Analysis of my attempts to figure out blogging and podcasting

Back in December I set out some goals for my travel blog for 2009. This is what they were:

• 5,000 RSS subscribers. (5x increase)
• 7,500 Twitter Followers (2.5x increase)
• Average 100,000 visits per month (5x increase)
• Have a book published
• Get my podcast on a regular schedule and done in a quasi professional manner

The Twitter goal has been smashed, crushed and otherwise made a fool of. Instead of 7,500 I’ll probably end up with over 100,000. While having a lot of followers is good, it isn’t quite as great as everyone might think. That is another post however.

I am on pace for 5,000 subscribers by the end of the year. As of May 31 I had 3,115. The progression has been interesting. I hit the 1,000 subscriber mark on December 31. I hit the 2,000 mark on April 28, and the 3,000 mark on May 30. That is almost 1,000 subscribers is a month which is really surprising. This came mostly from two sources. A contest with PVPonline and a mention in an article for Digital Photography School. The take away from this is pretty simple: getting mentions on large, popular websites dwarfs pretty much anything else you can do for marketing. Period. This is something everyone intuitively knows but people seldom talk about. I should also note that I got a fair amount of traffic and subscribers from a mention in an MSNBC.com article in April as well. All three of those sources are outside of the travel niche, which pretty much confirms what I think about where you need to generate traffic from.

I had a huge spike in traffic in May. In terms of raw traffic, I had 40,000 visits in May which much more than the previous high in April of 25,000. I wont be surprised if I fail in this goal. Subscribers are cumulative, traffic is not. I’ll need some big media mentions to hit that goal. Once I’m in the US that could happen, but I can’t plan on it. I’m not sure that Google is going to be the answer to achieving this goal either.

No news on the podcast front and I don’t think I’ll be doing anything with it until the fall.

The book outline is something together. I need to start contacting agents, which will help once I’m back in the US.

On December 20, I posted about how I was going to change my use of Twitter from just using it for communication to as a tool for marketing as well. The fundamental change I made was following everyone who followed me, and actively going out and following other people who might be interested in travel.

It has now been four months since I made the change to how I approach Twitter and I figure it is a good time to go back and look at how successful it has been.

Twitter Follower Growth

In addition to the changes noted above, I also invested $50 in a very nice looking Twitter background image. This has made a huge difference. The moment someone checks out my Twitter page, they know what I am about, even if they just scan the page. Here is how my follower list has expanded since December:

You can see I have gone from about 2,000 followers to 45,000 followers at the time of this writing. My marketing strategy is focused around serendipity. If people have a chance to accidentally discover me, I am pretty good at converting them. The trick is the initial introduction. Twitter is really good at this and I see the results of it every day. I think my success at growing my follower base is due to the compelling nature of what I’m doing, and the fact that I spend most of my time on Twitter answering questions and just engaging in chit chat with people about the places I visit. Most of twitter marketing is just BSing with people. It is really not hard.

Blog Traffic

I have gone from about 100 visits per week from the Twitter.com domain to about 900. This only reflects visits which come from the Twitter website, not people who use third party clients. This probably would at least double the amount of actual traffic I get.

I have also found that the number of clicks you get on a URL you put on Twitter is dependent on the number of times you display the URL. Most people seem to only look at traffic which appears when they are online. I’d very much like a WordPress plugin that will put a URL on Twitter X times every Y hours. I think once every 6 or 4 hours would be idea and most people wouldn’t get the sense that you are spamming the same URL. Most people wouldn’t even see the other mentions of the link.

Subscribers

My subscribers have increased dramatically over the past 4 months. I crossed the 1,000 mark on January 1 and as of today I am at 1813. That is an 80% increase. I can only indirectly point this to Twitter. It mostly has come from my site redesign and the launch of my email newsletter, but Twitter has played a big role.

Lessons
I don’t know if my experience applies to everyone. As I stated in my previous post on advice bloggers, everyone is going to have to apply lessons differently. Twitter has proven to be a great tool for people to discover you. If you have a more targeted blog, my approach probably wont be as successful.

Like many bloggers, I follow several sites that deal with internet marketing, blogging advice, and monetization. The longer I run my site, the more I notice that these sites are incredibly insular and inward looking to only their own niche.

The thing is all these blogging and marketing gurus mostly have no experience in marketing or blogging outside of the blogging advice/marketing niche. They almost exclusively read other sites that are in a similar space and don’t pay attention to people who blog and market outside of their niche. One of the few exceptions is Darren Rowse who’s first site was on digital photography, and it is still more popular than ProBlogger. His posts where he shows actual data from his site are very informative. Nonetheless, he still falls into the same trap, as almost all of the guest posters on ProBlogger are people who run marketing/MMO/blogging advice blogs, not people who are successful bloggers outside of his niche. I can’t recall many case studies or bloggers who write about lifestyle, sports, or entertainment mentioned as a case study of a successful blog.

I should note that the sites I’m calling out do not suck. Nor can I say their information is categorically “wrong”. I subscribe to all of them and will continue to do so. They are not devoid of good information and there are some topics which are indeed universal to all blogs. However, it is important to have a good crap filter when reading these sites. Many people take the advice way too literally and never bother to think for themselves. Every niche and every blog is different and there are things which might work for someone else which might not work for someone else.

I run a travel blog. I figured out right away that the advice I was reading on these sites didn’t necessarily apply to me. Travel is a very universal thing. If you were to poll people on the street, there would be vastly more people who are interested in overseas travel than those who were interested in internet marketing. There is a travel channel, travel magazines and entire travel section at the book store. You will never see a MMO or internet marketing equivalent of any of those things.

Nonetheless, MMO/Marketing/Blogging Advice sites get significantly more traffic than travel sites do. Figuring why this was the case one of the first things I had to deal with. No one was writing about this subject and the you certainly wont see any of the blogging experts address it. The reason was simple: the people who follow marketing and advice sites are very passionate about it, motivated to follow these sites, and most importantly, the niche has 100% internet penetration. They are going there to get information to better their sites. That is why there is such overlap between this niche and personal growth/productivity sites.

I get tremendous positive feedback on my blog. Every week I get emails or messages on Twitter applauding me on my courage or telling me that I am an inspiration. The problem however, is that very few people go out of their way to find a site like mine. Fundamentally, I’m entertainment. People find me via serendipity. They stumble across it or find it by accident. Moreover, this applies to the entire niche. Even travel tips and advice sites have relatively low traffic because people don’t follow travel like they do sports or the advice sites. This reality totally changes how I have to market my site compared to the people who run advice sites. The people who run blogging advice sites have little to no experience in this type of marketing.

Chris Guillebeau, who I noted above, recently got 25,000 downloads of his new ebook in a week because of a link from Seth Godin. That’s a great coup for him and he did a good job on his ebook. I read it the day it came out. However, it is near impossible for bloggers in other niches to get similar referrals because there are no Seth Godins in other blogging niches. Trying to find any sort of general lesson for everyone is futile, because you can only replicate it in a few niches. If it was a recipe book instead, even though the total percentage of the population interested in cooking is greater, it probably would never have had the same level of success. The marketing/blogging/mmo niche has very active bloggers and very active followers. This makes the rules which the operate under very different.

If you read blogging advice, MMO or internet marketing sites frequently, you probably might have never heard of the following bloggers mentioned in an article or referred to as A-List Bloggers: Andrew Sullivan, Tyler Cowen, Heather Armstrong, Ree Drummond, Perez Hilton. All of these bloggers have audiences that dwarf most of the so called A-List bloggers, but they get no attention from the blogging/marketing world. The lessons they can teach are probably more useful to the majority of bloggers than the experience of marketing bloggers, but they are ignored. I have probably had more success in the last 30 days trying to apply some of the successes of Ree Drummond than I have ever gotten from a marketing site…and she is never spoken of. I had to dig around on my own to figure out how she got so successful. I don’t know if anyone has ever interviewed her on an advice site. (and to be fair, there are probably a bunch of blogs which I do not even know about that should be listed, but then again, I’m not dishing out advice on how to run a blog)

The lesson for bloggers is this: there is good information to be had from following the blogging/marketing gurus, but you have to think for yourself. Realize that the advice they give doesn’t come from a comprehensive analysis of blogging excellence across the internet. It comes from their own experiences in their own niche and there is a good chance it will not apply to you.

I’ve been doing a few experiments this last week as I’ve been sitting in Tel Aviv waiting for my batter replacement to show up. They involve Facebook and Google:

Facebook Fan Pages
I’ve not put a ton of effort into my fan page in the past. Honestly, there are serious limitations with what you can do with a fan page. In fact, I have never even done the “suggest this page to a friend” thing, and I have over 500 Facebook friends. I did that a few days ago and increase my fan page followers from about 400 to 561 as of me writing this. Most of that has come from friends who didn’t know about the fan page.

The reason why I decided to pay some attention to the fan page is pretty simple: pages are now showing up along with profiles in the “people you may know” feature. That means the more people who join your page, the more people will have your page suggested to them. It is literally viral.

I don’t care about the fan page so much as a platform to actually communicate with people. I might set up an application to push out the RSS feed, but that’s it. It mostly serves the same purpose as an email list. The point being, given the mechanics of Facebook, it can be a great way to introduce yourself to people who may have no idea about you or what you are doing.

The next step would be to get a few key people to do the “suggest this page to a friend” to their friend list. If they are college kids with a huge friend list, that can grow the page in a hurry.

Googe Friend Connect
This is something which I think is really underrated. Google launched this a few months ago and only a handful of sites have added it. It is basically a widget where people can “join” your site. It then shows a bunch of small images for each person. It isn’t really a way to communicate with readers, doesn’t build links, nor does it directly drive traffic. Why do it?

There are three big reasons: 1) If you use Google Reader in addition, the site you joined will appear in Google Reader under “Blogs I’m Following”. This can add to your subscriber count. 2) The social validation of people with faces can give you a bit of cred. 3) I’m convinced that Google is, or soon will, use this data as part of its search algorithm. I’m guessing it will be factored into the domain trust or authority of a site. Google accounts are hard to fake. If you have people on Friend Connect, you have some real readers. This can be used as part of a profile to tell Google “I am a real site and have real readers”. I saw an increase of about 33% in search traffic after I installed the widget. I can’t prove it was casused by Friend connect, but I think it had something to do with it.

This weekend I put out a call on Twitter for people to join and I got 45 more in a few days.

I don’t plan on putting a ton of effort into either one of these, but I do think they deserve some attention for any blogger. If nothing else, get a fan page and put up the Friend Connect widget. (although I’m not going to bother for this site)

My goals for the year are on track.

7,500 Twitter Followers: I have demolished my 2009 goal of 7,500 followers on Twitter. I am almost at 20,000. I pick up 100-200 a day without doing anything at this point. If I try, I can get even more. Twitter is far and away the #1 marketing tool I have. It is so good, I have not spent much time in other places. Having 100,000 by the end of 2009 is not out of the question given my rate of growth.

5,000 Subscribers: With the newsletter finally launched, I have a chance at reaching my subscriber goal of 5,000 by the end of the year. I have increased my subscribers by 50% since the beginning of the quarter. 50% quarterly growth will put me at 5,100 at the end of 2009. Momentum is picking up, so I’m not worrying too much about it anymore.

Get my book published: I have begun talking to some publishers about my book and the feedback is good so far. I think that is going well.

100,000 visits per month: My goal of 100,000 visits per month is still going to need some work. I’m at about 22,000 right now, but I have not had a ton of social media traffic. I have done nothing with Stumble Upon or Redditt in months. Nonetheless, March will be my biggest month yet through nothing but search engines, Twitter and organic traffic. I suppose that is pretty healthy considering I’m not using traffic spikes to achieve it. If I could get some marketing help with the Stumble/Reddit/Digg department, I could do much better. I’m guessing with a concerted effort in the SU/Reddit department, I could easily double my current traffic in a month. The trick would be keeping the numbers up that high.

Podcasting: I have done nothing with this so far.

Check out my new iPhone travel wallpapers.

I’m about to launch the 3rd iteration of my travel blog. This has taken way longer than I had hoped, but but the launch day is close at hand. Just a few minor bugs to get worked out.

I have never been quite satisfied with my website. This time I got hired help and I think I’ll be quite happy for a while. It will make my photography much more prominent, be easier to navigate, the total width will be about 100px wider allowing more room for content, and its designed to drive more subscribers.

The big content addition I’ll be adding is my Aweber newsletter. It took me a while to come around to it, but the evidence in support of developing an email list is pretty overwhelming. The fact that Aweber syncs with Feedburner doesn’t hurt either. My current plan is to release the email newsletter every two weeks and include updates on where I’ve been, photography, and articles. Myself and other tech savvy people I know tend to use RSS and dismiss email, but it is much more accessible to the majority of internet users. I think most of my subscriber growth will come via newsletter subscriptions.

I’ll also be displaying videos prominently on the front page, which I hope should give me more incentive to shoot more of them.

I may have some other projects in the works soon too. All and all, I’m pretty happy where things sit.

Once all the website stuff is done, I’m going to turn my attention to my photos. I am officially declaring my attempt to self host my photos to be a failure. The storage costs alone will be more than using a service, and my goal of getting more photos indexed in Google Image hasn’t worked out. I’ve moved all my Flickr photos to Smugmug and have linking all my new photos to my Smugmug account.

Smugmug is great. The level of customization they allow is what makes it a great service. I’m going to map photography.Everything-Everywhere.com to my Smugmug account and customize it so it is pretty seamless with my blog. This should provide a much better experience for the user than my current site. Over time I’ll gradually change all the old links over to Smugmug and remove the images off my webserver. I’m giving up on getting indexed in Google Image.

I’m writing this post in response to this March 3rd article by Lara Dunston. I’m commenting here because my comments aren’t being posted on the site in question and I would like to defend myself. I’m the person she is talking about. The subject she is talking about is MY need to use guidebooks. She wrote an article about ME and then got all in a huff when I tried to respond.

Here is the background:

Feb 28, she writes an article titled Dubai: destination re-branding urgently required - from ‘playground of the rich’ to the complex compelling place we know it can be . I make one comment in the article about how I didn’t think Dubai was that great of a tourist attraction (something which I stand by). She replies to my comment and then ….

On March 2, she writes a full post in response to my comment on how I really need to use guidebooks titled: There’s more to beaches and malls in Dubai: the case for using a guidebook . The title of which came directly from a line in my comment in the previous article.

So this article is about ME. You will notice there are no comments listed in this article. I wrote a lengthy reply, as I was the impetus for the article. I mean, that seems fair right? You write an entire blog post about ME, take the title from ME, and quote ME you should let ME respond, right?? She never approved my comment. (You should also note that I previously wrote a controversial article on why you don’t need a guidebook) So much for “spirited debate”.

Now if you read the March 3 article where there is all the angst about commenting, I’m accused of “imposing (my) opinions on others, taking the topic to a place that we really weren’t interested in going.” At this point in the “spirited discussion”, I have made a single comment which got an even longer reply and a full blog post that was directed at me personally. All my comments were blocked after this.

Also, I do not even know how it is possible to impose my opinion on someone else, let alone in the comments of another person’s blog. Having an opinion isn’t imposing an opinion.

There was another March 1 post on some Australians who were arrested in Dubai. I made a shorter comment pointing out how she never addressed the facts surrounding the case. People were/are held in Dubai without being accused of a crime. I’m a big lover of freedom and I don’t like that. She approved a pro-Dubai comment but blocks mine which questions the actions of the Dubai government. (this is all really ironic considering that the Dubai government censors the internet and suppresses political dissent) If you are going to defend a government which suppresses speech and can imprison people without due process, then you should expect to defend it. My comment was directly on point to the subject of the article.

She accuses me of be insulting, obnoxious, imposing my opinion on others. If that is the case, prove it to the world. Let everyone see how obnoxious and insulting I am. I’m not the one hiding anything. I made my comments with the expectation of them being public and didn’t post them anonymously.

There never was a spirited debate. She doesn’t seem to like any disagreement, especially on the subject of the government of Dubai. The topic was probably going to “a place that we really weren’t interested in going”. It is hard to defend what the Dubai government is doing. All my comments were on point to the subject in the article which she wrote.

Its her website and if she wants to block comments she can. But I have a website too and I can use my platform to defend myself if she is going to malign me without a chance to reply. I’m not the one hiding anything.

Oh, as an aside, I don’t block comments on this site so anyone is free to comment or disagree with me, so long as the spam filter doesn’t catch it.

My Twitter experiment has been a huge success. My 2009 goal was 7500 followers. Two weeks into the year and I’m at 4,200 already. As you can see in the graph, since I’ve turn auto-follow on, my following rate has gone crazy. Once I got into the Twitterholic top 1000, it took on a life of its own. I can pretty much go on autopilot at this point and make my 2009 Twitter goal.

Everyone that follows me gets a link to my RSS feed, which I think has helped boost my subscribers. Moreover, a large Twitter following makes it much easier to meet people when I go to a new city.

Twitter has been working very well for me, but I’m not sure how well it would translate to another blog. I get a lot of people who discover what I’m doing and think its neat. I’m probably going to lay off the Twitter now for at least a few weeks. I’m going to be moving around a lot in the next few weeks, so I need to focus on content and not marketing.

I am at a crossroads with where I want to go with Twitter. It all has to do with what you can use Twitter for. Unfortunately, the two things are sort of mutually exclusive.

There are two schools of thought when dealing with Twitter. 1) Follow as many people as possible in an effort to get as many followers as possible. 2) Only follow the people you actually know or want to talk to.

You will find many of the people in the top 100 most followed Twitter users take the first approach and have tens of thousands of friends. If you follow them, they will follow you. The problem with this approach is that you cannot listen to tens of thousands of people. I tried this once and got to about 500 people before I gave up. I was missing what people were saying and couldn’t focus on the people I wanted to listen to. Once you have over 500 “friends” you are using Twitter for marketing and broadcasting more than for communications. You can’t have individual conversations with that many people, no matter what you say. Not at a personal level at least. It is however, probably the superior way to use Twitter to increase your exposure.

The second option lets you talk to people and follow all the tweets of the people you want to listen to. You wont have hundreds or thousands of people drowning out the voices of those who are important to you. The downside is that you probably wont reach as wide an audience as if you took the shotgun approach.

I currently follow about 100 people and have almost 2,100 followers. Of those 100 people, about half are people who either don’t know me or are people I never talk to. That 100 could easily be 50 or less if I really wanted to pare things down. Most of the people I talk to on Twitter read this site on a regular basis

Ideally, I could get the best of both worlds if I could create a client side “super friend” where I could pay extra special attention to people I really want to watch.

I am leaning to turning auto-follow back on, then using Friendfeed as my method of following the people I actually want to follow. That would be the optimal solution. Most of the people who contact me I do not follow, so it is all done via reply. That would probably stay the same if I followed a ton of people, as following too many is functionally the same is not following at all.

Remember to follow me on Twitter

There are two things occurring in Minnesota right now which also occurred in Florida in the 2000 presidential election:

1) There is an extremely close vote.
2) There are a number of ballots which are ambiguous.

Both of these things are unavoidable. Close elections will happen from time to time and it should be assumed that they will happen again. Humans, being fallible creatures, will always find ways to screw up even something as simple as filling in a dot on a sheet of paper.

For 99.9% of all elections (if you include elections at every level) the number of screwed up ballots doesn’t matter because the margin of victory is much greater than the number of ambiguous ballots. How they are counted will have no effect on the outcome.

In that 0.1% of elections where it does matter, it can cause problems. You get into issues like hanging chads and “voter intent”. I think having any group of people trying to determine voter intent is a very dangerous thing. If the voter wasn’t clear, then they expressed no clear intent.

The way out of this is easy and should be adopted at all levels of government:

Accept that there will always be a small level of error in any voting system. In the MN senate election, approximately 2,400,000 votes were cast and 5,300 have been called into question. That is 0.22% of the votes. I’m sure a more thorough study could determine what a reasonable number is.

If any election is within that margin of error (lets say 0.5%), have a runoff between the candidates in an election which would happen 1 month later.

In the case of Florida, they would have had a special election one month later between Bush and Gore, with no Ralph Nader. In MN, they would have another election with no Dean Barkley.

Odds are, even if the election is close again, which you would expect it to be, it wouldn’t be as close as it was in the previous election. The ballot would be cleaner, there would be more attention paid to the race, and other candidates would be eliminated.

While it is possible to have yet another extremely close ballot count in the second election, it is unlikely. If it did happen, the recount would be much easier on a ballot with only two choices.

About 1 year ago I made the decision to start marketing my site more aggressively. At the time I had about 100 RSS subscribers and the readership on my site wasn’t much more than friends and family.

Now at the end of 2008 I’m looking at 1,000 subscribers, almost a 10x increase over the course of the year.

As far as I can tell, I have the most popular travelogue on the internet. I have no way of verifying if that is true, but I can’t think of any others which are bigger, and I am familiar with most of them.

In the larger category of travel blogs I’m one of the larger ones. Not too many have 1,000 subscribers. I’m also near the top of people in the travel space terms of Twitter followers with over 2,000.

So things aren’t too shabby.

My goals for 2009 are as follows:

• 5,000 RSS subscribers. (5x increase)
• 7,500 Twitter Followers (2.5x increase)
• Average 100,000 visits per month (5x increase)
• Have a book published
• Get my podcast on a regular schedule and done in a quasi professional manner

Doing this is going to require a totally different approach from what got me to this point.

The travel blogging space, is in the big scheme of things, pretty small. The largest independent travel blogs which I know of are only about 2-3x the size of my current site in terms of subscribers. Most of the action takes place with the large corprate sites with multiple bloggers. I don’t really even like to consider myself a travel blogger as I don’t write about traveling in the bigger sense of the word. I just write about myself and what I do.

Also, if I’m already the biggest travelogue on the internet, I’m not just growing my site, I have to fundamentally create a new blogging niche. That is going to be the hard part. There are no established sites out there that are doing what I’m doing at the level I’m doing it at. Most of the advice given by the “pro bloggers” involve their success in niches which already have tons of blogs and tons of followers. I don’t think much of it is going to work for me.

How am I going to get from here to there? A 5x increase seems like less than a 10x increase, but 4,000 is a lot more than 900.

• Site redesign. I’ve hired a company to do a professional redesign. I’m hopping that I wont have to worry about this for a long time once it is done. I hope it will launch in early to mid January.
• I’m going to start a newsletter. I’ve been waiting to see if this is really worth the effort, and the evidence seems overwhelming at this point. I’ll hope to launch this alongside the site redesign. I hope to have the newsletter out biweekly.
• Create an ebook. I’ve actually started on this. It will be very photo heavy, so it wont be as much work as writing a real book. Many sites have had success with this as an incentive to subscribe to a site.
• Increase offline and non-travel industry exposure. If I am to grow the niche, I have to get exposure beyond the travel world and even beyond the internet. The best way to achieve this will be via the book and the associated marketing around it. I’ll basically have to market the book aggressively.
• Get back to the US. As counter intuitive as it seems, I’ve always had the biggest spurts in traffic growth when I was settled in a city for a few weeks. Actually traveling gets in the way of blogging. Being in the US for a few months should allow me to focus on marketing and let me network with people I wouldn’t be able to do when I’m on the road. Managing that time in the US will be important. I don’t want people to think the site is dead or that I’ve ceased traveling. I plan doing some traveling in the US to take some photos. In particular, I may drive to San Francisco and take photos and camp along the way.
• Podcasting. It always comes back to this. I’m having a hard time keeping up with photos and text. The video is just too much for one person to do on top of everything else. On my next trip I’m going to be bringing someone along to serve as a producer/cameraman/editor. I have no clue who this is going to be yet.

This will require a lot of work, but I think it can be done. One thing working in my favor is that I’ve noticed you get more people following you as you get bigger. The more Twitter followers I have, the more Twitter followers I get. I’ve seen other sites get a spike in subscribers once they hit 1,000.

I think the economy might help me. As more people cut back on traveling, traveling vicariously might be more appealing….or maybe not. I have no clue.

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.