Garaphernalia 6.0

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