Mark Penn says in his famous Wall Street Journal article that at 100,000 unique visits per month, a blogger hits 75K in income. There is a suggestion that there is a direct correlation between how much traffic you get and how much you make as a blogger. So how do you go about increasing traffic for your blog?
There are three kinds of traffic:
Search Traffic
Referring Sites
Direct Traffic
If you focus solely on content creation and engage in no other marketing effort, all your traffic is going to come from search engines. If you become inactive for any length of time, you are still going to get residual traffic. Most of that likely might be search engine traffic, except if you get residual traffic of the other two kinds from your previous marketing efforts.
It is fundamental that you use Google Analytics or a similar tool to see how much and what kind of traffic you are getting. The tool also tells you of the keywords people use to feed the search engines to end up at your site, and what pages they visit. This helps you discover your niche, and to create ever more content for that particular niche. For me right now that seems to be Android.
More specifically "donut android" and "cupcake android." For those two phrases my blog for now shows up on the first page of Google search results. That is prime real estate. The reason I have to hone in that niche makes sense at many levels to me.
When I write new blog posts on Android, content creation and marketing are not two different activities. They are one and the same.
Android is no cottage industry. It is not some sub sub sub topic. It just might end up being the top technology news for this year.
Android so totally fits into my IC vision and my startup. The more I learn about Android, the better for me. I don't mind getting paid to learn. (Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures) I plot every day to go back to working on my startup full time. Android is fundamental to the IC vision. The ground - operating system - itself has to move for the vision to become reality.
I feel lucky that the topic in technology that I find most fascinating right now is also my blog's prime niche according to Google Analytics. And I got told of that niche right after my first Android blog post. I find that amazing. My respect for Google's algorithms grew. And when Google gave me the number two spot after my first Donut Android blog post, my respect for the search engine really grew. (Taking The Number 2 Spot On Google Search For Donut Android)
Search engine traffic I think is the best kind, but working on the other two does not take away from your search engine traffic, quite the opposite, so don't ignore the other two either.
If I am a tech blogger, it makes sense that I visit TechCrunch, for example, or Mashable. And if I am going to visit anyways, why not participate in the comments sections? It takes but a few seconds. And because your name gets hyperlinked to your blog, those comments sections start sending a little traffic your way. What is there to complain?
Contrary to the stereotype, blogging is a social activity. You have to belong to blogging and online communities around your interests. You have to forge friendships in the blogosphere. And forging friendships with bloggers who are not so big name increases your chances of them putting you on their blogrolls. After traffic, those backlinks are what jack up your google rank. Those backlinks are key. And content creation alone will not do the work for you, especially during the early stages when you are still wondering how you hit 1,000 page hits a day.
Twitter is micro-blogging. And there is another: that would be the comments sections of other blogs. Got to participate.
Twitter is another great place to socialize. Don't just have a list of people you follow and followers. Got to make some time and visit their profile pages and respond to some of their tweets. These are real living, breathing people. Get to know some of them, or many of them if possible.
And there is direct traffic. Feedburner lets you put a box at your blog that gives visitors the option to subscribe to your blog with their email addresses. Seth Godin claims that mailing list is how he gets most of his traffic. But he probably became a star blogger first. But before you become famous and other people know you, when you are a small fish blogger, there are people you know. Once in a while it is okay to send out emails to people you know sharing a blog post or two with them. Look Ma, no hands!
Focus on great content creation.
Find your niche, and create great content for that particular niche, but also constantly be diversifying. You don't want to go out of business when one rainy day Google revised its algorithms and your blog ended up in Siberia.
Blogging is a social activity. Be in a habit of visiting other blogs and participating in their comments sections in meaningful ways.
Strive to generate a band of loyal visitors, people who want to lap up every blog post you put out because, oh, you are just so wonderful.
All your stuff is saved. Contacts you add on your Android phone are automatically saved in your Gmail account that you are used to accessing over your laptop. So you can lose that mobile phone and not lose anything. Get a new phone, sign in, pick up where you last left.
You can take your photos and videos from your mobile device straight to your online destinations, in Google's case Picassa and YouTube. You don't have to download them to your desktop and then upload them online. That right there is further liberation from the desktop. And of course the editing happens online.
Many human beings come with a pair of legs. We move around. A lot. The mobile space was always very important. Technology is catching up. But it would have been a minor disaster to realize the mobile space was a whole different silo from the big rectangle of your laptop.
That seamlessness from the mobile space to, what will we call it, the immobile space is key. It has to feel like one continuum. When mobile and not so mobile, we are still dealing with the same ecosystem of information and people.
The Android architecture has that seamlessness in mind. That seamlessness is at the heart of the Android vision. That is also why the architecture is open. You have the Open Handset Alliance. Android is open source. It is free. Just like Google search is free. The business model perhaps is to create a vibrant mobile space, get people to start using the basic services like Gmail and calendar, and then cash in in the mobile ad space which promises to be huge measured by any yardstick.
Android revolutionizing the mobile space and then sturdily moving into the Netbook space is kind of like Gmail coming offline into the Outlook space. The lines are blurring. The competition is heating up.
The Netbook space is not a subset of the PC space. While the PC space seems to have stagnated, the Netbook space has seen some action. The Netbook is half way between the PC and what I call the IC, Internet Computer.
The beauty of a free, functional operating system is it brings the price down, and so you have Dell running up and down the street.
Will Microsoft counter with a stripped down version of Windows, one that might go for $10? Since we know they don't do free.
If all the operating system needs to run is a browser, how much stuff do you need, really?
On The Web
Skytone Alpha 680 Android-powered netbook spotted | Google Android... Chinese manufacturer Skytone. ...... The Alpha 680 is expected to retail for around $250 and be available sometime in Q3 2009. ....... nice to see what appears to be progress on the Android netbook front. Android Set for Netbook Leap? sees Android making the jump off of smartphones and into the netbook arena in the near future ..... Android taking between 10% and 15% of the netbook market within two years ..... Netbooks and laptops are a big growth area; they have higher growth potential than smartphones even ..... certainly within Android’s best interests to find its way onto as many devices as possible ...... In time, it will be interesting to see how many different gadgets are hosting Google's operating system Freescale Android Netbook for $199, Coming Soon? | Android Central a summer 2009 availability and a price point of around $199. ASUS coming up with a Google Android netbook? | GadgetMix.com!::.. ASUS has already allocated a team of engineers to work upon an Android-based netbook and they will able to fully develop the Android-based netbook by the end of this year. It will be interesting to see the place for such a netbook, where 90% of the netbook market is using the old and trusty Windows XP as their OS. One reason that folks at ASUS may be looking upto the Android platform is the fact that it is free. ...... there are plenty of linux custom distros which offer full firefox even in the instant-on OS. Android Netbooks Tested By Google | Android Phone Fans They were even testing out Android on a netbook… LAST YEAR! ...... back in the day somebody had almost got Android running on a mini PC - this was a year ago or more ..... I wouldn’t discount the possibility of seeing a gBook of sorts that comes with all Google products. That means based on Android, Chrome Browser, Google Gears for using Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Google Reader and all down the line. ....... who wouldn’t want a super cheap netbook running Android? Dell Demonstrates Android-powered Mini 10v Netbook - Laptop News ... We've heard that many netbook manufacturers are planning to put Android on their netbooks, but Dell has gone a step further and proved that it's testing "something called Android." ..... three Mini 10vs running Dell's vanilla Ubuntu, Ubuntu Netbook Remix and, most interestingly, Android's Cupcake build. ...... Who doesn't want a "very nice, little, very small and very snappy little operating environment," which "actually runs very nicely," after all?
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