What Does Scalability Mean For Blogs?

Scalability is about expanding without increasing the workload on any individual, or as Wikipedia puts it “handling growth gracefully”. Blogging is harder to scale than many businesses because it requires fresh content to be churned out, without that your blogs traffic will decrease down to a certain low plateau and stay like that.

Ways To Scale

4. Keep building new niche blogs while not updating your other niche blogs.
The other niche blogs earnings will decrease, but still exist and eventually you will have a network of many seeming dead blogs (that earn a very little each day) and a few “living” ones, earning round the clock.

Advantages:

• You can do it all yourself, no need to spend resources finding bloggers to run it all for you.
• Once you are bored with a niche you can move on to the next one. You niche abuser.
• You end up with a very large number of sites, which means stability.
• If you took time off your earnings would only decrease slightly

Disadvantages:

• You are potentially wasting money that could be earned if you kept updating all the blogs.
• Your earnings will only increase if you keep starting new blogs
• Repeatedly starting new blogs and installing the same plugins and going through the same routines all the time is boring!

3. Build new blogs at a slower rate while maintaining them all

Your earnings keep increasing as your group of blogs becomes more and more popular. Once your time is filled you continue to blog on the same group of blogs (rather than starting new ones).

Advantages:

• You can keep the select few blogs on topics you enjoy blogging about. With a larger number more of the blogs will be forced over to be based on keywords rather than your hobbies.
• You can do it all yourself.
• A few well groomed blogs means a community can build up around the most successful ones, making it much more fun and satisfying.

Disadvantages:

• You have a less diverse portfolio of blogs. If one suffered an SEO penalty in some way it would make a large impact.
• Taking time off results in a dramatic decrease in earnings (not passive income)

2. Hire bloggers to run the blogs and pay them per post

You are hiring free-lance writers who are (hopefully) specialists on your topic.

Advantages:

• Your blogging business can run and grow independent of you
• If you have the budget you can ensure quality content by paying for more expensive writers

Disadvantages:

• Very high expenses!
• Your writers are not incentivized to promote the blog. They are very much writers and only writers. Part of their pay could go towards marketing, but their value there is hard to measure because one blogger could really make an effort but fail to bring much traffic and another could get lucky, how do you price that?
• You are risking much more money than in previous scenarios, which is unnecessary
• Most people can’t afford to start a blog business this way in the first place

1. Find bloggers to blog on a revenue split.

One way to do this is by inserting their adsense ID into the adsense units on the posts they write.

Advantages:

• Money is not risked
• Your bloggers are incentivized to do their best
• Runs and expands independently of you (passive income)
• You can keep expanding endlessly like this while risking very little money
• Your bloggers earnings should increase over time, which is satisfying for them

Disadvantages:

• Harder to find bloggers willing to work like this and they may be less experienced
• If the site isn’t earning enough they will leave

Conclusion

If you want to get into blogging and have a big budget, but are inexperienced I suggest trying to run a profitable blog yourself with a small budget, in order to gain experience in marketing and growing the blog; rather than simply spending lots on freelance writers wondering why traffic isn’t coming and then spending more on advertising (which is also unnecessary for the vast majority of blogs).

For most bloggers on a small budget, the best option is to go with option 3 until your time is filled and your blogs are earning enough for it to be attractive for other bloggers to blog on a revenue split arrangement there. Then you can gradually make the shift to to finding bloggers to blog on a revenue split while you get new blogs started and eventually hand them over to a revenue split system as well. Rinse and repeat.

ShareThis

From my experience Google gives sites a ‘trial run’ where upon first indexing the blog is given unnaturally high rankings for a few weeks and if it doesn’t gain enough links/content during that trial period it is de-indexed (sandboxed). Or if it gains some links/content it is given given lower rankings which have to be built up from scratch the old fashioned way.

I’ve found this out from starting several niche blogs some of which have kept the good initial rankings, some have been sandboxed and some have had their rankings lowered after the ‘trial period’. I have experienced every scenario and want to share what I believe the reasons Google treated my niche blogs differently.

Race Analogy For Google Ranking New Blogs

It is like you are running a race with a head start but also a heavy weight is tied to your ankle for being a newcomer. You have to run extra hard to stay ahead. If you cannot stay ahead of the other runners for x amount of time you are disqualified for the rest of that season but if you can stay ahead for long enough your weight is removed and you become one of the other normal runners.

How To Stay Ahead

• Churn out much more content. I’m not saying you should compromise quality for quantity but as a new site you have to teach the Googlebot who is boss by training it to visit your blog often. I would actually say this is more important than large scale link building because Google are more strict about gaining links to fast, but they lap up all the content gladly.
• Get a few quality links. You need this for Google to index you. Otherwise you could be waiting months if all you do is submit your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Obviously relevancy helps but to get that initial indexing a link from an off-topic site will do the trick.
• Don’t go overboard on affiliate links. It is easy to ignore this because we want to, but I have experienced entire blogs being de-indexed after adding to many (un-cloaked) affiliate links. Google doesn’t trust your domain yet so take it slow.
• Spread the link building out. You want the Google bot to see an increase in links each time it arrives but you will have a limited number of ways to easily get links. It works well to build some links, wait for indexing, build some more, wait to be crawled again, build more links etc.

I know these are things you would be doing normally anyway, but with a new blog if you get lazy the consequences will be far worse.

Do you have any other tricks to avoid early de-indexing and getting a new blog off to the best start?

ShareThis

I previously wrote about using Google Webmaster Tools to increase search engine ranking. The idea is to find the pages that have made it to page 1 of the search results but not quite hit the top spot, and give them a little push to make it there.

This method has its merits, but what was missed is that the higher up the SERPS (search engine results pages) your page reaches the harder it is to climb further. Just like a real mountain.

For example, imagine you publish a blog post with some keywords in the title. It gets indexed quickly because you’ve been blogging consistently for a while and google trusts your domain. It appears in the SERPS on page 25. The page then receives a single link from another blogger and jumps up to page 5. You then start promoting the post and even link back to it yourself in another post and with these few (lets say 5) more links the post has reached the bottom of page 1 of the SERPS.

If it took 1 link to move 20 pages, and then 5 to move up 5, how many will it take to move up 1 more?

A lot.

Naturally it depends on the keyword phrase you are aiming for, but if you plotted this on a graph it would be a curve. I.e. You need a greater number of links to move up a smaller number of places the higher you go.

How To Remedy The Situation

It is likely to be harder to move up to the top of page 1 than to get on page 1 in the first place. The way to avoid getting in this situation is to plan ahead for the keywords you are aiming for and if the first few results are ones that you will never beat, such as government/important Wikipedia pages then aim for slightly different keywords.

P.S. If you want to win a T-shirt that has one of the coolest blogging logos on it, check out the Health Bloggers Unleashed Contest.

ShareThis

I previously wrote about how Google Images loves H2 Tags and Directory Links. This is becoming more and more true for me every day as my AdSense earnings from niche blogs increase after making just a couple of tweaks to a couple of posts on a couple of blogs and using Submit Comfort to attain blog directory links. The majority of traffic to these niche blogs of mine comes from Google images, which means lots of happy AdSense clickers.

Optimizing Images For Google Image Search

Example of a well optimized image:

<img src=”http://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/insert_your_keywords_here.png” class=”centered” alt=”keywords_go_here_again” height=”250″ width=”400″ />

Points To Include:

• Name the image using the keywords you are aiming it to rank for. I use underscores to separate the words just to ensure Google can read them.
• Include it in a post optimized for the same keywords
• Use the keywords again in the alt text
• define the height and width of the image even if it is the right size for your page already

Some people also recommend adding the “title” attribute, but I did not do this for any of my images and they all rank very well. The links to the post the image is contained in (from my experience) helps the images gain good rankings in the Image search. It does not take many links to gain good rankings in image search because the vast majority of images online are not properly optimized to help Google know what the image is of.

How much traffic does Google Images send you?

ShareThis

For example, adding Google Adsense in a sidebar is probably less useful to your readers than linking to the other good sources of related content, which you found manually yourself, but that would undermine the function of the blog.

Not monetizing at at all flops you onto being charitable, which also undermines the function of the blog, unless its function is not to make money from advertising.

Photo by Mini OzzY

Core Principles

Function First.
The function determines the layout, which determines then the user experience. The function or purpose of the blog needs to be decided before anything else. If the function of the blog changes, the layout and usability needs to change too. Some common functions include 1 or more of these:

• Making money from advertising
• Building a readership to make money from later
• Building a readership to launch a start-up from
• Forming a reputation as an authority or entertainer
• Having fun
• Learning about a topic of interest
• Expressing yourself
• A motivational tool to achieve a goal (such as loosing weight by chronicling progress)

A Niche blogs‘ function is usually to make money from advertising, whereas flagship blogs often have many functions and as a result need more careful thought and planning

Making the most of the space you have means minimalism.
With all the free blog widgets its tempting to think, “It’s free, I might as well put it up to make use of the space“. This line if thought is very badly flawed for 2 main reasons.

1. Visitors to the blog have a very short attention span. Having too many options for them dilutes the attention away from what is important, the content and the monetization. It’s not just the the ad spots that loose value if you create more of them, every link on the blog looses value when an alternative is displayed.

2. It can result in readers not clicking anything at all because they dare not start scanning down a long list of links. People like choice, but not too much choice. This is why I have the option on Blogging Fingers for readers to add me as a friend on only Stumbleupon and Digg, because it just isn’t worth putting links to other profiles because they don’t bring such big benefits and each link added lowers the chances of being added on another.

Summing Up

With physiclal products, there isn’t usually the option to ‘throw another feature in’ for free, but with blogs there is. Define the function and build the blog to carry only that function.

ShareThis

Method Of How To View Top Search Queries

Go to Google Webmaster Tools. Then from your Dashboard to the site you want. Select the “Overview” tab, then click “Top Search queries”. You can also get here by going through Statistics.

On this page you will see a list of top 20 search queries with the position in the Google SERPS (Search Engine Results Page) and the percentage they each represent. They are fairly inaccurate because the exact position of your page in the search results varies from place to place so be sure to give them a little manual test yourself.

Using The Top Search Queries To Get More Traffic

Look for search a term that you already appear on page 1 for and that already sends a significant portion of traffic. Google search the term to find your post that ranks for it. That is the page you are now trying to push to the very top of the SERP.

If you can see that you are positioned for example 8th for a keyword phrase, and that phrase is sending you 30% of all your search traffic it is definitely worth trying to climb the ladder up the SERPS. Remember the very top position receives approximately 70% of all the traffic. Imagine how much you would get if you snatched the top spot for this phase that already sends 30% of your traffic!

Ideally you want an individual post page, because if your Homepage ranks for a phrase changing the title description of it may have dramatic effects on other search terms it ranks for.

Re-optimize The Page For Your Newly Desired Keywords

So you have found a blog post that you want to move up the SERPS just a few positions to get the number 1 spot. There is a good chance that when you wrote the post you were aiming for slightly different keywords or even didn’t aim for any keywords at all; in which case there are some changes to be made.

• The URL of the page must not be altered or the links you have gained to the page which gave it the high rankings in the first place will no longer function and will point to a 404 error page, so do not change the page slug.
• Do change the title of the post. It should be shortened down so that as much of it as possible is made up of the keywords. I.e. Cut the crap! (but it still has to make sense of course).
• Edit the post. Take a read of the post and swap in your keyword phrase in a few appropriate places
• Alter the meta description. If you use the all in one SEO pack this can easily be done by editing the post and re-filling the description box. Do not keyword stuff, but make sure your phrase is in there at least once.
• Edit the comments. This is a bit cheeky but can give you the extra boost you need. You as the author can alter the readers comments and swap in your phrase where appropriate. Alternatively you could simply reply to some more of the comments with your keywords included in your reply. (probably the better option!).

Do all these in moderation. Adding the keywords into every comment if there are 10 comments is keyword stuffing. Just 1 comment will make the difference, and just 1 or 2 times in the content is fine. Also include a few variations in the order of your phrase.

Photo by ian_ransley

Free Link Building To Your Post

This can be as gray-hat as you want it to be and is essential for getting crowds of people to visit your post via the search engines, because of course links with the keywords in the anchor text increase a pages rankings. I’ll start the list with the most white-hat.

• Link to your post from your other blog posts. You don’t have to write a whole new post to get the chance to link to the post you are trying to gain rankings for. Simply think back to previous posts where people reading them would also be interested in reading your new SEO’d post. You can then edit the related post so it links to your new SEO’d post. If you can’t find a suitable spot in the post to insert the link then you can simply add “related post” at the bottom, with the link underneath with the keywords in the anchor text. The more ‘link juice’ the post you link from has, the more it will effect your SEO’d post’s rankings, so pick a popular post to link from.
• Leave comments linking to your post on blogs that have “nofollow” turned off . There is a list of Dofollow blogs where the URL and name you leave in the comment will count as a valid link in the eyes of the search engines. I’m not recommending spamming these blogs but simply leave 1 well thought out comment on several of them, with your name as the keywords you are aiming for and your URL of the post you are SEOing.
• Submit your post to social bookmarking sites that have “nofollow” turned off. The chances are your post isn’t brand new and so probably wont have a chance of hitting page 1 of these sites, so there is little use in trying to game the system in that sense. Instead making a submission to lots of sites where your vote/bookmark is the only vote build links from lots of different domains and so is more effective. You can use Social Marker to speed up the process. Use this method at your own risk! Doing this risks your credibility if you use the same user name as when “playing fair” and can result in banning your IP or blog from these sites. If your post’s content is good enough your page will rank well before you need to consider resorting to this method.

Summing Up

It’s a very logical and simple method that can dramatically increase blog traffic sending crowds of people to your blog without too much effort. I generally don’t do too much work when it comes to SEO. Once my blog is optimized I just ‘roll with it’, but this is a great way to compensate for that.

Subscribe to the RSS for more great blogging advice and be the first to find out when my free e-book is published!

Technorati Tags: Google, SERPS, traffic, keywords, SEO

ShareThis

With So Many Gurus Poking You In Different Directions What’s A Blogger To Do?!

You can think of success as collecting a pearl held captive in a clamshell down at the bottom of the sea. You could keep trying to swim down to get it over and over again, barely giving enough time between each attempt to catch your breath until you give up.

OR

You can go back to shore, tell a couple of trustworthy friends about it and figure out a way to work together to get the pearl to the surface.

Method For Making Important Entrepreneurial Decisions

1. Take a few days off to get out of any blogging routines that may be preventing you from adapting and starting new projects. During this time there must be no secret brainstorming or dwelling on what to do. Not taking the time out is like trying to come up with a brilliant idea to get the pearl while still treading water far out at sea.

2. Spend a couple of days brainstorming and get all your ideas written down. I suggest having a casual read of 63 Constructive Opinions on the Best Way to Make Money Online at Dosh Dosh. I emphasise casual because if any of the 63 people who left their ideas there actually thought they were good enough to make big money online, they would have done it themselves rather than telling everyone else about it, although there are plenty of ideas to build upon there.

3. Develop your ideas by chatting to like-minded blogging contacts who you know also have big aspirations. Talk to the ones you can trust about your ideas and get feedback and possibly find JV partners.

4. Make your decision and stick to it. Kristopher Jones, The CEO of PepperJamSearch profoundly said on Next Internet Millionaire; “your experience will be different if you approach it with absolute certainty“. This stood out to me as an important life lesson. After all if you have a fantastic plan but you don’t believe in it, you are unlikely to carry it out fully.

Conclusion

With so many success stories appearing each day I find it impossible to simply stick with a simple blogging plan and my aims keep getting higher and higher as milestones are reached. The most important thing is to start at number 1 and continue the journey, rather than treading water until it is too late.

P.S. For more entrepreneur tips see Dragons’ Den Success.

ShareThis

In case you haven’t heard about the Link A Dink Plugin it allows you to set keywords/keyword phrases to be automatically linked to a page of your choice. This can be internal pages of your blog, or as suggested on CashQuests they could be sold to an advertiser looking for some link juice. Whenever you use that word/phrase it links too the page you have set it to link too.

Superficial Benefits

1. Your readers are shown relevant information without you having to remember what the best post would be to link to.
2. You can direct traffic to a page directly through the links.
3. A major search engine ranking factor is the anchor text of inbound links, therefore these links will shoot the desired page to the top of the search results.
4. If sold to advertisers you could make a whole wad of cash.

Why Each Of Those Benefits Are BS

1. Hopefully when writing a post there is a focus to it and you are trying to get a point across. You don’t see me linking the word ‘blogging’ to the Blogging Fingers Homepage each time I use it. Even with a more specific phrase, like “niche blogging”. Sometimes it may be appropriate to link to my niche blogigng post, but if I did it on every occasion often it wouldn’t fit in with what I am saying. It would mean in this paragraph I would have linked to it twice already instead of once! Links should be chosen carefully to strengthen an argument.

2. Having 100s of links appear in your archives isn’t going to sent floods of traffic. If your traffic stats are anything like mine, it’s the recent posts that get most of the social media traffic, and a few other pages get steady organic Google traffic. It’s a fact that almost all posts on the archive of a blog don’t get much traffic.

3. The supposed SEO benefits are non-existent. I had used the word “blogging” 10 times in the posts on the Blogging Fingers Homepage before this article was published. That means overall there are 100s of uses of the word “blogging”. Do you really think Google looks kindly on 100s of links, all with the exact same anchor text appearing over night? I think not. You’re probably much more likely to be penalised than rewarded by Google for using the Link A Dink Plugin.

4. The advertisers will realise this and not stick around paying you for long. Not to mention that even linking out like this may also result in penalisation just like linking in. I’m deliberately avoiding the elephant in the room of the issue of paid links, which is not the issue in hand.

I would say the plugin has potential, but this sort of unnatural linking is just the sort of thing to avoid. I use internal linking to link to my web hosting packages page when ever a suitable occasion arises, but that is a rare event.

The Solution

If you really want to get into this sort of unnatural linking, there is a more flexible plugin called aLinks. This lets you chose how often you want that word to become a link and it can make the links look much more natural to your readers and the Googlebot. Use it with caution.

ShareThis