Garaphernalia 6.0

I set several goals for 2009 with my blog. I achieved most of them and the one I didn’t achieve was more a matter of not having enough time. Here were the goals I set out and where I am now:

1. 5,000 RSS subscribers.
2. 7,500 Twitter Followers
3. Average 100,000 visits per month
4. Have a book published
5. Get my podcast on a regular schedule and done in a quasi professional manner

I made the 5,000 subscriber goal, even if I don’t include the inflated Feedburner numbers from Friendfeed. I have just over 5,000 with email and RSS subscribers.

The 7,500 Twitter follower goal was crushed long ago.

This Week in Travel has now gone 18 episodes and we are getting a lot of good feedback on the show.

I have contacted a publisher about a book, but haven’t had the time to pursue it. All my other goals have help my cause when I wish to pursue it, however. I might work on this in 2010.

The big goal that I didn’t know if I could do was the 100,000 visits per month. I did that in November. I’m at a 30 day run rate of 115,000 as of right now and might hit 120,000 in December. I’ll certainly stay above 100,000 for the foreseeable future (I hope).

My 2010 goals are going to be of a totally different. I haven’t finished a list yet, but I know they will deal more with Facebook, search traffic, and monetization.

The last three months have brought about a lot of changes. I’ve come back to the United States, launched a new travel podcast, and have started a two month road trip through the American west.

The goals I set out for 2009 were as follows:

1. 5,000 RSS subscribers. (5x increase)
2. 7,500 Twitter Followers (2.5x increase)
3. Average 100,000 visits per month (5x increase)
4. Have a book published
5. Get my podcast on a regular schedule and done in a quasi professional manner

Goal #1 is on track. If you look at my Feedburner numbers it is over 9,000 but that is mostly due to them adding FriendFeed numbers. If you substract the non-FriendFeed numbers, I’m still on track to easily get 5,000 by the end of the year. The RSS + email newsletter numbers are around 4,300 but I haven’t actually checked lately. With three months to go, I’m pretty confident about this.

Goal #2 has been demolished. Not much more to say about this. I have been putting more effort into Facebook than Twitter lately. Facebook is showing a higher rate of response from readers than Twitter. I think Facebook will be in my 2010 goals and Twitter will not.

Goal #3 is looking better but might still be difficult. This was always a long shot, but things have improved greatly in the last few months. In September I had 64,000 visits to my site and over 105,000 pageviews. 75,000 visits per month is easily in reach. Getting to 100,000 in December might require something I haven’t thought of yet. I am making some big changes, but I don’t know if they will kick in, in time. My Alexa and Complete rank should be below 50,000 when the dust settles. See below.

Goal #4 is in holding. I’m still going to do it, but I’ve been occupied with other things.

Goal #5 was achieved, but not in the way I thought. I launched This Week in Travel which is a podcast, and it is released in a consistent manner and is quasi professional. I was thinking in terms of something with video and about my travels when I made the goal. Nonetheless, I’m call it a win.

You may notice that none of my goals have dealt with money. I haven’t made monetizing the site a huge priority. I’ve been working on gathering an audience more than trying to make money off the site. The theory being that if you have an audience, you can always make money. Well, that time is now.

One problem I’m having is trying to get work done when I move every other day. It doesn’t lend itself to productivity. I’m going to take the first few months of 2010 and get an apartment, probably somewhere like Bangkok and work. I’m working on several new projects:

1) A massive SEO overhaul of my site. Most people who are regular visitors to Everything-Everywhere.com will not notice a thing. Currently, my navigation to all the places I’ve been is just linking to the category page in WordPress. This is horrible. I’m creating landing pages with all the content I’ve created for each country, city and attraction. I have a list of over 250 already. I’m also going back and working on my internal links for all these landing pages. This is something I’ve never done, so I’ve never really harnessed the power of my content. I’ll be putting ads on the landing pages and not on the front page of the site. This should dramatically increase my targeted search engine traffic.

2) Finish the move to Smugmug. I’ve removed (as far as I know) all the links to images on my self hosted photo site. I’ve also mapped my own domain to my Smugmug accounts (TravelPhotos.Everything-Everywhere.com) The next step is to remove all the Flick links from the blog. Once that is done, every photo on my site will be hosted under my own domain. I will also then work on reorganizing my photos into better sets and changing the layout of my photo page. I’m getting more traffic from Google Image search already and that should increase dramatically once this is all done.

3) I’m launching a new blog. I’ve been thinking about launching a multi-author blog but I didn’t just want to copy what other sites are doing. I thought about how I as an independent blogger would want to work with a multi-author blog and have come up with some unique things which should make it compelling to every independent travel blogger. If successful, it will drive traffic to their sites.

It will be interesting to see how the next three months pan out. I have a lot of work to do, but I’m moving in the right direction.

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.

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)