Ben Tremblay

It’s really strange and interesting at the same time how things can happen. This morning I woke up and thought about branding yourself or your website and how much I like talking about it. This led me to ask myself an important question: “Am I full of shit?”. This is a very honest question to ask and I think you should ask yourself very often as you can look at things from a different angle. What that made me think of is: “What if I stop advertising what I am or my brand? Could it be possible to have no brand, still bring visitors and have a certain feeling of success?” (more…)

This is going to be a short one, but a great one. Not because I have great stuff to tell you, but because I have great stuff to share. I was wasting time on You Tube and it actually ended up being the best wasted time ever! I have a video to share with you guys about SEO Best practices and this video is from Wil Reynolds (a SEO dude) and I really like him. You can check out his You Tube profile for a lot of great stuff you don’t want to miss, but here’s the quick video I was talking about (let me know what you think!):

I’m noticing a trend in the twitter world and I must admit I don’t really like it. Before going any further, I just want to say that I love twitter so much and it really is a revelation to me as I bashed on it for such a long time! I guess it is because I didn’t really understood its power or just simply didn’t take the time to fully appreciate the platform. Anyway, this is not about whether or not twitter is a nice platform, it’s more about the dirty little trick I keep noticing all around. (more…)

I just hit the “feed details” link on my Google Reader to find out about a nice little feature Google just added. It’s no big deal and won’t change your life (well maybe, so continue reading!), but it’s fairly interesting and I simply want to let you know about it. (more…)

I’ve been thinking about this for over a week now and it really obsesses me. Do you sometimes have the feeling your online journey won’t bring anything good to this world? I am not talking about blogging or running a website for a purpose or to give tips and tricks on a specific subject, I’m talking about building websites or blogs on a subject you have absolutely no clue about just to get money through AdSense or whatever affiliate program? (more…)

I thought about leaving the body of this article blank and just let the title speak for itself, but I thought it would look like I’m being lazy. I seriously think the title says it all, but let’s elaborate on the subject. Before we go any further, I want to say that this article mostly applies to people building a business with their website or blog and being serious about establishing a personal brand. (more…)

I really want to talk about the fear of taking action today. While I don’t know if I can call this “fear”, there is something holding a lot of people from taking actions and it is the main reason I think some people will rise faster or reach success while others won’t.

The step by step guide to success

Why do you think ebooks are so popular? I’m not talking about the ebook you write and give for free just to get more subscribers to your newsletter (By the way, if you have a newsletter, please make it interesting!), I’m talking about 5, 10, 100$ ebooks sold with the help of ugly (but very effective) landing pages. Also, why step by step articles and step by step guides are so popular? Why the hell do advertisements like “You can become rich in three easy steps! If a 15 years old can do it, you too can!” work so well?

I say it’s because most people want to have success overnight and most people don’t want to work. Trying to sell a “success package” with a sales pitch like “You’ll have to work your ass off and sleep 4 hours per night for the next year to MAYBE get some sort of success” probably won’t work even if that’s the reality. I don’t know a single person who made money online overnight without hard work.

Anyway, you already know you have to work hard so let’s get back on track. So we know people buy these “Make money overnight” packages, but do they really take action?

Risk of failure

I think the main reason some reach success and some don’t is the fear to fail. For example, let’s take a “success package” detailing how you can make a million dollar within three months by investing 25,000$. Let’s say there’s a pretty well detailed way on how you can convert that 25,000$ into a million dollar. Are you going to take action? Are you going to invest 25,000$ to build that million dollar? Would you actually take a 25,000$ loan because you know you can convert it into a million dollar? Most people won’t. Why? Because of the “What if it doesn’t work?”. If it works, you get yourself a million dollar, but if it doesn’t work you just lost 25,000$.

On a smaller scale

This is a pretty extreme example and I personally don’t think I would take the risk of  losing 25,000$ I don’t have, but let’s transpose this to a smaller scale. Are you ready to take some small risks? You know, I think it takes money to make money, but it doesn’t have to be a lot. By small risks, I’m talking about a small 10$ or 20$ here and there that could help you make 20 or 40$ after a couple of months. You’re not experiencing the results right away and it takes some time, but converting 10$ into 20$ is 100% ROI.

As an example, I bought OIO publisher (Shamelessly putting an affiliate link here) this month to manage the ads on frogstr.com and I will also be using it on other websites. OIO publisher (John Chow get out of this body) is 30$ with a promotional code (I used “johnchow”) and that’s what I paid for it. At the beginning of the month, I didn’t have a single clue if I would sell advertisements here, but I decided to take that 30$ and take a small risk. You know what? It’s already paid, a little less than a month later. The next months will be 100% profit and I can only see the amount of money to growing.

You see, when I say taking risks it has nothing to do with investing 25,000$. You’ll make some good investments and some bad investments, but in the end if you invest wisely it usually pay off.

Experiment

Taking risks can also mean just wasting your time. My first ever online revenue was through Google Adsense, but do you think it happened overnight? I actually tried a couple of niches and spent a lot of time building non-profitable websites before getting things right. I didn’t invest money, but I invested a couple of hours of my time every week without having a single clue if I was going to make money out of it!

Then I started making 0.10$ a day, then 0.20$ and eventually over 10$ a day. It’s important to accept that making 0.10$ a day for a month or two is actually OK and that eventually by working the same amount of time it’s going to be possible to double that amount every month.

Moderate risk taker

I’m a  moderate risk taker. I don’t want to ruin my life by investing 10,000$ I don’t have, but I’m ready to invest some money here and there. It’s also important to consider that for some, 10,000$ might be a small investment: it’s relative to the amount of money you make and the amount of money you’re ready to invest usually grow with the revenues you’re making online.

Some have big balls and don’t fear losing it all. Good for them and good for you if you’re one of them! I really admire that because you really maximize you chances of making money, but you’re also maximizing your chances of losing it all unfortunately.

Take the risks

What I wanted to say was that if you don’t take any risks, not much will happen. These risks don’t have to be related to money: it can also be your time or anything you personally consider a risk.

You know, a lot of bloggers want to be at the top, but aren’t ready to take the same risks the big guys took.

I am not going to make friends with that one for sure. As most of you know, I published an article last week about how you could artificially inflate or fake your Feedburner subscriber count and strongly advised you not to do it for obvious reasons. Now, do you think I would let you guys get away with it that easy? Of course not!

Wake up!

By exposing how easy it was to fake the subscriber count, I guess I wanted to say a little something to every advertiser out there: “Wake up!”. If you think this doesn’t apply to you because you’re not an advertiser you are wrong because the minute you comment on other blogs, you advertise your website. Advertising doesn’t mean paying money for an ad spot: to me it means having your brand displayed elsewhere. What I am about to say does apply to paid advertisement, but I’ll explain why it does apply to you also.

The main reason I think people are faking their RSS Subscriber count is to sell advertisements or reviews for more money. You know, some people will ask 25 or 30$ a month for an ad on their website simply because the feedburner chicklet shows 600 subscribers: it’s a common thing. Of course, you can check out some Alexa stats to make sure that number is real, but ShoeMoney has an Alexa Rank of 101,291 which makes me think Alexa is mostly crap. I also have another blog getting about 50 times more traffic than this blog with a crappy Alexa Rank as well. If we can’t really rely on Alexa Rank  – and I’ve talked about it in the past – it all comes down to the Feedburner subscriber count, right? Well it pisses me off because a lot of bloggers fake it and there is NO, absolutely NO return on investment when advertising on their blogs. It’s important for every advertiser out there to know what the real numbers are and I’m about to show you how (mostly).

I hope advertisers will read this because it will help them maximize their return on investment (ROI). The same applies to you, the average blogger with not so much money to invest in advertisement. I want everybody to make the wisest choice when it comes to advertisement and trusting the Feedburner chicklet is probably the worst decision of all.

I don’t pay for advertising, how does this apply to me?

You comment on blogs, you advertise. Whether or not you pay for it, every single time your link appear on a blog, it’s called advertising. Now, why does it matter? When you comment on blogs showing 600 subscribers, you’re actually making that blog a little more powerful because you’re advertisers more reasons to think the blog is active with real readers.

Can’t we use comments as a metric?

Unfortunately no, a lot of popular blogs out there don’t receive a lot of comments even if they have an impressive REAL number of subscribers. Take John Cow for example, he doesn’t receive 50 comments on every post, but he has a pretty good subscriber count and pretty good traffic. It’s a good indication, but we can’t use it as a very good metric.

Google Reader is the key

Not many people know that with Google Reader, you can get the number of subscribers subscribed via Google Reader for a particular feed! It doesn’t show you the real numbers because it only displays the number of subscribers subscribed using Google Reader, but this can give us a pretty good estimate. Where is that feature? It’s hidden a little bit, but when you select a particular feed in your Google reader, you will see a little “Show details” link and this link is the key! As an example, here’s are feed details for The Net Fool:

How can this help me get the real numbers?

Let’s do some maths here and compare the Google Reader count with the Feedburner chicklet on some blogs I have in my Google Reader:

I tried to include some well known sub 1000 blogs as well as some bigger blogs like Dosh Dosh, ShoeMoney and John Cow. There’s only 7 blogs in the list as I only took some blogs from my Google Reader and didn’t do an extensive search for feeds. While some might say it’s not that much and we can’t really get any statistics out of that, just check your Google Reader and you’ll notice it’s around 25% for a lot of blogs.  So you guys can basically do your own investigation, but you get the big picture and you know where I’m going with this.

What’s a “normal” ratio?

You’re the judge on that one, I don’t want to go out and say “Anybody under 10% is a cheater!”, I just want to raise a flag. I strongly encourage you to go through your list of feeds in Google Reader and check who looks suspicious. I unsubscribed to A LOT of feeds, especially in the MMO niche because of that and trust me, I know who’s faking it out there. I won’t point the finger at anyone as you’re all able to figure it out on your own.

I also want to point out that anybody with 300 Feedburner Subscribers and 15 Google Reader Subscribers is extremely suspicious. But as I said, you’re the judge.

Contests brings the ratio down

BS. While I agree contests are extremely popular and one of the requirements to get entries is to subscribe by email, I don’t think it would impact the count that much. I think most people will unsubscribe after the contest and subscribe to the feed via a reader if they like the blog. Even if people don’t unsubscribe, I’m not sure it can cause the ratio to go THAT down. The Net Fool ran a lot of contests and still has a pretty decent ratio. John Cow ran a lot of contests and has a pretty low ratio, but with 10,000 subscribers it really is a different game. We all know John Cow is getting traffic so there’s no question there.

I’m not saying ShoeMoney is cheating

Some might say, Shoe is at 5%, is he cheating? I don’t think so because if you check ShoeMoney, TechCrunch and big blogs like that the ratio is very low, mostly because the subscriptions come from so many different sources. For sub 1000 subscribers, it seems that the stats are pretty accurate. I also made some research online and it seems to be a well accepted fact that the Google Reader market Share is around 20-25% (That’s what it is on frogstr…)

Feedcompare.com

Another method Chris at chrisguthrie.net mentioned me is to actually have a look at feedcompare.com. It really is a nice website that let you have a look at how Feedburner feeds evolve into time. With it, you can actually see if there’s anything unusual on a feed if the feed in question has the “Awareness API” enabled. Mine isn’t enabled as I don’t like other websites and outside sources to have access to my feed without me knowing, but here is an example of a suspicious feed:

I’m not saying this guy is faking it, but going from 395 to 690 in two days is very suspicious…

You’re the judge

As I said, you’re the judge on this. I’m just saying you should be careful with the Feedburner count and don’t necessarily take it as a very good metric until you confirm the numbers by yourself. Google Reader is a good way to estimate the numbers and I honestly think 10-25% market share is a pretty accurate number. So, be careful when you buy advertisement, the Feedburner subscriber count shouldn’t always justify a higher price.

Prove me wrong

If you’re an honest blogger with 300 subscriptions and something like 15 Google Reader subscriptions It would be great if you could share some detailed stats. I would be more than happy to blog about it and say I was wrong!

Share this

I hope you guys will share this. Not because I want some link love, but because I want the community to know. I personally think the Google Reader subscriber count is a much better metric simply because Google Reader is the most popular reader out there and it’s a lot more harder to fake.

If you don’t already know, I love analyzing statistics and that’s why Google Analytics is my best friend. Whether or not you like stats, it should also be your best friend  because it helps you make smart decisions. If you don’t know where your traffic is coming from and you don’t know what that traffic is doing on your website, you’re never going to be able to grow. Why? Because you don’t have a single clue if the 500$/month ad you placed on some website is paying off! What if the FREE traffic you’re getting from Facebook or twitter for example converts more? That’s where Google Analytics comes into play, whether you like stats or not.

Direct Traffic

I love direct traffic because it makes me feel good! Direct traffic is someone who actually remembered your domain name and took the time to type it manually in the address bar to visit your site. If you reach my website on a consistent basis by typing the name manually in your browser, I love you.  Direct traffic is about 30% of my blog traffic which I think is huge! Let’s have a look if you guys are good traffic

If it’s green, it’s good. For people not familiar with Google Analytics, everything that’s green or red is the particular statistic compared to the site’s average. There’s no surprise here as direct traffic actually represents people willing to spend time on the site. The only bad statistics is the number of new visitors but I don’t see this as bad: you guys are coming back, that’s good!

Referring Traffic

Referring traffic doesn’t seem to be that good. Referring traffic is basically traffic coming from social networks or other blogs and a lot of that is because of comments I write on so many blogs. So, let’s have a look at how you guys can’t provide me with good traffic! Just kidding.

OK, so that sucks. I mean, the only good news is that it’s bringing me new visitors but I already knew that! When I look at the stats, these are pretty good stats to me but it’s below the website’s average! It doesn’t mean you guys should stop sending me love…!

Google Traffic

Now let’s have a look if the Google traffic loves me!

I am so impressed! The Google traffic ain’t that good on some other website I run so it really is a surprise to see how good in this niche the search traffic seems to be. Every visitor spent almost ten minutes of their precious time on my blog, visiting an average of 4 pages!

Build your personal brand

You see that referring traffic is good but not as good as direct traffic and Google traffic. What does that mean? Well, it means that we all have to continue building our brand. I don’t care if people subscribe to my feed, I much prefer to see them type my name directly in the address bar or in Google: it means people actually care! That direct traffic converts in word of mouth, because these visitors know who you are and can remember your website’s name.

As for the Google traffic I don’t know. It looks to be the killer, but it might go down in the future when the site gets a lot more traffic. I prefer to think people like what they read and decide to stick around.

Now it’s not because referring traffic isn’t the best traffic source that we have to stop commenting on blogs! You know why? Yes, that personal brand thing and the loop starts all over again. In the end, traffic is simple: it all comes down to establishing your brand out there.

I obviously want each and everyone of you to be better bloggers by reading this blog and for that I want you to think twice before pressing that evil publish button. Too many bloggers just press the publish button without even reading the post they just wrote and I think this is a mistake. If you’re the best writer out there this doesn’t apply to you, but if you’re like most bloggers you’re not in the business because you won the Nobel prize in literature. So, this applies to you.

Review until it flows

It is important to reach a certain level of quality for all your posts if you want to attract subscribers and eventually be an authority in your niche. Nobody writes a perfect post without a review, nobody. How many times do you read your posts and notice there could be some improvements but don’t bother? If you feel like there could be some improvements, then imagine what your readers think. For that reason, read your posts before publishing them and read them as if you were the reader, not the author. Always keep in mind what would make you stop reading and what would make you continue reading a post. Is your post catchy enough? Is the post too boring? Could there be some humor in it to keep the reader hooked? Are some sentences too long? Could there be some crap you could cut?

I think you get the big picture and you understand where I’m going. You know your readers and you know what they like, so offer that.

Stop until it’s too late

Sometimes I write an article and halfway through I realize how the post sucks. I’m sure this happened to you also and I hope you didn’t publish that crap. It’s probably the worst thing to do because if you’re not convinced about what’s you’re writing, your readers will feel it and if you think your post sucks, there are good chances your readers too! In a situation like that, save the post for later, and it might turn into a gem eventually, who knows.

Not every post is worth a Nobel Prize

We’re all writing bad, OK and awesome articles. The key is really just to minimize the bad posts and maximize the good posts as you probably already know. It’s something we have to accept as bloggers: we’re not always going to write the best post out there. Now, imagine if we can cut the “bad posts” part simply by reviewing every single article we write to make sure it’s at least an average post. You know, sometimes it’s not the content, it’s really the way we say things that just makes a post boring. With a little review time, most bad posts can become OK posts and that’s really what we want because nobody wants to write crappy content.

Preview on your blog

It’s important to preview your articles on your blog directly, not in the admin editor. Why? Because you will truly feel like a reader and trust me it works. Sometimes I make a first review in the editor and then read it on the blog to find out there are a lot of improvements to be made. It just feels different when it’s out there on your blog, so use the preview tool!

I don’t have time to review

If you know you just wrote a gem and it doesn’t need a review, fine. Otherwise, wait until you have some time.

Do you review?

I will end this post by asking you the obvious question: Do you review your posts before pressing the publish button?