All Posts Tagged With: "Tips"

Are You Afraid to Experiment?

Posted by Kyle Eslick on February 20th, 2008 | Category and Tags | 0 comments

In my offline life, I’ve always been someone who is afraid to experiment or take to many risks.   I love familiarity and it has always held me back all my life.  I need to know that I have a guaranteed paycheck each month and that my kids have medical insurance coverage.  That is just how I’ve always been.

When I started blogging in early 2006, I decided that this was not something that will hold me back when I moved online.   I started blogging because I enjoyed doing so, and I’ve always pushed myself to experiment and try new things to see what works and what doesn’t work.  Any time you find success, in addition to the successes, you’re going to find some failure.   I’ve found my share of both, but even in situations where I’ve failed, I have found that I learn a lot from each failed experiment.   The second time I may get it right, or I’ll use what I learned from that experiment in something else I’m working on.

Recently Dosh Dosh wrote an inspirational post titled Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment, which I recommend all bloggers read.  Its pretty short, so it will only take a minute, but it will hopefully get the creative juices flowing a little bit.  I truly believe that in order to be successful, it is important to continually try new things and see what works/what doesn’t work.

Are you actively experimenting on your blog(s)?   Add forums, try a new style, new type of post, add pictures to your posts, etc.?  It is impossible to know what works until you’ve properly experimented.

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The Importance of Natural Traffic

Posted by Kyle Eslick on February 6th, 2008 | Category and Tags | 0 comments

In the domaining industry, we have a commonly used term called natural traffic, which is basically defined as traffic to the domain from people typing the address directly into their web browser.  Bloggers will often refer to this direct traffic. 

I think that as bloggers and veterans of the internet, we often forget that not everyone uses a feed reader or searches to find what they are looking for.  Heck, only about 20% of the world has internet access, and I would guess that less than 10% are regular users and use search engines to get where they aer going.  There are many people that still type a URL to get where they are going, so if they are looking for information on monkeys, they will just try visiting monkeys.com, etc.  

Natural traffic is an extremely powerful and often overlooked tool for bloggers.   Ever wonder why Porn.com sold for 12 million dollars?  It’s easy to find a much better keyword-rich domain for under $100.00, but those domains won’t get any natural traffic.

As a blogger, I think to much focus is often placed on search engine optimization and not enough focus is on marketing yourself to potential readers.   While it is best to have a keyword-rich domain, people looking to also develop natural traffic need to place their focus on having a strong and easy memorized brand that goes along with their website.   Avoid using the plural version of words and avoid words that are easily mis-spelled.   You will also have trouble getting any natural traffic without a dot com domain. 

If you want to read some more about natural traffic, Daily Blog Tips covered this in a recent post, Direct traffic: 5 reasons you should care.   This is a big reason I re-branded this site under a new domain and so far I am very pleased with the results!

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Does Your Homepage Use Full or Partial Posts?

Posted by Kyle Eslick on July 28th, 2007 | Category and Tags | 0 comments

Not to be confused with a debate over full vs. partial feeds, I would like to gauge readers opinions on how to display posts on your blog’s homepage.  Do you prefer to see full posts, or partial posts with a “Read more” tag of some sort?  Or maybe you prefer full posts on some sites, but partial posts on sites where their content is a little wordy? 

I’ve been contemplating switching to displaying a partial post on the homepage.  This would allow me to display additional posts on the homepage, and possibly drive up page views, but would require me to remove the Adsense ads.  I’m looking forward to getting your opinion in the comments below!

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