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Ten days ago I posted How To Get 101 Subscribers to your New Blog in 30 Days.   This means I’m one third of the way to our April 10th deadline to claim the 101 subscriber bragging rights.  So here’s an account of our progress so far.

When I posted the article on the eleventh, I had a grand total of eight subscribers, down from a high of ten a couple of days earlier.  Since then, we’ve reached a high of forty-four subscribers as of a couple of days ago, and currently we’re showing forty-two subscribers.  So we’ve added 34 subscribers in ten days.  Assuming we can do that again twice in the twenty days that remain, we’ll finish up with 110 subscribers, well above the 101 we’re shooting for. 

What I’ve Learned,  Guest Posts, and The Winner So Far

Getting thirty-four subscribers again during each of the next two ten-day periods will be a challenge.

I believe that of the 34 subscribers we’ve picked up so far, probably about twenty of them come from my guest post on the Real Estate Tomato.  Another two to four probably come from miscellaneous sources including ActiveRain, and the remaining ten to twelve come from StumbleUpon.  So the likely winner to date for the contest would be Jim Cronin at the Real Estate Tomato, with the runner up spot going to Bob Younce at the Writing Journey for introducing my site to StumbleUpon.

From a subscriber standpoint, the guest post had the best results, StumbleUpon has done a better job in terms of raw traffic.  StumbleUpon has sent me 614 hits to date, versus 120 for Entrecard and sixty-five for the Real Estate Tomato.

Guest Post Progress Stalls

I lost forward momentum on the guest posts after the Tomato article.  I submitted an article to Anne Wayman at the Golden Pencil, but got no response after almost a week and another email.  Since then I’ve sent a rewrite of that article to ChrisBlogging.com.  I’ll let you know if it goes anywhere the second time, and how the other submissions go.

Commercial time:  Do you have great traffic and want a guest post to win a six month ad?  Check out our ad contest.

I’ve been making more progress on submitting some articles to low-paying or link-paying article submission sites.  The ones I’ve tried so far are Associated Content (which doesn’t impress me, even though they pay) and EZineArticles.com (which does impress me, even though they don’t pay).   I do expect to get some benefit from EZineArticles over time given the links they let you publish, but I don’t expect to see results before the April 10th deadline.

Overall Results

I still have my work cut out for me to get to 101 in 30 days, but I’m on track so far, and I’m very pleased with how things are going.  My unique visitor count is certainly better than I expected it to be at this point (more than 200 per day on average, which I consider excellent for 21 days on a brand new domain).  I’ve made some new friends, and it seems like every day I’m learning something new.

I have a dream.

I have a dream of getting 101 subscribers to this blog within 30 days. You can help by subscribing now.

I’m no Martin Luther King or anything, so this is not a big dream, but nevertheless it’s non-trivial. I have a niche blog that’s almost five years old that doesn’t yet have 101 subscribers. Getting 101 subscribers to a brand new blog that’s starting with 10 subscribers (YES — we have reached double digits as of today!) will be a non-trivial accomplishment. But I think it’s worth shooting for!

It’s March 10th, 2008, as I write this. I’ll post it on March 11th. 30 days hath September and so on, so by April 10th, I need to be showing 101 Feedburner Subscribers.

Why Do You Want More Subscribers?

No matter what your online writing business model is, you can benefit from having more subscribers. Especially if selling advertising is part of your business model, a huge subscriber base is an absolute must. If you’re offering blog ghostwriting or similar services, a blog chock full of subscribers is a work product showing what you can do by way of promoting your client’s business. If you’re selling information products online, folks who subscribe to blogs are the types of people you want in your target market. Even niche bloggers may find that having more subscribers will get their articles more attention than they would otherwise, leading to more incoming links and incoming referrals.

My Brain-Dead Simple Ten-Part Plan

The eleven part plan I’m using is below.

If you subscribe now, you’ll get to follow my attempt to reach this goal and you’ll find out if my eleven part plan really works or is all wet. Either way, though, together we’ll learn techniques for getting more subscribers to our blogs and doing more business!

Ready… set … go!

1. Start where you are.
   I started out with ten subscribers (Hooray — I only have to get ninety-one more!). If you don’t have ten subscribers already, it may take you thirty-two days. For extra credit it’d be neat if I could get to 111 subscribers by April 10th. That way I’ll know I added 101 to my original ten. But let’s be clear: my base goal is 101 by April 10th.
2. Start asking people to subscribe on your blog.
   Start asking people to subscribe at the end of each blog post. In a post like this talking about your goals, you could make something of a joke or game out of it asking people to please subscribe at least three times. OK, that’s three. I don’t want to annoy you with it.
3. Fix up your feed.
   Burn your feed with Feedburner, if you haven’t done so already. Fix up your subscription area and make it prominently visible. Make sure that people can subscribe via RSS or email. Free services for offering email RSS subscriptions are available through Feedblitz and Feedburner.
4. Put up a FeedBurner subscriber chiclet. You want to show how many subscribers you have now. Don’t worry about those cheesy ten subscribers. You’ll have 101 in a month. The past is simply prologue. Your new subscribers want to see your plan for new subscribers succeed, because if you can do it, so can they!
5. Offer a free ad. Offer an ad for free for a period of time (three months, six months, one year) for the webmaster who gets you the most new subscribers. A new ad format that’s very popular is the 125 x 125 pixel format. I’m going to put up a spot on my blog to host four such ads, and use winning one or more free ad as an incentive.
6. If you have other blogs or other social networks, use them. (If you don’t, it may take you 101 days or what have you — use what you have available). Ways to use your other blog include writing a post linking to your subscription drive. On social networks, one think I’m going to try is sending a message out to MyBlogLog Community or the like. Link to your free ad offer and other posts.
7. Blog about your subscription drive.
   Every few days you want to tell people about your subscription drive. Once every 1-3 days seems about right for the first week, then once every 3-7 days for the rest of the period. You don’t want to overdo it. Everyone likes public radio, but everybody hates a telethon.
8. Ramp up your social networking. There are hundreds of social networks out there. You may already be a member of one or more — and your friends there miss you and haven’t heard from them in awhile. Don’t let them down. Tell them what you’re trying to do.
9. Email bloggers about your free add offer. You’ll want to use this suggestion with some care, and realize that top bloggers get lots of requests for links, help, etc. Be polite in your approach, humble about your current blog traffic, and generous in the length of the ad they can win if they help you. I’ll post a sample email you can use in a future post. (Hmm . . . how will you be notified when that post comes out? If only there were a way to see when new blog posts came out for a given blog…).
10. Ramp up your commenting. Are you meeting new bloggers who might see your ad? My goal for the period of this promotion is five comments per weekday. Remember, don’t spam the comments about your program — your goal in commenting is to participate in other peoples’ conversation and get them to stop by your blog.
11. Ramp up your posts to other blogs. Maybe someone’s asked you to do a guest post recently, and you’ve been putting it off? If their blog is about how to promote a blog or has anything to do with online marketing, maybe now’s the time to go write that guest article! Make sure to mention your free ad offer.

There was a cartoon once in which a character was accused by some mad doctor type of having “Schizophrenia of the Brainia” — I put up a variant spelling above so you can see how to pronounce it.

Probably it was a Flintstones episode. I was glued to those as a kid.

It’s in the spirit of schizophrenia of the brainia that I reflect today on my web site and blog here. On the one hand I have a personal blog that’s kind of fun, about Buddhism and Depression and what-note that I feel like what-noting. On the other hand, I really want to use this prime “internet marketing real estate” to talk about (and sell) “internet real estate marketing” as a service. Pardon the clever use of dyslexia.

But schizophrenia / multiple personality disorder isn’t really the metaphor I’m going for. The goal of a doctor treating a patient with multiple personality disorder is to get them to become re-integrated. But the goal of doctor me in treating this multiple personality web site, unless I miss my guess, should be to disintegrate it into two separate blogs.

I’m pleased to report that ParticleWave today became fully Internets 2.0 compliant. Flickr has more about this.

I thought this would also be a good time to do my post-mortem on my first three-week iteration of LeadReply, which you might call iterations 1.0, given our naming convention. Actually in looking over the Software Requirements Specification (SRS), it looks as though iteration 1.0 is not quite mortem yet, since there’s one feature missing — Realtor® notification. That should probably be what I tackle today and tomorrow, even though by rights it’s OK since Eudora’s handling it for now.

The main thing is that in iteration one, we combined an autoresponder with an automatic data entry system into a system that can grow into a full fledged contact manager or drip marketing system. The SQL Server database design is pretty complete — what gets tricky now is that we’re actually entering clients and leads into production, so modifications to the schema become a bit more involved from here on out. Fortunately most of the changes we need now are additional stored procedures, so dropping all / creating all should still work fine in that realm.

Iteration one was a good brush up / learning vehicle for more SQL and SQL Server stored procedures than we’d done in many a month, so from the project portfolio aspect it was a good success. I also got to bang out some good ADO.NET code in C Sharp — not rocket science, to be sure, but some HR guy is bound to expect that it is, so now I can say, “sure, I’ve done that”, since he’ll never be able to figure out that I could based on how similar it is to everything else in the universe.

It might be worth getting with IHomefinder or Moineau Designs or the like at this point to see if there’s any demand for an IDX lead parser and autoresponder, since that’s what we’ve got at the end of iteration 1.

All in all I think being where I am at this stage is pretty good given some of the distractions that came up this week such as some existing web site work and a bit of direct client work as well. The web site, LeadReply.com, is almost utterly nowhere yet — but that’s exactly where it’s supposed to be at this point, with most of the work on the lead parser and database.

Built into the SRS was that each iteration should have a go / no go decision about the next iteration. I’m leaning toward “go” at the moment but will formalize that into the SRS. If we go ahead, some priorities are:

• Write and test the campaign scheduler for sending out emails after the first “one-off” welcome email.
• Write a parameterizable opt-in form that can be included on third party sites (e.g. MY third Internets 2.0 enabled third party sites ).
• Write the corresponding one-click opt-out form, where the default result is “opted out”, but in case the user made a mistake, let them opt back in.

That’s a bit different focus than the first version of the SRS, so I should get this merged into that and do a bit more planning.

As always, what should the business be doing is the harder question than what should the software be doing.

In my last post, I hinted that ParticleWave has been about making money on the Internet all along.

As Gavin DeGraw summed it up, “I don’t want to be anything other than what I’ve been trying to be lately.” And I might add, whatever that is, the mind has a propensity to declare that that’s been what it’s been all along.

Meantime over on my Oakland Blog, I hit the zone this morning with a post about how much I love Walmart. You might also call that post, “Confessions of an Interloper” — but if you do that, you waste a perfectly good title.

You know us interlopers: We always wonder about what’s in the title tag. That’s how you get to be an interloper.

So how do you make money on the Internet? It’s simple, get yourself a domain, like ParticleWave, and then fool around with it in every moment of your spare time for a couple of years until you know something. Then go off in a totally different direction, i.e., real estate, and have a head-slapping moment when you realize that some other guy in the office is being paid to be an internet interloper. (Or internetloper, as one might say). Then realize, “Hey, you can make money on the Internets in Real Estate? Sweet! I’ll try that approach.”

Alternatively, you can stumble into some other way to do. If you do, that’s great. I hope I do, to. Actually, I don’t plan to stumble. I plan to learn, and to teach, and to succeed.

Why not. What else have I got going on?

I will say this, though. When I see some other articles about how easy and overnight it is, however, I want to cringe. For me, it’s been hundreds of hours of work, lots of false starts, hits and misses. Even now, I can’t say that my Internet revenue is such a big deal that I can afford to give up my “brick and mortar” activities. Not that I really use brick and mortar on anything, but that’s the idiom.

After every major Google update, it seems, someone will come out with a new obituary, announcing the death of reciprocal linking. And it’s true that in recent years, Google seems to have downplayed reciprocal linking in their algorithm. Yet for all of that, reciprocal linking is alive and well.

There are several reasons why reciprocal linking survives. First, though they are the biggest game in town, Google is certainly not the only game, and Yahoo and MSN continue to put significant weight on reciprocal links. Secondly, the search engines aren’t the only reason to link — you can also expect some traffic directly from the link itself. Finally, even in the case of Google, all is not lost. Though they have downplayed reciprocal linking, there doesn’t seem to be too much evidence to suggest that Google actively penalizes them. (That said, you should read their webmaster guidelines for specific advice.)

As with anything else related to your web site traffic, however, it’s important to have some guidelines before setting out. Too often we see Realtors® doing reciprocal linking in a way that will give them less benefit, or no benefit at all. Here are specific mistakes we think you should avoid when you set out to include a link directory on your site:

1. Having all your links on one page, or too few pages. Google recommends that you keep your links to a “reasonable” number, fewer than 100 per page. Unfortunately many of the link directories set up on Z57 and Advanced Access sites that have linked to us violate that very rule. It may be that those sites can be configured differently. The custom sites we offer solve this problem by automatically limiting the number of links per page.
2. Linking to all comers, part I: “bad neighborhoods”. Google suggests you should avoid links to web spammers and bad neighborhoods. At the very least, it’s worthwhile to see if the site has been banned by Google. Go to Google and type in “site:www.potentialpartner.com” (substituting the real main web site address for your potential partner, of course). You should see something like “Results 1 - 10 of about [some number] from www.potentiallinkpartner.com”. If Google isn’t indexing anything at all, then either the site is brand new and not indexed yet (wait), or it has been banned (don’t reciprocate).
3. Linking to all comers, part II: no theme. Your goal in linking to other sites is partially to get other sites linking back, but also you want to establish — both for the search engines and your users — a reputation as an authority on real estate. Yes, that texas holdem site may link back to you, but so what? How is that related to your theme, and what does it say about your site that you link to it? Your focus should be first and foremost on real estate, and secondarily on related topics (local resources, real estate finance, lenders, etc.) Ask yourself: would a user of my site (someone moving or an investor) potentially find this of interest? If the answer is no, don’t swap links.
4. Linking to all comers, part III: no quality control. A site can be indexed by the search engines and be related to real estate, and still fail to be a site you should link to. I’m not talking about becoming the ultimate web site critic, but you should have a few basic standards in place. I personally want to see some sort of unique content, not just a link directory, and especially not just a link directory with a bunch of affiliate marketing / adsense ads. Again, would a user of your site be interested in a bunch of links and some advertising? If not, why are you linking to it? I prefer sites that are established. If they’re new, I at least like them to look like they’re not under construction. I definitely don’t mind cosmetically unusual sites from fellow Realtors® — often these home grown sites have the most real interesting content, even if some look a bit odd.
5. Paying no attention to search engines. I often copy the page the webmaster offers to link to me from into Google, Yahoo, and MSN. I like to see that my link will appear on a page that’s indexed by at least one of the major engines, or if the quality of the site is borderline, I like it to be indexed by two or more.
6. Paying too much attention to search engines. On the other extreme from being oblivious to search are those link partners who approach me with something like “I have a PR6 site and will link from a PR4 page in exchange for a link on your PR3 page here and your PR2 page here”. Forget page rank — focus on quality links to and from quality sites.
7. Ignoring link text. Link text is the text that appears underlined when the link is published, and tells users whether they’re linking to Peggy Sue McFeelgood or South Carolina Real Estate. We feel that — in general — the text of the link should match the title text of the page you’re linking to, and this should match the keyword you want to target. At the other extreme, however, having every single site that links to you link to the same page with the same keyword text may appear like an attempt to spam the engine, so don’t overdo it. We will sometimes alternate betweeen keyword phrases, and if a webmaster uses URLs for link text instead of keyword phrases, we’ll ask for those links, too. Also, if a webmaster gets the link text “wrong”, we frequently will let it go.