to get that up to 110,000 pageviews per month to increase my income.

This shows 1 year growth:

Here is my baseline from June of 2011:
4,744
Visits

3,137
Absolute Unique Visitors

11,346
Pageviews

2.39
Average Pageviews

00:02:38
Time on Site

63.79%
Bounce Rate

59.82%
New Visits

Day 1 is about publishing a list post, that’s just what i did, “10 Summer Fishing Tips“.
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