Self Made Minds » Blogging

Creating and Promoting a Facebook Page

Al — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:50:03 +0000

There are currently over 400 million active users on Facebook, which is somewhat insane. Last month Facebook became my 4th largest traffic source (admittedly it is ‘currently’ quite away behind the top 3). Before reading on I suggest becoming a fan here so you can see what I’m writing about.

I’ve always been a huge fan of building lists and subscribers to my various sites, it removes some of the reliance on search engines and gives you a bit more stability. Using my site coolest gadgets as an example we currently have around ~69K RSS and 10K email subscribers. When speaking to people outside of the industry, only a small percentage know what RSS actually is never mind using it, however even my technophobic father has heard of Facebook, so around 9 months ago I started looking at building a list on Facebook.

Creating a FaceBook Page
Make sure you’re logged into Facebook, go here, click “Create Page” and follow then follow the simple wizard. You’ll need to create a logo, add links in to your site and write a simple description but nothing too challenging. Next up we need to populate your page, you can either make daily posts yourself, pay somebody to do it or if your site has an RSS feed you can automate.

I’m currently using RSS Graffitti (thank you Zath, Clarke and Keith for the recommendation). This will automatically post a thumbnail and excerpt on your pages wall whenever a new post is published on your site. This will then link to the relevent page on your site, like so

You now have a fully automated page and source of traffic on one of the most popular sites on the web, cool.

Promoting Your Fan Page
The first thing you need to do is get 25 fans so that you can claim your vanity URL, I’d suggest manually mailing friends to become a fan, explaining why and personalise your messages a bit. Once you have 25 fans head here and claim a more human friendly URL for your fan page.

I’ve tried a few different methods promoting Coolest Gadgets fan page, the following graph shows how it’s grown since inception

1 – Did a blog post saying we are now on Facebook
2 – LG kindly donated a LCD TV as a competition prize, to enter the contest readers had to become a fan or tweet about it (hence promoting the competition more).
3 – Did another blog post about the contest, this time keeping it really simple: Fan on Facebook? Then Stand A Chance to Win 42″ LG LCD TV
4 – We announced the winner
5 – The site was redesigned with much more prominence on becoming a facebook fan, including a banner advertising the page and a widget showing current fans (see right).

If you have the funds you can also promote the page using Facebook ads, as you can target based on peoples interests this can be highly effective.

My aim is to build the fan base up to 6,000+ by Christmas and promote various offers and discounts when available. If you’re not a fan (or friend) yet feel free to add me.

If you don’t have a fan page yet I’d suggest investing an hour of your time and creating yourself a new traffic source, let us know if you do and we’ll link them from here.

Want to advertise in this feed free, check out Trialling a Feed Advert

Amazon rocks for conversions

Scott — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 16:12:02 +0000

Not exactly news to anyone and I remember speaking to Al about this when we first met but at the time I didn’t have any product based sites and had not used Amazon for some time, however with PC’s I decided to add some amazon banners/widegets and boy do they convert traffic!

OK so I am not selling high ticket value items just yet but I am working on it, PCs is just getting around 150-200 visitors per day which is fine it’s early days, I removed adsense as it’s pretty worthless at the minute and last week added Amazon so after around 8 days the screenshot on the left shows how it’s going.

116 clicks and 34 items ordered, it’s obvious from the stats some people have ordered 3 items etc so not 34 orders but 34 items, even still it’s a true testiment to what they do with your traffic when you send it across. Another plus is that it opens in a new window.

Like I said I’m probably preaching to the converted, however if your getting a few hundered visitors per day and your still using Adsense I’d recommend swapping that over if your product based in any way and getting some contextual or widgets on instead. When I logged in this morning I found out I sold 11 items yesterday most of which are still low value so I changed the main widget from showing pc games to actual desktops, laptops and netbooks to see if I could pick up higher value items, will be interesting to see how it goes and it’s a lot more fun than getting clicks for pennies.

Want to advertise in this feed free, check out Trialling a Feed Advert

A Stumbling Improvement

Al — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:45:00 +0000

I’m quite a fan of StumbleUpon as it has sent me a consistent trickle (100 or so per day) of traffic over the years. A few weeks ago I came across a plugin that I thought might help:
Increase Sociability Wordpress Plugin

Basically what happens is it checks the refer (what page the visitor is coming from) and if it matches either Digg.com or StumbleUpon.com then it will simply welcome the user and ask them to give you a positive vote if they like the page.

Along with using the plugin I also thought it would help if I hid any prominent Adsense ads from these visitors (social traffic is more likely to be pissed at adverts than click them). To do this the code is pretty simple (expecially when copied from the fore mentioned plugin):
if($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] != '') { $URL = parse_url($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']); if ($URL['host'] == "www.stumbleupon.com" || $URL['host'] == "buzz.stumbleupon.com" || $URL['host'] == "digg.com" || $URL['host'] == "www.digg.com") { $noadsense = 1; // Check this variable before displaying ads } }

So far the results have been pretty good. Three different stories created nice peaks in traffic. The two most popular being:

950,000 Volt Knuckle Duster (21,519 stumblers)
Wasp Knife injects ball of gas to freeze organs (10,399 stumblers)

The fact that Stumblers like knuckle dusters and knifes probably means Stumblers are best not messed with .

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Increasing Daily Email Subscribers by 500%

Al — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:57:51 +0000

Over the last couple of months I’ve been experimenting with a few ideas to improve my social traffic and garner more email subscribers. In this post I’m going to share some of what I’ve been doing, which techniques have been successful and which not so. All these tests were done on CG.

I updated the theme recently and at the end of each post I added the following menu bar:

This included 2 new features, Email to a friend and a social Share.

Email to a friend

This option lets readers email specific posts and pages to their friends, hopefully enticing them to the site. I used the plugin Wp-Email for this, the ongoing results are pretty nice for the small amount of work and screen real estate involved.
We are now averaging around 30 emails a day not a vast amount but some will become regular readers and will certainly add up over time. Originally we only displayed the link on individual post pages, we now display the footer links on the index and category pages which accounts for the increase around the day 61 mark.

Social Share ()

We use the Add This service to give our readers an easy way to share posts on their favourite social network. Results from this have been disappointing with daily highs of 7 uses but again it doesn’t take up much space so will be staying until I think of a better use for the space

Increasing Email Subscribers

One of my ambitions for the year is to create an email list of 10K+ subscribers, a goal of which I am way way off target from at the moment. The following graph shows how many new subscribers we are gaining on a daily basis:

There are two points on the graph where you can see you can see an increase on average new subscribers, these are caused by the following:

{1} – Added an email subscribe form near the top of the home page
{2} – This is a something I hadn’t seen before but makes sense. Visitors that scroll down to the end of the home or category pages are interested in the site, therefore more chance of becoming a subscriber if they see an option, so we display the following at the end of the home page and all category pages, it also displayed at the top (and bottom) of all subsequent pages (i.e. page 2 and after).

Previous we were gaining under 5 new subscribers per day, now we average over 20. If we’d done this from day one we’d be nearer on target for 10K subscribers by the end of the year, as we didn’t we’ll need to think of other ways to improve it (ideas very very welcome).

The next experimental case study I want to share resulted in an extra 20K+ visitors in a couple of days, I’ll leave that for my next post, if interested please subscribe to Self Made Minds by Email or our RSS feed.

Trialling a Feed Advert

How to expand your blog without more blogging

Al — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:37:59 +0000

Nearly 10 ways to extend your site

When I started this post it was primarily aimed at blogs but it’s relevant to pretty much any site. Here are a few ideas on ways to extend a site in a different direction by adding new features. For the following features many are available as scripts (both paid and free), or alternatively can be coded. By adding new sections it gives you more content (almost always a good thing) and opens up a whole new attraction for existing and potential visitors.

Forum
If you have a very vocal audience with plenty of subjects to discuss a blog is not the best places to do it, adding a forum to your site could help both your audience and you. They are relatively inexpensive to set-up but do require a large amount of work to get going. The somewhat famous forum Digital Point originally began as a support area for it’s tools, now look at it today.

Directory
If you’re in a somewhat crowded or very general niche you could add a directory related sites, this can be useful to your visitors in finding other sites of interest and is also a great way of networking with fellow bloggers.

Similar sites/online shops/ physical stores
Like the directory idea but more suited to product based sites, a simple list or directory of places to buy products from (affiliate links of course). You could also do this for physical stores in different locations.

Glossary
If your in a niche with lots of jargon, acronyms or TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms) you could create a glossary of explanations. I used to work at Xyratex which was a management buyout from IBM and they had some classic TLAs:

OAP – Optical Appreciation Panel AKA a window
TSU – Tall Storage Unit AKA a tall cupboard
WSU – Wide Storage Unit AKA a wide cupboard

In the staff handbook there were pages of these, unfortunately I can’t remember them all now so if you know of any others a comment would be cool. I do remember somebody saying “Can you get me the file from the TSU next to the OAP”, WTF!

FAQ
Do the same questions keep popping up over and over again, answer them in a FAQ.

Job Board
If you have a work related site, then offer your readers an easy way of finding or offering work. The ProBlogger Job Board is a great example of this.

Buy & Sell Section
This is an idea for product orientated blogs and sites, a section for your readers to sell their own products. You could also integrate some eBay listings to earn a bit of commission.

Arcade
Is your demographic gamers, give them an arcade to play in. We are thinking of adding a DTD section here to minimize competition .

Related Utilities
Instead of creating a mini site could you develop (or get a programmer to code it) a utility that will be useful to your current audience. The tools on Blog Storm is a relevent example here.

Do you have any other ideas, or do any of these sound suitable for your site?

Want to advertise in this feed free, check out Trialling a Feed Advert

Attracting RSS and Email Subscribers

Al — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:57:58 +0000

Writing my task list the night before has increased my productivity, one of the things I wanted to do for a while was add an email subscription option to both here and CG. That was added to my list last night and done today, so if you want to receive a daily email from us containing the day’s post(s) simply fill in the form on the right hand side.

One thing I thought that would be interesting is to learn how our readers prefer to follow sites. So if you can spare 5 seconds please give us your vote here (email and RSS subscribers will have to visit the site).

How do you follow sites that you read regularly.

Having a good feed count makes your traffic a lot more stable so promoting your feed is important for blogs and any other site with regular new content. To get started:

Publish a full feed
This may mean less visitors to your site but overall you’ll have more readers which is what you want long term
Provide Email and RSS Options
Not everybody knows about or uses RSS, however we all have an email account
Promote your feed in your posts
Look for reasons to include a link to your feed in your posts, if you’re doing a multi part post advise subscribing to read the next installment
Mutually beneficial feed adverts
Network with other similar themed bloggers and see if they want to swap feed adverts, they advertise their feed in your feed and vice versa. If you have over a thousand subscribers and a similar themed blog to SMM get in touch and we’ll see what we can arrange.
Contests purely for subscribers
Run contests on your site purely for subscribers

I will be doing a follow up post with the poll results and other ways to promote your feed so if you thank there is any methods that we should add please let us know via a comment and full credit will be given in the next part (if you want the next part delivered to your machine don’t forget to subscribe via RSS or email ).

Want to advertise in this feed free, check out Trialling a Feed Advert

New Blog Plug-In Check List

Al — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:21:39 +0000

First off thanks to everybody that gave us feedback with our setting up a new blog check list, I’ve updated the list with your suggestions (and link credited accordingly). Following on from that I’m going to a check list of plugins that the majority of new blogs will benefit from. Again if you have any suggestions let us know via the comments and I’ll update the list as appropriate.

Askimet
This one comes as standard with the WordPress download and is still the best way to help you combat comment spam
Contextual Related Posts
Displaying a list of related posts is good for both your readers and helps spiders find your content (which has an SEO benefit). I’ve manually hacked the plug-in to also display related posts in your feed (also useful when you get scraped as it means more links back to you at least). There is also a related posts plug-in for your feed though I’ve not tried it.
Democracy
A useful plug-in for running polls with your readers. It’s a good way of getting feedback and interaction with your visitor. I am looking for a newer version of this as the last poll I ran received a load of suspicious votes which it should of protected against. So if you know of a more robust plug-in please let us know.
Full Text Feed
If you use the more tag in your posts but still want a full feed this plug-in enables it (otherwise even if you specify full feed it will be cut off where the at the more tag)
Search Meter
A useful plug-in to see what people are searching for on your site, also has an unsuccessful summary which might give you ideas for future posts. I’ve used this with a bit of a hack in my $5,000 hour post.
Subscriber to Comments
Lets your commentators know when their comment has been answered (also a good way for getting them back to the site)
Nested Comments
If you get a lot of conversations going on via comments this is a useful plug-in to make them more readable
WordPress Mobile Edition
Show a mobile view of the post/page if the visitor is on a known mobile device.
Contact Form
WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
Login Lockdown
For those of us are security concious. Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.
Admin SSL
Secures Login and Admin pages using Private or Shared SSL. To use this you will need to get an SSL certificate which takes a bit of setting up but if you have a good host they will do this for you and you’ll just need to activate the plug-in.
WP Super Cache
Very fast caching module for WordPress. This is one I’ve never been able to get to work correctly (it seems to randomly only cache some parts of pages occasionally), others that use it swear by it so certainly worth trying and testing, if anybody has a clue what my problem is I’d love to hear.

It’s been a useful experience for me building this list as I’ve been looking at all my blogs to see what is installed on each making the list accordingly, this has highlighted quite a few things that are missing from here and other sites, so that’s this afternoon sorted.

If you have any suggestions please let us know.

Want to advertise in this feed free, check out Trialling a Feed Advert

Check List for Setting Up a New Blog

Al — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:37:20 +0000

One of the areas I intend to expand this year is my blog network, at the moment I have 5 or so blogs that all look and function pretty differently. What I intend to do is put some procedures in place to help me expand the network consistently and relatively quickly. Scott has already achieved one of his goals of 2008 so I need to get moving on some of mine .

Recently I received an email from Caroline Middlebrook promoting her free guide on creating mini sites with WordPress, I’m not looking at creating mini sites here but there is some good tips there none the less, especially for people that are new to WP. Any way onto my check list:

Install CMS Software, in my case this is WordPress so some of these points will be specific to that platform though other CMSs will likely have an equivilent.
Choose and set your permalink structure, this is the format of the URL for each post. I like to use: /%year%%monthnum%/%postname%.htm as this means posts are grouped (artificially) in a folder per month and are only one directory level away from your sites root.
Enable Askimet antispam and make sure that you have a valid key.
Install tracking software, be it Google Analytics or something else. You can generally either use a plugin to add it to your site or add a bit of Javascript to your themes footer.php. I need to find (or write) a plugin that works with the latest code version of Analytics as maintaining multiple themes will become a pain
Create a new FeedBurner account to track your subscribers and follow the instructions (installing another plugin) to make your feed URL point at the burnt one.
Install and automate a backup system. A good method is to use the plugin WP-DB-Backup and get the files emailed to you on a daily basis. This is where having a free email account with large storage space can come in very handy.

Next up is to through the other options and change any accordingly, these are the ones I find are worth changing:

General Options -> Weblog Title – Set to whatever the title of your blog is
General Options -> Tagline: A short (sentence) description of the site
Reading Options -> Show at most: 8 posts, I find 8 is enough for my blogs (the default is 10)
Reading Options -> Syndicate the most recent 20 posts – This is double the default but gives new subscribers plenty to read
Reading Options -> For each article, show: Full text – I find showing the full text is the best way to keep subscribers, it does mean you get less visitors to your site but is worth it in other ways. If you use the more tag you’ll need to install a plugin like this for full feed syndication to work.
Discussion Options -> Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 1 or more moderation, I go for all other default options but do manually approve ALL comments with links in

Once your blog is set-up it’s a good idea to keep it running (doh), Vladimir has some great tips on insuring your blog.

I will be adding to this list as I remember, learn and discover new things that I should be doing. If you have any suggestions for the list please let us know via comment.

This post is just about setting up new blogs, I will go into promotion and launching in a future post.

Trialling a Feed Advert

Al — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 12:52:17 +0000

I’m after a bit of feedback on this idea, so all thoughts and suggestions are very welcome (and there’ll be a bonus for commenting).

I’m trying to get more visitors to my site from my feed, so I spent an hour over the weekend creating a plug-in for WordPress that lets me display an extra sentence or so at the end of each post but only in the feed and not on the site. I intend to put an advertising link back to the main site where I can push visitors to affiliate pages with relevant offers.

If you want to see it in action subscribe to the SMM or CG feed.

After creating the plug-in it got me thinking how it could be used in a few different ways:

Promoting my own posts
Displaying a copyright notice, aimed at splogs
Links of my choosing would be displayed on splogs and sites that legitimately syndicate my content
I could do a feed link exchange (I heard about that on Blog Storm
Rent the space to advertisers

So firstly I’d like to hear if anybody is interested in the plug-in, as it would need a bit of tidying before releasing and secondly how much do do you think is a fair price for a slot on the Coolest Gadgets feed, based on the following stats:

There will be 10 adverts in rotation so yours would be displayed 10% of the time
We normally publish 10+ posts per day
We have nearly 70,000 feed subscribers
Our content is legally syndicated on sites like USA Today, Reuters, San Fransico Gate, IBS and a fair few more. So any adverts would also be on those sites (we have no control on how these are displayed)
Our feed is ripped and displayed on 5 or so splogs that I know of, so again the advert would display there

So how much do you think is a fair price for a monthly or weekly slot, I have a figure in mind but I’d love to hear other peoples thoughts.

I’m also going to be adding the plugin here (unless I hear a big objection from Scott) in exchange for feedback I’d be happy to include your simple text ad in the rotation of this feed.

Want to advertise in this feed free, check out Trialling a Feed Advert

Taking Your Site Mobile

Al — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 11:54:35 +0000

I travel a fair bit on both business and pleasure and when away I become totally reliant on my mobile phone, I don’t use it so much for calls but I do use it extensively for checking email, news (mainly football results), my sites and making the odd blog post.

I use the mobile version of GMail as my mail client, they do have a Java version especially for mobiles but I find their mobile enhanced web version works a treat especially since it’s been improved so that you can perform the same action on multiple messages via check boxes. As I do so much browsing on my mobile I think it makes perfect sense to include a mobile version of some of my sites (the fact that Adsense for mobiles is now live also helped kick me into action).

After doing a bit of Googling research, I came across a cool WordPress plugin by Alex King that automatically creates a mobile version of your WordPress blog, so a quick download and install of this and we’re ready to go. I made a few modifications to the code to make it fit the site and also be more standard compliant (which it still isn’t 100%).

The plug-in will automatically deliver a mobile version of your blog to mobile versions that request it, I decided to register a couple of mobi domains to make it a bit more obvious but all these will do is redirect to the existing site and display accordingly (you can register mobi domains at GoDaddy.)

There are a fair few tools and communities out there to help with developing with mobile sites, you can use this mobile emulator to see what you site looks like in a mobile, there’s also a great mobile page checker that tells you what you need to do to make your page mobile compatible.

I still need to do a bit of work on this and test on more mobiles so if you’re known to do a bit of mobile browsing please check out Self Made Minds or Coolest Gadgets and let us know what you think and you can leave comments via the mobile version too .

Want to advertise in this feed free, check out Trialling a Feed Advert

Self Made Minds » Blogging

Creating and Promoting a Facebook Page

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Amazon rocks for conversions

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A Stumbling Improvement

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Increasing Daily Email Subscribers by 500%

Email to a friend

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Nearly 10 ways to extend your site

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Attracting RSS and Email Subscribers

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New Blog Plug-In Check List

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Check List for Setting Up a New Blog

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