Analysis of my attempts to figure out blogging and podcasting

I’ve decided to remove the Entrecard widget off all of my websites. It no longer serves any purpose.

Here is a graph of my traffic from Entrecard over the last year.

The big spikes are when I bothered to drop cards. At its peak, I got 94 visits in one day. Lately I’ve been averaging about 4 or 5.

It takes up a lot of screen real estate for a dribble of traffic, the quality of which isn’t very good. Their forum sucks. I’ve tried to submit a blog post on their blog, but the owner, Graham, never replied to my email. I can say that I tried, but honestly, it serves no use whatsoever at this point.

I have one blog network widget on my site at this point, BlogCatalog, and that is probably going to go soon too.

These widgets just don’t work.

Something has happened to my StumblUpon traffic. Something good.

I was drilling down into the inner bowels of Google Analytics and I looked at my bounce rate for StumbleUpon. The StumbleUpon bounce rate is notoriously bad, as it is from other social media sites like Digg or Reddit. The last time I checked, I remember the bounce rate being somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% (meaning 90% of the visitors to the site didn’t bother to go to another page).

October 2008 was my biggest month for traffic from StumbleUpon. I didn’t have one giant spike, rather it was spread across multiple articles. (I guess that is a good thing). My bounce rate for October was an astonishing 44%. 1.85 pages per visit and over 1 minute spent on the site. This is over 4,000 visits for the month.

I dug a little deeper. Some time between July 4 and July 8, my bounce rate for SumbleUpon dropped from the 90% range to the 40-45% range, and it has stayed there ever since. (the orange line in the chart is my bounce rate. Blue is pages per visit)

I have no idea why.

I didn’t make any major changes to the website that I can remember. I changed the theme of the site in August.

I should also note that in October, StumbleUpon seems to have hit a point where it is on autopilot. Things are getting stumbled without any doing on my part, and what is getting stumbled is all over the map. I have no rhyme or reason why it is happening, but I’m going to enjoy the ride.

Reddit can still drive more traffic, but the quality is still very poor. Bounce rates close to 100%.

Here are the results for the top keywords coming from Google over the last three days (Nov. 1 to Nov. 3):

ulrur 22
travel blog 21
everything everywhere 15
gary arndt 13
november wallpaper 10

After all the effort I put into working the keyword “Travel Blog”, I am getting more traffic from a typo. I should note that I am ranked #1 for that typo. I am also ranked #1 for “everything everywhere” and “gary arndt”.

I’ve learned (the hard way) that being #1 for any keyword is better than being ranked below #5 for all but the biggest keywords. If you aren’t on the first page, you might as well not exist.

My efforts at ranking for “travel around the world” have advanced slowly. I’m currently at #16 on Google and #4 on MSN, which as generated very little traffic so far. In fact, I haven’t seen the key words appear on my Analytics results as of yet. I’ll reserve judgment till I can get to at least #5.

I’m tempted to go and misspell words on all my old articles.

I’ve entered my travel around the world blog (aka Everything-Everywhere.com) into the Blogging Idol 2.0 contest.

I was in the first version of the contest last summer as well and came in 3rd. The first contest was just increasing the raw number of RSS subscribers. The lack of rules sort of lent itself to people gaming the system. The nature of the contest is such that even if you don’t win, you can still win.

This time the contest is only 1 part RSS increase, 3 parts voting by the community and 3 parts voting by judges. I think I have a much better chance of winning outright this time for several reasons:

1) I have more RSS subscribers. On Nov 1 my subscribers showed 825. My peak was 850 about a week earlier. There is natural fluctuation in the number of subscribers Feedburner shows. A variation of about 5% from the peak number is very normal, and a 10% swing is possible on holidays. That means I got a free 25 subscribers which will show up at some point. Getting 25 subscribers is easier for a site with over 800 than a site starting at zero. I managed to get over 200 subscribers in the last contest. I’d be very happy if I were to do that again. Of the 114 sites in the contest, I’m #12 in terms of number of subscribers starting the contest.

2) I have the “that is so cool” factor working for me. If you look at the list of other sites competing, what I’m doing really sort of sticks out. Moreover, my contest really sticks out as different. If I can shoot a few more videos this month, that should draw even more attention. Most of the other sites are your tech, celebrity, and make money online blogs. If they do contests, they will probably give away the same old stuff.

3) This might drive me to start a newsletter this month. It is something I’ll probably eventually do, it is just a matter of when. The contest would be a good incentive to get it done. I just need to get my head around what it would be and how it would work. I’d be more comfortable with it when I get my site redesign done. A newsletter is something I never would have thought of myself, but the positive feedback I’ve seen from those who use them have me thinking.

Time.

It is really that simple. You know what the #1 factor which correlates highest with the reputation of a college? How long ago it was founded. Older colleges have more prestige.

Can you ever imagine a 20 year old getting elected president (assuming it was legal)? Of course not. Not enough time.

There are a few exceptions, but most big blogs were around for several years before they became big.

More time = more posts = more long tail Google searches.
More time = more reputation and authority
More time = more likelihood of getting lucky with a big post

Too many people want traffic NOW and it just isn’t going to happen.

My blog is about my travels around the world. Saying “I’ve been to 45 countries” has a lot more clout than saying “I plan on going to 45 countries” which is where I was 18 months ago.

Most bloggers just don’t have the patience to stick it out.

October set all sorts of records for me. Here are the numbers: (note: these are number for my travel blog, not this site:)

October crushed all my previous months. My high for visits was back in March when I had 13,935. My previous high for pageviews was last month with 29,466.

The astonishing thing in October, and I have no idea why this happened, is that the pages per visit and time on site has increased dramatically. Pages per visit had normally been under 2.0 with a peak of 2.53 last month. So, somewhere along the line, the quality of the traffic has increased.

Where did the October traffic come from?

1. stumbleupon.com 4,004
2. (direct) 3,904
3. google / organic 3,405
4. pvponline.com 3,263
5. reddit.com 2,025
6. google.com / referral 660
7. twitter.com 650
8. bloggerschoiceawards.com 431
9. images.google.com 408
10. yahoo 390

So, lots of traffic from StumbleUpon and Reddit, but also a ton of long tail referrals (421 total). I think this is just the maturing of a standard network effect of being around a long time. There was only two posts in October that I actively encouraged stumbles for, which is encouraging. That means users are stumbling my content without me doing anything.

70 different pages received at least one visit from StumbleUpon, with 34 pages getting over 25 visits, and 14 pages getting over 100 visits. That is a nice distribution. It means I’m not just getting a single spike for one article. The biggest article for Stumble traffic got 514 visits. The monthly bounce rate for StumbleUpon was a shocking 45%. (shockingly good)

Reddit drove about half the traffic of StumbleUpon, but it was much more erratic. Only 18 posts showed any sort of traffic, with almost all of that for 3 posts. One got 993 visits, with two others in the high 400’s. Nothing else got above 50. Reddit quality was very poor, with a 92% bounce rate and time on site of only 11 seconds. (Stumble traffic was over 1 min)

Whenever I get a link from PVP I get a big traffic spike. This month was no exception. Scott drove over 3,000 visits which was quality. After the link, my RSS subscribers shot up.

I put a big effort into Twitter promotion this month and it has paid off dramatically. My followers are now 1,870 and 650 visits came from Twitter in October. My Facebook page has also passed 150 fans.

My efforts to rank on Google for “travel around the world” has stalled at #21, but I also haven’t done much in the way of link building yet.

I am running a contest during November to encourage subscribers and backlinks. My goal is to get to 1,000 RSS subscribers by the end of the year. If the contest goes well, that could happen by the end of the month. I’d like to hit 1,500 subscribers by the time I get back to the US.

My friend Amy has agreed to help me do marketing as soon as she finishes her move from Minnesota to Texas. That should help a ton. I could drive more traffic from more social network sites if someone spent even a few minutes a day dedicated to it.

My Google Adsense PIN was finally sent to my parents house, and I have Adsense back up and running.

I am considering a weekly or biweekly newsletter, but haven’t taken any action yet. My concern is the amount of work I need to put into it. I think this may be the way I’ll go in the future just because the audience I want to target in the future probably isn’t RSS savvy.

I have also contacted Unique Blog Designs about doing a custom WordPress theme for my site. I think at this point that it would be worth the investment. I’m still dissatisfied with my layout.

I am expecting a dip in traffic in November, just because October was such a huge jump. I will also be publishing a 2009 calendar with Scott Kurtz of my “Skull Around the World” photos.

Oh, I’ll also be adding a top commenter plug-in to this site for those who want some link love.

I’ve slowly been getting rid of junk on my site. Mostly they have been widgets from blog networks. I have two left on my site and I think they are about to get the axe.

BlogCatalog
I already got rid of MyBlogLog. It drove about 3 visits per month. BlogCatalog is better, but not by much. In the last 30 days, BlogCatalog has delivered a whopping 22 visitors out of 22,000. Given the traffic it brings, is it worth the real estate it takes up on my site? Probably not. BlogCatalog, like MyBlogLog, is slowly getting filled up with junk websites and spam. 0.73 visits per day isn’t worth the extra time do download a widget for every user. I’m also guessing I’ll get just as much traffic without the widget.

Bloggers Choice Awards
I’ve already taken this off my site. I always felt bad begging for votes. I was hopping to use winning in 2008 as one more arrow in the quiver for getting a book deal. Win or lose, I wasn’t planning on putting a link up for 2009. The contest has no rules so it encourages gaming. I’m taking this one step further and am going to avoid participating in any sort of contest which requires readers to vote. If I’m going to spend goodwill amongst my readers, I’m going to do it for something more valuable like subscribing to RSS or putting in links. Also, it appears I can pretty much stay on page one for travel without having to put in any work for 2009. I wont win or be in the top three, but who cares.

Entrecard
Between ads I’ve run and organic clicks, Entrecard brought in 255 visits in the last 30 days. A little over 1.5% of my traffic. I don’t drop cards, and I refuse to do so. I can’t earn much in the way of credits from advertising. The information on the site doesn’t make buying ads very efficient. This is probably looking at removal at some point, but probably not just yet. Remove the ad buys, and you are looking at about 175 visits, much of that I guess is due to me being semi active on the forums.

Various Directories
I have buttons for various directories on my site. I plan on keeping them for now. The reason is simple: they score well in Google for keywords I’m working on, so I want my site on their list. Also, the images are very small and they provide some sort of social validation of the site. Being among the top 10 says to someone visiting for the first time that I’m for real and not a fake. They are much smaller than full blown widgets and eventually can be buried near the bottom of the page.

Once most of this is gone, I’ll need to rethink navigation and what I want to put on the site. It is an area I haven’t given enough thought.

I’m starting the process of getting a new theme for my travel around the world blog. When I made my last change, it was more out of desperation. I needed to change and so I got a theme which sort of worked and did the whole thing in about 24 hours. Since then, I’ve been making changes to the header and such, and it is starting to look like more of a kludge.

I don’t think I need to rush quite as much now, so I’m going to take my time and do it right. I don’t think a magazine theme is going to work for me. I think the process will be something along the lines of: figure out what I like on other sites, try to adapt those elements to something which will work for me, customize the design elements and launch.

I’m also tempted to get a custom theme made for me. While I can tweak photos in Photoshop, doing real graphic design is just beyond me. I have neither the technical talent nor the eye for it. I’d like to have something I’m comfortable enough with so I don’t have to change it for a long time. Problem is, I’m cheap.

I am also debating the wisdom of starting an email newsletter. I’ve heard good feedback from other blogs which do it, and the brief questioning I did of other people I know thought it was a good idea. I personally think in terms of RSS, so it is difficult for me to think like someone else. I want to target non-technical users in the future, so this might be something I have to do.

I’m also starting a contest which will run during the month of November. I’ll be using a corner peel ad to promote it. It should be up in two days.

If you haven’t figured it out, I don’t post information about the back end or business stuff on my main site because I don’t want to bore readers with the details of running a website. I’d rather bore them with the details of traveling.

This is where I bitch about my website.

For the last six months, I’ve been trying to play the Google game and get my site ranked high for the term “Travel Blog”. At one point in June I was ranked #5 and currently I am on the front page. There are over 400,000,000 pages ranked for that term, so hooray for me.

Something didn’t seem quite right. Even when I peaked at #5, I got a whopping 26 visits to my website from Google. Just because the keyword has a lot of sites doesn’t mean a lot of people search for it. As I noted in my previous article on traffic, spending time and effort in ranking for something hyper competitive with little traffic is a suckers game. Getting beyond #5 also seems really difficult as the sites above that are Lonely Planet and TravelBlogs.org.

So if not “travel blog” what else?

A recent thread on Griz’s Make Money Online blog (one of the only ones in that genre I enjoy. Most are garbage) got me thinking about what keywords I’m targeting. Ranking high for a crappy keyword is like not ranking at all.

I have an account on SEOMoz.org where they all sorts of tools you can use to check keywords and other metrics. One item they link to is free keyword tracker, which tells you how many searches are done per day on various keywords. In the last 24 hours, here are some of the stats: (The difference between specific and general is specific is the literal string, and general is any keyword search with those words included)

If you actually looked at the Google results in addition to this, the answer is pretty freaking obvious what I should be working on: Travel Around the World.

I’m not going to undo what has been done. Much of it is out of my control at this point, but there are many advantages to this approach.

1) Less conflict with other travel bloggers. That isn’t necessarily their niche. None of the bloggers I know are ranked high, and I’m not sure that they even would want to target that keyword.
2) Should be possible to reach #1. I don’t think it would be possible given my current efforts and budget ($0) with “travel blog” and who the competition is.
3) More traffic. More targeted traffic. My best readers are those who want to go on a similar trip or dream of doing so.

So, if you are reading this and have a link to my site, please change the anchor text to “travel around the world”

*UPDATE*
My rank for “travel around the world” was #151 before I did anything. After writing this article I changed the title of my site and rearranged some words so the keyword fit on the description paragraph on my site, and then put the keywords in bold. This morning, about 12 hours later, I am ranked #38. I have also changed the text linking to my site on this page and another blog I run, but those haven’t been indexed by Google yet.

I like stats. I love baseball stats and I like looking at my webstats. I don’t obsess over the gross numbers so much as I like looking at how people find my site and what sort of thing work and don’t work in terms of generating traffic. The second level stuff that most people overlook.

For the purposes of putting some parameters on the discussion, I’m only going to look at my traffic for the six months prior to today, October 12, 2008. I’m also getting all my data from Google Analytics, which might underestimate traffic by some percent. However, so long as the percent is consistent, I’m fine with using it.

Top Line Numbers

Here are the gross stats for the last six months:

* 68,659 Visits
* 51,711 Absolute Unique Visitors
* 146,904 Pageviews
* 2.14 Average Pageviews
* 01:57 Time on Site
* 72.67% Bounce Rate
* 74.63% New Visits

What does this tell me? Most people visit and leave. This is not shocking. I think this is the case with most websites. I view my job as to capture the attention of a small percentage of visitors, a number which is in the low single digits. (it isn’t secret, I just don’t know the actual number) A 72% bounce rate is pretty good considering that the bounce rate for my top traffic referrers are much higher.

Also, you can tell by the graph that the growth trend is up, but with big spikes.

Where does it come from


# Site Visits P/V Time New Bounce
1. google / organic 16,057 2.69 00:02:40 84.77% 70.16%
2. (direct) / (none) 13,759 2.22 00:02:02 48.32% 73.09%
3. reddit.com / referral 10,851 1.15 00:00:32 87.37% 91.61%
4. stumbleupon.com 7,373 1.58 00:00:49 97.25% 63.26%
5. bloggerschoiceawards.com 1,938 2.99 00:03:23 78.28% 59.39%
6. yahoo / organic 1,521 2.02 00:02:40 84.16% 69.17%
7. google.com / referral 1,403 2.54 00:02:42 41.20% 60.66%
8. pvponline.com / referral 1,109 3.42 00:04:37 62.22% 54.46%
9. images.google.com / referral 1,031 1.82 00:00:47 96.41% 78.18%
10. entrecard.com / referral 817 1.24 00:00:48 80.78% 87.39%


This isn’t that well formatted, but you can probably figure it out if you just stare at it. What does this tell me? First, the biggest source of traffic is Google by a more than 2-1 margin over anything else. This has been increasing steadily as I’ve produced more content for Google to find. Second, the best quality traffic comes from links where people know exactly what they are clicking on. In this case, it was a link from PVPonline and BloggersChoiceAwards.com. They have the best stats across the board. Sites like Reddit and StumbleUpon can bring numbers, but it is fleeting. Google image is starting to make some inroads, but so far only 84 of my 3,600 images on my site are in the index. I’ve put a lot of effort into Google Images, with little to show for it so far.

A closer look at Google
Of the over 16,000 visits from Google, that represented 10,342 different keywords. Talk about a long tail.


1. everything everywhere 771
2. travel blog 771
3. wonders of the philippines 732
4. 7 wonders of the philippines 297
5. seven wonders of the philippines 282
6. www.everything-everywhere.com 124
7. philippine wonders 115
8. gary arndt 110
9. everything-everywhere 106
10. wells fargo sucks 97
11. link:http://everything-everywhere.com/ 94
12. everything everywhere travel blog 84
13. everything+everywhere 79
14. philippines wonders 72
15. tarawa atoll 71
16. everywhere.com 68
17. wonders in the philippines 66
18. wonders of philippines 66
19. nan modal 64
20. green sand beach hawaii 62
21. amature traveler 54
22. everything-everywhere.com 52
23. the seven wonders of the philippines 48
24. solomon islands moon rock 46
25. seven wonders in the philippines 39


Note how quickly the number of visits drops. Almost all my Google traffic is long tail stuff. The #1 keyword had 771 visits, the #10 had 97, the #100 had 17, the #1000 had 2.

Of the things which are on this list it mostly are 1) people searching for my site, and 2) people searching for the wonders of the Philippines. I rank #1 for my name, Everything Everywhere, and Wonders of the Philippines. I don’t know if I rank #1 on many other keywords.

The only keyword I’ve gone out of my way to try to rank high in is “travel blog” and that brought in about as much as a single burst from StumbleUpon or Reddit. Effort spent ranking high would probably have been better spent elsewhere. “Travel Blog” is very competitive, but “wonders of the philippines” is relatively easy. I put no effort into ranking for “wonders of the philippines”. It just happened.

Lesson: #1) focus more on developing the easy keywords. #2) be number one in the SERP for that keyword

RSS and Subscribers

This is what I really care about. I view traffic as just a percentage game to try to get subscribers. I think I do much better than most sites in converting traffic. Many sites have similar levels of traffic, but not as many subscribers. I think that has mostly to do with the “what you are doing is soooo cool” factor, which I get in many of the emails I receive.

My RSS is public, so there isn’t too much to say. Here is a graph showing growth over the last six months. It feels slow, even thought I guess it is growing at good clip.

In the end, this is what I care about. I’d rather have 1 real, regular reader than 100 hit and run visits from StumbleUpon.

Going Forward

What all this data doesn’t show is where I’ve been putting my efforts. I’ve probably put more effort into social networks like Reddit and StumbleUpon than anything else. That probably has to change. The long term bang for the buck is going to be in link building. That is much harder than submitting to social media sites, but the payoff is much greater. Not only do you get ranked higher by Google, but you get direct referral traffic, some of which might end up stumbling you anyhow.

I’ll maybe try to get social media attention a few times a month for my best stuff, but other than that, not bother.

To this end, I’m going to maybe get some real SEO assistance, especially with my images, which I still think is the biggest untapped traffic source I’m sitting on.

So you’ve planned your big trip and you are thinking of starting a blog to chronicle your adventures. You are thinking that you might even put some advertising on the site and make a little money to help fund your trip. Here are some hints and suggestions I’ve learned from running my travel blog (Everything-Everywhere.com) for the last 18 months that can help you out.

For the purposes of this article, “travel blog” will be referring to a travelogue, or a blog about your actual travels, not blogs about the travel industry, airlines, hotels, interesting things you read about in the news from around the world, frequent flier programs, or travel gear. While they are “blogs” and are related to “travel”, that is not the focus of this piece.

Things you need to know

The biggest blogs on the internet tend to do with politics, technology, sports and celebrities: ie. popular culture. While many people will put “travel” on a list of interests, that interest doesn’t really translate into making popular blogs. When people are interested in travel, they tend to research specific things about where they are going. Unlike the above mentioned areas, travel isn’t something which most people follow like they do sports teams or politics.

There are tens of thousands of travel blogs out there. Probably more than any other single category. There are dozens of sites which do nothing but host travel blogs. Most, however, suffer from the same problems:

• They are updated infrequently. When you are on the road, it is difficult and time consuming to update your website, so it usually just doesn’t get done. You can’t really work on your site if you are sitting on the beach.
• They are usually just a diary of daily events. Most of the writing seems to be like a journal entry rather than an article. Reading reports of what you ate every day gets boring for most people.
• The intended audience is friends and family. Most sites are intended as a mechanism to let people you know follow what you are doing and aren’t written for a wider audience.
• The trip eventually ends. By the time you can build up an audience (and it does take time) your trip is over. There is an enormous graveyard of old travel blogs out there of completed trips. It may make for a great memory going back and looking at it, but a dead site can’t carry an active audience. Most big blogs have had years to develop an audience and you wont have that luxury.

So before you even leave the door, you have a bunch of things working against you.

Managing your expectations

If you can have an idea of what is facing you, you can better manage your expectations for what you can get out of your blog. Some things you could shoot for:

• Integrate into a pre-existing blog. If you already run a blog on some subject, try to just integrate your trip into your blog. The shorter your trip, the better it works. If your blog as some sort of area of focus, try to keep your updates at least tangentially related to your topic.
• Just set up a blog for your friends. You might get away just posting photos on Facebook, which is what about 99% of the people I see in hostels doing. Another option is to use travel blog hosting services like Travellerspoint or BootsNAll. They have simple blogs you can set up with tools which are specific to travel, like maps. They host thousands of similar travel blogs and have communities you can participate in.
• Set up your own site. Taking the step from a pre-made site to a site you manage yourself is an exponential increase in work. There are a lot of technical oriented people who just like to do that sort of stuff, so that isn’t a problem. Getting your own domain name, finding a server, getting a design are all an investment in time and money.

Marketing

If you’ve read all of this and still want to be the Jack Kerouac of the internet, then you really have your work cut out for you. Contrary to popular belief, if you write a better post on mouse traps, the world will not lead a path to your site. Building traffic to your blog takes time and a whole lot of marketing. Unless you are already an internet celeb, you wont have the luxury of hitting the ground running.

You are one voice in competition with a lot of others out there. You’ll need to get an education in search engine optimization (SEO), social networking (Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc), guest blogging, copyrighting, and photography.

I’ve found tremendous success with my Photography. While everyone brings a camera along on vacation, a simple point and shoot usually won’t cut it if you want to make photography a center piece of your site. You’ll at least need some sort of SLR with a halfway descent lens. You will probably need a laptop as well if you want to do any photo processing on the road.

Podcasting is also an option, but that also requires a lot of work if you are going to do all your editing from the road. A laptop is even more vital if you are going to do video editing, as I have never seen video editing software at an internet cafe. (I doubt if most internet cafe computers could even handle video editing).

The thing to remember is that everything you want to do has to be done away from home. You will often have limited or no access to the internet, so much of the marketing which other blogs can do, you can’t.

Conclusion

I’ve just scratched the surface of running a travel blog. In a nutshell, it is just like running a regular blog, but harder. You are constrained by time zones, internet access, and working in a niche with traditionally hasn’t been the most popular of areas.

All that being said, the hurdles can be overcome if you work hard and smart. You may need to spend some time at the computer instead of the beach once in a while, but if you are willing to make that sacrifice, you can run a successful travel blog.

There is something I’ve noticed with people who launch blogs. They usually end up in various blogging networks (Entrecard or BlogCatalog), following blogs about blogging (Problogger) and Make Money Online sites, and end up spending most of their time trying to attract traffic from other bloggers.

I’m here to tell you it is a losing strategy.

Bloggers are one on the worst groups you can spend time trying to attract, yet it is the one group which new bloggers spend most of their time trying to attract. The reason is they seem to be the low hanging fruit. When you have zero traffic, you can go to one of the blogging network sites like MyBlogLog and suddenly get lots of “friends” with little effort. Likewise, sites like Entrecard can bring you hundreds of visits per day and all you have to do is click on hundreds of pages per day.

The thing is, all those other bloggers are just like you. They only care about jacking up their own traffic. For the most part, the traffic you get from them isn’t real. It only exists so far as you are willing to perform the charade for them. Moreover, the size of the group you can target is only so big.

I laugh when people on many of the blogging boards talk dreamily about A-List bloggers like Jeremy Shoemaker or Daren Rowe. I have nothing against these guys personally, but walk down the street and find out how many people have ever heard of them. The answer is zero.

Bloggers target other bloggers because they are easy traffic, not because they are good traffic. They are online, accessible, and desperate for traffic just as much as you are. Like eating raw sugar, you can get a quick traffic rush, but in the long run, they are just empty calories. (and I should note, I put myself in this category. I do follow about 100 blogs, but most of them I discovered on my own and are subjects that interest me. I don’t follow them just because they follow me.)

The real audience you want to target are the average internet users who are interested in your subject area. They will most likely be using Yahoo, AOL, or MSN as a portal, and they are much, much harder to attract than bloggers. They may not know how to use RSS. There are, however, millions and millions of them. They are the protein, the real meat of what you can develop a following from.

This is why you see so many MMO and BAB sites. They are just going for the low hanging fruit and copying what they see others doing.

There are no easy tricks to attracting that big pool of average users. The fact that they aren’t as internet savvy means you have your work cut out for you. I’d suggest going directly to forums on major sites, and avoid the blogging networks.

Just to provide some balance, I want to give an example of a site which looks normal and provides a good analogue to the Romeuy site.

Also above me in the Blogging Idol contest is Homedesignfind.com.

The site is professional looking has as a very definite niche. If interior design is something you are interested in, this is a site you’d be very interested in. My guess is that the number of blogs dealing with this subject is much less than the number dealing with gaming.

Like Romeuy.com, the site has only been around for a few months. Unlike Romeuy, however, we are talking almost an order of magnitude fewer subscribers (low hundreds, not low thousands). This shows good growth, but it doesn’t jump out as fishy.

Hits are greater than subscribers. When you see a spike in subscribers, you see a spike in hits. It isn’t monotonic. After spikes, you still see small dips. There are no massive drops in subscribers. The big increase in subscribers occurred a full week after the contest started.

This looks like a standard subscriber graph. Every major site I’ve seen shares the same characteristics:

1) Feedburner hits > Feedburner subscribers
2) No monotonic increase in subscribers.
3) No extreme daily drops of greater than 75%

There is a contest being run at Daily Blog Tips right now called “Blogging Idol”. The contest is pretty simple: Get as many RSS subscribers as you can during the month of July.

For full disclosure, I’m entered in the contest and and I’m currently in about 4th place, so I do have an incentive in making sure that the contest is run fair. The website I have in the contest is Everything-Everywhere.com.

Odds are, even if what I have to say in this post is accepted, I wont win. I’m cool with that, but I sure as hell don’t want a cheater to win. The current leader of the contest is Rome of Romeuy.com, and Rome is a cheater. EVERYTHING about his RSS stats reeks of fraud, and there is NOTHING which points to a legitimate increase in subscribers. Everything about what he has done defies statistical probability to the point where it should be taken are prima facia evidence of fraud. If this were a court of law, the statistical evidence would be enough for conviction. Everyone has been tip toeing around saying outright that he is a fake, but I’ll step up and say it. Romeuy is a Fraud.

The Basics
If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck.

Romeuy.com is a gaming site started a few months ago. There are very few examples I can think of where a blog has been launched and has managed to get over 1000 subscribers in a short period of time. The only examples I can think of are when well known bloggers or celebrities launch new blogs and the new blog is heavily promoted on other websites. In other words, there needs to be traffic, buzz and links before there are subscribers. I dare say it is tautological.

Romeuy.com is a gaming site without any particular focus. It doesn’t focus on a niche like World of Warcraft, which might drive a particular group of fans to the site. Moreover, game sites are a dime a dozen. I know because I used to run one (Stomped.com) seven years ago.

Links

The site has few incoming links. If you go to Google and search for link:romeuy.com you will get a whopping FIVE links. Oddly enough, all five links come from the same website. A make money online website. Even more oddly, that make money online website has the EXACT same layout as Romeuy.com. In fact, the make money online site in question is owned and operated by the very same person behind Romeuy.com.

Does operating a MMO site make someone guilty? No. Does it raise suspicion? Oh yell yes. In fact, all of the fake RSS numbers I’ve seen in the past, with the exact same statistical signatures as the Romeuy.com site, have been MMO sites. Even many MMO sites operators who are legit will tell you that the niche has gotten a bad reputation because of the number of shady blog operators.

For the purposes of this discussion, Romeuy should be thought of as a Make Money Online site, not a gaming site. There is another MMO site he is associated with as well. He seems to have more irons in the MMO world, than in the gaming world. (I believe his MMO site also has fraudulent RSS numbers, but he didn’t enter that in a contest. MMO sites with fake RSS would raise a flag much quicker)

So, this guy is getting record levels of RSS subscribers with ZERO links coming from other gaming sites. How about Technorati? They show 77 links, with the majority coming from other MMO websites. Most of the links are also generic links to the site, not links to specific articles, which you’d expect if there was some sort of Digg or Slashdot effect going on.

Moreover, if you take out links dealing with the Blogging Idol contest, there has been no real increase in links during the time which his RSS numbers have been exploding. Certainly, his site doesn’t exist to the rest of the gaming world.

As another bit of evidence, his Google Page Rank is 0.

Traffic

I will hold it out as an axiom that RSS subscribers is, in general, a reflection of traffic. To subscribe to a site, people have to first visit the site. Moreover, not everyone who visits a site will subscribe. Many people don’t like RSS or just prefer to visit a site on a regular basis.

In addition to the amazing increase in RSS subscribers without incoming links, we are also to believe that he has done it without an increase in traffic. If you look at his Feedburner data, you see the remarkable fact that his RSS subscribers is several times larger than the number of hits he has incoming. Not visits mind you, but hits (or as feedburner is most certainly counting it, page views). That means that number of actual people going to the site each day is even less.

Go and look at the Feedburner data for any site which you believe actually has a lot of readers. You will find the Feedburner hits to be greater than the subscribers. Again, this pretty much has to be true by definition. People have to come to the site to subscribe. I’m going to get into the numbers with even more detail, but I believe that when subscribers > hits, by Feedburners own data, that should be prima facia evidence of fraud.

Check his Alexa data. His Alexa ranking is 273,312, which very odd for a site with so many readers. If you look at the traffic numbers, you’ll see no spike in traffic during his increase in subscribers. In fact you’ll see no growth at all.

I realize that Alexa is far from perfect, but it is usually in the ballpark, at least by an order of magnitude. Even if Alexa isn’t evidence by itself, it certainly doesn’t contradict any of the other fishy things about this, and is another bit of evidence which goes on the pile.

He has an Entrecard widget on his site as well. His popularity is 17, which means over the last 5 days, he’s gotten 17 clicks on his widget. Not 17 people mind you, but 17 clicks, 5 of which could have been his other MMO site. Traffic isn’t coming from Entrecard.

Also, compare his comments with other gaming sites with supposedly similar number of subscribers. You’ll see anywhere from 20-100 comments per post. Certainly some will have big spikes. He doesn’t.

Hard Data

If you look at any Feedburner subscriber chart, it shows behavior like the stock market. The overall trend might be up or down or flat, but with any short period of time you will see fluctuations in the data. This is due to how Feedburner counts subscribers. The act of subscribing is nothing more than telling your RSS reader to go to a particular XML file. If your RSS reader doesn’t poll the XML file, Feedburner wont count it. This is why you see dips in subscribers all the time. Weekends or holidays, some people might not check their RSS.

This is why any trend which shows a monotonically increasing number of subscribers should be suspect at face. That is just how the system functions in the real world.

The dips are usually within bounds however. The biggest dip I’ve seen my RSS numbers take in one day (other than the February ‘08 Feedburner problems which had every site show a dip in subscribers) was 15%. Even a 10% is usually pretty big and rare. I had a big dip about a week ago which was 9%. This is also a statistical signature of any Feedburner graph. The graph wont be perfectly smooth, but it shouldn’t have wild swings either. Just like the stock market goes up and down on a daily basis, you wont see a 90% drop in the stock market in one day, only see it go back up 90% the next. Historic one day drops in the stock market are in the neighborhood of 10% (the 1987 Black Monday drop was 22%) . While it is possible, the wilder the swing, the greater the improbability of it happening.

Lets look at the Romeuy.com Feedburner graph. There are multiple things about this which should strike you as fishy.

1) There are more subscribers than hits. As stated above, and by other bloggers who have investigated RSS fraud, its pretty much evidence of fraud by itself. (I should note that in almost every article on this subject you can find where someone investigates a case of RSS fraud, it shows up with the same signatures you see here).

2) Except for a few MAJOR swings, the RSS numbers have been monotonically increasing since June 12. When they go up, they never go back down. (more on the decreases later). Not only are his subscribers not visiting the site, and not finding it via links, but they are visiting every day, and in increasing numbers every day.

3) The biggest one day increase was on June 28, when the subscribers when from 463 on June 27 to 713 on the 28th. What happened on June 28th? The final $3,000 prize for the Blogging Idol contest was announced.

4) Since June 28, you will notice two days with enormous drops in subscribers.

June 28 - 713 subscribers
June 29 - 48 subscribers
June 30 - 759 subscribers

July 5 - 934 subscribers
July 6 - 49 subscribers
July 7 - 1000 Subscribers

The first drop was a 93.6% daily drop, and the second was a 95.1% drop. Such drops are really unheard of. It would make more sense if they dropped to zero. The webserver might have been down or something. But they didn’t drop to zero…..

AMAZINGLY, they dropped down to almost the exact same number each time: 48 and 49.

What could explain this?

The Smoking Gun

The fact that 95% of the subscribers are failing in unison means that they are using the exact same system, whatever that is (probably email. That is how most RSS scams work. Get bogus email addresses). The fact that they check every day without fail and the numbers are monotonically increasing shows they aren’t human beings. They don’t show the stochastic behavior which humans systems display (stock markets and every other legit Feedburner graph being good examples)

The extreme dips plus the monotonic increasing subscribers pretty much shows that there is some sort of automated system behind his amazing increase in RSS subscribers.

All other anecdotal evidence (Alexa, Technorati, Google, Entrecard, Feedburner hits) points to this site being nothing special and not one which has an enormous number of followers. NOTHING points to the contrary.

Conclusion

This stinks to high heaven and it should be obvious to anyone who is in anyway familiar with RSS numbers.

Romeuy.com is a mediocre gaming site without 50-60 real RSS subscribers, the rest of which have been purchased from a service like RSSxplosion.com (I wont provide a link to them. Cut and paste it yourself).

With a $3,000 prize, even if he spent $1 per subscriber, he’d still make a profit.

Most people like to play nice and don’t want to cause a fuss and point fingers. Everyone has been dancing around this, but no one has been willing to come out and say it. ALL evidence points to fraud. NO evidence points to real subscriber growth. I think the burden of proof is on the other side now.

Sometime last December when I was in Hong Kong, I decided to get serious about my blog. Prior to that I had done nothing in terms of promotion or marketing. Part of the process of taking my blog seriously was going out to learn all I could about blogging. Even thought I have been keeping this website as a personal website since 1998, I never considered it a blog. At first I just did all the HTML by hand, and only later did I install MovableType and WordPress.

Part of the education involved reading sites which dealt with the subject of blogging. I currently subscribe to over a dozen such sites, and there are tons more out there. Many of which can be lumped into the Make Money Online category.

For the most part, I’ve found these these sites to be completely devoid of actual information to help bloggers. They mostly tend to be fluff pieces or they just state what should be common sense. The article which pushed me over the edge is one from Problogger. The article is titles “Why Being a Better Writer Affects the Performance of your Blog”. No shit.

You can read the article yourself, but the rest of the article is just repeating the title over and over. Being a good writer is better than being a bad writer. If that wasn’t something you couldn’t figure out yourself, there is no hope for you anyhow.

Another winner type of category is the numbered list: “X ways to do Y”, “Z reasons to do W”. You have probably seen them. They to are usually just lists of common sense things.

What is seriously lacking is data. Hard data where someone tests something and then tries to determine what sort of results it got. Even if data is bad, it would at least be an attempt to try and get some truth rather than just spout broad platitudes.

The blogs about blogging genre has sunk to the level of the self help section of the bookstore for the world of technology.