John Cusack © by Gudlyf

John Cusack: A Mild Obsession

I love John Cusack (as an actor/writer). I will see every movie he’s ever in, forever. I don’t care what the reviews are,  I’ve seen enough of his films to know that he is one of my favorite actors and anyone who disagrees with me can suck it. He works for me.

What works for you?

What this has to do with blogging: micro-fanaticism. Everyone has their fascinations that for business or personal reasons, they want to keep reading about, seeing images about or hearing conversations about. You have something that, if someone gets you going talking about it, you won’t shut up, and you’re probably the smartest person in the room on that subject.

If you aren’t the person that people have decided to fixate on, you can be the curator of best of the topic that  certain people are fixated on. If you’re really good, you can turn the things that go with that into a career, or leverage your knowledge on a related topic into a boost for your current career.

What this has to do with Google rankings: as we will discuss shortly, consistency is often a key element to recovering a slipping ranking. Obsessive consistency to be exact. Think about it – is there anything you used to do that you aren’t doing now? Why?

Have you made changes to your site that might be the culprit? Even design changes may be responsible for a change in results. I once had a very lovely client who sold timeshare resales. At the time we met, he didn’t know the difference between a page view and a hit.

After he changed his web design, hits went down. I pointed out that page views were consistent and that hits were down because technically, a hit is any request for an element on the page, including images.

A page view is what it sounds like – a view of a page. So since the new design had fewer images, of course hits were down.

Of course, hits were as irrelevant then as page views are becoming now. But he didn’t know that.

The point is: for all you know you might not have a problem at all. One ranking may be down while another is up, leaving you with more targeted visitors. If your rankings go down and sales go up, do you really have a problem? Consider all the elements.

GIGO: No One Is Obsessed with Crap (Well. No One Sane.)

Oscar the Grouch Graffiti © by bixentro

I learned this one when I was first learning about computers. GIGO stands for Garbage in, Garbage Out.

The relevance to our discussion is that in order to be knowledgeable enough on a topic that people want to listen to you, you must be consuming the cream of the crop of thinking on the topic or at least a related one. Success in the blogosphere and social media is as much about consuming content as it is creating it.

You have to know how to pore through the yawn of empty, senseless, pointless random yammering to find the sweet golden nuggets.

So many elements are attached to the quality of your content.

Whether anyone will link to it, talk to friends, come back again, bounce back to the search engines – and some of these end up impacting search, particularly in the case of Google.

Now, you don’t need a Bieber-sized fan club to make it online, or for your business to get a steady stream of leads from the web. But a few hundred or thousand coming back every month and buying/subscribing won’t hurt your bottom line. That core repeat business group can also be referred to as a group of fans.

Name ten fans of garbage.

(Oscar the Grouch doesn’t count.)

Blogging:  A Bit More Important All of A Sudden (again)

will write for chocolate © by caparica

If you’ve been watching Google’s last few algorithm changes, you may have noticed that it’s not only the frequency of updates that seems to have saved certain blogs from a dismal fate. It’s the perceived quality of updates, partly the fact that they’re attached to known authors.

For now, I won’t say more than that on this topic. Let’s go back to what that means to you and your Google strategy: content production. Not just in quantity but in quality.

The smart bloggers, writers and authors know that they can’t necessarily spin gold out of straw every day. That is: most of the time, there’s no remarkable news, discovery or observation for you to draw on that’s relevant to what you want to talk about, even when the other content on the web in your area is absolutely stunning. And yet, your job, each day, will be to create this constant stream of readable, actionable, consumable content, day in and day out.

One of the many things bloggers who have either recovered (or never lost) their rankings have had in common has been consistency of quality content, on a tightly structured topic. (Yes, if you have a copy of my Evergreen Traffic System or Rescue Your Blog, I’m repeating myself.)

So if you’ve lost your rankings and you’re already blogging, think about those three things:

1. What’s your John Cusack as it relates to business blogging? Are you still talking about him/her/it or have you wandered off topic too much?
2. How much can you reduce the garbage that’s coming in to your brain on the topic and simultaneously expand the amount of quality content you consume?
3. Can going back to basics fix your ranking problem?

Now, keep in mind this isn’t the only possible solution to recovering a good ranking, nor are these the only possible set of problems you have with your rankings. An algorithm is merely an extremely complex formula when you break it down – so there must be a way to reverse engineer, from positive outcomes, how to fix your rankings.

However, remember that there are hundreds of variables going into this equation, and that what fixed another site may not fix yours. At the same time, re-committing to what worked before is not to be discounted as a solution to a re-occuring problem.

When I wake up each morning, my breath is not exactly fresh as a spring breeze. So I brush my teeth. It fixes the problem. If I stopped brushing my teeth, I wouldn’t be surprised that my breath stopped being fresh.

Sometimes the simplest thing is the solution.

And if it’s not? Come on back and talk to me, and we’ll see if we can avoid jumping off that bridge.

I’ve been reading this one blog ever since I sat next to an eye doctor, Dr. Alan Glazer, on an SEO panel.

Since I know for a fact that I don’t know everything, despite all my jokes and pretended arrogance, I subscribed to all my fellow panelists and began to follow their blogs and twitter streams.

The eye doctor has been the most fascinating study.

He blogs, giving away information you may normally have to sit down with a professional to get.

Then he tweets. (A LOT.) If you retweet, he responds personally and thanks you.

Then he blogs some more.

I’m sure he does other things, things he said or inferred on the panel we were on together, things like using keywords to figure out what people are talking about, and then writing into that conversation stream.

But the way he writes, it’s not obvious.

Over time, after reading his information, finding it useful, and growing to trust him as an authority on anything having to do with my eyes, I’m setting up an appointment to see him, despite the fact that he’s at least an hour away from my house. And I tend to stick with one doctor per body part for as long as I can when I find one I trust. So I’ll be a customer of his for at least as long as I live in Maryland, the next five to ten years.

Imagine how busy a doctor is, especially one with a thriving practice. Even if he doesn’t actually write anything himself, before he publishes under his company name, he’s at least going to proof read it, at the very least.

Does it take time to write, read or edit a blog post? Sure. keyword research? You bet. Respond to tweets, yeah, that too. So, it’s an investment of time. Definitely.

Let’s speculate – can we estimate what this doctor’s return on his investment was? How many new clients would have have to get for this activity to be worth it? I’m guessing not many. But let’s estimate.

Pretend you’re the doctor.

Once you get the hang of blogging, let’s say you spend an hour a day on your blog. Maybe you type slow or half of your blog posts are masterpieces. So five hours a week.

We’ll also assume the worth of that time is the time it takes to see one patient, and that you make a profit of $100 in that hour, for easy math, and that your average client comes to see you twice a year. So a new patient that’s going to see you for life, is worth $200 a year, $4000 over 20 years in today’s dollars.

Let’s imagine you have a small local market and writing a blog post gets you 50  visitors a day who are actually targeted, and just once a day, or 750 a month if half of them aren’t unique. The average conversion rate is 1.4 percent – in other words, 3 visitors out of every 200 are going to buy something from you. (If you’re following up etc, it can be much higher, but again, simple math.)

So about 11 customers a month.

11 customers a month are worth, collectively, $2200 a month. You’re spending 20 hours a month on your blog, and if the value of those hours are the same $2000.

So in terms of numbers, you’re making a profit.

Of course, I did that for easy math. But what if you write about half of your blog posts on weekday evenings when you really were just going to watch TV? What if you hire someone to help you at $20 an hour? What if you find some other way to reduce the cost or the value of the time it takes to write a blog post. How far ahead are you then?

Even more important than that is the personal way in which social media, including blogging, can come across to people reading your work. For instance, I’m not exactly passionate about reading articles on LASIK surgery. But I’m damn passionate about being able to see well with my corrected vision. So I want a doctor that I can trust with my eyes.

By writing into the conversation stream I was having with myself about my eyes, that doctor made me feel like the things he was writing about spoke to my specific situation. And they do. And I know he was writing generally, to a group of people. But it felt like he was writing to just me.

And when he followed up with me, he made me feel like I was the only person in the world he had to pay attention to that day. And that turned my maybe into a Definite Yes.

Personal, sincere customer service is a rarity in this country these days. I struggle to provide it myself. I’ve tried to train others to provide it, but to borrow an analogy from the early days of Technorati, it’s like trying to fix a wheel on a moving race car.

But man, when you get that person to person interaction right? It’s amazing. Even better when you follow it up in person.

I’m not saying don’t advertise. But when you place an ad, you’re most likely getting a handful of maybe that you pay for in currency, versus around the same number of definite yes responses you get for investing your time and sharing a bit of your expertise.

All I’m saying is this: be careful not to devalue the power of reaching your customers directly through blogging and other aspects of social media – when it works, it REALLY works.

Update: Just found out that Dr. Glazer wrote a book about his findings on using social media and how it impacted his search results. Here’s a sample:

… delivering great content to a hungry audience in the way they want to receive it, consistently will bring you success in the long term. All the other rules of web marketing are there to accelerate the long term, or to provide for you in the short term.

If you see someone become successful online, they followed this simple formula. Listen in to find out what got me thinking about this.

It truly is the Ultimate Traffic Method, better than JVs, having affiliates, great organic search results.

But the catch is? It often takes ten years to become an “overnight success”. So if you need food on your table now… well that’s what all the other advice is for.

Resources:

Tia Peterson’s lovely post on Amplify that got me talking about this.
The blog post in question on BizBlogChicks, also by Tia Peterson.
The successful blog it discusses.

download | mp3

[This is not an exact transcript of this audio - it's just the general gist.]

There are two big success secrets of people who broke all the rules and still manage to be massively successful, at generating traffic or anything else. These are people who went through the path of greatest resistance, if for no other reason than not knowing there was a faster way.

I still maintain that this is the best and most permanent path to success, though it’s also the slowest and hardest.

1- Give your targeted audience exactly what they’re most hungry for- that’s the definition of great content.

2- Do it consistently in whatever medium you choose.

Take me as a lesson. If I could have overcome my health problems to be just a bit more consistent, I’d literally be a millionaire by now. Yes, I mean literal in the proper sense of the word.

Consistency just fits into the habitual nature of humans. The most successful I ever am, is because I’m someone’s happy habit. Sales go up when I do something as simple as make sure there’s content in my blog on a daily basis. They go down when I don’t blog for week.

Luckily for me, I have a traffic system I can fall back on to provide me with ongoing traffic even if I can’t post, but it’s not the same as when I do, not by a long shot.

The Consistency Exercise.

Check your webstats and profits, gague where you are. Pick one thing, do it consistently for a month.

• guest blogging
• engage on twitter or facebook
• blog daily video, audio or text
• video/audio podcast daily
• publish newsletter daily

When the month is over, note your progress. Decide if it’s worth it to continue yourself, or pehaps to outsource it.

See if you can leverage the activity into more exposure. 30 days of blog posts, you say? 30 five minute audios on the same topic.

Say, did you just write a book?

Can you use blog posts as articles on other sites, or for other types of expertise marketing?

Re-purposing that content might be another good exercise to try.

But first, repeat that month if the project’s success positively impacted your bottom line.

Along the way, experiment with ways to make it as efficient as possible.

Are there tools that make podcasting easier?

Is there a site with guest blog post announcements?

Could you do a week’s worth of blog posts in advance?

Is there cheap or free software that can make your video recording easier?

(The answer is yes, obviously.)

This isn’t a formal project, but let me know in the comments if you decide to do this, or if there’s another business growth challenge you’re participating in, so I can be supportive, and perhaps even rally others to support you as well. If there’s enough of a response, maybe we can make it into one, like we have with the newly restarted #blogdaily challenge.

As previously discussed, I’ve gone on a personal mission to start blogging on a daily basis. I’ve started already, but it’s probably most fair for the GROUP to start after the holiday.

So here’s a bit more information, ideas, and a couple of intentions I have for this that aren’t quite firm.

• Intend to start a blog carnival around this
• Intend to publish a list of weekly posts. Blog carnival will allow you to choose which ones I put on the list.
• Hashtag in Twitter is #blogdaily
• Everything is optional after you respond to the original post about this with “I’m in.”
• We need a way to contact each other that’s not intrusive and less trouble some than email. I’m thinking a yammer group.
• Right now we have 10 people who said they were in, here or on the FB group.
• Hoping we can all support each other with commens and responses and such.
• Will be sending updates to the Open For Web Business Facebook group.

That’s it for now.

There was a really important post at DoshDosh today called “An Essential Marketing Principle: Give Before You Try to Get“. It went over a very basic marketing principle that has somehow gotten turned into a gimmick – the idea that in order to get someone, anyone, to do something for you, that you must first do something for them. 

It struck me, reading that article that everyone knows you’re supposed to do that. 

Everyone thinks they understand why to do that. 

And yet few people know HOW to do it. Or everyone would, and everyone would buy everything and all our problems getting the word out and  would be solved. 

I wonder why that is. Thinking back to when I was a newbie, thinking about how current newbies to traffic generation behave when they meet me, I think this quote from the article best alludes to the mystery:

You’re not selling to robots or animals. You’re selling to people whocare about the seller. Get what you want by first giving unconditionally. Manage what people think or feel about you and you’ll get what want easily.

When I was a newbie, I didn’t get that. I got into business to be able to help people and have some extra spare change – I was looking for a part time supplemental income.

One day put out some valuable information for free, and for a while got a lot of great attention for it. Then when flipping through Clickbank, I noticed that someone had turned my idea into a product. Out of curiosity I bought it, thinking they had the same idea I had at the same time – maybe we could work together and make something bigger.

And I saw that, word for word, some of the content in the product was stuff I was giving away free on my blog.

At the time I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

Sue? I didn’t have a lawyer and couldn’t afford one.

Contact the person and bluff that I was going to sue? I couldn’t make good on the threat, and besides, it was a lie. And people knew that person well – they were just getting to know me in the marketplace.

Ultimately I figured out that due to the ranking of the product, they couldn’t have been making a lot of sales. So I made a better product, and put it on the market. Six months later the market for that particular item was flooded with competition, and I was still on top.

I always believed it was because I provided better value, and people knew it. I gave away most of the information others make you pay for, and then heaped a lot of actionable content to pay for on top of that. Eventually my tactic paid off.

Because I wanted to build a business. The other guy just wanted to make a quick buck.

And that’s the difference between some of the new blood in any business and the veterans, between some of those living the “guru” lifestyle and the true experts.

One wants to build a business, the other is hoping to run away with some of your cash. One has to shoot straight with you or they risk losing your future business. The other doesn’t care because they just want to get you to buy this one thing and then run away.

If you want to earn trust with your audience, before everything you do, think, “will this build me a long-term relationship with subscribers, customers and clients?”

Ask yourself why they would come back for more.

Ask yourself why YOU would come back for more.

This month in Traffic Reality we’re going to be talking about how to use social media properties to build your business. I’m not going to just talk about Twitter, or Facebook or StumbleUpon or forum marketing.

I’m going to talk about all of them as a whole, from the technical points of how to use them, to the tips and tricks on each separate site in my Web 2.0 strategy and how I use them together to generate traffic, leads and sales.

I’ll be focusing on Actionable Steps, and how to reduce your daily social media workload to half an hour a day. We’ll discuss the intimate nature of how and why some things get popular in social media and other items fail miserably.

We’ll be looking into why these occurrences have nothing to do with quality of the resource, and everything to do with leverage. Actually we’ll be talking about that fact that I feel leverage is so important that, years ago, I named my company Leveraged Promotion.

This topic is so important that I’m going to start giving away bonsues in Traffic Reality at the beginning of the month of lessons instead of the end, so I can get them all in.

In the next post in this series, I’ll give you a few take away points for right now, as well as an announcement of our last content winner.

By the time this is published, it will indeed be my birthday on the East coast, where I’m currently located.

And I definitely wanted to take some time out to celebrate that, so I’m planning on not working at all tomorrow. Yay me!

What does that have to do with you? At some point in one of these videos I tell you exactly what you can do on my birthday to make me smile.  

Okay, seriously though, what this has to do with you is that every year, on my birthday, I’ve sent out a special newsletter, blog post, birthday gift to all my pals, something.

This year I’ve decided to be naked. 

Yeah, that’s drama, and kinda hype-y. But I bet you want to know what it means, doncha? 

If you don’t, you can always just leave.

.

.

.

Still there, huh? Thought so.

What it means this year is that I’m going to, right now, for the first time, give a video peek into the stats of my site. Not  a picture of last year’s stats.

Not a screenshot of last week’s stats. 

My web site stats for 2009, from the first three months of the year that I wasn’t promoting… and a look at the dramatic difference it made when I am actually well enough to promote this year. 

Where does nakedness come in? That’s how it makes me feel, totally exposed. But I’m comfortable being this open with you.

Of course, I can’t give it all up – I’m not THAT easy, LOL!

The one thing I didn’t share, that I’m only telling folks signed up to Traffic Reality is what links send me traffic. It’s surprising information that I also keep close to my chest.

But I show

• what keyword phrases send me traffic, and how much,
• what kind of traffic Google has sent me this month, 
• exactly how many unique visitors I’ve had this month, and,
• how my traffic tripled about two days into turning my promotion machine up from low to medium.

I’ll also point out how you can tell that this isn’t Bot traffic – at least 89% of my traffic is from real human people looking at my site.

I’m sure most of you remember this time last year that I was physically unable to work and couldn’t promote my site…  But the traffic kept coming, because of the way I have set up my sites.

That was shocking to some people, that you could keep having traffic for months or up to a year without manually promoting your site every day, with no spammy software, and no virtual assistants.

But if you think that was a shocker, wait until you see what it looks like after a day or so of me just doing a BIT of promotion. This is not full strength, now. 

Meaning none of this traffic is from JVs or affiliates, StumbleUpon, Digg, press releases, podcasting, video sites, link campaigns or any offline promotion .

This is just from search, blogging an average of twice a week, RSS traffic, one article published, a few Tweets, two newsletters sent, and very light auto-pilot promotion on Facebook.

Here’s the first video where I do a quick overview – look in the upper right corner at the time – this video was recorded live and just published a few minutes ago. You can see the time changing in my taskbar in the upper right – it matches up with the video, this video is unedited.

You may want to view it full screen for the full effect. Or you can see the first stats video here if you’re reading via the feed, or as this is republished on Facebook.

And here’s the continuation in the second video. Again, notice the time. The only reason there’s even a break is due to Jing Pro’s 5 minute limit per video.

Again, you may want to view this full screen for the full effect. Or you can see the second stats video here if you’re reading via the feed, or as this is republished on Facebook and other sites.

Now, why am I showing you how much traffic I get to this site?

1. Because it’s the one thing web site promotion professionals and marketers Will Not do whether they know what they’re doing or not, because the results are so often taken out of context. 

   For example, the amount of visitors I got to this site this month pales in comparison to traffic I’ve generated for clients and for some of my other sites.

   However, given that the majority of people online have absolutely no interest in a site about web site traffic? It’s pretty darn good.For the average online business person or marketer, it would be phenomenal.
    

2. To show you that those results are possible for everyone.

   You’ve heard my story, most likely. If not, go to the Evergreen Traffic sales page and read it. The bottom line is, yeah I’m an expert at this, but the methods I use are easily boiled down from rocket science into steps anyone can follow.
    

3. For me. To give myself a much needed pat on the back for still having “it”, 11 years after my very first website went online. 
    
4. To get you to give Traffic Reality a try.

Traffic Reality is my new membership site. Well, it’s my new, old membership site. I set it up to show people how to get better traffic results to their site back in 2006 and had to take it down. 

This year, with help from friends, I put it back up. If you’ve heard of Evergreen Traffic, in which I showed three simple traffic techniques and showed you how to combine them to multiply their effects, then you’re familiar with my concept of blending different traffic methods into a system in order to magnify their effect. 

For example, search marketing and article marketing can go well together if implemented properly. Try shortcuts or mis-judge how to blend them, and you’re courting disaster. 

In Traffic Reality, I

1. start you off with one traffic method, and teach it to you in bite-sized pieces,
2. show you how to put it on auto-pilot or semi-auto-pilot, then,
3. add another traffic stream. 

By the end of the second week of implementing the steps you see your first incremental traffic increase. The next month I teach you how to maintain those resuls while simultaneously increasing your traffic with another method, broken down into about a dozen of lessons, sharing literally hundreds of traffic tips, methods, techniques and sources.

So essentially, it’s Evergreen on steroids, split down into pill size. 

These are the exact same tactics I use to promote my sites. And a site like this one is in a difficult spot – almost every business is at least twice as easy to generate traffic for than mine is.

Until my birthday ends, the price special that expired last week is on. So, if you want to get into Traffic Reality at a 20% discount price that you’ll be locked into forever, you want to join today.

Oh yeah, all members can also sign up for the affiliate program. It’ll be a while before we introduce it to Clickbank – they have to approve the site and everything, it’s not like with a product. 

Current members, look for an incredible bonus at the end of each week of lessons for the next 9 weeks. One hint: if you’ve seen all the main pages of the site, you already know what it is.

I’ll be back with more birthday madness later on in the day.

Some folks have realized that they don’t necessarily have to be bloggers to benefit from blog traffic, and have taken to commenting on blog posts to increase traffic and links.

It’s not the best method out there, but hey, whatever pays your rent.

Seriously though, if you’re incorporating blog commenting into your overall traffic plan (you do have an Overall Traffic Plan don’t you? Mon Dieu…) and you’re new to commenting, here’s …

11 Idiotic Things Commenters Can Do to  Guarantee a Pissed Off Blogger.

You know, the one who you hope will publish your comment and send you traffic.

Yes. I’m looking at YOU. If you’ve ever done one of these, and you were a new blogger or I knew you from somewhere, I probably let it slide the first time and sent you an email. If your comments disappear after that?

It’s probably because you did one or more of the following. Take heed. I’m not the only who gets pissed off by these…

1- Be Sure Not To Use Your Real Name.

We don’t care who you are, and we Love to enhance the credibility of our blog with links out to people who think their keyword is more important than their identity.

Hint: Most people will find John Doe , the Your Keyword-er to be acceptable.

2- Make Your Comment as Generic As Possible.

We’d never figure out that your comment couldn’t possibly have anything to do with our specific post.

3- Be an Ass Kisser to Increase Your Chances.

Of getting deleted.

4- Leave your Link in the Body of the Comment.

Because I didn’t see it in that spot that says “URL” or “link”. And it won’t get auto-moderated into a queue where I will then remove it.

5- Cut and Paste the Same Comment Everywhere.

I don’t ever go to other sites. I’m a blogger not a- hey, wait, I’m a BLOGGER. By Definition I go to other sites. What do you know about that?

6- Be Way, Way Off Topic.

Every conversation, sooner or later, is about Viagra, isn’t it? Thanks for skipping the foreplay. Real time saver.

7- Send a Fake Trackback.

If I’m a busy blogger, they won’t get moderated until right before Google would give you some potential credit. And speaking of Do Follow/I Follow/No No Follow…

8- If I’m a DoFollow Blogger, Make it Apparent that You Could Care Less About Interacting, And Just Want a Link

That’s SURE to get me to turn off the NoFollow attribute for that comment. Oh, you didn’t know we could control that? Sucks to be you.

9- Mistake My Blog for the Support Department.

If you’ve got a question for me? You should probably use the email I gave you.

Or the form on the site.

Or the email address on the site.

Or if it was a phone order, the number on the sales page.

Or the direct number I gave you.

Or Facebook private message. Or Stumble Upon private message.

For reals? You should ONLY resort to a blog comment as a means of reaching support if all other methods fail.

And then you should do something in your comment that would get it moderated, but not as spam, being as how you’re always including your credit card number, phone number, home address or some other personal information that I cringe at when I finally moderate comments later on in the day.

10 – Never Come Back.

What freak show said that comments were about community? If God wanted comments to have anything to do with community he would have started the words with the same four letters.

Why should you form partnerships or get to know me for a while, so your request for a favor later won’t sound off the wall and out of the blue?

11- Ignore My Comment Policy.

I wrote it for my health, not for something silly like, oh, I dunno, your benefit. That’s not why I put a link to it on every page and again under the big button.

Of course, to be fair, in the old theme it doesn’t look like a link. But it’s not like I’m the only person whose comment policy you’ve ignored.

Why pay attention to some page I took time out of my life to write? It’s not like it gives you guidelines guaranteed to help you get your comment published, so that if all you want is a link anyway, you can get it.

It’s not as if I might to Stumble, del.icio.us, Sphinn, or even Digg the sites of people who comment on my posts, or include them in a post on another day. Why should you bother to increase your chances of getting as many free one-way, traffic sending links as possible?

Don’t be silly.

So, this past weekend, I was filled with joy, and started thanking people who have impacted my life. I wasn’t expecting anything from it but to make great people smile.

I started with Bill and Andy, from MyST and their excellent Blogsite. I started thanking people at random and they naturally came to mind first.

They helped me go from having people see what I could do to help them, to knowing what I could do first hand. And that meant a very comfortable income. That’s a really big deal – without them I’d have had to dramatically raise my prices to entrepreneurs and small business. The larger jobs I do for corporations make my do it yourself guides and smaller consulting jobs possible.

If it wasn’t for them, I’d have never worked with bigger corporate companies with Rodney through Leveraged Promotion.

And they… wrote back.

Here’s what Bill French said in public….

“Tinu has a profound understanding of what businesses require to benefit from participation in the Blogosphere and why Blogsite is ideal for companies that understand the importance of outsourcing a turnkey business blogging solution.”

—Bill French, Co-founder, MyST Technology Partners

This would be the equivalent of having a Pulitzer prize winner telling you that your writing is promising, for those of you who don’t know Bill and Andy due to how low key they are.

I have been privileged to know some great, wonderful people. But if you get the chance, ever, you must work with Bill and Andy.

You simply must.

It’s a privilege of mine to have a Blogsite, and for the year that I’ve neglected it, it’s never stopped bringing me search engine exposure, and professional accolades.

Please, understand, I’m not well enough to work with them yet, so it’s not like I get compensated for saying this.

But if I never saw another dime from them, and I could never work with them again, I’d say the same thing I’ve always said.

If you want the best website visibility in search, get yourself a MyST Blogsite and stop doing all the work yourself. It’s the Bentley of blog platforms.

I’ll do a video tour of our Leverged Promotion MyST Blogsite soon, so you’ll understand what I mean.

< rant >

Last time I actually counted, method by method, of my own knowledge, there are about 1991 unique methods you can use to draw traffic to your site.

(I.E. “submit to Digg” and “submit to Sphinn” are not two different traffic methods. They are the same tip, and if you list them that way, you’re a CHEATER. They fall under the same heading “Submit to social bookmarking sites.”)

Half of those traffic methods are free.

None of them is “comment on other blogs”.

That’s not a traffic method in and of itself – it’s a corollary to creating relationships between you and other bloggers. Forming relationships is always better marketing than getting a quick link.

I said “Forming relationships is always better marketing than getting a quick link.”

People running around giving one-off comments, but then don’t understand why they aren’t getting comments at their site.

Let’s get back to why commenting isn’t a traffic method though. I was counting the number of traffic methods I know for sure, 1991.

To get that number, rather than pick common tips that people give in their lovely link bait lists, I go by actionable steps whose actions you can reasonably expect to result in an actual new visitor like “form relationships with bloggers at y social bookmarking site, then submit x type of article to them, at this time of day if you can.”

Sure, linkbait is awfully cute, but at the end of the day, if you aren’t doing it as part of some type of learning series, but for traffic alone, what are you really giving to the community?

101 more things to do, with no starting point on how to actually do them?

75 more ways to feel inadequate and helpless? Bah!

I’ve noticed the rise in paid commenting like everyone else, but I say, why pay attention to stupid people? They want attention and you’re giving it to them. I’d rather refer to their unethical ways in passing, saying only this – yeah, those people are dumb, to sell, to participate, to buy them. It’s just a matter of time before their spam gets caught, and it’s normally before they get any link love from DoFollow bloggers.

But let’s not waste the whole article on them. The title and the one paragraph is enough.

If you must use commenting as a traffic method, despite my warnings, why not split your blogging up, between writing, and participating in the blogosphere?

Go make sincere comments on blogs you love? And just leave your link where you may not have left a link at all before? No cost, and the comments are sincere.

But I don’t believe in commenting *as a traffic method* in and of itself. Commenting is a part of blogging, and certain parts of blogging can be used as a traffic draw (a traffic draw is still not a traffic method. Methods keep bringing you traffic over time).

But using comments just for traffic potential is

1. Cheating.
2. Ineffective.
3. Inefficient.
4. Technorati’s, and to a lesser extent, Google’s fault.

Yeah.

I said it.

If you want people to stop spamming your directory, Technorati, stop being lazy and create a better measure of authority. 100 regular links should not be equal to 100 links by authority sites, and the definition should go much further than the number or even quality of links.

(Despite my sniping, I have some respect for Technorati and a great deal of respect for Sifrey. I can still think they’re wrong, though.

Because I’m *adorable8, that’s why. Laugh darn you, it’s MONDAY!)

You know what great bloggers are doing?

They’re writing great blog posts, not chasing after links. And people who have 25,000 links are 7 out of 10 times older blogs with consistent voices from seasoned bloggers who understand the game, and thusly, they deserve their ranking.

But what about the other three who got into blogging after the culture of linking began to fail and cheated to get their ranking – shouldn’t they be displaced by quality bloggers who have smaller audiences?

(Not me. Though you’re a dear for thinking that. I can get traffic easily, I don’t need to depend on Technorati. I’m fighting for You.)

I blame Google too, but at least Google gives more weight to what they consider quality links.

But let’s get back to you, traffic and comment.

You want more traffic? Fine.

I would stick more to methods that have a reasonable expectation of bringing you clients, such as “place a 4 line classified ad in a popular ezine.”

Despite the fact that email is on the decline as part of marketing, the people who have properly fed and watered their email lists have some of the most loyal followers in the world. I read maybe ten emails lists religiously and give them my real, ISP email address.

All week I wait for them and am so happy when they arrive, because I’m sincerely interested in them. I know they’re trying to sell me something and I’m happy because I want to buy — because their last product improved my life/business/relationship/earning potentional/happiness.

Ezines still count as a traffic method.

“But Tinu!” you might be saying – though I have no idea why you think you need to shout. Use your inside voice.

“But Tinu,” you might be saying, correcting your volume. “I get traffic from links at sites where I leave comments.”

“As well you should, if you left a good, sincere, comment,” I would say, “Even better that you should get SEO-related credit for your link if you’re leaving good comments, which is why I DoFollow.

“But if you’re leaving a link to try and get over on someone, expect them to delete it. There’s no law that says they have to publish *any* link, let alone spammy nonsense.

Some people perceive leaving links with your comments a way to get over, but allow it anyway. Wouldn’t you rather leave a comment that could get you a few hundred visitors than one that could bring you a few dozen?”

“Um, yeah,” you might say, if you were a sane person. “How do I do that?”

“You read the next article for some quick tips.”

< /rant >

Checking the box under Options -> Reading that says “WordPress should compress articles (gzip) if browsers ask for them”. I had it unchecked to make my Global Translator plug-in work – which it hasn’t since two months ago.

I finally figured out when something told me to check for an error message in the Feed Validator. I hadn’ previously done this, because the error in FeedBurner was always that the feed had a timeout error. I thought it had something to do with our last server upgrade, because it’s been a problem since that day.

And, of course, the Feed Validator gave me a message stating, in essence, that my site was telling the browsers that the feed was compressed when it wasn’t. Which fixed the error, and explained why I could see the raw feed in my browser and in some feed readers, but not all of them.

Yay Feed Validator! And welcome back Feed Burner subscribers and feed access points!

Hope this helps someone else… I’m reasonably smart and a bit of a techie and I was baffled.