It’s hard to get traffic to a blog. You really need it if you want to get eyeballs on things, like ebooks, but you also want to do it honestly. Last month I wrote a couple of posts on the discussion of Apple’s profits compared to Google’s revenue.

Before that I had written quite a few posts, mostly giving advice on blogging and social media. I even follow my own good advice on keyword research, which I know works because I’ve done it with other blogs with great success.

And one irritating thing stands out in every success: the successful posts are always blatant linkbait that happens to be useful. The posts that aren’t linkbait but follow all the “rules” get no search traffic. The two on Apple got traffic immediately, and it’s only increasing.

So how does the honest blogger take advantage of this? Well, I hate to say it, but Google likes linkbait. And people like linkbait. It’s why they click on it.

Why Apple gets clicks

People get religious about the software that powers their PC. Did I just call Macs PCs? Yes I did. If I did that and didn’t put this little note here, I’d get 10 furious people linking me on forums, sending hundreds of hits my way from people looking to complain, agree, and consider.

You have to understand that 99% of people say nothing. They click through, read, take it in, and go on with life. But they’re drawn in by the same things that draw the angry/happy minority in.

Say Apple is run by derivative hacks who know how to market average gadgets as superior, and you’ll get 1000 people who agree or disagree silently, and 3 who scream their opinion at you.

Is it bad to try and use this tendency to drive traffic to your blog? I don’t think so.

Some blogs abuse it, and go out of their way to write pure linkbait with no redeeming value. But linkbait gets the eyeballs, and you need eyeballs to make your blog more than a fancy notepad.

I like blogs. They let anyone publish anything, and they’re great for getting ideas out in to the world. But there’s a problem.

Many posts on the blog are tied to current events, and you don’t want to have to sort through them to find the timeless gems.

So I solved that problem for you. I’ve packaged the best and most durable posts into an ebook. This is published on the Kindle store, but you can read it on any device that supports the Kindle app, including your PC.

Click the image to buy it at Amazon, or use this link.

They’re in completely different businesses.

Google is a display advertising company that occasionally puts out a better display (Chrome, Android). Apple is in the business of finding and extracting value from hardware markets no one else took seriously.

You can’t even accurately compare Apple to smartphone manufacturers. Companies that make handsets that run Android, Windows Phone, and other operating systems provide hardware, but rarely the full software experience.

Who would you even compare them to as a competitor?

Since smartphone makers let the network provider handle the software, and Apple’s iPhone runs on those networks, a meaningful comparison would take a more detailed and thoughtful breakdown of business structure than the typical “Apple is killing Google” linkbait author feels like writing about.

I don’t even care enough to go into that much detail. But if you’re desperate for a simple comparison of Apple and Google, then you need to look at iAds. Nobody wants to look at iAds, as far as I can tell.

I couldn’t find a breakdown of Apple’s earnings report that shows how much revenue and profit iAds brings in.

But this is what you’d need to look at if you wanted to meaningfully compare the two companies.

There’s been a lot of irrational exuberance floating around the tech blogosphere since Apple’s earnings report. I don’t see anyone in the tech press being skeptical, and it’s a lack of skepticism that leads to problems.

History doesn’t have many examples of companies maintaining this kind of success, and nobody seems to want to talk about it. Are we just sick of years of recession and so desperate for a huge success story that we’ll ignore risks to maintain the illusion of an invincible Apple?

Apple has a board of directors and investors. Eventually, those investors will lose their restraint and demand that Apple make risky bets to make this crazy growth happen faster. Or Apple will just make a mistake–maybe Tim Cook won’t be able to do what Steve Jobs did, or what he did won’t work anymore.

Apple revived the dying PC industry and proved that mobile devices can be more than executive toys. That’s big. Apple found its fame with products that do fewer things than ordinary PCs in a way that’s appealing to a lot of people, and it’s taking every other gadget producer down the same road.

It’s on the network TV track, chasing products that appeal to as many people as possible while having no unique qualities beyond being accessible to a lot of people.

Apple kicked off a race to maximum blandness across the mobile gadget industry, leading to a flood of better-selling-but-not-different devices. I don’t even read gadget news anymore. It’s just so boring.

The good news, though, is that we’re at peak bland. Gadgets can’t get any more dull than they already are. Apple helped drive mobile into the hands of the masses, which drove component costs down and component capabilities up.

Cheap components mean there’s now room for innovators to swoop in with new and interesting ways to make a gadget without it costing a fortune. We saw the same thing happen in desktop computers when they started looking alike, and the components got more powerful.

Most large websites run on inexpensive servers, and the heavy lifting is done by an inexpensive network that keeps the sites fast in normal times and stable in the event of a huge surge in traffic.

This is the result of the race to averages in computing, and it’s what’s happening in mobile devices. Amazon’s AWS and all things like it exist because a few PC makers got together and had a bland-off for a couple of decades. It was the first clone war. The gadget swarm is #2, and Apple’s iPhone and IPad are equivalent to the IBM PC.

The gadget press likes to talk about how much money Apple is making right now, and how high their market cap is. Remember that race to averages in computing? Microsoft’s stock rode that to a market cap higher than what Apple is seeing now thanks to selling the operating system of choice for the people who built boring clones of IBM computers.

Microsoft ran the world for all practical purposes. Then a market shift happened. The one we’re seeing right now, with mobile, or Clone War II. Now the desktop isn’t as important, and all the most interesting developments are multi-platform. Microsoft has gone from a market cap of around $600 billion to about half that.

Apple’s rise isn’t going to last forever. It’s an artifact of soaring market share and creation of new mass markets where competitors are still learning. Eventually someone will make a clone that’s better than the original, or someone will obsolete the whole platform.

It could go on for a long time, but all it takes is someone figuring out how to do it, and that’s going to become more likely as Apple’s profile grows. Apple has earned its wealth, but it’s too easy for them to forget what made it possible and slide back down.

And I prefer it that way. Monopoly makes companies crazy.

Siôn le Roux wrote in with a good question about how bloggers keep up a semi-regular posting schedule.

I suppose in a way I’m a bit new to blogging. Is it normal for bloggers to post as often as once a day? I don’t see how you (or my other favourite blogger for that matter) find the time and commitment for it. How much time would you say you spend each day on writing blog posts?

Writing is like most arts: people underestimate the value of practice.

Writing regularly

Writing is like walking. It’s easier to go 2 miles if you spent the last week walking 1 every day. And you wouldn’t run a marathon if you spent the last year floating in space.

You’ll also find it easier to write if you have more inputs, and if the quality of those inputs is high. That means finding good books and blogs connected with the subjects you write about.

And just as a marathoner can do a mile in a minute, someone who writes a lot can write a lot in a short time.

Buffering

Some writers end up not writing most days with occasional huge bursts of writing. At times I’ve hammered out 20 posts in a day and couldn’t write another for a month. But it’s still a good idea to sit down and try every day.

It gets easier when you develop a readership and people send in questions. Half this post was already written in the form of my replies. Make sure you get permission to publish parts of the conversation though. Some people don’t like seeing their words out in public unexpectedly.

Editing can come later

If you’re not sure of a post’s quality, let it sit for a day and see if it still seems useful. It’s better to get it out in public and see what happens than to spend a week picking at it.

And remember: nobody’s on a panel judging you for a PHd here, so you shouldn’t worry too much if your first thousand posts don’t work out. Mine sure didn’t.

This question also coincided with me reading another post on prolific writers at Write to Done which has some interesting quotes from famous authors known for publishing a lot of books.

Update: I learned very little from my social media blackout. But I did learn one very important thing.

There are a lot of interesting things to share that are hard for me to write about, but that might produce some thoughts in someone else. The effect of blacking out was that I shared fewer ideas, and so fewer ideas were generated.

So I guess social media is a net positive. And my follower count on Google Plus continued to go up at a healthy pace while I was away. Weird.

I’m ending it earlier than I planned because I keep running into things worth sharing, and social media is a great place for that.

Look back several years. Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist. Google was an amazing search engine. Everyone was talking about how great blogs were, because they let anyone publish.

I liked the world where everyone had their own blog where they shared their thoughts, where people could comment right there on the post, or they could go and write their own post.

This was how people found new things before social media. That world had less noise, and clearer thoughts had an easier time emerging.

Maybe most people never would have made a blog, and they wouldn’t have said anything at all without social media. But how can you really know?

How many independent homes on the web never came to be because that first post happened on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ instead of a freshly created blog? Social media as we practice it today puts too much inside too fragile and too noisy a space.

I want to take the alternate view: that social media, as it’s practiced today, is the wrong way to do things. And it’s hard to find the right way while swimming in the present form.

So I’m cutting it out.

I’m going to stop linking to things on social media. I’m going to stop writing advice on using social media. And I’m going to start commenting more on blogs.

This isn’t a campaign against social media. I don’t expect a lot of people to go along with this experiment, especially since I’m not giving a rousing speech about the evils of Facebook and Google+.

I’m just not using social media for a while to see if I can find a better way to do things. This is why you see that blurb just before comments, encouraging people to write a response on their blog or make a comment.

All I want to do is remind people that there is a world outside the social media gardens (walled and otherwise). We should do that every half decade or so.

There are shady marketers who offer to give you friends on social media for a price. They produce the numbers, but they’re doing a disservice.

The numbers usually come from botnets that create thousands of accounts to follow people. In some cases they’ll even pay real people to follow you.

And it might look great and feel great, but it’s all an illusion. Numbers are worthless. Numbers don’t click your links, buy your products, or tell their friends about your services. They sit there, taunting you, telling you you’re important.

They know they’re lying. The people who sell the numbers know they’re lying. Now you know they’re lying and won’t deal with them. But you still want to know why your real followers aren’t talking to you.

Most of those people idly added you when they saw a post or two they found interesting. Very few of them show up again on their own.

You’re probably like I was not too long ago. You do get clicks, comments, and all those wonderful things, but not often, and it fizzles out fast. The content you post is probably fine, but most people never see it.

Here’s the problem: you’re not the only person vying for their attention. They have tens to thousands of people blasting content out.

It seems hopeless when you think of it that way. How do you, some random Internet person, get noticed? You won’t be seen by most people on the first pass, but more will see it if you post things people want to share.

This is something I’m still learning, but I’ll share what I know. I post a lot of comments and links related to technology, and most go unseen.

The few that do get seen have some shares, +1s, and comments. Those comments tell Google Plus that I posted something interesting, and it starts giving it higher weight in the streams of those thousands of previously disengaged people.

Now you can see where most people get hung up. They drop links and comments and hope for the best, never giving proper consideration to stickiness. Stickiness is how likely something is to stick to an eyeball as the something zips by an individual’s stream.

But even with your troubles, some people do engage. Take these little successes, learn from them, and use them for the next link or comment. Figure out why someone shared this link and not that link.

The same goes for +1s and comments. And you’ll get better at it with every post, turning more numbers into people who are interested in what you’re saying.

This is what I was talking about in my post on social media influence. You earn influence by learning how to engage more people with the things you say and do. And it’s why you should forget about numbers.

The numbers become viewers, clickers, readers, and circlers when you get better at engaging them. It’ll be different depending on your audience. Tech people like a lot of links to interesting tech things, so I post a lot of links.

Someone who talks about quilting might share photos of quilts from around the web. You need to do the things that get engagement, whatever those things are.

It’s up to you to figure that one out.

What is a secret that everyone is happy to share, but most people refuse to follow? A secret secret!

So you run a blog, and nobody’s reading it. Or not enough people read it. You know about Google’s keyword tool. You use it to make sure someone’s searching for what you write about, and that’s great. But most people use it incorrectly.

See that box over on the left that says “match types?” Broad match and its buddy phrase match are for blogs that already get plenty of traffic. Untick everything except exact match.

The secret secret is called market research

This new world of self-publishing is great because it lets anyone in, but not so great because it bypasses marketing departments. Well, that is good, but also bad for people who don’t like to market. Keyword research is a part of market research for the web.

Broad match covers a bunch of phrases you’re never going to rank for if you don’t have any exact matches on your blog. I’ve seen keyphrases with hundreds of thousands, even millions, of searches monthly under broad match.

I ranked for some of them, and thought I was doing it right. But no one was finding my posts. Then I discovered exact match. I watched high-volume keywords I was happy to rank for drop to tens of searches a month under exact match.

So I was ranking for them, but almost no one was searching for the things I ranked for. I worried I was a worse writer than I thought, or that I wasn’t performing the proper SEO incantation.

The problem, as it turned out, was that I was screaming into a void.

The right volume

My exact match threshold is around 500, but I like to aim for keyphrases above 2000. You might be willing to settle for a low volume per post if you can crank out tons of high-quality content.

Write with exact match phrases long enough, and Google will start giving you ranks for the broader stuff.

Apple’s focus is on the cost of textbooks and authoring tools. What Apple is doing can help keep the system from degrading further, but more and cheaper books will have limited impact. The future is in connecting people and knowledge across geopolitical boundaries.

Khan Academy and similar efforts address the major issues:

• Access to expertise

Imagine if your high school science class out in the suburbs could have had a videoconference with Neil deGrasse Tyson. This is realistic today. Even local schools here in Barrow do this with the University of Georgia. It’s a great time to be a student in Georgia.

• Collaboration

This goes along with access to expertise. The highest achievers can work with students who need help, and everyone can share how they got past the hard problems.

• Funding

This is one place where Apple’s thing actually helps. Books cost a lot, and underfunded schools can buy old iPads from wealthier districts at a huge discount.

• Measurement

It’s hard for a student to go up to a teacher and ask for help. Class analytics let the teacher come to the student and offer help.

The problem with most schools today is that teachers are overworked and under-resourced. The best thing Apple could do is help connect schools that can buy iPads and fund their classrooms to those that can’t.

They should work with all the efforts already in progress. Wrapping the present system under capacitive mesh helps in the short term, but the system needs deeper change than Apple presented today.

The internet existed from the ’50s in the form of connections between mainframes and terminals, but the part that impacted the present most happened with the standardization of the Internet Protocol in 1982. And it’s one of the most important events in the history of the computer.

The Internet as we know it today was developed by DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to enable rapid and difficult to interrupt communication between governments in times of crisis.

As with most cool government gadgets, like GPS and night vision, it became a commercial hit.

Having a common, standard protocol let a computer in Bangladesh talk to one in New York without difficulty. It was a hit with universities, which ran lines between campuses and other universities to speed up collaboration.

Email

But you had to have a way to communicate. The Internet Protocol was just a basis, like a freight train. They weren’t much use if you didn’t have anything to ship. So protocols had to be built on top of it.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is the big one, because it adds a suite of features to IP in the form of TCP/IP. It added things to IP to make sure data moved about reliably. And it worked great. You can be sure of that because it’s still in use today handling trillions of connections every year.

But you still needed some communication medium. Having a standard protocol to encode and decode data and make it go from Point A to Point B didn’t provide a way to communicate meaningfully over that protocol.

Email was one of the many answers. Anyone with any level of technical skill could type a message into an email client, and get it to where it needed to go using a simple human-readable address, like example@example.com.

But email could only do so much. It was disorderly if you were communicating with more than one person, and didn’t provide a way for people to see the conversation after the fact.

Usenet

That’s where Usenet comes in. Before the Internet, people dialed in to Bulletin Board Servers (BBS) where you could exchange files, discuss things with communities at each end, and see what was going on. But this was limited. A BBS server was only accessible to as many people as the server had phone lines.

Many protocols existed to make mass discussion on the Internet possible. But most of them were commercial and difficult to license, but Usenet was free to implement. So Usenet took over, and it worked great.

But there was a period every September, when new students came around, when chaos ensued. They eventually settled down to become productive members of the global Usenet community.

Endless September

Unfortunately, with masses of people come masses of problems. Usenet was born in universities where people learned the social norms, and expected behavior could be enforced. Most ISPs in the late ’90s provided Usenet access, and did little to control the behavior of their users.

Usenet has poor moderator controls, and even the best-run newsgroups collapsed under the strain of spam and trolls. This is usually referred to the Endless September.

Usenet was under attack from two fronts: bad users, and the rise of web-based message boards that gave moderators many tools to deal with problem users. With that and decreasing support from ISPs, Usenet is effectively dead.

You can still access it through Google Groups and paid Usenet providers, but it’s nowhere near as vibrant as it used to be. Most of the interesting discussion has moved to web forums and social media.

The World Wide Web

My experience with the web started when I figured out what that little blue button in AOL did. I was very young and didn’t document much of my experiences, but some of it is still there. These are the most interesting things I can remember.

The reign of AOL

This was back when ISPs still billed by the hour. It was a dark time where hours were traded on the black market, and people were mugged for the codes on their trial offers. Light was brought to this dark time in the form of plastic and metals forged into tablets of various shapes, on which codes were inscribed.

These tablets (known as floppy disks and compact discs) granted access to the Internet, and they turned up everywhere. They showed up in mailboxes. You could find them at the gas station, grocery store, book store, and any place where open counter space was found. A lot of people had computers, and a lot of them had modems, so there was no reason not to enter this new era.

After a time AOL did away with hourly billing and charged by the month, giving you as much time as you could consume for one flat rate. Editorials were penned on the hazards of spending so much time on the Internet. It turns out this wouldn’t be a problem. The new billing method brought the entire service to a crawl.

For months you were lucky if you could connect at all. They just weren’t ready for the amount of demand unlimited access would bring. These problems went away, and AOL became a certified thing.

AOL screeched into the public consciousness so fast and hard that it was a key plot point in the 1998 movie You’ve Got Mail. The movie, unlike AOL’s merger into Time Warner, was a resounding success. Happy times continued until the .com bubble burst.

Dot Boom

There was a strange era early in the life of the web when everyone and their mother thought they had a great business idea that centered on the web, and investors were happy to ignore the impracticality of most of them while throwing money at them.

The result was predictable. The .com bubble popped, dragging the world economy down with it. Companies with sound business ideas behind them (like Google and Amazon) survived, but most went down the tubes. The tech industry seems to have found a safe balance where it starts flooding bad ideas with money, then someone says “hey maybe this isn’t a good idea,” and the market cools again.

NetZero and freedom

NetZero took AOL’s model one step further and gave Internet access away. You just had to have a banner ad on your screen. That is, until you figured out that you could bypass the NetZero ad-handling dialer and connect through Windows’ own dialing program.

It wasn’t long before details on how to do this spread through IRC and Usenet, forcing it to become a normal ISP with billing and other businessy things. NetZero was pretty good. It looks like they’re still around, but I can’t vouch for the quality.

Eventually broadband came along and negated a whole era of computing. Now dial-up is a thing you get as a last resort, and most laptops and desktops have stopped coming with dial-up modems.

Namezero

Namezero let you register a domain name for free as long as you ran their banner advertisement in the lower quarter of the browser window. The idea was doomed.

Everyone on the web back then was at least a little bit technical, so adding a piece of JavaScript to remove the frame was easy. You had to host the domain somewhere else, so they had no control over the content.

All their attempts at forcing people to run the ad failed, and at some point they turned into a normal paid registrar. I’m not going to link them here because their site is painful to look at and their domains cost too much.

Microsoft Internet Explorer

Microsoft liked to add new things to their browser. This wouldn’t have been such a problem if their additions weren’t completely incompatible with other browsers, forcing web developers to create versions of their sites specifically for Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer 6 was notorious for being the bane of existence for all who dared to weave webs during the reign of Microsoft. Their browser’s death was heralded by the rise of Firefox and the new era of fancy interactive UIs, ironically driven by a thing Microsoft created but had no ambitions for.

Mozilla Firefox

This was the dawn of Web 2.0, where the tech media was flooded with trendy buzzwords and new companies whose names made no sense, like flickrand del.icio.us. Firefox’s plugin system changed everything. You no longer had to learn arcane incantations to develop add-ons like with Internet Explorer.

Most importantly, Firefox’s plugin system gave full control over the browser to developers. You could completely change the interface without touching the underlying code of the browser. This led to plugins like Firebug, which let web developers peek under the hood and see why their pages looked weird.

Google Chrome

But Firefox started down the dark path Internet Explorer followed with bugs and incompatibilities. Google depended on the proper display of sites showing its ads, and Firefox increasinglydidn’t work. So Google published and promoted Chrome, saying “this is how you do the web.”

Chrome pushed Firefox to get better, and it worked. Together, Firefox and Chrome blew holes in Microsoft’s once-dominant market position, so much so that even Microsoft had to start thinking about how to build a better browser.

We are here.

The Internet is still a wild place, but it’s gaining strength fast. From its role in the 2008 elections to its collective efforts to stop efforts to censor it, the Internet has gone from a toy for academics to a serious economic force.

It’s hard to predict where it’ll go from now. It’s still new, and it’s very weird. It shifted the balance of power from distributors to creators, which is how you’re reading this article right now. In the past I would have had to find a magazine to accept this article for one of its issues, and I probably wouldn’t have been paid for it.

This could be a fluke. We could go back to a tightly controlled content distribution network with publishing houses and media conglomerates holding all the power, but things are looking up for now and the near future. For now, the Internet is the realm of creators.

And you’re a part of it. Thanks for reading this article, and I look forward to putting interesting words in front of your face both in new books and here on my blog.

Until next time.

More on the subject

This is a rough overview, and is enough for the casual Internet user. If you want the long, super-detailed version, this post at Six Revisions has you covered.