Analysis of my attempts to figure out blogging and podcasting

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.

Note: there is a slight fisheye effect in the videos. That is a function of the lens I was using.

I’m testing several video services today. I’m uploading the same, unedited 8 second clip from my new Sanyo camera to several services. I’ll post them here for testing. The clip has a Sweedish and German couple I met in Mulu National Park.

I really like goofing around with my Google Earth layer. The ROI on the time spent on it is next to nothing, but I enjoy it.

There are a bunch of things I want to try and do with my current KML file.

1) I’d like to create a simple template for all my pins. I know you somehow create a consistent background color and font for each pin, but I don’t know how yet. Currently I’m just doing HTML on every pin.

2) I’m going to integrate Google AdSense into the map. I know it is possible, I just need to figure out how. I have no problems doing this.

3) As I mentioned earlier, I’m going to integrate the map into the header of my website. I’ve wanted to do this since I launched the site. A lot of travel sites use a map as some sort of graphical effect. I think i can use it in the same way, but also have it serve a very practical function.

4) One problem I’ve noticed is that the size of the balloons you get when you click on a pin is usually far to large for the size of the map on an web page. It looks fine in Google Earth, but not in Google Maps.

If anyone has experience or suggestions for how I can improve my map, please let me know.

I’ve been using Entrecard lately as a way to generate traffic on Everything-Everywhere.com.

While the system is a good idea (ie: a market based blogging network), having been using it now for over a month, I think it is in serious need of tweaking. Here are my suggestions:

1) Lower the cap on drops to 50 a day. This is a number which humans can reasonably do which would discourage chain dropping. The quality of traffic would increase as people would drop on sites they actually read. Chain dropping would still occur, but it would be seriously diminished. This would also deflate the currency. Over a few weeks the thousands of credits in the system would get eaten as ads are placed.

1a) Entrecard admins need to serve as a Federal Reserve and watch the supply of credits in the system and adjust the % of credits which are retired when an ad is purchased. They should be prepared to adjust this weekly if necessary and make the change public. I’d shoot for a credit per user ratio and try to stick to that over time. Just make the currency stable, regardless of what the ratio is.

2) Put in a real forum. If you want it to be a real community, put in real forum software. Let people create topics dealing with non-entrecard issues.

3) Remove categories and put in tags. Let each person give 3-5 tags for their site. I’d love to be able to target Filipino websites for example, but that is impossible with the current system.

4) Let site owners set their own price. A clearing price would soon be established for each site. Popular sites will sell for more obviously. If you set the price too high, you wont get advertisers. If you set it too low, you leave credits on the table.

5) Remove the “most popular” page and let people create ad hoc searches based on tags. If I want to find a site with “Japan” in the tag which sells for 30-60ec, then I can just find that site. This would remove the sexy factor of trying to get on the “most popular” page and eliminate a lot of the motivation for chain dropping. Results for “most dropped” could still be obtained and trumpeted, but you’d have to work for it.