Ben Tremblay

I feel good right now. For seo horror, which I launched this month, I had a simple goal for the first few months: “Not give a damn about Google”. I know you’ll say it’s pretty dumb for a blog called SEO Horror, not to care about SEO, but In fact I think it’s a pretty good SEO strategy.

Let’s be honest here, I still care a little bit about Google, but only for long term benefits. When launching this blog, I did the traditional SEO tricks: link directories submissions, join social networks, on-page optimization, etc, etc. This means that not caring about Google does not mean not doing SEO. When I say I don’t care about Google, it simply means I don’t give a damn about my rankings so far.

The social strategy

My strategy with this blog is being a lot more active socially than I used to be with other websites and so far it pays off. This initial strategy was to get traffic from alternative sources and with that, the Google traffic will come. You know, it’s extremely hard to make your way into the Internet Marketing business because there are just so many websites out there and so many SEO being done. It’s hard to get good ranking for popular keywords and for that reason, I didn’t want to spend all my free time just to get decent rankings. The way I see it is: if my blog is good enough and that I’m an active blogger, traffic will come from alternative sources like other blogs and social networks. I must admit I’m getting decent traffic from these sources and I’m extremely satisfied.

The John Chow example

I used not to like John Chow and now I must admit his marketing strategy is one of the best out there. John Chow got penalized some time ago by Google for a too aggressive SEO campaign and for that reason, he’s not even ranked for his own search terms “John Chow”. If you type “John Chow” on Google you won’t get johnchow.com in the results for that reason. Then, how do you explain this guy is one of the best known blogger and has some really good traffic? The answer is quite simple: he has Internet Marketing strategies outside of Google. Yes he does use controversy a lot and viral stuff as well but he’s damn good at that.

We can’t all be John Chow

I can’t use a marketing strategy similar to John Chow’s strategy for the simple reason I’m not John Chow. I’m not good at generating controversy like he his and it’s not part of my personality anyway. I know what I’m good at and I use it in my own social strategy. What are your social skills? I know for my part I make friends easily, get a long with mostly everyone, I’m a good marketer and I’m also good at selling stuff in an honest manner. That being said, I know I can’t fake personality traits so I use what I’m good at. Write your social skills on paper and think about how you can use those skills in a social strategy to generate traffic.

Feels good

Not caring about Google feels good because you concentrate on what’s really important: building a network around you. Nobody can act alone in the web Business, you need a network around you. Google won’t give you that network, so you have to build it on your own. Then, the Google rankings will surely come anyway. I used to care too much about Google rankings and forget about what’s really important. Yes, this was giving me good ranking and traffic, but it was not as fun and didn’t have much friends in my niche.

You’re the master of your strategy

In the end, you do what you want. It would be stupid to ignore Google so YOU HAVE to do some SEO, but I don’t think it’s worth investing 100% of your time in that. You don’t want to be 100% dependent on search engines: alternative sources of traffic are equally important and you’ll get that traffic with a good social strategy. It’s your call as to what percentage of your time you invest in link building, seo, etc VS the time you invest in making friends and establishing your brand. The bottom line is that you have to do both correctly, but don’t ignore the power of a good social strategy.

I made a post recently about sponsoring a category in BlogCatalog and I’d like to make a follow-up on that. So first of all, I’m a sponsor for the SEO category of BlogCatalog and this ensure me to always be in the top 5 ranking for this category. Wow, that sounds great with a reach of over 45 million visitors annually, doesn’t it? Well, let’s have a look at how this little thing performs.

Always and forever #5

First of all, let’s start with one of the thing I hate about being a sponsor in BlogCatalog. While BlogCatalog assure you to be in the top 5 ranking for the category you sponsor, it is based on a first-come first-served basis. What does that mean? This simply mean that I was #5 to buy the spot and for this reason I’m #5 in the ranking. What’s that? I mean, the #1 pays 12$ a month and I also pay 12$ a month, why would the other website get a better ranking? Oh yeah, that’s true, the guy subscribed first! That’s ridiculous from my point of view and there should be something to rotate the websites across the top 5 spots. If there’s such an algorithm it must really suck as I haven’t seen my website above #5.

The price ain’t bad

I must admit the price ain’t bad. Depending on the category you want to sponsor, the price can vary between 8$ and 25$. The SEO category is currently 12$/month and it’s not that bad for a reach of 45 million visitors annually on BlogCatalog.

What about the traffic?

I’m getting traffic from BlogCatalog for sure, but I doubt it’s because of the sponsorship. Most of the traffic I get is from the friends and also because I get involved in the community a lot. I haven’t noticed a significant increase from BC in the past couple of days and I’m really disappointed with the service.

The directory doesn’t bring traffic

The reality with BlogCatalog is that people don’t usually reach your site via the directory. I mean, who’s browsing the damn directory, it’s a 10 years old technology! The real BlogCatalog traffic comes from friends, neighborhood, broadcasts and groups so it’s no surprise being a sponsor for a category doesn’t give you that much exposure.

I was expecting that kind of results and I mentioned it in my initial post. I analyzed other websites sponsoring categories and by looking at their public stats, their traffic didn’t seem to sky rocket because of BlogCatalog. I really wanted to try it, but I don’t think I’ll pay for another month.

Worth it?

No. With 12$ you could do so much more for your website. With a little 12$ you can pay someone to submit your website to like 750 link directories or something like that. It’s a much wiser investment to be honest. I had to try it but now it’s done. I’ll probably give some more feedback at the end of the month as now it’s only been a couple of days but I don’t think this will get better. Bottom line: invest that 12$ elsewhere.

An important step in the lifetime of every blog is to get its own domain. A lot of bloggers have blogspot or WordPress hosted blogs and there comes a point where it’s important, for credibility, to get a real domain. I personally think a good domain name is extremely important to establish your brand and we’ll have a look at common mistakes while picking a domain name.

Getting a domain name is hard

First of all, getting a domain name is hard. A couple of years ago, it used to be very easy as the number of available domain names was still under control. Now, it seems like every possible domain name is already taken and you can’t even consider getting one like internetmarketing.com. But you know what? I don’t care. I don’t want internetmarketing.com and you don’t want it either (well, I don’t know in fact). I don’t want onlinecasino.com, poker.com or whatever premium domain name. These are the type of domains you want if you’re making 20,000K a month and want to buy an established business. I personally prefer to start new projects and start things from scratch, but it’s really not the purpose of this post so we’ll get back on track: getting a domain name is hard. It’s hard, but not that much if you’re using a bit of creativity.

Don’t confuse website name and subject

One of the first mistake you can make is to confuse ‘website name’ with the subject/category of your website. Let’s say your website is about cats, your first reflex will be to get a domain like: cats.com, onlinecats.com, cutecats.com or something similar. Why? Why would you want your domain name to be the subject of your website? You can have a blog about cats and still have a domain name like ‘catzy.com’. It’s true we still have cat in ‘catzy’ but it’s not a problem, we now have a catchy name and you have better chances for ‘catzy.com’ to be available than ‘catsonline.com’. I personally find it easier to remind ‘catzy’ and it really sounds great to me, which would ensure people would go back to your website if they ever need information about cats.

Think about the big names

Let’s make a little comparison with some of the biggest websites out there. I will list a couple of .com domain names and what could have been their domain names if they used their niche instead of an original name.

• google.com: searchengine.com
• youtube.com: submitvideos.com
• facebook.com: socialnetwork.com
• twitter.com: microblogging.com
• shoemoney.com: makemoneyonline.com
• John Chow: makemoneyonline.com also
• techcrunch: blogabouttechnology.com
• digg: votewebsites.com
• delicious: socialbookmarking.com

You see how boring these names are? I mean, Google is much more appealing than searchengine.com and the same goes for all websites listed above. Take Facebook for instance, I’m pretty sure that at the time of registration, socialnetwork.com was probably taken, but what about facebook.com? facebook.com was probably available and it cost a little 9$ to register the domain name like any other domain.

You see how important being creative in your domain name is? Not only it ensure you can pick an available domain name, but it also ensure your domain name is a catchy one.

Establish a brand

When picking a domain name, you want a name that will be great to establish as a brand. I would personally enjoy putting seohorror.com on a t-shirt, but I don’t think something like onlineseo.com would look as good on the same t-shirt. This is one thing I consider when picking a domain: would my name look great on a t-shirt or mug?

You also want people to remember your name so they can talk to their friends about it. If you have something too generic, people won’t remember it. If your name is something really unique, then it’s easy to remember. What’s also important for people to remember your domain name? Make it short! You don’t want a 100 words domain name: below 15 characters and two words is good. Again, it’s not an exact science as there are always special situations where a longer domain would be suitable, but in most cases, 15 characters and two words is OK.

Get that domain name!

It’s now time to get that domain name. Start your search on websites like Go Daddy for available domain names and remember not to confuse category/subject with name!

As bloggers, our main concern is to write good content so we can drive some traffic to our blog, but also build backlinks. One thing you’ve probably noticed is how hard it is to get backlinks from articles. Unless you have a good users base or write an extremely unique and valuable article, people won’t talk about your posts. We all know it’s impossible to write everyday the best post ever and nobody starts a blog with an instant 20,000 readers. So, what can you do?

Think outside articles

If you can’t initially drive thousands of visitors with your posts, you have to think about an alternative way of doing it. Even if you have thousands of visitors, it’s always interesting to increase your traffic and alternatives to articles are still of interest for you.

I know you’re asking “what alternatives can we use?”. Well, there’s nothing specific I can say here but there are a couple of concepts you can learn from. Being a developper, I always think of tools/plugins I could develop to help the community. This can be a WP plugin, a Google gadget or whatever web-based tool. How can you drive traffic with that? Well, if you host the tool on the same domain as your website, people will visit your website and subscribe to it if they like what you do. Many bloggers are doing it and it’s usually working great.

How is that different from an article? Well, it’s really unique and it’s something people can’t copy so they have to link to you. Let’s say you develop a great WordPress plugin, other bloggers will surely talk about it, use it and link to your website to actually download the plugin because it’s not available elsewhere.

One example I can give is a Google gadget I developed for one of my website. The website isn’t a blog, but the concept remains the same: not rely on Google ranking to get traffic. I’m a big fan of the well known Rubik’s Cube, so a couple of months ago I built an online Rubik’s cube timer with statistics so that people could record their best times. I had to find a way to be really different and not only rely on Google search to get some traffic, so I built a Google gadget people could put on their Google home page. I had to do this because at first, I wasn’t ranked very well for the keyword “Rubik’s Cube Timer” (Now I’m #2). While very useful, the gadget is a simple version of the timer and it’s lacking a lot of features so people still have to visit the website. The gadget is on Google directory, has a user base of 380+ users, help me drive additional traffic and is a free advertisement for my website on Google!

The gadget looks like that:

And see how it’s giving me free exposure on Google:

People searching for a timer or something similar for their Google home page ended up using my little timer. Whenever they needed additional features, they ended up on the main website. This was a great way at first to drive some important visitors and get people to talk about the website.

I’m not a developer

Ok, this was just an example to show you how can something you usually wouldn’t think about could drive traffic to your website. I’m a developer so that kind of tools is quite easy to do for me, but not everybody is a developer. There are a lot of other ways to drive traffic and backlinks to your website. Contests are particularly popular among bloggers. Having a contest on your blog will help you drive additional traffic and there are good chances other bloggers will talk about your contest if it’s any good. I’ve seen some contests like 25$ by Paypal for the top commentator of the month and stuff like that. Why not have t-shirts with your website logo and give that away once a week/month? Things like that work and you really just have to be creative.

I’m working on a couple of things outside articles only for SEO Horror and these should be live in the next couple of months. It’s OK if it takes time to develop or to get online because you’re not in short term blogging…Are you?

Be creative

I’ve said it a couple of times in this article: be creative. There aren’t any exact techniques but it’s just important to think about what else outside your articles you can use to drive traffic. One of the most successful blogger John Chow isn’t even ranked in Google for “John Chow” because of aggressive SEO techniques. How does he drives traffic then? Well, he has found numerous ways over the years to do so and he still has one of the most successful blog on the Internet with 27,000+ subscribers, whithout Google. You want to drive traffic from Google, but it’s just to show that Google isn’t everything, you can use alternative ways.

I’m a big fan of BlogCatalog and I actually much prefer it to MyBlogLog but I won’t go into details as to why I prefer it as it’s not the purpose of this post. I actually want to talk about sponsoring a category into BlogCatalog to get more exposure. I was interested in sponsoring a category to increase my visibility but I’m not sure it’s really worth it.

The price

The rates to sponsor a category are actually pretty good for a website like BlogCatalog which is receiving thousands of visitors everyday: it goes from 8$ to 25$. Prices depend on the category you want to sponsor. For example, a scrapbooking category will cost you 8$ while a Finance category will be 25$. It just goes with popularity.

What do you get?

Here’s what BlogCatalog gives you for sponsoring a category:

BlogCatalog’s Sponsored Category program is a way for you to get more visitors to your blog by taking advantage of BlogCatalog’s traffic of over 45 million annual visitors.

• A premium position in BlogCatalog’s Category specific directory
• Your blog will show up in one of the top 5 positions in the category you select
• Your sponsorship links to your BlogCatalog description page which links to your blog.

Worth it?

Well, with BlogCatalog, you can actually see the number of recent visitors on the website’s BlogCatalog profile and from what I’ve seen from other sponsors, I’m not convinced. The amount of recent visitors was similar to my profile’s recent visitors count and I wasn’t sponsoring any category which makes me think it’s not a big traffic source. These are only assumptions as I’m not sure how reliable the stats ar.

These are only assumptions, let’s try it!

Anyway, I don’t like to assume things so I decided to sponsor the SEO category on BlogCatalog for the next 30 days. So, if you search into the SEO category, you’ll see me appear in the first five listings:

So I say, if you were thinking about sponsoring a category to increase your exposure, just wait a week or two. I will provide some feedback in the next weeks as to wether it’s giving good traffic or not so this way you will be able to make a good decision and won’t throw away 10-25$. Let me do the dirty work!

Today, ShoeMoney published an interesting post about a recent “mistake” he made. That mistake was to remove his feedburner subscriber count from his website. He was actually annoyed of people reacting to the ups and downs of his subscribers count, so he decided to remove it and it’s understandable. Now, it seems that since he removed that feedburner count, his stats have completly plateaued at something like 16,500 readers.

We’re all sheep

I actually never bothered putting the feedburner count on any of my website/blog, I thought it was pretty useless for people to know the amount of people subscribed to my feed. Now that ShoeMoney published this article and that I think about it a little more, I feel like I made a mistake too by not bothering. Why? We are all a little like sheep: we like what’s popular and want to be part of it. When someone visit your site and sees something like 100, 300 or 1000 subscribers, it’s easy to say: “Wow, that many subscribers? This website must be great, let’s subscribe too!”. Now I feel it’s important to take advantage of the sheep in all of us.

Be careful

While it’s great to show your subscriber count if you are over 100, I don’t think it’s a good idea below 50 subscribers or even 100 readers. Why? Well, you will get the opposite reaction: “Only 22 readers, it must be an average/crappy blog”.

It’s your call

I will definitely try to put the subscribers count in the next couple of days because I really think this can have a positive impact on a website’s credibility. In the end, it’s your call wether or not you should show the counter. Like I said, you have to figure out when it’s time to show it so it can have the desired effect and not the opposite. I think 100 is a good number, but it’s up to you!

Do you publish summaries of posts in your RSS feed? If you do so, I’m pretty sure the reason is to monetize your blog. RSS feeds are extremely hard to monetize and limiting the size of the posts to force the user to visit your website is a common thing. Unfortunately, it’s the opposite: in the long run, you will loose money.

The preview feed

I think most bloggers started this way with their feed. What’s the point of putting ads on your website and publishing your content in a different place? What’s the point of having 5,000 readers if they all can read my content ads-free? Well, I’m sure you all read other blogs and even yourself get frustrated when you can only read a preview of an article in your favorite news reader. You don’t feel like visiting the website just to read a single article, so what’s the point of subscribing if you still have to visit the damn website? My usual reaction is simply to unsubscribe.

If myself, as a reader, unsubscribe from “preview” feeds, I’m sure you do and I’m also pretty sure that’s what your readers do! That is one of the main reason some blogs aren’t able to increase their number of subscribers. You might gain 10 readers a day, but there’s a strong possibility you’re also loosing 10 readers every day.

So, what do I do?

You should publish your full articles into your feeds. You can also place some ads into your feed if you really want to maximize your profits: it’s something we’ll see more often in the coming years. I personally don’t like to put ads in RSS feeds but this really is a personal decision and I don’t think this would impact the number of subscribers a lot. The main reason why you want a full feed is to keep your subscribers. You might not get a buck from your RSS feed, but loyal readers will comment on your blog often and also talk about you on other websites. What you really want to do is getting loyal readers in order to make long-term gains.

Thinking short-term is usually killing a business. Long-term thinking gives you less money at first, but it’s definitely worth it in the long run. I personnaly think full and ads-free RSS feeds are the way to go. You just have to make sure you write good enough content so that people feel the need to comment or visit your website for whatever other reason.

A lot of webmasters look at their bounce rate, realize how crappy it is but aren’t really sure what to do with it and how to analyse it. First of all, let’s define the bounce rate with Wikipedia’s help:

It essentially represents the average percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.

So let’s define bounce rate as the percentage of users who leave your site from the first page they visited. Not giving a damn about your bounce rate is a really good way to loose money and potential readers. Let’s say all your readers only visit one page (100% bounce rate) and you manage to get all these visitors to visit 2 pages instead, you double your page views but also double your advertisers exposure. What does this mean? More money. First, what’s a bad bounce rate? It all depends of the niche. For certain niche, a bad bounce rate might be 70% and on another niche it might be 40%. I’d say when you start going over 60%, there are some improvements you can make.

So how to fight that evil bounce rate?

To fight your bounce rate, you have to know your traffic. There are certain types of traffic that will kill your bounce rate (StumbleUpon) and you can’t do anything about it, it’s the type of traffic. For this article, let’s presume your traffic is mostly organic. What I usually do to improve my bounce rate is to put my girlfriend or a friend in front of the most popular page of my website and ask them why would you stay on my website and why would you leave? This is a terribly good technique because you can’t yourself evaluate objectively your website.

Get their comments and work on it!

Usually, the main comment is that there’s nothing catching their attention. Remember that someone leaving from the first page is someone who actually didn’t even read half of the first page. So, before concentrating on the second page, concentrate on the first page! Getting your readers’ attention is the first step and this will ensure they actually read the first page.

Right, but how do I get their attention?

Visitors are usually very attracted by colors and images. How painful is it to get on a colorless webpage filled with text? That leads me to one of the first solution: Your website design. Remember that for every single visitor coming to your website for the first time, your website is like any other. If on top of that your website’s template is a common template found on over a thousands blog, your website is really unattractive. No matter how good your content is, it still is a regular blog for any visitor. So why not work on your template a little bit? Change some colors, make yourself a little logo, etc. It doesn’t have to be terribly good, just a little bit different. If you are no web programmer/designer and you can afford a 50$-75$ template, do it! This will make your site a lot more distinctive and professional. My last experiment with getting a professional template improved my bounce rate of about 10%. Just because it looks more professional and unique!

Another solution I’ve used is to redirect your readers to some other related articles. Make yourself a section “Related Articles” or “You might also like” and place some related articles in there. If you use a CMS like WordPress there are some good plugins to help you achieve that.

People also like to read what’s popular. Why not have a section in your sidebar or where ever on your site called “Top articles”, “Top pages”, “Most commented”, “Most popular” or anything like that?

Make sure these sections are visible to your visitors and it should really improve your bounce rate.

One other thing I like to use are ads referring to my own site. On certain important pages, I like to put my own little banner which is referencing another page on my website. If the banner is attractive, it works like magic.

So there you go, with these little tips you should be able to improve your bounce rate.

How do you treat your old articles? Do you just forget about them because they simply bring you a couple of visitors per day? In the web business, you always have to make the most out of what you have and dead articles is money sleeping.

So let say you have a 100 posts blog and one post is briging you 75% of your traffic which is 750 visitors per day. So you have 99 posts getting only 25% of your traffic, how weird is that? It’s a very common situation among bloggers because each blog seems to have a “master” post. unfortunately, we tend to concentrate too much on that master post and forget about the older ones. Well, that’s a good way of loosing money.

Here’s what you can do:

1. On one of your “master” post, put a little something like: “If you liked this article, you might also like ‘x article’. So, you take most of your traffic and redirect that traffic on a similar post. This way, some people will consult two pages of your site, you double your advertisers exposure and you also double your chances of getting a new reader.
2. Write your own personal TOP 5,10,20,25, etc. It’s not because some articles are not popular that they are not good enough. Redirect your readers to great articles they don’t know about. Maybe one of that reader is a blogger who will talk about one of your newly discovered post on his blog.
3. Put a “most popular” or “personal top 5″ in one of your sidebar. People like to read the best content of a website or what’s really popular.

There are hundreds of other tricks you can use to resurect your old posts, just be creative! The important thing is not to forget about them.

Most of us bloggers have a “writing routine” to ensure new content everyday. There is absolutely no problems with that approach and it’s in fact a really good thing to have a writing routine. The problem is that most bloggers do it to keep the readers happy and feed them with new articles at least once a day. My piece of advice with that is: Don’t write just to write something.

There are some days you’ll feel like you have nothing to write about and it’s totally normal. These days usually end up with a crappy post because of that evil daily writing routine. You will loose more readers by writting crappy articles than you’ll loose by skipping a day. Your readers will get used to your posting habits and if you decide to write a quality article every two days instead of average articles every day, you will get more readers and traffic in the long term.

Always go for quality over quantity, in the long term it pays off. If you can write a quality article everyday then that’s great, but don’t feel bad to skip a day.