A web site devoted to the Gary enthusiast since 1998.

Lets suppose you are someone with no friends. You are a recluse who never goes outside. If you were to die inside your home, your corpse would rot until collection agencies came to get your electric bill. Literally, no one knows you are alive.

Now all of a sudden, you win the lottery. You want to get some friends. You buy some nice clothes, a nice car, and start going to clubs buying drinks for everyone. Suddenly, everyone wants to hang out with you. It is costs you $10,000 a night, but you finally have friends. Lets also say that every night you go out and buy drinks, 200 people are willing to hang out with you.

Now, lets assume the money runs out. 190 of those 200 people never even bothered to remember your name. They want nothing to do with you now. There are however 10 people who sill want to hang out with you even though you aren’t spending money on them.

How many friends did you really have at the peak of your popularity? The obvious answer is 10. The other 190 weren’t really friends, even though they may have provided the illusion of friendship.

This is pretty much how you can look at most of the traffic from Entrecard.

During my stay in Melbourne, I was dropping between 150 to 300 cards a day. The price for my travel site (Everything-Everywhere.com) got as high as 300, which means I had 150 people from Entrecard visiting my site to drop cards. I’d say on average it was around 260. In the week since I’ve left Melbourne, I’ve dropped zero a day because I don’t have regular Internet access. My price has dropped to around 120, which it was before I started dropping again.

I went from 130 people visiting my site on a daily basis to 60. That means that 70 of those people were only visiting because I was dropping cards on them. They weren’t coming for content or because of what I was doing. They weren’t real traffic, they were the illusion of traffic. The illusion of traffic shows up the same on your log file, but they will only show up if you jump through hoops for them.

If you are a brand new site and have zero traffic, jumping through hoops to build up some traffic might be worth it. Even if you get a bunch of illusionary traffic, you will probably pick up some readers in the process. The question however is how long is it worth the time and effort to keep people coming to your site who otherwise would not visit?

Many Entrecard users have developed a Paris Hilton syndrome where having hangers-on and the size of your entourage are considered a sign of status….even if they will leave you at the drop of a hat the moment the money stops flowing.

Entrecard is not free. Time is the most valuable resource and the time you spend day after day after day dropping on the same sites just to inflate your numbers is time you are not spending on creating new content or trying to promote your site to new readers. Moreover, the more real readers your site had, the more meaningless the 300 (maximum) fake visitors every day will become. A site with 3,000 readers would be crazy to spend a hour every day to increase traffic by 10%, especially when the 10% doesn’t care what you are doing. A site with 30,000 readers would be certifiably insane.

I still keep Entrecard’s widget on my site, but I don’t organize my life around it. There is nothing wrong with the system, you just have to keep in mind who your real friends are.

I have achieved my goal of getting to page 2 of Google for the term “travel blog”. Here is how I did it:

• First, I read up on search engine optimization. I had no clue what Google looked for and so this was really a necessary step. Your rank depends on two things: the content of your site and incoming links.
• I got a Pro account on SEOmoz.org and used their tools to analyze my site. I was able to run reports for which sites are ranked highest, where I rank, how the content of my page performs, etc. This was invaluable.
• I made subtle changes to the page. You might have noticed that I changed the title of the site from “Everything Everywhere” to “Everything Everywhere Travel Blog”. Not only is a bit more descriptive for people to stumble the site, but it also helps having the keyword you want in the title. Moreover, most of the people who linked to me will link the term “Everything Everywhere Travel Blog” which helps dramatically in determine where you show up. A very small change, but important.
• If you look at the site, you will notice a few other small changes. Under the RSS button, I changed “Subscribe to my RSS feed” to “Subscribe to my Travel Blog’s RSS feed”. Under the Bloggers Choice Award button I changed “vote for me” to “Click to vote for Best Travel Blog”. I put that in strong tags. I added a copyright notice at the bottom and used the H3 tag. Google looks to see how the term is used. By liberally putting the term on the page in different tags (headers, bold, links), it will add to the score of the page.
• I moved my blogroll to a separate page. This did several things. 1) I can liberally add many sites if I want to do link exchanges without bogging down every other page. 2) By limiting outbound links on every page, I can better preserve my page rank. 3) If I get page rank nuked for having lots of links, I am isolating it to a single page, not the rest of my site. 4) I am creating a page with the term “Travel Blog” in the URL.
• I did a search on SEOmoz on the top 200 sites ranked under “Travel Blog”. Many of them were directories. I submitted my blog to those directories and put the tiny button at the bottom of my site. That gives me links incoming. I also added rel=”nofollow” to all the outgoing directory links so I don’t get hurt on Page Rank. They still get links and the image, but it doesn’t hurt Page Rank. I also get a small trickle of traffic from the directories. Only put nofollow on the directory links and will link liberally when needed in normal posts.
• If you scroll down, you’ll see I had a day where I posted like 400 links to websites. I did it on this site, even though the link I added was for my other site. That has probably given me over 400 inbound links, all with the term “Travel Blog”. My Technorati rank went from 70,000 to almost 20,000. I totally stumbled into that link list, but it worked and I didn’t have to worry about the Page Rank backlash by putting it on my main site.
• Most of this was one time work. It shouldn’t require a ton of attention now that it is up and running. To rank higher I need quality links, not quantity. That will come from content, not gimmicks. I will probably never rank #1 because there are sites which have “TraveBlog” in the domain name. Most of the first page are either sites that host travel blogs, or the blogs from the travel editors of big newspapers. Also, the age of a site is a factor, and my site isn’t that old.
• I may do something similar for when I launch the podcast. Getting on page one for “travel podcast” should be much easier. Only 4 of the items on the front page are actual podcasts. I will have to make sure and label it the “Everything Everywhere Travel Podcast”.

The whole SEO process was very educational. I am confident I could do this for other sites now. There are some subtle things I have yet to learn, but overall, it isn’t rocket science.

I’m making good progress on my Q1 goals:

1) My RSS subscribers is now up to 280 as of today. I’m still looking to hit 350 by the end of March. I hope the podcast will help in that department. If I count podcast subscribers from iTunes (and there is no reason why not), I’m guessing I might be able to hit it.

2) I’m on page 3 for Google for the search term “travel blog”. My goal was page 2.

3) My Technorati Authority is now over 200 and I’m in the top 30,000. I also have 66 Technocrati fans. (if I really pushed this, I could get in the Technorati Top 100. #100 is only like 240). Again, this is pretty much meaningless to me now. After pouring over my stats, I’m going to just focus on quality links.

4) Major mentions. So far, nothing.

5) 1,000 visitors per day. It is hard to do this and have lots of RSS at the same time. I think I might hit 500 on an regular basis by the end of the month.

6) 2 of the 3 site improvements are done. The third and big one should be up in 2 weeks.

I’ve spent a lot of my time in Melbourne working on things like search engine optimization for the site, building a site map for search engines, etc. It is mostly work which is only necessary to do once. Once I’m out of Melbourne, I don’t think I’ll have a lot of time to work on that and I’d rather focus on actually doing content, which has been rather light this month.

I’ve also begun to lay the groundwork for eventually adding ads to the site. I’m not going to do that for a while. I think it is silly to put ads on your site if you don’t have sufficient traffic (and I do not). The earliest I can see doing that is in 3 months. I’m very concerned about contextual focus of the ads. I’m going to really go out of my way to make sure everything is targeted to travel and not to “punch the monkey”. I want things to look like they belong there. So much of what makes web ads annoying are the fact they have nothing to do with what the focus of the site is. I’m going to line up affiliate programs with various hotel and airline companies, as well as sites like National Geographic and Lonely Planet.

I’ve been helping my friend Scott with advertising. He has a very popular site and runs a lot of Google ads. They really aren’t as great of a deal as they used to be and that seems to be the consensus everywhere I go.

The Where On Google Earth site is gaining some traction, but slowly. Its fun so I don’t worry too much about it.

• Technorati Rank: I crushed this goal. I was aiming for the top 60,000. I’m currently in the top 30,000. I don’t really care about this metric anymore. After going over my Google Analytics data, I’m really focusing more on quality than quantity.
• Top Site Mention: I was hoping for 3 mentions. I have zero. A month left to go and most of Feb. I’ve sat on my ass in Melbourne.
• RSS Subscribers: I’m shooting for 350 and i’m at 262. It is possible, but it will be close.
• Traffic: wanted 1,000 visitors a day. I’ll probably end up with 600-700. I can easily get 1,000 with traffic spikes, but not on a consistent basis. Oddly enough, my RSS numbers are increasing faster than my regular traffic. I think that is a good thing. It means my site is pretty sticky.
• Podcasting: This should be off the ground soon.

A lot will depend on how I execute in the next month. I’m developing a better feel from sifting through the data for what people link to and read. I haven’t done a ton of that sort of stuff this month. I think the podcast will help traffic.

Read the initial post here:

Blue face doesn’t really get any reasons for what he says. Just makes assertions. When I claim site value should be de-linked from drops, he simply says “I disagree”. Ok….why? No reason is really given, he just disagrees. Likewise, when I say that tags should be used instead of categories, he says “Bad idea to remove the categories completely. Adding tags is a good add on, but it should not replace categories completely.” Why is it a bad idea? No reason is given.

I wrote a long reply, then realized I have something far more powerful: actual data.

• Based on current Ebay prices, 1000 credits is going for around US$5. You can see buy it now auctions for US$7 for 1,000 credits and the actual bidding is less than that. We will use $5 = 1000ec as the conversion rate. (You can move that ratio around a lot and it wont change the outcome of the demonstration)
• Entrecard and PW both sell the exact same inventory (125×125 ads) for the exact same length of time (1 day). Credit vs dollar comparisons will be very straight forward.
• I searched for sites which carry both PW and Entrecard, or have Entrecard and independent sales of 125×125 ads. If independent, I used a per day basis (month/30):

The lessons are simple:
1) assuming a site sells 125×125 ads for money and is on Entrecard, you are better off selling your credits on ebay and buying the ad on PW with cash. You come out ahead. We can quantify the amount by which the Entercard pricing system skews value: it is about 2600% for the top valued sites.

2) John Chow is losing $1000 a month by putting Entrecard on his site instead of 2 more 125×125 ads.

So of course Blue Face wants to keep the system. He is making out like a bandit.

There will be periodic posts like the one before. I don’t want to gunk up my main site, so I’m going to use this site for link exchanges, contests and other stuff I don’t want elsewhere.

Also, I broke the Technorati 50,000. I was way off on what was possible with my Q1 goals with that.

I recently came across this website. What they are planning to do is pay for 30 people to travel around the world for a year.

This is something which I happen to know something about.

Let me run the numbers:

At a minimum, it would cost $10,000 a year to travel around the world. This would be visiting the poor countries, eating instant noodles, and not really spending much money on anything other than what you’d need to survive. That averages to $27.40/day, every day for a year. Realistically, you are looking at $20,000 to travel for a full year.

Traveler 2.0 is expecting their travelers to visit a new city every 3 days on average. That means you are actually moving around and paying for transportation. This puts the expense at least $20,000/year if not more. Moreover, if you want people to follow along, you’ll want to visit the sexy places, and those are mostly in Europe, Asia and North America and those are expensive.

Lets use $20,000/year as a base. I think it is very low for a schedule of 1 city per 3 days, but it is a good lower estimate.

$20,000 x 30 = $600,000 for the first year, just for paying for travel expenses. Everyone and their brother will be applying for this, so the application process will be difficult and there is a high probability that they will get a lot of stinkers who are no good at blogging. Toss marketing, administrative and other expenses on top, and you are looking at a minimum of $1,000,000 the first year alone.

They expect to have 100,000 unique visitors per day in the first month. This is total horse shit. I follow most travel sites, including major ones. The only sites with that sort of traffic are the ones who have established brands outside of the Internet: National Geographic, Discovery Channel, Frommers, etc. You aren’t going to get that much traffic in the first month. It is absurd. It takes time to build an audience. They are just sort of assuming success in the business plan.

Take the top 30 travel bloggers (of which I’d easily count myself as one) and you don’t have 100,000 unique visitors per day. Nothing close. Take the top 1,000 and you probably don’t, because most travel blogs are only followed by friends and family.

Here is how they describe how they will make money:

Under precondition, each traveller is required to maintain a blog site, for the aim of creating a following and gaining
interest in the TRAVELLER 2.0 brand. All travellers will be expected to review any services and products they
utilise during this campaign period and encourage suppliers to register their services with TRAVELLER 2.0.

So, they don’t even have the suppliers lined up. The people traveling are supposed to be doing sales.

If you are visiting a new city every 3 days, plus doing all this, where are you going to find time to do anything interesting that would make people want to read your blog??? Shit, I can barely do what I’m doing and I’m not trying to do sales and review products I use.

What is the incentive of the people traveling to do this? I assume there will be some sort of contract which will probably make a bunch of disgruntled travelers after a few months. They will be stuck trying to enforce a contract on a 20-something with no assets who is out of the country.

Read the small print at the bottom of the page. “* Conditions and set criteria apply. Remuneration based on profit outcome.” So, there is a good chance you wont get a dime if they don’t make any money….and they wont. Certainly not if they are basing it on “profit” and not including travelers as a cost.

Scam.

Where On Google Earth?

Basically, an image from Google Earth where people can guess what the image is. When someone gets it right, a new image goes up.

I’m really looking forward to getting to Melbourne and getting work done. I am finding it hard to find someone who can do PHP and help me make some changes to my WordPress template.

I’m on track for several of my Q1 goals:

• I’ve already cracked the top 60,000 on Technorati. The top 50,000 should be obtainable by the end of March
• I’ve hit 212 RSS subscribers. I’m aiming for 350 by the end of March.
• My daily readers has increased to about the 400 range. This is on top of the RSS. Getting to 1000 might be difficult. It might require a big spike in traffic.
• I’ll think I’ll get some sort of spike when I’m in Australia as I can spend some time on site promotion.
• If you are reading this, please give me some feedback on what you changes you think I should make to Everything-Everywhere.com.

• IZEA started to actually work and I’m currently #1 in the travel category. That doesn’t mean much because not many sites are using it.
• I’ve hit 186 RSS subscribers. There is a daily fluctuation because Feedburner will only record RSS readers which requested the file on a given day. It can roam between 20-30 a day. The peak number is the best representation of the actual number. I’m on a path for getting my Q1 goal for RSS
• One of the new sites I’m going to open will be a regular Google Earth contest. You can see a mock up at WhereOnGoogleEarth.wordpress.com. I’ll be getting a domain for it soon. I’ll be putting a lot of ads on it and it shouldn’t take much work to keep it going.
• I’ve started making my first iPhone wallpapers.

The last month I’ve been experimenting with lots of different ways to increase traffic. I’ve had success with some, not so much with others, and some work well when you join, then sort of peter out after a while.

I have only a limited amount of time, so I’d like to efficiently spend my time so I can maximize my traffic.

This is my analysis of how efficient these various services are with respect to the amount of time you have to work on site promotion.

MyBlogLog

This was the first big blog networking site. You put a widget on your site and it shows the last n number of users. (you can define it from 5 to 50 I think). The idea is you can join networks of other sites and add other bloggers as contacts. You can work the system by adding a lot of friends and joining a lot of networks (you are limited to joining 15 networks a day). If you visit a site x number of times, you will automatically join the neighborhood (the minimum number of visits is 10).

You can get join the limit of other networks every day, but there is on guarantee that anyone else will join you, or that if they did join you, they will actually go to your website.

I received 66 visits between December 8 to January 7 from MyBlogLog.com. About two per day.

BlogCatalog

BlogCatalog is designed and organized much better than MyBlogLog. Unlike MyBlogLog, it has forums and groups. It also has a ranking system. The more people visit your site and join your neighborhood, the higher your rank. There are no limits to joining other sites like MyBlogLog. You still have to work other sites to get people to visit. I was listed as one of the most popular blogs on the site for several weeks which may have helped my traffic.

Between December 8 and January 7, i received 284 visits from BlogCatalog. Almost 9.5 visits per day.

EntreCard

I get two types of traffic from Entrecard. One are visitors from other blogs who see the ads I place. I got 1,068 visits from those readers during the above time period. The other group are other members of Entrecard. They stay for very brief periods. I got 740 visits of this type.

Entrecard takes the most time to work. You have to visit other sites one at a time to earn credits to spend and to make the value of your own site worth more. It can easily take two hours a day if you want to maximize the system.

Over time, the members who visit are almost all repeat visitors and the traffic can almost totally be discounted.

It is worth joining Entrecard, but it isn’t worth spending a lot of time on it after you’ve been in the system for about a week or two. Some people have gone crazy with Entrecard and have devoted their entire sites to it. Others have gotten pissed off at the lack of quality traffic and quit.

The truth is in between. It is worth joining, especially if you are a new site. It is worth working once you join. But it isn’t worth working the longer you are in the network. At the same time, it also isn’t worth leaving because you still get a stream of traffic bigger than the above two networks.

Stumble Upon

I had 2,158 visits from SumbleUpon during the same time period.

This dominates my traffic and I spend the least amount of time working it. I think if I spent more time in the SU community, I’d get more stumbles for my deep pages and not just the front page. The main reason SU is so successful at generating traffic compared to the above networks is that it doesn’t rely on other bloggers. You don’t need a website to take part in SU so the audience is much larger.

I think this is where I’m going to be putting most of my energy in the next month. It seems like you get the biggest bang for the buck.

Even small percentage changes in my SU traffic will be larger than doubling the traffic from other networks.

I think I could get my daily average from SU over 100 if I just spend more time working SU and less time on the other sites.

I know what I’m going to use as a logo.

This was sort of a hard thing to think of. You want something simple but iconic. I also want to avoid cliched symbols like a globe and a compass.

The National Geographic logo was something they just sort of stumbled across when they put a gold border on their magazine 90 years ago.

There people out there who get paid big bucks to think up this shit. I knew that if I just waited long enough, I’d come up with something that worked and had a great story behind it.

It hit me last night….

My tattoo.

I’m going to use the image of the man on my tattoo. It has a backstory. It is iconic. It has a cool name (Tikitikitangata). And most of all, the god damn thing is burned onto my arm. I might as well get my money’s worth

This is something I’m comfortable with. Moreover, it will look really cool when I roll up my sleeve to show someone where it came from.

This would be awesome if I had a hotel chain.

This took a very long time for Revver to approve. No approval was necessary for any of the other services

I’m not sure if this will work. I have everything uploaded, but the admin tools are confusing.