Categories
Blogging

The Demise of Earned Media

The Public Relations industry has been built upon a certain balance between their clients and journalists. Clients want publicity in the media and journalists who need to fill space and meet deadlines were looking for something to fill that space. PR provided assistance to journalists and provided a service to their clients and everyone could come away from the relationship as a winner. If successful, the exposure provided by the “earned media” coverage was far more cost effective than advertising.

I think that relationship is starting to break down.

Bloggers for the most part do not have deadlines nor do they have space to fill. Unless you happen to be a news site covering a particular industry, you have no need for press releases. In fact, almost every blogger I know finds press releases to be an extreme nuisance.

PR agencies have been broadening what they do, providing more promotional campaigns for their clients and straying into the world of advertising. The problem is, they still seem to have the mindset of “earned media”. I’ve had dozens of PR people contact me asking begging for what is basically free advertising. They don’t have the budgets that ad agencies have, nor do the have the mindset to actually pay for exposure.

What I’ve seen is that they start at the top of the list and work their way down until they find someone some sucker who is willing to do it for free. Inevitably after I say no to some promotion, I’ll see it pop up a month later on some site where the blogger is just flattered that someone is paying attention to them.

Of course, you get what you pay for. As with most things on the internet, blogs are distributed by a long tail curve. Any niche or sub-niche you want to look at will be distributed pretty much the same way. If you are willing to work with anyone, that is exactly what you will get. The bloggers who are willing to do anything for free and the ones who can do the least for you.

In my world of travel there are still opportunities to work with PR which make sense. Press trips being the most obvious example.

PR companies need to know that if they start to expand outside of the traditional bounds of PR (which they should), they need to adapt their methods as well. Begging for bloggers to promote their clients for free just doesn’t work, and in the long run is actually counterproductive.

Categories
Blogging

How to increase your Klout Score in 9 Easy Steps

1) Put all of your focus on Twitter. Despite the fact that they claim to look at other networks, the vast majority of any Klout score is just Twitter. Having a blog or a fan page doesn’t help you with your Klout score. Ignore everything else.

2) Auto-follow everyone. It doesn’t make a difference who they are, just jack your followers up as high as you can. Klout doesn’t care about how many people you follow.

3) Stop producing original content. Klout doesn’t care where content comes from, only that people retweet you. Content creation is a waste of time from a Klout perspective. Time spent writing is time that could be spent tweeting. You don’t get bonus points for being original in Klout.

4) Take part in every Twitter chat you can. There are tons of chats which happen every week on Twitter. Take part in all of them. Lots of retweeting going on with these events.

5) Follow conference tags. You don’t have to attend the conference, just use the hashtag a lot and retweet what others are saying.

6) Pump out lots of inspirational quotes. People eat this shit up. These are the Successories posters of Twitter. Try to do several every day.

7) Troll Reddit or Digg for links. Just find linkbait from other sources and tweet that. Remember, the title matters more than the actual content for getting retweets.

8 ) Take part in weekly hastag events. #FotoFriday #TravelTuesday #MexicoMonday Find as many as you can and take part in all of them.

9) Do not go on vacation. Being away from Twitter for even a few days will result in your “influence” going down.

Congrats! You are now influential. Enjoy the Klout Perks you will be receiving such as free tickets to the next Rob Schnider movie or cheap electronic gadgets which are no longer produced.

Categories
Blogging

Results of my load time efforts

Every so often I use the site load time tool from Pingdom.com. Not only does it give you a great analysis of what is and what isn’t slow on your site, it will also record the tests so you can check it out in the future. Here is a screen shot of my most recent site load test:

You can see just how much faster my site has gotten. It has gone from a 7 seconds page load 3 months ago, down to only 1.5 seconds now.

There are still a few minor things I could do to improve page speed, but we are talking things which would in total shave off only a few tenths of a second.

Overall I’m very pretty pleased with the performance of my site now.

I think I’m going to put this aside for the moment and focus on increasing conversions in September.

Categories
General

August Blog Review

A quick look at some of my numbers compared to July 2011:

Visits: +18.41%
Pageviews: +49.41%
Pages/Visit: +26.18%
Bounce Rate: -6.14%
Avg. Time on Site: +21.42%

Facebook Fans: 479, +4.4%
Subscribers: 630, +4.3%

My efforts at recommitting myself to blogging are paying off, and I haven’t really gotten going. I only had 1 guest post this month and didn’t publish anything in the larger outlets like The Atlantic or The Huffington Post.

There were two big wins this month in terms of traffic. One, was the guest post on Stuck in Customs and the second was my review of the iPad which got picked up by several gadget blogs.

The big thing I keep telling other bloggers (who never seem to listen) is that the ONLY way you can grow your audience is by exposing yourself to people who have never heard of you. That is exactly what both of those posts did for me. Having the same circle of people retweet, stumble and comment over and over does NOTHING for you. It is a circle jerk inside an echo chamber. This month I grew by more subscribers than most blogs have total, and it is because I found way to introduce myself to a new audience.

You will notice the big jump in pages per visit and time on site. There were several things which contributed to this:

  1. I removed the thumbnail links to wahoha and mgid.com and replaced them with links to my own content. What few complaints I did get were usually about those thumbnails. Those links generated about 3,000 visits per month for me, but they were low quality. By just writing more, I can compensate for the traffic loss. Also, those 3,000 visits were probably generated by 2,000 people clicking on them and leaving my site. Those 2,000 clicks are now staying on the site.
  2. I massively decreased the load time of the site. I wrote about that before. The end result for pages per visist isn’t quite the jump I saw in the first few days, but it has remained substantially higher.
  3. I added a “Best of” section in my navigation to some of my more popular posts from the past

I don’t expect massive jumps in this number in the future. If I get them they will be due to an influx in new readers who are exploring old content and it will only be a temporary increase. Any systematic increases will be small and incremental from here on out.

I have also read some speculative posts about Google using analytics data to determine “quality”. If that is true, then increasing time on site, pages per visit and reducing bounce rate should all help drive search traffic.

I’ll be writing 2x a month for BigThink.com. They were recently named by Time Magazine as one of the 50 Best Websites on the internet. I’ll probably be writing about more than just travel, or least more than what you might expect from a guy who travels. I also hope to have 1 or 2 more pieces appear in the Atlantic in September.

After bragging about my increase in search traffic I made a site wide change in how I display my HTML titles. I used to have the name of my site in every single title. I removed it and now the title is just the title of the post. It is cleaner and shorter. My traffic dropped a bit after I did it because I had so many pages change at once, but I expect it to bounce back.

I’m also changing how I title my daily photos. I’m no longer using the format “Daily Travel Photo – Place Name” but rather used the more descriptive text found in the caption of the photo. I think that should bring in more long tail traffic and the old format wasn’t doing anything for me.

As of today I’ve finished the huge glut of photos I had from the last 4 months and I will have much more time to write. This will mean more posts on my site (I have a long list) as well as more guest posts.

This has been a big stumbling block for me. Editing photos takes time to do it right and I can’t write about some places until I get the photos done. I have a few more from Tahoe and Mexico I took this month, but there aren’t too many of those.

Having taken care of most of my site load issues, I’m going to focus this month on conversions and tracking. I haven’t really paid much attention to this lately and I think I can see large jumps in conversion if I focus on it. I will also be implementing some changing to my Facebook page which I think should result in growth over there as well.

Categories
Blogging

How improving my page speed increased my pages per visit

Check this out…

When I took a day and worked on improving my page load time, I didn’t know what the impact would be. I wasn’t thinking in terms of quantitative improvements to my site.

To my surprise my pages per visit has almost DOUBLED since I implemented the changes!!!

From August 1-17 I averaged 2.35 pages per visit.

On August 18-19 I averaged 4.52 pages per visit!

That is a 92% increase in just 2 days!

Granted, this is only a 2 day trend and it is possible that things could go back to normal, however, the past two days would have been among the highest I’ve had ever. The other big days were back when my site was more basic.

I’m going to see if this continues over the next week or so. Regardless if it stays this high, one of my next projects is going to be making my archives easier to browse and putting a “best of” list of my favorite posts up on my main navigation area. Both of those features should encourage more browsing when people discover my site.