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.

Results may differ by search & genre but for a few I rank no.1 in I wanted to see what the ctr actually was:
While Ranking No.1 through October for a couple of keywords on a site I decided to look closer.

Google ‘exact’ Search tool stats :
Keyword = 246,000

Actual traffic according to Google analytics I received:
Keyword  = 64,035 visitors

At odds against the ‘old’ AOL CTR data set this works out at an actual CTR for position No.1 as:
Keyword  = CTR 26%

Around 26% seems low so it may be just me and this could be something I need to improve on, SO if you rank no1 for your main keyword(s), please check them against the exact search traffic in the keyword tool and see what CTR you feel you are getting and report back, are you getting anywhere near 42% CTR for your no.1 position? I’d be interested to hear. Please make sure it’s a large dataset, ie a decent search volume and not for something like your own business/domain name.

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 .

If you want a recap and some reading on what long tail search is I’d recommend this post and the one’s it links to. Al also did a specific post on it previously, long tail keywords have been explained very well before yet I still see webmasters getting hung up on top rankings for a few prized keywords which is an easy trap to fall into.

Checking your ranking for your top 3 keywords may make you feel better but by improving content and getting user submitted content you can glean more traffic through long tail search than you can from your main keywords.

Over the last 12 months the stats for my tattoo site help illustrate the long tail keyword benefits available by adding content, the main problem I had was my site is image based, not great for any keywords never mind long tail, this was something I had to and did address.

The main area I could address is the rate my tattoo area, this area lets users submit their own images which adds content but usually people are lazy and it’s easy to stay hands off and be lazy too, when people upload an image they often don’t give it a descriptive heading and lack clarity in the description, they just want to upload their image and have it rated like any other site.

So all images submitted are now moderated, thankfully my wife agreed to update this are of the site and before going live the title and descriptions are sometimes edited to make them reflect the image better, so when someone uploads an image called ‘tattoo’ which is one of my main keywords but doesn’t really describe the image, my wife now edits it in the admin area to call it ‘wolf with blue eyes’.

Time consuming? yes, but it really does make an overall difference for something that takes a few minutes everyday, when you get hundreds of images with good titles and descriptions you can increase your traffic by thousands. I also implemented a comments system, again moderated and being mainly image based this can add text and get users more involved.

To show the power of long tail search I will quote some numbers from July ‘07 to July ‘08

From the 9 million visitors, search sent 5,516,749 total visits.

My main keywords being tattoo, tattoos, tattoo designs account for 2,134,324 of these visits.
So without the long tail I could have had less than half as much traffic as I did!

I have 3 main keywords which bring in less than 50% of the search traffic, so how many keywords did the site rank for in last year remembering most of my content is image based?

Search sent 5,516,749 total visits via 157,337 keywords

Hobby sites can be amazing in that the network of sites out there still gladly review and link to good content at a time when people are more guarded than ever about their associations, I spent an hour looking for some nice relative links, nothing special – just the usual Googling the main terms and looking for good trustworthy sites and approaching looking for permanent or long term links.

The replies were nothing short of refreshing yesterday!

Around 20 relative links either live or setup to go when I am ready, really I never knew getting links could be so easy, of the 2 that I had to pay for, one was £40 for a year and the other $25 for a year with the other 18 were free gratis.

Sometimes it’s just really good to have a break and a change of scenery from the normal paranoid webmasters.
If you really want to build some links on really old pages often for very little money then head over to your favourite search engine and search for :               “sponsor this page” {keyword}

NB: There really isn’t too much going on just now so for the foreseeable future Al and myself shall post more irregularly when there is something to post about rather than for postings sake, better to have quality than quantity.

• previous clients
• testimonials
• portfolio 

If you do you see portfolio type pages, strong pages with few links offering services which are often affordable, how about trying out a service and getting a valuable backlink?

After using services it often pays to submit feedback in the form of a testimonial that could be used either on a portfolio page or even a homepage with your website link.

For example:
http://www.ziskadesigns.co.uk/clients.html
With products/services from £20 and a PR5 client page

In a climate where good links are hard to come by, if you seek out reputable services and give feedback & testimonials you can get great strong backlinks, for free. Even if you don’t need some of these services it almost works out pretty cost effective to try them at times.

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).

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 ).

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.

Well it may shock you to realise that you could get over 3 times more traffic just by moving up one place from 2nd to 1st.

Last year when the AOL search data was released there was a post on earnersforum where the number of searches were calculated and from that you could work out the exact difference from a data set large enough to be pretty accurate to work with.

Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100
Click Rank3: 418,643
Click Rank4: 298,532
Click Rank5: 242,169
Click Rank6: 199,541
Click Rank7: 168,080
Click Rank8: 148,489
Click Rank9: 140,356
Click Rank10: 147,551

This data can then be interpreted and presented another way which was done a few posts down.

Number 1 receives 42.1 percent of click throughs’.
Number 2 receives 11.9 percent of click throughs’.
Number 3 receives 8.5 percent of click throughs’
Number 4 receives 6.1 percent of click throughs’.
Number 5 receives 4.9 percent of click throughs’.
Number 6 receives 4.1 percent of click throughs’.
Number 7 receives 3.4 percent of click throughs’.
Number 8 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs’.
Number 9 receives 2.8 percent of click throughs’.
Number 10 receives 3.0 percent of click throughs’.

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 4.9x less
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 6.9x less
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 8.5x less
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 10.4x less
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 12.3x less
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 14.0x less
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 14.8x less
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 14.1x less

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less than ^
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 1.4x less than ^
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 1.4x less than ^
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 1.2x less than ^
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 1.1x less than ^
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 1.05x less than ^
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 1.05x more than ^

One thing of note here is that position 10 is pretty nice, better than position 9!
Other conclusions from the data were to be expected, like the top 10 is king and position 9 and 10 outperform being top of page 2.

Nothing new but it is important that rather than chasing new terms constantly or trying to be viral you stop, look at what your main keywords are, how you rank and devote a bit of energy into trying to move up one place, I did this recently and am a few thousand visitors per day better off for focusing on it.

Authority Sites & their web search

After a quick check it seems search results from the BBC and CNN are being indexed in Google.

Searching those pages shows that the search results do link out to external sites, for example search CNN for ‘craft’ : http://search.cnn.com/search.jsp?query=craft, now this search result page is cached in Google.

How do you get your backlinks? if you do a web search on any authority website that lists your site in it’s search results you can then link to the search page directly.

So if craftzine.com was your site you would search for ‘craft’ or something similar or even your domain name in cnn.com and then link to that search result page which would theoretically get spidered, indexed and count as a backlink to your site from that indexed page.

What puzzles me is that using Yahoo I can’t find any mention of these authority sites showing as a backlink so I am undecided as to whether this method actually works, I will keep testing myself.

.edu links
A good method for targeting specific sites that you may feel carry more weight like .edu websites would be to use Google to search for sites that deal in your specific genre. So doing a Google for  

 site:.edu “keyword”

That would bring up .edu pages in your genre, you can then drill down by being more specific with something like

site:.edu “furniture” “add your link”

Once you stat digging down into sites being very specific like this you often start to find a lot of your competitors already there.

My take on .edu links are that in themselves .edu doesn’t have extra weight but the quality of links they often attract give them the added weight so overall in general .edu backlinks are pretty valuable.

Once you find sites in your genre ,that list can then be manually checked through, remember that sending emails to the webpage creator offering to sponsor the page for a yearly fee can be attractive to some poor students, offer to sponsor a page for around $30 for a year in return for some love

Even though it’s an .edu domain you still get link pages, directories, paid directories and sponsorship opportunities for reasonable money or free links from related sites. 

Other methods

Blog Search
Use Google blog search to search for terms like “free backlink” and you’ll come across lots of offers and sweet deals like Ades for 1 week free link on a PR7 blog.

Using the blog search can bring up quick and very recent posts offering links so you know the offers are current and applicable.

Classified links
This one can be misused but is completely acceptable as long as you find the right sites and advertise your service, product or site properly as per the sites terms. You can Google for search terms like “place your advert” or “place a classified ad” and pay to place an advert on a website in a similar niche as yours, if you seek well and are lucky you’ll find adverts that allow unlimited time or long ad listings and url’s, you can advertise your services, website or products through classifieds listings that can bring you traffic and link love from related sites in a completely white hat manner.