Strategy - BlogCraving

Most Popular Blog Subject Ever

March 23, 2012 By Travis Lusk Leave a Comment

What is the most popular blog subject ever? What category gets the most draws the most traffic? What topic generates the most revenue?

Answer: Whatever is the most original at the time.

Since the earliest days of blogging, the most popular sites have always been the most original. I do not necessarily mean the most original writing, pictures, videos, or designs. Although, that certainly helps.

The most popular blogs have always been the ones with the most focused, original subject matters.

Until the early 2000′s, there were no such thing as a “politics blog” or “tech blog.” That meant that early political blogs like DailyKos and FireDogLake were extremely popular. Why? There wasn’t anyone doing it at the time. As crazy as it sounds, a politics blog was something that would have been considered niche for a pseudo news site.

Once political blogs started to surge in popularity, they became a dime a dozen. In order to compete, sites like DailyKos had to continue to improve the quality of their content since they were now competing for a share of each user’s attention.

Today, all the major subject areas are saturated with sites all writing about and saying the same things. The more niche, focused, and original your subject is, the better the chance of standing out.

It is almost impossible to launch a general interest, cooking, mommy, gossip, political, news, or sports blog and actually expect to get huge traffic.

You’ve got to take your subject layers deeper in search of originality.

If you want to start a general sports site, don’t. Instead, pick team. Pick a sports town. Pick a player.

The more niche you are, the easier to make a name for yourself. The tent will be much less crowded while you get up and running. This will help you actually get the initial traction you need to build an audience.

Speaking of audience, don’t be afraid that being too niche will limit your audience. First, you would be surprised how many people are searching specifically for content related to that niche. Secondly, users appreciate a site with clear focus. They like it so much that they come back often.

Overall, it doesn’t matter what subject matter you are passionate about, just pick one. Then, dig deep. Take ownership of your own little corner in that subject.

Be original. Do it well. The traffic will follow.

Filed Under: Strategy Tagged With: originality, strategy

Learning SEO More Important than AP Style

March 22, 2012 By Travis Lusk Leave a Comment

Do we really need to have such a big focus on AP Style in journalism school when SEO is going to be more valuable?

hashtag ap style Learning SEO More Important than AP Style When I was taking my journalism classes in college, I haaaated AP Style. For the record, I do not pretend to be a good writer at all. In fact, I’m barely passable.

I wrote some pretty damn good stories in college but lost many grade points because of AP Style errors. AP Style became the focus of my hatred for print media. I enjoy reading print stories, but knew it would never be my profession.

Now that blogs, Twitter, and Facebook lead American news dissemination, how much does strict AP conformity really matter?

Not at all

There is an argument to be made that journalists should be taught both. I can’t really disagree. However, that’s nearly impossible for many of us.

Most people have the capacity to learn one, maybe two writing styles, and actually be good at them. Your first is the everyday email style of writing. That’s really what I would consider most of my blogging; halfway decent streams of thought.

Second would be your more formal article style writing. Straight forward and clear, but not worrying much about AP Style.

Then there is this third category of New York Times style. The apex AP Style. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Don't Do It Tagged With: AP Style, Hashtags, seo

Top 10: Web Analytics Platforms You Should Know

March 19, 2012 By Travis Lusk Leave a Comment

I was invited to speak at the College Media Association conference in New York City by my good friend Colin Donohue. The CMA is similar to any other professional media consortium, but focuses exclusively on college and university media organizations.

This year, I was asked to speak about the importance of web analytics platforms. One of my sessions featured my Top 10 web analytics platforms that I believe everyone should know.

The Top 10 Web Analytics Platforms are in no particular order. Also, it is important to note that I do not think that you should use all of them. Instead, you should pick your favorites, and go with it. But make sure you know a little about all of them.

#1 – Google Analytics

google.com/analytics

Shockingly obvious, yes. However, the analytics beginner may not fully appreciate the power of this platform since it is ubiquitous to the industry. This fall, we saw GA release realtime analytics (finally!). Realtime analysis makes the platform more appealing to “newsroom” style publishers.

#2 – GetClicky

getclicky.com

Still my favorite all around analytics platform. I’ve used it for years, and it has never let me down. GetClicky has offered realtime analytics since virtually day one. The platform has continued to evolve including rich extensions such as an app for iPhone and iPad. For “newsroom” applications, they have released a big screen mode that basically takes over the full screen of your machine with realtime site traffic. Also has a robust solution for advertising and marketing tracking with no-fuss reporting. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Site Traffic, Strategy, Technology Tagged With: analytics, CMA, traffic

Bloggers are Conference Whores

March 16, 2012 By Travis Lusk Leave a Comment

It must have something to do with sitting indoors, behind a computer screen all day. Bloggers, especially those that work independently, freelance, or run their own sites, turn into conference whores.

Eventually, they stop going because they are actually interested in the conference. Instead they go for two things: validation and socializing. That’s it.

We could skip the conference and business part and just get to the giant “prom” of geeky bloggers.

In the early days when people start getting into web publishing, they attend conferences to truly learn things and network with others. Typically, I would go to learn more about a specific subject like layout, organic traffic, and advertising.

After a while though, you really have learned all you’ll ever learn at these conferences and trade shows (doesn’t take long!). But for whatever reason, you just keep going every year.

The shows become this weird annual reunion of otherwise strangers. No one has any intention of actually working the show floor. Maybe just to visit an old rep or seek out that hot new vendor. If you’re smart, you know which vendors are having private parties or have drink tickets, and you become friends with them. For free drinks, most will swim through the soup of trade show nerds.

None of the veterans have any plans of attending the conference sessions to see speakers other than those led by their blogger buddies.

The rest is just a giant get together. People compare notes, bitch about Google/SEO, compare how big theirs is [traffic that is], etc.

For a lot of guys, these events are their only social outlets for the year. It is only among these people that they feel important.

If you’ve read this far, I’m sorry. I didn’t really have a point other than to make note of my observation. Really, I’ve just noticed the quality of the events and quality of attendees really drop of in the last couple of years. I believe this is why.

Photo credit.

Filed Under: Don't Do It Tagged With: Conferences, Media Whores

Facebook Timeline Coming to ‘Pages’ on March 30th

March 2, 2012 By Travis Lusk Leave a Comment

Source: Facebook.com

You officially have 29 days to prep your business’ Facebook page for the conversion to Timeline. That’s right, Facebook has officially announced that current Pages will be converted to “Timeline” mode on March 30th. No, the change is not optional.

Timeline has been controversial. Ironically, there is a Facebook Page called “Facebook Timeline Sucks.” Little do they know how goofy that will look in 4 weeks.

If you have a Facebook page for your blog, you have until the end of the month to preview, prepare, end edit your page for Timeline deployment. If you are ready to go, you can even push it live ahead of time. However, after March 30th, it will automatically switch to Timeline mode forever.

Love it or hate it, Timeline does offer Page owners some handy new features.

You will now be able to take advantage of the large “Cover Photo” across the top of the page that you see in personal profiles using Timeline today.

Messaging is finally coming to Pages. In the current (old) version of Pages, users were unable to send the brand a private message like you can to real people. Now, users will be able to communicate directly and privately with the Page/Brand. [Read more...]

Filed Under: News, Strategy Tagged With: facebook

Your Blog Traffic Blueprint – Part Two

September 19, 2011 By Ellen Leave a Comment

In the last post I explained a number of different ways you could get your blog optimized for traffic and then methods in which you could drive traffic through the use of backlinking. The good thing about a lot of backlinking methods is that not only do they help your blog to be recognized as important by search engines like Google; many of the methods drive traffic directly to your blog because of the insightful content you are providing.

In this post I am going to lay out a blueprint for you that you can follow step-by-step and then in later posts I will give you more details on how to actually set up each of these methods to maximize their impact on your traffic stats.

Do the preparation steps in the previous blog post.
Write five articles related to your niche – this is not as hard as it seems – you can simply rewrite your blog posts to create unique articles.
Use Camtasia Free software and PowerPoint presentation slides to create videos out of your article content – don’t mind being in front of the camera? Then use that, but you want to create five videos based on your five articles and you will need five PowerPoint presentation slide shows for traffic generation as well.
Create an audio file of all five of your articles. If your article content is quite short just make one audio file including the information in all five articles.

Okay so at this point you will have five articles, five videos, five PowerPoint presentation slide shows, and at least one audio file. All of these files will contain backlinks to your site and if you can include a call to action (without sounding spammy) in the content as well all the better. Now you have to get these out on the net.

The Articles

Your articles are going to provide a hub for the rest of your traffic efforts. Firstly you want to submit them to Ezinearticles.com. Unless you are a premium member this is going to take a few days for the articles to be approved. You are also going to submit your articles to the following sites:

But wait until your articles have been approved on Ezinearticles.com first – EZA does not like duplicate content. Don’t forget to ping your article links (the actual link of the page your article is on) as well as Stumble it, Twitter it and put the link up on Facebook.

Next you want to find some graphics to go with your article content and then head over to Squidoo.com and set up five lenses using your article content and the pictures you have collected. Each article will make an individual lens. If you have not made a Squidoo Lens before then check out the help tutorials they have on their site which are very good or courses by people like Tiffany Dow or the PotPieGirl. Again once you have your lenses finished then ping them and use your social media links to put the word out about them.

Well that should be enough to keep you going for the moment. In the next post I will explain more things you can do with your articles and also where to post the other content that I had you create.

Filed Under: How to..., Site Traffic, Wordpress Tagged With: blog traffic, traffic generation

Your Blog Traffic Blueprint – Part One

September 18, 2011 By Ellen Leave a Comment

Generating traffic to your blog is something a lot of bloggers have trouble with. But if you use the traffic blueprint I have outlined below then you will have swarms of traffic hitting your site every time you write a new post.

Setting the Groundwork

Getting prepared for traffic to your site is something that you should be thinking off from the moment you install WordPress on your new domain. Before you start generating traffic you want to make sure that you have installed all of the plug-ins outlined in our previous post here [Link to 5 Essential Plug-ins You Blog Must have]. To keep Google happy your site will need to have a Privacy Policy page, a Terms and Conditions Page and a Contact page at the very least. You should also make sure that you have a minimum of three blog posts on your blog, with more scheduled or planned before you put this traffic plan into place. Ideally you should aim for one new blog post for your blog daily for about a month, and then at least three times a week thereafter so that your blog always has good fresh content coming in.

Setting Up Backlinks

If you are not familiar with SEO then it is unlikely that you have come across the term “Backlinks” before but these are a vital part of your blogging success. In a nutshell backlinks are links on other sites that point back to your blog, or a specific blog post. The more backlinks your blog has the more valuable it is considered by Google and other search engines. So you need to set up a system to start generating backlinks as quickly as you can.

Warning: There are a lot of companies online that claim they can get you hundreds or even thousands of backlinks for the price of a cup of coffee – Do not use these methods. They are considered spam and can get your blog banned from Google permanently if you use these “Black Hat” methods.

Your pinging will already be creating backlinks for you but you can go a lot further with this. Just some of the methods you can use include

Putting articles on article directory sites like Ezinearticles and GoArticles
Putting up videos on YouTube and other video sites (TubeMogul is good for this)
Creating audio files and placing them on sites like iTunes
Blog commenting on other blogs in your niche
Forum posting on relevant forums in your niche
Posting an ebook of your content on free ebook sites like Free-ebooks.net
Setting up related pages on Squidoo.com and HubPages
RSS feeds
Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon

Now before you go thinking that this could be a lot of work, remember that you can outsource a lot of these tasks and as we will show you in the next blog post – a lot of these ideas come from recycling and repackaging content you have already created. See you on the next post.

Read Part Two

Filed Under: How to..., Site Traffic, Wordpress Tagged With: blog traffic, blogging, traffic to your blog

The Best Six Facebook WordPress Plugins

April 13, 2011 By Matt Leave a Comment

Facebook is the largest social media website and thousands of users update their accounts as often as possible. Therefore installing Facebook plugins in WordPress helps users to provide the “share posts on Facebook” option for their visitors. There are six really amazing Facebook WordPress plugins:

WP-FBConnect: This plugin adds the Facebook functionality to WordPress Blogs through Facebook Connect APIs. To use this plugin you have to link your Facebook account to your WordPress and then sign into it again. This will allow you to publish comments through the Facebook newsfeed and avatars displayed in the comments field using WordPress.
Add to Facebook: This plugin provides a link at the bottom of your blog posts for users to click on. Once they click on this link they can add the post they are currently on to the mini-feed on their Facebook home page. All they will need to do is sign into their Facebook account.
Facebook Dashboard Widget: You have to be interactive on Facebook, and this application provides you with all the updates from friends. This widget allows users to work with both Facebook and WordPress to keep you updated about friends even if Facebook is blocked.
Facebook Comments: This is a very useful plugin which imports all the comments made about your post which were shared on Facebook. These comments will be posted directly into your WordPress blogs so that you don’t miss any of the comments.
Facebook Photos Plugin: Everyone likes images on posts; it makes them interesting, attractive and sometimes help people understand things better. This plugin helps you by making it easy to add photos to your blog posts. You simply have to link your plugins to your Facebook account using the WordPress blog. Once this is done, whenever you edit old or new posts in WordPress, a new icon in “Add Media Section” will appear. You will be able to see the uploaded photos in your Facebook account by clicking on the new icon visible on your screen. You will be able to insert your images as small sized, medium sized and large sized images. You can also align the images if you want.
Gigya: This is a very important plugin and all its features are configurable using the WordPress Administration Panel. Once you use this plugin you can enjoy secure signup and login to your website. Additionally you will be able to update your status on different social media sites and invite your friends to the different social media sites to join your blog.

Beyond doubt, WordPress is the best blogging platform anyone can use with Facebook.

Filed Under: Strategy, Technology, Wordpress Tagged With: facebook, plugins, social