Garaphernalia 6.0

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.