Web Site Design and Development

credit: sunshinecity

I am very pleased to announce that — subject to someone beating him by June 10th according to the original contest rules — Bob Younce of The Writing Journey is the winner of our ad contest. Bob wins the 125 x 125 pixel banner ad at the right for six months, for the traffic and subscribers that came as a result of his submission of my site to StumbleUpon, and for otherwise making an effort to promote the contest.

I say that Bob won subject to the original rules because according to the way the contest was originally framed, I reserved the right to post the winning ad on June 10th if I hadn’t gotten to my goal of 101 subscribers by today, April 10th. As of today I’m up to 67 subscribers, so I’m officially two thirds of the way there.

However, you could still win this contest if you are some well known blog A-lister and you wrote a glowing review about me and pointed people to the original contest rules and the Eleven Steps article.

So all of you A-Listers who are hanging on my every word, now’s your chance to win a foot race against Bob Younce!  I’ll bet you can’t do it.

Honorable Mention

Jim Cronin of the Real Estate Tomato gets an honorable mention as the early favorite in the contest, after publishing a guest post of mine.

Thank you to everyone else who participated as well by inviting me to do a guest post or promoting me on FaceBook or the like.

What’s Next?

Starting tomorrow we’ll have a brand new series, 21 Days to a Better Blog. Watch for it.

Son of Freelance Face-Off

Recently Chris Knight over at EZineArticles took notice of my original Freelance Face-Off between Associated Content and EZineArticles.  Michelle Devon had this to say about Freelance Face-Off classic:

Hummm, I write for both AC and EzineArticles, and I see them as two completely different animals and wouldn’t have ever thought to compare them, because they are so radically different.

What’s that you say?  Apples and oranges?  Man, that’s it.  The rhetorical gauntlet has been thrown down, and you know how I get in the presence of a down thrown gauntlet of a rhetorical nature.

I Got Your Apples and Oranges Right Here

No, seriously, Michelle, it’s all good, especially since our conversation made me think to compare those true apples and oranges, CatalystBlogger and Twitter.

CatalystBlogger is Jennifer Williamson’s excellent Freelance Writing Blog that I recommended elsewhere.  Its main characteristic is thoughtful, clear writing about interesting Freelancing topics.

Twitter is the social networking debutante du jour.  Love me, she cries, for I am still young and interesting.  Its main characteristic is that you have 140 characters to get your message across, which everyone is doing, incessantly.

So What’s The Relationship?

I wouldn’t have thought to compare CatalystBlogger and Twitter, except that today I was working on an article series that was going to mention Twitter, and I happened to check my traffic logs. 

Here’s an interesting section from them:

I say I “happened to check” my traffic logs, but I’ll let you in on a little secret.  That’s like an alcoholic saying “I happened to be enjoying a beer.” 

I can’t stop checking my traffic logs.  I need professional help.

Twelve Hits From Twitter Versus Thirteen From CatalystBlogger?

Are you serious? 

As good as Jennifer Williamson’s blog is, no one would dispute that Twitter has gotten more attention.  In terms of Google references, Twitter is approximately 1,000 times more popular than CatalystBlogger.  Yet in terms of recognition for Inklit, my participation on Twitter has gotten me not only nothing particularly worth reading, but one less web site hit than Jennifer’s blog.

Being Visible Is Not Being Interesting

There’s a difference between being visible and being interesting.  Twitter is visible.  CatalystBlogger is interesting.

The reason I got more traffic from Jennifer’s blog than I got from Twitter even though Twitter is 1,000 times more visible is that the people reading Jennifer’s blog are looking for something interesting to read, so they click through to my blog (only to discover that I’m not as interesting as Jennifer — but what the heck, I get the benefit).

In contrast to Jennifer’s readers, the people on Twitter are interested in being visible, and telling people they’re in the shower now, or what have you.

“Twit.”  That should have been a warning.

Present company included.

Is There a Moral Here?

Here are several of them.  I’m running a special.

• Being around people who are interesting is worthwhile.
• Commenting on other people’s blogs can be a more effective traffic building “technique” than hanging around on Twitter.
• Be interesting, and visibility will follow.
• Tweeting is for the birds.
• Friendship doesn’t abide your 140 character limit.
• There will be a new debutante in six months.

photo credit: joshuamckenty

If you’re a dedicated blogger and someone who has more than one interest in life, sooner or later you may be haunted by the issue of how many blogs you should have. That’s the position I find myself in now. To give you an idea of how much I’m wrestling with this issue, today at lunch I was doing a balance sheet of the pros and cons of using an existing blog and widening it to several topics, versus spinning off yet another blog that I’m not sure I have time for.

Because that’s so on my mind these days, I was very interested in this discussion on Suzie Cheel’s blog, which is about the pros and cons of having a narrowly focused, single-topic blog versus having a wide ranging blog with many topics.

The Battle of the Bloggers

A lot of folks weighed in on Suzie’s blog, and I was hoping some of my readers might also want to discuss it here. One of the first things I did in going over it was look at who was arguing for and against specialization, and how well that model seems to be serving them. On the specialist side of the argument was ProBlogger author Darren Rowse (In fact, I learned about the discussion because Darren linked to it). Taking the generalist approach was an author that Suzie Cheel cited in her original post, John Pozadzides. John believes strongly enough in the case for blog generalization that the tag line of his blog is “Specialization is for Insects”, part of a Heinlein quote that John gives in more detail in his About Page.

Digging into the numbers for both authors, I noticed that John had about 3,700 pages indexed by Google and 1,045 Feedburner subscribers as of today. He also posted a figure of an average of 15,000 to 20,000 page views daily. The ratio of page views to subscribers in his case is approximately 17:1, which is about what it is on Inklit, where I have 1,072 page views daily and 57 subscribers.

Comparing Darren’s numbers to John’s, what struck me immediately is that Darren had less than twice as many pages indexed by Google (5,260), yet he had about forty-two times as many subscribers. I don’t know Darren’s page view numbers, but I estimate them at something over a half million daily.

That’s Not The Result I Wanted

I love that Heinlein quote about specialization. I really wanted to have a blog about everything — in fact, as of yesterday, I had decided that that’s was where I was heading, and this morning I was taking the first steps in that direction, and was pretty much prepared to make the frightening announcement that Inklit was about to be devoured by my growing Borg Collective!

Have no fear. I am a specialist again. This is a blog about Writing on the Internet. Pay no attention to those digressions about Wordpress Plugins.

Readers, What Do You Think?

Comments? Do you specialize? If you generalize, do you do it in more than one place?

credit: The Moonstone Archive

When I wrote my 101 Subscribers in 30 Days post, Minnesota Investment Property specialist Scott Ficek was good enough to comment on on the post and recommend the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin, so I could get a nice-sized subscriber base like the one shown at right.

So, thank you to Scott and I hope he’s right that this plugin works well, lest I have my clothes sold off by pregnant teenage chain smokers.

(No, that’s not a bid to go after some of the wrong kind of traffic, but I’ll bet I get it anyway.)

While I appreciate Scott’s participation and suggestion, I must admit that I almost didn’t make it past the name on this plugin.

I realize that people who need someone to follow are stoned in love with the bald one, but many of us could care less what Seth Godin would do. I would have called it the “New Visitor Welcome Plugin” or the “Convert New Visitors to Subscribers” plugin. That way when people are wondering how to convert new visitors, they’d find the plugin. But that’s just me. I appreciate Richard Miller writing it, and if you’re going to contribute good code to the community I guess you can pick whatever name you want. Meantime those of us who’ve largely forsaken programming for writing can just shut up about it and link to the plugin, already, by way of saying thank you.

Thanks and a hat tip again to Scott.

credit: smokegirl_rebekah

Happy Friday.

I don’t usually go for confessional blogs myself, so I usually try not to write like mine is one. You know the genre. They usually have a tagline that starts with “Just”, to qualify their author’s efforts. “Just my thoughts on the war”, for example, or “Just the ramblings of a chain smoking pregnant teenager living with her boyfriend behind a music store in Taiwan”.

However, sometimes I live up to my own standards so poorly that I would make a great Republican. So this is just a happy Friday post, depending on the kindness of strangers, living behind the music store. It is just a confessional post, with the following confessions:

• I love how easy it is to self publish online, because it means there are lots of opportunities.
• I hate how easy it is to self publish online, because it means that every chain smoking pregnant teenager living with her boyfriend behind a music store in Taiwan is in competition with me.
• I also hate how easy it is to publish online because I can get confused about which of my projects are important. Given the terrible, self-imposed imperative to become awesomely popular and the number of chain smoking pregnant teenagers I’m competing with, I feel like I have to come up with a definitive domain / topic / killer app within the next few days or I’ll die penniless, with my young nemeses selling my clothes for cigarette money.

Now you know why I hate confessional blogs.

In the interest of replacing this funk with some creative work, I’m going to shift gears now and work on one of those projects. If you see any teens catching up with me, for God’s sake, won’t you please let them know how bad smoking is for the baby?

I’ve made my living for many years as a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist with myself and the people who work for me as my sole “client”. Now with Inklit.com I have an opportunity to explore the broader world of Internet writing. Like most people, new things interest me only if I can relate them to what I already know. Because of this, I’m fascinated by how Internet writing in general relates to SEO writing.

How Are Writing and SEO Related? It Depends Who You Ask

The answer you get about the relationship between writing and SEO varies quite a bit depending on who you ask.

Pro bloggers often tend to minimize SEO. Authors like Andy Beard and John Chow show a certain disdain for Google-only business models. Professional bloggers often point out that relying on Google is inherently fragile, since you can’t guarantee that the algorithm that favors you today will continue to bring you good fortune tomorrow. Furthermore, these authors argue that great writing makes SEO unnecessary, because great writing in itself will lead you to be widely known and recognized, making the search engines superfluous. In this respect, some authors stress that there’s something we can identify as first class writing, and this first class writing is somehow a thing apart from “mere SEO”.

Other authors — often those who are blogging trainers and hosting providers — stress that SEO is little more than constant writing. According to the blog salesmen, if you just blog consistently and often and well, you will rise to the top of the search engines. Do enough writing and you will inevitably rise to the top, so you don’t need an SEO specialist — what you need is to start blogging.

To the pro blogger, SEO has nothing to do with great writing, and to the blog salesman, SEO is nothing but great writing.

Adequate Writing is Good SEO

My own position is that I can’t envision Search Engine Optimization without writing, especially today. Many people still cherish the common misconception that meta tags or other secret shortcuts will rocket them to the top somehow, and this misconception doesn’t hurt the professional SEO consultant one bit. (In fairness I should point out that in the the “title” tag and the “description” meta tag are the exceptions to the misconception). Were his clients to learn the truth, that good SEO is 90% about writing, I’m sure many SEO fees would go down.

This riddle captures the essence of the problem, from an SEO consultant’s point of view:

Q. What’s the difference between an Internet Writer and a Search Engine Optimization specialist?
A. About forty dollars per hour.

Jokes aside, if it’s 90% true that you can write your way to the top, the SEO specialist makes a legitimate stand on the remaining 10%. Along these lines, there’s one blog salesman who uses one of my blogs as a “case study” of someone who blogged his way to the top of the search engines. He’s correct that blogging is a big part of my strategy. Where his analysis fails is that I did several other things that had nothing to do with blogging. To that extent, I understand and am sympathetic to the SEO specialists emphasis on their “secret sauce”. (Of course I’m talking about legitimate SEO specialists here, not the “rocket your web site to the top in 24 hours guaranteed” people who show up daily in your mailbox.)

Good Writing is Also Good SEO

Although I believe adequate writing will get your web site to 90% of where it needs to be all by itself, I believe that some of the 10% gap we’ve been discussing can also be filled in by writing, especially if your writing is exceptionally good. One of the things that happens to good writers over time is that they build a human readership. Depending on your niche, this may be valuable in itself, but from an SEO perspective, it’s always valuable as a source of potential incoming links.

As the Barbara Streisand SEO song goes,

“People…
People who need (one way links from high page rank sites that are thematically similar to their own)
Are the luckiest people in the world.”

Beyond incoming links, the other thing that good writing on your blog will buy you are opportunities to go be a good writer on someone else’s blog. Hey presto: more incoming links.

Is Adequate Good Enough?

I believe that if you’re looking to optimize your site, you should either start writing or hire someone to start writing. This is the most important thing you can do. Search engines have gotten much smarter over the years, so that more and more, they’re focused on indexing sites with lots of good, fresh content. Once once you’re writing on a consistent basis, your next step is to see if you can improve the quality of your material. Can you learn how to make it more link worthy, and can you find venues off of your main site that can help you to build your link reputation? Guest blogging and article submission are two great ways to place your writing strategically so you’ll get a search engine boost.