Blog Cikgu Blogging In Malaysia

Glen Allsopp, who is a loyal Daily Blog Tips reader, emailed me a while ago to let me know about a post he written titled 4,439 Words on Driving Traffic to Your Blog. I went there to read it, and found a really comprehensive piece. The 5 main areas where the touches upon are:

• Choosing your Niche
• Spreading your Brand
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Writing Quality Content
• Niche Engagement

And here is one quote from the post:

For example, if you are interested in ’scandanavian fly fishing’ and are hoping to become a full-time blogger then you might struggle to find an audience large enough to make a decent income. What I recommend in this case is that you simply step back in terms of topic. So if you are interested in scandanavian fly fishing then you write about fishing, if you are interested in snow boarding then consider creating an extreme sports website.

The idea here is that you don’t limit yourself to what you can cover. There’s nothing wrong with writing about celebrities or blogging or self improvement. Although they are niche topics they do have a very large potential audience if you can build your brand and gain some marketshare. However, if you want to write about blog design (which a friend of mine does) then you are limiting your potential post ideas. On the other hand, with this topic you are branching out from a huge niche so there is still potential to reach a few thousand subscribers and make a great go of things.

It is always interesting to read the experiences and perspectives of other people on Internet marketing and blogging, so check it out. If you want more on this topic, read also the group writing project we had a while ago titled 30 Blog Traffic Generation Tips.

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Some cool questions this Friday. Also, we just have one more Questions & Answers left in 2008! If you want to ask a question just leave a comment below.

1. Satish asks:

Why have you removed trackback links from your blog? There would be no problem with spamy sites linking to you, as you can always moderat the linkbacks.

I removed the trackbacks section for two reasons mainly. First of all it makes the comments section cleaner. When I used to have comments mixed with trackbacks it was a complete mess and difficult to follow the conversation. Even when I separated them I still didn’t like the look of the trackbacks section.

The second reason as you mentioned is related to the spam trackbacks. Many splogers use this technique to generate links and traffic to their blogs (some would even do it unconsciously by not removing the credit link I use on the bottom of my RSS feeds…). So instead of wasting time moderating those I just removed them altogether.

2. Rajasekharan asks:

I have noticed a trend in people replying/commenting through the email ID that you use for your Feedburner feed delivery. Being that the case, people should do that with your email newsletter too! Even I felt sort of commenting on your first newsletter but kept myself back knowing it would be humanly impossible if all of your newsletter subscribers start replying to your newsletters. Already being busy jumping between blogs, isn’t that a sort of dragging yourself with such mails? How are you going to tackle it, especially when your newsletter comes from your personal mail ID? Isn’t it a good idea opening up a separate forum for comments/discussions on your newsletter that would also increase your traffic and page views and lessen your burden of replying such mails?

Yeah that happens quite often. On Daily Writing Tips, for example, we get anywhere from 2 up to 10 email replied for every post we publish. I guess that is related to the big number of email subscribers we have there (close to 8,000).

Usually I am fine with it though. If a subscriber takes the time to ask us something or make a suggestion, we sure take the time to answer or at least read it.

The same is valid for the newsletter. One of the reasons that motivated me to start it was that it represents a more private channel for conversations. Feel free therefore to answer to my emails with your comments and or questions.

Finally, setting up a forum or a place where we could discuss such matters would be cool, but would take a lot of work, and I am not so sure how many people would end up using it, so for now there are no plans for that.

3. Pink Ink asks:

Daniel, do you know of a Blogger widget that can be inserted at the bottom of each post inviting readers to subscribe via RSS or email (other than cutting and pasting the sentence each time)?

Wordpress seems to have a lot more goodies, but I am not about to switch over…yet.

Also, at some point in your early blogging career, did you comment on every comment, and at what point did you answer just ones that you thought needed to be answered?? And did your readers care?

I don’t any any Blogger widget that would do that for you. But why don’t you just edit the template to include that instead of adding it manually below every post?

Interesting questions about replying to comments. On the very early days I would reply to most comments, and the readers appreciated it. As the time went by, more of them started coming everyday, more tasks started being on my plate everyday, so I was forced to stop that.

Today I reply only to the comments that ask me something. But I do put an effort to make sure that no question goes unanswered on the comments section.

I wish I could answer personally to each and every comment though. I might try one of these days. Daily Blog Tips gets an average of 30 comments per day if I am not wrong, so if I took 30 seconds to answer to each I would need to spend 15 minutes per day, which is manageable.

Might be something to try on 2009, stay tuned.

4. Arun Basil asks:

I am a blogger at the above blog and I earn about $10 per month from adsense. I know that cofee money, but do you think that placing ads are distracting readers..? Will any reader cease to comeback because of the ads..?

No one likes ads. Some people are neutral to them, but most would rather not have them around. So yeah if you run ads on your blog website there is always a chance that some visitors will get annoyed, and some might not return in the future because of that.

There are several factors that need to be considered to evaluate how big that risk really is.

First of all, is your content unique and valuable? If it is, there are good chances that people will bear with the ads. They would be getting value out of your content, after all, so a small annoyance would not be enough to make them go away and never return.

Secondly, does your site is established and seen as an authority? If the answer is yes, then you probably could get away with more ads on your site. That is why big brands like Men’s Health or The Washington Post can get away with many ads, some of them being very intrusive like pop-up ads.

Finally, how many ads you run and how intrusive are them? The higher the number of ads you run, the higher the chances of losing visitors. Similarly, the more intrusive the ads, the higher the chance of losing visitors.

Ads on the sidebar or at the bottom of the content, for example, are not intrusive since they don’t get in middle of the reading experience. Most people would not be bothered by those. Animated flash ads, pop-ups and AdSense blended with the content, on the other hand, have higher chances of annoying people.

The answer, therefore, is finding a balance and testing.

5. Alex Fraiser asks:

I have a blog with what I and a few other people (based on reviews) think is unique content in a niche that has barely been touched. My question is how would I go about promoting the blog? I have read countless articles telling me to go and advertise on blogs, forums, etc. in the niche, but as I had said before, there are no other sites in my niche that I can find. On top of all that, there is just nothing SEO wise I can think of to do, or any keywords to really rank good for.

I have been told to use Social bookmarking, but I have not gotten very good results. I have also been told to get a press release written too, but I am not even sure how to get one! Any insight would be much appreciated!

You mentioned that there are no keywords to really rank for in your niche. Well, if that is the case, you don’t have a niche at all!

If you are writing on a topic that some people would be interested to read about, they sure might search for that information somehow, right? Search engines are the most used way for finding information these days, so it is likely that people will use them in one way or another to find about topics in your niche.

If you are positive people don’t search for the keywords and terms related to your niche, then indeed there is no such a niche. Yet! Who said you can’t create it, though? Perhaps people would love to read your content, but they don’t know such content exists yet. Icanhascheezburger.com practically created the niche for funny pictures with cats and captions on them. Before it people wouldn’t know about those pictures, and they wouldn’t even think about searching for them on Google, right?

It is harder to create a niche, but it can be done. You would need to tap into other channels and promote your content extensively until it gets enough exposure and people start searching and talking about it spontaneously.

You might start working on parallel niches too. For example when Icanhascheezburger started you didn’t have people looking around for funny pics of cats with captions, but you had people looking for funny pics in general, so they leveraged those parallel niches to attract people to their own.

Finally, as you mentioned, social media can be a good place to tackle too. Don’t limit yourself to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble, but also try social network ones like MySpace, Twitter and Facebook.

6. Melissa Donovan asks:

Do you think that leaving comments is still a good way to get visitors? When I launched my first blogs, all I had to do to get comments and subscribers during the first couple of weeks was visit other blogs and leave interesting comments.

I’m trying that with a blog I’ve launched recently and I’m seeing a few subscribers but people aren’t reciprocating comments. Since it worked well with my other blogs, I have a feeling it’s not the writing or my style. Is comment reciprocation a thing of the past?

Your first question is: Do you think that leaving comments is still a good way to get visitors? Yes I do. That strategy still works, especially because today you have more blogs on every niche, those blogs have higher traffic, and overall more people read blogs.

Obviously if you leave 5 comments per day you shouldn’t expect to see a large traffic coming from it, if at all. I have seen people out there that leave over 100 comments per day on 100 different blogs, day after day. Now that is what I call traffic generation via blog comments.

Then you ask: Since it worked well with my other blogs, I have a feeling it’s not the writing or my style. Is comment reciprocation a thing of the past?

I agree that in the past people were more willing to reciprocate links and comments because the blogosphere was a smaller place. I remember when I started my first blog that I had a very close relationship with the other bloggers on my niche. We were not real life friends, but you knew everyone was reading the blog of everyone else and interacting when possible.

Sadly, but perhaps naturally, we lost that touch along the way. I say naturally because it might be a result of the exponential growth rate that the blogosphere suffered. With hundreds if not thousands of blogs on each and every niche, it is difficult to track closely the blog of some people and reciprocate the comments on your own.

Regardless of that, I still think it is worth to reciprocate comments and links if you think the blog of that person is interesting. The only problem is the time constraint.

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As I wrote a while ago, the web (particularly the Internet marketing sphere) is going through a small pop-up mania. After some years in disgrace, the intrusive technique is back to vogue.

Personally I don’t like pop-ups, but I also know that website owners have the right to use whatever techniques their want. Additionally, if they offer me outstanding content, sometimes I will bear the pain of closing a pop-up to read it.

From an Internet marketing point of view I also understand why people started using it again. The conversions are incredibly high, and the annoyance factor is not so bad as to have a tangible impact on your traffic (most of the times at least).

If you are using pop-ups, though, you must make sure that the code is working properly and not breaking your website. A good idea is to check it on different browsers, for example.

Just to give you an idea, today I was browsing on the site of Michel Fortin, one of the most famous copywriters around. Right after entering it the pop-up appeared, and the screen looked like this:

As you can see the YouTube video was overlapping with the pop-up. As a consequence, the “Close” button was hidden, and I couldn’t do anything. I was literally blocked from visiting his website. I couldn’t even use his contact form to let him know about the problem!

I have seen similar problems on many other sites too.

If you want to use pop-ups, therefore, run several tests to make sure they are working properly and that visitors will be able to close them easily.

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