Archives for the month of: October, 2007
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Blog updates and a few quick SEO tips

October 30, 07 //
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No groundbreaking post today, just announcing that I’ve made a couple of small changes to the blog’s setup which will hopefully help me improve the amount of traffic I receive from search engines. While I already receive a fair share of traffic, especially from Google, I don’t see any harm in making the blog a little friendlier for the spiders. Of course, as the friendly guy I am, I will be sharing these small tips with my loyal readers!

The first thing I did was setup a redirect from all URLs without the trailing slash (“http://lars-christian.com/catx/posty” now redirects to “http://lars-christian.com/catx/posty/”). This is because internally I use all URLs with the trailing slash, and now if someone links to the URL without it, the blog will serve a 301-redirect to the URL with the trailing slash. This makes sure that any potential link juice won’t be spread over two different pages.

If you want to do this for your own blog or site, you can simply add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/[^\.]+[^/]$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [R=301,L]

Next I added a nifty little plugin called Head META Description. This is handy because it automatically changes the META Description tags on all the pages based on the content of that page. WordPress by default uses the description of your blog as a description on all pages, and I believe this will help increase clickthrough-rates from the search engines, in particular Google which uses the META tag for its description of your search listings.

Another thing I did was to make it so that my archives don’t display full posts, but instead only excerpts with a link to the full post. This is not only much more practical, but it also avoids potential duplicate content penalties from search engines. You can find out just how to do it over at Daily Blog Tips.

The final thing I did was also something I picked up from Daily Blog Tips, namely modifying / optimizing the title tag. Check out that article as well. I had previously been using an “optimized” title tag, but it was a bit funky because the archives page just got the title from the most recent post in that category or month.

I also played a bit around with the header of the theme (the menu). It looks a bit funky now, but it still works. I think I’ll have to get around to completely redoing the top, because in all honesty it doesn’t look very good as it stands now.

Well that’s it for this little tip-filled post. In the coming days I’ll be transferring my blog to a new host, so now you know why if you can’t reach it in the near future. These days host-switching doesn’t involve much downtime though, especially concerned to five years ago. I’ll also be documenting the steps I take, and write a step-by-step guide to how to transfer your blog to a new host. It’s really easy, and I believe quite a few make it much harder than it has to be, so be sure to stay tuned for that.

Vertical and Horizontal Business Expansion

October 29, 07 //
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When developing an internet business you will always be looking for ways to maximize your revenue, and expanding your fields of operation is often a possibility that surfaces when you are evaluating the future of your businesses. While common to most of those who have formally studied business management, the concepts of Vertical Expansion and Horizontal Expansion are not always recognized by small time internet entrepreneurs such as myself.

Generally when facing the option of expansion, you will have two initial paths to choose from, and the way we usually seperate them is by classifying them as horizontal or vertical. So what separates these two options?

Horizontal Expansion is defined as expanding a business beyond what is presently known as its core functions. Best illustrated by example, a typical case of horizontal expansion was when ProBlogger decided to introduce their Job Boards. While ProBlogger’s core functions was providing bloggers with tips on how to make money through their blogs, the team behind the site identified that a job board could compliment what they already provided their “customers” (readers) with, and at the same time create a new cash flow and increase their revenue (by charging for the listings on the job board).

This is a type of horizontal expansion where you expand on your already existing brand and go beyond your core activity in order to create new and (hopefully) rewarding cash flows that by calculation will, at some point, make your business more profitable.

Another type of Horizontal Expansion is to create a completely new section of your company, and only tie them together under an umbrella. In the world of small, independant online publishers a feasible example would be that if you run a popular blog on a certain videogame, you can start a completely new blog on another videogame, and tie them together only by a company/network blog or website. Of course, the other method of expanding horizontally would be to simply extend the topic of your current blog to include the additional new videogame.

Vertical Expansion is often referred to as Vertical Integration (see WikiPedia) as well, but as I will point out shortly, for independant online publishers, expansion is a far more accurate word than integration. When you expand your business vertically, you try to increase your profits by expanding and improving on your existing core activities, and moving tasks you’ve previously outsourced inhouse.

For larger companies an example of vertical expansion could be to purchase or merge (hence the term Vertical Integration) with the company that handles their logistics. Similarly a possible vertical expansion for a blogger could be to sell his own ads instead of using AdSense, but seeing how buying AdSense off of Google is probably not very likely, the term expansion makes more sense in this case than integration.

And such the overall purpose of vertical integration for a blogger would be to minimize the costs of outsourcing (TextLinkAds for instance claim 50% of what they sell your links for), and make thus expand your own profits. Another goal of vertical expansion is independance. Your business will be less dependant on outsourcing services, and naturally also less dependant on 3rd party service providers.

Common to both types of expansions are that they both involve a certain amount of risk, horizontal even more so than vertical. When expanding horizontally as an online publisher you will be required to either outsource the information you will provide, or climb a steep curve of learning in order to gain the proper insight in order to be able to provide quality content on the new subject.

When expanding vertically, the curve of learning can be equally steep, or even steeper, because often it means that you will have to learn a completely new trade that you don’t have any prior experience with what so ever. Your already existing access to knowledge, whether it is in yourself or already employed people, should therefore be considered when considering either forms of expansion.

In future posts I will further investigate specific examples of both forms of expansion, and I will highlight certain types of expansion (in particular vertical) that I recommend all online publishers to make, and even included a detailed how-to. If you want to be sure not to miss it, I recommend that you subscribe to my blog, either by RSS or Email. That way you will never miss any of my articles again!

John Chow’s rise to fame – A case study

October 26, 07 //
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Little about the blogging scene is quite as intriguing as John Chow. This guy writes about restaurants he dine at and yet he manages to make over $20,000 per month from his blog. Of course, he also writes a lot about ways to make money online, but it’s certainly safe to say that he doesn’t follow the traditional “how to write about making money online” formula that we’ve gotten used to over the years.

One of the reasons John Chow is interesting is because he has managed to build himself an extremely loyal base of followers. And when I say loyal, I don’t mean loyal in the sense that they tend to frequently comment on his blog posts. Oh no, John has been one of the first bloggers to become a cult-symbol with a status comparable to what paparazzi-hunted celebrities experience. Just like Cult of Mac members don’t really care about what Apple does as long as it’s Apple doing it, many of those who read John Chow’s blog doesn’t seem to care about what John Chow writes as long as it is written by John Chow.

Just to illustrate, a quick Technorati search reveals no less than 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 (I think I’ll just stop there) within the past 24 hours. I’m willing to bet that’s more than what most restaurant bloggers out there are hoping for in the span of an entire month!

Obviously this is a very desirable position to be in, but is it possible to identify what has enabled John Chow to attain the status he currently enjoys? A number of factors obviously comes into play here, but we can simplify it and narrow it down to six important points:

  • Timing – Whether it was by chance or skill, only John knows, but he was just on the spot with his timing. He started blogging back in 2005 when blogs weren’t much more than public diaries, and it started as one for him as well. But eventually the blogging scene grew out of these constraints, and John seized the opportunities that arose.
  • Surprising – Most of those who try to educate you on how to make money online will tell you how important the rules are. John Chow on the other hand, presents himself in a way that makes the readers believe that if he finds a way to make money, he’ll share it with you, even thought it might not be morally defendable.
  • Success – Even before he started his blog, John Chow had been making good money online for years. This contributed to his success as a blogger because it gave his visitors social proof that he knows how to make money online, and such he is in a position where he can teach you. This point is also probably the most important when it comes to all the free, viral marketing John has managed to create for his blog, because it acts as Social Proof as well, which makes it easy for other people to reference to him.
  • Transparency – John Chow recognizes just how important these forms of social proof are, and that is the reason why he shares his earnings with the public. Combined with the other forms of proof he boasts (high RSS readership for one), it gives him an advantage over other, similar bloggers.
  • Controversy – Whether he is Banned by Google, or denied his rightful (at least in his own opinion) place in the Technorati Top 100 Blogs List or something else, John Chow never fails to make a fuzz about the controversy he is involved in. And whether people agree or disagree with your opinion, they are likely to voice their own opinions and give you great publicity.
  • Arrogance – John Chow is a self-proclaimed dot com mogul, and he rarely forgets to mention it. And while arrogance in many cases can turn people off, John has managed to make it a part of his public personality in such a way that it seems only natural to those who hear him say it. This also results in that he can get away with much more radical and controversial behaviour than other bloggers who haven’t branded themselves in a way that allows for it.

While these six points have helped John Chow’s blog become a success, it isn’t necessarily recommendable that you try and replicate them. More than anything it has to do with the prerequisites you have to work out from. If you haven’t made a lot of money online to the degree that it can be accepted that you try to present yourself as better and more successful than your readers (ie. arrogant), you will never get away with it.

Even though the points mentioned above have helped propell John Chow into a blogging superstar, they merely helped him expand an already strong foundation (in terms of traffic). I also want to point out the two factors that got him into that position where that brought him that luxury, or pushed him over the tipping point if you will.

If we start by looking at his traffic details as reported by Alexa (yes, I know they are inaccurate John, but for trends they aren’t completely worthless), we’ll immediately spot when his blog took off in terms of popularity:

JohnChow.com Traffic Stats

It was in the fall of 2006, only after John had been blogging for about a year, that his traffic spiked to the leve where it has hovered around since then. If we backtrack his blog posts to that period, we can even find that John himself wrote about this spike. The secret? Social Media Marketing, or in particular Digg.

Now, it didn’t take long before JohnChow.com was banned from Digg, but by that time, the “damage” was already done. He had gotten the initial surge of traffic he needed, and he wasn’t about to let a mere ban from a social bookmarking site stop him.

Of course, once you have all these visitors in place, you need to find a way to capitalize on the traffic in the best way possible in order to ensure that the traffic doesn’t just plummet and return to its normal level again. And John Chow came up with possibly the most ingenious scheme the blogging scene has seen to date of doing just that: Review his blog on your own blog, and get a link back from him.

Sure it seems simple, but the amount of publicity he got from that setup has undeniably been invaluable in sustaining his traffic levels. His latest batch of reviews was number 87, meaning that at least 870 blogs has reviewed his blog. Add in some very specific anchor text, and that’s a whole lot of valuable inbound links. As soon as John had the traffic, he came up with a brilliant way to capitalize on it.

What can we learn from this little case study, and the success John Chow has experienced with his blog? Well, I’ve obviously pointed out some of the things that has, according to my own humble observations, been crucial in John’s success. If I am to summarize it with a single sentence however, I would say that John Chow is a textbook example of how you don’t have to follow the textbook examples in order to be successful. Persistance and a bit of creativity goes a long way, just ask John Chow.

How to NOT treat your customers

October 25, 07 //
7

For the past couple of years I’ve been a loyal customer to the company which I currently host my blog with, Site5, but now I have decided to look elsewhere. After my blog and all my other sites that I have hosted on this account went offline yesterday, I sent a support ticket their way to get the lowdown on what was going on, and their response completely threw me off.

We do understand your frustration and are working as hard as possible to resolve the server/service issues that have been occurring very recently. Many of our servers have been attacked by a rather severe DDoS attack, which we are currently working on implementing a more permanent solution for. We do hope to have this resolved very soon.

That being said, our help desk is quite understandably being flooded with tickets regarding these issues. We ask that everyone please refrain from submitting tickets regarding server/service issues unless you believe the issue effects only your account, or otherwise not a global service failure issue to help keep support times low.

I might just be a tad sensitive here, but basically they are saying that even though I’ve been a loyal customer for an extended period of time (a couple of years certainly is just that in the fast-paced internet world), I shouldn’t bother them with my concerns when my sites are left online because it might not be affecting only my account? Okay, next please.

I have put up with Site5 for all this time mainly because they are cheap, and relatively stable if you overlook the longer periods of extremely slow loading times. This was however most certainly the final nail in the coffin for my relationship with Site5 though, and I’ve now decided that I will give my money to other hosting providers which will hopefully appreciate my business.

From the looks of it I’m not the only one tired with Site5 either. Alex over at Web 2.0 How-To Spot-er recently issued similar complaints and moved his blog over to another hosts, while Joe over at JJMELO was fortunate enough to avoid having to experience them first hand due to a beef with their Terms of Service.

Now let this be a lesson to all of you out there trying to make some money online, if you don’t at least manage to act like you actually care for your customers and the business they bring you, it will reflect poorly on your results. Show your customers that you care about their business, and you’ve already taken a large step towards success.

In this case a simple “we will try get your account back online as soon as we can, hopefully within xx minutes/hours” instead of the line about how I shouldn’t bother their swamped helpdesk would have made all the difference. I would have thought that large companies in such a competitive business as hosting would have realized the importance of customer satisfaction by now, but alas. Maybe their new Director of Technical Operations can help them with their problems?

And yes, that was just a cheap attempt to notify them how I felt about their customer service by pinging their blog.

Google sends a message!

October 24, 07 //
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If your feedreader looks anything like mine, you’ve probably seen nothing but posts about Google hammering the PR of a lot of high profile blogs down to what seems to be deceitfully low levels compared to the actual authorithy these blogs have worked for a long time to build.

A feasible theory about what’s actually going on is that the good people over at the big G are simply readjusting the algorithm that determines a site PageRank. While this makes sense, one can only wonder why it has only affected certain sites, while others have been left untouched. This quite obviously means that they are just adjusting certain factors within the algorithm. ProBlogger for instance previously enjoyed a comfortable PageRank6, but now only has a 4 (in most datacenters, anyways), while my old pet-peeve Zelda Universe, which has been at a PageRank 5 forever, remains unchanged. The same goes for Techcrunch and their monstrous PageRank 8.

One theory that was presented by Andy Beard is that they are heavily punishing sites that are part of larger networks that practice a lot of cross-linking between their properties. It certainly seems like a valid theory to me, and to be quite honest, I support it. The message they seem to be sending is that it shouldn’t be any easier for large networks to build authority for their new sites simply by passing the juice from their already established sites.

While most that have been hit are throwing hissy-fits about the changes, I for one am encouraged by this. To me it simply means that Google are trying to level the field, and sending a message that if you want credibility from them you have to build it through natural links. Being part of a larger network doesn’t necessarily make you any more of an authority than the independant blogger that sits alone without a large network to back him up.

While this isn’t directly related to Net Neutrality, we know that the principle has always been important to Google, and some might even say that this could be a way of promoting just that, and as I said, trying to level the field and make it easier for the independant publishers to get a their toes in the game.

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