Garaphernalia 7.5

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)

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.