I relaunched ViperChill a few weeks ago and the site has already received tens of thousands of visitors. This wasn’t by accident or any form of ‘luck’. Instead, I carefully took the time to setup everything necessary for a great launch that would allow me to explode traffic onto the site and turn those visitors into subscribers.

I’m not going to share the usual ‘write what you’re passionate about’ or even give you tips on how to install Wordpress — I’m hoping you’ve covered that already. What I am going to share, however, is exactly what steps I take when setting up a new blog (and why) so you can hopefully learn a thing or two to tweak on your current site or for your next launch.

WordPress Settings

1. Change the Domain – On a typical install, your blog will show in the Wordpress settings without the www in the domain. I prefer having this, so I add it back in my going to Settings >> General. You will probably have to log into your Wordpress admin again after doing this, but that will only happen once.

2. Tweak the Permalinks – Permalinks are simply the URL’s of your blog posts and pages. By default, your URL’s are setup like http://www.viperchill.com/p=8 which isn’t very pretty and doesn’t give an indication to what the page is about. In Settings >> Permalinks I use the custom option and type %postname%. This means that my URL’s can be something like http://www.viperchill.com/launching-new-blog/ which is both pretty and informative.

3. Enable Threaded Comments – In the past I would have installed a plugin for this, but now Wordpress offers this as standard. In Settings >> Discussion you can choose to enable nested comments and select how many levels deep you would want these to go. This enhances the conversation in your comments and allows you and other readers to reply to specific comments directly.

4. Add Ping Services – You probably won’t have to do this, but when I installed my blog there were no ping services in the Options >> Writing section of my Wordpress admin panel. Adding ping services means that you can send trackbacks to other blogs which lets them know when you link to their posts. It also gets your site listed in Technorati and other blog aggregation services.

5. Turn Off Comment Notifications – If you’re new to blogging it can be exciting or useful to find out when your blog gets a new comment. Once you get in the 30+ comments per post stage or even 200 in some cases (my record) then getting emails about comments completely takes over your inbox. I prefer to turn this off in Settings >> Discussion and simply find out about new comments from my dashboard.

Wordpress Plugins

6. Akismet – This comes default with Wordpress and is their own way of helping to combat blog comment spam. I guarantee that if you do not activate this, you’ll soon be going crazy with all the russian spam and porn links appearing on your website. Grab an API key from Wordpress.com and you’re golden.

7. Align RSS Images – I like to use images in my blog posts and I know I’m not alone. It’s common though that when someone puts images in their post and they align nicely, things won’t look as pretty when you get the post in a feed reader. This plugin aligns images in your RSS feed so they are exactly where they would be on your site.

8. Backtype Tweetcount – If you visit this post in your browser and look at the top left of the article, you’ll see a tweet count button with a link to retweet the article. Tweetmeme is a much more popular plugin which does the same thing but I like that I can customise Backtype to match my theme whereas Tweetmeme is (for now) not as easy to tweek.

9. Comment Redirect – If someone takes the time to leave a comment on your site, there’s a good chance they like what you’re writing and want to read more. Because of that, my good friend Joost wrote a plugin which automatically redirects commenters to any page on your site. If you leave a comment here for the first time you’ll see what this is like. I created a page that specifically tells new commenters about the sites RSS feed and how to subscribe.

10. Subscribe to Comments – RSS revolutionised writing content online and meant that people didn’t have to keep returning to a website in order to see if it had updated. This susbscribe to comments plugin allows commenters to get email notifications of new replies on the discussion they’ve taken part in without having to remember the URL or frequently returning to the site.

11. Cufon – I’ve only ever installed this on one blog (this one) but you might be wondering why my post titles look slighty like images. Well, Cufon allows you to transform certain text so that you can use a huge array of fonts and everyone will see them clearly, no matter what browser or operating system they are using. I think there are less than 10 fonts in the world that work well on every operating system and browser so this massively expands that choice.

12. OIO Publisher – You don’t see any ads on this site, but for my other sites I use OIO Publisher. This is by far the best ad manager available for Wordpress and allows you to not only sell ads automatically but track how many clicks they get, their rotation, and where they appear on the site. I’ve used this for years and can’t recommend it highly enough.

Basics

13. Add An About Page – My about page is not-so-cleverly called What the F**k? and tells people who I am and what this site is about. Ideally it should be easy for people to tell what you produce without having to go to this page but it is nice for readers to get to learn more about their favourite authors.

14. Set-up a Contact Page – Most bloggers want their audience to be able to get in touch with them so if you’re the same, you definitely need to set this up. My contact page is very simple, and simply contains an image of my email address. I don’t share the text version as I’m not a fan of spambots. I also don’t include a form because the few extra seconds it takes to type out an email and open a new browser tab will separate the people who really want to hear back from me with the time wasters.

15. Have 3 Remarkable Posts Ready – Don’t ask me why I chose this number, but I like to have 3-4 remarkable posts on my site before I launch or at least ready to go live as I start promoting. This not only gives people a sign of what is to come but allows you to deal with marketing your new site with a break for a week or two from writing content. If your posts aren’t remarkable, it’s unlikely people will come back so although they will take time to put together, put a lot of energy into them.

16. Sign-Up To Feedburner – Feedburner was purchased by Google a few years ago for $100m and is one of my favourite services online. It allows you to keep track of how many subscribers your blog has and what services your readers use. Not only that, but you can easily setup email subscriptions and insert social bookmarking links directly into your feed.

17. Decide on Categories or Date Archives – As you can see from my own sidebar (which will get a little busier soon) I’m a fan of minimalist design. Partly for minimalism and partly for SEO reasons, I think it’s better if people decide to either use categories or date based archives to organise their content, not both. I have also created a page which lists all of my articles for usability.

SEO

18. No Follow Certain Links – Adding the nofollow attribute to certain links tells search engines not to pass Pagerank to them and not to give any ‘benefits’ to the receiving page or site. This attribute was created due to the influx of spam on the Web and is used by default in Wordpress comments. I also nofollow links to pages that don’t need my link juice such as About or Contact and even things like my RSS feed. Google engineer Matt Cutts wrote that Google frowns on this sort of activity so use it at your own risk.

19. Change Your Title – Anyone with a clue about SEO will tell you the most important thing to optimise for on-site SEO is your title tag. By default, the Wordpress title tag is backwards. What I mean by that is it will show you the website name first before a post title on individual post pages. Instead, I prefer to simply show the post title by itself and then choose my own title for the homepage. My code for this being:

<title><?php if(is_home()) { echo ‘Viral Marketing : ViperChill’; } else { wp_title(”) ;} ?></title>

The title of your homepage should include the keyphrase you choose from the next point.

20. Choose a Keyphrase – Tons of people like to simply name their website after what it’s called, and not what it offers, and that’s fine. I, on the other hand, like to kill two birds with one stone by choosing a title that is both descriptive and has the potential to get me search engine traffic. Head over to the Google Keywords tool and find a term that is relevant to your niche and gets a lot of searches.

Once you have decided on a phrase, put it on your title and try to get backlinks to your site with this as the anchor text. For example, if you ever write guest posts then you can link to your website with this term as the hyperlink. There is a lot more to SEO and getting rankings than this, but that should get you started.

21. Get My Social Media Profiles – If you’re hoping your site will become a well known brand in your niche then it’s important to get accounts on the top social media sites with your site name to stop people hijacking your brand in the future. These should also help you ‘dominate’ the search results for your name. To start with, I recommend signing up to: Twitter, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Youtube and Flickr and any other sites that are relevant to your niche.

Design

22. Fix Address Bar RSS – In the address bar (where you type URL’s) your blog also has an RSS icon. The problem is that if you’re using Feedburner, this icon takes people to a different RSS address instead of your Feedburner one. Thankfully, the problem is quite easy to fix.

In your header.php file find this code:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> RSS Feed” href=”<?php bloginfo(’rss2_url’); ?>” />

And replace it with:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> RSS Feed” href=”YOURFEEDBURNERURL” />

There is a plugin that redirects your other feed, but I prefer to just do this simple hack. Now you’ll make sure you’re getting all of the subscribers you should be.

23. Make RSS Options Clear - The main goal for most bloggers is to increase their number of subscribers. So, if you want people to sign-up to your feed, make it easy for them. I include both a clear link to my RSS feed (for people who know what they are) and the option for people to get email updates. On PluginID, only 10% of my subscribers use email subscriptions, but that’s still over 500 people who may not have subscribed otherwise. I highly recommend including both.

24. RSS and Social Buttons in Footer – If you look at the bottom of every blog post on this site, you’ll see a graphic which encourages people to either subscribe to the RSS feed or tweet the article if they like it. Although I have a tweet button at the top, people are more likely to share something they have read and enjoyed rather than something they’ve just landed on.

Similarly, people are more likely to subscribe to your RSS feed after they’ve read an article they like, rather than just by landing on your homepage.

Over To You

What things do you do when launching a new blog? I would love to hear them…

Blog’s don’t grow on their own; they grow through people sharing them. By having people “talk about” your content, I simply mean people sharing your content. This could be via word of mouth, Twitter, Facebook, or even a link from their own blog. The latter example, surprisingly (or not) is what I’m going to look at today.

What are the most popular posts on the top blogs out there? What are they writing that gets people talking and linking to them? To answer that, I decided to study the most linked to blog posts on four of the most popular blogs in the world and analyse what made them so popular. Based on the findings here, you can apply the results to your own blogging ventures and produce the type of content that you know people respond to. After all, it’s been proven to work for these guys, so why shouldn’t it for you?

ProBlogger

Problogger is the authority website when it comes to blogging, authored by Darren Rowse. Darren has been kind enough to let me write on his site multiple times so I decided to list him first here. With over 5,000 blog posts to choose from, I was curious to see exactly what those top posts were.

1. Blogging Tips for Beginners (Link)
This is a resource post which combines all of the top blog posts on Problogger which offer advice for beginner bloggers. Everyone was a beginner once, and with over 100 million blogs out there, this definitely has mass appeal.

• Links: 4,250
• Words: 722
• Lesson: Have you put together a series of posts that could adequately cover a large interest? If so, consider putting them all in one resource which provides massive value.

2. How To Market Your Blog in 2007 (Link)
A great post that shows the number of ways you can promote your website over the coming year. Interestingly, this was a guest post by a Problogger reader.

• Links: 2,550
• Words: 2,601
• Lesson: Can you create an overall masterplan for your industry and provide them content for the coming year? A years worth of recipes, productivity tips, gadgets to look out for, or whatever is relevant to your niche?

3. Top 5 – Group Writing Project (Link)
One of the most linked to blog posts on Darren’s site happens to be a competition where he is giving away $1,001 to the winner. The idea was that people write a blog post around a “top 5″ theme and they would be guaranteed to get a link from Darren himself. I’m sure a vast majority of people taking part also linked to the original post.

• Links: 1,780
• Words: 1,303
• Lesson: Involve your readers as much as possible. You don’t have to get them to blog, but can you get them involved on Twitter, Facebook, or other platforms?

4. 10 Techniques to Get More Comments On Your Blog (Link)

As the title suggests, this is a list post that teaches people how to overcome a dilemma that most bloggers face at one point or another: how to get more comments.

• Links: 1,550
• Words: 1,178
• Lesson: List posts, as you probably know, are one of the most effective ways to get eyeballs on your content due to their quick-read nature. Could you write a list that helps solve a common problem your industry has?

5. 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog (Link)

Every blogger wants to gain subscribers but rarely do people look at the possibility of losing subscribers once they have them. This post provides a wealth of information for anyone to combat the issue.

• Links: 1,200
• Words: 597
• Lesson: It looks like Darren has taken what worked for him previously here and once again wrote a list post around an issue that many people in his niche may face. Definitely an angle to consider if you haven’t already. He also involved readers once again so I wouldn’t be surprised if those involved linked to his content.

Copyblogger

Apart from being one of my favourite blogs, Copyblogger has established their authority via Brian Clark to tens of thousands of readers. Self defined as “copywriting tips for online marketing success” Copyblogger certainly delivers its promise with excellent content published on a regular basis.

1. 10 Sure-Fire Headline Forumlas That Work (Link)
Headlines are without a doubt the most important part of a blog post. Here, Brian shares tips to help you create headlines that people are naturally drawn t0.

• Links: 2,450
• Words: 623
• Lesson: Find out what is important to your niche and write a list post which will help them easily provide that to their own audience. If you can allow each person to tailor that to their specific situation as done in Brian’s post with “[blank]” then even better.

2. How to Write Magnetic Headlines (Link)
Again, on the theme of helping people with the most important aspect of blogging, this “how to” guide from Copyblogger shares a list of the sites top posts on the subject collected in one place.

• Links: 2,250
• Words: 232
• Lesson: Work out what is the most important thing to your audience and write a number of posts on the topic. As the icing on the cake, put together one page which collects those posts in one place.

3. How to Attract Links and Increase Traffic (Link)
Yet another resource post of Copyblogger articles on a specific subject. This one looks at quite possibly the most important aspect to growing your blog: getting more links to your content and increasing traffic. The links here aren’t to other Copyblogger posts, however, but to posts by other posts across the web.

• Links: 2,170
• Words: 518
• Lesson: A resource post that includes links to other sites shows you as an authority in your niche and may even gain you links from the websites included.

4. Copywriting 101: An Introduction to Copywriting (Link)
Another great resource by Brian, sharing his top tips on Copywriting. It is unsurprising that Copyblogger shares a resource on this topic, seeing as this is the theme of the site.

• Links: 1,810
• Words: 425
• Lesson:  Again Brian shows that putting together a resource of your top posts on one subject can really get people talking (and linking).

5. 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers (Link)
A great list topic on a subject that all bloggers want, more subscribers. Brian shares 10 simple but quick ways to do just that.

• Links: 1,110
• Words: 878
• Lesson: Lists post are always going to be effective. If you can write one on a topic that you know really matters to your blog readers, then it has a good chance of being a hit.

Guy Kawasaki

Guy’s blog, How to Change the World, is perhaps one of the longest running blogs I’ve come across. Guy gives his excellent, unique, and first-hand view on business life as a successful investor and entrepreneur.

1. The 10/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint (Link)
After having sat through what is probably more presentations than anyone reading this combined, Guy shares his thoughts on how presentations should really be done.

• Links: 7,780
• Words: 627
• Lesson: Go against the status-quo and give a new way of working with something you know your audience uses.

2. 10 Ways to Use LinkedIn (Link)
LinkedIn is one of the most popular social networks in the world and is focused around business networking. Guy put together this great post which shows different ways to use the service.

• Links: 3,570
• Words: 1,155
• Lesson: Is there a niche site or service out there that is popular in your industry? If so, write an article on the different ways it can be used to help each of your readers.

3. How to Use Twitter as a Twool (Link)

In December 08, Twitter was experiencing its first major growth surge as it started to attract people outside of the tech industry. Guy, with over 100,000 followers, shows how he uses Twitter as a tool to market his businesses.

• Links: 2,740
• Words: 2,225
• Lesson: Find a product or a service that is relevant to your industry and write a comprehensive guide on how they can get the most out of it to benefit them directly.

4. How I Built a Web 2.0 Social Media Site for $12,107.09 (Link)
Guy shares a rare insight into how entrepreneurs build businesses online and in this case, his social voting website Truemors. It is great to see so much transparency and especially from someone in the spotlight as much as Guy.

• Links: 2,170
• Words: 1,121
• Lesson: There are few things with more viral potential than a list post, total transparency, and a case study that your audience can really relate to.

5. The Art of the Start Video (Link)
Guy shares a long video which is his guide to entrepreneurship and building successful startups. This received a standing ovation in person, so was also received well online.

• Links: 2,050
• Words: 147
• Lesson: Try offering your best content in a new format. Instead of just transforming text versions to video, try creating something long and compelling that is packed with value.

SEOBook

Authored by my friend Aaron Wall, SEO book is the top resource online about increasing your search engine rankings and getting more website traffic. Not only is Aaron an expert on the subject, but he is also a genuinely nice guy, allowing me to interview him for this website when I was only 16 years old.

1. 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity (Link)
It’s funny to see Brian Clark (Copyblogger) commenting on this excellent link building post by Aaron and Andy when, I assume, he was not a web celeb. This massive resource article shares excellent tips on how to build the most important factor in search engine rankings: backlinks.

• Links: 5,570
• Words: 3,276
• Lesson: Aaron shows that you should find out what matters to your industry and put together a huge resource post on helping them get it. Tie that into a list and you’ve got yourself a winner.

2. The Bloggers Guide to SEO (Link)
Another massive article by Aaron and his Wife Giovanna gives bloggers tips on how they can improve the on-site optimisation of their blogs. Something like this was sorely missing for quite a while in my opinion.

• Links: 2,540
• Words: 3,501
• Lesson: Find a big market and find out how you can give them your expert advice. Could you stamp your knowledge on the blogging, real estate, marketing, or any other niche?

3. New Search Engine Rankings Place Heavy Emphasis on Branding (Link)
Aaron goes in-depth on a new Google update showing a lot of figures and ranking reports since the changes. Aaron has been known for breaking content like this since writing about the Google Florida update back in 2003.

• Links: 1,609
• Words: 1,391
• Lesson: Cover breaking news in your industry and provide a more in-depth analysis than anyone else. Then, when other blogs write about the changes, they’ll cite you as their source of information.

4. Track Google Adsense Clicks via Google Analytics (Link)
Here Aaron shares a handy way to find out which visitors are clicking on your ads. From there, you can try to increase the traffic from that source and thus earn more money via Google Adsense.

• Links: 981
• Words: 349
• Lesson: Provide a tool or a way to do something with existing software that has a mass appeal. Webmasters using both Google Adsense and Google Analytics is a huge market.

5. Search Engine Algorithm Comparison (Link)
Although this was written over three years ago, a lot of the advice is both useful today (if less relevant). Another monster guide from Aaron shows the differences between the top search engines and how they rank websites.

• Links: 672
• Words: 9,334
• Lesson: Is there something confusing about your niche that people would like explained better? How about 401 k’s (finance), market trends (real estate), forex (stock trading) or even tyre options (automotive).

3 Key Things I’ve Learned

Hopefully with these 20 examples you have tons of ideas for blog posts in your industry. Although this took me hours to put together (and to find the most linked to blog posts) I believe there is more than enough value in this post to make up for it. Here are three things that really stood out for me while writing and researching this article:

1. Length Matters - What you say is far more important than how much you say, but length does matter (don’t worry, I won’t be putting penis englargement links here). The longest post had 9,334 words while the shortest only had 232. On average, however, the posts had 1,610 words.

I don’t know about you, but the majority of blogs I see don’t put 1,610 words worth of value into their posts. Maybe it’s time to start?

2. Resource Posts Get Links – This actually amazes me, but blog posts that just linked to other blog posts (on the same sites) managed to get thousands of links. Of course it helps if you have an established blog already, but I’m surprised other bloggers are linking to these pages. This is definitely something I’m going to incorporate into my own sites in the future.

3. Show How to Utilise Services – A good majority of these 20 posts were showing people how to utilise services — whether that was social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, or stats programs like Google Analytics. If you can teach people how to get the most out of a service, it seems like they are more than happy to talk about you.

Of course, it would be best to pick something relevant to your niche rather than just the examples posted here.

So, 2,250 words later, I’ll find out if this blogging analysis has helped me write blog posts that get links.

For the sake of nothing but interest, I have decided to do a monthly report which shares the traffic stats for this website. If you could not care less, then feel free to skip this post once per month. I personally love getting an insight into the traffic and other stats of people’s websites (maybe I’m nosey?) so here goes.

Please note that the following stats are only for 13 days worth of traffic. This site is practically brand new, so it’s going to be a while until we establish a decent amount of visitors.

Overall Traffic

• Visits: 3,575
• Pageviews: 7,135
• Avg time on Site: 2 mins 17 seconds

Top Referring Websites

Here are the top referring traffic sources for the month of October (only 13 days):

1. Direct: 1,479
2. Twitter: 618
3. StumbleUpon: 245
4. PluginID: 235
5. Google: 189
6. Sphinn: 146
7. Google (organic): 79
8. SmartPassiveIncome: 57
9. Facebook: 28
10. Ow.ly: 26

Top Referring Keywords

There were a total of 92 visits via 30 keywords this month. The top 10, were:

1. ViperChill: 47
2. Viper Chill: 8
3. titleist logo: 5
4. kina grannis: 3
5. viperchill.com: 3
6. top 100 business twitter accounts: 2
7. www.viperchill.com: 2
8. becoming likeable: 1
9. benefit analysis twitter: 1
10. definitive guide to becoming likeable online: 1

Nothing that out of the ordinary here. For ‘titleist logo’ I’m getting traffic via Google Images.

Subscriber Stats

With this blog, I’m not focusing on subscriber stats as much as I have with others. I still think it is an interesting metric though so I’m happy to monitor it here.

• October 1st: 2,362
• October 31st: 2,549
• Change: +187

I have done nothing but mention the site as a P.S. on PluginID and wrote good (fantastic? ) articles.

Personal Activity

This month I sealed off a long-running business deal. I’m really happy about how everything worked out and will be announcing it early next year. On another note, the games website I’m working on should be complete in a few days. That is just the actual game, not the site design or any launch ideas in place.

I’m also working on an eBook for PluginID entitled “Reality Switch”. It will be about the mindsets and steps necessary to turn your passion into an income or simply take life in the direction you want it too. I’m writing that with Bud who you’ll probably see a little more frequently on the site as he is an absolutely awesome dude.

It’s less than 4 weeks for me now before I leave to Amsterdam. I have been counting down to this for 6 months so you can probably imagine how excited I am. I’m really, really struggling to find an apartment in the city for less than $3k per month (even a 1 bedroom) so I’m probably going to end up in a hostel or hotel for a few days until I can find better accommodation.

Finally, I have the most awesome blog post ever going live on Wednesday. I have no doubt that you will be blown away by it and use it to provide massive value on your website so stay tuned for that.

Life is good.

These days however, things are very different. The top results for most keyphrases are either a Wikipedia page, a site that is very focused around community, or a clear leader in an industry. There are exceptions, but links tend to go to social sites (even Wikipedia has social aspects) by the people who use them.

SEO now is far less robotic, and far more social. Based on this, I knew it was going to be a challenge to rank for two competitive keyphrases in my industry when I was a total nobody. Yet, I still managed to do it, and I’m going to show you exactly how.

Analyse the Search Volume

The first step you need to do before trying to rank for any keyphrase in Google, is to find out how many people are searching for it. It’s completely pointless being number one in Google for “dog umbrellas” if nobody is typing it into the search box and looking to keep their dogs dry in the rain.

To save you a lost of wasted time, head over to the Google Keywords tool. This tells you how many people are searching for keywords or keyphrases each month. I recommend you change the settings to All Countries and Territories, and from Broad to Exact on the top right hand side of the page.

I knew that the main theme for my niche was ‘personal development’ so that’s exactly what I typed in first. The tool showed me how many people searched for that phrase, and lots of other relevant terms I might want to try and rank for as you can see in the screenshot below:

Ideally, because I knew I was going to give myself at least 6 months to try and rank for a phrase, I wanted to pick a phrase that received a high number of searches. This meant I would probably end up picking a more competitive phrase, but it would be worth it in the end.

I then searched for other relevant words like ’self help’ and ’self improvement’ and while self help received far more searches, I later found it to be way too competitive for my liking. I liked the look of the first two keyphrases:

• Personal Development (33,100)
• Personality Development (33,100)

Once I had found two keyphrases that I think would bring regular, relevant traffic to my site, I decided to check how competitive they were.

Check the Competition

This step is to simply find out how difficult it is to rank in Google for the terms I want to rank for. I’m only going to get a good portion of those thousands of searchers if I’m somewhere in the top 5 results. If my site is back on page 2, I would only get a trickle of search traffic each day. If you don’t know already, the major factor which defines where a page ranks on Google is the number of backlinks that the site / page has. Backlinks are simply hyperlinks from one page to another, like me linking to my about page in this sentence.

My next step was to find out how many backlinks the top searches for this page had. Here are the steps involved:

1. Search for your desired keyphrase in Google
2. Take the URL of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd results
3. Head on over to Yahoo as it is far better at showing links than Google
4. Type (without quotes): “link:oneofyourURL’sgohere -site:thedomain.com“
5. Write down the number of results that Yahoo shows

Note for step 4 that after -site: you type the domain name. So, if a result for personal development was johndoe.com/personal-development, that would be my URL, but “johndoe.com” would be after -site:

Run this 5 step process for all of your keyphrases and you should have a good idea of how many backlinks it will take to rank for them.

Decide on Your Final Keyphrase

If the top three sites all have tens of thousands of backlinks, it’s unlikely I’m going to try and outrank them as that could take me years. If they have a few thousand, on the other hand, I still might give things a try. I don’t believe that I can get thousands of links to my site (although, saying that, PluginID has 11,000) but I do believe I can get far better quality links than my competition.

Google not only ranks sites based on the number of links they have, but the quality and relevance. For example, it’s far better to have links to your site with ‘Personal Development‘ as the anchor text, rather than something like ‘Glen’s web site’. I knew I could get a lot of links with my desired anchor text so decided to go for it.

Personality Development looked like it would be far easier to rank for than Personal Development, so instead of just choosing one keyphrase, I decided to go for two. That is how I ended up trying to rank for 66,000 visitors worth of keywords.

On-Site SEO

There are two aspects to Search Engine Optimisation: on site and off. The first step is to make your site relevant to the keyphrase you are trying to rank for. Therefore, I put the keyphrase, Personal Development, in my:

• Website title
• Logo alt tag
• Navigation bar
• Footer (which linked back to my homepage)

Some people like to go a bit over the top with on-site SEO, but I personally don’t waste my time. On-site SEO probably makes up about 10% of rankings whereas backlinks make up the majority so that is where I wanted to spend my time. As long as I have the basics in place, I often find that it is enough.

I don’t think it’s wise to try and optimise your entire site for multiple keyphrases, so instead I created a blog post on the topic of personality development. This was an in-depth guide covering the subject which I believed would attract a lot of backlinks. It did attract some naturally, but not enough.

Building Backlinks

Whatever it is that you’re trying to rank for, this is where the hard work will come in. I’m someone who is willing to put the work into whatever I do, but I also like to kill two birds with one stone, where possible. Based on that, my plan was simple: I would grow my blog by writing guest posts for other blogs, and link back to my website with my desired anchor text links.

That was it.

I didn’t focus on directory submissions, forum links, paid links, article directories, or anything of the sort. I decided I would keep my strategy simple and try to write on as many websites as I could. It was going to take a lot of work to write enough articles for other blogs to make this work but once again: I’m someone who is willing to put the work in.

Below I have screenshotted some examples of the ‘footers’ of my guest posts:

I have written over 30 of these things so I won’t keep posting the screenshots, but I’m sure you get the idea. Even if this was not going to help me rank for the keyphrases, my guest posts allowed thousands of new readers to find my websites. There’s certainly nothing unethical about this either, unlike many SEO tactics, as I’m giving the authors free quality content for their website which took me hours to write.

Because of the work I did here, I rank in the top 10 of Google.com for both of these keyphrases. Note that the results fluctuate a lot (depending on datacentres, etc), but you should see me there.

In Summary

In reality, I ranked for far more visitors worth of keyphrases from the thousands of keywords I rank for, but I wanted to show you two examples that I purposefully focused on and how I did it. Thanks to my good friend Ali for being the inspiration for the blog post who will soon be ranking for millions of dollars worth of keywords.

If this sees like a lot of work, then ask: how much is thousands of highly targeted visitors to your website worth to your business?

My guess, is quite a lot.

I like to think I have Cloud-jacked quite a few niches over the last four years. For example, I’ve managed to build a top 10 personal development blog in 12 months and I was voted the top social media marketer under 21. It all took a lot of work, but it also followed the same process. And this process, guys, is what I’m going to share with you today.

For the rest of this article, I will assume you have a niche in mind. If you don’t, then decide on one. What is it that you love? What could you write about / create videos on / talk about with ease?

What is it that you read about and study when you should be sleeping or dream about while you’re at work? Whatever you’re thinking of right now, there’s a good chance that should be your niche.

Step 1: Find Your Market

If you asked me where people who are interested in personal development hang out online, I could answer you easily. They hang out on blogs by people like Marc, Luciano and Tim. There’s also the ‘leave your job’ type bloggers writing excellent content such as Cody, Corbett and Christine. They can be found on the Steve Pavlina forums, forums for specific aspects of personal development (motivation, productivity, health) and they also like to spend time on Facebook Groups.

I know this because that is my market. When you have an idea in mind of what to offer people (content on a particular topic) then you need to find where they are getting it already. Step one is to simply find out the biggest websites in your niche and the platforms in place that cater to your future audience.

If you’re lucky, the top sites in your industry will be bloggers. Even if you’re not going to start a blog, authors of these sites are very often the influencers online and with real people behind them, you have someone to engage with. To find out where your audience is hiding, I recommend searching:

• Google: Try keyphrases such as “top blogs on [niche],” “[niche] forum,” “[niche] community”
• Facebook: Search using the form on the top right of the site for keywords relating to your market. There’s a good chance you’ll find groups focused around topics you want to cover
• Ning: You can think of Ning as a Facebook but for niche communities. You can use their own search function or try a Google search like “site:ning.com [niche]” (without the quotes)
• Reddit: Reddit allows users to create sub-reddits so you can read content on certain topics. The top articles here will probably also help you find the top bloggers.

There are many more ways to uncover your market online, but those should get you started.

Step 2: Identify & Locate the Influencers

The influencers behind most blogs are of course, the writers. The influencers behind forums are often the owners, but sometimes the moderators or just active users. The influencers behind Facebook groups not only include the creator, but the people who put in their time and effort to keep the group active. The influencers on Twitter tend to be those with the highest (natural) and most targeted follow count (maybe sad, but it’s true) and the influencers on Digg and Reddit are not the content creators, but the people submitting the content.

Ideally, I would locate no less than five influencers and no more than ten. If you choose less than five then you may not get enough engagement back from them and if you choose more than ten it will hard to keep active communications with everyone. It may be that your influencers are all bloggers which is totally fine. Just know who they are.

Once you have located your influencers, find out where else they are online. Do they run blogs? Have Facebook? Use Twitter? Friendfeed? The more places you can connect with someone, the better.

Step 3: Look for Gaps in How the Niche Operates

If you’ve done the last two steps properly, this one should be fairly easy. By now you should have a good idea of where your market spends their time online and what type of websites they like to visit. Your task now is to see if there is some way you can differ from the competition and still give people what they want.

• If there are tons of blogs in your niche, would people benefit from a forum? (and vice versa)
• If your market is spread out on tons of different sites, would they appreciate something like a niche Ning website?
• If the bloggers are used to writing short content, could you write something longer which provides more value? (or short content where most people write long-winded articles?)

It may also be the case that people can’t actually find what they are looking for. To find out some interesting data, I recommend you use one of my favourite tools: the Google Keywords Tool. What this does is tell you exactly how many people are searching for certain keyphrases each month in Google. So I want you to head over there, select All Countries and Territories, and enter a keyphrase that is relevant to your niche.

Make sure the drop-down on the top right is set to exact instead of broad. From here, you will likely see keyphrases that are getting thousands of searches every month. The next step is to head over to Google, type in those phrases, and see if there are actually relevant results. If there are thousands of people searching for something that nobody is offering (or there are no great results), that could be your gap.

All you have to do is find a gap in your niche or differ from whatever is already out there. It’s very possible to dominate a niche simply by doing what everyone else does and using something like authenticity as your innovation, but it’s not always enough. As an example, look at what I have done here in the internet marketing niche with ViperChill. 99% of bloggers in this niche write 500-600 word blog posts on the most generic topics.

Then, here I am writing 2-3,000 word posts and I’m actually someone who makes my living online and has worked with Fortune 100 companies. I am eliminating the people who want short content and nothing more, but I really stand out for those who are sick of the norm. You cannot interest every single member of your market, but you can certainly build your 1,000 true fans from a new way of doing things.

Step 4: Building Out Your Base (& Your Brand)

Even before you have produced any type of content, you should be out there and interacting within your community. I don’t care if you don’t have a website to drive them to and neither do they. The more human aspects you can put across online without trying to get things from people, the more trust you will build and the more they will engage.

Wherever you found your market in step one and the influencers in step two, I want you to be there. If the market hangs out on forums and leave comments on a few popular blogs then I want you to register on that forum and start commenting on those blogs. This is really simple stuff, but you will be amazed at how many people neglect things like this.

If the influencers use Twitter or have active Facebook fan pages, I want you to become a fan and register an account on Twitter.

Get An Avatar – An avatar is a simple image that will represent you wherever they go. It’s important to choose one because people are far more likely to remember you by an image than by a username or ‘identity’. I know this because it really confuses the hell out of me when people talk to me on Twitter and I have no idea who they are just because they changed their image.

An avatar can really be anything that you like. Here are some I’ve found from active social media users that might give you some inspiration:

The second one is mine which I used for my PluginID brand

Once you have an avatar it can be used on places like:

• Forums as your profile picture
• Blog comments as your gravatar
• Your Twitter profile picture
• Your Ning / Youtube / Delicious / Plurk account image and so on..

Spend time interacting in the relevant communities without being someone there just to gain something in return. If you have picked the right niche to start with (one that you abso-friggen-lutely love) then this should be enjoyable anyways.

Step 5: Regularly Produce Remarkable Content

Every other step in ‘dominating’ your niche is completely pointless if you miss out this crucial point. Whether your content is in text, audio, video or even eBook form, it has to be remarkable. And by remarkable, I simply mean that it has to be worth talking about. I swear that if I see another “10 Plugins for Your Wordpress Blog” post that I’ll go insane. I’m sure a lot of other people feel the same way, which is why you’ll never see that kind of thing here.

With pretty much every single post, I want people to walk away (or click away) thinking their time was well spent reading this website and they should come back again. If I’m lucky, they’ll also tell their blog readers or friends and my audience will start to grow. I’m putting hours upon hours into every single article, but I believe that it is worthwhile. People just don’t talk about things that are mediocre.

As I said earlier, authenticity can be your innovation. If the influencers in your niche are robotic and not very personal, that could be your purple cow. That could be what people talk about. If you don’t set a standard for yourself on the quality of work you are going to put out there, your quality will probably drop as time goes on.

I have already made my motto for this site clear: if I’m not producing content that is better (just in my opinion, of course) than everyone else who blogs about marketing, I won’t click the ‘publish’ button. For PluginID, I wanted to be as honest as possible about the problems that have came up in my life and how I got over them (such as only having 3 girlfriends in 18 years and then having an abundance of women in my life). If I wrote blog posts as if I was perfect, nobody would be able to relate to what I was saying and feel engaged in my site.

Your remarkable content is your way of putting out hooks that people can grab on to. Remarkable can come in the form of humour, entertainment or education; but if you don’t have it, then your chances of achieving something great are next to none.

Step 6: Engage the Audience, And the Influencers

Now that you’re putting some great stuff out there, it’s time to put step 4 into overdrive. I’m sure you’re aware that the phrase “build it and they will come” does not apply to producing content online. A better adaption for the web would be “build it, engage, and they will come (and hopefully tell their friends)”. Yeah, I definitely prefer that second one, even if it is much harder to say.

Instead of giving very specific advice here, which I can’t because thousands of people will read this and your audience is in lots of different communities, I’m going to share ideas for how you can engage in different platforms and with different people:

• Twitter: I find that the people I engage with most in Twitter a) Retweet my articles b) Ask thought provoking questions or discuss thought provoking topics and c) bust my balls. If you want to get involved with others on Twitter, I can only recommend you do the same. The more human aspects you can bring to the service, the better.
• Facebook: Facebook is a tricky one and to be honest, I don’t spend much time there. What I do recommend though is that if you have a profile, put a link to it on your website. That allows people who are viewing your website already to get in touch and create a deeper connection. I know a number of people who have success with Facebook Fan Pages (rather than Groups) and I think you should start engaging with the ones that are out there already until you build your own.
• Forums: I used to be a forum (message board) junkie a few years ago and definitely built my authority in some. The most important tip I have for forums is to put your website link in your signature (if possible) and then just forget about it. Forget you might get visitors for interacting in the site…just interact. Start engaging threads and provide excellent replies and you might quickly find people naturally starting threads about what you’re working on.
• Bloggers: Bloggers are busy. Well, most of them are. So, instead of trying to get on a bloggers radar by annoying them through email, connect in a way that they will love. This could mean stumbling their articles, linking to their blog posts, commenting on their articles and even retweeting them. Giving before you get applies here more than ever. Once you’ve been giving for a while then start to engage in more personal surroundings like email.
• Offline: If you can meet your audience and the influencers in an offline environment, this will help you more than anything. You can create great relationships online, but they are absolutely nothing in comparison the ones you can create offline. If you can go to conferences, tweetups, seminars or anything of the sort then get yourself there. I’m far more likely to help out someone I’ve met than “some guy I spoke to on the internet some time.”

There are two things you need to remember about these sites:

• 1. There have not been built for you to spam an audience. They are there as communication tools that allow you to ethically engage with your market. I recommend you use them as such
• 2. They should not be what you do, they should be thought of like a megaphone to amplify what you’re already doing on your website.

Step 7: Please, Stay Consistent

I’m begging you, really. I know this is something you probably hear time and time again but I cannot stress enough how important this is. Around 4 months ago, there was a blogger in the personal development niche who was really started to get noticed. At 15, he definitely had his unique selling point down, and he was starting to grow his audience of a few hundred subscribers.

I watched an interview with him and I remember thinking, “Man, if this kid just keeps doing what he’s doing, he’s going to go far.” So, that’s exactly what I told him. I sent him an email and said “Dude, the only advice I have for you is this: do not give up.” He assured me that he wouldn’t because he loves what he is doing. Two weeks later I never heard from him again.

No blog posts, tweets, emails or anything. I actually have a bad feeling something might have happened to him, but I think it’s more likely that he just gave up one day and never got back into things.

All I have to say to you is exactly what I said to him: keep doing this. If you are providing excellent content and continue to hustle, things will start to work out in your favour. I blogged here at ViperChill for over 2 years before I made a single penny. I did not care about building an audience, I simply wrote for myself. I didn’t care that I didn’t make money of course, because I absolutely love what I’m doing.

If you’re relying on the internet as your big break to make money in 3-4 months so you can quit your job then it’s possible, yes, but probably not by building a remarkable site. I’m afraid (I’m glad actually, as those who are willing to put the time in get the rewards) you’re more likely to wait a year before you can do that. Depending on many factors, of course.

Now don’t let me down, I put hours into this article so you can start to dominate your market by giving your audience the best content they can get. It’s time to cloudjack, baby! Test

Before I get into that, you might be wondering whether being likeable really matters. After all, you could be anyone behind a computer screen. Let’s put it this way: I’m far more likely to link to my best friend in a blog post than a random blogger and I’m far more likely to send my favourite cousin a copy of my new product for free than someone I don’t know.

Of course, those are offline relationship examples, but online isn’t really any different. You don’t talk to people you don’t like. Unless, of course, you love drama.

Becoming likeable has many benefits:

• People link to you on their blogs
• People buy your products
• People help to share your content
• People stick around even when you do / say things that they disagree with

A good example of that last point is my friend Martin. Martin was very active in the internet marketing industry (I’m sure he won’t mind me using him as an example) until he was arrested for activities that both shocked and disappointed me. After 3 months in jail he was released and came back onto my social media radar.

Despite what he did, I still really like the guy. I like talking to him, I’m happy to help him, and I don’t think any worse of him than I had previously. You might think you would not do the same, but then you probably don’t have a Martin in your network right now.

Now if you remember I asked you to think about the most important factor to becoming likeable online — did you guess this would be it?

Don’t Care About Whether People Like You

I know it’s quite the paradox to suggest that if you want something, don’t care if you get it. But, in terms of becoming likeable online, it certainly matters here. There are two main reasons why this is the case:

• You allow your real self to shine through
• You stop coming from a scarcity mindset

Have you ever spoke to someone who seems like they’re trying really hard to impress you? They feel it is necessary to let you know how much money they make, what qualifications they have or what car they drive…even after two minutes of meeting them.

If you haven’t, then I have. And let me tell you, it’s uncomfortable. It just feels…difficult. Maybe it’s because I’m very self aware, but I simply can’t have flowing conversations with people who feel it is necessary to put me or them on a pedestal. If you stop caring whether people like you, you naturally won’t put them on a pedestal (think too highly of them) and make communication awkward.

A good example of this is Baker (who, like my father, doesn’t call himself by his first name). Baker came onto my radar via Twitter and I’m pretty sure the first thing he messaged me was a sarcastic insult regarding something I had written. His response was very funny and the type of thing one of my friends would say offline.

It didn’t matter that his blog was brand new and he was talking to someone in the niche with thousands of subscribers (not that it ever does) but he was just being himself and probably couldn’t care less about what I thought of him. Now, he gets links from me in blog posts.

Genuinely Care About What Other People Are Working On

It’s human nature for us to want to talk about our own achievements in life. Because of this, we also like it when others care about those successes and what we’re up to these days. It’s important to note that I put genuinely in this sub-heading. Being liked is totally pointless if you have to talk about things which don’t interest you.

This guide is about helping you become more natural online, rather than telling you to suck up to the A-listers in order to get their approval. If you don’t care about something, don’t pretend you do. If, on the other hand, a project that someone is working on interests you, let them know.

Dave Navarro (not the musician) is a great example of someone who knows a lot about what is going on in his niche without doing it for your approval or your friendship. He comes across like he genuinely gives a crap about what people are working on and I have spoke to him numerous times in the last few weeks about my own projects. Because of this, I was more than happy to help him promote his.

Don’t View People as a Statistic

Whether you’re successful online or just starting out, this advice applies to you in equal portions. I’ve been at both ends of the scale for about the same amount of time so know what they’re like.

If You’re Looking to Rise the Ranks – If you’re just starting out in blogging or getting your name out in a niche, it can be easy to just focus on the top guys. For example, if you want to excel in the internet marketing niche it would be a good idea to get on the radar of people like Darren Rowse, Brian Clark and Jeremy Schoemaker.

What you shouldn’t forget is that there are thousands of other people in your niche who:

• Could be one of these “A-listers” one day
• Can help you get to where you want to be

Don’t limit your focus to a select group of people. Sure a blog post from one of these guys might help your business more than 10 little guys, but how long does that last? If you’re in the mentality of focusing on the guys at the top of the food chain, you’ll probably forget your own growing audience in the process.

If You’re Already Well Known – For god’s sake, don’t forget the people that helped you on your way. As with starting out, you never know who could become one of these A-listers one day. You also never know when someone you help could increase your business or their golf buddy could be your next major client.

This is between us, but I still offer free support to people who have never bought anything from me. I sell a product on how to make money through blogging and affiliate marketing which comes with free support. However, I’ll often find myself spending hours helping people who have never sent me any cash. Luckily, I love what I do.

A few years ago I was very active in the internet marketing industry (specifically SEO) and the big blog to follow was SEOmoz. They had a team of rockstars which included Jane Copland. It feels really sad thinking about this now, but I remember getting in touch with Jane via Facebook and she spoke to me like I was a real person. At 16 / 17 this was someone who I really looked up to and just having her treat me like everyone else was amazing.

If Jane ever asked anything of me, I would more than happily help her out. Of course you may spend time helping people who will never return the favour, but if that bothers you so much, maybe you’re spending time on the wrong platform (the internet).

Put Your Full Self Out There At All Times

This links very closely to not caring whether people like you, but I still believe it deserves its own section. On the internet, there are many areas where people hold back. For example:

• They might not want their full name online
• They don’t want to show a picture
• They would never even consider doing a video

I know, because I’ve been there. In fact, I was mentioned on an official Google blog at 17 and referred to as Dave Chambers. This makes me laugh out loud when I write it but it’s true. Dave Chambers was my pen name at the time because I was too scared of my school friends “Googling” my name and finding out what I was working on.

If you are someone who is afraid of putting those things online, a good question to ask yourself is: “When does it matter?” When does it matter if someone finds out your blog that you know in person? Really think about that.

When does it matter if someone leaves a nasty comment on your Youtube video? When they write it? When you read it? Are you really that bothered about what some troll on Youtube thinks of your accent or haircut?

The people that matter don’t mind, and the people that mind don’t matter

A good lesson in putting yourself out there was my first Skype call with Jonathan Mead. My blog was just starting to get onto the radar with quite a few people and Jonathan was one of the people that I respected in the industry. I remember feeling quite “professional” and tried not to say any stupid shit. It wasn’t until Jonathan said some things that could not write down here that I realised there is a human being behind every successful person online.

Being yourself is far easier than putting on a front, and, as Oscar Wilde said, everybody else is taken anyway.

Work on Great Projects

It is research proven that if we can get someone to do something small, they’re more likely to do something that takes up more time. When you’re getting yourself out there online, it’s important to keep in touch with people, rather than get in touch and disappear off their radar for a while.

Whenever someone reaches out to me that seems like a genuine person, I will look to help them out where I can. However, if they’re not working on anything unique or just coming from a different angle, I don’t want to promote that to my audience. I’m happy to promote people who are doing different things.

This may seem a little cold, but being liked by anyone online is pointless if it isn’t going to go anywhere. If they can’t help you get clients, more blog readers, more links of anything of that sort, you’re just making friends. Friends are great, but you’re trying to build a business as well, right?

The best way to keep the communication going between you and anyone online is to be working on something excellent. Something that they can naturally follow. A few people who I’m happy to share their content and are really nice people include Jay, Chris and Karen. It would be hard for me to help them if they just wrote generic blogs or didn’t do anything at all. Instead, they’re all working on their own unique projects with their own style so I’m happy to do what I can.

Realise You’re Part of the Whole

Finally, and perhaps one of the most important points here, is to realise you are not alone. You’re not the only one looking for more traffic, more blog subscribers, or just more eyeballs on whatever it is you are doing. I am far more likely to help people who have helped me because it shows they’re interested in what I do and they aren’t too egotistical to think there is nobody else operating in their niche.

Some good tips for spreading your value include:

• Leaving comments on other blogs
• Retweeting blog posts that you like
• Stumbling the content
• Linking out to other people
• Respond to all of your emails. Even if you can’t help someone, send them to someone who can

The last one is very powerful these days because it is happening less and less. With the rise of Twitter, people are moving over to tweeting about articles rather than writing about them on their blog. This, in my opinion, is a real shame. Even when you’re writing excellent content, it can be harder to get it out there and get the links necessary for good search engine rankings.

If you operate like you’re the only person in your niche, you’ll find yourself as a lone person in your niche.

And remember: people don’t like me; I’m just taking my advice (being genuinely interested) from all of the awesome people (not viewing people as a statistic) I have linked to (realising I’m part of the whole) in this post.

My friend Gyutae managed to leverage over 35,000 hits in two weeks and I know blogs like TheNextWeb have reported over 250,000 visitors per month from the service in their stats. That’s a lot of traffic.

While getting a huge amount of retweets is one way to get twitter eyeballs on your content, there is another way. And that way, is by having a lot of followers on your account. My personal account only has around 10,000 followers but I’ve had many days of 400+ visitors from the service.

Because I’m often referred to as “Mr. Analytics” I decided it would be interesting to dig further into the statistics of the top 100 users and see if there are any clear factors about what it takes to become a top user or who stands out among the many celebrities using the service.

Number of Followers

Now the reason top users are referred to as such is because of the number of followers that their account has. This is simply people who have clicked ‘follow’ on their profiles and subscribed to their updates. This is probably the only graph in the post that is going to follow a nice gradual direction:

• Most followers: 3,830,056 (@aplusk – Ashton Kutcher)
• Least followers: 1,236,521 (@samantharonson – Samantha Ronson)
• Average number of followers: 1,637,361

As you can see from the chart, there is a clear separation between the top 15 or so users and then the following 85 tend to have very similar numbers. Many of the top 100 positions change on a daily basis because the figures are so close.

Number of Friends

The number of friends section looks at how many people that these top users follow. For most accounts I see, people have around a 1:4 ratio. That means if they were followed by 100 people, they would probably be following around 25. As you will see for most of the top users though, that is far from the case:

• Most friends: 753,958 (@barackobama – Barack Obama)
• Least friends: 0 (@womensweardaily – Womens Wear Daily)
• Average number of friends: 39,754

Most of the top users follow so few accounts that you can barely see them on the chart. While the president of the United States follows more people back than anyone else, Zappos and Whole Foods follow the largest percentage of people that follow them.

Number of Updates

The number of updates is how many tweets each user has sent out. Some of these are automated through RSS feeds (such as @Nytimes) and others are personal tweets, such as Shaquille O’neill (@THE_REAL_SHAQ).

• Most updates: 37,297 (@Nytimes – New York Times)
• Least updates: 14 (@ashsimpsonwents – Ashlee Simpson Wentz)
• Average number of updates: 3,545

It must be nice to have over 1.7 million followers when you have only made 14 tweets. I guess that just shows how passionate Ashlee Simpson fans are. Close to her was Oprah, who with only 72 tweets, has 2.4 million followers. But hey, it’s Oprah!

Length of Membership

The longest person who has been on Twitter in the top 100 users is of course co founder Biz Stone who has been on the service for 44 months. Besides that, I thought it would be interesting to see how long (or short) the top users have been members of the service:

• Longest membership: 36 months (@Veronica – Veronica Belmont)
• Shortest membership: 7 months (@kimkardashian – Kim Kardashian, @ashsimpsonwentz – Ashlee Simpson, @peoplemag – People Magazine), @serenajwillians – Serena Williams)
• Average membership length: 18 months

As you can see, there is no clear correlation between length of time on the site and how many followers that you have. In fact, Ashton Kutcher has only been on the site for half of the average time and is 300,000 subscribers ahead of second place.

Type of Account

Finally, I thought it would be interesting to see how many of the Top 100 accounts were individuals, and how many of the top 100 accounts were some form of business. I expected there to be a lot more individuals than companies. I was right about this, but the two figures were closer than I thought:

• Number of people: 66
• Number of companies: 34
• Most popular person: Ashton Kutcher
• Most popular business: CNN Breaking News

In fourth place, CNN breaking news is by far the most popular non-individual on the service with a whopping 2.78million followers.

Summary

As you can probably tell, the top individuals are generally celebrities. They tend to be people who have acceled in areas of acting, music, or sports. For the few people who aren’t world-known celebrities, they tend to be well known in the tech industry. For example, @Veronica (Veronica Belmont) hosts a show via Revision 3 which was created by Digg founder, Kevin Rose.

All in all, the aim of this analysis was to simply look at the results and see what interesting factors popped up. I think I’ve managed to achieve that and I hope you enjoyed the post!

That blog, was ViperChill. It has been over a year since I wrote here, and a lot has gone on in my life over the last four years since I started the site. For anyone who is interested, let me give you a quick run down…

• I dropped out of college and quit my part-time job
• I moved over to Cape Town, South Africa and spent 18 months there
• While there, I worked as the Social Media Manager for companies like Hewlett Packard, Land Rover, and Nissan
• Around 9 months in, I started making a lot of money on my side projects through affiliate marketing
• I quit my job in January of 2009, returned home to England, and have been self employed ever since
• I launched a blog on Personal Development which grew to over 4,000 subscribers in its first year

Now, I’m adding my “baby” into my time schedule. ViperChill is back.

Who Should Read the Site?

Instead of answering my own sub-heading, let me answer the opposite question: who should not read the site. You should not read this website if you’re looking for the same, short, generic articles on marketing you’ll find elsewhere. I used to write them myself, and if you want to find them, thousands of websites will be happy to cater to you.

Instead, on all topics I cover I will be as in-depth as possible (and necessary) and therefore I’ll probably post less frequently than anybody else. Every single post will be packed with value and while they’ll take longer to read than other sites, I think I know it will be worth it.

ViperChill is for anyone who wants to build a successful business online. Whether that is an affiliate marketing empire, a blog, or a niche site on Siamese cats (which is what someone I met recently is doing). I want to help you make it succeed. You can test how much I want to help you at any time by emailing me or leaving a comment. I reply to every single one and I have nothing to sell you.

My Aim is Simple

I’ve noticed quite a few bloggers mentioning that you should treat your blog like a business. On some level, I agree, and because of that, they also recommend you start out with a business plan of where you want to go.

I don’t have a business plan, but I do have a simple aim: to write better content and provide more value than anyone else in my niche. Of course, “better” and “more value” are subjective, but if I go by my own scale, I think I will have a lot of happy readers. If a post I write does not fit that criteria (apart from this one) then I will not publish it. It really is that simple.

Launch Bonus

For those of you who don’t know me, I make a five-figure monthly income online and I’m fortunate enough to be embarking on a tour around the world very shortly. I make my income in a variety of ways and have been building websites for over 4 years. If you would like to win a free site overview where I look at your website and offer suggestions for improvement, all you have to do is write a blog post about the re-launch of ViperChill.

I will give you a one to two page PDF document which highlights three areas of your site where I feel you can improve (and why) with action points for each. This offer is only valid for two weeks so if you’re interested, you know what to do.

A Quick Hello

Because I’m going to have to act like a ‘newbie’ just to get involved in the niche again, I want to say a quick hello to some long time e-friends: Lisa (and Rhea), Kevin, Tad, Kelvin, Rebecca (and Chris), Lee (and Adam), Rae, Michael, Branko, Jane, Patrick, Dave, Tom (and Will), Clint, Michael, Mark, Matt, Barry, Brian, Andy, David, Wiep, Kalena, and Rishi (where do I link man?). If I missed anyone, forgive me. I still love you!

It’s good to be back.