Master The Web

The StumnleUpon effect

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 08:03:00 +0000

Still I think StumbleUpon is an amazing tool worth investing into.

I don't get that many visitors on my blogs. I haven't got much time to blog and even less to market them, so the number of visitors are quite low.

Buy after reading several threads in BlogCatalog about StumbleUp, I decided to test it. I create a little post and went on asking my buddies at BlogCatalog to stumble it. The result was instant:

The big spike in my Analytics is from stumbling Breaking New: Whole Foods Market launched in London on Business Matters. You can see the effect: big rush of visitors (about 200 compared to a normal 4-5!). Sadly they don't stay very long (about 1-2 minutes) and don't stick either. Still I think StumbleUpon is an amazing tool worth investing into.

You must design ways to get them to come back: email/RSS subscription sounds like good idea, you could bribe them with freebies as well. Another option if you are into making money is to ask your buddies continuously to stumble your post (although they could get bored of it) as you will get spikes and spikes of visitors. If you have ads for instance that pay per view it is not a bad thing at all!

If you actually wanted to use it for yourself as opposed to just increate your traffic; basically you need create an account, then you should really install the FireFox toolbar for StumbleUpon and then you get lots of new buttons; 3-5 of them really matter.

One is called "Stumble", when you click this, you get instantly a new page loaded. The pages I believe is selected from the the interests you listed on StumbleUpon while creating your account and from the people stumbling pages. The 2 next important ones are "Thumbs up/down" which tell StumbleUpon if you liked what it showed you. I supposed the software behind must refine the selections based on your input. Finally, if you are nice guy or gal, you want to review some sites using the "Review" button which will give them more exposure because the reviews will appear in StumbleUpon are visible to all users.

All in all, StumbleUpon despite looking a little bit nerdy, is a great tool to give a boost to your Analytics ratings and also a cool way of visiting sites you will not normally look at.

Improve Your Technorati Rank

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 14:26:00 +0000

RTCunningham has started a new experiment to see how to increase your Technorati ranking. I am definitely up for it. As you can see from my previous post blogging and money, I am always keen to increase my ranking. Like everybody else, this is like an obsession.

I found that these little scheme works quite well. I believe my blogs ProLight and Master the Web ranking on Technorati went up for similar reasons (linking scheme). By the way you are wellcome to fav them (fav Master the Web, fav ProLight). This experience could help understanding the mechanics behind the Technorati beast even further.

So here is the deal, create a post on this experiment and link back to my little post. You can for instance use the text below (sadly Blogger insists in converting the code back to a link so use View/Source to get the code):

I am always k een to increase my ranking. Like everybody else, this is like an obsession.

Have fun.

Are we loosing the blogging fiber?

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 12:19:00 +0000

How much time do you spend actually writing new contents?

I have been trying to boost the ranking of my blogs in many different ways for a long time. It came to the point where I would literally spend all my time available on the computer finding ways to increase my ranking rather writing actual contents (not that I have much time).

That is really odd as the point of blogging is to write contents (which is actually what I like to do). What happened there? Why are we all become obsessed with making money through our blogs? Is it that we are all obsessed about money that we could not resist the lure of making money while blogging? Possible.

Actually that does not make much financial sense. I believe very few people make money out of it. Imaging you spend about 5 hours per week writing, monetizing and researching. The average wage in United Kingdom is about 5 pounds per hour. That means per week you need to make more than 25 pounds per week or 100 pounds per month.: below that you are making a loss. Looking at the How much have you earned from Adsense? thread in BlogCatalog very few people can make that much money per month.

It does not make much sense. Something else should explain that behavior. I don't think this is really about make money then. I think it is more about popularity than money. How much money you make is a good way of representing the popularity and success of your blog. If not why spending so much time to make so little money?

How much time do you spend fishing for links ?

How much time to spend researching ways to make (more) money?

How much time do you actually spend writing new contents?

Digg Reality

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sun, 27 May 2007 14:26:00 +0000

I thought that if you read my post An analysis of Digg numbers against visitors, you deserved a rest and a little laugh. Have fun!

An analysis of Digg numbers against visitors

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sun, 27 May 2007 13:07:00 +0000

Is there a relationship between number of diggs and visitors?

I recently created two posts that I pushed onto Digg. The two posts are in many ways quite different. One was written over several days and required quite a bit of research and the other was written in about 10 minutes or less while watching TV.

The first one BlogCatalog social networking strategy so far has received 11 diggs (the most I ever had) and attracted so far 16 unique page views. The other one was Amazing Flickrvision 2D/3D Flickr mashup so far has received only 2 diggs but attracted 41 unique page views.

Bizarrely the BlogCatalog post didn't receive a single visitor from Digg at all while the Flickrvision post received 19 unique page views from Digg. Clearly there is something rather odd in this.

The average time on page is very revealing. On BlogCatalog social networking strategy visitors stayed an average of 3 minutes while on Amazing Flickrvision 2D/3D Flickr mashup the visitors stayed a mere 1 minute and an half. The bounce rate is also very revealing. The BlogCatalog post bounce rate a little below 20% while the Flickvision bounce rate is over 70%.

There is about 15 news in Digg that include the term "Flickrvision". They have between 1 to 8 diggs. There is about 20 news in Digg that include the term BlogCatalog (a few of them relate to a newer press release from BlogCatalog). They have between 1 to 35 diggs.

Is there a relationship between number of diggs and visitors? I am not too sure this is an easy conclusion to make. I feel that the front page effect must be the main factor responsible for the rush of visitors from Digg to my Flickrvision post. That would explain why the BlogCatalog post didn't received visitors from Digg. It must have failed to make the Digg front page. But then what about the Digg upcoming page?

Finally using my little SEO plugin (see Great SEO FireFox plug-in by Aaron Wall), I can see that the Flickvision homepage as about 50,000 links (Yahoo search) while BlogCatalog homepage attracted more than 1,200,000 links (Yahoo search). Clearly there is today far more people interested into BlogCatalog than Flickrvision.

In conclusion, I believe timing is key in Digg. Being the first to digg on a new upcoming topic and making the front page must be of upmost importance to drive some of that Digg power juice. Also, writing real contents increase vastly your chances to retain some of the visitors you worked so hard to attract to your posts.

Blog activity report: Sunday 27th of May 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sun, 27 May 2007 12:00:00 +0000

Past:

On the 26th of April, I decided to push one of my post "Are venture capitalists all sharks?" to social networks, it didn't work, only 3 visitors,
On the 14th of May, I have posted a piece about BlogCatalog social networking strategy which has attracted quite a few diggs (11 so far), it attracted no visitors from Digg but quite a few people from the BlogCatalog crowd read it,
On the 20th of May, I posted a little post on a new Flickr mash-up which actually attracted quite a few visitors from Digg (about 50) despite having just 2 diggs,
On the 28th I setup my Google Analytics so that it gathers all the data from my sub-domains separately as well as together in one profile: not a complete success (see).

Future:

I need to investigate a spike in my ProLight blog. It has reached 29 links in Technorati and attracted temporally quite a few visitors: 6o visitors on Sunday the 22nd which is quite a lot more than usual,
I need to analyse the 2 posts that I recently dugg to understand why some brought so many visitors and the other none while the numbers of diggs went the opposite,
I need to investigate my Google Analytics settings, the weiersmuller.org profile, it does not show the pages from all the sub-domains as I wanted.

How to add a Digg button to a Blogger post

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sun, 20 May 2007 15:37:00 +0000

I was struggling this afternoon attempting to integrate the Digg button in one of my post. Eventually I got sick of it and posted on BlogCatalog my dispair. Very quickly borzack put me on the right track:

Blogger doesn't allow the script tag if i'm not mistaken. Here are a few help:
DiggButton
Tips for new Bloggers

I used the first link as I don't digg all my stories and don't want to cluter them to much. I think it worked see BlogCatalog Social Networking Strategy.

If anybody feels generous enough to click and digg my story I would really appreciate. I would of course return the favor as soon as you've got your button working ;-)

Thanks a lot to borzack and Diggbutton,

Kind regards,
Marc.

Great SEO FireFox plug-in by Aaron Wall

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sat, 19 May 2007 21:02:00 +0000

Aaron Wall from SEOBook has written a great little plug-in for Firefox that pulls together lots of SEO data and display in the Yahoo and Google search page results. You can basically check out your competitors ranking on various search engines and social networking or bookmarking tools very quickly: really cool!

Check out his great selection of free SEO tools don't forget to read Aaron SEO Book to learn the best SEO technics.

Thanks a lot Aaron.

How to post video on your blog

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Mon, 14 May 2007 22:38:00 +0000

Just go on YouTube copy and paste the embed URL in a new blog post, press publish and your are done. For instance see the embedded music clip below:

(PV) YUI - CHE.R.RY - Karaoke playing for us

Big thanks to Moe

BlogCatalog social networking strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sun, 13 May 2007 23:01:00 +0000

Sadly your browser does not display frame properly.I took part into a Technorati experiment a little while ago (see Do you want to take part in a Technorati experiment). It is now time to take part in a BlogCatalog experiment.

Don't wait any more time go through the list and start lobbying the people you like.

As a new blogger in a very crowded blogsphere, I struggle to push my voice out there and fail to grab some of these juicy Internet links. As such BlogCatalog is an easy way to increase your traffic from fellow bloggers. All you need is to have a few posts and a bit of history then you can register your blog.

When you have done so, you will see some curious BlogCatalog users popping in. Then you can start networking with your fellow BlogCataloguers and market your blog(s) to them. Don't forget that when you visit a blog, you then become visitor of that blog and will be listed on the BlogCatalog recent viewers widget possibly exposing your blog(s) to ever more people. Also don't forget to be polite and thank your visitors to entice them to come back.

However you must have a good strategy. Don't just go random that is time wasting: think ... then think again. Basically you need to scan through BlogCatalog users to find people:

with same tastes as you so that they and their readers read your blog(s),
with lots of inbound links (or contacts) so that you get some of that juicy traffic,
and finally friendly enough to reply or link back to you (or add you as a contact) so that you increase you ranking.

Ranking is visible in BlogCatalog on the users profile (see mine not so good). That is all nice and good but surely you don't want to scan the 1000's of users to find out the right people. Well, that is where you need to be clever. Just ask Google magic search engine, basically type this in Google (if you are down right lazy just click the link below):

"site:http://www.blogcatalog.com/user/"

What you get is the list of BlogCatalog profile ordered by ranking thanks to the Google magic. That means very likely the profiles with the highest number of inbound links (not quite sure as the Google magic is kept secret and we can only speculate about the recipe). You can also add specific search keyword(s) like photography to find like minded people. Although this does not mean number of contacts that should list the profiles with the most external visitors. Anyhow that's the job done.

This strategy will maximize your return on investment and make you more visible in the Internet space (more specifically in the BlogCatalog sphere). Of course it is a little hard work and to make sure it is worth your while, why not calculating your return on investment and let me know how you are doing:

"ROI = number of inbound link(s) gained / hours spent networking"

Notes: number of visitors is less relevant as they tend to vanish quickly, inbound links get you new visitors for ever. I thought I would use minutes but I think we need to be reasonable here one new inbound link per hour is pretty good.

Don't wait any more time go through the list and start lobbying the people you like. Don't forget to tell me how it goes by posting a little comment about this strategy!

Activities up to 22 of April 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 22:17:00 +0000

Sadly, I had to stop posting for a long while due to personal matters. However I am now back with my experimentations and stronger than before!

These last weeks have been very busy period for me. I have done a lot see below:

I have rebuild all my blogs using the new Blogger beta and a new black template so that all my blogs look and feel more or less match.
I have moved most of my blogs under sub domains of my main domain name weiersmuller.org except for ProLight which I may eventually move to marcweiersmuller.com.
I claimed "again" my reborn blogs in Technorati (you cannot change the url of your blogs) and removed the old ones.
I bought marcweiersmuller.com and put it on Sedo just in case I make a few pennies (I do not say pounds ;-)).
I created a front page on www.weiersmuller.org to point to the other blogs.

Weiersmuller.org got a face lift

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 11:56:00 +0000

This is has been messy, it is not finished but I am getting there.

I am nearly finished redoing all the Weiersmuller domain.

I have broken it down in sub domains: one per blog (using Blogger). Then I have copied the same template across all my blogs (sadly manually) and finally adapted the template for my main page on the www site.

This is has been messy, it is not finished but I am getting there. Hopefully eventually it will work together and look ok (feedback welcome). I have still some work to do on the www page as I want to display the latest post for Marc Weiersmuller and Hazel Tan blogs possibly in two parallel columns so that the www page becomes our front page for family and friends.

Other things to do are: contact page, about us page, nice photo gallery or slideshow, .... Eventually I might move back to a proper CMS (I started from PHP Nuke but my dear wife didn't like the look of it). I am now looking at Joomla.

Web 1.0 is dead, long live Web 2.0!

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:17:00 +0000

By doing so the Web is becoming more than just a technical tool for nerds or savvy computer users.

It was time. After several decade of slow progress, we are finally seeing some significant changes from the now quite old "World Wide Web".

So far the Web was merely of way of publishing information to a large group of users wired to computer using the Internet. It has slowly evolved to something more interactive. However lately new trends of software deemed more social (bookmarking, blogging, forums, ...)- as they integrate the needs of the Internet users - have lately started the transformation of the old Web 1.0 beast into a more human friendly Web 2.0 communication platform.

It is quite important to remember that people mostly work by exchanging bits of information. Even though Google has made a very significant contribution in last decade; so far the Web was good at listing this information, not so good at retrieving it. However right now it is getting better at sharing this information through social networks.

By doing so the Web is becoming more than just a technical tool for nerds or savvy computer users, it is becoming a form of common unconsciousness made of small human beings interactions. Where is it going to stop is impossible to guess, nevertheless it is clearly a big step forward and will transform the way we interact and work together for the decade to go.

How to add a sitemap to a Blogger blog

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 11:41:00 +0000

I found this great post on Blogger Tips and Tricks. It explains very clearly how to add a sitemap for a blog running on Blogger (note this post will not be very helpful for non Blogger blogs).

This is post was written and tested on Windows XP Home.

Have fun!

Suggestions for your reading list (14/09/06)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 14:33:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

I suggest you check ou the following post/arcticles:

Matt Cutts top tips list: compiled by SEO EggHead,
Backlink strategy:Number against Quality by Jim Boykin

Attention please!

Did you like this post? Why not submit it to your favorite social network (see list below post)? Don't miss a post subscribe to the feed (see RSS readers in sidebar). Do you own a website or a blog? Add a link to my blog, you will make me a very happy blogger (use permalink below post).

Help me: I don't understand a word of this.

Thank you very much indeed!

Do you want to take part in a Technorati experiment?

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:12:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

Rand is using is buddy's blog to test the Technorati blog list.

The idea is too see how easily we can push Todd blog in the list of (top) favorites.

You can help by adding your vote here.

Weekly report: 28th to 10th September

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 22:14:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

Activities:

I am afraid I have renamed again my photography blog. The old name was far too long. I read that long name where not good long term as regular readers could not remember them and would failed to retype it when they want to go back. Therefore this time I picked a very short name: ProLight. Hopefully this will be the last time.

I submitted to Google sitemaps for all my blogs following the instructions from this great post on Blogger Tips and Tricks. Straight and simple. I would therefore expect more direct hit from Google search in the next couple of weeks.

I implemented FeedBurner for all my feeds, it is simple and gives me a way to track my subscribers (no very high yet but growing!). I implemented the mailing list system as well using Squeet as I can manager the list with this tool. Nobody bit on this one at all. I also turned on their FeedBurner Blogbuzz feature which allows you to display a list of posts from one blog onto another website. I thereafter amended the sidebars of my blogs to include post from the other (relevant) blogs. Doing so I hope to cross-fertilize or at least keep the readers hooked longer by offering slightly different but related information.

I started looking at ways to gather feedback in order to define better the subject matter of my blogs. I looked at JotForm and Wufoo. Both are free online forms with some limitations. Although Wufoo appears to be better finished, I decided to use JotForm as there is no limits on the number of forms (Wufoo is limited to 3 free forms). I haven't worked out how to link that nicely to a specific post in the RSS feed yet. But I have nicely formatted a feedback form in the sidebar of "Master the Web".

I created another new blog called "Tricks for Geeks" where I intend to list all sort of simple Howto's to help guys like us that use computers on a daily basis. It should be easy for me to write posts as I do my normal day to day job recording helpful Howto's while I discover them. This could build up quite quickly and hopefully drag people in my "net" of blogs.

I added the Delicious tags cloud and link list on my blogs. It feels up the sidebar nicely looking quite cool and pretty. The link list is dynamic (from Delicious favorites) therefore it will show my latest "finds". I will have a different set of link lists per blog to match the subject matter.

Being busy with life and fiddling with blogs layout, I didn't really blog a lot lately except on "Trick for Geeks". I think I still have at least a couple of months before the structure of my blogs, the target audience, subject matter are defined in stone. In the meantime I shall start drafting my action plans for developing and marketing them. So far it has been very much had-hoc. That cannot continue if I want to have some success.

Analysis of the last 2 weeks traffic:

Since I haven't posted any large or significant piece on any of the blogs, traffic across all blogs went done strongly. I did however post a few comments on a few SEO related blogs which actually in one case brought an extraordinary amount of traffic considering the effort taken. It came from a blog called abduljaleel.typepad.com where I believe I announced my plans to look at different advertising schemes. Sadly the blog appears to have some technical problems. 80 visitors for a 2 line comment, not bad. It is worth noting that the author of that blog is a big digger. I suspect that is out he gets his traffic from.

Master the web:

Reddit is still kicking very well for "Master the Web", it brought me 170 visitors in the last 2 weeks. Way above Digg which brought me a mere 28 visitors. The other social networks did not respond at all to my 2 baits. Clearly, there is something different about Reddit. I think it might be a more technical audience more likely to appreciate my technical level analysis (from "Master the Web). I shall therefore invest more into Reddit for that specific blog as it pays back. Digg as you may have read was rumored to be rigged by a bunch of power users which support each other. If you haven't read it check out this post. I am quite disappointed by this crowd.

I still got a majority of new visitors (86%) compared to returning which I think is indicative of a problem. I would want to have more people returning as I see this as an indication of quality contents. Not surprisingly the majority of the returning visitors come from Reddit and =Blogger (none from abduljaleel.typepad.com yet?). Top contents is still Must have resources for wannabe webmaster amazingly bringing more than the root page (because it was one of the social network post baits).

"Depth of Visit" is still very low. Most people check only one page out. Since my blogs are still very new the depth of the blog is not important therefore this metric is not yet significant but I hope that over time this should give a good indication of how curious visitors are. The "Length of visit" is showing some positive signs. About 50 people stayed more than a minute on the site; clearly they read some of the article: positive feedback.

ProLight:

The number of visitors are still really small on this one (17 over the 2 weeks). I don't think the actual visitor number is any meaningful by itself. Still it is worth noting that 35% comes from Google. Since I changed its name just last week and posted the sitemap a few days later, it is quite impressive. Normally it takes far longer to get Google kicking in. The top keywords where: "Smugsmug", "Lightroom", "Zenfolio" and "Flickr" which match accurately my contents. Technorati is also kicking in.

"Top content" is not really meaningful as the number of hit is so low. "Length of visit" shows some interesting signs here: 5 people stayed more than a minute.

Tricks for Geeks:

This new blog is starting to get some visitors: Blogger is the main source and surprisingly I got a visitor from Delicious (did he get lost?).

Conclusions and Actions:

get back to posting, this is really key to get traffic in (no surprise here),
need to investigate Reddit more as it looks like a good winner for my "Master the Web",
Analytics goals not working, need to be fixed,
build a list of high traffic blog posts to plug my blogs,
Implement feedback form for other blog and for RSS feeds,
draft the blog plans of actions.

Suggestions for your reading list (06/09/06)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 12:57:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic: another great post from Rand (SEOmoz). As usual this is quite informative, highly recommended to any wannabe succesful blogger.
Cheatsheet: What is Digg?: nice little intro to Digg a prevelant social network, read it if you are new to the social network scene,
Dave Taylor at Affiliate Summit: are you in selling stuff, listen to Dave to explain how to use your blog,
Action Tracking by Referral Source & the Linkbait Bump: great post from Rand for Analytics addicts,
Social Media Marketing, eh? ...: another from Rand on social network for SEO (does he ever sleep).

Help me! I am an addict

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 22:22:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

It is official: I am addicted to Analytics!

I love it when it rockets and I hate it when it plummets.

This is really tragic. I just can't help it. I must check the numbers every morning before going to work, at lunch time and in the evening when I am back. As if the numbers will go up if I check them more often.

Worse, I realized that I can now see the daily stats by selecting today's date on the date range selection tool. I think that wasn't there before, I had to wait a full day (yes 24 very long hours).

I am doomed. What I am going to do?

What I usually look at first is the main executive screen specifically the big "visits and page views" chart: that is when my heart beat goes up (or down). Then a quick look at the pie chart showing the ratio of new and returning visitors (you want both let's less 2/3 1/3 respectively). Then I look at the visits by sources which usually reflect some activities (I think the scientific term is campaign) I had during the week.

After that I go in more details. I like to check my "Top contents" in "Contents Optimization" to see whether people read the post I expect (like the one I posted on social networks). After that I check the "Length of visits". I can see that I have a few more people staying a couple of minutes but still a majority stay 10 seconds or less (very bad). I usually skip the depth of visits since blog are rather flat it does not tell me a great deal.

While you are on the top contents, you want to cross analys top contents against source to see which are the source that bring the most people for the most read document (so that you can create a focus campaign on this existing success: always easier than a campaign against a losing paper). Select the red button of at the top of your contents list go in "Cross Segment Performance Source" select "Source Medium". Then what you see is the source just for that document. Then see whether you can max out on some of these sources with some email campaign, social networking, forums posting, blog trackbacks ....

That is usually when I realize that I have been starring at my screen far too long and that I should get a drink of water (so should you).

Allez oups go get that glass of water.

Have fun.

Attention please!

Did you like this post? Why not submit it to your favorite social network (see list below post)? Don't miss a post subscribe to the feed (see RSS readers in sidebar). Do you own a website or a blog? Add a link to my blog, you will make me a very happy blogger (use permalink below post).

Help me: I don't understand a word of this.

Thank you very much indeed!

The show with zefrank: brand after-taste?

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 20:29:00 +0000

It's definitely weird but it tastes good! That is Zefrank for you.

I wonder what the "Master the Web" brand after-taste is like?

Any idea? Then check out The show with zefrank.

Attention please!

Did you like this post? Why not submit it to your favorite social network (see list below post)? Don't miss a post subscribe to the feed (see RSS readers in sidebar). Do you own a website or a blog? Add a link to my blog, you will make me a very happy blogger (use permalink below post).

Help me: I don't understand a word of this.

Thank you very much indeed!

Suggestions for your reading list

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 13:00:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

As from now, I will start sharing part (the best of course) of my personal reading list.

These will be the articles or blog posts that as a "wannabe webmaster" trying to learn the trade I enjoyed the most or found the most helpful.

So, for this week, I suggest:

Winning Big With a Small Search Marketing Budget : If you are like me - (very?) small fish in a big pound - you will find this post quite refreshing, this is not the final answer to a small budget internet marketing campaign however it goes a long way to making you feel better about it.
Buying & Selling Text Link Ads It appears that using Text Link Ads to bring traffic in is now a common practice. I found that post from SEOmoz quite informative especially the comments also check-out the links to the 2 main player’s website.
Generating Buzz With Link Baiting and Viral Campaigns It is a fairly generalist post however quite inspirational. It will hopefully give you some starting points and ideas for you next (or first) link baiting campaign.
Is Black Hat SEO Officially Mainstream? As usual Black Hat is being very controversial. It is quite entertaining to read although a bit saddening. Keep an eye on the comments as I am sure this post will raise eyebrows (again).

Attention please!

Did you like this post? Why not submit it to your favorite social network (see list below post)? Don't miss a post subscribe to the feed (see RSS readers in sidebar). Do you own a website or a blog? Add a link to my blog, you will make me a very happy blogger (use permalink below post).

Help me: I don't understand a word of this.

Thank you very much indeed!

Technorati Tags: webmaster, search engine optimization, SEO, link building, increasing traffic, blog, blogging, blogger

Help me: I don't understand a word of this!

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:50:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

Everything is not lost. You are already reading a blog, this is a good start (see Wikepidea's definition of a blog if you are already lost).

Social networks:

Social networks are a new way to gather information through social groups sharing their favorite webpages (being a blog or a regular web page). In a social network, the information is "pushed" by the users to the user community arguably bringing out the more valuable pages. Compare this to Google which indexes and regurgitates it to you using some sort of secret recipe (not always successful).

In short, it is new, it is fun and it is hot. If you are not on it yet, you need to be very soon!

I suggest looking at Digg, Reddit, Technorati and Delicious which I found to be the most active.

Subscribe to RSS:

RSS is a an XML feed for your blog. Basically the blog is transmitted in that weird XML format to an RSS reader which displays the information in a readable format to the user (you). The difference with reading the same information right of the blog is that your RSS reader can pull the information for you from many many sources and put that together in a single user interface.

The benefits are obvious, you will get all the blog posts in one place at a push of a button, no more crawling the web trying to retrieve the URL of my blog.

Check out Google Reader (beta), if you are on that camp, I believe Yahoo and others would have a solution. Desktop applications exist as well.

Permalinks:

Permalinks - as you might have guessed - are permanent links. As opposed to dynamic links these links do not change. I suppose that does not help you a lot, does it?

You see, a blog is a sort of database application. It stores data (your blog posts) in a database and produces on demand a webpage (from the database of posts). The problem with that is that the ULRs are dynamic: read complex and susceptible to change. Usually that means problems as you cannot maintain a link to the page if the URL changes all the time thus the need for permalinks.

The permalink page (click on permalink below the post) actually creates a complete link for you to cut and paste into your own webpage: pretty cool.

Now, I am very hopeful that you will create a permalink to one of my posts, or subscribe to the blog itself or even better submit a post to a social network. Don't disappoint me!

I hope you enjoyed this post and found it useful.

Thank you very much,

Birth of the weekly report

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 11:04:00 +0000

Dear reader,

Today I decided that from now on I will take notes during the week and post a report on a weekly basis (probably on Sunday evening) that illustrates my activities for the week (starting from Monday to Sunday), the changes that I have noticed during that week in term of Analytics and AdSense results plus a quick analysis and conclusion.

This should be the base for my ongoing experimentations and hopefully will provide you with valuable feedback on a real life example of building and increasing a blog's traffic and potential earnings.

Weekly report: 21st to 27th of August

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 18:08:00 +0000

Activities:

Yesterday, I created 3 goals for "Master the Web" to monitor the number of people that subscribe to the blog's feed, use any of the permalinks or any of the social networks. This was a bit awkward to setup because the URL paths on blogs are fairly short thus there aren't many steps to enter. My goals merely contain the end-point URL and the main site URLs.

Plus I am not too sure these goals are going to work (except the fact that possibly nobody will go for these goals) as the matching URL patterns are fairly complex and the doc scarce. I eventually found some documentation for the regular expression required to build these complex URL patterns (see Analytics regular expressions).

I also fixed my social networking URLs (that is for that blog, I need to move the fix to the other blogs). I had a few issues with Technorati, Digg and Blacklist URLs. I think the code I found was a bit dated. It works better now. That hopefully will become more useful when the site takes off.

From now on, I will attempt to submit to the social networks a post on a weekly basis in order to monitor their effect on the traffic and of course build it. This week I decided to submit the "Must have resources for wannabe webmasters" post from this blog. I submitted to the main social networks: Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, Blinklist, Furl and Reddit.

Changes:

I had a big surprise this morning when I checked my Analytics results. "Master the web" approached the 200 visitors/day mark! I am very pleased. The day before I was at 34 and the day before at around 27. This follows my posting of "Must have resources for wannabe webmasters". A good part comes from Digg (Ah good all Digg always there when we need it!) but the surprise comes from Reddit. Over the last free days it accounts for 36.5% + 19.1% = 55.6% of the visitors (I posted on one Reddit sub site as well)! Digg accounts for just 10.65% and blogger.com 10.27%. No news from the other social networks.

Analysis:

Looking at my goals they appear to have completely failed. However, I went on FeedBurner and I do have 16 listeners (after just 2 days of signing for it). This indicates two things, my goals are badly setup and the contents is of enough value that some people subscribed to it (thanks guys). This is a good sign; I am on the right track.

I must say the overall number and the percentage of Reddit came to me as a big surprise. Don't go just for the obvious: Digg, Technorati, and Delicious. Although - as suggested in a previous post - the relevance of the contents is really key to success (my Flicker post had 3 diggs, 1 more than this last one, but brought far fewer visitors).

Reddit is clearly a very good source of referrals. There must be something wrong with the other ones, not a single referral seems odd to me.

Actions:

I must look at these goals. This is not right,
I will also look at renaming (for the last time ever promised) the photo blog and the tecky blog. I read that using shorter URL is advisable so that users can remember and type it back,
I want to create a new tecky blog as well on a different line, the existing one is not picking up at all,
I want to work on my Adobe Lightroom evaluation (possible weekly post to social network),
Finally I hope to start building a list of the best advertisement and affiliate schemes.

That is it for today folks,

See you.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Google, SEO, search engine optimization, webmaster, blog, social networking, Digg, Technorati, Blinklist, Delicious, Reddit

Master the web is now under Technorati hands

noreply@blogger.com (Marco) — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 20:58:00 +0000

That is it. I have decided to officially launch this new blog.

I do have good hopes for this one as without any advertisement it appears to attract people (good subject matter!). Therefore I hope that with a bit of help it will go very far.

First let's see what effect has claiming the blog under Technorati (I also push it to Pingoat). Incidentally I also enabled subscriber links with most of the readers (Yahoo, Google, ...). This is using the FeedBurner