Archive for the ‘blogs’ Category

Gaming the system without being original: The cynical guide to increasing visitors to your website

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

The majority of people who blog do it because they want to cover the topics that interest them. In fact some of the stuff they cover gets them all fired up into a passionate frenzy. It’s great to read blogs like that. If you just want Google love and don’t mind what you write about then you can easily increase web traffic by gaming the blogging system. For many of my regular readers this is probably known to them and for the rest it is common sense but I’ll give my experience on how you can increase traffic to your site by spotting the current zeitgeists and reporting on them as well as some other tricks.

What are the online kids talking about?
If you want to get the attention of web surfers then you need to see what they’re looking for. The best way to do that is have a look at what is the most discussed items on idea aggregators such as Tailrank, Metafilter, IrishBlogs.ie, Slashdot, BoingBoing, Technorati etc and then create some posts about this. The title is almost everything, remember that. Sprinkle the post with some keywords then as well. Once Google visits your site on a daily basis, these zeitgeist posts will show up quite quickly in the Google results. Don’t forget to link to other posts on these zeitgeists too as they’ll appear as trackbacks on those posts. To get people to click on your trackback link but also retaining a search engine friendly blog title, may I suggest that you give the start of a title a nice standard Google fodder string of words and then add a smart alecy text at the end to get the attention of the humans.

Tech zeigeists: Lots of traffic and lots of links
Every time Google or Apple or Microsoft releases a product there is a huge huge amount of chatter in the Blog O’Sphere which is still comprised of a lot of tech heads. A lot of bloggers will do the journalist thing and report on reactions to these products and put them on their own blog but newspaper journos and tech journos do this too. When Google became a domain registrar I blogged about it. Little did I know that the Register picked up on it and within a few minutes of them publishing the piece my traffic went way up. I still get visits on a weekly basis from that Reg article 13 months after they published that piece.

Go Against the Flow
Whenever you listen to radio shows where they have someone on arguing a point they generally have someone else on giving an opposing view. Sometimes you’ll notice the opposition are total nutjobs but in order to be balanced the shows have to find some opposition. Sometimes just going against the flow will get you on the airwaves, same goes for blogging.

If everyone is saying how great the new Microsoft gizmo is then a well constructed counter-post, knocking it and giving valid reasons will probably get you noticed by those who always have to take the opposite view of the masses and it will also get you noticed by journos and bloggers who need to balance their piece. “Not everyone liked this idea though, Damien Mulley viewed this product as just another ploy to ride the web 2.0 gravy train and he thinks the gizmo is overpriced junk.”

Print gets you more traffic then web in Ireland.
Yes yes, we all know I have some weird Aine Chambers fetish and I get a good deal of traffic via Google searches. However when the Irish Independent did a piece on Aine a few weeks back my Monday morning traffic surged. The Indo had no urls in their article but people searching for Aine Chambers landed on my site even though Aine’s site was the top result. Papers still generate a lot more traffic to you because Irish people may surf the web but they don’t write to it and until this changes you’ll see most traffic coming from Google searches as a result of print articles.

For example tomorrow people will still be talking about Bebo, Bird Flu and Denis Donaldson so having a few blog posts about these topics would get you traffic. Indeed, you could log into the online versions of the Irish Independent, the Irish Examiner and the Irish Times tonight at midnight, see what their main stories are, write some blog posts there and then and by the morning Google might have indexed you and those googling from their office computers in the morning will find your opinions.

That’s just some ways of getting traffic to your site without caring what you talk about on your blog. Tune in another time in the distant future when I tell you how to game the A-Listers and how to write original content and get it a massive audience. Or maybe not.

Midlake – Lots of potential here

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

Via Auds I found the Rawking Refuses to stop Blog and via them I found the I guess I’m Floating blog which recommended Denton, Texas bandMidlake who have recently been announced as support for the Flaming Lips.

Midlake

The below video is for the song “Young Bride” the first release from their forthcoming album “The Trials of Van Occupanther”. I love the song. It’s got the melodies, it’s got the great guitars and it has that violin thingy which reminds me so much of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” or maybe “Hero”, a nice chinese influence which makes fits nicely with the rest of the song. I’ve listened to some of the tracks from their debut “Bamnan and slivercork”and am very impressed with the album with the strong songs on it being Roscoe and especially Balloon Maker though Tim Smith does sound like a drunk Thom Yorke in parts.

That Girl interviews the Conforming Monkey

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

What a blog post title. Wonder what Google will bring to this post with those words…
That Girl interviews the Conforming Monkey. This is the first time I heard about this blogger. Conforming Monkey blog. Look forward to the next edition of “Cyber Spin the Bottle” as it now seems to be nicknamed.

.eu domain registering debacle

Friday, April 7th, 2006

Seems I was able to register ucc.eu, bbc.eu, rte.eu via goDaddy if I wanted to. I know these were previously taken. I rang the people in charge of the .eu domain – Eurid who tell me all of these were taken in the sunrise registration period. Just chatted with Gavin who was able to register sex.eu even though there were 220 aplications during sunrise alone. There is going to be a lot of pissed off people today. Their whois lookup is also down. GoDaddy has stopped selling .eu domains on their site now. On hold with GoDaddy right now. Will update this post with more news as it happens.

So right now you don’t know if you have a .eu domain despite getting billed.

Guillemots – Trains to Brazil – Lyrics

Thursday, April 6th, 2006

Found these folks via Sinéad.

Guillemots – Trains to Brazil

It’s 1 o’clock on a Friday morning,
I’m trying to keep my back from the wall.
The prophets and their pawns have had another success
And I’m wondering why we bother at all.

And I think of you on cold winter mornings, darling
They remind me of when we were in school,
Nothing really mattered when you called out my name
In fact nothing really mattered at all

And I think about how long it will take them to blow us away
But I won’t get me down!
I’m just thankful to be facing the day.
Cause days don’t get you far when you’re young.

It’s 5 o’ clock on a Friday morning
One hundred telephones shake and ring
One of those was someone who knew you

And I’ll still think of you on cold winter mornings, darling
They’ll still remind me of when we were in school
When they could never have persuaded me,
That lives like yours, were in the hands of these erroneous fools

And to those of you who mourn your lives through one day to the next
Well let them take you next!
Can’t you live and be thankful you’re here?
See – it could be you, tomorrow, next year.

Ben and Jerry’s Black and Tan ice cream

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

Via crooked Timber:

Black and Tan Ice cream

Yeah, not sure it’ll sell well in the Republic with that name. By Republic I mean the Cork one. Home of the other Ben and Jerry.

Mea culpa, Kieran over on Ice Cream Ireland blogged this yesterday. I was wondering what he’d think of this. Now I know.

Direct link to Ice Cream product

How do you give an asshole more traffic and more groupies?

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

Link to him.
He or she* will get a lot of traffic by naming them too so if you are too lazy to use a link just use their name and you’ll build their audience. The Internet is funny like that. So if you truly dislike a blog or blogger then just ignore them. This is the attention economy and any kind of attention makes a site stronger. || Just in case people think this is a dig at Fergal or Team Tuppenceworth because that was the last post I made, it isn’t. I like the blog and respect them. Must stick em on my site blog roll whenever I unlazy myself to do it. This post stems from a private email conversation but I thought I’d stick my views on it links here.

*Does the word asshole have a gender btw?

Thursday Fluffy links – 30 March 2006

Thursday, March 30th, 2006

Handy way of increasing Google Ads click-through. Is this within the Google rules?

Via BoingBoing is news that YouTube has done a deal with E! Networks. I’ve also read that all hosted videos have been restricted to 10minutes max. Shame about that.

Via Werblog is a Podcast from Supernova about online communities and what makes them tick. Well worth listening to:

The interview is a conversation with Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist.org), Julie Herendeen (VP of Network Products at Yahoo!), and Bill Flitter (CMO of Pheedo). The podcast explores how to facilitate, nurture, and benefit from online communities, which are becoming not just major social forces, but significant drivers of business activity both online and offline.

Obey the speed limit and piss off everyone

Sunday, March 26th, 2006

Via the InsideGoogle blog is a Google video of people driving exactly at the speed limit and annoying everyone. Watch towards the end where they come over the rise of the hill. Reminds me of Convoy. This could easily be done in Ireland. 🙂

Some fucking yank interviews Twenty Major

Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006

No, not that yank nor that one. No, not her either. Christ, we’ve a lot of the fuckers around these days don’t we? This is the interview.