Online Traction

I wrote the following for a friend and editor of a new rip-roaring Irish blog. As such it has a commercial slant, is not very refined but thought it worth sharing for bloggers and more traditional websites alike. What I have outlined here is pretty high level; there’s a lot more to good blogging not least compelling content, style and strategic linking. So, jump on the tip of the iceberg (before it melts)

Goes w/out saying but worth emphasizing : Know your competitors and similar blogging models (single vs ’stable of blogs’) and their business models and advertisers, what works and what doesn’t.

Metrics: ‘if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it’
At the least know how many visits, pageviews, bounce rates, average visit duration and origination of visitors. This will tell you vital data and info on not just popularity but what content is popular, what sites are referring traffic to you and geographic source of traffic. This information will be asked of you by your advertisers and will indicate which content works and where to focus your efforts. This data and info is available from any web hosting service worth its salt.

Watch site stats and post when you know search spiders are likely to hit.

Blog content:
1. Focus on longer, two-to-four word keyword phrases that tend to have consistently higher conversion rates
2. Repeat keywords throughout your blog (in post titles, category names, Technorati tags, etc.)
3. Use real words in your URLs and, better still, use keywords in URLs and domain names, tags and metatags
4. Use your feeds (RSS etc.) to promote your blog and use compelling keywords in your title and description
5. Post frequently � more food for the spider means its more likely to come back and include you on its regular rounds. Generate rich reserve of auxiliary articles and posts that can be drawn upon during times of lean content.

Blog PR:
1. Submit to blog directories and social bookmarking sites
2. Get mentioned by a-list bloggers
3. Concentrate on achieving primary page ranking in Google, MSN and Yahoo search engines that account for 80% of search traffic.
4. Devise linking strategy (reciprocal and one-way) with preference for sites/blogs with high page rank (see google page rank)
5. Use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising based on your selected keywords to raise your profile - most effective in the short term
6. Use adsense banners to host banner advertising and to monitor your own banner adverts on affiliates.
7. Consider other forms of media not only because they are tipping point candidates but more because they are topical and have definite viral qualities (podcasts, video (youtube.com), ebooks, online conferences etc.)

Usability and Search engine optimization (SEO):
1. Generate a sitemap and update it with new pages as created. Applies mostly to sites with static pages
2. Ensure super fast download speed (no animation) and use a dial-up modem as your benchmark
3. Include a ‘bookmark this site’ link, ‘email this post’, ‘add to del.icio.us’ and other social bookmarks
4. Mix small posts with long articles, link richly, encourage commenting and all forms of user input and interaction eg. ’send us your stories’, trackback etc.

Use the following tools:
Google alerts - to send you daily notifications on mentions of your blog, your competitors or subjects of interest
Google blog search - to find competitors, potential affiliates (banner advertising)
technorati - directory and guide to the blogosphere
del.icio.us - social bookmarking
fark - ditto
furl - ditto
others are emerging including google social bookmarks, Googlebase etc.

Finally - use a web host that has server redundancy (ie.excess capacity) to deal with spikes in service especially if you are doing hard launch as opposed to slow roll out. Monitor your traffic and align it with your web hosting plan -> exceeding bandwith can be expensive.