Tag Archives: Blogging

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“.
Subscribe to the Better Blog category feed to follow along if you like.

Not Exactly the 4th Estate

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A TechCrunch intern( under the age of 18) was found to have accepted a MacBook Air in exchange for a blog post – He got fired.

Here’s TechCrunch founder and co-editor Michael Arrington, “On Monday evening I received a phone call from someone I trust who told me that one of our interns had asked for compensation in exchange for a blog post. Specifically, this intern had allegedly asked for a Macbook Air in exchange for a post about a startup.”

1.  I’m stunned that TechCrunch, one of the most influential and widely read blogs in the world would allow someone so young to create content for the site.

2.  I’m glad they fired him and deleted his content.

3.  One of the comments tips you off  to the fired intern’s  identity but he’s a minor so I’ll let you figure it out on your own.

4.  Another commentor links to an insightful article by Mark Cuban who breaks down the legality of “unpaid” internships. (tl;dr they’re illegal if your work benefits the company in any way).

5.  I’m now much more skeptical of some blog content. If there is more than one author on a blog site, I want to be directed to the bio of the author when I click on the author’s name, not to a list of all their other blog posts.  Seeking Alpha is one example of a good author link (for full disclosure I am a contributor to that site).

When I interview Don Carli about sustainability in news media a while back we had the following exchange, which is relevant.

RI- Will people still care where they get their news from?

DC- I don’t think people care so much about where their news comes from, but journalism… yes I believe they still care. Anyone can make news and anyone can report it, but journalism is different and that difference matters. For example, Twitter is fast becoming one the most important source of breaking news, but it isn’t journalism. I think a robust Fourth Estate capable of independent investigative journalism is essential. The first tenet of sustainability is having a political system that secures effective participation of its citizens in decision making. That is the role served by journalists and the media channels that deliver and store their content. …full article

Anyone can make news. ps i could use a new car ; )

Metaprinter Tries Out Printcasting

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What is Printcasting?  From their site:

Printcasting is a first of its kind online tool that assists users in dynamically creating customized newspapers and magazines comprised of information gathered from local news sources such as blogs, newsletters, news organizations, user content, and other Contributors.  Creating your own publication is as simple as adding the elements you want included in your publication through the easy to use Printcasting.com interface.  Without having to hire a team of editors, graphic artists, or authors you will be able to create your own, professional publication for distribution.

Publishers will also be able to allow Advertisers to place targeted advertisements in their publications and, in the future, receive a portion of revenue generated from those advertisements.  Publications created by the user may then be available for print, download, and distribution to Subscribers.

I wrote about the years-ago-created RSS to print application FeedJournal and it’s potential for a digital newspaper application last year, so Printcasting’s claim to be the “first of its kind” in this realm isn’t necessarily true, what is unique though is their attempt to monetize the resulting product with a simple ad creation tool (among other things).

Printcasting is a Knight News Challenge winner and their website is inviting so I decided to give it a try for Metaprinter.  I want to emphasize that the Printcasting site was in open Beta / preview mode when I did this so don’t judge too harshly.

Step 1. Definitely watch this instructional video before doing anything. Continue reading →

Columbia Graduate School of Journalism – Blogging for Journalists Best Practices

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Show Name: Blogging for Journalists: Best Practices from SreeTips.com
Date / Length: 2/7/2008 3:30 PM – 1 hr

Tips and advice for print and TV journalists who are now blogging. Topics: Basics of blogging; how to get started; building traffic; building your blog’s brand; making money; taking it to the next level. SPEAKERS: Sree Sreenivasan, Columbia Journalism School professor and dean of student affairs & WNBC-TV tech reporter AND David Kohn, Baltimore Sun’s health and science reporter [blogging at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/maryland/doctor/blog/ ]

Prof. Sree Sreenivasan | sree@sree.net
Dean of Student Affairs, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
Technology reporter, WNBC-TV and WNBC.com
http://www.sree.net | http://www.sreetips.com

Starting Your Own Paper Blog… er Newspaper – The Ed Shamy Model

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Ed Shamy is the lone employee of the County Courier newspaper in northern Vermont.  Reading the description of what Ed Shamy does to operate a one man newspaper, it occurred to me that all he’s really doing is publishing a paper blog.  Check it out:

He opens mail, stuffs envelopes, fields complaints and helps unload the advertising inserts from a tractor-trailer that pulls up once a week outside the brick building, sending all hands outside to lift the stacks of fliers off the trucks and carry them inside.

And he writes a column, of course – about the traffic bottleneck at the Swanton municipal complex, about Vermont’s penchant for elections, about the local guy who found a battered book of mysteries along a roadside and set out to find its owner.

What he doesn’t have yet is a paycheck, but that’s his own decision. continue reading at SFgate.com

Ed’s passion about newspapers and journalism runs deep.  I can’t help but draw parallels between him and what the multitudes of bloggers out there are attempting every day.

He’s doing exactly what I talk about at the end of my podcast.  Running a small paper, getting involved with his community and building his value around the needs of that community.  This is what all the big papers are doing wrong.  

I love his story and I wish him the best of luck.

About the County Courier: Continue reading →

Charles Baudelaire Refers to Bloggers… err Photographers, as Imbeciles

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Would Charles Baudelaire Hate the Kindle? -from csus.edu via the26th story
19th century French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire’s famous attack on photography:

“As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance…” Read the entire thing

This reminds me of certain traditional journalists and their hatred of bloggers.

Newspaper Revenue Model Severely Jeopardized – Current Economy Reveals Massive Flaws

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Last week Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm that funded Apple, Oracle, Cisco and Google, among others held a meeting and made a presentation to its portfolio companies about how to try to survive an economic downturn.  The attached presentation is quite in-depth and technical however it does a good job of highlighting the implications on future spending habits.

The implications from the presentation for newspaper publishers are troublesome.  We already know the print advertising model has been rapidly failing since the second quarter of 2006.  Now, the increased exposure and reliance of newspapers on internet advertising and internet advertising growth can become a deadly problem.

————————————————————————————- Continue reading →