Dec 03

Be the leader of your tribe

Cybertowns, Doodling, Internet Marketing, Mind over Pixels, Social abuse, Web 2.0 Cutesy Bullshit 1 Comment »

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I recently became involved in community building, and I must tell you, it is hard work. The time it takes to gather that group of people, to give them focus, to coordinate their efforts into a common goal, it is all hard and takes enormous amounts of time.

But the payoff is worth it. A post on Traffick discusses Seth Godin’s Tribes, but I am not talking about that specifically. Please note the part where it says:

Take Avinash Kaushik’s common-sense exhortation that “aggregate” is never the name of your website visitor. If you get bogged down in aggregate statistics, you might be overwhelmed with just how many loosely-engaged, “valueless” clickthroughs come to your website every week. Yes, but why not make an exercise out of ignoring the 80% of people who aren’t connecting with you and zero in on just the 20% of those who do? Study their characteristics. Build and grow with them. (And it’s easier than ever to study them. This week, using Google Analytics’ custom segment features, I hand-built a segment called “engaged quintile,” for the 20% of website visitors on a client’s site that stayed a long time and viewed many pages. By definition, guess what the “bounce rate” was for that segment? Yes, it was 0%! It’s heartening and inspiring when you look at life through that lens.)

When I analyzed this blog a while ago, I did the exact same thing. Note where I said, nevermind the “hit and run” visitors, look at the loyal 20-25%.

This table shows us something interesting. While 75% of the visitors barely skim the site (maybe its the big fat smileys on top that deter them, but who cares…) we have a loyal percentage of ~20% who are definately reading the posts, and when we factor in the repeat visits from the other tables, we see that they do so often.

Please note how I completely ignored the bouncers, and focused on my loyal readers right from the start. Someone might say, what, you cut out 80% of the visitors! Are you crazy?

Well, yes, I am, and apparently I am also right. Why? Because we don’t give a shit about the “hit and run’s”. I have an internet marketing blog, that does not care to appeal to everyone. Those that actually like it, stick around long time, because they recognize the real value in this. Those are the guys I want, not the visitors from random sources. A skim through the keywords that brought in traffic for me shows these irrelevant ones:

  • “what is the best seo tool”, I should redirect these guys to either a dickroll or a 7$ ebook…
  • sensational.com affiliate, no I am not. Nothing to see here, move along.
  • avatar james cameron torrent, WTF?
  • boobs that we can see, do boobs come out in the invisible version now?
  • wholesale glowsticks, just proves my point.

No, I don’t need those visitors. But the more visitors you have, the better, right?

Wrong. A visitor is a liability, unless he “converts”. At the time of conversion, he turns from a liability into an asset. Until that time, he only wastes bandwidth. A conversion in my eyes can be a lot of things, here are some:

The visitor converts when:

  1. He clicks an ad
  2. He buys a product
  3. He downloads an info product
  4. He registers and becomes an active member
  5. He posts a useful comment
  6. He becomes a loyal reader
  7. He subscribes to RSS or email updates
  8. He blogs about something I said
  9. He links to one of my pages
  10. He recommends my content to others through other media like word of mouth or msn link sharing or whatever
  11. He completes a poll/survey
  12. He builds brand awareness (this one is for big time guys, you just need to grasp it, not use it)

Note that not all of the above points can be directly tracked, but most can. We can track 1,2,3,4,5,7,11. Indirectly, we can track 6,8,9. Please note that I did not include “click the digg button” on purpose.

Do you see now why I wrote in my analysis, screw the others, the 20% is the one that matters? That 20% represents any and all of the above list. That is why I care more about time spent on site, repeat visits, frequency of visit, and RSS readers. And while, yes, chaos theory does prove that the visitor who came in looking for “boobs that we can see” could be a 16 year old computer geek, who will jerk off on boobsurfer, wipe himself, take note of the Wickedfire banner, click it, have a revelation the likes of “omg I can make monies on the interwebs”, spend 200+ hours reading and posting stupid questions and get dickrolled an average of 5 times (actual statistical data), and then rise up in 2 years  as the next internet marketing genius to become rich, powerful and famous, nevertheless, I HIGHLY DOUBT IT.

Another reason why social bookmarking traffic sucks big time is this.  Do a tracking experiment, and see how many visitors with social site referrers slide into any of the spots above. Very few usually. And while you may see RSS subscriber numbers going up, it will deflate as fast as it came. Most of the time, social traffic is a big waste of time and effort.

In summary, focus on your loyal readers, on the active members of your community, on those people that are real assets to you. It takes hard work and lots of time, but the rewards are huge. Focus on what matters, and create a little part of the world that is your own little tribe. It is the apotheosis of being an alpha male.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Oct 11

Phpfox, not too SEO foxy

Cybertowns, Doodling, Heavy construction, Noobs, Web 2.0 Cutesy Bullshit 13 Comments »

I have been using a Phpfox installation to create a niche community. Mind you, this is not a full fledged review, just some notes.

Well, in summary, Phpfox sucks for SEO.

  • There are no url rewrites, and messing around with the code is bound to break something.
  • The sitemap generated is great for text only sitemaps, but you cannot generate an xml one. (EDIT: now you can, see how to make xml sitemaps for phpfox)
  • The internal urls forbid you from linking to any single file in the domain, practically the rewrites hijack anything to a useless page not found.
  • The rss feeds it generates are not validated in any standard. They do work with rss readers though, but you simply cannot burn them.

Of course, I did not expect the script to be a breeze like wordpress, but some seo options would be nice. The pages do seem to get indexed though, they are just not seo optimized.

To its defense, Phpfox is a beauty to work with.

The installation is simple and fast. As soon as you are done, you have a mini Myspace in your hands. The default options are enough to run the majority of social sites, complete with a forum, PM, announcements, chat, polls, blog pages, member search and both video and image galleries.

Every hardcore webbuilder like me will want to hack it to death, but for a newbie, its amazing. The adminpanel gives you somewhat easy and almost complete control over everything, with no technical skills required.

There are some way better options, but if you want a “right off the box” social site, Phpfox is your friend. And get ready to dish out 500$-1000$ for modding it.

Popularity: 28% [?]

written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,

Apr 13

User content sites

Cybertowns 2 Comments »

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The good thing about the internet, is that anyone can write their opinion, and express their view on a subject matter.

The bad thing about the internet, is that anyone can write their opinion, and express their view on a subject matter.

Once you have been a webmaster for a few years, you soon realize that writing content is the most tedious task. If the website’s subject is a hobby of yours, you will come up with occasional bursts of insight and create a good piece of content every now and then. To keep up though with the other 2428 sites in your niche, you need to come up with a way of generating content.

There are two ways to do this, either outsourcing on content writers, or providing users with a platform of sharing their own creations. Think of it: pure, original, keyword rich, on-the-subject content generated every day, every hour, every minute without you raising your finger.

The reality is a little bit different though. Only 5% of what people write will be of any use and value, and only 5% of the people will actually contribute something. The rest will be simply, pure and utter crap.

To make things worse, there come the moderation burdens. People will behave badly, and on the internet its so much easier to show your bad side. Then there is spam to look out for, people self promoting, plain assholes who take up your time, and idiots who cannot find the submit button.

In the end, it is worth it though. Creating a community is hard work, and it takes a long time to pay off, but it grows exponentially after it reaches a critical mass. A vibrant community also makes you feel proud. There will be shitheads who will ruin your day, but you will discover marvelous individuals who really know what they are talking about.  You can even make friends.

On a practical note, I will not regurgitate the articles out there, telling you how to create a community. Go to webmasterworld.com and find the great threads on how to kick start your community.

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written by Glowleaf \\ tags: , ,