Archive for November, 2008

If you remember it, I described here the method to build interrest for a web site from specialist forums (Niche sites and forums post). Here is some feedback about this marketing job.

I said that I wanted to reach 200 visits per day before the end of November for the ylovephoto.com web site. I reached this goal with 230 visits yesterday:

Google Analytics - Nov 2008 - YLovePhoto.com

Anyway, I need to admit publicly that the sudden climb of the recent days is mostly coming from the launch of a new camera from Nikon that heated the interest for all photo-related web sites. But, clearly, I did not miss this step. Demonstrating that the method is working.

If your web site has been existing for some time now, it is possible to increase quite easily the number of web sites linking to yours. Without any effort out of your site. If time has gone and your web site started to receive some links, there is a pretty good chance that some webs ite are trying to link to your content and “fail”.

Two cases or causes are possibles:

• You changed some pages and -whatever your information effort- the links did not “follow” your changes; They no longer point to real content;
• The webmaster of some site willing to point to yours, did some ugly typo and left a dead link.

You will be able to recognize this if you look into the error logs of your web site (if your hosting provider gives you access to them), or if you use some of the wbe master analysis tools (like Google webmaster portal which shows you the 404 errors to your web site).

On the Google tool, it is shown like in the following list screen:

Now that you have this list in hand, you just have to start correcting the error by creating the adequate page at the end of the erroneous links. No more error, more visitors. Even better, these links from other web sites are now counted by search engines as good references and you will value them. You don’t even have to ask for them, they already there.

That is what I did on roumazeilles.net, a few months ago, by adding a dozen of pages for nearly a hundred very real links. This is always a good idea to improve the Google PageRank (the visibility measure of my pages according to Google).

Here is a subject that has the ability to inflame me: many web sites are “optimised” for a certain screen size. As if it was an intelligent strategy.

On vous explique qu’il faut optimiser pour 640×480 ou 800×600 ou n’importe quoi d’autre. On vous explique combien il faut enlever de pixels pour les bords du navigateur.

Soyons clairs ! Ce ne sont que des c…ries. D’une part, les visiteurs de votre site ne vont pas forcément utiliser leur navigateur en plein écran comme le montre l’étude qui est relayée par Thomas Baekdal. Plus la taille de l’écran est grande plus les visiteurs utilisent une fenêtre -relativement- plus étroite.

D’autre part, il vaut mieux un site qui est capable de s’adapter aux différentes tailles possibles. Y compris les plus petits affichages : qu’en est-il des écran de téléphones portables ? Ces derniers sont de fait, par l’intermédaire des acrobaties des navigateurs portables, rapportés à 980 pixels.

Alors, un bon conseil : votre site doit pouvoir s’afficher utilement sur presque n’importe quoi, y compris les plus petits écrans. Je n’ai pas dit complètement : si la partie droite de votre site disparaît, votre site est-il encore utilisable ? Mieux encore est-il possible de faire un site qui s’adapte à la taille de la fenêtre de navigation ? C’était assez facile avec les structures à base de tables HTML, c’est plus compliqué -mais possible- avec les structures à base de CSS.

Ne laissez pas certains visiteurs à la porte de votre site. Adaptez votre site.

One of the most efficient ways to collect visits for your new web site (and nearly never described or never described properly) is to go and fetch interested visitors where they are. I am thinking about forums. They are a nice place where people of the same interest converge and are sharing information. Grabbing quality trafic is often a matter of interesting people there in order to attract them.

I am currently working on this approach for YLovePhoto.com. Since this is a photo-oriented web site, I identified several forums grouping visitors intersested in digital photography. And here is the strategy:

Phase 1

1. Identify the most important forums: Large trafic, large participation, considered as good references in the domain(s) that you want to target.
2. Create an account/user where I simply show a link to my web site in the account signature and ensure that it is displayed on all my messages.
3. During several days, select a few forum posts that are both recent (in the last days or even hours) and have a very low number of participations (nearly no answer).
4. Provide short and precise answers or insightful comments to the original post.

This way, I can attract some attention in the short term. Notice that answering to long posts is usually not efficient (many people only read the first 2 or 3 answers in a post).

But beware:

• No SPAM! You do not want to attract that kind of attention. You are not officially promoting your web site, but creating good will and interest.
• Do not initiate new threads (you are probably not sure to interest people in your prose, yet).
• Be short, to avoid spending too much time.
• You may be commenting on a few things, but avoid like hell the lame comments like “me too”. You are supposed to appear intelligent, resourceful, etc.

Phase 2

After a couple of days or a week, you can go to a further step. While no neglecting phase-1 participation (never stop this), you can now start including some actual promotion.

1. Identify the articles from your web site that contain precise information susceptible to interest and to answer to some questions: Pages with reference data or summaries, or data not found elsewhere.
2. Find posts no older than a week in relation with these pages.
3. Start suggesting these pages as an answer. This is the hard part: You must clearly show the link to your web site, but you also want to avoid appearing as a web marketer. I generally, suggest writing information, not only a web link (the text must both answer/complement the question, be sufficiently autonomous, but lead naturally to a click on the link).

On-going experiment

This is what I am currently experimenting. I am still in phase 1 of it for YLovePhoto.com, and I started to see the first wave of interest.

The forums I targetted are DPreview forums (reference in English), Chasseur d’Images forums (reference in French) and a couple of more specific forums regarding wildlife and nature photography.

Of course, I did not try anything like that before having some actual material in the target web site (in the case of YLovePhoto.com, there are already 50 posts in english and 50 posts in French, plus a database of digital cameras). Typically, the YWantVisits.com web site does not contain (yet) enough data to retain eventual visitors; This is why I did not start active promotion for it.

I started from less than 5 visits per day (essentially mine and a few search engines spidering the web site), to reach 56 visits per day yesterday. I intend to bring it around 200 before the end of the month.

Similarly, coming from no ad revenue at all, I already got the first 10 clicks (not a full dollar yet). This is important since with a Click-Through-Rate (CTR) nearing 1% (a very common figure on specialty web sites), the translation of visits into advertising revenue is nearly automatic.

If you were wondering, it’s the right time to read a paper from Slate titled “How do bloggers make money?“.

It describes those bloggers who make money with their own blog. How much do they earn et what are the different revenue sources (not everything comes from ads).

And I don’t mean to check what are the keywords written up in the headers of the HTML pages. This is supposed to be a great way to improve search engine ranking. It may have been true, but it’s no longer really important (search engine do not believe what you freely write there, they prefer what they can infer from the actual content and the other web sites).

However, the logs and analysis of your web site trafic should be able to give you a good idea of what kind of trafic is attracted to your web site. Search engines are already bringing visitors in. You must know why they are coming in. At least for the following reasons:

• Those visitors may come for a reason and may have found what they were looking for. Or not
• They may come attracted to what you intended to offer, or they may have discovered a little pearl in your web site

From the list of search key words, you will be able to develop several strategies (you probably want to play them all):

• Produce content specificially to increase the attractivity of your web site on these key words. It’s often relatively easy since there is already some good content; Just write more stories strictly about the issue.
• Knowing that some of the keywords may be a little surprise, you may also want to understand why the original target of your webs ite is not coming to you. Try and develop content that is more in line with it. Analyse why some keywords work better than others (you may be the only one to write about the issue, or you may be writing better content for some key words tan for the others).

This becomes the first steps in Optimizing your Site for Search Engine. No! the first steps in Optimizing your content for your visitors.

Final note: Did I mention that -usually- you get very good advertising results from those surprising keywords. They are so strongly targetted that Ads are also very strong (and often bringing a relatively high income).